Semmes: Rebel Raider

CAPTAIN Raphael Semmes and his executive officer, John McIntosh Kell, aboard the CSS Alabama in Capetown, South Africa, August 1863

I’ve studied infantry combat a lot and while you can never grasp every subtopic in your field, I’ve grown keenly aware of one big weakness in my studies—naval history. I’m trying to fix that, and just last week I ran across John M. Taylor’s Semmes: Rebel Raider at my local used book store. This book, otherwise an impulse buy, suggested itself for three reasons: I’m interested in the Civil War, I’m belatedly trying to learn as much as I can about maritime military history, and I also passionately enjoy short biographies of the sort that Paul Johnson writes. They’re a demanding form, the sonnet to the full-length biography’s epic, and push their authors to, in the words of Herbert Butterfield, “search . . . for a general statement that shall in itself give the hint of its own underlying complexity.” Happily, Taylor’s Semmes proves excellent in all three regards.

Raphael Semmes (1809-77), unlike the names Lee, Jackson, or Stuart, is probably unfamiliar to anyone with a less than an enthusiastic interest in the Civil War. Indeed, in the last round of protests of Confederate monuments, Semmes didn’t possess the notoriety to inflame even today’s protesters: “Although the protest was supposed to happen around 5 p.m.,” a Mobile news outlet reported regarding the city’s Semmes statue last year, “it appears the group never showed up.”

That Semmes is relatively unknown is strange—he was the most successful commerce raider before the era of the submarine—but not inexplicable, traits that could apply to his entire life. Born in Maryland, he joined the US Navy as as midshipman at 17 and spent almost all of the next forty years in the service, first for the United States and then for the Confederacy. Though a practicing Catholic from the South, he married into a Protestant family from Ohio and relocated to Alabama, where he tried to pursue both his naval career and a law practice. (This is not as strange as it might sound; lots of pre-Civil War military officers had side gigs, some of them much shadier than lawyering.) One can see his expertise in the law stemming from his strictly observed Catholic faith and Southern code of honor as well as his naval experience. After losing one of his first commands, the USS Somers, to a storm during the Mexican War, Semmes asked for, received, and was exonerated by a military investigation. His expertise in maritime law would prove useful for him during the height of his career.

He served in and out of active duty in a variety of capacities—commanding naval artillery under General Winfield Scott in Mexico, a duty which acquainted him with Captain Robert E. Lee of Scott’s staff, commanding a store ship, working for the Lighthouse Service as both an inspector and Washington bureaucrat—until the secession crisis in 1860. An ardent secessionist, Semmes believed the Southern states lived under a tyranny crafted to benefit the industrial classes of the North and, especially, New England. When the Southern states began to secede following the election of Abraham Lincoln, Semmes resigned his commission and immediately accepted a position in the fledgling navy of the Confederate States of America.

After a variety of peacetime assignments (it is often forgotten that several months of peace separated the secession of the first seven Confederate states from the outbreak of war), Semmes was sent to New Orleans to take command of the CSS Sumter, a converted steam cruiser. When Semmes embarked from New Orleans in June 1861, it was the last time he would see the South for over three years.

Semmes immediately proved his mettle. He deftly escaped the Union blockade at the mouth of the Mississippi and began a rapid series of raids on northern merchant shipping. Semmes, suspicious as he was of the New England commercial class, was well-suited to the task, and captured eighteen American ships in six months. Without a friendly port to which to send captured ships, Semmes removed their crews, any useful cargo, and burned them. Of the eighteen he captured, only seven were sunk in this way, but he had sent a clear message and would have an outsize influence. Semmes’s raiding not only hurt the northern economy but also tied down valuable naval resources; “by the end of 1861 Semmes was being pursued by half a dozen vessels that otherwise would have been tightening the blockade of Southern ports (36).”

In serious need of repairs, Semmes brought the Sumter into port at Gibraltar in 1862 for refitting. There the Union navy caught up to him and kept watch for him to depart British waters. Eventually, with the Yankees too close and the estimated repairs to the Sumter too expensive, Semmes paid off his hired crew and he and his officers sailed to England, where they took command of the ship that would create his legend—the CSS Alabama.

“Was there ever such a lucky man as the Captain of the Alabama?”

— Admiral David D. Porter, US Navy

In a cruise that lasted just under two years, Semmes and the Alabama ranged from the Azores to the Caribbean, rounded the Cape of Good Hope twice, crossed the equator four times, and sailed as far east as Vietnam, a voyage of 75,000 miles without a stop in a single Confederate port. Along the way he captured 64 northern merchant ships, burning 52, causing nearly $7 million dollars in damage to northern shipping. Throughout, despite pursuit by the US Navy, Semmes eluded his enemies through a skillful combination of cunning, local intelligence, daring, and—once in a while—luck. Think JEB Stuart crossed with Captain Blood.

The Alabama’s cruise ended at the Battle of Cherbourg in June 1864, when the USS Kearsarge threatened to box the Alabama in and Semmes offered single combat. The Kearsarge sent the Alabama to the bottom. Semmes and his officers, rescued by a British yacht, escaped to England. Though Semmes would later claim the Kearsarge had an unfair advantage in that it had primitive armor plating—chains draped along the sides of the hull near the engine—the Alabama was in bad repair, much of its powder was wet, its shells had defective fuses (a problem for Lee at Gettysburg as well), and, most importantly, it did not need to engage the Kearsarge.

Taylor makes this seemingly unnecessary engagement understandable, because he makes Semmes understandable. Chivalrous to a fault, Semmes took extraordinary care over the legality of his seizures and chafed at northern accusations that he was no more than a pirate. He lived by a strict code strongly inflected both by his Southern culture and his religion and held himself to a high standard. That the Yankees he captured did not confirmed his prejudices against the northern industrial and commercial classes. He was appalled to capture multiple northern vessels to find that their captains enjoyed the services of “stewardesses” or “chambermaids.” Their true function could not be clearer to Semmes. “These shameless Yankee skippers,” he wrote after one such capture, “make a common practice of converting their ships into brothels (77).”

“Old Beeswax”

Taylor’s attention to Semmes’s character and beliefs make this short book (the main body of the text is 110 pages) especially valuable. Semmes—a short, aloof man who waxed and twisted the ends of his mustache (his men called him “Old Beeswax”), who smacked his lips as he talked, who seemed to take no special notice of anything happening below the quarterdeck but always knew what was going on aboard his ship; a strict disciplinarian; a gentleman who took pains to reassure his prisoners that they would be treated well; a Catholic who kept a shrine in his quarters; a crafty, intelligent, and aggressive raider who nevertheless had a wry sense of humor—is as colorful and timeless a seafaring character as any invented by Sabatini, Stevenson, Conrad, CS Forester, or Patrick O’Brian.

But he is also a man of his era. He not only believed in the legality of secession but came to believe it necessary: the north had a Puritan-bred culture of alien moneygrubbers that was incompatible with the older traditions of the agrarian South. He was a 19th century culture warrior. Though he only ever owned a few personal servants, he favored the expansion of slavery to provide a bulwark against the north’s economic oppression. His wartime raiding was not only his military duty, it was an opportunity to stick it to the New Englanders he held ultimately responsible for the crisis. He did not soften these attitudes post-war, either: “Avoiding the false humility and the evenhanded praise of friend and foe that would mark later memoirs,” Taylor writes,

Semmes portay[ed] the war as a struggle between good and evil in which the South is on the side of the angels. He repeatedly compares the South’s struggle for independence with the English civil war two centuries earlier. He likens the South to the king’s Cavaliers, the North to the barbarous Roundheads. As for slavery, Semmes could not conceive of blacks’ prospering in a situation where they were left to their own devices (106-7).

Taylor lays all of this out clearly and succinctly. He also writes elegantly, relating the entire career of the Sumter and the Alabama without turning the central 70 pages of the book into a litany of names, dates, and naval jargon—a striking achievement. Some passages, such as the duel with the Kearsarge or Semmes’s several daring escapes from the Union navy, are even exciting.

It’s also witty and fun, finding ways to portray the human side—that is, the absurd and surprising sides—of the war. For instance, after overtaking the Ariel, a steamer owned by Cornelius Vanderbilt bound for Panama and, presumably, the gold fields of California, Semmes discovered that instead of a haul of gold and goods “he had on his hands a packet with some five hundred passengers, including a rather embarrassed company of U.S. Marines.” When Semmes finally bonded the Ariel and let her go, the female passengers gave him three cheers. Another time, Semmes captured a ship with a personal “stewardess”—“a category of passenger of which Semmes was quite disdainful”—to the captain aboard:

In the case of [the Yankee captain’s] companion Semmes’s attitude was fully reciprocated; she was so reluctant to board the Alabama that the Confederates had to tie her into a boatswain’s chair to transfer her to the raider. Once on the Alabama, however, the feisty Irish-woman, whose name is lost to history, marched up to Semmes and denounced him as a pirate! This was one charge for which Semmes would never stand still; when the woman refused to stop her tirade, Semmes ordered that she be doused with water—the only time he treated one of his female prisoners so roughly (73).

If there is one flaw in Semmes: Rebel Raider, it is that the introductory chapter on Semmes’s pre-war life and the final chapter on his post-war career are too short, too cursory. This is more a problem with the final chapter, which passes from the publication of Semmes’s memoirs in 1869 to his death in 1877 with no description of anything in between. But this is a minor problem and natural to the form, which must be selective, and there are full length biographies of Semmes—including one by Taylor—for these details.

And speaking of “natural to the form,” Semmes’s relative lack of fame—strange but not inexplicable, as I said at the start—is due to his line of work. As a captain in a small, weak navy whose ports were all blockaded, forced to operate for years at a time without a trip home, sailing aboard a British-built ship with a hodgepodge crew of Liverpudlians and other foreigners, and commanding a few hundred rather than thousands of men, Semmes “had no legion of postwar admirers” and had won his victories at sea in what “has been perceived as a land conflict,” leaving “no ‘Little Round Top’ or ‘clump of trees’ to mark them (vii-viii).”

Semmes: Rebel Raider is an excellent short introduction to the tiny Confederate navy, to the complexity of the Civil War political scene, to the ways in which global warfare could effect events in the United States and vice versa, and to one of the great maritime commanders who is less well known than many of his contemporaries in the infantry and cavalry.

Roger Scruton talks to Jordan Peterson

…or Jordan Peterson talks to Roger Scruton. Depends on which you were more familiar with first, I guess.

I’ve admired Sir Roger Scruton for some time. He’s the most eloquent and thoughtful voice advocating a Burkean conservatism rooted in tradition, prudence, and pietas today, and I owe him a debt for the influence he’s exerted on my own philosophical and—only secondarily—political thinking as I’ve matured. Jordan Peterson I’ve only “discovered” in the last year (as I’ve joked about elsewhere, my first awareness of him was Amazon’s autocomplete while searching for my own books), but I respect him for his intellectual honesty and genuine concern for human flourishing and the truth. While in many ways different men—one an English philosopher of aesthetics devoted to Burke and Kant, one a Canadian clinical psychologist influenced by Jung and Nietzsche—their thinking has several important points of convergence.

Last month, the Cambridge Centre for the Study of Platonism hosted this conversation—entitled “Apprehending the Transcendent”—between philosopher Scruton and Peterson, and it’s those points of convergence or overlap that provide their starting point. In a wide-ranging chat, Scruton and Peterson talk about what “the transcendent” is; the factual and the meaningful; the hermeneutics of suspicion pervading humanities programs; the obsession with power, privilege, and identity that undermines normality, tradition, and the ability of people to relate to and cooperate with one another; the transcendent power of art and especially music; cultural appropriation; and much more.

The latter half of the discussion touches on topics especially near to my heart, including teaching the humanities and the Western tradition as an act of love for one’s students, how to recover a shared understanding of ourselves as all commonly dependent on the transcendent, and the importance of gratitude to… everything. After all, to take it back to Cicero, as I am wont to do, gratitude “is not only the greatest of virtues, but the mother of all others.” Without mentioning Cicero, Scruton and Peterson both elaborate on that theme at some length.

It’s a really magnificent discussion with a lot of substance to it. While I hardly agree with them on everything, one of the reasons I respect both of these men is their facility in explanation. They are excellent communicators. (A striking contrast—Scruton tends to go for a quotation from an authority with a pithy summary that neatly encapsulates what he’s trying to say, while Peterson tends to tell stories from his clinical experience that concretely, and often stingingly, lay out any abstract ideas he’s discussing. Both valid, both interesting.) They also approach all of the topics of their talk from such specific and even idiosyncratic angles—see above—that it couldn’t fail to provoke a reexamination of some of what they were talking about. And it was a lot of fun: a winsome presentation of good ideas by two men who care about those ideas and their relation to the truth. I don’t think it’s widely enough appreciated how funny both Scruton and Peterson are despite—or perhaps because of—their earnestness, and both are in good form here. (Though Scruton’s deadpan burn of modern art in “Why Beauty Matters” is still my favorite one-liner of his.)

I plan to listen to it again sometime soon, but to quote one of the comments on YouTube: “I feel like my brain ran out of RAM.”

Check it out for yourself—it’ll be worth your while, particularly if this will be your introduction to one or both of them.

The Line that Held Us

It’s been quite a while since a novel has gotten its hooks into me the way The Line that Held Us did. Set in the rural North Carolina mountains near where I went to high school, this story by David Joy opens with an accidental killing that leads to lies, more lies, and ever more violence—including murder.

Darl Moody is hunting on another man’s property, hoping to shoot an out-of-season buck for some extra meat, when he spots what he takes to be a wild hog rooting around the forest in the twilight. He shoots it and finds that he’s actually killed Carol “Sissy” Brewer, a simpleminded man he knew in high school. Like Darl, Sissy was poaching—ginseng, in this case. Darl is terrified. He’s not only accidentally killed a man while committing a crime himself, the victim is a Brewer, and the Brewers are a white trash family known for their independence and violence. Sissy’s brother Dwayne is a ruthless giant who delights in provocation and cutting people down to size, and he’s the devoted protector of his little brother. If Darl confesses to the killing he’ll go to jail—and he’ll have to contend with Dwayne.

Faced with this dilemma, Darl tries to wriggle his way out of it and calls up his best friend, Calvin Hooper. After a lot of begging, Darl convinces Calvin to help him cover up the killing, and they bury Sissy in one of Calvin’s fields.

This accident and their response to it set in motion a cycle of lies, suspicion, and violence. Dwayne, whom we first meet bullying some bullies in the Franklin Walmart, proves an excellent detective and wreaks terrible vengeance as he works his way toward the truth of what happened to his missing brother. Darl and Calvin, for their part, repeatedly double down on their lies, seeking refuge in the continually shrinking cover of untruth and exposing themselves and the people they love to more and more danger.

I don’t want to say much more about the plot, but it surprised me several times—again, something I haven’t felt in a lot of my recent fiction reading. And I haven’t felt such a keen sense of dread in a long time, either. Both of these things—the surprising turns and the steadily mounting dread—stem from the powerful characters Joy has created.

Darl and especially Calvin feel like real people; I pictured them as some of the guys I grew up and went to high school with. I know the type—think of an Appalachian Llewellyn Moss—and their actions are authentically motivated and true to life. They’re independent minded but bound by bone-deep obligations to the land and their families. Perhaps the only tie that proves stronger is their friendship. Joy develops real and recognizable secondary and tertiary characters, especially Coon Coward, the old loner, fiercely protective of his ginseng patch, upon whose property the story’s tragic hamartia begins.

But the real standouts among the supporting characters are the women—the mothers, sisters, and aunts that shore up mountain communities: “For as tough as the men were in these mountains,” he writes, “the women had always been stone. They were used to loss, accustomed to never having enough. They were fit for the harshness of this world.” Chief among them is Angie Moss, Calvin’s girlfriend. Angie embodies a seemingly paradoxical pair of hillbilly qualities: intense personal independence and unshakeable loyalty to other people—in this case, Calvin, and, as we find out early in the book, their unborn child. Angie plays a small but crucial role in the book, raising the stakes both for Calvin, whose lies ensnare him and then threaten to undo his world, and for Dwayne.

“Dwayne is an Old Testament prophet, moved to wrath by love.”

For Dwayne Brewer is the most arresting character in the book. Scarred by his upbringing but defiantly embracing it, a bundle of ideals and resentments, violence and tenderness, Dwayne quotes the Bible with the facility of a seminarian and believes unyieldingly in the rightness and immutability of God’s law, but leaves no room for forgiveness. He is an Old Testament prophet, moved to wrath by love. His sole motive in life is to protect his beloved brother; deprived of that, his mission becomes to foretell and inflict as much suffering on the transgressors as possible. He’s at his most terrifying when he has a point.

These character traits and bonds of loyalty and obligation drive the novel. Calvin helps Darl cover up his manslaughter out of brotherly love. Angie finds deep reserves of steadfastness, endurance, and courage out of love for her unborn child. And Dwayne wreaks the havoc he does out of love for his dead brother. And all of these characters—with the exception of Angie—wrestle with the consequences of their misplaced and disordered loves.

In a novel so attentive to the damage done to relationships and human lives by one primordial sin, the ensuing deceit, and the inevitable death and damnation that must come without an unforeseen and un-hoped for mercy, it cannot be coincidence that one of the protagonists is named Calvin.

The Line that Held Us is dark; violent; grotesque in the right ways and the right places, with torture, exhumations, and brutality I haven’t even mentioned; elegantly written, with an evident love for the mountains in which it takes place; and utterly gripping. I lost sleep—and at the busiest time of the semester—to finish this book. If you want a hard look at some of the places we can go out of love and loyalty, pick it up.

*****

You can watch Joy read the first chapter of The Line that Held Us and discuss the book as a whole here. I’m not surprised to learn that Joy is a fan of Ron Rash, as am I, and he also mentions Cormac McCarthy’s Lester Ballard in describing Dwayne. A good interview, well worth watching if my review has piqued your interest in this excellent novel.

Heresy and Apologetics on City of Man Podcast

Another Ancient Asides episode of City of Man has dropped! In this episode, regular host Coyle Neal and I talk about the early Church’s incubation—including issues of heresy, persecution, and apologetics—under the heel of the Roman Empire between AD 150 and 300. Come for the history, stay for the gratuitous ragging of Dan Brown.

You can find the Christian Humanist Radio Network’s City of Man Podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, and other fine podcasting hubs, or listen in via the Stitcher player embedded in this post. Thanks for listening! Hope y’all enjoy.

Christmas giveaway

For Christmas we’re giving away a set of all three of my novel-length works: Viking Age ghost story No Snakes in Iceland, World War II thriller Dark Full of Enemies, and my latest, Civil War coming of age story Griswoldville. To enter, simply visit my official Facebook page, find the photo of all three books posted above, and like it. That’s it. One entry could win you three books!

You can find out more about each book here on my website—I’ve linked each book’s page above—or by clicking through to my author pages on Amazon or Goodreads, where you can also see what previous readers think.

The giveaway ends Friday, December 14. The winner’s name will be drawn randomly and contacted directly via DM. You don’t have to share, tag, or like anything else to enter.

Best of luck, and thanks for reading!

With the Marines at Tarawa

75 years ago today, the US Navy landed Marines on Betio, the largest island of Tarawa Atoll. The Japanese defenders had heavily entrenched themselves in sand and palm log bunkers and enormous bombproof dugouts. Though the island was just over a square mile in area it took the next three days to secure, with constant heavy fighting all the time. Over a thousand Marines were killed, and two thousand were wounded. Of the more than 2,600 Japanese defenders, seventeen were captured. The rest died fighting, along with over a thousand Korean forced laborers.

With the Marines at Tarawa is an Oscar-winning documentary short about the battle. Much of the footage was shot by Marine combat cameraman Norman Hatch—who just died last year aged 97—and who steeled himself for the project by pretending the assignment was just like any other. The film is an achievement, an unflinching, powerful depiction of modern war in all its terror, glory, and awful consequences. And it offers no false promises of easy victory, only a reminder that it will get worse before it gets better.

But as remarkable a film as With the Marines at Tarawa is, it almost didn’t come to be. Wartime censorship prohibited the depiction of dead Americans’ bodies, and so the producers of the film had to seek an audience with FDR himself in order to get permission to show the grisly footage of the battle. Roosevelt, moved by the footage and informed of the disconnect between what American troops were living through and what the folks back home were imagining—a disconnect explored in print by embedded reporter Robert Sherrod in his excellent Tarawa: The Story of a Battle—granted it.

I show this film to every US History II (1877-present) class that I teach. Despite its age, it always makes an impression. Take the twenty minutes to watch it today if you’ve never seen it before—and even if you have.

Outlaw King on City of Man Podcast

Chris Pine and Florence Pugh as Robert the Bruce and Elizabeth de Burgh in Outlaw King, directed by David Mackenzie.

The much anticipated (by me, at least) medieval film Outlaw King dropped on Netflix Friday. The next day, Coyle Neal of the City of Man Podcast and I sat down to talk about it. Was the film just meh? A giant turd? A bloody muddle? A merely gorier Braveheart reboot? A flawed but interesting depiction of a narrow slice of medieval history? Or was it some combination of all five? Listen in to find out, and to hear Coyle and I discuss the complexity of medieval politics, the roles and difficulties of medieval kings, and the unavoidable Braveheart comparisons. (Click through for my Historical Movie Monday post on that movie from this past Spring.)

I’ve embedded the episode in this post via the Stitcher player, but you can also listen in on iTunes and other fine podcasting media. As always, I had a ton of fun and am honored to be a guest on the show. Hope y’all enjoy!

Read an excerpt from No Snakes in Iceland

With the lengthening nights and chillier days, I decided this is a good time to revisit my first published novel, No Snakes in Iceland. It’s—among other things—a ghost story set in the wilds of Viking Age Iceland, where an English poet and friend of the King of England has gone into exile among his enemies. There, in the gloom of a subarctic winter, he must confront not only the violent people he hates and apparently supernatural forces of incredible strength, but his own past.

I published No Snakes in Iceland almost three years ago after nearly a decade of writing, revision, reworking, and a whole lot of just sitting idly on a shelf. I’m proud of this novel and thankful to have gotten to write it, and have been humbled by the warm reception it’s had among readers. It’s encouraged me in my writing, and I can credit all of my work since—especially Griswoldville, the first full novel I’ve written since publishing No Snakes in Iceland—to the pleasure of both writing and releasing this first one.

So please enjoy this excerpt from the first half of No Snakes in Iceland, a trio of chapters in which Edgar, the narrator, meets a number of threatening new people on Thorssted, the farm where he and a pair of monks have traveled to investigate the presence of Sursa, a ghost.

If you like what you read, or if the story sounds interesting enough to you already, please do order a copy! And thanks as always for reading.

Chesterton on backbone and bravado

All Saints’ Day seems like an appropriate time to think about courage, which is—for a few other coincidental reasons—what I’ve been doing for most of the morning. From “The Prehistoric Railway Station,” an essay in Tremendous Trifles:

“Brave men are vertebrates; they have their softness on the surface and their toughness in the middle. But these modern cowards are all crustaceans; their hardness is all on the cover and their softness is inside.”

Theodore Roosevelt’s maxim “Speak softly and carry a big stick,” which he explained as “exercising intelligent forethought and . . . decisive action . . . far in advance of any likely crisis,” comes to mind, as do the courteous medieval knight, who could compose romantic lays at court and ride his opponents down on the battlefield, and the refined antebellum gentleman, who could observe proper etiquette in all situations and fight duels.

Real bravery is built from the inside out, which takes firmness of purpose and discipline and results in the kind of rigidity that carries both individuals and groups through crises. It’s a lifestyle—in the same sense that the renunciations and carefully structured life of a Benedictine friar were a lifestyle. Compare this passage from Lord Moran’s Anatomy of Courage:

Courage is a moral quality; it is not a chance gift of nature like an aptitude for games. It is a cold choice between two alternatives, the fixed resolve not to quit; an act of renunciation which must be made not once but many times by the power of the will. Courage is willpower.

I’ve just returned to my office from showing a class the end of The Alamo, and the backbone—the softness of honor and courtesy on the outside with the toughness of honor and bravery in the middle—of those men still beggars belief. William Barret Travis could conclude a letter with “Victory or death!” and mean it. It wasn’t just a slogan.

What we have today, especially in our increasingly shrill political debates, is a lot of bravado and tough-talking. Witness the “bravery” of screaming protesters, vandals of inanimate objects, or, at its very worst, resentful loners trying to kill—sometimes successfully—the people they blame for society’s ills. It’s no coincidence that actors—people paid millions to play pretend for a living—can be called “brave” for the roles they take. “Bravery” is simply another posture now, a shape people put on, not a fundamental character quality. A society that makes bravery an attitude, a rhetorical mode, a system of virtue signalling, is a society of Chesterton’s crustaceans. When the crisis comes, they’ll crunch.

But respect for the vertebrate is still alive. One of the most uplifting, hopeful moments of a given day for me comes when—most frequently by accident now—I run across the story of some ordinary person showing this kind of courage. The fact that such stories can still evoke our awe and admiration tells me that hope is not lost.

To take this back to Chesterton, here’s another line from this essay that I appreciated, on respect for and value of tradition among ordinary people and the elite:

“If you wish to find the past preserved, follow the million feet of the crowd. At the worst the uneducated only wear down old things by sheer walking. But the educated kick them down out of sheer culture.”

Less talk, less crust. More backbone. We all know this; we just have to recover it and practice it.

The 39 Steps on the Christian Humanist Podcast

Richard Hannay (Robert Donat) clings to the side of the Forth Bridge to escape detection in Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps

I’m honored to be a guest on this week’s Christian Humanist Podcast, in which regular cohost David Grubbs, fellow guest Todd Pedlar, and I discuss The 39 Steps, Alfred Hitchcock’s 1935 espionage thriller starring Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll.

Over the course of the episode we discuss Hitchcock’s early filmography, from the silent era to his first big hits; the film’s source material, a “shocker” by Scots novelist John Buchan; the balance of humor and paranoia in the film; the film’s deft self-awareness; the ways in which Hitchcock paved the way for future espionage thrillers; a pair of amusing underwear salesmen; and much more.

Our discussion is part of the annual Christian Humanist Radio Network Halloween crossover, in which the various shows of the network swap hosts around for a series of themed episodes. While year’s theme is Hitchcock movies, previous years’ crossover themes have included The Twilight Zone—for which I joined The Book of Nature to discuss a few episodes, including “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”—the Firefly series, and the original Universal horror movie classics like Frankenstein, Dracula, The Mummy, and The Wolf Man.

If you’re interested in catching the other episodes in the series so far, check out Sectarian Review’s episode on Shadow of a Doubt, the Christian Feminist Podcast’s show on The Lady Vanishes, and City of Man’s show on Rear Window. Book of Nature is scheduled to drop an episode on Psycho tomorrow, which should be a must-listen. I’m especially looking forward to resident psychologist Charles Hackney’s perspective on the film.

You can listen in on the embedded Stitcher player above or via iTunes or other fine podcasting apps. The 39 Steps itself is in the public domain; you can view it on YouTube here.

Thanks for listening! I’m blessed and honored to be connected with such an intelligent and fun network of people. Hope y’all enjoy listening as much as I did participating.

Chesterton on a particularly vile modern evil

While I love the work of GK Chesterton, owe him a great deal, and am indebted to him in ways I’ll probably never fully realize, I never appreciate him quite so much as I do when I discover that we share a pet peeve:

“Of all modern phenomena, the most monstrous and ominous, the most manifestly rotting with disease, the most grimly prophetic of destruction, the most clearly and unmistakably inspired by evil spirits, the most instantly and awfully overshadowed by the wrath of heaven, the most near to madness and moral chaos, the most vivid with devilry and despair, is the practice of having to listen to loud music while eating a meal in a restaurant.”

— Illustrated London News, April 22, 1933

I’ve had good conversations with friends in restaurants after which I’m hoarse, simply because I’m trying to make myself heard above the music. I may not want to hear my neighbor smacking his lips and guzzling his drink, but I at least want to hear his voice.

That is, if I’m there to eat at all.

The Early Church on City of Man Podcast

Yesterday the latest installment of the City of Man Podcast’s Ancient Asides series, in which I and regular host Coyle Neal discuss Roman political history, posted online. In this episode, Coyle and I discuss the first generations of Christianity as this obscure Eastern movement developed into a large new religion under the heel of Rome. You can listen here via the embedded Stitcher player, or on iTunes or any number of other fine podcasting apps. You can read our brief shownotes and reading recommendations at the Christian Humanist Radio Network homepage, here.

I always have a great time talking to Coyle, and this is an interesting and important topic, especially as we press forward in Roman history and the Empire begins to change. Enjoy!