Devil Not Just In The Details

A couple of weeks ago, Jimmy blogged  on an article in the Daily Mail reporting on a Vatican Radio interview with Fr. Gabriele Amorth.

A few days later, content from that Daily Mail article cropped up in an incredibly garbled form in a Sydney Morning Herald article by one Linda Morris, credited as "Religious Affairs Writer."

I don’t know how you get to be "Religious Affairs Writer" for the Sydney Morning Herald, but based on this piece, if I lived in Sydney, I’d consider getting my religion news from a more reliable source. Like the National Enquirer.

Here’s how the article starts out:

Devil in the detail: Vatican exorcises Harry Potter

THE Vatican has never been a fan of Harry Potter, but its chief exorcist has gone one step further and condemned J. K. Rowling’s fictional boy wizard as downright evil.

"Behind Harry Potter hides the signature of the king of the darkness, the devil," says Father Gabriele Amorth, the Pope’s "caster-out of demons".

The books contained numerous positive references to the satanic art, falsely drawing a distinction between black and white magic, he told the Daily Mail in London. In the same interview, Father Amorth said he was convinced that Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler were possessed by the devil.

Last year the Pope, who was then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, described Harry Potter as a potentially corrupting influence.

Now… how many problems can YOU spot in those few short paragraphs?

  1. Source problems. The article claims to be reporting on an interview with Fr. Amorth given to "the Daily Mail in London." False. In fact, that article was reporting on an interview given with Vatican Radio. Fr. Amorth was apparently not interviewed by the Daily Mail.

  2. Furthermore, even in the Daily Mail piece the Harry Potter business is only tacked on the end as something that Fr. Amorth has said "in the past." So even the Daily Mail wasn’t reporting on recent comments made by Fr. Amorth. The Daily Mail doesn’t even source the "past comments" in question — and then the current story linked above misattributes the Daily Mail‘s unsourced comments to a non-existent interview with the Daily Mail itself — specifically stating that the comments were given "in the same interview," which they weren’t! Just goes to show how carefully the reporter read the piece she was regurgitating.

  3. The article calls Fr. Amorth the "chief exorcist" of "the Vatican" as well as "the Pope’s ‘caster-out of demons’" (the latter phrase apparently lifted straight from the Daily Mail story). Jimmy has already pointed out the problems with these assertions.

  4. Given that (as Jimmy points out in the above link) Fr. Amorth is a priest of the diocese of Rome rather than an official of Vatican City, the various references to "the Vatican" are even more misleading than such media statements typically are.

  5. "Last year the Pope, who was then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, described Harry Potter as a potentially corrupting influence." Since Cardinal Ratzinger was elected to the Roman See in mid-April, that would put the alleged comments within the first 3½ months of 2005. In fact, though, this statement represents a garbled report about a letter Cardinal Ratzinger wrote in March of 2003 — two years before he is supposed to have made the comments in question. Again, Jimmy has the clarification. Suffice to say, it is not at all clear that Ratzinger ever described Harry Potter as a "potentially corrupting influence," either last year or in 2003.

  6. The article paraphrases Fr. Amorth as saying that "The books contained [sic; the books still exist!] numerous positive references to the satanic art." As phrased, this suggests that Fr. Amorth attributed to Rowling positive references to "the satanic art" as such, when in fact satanism is perhaps never mentioned in any of the HP books. The paraphrase in the original article is slightly more convincing: "Rowling’s books contain innumerable positive references to magic, ‘the satanic art’." That makes more sense: The books refer positively to magic, which Fr. Amorth calls "the satanic art." That’s different from saying that the books "contain numerous positive references to the satanic art."

"Devil in the details," indeed!

I have to say, I’m sick to death of the news media reporting that "the Vatican" has done this or that every time someone sneezes in Italian.

This piece, though, is even more egregious than usual. Did the reporter even bother to read her source piece twice — let alone actually check a single fact?

Sydney residents, demand more from your local media!

Adding Wine To The Precious Blood

A reader writes:

We have been attending Mass at the local VA hospital whenever we can’t attend our local parish church for daily Mass.

We have noticed that at Communion, Father will reach over to the small table next to the altar(where the water and wine are kept) and pour more wine into the chalice.

We are wondering if this is okay, and what to do about it.

The short answer is that if he’d doing this on a habitual basis then it’s not okay. It is a significant liturgical abuse, and I would take action to deal with it.

The only circumstance in which something like this is permitted is described as follows in the General Instruction of the Roman Missal:

324. If the priest notices after the consecration or as he receives Communion that not wine but only water was poured into the chalice, he pours the water into some container, then pours wine with water into the chalice and consecrates it. He says only the part of the institution narrative related to the consecration of the chalice, without being obliged to consecrate the bread again.

Now, if the priest at the hospital has forgotten to pour wine into the chalice before the consecration and detects this fact afterwards–either by taste or by sight–then it would not only be okay but would be required for him to pour in wine and then proceed to consecrate it. If you saw this happen once or twice then, as long as he did what he was supposed to, no action would need to be taken.

But if he is doing it habitually then he is either so forgetful that it is questionable whether he should be saying Masses–at least in public–or (more likely given what you say) he is committing a grave liturgical abuse.

The precise nature of the abuse depends on whether the priest has included the wine on the side table in his intent to consecrate, but either way you go, there is a grave abuse occurring.

If he has not included the wine on the side table in his intent to consecrate then what he is doing is pouring unconsecrated wine into the Precious Blood, diluting it–possibly to the point that the Real Presence ceases.

That is gravely wrong, both in itself and because of the scandal it causes the faithful.

If he is including the wine on the side table in his intent to consecrate then, since it is still in his moral presence, the consecration takes place, but in this event he is pouring the Precious Blood from one container to another, which is prohibited by liturgical law. All pouring must be done prior to the consecration, lest any of the Precious Blood be accidentally spilled.

The instruction Redemptionis Sacramentum explains:

[105.] If one chalice is not sufficient for Communion to be distributed under both kinds to the Priest concelebrants or Christ’s faithful, there is no reason why the Priest celebrant should not use several chalices. For it is to be remembered that all Priests in celebrating Holy Mass are bound to receive Communion under both kinds. It is praiseworthy, by reason of the sign value, to use a main chalice of larger dimensions, together with smaller chalices.

[106.] However, the pouring of the Blood of Christ after the consecration from one vessel to another is completely to be avoided, lest anything should happen that would be to the detriment of so great a mystery. Never to be used for containing the Blood of the Lord are flagons, bowls, or other vessels that are not fully in accord with the established norms.

If the priest needs additional wine in the chalice for his own reception of Communion or for distributing Communion to others then he should pour this wine into the chalice prior to the consecration. Doing so afterward is not permitted.

If he can’t handle a chalice with more wine in it–for example, because his hands shake–then he shouldn’t be distributing Communion to the faithful under the form of wine, anyway.

So, either this priest is so forgetful that his ability to celebrate Masses in public is in question or he is committing a grave liturgical abuse. Either way, I would talk to him about it.

Jesus tells us to solve problems on the lowest level possible (Matthew 18), so I would speak with him respectfully and politely and find out what he’s actually doing, why he’s doing it, and point out the relevant passages of liturgical law. I would also explain how this confuses and potentially scandalizes the faithful and urge him to adopt the Church’s liturgical norms for the sake of their peace of mind and being a good shepherd that does not unnecessarily disturb the sheep.

If he does not correct the matter then speaking with the bishop and, if necessary, the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments would be warranted.

Compendium On Inerrancy

A reader writes:

I just picked up a copy of the Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church and skimmed through to paragraph 18.  That section deals with the truth of Sacred Scripture and says: "[Sacred Scripture] is said to be inspired and to teach those truths which are necessary for our salvation."

As an armchair observer of the inerrancy controversy, I think I recognize the italicized portion as the motto of theologians dedicated to a limited inerrancy.  This struck me as odd and I checked the Catechism. 

Sure enough, there’s no mention there of limiting the truth of Scripture to the "truths necessary for salvation."  Instead CCC 107 says: "[The Sacred Scriptures] firmly, faithfully, and without error teach that truth which God, for the sake of our salvation, wished to see confided to the Sacred Scriptures." 

Am I reading too much into this?  I’d appreciate your comments.

This is partly a translation issue. The Compendium is modeling its language off that used in the Catechism, and the Catechism is quoting from the Vatican II constitution Dei Verbum. It’s in Dei Verbum that the problem originates.

Basically, there was a huge, behind-the-scenes fight at Vatican II about inerrancy. The traditional Catholic teaching–which prior popes had said was infallible–is that Scripture has unrestricted inerrancy. That is to say, any time Scripture makes a factual assertion then, properly understood, it’s guaranteed to be true.

But after the rise of biblical criticism in the last couple of hundred years, and the increased skepticism that accompanied it, there were some at the council that disputed the unrestricted inerrancy of Scripture, and they were able to get a formulation into a draft of Dei Verbum that seemed to restrict the scope of biblical inerrancy.

Those who held the traditional view were apoplectic and appealed the matter all the way up to Paul VI himself.

In the end, the present wording of Dei Verbum was worked out, and assurances were given that the formulation–which was still not entirely satisfactory–was not to be understood as excluding the unrestricted inerrancy of Scripture.

But there were problems: While the final formula didn’t exclude the unrestricted inerrancy of Scripture, it didn’t mandate it, either. The formula could be read more than one way, with the clause about our salvation either serving to explain the purpose for which God put his truth in Scripture or limiting the scope of the truth which God inerrantly put in Scripture.

And so after the council people started reading the phrase both ways, and even translating it both ways. The translation that the Catechism relies on uses a rendering that is more open ot the purpose-oriented, non-restrictive interpretation, but other translations lean toward the restrictive interpretation.

I don’t know what the standard Italian translation says, but I suspect it’s in the latter category, and it seems to be influencing the way in which the Compendium formulates the matter.

So where does that leave us?

After the Catechism came out, Pre-16 made a big point, which I’ve blogged about before, of explaining that the Catechism merely summarized Church teaching without changing it. All of the points touched on in the Catechism had the same weight that they always had in Church teaching–no more and no less. The fact that they were placed in the Catechism didn’t increase them all to infallible status. Things that had only been tentatively taught by the Magisterium were still only tentative; things that had been firmly but not infallibly taught were still firm but infallible; and things that were infallible were, of course, still infallible. The Catechism summarized Church teaching without altering it.

The Compendium of the Catechism, precisely as a compendium–a summary–does exactly the same thing. It summarizes what’s in the Catechism, again without changing the doctrinal meaning or weights of the Church teachings that it covers. Changing or altering the weights of teachings is not its purpose.

As a result, if you want a precise, theologically-elaborated formulation of what the Church teaches, you have to go back to the original documents, which in this case means Dei Verebum and the documents on inerrancy that preceded it. The Compendium is just trying to summarize what the Catechism says, and the Catechism is just trying to present what Dei Verbum says. It’s Dei Verbum–if anywhere–that doctrinal development occurred, not in the later works summarizing its teaching.

That would seem to leave us with the ambiguous formulation of Dei Verbum, but there are a couple of problems for those who would like to read it in a restrictive way.

First, it’s patently obvious that Scripture makes assertions that are not connected with our salvation in any obvious way. For example, the fact that Andrew was the brother of Peter in some accepted first century meaning of the word "brother" (and clearly it meant that they were brothers living in the same household, with the same biological or adopted father, not just distant kinsmen) is quite clearly asserted in Scripture.

But if you recognize that there are matters of fact that Scripture asserts that have no bearing on our salvation then you have to explain how these assertions got into Scripture. If God put them there then, since God never   asserts anything erroneous, they have to be inerrant, too.

The only way for errant assertions of fact to get into Scripture would be for the human authors to put them there–independent of God asserting them–and this is precisely what Dei Verbum won’t let you do. Dei Verbum makes a big point of the fact that the human authors asserted all that God wanted asserted and no more, so that every assertion in sacred Scripture is an assertion of the Holy Spirit.

That means that, even though Dei Verbum does contain an ambiguous phrase that can be read in a restrictive manner, the overall context of the document still blocks an interpretation of Scripture as containing erroneous assertions of fact.

Anything that Scripture says that appears to the interpreter to be wrong or contradictory, therefore, either must not be an assertion of fact but something else or it must not be understood in the correct fashion by the interpreter.

That’s problem #1. Problem #2 is that the prior teaching of the Magisterium was awfully strong on this point and can, indeed, be read as infallible.

This means that, as far as I can tell, Church teaching has not changed on this point: The Church still teaches that Scripture has unrestricted inerrancy.

But we also have a huge problem, because many churchmen–including very high churchmen–are simply unaware of the problem here or the need to clearly reassert the Church’s traditional teaching.

The sooner an awareness of that is achieved, the better, for tremendous damage is being done to the faithful by their being told through priests and catechists and who have you that Scripture is not inerrant and thus contains errors.

Three Days To Never: The Interview

Threedaystonever_1

Tim Powers’ new novel,
Three Days To Never (3DTN), is a supernatural thriller about spies,
magic, science, religion, and the secret history of the 20th
century. Set in 1987 during that year’s famed three-day New Age “Harmonic
Convergence,” the story involves Albert Einstein, Charlie Chaplin,
Israeli intelligence, remote viewers, the Qabbalah, the nature of time,
identity, and free will–and an unsuspecting English teacher from San
Bernardino and his young daughter.

The author has graciously consented
to give JimmyAkin.Org an exclusive interview about his new book.

* * *

JA.O: Authors usually dread the
question “Where do you get your ideas?” so I won’t ask that, but
I’d like to ask about the starting point for 3DTN. Where did the germ
of this novel come from? What was the first thing that you decided about
it? Did you want to write about a specific theme, a specific moment,
a specific character, a specific concept?

Tim Powers: Actually
it all started simply by me being curious about why Einstein’s hair
is white in all photographs after 1928. Biographies note that he had
something like a heart attack at that time, in the Swiss Alps, but I
was in my writer-paranoid mode, so I wasn’t buying the heart-attack
story.

      I
suppose anybody’s biography would yield the sort of clues I look for
to base a story on — I bet I could find them in a biography of Louisa
May Alcott, or Beatrix Potter! — but I was pleased to find that Einstein’s
life was particularly full of odd bits. He really did devote years to
working on some kind of "maschinchen," little machine, which
apparently in real life came to nothing, and he did go to a séance
with Charlie Chaplin, and he did leave California forever on the day
of the big Long Beach earthquake, for instance.

      I
always simply note lots of interesting bits and then try to figure out
what sort of story they appear to be part of — as opposed to having
a story in mind in advance and then looking for substantiation for it.
And so when I found that Einstein was devoted to the state of Israel,
for instance, and donated lots of his papers to a university there,
I just noted that Israel would probably figure in the story. That led
me to the Qabbalah and the Mossad, and then they led me on to lots of
other colorful stuff.

* * *

I know that your stories
are heavily researched. How did you go about researching this one?

      Well,
I read a good dozen biographies of Einstein! Underlining and cross-referencing
and making customized indexes on the flyleaves! (I always wind up wrecking
my research books.) And I read heaps too on Qabbalah, and the history
of Israel, and Charlie Chaplin, and old Hollywood, as the Einstein biographies
pointed toward these things.

      And
since the story’s action was mostly taking place within an hour’s drive
of where I live, my wife and I were able (as usually we’re not) to go
to the places I was writing about, and take pictures and wander around
and make notes. Since I usually can’t go to the places I set my stories
in, I insist that it’s not necessary — but just between you and me,
it is a help!

* * *

3DTN involves
the Israeli intelligence service, the Mossad. How did you go about researching
them, and how close are the intelligence methods shown in the story
to the ones the Mossad used in the 1980s? Are you at liberty to tell
us or would you have to kill me and my blog readers if you said?

      The
actual Mossad is more efficient than the fictional agents I put in the
book — but moderately inefficient characters are more useful in fiction
and more interesting, I think, to read about. But the background and
methods I give them are accurate for the 1980s, assuming my research
books were accurate. I read Victor Ostrovsky’s By Way of Deception
, and Gordon Thomas’s Gideon’s Spies, and Israel’s Secret
Wars by Black and Morris, and several more. Taken altogether they
probably gave me a plausible picture of the Mossad in the ’80s, and
plausibility is more crucial than strict accuracy. (And as you note,
precise accuracy in espionage matters might be dangerous!)

* * *

When I read your stories,
I’m often surprised to find out that things I thought you made up
actually came from real history. For example, in 3DTN there is an occult
group with ties to the Nazi Regime that I thought you likely made up
(though we know the Nazis were interested in the occult). There is also
a long-lost Charlie Chaplin film that I suspected was an invention of
yours. Yet when I checked online, I found both of these were real. Are
there other things buried in the novel that the reader might be surprised
to find came from history?

      Actually
a whole lot of it is real stuff — Einstein’s maschinchen for measuring
faint voltages, his pal who assassinated the Austrian premier in 1916,
the mid-movie interruption of the first screening of Chaplin’s City
Lights, the "kidnap" and ransom of Chaplin’s dead body,
for instances. This is a result of me getting my story almost ready-made
by reading a whole lot of research stuff and noting the intriguing bits,
which I then only have to fit together into a plot. It’s much easier
to just find all this than to make it up!

* * *

One of the things that I
find fascinating about your work is the way that you mix real life with
fantasy. Like many of your novels, 3DTN is set in modern times. This
is different than many fantasy novels, which are set in either the Middle
Ages or an imaginary period that is meant to be like the Middle Ages.
Personally, except in the case of someone like Tolkien, I often find
those stories coming across as flat or artificial. Is there a specific
reason why you weave magic around modern settings instead of going with
the traditional "sword and sorcery" type of fantasy? Is it
just a personal preference or do you think there are advantages to writing
magical tales set in the present day?

      Well,
I want to trick my readers into believing, while they’re reading the
book at least,  that all this stuff is really happening, to real
people. If I set it in that default-medieval world, with wizards and
Dark Lords, readers would probably think, "Oh, an imaginary story!"
and I don’t want them noticing that it is, in fact, imaginary.
So I put the magical stuff in alongside TVs and freeways and Marlboros,
and hope that when the magical business starts up, it will seem to be
as genuine as … you know,  the internet and streetlights and
Big Macs.

      Ideally
my readers will develop a bit of reflexive mistrust of apparent, mundane
reality! You really don’t have to nudge readers very hard to elicit
this. People say things like, "I’m not scared of ghosts, I’m scared
of urban gangs and nuclear war," but if they’re all alone in a
house at night, and they hear a scraping sound down the hall, they don’t
think it’s an urban gang member; for at least a moment or two they
know it’s a ghost.

* * *

Elements of your own life
are often mixed into your stories. Your characters often live in the
same town that you do, and incidents in the stories are often modeled
on things that happened to you. For example, in your story
“The Bible Repairman,” you have a character who accidentally set
afire a Jehovah’s Witness Bible, just as you once did. Can you tell
us some elements of your own life that found their way into 3DTN?

      I
think most writers use their own lives as the basic kit for their protagonists,
to be altered as plot might require. It’s easier! You know the (ideally
mildly interesting) details of your own life pretty thoroughly, and
so a protagonist based on yourself is going to have a history, and tastes,
and even such flaws as you might be aware of having.

      I
don’t have a daughter, and my wife fortunately is still alive! But Marrity’s
house is our house, and his furniture and books and cats and pickup
truck are all ours. (Our pickup truck was a lot newer when he had it
in ’87 than it is now.) And I quit drinking some years ago, which I
think might be a wise course for Marrity.

* * *

Last year you visited Israel
for a science fiction convention. Visiting Israel was a very powerful
experience for me, and I wonder how it affected you. What did you think
about your trip and did getting to go there influence 3DTN in any way?

      Unfortunately
my wife and I went to Israel after I had finished the book! I
did manage to shove a few first-hand details about Tel Aviv into the
book, at least. And the real-life Israel didn’t contradict the Israel
I had imagined — I expected it to be a wonderful place, with admirable
people, and it was certainly that.

      And
we did get to Jerusalem, several times! As Catholics, we found that
was kind of comprehension overload — the realization that God walked
right here, and according to tradition touched this particular stone,
and died right here, is just disorienting. You only begin to appreciate
it later, in pieces.

      We
definitely want to go back. Ideally we’d go every year, with the tax
excuse of attending the convention!

* * *

Your previous novel,
Declare, had significant Catholic themes in it, while 3DTN has significant
Jewish themes. Specifically, it has a magical system related to the
Qabbalah of Jewish mysticism. Why did you decide to go that way this
time? It’s not just that you’re a huge Madonna fan or something is
it?

Well, no. What I generally do in my books, once I’ve got a situation
figured out, is look for the supernatural tradition most closely associated
with it — so that with pirates in the Caribbean I used voodoo [in the novel On Stranger Tides–ja], and
with Arabs I used genies [in the novel Declare–ja].   Declare was fun, in that one of the
historical characters’ uneasy fascination with Catholicism gave me an
excuse to present Catholicism as true. In this new book, I guess I present
Judaism as true! That Mossad character is a fairly orthodox Jew, and
isn’t comfortable using Qabbalah.

      And
Judaism isn’t alien to Catholics, of course — I always figure that
if Catholicism were somehow, per impossibile, proved wrong, I’d
jump straight into Judaism.

* * *

One of the ways that you
ground your stories in real life is by weaving science and magic closely
together. It’s not uncommon in your stories to have quantum mechanical
explanations for magic, or ghosts explained as a partly electrical phenomena,
or devices that are part technology and part enchantment. Depending
on how it’s handled, I could see this either helping or hurting a
story. What have you found to be the benefits and
risks of closely juxtaposing science and magic?

      One
way it helps — I hope! — in soliciting reader credulity is that it
shows magic impinging on, participating in, reality as we know it. After
all, if you can see a thing, then it’s reflecting light, and so it must
have some physical properties! And I like to give magical phenomena
a quantum or Newtonian or relativistic structure, just because those
have internal consistency and I hope my magical stuff will therefore
have a plausible consistency. I don’t want readers to think that I’m
free to make up any old magical effects at all.

      The
risk of this, of course, is that you’ll make magic into just another
technology — pentagrams are effective up to such-and-such amount of
stress, the effectiveness of magic spells diminishes as the square of
the distance — you risk losing the numinous, vertiginous qaulity which
is really the whole point of magic. Real magic should be as scary as
an earthquake, even if it’s "good" magic.

* * *

H. P. Lovecraft felt strongly
that a weird fiction story should be thoroughly grounded in reality
and contain only a single supernatural element—the
“wonder” at the heart of the story. Your approach is different:
You strongly ground your stories in the real world but you weave in
multiple supernatural elements. It’s like there is a whole magical
subtext bubbling just under the surface of daily life. Do you think
Lovecraft was too conservative about how much of the supernatural readers
can accept or are there special challenges to pulling off
the kind of thing that you do?

      Well
I suppose I’d claim that I’m only introducing one magical element, but
that it’s got lots of apparently-unconnected side effects! — but that
would probably be more glib than true.

      Yes,
I think Lovecraft was too conservative. The thing we want to show the
reader is that there’s a whole world of unsuspected stuff going on —
when Leeuwenhoek first looked into his microscope, he didn’t see just
one weird new creature, but dozens of them! The unsuspected world will
have its internal consistencies, its own possibilities and impossibilities,
but it’s gonna be intricate.

* * *

Albert Einstein figures
prominently in 3DTN and you go beyond the known facts of his life in
working him into the story’s background. Einstein is such an iconic
figure that many authors have felt the liberty to fictionalize his life
in books and movies, but just recently we’ve had a great deal of criticism
directed toward Dan Brown for his rewriting the facts of Jesus’ life
in The Da Vinci Code, and Jesus is
an even more iconic figure. A lot of people took offense at what Brown
did, but a lot don’t take offense at a fictional version of Einstein’s
life. How do you explain this and, in your view, how much liberty should
authors have when fictionalizing the lives of historical figures?

      I
think the main thing is to base your characterization on what’s known
of the real historical figure — don’t have him do things he never would
have done. You can invent lots of unrecorded motivations for him, but
he should react to those in character.

      I
like to think I presented Einstein as an admirable character, which
he appears mostly to have been. I’ve portrayed some historical bad guys
somewhat sympathetically — Bugsy Siegel, for example [in the novel Last Call–ja] — but I don’t
think readers mind that as much as going the other way, and portraying
revered figures as villains. Brown portrayed Jesus as a fairly vague
nonentity, but at least he didn’t make Him a bad guy!

* * *

Despite the emphasis on
reality, your stories often have striking elements of whimsy. For example,
some of your characters have joke names—and joke names based on ecclesiastical
Latin at that! In a couple of your novels there was a character named
“Neal Obstadt” (nihil obstat;
“nothing obstructs”) and in 3DTN there’s a woman going by the
name “Libra Nosamalo” (libera nos a malo;
“deliver us from evil”). Is there a risk of harming suspension of
disbelief here or do you think that the payoff in humor is enough for
those who’ll get the joke?

      Well,
I think there is a risk of harming suspension of disbelief, yes. I shouldn’t
do it! Anything that reminds the reader that he’s just sitting in a chair
holding a stack of papers all glued together at one edge, and not in
the presence of the book’s characters, is a mistake, even if it gets
a laugh.

      It
could be worse! After all, Neal Obstadt may have picked that name because
of its associations, and Libra Nosamalo explains that her parents had
an odd sense of humor.

      But
the best sort of humor in a book is things that arise naturally from
the action, things a reader can laugh at without stepping outside the
story!

* * *

Compared to many contemporary
novels, yours are fairly clean. While they’re meant for adults, they
aren’t loaded up with sex scenes and they don’t celebrate sin. There
are cuss words and your characters definitely have things they’d need
to talk about in confession, but on a deeper level your books presuppose
a moral structure to the universe. As a Catholic, how do you find the
balance between showing the reality of man’s fallen condition and
glorifying evil the way we commonly see in the media?

      Well,
while I show people doing bad things — even show the atractiveness
of doing bad things! — I like to think I show too that they work out
badly, and that the characters would have been way better off not having
done those things. Often a character wants to do the difficult right
thing but keep a couple of pet sins too — just little ones, they don’t
eat a lot or make much noise! And I hope I show that there’s bad consequences
of that. I always remember Lewis’s statement in The Great Divorce,
something like, "If we choose Heaven we will not be able to keep
even the smallest and most intimate souvenirs of Hell."

      This
is really more craft than morality — given, I suppose, my own beliefs.
Sex-scenes, for example, I think are generally just bad craft. They
usually feel to me like clumsy gear-changes, jolting the reader abruptly
from one sort of fiction into another. Not smooth carpentry!

* * *

J. R. R. Tolkien’s works
envision a world that differs from ours in a number of respects. Some
things are “okay” in his world that would not be okay in ours (e.g.,
Gandalf’s use of magic). C. S. Lewis’s
Chronicles of Narnia are similar. When reading or watching science
fiction and fantasy, I often imagine that I’m peeking in on a universe
where God established different rules (which is certainly his right),
but many people feel that there are limits to what authors should portray
in this regard. A considerable number of Christians feel that J. K.
Rowling crossed the line in her
Harry Potter series and created a world that could tempt real-world
children toward the occult. In your novels I’ve noticed that the more
people chase after magic, the more they get burned by it. Where do you
come down on this topic? Are there limits to how different an author
should make the world he envisions? Does it depend on the audience?
What are the boundaries?

      I
make magic a damaging thing for characters to mess with just because
that feels logical and convincing to me. I’d be writing about a fake
magic — fake to me, anyway — if I made it benevolent or even neutral.

      But
I wouldn’t advise a writer who sees magic as a nice thing to
try to change the way he deals with it! I don’t think you can fake these
things. I’ve known writers who try in their stories to endorse moral
correctnesses they don’t actually care about, or which they even feel
to be invalid, just to make their work more palatable to perceived readers’
tastes, and it never works. Your fiction is going to reflect what you
actually believe and don’t believe, and it’d be a mistake for Rowling,
for example, to vilify magic just because people think it ought to be
vilified. They may be right and she may be wrong, but it’s her eyes
we’re looking through when we experience the story.

      Joan
Didion said that "art is hostile to ideology." Fiction
can be educational and beneficial and improving, but that’s not
one of its jobs!

* * *

Your stories often begin
after the death of an important character—frequently a female character whose
death sets the plot in motion. Is this a consequence of writing stories
that often involve ghosts, is it just a good place to begin stories,
or is it a personal trademark?

      I
guess it’s just a personal quirk! I really wasn’t aware of it till you
pointed it out. I guess it’s a natural way to get into a dramatic situation
— the reader learns about this deleted person from seeing how the other
characters react to her (generally her) sudden absence, and when a mystery
becomes evident she’s not there to explain it, and they’ve got to try
to reconstruct what she secretly knew or what she was actually up to.

      And
yes, in stories of mine her ghost is likely to show up and have some
comments!

* * *

Your stories often end with
the creation of new families by characters who aren’t initially part
of the same family. Is this a crypto pro-family statement that you’re
trying to get across, does it play a specific
dramatic function, or is it something that you just find interesting?

      I
suppose it plays a dramatic function, in that it’s putting together
a new orderliness, with optimistic promise, out of the ruins of what
had been there before the story’s catastrophes started. Like, "Things
won’t be the same, but they’ll be nice in a different way." And
I generally get fond of my characters, and I want them to have nice
lives after the book’s spotlight isn’t on them anymore!

* * *

Your previous novel,
Declare, came out in 2001 and 3DTN has come out in 2006. You’re
not going to make us wait until 2011 for another Tim Powers novel are
you?

      I
hope not! No, no, definitely not. This one was slowed down by me teaching
two high school classes and one or two college classes every semester,
and I’m going to cut back on that, I swear.

* * *

ORDER THREE DAYS TO NEVER–OR OTHER WORKS BY TIM POWERS–FROM JIMMY AKIN’S STORE.

SDG who?

Yes, the red name above isn’t Jimmy, Michelle, or Tim J. In a rare foray from guest-blogging limbo, I’ve returned to… share some pictures from my summer vacation.

Wait! Come back! Don’t worry, I’m not talking about a slide show of My Trip to the Grand Canyon or anything like that. It’s just that last week, vacationing in North Carolina, I contributed an entry to a sand sculpture contest — and won — and, given the subject matter, I thought Jimmy’s readers might like to see the results.


See more pictures.

Granted, on this particular blog, graced as it is from time to time with Tim J’s stunning artwork, my summer-day diversion isn’t as impressive as it might somewhere else, but still, I’m pretty pleased with the results.

This was my first complete crucifixion sculpture; last year I made a couple of unfinished studies that gave me the confidence to tackle this project in spite of having only 75 minutes to do it in before the contest judging.

(The conditions weren’t ideal… The tide was high and rising; the time to sculpt sand is when the tide is receding, which allows the best access to wet sand. For awhile I wasn’t even going to enter the contest, but eventually I decided to give it a try, and was pleasantly surprised at how well the relatively dry sand above the tide line handled.)

In previous years, I’ve done sharks, crocodiles, mermaids and sea serpents.

Well, that’s all I have to say about that, so… see you next summer!

Praying For Earthly Blessings

A reader writes:

My question for you is something that struck me as I was walking down the street today; I’m relatively new to Christianity, so it’s a pretty basic question.  Essentially it’s this:  why do we bother to pray to God for earthly blessings, i.e. curing illness, ending abortions, etc?  Firstly, God as an omniscient being already knows our general wishes as humans to end illness etc, and he even knows our specific wishes, i.e. ‘please cure Grandma Ruth’s cancer,’ so the goal cannot be to inform God of our desire.  Secondly, I don’t see how being plaintive about our problems would motivate God to do anything to help us–after all, there’s nothing we have to offer Him.  Finally, it might not be in our interest to end our sufferings, for out of suffering often comes the greatest growth of faith.

I can understand that the purpose of prayer is to bring us closer to God;  as we meditate on Him we grow closer to Him.  But why do we pray for earthly blessings?  I just don’t get it.

While this question is basic in the sense that it applies to one of the most basic elements of religious life–prayer–it is actually a very sophisticated on that many people wonder about, and from that perspective, it is very high-end!

What you’ve written also contains the seed of the answer: drawing closer to God.

The basic reason that God wants us to pray to him is that doing so builds virtue. In fact, prayer builds several virtues, and this applies even when we are praying for the needs of this life.

Let’s take an obvious example first: Praying for an end to abortion. This is indeed an earthly good. But whose good is it? Cui bono? Who benefits? First and foremost, the babies who would be aborted if the horrible practice isn’t ended. By praying for an end to abortion we are led to recognize the needs of these babies (their need to live!) and thus praying for and end to abortion ends up drawing us out of ourselves and causing us to care for others–even others we will never meet. It builds the virtues of love and compassion in us.

And this does not stop with the babies, for anyone who prays regularly about pro-life matters eventually ends up praying for the mothers who have abortions, the fathers who push them into it, the doctors and nurses who perform them, the legislators and Supreme Court justices who enable the practice, the American public who needs to become more strongly against it, and the conversion of the people in evil organizations like Planned Parenthood and NARAL.

All of this helps us grow in love and charity and it helps us to re-orient our values to recognize what is and is not important as we wrestle with this issue in prayer and think through it.

We thus come to more closely model our values to God’s values as we pray about the issue and its different aspects.

Prayer also helps motivate us to take practical steps to help others. Pro-lifers who pray regularly for and end to abortion–because of their increased care and concern that is grown by prayer–are more likely to take practical steps to help end the problem and to help blunt its deadly force in the meantime (volunteering at pregnancy centers, donating to pro-life charities, supporting pro-life legislation, voting for pro-life politicians). Certainly, they are more likely to do so than those who never think to pray for unborn babies.

The same is true whenever we pray for someone else–including people who we do know, whether they are living or dead. By praying for them, the Christian community–and the human community–is built up in love. In prayer, we come to mirror the love for others that God has for them.

We also purify our values as we think about what we should pray for, using the intellects God gave us to think about whether something is really a fitting object of prayer or whether it is a selfish desire that we should learn to either subordinate to some other, more pressing concern or even become willing to do without entirely.

Even when we are praying for ourselves and our needs, this happens, and we also learn another virtue: a willingness to trust and depend on God to give us what we truly need and to help us recognize and live without what we don’t.

If a Christian prays for freedom from suffering and that is the best thing for him and God grants it then the Christian, if nothing else, has learned to turn to and depend on God as the ultimate source of goodness. If a removal of the suffering is not in his best interests and God does not grant the prayer–at least immediately (for all suffering is temporary; there will be none of it in heaven)–then the Christian learns the virtue of patience, as well as whatever other virtues may be built up through the suffering.

Prayer has never been about giving God information he didn’t already have. Jesus made that quite clear in Matthew 6. Prayer has always been about more closely modeling ourselves after God by re-orienting our values to become his and thus buliding virtue and being more godly. To encourage us along this path, God has made our obtaining certain blessings conditional on our willingness to ask him for them–and it happens whether the blessing in question is a spiritual or an earthly one. Virtue and a greater sharing in God’s values is built up, regardless.

This is not to say that there are no missteps in prayer. We certain pray for some things that are not in accord with God’s will, that are not good for us, but we learn through time as the process of prayer gradually purifies us and we learn to subordinate our wills and our values to God’s. We always start with where we are–which in the beginning is quite self-centered–but as we pray we are drawn out of ourselves, to respect and love God and the other immortal beings he has created.

All of this is also in accord with our natures as earthly creatures. We instinctively ask for things when we need them, and if God prohibited us from asking for our earthly needs, he would be prohibiting us from acting on our natures.

There is, of course, a natural temptation to view earthly matters are inconsequential in comparison to spiritual ones, and it is quite true that spiritual matters are of transcendant importance compared to earthly ones, but one should not set the two in opposition to each other. God made us as creatures that are both earthly and spritiual. Earthly matters are thus important, too, because God made them essential to human nature. They’re part of his creation and of us in particular.

In fact, since what we do in this life determines our eternal fate–since the flesh is the hinge of salvation, as the saying goes–earthly matters have eternal rammifications, for the virtues we build in this life by learning love and compassion for others will affect the way we are rewarded in heaven.

So here, as in so many areas of Christianity, the truth is paradoxical: The last shall be first, one gains by giving, acknowledging one’s weakness and need for God’s help makes one stronger, and praying for earthly things leads to spiritual growth.

The Catholic Answers Forums . . .

. . . are FINALLY back up.

GO HERE TO LOG ON.

I know this has been an enormous frustration for folks who regularly use the forums, and it has been a HUGE headache for us as well.

Because I’ve gotten a number of e-mails about the problem, I’ve been meaning to do a post about it, letting folks know when the forums would be back up, but I kept getting told that we were on the verge of having them up and I wanted the post to reflect that, but one problem after another intervened and kept pushing the date back a day or so each time, and thus this post is later than I meant it to be.

Sorry about that.

Anyway–since I know a lot of folks are wondering what happened–here’s what did: A mysterious event occurred three weeks ago that wiped out the forums. Period. They were gone. The nature of this event is not entirely clear, but it appears that it likely was a hacker attack on the server where the forums are hosted.

Also (apparently) destroyed were the backups of the forums that were resident there. The most recent backup copy of the forums database that escaped destruction (for reasons I won’t disclose for security reasons) was from April, meaning that this was all we had to use to rebuild with, so even when the forums came up again that means all conversations underway would have to get a 5 month reset. (So basically people will have to restart their conversations from scratch.)

Worse, the people who registered since the last surviving backup–about 4,000 of them–would have to re-register.

Once the forums went down and we learned that it was likely a hacker attack that took them out, we realized that we wouldn’t be able to just put the forums back up the way they were, with no additional security. It would do nobody any good to simply put up the forums the way they were and let the hackers come back and take them down again a week or two later, just as the forum patrons were getting used to having them back.

So we undertook a massive upgrade–a new box for the forums to run off of, a fresh install of the forum software with all the latest security upgrades, additional security provided by our hosting service, a new backup system that will not be vulnerable to the kind of multi-month data loss we suffered this time, various ways I can’t talk about to thwart additional attacks, etc.

And absolutely none of this was in the budget–but we’re making the investment to keep the forums up and secure in the future.

We’re extremely serious about this and have had multiple meetings devising ways to try and ensure that this kind of event never replicates, and the need to take such extensive protection measures has slowed down our ability to get the forums back online.

It’s been a huge headache for our web guys–getting multiple pieces of hardware and software, configured properly, and working together in a new, tighter security environment–integrating what can be salvaged from the old forums, and testing the systems to try and make sure that they’ll work properly and wouldn’t immediately break as soon as we got them back online.

We wish–very strongly–that it hadn’t taken three weeks to accomplish all this, and forum users have our apologies, but we wanted to be very thorough so as to not have an even more frustrating crash as soon as or soon after we went back on line.

Having said that, the forums are back up and functioning so,

CHECK ‘EM OUT.

Incidentally, one note about getting to the forums: Apparently we don’t yet have all the ordinary ways of accessing them smoothed out (that’ll be a top priority), so for now you need to get to them by going to forum(singular) dot catholic dot com, with no Ws up front, like this:

HTTP://FORUM.CATHOLIC.COM.

UPDATE: You can now get back in by going to forums.catholic.com (plural) or from the forums tab on the Catholic.com homepage.

NOTE TO FELLOW BLOGGERS: Many of your readers may be users of the Catholic Answers Forums. Please consider a post letting folks know that they are back up. Thanks!