“When it comes to the intellectual life in our day, the fear of error—believing things as true when they are in fact false—far outweighs a desire for truth.”
Watch this lecture from First Things editor R.R. Reno on how critical thinking has become more like criticism as an end to itself.
A former employee of Pastor David Jeremiah’s ministry, Turning Point, has come forward with a report that his employer directed him to buy copies of Jeremiah’s book with his personal American Express card in order to boost market sale numbers. He asked for prepayment before making the purchases.
World has the story. “Tyndale House Publishers lists David Jeremiah as one of its authors. Todd Starowitz, the director of public relations at Tyndale, refused to answer specific questions, but he did issue this statement: ‘Tyndale House Publishers does not contract with anyone or any agency who attempts to manipulate best seller lists.'”
The Chrysostom Society has taken to killing each other.
“That may sound like unseemly behavior for a group of celebrated Christian writers,” Jeffrey Overstreet explains, “but you can read all about the murderous conspiracies of The Chrysostom Society in their first collaborative literary effort: Carnage at Christhaven. It’s a serial murder mystery — satirical, smart, and subversive — each grisly chapter contributed by a different society member.”
This looks like a marvelous group.
In an interview on her second short-story collection, Megan Mayhew Bergman talks about her upbringing:
I come from the Southern tradition. I was in the South for thirty years before moving to Vermont and, even though I’m incredibly secular, I grew up in a church and I think most Southerners have sermons imprinted in their brains forevermore, and that’s a very short speech-driven, sound-driven, punchy narrative and with a pretty healthy whiff of drama in it. And on top of that, you know, the short story format is a Southern tradition that’s so strong. You grow up on Flannery O’Connor.
She also observes the difficulty she had being an atheist in North Carolina. “It was something I was ashamed of and had this closeted feeling and endured wave after wave of patronizing questions,” she says.
Harper Lee has taken over the Internet for a few hours with a press release about a new book. From the AP story:
“In the mid-1950s, I completed a novel called ‘Go Set a Watchman,'” the 88-year-old Lee said in a statement issued by Harper. “It features the character known as Scout as an adult woman, and I thought it a pretty decent effort. My editor, who was taken by the flashbacks to Scout’s childhood, persuaded me to write a novel (what became ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’) from the point of view of the young Scout.”
Gregory Peck could not be reached for comment.
Robert P. George
Raif Badawi has been accused of insulting Islam. His sentence is 10 years in jail and 1,000 lashes of which he has received fifty.
In a letter to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the group wrote, “If your government will not remit the punishment of Raif Badawi, we respectfully ask that you permit each of us to take 100 of the lashes that would be given to him. We would rather share in his victimization than stand by and watch him being cruelly tortured.”
George told PRI that it was “hypocritical” for Saudi leaders “to march in solidarity with the victims of terrorism and persecution for speaking their minds in Europe and then to practice that same abuse on people for speaking their minds … in their own country.”
While it’s unthinkable the Saudis would accept this offer, George said they didn’t make it half-heartedly.
In a spectacular essay titled “The Paradox of Intellectual Promiscuity,” found in his altogether indispensable final essay collection I Have Landed: The End of a Beginning in Natural History
, Gould uses Nabokov’s case to make a beautiful and urgently necessary broader case against our culture’s chronic tendency to pit art and science against one another — “We have been befogged by a set of stereotypes about conflict and difference between these two great domains of human understanding,” he laments — and to assume that if a person has talent and passion for both areas, he or she can achieve greatness in only one and is necessarily a mere hobbyist in the other.
(via Books, Inq.)
As [Dr. J. Kameron] Carter explains it, white churches that sprang up throughout American history did so in the pattern of the great European cathedrals and denominations from which they were transplanted. Black church, while it is related to those European frameworks, “is in excess of them,” says Carter, meaning they “were already doing work beyond what those traditional denominations were doing.”
“In the face of a modern condition that told Blacks they were only worthy of their labor power, black churches came along and affirmed that there was a mode of life far beyond the woundings that came along with black existence in America.”
This is the tradition that produced King. And it’s the same tradition that produced other civil rights leaders, like Rosa Parks and Ella Baker.
Brandon Ambrosino has written a lengthy interview with three scholars on Dr. King and the black experience in America.
The subject of the book The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven has released a letter denying his claims in the book (link defunct), something his mother has been doing for a few years.
“I did not die,” Alex says. “I did not go to Heaven. I said I went to heaven because I thought it would get me attention.”
Publisher Tyndale has responded by pulling the book and related materials.
If you read the accounts from Alex’s mother, Beth, you may ask how a publisher of Christian books for the body of Christ could railroad her and her son (apparently with the father’s permission) to publish a book with such terrible theology. In a post from September 2013 which offers a timeline of details following the accident, Beth tells us some of her interaction with people wanting to turn her family’s story into books and a movie.
I neither verbally nor in writing gave approval for any quotes. In fact I instead verbally gave my desire to not have any quotes by me put in any book. There was a time that I was sitting in PICU and told over the phone that some words from a webpage that no longer exists (prayforalex.com) that were written by me were going to be placed in the book. I was sitting in PICU with Alex! I told the person that they could not do that, to which they said they could and that that site was public. GRRR….the best I could do was to tell the person that they had better get every word correct. I have documentation of what is written in the book and that post from the webpage. The two do not match up 🙁 It saddened me more to learn that that interaction that was twisted is part of a Bible study…what? I certainly have witnessed some shocking things!
Money, she says, was the driving factor for these people, and they promised money to her for Alex, but she has not seen any of it.
Neil Gaiman explains one of the easy ways to become a writer. You just wake up one day, after having tasted the fruit of a certain tree. You’ll see what I mean.