Planned Parenthood: The New Confederacy

Photo credit: USA Today

When I was about ten years old, my family attended Dolly Parton's Dixie Stampede in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. The dinner show took place in a huge barn, where guests ate greasy food with their fingers and watched a dramatic display of stunt riding and antebellum fashion, to the backdrop of bluegrass. It was Southernness exaggerated, packaged, and monetized on an enormous scale. The guests were filtered to either side of the arena, based on place of origin. Yankees on one side; Johnny Rebs on the other. My family sat with the Confederates, and booed whenever the boys in blue galloped across the arena. Our Yankee opponents did the same as the Confederates appeared. It was fun, all in good humor, and in retrospect, more than a little obscene.

150 years ago, 600,000 men were slaughtered in a conflict which concerned the forced enslavement of 12.5 million human beings. The Dixie Stampede reduced that conflict to the level of a football game.

I didn't notice, because I didn't think about it very seriously. I wasn't alone. Southerners are quick to defend the confederate flag, because to them, it means a football game and not a war. Ask them to defend the flag, and they'll talk your ear off. Ask them where Antietam is, and they'll say, "What?" If you didn't know, the battle of Antietam was the single bloodiest day in the history of the United States.

The Music of the Spheres - Terry Pratchett

Terry Pratchett was a master of the art of British comedy. What's more: he was one of the great fantasy novelists and satirists of the 20th Century. In being all these things, he is - at least in America - often unfairly overshadowed by specialists in each. He created a famous black-haired, bespectacled young wizard who goes to a school in a castle, and then a young upstart came along and stole his thunder. A successor to Monty Python and P.G. Wodehouse, a contemporary of Douglas Adams, he was a bit more serious than any of them. The breadth of his invention rivaled Dickens, but then, he wasn't Dickens. And of course, Pratchett was far too funny to be taken seriously as a satirist.

It's a Dangerous Business - Tolkien, Rob Bell, and Belief

Yesterday was J.R.R. Tolkien's birthday. I refer, of course, to the man who wrote the best novel of the 20th Century: The Lord of the Rings. And no, that fact is not up for dispute.

Or is it? Among the fantasy crowd, there's a stubborn set of naysayers who deride Tolkien's work as reactionary and cliched. There's some truth in both of these criticisms, but here's the thing: it's not really all that brave to be edgy. These days, it's more cliched to have a main character who is plagued by self-doubt, wrestles with abstract dilemmas, and is always seeking to "find himself," rather than a protagonist who is certain of anything. If they are certain of their faith, they're a religious nut job like Noah; otherwise we reshape Moses into a postmodern skeptic.

Top Books of 2014

It's that time again. The Best Of Lists, which dominate your social media page with hyperbole and self-congratulation. However, all of these other lists are infinitely inferior to this list, which is, indeed, the best of all Best Of Lists, mine. It's selected from the 53 books I read this year, and is in no particular order.

Edgar Allan Poe: The Root of All Horror

The great G.K. Chesterton was a stalwart defender of pulp fiction, but he also dismissively spoke of Edgar Allan Poe as a really “morbid” writer, driven mad by his hatred of poetry. There is no contradiction here. Poe is indeed one of the great pulp authors, but he was also mad.

Poe has long been considered anathema to “serious” study. Perhaps the reason he is so distrusted by the literary establishment is his fatal mixture of vulgar sensationalism and popular appeal. In such stories as The Fall of the House of Usher, he shamelessly utilizes basic thrills to tell a story which doesn’t appear to have some Important Point to make, beyond plumbing the depths of human fear and psychosis.

Losing My Mind - Religion, Reason, and Truth

I’m fascinated by beauty. It is my final fortification against materialism, a barrier from reducing the world to numbers. Sam Harris’s arguments are very sound—they explain things, fill in the gaps. But atheism specializes in the details and misses the sunsets and the waterfalls and Beethoven’s Ninth and Charles Dickens.

The sky’s on fire in the west tonight

 A chorus of pink, purple, blazing orange

 The air pulses with meaning and—

 I think of random particles,

 of chance and infinite typewriters,

 but no cold device could make the beauty,

 nor make me understand it.

In Defense of “Under God" - Religious Freedom, Theocracy, and Me

Yes, this is me saying the Pledge. I don't know what my brother's doing.

"'What Better Work For One Who Loves Freedom Than the Job of Watchman. Law Is The Servant of Freedom. Freedom Without Limits Is Just A Word,' said Dorfl ponderously.

"'Y'know...if it doesn't work out, you could always get a job making fortune cookies.'"

~Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay

I've always taken the Pledge of Allegiance very seriously. Perhaps it was the deep strain of solemn Phariseeism in me, but when other children mumbled and rolled their eyes through the pledge, I would slap my hand to my heart and tearfully proclaim my earnestness for Americanism and all it entailed.

I remember once, hearing a fellow pledger replace "liberty and justice for all" with a surreptitious "liberty and justice for most." How dare he? I fumed mentally. That's so disrespectful! If you're going to give your word, you should really mean it. There's some irony there, because his nicety should have force me to realize that all the time I had said the pledge, it had never occurred to me to ask that most relevant of questions: do I believe it?

And I wasn't sure.

Happy 140th Birthday, G.K. Chesterton

I think it's probably a fair bet to say that no author has taught me more than G.K. Chesterton. On the other hand, the author who has taught me least would have to be, yep, G.K. Chesterton. It's an appropriate paradox.

Chesterton lived and breathed on paradox. His ability to enlighten me on matters spiritual is nearly immeasurable, but there's the rub: he may only enlighten those things which one already knows, which already lurk in the mind and form the basis of his favorite virtue: common sense. No other author has such a talent for revealing to me the truths that are, or should be, immediately evident.

This is, in fact, the premise of one of his greatest books: Orthodoxy. In it, he voiced many of the questions that plagued him as a young seeker.

"How can we contrive to be at once astonished at the world and yet at home in it?" 

"Why should ANYTHING go right; even observation and deduction? Why should not good logic be as misleading as bad logic? They are both movements in the brain of a bewildered ape?" 

"Can [one] hate [the world] enough to change it, and yet love it enough to think it worth changing?"

Tolkien on the Incarnation

Incarnation proves the intrinsic worth of each human person. 

~J.R.R. Tolkien, Letter 136

The Incarnation of Jesus Christ was one of the central ideas in J.R.R. Tolkien's theology. Besides his philological attention to the whole idea of the word-made-flesh, he was interested in in the Incarnation’s refutation of the perceived schism between body and spirit, an idea particularly fostered in modern times. In the good old days, it was branded a heresy: Gnosticism. The Gnostics believed in the supremacy of the spirit over uncouth bodies. The vice versa equivalent would probably be modern secular materialism, placing all emphasis on what can be quantified. Both ideas are popular now, with trendy pop-Buddhism taking the place of Gnostic spiritualism.

Top Books of 2013

(Selected from the 80 books I read this year, in no particular order.)

C.S. Lewis on the Blindness of Our Age

We all know that person. They're obnoxious. They ooze arrogance. It's so blatant that their friends have begun to avoid them. But oddly, despite its glaring obviousness, they just can't see it. "What's everybody's problem?" they ask indignantly. We have a furious desire to shove their face to a mirror, screaming "Can't you see?"

In a recent conversation with my friend Elora Shore, we talked about the sins of particular eras. Some, racism in particular, we found hard to pardon. How could anyone be so blind to such an obvious fault? I paused. After all, why shouldn't the entire world, and all of history besides, think like me? I realized that that was precisely what I was thinking, and the arrogance and ethnocentricity of it surprised me. We went on to talk of other things, but the question stuck in the back of my head.

When 24th Century historians look at us, what will they find impossible to understand? With a paranoid conception of the future, I imagined invisible time travelers peering in my window and felt slightly panicky. Will they think I'm old-fashioned? Is it possible to find out now? How can we see ourselves without the skewed lens of what C.S. Lewis called chronological snobbery? I want to be ahead of my time.

Never Say Die - Modernity and Morality - Part 2

Part 1

As a culture, we either avoid death or surrender to it—we are either blind optimists or self-centered pessimists. Speaking of death is often described as morbid. Speaking of it ceaselessly is either depression or being highly artistic, depending on one’s college degree. The optimists find themselves, in their last moments, scrabbling madly for a hold on life, staring at the wall in wide-eyed, hyperventilating terror. The pessimists go into a dark room and blow their brains out. What is the answer? What is the correct way to deal with death?

On one hand, there is no avoidance.

Death is the destiny of every man; the living should take this to heart.

Ecclesiastes 7:2, NIV

But…

O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?

1 Corinthians 15:55, KJV

Death is not there to be avoided, it’s there to be beaten—it has been beaten. Jesus took death down. Like a line-backer. This is the truest realism, not the despairing acceptance of meaninglessness. If it’s cowardice to avoid death, is it not cowardice to surrender to it? Is it not stupid to eschew all good things because of a hyped up idea that it’s sentimental? Isn’t that just intellectual dishonesty? Sure, it’s wrong to accept an idea because it makes you feel good, but isn’t it also wrong to reject an idea because it makes you feel good?

Anglophilia and A Severe Mercy

 

“So surrender the hunger to say you must know,

Have the courage to say ‘I believe,’
For the power of paradox opens your eyes,
And blinds those who say they can see.”

-Michael Card “God’s Own Fool”

I’m part of a group of American Evangelicals that I think of as The Anglophiles. They often homeschool. For as long as I can remember, I’ve loved British stuff. I grew up on a steady diet of Agatha Christie’s Poirot, P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster, and Joan Hickson as (the only) Miss Marple. Mr. Darcy was upheld as the ideal of all manhood.

My dad read me The Chronicles of Narnia, followed by The Hobbit, followed by that fiction above all other fiction, The Lord of the Rings. Charles Dickens, Terry Pratchett, and G.K. Chesterton number themselves among my favorite authors (lucky sods). I practice my Oxford English, Irish, Scottish, Cockney, and Geordie accents whenever I read aloud to my younger siblings. Just about the only thing I dislike is British music; I loathe the Beatles. But I eagerly devour British-inspired music.

When I started reading Sheldon “Van” Vanauken’s memoir A Severe Mercy, I was immediately swept into his familiar love. Like me, Van grew up immersed in British Lit., even though his childhood spanned the 1920s, and not the 2000s. He read Sherlock Holmes and Treasure Island – “As a child England had seemed much nearer than New York or the cowboy west.” When he finally went up to Oxford, he said it “was like coming home, coming to a home half-remembered – but home.” (EX-actly, I thought).

Van was one of the early Anglophiles, just like me. He was also an incorrigible romantic, a lover of beauty and goodness and all that is fair. He had the extraordinary luck to step into Oxford while the Inklings still lived. He and his wife, Davy, became good friends with C.S. Lewis, read Charles Williams, Dorothy L. Sayers, and G.K. Chesterton, and were converted to Christianity. They entertained dozens of deep thinkers at their little apartment in downtown Oxford.

Father Brown - Style and Sunny Skies, But No Substance

[Note: this concerns series 1 - I'm halfway through series 3 at the moment, and my impressions are somewhat different.] 

I’ve long been excited about the new Father Brown adaptation. I read several volumes of short stories featuring G.K. Chesterton’s clerical sleuth last summer, and enjoyed them immensely. In typical fashion, Chesterton used them to tote his own views, but included a fascinating howdunnit mystery, often hinging on paradox. The quirky, child-like character of Father Brown, the humorous philosophical discussions, the hilarious Chestertonian one-liners, and the gorgeous, glorious descriptions easily set the stories among the classic mysteries.

The old series with Kenneth More was quite good, but suffered from being made in the 1970s. The writing, mostly lifted directly from Chesterton, was witty and well-delivered, and elevated it beyond most shows of its time.

Lady Felicia, Mrs. McCarthy, Brown, Valentine, Suzie, Sid

Unfortunately, the new adaptation bears little relation to its source material. It starts off sticking to the original plot, but things quickly spin into embellishment. Father Brown (Mark Williams) has lost his air of whimsical befuddlement and dithering curiosity, and appears altogether too keen-minded (which, in the books, he only became during the final unveiling). He’s been turned into a much more wise, sagely, liberal Cadfael-esque figure. 

Another thing: Father Brown’s figure was always described as rather roly-poly. Williams is too tall to pull that off, but he does occasionally get in the childishness. Yet it's only very occasionally. Some joys are granted by the supporting cast: Sorcha Cusack is hilarious as the neighborhood busybody, and Hugo Speer makes a convincing and relatable Inspector Valentine, considering its never easy playing the Lestrade/Japp figure. Nancy Carroll's Lady Felicia is there for seemingly no reason. Kasia Koleczek as Susie, Father Brown’s Polish housekeeper, serves to advance the plot at times, but her boyfriend Sid (Alex Price) is truly interesting, being a some-time petty thief.

The Bible - Episode 3 Review

 Part 2

It’s a study in personality to see how the respective members of my family react to History Channel’s The Bible. Granny’s commentary about the show was interspersed with news about the neighbors and thoughts concerning the latest season of Downton Abbey. Baby, Granny’s red dog, sat and glared at us with You’re On My Couch writ large on his face. My mom and brother are the nitpickers, though Mom’s complaints make a lot more sense than Sam’s usual, “Hannah. Hannah. Herod wasn’t that fat, was he?” Mom’s question – “I can’t believe they didn’t show Nebuchadnezzar’s redemption” – made a lot more sense.

The Truly Great Man - My Understanding of St. Crispin's Day

Shakespeare is the number one best-selling author in the world, with Agatha Christie as a close second. (Taking into account that Bible has one Author, and He not of this world). But while Shakespeare is amazing as a writer, he really wrote to be spoken. When put in the hands of a brilliant director, like Kenneth Branagh, the result is magic. I’ve seen Branagh’s adaptation of Henry V several times, and it still gives me chills. Like Fiddler on the Roof, it’s one of the few older films that stand the passage of time.

There’s one scene in particular, near the end of the movie, which, without fail, makes my heart soar. King Henry V, nicknamed “Harry”, has led the British troops into France, and the Battle of Agincourt approaches. The French outnumber them by a large margin. It’s a pretty hopeless situation.

A fellow named Westmoreland laments, rather understandably, “O that we now had here but one ten thousand of those men in England that do no work to-day!”

Maybe It's Better

 

 

We live on a hill, surrounded by rolling and dipping hills and a tree-fringe and a hedge of blue mountains on the skyline. It had been raining gray skies for the last three days, and when the snow came, it was so quick it looked like streams of white cotton. It was only an hour before the ground was coated, invisible beneath a pale shroud.

 

Top 5's of 2012

Because I'm usually half a step behind the times, and generally wish I lived five hundred years ago, many of these things didn't come out in 2012, but that's when I discovered them.

Books:

Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Prophet, Martyr, Spy – by the wonderful Eric Metaxas. This book not only tells the amazing story of German pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, but it also paints in vivid detail Hitler’s sneaky political alliance with “the church” and what the real Church was doing behind the scenes. Disturbing parallels with modern America.

Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery - also by Metaxas. I didn’t know very much about Wilberforce until I read this book, but now I think he’s one of the greatest influences on Western civilization in the last four hundred years. And a Christian.

The Fellowship of the Ring – by J.R.R. Tolkien. Yeah, yeah, I’ve read it before, but this is the first time I’ve really read it with the spiritual eyes open. Tremendous book. I'm halfway through The Two Towers, and I'm savoring every moment. Interestingly enough, I just found out that the copy we own (see pic) is the Ballantine second edition - and it has a weird misprint. If you happen to have several thousand dollars laying around, I'd be willing to negotiate.





Orthodoxy - by G.K. Chesterton. Simply foundational stuff. I loved this book. So many moments where one thinks "Gosh! It's so obvious, so obviously true, but I never thought of it. Amazing."










Notes from the Tilt-a-Whirl - by N.D. Wilson. To come clean, I've only watched the bookumentary so far, but that was amazing. I won't quite look at anything the same way. Since, according to Shelfari, I've read about eighty books this year, it's quite an achievement. Along with Orthodoxy, it's had a major impact on my thinking.

The Other Stocking, by G.K. Chesterton

(Thought this was rather appropriate for the holidays, so here's a guest post from our friend Mr. Chesterton)

What has happened to me has been the very reverse of what appears to be the experience of most of my friends. Instead of dwindling to a point, Santa Claus has grown larger and larger in my life until he fills almost the whole of it. It happened in this way.

As a child I was faced with a phenomenon requiring explanation. I hung up at the end of my bed an empty stocking, which in the morning became a full stocking. I had done nothing to produce the things that filled it. I had not worked for them, or made them or helped to make them. I had not even been good–far from it.
...

And the explanation was that a certain being whom people called Santa Claus was benevolently disposed toward me. What we believed was that a certain benevolent agency did give us those toys for nothing. And, as I say, I believe it still.

I have merely extended the idea.

Then I only wondered who put the toys in the stocking; now I wonder who put the stocking by the bed, and the bed in the room, and the room in the house, and the house on the planet, and the great planet in the void.

Once I only thanked Santa Claus for a few dolls and crackers, now, I thank him for stars and street faces and wine and the great sea.

Once I thought it delightful and astonishing to find a present so big that it only went halfway into the stocking. Now I am delighted and astonished every morning to find a present so big that it takes two stockings to hold it, and then leaves a great deal outside; it is the large and preposterous present of myself, as to the origin of which I can offer no suggestion except that Santa Claus gave it to me in a fit of peculiarly fantastic goodwill.

Merry Christmas,
Longish

If There Was Any Justice in the World - The Evolution of the Detective Story

The laughter echoes through the halls of the mist-shrouded mansion. The clink of wine glasses, the sudden high-pitched voice of the host. A small group of seemingly innocent, happy people gather in the drawing room. Two of them are having an affair, three others were involved in a previous murder inquiry, that little old lady isn’t what she appears to be, and all of them have motives for killing the mysterious man in black.

Suddenly, a shot rings out. The maid screams. The inquisitive (but not overly surprised or distraught) group crowds around a body sprawled on the floor. Outside, the storm has arrived and the guests peer out into a snowy wonderland. The butler informs them that the phones are down.

“Well, old boy,” says the hawk-nosed individual in the interesting coat. “I suppose we’ll have to sort it out ourselves.”

It’s the classic setup. An interesting character trots around the English countryside, uncovering things folk would rather have kept hidden, asking awkward questions, pushing the limits of the law in defense of the law, and ultimately, inevitably, triumphantly arresting the local vicar for the murder.

Mystery writer Dorothy L. Sayers observed half a century ago that “Death seems to provide the minds of the Anglo-Saxon race with a greater fund of amusement than any other single subject.” It is still true today. Mystery is one of the three most popular genres in the English fiction market (the other two being romance and science fiction). (1) The most-watched TV shows in the world in 2006 and 2007 were the crime shows CSI: Las Vegas and CSI: Miami. Even the medical drama House, most-watched in 2008 (2), drew its inspiration from Sherlock Holmes, and another runner-up was the comedy-mystery show Monk. Clearly, there’s just something about a mystery.

As Christians living in a culture with so many books and movies centered on violence and immorality, it is important to examine what we read and watch. That begs the question, is it ever good to use evil? After all, “what fellowship has light with darkness?”(2 Cor. 6:14, ESV)

It’s not a new idea. Many in the early 20^th Century thought that “To write a story about a burglary is, in their eyes, a sort of spiritual manner of committing it.”(Chesterton, Defense) But when it gets down to it, murder mysteries, at least the good old-fashioned kind, aren’t really about murder. There is invariably a body, sometimes two, but they aren’t there because the author likes killing people, but because murders happen in real life. Mysteries, particularly the ones in later years, try to accurately portray how police deal with murders, and how murder is to be dealt with. There’s one thing about mysteries that isn’t realistic, and it’s not the murders. It’s not the evil part—it’s the fact that murderers are caught. Mysteries always have happy endings.

Dorothy L. Sayers’s fictional sleuth proclaimed that “in detective stories virtue is always triumphant. They’re the purest literature we have.”(qtd. in Dubose, 216) The murderer is nearly always caught, and justice done. For detectives, the first commandment is devotion to law and justice. Sleuths stand as lonely sentinels against encroaching lawlessness. In literature, the closest comparison would be knights and dragons, or possibly David and Goliath. It doesn’t get much purer than that, and the pursuit of Justice is a very Christian principle.