I found this very interesting. I've been reading Walter Brueggeman's The Prophetic Imagination, which talks quite a bit about the idea of empires (Egypt, Rome, Babylon, and Solomon) freezing time into an eternal now. Fascinating stuff. I highly recommend Brueggemman if you haven't read him yet.

I've been pretty well glued to the news from Ukraine, thus my lack of blogging. I've gotten a few emails from friends in Ukraine in the last day or so letting me know that things are tense but alright so far. I really don't know what to expect to see. I think perhaps the most likely thing at this point is a revote with a bit more transparency, but who knows. The idea of Yanukovich just ceding the election seems a bit too much to ask for.

A thoughtful article on personality tests by Malcolm Gladwell. Gladwell, who writes for the New Yorker, is the author of The Tipping Point, which I just finished this week and highly recommend. There are plenty of other interesting looking article on his website, so poke aound.

I've gotten about 30 calls this week from people trying to set me up with credit card payment systems. If I get one more I think I'll scream. Got an ad in the mail about it today too. There must have been some big event (some legal change as a result of the visa/mc v Walmart suit?) that kicked this off, but it sure is annoying. Anyone else having this problem?

It seems like this story really needs a punchline, or at least a moral.

One of my high school friends--which is to say someone currently in high school, not someone I went to school with--has started a "guys' movie night" at our church. I think this was the third or fourth week, but it was the first one I was able to attend. I'll give you a clue about the film we saw, it had a magic fish, and the line "love and hate are two horns on the same goat".

Unfortunately, that phrase is easily googleable, so you could find out pretty quickly that I'm referring to the 1958 Kirk Douglas pic, The Vikings.

Kudos to Christina for finding this great Jerusalem Post article on a roadmap to peace.

I really like this line of argument. As I have been thinking about the issue of marriage definition (and I suppose we've all been thinking about it), one of the nagging and difficult to define issues is the one of commitment. What legal forms of commitment can/should be attached to marriage? Also, if "gay marriage" begins to become a legal reality in various parts or the whole of our country, how many people will decide to become "legally gay" for the purpose of obtaining benefits of some kind? I'm afraid this will all be getting only messier over the next 20 years.

If you, like us, are not entirely sure what to do for Thanksgiving this year, here's an alternative which involves very little wear on your oven or teeth.

Today in my reading queue I got to a book on ecumenicalism and utopianism (forget the exact title, by one Peter Beyerhaus. I found it on a sale rack one day and it looked well worth the 88 cents. Beyehaus is a German evangelical theologian (how many Theologians have both Tubingen and Trinity (Deerfield, IL) on thier resumes?) and missiologist who has been an eyewitness to many of the ecumencial missions conferences of the last 40 years. It seems that the book is about the split which has developed in the ecumenical movement between the conciliarists and the evangelicals. I diecided to look up his name on google top see what I could see. The top response in English shocked me once I started into it. Apparently (really) vast conspiracy theories are not limited to politics (though if you stick with it you will find the standard Rockefeller/CFR references of course).

I forgot to mention that I enjoyed meeting this fellow a couple weeks back. Very interesting person.

Quite an article here on environmentalism and economics.

I'm not sure if this is a reversal of the early Christians under Rome or the story of Daniel. What do you think?

A little election day humor to lighten things up.

Been at a Piano Technicians Guild conference in High Point for the last two days. Fortunately its close enough to commute. I've learned a lot so far, but I'm starting to see why people hate business travel. The highlight so far was the Kawai rep. showing this video in a class on voicing. (Go ahead and ask what voicing is. I dare you)

There seems to be a certain sort of idiocy floating around our reading american public these days with which I am pretty well baffled. I refer to those who think that a novel which is long is badly written just for the fact of being long. I encountered this yet once again today. Just having finished Richerd Russo's amazing novel, Empire Falls, a Pulitzer prize winner, no less, I turn to amazon.com to see if others were as impressed as I was. You can click on the link yourself, but I'll save you the trouble by saying that one "reviewer" thought it somehow relevant to point out that the book had 480 pages in it, and suggested that My Russo should have hired an editor. It is probably fortunate that most books are paginated as otherwise the reviewer probably would not have been able to count all the way up to 480.

I suppose this is all just part of the short attention span syndrome plaguing our once highly literate nation. Nearly every long novel I have enjoyed had gotten this treatment from readers writing reviews at amazon. For myself I always feel cheated when I buy a short book, since it seems the price per page is much higher. I guess I'm just cheap.

Anyhow, the Russo book really impressed me. My only previous experience with him was the film adaptation of Nobody's Fool, which I also enjoyed quite a bit. Russo seems to have quite a way of seeing into the hearts of his characters, and of writing about a place full of people who seem more real than the people you really know. I felt that way about Robertson Davies as well, which makes this a very high comparison in my book (so to speak).

Looks like the anglicans aren't the only ones in the news this week.

A Brief Word on Morality and Fiction Occasioned by Watching Ingmar Bergman's The Shame

I just want to go on the record as saying that I think that it is good for fiction to be moral. By that I mean that it is good for a story to illustrate one or more moral principles, and not only that, but that many moral principles can only be illustrated through fiction. Those of us who call ourselves Christians should be able to understand this since Jesus used stories in just such a way.

This idea is counter to much of the direction of 20th century fiction writing. I'm no expert on the history of novels, so I can only be approximate here. If one reads the victorian authors it is easy to see that the authors were promoting certain ideals. In Trollope's The Warden, e.g., the main conflict of the story circles around the idea of whether recipients of charity can or should be content with what they have received, whether it is proper to receive money for administering charity, and the corrosive effects of rumor, slander, tale-telling, etc on relationships of all sorts. Now, I have mentioned to you some of these moral questions, but they are not the sort of things that can be understood well and properly outside the realm of actual relationships. This is something fiction can approximate. By having characters with relationships to each other, with histories and places in life, one can this image how morality actually works.

Sometime around the turn of the 20th century, many novelists decided that this was not what fiction should do, that it should just picture life as it really is. Thus H. L. Mencken scoffing at the idea of those who always are trying to improve humanity. Admittedly, much of 20th century fiction simply takes a back door approach, masquerading as a "realistic" picture but working to illustrate principles the novelist has in mind, or perhaps even principles which are subconsious to the author.

Much more and more intelligent discussion along these lines can be found in Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue (the section on Jane Austen), and Stanley Hauerwas' essay "The Novel as School of Virtue" in Dispatches From the Front. All of this brings me back to watching the Bergman film.

Shame, or The Shame (the article is missing on the box, but included on the title screen) is a fictitious story of a fictitious war in a fictitious European country. When it started I assumed it was WWII (and certainly it has plenty of echoes of that war), but it became clear that that was not the real context. Since Bergman seems to have wanted to make a film about "war", rather than a particular war, this ambiguity was effective. It follows the lives of a young, childless married couple who are non-combatants. The film systematically tracks how the war destroys their relationships with their neighbors, with each other, their livelihood, their property and savings, and, most importantly I think, their character.

This, it seems to me, is all proper for a war film to do. This is how fiction "tells the truth" in ways that other media cannot. For me this makes Shame a better film than, e.g., Saving Private Ryan. The latter film is much more realistic, is bound to a real setting in a real time and based, if I remember correctly, on a "true story". It also illustrates some of these principles in its own way, and some others as well. But the realism seems to create some ambiguities. We all know that WWII had a purpose (defeat the evil Nazis), and thus war could be seen as an evil which must be endured to achieve that end. So perhaps the war was good. In Shame, it is never clear what the purpose of the war is, or even if there is one. This seems to tell the story of many non-combatants more accurately. They did not ask for war, did not want to participate in it, and in nearly every way were victims of forces entirely beyond their control.

Weird. Slate ran a story two days ago about who some novelists are planning to vote for. Not much worth reading there, so I won't link it. Lets just say out of about 25 novelists, 22 said they would vote for Kerry. With each novelist there was an amazon link to his latest novel. Well, some doofus went to the three Bush voters and wrote negative book reviews. All on the same day. With no comments about the books. Someone else has already pointed this out in response reviews, since it wasn't very hard to figure out.

kinda funny