Long, long ago, when I used to sing solos in Christmas programs, my standard was “What Child is This?” I made a point of doing all three variant choruses. I’m happy to note that the divine Sissel does the same (no doubt she was a fan of mine).
A blessed Christmas to you and yours.
Sam Storms has an 11 book list of his ten best books of 2012, included two books on, if not actually by, Jonathan Edwards. He also worries that D. A. Carson’s The Intolerance of Tolerance will not find the readers who need it.
Crossway has a butt full of recommendations for serious readers (I’m sorry. I meant to type heart-full, but a Twitter trend got in my way #replaceheartwithbutt So juvenile.) Crossway’s staff recommend serious titles each, from John Frame’s The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God to Ender’s Game. They also asked their authors to recommend reading for the coming year, and of course after removing all of the self-promotion, they had a pretty good list.
For more non-fiction recommendations, Tony Reinke of Desiring God Ministry has a list of twelve.
If you haven’t perused the fun novels, etc. at The Rabbit Room, you should.
“My dear L.,” Tolkien writes in a draft letter from 1943. “I have been reading your booklet Christian Behavior. I have never felt happy about your view of Christian ‘policy’ with regard to divorce.” Tolkien did not send this letter to his friend, C.S. Lewis, but it was found and published after his death.
[Y]ou observe that you are really committed (with the Christian Church as a whole) to the view that Christian marriage—monogamous, permanent, rigidly “faithful”—is in fact the truth about sexual behavior for all humanity: this is the only road of total health (including sex in its proper place) for all men and women. That it is dissonant with men’s present sex-psychology does not disprove this, as you see: “I think it is the instinct that has gone wrong,” you say. Indeed if this were not so, it would be an intolerable injustice to impose permanent monogamy even on Christians.
…
Toleration of divorce—if a Christian does tolerate it—is toleration of a human abuse, which it requires special local and temporary circumstances to justify (as does the toleration of usury)—if indeed either divorce or genuine usury should be tolerated at all, as a matter of expedient policy.
Jake Meador discusses this disagreement more in his article for Christianity Today.
“They [the previous generations in the region] had edges and angles, rough sides. You could get hold of them, you could tell what they were. And they weren’t always on the make; they already were something. They weren’t just getting to be something else all the time. They were already human beings.”
“You make them sound pretty ideal,” Magruder said without irony.
“It’s the truth.” She lifted the glass uncertainly to her mouth, she was a little tight. “If it isn’t, it ought to be. It’s what I remember.”
“Really, though, weren’t they pretty ignorant and backward – insulated?”
“All right if they were,” she said. “It’s not any better now; everybody’s insulated now – from everybody else. And still ignorant too; it’s just different, it’s all inside. And everybody’s hiding it; that’s why they look so slick. Do you know what we are? Scared; everybody is.”
America does have fine Christian writers in its recent history, beyond Flannery O’Conner and Walker Percy. It’s just that nobody knows about them. The works of Madison Jones were recommended to me, and I sent away for A Buried Land. It’s a very dense book – written with tremendous craftsmanship, with layers and layers of meaning and symbolism down to the bedrock, which is pretty far down.
Percy Youngblood is a smart young man in a small Tennessee town. When we meet him it’s before World War II, and he and his friend Jesse are working for the Tennessee Valley Authority, helping to build a dam that will flood Percy’s family farm and many others. Percy’s at odds with his father, who can’t see the point of destroying a way of life he likes just fine, in order to create a world he doesn’t want in the first place. Percy takes up with a local girl cast off by his friend Jesse, with unplanned consequences that leave him and Jesse carrying a shared, guilty secret.
After a hiatus in which Percy serves in the war, he returns home to take a job in a local law firm. As he tries to fit in with the town’s progressive set, he’s haunted by his guilt, and terrified because a certain person has come back to town – someone who may or may not suspect him and Jesse’s crime. As in every tragedy, the very actions he takes to protect himself work to his destruction.
A Buried Land is a true work of art as literature, and a harrowing Purgatorio of guilt and sin. It’s a hard read though, because there’s no whimsy here; no moment of relief. The downhill road is a long and oppressive one. Also, I fear that today’s readers will miss the point. Instead of locating the sin in Percy’s heart and actions, they will blame the Puritanism of the times, the laws of the times, and sexist oppression. Which is too bad, because there’s much to learn from this book.
Recommended, if you have the stamina for it. Adult themes, but no major language or explicit scenes to complain of.
Tomorrow is the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year, known in the church calendar as St. Thomas’ Day. It was on St. Thomas’ Day in the year 1028 that Erling Skjalgsson, hero of my novels, The Year of the Warrior, West Oversea, and (soon) Hailstone Mountain, was killed at the battle of Soknasund. (Or Boknasund.)
By coincidence or divine appointment, I have today reached verbal agreement with Baen Books to re-release The Year of the Warrior in e-book form. Look for it soon.
Addendum: Thanks to Ori Pomerantz for facilitating the negotiations.
If you have an e-book reader, you can get C. S. Lewis’ classic space trilogy, Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength, for $1.99 each for a limited time.
The links are to Amazon for Kindle versions, because we get a cut of our linked Amazon sales. But if you’ve got a Nook or Kobo, you can buy the books through the Harper & Row site here.
This has been a service of your friends at Brandywine Books.
And Rupert Murdoch, I suppose.
Photo credit: Musicaline
I’ll fess up. I check our blog statistics now and then. Mostly not just to check the total clicks (though visit totals have been gratifying, thank you) but to back-track visitors and find what posts brought in the most Googlers. And this time of year an odd pattern appears. By far the most common search to wash up on these shores involves the words “Christmas crib.” And the searches, oddly, generally come from places in the Middle East. If I’m reading it right (always a questionable thesis), they generally land on this post, which says nothing at all about Christmas cribs, causing me to figure that the draw must actually be the picture of the crèche I used to illustrate it.
The term “Christmas crib” sounds strange to me. It’s not an English idiom, as far as I know. Nobody in these parts talks about Nativity Scenes that way. We call them Nativity Scenes or manger scenes, or if we’re feeling pedantic (and heaven knows I often do) we say “crèche.” But perhaps Christians in the Middle East do call them Christmas cribs. No reason why they shouldn’t. It’s a perfectly good name.
I might note (to continue in my pedantic voice, now that I’ve got it warmed up) that the Norwegian word for “manger” is in fact “krybbe.” There must be a history there, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it had something to do with manger scenes. But I don’t have any facts on that.
From what I’ve read, the traditional inverted A-frame wooden manger we see in Nativity Scenes is nothing at all like anything used in First Century Israel. Many scholars think Christ was born in one of the caves near Bethlehem, where sheep were stabled in those days. The mangers in those structures were made of stone masonry and were built into a corner of the wall. Which is bad for crèches, as it would badly mess up the composition.
However, another theory, which I’ve grown to favor, says that many Jewish houses of that day had an attached all-purpose room, which could be used for livestock when necessary, or could be cleaned out and turned into a guest room when the in-laws showed up. Such a room would have had a built-in manger as well, and that could explain the reference to the baby in the manger in Luke (where the word “stable” does not actually appear).
The problem with this theory is that it renders the traditional mean old innkeeper unnecessary. Which is OK with me, frankly, because he also appears nowhere in the text. And I’ve always identified with him.
It was disastrously easy to make bad horseracing pictures and only possible to do it at bankable level, in my view, if racing became the framing background to human drama.
Although the sentiments above, expressed by Tom Lyon, narrator of Wild Horses, refer to the movie business, they clearly express author Dick Francis’ own approach to writing mysteries. Racing is always the background, but the heart of the story is… well, the human heart.
Thomas Lyon, film director, is a native of Newmarket, Suffolk, England, and he has chosen to come home from California to do his latest film, based on a successful novel inspired by an actual murder that occurred during Tom’s childhood. A horse trainer’s wife was found hanged in a stable, and whether it was homicide or suicide remains a mystery.
The story starts with Tom at the death bed of an old friend, a farrier, who is dying of bone cancer. His friend’s mind is confused, and he makes a confused confession to Tom, thinking him a priest. Throughout the story that follows, Tom feels a strange kind of obligation, as if he were in fact a priest with a duty to God.
Although it’s been decades since the murder the movie is based on happened, it turns out that someone doesn’t want old stones overturned. Tom receives death threats, the film’s star is attacked with a knife, an old lady is wounded, and then there is a murder. And step by step Tom comes to the realization that his friend’s dying confession has a direct bearing on the mystery.
This is Dick Francis at his best. Tom Lyon is a very satisfying hero, ethical, brave, and not overconfident. A particular pleasure of the story is the joke Francis tells on himself (since he’d seen several of his own stories adapted, at least for TV), in making the script writer, also the author of the novel it’s based on, an arrogant, inflexible prima donna who is not as smart as he thinks he is and does nothing but make difficulties.
Only mild cautions for language and subject matter. Highly recommended. Good holiday reading, for instance.
Maybe in your Christmas reading, you have wondered about cooking a goose. You’ve read about the Cratchit’s Christmas dinner: “There never was such a goose. Bob said he didn’t believe there ever was such a goose cooked. Its tenderness and flavour, size and cheapness, were the themes of universal admiration. Eked out by apple-sauce and mashed potatoes, it was a sufficient dinner for the whole family; indeed, as Mrs Cratchit said with great delight (surveying one small atom of a bone upon the dish), they hadn’t ate it all at last. Yet every one had had enough, and the youngest Cratchits in particular, were steeped in sage and onion to the eyebrows.” Here, Isabella Beeton writes on how to choose and prepare this bird.
Don’t forget the Smoking Bishop drink, which is not the same as the cheese Stinking Bishop. Honestly, I don’t think I would like either of them.