Tag: books

A book I ought to read: Jesus for President

“We in the church are schizophrenic: we want to be good Christians, but deep down we trust that only the power of the state and its militaries and markets can really make a difference in the world.”

 

There was a study of a book in Albany called Jesus for President: Politics for Ordinary Radicals by Shane Claiborne and Chris Haw. Claiborne was even in town, leading some workshops. But I was busy. Then I read this excerpt of the book in my church newsletter:
“Christianity is at its best when it is peculiar, marginalized, suffering, and it is at its worst when it is popular, credible, triumphal, and powerful.”

Sounds like my kind of book.

From the preface:

This book is a project in renewing the imagination of the church in the United States and of those who would seek to know Jesus. We are seeing more and more that the church has fallen in love with the state and that this love affair is killing the church’s imagination. The powerful benefits and temptations of running the world’s largest superpower have bent the church’s identity. Having power at its fingertips, the church often finds “guiding the course of history” a more alluring goal than following the crucified Christ. Too often the patriotic values of pride and strength triumph over the spiritual virtues of humility, gentleness, and sacrificial love.

We in the church are schizophrenic: we want to be good Christians, but deep down we trust that only the power of the state and its militaries and markets can really make a difference in the world. And so we’re hardly able to distinguish between what’s American and what’s Christian. As a result, power corrupts the church and its goals and practices. When Jesus said, “You cannot serve two masters,” he meant that in serving one, you destroy your relationship to the other. Or as our brother and fellow activist Tony Campolo puts it, “Mixing the church and state is like mixing ice cream with cow manure. It may not do much to the manure, but it sure messes up the ice cream.” As Jesus warned, what good is it to gain the whole world if we lose our soul?

So what we need is an exploration of the Bible’s political imagination, a renovated Christian politics, a new set of hopes, goals, and practices. We believe the growing number of Christians who are transcending the rhetoric of lifeless presidential debates is a sign of this renovation. Amid all the buzz, we are ready to turn off our TVs, pick up our Bibles, and reimagine the world.

Over the last several years, the Christian relation to the state has become more dubious… Professing Christians have been at the helm of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, implicitly or explicitly referencing faith in God as part of their leadership. Patriotic pastors insist that America is a Christian nation without questioning the places in distant and recent history where America has
not looked like Christ. Rather than placing our hope in a transnational church that embodies God’s kingdom, we assume America is God’s hope for the world, even when it doesn’t look like Christ. Dozens of soldiers who have contacted us confess a paralyzing identity crisis as they feel the collision of their allegiances…

I’ll have to get a copy and add this book to my ever-expanding summer reading list.

Evil, President Romney, and my daughter’s future

Mitt Romney’s hard right swing makes it difficult for me to ascertain what his real values are.

First, Chris, in answer to my answer, writes:

You bring up Andrew Jackson and the Trail of Tears. However, my husband is studying for a military exam, and the honors that his company won during the “Indian Wars” is considered part of their venerable history… And then I think of Hitler and Genghis Khan and I wonder, were they genuinely trying to do good by their own?

This is why I picked him over the more obvious choice such as Hitler. History, at least the history most of us have read, has already assigned Hitler with the “evil” mantle; he doesn’t need me. Whereas Jackson’s place in history is a more of mixed bag. I have an ex who could talk your ear off (probably not literally, though I’m not sure) on the topic. I would submit that GWB’s war in Iraq may have been – OK, probably was, in his mind – initiated by “trying to do good” for his own people; didn’t make it right. I daresay most ethnic cleansing is done to “protect” one group from “the other” (see: Rwanda or Yugoslavia in the 1990s for recent examples). Whether the “good intentions” of mass murder are relevant inevitably will be written by the historians.

Maybe a better question is “What do you consider evil?” What is good and what is evil, really?

I defer to Potter Stewart, who famously said, concerning pornography, that he knows it when he sees it. I do agree, for example, with the sentiment in the article Condemning foreign governments for abusive acts while ignoring one’s own is easy. But the U.S. leads the way.

American slavery was evil, and you had good Christian people defending it at the time, though almost no one does now. People in the US North who were involved in the “triangular trade” at the time seemed to be oblivious to their role in the “peculiar institution.”

Not incidentally, I wouldn’t argue against your notion that this “American life” is supported by a modern-day form of slavery and exploitation, which is, however, much harder to see, though some of us do try.
***

Jaquandor of Byzantium Shores provokes me:

At the risk of provoking a more political post than you might wish…

Almost certainly true, BTW.

how bad do you think a Romney presidency might be? (I, as you might suspect, think it would be an absolute train wreck that might make us pine for the days of George W. Bush.)

Here’s the thing: I don’t know. His hard-right swing makes it difficult for me to ascertain what his real values are. I’m not a big fan of pointing to “flip-flopping” when a person’s view on life has changed over time; I know mine has. But Romney would contradict himself and even lie about his position from weeks earlier during this campaign. And I don’t remember him doing that during the 2008 race.

Let me go wildly optimist: Maybe he really is that guy who was the Massachusetts governor who could manage to have some sort of health care plan that would be palatable to Republicans.

Nah.

I believe that he would expand on the covert military actions that both GWB and Obama have overused; difficult to put that genie back into the bottle.

I believe he, with Republicans, will dismantle regulations pertaining to banking (such as they are) and the environment. I expect that the pipeline from Canada, which Obama has partially resisted, will be expedited, and a massive catastrophe will ensue.

I believe, if the Republicans still control the House, that there will be pushes to go into either Syria or Iran (or Lord help us, both), to terrible outcomes.

I believe that not only does the divide between the rich and poor increase, but there will be hunger in America with a safety net that has been rendered totally inadequate, so apparent that there will be demonstrations a lot more confrontational than Occupy has initiated to date. To Chris’ question about evil: some of it, at least, is all that Biblical stuff about NOT feeding the hungry, NOT clothing the naked.

What’s a movie or book that you were convinced you would hate and ended up liking a good deal?

Any number of movies billed as raunchy but I liked anyway, such as 40-Year-Old Virgin, and, to a lesser extent, Knocked Up. Dolphin Tale, which I saw with The Wife and The Daughter, I thought wasn’t awful, and Ramona and Beezus, which I saw with the Daughter, I rather liked. I actually did try to read The Bridges of Madison County, but just couldn’t, yet I liked the movie. But, in general, I go to a movie EXPECTING to like it; sometimes I don’t, but I have my anticipation.

Even more true, I just don’t read books I don’t expect to like. Well, when I was in my church book group at my former church, from about 1986 to 1995, we would read from various genres; that’s how I read Margaret Atwood, which I didn’t expect to like, but I did.

Are there any careers you’d like to see your daughter pursue? Or, on the flip side, any careers you would be deeply troubled to see her pursuing?

To the former, no. I’m REALLY TRYING to give her room to figure out her path. Although she could do worse than to be a librarian or teacher. There COULD be a parental bias here, however. She is starting to write stories, and while I would not wish a writer’s life on her – full of rejection – I’m happy about the learning aspect of her activity, at least. She likes to dance, and I don’t know whether that is a career path she’ll want or not. Maybe she’ll be a pastor; that was my dream when I was about 10 to 15.

But I wouldn’t want her to be a politician, because I just think it’s too brutal, with candidates decided upon with too much superficiality.

Book review: JOURNALISM by Joe Sacco

Many black Africans travel across the Mediterranean Sea, attempting to get to Europe, but end up in the tiny island nation of Malta.


Cartoonist/war correspondent Joe Sacco’s new book, JOURNALISM (Metropolitan Books; on sale June 22, 2012) is doing an interesting thing, addressing wars and other conflicts in recent human experience in a graphic form, while attempting to operate in the discipline suggested by the book title. Moreover, he generally succeeds in his mission, though it must be said that the writer himself may be his harshest critic.

Most, but not all, of the work had been published before, in a variety of venues. “The War Crimes Trials,” for instance, was commissioned by Details “during the short stint when Art Spiegelman [creator of the historic graphic novel Maus] was the magazine’s comic editor. Sacco’s access was limited by Detail’s reputation for “glossy photos of spoiled young men and saucily clad women,” so that the last page was compromised. I thought it nevertheless worked well.

There were three pieces in The Palestinian Territories chapter, including getting to “look inside” Hebron, seeing both sides of the struggle between the residents and the Israeli neighbors. The Caucasus section is dominated by a 40-page explanation of “Chechen War, Chechen Women,” which explains the history of the conflict and literally illustrates the fate of the victims of war.

In the Iraq section, Sacco complains that his “Complacency Kills” piece could have reflected any war; to me, that was a strength, the universality of conflict. “Down! Up!” may remind you of the gym teachers or coaches you hated most.

The India section addressed Kunsinagar, a section in northern India in the Uttar Pradesh province where the notion of “untouchables” has been abolished legally but not actually, corruption runs rampant, and a certain sense of hopelessness rules.

The best-realized section, though, has to be the Migration tale, “The Unwanted.” Many black Africans travel across the Mediterranean Sea, attempting to get to Europe, but end up in the tiny island nation of Malta. Almost everything you’ve heard in the debate in the United States over illegal immigration shows up here: mutual distrust of the natives and the newcomers and neo-Nazi resistance to the Africans, who also fight among each other. This piece works so well, I suspect because Sacco is Maltese and still knows a bit of the language, though his family had emigrated to Australia a number of years ago.

In some ways, though, the most interesting part of the book is the Preface, “A Manifesto, Anyone?” Critics, Sacco notes, “question the notion that drawings can aspire to objective truth? Isn’t that — objective truth — what journalism is all about? Aren’t drawings by their very nature subjective?” While the answer to “this last question is yes…this does not let the cartoonist who aspires to journalism off the hook. The journalist’s standard obligations—to report accurately, to get quotes right, and to check claims—still pertain. But a comics journalist has obligations that go deeper than that.” Fascinating stuff.

“Another trap promoted in American journalism schools is the slavish adherence to ‘balance.’ But if one side says one thing and the other side says another, does the truth necessarily reside ‘somewhere in the middle’? A journalist who says, ‘Well, I pissed off both sides—I must be doing something right,’ is probably fooling himself and, worse, he may be fooling the reader.” I have frequently heard this very observation from some newspeople and it pains me greatly. It’s like saying that some claim that six million died in the Holocaust, while others deny it happened at all, so we’ll compromise and decide that three million died. This obviously pleases no one.

“Balance should not be a smokescreen for laziness. If there are two or more versions of events, a journalist needs to explore and consider each claim, but ultimately the journalist must get to the bottom of a contested account independently of those making their claims.”

I highly recommend this book. According to the press release, “Sacco received the Eisner Award for Safe Area Gorazde, which was also named a New York Times Notable Book and Time Magazine’s best comic book of 2000; his most recent book, Footsteps in Gaza, won the Eisner award in 2010 and was also the first graphic novel to win the Ridenhour Book Prize.”

[I received a review copy of JOURNALISM, but no other compensation.]

Everyone else has a great Ray Bradbury story

My wife decided to re-read Fahrenheit 451 because she thought it was getting to be too close to prophecy.


Someone who knew Ray Bradbury, the writer who died last week, noted in Salon magazine: “Ray was the last living member of a “BACH” quartet — writers who transformed science fiction from a pulp magazine ghetto into a genre for hardcover bestsellers[, along with] Isaac Asimov, Arthur Clarke, and Robert Heinlein…”

My buddy Steve Bissette “heard the news of his passing as I drove… Instantly, a flood of memories—entire passages of Bradbury short stories I first read when I was 11 and 12, his novels, the movies from his tales—rushed through, and I had to turn off the radio to let them come. Ray made us all one of his ‘book people’ from FAHRENHEIT 451, I reckon… all I know is he changed my life, and (along with Lovecraft) instilled the desire to write, which I do every single day of my life.” He shared a link: Ray Bradbury- Story of a Writer (1963); “Bradbury in his prime—and when all the world, it seemed, was his oyster. The man until his death, and that is something more for all of us to aspire to.”

Here’s a story of Ray Bradbury spending three hours slathering the 15-year-old Mark Evanier with advice about writing. Neil Gaiman shares the story of an aspiring writer of age 11 or 12, getting the same kind of time and advice from Ray.

You can watch an hour of Bradbury addressing (mostly) new writers at the Sixth Annual Writer’s Symposium by the Sea in February of 2001. Or read tweets by celebrities.

And what do I have? Just a bunch of Bradbury-penned old episodes of Alfred Hitchcock, plus a classic Twilight Zone episode, which I saw before I even knew his name, and reading a bunch of his short stories, often seeing them adapted into other media.

Plus this: my wife decided to re-read Fahrenheit 451 because she thought it was getting to be too close to prophesy. She borrowed a book from a teaching colleague. But just before she finished it, she dropped the book into a mud puddle. So, separately, she and I bought replacement copies. We kept the one; seems like a book we ought to have on the shelf.

The Beginning of the Fall of the Roman Republic

As the gap between rich and poor widened, angry mobs began to riot.

The Wife was perusing a textbook entitled World History by Elisabeth Gaynor Ellis and Anthony Esler (2008, Prentice Hall), when she came across this piece about Rome, in a chapter called From Republic to Empire (p.157):

Conquests and control of busy trade routes brought incredible riches into Rome. Generals, officials, and traders amassed fortune from loot, taxes and commerce. A new class of wealthy Romans emerged. They built lavish mansions and filled them with luxuries imported from the east.

Wealthy families bought up huge estates, called latifundia. as the Romans conquered more and more lands, they forced people captured in war to work as slaves on the latifundia.

The widespread use of slave labor hurt small farmers, who were unable to produce food as cheaply as the latifundia could. The farmers’ problems were compounded when huge quantities of grain pouring in from the conquered lands drove down grain prices. Many farmers fell into debt and had to sell their land.

In despair, landless farmers flocked to Rome and other cities looking for jobs. There, they joined an already restless class of unemployed people. As the gap between rich and poor widened, angry mobs began to riot. In addition, the new wealth led to increased corruption. Greed and self-interest replaced virtues such as simplicity, hard work and duty, which had been so prized in the time of the early republic.

Thus endeth the reading.

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