Innocent, except

After Acts 26

He makes a defense in the form

of confession, and what compels

is not so much what he says

(which does appear rather insane)

but how he says it, the passion,

the conviction, the disregard

for what we hear, as if what

matters is the speaking, the act

of words, the word. And then he

asks me, tells me, I believe

the prophets, and I rise and

leave, asking myself how this man

sees my heart better than I do. And

we know, Festus and I, this Roman

and this king, that he is innocent,

he could be, should be, freed,

except for his appeal. I stand

on the balcony, see the crowds

below and the ravens above,

perched and waiting.

Painting: Apostle Paul on Trial by Nikolai Bodarevsky (1875). Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Saturday Good Reads

When we were on vacation in London this fall, one thing we noticed on British television was that certain ads, mostly by department stores like John Lewis or grocery stores like Sainsbury, were in a class all by themselves. Now comes an ad by Johnnie Walker. Yes, it’s a liquor ad, but you’ve never seen a liquor ad like this one.

The faith frenzy of the week is Wheaton College. I have no links to offer for this story, but there are plenty out there, and my Facebook news feed has once again filled up with ugliness. But I tend to be unsympathetic when someone positioning themselves as a person of conscience, like the Wheaton professor who says Christians and Muslims worship the same god, and then launches a social media campaign as soon as she’s suspended. Like the suspension was not only expected but anticipated and planned for.

Good poetry this week, and good posts on writing. And my friend David Rupert talks about Christian refugees in a way that you can’t ignore – are Western (including U.S.) politicians killing Christians?

Poetry

The Old Scarecrow – Matthew Steinle.

Marriage is a Sacrament, They Say – Shawn Smucker.

O Antiphons – D.S. Martin at Kingdom Poets.

On Callings – J.L. Jacobs at Headpiece Filled with Straw.

A Way of Happening – Jeffrey Bilbro at Curator Magazine.

A Grain of Sand – Brendan MacOdrum at Oran’s Well.

Holy Ground – Laura Boggess.

Writing

The One Thing We Can Take With Us – Mick Silva.

How to Beat Writer’s Block by Not Giving Up – Charity Craig at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Communication is not – David Murray at Writing Boots.

Seasons of Poetry – Mary Harwell Sayler at Poetry Editor.

Literature

A Child’s Christmas in Wales – read by the author, Dylan Thomas (Hat Tip: Maggie’s Farm).

A BBC Charles Dickensian Christmas – Witlow and Thatch.

Dear Brother – Johnnie Walker advertisement.

Photography

Barrel Cactus Studies – Tim Good at Arts by Tiwago.

Faith

The Gentleness of Advent – Winn Collier.

A Christmas question: Are the Gospels more reliable than scholars once thought? – Robert Hutchinson via Fox News.

Eighteen Years – Luke Herron Davis at Sacred Chaos.

Christianity in the Brave New World and Islam, Christianity, Secularism – Rod Dreher at American Conservative.

Life and Culture

Staying Godly in a Godless Workplace – Rick Segal at Desiring God.

How politicians are killing Christians – David Rupert at Red-Letter Believers.

David Archuleta and Nathan Pacheco sing “The Prayer”

Top photograph by Suzy Dubot via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

“The Chimes” by Charles Dickens

The Chimes was the second Christmas book written by Charles Dickens, published in 1844 and followed the enormous success of A Christmas Carol the year before. In theme and story line, it is similar to A Christmas Carol, but not as tightly woven as its predecessor.

Its official title is The Chimes: A Goblin Story of Some Bells that Rang an Old Year Out and a New Year In. It is the story of Trotty Veck, an old man who earns his living by running errands, delivering letter, and whatever else people may need to have done. He has a daughter, Meg, who’s in love with a young local man, Richard. Trotty stands near a church to show his availability for errands and deliveries, and he often hears the church’s bells as they peal the quarter hour (the story is divided into “quarters,” in fact).

Charles Dickens

Trotty has a good heart, but he listens a little too closely to those more well off, and comes to see poverty as the result of wickedness. So one night, he’s pulled to the bells, and discovers a whole array of goblins and other spirits, who will show him the realities he’s missing. Trotty is not a Scrooge-like character, but he has a Scrooge-like experience.

Like in A Christmas Carol, Dickens was aiming for his Victorian audience’s hearts. The poor could often get caught up in legal machinery of which they had no understanding and inevitably dealt them a bad hand. Unscrupulous and judgmental officials could and often did play a role; in fact, officialdom in the form of an alderman and a member of Parliament don’t come off very well in The Chimes.

The Chimes has many of the trademarks we associate with Dickens – vivid characters, sympathy for the poor, an interesting story – but it’s not as satisfying as some of his other Christmas books and is somewhat confusing as to why Trotty has to undergo his “dream experience” like Scrooge did. We prefer A Christmas Carol and rightly so, but we read The Chimes because it was written by a great author, not because it’s a great story.

Illustration: Trotty Veck by Kyd Clarke, from the first edition of The Chimes (1844).

James Calvin Schaap’s “Finding Christmas”

What we celebrate at Christmas is about many things, and one of those things is grace, that outpouring of God’s love where it is often most undeserved – us.

The stories in Finding Christmas: Stories of Startling Joy and Perfect Peace by James Calvin Schaap are about that – underserved grace, grace falling on the undeserving, the people dealing with the brokenness in their lives and in the lives of those they love.

Finding Christmas is comprised of seven stories, each with both a title and a subtitle. In “The Baby / Forgetting Jesus,” an eighth grader playing Mary in a Sunday school Christmas play has to find a doll to play the Baby Jesus.  In “The Party: Facts of Life,” a grandmother hungers to touch the granddaughter she’s not allowed to talk with. In “The Gifts / She’ll Love It,” a mother wrestles with believing she may have loved one daughter too much and the second a teenager pregnant and wanting to keep the baby.

“The Church / Finding Something,” a mother despairs of her professionally successful daughter who’s lost all interest in the church of her youth. “The Pageant / First Cry in the Stable” has a child learning a lesson about animals and living on a farm. In “The Afterglow / Merry Madness,” a worker in a home for abandoned children discovers grace on New Year’s Eve. And in “the Snowfall / Joy and Miracle,” a man discovers that Jesus came for all of the needy, including the educated, sophisticated elitists like himself.

James Schaap

James Schaap in an emeritus professor of literature and writing at Dordt College in Sioux City, Iowa. He’s a novelist and short story writer, and has also written several devotional books. His most recent book is Reading Mother Teresa: A Calvinist looks lovingly at “the little bride of Christ.” He blogs at Stuff in the Basement.

These stories of everyday, recognizable people – children, cafeteria workers, an actor, a pregnant teenager, mothers and grandmothers – are exactly what Christmas is about.

Photograph by Rostislav Kralik via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Larry Woiwode’s “The Invention of Lefse”

Lefse is a traditional Norwegian flatbread, made with potatoes, flour, butter and milk or cream. There are all kinds of variations on the lefse theme – with cinnamon, a cake version, a yeast version, even a version with peanut butter, among others. In the United States, lefse is usually associated with the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays.

But how was it originally created? Potatoes were introduced to Norway some 250 years ago, so the traditional version using leftover potatoes has a fairly recent origin (there may have been an earlier version using only flour and not potatoes).

You know how a question about a food’s creation is likely to play in a writer’s mind. Novelist and poet Larry Woiwode asked the question or had it asked of him, and he decided to answer it. He wrote a story, a children’s story, a children’s Christmas story.

His The Invention of Lefse: A Christmas Story is a delight, wrapped up in poverty, drought, family, and Christmas.

Mette Ivarsdatter is 13, the oldest of three girls in her family. It’s Christmas time, and times are hard. Norway’s farmers have all been affected by a bad year for crops, money is extremely tight, and Mette’s father would rather be working on carpentry projects anyway, like a porthole window for Mette’s room.

But it’s Christmas, and the family will be taking a long sleigh ride to the home of Mette’s grandparents. Mette knows there are tensions between her father and her grandfather, and she can hear her parents arguing in whispers. No money means no gifts for Christmas, so Mette’s family will take some flour and milk. It is much the same for the rest of the extended family, and someone has some potatoes.

Larry Woiwode

Mette’s grandmother will take these small gifts and make – lefse. From each small gift comes a larger one.

Woiwode has been North Dakota’s poet laureate since 1995. He’s the author of five novels, two short stories, a biography, a memoir and a book of poetry, in addition to numerous articles, essays, and reviews. He’s also won numerous literary awards.

Even if you’re not of Norwegian ancestry, The Invention of Lefse has a timeless appeal for children – and adults.

Related: My review of Woiwide’s Words Made Fresh.

Photograph: Lefse on the griddle by Lance Fisher via Wikimedia Commons. 

T.S. Eliot at the British Library, Part 1

We’re sitting in an auditorium in the British Library’s conference center.  The library, part of the British Museum until 1973, is housed in a huge modern building near the St. Pancras train station on Euston Road, just north of Bloomsbury but still considered central London. The auditorium’s seats slope down to the stage. It’s a good crowd, some 150 people, even if the auditorium isn’t filled.

We’re waiting for T.S. Eliot.

More precisely, we’re waiting for the two editors of a new edition of T.S. Eliot’s poems, published in Britain by Faber & Faber and simultaneously in the United States by Johns Hopkins University Press. It’s the 50^th anniversary of T.S. Eliot’s death, and the dual publications mirror Eliot’s birth in the United States and his move and eventual gaining of citizenship in Britain. And the two editors mirror this as well – while both are Brits, one works in England and the other at Boston University in the United States.

The British Library seems to have taken this anniversary of Eliot’s death seriously. A few weeks previously, it held a reading of Eliot’s “The Waste Land” by actor Viggo Mortenson (Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings film trilogy). That event was sold out, and the library scheduled a second reading, which also sold out. During British National Poetry Week in early October, organizers scheduled an “Eliot Walk” in the city, London’s financial district where Eliot worked in the 1920s (even then, poetry wasn’t a self-supporting proposition).

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

“The Fellowship” by Philip Zaleski and Carol Zaleski

They didn’t achieve the literary fame of some of their contemporaries – James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges or T.S. Eliot. They sat in rooms at Magdalen College and The Eagle & Child pub in Oxford and debated, discussed, reads works in progress to each other, critiqued each other, argued, laughed and drank. They were academics and they were Christians, although some had professional lives outside the university and not all of them had what we might call orthodox Christian faith.

But their influence was huge, even in their lifetimes, and it has only grown since their deaths.

In The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings, Philip Zaleski and Carol Zaleski tell the literary story of the four men who were the main Inklings – C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams and Owen Barfield. The work is filled with their biographical information, but it is more about their thought and ideas, their books, their lectures and influences. And their faith, and not only what they believed but how they believed.

I don’t think I’ve ever used an exclamation point in a book review, but I am now. What a marvelous book this is!

The Zaleskis have undertaken an enormous amount of research and closely read all of Inklings works, major and minor. Their gift is how well they tell this story, deeply sustaining interest for more than 500 pages (and add 73 pages of notes and a 23-page bibliography). The idea for this book, they write, started in the 1980s, with phone calls and letters from the last of four alive, Owen Barfield, to a young writer named Philip Zaleski.

We learn not only about the impact of the writings most familiar today – Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy and C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia and his Christian apologetic works like The Screwtape Letters – but also how each made major contributions in their academic disciplines. We see the long decades of struggle that Barfield experienced – with most of his career spent as an attorney while his heart was in literary studies. And we understand the contribution of Charles Williams, best known for a book about the Holy Spirit (The Descent of the Dove) but also the author of seven of the strangest novels you are ever likely to read. Williams also had a major impact on the writings of C.S. Lewis.

What’s particularly powerful is how the Zelskis consider each of the four Inklings – and the reader gets warts and all. These were men, men with Christian faith to be sure but also men with human frailties. By giving us a complete picture, we are better able to grasp the impact each of the four had.

Bonus: The Fellowship contains one of the best analyses of The Lord of the Rings I’ve ever come across.

Carol Zaleski and Philip Zaleski

Philip Zaleski and Carol Zaleski are co-authors of Prayer: A History (2006) and co-editors of The Book of Heaven (2000). He is also co-author of Gifts of the Spirit (2009) and editor of the annual editions of the Best Spiritual Writing and Best American Spiritual Writing. Carol is the author of Other World Journeys (1988) and The Life of the World to Come (1996) and a professor of World Religions at Smith College and a columnist for The Christian Century.

If you’re interested in Tolkien or C.S. Lewis, The Fellowship is a wonderful guide to their writings. If you’ve ever wondered where the Harry Potter books came from or why The Game of Thrones made it to television this book will help provide an explanation.

Or if you simply want to know who were some of the major Christian thinkers of the 20^th century, who thought about Christianity in the context of learning, academics, history, philology, literary studies, and life, then The Fellowship will serve as a fine introduction.

Top photograph (composite of, clockwise from upper left, J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams and Owen Barfield) – aslanchristianbooks.co.uk.