Filed under: Books
After having read Shopgirl a few years ago, I was giddy, when I saw another novel by the legendary Steve Martin. Martin seems compelled to create querky characters who have trouble connecting to the people around them.
This novella centers around the life of oddball extraordinaire Daniel Pecan Cambridge. A shut-in who was stranded in California by his inability to even cross the stree let alone get back to Texas. Daniel has what appears to be a rather debilitating case of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. He is unable to cross streets unless there are two scooped-out driveways directly across from one another.
He harbors a secret infatuation with a real estate agent who is attempting to rent out some apartments in a complex adjacent to his own. Every meeting with another person, except for his social worker/psychiatrist who stop by once a week, goes painfully wrong. Daniel can not seem to suppress his urges to do some unnecessary task that results in his being ostracized from everyone around him. If he were freed from the need to have human contact, this would be a painless thing to read about. But he is still very much dependent on some social interaction. He just happens to be completely unable to break free of a socially destructive mind.
In the end though community prevails, but not without heartache. Daniel finds the ability to let go of his need touch the corners on all of the machines at Kinko’s or making magic squares to calm himself whenever his cycle is broken. Steve Martin is, I believe, bringing North American literature into a new era. Read anything you find by him.
Grace and Peace,
Jared
Filed under: Books
I finished this book a while back and I’ve been working on other things, so I haven’t gotten around to reviewing it.
There’s not a lot to say about it though. Duffy’s writing is very easy to read and the book is not what I expected from a Catholic. I really did think that this would either be a work of Catholic propaganda or Protestant anti-polemic. It was neither. Duffy does his best to reliably recount the history of the papacy without going one way or the other.
Though this book was interesting, it took me almost a year to finish. It’s a must-read in the same way that Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. By that I mean it was interesting but I just kept putting it down for other things. I was really excited to see the transformation of western civilization cause a very reluctant change in the nature of the papal office chronicled. The blend of imperial/secular and ecclesiastical powers in the west were torn apart. The civilization of strong bureaucracies wherein historically civic institutions became a part of religious life, was torn from the control of the church. The most interesting portion of the book was the age of revolution and everything that followed. Seeing the church go from belligerently defying change to John Paul II’s quiet undertow of conservatism.
Sorry the picture is so small.
Grace and Peace,
Jared
I like David Brooks. On the long road I took from the fringe right to whatever it is that I am now, he’s been a, typically, clear and sober voice. And I must say that this op-ed piece is definitely in keeping with his sound thinking. I usually think that Paul Krugman is right on the money, but when he shot back at Brooks, I think he was providing a pretty superficial understanding of the situation. He seemed to want to point out how he, Stiglitz, et al were right and Reagan deregulation was wrong.
Yes we need individual restraint to provide the kind of long-term accumulation of wealth that benefits large swathes of the population, but we also need regulation to make that possible. It’s not enough to merely trust that the cream rises to the top. We have to facilitate that rise. The whole point of the financial regulation regime that was installed during the New Deal (e.g. Glass-Steagall) was to protect people, who were not taking risk, from any insane financial risks by either eliminating most of the possible scenarios in which that risk arose or by limiting that risk to the people directly involved.
And, while I really do agree with Brooks, we need more responsibility. He himself is one of the guilty parties in spreading profligacy in the US. Benjamin Barber references,unfavorably, him on several occasions as one of the apostles of consumer capitalism. In truth, we need both enhanced individual responsibility and comprehensive legislation to avoid seeing the kind of economic shit-storm we’re in now. We can not afford allow greed into our lives; individually or communally.
Grace and Peace,
Jared
This is a fantastic book that I’m reading for the second time right now. Noll does a fantastic job bringing some major events in the history of Christianity into this condensed volume for Christians who have never had formal exposure to Christian history.
Filed under: In Memoriam
Filed under: Uncategorized
1. I yell at old people on the street while driving my car.
2. I committed my first federal offense at the age of five.
3. I started the largest forrest fire in US history.
4. I pooped a squirrel.
5. I still wear Member’s Only jackets.
I wrote an earlier version of this and didn’t like. It was more summary or synopsis than the kind of review I wanted to give this book. So, understand that I intentionally went for more of a commentary than synopsis.
Early this spring I got a wild hair across my ass, as my Granddaddy would say, about Lyndon Johnson. I had listened to a series of lectures on iTunes about US history and I was fascinated by the portion on Lyndon Baines Johnson and his Great Society. There was something amazing to me in the fact that we, as a nation, in our history had forgotten to recognize what is very likely the most progressive legislative endeavor in the nation’s history. Johnson effectively out Roosevelted Roosevelt and yet he doesn’t get credit for most of what he did. I’m sad to say that this book, while illuminating in other regards, did not clarify this for me. In fact, it only created more questions. But that’s a good thing.
The Path to Power ( hereafter PTP) covers Lyndon Johnson’s family, early life and his career in the US House of Representatives up to the year 1940. The book begins not with “Lyndon Johnson was born to…” Instead we read:
Two of the men lying on the blanket that day in 1940 were rich. The third was poor-so poor that he had only recently purchased the first suit that he had ever owned that fit correctly-and desperately anxious not to be: thirty-two-year-old Congressman Lyndon Johnson had been pleading with one of the other two men, George Brown , to find him a business in which he could make a little money.
Lyndon Johnson was a self-serving, power hungry man. He craved attention from a very early age. But, it must be said that he was also incredibly disciplined. The focus that it must have taken a young man in his twenties to run the office of a lazy, freshmen congressional representative so well that he himself began to develop a reputation outside of his boss’ district is a testament to the focus and vision that he had for his future. That said, LBJ was, during the period that this book covers (his early life up to his leave of absence from the US House of Representatives to join the Navy) the harbinger of a progressive agenda. In fact, though he ran as a hardcore supporter of President Roosevelt, he had more in common with the more conservative element of the world of Texas politics. So far as I can tell, either Johnson spearheaded the Great Society because it was politically expedient to do so, or somewhere along the line, he was drastically changed, and truly believed that progressive policies could solve real problems. My best guess at this point is that the man who inserted cut throat politics into a backwater third-rate teachers college in the Texas hill country and the mock government set up for congressional secretaries, never really changed his M.O.
I don’t want to give the impression that Johnson was some completely vile man with no redeeming qualities. Not in the least. When he was a congressional secretary he worked tirelessly to ensure that every letter was answered, whether or not help could be given. While he was a teacher/principal at the “Mexican school” in a poor border town he made sure that his students had every opportunity to participate in a normal school life. Even if it meant organizing car pools to take the children to sporting events. He did much the same as a teacher in Houston. And in his duties as state director of National Youth Administration, he demonstrated a level of creativity, imagination and devotion to his job that was unmatched. In short, Johnson was prone to work feverishly to accomplish his goals.
I can’t deny that it taints for me the good things to read about such a self-interesting power-hungry person, but he did good things for needy people. And that has to count for something.
Grace and Peace,
Jared
Benjamin Barber has hit the nail squarely on the head in this book on adulthood and citizenship.
He begins his work by comparing the current state of capitalism to Max Weber’s so called protestant ethic style of capitalism. Whereas today we see an emphasis on spending, consumption and credit as the lifeblood of our commercial and economic life, it wasn’t too long ago that capitalism valued saving and hard work as the path to wealth. Barber spends roughly the first two-thirds of the book to lay out the transition due to infantilization that has taken place in the west and gradually much of the rest of the world. Barber paints with broad strokes in this portion of the book. For a much more in-depth look at this phenomenon I’d recommend Naomi Klein’s No Logo. But exposing the infantilizing tendencies of consumer capitalism isn’t the most comelling part of the book. The really interesting stuff comes toward the end of the book, where barber examines the deleterious effects of consumerism on citizenship.
There has been a constant and not always slow erosion on citizenship since at least the ’60s, but much longer I’m sure. Citizens have abdicated their responsibilities and obligations to the common wealth in order to privatize. We’ve contracted out almost all of the most essential public services in the interest of wealth accumulation and getting things done more efficiently. We’ve cordoned off so much of our lives into private and government. There is essentially no public life left. We take only responsible for our own lives. And with levels of debt rising and saving achieving almost the level of myth, we are even letting go of that.
Barber references the novels 1984 and Brave New World to illustrate the threat we feared and the threat we missed. We feared a world where books were burned and speeched was silenced; what we got was a world where books are marginalized and speech is hollow, childish and abstract to the point of uselessness.
This is a fantastic book that diagnoses and offers a simple solution to one of the major problems crippling our civilization today; let go and grow the hell up. I highly recommend this book to anyone hoping to be an adult citizen.
Grace and Peace,
Jared
Filed under: Uncategorized
I never thought the day would come when a The Daily Show with Jon Stewart elicits the same response that a show like Moyer’s Journal. But it did.
I think that maybe CNN, Fox and MSNBC need to pack it in. Those guys suck. I’ll take Stewart and Colbert over those jackasses any day.
Grace and Peace,
Jared
So, my friends Daniel and Tonya tagged me on a meme. I don’t know for sure what a meme is, but I’m going to go ahead and post five books or scholars that had the most immediate or lasting effect on me and how I read the Bible.
1. N.T. Wright. I don’t know if everything he says is correct, but his Resurrection of the Son of God, let me know that I was not crazy for questioning my dispensational background. And he gave me some very important tools to take with me on the journey through scripture by heightening my appreciation for resurrection and much more thorough eschatology. He was also the first person I’d ever come across who made it seem wrong to equate scripture as the only form of divine authority in my life. I re-learned from him that I serve Jesus, and not scripture. It never looks the same again after you realize that.
2. Who were the early Israelites and where did the come from? William Dever’s largely laborious and fact-heavy book on archaeology also helped me walk away from something. I had always been told that all things were equal when it came to scripture, though not in those exact words. That if the deluge of Genesis was proved to be false, then the whole faith was a wash, and that we were to be pitied most. Dever, a lapsed fundamentalist turned lapsed Jew, showed me that I needed to freshen my perspective on scripture with a little less inerrantist sloganeering and little more imagination.
3. Walter Brueggemann. I think the first shot fired across the bow of my fundamentalist frame of mind came from his An Introduction to the Old Testament. It was in that work that I was exposed to the idea that facts do not always work in the interest of truth. After that I realized that I ought to stop reading the Bible in search of fact after fact with which I could construct a “Biblical world-view”.
4. Hermeneutics by Henry Virkler. Quite simply this book exposed to the very concept of reading and understanding scripture. It may not be the best, but it had more effect on my understanding of scripture than anything up to that point. Possibly even still.
5. Colossians Remixed by Brian Walsh and Sylvia Keesmaat. This is a fantastic book with an extremely lame title. I almost didn’t read it because I thought it was going to be some silly and insulting book about the Christian life that insulted its young readers because of its daring to spoon feed them what someone who is not them with poorly written nonsense. Needless to say, I was wrong. This book brings to life the words of scripture veiled by time and distance, in the world of the here and now. And it uses scripture to bring to life the world of here and now. It was in Walsh and Keesmaat’s book that I realized that good, sturdy intellect could be applied to scripture and then brought into the world of pastoral concerns. It inspired to not hide my light under a basket.
I’m not tagging anybody, because no one really reads this. If I get a request I may change my mind. Otherwise, that’s all for now.
Grace and Peace,
Jared
