Author: Laurisa

Laurisa Brandt writes immersive and heroic science fiction fantasy sweetened with romance. When not writing, she can be found baking sourdough bread or taking walks in nature. She resides in Central PA with her husband and their adopted Timneh African Grey parrot, Hercules.
Posted on by — Leave a comment

Doomsday Prophets And Broken Clocks

Negativity garners more engagement than positivity. And I dislike Christian arts and entertainment critics for their employment of it. Social media has no shortage of people warning you about The Chosen TV series and its creators, or Phil Wickham or some other artist and their music, and they platform themselves on the premise of “truth telling” and warning or steering people away from the fires of hell, from the wolves in sheep’s clothing. Sometimes, they look like homemakers on YouTube who don’t explicitly tell you how to live your life, but they know their followers follow to emulate them.

They promote themselves as spiritual and someone you should follow if you want to be more like Christ. So when they post content like: “Top 10 “Christian” Music Artists to Avoid” and “Why I Stopped Reading Fantasy,” there is pressure to conform. The comment sections quickly reveal who this kind of content appeals to: people who lack discernment and have never been taught how to analyze art, neither Christian nor secular. Secondly, this kind of content is like a “Christian” tabloid. Church Gossip. It quietly shows you a picture of Phil Wickham or Forrest Frank’s face and says, “I’ll tell you something juicy about his life that will make you lose respect for him.” 

Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash

These social media doomsday prophets establish themselves as authorities of truth and titans of spiritual discernment, which, oddly enough is something that artists like the creators of the Chosen, or many CCM musicians do not do.  Their platforms center around warning others to steer clear of deception by completely avoiding the wolf-artist and their art.

Their audience was once uninformed that a certain song’s lyrics, or a certain film was harmful, but now they have been lovingly corrected and enlightened into shying away from the “appearance of evil,” from the deceiving lyrics or lukewarm theme. The self-made Christian art-critic builds himself up as spiritually discerning by tearing down others as deceivers. The result is a cultish herd mentality, with the comment section bonded over something they can collectively dislike, boycott, and shun.

I do not see these social media doomsday prophets as true critics. True analysis and criticism of a piece of media, art, or a public figure will approach the work or person in question by weighing the virtues against the flaws to provide a balanced, unbiased, and nuanced opinion.

“They build themselves up as spiritually discerning by tearing down others as deceivers.” 

Great art has always challenged the comfortable and comforted the challenged. This is why Michelangelo’s David statue is contested in the modern day by a Florida school board. Why Willis Wheatley’s artwork of Jesus laughing ruffled pious feathers. Why any new angle on a Biblical character, any thing that defies the conception of God and Heaven that our childhood illustrated Bible books ingrained in our psyche makes us cry “Wolf!” Why we spend more time bickering over how an artist portrayed a Biblical figure’s skin tone than how to have a change of heart and BE Jesus to the world of today. Maybe you won’t accept Cory Asbury’s “Reckless” version of God because you need God to be safe and predictable, because you can’t imagine recklessness as a part of Omniscience, and you can’t see “reckless” in a positive connotation but only as its negative denotative and literal modern definition.

But for all the doomsday prophet and their followers’ warnings of doctrinal unsoundness and what God can’t be (because the infinite God can’t be anything more than what we’ve already imagined Him to be), there’s a clear lack of thought put into what any Christian artist or art under fire has gotten right. No discussion around how the chorus of a song with a poorly written stanza really encapsulates a truth that will benefit the Church. So here’s how we can use and apply the parts that benefit, while staying alert to the stanza in question. Maybe a scriptwriter challenged our image of Jesus’s humanity in that TV series, or the artistic liberty seemed to cross a line in a certain episode, but here’s what the episode or season got right and how we can apply it, or how we can do better when presenting Jesus to the world in future works of art.

Criticism of the artist is much more dangerous water. We know we’re supposed to call out sin, but maybe we’ve forgotten that sin is not an action. It’s an identity issue. And self-righteousness, confusing the resisting of temptation as a form of good works, might be where the Christian Art Critic stumbles hardest. This is the beam in the eye of the doomsday prophet who is searching for the mote in the eye of every Christian artist. He so easily forgets to apply the truth of that Sunday School song, “God’s still working on me, to make me what I ought to be,” to his co-laborers in the Gospel. Or that God uses imperfect people to do great and mighty things for His Kingdom, and that His Strength is made perfect through our weakness. The self-made doomsday prophet lacks both discernment and Grace. He is a Pharisee and his appeal is to the spiritually weak and afraid, the pious and saved by their own works.

“…self-righteousness, confusing the resisting of temptation as a form of good works, might be where the Christian Art Critic stumbles hardest. This is the beam in the eye of the doomsday prophet who is searching for the mote in the eye of every Christian artist.”

If an authority on Christian art has any discernment, he will choose to platform the voices that he believes are without fault. Instead of tearing down Phil Wickham and Chris Tomlin, he will feature the Indie Musicians who are the Isaac Watts of today. Instead of criticizing Francine Rivers, he will point us to books and writers that he wishes all Christians would read. In a world where independent creatives have more opportunities than ever before, Christian art critics and consumers can challenge every mainstream deception by promoting the kind of media of which they desire to see more.

These are they who, if they read fiction at all, claim that the depiction of magical abilities in fiction offends their moral conscience. They will count how many times a fictional character was naked and mention this in their review. The more I see their judgements and opinions voiced in forums of CBA books and films, the more I have to wonder if any Christian artist’s work meets their standards for piety. And I often wonder why they bother to consume anything outside of Scripture at all. 

Since Scripture is the ultimate truth, why waste hours looking for truths hidden within fiction? 

We should not assume the Savior’s own parabolic sermons were so perfectly overt as much of the CBA audience expects of their fiction—whether they were fiction or recounts of real people Jesus had encountered in his earthly journey. We can be assured that the Lord God Himself is the best storyteller there is. Yet after each parable, his own disciples came to him asking for the meaning. The point of oral storytelling throughout history was for the listener to contemplate and decipher the morals, theme, and deeper meaning of the story. Christ spoke in the common tongue to common people. He told rustic stories that hid truth from the eyes of the wise and prudent and revealed their meanings to babes and those who were willing to learn. 

When it comes to fiction, music, and film, it seems not much has changed with our audience’s ability to understand. And the Christian artist should not be too surprised. There were pious people who must have walked away in offense over the details of Jesus’s stories, calling them “doctrinally unsound,” “unsafe,” and warning others not to hear Him. So today, there are pious consumers who will take offense to a piece of Christian media and warn others to steer clear. They may even use the Scripture, the “Law of Moses” to make their opinion sound like discernment.  

This isn’t to say that wolves aren’t hiding among the sheep, that the CCM as a publishing industry doesn’t have its issues, that every new song is worthy of being added to the Church Hymnal, or that the art of even the best intentioned among us is flawless and above reproach. But every doomsday prophet knows, if he’s critical about everything and everyone, he can guarantee he’ll discern correctly twice a day.

A wooden broken old clock on a shelf

Photo by Denny Müller on Unsplash

Laurisa Brandt

Independent Press and NYC Big Book Award Winning Author Laurisa Brandt writes immersive, character-focused speculative fiction balanced with rich world building and romantic subplot. While her novels embrace darker themes she aspires to offer readers hope and a bit of humor. Read More >>

Posted on by — Leave a comment

The Day I Fell In Love With a Typewriter

Estate auctions are a big deal in Pennsylvania. Whether the owners are deceased or downsizing for retirement or assisted living communities, there’s an estate auction happening three days out of every week in our area. To my Alabama blood, it seems to be a preference of Amish and Mennonite culture. But maybe they’re popular in other areas of the US as well. 

My husband and I popped into one such auction twenty five minutes north of where we live on the hunt for unique art pieces for my office. My frustrations with encountering AI generated images has compelled me to look for second-hand pieces.

As we perused a garage of tables loaded with dusty artifacts of past decades, my eye fell upon an open case containing a strange device. A dinosaur machine. Something I’ve barely seen in film and can’t recall having ever seen in person.

For a moment, it felt as though I was sucked through a portal into the 1930s

I stared at the typewriter. It existed like an omniscient time traveler, confident, graceful, and austere. Someone who never once questioned his value in a world madly dashing after the next shiny, new advancement. And that mystery compelled me to touch one of its keys. 

Ding! The carriage bell stirred something in my heart beyond my fantasies of how nice it would be to have a typewriter for decoration in my office. How all the cool writers had amber vignette photographs of themselves writing their novels on a typewriter instead of a computer. Though it would be nice to use it for writing update photos. 

Would it become a forty-pound dust collector on my bookcase? Would I have to fight other bidders for it only to regret how much I paid for it? Did it even work well enough that I might be able to peck out a few words for fun? Type out a letter to a friend for the novelty of it? 

I pulled up my phone and began searching for more information on the model before me. At a glance, I learned that models similar to this one were selling online for around $500.00 USD. If this machine worked, I had an amazing find. 

Since the sellers of the estate were living and present, I was able to ask the owner if the machine still worked. 

She reached toward it with a wrinkled hand. “It was given to me as a gift a very long time ago. I don’t think it was used very much.” 

When that was all she would say, I thanked her, realizing that she did not even know its potential value and therefore the auctioneer wouldn’t either. As the auction for the housewares was just beginning, I ran to the auction office trailer and claimed my bidder’s ticket. And then, I waited, as lot after lot of seasonal décor, collectible plushies, glassware, plate ware and more sold for cents and dollars. 

I stood for three hours, waiting for the sales assistants to bring the typewriter out of a back room and up for auction. I watched as another typewriter I had somehow missed in my perusal of the stuff, an electric Sears machine, sold uncontested for just a few dollars. But my doubts grew. Was it worth it? Was it a vanity purchase? Just so I could show my social media followers that I had a typewriter? And then what? Was I wasting my day standing here to get a heavy, old dust collecting machine? Was it junk? Or if a treasure, would all my waiting be in vain if someone else here knew its value and was willing to pay a high price? Would it go for $75? $150? 

As noon came and went, the steady drizzle, stagnant air, high humidity, my achy legs, overstimulation from the auction, headache, hunger, and thirst demotivated me further. What if I had buyer’s remorse? 

When the typewriter came up for auction, the auctioneer gave it a cursory look and started the bidding at $50. Then he dropped to $35. Then $15. And after a long, bored silence from the crowd, he asked for $5. Since I was sweating profusely from my armpits and feeling dizzy, I’d put my husband, more experienced at bidding, up to the task. He raised his hand. After a half minute of trying to conjure a second bidder into the arena, the auctioneer shouted, “SOLD! For Five dollars.” 

I danced a little jig right there on the spot and wriggled with delight as the heavy black case was passed to me. When I got home I took the machine out of its case and began to fiddle with it. I immediately found that the tape carriage mechanism didn’t rise high enough to meet the keys. The space bar also did nothing.

Tinkering with it and turning it over a while, I tracked the chain of intricate parts that made the thing tick. Two of those mechanisms were disengaged. After a little pushing, prodding, and tugging with a pair of tweezers, I managed to get everything reconnected and fed a piece of paper through the carriage to test it out. 

Click. Clack. Click. Clack.

Faded letters appeared on the paper before me. A ribbon that was clearly more than four decades old was still imparting ink. 

I dutifully typed out a short message from the typewriter to myself. 

Hello… My name is Remington. I am a typewriter from the 1940s. 🙂

And at that moment, it was as if I'd fallen in love with someone from another century.

A social event called me away from getting to know Remington for the remainder of the evening. I passed the hours at said event missing my new acquaintance, thinking about his chime just before the carriage reached its end, the weight of his keys beneath my fingers, and the mechanical artistry of his interior. 

As soon as I returned home, I spent a little more time typing away on Remington, trying to grow more acquainted with this distinguished machine. 

I couldn’t believe I’d been tempted to walked away from the auction and call it a day. Now I couldn’t imagine walking away without this typewriter. What a fool I’d almost been! What a magnificent piece of engineering I’d inherited for just $5.00 USD. 

Finally locating the serial number on the back (ND166044), I compared it to the typewriter database and learned that it was manufactured between January and February of 1939. Production of the Remington Portable Noiseless Deluxe typewriter ended in December of 1940 as factories switched to wartime production, though at least seven more machines are believed to have been made between 1940 and 1942. 

I am proud to be the inheritor of this piece of history. The first official document I typed out was a letter to my dad for Father’s Day. In it, I recalled my grandfather’s use of a typewriter he kept hidden beneath a piece of furniture in their apartment in Timisoara, Romania for translating Christian materials during Nicolai Ceaucescu’s Communist regime. My grandfather was born January 7th, 1939. 

In 2039, my typewriter will be 100 years old. And unless someone pries it out of my cold, dead hands, I will forever be its keeper. And it will be functional, practical, graceful and austere, like an omniscient time traveler, unafraid of the shiny new gadgets and technologies.  

Why I love my “new” typewriter is no mystery at all. It beckons me into a slower-paced world, free of distraction, free of social, political, and environmental chaos. It reminds me that value and relevance are qualities that never fade away, but are only visible to those attuned to them. 

And if, one day, my estate is ever up for auction and I haven’t bothered to sell old Remington for what he’s truly worth, I hope some young writer in the crowd gets him for $5.00…uses his tireless keys, cherishes his carriage bell’s ring, and finds a bit of solace from our progressive chaos for another half-century.

Laurisa Brandt writes speculative fiction with a dash of romance. Her award winning Birthright of Scars duology has appeared in the Susquehanna Style magazine.

When not writing emotional, thought provoking, high-action stories with deep spiritual themes, Laurisa can usually be found baking scrumptious sourdough bread or enjoying the outdoors. 

She resides in south central Pennsylvania with her husband, her 1930’s Remington typewriter, and her adopted Timneh African Grey parrot, Hercules.