“Celtic mythology, Arthurian romance, and an intriguing interpretation of British history” is what’s in store within the new translation of an old Welsh book from the Middle Ages, The Mabinogion. No, I haven’t heard of it either, but it’s bound to have some great material even if it’s a bit hard to read.
Irony defined
I can’t find a reference in The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Vol. III right now, but in a couple of the letters Lewis expresses his deep dislike for the “modern” fashion of printing book titles sideways on book spines, so that you have to tilt your head to read them on the shelves.
He likes his titles printed so they’ll read horizontally, straight across.
The current volume of this series features a spine over 2 ½ inches wide. If they’d called the book The Collected and Edited Letters of the Immortal Clive Staples Lewis, Copiously Annotated and Furnished With Supplements Containing Previously Unknown Letters As Well As the Entire Body of the “Great War” Correspondence With His Friend Owen Barfield, they still could have almost fit that title in one line across such a massive spine.
But they print the title sideways, so you have to tilt your head to read it on the shelf.
“There’s glory for you,” as Humpty Dumpty would say. Even if you’re C. S. Lewis, world renowned and up on a pedestal only a little below St. Paul’s level in the eyes of many Christians, you still can’t get a publisher to print your covers the way you want them to.
Star Map of Political Blogs
Politico.com has a cute star map of the political blogosphere. It’s a good bit different than the light network traced by Discover.
It seems so simple when I explain it to me that way!
I continue live-blogging my reading of Vol. 3 of The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis.
Just went through the year (1960) when Lewis’ wife, Joy Davidman, dies. One of the most poignant things about this part of the book is the fact that Lewis keeps up his mountainous correspondence almost without a break.
It makes you wonder about the people who wrote to him (especially Mary Willis Shelburne, the “American Lady” of Letters to an American Lady, the quality of whose letters you can only guess based on his replies. But she apparently thought of him as her personal unpaid counselor, a man with nothing in the world to do but advise her on how to pay her bills and get along with her daughter). One thinks of that poor man, himself in bad health, who had for years considered his personal correspondence a sort of hairshirt that he bore for the love of Christ, pushing his arthritic hand across the paper just as he always had, even with his heart broken.
If I’d been in his place, I’m pretty sure I’d have said, “I deserve some personal freedom just now.” I’d have sent form letters to all but my real friends, and I’d have assumed that the real friends would understand a period of silence.
The first letter in the book after Joy’s funeral is one to a lady in Fairbanks, Alaska (not Mrs. Shelburne). She has asked about something Lewis wrote in The Problem of Pain about God’s compassion. She apparently has some trouble reconciling the doctrine of God’s impassivity (the fact that he has no emotions in the human sense) with the biblical picture of God as being loving, angry, jealous, etc.
Lewis’ answer is somewhat philosophical, talking about how God is essentially a Mystery, whom we can never comprehend.
This is true. But I’m going to make so bold as to offer a (partial) explanation. Needless to say, if it’s true someone has doubtless said it before, and you’re free to tell me about it. If it’s original, I’m probably wrong.
But here’s how I see it.
We’re handicapped in thinking about God by the fact that we are singular beings who live in time, while He is a Trinitarian Being who dwells in eternity.
In other words, it seems to me, we can’t understand how someone can be unchanging and yet have emotions, because for us emotions always involve change.
But God is capable of being both loving and angry at the same time. (And when I say “at the same time, I’m obviously speaking from our point of view. From God’s point of view the statement is meaningless.) He has always been loving, and He has always been angry (at the perversion of His creation we call evil; in fact His anger is just a facet of His love). He doesn’t have to switch from one to another. It’s all eternally present with Him.
So now I’ve settled it for you.
You may thank me by buying my books.
I’ll even answer letters, in moderation.
Frivolous Elitist Drivel
Over here, Anthony Paul Mator says in passing, “I suppose we might drudge up the old Christian-artists-vs.-Christians-who-make-art battle, although I tend to shrug off such discussions as so much frivolous elitist drivel.”
Religious Persecution American Style
An astronomy professor suggests a supreme being may be the first cause of the universe and a religious studies professor circulates a petition to denounce him. The religion guy (with popular opinion) tells the astronomy guy he’s wrong? It reminds me of a line from a British sit-com. “You know I’m right, because you’ve resorted to slander.”
Sometimes I get the impression that on the subject of god, everyone is considered an expert.
Westerns: The Best Ones
Have you been wondering about the best westerns from last century? Wonder no more.
Gooseflesh and a Clenched Stomach
I was scared and had gooseflesh, and my stomach clenched, and the hair on my arms stood on end, and I tucked my feet beneath me so the boogieman under the bed couldn’t grab them, and when Nancy was in the tunnel I could hardly bear to turn the page for fear of what might happen next, and yet I couldn’t help turning the page to see what happened next. Oh, it was wonderful!
— Mystery author Nancy Pickard on reading the original Nancy Drew.
I haven’t read any Nancy Drew or Hardy Boys, but with an original movie coming up, I’m thinking about buying a set of the first six stories for my girls.
Raking Bloggers over the Coals
Frank Wilson has a couple posts on writers ranting against bloggers as if the two were separate species. You know, when I think I’d like to be a critic, I usually slap myself.
American Pietist
It’s been an interesting week. Special thanks to everyone who commented (and so civilly) on my post about divorce. I learned some things I hadn’t known, which I’d like to list and examine, as an exercise in humility.
On the basis of my upbringing, and everything I’d heard in my own contacts within my church body, I’d gotten the impression that our official position is “No remarriage after divorce, for any reason.”
I should have known better. First of all, we’re (organizationally) a congregational church body. We try to keep our central mandates to an absolute minimum. Every congregation has the right to make its own decisions on such matters as whom they will marry, and this issue is no different. Some of our churches (and pastors) will marry divorced people, some won’t.
I also hadn’t known (though I think Dale told me before, and I should have) that the Lutheran tradition has held almost universally that remarriage is permitted for innocent parties. The tradition where I grew up, which held a view closer to the Catholic one, is not mainstream but fringe.
I looked some things up, and talked to a couple knowledgeable people, and nobody seems to know where the tradition I’m familiar with first entered the Lutheran stream. I suspect that it may have come with Pietism, which in its purest form insists that any matter that might possibly be considered sin is indeed sin, and must be rejected. That’s why we Pietists have our famous rules against drinking and dancing, rules not actually found in Scripture.
On the other hand, somebody told me he thought the Missouri Synod also had an anti-remarriage tradition, and the Missourians are far from being Pietists. Maybe someone who knows more about that can give me more information.
But the Pietist thing is thorny. I consider myself a Pietist, and I’m proud of it. It’s easy for us, today, to look down on the Pietists and condemn them as loveless rule-jockeys. And there’s plenty of justification for that.
But if you know history, there are reasons for what they did. My own people, the Norwegians, had a reputation you wouldn’t recognize when they first arrived on U.S. shores. They were considered drunken, brawling reprobates, and they deserved it.
I wrote about my great-grandfather John B. Johnson a while back. He was a colorful character, but he was also a genuine monster. When he was drunk, which was often, he was capable of anything. He came home one night (so the story goes), with a friend in tow. He loudly announced he had “sold” his daughter (my grandmother, then a little girl) to his friend for the night. My great-grandmother took a broom to the both of them, fortunately, and nothing came of that.
But are you surprised if she wanted to join the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and wipe out saloons?
In the Pietist revivals, hundreds, even thousands, knelt at the altar and received salvation, and then were expected to live a Pietist life. No drinking. No gambling. No dancing (which was likely to put you in situations where you’d be pressured to drink and gamble). Living like that tends to concentrate you, and it also saves money. It greatly assists your upward mobility. Is it any wonder that Pietist immigrant groups tended to assimilate faster and do better in America than other groups? As Wesley is supposed to have said about his converts, “I just can’t keep them poor!”
And yet, as Joe Carter notes in this post at Evangelical Oupost, it’s unquestionably hubristic to try to be “more ethical than Jesus.”
I’ve long felt that the proper rule is, “I will determine in my heart, relying on Scripture and good counsel, how I believe God wants me to live. But I will not try to impose on anyone else any rule not plainly taught in Scripture.”
Which makes me a wishy-washy Pietist, I guess.
Now I wonder if I should start asking out divorced women. I could open myself up to whole new worlds of rejection.
Ah, well. I’m too poor to date right now anyway.