Movie Watch: January

Posted on February 1, 2024 by smellincoffee

Movie watching has become more of a pasttime for me in the last year or so, so I suspect posting a list at the end of the year would be….ungainly. A buddy of mine and I have been watching 2 movies a week for the last few months. Bold titles were particular favorites.

The Graduate, 1969.  Dustin Hoffman doesn’t know what he wants until the mother of what he wants seduces him.  I was not prepared for pool-casual Mr. Feeny. Mr. Feeny? Mr. F-f-f-f-f-eeeny?!

Midnight in Paris, 2011. A beautiful film about an American writer who goes to Paris to socialize with his shallow fiance’s  materialist parents. (His fiance is Regina George, which is like, so fetch?)   He falls in love with the city and wants to be a novelist living there, like his literary heroes Hemingway and Stein.  As the gulf in values between him and his fiance becomes more and more obvious, he begins going on walks in the Paris night and finds himself welcomed into 1920s Paris,  talking with members of the Lost Generation.  

Un Chien Andalou, 1929.  One of the characters in Midnight was an avante-garde filmmaker. I forget his name, but this is one of his films. There were no subtitles so I have no idea what this movie was about, but its camera work reminded me a little bit of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. There were no Andalusian dogs despite the title, and I for one felt cheated. However, the film year nicely brings my average down. (Minimum goal: keep average film year under 2000. Ideal: keep it under 1985.) 

Repo Man, 1984. Emilio Estevez plays a frustrated punk who takes on a job repossessing vehicles, and then there are aliens. Fun early eighties period piece.

Margin Call, 2011.   Unexpectedly compelling for a movie that takes place over the course of two days, all of which involve men in suits staring at computer screens and talking about the bubble popping that will lead to the Great Recession.   Great acting by Jeremy Irons, Kevin Spacey, and Zachary  Quinto.

Moneyball, 2011.    Brad Pitt is Billy Beane, a player-turned-scout-turned-manager, who hires a real number-cruncher to make the most of a limited budget for the Oakland A’s  – and has an amazing, record-breaking season. Lots of actual baseball people in the casting, along with Hollywood types like Pitt and Jonah Hill.

Before Sunrise, 1995. Interesting movie about two young people who meet on a train, hit it off, and decide to throw their plans out the window and spent the day and night exploring Vienna and falling deeply in love.

Airplane, 1980. Yes, I’d truly never seen this before – but so many lines of it have permeated into pop culture that I felt like I’d heard half the dialogue already.  Thoroughly entertaining.

Go Back to China, 2019.   A trust-fund baby with a serious spending problem has her cards cut off after her father in China realizes she’s blown through half of her fund. He forces her to return to China and learn the family business (toymaking), where she grows as a person, meets her family, learns to appreciate Shenzhen etc.  Enjoyable, if predictable.

Love and Death, 1974. Woody Allen has relationship problems. Napoleon invades Russia. 

Ayaneh, 2019. Short film (15 minus) about a young Afghan woman who meets a young Swedish woman while swimming and develops feelings for her. The feelings prompt Ayaneh to begin pushing back against her family’s strict customs – wearing a western-style swimming suit in the pool instead of a full-body one –  and begin growing into herself. I liked that aspect of the film, but her family is treated as stock villains instead of people who would be wrestling with their own complicated feelings – loving Ayaneh, but not knowing what to do with how she is acting.

The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry, 2022.  Raj Kuthrapali has left the world of physics to run a bookstore with his wife, but now she’s dead and he has a drinking problem. Then, his most valuable book is stolen and someone deposits a toddler in his store.  An enjoyable adaptation of the novel, though it has pacing/development issues, and Amelia is miscast as a standard-issue romcom hottie and not as a hippie with a mop of unruly hair and a passion for wearing rain boots in all weathers like she was in the book.   The use of David Arquette as the police chief was unintentionally hilarious, though, given that he was a easy-going and slightly bumbling sheriff’s deputy in Scream. 

The Seven Samurai, 1954. A very influential Japanese film in which a village frequently raided by bandits hires seven samurai to defend them. The  version I saw was the full, close to four hour edition.   It’s a very memorable film – visually striking, well acted,  and well directed. Lots of strong characters.

Fallen Leaves (  Kuolleet lehde, 2023), a Finnish film about two depressed people who meet and decide to become an item despite being repeatedly fired and demoralized by the Russo-Ukrainian war. Interesting visuals  and storytelling, especially the nature of time– -costumes and props make this seem like a film Out of Time, with antique clocks, jukeboxes, and films in use, and a deliberate contradiction between the official calendar date and the news broadcasts, which varied by two years –  but it was not exactly exciting and inspiring.  I have never seen a Finnish film before. 

National Lampoon’s European Vacation, 1985. Entertaining enough.  Will remember it chiefly for the guest stars like Eric Idle, The Major from Fawlty Towers, and Gladhand from West Side Story. 

It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, 1963.   A dying man tells some people where he buried some money. Absolute insanity ensues with cameos from the Three Stooges, Jerry Lewis, and Don Knotts.   

Wall Street. Charlie Sheen is a young broker who wants to make it big, and discovers opportunity by working with the ruthless Gordan Gekko, played expertly by Michael Douglas. Charlie’s faith in Gordan is shattered when he realizes that Gordan is playing him and will destroy the lives of the working men he grew up with by liquidating their company for a quick buck.

The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, 1976. A night club owner celebrates his final mortgage payment by a night on the town in which he incurs significant gambling debts that the mob makes him clear by knocking off  some high-ranking Chinese bookie.  

Red Heat, 1988. Ahhhnold is a Soviet cop sent to America to chase a Russian who has been selling cocaine in the Soviet Union. He teams up with John Belushi’s brother and a lot of people are shot.  (They were going to use John Belushi himself, but nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!)

Red, 2010. Bruce Willis is a retired CIA agent who is targeted for lethal retirement but survives. After discovering that several of his former colleagues have also been retired by bullet,  he and a few of the old guard team up to figure out what the hell is going on and return fire.  Turns out the CIA is being used to knock off people who could shed light on the vice president’s participation in a wee massacre down in Guatamala a few years back. Refreshingly cynical, with the CIA and FBI goonie boys being the villain for almost the entirety of the film.  In addition to the main cast (Bruce Willis, Morgan Freeman),   Richard Dreyfuss appears as a corrupt defense contractor.  Quite funny, too. 


Tokyo Drifter, 1966.   A crime/action movie about a yakuza hitman who, with his boss, is trying to go legitimate. Unfortunately, their former yakuza rivals won’t let them retire so easily, and the former hitman Tetsu is forced to roam from city to city singing his own theme song. The camera work & visuals are very interesting, especially at the beginning where saturation and contrast are played with for artistic effect.

Posted in General | Tagged | 3 Comments

Weird Things Customers Say in Bookshops

Posted on January 31, 2024 by smellincoffee

This book is exactly what it says on the tin: a collection of odd remarks overheard in bookstores, numbering a little over a hundred pages. If you are familiar with the Overheard in New York / Overheard in the Office / etc series of webpages, it’s like that but entirely PG-rated. The overwhelming majority of the quotes are from British bookshops, with a few more from other Commonwealth countries and one or two from American stores. There’s not much to review here: it’s a very casual kind of book, the sort one picks up for a few laughs now and again, with no need to sit and focus on reading it. There are some consistencies in the books chosen: wholly irrational customers, people confuse the bookstore with a library or a garden shop or a cafe or anything other than a bookstore, and my favorite — authors who come into the bookstore to look for or market their books. Some of the humor is directly book related (customers who struggle with remembering titles/plots), some of it is the kind of insanity one encounters from customers in any public-facing job, and some it is just assorted human randomness/goofiness/weirdness

Posted in Reviews | Tagged , | 7 Comments

January 2024 in Review

Posted on January 31, 2024 by smellincoffee

Welcome to the first monthly wrapup of the New Year. My preference in January is to do a grab-bag of topics, a kind of teaser for the year to come. I was….slightly successful in that, since we touched on little politics, a little science, a little southern lit, etc, but the month was mostly marked by fiction of all things: first, a series of short novels about human connection, each one more charming than the other, and then a silly series about the Republic of Texas getting involved in World War 2 in 1940. 

Science Survey:
Distracted by Alabama: Tangled Threads of Natural History, Local History, and Folklore, John Seay Brown Jr (Wildcard, I suppose — a mix!)

Reading Dixie:
Distracted by Alabama: Tangled Threads of Natural History, Local History, and Folklore, John Seay Brown Jr
My Selma, Willie Mae Brown

TBR Cleanup
In Search of Zarathrustra, Paul Kriwaczek
Human Scale Revisited, Kirkpatrick Sale

Coming up in February…

I’m currently working on two bits of SF and one of Jane Jacob’s last books, and there’s another book I’d lost interest in that I will probably return to just because the title amuses me. You’ll know it when you see it it, trust me. February 14 will mark Ash Wednesday, so don’t be surprised to see Lenten reading starting to appear.

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Texas in the Med

Posted on January 30, 2024 by smellincoffee
“Personally, Mein Führer,” said Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop, “I found it perfectly disgusting. Boasting about the murder of children is hardly the mark of a warrior, and I believe that Germany should distance itself from such acts.”

Well, things is gettin’ interesting around these parts. All of Gaul France is divided into three parts: Nazi Germany occupies part, the tyrant Petain who knocked off the democratic president before Hitler invaded rules Vichy France; and then there’s a few colonies and ships who call themselves the Free French. Petain is inexplicably still obsessed with Texas and arranges for a heinous attack on Texan soil, attacking children during Christmas parades and killing three thousand through a terrorist attack. Although the Texans seethe for vengeance and begin making plans for obliterating a French city through thermobaric bombs, some cooler heads — and British allies — point out that this is obviously Petain’s attempt to drive a wedge into the Allied camp, which constitutes the United Kingdom, Texas, and the Free French. Presently, they’re all coordinating to kick the Italians out of Africa. Texas in the Med saves this series from drifting too closely into the wake of real history, both through its plot developments (LBJ dies, Rommel lives) and through the frequent use of weapons and equipment that weren’t as common in the war our history books know. Texans make heavy use of thermobaric bombs and auto-gyros, for instance. I found a video of one operating from the 1930s, and they’re fascinating. Whatever the weaknesses of the storytelling — Petain being obsessed with Texas when there are literally German boots in France is absurd – fans of obscure military tech and wild WW2 variants will find enjoyable bits here. This book was published at the end of December 2023, so presumably it will be a year or so before we see what changes that infamous day brings.

Posted in Reviews | Tagged , | 6 Comments

Top Ten Authors From 2023 I Want to Read More Of

Posted on January 30, 2024 by smellincoffee

Today’s TTT is authors from 2023 who were new to us. But first, a tease!

CUSTOMER: Doesn’t it bother you, being surrounded by books all day? I
think I’d be paranoid they were all going to jump off the shelves and kill
me.
BOOKSELLER: . . .

Weird Things Customers Say in Bookshops

And now, authors who I read for the first time last year, but will read again..

Gordon S. Wood, a historian with a focus on early America.

Rhett Bruno & Jaime Castle. I include these two together because they did two collaborations in a dark-fantasy western series called Black Badge. They also have some SF.

Sarah Ruden. A classicist who did an appraisal of Paul, and who has produced her own translation of the Gospels.

Dan Jones. A medieval historian, who I introduced myself to via his two most-outlying works: a novel and an interpretation of a medieval poem.

Will Storr and Jon Ronson. Both journalists who focus on ‘weird’ topics like ghosts, cults, etc.

Fredrik Backman. Found his Man Called Ove via the American movie based on it, and enjoyed it enormously.

Kristin Hannah. I read her Four Winds, a novel of the Dust Bowl, and was blown away. (No pun intended.)

Lee Child, Jim Butcher. Both authors of series that have a big following, but which I was just investigating. 

Posted in General | Tagged , | 9 Comments

The Lone Star, the Tricolor, and the Swastika

Posted on January 29, 2024 by smellincoffee
. “LOOK OUT FROGS, HERE COMES LEEEEROOOOOY JEENKINNNNS!”

Despite the fact that France is technically at war with Nazi Germany, a secret society known as the Order of the Black Pillar have dedicated themselves to destabilizing the Third Republic so that their thirst for vengeance against the Republic of Texas can be slaked. Nearly a century ago, France invaded Texas and behaved barbarously, and in the war that followed saw virtually all of her army in Mexico destroyed. To humiliated by the Germans was one thing, but by cowboys and Indians? For decades, the Order has developed their power within France, infiltrating various organs of government. Now, the time has come to make their mark.Scratching her bruised ego, France continues to harass Texan shipping on the open waters, and after an attempt by the French navy to capture a convoy of oil tankers ends with half of the French fleet destroyed, open warfare quickly becomes inevitable and the course of what would become World War 2 changes dramatically. The Lone Star, the Tricolor, and the Swastika is an unexpectedly strong sequel to Texas at the Coronation, with an enormous amount of naval and air military operations. It’s still checked with grammar issues (“it’s” is consistently used for “its”) and pulp-fiction villainy, but the new theater of war and the dramatic potential consequences for what might follow. The military-technical parts are very interesting, frequently driving me to google for information on various ships, torpedo designs, airplanes, etc. Unfortunately, like Turtledove’s War that Came Early, the book’s ending is veering strongly right back into the path of normal history, despite elements existing that could have mixed things up. I’ll drop a line below on that for those who are curious.     

SPOILER! SPOILER! DIVE! DIVE!

So, Petain comes to power after the president is killed in a bombing. France then does a sneak-attack on Texas and bombs one of its major coastal cities with both conventional explodey-bombs and poison-gas bombs that kill thousands of civilians. France insists that Britain join it in prosecuting a war against Texas per their mutual-defense treaty,  or else it will make a separate peace with Germany.  Britain says “Not quite our cup of tea, thanks”, France begins its ceasefire, and Texas declares war on both France and Germany for some reason. I realize Hitler probably still wants Alsace-Lorraine, but if France is not opposing its movements in Poland, why would he want to waste men, time, and resources attacking it – -especially given Petain’s potential cultivation as an ally? And why is Texas going to war with Germany?

Posted in Reviews | Tagged , | 3 Comments

Shtetl Days

Posted on January 29, 2024 by smellincoffee

“We will do, and we will hear”. Such was the people’s reply when Moses descended from Mt. Sinai and presented the Ten Commandments to the Hebrews. There’s an inversion in that statement, alien to our modern age: imagine doing a thing before understanding why But, as Shtetl Days indicates, sometimes the beauty of a thing cannot be appreciate until it is engaged with. This is a novella set in roughly the present day, but in a world where Nazi Germany was victorious in what it calls the War of Retribution, and apparently successful in destroying most of the Jewish people. It is so successful, in fact, that it’s created a living-history village where tourists can come see how mid-20th century Poles and Jews lived, populated by method actors living as though they really are Poles and Jews. Veit Harlan, for instances, spends the majority of his time living as Jakub Shlayfer, an observant Jewish tinkerer. He talks in Yiddish to his fellow actors in the village, he argues Talmud, he says his prayers before every meal. Some actors are so committed to the part that they have themselves circumcised. Most of the actors are so immersed in their parts that they tend to live in a shadow of them even in their offtime, defaulting to Yiddish, thinking about and discussing Torah, and even saying a prayer over their food reflexively. The story follows Veit/Jakub as he rests after the annual pogram reenactment — in which the Polish actors begin rioting and beating the Jewish actors and even burning the Jewish quarter, although the only ‘actors’ who are killed are convicts who are introduced into the act for the purposes of being executed – and begins reflecting on the strange way he relates to being Jakub, on how what we think about and do shapes us. More interestingly, he admits to himself that he likes being Jakub more than he likes being himself: he likes living in a cozy, tight-knit community, likes living in a constant attitude of mindfulness and thankfulness, likes the dancing order of liturgy. What does it say of the Reich, that it had to destroy such things, such a people? His ‘life’ as Jakob isn’t clean and orderly as his life as Veit — he’s poorer in many ways — and yet there is a richness in this little village that surpasses those of the best of the Reich’s cities. I haven’t read Turtledove in nearly ten years because he’d gotten very lazy (The War that Came Early and Supervolcano were enough to put me off reading him altogether), but the premise of this one seemed interesting enough to give it a shot. I’m glad I did: it really brought to mind a quote from Narnia that I’ll post below a quotation from the story.

You needed to ignore the funny clothes. You needed to forget about the dirt and the crowding and the poverty. Those were all incidentals. When it came to living with other people, when it came to finding an anchor for your own life… He nodded once, to himself. This was better. Even if you couldn’t talk about it much, maybe especially because you couldn’t, this was better. It had taken a while for Veit to realize it, but he liked the way he lived in the village when he was Jakub Shlayfer better than he liked how he lived away from it when he was only himself.

Shtetl Days

“One word, Ma’am,” he said, coming back from the fire; limping, because of the pain. “One word. All you’ve been saying is quite right, I shouldn’t wonder. I’m a chap who always liked to know the worst and then put the best face I can on it. So I won’t deny any of what you said. But there’s one more thing to be said, even so. Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things—trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that’s a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We’re just babies making up a game, if you’re right. But four babies playing a game can make a play world which licks your real world hollow. That’s why I’m going to stand by the play world. I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia. So, thanking you kindly for our supper, if these two gentlemen and the young lady are ready, we’re leaving your court at once and setting out in the dark to spend our lives looking for Overland. Not that our lives will be very long, I should think; but that’s a small loss if the world’s as dull a place as you say.”

The Silver Chair, C.S. Lewis
Posted in Reviews | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Texas at the Coronation

Posted on January 28, 2024 by smellincoffee

The year is 1937, and on the eve of His Majesty King George VI’s coronation, a naval review is to be held in the United Kingdom — and the president of The Republic of Texas shall be in attendance, the first time Texas has ventured beyond its immediate neighborhood. Of course, Europe has come a-calling to Texas before: France invaded in the 1860s, resulting in a vicious war that has destroyed any chance of relations in the half-century since. So, an aging cruiser is dispatched to Europe, and after being night-bombed by Klansmen outside of Virginia who were offended by the Republic’s racial egalitarianism and subsequently hazing the French, they arrive. And…that’s it. That’s the story.

This is an odd…novel. It feels strange to call it a novel because so little happens: it’s almost entirely dialogue, which is half-discussion of navy and airplane specs, and half-info dump. The latter is useful for the reader, giving us some context: evidently, in this timeline, the Republic of Texas never pursued entry into the Union, was invaded by France in the 1860s, and has recently annoyed the Germans by encouraging Jewish engineers and the like to immigrate to the Lone Star Republic. Well, if Germany doesn’t want them, warum nicht?  I like the premise, though I don’t know that parts of the history make sense: Klansmen in the 1930s are anachronistic, since the Second Klan of the 1920s peaked in 1925 and dramatically collapsed after its leader was put on trial for raping, murdering, and trying to eat a woman, and I imagine the Civil War in this timeline played out rather differently. (No Sam Bell Hood!) Things abroad seem more or less normal: Roosevelt is in the White House, the right men are in the US Navy, that sort of thing: the French have a more difficult diplomatic position, as even the Brits and Japanese like annoying them. The villain characters are very villainy, more cartoons than anything. However, the premise is interesting enough — especially given that the second book appears to be about France attacking Texas even though it’s springtime for Hitler in Germany — that I will continue exploring.

Posted in Reviews | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Short rounds: human scale and bad religion

Posted on January 27, 2024 by smellincoffee

This week I’ve been finishing two works of nonfiction: Kirkpatrick Sale’s Human Scale Revisited and Ross Douhat’s Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics. 

Human Scale Revisited is, as its title implies, an update to Sale’s original Human Scale,  which argued that everything has a limit beyond which further growth will tend toward its destruction. He begins the book first by re-introducing that concept (“The Beanstalk Principle”), and then exploring specific applications in society and technology, from probing the optimum size for human cities to the enormous promise that decentralized/distributed power via solar panels offers, wrapping up with a critical look at the ‘need’ for states. Some of this is updated from the original book, like the study of how organizations gain in function, peak, and then become encumbered by that size, and some strikes me as new: I don’t remember the essentially anarchist arguments of the latter third of the book, nor Sale’s delightful support of movements to re-localize their own politics. Sale is one of those authors who, like Bill Kauffman or Ed Abbey, cannot be boxed up, politically: he refers to himself as an eco-leftist, but his critique of government and analysis of big-biz monopolies could come straight from the Austrian school, and he regards populism as a natural expression of peoples’ discontent with being dominated by big business and big government.I enjoyed this thoroughly, but I’ve been highly sympathetic to localism and Sale’s critiques of the Cult of Big for over ten years: before I ever read this book I’d written a post called “The Emperor Drives an AT-AT” expressing my own thoughts on the subject.)  I’m definitely going to be reading more Sale.

Bad Religion: How We Became a A Nation of Heretics addresses the sudden fall from influence of mainline Protestantism, and the explosive growth of pseudo-Christianities like the prosperity gospel, as well as Christianities that effectively worship Uncle Sam instead of Jesus The fundamental shift is one of Christianity becoming ego-oriented: – not ego as in “Benny Hinn is the greatest”, but rather on Christianity being about one’s personal feelings, so that a religion that used to both bind and shock, comfort and provoke, instead becomes an exercise in self-fixation. Although this is obviously linked to the explosive rise of consumerism, Douhat also reflects on Gnosticism at length, given its orientation toward the ego, and points to the explosive rise of narcissism. There’s a lot of teeth in this book, from Douhat’s criticisms of liberal Christianity, which has so watered down its message that there’s no reason to go to church save for feeling nice and being sociable, to his attack on politically-oriented Christianity, both left and right, that has become distracted by power, and deceived itself into thinking it is possible to build paradise on Earth. There’s a lot of food for though here, though I’m not confident I’ve adequately digested it. It’s one I picked up during a $1 sale a few years back, though, so I may revisit it.

Highlights:

In their quest to be inclusive and tolerant and up-to-date, the accommodationists imitated his scandalously comprehensive love, while ignoring his scandalously comprehensive judgments. They used his friendship with prostitutes as an excuse to ignore his explicit condemnations of fornication and divorce. They turned his disdain for the religious authorities of his day and his fondness for tax collectors and Roman soldiers into a thin excuse for privileging the secular realm over the sacred. While recognizing his willingness to dine with outcasts and converse with nonbelievers, they deemphasized the crucial fact that he had done so in order to heal them and convert them—ridding the leper of his sickness, telling the Samaritans that soon they would worship in spirit and truth, urging the woman taken in adultery to go, and from now on sin no more.

Given the climate of the 1960s and ’70s, these choices were understandable. But the more the accommodationists emptied Christianity of anything that might offend the sensibilities of a changing country, the more they lost any sense that what they were engaged in really mattered, or was really, truly true. In the process, they burned their candle at both ends, losing their more dogmatic parishioners to more fervent congregations and their doubters to the lure of sleeping in on Sundays.

“Liberal religion is adept at releasing energy,” James Hitchcock wrote in a 1977 essay, “freeing people from established obligations and prohibitions, but not at refocusing it.”

At its best, the prosperity gospel can be well-meaning, openhanded, and personally empowering; and it thrives as few other forms of Christian faith do in the soil of modernity. But like many forms of liberal Christianity, the marriage of God and Mammon half-expects somehow to undo the Fall, through the beneficence of Providence and the magic of the free market. In its emphasis on the virtues of prosperity, it risks losing something essential to Christianity—skipping on to Easter, you might say, without lingering at the foot of the cross.

An understanding that there can be strength in weakness and defeat; an appreciation for the idea that there might be greater virtue in poverty and renunciation, suffering and purgation, than there is in abundance and “delight”; a hard-earned wisdom about the seductions and corruptions associated with worldliness, power, and wealth. Shorn of these aspects of the faith, Christianity risks becoming an appendage to Americanism—a useful metaphysical thread for a capitalist society’s social fabric, but a faith that’s bound, perhaps fatally, to the rise and fall of the gross domestic product.

The narcissist may find it easy to say no to others, but he’s much less likely to say no to himself—and nothing defines the last decade of American life more than our inability to master our own impulses and desires. A nation of narcissists turns out to be a nation of gamblers and speculators, gluttons and gym obsessives, pornographers and Ponzi schemers, in which household debt rises alongside public debt, and bankers and pensioners and automakers and unions all compete to empty the public trough.

From our Hallmark cards to our divorce courts, the American way of love has become therapeutic to its very core. It emphasizes feelings over duties, it’s impatient with institutional structures of any sort, and it’s devoted to the premise that the God or Goddess Within should never, ever have to settle.

Yet many conservative Christians often make a similar mistake; they emphasize the most hot-button (and easily politicized) moral issues while losing sight of the tapestry as a whole. There are seven deadly sins, not just one, and Christianity’s understanding of marriage and chastity is intimately bound to its views on gluttony and avarice and pride.

We are waiting, not for another political savior or television personality, but for a Dominic or a Francis, an Ignatius or a Wesley, a Wilberforce or a Newman, a Bonhoeffer or a Solzhenitsyn. Only sanctity can justify Christianity’s existence; only sanctity can make the case for faith; only sanctity, or the hope thereof, can ultimately redeem the world.

Posted in General, Politics and Civic Interest, Religion and Philosophy, Reviews | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments

Teaser Tuesday from Bad Religion

Posted on January 23, 2024 by smellincoffee

A tease from Ross Douhat’s Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics.

The way orthodoxy synthesizes the New Testament’s complexities has forced churchgoers of every prejudice and persuasion to confront a side of Jesus that cuts against their own assumptions. A rationalist has to confront the supernatural Christ, and a pure mystic the wordly, eat-drink-and-be-merry Jesus, with his wedding feasts and fish fries. A Reaganite conservative has to confront the Jesus who railed against the rich; a post-sexual revolution liberal, the Jesus who forbade divorce. There is something to please almost everyone in the orthodox approach to the Gospels, but something to challenge them as well. A choose your own Jesus mentality, by contrast, encourages spiritual seekers to screen out discomfiting parts of the New Testament and focus only on whichever Christ they find most cogenial. And our religious culture is now dominated by figures who flatter this impulse, in all its myriad forms — conservative and liberal, conspiratorial and mystical, eco-friendly and consumerist, and everything in between.”

Posted in General | Tagged , | 2 Comments