Review: Art + Faith

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Art + Faith, Makoto Fujimura, foreword by N. T. Wright. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021.

Summary: A series of reflections connecting art and faith in the act of making.

Makoto Fujimura is a world-class painter and committed Christian. Many would not make this association in contemporary art but in this work, Fujimura offers a series of reflections on the seamless connection of these in his life, beginning with the act of making. Fujimura declares, “I have come to believe that unless we are making something, we cannot know the depth of God’s being and God’s grace permeating our lives and God’s creation.” The creator we come to understand through making is one who creates out of love and not necessity. God doesn’t need us but in love invites us to collaborate in God’s creation. We enter into this when we make.

We labor in a fallen world, but our work is not to “fix” broken plumbing but to be restored and participate in creation’s renewal empowered by the spirit restored through the sacrifice of Christ, and refreshed by God’s new wine. Fujimura illustrates this in his own creative process of Nihonga. It is not so much a technique but a kind of imitatio Christi of attending to the materials one works with, as part of a community of those who make the brushes, the paper, and powders with which he lays down wash after wash in creating, slowing down to work at the painstaking pace required of the materials.

It is a process that takes him into sacrifice and an understanding of brokenness, evoking another Japanese art practice, that of kintsugi. This practice works with broken cups and pottery, using lacquer covered with gold to mend the broken pieces, creating new beauty out of brokenness. This art points toward the New Creation of Resurrection that doesn’t obliterate brokenness but shines light and beauty through it.

Art helps renew our understanding of work. Fujimura observes that work wasn’t cursed but rather the ground and the serpent. Art points us toward work as gift, and toward the greatest Gift of the gospel. In the Eucharist, we make the very elements that reveal God’s gift of resurrection through sacrifice. We make not for it all to be burned up but toward New Creation.

Fujimura proposes that imagination and faith are closely linked. We often think of Christian theology and leadership in rational, propositional terms. Fujimura notes how much of scripture is in metaphor, in symbol, and description requiring imagination for understanding. As he has argued elsewhere, this imagination invites us into culture care, contra the culture war, battle of ideas that has framed much of our cultural engagement.

In another reflection, he likens the words “Jesus wept” to the “pinhole lens” that captures the whole story of God from loving creation to weeping over the broken creation to be restored through Christ’s suffering and resurrection. He offers a beautiful reflection on John 11 and 12, and the art form of wabi-sabi, the use of well-worn but well-loved objects like a well-worn wallet. He goes deeper into the tears of Christ in the art of Mark Rothko, the poetry of T. S. Eliot, and his own traumatic experience of 9/11, which displaced him from a studio in the shadow of the Twin Towers. He weds tears and fire in a discussion of artistic renewal out of the devastation. He concludes with a chapter on “Lazarus culture” reflecting on what it means to practice resurrection. To make in a fallen, broken world is to enter into Christ’s suffering and be enabled by the resurrection to point toward the New Creation.

The power of this book is in the contention that as we enter into the making of art as people of faith, we open ourselves to a way of knowing the story in which we live. His most trenchant words are those where he asserts the vital importance of imagination and making in the life of faith. His reflections remind me of what a vital role artists play in the life of the church, and perhaps the value of all of us finding ways to be makers and not just consumers, of culture.

Review: The Splendid and the Vile

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The Splendid and the Vile, Erik Larson. New York: Crown, 2020.

Summary: A day to day narrative of the first year as prime minister of Winston Churchill, focusing on the circle around him as well as how he inspired a nation fighting alone under the Blitz.

There are a number of biographies of Winston Churchill and studies of his leadership as prime minister during World War 2. What distinguishes this one is that Larson takes us into the intimate circle around Churchill, bringing the great man to life out of the pages of history. We become observers on the edge of an intimate circle rather than removed readers of history from eighty years ago during Churchill’s first year as prime minister.

We are with Churchill as he speaks in parliament or over radio broadcasts, not so much giving the people courage as helping them summon the courage and resolve that was in them. They would need it. Almost at once the bombings began, taking a frightful toll. We walk with Churchill among the ruins as people try to recover and go about their lives.

We get to know Churchill with his closest leadership, particularly the asthmatic but effective Max Beaverbrook who takes over aircraft production and doubles it. Beaverbrook had a genius for cutting through red tape and making enemies, but he got things done–between his resignations, which Churchill refused. The wisdom of Churchill was having someone so close who never told Churchill what he wanted to hear, but only the unvarnished truth, with no reverence for any institutions.

Larson takes us into the family circle: the reserved and opinionated Clementine, the dissolute Randolph, constantly mired in debt and affairs, to the distress of young Pamela, wife and mother, and Mary, the spirited youngest daughter discovering the world, love, and living with courage amid the restraints of her parents. She ends up heading up an anti-aircraft battery and recognizing her parents wisdom in rejecting her first love. John Colville rounds out the circle as Churchill’s secretary. His “intended” doesn’t return his affection, he wants to enter the air corps, but apart from a few sorties, serves with Churchill, in the process keeping a diary that is a treasure trove for historians like Larson.

We are acquainted with the ever-present dangers of the bombing, almost always at night, rendering the RAF ineffective, except in its own nighttime bombing of Germany. We learn of underground shelters for 10 Downing Street, the special hideaway of Churchill at Ditchley, rather than Checquers on the nights around the full moon. We glimpse the tragedy of the bombing of a nightclub that would have been Mary’s next stop on a night out. And we walk with and observe with Churchill, oblivious to dangers to his own person.

Another theme is Churchill’s clear perception of the vital importance the United States would play, and his vital role in maintaining the spirits and fight of the nation until it became politically possible for the U.S. to fully join the fight. As a career politician, he grasped Roosevelt’s challenges, working incrementally through the exchange of bases for materials and the passage of Lend-Lease. Of great fortune was the recall of Joseph Kennedy and the presence of Harry Hopkins and later Averill Harriman, both of whom Churchill welcomed into his inner circle and who became Churchill’s advocates with Roosevelt in consequence. It would cost Randolph’s marriage, already on the rocks, when Harriman and Pamela take up an affair.

Through it all is Churchill himself. I don’t think it is possible to write a bad book about Churchill because he is so interesting, even if sometimes exasperating! Larson gives us the man in full, from his demand to bathe twice daily wherever he went, dictating letters in bath and bed, to his prodigious alcohol consumption, the cigar which made him incomprehensible to his inspiring speeches and presence that made it clear to both his own country and Germany, that unlike the countries of the European mainland, there would be no surrender. This, too, was critical to the hoped for alliance with America.

What Larson has done is not just given us another biography or war history. He has helped us imagine being with Churchill during this first year from May 1940 to May 1941. Perhaps this is a good book for our time, when we are fighting a different, but it appears, no less protracted, combat. When life cannot be normal, we see what it is to live with day to day courage, resolve, and determination without losing heart.

Review: Jesus and John Wayne

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Jesus and John Wayne, Kristen Kobes Du Mez. New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2020.

Summary: A historical study of how the ideal of rugged masculinity typified by John Wayne influenced the evangelical embrace of authority, gender roles, and conservative, nationalist politics.

This is one of the most intensely discussed books in religious publishing over the past year. Kristen Kobes Du Mez, a Calvin University historian, offers a carefully documented account of the development of authoritarian, patriarchal and “muscular” models of masculinity which have invaded evangelical religious subculture and played a vital role in evangelical political engagement.

Her title is drawn from “Jesus and John Wayne,” a 1980’s Christian hit of the Gaither Vocal Band. She traces how Wayne’s muscular and sometimes violent form of masculinity supplanted the Jesus of the gospels as the evangelical model of masculinity. She traces the fascination with the square-jawed, passionate Billy Graham and the youth leader become family guru Bill Gothard as early figures in this trend, teachers like James Dobson and Tim LaHaye, media figures as diverse as Mel Gibson and Duck Dynasty, and military figures like Oliver North.

This is a movement not only about masculinity but patriarchal gender roles, supported oddly enough by women like Elizabeth Eliot, Phyllis Schlafly, and Marabel Morgan (remember The Total Woman?). Kobes Du Mez traces the influence of the Promise Keepers movement, John Eldredge’s books, Pastor Douglas Wilson, Mark Driscoll, and John Piper in upholding militant masculinity and male control of families. More troubling yet are the connections between this culture, purity teaching, and sexual abuse.

The book also traces the exploitation of this vision of masculinity by the conservative political movement from the presidencies of Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump. The author challenges the argument advanced by some that only “unchurched” embrace these values. She shows studies that demonstrate high numbers of the most faithful have been equally supportive. She argues that Trump’s rough masculinity appealed to a subculture schooled for seventy years on “John Wayne” models of masculinity and helped explain their willingness to overlook his moral flaws and failings.

This is a deeply troubling account, especially since I’ve witnessed the damage of women abused and not protected by the church, and the thwarting of the gifts of women eager to use them to follow Christ. This is an important but uncomfortable book for men in church leadership to read and wrestle with. Many of us have been troubled by the political allegiance of large swaths of evangelicalism with one political party. What this book connected for me is the connection between these allegiances and flawed masculine and gender role ideals. I also found troubling the complicity of much of the Christian bookselling industry in promoting these views.

If I would have any objection, it is that the narrative does not offer counter-examples, including the Christian institution at which the author holds tenure. We hear of the Council of Biblical Manhood and Womanhood but there is no mention of the Council of Biblical Equality. We hear of scholars like Wayne Grudem and John Piper but not of Craig Keener and Aida Besancon Spencer and many others supportive of equal partnership between men and women in marriage and ministry. Nor do we hear of egalitarian churches and ministries, except a passing reference to Beth Moore. Although these movements have not achieved the political influence nor the rank and file embrace of many evangelicals, they offer a counter-narrative that may point the way forward. Many of these operate in what Ross Douthat calls “the evangelical penumbra” and may be increasingly uncomfortable with the identifier “evangelical” for reasons this book makes abundantly clear.

The challenge these groups face, underscored by this book, is to articulate a compelling vision for men and women following Christ, of Christian character and the fruit of the Spirit, lived out in both marriage and ministry partnerships, committed to pursuing the missio dei rather than political influence. Neither the culture of the 1950’s or the 2020’s can help us. Only the real Jesus of the Gospels.

Growing Up in Working Class Youngstown — Slumgullion

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Slumgullion, Image credit: Alleko Licensed by iStock

The temperatures are starting to get cooler. The sun is lower in the sky. It brings back memories of late afternoon, after-school tag football games at Borts Field. By the time I got home and cleaned up, I was starved! At least I thought so.

One of the favorite comfort foods mom made was slumgullion. It was also called goulash, American goulash, American chop suey, or if it came out of a can, Beefaroni. In Columbus, where I now live, there is a cheesier version, known as Johnny Marzetti from its origins at Marzetti’s Restaurant in Columbus. In both my family and my wife’s, it was slumgullion.

At its most basic, slumgullion used macaroni noodles (or penne), 1-2 pounds of ground beef, onions, and tomato sauce (or pasta sauce or marinara). Whereas Johnny Marzetti adds a thick layer of cheddar cheese and was baked as a casserole, you might sprinkle grated cheddar over the top of the dish after all the ingredients were mixed and you’d be set.

Basically, you boiled your pasta, while sautéing your onions (and whatever else you added, like garlic, celery, chopped tomatoes, and peppers) and then adding your ground beef and browning it, draining off the fat. Then you added your sauce and your favorite herb-spice blend, heat it all through, and then mix it in with your pasta, sprinkle cheese over it, warm it through if needed and serve!

Seasoning is where you really make this dish yours. You can go for a traditional Italian mix of Italian seasoning, oregano, basil, rosemary, and parsley. I’ve also seen versions of the recipe with taco seasoning, or Indian curry. I might add my condiment of choice, sriracha sauce to add some zip. This is one of those dishes where “season to taste” is the rule.

It was the perfect working class meal for those cool autumn evenings. It was simple to make, filling, and inexpensive and made the house smell wonderful. Chances are, sooner or later you would have dinner with a friend and then there was the dilemma of whose mom made the best slumgullion. If you were smart, you just said it was “real good” and kept your thoughts to yourself.

To read other posts in the Growing Up in Working Class Youngstown series, just click “On Youngstown.” Enjoy!

Review: On Immunity

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On Immunity–An Inoculation, Eula Biss. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2014.

Summary: A collection of essays about vaccines, immunity, fears, risks, and related concerns about environmental pollutants and other dangers faced by the human community.

A few caveats at the beginning of this review. One is that this book was published in 2014. So it was not written in the context of our current polemics about vaccines to combat COVID-19. Also, the author is not a scientist but a talented writer who has won a number of literary awards and is currently an Artist in Residence at Northwestern University. She is the daughter of an oncolgist. She is also the mother of a child suffering many allergies.

The essays in this work reflect her background as an academic, writer, child of a doctor, and a mother. It is evident that she extensively researched this work. She explores the history of vaccination from which we learn that the term comes from the Latin name for the cowpox virus, from which the vaccinated developed immunity to smallpox. She explores how the understanding of immunity developed over the years, earlier issues with the safety of vaccination, and contemporary research and reporting systems that confirm the high level of safety and rarity of risks.

She makes an important point that the effectiveness of vaccines isn’t simply for individuals but for the communities within which they live and travel. Vaccines limit or eliminate infections when a large portion of the population is vaccinated. At one point she challenges the flawed reasoning that one doesn’t need to get vaccinated because others are. This only works when very few think that way, and an ethic that you can’t commend universally runs afoul of Kant’s categorical imperative. She observes, “Immunity is a shared space—a garden we tend together.”

But she is also a mom who wants to do the right thing for her child. Her personal concerns lead her to a sympathetic examination of the fears of others, the sources of reports about autism, and various contaminants in vaccines. She both acknowledge the continuing influence of these reports and how extensive research studies have refuted all of them. She explores the question of risk, and how highly unlikely risks, like a rare side effect that may be attributed to a vaccine, and the much more prevalent and often more serious risks of the disease vaccines are meant to prevent. In the end, she comes down on the side of vaccination–but hardly in an unthinking, “sheeple” fashion. She gently challenges being more afraid of inoculation than disease, and the luxury of entertaining fears that most of the world can’t afford.

She considers other chemicals in our environment from triclosan in our liquid soaps to plastics in our foods, drink bottles, and mattresses. She comes to recognize that there is no absolute immunity we can confer on ourselves or our children from all that could render harm. She experiences this herself when she required transfusion after nearly dying from an inverted uterus during childbirth, and has to trust the safety of the blood she is given. She balances this sense of our vulnerability with our amazing immune system, that can handle multiple vaccines at once because it responds to thousands of threats every day. She asks hard questions, reviews research and doesn’t simply accept authority, but also acts on the best evidence of the science.

The book wanders a bit. It is a collection of essays, not strictly a scientific or history piece. But it is also a human piece, rather than a clinical account or research paper. Biss does what we all need to do–listen, ask questions, be the parent, and learn to discern between flawed and reliable information, and make the best decisions one can. In many ways, this may be a helpful read for those with concerns about vaccines. It challenges us to make decisions not from a place of narcissism but enlightened self interest that also considers the common good. It is written from outside the current polemics, but reflects the concerns so many of us have.

What Makes A Great Series?

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The books I’ve read so far in Louise Penny’s “Chief Inspector Armand Gamache” series

Many readers love a good series, no matter what genre. I think of Orson Scott Card’s “Enders” series in science fiction, Robert Jordan’s “Wheel of Time” in fantasy, Sharon Kay Penman’s historical fiction, Lee Child’s “Jack Reacher” books, and Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin series, just to name of few. Louise Penny’s “Chief Inspector Armand Gamache” has provided a welcome diversion during the months of the pandemic–I’ve gotten through eleven of the seventeen books currently in the series.

What makes a great series? I think there are a number of factors. Here are some that are important to me.

Characters. I think this is foremost to me. Overall, I need to like the characters, especially the lead character or characters. In a series, I’m going to spend a lot of time with them. Would I enjoy having them to dinner or driving across country with them? I might not like all of them, but the chemistry of the ensemble is important. The one thing that is hard is when an author kills off a character we’ve come to care for.

Relationships. It is not only that we like individuals, but we like the relationships, such as between swashbuckling Jack Aubrey and the intelligent and somewhat mysterious Maturin. Of course, there is the classic relationship of Holmes and Watson. In Elizabeth Peabody’s Amelia Peabody series, you just have to love the relationship between Amelia and Emerson. In the Gamache series, there are multiple relationships–Armand and Gamache, Beauvoir and Ruth, Olivier and Gabri, and of course, Ruth and Rosa.

Setting: From the world-making of fantasy to the physical setting of a mystery series, setting matters. Louise Penny has created a fictional village many of us wish really existed. Good thing it doesn’t because we’d all move there and ruin it. Rivendell, and much of Middle Earth seems like the ideal place to live.

Development. I think of characters and plot. Do the characters grow? It doesn’t have to be linear. It can be fun when they surprise us. Part of what makes a good series as opposed to simply a collection of books with the same characters is a developing plot line, or even several plotlines. The corruption in the Surete in the Gamache stories and the development of Clara’s art, and the implications for Peter and others. This often means layered writing, where several plots are developing, with at least one coming to some kind of closure.

Stand-alone stories. I’ve read books in series that really felt like they were just serving as bridges to a subsequent book. While series work best when read in order, that doesn’t happen. I read #11 in the Gamache series because that is the one I first acquired. I thoroughly enjoyed it and was persuaded to go back to Still Life and read the series in order. I’m now up to #11, The Nature of the Beast, which I will re-read to see how it reads a second time.

Writing. Most series writers are not literary giants. What is helpful is prose that doesn’t get in the way. Some do this by page-turning action. Others are more “mental” and draw us into the psychology of characters. Some achieve a gradual build-up of tension that keep you reading.

They know when to end. For one thing, writers are mortal. Sometimes they write when they are past the peak of their powers. Sometimes they die before they finish, notably Robert Jordan in his “Wheel of Time” series. I thought Elizabeth Peters’ last books weren’t up to the standard of her earlier ones. Perhaps it is a human thing for one’s reach to exceed one’s grasp. And we don’t always know when death is coming. Sometimes the series itself needs to end, and it is best to go out strong rather than write one more subpar book.

I think a series appeals to the longing of every reader to know there are more good books to read than just the one in your hand. When I started over on Gamache, it was delightful to think that there were fourteen more (then fifteen and now sixteen) to go, hopefully each better than the last, or at least revealing new aspects of one’s favorite character’s persona.

Review: Majority World Theology

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Majority World Theology: Christian Doctrine in Global Context, Edited by Gene L. Green, Stephen T. Pardue, and K. K. Yeo. Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2020.

Summary: A global collection of scholars discuss the major doctrines of the Christian faith considering the history of doctrines, the scriptures, and cultural contexts.

Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, Wesley, Newman, Hodge, Warfield, Kuyper, Bavinck, Berkhof, Barth, Bonhoeffer, Niebuhr, Henry, Erickson, Bloesch, Hauerwas. These were some of the formative influences in my theological thinking. All male. All White. All Europeans or Americans. Many of my generation thought, and may still think that what they produced is Christian theology.

The global Christian church has gone through a massive transformation over the last fifty years as the locus of Christianity has shifted both south and east. Equally, in the American context, Black, Latino, Asian, and Indigenous theologians are speaking, teaching, and writing of the bearing of Christian theology on their distinctive cultural contexts. Many women have joined their male counterparts. What those of my generation, race, and gender thought was the conversation increasingly is part of a much larger conversation. As a student, we prayed and mobilized to reach the nations with the gospel. Now, increasingly, the nations are evangelizing the West and both challenging and enriching our understanding of the faith. I’m delighted I’ve lived to see this, which is what makes me so excited to review this significant volume.

This actually represents a compilation of six books, representing six annual gatherings focusing on the major theological categories of Trinity, Christology, pneumatology, soteriology, ecclesiology, and eschatology. Each of the six sections is introduced with an overview of the contributions for that section. This is followed by chapters written by theological scholars from every part of the world, eight chapters per section except for the final section on eschatology which has seven. The first chapter in each section surveys the historical tradition, usually the only one written by a Euro-American. The contributors affirm a commitment to scripture, tradition, and their own cultures. Having worked through this massive volume, my general sense is that the contributors hit all three of these marks and stretched my own thinking about such things as the honoring of ancestors and the meaning of one’s land. Due to length, I cannot discuss every contribution but I thought I’d highlight some of those I most appreciated from each section.

Part One: The Trinity Among the Nations: The Doctrine of God in the Majority World

Gerald Bray’s chapter on the Trinity is a masterly summary of outstanding clarity. It was delightful to read Randy Woodley offering an Indigenous American perspective, considering Indigenous ideas of deity and offering a framing of the Trinity as a “community of the Creator, existing eternally in shalom relationality.” I appreciated the care of Natee Tanchanpongs in evaluating various Asian Reformulations of the Trinity, holding orthodoxy and cultural formulations in a creative tension.

Part Two: Jesus Without Borders: Christology in the Majority World

Several of the chapters evaluated various Christologies from each continent. I appreciated Stephen Ezigbo’s discussion of African christologies by the categories of neo-missionary christologies, ancestor christologies, and revealer christologies. The second half of this section is more topical. Aida Besancon Spencer offers a sensitive discussion of the veneration of Mary vis a vis Christology. I also appreciated Yohanna Katanacho’s chapter on reading John through Palestinian eyes and the themes of holy space, holy time, holy experience, holy people, and holy land.

Part Three: The Spirit over the Earth: Pneumatology in the Majority World

I especially valued the articles that bookended this section by Amos Young and C. Rene Padilla (who recently passed). Then Wei Hua offers a thoughtful discussion of how ancestor commemoration may be integrated into Christian faith through the transforming work of the Spirit.

Part Four: So Great a Salvation: Soteriology in the Majority World

Milton Acosta offers a thoughtful discussion of salvation in the Latin American context where material and spiritual concerns often clash in “From What Do We Need to Be Saved? Reflections on God’s Justice and Material Salvation.” Elaine W. F. Goh’s “Qohelet’s Gospel in Ecclesiastes: Ecclesiastes 3:1-15; 7:15-22; and 11:1-6” draws together solid exegesis, tradition and Asian cultural insights in a credible argument for reading the gospel out of Ecclesiastes.

Part Five: The Church from Every Tribe and Tongue: Ecclesiology in the Majority World

Peter Neyende offers a thought-provoking reading of Hebrews centering on the church as the assembled on Mount Zion, which he believes a far more compelling model for the church than the family. Perhaps one of the most thought-provoking essays of the whole volume was Munther Isaac’s “Ecclesiology and the Theology of the Land: A Palestinian Christian Perspective.” speaks powerfully of what it means to be a church in an occupied land and a vision of living on a land “where people of all ethnicities and social backgrounds are treated equally.”

Part Six: All Things New: Eschatology in the Majority World

James Henry Owino Kombo’s “The Past, the Present, and the Future of African Christianity: An Eschatological Vision for African Christianity” considers how eschatology addresses concerns of ancestors, life, death, the intermediate state and Christian hope. Finally, Shirley S. Ho, in the concluding chapter discusses the affinity for Judeophilia of the Taiwanese, and how this misses the focus on the victory and reign of Christ.

This book might serve as a good text or supplementary text for a Christian doctrine or systematic theology sequence. It is also a helpful introduction for many of us educated on a diet of white, male, Euro-American theologians. It introduces us to scholars who are in vibrant conversations, whether we are listening or not. A strength of this work is its engagement with rather than wholesale rejection of the theological traditions of the church. It also explores cultural issues that are becoming increasingly relevant in the multi-cultural West. It models cross-cultural conversations about theology that evidence both our common faith and rich diversity. And it is a one-volume introduction to the global theological voices with whom we may want to become better acquainted.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

Review: Dragon’s Teeth

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Dragon’s Teeth (The Lanny Budd Novels #3), Upton Sinclair. New York: Open Road Media, 2016 (originally published 1942).

Summary: As Irma’s fortune wanes, Lanny uses his art dealings both for income and to secure release of the Robins, who are swept up in the anti-Semitism of pre-war Nazi Germany.]

This is the third of eleven books Upton Sinclair wrote around young, well-connected Lanny Budd, set in the years between the two wars and World War 2. In my review of book #2, I noted a Matthew Arnold quote about “Wandering between two worlds, one dead,/The other powerless to be born.” and hoping the wandering would end with this book. If anything, Lanny and Irma’s wanderings around Europe seem more pronounced with yacht trips and migrations from Bienvenu on the Riviera to Paris, Berlin, and Munich.

If there is a plot line, it revolves around the Robin family, a Jewish financier and his sons, Hansi and Freddi and their spouses. Hansi and Freddi were swept up into Lanny’s “pink” socialism, while Johannes had cultivated a business relationship with Lanny’s father, a gun manufacturer. Johannes thinks his affluence protects him and his family. It turned out otherwise. Lanny negotiates the family’s freedom with Hermann Goring, at the cost of the Robin fortune. But Freddi is left behind, and eventually reported in Dachau. Much of the story revolves Lanny’s efforts to get him out of Germany.

Under his trade as an art dealer, he goes in and out of Germany, holding shows of his step father, Marcel Detaze’s paintings. He mutes his socialism and cultivates ties with Goebbels, Goring, and even Hitler, who he meets twice. Throughout, the question is really who is using who, but a significant part of the narrative is an expose’ of the growing persecution of the Jews, the “disappearings,” and the ambitions of the Fuhrer.

Lanny and Irma make a glamour couple with her fortune and his looks, though that fortune is “declining” due to the crash of the market. In this book, one senses increasing tension between the daughter of capitalists and the socialist Lanny. Each indulge to a point the wishes of others, but Lanny’s efforts to rescue his Jewish, socialist friends at the risk of his life clearly strains the relationship as Irma sees more clearly who she married, and Lanny wrestles with the circuits around Europe, seeing and being seen. Irma wants to host a salon. Lanny wants to find some greater purpose, preferably resisting the rising Nazi threat, whose measure he has accurately taken.

This book won a Pulitzer in 1943. I personally wonder what this says about other published works of that year. Most of the action and excitement happens in the last 100 pages of a 600 page book. The rest is hundreds of pages of wanderings around Europe whose main purpose is to show Western society’s last flurry’s as Nazism arose–the dissolution of the French government against the backdrop of a German society buying order and prosperity at the cost of the suppression of the Jews and the rise of tyranny. I do think Sinclair could have cut at least 200 pages out of this book without harm either to the plot or Sinclair’s polemic purposes.

Reviews of previous books in the series:

World’s End

Between Two Worlds

Review: Seamus Heaney Selected Poems 1966-1987

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Seamus Heaney Selected Poems 1966-1987, Seamus Heaney. New York: The Noonday Press, 1990.

Summary: A selection of the poetry of Seamus Heaney from previously published works between 1966 and 1987.

My one previous encounter with Seamus Heaney was his rendering of Beowulf, a powerful version of this Old English heroic narrative. I’ve long wanted to explore his poetry and a while back picked up this collection, gathering a number of poems from the first half of his writing career (subsequently, an edition covering 1988 to 2013 was released).

The poems in this selection come from the following works:

  • Death of a Naturalist
  • Door in the Dark
  • Wintering Out
  • Stations
  • North
  • Field Work
  • Sweeney Astray
  • Station Island
  • The Haw Lantern

How does one summarize and review all this? One reviewer described reading Heaney as “muddled clarity.” I would agree with this assessment. Heaney demands multiple readings and this was merely my first taste. In the middle of a poem, you wonder what he is saying, and then a phrase leaps out and rivets your attention.

His work evokes the land–the bogs and trees, the fields and hedges, the broagh or riverbanks, that together create a sense of place. He captures the people–the farmers, the roof thatcher, and the Tollund Man, a mummified corpse found in one of the bogs. He remembers the dead, from Francis Ledwidge, who died in World War I to his mother, Margaret Kathleen Heaney (“M.K.H”) in Clearances that evoke all the memories of a loved one, the parting of death, and the awareness of our mortality.

The violence present in Northern Ireland is a frequently present backdrop to his poetry as is the imagery of Irish Catholicism from missals to masses. Much of this comes together in the last poem in this collection, The Disappearing Island:

Once we presumed to found ourselves for good

Between its blue hills and those sandless shores

Where we spent our desperate night in prayer and vigil.

Seamus Heaney, p. 261.

The collection includes selections from Sweeney Astray, Heaney’s version of the Irish poem Buile Shuibhne, the Glanmore Sonnets, and Station Island.

One should have a phone or computer handy to look up words and references that may be obscure to one. Perhaps some day, an annotated version of Heaney’s works will do this work for us. But for now, we are left to do the work for ourselves. Some will pass this up, but some of the richest readings are the ones that have required me to dig. Heaney’s works seem to me to be among these. In this we join Heaney who compared his work to that of his potato farming father:

Between my finger and my thumb

The squat pen rests

I’ll dig with it.

Seamus Heaney, “Digging,” p. 3.

Growing Up in Working Class Youngstown — Clyde Singer

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Screenshot of Vindicator art critic Clyde Singer via Google News Archive, September 12, 1971.

This is how I saw Clyde Singer when I was growing up in Youngstown. He wrote articles about new art shows at the Butler. I noticed them but cannot say I paid much attention. What I did not realize was his role at the Butler nor his body of work as a celebrated American artist. In researching him online, I discovered that one of his paintings, “On 14th Street” was sold by Christie’s for $50,000 on October 27, 2020.

Singer was a native Ohioan, born in 1908 in Malvern, Ohio, a small village in Carroll County, about 15 miles southeast of Canton. He was an artist from childhood, and much of his early art captured scenes and people from everyday life around Malvern. After high school, he worked for a time as a sign painter and then went to art school in Columbus before returning to Malvern. In 1933, he won a scholarship to the Art Students League in New York, where his teachers included John Steuert Curry, Thomas Hart Benton, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and Ivan Olinsky.

His style was characterized as Social Realist. While in New York, he painted in some of the same places famous painters of his time like George Bellow and John Sloan, including McSorley’s Saloon. But when he finished his studies, he returned to Ohio with $1.10 in his pocket. Soon, though, he received $500 for a large canvas exhibited at the Chicago Art Institute in 1935. Other exhibitions followed, but a steady income can be elusive for an artist.

In 1940, Joseph Butler III offered him a job. He was able to marry Bernice Shimp, an art student in 1941. Apart from war service from 1942 to 1945, he worked at the Butler until his death in 1999. He rose to the position of associate director. He also took on the work of writing articles for the Vindicator introducing new art shows at the Butler. He contributed a column every week.

He kept painting. He loved painting the blue-collar workers of Youngstown and the scenes of their lives. In all, he painted over 3,000 paintings, many in his basement studio in his home in Boardman. The Butler owns about 75 of them. He helped the Butler acquire a number of important works in its collection. He taught art classes at the Butler. And he made yearly trips to New York.

The advent of Abstract Art spelled the end of Social Realism and Regionalism in the art world. He tried his hand at this, sold some, but returned to what he loved because of his passion to capture everyday American life. The basic character of his paintings, including his humor, did not change–only the clothes–miniskirts and hippies replaced earlier styles.

He lived simply. He didn’t drive, his clothes looked like gifts and hand-me-downs. He could hold his own with other Social Realists but when the Butler acquired a painting of Kenneth Hayes Miller, Lou Zona, Butler director describes what happened in these words:

“He came in one morning, and I said, ‘I want to show you something.’ Instead of another electrical failure or a hole in the roof, the kind of things you have to deal with in an old building, I walked him over to the Kenneth Hayes Miller painting. He looked at it and his eyes filled with tears. He said, ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you.’”

His reputation has only grown since his death in 1999, purchased by collectors around the country. He is contribution to the cultural life of Youngstown during his nearly 60 years in the city is immeasurable. By the same token, the city and its people contributed so much to his work. In 2008 PBS Western Reserve filmed the video above on the occasion of a joint exhibition at the Butler and the Canton Museum of Art. It is a wonderful tribute to this man who did so much for Youngstown while creating a body of work that makes him one of America’s great artists.

To read other posts in the Growing Up in Working Class Youngstown series, just click “On Youngstown.” Enjoy!