Non-fiction, Reviews

God's Battalions, by Rodney Stark

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Sad to say, it is no surprise that the massacre of Antioch is barely reported in many recent Western histories of the Crusades. Steven Runciman gave it eight lines, Hans Eberhard Mayer gave it one, and Christopher Tyerman, who devoted several pages to lurid details of the massacre of Jerusalem during the First Crusade, dismissed the massacre of Antioch in four words. Karen Armstrong devoted twelve words to reporting this massacre, which she then blamed on the crusaders since it was their dire threat that had created a “new Islam” with a “desperate determination to survive.” Armstrong also noted that because Baibars [the Mamluk commander] was a patron of the arts, he “was not simply a destroyer . . . [but also] a great builder.”

This excerpt from page 232 of Rodney Stark’s God’s Battalions: The Case for the Crusades, is characteristic of his approach to his subject. He takes a hard look at the bulk of recent historiography on the Crusades, and finds most of it shamefully biased.

He identifies four great lies that have become common wisdom in recent decades, all of which (he insists) are demonstrably false: Continue reading God's Battalions, by Rodney Stark →

Authors, Poetry

Dickinson: Poetic Leadership

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Emily Dickinson

Roger Lundin, the Blanchard Professor of English at Wheaton College, talks about the poetic language of leadership.



“Q: You describe Emily Dickinson’s work as part of a stereotypically Protestant move away from talking about God with regard to external things toward focusing on internal things. Do you think the move toward looking for God internally is related to a modern distrust for institutions?”

Lundin replies:

It has to do with something that Alexis de Tocqueville wrote almost 200 years ago in “Democracy in America.” He said that the American is either occupied with a very puny and insignificant thing, i.e. himself, or with some vast subject: nature, society, God, the universe. He said the space between that small thing and that vast other is empty. Democracy drives people to an intensely inward focus. It looks at the outside world as this vast, indifferent other. That space between [the insignificant and the vast subjects] is mediating life: it’s churches, schools, politics and social communities.

People who lead well are often people who have done that intense interior work, but you’re never effective in public leadership if you’re constantly reflecting and constantly, in a sense, absenting yourself. Thoreau said in “Walden,” “I’m aware of myself in a double sense.” He said, “I am both an actor in the human drama, and the one who stands back and observes myself and others in action, so that I’m both in the stream of life and standing outside of the stream of life.”

Blogs, Socials

World domination update, updated

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Just to let you know that I’ve been invited to join the blogging crew at S.T. Karnick’s The American Culture blog. This will not affect my blogging here in any way. Mostly I’ll be reposting reviews from this blog over there.

The American Culture is not a conservative blog, as Sam Karnick describes it, but a classical liberal blog. Its two principle er… principles are freedom of expression, and personal responsibility as the mechanism that makes freedom possible. Sam writes:

I don’t have any formal ground rules on story/essay angles other than this: we’re for liberty, and we enjoy and appreciate culture, including popular culture. To wit, we don’t just complain about the culture but instead report on what’s good as well. To this end, it’s important to note a principle I consider essential and which nearly everybody on the right fails to understand: depiction is not advocacy. Instead of blindly totting up instances of various events in a work and then complaining about it being too dirty and not at all like The Sound of Music (which is of course a darn good film but not the only way to communicate edifyingly), we go deeper and consider the real meaning of it. Thus a book full of gory murders can be very edifying while a book about a Christian family can be very bad art. It’s the assumptions and thoughts they purvey that count.

I think that’s an extremely important principle. It means (which ought to be obvious) that a book that deals with adultery is not necessarily a book in favor of adultery. A book that depicts bigotry is not necessarily a bigoted book (a principle generally out of fashion today). A book that wrestles with questions about the goodness of God is not necessarily blasphemous. Any subject, no matter how disturbing, can be handled morally in a moral story. It’s all in the treatment of the material.

(Just don’t ask me to watch a movie with two guys kissing. Ick.)

Goofing

What Would Seuss Have Said?

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A friend on Facebook gave us this the other day: “Rewrite lines from famous movies as Dr. Seuss might have written them.”

Here are a couple starters.

Arne Duncan Joins Michelle Obama For NEA's Read Across America Event

1. Play it again, Sam. Play it for me. Play it for Suzy and Fibber McGee. Play it the way that you played it before on the flute, the kazoo, and violadore.

2. Inconceivable!

You keep saying that word, but do you know

if that word will take where you want to go.

Now, what will you do with that? I’m looking at you, Book. What will you do with that?

Authors

R.I.P. Benedikt Benedikz

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Our friend Dale Nelson sent me this nearly a year-old link to the Times (UK) obituary for his friend Benedikt Benedikz, an Icelandic-born English librarian and scholar who sounds like the kind of intellectual character they just don’t manufacture anymore. Singer, linguist, Viking scholar, and other valuable things too numerous to mention.

Fiction

Interview with Joshua Weigel

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Joshua Weigel directed The Butterfly Circus, which we linked to a while back. He says, “We have already had quite a few people approach us about turning The Butterfly Circus into a feature film and we will be spending the coming months writing the feature script. From the start we had a much bigger story in mind and feel it has the potential to be even better as a full length feature.”

I wish him the best.

Blogs, Socials, Fiction, Reading

But what do you call the thing beneath it?

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Just when I was wondering what to blog about, Loren Eaton at I Saw Lightning Fall uses… that word!

He links to an interesting book review by Newsweek’s Jennie Yabroff, dealing with the thorny subject of… subtext!

The title in question is Joshua Ferris’ The Unnamed, a novel about a lawyer struggling with an undiagnosed compulsion to endlessly walk until he keels over. An odd and evocative premise, one that Yabroff wrestles with mightily. She initially wonders if the affliction may be a metaphor for environmental destruction or the search for the divine or the nature of addiction, but concludes that it doesn’t really matter. “What if the book is about nothing more than a man who takes really long walks?” she muses before launching into a discussion about the dangers of overanalyzing….

This leaves me no choice but to quote one of the best movies of the 1990s, Whit Stillman’s brilliant Barcelona, the story of two American cousins grappling with cultural differences, sexual mores, love, and anti-Americanism in 1980s Spain. This movie contributed one of the greatest bits of dialogue ever placed in two actors’ mouths:

FRED: Maybe you can clarify something for me. Since I’ve been, you know, waiting for the fleet to show up, I’ve read a lot, and–

TED: Really?

FRED: And one of the things that keeps popping up is this about “subtext.” Plays, novels, songs–they all have a “subtext,” which I take to mean a hidden message or import of some kind. So subtext we know. But what do you call the message or meaning that’s right there on the surface, completely open and obvious? They never talk about that. What do you call what’s above the subtext?

TED: The text.

FRED: OK, that’s right, but they never talk about that.

Note to self: Must get the DVD.