All posts by Lars Walker

Uncategorized

Another helping of link sausage

2 Comments

Just a couple links from me tonight.

I just got my membership card today from the Friends of the Viking Ship, the society devoted to saving and preserving The Viking, the replica of the Gokstad ship that was sailed from Norway to America for the Columbia Exposition in in Chicago, in 1893. Nowadays replica Viking ships are fairly commonplace, but this was the very first, and no one was entirely sure it could even be done.

A few of you are Viking aficionados, so I thought I’d just mention that they’re always looking for support. It’s far from the most important cause in this sad old world, but it would be a mournful thing to be told the old ship has crumbled with no one to care.



Speaking of this sad old world, the always thoughtful Theodore Dalrymple has a profound article up at City Journal. It’s called Modernity’s Uninvited Guest. The subject is theodicy (the question of how a good God could create a world full of evil), and he relates it to the utopian fantasies of the Left, by way of Dr. Samuel Johnson’s 18th Century critique of a book of theology.

The superficiality of this argument requires, from a modern standpoint, little commentary. But even Doctor Johnson—a man with a delicate sense of personal imperfection who once stood several hours bareheaded in the rain in the Uttoxeter marketplace, in penance for having been disrespectful a half-century earlier to his father, who had run a bookstall there—did not criticize it strongly. Both he and Jenyns were a world away from our modern concerns about evil. Accustomed to our comforts and our delicate sensibilities, we would find their world unbelievably harsh; yet their notion of evil strikes us as naive and almost innocent. Despite the violence of Johnson’s review of Jenyns, the two men agreed more than they differed. They lived on the cusp of the Enlightenment but were both, at least in their treatment of evil, pre-Enlightenment in outlook. The burning question for them was not “Why do men behave evilly?” but “Why is there evil at all?”

That’s it for tonight. Tomorrow—scandal and passion among Norwegian pioneers!

Uncategorized

Hey, hay!

27 Comments

It occurred to me during my walk tonight that we’re well into haying season, and I don’t think I’ve ever told you about haying.

My brothers and I didn’t do a lot of heavy farm work growing up, but the one labor-intensive time of year was haying season (straw baling too, but the tolerances were greater with straw. Also it was much lighter to lift).

Up until sometime in my childhood, my dad used to make hay more or less the old-fashioned way, cutting it and drying it in the field, and stacking it loose, either in the barn or in a shed, or (when space ran out) on the ground under a tarpaulin. We had an undersized barn, and so usually ended up stacking some hay outside. This is not a good thing. Wet and vermin get in. You always use the outside hay first, because it goes bad first.

Here’s my dad and my grandpa, some time before I was born, working on a hay wagon.

Continue reading Hey, hay! →

Fiction, Reviews

Bearing the Saint, by Donna Farley

1 Comment

Anyone with an interest in the Vikings knows of the island and monastery of Lindisfarne. The start of the Viking Age is generally dated to 793, when a devastating and unanticipated raid from Scandinavia brought about its sacking. After centuries as a place of sanctuary, the island became from that day on a target, getting hit again and again by plunder-hungry Northmen. In 875 the entire Lindisfarne community, monks, priests, and lay folk, packed up the monastery treasures, including the remains of Saint Cuthbert and a holy book (thought to be the Lindisfarne Gospels), and set off to find a safer place.

They wandered the land like the children of Israel until 882, when a new monastery site was found (it was relocated to Durham some time after).

Bearing the Saint by Donna Farley is a young adult novel dramatizing the adventures and sufferings of that company during its period of homelessness. As the story begins, the hero, a boy named Edmund, is mourning the loss at sea of his fisherman father. Soon he has much more to worry about as he becomes part of the exodus. Over the years that follow he grows up, becomes one of the bishop’s official “saint bearers,” suffers hunger and exposure, has adventures, falls in love, and comes to terms with Danish rule in Northumberland.

I found the book’s pace a little leisurely for my taste. It was episodic, but that’s the nature of this kind of story, so I can’t call that a criticism. The narrative engaged me, but I wouldn’t call it compelling. It did educate me on an aspect of the history of the Danelaw with which I hadn’t been much familiar.

The book is published by Conciliar Press, an Orthodox publisher, and was sent to me by an Orthodox friend. Considering that fact, along with the monastic elements of the story, I would have expected there to be a lot more promotion of monasticism in it than there is. In fact, none of the main characters becomes a monk or a nun in the course of the story, which surprised me. Evangelical readers won’t find the sacramental aspects offensive, I think (unless the idea of saints’ miracles offends them).

I’d say Bearing the Saint is a good, wholesome book that might be especially useful to homeschooling parents who want to teach their children some history.

Reviews

DVD Review: The Whole Wide World

2 Comments

Here’s a remarkably fine, distinctive film, the victim of criminally bad distribution, which ought to be better known.

In 1933 Novalyne Price, a young schoolteacher and aspiring writer in Cross Plains, Texas, met the most famous man in town, the pulp magazine writer (and creator of Conan the Barbarian), Robert E. Howard. They liked each other, and Novalyne wanted to learn about writing, so they dated for a time (she was his only known girlfriend). Eventually they broke up due to Howard’s volatile personality. In 1936 she went to college in Louisiana and never saw him again. He committed suicide that same year.

But thankfully for fans and scholars, Novalyne had taken up the Boswell-like discipline of writing down conversations she overheard or participated in, including those she had with Howard. She kept these journals for many years.

In the 1970s and ’80s, after Howard had been rediscovered by fans and critics alike, she grew irritated with the amount of armchair psychoanalysis that was being done on her old friend. She organized her journals into a memoir called The Man Who Walked Alone, which came to the attention of filmmaker Dan Ireland. And so the movie The Whole Wide World came to be. Continue reading DVD Review: The Whole Wide World →

Music

When in doubt, post a Sissel video

2 Comments

Sissel and some guy singing Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water.”

That song always takes me back. I remember a night in college, when a friend was leaving because he’d flunked out (turned out in the end he had a learning disability). We took him out to our favorite haunt, Mitz & Bert’s diner in Lake Mills, Iowa, where you could get a tremendous hamburger and a big plate of hot-enough-to-burn-your-mouth french fries, plus a chocolate malt, for $1.03 (I had to watch my dollars in those days, so I remember). Before we broke up for the night, somebody played this song on the juke box, and it was like a benediction.

That was some time after my high school graduation, which is on my mind because we’re having a sort of informal class reunion this weekend, down in Kenyon. Every molecule in my body is screaming, “DANGER! STAY AWAY!!!!!!” but I guess I have to go, because I missed the last regularly scheduled reunion.

I’ve never understood why people invite me to things, or register disappointment when I fail to show up. Is it my unsmiling, expressionless face they miss? The way I sulk in the corners and avoid eye contact? My bitter, self-pitying jokes? Or my early exits with lame excuses?

No wonder I can’t talk to people. They’re strange.

Religion

Going to church doesn't make you a Christian, but neither does not going

1 Comment

I hope I didn’t contribute to the confusion.



I posted a while back (during the election, I think) that I wondered if Muslims around the world might be offended if we elected a man whose father was a Muslim, but who was not practicing Islam. I based it on what I believed to be a Muslim teaching, that the son of a Muslim man is always a Muslim, forever.

Apparently that doctrine is not universal among Muslims. Certainly we haven’t heard much about it during this administration. So that doesn’t seem to be an issue, and I was mistaken.

But it appears, according to a Pew Research poll, that 34 percent of Americans think President Obama is a Muslim, while 43 percent aren’t sure what he believes.

The usual voices are blaming talk radio, but I’m sure I’ve never heard any national talk show host espouse that idea (though crazy callers bring it up from time to time). Well, Michael Savage might have said it, but Michael Savage will say anything.

I did hear a guest on a local talk show last weekend say the president was a Muslim, but that was small-time radio.

Our president says he’s a Christian, and I believe he’s a “Christian,” at least according to his own lights (which would appear to be very different from my lights. Insert Rev. Wright joke here). When the form says “Religion,” he checks the box next to “Christian.”

But is anybody really surprised people are confused on the matter?

Has President Obama ever made a positive statement about Christianity to rival the many flattering statements he’s made about Islam since his inauguration? American politicians have a tradition of joining churches and parading their piety. It’s often hypocritical, but the president’s avoidance of public worship while in office has been no secret.

If I know a man is married, and I hear him talking all the time about Jane, and how beautiful Jane is, and what a great wife Jane is, I think I can be excused for being surprised when I learn that he’s in fact married to Sally, about whom he never talks.

Publishing

Late: a day. Short: a dollar

4 Comments

Another night of contending with my lawn mower. I suppose I should pity the thing. It’s dying. The guy at the shop said fixing it isn’t worth the price of replacing it. So I’m running it as long as I can, until its wife becomes a grass widow, or my fuel mixture runs out.

But it’s a temperamental patient. It smokes as it runs, and when it gets tired it stops, refusing to start again until it’s rested. Which makes mowing an indefinite operation.

Hence the lateness of this post.

And all I’ve got to share is this link from Dale Nelson, about the release of a new edition of The Saga of King Heidrek the Wise, translated by Christopher Tolkien.

Like my lawn mower, I can only do what I can.

Religion

The thoughtless side of the Force

4 Comments

35136, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA - Friday October 23 2009. Musician Steph Jones is in high spirits as he leaves Hyde nightclub in LA. Steph, who dates fellow singer Jordin Sparks, was wearing an Obi-Wan Kenobi badge!! Photograph: Josephine Santos, PacificCoastNews.com



Today I was too busy to listen closely to the weekly Ultimate Issues Hour on Dennis Prager’s radio show. But I caught one guy calling in on the subject of the existence of God. He explained that, for his own part, he thought of God as some kind of Force. Seeing God as an “old man in the sky” seemed to him primitive thinking.

One hears that sort of thing fairly often. I attribute it to the scientific world view that’s dominated public thought ever since the Enlightenment. Religion, under that view, is irrational and all about emotion. Science is about reason. If there’s a true explanation of ultimate reality, such thinking argues, it must be a scientific answer. So if there’s a God, He must be describable in scientific terms. A powerful Force seems to fit the bill.

Hey, George Lucas built a whole movie franchise out of it.

I would like to propose that describing God as a Force is both inadequate and profoundly unsatisfactory. Here’s why.

My first proposition is that God must be the greatest thing in the universe. Because if anything were greater than Him, that thing would be God. God is, by definition, that which has no superior.

A Force is by its nature an impersonal phenomenon. Forces do not think or choose or love.

Therefore, if God is a Force, God is not love.

But if you believe (as I do, and most people in our culture do, because they’ve never examined their beliefs) that love is the greatest thing of all, how can you say that God is a Force? That would mean that something that cannot love is superior to things that do love (that would be us).

You have to have it one way or the other. If God is a Force, He is not love, and love is not the greatest thing of all.

If God is Love, He is not a Force (or not merely a Force). He has to be a Person (three persons in one, according to Christians).

For me it’s a no brainer. Love wins. God must be Personal.