Now that everything seems to be up and running on here and the blog is doing well, I’ve decided to incorporate a few daily traditions on here. They’re certainly nothing serious nor are they set in stone, most likely life will get in the waand they may be delayed a few days but the proposed ideas are as follows-
Mailbox Monday which was created by ‘The Printed Page’. If you wish to join in you can do so at http://printedpage.us/category/mailbox-monday/ Mailbox Monday is an alliterative day in which readers share with others what has arrived in the house in the past week- this can be library books, book to be reviewed or books bought. We share the most exciting ones and give a quick review of them. I think it will be great fun and lead to us all buying far too many books.
Tuesday’s Choosings will look at ‘Five of the best… ‘with a different theme each week. This coming week I shall be looking at Five of the best fairy tale anthologies (I’m just so predictable).
The Wednesday of Whimsy is exactly what it sounds like, the day in which I review a book which doesn’t really have a category. A purely fun, whimsical, absurd crazy book which deserves the honour of being reviewed purely for its imaginative scope. This review will start today so keep your eyes peeled, I’ve got a great one to start with.
The Book Blogger Hop founded by the lovely Jennifer over at Crazy For Books http://www.crazy-for-books.com/ It is a weekly event starting every Friday where you sign yourself up via her blog as a way of promotion your book blog and finding new ones. It gives great support and new opportunities to fellow bloggers.
You want to do hard things.
But you don’t know where to start.
You are changing the world around you.
But you are tired and burned out.
You feel called to do the extraordinary for God.
But you feel stuck in the ordinary.
Do Hard Things inspired thousands of young people around the world to make the most of the teen years. Now Alex and Brett Harris are back and ready to tackle the questions that Do Hard Things inspired: How do I get started? What do I do when I get discouraged? What’s the best way to inspire others? Filled with stories and insights from Alex, Brett, and other real-life rebelutionaries, Start Here is a powerful and practical guide to doing hard things, right where you are.
Are you ready to take the next step and blast past mediocrity for the glory of God?
START HERE.
This book was provided by Multnomah Press for review and can be purchased at: http://waterbrookmultnomah.com and many other Christian Retailers.
Darkness and light mingle in this equally chilling and hilarious novel
It’s a fact universally acknowledged that people called Hilary must be the best at everything. Especially if it’s spelled with one ‘L’. And true to form, Ms Mantel won the Booker Prize in October 2009 with Wolf Hall, a book I really want to read but it’s about the size of a large-print hardbacked Bible and costs a massive £20 in Waterstones. So I’m going to review Beyond Black instead which I found in a charity shop for £1.50. High five!
Primarily a ghost story, Hilary Mantel’s novel is also a book about women. The story revolves around women’s lives, the trials, tribulations, loss, indignities and marginalisation that lead them to seek answers in psychic fairs and tarot cards, and in the attentions of Alison, a psychic who passes on otherworldly messages to the hordes who come to see her in dingy pubs and community halls just off the M25.
She’s not a fake, crook or charlatan, but nevertheless she elides and obscures the truth because the true nature of the afterlife isn’t the happy, peaceful realm that people imagine. Yes, there are harmless old lady ghosts obsessed with missing buttons, and confused queues of spectral, doddery relatives. But there are also the fiends.
Her spirit guide is one of them, a lowly, grotesque and unhygienic spook named Morris who plagues Alison’s every moment. Her live-in ‘human’ guide isn’t much better, a ruthlessly efficient woman named Collete who is two-thirds bully, one-third matter-of-fact divorcee forging a new life as Alison’s live-in manager (“I’m not a lesbian”, she frequently asserts to Gavin, her ex).
Together they roam the South of England, which in Mantel’s novel is a wasteland: a withered landscape of oozing, polluted substances and toxic dumps, of traffic and service stations, truck stops and burger vans. A perfect home for the fiends, the ghosts of the evil men who took her childhood and haunt her now, wriggling out of the woodwork like the mutated white worms infesting her neighbour’s garden.
Aitkenside, Pikey Pete, Keith Capstick and the shadowy, dreaded Nick: dog fighters, abusers, criminals and murderers in life morphed into ungainly demons in death, almost cartoonish in their lowbrow wickedness- more horror-show gargoyle than otherworldly spook. They seem almost amusing at times, but the humour of their unghostly earthiness and appetites gradually pales as Al gradually remembers the details of her past.
Bleak? Yes, but Mantel lightens the mood by dwelling on the mundane details of life, of trips to buy sheds, the psychic fairs, hen parties and Al’s bland neighbours and their squalling children. And mirroring this is the blandness of death: the old lady looking for her friend- even the fiends’ desire for pies and racing. She layers light, deft touches of humour on even the harshest of Al’s recollections until the overall effect is one of deep and resonant contemplation. Beyond Black, indeed.
Theology and Culture: A Guide to the Discussion, D. Stephen Long (Eugene: Cascade Books, 2008). 114pp.
As the pastor of two local churches, I am constantly told that our church must be culturally relevant if weare to reach more people. Every week I get junk mail offering the latest workshop on connecting with ‘Gen-X’ or planting a church in a coffee house. It would appear that if the Gospel is to be proclaimed we must be tuned in to the latest cultural trend. But why all the push to be culturally relevant? Or perhaps a better question: what kind of assumptions are at work when we seek to relate the Christian faith and culture? And for that matter, why is that we invoke the word culture anyway? Isn’t theology complicated enough without tying it to the language of culture?
In this short work, Steve Long offers us a guide to understanding these questions and many more. Long is careful to name that the book is indeed a guide, seeking not so much to offer definitive answers as to lead us through the complexities of our modern preoccupation with culture. This preoccupation brings with it both promise and peril, which Long explores in the first lesson. The next several lessons work toward defining culture, its many uses in various disciplines, as well as its relationship to both nature and language. These are dense chapters as the material is complicated and doesn’t lend itself well to one or two page descriptions. Here we are forced to remember that Long offers not an in-depth explanation but rather ”A Guide to the Discussion’.
The second half of the book begins to focus in on specific theologians and their engagement with culture. Long leads the reader through a who’s who list including: Ernest Troeltsch, H. Richard Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, George Lindbeck, James McClendon, Katherine Tanner, Sara Coakley, and John Milbank among others. As the as the list indicates, this is certainly terrain that calls for a skilled guide. It is this second half of the book that really shines as Long helps the reader to see the development of ourpreoccupation with culture, as well as six contemporary approaches to engaging theology and culture.
In the end, Long’s guide shows that the relationship between theology and culture is a question of Christology. Every question of the relationship between theology and culture is a question of how we will relate Christ’s two natures: the human and the Divine. Following the example of the Christological definition set forth at Chalcedon, ultimately, these are questions which call for engagement and discernment, not airtight explanations. Steve Long’s ”Theology and Culture” is an essential guide to this discernment process.
So, here I am again, after two years, wrestling with the language problem. The last time was when I was preparing a talk for a Bahá’í Conference on the etiquette of expression.
Then, as now, the words of Robert Graves came to mind. For a poet he was surprisingly suspicious of language:
There’s a cool web of language winds us in,
Retreat from too much joy or too much fear:
We grow sea green at last and coldly die
In brininess and volubility.
But concluded that we couldn’t stay sane without it:
But if we let our tongues lose self-possession,
Throwing off language and its watery clasp
. . . . .
We shall go mad no doubt and die that way.
I looked at a system of psychotherapy (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: ACT), which draws on many traditions of psychology philosophy and spirituality, shares this same suspicion about language and seeks to undermine our simple confidence in it in various ways. For instance they point out that it can lead to such circular and irresolvable torments as:
This statement is false.
You have only to ponder that for a few seconds to realise there is no way out!
I found similar reservations in the Bahá’í Writings.
People for the most part delight in superstitions. They regard a single drop of the sea of delusion as preferable to an ocean of certitude. By holding fast unto names they deprive themselves of the inner reality and by clinging to vain imaginings they are kept back from the Dayspring of heavenly signs.
(Tablets of Bahá’u’lláh Haifa 1978: page 58)
Language is cast here in terms that summon up the idea of ‘veils’ as used in the sense of things that come between us and the truth.
Let not names shut you out as by a veil from Him Who is their Lord, even the name of Prophet, for such a name is but a creation of His utterance.
(Epistle to the Son of the Wolf: page 176)
Obviously names are not all there is to language. ACT uses language to cover all symbolic activity. They feel we are all too prone to mistake a metaphor, which is only a map after all, for the territory itself.
The way we get seduced by the deceptive certainty of our maps is an aspect of those problems in the political arena that I looked at in previous posts (one on party politics and the other on complexity and climate change). I hadn’t realised how deep the problem lies until a week ago when I began to read a certain book.
Its Roots in the Brain
The book was published late last year. It looks at this problem from another angle again and makes an impressive contribution to the debate. It is The Master and his Emissary by Ian McGilchrist. I am only just about a quarter of the way through but am already mightily impressed.
At this point I’ll give only a couple of examples to illustrate why. I’m sure I won’t be able to resist revisiting this book in later posts rather in the same way as I kept going back to The Evolution of God of Is God a Delusion?
In the second chapter of McGilchrist’s book there is a section on Certainty.
Before plunging in to the specifics here perhaps I need to explain that his book is about the way that the two hemispheres of the brain operate. His thesis is not the simplistic left-brain equals language and sequential processes and is the foundation of all our achievements in science while the right-brain deals with holistic arty stuff of little real value. He is not happy with the way our science-based civilisation deifies the left-brain mode but neither is he going to sign up to the opposite camp that wants to glorifies the stereotype of the right hemisphere as the intuitive and organic guru, the one to follow. He is keen not to quarantine the left-hemisphere in the Hades occupied by tyrants when they’re overthrown.
He digs much deeper. He accepts that there is something contradictory about the way the two hemispheres of the brain work. He argues that the price of the relative suppression of the right in favour of the left has not been properly understood because we have disparaged the necessary and considerable abilities of the right hemisphere. However, we should be seeking to re-establish the right balance between them not reinforcing some kind of competition. If either hemisphere wins the race outright it will be no better than if we hopped around for the rest of our lives using only one leg.
So, back to his thought about certainty.
The left hemisphere likes things that are man-made. Things we make are also more certain . . . . They are not, like living things, constantly changing and moving, beyond our grasp.
(page 79)
Language, he argues, is a tool of the left-hemisphere in its battle to control and manipulate reality. It tends to relate to the world of the living as though it was all a machine of some kind that can be captured by analysis. Language provides its main map of reality, a representation, which the left-hemisphere in its hubris insists is all there is to know.
The Hemispheres
Because the right hemisphere sees things as they are . . . . it cannot have the certainty of knowledge that comes from being able to fix things and isolate them. In order to remain true to what is, it does not form abstractions, and categories that are based on abstraction, which are the strengths of denotative language. By contrast, the right hemisphere’s interest in language lies in all the things that help to take it beyond the limiting effects of denotation to connotation: it acknowledges the importance of ambiguity. It therefore is virtually silent, relatively shifting and uncertain, where the left hemisphere, by contrast, may be unreasonably, even stubbornly, convinced of its own correctness. As John Cutting puts it, despite ‘an astonishing degree of ignorance on the part of the left (supposed major) hemisphere about what its partner, the right (supposed minor) hemisphere, [is] up to, [it] abrogates decision-making to itself in the absence of any rational evidence as to what is going on.’
(page 80)
He goes onto summarise this:
So the left hemisphere needs certainty and needs to be right. The right hemisphere makes it possible to hold several ambiguous possibilities in suspension together without premature closure on the outcome. . . .The right hemisphere is able to maintain ambiguous mental representations in the face of the tendency to premature over-interpretation by the left hemisphere. The right hemisphere’s tolerance of uncertainty is implied everywhere in its subtle ability to use metaphor, irony, humour, all of which depend upon not prematurely resolving ambiguities.
(page 82)
All of this is grounded in a mass of evidence that there is not the space to include here.
He then moves onto an equally fascinating topic: morality.
He sees the left hemisphere as fixated on utility. If something isn’t useful in some obvious practical sense it’s a waste of time.
Moral values are not something that we work out rationally on the principle of utility, or any other principle for that matter, but are irreducible aspects of the phenomenal world, like colour. . . . . [M]oral value is a form of experience irreducible to any other kind, or accountable for on any other terms; and I believe this perception underlies Kant’s derivation of God from the existence of moral values, rather than moral values from the existence of God. Such values are linked to the capacity for empathy, not reasoning; and moral judgements are not deliberative but unconscious and intuitive, deeply bound up with out emotional sensitivity to others.
(page 86)
He points out the organic basis for this and I feel I need to quote it this time:
The Brain
Moral judgement involves a complex right-hemisphere network, particularly the right ventromedial and orbitofrontal cortex, as well as the amygdala in both hemispheres. Damage to the right prefrontal cortex may lead to frank psychopathic behaviour.
(Ibid)
The amygdala can perhaps be called the emotional centre of the brain and is relatively old in evolutionary terms. The others are all part of the higher brain centres in the right hemisphere which came along later.
Given how central the idea of justice is in Bahá’í thinking, it is also intriguing to find it has has its own seat in the brain:
Our sense of justice is underwritten by the right hemisphere, particularly by the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. . . . . The right frontal lobe’s capacity to inhibit our natural impulse to selfishness means that it is also the area on which we most rely for self-control and the power to resist temptation.
(page 86)
There is also (page 92) apparently ‘a slow accumulation of evidence in favour of religious experience being more closely linked with the “non-dominant” hemisphere.’
Conclusion So Far
I am now poised at the beginning of my exploration of his unpacking further implications of all this. I have just got past the bit that says:
I believe the essential difference between the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere is that the right hemisphere pays attention to the Other, whatever it is that exists apart from ourselves, with which it sees itself as in profound relation. . . . By contrast, the left hemisphere pays attention to the virtual world that it has created, which is self-consistent, but self-contained, ultimately disconnected from the Other, making it powerful, but ultimately only able to operate on, and to know, itself.
(page 93)
If these ideas have grabbed your imagination as much as they have grabbed mine, may be you won’t be able to wait for the drip-feed of bits and pieces that will come via this blog over the next few weeks. Perhaps you will prefer to go out and buy the book for yourself. I think it would be well-worth it.
So I just finished the book Tales of a Female Nomad by Rita Golden Gelman. It was a very interesting book. Its about how Rita getting into a Nomad lifestyle in her late 40s after living in LA and getting a divorced. Then it goes into the place, people, and her experiences for the next 15 years around the world. Mexico, Indonesia, New Zealand are the major stops along the way. It was a fun book to read and see how a single women in her 50s traveled and trusted people to help her around.
I just hope some day I can do some of the traveling she did. I don’t know if I could ever really do the whole nomad thing, I would get to homesick. I need a place to call home but then again my mind might change. Asked me 4 years ago if I would live in Bulgaria and have not been home or to American in going to be over 30 months I would of told you where crazy. But for now I know I need to go “home” and the problem is money. Today people are doing the Nomad lifestyle thanks to money back home or interest business that they can take with them on the road. But I don’t have either. Its hard you miss a lot at home I would think. So maybe when I’m in my 60s I will keep this in mind, in fact I know I will have the travel culture bug, because I now have it and its something that will never go away.
‘Sister Carrie’ is about an eighteen year old young woman who leaves her family and small town in Wisconsin to go to the booming city of Chicago in the 1890s. Her family is so poor that they can’t give her any money beyond the train ticket, but she does have a married sister who lives in Chicago with whom she moves in. Her married sister and husband are also extremely poor, so Carrie must get a job. She gets a job with one of the magnificent new department stores in Chicago at the time, but they pay her so little she can’t buy anything in the store. All Carrie’s experience at the luxurious department store does is make Carrie want more out of her poverty-stricken life. Her sister’s husband expects Carrie to give most of her meager income to him and his wife. She escapes from her sister’s family by moving in with a pleasant young man she had met on the train to Chicago named Drouet. Later she meets a married man named Hurstwood who has a devastating impact on her life.
Theodore Drieser wrote ‘Sister Carrie’ in 1900, but it was withheld from publication until 1912 because of its ‘sordid’ subject matter. It wasn’t published in its original form the way Drieser actually wrote it until 1981. Here is our heroine, Carrie, living with a man without the benefit of marriage. I had read ‘Sister Carrie’ a long time ago before I discovered what a compelling writer Theodore Drieser is. Since then I’ve come to treasure Theodore Drieser’s novels and short stories. Thus when I had a chance to listen to the audiodisk of ‘Sister Carrie’, I went for it. This novel turned out to be perfect for listening on audiodisk, because Drieser tells his story in direct straightforward prose, and there was no chance of getting lost between listenings. It held my attention throughout.
Theodore Drieser’s background was as a journalist, and one facet of ‘Sister Carrie’ I liked was the attention to details about both the rich side of life with its department stores, horse races, and theatrical performances and the poor side of life with its hunger, grinding poverty, and violent labor strife. Theodore Drieser started the school of naturalism in United States fiction, which can be described as telling things the way they really are rather than the way they could be or should be.
I can’t imagine two writers more different from each other than Theodore Drieser and Henry James. Henry James is exquisite, and Theodore Drieser is a barbarian. So far, I’m still very much in the Drieser camp rather than the Henry James camp when it comes to early 1900s writers. Of course, both Willa Cather and Edith Wharton may be better writers than these two gentlemen. Opinions on Drieser range from “among the American giants, one of the very few American giants we have had” (Irving Howe) to “If he’s the great American novelist, give me the Marx Brothers every time” (Rupert Hart-Davis).
If you want an easy way to appreciate Theodore Drieser, watch the 1951 film, ‘A Place in the Sun’, starring Montgomery Clift, Elizabeth Taylor, and Shelley Winters. This movie is based on another excellent Drieser novel, ‘An American Tragedy’. This movie is one of my favorite movies of all time.
Theology and Culture: A Guide to the Discussion, D. Stephen Long (Eugene: Cascade Books, 2008). 114pp. 
The book was published late last year. It looks at this problem from another angle again and makes an impressive contribution to the debate. It is The Master and his Emissary by Ian McGilchrist. I am only just about a quarter of the way through but am already mightily impressed.
‘Sister Carrie’ is about an eighteen year old young woman who leaves her family and small town in Wisconsin to go to the booming city of Chicago in the 1890s. Her family is so poor that they can’t give her any money beyond the train ticket, but she does have a married sister who lives in Chicago with whom she moves in. Her married sister and husband are also extremely poor, so Carrie must get a job. She gets a job with one of the magnificent new department stores in Chicago at the time, but they pay her so little she can’t buy anything in the store. All Carrie’s experience at the luxurious department store does is make Carrie want more out of her poverty-stricken life. Her sister’s husband expects Carrie to give most of her meager income to him and his wife. She escapes from her sister’s family by moving in with a pleasant young man she had met on the train to Chicago named Drouet. Later she meets a married man named Hurstwood who has a devastating impact on her life.