Among my recent readings are these four bios (or sorta bios, in that the life-narrative-rich Warner book is piece of family counsel). The other two are bio-ish, with Pachinko tracing, in novel form, the life of a Korean who finds herself in pre-WWII Japan, and a memoir-marinated group of essays, Gallimaufry, by Joseph Epstein.

Paxtor Hood’s Isaac Watts: His Life and Hymns—This composer of Joy to the World and When I Survey the Wondrous Cross astonished his parents with his childhood aptitude for verse. His mother was having trouble believing that the lines he’d presented her were his work, so, to convince her, he sat down (around age eight) and penned this acrostic based on his name:

I           am a vile polluted lump of earth,

S          o I’ve continued ever since my birth;

A          lthough Jehovah grace does daily give me,

A          s sure this monster Satan will deceive me,

C          come, therefore, Lord, from Satan’s claws relieve me.

W        ash me in Thy blood, O Christ,

A          nd grace Divine impart,

T          hen search and try the corners of my heart,

T          hat I in all things may be fit to do

S          ervice to Thee, and sing Thy praises too. 

Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko—I’m taking part in a Vanderbilt University alumni, on-line reading club, and this, our second book, traced the fortunes of Korean characters who found themselves in Japan in the mid and late 20th century. There were a couple of noble Christians in the book, one a frail pastor who married a poor, disgraced Korean woman impregnated by a rich adulterer, and also a young believer who died in captivity, refusing to mouth words of veneration at a Shinto shrine, instead, whispering the words to the Lord’s Prayer. But there were many less-than-admirable figures in the mix, some professing faith in Christ.

The core theme was the racist mistreatment of Koreans by the Japanese. One social aspect of this phenomenon was the way in which Koreans became the chief operators of the nation’s pachinko parlors—popular establishments but counted a bit shady by populace.

Here’s my contribution to the exchange of summary takes from the group:

Glad I read it, but it was a long march. I love books and movies that take me over or back to a culture with which I’m not familiar, and this book does that with amazing granularity. So many details and angles. But it does illuminate universals, particularly regarding racial and cultural prejudice, which is not simply a person-of-color issue. Among the many human attitudinal vices (including, or compounding with lust, greed, jealousy, pride, etc.) is racism. Some of it focuses on physical differences, much of it on social norms. Much of it is asinine, toxic, and unjust. Some of it is quite reasonable, as when one thinks harshly of cultures practicing and people affirming FGM or “honor killing.” Another book occurred to me as I talked with others about this reading, J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, which chronicles the self-destructive, mad, pathologies of some poor Appalachian whites, and yes, their features of nobility.

Kurt and Brenda Warner’s First Things First: The Rules of Being a Warner . . . What Works, What Doesn’t, and What Really Matters Most— Kurt Warner came out of football oblivion to be named Super Bowl XXXIV MVP in 2000. This book covers the relationship between Kurt and his wife Brenda, a former Marine, which began when they were not walking with the Lord. But when Jesus took charge of them, they moved into celibacy until their marriage. First Things First is a conversational book, with their taking turns to tell the story and recount their challenges and lessons learned. It covers a wide range of life topics, with granularity, e.g., their consistent policy of tithing—whether impoverished in the XFL or wealthy in the NFL; Kurt’s dealing with racial sensitivities among his teammates, including Larry Fitzgerald.

Among their “Eight Rules for Being a Warner Daughter or Son,” we read, “4. After ordering at a restaurant, be able to tell Mom the server’s eye color,” and 7. “Hold hands with a sibling for ten minutes if you can’t get along.”

Wolfram Eilenberger’s Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, and Heidegger and the Decade that Reinvented Philosophy—Ludwig Wittgenstein was a religion-haunted agnostic, who dabbled in Catholicism, and whose works were substantially edited by devout Catholic, G.E.M. Anscombe (namesake of the Anscombe groups at Ivy League schools who champion a biblical sexual ethic). He’d read Tolstoy and Kierkegaard, and he saw his dangerous WWI service as a matter of putting it all on the line. After the war, he was an elementary school teacher for a time, daily leading his pupils in the prayer, “Holy Spirit, come and shine your light of mercy on us, so that we may make our progress, our duty always to learn. To retain what we have learned and always strive to do good.”

Except for Ernst Cassirer, who was a domestically and academically conventional man, these philosophers, who put great focus on subjectivity, lived troubled, morally problematic lives. The sexually-promiscuous Marxist, Walter Benjamin committed suicide in flight from the Nazis. Martin Heidegger became an apologist for Nazism. Also a philanderer, he earned a bitter evaluation from one of his former paramours, the philosopher Hannah Arendt: “Decades later, Arendt would say that Heidegger did not have a bad character, in fact he had none at all.”

James Atlas’s Bellow: A Biography—Though Saul Bellow was a thin-skinned moral mess—a promiscuous, insecure, selfish (though strikingly gifted) writer and scholar—he had a conservative streak, which made him sympathetic to Allan Bloom’s anti-relativistic project in The Closing of the American Mind, for which he wrote the foreword. This Nobel Laureate, while not an observant Jew, said of the suggestion that he should write an autobiography, “There would be nothing much to say except that I have been unbearably busy ever since I was circumcised.”

Joseph Epstein’s Gallimaufry: A Collection of Essays, Reviews, Bits—As I write this, Joseph Epstein is under fire for a column he wrote for the Wall Street Journal, one in which he dinged the practice of calling Jill Biden “Doctor” (she with an EdD. rather than an MD or PhD). Many of his critics accuse him of misogyny, but I well recall the “word on the street” when I entered the PhD program in philosophy at Vanderbilt in 1970—that it wasn’t cool to call yourself “Doctor” or append “PhD” to your name, should you finish the program.

Anyway, he can have a tart tongue (or pen or keyboard), and it makes for some “Wowser!” reading.  And there’s plenty of that in this book, whose title means “a jumble of things.” One of essays, “A Short Attention Span” (2017), says that essayists like himself suffer from (or enjoy) a form of ADD, whereby they jump from topic to topic with joy. I have a bit of that myself.

Speaking of take-downs, he calls the celebrated Susan Sontag (darling of the intellectual elites) a “savant-idiot,” flipping the expression “idiot savant” (i.e., “a person with serious learning disabilities but gifted in a peculiar, usually extraordinary way, often mathematically or musically.” But Sontag, in his estimation, is “a person who is learned, brainy, brilliant even, but gets everything important wrong.”

Epstein taught for decades at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, where I was a church planter and a campus minister. I enjoyed bumping into him in town from time to time—at the city library, Whole Foods, and Blockbuster—and he was unfailingly gracious.  So I’m a fan, not only for his writing, but also of his persona, reviled though he may be by people whose revulsion is a badge of honor.

PS: As I’m reading through the essays in this book, I’m also working through his little book, Ambition, which traces and evaluates the trajectories of folks like Dale Carnegie and Henry Ford.