Category Archives: Non-fiction

Non-fiction, Religion

Why Are So Many Jews Liberal?

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U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Holds Annual Remembrance Observance I read about this book first in World Magazine, where Marvin Olasky gives it high marks. Now Seth Lipsky has a longer article on Norman Podhoretz’s book, Why Are Jews Liberals? I wish I could say political conservatives and Bible-believing Christians were completely innocent of the bigotry that encouraged many Jews to embrace what is now liberalism, but I can’t. Even some of our church fathers sinned against God by disdaining Jewish people. But of course, we/they aren’t to blame ultimately.

Lipsky states:

Early in the book he quotes a passage from I.J. Singer’s novel The Brother’s Ashkenazi about Nissan, the son of a rabbi who becomes a disciple of “the prophet Marx” and who, as Singer puts it, “never let his copy of Das Kapital out of his sight and carried it everywhere, as his father had carried his prayer shawl and phylacteries.” Podhoretz comes back to this theme toward the end, quoting G.K. Chesterton as observing: “When men stop believing in God they don’t believe in nothing; they believe in anything.” That was not true of the Jewish immigrants who came to America, Podhoretz writes. “Almost all the young intellectuals and political leaders among them had stopped believing in the God of Judaism, but it was not ‘anything’ they now believed, it was Marxism.” And when Marxism failed, Podhoretz writes, the “same process that had made social democracy into an acceptable refuge from orthodox Marxism now began making liberalism into an acceptable refuge from social democracy.”

Authors, Non-fiction, The Press

Don’t Criticize Those Peaceful People

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If they want to abuse their women, let them.

Michael Weiss writes, “Misogyny as multiculturalism,” in response to media flak over an academic book on religious abuse and suppression of women. The left in the British press (at least some of them) are afraid of Muslims and will self-censor just to get along. “Cowardice gets dressed up as cultural sensitivity;” Weiss explains, “an eagerness to please semi-literate reactionaries becomes a form of willing internal exile, whereby independence of one’s own mind is held in suspicion, if not thought to be lethal in itself.”

Non-fiction, Reviews

Perilous Realms, by Marjorie Burns

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Regular readers here are already aware that I’m a man of many prejudices, so it won’t surprise you to know that I approached Marjorie Burns’ Perilous Realms: Celtic and Norse in Tolkien’s Middle-earth with suspicion. I fully expect any book written by a female academic to be tailored for the Women’s Studies Department—full of anger at men and contempt for the Christian religion.

So I’m delighted to report that this book, written by a female English professor at Portland State University, was a very pleasant surprise in almost every way.

Burns notes that many scholars have traced the Norse and Anglo-Saxon themes in The Lord of the Rings. But she is convinced that Tolkien also drew (less openly, because of the fashions of his day) on Celtic myth and folklore as well. She examines all of Tolkien’s fantastic works (not only The Hobbit and the Trilogy, but the Silmarillion and the later gathered works) and points out (quite convincingly, it seems to me as a non-expert) Celtic parallels that may be nearly as important as the Norse. (Tolkien, she explains, loved Wales but did not care for Ireland. Also, there was a general opinion that Celtic matters were in some sense effeminate, lacking the practicality and fatalism of the Viking world-view. [Reviewer’s note: When you think of it, Tolkien and Lewis were an odd pair of friends—a Catholic Englishman and a Protestant Irishman.])

Gender issues are certainly in Burns’ mind as she examines the accusation that Tolkien’s work, with its vast majority of active males and small minority of (generally) passive females, is a mark of misogyny. But she stands up for him in what I’d call a courageous way. For one thing, she thinks that Tolkien (based on the prejudice mentioned above) had the Celts in mind, and therefore a sort of vital femininity, in his portrayal of the Elves. She also makes much of the manner in which males frequently assume traditionally feminine roles in the books—cooking, nurturing, housekeeping, nursing, etc.

She also spends much time refuting the accusation that Tolkien’s characters are cardboard, either all good or all evil. She not only points to the weaknesses, frailties and near runs with temptation that the good characters display. She also notes the way Tolkien “doubles” his characters—each good character being matched with an evil one. Thus, while Gandalf clearly embodies many of the more positive characteristics of the Norse god Odin, Sauron (who, like Odin, has one eye) displays the god’s wicked traits.

Burns ends the book with a short chapter outlining three questions about the books, and giving her own answers. These answers are blessedly free of radical feminism or condescension towards Tolkien’s Christian faith. In fact, she seems to appreciate the significance of the doctrine of the Incarnation.

So I enjoyed the book very much, and recommend it.

Authors, Non-fiction

Sink That Sub!

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Hand grenade According to biographer Terry Mort, Ernest Hemingway hated war, but knew one had to win once they were committed to a fight. So while part of a civilian patrol between the coasts of the U.S. and Cuba, the author would watch for submarines and plan to hit them with hand grenades when he saw one.

Non-fiction

Christ-Centered Worship

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“Christ-Centered Worship calls people to go beyond ‘contemporary worship’ without being polemical in spirit. It takes historic worship traditions very seriously but uses the gospel itself as the way to critique and design orders of worship. It is full, balanced, and extremely practical. This will now be the first book I give people–or turn to myself–on the practice of understanding, planning, and leading in corporate worship.”–Tim Keller, Redeemer Presbyterian Church; author of The Reason for God

Non-fiction

This Labor Day, Read About Suicide

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National Suicide by Martin L. Gross Cal Thomas praises “a must-read for people who are sick of the way government operates.” It’s Martin L. Gross’ book National Suicide: How Washington Is Destroying the American Dream from A to Z. This isn’t about health care or terrorism. It’s about politicians and the system they have worked up in Washington D.C. that has little to do with serving the public.

The current administration has a projected budget deficit of $9 trillion over ten years. I can only assume that’s because very few congressmen use calculators when considering budget proposals. Do any living congressmen ask about current revenues or unreasonable tax burdens for legitimate reasons, not political points? Do they care about the limitations put on them by the constitution?

Thomas describes some of the problems recorded in National Suicide:

The Alternative Minimum Tax, which he says is “based on an accounting lie,” will cost taxpayers $1 trillion over the next 10 years. America, he writes, spends $700 billion a year on various welfare programs, amounting to $65,000 for each poor family of four, yet we still have the poor with us. Both political parties, Gross charges, secretly encourage illegal immigration (the Democrats for votes, the Republicans for cheap labor) and then reward the immigrants’ children with automatic U.S. citizenship.

Care to guess how many government programs deal with “disappearing rural areas”? 89, 200, 500? It’s much higher than that.

Before the next election, we may want to think through what has brought us to the point of national suicide and ask ourselves who we can trust to serve the country with humility, loving mercy, and acting justly.

Non-fiction, Religion, Reviews

The End of Secularism, by Hunter Baker

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Our friend Hunter Baker’s new book, The End of Secularism, reminds me more than anything in my own experience of the work of Francis Schaeffer (though Baker criticizes Schaeffer in certain areas). It’s a dense book, heavily footnoted, presenting a lot of information in a relatively short (194 pages) format. You’ll want to keep a highlighter in hand as you read it, and if you’re like me, you’ll have to stop and contemplate what you’re reading from time to time.

Baker begins with several chapters of historical overview, tracing the history of the Christian church, then explaining how secularism as a world-view and ideology burgeoned in a world increasingly weary of religious conflict and war. Secularism—the view that religion (if tolerated at all) must be cordoned off from public life, so that even someone whose politics are formed by faith must find secular public arguments for it in order to participate in the process—was originally marketed, and continues to be marketed today, as the only rational and impartial alternative to the passions and intolerance of believers.

Baker then applies to this claim of rationality and impartiality the same kind of analysis that secularists like to use on religion. He finds secularism greatly wanting, and fatally blind to its own unexamined presuppositions. It’s strange to find postmodern thinkers presented positively in a Christian book, but Baker takes particular note of recent deconstructions of secularism by younger thinkers. These postmoderns note that secularists are not, as they imagine, impartial referees in the world of thought, but partisans holding a distinct ideology, and that their efforts to silence religious ideas in the public square are simply a new example of an elite class attempting to muzzle heretics. Baker also marshals historical facts to demonstrate that secularism has no better record of tolerance and the prevention of conflict than Christianity had. He devotes a later chapter specifically to the “legend” of the incompatibility of religion and science. In the final chapter he examines an interesting situation from recent history where politicians explicitly appealed to religion in a controversy in a southern state, and the secularists made no complaint at all—because in that case, religion was being marshaled in the service of a liberal cause.

The End of Secularism will challenge the Christian reader, and will raise some Christian hackles—Baker gives short shrift to those who claim that America was founded as a Christian nation, for instance. (Update: Hunter points out to me that he criticizes those who claim a secularist founding as well, which is a fair point.) But Christians should read it, for the mental exercise, and for the hope it presents that the long cultural dominance of secularism may finally be coming to the beginning of its end. Secularists should read it for an education.

Highly recommended.

Non-fiction

Pardon Me, Your Pants Are on Fire

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Robert Feldman from the University of Massachusetts talks about his research into our patterns of bearing false witness. In short, we lie a lot.

“We are not very good at detecting deception in other people,” Feldman says. “When we are trying to detect honesty, we look at the wrong kinds of nonverbal behaviors, and we misinterpret them.”

On this topic, some researchers think lying is mentally harder than telling the truth, so asking suspect to do something specific while recounting their story could help separate the liars from the honest. Of course, some people can’t handle the truth and make themselves look bad.

In related news from our How Things Have Changed Department, Time magazine has an old article on the lies presidents have told us.

In 1960, when the Russians shot down Gary Powers’ U2 spy plane, it was the Secretary of State, not President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who claimed a weather-research plane had gone off course. “So intense was the desire to not have the President lie,” says presidential historian Michael Beschloss, “to not break the bond of trust with the American people, it was left to others. Eisenhower never spoke an untruth.” Of course, Ike was never the focus of an investigation by a grand jury, either.