Uncategorized

Long, disjointed post on many subjects

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Some nights I can’t think what to write. Other nights I have to make a list to be sure I don’t forget anything.

First of all, for those of you interested in Things Norwegian, a new blog has been begun by Bård Titlestad of Saga Publishers. He’s the son of Prof. Torgrim Titlestad, author of Viking Norway, which I reviewed here. The blog is devoted to Norwegian-American issues. Which is perfect timing, as I just declared Norwegian-American culture dead, dead, dead a few days ago.

Well, I could be wrong.



Secondly, thanks to our friend Loren Eaton for his flattering review of The Year of the Warrior over at I Saw Lighting Fall.

In a related matter, a friend over at Facebook told me that new copies of TYOTW are selling for $40 over at Amazon.com. I turned aside to see this marvel, and found that the forty buck copy was the cheap one. Some entrepreneur is offering it at the optimistic price of $104.00. Continue reading Long, disjointed post on many subjects →

Fiction, Publishing

Vote for the Million Writers Award

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The Sixth Million Writers Award is now open for voting on the top ten short stories published online. You can read the stories from the list and then vote for them on another page. If you participate, let us know what you think about it all.

Religion

10 People A Pastor Should Fear

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Jared has a good list on parishioners who should come with warning labels:

2. The young guy who likes it when you rant against stuff or preach angry. Beware of pleasing young men too much. Young men are notoriously stupid. (I know, ’cause I am one.)

3. The guy or gal who doesn’t like it when you rant against stuff or preach angry. Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. If you’re sincerely and reliably preaching the Word, toes are going to be stepped on from time to time. If you’re not being self-indulgent about it and you are speaking the truth, beware those who think you should be more “positive” like those fellows on TV.

Fiction, Reviews

The Help by Kathryn Stockett

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If you don’t talk about the trouble in your community, does the trouble still exist? That’s the question Miss Eugenia Phelan faces in 1963 when she begins asking the colored women of Jackson, Mississippi, what it’s like to work as maids for white families. Many things could be said, but the maids don’t want to talk and the white women wouldn’t know what to talk about if asked.

For them, racism is a lifestyle they cannot recognize. It isn’t only the unjust acceptance of a black boy being beaten for using the wrong bathroom. None of the main characters in this novel would do something horrible like that, but many of them do believe the maids are essentially unlike their employers. They probably carry Negro diseases. They are intellectually inferior. And if one of them act as if there is no difference between whites and blacks, they may as well be insulting the family. All of this is condoned by those who claim to disbelieve it, because it isn’t what they believe that counts in many cases. It’s what Mississippi believes.

Kathryn Stockett’s beautiful debut novel, The Help, is told masterfully by three narrators: Continue reading The Help by Kathryn Stockett →

Religion

Atheists, the Anti-God Crowd

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This may go along with Ori’s link in the previous post. Atheists don’t appear to be more rational than their opponents, just more angry. Maybe they had bad Sunday School experiences. But then “a fool says in his heart, ‘There is no god,'” so we may be talking about complete irrationality here.

Uncategorized

In the Facebook of adversity

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Scott Lamb at World Magazine Blog commemorates the 25th anniversary of the death of Francis Schaeffer today.

Sunday is Syttende Mai, the Norwegian Constitution Day holiday. I was sure you’d want to know about that.



I’m thinking about Facebook today. I joined the online social networking community with some dread (anything with the word “social” in it, from “socialism” to “social disease,” scares me), but I’ve been gratified by the number of people interested in being my “friends” on Facebook. Several of them have been students at our Bible school, which is frankly incomprehensible. I’ve never spoken to most of these students, and the ones I have spoken to I’ve usually just told to take their cell phones out of the library. Yet they’re interested, and they join my Facebook group. I can only assume that they’re sadder and lonelier people than I ever dreamed, and I should have been kinder to them. (That’s a JOKE! A JOKE!)

What’s the deal with Facebook groups, anyway? I’ve been involved in forums before. When I was on AOL, I participated in several discussion groups about Norway, Vikings, C. S. Lewis, and the Avengers. We had vibrant (and sometimes nasty) discussions. I’ve been involved with a Viking reenactors’ discussion board, elsewhere from Facebook, for years now. It ebbs and flows, but the posts keep coming, and sometimes it’s hot and heavy.

But Facebook groups just sit there. People join—some have hundreds or thousands of members—but in all the groups I’m involved with, the members seem to feel that they’ve “voted” by joining, and that’s the end of their obligation. One of the most active groups I’ve joined, oddly, is the Avoidant Personality Disorder group, which is populated solely by people pursuing a lifestyle in emulation of Harpo Marx.

I’m one of the most verbal and outgoing members of two or three groups I belong to. That’s just wrong.

Publishing

Plan your trip ahead of time!

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I can’t seem to do a direct link, but if you go to my author’s site, and scroll down to “Latest Additions and Updates,” you can download a .pdf of the map that will appear at the beginning of West Oversea.

Religion

If there’s *no* God, how do you account for evil?

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Novelist and neocon Roger L. Simon hasn’t started believing in God again, after a lifetime of atheism.

He’s just beginning to have some doubts.

The doubts rise, not from an experience of God, but from a confrontation with Evil. He writes of his experience at the Durban II conference:

Well, just as there are no atheists in foxholes, maybe no one is an atheist when confronted with what he finally acknowledges to be Evil. If there is Evil, there must be Good, no? And some force governing this game, something that, well, looks over it.

I know I am being irrational here, so I will stop. Being in the presence of Ahmadinejad’s evil, fleeting and haltingly put me in the presence of something else.

Tip: Gene Edward Veith at Cranach.

Religion

Flag at half mast

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Publishing update: Looks like the new book will actually be released sometime around May 22.



On Monday, I replaced my desk flag.

It must have been late in 1968, my first semester at Waldorf College, Forest City, Iowa, when I bought a miniature Norwegian flag on a stand-up base for my dorm room desk. It’s been with me ever since, in several states, and in several states of being. But only recently I noticed that, in addition to being kind of limp and faded, it had actually started to show holes, produced not by any kind of friction, but just by the aging of the fabric (nylon, I think).

So I sent away to Ingebretsen’s Scandinavian Shop for a replacement. And I had to discard the old flag.

This makes me sad. Continue reading Flag at half mast →

Book Reviews, Creative Culture