Blog on the Lillypad
Saturday, September 25, 2004
|
Bassenco's Bookstore will announce four new amazon.com titles October 1, Lord willing. The newsletter carries this information, as well as other announcements, requests for book submissions, upcoming contests, and book reviews. Why not sign up to receive this monthly update? Addresses are kept private. |
Thursday, September 23, 2004
 | Got my copy today!
The book looks good. Margins are good; spacing is good. Highly readable. I was especially pleased with the covers, front and back. Very crisp and clear. It is nice to have a copy to tote around. I do read my own stuff. Sometimes to check for corrections; sometimes to review points I was trying to make, but sometimes just because I like to read what I wanted to write about. I'll take it with me to work tomorrow, Lord willing, and show it around. Say, isn't it time you got your copy of >Secret Radio? |
 | Yes, We Should Fight the IFB Myth Machine
A recent post on the FFF by an extremely young man lamented that now that Lester Roloff is gone, with Tom Malone, and some other preacher I never even heard of, soon to follow, how will we fare without such great preachers left? My jaw still hurts from when it hit the floor. Man, are these guys still feeding this crap to kids? I have communicated with survivors of the Roloff homes. By my count, 90 percent of them consider their time spent in his homes as one of being abused, belittled, and stunted in their growth and development. Those homes were prison camps. Some of these people have been damaged forever by the trauma. |
But I saw the self-referential eulogizing all the time in the fundies when I was young. Jack Hyles would routinely eulogize men who were sitting on the platform getting ready to preach. And he was eulogized. John R Rice was held up to us; so was Lee Roberson. And BJ Sr.
There was an entire stereo-opticon that you were supposed to look through that saw these men in a hazy glow of holiness, a view that missed the larger picture of all Christian endeavour and actually trained the focus of young people onto these men as the centers of Christianity.
Fundies routinely talked about "staying the course" and "holding the line" and "maintaining the cause of righteousness," even though they embraced so many tangents to the heart of the Gospel that they themselves were trivializing the course, tangling the line, and confusing the definition of righteousness.
While Hyles and the IFBs were out making dress length and hair length cornerstones of Christian holiness, BJU was drawing the attention of millions to itself not for the cause of the Gospel, but because they wouldn't allow inter racial dating. And in the 70's and 80's, an entire generation of Fundamentalist preachers got into "practical preaching" and introduced so many errors into Fundamentalist thinking that it still has not (and perhaps never will) recovered. Theology was left behind. The focus on diligent study of Scripture was abandoned (except at BJU and a few other schools, where there were still intense courses that weeded out pastoral candidates).
Many IFB schools became "practical". But practicality soon turned to "expedience," as we have seen in the bad morals, bad ethics, and bad teachings of places like First Baptist of Hammond and the clown circus that follows Hyles.
Did some of these people do good works? Yes! Were there good people in the hazy idealizing of fundamentalist leaders? Certainly. Were some of the leaders themselves godly men? Yes.
But the problem of myth making is that sooner or later harsh realities enter the myth. Then the believers of the myths have to either cling harder to the unreal world of myth that is comfortable and familiar to them, or they have to go through the trauma of letting go and finding the right view.
I hope that young people will strenuously object to myth making and insist on an academic and theological honesty that keeps the focus firmly on the centrality of Christ leading His people and providing for them. The myth making of my youth in Fundamentalism has cost many people dearly ebcause they became disillusioned. Abandon it now, young person. Men will fail; even good men will fail; Christ will prevail.
Wednesday, September 22, 2004
The Weight of Light
There's a weight of light past noonday,
Hour of the doe,
When silent things are rising,
And active things are slow.
The wind descends to silence;
Yet the water is disturbed.
Some presence presses downward.
A quiet glory grows.
When lost in office labyrinths
I hardly give it thought.
Yet facing sunlit windows,
My wonder's firmly caught.
Like some great breathing silence,
I feel it bearing down.
Majestic hidden grandeur
Is waiting all around.
Whose presence dwells in sunlight?
Whose breath evokes the waves?
And who has caused me know this,
On bright September days?
There's a weight of light past noonday,
Hour of the doe,
When silent things are rising,
And active things are slow.
The wind descends to silence;
Yet the water is disturbed.
Some presence presses downward.
A quiet glory grows.
When lost in office labyrinths
I hardly give it thought.
Yet facing sunlit windows,
My wonder's firmly caught.
Like some great breathing silence,
I feel it bearing down.
Majestic hidden grandeur
Is waiting all around.
Whose presence dwells in sunlight?
Whose breath evokes the waves?
And who has caused me know this,
On bright September days?
 | A Passion for a Diverse Fiction
At this point, the background music should be "Heard it Through the Grapevine," only change the words to "Heard it through the weblog." Fiction afficianado Cindy Swanson dropped me a line to check out BJ Hoff's website where a debate about the quality of Christian fiction was ongoing. I went by and jotted a quick assessment of the inherent problem at the heart of the CBA: having to target the most lucrative market and therefore steering the majority of Christian adult fiction to that market (white middle class women). |
I went out again and went back in the next day, where Ms. Hoff reminded me that the topic was actually Christian fiction and not the CBA itself. (She was kind about it.) So I corrected my error by writing a more thought-out assessment of the problems in Christian fiction: that it targets white middle class women and it is subject to errors in its very premises: Christians are not depicted as sinners; sin is not dpeicted as the tragedy common to all of us, and salvation takes up more space in the literature than is reflected in actual Christian life. (In other words, our Christian lives start at salvation, but a lot of Christian literature focuses on it as an endpoint.) The role of Christ as our enduring High Priest ought to take up most of the ground of Christian literature, and it does not. What Christ does in us as we live as Christians is just as amazing (if not more so) than the moment of salvation.
When I visited Cindy's blog today I saw a note that Ms. Hoff has closed down her website. The response to her discussion from a good number of readers, it seems, was a bit overwhelming for her.
Man, I thought. If I could get people that fired up about fiction, I'd be thrilled. Anything to get Christians away from TV and video games. Reminds me of the time back at BJU when I was put in charge of the Society (a Christian version of Sorority) games for our all-girls outing. I organized us into four teams, and we all had to have a team flag that we carried with us for a week to each meal and to chapel. Anybody who could steal the flag during the course of the week got a thousand points. The contest ended with a game of Capture the Flag at the picnic-style outing.
On the last day, at the outing itself, a shoving fight got started between girls on opposing teams. They started yelling at each other and calling each other cheaters. Our Society officers had to break it up. I was heart broken. My plan to pull off the best games in the history of Tri Sigma had fallen flat.
I went off to cry. One girl followed me, and she said, amazed, "I can't believe you got everybody so fired up about those flags! Nobody's ever done that! You did a great job! Nobody ever cared about the Society's games before this year!"
That's how it goes when you get people to care about something. Their feelings get involved. They get passionate. They have to think up ways to defend their views. They start reading. (Try "The Religious Writer and the Tired Reader" by Flannery O'Connor.) They quit being couch potatoes and start participating. Maybe they even yell a lot. When I opened SECRET RADIO up for comments, it got REALLY passionate, and I got yelled at a lot---especially by IFB preachers. I didn't care. Every time the preachers would yell about SECRET RADIO, the readership would increase by at least a third. I wanted them to keep yelling.
I think Ms. Hoff was onto something. Perhaps, in time, she'll feel more comfortable with passionate readers and try an open forum again. Or, if she doesn't, maybe I'll take a turn. I'm thinking through a lot of ideas about this. Maybe it's tiem to organize an Underground Christian Fiction Forum, for stuff that's hard-edged, culturally diverse, and yet still points unflinchingly to Christ.
Drop me a line at graceblog@earthlink.net if this idea appeals to you.
Tuesday, September 21, 2004
 | Right Angle Handstand
I've been too busy for the last two Monday nights to attend formal yoga class (though I have worked out with tapes at home). But last night I returned. There was no (or very little) concession to my absence. The class was arduous, to say the least. But I guess that my progress hasn't entirely regressed in my absence, for last night I moved on to the next level of exercise, preparing for the handstand. The teacher, Vicki, puts new students in the right angle handstand position. For beginners like me, she actually stands at the student's right shoulder to offer a brace. |
I had thought I would be afraid when it came my turn to try the early handstand poses, but I wasn't. I do have a lot of confidence in my teacher, and she breaks everything down to one step at a time. All of the people in the Monday class are still doing right angle handstands, though some of them no longer need her to brace them at the shoulder, and several can lift one leg straight up, bring it back to the wall, and then lift the other. So they're not very far from doing full handstands. But my guess is that it takes months to move from the right angle handstand to the unsupported, straight up and down version.
