All posts by philwade

Authors, Blogs, Socials, Bookselling

So Am I as the Rich?

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Some people can tell you their favorites easily. They seek them out often. Their favorite shirts are the ones they wear all the time. Their favorite meals they eat several times a year, or if that’s too expensive, at least annually for a birthday. I’m the type who doesn’t wear his favorite shirt so that it will last longer. I wear lesser shirts that can wear out. A favorite I’ll don for special occasions. It’s not the same for meals. I would eat favorite foods often, but I like many different things. Sure, that cake you made for my birthday was delicious. You made it last year too, and it was great. Maybe this year we make a different delicious cake.

So, like the speaker in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 52, I don’t frequent my treasures often “for blunting the fine point of seldom pleasure.”

“Blessèd are you whose worthiness gives scope,
  Being had, to triumph, being lacked, to hope.”

What links do we have today?

Shelby Steele: Author Shelby Steele and filmmaker Eli Steele discuss their ideas on power, race, and America with City Journal. “We have wealth; now we want innocence—that’s where power lies at the moment. So much of our politics and culture really come out of this struggle with innocence,” the author states. By innocence, he means the moral justification for authority and the exercise of power.

Book towns: Richard George William Pitt Booth MBE (1938-2019) said libraries couldn’t keep up with today’s publishing industry, and thus “the future of the book is in book towns,” such as the one he inspired in Hay-on-Wye, Wales. Bloggers Sophie Pearce and Sophie Nadeau both visited and took photos for their travel sites.

Ugly Buildings: “There is nothing so obvious that it cannot be denied.”

Spam: “The nostalgic valances that stem from that salty, pink block of luncheon meat go way back for some of us, not least because it represents a very specific experience: what it was like growing up in America with immigrant parents.”

Poets: Irish poet Maurice Scully died last year, “a true original in the world of Irish poetry, quietly and patiently doing things his own way for several decades.”

Photo: Newman’s Drug Store in New York, 1976. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Fiction, Reviews

Steelheart, a Superhero Thriller, by Brandon Sanderson

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“You’ve said it yourself—we can’t kill every Epic out there. The Reckoners are spinning in circles. The only hope we have, the only hope that humankind has, is to convince people that we can fight back. For that to happen, Steelheart has to fall by human hands.”

Ten years ago, an undefined cosmic entity called Calamity eradiated the Earth, causing some people to develop superpowers. These people were quickly labeled Epics and they began to claim territory for their own kingdoms. Some areas, in what became the Fractured States, were completely wasted as Epics fought over them, but Newcago, the city claimed by the title villain, Steelheart, was at least functioning under new management.

Epic powers range from standard (invincibility, premonition, illusion-making) to non-standard (the ability to fire a handgun without running out of ammo). Power sets and limits are discussed in detail throughout the book, as you might expect but also in a way that raises questions. More on that later.

Steelheart by Brandon Sanderson is a compelling sci-fi story. David Charleston, the young main character, witnesses the cataclysm that began Steelheart’s reign and becomes the sole survivor of the only time their invincible overlord has been injured. “I’ve seen Steelheart bleed,” he says at the beginning, and though he doesn’t know why this man who typically deflects all attacks was superficially wounded, he’s confident something in his memory will lead them to his fatal weakness.

This is the first of three books in The Reckoners series. It stands well as a single book, but with the open ending to one problem clearly to be addressed in book two (as can be seen in that book’s title), I’m eager to pick up the other books. But this one is not without problems.

I hesitate to much because maybe I’ve thought about this kind of sci-fi/fantasy too much and am in danger of complaining about reasonable choices I wouldn’t have made. For instance, Epic powers and weaknesses can be anything, and the heroes discuss how they defy scientific understanding. Thus, we have a character who can shoot a handgun indefinitely but not a rifle or any other weapon. That’s . . . silly. It reminds me of a guy in My Hero Academia who can use the lines on a street as weapons. Maybe the visual medium (manga) and the level of crazy at that point in the story makes such a power seem normal enough. It’s a long story with tons of power sets, so perhaps silly gets lost in diversity. In Steelheart, the handgun character is one of the first Epics we meet.

Plot tension and main characters are strong throughout. The conclusion is satisfactory, if somewhat forced.

Photo: Aaron Bean on Unsplash

Music

Christmas Singing: Brightest and Best of the Sons of the Morning

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“Brightest and Best” performed by The USC Thornton Chamber Singers

Today’s hymn may be in your hymnal but it won’t be arranged to a rollicking folk melody as Shawn Kirchner has in the video above. It’s a song about the Magi finding the infant King of the Jews after a long trek in pursuit of the star. It was written by Englishman Reginald Heber (1783-1826) while he was rector in the village of Hodnet, Shropshire.

“The LORD is near to the brokenhearted
and saves the crushed in spirit” (PS 34:18 ESV)

Refrain
Brightest and best of the sons of the morning,
Dawn on our darkness and lend us thine aid;
Star of the east, the horizon adorning,
Guide where our infant Redeemer is laid.

2 Cold on His cradle the dew-drops are shining,
Low lies His head with the beasts of the stall;
Angels adore Him in slumber reclining,
Maker and Monarch and Savior of all.

3 Shall we not yield Him, in costly devotion,
Odors of Edom, and offerings divine,
Gems of the mountain, and pearls of the ocean,
Myrrh from the forest, and gold from the mine?

4 Vainly we offer each ample oblation,
Vainly with gifts would His favor secure;
Richer by far is the heart’s adoration,
Dearer to God are the prayers of the poor.

Blogs, Socials

Making New Connections, Patterns, and Links

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I believe it’s common for Christian pastors and ministry leaders to say believers don’t need to learn more about the Bible as much as they need to apply what they already know. Maybe it’s only common in South. I’ve heard statements like this many times, and they’re good so far as they go. People who know Christ Jesus is risen and will come again in the flesh, who know to seek first his kingdom and not to worry about other concerns, who have passing familiarity with the fruit of the Spirit, may just need to apply what they know to their daily decisions.

But if that’s the case, why do these pastors continue to preach?

There are many reasons to continue to preach. Let me offer one reason that pushes back on notion that we don’t need more Bible knowledge, just more Bible application. Good preaching and teaching can make connections people haven’t, and maybe can’t, make for themselves. This is often the missing piece. It isn’t that church congregants aren’t familiar with biblical principles. Of course, they may not be, but familiarity doesn’t change the heart without reflection. We naturally take up unbiblical assumptions and patterns that work against the life God has called us to. Most of us don’t recognize what unbiblical beliefs we still hold, and we need godly preachers to show us how God’s truth applies to life. We need them to show us the patterns of a Christian mind.

Bible knowledge—in fact, straight, dry, matter-of-fact biblical knowledge—can make these connections if the Holy Spirit would graciously apply it to us, but often we need to hear a godly preacher or teacher reflect on a text with illustrations and applications for us. This is the way the body of Christ works. We aren’t copies of each other. Some of us don’t think well. We are hung up on ourselves. If we have passing familiarity with the Bible, we don’t understand how to get from what we know to an application like The Heidelberg Catechism’s first question.

What is thy only comfort in life and death?

That I am not my own, but belong—body and soul, both in life and death—unto my faithful Savior Jesus Christ; who, with His precious blood, hath fully satisfied for all my sins, and delivered me from all the power of the devil; and so preserves me that without the will of my heavenly Father, not a hair can fall from my head; yea, that all things must be subservient to my salvation, and therefore, by His Holy Spirit, He also assures me of eternal life, and makes me sincerely willing and ready, henceforth, to live unto Him.

What end of the year links do we have?

Poetry: A little on Thomas Gray’s other poems, not “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” but since you brought up Gray’s famous poem, here’s Dr. Iain McGilchrist reading it.

Charles Williams: C.S. Lewis had high praise for one of Williams’s novels. “A book sometimes crosses one’s path which is so like the sound of one’s native language in a strange country that it feels almost uncivil not to wave some kind of flag in answer,” said Lewis in his letter. “I have just read your Place of the Lion and it is to me one of the major literary events of my life—comparable to my first discovery of George MacDonald, G.K. Chesterton, or Wm. Morris.”

Williams and Lewis became friends shortly after this.

Every day we must make countless decisions about whether we will allow ourselves to be trained in habits of acontextualization, distraction, and incoherence. Resistance requires awareness, persistence, and intentionality. Dr. Keith Plummer is Dean of the School of Divinity at Cairn University.

Christmas: On Jan. 2, 1927, Arthur Machen wrote about Christmas traditions of his youth. “It is still Christmas, let it be remembered, and Christmas customs have not ceased to be topics of the day. And I am reminded of a curious old Welsh custom, which lingered well into my young days, which, for all I know, may still linger. Christmas in the very old days was one of the feasts on which the parish spent all they could afford on lights. . . . to simple village eyes accustomed to a dim tallow to get to bed by, if so much illumination as that, the church on Christmas morning must have been a place of splendour and glory, a paradise on earth.”

Photo: andreas kretschmer on Unsplash

The Press

The Long Decline of the New York Times

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Former NY Times editorial page editor James Bennet has a long essay in The Economist about his experience at the Gray Lady. He focuses on efforts to diversify the printed opinions and the fierce opposition that effort got from reporters and readers. In short, the Times staff is making itself comfortable in a handbasket on the road to an undisclosed location. (via The World and Everything in It)

During the first meeting of the Times board of directors that I attended, in 2016, [executive editor Dean] Baquet and I hosted a joint question-and-answer session. At one point, Baquet, musing about how the Times was changing, observed that one of the newsroom’s cultural critics had become the paper’s best political-opinion columnist. Taking this musing one step further, I then noted that this raised an obvious question: why did the paper still have an Opinion department separate from the newsroom, with its own editor reporting directly to the publisher? If the newsroom was publishing the best opinion journalism at the paper – if it was publishing opinion at all – why did the Times maintain a separate department that falsely claimed to have a monopoly on such journalism?

Everyone laughed. But I meant it, and I wish I’d pursued my point and talked myself out of the job. This contest over control of opinion journalism within the Times was not just a bureaucratic turf battle (though it was that, too). The newsroom’s embrace of opinion journalism has compromised the Times’s independence, misled its readers and fostered a culture of intolerance and conformity.

The Opinion department is a relic of the era when the Times enforced a line between news and opinion journalism. Editors in the newsroom did not touch opinionated copy, lest they be contaminated by it, and opinion journalists and editors kept largely to their own, distant floor within the Times building. Such fastidiousness could seem excessive, but it enforced an ethos that Times reporters owed their readers an unceasing struggle against bias in the news. But by the time I returned as editorial-page editor, more opinion columnists and critics were writing for the newsroom than for Opinion. As at the cable news networks, the boundaries between commentary and news were disappearing, and readers had little reason to trust that Times journalists were resisting rather than indulging their biases.

The Times newsroom had added more cultural critics, and, as Baquet noted, they were free to opine about politics. Departments across the Times newsroom had also begun appointing their own “columnists”, without stipulating any rules that might distinguish them from columnists in Opinion. It became a running joke. Every few months, some poor editor in the newsroom or Opinion would be tasked with writing up guidelines that would distinguish the newsroom’s opinion journalists from those of Opinion, and every time they would ultimately throw up their hands.

I remember how shaken A.G. Sulzberger was one day when he was cornered by a cultural critic who had got wind that such guardrails might be put in place. The critic insisted he was an opinion writer, just like anyone in the Opinion department, and he would not be reined in. He wasn’t. (I checked to see if, since I left the Times, it had developed guidelines explaining the difference, if any, between a news columnist and opinion columnist. The paper’s spokeswoman, Danielle Rhoades Ha, did not respond to the question.)

Poetry

A Christmas Eve Limerick

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Her sweater was all warm and cozy
With a scene that was Christmasy poesy.
The sermon so sweet
Almost put her to sleep
For she sat in the pew somewhat dozy.

Editor Sam O’Neil has been stoking the fires for limericks on Sunday for a while now, and today being Christmas Eve, I chipped in with the limerick above. #LimerickSunday

Music

Christmas Singing: Good Christian Men, Rejoice

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“Good Christian Men, Rejoice,” performed by RUNA

It’s Christmas Eve. This Christmas carol was written in the 14th century to a medieval German folk tune. It’s in the vein of songs that teach doctrine. The video above weaves another song, In Dulci Jubilo (“In sweet rejoicing”), and the fun they have with it recommended it above other recordings.

“And the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, as it had been told them” (Luke 2:20 ESV).

1 Good Christian men, rejoice,
With heart, and soul, and voice;
Give ye heed to what we say:
Jesus Christ is born today;
Ox and ass before him bow,
And he is in the manger now.
Christ is born today!
Christ is born today!

2 Good Christian men, rejoice,
With heart, and soul, and voice;
Now ye hear of endless bliss:
Jesus Christ was born for this!
He hath oped the heav’nly door,
And man is blessed evermore.
Christ was born for this!
Christ was born for this!

3 Good Christian men, rejoice,
With heart, and soul, and voice;
Now ye need not fear the grave:
Jesus Christ was born to save!
Calls you one and calls you all
To gain his everlasting hall.
Christ was born to save!

Authors, Blogs, Socials

Merry Old Christmastide Links

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Heap on more wood! the wind is chill;
But let it whistle as it will,
We’ll keep our Christmas merry still.

Letters: J.R.R. Tolkien wrote and illustrated letters to his boys as Father Christmas. They were originally published in 1976, the third anniversary of his death. Here’s the start of the one from 1925, copied from BritishHeritage.com.

My dear boys,

I am dreadfully busy this year — it makes my hand more shaky than ever when I think of it — and not very rich. In fact, awful things have been happening, and some of the presents have got spoilt and I haven’t got the North Polar Bear to help me and I have had to move house just before Christmas, so you can imagine what a state everything is in, and you will see why I have a new address, and why I can only write one letter between you both.

Domestic and religious rite
Gave honour to the holy night;
On Christmas Eve the bells were rung;
On Christmas Eve the mass was sung:

Historic Peace: Here’s a review of Tom Holland’s Pax, a history of the Roman Empire. It covers from the end of Nero to Hadrian, about 70 years. “He is the rare breed of serious historian who is fluent in the material, confident in his interpretations, and able to write with a novelistic flourish. Honestly, all 400+ pages of Pax are just so fun to read.“

Hadrian’s Wall: Speaking of Emperor Hadrian, the 200-year-old sycamore tree that stood to the side of Hadrian’s Wall between two hillocks was cut down in September by vandals, but the tree is not lost. “The National Trust confirmed that the seeds from the 200-year-old tree are expected to be able to grow new trees.” And the stump will likely grow again too.

The heir, with roses in his shoes,
That night might village partner choose;
The Lord, underogating, share
The vulgar game of ‘post and pair’.

C.S. Lewis: A 1946 Christmas sermon for pagans by the author of The Abolition of Man. “When something is wrong, Lewis suggests, the post-Christian Englishperson points to the Government or the education system or to God or whatever as the problem. Rarely does a post-Christian carry around a sense that they might be at fault.”

England was merry England, when
Old Christmas brought his sports again.
‘Twas Christmas broach’d the mightiest ale;
‘Twas Christmas told the merriest tale;
A Christmas gambol oft could cheer
The poor man’s heart through half the year.

The poetry in this post is taken from a Christmas section of Sir Walter Scott’s Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field, via the Scottish Poetry Library

Photo: “Child holding Christmas card” by Annie Spratt/ Unsplash

Poetry

Why, Mary, Do You Rejoice in the Prince of Peace?

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Thou Mother of the Prince of Peace,
         Poor, simple, and of low estate!
   That Strife should vanish, Battle cease,
         O why should this thy soul elate?
Sweet Music’s loudest note, the Poet’s story,—
Did’st thou ne’er love to hear of Fame and Glory?

From “A Christmas Carol,” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Despite being unqualified to make such a pronouncement, I doubt Coleridge’s “A Christmas Carol” is a very good poem. The verse is clunky, and I worry that the theme boils down to something John Lennon would approve, but perhaps it’s a good theme for this year. Would we rather glory in war or in the Prince of Peace?

Coleridge wrote “A Christmas Carol” in 1799, after he had taken up Unitarianism officially, and it was set to music many years later when the English were reviving the singing of carols. The words do seem to call for a tune with four lines and a couplet in each verse.

“Joy rose within her, like a summer’s morn;
Peace, Peace on Earth! the Prince of Peace is born.”

The world doesn’t understand peace; many believers don’t either. We are too worldly. We don’t follow Christ in making peace as much as possible, and we don’t understand the necessity of being prepared for war. In the poem, the shepherds come to Mary and she rejoices in their tale. Then, the poet steps in to ask her why she should rejoice in the Prince of Peace (note the verse above).

She responds, “War is a ruffian, all with guilt defiled, / That from the aged Father tears his Child!” Strife and Battle break the world and waste everything. “A murderous fiend, by fiends adored, / He kills the Sire and starves the Son.” Yes, yes, but this is personification. War isn’t a person; it’s a description of things people do. We fight each other for power, money, and fame. The Roman founders saw they needed women to be a successful colony, but instead of appealing to their Sabine neighbors, they fought them and took their women. Who taught them to take the path of war instead of the path of peace? No one. It would have been a natural choice for anyone.

I suspect Coleridge was like many who want peace as the absence of war, but the Prince of Peace says he gives a different peace, a peace that follows from seeking the Kingdom of Heaven first. It isn’t one we earn per se. It’s one that follows us, like goodness and mercy. The Lord may put us in a troubled time, and we may even be called to fight for the peace we want to see, but the Lord gives us a peace in knowing his kingdom has no end.

Of the increase of his government and of peace
there will be no end,
on the throne of David and over his kingdom,
to establish it and to uphold it
with justice and with righteousness
from this time forth and forevermore.
The zeal of the LORD of hosts will do this. (Isaiah 9:7 ESV)

“Madonna Nursing the Infant Christ by Jan Provoost Flemish 1520 oil” by mharrsch is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Fiction, Non-fiction

Movies Are Made of Moments

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British host Michael Parkinson interviews American actor Jimmy Stewart (and later Stewart’s wife, Gloria)

In the 1973 interview above with British TV presenter Michael Parkinson (1935-2023), actor Jimmy Stewart shares a number of interesting trivia from his life and career. They embarrass him in the beginning by sharing a clip from a romantic musical he did, and then at 9:25 shift to It’s a Wonderful Life. Stewart says the film didn’t do well at the box office, but it’s both his and director Frank Capra’s favorite movie.

He goes on to say he has a theory that “creating moments in movies” is most important. “Nobody knows exactly how it happens. What you should do is prepare yourself as best you can to make these moments happen.” Movies are less about the overall performance and more about moments like George Bailey’s desperation in the bar, crying out to God to show him the way.

I found this interview via Anthony Sacramone, who is very smart and a film buff. He added to Stewart’s comments with moments of his own.

Think about Bogart at the bar. Or the look on Hackman’s face as he sees the woman pushing the baby carriage in the middle of the street under the El. Or the “Ba-da-bing!” scene in The Godfather (or the expression on Michael’s face just before he shoots McCluskey and Sollozzo and changes the trajectory of his life forever). Think about that shot of John Wayne through the doorway as he turns and walks off into the distance in The Searchers. James Dean crying, “You’re tearing me ap-a-a-art!” in Rebel without a Cause. Rocky screaming for Adrian at the big fight’s end.