Phil Cooke has rounded up some serious Christian leaders and teachers to praise the movie based on the story of Noah in Genesis. Watch this video and tell me what you think.
Harry Hole novels by Jo Nesbo
I’ve been meaning to post a very short review of three of Jo Nesbø’s Harry Hole mysteries. There’s a whole list of books in the series, but the trilogy of The Redbreast, Nemesis, and The Devil’s Star form a self-contained unit within it, and make an interesting read in themselves. I reviewed Redbreast sometime back, and read The Devil’s Star without reviewing it. Recently I read Nemesis (out of order), and gained a new appreciation.
Nesbø’s Oslo police detective character, Harry Hole (pronounced “hoo-leh”) is difficult to evaluate. He pushes credibility, because it’s hard to believe that anyone this alcoholic and reflexively self-destructive has managed to maintain a career in a modern police department. But in these books Hole has begun a difficult — but promising — relationship with a single mother, which inspires him (intermittently) to attempt to reform himself. This would give him one added thing he actually cares about in his life, beyond police work.
The running narrative in this trilogy involves another detective, a popular and charismatic one, whom Hole suspects of illegal activities and the murder of a colleague. Hole hates him, but is almost seduced into corruption by him.
What’s fascinating about the Harry Hole books is the multiple layers of mystery involved. Once the mystery is solved, there’s plenty of book left, and the reader discovers there’s a mystery within the mystery. Then there’s a further mystery within that. It unpeels like an onion.
This may relate to one of Harry’s mottos — “There is no such thing as a paradox.” Someone informs him in the third book that paradoxes do in fact exist. It seems to me possible (I’m not sure) that that discovery is the whole point of the books.
Shared Storytelling: Author Battle
A few weeks ago, a couple guys invited me to participate in a Google+ group they called Legendary Author Battles (LAB). It’s a shared storytelling like we have discussed here in the past. One writer begins, the other continues, and back and forth until a conclusion. Then Simon Cantan makes a video of the authors reading their parts.
This is my first one, and even though I wish I could have taken my reading dramatics up several notches, I think the story itself is pretty good. Feel free to tell me I’m wrong.
The story is an urban fantasy which pits a telepathic librarian against an urban developer. The businessman wants to buy up the neighborhood, but the librarian and his neighbors won’t go along with him. That standard beginning doesn’t come anywhere near describing the whole story, so give it a listen and tell me what you think.
I shared this story with Dave Higgins, who has a new book out.
Recommended Reading
Hugh Howey recommends two books for overcoming the odds against you: Outliers: The Story of Success
Are Movie Titles Getting More Bland?
An upcoming animated film, based on the book The True Meaning Of Smekday, will be released as Home. Which of these titles is more interesting to you? Studios may have a habit of preferring bland titles over interesting ones.
Mark Driscoll Drops Bestseller Status
Within the last couple weeks, we’ve talked about what it means for a book to be labeled a New York Times bestseller and how marketing services can game the system to buy that status for your book. Now, Pastor Mark Driscoll admits “manipulating a book sales reporting system,” which he did for his book Real Marriage, is “wrong.” More than this, he says:
In the last year or two, I have been deeply convicted by God that my angry-young-prophet days are over, to be replaced by a helpful, Bible-teaching spiritual father. Those closest to me have said they recognize a deep change, which has been encouraging because I hope to continually be sanctified by God’s grace.
Update: Kevin DeYoung gives us “9 Thoughts on Celebrity Pastors, Controversy, the New Calvinism, Etc.“
At What Price Liberty?
Professor Alan Jacobs believes we will soon have the freedom to worship without much religious liberty, personal freedom to contemplate the divine on our own time without the liberty to exercise loving our neighbor in the name of Christ.
“I suspect that within my lifetime American Christians, at least those who hold traditional theological and more views, will be faced with a number of situations in which they will have to choose between compromising their consciences and civil disobedience. In such a situation there are multiple temptations. The most obvious is to silence the voice of conscience in order to get along. But there are also the temptations of responding in anger, in resentment, in bitterness, in vengeance. It might be a good exercise in self-examination for each of us to figure out which temptation is most likely for us.”
How the West Won, by Rodney Stark
Even some Catholic writers parrot the claim that it was not until modern times that the Roman Catholic Church repudiated slavery. Nonsense! As seen in chapter 6, the Church took the lead in outlawing slavery in Europe, and Thomas Aquinas formulated the definitive antislavery position in the thirteenth century. A series of popes upheld Aquinas’ position. First, in 1435, Pope Eugene IV threatened excommunication for those who were attempting to enslave the indigenous population of the Canary Islands. Then, in 1537, Pope Paul III issued three major pronouncements against slavery, aimed at preventing enslavement of Indians and Africans in the New World….
Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the rise of science is not that the early scientists searched for natural laws, confident that they existed, but that they found them. It thus could be said that the proposition that the universe had an Intelligent Designer is the most fundamental of all scientific theories and that it has been successfully put to empirical tests again and again. For, as Albert Einstein once remarked, the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible: “A priori one should expect a chaotic world which cannot be grasped by the mind in any way…. That is the ‘miracle’ which is constantly being reinforced as our knowledge expands.” And that is the “miracle” that testifies to a creation guided by intention and rationality.”
Our friend Anthony Sacramone of Strange Herring (link defunct) was kind enough to send me a copy of Rodney Stark’s How the West Won (published by his employer, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute) during my convalescence. Gradually I found bits of time in which to read it, and I’ll review it briefly, though the excerpts above should give you a good idea of the whole thing. If you’ve read Stark’s God’s Battalions, you’ll know what to expect — a take-no-prisoners re-evaluation of conventional wisdom, with most of the things you’ve been told about history rejected.
Stark’s premise is fairly simple — progress comes, not from great empires, but from diversity of culture and maximum human freedom. One particular claim that will shock many is that the Roman Empire did almost nothing for human progress, except for the invention of concrete and the adoption of Christianity. Instead, Stark praises the Middle Ages, when invention and entrepreneurship were once again liberated to strive for new things.
I don’t know if Stark is a Catholic, but he writes like a Catholic and doesn’t have high praise for the Reformation. In spite of that, I liked this book very much. I suspect you will too, if you’re a conservative and a Christian. If you’re not, you’ll probably want to throw it across the room.
Disappointed with The Road
“For me, McCarthy’s exercise in rhetorical compression was only so successful,” Jesse Freedman writes. “Saramago, for example, reaches considerable stylistic heights in Blindness, and he does so without proper punctuation. I think, in the end, that I wanted The Road to be more like that: daring, complete, raw, and unwavering.”
Schrödinger’s Cat and Other Jokes
Here’s a list of 20 good jokes that are supposedly funny only to intellectuals, but many non-intellectuals will get them too. For example: It’s hard to explain puns to kleptomaniacs because they are always taking things literally.
Ha!
Also, Schrödinger’s cat walks into a bar. And doesn’t.