Authors, Non-fiction

Interview with the New York Yankees’ Mariano Rivera

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The greatest relief pitcher of all time, Mariano Rivera, shares his extraordinary story in The Closer. It’s a pleasant, personal tale about a Panamanian son of a fisherman who found he could pitch pretty well. He signed on with the NY Yankees for $2,000 and still didn’t quite understand that he would have to leave for Tampa, Florida.

Q. You’ve given us the remarkable story of your life in baseball with this book, The Closer. Would you mind telling us what you were thinking in those first days of spring training with the Gulf Coast Yankees in 1990?

A. I was surrounded by guys who were stronger than me and threw harder than me, and I was outperforming them. I was thinking, “How on earth am I doing this?” I was getting results that were far beyond my physical abilities. It had to be the Lord’s work.

I have to thank my first catcher and good friend, Claudino Hernandez, for seeing my potential. When I was on the training field with Tim Rumer, Russ Springer, Brian Faw, and others, I wasn’t as fast or as strong as they were, but I could do one thing better than just about anybody else. It was the thing Claudino saw I could do at the try-outs. I could put the ball exactly where I wanted it.

Q. You’ve said several times that you try to keep it simple. Is that how you made it through your career, just keeping it simple?

A. You could say that. Life is hard and humbling. I do all I can to keep it simple and to pray to the Lord for clarity and wisdom, so that His will and His perfect goodness will guide me and keep me safe. The Bible will tell you everything about how I try to live. For me, it is not just the word of God, but a life road map that is packed with wisdom that you cannot beat. It has this kind of simple wisdom: “Whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted.”

You know how many times I’ve gone out to the mound thinking, “This guy has no shot, because I am Mariano Rivera?” Never. The guy with the bat in his hand is a professional. He is trying just as hard to get a hit as I am trying to get him out. I respect that, and I know everything I have is from the Lord.

When I was sent back to the Columbus Clippers after pitching a few games for the Yankees, I had two weeks of rest and then started pitching faster than ever before. My catcher, Jorge Posada, asked me what I was eating, because I jumped from throwing 88 to 96 mph that game. I know of only one answer. It was a gift from the Lord. The cutter I throw, my fastball with a wicked tail on it, wasn’t something I studied and practiced for years. The Lord gave it to me, and it changed my whole career.

Everything is in his hands. I do not take it for granted. It was the way I wanted to pitch, and it is the way I want to live. Put everything we have into living this moment the best way we can live it. Some players obsess over rumors, but for me, they are only distractions. In my worldview as a pitcher, distractions are the enemy. Again, simple is best. Continue reading Interview with the New York Yankees’ Mariano Rivera →

Fiction, Reviews

‘Ghost in the Machine,’ and ‘Devil in the Details,’ by Ed James

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Ed James’ novels on his police detective character Scott Cullen can’t help but be compared to a more famous series about an Edinburgh detective, Ian Rankin’s Inspector Rebus. And the books have some commonalities – gritty, urban crime settings, and tough, grim main characters. But James adds his own twists, and I found his stories pretty satisfying.

Scott Cullen is a new, inexperienced detective constable, but he’s still the smartest guy in the room – not because he’s a genius, but because his colleagues are generally pretty ineffectual – loafers and drunks (except for the female officers, who, in line with contemporary standards, are more or less exemplary one and all). Cullen’s worst trial is his superior, Inspector Bain, whose approach to any crime is to rush in, identify the most likely suspect, then turn all his (and his subordinates’) energy to building a case against that individual – even when there are other possibilities.

And yet… and yet, what I liked best about the books is that these characters, who could so easily have been caricatures, turn out to be more complex than they appear. Even Bain, when compelled to face the evidence, is capable of real police work, and even a measure of graciousness. Inconsistently, but now and then. In other words, he acts like a real human being. And Cullen has his own flaws, especially in his drinking and relationships with women.

I read the first two books in the Cullen series. Ghost in the Machine involves a missing person case which turns into a murder investigation, involving people who meet each other on a social networking site called “Schoolbook.” In Devil in the Detail Cullen and his colleagues are called out to a smaller town, where they investigate the disappearance of a mentally challenged girl. This story involves allegations of child abuse by a priest, but author James softens the possible offense but setting that abuse in a syncretist cult rather than a Christian church.

Well-written and tech-savvy, the Scott Cullen books are timely works in an old tradition. Cautions for language (the British police seem to have solved the problem of male language in female company by teaching the female officers to swear like the guys) and adult themes.

Reviews

‘Odd Thomas’ (the Film)

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Some of us were looking forward to the Odd Thomas movie, due in 2013, but it only happened in a marginal way. Legal problems prevented a conventional theater release, as I understand it. It’s now available on disk and on Netflix, where I viewed it.

Apparently a lot of people who’ve seen it didn’t like it. Well I liked it fine. I have quibbles, but I enjoyed immensely.

A very faithful adaptation of Dean Koontz’s first novel in the Odd Thomas series, this film stars Anton Yelchin, who’s appropriately charming in the role. Addison Timlin plays his beloved Stormy Llewellyn, and Willem Dafoe is Sheriff Wyatt Porter. Odd is a simple fry cook in a small town, but he has the supernatural power to see dead people who, though they can’t speak to him, appeal for his help in identifying their murderers or helping them “cross over” into the next world. He also sees demons he calls “bodachs” whose appearance inevitably portends some major act of mass violence. An unprecedented number of bodachs have been prowling the town recently, and Odd is compelled to do all he can to discover who’s planning mass murder, and stop them.

The cast is almost uniformly excellent, especially Yelchin, who seems to have the spirit of the character down, which is the really important matter for any lover of the books.

I have only a couple quibbles. One is that Odd is hyped a bit, presented as having Benihana skills with spatulas, and being a sort of martial arts master. That’s not a big deal. Worse is the casting of Patton Oswalt as Odd’s friend Boone, perhaps the worst miscasting since Whoopie Goldberg played Bernie Rodenbahr in Burglar. Fortunately his scene is very short.

All in all, perhaps the most faithful adaptation of a novel I’ve ever seen, and well worth viewing or even buying.

And yes, if you must know, I cried.

Authors, Religion

Osteenification of American Religion

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Hank Hanegraaff must have read all of Joel Osteen’s books, because he quotes them all in this article on Osteen’s heresies.

Osteen is the hip new personification of God-talk in America… Behind Osteenian self-affirmations—“I am anointed,” “I am prosperous,” “My God is a ‘supersizing God’”—there lies a darker hue. Behind the smile is a robust emphasis on all that is negative. If you are healthy and wealthy, words created that reality. However, if you find yourself in dire financial straits, contract cancer, or, God forbid, die an early death, your words are the prime suspect. Says Osteen, “We’re going to get exactly what we’re saying. And this can be good or it can be bad” (Discover the Champion in You, May 3, 2004). In evidence, he cites one illustration after the other. One in particular caught my attention: the story of a “kind and friendly” worker at the church. He died at an early age, contends Osteen, “being snared by the words of his mouth” (I Declare [FaithWords, 2012], viii–ix).

That snare is meant to be an application of Proverbs 6:1-2, but read those verses to see if you get the same application as Osteen does.

Hanegraaff says Osteen’s gospel is a version of New Thought Metaphysics, the idea that our words are a force of magic in the real world. In Osteen’s book, Your Best Life Now, he writes, “You have to begin speaking words of faith over your life. Your words have enormous creative power. The moment you speak something out you give birth to it. This is a spiritual principle, and it works whether what you are saying is good or bad, positive or negative.”

Hanegraaff has written on this at length in his new book, The OSTEENification of American Christianity, which is available for a gift of any amount to the Christian Research Institute.

Religion

Doing my homework online

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Georg Sverdrup Sven Oftedal

I’ve been neglecting you folks recently, because of the pressure of graduate school work. Tonight I’m going to compound the offense by using this space for homework purposes.

The two fellows you see above, reading from top to bottom, in photographs from the H. Larson Studio circa 1904, are Georg Sverdrup and Sven Oftedal, professors at Augsburg College, Minneapolis, and founders of the Lutheran Free Church, of which my current employer, the Association of Free Lutheran Congregations, is the spiritual descendant. Both born in Norway and respected scholars, they are nevertheless best remembered for the bitter controversies they were involved in (and often initiated), especially in the 1880s and ’90s.

As an assignment for one of my classes, I have to help assemble a “Digital Library Project” at Omeka. This involves posting, and coding with metadata, certain items relating to the theme of a group project. My project involves Scandinavian Culture in the Upper Midwest. Two of the items I chose to post were the above photographs, which reside in the archive I oversee at work. I took the pictures myself (obviously), and my lack of competence is apparent. But the instructions require a link to an external source for the photographs, so I’m making this blog post the source. (I’m not even sure that’s ethical, but I can’t think of another way to do it.)

But since I’m posting anyway, I want to discuss something shocking I’ve learned in my studies of these two men. Continue reading Doing my homework online →

Non-fiction

Understanding WWI as a Holy War

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Pershing’s CrusadersHistorian Thomas Kidd talks to historian Philip Jenkins about his new book The Great and Holy War: How World War I Became a Religious Crusade. Why is it essential to see this war as a religious conflict?

At the highest levels of the respective regimes, both Germany and Russia were deeply motivated by national visions that were messianic and millenarian, and framed in thoroughly Christian terms. Each nation saw itself as playing a predestined role that was divinely inspired, and those self-concepts contributed mightily to the outbreak of war. Religious visions also helped explain why people remained at war through the hellish conditions. We also have to understand the highly supernatural world in which all participants found themselves, and not just at the level of elite propaganda. The language of crusade and holy war must be taken very seriously – on all sides. When they entered the war in 1917, Americans, interestingly, were among the most passionate in presenting the war in crusading terms.

Also, the sense of having failed in a holy war enterprise goes far to explaining the secularized millenarianism that prevailed throughout the 1920s and 1930s, in the totalitarian movements. As in 1914, Germany and Russia were the storm centers.

They go on to talk about religious imagery and the idea that WWI did not disenchant the world of faith. Rather it re-enchanted it with new forms of old myths.

Coffee, Tea, Drinks

Reading The Lord of the Rings as Spiritual Food

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“Why is the Lord of the Rings so good at nourishing the spiritual flame?” asks Professor Bruce Charlton. “I think the answer is metaphysical – in other words, it is related to the basic set-up of imagined reality which structures the story and the ancillary material.

When people say that Middle Earth seems real – realer, in a sense, than this earth – this is what they probably mean.

It is not convincing characters, nor detailed landscapes and maps, nor the specifics of languages and history that sets Tolkien’s mythic world apart from any other I have encountered; it is a step back from all that: the sense that everything fits together in a deep and coherent fashion.”

Writing

Best Apps for Writing

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Lifehacker has a list of apps it believes have the chops to help you score no matter what cliché you’re throwing their way. Looking for something free of the usual on-screen distractions? Something to help you edit or write a screenplay? They’ve got it.

Authors, Poetry, Writing

Words: They’re What’s For Breakfast!

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  • Previous edited stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald are being released without the content edits. “Before these stories were bowdlerised, they contained antisemitic slurs, sexual innuendo, instances of drug use and drunkenness. They also contained profanity and mild blasphemy. The texts were scrubbed clean at the Post,” James West, general editor of the Cambridge edition of Fitzgerald’s work, said. He believes the stories make more sense without the tempered language. “One of the commonplaces of Fitzgerald criticism, for decades, has been that he avoided unpleasant topics and realistic language in his magazine fiction. We can see now that this was not altogether his choice.”
  • If Eskimos have 50 words for snow and 70 words for ice, do they experience these things more richly than the rest of us? Do their words shape their world? John H. McWhorter says not quite. We can think about concepts for which we have no words, and our world isn’t really shaped by our use of language. “…language has only a minor effect on cognition and no effect on a person’s view of the world—that is, in this case, how humans understand time, causality, color, space, and so forth.” Reports about studies that supposedly show the opposing view are exaggerated.
  • Crossway Books is throwing a sale in celebration of Crazy Busy winning Book of the Year.
  • The only measure of a writer is that you want to remember his words.
Poetry, Religion

Guite’s “Through the Gate”

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In his new collection, The Singing Bowl, poet Malcolm Guite offers this poem inspired by Dante’s Divine Comedy: “Through the Gate”

The GateBegin the song exactly where you are

For where you are contains where you have been

And holds the vision of your final sphere

And do not fear the memory of sin;

There is a light that heals, and, where it falls,

Transfigures and redeems the darkest stain

Into translucent colour. Loose the veils

And draw the curtains back, unbar the doors,

Of that dread threshold where your spirit fails,

The hopeless gate that holds in all the fears

That haunt your shadowed city, fling it wide

And open to the light that finds and fares …

Read the rest on the poet’s blog.

“My own poem,” Guite says, “is written in the conviction that that there is no depth or recess, no sin or secret, in me or in anyone, beyond the light of Christ, but we have to open the gate and let him come down to our depths, let his Light reveal and name and heal what we have hidden.”

Guite has written nine poems inspired from Dante’s great work.

Book Reviews, Creative Culture