Restoring the Family Bible

More than 40 years ago, my father gave me the Young Family Bible. It had been given to him by his father, who’d received it from his father. The value of the book, as experts like to say, was “intrinsic,” In other words, it was zero, except for what a family member would believe. 

The book as received from my father was wrapped in brown grocery-bag paper and tied with twine. It has sat on a closet shelf in my parents’ house for a long time, probably since they moved there in 1955. I have very vague memories of it from childhood. 

 

When my father gave it to me, I did the time-honored thing: I put it on a closet shelf. Eventually, I removed the wrapping and twine and wrapped it in acid-free paper and a box. Its value to me and the rest of the family was what it contained – four pages, inserted between the Old and New Testaments, of family births, marriages, and deaths. The earliest date was that of my great-great grandfather’s birth in 1802; the last date was in 1890. All of the events were written in the same hand – my great-grandfather’s Samuel Franklin Young. He also wrote his signature on an inside cover. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

Poets and Poems: Simon Armitage and "The Owl and the Nightingale"

The Owl and the Nightingale is one of the most famous poems to have emerged from medieval England. The story is straightforward. Two birds, a nightingale and an owl, face off across a clearing. The nightingale starts an argument that seems les an argument and more a stream of invective and insults aimed at the common owl (emphasis on “common”). The owl, taken aback by the verbal assault, gives back in kind, but she also seems to argue a more reasoned response. 

While reading this poem, it’s difficult not to imagine the two birds individually sporting colors of blue and red, one arguing from an elitist position and the other from that of the commoner. The only thing the nightingale doesn’t call the owl is “deplorable,” but you get the idea. Both birds make their arguments from Christian teaching; both constantly violate that teaching in how they argue. The nightingale, however, recognizes the merit in much of what the owl is saying, but is determined to yield no ground. The poem ends with both flying off to have the argument settled once and for all by Master Nicholas.

 

It’s the earliest example of debate poetry, sometimes called a verse contest, in Middle English. We know that the poem bears both Anglo-Saxon and French influences, which places it after the Norman Invasion of 1066. The poem is comprised of 1,800 lines written in iambic tetrameter, the most common poetic meter in English.

 

But from that point, the poem’s provenance gets murky. 

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

"The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self" by Carl Trueman

Carl Trueman published The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution in November of 2020. For a book about philosophy, sociology, psychology, cultural history, and religion, its success has been something of a surprise. But the book’s success is well-deserved.  

The book addresses a question so many of us have had: how did Western culture, and American culture, enter the Twilight Zone so quickly? Trueman’s answer: It wasn’t quick; it’s been coming at least since the 18^th century. 

 

With impressive scholarship, he walks the reader through a history of intellectual thought, beginning with Jean Jacques Rousseau; Romanticism; Frederick Nietzsche, Charles Darwin and Karl Marx in the 19^th century; and Sigmund Freud in the 20^th. He doesn’t neglect the work of related thinkers, like Simone de Beauvoir and Princeton bioethicist Peter Singer. 

 

What Trueman shows is that none of these thinkers operated (or still operate) in a vacuum; they influenced each other, they built upon each other; they operated with many of the same attitudes and beliefs. The key connection for what we confront today is that of Marx and Freud, or what Trueman calls “sexualizing the revolution.” What seems shocking but shouldn’t be is to understand the underpinnings of the sexual revolution that began in the 1960s and continues today has roots buried deep in Marxism.

 

Carl Trueman

What all is ultimately focused on is the chief goal of contemporary humanity, at least in Western culture – the full liberation of the self, usually identified by sexual identity. The idea of “feelings” is central, replacing evidence, fact, or even reality. Western elites appear to have embraced it all. And argument with people of differing views simply can’t happen; the mindset is so regimented that rational argument becomes impossible, replaced by ad hominin accusations, hysteria, and cancel culture. 

 

Trueman is a professor in the Department of Biblical and Religious Studies of Grove City College in Pennsylvania. He was educated at St. Catherine’s College, Cambridge University, and the University of Aberdeen. Before Grove City College, he taught at the University of Aberdeen, University of Nottingham, and Westminster Theological Seminary. He’s an ordained minister in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. He’s also the author of John Owen: Reformed Catholic, Renaissance Man, The Creedal Imperative, Fools Rush In Where Monkeys Fear to Tread, and Republocrat: Confessions of a Liberal Conservative.

 

The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self doesn’t project where all of this is heading; that’s not Trueman’s purpose. His intent was more to explain where it all came from, because it wasn’t something that happened overnight. And it won’t be resolved overnight. But what is clear is that Western culture, and Western nations as we known them, are not sustainable with these kinds of forces tearing at the foundations. 

A question

After Matthew 7:7-12 

The question begs

to be asked, but 

it has to be asked

if it’s to be

answered. Initiative

is required, the initiative

of asking. Nothing

matters, nothing

happens until

the question is asked.

But if it is asked,

if the initiative is taken

and the words employed,

the questions contains

the promise,

the promise of being

answered,

the promise of being

given.

 

Photograph by Ilkka Karkkainen via Unsplash,. Used with permission.

Saturday Good Reads - Sept. 3, 2022

I was startled to see the headline, “The Old South shall rise again.” It led to an article by conservative Victor Davis Hanson, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford. He makes the argument the the Confederate economic model – a tiny elite controlling vast wealth and power – has been resurrected by Silicon Valley.  

Britain and the EU are facing a very cold, very hard winter – thanks to Vladimir Putin and his response to the economic sanctions over the Ukraine war. Allister Heath at The Telegraph says that the energy sanctions are pushing Britain and the UK toward economic meltdown and socialism.

 

Ben Felsenburg at The Critic Magazine writes about the Yiddish writer and Nobel Prize winner Isaac Bashevis Singer, and he wonders what Singer would have made of today’s ideological edicts in publishing, the arts, politics, and culture in general. 

 

More Good Reads

 

Faith

 

The Bible in English – Stephen Nichols at Ligonier.

 

C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien and the Inklings: Telling Stories to Save Lives – Rachel Lu at America Magazine.

 

The Hope, Heart, and Habits of Your Legacy – Dan Reiland.

 

When You Hear of a Scandal – Darryl Dash at DashHouse.

 

Can Love Take Sides? – Wendell Berry at Plough.

 

Ukraine

 

What’s on with Ukraine’s new school syllabus – Svitlana Morenets at The Spectator.

 

Closed Libraries and Fading Light: On Life in Kyiv, August 2022 – Myroslav Laiuk at Literary Hub.

 

British Stuff

 

Two Cornhill Churches – St. Peter and St. Michael – A London Inheritance.

 

Writing and Literature

 

All Things Are Possible: The Eternal Youth of Flaubert’s Writing – Mario Vargas Llosa at Literary Hub.

 

Reading Flannery O’Connor under quarantine – H.W. Crocker III at The Spectator.

 

Threnody for a Good Man – Jake Meador at Mere Orthodoxy.

 

Life and Culture

 

“I Don’t Want American Kids;” The Real Reason Parents Are Suddenly Choosing Language Immersion Schools – Abigail Schrier at The Tooth Fairy.

 

Bromides of the expert class: Question intellectual authority – David Polansky at The Critic Magazine.

 

The Fall of ‘Nature’ – Bo Weingard at Quillette.

 

Television’s boundary-smashing pioneer turns 100 – Albert Mohler.

 

Panic – Jake Meador at Mere Orthodoxy.

 

Preparing for Winter – Paul Kingsnorth at The Abbey of Misrule.

 

Poetry

 

Sedition – Curtis Yarvin at Imperil Melodies.

 

Crescendo – The Piano Guys

Painting: Reading Boy, oil on canvas by Eastman Johnson (1824-1906). 

A door

After Matthew 7:7-12 

It looks ordinary,

this door, an entrance

to a house, a place

unvisited before. It does

not encourage or

discourage; it stands

there, offering protection

or domain to those

behind it and a barrier

to those in front of it.

It is a door made

to be opened, but it

does not open by itself.

To open, it requires

initiative, simple as

it is but still necessary

to open. All you must do

is knock.

 

Photograph by Edgar Moran via Unsplash. Used with permission.

"Magic Mirror" by Georgia Lee Maxwell

Georgia Lee Maxwell is a society reporter for a small newspaper in the Florida Panhandle. Blamed some mixed-up type (which suggested a criminal attended a society “do” as an honored guest), she quits her job and makes a rather abrupt change. She moves to Paris.

 

She’s scraped together freelancing jobs, and then a friend asks her to substitute for an interview with an art restorer. They arrived at the small, family-endowed museum, and are barely in the door when masked gunman break in, force Georgia Lee, the art restorer, and the museum director to lie on the floor, and kill the security guard. They steal one of the museum’s less-valuable objects – a piece of black obsidian known and the mirror of Nostradamus. 

 

Georgia Lee is determined to pursue the story; after all, she was something of an eyewitness to the crime. She attends press briefings, she interviews witnesses, and she follows people she thinks might be suspects. And she soon finds herself involved in an offer to pay for the mirror, second murder, a second murder, being considered both a suspect and an assistant to the police, and a kidnapping – her own.

 

Michaela Thompson

Magic Mirror by Michaela Thompson was originally published in 1988, when the author used the pen name of Mickey Friedman, and republished in 2013. It’s now available in eBook format.  It’s the first of two Georgia Lee Maxwell mysteries, the second being A Temporary Ghost.

 

In addition to the Georgia Lee Maxwell mysteries, Thompson also wrote five other mystery novels. She grew up on the northwest Florida Gulf Coast. She worked as a newspaper reporter and freelance journalist, and she’s contributed short stories to a number of anthologies. She lives in New York City. 

If you like reding about Paris, and an American moving to Paris, this is a mystery story to enjoy. It’s occasionally tongue-in-cheek, and the story of the mirror gets a bit complicated, but it’s an enjoyable story. And having been first published in 1988, there are no mobiles phones, internet, or social media.