Seven Deadly

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If your outlook contains the word “supremacy,” I would humbly suggest, it’s time to rethink your philosophy. Borne of a deep insecurity—or overweening pride, which may be the same thing—the idea that one characteristic of this complexity we know of as being human makes one group better than another is misguided. No recasting of the terms makes it any better. No matter from which angle you shine the light, belief in superiority always looks ugly. As someone the world has classified as a “white male”—and often I wonder what that’s supposed to mean—I can’t understand why that categorization defines me more than any other. This came home to me once when I walked past a black supremacist gathering where the leader was none too shy about saying what his adherents should do to “the white man.” Does anyone deserve to be judged for their genetic makeup? You can’t just change your genes.

When I look at human beings my cones fire more than my rods. Black, white, or shades of brown? I’m not denying that historical wrongs—horrendous evils—have been done. Was it because of racial disposition or because of ignorance? I think there’s only one way to answer that. When our children are raised in mixed racial environments prejudice tends not to appear. Although the world seems to be reacting against globalization at the moment, sharing a classroom with those who are different lessens the desire to lob missiles in one another’s direction. Being a supremacist is an argument against your own case. It’s one of those ironies that rusts when exposed to the air. We’re different from one another, not better or worse.

Back in the medievalist days among the European sect, seven sins were identified as particularly pernicious. They were so bad as to be called deadly. One of them, it seems to me, is worse than all the others. Pride does very strange things to people. Does technological achievement make anyone better than anyone else? Sure, it may make someone a more efficient killer, but in what sense does that make them any better? Indigenous populations—and I’m not advocating that weirdly self-aggrandizing “noble savage” mentality here—get along just fine until modern technology arrives. It shows us what the other has and I do not. Another of the deadly seven is greed. It may be worse even than pride. I have to wonder if, when you get all of the deadly sins together, do they argue among themselves which is the best of the worst? All sins, perhaps, come in grayscale instead of black and white. Is a superior sin ever a good thing?

Revisiting Frankenstein

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There’s nothing like going back to the classics. Many people don’t realize that one of the best-selling books of the nineteenth century was Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. It has never been out of print. As a novel it has its issues, but the tale strikes something deeply responsive in readers. And the story may not be what you think. You see, the movies have made Frankenstein’s monster into something Shelley never intended. Indeed, today’s Frankenstein monster is pieced together from various monster images, just like the mad doctor’s original creation.

After a lapse of many decades, I decided to read Frankenstein again. It must’ve been in my tweenage years that I’d last done so. I recall putting the book down thinking how sad it was. Something happens, however, when you return to a book after a span of many years. This time I was looking for the mad doctor and hoping to determine if the monster deserved that title at all. The story won’t let any easy answers come. Victor Frankenstein is a young, impulsive man carried away by an idea. He doesn’t contemplate the consequences of what he’s doing. It’s like buying a dog without considering that you’ve just realigned your priorities for several years. Not noticing that his growing creation is hideous to the eyes until it’s too late, he simply abandons the creature without a word. (The parallels with an absentee father should be obvious.)

The creature—monster is a bit harsh—wants acceptance. He isn’t a mute brute with bolts in his neck. He’s not a robot. He is Adam kicked out of the garden with no Eve. He doesn’t start out evil. The rejection of his creator forces him to murder in a desire for revenge. Shelley’s world was deeply influenced by the Bible as well as Milton. Religious concepts are constantly under evaluation. The child of radical parents—her mother was one of the first feminists on record—Shelley questions everything here. No doubt in Victor’s mind he’s created a demon. Or has the monster created Frankenstein? Until the very final pages nobody else actually sees his monster, or at least hasn’t seen him and lived to tell about it. What fuels the creature’s fury is rejection. Evil doesn’t just happen in the world of the mad doctor.

Sympathies are divided in Frankenstein. We feel for the monster. His creator never apologizes. Never reflects that he somehow shares (or completely owns) the blame for the sad fate of that which he’s created. Living under a Frankenstein presidency, these unanswered questions hang thickly in the air. Lack of foresight seldom ends well. The monster isn’t always who you assume it to be.

Becoming

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It’s pretty difficult to summarize the feelings when watching your own child graduate from college. Of course, she’s not a child any more, but that’s always the way you’ll think of her. Binghamton University, a “public ivy,” is a competitive school to attend. Hard to get in, and hard to get out. And you know that there were serious struggles to get to this point. Courses conceptually impossible for a humanities ex-professor to understand marked the trail to this point. The academic robes, the positive energy, and the overall sense of accomplishment make this one of those joyous occasions that mark the transition from being the instructed to becoming the instructors. It’s a time unlike any other.

Most of my collegiate thoughts, despite my three degrees in religious studies, have focused on science and engineering. It’s not that the basis of truth has shifted, but the practicalities of “finding a job” have to take precedence these days. The STEM universe may be the only real one, according to those smart enough to know such things. It’s difficult not to feel that studying religion was chasing a chimera, if not a little deluded. Tomorrow, though, the college of arts and sciences will send forth even more graduates into a world where employment itself may be a reverie. Still, I can’t help but think these engineers from the Watson School are just a little brighter than their more humanities-inclined classmates. Parenting is its own kind of bias.

Commencement is a singular moment. Parents sitting in the crowd want to attract their child’s attention for just a moment. Each one down there is a star. You want to be seen by them, recognized if only for a fleeting smile or subtle wave. They’ve accomplished something and everyone is here to cheer them on. Your meaning is tied up in being associated with that person that you’ve coached through so many aspects of life, and you hope you’ve done it well. They’re ready to leave academia behind and experience a bit of the wider world. It’s a cycle as old as this planet’s first molten rotations as it revolved around a distant star. And as those walking across the stage are growing in magnitude, those of us cheering them on try to recollect what it was like to have so much loving goodwill focused on us. It’s difficult to summarize these feelings, but I’m pretty sure I’d call them religious.

One Size Fits All

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The divide between religion and science is often artificially widened by one side or the other. Of course the divide’s artificial—both science and religion are human constructs, after all. This is illustrated well in the sense of wonder in an article titled “True Story Of Volcanic Eruption Told By Aboriginal People For 7,000 Years” by Robin Andrews on IFLScience!. The very concept that a scientifically verifiable event survived in oral tradition for thousands of years completely unbalances those accustomed to think that the ancients were superstitious dupes who looked to the gods to explain everything. What’s often not realized is that the gods were an early version of science. Think about it—ancient people observed their environment for cause and effect. They couldn’t use the empirical method because it hadn’t been invented yet. That didn’t mean they were unsophisticated.

We look at the pyramids and wonder. How could such archaic people construct such advanced monuments? The rudiments of science actually begin to appear in the human record very early. Our species is a curious lot. The explanations for the close observations tended to be mythological. Gods are great for filling gaps. What we don’t see is any conflict between knowledge acquired by reason and ideas conjured by imagination. They fit together nicely. Human brains evolved that way. Belief is a strange thing—it influences reality, at least on a quantum level, but somehow it must be denigrated when compared to “pure science.” A large part of the blame, of course, has to go to those who had learned to take the Bible literally, particularly beginning in the eighteenth century.

The Bible had a disproportionally influential role in the founding of European empires. From the regular Roman under Constantine to the Holy Roman under Charlemagne, what became Catholicism informed political structures. In the British Empire, ever vacillating between Catholic and Protestant, the Bible played a major intellectual role. Real problems developed, however, when the idea of science alone took over. This was after Newton, Galileo, and Darwin. None of these lights suggested religion had no place. The real issue isn’t vanquishing, but finding proper balance. No matter how well calibrated our instruments may become, until we learn to detect “spirit” we have to admit that science can’t replace religion. Such harmful ideas as eugenics and behaviorism indicate that we need a balance and not a slam dunk. Who knows? Some of even the Bible may be true. Unless we learn to admit we don’t know all, those sitting around the fireside telling stories should be given credibility regarding what they’ve seen.

Size and Its Matters

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Have you ever wondered where your Bible came from? No, I mean physically. There are many possible answers to such a query, so the other day I was searching for Bible printers on the web. A great many Bibles are printed by Royal Jongbloed, in the Netherlands. They specialize in the super-thin paper used in much Bible printing. The reason the paper is thin is purely pragmatic. The Bible is an economy-sized book and if printed with “regular” paper it would be large and unwieldy—something desirable only by those with nefarious purposes, I suspect. Bible paper, by the way, was developed originally by Oxford University Press. And in case you’re wondering, the convention of printing Bibles in two-column format is also a space-saving convention. So I was looking over the Jongbloed site, wondering if they’re nervous at all about the increase of Nones. Then I remembered that in many parts of the world Christianity is actually growing, so there should be security in the Bible printing market for some time.

The Netherlands had a large role to play in the development of Protestantism and its love of the Bible. Many English non-conformists found it a welcoming place. Bibles were welcome. But Bibles aren’t all that Jongbloed does. They print scientific manuals too. Now that caught my attention. There’s nothing mercenary going on here—some scientific manuals are really big and are printed on (of all ironies) Bible paper. Is there some kind of conflict on interest going on here? I mean, which is it—science or religion? Or maybe there’s a third way. Maybe it’s not an either/or proposition. Maybe Occam shaves a little too closely.

The craziness flooding out of the District of Columbia has us all worried. Science is being attacked. If you’re being attacked you look around for your enemies. Religion! But wait, is religion really science’s enemy? How easy it is to forget that science developed from alchemy and astrology, both religious practices. Even today many scientists see no inherent disagreement between the two. If we want to be effective in warding off the pressing insanity we need to realize who the real enemy is. Science and religion can both be honest searches for the truth of this universe we inhabit. No, the natural enemy of science is personal greed. It’s also, if we take any kind of religion at it’s word, the enemy of religion as well. What we see bursting the floodgates of Foggy Bottom is the desire for personal gain cloaked as governance for the masses. We should never forget that the Netherlands facilitated a movement that changed everything. Besides, it’s just too expensive to print Bibles in a land badly in need of a Reformation.

It’s Okay

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It once seemed improbable that an entire book could be written on one word. The first time I noticed this I was a doctoral student who’d run across the late William Holladay’s published dissertation on the Hebrew word shuv. Wow, I thought, an entire book on a single vocable. One syllable, nonetheless. Thus I was predisposed to read Allan Metcalf’s OK: The Improbable Story of America’s Greatest Word. The justification Metcalf gives for his “greatest word” award is the fact that OK is the most-used word of American origin world-wide. Even in languages with other scripts, there are ways of fabricating the “okay” pronunciation and everybody knows what it means. It’s really quite interesting. All the more so since OK first appeared as a joke. It’s now used by everybody in all seriousness. Just think of what one says to someone who’s been hurt or is ill. Isn’t the first question inevitably, “Are you okay?”

OK, you may be saying, but you say your blog’s about religion. Yes, and I’m getting to that, okay? Along about halfway through the book, Metcalf discusses how OK tends not to be used for products because it suggests mediocrity. An exception was James Pyle’s O.K. Soap back in the 1860’s. One of the ads included this affidavit: “The most intelligent classes in New-York use it. Editors of most of the religious papers patronize it.” I had to smile at that. Religious folk had, and sometimes still have (when they’re not too oily) the reputation of clean living. If you’re selling soap, you’re selling sanctity. It’s a very ancient connection. Anthropologists have shown time and again that purity is a concept that the religious own. Something about being worldly makes you feel like you should take a shower.

And it’s not only soap that makes okay religious. In the concluding chapter that describes OK as an American philosophy based on the “I’m Okay—You’re Okay” transactional psychological school, Metcalf notes we treat religions in just that way. Religious tolerance is saying “your religion’s OK.” That’s a lot to think about, considering that we’re talking just two letters here. And this book was written before the 2016 election, when tolerance was a word Americans were just beginning to understand. Maybe our hope is in getting OK back into circulation. After all, giving national security secrets away to Russia is okay. If you’ve got a Republican majority who’s going to quibble? Even Russians know what OK means, at least when it works to their advantage.

Spiritual Spelunking

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Looking at the headlines it’s sometimes difficult to believe we’ve evolved. I still trust evidence-based science, despite official government policy, however. So when a friend sent me a story about a new human cousin I knew it was worth a look. Homo naledi bones date from much more recent times than they should. At less than 400,000 years old (which means they might fit GOP ideology pretty well) they are almost contemporary with Homo sapiens. And, apparently, they buried their dead. Now much of this is still speculation. The bones were found in caves with openings so small that onlyfemale spelunkers could fit in, and the question of whether dropping bodies in a hole counts as burial has raised its head. Still, the human family tree is being redrawn, and in a way conservatives won’t like.

I became interested in evolution because of Genesis. My mother gave us a few science books as children even though we were Fundamentalists. One of them talked about evolution and I was intrigued. Clearly it didn’t fit with the creation story—I was young enough not to notice the contradictions between Genesis 1 and Genesis 2—and yet scientist believed it. They likely weren’t Christians, I reasoned. College gave the lie to that deductive thinking when I ran into Christians teaching the required “Science Key” who believed in, and yes, taught, evolution. I’d missed something, obviously. Once I discovered evolution could coexist with Scripture I was eager to learn as much as a non-biologist could. In my teaching days I focused on the early part of Genesis and even began to write a book on it.

Image credit: Margaret A. McIntyre, from Wikimedia Commons

It’s much more honest to admit that we’re related to the rest of life on this planet than to set ourselves aside as something special. Evolution has done something that the Bible never could—brought all living things together. There are too many towers of Babel and chosen people themes in Holy Writ to allow for real parity with our fellow humans, let alone other creatures. Yet the human family tree is wondrous in its diversity and complexity. We now know that Neanderthals were likely interbreeding with Homo sapiens and I wonder how that impacts myths of divine chosen species. Did Jesus die for the Neanderthals too, or just our own sapiens sapiens subspecies? You can see the problem. For a literalist it’s just easier to crawl into a cave. But only if the opening is large enough to admit males, since the Bible says they were created first, right?

Write or Wrong

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Lots of people write for lots of reasons. Some love it. Some hate it. Some can’t help themselves. For those who know me primarily through this blog, it may not be obvious which of these sorts I am. After having read Dani Shapiro’s Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life I finally feel confident putting myself in category three. It’s not that I don’t like writing—I live for it. The kind of person Shapiro describes, however, is the one who defines their entire being through writing. Each day I post between 300 and 500 words on this blog. I’ve been doing it since 2009, which means I’m somewhere over the million-word mark. But those compelled to write will never be satisfied with just that. One does not live by blog alone, after all.

Once in a great while I get asked how many books I’ve written. Well, that’s not a question with a straightforward answer. Two of my books have been published. I’ve written at least ten. Some of them never made it from my desk to a publisher’s wastebasket. A few of them have. Like others who are addicted to writing, I can’t stop. Ironically, with a decade of experience working in publishing I’m not so good at getting my own work placed. Some of it is fiction. Some of it is non. Some of it is even poetry. If you’re a graphomaniac, I don’t need to explain any further. If you’re not, think of chocolate, or sports, or anything else you just can’t get enough of. That’s what it’s like.

Shapiro’s book, although not point-for-point, but more than not, is like wandering through my own gray matter. I had no idea that other writers—including a successful one like Shapiro—felt the same constant, nagging doubts and insecurities. I didn’t know that others considered staring off into the middle distance (there’s not always a window nearby) as work. Or that sometimes you write something and when you’ve finished it seems like it wasn’t you at all. Writers can be a trying lot. We tend to be introverts. We have odd habits (in my case, waking up at 3 a.m. to write on a daily basis). We tend to be able to spot one another in a crowd, but more likely as not we won’t say anything to each other. And strangely, we write even if we don’t get paid. With lifelong royalties somewhere in the low triple digits, economically it makes no sense to do what I do. Generally the world feels creative sorts aren’t terribly productive. It’s because we measure value differently, I expect. I’m glad to have met another traveler on this path although, as is often the case, our meeting will only be through writing.

Ironically

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Irony is a national resource that’s in abundant supply. Those who inadvertently create it may be the least equipped to appreciate it, but that’s ironic, isn’t it? Time magazine used to be considered conservative. That was before the days when telling the truth was, by definition, liberal. A few weeks ago the famed news magazine ran a cover that was aimed at those of us who remembered the same cover that same week 51 years earlier. It read: Is God dead? That cover ran in the wake of a new wave of theology that perhaps may have been the last time that discipline held any public interest. Some thinkers had been tinkering with the idea that God might not be there. That was newsworthy.

Nature doesn’t work in round numbers, so just over a half-a-century later we found ourselves in a possibly even more dire world than one without God. This one has no deity, but it does have Donald Trump. Addicted to lies like they’re opiates, our commander-in-chief contradicts himself at 45 rpm. Comey was fired for mishandling the Clinton files. Then, moments later it was because of Russia. Then, moments later, I had been planning it all along. Kellyanne applauds from her alternative fact bunker. No truth may penetrate here. And we call this the free world. Where there is no truth there can be no freedom. Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan, riding on the tsunami of disinformation, are loving the surf. Not a word from the thumbs of the president can be trusted.

Truth used to be an anchor. Now ships just drift. You can never tell whether they’re headed to North Korea or not. The GOP, in true American style, is attempting to rig the voting mechanism of this country so they can never lose power again. “It’s democracy,” they lie. They propose new health-care laws to which they will be exempt. Somewhere deep in these twisted pipes is a value long rusted shut. It’s rusty because it’s made of irony. And should that valve ever be wrenched open again we’d understand that draining swamps is a very bad idea. Yes, mosquitoes and other bloodsuckers may abound, but they’re all a part of the natural order of things. The dragonflies eat the mosquitoes and the fish eat the dragonflies. The greatest fish story of all is that the Republican Party believes in anything beyond its own supremacy over the entire nation it is lawfully bound to serve. Ironically, God’s not here to see this.

Mothers’ Daze

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Washington’s war on women has made this Mother’s Day especially poignant. As hard as it is to believe, Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell had mothers. I can’t comprehend any male being anything but grateful and humble in a woman’s presence. Don’t accuse me of idolatry—I know women aren’t perfect. Neither are men. Especially not men. Mother’s Day isn’t an excuse to treat our moms as less-than-special other days of the year. We sometimes forget that life is a gift. And we should always say “thank you” to those who give. Pregnancy isn’t easy on a woman’s body. Indeed, until recent times childbirth was the number one killer of women. At some periods in history female life expectancy was only into the twenties. Giving birth is a self-sacrifice. We would do well to remember that daily.

Social organization outside the home was conveniently male early on, but not necessarily so. Without our mothers none of this would’ve been possible at all. Why do we fail to give back when we’ve been given so much? Yes, our moms are special to us, but women everywhere are mothers, daughters, and sisters to all of the men out there. To be human is to be both female and male. How could we ever forget that? How is it possible to use woman as political bargaining chips as if one person has any kind of right to tell another how to use her body? When we look at mom do we see only a physical body? Do we not see a mind? Emotions? Love? How can we look into the face of all that and claim that men are in any way superior or deserving of more than their share of power and prestige? Mother’s Day should be a revolution.

I don’t mean to be combative, but I’ve been pushed into a corner. From my earliest days I’ve felt women were stronger than men. Being raised by a mother on her own can be a revelatory experience. I emerged with nothing but gratitude for the sacrifices one woman had made to be called a mother. If any men have forgotten that lesson, use this Mother’s Day to repent. If you’re alive to read this, or to share it, you have a mother to thank. And tomorrow’s no excuse to forget that and act as if this one day were enough to show gratitude to those who have taught the human race to love. It’s Mother’s Day, but so should every day be.

An Elephant’s 100 Percent

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When I walked out of that dissertation defense, still a little unsure whether I’d passed or not, I thought my testing days were over. My early memories of struggling with exams—I wrote that a sphere was a kind of weapon on one vocabulary test I recall—made me anxious for an end of the process. Hadn’t I proved myself time and time and time again? People are funny that way. We’re suspicious of those who pass. Are they really as smart as that, or have they learned to game the system? (Admittedly, with what’s going on in Washington these days doubts about intelligence have definitely earned their keep.) Tests, however, have become less common these days, at least in the fearful exam room context. Now we’re giving them to animals.

It has long been clear to me that animals are quite intelligent. When that mouse, cat, squirrel, or robin pauses in front of you, looks you in the eye, then decides its course of action, it’s clearly thinking. Of course, some animals are more on the GOP scale of intelligence, such as deer that bolt out in front of cars, while others—ironically including elephants—show up 45 in tests we assign. An article in The Independent describes how elephants are far smarter than we’ve given them credit for being. Jealousy, perhaps, makes the elephant’s own party withdraw protections from endangered species. We’ve got to be sure nobody shows us up. At least not while we’re on camera.

Animals have greater thinking abilities than we’ve been willing to admit. For being so highly evolved, we’re an awfully petty species. We don’t want to share our great accomplishments with others. We’ll call the amazing architecture of the bowerbird “instinct” rather than admit they can build homes better than many in the Appalachians can. We’ll kick over anthills rather than face the fact that a hive mind is a terrible thing to waste. We’ve known for decades, if not more, that all life is interconnected. Because we’ve got opposable thumbs and reasonable cranial capacity, we’re the best thing this planet could hope to evolve, so we tell ourselves. What has made us so insecure? Why do we find the prospect of animal intelligence so frightening? It’s terribly hard to give up the role of being lord and master, I guess. Or if we were to switch it to a classroom analogy, we always want to be the teacher, never the student. But after walking out of that dissertation defense twenty-five years ago I learned that the testing had only begun.

Sideliners

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Sidelines can be interesting places to sit. You’re close to the action, and you’re privileged with a close view that few others have. You can’t, however, play the game. Sidelines are familiar to biblical scholars. I can’t count the number of times and/or ways the input of those who spend their lives trying to comprehend the Good Book are, well, sidelined. In the publishing world those who work with Bibles are simply ignored by most others, despite the enormous revenue Bible sales generate. In the academy religion departments overall are fair game for any potential budget cuts. And since what religion study survives tends to be intercultural, the Bible faculty are deemed somewhat less necessary than other sub-disciplines. It’s easy to forget that Christianity is the largest organized religion in the world and that some 2.2 billion persons claim that name. The Bible’s their foundational book. It tells us what motivates them. And yet, it’s easier simply to ignore the whole thing. Then something insane like an Evangelical-fueled Trump election, and everyone continues to say, “we can safely ignore this.”

I recently saw an article by scientists which explored why people engage in dangerous behaviors. The main idea was that although we know certain things are bad for us individually or as a planet, we still do them. We do them with the full knowledge that they’re deadly and will likely hasten our demise. Ignoring religion (and in the case at hand, the Bible) is very much like that. A well-armed true believer can ruin your day pretty quickly. Religion, in recent years, has generated over $82 billion in revenue per year. At least those in the dismal science ought to sit up and take notice of that! Hey, for once, the numbers are with us! Statistically, religion is very important. Sounds like a good thing to pretend doesn’t exist.

Having grown up a Fundamentalist, I often ponder this state of affairs. The Bible, we all knew, was the most important thing. Studying it formally does tend to force new ways of considering it, but few Bible scholars would want to dismiss the Good Book out of hand. It still means too much to too many people simply to ignore. Far safer is the proper handling of Holy Writ. This is much easier to instill when institutions support it. It really is a necessary kind of education. Still, it gets sidelined for industries with lesser profits and lesser baggage. I grew into a career defined by the Bible, but even if I hadn’t I’d hope that I’d be able to recognize that some things just shouldn’t be ignored. Yet I’m on the sidelines cheering on those who consider such a career a tragic mistake.

See Around Us

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There aren’t too many people that I consider personal heroes. Those that I do have earned the sobriquet in odd ways, I suppose. That makes them no less deserving. Rachel Carson became a hero because of The Sea Around Us. Published over a decade before I was born, it was a book that I treasured as a teen—or even as a tween, had the word existed then. I was no literary critic, but her style and lyrical writing drew me in and my own love of the ocean I’d never seen was kept alive through her words. Mark Hamilton Lytle, I think, shares my evaluation of Carson as a hero. The Gentle Subversive: Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, and the Rise of the Environmental Movement brought out much of what I admired, and still admire, about her. A woman in a “man’s world,” she became a scientist with a gift for literary finesse. She struggled, she believed, and she died far too young.

Lytle’s book builds up to the publication of Silent Spring, which appeared just two years before Carson’s untimely death. I picked up Silent Spring as a tween as well, but only read it within the last few years. I knew this book had nearly singlehandedly launched the environmental movement, but as the shame of modern life constantly reminds me, I’d been too busy to read it. Born the year it was published, and not terribly far from where Carson herself was born, I had an affinity with the book that strangely kept me from it. It isn’t easy to read, even today. Especially today. With a government ignorantly rolling away all the environmental safeguards that six decades of careful thought have put into place, we need Carson now as much as we did in the 1960s. Her modern critics, as might be expected, tend to be men.

Carson showed that a woman can change the world. Those who disparage her stunning work claim that her following is a religion, not science. Carson was a rare scientist who saw that everything is interconnected. There may be some mysticism to this, but for those willing to admit it, we feel it to be true. On the eve of environmental degradation that will, in a perverse kind of justice, possibly wipe us out, we need to return to the fine words and clear thinking of one woman who took on industrial giants to give a voice to the people. We do have a right to determine what happens to our planet. Lytle makes the point that Carson was like a prophet. For me the comparative preposition can be removed altogether.

Kindling

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Paula Cocozza, writing for The Guardian, describes “How E-books Lost Their Shine.” Like most inveterate readers, she says she has stacks of books growing like mushrooms after a summer rain, in her bedroom. I was working in the publishing industry (I still am, so please take no alarm at my rhetoric) when e-book sales plateaued. Then declined. “Industry analysts” were baffled. I wasn’t. The reasoning goes like this: e-books are light and cheap and amazingly convenient—why would anyone want something different? Those of us who love books know. If you know what I mean when I write “library smell” I’m preaching to the converted. More beguiling than new car scent, that first deep breath when you step into a library takes you places your physical body may never go. All those bodies of books gathered together let off a bouquet that insists you follow your nose to an earthly paradise. I just tried sniffing my iPhone. Nothing. No synapses fired. I’ve read books on it, but have I really?

Studies tend to show we have trouble remembering books read electronically. It’s just too fast. Wham-bam-thank you whoever you are. Let’s get on to the next thing. But books, as Cocozza writes, are slow. Publishing’s a slow industry. You submit your proposal, and the editor reads it. The editorial board discusses it. The book is written and sent to a copyeditor. Then a compositor or typesetter. Then a proofreader. Then it’s off to the presses. Printed, bound, and shipped. It can take a year or more. And when you curl up in bed with a book, furtively sniffing it, gently rubbing your fingers along its pages, drawn into a world not your own, plastic’s the last thing on your mind.

A few Saturdays ago I attended the Hunterdon County Library book sale. I go every year. It’s a big deal. People line up in advance. You step into the barn-like sales floor and it hits you—the smell of all those books. The aroma of knowledge. You can’t repurpose an e-book. You can’t sell it back because nothing was ever really produced. You purchased electrons, you’re stuck with electrons. Hit “delete” when the storage is full. All these books in this room are valuable. All for pocket-change. Many of them were wildly overprinted in the exuberance that naturally comes from being over-stimulated. Like kids about to enter Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. Industry analysts are puzzled. If they’d get their fingers dirty by thumbing through a used book once in a while they wouldn’t be. Yes, its dusty, grungy, and probably laced with germs, but I wouldn’t trade it in right now for a Kindle, even if it costs me nothing.

Filling the Frame

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Those who study the Bible have to reckon with the fact that someone else probably said it first. This is one of the inherent liabilities of studying something a couple thousand years old. Still, scholars have to keep their jobs, and so they come up with new ways of looking at something ancient. One of my favorite new methods is the use of movies to understand the Good Book. Clearly nobody in ancient times had any ideas about films, let alone stills, but still, they liked to tell stories. They have that in common with modern cinema. Although I’m naturally distrustful of collections of essays—there are so many of them and they are all of mixed quality—I decided to read Close Encounters between Bible and Film: An Interdisciplinary Engagement, edited by Laura Copier and Caroline Vander Stichele. I have to admit that I picked it up with some trepidation, but I was pleasantly surprised in the end.

Like all edited volumes, Close Encounters is uneven. Nevertheless, a fair number of the essays are well done and insightful. The others may be insightful too, but my exile from academe has led to a drop in tolerance for method-heavy essays. They make me think the Bible should mean nothing to anyone but experts, which, if true, is a sad state of affairs for a world that depends on it for salvation. But I digress. The fact is movies quite often draw on similar collections of brain cells as do sacred texts. That’s interesting. Not only that, but flicks show just how deeply embedded the Bible is in western consciousness.

Having read many books on cinema and the Bible, I was pleased at how well this one seemed to flow. At times it’s as if that authors are struggling to find some common ground, but the realization that both sacred text and cinema are part of the cultural sphere suggests that the connections are there. More than that, they suggest that the Bible might still retain some relevance for modern people after all. Hollywood hasn’t lost sight of Holy Writ either. Just a few years back three major biblical epics came out in one season. For me this makes it clear that the stories of antiquity still speak to modern people. They have to be gussied up with CGI and big-name actors, but the underlying tales go back to a day before lights and camera were necessary for action. And we might learn something while our intention is simply to be entertained.