They call me the Highwayman

Nobody who drives the car I drive should spend as much time on the road as I have in the last couple days.

Yesterday I picked up my uncle and aunt, who’d flown in from Maryland, and took them down to Kenyon for the family reunion. They asked me to do this even after I explained the true condition of Mrs. Hermanson, my Chevy Tracker. I can only give them credit for a level of trust equal to that of the centurion of whom the Lord said, “Not even in Israel have I seen such faith.”

As it turned out, we made the trip without incident, except for one of those incidents specially planned by the professionals at our state Department of Transportation. Those dedicated public servants believe in doing a job right, so once they had closed off the most direct route to Kenyon (Highways 55 and 56 by way of Hampton), they finished off the job neatly by also closing the southbound lanes on I35, the second best route, sending us off into the wilds of Burnsville without a marked detour. This forced me to perform the Extreme Act of stopping at a gas station for directions.

The reunion was great. We’ve had nicer weather (it was overcast but didn’t actually rain on us), but the company was good, and I had a better time than at any reunion in some years. Especially nice to see Cousin Tom from Kansas. And of course the road time with my uncle and aunt was precious. They don’t get up this way much anymore.

Today I drove up to Fergus Falls (which is just short of Moorhead) for a meeting of the Georg Sverdrup Society Board. 2 1/2 hours each way. Mrs. Hermanson again made it there and back without a tantrum.

This weekend, back to Kenyon for my high school class reunion.

I think it’s best described as vehicular Russian roulette.

What's the Point of Christian Fiction?

Readers IV: sleeper, reader, reader, sleeper

E. Stephen Burnett picks up on the discussion over comments made regarding the stories told by J. Mark Bertrand (“Russell” to his friends), asking an insightful question: “According to the Bible, what is the ‘chief end’ of story? Is it evangelism? Gritty realism? Entertainment? Or a higher goal?”

I chafe at the idea of everything we do in the world being evangelism or pre-evangelism, though perhaps it’s true. I like to think of life being more multifaceted than that. We delight in God our Father. We make disciples of his people. We fight for justice and work in mercy. What are the themes Jesus addressed in his Sermon on the Mount? Who are the blessed of God, being a life witness, the place of the law, the nature of sin (anger, lust, divorce, promises, retribution), loving one’s enemies and neighbors, mercy, prayer and more. Is all of this meant to be seen in the colors of evangelism?

No. A story may witness the glory of God to an unbeliever without having evangelism as its goal, and perhaps that’s the answer. Glory. I want to write to magnify God’s glory, to color myself and everything I see with it.

Still waters


Vikings feast at Ravensborg, Knox City, Mo.
I’ve already savaged the History Channel Vikings TV series in this space, but I have something new to say about it today. I think I may have found the source of one of its (many) errors.
Watching the two episodes I endured, I got the impression that the script writers had blocked out their story first of all, based on their preconceptions of what Viking life was like, and then went hunting through history books for authentic details to sprinkle around, sometimes without any understanding of context.
One of the many moments I disliked in the series was when, on the eve of a voyage, the Vikings brought out a ceremonial bowl of water and passed it around, splashing it on their faces and blowing their noses into it, as a sort of corporate team building exercise.
I knew where this idea came from – the 921 AD account of Norsemen in Russia by the Muslim diplomat Ibn Fadlan (whose account formed the basis for Michael Crichton’s novel Eaters of the Dead, on which the movie The Thirteenth Warrior was based). Ibn Fadlan describes, with palpable disgust, how the Viking company washed up this way in the morning. There’s no suggestion of any greater purpose; it’s just the northerners’ culturally inferior standard of hygiene.
I’m still reading Robert Ferguson’s The Vikings: A History (almost half way through; enjoying it), and I found there the following passage:

With the Volga flowing by outside, the economy would seem unnecessary. Perhaps some bonding ritual was involved that reinforced the group identity and strengthened its internal loyalty.

It would appear that Ferguson’s book was one of the sources the TV writers skimmed, and they grabbed up this bit of speculation as just the kind of gross-out detail they were looking for. But Ferguson doesn’t footnote the sentence. It’s just a guess.
My own guess, based on a conversation with author Michael Z. Williamson, who’s a Middle East war veteran and has some familiarity with Islamic customs, is that what offended Ibn Fadlan was simply the fact that the Norsemen washed in still water in a bowl. Under Islamic law, true washing always requires running water. Still water is unclean. Even if the thralls refilled the bowl for each man, it would still be a pollution in Ibn Fadlan’s eyes.
He was also, in the opinion of most historians, not beyond exaggerating from time to time.

'Who' is a hero

The big news items of the past week, to judge from the comments of my Facebook friends, was the choice of actor Peter Capaldi as the new Doctor Who. I’m fairly unmoved myself, as I stopped watching that series around the time of the Great Hiatus (though I’ve seen most of older episodes). I don’t trust the new production team; the people who produce it are prominent promoters of the Gay Movement, as Torchwood demonstrates.

But the name Peter Capaldi rang a bell. Couldn’t place it at first. Then I remembered. He played Johnny Oldsen, the geeky young Scots linguist, in one of my very favorite movies, Local Hero. It was, I am informed, his first major movie role.



Capaldi (right) with fisherman Alan Mowat in “Local Hero.”



Local Hero is a Bill Forsyth movie. Forsyth was a rising star back in the early ‘80s. He made several well-received comedies about the lives of urban young people in Scotland. His success got him the opportunity to work with Warner Brothers, and so he wrote and directed what I consider his best film (though Anthony Sacramone prefers Gregory’s Girl. What does he know?)

The main character in Local Hero is “Mac” MacIntyre (Peter Riegert), who works for Knox Oil, a major corporation in Houston. His life is all about communications at a distance (“I’m really a telex man”) and shallow or broken relationships close at hand. He gets chosen to go to Scotland and negotiate the purchase of an entire fishing village, along with its bay and adjacent acreage, for a refinery and storage facility, because he has a Scottish name – even though he’s actually of Hungarian descent. Admitted to the other-worldly Presence of his boss, Mr. Happer (Burt Lancaster) he finds that the old man doesn’t actually care much about the acquisition at all, but is insistent that he keep his eyes on the sky – his real dream is to discover a comet he can name after himself. Continue reading 'Who' is a hero

Ship shape



The Oseberg ship. Photo credit: Daderot.

Last night’s post was kind of a downer. Let’s flee to the past then, and delight in the Viking Age, which is a matter of set facts that cannot change.

Or can they?

The fact is that the field of Viking studies is almost as dynamic and fluid as modern society. Just the other day I learned a fact that shivered my timbers, so to speak. Another of the precious facts I’ve been telling people in lectures all these years turns out to be false.

I’ve written about the Oseberg Viking ship before. Along with the Gokstad ship, also housed in the Viking Ships Museum in Oslo, it’s one of the two most famous Viking ships in the world. Miraculously preserved through being sealed in clay when they were buried during the 9th Century, they were discovered around the turn of the 20th Century, and completely altered everybody’s thinking about the sophistication of Viking culture. Continue reading Ship shape

The Squeeky Nose of Nightmares

I wasn’t scared of Bozo as a kid. I don’t remember loving him, but I wasn’t scared of him. He was funny. Emmett Kelly was funny and sad, but I assumed kind-hearted. But many people are scared of clowns now. The Smithsonian has a history of scary clowns, saying the seeds were sown long before Gacy’s murders hit the news.

Charles Dickens, shortly after his success with The Pickwick Papers, wrote the memoirs of a clown named Grimaldi, who could joke, “I am GRIM ALL DAY, but I make you laugh at night,” because his tragic background was well known by those who loved his jokes. Linda Rodriguez McRobbie writes:

[Andrew McConnell] Stott credits Dickens with watering the seeds in popular imagination of the scary clown—he’d even go so far as to say Dickens invented the scary clown—by creating a figure who is literally destroying himself to make his audiences laugh. What Dickens did was to make it difficult to look at a clown without wondering what was going on underneath the make-up: Says Stott, “It becomes impossible to disassociate the character from the actor.” That Dickens’s version of Grimaldi’s memoirs was massively popular meant that this perception, of something dark and troubled masked by humor, would stick.

On the reservation

You may have noticed (though probably not) that I haven’t had a column published at The American Spectator Online for a while. This doesn’t mean I’ve been banned there, or that I’ve gotten into a dispute with the editor or anything. It’s just that, ever since the last election, I’ve had almost nothing to say, on any subject having to do with culture or politics, that I think is worth asking to be paid for, even at the Spectator’s rates.

I won’t deny it. The election shook me. It wasn’t primarily the reelection of the president that disheartened me (though that was part of it). It was the results of the referendum on same sex marriage in my own state of Minnesota. Up until that moment I was able to hang on to the believe that “the silent majority” still held to traditional moral values. But the referendum failed, and failed big. Minnesota’s social conservatives got put in our place.

Sometimes I tend to talk like a prophet. I shouldn’t do that. I don’t have a line on God’s plans any more than anybody else who reads the Bible. But I do belief that righteousness exalteth a nation. I do believe that those who turn their backs on the plain words of Scripture will suffer consequences – and because much has been given to those who have access to Scripture, much will be demanded of them.

The other day our friend Gene Edward Veith linked to a Buzzfeed article by McKay Coppins, in which he notes how the “traditional values” fight has shifted ground (which is another way of saying “lost ground”). It used to be that we struggled to teach our neighbors what God’s rules are, and to try to convince them to adopt them, for their own good and that of society. Now we are in a situation where the best we can do is to try to carve out a little cultural reservation where we’ll still be allowed to live the way we choose, without being forced by the government to conform to its morality.

The surging Libertarian movement – and there are an increasing number of Christian libertarians out there – see little problem with this. It doesn’t matter, in their view, how the populace behaves, just as long as taxes are kept low.

But I believe actions have consequences. I believe that redefining the central, organic institution of society (marriage) to the point where it has no objective meaning, will mean inevitable horrific consequences over time. I am not happy to watch my country descend into social chaos and the inevitable expansion of government which must accompany social chaos.

I just don’t know how to make that argument at this moment in history.

Best Literary Sites

Micah Mattix has a list of best sites for literature, in response to a decent, but incomplete–no, skewed–list on some other site. If I was a responsible blogger and reader, I would monitor every site on his list.

Too Many Problems with 'Zealot'

Gary Manning, Jr., associate professor of New Testament at Biola University’s Talbot School of Theology, has extensive take down of the currently popular book on Jesus, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth. He notes at the end of his long post that there are too many problems with this book to list or argue with them all, but here’s a couple of them:

“Why does Paul make a sacrifice in Jerusalem? It must be that James forced him to recant his heretical views, not (as Luke claims) to complete a Nazirite vow that Paul voluntarily began before arriving in Jerusalem. Why does Luke end the book of Acts with Paul’s imprisonment, not his death? It must be to cover up some damning evidence against Paul! (No mention of the idea that Luke ended Acts then because that’s when he wrote Acts).”

Manning summaries the book as a conspiracy theory. It’s message, he writes: “Jesus was really a proclaimer of violent revolution, but the gospels and Paul covered up the evidence. Aslan then has a typical conspiracy-theory approach: any time the gospels present evidence against Aslan’s theory, they were making it up; any time the gospels present evidence in favor of Aslan’s theory, they were telling the truth.” (via Justin Taylor)