“Christ’s death on the cross offered healing to billions over the past 2,000 years—and it also inaugurated a different kind of storytelling. The hero no longer had to be a Hercules whose strength moved huge stones. He could be one who gave his life for another—and then God would roll away the stone. “
World News Group’s Marvin Olasky wonders how many stories have been inspired by the life of Christ. I’d say, not so many that thousands more wouldn’t be welcome.
As I’ve been working my way through Paul Gitsham’s DCI Warren Jones series, I’ve commented that Inspector Jones distinguishes himself from other series detectives in (seemingly) having no particular skeletons in his closet. No old traumas, or addictions, or PTSD, which seem to be obligatory for the genre.
How wrong I was. Plenty of skeletons are revealed in Silent As the Grave, in which all Jones’ chickens seem to come home to roost at once.
An elderly man is found stabbed to death in a park. The crime seems unremarkable, except for the unusual dearth of clues, or a possible motive. The man had been a simple gardener, without known enemies.
Then Jones is approached by a man he does not know, but knows about. The man was his own predecessor in his present job – a cop gone bad, disgraced and facing trial. He says the gardener was murdered at the orders of a crime lord recently released from prison, now out for revenge. There will be more murders, he says. He’ll help Jones solve the case, in return for help in clearing himself.
Jones scoffs. The man is obviously trying to manipulate him, for his own benefit. Then the man plays his trump card – Jones’s father was innocent, he says, and he can help him prove it.
This is world-shattering. Jones’s father, we learn, was a policeman who committed suicide – Jones himself, a teenager at the time, found the body. His father was discovered to have been corrupt, and apparently killed himself out of shame.
Could that have been a mistake? Jones has spent most of his life hating his own father. Has he been doing him an injustice? Or is his informant just playing him cynically, for his own advantage?
Finding the answer will bring Jones himself, as well has his family, into mortal danger before a complex mystery is finally unraveled. The climax of the story is unexpected and shocking.
This one was somewhat more intense than I expected. The story still moves a little slowly, as with all the books in the series, but all in all it was pretty satisfying. Minimal cautions for language and mature subject matter.
As previously mentioned, I will be lecturing in the Barefoot Student Union Building, Union University, Jackson, Tennessee, Tuesday at 7:00 p.m. My subject will be, “When Christianity Came to the Vikings.”
More information here, if you’re in the neighborhood.
Forty-five years ago a murderous squad of tornadoes mobbed thirteen states within eighteen hours, killing 315 people and injuring 6,000 more.
When catastrophes happen, someone will likely attribute it to God’s judgment on our country at large or the damaged region in particular, saying the sin of those people had become so great that God had to do wipe them out with a grand outpouring of his wrath. That’s misguided but not entirely inaccurate. We should understand natural disasters as part of God’s judgment on our people or our neighbors. Our sin deserves it. For God to remind us of his terrible wrath, which will not ignore anyone, is profoundly merciful.
But a catastrophe isn’t only judgment. It’s mercy for some who have been living in bondage to other’s people sinful control. It’s opportunity for some to trust him, having been unshackled from their self-reliance or material ties. It’s a challenge to some to love their neighbors, to get out of their isolation and rebuild what they can. It’s providential direction for some, who are being forced to move to a new city and begin a new life.
We are too narrow-minded when attributing divine motives to particular events. God’s mind is infinite. His motives for orchestrating any event could be as many as the number of people involved. They could be plans we would understand if we knew them; they could be plans we don’t want to hear. No matter what his reasons, God bids us to trust him.
Great troubles come when we least expect them. We may be at peace in a happy home. At an hour when we think that all is calm, without warning — the darling child whom we love so much, lies dead in our arms! The friend we trusted, and who we thought would never fail us — proves false! The hopescherished for years — wither in our hands, like flowers when the frost comes!
The storms of life are nearly all sudden surprises. They do not hang out danger-signals days before, to warn us. The only way to be ready for them — is to have Jesus with us in our boat.
from J. R. Miller, Daily Bible Readings in the Life of Christ (1890)
It’s pretty much all Vikings, all the time for me this week. A family member sent me a link to the following video, about a brand new Viking exhibition in Oslo:
You can read more about the exhibition in this article from medieval.eu.
Due to unforeseen reparations being carried out at the Museum of Cultural History in Oslo, the opening of a new Viking exhibition has been rescheduled. End of March – hopefully – visitors will be able to enjoy a bonanza of the more spectacular archaeological finds from the last ten years; add to this a selection of some of the highlights from an earlier time, and visitors may expect an enjoyable tour of the Norwegian Viking past. Later in 2025, when the new museum opens at Bygdøy, the treasures will be transferred there, supplementing the finds from Oseberg, Gokstad, and Tune. Perhaps finds from the newly discovered Viking boat in Østfold – as yet not excavated – will join the older treasures
Lots of cool stuff here. I’m pleased that the video maker, who rejoices in the extremely Norwegian name, Bjorn Andreas Bull-Hansen, is not entirely convinced that women warriors existed, like me. I think I’ve been in this museum, if it’s the one I’m thinking of.
A grain of salt may be needed here. Research from this decade is showing 80 percent of millennials are reading books in one format or another. They prefer print but also enjoy ebooks and audiobooks. This generation (born b/w 1981 and 1996) use public libraries more than any other generation but also tend to buy the books they read. Keep these stats in mind when you see the next slate of research on millennial reading habits.
INFOGRAPHIC: The Surprising Reading Habits of Millennials
Hey, millennial, tell us how you read. Do you prefer books, use libraries, and read much or only a bit?
Photo by Fabiola Peñalba on Unsplash
The voluntary nature of the Scandinavian conversion – in Denmark and Sweden at least – seems to have led to communities feeling that they did not need to significantly alter their artistic communication or abandon their traditional culture in order to be good Christians.
C. S. Lewis writes somewhere that one of the best methods of evangelism would be for Christians, not to produce more “Christian” work, but to simply do better work as Christians. From my perspective as an amateur historian, I would say that Martyn and Hannah Whittock (father and daughter) have produced superior historical work in producing The Vikings: From Odin to Christ, published by Lion Books, a Christian publisher.
It’s weird for a guy like me, a promoter of the historical value of the Icelandic sagas, to say, but there’s good reason to believe that the story of the conversion of the Vikings, as presented in the sagas, may be misleading. The Whittocks point out – and somehow I’d missed this – that there is little report of violence in the conversions of Denmark and Sweden. Only in Norway, where saga writers had political motivation to glamorize Olaf Haraldsson as Norway’s national hero and saint, do we have stories of torture and threats of death.
It may be true that Olaf was a bloody-handed tyrant (I believe that). But his work may not have been as influential in the conversion as the sagas suggest. There’s good reason to think that the earlier Christian king, Haakon the Good, who gets short shrift in the sagas, may have been a far more effective missionary than history remembers.
This harmonizes with things I’ve been saying in my lectures for some time. Now, having read the Whittocks’ book, I have more ammunition for those arguments.
I’m also delighted that the Whittocks have very clearly read Bishop Fridtjof Birkeli’s untranslated book, Tolf Vintrer Hadde Kristendommen Vært i Norge (which Anders Winroth, for all his expertise, overlooks entirely in his book on the conversion of Scandinavia). I’m delighted that Birkeli’s important ideas, largely unknown to English readers till now, are being conveyed through this book.
The Vikings: From Odin to Christ covers a lot more than the conversion of Norway, of course. We start with a historical overview, then examine each Scandinavian country in turn, followed by various regions that the Vikings colonized. I have a couple minor quibbles – at one point they suggest St. Olaf’s opposition was motivated by heathenry, but they correct that later on.
I haven’t found a history book a page-turner in a long time. The Vikings: From Odin to Christ kept me turning the pages. I recommend it highly.
My reading pace is a little slow just now. Had some translation to do on Monday, and now I’m working hard on preparing for my lecture at Union University in TN next Tuesday.
So here’s some Viking news, courtesy of HisTecho:
While Norwegian archeologists in Trondheim’s city, excavated the market area, they stumbled upon a curious discovery.
It was 13 feet long, and while the wood had been destroyed over time, evidence such as nails and rusty lumps indicated that it was a boat. The boat dates from the 7th to the 10th century, a time when Vikings wandered the seas, raided and explored, according to the initial analysis.
Inside the boat, burial goods such as bronze, a piece of a spoon, and a key to a small box were discovered, alongside 2 long bones.
The DNA testing is yet to prove if the bones are human or provide any details that might bring more information about the person possibly buried in the boat.
The article indicates that scholars are surprised by the age of the find, but I don’t find it surprising that there would be human habitation, and burials, in Trondheim before the turn of the millennium. Trondheim didn’t become really important until Olaf Trygvesson’s time (around 1000), but we’re talking about arable land in a soil-poor country. Trondheim is a nice spot, with a good port. I’d be surprised if somebody wasn’t living there.
If you’d like to explore the Book of Kells, Ireland’s greatest medieval work of art (one the Vikings somehow missed), the entire work has now been made available online in digital form, thanks to the Trinity College Library, here.
Hat tip to Open Culture, where I got the link.
If you like long novels about families slouching toward their doom, marriage as a “life catastrophe,” and reconciliations that come fifty-years late if at all, then you may already know that writer and director Ingmar Bergman turned to novels at one point in his life to overcome the “perfectionist restriction” he felt in his film work.
He wrote the three autobiographical novels [following his autobiography] in a remarkable creative rush between the ages of seventy-three and seventy-eight. The Best Intentions, a dramatization of his parents’ improbable courtship and troubled marriage that’s punctuated by conversations (real or imagined) with Erik and Karin (referred to in the novel by the pseudonyms “Anna” and “Henrik”) in their old age, came out in 1991; Sunday’s Children, which focuses on a precarious moment in the young Ingmar’s relationship with his forbidding father, in 1993; and Private Confessions, a series of six brief stories, each featuring his mother at a crucial moment in her emotional and spiritual life, in 1996.*