I am proud (in a suitably humble way) to announce that my first article has appeared in Religion & Liberty Magazine, published by the Acton Institute.
Its topic, a sure crowd-pleaser, is the story of Professor Georg Sverdrup, Augsburg Seminary, and the Lutheran Free Church. Readers of this blog have enjoyed my accounts of the antics of the Free Lutherans for many years (as I’m editor of the Sverdrup Journal), but now the whole wide world can marvel at the story. The passion. The pathos. The pietism.
Getting back to the real world, I’m well aware that the saga of the Free Lutherans is pretty tall grass stuff, even for people generally interested in church history. And we Norwegian Americans do love our schisms, which complicates matters. Hot dishes and schisms, that’s how you can tell Norwegian-American Lutherans.
The obscurity of my topic was brought home to me in a surprising way when I received my copy of the magazine, opened it, and found that it had been illustrated with an image, not of the Georg Sverdrup I wrote about, but of his namesake great-uncle. I can sympathize with the artist – I wrote an article about the Reformation kings of Denmark for the Sverdrup Society newsletter a while back and got my Fredericks and Christians completely mixed up. Had to print a correction in the next issue.
The R&I editor, when I pointed the lapse out to him, was very apologetic, and the artist quickly produced a corrected version, which will be used when the article goes online next month. And I appreciate that.
But these are details. The important thing is that the article serves its higher purpose – the great cause for which I labor with unwearying toil.
The cause of me getting paid.
And, of course, contributing to public knowledge of the history of the Christian faith. That too.
He was one of those guys who look around when you talk about money because they can’t imagine any legal way they might earn it.
I reviewed another of Stuart M. Kaminsky’s Toby Peters novels the other day. Toby, a low-rent Los Angeles PI in the 1930s and ’40s, tends to be hired – under seriocomic circumstances – by various movie stars and celebrities to clear their names.
Down For the Count begins with Toby looking down at a murdered man on the beach – and up at Joe Louis, heavyweight champion of the world. Louis explains that he saw the man being beaten and ran up to help, but the killers got away before he got there. Toby, who is a fight fan and respects Louis, believes him. He advises the champ to run off before the police get there, and then undertakes to find the real murderer for him, so he won’t be implicated in a scandal.
Toby knows who the dead man is, because his widow (who happens to be Toby’s ex-wife) just hired him to locate the man. Investigation reveals that he had gotten involved in investing in boxers and arranging “cards.” Losses in such enterprises had gotten him involved with some of the nastiest characters in the LA underworld. There is no lack of suspects – or of tough guys (including cops) eager to rearrange Toby’s face, at best.
The Toby Peters books are always amusing. I enjoy the characters and the period flavor of Down For the Count. This one has a darker ending than most in the series. Recommended.
Morse had got it wrong, of course. Morse nearly always got things hopelessly, ridiculously wrong at the start of every case. But he always seemed to have thoughts that no one was capable of thinking. Like now.
I think I’ve read all Colin Dexter’ Inspector Morse novels already. But one of them showed up cheap for Kindle purchase, and I figured I’d re-read it – especially as I’ve been watching episodes of the old John Thaw BBC TV series recently. The book was The Daughters of Cain, and I recognized it as one that – though I enjoyed it – I thought included one ridiculous plot element.
Morse is put in charge of a case concerning an Oxford don who’s been murdered in his home. The chief suspect is the “scout” (the servant) in the college building where he worked. That scout had been found to be dealing drugs to students. He also (we learn) had been brutalizing his wife.
But that man has disappeared. Soon Morse begins to suspect that he too has been killed, by a conspiracy of nice women – his abused wife, her teacher friend, and his stepdaughter (also abused), who is now a prostitute.
As is customary in the Morse novels, we have no moments of Sherlock Holmes super-ratiocination here. Morse, fighting a bad cold and fueled by beer and cigarettes, makes one wrong guess after another, until by a process of elimination (and inspiration) he hits on the truth. Which is pretty much how it works in real life, which may explain the charm of the series.
What is harder to explain is the charm of Morse himself. I have an idea that author Dexter’s original conception of Morse was not much like the actor John Thaw (Shaun Evans of “Endeavour” may have been closer). As I recall, the first Morse novel features women commenting on how “dishy” the detective is.
But as the series continued, Dexter threw in with the TV show entirely, and his Morse and the video Morse became pretty much the same. Yet Morse seemed to possess the same attractiveness to women.
In The Daughters of Cain, one of the central characters is Ellie, the abused stepdaughter of the missing murderer, who is now a prostitute. Although Morse finds her repellant at first, he finds himself increasingly attracted to her. And then – and this is what I really don’t get – she reciprocates the feeling.
Why? What is there about Morse as we know him that would appeal to a young woman who has romantic options? He’s much older, he’s out of shape, he’s short-tempered, he isn’t rich.
This element of the story simply made no sense to me. (Not to mention that most cops have more sense than to fall for prostitutes.) It seemed to me as if the author was forcing his characters into unnatural behaviors, and that’s a major sin in fiction.
Otherwise, The Daughters of Cain was quite a good novel. You might feel differently about the romantic element.
“I’m Not Ashamed to Own My Lord” performed by Nathan C. George and family
Today’s hymn of faith is from the profound and marvelous writer Isaac Watts. The tune is called Pisgah and was written by J.C. Lowry according to the Kentucky Harmony tunebook (1811). The wonderful performance above captures the feel of the tune.
“For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is ethe power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek” (Romans 1:16 ESV).
1 I’m not ashamed to own my Lord, or to defend his cause, maintain the honor of his Word, the glory of his cross.
2 Jesus, my God! I know his name, his name is all my trust; nor will he put my soul to shame, nor let my hope be lost.
3 Firm as his throne his promise stands, and he can well secure what I’ve committed to his hands ’til the decisive hour.
4 Then will he own my worthless name before his Father’s face, and in the new Jerusalem appoint my soul a place.
This month I’ve been editing the video lectures of a philosophy course in my day job, and I’ve gotten into discussions on God’s existence. There are a couple natural problems with knowing God. One is that he is a metaphysical being, who by nature transcends the senses. We cannot know and observe God the same way we would anything in the created world. He is beyond us. He is invisible and without form. We think of the Holy Spirit as a breath because we have few metaphors to go by. God as a being is hard to describe.
Because God is beyond us, because he is the creator and we the created, we have epistemic distance with him. There’s only so much we can know about him because we can’t comprehend him.
He is also a person, who may choose to go unseen. This is a simple point for any person. If our environment allows it, we can hide from each other. If our environment doesn’t allow it, we can choose to sit the corners of the room and not talk to each other. People are intelligent beings who choose to communicate or stay silent. Since God is not a force of nature but an eternal being, he could choose for his own reasons to remain unknown to his creation.
There are some who ask why God doesn’t make his presence obvious. Why are agnostics even given room to breathe? Wouldn’t it be better if we all knew there was a God and couldn’t doubt? Responding to this, some argue that God maintains a distance from us in order to allow for our free will. He wants us to love him freely, not under compulsion. I can understand the appeal of this argument; many people put a lot of stock in human free will, but does this argument fit with the world as the Bible describes it?
God created the first couple in a perfect garden and spoke to them personally. We don’t know what that looked like, but it seems to be as relational as two people talking—no distance maintained out of respect for the free will of the created. And Adam and Eve chose the knowledge of good and evil over the divine being they spoke to earlier that day.
Jesus said, “And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil” (John 3:19 ESV).
This turns the question of God’s self-revelation back to us. It isn’t that he hasn’t done enough to reach us; it’s that we are running away. We stop our ears. We shut our eyes. We actively “suppress the truth” that we were created by God for his glory.
For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.
(Romans 1:18–20 ESV)
It would be more correct to say that God isn’t holding back out of respect for our free will but that we love darkness.
I’m late posting tonight, because I got in late, and anyway it felt like a Saturday to me. I was doing a Saturday thing, in my subjective world.
I think I’ve mentioned that I’m now editing the magazine of the Valdres Samband, one of many US organizations composed of descendants of immigrants from various regions of Norway (I’m not a Valdres descendant myself, which will tell you how desperate they were for an editor). Today, in that capacity, I attended their annual Stevne, which means their annual get-together, in Minneapolis. I also delivered my world-renowned lecture on Viking Legacy, and sold some books.
The video above does not represent what we were actually doing today. There was no dancing, though I’m sure it would have been welcome. But we did have a fiddler entertaining us during dinner on a Hardanger Fiddle, the instrument being played in the video, which (appropriately) was actually posted by the Valdres Samband several years back.
If the tones of the Hardanger Fiddle sound vaguely familiar, that may be because (at least according to what I was told) one was used for the theme music of the Riders of Rohan in the Lord of the Rings movies.
The Hardanger Fiddle is a uniquely Norwegian instrument. Below the usual four strings, it is strung with four or five more. These lower strings are not played directly, but resonate harmonically with the main notes, producing a weird, haunting droning sound sometimes compared to the bagpipes.
My Haugean pietist ancestors, by the way, would have been shocked by this, and might have smashed the fiddle if they could get their hands on it. They believed that dancing was bad in itself, but that Hardanger Fiddle music was positively demonic. Master fiddlers were regarded as a kind of wizard.
…the Divine Nature wounds and perhaps destroys us merely by being what it is. We call it the wrath of the gods; as if the great cataract in Phars were angry with every fly it sweeps down in its green thunder.
I wonder what J. R. R. Tolkien thought of Till We Have Faces. I can’t seem to find any information about that online. Tollers and Jack were, of course, somewhat estranged by the time this novel was published; not turned enemies, but their friendship had cooled through the circumstances of life. I have an idea Tolkien thought Lewis had lost interest in their mythopoeic project, their shared endeavor to write new myths foreshadowing the gospel for modern pagans.
But that’s very much what Till We Have Faces is – though the myth isn’t a new one (Tolkien specifically wanted English myths) but a retelling of a classic Greek one, the myth of Cupid and Psyche. The central mythopoeic idea that myths are “good dreams” that anticipate the gospel is here, richly and beautifully realized.
Orual is a princess in a fictional barbarian kingdom, apparently sometime in the early Iron Age. She is the oldest – and ugliest – of three sisters. Redival is pretty and frivolous. Istra, the youngest, is so beautiful and sweet that people treat her like a goddess. “The Fox,” the girls’ Greek slave tutor, calls her Psyche, and Orual dotes on her.
But when famine and pestilence come to the land, the people turn on Psyche, accusing her of blaspheming the gods, causing all this evil. It is determined by the priests that she must be taken to the Mountain and sacrificed to the Beast who dwells there. Orual is injured trying to defend her sister, and so is unconscious when the ceremony is carried out.
Later, Orual travels with the chief of the king’s guard up to the Mountain, to gather her sister’s bones for burial. To her astonishment and joy, she finds Psyche there, alive and well. But the girl tells her a crazy story about being married to the Beast of the Mountain, who is actually a sublime god. Orual, certain that Psyche has gone insane, conceives a plan to bring her to her senses. And great evil will come from this.
I first read Till We Have Faces a lifetime ago, when I was in high school and the book was fairly new. It was the second Lewis book I read, after The Screwtape Letters. Callow as I was, I recognized it for a book full of depths, but I couldn’t see very far into them.
Reading it now, as an old man, I found much more in the story. It moved me deeply. Has any book ever dissected the human heart as this one does, bringing to light all the petty possessiveness, jealousy, and even hatred that we humans often mean by what we call love?
Great book. Read it if you haven’t yet. If you have read it, read it again.
How desperate am I for work, you ask? How low would I stoop for money?
Would I sell a kidney? Flog condo time shares in Florida? Peddle my body on street corners?
Ha! Kids stuff.
I’ve been reduced to watching the History Channel Vikings series.
Yes, in spite of all my railings and denunciations against the thing, I’m watching the first season through now. I think I’ll need to watch more seasons, and I think the most economical way to do that will be to revive the Netflix subscription I dropped. As a business expense, though I don’t think I can deduct it.
Here’s how coming to this pass, uh… came to pass:
I have a friend who works with a web magazine that actually pays non-trivial money. I suggested to him an article I might write for it, one having to do with Vikings.
He countered that he’d like to see my topic related to the Vikings series.
I seem to recall I dickered my fee up a little at that point. Then I agreed to take the thing on. So I now have to watch enough of the series to enable me to speak with some authority.
I mentioned my plight on Facebook. Some friends suggested I might find I enjoy it.
This has not come to pass, so far.
What do I dislike about the Vikings series?
First of all – and I’ve written about this before – they get Norse society completely wrong. The Vikings in this production live in an autocracy, where the chieftain (the “earl”) calls the shots. He claims all the booty from raids. He kills people without consequence.
Sigh. Read Viking Legacy, for pete’s sake. The Norse had a grassroots democracy. Leaders were obligated to submit to election, and could be booted out if they got too big for said boots.
Armor and costumes – perhaps we reenactors overdid it, making “Vikings did not wear horns on their helmets!” our battle cry for so many years. The props people at the studio answered, “Got it! The Vikings didn’t wear any armor at all!” And that idea came to rule all their decisions, stuck fast in their consciousness like an axe in an unhelmeted skull.
There are plenty of fights here, and as far as I can see they’re entirely chaotic. Aside from the lack of armor, neither logistics, troop numbers, nor tactics matter at all. Victory is bestowed by the favor of the scriptwriting gods. Ragnar Lothbrok and his men (by the time of episode six, which is as far as I’ve gotten now) seem to be about to conquer the English kingdom of Northumbria with three ships’ crews).
I could go on and on. I’ll just mention one more thing. Clunkiness.
I’ve often said that one thing I’ve tried to avoid in my novels – and I hope I’ve avoided somewhat it through using Father Ailill as a bridge character – is clunkiness. Old time heroes, clunking around in funny costumes and heavy boots, ranting about honor and the old gods, in awkward sentence constructions. Making little psychological sense to modern readers/viewers.
I have an idea (bear in mind that I’m often mistaken) that Vikings will not age well. It seems clunky to me. When the haircuts stop looking cool, our grandchildren will laugh at it.
But I carry on with my “research.” If I’m going to sell my soul, I mean to give value for money.
There are still a few of the late Stuart M. Kaminsky’s Toby Peters novels left that I haven’t read. But now I’ve read Buried Caesars, in which Toby meets Douglas MacArthur and Dashiell Hammett.
The Toby Peters novels, in case you’re not familiar with them, are set in Hollywood in the 1930s and ʼ40s. They are semi-comic in spirit, finding our private eye hero taking jobs for one famous figure or another (usually, but not always, movie stars), though he never achieves financial success, continuing to live in a shabby boarding house and sharing his office with a low-rent (and low-hygiene) dentist.
It’s 1942, and Toby is summoned to a large estate, where he meets a man who isn’t supposed to be in this hemisphere. General Douglas MacArthur is supposed to be in the Philippines, but he’s come home in secret to deal with a personal crisis. Certain of American victory, he has – he explains – made some plans for running for president after the war. He prepared some strategy papers for his campaign which would be highly embarrassing if they were made public at the present time. And now one of his aides has stolen the papers and is in California offering them to the highest bidder. MacArthur wants Toby to investigate because he’s a) known to be discreet, and b) almost unknown otherwise.
Toby promises to turn all his resources to the task. His problem is that his resources are in fact very limited. However, he is surprised to find a famous man in the dental chair of his office-mate – the author Dashiell Hammett. Hammett explains that he’s trying to enlist for the war (in spite of his age), and the army tells him he has to get his teeth fixed. He’s (temporarily) off the bottle, he has a couple days free, and he’s curious to see whether he still retains some of his old skills as a Pinkerton detective. So he and Toby set out together.
Clues lead them to a castle in the desert, where a crazy millionaire is plotting a military coup, but he’s not the only suspect. Toby will also pick up a stray cat and a framed photo of Wallace Beery in a woman’s wig.
Buried Caesars is undemanding entertainment. I always resent Dashiell Hammett in real life (as opposed to his novels, which I love) because of his unrepentant Communism, but as usual, author Kaminsky steers clear of the most controversial stuff.
I am tall, and I gangle. I look like a loose-jointed, clumsy hundred and eighty. The man who takes a better look at the size of my wrists can make a more accurate guess. When I get up to two twelve I get nervous and hack it back on down to two oh five. As far as clumsiness and reflexes go, I have never had to use a flyswatter in my life. My combat expression is one of apologetic anxiety. I like them confident. My stance is mostly composed of elbows.
Another deal on a Travis McGee book by John D. MacDonald – and this is another important entry in the series, if only by virtue of its being the first.
I’ve told the story here before, because it amuses me. So I’ll just summarize it now. In 1963, Fawcett Publications, a major popular paperback house, hired a new author to create a detective series, replacing Richard S. Prather, their former top seller, who’d followed deeper pockets to greener pastures (to mix a metaphor). John D. MacDonald, the new kid, came up with a slightly reclusive hero, a beach bum living on a houseboat, called Dallas McGee (changed quickly to Travis McGee after the Kennedy assassination in Dallas, Texas). McGee called himself a “salvage expert,” but he didn’t salvage shipwrecks or cars. He recovered stolen objects or money, in return for half the value as a finder’s fee. The first book to appear, in 1964, was The Deep Blue Good-bye. (Every volume would incorporate a color in the title.)
McGee is persuaded by a friend, a dancer, to talk to another dancer named Cathy Kerr. Cathy is a country girl, a single mother, living hand to mouth. But she thinks she might have a right to a missing treasure. Her father, she explains, came home from the war with some secret package that he hid carefully, before being sent to prison for murder. He died before his release, but after a while his former cellmate Junior Allen showed up – a big, strong, dynamic type who swept Cathy off her feet and soon had her completely dominated. He also dug holes all over their farm. And one day he found something and vanished. Cathy is pretty sure he found her father’s stash, and she and her kid could sure use half of it, if McGee could get it back for her.
McGee doesn’t need work just now, but he’s impressed with Cathy’s dignity after all she’s been through. He traces Junior Allen’s footsteps, learning he was last seen on a yacht with a rich, beautiful woman. McGee finds the woman, Lois Atkinson, in her home, cast off by Allen and now a wreck of herself. Allen systematically broke her down and degraded her, and she has nearly starved herself to death in despair and self-disgust. McGee nurses her back to health, and at last begins a gentle affair with her, one which threatens to break through his prickly personal defenses.
But he still has Junior Allen to catch, and he formulates a devious plan to con the con man.
Unfortunately, as with all plans of battle, this one does not survive contact with the enemy. And Junior Allen is a formidable enemy indeed. The climax is one of the most harrowing and memorable in the series.
I read a review some time back that argued that The Deep Blue Good-bye is unworthy of the rest of the books, weighed down by the standard tropes of 1960s men’s fiction. I cannot agree. MacDonald certainly serves up the expected necessaries – plenty of violence and sex. But I think the original readers back in 1964 must have been puzzled by this book – there’s a lot of genuinely excellent prose here, and even the obligatory sex scenes are lyrical and revelatory of character, rather than sordid. (Though I do not approve of the sexual mores.)
Some of MacDonald’s prose – I would argue – is as good as that of his contemporaries Hemingway and O’Hara, only ensconced in far more interesting stories.
I drove back through late afternoon heat. The world darkened, turned to a poisonous green, and somebody pulled the chain. Water roared down the chute. Rose-colored lightning webbed down. Water bounced knee high, silver in the green premature dusk, and I found a place to pull off out of the way and let the fools gnash each other’s chrome and tinwork, fattening the body shops, busying the adjustors, clogging the circuit court calendars. The sign of the times is the imaginary whiplash injury.
Another notable element in this book was one moment – never to be repeated again that I can recall – when McGee hints at some trauma in his earlier life that left him perpetually commitment-averse.
To draw a line under it all, I highly enjoyed The Deep Blue Good-bye and recommend it. Not for kids.
