Coffee, Tea, Drinks

Do You Take Fascism With Your Coffee?

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Swiss retailer Migros is apologizing profusely over distributing coffee creamers with images of Hitler and Mussolini on the lids. The creamers were designed to resemble cigar bands with the likenesses of many different people, including the two dictators. The company responsible for the designs doesn’t see a problem with. Why should it matter if Hitler’s face appears on a coffee creamer lid? they said. But Migros said it is an “inexcusable blunder” that should never have been delivered.

If I received one of these as a customer in a restaurant, I’d laugh it off and wonder if I was being poisoned, but if I was a businessman responsible for selling them, I think I’d fire someone.

Authors, Religion

Marilynne Robinson and American Fiction

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Casey Cep wrote, “Marilynne Robinson is one of the great religious novelists, not only of our age, but any age. Reading her new novel Lila, one wonders how critics could worry that American fiction has lost its faith, though such worries make one think there might well have been wedding guests at Cana who complained about the shortage of water after witnessing the miracle with wine.” (via Alan Jacobs)

Religion

Would That They Were Actually Pagan?

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C. S. Lewis wrote, “When grave persons express their fear that England is relapsing into Paganism, I am tempted to reply, `Would that she were.’” Because pagans have been shown to be convertible to Christianity, but post-Christians have shown more resistance. Pagans appeal to gods who cannot hear them and suffer for it. Post-Christians still benefit from the God they rejected and believe they have earned all they receive. Lewis wished we could find our spiritual poverty again so that we would see the riches to be found in Christ Jesus.

Today Englishman Bob Davey has taken up saving an abandoned church in Norfolk from local pagans. After cleaning up the church, he worked over the graveyard. “But even after he had driven the Devil from the door, still his acolytes returned. On every Witches’ Sabbath – special dates in the Pagan calendar – Mr Davey spent the night camped out in the church, on guard duty.” It can get ugly.

Meanwhile, “The Church of England is trying to recruit pagans and spiritual believers as part of a drive to retain congregation numbers.”

Goofing

Laughter Worth Sharing: Jimmy Fallon

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Here’s a strong example of Jimmy Fallon’s great interviewing technique. He’s talking with Bradley Cooper about The Elephant Man, a play Cooper says inspired him to become an actor. Watch and learn, friends.

Religion

Announcing a New Spurgeon Center

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This just in. Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary has begun to build a center to house it’s a extensive collection of documents from the great preacher Charles H. Spurgeon and offer space for lectures and study. They’re calling it the Charles Spurgeon Center for Biblical Preaching.

Authors, Non-fiction

Asimov on Creativity

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A 1959 essay on creativity by Issac Asimov, that has not been published, has been released by a friend at MIT. In it, Asimov talks about the origin of the theory of evolution, which he says was devised by two men independently, Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace.

A person willing to fly in the face of reason, authority, and common sense must be a person of considerable self-assurance. Since he occurs only rarely, he must seem eccentric (in at least that respect) to the rest of us. A person eccentric in one respect is often eccentric in others.

Consequently, the person who is most likely to get new ideas is a person of good background in the field of interest and one who is unconventional in his habits. (To be a crackpot is not, however, enough in itself.)

He goes on to say a team hoping to develop great new ideas needs to become comfortable with each other and inspire each other to look forward. (via Prufrock)

Authors, Fiction

The Primeval Glory of War

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Janie Cheaney talks about war in the context of Andrew Peterson’s fourth book in The Wingfeather Saga. Do Christian novelists simplify and glorify it? “While most wars are wasteful and pointless, some are not. And ugly and terrifying as it is, battle seems to have an almost primeval appeal, especially to men. It’s as if they are called to find out what’s in them: savagery or heroism, unspeakable cruelty or self-sacrifice, the best or the worst.”

It’s a strong desire to live for something large. Perhaps that’s how we currently express the eternity God has set in our hearts “yet so that man will not find out the work which God has done from the beginning even to the end” (Ecclesiastes 3:11). That yearning for glory easily yields to the lust of our pride, making our desire to live for something big subservient to a desire to live a self-directed life, and in doing so we end up fighting over selfish things or for unwise causes. Lars’ latest novel, Death’s Doors, deals with this in that there’s a real battle over life and death raging around the characters, but their perspectives are too self-centered to see it for a while.

Writing

November Is National Novel Writing Month

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Men's LacrosseEveryone has a novel in them, they say. And those works of art or escapism should be published for everyone to read. Apparently, millions and millions of books are being published in the US every year. A small percentage of those books are novels (or fiction novels, as some call them). A very small percentage of the novels published over the last three or four years have depicted the world in chaos as Harry Potter and his friends discover they have been left behind in a uniquely British rapture.

A little under 200,000 people profess to be writers in the US. The rest are too ashamed to admit it. The latter are mostly the ones who participate in library-sponsored parties for NaNoWriMo writers, where anyone can gather with other strangers for a few hours to scribble or type at the first of at least 50,000 words. They will be hear great advice, like this from Chris Baty:

  • Jot down the names of your characters to stop a Mike becoming Matt or Mick as you write.
  • Eat peppermints: a Nasa-funded study showed the peppermint plant increased alertness by 30 per cent.
  • Go outdoors with a newspaper, a pen and a notebook. Close your eyes. When you open them spot ‘Your Person’ and write down everything about them. Close your eyes. Open your paper on a random page and let your finger choose a spot. Open your eyes. The thing you’re pointing to has a link to the person you just collected. Work it into your next chapter.

Many will say, “Just get it written.” They may insist, “The story must get out of you.” But let these stats depress you. And while you’re thinking over your plans for next month’s exercise, ask yourself whether your story is worth pursuing.

“Nine times out of ten, your idea is really quite mediocre and has been done before, actually a number of times and in a number of different ways,” Laurie Scheer states, but you haven’t read those stories. You’re just invested in your own. What still lies before you is the biggest challenge for all writers today: whether you want to write or to have written.

Go ahead and write 50,000 words next month, and if you love it enough to keep at it, then keep writing. Words are awesome. If you don’t love it, maybe you can organize that library party into a community lacrosse team.

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.