Miscellany: Kamala Harris, Historial Adam, and the Praise of Genre Fiction
Welcome to Three Things.
We’re a monthly digest of three things to help you engage with God, neighbor, and culture. But this is our monthly Miscellany where we (Andy and Phillip) tell you what we’ve been reading, thinking about and working on.
Phillip turned on Neil Diamond’s “America” first thing on Monday morning. The girls jumped up and down, dancing around the living room because this was indeed the day they were coming to America (“Today!”). Hours later, faced with the longest border security line imaginable on the other side of the Atlantic, the same children were itching to go back to their beds in the land of hope and glory. But jet lag is nearly gone now and today the Johnstons take to the highway for Michigan, Nashville and Asheville. Oh, the brutal joy of family travel.
Reading: Science and faith questions hold little interest for Phillip, but now that Genesis 2-3 is on the preaching horizon, he’s slipped down the historical Adam rabbit hole. William Lane Craig’s In Quest of the Historical Adam seems like the new standard evangelical work and, thankfully, he’s written a summary for mere mortals. Phillip was rather astonished and not a little uncomfortable when the quest led to a hard bite on the evolutionary pill. As a rejoinder, he’s reading Hans Madueme’s Defending Sin: A Response to the Challenges of Evolution and the Natural Sciences which is, according to one of its critics, “the most erudite and theologically sophisticated defense of ‘young earth creationism’ that I have read.” While Phillip is similarly astonished and not a little uncomfortable with biting so hard on the literalistic pill, he finds Madueme’s principle of “scientific fallibility” most needed in the discussion and worthy of emphasis.
Listening: Phillip arrived at the exodus in morning learning time recently. The children’s Bible mentioned that Miriam led the women in song on the far side of the Red Sea and the girls wanted to hear the song. Luckily, Handel captured it for posterity in 1739 and they were into it.
Also, Phillip loved this episode of Honestly called Kamala Harris and the Election of Laughter and Forgetting and thinks it should be preserved as a time capsule of this summer’s political madness. Listen, and then listen again.
Andy feels sorry for people who do not read fantasy and science fiction due to the simple fact that most non-genre stories span only one volume, whereas, a characteristic of fantasy is that its stories are often measured not in pages but in cubic feet of shelf space. Sure, you might read Brothers Karamazov and find in it an entire universe teeming with rich life, but that universe is bounded by the first and last page of a single book. Sad.
However, in the world of fantasy, if a story has only one book—with rare exceptions—it is nearly an orphan. Readers wonder why they have not been furnished with the subsequent seven volumes to which they have become accustomed. Maybe the author died…?
When one is lucky enough to stumble upon one of the great series as it is being written, one enters into a relationship that could span decades, as untold millions of fans experienced with the Harry Potter series and untold thousands are experiencing even now with the Harry Dresden series. Andy numbers these Harrys among his true friends, and, were it not for the good sense of his wife, would have named his firstborn son after them. Two Harrys, one stone.
All this is simply to raise a digital glass to those hardworking, underpraised authors of his favorite ongoing genre stories: Matt Dinniman, Pierce Brown, Jim Butcher, Zogarth, and so many others. Keep the stories coming.
Listening: Andy spends most of his day facing his computer screen and thus, listens to a lot of music. Follow his recent playlist breadcrumbs here and here. Recent artists of note: Rachel Chinouriri, Young Jesus, and Kinnship.
New from The Darkling Psalter (Andy’s Psalm project):
Psalm 18—Every naked thought crisped in the lightning light.
Psalm 20—We will know the silent sky can speak, and holy heaven ring like struck bells.
The Wager Stone: Read along with Andy’s fantasy/sci-fi novel about a broken man whose search for his family leads him, of all places, into a game world. Once inside, he loses all of his memories, and his body is invaded by a loveable but snarky brain spider. Hilarity, antics, and deadly peril ensue.