Non-fiction

Three Sides Better Than One

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The Jolly Blogger reviews J.P. Moreland’s The Kingdom Triangle, which he calls well worth reading. The triangle consists of “the recovery of the life of the Christian mind, the renovation of the soul and the restoration of the spirit’s power.” Here’s an excerpt:

Side two of the kingdom triangle is the renovation of the soul and I think Moreland offers one of the best and most incisive diagnoses of the illness that plagues our souls that I have seen anywhere. He describes this as the empty self, or the false self, and it has four characteristics.

  • The empty self is inordinately individualistic.
  • The empty self is infantile.
  • The empty self is narcissistic.
  • The empty self is passive.

He goes on to describe the antidote as a recovery of the art of Christian self-denial. This dovetails nicely with John Calvin’s contention that the summary of the Christian life is to be found in self denial.

So I am enthusiastic about Moreland’s diagnosis, but I diverge from him on the cure. Basically the cure for the empty self, and the practice of the renovation of the soul, is to be found in what I would call the practices of the Christian mystics, with an emphasis on the cultivation of the inner life.

Read on

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Throwing in the Towel

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Sentinel’s Michael Jacobson says there’s an upswing in terrorists giving up the cause. Some terrorists have become “disillusioned” with the death of innocients, particularly Muslims, and the character of their leaders.

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Links today

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I’m taking a couple days of vacation from work, so tonight I’ll just share some amusing links.

Apropos my post about children’s rhymes last night, I’ll bet you didn’t know that the poem “Little Bunny Fufu” has ancient historical roots. Thanks to reader Ori for directing me to this translation of that mighty Norse epic, “The Fufumal.”

And my friend the author Michael Z. Williamson gave me this link to a report on the one power tool every man must have.

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The Saint John’s Bible

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Saint John’s Abbey and University of Collegeville, Minnesota, has commissioned and produced the first handmade, illuminated edition of the Holy Bible since the printing press. The Library of Congress has an online exhibit, and you can see more about this edition at The Saint John’s Bible site. It’s beautiful.

Poetry

Kid’s stuff

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A local children’s ministry is doing ads for a special outreach on the talk radio station to which I generally listen.

From what I know of the ministry, it’s a good one that does fine, much-needed work.

But I find their promotion very odd.

They’re raising funds to get kids backpacks and supplies for school. Their ad features a kid getting his stuff together at the start of the year. He finds out his mother hasn’t bought him a new backpack, and he pitches a fit, saying all the kids will laugh at him because he’s using last year’s backpack.

Maybe I’m a heartless jerk, but there are a lot of things in the world I worry about more than kids having to use the same backpack two years in a row. I got laughed at a whole lot when I was a kid, and I’d have been pretty relieved if it’d had only been a matter of derision of my school supplies.

I keep wondering if this is some kind of head-fake. I’m sure the people who carry on this ministry have to deal with kids whose parents are neglecting them due to drug use, or sexually abusing them, or pimping them out. I wonder if they’re doing this backpack thing because they’re afraid to tell about the real needs they have to try to fill.

But if that’s true, they’re being dishonest with their donors, which I hope would not be the case.

So I just don’t get it.

Speaking of school kids, it occurred to me to wonder whether anybody’s done a folklore study of children’s traditional poetry.

I don’t mean the stuff written for children, like A Child’s Garden of Verses or the books of Dr. Seuss.

I mean the stuff composed by children, who knows how long ago, and passed down through generations from kid to kid?

Poems like “I Think I’ll Go Eat Worms,” and “________ and __________, sittin’ in a tree,” and little girls’ jump rope rhymes. And parodies like, “Glory, glory, hallelujah, teacher hit me with a ruler.”

It seems to me this is an example of a purely oral tradition, still alive in our literate culture. I’d think much could be learned by tracking those poems over the years and generations, observing how they change and stay the same.

Maybe somebody’s done that. But I can’t find anything about it on the web.

Book Reviews, Creative Culture