A publishing CEO decides to play the game, “Let’s See How You Like It,” with Google. He takes a couple laptops from the Google Booth at BookExpo and when discovered says he was doing to Google what Google Books is doing to publishing companies.
A CEO did this. Who says you have to grow up to be a success? (via Digg.com)
A mushroom and a couple parasites have been discovered in a seriously old chunk of amber. Which brings a question to mind. (It does not beg a question, because begging the question means circular reasoning.) How do you read Genesis?
I got into a discussion about the age of the universe on Thinklings, and I thought I’d bring up the topic here though not for debate because we don’t want to reach our target heart-rate on this blog. So, how do you read Genesis? Does it appear to be straight-forward history, despite the miraculous content? Are there literary cues you can point to showing it to be symbolic?
I’ve heard some people extract odd meanings from the first few chapters, because they don’t appear to be familiar with reading ancient literature. Genesis isn’t written a like modern book, so it can’t be read like one.
In Reuters article on a possible cure for a common form of blindness, the reporter writes, “Embryonic stem cells are the ultimate master cells of the body, giving rise to all of the tissues and organs. Their use is controversial because many people oppose embryo destruction, although Britain has encouraged such research.”
I guess this is par of the course in our culture of death, but explanations like this still surprise me. Sure, some people oppose using unborn children as medicine, but more than that, as I understand it, embryonic stem cells have not accomplished anything in the lab. They are praised and hoped for, but the real results have come from adult stem cells about which there is no controversy.
Here’s a book that doesn’t fit the summer reading motif. It isn’t light or very accessible, The Triumph of the Therapeutic, by sociologist Philip Rieff. Rod Dreher gives it a run down here. I heard about the book in a stirring set of interviews on Mars Hill Audio. (BTW, the recent postage hikes have increased the cost for mailing their tapes and CDs by 300%. That could sink this fantastic ministry. If you’re still looking for a Father’s Day gift, consider a subscription to the Mars Hill Audio Journal on MP3. No postage costs for them, and great conversation for your father.)
In The Triumph of the Therapeutic, Rieff describes the dominance of therapeutic language in our culture and how it rots our society by replacing moral truths and virtues with personal values and interesting, but nonessential, attributes. Rieff argues, as I understand it, that a culture may not be able to survive when its highest ideal is not virtue, but better living. If we urge each other only to cope with our trivial-to-major problems, we will never rise to the high calling of heroism. We will believe the government has limitless money to solve our problems if only the good guys win. We will believe evil men are only misunderstood men who need to talk through their pain, and we will not recognize any fight as good except that which eases our pain.
Also, the modern individual is told he is completely autonomous, but modern society works him over to conform to the crowd. You can see this in universities all over the country. Someone advocating depravity may be praised for faux individuality, but someone arguing for morals is ridiculed or shut down because he really is swimming upstream.
It seems like an excellent book as is the discussion about it on Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 82.
Here’s a bit of what’s going on at BookExpo. Promotional snacks for a book on Proust?
Perhaps this won’t go anywhere since I don’t know if studios like Disney habitually spend over $100,000 on scripts they don’t use, but the news from Variety.com is that The Big Ears has purchased a spec script for a cartoon about Adam and Eve. Satan tries to break them up, and Adam chases Eve through a modern city in a romantic comedy with biblical references.
This reminds me of a NY Times article on the film Evan Almighty, which says the producers are reaching out to churches to promote their film. Sara Ivry reports, “]The Passion of the Christ] demonstrated just how many evangelical moviegoers there are and how much money can be made from them.” Monkeying around with sacred stories won’t do it, not for me. For comedies, Universal should take stab at adapting Joe LaFlam. It could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship, Louis, if you know what I mean.
A couple worthy scholars are cleaning up the works of a puritan named William Perkins for a new release next year.
There appears to be a slump in conservative political books. “The conservative market is not unified, there are many fractures,” says the president of Regnery Publishing. “The ongoing war in Iraq and his positions on immigration and education has made it harder to get anyone to write books that rally behind [Mr. Bush].”
Also from the BookExpo, Hillel Italie reports, “New releases topped 290,000 in 2006, according to statisticians R.R. Bowker, which, thanks to revised methodology, added a bountiful 100,000 titles to its previous estimates. . . .
BookExpo reminds you of how the new becomes old, like watching Pete Hamill promote his new book, The Gift, while a few aisles away, at the “Remainders” section of the convention, a previous Hamill book, Downtown, was being sold for $3.”
A still life by Matthew Bates
Carl Sommer, author of We Look for a Kingdom: The Everyday Lives of the Early Christians, answers a few questions on the early church.
The most common misconceptions about the early Christians are that they were egalitarian, and that they were anti or non-liturgical in their worship. The notion of egalitarianism is easy to dispel. If one honestly looks at the New Testament data, one quickly realizes that the Twelve had more authority than the body of believers, and that they routinely passed a share of their authority on to others. . . .
It is, admittedly, harder to demonstrate the liturgical nature of early Christian worship, because there is no direct description of the Liturgy in the New Testament, but shortly afterward, in the Didache and in Justin Martyr’s First Apology, we find descriptions of Liturgies that look a lot like what we do today. We can’t simply assume that the first century Church worshipped as Justin did, but it seems reasonable to suppose that very early on, the Christians took existing Synagogue rituals and modified them for Christian usage, all the while with Jesus’ command, “Do this in remembrance of me” foremost in their minds.
(via Blogwatch)