Category Archives: Non-fiction

Non-fiction, Religion, Reviews

‘Confessions of a Charismatic Christian,’ by Rick Dewhurst

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In spite of the fact that I’ve never given any of his novels a rave review, Rick Dewhurst keeps alerting me to his new books. This argues a level of spiritual humility which I can only admire. I like his writing style, but I don’t think he’s ever found his real vehicle.

He has a new book out now, in a different genre entirely. It’s a spiritual memoir called Confessions of a Charismatic Christian.

It wasn’t, frankly, what I expected. I was anticipating something along the lines of C. S. Lewis’s Surprised By Joy. The plan here is somewhat different. These Confessions are a series of spiritual lessons, each headed by an experience (not related chronologically) from the author’s own life. Sometimes a miraculous one.

I don’t mean to disparage the book’s plan, but I would have enjoyed reading more about the life that produced such an intriguing writer. But it’s a capital mistake to judge a book by what you think it should be, rather than what the author chose to create.

I had some difficulty with the early chapters, which are the heaviest on the charismatic lessons. Rick is the pastor of a charismatic congregation in British Columbia. Although I myself spent time on the periphery of the charismatic movement back in the ‘70s, I have since joined a church that takes a skeptical attitude toward signs and wonders (though not denying their possibility). So I wasn’t entirely in sympathy with a lot of that part. But as I read on, I found more and more material that was profound and edifying for everyone.

I thought the writing a little discursive – the text could have been tightened up some. And the tone is sometimes unnecessarily apologetic. But Confessions of a Charismatic Christian was an edifying book from a seasoned pastor. Worth reading.

Non-fiction, Religion

If We Win the Leaders, Will We Win the Nation?

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I gather family devotions is a challenge for everyone. I remember my parents pulling us together a couple times for what resembled the semblance of something like a worship service. It was awkward. I didn’t like it. My father-in-law regularly read from the Bible after supper, so that’s the pattern that drew me in.

Since we have homeschooled our kids from the beginning, my wife read through the Bible with them during the morning routine. That and my desire to read something that applied the Word, if not strictly devotional, is what steered me toward reading through Christian books instead of the Bible. We read a few of Jared C. Wilson’s books, at least a couple of Jerry Bridges’s. After using the Advent readings from our church, I was at a loss for what to start next. My wife suggested a few of the small books from our shelf, and that’s what got us into Richard Wurmbrand’s Tortured for Christ.

This ain’t light reading. Wurmbrand is a Romanian minister from Bucharest who grew up atheist and came to faith through reading the Bible. He became an leader of the Underground Church after Communism began to strangle all of its citizens. What he and other believers suffered was demonic.

He writes like a missionary, as you would expect, and one of his principles provoked us to push back. He advocates winning people of influence first.

How was Norway won for Christ? By winning King Olaf. Russia first had the Gospel when its king, Vladimir, was won. Hungary was won by winning St. Stephen, its king. The same with Poland. In Africa, wehre the chief of the tribe has been won, the tribe follows. We setup missions to rank-and-life men who may become very fine Christians, but who have little influence and cannot change the state of things.

We must win rulers: political, economic, scientific, artistic personalities. They are the engineers of souls. They mold the souls of men. Winning them, you win the people they lead and influence.

Wurmbrand might have looked to the book of Daniel and asked whether Nebuchadnezzar’s repent and apparent faith did anything to turn Babylon around or the sympathy King Darius had for Daniel bore any fruit. Who was saved when Jonah preached to Ninevah? That nation was blessed by avoiding God’s wrath for a few generations, but when Nahum returned 150 years later, he said, “And all who look at you will shrink from you and say, ‘Wasted is Nineveh; who will grieve for her?'”

Certainly a people are blessed by Christian leaders. A society organized on biblical values is better overall than any other society, but it would not usher in faith for anyone by mere leadership. When civil leaders turn a country to Christ, it isn’t often by Christian means. The faithless see opportunity and take it by declaring themselves faithful.

God uses society and influence in ways we don’t often foresee. Remember how he has told us to care for widows and orphans. They aren’t the influential ones today, but they could be tomorrow. A common result would be that they seek Christ wherever they go and repeat the truth to a family or congregation, thereby keeping a few more people on the straight and narrow. Who can say this is an unambitious plan?

Non-fiction, Reviews

‘My Anecdotal Life,’ by Carl Reiner

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I’ve always had a mild fascination with Hollywood and Hollywood stories. A deal showed up on Carl Reiner’s memoir, My Anecdotal Life, so I picked it up. It was an amusing book, though it won’t mean as much to younger people as it does to Boomers like me.

The son of an immigrant Jewish watchmaker, Carl Reiner took acting lessons at his brother’s suggestion, and went on to enjoy a long and successful career as a comedian, writer, and producer. He’s best known for playing second banana to Syd Caesar on Your Show of Shows, being Mel Brooks’s straight man in the 2,000 Year Old Man routines, and creating and producing the Dick Van Dyke Show. He also did Broadway plays and movies (who knew he wrote a Broadway comedy pronounced the funniest thing he ever saw by no less an authority than Grouch Marx, which died thanks to a noncommittal Times review?).

According to Reiner himself, he had a stock of show biz stories he used to tell his friends, and they encouraged him to put them in a book, and this is it. It’s not presented in chronological order (which I consider a flaw), but they’re pretty good stories, especially in the cases where you know who the participants are.

My Anecdotal Life does fail in one of the pleasures most of us look for in show business stories – it’s short on dirt. We all know today what we all suspected from the beginning, that Hollywood is a nest of vipers that even regular vipers give a wide berth. But you’d never know it from this book. Except in the cases of a couple critics, Reiner doesn’t say anything at all if he can’t say something nice. He comes off as a pretty nice guy himself.

The writing was… okay. I would have expected a funny man to be more deft with words, but I suppose a lot of it was in the presentation in the original telling.

I was a little worried about politics, as Reiner was a well-known liberal. That element was pretty scarce until the very end, where he throws in a couple chapters related to his involvement with the anti-war movement in the Vietnam years, plus a touching anecdote about meeting Pres. Clinton. But it wasn’t too bad.

Not a bad book. Minimal rough language. The book shows its age in including the occasional sentiment that wouldn’t pass muster with the politically correct crowd today, especially regarding men and women.

Non-fiction

Crisis of Authority Among the Revolting Public

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Author Glynn Young reviews The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium by Martin Gurri, which speaks to the crumbling of some of our institutions and public trust. We cannot be everywhere, so we must trust those who represent us or our values to report to us what has occurred. If the day comes when we cannot trust anyone to tell us the truth about important matters, we will not be able to carry on as citizens.

Gurri’s book was first published in 2014 and updated in 2018. He isn’t talking about the events of this month or last summer.

“No,” Young explains, “the public is us, the people who read books, manage businesses, plow farms, drive trucks, work in hospitals, teach, sell cars, run factories, belong to and lead unions, and do a million other jobs. The age of information has taught us to mistrust authority, seek people of like minds in echo chambers, and increasingly think of opposing views as those of the enemy.”

Non-fiction, Reviews

‘Victims of Foul Play, by Patricia Lubeck

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I feel a little badly about reviewing this book. It was not written by a professional, and does not pretend to literary quality. It’s aimed at a very small public. But I read it as a favor to someone, and I feel that calls for a review.

On a December morning in 1961, farmer Clarence Larson of rural Garvin, Minnesota called for a neighbor’s help. His wife was dead, her body wrapped around the power take-off of their tractor. He said she’d been helping him “elevate” some corn into a bin (a procedure employing an augur in a chute; I know it well) when she got caught in the mechanism. (This was not uncommon; I heard many stories of people losing arms in power take-offs when I was a kid, and I knew a guy whose brother was killed by one of them.) However, in this case, an unexplained injury to the back of the woman’s head, plus the condition of the body, along with the presence of a new insurance policy, aroused suspicions. The county, however, was unable to prove Clarence’s guilt to a jury, and he went free.

Clarence moved to Tracy, Minnesota, and remarried. In 1980, his new wife disappeared. She failed to show up for regular appointments, and left behind personal possessions to which she’d been attached. When people asked about her, Larson gave conflicting explanations. The county sheriff called in the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (which you may know from John Sandford’s Lucas Davenport novels), and even a psychic. But sufficient evidence was never found to convict Larson of murder.

Patricia Lubeck’s book, Victims of Foul Play, is a bald and artless chronological account of events. There can be no doubt that the author believes Larson got away with murder. But in the end, she leaves us with the same thing the authorities had to accept: the man was a clever murderer who managed to hide any really incriminating evidence.

Victims of Foul Play will be of interest to people interested in the local history of Lyon County, Minnesota. I can’t recommend it to anyone else. It is not well written.

Non-fiction

Reject History or Embrace It Blindly?

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Alan Jacobs’s new book, Breaking Bread with the Dead, looks like a good read for the winter months ahead. Kevin Holtsberry reviews the book that’s subtitled, “A Reader’s Guide to a More Tranquil Mind,” calling it “sorely needed.”

Our polarized culture seems to offer two competing visions of engaging with the past. The defilement perspective views history as “at best a sewer of racism, sexism, homophobia, and general social injustice, at worst an abattoir which no reasonable person would even want to peak at.” Its vision is limited to the now. What matters in this moment is all that matters, and it judges the past accordingly, throwing most in the ash heap.

Another perspective approaches the past as a unifying, idealized, almost sanitized, source of universal values and character traits. This produces a reverence for the past that is also locked into the present: “To say ‘This text offends me, I will read no further’ may be shortsighted; but to read a ‘great book’ from the past with such reverence that you can’t see where its views are wrong, or even where they differ from your own, is no better. Indeed, in foreclosing the possibility of real challenge it is worse.”

Rather than either of these views, we should read history expecting to be challenged. Heroes, leaders, and all manner of influential people were no less human than we are. Their sins may have been egregious, but would we have made the same ones had we lived in their day?

Non-fiction

Maybe It’s Not True, but It Feels True

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Shelby Steele of the Hoover Institution at Stanford offers a profound concept in his new documentary about what happened in Ferguson, MO, called What Killed Michael Brown? It’s the term “poetic truth.”

“People believe cultural myths, he says, not because they have examined evidence and found it credible but because they align with narratives they’ve already bought into. They feel true,” Megan Basham writes for World News Group.

This ideas touches all groups. I would say most of us feel something is true and are willing to defend it before we know the facts. That’s pretty much how life works. We can’t research everything. There’s too much information in general. The most practical solution is for us trust certain sources to tell us the truth, a trust we form largely by feel.

I suppose that means not only the righteous live by faith.

Non-fiction

The Materialist Has No Room for Ghosts

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Patricia Pearson notes ghost stories have been with us since the beginning, but for about a hundred years now, experts have believed seeing or feeling something like a ghost isn’t healthy. Here are two of her paragraphs.

William Dean Howells, editor of The Atlantic Monthly from 1871-1881, defended the belief in ghostly visions from an emerging class of skeptics after his daughter Winny died in her twenties. “I would have the bereaved trust their mystical experiences for much truth which they cannot affirm,” he wrote in 1910’s “A Counsel of Consolation.” “They may be the kaleidoscopic adjustment of our jarred and shattered being; they may be prismal rays of celestial light: who shall say from knowledge?”

…

That the dead do not always stay dead continues to rankle the scientifically minded. When Christopher Kerr, a Toronto-raised palliative care physician who heads Hospice and Palliative Care Buffalo, first worked with patients on rounds, he was completely unprepared for the number of dreams and visions his patients described that featured the consoling dead. “We never had any such discussion on the topic in med school,” he emailed me. In his 2020 book, Death Is But a Dream, Kerr writes, “The acceleration of the science of medicine has obscured its art, and medicine, always less comfortable with the subjective, has been more concerned with disproving the unseen than revering its meaning.”

The Bible doesn’t seem to allow for ghosts as the spirits of departed persons, but it does teach of us souls and life immaterial. We understand that being made in God’s image means we are body and spirit together. Maybe the immaterial nature of our spirits explains the stories people tell of seeing those around them as they are dying or afterward, because we are connected in spiritual ways we cannot dissect. (via Prufrock News)

Non-fiction, Reviews

Do Facts or Stories Drive Your Political Vision?

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Conservative Christians often decry the fact that stay-at-home mothers seem less valued than they once were, and the working mom is now the norm. Well, what do you expect from a society where the ability to contribute directly to the wealth-creation process is ultimately the measure of somebody’s social standing and value?

Finishing up Carl Trueman’s Republocrat is not the best preparation for the 2020 presidential debates, because his final chapter argues that we have given the pride of place in American politics to an appealing narrative and general aesthetics. We don’t want real debates. We don’t want to wrestle with too many details or facts. We want that feeling that we are better off today than four years ago or the impression that our neighbors are better off. (When was it (2008? 2004?) that many of us feared the direction of our nation, and that while we were personally stable, we believed our neighbors were not?) You may remember when Bill Clinton didn’t offer details when answering a question about drug problems in America; he told us about his brother.

What we will get tonight will be 95% entertainment, especially from our comedian in chief. Fact-checkers will be burning up their keyboards, and many of them will need auditors to fact-check their fact-checking. But voters — let me stop there–fans of a candidate and those who like, tweet, and share are not necessarily voters. The Biden campaign got campaign posters inserted into Nintendo’s popular game Animal Crossing as a way to appeal to college kids, but it’s one thing to gain emotional support from people on the couch and another to gain their vote. The latter takes effort, even thinking ahead a bit. And so many get out the vote efforts have been scuttled, because though people would like to see change, they don’t want to vote for it or perhaps can’t overcome personal hurtles to do it.

But what was I talking about?

Trueman criticizes all sides for sloppy thinking in favor of their preferred narrative. Too many of us excuse our side and condemn the mere suspicion of wrongdoing on the other side. Christians, particularly those who endorse the doctrine of total depravity, should expect to see evidence of the curse everywhere we go, so we should readily understand that the best system or social structure in the world will hurt people and fail others when filled with self-seeking sinners. Because that’s true, we should seek healthy accountability everywhere for everyone, particularly our officials.

Overall, Republocrat is a good book. It mentions some issues you may disagree with, but the main theme of being more circumspect of our political beliefs and aspirations is a good word. Too many of us look for hypocrites only on the other side and broad brush everyone who disagrees with us. We need wisdom and humility to live together as one nation under God.

Photo by Paweł Czerwiński on Unsplash

Non-fiction, The Press

Many Foxes grow grey, few grow good

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Another chapter in Carl Trueman’s 2010 book Republocrat deals with Fox News and many people’s uncritical support of it. You’ve heard some of this before; it’s a common complaint that people are not more discerning of their news consumption, just as it is common to praise someone’s wisdom when they agree with you. Trueman begins his critique from a more British angle.

He says he grew up conservative in the British sense and began to question that when conservative leaders showed themselves to be just as self-servingly corrupt as the opposition party was supposed to be. Then the UK had to turn Hong Kong over to the Chinese in 1997. The last governor of Hong Kong as a British colony was Chris Patten, and he pressed as hard as he could to move the region into safe, democratic territory before he left. Everyone knew it was an uphill struggle, and Patten intended to publish his thoughts in a book (entitled East and West when finally published).

His contract was with HarperCollins, a publisher owned by Rupert Murdoch, a man Trueman believed to be a champion of free speech and the free world. His news empire would help guard the world against the Soviet Union and all the evils therein. But Murdoch got Patten’s book cancelled under the guise that it was substandard and boring. That caused what The New York Times called “a week of relentlessly bad publicity” and provoked the publisher to issue a public apology.

The apology represents an unusually public embarrassment for Rupert Murdoch, News Corp.’s chairman, who ordered that the book be canceled because of its highly critical stance toward China, a country in which Murdoch has considerable business interests and even more considerable financial ambitions.

The top brass ordered Patten’s editor to make excuses and cancel the book, because it could threaten Murdoch’s relationship with people Rush Limbaugh calls “the Chi-Coms.” Editor Stuart Proffitt was already on record praising the book, calling it a upcoming bestseller, so a public 180 would embarrass him personally. He refused and was suspended.

This event and others like it caused Trueman to question what the good guys were up to. Were they really standing up for freedom or their business interests? As we’re seeing in the NBA and Disney Studios today, Trueman writes, “Freedom, it seems, was only important so long as it did not do damage to profit margins.”

This is the man behind Fox News and many other news organizations, including Britain’s popular tabloid The Sun, which delivered nude photos to its readers daily on Page 3 and spurred its competitors to do the same. That’s enough to raise serious questions about Fox’s moral authority and general objectivity, particularly to those who think it is the one unbiased news source on the air.

Photo by Martin Sepion on Unsplash