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The Jevlir Caravansary

Month: September 2007

  • The God-Talk Club is Born

    Note: This is the start of a new series, without the end of any others. I will expand on this in the series page. Briefly, I want to practice writing dialog, try various ways of presenting it, and also try presenting different views on various theological topics in a sympathetic way. Basically I’m practicing here, so read at your own risk. Of course, that’s not much different from anything else on this blog!

    Also, all characters, places, events, and churches in this story are fictional. It is a work of fiction.

    * * * * *

    Mark wasn’t too sure why he pulled into the roadside cafe. He rarely ate out. As a seminary student on a partial scholarship but without church support he had to be careful with his money. But tonight he needed to get working on a three page paper, and he couldn’t think how he was going to do it.

    It was Saturday night, the paper was due Monday morning. He felt silly as he thought about that. He was a veteran of countless all nighters in which he had produced 10, 15, or 20 pages in a night with no problem, complete with footnotes, formatted according to the professor’s requirements. Yet he had this feeling of dread.

    “You will write three pages on what it means to you personally to be a Christian. No references, no quotations, not even Bible verses. Just three pages from you.”

    There was a short time of silence in the class. For many of them, half or more of a paper could be made up of summing up other people’s views and providing references for them.

    “But Dr. Youngman,” said one, “References to the great teachers of the past are important! I can’t imagine talking about Christianity without referencing some of the great thinkers in Christian history.”

    “Well, you’re going to learn to imagine it. Just three pages.”

    “Exactly?” asked another student.

    “Make it between 2.9 and 3.1 pages. Edit it until you get it to the right length.”

    “What if I’m not a Christian,” asked another student.

    “Good question,” said the professor. “One assumes that most students at a seminary are Christians, but one may be wrong. If you are not a Christian, then write about what it means to you to say someone else is a Christian.”

    “And if we’re not sure, not committed?”

    “Write about why you’re not sure then, 3 pages, all your words.”

    “I don’t think I can express myself in three pages. You’ve given us a broad subject.”

    “Narrow it down.”

    “But how? What is the most important thing for me to talk about?”

    “That’s what you should be asking yourself.”

    “What if I can’t think of three full pages?”

    “Consider the impact of a zero for this assignment on your grade, and feel the motivation flowing over you.”

    (more…)

  • Book: Alpha

    This book was a pleasant surprise. I’m normally annoyed by the huge possibilities that are ignored in stories about future AI or machine sentience. It seems to me to be the area in which near future science fiction does the worst job of projection.

    In this case, however, [tag]Catherine Asaro[/tag] does a wonderful job of looking forward but still providing a comprehensible, easy to read, and entertaining tail. One can feel the possibility of a future like this. I hardly had to suspend disbelief at all.

    Of course the actual possibilities are so varied that one can hardly predict anything, I think, but in this case, at least the story seems possible.

    As for characters, I found them a little bit light, but nonetheless interesting. There was more attention paid to the future technology than to the future people. The story did have some less predictable twists. I’ll certainly pick up books by this author again.

    I give it a numerical rating of 4 out of 5.

  • Book: Unashamed

    My wife handed me this book because she has been trying to get me to read one of [tag]Francine Rivers[/tag]’ stories about various Bible characters. I’m generally a bit slow to pick up this sort of book because production of a good story is very difficult. On the one hand you can stick closely to the [tag]Bible story[/tag] and ignore any problems that may cause for your story. On the other you can ignore the facts and create a story, but for me that doesn’t work because it isn’t consistent. Why write a story about someone with the name of a Biblical character if you are not actually going to use the Biblical character?

    My preference is that someone create a story about a person consistent with the characteristics of that person as claimed in the Biblical text. If one has to play with the facts a bit, that’s OK. What is invented to fill in the blanks is fine, as long as it stays consistent with the character.

    Unashamed takes on the story of Rahab, and I consider that a daunting task. First, Rahab becomes an exception to the order to destroy all the Canaanites, and the explanation given in the Bible doesn’t cover it. The spies swear an oath, and thus the Israelites keep that oath. This is consistent, though they seem to do so ungrudgingly, quite unlike their response to the oath they swore to the Gibeonites, which was kept only with great reluctance.

    Second, Rahab is a prostitute who becomes part of the genealogy of King David. That is an unusual thing and any proposed understanding requires some imagination.

    Rivers doesn’t really try to deal with the oddity of allowing a Canaanite to become part of the congregation. What she does manage is provide believable story elements to explain the position [tag]Rahab[/tag] was in so as to hide the spies, and how she might succeed in that. I find Rahab’s attitude toward her own people just a little bit cold and bloody-minded. Simply because they don’t grab hold of the God of Israel as she has, she shows very little sorrow for their deaths. She truly goes over to the side of the enemy. While that kind of cold-blooded attitude is a bit hard for me to accept it is quite realistic. To survive and have her name remembered favorably on the Israelite side, Rahab must have truly turned with vigor to the Israelites.

    I didn’t find the story overwhelmingly exciting. That is probably unavoidable in a story that connects to the Biblical story at all possible places. It’s hard to get into the tension of waiting in Rahab’s house while the Israelites march around the city when you know precisely what is going to happen! But that same characteristic makes this story an excellent example to use in studying the Biblical story. One of the procedures I suggest in the participatory Bible study method is to try to retell stories from different perspectives. People often find that hard to do with Bible stories. We are often afraid to let our imaginations work, but if you want to get the full benefit from a story, you need to think about that person’s attitudes and feelings, and that is going to require imagination. In my article Interpreting Stories, I try this process from the point of view of Ahab.

    If you have a study group and would like to try working more effectively on Bible stories, and by this I mean learning from the stories and making them relevant to your life, this little book would be a valuable contribution. Read it, think, imagine, and imitate.