Category Archives: Non-fiction

Authors, Non-fiction, Reading

R.I.P., Paul Johnson

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Sad, sad news. The historian Paul Johnson died today. He was born in 1928, and was a practicing Roman Catholic. He wrote more than 40 books, as well as innumerable articles. Originally a leftist, Johnson grew disenchanted with the Left, objecting especially to its blinkered moral relativism, a theme that runs through all his works. His books Modern Times and Intellectuals were formative for me (I delighted in his takedown of Ibsen in Intellectuals), and I also appreciated The Birth of the Modern.

The English Spectator has a memorial post today here. It includes a quote from an article he wrote for them on moral relativism:

As I see it, the Satan who confronted Jesus during this encounter is the personification of moral relativism, and the materialism which creates it. What we are shown is not merely ‘all the kingdoms of the world’ but the entire universe, in all its colossal extent, reaching backwards and forwards into infinity and beyond the powers of the human mind to grasp except in mathematical equations. We are told: this came into existence, not by an act of creation, but as a result of the laws of physics, which have no moral purpose whatever — or indeed any purpose. There is no conceivable room for God in this process, and mankind is an infinitely minute spectator of this futile process about which he can do nothing, being of no more significance than a speck of dust or a fragment of rock. If you will accept this view of our fate, then there is just a chance that by applying the laws of science to the exclusion of any other considerations, and by dismissing the notion of God, or the spirit, or goodness, or any other absolute notion of truth and right and wrong, we shall be able marginally to improve the human condition during the minute portion of time our race occupies our doomed planet.’

Rest in peace, Mr. Johnson. You’ll be much missed.

Non-fiction, Reviews

‘The Defendant,’ by G. K. Chesterton

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The poor—the slaves who really stoop under the burden of life—have often been mad, scatter-brained and cruel, but never hopeless. That is a class privilege, like cigars. Their drivelling literature will always be a ‘blood and thunder’ literature, as simple as the thunder of heaven and the blood of men.

On a friend’s recommendation, I picked up the Project Gutenberg version of G. K. Chesterton’s The Defendant. (My link, of course, is to a version you’ll have to pay for. You think we’re running a charity here?) It’s pretty standard Chesterton, which is to say, eccentrically stimulating.

The book’s title, as the author himself admits in the Foreword, is awkwardly put. Chesterton does not stand in his own defense here, but in defense of various topics he has chosen for no other reason than that they’re out of fashion (or were at the time). Subjects include: “Penny Dreadful” novels, skeletons, publicity, nonsense, “ugly things,” slang, detective stories, and patriotism. It helps, in reading, to have some general idea of intellectual fashions around the turn of the 20th Century. Although Christianity is mentioned, this is not one of Chesterton’s most Christian (or Catholic) works.

The Defendant isn’t one of the most memorable books in G. K.’s ouvre, but it’s definitely worth reading. There are excellent moments:

“There is a road from the eye to the heart that does not go through the intellect. Men do not quarrel about the meaning of sunsets; they never dispute that the hawthorne says the best and wittiest thing about the spring.”

“Scripture says that one star differeth from another in glory, and the same conception applies to noses.”

Non-fiction, Religion, Reviews

‘Real Near Death Experience Stories,’ by Kay and Tabatt

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I am no longer a young man. Occasionally, when I haven’t been dulling my reason sufficiently, I think about death. I don’t think I’m alone in saying that it’s not being dead that bothers me (especially as I believe in Heaven), but rather the actual process of dying that I find daunting. Seems like a pretty stressful exercise to put an old person through.

So when I found a deal on a Christian book called Real Near Death Experience Stories (by Randy Kay and Shaun Tabatt), I figured there might be some comfort in it.

It was comforting, for a Christian reader. Unfortunately, I didn’t find it awfully convincing.

The book consists of transcriptions of interviews conducted on the authors’ podcast, plus an introductory chapter about near death experiences in general. Everybody involved, the authors and their guests alike, seem sincere and seem to be people of good will. They tell lovely stories about how they’ve experienced death or near-death, and the wonderful (occasionally frightening) things they saw in Heaven (and in one case, in Hell).

Let me be clear. I absolutely believe in Heaven and Hell. I believe that Heaven is a place of eternal bliss, in the presence of the Triune God. I believe that Hell is a place where the unredeemed will suffer for eternity. So I don’t doubt that part.

It’s the extras. Having described their “go toward the light” experiences and the joys and beauties of Heaven, in several cases the interviewees go on to proclaim spiritual secrets (claiming in some cases that they have new revelations for the church in the end times). Tips on how to make it easier for miracles to happen in your life. That sort of thing.

It all sounded familiar to me. I used to hear this kind of thing a lot back in the ‘70s, during the Jesus Movement. All these stories were going around about miracles and visions and prophecies – which always happened somewhere else, never here. And the big message of it all was that Jesus was coming soon – certainly before the end of ‘80s or thereabouts.

For a lot of people, I think, the failure of these prophecies was an important element in their complete loss of faith. I got the idea, when I was reading science fiction, that 70% of the SiFi writers of my generation were embittered former Jesus Freaks. I was blessed to have a better scriptural grounding than these people, and I held onto my faith.

But when the interviewees in this book tell me, for instance, that Jesus in Heaven has blue eyes, or when another tells me that we have to let our “spirits” rule our “brains,” and that contemporary praise music is an essential weapon against demons, I am dubious.

I don’t really endorse the book Near Death Experience Stories. I have no doubt the authors (and the interviewees) are sincere. They’re probably even doing some good. But I don’t have confidence in them. “Let the prophet who has a dream tell the dream, but let him who has my word speak my word faithfully. What has straw in common with wheat? declares the LORD.” (Jeremiah 23:28, ESV)

Non-fiction, Reviews

‘The Splendid and the Vile,’ by Erik Larson

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Diarist Phyllis Warner found that she and fellow Londoners were surprised by their own resilience. “Finding we can take it is a great relief to most of us,” she wrote on September 22. “I think that each one of us was secretly afraid that he wouldn’t be able to, that he would rush shrieking to shelter, that his nerve would give, that he would in some way collapse, so that this has been a pleasant surprise.”

Author Erik Larson has found himself a useful and profitable niche, writing about famous characters and events in historical accounts that combine the actions of famous persons with the lives of ordinary people, to give us a many-faceted picture. The Splendid and the Vile is his account of London during the Blitz; mostly set in the crucial year of 1940. The spotlight is, naturally, on Winston Churchill and his closest circle – his cabinet ministers and department heads, and his family. But we also get to see events through the eyes of ordinary citizens. And from time to time he looks across the channel to see how Hitler and his henchmen – who couldn’t understand why Churchill repeatedly snubbed their “friendly” peace offers — reacted and responded.

And meanwhile, the ordinary public suffered, died, and (most of them) survived.

It was a harrowing time, and this is a harrowing book. But also fascinating, informative, and sometimes even darkly comic. Historical figures come alive through their own words. The great drama and surprise in the book is something neither Hitler, nor even Churchill, really foresaw – the amazing courage of the English people; what they were willing to endure to defend their civilization.

What troubled me most as I read was something not in the book – the knowledge that this epic crusade for western civilization would end in the abandonment of eastern Europe to Stalin. Plus the knowledge that the children and grandchildren of these brave people would happily accede to the demolition of that civilization in our time.

Still and all, The Splendid and the Vile is an excellent look at a pivotal point in history. Highly recommended.

Non-fiction, Religion, Uncategorized

‘The Hyperions’ Movie, And Can We Just All Get Along?

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We watched a new superhero comedy/drama called “The Hyperions” over the holiday. It’s the story of a super-enabled family that has broken up, because though they talk about being family, they have been managed more like a business team. Two of the original team members are young adults now, and they want their powers back.

The trailer leaves the impression the movie is pretty darn funny, but it doesn’t quite bring the laughs. It’s funny, just not that funny. Instead it leans into Vista Mandulbaum’s anger against her inventor/showman father, Professor Ruckus Mandulbaum, who seems to have wounded her and damaged the whole team only after she rebels and leaves. That makes this more a feel-good family drama with superhero comedy thrown in.

Cary Elwes carries the story as the absent-minded, perpetually frumpy Professor Mandulbaum. Penelope Mitchell Vista, the first of the Hyperions, conveys most of the story’s emotional weight, and everyone else is fine.

I chaffed most when the characters couldn’t talk honestly with each because of issues. One of my daughters thought the story could have shown us happy family moments in order to help us care about their pain more. Most of the violence is muted and sometimes light-hearted. It’s not really a superhero story. It’s a family-business story about superheros, and overall I enjoyed it.

What else to do we have?

Western Civilization: Susannah Black Roberts responds to an argument in Stephen Wolfe’s book on Christian Nationalism. He says no one seeks the well-being of everyone around; he only seeks that for himself and his own kind. The idea that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness applies to all mankind is not sound. We only seek that for those in our own ethnicity. To support this thesis, Roberts writes, Wolfe cherry picks from a wide range of author in the western tradition. And then she quotes Chesterton.

Once England: Here’s a photo of a map of England showing the monasteries dissolved by King Henry VIII.

Streaming TV: Ted Kluck says The Handmaid’s Tale could be good hate-watching, if you like shows on the preachy-preachy side.

Thomas Jefferson: World News Group’s book of the year is Thomas Kidd’s Thomas Jefferson: A Biography of Spirit and Flesh. “In this biography, Kidd shows us an original thinker attempting to cobble together his own brand of spirituality. Jefferson held unorthodox views long before he wrote the Declaration of Independence, but he wasn’t a Deist who saw God as an uninvolved Creator. He believed in God’s providence, but he saw that providence at work in America’s founding rather than in the saving of souls or the creation of the Church.”

Non-fiction, Uncategorized

First Thanksgiving in Virginia, Elite Evangelicalism, and Everything Decays

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Phil Wade

I hope everyone here, there, and elsewhere has had a happy Thanksgiving. I realize this is an American holiday, but it’s just one more way you should allow America into your hearts and lives for your own and your country’s flourishing. I’m talking to you, United Kingdom. You never should have let all the good people leave your empire, you sick tyrant.

Okay, what else have we got?

First Thanksgiving: “After a rough two-and-a-half months on the Atlantic, [the Margaret, a 35-foot-long ship with 36 settlers and crew] entered the Chesapeake Bay on November 28, 1619. It took another week to navigate the stormy bay, but they arrived at their destination, Berkeley Hundred, later called Berkeley Plantation, on December 4. They disembarked and prayed.”

Ben Franklin: In a new biography, D. G. Hart presents Benjamin Franklin as an example of a “spiritual, but not religious” American Protestantism. “As much of a cliché as pulling himself-up-by-his-bootstraps is, his wit and striving say as much about Protestantism as it does about American character.”

Cultural Elites: Carl Trueman is thankful for David French‘s articles supporting the Respect for Marriage Act. “Elite evangelicalism is clearly making its peace with the sexual revolution and those of us who will not follow suit are destined for the margins.”

The Ends of History: Michael Bonner has written a defense of civilization. “All this is to say that the ‘whole new world’ we were promised in the 90s is much like the old one, only worse. The theory of irreversible progress seems increasingly implausible. It seems that anyone of any walk of life or partisan stripe could agree with Livy that ‘we can bear neither our vices nor their remedies’.”

Education: Can Christian Higher Education Stay the Course? “I could rattle off a litany of universities that remain under the auspices of Mainline Protestant denominations but where an effort to think Christianly beyond the bounds of theology is foreign to its educational mission and has been for a long time.”

Non-fiction, Religion

Is There a Homogeneous ‘West’?

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In 1958, humor rag Punch published an essay by C.S. Lewis called “Revival or Decay?” in which Lewis criticized broad-brush assessments of his day–the same assessments people still make. Here’s his closing paragraph.

Is there a homogeneous ‘West’? I doubt it. Everything that can go on is going on all round us. Religions buzz about us like bees. A serious sex worship–quite different from the cherry lechery endemic in our species–is one of them. Traces of embryonic religions occur in science-fiction. Meanwhile, as always, the Christian way too is followed. But nowadays, when it is not followed, it need not be feigned. That fact covers a good deal of what is called the decay of religion. Apart from that, is the present so very different from other ages of ‘the West’ from anywhere else?

Non-fiction, Reviews

‘River Kings,’ by Cat Jarman

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A friend gave me a copy of Cat Jarman’s River Kings out of the blue, and I read it with great interest. I wasn’t always comfortable with the book, but it does very well in the job the author (a Scandinavian-English archaeologist) sets out to do. I believe its sales have been successful, and it deserves them.

The story begins with a nice narrative “hook” – a carnelian bead found in excavations at a Viking burial site in Repton, England. Carnelian is a semi-precious stone that was popular among the Vikings (especially with Viking women) and was imported from India. That is a long road to come by, and Dr. Jarman follows that road – through known evidence and speculation – to show how the great Viking trade system passed through England to the Baltic, down through Russia to Constantinople and the Caspian Sea region, eventually linking up with sources of carnelian. At each step along the way she describes how people and objects moved, how the world worked, and what social and economic forces impelled trade. She has the professional ability to provide many fascinating details of Viking Age life, and I benefited from reading this book.

My sole real quibble is purely a subjective one. As a woman of the 21st Century, the author looks everywhere for evidence of women’s activity and influence, as well as for signs of what we call today “cultural diversity.” She finds them and emphasizes them.

This is perfectly fair. I do the same in my own studies, though I’m looking for different things. If I disagree with her on some points, she’s the one with the credentials, so the burden’s on me. And I have to admit, she provided evidence I wasn’t aware of on the touchy subject of women warriors. I’m still skeptical about them, but the other side’s argument is stronger than I thought.

I recommend River Kings. It is informative, interesting, and well-written.

Blogs, Socials, Non-fiction, Reading

Let’s Just Say I Know What I Know, Midwestern History, And Truthful Jokes

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It’s easy to overgeneralize, and when someone is battle-scarred, he may overgeneralize combatively.

I worked at a men’s conference in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, several years ago, during which a speaker made some mildly controversial points in an aggressive manner. I think this man felt he was under attack because he lacked support for his work. He probably had to argue for his point of view, if not the reality of his experience (it was on the fringe). “Nobody knows what’s happening,” he’d say. “Why doesn’t anyone see this?” he might ask. And at least one time, that question would have been answered with the fact that many of those in the room knew saw what he saw. We agreed. We didn’t need to be persuaded, and we weren’t fighting him on that point.

Too many of us are willing to say no one is talking about something important, when the truth is we only know something of what’s being discussed in our small circle, including the limited amount of news we can consume. The noise or silence on select social media can convince us that everyone is or isn’t talking about something.

The solution, of course, is humility. We know what we know, and even that could be wrong. We walk on to the best of our knowledge coram Deo.

Midwesterners Unite: A review of a new history of the American Midwest. “In contrast to prevailing clichés and the modern platitudes about backwardness, sterility, racial injustice, and oppression, an in-depth look at the history of the American Midwest reveals a land of democratic vigor, cultural strength, racial and gender progress, and civic energy — a Good Country, a place lost to the mists of time by chronic neglect but one well worth recovering, for the sake of both the accuracy of our history and our own well-being.”

Reading: Contrasting styles, subjects, and tones can act as palate cleansers between books. “They have to be short, they have to be relatively undemanding, and if it’s a re-read, so much the better.”

Satire: The head of the Babylon Bee talks about writing jokes that smack of the truth and the blowback his company has received from media outlets. “The absurd has become sacred only because it hasn’t been sufficiently mocked.”

English-American-Scottish Words: George Grant has an audio piece on the clash of words between the English speakers of America, Britain, and Scotland.

Theater: “Excuse me, sir; are you with the show?”
“Well, let’s just say I’m not against it.”

Photo: Old gas station, Odebolt, Iowa. 1987. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Non-fiction, Reviews

‘Vikings at War,’ by Hjardar and Vike

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If the originator of the insult failed to respond to the challenge to fight he was considered an unmanly, false and unreliable coward. The punishment for that was to be outlawed, which meant that anybody could take his life without having to pay a fine. If the offended party declined to fight, the penalty was less severe, but he had lost the trust of society and could no longer speak at the ting or swear an oath.

Now and then a book comes along in the field of popular Viking studies that makes me want to stand up and yell, “Hey! Read this one!” to my fellow reenactors. Such a book is Vikings at War by Kim Hjardar and Vegard Vike (both of them Norwegian scholars. Hjardar is also a reenactor). Vikings at War is a great big book, and it’s packed with stuff you’ll want to know if you’re into Vikings.

Various sections of the work cover: 1. The Vikings (that is, who they were and where they came from), 2. The Art of War, 3. Viking Fortifications, 4. Viking Ships, 5. Viking Weapons, and 6. Viking Invasions (covering the various theaters of action in which the Vikings fought, from the Middle East to America).

Embarrassing as it is for an old know-it-all like me to admit, I learned a lot from Vikings at War. Particularly interesting (to me) was the examination of the Vikings’ activities in France, where their infamous depredations were often carried out at the invitation of the French nobility, who enlisted them as allies in their internecine fights.

Long ago, on my web page, I wrote that too much had been made by 20th Century scholars of Vikings being essentially peaceful. That they had their peaceful side I had no doubt, but I felt the theme was being oversold. If the recent movie, “The Northman,” hadn’t already convinced me that this is no longer a problem, Vikings at War would have done it. Hjardar and Vike understand that being a merchant doesn’t necessarily make you peaceful (especially when slaves are your major merchandise), and that a Viking man, whatever his occupation, was always prepared to defend his honor with the weapons he carried at all times.

Every student of the Viking Age will find things to quibble with here, as in any book. The description of the “incident” at Portland which opens the book is imaginative, and includes details which (I think) are not necessarily supported by the record. Viking feminists will find fault with the authors’ reluctance to wholeheartedly embrace the idea that shield maidens were a common phenomenon in the Viking Age (I agree with the authors). Although the authors cite one of the books written by Prof. Torgrim Titlestad (for whom I’ve translated), they don’t entirely endorse his theories.

But there’s a treasure trove of information here, which will make every reader richer and wiser in knowledge of the field. This is a book that belongs on the Viking shelf of anybody who has a Viking shelf. A magisterial work. Well written and highly recommended.