Loving my enemies (writing that is)

Writer’s Log: Stardate 28-1-12

I have to share this “review of a review” that I found today by accident. PZ Myers is a popular, articulate, bombastic and irreverent science blogger with a loyal following. He is a also a biologist although, as near as I can tell, hasn’t made any real contribution to that field beyond teaching at a university (which is an important contribution, of course.)

Myers is an enthusiastic atheist who thinks everyone who believes in God is out of their mind. He lumps NIH director Francis Collins together with the crazy creationist jailbird Kent Hovind.  Like so many of the outspoken atheists he intensely dislikes people like me, who suggest that there is a middle ground between the science-rejecting nonsense of Ken Ham and the sola scientia of Richard Dawkins.

This particular piece was titled “Ken Ham versus Karl Giberson—should I care who wins?”

Here are PZ’s comments on the NY Times review of our book, The Anointed:

What made me laugh was that both the book and the review have infuriated Ken Ham, one of the chief targets of the argument against these evangelical know-nothings. Oh, Ken Ham is spitting mad.

Recently, two AiG staff members reviewed a book entitled The Anointed, co-authored by a writer who is well known for compromising the pagan religion of millions of years and evolution with God’s infallible Word.

If you follow the creationist movement at all, one of the clear messages is that atheists like me might be the imps of Satan, but we’re mostly irrelevant to their concerns. We offer no serious temptations to Real Christians™. No, the real dangers are those heretics who still promise all of the good rewards of Christianity — eternal life, paradise, good buddy Jesus, that sort of thing — yet do so without demanding the rigors and trials of pure Biblical literalism and fundamentalism. They offer an easy route out of their specific sect, and the fear is that they will substantially erode the faithful away.

You can read the rest of it here. It’s quite entertaining.

The Special Pleasure of Book Recognitions

Writer’s Log: Stardate 12-1-13

The morning mail—which usually comes at suppertime—brought two important items. The first was my working glasses, which I had left at my daughter’s apartment in Connecticut on Wednesday.  These are special bifocals with the upper part optimized for a computer screen and the lower part optimized for reading a book. They are not so good for catching fly balls or driving a car, but I love them for working. To read anything except road signs with my regular progressive lenses requires that I tip my head back as if I was trying to stop a nosebleed, or locate a fly on the ceiling.

The second thing in the mail was a notification that The Anointed has been nominated for a 2012 Grawemeyer Award in the category of religion. If the book wins, Randall and I will share a generous cash prize and the enormous satisfaction of having our work recognized. But, even if we don’t win, simply being nominated is an honor in itself.

Being recognized for writing is important feedback. In fact, such recognitions are the reasons I have been able to start thinking of myself as a writer, and not just an “academic who writes books.”  There are many authors that I would not say are writers. Most scholarly books are written so terribly that you would never hand one to a student and say “You can learn to write by emulating this author’s style.” 

I have had several recognitions over the years but the greatest was when the Washington Post Book World—a premier literary publication—called Saving Darwin “One of the Best Books of 2008.” Saving Darwin also got another interesting recognition by being included on the 2011 “Book Lover’s Calendar.” The weekend entry for February 19-20 was a nice comment introducing the book and recommending it.

We don’t find out about the Grawemeyer Award until December 2012 but I will certainly write about it, if it happens.

Writer’s Log Supplemental: Stardate 12-1-13

I got an email from InterVarsity Press today asking for some corrections on the final version of The Wonder of the Universe before it goes to press next week. I find the editorial process very tedious. There seems to be an endless number of steps and everything takes a long time.  And there is so little creativity during this phase. But, it must be taken seriously or a lot of hard work will be compromised by errors and other problems that could have been corrected.

What is an anti-intellectual?

Writer’s Log: Stardate 12-1-10

Ken Ham had one of his associates attack Randall Stephens and I on his website yesterday. It is hard to know what to make of the strange pseudo-engagements with our work coming from Ham’s organization.  I generally ignore this kind of thing, but Georgia Purdom has provided such a powerful illustration of the thesis of The Anointed that I can’t help but comment.

Purdom, who taught biology for several years at Mount Vernon Nazarene University, has taken umbrage, understandably, at Randall and I for labeling her boss, Ken Ham, an anti-intellectual. She then puts on a display of anti-intellectualism worthy of an Oscar. She starts by describing The Anointed as “very anti-academic” and “tabloid-like.” This is a bizarre claim to make about anything published by Harvard University Press.  You can certainly disagree with books from Harvard University Press; you can accuse them of being too liberal, or unfriendly to religion; or insensitive to issues outside the ivory towers of academia. But you can’t call the most academic press in the world “anti-academic.” Our book was edited by Joyce Seltzer who objected vigorously every time Randall or I used language that was not objective.  If Harvard University Press is “tabloid-like” then what word is left to describe the National Enquirer or Glenn Beck—the actual purveyors of tabloid news?

Randall and I were quite careful to define anti-intellectual and nowhere in The Anointed do we reduce it to Purdom’s caricature of people who “do not have advanced degrees.” We expressed concern about this problem, but the real issue is whether one is informed about the consensus of experts, or whether one holds discredited views that experts reject.

Purdom is especially upset at our suggestion that Biblical scholarship is critical to properly understand the Bible. She describes our concern like this:

“An outcome of this supposed anti-intellectualism is that the Bible is not correctly interpreted and understood. In other words, the Bible is not clear and only people with advanced degrees or professionals can tell others what it really means.”

Purdom certainly knows that the Bible was not written in English so she has to know that even she cannot even read the Bible until Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic scholars have translated it. And she also has to know that translations are never perfect but require careful judgments that only scholars can make. This is not to say, of course, that ordinary people cannot benefit from reading the Bible.  Of course they can. But when it comes to understanding the meaning of complex passages—like the creation story in Genesis—scholars are critically important. What does the Bible mean when God says “Let us create man in our image,” using plural pronouns?  Why does the Genesis story, translated literally, say “When God began to create, the earth was without form and void?” This clearly implies that the creation began with pre-existing material. What does that mean?

Such complexities clearly require the specialized knowledge of scholars. To suggest otherwise is the very definition of anti-intellectual.

The Scary World of Reviews

Writer’s Log: Stardate 1-6-2012

The big event for today in my “Year of Writing Furiously” is a review of The Anointed: Evangelical Truth in a Secular Age in the NY Times.  My co-author, Randall Stephens and I, have been quite fortunate to get some high profile attention for our book. We have had the infamous op-ed in the NY Times that had so many fundamentalists wailing about how evil we were. Less inflammatory pieces appeared in the FrumForum and the Guardian. And there were reviews in the Weekly Standard, Christian Century, Wilson Quarterly, Answers in Genesis website, and a few other places.  Books & Culture has a review in the pipeline, and Insider Higher Ed has an essay from Randall and I ready to go. The Chronicle of Higher Education is also working on a more general story about the issues raised in our book.  And those are just the major outlets.  So we have been pretty fortunate in getting the word out.

Randall and I, like most authors I suspect, hold our breath when we know a review is about to appear. There is simply no way to know how the reviewer will approach the book. Our book was highly critical of the evangelical right wing and we “named names.”  We indicted Ken Ham, David Barton, James Dobson, Tim LaHaye and a few others for contaminating evangelical culture with their particular brands of anti-intellectualism.  But we also applauded Francis Collins, Mark Noll, NT Wright, David Myers and a few others for exemplifying evangelical intellectual excellence.

I was not surprised when Answers in Genesis published a hostile review of The Anointed, for we had been quite critical of them. What did surprise me, though, was how badly written the “review” was, especially since it was co-authored by a former professor at Mount Vernon Nazarene College, who should have known that a review is a not a “selective rant based on a few sentences.” I was also surprised at the Weekly Standard review as that reviewer seemed to not have read the book carefully.  He wrote as if he was oblivious to the fact that we had discussed “both sides” of the conversation and presented numerous evangelical leaders in highly positive light.  Weekly Standard is an aggressive right wing publication that takes pride in fighting the culture wars vigorously. I think the issue there was that culture warriors often don’t acknowledge people in the middle. They tend to see the world as black and white so, if you are gray, they make you whichever color they are not, since you are clearly not the same color as they are.

The NY Times review was really well-done. I even agreed with the criticisms.  Here are some really nice quotes from the piece, some of which I suspect may end up on the back cover of the paperback, whenever Harvard University Press decides to bring that out.

*The authors make a strong case that serious scholars are prophets without honor in a culture in which successful leaders capitalize on “anti-intellectualism, populism, a religious free market, in- and out-group dynamics, endorsement by God and threats from Satan.”

*“The Anointed” condemns the current state of evangelical intellectual life, but Stephens and Giberson avoid monolithic stereotypes. They are careful to note that evangelicals disagree wildly among themselves about almost everything.

*Why would anyone heed ersatz “experts” over trained authorities far more qualified to comment on the origins of life or the worldview of the founding fathers? Drawing on case studies of evangelical gurus, Stephens and Giberson argue that intellectual authority works differently in the “parallel culture” of evangelicalism. In this world of prophecy conferences and home-­schooling curriculums, a dash of charisma, a media empire and a firm stance on the right side of the line between “us” and “them” matter more than a fancy degree.

You can read the full review here