Religion

Spectator link, plus another saint the fewer

Leave a comment

My article on Norway is up at The American Spectator today. Link here.

Sad news (as if we needed more). John Stott has passed away, old and full of years as the Bible says (he was 90).

J.I. Packer remembers that Stott “in his younger days … was a brilliant and hard-worked student evangelist.” He was the chosen speaker for a considerable number of Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship’s week-long evangelistic campaigns at British universities, particularly Cambridge and Oxford. These later extended to North America and throughout the Commonwealth. From these evangelistic talks came one of his best-selling books, Basic Christianity (1958), which has been translated into 25 languages and sold well over a million copies.

Billy Graham first visited England in 1946, and Stott met him while sharing open-air preaching at Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park. In 1954 he welcomed Graham for his 12-week Harringay Crusade, and the two became warm friends. Later on this friendship would be important to the Lausanne movement, but it is worth noting that it began through an active, shared commitment to evangelism.

Religion, Reviews

Good stuff, bad stuff

Leave a comment

I squealed like a schoolgirl and jumped up and down today, when the great Andrew Klavan noticed my review of The Final Hour on his personal blog. Not as posted here, but as cross-posted at The American Culture. But who cares? It’s all about me.

On a subject I’ll be glad to see the end of, here’s a couple further things on Anders Barking Breivik, the worst Norwegian since Quisling.

From Timothy Dalrymple (by way of First Thoughts), a thoughtful article on the Christian response to the outrage.

And at the aforementioned The American Culture, a few excerpts from Breivik’s so-called manifesto, in which he explains how Christian he really is.

I’m working on a piece about Norway and Breivik for The American Spectator right now. I don’t know whether I have anything left to say that’s worth the publishing, but I felt I needed to make the effort. I’ll let you know if it appears.

Fiction, Reviews

Altamont Augie, by Richard Barager

Leave a comment

Will this book have the same visceral effect on other readers as it does on me? Perhaps not to the same extent.

Altamont Augie is, in the first place, a book about my own coming of age years—the late ʹ60s. The main characters are about four years older than me.

On top of that, the bulk of the action takes place on my home turf—Minneapolis and its environs. Mostly the University of Minnesota, where I did not attend, but visited often. I could easily have bumped elbows with these people. The main female character comes from the suburb of Robbinsdale, my present home.

The somewhat confusing title of the book is a double reference. “Altamont” means the Altamont Free Concert at Altamont Speedway in northern California in 1969, where four people died in the terminal delirium of the Woodstock Era. One of those dead remains unidentified to this day—a young man who climbed a fence and jumped into an aqueduct where he drowned.

“Altamont Augie” is the speculative name hung on that unfortunate man by the novel’s fictional narrator, a young Californian named Caleb Levy. It’s a reference to Saul Bellow’s novel, The Adventures of Augie March. Continue reading Altamont Augie, by Richard Barager →

Uncategorized

Gorgeous Landscapes from the American Frontier

Leave a comment

Thomas Cole, Alfred Bierstadt, and other painters who tried to recreate western American in the 1800s are exhibited in the Seattle Art Museum and reviewed by Laura Haertel for the California Literary Review. Ms. Haertel points to Cole for the exhibits theme:

“Nature has spread for us a rich and delightful banquet. Shall we turn from it? We are still in Eden. The wall that shuts us out of the garden is our own ignorance and folly.” -from Thomas Cole’s Essay on American Scenery, 1836

Non-fiction

The English Traveler

Leave a comment

Christopher Taylor reviews To a Mountain in Tibet by Colin Thubron in the London Review of Books, saying Thubron’s “books turn on the encounter between the energetic yet dreamy narrator, moving ‘in a boyish euphoria of self-sufficiency’, as he puts it in Behind the Wall: A Journey through China, and the sometimes deflating realities he finds. Once these have made him feel grizzled and disabused he’ll have a moment of human contact or a brush with the beautiful…” Thubron is the quintessential English travel writer, and he can’t help it. (via George Grant)

Non-fiction, Religion

The Omniscient Will Not Remember

Leave a comment

Last week, I listened to an audiobook of The Next Story: Life and Faith after the Digital Explosion. Author Tim Challies’ notes that many things we do online are recorded: our search requests, transactions, social network connections, and more. Each will be in its own database, but with the expansive overlapping of our social networks with other websites, that’s changing. Increasingly, what we do online is not only recorded, but tied to our social profiles so that even casual friends can know a good bit about us.

The Crucifixion Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472-1553)This raises a natural question. Would any of us be embarrassed by the revelation of our online actions: our comments, searches, browsing, how much we do or when? I’ll say upfront that I would be, and I try to lead a fairly transparent online life.

Challies makes the obvious contrast between these databases and the Christian life. Our Heavenly Father has given followers of Christ Jesus the righteousness of Christ, and in doing so, he has removed our transgressions from us as far as the east is from the west (Psalm 103:13)

“I, I am he who blots out your transgressions for my own sake, and I will not remember your sins.” Isaiah 43:25 ESV

The God who knows everything from the beginning to the end makes a conscious decision to reject the memory of our cancelled sins. What profound mercy. Psalm 103 says he remembers our frailty and has compassion on us like a father loves his children. He refuses to recount for us a long list of sins, because that list has been ruined. But he scored those sins in Christ’s own body and nailed them with him to the cross, like the horrible painting of Lucas Cranach the Elder shows.

What mercy.

Uncategorized

Apology, with weeping

Leave a comment

I’d wear sackcloth if I had any.

It appears I was wrong, and need to apologize to all Muslims.

Current reports tell that the vile, despicable murderer in Norway (current death count 91) is Anders Behring Breivik, a Norwegian national. He has variously been described as a Freemason, a radicalized former supporter of the conservative Norwegian Fremskritt (Progress) Party, and (according to some accounts) a “conservative Christian.”

If this is true, it makes this already unspeakable act of infamy a cosmic one. It is likely to spell the end of historic Christianity in Norway.

The precise opposite of the burden of my prayers for many years.

Even if it turns out, as in the case of Timothy McVeigh, that he’s not actually a Christian believer, we can expect the “Breivik was a Christian” meme to take hold, as it has with the self-worshiping McVeigh.

This is horrible. Horrible.

Uncategorized

A scream in Norway

Leave a comment

First of all, thanks to Dr. Gene Edward Veith for linking to my book trailer at his Cranach blog. Much appreciated.

But of course, my thoughts are mostly in Norway today. As I understand it, we don’t have a final death count in the bombings and shootings that happened today. But even if it rises no higher than the 15 or so we read about at the moment, bear in mind that Norway is an extremely small country in population–only about 5 million people. Oslo is by far the largest population center, with less than 900,000 inhabitants. This is huge.

My first assumption was that this was an act of Islamic terrorism. Latest reports say that they think the two incidents are related, and officials are downplaying the Islamist theory because the camp shooter was an ethnic Norwegian. Frankly that’s just the sort of thing I’d expect them to say, considering the European reluctance to connect anything violent with “the religion of peace.” European converts to the religion are hardly unheard of.

A group called Ansar Al-Jihad Al-Alami very quickly claimed responsibility. There have also been security concerns recently, due to the decision of a Norwegian prosecutor to put a “refugee” Iraqi named Mullah Krekar on trial for threatening Norwegian politicians.

It’s not unthinkable that a Norwegian neo-Nazi group would join forces with Islamists.

I’ll apologize if I’m wrong, but I still expect further investigation to discover that this is an act of Islamic jihadism.

I worry about Norway all the time. As a culture, they have drunk deeply at the well of Jean Jacques Rousseau, and their characteristic posture in the world, ever since the Viking spirit emigrated to America, has been one of genial defenselessness.

Fiction, Reviews

The Final Hour, by Andrew Klavan

Leave a comment

I’ll get out, I told myself. Rose’ll get me out. Two months, maybe three. I just need courage. I just have to survive.

That’s what I told myself.
But I was way wrong.
Andrew Klavan has completely realized his purpose in writing The Final Hour, the fourth and last in his The Homelanders young adult action series. He’s crafted a moral story that’s so exciting teenage boys will put off going back to their video games until they’ve finished it.
Is it over the top? Unquestionably. Poor Charlie West, the hero, caroms from one deathly peril to another, chapter after chapter. It’s like an Indiana Jones movie, except that Indie wouldn’t be able to keep up Charlie’s pace.
If you’ve been following the series, or just my reviews, you’ll know that the first book, The Last Thing I Remember, opened with Charlie waking up bound to a chair in a strange room, with terrorists outside the door discussing how much further to torture him. Since then he’s escaped and learned that (during a year that he’s forgotten completely) he’s been arrested and convicted of the murder of a high school friend. He’s escaped from custody since then, and has been on the run—gradually learning bits and pieces about the terrorists’ plot.
At the start of The Final Hour he’s in custody again, an inmate in a federal prison. The radical Muslim prisoners hate him for opposing terrorists, and try to kill him. He’s rescued by Nazi skinheads who want something from him, but he doesn’t want to have anything to do with them either. And oh yes, the corrupt prison guards have it in for him too.
Through it all, Charlie teaches lessons in Christian decency and patriotism, not by talking about those things, or even thinking about them much, but through practicing them—living out the lessons he’s learned from his parents and his karate teacher, Mike.
Which prepares him for his improbable but edge-of-your seat final confrontation with the murderous Homelanders.
Well done, Andrew Klavan.
Suitable (and highly recommended) for teens and up.

Fiction

Elemental Flash Fiction

Leave a comment

The Clarity of Night Contest, “Elemental,” has all the stories it’s going to get now, 102 in all. Styles, skill, and genres vary. Mine is #62, but here are my favorites of what I’ve read of the others.

There are other good ones too, so feel free to scan the list and bad mouth the authors here where they probably won’t read it. No, don’t do that. I’m shocked you would even think about it.