Elliot Ritzema's Blog, page 7
July 15, 2016
Beth Shemesh and Desolation
June 20, AM
On the morning of our second day in Israel, we left Azekah and went to Beth Shemesh, another site in the Shephelah (“lowlands”) of Israel. The name means “house of the sun,” and it’s possible that there was a temple (“house”) dedicated to the Canaanite sun god there at one time. It lies on the Valley of Sorek, an east-west valley that connects the coastal plain with the Judean mountains. In the Old Testament, after the Philistines captured the ark of the covenant, they put it on a...
July 12, 2016
Azekah and Action
June 20, AM
Our first stop on our second day (the first full one) was Azekah. As we had at Gezer, we hiked up to the site without knowing what it was, this time getting off the bus by the side of the road. Our group leader, Tim, wanted to start off the trip by getting us acquainted with various locations in the Shephelah, the foothills between the coastal plain to the west and the Judean mountains to the east. The word shephelah means “lowland”; some Bibles translate it that way, while others...
July 9, 2016
Gezer and Memorial Stones
June 19, AM
On our first day in Israel, we drove to a gravel parking lot and walked down a dusty white gravel trail toward Gezer. We didn’t know it was Gezer. As would be the case throughout the trip, our group leader, Tim, didn’t tell us where we were until we got there. Instead of looking ahead to the site, I could only think about what I was experiencing in the moment: “Gosh, it’s hot. The sun sure is bright on this path. I should’ve brought contacts so I could wear sunglasses right now. I...
July 7, 2016
On Pilgrimage
During the second half of June this year, I went on a pilgrimage to Israel and the West Bank. Our group of about 32 people was deliberate about not being tourists, even though we did ride around in a bus and go to some of the places tourists go. But we wanted our trip to bea pilgrimage. Tourists don’t gather together and recite the Shema every morning, as we did. Tourists roll right up to a site and park next to the gift shop; they don’t find a place by the side of the road to get out and hik...
June 17, 2016
Trying to Get By in Shanghai: A Review
Rob Schmitz is the China correspondent for NPR’sMarketplace,and he lives on a street in Shanghai whose name translates into English as “Street of Eternal Happiness.” In 2012–2013 he reported a series of short stories on the people he metalong the street, which lies in the former French Concession. Later, he reworked and expanded that material into a book:Street of Eternal Happiness.The stories Schmitz tells come together to give us a picture of what it’s like for people of various ages and ba...
May 28, 2016
A Christian Missionary to Christians: A Review
The nineteenth-century Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard was a Christian, but subsequent Christian readers have expressed divergent opinions about him. Francis Schaeffer, for example, associated Kierkegaard with the so-called “leap of faith” and condemned him for encouragingirrationality. Dave Breese, inSeven Men Who Rule the World from the Grave, expresses a similar view. On the other hand, Kierkegaard is viewed more positively by thinkers like C. Stephen Evans and Merold Westphal, andexe...
May 15, 2016
“My Bad,” and Other Sports Metaphors: A Review
I taught English as a second language for a couple of years just after college, and my students could never get enough of idioms and metaphors. By the time they had me as a teacher, most of them had been studying the basics of the language for a while; they really wanted a native speaker to tell them the origin of strange sayings such as “pee like a racehorse” and how to use it in the right context.
I wish I had Josh Chetwynd’s The Field Guide to Sports Metaphors back then. Chetwynd has colle...
April 16, 2016
The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict in Shades of Gray: A Review
David K. Shipler,aNew York Timesreporter based in Jerusalem during the early 1980s,won the Pulitzer Prize in 1987 for Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land. His book, rather than attempting to give a history of the conflict, was an honest look at the relationshipsbetween Arabs and Jews. Itcontained interviews withmany people who were deeply involved in the conflict, yet it refused to advocate for one side over the other.In his preface to the first edition, Shipler wrote:
This is no...
March 28, 2016
Authority + Vulnerability: A Review
I finished reading Andy Crouch’s newest book,Strong and Weak: Embracing a Life of Love, Risk & True Flourishing, this weekend. I was telling my wife about it, and she asked why I had been interested in readingit. I said, “Um, because I read everything Andy Crouch writes?” While there are in fact many things Crouch has written that I have not read, I have been a fan of his ever since his days editingre:generation quarterly,a magazine of Christian cultural criticism, in the early aughts. He has...
February 19, 2016
Reminiscences of the Book Business: A Review
Since I work in the publishing industry, I’m always on the lookout for books about it. Surprisingly, considering that the publishing industry’s main purpose is to put out books, there don’t seem to be that many. Sure, there are hundreds of books about how to get your book published and how to find an agent, but I’ve only found a handful of books about the history of the industry itself, or what the job of an editor or publisher is actually like.
Michael Korda wrote one of those books—sort of....
