Uncategorized

The Saga of Apple Johnson

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I was out of town the last few days. I took a long weekend for a trip with my brothers. I’ll share a couple pictures in a few days, when I’ve cleared up some technical problems with my camera.

It was a family history trip. We went to visit the natural habitat of one of our great-grandfathers on Mom’s side.

The man has always been something of a mystery to us. He was larger than life in family memory, half joke and half cautionary tale. But we didn’t know where he came from in Norway, or where to look for the information. The clues I remembered steered me entirely wrong.

But one of my brothers did some digging in his spare time, and not only located the old man’s grave, but also made contact with a second cousin. That cousin met us in Iron River, Wisconsin, along with his wife (nice people; devout Baptists). So we heard some stories, saw some documents, and visited some locations. The result was a more detailed, and nuanced, story of our great-grandfather, John B. Johnson.

The story:

Our ancestor was born on the island of Ytreøy, near Trondheim. The first fact that caught my imagination was that his baptism name was Johan Arndt Johanson. The name “Johan Arndt” is significant. Johann Arndt was a German Lutheran theologian in the 17th Century. Not strictly a pietist, his devotional writings were prized by the Pietists when they eventually came along. In Norway, they were particularly popular with the Haugeans, members of the evangelical lay movement (I’ve written about it here before) that changed Norwegian society, and to which my paternal family belonged.

So if a common family (and all my ancestors were common as dirt) named their son after Johan Arndt, that’s a pretty good indicator that it was a Haugean family.

Young Johan Arndt Johanson, however, was a prodigal son. A laborer and a sea cook, he was immensely strong, a prodigious drinker, and pretty much uncontrollable. Continue reading The Saga of Apple Johnson →

Non-fiction

Rage Against Cops Makes Us Less Safe

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Dallas police
“We’re in the midst of the greatest delegitimation of law enforcement in recent memory,” says the scholar behind a new book on policing in America today. “Officers are backing off of proactive policing, and as a result, crime in big cities, above all cities with large Black populations is going up at a very alarming rate.”

Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal. In her just-released book, The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe, she says the communities most in need of active policing are receiving less of it in part because of aggressive tactics citizens are taking to hold cops accountable. Officers do need training and support to uphold the law and seek justice, but much of this citizen accountability is an effort to get a cop off the street entirely.

From a piece in City Journal, Mac Donald writes:

The growing mayhem [this year in Chicago] is the result of Chicago police officers’ withdrawal from proactive enforcement, making the city a dramatic example of what I have called the “Ferguson effect.” Since the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014, the conceit that American policing is lethally racist has dominated the national airwaves and political discourse, from the White House on down. In response, cops in minority neighborhoods in Chicago and other cities around the country are backing off pedestrian stops and public-order policing; criminals are flourishing in the resulting vacuum. (An early and influential Ferguson-effect denier has now changed his mind: in a June 2016 study for the National Institute of Justice, Richard Rosenfeld of the University of Missouri–St. Louis concedes that the 2015 homicide increase in the nation’s large cities was “real and nearly unprecedented.” “The only explanation that gets the timing right is a version of the Ferguson effect,” he told the Guardian.)

There are many steps on the road to dealing with this problem. I doubt most of the efforts made by our churches will be reported, so let’s not fall into the trap of looking at atrocities and asking where the church is. The small interactions of a community seeking better health are not front page news. We are praying, seeking restoration, counseling, teaching, and loving. There’s plenty more to do. (via Instapundit)

7/13 update: Thomas Sowell reviews The War on Cops, saying, “Such facts would have spoiled the prevailing preconceptions. Many facts reported in The War on Cops spoil many notions that all too many people choose to believe. We need to stop this nonsense, before there is a race war that no one can win.” (via Prufrock News)

Uncategorized

Friday Fight: Live Steel Combat

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We used to share many videos from a couple Viking era combat reenactors, who worked hard to demonstrate the real fighting skill of the Viking while avoiding injury. If you search our blog, you’ll find many Friday fights. This one is a great example, an unarmored man versus a fully armored man. Who will win?

Authors, Non-fiction

Remembering Elie Wiesel

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Residents of Cleveland, Ohio, remember Elie Wiesel as a big-hearted author who wanted to teach and support them like neighbors.

Back in 1966, Wiesel himself remembers friends from his youth. “Today,” he says, “I know that the advice of our wise men — ‘acquire for yourself a friend’ — is ironic. There is nothing with which to acquire them. Nothing any more. Our generation suffers a poverty of dreams.”

Frances Coleman read Elie Wiesel’s Night within the past week, saying it is the best and hardest book she’s ever read.

In the sense that Wiesel’s evocative “deposition,” as he later termed it, shook me to my soul, then “Night” is the best book I’ve ever read; and in the sense that it reminds readers how utterly base we humans can be, it is the most punishing. Reading “Night” at night is punishing, too, because after you finish reading, you are left to lie awake in the dark, wondering if you could have survived such an ordeal.

Authors, Non-fiction

Tipping Off the American Pedestal

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Cheryl Magness tells us how the recently departed author Elie Wiesel’s message will continue to resonate.

As Americans we are taught, and most of us believe, that there is something special about America. We speak reverently of the independent and pioneering spirit that sparked a new nation “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” We cherish the “rugged individualism” that enabled us to build a “shining city on a hill.” We think of ourselves as being the most generous and compassionate people on the face of the earth.

This view of ourselves as something unique in history, a nation markedly different from, and superior to, any other, has the potential both to motivate us for good and to lead us into laziness and neglect. For it is in believing too fully in our pedestal that we have the greatest capacity to fall off of it.

http://thefederalist.com/2016/07/05/elie-wiesel-is-gone-but-his-message-is-forever/

Fiction, Reviews

‘Runaway,’ by Peter May

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Runaway

In London in 2015, an old man who has been a fugitive for many years is murdered. In Glasgow, Jack Mackay, a retiree, is summoned by his old friend Maurie, who is dying of cancer. Maurie makes a request, or more of a demand. The murdered man did not do the crime everyone thinks he did. For that reason, Jack must get the old band together, and they must take Maurie to London before he dies. That’s the premise of Runaway, by Peter May.

It’s a crazy request, but Jack is at loose ends in his life and has nothing better to do. Also, he’s curious. Fifty years ago, the friends were in a rock band, and they all ran off on impulse, to find fame and riches in London. What happened was traumatic, and left Jack with many unresolved questions that still haunt him.

Soon the old men are on the road, in a “borrowed” car, with Jack’s couch potato grandson dragooned into driving. As they follow the route they traveled half a century earlier, the reader follows Jack’s recollections of the original journey, the central event and great tragedy of all their lives.

I was uncomfortable with this book at first. I feared it would be yet another celebration of the glories of the Love Generation, with its supposed idealism and courage. But what the band encounters in this story is much closer to the actual truth – passions running riot, drugged confusion, and cynical predation by exploiters. Jack is victimized, and victimizes others himself, to his eternal regret.

It’s a sad story, but insightful, and – in the view of this survivor of the era – pretty authentic. I also ought to mention that on one particular social issue – I won’t spoil it for you – it takes exactly the right side.

This wasn’t an easy novel for me to read, but in the end I found it rewarding and enriching. Cautions for language, sexual situations, and disturbing content.

Fiction, Non-fiction, Religion

He Who Waits For the Best Time to Act

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The hobbit at his table
The hobbit at his table

One of my life quotes, which I wish I could say I’ve actually given proper attention, is a verse from a song in the Rankin/Bass version of The Hobbit.

“A man who’s a dreamer and never takes leave,
Who lives in a world that is just make-believe,
Will never know passion, will never know pain.
Who sits by the window will one day see rain.”

It’s a Glenn Yarbrough song, which you can hear here.

That verse is loosely related to a quote attributed by some to Martin Luther. “For truth and duty it is ever the fitting time; who waits until circumstances completely favor his undertaking, will never accomplish anything.” As our readers often say, “That’s the truth,” but did Luther actually say this?

The Quote Investigator doesn’t believe he did and has evidence to support his belief that another German theologian with a curiously similar name is the one who first put this thought (in his own words) on paper.

Non-fiction, Religion, Reviews

‘The Printer and the Preacher,’ by Randy Petersen

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The Printer and the Preacher

I picked up this book with great anticipation. It’s fairly well known that Benjamin Franklin and the English revivalist George Whitefield were friends. An account of their friendship promised a very entertaining and educational story. Unfortunately, though it was educational, the entertainment element was largely wanting in The Printer and the Preacher.

Author Randy Petersen clearly did a lot of research to produce this book on two remarkable men. George Whitefield to a large degree invented popular evangelism as we know it – emotional, dramatic preaching, avoiding denominational distinctives for a “mere Christianity” gospel. Benjamin Franklin, as his major publisher, supported his work (most of the time) because of its positive social effects, but could never accept the deity of Christ. Nevertheless the two men liked and respected each other, and were friends for many years, until Whitefield’s death. Whitefield again and again urged Franklin to consider Christ’s claims, and Franklin politely put him off.

Wouldn’t it be intriguing to have been a fly on the wall during one of these men’s meetings, when the very concepts of what would become American religion were being worked out by two men of intelligence and wit? Alas, The Printer and the Preacher never provides any detail of such a meeting, even in summary. Apparently such accounts don’t exist, and the two men’s letters don’t preserve the kind of interchange we’d like to have. What we get, instead, is bits of factual information scattered like raisins in the great oatmeal bowl of the author’s analysis. Don’t get me wrong – the analysis is good, as far as I can tell. But I wish the author had trusted his story more, and felt less obligated to explain each point to us. Of course that would have left us with a much shorter book.

The Printer and the Preacher is a useful work. But it’s not a great pleasure to read.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Drop,’ by Dennis Lehane

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The Drop

Bob’s church is closing. That, I think, is the central metaphor of The Drop, a masterful novel by Dennis Lehane.

Bob loves his church, and goes to mass every day. But he never communes, because he refuses to make confession. He loves the old church’s traditional beauty. He finds a kind of peace there. But the Boston diocese can no longer support it, due to legal obligations to victims of priestly abuse.

Bob is a nice guy. People like him. But he’s lonely. Women don’t find him attractive. His only real friend is his boss, his cousin Marv. He and Marv set out to be gangsters once, years back, trying to be tough. But then the Chechen mob moved in, showing them what tough really meant. They took over Marv’s bar, and Marv and Bob sank back, almost with relief, into semi-respectability. Except that the bar is now a “drop,” where from time to time gambling money is collected for pick-up by the mob’s messengers.

Then one night, Bob hears a noise from a garbage can. He opens it to find a puppy there, bloodied and abandoned. A girl watches him rescue the animal, and in one night Bob acquires both a pet and a (sort of) girlfriend.

Bob doesn’t know it, but people are making plans, intending to use him as a pawn.

They are making a big mistake.

This is one of Lehane’s best novels, in my opinion, which is saying a lot. Not only does he ratchet up the tension mercilessly, but he plots with elegance. I wasn’t prepared at all for the conclusion.

Christianity plays a major role in The Drop. I don’t think Lehane is advancing any kind of apology for Christianity, but he asks the right questions, and poses the big problem (in my view) entirely correctly.

Highly recommended. Not for kids, or those easily shocked.

Religion, Uncategorized

Faith of our founding fathers

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Proposed Great Seal
Benjamin Franklin’s proposed Great Seal of the United States, showing the Egyptians drowning in the Red Sea.

Thoughts after reading a book on Benjamin Franklin:

It is often stated that Franklin and Jefferson were Deists. This is justified in a sense, because they thought of themselves as Deists. But they really weren’t.

They believed that prayer had value, that God could be petitioned. That is completely opposite to true, continental Deism, which believed in a God who paid no attention to His creation.

What these men actually were, was Christians without the Incarnation. They accepted Christianity as a positive social good, but denied that Christ was God.

In essence they were secular, non-kosher Jews, who would never have considered converting to Judaism for social reasons.