Book Review: Three Cups of Tea

Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace . . . One School at a Time
by Greg Mortenson


The good that one person can do, December 12, 2008


Greg Mortenson is an extraordinary man who builds schools. "Three Cups of Tea" chronicles his journey from obsessive mountainerring bum to hands-on philanthropist. Mortenson is personally responsible for building dozens of schools for boys and girls in extremely remote and impoverished sections of Pakistan and Afghanistan. Along the way, Mortenson encounters illiterate-yet-wise village elders and communities based on tradition, justice and hospitality. The slow and predictable pace of this life is attractive to we hyperactive Westerners. But the beauty of the life and its setting is offset by the harshness of the climate and paucity of resources.

"There Cups of Tea" often reads like "The Perils of Pauline," with the author careening from one hair-raising calamity to the next. If he's not battling altitude sickness on K2, he is dealing with locals with their own agendas, America military men hunting terrorists or lonely potential donors relcutant to part with their money. There are times when it seems impossible that one person would have experienced so much. But through it all shines Mortenson's admirable humanity. He truly loves the people he serves and they love him back. The tragedy of then story, spanning the 9/11 attacks and the war in Afghanistan, is that it shows that it is within our means to influence the Muslim peoples of central Asia -- without resorting to force, bribery or intimidation. Mortensen learns that respecting the traditions of the people is the basis of all interactions. And when he builds a school in a village where none has stood for centuries, thus providing the children with hope of a brighter future, he believes that he is to strangling terrorism at its roots of hopelessness and ignorance.

Mortenson and David Oliver Relin have put together a great read that is part travelogue, part cultural study and part biography. Would that there were 50,000 Greg Mortensons in the world.

Book Review: My Jesus Year

My Jesus Year: A Rabbi's Son Wanders the Bible Belt in Search of His Own Faith
by Benyamin Cohen


Open, honest and moving, December 15, 2008

It might seem paradoxical that an Orthodox Jew can be considered a seeker. After all, isn't the heart of orthodoxy its rigid (even joyful) adherence to minute regulations?

Benyamin Cohen is the odd man in his family. The son of an Orthodox Rabbi in Atlanta, he is the only one among his siblings not to have become a rabbi or to marry one. Unwilling to shuck his faith, he is nonetheless desperate for something deeper than what he sees as a sort of bondage to the continual blessings and washings that are part and parcel of Orthodoxy. While not wanting to become Christian, he is curious about the majority US faith, and wonders whether Orthodoxy can learn something from it. The result is a year-long odyssey among the goyim, starting with his convert-wife's evangelical family and penetrating into the often strange world of Christian worship.

It would have been easy for Cohen to have lampooned Christianity as practiced in the Bible Belt. He quickly runs into the kind of hucksterism that often gives the faith a bad name. The purveyors of the Prosperity Gospel, who sells believers on the idea that God wants you to be rich, fill stadiums while cynically emptying bank accounts. But Cohen also encounters Christians whose quieter faith sustains them through illness and difficulty. It's the good heart of this book that Cohen is genuinely moved by the sick who find strength and solace (if not physical healing) in God's presence.

"My Jesus Year" is very funny, smart and well-written. While shining a light on seldom-seen corner of the Christian experience (Christian *wrestling*, anyone?) it also provides a rare glimpse into the world of Orthodox Judaism as experienced by one young man. Cohen's description of the Orthodox New York dating scene -- to which he literally had to fly across the country several times a month during his twenties -- held all the cute desperation of dating the world over. Cohen has written about the spiritual quest from a very real and very modern point of view. His book should be an inspiration to any open-minded religious person looking to deepen their faith journey from the perspective of their own religious idiom.

Movie Review: The Nativity Story

The Nativity Story


Pious, yet flat retelling, December 28, 2008

There's little in "The Nativity Story" that would give even the most pious Christian the slightest case of reflux. Mary (Keisha Castle-Hughes) is pouty, but generally obedient to her parents. Joseph is a hardworking young carpenter with his eye on the girl. The wise men -- portrayed here as Babylonian house astrologers -- include the traditional white and black man, though curiously, the one from the Orient is another white guy. They do provide a few of the lighthearted elements in this otherwise safe film as they bicker about whether the journey to Bethlehem should be a spiritual one or an arduous one. Otherwise, all the traditional elements are here -- the announcement by an angel, a visit to a older pregnant cousin, a difficult, wind-blown trek to be counted in a census, camels on sand dunes, etc.

What's missing is any of the humanity of other versions. Actors read their lines without much conviction and with no sense that events could transpire in any way but the scripted one. When 3 stars (actually, 2 planets and a mysterious heavenly body) combine into a blinding spotlight (accompanied by a Star Wars light saber sound effects) no one reacts, as though such celestial light shows were run of the mill in the first century.

Every movie version of the Jesus story bring its own special touch. In "The Nativity Story," village life is depicted with loving attention to detail. Entire families sleep together in the same room, roofs are painstakingly wrought of wattle and daub and women spend lots of time toting jugs of water. And I think this is one of the few movies to depict Mary as having a living mother *and* father. The people of Nazareth act in true peasant fashion, holding grudges and having dirty faces and hands. Too bad the movie's writers didn't imbue the plot and dialog with the same sense of gritty realism. And history buffs might grind their teeth at some of the confusions, the most egregious being the equation of Roman and Herodian soldiers.

As it stands, "The Nativity Story" is decent Sunday school fare, with nothing controversial and nothing illuminating.

Book Review: Joan of Arc

Joan of Arc
by Mary Gordon

Captures the contradictions of the cowgirl-turned-warrior (but ditch the audio book), January 19, 2009


Mary Gordon's biography of Joan of Arc reminds us of the the reasons that the story of The Maid of Orleans has inspired us -- Christians and non-Christians -- for nearly 600 years. Gordon traces the outlines of the story with a few strokes -- the uneasy domestic life in strife-torn Domremy; the otherwordly voices; the meeting with the Dauphin, the lifting of the siege at Orleans and the road to the coronation in Reims; the military victories and failures; the trial, the stake and subsequent glorification.

What stands out is Gordon's attempt to get to the heart of her subject as a person. We see the country girl who was brash, contradictory, intemperate, addicted to action and impatient with ceremony. We also meet the dedicated warrior with a genius for self-presentation, who understood and used the power of symbol and ritual, who wept at the death of friend and foe, and who had the temerity and strength of spirit to challenge and withstand the leading scholarly minds of her day.

Basing her story mostly on the best source of first-hand information about Joan -- her own words as found in still-extant records from her ecclesiastical trials -- Gordon provides fascinating glimpses into the person behind the myth. We learn where Joan learned to ride a horse; her bold threats against church reformer Jan Hus; her disregard for chilvalric niceties; her insistence at wearing men's clothing, even when it meant foregoing her beloved sacraments. Gordon's depiction of Joan's militery endeavors is less about strategy and more about lifting the veil on her subject. Bedeviling those who would paint her as a brilliant tactician, Gordon tells how during one of Joan's first battles, English soldiers evaded capture by dressing as priests-- a simple ruse that seems to have fooled the inexperienced soldier.

Gordon's forays into psycholanyis are intriguing, but often fall short. Shockingly, she seems to suggest that Joan's identification of her voices as belonging to Saints Michael, Catherine and Margaret was perhaps inflenced by her need at trial for the protection of certain strong, armed saints. While Joan's early testimony about her voices seems to vague (she speaks of them as "light" and "comfort") the thesis that Joan didn't ID them until 7 years after first hearing them seems forced. Similarly, Gordon's discussion of Joan's virginity completely ignores the prevalence of the cult of the Virgin that was prevalent in Catholic countries in the Middle Ages. It is fashionable nowadays to suggest that choosing virginity allows women a measure of freedom from the limitations placed on them by male-dominated societies. But virginity can also be a choice taken for other reasons: emulation of the Virgin Mary, or even a primal fear of physical intimacy. Strangely, Gordon does not even raise these theses. Gordon also suggests that Joan may have known about the location of the sword that she claimed her voices told her about. By claiming that Joan "may" have known about the sword on an unconscious level (!) suggests a level of deception and manipulation the part of the saint that seems out of character with the rest of her life. It's one thing for her to lie to her enemies out of fealty to her king, but this?

At the end of the book, Gordon explores some of the artistic responses to Joan's story. Joan has been portrayed as everything from a dreamy, tragic figure to a proto-Marxist. Gordon gives these theatrical depictions (from G. B. Shaw and others) more weight than recent filmed efforts, such as Leili Sobieski's "Joan of Arc" and the admittedly execrable "The Messenger." These, Gordon dismisses with hardly a second look. Yet for its shortcomings, it's Sobieski's TV miniseries Joan that was the most far-reaching vehicle for her telling her story.

I was particularlyy interested in Gordon's discussion of the the case for the Catholic Church's canonization of Joan, 500 years after her birth. To see the Church stretch and trim the real Joan into a pure and unblemished icon is to see he truth being violated in unseemingly ways. The Church needed an icon of medieval sanctity in its doomed fight against Modernism. Give me the brassy, arrogant cowgirl any day.

Though I would not make Gordon's version of the story the only Joan biography I read, its many stengths (and even its well-meant failings) make it a more-than-worthwhile read. Gordon's Joan is always young, with all of the virtues and vanities of the young. She is full of youthful boasting and valor, and more than willing to see her enemies (English and Burgundian) in the black and white terms common to youth. She is both reverent and uncompromising in her petulance at antagonistic Church officials. She urges a weak and reluctant king to reclaim his kingdom, yet is susceptible to the most transparent trickery. Gordon may not have succeeded in plumbing the depths of her hero, but hers is an honest attempt to limn her with modern eyes.

The audio fiasco

Sadly, the audio version of the book is impossibly irrititing. Narrator Mari Bevon has a wonderful and expressive voice and lends a dramatic approach to reading the material. But she sems to have misreprsented herself as a person who can read French. Her attempts to render short sentences were incomprehensible to this French speaker. She takes wild stabs at French words like "ecorcheur" (literally "scorcher" or marauder, anglicizable as "ay-kor-SHAR") and gives us, inexplicably, "ay-ko-RAY." This is careless and sloppy reading to say the least!

And her trouble constant mispronuciation of French town names, though sadly typical, was irritating. Reims becomes "Rimes", Compiegne becomes "Com-pig-nay" or "Compignon"; Vaucouleurs becomes "Vow-coo-lace" and Rouen becomes "Ruin" or "Rowan." Her pronuniations of French proper names also grates. Poor Alencon! He is dyslexically "Alsenon" and "Alksenon." And the Dauphin, who appears throughout the book, is a "Doff-een".

Worse, though, Bevon seems flummoxed by uncommon English words. "Otiose" is rendered "oh-toyce"; Saint Joan endures "canization"; Christ is whipped ith "scrouges", not scourges; papal legates are "leh-jeets"; "Joanolators," those who make an idol of Joan, are "Jan-o-layters"; palatable become "palpitable"; "men-sickant" monks roam the land; condemned criminals are "un-shryven". Abstemious and intransigent Joan becomes "abtentious" and shows "intransience". And her "synesthetic" experience of lending light to her voices becomes "synthesetic." And where she cannot mangle words, Bevon does the unimaginable, and substitutes -- turning "insignificant" into "insufficient." Not satified to mispronouce words, Bevon smears the boundaries between the two languages, giving a French cast to perfectly good English words. "Burgundian" is gallicized into oblivion as "bour-gohn-dien". "Retinue" is "retinyay"; "province" is "Provence" and Agincourt is An-gick-court. These bizarre errors do little to reflect on the care of the editors at Penguin Books, or on Bevon's intelligence or literary experience. It seems that the control booth was empty when this book was taped.

Poor Mary Gordon, whose hard work and insights are transformed so carelessly into birdbrained jibberish. I literally listened again to half the tape just to document these breathtaking and frequent howlers. Buy the book instead, unless you just wouldn't give a "sou" for correct pronunciation.

President Obama!!

What an awesome inaugural speech!

With cadences inspired by Dr. King, a call to service right of John Kennedy and a call to responsibility right out of Mom's kitchen, Barack Hussein Obama took the presidential oath of office before a relieved nation today.

Obama's speech was surprisingly severe in parts. Scathing references to the excesses of the Bush administration were peppered throughout.

Our journey has never been one of shortcuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the fainthearted -- for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame.

But our time of standing pat, of protecting narrow interests and putting off unpleasant decisions -- that time has surely passed.

...this crisis has reminded us that without a watchful eye, the market can spin out of control -- and that a nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous.

But also, there were admonishments to the American people for our bad habits and collective folly. He made it clear that it's time not just for the adults to be in charge, but for all of us to become adults.

We remain a young nation, but in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things.

Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some, but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age.

Ouch, Daddy O! That smarts!

But Obama also made sure to tell us that we were fully capable of doing better. His examples from the past -- of ancestors toiling "for us" and his stirring final image of a beleaguered George Washington readying his battered troops to cross the Delaware in the harsh winter of 1776 -- were intended to remind us that we are the heirs of greatness, courage and achievement.

The words were simple -- very few multi-syllabics and college talk. But the message was profound. We are a great people, we were told, capable of greatness and expected to deliver.

Congratulations, President Barack Obama, and may we go with you, with God's blessing, into a glorious future.