Juvenile Nonfiction

13. Pastor dad: scriptural insights on fatherhood

jnonfiction — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 13:58:53 +0000

A slim volume (free ebook), developed from a sermon. Driscoll is a polarizing figure, garnering both acclaim and scorn for his blend of extreme conservatism with the emergent church model. Most of the way, this reads like the barest gloss on Proverbs (“…14:26 says, ‘In the fear of the LORD one has strong confidence, and his children will have a refuge.’ … [So,] the safest place for children is with a man who fears the Lord.”), which isn’t bad. But Driscoll drifts into behaviorism and a shocking lack of grace, admonishing a failing father for his lack of wisdom by (obliquely) recommending he shoot his daughter’s boyfriend and summarily excommunicating Christians-who-sin from the Church. I don’t mind separating the wheat from the chaff. Really, I don’t. But I bet I could find a follower of Jesus to give me sound scriptural advice on fatherhood without demanding that I sift through this deadly legalism to find it.

(Update: I neglected to point out Driscoll’s conviction that it’s a Biblical mandate that a Godly father make a lot of money, which he emphatically asserts but takes little time to flesh out. It follows from the mandate to provide for his family, which, I’m not sure, but I think our role in provision is at the very most as a team member and probably more likely as a charity case.)

12. Trout fishing in America

jnonfiction — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 17:16:11 +0000

A colleague loaned this to me. It’s of a piece with writing of the time — squarely avant-garde, almost poetry, Sixties San Francisco. The phrase “Trout fishing in America” becomes a synecdoche, both for a number of representative people, places, thoughts, actions relating to America and for America itself. There’s something elegiac about it: Brautigan may feel that Trout fishing represents something both fundamental about and increasingly missing in his America, as especially represented by a late chapter in which he visits a scrapyard where they’re selling lengths of Trout fishing creeks and various waterfalls. His voice is relentlessly fun, and he’s willing to follow his pen to almost any absurdity it intends. A unique, quirky little book — one that’ll probably get stuck in my synapses long after it should reasonably have faded.

Been a long time…

jnonfiction — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 14:52:57 +0000

…since I recommended new music. Jeff Anderson has come into his own headspace (finally!), and Anderson Cale has released a self-titled set of instrumentals that make for great working music — stirring, well done, semi-ambient stuff. Go get it on iTunes and support a great couple of guys. (And hey, Anderson Cale: Bandcamp eats MySpace for breakfast. Get on that!!)

11. The Maltese falcon

jnonfiction — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 02:36:15 +0000

The story goes like this: my wife brought this home from book club. It’s Michigan’s The Big Read, see, and one of her fellow bookclubbers works at the Ferndale Public Library and had a raft of copies. Zena’s not interested, though — all she can think of is Garrison Keillor’s Guy Noir. But she picks it up, and when I needle her about it a few days later, she’s done a 180, she loves it, she can’t get enough of it, see? Which is enough to pique my interest, and here we are.

It’s a page turner, that’s for sure, with a great lead character, Sam Spade, a hard-boiled Detective who doesn’t trust anyone, listens when money talks and treats women like he owns them. He’s got an ethic, but it’s not a moral ethic — if your partner gets iced, you find and capture his killer, and you don’t chase a rabbit just to let him go.

It was amusing, reading the genesis of decades of Tough Dick Cliché. I’ve never seen the movie, so I came to it fresh — didn’t know a thing about the plot. Lots of descriptions of yellow or glowing eyes, set jaws, weak knees, etc. Very of its time. Women were dames and men were Men, a certain decorum reigned even among the riff raff, untrustworthy elements were “swarthy” or “Levantine,” on and on. Can you see why it would be enchanting?

If you can, I recommend it.

Cary Norton…

jnonfiction — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 21:34:46 +0000

…takes incredible photos. Patronize this guy.

Final

jnonfiction — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 14:28:03 +0000

Whiskerino is over. Which is a relief and a bit of a downer. There’s not much to say about it that you can’t glean from perusing my archive there. Except what David said, which is that he’d never before (nor since) encountered a forum that celebrated the Masculinity inherent in being an intelligent creative.

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

10. A wrinkle in time

jnonfiction — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 13:52:45 +0000

A trip up to the special collections revealed that my library has a copy of every single Newbery winner. Which led me to seek out this favorite from childhood and read it. Which resulted in the realization that I didn’t understand half of it, despite having read it multiple times as a child. The forces in the book were elemental to me, as a child, but not explicitly connected to the Great Story (despite the inclusion of scripture!!). I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s good to read books to your children, especially books that might be above them, so that you can explain things to them — new words, tough ideas — and guide them towards comprehension. And so they’re not afraid to reach up and out when they choose their own reading material. Meg’s space-and-time-bending journey to save her Father and her younger brother Charles Wallace is a moving reminder that we’re aided, equipped, and commissioned to resist the Darkness, and that it is our one monumental task, our responsibility, and our joy.

09. The ragamuffin gospel

jnonfiction — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 13:45:51 +0000

Manning is taking sides in the faith vs. works faceoff, and he’s squarely in faith’s corner. You can’t be good enough. You can’t be smart enough. You’re loved and forgiven before you even get your lame self-justification out of your mealy mouth. Probably a good once-in-a-while read for those of us in the semi-gnostic, Spirit of the Disciplines Dallas Willard camp.

08. In the Lake of the Woods

jnonfiction — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 17:36:55 +0000

O’Brien’s 1994 novel concerns a rising politician who crashes and burns once revelations of his involvement in My Lai come to the surface. It’s beautifully written, skillfully exploring in language the interior lives of its antihero, a flawed man — both very good and very bad — never fully at ease after the events in Vietnam. Wade, the politician, tries to create a Good life after the war, and almost succeeds until his devastating loss in a run for the Senate. At a cabin in Lake in the Woods, Minnesota, his wife disappears under mysterious circumstances one night, and the book explores what might have happened to her, taking pains to let us know that there were no conclusive findings. Her disappearance among the 1000 Lakes mirrors the shifting opacity of Wade’s own life, as if the horrors of what he did and saw in Vietnam had forever unhooked him from the corporeal. A solid novel.

07. Desiring the kingdom: worship, worldview, and cultural formation

jnonfiction — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 17:30:40 +0000

Desiring the kingdom is Smith’s attempt to reapproach Christian Education through the stomach, as it were. Cognitive approaches to Christian formation don’t touch the desires, he argues, and desire is the prime mover. We lead with our hearts. So while we learn at Christian Schools to adopt a Christian Worldview, the secular liturgies of the Mall, the Stadium, the University are getting straight to our hearts through our bodies, and forming a desire for a different Kingdom in us. Smith argues for a new approach to education, centered around Worship, which employs affective methods to truly form us as a peculiar people. It’s a refreshing idea, although his exploration into the ways that the Worship liturgy enact this formation struck me as after-the-fact, as if he’d formed his conclusions and then worked up examples to try to support them. Don’t let that dissuade you from tackling this very readable book, especially the last chapter on pedagogy.