Sherry has launched the Biblically Literate Book Club. “I hope the books will mesh in some way with the Bible readings to illuminate one another, especially the Bible illuminating the works of human authors.”

Guest blogger Fiona Maazel says she’s in the middle of about 400 novels at the moment. “Currently, I am still going at War and Peace, the Bible, Grant’s memoirs, Watership Down, Infinite Jest, American Gothic, Auto-da-Fe. I keep meaning to go back and finish these books, but I get sidetracked. Or I was getting sidetracked until one of my book shelves collapsed a few months ago.”

I’ve got to note that it got up to about 55° (13° C.) today, and it was just lovely.

Considering the way I’ve been griping, I felt I ought to mention that.



More today on the “Body and Soul” topic. I wanted to say more yesterday, but I thoughtfully chose not to throw a huge post at you all at once.

When I said that the doctrine of the Incarnation is the center of my theology, I felt awkward. I don’t think there’s actually any competition for “The Number One Christian Doctrine,” because Christian doctrine is like a Chinese puzzle—it all fits together in a particular way, and if you miss one piece, the whole thing doesn’t work.

But it seems to me that the doctrine of the Incarnation occupies a special place. When the Apostle John wrote, “This is how you recognize the Spirit of God: Every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, but every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God” (1 John 4:2-3), he gave us a puzzle that’s troubled many of us. “Aren’t there heresies that say that Jesus came in the flesh?” we ask. Well, yes, but I think I glimpse John’s point afar off.

In general, historically, the great heresies have gotten this particular doctrine wrong. They either overspiritualize or underspiritualize the nature of Christ. They either say He wasn’t fully human, or they call Him just a great prophet. The doctrine of the Incarnation seems to be (to mix metaphors) the fulcrum on which Christian doctrine balances, the touchstone that tells you whether the gold is pure or not.

And the human heart testifies to this by responding to the concept of incarnation on a profound level.

What is it that moves us when we look at that beautiful new car in the showroom? That wonderful new house we want? It’s more than just, “This car will get me from place to place really fast,” or “This house will be a comfortable place for my family to live.” It’s a feeling that in this car or this house we’ll find something new, something fresh, something that will satisfy us on an profoundly existential level. Something that will make our lives more joyous and meaningful.

We’re looking for a physical thing that satisfies a spiritual hunger.

This is especially true in the arenas of sex and love. I’ve been watching several Noir films recently, and I’ve come to the conclusion that (with certain exceptions) I don’t like them much. The classic Noir (this isn’t always true) tells the story of a fairly ordinary mug who gets the opportunity to make a big financial score and win a beautiful dame’s love. All that’s demanded of him is his soul. He has to make a little moral compromise. Usually just a small one at the start. But it leads him down the road to murder and his own death.

Well, what’s this mug doing? He’s trying to find his spiritual aspirations incarnate in the dame.

This, as any theologian could tell him, is an attempt to get the benefits of the Incarnation without submitting to the true Incarnate One. (That’s why most Noir films are essentially moral. I may not like them much, but I’ll admit they’re generally moralistic stories.)

And the reason the stories are almost always tragic is because all people, even movie people, understand that real happiness can’t be found where we think it’s found.

This is the tragedy of human life, and one of those places where human tragedy can be an opening for the gospel. In the words of Augustine, “Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.”

Harrison Scott Key writes about relationships with people who read books you can’t stand. He says, “In a pluralist culture, I suppose your Amazon Wish List is as much a cultural signifier as anything else. I somehow managed to marry a woman who not only reads books that I loathe, but who reads books that I find hard categorizing as ‘books.'”

I’m fairly easy-going about this, but then I haven’t been tested on this much. I don’t really read books anyway. I just read about them. . . .

Becky announces a reading challenge for April through November 2008. “Read five to eight books by authors who publish under their initials.”

Initials Reading Challenge, books, novels

The Paris Book Fair has opened, and some people are unhappy about it. Israel’s President Shimon Peres delivered opening remarks. “‘Those who want to burn books, boycott wisdom, prevent reflection, block freedom, condemn themselves to blindness, ignorance, to lack of reflection, loss of freedom,’ Peres said in his only reference to the boycott,” according to this AP story which has an error in its opening line. It reports there is “a boycott by some Arab nations upset that it honors Arab writers.” That should be honoring Israeli writers.

Fair organizer Serge Eyrolles said, “Reading must not become a dangerous sport,” even though I think it always has been–that is intellectually and spiritually dangerous. How many people have had their lives changed by reading a book? How many readers have had their eyes opened? And the reverse, how many have been blinded by the lies within books? The library, the bookstore can be dangerous places for ungrounded readers tossed back and forth by the waves of competing ideas.

Not a bad weekend, in spite of the fact that it was the debut of a new, absurdly early date for the start of Daylight Saving Time, which, according to the link in this earlier post of mine, doesn’t necessarily save any energy at all. Back when I was a lad, (in the time of Henry VI, Part 1), you had some consolation for losing an hour of sleep in the knowledge that spring was coming soon, and it was getting warmer). Now we’re making the change in the dead of winter (though today got up to about freezing, and the rest of the week looks good. But spring it ain’t).

I got together will my old buddy Chip on Saturday, and we went out to lunch at a marvelous place called The Fifties Grill. I’d heard about it but had never tried it. As you’d expect, the ambience is Ron Howard/Henry Winkler, and the waitresses wear poodle skirts. But the hamburger I enjoyed was better than anything I remember getting in a grill during the Eisenhower administration. If you live in the Twin Cities, you can find the place in Brooklyn Park, hard by Brookdale Mall. (Of course if you live in the Twin Cities, you probably knew it long before I got the hint.)

Then we went to a bargain theater to see “National Treasure: Book of Secrets.”

My evaluation: Fun, but dumb. But you knew that.

It’s nice to see a movie where they actually manage to talk about America without irony. But I’m too obsessive to just take the thing at face value. I had a couple problems with it.

One is, I just don’t like Nicholas Cage. From the first time I saw clips from “Raising Arizona” (which I’ve never watched), I haven’t liked his flat, dull eyes. I would not buy a used car from this man. He’s probably a great guy for all I know, but when you’re an actor, your eyes are a big deal.

Secondly, I’m too much of a writer to entirely enjoy a movie that plays that fast and loose with logic. I’ve talked about “movie logic” before. Movie logic is when somebody leaps a car over a river in a film. It all happens so fast—vroom, they’re gone—that you don’t have time to stop and think, “Would a vehicle with a heavy front end and a light back end actually stay horizontal through a jump like that, or would the front end dip?” Movie logic is when something explodes in a building, and the hero runs out and beats the fireball to the exit. It doesn’t make sense in the real world, but you just saw it happen right there on the screen, so you buy it.

In the National Treasure movies, they come up with these obscure clues (traveling all over the U.S. and Europe to follow them up), and once they’ve read them, Nicholas Cage says, “This has to mean X.” So they run off to check out X, and of course he’s right.

In real life, a clue that esoteric could probably mean a hundred things. But the process of actual and trial and error would slow down the movie, and the task of producing clues that actually make sense would tax the creativity of the writers. So they fall back on movie logic.

And it works, in terms of entertainment.

But it’s lazy, and I don’t like it.

I also finished reading The Face by Dean Koontz. I’ve done enough Koontz reviews in this space, but I just want to say that, although it doesn’t bear close examination theologically, this is an intensely, though subtly, Christian book. The payoff was very elegantly done, and I wish I’d written it.

I like this column by Steven M. Barr, over at First Things. First of all, it explodes one of those beloved bits of modern folklore, the one about Einstein being a bad student as a kid. Exploding error is always a good thing, however much comfort I may have derived from this particular legend as a boy. Then Barr goes on to discuss the deathless question of how much we can trust experts:

My own guiding principle is to trust the experts (generally speaking) on anything purely technical, but to rely more on my own judgment as far as human realities go. I trust the architect on what will keep the building up but not on what is beautiful. I trust the pediatrician, but not the child psychologist.

That’s about how I’d put it, only I’d be talking with less… whatchacallit. Expertise.

Turning to matters related to Phil’s post below on proofreading and fact-checking, I was reading this month’s Smithsonian Magazine today, and was surprised to see how long their list of corrections from last month was. Fact after fact had been wrong. I found a mistake in this month’s issue myself (only I can’t find it again now).

Nevertheless, I was much intrigued by this article by Michael Walsh. He was working on a couple of writing projects about Andrew Lloyd Webber, he tells us, back in 1987. Webber, of course, wrote the music for the big musical version of The Phantom of the Opera. In the course of that project, Walsh read the original novel by Gaston Leroux. This novel contains the line, “It will be remembered that, later, when digging in the substructure of the Opéra, before burying the phonographic records of the artist’s voice, the workmen laid bare a corpse.”

Readers for generations had read that sentence without bothering to ask, “Who buried phonograph records in the opera house, and why?”

Well, Walsh discovered the answer when he searched the theater (for other purposes) and accidentally came across a small door with a plaque that read, “The room in which are contained the gramophone records.”

Turns out that a number of very early recordings of the world’s greatest opera singers of the day had been placed in sealed containers and entombed in that room as a time capsule. They were buried in 1907, and were supposed to be opened in 2007.

The theater management had forgotten all about the time capsule by the time Walsh rediscovered it, but they decided to honor the original intention, and leave them alone for another two decades. However, the room was rediscovered by air conditioning workers a couple years later, and then it was opened. Since one container was visibly damaged, they were all removed, but not opened. Walsh says one of them is going to be opened this month (the delay, apparently, springs from difficulties in handling the old discs without damaging them). The recordings will eventually be digitally copied and sold to the public.

Anyway, it all goes to show what every novelist knows—readers don’t pay attention!

Update: I remember the Smithsonian mistake now. In their article on composer/arranger Quincy Jones, they said he’s a descendent of George Washington. There are no descendents of George Washington.