Books & Culture articles from November 2002

Books & Culture archives from November 2002

Letters.
November 1, 2002... Enigma of Anger Though I don't consider myself an angry person, I can see myself in some of the personal stories of Mr. Keizer ["The Enigma of Anger," September/October]. I even feel some of the impatience and agitation he expresses with...

Two Icons. (Stranger in a Strange Land).(Poem)
November 1, 2002... Two Icons I. Nativity As you lean in, you'll surely apprehend the tiny God is wrapped in something more than swaddle. The God is tightly bound within His blessed mother's gaze--her face declares that she is rapt by what...

Special pleading? (The Groves of Academe).
November 1, 2002... The most recent issue of BOOKS & CULTURE, with an editorial, column, and essay on Christians, public life, and academe [September/October 2002], set me back in my office chair at Calvin College and inspired some thought about the project of...

Signs and wonders.
November 1, 2002... In 1999, pretty much out of nowhere, M. Night Shyamalan hit the American movie scene with the kind of blinding flash that does not appear often in Hollywood. Super-hit movies come along with regularity, but not usually by boy wonders, and not...

Is a mustard seed enough?(Wallking Away from Faith)(The House Where the Hardest Things Happened)(Book Review)
November 1, 2002... A five-year-old girl loves her Sunday school, loves listening to her parents harmonize on the old gospel hymns, even loves the fire-and-brimstone preaching antics of Brother Munroe--loves everything about the First Church of God in...

Twice Chosen: a young convert to Orthodox Judaism converts to Christianity.
November 1, 2002... A few weeks before reading Lauren Winner's book, Girl Meets God, I heard that Chaim Potok had died of brain cancer. Potok was the novelist who made so many of us Gentile teenagers feel that something was missing in our lives: namely, Orthodox...

The real story of secularization.(Book Review)
November 1, 2002... The idea of secularization is fundamental to contemporary debates over the sociology of religion. As sociologist Steve Bruce puts the issue succinctly, "The basic proposition is that modernization creates problems for religion"; or to quote...

Africa: a mission accomplished?
November 1, 2002... Everyone agrees that the great shifts in the social geography of Christianity over the past half century have been the redistribution of demographic weight southward, and the inundation of the Christian south by Pentecostalism and its...

God is not dead. (Christ and Cultures).(Editorial)
November 1, 2002... The April 8, 1966, issue of Time magazine (scheduled to coincide with Easter) created a hubbub with the stark cover line, "Is God Dead?" Inside, there were references to Emory University's Thomas J.J. Altizer and the "current death-of-God"...

South Pacific Christianities.(Book Review)
November 1, 2002... Modern Australian history began in the late 18th century as Protestant Britain spewed criminals and rebels, including not a few Irish Catholics, thousands of miles south to its Pacific gulag. In the penal colonies of Botany Bay and Van...

The Renaissance of Religion in Canada.(Book Review)
November 1, 2002... "They aren't dropping out. They're dropping in." No, not Marshall McLuhan, though it mimics one of his gnomic sayings. This is another Canadian, sociologist and pollster Reginald Bibby, neatly summing tip the powerful challenge his work poses...

Uncompromising positions: Hitchens and Orwell. (Neccessary Belligerence).(Book Review)
November 1, 2002... In an interview with Brian Lamb of C-SPAN, Christopher Hitchens said that his chief motivation for writing is rage--rage against political corruption, media distortion of reality, and the culture of death in its many manifestations. Read the...

Adult education: why we need journals of opinion.
November 1, 2002... One of the more dramatic stories of my childhood concerned a magazine and the bargain my mother struck that made her a lifelong subscriber. Toward the end of the war--World War II, that is--a draft notice arrived for my father. Since he...

The windup world of the nervous tick: looking hard with Elvis Costello.
November 1, 2002... History repeats the old conceits The glib replies the same defeats Keep your finger on important issues With crocodile tears and a pocketful of tissues I'm just the oily slick On the windup world of the nervous tick In a very...

The authority of the song: Ojibwe singers enact hope through hymns. (The Persistence of Indians / In Search of Native America).
November 1, 2002... Late in the fall, my son and I traveled north, heading for the Leech Lake Reservation, one of seven in Minnesota belonging to the Ojibwe tribe. We were going to meet "Ojibwe singers," Native Christians who chant traditional Protestant hymns...

A Forest of Time.(Interview)
November 1, 2002... In an important new book, A Forest of Time: American Indian Ways of History (Cambridge Univ. Press), Peter Nabokov explores the complexity of American Indian approaches to the past. Nabokov, a professor of American Indian.Studies and World...

Bad Habits of the High-Tech Heart.(Book Review)
November 1, 2002... Imprisoned by the Czech communist regime in 1979 on trumped-tip charges of subversion, playwright Vaclav Havel was allowed to write only four pages of heavily censored correspondence per week to his wife. The circumstances seemed mind-numbing...

Outrageous vision: a conversation with Donald Miller about global Pentecostalism.(Interview)
November 1, 2002... Donald E. Miller is Firestone Professor of Religion at the University of Southern California and executive director of the Center for Religion and Civic Culture, which he founded with John B. Orr in 1996. Miller has been teaching courses in...

American gnostic: Harold Bloom's "Post-Christian Nation" ten years on.(Book Review)
November 1, 2002... The release in 1992 of celebrity literary critic Harold Bloom's The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation was less than the smashing success that both the author and Simon & Schuster were hoping for. Published on the...

Going to hell. (Painters of Modern Life).(Reverend McKendree Robbins Long)
November 1, 2002... After last fall's terrorist attack, the satiric newspaper The Onion printed an article titled "Hijackers Surprised to Find Selves in Hell." "I was promised I would spend eternity in Paradise," says a Qaeda terrorist, "but instead, I am fed...

The other Warhol.(Biography)
November 1, 2002... In Los Angeles, the Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA) recently closed a monumental retrospective of the work of Andy Warhol, which consisted of over 250 paintings, drawings, sculptures, and prints. Organized by the New National Gallery in...

Litigating the good fight: how Christians can avoid a persecution complex. (At the Bar).(Book Review)
November 1, 2002... Stories of hostility against Christians outside the United States have a way of putting problems at home in perspective. The deadly August attacks by Islamic terrorists on a Christian boarding school and a Christian hospital in Pakistan...

"What is written in the law?".
November 1, 2002... How to bring faith and learning together? The bookshelves in my office overflow with the output of hundreds of Christian scholars who have reflected on this question, whether in the broadest terms or with respect to specific disciplines, and...

How the monkey got his tail. (Sciencepages).
November 1, 2002... According to Darwinism, biological evolution proceeds without discernible plan or purpose. To be sure, biological evolution produces things that look planned or purposed. But what underlies Darwinian evolution ultimately is a blind mechanical...