All posts by Lars Walker

Non-fiction, Religion

The opiate of intellectuals

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Mark Tooley at Front Page Magazine reviews Between Faith and Compromise by Momchil Metodiev, a new book about Communist infiltration in the World Council of Churches in the 1970s and ’80s.

But a new book by a Bulgarian author reveals that the KGB and its Bulgarian intelligence affiliate exploited the Bulgarian Orthodox Church for direct influence on the WCC and the Conference of European Churches. In “Between Faith and Compromise,” Bulgarian historian Momchil Metodiev chronicles how the Soviets and their Bulgarian proxies employed the Bulgarian Orthodox and WCC to promote Soviet strategic goals globally.

You kids aren’t old enough to remember this, but back in those days (and back in the ’60s, in my own experience), we brainless Fundamentalists were screaming from the rooftops that the WCC was shot through with Communists. Smarter, more sophisticated churchmen laughed at our ignorance and bigotry.

Of course, we were completely right.

And of course, we will never get credit for it.

Uncategorized

The headless norsemen

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I’m low on ideas tonight, so I’ll just pass on the most recent big discovery in Viking studies.
Last summer, a collection of skeletons were excavated at Weymouth, in Dorsetshire in England. They had clearly died violently, and were judged to be victims of a mass execution. The bones were determined to be about a thousand years old
At the time of the news I suggested, on the Viking discussion board I frequent, that the bones were probably those of Vikings. My reason was that we know of only one attempt at genocide in England during the period in question, and that was King Æthelred the Unrede’s massacre of Danes in England, on St. Brice’s Day in 1002. (You’ll know about this if you’ve read West Oversea. You have read it, haven’t you? If not, click on the yellow cover in the carousel to the right. I’ll wait.)
I am so rarely right that I feel I need to preen a little here. According to National Geographic:

Analysis of teeth from ten of the dead—who were mostly in their late teens and early 20s—indicates the raiding party had been gathered from different parts of Scandinavia, including one person thought to have come from north of the Arctic Circle.

I think some Viking enthusiasts are a little embarrassed by this news, as it casts the Norse as victims. This in spite of the fact that many recent books have in fact openly portrayed the Norse as victims (of those nasty Christians).
I, on the other hand, have tried to dispute that victimization meme in my own writing.
But of course anyone can be a victim under certain circumstances. Hell hath no fury like a bunch of villagers who get the upper hand on a raiding party.
And the St. Brice’s Day Massacre is an undisputed historical fact.
More as the story develops.
Or not.

Music, Reviews

Passover greetings

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I don’t know what church did this, but apparently it’s in Texas, and this clip is pretty cool.

To our Jewish friends (we have at least one), greetings and best wishes.

Tip: Moe Lane at Red State, by way of Wizbang.

Reviews

DVD Review: Dark Kingdom: The Dragon King

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I finally broke down and joined Netflix a while back, and am taking the opportunity to catch up on some Viking (and Viking-related) films I haven’t seen before. This weekend I watched the European made-for-TV movie, Dark Kingdom: The Dragon King. As I understand it, it was originally broadcast in longer form, as a two-parter, so this American version is missing some material.

I found it a somewhat enjoyable, correspondingly frustrating film. In a nutshell, the production values were excellent, and some of the acting was good. Unfortunately, in a strange dramatic inverted pyramid, the better the actor, the smaller (in general) was their part. Continue reading DVD Review: Dark Kingdom: The Dragon King →

Non-fiction, Reviews

God's Battalions, by Rodney Stark

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Sad to say, it is no surprise that the massacre of Antioch is barely reported in many recent Western histories of the Crusades. Steven Runciman gave it eight lines, Hans Eberhard Mayer gave it one, and Christopher Tyerman, who devoted several pages to lurid details of the massacre of Jerusalem during the First Crusade, dismissed the massacre of Antioch in four words. Karen Armstrong devoted twelve words to reporting this massacre, which she then blamed on the crusaders since it was their dire threat that had created a “new Islam” with a “desperate determination to survive.” Armstrong also noted that because Baibars [the Mamluk commander] was a patron of the arts, he “was not simply a destroyer . . . [but also] a great builder.”

This excerpt from page 232 of Rodney Stark’s God’s Battalions: The Case for the Crusades, is characteristic of his approach to his subject. He takes a hard look at the bulk of recent historiography on the Crusades, and finds most of it shamefully biased.

He identifies four great lies that have become common wisdom in recent decades, all of which (he insists) are demonstrably false: Continue reading God's Battalions, by Rodney Stark →

Blogs, Socials

World domination update, updated

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Just to let you know that I’ve been invited to join the blogging crew at S.T. Karnick’s The American Culture blog. This will not affect my blogging here in any way. Mostly I’ll be reposting reviews from this blog over there.

The American Culture is not a conservative blog, as Sam Karnick describes it, but a classical liberal blog. Its two principle er… principles are freedom of expression, and personal responsibility as the mechanism that makes freedom possible. Sam writes:

I don’t have any formal ground rules on story/essay angles other than this: we’re for liberty, and we enjoy and appreciate culture, including popular culture. To wit, we don’t just complain about the culture but instead report on what’s good as well. To this end, it’s important to note a principle I consider essential and which nearly everybody on the right fails to understand: depiction is not advocacy. Instead of blindly totting up instances of various events in a work and then complaining about it being too dirty and not at all like The Sound of Music (which is of course a darn good film but not the only way to communicate edifyingly), we go deeper and consider the real meaning of it. Thus a book full of gory murders can be very edifying while a book about a Christian family can be very bad art. It’s the assumptions and thoughts they purvey that count.

I think that’s an extremely important principle. It means (which ought to be obvious) that a book that deals with adultery is not necessarily a book in favor of adultery. A book that depicts bigotry is not necessarily a bigoted book (a principle generally out of fashion today). A book that wrestles with questions about the goodness of God is not necessarily blasphemous. Any subject, no matter how disturbing, can be handled morally in a moral story. It’s all in the treatment of the material.

(Just don’t ask me to watch a movie with two guys kissing. Ick.)

Authors

R.I.P. Benedikt Benedikz

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Our friend Dale Nelson sent me this nearly a year-old link to the Times (UK) obituary for his friend Benedikt Benedikz, an Icelandic-born English librarian and scholar who sounds like the kind of intellectual character they just don’t manufacture anymore. Singer, linguist, Viking scholar, and other valuable things too numerous to mention.

Blogs, Socials, Fiction, Reading

But what do you call the thing beneath it?

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Just when I was wondering what to blog about, Loren Eaton at I Saw Lightning Fall uses… that word!

He links to an interesting book review by Newsweek’s Jennie Yabroff, dealing with the thorny subject of… subtext!

The title in question is Joshua Ferris’ The Unnamed, a novel about a lawyer struggling with an undiagnosed compulsion to endlessly walk until he keels over. An odd and evocative premise, one that Yabroff wrestles with mightily. She initially wonders if the affliction may be a metaphor for environmental destruction or the search for the divine or the nature of addiction, but concludes that it doesn’t really matter. “What if the book is about nothing more than a man who takes really long walks?” she muses before launching into a discussion about the dangers of overanalyzing….

This leaves me no choice but to quote one of the best movies of the 1990s, Whit Stillman’s brilliant Barcelona, the story of two American cousins grappling with cultural differences, sexual mores, love, and anti-Americanism in 1980s Spain. This movie contributed one of the greatest bits of dialogue ever placed in two actors’ mouths:

FRED: Maybe you can clarify something for me. Since I’ve been, you know, waiting for the fleet to show up, I’ve read a lot, and–

TED: Really?

FRED: And one of the things that keeps popping up is this about “subtext.” Plays, novels, songs–they all have a “subtext,” which I take to mean a hidden message or import of some kind. So subtext we know. But what do you call the message or meaning that’s right there on the surface, completely open and obvious? They never talk about that. What do you call what’s above the subtext?

TED: The text.

FRED: OK, that’s right, but they never talk about that.

Note to self: Must get the DVD.

Reviews

Film review: Gone Baby Gone

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Gone Baby Gone is my favorite of Dennis Lehane’s novels, which is saying a great deal. Fan of series that I am, I especially enjoy his series books about detectives Patrick Kenzie and Angie Genero, of which this one is (in my opinion) the best. I missed the movie when it was released (briefly) in theaters, but I finally rented it from Netflix and watched it this past weekend.

The movie is very faithful to the book. Kenzie (Casey Affleck) and Genero (Michelle Monaghan) are called in by the family to investigate the high profile disappearance of a little girl, kidnapped while her drug user/alcoholic mother was distracted. In cooperation with the police, they follow various leads, trying to pry the lid off a story that seems at once too neat, and infested with too many loose ends. The final payoff prompts a heartbreaking choice for Kenzie.

It’s a well-done movie, worthy of its source. The performances are excellent, the Boston locations perfect. I think (my memory may be fooling me) that the final crisis may have been presented with more ambivalence in the book. As it stands here, Kenzie’s ultimate decision seems a little hard to understand.

I don’t remember the language in the book being as rough as it was in the movie. I suspect that’s only because it’s less jarring on the page than when the words actually fall on your ears in your own living room.

But I wonder if that didn’t contribute to the movie’s lackluster box office performance.

Somebody (it may have been Michael Medved, or one of his guests) has pointed out that there’s really no economic incentive for film makers to use a lot of profanity in their movies.

Other vices have (let’s admit it) market appeal. A sex scene with a nude actress will admittedly sell tickets. Extreme, graphic violence will put lots of bodies in theater seats.

But nobody thinks, “Boy! I sure want to see this movie! I’ll get to hear a lot of F Bombs!”

I suppose the makers of Gone Baby Gone would have felt they were selling out if they’d toned the language down. But I have an idea they might have made money by it.