The interplay of these four doctrines–sola scriptura, the priesthood of believers, preparation for grace, and sanctification–inspired a passion for preaching, writing, and reading in colonial New England. But though these doctrines involved the individual soul, the culture of evangelical literacy was nurtured in corporate institutions, including the family, the church, the town, and the colony, all of which blended public and private in a special New England way. New Englanders understood social life through the concept of covenant, a contract of mutuality and reciprocity. … The way New Englanders organized their families, communities, and institutional lives would have a profound impact on the growth of the culture of evangelical literacy.

From David Paul Nord, Faith in Reading: Religious Publishing and the Birth of Mass Media in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) 17-18. Read the abstract in the Commonplaces Library.

Popularity: 7% [?]

LibriVox is an attempt to make all public domain books freely available online as audiobooks read by volunteers. The project is ongoing, but Joy Chan has already recorded and made available Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. She reads it well, and her accent makes listening to the 12 hours and 28 minutes a joy — at least I hope so. I have not yet made it all the way through her readings.

The readings are available in either 64 or 128 kbps. Each is included for your streaming pleasure. Please notice that each track is therefore listed twice.

Or listen to individual parts:

Part I

1. Author’s Apology for his Book – 00:11:27 (11MB)
2. The First Stage – 00:34:09 (32.8MB)
3. The Second Stage – 00:29:19 (28.2MB)
4. The Third Stage – 00:45:50 (44MB)
5. The Fourth Stage – 00:24:17 (23.3MB)
6. The Fifth Stage – 00:45:25 (44.5MB)
7. The Sixth Stage – 00:27:53 (26.8MB)
8. The Seventh Stage – 00:46:31 (44.7MB)
9. The Eighth Stage – 00:09:53 (9.5MB)
10. The Ninth Stage – 00:63:50 (61.3MB)
11. The Tenth Stage – 00:33:13 (31.9MB)
12. Conclusion of Part First – 00:01:52 (1.8MB)

Part II

1. The Author’s Way – 00:14:38 (14.1MB)
2. Pilgrimage of Christiana and Her Children – 00:28:57 (27.8MB)
3. The First Stage – 00:19:30 (18.7MB)
4. The Second Stage – 00:36:36 (35.2MB)
5. The Third Stage – 00:22:40 (21.8MB)
6. The Fourth Stage – 00:43:14 (41.5MB)
7. The Fifth Stage – 00:25:40 (24.7MB)
8. The Sixth Stage (part 1) – 00:40:20 (38.7MB)
9. The Sixth Stage (part 2) – 00:43:37 (41.9MB)
10. The Seventh Stage – 00:25:09 (24.2MB)
11. The Eighth Stage – 00:56:56 (54.7MB)
12. Author’s Farewell – 00:00:57 (919.8KB)

Read along via Google Books.

Popularity: 9% [?]

I have recently been asked to review two books for the Association of Christian Librarians. Now I’m concerned. According to Bob Harris, a contributor to Paper Cuts: A Blog About Books by the editors of the New York Times Book Review, I should not use any of the following words:

poignant: Something you read may affect you, or move you. That doesn’t mean it’s poignant. Something is poignant when it’s keenly, even painfully, affecting. When Bambi’s mom dies an adult may think it poignant. A child probably finds it terrifying.

compelling: Many things in life, and in books, are compelling. The problem is that too often in book reviews far too many things are found to be such. A book may be a page turner, but that doesn’t necessarily make it compelling. Overuse has weakened a word that implies an overwhelming force.

Reviewers often combine these first two words. Like Chekhov’s gun. If there is a poignant in a review’s third paragraph, a compelling will most likely follow. Frequently reviewers forestall the suspense and link the words right away, as in “this poignant and compelling novel…”

intriguing: It doesn’t mean merely interesting or fascinating although it’s almost always used in place of one of those words. When it is, the sense of something illicit and mysterious is lost.

eschew: No one actually says this word in real life. It appears almost exclusively in writing when the perp is stretching for a flashy synonym for avoid or reject or shun.

craft (used as a verb): In “The Careful Writer,” Theodore M. Bernstein reminds us that “the advertising fraternity has decided craft is a verb.” Undeterred, reviewers use it when they are needlessly afraid of using plain old write. They also try to make pen a verb, as in “he penned a tome.”

muse (used as a verb): Few things in this world are mused. They are much more often simply written, thought or said. “War is hell,” he mused. Not much dreamy rumination there.

Stretching for the fanciful — writing “he crafts or pens” instead of “he writes”; writing “he muses” instead of “he says or thinks” — is a sure tip-off of weak writing.

lyrical: Reviewers use this adjective when they want to say something is well written. But using the word loosely misses the sense of expressing emotion in an imaginative and beautiful way. Save lyrical for your next review of Wordsworth.

I think we should probably add a few more to the list — especially when reviewing works of theology. My list of words and phrases to avoid when reviewing a book:

1. Timely. Timeliness is good. But it does not automatically render the work a good treatment of the issue. A cheeseburger can be timely, though I would rather have a timely cheeseburger made from quality beef on a sourdough bun than a happy meal from McDonalds. Currency is not enough.
2. A valuable contribution. But so is my employer’s valuable yearly contribution to my retirement annuity. Please tell me what this author has to say to bring clarity to the issue or which moves the discussion forward.
3. Accessible. You mean cheap? The library has many copies? What?
4. Rivettingly interesting. I actually saw this on a back-cover blurb recently. The book was on Baptist Ecclesiology. Riveting? I think not. The real question is, “But is it Accessible?”
5. A uniquely helpful resource. Like Liquid Nails – it does the job but without all that old-fashioned hammering.
6. Brilliantly conceived. I.e., “I wish I had thought of this instead.”
7. A welcomed contribution to the field. Welcome to the club, Mr. Author. You have passed the test and we can now teach you the secret hand shake.

Please leave your additions to this list in the comments.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Forget the Da Vinci Code. Forget the Bible Code. Today marks the beginning of my quest to hunt down the real meaning behind the Oscar Mayer Code. If I should go missing over the weekend, my quest may have led me into the nefarious world of the Oscar Mayer Code.

Every now and then I pull a random book off the shelves here at our library just to see if it says anything interesting. Today I hit the jackpot. It seems that on December 7, 1955, Oscar Mayer (yes, that Oscar Mayer) delivered a chapel address to the students of Beloit College in Wisconsin entitled, “A Plan for Living.” In this address the Harvard educated (A.B., 1909) meat-processing businessman prescribed an eleven word “code” for living. I have only recently discovered a rare transcript of this address buried deep within the bowels of our mysterious library.

The transcript (click on the image) appears to imply that three of the words in the Oscar Mayer Code have some sort of special, and perhaps hidden, significance: Development, Consideration, Service. To complicate matters, it appears that this transcript was donated to our library by the author himself.

Questions that remain:

1. What do the emphasized words mean? What is the symbolism? Is it a puzzle? A riddle?
2. Why would Mayer discreetly hide a copy of the transcript in an unrelated institution?
3. Why has the transcript not circulated? It would appear that no one has checked it out. Ever.
4. Does the date the address, December 7, have any significance?

Is this all just a bunch of bologna?

Your thoughts?

UPDATE: My initial research has unearthed this video clip. Is it of any significance?

Popularity: 22% [?]

This is rather unfortunate. Reminds me of the accidental arianism we discovered in our own library a couple of years ago.

Popularity: 14% [?]

Let me start with a quote from Hugh Hewitt’s Blog: Understanding the Information Reformation That’s Changing Your World:

What made it all possible? What gave Luther the ability to succeed in his reform where others had failed? What allowed Calvin to shape the thought of every generation that followed him? Print. In 1449 Gutenberg amplified the human voice such that it could be heard around the world. He provided the means by which one person could communicate with the masses without the interference of the institutional structures of the day. At last individuals could speak, and none could silence them.

For the Mainstream Media, it is 1449 and 1517, at the same moment. (p.59)

Hewitt’s point is that we have embarked upon the next wave of transformation in the dissemination of information, and like the Reformations of the Sixteenth Century, this transformation provides a broader voice.

What, then, does this mean for libraries? If we are tasked with not only provision of access to information but also the preservation of that information, what are we to do with this new form? Clearly, anybody who can get online can read a blog. But if blogs are the new media, then what of their preservation? Whose, how often, and in what form should blogs be archived? And who should be tasked with it? In a hundred years will today’s blogs be accessible like the preserved media of a hundred years ago?

My second question concerns the cultural and societal change which is being sparked by this change in media. William Sonn in his Paradigms Lost: The Life and Deaths of the Printed Word argues that with each major historical shift in the manner and method of information dissemination there has been a consequent, and often quite significant, change in society. To quote him:

For every time the way media were produced changed in the past, politics shifted. So did economics. Migrations and emigrations followed; even mating habits changed sometimes. It is hard to trace how one particular tool–the telegraph, the radio, a device that made printing cheaper–directly led to one particular change; but all hell seemed to break loose when a new communications device superseded an old one, or even when the nitty-gritty manufacture and distribution of old media changed. (p. 7)

So where, then, are we going? And who will record the journey?

Popularity: 15% [?]

This mistaken preference for the modern books and this shyness of the old ones is nowhere more rampant than in theology. Wherever you find a little study circle of Christian laity you can be almost certain that they are studying not St. Luke or St. Paul or St. Augustine or Thomas Aquinas or Hooker or Butler, but M. Berdyaev or M. Maritain or Mr. Niebuhr or Miss Sayers or even myself.

Now this seems to me topsy-turvy. Naturally, since I myself am a writer, I do not wish the ordinary reader to read no modern books. But if he must read only the new or only the old, I would advise him to read the old. And I would give him this advice precisely because he is an amateur and therefore much less protected than the expert against the dangers of an exclusive contemporary diet. A new book is still on its trial and the amateur is not in a position to judge it. It has to be tested against the great body of Christian thought down through the ages, and all its hidden implications have to be brought to light. Often it cannot be fully understood without the knowledge of a good many other modern books.

C. S. Lewis, “On the Reading of Old Books,” as reprinted in Richard Gamble’s The Great Tradition: Classic Readings on What it Means to be an Educated Human Being (Wilmington, De.: ISI Books, 2007) 597. This book just crossed my desk and I am loving it. It contains excerpts from Plato to the Reformers to Dorothy Sayers.

Popularity: 11% [?]

Pierre Bayard, a well-known professor of French Literature at the University of Paris, has written a new book advocating the art of skimming in place of actually reading a book “the scientific way.” Move over, Mortimer, you’re old school now.

His book, Comment Parler des Livres que l’on n’a pas Lus (How to Talk about Books that You Haven’t Read), sold out in France and is soon to be published here in the States as well. It is destined for the best-seller list. According to the New York Times Magazine, his tips include:

• How to talk about a book you have never read: Avoid precise details. Put aside rational thought. Let your sub-conscience express your personal relationship with the work.
• How to review a book: Put it in front of you, close your eyes and try to perceive what may interest you about it. Then write about yourself.

While this advice is rubbish, it may appear that not all he has to say is that bad. For instance, in an interview with the New York Times Magazine he says, “I think a great reader is able to read from the first line to the last line; if you want to do that with some books, it’s necessary to skim other books. If you want to fall in love with someone, it’s necessary to meet many people. You see what I mean?” (10/28/07, p13).

Of course, I haven’t actually read the book. Ironic, isn’t it?

Read more here (New York Times – USA) and here (Times Online – UK).

Popularity: 14% [?]

Biblio-forensics is an art form.

Just see Brian Dettmer’s examples of what he calls “book autopsies.” Fascinating, time consuming, and, well, just plain cool.

Popularity: 13% [?]

In a 1972 book, John Stott wrote of “escape routes by which we avoid our God-given responsibility to use our minds responsibly.” He cites ritualism, radical social action, and an emphasis on experience as examples prevalent in particular denominations. See John R. W. Stott, Your Mind Matters (London: IVP, 1972) 10.

Henry Blamires in his classic book, The Christian Mind, didn’t bother beating around the bush quite so timidly. He wrote (45 years ago!):

The Christian mind has succumbed to the secular drift with a degree of weakness and nervelessness unmatched in Christian history. It is difficult to do justice in words to the complete loss of intellectual morale in the twentieth-century Church. One cannot characterize it without having recourse to language which will sound hysterical and melodramatic. Ther is no longer a Christian mind. There is still, of course, a Christian ethic, a Christian practice, and a Christian spirituality. . . . but as a thinking being, the modern Christian has sucumbed to secularization. — (1962, p.42)

Have things improved? Or have we continued to slide down hill? If so, is there even, as Blamires said, “a Christian ethic, a Christian practice, and a Christian spirituality” that is objectively recognizable anymore?

Ouch.

Popularity: 6% [?]