Book Quotes - Page 585

Publishing is no longer simply a matter of picking worthy manuscripts and putting them on offer. It is now as important to market books properly, to work with the bookstore chains to getterms, co-op advertising, and the like. The difficulty is that publishers who can market are most often not the publishers with worthy lists.

The ideas of the classics, so far as living, are our commonplaces. It is the modern books that give us the latest and most profound conceptions. It seems to me rather a lazy makeshift to mumble over the familiar.

You don't always have to have an e-book. You can have a real book. I'd like to see the old way maintain.

I definitely love history. I'm not formally trained or educated in history, but you could say I did go back to college in 2008 to do Untold History of the United States. That took five years. Co-author Peter Kuznick has been teaching history for something like 35 years, at American University and other places. His group of researchers brought me into contact with a lot of books.

People should really horde their Blu-rays like old comic books and baseball cards. Because they're really beautiful, and will be worth something if you like movies as I do.

You're not a historian, but most historians will tell you that they make very discrete judgment as to what facts to omit in order to make their book into some shape, some length that can be managed.

The concept of a midlife crisis is a well known one perpetuated by books and films. And recently the idea of a quarter-life crisis, between 20 and 30, has also gained a fair amount of media coverage. But there's a surprising lack of robust research on these events, and almost none on later life crisis.

I tell this anecdote with tongue in cheek at the start of my book William Burroughs and the Secret of Fascination, but my academic involvement with Burroughs was entirely due to my tutor at Oxford, Peter Conrad. I was discussing with him the idea of staying on to do graduate work and when I tossed the name of Burroughs into the conversation - well, he let it fall loudly onto the floor, and proceeded to cross himself as if warding off an evil spirit. Since I was very ambivalent about an academic career in any case, that decided it for me.

It started out as a typically insane idea to map every part of the published text in terms of its manuscript provenance and history, and to establish the cultural meaning of the book, part and whole.

In proportion as society refines, new books must ever become more necessary.

A book may be very amusing with numerous errors, or it may be very dull without a single absurdity.

The volume of Nature is the book of knowledge.

Just because everyone CAN publish a book these days, doesn't mean everyone SHOULD. The world doesn't need 1000 knock-offs of 50 Shades of Grey. I'm not so sure the world even needed ONE 50 Shades of Grey.

The shortest distance between where we are today as a nation and an effective return to increasing our freedoms and widespread prosperity is for regular American citizens to read and study the great books.

Since the purpose of reading, of education, is to become good, our most important task is to choose the right books. Our personal set of stories, our canon, shapes our lives. I believe it is a law of the universe that we will not rise above our canon. Our canon is part of us, deeply, subconsciously. And the characters and teachings in our canon shape our characters--good, evil, mediocre, or great.

In the chapter on the nature of the atonement [in the book saving Calvinism] I argue that it is a mistake to think that penal substitution is the only option on the doctrine of atonement.

[Jonathan Edwards] he has to be engaged with on this issue if you're writing about Calvinism as I am in this book.

In many ways the book [Saving Calvinism] is trying to argue for a more popular audience things I've said in some more scholarly works, namely, that the Reformed tradition is broader and more variegated than is often reported today, and that we need to recapture something of this in order that we don't end up unnecessarily narrow in our doctrine and in order to keep some perspective.

Sometimes we can lose the wood for the trees. Some specific issues dealt with in the book [Saving Calvinism]: the scope of election (who is saved?); the nature of the atonement (do we have to hold to penal substitution if we're Reformed?); the scope of the atonement (for whom did Christ die?); whether we have to hold to some sort of theological determinism (God ordains all that comes to pass).

[Jonathan] Edwards definitely shows up in the book [Saving Calvinism]. He appears as one of the interlocutors in the chapter on free will, the other being the Southern Presbyterian theologian John Girardeau.

I recommend Doug Sweeney's recent book [Jonathan] Edwards the Exegete (Oxford University Press, 2015), which is a terrific treatment of the way in which Edwards was steeped in the Bible, so that it shaped the whole of his thinking.

For those interested in Reformed thought more broadly, I'd recommend Peter Leithart's recent book on Reformed Catholicism entitled, The End of Protestantism: Pursuing Unity in a Fragmented Church (Brazos Press, 2016), as a thought-provoking and stimulating read that should get us all thinking about the future shape of the Church, wherever we come from.

The book [Saving Calvinism] itself is not recommending that we move the borders, so to speak. It is recommending that we look at what lies within the confessional bounds of Reformed thought.

The book [Saving Calvinism] argues in each case that the Reformed tradition is broader and deeper than we might think at first glance - not that there are people on the margins of the tradition saying crazy things we should pay attention to, but rather that there are resources within the "mainstream" so to speak, which give us reason to think that the tradition is nowhere near as doctrinally narrow as the so-called "Five Points of Calvinism" might lead one to believe.

The atonement chapter [from the book Saving Calvinism] shows how there are real riches in Reformed theology that most Christians today have no idea about.