Emotional manipulation

I found that “'Finney with a Twist': Elder Jacob Knapp and the Origins of Baptist Revivalism" explained the origin of practices I experienced in "revival meetings" over many years: repeated exhortations to commit, come forward, and accept salvation — the "altar call." The implication here, I think, is that such practices aren't entirely consistent with "believer's baptism." Knapp explained “The Utility of Anxious-Seats":

... He explains how at multiple points in the service he would give an invitation for the members of the audience to take their seats in the pews at the front of the room dubbed “the anxious bench” or “the anxious seat.” For Knapp, this was the key to a successful revival. First, it challenged the sinner to take a stand. Second, it required a public committal, making it nearly impossible for the sinner to backtrack once he had taken the first step. As Knapp writes, “It is more dishonorable and more mortifying to go back than it is to go forward.” Hence, “The more obstacles that can be put in the way of receding the better. … All the barriers that can be put in the way of the anxious, to prevent their going back, should be piled up behind them.” Third, it was a convenient way of making a public acknowledgement of our need of Christ. Fourth, the effect of seeing others go forward encouraged others to follow. “Thus,” Knapp writes, “one can be the means of bringing others to a right decision by the force of example.” Fifth, by this means, ministers were able to immediately ascertain the success of their labors. All this and more can be accomplished by admonishing sinners to take specially designated seats in the front.

At the conclusion of the service, those seated in the “anxious seats,” would follow Knapp to an “inquiry meeting,” sometimes called the “anxious room.” (Knapp’s critics called them the “finishing-off-room.”) At this meeting, Knapp focused less on giving “instructions to the anxious” and more on urging an “immediate decision—an instantaneous repentance, and faith in the Lord Jesus.” He writes, “I get all on their knees, and set them to crying to God (both saints and sinners), till he sends down salvation.”

Not unlike Finney, for Knapp the “anxious room” was a place to urge sinners to immediately profess faith in Christ. Whereas “thirty-five or forty years ago,” Knapp wrote, “Baptists, Presbyterians, and Congregationalists would tell inquirers to go home, read their Bibles, reflect upon their condition, look within, dig deep, and be not deceived,” Finney had introduced a more effective technique. As Knapp reflected, such “methods of introspection” often failed to result in conversion. Instead, Knapp called for “an immediate surrender of their hearts to God” and insisted on “the exercise of faith and repentance on the spot” as a matter of obedience. ....

There’s no question that revivalism is alive and well in Baptist churches today. .... Knapp’s adaptation of and expansion upon Finney’s “new measures” had lasting implications on the religious life and practices of Baptists in America.

Pastors need to understand that a change occurred among American Baptists in the nineteenth century, one that continues apace to this day. This change has shaped our intuitions about conversion, membership, baptism, and what it means to practice regenerate church membership. We live in a world infused with revivalistic intuitions and institutional practices that unintentionally undermine what it even means to be a Baptist church. .... (I am responsible for the bold emphases above, JS)

Caleb Morell, “'Finney with a Twist': Elder Jacob Knapp and the Origins of Baptist Revivalism," 9Marks, June 14, 2022.

A prayer on New Year's Eve

Samuel Johnson on New Year's Eve, 1749/50:

ALMIGHTY GOD, by whose will I was created, and by whose Providence I have been sustained, by whose mercy I have been called to the knowledge of my Redeemer, and by whose Grace whatever I have thought or acted acceptable to Thee has been inspired and directed, grant, O Lord, that in reviewing my past life, I may recollect Thy mercies to my preservation, in whatever state Thou preparest for me, that in affliction I may remember how often I have been succoured, and in Prosperity may know and confess from whose hand the blessing is received. Let me, O Lord, so remember my sins, that I may abolish them by true repentance, and so improve the Year to which Thou hast graciously extended my life, and all the years which Thou shalt yet allow me, that I may hourly become purer in Thy sight; so that I may live in Thy fear, and die in Thy favour, and find mercy at the last day, for the sake of Jesus Christ. Amen.

My advocate

Benedict XVI:

Quite soon, I shall find myself before the final judge of my life. Even though, as I look back on my long life, I can have great reason for fear and trembling, I am nonetheless of good cheer, for I trust firmly that the Lord is not only the just judge, but also the friend and brother who himself has already suffered for my shortcomings, and is thus also my advocate, my "Paraclete." In light of the hour of judgement, the grace of being a Christian becomes all the more clear to me. It grants me knowledge, and indeed friendship, with the judge of my life, and thus allows me to pass confidently through the dark door of death.

Hunted

One of my gifts to myself arrived in the mail just now. I've posted before about the pleasure I receive from Geoffrey Household's suspense novels, especially Watcher in the Shadows and Rogue Male. I have two film versions of the latter, Man Hunt (1941) and a BBC version for television, Rogue Male (1976), the closest to the book. There were rumors a couple of years ago that Benedict Cumberbatch wanted to film it, but so far as I know it didn't happen. The DVD that arrived today is of the 1976 version starring Peter O'Toole in the title role. That version has only been available in the US with very imperfect picture and sound. This one may be better. I'll find out tonight. It is a Blu-ray. I had to go to Britain to find it but fortunately I own a "region-free" Blu-ray player acquired when I realized there were films available abroad that weren't here.

The DVD description:

In early 1939 with war looming, English aristocrat Sir Robert Hunter (Peter O'Toole) embarks on a 'sporting stalk' of the deadliest of prey: Adolf Hitler. Captured by the Gestapo and left for dead. Sir Robert soon becomes the hunted on a chase from the Bavarian mountains to the wilds of the English countryside, where he will need all his sportsman's wit and guile to survive. Based on Geoffrey Household's cult 1930s thriller. Rogue Male is a suspenseful action adventure featuring an exceptional lead performance from O'Toole and a superb supporting cast, including Alastair Sim, Harold Pinter and John Standing.

"In Rama was there a voice heard, lamentation, and weeping, and great mourning"

Dec. 28, The Massacre of the Holy Innocents:

And when they were departed, behold, the angel of the Lord appeareth to Joseph in a dream, saying, Arise, and take the young child and his mother, and flee into Egypt, and be thou there until I bring thee word: for Herod will seek the young child to destroy him. When he arose, he took the young child and his mother by night, and departed into Egypt: And was there until the death of Herod: that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet, saying, Out of Egypt have I called my son. Then Herod, when he saw that he was mocked of the wise men, was exceeding wroth, and sent forth, and slew all the children that were in Bethlehem, and in all the coasts thereof, from two years old and under, according to the time which he had diligently inquired of the wise men. Then was fulfilled that which was spoken by Jeremiah the prophet, saying, In Rama was there a voice heard, lamentation, and weeping, and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted, because they are not. (Matt. 2:13-18 KJV)

The Martyrdom of the Holy Innocents, Gustave Dore

Wondrous love

Evil in the world comes of evil men and evil deeds

From The Spectator, Christmas 1940:

.... No confidence in the rightness of our cause is lacking, nor has doubt emerged about the ultimate issue of the struggle. What penetrates men’s souls today is not concern for their personal fate, or even for their country’s, but a sense, borne in on them with sombre force as this festival comes round, of the tragedy of the conflict in which millions of human beings are still locked on the day when the message of peace and good will to all mankind should be sounding from every pulpit and rung out by the bells of every steeple.

All that is part of the eternal problem of evil, taking immense and terrible shape before our eyes. We can no more profess to plumb the mystery of it than generations of thinkers in the past who have admitted that when all is said there remains a residuum of mystery still. But evil in the world comes of evil men and evil deeds, and we have no choice but to be resisting that evil today. ....

As we keep our war-time Christmas, and survey with sober fortitude the chances that the coming year may bring, we can take stock of our position without misgiving. As the Prime Minister said in the House of Commons last week, ‘some sense of composure and even satisfaction’ is justified, though the dangers that still impend are so obvious and so grave as to dispel all temptation to undue optimism. ....

But we must recognise how critical is the situation still. The promise of help from America is of such cardinal importance that if it comes in time it may properly be looked on as the guarantee of victory. But it is a race with time still. .... (more)

The Spectator, Christmas 1940, reprinted in that magazine, "Christmas after our darkest hour," Dec. 25, 2022.

When Mary Met the Angel

"Just another Mary" From The Wall Street Journal this morning:

The first person ever to hear that Jesus is the Son of God was a low-income teenage girl in an obscure backwater of the Roman empire. She went by the most common name for Jewish women of her time and place: She was just another Mary. But then she claimed an angel had appeared to her and told her she would give birth to the Son of God. From the perspective of both Jews and Romans in the first century A.D., her story was completely unbelievable. How has it lasted for 2,000 years?

Today, Mary’s claim to have met an angel is part of what makes her story hard to believe. We imagine angels like the fairy on top of the Christmas tree, only bigger, so Mary’s story feels like a fairy tale. But angels in the Bible aren’t remotely fairylike. They’re terrifying messengers from God. ....

“Do not be afraid, for you have found favor with God. And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. And the Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end!” (Luke 1:30-33).

.... Doubtless Mary had a lot of questions for the angel, but she asked just one: “How will this be, since I’m a virgin?” Mary knew the facts of life. The title “Son of God” could technically just have meant the Messiah. Perhaps she thought that Joseph, her betrothed, would be the father of this longed-for King. But then the angel dropped another bomb:

“The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy—the Son of God” (Luke 1:35).

.... But why would God become a man? Why would he live in poverty and die in agony? Why would the King of all creation come not to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many? According to the Christian story, it was because of love for every human being, rich or poor, weak or strong, enslaved or free. He paid the price for human sin—a word we may not choose to use but a reality we hit upon when we bewail injustice in this world and wonder why it seems so hard to fix. Christians believe that the Son of God was born to die, so that all who trust in him could live as sons and daughters of God—wrapped up more tightly in his love than the newborn Jesus was wrapped up by Mary in his swaddling clothes.

When Mary met the angel, she was a no-name girl from a disempowered people in a seemingly inconsequential place. Today, if you worry that you might be insignificant—unknown, unloved and unimportant in this world—perhaps this Christmas you will hear her message with fresh ears. If she was right about her son, then you are worth the birth and life and death and resurrection of the Son of God. (more)

Rebecca McLaughlin, "When Mary Met the Angel," The Wall Street Journal, Dec. 24, 2022.

"What think ye of Christ?"

From Dorothy L. Sayers, "The Greatest Drama Ever Staged":

.... What think ye of Christ? Before we adopt any of the unofficial solutions (some of which are indeed excessively dull)—before we dismiss Christ as a myth, an idealist, a demagogue, a liar or a lunatic—it will do no harm to find out what the creeds really say about Him. What does the Church think of Christ?

The Church's answer is categorical and uncompromising, and it is this: That Jesus Bar-Joseph, the carpenter of Nazareth, was in fact and in truth, and in the most exact and literal sense of the words, the God "by Whom all things were made." His body and brain were those of a common man; His personality was the personality of God, so far as that personality could be expressed in human terms. He was not a kind of dæmon or fairy pretending to be human; He was in every respect a genuine living man. He was not merely a man so good as to be "like God"—He was God.

Now, this is not just a pious commonplace; it is not commonplace at all. For what it means is this, among other things: that for whatever reason God chose to make man as he is—limited and suffering and subject to sorrows and death—He had the honesty and the courage to take His own medicine. Whatever game He is playing with His creation, He has kept His own rules and played fair. He can exact nothing from man that He has not exacted from Himself. He has Himself gone through the whole of human experience, from the trivial irritations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money to the worst horrors of pain and humiliation, defeat, despair and death. When He was a man, He played the man. He was born in poverty and died in disgrace and thought it well worth while. ....

Now, nobody is compelled to believe a single word of this remarkable story. God (says the Church) has created us perfectly free to disbelieve in Him as much as we choose. If we do disbelieve, then He and we must take the consequences in a world ruled by cause and effect. The Church says further, that man did, in fact, disbelieve, and that God did, in fact, take the consequences. All the same, if we are going to disbelieve a thing, it seems on the whole to be desirable that we should first find out what, exactly, we are disbelieving. Very well, then: "The right Faith is, that we believe that Jesus Christ is God and Man. Perfect God and perfect Man, of a reasonable soul and human flesh subsisting. Who although He be God and Man, yet is He not two, but one Christ." There is the essential doctrine, of which the whole elaborate structure of Christian faith and morals is only the logical consequence. ....

Dorothy L. Sayers, "The Greatest Drama Ever Staged," Creed or Chaos? 1938.

“The Grand Miracle”

C.S. Lewis on the Incarnation:

• …the Christian story is precisely the story of one grand miracle, the Christian assertion being that what is beyond all space and time, what is uncreated, eternal, came into nature, into human nature, descended into His own universe, and rose again, bringing nature up with Him. It is precisely one great miracle. If you take that away there is nothing specifically Christian left. (God in the Dock)
• The central miracle asserted by Christians is the Incarnation. They say that God became Man. Every other miracle prepares for this, or exhibits this, or results from this. (Miracles)
• In the Christian story God descends to reascend. He comes down;…down to the very roots and sea-bed of the Nature he has created. But He goes down to come up again and bring the whole ruined world up with Him. (Miracles)
• The Incarnation…illuminates and orders all other phenomena, explains both our laughter and our logic, our fear of the dead and our knowledge that it is somehow good to die, and which at one stroke covers what multitudes of separate theories will hardly cover for us if this is rejected. (Miracles)
• But supposing God became man—suppose our human nature which can suffer and die was amalgamated with God’s nature in one person—then that person could help us. He could surrender His will, and suffer and die, because He was man; and He could do it perfectly because He was God…. But we cannot share God’s dying unless God dies; and He cannot die except by being a man, That is the sense in which He pays our debt, and suffers for us what He Himself need not suffer at all. (Mere Christianity)
• Enemy-occupied territory—that is what this world is. Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed, you might say landed in disguise, and is calling us all to take part in a great campaign of sabotage.” (Mere Christianity)

"A close room, an easy chair, a large fire, and a smoaking dinner"

This morning Patrick Kurp quoted from a Samuel Johnson essay, "Variety necessary to happiness; a winter scene." Today where I live is a good day to "shrink back...to our coverts."

.... The winter, therefore, is generally celebrated as the proper season for domestick merriment and gaiety. We are seldom invited by the votaries of pleasure to look abroad for any other purpose, than that we may shrink back with more satisfaction to our coverts, and when we have heard the howl of the tempest, and felt the gripe of the frost, congratulate each other with more gladness upon a close room, an easy chair, a large fire, and a smoaking dinner. ....

To the men of study and imagination the winter is generally the chief time of labour. Gloom and silence produce composure of mind, and concentration of ideas; and the privation of external pleasure naturally causes an effort to find entertainment within. This is the time in which those whom literature enables to find amusements for themselves, have more than common convictions of their own happiness. When they are condemned by the elements to retirement, and debarred from most of the diversions which are called in to assist the flight of time, they can find new subjects of inquiry, and preserve themselves from that weariness which hangs always flagging upon the vacant mind. ....

...[A]ny of my readers, who are contriving how to spend the dreary months before them, may consider which of their past amusements fills them now with the greatest satisfaction, and resolve to repeat those gratifications of which the pleasure is most durable.

Samuel Johnson, "No. 80. Variety necessary to happiness; a winter scene," Dec. 1750.

Just like the Trapp family

Aloise Buckley Heath, William F. Buckley's sister, was blessed with ten children. I have a collection of her stories, Will Mrs. Major Go to Hell? Annually during the Christmas season one of the stories is re-published by National Review. One of my favorites has always been "A Heath Christmas Carol Program" from 1966.

With all the gaiety and caroling that goes on in our house all year round, it is only natural that we plan, early every December, a Christmas carol program, to put it on tape after it is absolutely perfect and send it to the children’s grandmother as an absolutely unique, unprocurable-in-stores Christmas gift. ....

Our carol program this year was to be not just Mother at the piano, John at the recorder, and nine children singing in unison. It was to include part singing, solos, duets, trios, and quartets, Buckley on the drums, ten-year-old Jennifer on the triangle, and a piano duet by Betsey and Alison, who are eleven and twelve and hate each other.

Our first difficulties I could see coming. Buckley played the drums, not with a gently medieval boom, or even with a gay 17th-century rat-a-tat, but as if he were soloing during a pause in a program by the Rolling Stones, which was impressive, to be sure, but reduced the singers to utter inaudibility. Jennifer ting’d on the triangle whenever it seemed to her that she had not tung for quite long enough, and Betsey and Alison, who have never entirely grasped the purpose of a duet, exchanged sidelong black-eyed glares and raced each other through “Jingle Bells,” Alison winning handily by a good two and a half measures. ....

Our repertoire was nearly finished when Pam addressed the group in less than a friendly tone.

“If anybody’s being funny around here, they just can just stop it right now.”

There was a blank silence. Long blue eyes met wide black eyes without the glimmer of a twinkle. Pam waited a minute, then she said: “Mother, let’s start over, and I’ll take the piano while you come out here and listen. There’s something peculiar going on. Now listen carefully.”

I listened carefully, and it was then I decided my children are either not quite bright enough to live, or else they are too gay to bear.

Do you know what “afforient” is? Neither did I till I heard Priscilla, who is 15 and who should know better, sweetly warble that the three kings afforient were, and I asked her. “Afforient,” if you are interested, is the state of being disoriented, or wandering, as one does over field and fountain, moor and mountain.

And has anybody ever wondered where the Ranger is on Christmas Eve? Has anyone, for that matter, ever given a single thought to the Ranger on Christmas Eve? Well, Betsey Heath has. “Away is the Ranger,” she will inform you, if you listen carefully. And obviously, he is away because there is no crib for his bed. ....

Have you ever wondered, in the long watches of the night, what Child is this who laid to rest on Mary’s lap is sleeping? Well, it is the Child whom angels greet with Ann the Sweet, while shepherds’ watches keeping. Well, St. Ann was Mary’s mother, certainly sweet and probably dead, argued Alison. Why wouldn’t she be with the angels? As for the shepherds, what with their setting off for Bethlehem, well-known for its good and bad thieves, keeping their watches was a very friendly gesture on the part of the angels. Ann the Sweet probably thought of it. ....

Pam, even Pam, kept announcing in her clear, sweet contralto that God and sin are reconciled; but she realized immediately, when it was pointed out to her, that God was far more likely to reconcile Himself to sinners than to sin, even if the book hadn’t said so, which it had. 

Jim had to argue a little. He was the one who kept urging the shepherds to leave their “you’s” and leave their “am’s” and rise up, shepherds, and follow.

“What in Heaven’s name is this about you’s and am’s?” I asked him. 

“Oh-h-h, rejection of personality, denial of self,” said Jim grandly. “Practically the central thesis of Christian theology.”

“Of course, I don’t go to a Catholic college, but I think that’s Communist theory, not Christian theology,” I told him. “In any case, could you come down from those philosophic heights and join us shepherds down here with our ewes (female sheep) and rams (male sheep)?” ....

But I was too weary to go on. “Children,” I said. “Let’s just do one song absolutely perfectly. Let’s concentrate on ‘Silent Night,’ because that’s the one we know best anyway. ....

They lined up, looking very clean and handsome and holy, Jim and John at the back, Timothy and Janet on either side of Pam at the piano, and the middle echelon sensibly and unquarrelsomely distributed in the middle according to heights. Just like the Trapp Family, I thought to myself happily. Pam turned and gave them all a long and, I hoped, stern look, before she played the opening measures.

“Silent night, holy night,” nine young voices chanted softly, and I noticed Jennifer and Betsey beginning to break up in twinkles and dimples. “All is calm, all is bright,” they went on, John’s recorder piping low and clear. Buckley and Alison clapped their hands briefly over their mouths. “Round John Virgin, Mother and Child,” the chorus swelled sweetly, and I rapped hard on the piano. “Just who,” I asked, in my most restrained voice, “is Round John Virgin?”

“One of the twelve opossums,” the ten young voices answered promptly, and they collapsed over the piano, from the piano bench onto the floor, convulsed by their own delicate wit.

And that’s why we didn’t have this year’s Christmas carol program.

— A story by the late Aloïse Buckley Heath is a NATIONAL REVIEW Christmas tradition. This, her last Christmas piece, was published two weeks before her death in January 1967.

Aloise Buckley Heath, "A Christmas Carol program," National Review, Dec. 27, 1966.

"Like a journal of my life"

From "We’re drowning in old books":

What to do with old books is a quandary that collectors, no matter what age, eventually face — or leave to their heirs who, truly, do not want the bulk of them. Old volumes are a problem for older Americans downsizing or facing mortality, with their reading life coming to a close. .... They’re a backache every time a collector moves. They’re a headache when collectors want to sell their homes....

Book lovers are known to practice semi-hoardish and anthropomorphic tendencies. They keep too many books for too long, despite dust, dirt, mold, cracked spines, torn dust jackets, warped pages, coffee stains and the daunting reality that most will never be reread. Age rarely enriches a book. ....

“Books represent a significant investment of time and intellectual effort in our lives,” Powell says. “They’re more like friends than objects. You’ve had a lot of conversations with the book. You want to remember the experience. They’re echoes of what you’ve read.” ....

Owners may experience relief from jettisoning old books. Not Coleman, 60, whose last move necessitated donating two-thirds of her books to the Goodwill in Swarthmore, Pa. “I regret it intensely. Those books were like a journal of my life,” she says. “Having those books surround me for all my adult life was a real source of pleasure.” ....

Karen Heller, "We’re drowning in old books. But getting rid of them is heartbreaking," Washington Post, Dec. 18, 2022.

God bless you, every one!

 

"It’s never too late to make amends"

From "How Dickens invented Christmas":

.... When Dickens sat down to write A Christmas Carol, Christmas was still a relatively low-key affair, and many of its festive trappings were conspicuous by their absence. It was merely the first day in a twelve-day holiday, which reached its climax on 5 January, the night before Epiphany, aka Twelfth Night.

The marginal significance of Christmas was reflected in Anglican liturgy. Advent was an austere affair, a time of quiet contemplation rather than celebration. Christmas (Christ’s Mass) wasn’t an important feast day in the Anglican calendar. ....

However, by the time Dickens embarked on A Christmas Carol, such attitudes were changing. The new Oxford Movement had begun to agitate for a less Puritanical C of E. Christmas Trees (introduced by George III’s German wife, Charlotte of Mecklenburg, and popularised by another German consort, Prince Albert) were becoming increasingly prominent, partly due to German immigrants to Britain’s industrial cities. In December 1843, the same month that A Christmas Carol was published, the director of the Victoria & Albert Museum, Sir Henry Cole, sent the first recorded Christmas Card. ....

Always a hands-on author, with an instinctive flair for marketing, Dickens oversaw the design of A Christmas Carol, and he made sure that it was specifically promoted as the ideal Christmas present. With a burgundy cover, embossed in gold, and hand-painted colour illustrations, it was an instant hit, selling six thousand copies in the first few days after publication. ....

Happily, Dickens’ book is still widely read ... but its biggest impact in recent times has been on screen and stage. The screen adaptations are almost too numerous to count, cementing Scrooge as one of the landmark roles for male actors of a certain age. .... From where I’m sitting (on a saggy sofa strewn with Quality Street wrappers and other Christmas detritus) the 1951 film, starring Alistair Sim, remains the definitive dramatisation. ....

But why? .... A Christmas Carol provides the respite of a happy ending, but it doesn’t shy away from suffering. Its depictions of illness, grief and poverty are painfully real (as in all his greatest fiction, Dickens mined the hardship of his early life to fuel this fable – like Scrooge, he had a sister who died in childhood, of tuberculosis).

Yet I reckon there’s also a deeper reason, and the clue is in the title. As its name suggests, A Christmas Carol has a profound religious subtext, rooted in the Christian creed of repentance and forgiveness. The moral of A Christmas Carol is that it’s never too late to make amends. The proliferation of Christmas carols indicates that, while we may be losing our appetite for churchgoing, we haven’t yet lost our appetite for the Good News of the Gospels. .... (more)

William Cook, "How Dickens invented Christmas," The Spectator, Dec. 18, 2022.

Rebus

Ian Rankin is the author of at least twenty-four novels about the investigations of Edinburgh DI John Rebus. I have read many of them. I also enjoyed the television series, especially the one with Ken Stott in the role. From The Telegraph's interview with Rankin:

His Rebus has always cut a truculent figure, prone to seeing the world in terms of moral absolutes, even while himself sometimes wandering between the lines of the law. “He’s very much an Old Testament character. If you’ve done a bad thing he’s not going to forgive you for it,” says Rankin. “That’s where we differ. Sometimes in the books I’m having a conversation with him in which I try to tell him that sometimes the world isn’t quite as polarised or fixed as he thinks.” ....

.... “I didn’t find a way to bring him back,” he tells me of his return to writing about Rebus in 2012, following a five-year break after “retiring” him in 2007’s Exit Music. “He found a way.”

Still, Rankin has had to relinquish that creative relationship to the playwright Gregory Burke for Rebus’s long-awaited return to the TV screen, announced last week by the Nordic streaming service Viaplay. It will see Rebus as a forty-something divorcée navigating contemporary Edinburgh across various six-episode-long stories. No details regarding casting or scheduling are yet available.

In a way, it’s a surprise: Rebus’s relationship with the small screen has been unhappy. .... “The problem is that they distilled an entire novel into 60 minutes, because they assumed audiences’ attention spans were becoming too short.” He became so disgruntled that he wrestled back the TV rights and has been looking for new partnerships ever since. ....

Rankin is now 62, although with his Britpop hair and lanky frame, he still has the look and gait of a 1990s indie musician. He wrote the first Rebus novel, Knots and Crosses (1987), while in his twenties....

Claire Allfree, "Ian Rankin: ‘After Sarah Everard, crime writers are starting to think: are the cops the good guys?’," The Telegraph, Nov. 13, 2022.

A Christmas Carol

Christmastide at 600 College St. when I was young: candles in every street-facing window, a wreath on the front door and a festooned evergreen in the front window (first real, then later, artificial), large-format Christmas Ideals on the coffee table, Christmas cards taped to the kitchen wall by Mom, and more. Records came out, too. We had a recording of A Child's Christmas in Wales read by Dylan Thomas himself. The record I remember best was a 45rpm of Lionel Barrymore as Scrooge in Dickens' Christmas Carol. He had performed that role year after year on the radio in the 40s and 50s. Listening to the record was one of our family Christmas traditions. I transferred the recording to CD years ago and just found it among my collection of Christmas music. The original record sleeve:

 And this, provided by YouTube, is the recording:

A creepy fantasy

Nick Catoggio​ finds political relevance in a 1961 Twilight Zone episode:

...[I]t’s the shrewdest commentary on tyranny in the Twilight Zone catalog.

Tell me if this sounds familiar. A vindictive child with superpowers demands that the adults around him indulge his every desire. If they refuse, he can wish them away into oblivion with an unkind thought. That leaves the adults trapped in a hostage crisis without an endgame, where the only way to survive is to keep humoring and flattering the captor they despise while waiting for something to change. Maybe the child will die, maybe he’ll mature, maybe he’ll get bored and move on to something else in life. But until fate intervenes to liberate them, they’re at his mercy.

Imagine a political party being so dysfunctional as to replicate a Twilight Zone plot arc. ....

Nick Catoggio, "Is Never Trump Forever?," The Dispatch, Dec. 12, 2022.

"Keep the main thing the main thing"

Kevin DeYoung's advice to pastors this season:

.... Don’t get cute at Christmas. Your people need regular meat and potatoes, not the newest eggnog recipe. Stay away from props and video clips. Put to death the Star Wars tie-in you’ve been really excited about. Don’t worry about preaching the same truths and the same themes. They don’t remember last year’s sermon anyway. Go ahead and tell them the old, old story one more time.

That means the Christmas Eve service should not be about the evils of shopping or the dangers of busyness. We can leave behind clever cliches like “Wise Men Still Seek Him” or “Have Yourself a Mary Christmas.” There’s no need to focus for 40 minutes on what exactly was the Star of Bethlehem, and if you are going to talk about the Magi, don’t make it an academic lecture on Persian astrology. Let’s spare our people the usual harangue about how Protestants have ignored Mary for too long (even though, I’ve heard that sermon and read those articles every year since I was a kid). Let’s not get caught up in the dating of Christmas or debunking the supposed parallels with Mithras.

Are any of these things wrong in themselves? Of course not. I’ve touched on these themes in a number of messages over the years. But let’s keep the main thing the main thing.

There will be unbelievers at your Christmas Eve service. And struggling saints. And weary souls. And wayward sinners. And stragglers who have ventured into a church for the first time in a long time. They need to hear about Jesus, about the Word made flesh, about the only begotten Son sent from the Father, about the one who fulfilled ancient prophecy, about the one who came to save his people from their sins. ....

Kevin DeYoung, "Pastor, Don’t Get Cute this Christmas," December 12, 2022.

Still explains a lot

Re-posted from 2011.

James Taranto notes a study:

"Rude People Can Be Perceived as Powerful," according to a Scientific American headline. The magazine reports on a new study in which subjects read about "a person who, without asking, helped himself to a cup of coffee from another person's pot" and "a bookkeeper [who] consciously ignored a financial error," as well as "scrupulous coffee drinkers and bookkeepers." The subjects reckoned that the bad-behaving ones were "more in-control and leaderlike":

In another test, being publicly rude also seemed to engender a perceived sense of power. A hundred twenty-six subjects watched one of two videos. One of a man sitting in a sidewalk café and acting courteously, the other of the same man stretching his legs out on a chair next to him, tossing his cigarette ashes wherever, and barking orders at the cafe staff. Subjects thought the crude man was more likely to be a decision-maker and get his way than the same man behaving himself.

So next time you think someone is important, remember: They [sic] may simply be a jerk.

And a comment at Scientific American suspects that may explain another behavior pattern:

That might also explain some of the appeal of "bad boys" to certain women, as they're unconsciously perceived as being more socially dominant....

I Timothy 3:1-3 suggests that Christian leaders should exemplifly other qualities:

If anyone aspires to the office of overseer, he desires a noble task. Therefore an overseer must be above reproach, the husband of one wife, sober-minded, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, not a drunkard, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome.... (ESV)

'Don't You Know Who I Am?' - WSJ.com, Rude People Can Be Perceived as Powerful: Scientific American Podcast