Reading

Should Your Kids Read Dark, But Truthful Books?

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N.D. Wilson writes about “dark-tinted, truth-filled reading” for children: “I would understand if hard-bitten secularists were the ones feeding narrative meringue to their children with false enthusiasm. They believe their kids will eventually grow up and realize how terrible, grinding, and meaningless reality really is. Oh, well—might as well swaddle children in Santa Clausian delusions while they’re still dumb enough to believe them. But a Christian parent should always be looking to serve up truth. The question is one of dosage.”

He says Christians should be protecting their children, but not over-sheltering them from the real painful world. Christian kids need “stories in which murderers are blinded on donkeys and become heroes. Stories with dens of lions and fiery furnaces and lone prophets laughing at kings and priests and demons. Stories with heads on platters. Stories with courage and crosses and redemption. Stories with resurrections. And resurrections require deaths.”

Julie Silander has begun a list of such reading on StoryWarren.

Fiction, Reviews

'The Tourist,' by Olen Steinhauer

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I had been reading for some time of Olen Steinhauer as a superior writer of espionage novels. So I bought a copy of The Tourist, one of his Milo Weaver trilogy.

My perception is that there are two major strains of spy novel. One is the rah-rah thriller, in the tradition of James Bond and Jack Ryan, where the emphasis is on action but there’s little or no question who are the good guys.

The other strain is the John Le Carré school, probably more technically realistic, where the tendency is to reduce the conflict between freedom and tyranny to a game played by cynical and generally dispassionate professionals. In this kind of story it’s hard to tell one side from the other; in fact, our side generally comes off looking worse, as we get a closer look at its transgressions.

Judging by The Tourist, Olen Steinhauer seems to belong to the second group.

His hero, Milo Weaver, is a former “Tourist,” a roving professional assassin for the CIA. Now he has settled down happily with a wife and stepdaughter. Then he’s recalled to join the hunt for a famous assassin, loose in the USA. Once he catches him he learns things that lead him to question some of his most cherished relationships. Caught in a power struggle between the CIA and Homeland Security, he must take the risk of trusting an old enemy, and take the chance of losing everything that has made his life worth living.

The writing’s good, and Milo is an engaging character. But I disliked the cynicism of the story, the assumption that there’s really nothing to choose between America and any other world power. There isn’t much hope in this book. Cautions for language and mature subject matter.

Uncategorized

Holmes with too much heart

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I’ve been watching the new series of BBC’s Sherlock, of course, and of course it’s very good. If you’re on Facebook, you’ve probably seen, as I have, a number of positive reviews.

And I don’t mean to pan it here. I enjoy watching it. I think it’s extremely clever and well done.

But I have to say I think the series has lost its way.

The first season was remarkable, in my view, for being an update and a reboot that managed to keep the spirit of Conan Doyle’s characters and stories to an amazing degree.

Last season, I think, was a little less so. And this season even less.

The failure (it seems to me) is an overdose of something I ordinarily like – excellent characterization. Cumberbatch’s Holmes and Freeman’s Watson are wonderfully alive and interesting. But they’ve moved too much to center stage.

Remember, these are supposed to be mysteries. This season’s stories have been mostly about Holmes’ and Watson’s friendship. In Episode One, the great question was, Will Watson forgive Holmes for going off and letting him think he was dead? In Episode Two, it was, How will Holmes manage to function as best man at Watson’s wedding, considering his personality problems? In each case, the mysteries were shoved off onto the periphery.

I don’t mean to complain – much. But it’s important not to lose focus on your primary task, whatever you’re doing. A Holmes story that’s more about relationships than mystery is not really a Holmes story.

Fiction

Pynchon: Let the Non-Reader Beware

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Are Pynchon and Dickens essentially the same writer? Alan Jacobs notes, “The Pynchonian and the Dickensian projects have a great deal in common [big rambling eventful tragicomic books featuring outlandish characters with comical names], and as time goes on I think it will become more and more clear that there is something truly old-fashioned about Pynchon’s career.”

Jacobs says Pynchon’s style appears to be to write long, complex books about people who don’t read long books at all. His characters are caught up in the Interwebs, the TeleVision, and commercial products of all types. He says Pynchon may be driving at a warning: let the non-reader beware.

Goofing

An interesting Lutheran

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I meditated the other day, in this space, on the question of whether Lutherans are boring. It’s a given, of course, that I’m boring personally, but what about the rest of my brethren? I tried to think of some notable Lutheran I could point to and say, “You call that boring? Ha!” But I couldn’t come up with any.

And then one of my Facebook friends posted this video.

Now I don’t know whether Egil Ronningsbakken, the performance artist here, is a Lutheran or not. Odds are he’s at least nominally Lutheran, since most Norwegians are, but more and more Norwegians are purely secular nowadays, without even going through the traditional pro formas of baptism and confirmation.

Still, he’s at least Lutheran by heritage. And whatever you may call whatever it is he’s doing, you can’t call it boring. Frankly, just watching the video is almost physically painful to me, afraid of heights as I am.

I might mention that Preikestolen, the cliff where he’s performing here, is the precise spot I had in mind in the big climactic scene in The Year of the Warrior where Erling and his men confront a warlock under the northern lights. I called it the High Seat in the book, not in order to protect the innocent, but just because I assumed that Preikestolen (The Pulpit) wouldn’t be a name the Vikings would have used. So I made one up.

Lutherans. Not boring. Just bug-eye crazy.

Music

The End of This Story Brought Me to Tears

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A friend asked me to read an illustration of God’s faithfulness yesterday morning. Perhaps, you’ve read or heard it. Here’s the start of one version.

A mother took her small child to a concert by Paderewski to expose him to the talent of the great pianist. She hoped as she did to encourage her son in his piano lessons, which he had just begun.

They arrived early at the concert and were seated near the front. Standing alone on the stage was a marvelous Steinway grand piano. As they waited for the concert to begin, the mother entered into a conversation with the people beside her.

Her boy had wandered up to the stage and began to play “Chopsticks” (or “Twinkle, Twinkle” in other versions). Members of the audience called out to get the boy off the stage and asked who was responsible for him, but then Polish pianist Ignacy Jan Paderewski hurried out to the piano. He leaned over the boy and whispered, “Keep playing, son. Don’t stop.” The master reached around him and improvised a piece worthy of the concert audience.

The story illustrates God’s faithful encouragement to his people. The version I read was in a Charles Swindoll book, which elaborated on God’s words to us. Keep going. Don’t give up. That’s the part where I teared up.

The story isn’t true, unfortunately. It’s a good illustration and has a bit of the variations you see in common among urban legends. Truth or Fiction says it may have been inspired by a poster for a Polish Relief event, showing Paderewski encouraging a young Polish boy at the piano.

But since we’re talking about urban legend types, you may have seen the one about the guitarist who gave a lengthy solo at the end of one of his band’s regular numbers. Someone began to boo him. The musician challenged this non-fan, saying, “If you think you can do better, come up here and prove it.” And the man walks up to the stage, showing himself to be Eric Clapton.

Continue reading The End of This Story Brought Me to Tears →
Religion

"Those that sleep in the Lord"

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Our friend Gene Edward Veith at Cranach blog links to a post where the blogger wonders why, if many young people are being attracted to liturgical churches, as has been widely reported, they aren’t streaming to Lutheran churches.

Our friend Anthony Sacramone, at Strange Herring, provides an answer: Lutherans are boring:

Growing up, all the Lutherans I knew were boring. They minded their ps and qs and paid their taxes on time (begrudgingly—I was LCMS, after all) and kept their heads down and their feet on the ground. They were good citizens and thought things through and were practical, rarely all that imaginative (although every once in a while a teacher would try and shake things up, only to be brought to heel if no great measurable results were forthcoming). There were exceptions, of course. (An elementary school teacher pretty much drank himself to death.) But they were notable for being exceptions.

I would rise to the spirited defense of my Lutheran brethren (and Anthony is a Lutheran, by the way), but I think I need a nap.

Religion

We Fought the War for Religious Liberty Too.

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Thomas Kidd of Baylor University talks about Christians wanting to sanitize the past and the restrictions on religious worship in the American colonies:

If religious liberty is one of our greatest national legacies, we can thank many early Baptists for being on the front lines of the fight for that liberty. In the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and later Rhode Island, Roger Williams was one of the first dissenting voices speaking out against a state establishment of religion, and against the state policing people’s religious beliefs. (For Williams, religion was too important for the government to meddle in it.) In the era of the Revolution, Baptists emerging from the Great Awakening wanted full freedom to create their own churches and to preach to whomever they wished. In most of the colonies, such freedom was not readily granted.

We forget that at the same time as the fight for independence from Britain, Americans were also fighting for freedom from oppressive religious laws. There were Baptist pastors being fined and even jailed for illegal preaching in Virginia in the early 1770s.

Goofing

Enough to curl your hair

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I’m not the Norway expert I thought I was. I hadn’t been aware that the Norwegian Olympic curling team is famous, not for winning matches, but for wearing silly pants.

I do not feel richer for the knowledge. It does make me feel better about my ancestors’ decision to emigrate, though.

Tip: “Scott” at Threedonia.

Authors

Personally Acquainted with Martin Luther King, Jr.

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The American Policy Roundtable has a podcast this week on Dr. Martin Luther King with a pastor who knew him personally, Dr. Sterling Glover. It’s remarkable what some of us do not know about certain important figures in our country or the truth of the biggest civil problem of 20th century America.