Category Archives: Non-fiction

Authors, Non-fiction

Remembering Elie Wiesel

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Residents of Cleveland, Ohio, remember Elie Wiesel as a big-hearted author who wanted to teach and support them like neighbors.

Back in 1966, Wiesel himself remembers friends from his youth. “Today,” he says, “I know that the advice of our wise men — ‘acquire for yourself a friend’ — is ironic. There is nothing with which to acquire them. Nothing any more. Our generation suffers a poverty of dreams.”

Frances Coleman read Elie Wiesel’s Night within the past week, saying it is the best and hardest book she’s ever read.

In the sense that Wiesel’s evocative “deposition,” as he later termed it, shook me to my soul, then “Night” is the best book I’ve ever read; and in the sense that it reminds readers how utterly base we humans can be, it is the most punishing. Reading “Night” at night is punishing, too, because after you finish reading, you are left to lie awake in the dark, wondering if you could have survived such an ordeal.

Authors, Non-fiction

Tipping Off the American Pedestal

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Cheryl Magness tells us how the recently departed author Elie Wiesel’s message will continue to resonate.

As Americans we are taught, and most of us believe, that there is something special about America. We speak reverently of the independent and pioneering spirit that sparked a new nation “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” We cherish the “rugged individualism” that enabled us to build a “shining city on a hill.” We think of ourselves as being the most generous and compassionate people on the face of the earth.

This view of ourselves as something unique in history, a nation markedly different from, and superior to, any other, has the potential both to motivate us for good and to lead us into laziness and neglect. For it is in believing too fully in our pedestal that we have the greatest capacity to fall off of it.

http://thefederalist.com/2016/07/05/elie-wiesel-is-gone-but-his-message-is-forever/

Fiction, Non-fiction, Religion

He Who Waits For the Best Time to Act

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The hobbit at his table
The hobbit at his table

One of my life quotes, which I wish I could say I’ve actually given proper attention, is a verse from a song in the Rankin/Bass version of The Hobbit.

“A man who’s a dreamer and never takes leave,
Who lives in a world that is just make-believe,
Will never know passion, will never know pain.
Who sits by the window will one day see rain.”

It’s a Glenn Yarbrough song, which you can hear here.

That verse is loosely related to a quote attributed by some to Martin Luther. “For truth and duty it is ever the fitting time; who waits until circumstances completely favor his undertaking, will never accomplish anything.” As our readers often say, “That’s the truth,” but did Luther actually say this?

The Quote Investigator doesn’t believe he did and has evidence to support his belief that another German theologian with a curiously similar name is the one who first put this thought (in his own words) on paper.

Non-fiction, Religion, Reviews

‘The Printer and the Preacher,’ by Randy Petersen

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The Printer and the Preacher

I picked up this book with great anticipation. It’s fairly well known that Benjamin Franklin and the English revivalist George Whitefield were friends. An account of their friendship promised a very entertaining and educational story. Unfortunately, though it was educational, the entertainment element was largely wanting in The Printer and the Preacher.

Author Randy Petersen clearly did a lot of research to produce this book on two remarkable men. George Whitefield to a large degree invented popular evangelism as we know it – emotional, dramatic preaching, avoiding denominational distinctives for a “mere Christianity” gospel. Benjamin Franklin, as his major publisher, supported his work (most of the time) because of its positive social effects, but could never accept the deity of Christ. Nevertheless the two men liked and respected each other, and were friends for many years, until Whitefield’s death. Whitefield again and again urged Franklin to consider Christ’s claims, and Franklin politely put him off.

Wouldn’t it be intriguing to have been a fly on the wall during one of these men’s meetings, when the very concepts of what would become American religion were being worked out by two men of intelligence and wit? Alas, The Printer and the Preacher never provides any detail of such a meeting, even in summary. Apparently such accounts don’t exist, and the two men’s letters don’t preserve the kind of interchange we’d like to have. What we get, instead, is bits of factual information scattered like raisins in the great oatmeal bowl of the author’s analysis. Don’t get me wrong – the analysis is good, as far as I can tell. But I wish the author had trusted his story more, and felt less obligated to explain each point to us. Of course that would have left us with a much shorter book.

The Printer and the Preacher is a useful work. But it’s not a great pleasure to read.

Non-fiction, Reading

Read the Bible in Whole Books

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When we change the Bible into a chapter and verse Bible, plus added all these other modern additives — cross references, section headings, footnotes, all the other stuff that we put in Bibles — we have really made it hard for people to just flat out read the Bible. And one of the things I contend in my book is we should be reading first and studying second and actually doing our study in the context of having read whole books, because that is really what authors intended. Their central unit is not a verse, is not a chapter, it is a book.

Tony Reinke of Desiring God talks to Glenn Paauw, the Executive Director of the Biblica Institute for Bible Reading, on how the Bible came to be designed the way it is today. Paauw says practical considerations simply built on each other so that while we’ve done much to help people reference the Bible, we’ve also hindered them from simply reading it.

Authors, Fiction, Non-fiction

Who Once Destroyed Harold Bloom

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Cynthia Ozick, who is now 88 (“piano keys,” as she sprightfully said when I [Giles Harvey] congratulated her on her recent birthday), has not ceased from the mental fight in the intervening years. She remains a crusader, a missionary or, as she recently put it to me, “a fanatic” in the cause of literature. With one hand she has written some of the strangest, most intellectually daring and morally intelligent fiction of recent times, including “The Shawl” (1989) and “The Puttermesser Papers” (1997); with the other she has produced a prose brick of lit crit, essay after essay on subjects ranging from the Book of Job and Gershom Scholem to Helen Keller and Susan Sontag. You could furnish a room with the prizes she has won, and yet the embrace of a wide readership and extraliterary fame has proved elusive; and no wonder. Public demand for the exacting insights of practitioner-critics, never high, has been in steady decline for a good while now.

Harvey begins his profile of Ozick with a remarkable story of how she punked critic Harold Bloom in a public discussion 30 years ago.  “She beat the crap out of him,” one editor said afterward. (via Prufrock News)

Fiction, Non-fiction, Reading

What Americans Claim to Read

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Last week, the Library of Congress opened a new exhibit called “America Reads” to “celebrate the public’s choice of 65 books by American authors that had a profound effect on American life.”

It’s a follow-up to the 2012 exhibit “Books That Shaped America.” At that time, “the Library of Congress urged members of the public to name other books that shaped America and to tell the Library which of the 88 books on the list were most important to them. Thousands of readers responded.”

We, the people of these United States, chose books such as Robert Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, both Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead and Anthem, The Book of Mormon, Stephen King’s The Stand, Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, The Cat in the Hat, AA’s Big Book, The Feminine Mystique, and Spock’s Baby and Child Care.

The LOC reminds us, “The volumes featured in the ‘America Reads’ exhibition do not necessarily represent the best in American letters, nor do they speak to the diversity of our nation and the books it produces.” No, but it does speak to the type of people who visit the Library of Congress and respond to reading surveys with what amounts to Boaty McBoatface without the priceless publicity.

The Big Book? Baby and Child Care? How many actual people who put on pants in the morning responded to this survey? It couldn’t be thousands, unless almost everyone picked a unique title, making the three votes for Baby and Child Care a standout choice.

The exhibit will run through the end of the year.

Non-fiction, Religion

Some Churches Have Lost Their Way

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How do you react to the claim that what a Christian does at church on Sunday morning is the most important thing he can do that week? I think some pastors have said this as a way of saying worshipping God is our most important act, but if that’s what they intend to say, they aren’t quite saying it. One could easily hear in such a claim that attending church that morning is the most important part of the week. Is that what worship is? Are we only able to worship the Lord in an organized service on one day or can we develop a lifestyle of worship for the whole week? Is the church’s mission to draw people into its organization or to declare the wonders of Christ Jesus?

Jared C. Wilson has experience in churches that put all of their creative energy into making the Sunday morning service exciting, unique, and attractive to the people of their city, and he believes those church leaders have lost the vision for Christ’s church on earth. The manner of the services and the theme of the sermons (or talks) point to good feelings and self-improvement. “But are they the real message of Jesus?” he asks.

Wilson’s argument in The Prodigal Church rests on his belief that what you win people with is what you win them to. “Pragmatic discipleship makes pragmatic Christians. The way the church wins its people shapes its people. So the most effective way to turn your church into a collection of consumers and customers is to treat them like that’s what they are.”

He urges church leaders to question their assumptions about what takes place in their services and programs. If their goal is make clear the claims of Christ or to help others make God of first importance in every part of their lives, then they are on mission regardless their presentation style.

You could walk away from the attractional church’s pattern of teaching and think you needed some more skills, some more enthusiasm, and some more advice, but you’d rarely walk away thinking you need more grace.

Wilson is careful not to overly criticize. He isn’t arguing for his preferred church style or saying that everyone has to agree with him on what makes for a good worship service. He admits we have different styles, but making consumerism a normal part of the American church does not lift up the name of Christ or apply his grace in healthy ways. That’s not a style choice. It’s a problem. It isn’t cultural sensitivity; it’s being co-opted by the culture.

The second part of the book offers many thoughts on how to do church well, including some stories of people who realized their manner of ministry didn’t accomplish their intentions. I heartily agree with and recommend this book.

Non-fiction, Religion

Excerpt from The Prodigal Church by Jared C. Wilson

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Many attractional churches still preach that Jesus died for our sins, of course. But too often this message of Christ’s death has become assumed, the thing you build up to rather than focus on. Or, in too many other cases, this message is treated as the “add-on” to other messages, the proposition presented at the end of a message that is more about our personal success than Christ’s personal victory.

A cognitive dissonance can result for those who hear a message all about what they should do to be more successful or victorious or happy or what-have-you, only to then hear the proposition that Jesus died for our sins. To hear a lengthy appeal to our abilities, culminating in an appeal to our utter inability, can cause spiritual whiplash.

But the appeal is easy to see. Attractional is certainly attractive. These kinds of messages, over time, communicate to seeker and believer alike that Christianity is about themselves, making the faith more about self-improvement or life enhancement—which are things we all want deep down. But are they the real message of Jesus?

— From The Prodigal Church:A Gentle Manifesto against the Status Quo, by Jared C. Wilson

Though I am in no position to challenge Wilson’s assessment here, I want to offer the suggestion that the spiritual whiplash may be negated quite a bit by presenting the gospel with a heavy emphasis on personal choice. These preachers could be summarized as saying that since Christ has done so much for our eternal lives, doesn’t it make sense to take advantage of it. Don’t you see how your life would be improved by declaring yourself a follower of Christ Jesus?

That may be a way to make converts, but it isn’t a way to make actual disciples.

Non-fiction

Is the Declaration of Independence Racist?

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Dr. Thomas Kidd is now blogging at The Gospel Coalition and he responds to a charge made this week that the Declaration of Independence is a systemically racist document.

“The greatest ideal animating the American experiment is here: the notion of equality by creation.” And yet, “if people are equal before God, then how can you justify slavery? Some African Americans like American soldier and evangelical pastor Lemuel Haynes asked this question within weeks of the promulgation of the Declaration.”

Haynes wrote an essay in response to Jefferson, in which he said, “Liberty is equally as precious to a black man, as it is to a white one, and bondage equally as intolerable to the one as it is to the other.”

But is the Declaration fundamentally racist? No, though it does have troubling spots, which only makes it an imperfect document. The key idea still isn’t racist at all, even if it was originally interpreted in a way we would not today. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”