This is good. It speaks to a harmful, knee-jerk reaction we are trained to in this culture by our p.c. masters. I got this from Alan Jacobs, but it is by D.G. Myers. The entire post can be found here. Perhaps good to keep in mind with all the year-end “Top ____” posts. I plan to do that soon, perhaps. So consider this cover. -Sam
“‘The universal reaction to book lists,’ I wrote a few days ago, ‘is annoyance over what has been left out.’ I should have added: followed immediately by an accusation of bias. If you don’t happen to think very highly of a writer—and if, because space limitations make explanation impossible, you are silent about the writer—you will be said to hold a grudge against the class to which the writer belongs. Worse yet, if you fail to mention a sufficient number of members of the writer’s class, although the required proportion remains vague and undefined, you will be dismissed as irredeemably intolerant if not bigoted toward the entire class.
“I don’t know why it took so long for me to figure out what was going on. The accusation of bias has been leveled against me so often that I no longer take it seriously. Only recently, though, did it strike me that the accusation is more than simply a moral fashion. It is a learned response, an intellectual commonplace, picked up in school and college like mono or herpes. It is the voice of the academic literary guild, stripped of any theoretical sophistication, coming from the mouths of latter-day undergraduates who still hope for their professors’ approval.
“Race, class, and gender (and their substitutes and equivalents, adopted by outsiders eager to get in on the game) have finally completed the tendency that Mencken observed so long ago. Their invocation no longer makes it hard to talk about a book’s intrinsic qualities. They have made it so that such talk, when it occasionally occurs, sounds like a dead language. Nobody understands what is being said, and assumes the worse. For any critical discussion that refuses to cloth itself in the vocabulary of race, class, and gender is nothing else—can be nothing else—than an expression of naked bias.
Now, I understand that there are more ways to measure the health of a culture than by lifespan and wealth, but still, this is quite telling.
It’s a wonderful time to be alive in so many, many ways!
“Better is the end of a thing than its beginning,
and the patient in spirit is better than the proud in spirit.
Be not quick in your spirit to become angry,
for anger lodges in the bosom of fools.
Say not, “Why were the former days better than these?”
For it is not from wisdom that you ask this.
Wisdom is good with an inheritance,
an advantage to those who see the sun.
For the protection of wisdom is like the protection of money,
and the advantage of knowledge is that wisdom preserves the life of him who has it.
Consider the work of God:
who can make straight what he has made crooked?”
Mike Cosper has a wonderful post on the ironic, violent meaning of Christmas. Here’s an outtake…
Christmas is violent. It’s earth-shattering. The very order of things, the way the world worked, was being rewritten. In 1811, an earthquake in Missouri caused church bells to ring in Philadelphia and made the Mississippi River run backwards. When the Christ-child gasped his first breath, the hinge of history swung in a new direction, and hell shuddered. The assault on its gates had begun.
We celebrate Christmas right at the Winter Solstice—a bit of metaphorical genius, if you ask me (at least for those of us in the northern hemisphere). Right as the year reaches its coldest, just as the nights get their longest and darkest, we open our Bibles and read,
The people walking in darkness
have seen a great light;
on those living in the land of deep darkness
a light has dawned (Isaiah 9:2).
Historically, the church observed Advent in the month before Christmas, a month of fasting and anticipation. I grew up in churches that skipped the fasts and dove straight into the fa-la-la’s. Discovering Advent was like discovering Good Friday. A deep well of meaning gave Christmas wider and broader dimensions. For all of Christmas’s cause for celebration, there’s an accompanying need to awaken our minds to the surrounding desperation. The world was, and remains in many ways, in darkness. Christmas is part of that glorious already/not-yet tension, where the finished song of redemption awaits the “Amen!” of restoration. We celebrate Christmas in a broken and fallen world, in broken and fallen churches full of broken and fallen people.
Whatever we do in these coming days, let’s not miss the truly epic story of irony and violence that is the “true meaning” of Christmas.
This one’s a shameless plug. (First I wrote “shamless plug” and it’s that too.)
My wife is a super-swell lady and I’m way proud of her. One thing, among many, she does well is make handmade things. (Handmakes things?)
She has a store and in this store, she sells items from time to time. This is a newish thing for us. Anyway, today she has a few new items for sale and I wonder if you wouldn’t mind popping over and having a peek at said items? May-hap you could see if you might like to buy one for yourself, or someone you love, for Christmas, or for sheer jocularity.
It’s good stuff. I actually wrote some of the ad copy (we’re literally a mom and pop shop) and you might enjoy reading it because it’s supposed to be intentionally funny and lead to peace in the Midwest.
There’s a tea/coffee cozy. (This picture -below- of the cozy cozy features my mug on a mug. Ha!)
There’s this thing called a “List-maker.” I have no idea what it’s for, but it’s very cute.
UPDATE: I’m informed this is called a “List-TAKER,” not a “List-MAKER.” Very different, certainly, by Jove. Apparently, this thing “takes” your lists. Then you are listless.
And there’s another of her popular banners. This one’s the best yet, by far. The words look cool and have this subtly glittering quality to them. Like magic. The picture doesn’t quite reveal the magicalness (magicality?) of it, so trust me. It says, “Peace To You.” See it.
Act fast while supplies last. (<–Rhyming.) OK, commercial over. Enjoy.
Here’s a little outtake from Lanier Ivester’s wonderful post over at The Rabbit Room, Two Trees.
“The affair in the Garden was not about keeping rules or breaking them so much as choosing the Desire of our souls or choosing His counterfeit. At the heart of this poem lies that ancient choice, as terrible today as it was when God first granted it in the Garden: heaven or hell? Life or death? Not only for all eternity but for this very moment snared in time. ‘Gaze on this,’ the poet pleads, ‘not on that.’ Love and long for—in other words, submit to and believe—the ecstasy of the Life offered you. Take faith to turn from the ruin of your own heart and fix your eyes on something that is truer than all the sorrow of the world put together.
“It has been said that for every look at self we must take ten looks at Christ. I find that truth expressed with such magnificent beauty in this poem. For while the accepted interpretation—and for all I know, the original intent—of these lines may uphold an inward search for goodness apart from Christ, as a Christian I take great delight in the freedom I have to celebrate the gleaming flashes of truth that glitter and sparkle with such inexorable joy in the world around me. We’re miners, really, we servants of the true King, plunging through a darkened world in enemy territory to retrieve the scattered bits of Eden that were made to flame in the light of the sun. For though far-flung and often couched amid the hard crust of error and inaccuracy, they are there all the same. As C.S. Lewis recounted in Surprised by Joy, longings that disclose eternal realities may be mediated to us by ‘the water-colour world of Morris, the leafy recesses of Malory, the twilight of Yeats…’ That is just the wonder of poetry—or of anything beautiful, for that matter. They bear the opportunity of communicating spiritual truth, these remnants of a lost paradise with which our tired earth is endowed like veins of living gold, and give us courage to hope in a Redemptive Plan that is steadily, patiently, unrelentingly working to restore all things to their original purpose.”
I recommend the entire piece, which includes the poem, The Two Trees, by Yeats. Lanier and her husband, Philip, live in a farmhouse in Georgia. I was privileged to meet them at Hutchmoot 2010. She is a wonderful, careful and thoughtful writer.
She also has a website and a bookstore where she probably has what you’re looking for for the bibliophile in your family this Christmas. Note: It’s not for Kindle.
“This picture has nothing to do with this post, but all cats should die.” -Male Human
David Brooks talks about what makes for success in the modern world economy: Networks.
“Howard Gardner of Harvard once put together a composite picture of the extraordinarily creative person: She comes from a little place somewhat removed from the center of power and influence. As an adolescent, she feels herself outgrowing her own small circle. She moves to a metropolis and finds a group of people who share her passions and interests. She gets involved with a team to create something amazing.
Then, at some point, she finds her own problem, which is related to and yet different from the problems that concern others in her group. She breaks off and struggles and finally emerges with some new thing. She brings it back to her circle. It is tested, refined and improved.
The main point in this composite story is that creativity is not a solitary process. It happens within networks. It happens when talented people get together, when idea systems and mentalities merge.”
(The rest of the article is here.) This has become a big feature of my thoughts in the last few years. Seth Godin’s Tribes moved me from undirected thinking on the subject to very concrete planning. I feel a desire to help connect thoughtful Christians who love sub-creative art with both artists and with each other, appreciators and receivers all. Maybe one day soonish I’ll be able to share some more on this.
Hint: It has nothing to do with the rumors that I have invented a new way to facebook your e-mail websites. (But I have.)
Alan Jacobs sits down with Doug and N.D. Wilson to talk C.S. Lewis. They range all over, from films to the Space Trilogy with asides that will delight fans of the creator of Narnia.
This was a real pleasure to watch. I can’t recommend it highly enough. If you’re a Lewis fan, a movie buff, a story lover, a Christian, a human, you’ll appreciate this.
I loved Alan Jacob’s book The Narnian, and if you watch this you’ll see why. The man, in fact all three of these fellows, absolutely get Narnia. They also deeply get Lewis himself and his magical worldview.
“Many people in the United States purchase one or fewer books every year.
Many of those people have seen every single episode of American Idol. There is clearly a correlation here.
Access to knowledge, for the first time in history, is largely unimpeded for the middle class. Without effort or expense, it’s possible to become informed if you choose. For less than your cable TV bill, you can buy and read an important book every week. Share the buying with six friends and it costs far less than coffee.
Or you can watch TV.
The thing is, watching TV has its benefits. It excuses you from the responsibility of having an informed opinion about things that matter. It gives you shallow opinions or false ‘facts’ that you can easily parrot to others that watch what you watch. It rarely unsettles our carefully self-induced calm and isolation from the world.”
So says Steven D. Boyer in his very insightful piece in Touchstone aptly called “Invading Narnia.” He demonstrates the obvious, that Lewis loved hierarchy (unperverted) and that it is central to the Narnian stories (and really all of his work). This is one of the many problems (tragedies) of the movie versions of the books.
“In order to address questions like these, we have to ask first what Lewis is trying to do. What is his ‘Christian vision of the world’? We could address this question by focusing on the Narnia tales specifically, but it ends up being more productive (and avoiding some of the twists and turns of scholarship on Narnia) to begin with a broader account of Lewis’s basic theological outlook, and so that is what we shall do.
Understanding this basic outlook does bring with it, however, one really substantial obstacle: we have to think carefully about a significant element in Lewis’s vision that does not play very well in our world, even among contemporary Christians. That element is Lewis’s peculiar fondness for hierarchy.
The word ‘hierarchy’ does not have very pleasant connotations in our day, so to speak of someone being ‘fond of hierarchy’ sounds very ‘peculiar’ indeed. It is like admitting that your great-uncle Jack, really a fine old gentleman, never got over his childhood delight in pulling the wings off flies. Of course, this odd and even repulsive idiosyncrasy might be ignored by members of the family, out of their affection for Uncle Jack.
The only problem with treating Lewis this way is that his particular oddity reappears everywhere in his work, usually quite explicitly, and it has an exceptionally strong bearing upon the way he understands orthodox Christianity. If we are going to understand Lewis’s deeply Christian vision of the world, we will need to try hard to understand how this suspicious attraction to hierarchy is a part of it.”
It’s an excellent read. The entire piece by Dr. Boyer is here.
-Sam
