I’m in the process of downsizing my home library. I just donated twenty some books to my seminary’s library. Since the thought of ridding oneself of books will be appalling to almost all of my readers let me put you at ease by saying keep what books you like, but when the time comes to clear out the ones you likely won’t look at again, look no further than your alma mater’s library. Your donations will help your “nourishing mother” carry on doing just that–provided the library doesn’t discrimihate against your hand-me-downs.

You might be thinking that a library would never want that kooky pseudo-Christian how’d-it-get-published mess you unearthed in your parent’s basement or the random book you snagged in a thrift store far, far away, but you’d be wrong! I’d argue–despite the fact I hate people saying “I’d argue” because they never actually argue their point, but rely on the assumed force of “I’d argue” to be blunt enough to bull the argument over–I’d argue that that is precisely the book you should give. Somebody sometime will need your book in their research.

Check this out as a testimony to bibliotec benefaction. In the batch of books I recently donated there was one that I’ve had for years that I snagged from a rather fundy Baptist conference I attended while in college. I donated that action to my library and now SEBTS, according to WorldCat, is the only library in North Carolina to have a copy! I’ve also got a book on how Christians should respond to Y2K. Y2K! Somebody will need that book. And look at it this way: when you give a book to your library, you’re making it available to the world via interlibrary loan. My fundy book or my Y2K book could go anywhere in the world because I gave it up for my library. Won’t you do the same? Softly and tenderly your library’s calling…

To close out God’s Battalions Rodney Stark draws together his research and insights into one concise concluding paragraph:

The thrust of the preceding chapters can be summarized very briefly. The Crusades were not unprovoked. They were not the first round of European colonialism. They were not conducted for land, loot, or converts. The crusaders were not barbarians who victimized the cultivated Muslims. They sincerely believed that they served in God’s battalions.¹

With this in mind what I find particularly interesting in the closing chapter is Stark’s very brief interaction with Karen Armstrong’s writing on the Crusades. In her Holy War: The Crusades and Their Impact on Today’s World she completely throws the West under the bus, which is especially disconcerting given her so-called Charter for Compassion (“a cooperative effort to restore not only compassionate thinking but, more importantly, compassionate action to the center of religious, moral and political life”). Apart from selective use of history, what I find disconcerting is not that Armstrong is critical of the West–Stark is as much in this work–but the default antagonism to the West that is to me a betrayal of one’s own heritage. This default stance against the West baffles me. Compassion for Muslim victims of Christian crusaders is trendy, but taboo is compassion for Christians ravaged by Islam advancing by the sword in the centuries leading up to the Crusades. Compassion must supercede an inherit antagonism to one’s own heritage and to one’s perceived historical
“enemies.”

This is one of those films that I end up watching because of its popularity and then after watching, I’m unsure how to proceed having seen it. Do you talk about a Not Rated film with Christian friends and unavoidably stir up their interest in a movie the content of which you want to distance yourself from?

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is graphic to be sure. (When I mentioned the title to my wife, she asked if it was a porno! No, it’s not.) The basic story is that of a journalist who in the months before he has to fulfill a prison sentence is hired by a ritzy tycoon to track down his long disappeared neice. The journalist gets help from a mentally-troubled goth computer hacker who plays host to an enormous dragon tattoo on her back, which you wouldn’t see except for a sex scene. Overall, the film even at 2:26 is an absolute thriller of a mystery that will easily end up being the shortest longest film you’ve seen, if you decide to see it.

I read this week that the most important philosophical question to ask when watching a movie, according to the author of a new book called Meaning at the Movies, is

What is the overall view of the nature of man presented by the film as seen by a reasonably perceptive viewer? This can largely be determined by considering plot, characterization, and the tone or mood of the film.

Reasonably perceptive, eh? Well, it doesn’t take much to gather that the view of man in this movie is total depravity. You could even take total depravity in the oft misunderstood sense of “as evil as can be” and still be on target. But this is the view of men in the film. Women are almost exclusively portrayed as the helpless victims of horendous abuses while the girl with the dragon tattoo is the defiant female taking charge. In fact, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is only the name of the novel/film in English. The original Swedish title is Man som hatar kvinnor (“Men Who Hate Women”). The film indeed highlights misogyny at its worst.

Far from regulating biblical interpretation arbitrarily, doctrinal frameworks challenge new generations to recognize their own cultural assumptions and to revise them in light of how the church has understood Scripture as a whole.

Daniel J. Treier in Introducing Theological Interpretation of Scripture (p. 77)

The Westminster Seminary bookstore will be offering 45% staff favorites until July 14 during the course of their move to a new warehouse. There are a lot of great books in the sale. Here are the books I’m particularly interested in, some of which I’ve already read and whole-heartedly recommend.

You can view the complete list of books in the WTSBooks enews archive.

I’m really glad that the Language Log blog did a recent post on the who cares of other language’s vocabularies and especially as this one has to do with the World Cup. The World in Words podcast which I otherwise adore annoys me on this point by showcasing each week “hard to translate words” which they then promptly translate. Maybe they’ll feature “vuvuzela.”

Who cares what Zulu has a word for?

Did you know Zulu has a word for “annoying three-foot-long one-note plastic trumpet”? Isn’t that fascinating? No. Of course it isn’t fascinating. It’s a wonderful example of why I tend to think the issue of what things different languages have words for (especially, have nouns for) is stupid and trivial.

Turn on your TV right now to whichever sports channel is showing the England’s soccer game against the USA in the World Cup in South Africa. Turn the sound up. Why does it sound as if several dozen propeller-drived airplanes have started up their engines in the stadium? Has someone dropped one of the commentator’s mikes into a huge beehive? No It’s just that South Africans love to bring annoying three-foot-long one-note plastic trumpets to every game and blow them continuously. (They all seem to be tuned roughly to A below middle C.)

Because they use these things, Zulu has a word for them (and other languages like Setswana do too, but the Zulu one happened to catch on). And because the World Cup is being played in South Africa and the move to have these things banned failed, English has borrowed the word: vuvuzela…

It’s not a fascinating fact that English has this [word] now, it’s trivial and obvious, like every other factoid about things people have nouns for…

Has there been a renewed interest in the crusades? First, sociologist Rodney Stark offers a new book on the subject called God’s Battalions: The Case for the Crusades, buzz for which I’ve seen cropping up in various places. He argues, according to the publisher, that “the Crusades had less to do with spreading Christianity than with responding to an ever more dangerous enemy—the emerging Islamic empire.” What I found most interesting from Stark’s interview was this comment:

Until about the start of the 20th century, the Muslims didn’t even remember there had been Crusades… By the way, I’m not making this up, either. Again, there is a consensus among historians of the Crusades that there is no record of Muslim concern with the Crusades until the 20th century.

Now Tom Asbridge, University of London medieval history scholar, spoke today at the UK’s Hay Festival of Literature and Arts in an effort to sever the artificial link between modern Christian-Muslim conflict and the Crusades.

“This [link] is a manipulation of history, not a reality. I believe there is no division linking the medieval past and the conflict of the crusades with the modern world,” he said. “[It's a] misunderstanding which goes back to the 19th century and western triumphalism in emerging colonialism, and the tendency of western historians to start to glorify the crusades as a proto-colonial enterprise, an [obsession] with Richard the Lionheart and a burgeoning interest in [Muslim leader] Saladin as almost the noble savage.”

The Guardian’s got the rest of the story, but I’ll just give you the concluding remarks:

There has been “distortion and simplification” of the truth about the crusades, and, concluded Asbridge, “both sides [today] need to acknowledge the crusades for what they were … [they] belong in one place and one place alone – and that is the past.”

What I’m gathering is we don’t quite understand the Crusades and yet we’re happy to pontificate and apply them. Stark adds that “It struck me that the historians of the Crusades had not reached the public.” True enough. It’s not hard to have the average person on the street mention the Crusades in a discussion about religion. Unfortunately, the discussion is bound not to be an intelligent one as we basically don’t know what we’re talking about. So, let’s educate ourselves.

photo credit: Spatial Mongrel

I want to announce a new podcast that will automatically deliver an audio recording of a chapter from the Hebrew Bible everyday directly to whatever device or software you use to podcast. It’s called Memra and you can subscribe by adding the feed: http://podcast.katadrew.com/feed/podcast.

The podcast features recordings from mechon-mamre.org and an enclosed text translation from the English Standard Version. The readings alternate from the Tanak: Torah, Prophets, and Writings. Yesterday’s edition wasGenesis 1. Today’s isJoshua 1 and tomorrow’s will be1 Chronicles 1.

I have it set up to deliver straight to my Droid where I collect numerous podcasts and listen through them daily. I’m already listening through a daily English reading plan, so original language daily reading makes a lot of sense.

Let me know if you subscribe or have any thoughts or suggestions.

Given the various interpretations of what it means for mankind to bear the image of God, the imago dei, I think the suggestion of William P. Brown, Professor of Old Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary, is particularly helpful for warding off the fallacy of the excluded middle. Otherwise, you will likely find yourself vacillating theologically between each interpretation as you hear it put forward in the commentaries and literature. We should be cautious if something as complex as the imago dei is simplified.

Our species-specificity operates on a number of different levels, so also God’s specificity. Thus, it is best to think of the imago Dei not as something that reflects a singular aspect of the divine off a singular aspect of the human but as a prism refracting the various ways human beings, beginning with their gendered diversity, are capable of conveying the manifold character of God in the world.¹

photo credit: chris-dcx

Pope Benedict XVI, then Cardinal Ratzinger, on the connection of sabbath and worship with creation:

The Bible, to be sure, could take up the fundamental notion of the universe as existing for the sake of worship, but at the same time it had to purify it. This idea is to be found there, as has already been said, in the context of the sabbath. The Bible declares that creation has its structure in the sabbath ordinace. But the sabbath is in its turn the summing up of Torah, the law of Israel. This means that worship has a moral aspect to it. God’s whole moral order has been taken up into it; only thus is it truly worship. To this must be added the fact that Torah, the law, is an expression of Israel’s history with God. It is an expression of the covenant, and the covenant is in turn an expression of God’s love, of his “yes” to the human being that he created, so that he could both love and receive love.¹