Robin Hardy's Abbey Lands
Random Mutterings
The Problem with P.D. James
Jan. 13, 2025: When a reader asked about my favorite books, I'm afraid I gave her more than she bargained for. It's apparent that I like mysteries, but I left one prominent mystery writer off that list: P. D. James.
Her intelligent writing, deft characterizations, and meticulous plots had me carrying her books—Cover Her Face, Death of an Expert Witness, The Black Tower, Unnatural Causes—out to the chicken coop to read. But I began to weary of her aggressive atheism, which seemed to grow more pronounced in the later books (i.e., Devices and Desires.)
Now, I don’t require my mystery authors to be Christian; I don’t even require that they acknowledge God. But if they’re going to assert that all religious faith is illusory and all Christians are dupes, they have to find examples honestly. Misquoting Scripture is cheating.
In James’ A Taste for Death, the cowardly, ineffective priest who has found two men murdered in his church sits contemplating how he will contend with the aftermath of the tragedy, especially the publicity. He decides he must be proactive, visiting the prominent victim’s family: “Now that he knew what had to be done, it was remarkable how different he felt. A biblical phrase dropped into his mind, ‘Doing evil that good may come.’ But he quickly put it away from him. It was too close to blasphemy to be comfortable.” (That’s on p. 95 of the Warner Books paperback.)
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The implication for someone who doesn’t know Scripture is that “doing evil that good may come” is something that God approves of, or does Himself. In certain circumstances it’s okay. That the priest vaguely feels it’s blasphemous only means he’s too timid to do what God’s Holy Book says or that what it says is really kind of evil.
Well, there really is such a verse, Romans 3:8. But what the Apostle Paul actually says is, “And why not do evil that good may come?—as some people slanderously charge us with saying. Their condemnation is just.”
See Romans 3:1-12 for some context, though it's not Paul’s complete argument. Most of the rest of that chapter is his forcefully explaining why God is righteous and therefore His people must be righteous. But how many of James’ readers are going to look that up?
After two thousand years, Christians are still being slandered with the same old lies.
Confessions of a Facebook Fact-Checker
Jan. 14, 2025: About seven years ago, I began freelancing for a large international corporation as a fact-checker for Facebook. The name of our division was Uolo. There were hundreds, if not thousands of us working in the United States market alone. This is how we did our job:
We were given lists of flagged Facebook posts to evaluate. The standards we were required to use were a select number of newspapers or journals: The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, The Wall Street Journal, The Chicago Tribune, The Week, AP, Reuters, The Atlantic, and a few more I can’t remember. These were the only allowable sources to determine if content was valid or not.
I quickly discovered that these sources tended to congregate around a single position on any issue—that is, there were no divergent viewpoints. Worse, in a few instances, the only approved source I could find that spoke on a particular issue was the one I was evaluating. We were permitted to use a source to fact-check itself.
By selectively interpreting quotations, I was able to allow a number of questionable posts to stand without getting in trouble—until COVID hit in 2020. Then I watched in disbelief as a number of eminent scientists and researchers who questioned the prevailing wisdom about vaccines, social distancing, masking, and closing schools and businesses got deplatformed. The more of their posts I read, the more I realized they had valid points. But I was only a cog in the fact-checking machine.
By 2021, I’d had enough of this, and dropped the work. By this time, I had become engrossed in a new story about a Westfordian soldier who had fallen ill with the fever, and crawled out the infirmary window to find shelter from the rain in a henhouse, then was found by a young girl who came out to feed her chickens the following morning….
The Afterlife
Jan. 19, 2025: “For this is why the gospel was preached even to those who are dead, that though judged in the flesh the way people are, they might live in the spirit the way God does.” (1 Pet. 4:6, ESV)
Scriptures like this (and 1 Cor. 15:29) are why I decided to change the ending
of the third book of the Streiker Saga, Streiker's Morning Sun, and follow that
up with If Only for This Life. Some readers have been irritated or confused by my extension of Adair and Fletcher’s relationship into the supernatural, and some, ah, hate it.
​I understand that. My own Southern Baptists have very strict rules about God’s not messing with people after death other than to send them to heaven or hell. But then how do you explain the verse in 1 Peter?
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Some translations or paraphrases try hard to explain away the obvious reading. Several add the word now to make the verse read, “those who are now dead”—implying that these people were alive when they heard the gospel. The Contemporary English Version, while avoiding the insertion of now, explains in a footnote: “the dead: Either people who died after becoming followers of Christ or the people of Noah’s day (see 3.19).”
Their appeal to 1 Peter 3:19 doesn’t help much, for while Peter does mention the unbelievers in Noah’s day, he specifically says Christ preached to their spirits in
prison (echoing Paul’s argument that Christ descended into the “lower parts” of the earth). The New Living Translation, knuckling under the pressure to add now,
does concede in a footnote that the original Greek reads, “preached even to the dead.”
The only honest explanation I see is that the afterlife is God’s purview to do whatever He wants, and He wants to redeem us. In that spirit, let’s look at a Medieval illustration: The Wild Hunt and the Purgatorial Procession. Unbelievable?
​Not to me, nor to others who have captured the phenomenon. Have a listen to Johnny Cash’s “Ghost Riders in the Sky.”
You Call That a Party?
Jan. 21, 2025: So, I found this on one of those bad album cover sites—
Which is not really fair, because it's not a bad cover; it just needs a little something extra to indicate that there is actually a party going on. So I improved it:
Now THIS is a party. You're welcome!
Your Life Is a Story
On the trek up the switchback, they heard Cudmore, on courtyard gate duty, whistling “Whoopsie Daisy”—a song that only old-timers from Westford would know. Hearing it for the first time in years, Efran was both comforted and saddened, for it called to mind men who had been friends and tutors to him, now long gone.
They played such a large part in shaping me, he mused. And Therese whispered, In Your book were written the days that were formed for me, every one of them, when as yet there was none of them. [Ps. 139:16] Raising his face to the white fortress above, he realized, I am a character in a story. How good a character I am depends on my faithfulness to the rôle the Author wrote for me.
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In the family room of my childhood home, one whole wall was lined with books, the lower shelves being dedicated to children’s books. So I’d fry a bologna sandwich, take it to the family room, and sit on the floor next to the shelves to pull out one of the books of children’s classics.
Sitting cross-legged on the floor, eating my sandwich, I got acquainted with poetry and prose. Without knowing it, I absorbed rhyme and rhythm, sound effects, and significant details. I became attached to characters solely to find out what happened to them. Again without realizing it, I learned that story is everything. That is, the power of a story is in the plot, in what happens. The most wonderful story ever is the Biblical story, that of God’s dealings with people. How they respond to Him determines what happens in their own story.
Free will is the greatest gift imaginable. I often tell aspiring writers that, to be believable, their characters must be free to defy the author. If the characters are not free to do what they want, they’re only cardboard cutouts, making the plot a sham and the story worthless. So the great Author gives His characters the freedom to do what they will with the gifts He gives them. And many, many stories come to life.
As a young adult with children of my own, I rediscovered the importance of story. Bible stories were my lifeline during that time. When I understood the meaning of “Obedience is better than sacrifice,” I saw how a character can cooperate with the Author to live a story of purpose and power.
The creator of The Hardy Boys books, Franklin W. Dixon, gave this advice on making a good story: “Get your hero in a pit and throw rocks at him.” Conflict is essential to story in that it lays open the characters for inspection: what are they made of? What is in their hearts? This exploratory surgery is painful to the characters, of course, especially the ones who choose to look at the results. But these results are what shows the characters how to survive in a story that includes the actions of more powerful characters. The Author Himself will not make characters do what He wants, but His gift of freedom enables some characters to bend others to their will. These tyrants usually find their stories going quite well... until the last chapter.
In the middle of Chapter 10, the protagonist cannot know what will have happened by Chapter 23; he only knows what clues he has picked up from the Author in the preceding nine chapters. So when the Author points out the path of perseverance, self-denial, and respect for truth as the way of escape, and the protagonist chooses that difficult road, he eventually emerges into an ending previously unimagined in its satisfaction. The Author has been able to create that ending only because the protagonist allowed it.
Right now, today, we are creating our own stories. Our stories will eventually be read to the entire universe
one way
or another,
and it is completely in our power to determine how our story ends.