As the semester turns

The deadline has passed for dropping a course without a grade, so it’s time to get serious with this guide to reading like a scholar. And let’s back that up with some thoughts on how spiritual discipline is part of a complete education.

Some things should be falling into place by now. If not, now is the time to get help—from professors, counselors or pastors, Student Support Services—people who really know what’s what. Your friends and family love you, but for that very reason, sometimes they’ll try to fix things for you instead of helping you learn things yourself. Make the most of college.

Charitable clicking

I’m just one of many to point out that if you go to, for example, The Literacy Site,you can donate to that charity and several others (linked to it) by merely clicking a “button.” The most painless charitable action you’ll do all day. So why not make it part of every day?

Making me happy: medieval mystics

A few years ago I wrote a paper comparing the indie film Anchoress with what medieval scholars and theologians really think about real anchoresses and female mystics, based on medieval texts. Anchoress is a visually-striking film, and rather useful for illustrating the enclosure and giving some indication of an anchoress’s daily life. But in the end, it goes off with a stereotypical 20th-century, new-age agenda.

Now First Things‘ Matthew Millner notes that “more sophisticated readings” of medieval mystics are turning up all over—and about time, too, say I. After pointing to several recent essays by top scholars, Millner writes:

Historians who understand that sex is not everything have set themselves a more complicated task than the “psychoanalysis of visions.” Their appointments at leading institutions testify that the results have been more satisfying. Good historiography, however, is no end in itself; its purpose is to facilitate encounter with medieval mystics, one that we moderns would do well to pursue.

Having just discovered that the 8th edition of the Norton Anthology cut large chunks of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe in order to shoehorn these two mystical yet very different 14th century women into a unit on “Christ’s Humanity,” AND has yet to make those materials available online, I was feeling cranky about the perception and interpretation of medieval mysticism, but after reading Millner’s column, I feel slightly better.

Pray for Congo

Last week CNN reported an outbreak of ebola fever in the area of Kasai Occidental province where my parents lived and worked as medical missionaries from the mid-1960’s to early 1990s. BBC updated the story two days later, confirming that

Five people are confirmed to have died from the virus, but at least 166 people have died in total in the area and WHO says it is aware of 206 more cases.

Apparently people had been falling ill for at least three months before the fever was identified as ebola. This week reports have come from Presbyterian and Baptist missionaries in the area, who are responding to help along with Doctors without Borders, the Centers for Disease Control, and the World Health Organization. News today reports

“In the past week we have seen a slight dip in suspect cases. On average we have one new case every day and a death every two or three days,” said Dr. Fortunat Mtumba, health minister for the affected Western Kasai region….In the past four months there have been 170 fatalities from 378 cases of either Ebola or shigellosis, Mtumba said.

Please pray for the people of this troubled nation, and for the medical professionals and others aiding them.

On beyond English majors

Or, more “things to do with your English major.” Seriously, I’ve been fascinated to discover that one of the most frequent “referrer” search engine terms that apparently brings readers to this blog is some variation on “jobs for English majors.” I oblige this week with these success stories from monster.com, the famous online job referral service.

Among the best advice these successful English major grads give: internships can provide you with very useful experience and contacts for job prospects after graduation, if you’re looking for work in areas other than teaching.

English majors have to use their imaginations and resources. Fortunately, they have those qualities in abundance.

Madeleine L’Engle

Opera lovers mourned the passing of Luciano Pavarotti this week, but we readers (some of whom, no doubt, also love opera) now must say farewell to Madeleine L’Engle and celebrate her life and work. L’Engle’s Newberry Award-winning novel A Wrinkle in Time was one of the first books my parents gave me (after Lewis’s Narnia chronicles), and at one time or another in middle-school, high school, or college, I read many of her other books, including her advice to writers.

In a 1995 writing workshop at Vancouver School of Theology, L’Engle said

a writer’s responsibility is to radiate hope, to bring healing, to say yes to life. Her works wrestle with the unanswerable questions of life and death, God and darkness. In Walking on Water, a superb book about how faith and art influence one another, L’Engle argues that there is a “chief difference between the Christian and the secular artist-the purpose of the work, be it story or music or painting, is to further the coming of the Kingdom, to make us aware of our status as children of God, and to turn our feet toward home.”

Madeleine L’Engle should be remembered for doing just that through her writing. May she rest in God’s eternal light.

Thursday things + book rec: Dante translations

Even though we didn’t actually have Labor Day off (long story—don’t ask) this week has felt “off” somehow with missed connections and best-laid plans ganging agley (thank you, Robert Burns).

To improve the time, let’s consider the new Hollander translation of Dante’s Paradiso, which the New Yorker likes very, very much:

It is more idiomatic than any other English version I know. At the same time, it is lofty, the more so for being plain.

Acocella’s review does make it sound good, and she makes a strong case for reading Paradiso, in some form—of course it goes without saying that it’s worth reading Inferno and Purgatorio, or you’d think so, but I was unhappy to discover that my new World Lit. anthology (which shall remain nameless, because I liked it pretty well otherwise) includes only Inferno! What the who with the what now?!

Call me old-fashioned, but I remain fixated on Dorothy L. Sayers’s lyrical Dante translations (Penguin paperbacks), which even manage to imitate terza rima. I suppose they’re not trendy, but her introductions and notes are also extremely helpful in explaining Dante’s spiritual symbolism and allegories.

A fellow I knew in grad. school, Tony Esolen, has also translated the Divine Comedy. I keep meaning to try his translation. According to this review:

Thanks to Esolen’s superb rendition, one can finally delve into the Divine Comedy in English and catch the rigor of Dante’s style and the polyphonic range of his voice….

Esolen has produced an incomparably good work, which is likely to become the standard poetic translation of the Divine Comedy for years to come. He correctly views the poem as the paradigmatically Christian vision and the very voice of Western spirituality.

Note to self: put this version on your wish list.

On writing and reading great literature

Check out this guy Scott W. Kay on some factors that may be preventing evangelical Christians from producing great literature, including lack of imagination, shaky grounding in theology, and lack of exposure to great literature of all kinds. He cites Flannery O’Connor and Camille Paglia—strange companions, indeed! John Piper responds to the same Touchstone article that set Kay off, exploring how fiction and art are “true and valuable.”

Speaking of reading great literature, Ken Morefield is up to chapter three in Jane Austen’s Emma. The less said about his reaction to the Austen-bio-fiction film Becoming Jane, however, the better!