My first book, Reformation Spirituality: The Religion of George Herbert
My book on George Herbert is back in print
The Great or Not-so-great Gatsby?
Words and images are two different media, so a novel and a movie are two different kinds of art forms. Sometimes a good written story can be told visually, but if what makes the novel good is its language, that may not translate at all into motion pictures. I don’t know if the movie version of The Great Gatsby (in 3-D, no less!) is worthy of Fitzgerald’s novel or if it might possibly be a good movie in its own right. I haven’t seen it, so you tell me.
But I was struck with this example of a genre in its own right, the movie review, by a master of the form, Rex Reed, who eviscerates the Gatsby movie with razor-sharp words: [Read more...]
What is a nation?
As college classes, including my own, conclude for the Summer, I will reveal an academic secret: professors often learn from their students. Being an audience of one for all of those papers has its rewards. In my Shakespeare class, several students wrote about some aspect of the emerging view of nationhood in Shakespeare’s history plays. The nation-state, after all, was a fairly recent development in the 1590′s when Shakespeare wrote his histories, with England transitioning from the feudal system, with its personal loyalties to local lords, to a highly-organized central government commanding citizens with a strong sense of their “Englishness.”
But, as Shakespeare’s plays suggest, there are different understandings of what constitutes a nation: (1) a geographical locality; that is, a land, a place (“this sceptered isle”); (2) a people (“we band of brothers”); (3) a government; that is, a sovereignty embodied in the monarch (“Henry V”); (4) a distinctive spirit or ideology (not so evident in Shakespeare, except for perhaps hints of English liberties and differences with France).
It occurred to me that these same different views of nationhood are still with us today and that we Americans have not really arrived at a consensus about it, resulting in some of our confusions. [Read more...]
The Freedom of a Christian
What’s the best book by Martin Luther to start with? The answer is simple: The Freedom of a Christian. This is Luther at his very best, both in the brilliance of his writing and in his penetrating insight into the Word of God, the Gospel, and the Christian life. “Freedom” lacks the harsh polemics that so often turns off modern readers, though all sides practiced it in the 16th century. Like the best works of theology, it is stimulating both intellectually and spiritually and reading it is a profoundly devotional experience. (Calvinists want you to start with the Bondage of the Will, which, they think, makes Luther sound like Calvin, though, as commentator Larry keeps pointing out, really isn’t so.)
Most of all, “Freedom” gives us the most exhilarating applications of the Gospel, including Luther’s teachings on how Christians are simultaneously saints and sinners, that we are simultaneously free lords of all and servants of all, that the Christian life involves loving and serving our neighbors, that we are to be “little Christs” to each other, etc., etc. (The book has recently been released in a new modern translation by Ed Engelbrecht from CPH: Christian Freedom: Faith Working through Love
Tolkien’s Imagination
Arman J. Partamian has written a fascinating piece entitled “J.R.R. Tolkien and the Catholic Imagination.” My question: What is distinctly “Catholic” about what he describes? Could a Lutheran or an Anglican or Orthodox or other kinds of Christians (at least sacramental Christians) have this kind of imagination as well? From the post (but read it all):
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was a genius. The Lord of the Rings is a masterpiece of Catholic literature, and in fact was a big factor in my conversion to Catholicism. The books are rich in the “sacramental imagination” – seeing the extraordinary behind the ordinary. In its deep and complex history and its high symbolism, it beautifully tells the story of our Fall and Exile (especially in the Silmarillion, which contains the creation myth and the ancient history of men and elves), and our longing to return to Eden/Heaven. It is a Christian story that powerfully draws non-Christians into its world, and it does this by concealing its Catholicism. In fact, Tolkien’s genius was to re-tell the Christian story in a hidden way. [Read more...]
I bet I can make you cry
You may be all macho, sophisticated, cynical, and Stoic, but I have found a sequence of words that I predict will cause liquid to well up in your eyes.
It’s a dog story, from that Michael Dirda review of Mr. and Mrs. Dog by Donald McCaig that we posted about earlier. Take the challenge, if you dare, after the jump. [Read more...]
Lars Walker’s new Viking novel: free
Lars Walker, who frequents this blog, is a notable novelist who is also a Christian, yea Lutheran, a master of historical fantasy. His fiction is generally wildly entertaining, while also being thought-provoking and spiritually edifying. He has a new book out, a sequel to his wonderful Viking saga West Oversea
I haven’t read it yet, but am anxious to do so. Here is a reader review by Phil Wade:
This is an absolute ripping yarn, as ripping a yarn as you are likely to find, and unlike some TV series, it’s steeped in solid historical detail. Do want a fun sense of how Vikings lived in 1000 A.D.? Read Lars’ Erling novels.
This one is the fourth, but the first two are combined into one book, The Year of the Warrior. Next comes West Oversea. . . . And here, Hailstone Mountain. brings us the courageous, noble Erling Skjalgsson stepping into the battle of his life. [Read more...]
The end of [fill in the blank]
Carlos Lozada writes about the publishing trend of books that announce “the end” of something. Here are some recent titles:
The End of America
The End of Sex
The End of Men
The End of Money
The End of Lawyers
The End of Work
The End of the Free Market
The End of Nature [Read more...]
Shakespeare the capitalist
One of the many unfortunate legacies of Romanticism (there were some fortunate ones as well) is the mystification of the artist, as if, say, a literary genius were some ethereal sensitive soul far above the crass material realm of everyday life. Whereas in reality, actual literary geniuses–like Chaucer, Jane Austen, Dickens–tend to be of solid, down-to-earth middle class stock. That certainly was true of William Shakespeare. Recent research into the abundant records of his business dealings show him to have been a rather ruthless capitalist. [Read more...]
Jonathan Swift and the Jesus stompers
You have doubtless heard about the college that had students stomp on the name of Jesus as an exercise in a class on cultural understanding. I noticed the parallel to something that happened in Gulliver’s Travels in which the satirist Jonathan Swift portrays Dutch traders as being willing to trod on a Crucifix as a way to convince the Japanese that they weren’t Christians so that they could trade with that country. Of course, the Dutch, being Calvinists, considered the Crucifix to be an idol, so stepping on it didn’t bother them.
I wondered how much of that was true and how much was Swift’s lampoon. The Dutch were the only Europeans the Japanese would trade with. Whether that was because they would trod on the Crucifix because of their iconoclastic theology, I’m not sure, but Swift, an Anglican priest, lambastes them. Anyway, I was glad to see that Anthony Sacramone, who has taken up blogging again, makes that same connection and tells us more about the requirement for blasphemy in the context of Christian persecution, now showing up in a college classroom.
(There was only one student who objected, by the way, and he was a Mormon. Did the Christians in the room just go along with it? Surely, desecrating the name of Jesus would bother even iconoclasts whose distaste for physical images never extended to the use of language.) [Read more...]
Follow Patheos
Evangelical: