The American Spectator was kind enough to publish my essay, “The Northman and the Truth,” on Sunday.
I’ve been waiting all my life for a good Viking movie. One with a plot that’s not laughable, with historically authentic costumes and sets. The Northman is that movie at last. I could nitpick about this and that, but by and large they did a good job of delivering a reasonably authentic film that commands respect as a work of art.
Still, it’s not the movie I wanted.
Read it all here.
A college professor told me he gets the most response from his students by exposing them to the first question of the Heidelberg Catechism. It challenges contemporary assumptions and calls out our faith.
“What is your only comfort in life and death?
“That I am not my own, but belong with body and soul, both in life and in death, to my faithful Saviour Jesus Christ. He has fully paid for all my sins with his precious blood, and has set me free from all the power of the devil. He also preserves me in such a way that without the will of my heavenly Father not a hair can fall from my head; indeed, all things must work together for my salvation. Therefore, by his Holy Spirit he also assures me of eternal life and makes me heartily willing and ready from now on to live for him.”
Here’s some other reading from this weekend.
Reaction: Kevin Holtsberry reviews the novella Trust by Italian author Domenico Starnone. “I enjoyed the story as a mediation on the way we create stories and perceptions of ourselves and our lives, about who we are and why we do what we do, etc.”
Paul Auster: Locked in a room, unsure of many people and things, the writer in this Auster novel wrestles with the difficulties of knowing and telling the truth. (via Books, Inq.)
Jewish Book Council has released its list of winners of the 2021 National Jewish Book Awards. The winner for fiction is Joshua Cohen’s The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family. (via Literary Saloon)
Writing: What could happen if you committed to writing at least a little every day?
One Nation Under the Pope: Some politically and theologically conservative leaders today dislike the secular government we have in America and would like to unite the country under one holy, Roman high priest.
Glynn Young: A grassroots level summary of a major problem with journalists and how the Internet changed the news.
Photo: Main Street, Columbus Junction, Iowa. 2003. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
Communists need their people to toe the party line without question, just like INGSOC does in Orwell’s 1984.
In Cuba, the island nation that could be a paradise, 66 protestors arrested for their actions last summer were tried in December and are still awaiting their sentences. A few who were also arrested for unauthorized use of speech have been sentenced to 15-30 years in prison.
“It has never been easy for journalists to work in Cuba,” Juliane Matthey, press officer for Latin America at Reporters Without Borders, said. On the organization’s 2021 list ranking countries on journalistic freedom, Cuba is the 9th worst, not taking last summer into account.
The Communist Chinese continue to bully journalists in Hong Kong. Stand News was the largest free news agency in the country until Dec 29, when police raided their offices. “The online media organization, which had operated for seven years, took down its website and social media accounts and dismissed all staff.”
Our friend Dave Lull recently sent me a link to a National Review article reviewing the late D. Keith Mano’s novel, Topless, which was released 30 years ago and is (like most of his work) out of print.
I hope it won’t be offensive to our readers to link to this review by Michael Washburn: Topless, a Noir Tragicomedy that Anticipated the Scandals of the Present.
Topless is the first-person account, in the form of diary entries, of a Nebraska-based Episcopal priest, Mike Wilson, who comes to New York after the death of a young woman named Rita and the disappearance of a man involved with her, who happened to run the Smoking Car, a strip joint in Queens. The man is Tony Wilson, Mike’s brother. How pitifully unprepared poor Mike is for the world — of exhibitionism, prostitution, alcohol, and drugs — in which his brother thrived….
If the concept sounds salacious, it is, but the book looks at all the sleaze with a Christian (if often distracted) eye. Tony Wilson knows from the beginning that he’s playing with fire, getting involved in his brother’s world. But he is full of rationalizations. In the end, what he discovers is as much about himself and his limitations as about the solution to the mystery. And there’s a biblical twist at the conclusion that I’ve never been able to get out of my mind.
As reading matter for Christians, I can’t wholeheartedly recommend the book (if you can find a copy). Author Mano, to the extent I understand him, struggled most of his life to find a Christian response to the sexual revolution, which seemed so overwhelming and permanent back in the ‘70s and ‘80s. (Little remains of it now, I’d say, thanks to Feminism and Wokeness, except for its contempt for marriage and its reverence for abortion.) I don’t think Mano ever really succeeded in his effort, even to his own satisfaction. The book does anticipate our own times in a way, as Washburn says, but in other ways it’s hopelessly stuck in a cultural moment now dead and buried.
Veteran reporter Mindy Belz is leaving World News Group after thirty years. She brought news from Syria and the Middle East over the last decade, the kind of reporting that lead to her 2016 book, They Say We Are Infidels: On the Run from ISIS with Persecuted Christians in the Middle East.
“The fuel to carry on through these decades isn’t found in viewpoint journalism left or right,” she says. “It’s found in promises of hope beyond our circumstances.”
We need reporters like her to bring us the real story from difficult areas in the world, because we won’t get it from other major news sources. They continue to drop reporters into foreign circumstances, have them put together a story that looks whole on paper and that the editors prejudicially approve, and call it good. Journalistic integrity doesn’t sell.
All the best on the next season, Mindy.
File this under “News That Surprised Absolutely Nobody:”
Counting tree rings reveals that wooden objects previously found at an archaeological site on Newfoundland’s northern peninsula were made from trees felled in the year 1021. That’s the oldest precise date for Europeans in the Americas and the only one from before Christopher Columbus’ voyages in 1492, geoscientists Margot Kuitems and Michael Dee and colleagues report October 20 in Nature.
You can read the rest here at Sciencenews.org.
1021 is actually fairly late in the game, if you give the sagas any credence. But most of us believe the Greenlanders were here for quite a few years. The sagas describe three expeditions in detail, and it seems probable that the Greenlanders would have exploited American resources (especially lumber) for quite a long time, even after they gave up on the idea of a colony.
I hold to the widely-held theory that the L’Anse Aux Meadows site in Newfoundland is not the entire Norse American enterprise, but merely a station – possibly a pretty insignificant one. The only real activity we can identify there from the archaeology is boat repair and its ancillary crafts.
Our good friend Dave Lull sent me this article from The American Conservative: A Norwegian American Journey, by Sam Sweeney.
Growing up in rural Montana, I was a bit removed from the Norwegian enclave in western North Dakota that my mom’s family is from. We ate lefse at Thanksgiving, but other than that, compared to my cousins I was not particularly in touch with my Norwegian heritage. I never felt a particular connection to Norway as a country, but do mention my heritage to Norwegians I meet, as there are a surprisingly high number of them in the Middle East, where I’ve spent much of the last decade. Reading Giants in the Earth, however, was an enlightening experience, and it brought to life the journey that my ancestors took from Norway to the Dakotas.
After reading O. E. Rolvaag’s Giants in the Earth and Peder Victorious, the writer goes on to ponder Scandinavian cinema (I myself have seen The Last King and The King’s Choice, but none of the other films he describes). The article is interesting, though I was wondering by the end what its point was.
I personally am not a fan of much Scandinavian literature or film, as I expect I’ve made pretty clear. I read Giants In the Earth in college, and my major take-away was what a depressing book it was. I never read the sequel, Peder Victorious, but a friend described it to me, and the description didn’t appeal much (here’s a hint – the name “Victorious” [Norwegian Seier] is darkly ironic). The same friend described other books by Rolvaag, like The Boat of Longing, and that sounded even worse. I do not recommend reading Rolvaag if you struggle with suicidal ideation.
Scandinavians have a bent for looking at things coldly and in a brutal, unsentimental light. When the Scandinavians were Christian, I think, they found ways to mitigate that brutal honesty. Now that they’ve mostly “transcended” Christian faith, they seem to have settled on a glum fatalism, like those dogs in the famous Learned Helplessness experiments.
I think that probably explains most of their current social policies.
If any of our readers live in the Twin Cities area, you may be interested in a live event coming September 30 to Free Lutheran Bible College & Seminary in Plymouth, Minnesota. Key voices heard on The World and Everything in It podcast will be there, and we’ve boosted that excellent show a few times on this very blog. Seating is limited, so register ahead of time.
Today, The World and Everything in It has released the first of a two-part program on Free North Korea Radio, which has broadcast into the Hermit Kingdom for several years. Read some of the story in this piece, “The Campaign Against Kim.“
In today’s program, they tell of humanitarian supply trucks going into North Korea and government troops following up afterward to collect everything that was given out. Children came to understand that they shouldn’t eat the cookie given to them because one of Kim Jong Un’s agents would be along to take it away.
If [Larry] Elder were running as a Democrat, the press would be celebrating the possibility of California’s first black governor. Instead, we hear nothing about “shattering glass ceilings” or “diversifying” the ruling elite. The New York Times ran an entire front-page article on Elder’s candidacy without once mentioning that he was black. (The article did claim in passing that Elder was an affirmative-action admit to Brown University, an unthinkable charge regarding a black liberal.)
Larry Elder is a nationally syndicated talk show host and lawyer running to replace the current California governor, if voters approve the recall. Real Clear Politics has recall polling results stepping over the line toward approving a recall and Elder is clearly ahead of the many candidates vying for the governorship.
That has the heads of national media outlets spinning.
City Journal describes the issues and some of the media’s attempts to whitewash Elder as a white supremacist. Editor Heather Mac Donald notes how the press celebrates minority status with leftist candidates but have ignored it with Elder’s gubernatorial victory close at hand.
The co-founder of Snopes.com has been outed as plagiarist. David Mikkelson has been suspended from editing his own website, but I gather he has not been dismissed entirely, if that’s even possible since he owns half the company.
Buzzfeed News has the story today. A few years ago, a statement like that would have sounded like saying, “ClickHole reports this shocking bit of truth.” But Buzzfeed does real work now. Who would have thought?
The article quotes from a couple former Snopes staffers who say Mikkelson’s policy was to plagiarize first, rewrite into original wording later. “I remember explaining that we didn’t need to ‘rewrite’ because we’d always done this stuff quickly,” Kim LaCapria said, “He just didn’t seem to understand that some people didn’t plagiarize.”
Have you put much or any stock in Snopes recently? I haven’t looked at it for a long while, having become disenchanted with it after reading a couple articles that weren’t fact-checking at all. But most of my fact-checking for the last few years has been etymological.
In the spirit of transparency, I got distracted while writing this post by my need for a good turnip greens recipe. I thought you should know.
I’m going to do something different tonight, in reviewing David Handler’s short Stewart Hoag mystery, The Girl Who Did Say No. I’m going to give the book a less than enthusiastic recommendation, in spite of my fondness for the series as a whole.
The set-up is pretty standard for the series. Hoagy, one-time literary wunderkind and current ghost-writer to celebrities, gets a high-priced offer to do an editing job. Anna Childress, a legendary Hollywood sex symbol of the 1960s, died recently and left her personal diaries behind. Rumor has it the diaries contain the straight dope on all the film industry’s dirty laundry from the big studio days. Her agent has arranged to have the removal of the diaries from the bank safe deposit box broadcast on national TV. Millions are expected to watch, and the book is a guaranteed monster bestseller.
But when Hoagy arrives in LA, he’s immediately waylaid by the last of the old studio moguls. The studio head is willing to pay him twice his promised fee to just walk away from the project. The industry’s secrets need to remain secret, he says. That’s what people would really want, if they knew what was good for them. Hoagy refuses.
The story worked out in a fairly predictable way, it seemed to me, and was uncharacteristically downbeat for this usually light-hearted series. Plus, I detected at least one political barb. And it seemed to me the price was a little high for a book of this length.
But you might like it better.
