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.
Category Archives: Non-fiction
Christ-Centered Worship
“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
This Labor Day, Read About Suicide
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.
The End of Secularism, by Hunter Baker
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.
End is Near
Yesterday, I received my copy of Hunter Baker’s The End of Secularism. I’ll fill you in on the yummy details when I can. You can listen to him on Moody’s Prime Time America from a link on his blog.
Pardon Me, Your Pants Are on Fire
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.
Read This Book
Russell Moore on Hunter Baker’s The End of Secularism, also known as “The Sky Has Fallen: What I Learned While Dating Bertrand Russell.”
In Time For Banned Books Week
Pseudo Histories and Truth
From the Times Literary Supplement: “Ronald Fritze, a historian and dean at Athens State University in Alabama, is concerned about, and clearly fascinated by, the pseudo-histories and pseudo-sciences . . .” The article goes on to describe his work, and the writer of the article appears to have trouble with discernible truth and passionate lies.
“But, how do we reckon with the fact that pseudo-historians also insist on their stories’ truth? Through evidence and “objective” empirical methods, Fritze tells us, again without raising any questions of method and evidence. While objective historians look at all the facts, guarding themselves against presuppositions, pseudo-historians choose only those that support their case.”
Because insisting on the truth of something does not make it true. Imagine that.
Your Jesus Is Too Safe, by Jared C. Wilson
The title of Jared’s first book, Your Jesus Is Too Safe: Outgrowing a Drive-Thru, Feel-Good Savior, brings to mind J.B. Phillips’ classic book, Your God Is Too Small: Miracle Grow for Your Puny Religious Imagination (OK, I made up that subtitle, and Phillips would not have thought it funny). What I remember most of Phillips’ book is the first part, the destructive part, in which he tears down inadequate views of the Almighty. I expected to find Jared’s book similarly organized, but it isn’t. He doesn’t spend much time describing poor views of Jesus, like Hippie Jesus or the inhuman Flannel-graph Jesus. He touches on them in the context of healthy views on Jesus’ role as a shepherd, a judge, a prophet, a king, and many others.
Something Jared says while discussing one role puts a finger on his approach to the whole book. “In contemplating Jesus as Shepherd, I’m most tempted to make a short list of things shepherds do—the shepherd’s responsibilities chart—and cram Jesus into and see how he fits. Some books actually take this tack. I believe this is a backward way to go about things—sort of getting the cart before the horse . . . or sheep, I guess.” Jesus—the real, historic, biblical Jesus—is the focus on the book. If a reader finds it unfamiliar or oddly lacking in application, then I suggest they question whether they may be influenced by preaching and reading that presents the Christian life as a pattern of moral behaviors, who Jesus is not being nearly as important as what he supposedly wants us to do. Your Jesus Is Too Safe is a Christian Living book, but not a book with 40 ways to have a victorious Christian life. Just to iron out any possible subtly here, the latter book is the safe one; this book isn’t safe.
It isn’t too dangerous either. Even though Jared jokes about making readers angry when talking about Jesus’ humanity, (he says people in some circles get riled at the suggestion that Jesus may have relieved his bowels at some point during his life) he does not draw excessive lines in the sand and call out the heretics lurking in every church. He is very charitable, while presenting sound, biblical portraits of Jesus. I appreciate how he reasons deeply from the Scripture and does not fill each chapter with personal stories or extra-biblical illustrations. It’s a darn good book, in other words.
One outstanding point of interest for readers of Brandywine Books is the section on Jesus’ human intelligence. Jared quotes from Dallas Willard’s The Divine Conspiracy to say Jesus isn’t generally considered smart because “the world has succeeded in opposing intelligence to goodness.” Saintly people who are also brilliant are considered anomalies in the world, if their brilliance is recognized (I suppose Chesterton’s Father Brown was one). Some Christians take this idea so far as to discourage heavy study, even in theology, but noting that Jesus was God in human form, Jared states “anytime a Christian denies the importance of reading, learning, and studying . . . one is, practically speaking, denying the incarnation.” So loving the Lord our God with all our minds may mean reading Plato or Shakespeare because doing so would enrich our imaginations.
Continue reading Your Jesus Is Too Safe, by Jared C. Wilson