The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress

The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1964) is my favorite science fiction book.  In it Robert Heinlein portrays a society then a century into the future.  On the earth's moon exists a colony initially established as a penal colony.  While new prisoners are deported to the moon, most of the inhabitants are the descendants of former deportees.   Much like the exiles on the First Fleet, the criminals are as likely to be political prisoners as ordinary law breakers.   (Colleen McCollough portrays British justice and horror of the process in Morgan's Run.)

The language spoken by the "Loonies" is a dialect of English with Russian and other words mixed in.  I suspect that Heinlein, an Annapolis graduate,  spent time in Australia either while in the Navy or subsequently.  There is a sprinkling of Aussie in the Loonies' vocabulary; the speech patterns remind me of Sydney;  and many of the social mores are understandable in terms of Sydney's history.  I tried to reread the book when I was in Australia (1991-3), but found that the publisher had Anglicized the language, i.e., translated American English into British English.  For an hilarious introduction to Aussie English, read John O'Grady's book.

Libertarian Heinlein teaches a fundamental lesson: TANSTAAFL or "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch."  This is a fundamental principle of economics and democracy, as the Revolutionary War proved to our Founding Fathers.

When I taught Economics 20 at St. Peters College (Jersey City), I would assign it as a reading.  The story allowed students to imagine an economy without the state.  The plot is great. Because it is science fiction, readers do not notice how seditious it is.

Buy it at Abe Books or on Amazon.

Beware: 2076 is coming fast!

The Ideology of Terror or the Peace of Islam?

Is Islamic terrorism better understood as a return to Islam at its core or as an ideological version of Islam, a culture politicized? I would contend that ideology is a rationalistic distortion of reality and the product of literacy and Western thought.

Yale University Press has published a new book by Ali Allawi, The Crisis of Islamic Civilization. Judging from the reviews, Awawi the political route followed by the Islamofacists is untrue to Islam and Islam must reach into its own resources to deal wit the challenge of modernity.

The Economist writes: "Mr Allawi calls his new book an 'attempt to understand the factors behind the decay of the spirit of Islam'. He locates this decay not in the personal piety of the world’s Muslims—which remains vibrant—but in the collective failure of Muslims, over the past 200 years, to come up with an adequate and effective response to Western modernity. The problem is not that Islam is incapable of finding its own path to modernity. Mr Allawi wholly rejects the popular notion that Islam is inherently incompatible with tolerance, democracy, women’s rights—in short, all that the West holds dear.

"The difficulty, he says, is that the predominant Muslim response to the Western challenge has been narrowly political instead of being rooted in the inherited ethos of Islamic civilisation. Seen in this light, the Islamist movements which have received so much attention since the Islamic revival in the 1970s are shallow and passionate. For all their pretence of offering an 'Islamic alternative', they represent, or so he argues, nothing more than Western modernity in Islamic garb."

Mr. Allawi is an experience politician in the post-Sadam government and worldwide bestselling author.

Susan Moore

Portico Books has just published The Living Word by Susan Reibel Moore. This is a strong introduction for young adults and not so young adults to the faith of Christ.

Susan is an Aussie (transplanted from America) who is an expert on children's literature. You can read her recently reprinted "Fantasy and the Occult in Children’s Literature" in Homiletic and Pastoral Review.

More Information on Josef Ratzinger's Complete Writings

Herder Verlag is the publisher for Josef Ratzinger's Complete Writings. (You will find the description on Herder's web site.) The first volume costs fifty euros (45 if bought as part of a subscription to the whole series.) At current exchange rates that is a pretty penny.

The sixteen volumes will each contain Benedict's complete writing on a particular topic prior to his papacy. Herder plans to publish 2-3 volumes a year and complete the project in about six years. Herder says that the individual volumes will be about 500-700 pages.

Volume XI, the first volume published, is about the liturgy (see the next posting, "Josef Ratzinger's Complete Writings Starts with the Liturgy.") The liturgy is central to his theological thinking. The volumes will be:

Der Editionsplan

1. Volk und Haus Gottes in Augustins Lehre von der Kirche. Die Dissertation und weitere Studien zu Augustinus von Hippo.
2. Offenbarungsverständnis und Geschichtstheologie Bonaventuras. Die ungekürzte Habilitationsschrift und weitere Bonaventura-Studien
3. Der Gott des Glaubens und der Gott der Philosophen Die wechselseitige Verwiesenheit von fides und ratio
4. Einführung in das Christentum Bekenntnis – Taufe – Nachfolge
5. Herkunft und Bestimmung Schöpfung – Anthropologie – Mariologie
6. Jesus von Nazareth Spirituelle Christologie
7. Zur Theologie des Konzils Texte zum II. Vatikanum
8. Zeichen unter den Völkern Schriften zur Ekklesiologie und Ökumene
9. Offenbarung – Schrift – Tradition. Hermeneutik und Theologische Prinzipienlehre
10. Auferstehung und Ewiges Leben Beiträge zur Eschatologie
11. Theologie der Liturgie Die sakramentale Begründung christlicher Existenz
    [erscheint als erster Band]
12. Künder des Wortes und Diener eurer Freude. Zur Theologie und Spiritualität des Ordo
13. Im Gespräch mit der Zeit Interviews – Stellungnahmen – Einsprüche
14. Predigten zum Kirchenjahr sowie Meditationen, Gebete, Betrachtungen
15. Aus meinem Leben Autobiographische Texte
16. Bibliographie und Gesamt-Register

Bernard Nathanson's Aborting America

Bernard Nathanson is a most interesting man. He probably performed more abortions than any American alive before he had a change of heart. He was at the founding, if you will. Nathanson shows how the abortion lobby (for lack of a better term) targeted the Catholic church on one hand and convinced the woman’s movement that abortion should be a central tenet of its agenda on the other. (Prior to the second edition of Betty Friedan’s book, abortion was seen as anti-women. The suffragettes, women like Sojouner Truth and Susan B. Anthony, were solidly anti-abortion. They were part of the movement that past the laws outlawing abortion, most of which were enacted during the late nineteenth century.)

Eventually Nathanson came to the conclusion that what he was doing was evil. His intellectual and moral conversion was such an amazing turnaround that it would seem to be a miraculous confirmation of the power of prayer. (For every publicized case of violence at an abortion factory, there are the unpublicized tens of thousands praying for those involved in abortion: the women, the babies, the doctors, and the nurses.) His later conversion to Catholicism is perhaps even more shocking. Any novelist would reject as unbelievable a plot in which a leading Jewish intellectual atheist, Dr. Death himself and a mastermind of the abortion industry’s propaganda strategy, recants his beliefs, starts making pro-life movies, and ultimately becomes a Roman Catholic.

If you ever get a chance to speak, do hear him. But beware, his views are dangerous to the conventional wisdom!

Sayers, Flannery O'Connor and the Making of the Artist

Mystery, Manners, and the Mind of the Maker by Paul Erlandson

Christian art represents the mysteries of God and creation, according to authors Dorothy Sayers and Flannery O'Connor

It would be an exaggeration, but not much of one, to say that everything I know about Christian Art was taught me by two women. The women, both certainly among our century's canonized fiction-writers, taught me their wisdom not only through their fiction directly, but through their essays. [Read on]

You May Love Lewis, But the Golden Compass Is No Narnia.

The first clue was that Nicole Kidman is in the movie version. The second is that Phillip Pullman, the author of the book thinks Tolkien is "infantile." Here is what I learned from ZENIT, "The film 'The Golden Compass' isn't simply about using fairy-tale magic to tell a good story, it corrupts the imagery of Lewis and Tolkien to undermine children's faith in God and the Church, says Catholic author Pete Vere.

"In this interview with ZENIT, Vere and Sandra Miesel discuss the movie adaptation of the fantasy novels written by Philip Pullman. The film, staring Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig, will be released in the United States in early December."

Please read the whole interview.

A tip of the hat to Paula Wierman a Catholic homeschooler in Wichita.

Graham Greene's The Honorary Consul

I just (8/8) finished Graham Greene's The Honorary Consul. Starts slow, ends with a wallop!

What is love? What happens when someone can't or won't love?

Powerful stuff.

It takes place in Argentine during the 1970s. the action is in a fictional border town across the Parana from a Paraguay ruled by a repressive dictator. The protagonist, who seems to have more trouble with the sixth commandment than with the ninth, finds the reality of love, the selfless giving of one's self for another, beyond his ken.

Nick Allen at Bloomberg Reports MI5 Was Watching George Orwell

Nick Allen tells us, "George Orwell Was Right; Big Brother's Agents Were Watching" him!

Britain's MI5 was keeping tabs on George Orwell. In 1984, he gave us the vision of a world dominated by Big Brother who controlled ever part of our lives. Mr. Allen details the contents of MI5's files.

It is not widely known, but Orwell's original tittle for the book was 1948, but that was rejected by his publisher.

Is Harry Potter Christian?

One of the most popular articles on Kansas.com, the website for the Wichita Eagle, is by Jeffrey Weiss of the Dallas Morning News. "Final chapter of 'Harry Potter' clearly Christian" will no doubt add more fuel to the controversy of whether good Catholics and Christians should let their children read Harry Potter (Click on this link to get my and other's viewpoints.)

I will not read Weiss's article until after I read the book: I have an embargo on all reviews of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows until I read it myself. I also have an self imposed embargo on Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows itself until I finish some crucial tasks around the Harris household.

Check back!

Harry Potter is Almost Here!

The hype is outrageous. I agree the publishing industry is too much about blockbusters. Harry Potter and the Death Hallows is the blockbuster of blockbusters. But when it comes to J.K. Rowling's novels, I say just read and enjoy. Just do not start one of the books when you have something due on deadline!

The Harry Potter books are fun to read. The characters are ones any teenager can identify with as can anyone who was once a teenager. They remind me of Robert Heinlein's teen novels. Heinlein, the great science fiction writer, wrote that those novels taught him his craft. He had to have a plot that would keep them reading. He needed to keep his vocabulary direct and straight forward. And in those days sex and violence were not available to make up for a lack of craft.

Some Christians shun Harry Potter books. I will not rework the arguments about whether these books are a threat. There are three excellent essays that do a better job than I would: (1) "An in-depth analysis of the literary use of magic in the works of J. K. Rowling, J. R. R. Tolkien, and C. S. Lewis" by Steven D. Greydanus. (He also reviews the films on his DecentFilms.com website; (2) "Harry Potter's Magic" by Alan Jacobs; and Charles Olson's posting, "If you thought I was anti-Harry Potter..." on Ignatius Insight Scoop.

In the Harry Potter books, the magic is a fiction. Like the devices of science fiction, the reader needs a "willing suspension of disbelief." That is not the same as believing in magic.

Rowling is very clever in the imaginative devices with which she fills her world. After decades of moral relativism and the denial of evil, it has been refreshing to have a wildly popular source of entertainment clearly describe Good and Evil at war with each other. Ditto for Star Wars.

Rowling is also an excellent craftswoman. That is not to claim she is T.S. Elliot or Fyodor M. Dostoevsky. The elite looks down its nose at her, but they look down their noses at J.R.R Tolkien and C.S. Lewis too. Rowling and I are fans of both! None of the major publishers would touch her first book. Ironically, they are now the hype masters for number seven!

The Alexandria Link

Steve Berry wrote a best selling novel entitled the Alexandria Link. It depends on two crucial plot points: The ancient library of Alexandria has been preserved by guardians hidden in the desert. Kamal Salibi's theory (or should I write "wild hypothesis"?) that the pre- exilic Israel described in the Hebrew bible actually was in western Arabia and not in the Holy Land. Thus Yahweh's promise of the land to Abraham and Issac and Jacob was not promising that postage stamp of land we call Israel today, but a stretch of western Arabia which includes Islam's most sacred places. This has important geopolitical implications for that land which has been fought over by Jews, Christians, and Muslims these many centuries.

To achieve his plot, Berry needs to argue that the Christians manipulated the biblical text when Jerome translated the bible from Hebrew and Greek into Latin and that the Jews had to manipulate the biblical text when it was translated into Greek (the Septuagint) and that nobody knew enough Hebrew to catch these frauds.

Berry also makes up correspondence between Augustine and Jerome in which they conspire to mold (i.e. distort) the translation to further Christian objectives. Although he freely acknowledges these to be fictions he made up for the book, the reader will only know that if he reads the Author's Notes after the novel. None of these letters read like something the actual Augustine or Jerome would have written.

The central scriptural issue is what is the true text of the original Hebrew scriptures and how the place names in the original text map back to modern day geography. Primarily this comes under the heading of textual criticism, the work of those biblical scholars who work back from the manuscripts in the original languages and in the versions (translations into Latin, Greek, Aramaic, etc.) to the original words as first written down. However Salibi's argument appears to be primarily philological: how one vocalizes the original Hebrew words (i.e what vowels one decides to put between the consonants since Hebrew does not have vowels in the original written form.

There are a number of points that Mr. Berry appears to be naive on:

He appears to believe that there are no Old Testament manuscripts in Hebrew ("Old Hebrew" as he calls them) before the tenth century A.D. While that may have been true before the discovery in 1947 of the Dead Sea Scrolls, that marvelous cache of documents includes manuscripts dating between the the third century B.C., and 68 A.D. "All of the books of the Bible are represented in the Dead Sea Scroll collection except Esther."

He seems to think Hebrew was a dead language from fifth or sixth century B.C. on. This seems an extreme position. Certainly Hebrew was at minimum a literary and a liturgical language long after that. We have documents written in Hebrew well after that. Some of the minor prophets were written after the exile. Daniel was probably written in the second century B.C. The Hebrew text of I Maccabees is attested to in a manuscript among the Dead Sea Scrolls. Presumably that dates to the first century B.C. Jubilees is though to be written between 135 and 105 B.C., although our Ethiopian Orthodox brethren consider it to be canonical and written in Moses time. We also have the Manual of Discipline and the Damascus Document. Finally, we know the bible was read in Hebrew in Jesus' time.

Berry represents the Septuagint as a deliberate mistranslation of the ancient Hebrew text. In fact, the Septuagint appears to be a rather literal translation of a Hebrew text. The major discovery of modern textual criticism is that the Hebrew text underlying the the Septuagint differs from the standard (Masoretic) text and in some cases reflects differences in the oral tradition before the original text was written down.

The uninformed reader may not appreciate the issue of textual variants and discrepancies in the the scriptures. There are variants in the handwritten record handed down over the millenia. One manuscript represents a bible verse one way and another manuscript records the verse differently. There are a great many of these textual variants. Many are straight forward copying errors that are obvious to correct. Those remaining are small relative to the huge number of verses in the bible. Remarkably, given how many crucial theological issues hang on particular bible verses and passages, hardly any of these textual variants affect a major theological issue dividing Christians. I would be surprised to find that the geographical text would be so ambiguous.

Berry (and perhaps Salibi) make the blanket claim that archeology has been singularly unable to authenticate any of the historical record of the Old Testament. That is such a preposterous statement that I assume he adopts it purely for the sake of advancing his plot. There is a huge opus of archaeological findings about places mentioned in the Old Testament.

Although Berry correctly portrays the influence of the Vulgate (it produced the literary language of Europe from the fifth century through the sixteenth century), he seems unaware that there were Latin translations before Jerome's Vulgate, principally the Old Latin Version produced about 150 A.D., and an important witness to the text of the New Testament.

As to Salabi's theory, Professor Phillip C. Hammond, comments in his review of Salabi's first book in the International Review of Mid East Studies, "A proper review of this book would unfortunately subject the reader to a volume far larger than the one being reviewed. The sheer enormity, page by page, of "identifications," transmutations [sic!], blantant historical error, misconceptions, and similar problems with the scholarship, preclude considerations within the scope of any "review." It is difficult to understand how such a volume could have been foisted upon an unsuspecting public. Perhaps the scholarly reader will find a certain degree of amusement in appreciated the skill of the author in his attempted linguistic exercises, but the lay reader might, regretably, be misled by the appearance of the "scholarship" presented. To assume that similar, or even identical, place names are proof of "identity" between two places is palpably absurd. To declare that archeology, with its modern chronometric techniques, cannot place occupations correctly is contrary to fact . To ignore the linguistic analyses of biblical Hebrew from the Massoretes to modern scholarship is presumptuous. To dismiss casually all modern scholarship in the field is unscholarly in the extreme. To display ignorance of published archaeological and other data in favor of selected, "favorable" quotations is likewise not the way knowledge is advanced.

"In short, this reviewer can see no reason why this volume was published, either in its original German edition, or in English translation."

From Steve Berry's point of view there was an excellent reason to publish Salabi's book: it gave him a best seller!

Did You Know Robison Caruso was Bowdlerized?

Did you know Robison Caruso was bowdlerized? No? Read Zaleski's "The Strange Shipwreck of Robinson Crusoe" published some years back in First Things by clicking on the link in the tittle of this post. We must protect our childr!n from obscene things like God, religion, and moral improvement.

Death Comes For the Archbishop IV

"He was soon to be done with calendared time, and it had already ceased to count for him. He sat in the middle of his own consciousness; none of his former states of mind were lost or outgrown. They were all within reach of his hand, and all comprehensive." -363." Willa Cather, Death Comes For the Archbishop (Thorndike, Me: Thorndike Press, 1984) p. 62.

Death Comes For the Archbishop III

I have just finished Willa Cather's Death Comes For the Archbishop. It is a shame I took thirty years to read it. Cather, who died the year after I was born, creates a Santa Fe I recognize and, in Bishop Latour, a character worthy of Bishop Lamy.

Cather draws an insightful contrast between Fr. Joseph Vaillant and his companion and bishop, Jean Latour. Early in the book, she puts a most memorable sentence in the down-to-earth Fr. joseph Vaillant's mouth: "I noticed that scholars always manage to dig out something belittling." Willa Cather, Death Comes For the Archbishop (Thorndike, Me: Thorndike Press, 1984) p. 62.

Too true.

Death Comes For the Archbishop II: The New Mexico Sky

Willa Cather's description is clear, vibrant, and true. Images of New Mexico came tumbling back into my consciousness as I read her words. Consider how she captures that enormous sky:

"The sky was as full of motion and change as the desert beneath was monotonous and still, – and there was so much sky, more than at sea, more than anywhere else in the world. The plain was there under one's feet, but what one saw when one looked about was that brilliant blue world of stinging air and moving cloud. Even the mountains were mere anthills under it. Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky. The landscape one longed for when one was far away, the thing all about one, the world one actually lived in, was the sky, the sky!" Willa Cather, Death Comes For the Archbishop (Thorndike, Me: Thorndike Press, 1984) pp. 292-3.

Death Comes For the Archbishop I

I have just finished Willa Cather's Death Comes For the Archbishop. It is a shame I took thirty years to read it. Cather, who died the year after I was born, creates a Santa Fe I recognize and, in Bishop Latour, a character worthy of Bishop Lamy.

Cather draws an insightful contrast between Fr. Vaillant and his companion and bishop, Jean Latour. Early in the book, she puts a most memorable sentence in the down-to-earth Vaillant's mouth: "I noticed that scholars always manage to dig out something belittling." Willa Cather, Death Comes For the Archbishop (Thorndike, Me: Thorndike Press, 1984) p. 62.

Too true.