Religion

The Mother of all delusions

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This splendid article by Peter Wood in The Chronicle of Higher Education states some hard truths and asks some hard questions about assumptions concerning religion that reign in academia today. How come Christian Fundamentalists are openly discriminated against in educational hiring, while scholars promoting the more ridiculous claims of feminists about a supposed prehistoric matriarchal “golden age” are routinely welcomed and promoted?

There is no real evidence that humanity every passed through a stage in which society was matriarchal, and abundant evidence to the contrary. Goddesses, of course, appear frequently in the world’s religions and myths, but the notion of a great prehistoric cult of the Goddess in Europe connected to matriarchal rule has no foundation.

Why bring this up now? Because higher education’s relaxed attitude about appointing faculty members who not only believe but who actually teach this moonshine demonstrates the hypocrisy of those who say that faculty members are acting out of the need to protect the university from anti-scientific nonsense when they discriminate against conservative Christian candidates for academic appointment. The possibility that a candidate for a position in biology, anthropology, or, say, English literature might secretly harbor the idea that God created the universe or that the Bible is true, is a danger not to be brooked. But apparently, the possibility that a candidate believes that human society was “matriarchal” until about 5,000 years ago is perfectly within the range of respectable opinion appropriate for campus life.

Splendid stuff. A long article, but definitely worth reading. Tip: Cronaca.

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I'm too creative for my hat

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I improved my new Viking table this weekend, with the help of my friend Shawn. Because we couldn’t find the kind of screw-in legs I wanted, we bought some closet poles and some hanger bolts, and with drills and epoxy made our own. The result looks like this:

Yes, I know it looks pretty much like it did before, especially in a photograph. But trust me. The legs are un-tapered now, and I’m much happier with it. Someday I hope to drill out my fake joinery plugs and replace them with larger ones, better aligned. But for now this is essentially what I aimed for.

I’m gearing up for my big trip to the Viking encampment in Missouri this weekend. My big acquisition has been a Sony Handycam (used), which I acquired on eBay. The guy who sold it to me got sick the day we closed the deal, so delivery was delayed and I chafed a bit, but the thing finally arrived on Saturday. All in all I love it. It’s a sweet device.

My purpose is to produce a book trailer, because they’re all the rage right now and my publisher has been hinting broadly that I ought to make one or get one made. I’ve done some reading on film making, and I think (I suppose hubristically) that I have a fair grasp of the essentials. Long shots, tight shots, inserts. Rhythm. Increasing tension. (It’s not entirely unlike writing a story.) Background music makes a huge difference (I’ve already downloaded a free track I like very much.)

Now to see how well I handle the actual shooting. I want to enlist some people to deliver a couple lines of dialogue. Will I have the boldness to ask them to help me?

Also it’s supposed to be rainy down there on Friday, the set-up day. I was hoping to get some filming done that day, but that may not happen. At least I should be able to shoot some interiors in the hall.

I am an artist! I cannot work under these conditions!

No, Gloria, you are not ready for your close-up.

Non-fiction, Reviews

Witness, by Whittaker Chambers

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It is probably the measure of Whittaker Chambers’ success that he’s largely forgotten today, except in conservative circles. If his enemies had found a way to satisfactorily discredit him, he’d be included in the Rogues’ Gallery of Red Scare Crazies, like Sen. Joseph McCarthy and the members of the John Birch Society. But in fact his witness has stood the test of time (especially since Soviet intelligence files were made available to the public). So he has been ignored, made a non-person in the Stalinist tradition.

The title of his autobiography, Witness, has a double meaning. Its obvious reference is to his testimony, as a former Communist, before the House Committee On Un-American Activities in 1948. In that testimony he named several people he knew to be Communists, or Communist collaborators, in high government positions. In particular he named Alger Hiss, a state department official who had played a major role in the establishment of the U.N. When Hiss sued Chambers for libel, Chambers produced documentary proof that Hiss had lied about their association. In the end Hiss went to prison for five years, for perjury (his espionage activities fell outside the statute of limitations).

But the second meaning of the name Witness is Chamber’s confession of his Christian faith, a faith he adopted about the same time he left Communism (he became a Quaker). Those who know Christian history will immediately think of the ancient Greek word for “witness,” which is martyr. Although he does not mention that connection, Chambers makes it plain that when he went to the government to inform on his former comrades, he expected that the Communists would try to kill him, and that the government would very likely indict him for his espionage activities. He expected his life to be ruined, but he felt that was the duty he had to perform, the ministry to which God had called him.

He was not a perfect witness. His memory was sometimes inexact when testifying about events more than a decade in the past. He held back, at first (to the point of perjuring himself), the fact of his and his friends’ spy work for the Soviets. At one point the pressure became so great that he attempted suicide.

But he persevered by grace, a dumpy, not very photogenic celebrity, the butt of many jokes and the target of endless slanders. He came through at last, a little the worse for wear, to return to his beloved farm and family.

Witness is a moving book. It’s a long book, and the later parts featuring long transcripts from the Senate hearings sometimes make heavy reading. But he was a fine writer with a sensitive spirit, and the impression the reader comes away with is, most of all, what a great lover he was—of nature, of his family, of his country, and of his God.

Economics is not the central problem of this century. It is a relative problem which can be solved in relative ways. Faith is the central problem of this age.

Highly recommended.

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A Cookbook Reading

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Someone has prepared a humorous video of a “Spaniard” reading from Gwyneth Paltrow’s cookbook. It’s about two minutes of lines like “Could I use some butter and cheese and eggs in my cooking without going down some kind of hippie shame spiral? Yes. Of course I could.”

Religion

Salt water theology

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A randomly selected reader asks the following question:

Lars, given the sea-faring nature of the Vikings, what do you think (perhaps what did they think) of the words in Revelation about the new heaven and earth.  “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more.” Perhaps they never heard a sermon on that verse and didn’t have the Bible in their language to read themselves. So, what do you think?

 

Phil Wade

Dear Phil,

Thank you for your question. It is always good for young people to seek wisdom from their elders.

The passage to which you refer is Revelation 21:1. What did Viking converts think of this? I don’t think it’s a matter that came up much, and I know of no discussion of the matter in the sagas.

My first thought is that the Vikings might not have cared as much about this issue as we might expect. I’ve always loved the sea, but it was the idea of the sea I loved. I grew up hundreds of miles from the nearest shore, and the sea was a romantic image to me. For those who live close to it and deal with it every day, it’s not (I suspect) the same thing. Just as the American prairie has never held much magic for me.

My great-grandfather, I know, grew up working in the Norwegian herring and cod fishery, and once he was able to get a landlocked farm in Minnesota, he never looked back. He couldn’t see why anybody would want to go fishing, ever.

I might add that my own interpretation of that particular passage is not literal.

One thing I’ve learned in my Bible study is that the biblical Jews viewed the sea as almost entirely an evil thing. They identified it with the premordial abyss of Genesis 1:2: “Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep…” The sea was the treacherous place where there was nowhere to stand, where a man was swallowed up and lost forever.

This, by the way, is important to remember when reading the New Testament stories about Jesus calming the storm and walking on water, etc. He was asserting His authority over hell itself, in the disciples’ eyes, when He did those things. It also explains the plea of the demons of the Gerasenes not to be cast into the abyss, when they in fact end up in the Sea of Galilee (Luke 8:31-33).

That’s why I read Revelation 21:1 symbolically (that’s hardly a liberal reading, as so much of Revelation is clearly symbolic). I think the passage means that the wanton chaos of our moral world will be gone forever. Life will be fair at last.

But if I’m wrong, I’m sure I’ll learn to live with it.

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Spoke too soon

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I should have known better than to declare spring yesterday. Today it only got up to around fifty, and there’s even a little snow predicted over the weekend.

I have the superpower of always being wrong. I must learn to use this power for good.

Fiction, Reviews

Sloth, by Mark Goldblatt

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One of the most interesting tricks of the mystery writer is “the unreliable narrator.” When you aren’t sure if you can believe what the storyteller tells you, it adds a whole level to the puzzle.

Author Mark Goldblatt has added a further level of complexity. Not only does the narrator of Sloth (re-released last year by Greenpoint Press) sometimes deceive the reader, he may in fact not even exist. He never tells us his name. The only name he ever uses in the story (one chosen in order to deceive the woman he loves) is Mark Goldblatt, the name of the actual author of the book. But he didn’t borrow it from his author. He borrows it from his friend Zezel, who is an author and uses it as a pseudonym. (Or is he and does he?)

You see the kind of book we’re dealing with here?

Mark Goldblatt (the real one, I mean. S. T. Karnick assures me he actually exists, and that’s good enough for me) has written a parody of postmodern novels in which he out-deconstructs the deconstructors. Layers of meaning and misdirection are everywhere (as well as a lot of word play and fairly low humor).

The unnamed hero’s initial challenge is to convince a girl he’s never met—a girl he knows only through the television screen—that he’s not insane. A resident of a Manhattan apartment, he’s fallen in love with Holly Servant, a model/exercise instructor on a cable TV show out of California. He writes her erudite, impassioned love letters, not really expecting a response, but desperately hoping she’ll at least read them and bestow on his passion the dignity of her recognition.

When she eventually does reply, he attempts to impress her by assuming the Mark Goldblatt (fictional in two senses) identity.

“But since you’ve inquired, I will confess that I am in fact a journalist. It’s a point of considerable humiliation for me. For what is a journalist except a liar in denial? Truth is the single greatest threat to my livelihood, the sword poised eternally overhead, for if ever the reader asks himself, Should I trust the words? then I am lost.”

Meanwhile, the narrator comes under suspicion in the murder of a male prostitute in his neighborhood, and is questioned by a detective named Lacuna (I kid you not).

And his friend Zezel (their relationship just skirts the edges of homoeroticism, but this may be because the narrator actually is Zezel. Or perhaps he does exist, and the narrator doesn’t. Zezel sometimes sneaks into the narrator’s apartment, turns on his computer, and enters falsehoods [or are they?] into the manuscript, another layer of uncertainty in the narrative) is having an affair, and his spurned wife throws herself at the narrator.

Sloth is a wickedly funny, challenging and brilliantly written novel by an author of rare wit and creativity. Great fun for sophisticated readers (hey, I enjoyed it, so you don’t have to be all that sophisticated). Cautions for language and sexual situations.

Writing

Recommendations for the Grammar Lover

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We want to write well, even if no one can define well for enough English speakers for very long. For this year, however, there are a few grammar book recommendations from Robert Lane Greene. He notes, “There’s nothing wrong with holding grammar in high regard, but much of the high dudgeon around it is more than a little bit of bunk. These books help you approach writing and speaking not with anxiety or frustration, but humility and wonder.”

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The fellowship and the spring

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I have just joined The Fellowship of the Viking Dragon. This is not a heathen religious group, but a group of supporters of an ongoing project to build the largest replica Viking ship ever constructed. I’ve offered them my services as a writer and translator. If you want to keep up to date on the project, or help in some way, information is here. Look around. There’s a lot of interesting photos of the process.

The ship’s being constructed in Haugesund, which is essentially the ancestral home town of the Walkers, who came from Karmøy just across the sound. So I’m very keen on this project, aside from its essential coolosity.

Somebody needs to do a good, epic Viking movie one of these days, featuring a big sea battle. There’s a growing fleet of very fine replica Viking ships in the world, just aching for a shot at stardom.

I’ve been doing a lot of Norwegian blogging lately, haven’t I?



For a change of pace, I’ll add something about the weather. Yesterday was the day I relaxed at last. I tense up every year around the beginning of November, and I don’t ease again until spring is firmly in place. Yesterday I felt that had happened. I saw one tiny snow pile in the shade of a tree while driving to work this morning, but I’m betting it’s gone as of this hour. Had a lovely walk by the lake tonight.

Tomorrow’s only supposed to get up to fifty, but I stand by my decree–spring is here.

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Men should not act like boys, unless they're playing Viking

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Another Viking from my group posted this video of us on Facebook. It’s not one he made; he found it somewhere. I’m not entirely sure who made it, but it’s very well done.

You’ll note that I “kill” Ragnar in the first fight. A phenomenon that rare deserves to be memorialized on film.

Watched the movie, The Hangover last night. I’d heard a lot about how hilarious it is.

Well, it’s funny. I laughed (snorted, actually) in a couple places. But mostly I found it distasteful.

It purports to be an affirmation of manhood and male bonding, in the face of a feminizing culture.

But that affirmation of manhood is actually an affirmation of boyhood. These men aren’t asserting their right to their status as men. They’re asserting their right to be irresponsible and make idiots of themselves. As if that’s what being a man is about.

I was particularly troubled by the attitude of the father of the bride (played by the great Jeffrey Tambor), who sends the bridegroom off to his Vegas bachelor party with a serious, fatherly speech that says, “Remember, what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.”

What kind of father is that? What kind of father will his son-in-law be?

Yeah, I’ve achieved fuddy-duddy status at last.