Entangled States

McLaren responds to critiques of "A New Kind of Christianity"

I'm leading a group here in the Diocese of Arizona that's reading through Brian McLaren's newest book. At the beginning of the week I posted a critique of his criticism of the Graeco-Roman world view and its effect on reading the Bible properly. Apparently I wasn't the only one to have the reaction I had.

So McLaren has posted a response to the critics.

"1. I would encourage people who are critical of the chapter (4) dealing with Plato and Aristotle to be sure to read the lengthy endnotes for the chapter, especially notes 1, 2, 3, 5, 14, and 17, where I address some or maybe most of their concerns. I noticed how some of the criticism paraphrases exactly the kinds of provisos and qualifications I offer in notes 1 and 2, which made me think the commenters hadn't seen those notes. Perhaps I should have included these provisos in the text itself. At any rate, in the notes (and at points in the text itself) I try to make it clear that I'm dealing with some of the popularized 'isms' associated with these great philosophers, not with their rich and nuanced thinking itself, which I also acknowledge could never be reduced to a simple or formulaic summary. If someone is seeking a thorough understanding of these philosophers themselves, I imagine Nathan would be a good source of information. My purpose was to offer some explanation for how a certain narrative alien to Jesus and his gospel may have come to frame Jesus and his gospel. Whether my proposed explanation is valid or not, this narrative still arose from somewhere, and still deserves some attention, and, I think, questioning."

Read the full response here, there's a great deal more.

To which I respond, "fair enough".

As I've gotten further into the book, McLaren's left this particular line alone and if following different ones. At the moment he's pointing out that our sense of what it is to properly interpret scripture is highly culturally conditioned. He's listing the horrific ways that the Bible was used to justify human slavery in the southern U.S. As I read these sections, there's not much to disagree with. It's pretty standard stuff and represents much of what was being discussed, taught, debated, etc at Yale when I was a student at the Divinity School there back in the late 80's.

I still think McLaren could strengthen his argument against the traditional Reformation reading of the Bible by saying it no longer makes sense to us in the 21st century rather than by dismissing the sources that the Reformers used to make their argument. But, that's a nuance and not a dismissal of the main point.

... More as I get further into the book.

Some first thoughts on "A New Kind of Christianity"

I've asked some of my "students" to read Brian McLaren's new book "A New Kind of Christianity" with me as part of our regular weekly seminar. I'm just a few chapters in and I thought it might be useful to post some of my impressions as I'm reading along. This series of posts won't be so much a book report as a journal of ideas that McLaren's writing sparks.

I'm going to try this at the suggestion of Diana Butler-Bass. Diana preached at Trinity Cathedral over the weekend (we'll be posting the audio of her sermon here tomorrow) and in between the services, as she was signing books and greeting visitors, our conversation turned to Brian McLaren's new book. I was sharing some of my reservations with her, and she's the one who suggested posting them so that you all might shoot at them, and that Brian might have a chance to see them.

I'm not particularly interested in condemning a book that I haven't fully read, so if you're waiting for that, you're going to be disappointed. Also, while I have some quibbles with the ideas that are presented, I actually think there's a great deal of value in what I've read so far. I get the sense that McLaren is involved in the primary theological task of the 21st century - the "re-traditioning" of the Church (to borrow a term from Butler-Bass).

The book opens with a brief manifesto of sorts, laying out the reasons why the traditional Christianity of the 18th, 19th and early 20th century is no longer working for the majority of people in the West. That's a key point I think; that it's no longer working for people in the cultural west. Because clearly the enlightenment version of Christianity that grew out of the Reformation is very effective in the developing world of Africa and in the Far East. And that goes for both the Protestant and the post-Council of Trent Catholic versions.

But I think McLaren's got the right of it in the West. The Reformation was immediately preceded by what a friend of mine names a "plausibility collapse". The web and scaffolding of ideas that upheld the Medieval worldview suddenly collapsed, almost overnight. Luther's rejection of the cult of relics and papal selling of indulgences found willing ears in a culture that suddenly couldn't find a way to make sense of what had made sense. It's seemed to me for a while now that the West underwent a similar moment of plausibility collapse back in the 1960's. (1968 I guess if you want me to pick a year.) And the reverberations and internal cognitive dissonance from that event have shaped the arc of politics, culture and theology since.

At any rate, coming out of the Sixties, the classical reformation ideas of Christianity were no longer self-evident to people. Folks began to reject them out of hand, and to date, nothing really robust has been found to replace them. (Note that I'm trying to be precise and point to the idea of classical reformation ideas.)

I think part of this has to do with the fact that going forward from the 1950's, we stopped teaching the classical canon of literature. Latin was dropped from many curricula. Classical greek is no longer common. And with the loss of the classical canon, the regular exposure to the great ideas of Greece and Rome has faded. Much of western pedagogy until the 1950's tended to follow the old Roman teaching methods of classical education. Read the Canon. Learn the Canon. Emulate the Canon. But the need to share new science and ideas pushed the classical canon aside, into a backwater of sorts, and today very few people are intimately familiar with the ideas of Plato or Aristotle.

And because so much of the Reformation grew out of the West's recovery of these classical ideas during the Renaissance, when the classical scaffolding was removed from the common experience, the Reformation's logical exposition of God ceased making sense to people.

My first quibble with McLaren's writing, so far at least, is that he's created a sort of stalking horse that he calls the "Graeco-Roman" worldview. He describes a six line narrative arc for salvation history that grows out of this Graeco-Roman worldview. And he ridicules and rejects it. He does so in much the same way that people today reject and ridicule the Anselmian doctrine of the Atonement. The problem is though that when they ridicule the ideas of Anselm, they're not actually engaging his ideas. They're engaging a parody and dismissing that. And while they're right to dismiss the parody, it might be more useful for folks to try to understand the full idea first, and then dismiss that if they so desire.

I sort of get the feeling that McLaren's rhetoric gets away from him in the first section as he poo-poos the Platonic world view. At least I hope that's what's happened. Preachers do tend to have problems with rhetorical flourishes. (Don't ask me how I know this...)

Here's what I suggest to strengthen his argument - at least as far as I've read. Rather then saying that the whole enterprise of the Church is flawed because it's concept of salvation and cosmology has been understood through the lenses of a Graeco-Roman; simply say that the classical form that made sense to the Church's that grew out of the Reformation no longer works today. It no longer works because we're no longer exposed to it in school. We have been given new sets of lenses.

And just as the Reformation grew out of a cultural shift ("Emergence" to borrow Phyllis Tickle's term), what we are becoming will do that as well.

So, I agree that we must recast much of the traditional reformation language. I agree that the Reformation world view no longer works. I don't think though that it's worthy of total rejection though because there's an awful lot of useful ideas buried deep within it and rejecting the whole means we'll necessarily reject the useful parts too.

(Aside: This reminds me of something I tried to point out when teaching the History of Science. When a new paradigm comes along, the new paradigm has to be explain as much as the old paradigm did and then extend that for it to be taken seriously. Just coming up with a new paradigm and explaining something new is fun, but not terribly helpful if you can't explain the things the old paradigm did. Relativity is so impressive because in the case of slow velocity, it collapses to Newtonian physics.)

As I'm reading now (in book 1 of "A New Kind of Christianity") McLaren has called for a return to the Jewish narrative structure of the Old Testament. It seems to me that he's recapitulating the work of Hans Frei (who helped created the Yale Method of biblical criticism) - calling for us to read the biblical narrative as a narrative and not as an atomistic string of aphorisms. Yay for Brian in this.

Returning to the text, reading it anew through "Jewish" eyes is most likely going to be a profitable path. Not though because that's the secret key to unlocking everything. We already know the key: Jesus. But it's useful because rereading the texts with a new set of lenses will probably be the way we find a scaffolding and web of ideas that will allow to construct a world-view that speaks to the next 500 years or so of human experience (again a la Tickle).

... so that's what I've got so far. If you've read the book, I'd be curious to hear your reactions to the first section as well. Let me know what you think in the comments!

Anthony Dale Hunt seems to be reacting to the same thing that I am in his essay here.

Gospel History: Richard Bauckham’s Jesus and the Eyewitnesses

One of the surprising pleasures of my professional life this past year has been leading a class on liturgy for clergy of other denominations who are in the process of being received as Episcopalians. In partial fulfillment of the canonical requirements for their reception, we’ve been meeting once a week and working our way through the liturgies and theology of the Book of Common Prayer. The opportunity has allowed me to return to my own notes from the classes I took with Prof. (now Bishop) Paul Marshall back in the day and add to them my own experience after nearly twenty years of using the liturgies in regular worship. Answering their questions of “why?” has gotten me to revisit my own pat answers and realize that there’s now more nuance to them than they used to have.

I guess because the Bishop here saw how much fun we were having, he asked if he and couple of others could occasionally crash the party. (Well, not actually, but it sounds good.) He and the Canon to the Ordinary join us a couple of times a month. When that happens we put away our regular lesson plan and substitute a seminar like discussion of challenging recent book that would be of interest to all of us. Right now we’re reading through Antony Flew’s latest “There is a God” and next up is Rene Girard’s “Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World”. Our first book was Richard Bauckham’s “Jesus and the Eyewitnesses”.

Bauckham’s book, which won the Ramsey prize for theological writing last year, was not exactly a page turner. His academic writing style slows the reader down and forces us to pay attention to his line of thinking. He marshals an incredible amount of data, often presented in table form, and the reader needs to pour over these if one is hoping to read his book with any sort of academic integrity so as to ask him to convince them of his thesis.

And it’s a thesis that’s worth the work. He argues contra much of the academic tradition of the latter part of the twentieth century that the oral traditions of the New Testament writing are very reliable. Furthermore he points out that the time between the founding of the Church and the writing of the gospels was so short that there were still eyewitnesses who could and would challenge details of the narratives if they were fanciful or fraudulent.

He begins with a return to the fragments of Papias’ writing found in Eusebius’ Church History. Papias has been granted some recent notoriety for his claims that he disdained the written accounts of Jesus life preferring instead to hear the accounts of the eyewitnesses to the events who were still alive in his day. Bauckham reexamines these words and finds not a disdain, and makes a rather sophisticated argument that the gospels and the actual writings of Papias are written in the form of best historical works of their day.

Bauckham then spends a goodly portion of the rest of his book pointing out that what we can actually test of the narratives (context, sitz-im-leben, narrative style, names, etc) is consistent with this idea.

The point of the argument seems to be this: The gospel authors intended to write accurate accounts. They wrote in a form that was recognizably a historical biography (of which most of the contemporary examples of the genre have been lost). They wrote in a period in which there still people who could write challenges if they made claims that weren’t true.

People who have dismissed the gospels as clumsy pieces of propaganda written by unlettered rubes, making up a genre as they went have to confront this challenge. The writers, according to Bauckham’s view, wrote in the form of the best history of their day. They wouldn’t have done so if they weren’t trying to convince their readers of the veracity of their account. If they are as unlettered as is argued, then they wouldn’t have had the sophistication to use the form they did. If they we sophisticated liars, then why didn’t they do a better job smoothing over the rough spots of the gospels?

I’m not sure the critics of the gospels as historical documents really can answer this challenge satisfactorily.

And if this is all so, then rather than read the Gospels as something quaint, we can approach them as reliable documents, certainly of the quality of other documents of the same period which we have traditionally used as primary sources for doing academic history.

The reading group I led did not follow uncritically to this idea. But we all arrived in agreement that except for a few quibbles of side issues, Prof. Bauckham proves his point.

And that point, that the Gospels are not to be dismissed as narrative fiction, but reliable accounts of something unique in human history, forces one to once again ask the question: “Who do I say Jesus is?”

As a believing Christian I’ve answered that question the same way most of my life: “My Lord and my God.” But now I say that with a greater degree of certainty that I’m referring to the historical Jesus of Gospels as well as the full revelation of the Divine in the man Jesus that the early Church followed.

If you’re a preacher, put this book on your reading list.

eBook version of "The Lost Symbol" is outselling paper

I've seen this news reported in a number of places online this afternoon. Dan Brown's latest book "The Lost Symbol" is selling more copies electronically on the Kindle than it is in paper. At least at Amazon.

Most of the online reports seem to track back to this post at Kindle Nation Daily:

"As of 10:30 a.m. EDT today, September 15, the Kindle edition is ahead of the hardcover edition in Amazon's own hourly-updated sales rankings. "

Read the full note here.

Interesting.

I bought the Kindle version. It was half the price of the hardback. I'll finish in a half day's worth of reading and I'm not likely to reread it many times. I won't have to store a copy in my already overloaded bookshelf. And it was cheaper. (Did I mention that already?)

Perhaps we're starting to see a long expected shift?

----

On a quick note about the actual book - I'm a little worried about how Brown tries to base Noetic science (the science of human consciousness according to his novel) in part on the ideas of Quantum Entanglement.

I've always been uncomfortable when people try to push physics models further than they are valid, or into regimes where they are not meant to be used. I've read a lot of hackneyed religion and new age ideas that try to build off some of the surprising and counter-intuitive predictions of Quantum Physics. I've done my best to avoid that here. But I'm thinking that we are all in for a lot of nonsense if this new book has anything like the following of Brown's last book.

Something fun

The first book I remember reading was Edith Hamilton's "Greek Mythology" when I was starting 2nd grade. Somehow that, and my pouring over my father's Ancient Greek and European history textbooks when I was boy, created a deep an abiding love of ancient cultures and, more importantly, their stories.

I've been reading fantasy novels forever. When I read for fun, it's pretty much a toss up between Sci-Fi and Fantasy with Fantasy winning out more often than not. A well written novel is the balm when one is needed. And lately...

Years ago I discovered a wonderful site for people who really like well written fantasy novels and short stories: The Greenman Review. It's a site that publishes multiple reviews of what's worth reading and it's invaluable when you're looking for something to take on vacation or retreat and don't want to waste your time.

Here's a little bit of the introduction to the latest issue. Hopefully it gives you a sense of the quality you find on the site:

"Neil Gaiman once said that his favorite smell was 'November evenings -- frost and leaf-mould and woodsmoke. The smell of coming winter.' Now I'll bet you, like I, can now smell frost and leaf-mould and woodsmoke as that's what a truly great storyteller can do and Gaiman's among the best storytellers that have ever graced this culture. To his credit, he is also, as one fellow writer put it, 'a truly nice fellow'. Having encountered in my day some writers who were, to put it mildly, far less nice than one would hope they would be, Gaiman is one of the better blokes in the writing business these days! Once upon a time, we made him Oak King for a year -- an honor reserved for the best storytellers!

And he's certainly a prolific writer/scriptwriter/poet/lyricist as well -- we've reviewed more works by him than anyone else by far! So we honour him with a special edition that looks at him as a person, has suggestions on where to start reading his works, and has a whole slew of fellow writers saying what they like best by him. So let's get an Imperial pint of cider and take a look-see at Gaiman and his works!"

Read the full piece here.

They publish their full updates via RSS or via email (whichever works best for you). If you've not seen this before, have fun!

The Mosher Pit » "Tag"

One of my online friends wrote this yesterday:

"The funny thing about being tagged in a “what are you reading” meme (as I was by Jamie Notter) is that I do much of my reading through audiobooks, so the book I’m currently reading doesn’t have a page number, although I could dig up the physical copy of the book if I looked around enough, that’s not true of most audiobooks I “read.” See, I have a long commute, and what makes it bearable is Fairfax County library’s extensive collection of CD audiobooks. Granted, I am an NPR fangirl (we’ve dug up the evidence from the 2004 archives and will migrate it here soon), but I love being read to."

Read the rest here.

And then Helen tagged me, and a few other people to list what we're reading.

You can see the blogs I'm reading over on the right-hand column.(And if I could figure out how to link it, I would...)

At the moment on my bedside table is a copy of "Barth for Armchair Theologians".

On my Kindle right now I'm reading:

• "World Without End" by Ken Follet
  
• "Aegypt" by John Crowley
  
• "Copernicus' Secret: How the Scientific Revolution Began" by Jack Repcheck
  
• "Founding Faith: Providence, Politics, and the Birth of Religious Freedom in America" by Steven Waldman
  
• "The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism" by Timothy Keller
  
• "The Other Boleyn Girl" by Philippa Gregory

Sounds much more impressive than it is. But I'm hoping to have the pile of them done by the end of May so that I can start piling up some summer reading.

Christmas Vacation

I’ve been intentionally offline here for a few weeks now. I realized earlier this fall that I hadn’t taken a real break from my daily duties in more than a year. That isn’t surprising given the number of irons in the fire I’ve been watching and the fact that this was a year of significant transition for me as I moved to a new ministry and a new part of the country. Thus I felt I was due for a real break.

What do you do when you take time off? For years - like since I was a young teenager - the answer to that question has been that I’ve curled up somewhere in a chair and just read voraciously. I remember how I used to reward myself at the end of finals or after a major project was finished by putting on some quiet music and picking the top book up off my accumulated pile and plowing through four or five of them in a week. Somehow just entering the fugue state of reading - letting myself be completely absorbed into another person’s thoughts was more refreshing than any other activity I tried.

But it’s been years since I’ve been able to do that. Some of you know that I have a mild form of arthritis. One of the inflammation sites is my shoulders and neck. Over the past ten years or so, the act of sitting still and holding a book so that I could see it and read it for more than an hour or so would mean that I would have to take a couple handfuls of anti-inflamatory meds to keep my regular level of functioning. For some reason reading on a computer screen didn’t bother me as much - I think because I didn’t have to hold anything up while I was reading.

So I am overjoyed to report that my christmas present from my daughter and wife, has made it possible for me to read again in the way I used to be able to read. The Kindle that I received on Christmas Day has been in my hands pretty much continuously since. I read Isaacson’s bio on Einstein. I read the Pullman “Dark Materials” trilogy. I’m reading “The Nine” at the moment and have Doris Kearn Goodwin’s book on Lincoln’s administration cued up next. I’ve also decided to experiment with having the full NY Times wireless delivered to me each morning. (I’m curious if I’ll prefer that more than the online version or not.) The Kindle’s lightness and it’s lack of needing two hands to hold seems to make it less irritating to my neck and shoulders to read with. The screen is superb, especially when I sit in my favorite reading chair and use a reading lamp. I pretty quickly forget the platform that I’m using and just read the words that are flashing by on each page.

I’ve been checking webpages and email a few times a day for the past weeks, but mostly just enjoying the ability to read for long stretches again. I really do feel like I’ve stirred a bunch of cobwebs out of my old mind.

I was hoping that this device would work this way for me. I’m more delighted than you can imagine to be able to say that it did.

(There are lots of other cool, game changing features on the Kindle, but frankly I’m less concerned about them than I am that it makes reading a joy again for me.)

So I had a pretty great vacation. Thanks Karen for my present. I’ll try to remember to show up for meals.

Grin.

Dumbledore was gay, says JK Rowling

Since I've been posting information on the Harry Potter series over the past months, I thought I'd share this piece of news that I found in the Scottsman this morning:

"Harry Potter author JK Rowling today revealed that Dumbledore, Headmaster of Hogwarts, is gay.

The Edinburgh writer made the admission during a question and answer session with fans at New York's Carnegie Hall.

She was asked by one young fan if Dumbledore finds "true love".

"Dumbledore is gay," Rowling replied to gasps and applause.

She said he was smitten with rival Gellert Grindelwald, whom he defeated long ago in a battle between good and bad wizards."

In other interviews Rowling goes on to say that the books contain an extended argument for tolerance and acceptance.

Read the rest here: Scotsman.com News - Entertainment - Arts - Dumbledore was gay, says JK Rowling

Ms. Rowling Discusses Christian Content of Novels

From the blogsite Hogwarts Professor:

"Well, folks, it finally happened. The Main Stream Media finally asked Ms. Rowling about the Christian content of her writing, she acknowledged it openly and frankly, and the reporter writes that the ‘religious parallels’ were ‘always’ evident to the ‘sharp-eyed reader.’ What a hoot. I argue for years against the current of opinion and the day Ms. Rowling acknowledges her faith and its place in Harry Potter, the religious meaning and specifically the Christian meaning is now, as she said herself, ‘obvious.’

And MTV breaks the story! Not quite the Quibbler or National Enquirer, but not the LA Times or Washington Post, either, and they were at this news conference, right? Really, this story is funny. Two months ago in Time magazine Lev Grossman says the books are about the death of God and the victory of secular literature; we morons here who thought otherwise were just projecting our beliefs into the storyline. Now we are part of the crowd who knew it all along. People are funny; reporters are hilarious.

[Please note that the reporter who wrote this up unwittingly serves as the mouthpiece of the Star Chamber Catholics who want us to believe the pope as Cardinal Ratzinger condemned Harry Potter. Some stories will never die.]"

Read the rest here: Ms. Rowling Discusses Christian Content of Novels

Jesus for the Non-Religious: A book review

Bishop John Spong has published another book. This one is entitled "Jesus for the Non-Religious"

Ben Myers has a review of the book, pointing out the good intentions and the admirable desire of the book to bring modern biblical scholarship to the common reader, but also pointing out the numerous ways in which Bishop Spong relies on out-dated scholarship when he does so.

Myers however finds the key problem with this book - and with so many others lately - when he makes the following observation about the Jesus presented to the readers of the book:

"[According to Spong] Jesus overcomes our prejudices and stereotypes, so that we can be inclusive and tolerant towards others. This, in a nutshell, is ‘the new reformation’; this is Bishop Spong’s Jesus.

And for all Spong’s iconoclastic claims, there is something strangely familiar about this Jesus. A Jesus who champions inclusiveness and tolerance is a Jesus who looks suspiciously like – well, like ourselves. Presumably Spong’s readers will already identify with the Western liberal values of tolerance and inclusiveness. We did not learn those values from Jesus, but, thanks to Spong, we discover subsequently that Jesus himself is also committed to the same values.

The function of Spong’s Jesus is thus simply to maintain the social and political status quo. He takes our own most cherished and self-evident Western values, and he provides them with a theological justification. Thus our own values are made absolute and unimpeachable – they are elevated to the status of ideology. Simply put, Spong tells us that political correctness is correct, since even Jesus was politically correct.

This should give pause to any reader of the Gospels. After all, the Gospels consistently depict a Jesus who is radical and confronting and unsettling – a Jesus who challenges the status quo, who hangs out with the wrong people and antagonises the establishment, who resists every attempt to domesticate his message, refusing to allow his actions to be calmly assimilated into any existing religious framework. And for just this reason, the Jesus of the Gospels is finally executed. In contrast, however, it’s hard to imagine why anyone would be offended by Bishop Spong’s politically correct Jesus. A Jesus whose sole commitment is to tolerant inclusiveness is simply not the kind of Jesus whom anyone would want to crucify."

This danger of finding, upon careful study, that Jesus is actually telling us that we should be just like we want to be anyways, is not unique to Bishop Spong or to modern inclusivist theological thought. It's pretty trivial to observe that within the right-wing of American theological teaching, a claim that careful reading of the biblical accounts of Jesus show him to be a prototype model American citizen who's imprimatur supports most any action the present American administration undertakes.

Nor is this projection of ourselves onto Jesus unique to our particular moment in history. It was the recognition that ultimately any attempt to uncover the "real Jesus" by getting "behind" the gospel accounts would end up creating a figure who was a projection of our most cherished beliefs that finally derailed the "Historical Jesus" movement from serious scholarly pursuit.

Albert Schweitzer said of the whole enterprise, (something to the order of) "When we peer down into the wells of history to see the truth, what we ultimately end up seeing is our own face reflecting back up at us."

Read the rest: John Shelby Spong: Jesus for the Non-Religious

Harry vs Luke

Cool post over on the "Duck of Minerva" about the similarities between the Potter "universe" and the Star Wars "universe"

"Harry Potter [...] inherits two things from Star Wars: a set of cultural commonplaces on which it draws for much of its evocative power, and the mantle of serving as a root experience for massive numbers of people -- especially for younger people, into whose cultural lifeworld notions like 'muggle' and the Ministry of Magic have now been firmly implanted. Just as much of cultural life in the industrialized parts of Europe and North America (and quite a ways beyond it) was decisively shaped or colored by the way that Star Wars updated and transmitted the cultural commonplaces that it deployed and utilized, so too will cultural life be divisible into pre- and post-Potter eras, with a 'Potterian' flavor going forward.

Fortunately for us, the post-Potter world contains much of what the pre-Potter world contained, because the Harry Potter story -- as mythology -- is an old, old story. What is new here are the details and specifics, not the basic themes and tropes"

Read the rest here: The Duck of Minerva: What Harry Potter inherits from Star Wars

(And this should probably be required reading for Youth Ministers all around the church - the same way as we all used to need a more than passing familiarity with "The Force" if we were going to be able to connect.)

My favorite scenes in the "Deadly Hallows"

Will not be posted in the body of this post, but in the comments so as to not give away any spoilers. (These shouldn't really be spoilers, but just in case, you've been warned...)

Done.

An amazing read.

JK Rowling has given us a great gift. Bless her.

My Harry Potter Plot Prediction

Okay, I just finished re-reading the Half-blood Prince yesterday in preparation for my daughter and my midnight trip to the bookstore to buy “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.“

I am now going to issue my one and only guess about Prof. Snape. (/drumroll)

I think Snape is loyal to Dumbledore in the end.

I believe that Dumbledore pleaded with Snape to kill him because if Dumbledore did not die, Draco Malfoy and his family would be killed by Voldemort. Snape, who had sworn an unbreakable vow to aid Draco, in acting in accordance with Dumbledore’s wishes both achieves the end result of his vow and keeps faith with Dumbledore.

The look of revulsion on Snape’s face was because he hated having to kill Dumbledore, the only person who ever finally believed totally in him.

Note that Snape very carefully avoids harming Harry Potter in the next scene and instead acts to protect Harry from the worst of his desire to act in revenge.

The loathing look on Snape’s face was probably a profound jealousy that he would never share the mentor-student relationship with Dumbledore that Harry had.

So in the end, Dumbledore sacrifices himself to save a traitor’s life. A profoundly Christian thing to do.

I guess if I’m right, I’d expect Draco to show signs of redemption as a result.

I’ll be back in about 36 hours to grade myself.

(Update: I've gotten my silver armbands and my tickets for the drawing at Borders tonight. My daughter is in a show that's opening tonight, but the plan is that as soon as she's out of costume and make-up we're on our way to the book store. It took me until about 8 AM in the morning to read my way through the Half-blood prince. Let's see if I can do the same with this book.)

BabyBlue: Why Harry Potter?

There's a great post of a letter by the author of the Baby Blue Cafe written to a member of a the church she attends explaining why she believes it's possible to be both Christian and a fan of the Harry Potter books.

Here's just a bit:

"I read the books and realized that the 'magic' in them was in line with the magic in Tolkien and CS Lewis and Shakespeare (i.e., The Tempest, Hamlet, Macbeth). It was a literary device and what was really astonishing were that the themes were the themes of Jane Austin and CS Lewis as well. I read a book called 'Finding God in Harry Potter' (and it's earlier version called 'The Hidden Keys in Harry Potter') and actually took a class from the author, John Granger which led me to be one of his readers during the writing of his latest book. His thesis is that JK Rowling is a modern-day 'Inkling' (the name of the group that included CS Lewis and Tolkien as well as others) and that she is writing a Christian-inspired story. I think he's right - though we won't know for sure until we read the final book in the series which is coming out this summer.

What is spiritual warfare really like? What is the difference between the nature of good and evil? How are people redeemed? How are they saved? I could go on and on - the books are rich with Christian imagery - in fact, 'Gryffindor' which is Harry Potter's 'house' at his school is a Christian symbol. JK Rowling is no fan of Philip Pulman (and his books) and there are rumors that one of her characters may be based on him (it's not a very nice character). He is hostile to Christianity and is an atheist. Jo Rowling has been clear that she's a Christian (though what kind of Christian we don't yet know). The 'secular left' in the UK are now very troubled by her writings - which depicts traditional family roles and historic Christian themes found in historic British Literature - themes, as I mentioned earlier, are covered by authors - Christian authors, such as Jane Austin, Charlotte Bronte, CS Lewis, and Dortothy Sayers."

As someone who has gone down with his daughter to pre-order the last book of the series, and who's read and listened the stories a number of times, I urge you to read the rest here if you've wondered about people like me: Why Harry Potter?

(Via BabyBlueOnline.)

Inside the Hobbit House

I SO want one of these...

"Asked to design a fitting repository for a client’s valuable collection of J.R.R. Tolkien manuscripts and artifacts, architect Peter Archer went to the source—the fantasy novels that describe the abodes of the diminutive Hobbits.

‘I came back my client and said, ‘I’m not going to make this look like Hollywood,’’ Archer recalled, choosing to focus instead on a finely-crafted structure embodying a sense of history and tradition."

Read the rest here: Inside the Hobbit House - Fine Homebuilding Article

One more JRR Tolkien book being published

This news is making the rounds on blogsphere this morning:

Link: Tolkien Jr completes Lord of Rings - Independent Online Edition > News.

The first new Tolkien novel for 30 years is to be published next month. In a move eagerly anticipated by millions of fans across the world, The Children of Húrin will be released worldwide on 17 April, 89 years after the author started the work and four years after the final cinematic instalment of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, one of biggest box office successes in history.

The book, whose contents are being jealously guarded by publisher HarperCollins - is described as "an epic story of adventure, tragedy, fellowship and heroism."

I'll be buying a copy - probably the day it's released. LOTR was such an important book for me when I was a teenager (I think I read the series twice a year all the way through High School) that any chance I have to find out more about the vision Tolkien saw for Middle Earth, I grab for it.

It's funny how important books our to our intellectual development. I was reminded of that the other day.

Kenney (my daughter) and I went book shopping this weekend. (We finally discovered the gianormous Borders around the corner from our new home.) She's been complaining that she's not found anything to read that's she's really cared about. I took her with me to the Science Fiction and Fantasy section and was delighted to discover that some of my favorite books from when I was her age were right there on the shelves. We walked out later with copies of Mary Stewart's Arthurian Trilogy and a couple of the first in the series of Piers Anthony's Xanth novels. I'm crossing my fingers that she'll love them as much as I did. (If not, it's okay. Having them at home again will give me a chance to re-read them yet another time.)

What books or authors did you fall in love with when you were a teenager? I've discovered (probably not surprisingly) that most clergy loved science fiction and/or fantasy...

Spiritual thriller flying off shelves

Just saw this news about a new book that's apparently quite the rage...

"A clandestine sect with evil plans to end the world. An ancient code. Secret saints. And the Kabbalah.

These are the key elements of The Book of Names, a new spiritual thriller that has been flying off the shelves since its release last month.

The book, co-written by Chicago native Jill Gregory and her best friend/writing partner Karen Tintori, was released Jan. 9 with a first printing of 75,000 copies and already has gone into its second printing, Craig Libman, a publicist for St. Martin's Press, said Friday."

The article goes on to say "Look out Dan Brown!"

I've not seen the book - and this is the first I've heard of it. Have any of you come across it? Is it worth reading as a "fun" book before Lent gets here?

Read the rest here: Cathleen Falsani :: Spiritual thriller flying off shelves

(Via Chicago Sun-Times.)

My 2007 Lenten Discipline

It’s getting to be time to start planning how I shall observe Lent. Usually I try to pick up an extra spiritual habit rather than put something aside - though I’ve made exceptions over the years.

This year I’ve pretty much decided that I’m going to focus on two books for the six weeks of Lent and make my way through them in a very careful and thoughtful way.

The first is St. Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians. We’ve been reading from this epistle the past couple of weeks in Morning Prayer and I’m finding myself more and more intrigued by Paul’s critique of Peter’s actions regarding accommodation of the circumcision party’s observance of the Law in the early Church. I’m just finishing up Gary Wills book “What Paul Meant” and I’ve rekindled my fascination with St. Paul. It was my reading Paul’s writing in a good translation (the Revised English Bible) years ago that formed my understanding of what it means to be a “centrist” or moderate in the Church. But the Letter to the Galatians gives evidence that there are things upon which the Apostle would not compromise. I think...

Anyway, I’m off to find a really good commentary on Galatians. Any suggestions?

Secondly I’m going to read through William Webb’s book “Slaves, Women and Homosexuals”. (I’ve already blogged about this book before.) The point being that anyone who wants to make a case for the acceptance of women into the clergy, gay and lesbian people into the full life of the Church and the absolute prohibition of slavery can’t easily make a proof-text based scriptural argument. Rather the argument has to be focused on the full teaching of the Bible, the characteristics of the Kingdom of God and the development of God’s self-revelation to humanity. This book is supposed to be one of the best places to encounter such a line of reasoning.

A friend of mine told me a year ago that the Archbishop of Canterbury had remarked to him that the Episcopal Church has yet to make a fully convincing argument that there is scriptural warrant for our actions to fully embrace the ministries of women and gay and lesbian Christians. According to his report, the Archbishop says that such an argument can be made, but we’ve not yet done it. I’m not sure that what the Archbishop is true about us not making the argument but if there’s a way to make our presentation to the rest of the Communion stronger, then I’m very interested in learning how to make that happen. Hence the choice of this book for Lent.

What about you all? Have you planned your Lenten disciplines yet? What are you going to be doing?

The disbeliever | Salon Books

There's an article up on Salon this evening about the author of a book titled "The End of Faith":

"Sam Harris, author of 'The End of Faith,' on why religious moderates are worse than fundamentalists, 9/11 led us into a deranged holy war, and believers should be treated like alien-abduction kooks."

...
The heart of Harris' book is a frontal assault on Islam and Christianity, carrying both pages and pages of quotations from the Quran imploring the faithful to kill infidels, and a chilling history of how Christian leaders have brutally punished heretics. Harris argues that much of the violence in today's world stems directly from people willing to live and die by these sacred texts.

In perhaps his most daring rhetorical gambit, Harris seeks to undermine religion by denouncing not just jihadis and fundamentalists, but moderates. "Religious moderates are, in large part, responsible for the religious conflict in our world," he writes, "because their beliefs provide the context in which scriptural literalism and religious violence can never be adequately opposed." Harris especially chastises moderates for refusing to criticize scripture-quoting extremists; for him, they are basically guilty of legitimizing fundamentalism.

The body of the article is an interview with Harris. In it he says that he wrote his book as a response to the events of 9/11. He takes on Islam, Christianity and Judaism, focusing especially on passages that have been used as proof-texts to justify violence and torture against people with whom the faithful disagree.

Harris goes on to defend his own belief in Buddhism and his fascination with Telepathy. While there are some interesting points here, it seems to me that the whole enterprise is simply a "rant" writ large. I could imagine using his techniques to condemn nation-states and most any "ism" that has gotten any real traction.

I can imagine thoughtful ways to critique the religious impulse and the need to explain our existential reality, and even ultimately attempt to explain away religion entirely as merely a particularly successful evolutionary strategy. This is book is apparently not that - and at least according to the interview doesn't even really ask the more subtle questions that could be asked.

You can read the rest here: The disbeliever | Salon Books