{"id":14967,"date":"2021-01-08T18:13:07","date_gmt":"2021-01-08T23:13:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/?p=14967"},"modified":"2021-01-08T18:13:07","modified_gmt":"2021-01-08T23:13:07","slug":"faith-among-the-ruins","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/?p=14967","title":{"rendered":"Faith among the ruins"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Kristofer and Gry Molvaer Hivju. Photo credit: NRK<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

I have some dislocated thoughts<\/strong> I\u2019m going to try to coordinate in this post tonight. Just subjective responses to a couple recent entertainment experiences. They may or may not mean anything to you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The picture above is of Kristofer Hivju, a Norwegian actor who\u2019s attained high visibility since appearing in the Game Of Thrones<\/em> miniseries. Beside him is his wife, Gry Molv\u00e6r Hivju, who is a documentary film maker. They constitute, as you\u2019ll note, a striking couple.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I heard about a documentary series they made together, and watched it recently on the Norwegian NRK network feed, using a VPN. I don\u2019t know if it will ever be offered outside Norway. The series is called simply \u201cOlav<\/em>,\u201d and it relates a personal quest to find the historical truth about Norway\u2019s patron saint, Olav (or Olaf. Best known, of course, as a character in my novel, The Elder King<\/a><\/em>) Haraldsson. We learn that Kristofer first learned of Olav as a boy, when his father, also an actor, played Olav in the annual Olav play presented (most years) near Trondheim, Norway. He tells us that Olav has been his hero all his life \u2013 the Viking who became a Christian king, and converted his country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m not sure how seriously to take the dramatic arc of the series. Hivju may be playing a role as he presents himself as a lot like a little boy, shivering with excitement to go where his hero went and see all the evidence of his life. His disappointment is palpable as he travels to England, France, and Russia and finds \u2013 generally \u2013 that evidence for Olav\u2019s life (outside the Icelandic sagas) is pretty sparse. Judging by the evidence, Olav was a fairly minor player on the European scene until after his death, when Norwegian churchmen and chieftains promoted him and his saga for political reasons. (I note that no mention whatever is made of the work of Prof. Torgrim Titlestad, whose book, Viking Legacy<\/a><\/em>, I translated. They even report that a Norwegian translation of the Icelandic Flat\u00f8ybok <\/em>has recently been released, but they don\u2019t mention its publisher, Saga Bok, Prof. Titlestad\u2019s publishing house, or even let us see a copy).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The final resolution of the whole thing (and I\u2019d have bet my house that this would be the case) is that they conclude that history and faith are different things, and each is important in its own realm. I reject that principle in terms of the central affirmations of Christianity, though I don\u2019t doubt that many false stories have been told of saints and holy men over the years. I wondered about Hivju\u2019s own faith, which he never really explains. Does his faith include Olav\u2019s God, or only Olav as a hero? None of my business, I suppose.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00a0Around the same time, I was reading a couple books by Blake Banner, whose Cobra<\/em> series of thrillers I\u2019ve enjoyed very much. So I picked up a couple from his Dead Cold Case<\/em> series, which I\u2019d started and given up on for some reason. Reading again, I remembered why.\u00a0 I\u2019ve never encountered a more God-bothered series of books, and in a bad way. In each of these books (as far as I could tell) the author felt it necessary to insert a few Awful Christians. Judgmental, repressed, joyless, hypocritical, and often criminal. His knowledge of Christianity seems to come primarily from a bad experience of Roman Catholicism \u2013 when he describes an American Methodist Church, he assumes that they cross themselves when they enter the church, call their services masses, and reject sexual pleasure as sin. I feel sorry for whatever bad experience the author must have had, but I couldn\u2019t take much of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We live among the ruins of shattered faith today. Those who believe, generally believe in a subjective way that has little to do with the real world. Those who don\u2019t believe seem furious at God for not existing. We who hold onto Christianity have lots of work to do. It may be illegal work, before long. But that\u2019s how Christianity started, after all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have some dislocated thoughts I\u2019m going to try to coordinate in this post tonight. Just subjective responses to a couple recent entertainment experiences. They may or may not mean anything to you. The picture above is of Kristofer Hivju, a Norwegian actor who\u2019s attained high visibility since appearing in the Game Of Thrones miniseries. … Continue reading Faith among the ruins<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[13,1],"tags":[3494,3580,3581],"class_list":["post-14967","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reading","category-uncategorized","tag-blake-banner","tag-kristofer-hivju","tag-olav"],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14967","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14967"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14967\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14969,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14967\/revisions\/14969"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14967"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14967"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14967"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}