Luther, Martin Luther. I’m an Art Critic

The IMMA (Irish Museum of Modern Art)Daniel Siedell, a Christian art critic and curator, writes, “While finishing my doctoral dissertation and teaching modern art at a state university in the mid-1990s, I read Francis Schaeffer’s Art and the Bible and H.R. Rookmaaker’s Modern Art and the Death of a Culture, and I was shocked. Their conclusions about modern art bore no resemblance to the work I had devoted years of my life to understanding from within the history and development of modern art.”

He finds a path toward a theology of art with from Martin Luther and writes about it in his book God in the Gallery: A Christian Embrace of Modern Art (Cultural Exegesis). This reminds me a Mars Hill Audio interview this year, which I’m too lazy at the moment to look up and link for you. Do I have to do all the work around here? (via Cranach)

Hostfest 2012, Report 1

Here I am, back at the old stand at Norsk Høstfest in Minot, ND. I got here on Monday, having ridden with another Viking rather than driving myself, this time. So far it’s been pretty low pressure. We’ve given ourselves lots of time for things. That will doubtless change in a few minutes, when the crowds start showing up for the first day.

Oh, by the way, I had a hot beef sandwich at Kroll’s Diner in Minot which far surpassed any I’ve ever before tasted, or dreamed of. This has been an unsolicited testimonial.

It will be interesting to see how how changes in the town make changes in the festival. Minot as we know it has always been a nice, small midwestern city with an air base, remote from the rest of the world. Then last year, after the flooding, it was a recovering disaster area, stubbornly refusing to lose heart.

This year it’s a boom town. The actual boom is centered around 120 miles west, around Williston. But the economic waves have spread to Minot now. At least a half a dozen (that’s what we’ve counted; doubtless there are more) motels are going up around town, and even before they’re opened they’re being leased by the drilling companies for their employees, who will live in the rooms and commute all the way to Williston to work. They’re making so much money, that’s actually economical to do.

Tough on some of the locals, though. Not only because the street traffic’s gone insane, but because prices have skyrocketed, and that puts economic pressure on anyone who’s not in the oil business.

On the plus side, the weather’s beautiful. And aside from the Oak Ridge Boys (as usual), we’ll have the New Christy Minstrels (who are pretty old now) singing at the stage around the corner this year. As someone who actually enjoyed the music in “A Mighty Wind,” that’s good news for me.

More as the situation develops.

Fun When It’s Not Disturbing

Speaking Loren Eaton (see last post), a while back he was kind enough to send me an e-book, called Splinters of Silver and Glass, from a flash fiction friend, Nathaniel Lee. I’ve dabbled in it every now and then, since it’s the kind of book one dabbles in, being filled with 100 short short stories plus two longer ones. For the price, I can definitely recommend it for a mixed bag of story bites skewing heavy into fantasy and horror. All of them can be found on Lee’s blog, Mirrorshards, and he continues to write them, which means you can get them in your RSS feed this very day. This one, “Girl Stuff,” is one of my favorites. Here’s another that’s much more crazy.

Some of the stories have an eery sound to them, and when they come after a few humorous ones, they deflate me a bit. But the quirky and humorous ones come around soon enough. Naturally, if every story had perfect pitch, it would be easy to rave, even if I could only say that you had to read it to know what it’s like. It’s possible short short stories simply don’t reach deeply enough to stir our hearts. Perhaps they can’t, being only 100 words. I like to think they can, even though they are just snatches of stories.

Wonder WheelI still have my copies of Story quarterly from the mid-90s. They ran short short stories competitions which had to be kept under 1,500 words. Brady Udall’s piece, “The Wig,” from the Summer 1994 issues, has always stuck with me as a beautiful, human moment. The first line goes, “My eight-year-old son found a wig in the garbage Dumpster this morning.” Story‘s editor, Lois Rosenthal, said, “In three hundred words, Udall’s deft tale of an enormous loss swiftly reduced most of our contest judges to tears.” I think I cried too. At least, I felt the loss he described. (The story is available with others in Udall’s anthology, Letting Loose the Hounds.)

When I’ve posted 100 word stories here, “The Wig” has been in my ear as the pitch I’m hoping to sustain. It’s hard to tell if I have.

Oh, speaking of Loren Eaton, he has another delightful 200-word tale here: “Silver Sea, Salmon Sky.”

Stories of the Cursed World

Loren Eaton writes, “We love Aslan breaking endless winter’s chill grip on Narnia and Aragorn being crowned King Elessar and Christ the Bridegroom triumphing over that serpent of old. Yet in appreciating these good tales, we’ve largely ignored what Frye calls ‘the story of winter,’ those narratives that slide from bliss into torment.”

On Story Warren, he is writing about tales of winter and the virtues of exposing children to downbeat stories. It reminds me of the beautiful animated movie, The Secret of Kells, and how my girls didn’t like it. It also makes me wonder what we would have gotten if Lewis had written of the story in The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe as a trilogy–longer, deeper, and probably darker because winter would have lasted for two books at least.

The Secret of Kells

Hiding from Autumn at the Inn

Wayside Inn

Longfellow tells us:

“A cold, uninterrupted rain,

That washed each southern window-pane,

And made a river of the road;

A sea of mist that overflowed

The house, the barns, the gilded vane,

And drowned the upland and the plain,

Through which the oak-trees, broad and high,

Like phantom ships went drifting by;

And, hidden behind a watery screen,

The sun unseen, or only seen

As a faint pallor in the sky;–

Thus cold and colorless and gray,

The morn of that autumnal day,

As if reluctant to begin,

Dawned on the silent Sudbury Inn,

And all the guests that in it lay.” Read on

Reading Through Deep Depression

A reader of The Paris Review asks for recommendations to him through depression: “books that will show me why to live and how, and books that will allow me to escape my present torture. Both need to be pretty easy to follow.” This post suggests many titles, and blog reader recommend many more. I don’t know if any of the readers recommend the Bible (Oh, I see someone does), but I think the poetry suggestion is very good: old sonnets, Wordsworth (even his silly stuff), Robert Frost, Billy Collins. I also wonder if painting, cooking, or gardening would help this person.

Going my way?



Landscape with classical ruins and Christ with his disciples on the road to Emmaus. Bartholomeus Breenbergh (1598-1657)

As I prepare to go on the road, a few thoughts about roads.

In the novel I’m working on, (it’s called Hailstone Mountain. You’ll be hearing more about it) there’s a scene where I have Father Ailill, the narrator, talk about roads as a metaphor. He quotes a wise old monk he once knew:

“And Brother Eamon answered, ‘If you are walking a road, and another man is walking far behind you, one of two things may be true. He may be walking away from you, in which case you’ll never see him again, or he may be walking in the same direction as you, only far behind. Indeed it may be that he is walking faster than you are, and will in time catch you up. He may become your companion, or it may be he’ll outpace you. That’s why we must be careful of judging. We can’t always see in which direction another man is walking. Not only that, but sometimes even we in all our wisdom may find ourselves headed the wrong way for a time.’…”

I think I’ve told this story here before. Back in college, some friends and I were trying to promote a series of evangelistic meetings. I was sitting in a study room in the dorm one evening, working on a poster with one of my best friends. This was a guy as close as a brother, with whom I had prayed, laughed, and wept.

Another student walked into the room and asked us what we were doing. We explained, and he raised some objections. He didn’t believe in evangelical Christianity. We argued a bit, in a polite manner, and he went his way.

A few years later, I encountered the guy who walked in again. Now he was a fervent evangelical Christian, deeply involved in gospel work.

And not long after that, my poster-making friend shifted to liberal Christianity, and as far as I know he has never since uttered a single word not approved by the New York Times.

The point of all this is that you never know.

I wanted to say that the road metaphor in the snippet above only applies to Christians. But that’s not really true. The mystery of the faith road is that you can’t see it. You just meet people, and you don’t know how they’re moving in relation to you. The person you meet who seems to be opposing you may in fact be going in your direction, and just isn’t aware of it yet.

What’s the Purpose of My Children’s Education?

Niki Parker, Grade 11, Homeschool, reads her poem "Limousines" (2nd Place, 10th-12th Grade)Alan Jacobs rebuffs old arguments made against homeschooling which say to keep your children from public school is to ignore your “missional” responsibilities as a Christian. Jacobs replies that we need to think in longer terms. He says:

Because when properly understood education is for something — it is preparatory to the assumption of full adult responsibilities. In John Milton’s great essay “Of Education” he writes, “I call therefore a compleat and generous Education that which fits a man to perform justly, skilfully and magnanimously all the offices both private and publick of Peace and War.” You might feel that you’re doing your part for the “societal contract” by sending your kids to public schools for twelve years, and indeed you might be — but what if those schools do little or nothing to prepare those kids to serve the communities in which they live for the remaining sixty or seventy years of their lives? Intrinsic to both conservatism and Christianity as I understand them is the necessity of thinking in the longest possible terms, and well beyond the impulses, gratifications, and calculations of the present moment.

The girl in the photo above was in 11th grade in 2011 and was taught at home. She is reciting a poem in a county library contest, in which she won second place in her bracket.

Love me, love Minot



Folk costumes from Telemark, Norway. These people are professionals. Do not try this at home.

Just to give you fair warning, so you may steel yourself for the ordeal, I’ll tell you now I’m going to be out of town and posting only as possible next week. Once again I’m off to Norsk Høstfest in Minot, North Dakota. This year, you may be relieved to learn, I’m not going to drive out on my own in Mrs. Hermanson (who’s been kind of a drama queen lately), but riding along with another Viking in his big van. We both travel alone, so we might as well keep each other company on that long, long trek into the sunset. And back, one hopes.

I’d invite you to stop in if you’re in the neighborhood (that’s a joke. Nothing’s in Minot’s neighborhood), but Høstfest is not an event to visit on a whim. You need to book your room at least a year in advance if you want to spend the night, and you pretty much need to spend the night. It will be interesting to see what the turnout is this year. It was down last year, not because of the recession (there is no recession in North Dakota), but because of the previous spring’s flooding, which wiped out a lot of hotel rooms and private homes. One assumes that situation will be better this year.

Headliners on the main stage this year include Jeff Foxworthy, Olivia Newton-John, and Vince Gill. I don’t imagine any of them will drop in on our camp. One of our members (the guy I’ll be riding out with, as a matter of fact) loves to tell of the day he was holding down the fort all alone, making chain mail, when Victor Borge dropped in and asked him what he was doing. He explained the process and Borge joined in for a while.

But that was long ago, and the big talent seems to have grown more distant. I’m not all that keen on meeting any of these people anyway, I guess. Jeff Foxworthy, maybe. I’d love to meet Olivia Newton-John… forty years ago.

And, as before, here’s fair warning to burglars—my renter will be resident in my house during my absence, training his new pet wolverine.

Writing on the Job

Your day job can be a means to an end by putting food on your table while you write, but it could be an end to your means by sucking the life out of you. This Writer’s Digest blog takes the first approach, describing the benefits of interacting with people and learning non-writing job skills. How else are you going to learn the sound of man’s last breath after he has been stabbed? You learn that kind of thing on the job.

Elsewhere on the web, Joss Whedon didn’t need a vacation after shooting The Avengers; he needed a working vacation on a radically different movie. So his wife insisted he take up an adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing.

“I’m a huge proponent of the no budget movie,” Whedon says. “I love working on location. It makes you a better filmmaker. You don’t have everything conveniently placed for you. People are using the environment and it spices things up. I think of myself as a classical storyteller, which is why the digital era excites me. Classical storytelling is about getting a story told. It started with cave people around a campfire saying, that wooly mammoth was enormous, you should have been there! For me, that’s all that matters. It’s why I love writing comic books and I love writing prose. I love all mediums.”