Discipleship in the Present Tense: Reflections on Faith and Culture by James KA Smith

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Discipleship in the Present Tense: Reflections on Faith and CultureSummary: A series of essays on faith and culture.

James KA Smith is a philosophy professor at Calvin College and editor of Comment Magazine.  He keeps coming across my radar screen but I have not read enough of his books.  I picked up Discipleship in the Present Tense last year when it was released.  It has taken me a nearly a year to get around to reading it, but it is worth the read.

I have had a long standing opposition to parts of Reformed Theology.  But Smith makes me want to investigate wings of the Reformed world that are less focused on the newer ‘Restless and Reformed’ wing and more focused on the older full systems of the Reformed Tradition. (He is more interested in liturgy, the full life of the Christian and less focused on 5 points and cage fighting.)

In the series of 24 essays, Smith mostly is talking about the church’s relationship to culture.  Some of the essays I have read before, such as the very good review of James Davidson Hunter’s book To Change the World which appeared in Books and Culture Magazine and I linked to in my review of Hunter’s book.  But most were new to me.

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Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue/ The Untold Story of English by John McWhorter

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Summary: Every area of study has its rebels and story tellers. McWhorter’s is rebelling by claiming that English gained more from the Celts than others.

One of the joys of reading is picking up a book in a subject area that you know nothing about and just diving in.

I am going through a bit of reading malaise.  I have found in the past that I need to read something completely different. And I have not been excited about my on-deck audiobooks.  So I picked this up last week when it was on sale for $1.99 on audiobook with some promotional credits (making it free for me and still technically keeping to my buying no more than 1 book a month pledge.)

Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue is about linguistics and the history of English.  The subtitle is over reach and probably written with marketing in mind.  But the basic book is five arguments about why we need to pay more attention to grammar in the history of English and less attention to borrowed words and etymology.

Everyone knows that English borrowed a bunch of Viking and French words as part of its development. McWhorter says that more important is the fact that English has borrowed a lot of grammar as well.

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Darwin’s Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design by Stephen C Meyer

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Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design by Stephen C MeyerA devastating critique of Darwinian and neo-Darwinian theories of life’s origins, and a rigorous defense of Intelligent Design as a legitimate and compelling scientific theory. Stephen Meyer is a philosopher of science, and he ably traced the discovery of DNA and its contemporary challenges in his previous book, Signature in the Cell.

Now, in Darwin’s Doubt, Meyer takes on the fossil record in the “œCambrian Explosion” and details the attempts by evolutionists to account for it. As it turns out, Charles Darwin himself recognized that the fossil record exposed a potentially fatal weakness in his new theory of natural selection, but one he assumed (not unreasonably at the time) that science, given enough time (pun intended), would fill in the gaps. Unfortunately, as our understanding of biology and genetics has increased exponentially over the last 150 years (and especially since the 1960s), the difficulties for Darwin’s theory have only gotten worse.

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Testing Blogging Software

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Starting this morning I am going to be testing a desktop blogging software called Desk PM.  This is a very early beta test of the software.  So things may be a bit odd over the next couple weeks as I work through it, try to learn how to use it properly and find the inevitable … Read more

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

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Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Part of my goal this year is to catch up on all of the classic audiobooks that I have picked up over the years. I picked up nearly 20 free classics last year when Audible and Amazon were promoting their kindle book/audiobook integration (whispersync).  And you can still pick up over 100 classic audiobooks for $0.99 each.

While I have seen a couple of movies based on Jane Austen books, prior to this reading of Pride and Prejudice, I have not read Austen before.

As I have been reading through a number of classics over the past year or so there has definitely been a mixed bag.  Some are clearly classics because they brought something new (but do not feel all that great because that new feature is now common, think Citizen Kane.)  Others really are great and their greatness is still visible.  I would put Pride and Prejudice  in the later category.

The story is fairly familiar.  It is a proto-romantic comedy.  There is misunderstanding and unrequited love.  There is the guy that looks good but is not.  There is the guy that seems annoying, but is really the right one.  There are all kinds of situations (and personal pride) that keep the lovers apart.  And there is a real sense of comedy, although not the slapstick or baudy that is common among a lot of modern romantic comedy.  What is clear is that family honor is one of the biggest reasons that keeps the two apart and that is certainly not what would keep a couple apart today.

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The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Emmuska Orczy

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The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness OrczySummary: An early 20th century romantic thriller set during the French Revolution.

When I was an elementary student I had two ‘go to’ reading choices, a set of children’s biographies (more historical fiction than biography) and the Illustrated Classic series.

The children’s biographies gave me a pretty good sense of history and historical figures (although probably 80 percent of each book was fiction.)  And the Illustrated Classics gave me the rough outline of a number of classic books.

But as I read many of those classics again as an adult I have a hard time remembering if I actually have read the full version or the children’s abridged versions prior to re-reading.  (And there is often a pretty large difference.)  Stories that I loved, I sometimes love even more reading the full original version.  And sometimes my memory of the story is nothing like what the actual book is like.

The Scarlet Pimpernel was written originally as a play in 1905 and then novelized.  It is a swashbuckling novel of heroes and light romance.  But in many ways reading it again it feels more like a 1940s pulp fiction than a classic.

The hero (Sir Percy) is perceived as bumbling and slow (but very rich) by everyone, including his wife.  In reality he is cunning and a great fighter.  It feels like Zorro (but I looked it up and Zorro was written 14 years later.)  That same secret identity idea really took off with the comic book superheroes.

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Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

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Remains_of_the_dayThe Remains of the Day is a very well known British novel by Japanese-born British novelist, Kazuo Ishiguro.  The novel is a first person narrative coming from the voice of an accomplished butler, Stevens, in post-war England.  Stevens goes on a much deserved “œmotoring trip” and as he makes his way around the country side of Great Britain he takes the time to think back over his career as butler at Darlington Hall.  Stevens is very matter of fact as he describes his life as a butler, his duties, and his relationships with his staff and his employer.  As the reader hears more and more, we discover that Stevens has perhaps taken his duties and loyalties as butler so seriously that he has missed out on a more fulfilling life, a life of love and devotion to someone other than his employer.

In reading about Ishiguro’s background, I have learned that Ishiguro experienced an especially unique upbringing, as England was all that he knew as home since his family moved to Great Britain when he was 5, and yet he grew up in a Japanese speaking home in order to keep his Japanese culture in tact.  While I haven’t read his first two novels, Ishiguro states that his image of Japan that appears in the novels comes strictly from his imagination and how it had been described by his parents.  While I would perhaps state that no remnants of his Japanese culture appear in The Remains of the Day, it seems that his tendency to write from the flawed first-person perspective, which is apparently a repeated theme throughout many of his works, is seen as more typical of Japanese influence then British.

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