A couple interesting (to me) links tonight.
Rick Gekoski, writing in the Guardian, gets all curmudgeonly about book lovers:
If you think that reading the right things in the right ways is morally bracing, improves one’s discriminations and heightens sensitivity – basically, the Leavis line – then all you have to do is look at the behaviour of Dr Leavis himself to begin to doubt the thesis. Indeed, if it were true that wide and deep reading redounds wholly positively on the development of a wholesome self, consider a typical member of a university English department, and despair.
He scores some nice hits, as in the passage above, but also takes some shots at comments by Milton and C. S. Lewis that strike me as just snarky (I’ll admit I’m prejudiced in the matter). Frankly, he reminds me a little of one of those misanthropes who can’t see a young couple in love without muttering, “Give ’em a couple years and they’ll be hiring hit men to murder each other.”
Tip: Joe Carter at First Things.
Dennis Ingolfsland, at The Recliner Commentaries, quotes a book that sounds fascinating, Is God a Moral Monster, by Paul Copan:
Though I used to complain about the indecency of the idea of God’s wrath, I came to think that I would have to rebel against a God who wasn’t wrathful at the sight of the world’s evil. God isn’t wrathful in spite of being love. God is wrathful because God is love (Miroslav Volf as quoted in Is God a Moral Monster? by Paul Copan, 192).
That noise you hear in the distance is me yelling, “YES! YES!”
Hmmm. I never claimed to read books because it makes me a better person. I read books because I enjoy reading books. Sometimes I do read books with the express purpose of learning something; but even in that case, it’s not the act of reading itself that’s improving.
The author is being pretty literal, isn’t he? “We read to know we’re not alone.” Does Mr. Lewis mean that if you’re illiterate you’re doomed to a life of unalloyed solitude? Of course not. He does mean, presumably, that literacy puts us in touch with a wider world, and a greater chance of encountering people who see the world as we do.
About the “Moral Monster” — yes: it’s gotten fashionable to imagine God as incapable of anything as harsh as wrath, because He’s now associated with finicky, outdated restrictions on free sex and drugs. Imagine Him casting an eye on child abuse, though, and it’s harder to picture Him nodding away with a sad, indulgent smile.
Good point, Texan. We may struggle a lot with the evil God allows in the world, but if someone wants to condemn God’s character because of it, we have to ask when that person wants God to intervene. Does the critic want God to save evil drug addicts from the consequences of their addiction or before they get addicted or before the drug is made? Should he save us from the consequences of free sex or to stop us from risky behavior in the first place? Or does the critic of God’s goodness really want him to destroy the evil man in blatant judgment of his deeds?
Re. Gekoski:
I think one could write a book about his essay, tracing the way he views his perspective as reasonable and all others as insignificant and unscientific, especially as illustrated by his overly-literal quotations.
However, THAT would be one book, we can all agree, whose reading would in no way make one a better person.