Lou Priolo divides his book Pleasing People: How Not To Be an “Approval Junkie” into two sections: Our Problem and God’s Solution. I’ve only read the first half, so consider this a partial review.
Priolo is one of those authors who steeps himself in the Puritans, then rewrites their material and presents it in a fresh new way so that readers today can benefit from old but valuable insights. You should always beware of such authors! [wink] Anyway, along with the Puritans he relies heavily on Richard Baxter, whose practical insights into the intricacies of the human heart are as good as they are voluminous.
At the midway point my essential comment on the book is, “Ouch!” I’ve suffered through 124 pages of prosecution, though he could have won a conviction in less than half of that. Still, it’s quite valuable; but the real test will be in the second part – he has claimed that there is a solution to this mess, yet he’s dug me a hole so deep I can’t even see light when I look up. Part two better be really good.
When I first read Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop about 15 years ago, I thought that it could easily and powerfully be transofrmed into a movie. It has an envigorating visual scope (the Southwest, especially northern New Mexico, which is of course the most beautiful place on planet earth), the interplay of multiple cultures (Mexican, Pueblo Indian, Navajo, American, Spanish, French), spirituality (primarily Roman Catholic and Native American), and it portrays and celebrates a dear and pure lifelong friendship between two good men.
What more could you want from a film? (more…)
In July I read Theodore Dalrymple’s Our Culture, What’s Left of It, and recommended it highly. I’ve just finished his latest, In Praise of Prejudice: The Necessity of Preconceived Ideas, and encourage you with even more vigor to read it. Dalrymple takes apart the prevailing idea that any sort of prejudice is bad, and that, if we want to be authentic human beings, we much each choose every idea based on our own examination of it, and accept nothing at all on authority. He demonstrates the obvious absurdity of the notion, shows its clear roots in J. S. Mill’s essay On Liberty, and illustrates again and again the mess that this sort of thinking gets us into.
In a few chapters he shows how the doctrine of the absolute autonomy and sovereignty of the human will has shaped (or rather distorted) our notions of rearing children and education, and how that has led not to the anticipated liberation of the human soul, but has led to a new and destructive bondage: (more…)
A friend asked me to review Henri Nouwen’s Life of the Beloved when I finished reading it. I’m done, and here are my thoughts.
Nouwen wrote this book in response to his friend Fred’s request for something about the spiritual life, but addressed to secular people like Fred and his friends. So Nouwen set out to write a book that wasn’t couched in the language and symbols familiar to religious people with a church or synagogue context to their lives, yet still a book that touched the central yearnings of the human heart. I wanted to read it precisely because of its goal – because I’d like to learn how to do the same (if it is possible).
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I’ve told you more than once, and even insisted on it, that you should read Gilead. It was Marilynne Robinson’s Pulitzer-Prize winning second novel, so I wanted to read her first. I had some time on my hands while I lay in the hospital bed for eight days last month, so I picked it up. It’s called Housekeeping, and it’s not nearly the story that Gilead is, but it is full of beautiful writing.
Here is one sentence of hers that made me fall down in admiration (and double over with laughter – as much as anyone with a severe back injury and lying in a hospital can be said to double over). The narrator is describing a neighbor named Beatrice:
She was an old woman, but she managed to look like a young woman with a ravaging disease.
A few words to supplement my previous post on Dalrymple’s book: In the second half he exposes the depths to which British society has plunged as a result of its delight in barbaric culture – and the recounting of the perversion is gruesome. These essays are not easy reading, and anyone not unsettled by them is surely hardened. They are strikingly reminiscent of the closing chapters of the book of Judges, when Israel had no king and everyone did what was right in his own eyes - but drawn in more detail. I would not put them in front of my young sons, but after reading them I feel the need to prepare Kristian and Ethan to face this sort of world.
And I am shockingly forced to revisit how well I understand what Jesus meant when he said that he came “to seek and to save the lost.”
I’ve now read enough of Theodore Dalrymple’s Our Culture, What’s Left of It, to commend it to you. He is a master at deconstructing the barbarism of much of western culture, and that’s helpful to Christians who want to understand the worldview of people around them. He clearly shows the emptiness, which paves the way for Christians to proclaim the only hope of deliverance from the mindless vulgarity around us.
His weakness is his own answer to the problem. He doesn’t appear to be Christian, though he accepts what he calls a “religious view” of human nature: “that man is a fallen creature for whom virtue is necessary but never fully attainable.” But for him barbarism is the enemy – not the same as what a Christian means by sin; and his answer is civilization, not grace. My guess is that his god is Culture – High Culture.
This is most clear when he pauses (more than once) to admire those who, in their last hours on earth, knowing that they would soon be killed by the Nazis, chose to spend their time playing Beethoven. Poignant, yes – but that hardly compares with the stories of the Christian martyrs who have died praying for their enemies.
Still, read the book.
Marilynne Robinson, the author of the book Gilead (which I have raved about), has written a powerful review of Richard Dawkins’s popular attack on religion, The God Delusion. Here’s a sample paragraph to pique your interest:
The nineteenth-century abolitionist, feminist, essayist, and ordained minister Thomas Wentworth Higginson made the always timely point that, in comparing religions, great care must be taken to consider the best elements of one with the best of the other, and the worst with the worst, to avoid the usual practice of comparing, let us say, the fatwa against Salman Rushdie with the Golden Rule. The same principle might be applied in the comparison of religion and science. To set the declared hopes of one against the real-world record of the other is clearly not useful, no matter which of them is flattered by the comparison. What is religion? It is described by Dawkins as a virtually universal feature of human culture. But there is, commingled with it, indisputably and perhaps universally, doubt, hypocrisy, and charlatanism. Dawkins, for his part, considers religion wholly delusional, and he condemns the best of it for enabling all the worst of it. Yet if religion is to be blamed for the fraud done in its name, then what of science? Is it to be blamed for the Piltdown hoax, for the long-credited deceptions having to do with cloning in South Korea? If by “science” is meant authentic science, then “religion” must mean authentic religion, granting the difficulties in arriving at these definitions.
For the record: I have not read The God Delusion, but I have read Dawkins’s The Blind Watchmaker. I can see why his writing stirs people up—but I have not been impressed by his arguments. Still, because he is so influential, it is worthwhile to read him and understand his ideas and their implications—as well as the presuppositions that drive them.
Did you hear about the Danish husband who loved his wife so much he almost told her?
We Danes are notorious for our Stoicism. We keep our emotions under the surface, ”where they belong.” But I’m only a fourth-generation Dane, so by now there’s enough Mediterranean blood in me that—once in a while—those hidden emotions sneak out (or blow out, as the case may be).
What does all that have to do with a book review and a warning to readers? Well, when I got to the end of Gilead, which I have highly recommended and still highly recommend, I made a foolish mistake. The book had already stirred me deeply, and in that state of stirredness I was unable to restrain myself from reading to Paula a delightful passage in which the narrator, John Ames, recounts his “courtship†with his bride. I had to stop at a few points to collect myself before going on, but when I got to the line that reads, “Love is holy because it is like grace—the worthiness of its object is never really what matters,” it was over. I burst into a state that I can only remember falling into once before: I was sobbing out of control, and laughing at the same time. It made some pretty funny sounds come out of me, which made me laugh harder, and I know I looked downright ridiculous and very un-Viking-like. The sobbing kept up right alongside the laughter, so it was just plain weird. I guess it was joy, but probably mixed with some other things. I’m not sure I can even analyze it—at least not as well as Ames could.
But I do know this: Paula loves me with that grace-like love, and that moves me. What’s more, God does too. And that’s worthy of an outburst of weeping laughter.
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