Posts filed under 'Books'
The title of Julia Scheeres’s memoir comes from a series of signs that she and her adopted brother David encounter soon after moving to rural Indiana: “Sinners go to: HELL. Rightchuss go to: HEAVEN. The end is neer: REPENT. This here is: JESUS LAND.”
I’m sure that religious signs with such egregious misspellings do exist—and I’m pretty sure I’ve seen some of them. I just wish that Scheeres hadn’t chosen to represent the sign-maker this way, as it reinforces our assumptions that Christian fundamentalists are ignorant. And, in Scheeres’s book as a whole, the Christians who commit the most horrific acts of prejudice and abuse are not those who would misspell words. They’re educated—they just read the Bible in the most selectively literal way, a way that justifies their twisted actions.
Jesus Land is a heart-wrenching book. It’s also a moving tale of love, particularly the bond between the young Julia and her adopted African American brother David. Where these two learned how to love is difficult to figure out, since their mother is extremely cold and distant, and their father is abusive. The family attends a Christian Reformed (Calvinist) church, and the congregation sees them as ideal Christians, unaware of the seamy underside of their home life. (Scheeres also tells us that her parents’ behavior worsened after her eldest siblings left home, but it’s not really clear what triggered this change—I wish we had a fuller portrait here, but the book does have to limit its focus.)
After the family moves to the country from slightly-less-rural Lafayette, Indiana, the prejudice directed against David at the local high school becomes almost unbearable. After he attempts to slit his wrists, the Scheeres parents send him to a “Christian” reform school in the Dominican Republic. After it is discovered that Julia has been experimenting with sex and alcohol, she is given the option of going to join him. Feeling that he is her only true family, she does.
(And I should mention here that one of the most intriguing things about the book is its portrayal of Midwestern “family values” people—the Scheeres parents—who really don’t care about family. After David leaves, Julia watches her mother clean his basement room with Lysol, erasing every trace of his existence from their home. Uf. It’s an incredibly painful scene. See what I mean about Julia’s and David’s strong love for each other emerging ex nihilo? Out of nothing, the two children create their own little family, and Scheeres implies that, in the end, family is all that matters.)
David’s letters home have given no indication of the horrible conditions, including psychological and physical abuse, at the school. Escuela Caribe’s staff tries to instill “godly respect for elders” into the teens by humiliating and otherwise maltreating them. David and Julia survive only by holding on to each other and to the dream of an independent life in Florida after they turn 18.
Jesus Land is at its best when depicting the deep bond between the siblings. Perhaps because Scheeres envisioned this book as telling David’s story (necessarily through her perspective), she never seems to whine when describing her own abuse at home or school. Her own treatment is almost unimaginably evil, but the book describes her growing realization that David receives even worse, simply because he is black.
The book in itself is strong, well contained within the perspective of a sixteen- and seventeen-year-old girl, but reading statements from the adult Scheeres makes her seem more simplistic. For example, in the book’s epilogue, she claims that her time at Escuela Caribe taught her “to believe in people over dogmas.” But she was abused by people—dogmatic people, sure, but people nonetheless. I would suggest that there was something hurting or broken in those people that led them to embrace dogma. It was something about who they were that caused their dogmatism—it’s just not that easy to separate people and dogma. And there are all sorts of dogmas other than religious ones, too.
I say this not to detract from the true pain of Scheeres’s experience or to deny that the fundamentalists’ behavior had roots in (a misinterpretation of) religious faith. Christians need to read stories like these, so that we can understand the lives of those who have been abused by those who also claim to follow Christ and to have deep compassion for them. It also keeps us humble, knowing the many ways in which Christians have perverted the gospel. More than anything, Jesus Land stirs me to pray for the many Christian hypocrites and Christian hypocrites’ victims out there—and to pray that my own hypocritical ways (less extreme, definitely, but still there, since I do happen to be human) will be transformed.
November 13th, 2006
When I heard this morning that Muhammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank, had won the Nobel Peace Prize, I dropped my spoon into my cereal bowl and started dancing around the kitchen in glee. It’s so exciting when someone whose work you’ve been following for ten years actually gets honored for it, especially when that work has helped so many thousands of women living in poverty. Plus, I admit that I have an element of personal satisfaction in Yunus’s receipt of the award: when I was in high school economics class, our teacher required us to read about and report on some famous economist (like, you know, Adam Smith or John Maynard Keynes). I didn’t want to. Instead, I went to Borders, browsed the shelves, and selected a book about Muhammad Yunus. I think Mr. W thought I was insane for reporting on somebody who actually helped the poor. Ha! In your face, Mr. W! (A very “peaceful” attitude on my part, I know.)
Also, I’m really excited about Orhan Pamuk winning the Nobel Prize in Literature, because I just started reading his novel My Name Is Red on the way back from my trip to Turkey and Egypt. K had recommended the novel, which is about the meeting, involving both mixing and clash, between Eastern and Western artistic styles during the Ottoman Period. I’m only about two-thirds of the way through, so I can’t yet make a definite declaration of whether I like the novel or not, but I do find the themes interesting. The Washington Post’s article on Pamuk describes his work as evoking “modern Turkey’s complex blending of westernized culture and Ottoman tradition. It is a mix, Pamuk said, that puts the lie to the simplistic notion of a ‘clash of civilizations’ between Islam and the West.”
It’s so gratifying when Nobel Prizes go to people you’ve actually heard of.
October 13th, 2006
Inspired by a similar idea on the Think Christian blog, I decided to add to Christianity Today’s “Top 50″ list by naming the books that have been most influential for me. The following are listed not necessarily in order of importance, but in chronological order of when I read them. Of course, those early books do tend to be quite formative–especially when they’re such good stories!
1. Madeleine L’Engle’s “Time Trilogy” (A Wrinkle in Time, A Wind in the Door, and A Swiftly Tilting Planet)
I can think of no better introduction to the unfathomable aspects of a personal God than L’Engle’s books, which so skillfully combine scientific wonder with imaginative mythology with very concrete love between family members. My dad first read her books to me when I was five and six years old, and some of the images still spring to mind today.
2. J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings
A quest where the hero sets out to lose something? A sense that we’re all part of a grand story, even if we can’t fully understand our part in it? Grace acting through apparently irredeemable characters to save us from ourselves? Even a six- and seven-year-old can sense the depth here.
3. C.S. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia
It’s probably cheating to count them as one book. If I had to pick two out of the seven, they would be The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (Eustace’s de-dragoning, Lucy reading the book in the magician’s house—and Dufflepuds!) and The Last Battle (to this day, Emeth is the best answer I can think of when people ask whether non-Christians go to heaven).
4. C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce
Why is it that Lewis is the only writer I’ve ever read who makes heaven seem appealing? The Great Divorce is like the best points from Mere Christianity and The Four Loves all rolled up into vivid characters.
5. Kathleen Norris, The Cloister Walk
I started reading Norris because she reminded me of my mom—both were former military brats who reclaimed their Christian faith in their twenties and subsequently spent a lot of time hanging out with monks. As a poet, Norris continually provides fresh images for a spirituality rooted in ancient church tradition.
6. The Venerable Bede, The Life and Miracles of Cuthbert, Bishop of Lindisfarne
After Cuthbert has spent the night in the sea praying, two otters come up and dry his feet. He blesses them. Need I say more? This short work launched my obsession with Celtic Christianity and with early hagiography.
7. Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Complete Poems
This guy definitely got Incarnation. And sprung rhythm.
8. Esther de Waal, Living with Contradiction: An Introduction to Benedictine Spirituality
Yay, paradox. There’s nothing more helpful to living in Christ.
9. Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy
Willard emphasizes how the scriptures are not merely prescriptive, but also descriptive of life in the kingdom of heaven. This helped me to stop whacking myself over the head for not having followed all the prescriptions yet.
10. Flannery O’Connor, The Habit of Being (a collection of her letters)
O’Connor reassures me that it’s okay to be a cranky Christian. Plus, she doesn’t romanticize faith. Not one bit. And she’s really funny.
I’d love to hear your own top ten lists–send them in!
October 10th, 2006
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
Okay, you know how I said in my last posts that Esther de Waal quotes tend to crystallize whatever I’m thinking, writing, and talking about? I found yet more connections to her “margins” quote when reading Victor and Edith Turner’s 1978 classic Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture.
The Turners discuss how, in the later Middle Ages, the Church began to centralize control over pilgrimages, even making pilgrimages to Rome obligatory for archbishops and diocesan bishops. As the Turners describe it, “Structure, not communitas, is made central to this pilgrimage obligation.” However, they note, “one result of structuring the center is that communitas breaks out, like solar coronas, all over the peripheries, in spontaneously engendered pilgrimages, crackling with charisms [manifestations of grace].”
That not only makes me think of the de Waal quote, but of Browncoats vs. the Alliance in “Firefly”/Serenity as well–there’s certainly a strong sense of communitas on board Serenity.
August 17th, 2006
Esther de Waal, Anglican Celtophile and lay Benedictine, is one of those very few spiritual writers in whose books I continually find images or quotes that shift my view slightly, or sometimes encapsulate what I’ve always felt but have never put words to. Her small book Living with Contradiction: An Introduction to Benedictine Spirituality is a fascinating meditation on paradox, on living tensions rather than trying to resolve them. It’s so cool that I even snuck it into some of my non-blog writing.
I’m just now reading de Waal’s more recent book Lost in Wonder: Rediscovering the Spiritual Art of Attentiveness. Though I’m not yet very far into it, I’ve already found one of those quotes that seems to relate to everything I’m thinking and talking about right now. Here ’tis:
“An American lay woman who is fortunate enough to be associated with a Cistercian abbey, describes her experience of the institutional Church as that of finding ‘no room at the inn.’ But she tells us that when there is no room in the traditional structures, ‘God with us’ becomes a reality in the stable, on the margins.”
I won’t comment on that much, because I know that many of you, like I, often feel there’s no room at the inn for people who aren’t interested in busy-busy “churchy” stuff. A lot of us keep going to church anyway, because Jesus can still be there even if we can’t stand the other people who worship him. But we find our real spiritual nourishment and community on the margins. Anyway, I knew many of us shared this experience, but I hadn’t thought of it in spatial terms of “inn” and “stable.”
It’s also kind of neat that the Cistercian abbey–what many people might think of as a “traditional structure”–is a “margin” for this laywoman. It’s nice to be reminded that margins can be opened up anywhere, that stables can exist inside inns. And, as those of you who’ve read The Last Battle know, stables can contain the whole world.
August 16th, 2006
Last night I drove to Irish dance practice, listening to NPR as usual. And lo, as I was seconds away from my destination, they began a story about a medieval Psalter just recently discovered in an Irish peat bog (see the same story as reported in the Washington Post). What could I do but intentionally drive past my turn and meander around side-streets until the story was over?
In case you don’t already know, I’m a nut for the medieval history of Ireland and the British Isles, particularly for hagiography (stories about saints’ lives). Kind of a weird obsession, I know. It began, naturally, when I discovered stories about saints and otters.
The best otter tale is that of the seventh-century St. Cuthbert of Lindisfarne: for that one, I refer you to the Venerable Bede.
But there’s actually a saint-and-otter story that directly relates to Psalters and bodies of water. Celtic Christian monks often prayed standing in cold water, to keep themselves awake. One day St. Kevin (“Coemgen” in the inscrutable Gaelic spelling) was praying in a lake at Glendalough when he accidentally dropped his psalter into the water, and the book “sank some distance in it; and the angel came to help him. Thereupon an otter came bringing him his book in its mouth.”
Hurrah! I love it that the angel uses an otter to help Kevin out. Smart angel.
Anyway, whatever careless 9th- or 10th-century monk dropped his book in a peat bog clearly didn’t have any otters around (as far as I know, otters don’t hang out in peat bogs).
I’m disappointed that the news articles about this amazing find don’t mention other great archeological finds from Irish peat bogs, such as the victim of the “triple death.” The so-called Lindow Man, found in an Irish bog, gave proof to the theory that, for the ancient Celts, sometimes killing a person once wasn’t enough. Instead, he had to have his head clubbed, his throat slit, and be drowned. Sometimes I consider reviving the good old triple death tradition for people who particularly irritate me.
Anyway, the other important thing many articles fail to mention (but which the NPR report included!) is that the Psalm legible in this 20-page Psalter is Psalm 84 in the old Vulgate numbering. All Protestant and most current Catholic translations use the Hebrew numbering system, and thus this will probably appear in your Bibles as Psalm 83. A shame, in a way, because Psalm 84 is a much “nicer” Psalm. Psalm 83 is all about vengeance against God’s enemies. It does make me wonder why this particular Psalm was so important that it appeared in its own book (since books were still so costly, many monks simply memorized the Psalms). Perhaps our Irish monks were afraid of the Vikings, who began to attack monasteries during this time?
July 27th, 2006
This week one of our Netflix selections was the DVD of bonus material for The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Given our obsession with adopting Georgie Henley (no luck there yet), we most enjoyed a short documentary focusing on the children playing Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy.
Director Andrew Adamson had good taste: he said he knew, as soon as he saw Georgie’s audition tape, that she would be Lucy. Why, then, did she and the three other children (not to mention their unsuccessful competitors) have to spend a year and a half in the audition process before casting decisions were made? I mean, sure, you want to make sure that you’re not getting obnoxious little child actors, but a year and a half? That’s torture for any child. They could have spent that time getting a head start on Prince Caspian, which is due to be released an eternity from now. Georgie may be a teenager before they get to my favorite book, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Speaking of casting children for adaptations of fantasy books, many of you have probably already heard that the movie of Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass will star a little girl named Dakota. Not Fanning. Her full name is Dakota Blue Richards, and there are no images of her available on the Internet.
The more interesting Golden Compass news is that Nicole Kidman may be joining the cast as Mrs. Coulter (ah, but will her golden lion tamarin be as charming as a certain undead monkey?). Several sources say this rumor is “confirmed,” but IMDB still lists her connection as “rumored.” The same goes for Paul Bettany, who may or may not be playing Lord Asriel. Anyway, I thought Jillian and Dormouse would be very happy about these rumors.
I’m really enjoying the fact that I can talk about Lewis-based and Pullman-based movies in the same post. Because, as you may know, Pullman hates Lewis. His famous 1998 essay “The Dark Side of C.S. Lewis” critiques Lewis for filling The Chronicles of Narnia with Christian didacticism . . . and yet The Amber Spyglass, the third installment of Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, is one of the most didactic bits of twentieth-century fiction I’ve ever read. It just happens to be atheist (or perhaps satanic, in the technical sense, would be more accurate) didacticism. The characters kill God because he’s a Fascist. Pullman says that it’s a cheap trick for Lewis to “kill off” his characters in The Last Battle and assert that they’re all right because they’ve gone to heaven, yet Pullman kills his characters off and then asserts that they’re all right because they’ve disintegrated into happy little dust particles.
I could go on and on about how silly Pullman’s critique of Lewis is, but instead I’ll refer you to Alan Jacobs’ Lewis biography The Narnian. Jacobs is also very familiar with Pullman, and, like me, he was intrigued with The Golden Compass because of its vivid alternate-world creation. (Porpoise and I were reading the Pullman books at approximately the same time that Jacobs was, so we were able to trade reactions as our disappointment grew with The Subtle Knife and finally The Amber Spyglass.) If you don’t have time to check out The Narnian, take a look at Michael Nelson’s article from The Chronicle Review.
On a completely different note, but one still related to my original topic of casting rumors, a movie adaptation of Philippa Gregory’s The Other Boleyn Girl (which I know nothing about, except what I’ve read on Amazon) is set to star Eric Bana as Henry VIII, Natalie Portman as Anne Boleyn, and (possibly) Scarlett Johansson as Mary Boleyn. Wow—that’s a lot of pretty people in one movie. Eric Bana as Henry VIII? Kind of hard to picture. Not much rotundity there. Also, since Bana is 6’3”, Portman is 5’3”, and Johansson is 5’4”, I’m imagining that a lot of scenes featuring between either of the sisters and their love are going to have to be carefully angled to make up for a foot of height difference. Heels can only do so much. But, hey, hurrah for casting petite people!
July 22nd, 2006
So many of you already know that I’m the only child raised in the 1980s who didn’t see Star Wars. Any of them. And you know that the reason I didn’t see Star Wars was that my parents thought it was New Age-y and anti-communist. (Not that they forbade me from seeing it or anything—they just made it sound uninteresting. Which it is.) I cannot count the number of people who have informed me that Lucas did not intend the “Evil Empire” to refer to the USSR, but rather to Nazi Germany or even the imperialist US (I buy that argument for Revenge of the Sith, but not necessarily for the early ones). Blah blah.
But here’s Adam Roberts of The Valve (yes, that’s right—he of the “Taking the Hobbits to Isengard” analysis) agreeing with my instinct that the Jedi are not only annoying but also fascist! Hurrah! I am vindicated! Adam Roberts is fast becoming one of my favorite people. (You do have to scroll down to the paragraph after the extended Suzy Rice quote to get to the most interesting bit–the rest is about the font choice for the logo.)
Of course, the difficulty is that you could critique many world religions-as-practiced for being fascist in the same sense that the Jedi are. Extra emphasis on the as practiced, though. Ideally, Christianity not only participates in the messiness of incarnate life but also does not seek to control others through state means (if you’re up for a dense and difficult read, check out John Howard Yoder’s The Politics of Jesus, which elaborates on this latter principle—it’s brilliant and inspiring, if you’re willing to wade through all the references to various German theologians). Ideally. However, the messiness of incarnate human life also means that people, being people, mess things up.
June 22nd, 2006
I have met with strangeness this morning. And I hope it’s not because I just woke up that I find it hilarious.
First, check out this YouTube dance mix of notorious lines from The Lord of the Rings movies.
Then, you have no option but to read the metrical analysis of this little ditty posted on The Valve, a site devoted to literary criticsm.
Oh my. I think I may need a while to recover my breath.
Spon-DEE! (That’s irony.)
June 18th, 2006
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