hughbiquitous

One of the reasons I enjoy blogging is that I enjoy writing. More than that, I enjoy wrestling with language to make it do something that elevates discourse and glorifies God. I can relate to Alan Jacobs, author of the Books & Culture Magazine piece Sentences, in which he confessed something of an obsession when it comes to finding the right words to express an idea with the appropriate rhetorical flair. (The problem for us bloggers is that blogging is supposed to be quick, but that’s another story.)

Mr. Jacobs rightly notes that virtue is at stake when wordsmithing:

John Updike was widely reviled, and rightly so I think, for using the collapse of the World Trade Center towers as an opportunity for making beautiful sentences: “Smoke speckled with bits of paper curled into the cloudless sky, and strange inky rivulets ran down the giant structure’s vertically corrugated surface,” he wrote in The New Yorker; one of the towers “fell straight down like an elevator, with a tinkling shiver and a groan of concussion distinct across the mile of air.” Leon Wieseltier in The New Republic offered the most incisive critique of Updike’s approach: “Such writing defeats its representational purpose, because it steals attention away from reality and toward language. It is provoked by nothing so much as its own delicacy. Its precision is a trick: it appears to bring the reader near, but it keeps the reader far. It is in fact a kind of armor: an armor of adjectives and adverbs. The loveliness is invincible.”

Contrast Updike’s approach to depicting the horrific with another writer’s:

And when they came to a place called Golgotha (which means Place of a Skull), they offered him wine to drink, mixed with gall, but when he tasted it, he would not drink it. And when they had crucified him, they divided his garments among them by casting lots. Then they sat down and kept watch over him there. And over his head they put the charge against him, which read, “This is Jesus, the King of the Jews.” (Matthew 27:33-37)

… or this writer…

Two others, who were criminals, were led away to be put to death with him. And when they came to the place that is called The Skull, there they crucified him, and the criminals, one on his right and one on his left. And Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” And they cast lots to divide his garments. And the people stood by, watching, but the rulers scoffed at him… (Luke 23:32-35)

One more:

So they took Jesus, and he went out, bearing his own cross, to the place called The Place of a Skull, which in Aramaic is called Golgotha. There they crucified him, and with him two others, one on either side, and Jesus between them. (John 19:16-18)

In Matthew’s account, the crucifixion actually happens after once sentence ends and before the next one begins. You almost get the sense that the evangelists were telling you to look away while the deed was being done. Their descriptions were simple and straightforward, without being clinical. Perhaps this was because their readers surely knew the graphic details of what was being retold. Or perhaps they just understood that the point of telling the horrible story was not to be indulgent.

Having endured the 9/11 spectacle, I think it entirely inappropriate to try to capture the horror of what happened that day in purple prose. It also makes me doubt Mr. Updike’s integrity as a writer, because his writing obscured my view of the grave reality of what happened — something a writer in his position should have respected above all.

This study of contrasts makes me appreciate the evangelists’ minimalism. It lends credibility to the evangelists and the Gospels themselves — they are written with just the sort of direct clarity one would expect from those who really experienced the life, death, and resurrection of the Son of God.

J. Mark Bertrand is almost pornographic in the way he reviews Bibles.

I should say he reviews Bible design and binding—not the content thereof (the Jesus Seminar et al hate competition). He makes me smile with gems like this on his new blog:

Like trying to hold water in my hands … that’s what my first experience with the Cambridge Wide Margin Reference Bible was like. I expected the goatskin cover to be flexible, but this was ridiculous. Ridiculously good, that is. Wherever it wasn’t supported by my hand, this Bible gracefully plunged toward the floor, almost like it was wet. I half expected it to be dripping, but of course it wasn’t. That’s the illusion a fine, flexible binding can give.

Am I blushing?

I’ve posted in the past about my wish for the perfect Bible… and I still haven’t found what I’m looking for. I tried doing some of my own typesetting with Microsoft Word and the text of the Gospel of John, and I love the way it turned out—but it was way too much work.

But for you ESV folks, Mr. Bertrand follows the “graphic” description above with this: “I’m excited about the prospects of a similar edition using the ESV which may hit the market next year, and if it’s as well-made as this NASB, there will be much rejoicing in my house.”

"Winning at all costs is boring."

I read that in an ESPN piece the other day, and I thought it was a spot-on description of my feelings as a New York Yankee fan. As it happens, the article was about the Steinbrenner effect:

The past few years… Yankees fans [have] had the fun smacked out of [them]. Such is the byproduct of watching your team purchase so many high-priced free agents, then watching them beat up on the Kansas City Royals and Tampa Bay Devil Rays en route to the inevitable — and joyless — postseason berth.

Exactly. Joyless. If the Yankees win, they’ve merely done their duty. If they lose, it’s a double disappointment: not only do they watch somebody else go home with the hardware, they face the crushing weight of impossible expectations. You just can’t win.

As a result, Joe Torre will soon be out of a job, unless the madness of King George takes an improbable detour. Mr. Torre has delivered twelve straight seasons of postseason ball: ten division titles, two wild-card berths, six American League pennants, and four World Series rings. For crying out loud, in one of the final Peanuts comics, Charlie Brown said, "This is my Joe Torre look. I’m going to use it next season. I’ll manage the team from the bench like Joe Torre, and I’ll stare at everybody like this. And we’ll win every game." Because since Joe Torre took the helm in 1996, they’ve just about won every game. And he’s about to get fired because the Yankees lost in the first round of playoffs for three years in a row. Translation: Win it all, Yankees, for that is your duty.

But please, Mr. Steinbrenner, if you’re going to fire Joe Torre, please explain to me why I should believe his successor will do his duty of "winning it all" better than Mr. Torre. And as long as I’m addressing you, Mr. Steinbrenner, you ought to know that I don’t care as much about winning as I do about enjoying my favorite team. The best way to do that involves winning. But I can face November without the World Series win and still enjoy the team.

I often ask "what does that look like" to turn abstract ideas into something useful. So what does an Enjoyable Team look like? Let me put it this way: winning is the plot of the story, but what makes a story great are characters you actually care about.

The Enjoyable Team has young guys who come up through the organization and make it big, like Derek Jeter, Andy Pettitte, Mariano Rivera, Bernie Williams, and Jorge Posada. It’s got a few guys that other teams give up on, but you take a chance on them anyway — like Paul O’Neill and Scott Brosius (pictured here). Then tack on the veteran superstar who’s never won the championship, Roger Clemens: he just wants to play for a team that can help him bring home the hardware, and he brings his Hall-of-Fame A-game to make it happen. (Of all those guys, only Clemens, and probably Jeter and Rivera, will make it onto a Hall of Fame ballot with any shot of making it in. So we’re not talking about a boatload of superstars here.)

I’ve been a Yankee fan ever since I was a six-year-old kid watching Reggie Jackson hit three home runs in three swings to win it all in 1977. But even then, being a Yankee fan was no fun. Then King George got suspended from baseball in the early ’90s, and the Yankees started being fun for the first time ever. Even with Steinbrenner’s return, they gave me Enjoyable Teams from 1994 to 2001. But in 2002 they lost to the Angels, a team that was clearly having fun while the Yankees were not. What was the difference?

The difference is that you can take an Enjoyable Team and turn it into a joyless team by adding duty-bound, high-priced, overachieving, over-the-top (and often over-the-hill) free agents like Jason Giambi, Randy Johnson, Kevin Brown, Gary Sheffield, Johnny Damon, and Alex Rodriguez. (Though when they traded for A-Rod, I loved Peter Gammons’ take on it: "The Beatles Just Got Elvis.")

Still, I enjoy the Yankees at another level, a level that makes others hate them with passion equal to my delight. This is a team that has over two dozen championships on its resume and a history that includes names like Dimaggio, Ruth, Mantle, and Gehrig. It has Yankee Stadium and its 97-year-old public address announcer, Bob Sheppard, the “Voice of God,” whose pronunciation is so clear it has been said you could hear each “g” when he introduced Wade Boggs.

Speaking of Mr. Gehrig, this was a sort of perfect requiem for the Joe Torre Yankees: after watching the Yankees lose to Cleveland the other day, I just had to watch something else for a while before hitting the sack. A couple channels away, I found this:

As #4 walked off the field at the end of the movie, I couldn’t help but believe I’ve seen the last of Mr. Torre’s #6. If that’s the case, it’s a sad thing. With him will go some great memories. Even the bad memories had enough good to make them sweet. The 2001 World Series loss to Arizona featured two of the most exciting games I’ve ever watched, the "Mystique and Aura" games in which the Yankees were down to their last out — on consecutive days — but hit home runs to tie and then win. Aaron Boone’s home run to beat the Red Sox in Game 7 of the 2003 ALCS almost entirely obscures the loss to the Marlins in the World Series that year.

And I guess that underscores the point I made earlier: I just want to enjoy my favorite team, and I can do that without World Series championships — even though I really, really want them. But when going home as the winner is the only thing you care about, going home joyful gets picked off every time.

One of my college professors, Dick Baer, is of a rare breed: an evangelical professor at an Ivy League school. He has observed that Christian witness is usually regarded, at best, as nonsequitur. More commonly, it’s ignored with a certain disdain:

For over five years I attended a weekly Cornell graduate student/faculty seminar that focused on issues of science, technology, and public policy. Perhaps every third or fourth week, I would make a comment or two based on my knowledge of Bible, theology, or Christian ethics… But again and again, I would get the same kind of response. No one agreed with me, no one disagreed. To put it rather crudely, but very accurately, it was as if I had farted. And when someone farts in public, no one applauds, no one boos. They simply act as if it hadn’t happened. Someone violated a social taboo, and the best way to deal with the embarrassment is to go on to the next item of business as quickly and unobtrusively as possible.

I can relate.

I suppose the best you can say about this is that Christian ambassadors are supposed to recognize that, as Greg Koukl often says, “the Gospel is offensive—enough.” Meaning, of course, that if you offend somebody when you present them with the Gospel, don’t let it be because of the way you present it. Instead, it must be because of your faithfulness to the message of the Gospel — including the “I told you that you would die in your sins” and “deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow Me” bits. The sad fact is that even if you are as tactful and as erudite as can be, as my professor was, some people will still take offense. As Paul said,

For we are the aroma of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing, to one a fragrance from death to death, to the other a fragrance from life to life. Who is sufficient for these things? For we are not, like so many, peddlers of God’s word, but as men of sincerity, as commissioned by God, in the sight of God we speak in Christ. (2 Corinthians 2:15-17)

Excuse me while I preach to myself: may we all speak up in the name of Christ, even if it sends our hearers scrambling for their gas masks. And a big “boo hoo” if they do: we’ve got it easy here. When Paul did it, his hearers went scrambling for stones, whips, wild beasts, and the executioner’s axe. May we who name Christ be more embarrassed of betraying our Savior and His martyrs’ blood than of committing a social faux pas against the delicate sensitivities of an effete culture.