I've watched with interest as Stephen Prothero makes the rounds in support of his book — Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know — and Doesn't. I suppose I will need to read the book, but from what Prothero has said so far in interviews and op-eds, I find I agree with his diagnosis, but disagree with his prescription. Here's Prothero in The Los Angeles Times: U.S. citizens know almost nothing about the Bible. Although most regard it as... Read more
Left Behind, pg. 275 Rayford and Chloe Steele have just finished watching Nightline. This is noteworthy since we're well enough acquainted with the Steele's daily habits, at this point, to know that they don't usually watch this show. The Steeles don't watch Nightline or Letterman or Leno (and the book was written in 1995, so Colbert isn't an option). Apart from a bit of CNN — far less than most would watch after something like The Event — they don't... Read more
I see from the comments thread here that I should clarify what I meant by the "mirror image" of illiteralist fundamentalism. Fundamentalists believe that the Bible is "literally" true. What they mean by this is that every story it contains must have actually happened in real life, exactly the way it is told. The problem is that this is not how much of the Bible was written, not how much of it is supposed to be read. I can't figure... Read more
Left Behind, pp. 227-308 The pattern in Left Behind is to skip back and forth between our dual heroes, so having just completed a scene with Buck, we're about to get to a Rayford scene. This is a common tactic in an story involving multiple protagonists and I don't think there's any one single way of doing this right. There are, however, ways of doing this wrong, and this being LB, our authors have managed to find such a way.... Read more
A few months back I posted an excerpt from E.F. Schumacher's Small Is Beautiful so that I would be able to link back to it from time to time. This is one of those times. That excerpt concludes: … if it is taken for granted that education is a passport to privilege, then the content of education will not primarily be something to serve the people, but something to serve ourselves, the educated. The privileged minority will wish to be... Read more
Why are crows' feathers black? As it happens, there's a story that tells why. It's a lovely story, told in a lovely children's book, and nicely retold at Sandy Schlosser's folklore site.* Read the story, though, and you'll see that it's really not mainly concerned with the question it nominally addresses. The structure of the story is something like this: Q: Why are the crow's feathers black? A: Courage and helping others are good. Remember that every time you see... Read more
Will Rogers suggested a simple standard for evaluating any country or community: Are people trying to get in? Or are they trying to get out? By that standard, as Dahr Jamail reports on TomDispatch, Iraq is a massive failure: Let's start with the numbers, inadequate as they are. The latest UN figures concerning the refugee crisis in Iraq indicate that between 1-1.2 million Iraqis have fled across the border into Syria; about 750,000 have crossed into Jordan (increasing its modest... Read more
"Security beefed up at Cedar Rapids Public Library" was a memorable piece from The Onion — memorable because coming less than a month after the Sept. 11 attacks, it offered a healthy dose of perspective while much of the "real" news media was still in hysterical-panic mode. But while the Cedar Rapids Public Library probably isn't terribly high on the list of likely terrorist targets, it's higher on the list than the town of Ocean View, Del., population 1,135. But... Read more
Slight tangent for a look at an all-too-real example of why the World's Worst Books are worth exploring as more than just a celebration of wretched writing. Here's CNN host Glenn Beck: Are the cataclysmic events of 9/11, Katrina, tsunami, famine and the threat of global pandemic signs we`re living in the end times? One world government, one world economy, one world vision. Are we creeping even closer to the Book of Revelations` countdown to doomsday? And does an age-old... Read more
This was pretty much me the last three days. So, um, did I miss anything? Read more
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