The Culture Beat

Well, I joined the thousands if not millions of readers who have read a most unlikely best seller. Published last October, it holds the number one non-fiction hardback spot ten months later. Marley & Me isn’t about a friend’s reminiscence of the famous Reggae singer; it’s about a dog. A big doofus of a Labrador Retriever–the book‘s subtitle captures it: “Life and Love with the World’s Worst Dog.” John Grogan and his wife Jenny were newlyweds when they decided they would try preparing themselves for the daunting prospect of parenthood by acquiring a pet dog. The Lab puppy they brought home had all his papers but they were not prepared for the outrageous behavior that little-but-not-for-long Marley would exhibit from the first week. Extremely “outgoing,” Marley was always bounding around the house, eager to play with his masters and anything he could grab and tear to bits, including pillows and shoes, a habit he never lost. Always hungry, he helped himself to anything that caught his eye, swallowing seemingly inedible items whole which would eventally pass through to be deposited outside in the yard or on walks. Terrified of thunderstorms, he could claw and chew his way through wooden doors or drywall when left in the garage. But Marley was a loving and loyal dog and taught Grogan much about enjoying life. For most of Marley’s life, the Grogans lived in south FL in West Palm Beach, where I reside. Today I drove past their old house on Churchill Street and took a picture of the house where Marley wrought so much havoc.

Marley even gained a little bit of movie immortality when cast in a family film, The Last Home Run that went nowhere and may be hard to find but whose Marley scenes can be found–where else?–at YouTube. I will not be surprised to hear that the book has been optioned for production as a movie or even a television series. It sure worked for James Herriot’s All Creatures Great and Small, another product of an animal lover with great descriptive skills. The books website is a good introduction.

What might have been a good five-minute read in a Reader’s Digest article, has, because of Grogan’s skill at describing his 13 years with Marley, become an enormous publishing phenomenom. This interview with Grogan sheds more light on the best seller. Readers relate to the joys and exasperations of dog ownership and how certain pets truly become part of the family.

(Stanford University chapel pictured)

One reason I haven’t posted recently is I’ve been frantically reading a really big book, The Soul of the American University, by George M. Marsden, in time for a faculty colloquium that ran for the last two days. Various faculty at my school, Palm Beach Atlantic University, meet at these occasions and spend two days going deep into the text of notable and classic books to grapple with their meanings and themes. Last year I went to one on Dante’s Paradiso, and it was wonderful to go through the sublime medieval masterpiece and catch a glimpse of the mind and art of a poet who could so brilliantly take readers ever higher into heavenly things.

This week’s book is more down to earth, alas, being a history of American higher education that takes you, as the subtitle says, “from Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief.” It explains in great detail how the early American colleges (such as Harvard and Yale) founded as Christian institutions gradually eliminated any specific faith content from their curricula or missions. It is a reminder that the struggle to keep Christ and good doctrine at the core of culture and learning is a unending project.

The problem in the colonies was that these schools were usually begun with the idea that no one sect (denomination) was big enough to dominate a school’s character or mission and thus these Protestant schools generalized their Christianity and sought to make it serve a new and growing nation. Thus the aims of the Protestant faith and American nation became intertwined and eventually so identical that the church was indistinct from the nation. Since you can’t really confuse the eternal (church) with the temporal (an earthly nation), something’s go to go, and so gradually, over time, Christianity at these and then other pioneering schools, became so broadly defined that it was possible to eventually marginalize it which then led to it becoming superfluous. The twentieth century saw the rise of the large universities designed to serve government and business with their vast research missions that focused on the growth of factual knowledge but lacked any values other than materialistic ones. Christianity, being a supernaturally-based religion, like all other non-scientifically-based ways of thinking and living, is rejected by the academy. Marsden ends the book with a call for allowing religiously-based scholarship back to the table to supply the diversity of thought that universities say they want but rarely allow.

This is one of the most challenging books I’ve read in years and at times depressing, so inevitable did the secularizing revolution seem to have been. Now that we live in a time of academic barreness regarding any unifying beliefs that would give meaning to all the knowledge we have gained, perhaps allowing faith-informed thinking to compete in colleges and universities is the next big revolution.