Absent Fathers, Missing Bodies, and Supreme Evil in Harry Potter

April 14, 2020 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

It’s not hard to see the ways in which Harry’s actions mirror the christological themes of self-giving love and atonement of both the propitiatory and expiatory varieties. And it’s no surprise that in fictional improvisations on the gospel story, the Christ figure is easiest to illumine of the triune persons. The Father is usually barely there (think of the only alluded-to “Emperor over the Sea” in Narnia) and the Spirit is entirely ignored (I don’t know of any fictional analogue at all).

But J. K. Rowling does manage to have a substantial image of the Father in her great tale and, what’s more, accurately captures the Father-Son drama. This Father here is, of course, Dumbledore. His own past failures don’t detract from this role; if anything, they are crucial to the emotional drama. The red thread of the final installment of the series is whether or not Harry will trust Dumbledore to the end…

Lutheran Saints #12: Albrecht Dürer

March 31, 2020 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

It would have been gift enough to the world if Albrecht Dürer had only been an artist.

The third of eighteen children, he was apprenticed first to his goldsmith father and later to the most highly regarded painter in his hometown of Nuremberg. From both Albrecht learned a variety of skills, artistic and technical: silver point, engraving, pen, brush, gouache and watercolor, woodcuts. As a young man he toured throughout Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands, learning ever more in his field. After a return home for an arranged marriage to a woman named Agnes Frey—not a happy union—he set off again to see the great centers of the Renaissance in Italy: Venice, Padua, Mantua, and Cremona. The journey south made such an impact on young Albrecht that his return is credited with the birth of the Renaissance in northern Europe. When opportunity arose he returned to Italy and stayed from 1505 to 1507.

Once settled back again home in Nuremberg, Albrecht became extraordinarily productive and by the time of his death had produced “more than six dozen paintings, more than a hundred engravings, about two hundred and fifty woodcuts, more than a thousand drawings, and three printed books on geometry, fortification and the theory of human proportions.” His good friend Pirckheimer composed a epitaph befitting the high regard in which the artist was held: Quicquid Alberti Dureri mortale fuit sub hoc conditur tumulo, “Whatever was mortal of Albrecht Dürer is covered by this tomb”…

Serendipity and Synchronicity in a Pop-Up Book

March 17, 2020 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

This is simply too weird and wonderful not to share.

Somewhere around 1998 I discovered what seemed to me to be the true cosmic reason for the internet: namely, online used book stores that would allow me to summon home all the long-lost treasures of childhood. It is the closest I’ve ever come in my life to a runaway spending spree.

Memory, however, is slow, and so are used book sellers. It was some years till I remembered a beloved pop-up book of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale “The Steadfast Tin Soldier”—but when I’d look online for it, either it wasn’t there at all, or there were multiple options and none with a photo of the cover to help me disambiguate. And then I’d forget again for a few years, before I’d look and run into the same conundrum.

But last month, as I was selecting my book purchases to bring home from a trip to see my parents in the U.S., this one came to mind again, and, sing praise to the heavens, there was a cover photo—which I recognized immediately. Yes, this was my long-lost book, and the seller assured that the pop-ups were intact (which is no minor consideration). So I ordered it and had a very happy reunion when I arrived Stateside…

Vegetables at the Speed of Light

March 4, 2020 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

Not too long ago I wrote about Vegetables Every Day, which I named the best vegetable cookbook ever written. This post is about the second-best: Power Vegetables.

It could not be more different from the first in tone, coverage, or layout. To start with the latter, the book is full-color and filled with photographs that proudly reclaim the goofy palette and styling tricks of the 1970s. (Never underestimate the force of nostalgia.) You can see the plasma globes on the cover nestled amidst artichokes and eggplants. A picture on the inside features a guy in a pretend superhero outfit; another has a plastic dinosaur attaching a Caesar salad…

Lutheran Saints #11: Elisabeth Fedde

February 18, 2020 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

On Christmas Day 1850 Elisabeth Fedde was born on the south coast of Norway, and on Christmas Day 1873 she was reborn a deaconess at the Lovisenberg motherhouse under the leadership of Mother Katinka Guldberg, who herself had been trained at Theodor Fliedner’s motherhouse in Kaiserswerth, Germany.

Although Elisabeth was an orphaned servant girl without prospects, her destiny as a deaconess was by no means inevitable. The first time a wellwisher suggested she join the ranks of these proto-nurses, her disdainful response was, “What is that? Do you mean those women we see on the streets wearing the peculiar dress? No, thank you, I shall not join them.” And in any event, she had a sweetheart, Ole Slettebø. But despite her initial resistance, there was something about the strangely dressed women devoted to the sick and suffering that drew her.

They also brought out the best in her. Elisabeth proved herself to be extremely adept at medical care and knowledge at a time when nursing did not exist as a distinct profession and assistants to doctors, women especially, were not expected to know anything about health and hygiene. She was additionally gifted with a blessed persistence. Putting the needs of her patients first, Elisabeth would do whatever was necessary—even to the point of setting fire to lice-infested mattresses so that the hospital had no choice but to replace them—to get the sick what they needed…

The Bitter Price of Making the World a Better Place

February 4, 2020 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

Rosemary Kavan, Love and Freedom: My Unexpected Life in Prague (New York: Hill and Wang, 1988), 278 pp. Originally published as Freedom at a Price: An Englishwoman’s Life in Czechoslovakia (London: Verso, 1985).

In reading Janko Jesenský’s The Democrats, I found myself as intrigued as anything by the book’s translator, Jean Rosemary Edwards, also known as Rosemary Kavan (or, in Czech, Rosemary Kavanová). I’d found out a little about her—she married Czech Communist Pavel Kavan, lived in Czechoslovakia during the communist rise to power, enjoyed a short stay with him working at the embassy in London, and then returned to Prague only for Pavel to be arrested—like countless other true-believer communists—by his own party and country on trumped-up charges of treason. Pavel was released sooner than his sentenced twenty-five years, but his health was destroyed and he died in the late 1950s. Rosemary stuck it out in Prague until her older son Jan Kavan’s liberal activism in the Prague Spring, and her support of it, threatened her own liberty and life. She escaped Czechoslovakia in the early 1970s and stayed away until her death of cancer in 1981.

This memoir of her life, finished shortly before her death and published by her aforementioned son, fills in much of those details, not least of all the extremely difficult marriage she had with Pavel. Confusing their chemistry with love (hardly an original mistake) and his ideological passion for the whole human race with the ability to love well and attentively a single person, she stuck by her man, his short temper, inconsiderateness, neglect, and occasional violence notwithstanding. The communist commitment to ending the exploitation of man by man rarely noticed the problem of the exploitation of woman by man…

Singin' the Woes

January 21, 2020 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

It started out innocently enough. Well, sort of.

Years and years ago I was staying at a certain Lutheran camp that shall remain nameless and found myself “lonely for the Bible,” as the thought formulated itself in my mind. A reflection, I suppose, of the reception the Bible got in the preaching at said camp.

My remedy was to start sketching out what would become the Exodus Matins, which was followed in due course by the II Corinthians Vespers. The former is probably the more usable of the two (and was even sung once at the Luther Seminary chapel), though I still like the latter quite a bit. I just don’t expect many people will get into a hymn entitled “The Aroma of Christ,” however scriptural it may be (II Corinthians 2:15).

These in turn led to the idea for a “Matthew Mass,” which for various reasons I never finished. But I did compose a hymn text based on the Beatitudes from the Sermon on the Mount, set to a Tanzanian Easter tune I especially love…

Lutheran Saints #10: Eivind Berggrav

January 7, 2020 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

How unlikely that an unbelieving student, who on principle declined to receive the Lord’s Supper for a decade, would go on to become bishop of Oslo and spend three years in solitary confinement as the cost of his public faith!

Eivind was a pastor’s son, and despite a reasonably happy upbringing in a country parish, doubts crept in and took over. The bitter factiousness of church and theology in the Norway of his youth certainly didn’t help. At his lowest point, Eivind even ripped out the page of his confirmation Bible that his mother had inscribed and burned in ceremonially. He turned to journalism, adding to it teaching, and in time, mysteriously, the wounds began to heal. Marriage to his gifted wife Kathrine helped, as did the fellowship of Christian students. Time spent reporting on World War I, on site in Germany, opened up to him the striking fact of soldiers’ faith. But it was only his father’s death in 1918 that brought about the of his confusion and pain. He knew, then, that he also had a call to serve in the ministry of the church, and he accepted it.

Eivind’s gifts for the work were immediate and enormous. He could talk to anyone, and would, whether villagers in rural Norway or prisoners at the Oslo penitentiary. Through à Nathan Söderblom he got involved in the nascent ecumenical movement and made friends across multiple national and confessional borders. He studied religious psychology and even spent time in Switzerland with Carl Jung before heading even farther north to serve as bishop of Hålogaland, the Arctic diocese populated by the Sámi and their reindeer. One of the most popular among his more than forty books was Land of Suspense, an account of his nine years there that honored both the culture and the faith of a people very different from the usual portrait of Norway.

In 1937 Eivind was summoned back south: he was appointed Bishop of Oslo and thereby the Primate of the Church of Norway. It was not an auspicious time…

Lutheran Saints #9: Katharina von Bora

December 21, 2019 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

Proverbs 31 may as well have been written about Katharina von Bora, the former nun who married Martin Luther and thereby became the most world-changing wife in history. But in her case, to be a wife was not simply to be attached to a famous husband. Wife was truly an office, like the office of preacher or teacher or judge: a public role with vast responsibilities demanding faultless acumen. It is hard to imagine that anyone with less resolve, grit, and personality could have pulled off the role as first lady of the Reformation and personal companion to the energetic and irascible Martin Luther.

Though more is known about Katharina than just about any other woman of her time, that still amounts to precious little. Almost none of her own thoughts are preserved; what we know about her comes to us through other people’s records. Her birthyear of 1499, for instance, was mentioned by Erasmus of all people, and her exact birthdate of January 29 doesn’t show up in any records until 1733.

Her family is known as historically important landed gentry, relatively impoverished by the time Katharina came along. Her mother died early, which may account for why Katharina spent nearly twenty years in convents, starting at the age of six as a boarder in Brehna, then five years later joining two of her aunts at Marienthron in Nimbschen, where she eventually took her vows. There she learned to read, write, and sing and started on Latin—a remarkable education in an era that considered girls’ education to be a luxury at best—as well as the business of running a household economy. No one knows what she thought of convent life except for the sheer fact that, in the end, she left it…

Slovak Novels in English #24: Death Is Called Engelchen

December 10, 2019 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

After a string of rather dreary contemporary Slovak novels wallowing in the meaninglessness of it all, I was happy to return to Ladislav Mňačko, whose The Taste of Power and The Seventh Night I’d enjoyed previously. It’s a testimony both to the dreariness of the other novels and Mňačko’s own skill that I’d consider this book an improvement, given that the subject of the novel is military failure and mass carnage.

The setting is early spring 1945. The story opens with the narrator, called Volodia (though this is evidently not his real name), being hauled to the hospital after his legs have become paralyzed in battle. As he lies in bed, wondering if he will ever walk again, alternately flirting with and berating Nurse Eliška, he starts to walk back through recent events, and in time to share them with Eliška. The war is pronounced over during his recuperation, but the plot does not tend toward victory: it recounts the relentless march of death in the final days of this devastating war…