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There are 29 reviews in our database. Latest Listings | Category: Books
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 Title: The Case For God  | views:13 |  Book Review John L Ng Dec 09
The Case For God
By Karen Armstrong, Alfred A. Knopf. 2009
Standing in his workshop, I entered into a delightful conversation with a Yeshiva teacher who moonlights as a furniture repairer (He was fixing my dining table chairs). I asked him to help me understand the illusive meaning of El Shaddai, one of the Hebrew names for God in the bible. He said one must begin by acknowledging that God is beyond human knowing. No one can know God; otherwise God is not God. We can only perceive God through our experiences within God’s creation. This brief encounter prepared me for Karen Armstrong”s The Case For God.
Ms Armstrong begins her monograph with the same premise as my Jewish friend. It is an eloquent and intelligent survey of Western religious thoughts. The book is divided into two parts, from The Unknown God prior to the Renaissance to The Modern God since then. She is no stranger to the subject. According to my count, she has written at least 15 books, including A History of God: the 4000-year quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam and The Bible: a biography, on similar subjects. In fact, if you have read any of her books, you will find that there is much recapitulation in this one.
Her approach is in contrast to Tim Keller’s The Reason for God. Both seek to argue for the reality of God. Here they part company. Keller uses pseudo-rational methods to prove the God of the Christian traditions. Few of his arguments are circular reasoning. Armstrong argues that you cannot prove or disprove God through reasons (logos). Rather every religious tradition is embedded with stories (mythos). Its adherents experienced God through rituals, symbols and gestures in these stories. For example, the Christian tradition centers around two great narratives – the Exodus event in the older Testament and the Christ event in the newer Testament. Out of these grand narratives, every Christian in history finds faith, meaning and a sense of being.
The rise of science in the Age of Reason is the cause of this shift from the mythos to the logos. The mistake of the church was to succumb to rationalism in defending its historical faith. It tried to apply scientific methods in understanding Scripture. This rational approach to faith would be foreign to the great church fathers from Augustine to Aquinas. In many ways, the Western church has continued this rational approach to faith and has not recovered from this gross error.
Of particular interest is her critique on the recent atheistic movement in the West. These neo- atheists, Dawkins The Blind Watchmaker, The God Delusion, Hitchens God Is Not Great: how religion poisons everything, and Harris The End of Faith: religion, terror and the future of reason, make the same glaring error in their polemics as the religious fundamentalists. Both take a similar literal and rational approach to argue for or against faith. Armstrong rebukes both to lower their polemics by recognizing the balance and differences between mythos and logos.
Theism is not a rival theory to be tested. It is not primarily a set of propositions about God to be asserted and assented in a worldview. God is not a theory to be discussed but an ultimate reality in which people, individually and especially communally, find significant meaning through story living and story telling. Much of our Bible is narrative. It was given through history not to argue for God in rational sets but for us to encounter God in our ontology.
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| Review submitted: 2010/1/20
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| Category: Movies
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| Title: Up In The Air | views:7 | Film Review by John L Ng Jan 10
Up In The Air is about homelessness and our innate human desire to be home with family. Loosely based on Walter Kirn’s novel, the movie follows Ryan Binghan (George Clooney) crisscrossing the continent as a hired gun to fire employees whose employers are too timid to pull the trigger themselves. Ryan thrives on the road. When asked where he is from, he responds, I’m from here. He travels light and is detached of meaningful human contacts. When someone accuses him of living in isolation, he retorts, I’m surrounded.
Seemingly he is having fun doing what he does. To showcase his homeless joy, he frequents the motivational talk circuit. The speech and the prop are the same at every hotel conference room. He walks up to the podium with a backpack and talks about traveling light, with no roots, no meaningful relationships and no lasting commitment to bog him down. He confesses that relationships are the heaviest components in your backpack. To travel light, you have to discard everything, including relationships. His prized goal is to rack up ten million frequent flyer miles.
Then two women enter his homeless space and throw him off his delusional self confidence. While nursing a drink at an airport lounge, he spies Alex Goran (Vera Farmiga) massaging her glass while waiting for her flight. They each turn on the other bantering in corporate syntax with double entendres. A one night stand evolves into a vulnerable need to see each other more. They coordinate their travels to spend time together. Call me when you are lonely, she purrs while walking to her gate. Immediately he pleads, I’m lonely. Not unexpected, their chance encounter exposes his innate need for companionship.
The other woman is a fresh out of ivy league, MBA graduate who has been hired by Ryan’s company to maximize corporate efficiency. Natalie (Anna Kendrick) is as naively ferocious as she is meekly needy. Ryan is assigned to take her on the road for a crash orientation. Reluctantly he plays along. Soon they nurture a paternal-child relationship where she questions everything Ryan lives for as he begins to question everything he believes in.
When his estranged sisters insist that Ryan come home to attend his younger sister’s wedding, on a whim, he drags Alex along to smooth the rough week’s end. While in his hometown, they revert back to their adolescence. They throw snowballs at building windows, break into his old high school and ransack its hallways, and sneak into a basketball game in the school gym. As if they regress into a teenager date. A family crisis demands Ryan’s hesitant attention. When he somehow manages to resolve the crisis, his older sister in gratitude declares, welcome home.
Up In The Air is fun to watch but not fun to digest. The script is clever and breezy but it hurts to laugh, or it hurts more if we don’t laugh. The tone is light but the textural layers are dark. Every one seem to talk in family vernaculars – roof over one’s head, having babies, making a home homey, coming home, having a wedding. But hardly any one has a family except those who are being fired. The intermittent images of fired employees lament their family’s well being scream that we all are in need of family to go home to. At one point, Ryan blurs out, we’re not swans, we’re sharks. He’s in denial. In his detached self, he does look like a graceful swan gliding along from airport to airport. But underneath that quiet facade, his feet are frantically paddling to go home, settle down and find joy with the ones he loves.
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| Review submitted: 2010/1/20
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| Category: Books
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| Title: I Was A Stranger; Untamed Hospitality | views:25 | Review John L Ng Nov 09
I Was A Stranger: a Christian Theology of Hospitality
By Arthur Sutherland, Abingdon, 2006
Untamed Hospitality: welcoming God and other strangers
By Elizabeth Newman, Brazos, 2007
Sutherland’s book is thin with numerous personal muses; Newman’s is thick with theological and philosophical discourses. Both call us back to this missing virtue of the church and its congregants. Hospitality is practiced among God’s people since the time of Abraham. In fact, in many cultures, old and present, hospitality is a social norm. And yet, according to the authors, and I agree, it is glaringly missing in today’s churches.
It is not there maybe because we have a distorted notion of hospitality. Some think it is nothing more than social entertainment. Some reduce it to sentimental nicety. Some assume it is a woman’s thing and should be left to them. Some see it narrowly as a professional tool in the market place. Some see it widely as inclusion in a diverse society. Whatever the reasons or excuses, it remains that most of us do not practice hospitality.
According to Newman, hospitality is an intentional, responsible and caring act of welcoming, in public and private, friends and strangers without regard for reciprocation. She spends 200 pages with footnoted research to propose a doctrine and practice of this definition. At times her arguments are pretentious and darkly negative. Sutherland, on the other hand, needs a little more than 80 pages to be lightly funny. As different as their approaches, both always return to the Biblical texts as the content and context for hospitality.
There is where we need to go to inspire our practice of hospitality. Three iconic images illuminate our way. The classic image is Abraham and Sarah in Genesis 18 welcoming strangers to their tent. It says that Abraham ran to greet them and bowed to the ground in their presence. He provided water to wash their feet; Sarah baked fresh morsels of bread and a servant prepared a calf to feed them. At day’s end, they hosted this enjoyable evening with strangers under the shade of an oak tree and had an epiphany that changed their lives for good and ever.
On their way home from a horrific week in Jerusalem, two disciples (probably husband and wife) were terribly sad and emptied of courage (Luke 24.13f). Along the way they met a stranger and three of them rehearsed the events surrounding the crucifixion. Toward sundown, they arrived in Emmaus and the couple invited the stranger to stay with them. A hurried meal was prepared. Their guest took break, gave thanks, broke it and gave it to them. In that Eucharistic act, Jesus, the guest who became the host, brought joy to their hearts, emptied them of sadness and gave them courage.
Acts 16.11f tells the story of Paul and company’s encounter with Lydia in Philippi. At a prayer meeting, they met Lydia and shared with her the gospel. After she prayed to embrace Jesus as her savior, she invited these strangers to stay at her home. At first, Paul refused her hospitality. But Lydia insisted and prevailed upon them to stay with her. The scene is at once poignant and awkward. A bunch of strange men, at least five, staying with a single woman would break every social mos. Be that as it may, Lydia’s single act of hospitality was strategic in securing Paul’s missionary efforts in Macedonia.
No doctrine of hospitality is as effective in convincing our practice of hospitality as listening with our eyes to the above three narratives. Ultimately, hospitality is an act of the heart. It begins with and feeds on the compassion we feel for others, be they family, friends or strangers. Who knows – maybe we are welcoming God when we are welcoming others into our lives.
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| Review submitted: 2010/1/10
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| Category: Books
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| Title: A Thousand Splendid Suns | views:191 | Review by John L Ng Jul 07
A Thousand Splendid Suns
By Khaled Hosseini Riverhead Books, 2007
The lovely title of Hosseini’s novel is from a poem he recites toward the end of his story. The story is about a long lesson in endurance. No matter what a person is given, to survive and to live, one must find the resolve to endure that which is beyond her power. We are to believe that under any circumstance we still can live under a thousand splendid suns. It is the enduring friendship of two women to whom life has dealt disparaging circumstances. The setting is Afghanistan in the last three decades of war and turmoil.
Mariam is an illegitimate child whose scornful mother hates the world and men. Her relentless and loud scorn almost robs Mariam of her gentle nature, but not. At 15, Mariam is married off to a middle-aged shoemaker with bad teeth and a brutish disposition. Years later, we meet Laila, 14, who is the daughter of a middle class teacher. In an inexplicable moment, a stray rocket destroys much of her extended family. Thinking her boyfriend has been killed and carrying his child, she reluctantly agrees to be the second wife of Mariam’s husband.
While their world rages, these two women learn to cope by nurturing their relationship. They learn to collect strength from the other as they suffer long and frequent in their repressive culture and unhappy and abusive marriages. At first, Mariam is resentful and accuses Laila of stealing her husband. After the much younger Laila gives birth to Aziza, Mariam’s gentle nature prevails and transforms her into a surrogate mother for both. Through some harrowing experiences and with some painful consequences, their friendship endures but not without a sad ending.
Mariam and Laila may well be a modern version of the Biblical patriarch Abraham’s women. Both narrations are a study of human pathology and divine redemption. Whether in today’s Kabul or ancient Canaan, when chronic upheavals brings systemic and personal oppression, women suffer more and more often than men. Hosseini, an American medical doctor born in Afghanistan and a goodwill envoy for the United Nations Refugee Agency, writes unevenly and with mixed success as women’s voices telling the story. Many scenes are weaved together like a soap opera texture. What could have been powerful and deep emotions read glossily and quickly. Nevertheless, the novel is a good read. It celebrates courage and hope, friendship and family, commitment and sacrifice.
This story also serves well for St. Paul’s prose in Romans 5: but we also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. Suffering, deserved or undeserved, can make someone bitter like Mariam’s mother. And yet, when suffering is endured under the light of a splendid sun, it can make a good person better, like Mariam. Long suffering is a sure sign of divine grace and redemption. |
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| Review submitted: 2010/1/10
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| Category: Movies
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| Title: Film Review : A Serious Man | views:19 | Review by John L Ng Nov 09
Something is amiss when this strange movie begins with a quote from the medieval rabbi Rashi – receive with simplicity everything that happens to you, and a stranger parable set in an Eastern European Yiddish village about how a righteous person might be a ghost (I think!). Then there are the lyrics by the ’60 band Jefferson Airplane – when the truth is found to be lies / and all the joy within you dies / don't you want somebody to love – that permeate the movie. A Serious Man, produced, directed, written and edited (under a pseudonym) by Joel and Ethan Coen is about a serious man Larry Gopnik (played by Michael Stuhlbarg) who seeks to do right but is wronged.
In the fullness of time, his shalom of prairie existence in suburban Minnesota is vandalized by a gang of random circumstances. Slowly a series of existential inconveniences mutates into ontological miseries. One of his students protests a class grade and tries to bribe and sue him. His tenure committee receives anonymous malicious letters regarding his disqualification. A mail order music company harasses him for non payment. His unemployed and live-in brother slips down physical, mental and moral precipices. The bickering rivalry between his son and daughter irks him with daily distractions. His wife decides to leave him for a pompous older widower.
But unlike the story of the Biblical Job, we get no preface glimpse of why these wrongs happened to Mr. Gopnik. At least in first chapters of the book of Job, we are told that the horrific calamities came upon Job because there was a bet between God and the Adversary in heaven. In his travails, Mr. Gopnik is undeterred – he seeks the counsel of not one but three rabbis. First, his synagogue dumps a naïve junior rabbi on him. The young rabbi in earnest seeks to convince him that reality is a matter of perspective. Things aren’t bad if you frame it with imagination.
Then Mr. Gopnik sits before a second rabbi, respectable but pretentious. He tells a story of how Jewish dentist encountered a kind of epiphany in the mouth of a Gentile patient. The dentist searched for meaning in futile agony. At last he went back to his mundane life of weekly golf with friends and daily meals with spouse. At wits end, Mr. Gopnik finally begs for the wisdom of an aged rabbi. But the eminent rabbi’s contemplative life is too busy to have time for him. Once again, his existential questions are left to himself, unanswered.
The movie is ubiquitously Jewish. Some of its cultural and religious references fly over this Gentile’s head. Yet the notion of God’s and life’s incomprehensibility strokes the ruffled perplexity in us all when we witness what seems to be senseless and random evil. More than a few times, Mr. Gopnik laments: I’ve tried to be a serious man. I’ve tried to do right. The incongruity of his desire for right and what ends up as unexplained wrong is troublesome in any thinking person of faith. But there are no answers, even to a person of faith.
The movie is also opaquely funny. A truism from the old Catskills vaudeville days may explain the movie’s humor. Many great comedians are Jewish because the Jewish people suffered so much in history. Mr. Gopnik laments again: Why does He (Hashem, Hebrew for ‘the name’ referring to God) fill us with questions if he doesn’t answer. Here I turn to the third book after Job in my bible. Maybe Ecclesiastes’s counsel is the wisest practice – at day’s end, there is one thing left to do: eat, drink and find happiness wherever we are and what ever we are doing.
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| Review submitted: 2009/11/24
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