Riverwood Presbyterian Church

Books

BookTV Viewership Doubles

by Tim Lien

With seventy-plus channels available on cable television, BookTV doesn’t even seem like a viable economic venture. Most of their potential viewers are probably reading a book, anyway. But Sunday night, BookTV’s ratings enjoyed a rare spike when I joined Prof. Robert “just-call-me-Bob” Koshansky* (from Kankakee, “just-south-of-Chicago”) in watching a woman pitch her book to a meager crowd, the cameraman, Mr. Koshansky, and myself. I missed the actual title of the book, but it was a biography on Harriet Beecher Stowe.

[*Yes, Mr. Koshansky is a fabricated, fictitious character used to emphasize the small amount of people watching BookTV.]

I just finished The Minister’s Wooing, by Stowe, so I was pleasantly surprised to see her enjoy some Prime Time. Well, it was 10:30pm, my time. But it was Prime Time somewhere. Stowe’s famous quote was printed on a backdrop behind the vivacious biographer:

I wrote what I did because as a woman, as a mother, I was oppressed and broken-hearted with the sorrows and injustice I saw, because as a Christian I felt the dishonor to Christianity— because as a lover of my country, I trembled at the coming day of wrath.

A good quote, but this is one that I had underlined in The Ministers Wooing:

He was called a good fellow, — only a little lumpish, — and as he was brave and faithful, he rose in time to be a shipmaster. But when came the business of making money, the aptitude for accumulating, George found himself distanced by many a one with not half his general powers. What shall a man do with a sublime tier of moral faculties, when the most profitable business out of his port is the slave-trade? So it was in Newport in those days. George’s first voyage was on a slaver, and he wished himself dead many a time before it was over, — and ever after would talk like a man beside himself, if the subject was named. He declared that the gold made in it was distilled from human blood, from mothers’ tears, from the agonies and dying groans of gasping, suffocating men and women, and that it would sear and blister the soul of him that touched it; in short, he talked as whole-souled, unpractical fellows are apt to talk about what respectable people sometimes do. Nobody had ever instructed him that a slaveship, with a procession of expectant sharks in its wake, is a missionary institution, by which closely. packed heathens are brought over to enjoy the light of the Gospel. So, though George was acknowledged to be a good fellow, and honest as the noon-mark on the kitchen floor, he let slip so many chances of making money as seriously to compromise his reputation among thriving folks. He was wastefully generous — insisted on treating every poor dog that came in his way, in any foreign port, as a brother — absolutely refused to be party in cheating or deceiving the heathen on any shore, or in skin of any color — and also took pains, as far as in him lay, to spoil any bargains which any of his subordinates founded on the ignorance or weakness of his fellow-men. So he made voyage after voyage, and gained only his wages and the reputation among his employers of an incorruptibly honest fellow.

It was amazing to see the continuing relevance and prescient wisdom of Stowe’s observations from 1859. I can’t help but think that we have our own correlating “slave ships,” that we use to justify our own evangelistic ends. Talk amongst yourselves.