Category Archives: Non-fiction

Non-fiction

"Never mind," Black Death edition

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“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.

Non-fiction

Vapid Speech from the Highest Office

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I wish I could link you to the great interview Ken Myers recorded with Elvin Lim, author of The Anti-Intellectual Presidency: The Decline of Presidential Rhetoric from George Washington to George W. Bush, because it’s worth the time to listen to Lim’s essential argument. Presidential rhetoric has been leaning strongly toward emotional appeals to common sense and away from what may be called intelligent reasons.
“[S]uch appeals rest on reductive and oversimplified reasonings that are often false in significant ways. Persuasion based on such emotional appeals is necessarily shallow and often does not do justice to the issues at stake,” states the brief summary of the interview on the Mars Hill Audio Journal site.
Presidents have become too powerful, Lim states, due to their appeal to extra-constitutional authorities, particularly the perceived electoral mandate from the most recent election. The White House should instead discuss policy with Congress like adults, something many on both sides claim to want, but fewer actually support.

Fiction, Non-fiction

Spoils of the weekend

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It was one of the most exhausting weekends I’ve had in a long time, involving considerable interaction with other human beings, always a workout for me. But nevertheless it wasn’t a bad weekend. Two things that happened, in particular, pleased me inordinately.
First of all, I got this link from my friend and sparring partner, Ragnar. They’re going to do The Long Ships as a movie again. In fact, they’re going to do two movies and a TV miniseries. They’re going to do it in Sweden, and if the Swedes are to be believed (always, ahem, a gamble), they’re going to do it right this time. Continue reading Spoils of the weekend →

Non-fiction, Religion

Christian Smith's Straw Men

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Professor at the University of Notre Dame Christian Smith has written a book criticizing an evangelical view of the Bible. The Bible Made Impossible: Why Biblicism Is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture complains that many American Christians have what he calls a “biblicist” point of view, meaning essentially the Bible is the inerrant Word of God, understandable by any intelligent reader, and universally applicable to all. (The list is longer than this, but I think it boils down to these main points.)

Kevin DeYoung reviews The Bible Made Impossible:

For starters, the book is littered with straw men. Smith frequently attacks ideas that none of the mainstream institutions, documents, or persons he criticizes holds. He opposes mechanical dictation theory, admitting that “most” thoughtful evangelicals do not hold to it (81). I can’t help but wonder which thoughtful evangelicals do? He chides biblicists for things I’ve never seen anyone do, like worshiping the Bible (124) and thinking that fellowship with God comes through paper and ink (119)…. Likewise, he mocks the logic of biblicism for being equally certain about the divinity of Jesus as it is about the ethics of biblical dating (137). But who actually espouses any of this? These are simply cheap shots…. He frequently attacks the notion that the Bible is completely clear, but then in the end he says the Bible is perfectly clear when it comes to the important stuff of the gospel (132).

Having not read this book, I’m sure Prof. Smith makes some good points in it, but it appears from DeYoung’s review that he loses those points in the middle of a lot of partisan propaganda, by which I mean he is defending his team against other teams with whom he agrees essentially. Read all of DeYoung’s review, and you’ll see what I mean.

Non-fiction, Reviews

The Steel Bonnets, by George MacDonald Fraser

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There is said to have been a tradition among the Borderers that when a male child was christened his right hand should be excluded from the ceremony, so that in time of feud he would be better equipped to strike “unhallowed” blows upon his family’s enemies.

At the end of the 2001 Common Reader edition of George MacDonald Fraser’s 1971 book The Steel Bonnets: The Story of the Anglo-Scottish Border Reivers, an interview with the author is inserted. There, in response to a question as to whether he plans to write more straight history books, Fraser (most famous for his Flashman series of serio-comic romances) replies that “he found he could get closer to the truth of the past in fiction.”

I think his instincts were good. Although The Steel Bonnets seems to me (a fairly uninformed reader in that area of history) a masterful work on a challenging subject, I also found it hard to follow, and wished it no longer than it was. If I had Scottish roots I might feel differently. A lot of people, I’m told, are very keen on this book, which is not surprising when you note how many of the names that show up again and again in the accounts of the Border feuds are familiar today—especially in America. At the beginning of the book, Fraser muses on Richard Nixon’s inauguration ceremony, in which you found a Johnstone (Lyndon Baines Johnson), a Graham (Billy) and a Nixon together on the platform. Nor does he fail to note that the first man on the moon was an Armstrong, a scion of perhaps the greatest Reiver family of them all. Continue reading The Steel Bonnets, by George MacDonald Fraser →

Non-fiction

The English Traveler

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Christopher Taylor reviews To a Mountain in Tibet by Colin Thubron in the London Review of Books, saying Thubron’s “books turn on the encounter between the energetic yet dreamy narrator, moving ‘in a boyish euphoria of self-sufficiency’, as he puts it in Behind the Wall: A Journey through China, and the sometimes deflating realities he finds. Once these have made him feel grizzled and disabused he’ll have a moment of human contact or a brush with the beautiful…” Thubron is the quintessential English travel writer, and he can’t help it. (via George Grant)

Non-fiction, Religion

The Omniscient Will Not Remember

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Last week, I listened to an audiobook of The Next Story: Life and Faith after the Digital Explosion. Author Tim Challies’ notes that many things we do online are recorded: our search requests, transactions, social network connections, and more. Each will be in its own database, but with the expansive overlapping of our social networks with other websites, that’s changing. Increasingly, what we do online is not only recorded, but tied to our social profiles so that even casual friends can know a good bit about us.

The Crucifixion Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472-1553)This raises a natural question. Would any of us be embarrassed by the revelation of our online actions: our comments, searches, browsing, how much we do or when? I’ll say upfront that I would be, and I try to lead a fairly transparent online life.

Challies makes the obvious contrast between these databases and the Christian life. Our Heavenly Father has given followers of Christ Jesus the righteousness of Christ, and in doing so, he has removed our transgressions from us as far as the east is from the west (Psalm 103:13)

“I, I am he who blots out your transgressions for my own sake, and I will not remember your sins.” Isaiah 43:25 ESV

The God who knows everything from the beginning to the end makes a conscious decision to reject the memory of our cancelled sins. What profound mercy. Psalm 103 says he remembers our frailty and has compassion on us like a father loves his children. He refuses to recount for us a long list of sins, because that list has been ruined. But he scored those sins in Christ’s own body and nailed them with him to the cross, like the horrible painting of Lucas Cranach the Elder shows.

What mercy.

Authors, Non-fiction

Discovering the Diary of Anne Frank

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Mike Williams has the story on how Judith Jones, who became a famous senior editor and vice president at Knopf, pulled the French translation of The Diary of a Young Girl off of the reject pile and urged her boss to send it to New York for consideration.

Non-fiction, Reviews

Review of Cruciform by Jimmy Davis

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Jesus calls us to take up our cross daily, and in doing so, our lives will take the shape of His cross. Jimmy Davis describes such a life in his book, Cruciform: Living the Cross-Shaped Life, possibly the best under-the-radar, Christian Living book this year. He writes, “We are shaped by the cross into the shape of the cross,” and thus are transformed to fulfill roles of seeker, shepherd, sower and steward.

I will summarize these points.

  • As children of God, we seek his kingdom and his righteousness first (Matthew 6:33). We desire to act like him, to love and think like him. We look to Jesus as our example for living well.
  • “In relationship to other disciples,” Davis writes, “the servant is a shepherd, one who encourages brothers and sisters in Christ, who loves and labors with them” for the kingdom (Colossians 3:12-16). There are caveats with this point, but generally speaking we love and work with each other keeping the abundant life of Christ in mind.
  • To those who aren’t disciples, we sow the gospel through actions and conversation. We have compassion for the crowds, like Jesus does (Matthew 9:37), praying for them and serving them for the sake of His kingdom.
  • For everything in God’s creation, we are stewards on His behalf of all the resources God has given us: “body, time, talents/gifts, money, head/heart/hands, words, work, creation” (Matthew 24:45-51).

We do this due to a focus on Christ’s life, which is essentially cross-shaped, and out of the source of our spiritual strength, which is a cross-shaped spirit. Each of these roles intermingles with the community in which they serve, a give-and-take that makes Jesus’ disciples interdependent. Davis carries these concepts through the end of the book as he describes that cross-shaped source of our spiritual lives.

Each chapter opens with a well-written, personal example of that chapter’s theme, showing how he has learned and continues to learn the principles he has written here. Perhaps the most difficult of these principles is the overcoming of sin by faith, not by effort (Galatians 3:1-5), which is the reason Davis builds his book on it. His constant refrain throughout the book sings of the grace by which we were saved being the same grace through which we obey and are made holy. Even in the worst situations (the last chapter begins with one), our Heavenly Father’s grace gives us the strength to persevere.

I look forward to living perpetually in that grace. Sometimes I think I’ve learned that lesson, and then I discover I haven’t. I want to make space in my daily routine to hear the gospel, to dwell on the Father’s love, as Davis describes it, because that cross-shaped song is where the abundant life is.

Non-fiction, Reviews

Two biographies of Davy Crockett

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“When I got there, it was to the utter astonishment of my wife; for she supposed I was dead. My neighbours who had started with me had returned and took my horse home, which they had found with theirs; and they reported that they had seen men who had helped to bury me; and who saw me draw my last breath. I know’d this was a whapper of a lie, as soon as I heard it.”

This Mark Twain-esque passage comes from A Narrative Of the Life of David Crockett, Of the State Of Tennessee. It purports to be the autobiography of Congressman Crockett. Historians are divided as to the extent of the truth of that claim. It’s now known that he collaborated with a fellow congressman and Baptist minister, Thomas Chilton, to produce the book. No one knows how much Crockett actually contributed (writing was a hard job for him, he himself admitted). Still, for this reader, the narrator’s voice is unmistakable, and I thought I could tell when an educated hand took over to insert more refined passages.

If Davy Crockett had been born in the 20th Century, he’d have lived in a trailer park. I don’t say that in condescension. He took considerable pride in belonging to the lowest stratum of white society, the movers and fringe population who drifted ahead of the great waves of settlement, living a subsistence life where more Indians than whites dwelt. Until he discovered that his affability and storytelling skills could win him political office, he could boast no distinction at all, aside from being one of Tennessee’s foremost bear hunters. He’d served honorably under Andrew Jackson in the Creek War, but with no great distinction either. He made several efforts to become a man of wealth, but never once achieved any success, except in election. Continue reading Two biographies of Davy Crockett →