Collected Miscellany

Here is another interesting link Why Aren’t We Serious? by J. Mark Bertrand. Bertrand examines the question of why Christian fiction hasn’t seemed to produce the serious work that many of its practitioners and readers want (or claim to want). As usual, you should read the whole thing, but for those of you who are too busy, and to tempt you to read the rest, here is the conclusion:

Why don’t I write serious fiction? Because it’s hard. Because I’m afraid that I won’t be able to do it, or that if I manage, I won’t be rewarded. Why don’t I give up on writing serious fiction? Because I love it too much, because even in my unseriousness there are sometimes intimations of more. Because I want to do justice to this great legacy I’ve inherited, to the perceptions I’ve been gifted with. Because I want to speak to people I write for, and to speak for them, too. I want to express in words the depth I find in myself, and discover that I’ve said something that is true of us all. Not to manage this, I fear, is to fall short of the calling. Not to care is even worse.

Fascinating book review/essay over at Books & Culture by Susan Wise Bauer. She is reviewing Inspiration And Incarnation: Evangelicals And The Problem Of The Old Testament by Peter Enns and in doing so notes a number of interesting and uncomfortable questions, raised by Enns, that I couldn’t possibly summarize. So please read the whole thing. But I wanted to quote a part of her conclusion because I think it is a powerful statement:

Well, of course it is going to be troublesome, and Enns, who knows the evangelical community well, is perfectly aware of it. But Inspiration and Incarnation makes clear that Scripture, like the Incarnation itself, is a scandal: like Christ crucified, a stumbling block to the wise. It takes ancient and unreal images, like the lion and the lamb together, and demands that we look back on them with faith in the resurrection of Christ. It claims, against all common sense, that this faith will transform the dead pictures into a living hope. It is loaded with problems and imperfections. And it is the Word of God, which means that we must engage in as much prayer as study of Hebrew vocabulary, as much faith as reading up on the history of the ancient world, as much charity (something remarkably lacking in most of the debates over how to read Scripture) as Greek grammar. It means that when an evangelical scholar like Enns—teaching in an evangelical seminary, a faithful member of his local church—writes, “There do not seem to be any clear rules or guidelines to prevent us from taking [the process of interpreting Scripture] too far,” we must recognize this as an honest and truthful statement of the difficulties rather than an open door to chaos. It means, in the end, that we must take incarnation seriously.

As I said, read the whole thing. It is most certainly food for thought.

I received another one of those weird Amazon emails. The computers over there are off again. Here is the latest odd match:

We’ve noticed that customers who have purchased The Cold War : A New History by John Lewis Gaddis also purchased books by Joseph Volpe. For this reason, you might like to know that Joseph Volpe’s The Toughest Show on Earth : My Rise and Reign at the Metropolitan Opera will be released on May 2, 2006.

Could someone please explain what a historiogrphical study by one of the pre-eminent Cold War historians has to do with the Metropolitan Opera? Wouldn’t those snooty rich liberals (at least stereotypically) at the Met disdain this kind of conservative cold warrior stuff? Or perhaps they are rich snooty Republicans who were Reagan supporters. . . .

In case anyone is wondering, yes I still read fiction and will be reviewing plenty of it here in the days and weeks to come. This week has had a rather somber focus, what with books on death and war and whatnot. I thought it might be good to bring fiction back into the picture.

I am currently reading A Short History of a Small Place in anticipation of reading the recently released sequel Glad News of the Natural World . I have found it to be a delightful read so far and have read a number of passages out loud to my wife. I thought I would share a passage with you as well. In describing the latest work, Publishers Weekly says “the novel rambles gracefully.” This seems an apt description. And, as long as you are in the mood for it, isn’t a particularly harsh criticism to my mind.

The section quoted below describes how the narrator, Louis Benfield, comes to know it is winter. It struck me as true and poetic.

So once a year in November I wake up on a Saturday with the sort of felling that must come over birds just before they migrate, and I get straight out of bed into my playclothes and put on my carcoat and my work gloves and my green corduroy hat with the earflaps and I fetch the rake out of our cellar and set out for the bottom of the back lot, where I am condemned to thrash at the mock orange bushes for the balance of the day. And that is when it usually happens, not while I’m still trying to extract from the mock oranges everything that has blown or fallen into them in the course of the year, but after I have left off from the struggle for a spell and have sat down on the grass where I pluck at the rakehead to make the tines sing, and I listen to the sound of the sprung metal dying away sometimes mixed with the cry of a hound or the low, indecipherable noise of a voice on the air, and suddenly I am aware of the sort of chill I haven’t known in a year and I notice that the sky is very high and tufted and the color of ash in a grate, which is the color of my breath, which is the color of the afternoon, which is the color of the season; and I know it isn’t autumn anymore.

Ramesh Ponnuru is a senior editor at National Review and the author of The Party of Death recently published by Regnery. He is a graduate of Princeton University and has covered politics for more than a decade. In addition to his work with National Review, he has written for the Wall Street Journal, Newsday, the Washington Times, the Weekly Standard, and Financial Times.

With the recent publication of his book and the debate that is sure to spring up around it, Ramesh was kind enough to agree to answer some questions vial email. What follows is the result. My questions in bold, Ramesh’s answers below.

You claim in the book that: “Everything you think you know about Roe is a lie.” What do you mean by that?

Most people believe that Roe v. Wade was a more limited decision than it was: They don’t realize that it created a right to abortion at any stage of pregnancy for any reason, which is more extreme than any other developed country’s abortion policy. Many people mistakenly believe that overturning Roe would amount to criminalizing abortion nationwide. Most people are under the impression that the country was headed toward liberal abortion laws even before Roe. That’s not true either. Finally, they think that women were dying in large numbers from illegal abortions before Roe. Again, that’s false. Even after 33 years, there are a lot of myths about Roe that haven’t really been challenged—myths that the media continue to spread. Even many pro-lifers believe some of the things I just mentioned.

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Even before Ramesh Ponnuru’s new book, The Party of Death: The Democrats, the Media, the Courts, and the Disregard for Human Life, came out it was being attacked. As is sadly all too common these days, “reviewers” at Amazon and bloggers began to complain that the book’s title was inflammatory, hypocritical, etc. They sought to discredit the author and dismiss the book.

As a result of this – and to be fair certain of the book’s marketing material – some will be tempted to dismiss this book as another hyper-partisan attack; as just another book of GOP talking points cranked out by a pundit. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Party of Death is tightly argued, meticulously researched, and remarkably rant free. It might very well be the definitive book on “life issues” for years to come.

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