Uncategorized

Celebrating Liberty, Respect on Juneteenth

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“Juneteenth is not a celebration of American perfection, because nations are never perfect. But it is a right and good celebration of our ongoing commitment to strive toward perfection, by admitting our sins and seeking to overcome them,” Dean Nelson of Human Coalition writes in World Opinions.

That’s a Christian message, and anyone who wants to turn his American toward the living God could take up this message and celebrate our national and spiritual freedom together. Let it carry over to July 4th so we can have a few weeks of it.

It will be many years before we fully overcome, if that is even possible. We still misunderstand the implications of Frederick Douglass’s speech, “What to the Slave Is the 4th?” delivered in 1852, if we even know it. We struggle to recognize different people as fully human, worthy of respect and of handling the consequences of their own actions. We struggle as a society to do what is right when it conflicts with what is comfortable. We don’t use the same language they did in 1852, but the ideas of our illiberal society overlap.

For the present, it is enough to affirm the equal manhood of the Negro race. Is it not astonishing that, while we are ploughing, planting and reaping, using all kinds of mechanical tools, erecting houses, constructing bridges, building ships, working in metals of brass, iron, copper, silver and gold; that, while we are reading, writing and cyphering, acting as clerks, merchants and secretaries, having among us lawyers, doctors, ministers, poets, authors, editors, orators and teachers; that, while we are engaged in all manner of enterprises common to other men, digging gold in California, capturing the whale in the Pacific, feeding sheep and cattle on the hill-side, living, moving, acting, thinking, planning, living in families as husbands, wives and children, and, above all, confessing and worshipping the Christian’s God, and looking hopefully for life and immortality beyond the grave, we are called upon to prove that we are men!

Michael Carter Jr. of Virginia is working to reclaim some of this list for a new generation of farmers. “Land is a forever asset. We acquired this land for $722.05 one hundred years ago.” And he’s farming 150 acres of it.

Fiction

Listening to ‘The Eye of the World’ (Wheel of Time) – DNF

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The other day I mentioned my ignorance of The Wheel of Time series and what I was seeing in reviews. Many YouTubers have recorded their thoughts on each book or the whole series, and many have explained the problems in the Amazon adaptation.

After that post, I found a YouTube recording of The Eye of the World read by Rosamond Pike, who depicts Moiraine in the adaptation. Her voice is marvelously smooth, and the drama she brings to every character could ruin a guy on listening to any other audiobook narrator. (A quick Audible search turns up several titles Pike has recorded, including a couple of Jane Austen’s.)

Even when I feel the story lagging in the beginning, her voice has carried it forward. Now that I’ve listened through chapter 25 or so, lack of interest in the story has bogged me down. It’s cool that Perrin has a connection with wolves, but weak that it’s something he was born with and would never have discovered had he not fled his home village. A few other things are interesting too, but I’m put off by the fact that the three women in the main cast of characters are all of a type. One of them hits most of the marks of being a villain. I don’t believe she becomes one later on, but she accuses and rages and lacks an ounce of humility. She’s the kind of person who gets herself or half of the party killed in other stories.

That’s the main thing. Add to that a few small things and a lack of other things, and I’m going to give it full pass. (DNF = did not finish)

Fiction, Non-fiction

How Reading Christian Fiction Shaped Evangelicals

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I read Frank Peretti’s This Present Darkness and the sequel Piercing the Darkness as part of my high school Bible class in the 80s. I’m sure we talked about them in class at some point, but I don’t remember anything any of us may have said. I’m sure we thought it was a good depiction of spiritual warfare.

This Present Darkness is one of the five novels Daniel Silliman uses to analyze Christian imagination in his book Reading Evangelicals: How Christian Fiction Shaped a Culture and a Faith. The others are Love Comes Softly, Left Behind, The Shunning, and The Shack.

In her review, Gina Dalfonzo sums up the book with this question, “Ever wonder about the enduring popularity of Amish fiction, or how The Shack grabbed an audience that once went for much more theologically conservative books?”

“He traces an ideological line through these books that helps us understand how the evangelical community got to where it is, spiritually, ideologically, and politically.”

Someone should have written a parody of The Shack, like The Shed. Just make it funny, theologically sound, and feature a conversation in a shed and you can do anything else you want with it. Left Behind had a few parodies written, one of which we reviewed here, Re:raptured.

Uncategorized

Ukrainians Increasingly Reject Russian Language

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Not that long ago, Ukrainians spoke and read mostly in the Russian language, even if they knew Ukrainian.

In the 60s, novelist Andrey Kurkov writes, “If someone on the street spoke Ukrainian, people thought they were from the village, or some strange intellectual, or maybe even a Ukrainian nationalist. . . . [H]aving Ukrainian as your first language was considered by many as a handicap.”

Today, after 100 days of war, “[o]nline and in casual conversations Ukrainian patriots increasingly refer to Russian as the ‘language of the enemy.’ Those who endorse this rhetoric would prefer to ignore the fact that up to 40 percent of Ukrainians speak Russian as their mother tongue. However, if some of them no longer want to speak Russian, many more no longer want to talk about it.”

Bookselling, Publishing

Russia Published War Novels Telegraphing Their Invasion

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Sergej Sumlenny, a political scientist focused on Eastern Europe and living in Berlin, posted a Twitter thread on the preparations Russian books made in advance of the Ukrainian war.

“One of the first indicators of Russia preparing for a full-scale turn to dictatorship and a global war,” Sumlenny says, “was the mass production of books about cool sides of Stalin and Stalinism and about upcoming war against the West.”

The secret police control the publishing industry, he says, so it wasn’t the free market bringing a surge of books with titles like “Be proud, not sorry! Truth about Stalin Age,” “Stalinist’s Handbook”, and “Stalin’s Repressions: A Great Lie” in 2010 and following. Bookstores followed the theme with vintage war paraphernalia.

Continue reading Russia Published War Novels Telegraphing Their Invasion →
Music

Sunday Singing: I Heard the Voice of Jesus Say

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This marvelous hymn from the Scottish minister Horatius Bonar (1808-1889) has a beautiful grandeur in this recording, but I’ve sung the song at a ripping pace, time and a half this pace, almost like a sea shanty. It’s stirring. I don’t know if the Free Church of Scotland would have approved of it, but I think it still keeps the spirit of worship.

1 I heard the voice of Jesus say,
“Come unto me and rest;
lay down, O weary one, lay down
your head upon my breast.”
I came to Jesus as I was,
weary and worn and sad;
I found in him a resting place,
and he has made me glad.

2 I heard the voice of Jesus say,
“Behold, I freely give
the living water; thirsty one,
stoop down and drink, and live.”
I came to Jesus, and I drank
of that life-giving stream;
my thirst was quenched, my soul revived,
and now I live in him.

3 I heard the voice of Jesus say,
“I am this dark world’s Light;
look unto me, your morn shall rise,
and all your days be bright.”
I looked to Jesus and I found
in him my Star, my Sun;
and in that light of life I’ll walk,
’til trav’ling days are done.

Continue reading Sunday Singing: I Heard the Voice of Jesus Say →
Authors, Blogs, Socials, Publishing

Freedom of the Press, Lovejoy, and Bad Arguments

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I’ve been reading from a book of American speeches from the time of our nation’s founding to the Civil War. It’s good fodder for guilt over my short attention span and how I’ve wasted my life on the Internet. It also shows the value of knowing this kind of history, because arguments made 180 years ago are still circulating today.

John Calhoun’s defense of slavery in the South in a Senate speech in February 1837 goes from reasonable though wrong to ridiculous. We’ve heard the same fearmongering over the last couple years.

In Wendell Phillips’s response to the 1837 murder of abolitionist and journalist Elijah Lovejoy in Alton, Missouri, he rebukes the characterization of the mob as patriots and bizarre criticisms of the freedom of the press. He says an Alton minister claims that no one has the right to print opinions with which his community disagrees. In fact, this minister says speaking what we think is evil.

“This clerical absurdity chooses as a check for the abuses of the press, not the law, but the dread of a mob,” Phillips states. “By doing so, it deprives not only the individual and the minority of their rights, but the majority also, since the expression of their opinion may sometimes provoke disturbance from the minority. A few men may make a mob as well as many.” No one would have a right to speak their mind, if it could provoke a mob.

Haven’t we heard similar arguments against this first freedom today?

John J. Dunphy of the Second Reading Book Shop in Alton, Missouri, reviews a new biography of Elijah Lovejoy, called “First to Fall.”

As for other links I wish to share today . . .

Publisher: Eerdmans – “We do not think it is for us as a publisher to define doctrine for the church,” but we won’t publish “false teaching.” Coming in August 2022 from Eerdmans is a transgender reading of Scripture.

Dostoevsky: “The advice every writer hears at one point or another? Write what you know. Whenever I hear those words I wonder, How do you explain murder stories?”

More important than being right: “Neither labels nor worldly ideologies require renewal or transformation. None of them require humility. And none of them bring life. They simply offer an unbalanced formula to conform to that creates a deeper divide within the church, as well as the culture at large.”

Fully human? “No true portraits of Africans by White artists existed; that White artists couldn’t see past their own ingrained stereotypes of Blackness.” The white author of this novel about two black men believes she can see past such stereotypes, but perhaps not clearly. (via Prufrock)

Photo: Main Street, Stillwater, Minnesota. 2003. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Fiction

What Makes a Murderer Tick?

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Evil Explored in ‘Pattern of Wounds’

In the second of three crime novels, Pattern of Wounds, J. Mark Bertrand’s homicide detective, Roland March, tries to capture the inner-work of his suspect. He lingers at the hideout, trying to get a feel for the thoughts behind the crimes. He looks forward to the interrogation, hoping to find out what makes him tick, but his superior officer offers another line of thought.

“Maybe you can’t put a label on him. Maybe it’s not enough to say he was insane or evil or a product of a bad environment. But in this case, there’s one thing you do know. He’s guilty.”

The question March wants answered is what produces a dedicated murderer. Many stories depict the wages of hatred as murder. The loving husband, who worries over his troubled marriage, discovers his wife’s infidelity and disdain for him, so in jealous rage he lashes out at her. Most people just walk out; some lose control.

“You have heard that it was said to those of old,” Jesus taught, “‘You shall not murder; and whoever murders will be liable to judgment.’ But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment; whoever insults his brother will be liable to the council…” (Matthew 5:21-22). This raises the bar very high, equating hatred with murder. Despite this warning, many of us still get angry with each other. Some of us hate certain people, even if we don’t actually kill them.

What would provoke us to murder, or are you and I immune by our natures? Bertrand gives us a few clues.

“If Only There Were Evil People”

When the murderer is gradually revealed, we get to read some of the backstory: abusive behavior, broken home, sociopathic trends, etc. We get an explanation for what drove this one person to act, but what goes untold are the many things absent from the final portrait: healthy love, constructive discipline, selflessness, respect for family and outsiders, to list a few. All of these things work together to produce the kind of disturbed person who believes murder is a good exercise.

Is the murderer crying out for a father’s love? Has he been spoiled by permissiveness, by being protected from natural consequences through family or money? Was he abused? Is he just twisted? Yes, maybe all of those things, and together they work to motivate him to choose murder.

So when someone accuses violent video games, for example, of provoking murder, he may have a good point about desensitization and training to kill, but he takes it too far when he implies the games alone bring a player the violence. It can only be one of many factors.

“The Line Dividing Good and Evil”

Detective March does not have a spotless reputation. In the first book, Back on Murder, he works in the Houston Police’s Homicide Department, but he doesn’t work on regular homicide cases. He works the standard procedure cases no one else wants. He earned that position from a long line of disappointing decisions, “letting things drop” and “cutting corners” as he would say. Because of that, his old partner believes he is completely corrupt, and his superiors don’t trust him to follow through with things.

March swears he has changed, and we see the contrast between who he is and who he could be in a Louisianan cop named Fontenot. Both are veteran cops. Both are zealous for justice. Both have been tempted to take matters into their own hands, and both have. But one of them has begun to hold back.

Continue reading What Makes a Murderer Tick? →
Fiction, Reviews

‘Poor Dead Cricket,’ by W. Glenn Duncan

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W. Glenn Duncan’s Rafferty series, about a tough Dallas private eye back before the turn of this century, is not my favorite hard-boiled series by far. Think of Robert B. Parker’s Spenser, then move him to Dallas, give him a gun-happy cowboy buddy instead of a black gangster type, and reduce his intelligence and wit by about 25%, and you’ve got Rafferty. But the books are entertaining enough to keep me interested, and refreshingly un-Woke.

In Poor Dead Cricket, Rafferty is hired by an obscure environmentalist group to investigate the death of one of their informants, Sandra “Cricket” Dawes. Cricket was apparently killed by a mugger in her apartment’s parking lot. Crime of opportunity, no arrest likely. But the environmentalists insist she was in the process of delivering secret files she stole from a nuclear power company employer, documents that could blow the lid off dangerous practices in handling fissionable materials. They think the company killed her. They also want those files, if Rafferty can find them.

Rafferty isn’t much impressed with the environmentalists, whom he considers shallow headline-chasers, and he doesn’t even like much what he learns about Cricket. But she’s dead, and nobody seems very concerned about her as a person. So Rafferty gets to work.

Lots of switches and surprises, a couple gunfights, and a pretty neat final twist. I enjoyed Poor Dead Cricket, and recommend it for light reading. Only minor cautions for language.

Authors, Fiction, Religion, Uncategorized

Of Northmen and Kingsnorth

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Now I draw toward the conclusion of a brief, strenuous stretch of days leading up to the rigors of a long airline flight (different from prison incarceration, as I often say, mainly in that you’re likely to get out of prison ahead of schedule). Friday I drove up to Brainerd to speak to the convention of the 1st District of the Sons of Norway. Spoke twice on Viking Legacy and got a very good response. My only disappointment was that somehow I was boneheaded enough not to check my stock of the book. I had three copies to sell of the book I was promoting. Well done, Marketing Genius! I did have plenty of my novels, The Year of the Warrior and West Oversea (see the upper right, if you’d like to buy them), and they went pretty well.

Anyway, it was a good experience, though driving two hours (each way) is more of a challenge than it used to be – not so long ago, it seems.

Then on Sunday it was Danish Day at the Danish-American Center in Minneapolis. Last year I planned to go, but that was when Mrs. Ingebretsen, my poor PT Cruiser, broke down. The sequel to that, as you may recall, was three-and-a-half months without my car.

This year I crossed my fingers and made it. Nice day, and a good number of our Viking club members showed up to wear costumes and fight with blunt swords. The younger ones did the fighting – I looked on with a paternal smile. I only sold one book, but I never sell much at Danish Day. It was good to be out there again with my A-frame tent. And the young people were very good to help with the loading, unloading, and setting up. And down.

Our friend Gene Edward Veith has a fascinating post today (behind a paywall, alas, but I’ll link to it here anyway) about the novelist Paul Kingsnorth, previously unknown to me, who has quite a conversion story – out-Lewising C. S. Lewis himself. He went from being an atheist to being an environmentalist, to being a seeker, then a Wiccan:

I had known, I suppose, that the abyss was still there inside me—that what I was doing in the woods, though affecting, was at some level still play-acting. Then, one night, I dreamed of ­Jesus. The dream was vivid, what he had looked like. The crux of the matter was that he was to be the next step on my spiritual path. I didn’t believe that or want it to be true. But the image and the message reminded me of something strange that had happened a few months before. My wife and I were out to dinner, celebrating our wedding anniversary, when suddenly she said to me, “You’re going to become a Christian.” When I asked her what on earth she was talking about, she said she didn’t know; she had just had a feeling and needed to tell me. My wife has a preternatural sensitivity that she always denies, and it wasn’t the first time she had done something like this. It shook me. A Christian? Me? What could be weirder?

Eventually he found a home in the Romanian Orthodox Church. His full account can be read on his blog here.

Dr. Veith says he’s ordering Kingsnorth’s novel Alexandria. But since it’s the third book of a trilogy, I can’t resist starting with the first installment, The Wake.