Jon Hessler, an author and Minnesotan, died this week. Terry Teachout says Hessler was one of his favorite American authors:
Try thinking of him as a Midwestern John P. Marquand and you’ll get a better idea of what he’s about. ‘Of all the people I know,’ Marquand observed, “only Americans, because of some sort of inferiority complex, keep attempting the impossible and trying to get away from their environment.” Jon Hassler has never made that mistake.
Happy Easter, everyone. My four year old just told what we used to call a rip-snorter.
Why did the chicken cross the road to get the ball?
He didn’t want to be a snowflake.
Mmm, does it get any better than that?
The Lord grieved in the garden, as depicted by Robert Walter Weir
Then Jesus went with his disciples to a place called Gethsemane, and he said to them, “Sit here while I go over there and pray.” He took Peter and the two sons of Zebedee along with him, and he began to be sorrowful and troubled. 38Then he said to them, “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. Stay here and keep watch with me.” Going a little farther, he fell with his face to the ground and prayed, “My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will.”
Jared posted a couple myth busters a few days ago (link defunct). The word sincere, he explains, did not come from the marketing language of Roman potters, as you may have been told, and Jesus actually talked about heaven more than hell, though he talked about hell a good bit.
Along that lines, I have a good source on an illustration I’ve read a few times and appears to have grown into a fish story. Jonathan Edwards, one of America’s best theologians, had many godly or otherwise productive children, grandchildren, and so on. Comparing his family to that of another man who lived at the same time is meant to illustrate the fruit of a godly life. Here’s the account from an article by Leonard Ravenhill:
A thin crust, a very thin crust of morality, it seems to me, keeps America from complete collapse. In this perilous hour we need a whole generation of preachers like Edwards.
“O Lord of hosts, turn us again; cause Thy face to shine upon us, and we shall be saved.”
Contrast this great man of God with his contemporary. I quote from Al Sanders in Crisis in Morality!
Max Jukes, the atheist, lived a godless life. He married an ungodly girl, and from the union there were 310 who died as paupers, 150 were criminals, 7 were murderers, 100 were drunkards, and more than half of the women were prostitutes. His 540 descendants cost the State one and a quarter million dollars.
But, praise the Lord, it works both ways! There is a record of a great American man of God, Jonathan Edwards. He lived at the same time as Max Jukes, but he married a godly girl. An investigation was made of 1,394 known descendants of Jonathan Edwards of which 13 became college presidents, 65 college professors, 3 United States senators, 30 judges, 100 lawyers, 60 physicians, 75 army and navy officers, 100 preachers and missionaries, 60 authors of prominence, one a vice-president of the United States, 80 became public officials in other capacities, 295 college graduates, among whom were governors of states and ministers to foreign countries. His descendants did not cost the state a single penny. ‘The memory of the just is blessed’ (Prov. 10:7).
To us this is the conclusion of the whole matter.
This is a better account than the one I’ve seen more often, but the details are not as accurate as they should be. According to the March 8, 1902, issue of The School Journal, the numbers vary a bit.
Suffice it to say, “The almost universal traits of the ‘Jukes’ were idleness, ignorance, and vulgarity. These characteristics led to disease and disgrace, to pauperism and crime. They were a disgustingly diseased family as a whole. There were many imbeciles and many insane.”
There’s much more to say about the Jukes and Edwards families and what they may teach us about discipleship or public education.
In the version of the story I have, Jukes’ name is claimed as the origin of the word juke, meaning “to fake or deceive.” No, it wasn’t. It’s from a word meaning “wicked, disorderly” in a Southern English creole.
This is not so much a busted myth as a clarification. I hope I have edified you.
The significant science fiction author, Arthur C. Clarke, has died. In a 2001 Reader’s Digress–I mean, Digest–article, Clarke listed several predictions for future developments. Several he hoped would not occur, but these perhaps he did hope for.
In 2012, he suggested “Aerospace-planes [would] enter commercial service.” Prince Harry would be the first of Britain’s royalty to fly in space the following year, and in 2014, “Construction of Hilton Orbiter Hotel [would] begin by converting the giant shuttle tanks previously allowed to fall back to Earth.”
All of that would lead to this prediction for 2017: “On his hundred birthday, December 16, Sir Arthur C. Clarke is one of the first guests in the Hilton Orbiter.”
Tony Woodlief is writing on Christian writing again.
There is not redemption . . . without a fall, nor grace without sin. For O’Connor and other serious Christian writers, this reality led them to write books that would never be allowed on the shelves of a typical Christian bookstore.
This leads to an interesting possibility: that our local public library has more genuinely Christian literature — which is to say books that tell a truer story of the fall of man and his redemption by Christ — than most Christian booksellers.
In his follow-up post, he writes:
[B]ad Christian art cripples our compassionate imagination. When the bad guys practically have signs in a novel or movie labeling them as such, and the soon-to-be saved characters are similarly cordoned off, we lose sight of the wickedness that inhabits saints, and the despair that inhabits the hearts of the lost. Instead, we have our natural tribal mentality bolstered, that pernicious instinct that prompts us to think in terms of God’s saints on the one hand, and hell-bound heathens on the other, which is always accompanied by the delusion that we can spot them easily.
This second point is dead-on to use a cliché. But how does a writer or editor get away from this critique, especially as our world’s culture is being pornographified every year? Writers like Tony could be read as arguing for more vice in otherwise moral stories, even though he isn’t, but the preception and the reaction to it is the reason we have the art and stories we have today–mostly shallow and either sanitized or unsanitized.
What does the good stuff look like? It can’t be only literary or of high culture.
Novelist Terry Pratchett, who has begun to suffer from Alzheimer’s, donates $1M to The Alzheimer’s Research Trust, a British charity.
We’re having Toads in the Hole for supper tonight. It’s not an Irish dish, but it’s different than our usual fare, and I don’t like corned beef and cabbage. We bought some more or less traditional Irish soda bread over the weekend. That’s good stuff. I could eat that more often.
The last few years on St. Patrick’s Day, I’ve tried to talk myself into having a beer for the first time. This year, I won’t do that, but I did have my first beer back in January when I went to The Fresh Market, revealed my ID, and brought home a single can of Guinness Stout. I followed the directions by pouring it, chilled, into a cold glass. “A tiny plastic widget jets a stream of bubbles into the GUINNESS® beer when the can is opened. The result is black, white and beautiful,” according to the fans.
My experience varied.
I’m not sure what I expected, perhaps something that tasted more like barley and less like the spine-shuttering liquid in my chilly glass. I couldn’t drink more than half. Perhaps I should try Harp or even one of those sissy fruit beer I hear some men like, but I don’t plan to burn a path anywhere to find one. After all, what would St. Patrick do?
Last weekend, the movie adaptation of Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hears a Who opened. It looks like a fun my girls will enjoy.
You might think the essence of the story affirms life at all stages, but I’ve read that Dr. Seuss and his widow always disapproved of the signature phrase, “A person’s a person, no matter how small,” being used as a pro-life message. A few years ago, a biographer discussed the matter on a book show in Australia:
Amanda Smith (of Book Talk): And then, also, the anti-abortion lobby in the United States has used a line from Horton Hears a Who, the line that says, ‘A person’s a person, no matter how small.’ Would that have been in accord with Seuss’s intended meaning?
Philip Nel (author of Dr Seuss – American Icon): Absolutely not. In fact, during his lifetime Seuss threatened to sue an anti-abortion group unless they took that off their stationery and they did take it off their stationery but it’s still used. I’ve still seen propaganda in recent years from pro-life groups that have adopted Horton’s line, ‘A person’s a person, no matter how small.’ It’s one of the ways in which Seuss has been misappropriated. He would not agree with that.
I don’t remember the book clearly, but I wonder if this story is larger or beyond Dr. Seuss’ intentions. Once a story is published, it’s out of the author’s hands, is it not? An author may have written something with themes he doesn’t fully agree with, stumbling on truths he does not recognize.
For this day, a special St. Patrick’s Day because it falls between Palm Sunday and Easter, here is a part of Patrick’s confession (also found here). The real man behind the day is here:
I, Patrick, a sinner, a most simple countryman, the least of all the faithful and most contemptible to many, had for father the deacon Calpurnius, son of the late Potitus, a presbyter, of the settlement of Bannaven Taburniae; he had a small villa nearby where I was taken captive. I was at that time about sixteen years of age. I did not, indeed, know the true God; and I was taken into captivity in Ireland with many thousands of people, according to our deserts, for quite drawn away from God, we did not keep his precepts, nor were we obedient to our presbyters who used to remind us of our salvation. And the Lord brought down on us the fury of his being and scattered us among many nations, even to the ends of the earth, where I, in my smallness, am now to be found among foreigners.
And there the Lord opened my mind to an awareness of my unbelief, in order that, even so late, I might remember my transgressions and turn with all my heart to the Lord my God, who had regard for my insignificance and pitied my youth and ignorance. And he watched over me before I knew him, and before I learned sense or even distinguished between good and evil, and he protected me, and consoled me as a father would his son.
Therefore, indeed, I cannot keep silent, nor would it be proper, so many favours and graces has the Lord deigned to bestow on me in the land of my captivity. For after chastisement from God, and recognizing him, our way to repay him is to exalt him and confess his wonders before every nation under heaven:
For there is no other God, nor ever was before, nor shall be hereafter, but God the Father, unbegotten and without beginning, in whom all things began, whose are all things, as we have been taught; and his son Jesus Christ, who manifestly always existed with the Father, before the beginning of time in the spirit with the Father, indescribably begotten before all things, and all things visible and invisible were made by him. He was made man, conquered death and was received into Heaven, to the Father who gave him all power over every name in Heaven and on Earth and in Hell, so that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord and God, in whom we believe. And we look to his imminent coming again, the judge of the living and the dead, who will render to each according to his deeds. And he poured out his Holy Spirit on us in abundance, the gift and pledge of immortality, which makes the believers and the obedient into sons of God and co-heirs of Christ who is revealed, and we worship one God in the Trinity of holy name.
He himself said through the prophet: “Call upon me in the day of trouble; I will deliver you, and you shall glorify me [Psalm 50:15].” And again: “It is right to reveal and publish abroad the works of God.”
I am imperfect in many things, nevertheless I want my brethren and kinsfolk to know my nature so that they may be able to perceive my soul’s desire.