Philip Jenkins describes the climate of the Great Awakening and how bitter cold and other calamities provoked people to cry out to God.
Clearly, the apocalyptic forces were running wild – famine, plague, insurrection, and war. What a proclamation of human powerlessness in the face of unknown powers, and the futility of all human efforts! How could anyone doubt that Judgment was near, or that revival was the only solution?
All satire exists in the gap between what ought to be and what is, and therefore remains a powerful skewer against the shortcomings of an all-too-human church. “The hard and sordid things of life are too hard and too sordid and too cruel to touch them year after year without some mitigating influence, some kindly veil to draw over them,” Mark Twain wrote in a 1905 New York Times essay.
Laura Turner reviews a book on religious satire, attempting to tie together the truth and the self-righteous.
http://blogs.ancientfaith.com/joeljmiller/time-to-panic/?utm_content=buffer0edce&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer
Speaking of scary, Stephen King said the new movie The Witch scared the hell out of him. From what I’ve read, I think it would do the same for me, but then I don’t take to horror movies well. Josh Larsen says Christians may find some good themes in that story. “For Christian horror-movie fans, it functions as a provocative consideration of the ways religious extremists may be particularly susceptible to the devil’s whims.”
Eco was funny and smart and he made all of us feel funnier and smarter just by reading him. That’s a trait, a sharing of the wealth, we authors should aspire to. An abundance of ideas, after all, means there’s enough of them for everyone.
Glen David Gold writes about interviewing Umberto Eco, a James Bond expert among other things.
Is the literary mash-up a passing fad or a fertile new genre? The art of mashing up involves putting together two completely incongruous genres, only to discover that something in the high-cultural original matches the low material with which it is mixed. In Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
the Bennet girls prepare themselves for encounters with the undead just as enthusiastically as they prepare themselves for husband-hunting in the original.
The Guardian’s John Mullan suggests several ideas, like this mashup of Paradise Lost and X-Men.
John Milton was surely a super-hero bard avant la lettre. All those angels tumbling from heaven’s crystal battlements, flying across the universe to visit Earth. Think of the war in heaven, where the fallen angels pit “their engines and their balls / Of missive ruin” against the less well-armed Cherubim. It could surely have profited from the involvement of Wolverine and Gambit, while Satan’s concordat with Magneto would challenge the Archangel Michael, even with his sword that “felled / Squadrons at once, with huge two-handed sway”.
Democracy can lose its soul when it “exaggerates” its principles, when it forgets the legitimate place of hierarchy, authority, and truth within their own spheres. As Dominique Schnapper argues in a brilliant new study inspired by Montesquieu’s insight (The Democratic Spirit of Law), in an “extreme democracy” equality risks becoming indiscriminate egalitarianism, the defense of novelty risks giving rise to the “temptation of the unlimited,” and healthy skepticism risks decaying into “absolute relativism.” As another contemporary French thinker, Pierre Manent, has put it, “To love democracy well it is necessary to love it moderately.”
This is what we should mean if we say we want to get back to a better America, rejecting hubris and restoring healthy boundaries in our civilization. People in the old days were not sinless, but they did understand the morality that builds and maintains a nation a little better than perhaps we do today. How do we get back there? It is partly by politics, but politics only as an outgrowth of godly community, by healthy church life, and by following the Good Shepherd wherever he goes.
My ongoing attempt to shift my recreational reading to older novels is not, I must admit, going as well as I hoped. I’ve discovered some gems, it’s true – Frank H. Spearman’s westerns, E. Phillips Oppenheim’s spy stories. But my attempts to acquire a taste for Golden Age mysteries seems fruitless. Aside from Dorothy Sayers, I honestly can’t think of a Golden Age mystery novelist I care much for. Robin Forsythe did not change that judgment.
Robin Forsythe was an English civil servant who went to prison for a while for fraud, and came out determined to make his living writing mysteries. He did all right too, for the remainder of his short life.
His fictional detective was Tony “Algernon” Vereker (I never did figure out quite how to pronounce that last name). Vereker is a London artist of independent means. In Missing or Murdered, the first novel in the series, his old friend, Lord Bygrave, a government minister, disappears. Vereker attaches himself to the investigation (the Scotland Yard detective in charge is oddly untroubled by the intrusion). He follows the detective around and compares notes with him frequently. They make the investigation a sort of competition. Eventually the work out what happened to Lord Bygrave and who is responsible.
I suppose my tastes have been corrupted by postmodern culture, but I had trouble enjoying Missing or Murdered. Both Dorothy Sayers and Charles Williams liked Forsythe’s work, but for my money they both leave him in the dust. There’s lots of talking in the book, with some rather forced wit, and everything is leisured and decent, and it bored me silly. Couldn’t wait for the thing to be done with.
But it’s fine if you like this sort of thing.
Umberto Eco, writing in 2005, about religion’s role in our age.
Human beings are religious animals. It is psychologically very hard to go through life without the justification, and the hope, provided by religion. You can see this in the positivist scientists of the 19th century.
They insisted that they were describing the universe in rigorously materialistic terms – yet at night they attended seances and tried to summon up the spirits of the dead. Even today, I frequently meet scientists who, outside their own narrow discipline, are superstitious – to such an extent that it sometimes seems to me that to be a rigorous unbeliever today, you have to be a philosopher. Or perhaps a priest. . . .
G K Chesterton is often credited with observing: “When a man ceases to believe in God, he doesn’t believe in nothing. He believes in anything.” Whoever said it – he was right. We are supposed to live in a sceptical age. In fact, we live in an age of outrageous credulity.
Author Umberto Eco has died. A fascinating author of complicated work, Eco said he was interested in the Middle Ages, because it “is exactly the opposite of the way people imagine it. To me, they were not the Dark Ages. They were a luminous time, the fertile soil out of which would spring the Renaissance.”
As a teenager. Eco worked on comics books.
“I was a perfectionist and wanted to make them look as though they had been printed, so I wrote them in capital letters and made up title pages, summaries, illustrations,” he told The Paris Review in 1988. “It was so tiring that I never finished any of them. I was at that time a great writer of unaccomplished masterpieces.”
As an adult, he gave himself over to novel writing. The Guardian describes his first hit like this.
Eco’s first, landmark novel, The Name of the Rose, was published in 1980. An artful reworking of Conan Doyle, with Sherlock Holmes transplanted to 14th-century Italy, the book’s baggage of arcane erudition was designed to flatter the average reader’s intelligence. In reality, Eco’s medieval whodunnit was upmarket Arthur Hailey with ingenious modernist fripperies. Subsequently translated into 30 languages, it sold more than 10m copies worldwide, and was made into a film starring Sean Connery.
Take a look at all of Eco’s books
For months, the news on Twitter has been that they don’t know how to monetize their platform of 232 million users. We’ve seen some advertising and promoted messages, but apparently they don’t make enough money. Ian Schafer suggests Twitter and its many critics don’t know what kind of company it actually is.
Maybe Twitter is deciding that it’s identify is to censor in the name of social justice.
For years, social media companies have been besieged by a new wave of progressive advocacy groups who demand restrictions on political speech under the guise of preventing “online abuse.” These are the groups who now make up Twitter’s dystopianly-named “Trust and Safety Council.”
That council has acted within the last few hours to suspend popular conservative tweeter Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain). Before this, they were slowing down the use or discovery of certain hashtags, as described below.
Naive I guess, but I didn’t know Twitter manipulated hashtags & trends like this #FreeStacy https://t.co/SzDrroQW1l pic.twitter.com/xsrxsGyb6T
— LauraB in MN (@LauraBxd) February 20, 2016
Breitbart.com argues for organization for all of us.
Conservatives and cultural libertarians are the most likely constituency to rise up, as they are the ones being predominantly targeted, but this is really a battle that should be taken up by all social media users. The Twitters and Facebooks of the world are not like the media empires of old; they are entirely reliant on users. Properly organised, users could hold them to account, in a way that would make investors sit up and listen — but they are not yet properly organised.