Religion

Most Influential Pastor?

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What pastor has most influenced your life?

I take this question from a recent Mortification of Spin podcast. I’d love to read your answer to it, and I think it would be remarkable if we can get good, 21st-century data on this influence. Wouldn’t it be easy to suppose your favorite pastor or minister has most influenced you when in fact it was someone else, someone whose teaching has defined your life more than you recognize? Someone like your youth pastor so many years ago or the minister at the church you visited for a couple years during your stint in Duluth.

To answer the question, my most influencing pastor has to be the founding pastor of the church I’ve been a member of virtually all of my adult life. I can’t quote many of the things he’s said, but I think many of his expressly taught conclusions as well as his approach to Scripture and manner of handling doctrine have shaped me more than anyone else could have.

What about you?

Image by Helge Leirdal from Pixabay

Fiction, Reviews

‘Game of Snipers,’ by Stephen Hunter

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The West cannot be destroyed through numbers; it must be destroyed through its imagination.

You know what you’re getting when you start one of Stephen Hunter’s Bob Lee Swagger novels. It’s not realism (though a fair amount of technical detail may be involved). A Bob Lee Swagger novel is transparent bunkum, like the imitative title of this book. But the entertainment value for money is 100 per cent.

Game of Snipers opens with old Bob Lee, relaxing on the front porch of his ranch house, getting visit from Mrs. Janet McDowell, widow and gold star mother. Her only son, she tells him, was killed in the Middle East by a legendary Al Quaida killer known as “Juba the Sniper.” Since then she has made it her obsession to learn all she can about the man. She has traveled to the Middle East and been beaten and raped. She even converted to Islam (this did not please me), to “get inside his head.” She thinks she knows where the man is hiding, but she’s worn out her welcome with the CIA and the military. Could Bob Lee use his contacts to get her a hearing, in the hope that he can be stopped at last?

Bob Lee goes to his friends in Mossad, and (improbably) is invited along on a raid on Juba’s hiding place. The raid misses Juba himself, but Bob Lee, with his sniper’s eye, notices a clue that tells him Juba is planning a job in the United States – a high-profile assassination at the distance of a mile.

He takes this information to the FBI. They pull his old friend Nick Memphis (improbably) out of retirement to coordinate a desperate effort to learn the place, the time, and the target. Meanwhile we follow Juba himself – fanatical, concentrated, and not without honor, as he prepares an act of terror that might very well tear the United States apart.

As with all Bob Lee Swagger novels, I didn’t believe it for a minute, but it was a fun ride. Stephen Hunter combines the ability to expertly raise the plot stakes with a mastery of character and dialogue. A fun ride is even better in the company of old Bob the Nailer.

Highly recommended. Mild cautions for language.

Authors, Non-fiction

The True Crime book Harper Lee never finished

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Author Casey Cep writes about a true crime story Harper Lee could not complete. “Harper Lee always said that she was ‘intrigued with crime.’ She grew up surrounded by stacks of the magazine True Detective Mysteries, cut her teeth on Sherlock Holmes, watched trials from the balcony of the local courthouse as a kid, and studied criminal law at the University of Alabama.”

The story of Reverend Willie Maxwell, a man accused but not convicted of murdering and collecting death benefits from five family members, was as compelling as any story Lee had grown up with. But she could not pull it together. Perhaps the characters were too much larger than life.

Part of why true crime stories are so appealing is that they force us to confront the limits of what can be known, and eliding those limits, whether by fabricating motives or means or inventing someone’s inner life, doesn’t just cross the boundary between fiction and nonfiction; it transgresses something deeper.

Non-fiction, Religion

For His Lovingkindness Endures Forever

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A great way to remember the Lord’s work in your life is to write down your prayers and experiences. My pastor has recommended a mementos box to remind you of the stories of God’s faithfulness. Others have recommended keep a diary. I know a ministry leader who has filled up dozens of journals with daily devotions, prayers, and their answers.

World News Group reports on a great-grandmother, Ernesta Wood, who has been writing letters for many years.

Wood’s home displays photos of her 53 descendants, nearly all Christians. Once a week for the past 16 years, she has sent them letters—777 in all, as of July 1—filled with stories. Some are dramatic: Her blind grandmother miraculously saw Wood’s grandfather minutes before he died. Other stories cultivate a sense of God’s presence in less dramatic moments: Once, her parents’ pet birds escaped but returned to their cage before dark, just as her mother had prayed.

Authors, Religion

Promises Not Made

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I’ve seen many critical comments about “purity culture” this year from strangers on the Internet. I didn’t know exactly what they were referring to, but that’s normal when you come into the middle of someone’s conversation, which is what social media allows you to do all day, every day. And you can’t bring a pot of coffee with you. Last week such conversations couldn’t be avoided as everyone on my side of the Internet cafe took up talking about the announced divorce and apostasy of the author of a 1990s bestselling book, I Kissed Dating Goodbye.

The criticism has been as open-ended as the label. I think much of what I saw was from people who were pushing back appropriately on a shame-based rationale they were taught, but many critics seemed to be attacking biblical sexual ethics as a whole. The latter is ridiculous, but I’d like to write about the former for a minute.

Continue reading Promises Not Made →
Fiction, Reviews

‘Dead Eye,’ by Mark Greaney

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Moving along through Mark Greaney’s implausible but enjoyable The Gray Man series, we come to Dead Eye. I have to say that, though the temptation to fall into tropes is probably strong, author Greaney manages to keep the concept fresh.

The concept, in case you missed previous reviews, is this: Court Gentry is the world’s greatest assassin. Former military, former CIA, he was suddenly targeted for death by his former employers, he doesn’t know why. Now he lives as a professional hit man, but he only kills people he considers genuinely evil. He is totally isolated, with no family, no living friends, no fixed address.

Like all action heroes, Court is effectively infallible, always one step ahead of his enemies, capable of sustaining injuries that would stop a lesser man. But as Dead Eye begins, he makes a mistake. He’d be dead because of it except for the intervention of an unexpected ally – a member of the hit squad sent to kill him, who suddenly changes sides. Court is grateful but skeptical. The guy seems a little off.

His savior, Russell Whitlock (code name Dead Eye) is almost Court’s clone. He moves like him, thinks like him, even resembles him physically. And he’s been a student of Court’s career. He wants to team up. Together, he says, they’ll be unstoppable.

But that’s not what Whitlock really wants. His true plan is devious and ruthless. Court rushes through northern Europe to catch and stop him, forming an uneasy alliance with a female Mossad analyst, until the Gray Man and Dead Eye meet in one final showdown.

Dead Eye was, like all the Gray Man books, completely preposterous. But highly readable (in spite of some slips in diction). I highly recommend Dead Eye, if you don’t mind some bad language and lots of violence.

Uncategorized

On the Benefits of Slowing Down

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Jason Duesing talks about taking the time to stare at a painting, Caravaggio’s “Saint John the Baptist in the Wilderness” and what slowing down could mean for anyone.

https://jgduesing.com/the-christian-art-and-rediscovering-john-the-baptist/
Music

‘Les Bicyclettes de Belsize’

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You could probably tell that my birthday yesterday left me a little melancholy. I pursued music on YouTube to soothe my savage breast, and came on a version of “Les Bicyclettes de Belsize” sung in 1969 by the French singer Mireille Matheiu. I’ve always loved the song, which first appeared in my college years, but I’d never heard this singer before. She’s sort of a successor to Edith Piaf, and her performance kind of blew me away.

According to Wikipedia, Miss Mathieu is a major star in France. She is a devout Roman Catholic (though famously superstitious) and politically conservative. She has, regrettably, ties to Vladimir Putin in recent years.

The song comes from a 1968 short film directed by Douglas Hickox. In spite of the name, it’s an English film, not French. Nor does London’s Belsize Park appear anywhere in it.

Beauty doesn’t have to make sense.

Uncategorized

‘This very day was Cassius born…’

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Photo credit: Sophie Elvis @thetechnomaid

In case you missed the parades and fireworks, today is my birthday. I won’t tell you how old I am, for online security reasons. Let’s just say I don’t think I can get away with calling myself middle-aged anymore.

It’s a challenge to write about one’s birthday without sounding self-pitying — probably because I am pitying myself to a degree. Birthdays, especially when one is alone, are mostly opportunities for ruthless self-examination. And those are seldom occasions for merriment.

My brother and his wife bought me lunch the other day. I took myself out for lunch today. I thought about buying a little cake, but I’d already sabotaged my diet pretty ruthlessly. And events beyond my control are coming up that promise to subvert it even more.

What are we to do? Longevity is its own punishment.

And then I exchange emails with a friend who happens to have the very same birthday. And he tells me he highlighted his day by scheduling a biopsy.

Perspective. Ah, well. Thanks to everyone who sent greetings on Facebook. I do appreciate them.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Ballistic,’ by Mark Greaney

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If you’re looking for realism, Mark Greaney’s The Gray Man series is probably not for you. If you’re looking for pulse-pounding action entertainment, you could hardly do better.

Years ago, Eddie Gamboa went far beyond the second mile in Southeast Asia, to save the life of CIA operative Court Gentry. Later on, Eddie returned to his native Mexico, where he became a drug enforcement officer, one of the few honest ones trying to stop the cartels. Not surprisingly, that got him killed, along with most of his team.

As Ballistic begins, Court, now “The Gray Man,” international assassin without a country, is passing through Mexico, on the run after a pretty hairy mission. He stops by Eddie’s grave to pay his respects, and accidentally meets his widow. She insists he must come with her and the family to a memorial service in Puerto Vallarta the next day. But the service turns into a bloodbath when cartel gunmen start firing on the crowd. Court is able to save most of the family and get them away, but now he has two big problems – he has innocent people to protect with limited resources – and his picture was taken and published, meaning his many enemies around the world know where to find him.

The situation looks impossible, but impossible is what Court is good at.

I was about three-quarters of the way through Ballistic when I realized what it was. It’s A Fistful of Dollars.

Which is Yojimbo. Which is Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest.

The plot is a hardy perennial – and as far as I’m concerned, Ballistic is as effective a retelling as any.

This book has an interesting and somewhat strange subplot involving religion. Court is puzzled but attracted by the Catholic faith of his charges, especially that of Eddie’s beautiful sister. A very odd scene involves her explaining her faith to him in a very winsome way – but that testimony leads into to a sex scene, which was a little weird.

Nevertheless, I thought Ballistic worked very well. Cautions for language, violence, and mild sex.