Several friends have made "what I've been reading" lists, so I thought I would too. These are the books I both started and finished reading during January (which has perhaps not been a typical reading month).
Three by Annie Dillard
Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974): this is the sort of book Madeleine L'Engle might have written if completely intoxicated by Nature and by words.
Annie Dillard, An American Childhood (1987): a very enjoyable read, though ending rather abruptly (as childhood often does).
Annie Dillard, The Writing Life (1989): I hoped some of her talent would seep through. It didn't. I must read it again.
G. K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare (1908): a classic. Rereading it in the light of the biography helped to clarify some things.
G. K. Chesterton, The Innocence of Father Brown (1911): the first of the Father Brown books, and one containing some of my favourite stories, with great lines like "On plains of opal, under cliffs cut out of pearl, you would still find a notice-board, 'Thou shalt not steal.'" and "By no stretch of fancy can the human mind connect together snuff and diamonds and wax and loose clockwork".
Other Fiction
P. G. Wodehouse, Jeeves in the Offing (1960): funny, though not my favourite Wooster/Jeeves book. Bertie's friendship with Sir Roderick Glossop seemed odd at first, but presumably follows on from the rapprochement in Thank You, Jeeves.
Jill Paton Walsh & Dorothy L. Sayers, A Presumption of Death (2002): more JPW than DLS, but an interesting wartime setting. Reading Connie Willis' Blackout/All Clear last year prompted me to re-read this. I like the scene where the two young lads hand over their work to Bletchley.
Other Nonfiction
Richard J. Mouw, Calvinism in the Las Vegas Airport (2004): the title made me want to read this years ago, but it was a little disappointing, and its exposition of Kuyperian Calvinism was more than a little unorthodox on some points.
C. H. Dodd, The Parables of the Kingdom (1935): a useful addition to the other books I've read on the subject, though there was much I disagreed with.
Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work (2009): not a Christian book, but a great discussion of the value of "working with [your] hands the thing which is good." As a former programmer (pretty much a blue-collar desk job), several statements in the book resonated.
As I said earlier, I recently listened to an interesting talk by Shai Linne on Christianity and the Arts. Linne quoted Philippians 4:8:
Finally, brothers, whatever is true (ἀληθῆ), whatever is honourable (σεμνά), whatever is just (δίκαια), whatever is pure (ἁγνά), whatever is lovely (προσφιλῆ), whatever is admirable (εὔφημα) – anything that is excellent (ἀρετὴ) or praiseworthy (ἔπαινος) – think about those things.
Now, I take truth here to mean propositional truth, even in the case of works of art, noting that the propositions inherent in a work of art may not always be precisely articulated. The truths expressed may be new and surprising, or they may be old truths that people have lost sight of. “Firefighters are brave,” for example, is something that people know to be true, but often forget until disaster strikes:
The subject of this painting, incidentally, is also excellent (ἀρετὴ), praiseworthy (ἔπαινος), admirable (εὔφημα), and honourable (σεμνά).
The song “Torn” (written by Scott Cutler, Anne Preven, and Phil Thornalley, but turned into a hit by Natalie Imbruglia in 1997) expresses a truth about the ending of a relationship based on infatuation rather than love: “I'm all out of faith, this is how I feel: I'm cold and I am shamed, lying naked on the floor. Illusion never changed into something real; I'm wide awake and I can see the perfect sky is torn.” Indeed, the song's popularity was largely due to the fact that the truth of this description resonated with the song's audience, although somewhat deeper insights into human relationships could perhaps be gained from reading novels like Anna Karenina or Persuasion. Some critics have also suggested a certain artistic falsity in the song: that the pop form belies the seriousness of the lyrics, but de gustibus non est disputandum.
In the visual arts, Impressionism was heavily criticised in its early days. G. K. Chesterton, for example, was very distressed at the element of perceived subjectivity in Impressionist paintings. “If you were there, this is what you would have seen” didn't seem to be a sufficient truth for him, although it is difficult to believe that earlier artists painted their subject's essence or quiddity in a way that the Impressionists did not (a century later, one suspects that people simply had to learn how to look at Impressionist paintings).
Even for the following two paintings by van Gogh, it is not clear that the accompanying modern photograph is in any way more “true.” Indeed, in Café Terrace at Night, the artist has captured both the warm artificial light outside the café and the cold light of the distant stars: a combination that the human eye can see more clearly than an ordinary camera:
It it is also possible for a song or work of literature to include a statement (say, X) which is definitely false. From a Christian point of view, this would include lyrics such as “the things that you're liable to read in the Bible: it ain't necessarily so” (from the 1935 opera Porgy and Bess). However, framing techniques – placing artistic quotation marks around a statement – can transform such lines into truth (i.e. Certain people say “X”). Often this is done by having a character in a story (other than the protagonist) say the words, in a way that makes clear that the author does not endorse them. In the case of “It Ain't Necessarily So,” the words are sung by Sportin' Life, a drug dealer, and form part of a true portrayal of that character:
Reggie Whitehead's depiction of Sportin' Life has been described as “as close to Mephistopheles as is possible without horns and a tail.” In this case, that is artistic truth. It is also often artistically necessary: one can't truly depict a Frodo or an Aragorn without also having a Sauron or a Saruman.
Since the US has just celebrated Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, it may be appropriate to quote from King's last speech, I’ve Been to the Mountaintop:
One day a man came to Jesus and he wanted to raise some questions about some vital matters of life. At points he wanted to trick Jesus, and show him that he knew a little more than Jesus knew and throw him off base. Now that question could have easily ended up in a philosophical and theological debate. But Jesus immediately pulled that question from midair and placed it on a dangerous curve between Jerusalem and Jericho. And he talked about a certain man who fell among thieves. You remember that a Levite and a priest passed by on the other side; they didn't stop to help him. Finally, a man of another race came by. He got down from his beast, decided not to be compassionate by proxy. But he got down with him, administered first aid, and helped the man in need. Jesus ended up saying this was the good man, this was the great man because he had the capacity to project the "I" into the "thou," and to be concerned about his brother.
Now, you know, we use our imagination a great deal to try to determine why the priest and the Levite didn't stop. At times we say they were busy going to a church meeting, an ecclesiastical gathering, and they had to get on down to Jerusalem so they wouldn't be late for their meeting. At other times we would speculate that there was a religious law that one who was engaged in religious ceremonials was not to touch a human body twenty-four hours before the ceremony. And every now and then we begin to wonder whether maybe they were not going down to Jerusalem, or down to Jericho, rather, to organize a Jericho Road Improvement Association. [Laughter] That's a possibility. Maybe they felt it was better to deal with the problem from the causal root, rather than to get bogged down with an individual effect. [Laughter]
But I'm going to tell you what my imagination tells me. It's possible that those men were afraid. You see, the Jericho Road is a dangerous road. I remember when Mrs. King and I were first in Jerusalem. We rented a car and drove from Jerusalem down to Jericho. And as soon as we got on that road I said to my wife, "I can see why Jesus used this as the setting for his parable." It's a winding, meandering road. It's really conducive for ambushing. You start out in Jerusalem, which is about twelve hundred miles, or rather, twelve hundred feet above sea level [actually about 2100 feet or 640 metres]. And by the time you get down to Jericho fifteen or twenty minutes later, you're about twenty-two feet below sea level [actually 846 feet or 258 metres]. That's a dangerous road. In the days of Jesus it came to be known as the "Bloody Pass." And you know, it's possible that the priest and the Levite looked over that man on the ground and wondered if the robbers were still around. Or it's possible that they felt that the man on the ground was merely faking, and he was acting like he had been robbed and hurt in order to seize them over there, lure them there for quick and easy seizure. And so the first question that the priest asked, the first question that the Levite asked was, "If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?"
But then the Good Samaritan came by, and he reversed the question: "If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?" That's the question before you tonight. Not, "If I stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to my job?" Not, "If I stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to all of the hours that I usually spend in my office every day and every week as a pastor?" The question is not, "If I stop to help this man in need, what will happen to me?" The question is, "If I do not stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to them?" That's the question. [Applause]
The exposition of the parable here touches on the (fairly standard) interpretation that Christopher Hitchens found so surprising when Douglas Wilson mentioned it in Collision.
I recently listened to an interesting talk by Shai Linne on Christianity and the Arts. Linne referred to (among other passages) Philippians 4:8:
"Finally, brothers, whatever is true (ἀληθῆ), whatever is honourable (σεμνά), whatever is just (δίκαια), whatever is pure (ἁγνά), whatever is lovely (προσφιλῆ), whatever is admirable (εὔφημα) – anything that is excellent (ἀρετὴ) or praiseworthy (ἔπαινος) – think about those things."
Now, the things that are lovely (προσφιλῆ) are of course the standard subjects of conventional art:
Miranda Kerr, model (photo by Ahmad Fauzi Abdullah, 2009)
However, for Christians, beauty is determined not simply by convention, but by the inherent worth of Creation ("In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth... And God saw that it was good" – Genesis 1) and by people sharing the image of God (Gen 1:27) as they themselves make things. The artist may therefore play the role of pointing out beauties that the casual observer may have missed:
