J. Mark Bertrand echoes another reader of the ESV Reader’s Bible in finding he reads more in this edition than in other editions. Readability, he says, is a thing, and it influences how we read. “Yet, like Steve, I’ve found myself getting sucked into the reader, coming up for air much later than expected.”
All posts by Phil
Two Tolkien Movies Aiming for Easter Release
Two films, Tolkien and Tolkien & Lewis, are being developed by small companies with the hopes of capturing the ticket money of a bunch of us Tolkien/Lewis fans. (via Overstweet)
How Orthodox Must a Christian Publisher Be?
The National Religious Broadcasters has pressed WaterBrook Multnomah Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, to resign from its organization over the publishing of a book under a new sister imprint, Convergent Books (for more on that book: “‘Biblically Based’ Author Argues Against Biblical Morality”). Convergent is a little more than a year old. I could care less about this, because I’ve been ramping up to lead the Lars Walker’s Awesomest World Publishing Group for the last few months. Soon that will be the only label you’ll want to watch for. You heard it here first.
But seriously, NRB President Jerry Johnson explained the problem in a letter to his board. According to Christianity Today:
“Unfortunately, while the Multnomah Publishing Group is separate from Convergent, as a legal and business entity, the staff of the Multnomah and Convergent operations are substantially the same,” Johnson wrote. “Most notably, Steven W. Cobb serves as the chief publishing executive for both groups. … Other Christian workers do so as well. … This issue comes down to NRB members producing unbiblical material, regardless of the label under which they do it.”
I understand how the book in question is unbiblical, but what about other books? For years, thoughtful Christians have criticized Christian bookstores for selling pablum and heresy. Are these publishers accepted in the NRB? It’s one thing to sell The Prayer of Jabez; it’s another to sell Joel Osteen’s Break Out. Jabez was a mid-90s book from Multnomah. Osteen is published by Faithwords, a division of Hachette.
The publisher’s About page shows its diversity: “Based near Nashville, Tennessee, FaithWords has grown dramatically by acquiring a solid list of faith-building fiction and high-profile authors with edifying messages, including bestselling authors Joyce Meyer, Joel Osteen, John Eldredge, and David Jeremiah. Several FaithWords titles have appeared on national bestseller lists, most recently Every Day a Friday, by Joel Osteen, Living Beyond Your Feelings, by Joyce Meyer, and I Never Thought I’d See the Day!, by David Jeremiah.”
Two sister imprints to Faithwords target mainline and “uplifting” divisions in the broadly based spiritual book market, and none of them are members of NRB.
Leawood Boy Allowed to Keep Free Library in His Yard
Last month, I linked to a story on a 9-year-old boy who had his “little free library” taken down by his city government. Yesterday he appealed to the Leawood, Kansas, city council and won a temporary moratorium on these structures. The council will take up a permanent resolution this fall.
But all was not good in the hood, according to The Daily Signal. “Why do we pay taxes for libraries and have those boxes on the street?” asked one attendee. Another member claimed the little libraries were eyesores and argued, “You will destroy Leawood if you destroy our codes and bylaws.”
One must ask how many towns across America will be destroyed before the freedom to read will be abolished. One can only hope that citizen will vandalize the boy’s little library in the name of John Adams, George Washington, and all of our great forefathers who looked upon their children with books in hand and said, “Not today, son. That’s not what this country is about.”
Don’t Call Thor ‘Miss’
“No, it’s a myth, a myth!” he said.
“Yes?” she replied.
In more exciting comic book news, Marvel wants to make its lineup more gender-balanced, so they are retrofitting old characters. In October, Thor will be a woman.
On Twitter, FlannelJedi observes, “By my count, a woman has wielded the power of Thor 3 times so far- in official & What If? scenarios. Storm, Black Widow & Thora (Earth X).” The NY Daily News spells out Marvel’s other offerings, “In recent months, new titles have focused on veteran heroines Black Widow, She-Hulk, Captain Marvel and Elektra, as well as introducing series around a new Ms. Marvel character, whose secret identity is a Muslim American teenager from Jersey City. Marvel also launched an all-female “X-Men” title last year.“
R.I.P. Archie Andrews
This week’s issues of Life With Archie will include the main character’s death. Archie, who has had a 73-year run as one of America’s favorite comic book teens, will bite it this week by taking a bullet for his gay best friend. His publisher said it could have ended in other ways, but “metaphorically, by saving Kevin, a new Riverdale is born.”
Do Christian Artists Get Fair Reviews?
Mike Duran points to the films of Dinesh D’Souza and Scott Derrickson this week to ask if these films are hitting their intended marks and attracting negative reviews because of that or are the reviews fair?
“My point here is not to endorse (or pan) either film, but to simply ask whether the artists’ beliefs or their film’s point-of-view make them unfair targets to critics,” Mike says.
I think there’s merit to this idea. Any work of art or entertainment gains attention or snores based on how its subject matter resonates with its audience. Even bad art gets praised because it resonates. In comments on the NPR review for Deliver Us From Evil, one person asks, “Will you lighten up? Why should this movie be seriously reviewed?” and another person says, “And J.J. Abrams ‘Star Trek’, MESS, got a 95% from ‘serious film critics’??!!”
I don’t think we’re talking about objective, humble film reviewing here. What is humble film reviewing, anyway? Critics aren’t the kind of people you give your daughters to marry. Am I right?
Talking ‘Bout My Education
Andrew Furgeson writes about nationwide education reform and why we love it every time it returns:
Common Core was announced only eight years after President George W. Bush and Sen. Edward Kennedy introduced another revolutionary approach to learning in public schools, an expensive and ambitious program called No Child Left Behind. NCLB, as it’s referred to in the acronym-crazed world of education reform, forced states to raise their academic standards, which were considered too low, and to improve scores on standardized tests, which ditto.
NCLB itself came eight years after President Clinton thought up Goals 2000, a nationwide school reform program to enact “standards-based reforms” and thereby improve test scores. Goals 2000 was a reworking of a school reform plan called America 2000 that President George H.W. Bush launched in 1990 as a way of raising standards and getting better test scores out of America’s public schools. He wanted to be called “the education president,” President Bush did, and his approach, he said, was revolutionary.
And in 1983, only seven years before the ambitious launch of President Bush’s America 2000, the nation received an alarming report commissioned by President Reagan, who was troubled that test scores, along with standards, were too low among public school students. The report was called “A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform.” It concluded that higher standards were necessary to raise test scores. “A Nation at Risk” was written by a blue-ribbon commission in an attempt to end-run the Department of Education, which had been started in 1979. The department was Jimmy Carter’s idea. He worried that lax standards were destroying American public education. A federal department, he reasoned, might be able to oversee a revolutionary new approach that would set things right.
For nearly 40 years, it’s pretty much been all reform, all the time for the nation’s public school students, teachers, and parents.
(via Prufrock)
How the French Buy Books
“We don’t force French people to go to bookstores,” explains Vincent Montagne, head of the French Publishers Association. “They go to bookstores because they read.”
And the French government doesn’t allow them to discount their books more than 5%, so Amazon.com isn’t undermining local stores through deep discounts. France has around 2,500 bookshops now.
“We couldn’t have opened our bookstore without the subsidies we received,” Ms. Pérou said. “And we couldn’t survive now without fixed prices.” She and her husband own L’Usage du Monde in Paris.
Pamela Druckerman suggests this plethora of bookshops affords the French the choices we all want, but what do the booksellers offer that publishers don’t produce? Is choice in reading a selling, not a publishing, option? (via The Literary Saloon)
Changing: The English of the Future
Most English speakers today learned it as a second language, so how will their habits, struggles, and primary languages change the English language? Prospero says it has already gotten simpler. It may continue down that path.
“For example, European Union bureaucrats are likely to use the English ‘control’ to mean ‘monitor’ or ‘verify’, because contrôler and kontrollieren have this meaning in French and German….
“What, then, can we predict English will lose if the process goes on? An easy choice seems to be ‘whom’. English was once heavily inflected; all nouns carried a suffix showing whether they were subjects, direct objects, indirect objects or played some other role in a sentence. Today, only the pronouns are inflected. And while any competent speaker can use I, me, my and mine correctly, even the most fluent can find whom (the object form of who) slippery. So whom might disappear completely, or perhaps only survive as a stylistic option in formal writing.”