Tag Archives: China

Salt, Light, Memory, and a Few Good Books

In the current issue of World Magazine, veteran journalist Cal Thomas talks about the scant trust in new media and some of his experiences over fifty years. Here’s one.

One of my favorite stories about what maintaining integrity and “guarding your heart” in the Christian life can mean came, surprisingly enough, from the pornographer Larry Flynt. In 2007, Flynt was offering $1 million to anyone who could “out” a member of Congress or other public ­figure who was a “family values conservative” in rhetoric, but something quite different in private life. One day, Flynt rolled into Fox’s green room in New York in his wheelchair (he had been shot and paralyzed by a gunman in Georgia in 1978). After exchanging perfunctory greetings, he said to me, “I thought you’d be interested in something.”

“What’s that?” I said.

“We did an investigation of you.”

“Is that right?”

“Yeah,” Flynt said. “We didn’t find anything.”

I laughed. “Praise the Lord, a personal endorsement from Larry Flynt! You were just looking in the wrong place for my sins.”

Nostalgia: What do we make of the past? “A man who can reach a certain age—I cannot be precise as to what age—without experiencing nostalgia must have had a pretty wretched existence.”

Reading: Long-time editor and reviewer John Wilson offers a list of novels and books he’s looking forward to this summer, including the work of E.X. Ferrars and her Andrew Bassnet series, in which a retired botanist retires only to find he’s come across a murder.

The Soviet Man: In his book The Soviet Century, Karl Schlögel “argues that over its sixty-eight years of existence, the Soviet Union did succeed in its goal of creating a ‘new Soviet person’ (novy sovetsky chelovek). But, as he puts it, ‘The new human being was the product not of any faith in a utopia, but of a tumult in which existing lifeworlds were destroyed and new ones born.'” What helped build this new person was a curious amalgamation: “Soviet Americanism.”

Anniversary: In Hong Kong, they will not forget what happened in Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989. None of us should.

"Your heart is not the compass Christ saileth by." - Samuel Rutherford

From @SJMelniszyn /Twitter

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

The Best of the Worst, an Honest Question, and Snow

My girls would love to watch endless varieties of good holiday rom-coms, but multiple factors work against them. We don’t have a TV service to feed us the Hallmark Channel or network broadcasting (also the reason we don’t catch the full Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade). We don’t have Netflix anymore. And, fundamentally, “good holiday rom-coms” are as common as good, ugly Christmas sweaters. They call them “ugly” for legit reasons, so to find good ones you have to take up a particular mindset.

This would have come up even without Molly K advocating for The Spirit of Christmas (2015) as the best of bad Christmas movies. Moving on.

Animator Hayao Miyazaki, co-founder of Studio Ghibli, is coming out of retirement again with a “grand-scale” fantasy idea based on a 1937 novel by Genzaburo Yoshino called How Do You Live?

Remaking Notre Dame Cathedral: “Newly released plans for reconstruction of the Notre Dame Cathedral will incorporate what some describe as a ‘politically correct Disneyland,’ reports the Telegraph. Christophe Rousselot, the director-general of the Notre Dame Foundation, says the intent is to make the cathedral and Christianity accessible for those not raised in a Christian society.”

Broadway composer Stephen Sondheim, who worked with Oscar Hammerstein as a youth, died on Thanksgiving Day. He was 91.

Willa Cather wrote, “I think even stupid people like to puzzle over a book. A slight element of mystery is a great asset.” 

Adam B. Coleman asks, “To the people who would insinuate that I am being used by white conservatives or that I express ‘right’ leaning viewpoints for white acceptance, I have a question: Would you say this to a black liberal?

Movies in China: “One of the last vestiges of free speech in Hong Kong is now gone. The result is self-censorship by filmmakers who now have to question what might run afoul of the new rules and increased scrutiny by financiers and distributors who now must consider that very same question.”

From “Snow Day” by Billy Collins
In a while, I will put on some boots
and step out like someone walking in water,   
and the dog will porpoise through the drifts,   
and I will shake a laden branch
sending a cold shower down on us both.

Photo: Southampton Theater, Montauk Highway, Southhampton, New York. 1989. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

In China, A Christian in a Bad Church May Have No Options

PastorZhang San writes, “As Christians living under a communist regime—the Chinese Communist Party was founded 100 years ago [Thursday] —there is a sense in which we are blessed. As Proverbs 30:8–9 says, ‘Give me neither poverty nor riches . . . lest I be full and deny you and say, “Who is the LORD?” or lest I be poor and steal and profane the name of my God.’”

But churches hide from strangers to guard themselves against being reported to the state. If a believing family wanted to find more biblical teaching than they are receiving at their current church, they may not be able to find another congregation.

Pray for Early Rain Covenant Church IN CHENGDU, China

Our technology has allowed us to expand our awareness to the entire world, making requests for prayer seemingly boundless. I hesitate to say this is the biggest prayer request of the month, but the persecution of Early Rain Covenant in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province in southwest China, is something important to pray and praise the Lord over. I copied their Christmas Eve update below. Here’s a letter from earlier this month for more context on the government’s unlawful routing of their congregation.

“Now when they had departed, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, ‘Rise, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you, for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him.’ And he rose and took the child and his mother by night and departed to Egypt and remained there until the death of Herod. This was to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet, ‘Out of Egypt I called my son.’” (Matt. 2:13-15)

Like the “White Terror” during the first Christmas, brothers and sisters of Early Rain Covenant Church, as members of the Lord Jesus, are currently walking the path that the Church’s Head once walked. Authorities are continuing to suppress Early Rain Covenant Church through everything from criminal detention, administrative detention, enforced disappearances, stalking, and financial pressure to the seizing of church property. 

On Christmas Eve, the 23rd-floor sanctuary of Early Rain Covenant Church was taken over by the Chengdu Qingyang District Shuangyanjing Community Police and converted to a community police office space. Linxishu Church, a church plant of Early Rain Covenant Church, was seized by the Pidu District authorities and community police. The church property at Enyue Church, another church plant of Early Rain, was cleared out by New Tianfu District authorities. The current church spaces were privately purchased or rented. As long as the civil contract has not expired, no one is allowed to alter or cancel it without the permission of both parties. Officials and local governments have violated both the law and morality. They have stolen nearly 1000-square-feet of real estate without paying one penny. 

And yet, Lord, we still praise you. Lord’s Day worship at Early Rain Covenant Church was observed in the homes of families and small groups called and set apart by the Lord, as well as other locations. Some brothers and sisters were confined to their own homes. One small-group’s worship was interrupted by police. A total of 20 people (including 8 children) were all taken to the police station. They returned peacefully to their homes the same day. Another small group was forced to change locations. Yet another was spoken to by police after the meeting ended. In these difficult circumstances, the Spirit of the Lord has been feeding, strengthening, and challenging everyone through Chapter 2 of Matthew’s Gospel and through His servants who are in the middle of these trials and tribulations. 

Continue reading Pray for Early Rain Covenant Church IN CHENGDU, China

Who Has Authority to Speak on a Subject?

Min Hyoung Song, an English professor at Boston College, focuses much of his time on Chinese-American literature and has written this review of book that contrasts two China-focused authors, one a Pulitzer and Nobel winner, the other struggling for any attention at all. He asks:

What does it mean to be serious? Or, more specifically, how does a subject get to be something (or someone) worth speaking about? Who gets to speak about this subject and be accepted as someone who knows what he or she is talking about? What forms can this authority take, and in what kinds of contexts? Pearl S. Buck’s wild successes and H. T. Tsiang’s wild failures are the two extremes.

Those are good questions for any subject, and the answer seems to have much to do with personal trust and connection. An author or teacher may have good, or what would be fair to call “the right,” answers on a topic but fail to connect with his readers. Without such a connection, no one will trust him to know what he’s talking about. On the other hand, that person who has gained his readers’ trust can be wrong about many things and still be considered an authority. Personal trust is the key. (via ALDaily)

“Please Keep Silence”

Gui Minhai, a naturalized Sweden, originally Chinese, has worked with four other men in “publishing books about political intrigue among China’s Communist Party leaders; now they are in the custody of mainland Chinese authorities, apparently charged with selling illicit books.”

In January on state-controlled TV, Gui “confessed” to being convicted and paroled for vehicular homicide. Now he is emprisoned for having broken that parole. His daughter, Angela, doesn’t believe it. She’d never heard of any wreck, killing, or conviction until the newscast. What won’t be confessed is the government’s rounding up everyone in Gui’s publishing company to stop them from writing criticism of the government.

Angela Gui said she received a Skype text message from her father’s account a day or so after his TV confession on Jan. 18, when she was widely quoted in foreign media as saying she had never heard of the vehicular homicide case he cited. The message told her to “please keep silence.” Judging from the grammatical errors, Gui said she didn’t believe her father was the author.

Crime Fighting, Old and New

“For me, Batman has the most spiritual narratives. I’d venture to say that, in general, D.C. excels Marvel in exploring the hero’s soul, and no soul is darker than Bruce Wayne’s.”

Smoking GuyBrad Fruhauff talks about his appreciation of Batman’s character and storyline, and he’s probably right. Batman wins by sheer force of will, despite the flood of evil he faces.

Turn the page. Author Christopher West says the Chinese were telling the equivalent of police procedurals far before anyone in the West.

A genre known as gong’an began in the Song dynasty (960 to 1279): the term means a magistrate’s desk, and the modern equivalent would be police procedural. Stories would be narrated by wandering storytellers or in puppet shows, and usually told of upright officials exposing corruption and cover-ups. No examples of these stories have survived, however. The oldest gong’an tales come from the next dynasty, the Yuan (1279 to 1368).

Turn another page. For a limited time, BBC Radio 4 is airing a production of an unfinished work by Alfred Hitchcock, The Blind Man. “The world premiere of Alfred Hitchcock and Ernest Lehman’s unfinished screenplay, the follow-up to North by Northwest, now completed by Mark Gatiss” stars Hugh Laurie and Kelly Burke.

“Set in 1961, a famous blind jazz pianist, Larry Keating [Laurie], agrees to a radical new medical procedure – an eye transplant. The operation is a success but his new eyes are those of a murdered man, and captured on their retina is the image of his murderer. Larry and his new nurse, Jenny [Burke], begin a quest to track him down – before someone else dies.”

Memory for the Willfully Forgetful

Memory is dangerous in a country that was built to function on national amnesia. A single act of public remembrance might expose the frailty of the state’s carefully constructed edifice of accepted history, scaffolded in place over a generation and kept aloft by a brittle structure of strict censorship, blatant falsehood and wilful forgetting. That’s why a five-foot-tall, 76-year-old grandmother poses enough of a threat that an escort of state security agents, at time as many as 40 strong, has trailed her to the vegetable market and the dentist.

Louisa Lim has released a book she didn’t want to write: The People’s Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited. How did China systematically forget what happened June 4, 1989, in Tiananmen Square?

Can Anyone Return from Heaven?

Very Steep Cliffs in Heaven's Gate MountainsPhil Johnson has an article on the recent rash of supposedly eyewitness accounts of heaven. He says it’s nothing new:

Various survivors of near-death experiences have been publishing gnostic insights about the afterlife for at least two decades. Betty Eadie’s Embraced by the Light was number one on the New York Times Bestseller List exactly 20 years ago. The success of that book unleashed an onslaught of similar tales, nearly all of them with strong New Age and occult overtones. So psychics and new-agers have been making hay with stories like these for at least two decades.

Johnson points to an upcoming book by John MacArthur on heaven and these books. He argues that the Bible forbids the possibility that anyone can return from beyond the grave. “All the accounts of heaven in Scripture are visions, not journeys taken by dead people,” MacArthur writes. “And even visions of heaven are very, very rare in Scripture. You can count them all on one hand.” Moreover, the biblical accounts focus on God’s overwhelming glory, not all the fun junk we might do in heaven.

In his excellent book Gospel Deeps: Reveling in the Excellencies of Jesus, Jared Wilson touches on this in a paragraph near the end.

Can I tell you one of the problems with books like Heaven Is for Real? Aside from the obvious honesty issues, they very often demote Jesus to a Character in heaven like one of the costumed players at Disney World. He is Santa Claus, an attraction of some kind. Continue reading Can Anyone Return from Heaven?