Tim Challies reviews what looks to be a stirring e-book on the life of Leonard Ravenhill: In Light of Eternity.

“He especially deplored the weakness of the praying of most local churches. He felt the strongest meeting of the church should be the church prayer meeting, but said that it was generally the weakest, if it even existed at all.” In his lifetime Ravenhill saw the daily or weekly prayer meeting disappearing from most local churches. This grieved him because he “directly connected the effectiveness of true ministry with the prayer life of the church.”

Prof. Brendan Riley (you know, the guy teaching the zombies in popular culture course) reviews Dr. Robert A. Burton’s book, On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You’re Not. According to Burton, emotions determine our confidence more that rationale. Riley writes that Burton “makes a strong case for the biological weirdness of that feeling, and its disconnection from actual knowledge.”

Political scientist Tim Groseclose has a book on media bias in which he has tried to quantify and measure political leaning in politicians and voters. His book, Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind, points to a study showing a difference the decisions of young voters after three months exposure to either the NY Times or the Washington Times. Exposure to the NY Times actually resulted in more liberal views from the readers in the study.

Mr. Groseclose says he didn’t want to write just another book claiming to expose bias among reporters and broadcasters. He wanted a scientific book that proposed solutions. Among those solutions is determining your own political quotient. On his website, you can take a 40-question quiz based on congressional roll-call votes in 2009 to see what your PQ is and how it compares to other politicians. This is not an easy quiz. The first two questions are a bit deep in the weeds, but I trudged through them to get a 7.7 PQ.

Even though this is all fairly interesting, I doubt it will change many minds. I hate thinking so cynically, but how many of us think about our civil responsibilities at all? Maybe a book like David Mamet’s The Secret Knowledge will shake us up a bit or one like Mark Steyn’s After America: Get Ready for Armageddon, if we haven’t already written him off, but modern political argument for most American voters seems to be built up from our preconceptions. We believe what we believe, and you’re a brainwashed nut-job if you don’t agree with us.

And yet the Christian in me still holds on to the hope that even this can get better. Maybe I can’t help believing America is exceptional in this way, that all of us really can have liberty and justice.

I finished reading the history book from Kvalavåg (one of my ancestral homes in Norway) about which I wrote the other day. Most of it is stuff that wouldn’t interest you much, but there was one amazing paragraph in the section on the German occupation during World War II (my translation follows):

One of the leaders of the 14-man German troop was Konrad Grünbaum. He was actually of Jewish origin, and came from the city of Furth. His civil occupation was metal work, and he had been an active member of the Socialist Workers’ Youth. Before the war he himself had been in Dachau concentration camp. He had been accused of illegal work and sentenced to three years’ punishment. Through an error he came to Norway in ̀́41 and was promoted. Grünbaum himself said later that he had had very good relations with the people in Kvalavåg while he was there, up until 1943. People used to call him “the Englishman” because he spoke only English with the people. Others called him “Grandfather.”

What a bizarre story. I can only imagine the terrors he must have suffered, worrying in his bed that somebody in Personnel would notice his ethnicity and denounce him. And after the war, what must he have felt, when he pondered the cosmic lottery win that saved his life when so many others perished?

“The Plague in the Stairway,” by Norwegian artist Theodor Kittelsen

You know how they taught you in school that the Black Plague was caused by fleas carried by rats?

At least according to one scholar, this is probably a slander on fleas and rats.

“The evidence just isn’t there to support it,” said Barney Sloane, author of The Black Death in London. “We ought to be finding great heaps of dead rats in all the waterfront sites but they just aren’t there. And all the evidence I’ve looked at suggests the plague spread too fast for the traditional explanation of transmission by rats and fleas. It has to be person to person – there just isn’t time for the rats to be spreading it.”

He added: “It was certainly the Black Death but it is by no means certain what that disease was, whether in fact it was bubonic plague.”

People at the time believed it was caused by “bad air.” Maybe they were right, if it was caused by human-to-human contact.

G. K. Chesterton would have loved that.