All posts by Phil

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Understanding Pornography Through Tolkien

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“‘No, I am afraid not, Sam,” said Frodo. “At least, I know that such things happened, but I cannot see them. No taste of food, no feel of water, no sound of wind, no memory of tree or grass or flower, no image of moon or star are left to me. I am naked in the dark, Sam, and there is no veil between me and the wheel of fire.”

Samuel James says, “I don’t think I have ever read anything that more poetically expresses what it’s like to be addicted to pornography than that passage.”

“As someone who was rescued from severe bondage to porn, I can feel the contrast in my life now versus my life then much more keenly than I can describe it. I feel emotional lightness, I suppose, and I no longer live in that withering dread of exposure that colored every human encounter.”

Uncategorized

Make Moral, not Materialistic, Arguments

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Americans are not materialists. Most find materialism noxious and ugly, as they should. They are uneasy at its presence in their own lives and they rebel against it in public life. So when conservatives present the policies America needs with materialistic language, we are placing our ideas in a box so ­unattractive that people simply don’t want to look inside. They instinctively side with moral over materialistic rhetoric, and often vote for progressive politicians as a result. But many of the policies they subsequently get are materialistic to the core. The people are left dissatisfied and convinced that both sides are awful.

Arthur Brooks explains how conservatives lose arguments, even with good ideas. He says conservative Republicans, energized by the Reagan revolution, began to view themselves as primarily economic advocates. If we can just explain how money and taxes work in the real world, people will listen to us. But that’s the way we lose. Instead, Brooks recommends leading with our hearts.

Fiction, Religion

Hope for Susan Pevensie

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Joshua Rogers describes how his view of Susan in The Chronicles of Narnia changed when we realized the impact of something Aslan says.

For the first time, it dawned on me that Susan’s story wasn’t over—not at all. It couldn’t be. One day, Susan was obsessing over “lipstick and nylons and invitations,” and the next, someone would telephone her to tell her that her mother, father, sister, two brothers, a cousin, and three old friends were dead.

Also, photos of the rare white stag, which is the animal the Narnian royalty sought when they returned to our world at the end of the first book.

Authors, Religion

Jerry Bridges

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A very influential author in my life, Jerry Bridges, has passed away last night after a cardiac arrest on Saturday. He was 86.

Ligonier Ministries interviewed him in 2011 and asked, “You have written numerous books on the topics of grace and holiness. Why did you write on these topics, and how do you hope God will use these books in the lives of His people?”

JB: From my earliest contact with The Navigators, I sensed the need to apply the Scriptures specifically and intentionally to my life. But I struggled with the question, “What is my part and what is God’s part?” Finally, the Lord enabled me to see from the Scriptures the principle I call “dependent responsibility.” We are responsible to respond to the moral commands of Scripture, but we are absolutely dependent on the Holy Spirit to enable us.

I started to teach this principle of “dependent responsibility.” Then I was challenged by a friend to try writing. My first book, The Pursuit of Holiness, became a best-seller. But I soon realized that a pursuit of holiness that is not founded on grace and the gospel can lead to a performance mentality and even to discouragement. That’s when I began to emphasize grace and the gospel as foundational to the pursuit of holiness.

It is my desire that as a result of reading my books, people will seek to pursue holiness out of gratitude for what God has done for us in Christ. There is no doubt that it is our duty to pursue holiness. But I want believers to desire to do out of gratitude what is our duty to do. I want to see the “ought to” mentality replaced with a “want to” attitude.

Fiction, Non-fiction, Publishing

Melville’s Lost Novel

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What manuscripts by accomplished authors have been lost to us over the years, snatched by bibliophilic Huns or discarded as immature? The Smithsonian has a list of ten of would likely be the best lost books. The Shakespearean play on a character in Don Quixote is incredible to imagine, but here’s a good story of the great Melville doing his normal thing and finding a dead end.

On a trip to Nantucket in July 1852, Herman Melville was told the tragic story of Agatha Hatch— the daughter of a lighthouse keeper who saved a shipwrecked sailor named James Robertson, then married him, only later to be abandoned by him.

The tale would serve as inspiration for a manuscript titled The Isle of the Cross, which Melville presented to Harper & Brothers in 1853. But the publisher, for reasons unknown, turned it down. And no copy of the manuscript has ever been found. In an essay in a 1990 issue of the journal American Literature, Hershel Parker, a biographer of Melville’s, claims, “The most plausible suggestion is that the Harpers feared that their firm would be criminally liable if anyone recognized the originals of the characters in The Isle of the Cross.”

Religion

The Heresy of “Me and Jesus”

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I confess that far too often I have fallen into the heretical idea that it’s “me and Jesus,” which leads to the conclusion: If I am faithful, I know His pleasure; if I am unfaithful, I experience His loving but painful discipline. There have been many times in my life, when because of a particular unconfessed sin from which I have not repented, I have experienced with the Psalmist “my bones wast[ing] away . . . [and] groaning all day long. For day and night [the Lord’s] hand was heavy upon me [and] my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer”(Ps. 32.4).

But far too seldom, until of late, have I understood that it isn’t just “me and Jesus.” Only in my old age have I begun – and I have only just begun – to realize that as part of a covenant community the sins of my people are also my sins, and that I am responsible before God to confess these sins, to ask His forgiveness, and to repent both personally and corporately of such sins, to turn from them, and to return once more to the way of the Lord.

Dr. Caines, who has been my pastor for many years, writes about his reluctance to accept responsibility for the negligence of God’s people in defending and uplifting those who suffered various abuses during the civil rights and Jim Crow eras.

While I would assume that some in my church in the 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s spoke out against injustice and prejudice, the overwhelming majority in my church and its leaders seemed more concerned about the possibility of whites and blacks intermarrying than about blatant injustice and mindless prejudice. In fact, some even twisted the Scripture to defend the “ways thing are.”

Part of his thinking comes from the idea that my Christian life is just a matter between me and Jesus, that I come to the garden alone for Jesus to walk strictly with me. Sure, he is walking with others too, but all of us are walking with him individually.

Fiction

Kickstarter: The Wingfeather Saga

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Yesterday, Andrew Peterson posted a big announcement about his fantasy series, The Wingfeather Saga. He has formed a production company and is asking for crowdfunding for an animated series.

“Most of you probably don’t know this,” he said, “but when I was in high school I had every intention of either going into animation or penciling Batman comics. I’ve always loved illustration, but am a total hack when it comes to drawing (which, thankfully, led to a music career).”

So Peterson isn’t drawing the shows himself, but “I would really love to see the Wingfeather Saga play itself out in a different format that might just get Janner’s story into many more kids’ imaginations.”

Right now, he has 68% of his requested funding. That’s impressive for twenty-some hours.

Music, Religion

Church Without the Sermon

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The hard-shell Baptist doctrine upon which I was raised plays very little part in my worldview these days. But that church music draws me still, and those singing conventions in my memory were its purest expression. Hundreds of voices coming together in rough harmony, most all of them untrained except perhaps for a weeklong “singing school” at some church. No “program” to dictate the day’s events. The “president” of the local singing convention would just call on a singer from the crowd to stand before the choir and lead the song of his or her choice. After a moment of hymnal browsing, you’d hear something like, “Please turn to page 36 …” A piano player would roll through the first few bars of the song, and off they’d go, making a joyful noise. You never knew what you would hear next.

These Southern singing conventions thrived because the untrained singers, who had to sing from written music, could learn how through a technique called “solfège,” to use the music-school word for it. Plainer folks called it shape notes. You know the system. You’ve heard it a thousand times.

“The thing that I love about Sacred Harp is that when you walk into that church door, you have people from all different kinds of walks of life. You have people from different denominations, you’ve got people that are young, people that are old, people who have grown up loving the Lord their entire life, and you have people that do not know the Lord, who have rejected the Lord. Strong contrast, from any way you look at it.”

Non-fiction, Publishing

“Please Keep Silence”

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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.

Fiction

Brutal Satire in Eve Tushnet’s ‘Amends’

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“That skirt is so short I can see your soul.”

That’s one of the biting lines in Eve Tushnet’s novel Amends. Kate Havard reviews it. The story is about a reality show focused on alcoholics going through rehab for a month.

At first, it appears that [the right-wing journalist] and his fellow cast members [and Internet social justice warrior and a would-be saint, among others] have nothing in common except for their sustained commitment to drinking and “waiting for the alcohol to eat up the present and excrete it as the past.” But it turns out that what this group has in common is a great talent for lying, mostly to themselves. Each cast member has built an elaborate origin story that allows them to keep on living in a way they know, but can’t admit, is unsustainable. . . .

The addicts in Tushnet’s novel who are really in trouble, though, are the ones who have given up trying to justify themselves, and choose to tell the story in which they are not, and cannot ever be, good.

[via Prufrock]