Non-fiction, Religion

Stirring Puritan Sympathies

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Micah Mattix reviews a book that explores the passions and brotherly love of that group of people popularly slandered as being close-minded and stern.

Preaching on 1 Peter 3:8, Nicholas Byfield remarked, “The doctrine is cleer. That we ought to have a sympathie one towards another.” Robert Bolton urged his readers to “make conscience” their sympathy. Puritan sermons often aimed at stirring the holy affections of congregants, and Van Engen writes,

The imaginative work of sympathy, furthermore, constituted its own distinct practice. Puritan ministers instructed their parishioners to pray for others and provide physical aid, but before they acted, they had to be moved.

This helps explain why the Puritans, contrary to popular belief, were so expressive. When his wife was dying, John Winthrop was “weeping so bitterly,” Van Engen writes, “she asked him to stop” because (in her words) “you breake mine heart with your grievings.” When the Puritans fled England, and British soldiers separated children from their parents, William Bradford wrote that there was “weeping and crying on every side.” Anne Bradstreet regularly refers to her “troubled heart,” “sorrows,” “cares,” “fears,” and “joy” in her poetry. One of the most popular poems of the early colony was Michael Wigglesworth’s “The Day of Doom” (1662), in which he imagines the “weeping” and wailing of sinners but also the singing and “great joy” of God’s elect at Christ’s second coming. Van Engen writes that each instance of “tears and grieving, melting and weeping, pity and sympathy” in Puritan texts fits within “a broad tradition of Puritan fellow feeling.”

Author Abram C. Van Engen reveals these and other events in his book Sympathetic Puritans: Calvinist Fellow Feeling in Early New England. He touches on theological controversies and the witch trials, saying there are elements of Christian charity in all of Puritan life.

Speaking of early America, Mark David Hall criticizes a book on the religious mindset of the founding fathers. Were they a group of “pious, orthodox believers who sought to establish a Christian nation” or were they “Enlightenment deists who created a secular republic that strictly separated church and state”? Were they rational men who were strongly influenced by Christianity? Hall notes some good and bad points in Steven Green’s book Inventing a Christian America. (via Prufrock)

Hey Pilgrim

Non-fiction, Reviews

‘Three Roads to the Alamo,’ by William C. Davis

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In Library and Information Science, there’s a popular concept called “faceting.” Faceting means describing a resource in more than one way, as more than one thing. The idea is that faceting makes it possible to describe an object more fully, in a way that’s more useful to more people.

William C. Davis’ Three Roads to the Alamo is a faceted historical work. Instead of a single narrative, the author takes us along with the Alamo’s three most famous defenders, Crockett, Bowie, and Travis, on their lives’ journeys, providing us not only a fuller description of each of them, but a more three-dimensional picture of America (at least the American south and southwest) during the early 19th Century.

The first subject we meet is the oldest and most famous – even in his own time – Congressman David Crockett of Tennessee. Indeed, as Davis reminds us, Crockett was the very first American media celebrity – the first American to see the newspapers and magazines create for him a separate persona, not entirely unlike him, but exaggerated and oversimplified. It must have been a bizarre life for him – in the east he dined in the finest restaurants, was feted by the rich and powerful, and spoke from the same platforms with Henry Clay and Daniel Webster. When he went home, it was to a dirt-floored cabin and a mountain of debts that never seemed to diminish. He finally solved the debt problem – to a degree – by figuring out how to monetize his celebrity. He wrote his autobiography (which I reviewed here), and it became a bestseller. Continue reading ‘Three Roads to the Alamo,’ by William C. Davis →

Authors, Non-fiction

The Greatest Biography

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Joseph Epstein states, “The world’s greatest biography was composed by a depressive, a heavy drinker, an inconstant husband and a neglectful father who suffered at least 17 bouts of gonorrhea.” That biography is filled with quotations like this: “Depend upon it, that if a man talks of his misfortunes, there is something in them that is not disagreeable to him.”

And this: “The Irish are a very fair people—they never speak well of one another.” (via Prufrock)

Authors, Fiction

Eve Through the Eyes of Young

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The author of The Shack, William Paul Young, has a new novel on creation. Ann Byle interviews Young on what responses he expects to receive.

Some might argue that you are recasting Scripture from a more feminine perspective.

Yes, some might argue and others will likely insist, but I reject the notion. I am not trying to recast the Scriptures from a more feminine perspective. I am doing something much more sinister than that. I am recasting Scripture from a more “human” perspective. How sad is it that any conversation about the emergence of true humanity in the world, which includes submission, generosity, kindness, strength, integrity etc., is seen as a feminist conversation?

Non-fiction, Uncategorized

From Honor to Dignity to Victimhood

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Jonathan Haidt has written an edited version of a sociology paper that attempts to explain microaggressions among American college students.

We’re beginning a second transition of moral cultures. The first major transition happened in the 18th and 19th centuries when most Western societies moved away from cultures of honor (where people must earn honor and must therefore avenge insults on their own) to cultures of dignity in which people are assumed to have dignity and don’t need to earn it. They foreswear violence, turn to courts or administrative bodies to respond to major transgressions, and for minor transgressions they either ignore them or attempt to resolve them by social means. There’s no more dueling.

Now, the paper’s authors conclude, we’re moving into a culture of victimhood, where slights against one’s honor are being defended by appeals to authority and public opinion. Being a victim is rewarded in different ways and universities are encouraging their students to view slight offensives or potential insults as system problems.

Haidt has written about this bizarre collegiate environment in an essay for The Atlantic this month, providing examples of what and his coauthor call “The Coddling of the American Mind.”

Some recent campus actions border on the surreal. In April, at Brandeis University, the Asian American student association sought to raise awareness of microaggressions against Asians through an installation on the steps of an academic hall. The installation gave examples of microaggressions such as “Aren’t you supposed to be good at math?” and “I’m colorblind! I don’t see race.” But a backlash arose among other Asian American students, who felt that the display itself was a microaggression. The association removed the installation, and its president wrote an e-mail to the entire student body apologizing to anyone who was “triggered or hurt by the content of the microaggressions.”

All of this is working to create “a culture in which everyone must think twice before speaking up, lest they face charges of insensitivity, aggression, or worse.”

...non fidarsi è meglio - my scared cat / gatto

Uncategorized

Conservatism is scientific

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I shared this idea on Facebook today. I’ll elaborate it here.

I had an epiphany today. I figured out what I think is the essential problem with liberalism in our time. They believe in an outmoded form of science, a pseudoscientific myth.

Think of one of our president’s favorite phrases: “My opponents are on the wrong side of history.”

Think about it. What does it mean to be on the wrong side of history? How can history have sides?

It can only have sides if you believe there is some overarching inevitability to the course of history. It’s understandable for Christians to think that way. We’re supernaturalists. We believe a Mind is in control. That’s how our world-view works.

But how can secularists believe that history has an inevitable course, a right and a wrong side?

It can only come from a myth, a belief in some kind of driving force behind the course of events, even if it’s seen as somehow non-supernatural.

In the 19th Century there was a common belief in Progress. You may think of the 19th Century as an age of faith, but it was also an age in which the driving, dynamic new world view was Darwinian. The problem was that even the scientists of the time generally didn’t understand how evolution works.

(I don’t propose to debate the evolution question here. I’m talking in terms of social myths and common assumptions.)

The kind of Evolution that was popularized by writers like H. G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw was purposeful. Nature – in some way – was striving to perfect itself. Everything it did was an attempt to come closer to the perfection that waited at the end. History had an inevitable course. This is implicit in Marx. He firmly believed he was writing science. Because it was science, anyone who disagreed had to be insane. Continue reading Conservatism is scientific →

Poetry, Publishing

Rejected Under His White Name

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Poet Michael Hudson has a strategy for getting his poetry accepted. He explains it in a note attached to his contribution to The Best American Poetry.

“After a poem of mine has been rejected a multitude of times under my real name, I put Yi-Fen’s name on it and send it out again,” he wrote. “As a strategy for ‘placing’ poems this has been quite successful … The poem in question … was rejected under my real name forty times before I sent it out as Yi-Fen Chou (I keep detailed records). As Yi-Fen the poem was rejected nine times before Prairie Schooner took it. If indeed this is one of the best American poems of 2015, it took quite a bit of effort to get it into print, but I’m nothing if not persistent.”

The guest editor this annual collection, Sherman Alexie, was angered by Hudson’s bluff, but he kept the poem in the collection because Hudson’s rationale was looking him right in the eye. “If I’d pulled the poem then I would have been denying that I gave the poem special attention because of the poet’s Chinese pseudonym. If I’d pulled the poem then I would have been denying that I was consciously and deliberately seeking to address past racial, cultural, social, and aesthetic injustices in the poetry world.”

Naturally, this has stirred up a conversation about race and the merits of poetry.

Update: Hudson’s pseudonym is reportedly the name of one of his high school classmates. The Guardian states, “While the real-life Chou refused to speak to the paper directly, her sister said that the woman was furious at the appropriation of her name for this purpose.”

Fiction, Religion

What If Jesus Brought You Coffee?

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Paul Pastor (you may call him Pastor Pastor) reviews the second volume of David Wilkie’s Coffee with Jesus. He remembers Wilkie saying, “You have to be able to laugh at yourself first, because you might be the problem, not everybody else.”

It is precisely this humility of humor, large and startling in its own way, that points to what I hope will be the true legacy of Coffee. Rather than blazing new comedic trails, pioneering cartoon art, or codifying some brilliance of original thought, it is the unitive speculation—what would Jesus say to the sincere nonsenses that we spurt on a daily basis?—that makes one think, that makes one feel charitably toward the weak of heart or opinion, that makes one laugh and wave some Trojan truth past the guards at the gates.

Religion

‘God Gives No Empty Titles’

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Thomas Boston said, “God gives no empty titles, nor will empty titles answer the necessities of believers. As his name, so is his nature; the name truly expresses what he is. He manifests himself to be what the name bears. What he is called, he is found to be in the experience of saints.”

I quote Boston in a devotional on living in Jesus’ glorious name, which has been posted on Midwestern Seminary’s For the Church website.

Book Reviews, Creative Culture