Academic Politics

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Being the curious sort, I followed up on the post I dropped the day before Valentines.  I had written about Scholars Press and how details were hard to find.  I kept digging after that post.  I learned some things.  The Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) used to meet regularly with the American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR).  ASOR was all about archaeology.  Then, in the year 1969 SBL and the American Academy of Religion (AAR), formed the Council for the Study of Religion.  The next year they began holding their conferences together.  ASOR was still part of it.  In fact, the three societies, along with Brown University, formed Scholars Press.  (For those in the know, this is why SBL now publishes Brown Judaic Studies.)  Scholars Press churned along, but ASOR was increasingly being shunted aside.  The conference started being called AAR/SBL, with no ASOR.  In 1997 (I remember this personally) ASOR started holding separate conferences.

Two years later, in 1999, Scholars Press dissolved.  SBL, the oldest of the societies, began publishing as Society of Biblical Literature.  AAR partnered with Oxford University Press to do their publishing.  (By the by, AAR started out as Association of Biblical Instructors in American Colleges and Secondary Schools).  ASOR went its own way, and Brown settled on SBL to continue its religious studies publishing.  As a young scholar, I was a member of all three societies.  (I didn’t attend Brown, though.  But I did go to a graduation there once, if that counts.)  I wondered why they couldn’t get along.  In a word, it was because of politics.

Those who know me personally likely know that I have tried to pursue the ordination track in three different denominations.  What they may not know is that the reason I never got through the process was, you guessed it, politics.  I started to learn, when in college, just how many power plays were involved in covens of ministers.  When dealing with the ultimate power, I guess, everyone wants to get the upper hand.  That bothered me as a seminarian.  The second and third denominations both showed their politics up front, and those sharp, flashing teeth made me realize that I’d never be free of politicking had I moved ahead.  I suppose I could go be a hermit and live in the desert—I might escape it that way, but whenever two or three are gathered, the politics start to show.  ASOR, SBL, and AAR have quite a lot in common.  All are under threat as part of the dreaded “humanities” category, and yet that’s not enough to make them want to pull together.  Politics just go that way.

Spirit Storm

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Some time ago, we experienced quite a windstorm.  More than wind, there was a dump of rain, thunder, hail, and all that.  My wife and I were attending a Tibetan singing bowls sound-bath with some others in the cancer support community.  I’ve described this practice before, here.  In any case, the meditation is held in a large room with a tin roof—the kind of place you don’t want to be during a tornado.  We’d just got inside when the gust front hit and knocked out the power.  The instructor still went through the meditation, but the storm sounds blended with those of the singing bowls.  Afterwards my wife asked about Job.  Specifically, God speaking from the whirlwind.  I told her that was God on a bad day, but I understood what she was getting at—there’s a spirituality to the weather.  (I was going to suggest Elijah instead, but “but the Lord was not in the wind.”  Alas.

I thought of Weathering the Psalms.  My contribution to biblical studies, had I been allowed to remain in academia, would’ve been further explorations of weather terminology in the Bible.  But the Lord was not in the wind.  I wrote that book because I noticed the juxtaposition of severe weather with daily chapel at Nashotah House.  We were required to attend, no matter what the weather.  (Such is life on a fully residential campus.)  We were reciting the Psalms one day when a storm blew the power out.  It may have happened more than once, since we’re getting on past two decades hence my memory’s a touch imprecise on the point.  In any case, the spirituality of the power of the storm fascinated me.

It still does.  The next morning, out for my jog, I marveled at the number of branches down.  Thousands in the Lehigh Valley were without power.  This is probably why the ancients considered the storm god chief of the rest.  The violence of nature is something that suggests divinity.  Other primates have been observed screeching back at the sky during thunderstorms.  It’s deep in our DNA.  That doesn’t make it any less spiritual.  There’s a lot of weather in the Bible.  I only explored a tiny piece of it by trying to tackle the Psalms.  The Good Book, however, doesn’t say much about the spirituality of weather.  It’s there nevertheless.  Anything that can snap a tree a foot in diameter like a toothpick has a spiritual message for us.  I mused on the way home—we had to take a detour because of downed trees—that had the storm claimed us as victims, dying while meditating is probably not the worst way to go.  Now I wonder, what might God’s nice words from the whirlwind be?

Mustard Monster

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Speaking of mustard seeds, as a child something troubled my literalist brain.  Mark 4.31, “It is like a grain of mustard seed, which, when it is sown in the earth, is less than all the seeds that be in the earth…” According to subsequent translations after the KJV “less than all” reads, “the smallest.”  Of course, in Elizabethan English that’s what “less than all” denotes.  Since these words came from Jesus, and since the Bible was factually true on every point, I wondered how this error had crept in.  The mustard seed, I knew as a child, wasn’t the smallest seed.  Not by a long shot.  I knew, for example, that poppy seeds were smaller.  Why had Jesus said the mustard seed was the smallest when it wasn’t?  I was too young for the casuistry called exegesis, so a small crisis of faith emerged.

Pardon the resolution: I don’t have a macro lens any more. Mustard (left) meets chia seed (right).

The mustard seed has other roles in the gospels as well.  I still frequently recite “If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you” (Matthew 17.20).  All of this made me curious as to the history of mustard.  While in Wisconsin we used to visit the Mustard Museum in Mount Horeb.  It’s now the National Mustard Museum and is in Middleton.  It seems that mustard, in its familiar paste form, was developed in China centuries before Jesus.  And people had been using mustard seeds as a spice long before that.  Jesus, like earlier prophets, used nature to make a point.  The problem wasn’t Jesus, it was literalism.  

Jesus also said “For as Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale’s belly; so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth” (KJV) in Matthew 12.40.  Modern translations of “sea monster”—for the Hebrew says it was a fish—forced me to dust off my Greek New Testament.  So Jesus said “in the belly of Cetus.”  Cetus was mythical sea monster, not unlike the mythical Leviathan God describes in Job 40.  Good thing I couldn’t read Greek or Hebrew as a kid!  Well, it seems we’ve gone from mustard to monsters.  If you’re familiar with the history of this blog, that shouldn’t surprise you too much.  I wonder what literalists believe about the Loch Ness Monster?  But don’t get me started on that or we’ll be here all day.

Demons and Gremlins

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Gremlins have an ancient pedigree, whether they know it or not.  Credited with airplane problems during the Second World War, these meddlers in technology had an older cousin in the demon named Titivilus.  Titivilus was a demon said to be responsible for errors in the works of scribes.  Long before the printing press hit Europe, manuscripts were copied by hand, of course.  Anyone who works with Bibles, for example, knows that no ancient manuscript exists without errors.  But scribes copied more than Bibles, and anyone who has tried to copy an entire manuscript knows that errors always creep in.  (When I was a college student I tried to get my local church back home to set up a Bible-copying station so that when hungry parishioners were leaving the service they might stop and copy a verse.  This was to show how errors appeared in biblical texts.  The experiment took place but results were disappointing—full of errors but we didn’t get past the early chapters of Genesis).

However that may be, having a demon to blame for things going wrong proved to be mighty handy.  The tradition lasted well into modern times.  In the days of manual typesetting the young printers’ apprentices were called “printer’s devils.”  Demons were blamed for spilled cases—capital letters were kept in the upper case, and minuscules in the lower case—and other mishaps.  It may be a stretch, but such a demon interfering with humans trying to accomplish something important, led to ideas such as gremlins.  Most of us, I suspect, don’t like to confess that we’re sometimes clumsy or sleepy and make errors.  One of my notebooks is all crinkly because I knocked a nearly full water bottle over onto it while trying to catch a bug in my office.  ’Twas no demon, just haste making waste, as it does.

The idea of someone not human to blame is compelling.  All the more so because sometimes we are the legitimate victims of circumstance.  Life offers many opportunities to wander, unknowingly, into situations that might not turn out so well.  We don’t have minds well equipped to see the entire picture.  Even if we could the universe, we’re told, is infinite.  Who doesn’t make mistakes because of limited knowledge?  And sometimes those mistakes can eat up years of your life.  Doesn’t it seem more likely that a demon or gremlin lurks behind an all-too-human error in a judgmental world?  I’m sure that, for most people, if we knew better we wouldn’t have done it.  So we invent our demons.  We sometimes even give them names, and thus Titivilus was born.

Image credit: artist unknown, public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Poe’s Novel

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Certain authors, some great among them, excel at short stories.  I know from personal experience that trying to publish a book of such stories is a very hard sell.  For a writer like Edgar Allan Poe, who was trying to live on his words, it often led to periods of poverty.  Thinking of him as a short-story author, I had never read his only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket.  Hailed by fellow brief-tale writer Jorge Luis Borges as Poe’s best, I figured I’d better give it a try.  I’m glad I did.  I had, however, no idea what to expect.  Those who write on Poe seldom pay it much mind.  He was famous for his poems and stories, and this gothic, sea-faring novel was, according to the introduction, suggested to him by those who felt his making a living as a writer might improve if he used long form.

Concerning the edition: the novel is in the public domain.  Penguin Classics, however, often contain nice introductions.  Indeed, the intro by Richard Kopley in this edition is excellent.  A few of his observations stood out to me—this novel was, in some measure, about Poe’s family.  Both the protagonist and the author have five-syllable names with the same cadence, ending on a three-letter surname beginning with P.  Also, as both the introduction and notes make clear, Poe was deeply steeped in the Bible.  You seldom read about Poe and religion.  Writers from America’s first generation, however, were uniquely brewed in it.  I’d never considered that about Poe before.  There are many editions of Pym available, but I recommend this one because of its introduction.

The story ends without resolution, just so you know.  Pym, talked into an adventure by a somewhat devil-may-care friend, goes out on the ocean on a boat after a night of drinking.  And herein hangs the tale.  Well, actually, the friend convinces the young man with a taste for the sea to stow away on a whaler that his father captains.  A mutiny, however, leaves Pym “buried alive” onboard.  A shipwreck leads to near starvation and a boon companion survivor.  Picked up by an explorer headed south, they discover a surprisingly temperate Antarctic circle where a native tribe turns treacherous because of their fear of the color white.  It does seem that there’s a race narrative taking place here too.  I enjoyed the story although the chapters about longitude and latitude don’t quite rise to the level of Melville’s maritime writing.  It’s a tale worth the read, however, but find one with a good introduction and it will be smoother sailing.

Wondering Wailing

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You have to wonder, it seems to me, if the western, imperialistic gaze sometimes overcompensates for its past sins.  We remain reluctant to say we don’t understand something and sometimes even declare such things superior to what we produce.  That was the feeling that came over me upon reading about The Wailing.  Don’t get me wrong—I like K-horror well enough, but I’m not sure that I would say, with some critics, that it leaves American horror in the dust.  It’s good, yes, and it’s very long (two-and-a-half hours seems too long for a horror film).  The story doesn’t answer all the questions it raises and I was looking for some kind of religious message.  That’s why I watched it in the first place.  

What’s it about?  That’s hard to say.  The best that I can do is it’s about the doomed family of a Korean police officer in a small village.  As others have pointed out, this movie has ghosts, demons, zombies, exorcisms, and other horror standards.  There’s a considerable amount of Christian versus shamanism interplay.  And it seems okay, when someone else is doing it, to suggest a foreigner is the Devil.  None of this is intended to take away from the fact that the movie is effective.  I particularly found the shamanistic exorcism scene fascinating.  The thing is, you never really learn if the self-admitted Devil at the end is working with the shaman or not.  Or if the third potential villain, a woman named “No Name,” is in on it with them.  Or maybe I’m looking at this from the wrong angle.  Maybe the policeman’s family is simply doomed.  Nothing they can do changes that.

The movie suggests that such things are like fishing.  You can’t be certain who’s going to take the bait.  According to those who know, apparently a deleted scene at the end helps to clarify this a bit.  There is a lot of talk about belief, and a Christian clergyman confronting the Devil.  For me, however, I need to be able to follow a story well enough to figure out whether I’m misinterpreting or not.  The problem with a movie this long is finding the time to go back and rewatch it.  It opens with a quote from the Bible and it uses biblical tropes, such as the cock crowing three times, to make some strong points.  In fact, the opening quote from Luke 24.37-39 implies that the ghost may be God.  One thing is certain, I’ll be mulling over The Wailing for some time.  And maybe someday I’ll start to understand.  In the meanwhile, I’ll still watch and appreciate American horror, inferior though it may be.

Monopoly by Statute

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The Bible is an odd book.  It is foundational for the modern world, no matter how much we might want to deny it.  Even so it’s a strange book.  The King James Version (KJV) of the Bible is a masterpiece of English literature.  There’s not one King James Version, however, as several variants exist.  Nevertheless, the KJV remains quite popular among some religious groups and it is still studied in English Departments as part of our cultural heritage.  It is also in the public domain, which means anyone can print and sell it.  Unless, of course, you wish to do so in the United Kingdom.  Here’s where the story gets interesting.

Because of England’s troubled religious history—remember the whole Catholic v. Protestant monarch thing?—the printing of religious books became a contentious issue shortly after the adoption of the printing press.  In 1577 a monopoly on Bible printing went to one man, Christopher Barker, the Royal Printer.  Ostensively to control the version of the Bible approved for use in the Church (of England), this royal privilege became law.  In perpetuity.  Now rights, as commodities, can be bought and sold.  And this happened from time to time.  Cambridge University, however, had been granted a royal charter earlier—also perpetual—to print “all manor of” books.  Since this arguably included the Bible (a lucrative business) it wasn’t prevented from printing them as well.  Oxford University was granted a similar charter some years later and so the two ancient universities and the Royal Printer were the only ones allowed to print the Bible for sale in the United Kingdom (except Scotland, but that’s a story for a different time).

Image credit: Daniel Nikolaus Chodowiecki, public domain via Wikimedia Commons

This privilege, which still exists on the books, did not apply to later versions of the Bible.  The KJV became wildly popular and really wasn’t challenged much for over two centuries.  By the nineteenth century British lawmakers, presumably, had better things to do than argue about who could print the Bible.  Meanwhile other translations divided and conquered the profits coming in from the sale of what had been, in essence “the” English Bible.  As late as 1990 the Royal Printer status landed with Cambridge University, so the sale of rights continues.  A similar story accompanied the Book of Common Prayer, which has always been in the public domain but can only be printed in the UK by the two major university presses.  The story of the Bible is a fascinating one, and since it has shaped western civilization, it seems appropriate to give it the last word: “where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”

Sodom Returns

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Somebody really ought to write a book.  It’s not me, but when new archaeological discoveries with large explanatory value emerge, they begin to paint an interesting picture.  Archaeologists have determined that Tall el-Hammam, a city in Jordan of about 8,000 residents, was wiped out by a cosmic airburst, or meteorite.  If you missed it in the headlines it may be because this happened in 1650 BCE.  Barring volcanoes and other melting phenomena, since they don’t get hot enough, the cosmic airburst is the best theory.  Given that Tall el-Hammam is not far from the Dead Sea, it has been posited that the sudden destruction of this city led to the biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah.  This makes sense to me.  Just like the theory that the flooding of the Black Sea by the Mediterranean led to stories of the flood.

Sodom and Gomorrah afire, by Jacob Jacobsz. de Wet; image credit: Daderot, public domain via Wikimedia Commons

People who had no other ways to explain such things would naturally consider them forms of divine punishment.  Deep-seated guilt seems to be a universal of human psyches, sometimes for good reasons.  In any case, an entire city wiped out by a meteorite looks like the finger of God just as much as lightning does.  Biblical scholars have long supposed that the story of Sodom and Gomorrah was an etiology, or origin story, of the formation of the Dead Sea.  This is partially based on the famous salt pillars, more than one of which bears the name “Lot’s wife” or the equivalent.  And the Dead Sea is unlike any other body of water on the planet.  

I suspect that over time other biblical stories may find logical explanations in ancient catastrophes.  I haven’t found convincing those that try to explain the “plagues of Egypt” based on a scientific daisy-chain of events, although they are interesting.  There’s no doubt that between the expulsion from Eden and the arrival of Moses there were dramatic events narrated by Genesis.  If these were ghosts of memories of ancient tragedies that makes sense to me.  They’re moralized, of course.  Aesop’s Fables also ended with the moral of the story.  We still like to know what a story means, and a good movie or novel will have some kind of message to convey.  There’s no way to prove that Tall el-Hammam’s destruction led to the biblical account, or that memories of a catastrophic flooding of the Black Sea led to tales of arks.  But still, somebody ought to write a book.  I’d read it.

More Omens

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Brushing up on my eschatology, I watched The Omen again.  The original, that is.  One of the underrated aspects of cinema is that people learn their theology from it.  Movies tend to be more memorable than sermons.  It is opined among some that The Omen is responsible for the prevalence of dispensationalism among many Americans.  I’d put a bit of a finer point on it in that The Late Great Planet Earth was being raptured off the shelves all the way through the seventies (I personally bought two copies) and it caused a feedback loop with The Omen.  Many mainstream ministers, without benefit of a Fundamentalist upbringing, were caught unawares, I expect.  Scholars of religion have noted how several aspects of the narrative—the character of “the Antichrist,” the rapture, indeed, the Apocalypse—have been read back into the Bible by credulous believers.

What I found interesting in this viewing is the debt owed to The Exorcist.  Of the two there’s no doubt as to which is the superior film.  The name Damien in The Omen, I read somewhere once upon a time, was taken from Fr. Damien Karras.  During the late seventies and early eighties, unruly boys were routinely called “Damien” by frustrated camp counselors and others.  Apart from this nod, if true, is the fact that the abruptly introduced character Karl/Carl Bugenhagen is an archaeologist exorcist.  (He’s the guy who gives Robert Thorn the knives, if you haven’t seen it for a while.)  The scene shot in Jerusalem (said to be Megiddo) underscores that Fr. Merrin is also being channeled here.  I suspect that the film was getting a bit long in the tooth and some explanatory material on Bugenhagen was left out.

It has also been suggested that the number 666 entered popular culture because of The Omen.  I would temper that a bit with the fact that a lot of people were reading Hal Lindsey’s new apocalypse as well and the two of them got the job done.  There’s no doubt that after the film the evil number took off in a direction that would’ve left John of Patmos scratching his head.  This brings me back to the point that belief is influenced—sometimes constructed—by movies.  The Omen was a huge success at the time, despite the fact that many critics (also not raised Fundie) thought the premise was silly.  Most people aren’t film critics.  The Bible can be pretty impenetrable as well.  Preachers may not be inspiring.  Movies, however, wrap it up neatly and tell you what to believe.  Perhaps it’s some kind of sign.

As We Know It

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The end of the world, as we know it, is really more recent than we think.  Yes, Christians of a certain stripe have been looking for the second coming since the first leaving, but that detailed map of how we’re living in the end times, courtesy Hal Lindsey, is a new thing.  Here are the fast facts.

First and second centuries, Common Era: early Christians tended to think Jesus would “be right back.”  When that didn’t happen they began to look in the Bible for reasons why and started to develop theologies to cover the bases.

Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages: settled in for the long haul, theologians developed eschatology.  Although that sounds like a disease, it’s actually a system for thinking about how the end of the world will come down.  There were conflicting theories.  The two main flavors were premillennialism and amillennialism.

Early Modernism: Protestants came along and searched the Bible for minute clues to make into a system.  In response, postmillennialism became a thing.  Now there were three options.  Various phases were discussed: tribulation, resurrection of the dead, and the already-met millennium.

1820s: William Miller, a Baptist minister, began number-crunching and figured the end of the world would take place by 1843.  His followers, “the Millerites,” continued on after what was called “the Great Disappointment.” 

1830s: John Nelson Darby, a Plymouth Brethren leader, came up with Dispensationalism, a scheme that divides history into eras, or “dispensations.”  He thought we were living near the end of that scheme about 200 years ago.  The idea of “the rapture” was added to the other phases.

1917: Cyrus I. Scofield, published the Scofield Reference Bible.  A man with little formal education (and a “colorful” background), he applied Darby’s dispensations in his Bible, giving the United States a road map to the end times.

1970: Hal Lindsey, a seminary educated evangelical, published The Late, Great Planet Earth.  It became the best selling book (classified as nonfiction) for the entire decade.  New ideas, such as “the Rapture” and “the Antichrist” began to be read back into the Bible.  The book was made into a movie.

1976: David Seltzer, a Jewish screenwriter, penned The Omen.  The movie made use of Lindsey’s adaptation of Scofield’s adaptation of Darby’s ideas.  The wider public, seeing it on the big screen, believed it was about to happen.

2000: the world still didn’t end, either with a second coming or Y2K, as many predicted.  Round numbers will do that to people.  It didn’t stop predictions of the end of the world.

2012: the Mayan calendar gave out.  A movie was made.  People believed. Apocalypse averted.

2024: you fill in the blanks.

Image credit: Albrecht Dürer

Gather Round

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The church has been keeping secrets.  That’s the basic premise behind a fair raft of horror films.  Apart from giving those of us watching religion and horror quite a bit to talk about, it reinforces just how close the two are.  The Gathering is a film I missed when it came out, but one which has an interesting, if unlikely premise.  At times it reminded me of The Reaping, and at other times, the prequels to The Exorcist.  Cassie is a young American woman who loses her memory after being hit by a car near Glastonbury, England.  At about this time a deliberately buried church is being explored by an art history professor.  He asserts that it is the church Joseph of Arimathea built and represents, in its altarpiece, the earliest rendition of the crucifixion.  The clergy seem quite disturbed by this.

Meanwhile, Cassie recovers and is taken on as an au pair for the art historian and his wife (the one who hit her with the car).  The people of Ashby Wake stare at Cassie, as if they know her.  She has premonitions of several local people dying violent deaths.  The clergy learn that the altarpiece depicts those who came to watch Jesus’ crucifixion, not out of love or devotion, but simply for spectacle.  Since then they’ve been cursed and show up to watch various historic tragedies.  The clergy want the church, the earliest representation of the spectators, reburied.  The people of Ashby Wake include those of “the gathering,” indicating tragedy is about to unfold in that small town.  There is a twist ending I won’t reveal, but this is one of those horror films that rely on religion to make them work. 

Critics tend to dislike the film while viewers are divided on the question.  I actually enjoyed it, personally.  The concept of the watchers committed to bloodlust seemed different, particularly when put in the context of nascent Christianity.  It doesn’t handle religion as well as some horror does, but it’s a serious effort.  Why Joseph of Arimathea would want to have portrayed gawkers rather than those loyal to Jesus is one of the bigger questions left unanswered.  After the ending some of the unusual scenes earlier on make more sense.  But still no reason is given why an early church would have portrayed those not to be emulated.  As a horror film with no jump startles, but a slowly building dread, it fits the bill for some of us.  The “church keeping secrets” theme is one that should be explored further.

Sequel Pondering

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Of course I’m working on another book.  I can’t say what it is at the moment, but one of the projects I’ve long been contemplating is a kind of sequel to Holy Horror.  The problem is that if the first book didn’t sell very well (the premise is perhaps too academic), a sequel couldn’t be expected to do any better.  I’m still working on sloughing that academy skin.  But I keep watching what we insist on calling “horror” and the more I do, the more I find the Bible in it.  Others have taken up the gauntlet—mostly academics who have jobs that encourage such behavior—of connecting horror and religion.  The Bible’s role, while a subset of the larger field, has its own particular parameters.  In one of my notebooks I have a list of 23 movies to add to my analysis.  I know that there is a twenty-fourth, but it’s only streaming on an exclusive service and still costs a bit too much for something that doesn’t come with a plastic case.

In any case, Holy Horror just scratched the surface.  One of the factors I’ve mentioned before is that there is no database of the Bible’s appearances in film.  It would be an extensive list altogether, and a substantial number of horror films would be on it.  In general, it seems, people really aren’t too interested or intrigued by this fact.  I certainly am.  Our society is a curious mix of sweet and salty.  We want to think we’re too sophisticated for religion, but religion undergirds just about everything we do.  Otherwise it’s pretty difficult to explain how the Bible keeps showing up in horror.  Usually as a mysterious artifact.

I recently saw myself referred to as a biblical scholar.  There’s no doubt that I taught biblical studies for many years.  I even wrote a book interpreting one aspect of the Good Book.  My degree, and my interest, however, has always been historical.  I follow this history of ideas.  Although many people don’t understand my current horror fascination, it’s clear this is another jog down a trail of history.  How did we get to the point that a totemic (the scholarly phrase is “iconic”) Bible became a stand-in for God in movies?  I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to write Holy Sequel, although, if my profession ever permitted it, I’d certainly have the interest in doing so.  There’s a lot to be learned from such explorations.  That’s true even if the books containing the information only appear on a few dusty library shelves.

Sinful Thoughts

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The driving force behind Holy Horror is the fact that the Bible appears in lots of horror movies.  More than might be expected.  Although I’ve moved on to other projects, I still keep an eye out.  There may not be time or opportunity in my life to write a sequel, but you can’t unnotice the Bible in The Sinners.  The title drew me in, as did its free status on Amazon Prime.  It’s a Bible-based flick, for sure, but even the basic description gets religion wrong.  I generally like movies by female directors, and this one was a project of Courtney Paige whose name, for some reason, sounds strangely familiar.  In any case, one of the biggest blunders movies like this make is that the religion doesn’t hang together.  Of course, it doesn’t say what variety of Christianity it is, but it’s of the literalist stripe.

Seven alpha females at a Christian school in a Christian community form a clique in which they’re each characterized by one of the seven deadly sins.  They’re lead by the pastor’s daughter, of course.  One of the girls keeps a journal in which she confides that she confessed their activities to the pastor.  The betrayed girls decide to scare the offender but she escapes when they’re intimidating her.  She’s found dead but then the other sinners start being murdered.  The police aren’t really effective and the girls try to figure out who’s behind this.  I won’t say who but I will say that it doesn’t really make much sense.  Scenes jump around and characters appear with little or no introduction—it’s disorienting.  But that religion…

I know enough PKs (preacher’s kids) to know they often aren’t as innocent as dad thinks (and it’s generally dad).  I also know that forced conformity of religion builds resentment and resistance.  But there’s something wrong here.  The pastor drinks wine.  Even the truly religious girls drop f-bombs.  One even attends a Satanist meeting with no explanation.  The pastor’s wife is having an affair.  The school librarian has sex with her husband at the school between classes.  They can all quote scripture, and often do.  What religion is this?  I couldn’t really engage with the movie because there were too many distracting religious gaffs.  Hey, I don’t mind when movies show the problems with religions—they’re fair game for commentary, after all.  But if you’re going to do it, try to understand the mindset of the religion you’re criticizing.  There’s a lot to think about in this movie, and it really isn’t that bad.  But for those who know religion there’ll be some question of which it is that’s under fire.  If I ever get back to Holy Horror I’ll say more.

Author! Author!

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It happened in Salem.  In 1861.  The classic American card game, Authors, was published.  G. M. Whipple and A. A. Smith devised the game, which has remained available ever since then.  It’s one of the few games I remember having as a kid.  We, of course, had the Bible Authors game as well, which I’m kind of nostalgic for, but not enough to see if it’s on eBay.  The object of Authors, an early form of “Go Fish,” is to collect sets of four cards for each author.  Each card lists a different work.  Poets are represented by poems, of course, but prose authors mostly by books.  I have to confess to having eBayed this some time back and having beetlebrowed my family into playing it with me.  I noticed, however, a few curious omissions.

Edgar Allan Poe isn’t among their number.  Neither is Herman Melville.  Rather strangely, they included Shakespeare—centuries earlier than the others—and Alfred, Lord Tennyson.  The only female is Louisa May Alcott when there were perfectly acceptable Brontës in the room, as well as Jane Austin.  The game reflects its time.  A couple years back I was in Michaels—you know, the arts and crafts supplies store.  In fact, Michaels is one of those places for family outings, for families like mine.  (We tend to be creative types.)  While I’ve never been into scrapbooking, I walked down that aisle and found a set of stickers labeled “Literature.”  Two authors were represented: Shakespeare and Poe.  People smarter than me have argued that worldwide Poe is probably the best recognized American author.  I think it’s safe to say Shakespeare occupies a similar role in Britain.

Poe had fallen afoul of many in America because of an intentionally damning obituary by Rufus Wilmot Griswold, whom Poe had named his literary executor.  If it weren’t for Poe nobody would likely know Griswold’s name today.  In 1861, when Whipple and Smith were inventing their game, Poe wasn’t really considered worthy of emulation, largely because of Griswold.  He wasn’t the kind of guy you’d want your kids to be too curious about as you tried to teach them about literature.  Authors has gone through over 300 editions over the years.  I’ve never seen any of them (apart from Bible Authors) other than the Whitman edition from my childhood.  Each time I pick it up, smell the cards (go ahead—try smelling your Kindle), and thumb through the authors I feel like I’m missing something.  Go fish.

Nuts and Bolts

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It all began with an innocent laugh at the local hardware store.  It was Saturday morning, around 8:30 and I had to get some nuts and bolts.  Literally.  From those neat little trays that separate out individual pieces that may be the last place on the planet you can spend just a dime.  These local stores have an honor system with little bags on which you write down how many of which piece you took and the price.  Also a dying breed, these bags are made of paper.  One other guy was there doing something similar and when I picked up my bag, another clung to it and slipped to the floor.  He laughed.  Then apologized.  He explained that he seldom made it through the day without some aspect of Murphy’s Law taking place.  I let him know I didn’t take his laugh wrongly and that I knew Murphy’s Law, perhaps too well.

He then told me that he thought he’d write a book about it.  A novel, he said, like the book of Job.  My ears perked up.  Only this time, he suggested, God had to treat Job so that only bad things happened and used Murphy’s Law so that they would turn out good.  Every good thing God wanted to do would have to appear evil at first.  I encouraged this stranger to write this book.  I meanwhile couldn’t believe that I was having a conversation about Job with someone I didn’t know in a town where I’m still a bit of a newbie.  Do I have “former Bible professor” written on my forehead?  Even when I’m wearing a mask they seem to be able to tell.

Job, according to William Blake

But seriously, although I don’t get out much any more throughout my life I’ve had strangers approach me with religious issues for conversation.  Often at the strangest times.  I wonder if this happens to other people.  You can’t assume someone will know the book of Job, or what it’s about.  You can’t know that a stranger won’t take such a story idea the wrong way.  Me, I was counting out nuts and bolts.  Perhaps I was there to build my own Frankenstein’s monster.  Or some evil device to end the world.  Would Job calm me down or rile me up?  As it was, I was glad for the diversion.  8:30 on a Saturday morning is well into the day for me, having been awake for over five hours already.  And I’m glad to have an innocent laugh from a stranger.