IVP - Behind the Books - August 2007 Archives

How literary are evangelicals?

This is from a recent magazine article about what evangelicals can learn from Flannery O'Connor:

. . . Evangelicals publish reams upon reams of prose. What we have not tended to write is anything recognized as having literary value by the literary world. What makes this failure remarkable is that our Protestant forebears include a number of people who did: Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, George Herbert, John Milton, and John Bunyan, to mention a few.

Equally remarkable is the host of near contemporary conservative Christians—sometimes quite evangelical and even evangelistic, though not “Evangelicals”—who were also important writers. G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, T. S. Eliot, Graham Greene, Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, Walker Percy, and Flannery O’Connor are all recognized as important literary figures even by people who do not share their Christian commitment.

Where is the contemporary American Evangelical who can make such a claim?

The modern Christians who are important writers are all from liturgical churches: Catholic, Anglican, Orthodox. The closest thing Evangelicalism has to a name that could rank with these is probably Walter Wangerin, Jr., who is not really a mainstream Evangelical but a Lutheran—again, from a liturgical tradition.

Try to think of a conservative Baptist, a Free or Wesleyan Methodist or a Nazarene, a conservative Presbyterian, a Plymouth Brother, a member of the Evangelical Free Church or the Christian and Missionary Alliance, a Pentecostal, or a member of an independent Bible church who belongs in that company. (Some have mentioned writers who used to be in those churches—but the phrase “used to” in the observation is telling.)

As I glance at IVP's list of authors, I see quite a diversity - Anglicans like John Stott, J. I. Packer and N. T. Wright, Baptists from Timothy George to Roger Olson, Methodists such as Tom Oden and Ben Witherington, Presbyterians like James Montgomery Boice and Craig Barnes, Anabaptists like Tom Finger and Mark Baker, and people from independent megachurches like Bill Hybels and Mindy Caliguire. Of course, none of these are "literary" writers in the vein of a Flannery O'Connor.

So why don't contemporary evangelicals tend to produce literary works? Are we too concerned about efficacy of evangelistic message and clarity of doctrine to bother with the mysteries of art and literature?

Comma Ergo Sum

[Dave Zimmerman is out of town at an insecure undisclosed location, but he e-mailed us this post.]

There's a genre of literature designed especially for those two- to three-minute periods when you find yourself sitting around with nothing to do--for example (and I'm speaking euphemistically here), when you're "waiting in line to check out" or "waiting on a friend to drop by." IVP Books has one such book, The Original Dr. Steve's Almanac of Christian Trivia: A Miscellany of Oddities, Instructional Anecdotes, Little-Known Facts and Occasional Frivolity. Lately my brief-read book of choice has been Sit & Solve Logic Puzzles.

It turns out I'm not half-bad at logic puzzles; I've only failed two so far. My latest failure, however, I'm ashamed to admit, has to do with my command of grammar. The challenge was to figure out in what order a woman read five authors, and how many titles by each she read. The clue that threw me was as follows: "Ursula Le Guin is the third author that Miranda read after completing five books by another author."

I promptly wrote Ursula's name in the "third author" box and the number five in the "second author" box. What I failed to note was that the phrase "after completing five books . . ." was not preceded by a comma, which made it a restrictive (rather than nonrestrictive) appositive. Or something like that. It turned out that Ursula was the fifth author--three authors after the author of five books. My logic failed me because my grammar failed me.

I've had worse potential consequences for bad editing. Once upon a time my boss came up to me, dropped a newspaper on the table in front of me and said, "Find the error or you're fired." Fortunately the error, in 64-point type, was easy to spot--the Church of England was printed as the "Chruch of England." Needless to say, I'm still employed.

I still have reasonable confidence in my rational faculties too. Two out of three logic puzzles wrong ain't bad, right? And it's good to know that good grammar plays a critical role in good logic, I suppose. That makes editors something akin to philosopher kings in my book. But my professional confidence was shaken nonetheless: the unacknowledged absence of a simple comma sent me down a path into logical confusion. That doesn't make me a bad editor, does it?

Hitchens vs. Hitchens

The "new atheists" of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and company continue to have high visibility across the media. (The Friendly Atheist, Hemant Mehta, posted this picture of strategic book stickering on God Is Not Great.) I was interested to come across this article in The Daily Mail by Christopher Hitchens's brother, Peter, who in many ways is a polar opposite of his famous atheist brother. He writes:

Christopher is an atheist. I am a believer. He once said in public: "The real difference between Peter and myself is the belief in the supernatural. I’m a materialist and he attributes his presence here to a divine plan. I can’t stand anyone who believes in God, who invokes the divinity or who is a person of faith."

I don’t feel the same way. I like atheists and enjoy their company, because they agree with me that religion is important. I liked and enjoyed this book, and recommend it to anybody who is interested in the subject. Like everything Christopher writes, it is often elegant, frequently witty and never stupid or boring.

I also think it is wrong, mostly in the way that it blames faith for so many bad things and gives it no credit for any of the good it may have done. I think it misunderstands religious people and their aims and desires. And I think it asserts a number of things as true and obvious that are nothing of the sort.

For more, see the article here.

Stott's Lasting Legacy

Last month John Stott concluded his public ministry with an address at the Keswick Convention in England. For over a half-century Stott has been the leading evangelical in Great Britain with an enormous influence worldwide as well through his speaking and writing. At age 86 his fragile health has made him reluctantly conclude that it is time for him to move to the next stage. But I was not surprised to read that "Dr. Stott's frailty vanished as he started to preach for the final time publicly." That was my own impression when I was with him and heard him speak a couple of years ago. The vigor and solidness he has always been known for suddenly emerged from his weakened frame when he began to preach.

Of course Stott's many books will continue to have a wide impact; thousands are read every year in dozens of languages. But I wonder if the widest and longest impact might come from a source fewer know about.

For decades Stott has been pouring himself into the next generation of leaders in the Majority World. This work has been formalized in the Langham Partnership International (known as John Stott Ministries in the United States). As a result, thousands of pastors around the world have received books and commentaries they would otherwise not have been able to afford, and hundreds have received training and scholarships for advanced study. It is no coincidence, I think, that we have during these same recent decades seen the church explode in Latin America, Africa and Asia, a church that will be leading worldwide Christianity in the coming century. Thanks to Stott's vision, that church will have many leaders who are deeply rooted in Scripture.

Building Your Creation

While cleaning off my desk at home recently, I came across a wonderful statement about writing from my son, Spencer. He was then six and was eating breakfast before heading off to a morning at kindergarten. We'd been working on building a tower of legos that would reach the ceiling, and a connection clicked for him.

I guess writing books is hard. Cause they are big. It's kind of like building with legos. First, you have to think of a title. Then you have to think of what to write. It's like legos when you build your own creation, not someone else's creation. You have to think of what to make and how to build it. Like, take the tower. You have to think of how to keep it stable so it won't all fall down. But finally one day we built our tower to the ceiling. Like with books one day you have finished a book. And then that day we got to knock it down. But it's not like that with books--you sell them.

Happy Birthday, Helvetica!

2007 marks the 50th anniversary of the Helvetica typeface. New York's Museum of Modern Art is running a special exhibition on the history of Helvetica, and it's the subject of an award-winning independent film. According to U.S. News & World Report's commemorative article, Helvetica is so ubiquitous that it's the font for lighted exit signs, cigarette warnings and the U.S. government's tax forms. Corporate brand name logos like American Airlines, Microsoft, Panasonic and 3M all use Helvetica. Wikipedia notes that Helvetica is the official typeface for Canada's federal government.

Helvetica was developed in 1957 by Swiss graphic designer Max Miedinger. It was originally called Neue Haas Grotesk. But that didn't catch on, so four years later it was renamed as Helvetica. Did you know that the name Helvetica is derived from Helvetia, the Latin name for Switzerland?

It has been called the typeface of the 20th century, but our typesetters here at IVP tell me that we don't use Helvetica in our books very much anymore. We used to, but other fonts have supplanted Helvetica as the font of choice. Now we use fonts like Berkeley, Garamond, Trajan and Palatino. My own book The Suburban Christian was set in Berkeley, but it used Helvetica on the chapter subtitles. Helvetica is now rarely used for our cover designs. One forthcoming title, Faith, Film & Philosophy, will sport Helvetica on its front cover, but that's the exception these days.

Anyway, a toast to Helvetica. Thanks for five decades of service, and may many more e-mails and Word docs sport your clean sans-serif lines for years to come.

Typo of the Day

Sometimes they just jump out at you:

I lay down my fife for the sheep.

At first I wondered, Do sheep not enjoy fife music? But then I noted the attribution given to Jesus, as recorded in John 10:15, and I realized that fife should read life. I attribute this typo not to the author or the editor (Whew!) but to the scanner, which interpreted the l in life as an f.

That happens a fot; a smudge on the page causes a scanner no end of confusion. Other fetters--even numbers and speciaf characters, get affected as weff; a capitaf I is read as a 1, the 1 is read as a fower-case l, and the l is read as an f. You'd think a scanner woufd efiminate error, but the editor can't rest on his or her faurefs; we need to keep our eyes constantly peefed for the inevitabfe sfip.

I guess this time we just got lucky.