Rob Long has a piece on writers procrastinating by giving talks on writing.
“Writers, in general, love giving these talks, love giving advice, because it’s as close to writer-ish activity as you can get without actually having to write, which is something that all writers, or at least all honest writers, hate.” (via Prufrock)
Walter Rosenberg knew that escaping from the Auschwitz Concentration Camp was a crazy idea and probably impossible, but when he turned 18, he knew he should be the one to attempt it. Others had tried and failed. Even attempting to warn someone before their deaths resulted in one’s own death for breaking the deception the Nazi’s employed to efficiently usher their prisoners into the gas chambers.
“The factory of murder that the Nazis had constructed in this accursed place depended on one cardinal principle: that the people who came to Auschwitz did not know where they were going, or for what purpose. . . . The Nazis had devised a method that would operate like a well-run slaughterhouse rather than a shooting party.”
On April 7, 1944, he and Fred Wetzler acted on all of their preparations. The UK Guardian has their story.
“Walter understood that the Nazis wanted him and every other prisoner to conclude that escape was futile, that any attempt was doomed. But Walter drew a very different lesson. The danger came not from trying to escape, but from trying and failing.”
“I looked, and there was a white horse! Its rider had a bow; a crown was given to him, and he came out conquering and to conquer” (Revelation 6:2 KJV).
Franny Crosby is that familiar, Methodist Episcopal hymn writer whose hymns are lodged in my head so neatly I can’t remember which ones are hers or when I last sung one. I don’t think this hymn has come up in our church in a long time, but it could be that I just can’t remember it.
I think the theme of this hymn is out of fashion today, and believers need it as much as they ever did. The battle is not to the strong; the race will not be won by the swift. Victory will be given by the Master to his own on his own terms.
1.Conquering now and still to conquer, rideth a King in His might;
Leading the host of all the faithful into the midst of the fight;
See them with courage advancing, clad in their brilliant array,
Shouting the Name of their Leader, hear them exultingly say:
Refrain:
Not to the strong is the battle, not to the swift is the race,
Yet to the true and the faithful vict’ry is promised thro’ grace.
2. Conquering now and still to conquer, who is this wonderful King?
Whence are the armies which He leadeth, while of His glory they sing?
He is our Lord and Redeemer, Savior and Monarch divine;
They are the stars that forever bright in His kingdom shall shine.
3. Conquering now and still to conquer, Jesus, Thou Ruler of all,
Thrones and their scepters all shall perish, crowns and their splendor shall fall,
Yet shall the armies Thou leadest, faithful and true to the last,
Find in Thy mansions eternal rest, when their warfare is past.
I listened through Out of the Silent Planet the other day, because I’ve been reading That Hideous Strength with friends for a few months and we took a couple weeks off for multiple reasons. It’s a fun adventure that spends a good bit of time on details like the space ship and experiencing interplanetary travel with a Wells or Verne feel. It would probably make a good launchpad for discussing Lewis’s ‘scientific’ observations in contrast with current views. Science is always changing, always correcting itself or arguing over what is correct.
You could also walk away from that book with idea that submitting to God could be a very big deal. Or you could be thinking, “Words are cool.”
Here are a few, loosely related links.
Off-road: Professor Christopher Yuan notes a troubling bent in a post yesterday from theological publisher Eerdmans. Recommending reading for this month, the publisher of the theology text I used in college says, “We find ourselves at a time again where we should be willing to listen and seek to understand those in the LGBTQ+ community who are simply fighting to be seen and heard, cared for and loved.” Yuan sees this as a sign the once theology powerhouse has steered in the direction of declining mainline denominations everywhere.
Yuan’s own book on sexuality would be more insightful than any of these.
Reading Life: “[Dana] Gioia describes his ‘odd and bookish’ childhood growing up in a working-class family in Los Angeles. . . My parents never knew what to make of a kid obsessed with books.”
Interplanetary: Space opera is resurging. “Typically seen as (and often being) the least literary form of SF, space opera hasn’t gone out of style since Buck Rogers began battling galactic evils in the 1920s and ’30s . . .” (via ArtsJournal)
Children Should Know the Truth: We shouldn’t keep life realities from our children by pretending everything will be okay. “It is likely that today’s children will inherit a world more violent and more precarious in every way than the one experienced by post–Cold war generations. The belief that everything will be all right was always a recipe for fragility; now it is simply a fantasy.”
Photo: Smalley’s Jewelry Store sign, Ogden, Utah 1980. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
Martha felt like an imposter at Harvard with so many of the super smart around her. “The importance of prestige is so overwhelming in that culture,” she said, “that people hardly look at each other, let alone their environment.”
With a few minutes before class, she visited a friend in the psych department. “My friend was in her lab, conducting an experiment that consisted of implanting wires into the brains of live rats, then making the rats swim around in a tub of reconstituted dry milk.” Why? Reasons. But the tub was a child’s swimming pool decorated in Smurfs.
Martha got to her class a couple minutes late, catching everyone’s attention as she walked in. In her book, Expecting Adam, Martha N. Beck wrote:
“Ah, Martha,” said the course instructor, “we’ve been waiting for you.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I was upstairs in the Psych lab, watching rats swim around in a Smurf pool.”
“I see,” said the instructor, “Yes, I believe I’ve read about that.”
A professor, one of the visiting dignitaries, chimed in. “How is Smurf’s work going?” he inquired. “I understand he’s had some remarkable findings.”
“Yes,” said a graduate student. “I read his last article.”
There was a general murmur of agreement. It seems that everyone in the room was familiar with Dr. Smurf, and his groundbreaking work with swimming rats.
. . . Comprehension blossomed in my brain like a lovely flower.
“I think,” I said solemnly, “that Smurf is going to change the whole direction of linguistic epistemology.”
They all agreed, nodding, saying things like ‘Oh, yes,’ and “I wouldn’t doubt it.”
I beamed at them, struggling desperately not to laugh. It wasn’t so much that I wanted to mock these people. I was giddy with exhilaration, because after seven years at Harvard, I was just beginning to realize that I wasn’t the only one faking it.
Witch Wood, the story of a new minister in a rural parish of Scotland, is said to be author John Buchan’s favorite and his most critically praised. Buchan (1875-1940) wrote a number of novels and may be most remembered now for his 1915 spy novel, The Thirty-Nine Steps.
Witch Wood, published in 1927, is the moving account Rev. David Sempill’s arrival in Woodilee Village, Scotland, on August 15, 1644. We is warmly received and eager to minister to his flock in every duty required of him. Soon he learns of the nearby forest, named Melanudrigill or “The Black Wood” out of fear of spirits living within it. Sempill rebukes the idea as pagan superstition, but eventually discovers a weathered stone table in the midst of a forest clearing. What is written on it is “I. O. M.” — Jovi Optimo Maximo, Roman markings for an altar.
This and other signs tell him members of his own congregation practice the occult in secret. Sempill won’t simply dismiss an issue like that, but no one in his presbytery is willing to believe him. Some accuse him of imagining it. Arguments against him sound too familar.
He worries about his flock. “The profession of religion was not the same thing as godliness, and he was coming to doubt whether the insistence upon minute conformities of outward conduct and the hair-splitting doctrines were not devices of Satan to entangle souls.”
To his immediate superior, who does not believe a pious elder of the church could be involved in this and would prefer to keep the kirk united against the world, Sempill asks, “In the name of God, whose purity is a flame of fire, would you let gross wickedness go unchecked because it may knock a splinter off the Kirk? I tell you it were better that the Kirk should be broken to dust and trampled underfoot than that it should be made a cloak for sin.”
An epilogue in my edition reveals the source of the story; it’s an interpretation of real events during the war between Covenanters and Scottish Royalists. Without revealing more of the story, I want to tell you I worried at a few points that the heroes would not succeed and everything would come crashing down on their heads. I guess that’s a sign Buchan had me gripped.
Definitely a book for the scotophile. The most difficult part for me was that thirty percent of the text is the Scottish dialect of Woodilee folk.
“There’s ill news frae up the water, Mr. Sempill. . . . Marion puir body, has been ill wi’ a wastin’ the past twalmonth, and now it seems she’s near her release.”
“Me! I ken nocht. Me and my man aye keepit clear o’ the Wud. . . . Woodilee has aye been keened for a queer bit, lappit in the muckle Wud, but the guilty are come by an ill end.”
I’ve gotten more used to it, but with whole conversations written in this style, I felt I couldn’t keep up without a dictionary.
This hymn comes to us from the Englishman Samuel Medley (1738-99), set to a tune by Englishman John Hatton (1710-93).
1 I know that my Redeemer lives!
What comfort this sweet sentence gives!
He lives, he lives, who once was dead;
he lives, my everliving head!
2 He lives triumphant from the grave;
he lives eternally to save;
he lives all-glorious in the sky;
he lives exalted there on high.
3 He lives to grant me rich supply;
he lives to guide me with his eye;
he lives to comfort me when faint;
he lives to hear my soul’s complaint.
I love discussions that delve into how the whole world has changed under the influence of Christianity. Speaking to unbelievers, Glen Scrivener writes, “You already hold particularly ‘Christian-ish’ views, and the fact that you think of these values as natural, obvious, or universal shows how profoundly the Christian revolution has shaped you.”
Scrivener has a new book, The Air We Breathe, in which he discusses how all manner of modern ideals have Christian origins, and when debating Christian speakers, atheists and other non-Christians will assume Christian positions on their way to undermining Christian principles. Black Lives Matter couldn’t exist as a popular American concept brought up in many arguments over human dignity without the foundation of God’s created image so many assume today (despite explicitly rejecting it, as some do). It’s marvelous.
Movies: The state of cinema today (via Prufrock)
“We are in the present losing more movies from the past faster than ever before. It seems like we aren’t, but the mere disappearance of physical media is already having corporations curating what we watch, faster for us,” Guillermo Del Toro said.
A Memorial Day Story: Elliot Ritzema heard from his grandpa via the marginal notes in Citizen Soldiers. “When Ambrose wrote, ‘The Ninth Tactical Air Force had a dozen airstrips in Normandy by this time,’ my grandpa added, We were one of these airstrips, 36th Fighter Group, 32nd Service Group.”
The Hobbit in Bears: Is this is a case of life imitating art?
Photo: Big Ole, Alexandria, Minnesota, 2001. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
Today hymn is believed to have been originally written by Ignaz Franz (1719-1790), chaplain at Gross-Glogau and vicar of Glogau in Silesia, Poland, during the 1740s. Clarence A. Walworth (1820-1900) translated it from German.
1 Holy God, we praise thy name.
God of all, we bow before thee.
All on earth your scepter claim;
all in heav’n above adore thee.
Infinite thy vast domain,
everlasting is thy reign.
2 Hark, the loud celestial hymn,
angel choirs above are raising.
Cherubim and seraphim,
in unceasing chorus praising,
fill the heav’ns with sweet accord:
Holy, holy, holy Lord.
3 Lo! the apostolic train
join thy sacred name to hallow.
Prophets swell the glad refrain,
and the blessed martyrs follow,
and, from morn till set of sun,
through the church the song goes on.
4 Holy Author, Holy Word,
Holy Spirit, three we name thee;
still, one holy voice is heard:
undivided God, we claim thee,
and adoring bend the knee,
while we own the mystery.
I’ve been doing these Saturday blogroll posts for a while now, and I’m always happy to see a kind of theme emerge from the articles to which I link. This post will be more random. Sorry.
What do Red Letter Christians who disparage Paul’s words in favor of Jesus’s quotations do with the fact that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John wrote the gospels, not Jesus himself? Jesus didn’t write anything. If you say the biblical authors may have gotten their letters wrong, it applies throughout. Or are we saying that only the parts I dislike and challenge my modern sensibilities are the parts that probably are not inspired Scripture?
Music: “There are all these different metal bands out there from Scandinavia who incorporate Viking and pagan culture into their art. I always wondered why no one that I knew of had done that with Native American culture.” Album Offers Today’s Hits — Sung in Cherokee (nextcity.org)
That’s cool in a sense, but I don’t listen to metal. Here’s a new musician singing songs I do listen to: Colm R. McGuinness sings The Rocky Road to Dublin
And I don’t know who needs to hear this, but, uh, God’s gonna cut you down.
Thrillers: 10 Best Adaptations of Legal Books to Film of All Time
Ombudsman: Media Mistakes in the Biden Era: the Definitive List | Sharyl Attkisson
Reading Fiction: Should we read fiction as part of our discipleship?
We who belong to the church, who have cognitively accepted the Unseen Reality, as Evelyn Underhill described it, also suffer from constricted imaginations. The disenchantment we have all undergone as products of the modern world has critically stunted our spiritual development, our knowledge of ourselves, our hopes and dreams for God in the world.
Photo: I-84 near Hammett, Idaho. 2004. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
