Authors, Religion

Mano on the Bethsaida Miracle

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Photo credit: Stormseeker (sseeker). Unsplash license.

Our friend Dave Lull, ever generously aware of my fascination with the late author D. Keith Mano, sent me to this 1997 article he wrote for National Review.

The article builds on new medical information, shared by Oliver Sacks, concerning what happens to blind people when they are given (or even regain) their sight. Lacking the experience sighted people have acquired from childhood in recognizing visual clues, these people (he cites a patient named Virgil) see the world as an incoherent jumble of shapes and lines. They can tell color and movement, but all the rest of the data confounds them. Depth and perspective are particular challenges.

Mano relates this information (never available before modern times) to the biblical account of Jesus healing a blind man at Bethsaida in Mark 8:22-25:

“And he cometh to Bethsaida; and they bring a blind man unto him, and besought him to touch him. And he took the blind man by the hand, and led him out of the town; and when he had spit on his eyes, and put his hands upon him, he asked him if he saw ought.”

And the blind man (in what I had always considered a poetic image) replied to Jesus, “I see men as trees, walking.”

Mano notes the sequel, where Jesus touches the man a second time to enable him to process all this new information, and then draws the conclusion:

So let us suppose a man like Virgil, blind since childhood because of traumatic shock. Let us also suppose that Jesus, Messiah-as-therapist, came along and healed Virgil in a non-miraculous way. That does not (and cannot) explain Part Two. Whether Virgil’s blindness was physical or psychosomatic, still his brain would have been deprived of the visual exercise and constant drill essential to clear three-dimensional sight. Only by a miracle could Jesus provide that necessary crash course in visual recognition. Charismatic therapists may be able to unblock sight –but they cannot infuse a human brain with that lifetime of visual experience necessary for normal sight.

Read the whole thing.
Reviews

Amazon Prime film review: ‘The Snowman’

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Okay, I’ll just start this semi-review by mentioning (in case you’re new here) that I have a dysfunctional relationship with the genre called “Nordic Noir.” Much as I love Norway, I find myself unable to get in the spirit of the boom in Scandinavian mysteries that persists today. I find Nordic Noir – in general – depressing and nihilistic. I’ve tried to enjoy Jo Nesbø’s Harry Hole mysteries, but I have trouble sympathizing with – or even believing in – a police detective who’s so desperately alcoholic that it interferes with his work, and who yet manages to keep his job and even be an asset to his department.

But I checked out the 2017 film adaptation of the Harry Hole book The Snowman on Amazon Prime. It’s not a film I did translation for (indeed, it’s not even a Norwegian production, but Swedish along with other countries), so I can say what I like about it.

I gave the novel a less than negative review (for a Nordic Noir) here. I guess I feel pretty much the same about the movie. Which seems to mean I liked it better than most people.

How very odd.

Michael Fassbender plays the role of Harry, whom we first observe, after a prologue, sleeping off a binge in a bus shelter in mid-winter. When he gets to work he meets a new partner, Katrine Bratt (Rebecca Ferguson), whom he finds annoyingly fresh and spunky. They investigate the disappearance of a young mother. Over time they discover that there have been a string of such disappearances, in different places over a long period of time. When the bodies are discovered, they are decapitated, the heads placed on snowmen. Harry’s difficult relationship with his ex-girlfriend’s son, who sees him as a father figure, provides a subplot that will eventually merge with the main plot.

The best part of the movie – as is often the case when they’re filming in Norway – is the scenery. There’s some spectacular footage here, especially as characters drive along the causeways of the famous Atlantic Road. J.K. Simmons, who always elevates any production, is on hand as a sleazy businessman/politician, an easy character for good Socialists to hate.

I can also see the problems in the film. One is a very dark plot, including one particularly awful surprise. Another is the odd presence of Val Kilmer, playing a now-dead character in flashbacks. He looks barely functional, and indeed was recovering from a stroke during filming. All his dialogue is dubbed but still hard to understand.

My big problem was a fairly heavy-handed message about abortion.

Still, I found the movie watchable, and it kept my interest.

Semi-recommended, but with cautions (language, sexual situations, brief nudity, disturbing violence) and without great enthusiasm.

Uncategorized

The Avaldsnes festival 2022

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I am a busy man. Busy, busy. Like a bee. Or a beaver. Or some other animal that starts with a “b.” Busy as a butterfly? Busy as a badger? Busy as Behemoth?

Anyway, I’ve got translation work today. Sweet translation work on a project which (as usual) I can’t tell you anything about. I will tell you (because it’s redundant) that it’s in Norwegian and I need to run it through the processors between my ears, extruding in the end an English script of rare beauty and grace.

It’s a good script, too. One I’m happy to be involved with. I will tell you that. I don’t think the lawyers will object.

Also, I’m only about a third of the way through the hypertrophied book I’m reading for review, so there wouldn’t be a review tonight anyway.

Instead, I found the video above. It’s by a guy I know nothing about, and my sharing it implies no endorsement of any kind. But he was at the Avaldsnes Viking Festival last summer when I was. So you can get the flavor of it. He missed a great opportunity, though, in not getting a shot of me in my Viking togs.

Music

Sunday Singing: Thine Be the Glory

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“Thine Be the Glory” performed by The Harmonious Chorale Ghana

One more Easter hymn for the month. “Thine Be the Glory” was written by Swiss hymnist Edmond Louis Budry (1854–1932) specifically to the “conquering hero” theme in Handel’s oratorio Judas Maccabaeus. Englishman Richard Birch Hoyle translated the work into English.

1 Thine be the glory, risen, conqu’ring Son:
endless is the vict’ry thou o’er death hast won;
angels in bright raiment rolled the stone away,
kept the folded grave-clothes where thy body lay.

Refrain:
Thine be the glory, risen, conqu’ring Son;
endless is the vict’ry thou o’er death hast won.

2 Lo! Jesus meets us, risen from the tomb;
lovingly he greets us, scatters fear and gloom;
let the church with gladness, hymns of triumph sing,
for her Lord now liveth, death hath lost its sting. [Refrain]

3 No more we doubt thee, glorious Prince of life;
life is naught without thee: aid us in our strife;
make us more than conqu’rors, thro’ thy deathless love:
bring us safe thro’ Jordan to thy home above. [Refrain]

Blogs, Socials, Non-fiction, Religion, Uncategorized, Writing

What Is the Essence of Story?

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The essence of a story is conflict. We may think the essence as theme and remember some stories for a moment of discovery or clarity that moves us, but that moment must come through conflict to carry meaning.

In a 1959 text called Understanding Fiction, Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren write, “A story is a movement through complexity to unity, through complication to simplicity, through confusion to order.” Both adventures and mysteries follow this path. You begin with many questions and maybe competing statements of fact. The confusion may be as simple as being lost, and finding the way out takes a lot of problem solving. When order or simplicity is found, when the events finally make some sense, then you have a story.

There are many types of conflict, Brooks and Warren note, but an account of “purely physical conflict” can’t be called fiction. Motives and ideas are necessary. We need characters, not just actors. A writer needs to “investigate motives” and “imply sympathy or antipathy” for the characters involved. Dr. Jones wants to preserve the ark or save Marion and himself. Belloq wants to use the ark to conquer the world. (And there are layers of conflict despite what fan critics have said.)

In another Saturday post, I said games and sports could hit the points of story, and I think motives and character is what I was talking about. The conflict is there, and if you impute evil intent onto the other team, you’ve got something that smells like a story.

What else have we got?

Book Banning: The ALA asks us to believe “2,571 unique titles were targeted for censorship” in mostly “school libraries, classroom libraries, or school curricula” in 2022. That’s a 38 percent increase over 2021. Though you may suspect the ALA of cooking the books to raise this number, a glance at the top 13 most challenged books shows “claimed to be sexually explicit” on every title. Why are any of these recommended in schools?

Faithfulness: A new book tells the stories of Lutherans under Stalin.

But the Communist Party sought also to erase Christian ethics. “Love your neighbor” violated the Marxist principle of “class struggle.” Thus, pastors could be charged with “preaching class peace.” Lutherans had an extensive network to help the poor and the disabled, but this was held to compete with the state and to keep the deprived “in thrall to their exploiters.” Consequently, the church was defined as an enemy of the state. One of the Lutheran bishops summed up the goal: “Everything that is connected to the Christian faith or reminds one of it must disappear from the life of the people and its individual citizens.”

Ukraine: “[Victoria] Amelina is one of Ukraine’s most celebrated young literary figures and a common presence at literary festivals both in Ukraine and abroad.” Now, she researches war crimes, starting with what happened to children’s literature writer Volodymyr Vakulenko.

Reader Reviews: A writer gets angry that ARC readers aren’t leaving reviews.

Grassroots Hatred: Will anti-Semitism ever die?

Music

One of my stupider posts…

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Which is saying a lot.

I’m just getting going on a reeeeeally long book to review, so I’ll be posting oddments here for a few days. And Friday is a day I often do musical posts.

But I didn’t have this in mind, I swear to you. I was looking for some kind of hymn in Old Norse, and stumbled on this… thing.

I guess it’s kind of amusing. In Simon & Garfunkle style, they tell how the Vikings settled in Britain and assimilated. And they list some of the Viking contributions to British culture. I got a giggle or two out of it.

You’ll notice, if you’ve read my novel The Elder King, that they repeat the story that the nursery rhyme, “London Bridge Is Falling Down” refers to King Olaf Haraldsson (later Saint Olaf) pulling down London Bridge during his time as a mercenary in England. I use that legend in my book, but integrity forced me to confess in the Afterword that there’s no genuine historical basis for it. One translation of Heimskringla includes a skaldic poem with the lines, “London bridge is falling down / Gold is won and bright renown.” But that line was a whimsy of the translator’s. It doesn’t appear that way in the original poem. Scholars are confident that the nursery rhyme commemorates a much later occurrence.

Have a good weekend, if you can handle that disappointment.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Dead of Night,’ by Robert McNeill

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Maurice Hillard is a French scholar teaching at the University of Edinburgh. He has a reputation as a ladies’ man, not discriminating between his own students and other men’s wives. So there’s no lack of suspects when he’s found dead in the Union canal, his neck broken. But all the chief suspects seem to have good alibis. Meanwhile, Inspector Jack Knox is under pressure from his superiors to solve the crime quickly, without scandal.

Meanwhile, his colleague and fiancée (how do they work that out?) Yvonne Mason is bedeviled by someone vandalizing her car and apartment door. Little does she know that this harassment is just part of a plot by a clever criminal, for whom she’s a means to a sinister end.

I’ve read previous volumes in the Jack Knox series. I like them but don’t love them; they’re well written.

What I personally disliked in this book was a very modern view of marriage. A highly nasty character invokes the Christian view of matrimony for evil purposes (though nothing is actually said about Christianity per se), and divorce is treated lightly – as it tends to be in any book written nowadays. And, of course, the Scottish Presbyterians have a history of easy divorce, as is well known from British history.

But these matters aren’t actually harped on. Dead of Night was professionally written and enjoyable to read. Moderately recommended.

Coffee, Tea, Drinks, Uncategorized

When Did Biscuits Become Light and Fluffy?

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A visiting preacher from England spoke out our church last year, and he share what he was offered for breakfast by his host on his first morning in our city. There may have been more to the offer, but he focused on his initial take on being offered biscuits and strawberry jelly. He knows how Americans use English differently than he does, but he couldn’t help reacting to the thought of having cookies and strawberry Jell-O for breakfast, because that’s the British use biscuits and jelly. For the actual food he was being offered, he would have said scones and jam.

The American Encyclopaedic Dictionary of 1896 defines biscuit first in this way: “Thin flour-cake which has been baked in the oven until it is highly dried. . . . Plain biscuits are more nutritious than an equal weight in bread, but owing to their hardness and dryness, they should be more thoroughly masticated to insure their easy digestion.” Among other explanations, the writers warn that toasted biscuit crumbs have been used to “adulterate coffee” grounds (which is far preferable to sheep dung, if adulterated coffee is all they have at the market). They also allow that some biscuits are “raised” with shortening or “lightened” with baking powder and perhaps known to be dunked in coffee, but this definition doesn’t carry the weight of authority of the first one does.

Look at the etymology of the word, and you see what our forefather’s bit into. Biscuit comes through the French from the Medieval Latin biscoctum, which means “twice-baked.” It’s something of a fraternal word to biscotto, which is actually baked twice and dunked in 99.97% pure coffee.

So, how did twice-baked flour discs become comforting bundles of all that’s right with the world?

Shawn Chavis of How Stuff Works attributes it to improved flour coming out of Midwestern mills and the invention of baking soda in the 19th century. In these early days, risen biscuits were called “soda biscuits” by some to distinguish them from the regular kind.

Fluffy biscuits rose in the South for a variety of reasons. Debra Freeman writing for King Arthur Flour notes regional biases sidelined this quick bread in the North and allowed it to flourish in the South. Mix in particular creativity from various African Americans, and Southern biscuits were popping out of American ovens from coast to coast.

Photo by Stephen McFadden on Unsplash

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Preacher’s First Murder,’ by K. P. Gresham

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Pastor Matt Hayden of Wilks, Texas is a new creation in more than the spiritual sense. Once a Miami police detective, the hero of The Preacher’s First Murder entered the federal witness relocation program after a horrible day in which his brother and father, both cops, were killed. He changed his name, went to Lutheran seminary, and then the church sent him here. He has learned that the town and the church have their own strict rules of behavior. One of those is that the pastor needs to stay away from the Fire and Ice House, the bar just across the river from his church. It’s run by the beautiful Angie, daughter of Maeve, the owner, who suffers from Alzheimer’s.

Maeve goes missing, and Matt recruits some church members to help with the search – to the outrage of the Wilks family, which owns the town and runs the church. Their matriarch nurses a particular hatred for Maeve, but Matt feels a responsibility as a Christian.

When Maeve turns up dead, shot by a stupid Yankee hunter farther out of town than she should have been able to walk on her own, Matt’s old cop instincts tell him something’s fishy. And when the sleazy local gas station owner is murdered and Angie is arrested for it, Matt has no choice but to start his own investigation. Especially because he’s Angie’s alibi, and she refuses to let him reveal it, for the sake of his reputation in the church.

I’ve often said that I avoid novels written by women; my experience is that they tend to write their male characters poorly. I didn’t realize that author K. P. Gresham was a woman when I read this book, but I’m forced to admit – much against my will – that she didn’t do a bad job. And the writing in general was well done, which counts for a lot in the depressed world of Christian fiction.

I did have a few problems with the story, though. The picture of the Lutheran church in the book was surprisingly negative – the domination of church business by women was certainly realistic, but (although I grew up in a very puritanical church) I never encountered a church as judgmental as this one. We always understood that you can’t ostracize sinners – you have to reach out to them.

Also, I was a little puzzled by the theology. This does seem to be a Christian novel (the complete lack of dirty words is kind of a tip-off), but I wasn’t sure what theology was being promoted. Pastor Matt’s concern with doing good to others was perfectly consistent with Christian morality. But Christian morality seemed to be all he had. There was no mention of God’s grace or of the cross. A reader might get the impression that good deeds are all the Faith is about.

Still, The Preacher’s First Murder was pretty good, all in all. I might be persuaded to read the second book in the series.

Fiction, Reviews

‘A Killing Game,’ by Jeff Buick

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Curtis Westcott is Chief of Homicide in Boston in A Killling Game, first book in a series by Jeff Buick. In this story, a rich and powerful man’s daughter is kidnapped by a criminal who doesn’t want money, but revenge. And to show the police how smart he is.

As the story proceeds, Curtis realizes that the killer is leaving a series of messages for him. These messages contain hidden riddles which – if he can solve them – will make it possible for him to stop the murder.

That’s really all I think I’m going to tell you about the plot. Because frankly, I don’t think this book deserves a lot of description.

It follows a formula you see often in thrillers – the super-smart criminal mastermind plays a game with the police, confident that his superior intelligence makes him unassailable, but longing at the same time for “a worthy adversary.”

I’m pretty sure this never happens in real life. A writer can make it work, but it takes a lot of skill.

Also, the plot involves a trail of obscure brain puzzles, which the detectives have to solve before the clock runs out.

I’m confident that this never, ever happens in real life. I did not believe this aspect of the story for a single moment.

Also, it struck me as ironic that the plot calls for the interpretation of ridiculously obscure verbal clues, while the author himself didn’t trust the reader to understand his plain words – the book is in fact overwritten. It would benefit from a great deal of cutting.

This happens when an author assumes his audience is too stupid to understand him, or when he doubts his own narrative power, so he reiterates everything he says.

[Here’s a Deathless Principle from Walker’s School of Writing: Good writing is like leading a friend along a path to see a beautiful vista. Once you’ve led him to the ridge where he can look out and see it, don’t keep informing him what he’s seeing. If you led him to the right spot he’ll see for himself.]

So I didn’t care much for A Killing Game. Though I have to admit I powered through to the end, just to see how it came out. Which, I suppose, means the author actually did his job, even if he didn’t do it the way I’d have liked.