“Victory Through Grace” performed by the choir of Cornerstone Church
“I looked, and there was a white horse! Its rider had a bow; a crown was given to him, and he came out conquering and to conquer” (Revelation 6:2 KJV).
Franny Crosby is that familiar, Methodist Episcopal hymn writer whose hymns are lodged in my head so neatly I can’t remember which ones are hers or when I last sung one. I don’t think this hymn has come up in our church in a long time, but it could be that I just can’t remember it.
I think the theme of this hymn is out of fashion today, and believers need it as much as they ever did. The battle is not to the strong; the race will not be won by the swift. Victory will be given by the Master to his own on his own terms.
1.Conquering now and still to conquer, rideth a King in His might; Leading the host of all the faithful into the midst of the fight; See them with courage advancing, clad in their brilliant array, Shouting the Name of their Leader, hear them exultingly say:
Refrain: Not to the strong is the battle, not to the swift is the race, Yet to the true and the faithful vict’ry is promised thro’ grace.
2. Conquering now and still to conquer, who is this wonderful King? Whence are the armies which He leadeth, while of His glory they sing? He is our Lord and Redeemer, Savior and Monarch divine; They are the stars that forever bright in His kingdom shall shine.
3. Conquering now and still to conquer, Jesus, Thou Ruler of all, Thrones and their scepters all shall perish, crowns and their splendor shall fall, Yet shall the armies Thou leadest, faithful and true to the last, Find in Thy mansions eternal rest, when their warfare is past.
I listened through Out of the Silent Planet the other day, because I’ve been reading That Hideous Strength with friends for a few months and we took a couple weeks off for multiple reasons. It’s a fun adventure that spends a good bit of time on details like the space ship and experiencing interplanetary travel with a Wells or Verne feel. It would probably make a good launchpad for discussing Lewis’s ‘scientific’ observations in contrast with current views. Science is always changing, always correcting itself or arguing over what is correct.
You could also walk away from that book with idea that submitting to God could be a very big deal. Or you could be thinking, “Words are cool.”
Here are a few, loosely related links.
Off-road: Professor Christopher Yuan notes a troubling bent in a post yesterday from theological publisher Eerdmans. Recommending reading for this month, the publisher of the theology text I used in college says, “We find ourselves at a time again where we should be willing to listen and seek to understand those in the LGBTQ+ community who are simply fighting to be seen and heard, cared for and loved.” Yuan sees this as a sign the once theology powerhouse has steered in the direction of declining mainline denominations everywhere.
Reading Life: “[Dana] Gioia describes his ‘odd and bookish’ childhood growing up in a working-class family in Los Angeles. . . My parents never knew what to make of a kid obsessed with books.”
Interplanetary: Space opera is resurging. “Typically seen as (and often being) the least literary form of SF, space opera hasn’t gone out of style since Buck Rogers began battling galactic evils in the 1920s and ’30s . . .” (via ArtsJournal)
Children Should Know the Truth: We shouldn’t keep life realities from our children by pretending everything will be okay. “It is likely that today’s children will inherit a world more violent and more precarious in every way than the one experienced by post–Cold war generations. The belief that everything will be all right was always a recipe for fragility; now it is simply a fantasy.”
Photo: Smalley’s Jewelry Store sign, Ogden, Utah 1980. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
Martha felt like an imposter at Harvard with so many of the super smart around her. “The importance of prestige is so overwhelming in that culture,” she said, “that people hardly look at each other, let alone their environment.”
With a few minutes before class, she visited a friend in the psych department. “My friend was in her lab, conducting an experiment that consisted of implanting wires into the brains of live rats, then making the rats swim around in a tub of reconstituted dry milk.” Why? Reasons. But the tub was a child’s swimming pool decorated in Smurfs.
Martha got to her class a couple minutes late, catching everyone’s attention as she walked in. In her book, Expecting Adam, Martha N. Beck wrote:
“Ah, Martha,” said the course instructor, “we’ve been waiting for you.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I was upstairs in the Psych lab, watching rats swim around in a Smurf pool.”
“I see,” said the instructor, “Yes, I believe I’ve read about that.”
A professor, one of the visiting dignitaries, chimed in. “How is Smurf’s work going?” he inquired. “I understand he’s had some remarkable findings.”
“Yes,” said a graduate student. “I read his last article.”
There was a general murmur of agreement. It seems that everyone in the room was familiar with Dr. Smurf, and his groundbreaking work with swimming rats.
. . . Comprehension blossomed in my brain like a lovely flower.
“I think,” I said solemnly, “that Smurf is going to change the whole direction of linguistic epistemology.”
They all agreed, nodding, saying things like ‘Oh, yes,’ and “I wouldn’t doubt it.”
I beamed at them, struggling desperately not to laugh. It wasn’t so much that I wanted to mock these people. I was giddy with exhilaration, because after seven years at Harvard, I was just beginning to realize that I wasn’t the only one faking it.
I went together with a friend to stream the Minnesota Historical Society’s production of Runestone! A Rock Musical on Saturday. This review will be entirely useless to you, because the show’s run is now finished, but I figured I’d report on it anyway, for the benefit of future generations. And also to fill blog space.
The production is a fairly low-budget affair, presented on a circular stage (but not theater in the round – the audience sat in front). A screen behind the actors, for most of the program, concealed the band members. Costumes and staging were minimal – the men tended to wear suspenders or vests, to suggest 19th Century clothing, and a few props were set up to suggest settings – including, oddly, a tractor to indicate the farm, though the main character died well before such vehicles became common. A small cast filled the roles, most of them playing more than one (this was exaggerated in the performance that was streamed, as a couple actors were missing. Other actors filled their parts “on book,” sometimes crossing gender lines).
The production opened with a mealy-mouthed statement from the director or somebody, which included a groveling declaration of their profound awareness of the fact that they were standing on stolen land, and declaring their commitment to the goal of “decolonization.” I’m not entirely sure what decolonization means in real life. I’m inclined to think it means genocide.
The drama goes on to portray Swedish-American farmer Olaf Ohman and his son in 1898, as they discover a carved stone buried in the roots of a tree on their farm near Kensington, Minnesota. The local banker persuades Olaf to display the stone in the bank window, and rhapsodizes about the possibility of making Kensington a tourist destination. Preliminary statements from Minnesota historians tend to support the stone’s authenticity, and spirits are high, until a Norwegian scholar dismisses the whole thing as a hoax.
At this point the actors switch to an alternate narrative, describing how Ohman, the banker, and a neighbor could have colluded to create the stone simply as an exercise in “rural humor,” meant to trick the city folks and have a laugh at their expense.
Now Ohman becomes a pariah, a subject of ridicule. He takes the stone back home with him and tries to forget it all until he’s approached by the writer Hjalmar Holand (they pronounce “Hjalmar” wrong), who takes possession of the stone (there’s some disagreement about whether Ohman sold it to him or not), and turns it into his own meal ticket, giving many lectures and writing several popular books. This leads to a final break between Ohman and Holand.
The production seems to lack any interest in making a judgment on the question of authenticity. This is fair, I suppose, and certainly prudent in a state where feelings still run high on both sides in some circles. But it’s also kind of cowardly, and makes the production more a documentary than a work of art. I might mention that the “flashback” scenes depicting the voyage of the Norsemen who may have carved the stone feature very tacky costumes including crude horned helmets. This obscures the important fact that these men (if they ever existed) were 14th Century Scandinavian Christians who’d probably have been offended to be called Vikings. If Vikings ever wore horned helmets. WHICH THEY DID NOT!
I’ve always been touchy about urban productions portraying country people (I hated the Andy Griffith Show and Green Acres back in the day). So it may mean nothing that I found the portrayals here arch and sometimes borderline insulting.
The music was not memorable. This was no Tommy or Jesus Christ, Superstar. None of the songs lingered in the mind. Sasha Andrews did a pretty good job portraying Ohman. But all in all, I found Runestone! A Rock Musical unimpressive.
Witch Wood, the story of a new minister in a rural parish of Scotland, is said to be author John Buchan’s favorite and his most critically praised. Buchan (1875-1940) wrote a number of novels and may be most remembered now for his 1915 spy novel, The Thirty-Nine Steps.
Witch Wood, published in 1927, is the moving account Rev. David Sempill’s arrival in Woodilee Village, Scotland, on August 15, 1644. We is warmly received and eager to minister to his flock in every duty required of him. Soon he learns of the nearby forest, named Melanudrigill or “The Black Wood” out of fear of spirits living within it. Sempill rebukes the idea as pagan superstition, but eventually discovers a weathered stone table in the midst of a forest clearing. What is written on it is “I. O. M.” — Jovi Optimo Maximo, Roman markings for an altar.
This and other signs tell him members of his own congregation practice the occult in secret. Sempill won’t simply dismiss an issue like that, but no one in his presbytery is willing to believe him. Some accuse him of imagining it. Arguments against him sound too familar.
He worries about his flock. “The profession of religion was not the same thing as godliness, and he was coming to doubt whether the insistence upon minute conformities of outward conduct and the hair-splitting doctrines were not devices of Satan to entangle souls.”
To his immediate superior, who does not believe a pious elder of the church could be involved in this and would prefer to keep the kirk united against the world, Sempill asks, “In the name of God, whose purity is a flame of fire, would you let gross wickedness go unchecked because it may knock a splinter off the Kirk? I tell you it were better that the Kirk should be broken to dust and trampled underfoot than that it should be made a cloak for sin.”
An epilogue in my edition reveals the source of the story; it’s an interpretation of real events during the war between Covenanters and Scottish Royalists. Without revealing more of the story, I want to tell you I worried at a few points that the heroes would not succeed and everything would come crashing down on their heads. I guess that’s a sign Buchan had me gripped.
Definitely a book for the scotophile. The most difficult part for me was that thirty percent of the text is the Scottish dialect of Woodilee folk.
“There’s ill news frae up the water, Mr. Sempill. . . . Marion puir body, has been ill wi’ a wastin’ the past twalmonth, and now it seems she’s near her release.”
“Me! I ken nocht. Me and my man aye keepit clear o’ the Wud. . . . Woodilee has aye been keened for a queer bit, lappit in the muckle Wud, but the guilty are come by an ill end.”
I’ve gotten more used to it, but with whole conversations written in this style, I felt I couldn’t keep up without a dictionary.
It’s a strange and somewhat disquieting experience for me to discover a classic mystery series from the Fifties of which I’d never heard. This is the John J. Malone series, written by “Craig Rice,” which turns out to be a nom de plume for Georgiana Ann Randolph Craig, a troubled and alcoholic writer who kept much of her life private. I thought as I read this book that it had the feel of a book written by a woman, because of the nature of the women’s conversations. I didn’t think a man could easily write that kind of dialogue.
However, I am informed, by an Amazon reviewer and by the author’s Wikipedia page, that this is almost certainly a ghostwritten book. So a guy might have written it anyway. And wouldn’t my male chauvinist face be red if that’s true?
In any case, the book is But the Doctor Died, the final book-length work in the series. I picked it up because I got a deal on the Kindle Version. John J. Malone is a Chicago lawyer, on the seedy side of the profession. He’s scrappy and aggressive and has his own code of conduct, which doesn’t always coincide with the laws on the books. In this story, John is defending a small-time criminal, but the cops have got him locked up somewhere he can’t locate. Then a poor mother comes to him to ask him to defend her son, who is completely innocent (actually he’s a bum, but a client’s a client).
Then he sees his friend Helene Justus, wife of Jake Justus, night club owner, on the street. He’s fond of them both, but secretly in love with Helene. She is walking along the sidewalk in a haze, carrying a bag of confetti, and doesn’t seem to recognize him. He will soon learn that she’s gone to work for a top-secret government agency, where suspicious things are happening.
The whole thing gets pretty complicated. Incredibly complicated. I found the plot wholly impossible to follow. But I understand that’s how these books are – light, improbable hard-boiled stuff.
I should probably read a book by the actual author before I judge her work. I may just do that. Even in this form, I found the characters intriguing.
If James Bond had been an art theft investigator instead of a spy, he’d probably be something like John Kite. I couldn’t help imagining him with Roger Moore’s appearance and voice.
His real name is not John Kite. He discovered, after growing up in luxury, that his parents were part of organized crime. So he broke all ties with them, assumed a new identity, and devoted himself to fighting art crime.
In Pictures to Die For, Book 3 in the series, John is babysitting the transport of a ridiculously valuable painting by a very hot, recently deceased artist, in Florida. But the armored car carrying the painting is struck by a rocket-propelled grenade and vaporized. Why would anyone want to destroy such a valuable object?
Witnesses report a mysterious man and woman making inquiries at John’s motel just before the crime. He will need to try to trace them and talk to them.
Then suddenly he’s contacted by Rochelle, his former partner, now married to an English lord. She says her husband has disappeared, and she’d like John to look for him. John still cherishes feelings for Rochelle, so he’ll try to help her with her problem too. His journey will take him to Brussels, and at last back to the US for a cinematic final showdown with a criminal mastermind.
If this plot sounds like it belongs in a Hollywood thriller, that’s because it does. Indeed, the author, Stuart Doughty, spent his career in the film industry, and obviously learned the formula. Do not look for realism in this book. John Kite is as indestructible and unbelievable as Jason Bourne or Rambo.
However, I was surprised by the quality of the writing. Author Doughty knows what he’s doing with words. And that bought a lot of goodwill from this reader.
I will consider reading more John Kite books. There’s nothing substantial here, but it’s enjoyable entertainment, suitable for popcorn.
I always post “The Mansions of the Lord” on Memorial Day, because no other song I know expresses it like that one does. It doesn’t work theologically, but even I have to just go with my heart sometimes.
As I wrote in The Year of the Warrior, playing fast and loose with theology in my own right:
“It’s strange to die this way, and me a Christian. If I were heathen yet, I’d know that Odin would welcome me to Valhalla. What welcome has Christ for a warrior, Father?”
I had no quick answer, and Moling must have seen my trouble, because he asked what the boy had said. I told him.
“Tell him I’ve had a dream about Heaven,” said Moling. “The teachers tell us that the Beloved lives outside Time itself. He goes back and forth in it when He wills. And when we go to be with Him, we too will be outside Time.
“It seemed to me in my dream that at the last day the Beloved called together all the great warriors who had been brave and merciful, and who had trusted in His mercy, and He mustered them into a mighty army, and He said to them, ‘Go forth for Me now, My bonny fighters, and range through Time, and wherever there is cruelty and wickedness that makes the weak to suffer, and faithful to doubt My goodness, wherever the children are slain or violated, wherever the women are raped or beaten, wherever the old are threatened and robbed, then take your shining swords and fight that cruelty and wickedness, and protect my poor and weak ones, and do not lay down your weapons or take your rest until all such evil is crushed and defeated, and the right stands victorious in every place and every time. We will not empty Hell even with this, for men love Hell, but I made a sweet song at the beginning, My sons, and though men have sung it foul we will make it sweet again forever.’”
I said these words to Halvard in Norse, and he died smiling.
I love discussions that delve into how the whole world has changed under the influence of Christianity. Speaking to unbelievers, Glen Scrivener writes, “You already hold particularly ‘Christian-ish’ views, and the fact that you think of these values as natural, obvious, or universal shows how profoundly the Christian revolution has shaped you.”
Scrivener has a new book, The Air We Breathe, in which he discusses how all manner of modern ideals have Christian origins, and when debating Christian speakers, atheists and other non-Christians will assume Christian positions on their way to undermining Christian principles. Black Lives Matter couldn’t exist as a popular American concept brought up in many arguments over human dignity without the foundation of God’s created image so many assume today (despite explicitly rejecting it, as some do). It’s marvelous.
Movies: The state of cinema today (via Prufrock) “We are in the present losing more movies from the past faster than ever before. It seems like we aren’t, but the mere disappearance of physical media is already having corporations curating what we watch, faster for us,” Guillermo Del Toro said.
A Memorial Day Story: Elliot Ritzema heard from his grandpa via the marginal notes in Citizen Soldiers. “When Ambrose wrote, ‘The Ninth Tactical Air Force had a dozen airstrips in Normandy by this time,’ my grandpa added, We were one of these airstrips, 36th Fighter Group, 32nd Service Group.”
The Hobbit in Bears: Is this is a case of life imitating art?
Photo: Big Ole, Alexandria, Minnesota, 2001. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
