Collected Miscellany

The cover of next week’s BusinessWeek is on the business of Christian ministry. “Earthly Empires: How evangelical churches are borrowing from the business playbook” delves into megachurches and high-profile ministries, both sound and unsound. If you have not heard the message of Joel Osteen, pastor of America’s largest congregation Lakewood Church of Houston, TX, then let me offer my brief opinion: It isn’t the Gospel of Jesus Christ. (see “Who is Joel Osteen?”)

The magazine has several online parallels, one on the Christian media market. Left Behind, which was rejected by several publishers before Tyndale House accepted it, The Purpose-Driven Life and it’s precursor The Purpose-Driven Church, The Prayer of Jabez, and a number of other strong sellers in religious non-fiction have convinced corporations to wade or jump into the Christian publishing pool. Left Behind alone “brought in more than $650 million and helped establish Christian fiction as a huge market.” Now if only we could publish something truly worth reading.

Thomas Nelson has styled New Testaments as fashion magazines, spinning the timeless Scriptures as modern advice, and found the market they wanted. Now they have several versions of “Bible zines.” I shouldn’t complain when things like this are published for willing buyers. I probably should hope they do someone some good. But I’m not encouraged by a Christian retail industry which seems to pursue trinkets over gold, elementary Sunday School over seminary, local bluff view over Grand Canyon. I want to hope for the best, but this paragraph captures my impression of the majority of the industry.

“I write for the people who don’t like to read,” says inspirational author Max Lucado, who also pastors a megachurch [and] has sold more than 40 million books.

BusinessWeek reports that Christian books and music are now a good percentage of media sales in large discount stores, like Walmart and Target. That’s good for the publishers, but has led to the closing of almost 1000 Christian bookstores over the past few years.

Let me admit up front that I don’t like David Greenberg. Mr. “History Lesson” at Slate. I don’t like his snide condescending attitude. I don’t like the way he acts like he is some sort of arbitrator of accurate history in his columns when in fact he simply regurgitates the liberal party line and slams conservatives as evil, bigoted, cranks whenever he gets the chance. I don’t like the way his uses history as a weapon in the cultural/political battles (for the record I don’t like the way a lot of conservatives do the same thing).

So my bias is up front. Not surprisingly I was annoyed with Greenberg’s two part series on popular history (start here). But I didn’t feel up to talking about it. Let it go, Kevin I told myself. But I am emboldened to speak up because Ed at Return of the Reluctant has raised the issue. Those of you who read both blogs are surely aware that Ed and I do not see politics or culture the same way. Blue State/Red State, Left/Right, you name it we seem to be on different wavelengths. We both love books, however, and that is worth something. (Plus, Ed is funny and that goes a long way with me.)

Ed captures Greenberg well, however, and communicates many of the same doubts I had:

Greenberg’s assault is largely composed of ad hominen tactics and arguments without support. Without citing any specific examples (the stuff that one would expect from a professor), he has declared popular history “vapid mythmaking that uninformed critics ratify as ‘magisterial’ or ‘definitive.'” But if the alternative to popular historians along the lines of Stephen Ambrose or Will Durant is a populist reading public that is not concerned or curious about history, I have to wonder why popular history is such a bad thing . . .

Ed also accurately describes Greenberg’s tone:

One sizable problem with Greenberg’s argument is that it is laced with a strange contempt.

Ed has a different take on some of the more substantive issues of popular history so be sure to read the rest of his analysis but, as a former history grad student who loves popular history, allow me to throw my two cents in.

Continue reading →

The New Criterion announced their sixth annual poetry contest for “a book-length manuscript of poems that pay close attention to form.” The winner will receive $3000 and have the manuscript published by Ivan R. Dee. Submissions are due by September 30. More details here. Past winners are Geoffrey Brock, Deborah Warren, Charles Tomlinson, Adam Kirsch, and Donald Petersen. (Now, I am facing the temptation to buy one or more of the winning volumes from these poets.)

I have, as they say, a lot of balls in the air. Hence the lack of content of late. To assuage my guilt I offer a few interesting links:

– In the midst of a review of Stacy Schiff’s A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America Slate reviewer Rachel Cohen praises the author with this though provoking paragraph:

The avid reader of biographies has of late plunged into so many studies that begin, like certain realist novels, with the subject’s grandparents and their immigration, followed inevitably by chapters on “initial obstacles” and “first successes,” and then by wearying passages on “maturity” and “flaws,” that Schiff’s choice to present her biography not as if it were a novel, but with a sense of theater, comes as a welcome change. Schiff has thought through the form carefully and creatively, deciding on a version of the Aristotelian dramatic principle that there should be a unity of time and place in the unfolding of her story. The setting, then, is Paris in the years between 1776 and 1785, and each chapter of the book traces a year or 18 months of that period.

Are biographies too much like realist novels and not enough like theater?

– Thought provoking article on Biblical literacy by David Gelernter in the Weekly Standard. He raises a couple of issues: 1) What do students know about the Bible, 2) what impact does that have? and 3) what can we do about it? Along the way he raises some “tricky questions.” Here is a taste:

Evidently young Americans don’t know much about the Bible (or anything else, come to think of it; that’s another story). But let’s not kid ourselves–this problem will be hard to attack. It’s clear that any public school that teaches about America must teach about the Bible, from outside. But teaching the Bible from inside (reading Scripture, not just about Scripture) is trickier. You don’t have to believe in the mythical “wall of separation” between church and state–which the Bill of Rights never mentions and had no intention of erecting–to understand that Americans don’t want their public schools teaching Christianity or Judaism.

But can you teach the Bible as mere “literature” without flattening and misrepresenting it? How will you address the differences (which go right down to the ground) between Jews and Christians respecting the Bible? (The question is not so much how to spare Jewish sensibilities–minorities have rights, but so do majorities; the question is how to tell the truth.) What kind of parents leave their children’s Bible education to the public schools, anyway? How do we go beyond public schools in attacking a nationwide problem of Bible illiteracy?

– Christopher Orlet discusses a problem with urban libraries in the American Spectator. After describing the St. Louis’ Public Library (designed in 1912 by Cass Gilbert, architect of the U.S. Supreme Court Building and New York’s celebrated Woolworth Building) and its problems with men from a nearby homeless shelter, Orlet argues that the crisis is national:

AMERICA’S URBAN biblioteques long ago lost their cachet as havens for scholarly research. Once “the delivery room for the birth of ideas — a place where history comes to life,” they are now little more than a place to flop, surf the Net, or a source of free rock CDs and DVDs one can take home and copy. Once cultural Meccas, urban libraries are now more akin to homeless shelters, lunatic asylums, and public baths. The problem is not unique to St. Louis. Libraries across the country are experiencing similar troubles.

Food for thought . . .

Well, the day has finally come. The Lit Blog Co-Op “Read This” selection has been announced and it is Case Histories by Kate Atkinson. Here is Lizzie Skurnick Atkinson:

It seems impossible to believe that Kate Atkinson’s sentences ever had an awkward stage. Each paragraph, each page, each chapter unfolds with perfect precision, the prose and pacing fully shaped. There’s nothing flowery about the words, but no stripped-down drama either. Atkinson’s a pro – a juicy pro.

The reader can also luxuriate happily in the plot. Now that I know her work, I’d be happy to read Atkinson ruminating on the benefits of fertilizer brands, but there’s a distinct pleasure in watching someone handle what is essentially a stock murder mystery with expert literary precision. In short, while the plot could still hold up in the hands of a lesser author, and Atkinson’s voice could carry a bloated text that went nowhere, thankfully, there’s no need to choose.

So run out and pick up a copy as I am sure it will be the talk of the lit blogosphere. (And yes, being the GOP capitalist tool that I am, I put up an Amazon link and I do get a tiny cut of the sale)

Dale Peck has an interesting review/essay on Star Wars in the Observer. I particularly liked this quote:

People who do stupid things and fail are called fools; people who do stupid things and succeed are called visionaries; the people who buy into this stupid binary are called consumers. But consumers exact their revenge. They torture their celebrities mercilessly: stalk them with paparazzi, dissect their every move and speculate wildly about their motives, force them to diet and suture themselves, encourage their excesses, fan their idiosyncrasies and insecurities into outright perversion, and, most of all, glut in their fall. We live in a discriminatory era whose prejudices are cruel but whose love is even crueler. Witness Howard Hughes; witness Princess Diana; witness Michael Jackson. We prefer these more flamboyant or grotesque examples of egomania and destruction to the more straightforward banality of greed—which, when you get right down to it, is the only real explanation for the making of all six of the Star Wars movies, and the success of the last five.