Maybe these trends are related, but whether they are or not, it is clear that we live in an age when faith is being tested and Christianity’s truths are being questioned.

I’ll quote from an article that appeared in the New York Times recently (Aug. 7), but let me preface this by saying that I belong to a fellowship that generally does not use the terms “clergy,” “pastor,” and “parishioner.” We say “leadership,” “preacher,” and “member.” Having said that, I share these thoughts from the Times’ op-ed contributor G. Jeffrey MacDonald, who wrote that “researchers have observed… that pastors work too much.” The reason why? “Congregational pressure to forsake one’s highest calling.”

Congregations are not necessarily pressuring their pastors/preachers to resign their jobs (that is, vacate their positions). Rather, as MacDonald put it, they are pressuring pulpit ministers to change their approaches. And yet such is the nature of these desired changes, that the prospect of those changes themselves are causing the ministers to feel stress and burnout. Yes, ministers are working more hours. Research has indicated that. But, as MacDonald argued, the greater stress for the ministry is not additional hours but rather those changes that are sought by the congregation itself, or by its eldership/leadership.

What are the changes? “Churchgoers increasingly want pastors to soothe and entertain them,” wrote MacDonald. “It’s apparent in the theater-style seating and giant projection screens in churches and in mission trips that involve more sightseeing than listening to the local people. As a result, pastors are constantly forced to choose… between paths of personal integrity and those that portend greater job security. As religion becomes a consumer experience, the clergy become more unhappy and unhealthy.”

MacDonald stated that he had faced similar pressures himself.

“In the early 2000s, the advisory committee of my small congregation in Massachusetts told me to keep my sermons to 10 minutes, tell funny stories, and leave people feeling great about themselves. The unspoken message in such instructions is clear: give us the comforting, amusing fare we want or we’ll get our spiritual leadership from someone else.”

MacDonald argued that individuals who enter the ministry generally do not do so hoping to become entertainers. They enter, instead, to try to help people “do what’s right in life, even when what’s right is also difficult.”

For the full text of that New York Times article, click here.

I’d have to say I agree with MacDonald about the nature of the dilemma. It’s where he suggested a remedy that I begin to disagree.

For instance, MacDonald stated that “Clergy need parishioners who understand that the church exists, as it always has, to save souls by elevating people’s values and desires.”

I have no argument with the idea of “saving souls.” That’s what the church is meant to do. That is its highest calling. But what about this business about “elevating people’s values and desires”?

Allow me to interject a different approach. The church exists to help people achieve eternal life. If “elevating people’s values and desires” means lifting their gaze from this world to the next one, from earthly life to heavenly life, then yes, that works, and I have no problem with it. But I suspect that more was meant here by “values and desires” than the idea of gaining eternal life.

I readily admit that Christianity offers blessings for believers on this side of the grave. It also offers trials and tribulations.

I raise these issues because I see so much focus on the here-and-now in modern religion. If there is any common ingredient in what we see in Christendom that might be called misdirected or problematical, it falls into the category of a too-heavy emphasis on what Christianity does for someone on this side of the grave.

There are different names for this. A “health-and-wealth gospel.” A “prosperity doctrine.” Or a “social gospel,” as in an emphasis on what Christianity does for a person in his business life, family life, contemplative life, or civic life.

In a recent post on this site, I defended the work of a believer and patriot named Jon McNaughton. McNaughton’s painting One Nation Under God, a sublimely patriotic historical tableau that honors the influence of Christianity on the framers of the U.S. Constitution, has drawn huge praise and harsh condemnation. A Youtube video of his creation of the work pulled more than 3 million hits and thousands of comments. But a particularly vehement attack called out for rebuttal, and so I wrote a piece that has since become the most-trafficked of all my postings thus far. In that piece, I argued against the currently popular theme known as “social justice,” and I argued against it for reasons I will share below—mainly, that Christianity is foremost a vehicle for eternal life, not (mainly) for social change. (To view that posting, click here.) We might not be able to change this world. This world will never be right. But we can help ourselves, and others, reach the next world. And that world will not have the problems that this one will never escape.

One other issue that intrudes itself, where ministers and their congregations are concerned, is worldliness within the body. The more that the church assembly reflects “the world,” the more likely it is that the minister will feel the pressures and tugs of the very thing that he hopes to draw the lost away from: that is, the world. As the Bible says, we are “in the world, but not of the world.”

Through all of this, we have said nothing of the issue of political correctness. I read an interesting treatment of that issue in the May edition of Rocky Mountain Christian. Therein, minister Guy Orbison, Jr., in a column entitled “The Offensive Word,” laid down a challenge for ministers everywhere.

“For fear of being politically incorrect, many preachers have adjusted their sermons to offer nothing more than a mild breeze wafting over the congregation to provide cooling comfort,” Orbison wrote. “Uppermost in the preacher’s mind is the desire to not be offensive.”

As Orbison observed, sometimes when Jesus spoke, people were offended. Sometimes that is necessary. Even from our pulpits.

“This great desire [that is, pressure] to preach non-offensively has weakened the pulpit and removed its power,” Orbison wrote. “Elders of some churches put the pressure on their preachers to preach positive, uplifting sermons that bring in numbers to the congregation but contribute nothing to the saving of souls. Preachers are willing to compromise doctrine in order to increase the size of their audience, while diminishing the register of heaven.”

You’ll find the full text of Orbison’s article here.

Somewhere among his writings, C.S. Lewis remarks on the fact that God places two different kinds of motives before us. This world we inhabit has both bad things and good things. There is suffering and turmoil and pain. The Christian, indeed, might find himself or herself subjected to additional forms or degrees of suffering or trials. Likewise, this world holds pleasures and comforts, as well as beauty and adventure and happiness. There are even special joys and satisfactions reserved only for those who are Christians in the here-and-now—that is, in the flesh. And yet…

And yet Lewis’s conclusion is that these two motive forces, taken in tandem, prod us onward as Christians. If the world were full of nothing but pleasures, then hardly anyone would feel any compulsion to seek anything different from life as we know it on earth. We would have such complacency that the idea of diligently seeking God might feel too strenuous, or too unpressing, for us to concern ourselves with.

Same, too, with the idea of discomforts, but in reverse fashion. If our pains are too unrelenting or too severe—if life, such as we have known it, is something dreadful or deplorable—then where is there any desire for an endless (as in eternal) extension of life? We would rather just reach the end of this life we know, and be done with the business. But another thing that hardships do for us is that they teach the believer that he does not want to find his comforts here in this world, for he will never be completely at ease here, no matter how healthy he may be, no matter how glorious his earthly Christian fellowship may be. It will never be perfect. And so he must soldier on, for something better awaits. His motivations, taken together, always nudge him in the right direction.

That direction is eternity. It is worth noticing that each of these motives—earthly goodness and earthly badness, temporal pleasure and temporal discomfort—prod us on to something else that is neither of these things. They motivate us, as Christians, to eternity, and it is only in eternity that we will truly find what we are seeking.

That was Lewis’s point, and I think it is well considered.

Too often today, individuals seeking to build followings of believers play the “health and wealth” card, or make some similar appeal. And they do so because they are shrewd observers of human nature. The average human being is prone to succumb to appeals directed to his creature comforts. He wants to be wealthier. He wants to have better health. To be at ease.

Then, too, there are weightier issues. He wants to break the grip of drugs or abuse or some other grim issue. How are we to answer that?

We cannot fault someone for wanting to make his or her temporal existence a better one.

The fault comes in making those matters the main thrust of Christianity.

And it is here that I suspect that the real pressures are brought to bear upon Christian ministers. In asking ministers to make their appeals more “relevant,” or in seeking to “reach people where they are,” we are only pressing them to appeal to lowest common denominators, and those denominators will revolve around providing social fixes for their hearers, or solutions to earth-bound troubles (dire though they may be), or providing entertainment for church-goers, or extending other promises of benefits in this earthly, biological life we know now.

Again, I will not argue that there can be blessings along the way, and that these can have their appeal. But I hope that people will recognize that when we focus on the temporal, here-and-now, this-world blessings of being a Christian, we are looking at half-truths, and half-truths, while they have at least some truth in them, can be problematical matters.

I am an admirer of the early (19th century) Restorationist preachers, and I once read those pioneer preachers were known for preaching eternity. I have always prized that thought. It has helped me to keep a focus in my own studies and my own Christian walk.

If you are struggling with finding the right path where these kinds of questions are concerned, my suggestion is that you will not go wrong if you lean towards favoring eternal issues over temporal issues. The person who looks to eternity also takes into account the affairs of this world. He does not reject them. But if quandaries arise because of religious appeals, the tactic of “taking the long view” will serve a person well. The Bible’s heroes of the faith, as described in Hebrews Chapter 11, were individuals who were looking for a “city with foundations.”

COPYRIGHT 2010 JESSE MULLINS

John R. Erickson with group of college students on his M-Cross Ranch, spring 2010. ALL ON-LOCATION PHOTOS COURTESY NATHAN DAHLSTROM, LUBBOCK, TX.

“What we choose to see, hear, and read matters greatly. People need good stories just as they need home-cooked meals, clean water, spiritual peace, and love. A good story is part of that process. It affirms divine order in the universe and justice in human affairs—and it makes people better than they were before they read it.”
—John R. Erickson, from Story Craft

“An American treasure.” That’s who John R. Erickson is to many who are in-the-know about this Texas-based cowboy-turned-rancher, the creator of the hugely successful humorous book series known as “Hank the Cowdog.”

More than 7.5 million copies of Hank the Cowdog books and audios have entertained buyers appreciative of Texas author’s unique storytelling talents and his priceless sense of humor.

In the past two decades Erickson has been courted by such network heavyweights as Disney and Nickelodeon for animation rights, but thus far he has held out, mainly because he has been unwilling to compromise the values of his franchise.

Erickson (in hat, at back right) hosted a seminar for writing students at his ranch earlier this year.

That story—of a heartland author holding out for wholesomeness and virtue in an age when standards elsewhere are in swift decline—is a stand-up-and-cheer event. If the literary world had more John Ericksons, the reading public would not just be blessed with more quality reading material. No, the public would be a better public, period. I am convinced that if more Christian authors and thinkers were to heed Erickson’s examples and his advice, art itself would be elevated. And Christianity could approach its former prominence in society-at-large—a development that could only lead to greater public enlightenment, productivity, and prosperity—to say nothing of salvation.

Those are huge claims, and I know that John Erickson would never make them for himself. And I am not saying that any artist by himself or herself could ever, will ever, exert such profound effects on the wider world.

Much of the weeklong event was open-air.

But what I am saying is that Christian influence and uplift, in Western society, has always preceded societal, scientific, educational, and economic gains.

This position has never been plainer to me than after reading Erickson’s new book Story Craft. Not because Erickson gave any history lessons. But because Erickson explains how art and literature are meant to “nourish the human spirit, not poison it.”

He applies an analogy of a compost heap:

People who tend compost heaps are fanatical about what goes into them. It must be organic material, never garbage that might include solvents, plastic, paper with ink or dye, or inorganic substances that might be harmful.

“What you put into your compost heap is what you eat. This is chemistry at its most basic level, also known as nutrition. If you give your compost heap garbage, it gives you garbage back.

“The same principle applies to the creative process. I never know exactly what will come out of my mental/spiritual compost heap. The characters, dialogue, and plot lines that end up in my stories bear some resemblance to the experiences I’ve had, yet they’ve been transformed in mysterious ways into something else. But the important thing is that they don’t become toxic.” (Story Craft, p. 56)

Elsewhere in his book, Erickson writes that he knows of no profession outside the arts that permits a practitioner to invent his craft as he goes along.

But, as he says,

“It happens every day in modern America, where the artistic elite, representing what I call ‘Uppercase Art,’ has turned its back on four thousand years of tradecraft and moral tradition. Art today has become what an ‘Artist’ does, and if that happens to be loathsome, too bad.” (p. 79)

And there’s also this: “’Uppercase Art’ in modern America has become a synonym for arrogance, irresponsibility, vulgarity, disrespect, and wild suicidal self-indulgence.” (p. 81)

This is John - with me (JFM) looking on - accepting the Western Heritage Award in April 2007 for his article "Six Days Ablaze" in the magazine I edited, American Cowboy. PHOTO BY JOE OWNBEY.

Against this enveloping tide—what some, myself included, would classify as Postmodernist secular humanism—Erickson makes his case for Christian literature, and by Christian literature he does not necessarily mean a literature that merely spouts Christian/Biblical doctrine and/or principles. He takes a broader view that considers also the influence of a Christian worldview upon the writer’s own personality and outlook, and the creative products that arise from such nourishment.

“I think we can establish a kind of statistical grid that offers some clues about the broad characteristics of Christian literature—and notice that it has nothing to do with the repetition of “faith” words, such as God, Jesus, Bible, or Gospel. Christian literature as a total body of work is more likely to be structured than chaotic, more likely to be harmonic than dissonant. It is more likely to find justice, beauty, hope, and resolution than their opposites.” (p. 63)

For more comments from Erickson in these veins, click here.

I was alerted to Story Craft, which I consider a landmark book, a few months ago when I opened a copy of the Christian Chronicle to see it reviewed in their pages. (Click here for review.) I knew Erickson from my years as editor-in-chief of American Cowboy magazine. In fact, in 2006, a two-part article authored for us by John won the Western Heritage Award for Best Magazine Article—a national competition. In April 2007 that honor was conferred during a black-tie event attended by 1,200 patrons of the sponsoring National Cowboy Museum. So, yes, I knew John Erickson, for he had been responsible for the highest honor our magazine had ever received.

The Western Heritage Award was no small thing. The show's hosts included Barry Corbin, Sam Elliott, and Buck Taylor. PHOTO BY JOE OWNBEY.

But I had not been aware that John had ever written anything in this vein—what might be called philosophy or ideology. So I immediately obtained a copy and began reading what I believe is a book that ought to matter to more than just writers—to Christians and concerned citizens everywhere.

And I’m not the only one.

“I wish Story Craft would be read by more people,” said Nathan Dahlstrom, a friend of Erickson’s and the photographer who shot most of the on-location (ranch) photos displayed in this article (and in related webpages on this site). “I tried to talk someone else [a more mainstream publishing house] into publishing it. [Erickson published it under his own publishing imprint, Maverick Books.] There is a lot of important material in there. It needs to be read by people in the media. It needs to be read by students.”

Dahlstrom voiced concern that, because the print run was modest and the book is not being marketed and distributed by a major publishing entity, it will not get the exposure it merits. “I wish I had a way to get more people to read that book,” he said.

Nathan Dahlstrom, a friend of Erickson's, said that the author deserves a wider audience. Dahlstrom shot the on-location photos displayed in this article.

So do I. Hence this coverage. And I’ll have more to say, further below, about Story Craft. But there is more to John R. Erickson than his latest book. There is also the phenomenon that is Hank the Cowdog.

Not familiar with Hank the Cowdog? If you are a parent with kids aged, oh, anywhere from early teens on down into the elementary years, chances are your child has at least heard of Hank, if not enjoyed him personally. Hank has a high saturation level in American schools and juvenile reading circles.

It’s more than just books. Erickson, who has a gift for doing voices and considerable musical talent (singing and playing), began from the outset to record the books as audio offerings. The books themselves are written for reading aloud, and they make great experiences for sharing—whether among friends or within families.

Erickson’s first Hank stories were written as humor for grownup audiences, having found earliest publication in The Cattleman magazine. It was only later that he packaged them for juvenile audiences.

“I had never intended the stories to be for children,” Erickson writes in Story Craft, “and it’s a good thing I didn’t. If I had set out to write children’s stories, I would have assumed that children were not capable of appreciating my best licks as a writer. I would have written down to the audience.”

That assessment is echoed by someone who was one of my most valued freelance contributors when I was editor-in-chief at American Cowboy. Connie Hubbard heard I was writing on John, and she had this to say:

He's the self-appointed "Head of Ranch Security." Hank's adventures are illustrated by Gerald L. Holmes.

“When my 3rd-generation-rancher father had his penultimate stroke, he lost his ability to focus on a book. Since he could no longer ride or drive at that point, we used to read to him. His favorites were Hank the Cowdog books and he’d laugh until the tears rolled, infecting all of us with whoops of mirth. The story in which Hank fell for the [attractive young female] coyote, Missy Coyote, was a hoot. When Hank began to see her looking just a little like her mother as time wore on it had us all doubled over in laughter. Those books are NOT just for kids.

“He [Erickson] made my father’s final few months a lot more fun than they otherwise may have been… and we appreciated him more than he’ll ever know.”

For those not among the Hank cognoscenti, this cowdog regards himself as Head of Ranch Security. Because of that self-appointed role, and because he is a dog, Hank makes everything in his world his business. He is suspicious, smug, excitable, easily ruffled, reactionary, and pompous. And, being a dog, he has a short attention span.

Hank sees all varieties of monster. The airplanes that occasionally pass overhead—“silver monster birds,” to Hank—are stealthy threats to ranch security and they do not escape his vigilance.

He’s also naïve, gullible, and an easy mark for such archrivals as Pete the Barn Cat. By the end of each story, though, Hank generally shows his best qualities and comes off rather endearing and even a bit admirable.

Sometimes enlisting the assistance of the affable Drover, whom Hank inwardly, and sometimes outwardly, regards as “the mentally pathetic mutt,” or “the runt,” (as in, “I stared at the runt”), he solves mysteries—some imagined, some real—around the ranch. (For a taste of Erickson’s winning way with a running gag – and he is a master of it – see this bit from the Hank book shown at right.)

I’d been to the Ericksons’ own ranch, called the M-Cross, outside Perryton, in the northern part of the Panhandle, some dozen or more years ago, and I have interviewed John on more than one occasion, besides having bought and published articles of his. I was a fan of his nonfiction prose even before I was acquainted with his Hank material. (Cowboy poet Baxter Black once said of his friend: “If West Texas Cowboy had been a book in the Old Testament, John Erickson would have been the author.”) For a side jaunt into the ranching dimension of Erickson’s ranching life, click here.

So, recently, when I interviewed him for this piece, it was a matter of catching up on changes in his life.

“Well, I think the way my life changed in the last few years is that I am spending more time with Christian groups, home-school groups, churches, and Christian schools,” Erickson said. “I still do a lot of ‘Hank programs’ in the public schools. That’s rewarding—I enjoy it.”

Erickson said that there have always been those people around who have “seen things in the Hank stories” that could only be called spiritual. This despite the fact that the Hank books make little mention of Christianity or the Bible or church-going, other than the fact that the ranch family does attend church.

Learning the ropes...

“Those [spiritual elements] are things I’ve always considered important. They are things that have been there—I don’t know if ‘by design’ is the right way to say it, but there by instinct,” he said. “And I’ve always gone to trouble to protect those things from being chewed up, or corrupted, by popular culture.”

That is a large part of the message of Story Craft, Erickson said.

“For years I was just making my living as an author/entertainer/public speaker and I always had certain standards. But I wasn’t trying to preach. Yet it was through the teachers and librarians who invited me into schools I began to realize there was a spiritual element in those stories that I had put there and protected. I had not put that much thought into it. I was just pulling my plow… trying to pay off a ranch.”

Meals were held family-style.

It was friends and acquaintances of Erickson’s who were members of the church of Christ (Dahlstrom, Chuck Milner, and Sandra Morrow among them) who were among the first to say to Erickson (himself of the Methodist persuasion) that there was a spiritual element to his writing that clearly displayed his reverence for God, whether God was mentioned in his writing or not.

Sandra Morrow, librarian at the Austin, Texas-based Brentwood Christian School, created the Lamplighter Awards (given continuously since their inception in 1992) to “encourage elementary and junior high students to read wholesome and uplifting books by providing lists each year of the best literature.” She became acquainted with Erickson when he became a Lamplighter winner in 2004 for his youth-market novel Moonshiner’s Gold.

"God-given talent." Sandra Morrow created the Lamplighter Award, which Erickson won for his youth novel, Moonshiner's Gold.

Morrow noted that Erickson had always worked within the public schools to promote his Hank the Cowdog series. “These stories were enormously popular and it seemed as though Mr. Erickson would continue to add to that series and be perfectly happy for the rest of his life,” she said. “Then, for some reason even he may not have known at the time, he wrote Moonshiner’s Gold. Mr. Erickson was totally unaware that this title was getting a great deal of attention from students within the National Christian School Association. The book was so well received that the students voted it the 2004 Lamplighter Award. He was very moved by that and he realized that his Christian worldview had been a part of his writing all along. For the first time he saw that his was a God-given talent and he felt compelled to record his literary journey in Story Craft and its follow-up, Small-Town Author: How Hank the Cowdog Began in the American Heartland. (The book is not yet scheduled for publication.)

“I was privileged to get to read this latter title as a manuscript. I was struck by how driven Mr. Erickson was to write day in and day out for years, with very little return. He was unwavering in his pursuit of his literary dream and all the while worked as a cowboy to provide for his growing family. It seemed as though getting published was out of his grasp and still he would not give up. God certainly did not give up on him.”

A branding crew at work on the M-Cross Ranch.

Milner, a friend of Erickson’s, is another individual who read and critiqued Story Craft (“I thought it was pretty awesome”) in manuscript form. He also has worked alongside Erickson in the saddle, and he knows Erickson’s main constituency (school-age kids) from having done in-school programs himself.

“I’ve been an entertainer—I was an artist-in-residence for 8 years—and I do the education programs for the Working Ranch Cowboys Association,” Milner said. “We go to every fourth grade in Amarillo. I’ve probably done over four or five hundred programs. And I’ve never been to a school anywhere in the United States where the kids didn’t know Hank the Cowdog.”

Milner, right, with Erickson at an M-Cross Ranch get-together. PHOTO BY NATHAN DAHLSTROM.

For Erickson, there came another step in his journey towards deeper self-awareness when, about three years ago, he was invited to Virginia, to the campus of Patrick Henry College, to speak to students there.

“I was so impressed with that college,” Erickson said. “They are training kids to go into professions where their Christian worldview can be put into practice and they can change the world a little bit at a time. When I was up there I was surprised at how respectful they were of me, because I am not an evangelist. But they were very respectful. A lot of those kids were raised on Hank books. They wanted to know what it was I had put into the stories.”

It was just another nudge from his appreciative readers, wanting to know what that “special something” was in the Hank stories. So Erickson—himself not fully satisfied about the nature of that element—set out to define it for himself, and for others.

“My first audience [for the message that would become Story Craft] was going to be the kids at Patrick Henry,” he said. “So I spent 18 months on it. It was the most difficult book I ever wrote. That’s because I was trying to put into words things I had been doing instinctively. The Hank books are deeply rooted in a Christian worldview, and that is one of the reasons why teachers and librarians can recommend them to kids. They know that there is not going to be any objectionable material in them.

“So that [realization] is where Story Craft came from,” he said.

Kris is a mandolin player, while John mainly sticks with the banjo. The Ericksons have performed in hundreds of venues.

Meanwhile, Erickson decided to invite students from Patrick Henry to a weeklong creative seminar conducted on the grounds of his M-Cross Ranch. Students who have come to the ranch (he has held the seminar two years running) have lived on site for the week, and taken part in ranch activities, as well as their studies. Erickson has developed his own lesson plans for the events. This year students from some Texas colleges were included along with the Patrick Henry contingent.

“I want to share with these kids my experience as a writer,” Erickson said. “My experience is not backed up by a lifetime of reading every book ever written. I don’t have a doctorate in anything. No teaching credentials. But I do have some insights that I have gained in more than 40 years of being a writer, and I am willing to share that with the kids. And they seem to think I have something worth teaching them.”

In this past spring’s event, the author kicked things off by launching into the first three chapters of Genesis.

“That is where it is all laid out for us, and the most important concept in those three chapters, is that human beings are not absurd little robots on an absurd rock circling the sun in an impersonal universe,” he said. “We contain a divine spark that was given us by our Creator and one of the ways we thank God for this is by producing beautiful art, so for me it is a Christian calling.”

Erickson cited Marshall McLuhan’s famous remark that “the medium is the message,” but gave it his own spin:

“If the medium is chaotic, then it reflects a chaotic view of the universe, which is not Biblical. Our founding document is the Book of Genesis and it tells where we came from and it tells us that it was an act of creation. It was willed by the Creator. One of the first things God did was to separate the darkness from the light. And the firmament (water) from the earth. And he created an orderly universe and that is fundamental to a Christian worldview.

“We are a special act of creation,” he added. “We were given dominion over the earth. As it says in the Psalms, ‘created a little lower than the angels.’ And so to me Christian art should reflect the order in the pattern of God’s design. When we find art that is disjointed and jagged and absurd and hopeless, it means that it is not Christian. It means that it is bad art.”

Erickson said he is much influenced by Gene Edward Veith, and he underscored Veith’s remarks about our “vocations” as Christians (God at Work: Your Christian Vocation in All of Life, Crossway Books, 2002).

The M-Cross is home to lots more than cattle and horses...

“He [Veith] resurrected the Reformation concept of vocation, which is that everyone, regardless of how big or small, has a cluster of vocations, and it is our job as Christians to do a thorough job with our vocations. I have a vocation to be a husband to my wife. That is a godly task. A Biblical pursuit. Ordained by God in the Book of Genesis.

“So that is probably my most important vocation. And then, I have a vocation as a father to my children. And one as a rancher—a steward to my land. That land is God’s gift to me. And as that is God’s gift, it is up to me to protect this land, not overuse it, not rape it.

“I am also steward to my livestock—I consider them part of my godly vocation. And then, too, as a writer. And part of that vocation is to find order in chaos… to find beauty in ugliness, to find God’s design in our world. Now, that sounds very presumptuous for a guy who writes funny stories about a dog who isn’t very smart. But that happens to be my vocation. And it has been a very good vehicle for doing God’s work.”

His books do God’s work “in ways that are very mysterious [to him],” Erickson said. As an example, he cited the fact (also discussed in Story Craft) that teachers and mothers of autistic and dyslexic kids have come to him thanking him for what he has done for their students/children.

...as everyone finds out...

Some letters he has received have “given [him] a jolt,” he wrote in Story Craft.

“After I had gotten three letters… in the space of a month, I wrote back to one of those mothers and asked, ‘What is your child finding in my stories? I know nothing about autism.’

“She pointed out that autistic children fight a constant battle against mental chaos. They crave structure and order. My stories are orderly and structured. They all have 12 chapters and the same cast of characters. They all begin with the same sentence: ‘It’s me again, Hank the Cowdog,’ and most end with ‘Case closed.’

“They all have happy endings and in every story, justice is affirmed. When Hank makes a dumb mistake, he pays for it. When he makes a good decision, he enjoys a moment of triumph—before he blunders into another mistake.

“Those letters didn’t come from literary critics. They came from mothers and teachers who were involved every day in the process of nurturing—giving life. And from them I learned that my business is not books. It’s nourishment.” (p. 105)

It’s not a meaningless world, Erickson said. “And yet dilettantes can play with chaos, and meaningless existence, and it is just a toy for them. But if you are autistic and fighting against mental chaos, it is not a game. People in the entertainment business who contribute to that disorder—to me, that is obscene.”

Said Hancock: "John... works with the ground. That connection... shapes his views about life."

Britt Hancock, a church-planting missionary and a friend of Erickson’s, is an advocate for the author’s work. “Hank the Cowdog has been a part of our family’s entertainment for years,” Hancock said.

Describing himself as an “independent” as regards his denominational affiliation, Hancock said he was raised in the Assembly of God fellowship and spent some of his formative Christian years at the non-denominational New Life Church in Colorado Springs, Colo.

Today, he lives with his family in the mountains of northern Puebla (Puebla is a state in Mexico), where his missionary efforts are an outreach to the indigenous populations there, including the descendants of the Aztecs. He works with other language groups there as well. Says Hancock: “We have congregations in about 48 villages.”

So how did Hancock come in contact with John R. Erickson?

“On my oldest daughter’s birthday, [the kids] wanted to listen to my mom read from a Hank the Cowdog book. We’d been doing that for years. I grew up on a farm in rural Alabama, and we had always had dogs, and [for a storyteller] to humanize dogs, well, it was hilarious.”

Caught up in the sentiment of the moment, the feeling of family closeness that comes from sharing a storytelling tradition, Hancock felt he just had to convey those feelings – somewhere. So….

“I jumped on the Hank the Cowdog website [www.hankthecowdog.com] because I had noticed [from an earlier visit] that you could email Hank. So I emailed Hank and told him thank you for providing such great family entertainment with such strong values. I told him it was my daughter’s 18th birthday and that we were missionaries in Mexico.”

About 3-4 days later, Hancock received a personal email from Erickson.

A retreat, yes, but serious studies too.

“We started up a friendship from there,” Hancock says. “And we were invited to an event where they were going to dedicate a monument to Hank. From that, things have kinda progressed. Now we go out to the ranch. That’s a cool thing. I am blessed by our relationship. He is a neat man.

“His [Erickson’s] ‘grid’ that he thinks from, and from which he views society and analyzes the moral content around him, is the fiber and stability of our nation,” Hancock said. “It’s like what we had with the World War II generation. Their perspective about life anchored us—and we are losing those people. I think it is essential to have an understanding of the principles that underpin our society. Part of that is a direct connection to the ground—to working with your hands. And John, though he is intellectual, is someone who works with the ground. That connection is what shapes his views about life and [provides the] angles by which he sees everything. That is what gives it its strength and validity. He is the whole package.”

Hoover has performed with Erickson in schools: "There's a lot of affection for John and his books out there,” he said.

Jeryl Hoover is another individual who was spent considerable time around the author. And like the others quoted here, he has read Story Craft.

“It’s a great book,” said Hoover, a former Baptist minister who is currently a professional actor and musician. At one time Hoover used to do musical programs in the schools along with Erickson. He confirms that “there is a lot of affection for John and his books out there.”

“I’ve known John about 12 years and I always felt he was really guarded about how he felt about his product and his abilities and what he was trying to accomplish with his work,” he added. “I’ve never thought he really liked talking about himself. What Story Craft did for me is to let me inside his heart. It is a really good explanation of who John Erickson is and why he does what he does. It gave me a great deal of respect for him as a writer and a person.”

As Erickson remarked (earlier), one of the recent changes in his life has been his involvement with the home-school movement. A key figure in his life, in this connection, is George Clay, whom Erickson has known for a number of years.

Clay, who resides in Wichita Falls, Texas, said he met John at a home school conference in Houston in 2004 when the author came there as a keynote speaker/performer.

Immersion course: Cooling off in the Canadian River after an afternoon of (for some of them) working cattle.

“It was the first home school conference he’d ever done, and I took him and his wife and wife’s mother out that night, just to get to know them,” Clay said. “We hit it off immediately. I feel like I have known John my whole life.”

Erickson, meanwhile, recounted some eye-opening experiences following that conference.

“On the trip back to the Panhandle, my wife and I noticed the startling contrast between the young people we saw in the airports and those we’d met at the convention,” he wrote in Story Craft.

“The homeschooled children at the convention were serene, clear-eyed, polite, clean, at peace. They seemed to know who they were, and their sense of identity began in the knowledge that they are part of God’s creation. From that everything else flowed naturally. Their home-based education was a process of learning about the roles we are meant to play in a plan that was here before we were born, a plan we don’t have to re-invent every day.

“In the airports we saw many children of pop culture: young people with empty eyes and graceless gestures; girls who showed no hint of modesty or virtue, and boys, flabby and tattooed, staring at nothing and bobbing their heads in time to the clattering sounds piped into their heads through headphones.

College student seminar attendees, spring 2010. George Clay is in the back row, at left. John and Kris are back row, right.

“Their appearance suggested a generation whose only purpose is to consume and feel good, and then, like summer moths, to die. Their faces revealed the tragedy of lives without structure, including the wonder of God’s plan.” (p. 107)

Clay confirmed those sentiments. “That was one of the things he was so amazed at,” Clay said. But there was a good side to it all. “With the children and the families he was meeting at the homeschoolers convention—with those kids looking him in the eye—it was like he had hope again for this generation.”

Erickson was a “tremendous hit” at the convention. There was a packed house for the first (Friday) night of the event, when he performed. Erickson consented to do a second evening, and they had another 800 in attendance for that one.

Everyone beats the heat...

“There was a standing [unwritten] rule that you don’t invite the same speaker back for the following year’s conference,” said Clay, who, in his working life, is president of High Plains Health Providers (caregivers for developmentally challenged adults). “But he has been there every year since. He continues to be a hit and everyone loves him.”

Clay said that John’s wife Kris travels often with her husband, and at a conference such as the Houston one, Kris would go on stage with her mandolin and John with his banjo and, with hardly a word of introduction, would launch into two or three songs from the Hank stories.

“A lot of people in attendance may have read the songs in the books but they have not heard them put to music,” Clay said. “So, for the first time, they hear the voices of John and Kris, and those two have a beautiful duet.”

After that beginning, John engages in banter with the audience.

... everyone. Cowdogs, too...

“Then he’ll do something real simple. He’ll open up a book and he’ll read five, six, or seven pages. He’ll give the context of it all. He might do six or seven different voices. John can change his voice any way he wants to… and he does.

“And that,” Clay said, “is what we call a ‘Hank talk.’”

Clay has been to the ranch on multiple occasions. He said that Erickson “reads voraciously” and that the author “gets up early every morning and writes for hours.”

“And there are times when, if you ask him, ‘What did you write about today?’ he might say that it was nothing special—that it was the events of the last day or maybe something he read about recently.”

Clay has been on the ranch for the seminar events. “Every waking minute, John and Kris are serving these kids and giving them—some of them—the best week of their life. I’ve heard a couple of the kids actually say that. They said, ‘This was the best week of my life.’ And if you saw the way that John and Kris kind of ‘co-minister’ to these kids, well, it is kind of amazing.”

More than one source for this article remarked that Erickson has been known to pull an amusing trick or two.

Clay said that John warns visitors to the ranch to be sure to roll up their car or truck windows when they park there. The reason is simple. Pete the cat is notorious for entering through open vehicle windows and urinating in one of the seats.

“Well, for some reason [here Clay chuckled at the memory] John forgot to tell me. I slept in the bunkhouse that night.”

The next morning George and John had someplace they needed to go, and George volunteered his vehicle. A window had been down.

Don't leave the cab of your vehicle open or exposed. Clay, a friend of the Ericksons, is someone in the know. PHOTO COURTESY GEORGE CLAY.

“We climbed in,” George said. “As soon as we were seated, John had this grin on his face. I didn’t know at first what was funny. He said, ‘Don’t you smell that?’ At first, I couldn’t tell what it was. But he could. Fred the cat had paid a visit.

“Kris acted furious with him,” Clay added. “She said, ‘John, why didn’t you tell him?’ He said, ‘I just didn’t think of it.’ She said, “John Erickson, you forgot on purpose!’

Not that it doesn’t work both ways. On another occasion, when Erickson was traveling and Clay was going to see him off to the airport, Clay was left in temporary care of Erickson’s luggage. “So I put about 30 pounds of rocks in it,” Clay said. “I was thinking to myself that he would lift it, and realize it was weighted down, and he would then get rid of the rocks. But he didn’t figure it out. And they charged him $100 to check that bag. So….[he laughed]… we go back and forth.”

Chuck Milner knows that side of Erickson too. “You can imagine that he is full of pranks,” he said.

But there’s more to the author than his humor.

[Story continues below photo...]

Mudslinging, yes, but in a "nice" way...

“I can’t emphasize enough how universal he is to the children of America,” Milner said. “I am proud that he has given them something wholesome. My thing is teaching people, and no matter where we go, I can always interject a mention of Hank the Cowdog, and kids’ eyes will just light up. ‘I know Hank!’ they’ll say. ‘I know Drover!’”

As Hank would say, "Case closed!" PHOTO BY NATHAN DAHLSTROM

His own kids quote Erickson, Milner said. “When certain things happen, they have a saying to go with it. We’ll have a cow get down [take sick], and my daughter will say, ‘Well, you know what John says. “Not sick enough to die, but too sick to get well.”’ So, yes, they’ve always got a John Erickson saying. And sometimes one to give me a hard time with!”

Milner said he feels blessed to know his friend.

“He has brought something decent into the world,” Milner said. “And the gift of laughter—what a blessing that is.

“It’s almost like a dream. I almost want to pinch myself. I live about 80 miles from him, and I can call him my friend.

“I’ll tell you what I think,” he said in summation. “He’s an American treasure.”

For additional insights/commentary about John Erickson from some of the same sources quoted in this article, click here.

For a sampling of John Erickson as a commentator on the national scene, see this brief commentary on World magazine’s site.

To visit the official Hank the Cowdog website, click here.

Copyright 2010 Jesse Mullins

On the college student seminars held at the Ericksons’ ranch:

“For the second year in a row he held this writing camp. What the college kids want to know is, ‘What is the ABC for being a good writer?’ They want a one-two-three. An outline. And John will just have a smile on his face, but he rarely says anything more than ‘You’ve got to practice your craft. If you are a surgeon you do surgery all the time. If you are a writer, you’ve got to write. And if you write [constantly], you are going to get better at it.’”

George Clay

Clay speaks of Erickson as being “very other-oriented” (as in focused on others).

“I call him a culture warrior. He cares about our culture and he doesn’t just sit around and complain about how bad things are. He is out making a difference.”

Jeryl Hoover:

Jeryl Hoover

On Erickson as a person:

“There is a lot of depth to him. Here is a guy who writes humorous stories about a dog on a ranch, and yet the interesting thing is, behind all of that is a lot of depth.

“I used to do Hank the Cowdog programs in schools with him, and I can tell you that there is a lot of affection for him and his books out there. My kids are grown now but I hope some day to have grandchildren, and it is nice to know you can turn them over to an author like John Erickson and know what they are going to read will be good wholesome stuff with good characters.”

On Story Craft:

“It’s personal story and [an account of] some of the trials he has been through with the Hank product. Here is a guy who would not compromise in any way. If he had sold out, he would have paid a price. He would have been a richer person financially. But not in his heart. And he knew that. And it is great to come across a guy with that kind of self awareness.”

Britt Hancock:

The Hank stories, Hancock says, exhibit a strong moral stand. “It’s good, clean humor and it has tremendous value for us as parents because there is so much junk out there.”

Then comes the telling part.

Britt Hancock

“I didn’t know he was a believer but I just sorta figured it out because of the content and the way that he has. You can see it from that moral base of his and the way it is woven into his stories. I think the further you go into them, the more great lessons there are woven into them. And it’s done in a humorous way, a way that, for me, is reminiscent of the values I knew growing up in a rural setting. That platform is being lost more and more, partly from urbanization.

“I can guarantee that when it comes to people who have never that kind of connection to the ground, never had any blisters from that kind of work, there is a lot about reality that they don’t understand.

“We have this pushbutton society. In a pushbutton world, people understand life theoretically but they don’t understand reality—the things of substance—the real assets of who we are as a people, of who we are as a nation. It isn’t that people don’t understand what manual labor is all about. But there is a marked difference between the way people think who know how to do things with their hands and have sort of worked through the struggle of producing something. And I can guarantee you that John R. Erickson has had many blisters on his hands and on his feet.

“Rural people understand the things that underpin everything that we stand on top of, and the foundation comes from the dirt. Even in building a house, the most important part is the foundation. You don’t start on the roof. I work with subsistence farmers. They understand.”

Hancock has read Story Craft. What did he think of it?

“I thought that it was absolutely tremendous. You can see that it takes a very smart man with a sharp mind to write the kinds of stories he does in the Hank books, but apart from that, in Story Craft, you can see that not only is his intelligence level extremely high, but his concern for the moral state of the country is strong as well. To me, it [Story Craft] is a reflection of who we are—and the values that we hold, even theologically. Because I have a great concern for the church. I feel we have deteriorated so many things to doctrine. Information. And what we need is to live the values that we teach.

“The thing that really resonated with me, outside of the moral message of Story Craft, is his positive belief in skillful story craft. Teaching passes information, but a story is how that information is applicable or transferrable in a real-world way.

“Somebody’s testimony is in essence their story, and so Story Craft is to me a call, a clarion call, stating that it is people’s lives, people’s stories, both fictional and non-fictional, that lend so much power to the fabric of who we are.

“There are thousands of pages of theologies. But there are not thousands of stories of people’s lives and how they have become what the theology is trying to accomplish. Paul said, ‘You are my living epistles,’ and to me that is the message of the church. To write ‘living epistles.’ I think our need, from a literary standpoint, for skilled [Christian] storytellers is unprecedented.

“In the church, in religious circles, there aren’t that many who are good at it [telling stories]. Most of the books they write are ‘teaching’ books or they are autobiographical in nature. At least among the current author pool. And so much of that material is rather dry.

“And so I think it [storytelling] is the most powerful means of communication. Jesus was a great storyteller. His parables were what he used to illustrate the deep meanings of God. And a parable is just a story with a point to it. It is the main medium Jesus used to communicate the deep meaning of the kingdom.

“Actually, when I preach, about 50 percent of it is storytelling… and it is the thing that causes people to relate the most. And it is the thing that brings these complex heaven-hell ideas [into focus] and makes people understand that they are attainable. It creates the idea of possibility within people.”

Nathan Dahlstrom

Nathan Dahlstrom

On knowing John:

“I met John I guess five years ago. My dad, being superintendent at Lubbock (Texas)  Christian School, had hired John to do their fundraising dinner. I met John at that. We really hit it off.  I had an artistic interest in what he was doing and I have cowboyed professionally off and on when not sitting at a desk. He [John] has taken me under his wing.” [Dahlstrom is Unit Director at the school, and he is in the process of opening a boys’ ranch in Missouri, for which he will serve as Executive Director.]

“There are people who are famous to the masses and yet the people who meet them are disappointed with them. John, when someone gets to meet him, is someone who is likeable. He is still ‘just a guy.’ That’s who John Erickson is. He has stayed honest to his roots.”

On the message of Story Craft:

“A big part of the ‘other side’ [the secular, non-believing public], as soon as they hear our Christian language [as writers or artists], decide that that cheapens our work. It turns them off. But look at To Kill a Mockingbird. That book, though it didn’t discuss Christianity, was profoundly Christian. It’s full of honesty. The character Atticus Finch is a gentleman. He stands up for the idea that racism is wrong. It is about injustice. It is full of inherently Christian worldviews. You can reach people without an altar call.”

This is what is meant by “creating the culture,” one of the themes of Story Craft, Dahlstrom said.

To return to your place in the main text, simply click the “back” button (or arrow) on your browser.

To access (from its beginning) the profile of “Hank the Cowdog” creator John R. Erickson, go here.

The crew with herd of Bonsmara cattle. PHOTOS BY NATHAN DAHLSTROM, LUBBOCK, TX.

John Erickson leases another 1,000 acre-tract that abuts the river, connecting the river bottom to his deeded land, thus giving him a contiguous 7,000 acres of pasture in all.

When I visited here in the late 1990s, he was running mostly black-baldface cattle (Hereford-Black Angus crosses). Since then, the rancher has transitioned into a South African-bred strain of bovine called the Bonsmara. He has already produced two calf crops since he began running the breed.

An Amarillo-based cattleman named George Chapman has been the local popularizer of Bonsmara cattle. Erickson, who referred to Bonsmara research done by Chapman and some associated Texas A&M Ph.D.’s as “meticulous,” said he “looked at his [Chapman’s] deal for about six months and it appeared to me that he had been listening to the American consumer and heard what they wanted. Consumers were saying that the beef they were getting was too fat and too tough.”

The Bonsmara, its backers contend, is neither. “They score very high in tenderness and leanness,” Erickson said.

Puttin' the M Cross on 'em.

Chuck Milner, a friend of Erickson’s and a rancher/stockman in his own right, knows the Erickson operation from regular visits to the M-Cross to help gather, sort, and work cattle. (Milner and his son appear in some of the photos that accompany this article or the main text. His son is the youngest of the boys in the shots.)

“He [John] does everything the right way and he works his cattle horseback, which is the way they are supposed to be worked,” said Milner, who ought to know. Milner is Rangeland Management Specialist for the 30,000-acre Black Kettle National Grasslands in western Oklahoma.

Incidentally, Milner maintains a schedule that might rival Erickson’s for occupational diversity and go-getter-ness. Here’s how he puts it: “I run cows and I day work and train horses and play music [he’s a cowboy singer/songwriter] and I preach and I have a full time job.” The job is the Black Kettle work and the preaching is what he does for the church of Christ in Reydon, Okla., as well as another nearby congregation (Durham).

As for Erickson, “Early of a morning he will go to his office and plan out how it is going to be,” Milner said. “He is big on bringing in young guys to see how the work is done.

Waiting for the next bunch of calves to be worked.

“John is just the coolest guy in the world,” he adds. “He’s tremendously funny. I enjoy being around him. It’s very nice for me to get to take my son to a place where there is not going to be a lot of cussing and we are going to pray before a meal. And for my son to get to learn the cowboy way—from John and his crew. It’s a blessing to know him.”

(Trivia item: Milner was the song leader for the worship service that included the last sermon ever preached by Reuel Lemmons. [For more on Lemmons, see this article from the last newsletter.] “That was in Handy, Texas,” Milner said. “And I never realized what a big deal it was, ’til years later. But he was kind of one of my heroes, as far as preachers go.”)

To return to your place in the main text, hit the back button (or arrow) on your browser.

To access (from its beginning) the profile of “Hank the Cowdog” creator John R. Erickson, go here.

For example… Who hasn’t observed, sometime in their life, a plastic object that has been chewed up by a dog? Erickson takes a commonplace like that, and goes one step further. Consider this snippet from The Quest for the Great White Quail:

“I started chewing the truck and I LOVED IT!

I had never dreamed that chewing plastic could be such an exciting experience, but it was, and all at once Drover didn’t seem nearly as crazy as I’d thought.

I chewed it to smithereens and wanted more… more plastic! Yes, plastic. Who needs bones in a world full of nice, chewy plastic? Bones can wear down your teeth and cause bone particles to collect in your estomagus, but plastic… it doesn’t splinterize and poke your gums. Furthermore, since you don’t swallow it, all the various pieces remain outside the bodily so-forth.

See, plastic was invented for DOGS. Maybe you didn’t know that. Maybe I didn’t know it either, but after conducting this first experiment with a plastic substance, it became very clear to me that someone out there had invented plastic so that dogs could chew it.

Why not? For thousands of years, dogs have been man’s best friend. We’ve liked our people when they were unlikeable, loved them when they were unlovable, forgiven them when they were unforgivable. We’ve licked their ears when we really wanted ice cream, kept them warm on cold winter nights, laughed at their stale jokes, and listened to their corny songs about Old Paint and Dunny.

Don’t we deserve something special? Yes, of course we do, and that special something is PLASTIC.”

That little episode explains why, 60 pages later, when Hank is poised to whisk Plato the Bird Dog from the coyote’s den (the coyotes, unbeknownst to them, are in the back, asleep), we get this bit of business:

“Plato dropped to the floor of the cave, covered his eyes with his front paws, and began moaning. ‘No, I won’t go! I’m a failure. I can’t face the shame and disgrace!’ He whimpered and sniffled for a long minute, then peeked out from behind his paws. ‘You don’t understand any of this, do you? It must sound crazy.’

‘Yes, as a matter of fact, it sounds as nutty as a pecan tree.’

‘I guess cowdogs don’t have any of these wild compulsions.’

‘Apparently not.’ For some reason, my mouth began to water and I found myself… well, glancing around the cave. ‘You don’t have any plastic in here, do you?’

Plato uncovered his other eye and stared at me. ‘Plastic?’

‘Right. You know, toys, milk jugs, bread bags, garden trowels… anything made of plastic.’

‘I don’t think so, but why do you ask?’

“No reason, just curious.’ My mouth continued to water. ‘Are you sure there is no plastic in here? I mean, it doesn’t have to be huge, just something made of… Why are you staring at me?’”

And so on… There’s something very human about that dog, and the “human” side of him is as amusing as the “dog” side.

To return to your place in the main text, simply press your browser’s back button (or arrow).

To access (from its beginning) the profile of “Hank the Cowdog” creator John R. Erickson, go here.

“I am alarmed by the slide of American popular culture toward things that are coarse, ugly, violent, self-directed, obscene, profane, visual, and non-rational, and by a parallel development that we might call the ‘Santa-Clausation’ of culture—the detachment of an event (the birth of Christ) or a creative endeavor (books, movies, music) from the spiritual and historical sources that give them meaning. It is no accident, I think, that we find these two developments side-by-side at this point in history.

“A good deal of popular culture is offensive to me,” he continues. “Some of it strikes me as poisonous, and since I’m in the business of producing cultural material and have spent quite a bit of time trying to protect it, another voice in my head whispers that maybe I should talk about this. As a writer I am convinced by the evidence that a purely secular worldview will poison art at its roots, and without roots it won’t survive.”  (pp. 3-4)

“When novelists and screenwriters stop telling stories and ‘go to preaching,’ Christian literature shrinks down to one book, and we surrender our national culture to people who don’t read it. We need both preachers and storytellers, but not in the same place and the same time. If we have any hope of influencing popular culture, our stories must compete in a secular marketplace and win, and that means we have to master story craft and produce better stories than the competition.” (p. 111)

To return to your place in the main text, simply press your browser’s back button (or arrow).

To access (from its beginning) the profile of “Hank the Cowdog” creator John R. Erickson, go here.

You’ll find all the same links here that you saw highlighted on the e-newsletter itself. When you clicked on the “Editor’s Notes” link, you were whisked to this website, where all the stories “live.” This particular webpage just provides a permanent, bookmark-able menu (see below) for all the articles in the August issue of Something Solid.

Here’s the short version:

For the study on The Biggest Misunderstanding About Jesus, click here.

For the profile on author John R. Erickson, click here.

For the commentary called Social Gospels to the Side, click here.

For my tongue-in-cheek bit on Chicken-Fried Bacon, click here.

For the list of Coming Attractions, click here.

And the longer version:

Click here for The Biggest Misunderstanding About Jesus.

The Biggest Misunderstanding About Jesus. With this issue I begin a thread of thought that will crop up with regularity. I have found too many instances of it, in my doctrinal studies, to ignore it. In fact, most of my writings on matters of scripture (and I have already penned two books) expose some form or other of doublethink. Once I learned to spot it in Bible doctrine, I realized it was rampant.

What is doublethink? Many of you doubtless already know that it is an Orwellian term—one that so many high school English students encounter in their reading (is it still required reading?) of George Orwell’s political/totalitarian novel 1984.

I don’t employ the term in quite the sense that Orwell does, because he applies it in the context of political propaganda, and I use it in a broader sense that focuses purely on contradictions. But Orwell’s own definition of doublethink works fine for my purposes.

He called it “the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”

I submit that in Christian circles today, a great deal of the doctrinal dismay and exegetical murkiness that we encounter is due to the tendency that the modern mind has to embrace two ideas simultaneously, and accept both of them, without realizing that the two ideas are mutually exclusive.

This is indeed a phenomenon of modern society. Orwell warned the world that tendencies such as doublethink were on the increase. I contend that doublethink has encroached into Biblical exegesis and theology and colored the way that we read and understand (misunderstand?) the Bible.

But all of this defining and explaining will mean nothing if I do not produce a simple example. That’s what my article does. It takes a very commonplace concept from the New Testament and demonstrates that we moderns have long held two contradictory views on the idea.

This one has to do with the source of the miraculous powers that Jesus possessed while He walked on earth. Did He hold those powers by virtue of who He was? Or was He able to exercise those powers because they were supplied to Him by the Holy Spirit, who endued Jesus with power at His baptism?

As you will see, it cannot be both.

There are many other instances of doublethink in Bible doctrine. I share this article purely as an introduction to the subject. But I do think it is worth reading for other reasons too. Enough of my pitch. : – )  You know where to click!

John Erickson (right) with me (JFM) at the Western Heritage Awards, April, 2007. We lugged home two of those hefty bronzes, but he was responsible for both. PHOTO BY JOE OWNBEY.

Click here for John R. Erickson, Story Crafter. The email message came in 2006, probably in May, a couple of months after Texas’ worst range fire in modern times. I was editor-in-chief of American Cowboy magazine, and I recognized the sender as the much-beloved author of the Hank the Cowdog stories for young people. John R. Erickson had contributed some excellent nonfiction to our magazine in years past. This email would hold his best to date.

A couple of paragraphs in, I read this line: “About 8:00 that night… we loaded up in our Excursion… and drove up to a high spot in the east pasture, where we had a good view of the country to the south. There, we saw an astonishing sight, a line of flames that lit up the entire southern horizon and appeared to be 50 miles long. The reports on the radio said that the towns of Miami, Wheeler, Canadian, McLean, and Allanreed were being evacuated. In such a high wind, any fire is beyond control. You feel utterly helpless and fear begins to gnaw. This fire was a killer.”

I didn’t need to be a paid journo to know that what I was reading was something special. As soon as the deal was struck, I scheduled a two-parter (6 pages to each part), and we made space for Part I in the issue we were then beginning. Before year’s end, we’d entered it in a national competition, and by the following spring John and I were in Oklahoma City’s National Cowboy Museum, where he accepted the prestigious Western Heritage Award.

That honor meant a lot to our magazine. It lifted our profile within our industry.

As impressed as I was with that article of John’s, I was more impressed with the message he shares in his new book Story Craft, a bellwether book for anyone who cares about the dynamics, not to mention the stakes, of the culture wars. John’s chapter on Disney Studios is, by itself, worth the price of the book. It is a case study in how giant media interacts with individual creative talents—particularly individual creative talents who are dead set on maintaining the principles that their products stand for.

My piece on John and his book is the most ambitious article I have tackled since launching this e-newsletter last March, and definitely the most photo-rich article. The fine photography by Nathan Dahlstrom (I wish I could have run the photos huge, but the page formats did not permit it) is worth the click, even if all you want to do is scroll down through it.

Click here for Social Gospels to the Side. This is another topic that I will revisit from time to time. It is currently an issue of hot discussion among Christians. How we respond could well affect decide the course of Christianity in America. This article also has embedded in it a link to another posting I put on the site in-between newsletter issues. That article, called “Social Justice… or Something Higher?” has gotten probably close to 1,000 hits. It has been the biggest draw on my site this past summer.

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Chicken-fried Bacon. I don’t want to make too much of this little, throwaway article. Just having some fun with an actual menu item at an actual restaurant in the town where I live. Click here for the item.

And, again, the Coming Attractions are here.

That’s it! If you are wondering if you missed an issue, I can understand why you’d think that. This is the third issue of Something Solid. I’ve called it the “August” Issue, but it is actually the July-August issue. I got more ambitious on the contents of this one and that extra work put me behind. But the fact is that this is No. 3, and unless you overlooked Numbers 1 or 2 in your inbox, you shouldn’t have missed any. If you want a back issue (No. 1 or No. 2), please let me know and I will just forward it to you. Thanks for your patience! I’m hopefully optimistic of getting No. 4 out sometime in September.

May the Good Lord bless you! Always happy to hear from any of you.

Jesse

jfm@jessemullins.com

469.371.7323

Would prefer that you be getting the newsletter itself, because there is info there that my contents page does not have. Send me your email address (at jfm@jessemullins.com) and I’ll add you to the list to get the free e-newsletter. It is handled through Constant Contact, so unsubscribing is easy.

And, so, when I found this dish on the menu at a restaurant (Catfish Corner) here in my hometown of Abilene, Texas, what could I do but order a plateful for myself? After all, being a member of the media, I recognize my duty to serve my public’s right to know.

Not every restaurant serves up a dish like this.

What can be said about chicken-fried bacon? Jane Hurley, senior nutritionist at the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Science in the Public Interest, has gone on record stating that she has “never heard of anything worse.”

Chicken-fried bacon, not to be confused with Bacon Explosion (itself a 5,000-calorie dish), is real, is totally Texan, and is served with ranch dressing on the side (some places accompany it with cream gravy).

Chocolate-covered Bacon, meanwhile, is a dessert dish, sort of. I didn’t have it with my chicken-fried entrée. (If I had, I might not be in shape to write about it, or anything else, right now.) But I’d have to say that chicken-fried bacon ranks as perhaps the greasiest, richest dish I have ever consumed. I heard recently that Coldstone Creamery makes a milkshake that has the fat equivalent of 63 (!) slices of bacon. Maybe that dish would be more artery-clogging than the one I had. But I don’t think I’m going to go to those lengths to find out.

It was a Texan, Frank Sodolak, a culinary artist (if I might call him that) who reputedly invented chicken-fried bacon. He put it on the menu at his Snook, Texas-based eating establishment, known as Sodolak’s Original Country Inn.

In 2001, the place caught fire. The Austin American-Stateman carried an article (title: “Grease: It’s not just a food; it’s a way of life”) wherein John Kelso wrote that “Fans of chicken-fried bacon will be happy to learn that Sodolak’s Original Country Inn should be re-opened by mid-July after being totaled by fire in February.” At the time, Sodolak said that either a flare-up on the charbroiler or a grease fire was responsible.

Hard to swallow? Depends on what you think of Texas, and Texas cooking.