Month: March 2013

Reviewing George Saunders’s short story collection, Tenth of December, Justin E.H. Smith praises the way Saunders channels a distinctly American idiom:

Saunders is an American writer in the same way that Chingiz Aitmatov is a Kyrgyz writer or Robert Service is a Yukon poet. He speaks for the place. He especially speaks for the lower-class white part of the place. And if, like me, that is a part of America you know well, but from which you have become estranged in later life, then it can be particularly gratifying to see Saunders describing it with such great power of observation. The encounters in “Puppy” and in “Home”, between the benighted, marginalized lower classes, on the one hand, and the equally benighted, but vastly more self-satisfied, so-called ‘middle class’ on the other, seem to tell the whole story of America, and a good part of my own life history in America. When the middle-class mom goes to pick up the puppy from the white-trash family, and sees “the dry aquarium holding the single encyclopedia volume, the pasta pot on the bookshelf with an inflatable candy cane inexplicably sticking out of it,” I swear I have known both sides of this encounter with equal intimacy, and love, and desire to get away.

Recent Dish coverage of Saunders’s work here and here.

Reviewing Alister McGrath’s new biography of C.S. Lewis, a hero to American evangelicals, A.N. Wilson drops this little parenthetical detail:

Where McGrath is so good is in sorting out the truth of this story. Lewis remembered, shortly after his conversation with Tolkien, being driven in the sidecar of his brother’s motorbike to an outdoor zoo—Whipsnade. In the course of this journey, he decided he believed in the Incarnation of Christ. He remembered his exultation as the two brothers walked together among bluebells. But, McGrath, points out, it was September—when bluebells are not in flower! McGrath cunningly shows us that the moment of epiphany must in fact have come two years later, when Lewis went to the zoo with his lover, or former lover Mrs. Moore and her daughter Maureen.

Mrs. Moore is the most understandable omission from Lewis’s autobiography. (Another being Lewis’s obsession with sadism; he nicknamed himself Philomastix, or Lover of the Whip).

“I’ve never known a writer who didn’t feel ill at ease in the world. Have you? We all feel unhoused in some sense. That’s part of why we write. We feel we don’t fit in, that this world is not our world, that though we may move in it, we’re not of it. Different experiences in our lives may enforce or ameliorate that, but I think if they ameliorate it totally, we stop writing. You don’t need to write a novel if you feel at home in the world. We write about the world because it doesn’t make sense to us. Through writing, maybe we can penetrate it, elucidate it, somehow make it comprehensible. If I had ever found the place where I was perfectly at home, who knows what I would have done? Maybe I would have been a biologist after all,” – Andrea Barrett.

In an interview with Rolling Stone, Marcus Mumford expressed ambivalence about the label “Christian”:

Does he still consider himself a Christian? “I don’t really like that word,” he tells senior writer Brian Hiatt in his band’s first Rolling Stone cover story. “It comes with so much baggage. So, no, I wouldn’t call myself a Christian. I think the word just conjures up all these religious images that I don’t really like. I have my personal views about the person of Jesus and who he was. Like, you ask a Muslim and they’ll say, ‘Jesus was awesome’ – they’re not Christians, but they still love Jesus. I’ve kind of separated myself from the culture of Christianity.” Mumford emphasizes that while his spiritual journey is a “work in progress,” he’s never doubted the existence of God.

Josh Larsen tells the band’s religious fans to relax:

Can believers be too eager to anoint public figures who seem to speak the same language? (Branson Parler wrote about the dangers of this earlier on TC in regard to Denzel Washington.) Does giving a Christian stamp of approval to certain artists limit or diminish their art? If Marcus Mumford’s faith journey is a “work in progress,” as he describes it in the interview, isn’t there value in walking alongside him via his music? Aren’t we on similar journeys ourselves?

David P. Barash outlines the convergences between evolutionary biology and existentialist philosophy. He argues that “science has not completely destroyed our understanding of free will, as so many critics contend”:

As descendants of both existential and evolutionary perspectives, we have the opportunity to assert ourselves as creative rebels. We may elect intentional childlessness. We may choose to be less selfish and more genuinely altruistic than our genes might like. We may decide to groom our sons to be nurses and our daughters to be corporate executives. I would go farther, and suggest that we must do such sorts of things—deny aspects of our own biological heritage—if we want to be fully human. The alternative—to let biology carry us where it will—is to forgo the responsibility of being human …  We cannot assume the lifestyle of honeybees, or Portuguese men-of-war. But such restrictions are trivial and beside the point: Within a remarkable range, our evolutionary bequeathal is wildly permissive.

Paul Bloom of Yale talks to Stephen Asma, author of the book Against Fairness, who argues that it’s ethical to privilege your family members over others:

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You can watch the entire video here, and subscribe to The Mind Report here.

Adam Kirsch reviews Brent Nongbri’s fascinating recent book, Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept, which argues that the “universality of religion is an illusion, caused by our way of thinking and talking about what are, in reality, vastly different spiritual mind-sets and practices”:

Before the Renaissance, Nongbri shows, Europeans had no concept of the world as divided among different, equivalent religions. Early Christians trying to make sense of Islam categorized it, instead, as a Christian heresy; they could not imagine a rival to Christianity, only a deformation of it. Likewise, ancient Greek and Roman gods were not thought of as comprising a religious system. They were held to be devils and demons, which maliciously led people astray from the worship of the one true God.

This kind of parochialism was shattered, Nongbri writes, by the Reformation, which led to internal divisions within Christianity, and by the Age of Exploration, which brought Christians face to face with radically different conceptions of God. At first, Europeans in South America continued to think of native deities as Christian devils. When Pizarro despoiled the temple of the Incan god Pachacamac, according to a sixteenth-century chronicler, “the Christians explained to the Indians the great error in which they had been enveloped, and that he who was talking in that idol was the devil.” Only gradually did Europeans come to conceive of non-Christian beliefs, including those of ancient Greece, as comprising religions with an integrity of their own.