Jesus Christ has been depicted in more varied an absurd ways than any other historical figure.  It seems one minute he can be portrayed by a twelve year old in a church skit, next bigots can label him an anti-Semite with whip, and after that pastors can portray him as a jive-talking black man or a down-to-earth Southerner dispensing platitudes of wisdom.

At first glance, the Manga Messiah comic book appears to be just another far-fetched depiction of Christ designed to make Jesus palatable to another segment of society, the Japanese comic book loving segment.  For those not in the know, Japan has a distinctive form of artwork called manga.  In a practice dating back nearly 500 years, the Japanese elite would dispense wisdom, tell legends, and even share cooking recipes via manga comic books.  (On my last trip to Japan, I was able to see some of this artwork on display the Tokyo National Museum.) Today, with the global saturation of Guttenberg’s innovation, everyone in Japan enjoys manga.  In Japan you can’t get on a train or walk into a restaurant without spotting someone reading a manga book; there are even commercial, open-all-night manga libraries. Slowly but surely, and with the help of the internet, the appetite for manga is speading to other Asian countries and throughout the world.

Acknowledging this cultural trend, it is my conclusion that the Manga Messiah is not merely some cultural caricature, but a sincere attempt to work within a genre to explain the gospel.  In a world where the most revered depictions of Jesus, a Middle Easterner, portray him as a blond haired, blue eyed Italian, the transition to an olive-skinned, brown-eyed Jesus should be a welcome change for the twenty-first century.

Moreover, in a Christian culture where Jesus tends to be presented either in hokey Sunday School terms or elitist seminary language, the Manga Messiah presents the gospel in a way that is relevant to youth.  I first learned about the book from a parent who had a son that couldn’t stop reading it.  During the same week that I was reading this hefty 288-page volume, I noticed a sixth grade girl also reading it in the school lunch room.  I ask her if she liked the book, and her affection for the book was obvious: she revealed to me that she was on her sixth reading.

Despite the appeal to youth, Manga Messiah does have some limitations. Matthew J. Brady, a serious Manga fan and reviewer has criticized the background drawings claiming that they’re plain, un-sophisticated, and computer-generated.  The book’s Wikipedia article reveals that some reviewers find depictions of the Pharisees at simplistic and anti-Semitic, a charge that I half agree with.  While the depiction of Jesus is quite complex and historically-believable, the secondary characters are hit and miss. The disciples are often presented as quite childish; the women have fair skin and don’t quite fit with their Arab-esque counterparts; the demons and angels, as in most manga, are drawn in truly bizarre fashions; and, yes, the Jewish Pharisees are quite sinister.

Yet anyone that advocates present-day persecution for the actions of Jewish zealots that lived over 2,000 years ago, totally missed the point of Jesus’ message anyway. If you actually believe the Bible, you’ll realize the Pharisees schemes weren’t even successful. Remember, we now supposedly have a risen, living savior that reigns as the Prince of Peace.  The Manga Messiah, I believe, is a serious attempt to tell this important story and its unique depictions will make the events in Jesus’ life as well as his parables more memorable in the mind of the reader.

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]]> http://www.cullenhartley.com/2009/05/book-review-manga-messiah/feed/ 0 http://www.cullenhartley.com/2009/04/grammar-for-teachers/ http://www.cullenhartley.com/2009/04/grammar-for-teachers/#comments Fri, 03 Apr 2009 15:04:03 +0000 cullenhartley http://www.cullenhartley.com/?p=223 Grammar for Teachers helped solidify in my mind the necessary place of grammar in the classroom.]]>

Few books thrown from a throwaway pile ever make a pervasive change in my thinking, Grammar for Teachers: Perspectives and Definitions by Constance Weaver is an exception.

Rescued from the trash bin when I noticed one of my university professors throwing it away, this book helped solidify in my mind the necessary place of grammar in the classroom. The necessary, essential, undebatable role of grammar that Constance elaborates upon in her volume is that language grammar and mechanics knowledge must be thoroughly embedded and understood in the mind of the teacher.

The first chapter of Weaver’s pea green volume elaborates on the psycholinguistic nature of grammar and implies that in a perfect world teachers could just teach the language rules and be finished with the lesson.  Yet the unfortunate reality that Weaver embraces is that not all children will learn these rules, even with a teacher’s best efforts.  Developmental, cultural, and attitudinal barriers militantly guard the way.  Her solution is for teachers to provide both structured and unstructured opportunities for students to manipulate and create language and to intuitively learn that unclear, ungrammatical writing is inherently inferior to properly written prose. However, the only chance for teachers to provide these learning opportunities is if they already have a thorough understanding of grammar.

Weaver continues by explaining how grammatical structures and morphemes are combined in increasingly sophisticated sentences and thoughts as brains learn and mature. The meat of her book explains specific examples about how teachers can integrate grammar instruction into reading and writing lessons without the requirement of teaching specific rules. Her most compelling call during this section of the test is her plea for properly facilitated sentence combining activities. The final chapters explain the essentials that teachers should know about traditional grammar, the content that has traditionally been taught in primary and secondary schools, and structural grammar, the methods that modern-day linguists use in their field of research.

It is true that some of Weaver’s claims will come across as radical, especially her contention that punctuation, agreement, and other prescriptivist features of writing can be facilitated intuitively in a way that is similar to how a child learns to talk.  However, her main contention, that all language teachers must know grammar, should not be debated.  Whether you teach explicit grammar rules or use more indirect forms of persuasion, whether you accept whole language or phonics in the reading development debate, there is no question that teachers must know and understand grammar.

The book of Proverbs promises that when fully trained a student will “become like his teacher.” If I ever become a principal, I will consider giving prospective grammar and language teachers a short quiz during the hiring process; because, most assuredly, if the teacher does not understand the content, the student never will.

Constance Weaver teaches at the University of Western Michigan and has a homepage.

You can help me maintain this site by purchasing this book through my Amazon Affiliates link.

This book can also be purchased through the National Council of Teachers of English. The organization graciously has one chapter of the volume available online.
Grammar for Teachers: Perspectives and Definitions

Extreme caution must be levied anytime we first-world Christians discuss the persecution of the church.  On one hand, we might not only declare that we not only have our rights, but we might also declare that any locale that persecutes Christians, or any other religion for that matter, is barbaric and inferior.  On the other hand, we must admit that many of us are soft and have never truly felt the flames of religious adversity, had our faith tempted by physical trials of the flesh, or lived in an environment where criticism of outsiders, coupled with skepticism, represents a way of life.

When considering a similar matter, Jesus presents a stern warning during his rebuke of the Pharisees:

“Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You build tombs for the prophets and decorate the graves of the righteous. And you say, ‘If we had lived in the days of our forefathers, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets.’ So you testify against yourselves that you are the descendants of those who murdered the prophets. Fill up, then, the measure of the sin of your forefathers!

-Matthew 23:29-32

While perhaps the modern church isn’t building tombs for Biblical prophets, I believe the modern church has a tendency to construct ideological alters and laud people who once would have been on the fringe, to hagiographize people that might be rejected or marginalized if they walked through our own Protestant church doors.  Some Catholic thinkers, charismatic healers, and fringe evangelists come to mind.

Nevertheless, scripture is filled with stories of those that have been persecuted for their faith, and it was written to provide encouragement for all who believe.  Reading narratives of persecuted contemporaries that reinforce this legacy should provide that same sense of inspiration.  It should also challenge the reader to examine how he might react under the same pressures and consider the outcome of our own faith should it too be challenged with pain, physical torture, or even the brink of death.

And no modern book will challenge the reader more to consider these horrendous outcomes and possibilities than Brother Yun’s The Heavenly Man. Translated by Paul Hattaway, the book chronicles decades of persecution that Brother Yun endured under China’s Communist regime and the remarkable ways that the Lord consistently rescued his ministry and preserved his life.

Brother Yun’s story begins in China in the year 1974, a time when the Cultural Revolution was still destroying the old ways and ripping a red streak across the land.  Yun’s father, a former Nationalist military leader, was teetering on the brink of death with lung cancer.  Without proper treatment, he would die.  Miraculously,  Yun’s mother’s prayerful cries to the Lord for healing were answered and it sparked a revival and awakening within the small family.

As Yun grew older he developed a ravenous spiritual hunger that could only be filled with a Bible, something a poor, government-monitored family in Red China would have little access to receiving. Again, miraculously, Yun’s prayers were answered, and this would serve as an encouragement that would spur him to a hazardous life of ministry.

God intervened again and provided Yun a wife, a woman named Deling who courageously agreed to answer God’s call to marry an impoverished, house-church pastor. Eventually Yun’s preaching grew bolder and the Communist government’s suspicion of Yun’s activities would grow greater. Many times Yun would go to prison, endure torture, and be offered only scant food. In one particularly graphic passage, Yun shares his pain and hardship:

The guards electrocuted me again and again, and forced me to crawl like a dog through human feces. They kicked me with steel-capped boots, forcing me to roll over into the excrement.  They even used their electric batons to stab me inside my mouth. I cannot easily describe the pain this caused. I thought my brain was going to explode.

The Heavenly Man is not for the feint of heart, and it is literally filled with dozens of accounts such as this.  The process of reading this book would be quite masochistic if Yun did not also describe how the Lord would give him strength to endure each and every trial.  Once Yun completed a 74 day fast; several times, like Joseph of Genesis, he would earn the favor of prison guards; other times Yun would receive solace and consolation from other Christian prisoners, usually people he converted; and, most miraculously, he would simply walk out of a maximum security prison.

But Yun’s point in the volume is not to talk about himself; all of Yun’s stories of hardship and triumph are designed to give glory to the One that gave him the strength to endure. He ends this book with a call for all churches to support missions.  Yun believes that the Western churches, if given the proper direction and a unified spirit, can spur and finance the believers of the developing world to evangelize Muslims and Buddhists in nations that still have little or no exposure to the Good News of Christ. Eventually, Yun claims, a westward expansion of the gospel will continue until the Christian movement evangelizes every tongue, tribe, and nation- finally returning back to where it started, the city of Jerusalem.

More information about Brother Yun and the way he sees God’s vision for world evangelism can be found at the Back to Jerusalem website (www.backtojerusalem.com).

You can support this website by purchasing this book through my Amazon Associate’s link.  Please remember, you must click the link for this website to benefit.

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