Today's Lull Report …

… Heather Scott Partington on More Than Conquerors : A Memoir of Lost Arguments and City of God : Faith in the Streets: True Believers |

One of the common threads running through both Miles’s and Hustad’s memoirs is the idea of plurality of belief. Even within the Christian tradition, even among those who claim the same God, there is no one narrative, no staunchly defined truth. Both books acknowledge the multilayered experience of believers. Miles’s desire to take ashes out into the streets is a reflection of her own faith and desire to reach others, but also an acknowledgement of the incongruence of Christianity itself. A nod to the idea that faith bonds communities but is an act defined and practiced by the individual.

That is because faith as lived is a vocation and must be thoroughly individuated.



… Kindred spirits: COMMENTARY/ The Hanshinkan Kid (4): Haruki Murakami’s love affair with libraries.

“I walked around from one bookshelf to another in the room devoted to books for boys, watched countless stories which had come from all kinds of countries of today and in the past to pack the bookshelves, and reveled in dazzling sensations,” Murakami wrote. “Once I opened a book, I could easily enter the fantasy world unfolding on its pages. I returned to this world when I closed the book.”

… Healthy skepticism: Taleb, Mystery and Conservatism.

It has always seemed no coincidence that in seeking to kill God, the logical positivists also killed consciousness, meaning, purpose, emotion, beauty and morality because none of these things are susceptible to scientific verification and reference either.
A belief in an ineffable God does seem to make intellectual room for other ineffable aspects of life.

I recently said something like this myself: Just a thought … 


… Sounds good: TV's a closed book so bring on the 'BookTube' critics. Over to you…

What we need is for tech-savvy critics to start BookTubing, the younger cooler sister of book-blogging (followbooktubenews.tumblr.com for the latest video book reviews).

… Ron Slate


on Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life, by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings.

… his latest American biographers … have assembled a Benjamin afterlife that weighs and integrates his attributes, habits, ideas, life choices, influences, relationships (literary and erotic) and creative works in light of his milieu and world events. Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life sheds what light it can on the idiosyncratic strangeness of the person often regarded, as they write, as “one of the most important witnesses to European modernity … Yet for all the brilliant immediacy of his writing, Benjamin the man remains elusive. Like the many-sided oeuvre itself, his personal convictions make up what he called a ‘contradictory and mobile while.’”