The link below is to a book review of ‘Practicing the Power – Welcoming the Gifts of the Holy Spirit in Your Life,’ by Sam Storms.
For more visit:
https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/book-review-practicing-power-sam-storms
Monthly Archives: April 2017
Productivity and Audiobooks
The link below is to an article that looks at what is driving the audiobook explosion.
For more visit:
https://qz.com/924075/audiobook-readers-obsessed-with-multitasking-are-driving-americas-biggest-new-reading-trend/
Colin Dexter 1930-2017: Morse novels a clue to the depth of writer’s intellect
Martin Pettitt, CC BY-SA
Sarah Olive, University of York
Colin Dexter’s death at the age of 86 has revived the debate about “serious” versus “genre” novelists. Newspaper tributes rightly referred to the creator of Inspector Morse as a “crime writer” – and so he was. But the sophistication of his novels, like those of John le Carre or Patrick O’Brien, mounts a strong argument for the proposition that pigeonholing their work simply as “detective” or “spy” or “historical” fiction is to diminish their value. 
Dexter’s writing draws frequently on literary and other arts – and it should be particularly valued for its complex and nuanced representations of the merits and pitfalls of education and high culture.
First published during the Thatcher years, Dexter’s novels speak with renewed force to my concerns about recent negative representations of intellect, education and the academy in media and society. In the past year alone, academics in the UK and US, for example, have been painted as threateningly left-wing, liberal (in the US), silly, idiotic, and irrational.
They’ve been accused of trampling on freedom of speech and, by the US education secretary Betsy de Vos, of brainwashing students – as well as epitomising self-righteousness and entitlement.
Dreaming spires
Dexter’s Oxford, which is the backdrop for Morse’s adventures, is the most enduring fictional representation of a UK university – perhaps any UK educational institution. It includes depictions of town as well as gown, and balances an idyllic surface by plumbing the murky depths of elitism and corruption.
In his own words, Dexter created Morse because of his perception that in 1970s British readers and viewers were “fed up” of American hard-boiled crime fiction – “people running up and down corridors” – and endless “car chases”, saying: “What we want is a bit more brains and a bit less brawn.” The actor Kevin Whately, who played Morse’s sergeant Robbie Lewis, has spoken of Dexter’s obsession with “alpha-brains” – the superior intellect with which he imbued his detective protagonist.
Morse never graduated from his Oxford undergraduate degree, but is ferociously agile at crosswords and passionate about opera. His uncertified intelligence in the novels is pivotal to his success as a detective – Morse has the knowledge and ability to match the Oxford dons and high-flying students he encounters (often finishing off quotations for them, to their surprise and chagrin). Meanwhile his outsider status allows him to investigate unhampered by the old boys’ network.
Although Dexter’s writing celebrates lively intellects and culture vultures, with or without the trappings of academic qualifications or wholly rarefied lifestyles, it also paints Morse as a bit of an intellectual snob himself, despite facing prejudice from the Oxford establishment that he failed to join when he dropped out of university. Dexter also slyly celebrates Lewis’s vast, up-to-date knowledge of popular culture, which invaluably complements his boss’s academic and cultural sophistication when it comes to solving puzzles.
Formative influences
Dexter’s ability to convincingly represent different perspectives on intellect and education arguably stems not just from his life experiences but, more importantly, his own attitudes towards them. Dexter grew up in the East Midlands and declared that his family owned only three books. He and his brother trained to be Classics and English teachers. As a result – and unlike Shakespeare, whom he conventionally termed “the greatest writer in English” – Dexter could certainly not be accused of having “small Latin and less Greek”. Meanwhile Dexter once described his brother as becoming a talented pianist and violist, with a penchant for Wagner – a trait instantly recognisable in Morse.
In a late 2015 interview with Susan Smith, a postgraduate researcher at the University of Birmingham, he paid tribute to his school English teacher – the aptly-named Mr Sharp – who made it his mission to guide the teenage Dexter through his “ignorance of English literature” and the entire canon of Thomas Hardy.
Dexter was particularly fond of the teaching tradition of learning passages of poetry and phrases from drama by heart. He used them consciously and unconsciously in writing and apparently penned them from memory, rather than searching for his allusions in books.
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He also emphasised the difficulty readers today face in getting Shakespeare’s historical references and believed that the sounds of Shakespearean lines could be more accessibly pleasurable and valuable than what they actually meant. If this was a veiled attack on test-driven education, it is an interesting one given Dexter’s work for the University of Oxford’s local exam board, a body which designed and awarded vocational qualifications. Meanwhile, the emphasis on the sound of words is poignant given that the onset of deafness was the impetus for this first career move away from teaching.
Killing off experts
The “death of the expert” has often been announced in recent months, and alongside it a more widespread anti-intellectualism bemoaned. Dexter’s whodunnits and their descendants are saturated not just with erudite characters with wide-ranging specialisms, high cultural works and events (opera, classical music, literary festivals). They also exhibit an everyday joy in mental exercise given Morse’s fondness for crosswords, anagrams, and arithmetic.
Indeed, his works constitute opportunities for readers’ and viewers’ mental puzzling, including spotting Dexter in his Hitchcock-style cameos as well as his mischievous deliberate errors and made up quotations. Their popularity, still airing in prime-time slots on various, commercial, free-to-air channels, after over half a century, goes someway towards counterbalancing moral panic about alleged social apathy – even hostility – to intellect, education and the academy.
Sarah Olive, Lecturer, English in Education, University of York
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
What is fiction good for in a post-truth world?
Johanna Altmann / Shutterstock.com
Rafe McGregor, University of York
Ever since Plato equated poetry with falsehood in the fourth century BC, the value of fiction has been in doubt. No convincing case for its value has since been made, beyond the obvious pleasures experienced by readers and audiences. 
Today, fiction in the form of narratives – or, more simply, stories – permeates almost every aspect of our culture, from entertainment to law, medicine, and identity. We are also in the age of post-truth politics, where telling a demonstrably false story can be more compelling than telling the truth. Could overexposure to fiction account for the devaluation of truth that dominated the recent presidential elections, where both candidates lied and the most extravagant liar won?
Philosophers, critics, and artists have long attempted to offset the potential dangers of fiction by proposing various links between the experience of fiction and competing conceptions of truth. The tradition of defending fiction was founded by Aristotle and includes Horace, Sir Philip Sidney, Dr Johnson, and Matthew Arnold.
Since the contribution of Friedrich Schiller at the end of 18th century, the theory has been known as aesthetic education. Such theorists argue that art provides an indirect but integral education in ethics, a moral education by aesthetic means. Contemporary advocates include Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Martha Nussbaum. Of course, claims about the psychological and behavioural benefits of engaging with sophisticated and popular fictions vary wildly in strength.
Thomas Bethge/Shutterstock.com
Empirical evidence
The question of whether the ubiquity of narratives has devalued truth or enhanced morality prompts a further question: what exactly happens to us when we read books or watch films? There is a paucity of empirical evidence in this field.
The most frequently-quoted study on the topic was published by psychologists Evan Kidd and Emanuele Castano in 2013. They conducted five different experiments on samples of between 72 and 356 participants, each of which was divided into two groups. One read short passages of literary fiction (understood as being complex or challenging) and the other short passages of nonfiction or popular fiction.
The results indicated that participants who had read the literary fiction performed significantly better on a theory of mind test – which measures the ability to understand the mental states of others, a precondition of empathy – than those who had read either nonfiction or popular fiction.
Sounds like it backs up the aesthetic education theory, right? But the limitations of the study have been widely acknowledged, and its validity in this case is also doubtful. Literary narratives are, like their theatrical and cinematic counterparts, designed to be experienced as a whole. We cannot assume that the benefits of the literary experience will simply be the sum of the experiences of its parts. The same objection applies to the failed attempts to replicate Kidd and Castano’s findings in 2016.
breakermaximus / Shutterstock.com
If the evidence for the effects of engaging with fiction is so limited in quantity and quality, it seems prudent to seek an answer from a comparable field in which there has been more research. The obvious example is the relation between video-game violence and aggression. Video-games are designed to entertain and may or may not cause aggression in players; fictions are designed for the same purpose and may devalue truth, enhance morality, or have no secondary effect at all.
In a multiple analysis published in 1998, Karen Dill and Jody Dill claimed that there was a link between exposure to video-game violence and aggression, but advised caution on the basis of the limited quantity and quality of studies published.
Then, in a multiple analysis published 25 years later, Malte Elson and Christopher Ferguson lamented both the continued lack of standardisation and the frequency with which academics and others made controversial claims that were not supported by the data. They found that the evidence for a causal link between video-games and aggression was at best inconclusive.
Given that the research in the video-game field has been extensive, and unearthed no answers, it is hardly surprising that so little is known about the effects of experiencing fiction.
Counterfactual value
Fiction is nonetheless valuable in at least one way: its falsehood. In representing undisguised untruth, fictions present what psychologists call counterfactual thinking and philosophers call possible worlds.
In watching Amazon’s The Man in the High Castle, we experience a representation of what a world in which Germany had created the atomic bomb before America would look and sound like. Aside from its entertainment value in engaging audiences on sensory, imaginative, and emotional levels, the series provides a detailed example of how an America run by right-wing extremists might have looked and might look like in the future. In doing so, it highlights the significance of avoiding that possible future.
The truth value of fiction is in the various ways in which it enlightens by deviating from the truth. Undisguised fictions will continue to be of value, no matter how many fictions presidential candidates disguise as facts.
Rafe McGregor, Associate Lecturer, University of York
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Not My Review: On Liberty, by John Stuart Mill (1859)
The link below is to a book review of ‘On Liberty,’ by John Stuart Mill.
For more visit:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/apr/03/john-stuart-mill-on-liberty-100-best-nonfiction-books-review-robert-mccrum
Guide to the classics: Neil Gaiman’s American Gods
Starz
Elizabeth Hale, University of New England
Fans of Neil Gaiman are having a bountiful year. In February there was the release of his retelling of the Norse myths. In March, Dark Horse is releasing the comic book adaptation of his influential 2001 novel American Gods. And in April, American Gods comes to the small screen, released through Starz. 
If you like your literary gods multiple and varied, from cultures galore, in a controlled riot of power, fear, wit, and wisdom, then American Gods is for you.
Its premise is one of the book’s many appeals: the United States contains all sorts of ancient gods from abroad, surviving in the myths and stories and imaginations of the immigrants who brought them there. It’s a novel that investigates the American condition through its beliefs, and its contradictions, and offers the idea that gods walk among us (if we only know where to look for them).
‘All the tradition we can get’
In American Gods, a man named Shadow is released from prison when his wife dies in a car accident. As he travels home, he falls in with Mr Wednesday, a mysterious grifter, who offers him a job as a bodyguard. When he accepts the offer, they seal the deal by drinking mead, the honey-wine that is the drink of Norse gods and warriors. “We need all the tradition we can get,” says Wednesday, referring to the seriousness of their deal, but also to the key concept of the novel.
It emerges that Wednesday is really the Norse god, Odin, drawn to the US by Viking voyagers. “Tradition,” in the form of old gods like Odin, is under threat, he tells Shadow. People don’t believe in old gods any more; they’re too busy worshipping new gods, or concepts, like cities and towns, roads and rails, high finance, media, and digital technology. As an “old” god, Wednesday is preparing to do battle with the new ones. A god who is not believed in suffers a particularly final form of death.
With Shadow in tow, Wednesday traverses the US, calling the old gods to action, convincing them to gather and fight enemies like Mr Town and Media.
They call on Czernobog, the Bulgarian god of darkness, who lives in Chicago with the Zorya star sisters of Morning, Evening and Night. And Easter, the German goddess of fertility and rebirth, in whose footsteps flowers bloom, who is living in San Francisco. Mr Jacquel, the Egyptian god Anubis, runs a funeral parlour with his partner Ibis (the god Thoth), in Cairo, Illinois. Mr Nancy, Anansi the African spider-trickster god, and Mad Sweeney, an original Irish leprechaun, appear from time to time, as do many others.
Starz
From Haitian Voodoo figures to Hungarian Kobbolds this America is inhabited by a panoply of old gods. It’s symbolic of the elaborate tapestry of heritage that makes up a nation that prides itself on its newness, but is uneasily aware of its traditions. As Shadow crosses America, he reflects on these ironies, as well as the local quirks he observes, slotting them into an increasing sense of the nation’s variety and commonalities.
Interspersed throughout American Gods are extracts from a history, ostensibly written by Mr Ibis (the Old Egyptian God, Thoth). These extracts tell how other gods and mythical beings make their way to the US, in the beliefs and stories of different culture. There’s Essie Tregowan, a Cornish con-artist who is transported to America, and who brings with her the piskies of her youth, or Salim, a taxi-driver from Oman who becomes a jinn. Postmodern novels often use approaches like this to broaden the range of reference; these inset stories provide a neat way of exploring different gods and myths as they connect to Gaiman’s America.
While American Gods is a serious reflection on the nature of American culture, its most appealing aspect is the concept that the gods live among Americans, hiding in plain sight.
This is the key to American Gods’ continued popularity, I think: it offers the fantasy, the hope, (or the fear) that our reality is merely one plane of existence, that just out of sight, or in plain sight if we choose to look, is something bigger, something mythical, something more powerful.
Starz
And if you know how to find them, you have the opportunity to collect them, as Wednesday and Shadow do, to gather them together for a final battle, much as one might in an epic game of Dungeons and Dragons, or a supernatural round of Pokemon Go.
I do believe in fairies
Gaiman is not alone in exploring the power of belief and fantasy to keep the gods alive. It’s a theme that never quite goes away: witness JM Barrie’s comment in Peter and Wendy (1908):
Every time a child says, ‘I don’t believe in fairies,’ there is a fairy somewhere that falls down dead.
In Michael Ende’s The Neverending Story (1979), eroding belief in fiction is killing an imaginary kingdom called Fantasia, until an ideal child reader can bring it back to life. In contrast are Terry Pratchett’s piling of myth upon myth in the hugely popular Discworld series, or Rick Riordan’s recasting of the Perseus myth in the Percy Jackson series. All play in different ways with ideas about mythology, the role of belief, and the endurance of ancient ideas about power and creation.
In American Gods, Gaiman contrasts belief in the old gods with the flattening, meaningless forms of new media and digital technologies. But a lot has changed since June 2001 – not least the continuing evolution of the internet – which has turned into the ideal tool for reinvigorating and investigating them.
Starz
From online gaming communities, to exhaustive wikis, to the project I’m currently involved in, Our Mythical Childhood, which gathers and analyses the retellings of classical myth and culture in children’s texts around the world, people interested in mythlore are finding ways to think about myth using technology.
We like observing the gods, exploring their powers, telling their stories in different ways, collecting them, arranging them, playing with them. We seem to like all the tradition we can get, even on the most cutting edge of technological advancement.
‘Right angles to reality’
American Gods is a response to the perceived flat soullessness of a tech-heavy, media-heavy, corporatised, citified, sophisticated world. Divorced from the old gods, which symbolise the meaningful association with life and the land, Wednesday wonders what hope is there for society.
And yet, it emerges that Mr Wednesday is as much of a soulless con-artist as any of the new gods he despises, manipulating the battle for his own power. It takes an act of real, primal sacrifice on Shadow’s part to let him to see through the con, and understand that, when it comes down to it, as a human, all you have is yourself:
You know, I think I would rather be a man than a god. We don’t need anyone to believe in us. We just keep going anyhow. It’s what we do.
Though the advertisements for the upcoming television series exhort viewers to “Believe,” the response might well be: “Believe in what?”
In the novel, it is the land that eclipses gods and men, as Whiskey Jack, the Native American trickster spirit, tells Shadow after the battle is over:
Listen, gods die when they are forgotten. People too. But the land’s still here. The good places, and the bad. The land isn’t going anywhere.
Believe in the land, then. Gaiman’s novel finds its power in the land, in the people’s relation to the land, in the quirky, carnivalesque, homespun totems and places of power he nominates as places to overlay his web of mythicalism. This is the ultimate appeal of American Gods: the idea that all you have to do is find the places of power.
In this novel they are out-of-the-way carnivalesque sites carved into rock-faces, such as Tennessee’s Rock City and Illinois’ House on the Rock (both real-life American tourist attractions).
House on the Rock
To access the mythical plane, go to places like these, and turn at “right angles to reality” (easier said than done, but at least Gaiman gives us the clue). That’s the ultimate point of novels like this, which invest reality with mythology, magic or fantasy: the promise of finding out the true story lying beneath the surface, the secret to the universe.
This book, beyond collecting, analysing, and arranging American gods, is an examination of power – what is real power, and what is not. “Mythologies,” Gaiman said, round about the time he must have been mulling over American Gods, “have always fascinated me. Why we have them. Why we need them. Whether they need us.”
It will be interesting to see what the TV adaptation does with American Gods, whether it takes on this questioning. But the questioning may also have changed. The novel was published in June 2001, and the Western world turned sharply at right angles to itself not long after.
One new element of the adaptation, preview writers have noticed already, is the addition of Vulcan, the Roman God of metallurgy and weaponry. It’s a highly appropriate comment on an America now more than ever in the grip of gun-ownership, and intriguingly it adds a figure from the classical Roman pantheon, missing from the original. Adaptations always move the conversation on a little. Perhaps the gods, too, move with the times.
Elizabeth Hale, Senior Lecturer in English and Writing (children’s literature), University of New England
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Not My Review: Alex, Approximately by Jenn Bennett
A Harry Potter Collection
Not My Review: A Horse Walks Into A Bar, by David Grossman
At the BookShelf 
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