Seriously, a couple of books

Okay, I'm not messing around this time. There's many books responsible for this travesty of a vaudeville that is Atheist Viagra. Here's two of them:

1. Miriam Rubin's Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jewry. This is the book that planted the vicious seed of this play. I've always been fascinated by the function that stories play in both society and the individual psyche. In medieval Catholic Europe, stories of host desecrations were used to rouse the populace to massacre Jewish communities and steal their property. The stories are full of what we would call stereotypes: the conniving Jew, of course, but also the weak woman, the penitent thief, and the truthful child. The stories are consistently cast with these characters. Part of Rubin's point is that the stories depended on these caricatures, agreed upon by the population, in order to work their magic. This struck me right in the grey matter. We artists often concern themselves with the avoidance of stereotype, the search for truthful characters; but perhaps there are there fundamental agreements we make with our audience about types of people in the world? What are they, and how do we manipulate them?

Rubin never uses her historical distance to point up the absurdities of the story that seem obvious to us in the twenty-first century. But she does look at the reasons why the stories were found so acceptable and rarely resisted. In thinking about this, I wondered about stories that gain popular credence in contemporary society that are nevertheless demonstrably false: urban myths (more on these later). What function do they serve both in our society and in ourselves?

One thing the author also does is place one of the only extant contemporary responses from the Jewish community to the massacres, a verse lament, smack dab in the middle of the book. This takes the book out of the realm of scholarly publication and into something more artistic accessible, at least to a spongehead playwright like me.

But what was really awkward was explaining to my five-year old why they were cooking a child on the cover.

2. How to Have a Soul-Winning Church by Gene Edwards. This is a "how-to" guide for, well, winning souls. It mixes sales techniques with evangelism in a way that I think is at the heart of American Christian Fundamentalism. Edwards has a lot of practical advice, as well as thoughts on what the function of Christianity should be in our country (printed in 1962, he advocates the church as an "assassin of communism").

Not much more to say about this book. It has to be read (or at least leafed through) to be appreciated. I'll quote from the introduction, Edwards' argument of purpose:

This book is for the minister who desires to have the most effective Christian witnesses and soul winning church possible -- for the church that wants to see men come to Christ every week.

The goal of this book is to show you how a church can witness to, and seek to win, every human being in the city. This book is for the Christian who, more than anything else in all the world, wants to be a soul winner.

This is for the minister who wants to grow laymen in his church, who do nothing but talk soul winning, eat soul winning, dream soul winning, and do soul winning.

I rephrase this in purely functional terms: an organization whose entire function is to grow the organization.

More books later