Besides the Bible: 100 Books that Have, Should, or Will Create Christian Culture is now part of the InterVarsity Press family. We couldn’t be more pleased.

Photo: Jordan models the new book.

James Joyce’s great novel Ulysses begins with the line “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.” – and ends with the great affirmation “…yes I said yes I will Yes.” The 780-odd pages between contain whole worlds, condensed into a single Dublin day, June 16, 1904. (June 16 was also Joyce’s first date with his future wife, Nora Barnacle.) The book’s main characters are Leopold and Molly Bloom. Thus is June 16 called “Bloomsday” and recognized by bookish types as something akin to a literary holiday. Bloomsday is often marked my marathon readings of Ulysses, drinking, lemon soap, and parties at which guests are encouraged to come in Edwardian dress. Flavorwire has some other ideas on ways to celebrate. Tonight’s Bloomsday celebration is a low-key affair in the Pattison house. I’m drinking Guinness alone and yawning.

Though I love Ulysses, I have never been able to finish the book. My own daughter is named after Molly Bloom (one of my favorite characters in all of literature), but I’ve only come as close as page 680 in my several attempts to read the book straight through. I used to get discouraged by the book; now I tend to get distracted.

Well, no longer. This is the year I finish Ulysses, and I want to invite you to read it with me as the first in our “Big Books Blog” series. I’m going to adapt the reading plan the 92nd Street Y used earlier this year to finish the books in four weeks. There are 18 episodes in Ulysses. Here is my schedule:

Week One: Episodes 1-4: Telemachus; Nestor; Proteus; Calypso
Week Two: Episodes 5-9: Lotus Eaters; Hades; Aeolus; Lestrygonians; Scylla and Charybdis
Week Three: Episodes 10-15: Wandering Rocks; Sirens; Cyclops; Nausicaa; Oxen of the Sun; Circe ( first half)
Week Four: Episode 15-18: Circe, (second half); Eumaeus]; Ithaca; Penelope

The links take you to a helpful readers’ guide. I have a few deadlines in the next couple days, so I will likely publish my first reading journal from the book early next week. I’d love to hear thoughts as well.

By the way, the next selection in the Big Book series will be the deathbed edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. We’ll start that book on July 4, the day the first edition of Leaves of Grass appeared back in 1855.

The full title of Ann Coulter’s new book is Demonic: How the Liberal Mob is Endangering America. And the product description of the book begins: “The demon is a mob, and the mob is demonic. The Democratic Party activates mobs, depends on mobs, coddles, publicizes and celebrates mobs – it is the mob.” Do I even need to tell you that she compares the “Amercan Left” to Hitler, Stalin, Charles Manson, and the guillotine? She writes:

“Just as fire seeks oxygen, Democrats seek power, which is why they will always be found championing the mob whether the mob consists of Democrats lynching blacks or Democrats slandering the critics of ObamaCare as racists.”

Demonic is yet another disheartening reminder (Coulter’s 2006 book was called Godless: The Church of Liberalism) that the people who are driving much of our public discourse have abandoned nuance and civility in favor of spectacle and mean-spiritedness. Politics is their religion, so they play politics with religion, and the Devil is always the other guy.

This is terrific design. Why isn't Relevant doing this kind of stuff anymore?

Less than 24 hours ago, I was complaining to John and Dan about the fact Relevant Magazine’s online component hadn’t even mentioned us. We’ve all contributed to Relevant at least twice throughout the years, and John serves as their de facto books editor. Our book is filled with contributions from folks Relevant readers love, like Donald Miller and Phyllis Tickle. (I’m assuming Relevant readers like Phyllis Tickle.) Why not throw us a bone?

So I felt quite sheepish today when Relevant’s review of Besides the Bible appeared on their main page. The review has some caveats (not enough lady writers, some [admitted] bias). We also committed an egregious error by writing the book before Rob Bell’s Love Wins was released, because if there was anything the world needs more of, it’s young, middle-class white males weighing in on the status of Rob Bell’s soul.

Still, author Sara Helm is now my new best friend, evidenced by the fact I’m following her on Twitter. Thanks so much, Sara! We’re also a little embarrassed that we haven’t posted anything on here in a while. Here was a fun post we wrote recently. You can also read John Pattison and I heatedly argue about books and technology. Welcome, Relevant readers!

Does anyone know if David Foster Wallace intended for his notes for The Pale King to be shaped into a book after his death? I doubt he communicated this to someone before his suicide three years ago, but I haven’t read much about the book yet, so Wallace might have done exactly that.

This brings to mind another question, one which also came up recently when Knopf published 138 index cards that comprised a rough draft of a new novel by Vladimir Nabakov, The Original of Laura: how much artistic liberty should we take with a dead author’s notes and papers?

More questions: Is publishing Nabakov’s index cards and DFW’s unfinished novel the equivalent of displaying or publishing the pencil sketches of a great painter? Does it matter that Nabakov insisted that his index cards be burned? Or is it a matter of degree? Nabakov’s family published the index cards as they were. Is it less justifiable to put DFW’s notes in chronological order and apply some editing – because at that point the editor is starting to apply his or her will to the material?

On the other hand, the only reason we have The Trial and The Castle is because Max Brod defied Franz Kafka’s orders to destroy his unpublished manuscripts. “Dearest Max,” Kafka wrote, “My last request: Everything I leave behind me to be burned unread.” The world is richer for Brod’s noncompliance.

All this being said, I’m sure I’ll eventually read The Pale King. My curiosity will eventually overwhelm any sort of principled stand I pretend to take. It’s like the deleted scenes now included as standard practice on a movie’s DVD. I have mixed feelings about deleted scenes. The film should be judged on its own merits, as presented to us by the director. Does including deleted scenes dim the structural integrity of the artistic product? Can you imagine a novelist including deleted scenes in the back of her book?  But we recently watched Harry Potter 7a on Blu-Ray, and as soon as the movie was over, we turned to the deleted scenes. I just can’t get enough of Harry, Ron, and Hermione.

Some genius of the Internet (Dan Wilbur) came up with Better Book Titles, a site which photoshops classic (and more recent popular books) with new, more appropriately specific titles. It’s pretty genius. And, of course, the list includes many of the books listed in Besides the Bible. Our alternative title could be 100 Examples of Why Most Christians Are Dumb, But We Are Totally Smart, and We Have Cool Friends.

Here’s a list of the books BBT shares with BtB:

• To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
• The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand
• The Giving Tree, by Shel Silverstein
• The Road, by Cormac McCarthy
• Paradise Lost, by John Milton
• The People’s History of the United States, by Howard Zinn
• Gulliver’s Travels, by Jonathan Swift
• The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins
• Franny and Zooey, by J.D. Salinger
• The Collected Short Stories of Flannery O’Connor
• The Inferno, by Dante Aligheri
• Blankets, by Craig Thompson

Author’s note: My review of The Poetry of William Carlos Williams of Rutherford first appeared on the Englewood Review of Books website. It is reposted here with permission.

We at BtB are big fans of the ERB. They post reviews of a wide range of books, and they put out a quarterly print edition that you can actually hold in your hands. You can (and should) subscribe here.

Wendell Berry has written a thoughtful book-length meditation on the poetry of William Carlos Williams titled, appropriately, The Poetry of William Carlos Williams of Rutherford. But let us be honest with one another: with the United States fighting two wars while governments fall throughout North Africa and the Middle East, with the economy still in shambles and almost one in ten Americans out of work, and with the rising of the oceans and the temperature of the planet, what use is poetry, really? And what is there for us in a book by a farmer-poet from Kentucky about a doctor-poet from New Jersey? In a passage from his poem “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower,” Williams writes, “It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.”  But what exactly can be found in poetry?

Spirited defenses of poetry have been raised throughout history (of note, Sir Philip Sydney’s in the sixteenth century and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s in the nineteenth), and though he does not claim anything so bold, Wendell Berry has written his own defense for our time. Readers familiar with Berry’s work will not be surprised that Rutherford, New Jersey would be of interest to him. Except for the years Williams spent in medical school at the University of Pennsylvania and his subsequent internship in New York City, he lived, practiced medicine, and wrote in the place of his birth. His decision to settle in Rutherford is echoed in the life of Berry, who returned to his native Kentucky after finishing his formal education to live and farm and write. When Berry writes of Williams, “He lived by the terms of a community involvement more constant, more intimate, and more urgent than that of any other notable poet of his time,” he could also have been writing about himself.

By choosing not just to live in Rutherford but to make it the focus of his work, Williams engaged in a lifelong struggle to find a “locally appropriate language.” This led to a distinctly embodied poetry consistent with a philosophy Williams summarized as “no ideas but in things.” Or: flesh made word. Unlike that of his contemporaries T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens, Williams’ poetry was not born out of abstractions, but, as Berry writes, from the “details of geography, of daily work, of local life and economy, and of course the details of an imposed industrialism and its overwhelming power to uproot, alienate, and corrupt.” Throughout his own body of work, Wendell Berry has explored how a worldview that generalizes local particularities into abstract principles is able to reduce living, interrelated ecologies into their constituent parts, which may be auctioned off to the highest bidder. For example, what we offhandedly refer to as our need for “energy” provides the emotional and intellectual distance necessary for us to tear off mountaintops for coal and drill into the earth for oil without an honest accounting of how these actions damage the health of the land, our communities, and future generations.

A companion to locality in the work of William Carlos Williams (and, of course, Wendell Berry) is the value placed on limits. Berry addresses this most directly in two chapters in the middle of the book titled “Economy and Form” and “Measure.” By valuing both limits and the local, Berry finds himself at odds with the prevailing culture. We are nation that believes in reinvention through relocation and in a pursuit of happiness that is synonymous with more. But we have found the pursuit unsatisfying and hollow, just as we know—although often only intuitively—that “there is pleasure, and there is beauty too, in any work with an exacting sense of enough.” Berry is writing here about poetry, but he could just as well be talking about a type of life lived, as he could when he writes:

What has been included is brought within measure, made eloquent, even musical, by being freed of the burden of all that has been, has needed to be, excluded.

Yes! We know this to be true, even though we rarely, if ever, practice it. Reading this book makes me want to go through my house with boxes and bags for a trip to Goodwill. It also causes me to examine how I spend my time: how can my life be made eloquent, even musical, by being freed of the burden of things that should be excluded?

Of course this what you might expect from a book by Wendell Berry, but what does it have to do with poetry? First, it is important to recognize you will not find truth or meaning in a poem if you are not willing to stop, be still, and listen to what it has to say. The dynamic between poem and reader is in many ways similar to (though certainly not a substitute for) the relationship between religious faith and the believer. Both require a present and active participation—a partnership—in order to realize their transformative power (although this age of distraction we are losing our capacity to enter into this kind of relationship). Also like religious faith, poetry exists at the “convergence of the eternal and the present;” it provides an opportunity to reach out toward a reality that is just beyond the limits of ordinary language.

Poetry, according to Berry, is “the means of giving to realizations of the fleeting eternal moment a kind of permanent presence, so that amid the confusion of ever-accumulating mass of details they can be returned to, not as ends in themselves…but as reminders of an indispensable possibility, a wakefulness belonging to the highest definition of our humanity.” We need these reminders—each of us. Poetry does not belong to professors in universities or to “high culture,” and it does not exist on the sidelines of life, while the real game of economics and science and politics and education takes place on the field. Poetry is “part of the necessary conversation of a local culture,” and so it matters that William Carlos Williams’ poetry is formed from the language of his own community, a poetry of locality and limits.

Poetry is not a panacea for all that ails us, but I regret that it has been marginalized in our society, along with the importance of belonging to a place and the satisfaction found in enough. Skeptics may question the value of “local arts of poetry, storytelling, painting, and music,” just as experts question the efficiency of a local economics, agriculture, fishing, and forestry. However,

Without such rootedness in locality, considerately adapted to local conditions, we get what we now have got: a country half-destroyed, toxic, eroded, and in every way abused; a deluded people tricked into gauds without traditions of any kind to give them character; a politics of expediency dictated by the wealthy; a disintegrating economy founded upon fantasy, fraud, and ecological ruin.

Again, skeptics may question the usefulness of poetry and the prophetic voice of Wendell Berry. But as we face the rising consequences of our individualism, our displacement, and our exploitive consumption, it seems like the burden of proof is on them.

Josh Cacopardo has a well-written, funny, and enthusiastic essay in The Curator magazine entitled “The Willful Death of a Luddite”, about his conversion to e-readers. Cacopardo cites a number of reasons for his move “into the future of literary technology,” including the availability of free out-of-copyright books, the convenience of e-readers, and “the rapture of having an entire catalogue of literary classics at your fingertips, any time you want.” Cacopardo’s piece deserves a full response but with my own writing deadlines looming, I will have to postpone. For now, I’ll just mention three things.

First, I’ve never understood the appeal of having an entire library of books at one’s fingertips. Are we reading the library all at once? Isn’t it sufficient – maybe even preferable – to limit our reading to the number of books that can fit comfortably into a backpack or a back pocket? What is the practical use of having access to a virtual Library of Alexandria every minute of the day…or as long as the battery life on your e-reader.

Second, Cacopardo mentions that he wants to buy Kindles for his unborn kids. I think this was a joke, which is good because the technology will be obsolete by their first birthday. This is one of the benefits of print books. They may or may not go out of style, but they don’t require software upgrades, file conversions, or extended warranties.

Lastly, I’d like to point you to a conversation Jordan and I had about e-readers several months ago on this blog. Here is my initial post (“Smaller Cellphones, Bigger Books”), then Jordan’s response (“I’m Scared of New Things!”), and then my response to Jordan (“In Defense of Nostalgia”).

This is an important conversation, and, while I may disagree with some of his conclusions, I appreciate The Curator magazine’s and Josh Cacopardo’s thoughtful contributions to it.

I’m writing an article for Neue Magazine about the possibility of “Slow Church.” I’m grateful for the opportunity to explore an idea that began as a hunch, but it’s clear now that 2,500 words will only whet my appetite with this topic. (It’s also clear that I’m not the only one to notice this connection. I’ve found some interesting blog posts, essays, and sermons from Jonathan Dodson, Kyle Childress, Gordon Atkinson, and Tim Chester.)

My thesis is that all these Slow Food principles have (or could have) corollaries in the church: the table, hospitality, pleasure, justice, real connections, conversation, local knowledge and identity, shared traditions and shared space, consumers as co-producers, manageable scale, an unhurried pace that is profoundly countercultural, and a focus on the abundance of Time rather than the oppressiveness of Time.

Alice Waters talks about the Slow Food movement as a “re-education of the senses.” Slow Church is about…what? I’m still trying to work out the best way to put that. Maybe “the reconciliation of the world to God, one neighborhood at a time.”

I hope somebody is a writing a book on “Slow Church” so I don’t have to. What am I saying? I’d love to write this book.