Richard Beck writes about his experience with Bram Stokers' novel Dracula.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula is a very Christian novel. I would even say that Dracula is one of the greatest Christian novels of all time. Christianity suffuses the book. Faith is the air the novel breaths. Fans of the novel, of course, are aware of this, but the pious devoutness of the story caught me by surprise.

My wife and I both read and loved Dracula a few years ago. I honestly wasn’t struck by how overt the Christian themes were until I took in Beck’s piece. It’s interesting how integrated into the story those themes were and how that made them seem more subtle. It’s just another example of how good art weaves faith into its narratives without beating you over the head.

Source: richardbeck.substack.com

Tim Challies writes about All Creatures Great and Small, which he dubs “the most pleasant show on television.”

So much of today’s entertainment is violent or edgy, provocative or profane. So much of it is a thinly-veiled veneer for identity politics as if that message is so important that no other quality really matters. It’s unpleasant—and if it’s unpleasant in the middle of the day it somehow seems even more so at the end of a day.

I think it’s challenging sometimes, as a Christian, to find appropriate entertainment. Discernment is an increasingly complex proposition with the types of shows that make up the bulk of streaming television.

Source: challies.com

I’ve long been a little allergic to brandishing symbols of my Christian faith. When I was a youth, I had a beloved cross that I used to wear around my neck. The chain for it was broken whilst I took a thrashing at the hands of a playground bully in the sixth grade. For many years afterward, I refrained from adorning myself with anything that reflected my beliefs.

It wasn’t until I was received into the Orthodox Christian Church that I again wore a cross necklace, though this time I typically keep it positioned under my clothes and out of sight.¹ I’m mindful of the admonition in Matthew 5:15 not to hide your lamp under a bushel. However, I’m also cognizant of my own imperfections and the danger of being a negative witness. I aspire to make sure people know where I’m coming from, as in my blog description, but I’m wary of being showy about it.

I never want to be the person with the Jesus fish attached to my car that cuts you off on the highway. There are enough Christians out there now who serve as discouragement from engaging with the faith. I’m concerned about adding to their numbers. Maybe that’s unfortunate, and I should be more bold in my identity as long as it’s rooted in something good. I’m still not sure.

Ironically, I was thinking these very same thoughts on a morning a couple of weeks ago as I drove to church. In the midst of interrogating my feelings, a van was riding my tail on the highway in a way that made me uncomfortable. Eventually, though I was going slightly over the speed limit, the van went around me to pass in the left lane. Enscribed on the side of the van in big, bold letters was something like, “Jesus is my salvation!”

Maybe it’s a bit early to be making New Year’s resolutions. Though this used to be a popular practice, many now don’t even believe in setting stretch goals just because the calendar changes. I confess that I have waxed and waned in my observance of making annual resolutions. This year, though, I have something lined up that I think will actually improve my life in meaningful ways.

I’m trying to go more analogue after the Christmas holiday. My Christmas list consists of items to help me do that. Now, before I reveal what is on the list, I have to admit that I’m fudging the idea of analogue a bit. In this context, analogue may contain a bit of digital, as long as it keeps me disconnected from the great network. I’ve been developing the idea that the internet is a place to go for a specific reason.

When I worked in retail, I was introduced to the concept of destination shopping. The idea consisted of the belief that customers were in your store for a particular reason. If you worked at a “destination,” the theory went, customers were there to buy rather than to look around. If you bought into it, you had reason enough to disregard customers quick responses of “just looking” when you asked if you could help them. It could mean being an obtrusive sales associate, but that was sometimes encouraged.

I want to treat the internet as a destination. Too often, I’m logged on to browse around and look for whatever may catch my fancy. It’s not the worst thing in the world, but it lacks intent. When you have no intent, and no focus, you quite often end up wasting time which would have been better spent in other activities.

If I can work with tools that help me to avoid mindless internet browsing, I think I can improve my attention span and spend time more intentionally.

Here is the list of tools (some of which made it to afformentioned Christmas list):

1. Bullet Journal - I didn’t start a new one last year, and it’s always hard to begin off-cycle. I missed it, even if my cat is my enemy here because he loves to attack the placeholder strings.
2. FiiO DM13 portable CD player - This is what I meant when I said I was bending the definition of analogue. Sure, technically the CD player is digital, but it will keep me from going to an internet-connected device when I want to listen to music.
3. The Orthodox Study Bible from Ancient Faith Ministries - This was just gifted to me by a close friend for the Nativity. I plan to make good use of the apocryphal books and also footnotes in areas that I thought I had great familiarity with (like the Gospels).
4. Kindle Paperwhite - My favorite reading device. Loaded up with books from the Amazon store as well as classics from Standard eBooks, this is an extremely useful tool.

My bed will no doubt be littered with items at the end of the night, as opposed to just my iPad, but I need to detach myself somewhat from the full-featured tablet.

The election is, whether mercifully or unmercifully, in the rearview mirror. Like some others, I want to turn my attention away from the day’s news, so closely coupled as it is with political events. Before I read about Kid Rock being appointed ambassador to the U.N., I mean to spend some time with my head in books. 

Standard Ebooks has inspired me by making the barrier to reading well-produced classics low and ebooks free to obtain. From the site:

Standard Ebooks takes ebooks from sources like Project Gutenberg, formats and typesets them using a carefully designed and professional-grade style manual, fully proofreads and corrects them, and then builds them to create a new edition that takes advantage of state-of-the-art ereader and browser technology.

This week I downloaded a collection from Emerson (which includes Self Reliance) and The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis. I haven’t started on Emerson yet, but I’ve found much enrichment in the latter book. Its short, focused chapters are a sort of balm in times when the world feels abrasive. 

In the pages of this 500-year-old book, you will find the very things that speak to the rancor and division of contemporary American society.

True it is that every man willingly followeth his own bent, and is the more inclined to those who agree with him. But if Christ is amongst us, then it is necessary that we sometimes yield up our own opinion for the sake of peace. Who is so wise as to have perfect knowledge of all things? Therefore trust not too much to thine own opinion, but be ready also to hear the opinions of others. Though thine own opinion be good, yet if for the love of God thou foregoest it, and followest that of another, thou shalt the more profit thereby.

I’m praying that I can read these words with fresh eyes. It’s easy to absorb the words at night, though, and much harder to go out into the following day and put them into practice.

I woke up at 4 AM a few days ago, hungry from fasting. I decided to check out what the internet had in store for me and ended up perusing through videos on YouTube. My early morning restlessness led me to a very strange video from singer Caroline Polachek and I followed that rabbit trail to an interview with her.

As with other times I’ve seen her interviewed, Polachek is lively, engaging and articulate. One part that struck me, though, is when she talks about the magic of crowds at her shows singing in unison. She understands the positive power that a group of people singing together brings. However, when she tries to come up with an instance of people coming together to sing in a way that expresses transcendence, the best analogy a creative and intelligent woman like Polachek can come up with is… a sporting event!

This seems strange to me, since at least once a week, I go and sing with others in praises to God in church. I think it’s another oddity of living in the post-Christian West that people now have a kind of ignorance of religious traditions. Apparently, I’m not the only one who finds this to be odd or concerning. Even atheists are lamenting the disconnection from religious roots. Derek Thompson writes for The Atlantic about the decline in church attendance.

That relationship with organized religion provided many things at once: not only a connection to the divine, but also a historical narrative of identity, a set of rituals to organize the week and year, and a community of families. PRRI found that the most important feature of religion for the dwindling number of Americans who still attend services a few times a year included “experiencing religion in a community” and “instilling values in their children.”

Despite his own unbelief, Thompson recognizes the value that a church community provides. Justin Brierly is a Christian who is capturing the stories of those who realize how much our culture is indebted to Christian values in his documentary podcast The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God. Shocking as it may seem, prominent new atheist, Richard Dawkins, is now calling himself “a cultural Christian” (though this may be due to his xenophobia more than anything else).

Recently, author and professor Gary Shteyngart wrote a much-discussed and sometimes hilarious piece for The Atlantic about his time aboard a Royal Caribbean cruise. He was interviewed about the piece by Hanna Rosin. His experience of the fervor of the cruise aficionados sounded a familiar tone to what others have been describing about filling in the gap left by declines in religious observance.

So, on this ship, what I was seeing was people desperately trying to belong to some kind of idea. And I feel like the cruising life because these people are so obsessed with the cruises that they wear these—half the people or more were wearing T-shirts somehow commemorating this voyage on the first day of the cruise. So I think I really offended a religion. I insulted not just a strange hobby that people engage in, but a way of life.

And I think that’s the future. Trying to understand America today is to try to understand people desperately grasping for something in the absence of more traditional ideas of what it means to be an American, right? And this is one strange manifestation of that. But it was, for me, an ultimately unfulfilling one.

There are, of course, more direct ways that people are trying to replace traditional religious practices with secular ones. There are churches for humanists and just plain atheists under the premise that if you just take out the supernatural stuff, church services could be kind of cool. My hunch is that trying to create something based on nothing will not work, in the long run.