From Behind the Veil: The Epistles of John

Deep Exegesis:The Mystery of Reading Scripture

Jane Austen
(A Biography)

Solomon Among the Postmoderns

The Baptized Body

1 & 2 Kings
Brazos Theological Commentary

The Promise Of His Appearing: An Exposition Of Second Peter

A Great Mystery: Fourteen Wedding Sermons

Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, And Hope In Western Literature

Miniatures & Morals: The Christian Novels of Jane Austen

The Priesthood of the Plebs: A Theology of Baptism

A Son To Me: An Exposition of 1 & 2 Samuel

Against Christianity

From Silence to Song: The Davidic Liturgical Revolution

Ascent to Love: A Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy

Blessed Are the Hungry: Meditations on the Lord's Supper

A House For My Name: A Survey of the Old Testament

Heroes of the City of Man: A Christian Guide to Select Ancient Literature

Brightest Heaven of Invention: A Christian Guide To Six Shakespeare Plays

Wise Words: Family Stories That Bring the Proverbs to Life

The Kingdom and the Power: Rediscovering the Centrality of the Church

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Miscellaneous: Pitching sales

Amazon says they’ve got my Jane Austen biography in stock.  Click the icon to the right and you’ll get there.

New St Andrews College philosopher Mitch Stokes has a biography of Isaac Newton (Christian Encounters Series) in the same series from Nelson, and it’s in stock at Amazon too.  Check it out.

Miscellaneous: Available on Amazon

As you’ll notice in the icon to the right, my commentary on 1-3 John is now available on Amazon.

Miscellaneous: Research

As you walk away from the stacks, your eye lands on an intriguing title you’ve never heard of and you’ve not been looking for.  It turns out to contain all the crucial information.

Just when you’re hitting transition and the book is just not going to come without a surgical intervention, a book that you don’t remembering ordering arrives in the mail, and it happens to have notches in all the right places.

Someone you barely know who doesn’t know what you’re working on makes an irrelevant and passing, but wholly illuminating, comment.

Tossing in bed at 4 AM, suffering deadline insomnia, an organizing thesis forms in your brain.

Research.  That’s how it’s done.  Like everything else, it’s sheer grace.

Miscellaneous: Tough Languages

According to the Economist, the Estonian language has 14 cases (including inessive, elative, adessive, abessive), “Bora, spoken in Peru, has more than 350″ genders, and the Solomon Island language of Kwaio has an exclusive and inclusive form of “we” and in addition to singular and plural has dual and paucal.

The Kuuk Thaayorre of northern Australia have no words for left and right, but instead use absolute directions: “as in ‘You have an ant on your south-west leg.’”  To “where are you going,” they’ll give answers like “north-north-east, in the middle distance.”

Miscellaneous: Hiawatha photographing

From Lewis Carroll, quoted in Robin Wilson’s delightful Lewis Carroll in Numberland: His Fantastical Mathematical Logical Life:

From his shoulder Hiawatha
Took the camera of rosewood,
Made of sliding, folding rosewood;
Neatly put it all together.
In its case it lay compactly,
Folded into nearly nothing;

But he opened out the hinges,
Pushed and pulled the joints and hinges,
Till it looked all squares and oblongs,
Like a complicated figure
In the Second Book of Euclid.

Continue reading…

Miscellaneous: Canon Sale

Canon Press is having a Fall Sale, which you can read about here: http://www.canonpress.com/shop/

Miscellaneous: Good times

Along with a friend, my son, Jordan, has started an online comic strip.  Check it out here every Tuesday and Thursday: http://www.goodtimescomic.blogspot.com/

Miscellaneous: Logos Software

The folks at Logos Bible Software have included a number of my books in their software.  You can get more information here: http://www.logos.com/products/prepub/details/4582

I’m told that now is a good time to order, since “pre-order prices often rise as we get closer to production” and “the earlier they order, the better the deal.”

Miscellaneous: Outliers

I’ve read several devastating reviews of Malcolm Gladwell’s latest in the past few weeks, but Carol Tavris (TLS, 2/20) takes the prize.  She identifies the main problem with Gladwell’s work as the “except when it doesn’t” problem. She writes,

“the premiss of Outliers: The story of success is that ‘extraordinary’ success depends on culture, circumstances, demographics and chance, except when it also depends on talent, willingness to break rules, imagination and risk-taking.  Success depends on being in the right place at the right time, except for all those other people who were in the same place at the same time and didn’t notice that the time was right.”

Miscellaneous: Jane in limbo

Miscellaneous: NICE

In the UK, they’ve got something called the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence.

CS Lewis called it: There really is an N.I.C.E.

Miscellaneous: Style as proof

In an essay on M. H. Abrams’s Natural Supernaturalism, Wayne Booth praises the style of the book, but more: “I must emphasize that I am not simply praising Abrams’ style.  i am making what I take to be a much more risky claim: that a style that is good in the way Abrams’ style is good not only tends to carry us with him: it ought to.  It carries a legitimate warrant for the author’s theses.  To write well in this way helps prove your case, though of course it cannot go it alone. . . . The fact that if ‘a subject’ – whatever that means – enables a critic to write well about it, without requiring him to rely on easily separable blandishments and charm, the mere production of hundreds of pages of well-written sense about it constitutes as good a test as we have for his these.  If the theses were very weak, we have a right to conclude, a man like Abrams (as implied in his style) would have discovered the weakness as he tried to write honest sentences about them; and if he became dishonest and tried to fake, it would somehow show.”

Miscellaneous: Googled?

Nicholas Carr asks in the July/August issue of the Atlantic whether Google is making us stupid.  He points out that the web tends to scatter attention and diffuse concentration by bringing information from various sources at us all at once.  As the web comes to dominate our access to news and entertainment, other media adjust to become more web-like.  “Never,” he writes, “has a communications system played so many roles in our lives – or exerted such broad influence over our thoughts, as the Internet does today.”

Carr says that re-forming the way we think is a conscious goal of Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the two founders of Google.  Brin said in 2004, “Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.”  Page has said that Google is aiming “to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale.”

Carr isn’t convinced that we’d be better off if our brains were “supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence.”   He challenges the underlying view that “intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized.  In Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation.  Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed.  The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.”

Miscellaneous: Full Frontal Phrenology

When Hillary and W. got to college, both had posture photos taken, nude or in underwear.  So says M. F. Burnyeat in the May 16 TLS.

Burnyeat adds, “Officially, the idea was that the pictures would reveal which students needed remedial treatment for poor posture.  In reality, the project was to correlate the students’ undergraduate posture with their success or failure in later life.  As the evidece accumulated, it would become possible to predict the Presidential chances of each year’s intake. . . . Professor W. H. Sheldon of Columbia University, the eminence grise behind these programmes, was eventually disgraced and his research abandoned.  The ultimate inspiration had been Francis Galton, the eugenicist founder of Social Darwinism, who proposed a similar photo archive for the entire British population.”

Not that Burnyeat has seen the pictures.  But he did have the story confirmed by three friends who attended Ivy League schools at the time.

Miscellaneous: Dangers of Retirement

Brian Vickers taught and researched English literature at Zurich for several decades.  He is an impressive literary scholar and historian who has written on Shakespeare, rhetoric, tragedy, edited Bacon and others, and produced a nice shelf full of deeply researched books.

He also seems to have run out of things to do.  Nearly every recent issue of the TLS  contains an irritated, erudite, cranky, frequently self-defensive letter from Vickers to the editor.

Miscellaneous: Me and the Bush Police State

I don’t want to over-dramatize, but I had a taste of the Bush police state this weekend. I crossed the line, and felt the force of the federal government bearing down on me. I tasted totalitarianism.

I was dragged into The Castle, playing the role of K.

The TSA tried to take my Trader Joe’s salsa.

Continue reading…

Miscellaneous: Success

Brink Lindsey of the CATO Institute writes in the March 12 TNR that the key to success is, surprise, hard work and parental involvement.  A couple of quotations:

A study led by Florida State psychologist Anders Ericsson found that a “common denominator” in their study of top performers in various fields: “practice.  Chess grandmasters, concert pianists, and other superstars are distinguished from less-accomplished performers by two main things: starting their chosen fields earlier in life, and logging more hours per day of training over the course of many years.”

Parental interaction with young children is also a significant predictor of academic success.  Psychologists Betty Hart and Todd Risley found that there are “dramatic differences in the intensity and nature of the verbal stimulation the kids were getting: Professional parents directed an average of 487 ‘utterances’ per hour toward their children, as compared to 301 for working-class parents and only 176 for welfare parents.  The quality of those utterances was also very different: Among professional parents, the ratio of encouraging to discouraging utterances was six to one; for working-class parents, the ratio slipped to two-to-one; and welfare parents made two discouraging utterances for every encouraging one.”

Miscellaneous: War on Cliche

Martin Amis’s 2001 collection of criticism was entitled The War Against Cliche.  Now he comes out with The Second Plane: September 11: 2001-2007.  According to Marjorie Perloff (in the TLS), it’s mostly cliche.

There are religious cliches.  Though the age of ideology in the last century was bad, the age of religion that’s a-dawning is  far worse: “an ideology is a belief system with an inadequate basis in reality; religion is a belief system with no basis in reality whatever.  Religious belief is without reason and without dignity, and its record is near-universally dreadful.”

There are cultivated cliches: Literature is “the most persistent candidate for cultification, partly because it nonchalantly includes the Bible and all other holy texts.”

There are political cliches: Perloff says “The war against cliche has a curious way of morphing into the cliche against war.”

We might have predicted it.  In the 2001 volume, Amis says that the opposite of cliche is “Freshness, energy, and reverberation of voice.”  How chiched.

Miscellaneous: Odd words

A favorable Publishers Weekly review of Michael Burleigh’s Sacred Causes criticizes his obscure language: “Use of odd words such as ‘erastianism’ and ’soteriological’ detract from what is otherwise a rewarding example of intellectual history.”  It’s a book about religion and politics, mind you.

Miscellaneous: Master and Disciples

Anatole France said, “It is rare for any master to belong to the school he has founded as firmly as his disciples do.”

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