I’m no literary connoisseur.  My taste in fiction (though its hard for me to remember the last time I read any) runs toward horror or spy novels.  In other words, I don’t read any “deep” fiction.

But even I recognized the name of Sylvia Plath when I saw today’s New York Times headline that her son just killed himself, nearly fifty years her own suicide at age 30.

Plath’s most famous work told a story that tracked her own: a women suffering a nervous breakdown and suicide attempt.  How sad that her son, Nicholas Hughes, only a year old at the time of her suicide and shielded from the details for most of his youth, should also kill himself.

Hughes had apparently been battling depression for a long time.  I’ve never suffered from it myself, but have had to deal with it in others — though I didn’t do a very good job.  Let me just ask the usually snarky and those who discount the impact of mental illness on people, who think those suffering from depression need to “just get over it” — let me ask you all to think again.  We’re all made different, and our brains are different.  Help these people, and don’t turn your back on a family member, friend or colleague because you think he or she needs to “get over it.”

My father-in-law is a good guy, and interesting. He’s a member of the center-right party over there, whatever it’s called, that came to power just within the past few years. While he is proud of some aspects of Sweden’s socialist system, he recognizes its major drawback: the absence of incentive. He says the younger generation just doesn’t expect to have to work for anything. The Wall Street Journal had a piece a few years ago that the only reason the socialist economies in Europe had prospered as well as they had is that they were built on the work ethic of the older generation. My father-in-law’s observations are consistent with that.

Anyway, back to the festival. I think they cheat a little. The countries celebrated include not only Norway, Sweden, Finland and Denmark, but also the Baltics — Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia.

This year’s festival was very subdued. A lot of things from earlier years, especially kid-oriented things like the Tivoli park, were absent. I’m pretty sure the whole project has been winding down for some time, as the event moved from annual to biennial a couple of years ago.

The most depressing display was a series of banners honoring Scandinavian recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize. Socialists and/or pacifists all, and proud of it. Were they alive today, they would no doubt be applauding Jimmy Carter’s laying of the wreath at Arafat’s grave, and of course they probably would have excused every atrocity of the Soviet Union.

All of this brings me to my favorite vendor: some Estonian guy who, in addition to his Estonian crafts, also had for sale The Black Book of Communism and Gulag: Life and Death Inside the Soviet Concentration Camps 1917-1990. He was also selling Gulag t-shirts with a quote from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn on the front. This is enough to tell me this guy was far more moral than any of the lionized peace prize winners.

Dennis talks to one of the world’s most renowned Biblical scholars, Bart Ehrman, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and is a leading authority on the early Church and the life of Jesus. His latest book is God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question–Why We Suffer.

This is really a fascinating hour. Among the professor’s positions I found to be most astounding:

• He finds the state of the world so inconsistent with the existence of a loving God that he turned from evangelical Christian to atheist.
• Life is no more meaningful if there is a creator than if there is not one.

Prager raised one of my favorite arguments, which I’ve heard from him before. That is, mankind would ask why a loving God would allow suffering no matter how little suffering was in the world. Take away suffering from earthquakes, and we would demand an answer from God as to why he allows tornadoes. Take away tornadoes, and we would demand to know why God allows floods. Take away all natural disasters, and we would demand why he allows cancer, then diphtheria, and eventually we’d be demanding to know why he allows the flu, the common cold, bee stings, or even stubbed toes.

There is a place where God removes all suffering, but it’s heaven, not here.

By the way, the podcast omits commercials and the discussion takes about 35 minutes. Tells you how little of the typical talk radio “hour” is really filled by what you’re actually tuning in to hear!