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1916: Art and Entertainment

Sep26

On May 20, 1916, artist Norman Rockwell publishes his first cover for the magazine Saturday Evening Post. The picture was called Boy With Baby Carriage., and it shows a boy who is having to push a baby in her carriage while his friends go off to play baseball.

Also, during 1916 and until his death in 1926, Claude Monet continues to paint his murals of water lilies even though he develops cataracts on his eyes and is unable to see as clearly or paint in such detail as he was in his earlier work.

Christina Bjork (b. 1938) is author of the beautiful book, Linnea in Monet’s Garden. In the book, Linnea, a young girl, and her neighbor, Mr. Blom, get to visit Paris and Giverny and see the places where Monet created his paintings. The book is a wonderful introduction to impressionist art and to the work and life of Claude Monet.

The Fear: Robert Mugabe and the Martyrdom of Zimbabwe by Peter Godwin

Jul11

Peter Godwin is the award-winning author of When a Crocodile Eats the Sun and Mukiwa. Born and raised in Zimbabwe, he was educated at Cambridge and Oxford and became a foreign correspondent, reporting from more than 60 countries. Since moving to Manhattan, he has written for National Geographic, the New York Times Magazine, and Vanity Fair. He has taught at Princeton and Columbia, and in 2010 received a Guggenheim fellowship.

The Fear covers events and stories of people in Zimbabwe mostly during 2008-2009, the time of an historic election in Zimbabwe which resulted in a new government to replace that of the octogenarian dictator, Robert Mugabe. I knew a very little about current and recent events in Zimbabwe going into this book—only that Mugabe was a dictator and that the economy of Zimbabwe was in a shambles as a result of his rule.

Now, I know a lot more, even though the narrative was somewhat confusing at times. Godwin travelled around the country, interviewing this person and that, and telling the stories mostly of the opposition party that actually won the election in 2008, the MDC. Mugabe’s thugs, the ZANU-PF, are uniformly seen as just that—thugs, murderers, and torturers. I tend to think that one-sided picture is accurate. Even though MDC presidential candidate Morgan Tsvangirai won the election in 2008, Mugabe refused to give up power, and eventually the two men and their political allies were forced to enter into a power-sharing agreement brokered by South Africa. In spite (because of) of widespread election violence and persecution of those who voted for the MDC, Tsvangirai decided to avoid a civil war by becoming part of the government and trying to work for change from within.

The Fear is a harrowing book. The tales of torture and suffering that fill the book are quite overwhelming. I wondered how people could be so cruel and evil, and then I remembered that we are all capable of great evil and only held in check by the grace of God. I also wondered how people can continue to live relatively normal lives in the face of such brutality, and I remembered that humans are remarkably resilient.

Sometimes I had trouble remembering who was who as the narrative moved from one political figure or common person to another, and much of the terminology was not explained. I could have used a glossary, at least. Part of the problem was reading the book on my Kindle, where I’ve found it is difficult to look back and remind oneself of what has gone before, who a particular character is, or what information may have been explained in the second chapter and merely referenced in the fourth or fifth. I prayed for the people of Zimbabwe as I read, however, and I was moved to pity by their plight.

Of course, the questions in my mind throughout my reading were: “What is going on now in Zimbabwe? How have these people fared? Have conditions improved?” Recent headlines are not encouraging:

Bomb blast hits Zimbabwe official’s home
Police violently break up Zimbabwe rally
Zimbabwe in a state of ‘crisis’
Mugabe depends on diamonds for power
Mugabe begins anti-sanctions campaign

If you are interested in Zimbabwe in particular or African governments and politics in general, you will appreciate the information in Mr. Godwin’s book. You will also wonder how people can be so cruel and how you can help the people of Zimbabwe who have suffered so much for so long. I would suggest prayer and possibly a contribution to one of these charities in Zimbabwe.

Missionary Fiction

Jun23

In an episode of what Madame Mental Multivitamin calls synchronicity/serendipity/synthesis, I read two works of fiction this week based on the lives of the authors’ missionary grandparents. I’ve also been thinking a lot about sending two “missionaries” from my own home to Slovakia in a couple of weeks and about my mother and my father-in-law and the legacy of faith they have given to me and to my family.

The first book, The Moon in the Mango Tree by Pamela Binnings Ewen, was just O.K. The writing quality is somewhat uneven, and the characters sometimes enigmatic. The story opens in 1916 in Germantown, Pennsylvania, when Barbara (Babs), a schoolgirl and aspiring opera singer, meets Harvey Perkins, a young medical student. As the two grow together, get married, and then endure being parted while Harvey serves in the military in France during The Great War, Barbara learns that she must subordinate her choices to those of her loving but firm-minded husband. The couple go to Thailand to serve as medical missionaries, even though Barbara must give up her hopes for a career in opera and even her enjoyment of classical music itself to live in a remote mission outpost in Northern Thailand. Of course, with such different outlooks and goals in life and with what I suppose was a typical (?) early twentieth century lack of communication in the marriage, trouble is bound to ensue. And it does.

Besides the fact that the characters’ motivations were sometimes obscure, I guess what I disliked about the story was that neither Harvey nor Barbara seemed to have much of a faith in God to lose. They do lose their faith, both of them, in the face of suffering and hardship in Thailand. But I couldn’t figure out whether they believed in anything much in the first place, other than themselves and their own ability to “be a team” and improve the physical lives of the Thai villagers. The book was good, but not great, although I liked the ending and the ideas about the legacy we leave as a result of the choices we make.

The second book I read had the same basic premise as the first: a young couple goes to the mission field, China this time, in the early twentieth century. However, City of Tranquil Light by Bo Caldwell made me cry. It’s very, very difficult to write a book about Good People, about heroes and heroines, without making them larger than life, unapproachable, and unrelatable. (The dictionary says “unrelatable” isn’t a word, but it should be, and I’m going to use it anyway.) Will and Katherine Kiehn are ordinary, fallible people, and yet they are heroes. They go to China as young, untested volunteers with only their calling and their faith in God’s love and mercy to sustain them, and they survive disease and poverty and famine and family tragedy and war and persecution. Each of the two has a “crisis of faith”, maybe even more than one, but they manage to hold onto the the God who is always holding on to them, even when doubt and fear threaten to overwhelm. The story is told in first person from Will’s point of view, interspersed with excerpts from Katherine’s sporadically kept journal. The whole novel is just golden.

As a reviewer, I feel as if I ought to be able to tell you how Ms. Caldwell was able to write such a true story about people that I believe in as much as I believe in my own parents and grandparents, but I can’t. The humility and the honesty displayed in the characters of both Katherine and Will inspire imitation. I wanted to sit beside an elderly Will Kiehn, listen to his stories of China, and absorb some of his wisdom and his indomitable meekness.

City of Tranquil Light is one of the best fictional accounts of missionary life I’ve ever read. It ranks right up there with Elisabeth Elliot’s No Graven Image, a book I mentioned (and recommended) here. City of Tranquil Light has the added advantage of painting a wonderful picture of a committed, growing marriage.

Can you tell I really, really liked this book? I happened to pick it up from the library and read it because it’s one of the books on the long list of nominations for the 2011 INSPY Awards. Thanks to whomever nominated this book. If all the nominated books are as good as this one, the judges will have an impossible job.

Lost in Shangri-La by Mitchell Zuckoff

Jun10

World War II, in addition to being The Good War fought by the Greatest Generation, continues to provide a wealth of lessons, images, illustrations, and just good stories for authors to mine and for readers to appreciate. Lost in Shangri-La, subtitled “A True Story of Survival, Adventure, and the Most Incredible Rescue Mission of World War II,” is one of those many stories that can inspire and educate us today, some sixty odd years later.

The episode took place in Dutch New Guinea (later called Irian Jaya and West Papua, a part of Indonesia) in the waning years of the war, 1945-1946. Twenty-four AMerican servicemen and WAC’s boraded a transport plane for a sight-seeing trip over the Baliem Valley, also called by the service personnel that discovered, Shangri-La Valley because it reminded them from the air of James Hilton’s novel, Lost Horizon. The plane crashed, and three of the twenty-four miraculously survived the crash. However, the three were trapped inside a valley that was inaccessible to airplanes, and between them and the coast where Allied base were, was miles and miles of jungle, home to possibly hostile tribesmen and also possibly filled with Japanese soldiers who had yet to surrender. And to compound the problem of getting back to their comrades, the three survivors were covered with serious burns from the crash that were in danger of turning gangrenous.

The mountains were too high for helicopters. The valley was too narrow for planes to land, and there was no suitable runway anyway. The jungle was too thick fro planes to even spot the survivors from the air. How were the three to be rescued? The story of how and who did it and what the crash survivors encountered in the valley of “Shangri-La” is quite fascinating.

I was reminded of the missionary story, Peace Child by Don Richardson. Mr. Richardson worked with the Sawi people of Papua somewhere in or near the Baliem Valley where the people in Lost in Shangri-La were marooned. He was also in contact with the Dani and Yali tribes, the same peoples with whom the survivors of the Shangri-la plane crash found refuge. After the war, many of these isolated Papuan tribespeople were introduced to Christianity and prepared by missionaries for their inevitable encounter with Western culture.

It was fascinating to get a glimpse of these tribes in their pre-Western-influenced and pre-Christian cultures. Obviously, the coming of Western influences to these tribes has been a mixed blessing. Before World War II the Baliem Valley was largely unexplored and isolated from the rest of the world. Now, although the valley is still somewhat isolated because of its inaccessibility, most of the native people claim to be Christians, and the wars between villages that took place with regularity before are no more the men’s favorite pastime.

At any rate, if you’re interested in these sorts of things—isolated people groups and cultures, World War II stories of adventure and bravery, historic encounters between modern and prehistoric groups of people— Lost in Shangri-La should be just the ticket.

Similar and related books:
The Airmen and the Headhunters: A True Story of Lost Soldiers, Heroic Tribesmen and the Unlikeliest Rescue of World War II by Judith Heimann.
Peace Child by Don RIchardson.
Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand.

What is your favorite (true) World War II story?

Glimmers of Hope: Memoir of a VSO in Zambia by Mark Burke

May9

Glimmer is right. Mr. Burke, who served as a math teacher in a rural Zambian school for boys from 2004 to 2006, under the auspices of the VSO (a British something like the American Peace Corps?), left Zambia disillusioned and rather disgusted with the “wastefulness and inefficiencies” that were “trapping Zambia in self-fulfilling, perpetual stagnation.”

“I had been sceptical of religion beforehand and my experiences in Africa had cemented my poor opinion of Christianity in particular. Christianity was paraded endlessly in Zambia, but I often reflected that I never really met anyone there who I would consider genuinely Christian, most especially those in the employ of the church.”

Perhaps Mr. Burke is right, and all Zambian Christians are hypocrites and materialistic, selfish beggars. Or perhaps he found what he expected to find in the Christians of Zambia.

“In the context of Zambia I came to see Christianity not just as harmless nonsense but as positively dangerous. It encouraged irrational thinking and opposed the development of Reason. I had always had this view of religion, but now saw it brutally in action in a poverty-stricken country.”

He attributes almost all aspects of Zambian behavior and culture that he does not like and finds backward and unreasonable to “a lack of critical faculties encouraged by the sheepish following of religion.” It’s the Enlightenment versus the Age of Faith, Frederick the Great versus Bach, debate all over again.

I could not escape the impression that Mr. Burke came to Zambia hostile to Christianity, and he found in Zambian culture reasons to support his hostility. I’m sure that were I to go to Zambia I would find problems within the Zambian church and in the practice of Christianity in that country, but since I am a committed Christian I would see issues and aberrations that needed to be fixed rather than an entire belief system that needed to be jettisoned in favor of a devotion to Reason and Western common sense.

If Christianity is a foundational part of Zambian culture at this point in history, wouldn’t it make sense for even secular aid workers and others who want to help Zambians pull themselves out of poverty and stagnation and ignorance to work with the prevailing culture and help them to live up to the tenets of their faith rather than criticize the people for their Christian “obsession” in the first place? Should outsiders really damn the Christian message itself for not living up to whatever secular heights of Reason the author wants the Zambian people to scale? If your preconceived attitude is that Christianity is equivalent to superstition, then you will find evidence to support that notion wherever you go. Because of my underlying, entirely reasonable, preconceptions, I find Reason itself to be an inadequate god, and I believe that persons in the helping professions need a foundation that is stronger than secularism to provide strength and purpose over the long haul.

I thought this book was informative in regard to the problems in Zambia, but short on answers and quite lacking in a genuine empathy for the Zambian people. Unfortunately, Mr. Burke comes away from his “missions” experience discouraged and dominated by compassion fatigue. He does mention some of those “glimmers of hope”, one or two aid programs that he thinks might be somewhat effective, but the main themes of the memoir consist of disillusionment and disappointment.

Elisabeth Elliot wrote a fiction book after completing her work with the Quechua people in Ecuador in which she meditates on the inability of missionaries to effect change in a culture and on the unfathomable ways of God. The book is called No Graven Image, and it should be required reading for missionaries and other Christian aid workers. In the story, Margaret Sparhawk goes to South America to work with the Quichua (just as Elliot did). While there her most basic assumptions about God and about the effectiveness of missions work are challenged. The difference between Ms. Sparhawk’s fictional experience and Mr. Burke’s real-life experience is that even though the fictional missionary finds out that God does not always “bless” the work, it is the calling and the service lived out before Him that matter.

Again, Mr. Burke has some valid questions about Christianity as it is lived out in the context of Zambian culture and to tell the truth, as it is lived out many times in the U.S. and in other places. It is true that atheists are sometimes more compassionate and more honest than those who claim to follow Jesus. But I could wish that Mr. Burke would have looked a little more carefully in Zambia and elsewhere in his life experience to acknowledge that not all Christians are hypocrites and not all of the consequences of a Christian worldview are negative.

Around the World and Here at Home

May6

In our homeschool this week we started a year-long study of geography and cultures of the world. Our books this week were mostly about maps and globes and comparisons of world cultures and regions. We’ll be starting our travels in the Arctic and the Antarctic next week.

Books we read:
The Seven Continents by Wil Mara. (Rookie Read-about Geography)
Looking at Maps and Globes by Carmen Bredeson. (Rookie Read-about Geography)
Living in Polar Regions by Tea Benduhn. (Weekly Reader Life on the Edge)
The Whole World in Your Hands:Looking at Maps by Melvin and Gilda Berger.
Follow That Map! A First Book of Mapping Skills by Scot Ritchie.

Z-baby liked the last one best, Follow That Map!, probably because it had a story line and because I read it to her instead of having her read it herself. I thought all of them were adequate, information-wise, but not too terribly exciting or enticing. I’ll be working this summer and probably into the fall on a list of the BEST in primary/preschool level geography books and picture books set in countries around the world. What are you favorite around-the-world picture books?

Book links for today and this weekend:

Mother’s Day books your mom will actually like. by Kathleen Massara.

Christy Award nominees for 2011. Honoring and promoting excellence in Christian fiction. I’ve read exactly two of the books on the nomination list, She Walks in Beauty by Siri Mitchell (Semicolon review here) and Crossing Oceans by Gina Holmes (Reviewed by Gautami Tripathy). I thought both of those novels were O.K. but not really anything to write home about.

Have you read any of the Christy Award nominees? Are there any that you highly recommend?

More Books for Zambia

Apr25

Back in January, I went public with a project I called Books for Zambia, an effort to collect books to place in the library of Kazembe Orphanage in Zambia. We collected a few books and sent them back to Zambia with Amy Morrow and her family in February when they were here in Houston for a brief visit. Amy and her husband Tom are the founders and directors of Kazembe Orphanage. Thank you to those of you who contributed books to send to Zambia back in January.

Now a small group from my church is planning a trip to Kazembe for the month of July, and I would like to send more books with them.

If you would be interested in helping with this project by providing any of the books (new, or used in good condition), please email me (sherryDOTearlyATgmailDOTcom) for more information. You can order any of the books from Amazon and have them sent to me. Or if you have one or more of the books on the wishlist in good condition or have your own source, just email me the titles of the books you would like to contribute, and I will give you my address to send them. Right now the plan is for a group from my church to go to Zambia in July and take the books that we have gathered with them.

Purchasing children’s books in Zambia is quite expensive, and the selection is limited. There are seventeen twenty-one children at the Kazembe orphanage now, ranging in age from infants to five years old. The plan is for the children to stay at the orphanage until they are grown, receive an education, and become a force for good and progress in Zambia. You can read more at this post on Amy’s blog. You would be welcome to post information about Books for Zambia or about Kazembe Orphanage on your blog or website. I can vouch for both the financial need of the orphanage and for the fiscal responsibility of the Morrows in spending your money wisely to care for these children.

More information on Kazembe Orphanage:
Kazembe Orphanage official website
Kazembe Orphanage on Facebook
Amy’s blog, Amy’s Assorted Adventures.
Videos of the orphanage at vimeo
Twitter page for Kazembe Orphanage
Please consider donating a book or two during the month of May.

Resurrection Sunday: He Is Risen Indeed!

Apr23

I thought I had already linked to or embedded this video from Easter last year, but I don’t see it anywhere. Enjoy, and celebrate the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ.

On April 4, 2010, over 1,300 young people, all of them members of Faith Church celebrated Resurrection Sunday in Budapest, Hungary.

Music: Ferenc Balogh Jr.
Lyrics: Shelly Matos, based on the Hungarian text by Tamas Pajor (Tompage)
Producer: Ákos Nemes
Art Producer: Tamás Pajor (Tompage)

Peace Child by Don Richardson

Mar30

40 Inspirational Classics for Lent

Don Richardson (born 1935) is a Canadian Christian missionary, teacher, author and international speaker who worked among the tribal people of Western New Guinea, Indonesia. He argues in his writings that, hidden among tribal cultures, there are usually some practices or understandings, which he calls “redemptive analogies”, which can be used to illustrate the meaning of the Christian Gospel, contextualizing the biblical representation of the incarnation of Jesus. ~Wikipedia

That rather academic introduction to the story of missionary Don Richardson and his work with the Sawi people of Western New Guinea in Indonesia makes it sound almost boring. Peace Child, a missionary memoir, is anything but boring. Richardson went to Western New Guinea with his wife, Carol, and their seven month old baby in 1962. There they worked with a people who as a culture glorified violence, cannibalism, and revenge. In fact, as they listened to the story of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection in their own language, the Sawi laughed at the poor fool Jesus and admired Judas for his ability to deceive and betray such a close friend. Richardson despaired of ever being able to teach the Sawi the truth of the gospel until he discovered in their own culture that the Sawi had a tradition that mirrored the substitutionary death of Jesus as a “peace offering” for our sins.

The entire idea of redemptive analogies placed within cultures by God for the purpose of giving people a deeper and more complete understanding of the gospel should be handled carefully. I can see how it could be misused and and lead to more misunderstanding than understanding. However, used prayerfully and carefully, I can also see how God could use the stories and educational tools of a people and a culture to bring about miraculous communication. Peace Child is a wonderful story of just such a miracle.

1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was with God in the beginning. 3 Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. 4 In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. 5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. John 1:1-4

And The Word . . . Dwelt Among Us

Mar7

The Kimyal people of Papua, Indonesia receive the Bible in their own language:

What a celebration. Do we even begin to know what precious truth God has entrusted to us? “To whom much is given, of him much shall be required.” We in the West are abundantly blessed. God forgive us for the misuse and waste we have perpetrated with the blessing He has given us.

And won’t heaven be grand as we all worship the Lamb together, from every nation and tribe?