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Quiver Full Revisited, Part 2

Aug4

Next reading assignment: Molly at My Three Pennies Worth writes Quiverfull Schmiverfull. Good stuff to continue our discussion. Summation quotation:

“There are some good reasons why limiting family size can be godly, and I have friends who have had to make that difficult decision due to life-threatening issues. They are the minority, though. For many, the decision to “have 1.7 children” is not birthed (pardon the pun) from prayer, but from a nonchalant acceptance of what our godless society says is Normal.”

So to review from Quiver Full Revisited, Part 1, my first point was: Our culture is becoming anti-child, and this attitude is bad for our society and wrong for Christians.

My second point is easy to state and understand, too. The anti-child attitude and the lack of prayer and careful thought about the issue of contraception among Christians is a problem—not the number of children a couple chooses to have or not to have.

I consider myself “quiverfull.” We have eight children, and we don’t use contraceptives (anymore). We came to this place slowly after several years of the same prayerlessness and lack of careful thought that I decry in the above statement. I’m glad to see Christian women (and men) thinking about the issue of contraception and asking what the One who is supposed to be Lord of our entire lives would have them do in this area of decision.

A few years ago a leader of women’s ministry in my (Baptist) church told me, laughingly, in front of the younger of her two children, that she and her husband should have only had one child. The second one was a mistake. They were really only able to handle one child, and after the second one was born, they got that “fixed” right away so that there wouldn’t be any more mistakes. I couldn’t believe she was telling me this, and I was literally speechless. I have since thought of many responses, both good and bad, but the main question I would like to ask that lady if I were able to do so is this: “Do you really believe God made a mistake in giving you a second child?”

For Christians, children are never mistakes; children are blessings.

Born August 3rd

Aug3

Two of my favorite novelists have birthdays today: Baroness Phyllis Dorothy James (b. 1920) and Leon Marcus Uris (b. 1924, d. 2003).

Although I like her detective novels very much, my favorite P. D. James novel as of now is Children of Men, a dystopian novel about a world where no children are born. I suggest that those who are struggling with the “quiver-full question” read James’ rather chilling picture of a future with no children at all. Read my review here.

Leon Uris is sometimes described as a “Zionist” and one obituary in the British newspaper The Guardian referred to him as a racist for his portrayal of Arabs in his admittedly pro-Jewish novels. I think this is an unfair accusation, but if you are Palestinian, or sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, you might not enjoy Uris’ novels as much as I do. Exodus, Mila 18, and QB VIII are all great stories with lots of historical information about Israel and the experience of modern Jews in Europe during and after World War II. My thoughts about Uris and James and their books on this date last year.

Born July 30th

Jul30

Emily Bronte, b. 1818. Some critics insisted that Emily’s novel, Wuthering Heights, must have been written by a man because no woman could have written such a passionate story. Emily Bronte died of tuberculosis one year after the publication of her only novel. She was 30 years old.

For children who are not quite ready for the sturm und drang of Wuthering Heights, I recommend The Return of the Twelves by Pauline Clarke. It’s the story of a boy and his sisters who find in the attic of their new house twelve toy soldiers that magically come alive. The soldiers turn out to have belonged to another boy, Branwell, and his sisters, and keeping them a secret becomes a challenge.

All for One, and One for All!

Jul24

dumas

On the first Monday of the month of April 1625, the town of Meung looked as if it were in as complete a state of revolution as if the Huguenots had just made a second La Rochelle of it.

Alexandre Dumas , pere, was born near Paris on July 24, 1802. His grandfather was a marquis, and his grandmother was a black slave. Dumas’ father was soldier in Napoleon’s army. Dumas himself was a prolific writer; he wrote hundreds of plays and novels. However, his critics were numerous also. They said he plagiarized mnay of his works, and he made no secret of the fact that he employed several anonymous collaborators who wrote much of what Dumas published in his own name. Often Dumas provided the plot summaries, and his stable of writers fleshed out the stories and plays. His son, Alexandre Dumas, fils, became a famous playwright who wrote the story upon which the opera La Traviata is based.

The Three Musketeers is Dumas’ best-known novel. It is the first in a trilogy which consists of three novels:
Les Trois Mousquetaires,
Vingt Ans Après (Twenty Years After), and
Le Vicomte de Bragelonne ou Dix Ans Plus Tard (Ten Years Later).
This third novel is often split up into three pieces when published in English:
The Vicomte of Bragelonne,
Louise de la Vallire, and
The Man in the Iron Mask.
Dumas also wrote The Count of Monte Cristo.

If you’ ve never read these, you should. If you’ve only seen movie versions, you should read the book(s). You might get the impression from the movies that have been made that the musketeers were quite amoral or even immoral; however, in the books they are only chilvalrous and rather foolish knights who, in the romantic tradition, have lady loves, mostly worshipped from afar or at least chastely. There are all sorts of intrigues and plots, but the musketeers are loyal to their king and to one another. And the books are great fun.

First lines anyone?

Jul23

Michael Berube teaches literature and cultural studies at Penn State. On his blog, he’s started a l-o-n-g discussion (187 comments and counting) of Great First Lines in Novels.

Here are some of my favorites, not necessarily my favorite novels, but favorite first lines:

1. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.

2. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only

3. Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.

4. There once was a boy named Eustace Clarence Scrubb and he almost deserved it.

5. Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.

6. Now, Bix Rivers has disappeared, and who do you think is going to tell his story but me? Maybe his stepfather? Man, that dude does not know Bix deep and now he never will, will he?

7. “Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents,” grumbled Jo, lying on the rug.
“It’s so dreadful to be poor!”

8. Dr. Strauss says I shud rite down what I think and evrey thing that happins to me from now on.

9. It was a bright cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen.

10. All children, except one, grow up.

Not too hard. Who will be the first to guess all ten?

The Thinking Toolbox by Nathaniel and Hans Bluedorn

Jul20

Wow! What a great resource! This self-published book written by two young men who were homeschooled and “live in the middle of a cornfield” doesn’t look or read like an amateur job at all. These guys give learners a professional, but reader-friendly, introduction to logic and debate in thirty-five lessons. Of course, the school teacher in me immediately sees thirty-five chapters as one lesson for each week of the school year, and that’s probably exactly how we’ll be using this book this next year.

“This book is like a toolbox. This book is full of different kinds of tools you can use for different thinking tasks. Just as you take a wrench out of a regular toolbox and use it to fix the sink, so you can use the tools we give you in this book to solve thinking problems.

This book would be a good introduction to logic or to science since it covers rules of debate and argument, evaluating evidence, and using the scientific method to test observations and come to a conclusion. In the final section of the book, the authors encourage learners to do a project using the information learned in the first part of the book. The purpose of the project is to use the thinking tools that students have been reading about so that the information will become more than just isolated facts about circumstantial evidence and brainstorming and the analysis of data. Thinking tools that are used to do a project that interests the student become useful thinking tools that can be pulled out and applied to other tasks and projects.

Not only do I plan to use this book in my homeschool this year with my third grader and my fifth grader, I also will suggest that we use the book in our homeschool co-op to teach middle school and/or high school students the reasoning skills that the Bluedorns so skillfully explicate. The outside cover of the book itself says that it is “written for ages 13 through adult;” however, I gave it to my eight year old, and he was fascinated by the information, the cartoon pictures, and especially the exercises at the end of each lesson. I would say that the book could be used with students in the upper elementary grades with the help of a parent or teacher and as a self-teaching tool for any student over the age of twelve.

The Thinking Toolbox is available from any one of a number of suppliers listed at the publisher’s website, Christian Logic, along with the Bluedorns’ other book on logic for students, The Fallacy Detective. I received this book as gift from the publisher via Mind and Media, a clearinghouse for reviews of Christian books and other media.

GTW (Gone to Walmart)

Jul19

Engineer Husband and the urchins are GTW to buy some school supplies to donate to the “Fill a Backpack” drive at the church where the urchins are attending Vacation Bible School this week. In the meantime, via Betsy’s Page I found this City Journal article by Steve Malanga about how the Walmart critics are all wrong. Key quotes:

Walton figured out that one key to success was to develop a corporate culture in which management and employees worked together with the sole aim of serving the customer, a revolutionary idea at the time, though now a standard management technique.

It is instead a clash of worldviews, as unions and their allies, representing a narrow band of special interests masquerading as a populist movement, try to convince the public that super-efficient discounters like Wal-Mart lower workers’ standard of living even as they actually raise living standards by offering goods to so many at such low prices.

Regardless of the campaign against it, Wal-Mart is generating enormous support in many of its newest markets, especially in lower-income urban areas where shoppers often have few choices among stores, and where prices are typically high—especially for groceries, which account for so big a percentage of low-income budgets. Minority communities traditionally friendly to the Left’s agenda have shocked opponents by welcoming Wal-Mart and working closely with it.

Some of the critical drumbeat doubtless reflects the fact that Wal-Mart and its founding family still promote causes and values that the mainstream media oppose. Sam Walton supported conservative and free-market groups.

Ay, there’s the rub. The Big W builds stores in the inner city and in rural areas, charges low prices, operates efficiently, doesn’t pay huge salaries to its executives, and gives money to conservative groups, and won’t allow the unions to drive a wedge between workers and management. Ergo they must be evil, right?

William Makepeace Thackeray

Jul18

I wrote about Thackeray here and here.

I really like Victorian novelists, almost all of them: Dickens, Thackeray, WIlkie Collins, the Brontes, George Eliot, Mrs. Gaskell, Trollope. They could all tell a story, make up characters that entice the reader to care what happened to them, come to a satisfying conclusion. Modern novels are so often lurid, sexually explicit, and inconclusive. I’d much rather lose myself in a Victorian literary world where certainly bad things happen: Becky Sharp prostitutes herself for money and security; David Copperfield is put to work in a sweat shop by his evil step-father; Jane Eyre is almost trapped into a bigamous marriage. Nevertheless, the authors don’t describe violence and sin in excruciating, and ultimately boring, detail. And still in Vanity Fair, I read the story of a young girl who becomes a fallen woman, trapped in a vain and empty life by her own evil desires. Anthony Trollope said of Thackeray, “Whatever Thackeray says, the reader cannot fail to understand; and whatever Thackeray attempts to communicate, he succeeds in conveying.”

And he did it without spending multiple pages describing the intimate details of Becky’s dissolute life. Nor is Thackeray concerned in describing the Battle of Waterloo with giving us a gory narration of every nasty thing that happens in war. He describes George Osborne’s death thusly: �Darkness came down on the field and the city; and Amelia was praying for George, who was lying on his face, dead, with a bullet through his heart.� Can you imagine what distracting and lengthy description a modern novelist would have given of such a death scene? Because the Victorians had some sense of propriety, we’re allowed to get on with the story instead of skimming through the gore.

And it’s a great story, too. Thackeray wrote Vanity Fair to illustrate the emptiness and futility of life without God. “Thackeray expressed this sentiment in a letter to his mother: ‘What I want is to make a set of people living without God in the world (only that is a cant phrase) greedy pompous mean perfectly self-satisfied for the most part and at ease about their superior virtue.'”
Writers who complain about the restrictions Christian publishers place on the treatment of sensitive subjects could learn a few lessons from the Victorians. They certainly didn’t let such restraints keep them from writing fine literary fiction.

The Ropemaker by Peter Dickinson

Jul14

I just finished reading this book that I picked up at the library because of the author. I remember reading Mr. Dickinson’s scifi/fantasy trilogy, The Weathermonger, Heartsease, and The Devil’s Children, when I was a teenager. At the time, I really enjoyed those books. I also realized at some point that Peter Dickinson is married to one of my favorite YA authors, Robin McKinley, author of Beauty and Rose Daughter, separate retellings of the story of Beauty and the Beast.

The Ropemaker was OK, not fantastic, just OK. Mr. Dickinson tells a good story, but after I was done I felt . . . unsatisfied. It’s as if there were no substance to the story, no real reason for telling it. Some people go on a quest, manage to get through all the attendant dangers and pitfalls, evil is defeated, and everyone gets home in the end. The heroine comes to some kind of self-knowledge or self-realization, but I’m not sure what it is she realizes. The storyteller leaves a lot of loose ends. Who is The Ropemaker and what will he do next? What is the difference between The Ropemaker and the other magicians in the story? Why do we have any reason to believe that The Ropemaker will remain uncorrupted by the power of magic? Is the magic in the story ultimately good or evil? Are the people in the story able to wield magic for good purposes or not? Why did the world start to change at the particular time the story takes place? What is the meaning of all this sound and fury?

At any rate, I looked at a bibliography of children’s and young adult novels by Peter Dickinson, and I thought several of them looked worthy of addition to The List. The Ropemaker wasn’t on The List. Of course, that’s the problem with my list; I find books that look interesting at the library while I’m getting some of the books I planned to read, and The List just grows and grows.