Category Archives: Read This and Your Work Is Done

Don’t trust the mainstream media when it comes to assessing what’s most important to you. Journalism’s jaded jackanapes live lives of quiet isolation, lost in the fetid recesses of their unconscious desires and fetishes, projecting their own fears and prejudices onto the great news wallscreen that is the Internet.

And so, in an effort to keep you, my beloved readers, not only informed and entertained but also convinced that you need someone like me to brings stuff like this to people like you, I do hereby present the Ten Most Important Stories of 2011:

10. Champion Feed & Supply relocates to 1115 Industrial Road in Kearny. Kearny!

9. Despite chatter to the contrary, PV’s FCCLA attends conference. Wackiness ensues.

8. Spirited city council meeting covers wide range of issues.

7. Mystery object found in Ely, Minnesota, putting the lie to the hateful canard that nothing interesting ever happens in Ely.

6. The Mattawa Shell station in Mattawa, Washington, now offers “Oriental” food and an inside-seating Laundromat to its Occidental customers. Get that lo mein stain out of your khakis while you fill up.

5. Basin Republican Rambler scoops AP on Basin Library Children’s Time candy-treat dispersal.

4. Crocketts Bluff residents “question” post office closure. Will FedEx be next?

3. Kayla Kisner will vie for Distinguished Young Woman title of 2012, ending rumors that she would sit this year out.

2. The Grand Saline Sun opens up can of worms with great PB&J controversy.

And the No. 1 story of 2011:

1. Utility shed measuring 8′x8′x8′ will, repeat, will benefit the Canistota Fire Department.

To those who would argue that these small-town stories cannot possibly compete with the execution of Osama bin Laden, the death of Steve Jobs, the end of the Iraq war, or the cancellation of Bored to Death, I say there are no small towns or small stories…only small fonts.

After all, what affected your day-to-day existence more: the death of Apple’s  founder or your kid’s prom?

Robertson Davies, Richard John Neuhaus, Erasmus Lecture 1990

OK, here’s one for my Combox Magisterium: Why is it that virtually all the contemporary Christian fiction is being written by women? Or is it that just the best contemporary Christian fiction is being written by women (with one exception, apparently):

Complete list of the 2011 Carol Award winners:

Debut Author
Crossing Oceans by Gina Holmes (Tyndale House Publishers)

Long Contemporary
Never Say Never by Lisa Wingate (Bethany House)

Long Contemporary Romance
Plain Paradise by Beth Wiseman (Thomas Nelson)

Long Historical
Sons of Thunder by Susan May Warren (Summerside Press)

Long Historical Romance
Love Finds You in Homestead, Iowa by Melanie Dobson (Summerside Press)

Mystery
The Camera Never Lies by Elizabeth Goddard (Barbour)

Novellas
A Trusting Heart by Carrie Turansky (Barbour)

Romantic Suspense
The Silent Order by Melanie Dobson (Summerside Press)

Short Contemporary
A Father for Zach by Irene Hannon (Love Inspired)

Short Contemporary Suspense
Night Prey by Sharon Dunn (Love Inspired Suspense)

Short Historical
Her Healing Ways by Lyn Cote (Love Inspired Historical)

Speculative Fiction
König’s Fire by Marc Schooley (Marcher Lord Press)

Suspense/Thriller
Predator by Terri Blackstock (Zondervan)

Women’s Fiction
Beaded Hope by Cathy Liggett (Tyndale Publishers)

Young Adult
Anything But Normal by Melody Carlson (Revell)

Is it that the market for these books is mostly female? (I can tell you from firsthand knowledge that most readers of magazines are women.)

Or is “Christian fiction” defined too narrowly, perhaps didactically? Would our favorite fantasy author Lars Walker have qualified? (Lars is in North Dakota this week, so he can’t hear us talk about him.)

Would Flannery O’Connor have qualified? Or would her having been a Catholic proved an impediment to the “judges,” not to mention that her novels and short stories are brilliantly creepy, and you have to dig beneath the wild-eyed characters and extreme behavior to find the living Word that animates her work?

How about Dorothy Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey novels? I guess what I’m asking is, not having read any of the regaled books, and having absolutely no intention of doing so, certainly not as long as I have still not read all of Dickens, what defines these books as Christian? Is there an evangelistic bent to them? Do the heroes and heroines all find solutions to their dilemmas in Scripture and right-living? Or is there room for ambiguity?

Apropos of nothing: How crazy would it be if R. Crumb were to illustrate an O’Connor Collected Works? And by crazy, I mean necessary before I die?

Also: When talk turns to great Christian fiction writers of the 20th century, why is it you almost never hear the name Robertson Davies? Wasn’t he a high-church Anglican? Or did I mistakenly glean that from his oeuvre?

Crystal clarity at a time when stating the obvious is considered bad manners at the very least and a political crime against a protected “marginalized” group at the very most:

[T]here was, and still is, a perverse desire to say that the 9/11 atrocities were in some way deserved, or made historically more explicable, by the many crimes of past American foreign policy. Either that, or—to recall the contemporary comments of the “Reverends” Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson—a punishment from heaven for American sinfulness. (The two ways of thinking, one of them ostensibly “left” and the other “right,” are in fact more or less identical.) That this was an assault upon our society, whatever its ostensible capitalist and militarist “targets,” was again thought too obvious a point for a clever person to make. It became increasingly obvious, though, with every successive nihilistic attack on London, Madrid, Istanbul, Baghdad, and Bali. There was always some “intellectual,” however, to argue in each case that the policy of Tony Blair, or George Bush, or the Spanish government, was the “root cause” of the broad-daylight slaughter of civilians. Responsibility, somehow, never lay squarely with the perpetrators.

Yes, Hitchens can be infuriating when he goes on his atheist binges, but not because he’s some kind of threat to the Faith but because it’s one of the few subject matters in which it is patently obvious that he is writing beneath his considerable talent.

But I would gladly put up with that stuff to be able to continue to enjoy someone with his media cachet (not to mention gift for making English sound like he invented it) take a hatchet to the poltroonish Truthers:

I found myself for the first time in my life sharing the outlook of soldiers and cops, or at least of those soldiers and cops who had not (like George Tenet and most of the CIA) left us defenseless under open skies while well-known “no fly” names were allowed to pay cash for one-way tickets after having done perfunctory training at flight schools. My sympathies were wholeheartedly and unironically (and, I claim, rationally) with the forces of law and order. Second, I became heavily involved in defending my adopted country from an amazing campaign of defamation, in which large numbers of the intellectual class seemed determined at least to minimize the gravity of what had occurred, or to translate it into innocuous terms (poverty is the cause of political violence) that would leave their worldview undisturbed. How much easier to maintain, as many did, that it was all an excuse to build a pipeline across Afghanistan (an option bizarrely neglected by American imperialism after the fall of communism in Kabul, when the wretched country could have been ours for the taking!).

Exactly.

So First Things has revamped its website, and it’s quite attractive, with multimedia features and a select menu of sponsored blogs.

I have been asked to contribute from time to time to the First Thoughts blog — mostly on fusion/io solid-state technology. (Not sure why. I lost the original email.)

Keeping Richard John Neuhaus’ vision alive through both the book and the new website is no small task, so please consider subscribing to the former and visiting the latter regularly.

Or our world will collapse into a pernicious goo of nihilistic self-absorption, and all the little babies will die.

No pressure.