Non-fiction, Reviews

‘The Pirates Laffite,” by William C. Davis

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I love history because I love romance (by which I mean, not novels by Barbara Cartland, but romantic adventure – swashbuckling and gunplay in long-lost times and distant places). I picked up The Brothers Laffite: The Treacherous World of the Corsairs of the Gulf, by William C. Davis, to get some of the facts behind the legend of Jean Laffite and his brother Pierre. I knew what I was getting into, and was already aware of their sordid side, so I read it with interest.

Most of us know the Laffites as “the pirates who helped Andrew Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans.” And they did that, though they weren’t quite as noble as the movies make it seem. They were operating a smuggling operation out of Barataria Island, taking advantage of political instability and the difficulties the US government had enforcing its laws in the newly extended territories of the Louisiana Purchase. When the British fleet sailed in, they seem to have tried to play both sides against the middle (a recurring theme in their story), but the Americans got their hands on them first, so they helped them.

Like most criminals, they never actually got very rich, although they tried to live like it. They seem to have been rather courtly with their (white) prisoners, but at bottom their reality was pretty ignoble. They violated America’s ban on importing slaves through a clever manipulation of the law, first importing the miserable captives illegally, then turning them in as contraband and collecting the reward (Jim Bowie partnered with them in this scam). They were also “filibusters,” a term which originally referred to adventurers, mostly Americans, who set up bogus “revolutionary republics” in Spanish America and then issued letters of marque giving their acts of piracy a cloak of legality. But the Laffites added a characteristic twist of their own – they informed on their fellow filibusters to the Spanish, for pay.

There’s little heroism to find in this story, but what it does offer is a fascinating look into a formative but little-known era of American history. The book is very long, but half of it is footnotes.

Non-fiction, Religion

What Exactly Does the Bible Tell Us?

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According to Michael J. Kruger’s review of Professor Peter Enns’ new book, The Bible Tells Me So: Why Defending Scripture Has Made Us Unable to Read It, the Bible doesn’t tell us anywhere near what we might think it does. Kruger says he always notes the cover endorsements on a new book, and some gave him pause.

But perhaps most illuminating was the inside flap, where the publisher describes the book’s purpose: “In The Bible Tells Me So, Enns wants to do for the Bible what Rob Bell did for hell in Love Wins.”

Not until after I read the book in its entirety did I realize how accurate this comparison actually is. Of course, Bell’s book (also published by HarperOne) challenged a core historical tenet of the Christian faith, namely the belief that hell is real and people actually will go there. Christianity has just been wrong, Bell argues, and we finally need to be set free from the fear and oppression such a belief causes. Bell positions himself as the liberator of countless Christians who have suffered far too long under such a barbaric belief system.

Likewise, Enns is pushing back against another core historical tenet of the Christian faith: our belief about Scripture—what it is and what it does. The Bible isn’t doing what we think it’s doing, he argues. It doesn’t provide basically reliable historical accounts (instead, it’s often filled with myth and rewritten stories). It doesn’t provide consistent theological instruction (about, say, the character of God). And it doesn’t provide clear teaching about how to live (ethics, morality, Christian living). Although Christians have generally always believed these things about Scripture, Enns contends that scholars now know they simply aren’t true. And when Christians try to hold onto such beliefs, it only leads to fear, stress, anxiety, and infighting. Like Bell, Enns is positioned as a liberator able to set believers free from a Bible that just doesn’t work the way they want it to.

In the end, Kruger says Enns’ book wants it both ways. Discover God in the pages of Scripture while understanding most of what’s written there is imaginary and contradictory. Repent and believe in Christ on the cross, but the Bible’s morality is untenable and inapplicable to you.

Uncategorized

Storytelling & Christian Habits

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Mike Cosper, pastor of worship and arts at Sojourn Community Church in Louisville, Kentucky, has a new book on the stories we tell and our longing for truth. Here are some quotes of his ideas carried in Christianity Today.

“When people, against their better judgment, find themselves hooked on a show, we can trace the line back to find the hook in their imagination.”

“Our most perfect creations—our efforts at playing God— always stumble into the inherent problem of human weakness, creation’s unpredictability, and the impending threat of evil.”

“If we believe the Bible to be true, we must admit that there is more to this world than we perceive. Powers and persons that we can’t see or comprehend are at work, but somehow we intuit them. That intuition works itself out in our imaginations, and we tell stories that try to explain what we feel and comfort us from fear of the shadows.”

One of his chapters is entitled “Honey Boo Boo and the Weight of Glory.” That’s probably worth the price of the book alone.

Authors

Marilynne Robinson’s Humble America

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Aaron Belz offers this snapshot of Marilynne Robinson’s America, that land where the least of us can become great by the Lord’s grace:

As unpopular as it is, the Calvinist/Puritan doctrine of total depravity shares ground with the philosophes’ and founding fathers’ view of humans. Read Candide, a violent satire full of rape, bestiality, and murder designed to supplant European aristocratic classism with individualism and equality. Though Voltaire loathed organized religion and outright rejected Calvinism, he depicted the human race in a Pauline way, each misguided soul awaiting a humble revelation of its own worth. And remember that it was Thomas Hobbes, also a philosophe, who famously described human life as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”

(via Prufrock)

Authors, Fiction

Happy Birthday, Plum!

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One of our favorite authors, P.G. Wodehouse, was born on this day in 1881. In honor of the day, we link to McSweeney’s for a bit of Plum parody from Rhian Jones in “P. G. Wodehouse’s American Psycho.”

I had, on the morning in question, breakfasted as usual on the old bran muffin and decaffeinated herbal tea before completing a thousand physical jerks and setting off downtown to Pierce & Pierce. Whilst performing my ablutions I’d gained the fleeting impression of there being something distinctly odd about my reflection, as if I wasn’t quite there, but I put it down to the previous evening’s indulgences at the club and paid it no mind.

Beneath the old six-button double-breasted tailcoat, I was sporting shoes by Susan Warren Bennis Edwards and some frankly tremendous trousers, which allowed me to feel inordinately pleased with myself. This happy state of affairs had of course as much likelihood of lasting as the early grace enjoyed by Milton’s Satan. I realised as much upon entering the meeting room, where I beheld my chums engaged in conversation with Paul Owen, a chap whose company I must admit I struggle at the best of times to tolerate.

Authors

Needing a History to Properly Enjoy

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Patrick Kurp says he couldn’t have read Max Beerbohm at a young age, because he requires a personal depth or history to draw upon while reading. He notes, “In another small masterpiece from And Even Now, ‘The Golden Drugget,’ Beerbohm describes a rather drab, undistinguished inn near his home in Rapallo, overlooking the Gulf of Genoa, in Italy:

“By moonlight, too, it is negligible. Stars are rather unbecoming to it. But on a thoroughly dark night, when it is manifest as nothing but a strip of yellow light cast across the road from an ever-open door, great always is its magic for me. Is? I mean was. But then, I mean also will be. And so I cleave to the present tense–the nostalgic present, as grammarians might call it.”

Authors

How Lovecraft Has Influenced Too Many People

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Does Lovecraft still matter? A new annotated volume argues in favor of this old horror writer. Lovecraft, who died five months before his 47th birthday, also “shrewdly created an American pantheon of horror,” Klinger said of the hardcore New Englander. “He was the first writer of supernatural literature to understand the psychological consequences of the generations of Puritanism and the warping of the human psyche that resulted.”

I always get a chuckle out of accusations that Puritans twisted our civilization. Where would America or the world be without the Puritans of England and its New World colonies? Nowhere. They would be unrecognizable to us, if we could see such an alternate history.

Speaking of Alt-history, Lars’ Death’s Doors is tons of fun. You should read it. For real. (via Prufrock)

Bookselling, Publishing

New Catholic Literature Prize

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The new George W. Hunt Prize, sponsored by America magazine and Yale University’s Saint Thomas More Chapel, will recognize a variety of accomplished literature from Roman Catholics. The judges appear to be looking for good, expressly Catholic works by authors who lead moral lives.

“We’re trying to promote new creative thinking,” Beloin told The Washington Post’s Ron Charles. “Catholic theology is a very wide umbrella — or at least it’s supposed to be.” The Hunt Prize will be awarded to an author who is “trying to write things that are true — to bring a fresh language to theology, to bring real creativity to intellectual life and Catholic imagination.” (via Literary Saloon)

Non-fiction, Reviews

‘Lying With Memes,’ by Ori Pomerantz

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Ori Pomerantz is a personal friend of mine, and of this blog. So my endorsement of his new e-book, Lying With Memes: Quick, Concise, and Wrong, might be a little suspect (I got a free review copy, by the way, so you can factor that in). But I thought it was a valuable and entertaining little book.

Memes, those short messages pasted on art, like digital posters or vertical bumper stickers, are part of my life, and probably of yours too, if you’re reading this blog. If you use a service like Facebook, you’ve probably laughed or done an arm pump on seeing some, and promptly shared them. Sometimes you learn later that they’re false or misleading, and feel embarrassed. You’ve probably also been angered by some memes, and they may have even sparked arguments and lost you friends.

Ori’s short book is an explanation of how memes are constructed (with how-to instructions), and also a plea for more rational, decent memes. He provides a simple short course in logic (something much needed in our time) and admits that the information he gives may be used or misused. “I hope you will use this knowledge for good,” he writes, “to identify when people try to cheat you, rather than for evil, to cheat people yourself.”

A quick read and not expensive. Recommended.