I love “Top 50” or “100 Most [Insert Adjective Here]” lists. It’s fun to look at them and say, “Ulysses? The best novel of the 20th century? Really?” or “I can’t believe they left Benny and Joon off the list of 100 Top Films Featuring Dancing Hot Dog Buns!” In other words, they’re inherently going to cause disagreement.
So it’s no surprise that Christianity Today’s “Top 50 Books” list (which only includes books published since World War II) seems to be an odd conglomeration featuring books from all over the evangelical spectrum. Of course, my first question when I look at the list is: Which evangelicals are we looking at to determine these books’ influence? Are we measuring influence by sheer quantity of people who have read these books or by the relative power within evangelicalism of the individuals who have read these books? Looking at the list, the answer seems to be a little bit of both.
For example, I doubt that, as crucially important as it is, many typical evangelical congregants—or leaders, for that matter—have read Philip Jenkins’s The Next Christendom. Granted, it’s a pretty recent book, but I don’t get the impression that many American evangelicals are aware that the Global South is currently the hotbed of fervent, evangelistic Christianity—or if they are aware, it’s from their personal experience and not from reading Jenkins’s book.
Similarly, though I wish it were the case, I doubt that Ron Sider’s Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger has that much clout among the majority of evangelicals. It’s popular enough that it got republished in a special 25th anniversary edition a few years back. But if more American evangelicals had read Sider’s prescient vision of the current global political situation, I doubt we’d be in the mess we’re in today. However, when I look at the names of people who made suggestions for the “Top 50” list and see the “evangelical social justice” triumvirate of Tony Campolo, Jim Wallis, and Sider himself among them, Rich Christians’ inclusion isn’t that surprising.
Similarly, I’m puzzled by the inclusion of Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, since evangelicals have been even more suspicious of it than they have of most Christian-authored fantasy. It seems like Lewis’s The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe would be a more representative choice (though, even there, I had a couple of childhood friends whose mothers wouldn’t let them read The Chronicles of Narnia because they were “Satanic” books—they had witches and magic in them, after all).
Sigh. My cynicism about evangelical subculture really shows through when some of my favorite books on the list are the ones that I doubt the popularity of. Just to be fair, I’ll say that I also really like Dallas Willard’s The Divine Conspiracy, Richard Foster’s Celebration of Discipline, and C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, and I don’t question that they’ve been truly influential among evangelicals.
My biggest complaint about the list? It’s really white. What about the books that have been influential among African American evangelicals—the books of T.D. Jakes, for example?
In general, though, since I haven’t been alive for all of the past 60 years, I’m probably not the best judge of what should and shouldn’t be on the list.
October 9th, 2006
Amazingly, just after I posted about watching LolliLove, in which a clueless rich couple forms an organization to give out lollipops to the homeless, I myself had a lollipop encounter in the accessories department at Macy’s. Dormouse and I were standing there looking at scarves when a woman came up to us and asked, “Excuse me, would you like a lollipop?” I almost died. It turned out it was part of a Clinique promotion, which seems odd, but at least it’s not posing as charity.
Now for the distressing news: Entertainment Weekly and TiVo have both failed me. EW claimed that last Friday’s “Doctor Who” was the season premiere, but it turned out that the premiere had aired the previous Friday, along with a two-hour between-the-seasons special. That’s three whole hours of David Tennant that I missed! To compound my angst, our TiVo for some reason claimed to be recording “Doctor Who” last Friday, while it was actually recording “Battlestar Galactica.” I accused Porpoise of deliberately trying to sabotage my DT obsession, but he claims innocence, so I guess we’ll have to blame the TiVo. Still, I checked to make sure it was properly set up to record the first installment of Casanova last night.
I suppose I should wait until I’ve seen the second half of Casanova before commenting on it, but I have a few things I’d better say while I’m thinking about them. First of all, I forgot that another Casanova came out last fall: a big-screen film starring Heath Ledger and Sienna Miller. Don’t know anything about that movie. I suppose I should Netflix it for comparison’s sake, but it doesn’t look that interesting. I admit I’m biased, but I don’t see how Heath Ledger can be as interesting a Casanova as David Tennant. Ledger is good-looking in a more traditional (i.e., hulking, oafish) way and therefore rather boring. Casting someone with Tennant’s quirky good looks means that the actor has to suggest that there’s some appeal to Casanova other than merely the physical.
This appeal, in the BBC Casanova’s case, is his outrageousness and cheekiness, not to mention his undying ardor for the one woman he can’t have (though of course that doesn’t stop him from sleeping with lots of other women). Casanova screenwriter Russell T. Davies (the Welshman also behind many of the recent “Doctor Who” scripts) wanted to make Casanova a more sympathetic figure than he’s often been. Says Davies, “When I sat down to read Casanova’s autobiography – all 12 volumes of it! – I discovered that our modern-day impression of a lascivious, misogynist man is hopelessly wrong. . . . This man genuinely loved women, and respected them with an astonishingly modern mentality. I also discovered that, outside his love life, Casanova was a wonderful, barmy, inventive man. And what a fraud! Like an 18th century Jeffrey Archer, but funny. He wasn’t born an aristocrat, he lied his way into jobs and positions of power with charm and cheek. He’s just irresistible.”
The style of this Casanova is also rather barmy and inventive. Porpoise commented as we watched that it almost felt like an episode of “Doctor Who” (and this was before we looked up Russell T. Davies on IMDB to find out why his name sounded so familiar). It has electronic music here and there, a fast, almost goofy pace, a mix of humor and occasional pathos, and intentional anachronistic flourishes. In fact, the latter made me think of Sofia Coppola’s upcoming Marie Antoinette film, much of which is set to 80’s music.
Anyway, Casanova is certainly more risqué than most Masterpiece Theatre miniseries, though I suspect it’s been toned down a bit from the BBC original. Still, I would advise parental discretion (meaning: parents, you probably don’t want to see this). It has its merits, though, especially in the portrayal of Casanova and his lady-love Henriette as two low-born posers scrambling to get by any way they can in class-conscious eighteenth-century Venice.
October 9th, 2006