What I remember of reading Jonathan Edwards’s account of the New England revival he witnessed is his deliberate skepticism of those of professed conversion. He saw people expressing themselves, claiming to be moved by the Holy Spirit, but only after he saw their piety during the week did he believe their profession. Bars closed. Reports of various vices ceased. New believers expressed a love for the Lord in their daily lives and helped each other more than ever–if I remember correctly.
All of this compelled him to believe the revival was a genuine work of the Spirit.
The 1801 revivals in this account Raymond Bost, encouraged by two Presbyterian ministers and scrutinized by a few Lutheran ministers, does not appear to be of the same caliber. The Presbyterians reportedly wanted to stir up the crowds and call it spiritual movement. Paul Henkel of North Carolina clashed with this trend and pushed for a disciplined catechism as a better way to produce genuine believers.
That’s an emphasis I’d like to see throughout the Americas today. Let us preach the word faithfully, catechize the young as well as young in faith with love, and put aside emotional displays as a reliable measure of faith.
That Hideous Strength is the third of C.S. Lewis’s space trilogy, the first two books being Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra. One of my friends recommended it as a suitable stand-alone, and we read it together as a group. I have since listened to Out of the Silent Planet and understand the gist of Perelandra, but while they expand and explain That Hideous Strength, they each have somewhat self-contained stories. In fact, one of us noted you could strip this story of its fantasy gods and planetary symbolism and it would remain intact, lacking only a magical framework for the weird stuff. That framework is explored in the first two books and brought to bear in the third.
The story develops slowly to give us time to understand our central characters, Mark and Jane Studdock, both educated, progressively minded people. Mark wants to be an insider, an opinion-maker or influential voice within Bracton College. Jane wants to be her own woman–married, of course, but equal to and independent of her husband. In chapter one, we see her chafe at what her life, marriage, and career had become. Mark doesn’t begin to chafe at his circumstances until much later, when it appears his wife is a hinderance to his career as a high ranking official of the NICE (National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments).
If you know anything about the story, you know something of the trouble caused by NICE. They aim to rewrite the world. They bring Mark in initially to write stories for distribution in diverse publications in order to smooth the way for them, and it takes him a while to understand the point.
“Why you fool, it’s the educated reader who can be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they’re all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the high-brow weeklies, don’t need reconditioning. They’re all right already. They’ll believe anything.”
In his preface, Lewis frames his story as a “fairy tale,” and “a ‘tall story’ about devilry”–a fictional take on the thinking that went into another of his books, The Abolition of Man. If you have not read that book, taking it up before reading That Hideous Strength will likely help draw out its meaning and dramatic imagery.
You could say this book is about marriage, because that tension between Mark and Jane runs throughout. You could say it’s a book on the gloriously mythological roots of Great Britain; Arthur, Merlin, and Atlantis all figure in heavily. But the main theme begins with the quote above–that educated people will believe anything.
Experts, who may be rather immature human beings while still highly skilled in their field, can and do cause great harm to society. They acquire authority and use it for their own ends, perhaps compassionately to a point, perhaps with good intentions, but those ‘who know best’ will eventually force the best down our throats in the name of progress.
This danger could come from many sides; many people and institutions undermine the values they profess. Every one of us must seek the light while it can still be found.
“This Is My Father’s World” performed by Keith and Kristyn Getty
This marvelous testimony to God’s sovereignty and creation of all things comes to us from Presbyterian Maltbie D. Babcock of New York (1858-1901). It was published after his death in 1901 to a traditional English folk tune arranged by Franklin L. Sheppard.
1 This is my Father’s world, And to my listening ears All nature sings, and round me rings The music of the spheres. This is my Father’s world: I rest me in the thought Of rocks and trees, of skies and seas– His hand the wonders wrought.
2 This is my Father’s world: The birds their carols raise, The morning light, the lily white, Declare their Maker’s praise. This is my Father’s world: He shines in all that’s fair; In the rustling grass I hear Him pass, He speaks to me everywhere.
3 This is my Father’s world: O let me ne’er forget That though the wrong seems oft so strong, God is the Ruler yet. This is my Father’s world: Why should my heart be sad? The Lord is King: let the heavens ring! God reigns; let earth be glad!
D’you mind if I jabber about words a bit? No? Thanks.
Are gulch and gully related? A gulch is a “deep ravine,” derived from Middle English gulchen “to gush forth; to drink greedily.” A gully is “channel in earth made by running water,” possibly a variant of Middle English golet “water channel.”
Douglas Harper of the Online Eytmological Dictionary notes there is no relational root between these words, except for the sound. We seem to associate gul with the rush of liquid or swallowing, such as gullet.
Is there any difference in the meaning of these words? If someone described a large ditch beside a country road as a gully, would there ever be a reason to say, “That’s more of a gulch”? Webster’s defines ravine as “a small narrow steep-sided valley that is larger than a gully and smaller than a canyon and that is usually worn by running water.” A gulch is a “deep cleft,” often with water or notable for being dry.
So, uh, yeah. You firing up the grill this weekend?
Revisionism: China is preparing to teach their Middle Schoolers that Hong Kong was never a British Colony. “Hong Kong has been Chinese territory since ancient times,” says one new textbook seen by the AP. “While Hong Kong was occupied by the British following the Opium War, it remained Chinese territory.”
Culture: Your local niche is not the whole culture, Yair Rosenberg wrote earlier this year. Most people “just consume culture that they like and go on with their day. If someone can’t appreciate popular culture in this way, they will have trouble understanding why most of it is popular with its audience. This doesn’t mean we cannot or should not consider other issues—like the politics of certain creators or creative choices—when evaluating art. We should! But if a critic allows those to dominate and color every piece of commentary they write, they will gradually become alienated from the very culture they’re attempting to cover.”
Watergate at 50: “Chuck Colson certainly earned his early reputation as Nixon’s ‘hatchet man,’ a tough, ruthless, and loyal operative. . . . Everything, however—and I mean everything—changed in the wake of Watergate. “
Today in pulp: things they used to sell in vending machines!
“Juneteenth is not a celebration of American perfection, because nations are never perfect. But it is a right and good celebration of our ongoing commitment to strive toward perfection, by admitting our sins and seeking to overcome them,” Dean Nelson of Human Coalition writes in World Opinions.
That’s a Christian message, and anyone who wants to turn his American toward the living God could take up this message and celebrate our national and spiritual freedom together. Let it carry over to July 4th so we can have a few weeks of it.
It will be many years before we fully overcome, if that is even possible. We still misunderstand the implications of Frederick Douglass’s speech, “What to the Slave Is the 4th?” delivered in 1852, if we even know it. We struggle to recognize different people as fully human, worthy of respect and of handling the consequences of their own actions. We struggle as a society to do what is right when it conflicts with what is comfortable. We don’t use the same language they did in 1852, but the ideas of our illiberal society overlap.
For the present, it is enough to affirm the equal manhood of the Negro race. Is it not astonishing that, while we are ploughing, planting and reaping, using all kinds of mechanical tools, erecting houses, constructing bridges, building ships, working in metals of brass, iron, copper, silver and gold; that, while we are reading, writing and cyphering, acting as clerks, merchants and secretaries, having among us lawyers, doctors, ministers, poets, authors, editors, orators and teachers; that, while we are engaged in all manner of enterprises common to other men, digging gold in California, capturing the whale in the Pacific, feeding sheep and cattle on the hill-side, living, moving, acting, thinking, planning, living in families as husbands, wives and children, and, above all, confessing and worshipping the Christian’s God, and looking hopefully for life and immortality beyond the grave, we are called upon to prove that we are men!
Michael Carter Jr. of Virginia is working to reclaim some of this list for a new generation of farmers. “Land is a forever asset. We acquired this land for $722.05 one hundred years ago.” And he’s farming 150 acres of it.
The other day I mentioned my ignorance of The Wheel of Time series and what I was seeing in reviews. Many YouTubers have recorded their thoughts on each book or the whole series, and many have explained the problems in the Amazon adaptation.
After that post, I found a YouTube recording of The Eye of the World read by Rosamond Pike, who depicts Moiraine in the adaptation. Her voice is marvelously smooth, and the drama she brings to every character could ruin a guy on listening to any other audiobook narrator. (A quick Audible search turns up several titles Pike has recorded, including a couple of Jane Austen’s.)
Even when I feel the story lagging in the beginning, her voice has carried it forward. Now that I’ve listened through chapter 25 or so, lack of interest in the story has bogged me down. It’s cool that Perrin has a connection with wolves, but weak that it’s something he was born with and would never have discovered had he not fled his home village. A few other things are interesting too, but I’m put off by the fact that the three women in the main cast of characters are all of a type. One of them hits most of the marks of being a villain. I don’t believe she becomes one later on, but she accuses and rages and lacks an ounce of humility. She’s the kind of person who gets herself or half of the party killed in other stories.
That’s the main thing. Add to that a few small things and a lack of other things, and I’m going to give it full pass. (DNF = did not finish)
I read Frank Peretti’s This Present Darkness and the sequel Piercing the Darkness as part of my high school Bible class in the 80s. I’m sure we talked about them in class at some point, but I don’t remember anything any of us may have said. I’m sure we thought it was a good depiction of spiritual warfare.
In her review, Gina Dalfonzo sums up the book with this question, “Ever wonder about the enduring popularity of Amish fiction, or how The Shack grabbed an audience that once went for much more theologically conservative books?”
“He traces an ideological line through these books that helps us understand how the evangelical community got to where it is, spiritually, ideologically, and politically.”
Someone should have written a parody of The Shack, like The Shed. Just make it funny, theologically sound, and feature a conversation in a shed and you can do anything else you want with it. Left Behind had a few parodies written, one of which we reviewed here, Re:raptured.
Not that long ago, Ukrainians spoke and read mostly in the Russian language, even if they knew Ukrainian.
In the 60s, novelist Andrey Kurkov writes, “If someone on the street spoke Ukrainian, people thought they were from the village, or some strange intellectual, or maybe even a Ukrainian nationalist. . . . [H]aving Ukrainian as your first language was considered by many as a handicap.”
Today, after 100 days of war, “[o]nline and in casual conversations Ukrainian patriots increasingly refer to Russian as the ‘language of the enemy.’ Those who endorse this rhetoric would prefer to ignore the fact that up to 40 percent of Ukrainians speak Russian as their mother tongue. However, if some of them no longer want to speak Russian, many more no longer want to talk about it.”
Sergej Sumlenny, a political scientist focused on Eastern Europe and living in Berlin, posted a Twitter thread on the preparations Russian books made in advance of the Ukrainian war.
THREAD Let's start a long thread about how Russian book market prepared Russians for a full-scale war against Ukraine, NATO, the West, and promoted stalinism and nazism, and how this was ignored by the West. Keep seat belts fasten, you will see a lot of nasty things here. pic.twitter.com/iPgl4OTU7C
“One of the first indicators of Russia preparing for a full-scale turn to dictatorship and a global war,” Sumlenny says, “was the mass production of books about cool sides of Stalin and Stalinism and about upcoming war against the West.”
The secret police control the publishing industry, he says, so it wasn’t the free market bringing a surge of books with titles like “Be proud, not sorry! Truth about Stalin Age,” “Stalinist’s Handbook”, and “Stalin’s Repressions: A Great Lie” in 2010 and following. Bookstores followed the theme with vintage war paraphernalia.
This marvelous hymn from the Scottish minister Horatius Bonar (1808-1889) has a beautiful grandeur in this recording, but I’ve sung the song at a ripping pace, time and a half this pace, almost like a sea shanty. It’s stirring. I don’t know if the Free Church of Scotland would have approved of it, but I think it still keeps the spirit of worship.
1 I heard the voice of Jesus say, “Come unto me and rest; lay down, O weary one, lay down your head upon my breast.” I came to Jesus as I was, weary and worn and sad; I found in him a resting place, and he has made me glad.
2 I heard the voice of Jesus say, “Behold, I freely give the living water; thirsty one, stoop down and drink, and live.” I came to Jesus, and I drank of that life-giving stream; my thirst was quenched, my soul revived, and now I live in him.
3 I heard the voice of Jesus say, “I am this dark world’s Light; look unto me, your morn shall rise, and all your days be bright.” I looked to Jesus and I found in him my Star, my Sun; and in that light of life I’ll walk, ’til trav’ling days are done.
