Tyndale by David Teems

Tyndale is one of the most influential writers of English after the man who was Shakespeare and among the most creative, counted among Chaucer and Joyce. The book, Tyndale: the Man Who Gave God an English Voice by David Teems (Thomas Nelson, 2012), is at its best discussing the contributions and innovations of Tyndale the translator, but is marred by dischronous and ill-fitted metaphors that set the stage. Comparing the church at the time to radical Islam, its actions to Jihad, and referring to the orange and red “threat level” do a great disservice to the period; as is calling it a “humorless age”. So while the bulk of the book does not trade on such currency, it makes for an unfortunate first impression.

The glories of the book pay tribute to Tyndale’s style and panache for turning a phrase: Be not weary in well doing, Seek and ye shall find, Fight the good fight. The price of the book is well worth it for the list of words the English language owes to William Tyndale: atonement, churlishness, brotherliness, particolourd, fatling and on and on. His economy put us in such debt that it can never be paid, but in honoring the man who coined them.

 

Fyodor Dostoevsky by Peter Leithart

Biography is a troublesome genre in that it requires reducing a life to its lifeless chronology, pinning the influences upon the writer like labels to the appendages of a butterfly. The default setting of most biographers is to introduce the anxieties and trauma of a writer’s childhood so that the ensuing monuments of literature look to be the inevitable result of such a life, but the new biography of Dostoevsky by Peter Leithart (Thomas Nelson, 2011) avoids both the pitfalls of dreary biographical recap and the tenuous prospect of connecting an author’s psyche with his scholarship by artfully framing vignettes to develop the very themes Dostoevsky reflects upon in his novels. Drawing from Dostoevsky’s letters he constructs conversations as a novelist might to convey the person and his motives.

These biographical vignettes, rigorously researched and footnoted, are ordered by Dr. Leithart with a poets precision and timing. While no doubt a popular biography, Dr. Leithart’s “Fyodor Dostoevsky” nonetheless accomplishes a full vision of this great Russian novelist that a scholarly tome would spend hundreds more pages attaining.

A review copy was provided by the publisher Thomas Nelson, via Booksneeze.

Pope Benedict on Art

“The only really effective apologia for Christianity comes down to two arguments, namely, the saints the Church has produced and the art which has grown in her womb. Better witness is borne to the Lord by the splendor of holiness and art which have arisen in the community of believers than by the clever excuses which apologetics has come up with to justify the dark sides which, sadly, are so frequent in the Church’s human history. If the Church is to continue to transform and humanize the world, how can she dispense with beauty in her liturgies, that beauty which is so closely linked with love and with the radiance of the Resurrection? No, Christians must not be too easily satisfied. They must make their Church into a place where beauty — and truth — is at home. Without this the world will become the first circle of hell…. A theologian who does not love art, poetry, music and nature can be dangerous. Blindness and deafness toward the beautiful are not incidental: they necessarily are reflected in his theology.”

- Joseph Ratzinger (1985)

Listen : James Carse

“…a creative listener is not someone who simply allows me to say what I already want to say, but someone whose listening actually makes it possible for me to say what I never could have said, and thus to be a new kind of person, one I have never been before and could not have been before this directed listening.”
-James Carse, The Silence of God

Rowan Williams on the “Poet-Priest”

“I always get annoyed when people call R.S. Thomas a poet-priest. He’s a poet, dammit. And a very good one. The implication is that somehow a poet-priest can get away with things a real poet can’t, or a real priest can’t. I’m very huffy about that. But I do accept there’s something in the pastoral office that does express itself appropriately in poetry. And the curious kind of invitation to the most vulnerable places in people that is part of priesthood does come up somewhere in poetic terms.”

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from the Book of Common Prayer

O Lord, support us all the day long, until the shadows lengthen, and the evening comes, and the busy world is hushed, and the fever of life is over, and our work is done.

Psalm 8 as Translated by Google

Conductor on - Gitit Psalm of David:

2 Lord our Lord - What a great name in - the land that gift Hudach on - heaven

Three from the Infants | Links I founded fierce foe for Courarich taking revenge;

4 that - I’ll see Shmich acts Azvatiach moon and stars which shank;

5 What - Enosh that - you remember him and Ben - a man that Atpkednu:

6 Utahsarhu slightly from God and honor and glory Ataterhu:

7 Tamshilhu acts of hands every drink under - up:

8 cold and thousands of them all and beasts of the field:

9 bird fish of the sea water has paths of days:

10 LORD our Lord - What a great name in - country

Bad Christian Art : Tony Woodlief

“I’m convinced that bad art derives, like bad literary theory, from bad theology. To know God falsely is to write and paint and sculpt and cook and dance Him falsely. Perhaps it’s not poor artistic skill that yields bad Christian art, in other words, but poor Christianity.”

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Heidelberg Catechism : Lord’s Day 22 : Question 58 as Poetry

Q: What comfort do you receive from the article about the life everlasting?

Since I now already feel
in my heart the beginning
of joy eternal,
I shall
after this life possess
perfect blessedness,
such as no eye has seen,
nor ear ever heard,
nor the heart of man
conceived– a blessedness
in which to praise forever God.

On Knowledge and Desire

“We cannot know God without knowing self, cannot know self without knowing God, and cannot know either without encountering God in His good creation.”

“We need to recognize that any renunciation, any check on or discipline of desire, is for the sake of a more complete satisfaction of desire. Suppression of desire can only pervert desire. Desire is “disciplined” by desire, desire for things now channeled by overwhelming desire for better things later.”

-PJ Leithart

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