“I’d Never Do That!”

Mary Doria Russell had a problem.

She was teaching anthropology and came to stories of the massive mistakes explorers from the West sometimes made when they first encountered different people groups around the world. Often death, pillaging, and slavery resulted.

Inevitably, students would say something to the effect of, “Oh, I would never make a mistake like that. How could they have done something so stupid?” 

But Russell knew that even though it seemed simple, it wasn’t. How could she adequately explain that first contact is just much more difficult than we can imagine? That’s what motivated her to write her profound, wonderful, absorbing novel The Sparrow.

She imagines a group of intelligent, well-meaning, goodhearted, skilled people who make an effort to meet a species from another world. One reason I especially like the novel is that this is just a great group of people. If I were to go on a multiyear journey, these are absolutely the kind of people I would love to travel with. 

Despite this team having far more gifts, abilities, and experiences than her students or most of us, things go wrong—terribly wrong. Even the most benign actions like trying to improve nutrition for those they meet had disastrous effects they had difficulty anticipating.

Should we never try to help people in other cultures? Should we never try to fix things that seem wrong? That’s not my point.

Rather, when we do, we should approach such efforts with a maximum dose of humility. We need to give the benefit of the doubt to people who act in ways we find wrong or unenlightened. We need to learn as much as we can before we act.

Why? Because we just don’t know what we don’t know. We don’t adequately appreciate the finite, limitations of human knowledge or of our own perspective. Nor do we appreciate enough how our fallen, sinful nature can unconsciously skew our opinions about what is wrong with the world and how to fix it.

What can we do when we encounter people we think are strange or just wrong?

  • Remember how fun it is to learn new, surprising things.
  • Don’t automatically dismiss information or ideas that are contrary to our viewpoints.
  • Remind ourselves that we are finite and that our motives or emotions may be skewing our outlook in ways we aren’t aware of.
  • Ask those we are trying to help what they think would be the best ways we could be of assistance.
  • Remember that all of us—the people we are trying to help as well as those we disagree with—are people with God-given value and dignity.

Try to help others? By all means, and always with great humility.

When We Have No Answers

I have wondered and brooded over the evil in the world for decades. Why does God allow people to do such terrible things to others? Why doesn’t he just stop it all?

In ways, there are no satisfying intellectual answers. And even if there were, I think we, like Job, would still want to tell God a thing or two.

Perhaps that’s why I found Olga Dietlin’s brief reflection on suffering so worthwhile. In her blog this friend treats life’s most difficult challenges not just academically but humanly. She is honest yet hopeful.

Suffering is complex. When we try to give easy answers, we trivialize it and we trivialize others. Olga does none of that. As she says, “Perhaps all suffering is a cosmic heartache—a fracture in the beauty of Creation that cuts straight through the heart of God Himself.”

When all our speculations are done, the question that remains is who we will be in the midst of suffering. That’s why I commend her blog to you. It will only take a few minutes to read. Click on the link here. It will be worth your while.

How We Won the War

Hitler shot himself in the foot. OK, not literally. Figuratively.

He could have beaten the United States in the race to build an atomic bomb, but he didn’t. Why? In the 1930s Hitler fired some of his best scientists. Many of these realized that Germany was going to make life very difficult for them—difficult to find jobs and maybe even imprison them. So they left the country and went to England and the United States.

Why did Hitler systematically cleanse his country of these valuable citizens (and many others) who could have helped him win World War II? Because of their race, their ethnicity. They were Jewish.

Einstein was one of the first. He left Germany in 1932 and never returned due to Nazi persecution. The most famous scientist in the world quickly settled in at Princeton University in New Jersey. Many other top nuclear physicists soon left Germany for the same reason, including Leo Szilard, Edward Teller, Hans Bethe—who all helped the Manhattan Project successfully develop the atomic bomb for the U.S.

Enrico Fermi fled Italy because new racial laws affected his Jewish wife. He led the team at the University of Chicago that created the world’s first sustained nuclear reaction in 1942.

Hitler made many mistakes that contributed to his defeat. Certainly a key error was forcing out many of Germany’s smartest, most talented, most creative people. Without them his atomic project faltered and failed. And Germany lost the war.

History tells us, if we care to listen, that countries succeed when they allow everyone in the arts, science, commerce, agriculture, construction, finance, and every other enterprise to contribute an honest day’s work. When they artificially exclude people on criteria that have nothing to do with their skill, expertise, and potential, they are simply shooting themselves in the foot.

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You can read more about this fascinating story in Richard Rhodes’ The Making of the Atomic Bomb and Hitler’s Gift: The True Story of the Scientist Expelled by the Nazi Regime by Jean Medawar and David Pyke.

All Those Dark Futures

The Hunger Games, The Matrix, Divergent, The Maze Runner, Ready Player One, The Road—these are just a few of the dozens of dystopian movies and novels that have exploded on the scene in the last twenty years.

Books depicting a future that has crumbled into economic, ecological, social, or dictatorial disaster are not entirely new. Jules Verne and H. G. Wells in the nineteenth century offered several versions. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1936) and George Orwell’s 1984 (1949), however, set the standard for the genre in the last hundred years.

The question I’ve wondered about, however, is why? Why the massive increase in number and popularity? Why all this pessimism? Sarah Irving-Stonebreaker offers one possible explanation.

The Judeo-Christian world view that history is going somewhere, that it has a purpose, has fallen out of favor. Even an atheistic worldview like Marxism which believes that history is headed somewhere—to a workers’ paradise—has also been discredited.

Such positive outlooks have been replaced by a sense that the universe is random and has no purpose. History, therefore, doesn’t matter. “History is not part of any greater story and therefore has little to teach us,” she writes. In fact, our history is merely a source of shame and oppression.* The past cannot and should not tell us who we are, how to act, or where to go.

We are left completely on our own.

While that might seem hopeful to some, it has had the opposite effect. Without a sense of connection to the past and that history is leading us somewhere, all we have left is despair about the future, which is exactly the story that dystopias tell.

Such stories can and do act as cautionary tales. Possibly the first of this genre, Jonathan Swift’s imaginative Gulliver’s Travels (1726) presented a social and political critique of his day. Even the New Testament’s Book of Revelation offers a very dark picture of the future. But it’s purpose is very different than most contemporary apocalyptic visions which may only provide a glimmer of individual hope in the midst of social despair.

Though Revelation may seem confusing, its “main theme is as clear as day: despite present trouble, God is in control, and he will have the final victory. God wins in the end, even though his people at the present live in a toxic culture and are marginalized and even persecuted…. the author’s purpose is to engender hope in the hearts of his Christian readers so that they will have the resolve to withstand the turbulent present.”**

Yes, dystopias can serve a redeeming purpose. But more is needed—the knowledge that we are not alone in our past, in our present, or in our future.

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*Sarah Irving-Stonebreaker, Priests of History (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2024), 34 and 25-28.

**Tremper Longman III, Revelation Through Old Testament Eyes (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Academic, 2022), 14.

The Greatest One-Term President

When Jimmy Carter died December 29, 2024, and as Joe Biden ended his term, my daughter asked me, “Who do you think was the greatest one-term president.”  

A number of candidates came to my mind. William Howard Taft and Gerald Ford were two. But I think the best answer is George Bush Sr.

The title of Jon Meacham’s book on Bush, Destiny and Power, certainly sounds like a presidential biography. But I think a better title would have been The Good President. George H. W. Bush was not only extremely effective in foreign policy and reasonably effective domestically, he was one of the truly honorable men to hold the highest office in the country.

Jon Meacham consistently emphasizes how the values Bush learned from his parents shaped his life personally and publicly—work hard, do your best, compete to win, serve others. Yes, he came from a well-to-do background that gave him many opportunities others didn’t have, but he also knew he was expected to excel on his own.

Bush volunteered to fight in World War II and flew many combat missions, including one in which he was shot down. He left the family cocoon in Connecticut to start his own business in oil. His 1964 U.S. Senate bid in Texas was overwhelmed by the Johnson landslide. But two years later he won a Congressional seat. Then came a series of challenging assignments—ambassador to the U.N., chairman of the Republican National Committee, envoy to China, director of the CIA.

He lost the Republican nomination to Ronald Reagan but won on the ticket as Vice President in 1980 and then 1984. He showed his calm, sure-handed demeanor during the critical hours after the assassination attempt on Reagan. But his sense of loyalty got the better of him in not more strongly opposing the Iran-Contra deal.

Meacham, while clearly admiring Bush, is not afraid to mention other mistakes. Promising no new taxes in his 1988 presidential run was doctrinaire but didn’t fit the pragmatic Bush. He was then severely criticized when he worked with a Democratic congress to bring down the deficit by cutting expenses and raising revenues.

Yet he also championed the bipartisan Americans with Disabilities Act. Though politics has always been rough and tumble, hearing how Bush worked with both parties for the common good made me almost nostalgic.

His foreign policy expertise shone in his deft and understated response to the fall of communism in Eastern Europe in 1989 as well as in putting together a large coalition of nations against Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990-91. Again, when a coup attempted to unseat Gorbachev, he skillfully played but did not overplay U.S. support of the Soviet leader.

George H. W. Bush may not have had the communication skills of Reagan or the charisma of Clinton or the intelligence of Obama, but he may have been our best president of the last fifty years.

Growing Creative

Leonardo da Vinci is best known for the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper. Yet it’s possible his achievements in science even outstripped those monumental paintings. A hundred years before Francis Bacon (the “father” of the scientific method), da Vinci pioneered key concepts in anatomy, geology, and fluid dynamics by the uncommon means of observation and experiment.

Perhaps the most extraordinary of all these was his investigation into how the human heart functioned. Remarkably, he made a glass model of a heart so he could better see how blood flowed. Some of his findings were not proven until five hundred years later. Even as late as 1960 scientists misunderstood some aspects. Only in 2014 was da Vinci conclusively shown to be correct.  

How did da Vinci manage to be hundreds of years ahead of his time in so many different areas of science? That is the story Walter Isaacson tells in his fascinating biography, Leonardo da Vinci. Isaacson’s other biographies also focus on some of the most creative minds in history—Benjamin Franklin and Steve Jobs—because Isaacson wants to know where inventiveness comes from and how to nurture it.

In his last chapter Isaacson offers a list of how we can all learn from Leonardo to be more creative. One is being collaborative. Da Vinci readily consulted with those who had expertise that he lacked, such as in anatomy and mathematics. He also cooperated, for example,  with several colleagues in developing his Vitruvian Man which famously shows the proportions of a human figure inscribed in a circle and a square.

What Isaacson does not point out is that being in an urban setting enhances the possibilities of multiple connections which is the essence of creativity. Many recent studies have shown how social proximity, networking, and openness in cities can result in expanded creativity. The more people you can interact with, the more your own mind is stimulated. Da Vinci worked almost his entire adult life in the thriving centers of Florence, Milan, and Rome.

Isaacson also highlights the role of being interdisciplinary. Da Vinci was fascinated by almost everything—optics, neuroscience, aerodynamics, paleontology, and more. Like being collaborative, having many interests (and reading widely) makes possible many more fresh connections, stimulating new insights, and unexpected questions which, again, is at the heart of creativity.

These first two, being collaborative and interdisciplinary, allowed him to develop a habit of using analogy to understand what he observed. He saw eddies in water and by analogy correctly assumed there must be similar eddies in air movement. He even went further to suppose that curling locks of hair followed some of these same patterns. He also deduced from autopsies and other observations that eddies must occur within the bloodstream as blood circulates, even though the medical assumption of his day was that blood didn’t circulate but went back and forth.

Likewise he wondered if the principles by which trees branched was analogous to that of rivers and then to how blood vessels branch in a body. He was right about it all.

And if anyone is going to remember your work, writing everything down on paper is essential. No one is going to have your Facebook posts in fifty years. Da Vinci probably filled 35,000 pages of books with his notes, doodles, observations, sketches, and lists. While only about a fifth of these survive, if he hadn’t put things down on paper, we’d have none of his insights.

Not all his ideas were brilliant. Some were dead ends. But by being immensely productive, we increase the chances that something remarkable will emerge.

Sadly, his genius was hidden in those notebooks for centuries. Why? He never published and rarely finished paintings.* Therefore, only hundreds of years later did others unknowingly perform experiments and make discoveries that ended up replicating what he had done much earlier.

Why did he release so little to the public? He was a perfectionist and possibly ADHD, haphazardly following every shiny idea that flitted across his mind. He was too distracted to finish much and didn’t seem to care about sharing knowledge.

Ironically, the hyper-charged mind that so sidetracked him also made him incessantly curious about everything—which may have been his greatest strength. Did birds flap their wings faster on the downswing or the upswing? Why were fossils on top of mountains?  Why do we see objects with slightly blurred edges instead of in sharp outline?

No, we can’t all be Leonardos. But we can be more creative at home, at work, in relationships, in gardening, in cooking, in writing by making one or two of his natural impulses into our habits.

_____

*Da Vinci even kept the Mona Lisa till his death, never turning the painting over to the patron who commissioned it (and was thus never paid) because he was forever tinkering with it.

The Rarest of Leaders

When John Kennedy ran for president, I was excited. He was young, charming, and witty. And as an eight-year-old Catholic, I thought it was cool that he might become the first Catholic president. My enchantment with JFK continued into my early teen years when I read his book Profiles in Courage.

Given our day of politicians being hyper-pressurized to conform to their party (Republican or Democratic), I decided to revisit this book about eight U. S. senators from over a span of two centuries. I remembered little of it but wondered what the stories might teach about a willingness to sacrifice one’s political career for principle and the common good. And I found some of what I expected.

When Senator John Quincy Adams supported the contested trade policy of the other party’s president (that is, of Jefferson who had defeated Adams’ own father!), “Simply because he had placed national interest before party and section, the Federalists had deserted him. Yes, he thought, I did not desert them, as they charge— it is they who have deserted me” (p. 30).

But then I also found sentences I tripped over. Kennedy wrote that radical, abolitionist Republicans made Reconstruction “a black nightmare the South never could forget.” (p. 139) Well, yes, the dozen years after the Civil War were a nightmare for most whites when northern troops enforced the Fifteenth Amendment so blacks could vote as full citizens. But was Kennedy really accepting a racist white viewpoint that this period was a disaster?

Apparently so. I was then bewildered to read, “No state suffered more from carpetbag rule than Mississippi.” Kennedy said that corruption was rampant and that taxes rose by a factor of fourteen under the state government elected in Reconstruction. “Vast areas of northern Mississippi lay in ruins” (p. 147).

Yet as historian Nicholas Lemann writes, “None of this is true.”

Only in recent decades has the fuller, more accurate story become better known of the systematic campaign to deny blacks the vote in the South after Reconstruction from 1877 to the mid-twentieth century. (See, for example, of Ken Wytsma’s The Myth of Equality, pp. 55-57.) Layer upon layer of requirements were (unequally) enforced to limit who could vote, limits “not based on race” which nonetheless somehow(!) dramatically reduced black but not white voting.

Kennedy also writes positively about even the staunchest and best-known pro-slavery Senator in U.S. history—John C. Calhoun—who, Kennedy tells us, nearly made the cut in his book as one of the Senate’s most courageous.

Given that Civil Rights is one of the chief pillars of Kennedy’s presidential legacy, what is going on? Several answers are possible.

One is that Kennedy was simply a man of his time, influenced by the northern and southern white desire to not rock the boat by dredging up all the unpleasantness of the past. Another (less courageous and more cynical) answer is that this book, published in 1956, was intended to broaden southern support for the presidential candidacy of a senator from Massachusetts in 1960.  

Kennedy was a complex person, and we should not judge him one dimensionally. We should also be generous enough to recognize that people can grow and change. Profiles in Courage likewise needs to be read more than one dimensionally.

One thing we can take away is this: we still need those most rare of political leaders—those courageous enough to stand against their party and even their own constituents in order to stand for the value of every human, the common good, and doing what is moral.

How to be Well Versed

For Bible lovers, our hearts are warmed to be reminded to “Be still and know that I am God” or that “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me” (Philippians 4:13 NKJV).

But sometimes taking a verse out of context can put us in a bit of a pickle. Does “all things” include me being an NBA All-Star even though I am vertically, age, and athletically challenged? The context of Philippians 4 (rejoicing, unity in Christ, being gentle, not worrying, being content in Christ) matters. Those are all the kinds of things Paul has in mind that Christ can strengthen him to do–not finding athletic, financial, relational, or artistic success.

The biblical authors didn’t write expecting that their sentences would be taken in isolation. They intended readers to understand how each part fit in the whole. But we often take verses out of context—sometimes to prove a point, sometimes for comfort or reassurance. Why do we do this?

One reason might be the introduction of verse divisions about 500 years ago. This made it easier for those writing or speaking about the Bible to be precise about where to find a particular quotation. A good thing. But over the centuries it has given the impression that each verse stands alone from its context. This can make it look like each verse is its own bullet point.

In fact, when the King James Version was originally typeset and published, each verse began its own paragraph. And that is still the way it is printed!

Verse divisions were not part of the original manuscripts of the Bible books. And certainly each verse was not its own paragraph. Paul’s letters, for example, were written in ancient Greek without paragraphs or any punctuation—not even with spaces between words!

Punctuation in Greek and other languages slowly developed over the next thousand years to make reading easier and the text clearer. And punctuation is still changing.

Is it okay to hang “The Lord is my shepherd” on my wall. Of course. But let it be a reminder of the whole of Psalm 23, and how it fits in the middle of Book 1 of the Psalms (1-41), and of the whole book of Psalms in which we find it, and how the Psalms fits in the Bible.

Ink-Stained Dreamers

As a lover of books and a lover of history, I found Adam Smyth’s The Book-Makers a delight. By zeroing in on a dozen and a half practitioners of the trade, Smyth gives us both a happy overview and fascinating stories of these often quirky individuals. My full review appears in the January-February 2025 edition of Christianity Today, which can also be found online. Here are a couple parts of the review that the editors left on the cutting room floor.

The chapter on an early bookbinder, William Wildgoose (yes, that really was his name) begins and ends with the tale of a wayward volume that was first housed in the famous Bodleian Library in Oxford, only to return unexpectedly three centuries later. In 1905 a young man comes in wanting advice on rebinding his ancient book. When the sub-librarian and assistant librarian inspect it closely—and then more closely!—they discover that this was once in the Bodleian’s collection, sold off as new printings became available. The book has been remarkably preserved through generations. And like someone who found a priceless pearl in a field, the Bodleian raises an enormous sum now equivalent to $300,000 to buy it back. The volume? Shakespeare’s First Folio, bound by William Wildgoose in 1623.

While zines go back a hundred years, Smyth features examples of the last few decades. The creators of these periodicals intentionally positioned them outside mainstream publishing in content and production values, often being photocopied and stapled. They knew that online existed, but they were committed to the tangibility, the physicality of their publications. They believed it provided a more multi-sensual experience that is not diluted by the digital.

Perhaps the author chose to highlight them for this very reason, as Smyth’s volume is in many ways a celebration of the physical book in all its dimensions.

A Beautiful, Heartbreaking Book

In A Matter of Death and Life, Irv and Marilyn Yolam offer a beautiful, heartbreaking book. In alternating chapters this husband and wife of 65 years write about Marilyn’s final months of fighting cancer. In the last half Irv alone tells his story.

Because this is very much a memoir, they give little advice on how to cope with death and sorrow. They simply relate their own experiences and reflections. For that reason, I find this much easier to read than many books on the topic. I can enter into their story, remembering my own, and grieve with them. 

Irv, being a career therapist, brings a unique double perspective as both one who suffers and one who walks alongside others. Not surprisingly, he honestly tells how hard it is sometimes to follow his own counsel. His reflections on sex, memory and its loss, and facing our own death during grief are also worthwhile.

During the course of all this, he reads some of the books he has published and finds his own past case studies illuminating. I was especially struck by “Irene” who refused to accept counsel from someone like him who had not (at that time) suffered loss. Though the two continue to meet, they hit something of a stalemate. In retrospect Irv now believes his own grieving would make him a better therapist with her even if his counsel wouldn’t change.

Though I give the book a warm recommendation, I did find two things a bit concerning. First, a couple times Irv says most of his clients moved to a healthier place after a year, maybe two. Second, he comments that those who had a good marriage are often able to move forward more quickly than those who have not. I just hope that readers who don’t fit these patterns will realize they are his generalizations. Not everyone experiences grief in these ways. And there may be nothing wrong with those who don’t.

This warm, honest, insightful book movingly intertwines two stories of facing our own death and grieving the death of a loved one.