Books & Culture articles from September 2007

Books & Culture archives from September 2007

Paul Hiebert: a life remembered.(RIP)(Obituary)
September 1, 2007... Paul Gordon Hiebert, Distinguished Professor of Mission and Anthropology at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, arguably the world's leading missiological anthropologist, died on March 11 of cancer. He was 74. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] ...

Future contingency.(STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND)(God's Continent: Christianity, Islam, and Europe's Religious Crisis )
September 1, 2007... Elsewhere in this issue (p. 23, to be precise), you'll find Greg Cootsona's review of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a Wall Street trader whose previous book was the 2004 release Fooled by...

Simply stay.(Caring for Mother: A Daughter's Long Goodbye)(Book review)
September 1, 2007... My father turns seventy this year, and my mother has survived breast cancer. While they are both still vigorous enough to chase grandkids around for an entire day, their aging is becoming a more frequent topic of discussion among our family....

Exercised over "free exercise".(POLIticS)(Joseph P. Viteritti's book, The Last Freedom: Religion from the Public School to the Public Square)(Critical essay)
September 1, 2007... The waning phase of the acrimonious Bush era features a newly aggressive secularism, reflected in bestsellers that cast sophomoric scorn upon believers of all faiths. According to a New York Times Book Review critic, it looks like America's...

Banking on it.(POLIticS)(Robert Wright and David Cowen's book, Financial Founding Fathers: The Men Who Made America Rich)(Critical essay)
September 1, 2007... Every year or two, we are reintroduced by our leading historians to one or more of the nation's founding fathers. One year John Adams and his wife Abigail came as a revelation, another brought a new slant on Thomas Jefferson. Even more than...

Making biscuits.(Long Time Leaving: Dispatches From Up South; Dream Not of Other Worlds: Teaching in a Segregated Elementary School, 1970)(Book review)
September 1, 2007... How would you feel if your 12-year-old ran around the house singing, "I'm Selling My Pork Chops, but I'm Giving My Gravy Away"? Personally, I'm a little nervous about it, though I admire a child with entrepreneurial spirit. It seems to me...

The joy of texts.(J. Harold Ellens' book, Sex in the Bible: A New Consideration)(Critical essay)
September 1, 2007... Whenever someone starts talking about "God's way of X" or "what the Bible says about X," I'm tempted to turn and run. Especially when X involves food or sex. It's very hard not to read our own opinions back into the Bible, picking and...

The guy in the wheelchair.(science pages)(Stephen Hawking)(Critical essay)
September 1, 2007... In my freshman astronomy class, filled with unwilling non-science majors unhappily meeting an unappreciated general education requirement, I show the PBS video series "Stephen Hawking's Universe." The script for the series was well done, the...

In Extremistan.(Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable)(Book review)
September 1, 2007... One impossibly sunny September day in Manhattan, I was making my way to work, and--appropriately enough for a New Yorker--dropping off dress shirts. My extremely pleasant dry cleaner eschewed the usual greeting and exclaimed, "A plane has hit...

Yeoman of the new South.(High Cotton: Four Seasons in the Mississippi Delta)(Book review)
September 1, 2007... In recent years the publishing world has seen a spate of books devoted to the proposition that history can be profitably viewed through the lens of some single commodity: salt, say, or potatoes. Gerald Helferich works hard here to make the...

The big sneeze.(Allergy: The History of a Modern Malady; Breathing Space; How Allergies Shape Our Lives and Landscapes )(Book review)
September 1, 2007... Lewis Thomas, the noted physician and essayist, mused openly on the allergic tendency of our species. He found the condition without teleological merit, and declared it a "mistake." Now two books--Mark Jackson's Allergy: The History if a...

Music in God's world.
September 1, 2007... For the Christian, the physical world we inhabit can never be seen as just there, a naked fact, to be treated as a neutral boundary or (worse) as something that is basically an impediment to a fulfilling life. The cosmos did not have to be....

The dance of thought.(Georges Liebert's Nietzsche and Music)(Critical essay)
September 1, 2007... "Nietzsche experienced music as authentic reality and colossal power. Music penetrated to the core of his being, and it meant everything to him." (1) That Rudiger Safranski opens his monumental biography by focusing on music should almost...

A bigger tool kit.(rock group Tool's album, '10,000 days')(Sound recording review)
September 1, 2007... In 2006, the heavy "prog rock" band Tool released their fourth full-length CD, 10,000 Days. Since Tool puts out new material every five years or so, each release tends to be a big event. The band has been touring nonstop since May 2006 with...

9/11, 1857.('Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows' by Will Bagley)(Critical essay)
September 1, 2007... On Friday, September 11, 1857, a Mormon settler named John D. Lee used a white flag to approach a besieged emigrant train in southwestern Utah. Unexpectedly, the pioneers had traveled into a maelstrom. As they made their way from Arkansas to...

The Jesus diet.(Eugene Peterson's books, 'Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading' and 'The Jesus Way: A Conversation on the Ways That Jesus Is the Way')(Critical essay)
September 1, 2007... Here's a story I'm not proud of. Once, in an effort to teach Marshall McLuhan's concept of integral awareness in my communication theory class, I put up a big-screen version of a Magic Eye photo. (1) It was a faux sylvan scene, lots of trees...

Theology is Stranger Than Fiction.(Stranger Than Fiction)(Movie review)
September 1, 2007... Who would have thought that Will Ferrell, master of fatuous farce and stupid stunts, could pull off a star turn in one of the most profoundly theological films of 2006? Judging from the tepid reviews of Stranger Than Fiction, not many....

Whitman the Temperance novelist.(Walter Whitman's book, Franklin Evans, or The Inebriate: A Tale of the Times)(Critical essay)
September 1, 2007... In 1842-long before his self-reinvention as the Bard of America in Leaves of Grass--an aspiring author named Walter Whitman published a novel called Franklin Evans in a New York weekly called The New World. The editor of The New World, Park...

A tabernacle in the dark.(Cormac McCarthy's book The Road)(Critical essay)
September 1, 2007... Grant, for argument, that life is pointless--that purpose and moral order are mere projection, God just a big piece of embroidery. Still, there remains this odd human genius for projecting and embroidering. We call it "adaptive," and then...

Tangy.(Stephen Owen's The Late Tang: Chinese Poetry of the Mid-Ninth Century, 827-860)(Critical essay)
September 1, 2007... [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] Li Shangyin, First Month at Chongrang House [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] Locked up tight, barred gate on gate, cased in green moss, hallways deep within, tower remote, here I pace back...

Eliot's rebellious heirs: the Confessional poets as closet modernists.(Adam Kirsch's The Wounded Surgeon: Confession and Transformation in Six American Poets)(Critical essay)
September 1, 2007... In his essay "Hamlet," T. S. Eliot not only introduced a new term to the literary-critical lexicon--objective correlative--but also performed an audacious act of literary revisionism by questioning the aesthetic merits of one of Shakespeare's...

Finding your MacBearings.(The MacBears of Bearloch)(Book review)
September 1, 2007... Excuse me, which way to the well at the world's end? If you are like C. S. Lewis, the question--even when sprung at you in such prosaic fashion--will send a pleasant shiver down your spine. But never mind that: what is the answer?...

Supper with the infinite.(Franz Wright's books, God's Silence and Earlier Poems )(Book review)
September 1, 2007... Whether in a phone suddenly gone dead or the predawn serenity of a seaside town, silence carries power. It can be terrifying in emphasizing the absence of an other, or comfortable in an immense familiarity with an other requiring no...

The youngest brother's tale.(J. K. Rowlings' book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows)(Critical essay)
September 1, 2007... A little more than a hundred years ago, a number of British educators, journalists, and intellectuals grew exercised about the reading habits of the nation's children. The particular target of their disapproval was the boy's adventure...

Water Strider.(Poem)
September 1, 2007... He walks on water with long, tensile legs skates the surface of this element leaving no ripple, no distorted clarity never breaking the surface tension quite at home in the sky mirrored under him. He is no philosopher though...