Religious Liberty: A new book by Norte Dame political scientist Vincent Phillip Muñoz “provides one of the best treatments we have on the meaning of the religion clauses” focusing on the debates held in each state “about establishments and religious freedom. . . . These debates, and the views of a spectrum of Founders, allow Muñoz to craft a convincing argument. He contends that the founding generation’s concept of religious liberty was rooted, first and foremost, in natural law and inalienable natural rights.”
Science Fiction: Disney now has creative input into the BBC’s Doctor Who series, boasting it with financial support. I loved the classic series growing up. I watched every episode broadcast on PBS from Jon Pertwee’s run (#3), Tom Baker’s (#4 and still the best ever), Peter Davidson’s (#5), and Colin Baker’s (#6). I may have watched all the episodes with Sylvester McCoy, but the show lost its appeal for me during that time. Recently, I watched the new season 5 and part of 6 with Matt Smith, who is great as a title character, but over half of the stories were so much nonsense, I lost interest again.
Book Banning: At least 520 Penguin Random House staff and connections are arguing that Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s book contract be cancelled. They don’t oppose free speech, they write. They aren’t calling for censorship. “Rather, this is a case where a corporation has privately funded the destruction of human rights with obscene profits.”
Photo: Tivoli Theater, Stephenson, Michigan. 1980. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
For some years, I’ve had a water damaged copy of Ogden Nash’s Good Intentions. Here’s a look at a good copy of it; this one has the slip cover too (I hadn’t seen it before).
Yesterday, I found similar red, hardback copies of Many Long Years Ago, a collection of mostly previously published verse from 1931-1945, and The Private Dining Room, new verse published in 1953. I refrained from replacing Good Intentions or buying another volume they had, so you know what that says about me. We don’t need to say it out loud. I also could have purchased one of a couple more recently published anthologies. This is one of them. But, if I do anything, I’d like a set of the five red hardcovers.
Here are a few lines from Many Long Years Ago.
“Who wishes his self-esteem to thrive Should belong to a girl of almost five.”
“We’ll remind each other it’s smart to be thrifty And buy our clothes for something-fifty.”
“If turnips were watches they’d make as good eating as turnips.”
How would Jesus advertise? I have a hard time believing Jesus would encourage us to spend millions on advertising his character traits. How many vice is being funded with a Super Bowl ad? But I also have a hard time throwing stones at this.
Does reading change the brain? “When it comes to a cultural trace in the form of literature, we would really like to know whether there is some sort of permanent alteration to the structure of the brain.” They chose Robert Harris’s Pompeii to see if they could detect a small brain change.
Banned Books: Anthony Sacramone has a book challenge for public schools. “Try and get all these at one go onto a public school curriculum (NYC, LA, SF) and see how that goes. I’d love to be proven wrong.”
Someone in our house picked up Amazon Prime, which means we’ve watched five episodes of The Rings of Power. If you remember what Lars said about not watching it, those reasons still stand. After the first two shows, I told the rest of my family it was not a Tolkien’s story, but a good fantasy that leaned heavily on Tolkien’s established world. It could have been independent of Middle Earth, but then it wouldn’t have gotten all of the hype, fans of Tolkien wouldn’t have come out of the woodwork to comment, and it wouldn’t have disappointed viewers as badly as it has.
I can’t say I’m in the most disappointed camp yet, though I have my complaints. Straight out of the gate, the writers tell us there was a time without darkness, which I took to mean evil had yet to come into the world, but they follow those words with little Galadriel getting bullied over her toy boat. Then they say, you know why a boat floats and a rock sinks? It’s because a boat has hope and keeps it head up. If the dialogue had maintained that level of inanity for the whole first episode, I would have dropped it, but it improved. Not before arguing that Galadriel, who had bent her life on stamping out Sauron, was in danger of sustaining the evil by seeking it, because if evil isn’t out there, but you think it is, then you could become the very thing you seek.
Those were meta level reasons I said the story wasn’t Tolkienesque, but it still seemed okay as we moved along. Characters weren’t doing stupid things until maybe episode five. A wizard-like character who fell from the sky has not been explained–he’s interesting. The Sylvan elf is the only one fighting at this point and has gotten in some good Legolas moves. The Duran-Elrond storyline is good overall.
But with episode five, things have begun to turn sour. There’s a laughable fighting tutorial that suggests swordmen should fight with their feet, not with their arms. An actor with stage fighting experience has a couple videos in response to this part of the show, in which he explains how actors swing weapons to appear lethally aimed when they aren’t and what the camera must do to make a battle look real.
I could say more, but many others have said many things about this show already. I should just move on with blogroll links.
Bookcases: “We’re so enamored of digital technology we often presume its superiority; worse, we sometimes forget its alternatives even qualify as technologies.” Joel Miller recommends a bookcase as the most underrated user interface we have.
Liberty: Peter Mommsen writes about our love of liberty, fear of commitment, and the freedom found in making good vows. “I soon discovered that being bound [by a vow] didn’t feel like a loss of liberty. On the contrary, once the step had been taken, paralyzing daydreams about other possible life paths disappeared . . .”
Libraries: The Palafoxiana Library in Puebla, Mexico is the oldest public library in the Americas. “On the first floor, there are more than 11,000 Bibles, religious documents and theological texts. The second level is dedicated to the relationship between God and people — chronicles of religious orders and the lives of saints — and the third contains books on physics, mathematics, botany, language, architecture, even carpentry.” (via Arts Journal)
Photo: Springfield Library, Springfield, Massachusetts. 1984. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
Reading:Where do you like to read? A hammock, a couch, an overstuffed chair? At a desk, on a bench, or while walking somewhere? The chair in the photo above would suit me well for firmness and lighting.
I feel I can’t read in half of my house without falling asleep, and while it would be easy to blame my age now, I don’t think that has been the reason for my fatigue or maybe mental laziness before now. I am a poor, distracted, uncompelled reader for the most part. No one will learn of my literary habits in the coming years and find in them a pattern to follow.
Historic Novels: Some books are not comfort reads. Gina Dalfonzo says she had trouble sleeping after reading The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell. It’s a novel about Lucrezia de’ Medici, the wife of Alfonso II d’Este, Duke of Ferrara, who died at age 16, and is remembered mainly as the subject of Robert Browning’s, “My Last Duchess.”
That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall, Looking as if she were alive. I call That piece a wonder, now; Fra Pandolf’s hands Worked busily a day, and there she stands.
Saith the Duke with every indication that he suspected his Duchess of infidelity or perhaps, more vaguely, unworthiness.
Artist and illustrator N. C. Wyeth (1882-1945), trained by the famous Howard Pyle and painter of the Brandywine School, produced illustrations for many Scribner’s Classics editions such as Treasure Island, Kidnapped, The Lastof the Mohicans and The Yearling.
Best of: Ted Gioia offers his paid subscribers his reviews of the 50 best works of non-realist fiction (sci-fi, alt-history, fantasy, and more). Read the list for free (part one of five so far). The reviews are behind the paid wall.
In this short span, he wrote his breakthrough story cycle, The Martian Chronicles, a book that signified a start to the genre’s inclusion in mainstream literature; published the celebrated science-fiction collection The Illustrated Man; followed up with the underrated collection of mixed fiction (fantasy and contemporary realist prose), The Golden Apples of the Sun; wrote his magnum opus, Fahrenheit 451; and began work on the screenplay for Moby-Dick for director John Huston.
Cleopatra: His legs bestrid the ocean, his reared arm Crested the world. His voice was propertied As all the tunèd spheres, and that to friends; But when he meant to quail and shake the orb, He was as rattling thunder. For his bounty, There was no winter in ’t; an autumn ’twas That grew the more by reaping. His delights Were dolphin-like; they showed his back above The element they lived in. In his livery Walked crowns and crownets; realms and islands were As plates dropped from his pocket.
Dolabella: Cleopatra—
C: Think you there was, or might be, such a man As this I dreamt of?
Yesterday, the socials were torn up with complaints about the Wordle word of the day. Wordle renews at midnight, and some people rush to solve it first. I usually play it in the middle day, and yesterday I happened to see the angst from other players ahead of time.
The word was parer. It’s not Merrium-Websters or Oxford, but it is the American Heritage. This is enough to inspire fulminating effusions of grief over how hard the game is or the loss of a win streak. It’s not even a real word, they say.
I did guess this word, perhaps because it’s one in another word game I play but perhaps because the perceived difficulty of a Wordle level depends on your starting word. You could go vowel heavy (audio, ideas, adieu) or consonant heavy (smart, plumb, track). You could attempt more common letters (scope, trace, broke).
I like word light (or sight, might, fight) because of the common letters. If H is eliminated, then CH and SH are too. If I is out, then AI, OI, EI are too.
But with a word like parer, if you approach it as PA_ER, then you can see the potential for angst. Is it paper, paver, pager? When you have a word like this, it’s good to attempt a word with three possible letters, like grave, so if all three out, you can attempt a fourth option, like the P if the R hadn’t been the answer.
I’m sure, as they say in the podcasts, nobody cares. Let’s move on.
Manhood:For the Church | Episode 177: Brant Hansen on The Men We Need. Here’s an enjoyable podcast ep. on a manhood book that may be more grounded than some of those you’ve heard about. Hansen, an “Avid Indoorsman,” appears to keep his advice within the bounds of Scripture and argue for flip-flops as a sign of failed masculinity.
True Crime:“Nothing But the Night takes readers back to 1924, when two students at the University of Chicago, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, kidnapped a fourteen-year-old boy named Bobby Franks and callously killed him. When the crime came to trial, Leopold and Loeb were defended by the celebrity lawyer Clarence Darrow, whose passionate courtroom antics were read in newspapers and circulated like the latest radio drama.” (Get the book here)
Education: In the book Letters Along the Way, a young believer says he intends to go to Yale to help Christians gain academic respectability. The corresponding senior saint writes, “At the risk of sounding pedantic (though realizing I sometimes come across that way), I doubt very much that evangelicals are wise to pursue academic respectability. What we need is academic responsibility. There is a world of difference.”
Jazz: In the current issue of ByFaith (not yet online), there’s a conversation with jazz pianist William Edgar, who is also a professor at Westminster Theological Seminary. He says, “I used to be fairly pessimistic about the future of jazz, but then I listen to these guys like Jon Baptiste or the guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel, and it’s the real thing. . . . it’s the theme of my book, ‘from deep misery to inextinguishable joy.’ You can’t take a shortcut to the joy, because it becomes happiness instead. You also can’t swell in the sin without becoming morbid. Jazz is that journey that goes from one place to the others.”
You can listen to Jon Baptiste with friends in this recording from 2020.
Photo: Fire Department, Columbus, Indiana. 1977. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
No matter where they are in the world, when someone refers to the Queen, they almost always mean Elizabeth II, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of Her other Realms and Territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith.
This photo of the young queen hangs in Nottingham’s Council House (Lee Haywood/Flickr).
C.S. Lewis watched Elizabeth’s coronation on TV and wrote this in a letter:
. . . the Queen herself appeared to be quite overwhelmed by the sacramental side of it. . . .
The pressing of that huge, heavy crown on that small, young head becomes a sort of symbol of the situation of humanity itself: humanity called by God to be his vice-regent and high priest on earth, yet feeling so inadequate. As if he said, “In my inexorable love I shall lay upon the dust that you are glories and dangers and responsibilities beyond your understanding.”
Celebrities: “But over time, it seemed, the fallen leaders managed to accrue immense social power without true proximity. They cultivated an image of spiritual importance while distancing themselves from embodied, in-person means of knowing and being known.” Gina Dalfonzo reviews Celebrities for Jesus: How Personas, Platforms, and Profits Are Hurting the Church by Katelyn Beaty.
A Writer’s Regrets: A.N. Wilson, who has published over 40 novels and other books, has released a memoir. He “says that he cannot believe that the ‘young fogey’ of the 1970s and 1980s, dapper, elegantly suited, was him. He describes himself as thrustingly ambitious, full of himself and unfaithful not only to his wife but to his own better nature.”
Stolen Books:Joel Miller has a roundup of stolen book news, such as the Gospel manuscript that was taken during WWI and how Bibles were a common stolen good when he worked at a bookstore in California.
“Growing up, I often heard that the medieval church used to chain up Bibles so average people couldn’t read it. It’s a common myth. The reality is that illiteracy was the norm, average people had better things to do than read, and books were only chained to keep clerics, monks, and visiting scholars from stealing valuable property—or reading in the latrine.”
Religious History:“. . . the more you got to know the men, the more human did they become, for better or worse; you were more concerned to find out why they thought as they did than to prove it was wrong.”
Photo: 7-Up Building, Portland, Oregon. 1976. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
Last week, I wrote about an English teacher encouraging her students to read challenged books. Yesterday, World’s Doubletake podcast released a story on diversity libraries in schools and parents and teachers pushing back against school boards who advocate immoral reading. They mention a book “about a 17-year-old alcoholic girl in a sexual relationship with a 38-year-old man. . . . Other books describe teenagers in homosexual activity with adults. Others depict incest.
“Some parents, teachers, three school board members, and a librarian defended the material at that 2020 board meeting. They said young kids should be able to see themselves ‘reflected’ in the books. They said it was important to read about pedophilia because it was, quote, ‘culturally enriching.'”
This may be what school-choice supporters need to fuel their fire.
However, some have reacted negatively to this and any aspect that smells of a culture war. They would much rather Christians keep to themselves: “For all the voices calling our attention and energy to school-board politics right now, discipling our kids in a holistic and faithful way is a more constant, difficult, and worthwhile task.” Influencing your school board or, I guess, being a voice in your community is not within the scope of discipling your children. Maybe if we thought it as being the salt of the earth?
Discipline: “Religious discipline confounds the modern sensibility because it upends our ideas about the value of discipline and sacrifice. To a person steeped in modern heroics, religious discipline looks solely like abstention, with none of the benefits of lifestyle discipline. It is giving up pleasurable things just to make your life less enjoyable; it is overcoming, ignoring, or dismissing your own desires solely from masochism, or because of communal expectations, which is the worst possible sin these days, to do something because someone or some group expects you to.”
Faith: “O Timothy, guard the deposit entrusted to you. Avoid the irreverent babble and contradictions of what is falsely called ‘knowledge,’ for by professing it some have swerved from the faith.” (1 Tim. 6:20 ESV)
Used Bookstores: Carl Lavigne writes about his time at The Dawn Treader Book Shop in Ann Arbor, MI. “Is there a German word for being surrounded by stacks of once-feted, now forgotten novels piled in a deeply haunted basement wondering, ‘What if this is where my book ends up?’
“A customer demands a book recommendation. ‘Something good.’ ‘Sorry,’ I joke. ‘Fresh out.'”
Photo: YMCA, Geneva, New York. 1995. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
I try to be gentle on my books. I don’t crack the spine, if I can avoid it. I try to avoid dog-earring pages like I did with the last book I read (carrying it to work in a backpack roughed it up). On the other hand, I don’t mind writing notes or marking sentences in the margin. I will do this in any book if I think I’ll return to a passage later or feel piqued enough to comment. I try to use a pencil though, so anything can be erased later.
I’m thinking of these things after watching Elliot Brooks talk through reading habits that divide people.
Feature News: I think I’ve told you before that all of World’s podcasts are excellent. I listen to all of them. A new one, Doubletake, tells one feature story per 35-minute episode, and the stories have been fairly diverse. The first episode focuses on Brandon Young and being a clean comedian. The second episode tells the story of a doctor who left Canada to avoid being forced to euthanize someone. The third episode talks about abortions performed at a Christian hospital in Illinois.
“Of course, the pro-abortion nurses on the floor are mad at me [for speaking up], but I never expected the pro-life nurses to be mad at me.”
You can listen to these on their website or through your podcatcher.
Reading: Joel Miller asks, “Do you know the difference between a carrot and a caret? Family forms a key ingredient in Anne Fadiman’s essay collection, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader, as do plagiarism, writing in books, eating books, and proofreading—hence the carrot/caret reference. Fadiman’s 18 essays range over all aspects of bookish living, including some truly strange. Did, for instance, Sir Walter Scott really shoot down a crow and jot a note with its blood to ensure he remembered a sentence he’d been stuck on?”
Independence Day: August 24 is Ukraine’s Independence Day. Here’s a celebration video from last year with English subtitles. Slava Ukraini.
Amazon’s Middle Earth series, The Rings of Power, will begin September 1 and run into October. I don’t know much about it, but I hope to enjoy it if we still have a Prime membership (which seems to come and go regularly of late).
Because of the series, I intend to read The Silmarillion soon. I know I read about half of it before, but I don’t remember where I stopped. One of the chapters, perhaps thirteen, dragged on about geography about as warmly as a fifth-grade social studies text. I aim to push past those parts and enjoy the stories beyond them.
I don’t know if I will attempt to blog about the series if I’m able to watch it near the release days. I probably wouldn’t have enough thoughts to share.
Notes from Underground, Poor Folk, and The Brothers Karamazov are among the must-reads. The Double and The Gambler are on the list for reading after the must-reads. Uncle’s Dream and The Permanent Husband are only for the most dedicated readers.
“I won’t be exaggerating,” she says, “when I say [The Brothers Karamazov] brought me back from abyss. It might not work the same way [for you as] it did for me, but there is an obvious need for more people to read and understand the beautiful intricacies of life and its fallacies, to love life in its entirety.”
Oh, gentlemen, do you know, perhaps I consider myself an intelligent man, only because all my life I have been able neither to begin nor to finish anything. Granted I am a babbler, a harmless vexatious babbler, like all of us. But what is to be done if the direct and sole vocation of every intelligent man is babble, that is, the intentional pouring of water through a sieve?
Social Media: “How teens use social media often drives how everyone uses social media.” YouTube is the most-used social media platform and the second most-used search engine.
For Love of a Hero: Mo Ghille Mear (My Gallant Hero), performed by The Choral Scholars of University College, Dublin.
Photo: March Mobil Gas, Mount Clemens, Michigan. 1986. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
