D. Lee Grooms shares a fun moment when my tweet promoting on old post adds to art. Spidey probably reads this blog. All the cool kids do.
If you’re asking who said, “With great power comes great responsibility?” ask no more.
Category Archives: Blogs, Socials
Viral Photos of Bookcases
Jeff Reimer writes about how it felt to have a tweet of photos of his father’s handmade bookcases go viral for half a week. His follower count is relatively through the roof.
I hovered over my computer screen counting the clicks from people otherwise unknown to me who pined to luxuriate in the very room I was sitting in. I observed in a follow-up tweet (currently at twenty-four likes) that Walker Percy could have made a lot of hay with this scenario. Even the person who luxuriates in the beautiful room with beautiful bookcases (i.e., me) will be aware of their luxuriating in it, and will take as much pleasure from the idea of luxuriating as they will from luxuriating itself. In order to reassure themselves of their own luxury, that same person (again, me) feels the need to further certify the space by photographing it and publishing it online so that it (or rather he, or rather I) becomes a real, actual thing in the world. Every like is a certification that I exist.
“Going Viral,” Comment Magazine, September 14, 2020
He quickly knew it was trivial, yet still compelling. How much of this draw of public reaction shapes our news, even our churches?
A librarian’s best friend
I’m in haste tonight. Got a translation assignment, and I think I may have promised to deliver faster than I should have. So time’s wingéd chariot is tailgating me like a Ferrari on a blue highway.
In lieu of anything original, I’ll share this nice article from Atlas Obscura about the curses medieval scribes placed in books, so that people wouldn’t steal or mangle them.
“These curses were the only things that protected the books,” says Marc Drogin, author of Anathema! Medieval Scribes and the History of Book Curses. “Luckily, it was in a time where people believed in them. If you ripped out a page, you were going to die in agony. You didn’t want to take the chance.”
No Amazon link. I checked and Drogin’s book is very rare and copies are expensive. At those prices, they should have their own curses.
Pastoral Yoda Tweeting: Wise You Think You Are, Do You?
If you’ve read any social media for long, you’ve run across the proverbial, possibly deep, possibly pithy statement from someone who wants to drop the truth on the world. When a Christian leader does this on Twitter, that’s called a pastor yoda tweet.
This isn’t the same as tweeting a quotation from a quotable writer, but it may be a statement made by one such quotable writer on his own account. He may even be quoted himself. Tim Keller quotes from his own books in an effort to say something strong that has a context that can been explored. Here are good examples of pastors and leaders who aren’t quoting themselves.
Ronnie Martin: “It has never not been our moment. #thechurchthatjesusbuilds”
Also Ronnie Martin: “A quiet, without a calm. These are times when ‘the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding’ is desperately needed for both personal comfort, and public compassion.”
Issac Adams: “A commitment to forbear with someone is a commitment, in no small part, to not pick nits.”
David Paul Tripp: “Today you face war, no, not with the people in your life, but a war of kingdoms, fought in your heart, that will not be fully settled until you’re on the other side.”
But of course there are those who would like to tweet proverbial wisdom and fail.
The Happy Rant guys have talked about good and bad tweeting a few times. Here’s one episode that talks about pastor yoda tweeting and also features a story about John Piper speaking to a crowd that completely misunderstood him. Here’s a recent one in which they worry about too much yoda tweeting.
Earlier this month, Taylor Burgess explained it well, “Maybe it’s just me, but I feel like you’ve got to be at least 40 before you drop one of those ‘young pastor, [insert wise proverb]’ tweets. Err’body out here trying to be Yoda when most of us are Attack-of-the-Clones Anakin.”
R.I.P. ‘Threedonia’
For the past 12 years (nearly), one of my constant resorts on the internet has been the Threedonia blog (no point linking to it; it would do you no good).
Threedonia began as a spin-off of the old Dirty Harry’s Place movie blog, run by John Nolte. Three guys originally ran Threedonia, though after a while the roll was reduced to one, or one-and-a-half. Like so many blogs, the years had reduced its readership, but it remained a pleasant, cantankerous Christian entertainment blog, frequented by a small group of regular commenters, of whom I was one.
That’s all over now. Last week malicious Japanese hackers broke in and destroyed it. The administrator tells me he doesn’t have the time or the money to rebuild it.
Farewell, “Floyd” and “Rufus” and all Threedonians. It was fun while it lasted.
May the hackers’ evil rebound onto their own heads.
Another Review: ‘Blood and Judgment’
Mary J. Moerbe continues reviewing my novels with a glowing review of Blood and Judgment:
But then Blood and Judgment adds a few more layers, as weak men must choose between courage and complacency, humanity and survival. A few Norse Old Ones pop up. Doors between worlds are opened and closed. Viking Hamlet, Amlodd, cannot feign madness and so agrees to gain a feigning mind, effectively switching bodies with one of the actors! Oh, it was delightful!
I think she liked it. Read it all here.
‘The Year of the Warrior’ Review
Lutheran writer Mary J. Moerbe (who happens to be the daughter of Dr. Gene Edward Veith) has reviewed my novel, The Year of the Warrior at her blog, Meet, Write, & Salutary:
The descriptions hit me very powerfully. I mean, normally we would talk about world-building in a piece of fantasy, but this book may have made me even more engaged into my own world, allowing me to see it through re-opened eyes and a broadened perspective.
Read it all here. Thanks, Mary.
When the Majority Become Cultural Snobs
I’ve been thinking to write a thoughtful something about the third season of Marvel’s Jessica Jones. When I started watching it a few weeks ago, I noticed I had forgotten the big storyline from season two, but I remembered that I did not blog about it. Something wasn’t there. Maybe I wasn’t provoked enough (or maybe the sexual aspects of it held me back).
The third season continued to lean into that part of the story. Though Hogarth’s struggle was compelling, it was also awful and fairly ugly. The first season felt like Jessica’s gritty origin story, but now that season three is over, the whole series feels like her protracted story of coming into hero work. She needs Edna Mode to smack her around to help her find her destiny.
But I was talking about something else.
I have watched Stranger Things 3 more recently and may write something about the Upside Down, but Brooke Clark says pretending a TV series is a mature work of thoughtful deliberation does not redeem our interest in it.
Although we are trained to believe in books, we find ourselves watching shows about dragons, criminals, and covens. This leads to cultural status anxiety—a feeling that we aren’t really as sophisticated as we think, because when given the choice, we’d rather flip on HBO than pick up Middlemarch.
There are two ways out of this cognitive dissonance: we can admit our tastes aren’t really as elevated as we like to believe, or we can convince ourselves that television is actually an example of high culture.
We may not have gotten away from what W. H. Auden said decades ago in “The Poet & The City” : “What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish. This is bad for everyone; the majority lose all genuine taste of their own, and the minority become cultural snobs.” (via Prufrock News)
Of conservatives, progressives, and Christians
My Close Personal Friend Gene Edward Veith posts an interesting meditation today on the differences between the ways conservatives and progressives think — and how Christians are (or should be) distinct from both.
It would follow that Christians, while tending towards conservatism, would also be sensitive to some of the evils that bother progressives. But they would see them as violations of God’s design, rather than as an excuse to violate that design further. Christians would have at best modest hopes for what human governments and “nation-states” can accomplish, avoiding all utopian thinking–whether of the conservative or the progressive variety–in a spirit of realism and skepticism, even while they do what they can to advance the common good. The Christian’s hope is fixed not so much on this world, which will soon pass away, but on the world to come–on Christ who has atoned for the sins of the world and who will reign as King over the New Heaven and the New Earth.
From this perspective, Christians must sometimes be progressive, sometimes conservative, in relation to changing conditions.
I’m sure (because they keep saying it) that my progressive friends truly believe that we are on the brink of a fascist takeover. That we must all run to the port side of the boat right away, lest we tip over to starboard.
I can’t see that. We have an (imperfectly) conservative president, and one house of Congress that’s sort of conservative on a good day. Our educational system, our government bureaucracies, our news media and our entertainment media are uniformly progressive — and at the moment they’re competing with one another to prove who can be the most like Mao.
I’ll continue to sit over here on the starboard side, thanks. Wake me up when the president closes down a newspaper.
For your Spectation…
I didn’t even know The American Spectator Online posted on Sundays. But that was when the put up my latest column. And I guess it’s appropriate to the subject matter.
Read it here.