Laudable Linkage

Posted on July 5, 2014 by Barbara Harper

Here is my semi-weekly round-up of interesting reads – I hope you’ll find one or two of interest:

A Return to the Book. “The further I move from the written Word of God, the less confidence I can have that I’ve heard a word from God. ”

The Danger of Coasting. When we’re not living intentionally, we usually end up somewhere we didn’t mean to go.

Flip or Flop. People can say and do horrible things – like in an earlier post by this author where people commented, “Your poor husband – 6 kids and wife in a wheelchair” or tell her that her children will grow up to resent her disability. But in this post she discusses the good things people have said and done and the choice we can make in which to focus on.

5 Ways Moms Create Cranky Toddlers. Written by a mom and shared by a young mom friend.

Seven Ways to Love Your Pastor.

Why I Read Heartwrenching Stories. I haven’t read the book discussed here but I like what she said about why she reads books that deal with topics that are hard to read about.

Louis Zamperini, the subject of the book Unbroken by Lauren Hillenbrand (one of the best I’ve ever read) passed away this week at the age of 97. An Olympic athlete, WWII soldier, and POW, his greatest victory came through faith in Christ. Here are a couple of short news videos about his life and death, neither of which mentions his faith: let’s hope the upcoming film based on the book does:

Book Review: The Knowledge of the Holy

Posted on July 2, 2014 by Barbara Harper

I read The Knowledge of the Holy by A. W. Tozer some ~~years~~ decades ago, but The Cloud of Witnesses Challenge inspired me to pick it up again, and I am so glad I did.

“True religion confronts earth with heaven and brings eternity to bear upon time,” Tozer begins. He writes that the church has lost its view of the majesty of God and their awe of Him, and that in turn is having an effect on what kinds of Christians it is producing (if that was true at the time of the book’s publication in 1961, how much more is is true now!) “No people has ever risen above its religion…no religion has ever been greater than its idea of God. Worship is pure or base as the worshiper entertains high or low thoughts of God” (p. 1).

“A right conception of God is basic not only to systematic theology but to practical Christian living as well. It is to worship what the foundation is to the temple; where it is inadequate or out of plumb the whole structure must sooner or later collapse. I believe there is scarcely an error in doctrine or a failure in applying Christian ethics that cannot be traced finally to imperfect and ignoble thoughts about God” (p. 3).

“The one mighty single burden of eternity begins to press down upon him with a weight more crushing than all the woes of the world piled one upon another. That mighty burden is his obligation to God. It includes an instant and lifelong duty to love God with every power of mind and soul, to obey Him perfectly, and to worship Him acceptably. And when the man’s laboring conscience tells him that he has done none of these things, but has from childhood been guilty of foul revolts against the Majesty in the heavens, the inner pressure of self-accusation may become too heavy to bear.

The gospel can lift this destroying burden from the mind, give beauty for ashes, and the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness. But unless the weight of the burden is felt, the gospel can mean nothing to the man; and until he sees a vision of God high and lifted up, there will be no woe and no burden. Low views of God destroy the gospel for all who hold them” (p. 4).

Tozer’s purpose, then is to help people think about God “as He is in Himself, and not as…imagination says He is” (p. 16), at least as much as we can know about Him from His Word, for we could never comprehend Him totally. He does so in readable everyday language rather than that of a theologian.

“The study of the attributes of God, far from being dull and heavy, may for the enlightened Christian be a sweet and absorbing spiritual exercise. To the soul that is athirst for God, nothing could be more delightful” (p. 19).

After a chapter on the Trinity and on what an attribute is, Tozer then discusses some of God’s attributes one by one, from omniscience, self-sufficiency, and self-existence to His justice, love, mercy, grace and several others. As He discusses each one, he also discusses how they relate to each other.

“I think it might be demonstrated that almost every heresy that has afflicted the church through the years has arisen from believing about God things that are not true, or from over emphasizing certain true things so as to obscure other things equally true. To magnify any attribute to the exclusion of another is to head straight for one of the dismal swamps of theology; and yet we are all constantly tempted to do just that” (p. 123).

“We can hold a correct view of truth only by daring to believe everything God has said about Himself. It is a grave responsibility that a man takes upon himself when he seeks to edit out of God’s self-revelation such features as he in his ignorance deems objectionable. Blindness in part must surely fall upon any of us presumptuous enough to attempt such a thing. And it is wholly uncalled for. We need not fear to let the truth stand as it is written. There is no conflict among the divine attributes. God’s being is unitary. He cannot divide Himself and act at a given time from one of His attributes while the rest remain inactive. All that God is must accord with all that God does. Justice must be present in mercy, and love in judgment. And so with all the divine attributes” (p. 124).

“God is never at cross-purposes with Himself. No attribute of God is in conflict with another” (p. 136).

“Both the Old and the New Testaments proclaim the mercy of God, but the Old has more than four times as much to say about it as the New” (p. 140). (Interesting! Especially as people seem to think the NT is more “merciful” than the Old.)

“When viewed from the perspective of eternity, the most critical need of this hour may well be that the Church should be brought back from its long Babylonian captivity and the name of God be glorified in it again as of old. Yet we must not think of the Church as an anonymous body, a mystical religious abstraction. We Christians are the Church, and whatever we do is what the Church is doing. The matter, therefore, is for each of us a personal one. Any forward step in the Church must begin with the individual” (p. 180).

It’s not unusual for me to think of God as He is or to think high thoughts of Him: that comes with having regular times in the Word of God and hearing His Word proclaimed by faithful preachers. Yet too often my response is something like “Wow, that’s neat!” or a quick prayer of thanks as I go on to the next verse or go about the tasks for the day. Having this sustained time of focusing on what He says about Himself and Who He is has been both humbling and uplifting. I highly recommend this book to everyone.

I wanted to say just a word about reading what some friends have called “deep” books. It’s actually been a long time since I’ve read this kind of book, and I’m thankful to the The Cloud of Witnesses Challenge for encouraging me to get back into them. It works best for me to read a little bit from a book like this after my regular devotional time. It’s not that I couldn’t pick it up at odd times during the day and get something out of it, but personally I just get more out of it by regularly plodding through in the morning before my attention is diverted. For some people other times of day work best. Mere Christianity was a little easier to do this with because the chapters were very short: the chapters here were longer, so some days I was only able to read a few pages at a time. Someone encouraged me once that just fifteen minutes a day in a book will eventually get you through it, and get you through more in a year than you’d think. Neither of these books was hard to read or understand.

I’ll close as Tozer does:

Thus far we have considered the individual’s personal relation to God, but like the ointment of a man’s right hand, which by its fragrance “betrayeth itself,” any intensified knowledge of God will soon begin to affect those around us in the Christian community. And we must seek purposefully to share our increasing light with the fellow members of the household of God.

This we can best do by keeping the majesty of God in full focus in all our public services. Not only our private prayers should be filled with God, but our witnessing, our singing, our preaching, our writing should center around the Person of our holy, holy Lord and extol continually the greatness of His dignity and power. There is a glorified Man on the right hand of the Majesty in heaven faithfully representing us there. We are left for a season among men; let us faithfully represent Him here (pp. 183-184).

(This will also be linked to Semicolon‘s Saturday Review of Books.)

Book Review: The Book of Three

Posted on July 1, 2014 by Barbara Harper

The Prydain Chronicles by Alexander Lloyd are well-known children’s classics, but somehow I had never heard of them until the last few years. I saw them mentioned favorably at various blogs, so when I saw the first three books either on sale or free (I forget which) for the Kindle app, I got them.

The first in the five part series is The Book of Three. Young Taran lives with a retired soldier named Coll and an old “enchanter” named Dallben. He has ambitions to do great, heroic things, but in the meantime he is made Assistant Pig-Keeper. The pig he is charged with keeping is not just any old farm pig, however: this one, called Hen Wen, is a white oracular pig: she can tell prophesies and help information come to light. Taran fails at his first major responsibility when Hen Wen runs away. He sets out to find her even though he has been told not to leave the farm.

While searching for the pig, Taran is startled to see the dreaded Horned King, the champion of Arawn Death-Lord ride by with his soldiers. One throws a sword at him which wounds him, but not fatally. After running for his life and passing out, he awakens to find his wounds being treated by none other than Prince Gwydion in disguise.

Gwydion and Taran face unexpected battle and are captured. Taran escapes but is sure that Gwydion has died when the castle where they were held collapses. He decides he must go to warn the king of the advancing army of the Horned King. Along the way he is joined by a minor king named Fflewddur Fflam who is moonlighting as a bard and whose harp strings break whenever he stretches the truth, Princess Eilonwy, who talks a lot and has been learning magic, and Gurgi, sort of between man and beast who refers to himself in the third person and speaks in rhymes (“crunchings are munchings,” his reference to food,””sneakings and peekings,” “smackings and whackings,” etc.).

In his quest Taran has to come face to face with his own shortcomings and learn that heroism is not only not easy, but it isn’t always displayed in mighty public acts.

The books are somewhat loosely based on Welsh mythology (with which I am not familiar). The author grew to love the land and language of Wales when he was stationed there during WWII while in the army.

A few of the notable quotes from the book:

“Neither refuse to give help when it is needed,… nor refuse to accept it when it is offered.”

“It is not the trappings that make the prince, nor, indeed, the sword that makes the warrior.”

“I have studied the race of men. I have seen that alone you stand as weak reeds by a lake. You must learn to help yourselves, that is true; but you must also learn to help one another.”

I enjoyed some of the humor in the story, such as this exchange:

“By all means,” cried the bard, his eyes lighting up. “A Fflam to the rescue! Storm the castle! Carry it by assault! Batter down the gates!”

“There’s not much of it left to storm,” said Eilonwy.

“Oh?” said Fflewddur, with disappointment. “Very well, we shall do the best we can.”

I have to admit it took me a while to get into the story, and I didn’t like it at first. I didn’t really care for the princess: I hate when girls continually take things said in innocence and twist them around to mean something else and get offended by them, and the princess here did that quite a lot. Then again, she is young as well, so possibly her maturing will come about in one of the next books. I thought the idea of an oracular pig was silly, and the story seemed to resemble The Lord of the Rings a little too closely in the beginning with the undead Cauldron Born soldiers a little too similar to the Ring Wraiths, and Gurgi sounding very much like Gollum. As the story went on, however, Gurgi developed into quite a different personality than Gollum and the story took on its own direction and feel.

I do like coming of age “quest” stories where the protagonist has to reach beyond his abilities and learn about himself and life in the process, and this story fits that bill nicely. The author says in his after-word, “Most of us are called on to perform tasks far beyond what we can do. Our capabilities seldom match our aspirations, and we are often woefully unprepared. To this extent, we are all Assistant Pig-Keepers at heart.”

(This will also be linked to Semicolon‘s Saturday Review of Books.)

Book Review: The Sign of Four

Posted on June 30, 2014 by Barbara Harper

The Sign of Four by Arthur Conan Doyle is the second Sherlock Homes novel. It was originally published in a magazine as The Sign of the Four and later published as a novel. Later publications shortened the name to The Sign of Four.

Sherlock and Watson are visited by a Miss Mary Morstan. Her father had disappeared ten years earlier and she began receiving a valuable pearl from an anonymous source every year for the last six years. She’s just received a note saying she is a wronged woman and requesting a meeting. She can bring two friends as long as they are not police. Sherlock and Watson agree to go. Mary shows them an odd paper found among her father’s things that appears to be a map with four crosses and four names, three of them English and one Indian.

When they arrive at their destination they are greeted by one of two twin brothers who were sons of an associate of Mary’s father. I’ll leave what he told them and what they found there for you to discover if you read the book. 🙂

Hearing that Holmes engaged in drug usage caused me to hold his stories at arm’s length at first, but Wikipedia explains that the drugs he uses are not illegal at the time. He uses them when he is extremely bored or when he feels his brain needs the stimulation. This book introduces the habit and Watson’s disapproval, which he finally works up the nerve to express to Holmes. According to Wikipedia, in later stories Watson is eventually able to “wean” Holmes off of them. The drug use doesn’t play a major role in this book, but it’s there, mainly at the beginning.

This book also delves more into Holmes’s pysche and personality, which I found as interesting as the mysteries. We saw in the first book that Holmes had a brilliant intellect and developed his skills for deductive reasoning and crime solving almost to the exclusion of others, even to the point of not knowing that the earth revolved around the sun or caring since it didn’t affect his work. Some years ago I saw an documentary on Einstein which showed him to have a horrible relationship with his wife. I almost wondered then whether becoming a genius in one area required one to be out of balance in other areas. I don’t know – I’ll have to explore that idea further if I read about any more geniuses. 🙂 But it appears to be true in Holmes’ case: if he is not solving a crime or developing a skill which will help in the future, he’s utterly bored and doesn’t know what to do with himself. This book humanizes him a bit and we see him as more than just a brilliant intellect.

Part of my interest in reading Holmes’ stories is spurred by some modern adaptions of them, mainly the BBC television production of Sherlock starring Benedict Cumberbatch, which depicts Holmes as a modern London city-dweller and adapts the stories in the current culture and technology. I’ve only seen the first three episodes and have been advised that the fourth (or actually the first episode in the second season, concerning Irene Adler) is best avoided. But I’ve enjoyed the three I’ve seen and thought they were quite well done. They don’t follow the original stories exactly but there are enough similarities to make the modern Sherlock as much like the original as possible within a modern framework.

But even though the TV series touched off my reading of the Holmes books, they are interesting enough that I want to continue to read them for themselves. For this book I listened to the audiobook ably narrated by David Timson. The text of the story can be found online here.

(This will also be linked to Semicolon‘s Saturday Review of Books.)

What’s On Your Nightstand: June 2014

Posted on June 24, 2014 by Barbara Harper

The folks at 5 Minutes For Books host What’s On Your Nightstand? the fourth Tuesday of each month in which we can share about the books we have been reading and/or plan to read.

Since last time I have completed:

Loving the Church by John Crotts, reviewed here.

The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky via audiobook, reviewed here. This is the August selection for Carrie’s Reading to Know Classics Book Club list, if you want to try to give it a whirl before then. 🙂

Wow, not very much, considering one was an audiobook! Not sure what happened to my reading time in June.

I’m currently reading:

The Book of Three by Alexander Lloyd, first book in the Prydain Chronicles.

The Knowledge of the Holy by A. W. Tozer

How to Read Slowly: Reading for Comprehension by James W. Sire. Not that I want to actually decrease my reading speed or that I have problems with comprehension, but I’d like to retain more of what I read, so I am hoping this will help.

The Sign of the Four by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, second of the Sherlock Homes novels, via audiobook.

Next up:

Why We Are Not Emergent: By Two Guys Who Should Be by Kevin DeYoung, Ted Kluck, and David F. Wells

Undetected by Dee Henderson

I will Repay by Baroness Orzcy, part of The Scarlet Pimpernel series

Possibly Girl in the Gatehouse by Julie Klassen and Just Jane: A Novel of Jane Austen’s Life by Nancy Moser, two of my alternates from the TBR Challenge list, rather than the one remaining nonfiction book I have left there. The nonfiction has been beneficial, but I am missing stories. 🙂

Carrie’s Chronicles of Narnia Reading Challenge. is in July, but I haven’t decided whether I’ll do anything for it yet. I finished the Narnia series last year and am not ready to start it over again. There are several Narnia-related non-fiction books I’d like to read, but I am reading so much other non-fiction this year I am not feeling inspired at the moment to choose another one. I hate to miss out on it, though, as I have participated for the last few years, so I may decide to jump in before it’s over.

What have you been reading?

Book Review: The Brothers Karamazov

Posted on June 23, 2014 by Barbara Harper

Dostoyevsky is one of those people I’ve thought about reading for a long time, but his works tend to be pretty chunky volumes. However, I did read somewhere not long ago that his books are actually fairly easy to get into, so when I saw his The Brothers Karamazov on Carrie’s Reading to Know Classics Book Club list, that seemed like the perfect opportunity to give him a try. This book is the selection for August, but I kept thinking it was coming up in July and I wanted to get a head start on it, so I started listening to the audiobook some weeks back and just finished it a few days ago. I wanted to go ahead and write a review wile it was still fresh in my mind.

The first of the title brothers is Dmitri, also called Mitya, the oldest (about 28 when the book begins), passionate, impulsive, tempestuous. He has a running feud with his father over his inheritance and over a woman who is called Grushenka.

The second is Ivan, brilliant, logical, skeptical. He can’t reconcile the idea of God with the suffering he sees in the world, particularly that of children, and feels that if there is a God, He is malevolent. He comes to find out that the logical conclusions of his philosophies have natural but unforeseen consequences.

The youngest is Alexei, also known as Alyosha, about age 20, who lives at the monastery (Russian Orthodox) while training to become a monk. He is kind, reasonable, thoughtful, compassionate, a peacemaker and has a genuine love for people.

It’s widely believed that there is a fourth illegitimate brother called Smerdyakov. His mother was a retarded homeless girl who died in childbirth. He is found and raised by the senior Karamazov’s servant, Grigory, who raises him. He becomes a servant in the Karamazov household as well. He is epileptic and has a mean, warped streak.

The father of this brood is Fyodor (the three sons all have the middle name Fyodorovich, which means “son of Fyodor”). Fydor is wealthy but debauched, wicked, and greedy. He has had little to do with any of his sons’ upbringing, and they all hate him except for Alyosha.

It is not much of a spoiler to say that Fyodor is killed: the author refers to his coming death early on and hints at a terrible event: it’s not much of a stretch to connect the two and realize that Fyodor is going to come to a bad end. And, indeed, he does: he is murdered. One of his sons is arrested for the murder and the evidence seems pretty certain against him (again foreshadowed by the author as he often comments that this or that happened “as so-and-so testified later.”) But the evidence isn’t conclusive, leaving the reader to wonder for a while who actually killed him. Besides being a major factor in the plot, Fyodor’s murder is also a major catalyst in the lives of his sons for different reasons.

Amidst all the action there are several philosophical discussions, notably between Elder Zosima, Alyosha’s mentor, and various people, and later between Ivan and Alyosha, touching on the nature of God, free will and whether it is a burden, moral responsibility, and other subjects.

I am heavily indebted to SparkNotes for getting much more out of this book than I would have from a surface reading/listening. I liked reading the chapter analysis and summaries at intervals (but I have learned from past experience not to look at the plot overview or character analysis there until finishing a book because they reveal key details of the story). The chapter analyses did help me see the connection between the philosophical discussions and the action: those discussions weren’t isolated rabbit trails: they were integral to the story (possibly the main points of the story), and the action played out the truths discussed. For instance, I hadn’t connected Alyosha’s ministrations to a dying child (Ilyusha) to his earlier discussion with Ivan, but SparkNotes pointed out:

Ivan looks at the abstract idea of suffering children and is unable to reconcile the idea with his rational precepts about how God ought to be. His solution is to reject God. Alyosha, on the other hand, sees an actual suffering child and believes that it is God’s will for him to try to alleviate the child’s suffering to whatever degree he can. His solution is to help Ilyusha. Again, Dostoevsky shows how the psychology of skepticism walls itself off, in elaborate proofs and theorems, from having a positive effect on the world, while the psychology of faith, simplistic though it may be, concerns itself with doing good for others. This very subtle response to the indictment of God presented by Ivan in Book V brings the philosophical debate of the novel onto a plane of real human action, and shows the inadequacy of Ivan’s philosophy—which Ivan himself would readily acknowledge—to do good in the real world.

As with many older classics, this book can seem a little tedious and wordy by today’s standards. Newer stories start off with action that grabs you and makes you want to know what happens next or causes you to care about a character right away: older books have a lot of explanation and description first. The first style is usually more exciting; the latter takes a little more patience but does usually pay off in the end.

This story that has more layers than one would think at first, and it is causing me to think and make connections long after I’ve finished it – a hallmark of a classic. I didn’t agree with much of the theology, but the overall theme of a quiet faith lived out in everyday life with love and service towards one’s fellow man appealed to me.

I also enjoyed reading more of Dostoyevsky’s background at Wikipedia and SparkNotes.

I usually like audiobooks for classics, for several reasons, but in this case it was probably not the best way to go. For one thing, the multitude of polysyllabic Russian names and nicknames was hard to distinguish at first, but after a while I was able to distinguished who was who (whom?) Secondly, there were a few sections of philosophical discussion that were hard for me to follow just by listening while driving, fixing hair, etc.: those would have benefited from being able to go over them on the printed page a couple of times. Nevertheless I thought the narrator, Constantine Gregory, did a good job telling the story.

(This will also be linked to Semicolon‘s Saturday Review of Books.)

This also completes one of my selections for the Back to the Classics Challenge hosted by Karen at Books and Chocolate.

Reading Challenge Updates.

Posted on June 18, 2014 by Barbara Harper

I keep forgetting that Roof Beam Reader, who hosts the 2014 TBR Pile Challenge, has check-in points around the 15th of each month so we can summarize how we’re doing. I haven’t done one since March, and since that time I have completed (all links are to my reviews):

Wednesdays Were Pretty Normal: A Boy, Cancer, and God by Michael Kelley.

The Great Divorce by C. S. Lewis.

Crowded to Christ by L. E. Maxwell.

Walking From East to West: God in the Shadows by Ravi Zacharias.

Loving the Church by John Crotts.

Out of the 12 books I chose for this challenge, that completes 8, and I have started two more, so I am feeling pretty good about this challenge.

And while I am here I may as well update the other reading challenges I am participating in this year:

The Back to the Classics Challenge has a mid-year check-in. I’m happy to say that after completing My Man Jeeves by P. D. Wodehouse, Bleak House by Charles Dickens, and The Brothers Karamazov yesterday, ~~though it will take me a few days to get a review together~~, I’ve completed all of the required books I chose for this challenge and all but two of the optional ones. Here are my completed choices (links are to my reviews):

Required:

A 20th Century Classic: My Man Jeeves by P. D. Wodehouse
A 19th Century Classic: Bleak House by Charles Dickens
A Classic by a Woman Author: The Blue Castle by L. M. Montgomery
A Classic in Translation (A book originally written in a different language from your own.) The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoyevsky.
A Classic About War The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy.
A Classic by an Author Who Is New To You: The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins

Optional Categories:

An American Classic: Farmer Boy by Laura Ingalls Wilder
A Classic Mystery, Suspense or Thriller: A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle, the first Sherlock Holmes book
A Historical Fiction Classic: I will Repay by Baroness Orzcy, part of The Scarlet Pimpernel series. (Not completed yet)
A Classic That’s Been Adapted Into a Movie or TV Series: To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. (Not completed yet)
Extra Fun Category: Write a Review of the Movie or TV Series adapted from Optional Category #4 (Not completed yet).

For the The Cloud of Witnesses Challenge.I completed Mere Christianity and Crowded to Christ. I had planned to read four books in this category of nonfiction books written by a Christian who has passed one. I’m also reading Traveling Toward Sunrise by Mrs. Charles E. Cowman, a devotional which which be completed by the end of the year, and just started The Knowledge of the Holy by A. W. Tozer. While it looks like I’ll have no problem completing my goals for this challenge, now that I have started reading this type of book again, I want to continue.

And in the Nonfiction Reading Challenge in which I am aiming to read 11-15 nonfiction books, I have completed 12. But I have other nonfiction books to complete for some of these other challenges, so I’ll be adding more to this list.

It helps a lot that many of these challenges overlap. That’s one reason I decided to participate in them all – otherwise I would have had to choose just one or two. And audiobooks have helped a lot, too, particularly with the classics.

It’s funny how just having these on a list of goals to complete for the year have been driving me towards completing that goal. Sometimes I don’t like that driven feeling, but that’s probably because I gravitate more toward…not fluff, exactly, but lighter reading. Yet I am glad for the impetus to incorporate some reading I would not otherwise get to.

Booking Through Thursday: Objectionable Elements

Posted on June 12, 2014 by Barbara Harper

Booking Through Thursday is a weekly meme which poses a question or a thought for participants to discuss centering on the subject of books or reading.

Today’s question is:

How do you feel about explicit detail in your reading? Whether language, sex, violence, situations and so on … does it bother you? Faze you at all? Or do you just read everything without it bothering you?

I do not like explicit detail in my reading and try to avoid it.

Don’t get me wrong, I understand there has to be a “bad guy” or something wrong in order to have a plot. I know there is adultery and violence in the real world. But we don’t need explicit detail.

Any war story is going to have some degree of violence, but I don’t need details about eyes bulging out or blood spattering or whatever that are there just to titillate or disgust or increase the gore factor. Ditto for sexuality. As one friend once said, sex is not a spectator sport.

Since I am a Christian, I take my cues from the Bible. The story of David and Bathsheba tells us all we need to know of their tryst, but there is nothing in the description that would cause arousal in the reader.

Language is a bit harder. For the most part I avoid profanity or taking God’s name in my reading because I don’t want to fill my mind with it and increase the chances that those words are going to filter into my thoughts and possibly come out of my mouth in an unguarded moment. But if I were going to try to eliminate them completely, I’d have to unfriend some of my relatives on Facebook. 🙂 There are a few “damns” even in some of the classics (like The Brothers Karamazov, which I am reading, or rather listening to now). I think sometimes a story can transcend those elements (like Unbroken), but I’d still rather they weren’t there. A character can be shown to be a profane character without giving us the full brunt of his profane mouth.

In fact, I think it takes much more talented writing to show a profane character or a violent or sexual scene without explicit detail. In one of the most violent scenes I have seen on film, nothing was shown but the victim’s feet. A bit of restraint and leaving some details up to the reader’s imagination are far more effective.

To weigh in on this week’s question or read other responses, go here.

Give-away: E-version of The Tenth Plague

Posted on May 28, 2014 by Barbara Harper

Several days ago I commented on a post on Adam Blumer’s Facebook page to be entered in a drawing for an e-version of his book, The Tenth Plague. I had thought I was entering to win his new book – which, if I’d thought about it for a second, I would have realized that wasn’t possible because it is not even out yet (I can be a little dense sometimes. 🙂 ). I did happen to win Adam’s drawing, and since I’ve already read The Tenth Plague (reviewed here, along with an author interview), I asked him if I could have a copy sent to one of you instead, and he agreed.

The story is a sequel to Adam’s first novel, Fatal Illusions (reviewed here), but can be read independently. It involves Marc and Jillian Thayer, who have just adopted a new baby boy, and a friend has invited them to a Christian-themed resort for some rest and time together as a new family. But soon odd things begin to happen: someone rigs the water system to dispense what appears to be blood from the faucets. At first this is thought to be a weird prank, but soon other events occur which are based on the ten plagues of Egypt found in the book of Exodus in the Bible. Marc and a retired detective friend try to find out what is going on while Gillian runs into someone from her past who has hurt her deeply. One of the major themes in the book is the need to extend forgiveness.

Adam writes suspense very well, and his characters are realistic, everyday Christian people trying to discern and apply God’s will in their circumstances.

You can read an excerpt here.

If you’d like to be entered in a drawing for a free Kindle or Nook version of The Tenth Plague, leave one comment on this post. I’ll use random.org to draw a name from among the comments next Wed. morning (June 4).

The drawing is concluded and the winner is Lou Ann! I’ll be contacting her shortly. Thank you all for entering!

Book Review: The Great Divorce

Posted on May 7, 2014 by Barbara Harper

I first picked up The Great Divorce by C. S. Lewis some years ago when I found it on sale in a bookstore. I wasn’t sure what kind of divorce the title was talking about, and the description on the front about a bus ride from hell to heaven seemed really weird, but it was Lewis and it was on sale, so I got it. But it sat around for all these years unopened. The TBR challenge of reading things that have been unread on our shelves spurred me to work this book in this year.

Lewis explains in the preface that the title and concept came in response to William Blake’s book The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Lewis explains that there can be no such marriage.

“We are not living in a world where all roads are radii of a circle and where all, if followed long enough, will therefore draw gradually nearer and finally meet at the centre: rather in a world where every road, after a few miles, forks in two, and each of those into two again, and at each road you must make a decision. Even on a biological level life is not like a river but like a tree. It does not move towards unity but away from it and the creatures grow further apart as they increase in perfection. Good, as it ripens, becomes continually more different not only from evil but also from other good.”

“Evil can be undone, but it cannot ‘develop’ into good. Time does not heal it.”

To illustrate some of those fork-in-the-road choices as well as the opposite directions of heaven and hell, Lewis developed this fantasy of a group of people on a bus ride from hell to visit heaven. When they arrive, they are surprised to find that they are transparent and that contact with solid objects is painful (“It will hurt at first, until your feet are hardened. Reality is harsh to the feet of shadows.”) They are called ghosts, whereas the inhabitants who come to meet them are called Solid People or Spirits. Most of the people decide not to stay for various reasons, despite the Spirits encouraging them to put away whatever is holding them back and enter into joy.

The cleric who does not believe in absolutes refuses to believe in them still: “For me there is no such thing as a final answer. The free wind of inquiry must always continue to blow through the mind, must it not? ‘Prove all things’…to travel hopefully is better than to arrive.” The Spirit speaking with him, a friend he knew in life, responds, “If that were true…how could anyone travel hopefully? There would be nothing to hope for.” The artist prefers his painting to reality. “Every poet and musician and artist, but for Grace, is drawn away from the love of the thing he tells, to the love of the telling till, down in Deep Hell, they cannot be interested in God at all but only in what they say about Him.” The overbearing wife wants to continue “managing” her husband. The mother who has developed motherly love into idolatry would rather take her son from heaven back to hell with her than lessen her focus from him to love God. “Mother love…is the highest and holiest feeling in human nature,” she says, and is told, “No natural feelings are high or low, holy or unholy, in themselves. They are all holy when God’s hand is on the rein. They all go bad when they set up on their own and make themselves into false gods.” The man who lives for manipulating people with his self-pity is told, “Did you think joy was created to live always under that threat? Always defenseless against those who would rather be miserable than have their self-will crossed?”

But a few are willing to have their besetting sins taken and killed, and they grow more “solid.”

“There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, “Thy will be done,” and those to whom God says, in the end, “Thy will be done.” All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock it is opened. ”

“Good beats upon the damned incessantly as sound waves beat on the ears of the deaf, but they cannot receive it. Their fists are clenched, their teeth are clenched, their eyes fast shut. First they will not, in the end they cannot, open their hands for gifts, or their mouth for food, or their eyes to see.”

Lewis, or the narrator, finds George MacDonald, someone he has greatly looked up to and learned from, who then becomes a guide and teacher for him, similar to Dante and Virgil in The Divine Comedy.

Lewis assures in the preface that he is not writing to propose anything about what heaven might be like: he is simply using this scenario as a vehicle to discuss truths.

There are a few similar themes as are found in The Last Battle, the last book in the Narnia series written about 10-11 years later: the idea of moving “further up and further in” and the effusive joy of heaven.

I don’t know if Lewis believed in a purgatory or if he was just using the idea of the dead getting “second chances” to illustrate that many of them would not take it. The Bible says in Hebrews 9:27 that “it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment,” so I would have a problem with this book promoting the idea of purgatory, but I think the whole second chance scenario is just part of the plot device.

One character in the book says, “Hell is a state of mind – ye never said a truer word. And every state of mind, left to itself, every shutting up of the creature within the dungeon of its own mind – is, in the end, Hell. But Heaven is not a state of mind. Heaven is reality itself. All that is fully real is Heavenly. For all that can be shaken will be shaken and only the unshakeable remains.” Again, I don’t know if the idea of hell being just a state of mind was part of Lewis’s own philosophy or if it was just the nature of it in this as a fantasy, but the Bible does speak of hell with literal terminology.

Overall this was quite a fascinating and thought-provoking read.

(This will also be linked to Semicolon‘s Saturday Review of Books.)