Attacks at Home

This afternoon I overheard a reporter (on “Fresh Air”) who has covered terrorist attacks all around the world. Now he is reporting one in his hometown of Boston. He said it seemed very strange to be covering a terrorist attack in which the victims had Boston accents. It made him think he needed renewed dedication to remembering that every terrorist attack is in somebody’s home town.

We get inured to attacks in strange places. In the same newspaper in which I read of Monday’s attack, another report in the back pages told of a car bomb (in Iraq, I think) that killed 50 people. I imagine that people in Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, or Somalia are not overwhelmed by the deaths of three in Boston.

Naturally, domestic crises always seem most significant to us. An accident in which my brother got killed inevitably would strike deeper than an accident in which eight people I have never met lost their lives. We care more about those closest to us. I don’t think we can or should help that.

We can, however, try seriously to grasp the nature of other people’s losses.

I haven’t quite forgiven the Spanish professor who, on 9/11, lectured his American students in Barcelona (including my daughter) to the effect that America had it coming. Even in the more moderate form of British intellectualism, I don’t like reading that America overreacted in a vengeful manner. In other words, I feel strong distaste for heartlessness when it’s directed my way.

Maybe, though, I should rethink the way I react when I read stories from Afghanistan.

Birmingham is here!!!!

This is a big day for me! After years of waiting I can finally announce that my novel Birmingham is available!

It’s at Amazon and Barnes & Noble, in both ebook and paperback formats.

The novel is set in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963–fifty years ago, when Martin Luther King joined Fred Shuttlesworth in leading what is sometimes referred to as the children’s crusade. This was a turning point for the civil rights movement–children facing into the dogs and firehoses of the Birmingham police.

My story begins with a white seminary student who shows up to help the protests–penniless, naive, idealistic. He gets taken in by the movement and put to work, even though his presence is both illegal and dangerous. Chris Wright is his name, and as the protests advance over weeks of turmoil and frustration, he gets entangled with a faction of the Ku Klux Klan and with Dorcas Jones, a young, hard-nosed agitator.

I wrote the novel because I find these events so fascinating, and so easily forgotten. It was much more complicated than the view you will get from the 50th anniversary celebrations this May!

In many ways, our nation was on trial. We came through–but only because of the courage and vision of countless individuals, mostly poor, Bible-believing African-Americans. This was not a triumph of the elites. It was a triumph of the powerless and the despised.

Please buy Birmingham for yourself and all your friends and relations. If you like it, please write a brief review on Amazon (or any other website). If you have a blog, please feature the book. If you have a book group, please consider reading Birmingham together.

On Lincoln

Ross Douthat has an excellent blog post on the film Lincoln. Thanks be for that very rare thing, a truly thought-provoking popular Hollywood movie.

Where Is Mrs. Jesus?

I liked Ross Douthat’s commentary on the recent “Mrs. Jesus” media frisson caused by an obscure, late, possibly forged document mentioning Jesus’ wife. The only reason this made the news is because it suits us to reimagine Jesus in our image, and “our image” is certainly not celibate.

Douthat points out the classic “scholarly” move (scholarly only because it is made by scholars) in puzzling over why none of the original sources mention Jesus’ marriage. He cites the Smithsonian piece quoting the document’s discoverer, Harvard’s Karen King:

The question the discovery raises, King told me, is, “Why is it that only the literature that said he was celibate survived? And all of the texts that showed he had an intimate relationship with Magdalene or is married didn’t survive? Is that 100 percent happenstance? Or is it because of the fact that celibacy becomes the ideal for Christianity?”

Two options: either random accidents of history have misplaced those documents, or else there was an early church conspiracy to erase them. The possibility that no documents mention Jesus’ marriage because he wasn’t, in fact, married, is too simplistic, too unsophisticated, to consider.

A Separation

I’d like to recommend “A Separation,” an Academy Award 2011 movie made in Iran. The film is not violent but it is extremely intense. It’s about a quarreling husband and wife, living an urban, car-driving, apartment-dwelling life. Children’s school examinations and the care of an Alzheimer’s-afflicted parent are the crucial issues–not Israel or, in fact, any kind of political or religious ideology.

On one level, this is a movie about how the dissolution of a marriage affects people–regular, fundamentally decent people. At a deeper level it’s about willfulness and stubbornness, which means it speaks to all of us, whatever our circumstances. I won’t give away the ending, which is a surprise that sticks in your mind.

While the movie is not particularly religious, it’s interesting in depicting an Islamic society. Just as is the case in America, religion touches people in many very ordinary ways. The devout and the non-devout act quite differently in some ways, and in others are just the same. It’s not a pro-Islamic movie. I would say, however, that it reflects a fundamentally Islamic view of family and marriage, perhaps because of the makers’ convictions, and perhaps simply because that is what the artists had to work with in making an Iranian picture.

From what I can tell, Islam is a religion profoundly in crisis, trapped in a dead-end. Nevertheless, the Islam behind this film is deeply humane, and its convictions about humanity are both strongly felt and relevant to all people. It spoke to me.

Learning comes from many sources, including some that we find surprising. That is one more reason to take care not to demonize others.

Life Review

I published As Our Years Increase 23 years ago, when both my parents and Popie’s parents were alive. My father-in-law, Henry Herrod, stimulated my writing by demanding to know how we planned to take care of him when he got old. I wasn’t altogether delighted to ponder that question, but I conceded he had a point. As Our Years Increase was my way of answering. It’s a research-based book about life after 65 and how families go through it together.

A year or so ago I decided to take some of my out-of-print books and turn them into ebooks. I thought some of them might still have something worthwhile to say. Today I’m announcing that my first one is up, available both through Amazon and through Smashwords (with Barnes and Noble and others to come) for $2.99.

I found it interesting to go through the book preparing to re-publish it. Each chapter begins with a memo to a parent or in-law, putting the subject in a very personal, family frame. That was a little tricky and theoretical when I wrote, as those issues weren’t yet “real” for us.

In the intervening years, they’ve become real. We’ve seen all our parents to the end of their lives. Henry died very suddenly from a heart attack. Lung cancer took my mother, one month after diagnosis. My father, who had been in long decline from Alzheimers, died four months after my mom. And last year my mother in law, Ozzie, died at least partly because of the trauma she experienced when the tornado hit her home in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. She was 93.

What I’d written theoretically so many years before all held up, I’m glad to say. Nothing proved foolish or fundamentally mistaken.

I think As Our Years Increase can still be helpful to people contemplating the dilemmas of aging. There’s practical advice gleaned from many sources, and there’s a lot of reflection on what old age is supposed to mean, in all its many phases. If this interests you, do take a look. At Smashwords you can preview the first 20% for free.

Read If You Are OK with Crying.

This morning I caught up on one of the (few) blogs I follow, “Showerheads and hairdryers.” I know the writer, Susan, because she and her husband Alex had a great impact on some of my kids when they were in college. But this would be valuable stuff if I had never met Susan. She writes about life in their family, mostly involving her nine-year-old autistic son Josh. It often makes me want to cry, and always makes me think.

Evangelicals’ Most Winsome Spokesman?

This morning our local NPR affiliate, KQED, hosted Francis Collins on the morning talk show. It’s a pleasure to hear an evangelical on the radio who doesn’t make you cringe. There are a lot of hostile folks in the media audience ready to rant against anything Christian, but Collins comes across as bright, competent, friendly, appreciative and articulate. Of course it doesn’t hurt that he’s one of the world’s best-known scientists.

Here’s the link, in case you want to listen: 
http://www.kqed.org/a/forum/R201110040900

GM Sisyphus

I highly recommend “Moneyball,” the new movie. Of course as an Oakland A’s fan I have a special relationship to the movie–its events and its setting are very familiar to me. And I loved Michael Lewis’ book, on which the movie is based. Ultimately, though, this is not a baseball movie. It’s a movie about Sisyphus, the Greek tragic hero who is doomed to keep rolling the rock up a mountain, though it always rolls back down. What makes Sisyphus tick? Why does he keep trying when he is certain to lose?

Billy Beane is the A’s General Manager, and his task is to beat the Yankees. He doesn’t have anything like the Yankees’ budget, so he tries desperate measures to outsmart them. The film portrays Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) as a high strung, emotional, impulsive and fundamentally caring man driven by his own failings as a baseball player. It’s a subtle, almost delicate performance. You won’t forget Billy Beane.

Also notable is his sidekick,played brilliantly by Jonah Hill. It’s all done with body language.

Trust me, you don’t have to care about baseball to love this movie.

All the News that Fits You, We Print

Today I caught a little bit of Eli Pariser on NPR, talking about his book, The Filter Bubble. His point is that internet algorithms—he focused on Google and Facebook—invisibly tailor your internet experience to bend you toward choices you will like. That’s where the faux-NYT slogan comes from: “all the news that fits you, we print.” Google and Facebook work hard to create a custom-made universe for you—custom-made to provide, based on your internet profile, what you will like, and to hide all the rest. You don’t have a choice in it. It all happens invisibly.

In the extreme case, you will search for opinion pieces and only find those that agree with you. Or you’ll think that the only music in the universe is the type you enjoy. You can be shielded from the cruel world of difference—and you won’t really know that you are.

Of course, a lot of life is already like that, without the assistance of Google. I live on a street of people who are relatively similar to me in taste and income and education. My choice of a California residence shields me from some of the horrors of life in, say, Minnesota. (Also, from the horrors of life in Bangladesh.) I attend a church peopled by white Presbyterians, not Latino Pentecostals. I hardly know any poor people, except the children I meet when I volunteer. I’ve created a bubble of my own, and I don’t think about it very often.

Google has only managed to do for me what I would do for myself.