Holy Cows

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Back in the days when a book was a luxury item, great care was taken in its production and protection. Having your investment lying around with flimsy paper covers that would begin to grow blunt and roll back even before you finished reading would have seemed irresponsible. To shield the vital contents from the weather and other dangers, leather was used as a kind of skin—come to think of it, it really is skin—and safely the words were housed. Many of these volumes were, naturally, Bibles. Leather and the good book became synonymous for some—even with onionskin paper a book’s not a Bible with just a printed case hardcover. Paperback? How can you take that seriously? To make a Bible authoritative, it seems, cattle must be harvested. After all, sacrifice is at the center of it all.

Being a long-time vegetarian, this often gives me pause. My belt and watch-band are made of canvas, and I try my best to avoid leather shoes (although this is often difficult). I’m pretty sure that my leather Bibles are faux skin. Even though my family respected the Bible to the point of bibliolatry at times, we really couldn’t afford genuine cowhide. Now I take a more circumspect look at the cost of appearances. We’ve outlived the need for animal-bound Bibles. It has become more of an expectation than a necessity. An affectation. There is, however, still a big business in leather Bibles, and Italian leather seems the best fit for a Semitic savior.

What troubles me the most is the idea that animals—deemed not conscious by the very religion that allows their slaughter—are made to pay the cost for human foibles. The whole sacrificial system is built around a radical inequality. Humans domesticated cattle for their own exploitation, and their skins, when no longer needed by their hosts, came to clothe holy books of their masters. In any shade or hue of the rainbow. We can make it less grim by dying it a cheerful color and declaring its progenitor had no thoughts in its vacuous head. It lived a life of servitude and when it paid the ultimate price, it received the martyr’s gift of becoming part of the Bible. The end result? We should feel less qualms about our peccadillos and atrocities. We’ve wired their brains to trust us—we are not the predators to fear. Try not to take it personally. It’s just what our religion demands of us, for we too are a domesticated herd.

From the herd of purple cows...

From the herd of purple cows…

Flood of Fancy

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Years ago I was approached to write a book about Noah. There was still some hope at that time that I might find a university job and that my words would have more credibility than just any old internet hack. At the time I’d read just about every book about Noah that had been written—and there weren’t that many. Biblical scholars, beyond tying the story to its obvious Mesopotamian sources, have long relegated the tale to the nursery school of biblical drama. Sure, it’s a great story, but what serious scholar takes an interest in a great story? Well, I outlived my academic job and it looks like Noah is going to have the last laugh. We’re told that the Pope has been tweeted about the movie by Russell Crowe and that several Islamic nations have already banned it. According to Today Darren Aronofsky, the director, is more interested in getting non-believers into the theater than trying to please the faithful. Well, let’s face it. A movie based strictly on the Bible would have to be pretty preachy.

The bigger draw seems to be this: our society is simultaneously deemed secular and religious. Americans go to church. They also respond to surveys that they believe in God, the Devil, Heaven, and Hell. They also act as if none of this were true. Business practices tend to be anything but caring, and we show no concerted effort to make sure basic healthcare is offered to all our citizens, let alone the millions who are daily suffering and dying elsewhere in the world. We don’t want to reduce our emissions as a real flood—a literal flood—is on the rise on a global scale. Maybe we’re waiting for a biblical-scale miracle to save us. Noah’s face stares out at you all across Midtown. Judgment is upon us.

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Action films draw male viewers. Religious movies draw females. Aronofsky and Crowe have the winning combination. No gender-bias for a secular-religious nation that has enough loose change to spend a weekend at the movies. The biggest complaint is that it isn’t the Bible. I have to admit I’m kind of enjoying the hype, despite the fact that I never received the chance to write that Noah book that was next on my agenda. If I had, now it might have enjoyed the sales that Irving Finkel’s The Ark Before Noah—scheduled for release three days before the movie—surely will. Timing has never been my strong suit. Of course, money can be its own sort of flood, and many more drown in it than in the literal waters of a secular-religious society. According to Genesis a raven was released to fly about looking for land. The Crowe might have been a better choice since movies, as we all know, improve upon the book.

Flatland

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ThePowerOfPlaceThe world is flat—not.  Harm de Blij’s The Power of Place: Geography, Destiny, and Globalization’s Rough Landscape is, despite the author’s hope of improvement, a sobering read.  Geography is one of those subjects that studies show Americans consistently failing.  But de Blij begins and ends with one of my favorite themes: that place defines a person.  One of the realities with which all humans must reckon is that we have no control over where we’re born.  As de Blij demonstrates, not fatalistically, that place will determine to a great extent what life has to offer us.  Chances are that most of you reading this were born in what social geographers call “the core.”  The core is that affluent part of the globe that encompasses successful states with relatively good prospects for their citizens.  It is, numerically, the smaller part of the world’s population and it is the base of claims for the world’s flatness—that is, its apparent sameness across borders.  De Blij, who has crossed one or two of those borders, knows that there is a roughness inherent in this world, and those outside the core pay the highest price.

Among the many factors de Blij examines one—religion as an accident of birth—comes up repeatedly.  Religions quickly complicate efforts at fairness and equal distribution with various theologies of why the poor are poor and that we can justify leaving them that way.  Or worse, a religion may decide, since it alone is right, that those believing otherwise ought to be destroyed.  Internecine as well as international rancor is a commonplace of the news as religions compete for the alpha male spot on the human (actually man-made, gender distinction intended) hierarchy.  The religion you’re born into, for most of the world’s population, is the correct one.  Missionaries, by definition, disagree.  Theirs is the true correct religion and even if it doesn’t improve the lot in life of the poverty-stricken, it will at least make for a better afterlife, cold comfort though it may be.

One issue that de Blij touches upon only minimally is the sacredness of place.  Of course, that is often the ground for conflict, but in smaller ways we often feel an attachment to the place we enter the world.  Beyond visiting the relatives still near my hometown, sometimes I just want to go there and linger, pondering what this world intended for such as me.  The distress I feel when I see that the hospital where I was born has been closed down, the houses in which I grew up razed, and even my first school remodeled, touches something deep and undefinable.  It is a small part of who I am that has been erased, the silencing of the clock’s ticking.  Those rough hills were my home for the two most formative decades of my time on earth and I belong to them.  I owe them who I am.  This is the mystery of sacred geography.  The refinery fires, the childhood friendships, the Christian bookstore that propelled me in a direction I may alter but not eradicate.  It’s not rational, I know.  But like many animals, I feel the draw, and de Blij points out the many benefits and frightening realities that attend it.

Frozen Few

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It’s that time of year, neither winter nor spring, when ambivalence is in the air. Gray skies with just the first damp aromas of a change in the season, followed by another snow storm and icy winds custom-made in the arctic. So we turn to movies. Frozen is continuing to make headlines and break records. And although the critics voice strong opinions, ambivalence about a powerful message still rocks a society that can’t decide if a woman director having success is an anomaly or an idea far past its time. Stories about the animated feature crop up on the internet on a daily basis, five months after its theatrical release. Some claim it is the most Christian movie in years while others claim it has homosexual marriage at its core. The queen doesn’t need a man and the world’s most conservative, progressive society is in a muddle.

Perhaps I’m just showing my age, but I noticed what I thought was an older child in the sauna when Anna first meets Kristoff. The movie didn’t give me any clues as to his being a gay partner to the shopkeeper, although it’s none of my business if he is. Disney movies have had subtle clues to a kind of radical equality that I’ve noticed over the years, from Edgar’s license plate that reads RU-1 in The Aristocats to two masculine creatures sharing a pad in Monsters Inc. I even remember some people staring suspiciously at Ernie and Bert while the insanely ambiguous Teletubbies were faulted for carrying purses and dressing in primary colors. (Even Judas Iscariot kept a purse, according to the Bible.) A good, empowering story is suspect if we think something more is going on when the lights go out in cartoon-land. Our culture can seem to think of little else beyond mores and how to enforce them.

Globalization has repeatedly demonstrated that there are many different ways of being in the world. And yet, when worlds collide the more conservative culture inevitably makes claims on its more “progressive” neighbor. We see this happening as the church in Africa, now larger than the church in America, drives social policy through denominations that somehow feel guilt at promoting equality. Perhaps proselytization is, at the core, of our fear of difference. What if the other guy is right and we are wrong? Read that back into all our misguided ancestors and we feel chilled indeed. How far do we really trust objective truth? My guess is that ice ages have come and gone that have forged the truth of the moment. Only when the cold faces us do we really admit just how slippery truth might be.

The beauty of ice.

The beauty of ice.

Wee People

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Whence we come influences our outlook. Sometimes invisibly, at other time quite consciously. I remember as a child, wanting to be honest about the wearing of the green on St Patrick’s Day, asking whether we were Irish or not. Of course, for many Americans being Irish, German, or Swedish really means having ancestors long ago from a different country. Most of my ancestors had been in America for some time—a couple hundred years at least. In New Jersey, where many people are literally from elsewhere, that can seem exotic. Great-great-grandparents in one of my lines can be traced to another country, but most of my ancestry is already settled in the United States long before that. Unknown to my mother at the time of that question, one of my ancestors was indeed from Ireland, a stowaway, as I understand it, and thus I could wear green without being dishonest. (Children can be so parsimonious.) When I saw the locals walking away from yesterday’s St. Patrick’s Day parade in my local town it was obvious that not all of them were Irish (or American with an Irish ancestor), but they nevertheless came out on a cheerless, chilly day to join in the Celtic spirit of celebration. St Patrick’s Day is all about belonging.

Photo credit: Andreas F. Borchert, Wikicommons

Photo credit: Andreas F. Borchert, Wikicommons

The rich mythology of Ireland was never supplanted completely by the Catholic influence that became synonymous with many parts of the country. Leprechauns, the little people with their pots of gold, have been fused into a mythology of St Patrick and his magical clover that somehow explained the Trinity, while it is the four-leaved variety that brings good luck. And Ireland’s snake-free evolution was attributed to sacred innovation rather than the Ice Age, the true culprit. It is our myths who make us who we are, however. Where would Ireland be with a massive chunk of ice preventing snakes from evolving in a land where a genetic variation sometimes leads to a fourth leaf on a common grass of the field? And where is that pot of gold anyway?

And yet, within the last year construction on a highway was halted in Iceland (I know I’ve island-hopped here, despite the difference of a single consonant) because locals protested that it would disturb the habitat of the little people. While a post-graduate representative to the Faculty of Divinity in Edinburgh (switching islands yet again), one of the faculty admitted to a fascination with Celtic folklore. A more rational theologian challenged him saying, “what about the farmer who loses valuable space in his field because he leaves a ‘magical’ tree standing—isn’t that tragic?” The renegade faculty member allowed that this too was especially wonderful. A world enchanted is swiftly disappearing beneath the unrelenting tires and blades of scraper and cold planer, or the axe-bearing lord of ultimate efficiency. The soul is just another casualty on the road to enlightenment. And yet yesterday, those with ancestry from Africa, India, China, Italy, and even England, gathered to watch the parade where the mythology of an island that never had an empire nevertheless draws together people of all ancestries to wear a bit of green and to celebrate whence we came. St Patrick’s is a day to celebrate whoever we are. And to leave the door ajar for the wee folk that might still be around.

Today’s Truth

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I spend a lot of time on Amazon. My job is one of those where it is a legitimate form of research—finding authors, seeing what’s already available on any given topic, checking prices. It’s kind of like those old, heavy tomes, Books in Print. Only lighter and faster. Of course, Amazon also lets anyone become an author. Often I’ll spy a name that I don’t recognize even after years of being in biblical studies. Many of these books are written by someone with a keyboard and an ego, but no real training. Then I came across what is surely a death-knell to civilization: books that are collected and printed articles from Wikipedia. Yes, that’s right—the source your professors told you never to cite is now available in book form. University Press (university-press.org) sounds like a reputable publisher, but as the website explains, this is a place to get Wikipedia articles on related subjects bound in book form. Author not included.

I don’t wish to single out University Press; many individuals and small-time publishers exploit the fact that just about anyone can generate enough words to constitute a “book.” Long before Johannes Gutenberg was an ink-blot in his parents’ eyes, books were hand-written. That was a form of natural selection since most of the populace was illiterate. A thousand pages written by hand are authoritative by any measure. The printing press gave rise to publishers—the gatekeepers of wisdom. The publisher decided whether ideas were worthy of print or not. Of course, I’m a bit of a hypocrite for writing such things, since most of what I’ve published has been declined a time or two before being accepted. In any case, the role of the publisher was to ensure the accuracy and orthodoxy of the book. Thus it was from Gutenberg to Wales.

Wikipedia is the first stop on many a quest for new information. With a high search engine optimization, and a built-in collective corrective, in theory Wikipedia should be mostly accurate. Depending on when you access it. A few years back I was researching a historical individual when I came across a sophomoric comment about said individual’s paternity. Since anyone can edit, I deleted the statement and read on. Still, since that time, doubts have haunted me about the combined wisdom of the human race. To hear politicians tell it, universities are merely liberal propaganda tools and the truth resides in politicians’ mouths only. I shudder at the implications. It used to be on Amazon that I knew the books had been vetted by some kind of expert reader (although they even let such as me work as an editor in the industry). Now each item has to be examined closely. For depending on the day and hour, the great wiki of truth is ever changing.

From Wikipedia, of course.

From Wikipedia, of course.

Credo Universitas

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DeclineSecularUniversity“I am a Christian gentleman and I teach my course as a Christian gentleman.” The quote was made to me by a colleague at a state university, regarding a former professor of Hebrew Bible, or, in this instance, “Old Testament.” The idea rankled me a bit. You see, religion departments come under pretty constant attack for such things, since in the secular university—especially one that receives state funding—the disestablishment clause looms large. How can one simply bring one’s personal beliefs into the classroom as if normative? I suppose that’s why C. John Sommerville’s The Decline of the Secular University gave me pause. Sommerville, an emeritus professor of History at the University of Florida is no crackpot. He raises some major questions that universities, of all places, should be debating.

While Sommerville is not a scholar of religion per se, he has written about religion before, and he raises some vital questions regarding the secular enterprise. It should be no surprise that secularism can become a kind of religion, especially since the definition of “religion” is anything but fixed. We still don’t relally understand what religion is, except that every human seems to have it. Some call it rationalism or science, but it is essentially belief. None of us has direct access to reality as a Ding an sich, and we all choose to believe senses, reason, and tradition, to varying degrees. Our universities should teach us to be skeptical, but can they excise belief all together? To do so would be to reduce students (and that endangered breed, faculty) to sub-human.

What is it that makes the educated so afraid of belief? I suppose it must feel like weakness to a harsh rationality. Like the implacable Romans of celluloid fame, unmoved by human emotion. Mr. Spock in charge of the nursery. Religion is quite at home in the realm of emotion, and like it or not, humans cannot survive by reason alone. We need our feelings—survival instinct, by itself, is not always rational. As a society, however, we’ve downgraded religion to the point that universities have trouble taking it seriously. I’m sure it would open a few administrators’ eyes very wide to sit in on the religion classes I’ve taught at secular schools. Although most of the students are not majors, all, in some sense of the word, are believers. Sommerville’s book contains much that is challenging, but I think his thesis is absolutely correct: any institution that claims to be human, but removes the possibility of belief, is deluding itself and all its customers.

Backyard Archaeology

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Among safe topics for discussion among strangers and casual acquaintances, the weather tops the list. It affects each and every one of us continually, and there’s nothing we can do about it. The ideal neutral subject. In fact, however, the weather is highly freighted with religious thinking, deeply sublimated. If you listen closely, you will hear it. Well, this year, at least in the northeast of the United States, winter has been the topic. We still have snow on the ground in New Jersey, and it has been here continually since January. The thaw has begun, however, and when I went to fetch the paper I noticed a newly melted item on the lawn—an archaic newspaper. Obviously the paper-deliverer missed the front steps that day, and by the time I stepped outside it had already been buried. Curious, I brought it inside to get a first-hand look at the past. It was the Monday, February 3 paper. The day after the Super Bowl. Apparently nothing much else was happening in the world a month ago. I don’t even know who played in the game.

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Religion and sports have a long pedigree. One of the first books I signed up at Routledge was on religion and sports in American culture. Routledge decided to sack me before the book was published, so I haven’t had the opportunity to see it yet. Nevertheless, it is clear that the meaning once provided by the strong arm of the Lord is now covered by the stronger arm of the athlete. I’ve watched in fascination as reporters question the players after the game, panning for bits of wisdom as if they might actually get us up off the couch and lead us to a few minutes of physical glory. Instead cliches trickle out: “we saw what needed to be done and did it.” “I took it to the next level.” “First of all, I want to thank Jesus.” Each one like a nugget of pure gold. I still don’t even know who was playing.

On my kitchen table, however, sits a soggy newspaper with the answers to that. The news is old news. And damp. We’ve had an entire Olympics since then, and war seems to be breaking out in the Crimea. Wait a minute, what century is this again? It seems that no matter how old the news is, it still isn’t old enough. One of the oldest news flashes received by humankind, if the Mesopotamians are to be believed, is that there is a huge flood coming. I turn on my browser and lo, a flood indeed! Noah will be released later this month. Posters began to appear in Manhattan as soon as the Super Bowl cleared out. Move on to the next big thing. And, unbeknownst to me, a newspaper laid buried beneath the snow, containing all the information I needed to know. I’m still wondering how that flood turned out.

High School All Over

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“Jungle calls around the corner!”  This shout was followed by hoots, grunts, and squeals as the bus turned, intended to madden the driver of infamous bus 18. My high school bus had a reputation for driving its drivers—driving them to drink, anyway.  Some of the more memorable replacements had unflattering nicknames hurled at them: Wedgehead and Illiterate Bob are two I remember well.  I arrived at school smelling of pot and slightly deaf from the shouting more than once. Then we got a driver who fought back. One day he expelled all the boys from the bus for the remainder of the week. Being a Bible-reading, church-going youth who sat quietly up front, I felt that I didn’t deserve this punitive measure. Still, I felt sorry for the drivers.  And I’d learned a valuable lesson—being responsible for the safe arrival of fifty people is a lot of pressure.

Yesterday I climbed aboard the adult NJ Transit bus 117. Only later did I ominously realize that if the first digit were added to the final digit, you would get bus 18.  Or was it really the Pequod?

Those of us who stumble aboard the bus before 6 am are a docile, sleepy crowd, for the most part.  I open my book, and if someone insists on talking, plug my buds into the white noise app on my phone.  This is how I get my reading done.  Some of the regulars like to argue with the drivers. “You’re too early,” one woman says (although she’s ironically on the bus at the time). Or “Why didn’t you stop for me? I had to chase the bus!” The latter was the complaint yesterday.

For being soporfiric, the early crowd is pretty tightly wound. Daily we spend about 4 hours commuting for 7 hours of work.  We catch the early bus because traffic going into Manhattan meets the dictionary definition of Hell. Well, the complainer chose a tightly wound driver to challenge yesterday.  The complainer wouldn’t let up. I could hear the yelling through my static-filled earbuds.  In a move that would’ve done Illiterate Bob proud, the driver slammed on the brakes right on the highway and pulled over.  He demanded the lady off the bus.  She wouldn’t leave. He got off the bus and called his supervisor for 30 minutes. At the dawn of rush hour. The passengers began to grumble, not least of which was the complainer.  Held hostage, we all knew we were going to be late for work. I put away my book.  I’d been here before. I knew what would come next. I braced myself.  “Jungle calls around the corner!”

In the belly of the whale.

In the belly of the whale.

Any Witch Way

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Witches&WitchHuntsIt’s easy to feel smug over the past. At every moment of human civilization we deem ourselves higher than those who came before. There’s no doubt that the eradication of the thought-processes that led to the witch hunts of past centuries seems decidedly positive for all parties involved. Wolfgang Behringer’s Witches and Witch-Hunts, however, is a surprising book. I’ve read a fair number of studies of those dark ages when people were cruelly tortured and murdered in horrendous ways because they were deemed to be in league with Satan. As usual in such books, Behringer begins with that history. What makes his study surprising, however, is that he doesn’t stop in the eighteenth century when, in what we’re usually told, the witch trials ended. Behringer points out that witch hunts are still happening, and that the rates of those killed perhaps rival those, per capita, of the numbers during the Middle Ages. How can this be? In an era of global awareness, we sometimes forget that the focus isn’t always on Europe or America.

In many parts of the world, witches are still part of local belief systems. Not all of these are women, by the way. Many cultures favor the male witch. What these cultures do have in common, however, is their natural fear of black magic being suppressed by colonialism. More “civilized” westerners came and enacted laws which, to the minds of the locals, protected the witches! Local tradition of eradicating those who practice black magic was considered righteous, and now the government forbids it? That seems strange, especially when many of the colonizing forces were also interested in Christianizing as well. Missionaries wanted to affirm belief in the supernatural, and, ironically, often became the vehicles that allowed beliefs in witchcraft to continue. As Behringer points out, some populations converted to Christianity precisely because it allowed the continued belief in physical evil—therefore witches—and the eradication thereof.

This creates a vexing problem. When cultures meet they inevitably attempt to assert their values. When the technologically superior force their ways of life on those behind on that front, a kind of pressure of misunderstanding builds. Instead of bringing witches to trial, they lynch them instead. It seems we may have underestimated the pull that belief in witches has on people. Traditional societies uninfluenced by the developments in Europe also came up with the idea of witchcraft independently. Witches, it seems, stand for the classic issue of theodicy—explaining why things go wrong in a world that should be ordered by deities. Coincidence is always cold comfort in explaining loss. Even the rule of law breaks down. At the same time, how can it be right to allow the murdering of those suspected of witchery even in the enlightened twenty-first century? This fear is one of our most abiding demons, and the solution remains out of reach, unless, of course, we allow ourselves to resort to magic.

Weathering Qohelet

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Over the weekend I finished the initial formatting of Weathering the Psalms, my long-suffering book on the weather terminology in the Psalter. While I’ll have to give it another going over, a strange cocktail of feelings has come over me in the process. Scholars age quickly. The time between putting that last period on that last sentence and the book showing up in a few dozen hands is generally over a year. You feel outdated. Not only that, but this book was finished, for all practical purposes, a dozen years ago. In this world of endless, indeed, almost insane academic publishing, many books and even more articles have appeared that I should have read, pondered deeply, and incorporated into my work. That, however, is a luxury reserved for those society deems fit to place in colleges, universities, and seminaries. The predominant feeling, apart from relief, was a kind of melancholy, however. The book represents a world that no longer exists. Indeed, a young scholar who no longer exists.

From the day I started teaching at Nashotah House in 1992 (or even before), I knew it would be a limited-time engagement. The then dean, interviewing me, knew that I was too liberal to fit the medieval theology then current (and still current) at the school. As a teacher of the “Old Testament,” however, the damage I might do was deemed minimal. I wrote several articles on my beloved Ugaritic, but no job interviews came. Those who’d sussed the system suggested I try publishing biblical material—after all, that’s where the jobs are. (Ha!) So I began. Weathering the Psalms took several years to research and write in scholarly isolation. I began rising at 4 a.m. to find the time to do the writing. Most of the book was written between four and six in the morning. Yes, it’s rough. And tentative. A young scholar unsure of himself. Now I’m an old man even more unsure of himself. Still, there are insights in that outdated tome that I hope some will find worth their time.

I have a photograph of myself that my daughter took at the time. I was putting on my boots to go shovel some snow. The face in the photograph is young. Optimistic, even. I was facing the weather. I’ve come to realize that all photographs are lies. They capture an instant of time that has already vanished. In my case, a livelihood. A dream that was shredded on the plains of some theologian’s ideological Somme. Winters seem to have become much harsher since then. Colleagues who’ve found jobs prosper while the rest of us fight against nightmares and that sense that all we ever tried to do was, in the end, vanity. One of the questions in the study, The Bible in American Life is, which is your favorite book of the Bible? Mine has always been Ecclesiastes. And even as I make final preparations to ship my manuscript to Wipf and Stock, I know that the preacher is right: there is nothing new under the sun.

snowman

Royal Reading

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Post-Christian America still reads its Bible. One of the perks, such as it is, of working with Bibles is getting such vital news early. The Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) has just released a study that was underway when I visited the school a couple years back. “The Bible in American Life,” available online, presents the results of a scientific survey of Bible reading in the US. Suffice it to say, we’re not done with Holy Writ just yet. In our world of high tech gadgets where the waves and particles that make the internet possible penetrate our bodies constantly, it is sometimes easy to forget that the Bible in many ways made this all possible. Both the good and the evil that drove western civilization to colonize its world had at least some dusty memory of “manifest destiny” embedded in sacred writ about it. And those who take the Bible seriously have continued to read, mark, and inwardly digest it.

The Bible in American Life, already picked up on by major media, indicates that about half of the population of the United States reads the Bible outside of worship. Perhaps not surprising given the still faltering civil rights dream, African-Americans are the biggest Bible reading demographic in the country. In fact, the study states, race is the single largest indicator of probable Bible reading. Those who are low on the economic scale also tend to read Scripture more. Those for whom “success” isn’t what it seems to be at first. Those whom “success” has passed by. Even Hispanic readers outnumber the white majority. People who have been distracted by material success, predictably, have little time for ancient wisdom. Still, half the country does turn to the Bible on occasion. Among the more interesting demographics is the fact that nones—those who are unaffiliated with any religion—also turn to the Bible for learning about life.

434px-King_James_I_of_England_and_VI_of_Scotland_by_John_De_Critz_the_ElderThe media seems to have picked up one of the major points as well—few Bible readers turn to Holy Writ for political advice. To hear the news weavers tell it, politicians and rabble-rousers trawl the Bible for its scant words about homosexuality and abortion—issues ignored by Moses and his ilk, for the most part. In fact, most people rate such issues very low on their scale of why they turn to the Bible. It is read more for consolation than for political intrigue. Having just about finished my formatting of my book on the Psalms, it warms my heart to read that the Psalter tops the list of favorite books of the Bible, narrowly inching out the Gospel of John. The study doesn’t, and can’t, come right out and say it, but the Bible is read by people to help them feel better. They still prefer the King James by a considerable margin. And in this world of self first, they can still read, “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” Even though Bible readers are, in the majority, women. Good old King James still shows the way, as the ruling white man always has.

Star Tracks

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Star_Trek_The_Motion_Picture_posterLong ago in a galaxy far away—1979 in rural western Pennsylvania, to be precise—the local inhabitants were surprised to learn that James T. Kirk was now an admiral. Two years earlier Star Wars had thrilled us with special effects first mastered in 2001: A Space Odyssey but a more accessible plot. Robert Wise, who had not only given the world The Sound of Music, but also The Day the Earth Stood Still, took the helm for the new Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Star Trek geeks, of which crowd I do not count myself, hadn’t really taken their cliched role in the emerging high tech society, and CGI was still a few years off. Nevertheless, rumors in school had it that the movie featured a bald woman and had boldly gone where no man had gone before. The original crew was all there. So on a Friday night I dutifully made my way to the Drake Theater to watch and left saying, “is that all?” Star Wars was action-packed and fun, filled with archetypes and wise-cracking robots. Star Trek had Voyager 6, like E.T., trying to phone home. In a word, the movie was forgettable.

On a tour of the original Star Trek world, I finally sat down to watch The Motion Picture, with its grandly archaic-sounding name, last night. I shuddered to think I’d last seen it 35 years ago—that makes me as old as the crew was starting to look—but this time I was able to see things I hadn’t before. Spoiler alert! Voyager 6 is looking for God. The original Voyager 1 reached the end of our solar system a couple years back, but in 1979 there was no reason to suppose that we wouldn’t try again and again to reach out to parts unknown. We were rapidly become materialistic, and the universe could be a known quantity. Three centuries in the future, Voyager 6 is headed home, having been rebuilt into an unstoppable living machine. When the creator—humanity—doesn’t pick up the phone V’ger poises to wipe out the carbon-based infestation until it learns how to physically, biologically merge with a human being (cue the bald lady and otherwise superfluous Captain Decker). Lots of colorful lights and we can all go home.

Even now I can’t muster the courage to say the movie is profound, but it does touch on an issue that has only grown over time—we have voluntarily left our deities behind. In our rush to reduce the world to the least common denominator, we have pulled the plug on the cosmic phone. The Voyager program ran out of steam as the Cold War was heating up down here on earth and we were being told we were all just a bunch of atoms fooling around anyway. The machines, in the meantime, had come to believe. I probably won’t survive another 35 years to watch Star Trek: The Motion Picture again, but I do hope that in that time we may become more aware of our humanity. And I do hope that if someone divine does happen to call, that we’ll at least pick up the phone.

The Varieties of Biblical Experience

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Working with Bibles can be a heady experience. I mean, the sheer numbers are staggering. A whole herd of cattle must be slain annually just to manufacture the covers for all the Scofield Bibles in the world. What is it about literalists that demands animal sacrifice to read the words of the Prince of Peace? Bibles, Bibles everywhere, and not a word to read! According to statisticbrain.com, there are over 6,001,500,000 Bibles in print. That’s closing in on a parity with the world population, only one billion to go. There are websites dedicated to selling only Bibles. Nearly any bookstore will have at least a shelf full of them. I even ran across the website of an enterprising individual who seems to have figured out that there’s a market for taking Gideon Bibles from hotel rooms and selling them online. The Bible business, in the words of Big Dan Teague, “is not a complicated one.” And every year more are printed. Full-text versions are freely available online at any number of sites, and still more can be sold.

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I often ponder the western love affair with the Bible. My entire career, with all its ups and downs, has been fashioned from an early intrigue with holy writ. In the beginning was the Bible. And culture followed in the footsteps of holy scripture. It’s not difficult to see why. Even further back than ancient Palestine, people worried about dying. Consciousness is funny that way—it has trouble conceiving of the world without itself. The Bible, for many centuries, offered the accepted solution to the death equation. You may have to die, but you don’t have to stay dead. Today we think of zombies as those refusing to remain lifeless. The Bible begs to differ, unless, of course, you’re reading the Zombie Bible. And still the presses roll on.

Considering the profit to be turned by selling Bibles, I wonder that more don’t show the cynicism of Big Dan. Is no one suspicious that printing the Good Book is called an industry? What other book, so freely given away, can sustain such a massive global market? I have to plead guilty myself to having a least a dozen different Bibles within easy reach every day. They even have their own separate labels at Barnes and Noble. So as I sit down planning on how to grow this ever-expanding market even more, I think of the many other industries that rely on mine. We have spun off worlds that orbit around the Bible. It is, despite the many nay-sayers, the cornerstone of modern Western civilization. If a tree falls in the woods, a Bible may be printed from it. Which of the 57 varieties do you take with your daily bread?

The Cthulhu You Knew

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DissectingCthulhuThe word “fan,” an apocopated form of “fanatic,” is a word borrowed from the realm of religion. Most often associated with sports, it can refer to any overly enthusiastic devotee. While I enjoy reading H. P. Lovecraft’s fiction, I think I would stop short of calling myself a fan, but were I to take that step I would have some serious competition. The circle of those truly enamored of Lovecraft have yet to break into the hallowed, or perhaps haunted, halls of the western canon. Fans there are, but not the sort who find regular play in literature classes. Still, as I read S. T. Joshi’s edited collection, Dissecting Cthulhu: Essays on the Cthulhu Mythos, I came to realize just how committed Lovecraft’s fans are.

My fascination with Lovecraft arises from his felicity with gods. Some argue that his gods are aliens, but even Erich von Däniken hasn’t stopped the true believers. Dissecting Cthulhu is a collection of articles from a variety of Lovecraft analysts debating the fine, and sometimes gross, points of the postulated “Cthulhu Mythos.” Cthulhu hardly requires any introduction these days. He has basked in his underwater fame since the internet has made a star of him. The eponymous deity of the alleged cycle, the divinity, or alien, was never really put front and center by his creator. Deities are all the more powerful for being unseen. Here is where Lovecraft the atheist becomes Lovecraft the theologian. By creating gods we tacitly admit their subtle power over our psyches. We may call them aliens or monsters, but compared to us, they’re gods.

After reading Dissecting Cthulhu, however, I’m not sure that I could say much more about him than before. This is often a problem shared by theologians—what more can you say about an entity that won’t sit still long enough to be interviewed? Gods will be gods. The rest of us are humble hermeneuts. There’s no doubt that Lovecraft touched on a deep and abiding current in human experience when he held alienation high as the standard of life on earth. Somehow we resent Cthulhu for not being there, even though his is no octopus’s garden under the sea. Other galaxies were discovered and partially understood for the first time during Lovecraft’s lifetime. Suddenly it felt pretty lonely down here with all that empty space up there. It is better to populate such a large expanse with gods. Not seeing is believing after all.