A Review of

Homer Simpson Marches on Washington:
Dissent Through American Popular Culture.
Timothy Dale and Joseph Foy, eds.
Hardback: University Press of KY, 2010.
Buy now:  [ Amazon ]

Reviewed by Chris Smith.

Homer Simpson Marches on Washington: Dissent Through American Popular Culture is a fine follow-up to the earlier volume 2008’s Homer Simpson Goes to Washington.  In the book’s introduction, editor Joseph Foy, gets to the heart of the book’s purpose:

In the premiere episode of The Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert announces that the viewers of his show are “heroes” who know that “something must be done.”  He then pounds his fist on his C-shaped desk to inform them that they are doing something right now – they are “watching TV.”  His proclamation might be met with smirks, guffaws, and skepticism, but the authors of the chapters of this book lend credence to this tongue-in-cheek commentary.  Although true activism requires mobilized engagement to inspire change, the empowerment of political dissent via mass media and popular culture reflected in these pages provide an argument that true public, democratic action is occurring through popular culture.  We merely have to tune in to join the conversation (14).

The essays in this collection explore a diverse range of media from television (The Simpsons, of course, The Daily Show, Star Trek: The Next Generation, and more), to music (“Protest Songs in Popular Music,” Hip-Hop) to the movies (M. Night Shymalan’s The Happening, and more).  Although this is an excellent and engaging book, a few of the essays were difficult to read because I was unfamiliar with the TV show or film that they were examining.  Perhaps the most captivating piece, however, was Matthew Henry’s “Gabbin’ About God: Religion, Secularity and Satire on The Simpsons,” which not only explores these themes as they are played out on the show, but also critically examines other books that have explored The Simpsons’ treatment of Christianity.  Two more of the best essays in this volume were Jamie Warner’s treatment of the “Politics of Truth” on Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show and Carl Bergetz’s piece “It’s Not Funny ‘Cause It’s True: The Mainstream Media’s Response to Media Satire in the Bush Years.”  On the other hand, Jerry Rodnitzky’s essay on “The Evolution of Protest Songs in Popular Music” was rather disappointing because it limited its focus to only the most mainstream of popular songs, ignoring more marginal arenas of pop music like rap (e.g., Public Enemy) or punk/post-punk ( The Dead Kennedys, Rage Against the Machine, etc.).

Homer Simpson Marches on Washington is essential reading for anyone who believes that mass media can be effective in exposing the oppressive powers that be and inspiring people to resist them.

Thanks to Thomas Nelson, we are giving away a copy of St. Patrick by Jonathan Rogers (our review) and Isaac Newton by Mitch Stokes (our review).  Both of these books are a part of the new series “Christian Encounters” from Thomas Nelson.

One lucky winner will win a copy of both books!  How to enter to win:

1. Announce the contest on Twitter, Facebook or your blog: I just entered to win  bios of St Patrick & Isaac Newton from The Englewood Review (@ERBks ). You can enter too: http://ow.ly/1sMme
   
2. Post a comment to this announcement with your name and a link to your post for #1.
3. You may enter one time per day for the duration of the contest.
4. We will pick a winner at random from the eligible contestants and notify them this weekend.

The contest will end at 4PM ET on this Friday April 2nd.

Just in time for Easter, here are two excellent videos of NT Wright discussing the importance of the resurrection of Christ for the Christian faith.  We will be running a review of Wright’s newest book After You Believe: Why Christian Character Matters, in our next issue due out this Friday.

Also, there is less than a week left to enter our Easter N.T. Wright Book Giveaway (with over $250 of N.T. Wright books to be given away as prizes!). If you have not yet entered, you will want to do so soon!

Excerpt from the recent book:

When the Church was a Family:
Recapturing Jesus’ Vision for
Authentic Christian Community.
Joseph Hellerman.
Paperback: B&H Pub. Group, 2009.
Buy now: [ ChristianBook.com ]

Another Spring
Christina Rossetti

If I might see another Spring
I’d not plant summer flowers and wait:
I’d have my crocuses at once,
My leafless pink mezereons,
My chill-veined snowdrops, choicer yet
My white or azure violet,
Leaf-nested primrose; anything
To blow at once not late.

If I might see another Spring
I’d listen to the daylight birds
That build their nests and pair and sing,
Nor wait for mateless nightingale;
I’d listen to the lusty herds,
The ewes with lambs as white as snow,
I’d find out music in the hail
And all the winds that blow.

If I might see another Spring—
O stinging comment on my past
That all my past results in “if”—
If I might see another Spring
I’d laugh to-day, to-day is brief;
I would not wait for anything:
I’d use to-day that cannot last,
Be glad to-day and sing.

“Explaining the Magnificence of the Universe“

A Review of
The Seven Pillars of Creation:
The Bible, Science, and the Ecology of Wonder.

by
William P. Brown.

Reviewed by David E. Anderson.

The Seven Pillars of Creation:
The Bible, Science, and the Ecology of Wonder.
William P. Brown.
Hardback: Oxford UP, 2010.
Buy Now: [ Amazon ]

Science and religion are strange bedfellows along the lines of Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas in the movie The War of the Roses. The family dog is safe, but both parties are going at each other red in tooth and nail, and it’s just a matter of time before the chandelier crashes down on them.

Columbia Theological Seminary professor William Brown says that this dysfunctional relationship that we find nowadays between science and religion doesn’t have to be that way. Rather than look around us at our current messy state of global affairs—pollution, climate change—or back at the long and often sorry history of humankind’s rape of nature—not infrequently justified by religion—and exclaim “The horror!” we should gaze at our world with a different mind-set and rejoice at the wonders of creation. According to Brown, science and religion may not explain the magnificence of the universe in the same words, and at times their explanations may clash, but they share a transcendent goal.

Brown fervently believes that science and religion need not be at each other’s throats: “Is science really hell-bent on eroding humanity’s nobility and eliminating all sense of mystery? Not the science I know. Is faith simply a lazy excuse to wallow in human pretension? Not the faith I know. What if invoking God was a way of acknowledging the remarkable intelligibility of creation?” His goal in this wide-ranging study is a simple one: “I want to bring together two distinct disciplines, biblical theology and modern science, and explore points of conversation in ways that I hope generate more synergy than sparks. My conviction is that one cannot adequately interpret the Bible today, particularly the creation traditions, without engaging science.” Brown’s methodology is straightforward: (1) “Elucidate the [Biblical] text’s perspective on creation within the text’s own contexts.” (2) “Associate the text’s perspective on creation with the perspective of science.” And (3) “Appropriate the text in relation to science and science in relation to the text.”

(more…)

“A Strong Argument for
Locally-Oriented Communities“

A Review of
Harry Smith:
The Avant-Garde in
The American Vernacular.

Andrew Perchuk and Rani Singh, editors.

Reviewed by Chris Smith.

Harry Smith:
The Avant-Garde in
The American Vernacular.
Andrew Perchuk and Rani Singh, editors.
Paperback: Getty Research Institute, 2010.
Buy Now: [ Amazon ]

I’ve been thinking a lot in recent months about a church community’s role in nurturing the local culture of its place (see, for instance, my review of Walter Brueggemann’s newest book Journey to the Common Good).  Most recently, I have been thinking about the idea of folk music – i.e.,  music that is distinctive to the people of a place – and its relation to the church.  It seems like there is a lot of good work to be done by churches in discerning a style of music that reflects the people of the place, and at the same time allowing the music of the church to be open to this sort of local folk music – which could come in the form of writing new songs or in the way old hymns or songs are sung or accompanied.  My understanding of what folk music is has been shaped to a large extent by the classic collection The Anthology of American Folk Music (AAFM), which was assembled in the early 1950’s by the eccentric artist and ethnographer Harry Smith.  As I was beginning to reflect more intentionally on the idea of folk music as it relates to the church, I happened to see that the Getty Research Institute had released a new biography of Smith, which will undoubtedly become the authoritative reference work on Smith’s life and work.  This book, Harry Smith: The Avant-Garde in the American Vernacular, reflects the broadness of Smith’s work as an artist and scholar: ethnographer, collector, bibliophile, visual artist, filmmaker, etc.  The book is divided into five parts, the first of which contains biographical essays, the subsequent four engage various aspects of Smith’s work (his films: “Heaven and Earth Magic” and “Mahagonny”; theAAFM”; and finally his use of collage).

The first part of the book is helpful for understanding Smith’s development as an artist, and provides a rich context in which the following essays on his work can be understood.  Smith was born in 1923 in Portland, Oregon and raised by his theosophist parents who encouraged him to explore all the sorts of esoteric philosophies, “which led to an early and ongoing fascination with unorthodox spirituality, comparative religion and philosophy” (16).  The picture that is painted here of Smith is one of a man of extraordinary intellect and endless curiosity who was well-connected with key and cultural figures of his time (especially the poet Allen Ginsberg), and yet much of his life was spent in – or on the edge of – destitution.  Several stories recounted here, for instance, depict Smith as a literal embodiment of Erasmus’ famous epithet: “When I get a little money, I buy books and if any is left, I buy food and clothes.”

(more…)

“What Other Choice Do We Have?“

A Review of
Msr. Pain: A Novel.

by Roberto Bolaño.

Reviewed by Matthew Kaul.

Msr. Pain: A Novel.
Roberto Bolaño.
Hardback: New Directions, 2010.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]

The recent explosion of interest in the Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño (d. 2003) has been fueled chiefly by his two major novels, The Savage Detectives (1998; translated 2007) and 2666 (2004; translated 2008). Bolaño’s work might be best understood by describing him as a sort of rebellious sociologist of culture, or perhaps more accurately, a cultural geographer intent on a revisionary remapping of the territory. As such, Bolaño thinks and writes on the borders of culture, examining the ways in which cultures overlap and the frequently-violent interactions that result.

The Savage Detectives and 2666 are interested in, among other things, the ways writers, especially poets, relate to the world surrounding them. The Savage Detectives traces a group of self-styled hipster poets, the “Visceral Realists,” around Mexico City as they pontificate, found journals, denounce their competitors, and generally talk big and produce little before being run out of town. 2666, on the other hand, begins by following a quartet of literature professors as they seek out an obscure, reclusive German author in whose work they specialize. In both books, these protangonists are drawn in to the world of literature, but are unable to ever completely integrate themselves within that world. On the cusps and borders of the literary world, they inhabit cities but are never fully formed by those cities.

(more…)

A Review of

From Head to Hand:
Art and the Manual.
David Levi Strauss.
Hardback: Oxford UP, 2010.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]

Reviewed by Brent Aldrich.

It’s hard to describe exactly the scope of David Levi Strauss’ new book From Head to Hand: Art and the Manual; it begins where I might expect, with several essays narrating the physical materialization of ideas in the work of hands-on, process-oriented artists. Continuing through this book, though, the focus broadens to include larger social contexts, the cultural tradition of art, and artists and writers influential for Strauss as a writer. Very early on, anyway, Strauss introduces “making things by hand” as a radical act in our disconnected age, in that “it puts human beings in a direct, rather than hidden, relation to labor” (2); stated more broadly, “ ‘to utter that which is unutterable, to render audible that which is ineffable, to render visible that which is hidden’ ” (159) is the translation ‘from head to hand’ by which all human art is performed. The Word becoming Flesh is an irresistible metaphor (and partially the subject of the final chapter), an ultimate creative act by which separations such as mind and body and spirit become much more fluid. Human work, then, that deals directly with the transformation of materials, and specifically visual or textual art, is also bound up in the reciprocal process between ideas and materials.

(more…)

This week marked the 30^th anniversary of the assassination of El Salvadoran priest Oscar Romero.  In commemoration of this anniversary, Jamie Moffett filmmaker of such documentaries as The Ordinary Radicals and most recently Return to El Salvador, a film narrated by Martin Sheen that “brings the hopes of the Salvadoran people to light and helps find significant ways to walk with them in their journey,” has released Mothers In Arms, a companion book which traces the stories of women who took up arms in the El Salvadoran civil war in the 1980s.  The book is available in an ebook format in either English or Spanish and a hardcover edition is available for pre-order.

[ Order MOTHERS IN ARMS through the book's website... ]

Video introduction the book by co-author Betsy Morgan.

Part 1:

Part 2: