Fair Semblances

I’ve been reading Nathan Pitchford’s current book, an allegorical fantasy entitled Fair Semblances, for a few months now and thoroughly enjoying it. There are 20 chapters to catch up with, and regular fixes installments every Monday. I’ve been meaning to spread the word for some time now, and have finally got round to it. Some resolutions are best unmade, then they have more chance of being kept! There’s some great theological reflections on the blog as well as a great story. If you enjoy the book, leave Nathan a comment to encourage him.

A lesson in lion taming

C. S. Lewis ends the fourth chapter of Book I of Mere Christianity with a note on the supposed middle road between the twin alternatives of a universe viewed from the perspectives of materialism and religion. He dispels the notion that the Life-Force philosophy (a.k.a. Creative Evolution, or Emergent Evolution) is in reality a middle road. If the force is personal, then it is the same thing as religion, and if impersonal, then it is materialism by another name. He describes the pulling power of this view astutely:

One reason why many people find Creative Evolution so attractive is that it gives one much of the emotional comfort of believing in God and none of the less pleasant consequences. (p. 34)

He sees so clearly that the thought of a great Force gives a sense of continuity and is somehow vaguely comforting when life is going well. But,

If, on the other hand, you want to do something rather shabby, the Life-Force, being only a blind force, with no morals and no mind, will never interfere with you like that troublesome God we learned about when we were children. The Life-Force is a sort of tame God. You can switch it on when you want, but it will not bother you. All the thrills of religion and none of the cost. Is the Life-Force the greatest achievement of wishful thinking the world has yet seen? (p. 34)

The abundance of faiths in the supermarket of religion to which we trundle our spiritual trolleys bears out Lewis’s point well. Even dyed-in-the-wool materialists cannot escape the hope of this wishful thinking, so Dawkins calls himself a “cultural christian”, while all the time denying every doctrine of the Church. Let’s face it, science may have smells, but only liturgical Christianity has the bells and smells.

But it strikes me that such wishful thinking is not only to be found among nostaligic materialists who gravitate to the more liturgy-focussed Christian denominations. Even those of us who worship in more Word-focussed forms of service may be content with just the familiar cadences of the preaching. Once through the doors, we can be adept at turning the volume down, or even off, until next Sunday. It can be hard to tell whether it is a fix or an inoculation. However it is to be viewed, it clearly demonstrates that we have never answered Lewis’s question in another book, “Is he a tame lion?”

Buying, Reading and Calculating the Cost of Books

Ann Zerkle has written an interesting article “In Defense of Buying Books” (Get Rich Slowly, 30 Dec 2008; HT lifehacker, 3 Jan 2009) that made me feel good about my book buying habits. I do borrow from the University library, but for the really important books, a purchase is definitely a must.

I’ve never really calculated the cost per hour, but I think many of my purchases are definitely less expensive than Zerkle’s. I have a considerable number of technical books on databases, programming languages and Web development. Most of them weigh in about £25-30, and I reckon they would take 25-30 hours of reading, so I think they’re about £1/hour. Set them against a 2 or 4 day course, and they definitely pay for themselves many times over.

Novels at, say, £10, that take, say 15-20 hours enjoyable reading, are even better value at 50-70 pence/hour. But then classic novels will be reread several times, so the cost comes down considerably. The same goes for classic theology books. I’m rereading C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity again (prompted by Tim Challies’s Reading Classics, but way behind schedule at the moment). I reckon this is my third time round, and likely to take about 20 hours. My copy cost the princely sum of 25 pence (back in the mid 70s), so that’s costing me less than a ha’penny per hour!

Of course, the main thing about reading books is not the cost, but the sheer enjoyment of turning the page. A good television dramatisation doesn’t even come close to reading a well written novel up close and personal. I’ve just started 2009 with P. D. James’s latest offering, The Private Patient, to lighten up the week after a daily dose of Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion. I’ll be reading, but only occasionally blogging it for Calvin’s 500th anniversary.

Now that I’ve salved my conscience on the buying front, it’s time to knuckle down to some serious reading.

How to read a book

I’ve been reading Mortimer Adler’s book How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading (Simon and Schuster, 1972) that he updated with Charles Van Doren. I’ve found it helpful to challenge how I read, and to become more effective in my reading. It’s definitely a worthwhile investment for any reader. I see that Brian Fulthorp has been publishing a series of summaries of the chapters over the past few months. I’m going to be reading them to see if I missed anything useful so far.

Fiction pick

I’ve just started reading C. J. Sansom’s Dissolution (London: Pan, 2003). It’s the first novel in his Shardlake Series, following the sleuthing of hunchback lawyer Matthew Shardlake during the reign of Henry VIII. Last year I read Sovereign, the third book in the series and enjoyed it immensely. (Yes, I know it seems strange not to start on the first one, but I got it ridiculously cheap for a hardback, and thought I had nothing to lose if I didn’t like it. Amazon had this one discounted, so I took the plunge, along with the latest volume in the series, Revelation.)

I suppose my commendation won’t add much weight to those from Colin Dexter and P.D. James. But James is right, “the sights, the voices, the very smell of this turbulent age seems to rise from the page.” I’m finding it as compelling reading and the previous one I read. Sansom has researched the period well, and although he has written a good fictional story, it feels authentic. I find my appetite for the history of the period whetted, yet again. Now I’m going to have to but a book on Henry VIII in the New Year.

This is not CSI. It’s more Morse set in Reformation times, or Sayers; not so much blood and guts as a good story with lots of intrigue and characterization. I’m trying to resist the temptation to read through it too quickly. I think a novel like this is best savoured slowly, so I’m doing my best, but it is hard as it is a real page turner. It makes a refreshing change from theology, and is helping keep me sane during database development.

Practical tips for interactive reading

Like the Ten Commandments, Tim Challies’s Ten Tips to Read More and Read Better can be summarized by two: Read Widely and Read Wisely. Tim take it for granted we must read, and his correct. I don’t know where I heard it first, but I’ve always seen buying books as an essential purchase, not a luxury. There is much to be said for including an amount in the household budget for book acquisitions.

Of Tim’s ten tips, I found the most beneficial one to be Read Interactively (a Read Wisely one). Since I began to do this a number of years ago I have found I have retained and understood more of what I read. I tend to consolidate my notes in a word processed document.

I try to summarize the chapters as I read using pen and paper, as I find this aids my understanding. Typing them up afterwards helps retention and keeps the summaries short, since I know I will be typing afterwards. I include useful quotes with page references so I can find them again, or I can cite them accurately in blog posts and essays. I also also include my own questions and reflections. I find it helpful to have a template with suitable styles to make it easy to distinguish my comments from the basic book summary and quotations.

From a practical point of view I usually begin by typing out the table of contents of the book. That can be a little tiresome if you don’t type too fast and/or the table of contents is quite detailed. Now that many publishers make extracts available on their Web sites, it can often be possible to get the table of contents in PDF format from which to copy and paste to get started. I’ve also recently discovered  that some contents are available from the Library of Congress site in plain text if the publisher doesn’t make them available.

Full hands and empty heads?

Ravi Zacharias mentions a guru whose mantra was “Your hands must be full and your head empty” (The Grand Weaver (Grand Rapids, Mi: Zondervan: 2007: p. 124)).

But Christians come empty-handed to the Lord of life. “Nothing in my hand I bring // simply to thy cross I cling” sums it up perfectly. Full hands are a great hindrance to life and salvation. The Christian gospel is not about what we can do to reconcile ourselves to God, but what he has done to reconcile us to himself.
The guru’s mantra is totally wrong, not just on the need for full hands, but al on the love of empty-headedness. The Christian Gospel is not a mind-emptying message, but a mind-enhancing and hand filling one. We do not come to Christ with empty heads. The Christian Gospel has real content: that Christ died for our sins and was raised for our justification.

If we do not have some understanding of our sinful condition and Christ’s sinless remedy, we will be unwilling or unable to accept it. We do not come with full heads, as if there is nothing more to it. We do come with the sufficient information the Bible gives us that we may be convinced that this is the truth of God. Thereafter, as we grow in the knowledge of God our heads will be filled constantly and more fully with him who is all in all. It will be our delight to be filled with him in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.

If the Christian Gospel had a mantra it might be empty hands and non-empty heads. Anything less will open us to deception, deception to believe we can save ourselves, and deception to believe any nonsense we come across.

Thank God for a Gospel that requires empty hands and non-empty heads.

To read or not to read: the big decision

What should I read?

Should I read this book? Should I read that book?

There are many books I could read, but what should I read? Should I read a book because it is a best seller? or popular?

Choosing what to read is no longer easy when there is so much choice. But more important than availability or popularity is whether a book will be edifying. Will it build me up in my faith? Will it help me know God better, and live more faithfully as his servant? If it will help me, it will be faithful to Scripture. If it is not, then I should pass it by (unless I am seeking to evaluate it myself against Scripture).

Recommendations and reviews are so helpful in deciding what to read. Rather than continuing with a page of my current reading, which astute readers of this blog may have noticed disappeared a while back, I’ve decided to comment on some current and planned reading in the main body of the blog. I’m never organized enough to post proper reviews, so anything I post will either be short recommendations or interactions with passages.

I can’t promise anything too regular, as I sometimes get engrossed in my reading to the exclusion of blogging. As I find the time, I’ll try to post a few tidbits. That way I won’t have to avoid Colin when I meet him again!! Thanks for the encouragement to keep posting, Colin.

Googling ourselves to death?

I’ve just finished reading a couple of articles that deserve wider exposure. Bryan Appleyard wrote in The Times on 20 July 2008 “Stoooopid … why the Google generation isn’t as smart as it thing: The digital age is destroying us by ruining our ability to concentrate.” Nicholas Carr wrote an article earlier in The Atlantic Monthly for July/August 2008 entitled “Is Google Making Us Stupid? What the Internet is doing to our brains.”

Like both writers I’ve found myself less able to read deeply in a sustained manner over the past few years. And like them, I would attribute this to the effects of the Web.

Two weeks without Internet access on holiday threw me back to reading from dead trees almost exclusively. Only almost exclusively because I brought my laptop with me. Extremely limited television viewing for the past month has also reinforced my use of print. I think I’ve read more thoughtfully, even though I still read at a fast pace of knots. (During the fortnight, I managed to read Dorothy Sayer’s novel The Nine Tailors, Sinclair Ferguson’s The Pundit’s Folly, David Wells’s The Courage to be Protestant, and Ravi Zacharias’s The Grand Weaver. Some reflections may follow.)

Over the past year or so I’ve increasingly printed out Internet articles I wanted to read, initially because of deteriorating myopia, but now more because I can interact with them the better. I usually scribble objections, agreements and thoughts, tangential or otherwise, in the narrow margins, continuing onto discarded sheets previously printed, but still containing valuable white space. I might scream at the screen, but would rarely put pencil to paper unless I am reading from paper. Somehow the screen encourages only screams, but the catharsis of writing reflections on my reading seems altogether more satisfactory, and much easier when you have the printed paper before you.

And the very act of writing also helps clarify my thinking (though much muddle undoubtedly remains). Even if my scribblings lie in my ever ascending Tower of Babel, I seem to retain much more of their logic and reason than when I just skim on-screen. Our modern day fountain of knowledge seems like it has devastating consequences like the ancient tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Instead of a clarity of thought, there is a great muddle of unconnected and rapidly fading factoids.

It is gravely concerning to see British government blithely pursuing an educational policy of seeking to provide ever more computer and Internet access to cure falling educational attainment targets (as reported on a recent BBC news broadcast). It seems like trying to cure an inveterate gambler’s addiction by providing free chips for his local casino. But then, education is following health policy — provide free methadone for heroin addicts. That will surely cure their drug problems.

Once we get online voting for local and national elections, Parliament and local councils will be little more than Big Brother where we eject the party of housemates we no longer favour.

Are we fast approaching the point where the undoubted benefits of the Internet for serious research will be outweighed by its debilitating side-effects? Or have we passed the point of no return already? Are we simply Googling ourselves to death?

———–

Update (18 Aug 2008): I see from Scott Karp (How Newsrooms Throw Away Value By Not Linking To Sources On The Web) that Nicholas Carr has listed his sources for his article in detail on his blog.

Best read?

Matthew Perry has an interesting posting on Spurgeon and extemporaneous preaching, where among other things he says, “Preachers should be the most well-read individuals on the planet — with the Scriptures being the first in line, of course.” I couldn’t agree more. And, of course, every Christian should follow their pastor’s example. The article is well worth reading. It gives an interesting insight on the Prince of Preachers.