Tag: Reading

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The Purpose of Life: Romans 11:36

For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen.

Romans 11:36

My semester’s theme thus far has been process over product, and this week’s verse underscores it. I can easily declare that all thing have their proper end in glorifying God. It is another to navigate the process that leads to that end result.

This passage in Romans connects the entire process — the beginning the middle and the end — to Christ. Everything starts with his word. Everything holds together through his word. Everything was made to glorify him.

I don’t find it difficult to acknowledge God is creator, and I confess with my mouth the Westminster Confession’s claim that the end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever. This is very different, however, from enjoying him right now in the middle of a work week or in the middle of a difficult class or in the middle of a grading session. It is easy to say, “Love God with everything you have and love your neighbor,” but what does that mean in the gritty details of your life?

This week, I am focusing on the process as a means to help my students improve as readers and writers. If I want my students to develop their reading and writing skills, I must be willing to give them ways of approaching their tasks. What I am praying for is a greater awareness of how God informs that process. Yes, He made all things, and yes, all things were made to glorify Him, but how does that translate into my concrete teaching and something as simple as free-writing or summarizing what I just read?

One thing I am recognizing is that there are far too many parts of the process of learning and teaching that I think I can do on my own. This simply isn’t true. I pray that God gives me the humility to ask for his guidance in every part of my educational and pedagogical process.

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A Review of a Classic Russian Novel

Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Crime and Punishment, 1864.

A deeply philosophical and religious novelist dedicated to understanding human nature, Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote this massive tale of sin and its consequences in 1864. Dostoevsky sets the story of poor student who commits murder in the crowded, dissolute streets of St. Petersburg but folds into the novel the social, political and economic issues of 19th Century western culture. Even 150 years after its publication date, this is still a gripping read. The book is the starting point for an imaginative account of what happens when humanity tries to conceive of ethics apart from God. Or, you can combine it with philosophy of Charles Taylor for insight into the disenchantment that accompanies the secular age. Conversely, you can read it as a story of redemption and resurrection, a backstory for a criminal like the thief on the cross who asked Christ to remember him. I recommend the novel as a seminal volume for understanding the internal and external consequences of sin.

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Why It’s Good to Feel the (Cognitive) Burn

It’s always good to feel the cognitive burn.

Today, I wanted to take reading notes as a model for my students. Not wanting to double up anything in the course, I decided to take first notes on a book I’m rereading, Augustine’s Confessions. The book has always given me problems. I’m fascinated by it, but there’s almost too much there to do anything but mark everything up: too much style, too many questions, too many scripture citations.

So I found myself in a very interesting situation this morning as I read Chapter 1. It wasn’t clicking for me. I felt confused. I felt lost. I knew that I would have to summarize the chapter when I was done, and it seemed like there were too many things that merited inclusion (or nothing that merited inclusion, I guess). But I knew I had to keep going.

And after 15 minutes or so, the reading began making more sense. I remembered passages I had forgotten about: the stuff about being a selfish baby, the criticism of The Aeneid, and his lamenting of how he used his rhetorical skills.

As the chapter ended, I didn’t have to wonder how to respond or make up my notes from scratch. I had three clear objectives: put the content in my own words, find two key quotations, then think about how the chapter connected to other things I had read or experienced. I could do that.

It was good to remember what it feels like to be confused, to know there was a simple task on the other side of my confusion that I could use to work towards understanding, and the awareness that this kind of response will be great for students to use on everything they read: from the Bible to their psychology textbook.

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Three Books I’ve Been Reading

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell—Susana Clarke: I’ve fallen headlong into this 1,000 page neo-Victorian novel with its faeries and magic, delightfully drawn human characters, and flat-out world-beating narrator. I’m not sure how I’m going to finish it as the semester ramps up, but I’m going to find a way. The two title characters have just met (it took nearly 300 pages!), and their differences in proximity to one another are intensifying the novel’s already abundant pleasures. One surprising feature? The copious footnotes that delineate the 19th century world of faerie/magic scholarship.

The Case of the Screaming Woman—Erle Stanley Gardner: This novel produced my favorite episode of the television series. I’ve been looking forward to reading the novel, and I was delighted to find that Gardner was responsible for my two favorite parts of the show: a tête-à-tête between Perry and a shyster defense attorney and Della having to testify while Perry fends off the DA’s questions with a barrage of objections. Everything from the murder victim to the defendant and murderer were different, but those two scenes were worth the price of admission.

Crime and Punishment—Fyodor Dostoevsky: I am now through four parts of Dostoevsky’s book and am now thoroughly enjoying it. The first two sections started slowly and then gained in interest as they went in. Parts three and four have been fascinating from start to finish. Svidrigailov is a great villain, Dunia and Sonia are strong female characters, and Porfiry? Well, that guy is Columbo avant la lettre. One of the things that I was particularly intrigued by was Sonia reading the story of Lazarus to Raskolnikov. It’s such a moving scene. We rarely see characters who are not ministers read scripture, much less do so in community. This scene is amazing. 

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Why Team Success Is Hard To Sustain

Halberstam, David. The Breaks of the Game, 1981.

A Harvard-trained journalist who made his bones chronicling the Vietnam War, David Halberstam was the first high-profile journalist to spill ample amounts of ink on the NBA. His classic The Breaks of the Game is the result of a year, the 1979-1980 season, spent with the Portland Trail Blazers who had only a few years earlier been league champions. Through the story of one team, Halberstam was able to offer a view of the entire professional sport at what, nearly 30 years later, was a crucial moment in that sport’s history. Halberstam’s book profiles too many players, coaches, and executives to have one real protagonist. In fact, the man on the cover of the current edition of the book, Bill Walton, isn’t even a Blazer during the season Halberstam covered. Yet Walton’s legacy, especially his contribution to the Blazers’s championship in 1976-1977 championship, hangs over the entire book like a thick fog. In addition to Walton, Halberstam spends considerable time covering, among others, the Blazer players Kermit Washington, Maurice Lucas, Larry Steele, and Billy Ray Bates; coaches Jack Ramsey and Lenny Wilkins; as well as Blazers GM Stu Inman and owner Larry Weinberg. In Halberstam’s hands, the season encapsulates the conflict of sports and business, the tensions of individual and team success, and the turn-on-a-dime nature of professional heartbreak or jubilation. This is the best sports book I’ve ever read.

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Two Books I’m Reading This Week

The Breaks of the Game—David Halberstam: The game is basketball, and the breaks are the hundreds of tiny things that go into making someone’s professional career in the National Basketball Association a success or failure. By the time Halberstam drops the titular phrase, you’ve felt the highs and lows of the sport and the men who play it. The man who uses the line is Larry Steele, a veteran of the Portland Trail Blazers whose name and history in the league are probably only recalled by Blazer trivia fanatics. But here was a man who played for nine seasons with one team, sacrificed his body for his team, won a single championship, and then was placed on waivers when his knees gave out. Steele played for Adolph Rupp at the University of Kentucky and had joined the Blazers in their first year of existence. His tale is one of small heartbreak and a modicum of achievement, yet when you hear his story, it feels like something more. He is one small character in Halberstam’s amazingly detailed journey through one NBA season with Steele’s team, the Trail Blazers. Along the way, Halberstam provides insight into the intersection of commerce and sports, the history of professional basketball, the racial dynamics in the league and the nation, and the most interesting players on every other team because this was the rookie year of Magic Johnson and Larry Bird. This was a great read, and once I started it I couldn’t stop reading it.

The Secrets Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert—Rosaria Champagne Butterfield: I was drawn to Butterfield’s story because she was a tenured professor of English at Syracuse University when she converted. She is no longer a professor. Instead, she teaches her adopted children while her husband serves as minister for a Reformed church. In these polarized times, a conversion narrative where someone changes his or her mind is worth reading. When that someone happens to be in my profession and the change means going from a critic and disparager of Christianity to a proponent of rigorously conservative and deeply theological Christianity, this story is a mind-blower indeed. I have yet to mention the reason I had this book recommended to me; Butterfield was a militant feminist and lesbian prior to her conversion. This makes her story a particularly loaded one for debates about same sex desire. Butterfield is adamant that the holy spirit changed her and that is she is not who she was. These parts of the book are powerful and worth reading. What makes the book remarkable is that Butterfield has included so many other ruminations on life as a believer. The most memorable were her comments on the pains, along with the joys, of conversion so as to let Christians who pray for their friends to come to Christ might know the serious consequences of what they’re asking for; her detailed description of the regulative principle of worship as a way of demonstrating how she now engages with scripture as part of a larger community; and her chapter on adoption which is raw and honest and God-honoring.

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A Key Moment in the History of Data Visualization

Johnson, Steven. The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic—And How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World, 2006.

A popular science writer and former distinguished writer in residence in NYU’s school of journalism, Steven Johnson has produced a page-turner that tells the tale of London’s 1854 cholera outbreak. Johnson’s book has four protagonists: the city of London, the bacterium that caused the outbreak, and two men—the doctor John Snow and clergyman Henry Whitehead. In Johnson’s hands, this story encapsulates science’s victory over superstition and marks the point at which it became realistic to believe urban centers like London could survive and thrive, not just in spite of, but perhaps because of their size. If you can manage to get past Johnson’s occasional religious biases, you’ll get something out of the book. 

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Why I Believe in God Part 2: Rhetorical Analysis

Last week I began analyzing the Cornelius Van Til tract “Why I Believe in God.” Each Tuesday, I will continue that series until I complete it.

In the second section of his presentation “Why I Believe in God,” Van Til addresses the cultural assumption that our birth is an accident.  He addresses the listener’s upbringing in Washington DC, a city that represents freedom, opportunity, and power. In contrast, Van Til’s own upbringing was humble. He was born on a farm in Holland claims to have worn wooden shoes. His point is that neither of them was really born in an extremely foreign place but in nations that have a religious past that is distinctly Christian. Van Til concludes that their discussion about God should thus concern the Christian God. Van Til admits that he and his listener differ in their belief, but he wants to make clear that he’s not arguing for the existence of a generic deity. The God he’s talking about is the Christian God. Next, Van Til addresses how he will make his argument. He admits he cannot produce God to walk alongside them as though God were just another human being. This is fine on Van Til’s part since the invisibility and omnipresence of God are not things that would allow such proof. Van Til is going to show: it’s reasonable to believe in God. Van Til registers the listener’s response. Van Til understands this will require a serious conversation because the consequences of the listener changing his mind about God would include the way the listener thinks about himself. In fact, Van Til gives the listener a chance to leave but appeals to the listener’s intelligence: why not hear the other side?

Van Til’s argument continues to be effective, chiefly in using his own story to limit the parameters of the case he’s making to the unbeliever. He will argue for the Christian God, not any God, and he believes he case he’s presenting is reasonable in accordance with who the Christian God is. Any proof of the Christian God’s existence is not subject to the reasonableness of the listener, but to the qualities God has revealed about himself in his word. The point is sealed by the fact that Van Til gets the listener to agree to listen based on the listener’s own reasonableness. That is, Van Til has not allowed the listener to determine what a reasonable demonstration of God’s existence is, but he has gotten the opportunity to share about the Christian God by appealing to the listener’s general reasonableness as demonstrated by the willingness to listen to someone you disagree with.

Also effective is the key figure of speech Van Til uses which shows that he understands the emotional stakes of this discussion. He says the listener looks “like a man about to undergo a major operation.” The comparison is apt. As a believer in God, Van Til feels something is wrong with the listener who does not believe in God, and Van Til wants that dire condition in the listener to be fixed. But surgery is serious. It requires preparation and serious recovery time. It’s not like reading the newspaper. This gives Van Til the opportunity to expound on a truth about believing in God: it has consequences. It changes the way you see yourself, and Van Til knows that this might hurt, just as surgery might leave you sore. Van Til also knows that without the surgery, the patient will likely die, so after gaining the listener’s consent, he continues his case.

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Thursday Reading Log

Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostovesky: I’d never read it before, and our SWU students wanted to tackle it this summer. I’m glad I have an excuse to read it. I’ve read about 200 pages thus far, and it’s very good. The murder is horrifying (as it should be), and I’m already starting to see how Dostoevsky is going to handle its brutal aftermath: through periodic peaks and terrifying depths in Raskolnikov’s emotions and mind.

The Rhetoric of Transformation – Adam Ellwanger: This is a friend’s forthcoming book, and it was a gripping read, high praise for a book destined for an academic press. Ellwanger traces the classical rhetorical term metanoia from a way to describe a linguistic apology to a term that described personal transformation in Christianity to a means to assert the reclaiming of one’s original identity in contemporary secular culture. The final section, where Ellwanger explains what the ramifications of this turn might be for how we think about composition studies, is an absolute haymaker.

Why Liberalism Failed – Patrick Deneen: I continued reading this book, and I found it a nice companion piece to Ellwanger’s book. The biggest attraction and flaw of liberalism, according to Deneen, is the way it privileges the autonomous individual. There are weaknesses in Deneen’s argument. I’m not ready to cede that liberalism, root and branch, is the problem. But Deneen’s arguments force me to come up with compelling arguments for things I considered givens re: my political beliefs.

The Case of the Daring Decoy – Erle Stanley Gardner: The latest novel I’m reading for my Perry Mason podcast, this book is notable for giving Paul Drake a potential love interest, a first for any novel I’ve read. The novels never feature a confession (this one is no different), but Perry’s courtroom means of confirming the murderer’s guilt while in court is quite nice. The television adaptation of this episode took most of its beats from the novel.

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How Do You Think Well?

Jacobs, Alan. How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds, 2017.

Alan Jacobs, an English professor in the Baylor University Honors Program, provides hope for those who wish to think more soundly in these contentious times through this short, lively manual on the way we make decisions. Jacobs engages with the experts on the topic (chiefly Daniel Kahneman and Jonathan Haidt), pulls specific examples out of the recent past to illustrate his points, and even provides a compelling checklist for thinking well. As Jacobs contends, part of good thinking is merely diagnostic: knowing that you have a thinking conundrum. If you can internalize a few more of Jacobs’s recommended best practices, you’ll be glad you read the book.  

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