Tête-à-Tête-Tête » Books

Evolving in Monkey Town

smijer — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 11:00:22 +0000

I guess I’ll have to subscribe to the blog until I can get around to the book, but June Griffin makes her first appearance in Chapter 2, so it is going to have to be read.

So… anyway… I’m looking forward to it. I imagine other Eastern Tennesseans will enjoy it as well. Matter of fact, I expect it will do well with the national audience it seems to be targeted to.

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Pearl Buck

smijer — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 14:43:34 +0000

Speaking of books that made a permanent impression on me, The Good Earth did. It made a noticeable and long-term impact on my perspective and values. If I remember correctly, I read it on recommendation from my mother.

I always thought Pearl Buck was a funny name… for a man. I never read anything biographical about this author until today. And so, never learned that this author was a she. Today, I rectified that (via 3qd). If you haven’t read about her – or more importantly, read her most important work, you should.

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Book Review After a Dozen Years

smijer — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 11:00:50 +0000

It was 1998 when I read M. Scott Peck’s The Road Less Travelled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values, and Spiritual Growth. I have not re-read it since then, so please bear with me. I’m working from memory.

Before I get to the good stuff, which comprises the first half of this book, I should start with a few negatives. The title is misleading – this is not a book about the science of psychology in any sense. Psychology is a soft science, but it is a science none-the-less. This is not a psychology book, though Peck is a psychiatrist (maybe a good one, I don’t know), and though he occasionally alludes to a bit of scientific information that helps him present his points. It is not a psychology book – it is a self-help book.

And, unfortunately the latter half contains a hefty portion of Christian-flavored New Age mumbo jumbo.

That said, I would recommend the book (at least the first half of it) to anyone… and may even go procure a copy for my family at home to peruse.

The big lesson of it – one that I shamefully didn’t figure out without Peck’s assistance – has stayed with me for a very long time now, at least in some permutation or another. It is this: sentimentality is not the same as love (though loving relationships can inspire some sentimentality). Romance is not the same as love (though romantic feelings can characterize some stages in the growth of a loving relationship).

Love is not an emotion. Instead, it is a committed activity.

Now, I’m not exactly clear on how Peck understands what that activity is… but here’s how he puts it: “Love is not a feeling. Love is an action, an activity… Genuine love implies commitment and the exercise of wisdom… love as the will to extend oneself for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth…..true love is an act of will that often transcends ephemeral feelings of love or cathexis, it is correct to say, ‘Love is as love does’.”

I think that’s a reasonable way to put it. Maybe I would replace “spiritual growth” with something else that conveyed both more and less than that phrase does. Maybe I would say instead that love is the extension of oneself for the purpose of enriching the life of another.

As imperfect a construction as I find Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, I think that love means playing a role in helping others meet all sorts of “needs” (in Maslow’s sense) under various circumstances, and depending on the nature of the relationship. I put “needs” in scare quotes because I want to make clear that, while I may be a fuzzy-headed liberal, the sense that I am trying to convey here is compatible with the “tough love” championed by sensible conservatives. In other words, I don’t mean that love nurtures in a way that undermines the self-reliance of the beloved, but that enhances it, instead.

I would also be careful to add that while love sometimes requires self-sacrifice, love doesn’t require a noble but meaningless gesture of self-sacrifice. No greater love hath someone than that they lay down their life… but not so that their corpse can be a temporary crutch for the beloved. Love preserves for itself the ability to nurture in real and meaningful ways, and only sacrifices when doing so will bring meaningful good and when it can afford to do so without giving up more opportunities for good.

Oh… but I have strayed from the task. I’m no longer reviewing the book. I’m sharing the perspective that I owe in part to that book. Which I guess is the point. A person could do worse than to internalize this view of what love means and to strive to live it in all of their relationships. That in mind – maybe you should pick up a copy of “The Road Less Travelled”.

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Emerson II

smijer — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 15:57:30 +0000

Another brief quote from the master, whose worth I have sadly begun to doubt.

The temperance of the hero proceeds from the same wish to do no dishonor to the worthiness he has. But he loves it for its elegancy, not for its austerity. It seems not worth his while to be solemn, and denounce with bitterness flesh-eating or wine-drinking, the use of tobacco, or opium, or tea, or silk, or gold. A great man scarcely knows how he dines, how he dresses; but without railing or precision, his living is natural and poetic. John Eliot, the Indian Apostle, drank water, and said of wine, — “It is a noble, generous liquor, and we should be humbly thankful for it, but, as I remember, water was made before it.” Better still is the temperance of King David, who poured out on the ground unto the Lord the water which three of his warriors had brought him to drink, at the peril of their lives.
It is told of Brutus, that when he fell on his sword, after the battle of Philippi, he quoted a line of Euripides, — “O virtue! I have followed thee through life, and I find thee at last but a shade.” I doubt not the hero is slandered by this report. The heroic soul does not sell its justice and its nobleness. It does not ask to dine nicely, and to sleep warm. The essence of greatness is the perception that virtue is enough. Poverty is its ornament. It does not need plenty, and can very well abide its loss.
But that which takes my fancy most, in the heroic class, is the good-humor and hilarity they exhibit. It is a height to which common duty can very well attain, to suffer and to dare with solemnity. But these rare souls set opinion, success, and life, at so cheap a rate, that they will not soothe their enemies by petitions, or the show of sorrow, but wear their own habitual greatness. Scipio, charged with peculation, refuses to do himself so great a disgrace as to wait for justification, though he had the scroll of his accounts in his hands, but tears it to pieces before the tribunes. Socrates’s condemnation of himself to be maintained in all honor in the Prytaneum, during his life, and Sir Thomas More’s playfulness at the scaffold, are of the same strain. In Beaumont and Fletcher’s “Sea Voyage,” Juletta tells the stout captain and his company, –
_Jul_. Why, slaves, ‘t is in our power to hang ye. _Master_. Very likely, ‘T is in our powers, then, to be hanged, and scorn ye.”
These replies are sound and whole. Sport is the bloom and glow of a perfect health. The great will not condescend to take any thing seriously; all must be as gay as the song of a canary, though it were the building of cities, or the eradication of old and foolish churches and nations, which have cumbered the earth long thousands of years. Simple hearts put all the history and customs of this world behind them, and play their own game in innocent defiance of the Blue-Laws of the world; and such would appear, could we see the human race assembled in vision, like little children frolicking together; though, to the eyes of mankind at large, they wear a stately and solemn garb of works and influences.

Far be it from me to criticize the words of my betters… so I’ll be very brief about it… When I read this it stirs a feeling of valor, but those feelings do not seem genuine. Funny – I’m reminded reading this of those modern talkers who are sometimes referred to mockingly as glibertarians. It sounds pretty but it doesn’t line up with my own self-appraisal or my appraisal of the best I know in other people. I’m being to hard. I shouldn’t say that it doesn’t line up – I should say that I don’t see it lining up in any kind of clear way. The impulse is there and it seems a fine one. But it relates to real life only in a partial and hazy way.

Earlier I said I don’t know if Emerson’s Grand is true or not. And I got corrected that there is an element of the grand in life. And I agree that there is. But I think it’s a kind of grand that lacks constancy, lacks regularity, and lacks heroism. It’s a grand of muddling through the best you can, take or create, and to savor, the best moments the best you can, and learning to take the worst ones without constant suffering – if you are able. And, I guess more than anything… that if there’s anything from Emerson’s experience that helps us see or experience grandeur, it’s only the happy accident that he walked a few of the same steps we have to…. not that he had anything special really figured out. He can make us glad that one time a slave laughed at his executioner – but he can’t tell us what to do between the time we wake up in the morning and go to sleep at night that will give us that same character. He can’t even promise us that this is really the best character to have. Did the slave that cringed and wept and was left out of the noble story really live an inferior life than the one who laughed and was immortalized in flowery words? Or did he cringe and weep because he felt more to lose from the executioner?

I guess I’m just saying that for me, the clarity is gone from Emerson… And that’s probably good. I’d rather have the confusion of honestly not knowing than a false sense of having it all figured out.

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The Singularity is Near

Buck — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 19:41:55 +0000

I was reading the Tucker Carlson interview of Jeb Bush last Friday and Tucker asked him what he was currently reading.

Sometimes folks think that is a bullshit question but I love to know what other folks are reading because I am always reading something.

Jeb said that he was reading The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, by Ray Kurzweil. It sounded interesting so I put it on the Kindle.

I got through a couple of chapters this weekend and it is weird and wild and wacky stuff.

Any opinions out there about Ray Kurzweil?

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James, Brother of Jesus.

smijer — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 12:22:37 +0000

A friend from church lent me his copy of James the Brother of Jesus. Rather than review it properly, I’ll just list what the author tries to achieve in terms of my response to it.
Heading 1: Those items I felt the author achieved convincingly.
These are items which the author convinced me of or that I already accepted and found that he wrote convincingly of…

That James was likely Jesus’ biological brother.

That James was possibly among the twelve, and likely a supporter of Jesus before his death (and that Jesus’ family generally were likely supportive of his ministry)

That James was a very important figure in the Jerusalem church, and therefore in early Christianity

That James was a devout Jew, continued to worship in the Temple, and maintained good standing with the non-Christian Jewish community in Jerusalem

That there was real tension between Paul and the apostles, especially those associated with the Jerusalem church, and this tension was resolved in Paul’s favor only after the death of James and the sack of Jerusalem. This tension was chiefly due to Paul’s view of the Law.

That the Saducees were opposed to James because of his disapproval of Temple polity, a disapproval shared by Jesus.

The role of James (and the family of Jesus generally) was intentionally obscured in the canonical gospels, and the controversies with Paul were intentionally played down in Acts and, to some degree, in Paul’s epistles.

Heading 2: Those items I felt were inadequately argued, but toward which I entertain at least a somewhat sympathetic view…

That James was a Pharisee

That James upheld a very strict view of the Law, and was possibly a Nazirite

That Jesus’ view was very similar to James’ in terms of mission and eschatology

That Jesus was also a Pharisee.

That James’ leadership and subsequent leadership of the Jerusalem church were held dynastically, corresponding to a more-or-less literal view of Jesus’ kingship.

Jewish Christianity in the Diaspora, including the Ebionites and other so-called heretical sects of “Judaizers” are the remnants of the Jerusalem church and represent a more authentic Jesus tradition than does the “proto-orthodox” movement.

Heading 3: Those items which I feel are inadequately argued, and toward which I am quite suspicious…

That Jesus’ view was very similar to James’ in terms of the Law, and that Jesus was also likely a Nazarite.

That Jesus, knowing the fate of John the Baptist and being devoted to a similar mission, predicted his own death.

Heading 4: Unqualified statements, not argued per se

At least some among the disciples of Jesus during his life experienced or thought they experienced resurrection visitations. This is uncontroversial.

That James and the Jerusalem church held a low and adoptionistic Christology, with higher Christology emerging in stages at a later time. This is controversial, but I believe as well or better founded in the evidence as any other. A quesiton of particular importance is how views of the Divinity of Jesus arose in a monotheistic Jewish culture. Several lines of evidence are currently under discussion that relate the origin of Jesus’ Divinity to certain Jewish notions of Divine Emanation, the bestowal of the Divine Name, and/or Angelic co-Divinity. I am inclined to think that adoptionistic Christology represents a form of this so-called “Two Powers” thinking, and that such thinking represents a first step (or two) in the direction of the Divinity of Jesus. No arguments in favor of a Two Powers interpretation of the Divinity of Jesus or in favor of adoptionism appear in the book.

Heading 5: Grand notions of the import of James scholarship to modern politics and religion… to say that I am skeptical of this is quite an understatement.

Because Muhammed is likely to have encountered Jewish Christians in his travels and to have been influenced by them in his theology,a Jamesian (since “Jacobite” is taken) Christianity would represent common ground between Islam and Christianity. Since Jamesian Christianity was thoroughly Jewish, it represents a common ground between Christianity and Judaism. Since such common ground can exist, a revival of James can serve to bring together an ecumenical fellowship of Jews, Christians, and Muslims and bring peace to the modern world. Pollyanna would be proud.

Pauline Christianity was the salvation of Jesus’ ethical message despite being unfaithful to it. Without Paul’s missionary work to the Gentiles and his insistence on eradicating barriers to their full fellowship, Christianity would not have survived the fall of Jerusalem and become a major world religion. Without Paul, the writings that do authentically represent Jesus would not be available to us today. While there is some truth to this, very similar ethical teachings from Hillel and other first century Jews would likely have survived, as would have those from other major religions that echo the progressive ethics shared by Jesus.

A couple of final notes… I found this book disappointingly haphazard on critical backgrounds for the texts, both canonical and extra-canonical, upon which it relies. Traditions are often cited with only the barest speculation about their provenance in historical reality, leaving one somewhat at a loss to evaluate the strength of the arguments they support. Furthermore, I was disappointed by the absence of mention of Marcion who existed at the anti-Jewish extreme of early Christianity, and whose interaction with the proto-orthodox might have been instructive. Lastly, I found that the book places too much importance on the (much later) Catholic doctrine of perpetual viriginity in explaining the New Testament treatment of Jesus’ family. I would not recommend this particular volume to anyone, but I would encourage anyone to try to get a better glimpse of James and the implications of his tradition for ancient Christianity.

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Forensic Psychics

smijer — Fri, 29 May 2009 19:00:43 +0000

Psychics can’t lead investigators anywhere they couldn’t get on their own faster.

That seems like a no-brainer… but of course there are suckers born every minute. The reason I mention it is that it reminded me of one of my favorite reads when I lived in Mobile, AL – Mississippi Mud: Southern Justice and the Dixie Mafia. Which was a five star account of the murder of a Biloxi Judge and his family, and the underbelly of a good-ole-boys crime network with plenty of crooked cops & colorful crooks.

It was marred only because of the sensationalist account of a psychic’s intervention which helped solve the case – one which led me to doubt the accuracy of the rest of the account as well. What a shame.

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Witherington on Ehrman, part III

smijer — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 15:00:49 +0000

Part III of Ben Witherington’s critique of Bart Ehrman. Needless to say, I still haven’t read the book. Part III does seem to be the most damning, though. Some salient points:

When it comes to the issue of the virginal conception vs. the incarnation it seems to me that something vital is missing in Bart’s discussion—namely the recognition that these two ideas are not rivals, nor do they contradict one another, for they speak really of two different things. Incarnation tells us that a pre-existent person showed up in the flesh, without telling us anything about how. The virginal conception tells us something about how the human being Jesus came into this world.

Perhaps I should give Ehrman some benefit of the doubt here, but I know of no reason that the crux of this argument isn’t valid. Certainly the gospel authors may have understood the conception as the beginning point of the incarnation – but they could have written about it understanding it to be the incarnation of a pre-existing figure without making that completely clear.

In his succinct presentation of the teaching of Jesus in Mark, Bart is right that this Evangelist takes an apocalyptic approach to presenting Jesus. This is quite true (see my Gospel of Mark commentary), and he agrees that Jesus is presented as the Son of Man in Mark. He says nothing however about the connection between these two facts, namely that Jesus presents himself as the figure referred to in the apocalyptic vision in Dan. 7—the one ‘like a son of man’ who descends on a cloud from heaven, and is given a throne by the Ancient of Days and will judge the world, and rule in a kingdom forever.

As Michael Whitenton has stressed on his blog that the Son of Man texts in the Gospel have a closer affinity to the Parables of Enoch than Daniel 7. The Parables stress the pre-incarnation of the Son of Man, whereas Daniel leaves this point out. Either way, it is clear that the Gospels characterize Jesus as being the “Son of Man” which was certainly a worshipful and divine figure. And, perhaps Witherington’s critique could be even stronger here if he acknowledged the Parables material. Whether the Gospels present Jesus as “fully Divine” and as the God of the Jews is a somewhat separate question, and I would enjoy seeing Ehrman’s treatment of it. However, if it’s true as Witherington claims that Bart ignores the import of the Son of Man material, then that would absolutely dilute his case!

I’ll have to slide over some of the questions I have about the final part of the review – there are several complaints about Ehrman’s treatment of the parousia that I don’t have time to properly assess.

The last thing I’ll say about this post concerns this:

On p. 77 Bart makes a surprising statement— “Jewish apocalypticism was a worldview that came into existence about a century and a half before Jesus’ birth…” Now perhaps Bart is thinking solely of Daniel, and is really late dating the book, but even if so experts in apocalyptic literature are clear enough that we see the beginning of this way of thinking much earlier— in the exilic period with Ezekiel and in Zechariah for example which certainly are not books that date to the second century B.C. Why quibble over this point? Well because of course historically it matters, and it calls into question Bart’s historical judgment. For my part, I don’t think, once one has read the gamut of scholarship and commentaries on Daniel, that one can conclude that even Daniel can safely be dated no earlier than the second century B.C. as a book.

I would be very surprised to learn that Ehrman was ignorant of apocalyptic language in Ezekial and, to a lesser degree in Jeremiah. Again, not having read it, I am willing to hazard the guess that he is not referring to the earliest appearance of apocalyptic language in the Hebrew Bible, but to the time when the Jewish Apocalyptic worldview came into its own as a pan-Judaic point of view. If that is the case, he is probably correct in dating it to the second century, and it would probably be correct to consider some of the late material in Daniel as belonging to that second century innovation. In other words, I think BW is being a little bit too harsh here.

Still & all, I sympathize with Witherington’s view and I’ll be surprised if I am not disappointed in some of these same ways by Jesus Interrupted when and if I get around to reading it!

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Robert Jordan

smijer — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 11:51:34 +0000

This weekend, I finished Knife of Dreams (Yes, I’m over 35 years old and am just now reading the Wheel of Time… Yes, I’m reading it anyway). That’s the last written by Robert Jordan before his death, the eleventh in the series, and the penultimate book of the series. I look forward to the ghostwritten final book when it is completed and published, likely some time this year.

The good: Complexity. A dizzying array of agents and involvements support an extravagantly tangled knot of plot lines, each expertly tied to the central plot. Subtlety. Intramural controversies carry nearly as much of the suspense as overt hostilities. Those overt hostilities, in turn are nearly equally divided between squabbles among factions aligned loosely with “the Light” (good) as between them and the factions – also in internal disarray – associated with “the Dark”. In other words, there is realism about international relationships which all but upstages the trite “cosmic” struggles.

The bad: Wooden characters. Each character could be summed up almost completely with a paragraph of text. Rarely do we see any character development past what can be summarized this way. The “Power” is a touch too powerful, and is overly depended upon. Cosmic struggles are like all cosmic struggles in fiction – contrived, simplistic, and cosmic. And, by cosmic, I mean not reflective of the real world sources of goodness and evil.

Overall, I enjoyed the books, and would recommend them for a youngster who has already read Tolkien and Lewis and is still interested in reading fantasy.

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Listen: Billy Pilgrim Has Come Unstuck

smijer — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 12:00:48 +0000

I read Slaughterhouse Five as a teenager. Reading it, even knowing that it was a highly fictionalized account of war, had more influence on my thinking about war than it should have. But time… as though I hadn’t daydreamed enough about time, time travel, time dilation, eternity, … you name it – Billy Pilgrim’s pickle took that to a whole new level of befuddlement, where it remains to this day.

Now, physicists are telling us that time may not, exactly, exist. Is time an illusion? sums it up as well as anything else I’ve read about Rovelli’s paper… as far as I can tell. Someone who knows better may think differently.

This, I find comforting:

Others also urge caution in interpreting what it all means for the nature of time. “It is wrong to say that time is an illusion,” says Rickles. “It is just reducible or non-fundamental, in the same way that consciousness emerges from brain activity but is not illusory.”

In other words, I find it reassuring that while time may not be “real”, it probably still cannot be defeated in the macro sense. In other words, I’m glad the science fiction of time travel will always remain science fiction. As much as I’d like to go back and “fix” some things… as much as I’d like to go back & witness events from history that we only know now through ancient texts and archaeology… I’m quite happy to keep my sanity, thank you!

At the same time, just as I felt when contemplating Billy Pilgrim’s difficulties, reading this makes me feel I can almost mentally model the concept of eternity. From a frame of reference inaccessible to me, there is never a “time” when there is no smijer. There is only an ever-expanding space. And in that space, there are areas with quantum entanglements in arrangements you might call “smijer” joined with arrangements that can’t be recognized as such. Same goes for anyone or anything else. No one is born or dies – everyone is just a weave of probabilistic threads coming from all over the place, going all over the place, smooth on one end and wrinkled on another.

Such a picture leaves me kind of cold. It’s not a happy thought or a sad one. And probably no more “true” than any of the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and what we’re doing. But it’s a picture that finds its way into my head. Someday, maybe my grandkids will explain to me the physics of it all, and tell me why my picture is so dumb.

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