Eyes Wide Open

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Author: William Romanowski (living)
Genre: Arts
Difficulty: 2 - Easy

Another previously written review:

When The Passion of the Christ came out, I remember talking with a non-Christian friend of mine. He remarked that he found it puzzling that many Christians would enthusiastically promote the movie, and yet condemn other movies like Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill for their violence. ‘I don’t understand it; I thought the issue of violence was important to Christians,’ he said.

When you stop to think about it, it is puzzling. Many of us struggle with the need to find culturally relevant ways of presenting the gospel, ways that are faithful to our worldview as Christians but have a broader audience than the Left Behind books. William D. Romanowski’s book, Eyes Wide Open: Looking for God in Popular Cultue (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2001) is an excellent foray into the heart of that discussion. Christians can never completely escape culture, he says, and so they need to think critically about the issues surround the culture they condemn, consume, and appropriate. Romanowski writes:

"I approach the popular arts, then, as part of the historical unfolding of God’s creation. They do no lie outside God’s judgment – or beyond God’s redemption…The challenge is to discover what it means for Christians to be faithful to God and responsible to their neighbor through the popular arts."(pg. 20)

We will encounter the popular arts, no matter how hard we try to avoid them, so it behooves us to think about how to engage them faithfully.

This responsibility leads us not only to question the kind of popular art that is deemed ‘secular’ but also, Romanowski affirms, the art that lies inside our own culture as evangelicals. Often, in their desire to harness the popular arts for the kingdom, Christians promote art forms that look and sound like the broader culture, but have a Christian content and message. Romanowski turns a critical gaze on worship music as an example of this kind of accommodation:

"Many praise and worship songs, for example, can be criticized for privatizing faith and promoting values associated with American notions of individualism. Some of these songs encourage world flight instead of Christian cultural engagement and can undermine community and accountability beyond one’s self." (pg. 70)

Besides, we too often forget that the Christian culture industry is still driven by marketing and profit: “Is it any surprise that the Christian music industry is largely populated with young attractive ‘music ministers’… who can appeal to the ‘white, middle-class customers’ who purchase most Christian music?”(pg. 82) Despite the ‘Christianized’ content, the industry is still driven by the need to market a product, irregardless of the merits that product may or may not have.

This is the main point Romanowski wants to make – that whether we are interacting with secular or sacred culture, we need to keep our ‘eyes wide open’ to its message and philosophical implications. Popular culture, whether it is produced in a Christian atmosphere or not, can offer meaning and exploration into the common themes of humanity – even if they don’t answer all the questions.

As Christians, it is so much easier to interact with material that does provide all of the answers; we are more comfortable with The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe than with Harry Potter because the themes are much clearer to us. But we have to face the fact that other people – particularly those outside the church – may understand the themes of Harry Potter far more readily.

To that end, Romanowski offers some helpful perspectives on interpreting and critiquing popular culture in the Church. Is there a place for melodrama? Should movies always have a happy ending? These kinds of questions and more are raised as he walks through a cultural landscape of movies, television, and music. Walking through movies like Schindler’s List and Pretty Woman, Romanowski points the necessity of thinking critically about movies: “To be good critics, Christians have to be able to discern the cultural values that inform characterizations, drive stories, and determine acceptable resolutions and be able to evaluate these according to Christian principles.”(pg. 123) (Fear not - Romanowski offers two excellent appendices on the practical aspects of how this is accomplished for the unpracticed).

Romanowski sets out to prove a philosophical point – popular culture is inherent in being human, is a fruitful avenue of discussion, and can even inform our faith. To that end, he pushes hard – perhaps a little too hard – against perspectives that protest against the involvement of Christians in the world of popular culture. He assumes that people will simply agree with his perspectives, and moves quickly through his arguments leaving little room for disagreement. But his point is one that must be noted: popular culture demands a response from the Christian community. How can we, as believing Christians, be faithful to the call to be ‘in the world, but not of it’? It is a question that bears a great deal of thought, and there is no better place to start thinking about it than Eyes Wide Open.

A Series of Unfortunate Events

Available from Amazon.ca here!

Author: Lemony Snicket (alive - and a pseudonym)
Genre: Children's Literature
Difficulty: 1 - ReallyEasy.

A short review of the series I wrote for an assignment. titled Bathos and the Baudelaires:

“If you are interested in stories with happy endings, you would be better off reading some other book.” This was my introduction to the miserable world of three orphaned children who meet with more misfortune and pain in a single book than all the children’s books I ever read put together. It is, of course, the opening sentence of The Bad Beginning, book the First of Lemony’s Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events (New York: Harpercollins, 1999), a popular children’s series that recently concluded with the thirteenth installment. And the series certainly lives up to the expectation set in the opening pages. Klaus, Violet, and Sunny Baudelaire discover that their parents have perished in a fire, along with all their belongings and worldly goods, and they are carted off to live with a sinister uncle, Count Olaf, who is only interested in the fortune that the orphans are set to inherit.

And it doesn’t stop there – the three orphans are subjected to all kinds of depressing situations and nefarious plots. Every good thing that crosses their path, whether it’s a kindly uncle or a friendly pair of triplets (who also happen to be orphans and have lost their younger sibling in the process) is taken from them. The situations that the three children are placed in seem impossibly hopeless, absurd, and inescapably discouraging, and by the end of each book they are not at all better off than where they began. It reads a bit like the French existentialists Satre and Camus for children, in a way.

So it is surprising to discover how popular the books are, not just among children, but among adults as well. What is so popular about a book that promotes such a dismal view of suffering and misfortune? Is it in fact nothing more than simply a gratuitous attraction to vicarious experience, something along the lines of the currently cultural addiction to reality television? I do not think so; in fact, I think quite the opposite. The Snicket books, while seemingly obsessed with misfortune, actually give us a frame of reference for coping with suffering in the form of a heavy use of bathos.

‘Bathos’ as defined by Merriam and Webster is as follows: “the sudden appearance of the commonplace in otherwise elevated matter or style.” An example, taken from the back cover of The Bad Beginning should be a helpful explanation: “In this short book alone, the three youngsters encounter a greedy and repulsive villain, itchy clothing, a disastrous fire, a plot to steal their fortune, and cold porridge for breakfast.” It is the last part, the “cold porridge for breakfast” that is bathos, the sudden appearance of the ordinary and quite comic in the midst of a list of otherwise unfortunate elements (including the itchy clothing). The Snicket books are full of this kind of comedy, treating cold porridge as if it were on the same level as a repulsive villain trying to steal your fortune.

We might be tempted to dismiss bathos as nothing more than a gruesome sense of humor, but the fact of the matter is that for some reason, it works. The presence of bathos confronts use with the ordinary nature of suffering and misfortune, in a culture that tends to hyperbolize the unfortunate. The truth is that we do not want to think of suffering as ordinary, as the rule rather than the exception. We take potent medications, or adopt addictive behaviors as ways to avoide the recognition of the misfortune that permeates our lives, because we don’t know how to handle it.

Lemony Snicket diffuses the fear of misfortune for us through a little humor. And he allows that humor to illustrate a very striking point – the acknowledgement of misfortune does not inevitably lead to depression and isolation. Rather, the Baudelaire children find strength in each other, to work through and against the suffering that is to a large extent imposed upon them. The humour is cathartic, not escapist; it frees us to recognize the ordinary nature of our lives. We all deal with fortune and misfortune, and we are not alone in the ordinariness of our suffering. Instead of the idealist vision of general and perfect happiness for all, Snicket presents us with a reality that is much more like what we actually experience; that misfortune is ordinary, for surely all of us would find a cold bowl of porridge at least a little unpleasant.

5 Keys to the Successful Book Club

Seeing as how one of my hopes for this blog is to inspire other book clubs, I thought I would hand out some ideas that have helped me run my own. I'm not an expert by any means, but I'd like to think that the following ideas offer practical suggestions to run a book club well.

1. Eat and Drink
To a large extent, the success of a book club hinges on the group that is discussing the book. The more relaxed and open people are with each other, the more interesting and lively the discussion will be. So why not start the night off with a potluck meal? Nothing builds relationships like a dinner table, and making it a potluck allows everyone to contribute. Whether you organize the menu ahead of time, or make it a free for all, having a communal meal frees you up to get to know the people behind the critics. A little bit of wine never hurt, either.

2. Pick the Right Books
Mark Twain once wrote that, "A classic is a book that everyone wants to have read, but nobody wants to read." Often people think that they need to pick great works of literary art, with vast depth and symbolism, in order to have a successful book club. I think this is a mistake. Pick books that the people in the group actually want to read, and will enjoy reading. If you have a group of bibliophiles, then by all means read Joyce, Spenser and Milton. But if the group has little literary training, then they won't enjoy hearing about the symbolism of Madame Bovary. Have people in the group suggest their favorite books, and try to have a general consensus on what to read. I'd also suggest alternating fiction and non-fiction, especially if there are widely divergent tastes in your group.

3. Give Enough Time
There are fast readers, and there are slow readers, and your group may well be a mix of both. Not everyone will be able to read War and Peace in a single month. For my group, meeting once every four or five weeks seems to be the right pace - it may not be for your group. If you pick a longer book, maybe do it over two sessions. The point is for people to enjoy reading the book, and don't worry if they haven't finished it by the time the meeting rolls around. If they liked it, they are likely to finish it on their own, for their own satisfaction.

4. Be Relaxed
The discussion doesn't have to follow the book, and there doesn't have to be a lecture on the background of the author and possible interpretations. Focus on the response and the experience of reading the book from your group. What did they like, what did they not like? What stuck out to them in the story? How do they relate to the themes or the characters? By allowing the experience of the reading to set the context for the book, everyone in the group starts from a common ground (unless they haven't read the book!). And it allows everyone to have something to say about the book, whether they know what the flowers symbolize or not.

5. Be Prepared
Once in while, for whatever reason, it's hard to get a good discussion started. Either the book didn't resonate with people, or no one can think of anything to say about it, or maybe they didn't get what the book was driving at. If you're the host, take a few minutes to note down some passages that stuck out to you, and if the discussion is slow to get going, open it up and read one aloud, and share why you picked that passage. Often, just doing that is enough to get people talking and interaction around the material.

Of course, your book club will have off nights, where people may not really feel like discussing the book. It happens, and it doesn't mean you picked a bad book, or that people don't want to participate. But these five things have helped make our book club a memorable event, where people have fun, get to know one another, and will have their minds and imaginations stimulated through literature. If that happens, consider your book club a complete success.

About This Blog

To make interacting with this blog easier, I'm going to do my best to provide a couple different ways of classifying the books that I post about. Hopefully, these will help you understand not only what the book is about, but also find books on similar topics, or written in similar styles, or of a similar difficulty. I want this blog to be as user-friendly as I can make it, and responses are always welcome. Below are some key things to note about this blog:

The lack of a "goodness" scale
All books are worth reading - even if it is to find out that some books really aren't. Seriously though, whether or not you enjoy a book is as much based on the context in which it's read (where you are at in your life, what the previous book you read was, whether you could discuss it with someone along the way, etc). Books are just too different to compare side by side, and each reader will come out with something different. I would probably say that all the books that will make it into this blog are worth reading, even if I didn't particularly like some of them.

The Difficulty Rating
Difficulty is a little less subjective than whether or not a book is good, so I'm going to attempt to rate them on a simple scale of how difficult I think it is to read them. However, this will depend not only on the subject matter, but also on style, the culture it was written in, etc. I've come up with a 5 point scale to describe the difficulty:

1. Really Easy - Simple style, limited vocabulary, requires no outside knowledge of the book. Stuff like children's books and simple fiction. (Examples: The Little Prince, James and the Giant Peach, A Series of Unfortunate Events)
   
2. Easy - Relaxed style, common vocabulary, little interpretation needed. This would be reflective non-fiction, and adult fiction. (Examples: The Life of Pi, Becoming Human, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time)
3. Moderate - Consistent style, larger vocabulary, contains themes/subject matter/cultural elements that may be unfamiliar or hard to understand. (Examples: The Stories of Edgar Allan Poe, The Screwtape Letters, In Praise of Folly)
   
4. More Difficult - Serious style, significant vocabulary, contains subject matter that may require research or other reading, or present ideas that require serious reflection (Examples: Moby Dick, The Silmarillion, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Shakespeare)
   
5. Very Difficult - Impenetrable style, extensive vocabulary, and dense subject matter; will likely require more than a single reading to make any sense of it (Examples: James Joyce's Ulysses, Aquinas' Summa Theologiae, The Brothers Karamazov).

Of course, there is a large degree of subjectivity to this, as well. If you find all non-fiction difficult to read, it may not matter if I rate it as a 2 or a 4. Still, I hope this helps you get a sense of what you may be getting yourself into. And I would encourage you to try to read a book that you think might be beyond your comfort level - you might surprise yourself!

Labels and Tags
I'm going to try and consistently group books into categories that will allow you to easily locate books of a similar genre or difficulty. Stuff like "spirituality" or "biography" or "fiction" or "fantasy". I don't have all the labels made up, because I'll likely just do it as I go. However, there will be a couple other tags that will appear from time to time:

• "Book Club" - This describes a book that I've used in a book club before, and you might want to consider using it in a book club of your own. Many of the books with this tag resulted in great discussion; some didn't. But they're worth talking about.
• "Blackfriar Favorite" - Because this is my blog, I get to note the books that are personal favorites of mine, and ones that I would highly recommend. You'll find that these come from a wide variety of genres and difficulties, covering everything from children's literature to russian literature to academic theology.
  
• "Author (living)" and "Author (dead)" - I once had a professor who suggested that for every living author I read, I should read two books by a dead author. The idea was, of course, that books written a long time ago had stood the test of time and proved their worthiness of being read. While I haven't kept to that rule, I do meet a great many people who really only read living authors. I'm hoping this will encourage someone to read a dead one.

Now you are fully equipped to take on the blog! Let the reading begin!

Introduction

I've been a voracious reader, for almost as long as I can remember. In fact, one of my earliest memories is of story time in the library in primary school - the librarian was obsessed with reading "Little House on the Prairie" to us, and out of boredom I began reading random books off the shelf (notably, the Prydain Chronicles, by Lloyd Alexander). Later on, during family vacations, my parents would have to ration the time I was allowed to spend reading, as I would plow through all the books I had brought (usually 15 - 20) in a matter of days. In college, I attempted (and succeeded) in reading the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy in a single weekend (Friday afternoon through to Sunday evening, not including appendices). I have grown to love all sorts of forms and genres of writing, from fiction to non-fiction, short stories, essays, poetry, manifestos, journals, philosophies, plays, histories, letters, and many more.

So why a book blog? There are a couple of reasons:

• Firstly, to encourage myself to continue to read outside of schooling and academic study. Lately I've found myself reading for pleasure less and less, and that's something I'd like to change.
  
• Secondly, to encourage others to read as well. Some people just don't know where to begin, or what books might be to their liking. Hopefully, this will generate some ideas for some people.
• Thirdly, to encourage people to read books together. Me and my wife host a book club once a month, and I hope that a rough guide like this blog will inspire others to read books in community.

Finally, why the name "Blackfriar's Books"? Well, "blackfriars" is another term for Dominicans, an order of mendicant friars (or monks) founded by Saint Dominic, around the same time as Saint Francis of Assisi founded the Franciscan order (13th century). Where St. Francis' abiding passion was for ruined churches, wild animals, and the poor, St. Dominic was passionate about books, education, and the poor. The purpose of the Dominicans was to spread education in the towns and cities, unlike the traditional monastic orders who existed within the confines of a monastery. I've always had a great deal of respect for Dominic and what he stood for, and although I am not a Dominican monk (actually, I'm not even Catholic) I'd like to think that Dominic and I would have got along well together.

So, I hope you enjoy, settle back with a nice glass of wine in a comfortable chair, and let yourself be swept into a good story, or engaged in an interesting idea. Most of all, regardless of what it is, I hope you're inspired to read a book.