IVP - Behind the Books - February 2008 Archives

Bragging on a Colleague

Al Hsu's first Christianity Today 'Kingdom Sightings" column is in the February 2008 issue and is now available online. I found it to be very moving, so I thought you might like to read it as well.

Kingdom Sightings
The Vision Thing
Clarity came just as things got blurry.

My vision has never been good. I've worn eyeglasses since second grade and contact lenses since high school. Once during a Little League game, a line drive smacked me right on the nose, splitting my glasses' plastic frames neatly in half. My vision was so bad that at optometrists' exams, the only letter I could see on the eye chart was the big E—and then only because I knew it was an E.

Here's a link to the rest of the essay.
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2008/february/32.76.html

Remembering Larry Norman

One of the founding fathers of Christian rock music, Larry Norman, died this past weekend. Our author Paul Tokunaga knew him while growing up and offers the following reflections.

Longing for More

I learned a long time ago that pastors love to hear something more specific about their preaching than, 'Nice sermon, pastor" (especially if those specifics don't involve the parishioner dragging out a Scofield Bible and correcting the pastor's Scripture interpretation). The same is true for authors! They love to hear from readers.

You might be surprised how little real input most authors (and editors for that matter) hear from the end readers. When we get some concrete input from how our books make a difference in someone's life, it fills another day at the office with purpose!

Here is some reader input on our book Longing for More that was happily received by the author, Ruth Haley Barton, and forwarded to me. The writer of this note has given permission for us to share her thoughts on this blog.

Dear Mrs. Barton,
Thank you so much for your work in Longing for More. I literally just finished it and felt moved to tell you that you gave voice to my own journey over the last two years; no, over a lifetime.

I was pregnant with my son, after giving birth to two daughters, when I began wrestling with this idea of gender. I have felt for my entire life that I was "wrongly born." My gifting and calling seemed more suited to a man's body. And yet, there I was. I withdrew and hid from my gifts in order to embrace being feminine. But when I discovered that I was carrying a boy an indefinable need to understand this idea of gender overtook me. I wanted to have a true sense of what made me a woman so that I could be clear in forming him into a man.

It was scary to open the door to this journey. I am a minister's wife who has atrophied in myself, not by my husband's desire but in order to be the correct minister's wife. Much of my reading and searching leaned over into
the world of feminism and I couldn't digest that. Parts of the dialogue were familiar but the conclusions were inconceivable.

Longing for More is the first link I have found to answer those parts of myself that are buried but still be a godly woman in the church. Thank you for showing me the place where the two parts of myself could meet again and begin to journey together for the first time.

Grace and peace,
Rhesa Higgins

If you want to read more, Rhesa has blogged about Longing for More at www.danceofthedevoteddaughter.blogspot.com.

Vote for Your Favorite Cover

Here is an opportunity to get inside the publishing process! We have an upcoming book with Gary Haugen (author of Good News About Injustice) called Just Courage. We have two cover choices below. Please use the comments to tell us which one (the door cover or the candle cover) you like best and why!

Recovering the Christian meaning of Valentine's Day

In honor of Valentine's Day, I'm reposting a blog entry from my Suburban Christian blog that ran a year ago.
---------------
Yesterday on a Christian radio station the host was talking about things to do for Valentine's Day with your sweetie, and it just seemed like an extended commercial with specific brand-name product placements for this or that kind of candy or flowers or whatnot. And it struck me that while Christians have long bemoaned the commercialization and secularization of Christmas and Easter, we haven't had as much of an outcry against the commercialization and secularization of Valentine's Day.

I think this is probably because many of us haven't really seen it as a Christian holiday. But it really is. As I mention in my book Singles at the Crossroads, St. Valentine (or Valentinus) was a priest and physician in third-century Rome. According to church tradition, Valentine was known for doing good deeds, caring for the poor, healing the sick. He was arrested during a persecution of Christians, and the Roman emperor Claudius Gothicus handed him over to a magistrate. While in custody, Valentine healed the magistrate's blind, adopted daughter, and the entire family was converted to Christianity. Upon hearing this, the emperor had Valentine beheaded--on February 14th.

From then on, Christians have commemorated this day in memory of Valentine's life of selfless service and ministry. And note what is missing from this narrative - it's not all about romantic couple love. Rather, the emphasis is on love of neighbor, agape service love, not romantic love. The romantic emphasis didn't come until the Middle Ages, and then of course it was heightened by 18th-century Romanticism and now exacerbated by modern Hollywood mythology and Western consumer culture. I think Valentine's Day should be reclaimed by Christians with a more holistic, trinitarian, agape understanding of love, not this narrow emphasis on romantic couple love.

After all, in Christian tradition, romantic love is not the highest love. Greater love has no one than this, that we lay down our lives for our friends. For much of church history, friendship love was acknowledged as the highest form of Christian love and service. And actually, romantic love was viewed suspiciously because it tended to be overly emotive, irrational and could create an idolatry of the love interest. So while we certainly should love and honor our spouses and significant others on Valentine's Day, we should only see this as one particular expression of the greater love that is agape love of neighbor.

Last night my wife said that she hadn't gotten me anything for Valentine's Day, and I said, "Great! Don't get me anything." Don't buy into the commercialism of the secularized holiday. I told her that if she really wanted to get me something, she could make a contribution to Compassion International, World Vision, Samaritan's Purse or something else, or find some other creative way to share God's love with the world. And instead of spending lots of money on an expensive date out, we're exercising stewardship by having a quiet date night at home. Not to diss romance entirely (both of us are NF romantic saps on the Myers-Briggs), but this is our modest attempt to celebrate Valentine's Day more Christianly.

So commemorate Valentine's Day by being other-centered and honoring others in the spirit of Christian love. Get a pack of children's valentines and give them to your friends and coworkers. Use the day as an opportunity to call, write or e-mail someone you haven't heard from for a while. Honor Christ by serving him in the spirit of St. Valentine. Happy Valentine's Day!

Go Read "The Voice of Experience" Somewhere Else

Check out what our esteemed boss is posting over at his blog:

It's hard for authors to believe that a publisher might be doing them a favor by not publishing their book. But sometimes that is the case.

Read the whole thing here. And for all those authors we've recently rejected, umm, you're welcome?

Why Does It Take So Long?

I've written before about why authors expect (not unreasonably) that it should not take too long to get a revised manuscript typeset and printed.

Rachel Donadio offers another look at the same topic here, explaining that while technology can make things fast, people, geography, planning and distribution can still take a long time.

The Editor as Ignoramus

Pulling back the curtain is, generally speaking, a worthwhile effort. Everybody benefits--the curtain-puller is more fully known and better understood, the audience is better informed and more fully engaged. I get it. I do.

But sometimes pulling back the curtain is entirely inappropriate--pulling back the shower curtain, for example, benefits no one. And regardless of whether the drawn curtain is revealing something good and insightful or something unsightly and humiliating, nobody involved will ever be the same.

I've pulled back the curtain twice this week, once with an editorial intern and once with an IVP author. And in both cases I've revealed the final frontier of full disclosure: I've put on display the Editor as Ignoramus.

The nice thing about an IVP editorial internship is that you get to see the entire publishing process from the inside--participation in a variety of meetings at every point in the process, occasional field trips to printing presses, editing and copywriting projects, everything from soup to nuts. (I think I'm using that correctly.) The problem with an IVP editorial internship is that someone needs to be prepared to guide the intern through the publishing process, and that person is typically me. And I only occasionally know what I'm talking about.

This week, midway through our debriefing about a particularly complex interdepartmental meeting, I realized that I was effectively making up my responses to our intern's questions. In my defense, this was informed improvisation; I've been around the IVP block a few times, so I have a good general understanding of how things work around here. Nevertheless, I felt compelled by my sense of intellectual honesty to tell her that I was, in fact, making up my comments as I went along. Fortunately, a few of my colleagues were within earshot and came to bail me out--not to mention rescuing my hapless victim from slipping into the rather dubious role of Intern as Ignoramus.

My other display of mediocrity this week is the real dual purpose of this post--to confess my ignorance and to accommodate a request in the only way I know how. L. L. Barkat, who very graciously covered for a recent spate of writer's block here at Behind the Books, generated more comments than is common for our site with her post about the writer's muse. Along the way she decided to direct readers to the site of fellow IVP author Ed Gilbreath. She didn't know how to do that using our blogging software, so she asked me to fix the link.

Well, L. L., the thing is, ummm . . . I don't know how to do that. Because when you get right down to it, I'm an ignoramus.

I do, however, know how to include a link in the main body of a blog post, hence today's post. I also, apparently, know how to ramble on incessantly about nothing of great import, hence the length of today's post. But in the grand scheme of things, I think, this was bound to happen at Behind the Books: the curtain has been pulled back as far as it will go, and there stands the editor, fully disclosed, warts and all on display. Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by?

Books Can Speak

Here's what I read this morning in Thomas Merton's book Thoughts in Solitude (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1958):

Reading ought to be an act of homage to the God of all truth. We open our hearts to words that reflect the reality He has created or the greater Reality which He is. . . .

Books can speak to us like God, like men or like the noise of the city we live in. They speak to us like God when they bring us light and peace and fill us with silence. They speak to us like God when we desire never to leave them. They speak to us like men when we desire to hear them again. They speak to us like the noise of the city when they hold us captive by a weariness that tells us nothing, give us no peace, and no support, nothing to remember, and yet will not let us escape.

As an editor, I find this very inspiring. It reminds me of why I care about books of spirituality. There are many writers that can "hold us captive" but tell us nothing. And while such writing can beautiful, memorable and evocative, it doesn't lead to human growth. Indeed it can leave us with the sense of unrest described here.

But how wonderful to be reminded of our calling to read books that draw us into God's presence.