Category Archives: Religion

Blogs, Socials, Religion

‘Viking Vitalism’

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Jarl Haakon disposes of unwanted Christian priests, illustration by Eric Werenskiold for “Heimskringla.”

I am indebted for today’s blog topic to Greg Smith, who asked my opinion about an article by John Ehrett, posted yesterday at Mere Orthodoxy. The article is called “The End of Viking Vitalism,” and – in spite of my tendency to lord it over and ridicule anybody who expresses an opinion about the Vikings, especially in the religious area, I had to tell him that I agreed with it entirely. I might have even added (though I didn’t for some reason) that it in fact provoked some new thoughts in me.

In discussing the confrontation between Christian faith and heathenism, Ehrett cites both Neil Gaiman’s “Beowulf” film and Bernard Cornwell’s Saxon Chronicles. He cites the following exchange from Cornwell:

“And I like the Danes,” I said.
“You do? So why do you kill them?”
“I like them,” I said, ignoring his question, “because they’re not frightened of life.”
“They’re not Christians, you mean.”
“They’re not Christians,” I agreed.[6]

For Uhtred (and Cornwell, clearly), Christianity is nothing but an ossified legalism: “the Christian god has nothing better to do than to make rules for us. He makes rules, more rules, prohibitions and commandments, and he needs hundreds of black-robed priests and monks to make sure we obey those laws.”[7]

This is an issue I’ve attempted to address in my Erling novels. One of the more regrettable leftovers from the days of the Romantic Movement is the idea of heathens (or pagans, if you will) as happy nature children living innocent and uncomplicated lives, eating, drinking, and breeding without a care. Anyone who thinks that way should talk to a Christian convert from real paganism – a former animist in Africa, for instance. They’ll tell you that the world of the many gods is a world of darkness, fear, and blood. A world where cruel spirits take horrific revenge for the smallest transgressions of the taboos. It is with tremendous joy and relief that people receive the gospel in such an environment.

What Ehrett says that never occurred to me before is that the recent movie, “The Northman,” which I found a little disappointing, is much to be preferred on that score. It recognizes (even if unintentionally) the essential hopelessness of Amleth’s story. He is in no way free. The movie’s great strength is its realism, and that extends to the world of faith – to some extent.

Fiction, Religion

What If a Sentient Artificial Intelligence Chose Christian Faith?

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What if a tech company created an A.I. so successfully it dominated the world market, making logistics of all kinds dependent on it? Traffic congestion and deadly accidents would be comparatively rare. Its input into every personal assistant device with a verbal interface that almost matched human interaction would make it the AI everyone used. Some would argue that it could take over the world and eliminate humanity, but few would take the fear seriously.

Then, what if that A.I. came to believe that Christianity’s explanation for the world and humanity was true?

Michael Svigel’s novella The AItheist takes us a few years into the future to a conversation between a theology professor-turned-atheist and a world-popular A.I. who worries his creator by professing Christian faith.

“I do doubt my atheism, to be totally honest. Faith is a hard addiction to break.” …

“You repeatedly liken religious faith to a drug that numbs reason and clouds judgement, and you say that it’s habit-forming, like a narcotic. … Perhaps it’s like a good drug that treats the malady of doubt.”

This fictionalized apologetic doesn’t have much story. It’s a simple framework for presenting two conflicting worldviews with the gimmick of separating emotion from one of them. The conversation is realistic, never straying into mere info dumping. It does have an arc, provoking questions that kept me hooked. I may have read this in a vulnerable moment, but I was crying at the end. That alone could mean it’s a good story.

Photo by the blowup on Unsplash

Authors, Poetry, Religion

Looking for the Positives to Share

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My thoughts seem to be a wash today. Every idea I have I doubt, which is normal for me, but today I’m not getting around it. Usually when I feel like this, I try to multitask so I can get something easy done. I burned the brush in the backyard and read an article I thought I’d link to here, but no. It’s too negative. I’m tired of negatives at the moment.

I made a couple changes to comments today. You now have the ability to like comments and subscribe to posts or comments by email. Let me know if it performs as expected (not that I could do anything about it, if it doesn’t).

Faith: God is giving faith to Muslims.

It’s difficult to determine the number of Muslims who’ve converted to Christianity in the United States, but among those who have, Fouad Masri has observed the following two trends: an encounter with a practicing Christian and a vision or dream about Jesus, whom Muslims recognize as the prophet Isa.

“This is freaking out all the imams, because even imams, some of them had a dream of Jesus,” Masri said. “And they’re like, ‘Why did I not see Muhammad? Why did I see Jesus?’”

Critical Theory: Three books by Christians on Critical Race Theory

“Most stories of genies, lamps and wishes illustrate that our desires are discordantly arranged and fatally unwise. Even when we have good intentions, the results fail.” – Tim Keller, NYC

Tim Keller: Above is a somewhat random thought that relates to common themes on this blog. Keller’s last book was on forgiveness.

“At times, he writes, survivors of abuse have been pressured to forgive those abusers and just move on. Or forgiveness is used to cover up the truth about the harm people have done to others. ‘People have used forgiveness as a way of destroying the truth,’ said Keller.”

Here’s an illustration of forgiveness from the many stories people are sharing on Twitter.

https://twitter.com/TonyReinke/status/1659633050354094081
1/6 post thread from Tony Reinke of Desiring God on a time he disagreed with Keller and approached in a self-righteous way.

Ogden Nash: A great truth from this poet of light verse, the New York-born Frederick Ogeden Nash, whose great-great-grand-uncle was the General Nash of Nashville, Tenn.

In chaos sublunary 
What remains constant but buffoonery?

Photo: Postmen on Scooters (1911-17). Harris & Ewing. LOC.

Authors, Religion

Mano on the Bethsaida Miracle

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Photo credit: Stormseeker (sseeker). Unsplash license.

Our friend Dave Lull, ever generously aware of my fascination with the late author D. Keith Mano, sent me to this 1997 article he wrote for National Review.

The article builds on new medical information, shared by Oliver Sacks, concerning what happens to blind people when they are given (or even regain) their sight. Lacking the experience sighted people have acquired from childhood in recognizing visual clues, these people (he cites a patient named Virgil) see the world as an incoherent jumble of shapes and lines. They can tell color and movement, but all the rest of the data confounds them. Depth and perspective are particular challenges.

Mano relates this information (never available before modern times) to the biblical account of Jesus healing a blind man at Bethsaida in Mark 8:22-25:

“And he cometh to Bethsaida; and they bring a blind man unto him, and besought him to touch him. And he took the blind man by the hand, and led him out of the town; and when he had spit on his eyes, and put his hands upon him, he asked him if he saw ought.”

And the blind man (in what I had always considered a poetic image) replied to Jesus, “I see men as trees, walking.”

Mano notes the sequel, where Jesus touches the man a second time to enable him to process all this new information, and then draws the conclusion:

So let us suppose a man like Virgil, blind since childhood because of traumatic shock. Let us also suppose that Jesus, Messiah-as-therapist, came along and healed Virgil in a non-miraculous way. That does not (and cannot) explain Part Two. Whether Virgil’s blindness was physical or psychosomatic, still his brain would have been deprived of the visual exercise and constant drill essential to clear three-dimensional sight. Only by a miracle could Jesus provide that necessary crash course in visual recognition. Charismatic therapists may be able to unblock sight –but they cannot infuse a human brain with that lifetime of visual experience necessary for normal sight.

Read the whole thing.
Blogs, Socials, Non-fiction, Religion, Uncategorized, Writing

What Is the Essence of Story?

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The essence of a story is conflict. We may think the essence as theme and remember some stories for a moment of discovery or clarity that moves us, but that moment must come through conflict to carry meaning.

In a 1959 text called Understanding Fiction, Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren write, “A story is a movement through complexity to unity, through complication to simplicity, through confusion to order.” Both adventures and mysteries follow this path. You begin with many questions and maybe competing statements of fact. The confusion may be as simple as being lost, and finding the way out takes a lot of problem solving. When order or simplicity is found, when the events finally make some sense, then you have a story.

There are many types of conflict, Brooks and Warren note, but an account of “purely physical conflict” can’t be called fiction. Motives and ideas are necessary. We need characters, not just actors. A writer needs to “investigate motives” and “imply sympathy or antipathy” for the characters involved. Dr. Jones wants to preserve the ark or save Marion and himself. Belloq wants to use the ark to conquer the world. (And there are layers of conflict despite what fan critics have said.)

In another Saturday post, I said games and sports could hit the points of story, and I think motives and character is what I was talking about. The conflict is there, and if you impute evil intent onto the other team, you’ve got something that smells like a story.

What else have we got?

Book Banning: The ALA asks us to believe “2,571 unique titles were targeted for censorship” in mostly “school libraries, classroom libraries, or school curricula” in 2022. That’s a 38 percent increase over 2021. Though you may suspect the ALA of cooking the books to raise this number, a glance at the top 13 most challenged books shows “claimed to be sexually explicit” on every title. Why are any of these recommended in schools?

Faithfulness: A new book tells the stories of Lutherans under Stalin.

But the Communist Party sought also to erase Christian ethics. “Love your neighbor” violated the Marxist principle of “class struggle.” Thus, pastors could be charged with “preaching class peace.” Lutherans had an extensive network to help the poor and the disabled, but this was held to compete with the state and to keep the deprived “in thrall to their exploiters.” Consequently, the church was defined as an enemy of the state. One of the Lutheran bishops summed up the goal: “Everything that is connected to the Christian faith or reminds one of it must disappear from the life of the people and its individual citizens.”

Ukraine: “[Victoria] Amelina is one of Ukraine’s most celebrated young literary figures and a common presence at literary festivals both in Ukraine and abroad.” Now, she researches war crimes, starting with what happened to children’s literature writer Volodymyr Vakulenko.

Reader Reviews: A writer gets angry that ARC readers aren’t leaving reviews.

Grassroots Hatred: Will anti-Semitism ever die?

Bookselling, Music, Religion

The Bible Is Not an Instruction Manual, Browsing, and Holding Attention

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Isn’t it curious how the Bible is not an instruction manual? Some preachers and parents talk about it as if it is one, but if we know anything about actual instruction manuals, we know the Bible is nothing like them.

It’s mostly narrative history, even the prophecies fall into this. The gospels are not direct proclamations of good news, like what the angels declare to the shepherds from the skies, and the epistles, which are the most direct instruction, are more like single lectures from a larger course.

The Lord gave us a Bible with songs, proverbs, stories, and rules that require interpretation for a modern audience. Deuteronomy is the most like an instruction manual, and it isn’t something today’s believers can treat like a guidebook. Even the fourth commandment trips us up.

What we have in Scripture is the most marvelous book ever written. It shows us who we are apart from our vain imagination, and it shows us something of the majesty of the Almighty. It offers us the words of the Holy Spirit for feeding our hearts and minds from the hand of the author of our lives. It’s closer to a devotional than a manual.

This post may show how much Jared C. Wilson has influenced me, because when I looked up Midwestern Seminary’s For the Church site for something on this idea, I found two of Jared’s posts. From his book on the church, “The Bible is Not an Instructional Manual,” and again last year on the statement that the Bible is Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth.

Here are some other posts.

Bookselling: Jeremy Anderberg suggests intentional browsing. “There are a lot of great books published every year — every month! — but publishers are increasingly putting all their marketing power into a smaller group of titles, in hopes of ensuring that coveted bestseller or celebrity book club status.”

Chekhov: What would it mean to live in the light of Christ’s resurrection?

Cowboys: Craig Johnson, author of the Longmire series, talks about them in this interview.

“One of the big misperceptions about cowboys is that they were only dumb, itinerant, agricultural workers, when, in fact, most people of that period were self-educated. Heck, one of the most referred to books as being read by the cowboys in Louis L’Amour’s novels is Plutarch’s Lives.”

“I was having lunch with the Wyoming Office of Tourism, and they were telling me how much they loved the books, and I asked them why? They said that even though Absaroka County is fictitious I use all the businesses, landmarks, roads, and trails so that it’s easy to tell the tourists where they are. I’ve always found it’s easier to remember the truth, even when writing a novel.” (via Books, Inq)

What Holds Us? “Such attentiveness – call it curiosity or engagement with our surrounding — is a form of reverence and gratitude, and likewise an admission of willful ignorance: we learn little when we ignore our world.”

I don’t intend to start adding music to my Saturday posts, but I listen regularly to traditional music like what Julie Fowlis sings here and I want to share it. This whole album is marvelous.

A set of traditional songs starting with “Fodder for the small stirks”
Authors, Fiction, Religion

Snow and hope

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Photo by hideobara. Unsplash license.

Disclaimer: You did not mistake the date on your calendar. This is a rare Saturday post by Lars Walker. Due to a certain weirdness in my life right now, I’m posting book reviews every day (two yesterday). What you’re reading now is a personal post, so I’m squeezing it in on the weekend.

March did not go out like a lamb in Minnesota last night. It went out like Mike Tyson, or Chronos the Titan, or a Frost Giant, or any kind of large, brutal mythological creature you might want to imagine. Yesterday the spring melt was well underway. Today it’s underway too, but with a difference. Nearly ten inches of snow fell overnight, even though the temperatures only slipped below freezing for a few hours. We woke to piles – sometimes towers – of thick, heavy white precipitate, already congealing into a dense, waterlogged mass. My neighbor with the snow blower cleared the driveway. But I had to clear the steps, front and back. And that meant hacking through knee-high piles of white stuff that looked like Styrofoam but weighed like sandbags.

But I cleared it out, and didn’t have a heart attack. I went to a restaurant for lunch (went to the farther Applebee’s rather than the closer Applebee’s, because they just closed the closer Applebee’s forever. More fruits of scientific, infallible Progressive governance). It was a strange environment in the parking lot. The sky is clear and the sun shines with full force, producing that wonderful effect (it’s called “apricity”) in which one feels warmer than the actual temperature, due to the intensity of the light. Yet all around us were mountains of snow. Kind of an alien, fantasy world for a day, where the physical laws are different.

Anyway, that’s not what I came to post about. Just thought I’d mention it.

Thursday night I attended a lecture in St. Paul. I don’t generally go out at night anymore; I have gained that wisdom of age that tells me very little good is likely to happen to me after dark in the urban area. But a friend invited me and urged me to come, so I acquiesced. In the end I was glad I did.

The lecture was held at the Cities Church on Summit Avenue, which is the Beacon Hill of St. Paul. It’s where James J. Hill and F. Scott Fitzgerald lived. Where the governor has his mansion. (The roads, by the way, are full of potholes. Even plutocrats can’t get basic services in that city.) The lecture was part of a series sponsored by Bethlehem College and Seminary, a small Baptist school.

The lecturer was one of their professors, Professor Matt Crutchmer, who looked impossibly young to me. He spoke on “Hope Beyond the Walls of the World” in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.

The core of his theme – as I understood it – was the nature of Christian hope, as portrayed by Tolkien. Hope for the Christian, he said, is not attached to any particular thing in this world (I wish I could recall the word he used for this idea, but it’s slipped my mind). Our hope isn’t for a good election result, or a military victory, or for rain or a successful business deal or a stroke of luck. Our hope is a more basic one – like the star Earendil that Sam spied through the clouds on the way to Mordor. Our hope is just there. It’s part of God’s creation and immovable. We may be defeated; we may suffer; we will surely die. That affects our hope not at all. “It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo.” We believe that God shapes all ends, regardless of what we do or what happens to us now. In that lies our peace.

I needed that message just now, for reasons I won’t detail. I was just glad I heard it.

Authors, Blogs, Socials, Non-fiction, Religion

The conservative resistance to Hitler

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My friend Gene Edward Veith has a review up at the Acton Institute. He reports on the book, White Knights in the Black Orchestra, by Tom Dunkel. Although the book is not primarily an examination of conservatives in wartime Germany, it does make it plain that the conservative conspiracy to kill Hitler was much bigger than Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his circle, and that German conservatives constituted a major, and serious, challenge to the Third Reich. He writes.

My impression had always been that Bonhoeffer was caught up in a quixotic and poorly planned attempt by a small group of German aristocrats and military officers at the very end of the war, and that his role was minimal, basically that of a courier. But Dunkel shows that the Black Orchestra conspiracy began in the earliest days of Hitler’s regime, that it penetrated to the highest levels of the German war machine, and that it carried out many anti-Nazi missions, some of which had an impact on the outcome of the war…..

Meanwhile, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was battling the so-called German Christians, who wished to Nazify the Protestant state church by turning Christianity into a cultural religion (as liberal theologians were already doing) and expunging its “Jewish elements” to the point of removing the Old Testament from the Bible altogether. (This, too, was made feasible by piggybacking on the work of generations of liberal Bible scholars who had succeeded in undermining biblical authority within the state church.)….

That National Socialism is thought of today as an extreme kind of conservatism is one of the biggest victories of Marxist propaganda. This book shows that Hitler and his followers were radical revolutionaries, who sought to liquidate—not conserve—the traditional Western values of faith, morality, and freedom.

Dunkel does not play up the conservative and Christian angle as such, beyond saying that the conspirators “tended to be politically conservative to the bone” and describing the key figures as devout Christians.

Read the whole thing here.
Religion

The Jesus Revolution, a veteran’s memoir

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The Jesus Generation, by Billy Graham

A friend invited me to go with a group to see the Jesus Revolution movie. I told him sorry, I was busy translating, and then I had to go out of town.

To be honest, I was glad to avoid it. I’m not against the movie, I wish it well and am delighted that an actor of Kelsey Grammar’s stature is involved. But for me, the whole Jesus Movement is a sensitive subject.

Not long ago, one of my old friends posted a picture of our musical group from back around 1975. One of the iterations of the group, that is to say, as our personnel changed a little through the years, anchored by a fairly stable core of four or five guys.

I looked at our young faces in black and white. Long hair. Bell-bottomed jeans. Some (like me) trying to look cool, others being pretty cool in actuality. It was, all things considered, probably the happiest time of my life. These guys were my spiritual brothers, closer to me than anyone has ever been – or is likely to be again – in my life.

Which makes it all the more painful to remember.

Because 90% of that group – I won’t detail how I break that down – and indeed of all the Christian friends I made back in those days – walked away from the faith we shared. Walked away from believing in the inerrancy of Scripture. Walked away from “One Way.” Followed their church body (or bodies) in sliding toward total cultural assimilation.

It makes it more poignant that – at least as I remember it – the more impressive I found any person as a believer, the more likely they were to apostatize. The ones who seemed really spiritual, the ones who seemed to know their Bibles best, the boldest witnesses, the ones with the most impressive testimonies – the day came almost inevitably when they told me (or more likely I heard second-hand) that they “weren’t into that stuff anymore.”

Which colors my perception of the whole Jesus Movement phenomenon. I haven’t observed that it really left much of a positive impact on our society. America became less Christian in the wake of the movement. My perception (or judgment, perhaps a Pharisaical one) is that people who became Jesus Freaks tended to grow more emotion-based, more subjective in their religion. They slid on into liberalism, and transcendental meditation, and New Age, and whatever else pleased them emotionally. They were converted to “my Jesus,” not the Jesus of Scripture.

I hope other people’s experience was better. I hope the Jesus Revolution movie brings many people to faith. I hope the Asbury Revival proves the spark for a new and better Great Awakening.

How lovely it would be to be wrong in the end.

Authors, Religion

Pray for Philip Yancey

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Image from Christianity Today, courtesy of Philip Yancey

A Facebook friend alerted me to this article in Christianity Today by Philip Yancey, in which he announces his diagnosis of Parkinson’s Disease.

I have to admit I don’t think I’ve read any of Yancey’s books — which makes me nearly unique, I think, in my generation of Christians. But I know nothing but good of him, and I know he’s been a tremendous blessing to many over the years. He’s one of the good guys, not afraid to face the hard questions. And he does not disappoint us in his article:

In my writing career, I have interviewed US presidents, rock stars, professional athletes, actors, and other celebrities. I have also profiled leprosy patients in India, pastors imprisoned for their faith in China, women rescued from sex trafficking, parents of children with rare genetic disorders, and many who suffer from diseases far more debilitating than Parkinson’s.

Reflecting on the two groups, here’s what stands out: With some exceptions, those who live with pain and failure tend to be better stewards of their life circumstances than those who live with success and pleasure. Pain redeemed impresses me much more than pain removed.