Lutheran Saints #21: Nenilava

December 7, 2021 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

Young Volohavana kept having dreams—powerful, moving dreams—but she could not understand them. Nothing in her small farming village along the southeastern coast of Madagascar could explain what she was seeing.

The dreams started when she was ten. A tall man placed her in a basin of water and washed her feet. After drying them, he rocked her gently to sleep. In another dream, he caught her in a net and then led her up to heaven. In yet another, he brought her to a church and up into the pulpit. He preached and told her that one day she would do the same.

Sometimes the dreams ceased altogether but then, during the day, she would hear a voice calling her name. At first she thought it was her parents, but they denied it and worried she might be losing her mind. She sensed somehow that the voice of the divine was calling out to her, but she didn’t know how to draw nearer to God. She gave up playing with other children and sat alone under a tree, weeping for want of God’s presence.

It wasn’t only the lack of God that troubled Volohavana. Her father Malady was a diviner with a widespread reputation. For pay he would consult with spirits through his oracle and offer wealth, zebus, children—whatever the heart desired. But Volohavana was not impressed. She doubted the power of the spirits; she mocked her father’s work, sometimes even in front of clients.

Worse yet, as her marriageable age came and went, she refused all the many qualified suitors asking for her hand. In desperation Malady turned again to his oracle, but this time the spirits gave him a very different kind of answer. “A superior Spirit, a God supreme dwells in her, and causes her indifference toward marriage,” they told him. “You, you are a slave, but Volahavana is a queen”…

Slovak Novels in English #39: Dead Soldiers Don't Sing

November 23, 2021 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

There was no question but that I had to track down this novel, one of only three from the Slovak published by Artia in the early 1960s in English to prove that good-quality literature can come from Communist nations, too. However, as only six libraries worldwide appear to have it (four of them in Denmark—uh, what’s that all about?) and I have never even once seen it for sale on any used book site, I was getting desperate.

Which explains why I finally forked over an astronomical sum to get a scan from the U.S. Library of Congress. I won’t say exactly so much; only that it made the $60 I threw away on The Heiress look like a deal by comparison.

Unfortunately, compulsion of this nature rarely pays off, and so it is in this case…

How to Launch Your Own Independent Press

November 9, 2021 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

It was a great delight and honor to give a talk at the 2021 Japan Writers Conference on “How to Launch Your Own Independent Press.” I really enjoyed the opportunity to reflect on what I’ve learned over the past two years and condense it for an audience eager to try it out for themselves. How little I realized, before I founded Thornbush Press, what an entrepreneur lay dormant within me! …

Slovakia Nonfiction Grab Bag

October 26, 2021 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

While my main project lo these many years has been to read and review Slovak novels in English, the fact is that I have also read no small amount of nonfiction about Slovakia and (to a lesser extent) by Slovaks. Sorting out the history of the nation we now call the Republic of Slovakia was in fact one of the great delights of working on my memoir. It turns out Slovakia’s history is a good window into the whole history of Europe, and to a whole range of political and economic questions.

So, for those of you out there who’d like to know more—all six of you—here’s a handful of books worth noting…

Lutheran Saints #20: Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt

October 12, 2021 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

Although Christoph grew up the son of the preacher of hope and healing Johann Christoph Blumhardt, he felt spiritually dry for much of his early life, even into young adulthood. Living at the center of an awakening had attuned him to spiritual realities, and the care to the point of exhaustion offered to the suffering turned his loving attention on the needy. But the bright confidence of his famous father did not break through to his own soul until the very linchpin of the awakening was taken from them.

Christoph was with Gottliebin Dittus on her deathbed. While her breaking free of the devil’s power had been the moment of truth for his father Johann Christoph, it was her death in Christ’s hands that changed everything for Christoph. But in both cases, the good news was the same: “Jesus is victor!” His victory was not a matter of the past—whether the distant past of prophets and apostles, or the more recent past of his own childhood and his father’s Möttlingen pastorate. Jesus is victor now, today, and into the future.

Johann Christoph saw with the joy the transformation in his son. On his own deathbed, his place his hand on Christoph’s head and spoke his final words: “I bless you for the victory.” Not the victory of career or success: the victory of Christ.

From then on Christoph took the mantle of Bad Boll, the institution founded by his parents to care for the sick and suffering. Like his father, he became a renowned preacher. But much more quickly than his father, Christoph became disenchanted not only with his renown, but with its effect…

Lutheran Saints #19: Johann Christoph Blumhardt and Gottliebin Dittus

September 28, 2021 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

In the spring of 1842 Pastor Johann Christoph Blumhardt was advised by his parishioners to investigate the strange goings-on at the home of the Dittus siblings. Orphaned and bereaved of several other siblings as well, four of them—Gottliebin, Anna Maria, Katharina, and Hansjörg—lived together in a tumbledown house under conditions of extreme poverty. But the poverty was not the primary target of concern. It was the noises, the strange lights, and above all the strange behavior of Gottliebin that called for further examination.

Gottliebin did not respond warmly to the pastor’s friendly overtures. He let her be, but neighbors complained again: Gottliebin fell down, she fell ill, the noises in the house were so loud as to keep them up at night. Johann Christoph dispatched the siblings to stay with a relative overnight while he and trusted members of the congregation searched the house. Therein they found strange objects, and thereby the fears of Johann Christoph were confirmed: dabbling in occult magic was a widespread spiritual disorder in his flock. Further inquiry revealed that Gottliebin’s early life had been filled with attempted initiations into such dark traffic at the behest of her elders.

Spiritualist studies were not unknown at the time. Reputable figures investigated reports of poltergeists, converse with the dead, and spirits of all kinds. Johann Christoph consulted with such experts of his acquaintance, but remained uneasy with their eager conclusions. Scripture forbade all forms of magic and attempts to communicate with the dead; the devil would deceive by any means necessary, including by lures of knowledge of the supposed beyond. Johann Christoph was resolute: he decided only to pray and place his trust in Jesus Christ…

Slovak Novels in English #38: The Heiress

September 14, 2021 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

In many ways, this review marks a triumph: the completion of my quest to locate and read all of Kristína Royová’s books in English! (See the now-complete bibliography at the end of this post.) The title is not literal—in Slovak the book is called Moc svetla, “The Power of the Light,” with an epigraph from John 1:5. A whole seventy years passed between in its initial publication in Slovak and its translation into English.

It was no small thing to add this last Royová novel to my collection. The only used copies I could locate online originally cost upwards of $200! I wrote a few pleading emails to the vendors to broker a deal. None of them ever responded, but not long after, one dropped the price to $60. Still a bit much for a faded mass market paperback, but I wasn’t going to let the chance slip away. Collectors are always at the mercy of dealers!

I wish I could say that this almost 600-page book was worth the 10¢ per page. Unfortunately, I have to admit that the 3-star rating for The Heiress is awarded on the same arbitrary grounds that I gave the same rating to Bellevue: a split between a 5 for the book achieving its intended purpose and a 1 for the enjoyment I took in reading it.

It’s pretty funny, actually, that I would have the same issue with these two particular Slovak novels in English, because they are about as diametrically opposed in outlook as humanly possible. Bellevue is bleak and nihilistic; The Heiress is chirpy and optimistic. In truth, the best characterization I can think of for The Heiress is “religious soap opera”…

Narrative Cookbooks

August 31, 2021 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

The worst kind of cookbook is one whose recipes just don’t work, of course. A close second is a database of recipes with no context, explanation, or personal story—recipe as equation that will give as clockwork and uninspired a result as a multiplication table. The kinds of cookbooks I love are personal, passionate, and preface each and every recipe with enough detail to know why it mattered to the cookbook author to include it, and how to judge the results as the reader and cook.

But even that kind of cookbook is primarily a tool—for expanding one’s repetoire of flavors or skills or simply grasp of how the other half eats. I’ve concluded, though, that my most favorite cookbooks are something beyond tools. They are what I hereby officially dub Narrative Cookbooks.

A Narrative Cookbook is not a Memoir with Recipes—a fine genre, and have I mentioned lately that I myself have written a Memoir with Recipes?—but its distinct own thing. In a Memoir with Recipes, the primary purpose is to tell the personal story, and in this particular case the personal story is very much bound up with food, so the author would like you the reader to taste or at least imagine the taste of the food that informed the life.

By contrast, a Narrative Cookbook is still more about the food than the life, but it recognizes that you can’t extract the one from the other, and the food won’t come to life without the life itself being reported alongside the recipe.

In my entirely unscientific survey, I find that Narrative Cookbooks span a spectrum from most essay-ish to most memoir-ish and the whole range in between…

To Baptize or Not to Baptize; or, How a Lutheran Comes to Commit Casuistry

August 17, 2021 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

Upon reading To Baptize or Not to Baptize: A Practical Guide for Clergy, more than one person has told me, “This is an excellent work of casuistry.” Not exactly the words to warm the heart of a Lutheran theologian. But they meant it as the sincerest of compliments.

And they’re right—in a sense. “Casuistry” is mostly a dirty word inside religious circles and out. It connotes the very worst of all legal and bureaucratic systems: reductionistic, narrow-minded, and inhuman. It binds the innocent in twisty cords of corruption and lets the wicked off the hook on a technicality.

But in fact “casuistry” shares a common Latin etymological root with “case,” as in “case study,” a time-honored strategy for moral discernment. At its best, casuistry is simply case studies, examining the wide and intriguing array of situations that we human beings get ourselves into, and thinking through the possible responses and options that arise as a result.

In that sense, To Baptize or Not to Baptize is chock full of casuistry, as it narrates forty-nine different baptismal situations calling for pastoral discernment. There may well be more…

Slovak Novels in English #37: The Shop on Main Street

August 3, 2021 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

Once again I’ve chosen a novel that pushes the boundaries of my mandate to read all “Slovak Novels in English.” In this case, the issue is equivocation on the term “Slovak.” The fact is, The Shop on Main Street was not written in the Slovak language at all… but in Czech, which is why it’s been issued in a series called Modern Czech Classics. Whether and to what extent Czech and Slovak are different languages has been a neuralgic issue for a long time, and even more so in the days when the two peoples shared a country. In any case, they are mutually intelligible to a degree that native English speakers can’t even imagine. However, I will not therefore conclude that I need to cover all Czech novels in English, too!

The more specific reason in favor of counting this one a “Slovak Novel in English” is the fact that the author was, in fact, a Slovak. Ladislav Grosman moved to Prague and adopted the local lingo to such an extent that it made sense to write first a short story, then a hybrid novel-screenplay, in Czech. Still, the story is set in Slovakia and all the characters are Slovak. So the novel passes my own personal litmus test…