James E Hartley

Be Like Francis

“St. Francis was not a lover of nature. Properly understood, a lover of nature was precisely what he was not.”

That is G.K. Chesterton doing that thing Chesterton loves to do. He takes something we all know (Francis of Assisi loved nature) and argues that what we all know isn’t true. He spends a whole book, cleverly titled St. Francis of Assisi, convincing us that we really need to think more deeply about Francis.

The stories about Francis are extraordinary. He is endlessly fascinating because of all the seemingly very odd things he would constantly do. In a giant protest against his father, he strips off all his clothes and wanders off into the countryside. What does he wear? Nothing more than a brown tunic tied with a rope. He owned nothing. Why? If you own things, then you have to hire guards and have laws to protect them, but if you don’t own anything, you’ve got nothing to lose. So, he would wander around and talk to all the beggars and lepers. People would see Francis roaming is his little brown tunic and they’d give him a coat when it got cold. It gets cold up in the mountains. Francis with his new coat would see a beggar who didn’t have a coat, and immediately give away his coat.

And that isn’t even the craziest story. One day he’s wandering down the road with a bunch of his followers and he sees the birds and says, “Oh, I need to go preach to the birds.” So he did. He gave a sermon to a bunch of birds. The story notes that not a single bird left during his sermon because they were all so enamored with hearing him preach to him. Francis looked out at all the animals and they were all like his brothers and sisters. There’s also the great story of Brother Wolf. There was a town in Italy in which a wolf was marauding and killing people. Francis went out, found the wolf, made the sign of the cross, and called the wolf to him. He then brought the wolf down to the village and told the villagers that Brother Wolf here was just hungry. That’s why he was eating people. It wasn’t malice. If people would just feed Brother Wolf, then Brother Wolf would stop killing people. It was great and they all lived happily ever after.

We look at Francis and say, “This guy is crazy.” On the one hand, it’s impressive. He is a fun guy to read about. But do you want to go live like that? Do you really want to just drop everything and go wandering around talking to Brother Wolf and preaching to birds and having no possessions and not worrying if you meet a robber in the road because you’ve got nothing to steal? Is that what you want to do?

How do we make sense of Francis? That is where Chesterton comes in:

St. Francis was not a lover of nature. Properly understood, a lover of nature was precisely what he was not….In a word, we talk about a man who cannot see the wood for the trees. St. Francis was a man who did not want to see the wood for the trees. He wanted to see each tree as a separate and almost sacred thing, being a child of God and therefore a brother or sister of man….He did not call nature his mother; he called a particular donkey his brother or a particular sparrow his sister.

There’s the key to thinking about Francis. He walks out and he doesn’t see trees. He sees that tree right there. That one oak tree, that one maple tree. Francis realizes something amazing about that maple tree. That maple tree right there is totally unlike every other maple tree that was ever created. God didn’t make maple trees. He made Brother Maple right there. He made that one particular rhododendron, Sister Rhododendron right there, and Sister Rhododendron is unlike every other plant that ever existed, a unique and amazing plant. Francis realizes that just like God created him as a unique individual person, God also created that sparrow as a unique and individual sparrow. St. Francis wasn’t preaching to the birds. He was preaching to Sam and Sally Sparrow. He was preaching to Robin Red Fellow. He was preaching to actual particular living entities.

You walk down the street and you see the trees and the bushes they just blow by because you’re not thinking of them and saying “Wow! That bush is amazing. Look at this one bush. Look at how amazing it is.” You think about animals and they are also just there. Except, of course, your pet. Your pet has a name. Your dog, your cat, your goldfish, is unique. If somebody were to come along and say, “Your dog is just like every other dog,” you know that person is wrong. Your dog isn’t like every other dog. Your dog is a special dog. It’s an amazing dog. It’s got a personality. You know what else you do? You talk to your dog, you tell your dog stories, you laugh at your dog. You think your dog is cute. You think your pet is an amazing little creature. You are so happy that this amazing little creature is living with you. You might even be thankful to God for your dog or your goldfish. What Francis realized was every plant you see and every animal you see is just like your pet. They’re all unique, they’re all individual, and they are all amazing.

It’s not just all the plants and animals. What else is unique and amazing? People are unique and amazing. Chesterton again:

I have said that St. Francis deliberately did not see the wood for the trees. It is even more true that he deliberately did not see the mob for the men….He only saw the image of God multiplied but never monotonous. To him a man was always a man and did not disappear in a dense crowd any more than in a desert. He honored all men; that is, he not only loved but respected them all. What gave him extraordinary personal power was this; that from the Pope to the beggar, from the Sultan of Syria in his pavilion to the ragged robbers crawling out of the wood, there was never a man who looked into those brown burning eyes without being certain that Francis Bernardone was really interested in him in his own inner individual life from the cradle to the grave; that he himself was being valued and taken seriously, and not merely added to the spoils of some social policy or the names in some clerical document.

Imagine if every person you saw, not just the people you know or the people in your family, but literally every single person you saw, prompted you to exclaim, “Wow! There is a unique creation of God. That person is amazing.” Moreover, Brother Oak is amazing. And Brother Wolf is amazing. Imagine going through amazed at every part of creation, not just creation as a whole, not just the broad categories as a whole, but every single entity from the person you see to the birds to the trees to the rocks. God, in his infinite abilities, made that rock right there, not just the subspecies rock. It’s shaped different than every other rock. It’s in a different location. It’s got a story different than every other rock out there. That’s what Francis saw when he looked out at the world. He saw all of these individual things and they excited him and every day was amazing.

To experience the joy that Francis felt every day, the first step is to look out at Brother Oak and go talk to Brother Oak. Ask Brother Oak, “How are things today? Does the sun feel good today?” Ask Sister Lowly Worm, “How’s the soil?” Then you could tell Sister Worm all about your day or about Jesus. Let the worm tell you how great it is to dig today. You learn something about God by thinking about that worm as an individual created by God.

Imagine going through your life like that, surprised and in awe at everything you see. God created every plant, every animal, every person, every rock. Imagine seeing every one of them as another glimpse of God. Another little representation of God right there. If you could do that, imagine the joy you would feel all the time. What do you need to feel all that joy? Absolutely nothing. Just need to look around and it’s all there. Suddenly you realize if you had that kind of joy all the time, why do you need all the stuff you own? St. Francis wasn’t depriving himself; he just found the magnificent joy all around him.

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Dignity, the Amoral Virtue

The Remains of the Day (by Kazuo Ishiguro) is an absolutely brilliant bit of writing. It is a first person narration by a butler in one of the great English country houses. Stevens, the butler, is, to put it mildly, a hyperprecise narrator. Hyperprecise.

You want an example? I flipped open the book at random. Stevens is on a road trip and ran out of gas. He walks up the road a short bit to a gate which opens onto a field and sees a small village about a mile away. He explains why he decided to walk to this nearby town:

“There was little to be gained in growing despondent, however. In any case, it would have been foolish to waste the few remaining minutes of daylight. I walked back down to the Ford where I packed the briefcase with some essential items. Then, arming myself with a bicycle lamp, which cast a surprisingly good beam, I went in search of a path by which I could descend to the village. But no such path offered itself, though I went some distance up the hill, a good way past my gate. Then when I sensed that the road had ceased to climb, but was beginning to curve slowly down in a direction away from the village—the lights of which I could glimpse regularly through the foliage—I was overcome again by a sense of discouragement. In fact, for a moment I wondered if my best strategy would not be to retrace my steps to the Ford and simply sit in it until another motorist came by. By then, however, it was very close to being dark, and I could see that if one were to attempt to hail a passing vehicle in these circumstances, one might easily be taken for a highwayman or some such. Besides, not a single vehicle had passed since I had got out of the Ford; in fact I could not remember really remember having seen another vehicle at all since leaving Tavistock. I resolved then to return as far as the gate, and from there, descend the field, walking in as direct a line as possible towards the lights of the village, regardless of whether or not there was a proper path.”

The mannerisms and style of the narrator should make this insanely dull, but instead, it is extremely compelling. All that hyperprecision is marvelously done. Any other narrator would have simply said, “I ran out of gas, but fortunately I was within walking distance of a village.” Instead, we get the minute details, e.g. that bicycle lamp, “which cast a surprisingly good beam.”

As the novel proceeds, this endless precision, trying to make sure he is articulating the matter in such a manner as to leave no wrong impression, reveals itself to have a rather deep psychological motivation. By being obsessively focused on the minute details of life, Stevens is manifestly deluding himself about the rather more important events going on around him.

The novel is set in 1956, but most of the story is Stevens relating the details of his work in the 1930s. Back then, the owner of the house in which Stevens served was Lord Darlington. We get some vague hints early on that there is something a bit off about Darlington, but Stevens glosses over it at first. Then as he is relating the tale, we find out Darlington was really active in the peace movement of the 1930s and some of the other people with whom Darlington was working on achieving world peace were Germans who would later become rather notorious. Then as Stevens talks further, we find out that Darlington was actually a Nazi sympathizer. Well, that turns out to be not quite right either. Darlington was a Nazi collaborator.

So, Stevens spent the 1930s in the employ of a Nazi. Stevens knows it. Throughout the book, when he meets people who find out he is working at Darlington’s old house, he quickly tell them that he never worked for Darlington. Then in his reminisces of his past, he is actively trying to convince himself that Darlington was not doing what Darlington was obviously doing. The extent to which Stevens goes to disguise this fact from himself is at times quite comical. When Darlington is hosting what is obviously a gathering of Nazis, Stevens spends the time telling us about the evening by obsessing about the shininess of the silverware.

Not only is Stevens an unreliable narrator for the reader. He is an unreliable narrator even when talking to himself about his own life.

This is not the only way in which Stevens is deluding himself. The housekeeper, Miss Kenton, looms large in his memories. From the outside, it is obvious that Stevens is in love with Miss Kenton, but he will never admit that fact, even to himself. It also seems that Miss Kenton was in love with Stevens but he also would never admit that fact. Not surprisingly, things don’t work out between Stevens and Kenton.

So, why is Stevens like this? To understand Stevens, it helps to hear his explanation of what constitutes the Greatness of the landscape of Great Britain: “it is the very lack of obvious drama or spectacle that sets the beauty of our land apart.” The same is true of the Great Butlers, of course. It’s all about Dignity.

Stevens’ father was a butler. Stevens aspired to be one of the Great Butlers, and thus he molded his life toward that aim. From his youth, he believed that Dignity is the most important quality in a butler, and, not incidentally, in a man. He strives to maintain dignity in everything he does. He is working at one of the great houses in England. But, for reasons out of his control, the head of household becomes a Nazi. What is the dignified butler to do? Maintain his dignity, of course, by engaging in a massive effort to perfect his cognitive dissonance: he knows Darlington is reprehensible, but dignity demands he serve well. On top of that he is in love, but dignity demands he not let emotion get in the way of service.

What course of action could he take which would not violate that core belief? The moral dilemma: should a butler with dignity continue to serve in an otherwise fine establishment or should he quit because the head of the house is enabling evil? Which is the more dignified thing to do? Serve or quit?

Notice, the question is not about the moral thing to do. The question is which action is more “dignified.” The book can thus be seen as an argument that dignity is an amoral virtue…which is when you think about a rather odd adjective for a virtue. Surely it is good to be dignified, right? As the book asks, isn’t remaining dignified somehow wrapped up in the idea of being honorable? Being honorable is good, right?

Of course, it is easy to sit back and say that obviously Stevens should have quit. But note, the quit option would require the quitter to bare his own soul, to say that the desires of the quitter are more important than the requirements of the job. To make that sort of assertion is figuratively removing one’s clothing in public, revealing what is underneath the clothing of dignity in the presence of others.

The end of this novel is extremely poignant; it is hard to think of other novels which compare. Stevens reveals he knew about the conflict between maintaining dignity while serving an abhorrent man or abandoning his post and losing dignity. He chose the former, but he has doubts about whether that was the right thing to do. Once those doubts creep in, he then spends the whole book constructing a defense of his own actions. It isn’t obvious that Stevens believes his own defense.

Then add in the loss of love. Not only did Stevens’ quest for dignity result in a career of which it is hard to be proud, that same desire to always be dignified destroyed any chance Stevens had for love and family.

This is a guy who knows he did not have a life well-lived, but it would destroy him to acknowledge that. So, he tries desperately to avoid facing that fact by obsessing about the small details of his life. For example, in that passage above which I chose randomly, Stevens is explaining that he made the right decision to walk down to that village after his car broke down. See? He is a very good decision maker. He really thinks things through. You can’t fault his decisions. Right? Right?

I could not help wondering what Stevens would have thought about Jeeves. It is obvious what Jeeves would have done if he found himself in the service of a Nazi (Roderick Spode, for example). He would have coughed politely and tendered his resignation. Jeeves would have lost zero dignity in such a course of action. Yet, such a possibility never occurs to Stevens. More evidence that everyone should read Wodehouse, I suppose.

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How to Plant a Church

“The problem comes when we aren’t conscious or honest about the real reasons we plant churches. I professed to plant churches for the glory of Christ, but my practice had a lurking desire that compromised our work. I wanted glory.”

That is Nathan Knight, a pastor of a church in Washington, DC, and the author of Planting by Pastoring: A Vision for Starting a Healthy Church.

It is not hard to see why someone like Knight would be captivated by the idea of glory. The church planting movement in modern America all too often makes it seem like personal glory is the whole point of planting a church.

Consider the familiar template. Christians are told that God wants his church to grow, which is obviously true. Then some statistics are trotted out to show that there are a whole lot of unchurched areas, places where there are lots of people who do not regularly go to church. A crying need! Isaiah is quoted: “I heard the voice of the Lord saying, ‘Whom shall I send?’” (ESV) Will you be Isaiah and say “Here I am! Send me” or will you continue to live your safe life? Answer the call!

Then when you do, you find an entire set of resources at your disposal. Endless books and videos and conferences to give you the secrets to successfully planting a church in the 21^st century. You need these resources because you don’t want your new church to fail, do you?

The industry that has sprung up around the best practices for planting a church has a strange feature. It looks a whole lot like the industry that has sprung up around the best practices for starting a business. To be a church planter, you are encouraged to get the church equivalent of an MBA.

Indeed, as I thought about this, I realized that it is rather surprising that some entrepreneurial college has not launched a Masters in Church Administration (MCA) program, where aspiring church planters can go learn the latest techniques. Then I googled it, and, of course, there are such masters programs. Masters in Church Management seems to be the preferred moniker, though, presumably to mask the fact that it is just a spiritual MBA program.

Knight takes this entire way of thinking about church planting to task.

I wanted to write this book because I can’t help but notice the absence of the church in most church-planting resources. I’ve read more than a dozen books on church planting. I’ve watched talks online. I’ve read blog posts, I’ve listened to podcasts, and I’ve attended conferences and assessments. I’ve talked with “strategists,” and I’ve met with future planters. And you know what? Ecclesiology is hardly mentioned!

Ah, yes, ecclesiology, that branch of theology related to the church. Let’s face it, the theology of the church is really boring compared to that breezy feel-good tome offering the latest techniques on mounting a successful ad campaign for your church. Why bother studying Acts or the letters of Paul?

Knight begins the book by noting the errors of church planters who think about the four S’s: “size, speed, sufficiency and spread.” That is the list of traits of a successful commercial establishment. Instead, Knight encourages church planters to think about the four C’s: “character, capability, conviction, and compassion.” The C’s are the marks of a faithful Christians, not the marks of an entrepreneur.

The corruptions arising from thinking about starting a church in the same way we think about starting a business are legion. Knight catalogs all sorts of errors. Consider the “Target Group.” If you want to build a successful business, you obviously need to identify your customer base and then target your advertising to that set of people. So, if you are starting a church, who is your target audience? Millennials? Young families? Singles? Military families? Liberals or Conservatives (obviously not both)? Pick your target and build your church!

Except…as Paul would be quick to tell you, there is One Church. Does the gospel message only apply to a subset of humanity? Is the church family just people who share your characteristics? As Knight puts it, “Each person with his or her myriad of backgrounds and experiences collected together as one united family in Christ is unlike anything else in all the world.” Does the world need another cultural gathering of like-minded people? Isn’t the point of church that there are all these people who are different from you and that you are all working together for the common aim of bringing glory to God?

At times Knight seems to relish in not even trying to follow the advice of church planting gurus. He tells the story of a man who once told him in a room full of people, “I thought your sermon was boring.” Knight (rather churlishly) replied, “Do you believe it is my job as a pastor to entertain you?” He then goes on: “The conversation that followed centered on the preacher’s need to not be boring, yet still faithful. As Martin Lloyd-Jones said, “The preacher must never be dull, and he must never be boring.… How can a man be dull when he is handling such themes?’”

As Knight goes on to argue, he really can’t help it that he is boring. He has no idea how to put a sermon together. He is not a performer. And yet:

These folks endured my boring preaching. Some of them still endure it! Why? Because as I opened and explained and applied God’s word, they smelled the aroma of life—not only from the pulpit but over meals in restaurants and during walks around the block.…Faithfulness may not be flashy, and it might look quite boring. But it leads to fruitfulness—every time.

Be Boring Boldly! Knight is onto something here. The apostles were not celebrities when they were called to spread the gospel. Yet, the gospel spread. Churches popped up all over the place, despite the fact that nobody in that era had ever read a book on church planting. How is that possible? It’s almost like the power of the gospel message doesn’t need the help of the very model of the modern major-general.

The message of Knight’s book is thus quite solid, and I suspect that there are quite a few prospective and active church planters who will benefit immensely from learning that if they want to be successful, they should toss the help manual and instead read the Bible itself and model themselves after Christ. Mixing metaphors, Knight points out that Christ is the Great Shepherd and God wants shepherds to plant churches. If you are starting a church and are more focused on numbers than on the needs of the person right in front of you, then you are missing the whole point of being a church planter.

In one way, though, Knight’s book is quite depressing. There really is not anything particularly deep or profound in this book. That is not an insult. Knight agrees:

I assume no faithful follower of Jesus will disagree with anything I’ve said. So why say it? My burden comes down to a matter of emphasis. What I’m trying to do in this book is to emphasize various essentials that are often assumed or taken for granted.

If a church planter or a pastor in quest of more resources to help them figure out what to do picks up Planting by Pastoring instead of the latest crypto-MBA manual, then some good will have been done. It would be nice to live in a world where church planters did not need to be reminded that those neighbors they should be loving are the people they meet on the side of the road and not the target group of an ad campaign. We don’t live in that world.

The local congregation of which I am a part was started almost thirty years ago. It is still going strong. One of the most important things I ever learned about church was from a conversation with one of the gentleman, Marv Kuipers, who helped start the church. The church planters spent countless hours thinking about how to start the church, working out the details of what was truly important and how the church would be managed. I was talking with Marv a few months after the first service, raising the question of how long this new church plant would be around. He said, “It will be here as long as God wants it to be here.” As long as this local congregation is faithfully doing the work of God, then none of us really needed to worry about the rest. God can take care of whether the church grows or dies out. Our job was much simpler: be faithful Christians and glorify God.

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(The legalese: Crossway sent me a copy of the book to review. It would be nice to live in a world where this notice was not legally required. Alas, there are people who write nice things about products just to get more free products. So, this legal bit is required. Don’t you feel better now that I have fulfilled my legal obligation?)

Thoreau, New Mexico: Origin of a Name

While barreling down Highway 40 in New Mexico (speed limit 75!), there is an off ramp into the town of Thoreau. There aren’t a whole lot of other distractions on this stretch of road, so I cannot be the first person to wonder, “Why would there be a small town in New Mexico named after Henry David Thoreau?”

The next stop was obviously Google. (Fear not, I was traveling with the Long Suffering Wife of Your Humble Narrator. Don’t Google and Drive, kids.)

[Side note: this is the same highway Hunter Thompson was travelling in the magnificent opening line of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.” Don’t Drop Acid and Drive, either.]

Google was of zero help in answering the question. The most direct answer to the question was “This town was named after poet and philosopher, Henry David Thoreau. However, the name is pronounced thuh-Roo, with local history claiming the town was named after a town administrator.” Great. Dueling origin stories. I could not resolve the matter in the car.

So, being an academic, once I returned to my office in Massachusetts (where a town named after Thoreau would not seem odd), I commenced on a quest to find the answer to my question so I could put it on this here blog so that future travelers of that road oft taken could satisfy their curiosity. (One of the real perks of being a professor—figuring out strange things like this is what I am paid to do!)

The short answer: There is no short answer.

First the (seemingly) undisputed background: In 1890, the Mitchell brothers bought a large tract of land from the Atlantic and Pacific railroad in order to start a lumber business. A town started up, originally named “Mitchell.” The business failed and the land reverted to the railroad in 1893. At some uncertain point, the town was renamed Thoreau.

The obvious place to start is a book mentioned in the Wikipedia entry for Thoreau, New Mexico. Roxanne Trout Heath’s Thoreau: Where the Trails Cross! (yes, the exclamation point is part of the title) published in 1982. Oddly, Mount Holyoke’s library did not have a copy of this volume. Even odder, Amazon has a page for the book, but zero copies for sale. Even odder still, I couldn’t find a used copy of the book for sale anywhere.

Interlibrary loan to the rescue. I got a copy from…are you ready for this?…The University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. Now why would a library in Arkansas have a rather rare book about Thoreau, New Mexico? The author bio has the answer: Roxanne Trout Heath attended that fine institution. Big Red (the mascot of that institution, modeled after a razorback pig) is surely proud of its graduates.

Heath was a resident of Thoreau and decided the world needed a book to preserve the history of her town. It was self-published (in 1982, recall, when self-publishing was not as easy as it is today). The bulk of the book is interviews with assorted residents of the town. One of the questions she asks in five of the interviews is about the name of the town.

Here is the complete set of answers to that question in Heath’s book:

1. Volten “Fats” Tietjen, an “old-timer”

Q: Do you think Thoreau was named for the Massachusetts philosopher, Henry David Thoreau? If not, why not?
A: No, it wasn’t named for the author. Thoreau was named after a bookkeeper for the Mitchell brothers. The Mitchell brothers, Austin and William, were cutting ties to finish the Santa Fe railroad. They had a small contract and a small railroad. Their sawmill was where the El Paso Natural Gas Company is now. I believe the bookkeeper’s name was Thoreau.

Now that sounds authoritative. Alas, the “I believe” adds note of hesitancy. Tietjen was born in 1905, so he wasn’t alive when the renaming happened, but the Tietjen clan had been in the area before his birth. Suggestive, but not conclusive.

2. Billy Navarre

Q: How do you think Thoreau was named?
A: The railroad was done by contractors and Thoreau was the end of the contract. Another contract took up and went up to what is Coolidge and a fellow by the name of Coolidge had that contract. As post offices were established, people started to settle up and around. The places Coolidge and Thoreau were named for the contractors that built the railroad. This is what many of the old timers believe.

Again, the note of hesitancy at the end. Also: a contractor to build the railroad is not the same thing as the bookkeeper for the Mitchells. Furthermore, Billy didn’t actually live in Thoreau when he was young, but he did go to high school there in the mid-1930s.

3. Anna Radosevich, “a long time resident”

Q: Do you know how Thoreau was named?
A: No

Not exactly helpful. But, it does emphasize the uncertainty in Billy Navarre’s “This is what many of the old timers believe.”

4. Carolyn Carter

Q: Do you remember how the town got its name?
A: For Henry David Thoreau, but I don’t know why, since he died in 1862

Carter first came to Thoreau is 1920 to join her father and moved there in 1933, so she is there at the same time as Billy Navarre, but has a completely different idea about how the town got its name.

5. Laverne Barnes

Q: What information do you have about how the town was named?
A: The town was named after Henry David Thoreau. A lot of people don’t know it but it really was. I’ve got an excerpt here taken out of a book written by Gary L. Tietgen and what he knew of Thoreau in the early years. The town was changed from Mitchell to Thoreau when the railroad came in. From Tietjen’s book, “The Hyde Exploration Expedition was the National Geographic expedition which in 1896 started exploring Pueblo Bonito in Chaca Canyon. They set up headquarters here in Thoreau and then they renamed the place after the Massachusetts philosopher.” There is something that many people do not understand and that is that the pronunciation has not changed. Through the years that I’ve been postmaster here, I have been in touch with the head of the Henry David Thoreau Society and he has corresponded with me at different times. He has sent me information and pictures and things. He came out here to look into the background of why Thoreau was named Thoreau. Most people think Thoreau is pronounced (Thr-ow) which is the French pronunciation but at the time Henry David Thoreau was alive his name was pronounced Thoreau (Thr-ew) not Thoreau as in plateau.

Now a completely different picture has emerged. That sounds rather authoritative. The curious thing, which surprisingly Roxanne Trout Heath did not explore: the most authoritative sounding explanations are from Volten Tietjen, the “old timer” who was seemingly certain about the bookkeeper story and Gary Tietjen who authoritatively says it was Henry David Thoreau. How are Volten Tietjen and Gary Tietjen related? Sadly, Heath does not say.

Heath’s conclusion about the name: “It appears most likely that Thoreau was named for a personage within its boundaries or an old Army paymaster.” It is not at all clear based on what is in this book how Heath reached that conclusion.

So, I went to get a copy of this book by Gary L Tietjen, to see if there were more details. Found it: Encounter with the Frontier, an obviously self-published book from 1969. Once again, Mount Holyoke’s library did not have a copy. There was a copy for sale at Amazon. For a mere $99. It is signed, so that surely pushes up the price. I did find another copy elsewhere…for half that price. But interlibrary loan found me a copy to borrow for free. This copy came from the University of Arizona.

Sure enough there is a page describing the origin of Thoreau. However, it turns out that the quotation from the book that Laverne Burns read in his interview with Heath isn’t actually in Tietjen’s book. Burns was paraphrasing. I have no idea why Heath thought he was reading from the book. Here is what Tietjen actually wrote:

In 1896 the Hyde exploring expedition was organized to excavate the Pueblo Bonito ruins at Chaco Canyon. In time, the expedition developed into an extensive Indian trading business. Hyde’s had created a market for Navajo rugs and jewelry and did a prosperous business in several stores. They put up three warehouses and a store at Mitchell and renamed the place Thoreau after the Massachusetts philosopher.

There you have it. The authoritative answer. Right? Gary L. Tietjen did his homework and figured this all out. Right?

Sigh. The preface to Tietjen’s book has the following note:

I wanted more to recapture the spirit of the times than to recite cold facts, and the reader will notice that I have sometimes sacrificed the latter for the former. A historian is always confronted with contradictions, and the reader may be interested in knowing what I did with these. If I could not determine which story was most likely, I tried to decide which source was the most reliable in other areas. Failing this, I took the most interesting account.

Rarely does an author tell you up front that you can’t trust the book he just wrote. Sadly, Tietjen gives no indications when his stories are unreliable. And sadly, the story that Thoreau is named after Henry David Thoreau is the most interesting story. But, is it the true story?

That is as far I got. I can’t find anything else about the naming of this town that does not rely on Heath’s or Tietjen’s self-published books. So, if you are travelling down Highway 40 and start wondering about the origin of the name Thoreau, you will have to continue to wonder.

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Whitman, Walt Leaves of Grass “Leaves of Grass (imaginary edited edition)”

Get Woke, Go Broke?

Woke Capitalism is a growing and troubling dimension of contemporary economic and political life, especially among the mammoth multinational corporations that dominate so many aspects of our lives.” Such laments have become omnipresent in conservative circles. It has become hard to keep up with the Outrage of the Day. Woke Corporations have adopted the norms of the Left’s pet programs, both in advertising and public declarations, as well as in adopting ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) and DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) guidelines, leaving conservatives fuming.

What is surprising is that the opening quotation was not written by a conservative. It is the assessment of Carl Rhodes in Woke Capitalism: How Corporate Morality is Sabotaging Democracy. Rhodes, a Professor of Organization Studies at the University of Technology Sydney, is a very proud progressive. While he hates Woke Capitalism every bit as much as all those “right-wing reactionaries,” he goes to great lengths to reassure the reader on nearly every page that he is not one of them.

Have we finally found a place where conservatives and progressives can agree?

Read the rest at Law and Liberty

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The Sovereignty of God

“At the end of the days I, Nebuchadnezzar, lifted my eyes to heaven, and my reason returned to me, and I blessed the Most High, and praised and honored him who lives forever,
for his dominion is an everlasting dominion,
and his kingdom endures from generation to generation;
all the inhabitants of the earth are accounted as nothing,
and he does according to his will among the host of heaven
and among the inhabitants of the earth;
and none can stay his hand
or say to him, ‘What have you done?’”
Daniel 4: 34-35, ESV

The story of King Nebuchadnezzar in the fourth chapter of Daniel is one that fascinated me since I read it in a picture book as a kid. He grew very proud of the empire he had built, exclaiming, “Is not this great Babylon, which I have built by my mighty power as a royal residence and for the glory of my majesty?” And the next thing you know, as Daniel had prophesized, he becomes like a beast of the field until he knew “that the Most High rules the kingdom of men and gives it to whom he will.” The quotation at the outset is Nebuchadnezzar coming to his senses, realizing that God is sovereign.

Conrad Mbewe relates this story early in his slim volume Is God Really Sovereign? Part of Crossway’s “Church Questions” series,” this is a 37 page extended essay on the topic. Mbewe is the chancellor of the African Christian University and a Baptist pastor in Zambia.

The first part of the book is a rather winsome exposition of the completeness of God’s sovereignty. It is a commonplace among Christians that “God is Sovereign,” but as Mbewe documents, the extent of the sovereignty is much larger than many Christians imagine. God’s plan was created before time began, He created the world in which that plan would unfold, He has total control over history, He included a plan of salvation, He works out that plan of salvation in history, and He will one day execute his plan for final judgement.

How detailed is this control? Mbewe explains:

But God not only sustains the universe, he is also intricately involved in ordering all the events of every one of his creatures right down to the smallest detail. The next time you’re playing a board game, consider that according to scripture every roll of the dice was planned and purposed by God: “The lot is cast into the lap, but it’s every decision is from the Lord” (Prov. 16:33).

Many people do not like the idea of God’s sovereignty being so all-encompassing. But, for Mbewe, this doctrine is not only important because it is True, but because it causes great joy in those who understand it.

I want you to know the God of the Bible. I want you to find God’s sovereignty to be as life-giving as I do. I want it to be a cordial tonic for your soul, just as I have found God’s character and power a comforting balm and great hope in my Christian life.

So far, so good. Reading this description of the extent of God’s sovereignty makes it very clear that that Mbewe is a rather engaging, inspiring, and charismatic speaker. Everything is so cheerful and happy. Until…well, you know…

Every discussion of the idea of the total sovereignty of God sooner or later comes crashing into the problem of Evil. If God is sovereign, why is there sin and evil? This question is so common, trying to answer it has a name: theodicy. Mbewe faces the question squarely. Yes, it seems like there is a problem here. God is sovereign, holy and good. Horrible things happen in the world. Surely something must give. It is impossible to deny that horrible things happen. If Mbewe is right, then we cannot avoid concluding that God is also sovereign and good and holy. What then?

God brings disaster on a city, and yet Scripture maintains that he remains holy and good. His sovereignty doesn’t compromise his holiness, and his holiness doesn’t compromise his sovereignty. In fact, the biblical authors never even acknowledge any supposed tension between these two ideas. They simply reveal that God is sovereign, holy, and good.

That answer will satisfy nobody. Mbewe knows this, so he goes on to attempt a fuller explanation. He arrives at this maxim: “God has a hand in the action of the sin but not in the sin of the action.” Clearly that distinction makes some sense to Mbewe. His example is the story of Joseph, in which Joseph says to his brothers “As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today.” To be sure, that is a good example of how God and man can be looking at the same event in very different ways. But the good of Joseph being able to provide food for his family is pretty obvious. Translate the idea to things of greater horror: God had a hand in the fact that genocide happened, but had no hand in the sin of the genocide. Yes, as a sentence that works, but would it reconcile anyone to the problem of believing simultaneously in the goodness and the sovereignty of God? Don’t very many examples of suffering and evil create exactly the same problem?

To his credit, and unlike most writers on this subject, Mbewe is willing to acknowledge that his answer to this question is not full satisfactory. “We simply have to confess that we are shortsighted. We may have to leave some questions unanswered.”

That is the secret of this short book. It does not try to do too much. If you or someone you know is looking for a quick primer on the doctrine of the sovereignty of God, one which will make you appreciate this aspect of God, then this book is a charming starting place.

[An aside about the marvels of the internet age. That book I loved when I was a kid about Nebuchadnezzar turning into a beast has long been lost. But, with a Google search for children’s picture books about this story, I found the book! Copies are even on sale at Amazon! And, as an added bonus, over on YouTube, someone reads the book! My biggest shock—I had no memory that the book was written in rhyme.]

(The Obligatory note: yes, Crossway sent me a copy of the book (Mbewe’s, not the The Braggy King of Babylon) so that I could review it here. Yes, for legal reasons they request that I note this fact. Yes, if you find this fact important, then you probably shouldn’t be bothering to read the things I write about books. Then again, it isn’t really clear to me why anyone would suspect I am being dishonest in my reviews.)

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