Philip Christman has ranked and encapsulated (sort of) 22 works by Muriel Spark. He says, The Hothouse by the East River comes off like overripe fruit. For Robinson and The Bachelors, he says “Spark was pretty much kicking ass right out of the gate; these are ‘the worst’ of her early novels, and yet they would have represented a quite respectable peak for anyone else.”
The Girls of Slender Means
“God’s mercy is so great that you may sooner drain the sea of its water, or deprive the sun of its light, or make space too narrow, than diminish the great mercy of God.”
“A Jesus who never wept could never wipe away my tears.”
“If you are to go to Christ, do not put on your good doings and feelings, or you will get nothing; go in your sins, they are your livery. Your ruin is your argument for mercy; your poverty is your plea for heavenly alms; and your need is the motive for heavenly goodness. Go as you are, and let your miseries plead for you.”
Relevant has 20 Spurgeon quotes for today. I think I’ll tweet Spurgeon quotes all day. (via Jared C. Wilson)
Mike Duran interviews Eric Ortlund about his zombie novel, Dead Petals. Ortlund says, “At some level, I am an endlessly hungry dead thing; but I’m also watching to see how I might survive that evil. And it got me thinking about what the apostle Paul says about humanity being dead in sin in Ephesians. Then I wondered, if a zombie could talk while still undead, what would that sound like? Then the writing started happening. . . .
“The influences are many. First, the Old Testament is the first apocalypse—i.e., it first got that particular way of looking at reality going. Second, the OT has a fund of cosmic symbols (the abyss, the storm, the holy mountain, the tree) which cannot be translated or decoded without essential loss. . . . Third, the OT has this really interesting way of protesting the surrounding idolatrous culture and also “highjacking” it—taking over symbols and themes and images and using them to talk about the real God.”
The Milwaukee Alchemist Theatre received a cease-and-desist letter from playwright David Mamet after one performance of Mamet’s Oleanna, a play about a pompous male professor accused of sexual harassment by a female student. The Alchemist’s production cast a man in the role of the female student. Theatre owners claimed they “did not change the character of Carol but allowed the reality of gender and relationship fluidity to add to the impact of the story.”
Mamet disagreed. I don’t think he plays the “gender fluidity” game. (via Prufrock)
Columnist Chris Hedges, who wrote such pieces as “We All Must Become Zapatistas” “Thomas Paine, Our Contemporary,” has been accused of plagiarism by Harper’s and others. The New Republic spells it out:
The plagiarism at Harper’s was not an isolated incident. Hedges has a history of lifting material from other writers that goes back at least to his first book, War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, published in 2002. He has echoed language from Nation author Naomi Klein. He has lifted lines from radical social critic Neil Postman. He has even purloined lines from Ernest Hemingway.
Editors at Harper’s were surprised. “A leading moralist of the left, however, had now been caught plagiarizing at one of the oldest magazines of the left,” Christopher Ketcham explains. “These examples suggest not inadvertent plagiarism,” Kelly McBride of the Poynter Institute tells him, “but carefully thought out plagiarism meant to skirt the most liberal definition of plagiarism.”
Professor D.G. Myers comments on Twitter, “The case of Chris Hedges teaches a basic truth about literature: every fraud will be unmasked eventually.”
Who said, “Being a Christian is less about cautiously avoiding sin than about courageously and actively doing God’s will”? It wasn’t Bonhoeffer, but it was written in Eric Metaxas’ book on Bonhoeffer, so someone fudged the rules on quotations and attributed the words to German pastor instead of his biographer. Today, Metaxas is getting out the word that his popular subject did not say this exact. He may have agreed with it, but he didn’t say it.
Now Wikiquotes, which I’ve found to be a reliable, though not exhaustive, resource, notes this quotation correction.
I noted earlier that Tullian Tchividjian had separated from The Gospel Coalition (TGC) over what I understood to be somewhat doctrinal, somewhat pastoral issues. That didn’t bother me much, despite my appreciation for Pastor Tullian and the many people at The Gospel Coalition. I usually like to think of everyone I like being on the same team, so a deliberate separation like this is a little disturbing. But what irritated me far more was the dialogue and comments about it I heard this week.
Chris Fabry ran a prerecorded show on Monday (Memorial Day) with Tullian, essentially throwing Tim Keller, Don Carson, and others (none of them by name) under the bus of the disagreement. They didn’t discuss the issues directly. They talked around it and suggested some of the people at TGC were becoming a denomination unto themselves. These unnamed critics were quick to complain about other people’s theological missteps and slow to see any missteps of their own.
Add to that someone on Patheos.com saying when your purpose is to contend for the gospel, then you have to make sure you have enemies to contend with. TGC is a fight club now, picking out the splinters in everyone else’s eyes.
I know good people disagree on important things, but the people named above are very godly men. How can these common complaints be true of these men, even Chris Fabry, our humble radio host and fiction author? I have a very hard time believing they would deliberately misrepresent the facts or “flat out lie,” as one accusation put it.
So I am relieved to read Tullian’s apology on his blog today:
I’m sorry for saying things in my own defense. One of the things that the gospel frees you to do is to never have to bear the burden of defending yourself. Defending the gospel is one thing. But when a defense of the gospel becomes a defense of yourself, you’ve slipped back under “a yoke of slavery.” I slipped last week. I’m an emotional guy. And in my highly charged emotional state, I said some things in haste, both publicly and privately, that I regret. I never want anything I say to be a distraction from the mind-blowing good news of the gospel and last week I did. I got in the way. When you feel the need to respond to criticism, it reveals how much you’ve built your identity on being right. I’m an idolater and that came out last week. Because Jesus won for you, you’re free to lose…and last week I fought to win. I’m sorry you had to see that. Lord have mercy…
There’s more to it, but this is a critical part. Thank you, sir. The Lord is faithful and merciful. May he continue to bless your ministry for the expansion of his kingdom throughout the world.
Rachel Carson’s book, Silent Spring, led to the banning of DDT, a pesticide against malaria-carrying mosquitoes. This week, Google celebrated her 107th birthday with this doodle.
Bethany Mandel writes: “Using faulty science, Carson’s book argued that DDT could be deadly for birds and, thus, should be banned. Incredibly and tragically, her recommendations were taken at face value and soon the cheap and effective chemical was discontinued, not only in the United States but also abroad. Environmentalists were able to pressure USAID, foreign governments, and companies into using less effective means for their anti-malaria efforts. And so the world saw a rise in malaria deaths.
Gallingly, environmentalists even claimed that the effectiveness of DDT was leading to a world population explosion. Translation: preventable disease wasn’t killing enough poor children in developing countries.”
She goes on to tell of a horrible experience she had with a dying child in Cambodia, where one million people are infected with malaria each year.
On the 450th anniversary of his death, Joe Carter gives us 9 things we should know about the great reformer, John Calvin.
Thus spake Mark Bertrand:
“Things that don’t matter don’t keep getting done. Things that do become second nature. The key to any discipline, I suppose, is figuring how to make it matter.”
So if we want to be writers, we must decide writing is what we actually want to do. And whatever work that must go around the writing too must matter–the research, the market opportunities, and the spiritual nurturing that keeps us closer the Lover of our souls.
“Writers already lead uncomfortably quantified lives, measuring our worth in the number of words written today, in the number of books in print and how well they’ve sold. All of these metrics speak to one kind of quality –– my quality of life –– without addressing another, the quality of my work. The best written books aren’t always the bestselling…”
Far more than any philosophical writing, Bertrand says reading novels exposes and explores him in unexpected ways. “In novels I face up to things I never seem to in other kinds of writing.”