Not the Wrong Side of History

June 4, 2015 Phil Leave a comment

Tim Keller reviews two books that argue in favor of Christians accepting homosexuality, saying the books by Vines and Wilson are the ones he is most often asked about. Not wanting to dismiss the books as simply unbiblical and open himself to the accusation of flippantly ignoring the subject, he writes over 2,500 words on what the authors profess and how they are wrong. On the issue of secularism, which we’ve discussed many times on this blog, Keller observes:

More explicit in Wilson’s volume than Vines’ is the common argument that history is moving toward greater freedom and equality for individuals, and so refusing to accept same-sex relationships is a futile attempt to stop inevitable historical development. Wilson says that the “complex forces” of history showed Christians that they were wrong about slavery and something like that is happening now with homosexuality.

Charles Taylor, however, explains how this idea of inevitable historical progress developed out of the Enlightenment optimism about human nature and reason. It is another place where these writers seem to uncritically adopt background understandings that are foreign to the Bible. If we believe in the Bible’s authority, then shifts in public opinion should not matter. The Christian faith will always be offensive to every culture at some points.

And besides, if you read Eric Kaufmann’s Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? (2010) and follow the latest demographic research, you will know that the world is not inevitably becoming more secular. The percentage of the world’s population that are non-religious, and that put emphasis on individuals determining their own moral values, is shrinking. The more conservative religious faiths are growing very fast. No one studying these trends believes that history is moving in the direction of more secular societies.

(via Jared C. Wilson)

Uncategorized

Remembering Carl

June 3, 2015 Lars Walker Leave a comment

“Chicken Eggs 29563-360×480 (4899748717)” by Emilian Robert Vicol from Com. Balanesti, Romania – Chicken Eggs_29563-360×480. Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

For no conceivable reason, I’ve decided to relate another childhood memory, something I haven’t done here in a while.

I grew up on a farm outside Kenyon, a small town in southeast Minnesota. We operated what they now call a “diversified agricultural operation,” which means we grew and raised whatever we could think of that would earn back worth the trouble.

One of the things we raised was chickens. I’m not sure how many we had; maybe about a hundred; probably less. The numbers fluctuated, I’m sure. In any case, one of the daily chores was to “pick the eggs,” to gather them from the box nests we had for them in the chicken coop. I have breathed a lot of powdered chicken manure in my time; it accumulated on the floor and we just walked on it. It dried fairly quickly. A doctor told me I have a spot on one lung that’s common in people who’ve worked with chickens; it might come from those days.

After the eggs were gathered in a pail, we took them into the house and down to the basement. There we would wash them in a special solution, swishing them in a bucket with many, many holes, inside a larger bucket of the washing solution, clockwise and counterclockwise until they looked clean.

Then the person doing the job would take them to another room in the basement, where we kept the Big Egg Carton. There was a stool there for sitting on and a bright light hanging from the ceiling. Each egg would be examined for cracks, and any lingering crud on the eggs would be sanded off with a sandpaper block. Then the eggs were placed in cardboard trays inside the big carton, several layers stacked one on top of the other.

(Eggs with cracks were kept for our own use. We kept them in a regular egg carton, the kind you see in stores, on a counter next to the stove. We didn’t bother to refrigerate them. We used them up pretty fast.)

When the carton was full, we’d load it in Dad’s Studebaker pickup and take it to town. There, in the southeast corner of town, near the railroad tracks, was Carl Larson’s poultry operation. Continue reading Remembering Carl →

Non-fiction, Uncategorized

Making Yourself a Soft Target

June 3, 2015 Phil Leave a comment

Charles Murray received the third Edmund Burke Award for Service to Culture and Society last April. His book, By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission is came out in May. When accepting the award, he told this story:

My wife knows a man in a town near us that I will call Bob. Bob operates one of the many kinds of businesses that use Latino workers. What makes Bob different from almost every other such employer in his line of work is that all of his workers are documented. He spends about $20,000 to $30,000 a year for the excruciatingly complicated visa process. He pays good wages, pays for his workers’ airfares, and is in other ways a model employer and member of his community.

My wife started to tell me stories about how Bob has come under relentless harassment by the government. Why pick on him, when his part of the country is full of employers who have 100 percent undocumented Latino workers? Because, by doing the right thing and documenting his workers, he opened himself up to easy inspection by government enforcers of regulations. He made himself a soft target.

The story that tipped me over the edge involved a stupid regulation that Bob could not comply with. He didn’t have enough American-born employees—and there’s no way he could get Americans to work for him. Bob became so frustrated that he told the bureaucrat that he would fight it in court—at which point the bureaucrat said to him, “You do that, and we’ll put you out of business.” And Bob knew that is exactly what would happen.

The Press, Uncategorized

Grocers: Stop Selling Immoral Magazines

June 2, 2015 Phil Leave a comment

Do we view ourselves as political beings? Would we say our minds are bound by cultural cords? I don’t think most of us would describe ourselves in these ways. We think of ourselves as independently minded and capable of standing on our own, but if we allow our attention to be directed by the popular press, we are training ourselves in groupthink and tweaking our moral compasses.

Not long ago, the media was celebrating the suicide of a terminally ill woman. They repeated uncritically the ridiculous arguments for suicide being a matter of dignity and honor. How long will it be before they celebrate someone making public arguments about the right to suicide without illness? “Ask not for whom the bell tolls,” he’ll say, “so I wanted to die on my own terms.” Doesn’t the press already support this the line of thought?

This week, they have celebrated another vein of self-destruction, and I’m troubled by the many people have said it’s none of their business. It is your business. It’s just as harmful as celebrating suicide. We are not islands. When others buy and sell vanity in the marketplace, we can’t just ignore it or many more will be hurt by it.

Take the idea that some people don’t believe they should live without disability. Does the press celebrate this yet? Is any form of identity up for grabs?

I think we need to reject the popular press at large. Many individuals already have, but I want to encourage select business leaders to take this up.

Grocers who are willing to sell the regular line of magazines everyone else sells should reconsider what I assume are practical reasons for selling what they would not want their families to read. It doesn’t matter if all the publications are bundled together by the vendor. Insist on being allowed to sell only what you want to sell. Make noise about wanting a choice in the titles you offer, and don’t surrender to the bad logic that says someone is going to sell it, so it might as well be you. A vendor can’t force you to make immoral choices. By refusing to offer pop culture and other immoral magazines, you help others avoid buying them. You encourage them to think independently, as they already believe they do.

It feels like a throwback idea from the ’80s, but is it not still a fair idea?

The Press, Uncategorized

An occasion of crime?

June 1, 2015 Lars Walker Leave a comment

There’s an old theological term, “an occasion of sin,” which (if I understand it correctly) means to place temptation in someone’s path. I hope I haven’t been an occasion of crime in this blog.

Last month I posted a story, and a picture, about my visit with the Viking Age Club to historic Ness Church, Litchfield, Minnesota. I told how the first victims of the Dakota War of 1862 are buried there, and that local legend says the place is haunted.

Four days after I posted my story, according to this article from the Minneapolis City Pages newspaper, four people were arrested for breaking into the church and vandalizing it, as well as the monument.

I hope they didn’t learn about it here.

Probably not. We cater to a pretty high class of reader at Brandywine Books.

Authors, Fiction

Revisiting Catherine Cookson

May 29, 2015 Phil Leave a comment

Dominic Sandbrook talks about the virtues of author Catherine Cookson, who published 104 works before her death in 1998. “She is not cool or trendy. Cookson was sneered at a lot in her lifetime because her readers were the antithesis of the readers usually celebrated by literary critics: predominantly middle-aged and elderly women, often working class. Her books are conservative.”

Sandbrook has produced a biopic for BBC2 on Cookson. (via Prufrock)

Fiction, Reviews

‘Missing You,’ by Harlan Coben

May 28, 2015 Lars Walker Leave a comment

First of all, let me state at the outset the important fact that Missing You by Harlan Coben is an exceedingly good novel. One of his best, I’d say, and that’s no mean praise.

I have to say that because I’m going to do some ideological quibbling at the end.

Anyway, the main character of Missing You is Kat Donovan, a New York City police detective who very quickly finds herself tugged in several directions by a number of worries and crises.

First of all, a friend has signed her up for an online dating service. Looking through possible matches, she discovers a photograph of the fiancé who abandoned her eighteen years before. She’s never gotten over him. Everything was going fine, they were planning a life together, and then one day he was gone without a word. Now here he is, describing himself as a widower with one child. And when she sends him a message, he doesn’t seem to remember her. Continue reading ‘Missing You,’ by Harlan Coben →

Non-fiction, Reviews

‘The Professor and the Madman,’ by Simon Winchester

May 27, 2015 Lars Walker 2 Comments

I bought this one because it’s going to be assigned in a class I’ll be taking later this summer. Since it interested me on its own merit, I thought I’d read it now and get a jump on things.

The Professor and the Madman, by Simon Winchester, is a careful examination of the facts of a story that’s become a legend in the literary world. The popular account, first published by an American journalist in 1915, tells how Professor James Murray, chief editor of the magisterial Oxford English Dictionary, wished to meet in person his most valuable volunteer contributor (in those pre-database days, the literary citations necessary to trace word meanings through the centuries were gathered by an army of volunteers who combed old books for examples of word use and sent them to Oxford on slips of paper). So he wrote to Dr. William Minor of Crowthorne, Berkshire, asking to visit. Receiving his invitation, he took the train to Crowthorne, and was driven by carriage to a great, walled estate out in the countryside. Ushered inside to an impressive office, he asked the distinguished man behind the desk if he had the honor of addressing Dr. William Minor. The man said he was not. “I am the superintendent of Broadmoor Asylum. Dr. Minor is one of our patients.”

The actual events, which author Winchester documents, are a little less dramatic, but the overall story remains a fascinating one. William Minor was born to missionary parents on the island of Ceylon. He studied medicine, became a surgeon, and served in the American Civil War. Suffering increasing paranoid delusions in the wake of his war experiences, he eventually moved to London (Lambeth), where early one morning he murdered an inoffensive workman with his Colt revolver. His obvious insanity earned him a suite at Broadmoor, where he answered a call for volunteers to help with the massive, multi-volume dictionary.

Simon Winchester is an excellent writer, and the story is a fascinating one for anyone who loves books and words. I have a set of the OED myself (the two-volume micrographic edition, which you have to read with a magnifying glass), and it’s a treasure. Winchester notes that the purpose of the project was different from that of other nations. Unlike the French, for instance, there was no intention to “fix” the language in a definitive, unchangeable form. The OED was designed to trace the history of each English word, and to include all current variations.

The author’s attempt to parallel Murray’s and Minor’s life stories is not entirely successful, in my view. Yes, they were both raised Congregationalists, but in different countries, and their life’s paths were not all that similar. It is suggested that Minor’s childhood Puritanism may have contributed to his breakdown, but that theme is not hammered on too heavily.

All in all, a masterful book about a masterful project. Recommended.

Brandywine Books

Not the Wrong Side of History

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Remembering Carl

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Making Yourself a Soft Target

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Grocers: Stop Selling Immoral Magazines

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An occasion of crime?

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Revisiting Catherine Cookson

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‘Missing You,’ by Harlan Coben

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‘The Professor and the Madman,’ by Simon Winchester

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Book Reviews, Creative Culture

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Book Reviews, Creative Culture