From last June, my appearance on the “All Over the Place” podcast has just been posted on YouTube.
Eric and Jim used to be regulars on the old “Freedonia” blog, which was one of my favorite hangouts on the internet. It’s been gone for a while now, alas. It was nice to get together with them and have some facetime.
Some people can tell you their favorites easily. They seek them out often. Their favorite shirts are the ones they wear all the time. Their favorite meals they eat several times a year, or if that’s too expensive, at least annually for a birthday. I’m the type who doesn’t wear his favorite shirt so that it will last longer. I wear lesser shirts that can wear out. A favorite I’ll don for special occasions. It’s not the same for meals. I would eat favorite foods often, but I like many different things. Sure, that cake you made for my birthday was delicious. You made it last year too, and it was great. Maybe this year we make a different delicious cake.
So, like the speaker in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 52, I don’t frequent my treasures often “for blunting the fine point of seldom pleasure.”
“Blessèd are you whose worthiness gives scope,
Being had, to triumph, being lacked, to hope.”
What links do we have today?
Shelby Steele: Author Shelby Steele and filmmaker Eli Steele discuss their ideas on power, race, and America with City Journal. “We have wealth; now we want innocence—that’s where power lies at the moment. So much of our politics and culture really come out of this struggle with innocence,” the author states. By innocence, he means the moral justification for authority and the exercise of power.
Book towns: Richard George William Pitt Booth MBE (1938-2019) said libraries couldn’t keep up with today’s publishing industry, and thus “the future of the book is in book towns,” such as the one he inspired in Hay-on-Wye, Wales. Bloggers Sophie Pearce and Sophie Nadeau both visited and took photos for their travel sites.
Ugly Buildings: “There is nothing so obvious that it cannot be denied.”
Spam: “The nostalgic valances that stem from that salty, pink block of luncheon meat go way back for some of us, not least because it represents a very specific experience: what it was like growing up in America with immigrant parents.”
Poets: Irish poet Maurice Scully died last year, “a true original in the world of Irish poetry, quietly and patiently doing things his own way for several decades.”
Photo: Newman’s Drug Store in New York, 1976. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
I believe it’s common for Christian pastors and ministry leaders to say believers don’t need to learn more about the Bible as much as they need to apply what they already know. Maybe it’s only common in South. I’ve heard statements like this many times, and they’re good so far as they go. People who know Christ Jesus is risen and will come again in the flesh, who know to seek first his kingdom and not to worry about other concerns, who have passing familiarity with the fruit of the Spirit, may just need to apply what they know to their daily decisions.
But if that’s the case, why do these pastors continue to preach?
There are many reasons to continue to preach. Let me offer one reason that pushes back on notion that we don’t need more Bible knowledge, just more Bible application. Good preaching and teaching can make connections people haven’t, and maybe can’t, make for themselves. This is often the missing piece. It isn’t that church congregants aren’t familiar with biblical principles. Of course, they may not be, but familiarity doesn’t change the heart without reflection. We naturally take up unbiblical assumptions and patterns that work against the life God has called us to. Most of us don’t recognize what unbiblical beliefs we still hold, and we need godly preachers to show us how God’s truth applies to life. We need them to show us the patterns of a Christian mind.
Bible knowledge—in fact, straight, dry, matter-of-fact biblical knowledge—can make these connections if the Holy Spirit would graciously apply it to us, but often we need to hear a godly preacher or teacher reflect on a text with illustrations and applications for us. This is the way the body of Christ works. We aren’t copies of each other. Some of us don’t think well. We are hung up on ourselves. If we have passing familiarity with the Bible, we don’t understand how to get from what we know to an application like The Heidelberg Catechism’s first question.
What is thy only comfort in life and death?
That I am not my own, but belong—body and soul, both in life and death—unto my faithful Savior Jesus Christ; who, with His precious blood, hath fully satisfied for all my sins, and delivered me from all the power of the devil; and so preserves me that without the will of my heavenly Father, not a hair can fall from my head; yea, that all things must be subservient to my salvation, and therefore, by His Holy Spirit, He also assures me of eternal life, and makes me sincerely willing and ready, henceforth, to live unto Him.
What end of the year links do we have?
Poetry: A little on Thomas Gray’s other poems, not “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” but since you brought up Gray’s famous poem, here’s Dr. Iain McGilchrist reading it.
Charles Williams: C.S. Lewis had high praise for one of Williams’s novels. “A book sometimes crosses one’s path which is so like the sound of one’s native language in a strange country that it feels almost uncivil not to wave some kind of flag in answer,” said Lewis in his letter. “I have just read your Place of the Lion and it is to me one of the major literary events of my life—comparable to my first discovery of George MacDonald, G.K. Chesterton, or Wm. Morris.”
Williams and Lewis became friends shortly after this.
Christmas: On Jan. 2, 1927, Arthur Machen wrote about Christmas traditions of his youth. “It is still Christmas, let it be remembered, and Christmas customs have not ceased to be topics of the day. And I am reminded of a curious old Welsh custom, which lingered well into my young days, which, for all I know, may still linger. Christmas in the very old days was one of the feasts on which the parish spent all they could afford on lights. . . . to simple village eyes accustomed to a dim tallow to get to bed by, if so much illumination as that, the church on Christmas morning must have been a place of splendour and glory, a paradise on earth.”
Photo: andreas kretschmer on Unsplash
Heap on more wood! the wind is chill;
But let it whistle as it will,
We’ll keep our Christmas merry still.
Letters: J.R.R. Tolkien wrote and illustrated letters to his boys as Father Christmas. They were originally published in 1976, the third anniversary of his death. Here’s the start of the one from 1925, copied from BritishHeritage.com.
My dear boys,
I am dreadfully busy this year — it makes my hand more shaky than ever when I think of it — and not very rich. In fact, awful things have been happening, and some of the presents have got spoilt and I haven’t got the North Polar Bear to help me and I have had to move house just before Christmas, so you can imagine what a state everything is in, and you will see why I have a new address, and why I can only write one letter between you both.
Domestic and religious rite Gave honour to the holy night; On Christmas Eve the bells were rung; On Christmas Eve the mass was sung:
Historic Peace: Here’s a review of Tom Holland’s Pax, a history of the Roman Empire. It covers from the end of Nero to Hadrian, about 70 years. “He is the rare breed of serious historian who is fluent in the material, confident in his interpretations, and able to write with a novelistic flourish. Honestly, all 400+ pages of Pax are just so fun to read.“
Hadrian’s Wall: Speaking of Emperor Hadrian, the 200-year-old sycamore tree that stood to the side of Hadrian’s Wall between two hillocks was cut down in September by vandals, but the tree is not lost. “The National Trust confirmed that the seeds from the 200-year-old tree are expected to be able to grow new trees.” And the stump will likely grow again too.
The heir, with roses in his shoes, That night might village partner choose; The Lord, underogating, share The vulgar game of ‘post and pair’.
C.S. Lewis: A 1946 Christmas sermon for pagans by the author of The Abolition of Man. “When something is wrong, Lewis suggests, the post-Christian Englishperson points to the Government or the education system or to God or whatever as the problem. Rarely does a post-Christian carry around a sense that they might be at fault.”
England was merry England, when Old Christmas brought his sports again. ‘Twas Christmas broach’d the mightiest ale; ‘Twas Christmas told the merriest tale; A Christmas gambol oft could cheer The poor man’s heart through half the year.
The poetry in this post is taken from a Christmas section of Sir Walter Scott’s Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field, via the Scottish Poetry Library
Photo: “Child holding Christmas card” by Annie Spratt/ Unsplash
I was thinking about the Roman Republic and Empire lately, and, no, it wasn’t a leftover from the Tik-Tok curiosity the other week. It was for my job, working on a humanities course. The text described how Romans formed their government initially with two political bodies, one restricted to families with old Roman blood, the other for plebians. The plebians pushed for political opportunity and got laws in place that allowed them to stand for election to important offices. This was an important shift from appointing a man of good standing from within the ruling class to establishing an office with legal responsibilities for anyone who holds it. It elevated the law above the man.
Liberty within the law is an important democratic principle. If a governor is just the man in power, he rules in his own interest, and if he’s wise, he will build up the whole region, but if he’s interested only in his own leisure, he will consume what he can for as long as he can at the expense of the people. But if the governor is an office with legal responsibilities and accountabilities, then whoever is put in the office has a public role to fulfill. He is a public servant.
This idea is being threatened by those who wish to redefine us into categories with rights and privileges inherent to those categories. They are working on us to view each other as types, some with innate goodness, some with innate justification, and some with innate wickedness who can do no good apart from submission. It undermines our liberty within the law and argues for those with the right blood lines to take control.
On this subject, I heard a good conversation this week on Cairn University’s defragmenting podcast with the author of Reforming Criminal Justice. Attorney Matthew T. Martens explains how politics has divided terms and concepts incorrectly, and how justice is a matter of Christian love. As host Dr. Keith Plummer puts it, there’s something in this book to ruffle everyone’s feathers, but it sounds like a well-composed argument for respecting our fellow citizens within the responsibilities of the law. Look into the book here.
What else do we have today?
Farming: Here’s an outside list I think you’ll find interesting: 22 Books about Farming, Food and Agricultural Innovations
Ministry: The Gospel Coalition 2023 Book Awards has some good titles, including an encouraging book on “’dechurching,’ why they’re leaving, and how we might thoughtfully engage them.” The media paints its own picture of people leaving the church; the truth is far more complicated and hopeful.
For comparison, look over the 2023 books selected by For the Church.
Gingerbread: The OED offers an interesting etymology of the word “gingerbread,” which is a seasonal food I enjoy year-round.
Photo: Socks the Cat Standing Next to the Gingerbread Replica of the White House: 12/05/1993 (The U.S. National Archives, Public Domain)
Giving books at Christmas has been a long tradition with readers. In the early 19th century, plenty of books sold in the weeks preceding Christmas, but none of them were published for the season. Often people bought attractively bound collections of essays, poems, or classic novels that they knew they would enjoy.
In one of his books on the industry, publisher Joseph Shaylor writes, “Between 1820 and 1830 there came into existence a series of Annuals which caused quite a revolution in the sale of books for Christmas.” British bookman Rudolf Ackermann came up with the idea, publishing Forget-Me-Not: A Christmas and New Years Present for 1823. They were published every year through 1848, having a circulation of 18,000 at the height of its popularity.
Another publisher released Friendship’s Offering in 1824, which found its way to America some years later as knockoff copies. Apparently, many volumes were hacked this way in America, even lesser works rebound and distributed under new popular titles (which sounds like clickbait to me). Friendship’s Offering may have published some higher quality literature than most. For example, Thomas Babbington Macaulay’s poem “The Armada” was printed in the 1833 edition. It ran until 1844.
Engraver Charles Heath launched multiple annuals, “such as the Picturesque Annual, in a guinea volume which contained engravings from the best landscape painters of the day,” and The Book of Beauty, edited by Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington and Irish novelist in her own right. Her social influence drew attention from many literary stars and would-be stars, including Disreali.
“The rise of the Annuals appears to have diffused a fashion for artistic and elegant pursuits, and helped to evolve a taste for literature and the fine arts. They were the principal publications of the year, and much time and consideration were given to their production.”
Booksellers have tried to inspire an Easter season of book-giving to no avail.
All right. What else we got?
Literary Translation: Joel Miller talks to Russian translator Lisa C. Hayden about the art of moving a novel into another language.
When it comes to translation choices, there’s not always a “right” choice, just the choice that seems best. How does literary intuition play into your work?
I rely a lot on intuition. It particularly kicks in when I’m reading the manuscript out loud. I’m listening for lots of things but particularly want to feel that there’s an ease to the reading and a rhythm to the writing. I know when they feel right but rarely know how to explain why they feel right.
Secular Morals: Seth Mandel writes the former director of Human Rights Watch “is what you’d get if Soviet ‘whataboutism’ were a person, a golem manifested by the chantings of Oberlin freshmen. . . . HRW and Amnesty International both had no idea how to handle a post-9/11 world because terrorism didn’t really fit into their worldview.”
Writing: “True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,
As those move easiest who have learned to dance.”
Books: “Books are men of higher stature, And the only men that peak aloud for future times to hear.” – Elizabeth B. Browning, “Lady Geraldine’s Courtship”
In this news recently, we heard from students and presumably responsible adults tout the fictional premises such as supporting Hamas is a human rights cause and Israel has never had a claim to land in the Middle East. News outlets dedicated to printing “the truth” have printed and aired reports from Hamas-approved spokesmen who could pose as objective reporters by the simple fact that they were in American media. Today, a commentator said that people hold to this fiction is not really different from those who hold to some of the other political conspiracy theories we’ve heard from the last presidential election. The facts don’t support their belief, and yet they refuse to change their minds.
I’ve often said this was a matter of trust. Different people trust different sources and voices without much comparison to reality. Maybe a better answer is that they trust their own unexamined conclusions most of all.
From the first section of Pascal’s Pensées, his ninth and tenth thoughts are these:
When we wish to correct with advantage, and to show another that he errs, we must notice from what side he views the matter, for on that side it is usually true, and admit that truth to him, but reveal to him the side on which it is false. He is satisfied with that, for he sees that he was not mistaken, and that he only failed to see all sides. Now, no one is offended at not seeing everything; but one does not like to be mistaken, and that perhaps arises from the fact that man naturally cannot see everything, and that naturally he cannot err in the side he looks at, since the perceptions of our senses are always true.
People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come into the mind of others.
Even if what they’ve discovered is ridiculous, they will likely hold to it better than they will an answer we give them, because it’s their idea. They drew their own conclusion or believe they did. I’ve heard a couple pastors tells stories about one of their children coming to them with a remarkable truth they had discovered in the Word and repeat some of their own words back to them. That’s how it works. Most of us aren’t original thinkers, but we should all learn to think for ourselves.
Now, to our Features Desk for today’s links.
Lost in the Cosmos: “Percy’s philosophy and storytelling both aim at restoring our ability to see ourselves rightly and to make the ineffable curiousness of our consciousness visible once more. He ends this peculiar book with a pair of interconnected science fiction stories—both brief choose-your-own adventures with tragicomic twists. In these tales, he confronts readers with the possibility that the help we really need has already arrived.”
Moral Imagination: In 1997, Justice Scalia said that while remembering the Holocaust is important, “you will have missed the most frightening aspect of it all, if you do not appreciate that it happened in one of the most educated, most progressive, most cultured countries in the world.”
C.S. Lewis: In 1952, C.S. Lewis discovered there was a woman at the Court Stairs Hotel who claimed to be his wife.
Welcome to the faith: Ayaan Hirsi Ali finds Christianity more compelling than secular humanism. “That is why I no longer consider myself a Muslim apostate, but a lapsed atheist.”
Clive James’s book of essays called Cultural Amnesia offers a take on a German medieval scholar who wrote influentially on literature and Western civilization. As the Nazi party began to gain power, Ernst Robert Curtius warned of danger to come, but when it did come, Curtius retreated into his scholarly study and said no more. He didn’t directly support the Nazis, but with his silence, one has to wonder where his loyalties settled.
James says many German and French intellectuals prior to WWII wanted to believe they could forge wonderful, cultural bonds high above the dirty politics of their day. He calls this a “wishful, wistful thought.”
Most of our wishful thinking is about what we love. . . . But if we are to learn anything from catastrophe, it is wise to remember what some of the men who shared our passions once forgot. Curtius forgot that continuity is not in itself an inspiration for culture, merely a description of it.
Curtius thought he was doing his humble part to preserve civilization, and it wasn’t worthless work, but the hard chore of cultural preservation was being accomplished by the men in bombers, parachutes, and fatigues. It wasn’t the time to discern the patterns of principles in the past; it was the time to fight for the morals they already had.
Curtius the universal scholar is left looking depressingly restricted, and humanism is left with its besetting weakness on display—the temptation it carries within it to reduce the real world to a fantasy even while presuming to comprehend everything that the world creates.
Clive James, Cultural Amnesia, p. 159
It’s been another week, hasn’t it? Here are some links to consider.
Legacy Press: Are there any good journalists working for the biggest names in news? “These seven failures from the past few weeks should dispel any benefit of the doubt you have left for the corporate media’s honesty.“
Russia: A new book exposes a movement I wish American opinionmakers understood. “Russia is systematically and deliberately instilling in its children hatred, vengefulness, and the desire to kill.“
Poetry: William Cowper said, “Despair made amusements necessary, and I found poetry the most agreeable amusement.”
Dostoevsky: John Stamps praises the Michael R. Katz translation of The Brothers Karamazov, calling it thrilling and lively. Katz doesn’t attempt a literal translation but adapts the work to English ears by simplifying the naming convention, cutting back some repetition, and using footnotes instead of endnotes.
Woodlands: Two forest lovers, ages 10 and 8, “have hiked every trail in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park”—900 miles of hiking.
Photo by David Hawkes on Unsplash
Here’s a Thoroughly Professional Video showing a couple of my antique books. They aren’t commercially valuable, but they’re pretty and have the humanistic value of a great books. On the left is the Complete Works of Shakespeare, a Walter J. Black edition, which I think means it’s cheap. I say it’s leather bound, but I’m sure it’s imitation leather. On the right is the Works of Edmund Spenser, an 1895 MacMillan edition.
It’s too bad I don’t have something really nice to show you, but I may record more physical books to better reveal their tangible value, especially if I can up my A/V quality.
Inklings: “The Ellison Institute of Technology (EIT) has purchased the historic Eagle and Child pub on St Giles’ from St John’s College, with plans to refurbish and reopen the space to the public.”
Poetry: From Philip Larkin
“For nations vague as weed,
For nomads among stones,
Small-statured cross-faced tribes
And cobble-close families
In mill-towns on dark mornings
Life is slow dying.”
Horror: Mike Duran has written on horror stories and how they fit with a Christian worldview.
Also, some of the story of the man who portrayed Father Damien Karras in The Exorcist.
(Photo: “The Eagle and Child,” Hofendorf/ Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 4.0)
“Dangerosa Jones” at the Regular Rules on Substack has posted a highly flattering review of King of Rogaland:
This combination of history and myth produces a ripping yarn. There is no other way to put it. Father Ailill and Erling are by no means perfect. They are holy warriors only in the most flawed and human of ways — this makes them interesting, multi-dimensional, and armed, a compelling combination. I do not like the popular form taken by current fantasy novels, most of the time, as I find the characters shallow and the conflicts contrived. These books are the exception that proves the rule.
Read it all here.
