Hah! You and me both, Randy. I find Trivial Pursuit to be a very annoying form of torture. Though it does keep me humble for sure.
The movie was Fried Green Tomatoes. One of the rare movies I’ve watched more than once. I like the soundtrack on that one too.
Great book – I read it a few years ago and really enjoyed it. He covered a lot of sad topics while remaining life-affirming and hopeful.
Still working my way through The Righteous Mind, mostly just at night before sleep. But I just learned the next novel I put a hold on is finally in. A Canticle for Leibowitz is something I first read back in the late 60’s, actually the first scifi I ever read. I remember really liking it and nothing else whatsoever. I guess everything old will be new again … at least as far as I can remember.
This was really a strange claim. Hundred years war? No nothing to do with that. In fact I couldn’t figure out when any war was fought where one side believed Jesus was human in divine form. I cannot even find anybody who believed in such a thing. Divine in human form? yes But human in divine form? Who ever believed that? I cannot even make sense of it. The closest I can even come to such an idea is adoptionism. Adoptionism is that Christ is man become God rather than God become man, which is not really the same as what Rabih Alameddine said and I cannot find any war which was fought over such an issue either.
Well it is a passage from a novel set in Beirut a place which has been touched by war for a very long time. It isn’t a claim anyone is making or supporting. It might even be an expression of exasperation rather than of fact. It isn’t even mythos, just good fiction but I still found the book touching.
Picked up my copy of A Canticle For Leibowitz (ACFL) today from the library. I had been waiting as the first person in line for probably two months or more. So I guess they decided their old copy was never coming back and they went out and bought a brand new paperback version.
I haven’t really dug in yet but there was an interesting passage in the ‘new’ intro written in 2005 by Mary Doria Russell of The Sparrow fame which @Mervin_Bitikofer and @jpm and I at least read. She is obviously a fan. Here are some outtakes from her Introduction:
Fiction or Literature? … What’s the difference between the two?
… I looked both words up in the dictionary when I got home. Fiction was defined as “any literary work portraying imaginary characters and events, as a novel, story, or play” while literature included “all writings in prose or verse, especially those of an imaginative character, but especially those having excellence of form or permanent value”.
So basically, Literature is classier than Fiction.
Still curious, I started asking people in the book business how they decided what was classy enough to be Literature. The semiserious consensus among the pros was, “If an editor has to look up three words while reading the manuscript, its literature.” The best answer I got was from my stepbrother Jack Provenzale, who doesn’t sell books but is a passionate reader. He said, “Literature changes you. When you’re done reading, you’re a different person.”
A Canticle for Leibowitz is Literature, no matter how you define it [as well as being sold under scifi].
Its author, Walter M. Miller, Jr., is indeed dead: tragically (and ironically, considering the final third of the book), a suicide.I’ve read this novel three times. The story has, of course, remained the same since 1959, but the persons who read it 1968 and in 1998, at eighteen and forty-eight, are not the same as the one who came to the novel most recently at the age of fifty-five. All three of us have been altered by it, according to our gifts at the time.
Looks like she and I are contemporaries. And I may have read it the first time in the same year she did. But this will be only my second reading now about fifty years later. I’m keen to see if it has any power to change me now. I know I’ve changed in many ways over the fifty years between but while I remember liking the book, I remember nothing specific from it and can’t say what if any changes it may have contributed to.
You’ve inspired me to think of giving it a second reading myself as well. I too remember … maybe not being profoundly changed by it so much as being (eventually) grabbed by the narrative and resonating strongly with it. As I recall it took me a bit to get into it … (another sign of great literature?). It took me several tries into the Lord of the Rings before the fire caught for that story as well.
I was disappointed, however, by my first (and only) foray into the sequel for Miller’s “Canticle…”, “St. Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman” (A title that surprises me now, because it doesn’t at all jog my memory even though I know I got a good start into what must have been that very book.) Perhaps it’s just because of my youth when I first tried that and should try it again now. I just remember being somewhat dismayed about various events in the story that perhaps (for better or worse) would not morally horrify me so much now. Perhaps there is yet ‘fire to be caught’ in that work too. It is also possible that he reached a pinnacle with “Canticle”. After all, that is the book everybody hears about.
I confess I was hoping to stir up a posse. But I’m tempted to wait a few days to start so I can finally finish The Righteous Mind. Such a good and enlightening read. Deserves to be very widely read. But last night it let me down by, instead of easing me off to sleep, it got head so stirred up I couldn’t much sleep.
No hurries here … (if patience was all you needed to get a hoped for posse rounded up). It will be a bit before I try that as my own reading list has been backing up here just a bit lately. But if or when you do, I’m in.
Cool. And if I start before you I will be discrete any potential spoilers. But I’m a regular tortoise with a book and I have a few other nonfiction books in progress, though they sre generally very forgiving when my eyes stray to a novel.
Okay, fair warning for any and all scifi buffs. I’m a couple of chapters into A Canticle for Leibowitz now, having finally finished The Righteous Mind. (Anyone else besides me think some version of the Haidt material should be a high school requirement?) Anyway, Walter Miller Jr’s A Canticle for Leibowitz is so well written, it practically reads itself. Like The Sparrow, it has one foot in science fiction and the other in religious fiction. Fifty years from having read it the first time, so far it is entirely new to me. Given how quickly my memory’s half-life seems to be shrinking, I imagine I’d still be able to discuss it for several months past the day I complete it. 
Looking forward to your report. I haven’t finished “Righteous Mind” yet, as I find it a bit disturbing (although very accurate) and have trouble listening to it while I work. However, so far it is excellent… I will have to listen to “Canticle” and place it on my list.
It is disturbing but at least it makes some sense of all the disturbing things we see in the broader culture - as well as, I imagine, within most subcultures. I don’t know that I can boil it down any more and certainly not better than he does. Usually I delight in finding key quotes which speak volumes to me. But his insights are blended pretty smoothly thoughout so I don’t think I’ll have much more to say about the book except in discussion. Is there anything you can put your finger on that you find especially disturbing?
Judging from the first few chapters I don’t think you’ll find it hard to listen to. I mean, it does describe a post apocalyptic world. The fact that there are still any humans around and that they manage to find expression for religion is more hopeful than I sometimes feel about our chances. It feels like we’re not far removed from this but with much more deadly means of destruction at our disposal.
For @Randy, I wasn’t going to write anything about the Haidt book but I just ended up doing that on Facebook so I’ve copied it for you here for what it’s worth. It probably isn’t specific enough for your use but I wanted to make it appealing to my majority liberal friends.
Just as we humans have five taste receptors and yet don’t all like the same foods, so Haidt explains we all have five moral foundations to draw on but don’t share all of the same values since we don’t place the same importance on all five moral foundations, denoted by: care/harm; fairness/cheating; loyalty/betrayal; authority/subversion; and, sanctity/degradation.
Conservatives value all five foundations nearly equally. What’s more, as moral creatures we are not primarily ruled by rationality. Might be nice if we were, but we aren’t. Moral reactions take place immediately without analysis. He compares our moral reactions to an elephant and our rational capacity as a driver on that elephant. Would be nice if the elephant always went and did as the driver wished but the truth is, the driver more often acts as a press secretary for the elephant - apologizing for or defending the elephant’s actions.
Apparently we who identify as liberal or progressive tend to emphasize just the first two foundations. I can remember in fact thinking that they alone were the essence of morality with other concerns falling under something more like manners. In order for democrats to be more successful, our politicians need to be more nuanced in the ability to address more than just issues of care and fairness. Recognizing that so many people’s inner elephant is going to immediately lean away from them if they don’t have something reassuring to say on all five foundations, they really need to learn to do this and of course in a way that they can mean what they say.If it were up to me, I’d make the material from this book part of a high school graduation requirement. I only wish I knew all this much sooner.
Thanks. That’s a good observation. When I get deeper in the book, I’ll have to do some more delving–Ancient Near East morality was strongly based on group identity, and it’s said that Eastern consciousness is frequently still affected by that. In some ways, our ideas of justice and democracy, stemming from Greek and Roman times, seem hard to spread. Maybe we need to read more into this so as to better understand their cultures.
ANE morality, for example, found it perfectly appropriate to kill the offspring to punish the sins of the father (though there is a caveat in Ezekiel about that).
The honor system and face saving, are sometimes stronger influences in some cultures than the West. That’s not to say they’re wrong–but the other 3 elements of morality are more prominent in some cultures than in the progressive, Western elements, too, I think.
“Righteous Mind” as listed by Russel Moore as one of the 20 most important books of the last 20 years accompanied by quotes just to give you 20 quotes from books in one spot.
https://erlcemailcommunication.cmail20.com/t/ViewEmail/r/C25CCB001D62458D2540EF23F30FEDED/5FDF8DACC1A48EAA13FFE994E815FA5E
One quote that struck me as appropriate in this current day, was from one of my favorite books, Gilead:
Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (Picador, 2004)
“This is an important thing, which I have told many people, and which my father told me, and which his father told him. When you encounter another person, when you have dealings with anyone at all, it is as if a question is being put to you. So you must think, What is the Lord asking of me in this moment, in this situation? If you confront insult or antagonism, your first impulse will be to respond in kind. But if you think, as it were, This is an emissary sent from the Lord, and some benefit is intended for me, first of all the occasion to demonstrate my faithfulness, the chance to show that I do in some small degree participate in the grace that saved me, you are free to act otherwise than as circumstances would seem to dictate. You are free to act by your own lights. You are freed at the same time of the impulse to hate or resent that person. He would probably laugh at the thought that the Lord sent him to you for your benefit (and his), but that is the perfection of the disguise, his own ignorance of it.”
I remember starting to read that because so many people loved it. But I found it slow and depressing. I hung in there for what seemed a very long way but finally gave it up. But that is a good quote. If there had been a few more morsels like this one along the way I think I could have made it.
It is one of those books you appreciate more after reading the sequels, Home and Lila. And now Jack, which I hope to get for Christmas.
Some people will find a whole lot of it disturbing if they are already afraid of science and don’t want any traditional religious answers about morality to get poked at. That won’t be most of the people that hang out here a lot. BUT … there is another anecdote in the book that very nearly everybody should find disturbing (and the author himself fully expects people will - it’s part of his point) and that is his story where he demonstrates (by our emotional reactions) how virtually nobody really buys into a version of a recent secular screed which essentially says: “informed adult consent” is the last word on any (especially sexual) ethics. All I will say here is that he has a true anecdote about a German man who ate another man - and Haidt gives enough detail about how that all happened (including a sexual fetish that was involved) that anybody of healthy, sound mind will be shocked by it. I think it’s fair to say that this one anecdote was by far the most shocking thing to read in the book, and minus that, the book could pretty much be considered for general audiences (again … also minus any sensitive fundamentalists who are scandalized by much less.) I forget which chapter that anecdote was in, but it is fairly early on in the book.
[…all this just to say, Randy, that if you’re past that story; then relax. Just bracket that one aside with any other nightmares you deal with, and enjoy the rest of the book … easy sailing from there.]
Just went back to see what else made that list in edition to Gilead and The Righteous Mind and was heartened to find the book that has my worldview in its grips currently, The Master and His Emissary by McGilchrist.
I’m always eager to discuss that book with others who have read it but, as with the Bible, it can’t be read from a purely rational point of view. The same is true for another writer who has been influential shaping my POV, the American Jungian psychologist James Hillman.
From the source you cited:
Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (Yale University Press, 2010)
“My thesis is that for us as human beings there are two fundamentally opposed realities, two different modes of experience; that each is of ultimate importance in bringing about the recognizably human world; and that their difference is rooted in the bihemispheric structure of the brain. It follows that the hemispheres need to cooperate, but I believe they are in fact involved in a sort of power struggle, and that this explains many aspects of contemporary Western culture.”
Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (Pantheon, 2012)
“Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second. Moral intuitions arise automatically and almost instantaneously, long before moral reasoning has a chance to get started, and those first intuitions tend to drive our later reasoning. If you think that moral reasoning is something we do to figure out the truth, you’ll be constantly frustrated by how foolish, biased, and illogical people become when they disagree with you…the mind is divided, like a rider on an elephant, and that rider’s job is to serve the elephant. The rider is our conscious reasoning—the stream of words and images of which we are fully aware. The elephant is the other 99 percent of mental processes-the ones that occur outside of awareness but that actually govern most of our behavior.”
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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