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.

Reading, Religion

Understanding the Bible Yourself

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John Piper has a new plan to teach people to understand the Bible on their own. He’s calling it “Look at the Book,” and at first blush it looks to be inductive Bible study, something Precept Ministries and Bryan College have done for years. Not that it isn’t worth doing again by other people. I’m just making the connection.

Non-fiction, The Press

Crowdfund a Movie on Kermit Gosnell

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This is where we are in the world today. We self-publish our own books. We can solicit our own funds for movies. We can circumvent the nightly news, if it still exists.

Here’s a trio, who have made award-winning documentaries in the past, wanting to blow the lid off the media silence on the man they call the most prolific serial killer in America.

There are at least two angles on the media silence on this case. The biggest one is that Gosnell is an abortionist operating within the scope allowed by those who have argued they want abortions in our country to be safe and rare. This man’s clinic was nowhere near safe, so the political agenda doesn’t support exposing him at the risk of undermining the most scared battleground for the political left.

The second angle is not as politically defined as the first. It’s what Ann McElhinney describes in the video below. The women who were murdered were poor, unseemly, and minority–the kind that gets killed everyday in some cities, so what’s the news? You might think those who cry loudly about the rights of woman and minorities would cry out about this too, but perhaps their classism gets in the way. Maybe it just doesn’t trump the first angle. Abortionists are priests in the Church of Ne’re Do Ill. The blood on their hands is only red fruit punch.

If you have the funds to contribute to this, I encourage you to consider it.

Bookselling, Publishing

Christian Book Awards

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Crazy Busy: A (Mercifully) Short Book about a (Really) Big Problem, by Kevin De Young wins the Christian Book of the Year Award from the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association. Ron Charles of the Washington Post gives a brief rundown of the book and lists other awards given out yesterday at the ECPA banquet.

Publishing, Writing

Do Literary Writers Succeed in Digital Publishing?

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Do literary writers find readers and make money in digital publishing? Not yet. Porter Anderson writes:

Literary fiction, by contrast, has no content guidelines, makes no promise of one topic or another, varies vastly in style and form. Not surprisingly, then, it’s perennially difficult to define without a fight. Claims of serious intent and/or artistic achievement may be asserted by fans of literary fiction. Its detractors love to charge that it focuses on language over plot; “navel gazing” poetics over entertainment; precious reflection over storytelling.

But Jane Friedman says you can see some successful writing if you look beyond the book length form. She says, “Thoughtful, intelligent ‘literary’ work is doing quite well digitally if you step away from book-length or novel publishing and into journalism-driven or nonfiction-driven publishing. Most of the following outlets and platforms include some fiction, too, just not a lot.” These platforms include: Byliner, Atavist, Medium/Matter, Symbolia, The Magazine, Storybird, and Hi.

In general, she says, people don’t want to read short stories or poems on no-name sites like Brandywine Books. Big name sites, like The Poetry Foundation, get readers, but not others. I think the field may still be in flux as more readers read everything onscreen. I also think literary writers should reflect on the poverty of our recent literary traditions and develop a new perspective based more on Shakespeare and Milton than on Freud and Beckett.

Book Reviews, Creative Culture