On October 31, 1517, Dr. Martin Luther posted ninety-five theses on the door of the Wittenberg church, intending to invite debate on the doctrine of indulgences and its implication. Next year is the 500th anniversary of that decision.
LUTHER Official Teaser Trailer from Stephen McCaskell on Vimeo.
Now, the makers of the film Through the Eyes of Spurgeon are raising money to fund their production of a documentary on Luther.
“I think the people who have influenced me most as a pastor,” Eugene Peterson said, “haven’t been the theologians – they’ve been the artists.” Jeffrey Overstreet interviewed Peterson for Seattle Pacific University back in 2011.
From artists I learned never to look at just the surface of a person, but to look for the interior life, to consider what I know of their past. An exterior is never just an exterior. In our culture, we’re trained to focus on the exterior, for instance, through advertising and publicity. Being present to a person long enough to start sensing that they’re never just themselves, they’re their parents, their grandparents, their kids, their neighbors – all of that becomes part of their story. Artists help me do that, because they are attuned to the interior life.
I think it’s interesting that Karl Barth, the theologian who has influenced me most, was mostly influenced by Mozart. Mozart was a theme in his life. I think he learned a lot about writing theology by listening to Mozart.
A remarkable book was released yesterday: The Faith of Christopher Hitchens: The Restless Soul of the World’s Most Notorious Atheist. Samuel James talks us through it.
September 11 may not have been have been Hitchens’s Damascus Road moment, but it did much to disarm his innate hostility to those outside his ideological family tree. By pivoting to the right on terror, Hitchens was forced to doubt the categorical identity politics that so often dominate American discourse. This doubt—this shaken faith in the inherited doctrines of the Left—created the space into which Christian friendship, and Taunton himself, entered.
http://mereorthodoxy.com/reviewing-the-faith-of-christopher-hitchens/
Douglas Wilson praises the book as well. “And as far as the eyewitness testimony goes, I can say that his account rings completely true. The man he traveled with and debated is the same man that I traveled with and debated.”
A mock Western written by an eighteen-year-old James Thurber was found in an archive and has been unleashed on the world in the Strand magazine.
“This was the first time Thurber tried his hand at penning a satirical story in the wild west, which features a gun-slinging bartender, a couple of wild bullies, and a very odd sheriff,” said Andrew Gulli of the Strand.
That sheriff in “How Law and Order Came to Aramie” is like a pre-incarnation of Thurber’s Walter Mitty.
Gulli said the story “uses every single western cliche and, in Thurber style, turns them all into something very funny.”
Tom King joined the CIA in response to the 9/11 attack. After several years as an undercover operations officer, he returned home, began to work on writing, produced this superhero novel, and now has landed a job with DC Comics to write Batman.
“Batman gets close to the insanity of Gotham, to the craziness, to what drives that city mad, and not be driven mad himself—or at least most of the time he isn’t,” says King. “That’s most like the mission of the CIA. We get into the heads of our enemies without becoming our enemy. I’ll use that experience to tackle this character.”
A very influential author in my life, Jerry Bridges, has passed away last night after a cardiac arrest on Saturday. He was 86.
Ligonier Ministries interviewed him in 2011 and asked, “You have written numerous books on the topics of grace and holiness. Why did you write on these topics, and how do you hope God will use these books in the lives of His people?”
JB: From my earliest contact with The Navigators, I sensed the need to apply the Scriptures specifically and intentionally to my life. But I struggled with the question, “What is my part and what is God’s part?” Finally, the Lord enabled me to see from the Scriptures the principle I call “dependent responsibility.” We are responsible to respond to the moral commands of Scripture, but we are absolutely dependent on the Holy Spirit to enable us.
I started to teach this principle of “dependent responsibility.” Then I was challenged by a friend to try writing. My first book, The Pursuit of Holiness, became a best-seller. But I soon realized that a pursuit of holiness that is not founded on grace and the gospel can lead to a performance mentality and even to discouragement. That’s when I began to emphasize grace and the gospel as foundational to the pursuit of holiness.
It is my desire that as a result of reading my books, people will seek to pursue holiness out of gratitude for what God has done for us in Christ. There is no doubt that it is our duty to pursue holiness. But I want believers to desire to do out of gratitude what is our duty to do. I want to see the “ought to” mentality replaced with a “want to” attitude.
Eco was funny and smart and he made all of us feel funnier and smarter just by reading him. That’s a trait, a sharing of the wealth, we authors should aspire to. An abundance of ideas, after all, means there’s enough of them for everyone.
Glen David Gold writes about interviewing Umberto Eco, a James Bond expert among other things.
Umberto Eco, writing in 2005, about religion’s role in our age.
Human beings are religious animals. It is psychologically very hard to go through life without the justification, and the hope, provided by religion. You can see this in the positivist scientists of the 19th century.
They insisted that they were describing the universe in rigorously materialistic terms – yet at night they attended seances and tried to summon up the spirits of the dead. Even today, I frequently meet scientists who, outside their own narrow discipline, are superstitious – to such an extent that it sometimes seems to me that to be a rigorous unbeliever today, you have to be a philosopher. Or perhaps a priest. . . .
G K Chesterton is often credited with observing: “When a man ceases to believe in God, he doesn’t believe in nothing. He believes in anything.” Whoever said it – he was right. We are supposed to live in a sceptical age. In fact, we live in an age of outrageous credulity.
Author Umberto Eco has died. A fascinating author of complicated work, Eco said he was interested in the Middle Ages, because it “is exactly the opposite of the way people imagine it. To me, they were not the Dark Ages. They were a luminous time, the fertile soil out of which would spring the Renaissance.”
As a teenager. Eco worked on comics books.
“I was a perfectionist and wanted to make them look as though they had been printed, so I wrote them in capital letters and made up title pages, summaries, illustrations,” he told The Paris Review in 1988. “It was so tiring that I never finished any of them. I was at that time a great writer of unaccomplished masterpieces.”
As an adult, he gave himself over to novel writing. The Guardian describes his first hit like this.
Eco’s first, landmark novel, The Name of the Rose, was published in 1980. An artful reworking of Conan Doyle, with Sherlock Holmes transplanted to 14th-century Italy, the book’s baggage of arcane erudition was designed to flatter the average reader’s intelligence. In reality, Eco’s medieval whodunnit was upmarket Arthur Hailey with ingenious modernist fripperies. Subsequently translated into 30 languages, it sold more than 10m copies worldwide, and was made into a film starring Sean Connery.
Take a look at all of Eco’s books
It may come as a surprise to many, but most Norwegians were never particularly proud of their Norse ancestry. The little knowledge they had of the Viking Age and our common ethnic and cultural heritage was usually horribly outdated. Until recently, in popular culture the Vikings were almost always portrayed as dumb, brutal rapists and villains. Also, Norse mythology was a subject of parody and not to be taken as anything more than naive stories told by our stupid ancestors. Those of us who thought differently, those of us who had already connected with our Norse ancestry, were ridiculed.
Aside from its praise for the awful History Channel “Vikings” TV series, I was pleased but not especially surprised by this article “How the Americans Taught Us Norwegians to Love Our Viking Heritage.”
One thing I learned in my translation work for Prof. Torgrim Titlestad (they tell me our book’s coming out this spring at last. We’ll see. Watch for it in any case; it’ll be called The Viking Heritage), is that for several decades now the Norwegian school system has taught almost nothing about the Viking Age. The main reason was a higher critical view of the Icelandic sagas, our main source of information about Norwegian politics in that time. The same kind of destructive skepticism that scholars have applied to the Bible, they also applied to the sagas. Since the sagas were written a century or more after the events described (much longer than is the case for the gospels), they argued that no information of value could be derived from them.
Scholarly views are changing, though. Sociological studies have shown that substantial useful information can be preserved by oral (non-literate or semi-literate) cultures for much longer than is the case in cultures which rely on books for their records.
Bjørn Andreas Bull-Hansen, the writer, is a novelist, screenwriter and blogger living in Norway. A brief perusal of his site indicates that he’s not crazy, which is generally a good thing.