The Pulley

"I've Found Grace Inside a Sound"

2009-03-21T20:31:00.007-06:00

I just found a well-written article (HT: Jeffrey Overstreet) by Jeff Keuss about the comedy of U2's new album No Line on the Horizon. He uses Gustav Freytag's "pyramid" to trace the arch of U2's whole body of work, focusing primarily on No Line and its comic movement. Keuss articulates well what I was trying to say in fewer words in a previous post, paying special attention to the "sound" motif throughout the album.

Poetic Preachers

2009-03-19T22:25:00.007-06:00

I just found out about a recently published book by M. Craig Barnes called The Pastor as Minor Poet. I've been wondering when someone would publish such a book (of course, Eugene Peterson has done so--just not so directly--just not books aimed directly at pastors). As a friend of mine once said, "There needs to be preachers who are poets." Amen. We need pastors who view the world poetically as opposed to merely scientifically, legally, factually, etc. Though I've not read Barnes' book, it looks promising from a quick perusal of the table of contents.

Speaking of poetic preachers...one of the most poetic preachers I've ever had the privilege of hearing over a long period of time is Skip Ryan, formerly of Park Cities Presbyterian Church (where my wife and I met) and now Chancellor of Redeemer Seminary.

I am always a little leery of allowing the sermon to be so central to worship. We are, after all, more than minds and worship has to do just as much with our bodies as it does our brains (hence, we kneel, stand, smell the wine of the communion cup, etc.). Skip understood this, I believe. I remember him saying, a la Dorothy Sayers probably, that the whole worship service is a drama--a space created where we can encounter God through the sacraments, Scripture, fellowship, etc. We, in the fullness of our humanity, encounter the God who became flesh. Because that mystery was central to his preaching, Skip's sermons took on the character of poetry: he used language, rhythm, and his gravitas in such a way that the sermon left you with a deeper sense of awe and conviction. Listen to his sermons if you have a chance. They're worth your time. You can find them here.

(Skip Ryan meeting Bono in 2006)

RIP Horton Foote and Musings on U2's New Album

2009-03-06T22:10:00.010-06:00

I heard last night that Horton Foote (March 14, 1916 – March 4, 2009) died a couple of days ago. If you don't know Horton Foote, you should really check out his screenwriting chops. He's also known for writing the Academy Award-winning Tender Mercies (one of my personal all-time favorite films and filmed near my home town--the rolling prairie land that makes up its geographical setting fills me with longing too deep for words...memory, dreams, Sehnsucht).

On another note...U2's No Line on the Horizon is quite the record. When I first heard it, I was dubious. I thought, "Ah, their music's gettin' soft...what is this poppy stuff." But then, through more listening, I think No Line is a truly comic album: an album that celebrates "love" that "can heal such a scar." This sentiment expresses a perfect answer to Achthung Baby's "Love is clockworks and cold steel / Fingers too numb to feel...Love is drowning in a deep well /All the secrets, and no one to tell./ Take the money, honey...Blindness." The former is the hopeful answer to the tragic limitations found in the latter's disordered love (HT to my friend and colleague, Brett, for that last thought). Bono has progressed as a writer, his artistic vision moving toward the wholeness of the time when heaven and earth will be one--as in "no line on the horizon."

If you don't own No Line already, give it a listen at U2's Myspace page. It has free streaming of the whole album. I'll leave you with a live version of the title song "No Line on the Horizon."

Spotlight on Poetry: Richard Wilbur's “A Baroque Wall-Fountain in the Villa Sciarra”

2009-02-27T21:39:00.006-06:00

Today, I attended an AP conference where I got to listen to a retired teacher talk about one of my favorite poets, Richard Wilbur. Though I am fairly familiar with his work, I had not read read the poem you will find below. Please read it. It looks daunting and, well, it is, for the most part. But it will reward you. Spend some time with it. Look up words you don't know. You'll be glad you did. Hint: the speaker is thinking about two different fountains he's seen in Italy. Also, Don't read right past the reference to St. Francis.

Oh, I tried to get Blogger to copy the poem in stanzaic form, but it refused. It you want the poem with all it's stanzas, here it is.

“A Baroque Wall-Fountain in the Villa Sciarra”

Under the bronze crown

Too big for the head of the stone cherub whose feet

A serpent has begun to eat,

Sweet water brims a cockle and braids down

Past spattered mosses, breaks

On the tipped edge of a second shell, and fills

The massive third below. It spills

In threads then from the scalloped rim, and makes

A scrim or summery tent

For a faun-ménage and their familiar goose.

Happy in all that ragged, loose

Collapse of water, its effortless descent

And flatteries of spray,

The stocky god upholds the shell with ease,

Watching, about his shaggy knees,

The goatish innocence of his babes at play;

His fauness all the while

Leans forward, slightly, into a clambering mesh

Of water-lights, her sparkling flesh

In a saecular ecstasy, her blinded smile

Bent on the sand floor

Of the trefoil pool, where ripple-shadows come

And go in swift reticulum,

More addling to the eye than wine, and more

Interminable to thought

Than pleasure’s calculus. Yet since this all

Is pleasure, flash, and waterfall,

Must it no be too simple? Are we not

More intricately expressed

In the plain fountains that Maderna set

Before St. Peter’s – the main jet

Struggling aloft until it seems at rest

In the very act of rising, until

The very wish of water is reversed,

That heaviness borne up to burst

In a clear, high, cavorting head, to fill

With blaze, and then in gauze

Delays, in a gnatlike shimmering, in a fine

Illumined version of itself, decline,

And patter on the stones its own applause?

If that is what men are

Or should be, if those water-saints display

The pattern of our arête*,

What of these showered fauns in their bizarre,

Spangled, and plunging house?

They are at rest in fullness of desire

For what is given, they do not tire

Of the smart of the sun, the pleasant water-douse

And riddled pool below,

Reproving our disgust and our ennui

With humble insatiety.

Francis, perhaps, who lay in sister snow

Before the wealthy gate

Freezing and praising, might have seen in this

No trifle, but shade of bliss –

That land of tolerable flowers, that state

As near and far as grass

Where eyes becomes the sunlight, and the hand

Is worthy of water: the dreamt land

Toward which all hungers leap, all pleasures pass.

* ancient Greek term used to describe "excellence" or the pursuit of the highest limits of human potential

A Quick Evaluation of Benjamin Button

2009-01-28T17:23:00.007-06:00

Spoiler Alert: This post contains details pertaining to the film The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

I haven't been able to get out and see many of the films that have been nominated for the Academy Award's "Best Picture," but Jana and I were able recently to drop the little one off at the folks so we could go watch The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. We wanted to see Slumdog Millionaire, but it was not showing in the part of town we were visiting, so we settled for Benjamin Button.

I have read various judgments of the Academy's nominations and many of them have been highly critical--including this one. I have to say, after seeing Benjamin Button, I tend agree with these nay-sayers.

The main problem with film--besides the fact that its been done before (see Forrest Gump)--is that Benjamin is so uninteresting. He doesn't change. Actually, I take that back: he does change, but the change is only skin deep--quite literally. He goes from ancient-ugly-infant to a weird A River Runs Through It Brad Pitt to adolescent-trying-figure-himself-out to cuter infant. But that's it. He's a manchild all the way through and static; his co-star Cate Blanchett's character (i.e. Benjamin's "Jen-nay") is more interesting with her moving to New York, talking about D.H. Lawrence, and having a career-ending accident. Her struggle is more internal, and she seems a bit more complex and therefore, interesting.

Also, I am not sure why Hurricane Katrina in the frame story is so important. Is it there simply for context--to let us know that the frame story takes place in recent years? Fine. But when the waters from the broken levees begin to flood the basement where the clock, which is so central to the story, is stored, you being to think Katrina is supposed to represent something more than just a backdrop to the present-day story.

I am not always this critical of the Academy. I was pleased with No Country for Old Men's selection last year. But then again, there have been other years when the Best Picture went to more mediocre fare.

Throw Down Your Heart

2009-01-27T16:37:00.004-06:00

I just found out about this documentary coming out this Spring. In it, Bela Fleck (you should know him and his music if you do not) takes the banjo back to Africa, where it is believed this beautiful instrument originated, to play with African musicians from all over the continent.

There are not many instruments that "send the chills down my spine," as I heard Bill Monroe once say, like the banjo. Its history also interests me given that it was brought over by slaves and eventually became a core instrument of bluegrass, country, etc.

It's Been a Really Looong Time...

2009-01-19T18:58:00.007-06:00

It's been a really long time since I posted anything on this blog. I had pretty much given up on it. What, with taking on new teaching duties and adopting the cutest baby in the world, I've had little time for such superfluous activities. But, hey, here I am taking some steps back into the blogosphere.

I thought I would re-christen this weblog by posting a copy of the poem that inspired its name. It captures, I think, the single most common theme running through the lives of all men and women and children: limitation.

I was reminded the other day of why this fact of life is of such interest to me when I was listening to some old radio interviews with Rich Mullins. In one of them, he points out that that most blessed of gifts we have been given, friendship, is not a cure for loneliness: that even in the most intimate moments with an Other, there is something undone, something not-yet-united, something incomplete. This absence, or lack, is always there lurking underneath all the fluttering emotions and the activities of the glands (a la Faulkner) that often accompany our many and varied experiences--including friendship. It's that lack, which works itself out into a holy "restlessnesse" (see the poem below), that is central to this blog.

As Herbert depicts below, we are body and spirit, and though these two forces are meant to live in harmony, they often are at odds. Moreover, though the Incarnation reaffirms our life in the body, we will never, in this age of the "inaugurated eschaton" (thanks, NT Wright, for that apt term), find rest-wholeness-unity in its complete and final form. This blog is borne out of that restlessness and the urge it creates to continue to explore God's wonderful (literally) world, looking for signs of wholeness, beauty, truth--signposts of that wholeness to come--even in the midst of darkness and brokenness--especially in the midst of the darkness and brokenness.

So, one of the signposts I hope to continue exploring on this blog is art in all its forms: poetry, prose, music, painting, design, etc. The postings may be sparse, but I plan to at least be "faithful" (wow, that feels silly--faithful to a blog).

Enjoy and see you 'round the 'sphere.

THE PULLEY.
WHEN God at first made man,
Having a glasse of blessings standing by ;
Let us (said he) poure on him all we can :
Let the worlds riches, which dispersed lie,
Contract into a span.

So strength first made a way ;
Then beautie flow’d, then wisdome, honour, pleasure :
When almost all was out, God made a stay,
Perceiving that alone, of all his treasure,
Rest in the bottome lay.

For if I should (said he)
Bestow this jewell also on my creature,
He would adore my gifts in stead of me,
And rest in Nature, not the God of Nature :
So both should losers be.

Yet let him keep the rest,
But keep them with repining restlesnesse :
Let him be rich and wearie, that at least,
If goodnesse leade him not, yet wearinesse
May tosse him to my breast.

~ George Herbert

Having Children Not Eco Friendly According to Some Women

2007-11-23T08:33:00.000-06:00

How did we arrive at this place:

"Having children is selfish. It's all about maintaining your genetic line at the expense of the planet"?

Actually, here's one with more gravity...

2007-11-12T15:52:00.000-06:00

I couldn't pass up posted a link to this fine piece of writing by Peggy Noonan. It was in Friday's Wall Street Journal Opinion section. It's a commentary on Hillary Clinton and her recent slide in the polls. Noonan compares her to Margaret Thatcher. Here's an excerpt.

The point is the big ones, the real ones, the Thatchers and Indira Gandhis and Golda Meirs and Angela Merkels, never play the boo-hoo game. They are what they are, but they don't use what they are. They don't hold up their sex as a feint: Why, he's not criticizing me, he's criticizing all women! Let us rise and fight the sexist cur.
When Hillary Clinton suggested that debate criticism of her came under the heading of men bullying a defenseless lass, an interesting thing happened. First Kate Michelman, the former head of NARAL and an Edwards supporter, hit her hard. "When unchallenged, in a comfortable, controlled situation, Sen. Clinton embraces her elevation into the 'boys club.' " But when "legitimate questions" are asked, "she is quick to raise the white flag and look for a change in the rules."
Then Mrs. Clinton changed tack a little and told a group of women in West Burlington, Iowa, that they were going to clean up Washington together: "Bring your vacuum cleaners, bring your brushes, bring your brooms, bring your mops." It was all so incongruous--can anyone imagine the 20th century New Class professional Hillary Clinton picking up a vacuum cleaner? Isn't that what downtrodden pink collar workers abused by the patriarchy are for?

Here's the rest.

It's been a while...

2007-11-12T15:40:00.000-06:00

I recently checked my blog (the first time in months) and saw a couple of comments from as many readers (my two faithfuls) asking for another post in order to move the mug of Hillary further down the page.

School's keeping me quite busy but I thought I'd post this clip from a favorite old SNL sketch of mine: Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer (starring Phil Hartman--one of my old favorites). Enjoy. (At least it will push Hillary further off the opening page).

unfrozen caveman lawyer

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Girls Just Wanna Have Fun...Hillbilly Style

2007-08-27T19:13:00.000-06:00

I really don't have time to do this, but I need to blow off some steam as my entire day has been consumed with the business of getting the school year started.

Below, you'll find a clip of The David Rawlings Machine (which is really--again--just Gillian Welch and Rawlings, but here, with The Machine, Rawlings is the frontman). They're singing a cover of "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" by Cyndi Lauper. Just in case the clip in the last post of their singing "Caleb Meyer" was a little too dark.

Also, if you find this version of "Girls" a little lethargic, give it at least until the last minute of the song when Rawlings does his big solo.

Murder Ballads

2007-08-24T21:32:00.000-06:00

I like a good murder ballad. Why? Well, I'm feeling a little too brain dead to get into it right now (from a retreat with students, which was good)--maybe in a later post. In the meantime, why not enjoy this footage of one of my favorites--Gillian Welch and her partner, David Rawlings--singing "Caleb Meyer."

This next one I've written about before. Just listen to the next to the last verse if you find the song a bit unsettling and let the video play out until the end. Cash wrote this years before he recorded it with Rick Rubin.

The Assumption of Mary

2007-08-13T08:10:00.000-06:00

August 15 is the day that the Church has traditionally celebrated the Assumption of Mary--the Blessed Virgin's being taken up into heaven without experiencing death. There are a couple of views on how this happened. The Eastern Orthodox Church believes that the Blessed Virgin actually died but was not confined to the grave. Her body was inexplicably removed from its tomb and assumed to heaven. I think the story of one Eastern tradition goes something like this: the same apostle Thomas, who doubted Jesus' resurrection, wanted to see the dead body of Mary after her passing. When they took him to her tomb, the body was gone. The Orthodox do not view this as a resurrection. Rather, Mary's body was simply taken up into heaven as Enoch's and Elijah's were.

The Western Church, on the other hand, has mixed views. The Catholic Church claims that Mary was assumed before she ever died. And from what I understand, this view solidified as the cult of the Virgin grew in popularity in the Western medieval church.

Of course, most Protestant denominations do not recognize Mary's assumption--mostly due to their belief in Sola Scriptura. However, the Anglican church--especially Anglo-Catholic churches--do pay some attention to it--though I believe their observance of it tends to be more private than public (I could be wrong). Lutheran churches, on the other hand, I think, do have a place for its observance in their calendar.

I like the position that the Orthodox take. It is not an official teaching, or dogma, of their church, and seems to be a via media between the Catholic view of perhaps honoring Mary to much and the extreme Protestant view of not viewing her as "Favored One" and "Blessed among women" but as just another one of us. Any thoughts?

Cootie Queen

2007-07-10T12:53:00.000-06:00

Stinky McStink Face!

Once

2007-07-05T10:29:00.000-06:00

Pseudo Spoiler Alert: I am writing about the movie Once below. I don't give away the ending but I do try to enter into the plot a little to provide some insight into the film. I don't think I give awaytoo much, but you may be really fastidious about what you do and do not know about a film before you see it.

There is a film that is out now that would be worth your seeing: Once. It's a lovely film about a man and a woman and their mutual love for music. The movie is, in fact, a musical of sorts--not the Sound of Music type but a new kind. The characters, played by Glen Hansard (of the Irish rock band The Frames) and Marketa Irglova (who has recently recorded an album with Hansard under the title The Swell Season which contains some of the songs from the movie), tell the story through songs--most of which were composed by Hansard.
What I liked most about the film was the way the music acts as a medium through which the characters approach each other. To paraphrase Wendy Shalit from her 1999 book A Return to Modesty, there was a time when it was widely considered necessarily sexual for a man and woman to simply be alone in a room together. There are plenty of scenes where the two main characters are alone and yet their music (along with a couple of other important checks) acts as a mediator, allowing them to transcend their raw (albeit good) desires for companionship. The music also is the thing that gives the movie an unfulfilling---yet at the same time, fulfilling--ending. I don't want to spoil the whole thing for any of you interested in seeing Once, so please go watch it to see if I'm on to anything.

Poets as Painters

2007-06-22T14:34:00.000-06:00

I have, in recent years, been interested in why I am personally more attracted to the particulars of poetry and painting/drawing as opposed to the particulars of music. I took up the guitar in high school and I still play it, but I never could stick with--what I now see to be--the abstraction of music (I'm not talking about what we call lyrics here but what we might call tune). (I also could never muster up the energy to handle the exactitude needed to really learn how to play "my axe"). Stephen Henderson over at Trees Walking has an insightful quotation by the poet Richard Wilbur on this subject. I'll insert a little of it below.

I think I can say why there are more painter-poets, or poets who are would be painters, than there are poets who have to do with music. It strikes me that music is infinitely more abstract then painting or poetry. That you can't make any precise statements as to what music is up to. Poetry simply has to be exact and concrete or it bores to death. And on the whole, I think--despite some successes in abstract painting-that it's the same with painting.

The Masculine Mystique

2007-06-19T13:36:00.000-06:00

There are a lot males in my family. I have two older brothers (my poor mother!). My oldest brother now has three sons (the youngest of which you see to the left here with me--I just met him for the first time this past weekend). My other brother and his wife will be welcoming another boy into the family in September.

My wife and I are adopting from Ethiopia. I think we're going to aim for a girl.

Ralph Wood on "Holy Time"

2007-06-08T16:55:00.000-06:00

I am attending the Trinity Arts Conference at the University of Dallas this weekend. I listened to Ralph Wood, professor of literature and theology at Baylor, speak about how the Christian story redefines beauty (an element, by the way, that often gets less press in Western churches compared to truth and goodness).

This afternoon, when Wood showed us the Grunewald painting above, someone made a remark about John the Baptist (on the right, pointing) being present in it. I appreciated Wood's response: "Holy time is not chronological time." Wood had just finished talking about the importance of the church calendar to our lives.

Here are some musings based on what Wood said: We need a way of shaping our view of time that is free from the demands of the fiscal year, work year, etc. In the end, what we do in worship is "useless" according to the world's (I mean world in the way John the Revelator used it) understanding. We need something to remind us that work and acquiring "stuff"--dare I say, even acquiring knowledge--is not our ultimate end. We need something to remind us that our Ultimate End is the enjoyment of God--the beatific vision.

For all you Facebookers out there...

2007-06-06T21:27:00.000-06:00

China's One-Child Policy

2007-05-24T15:17:00.000-06:00

I found this interesting piece about a recent Chinese governmental birth control raid in southern China. Here's a few excerpts:

Residents of this southern China county on Thursday angrily accused authorities of forcing women to have abortions and vandalising homes in a brutal campaign to enforce birth-control policies...

Authorities had even forced women pregnant with their first child to undergo abortions merely because they had not completed paperwork required before getting pregnant, said a woman surnamed Xu, a waitress in a Bobai restaurant that was deserted at lunchtime due to fear pervading the district.
"This has been going on for about three months. The one-child policy is wrong. We are totally against it. I know a woman who committed suicide by jumping in the river because she did not want to be caught by the work teams," Xu said.
A feeling of palpable tension has gripped the area, where deserted roads contrast with bright red-and-white banners and billboards bearing government slogans such as: "Support the one-child policy" and "Happiness is to have one child".

More than a year ago, I posted an entry about this alarming statistic: by 2020, 40 million frustrated Chinese bachelors will have no one to court and marry due to the one-child policy in their country.

The scary thing about China and their desire to modernize and be progressive (and yet still hold on to their nationalistic ideas) is the lack of foresight they exhibit and the seeming inability to learn from history (perhaps because theyhave been closed off from Western history for so long--I don't know). We in the West have learned what happens to over-masculinized (in China's case, literally over-masculinized) cultures: it's called Nazism--with its desire for a perfect race, its nationalistic pride and devaluing of the feminine virtues and so on.

An Opinion Piece about "God's Prior 'Yes'" by Peter Leithart

2007-05-21T14:37:00.000-06:00

Here is a very interesting article I found at Reformed News (reprinted there with permission from Leithart's blog). It's an opinion piece by Peter Leithart (Side note: perhaps I read too much Leithart, but most of what he says has the "ring of truth" to me). He says that the fundamental issue between the Federal Vision crowd and their opponents is an understanding of creation. This is a thought I have had myself, but I will let Leithart say it better than I can. Here's an excerpt, but by all means, do read the whole piece.

Before God prohibited Adam from eating the tree of knowledge, the Eternal Word had already spoken Adam into existence. Before God's No He had already spoken a preexisting Yes, and the Yes set the context for the No. The sheer fact that there is something rather than nothing is testimony to God's prior Yes.

Every No from that time on is set within the context of God's Yes: God says Yes to Noah, and then commands him not to eat blood. God says Yes to Israel in bringing them out of Egypt, and then issues the Ten Words. Every command that God issues presupposes His preexisting Yes, because unless God was committed to preserving a people He would not warn them off the way of death.

For a certain brand of Reformed theology, such talk amounts to denying the gospel because it denies what is thought to be the sub-stratum on which the gratuity of the gospel depends.The Federal Vision controversy is, from this angle, more about creation than about soteriology or sacramental theology. Far be it from me to accuse those who oppose the Federal Vision of "denying creation," but they are, in my view, failing to work through a fully creationist theology. Dare I say, they have failed to think through a fully evangelical theology of creation.

Well said.

A funny thing happened on the way to the academy this morning...

2007-05-19T12:58:00.000-06:00

Because I ride the bus to work everyday, I do a lot of observing. I peer out a frame created by the massive rectangular windows every morning to see my bustling little sector of Dallas on their way to work, walking their kids to school, stopping to fill up the gas tank.

Yesterday morning, I did a double take as my number 51 bus came near a Target store. There, in the the parking lot, I got a glimpse of an hunter orange-vested cop issuing a citation to a full-size Chevy pickup truck driver. As the image began to make the trek into my memory, I saw with my mind's eye that there was no police car any where near the scene. Luckily, we were at stop sign, and as I curiously pointed my eyes back to the parking lot, I saw something I'd never seen before: the cop was on a Segway. Whha-a! I couldn't help but emit a small chuckle as I mused upon the event: "How embarrassing! To have this truck with probably a V-6 like engine and to be ticketed by none other than a Segway cop!"

A Difference in Imagination

2007-05-11T21:43:00.000-06:00

As I finished up the PCA's ad interim committee's report on the Federal Vision, etc., I could not help but think of how it seems to be missing a fundamental, philosophical assumption of FV. But then I thought, "No, philosophical assumption is not quite right. It's something perhaps more basic." Then I found this from Peter Leithart's blog. There is a fundamental difference in how each group sees the world: that is, there's a fundamental difference in imagination. That's what I was looking for: imagination. From Leihart's post:

One of the differences between those associated with "Federal Vision" theology and those opposed to it is a difference of theological imagination. The opponents operate with a theological imagination that distinguishes and clarifies; ontology is distinguished from relationality, nature from supernature, ecclesiology from soteriology.

Leithart goes on to describe what he calls the perichoretic imagination that one tends to find among the proponents of FV. Perichoresis was an ancient Christian way of attempting to describe the relationship of the three persons of the Trinity. Read more about perichoresis here and here.

John Calvin: Catholic with a little "c"?

2007-05-07T19:14:00.000-06:00

I've been reading the PCA ad interim study group's findings on the Federal Vision (FV), New Perspective on Paul (NPP), and Auburn Avenue Theologies (AAT). I will have more to say about this document in future posts. In the meantime, I found this comment interesting by a Dominican professor who teaches at the University of Virginia.

Contrary to the false interpretations of Calvin on grace and the sacraments that are retailed by some of the Reformed, Calvin was, I would say, the one catholic writer among the Protestant reformers.

To me, this seems similar to what is being said among some of the Federal Vision folks. This comment was made by Fr. Augustine Thompson, O.P., at Francis Beckwith's blog:the Francis Beckwith who just recently resigned his post as President of the Evangelical Theological Society (ETS) because of his recently being received back in to the Roman Catholic Church.

Bruce Edwards on NT Wright's Assessment of Mere Christianity

2007-04-29T18:49:00.000-06:00

Here is an interesting response to N.T. Wright's remarks about C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity by Bruce Edwards, a noted Lewisian scholar.

Before Joe Camel...

2007-04-28T10:06:00.000-06:00

Before the days of Joe Camel, there was Fred Flintstone. Seriously. Watch this.

N.T. Wright on C.S. Lewis

2007-04-20T14:35:00.000-06:00

I was reading a review of Lewis' Mere Christianity that NT Wright has written for Touchstone. This is the 60th anniversary of its publication. I ran across these words of Wright's. Well said.

I think it’s important that we are justified by faith: not by believing in justification by faith, but by believing in Jesus Christ. Obviously a clear understanding of justification would help a great deal, but I don’t myself regard that as the first thing to explain to a potential convert. Sufficient to draw them to Jesus.

The rest of the review is quite good. Wright offers some good criticisms and reaffirmations of Lewis in this classic work of the Oxford don.

In the days following the Virginia Tech massacre...

2007-04-20T13:26:00.000-06:00

Peggy Noonan has some apt words for such a time as this. She wonders where all the common sense--perhaps we should read "backbone" here--has gone in our therapeutic culture. She implies that Cho Seung-Hui's behavior has been spoken of in such ambiguous--seemingly compassionate--terms that it lacks any sense of reality. Noonan's piece picks up on an irony present in our culture today: with all the talk of tolerance and compassion that's perpetually in the air, it's interesting that there is little in the way of real compassion present in our society. It takes real differences for there to be a place for actual compassion. Don't call someone a "mental defective," it may just exacerbate their psychosis (which, believe me, I understand--words and assumptions one develops about himself do affect his understanding of his self) or hurt their self-image. I heard this sentiment expressed just this week regarding Cho. But isn't it more damaging--and after Monday's events, I think everyone has to answer "yes"--to take such a narrow view--to think only of an individual's rights and self-image? I thought this part by Noonan was an insightful piece of writing:

With all the therapy in our great therapized nation, with all our devotion to emotions and feelings, one senses we are becoming a colder culture, and a colder country. We purport to be compassionate--we must respect Mr. Cho's privacy rights and personal autonomy--but of course it is cold not to have protected others from him. It is cold not to have protected him from himself.

That is, it's actually cold not to name things what they are and it's actually heartless not to interfere and intrude upon one's privacy--especially when the private world of that person does not match the real world "out there" of everyone else.

In the end, Noonan says that the most realistic and truest thing she has heard all week came from one of the shooting victims.

The most common-sensical thing I heard said came Thursday morning, in a hospital interview with a student who'd been shot and was recovering. Garrett Evans said of the man who'd shot him, "An evil spirit was going through that boy, I could feel it." It was one of the few things I heard the past few days that sounded completely true. Whatever else Cho was, he was also a walking infestation of evil. Too bad nobody stopped him. Too bad nobody moved.

Good Friday

2007-04-06T09:49:00.000-06:00

I posted this quotation last year on Good Friday. It's worth doing it again.

God, who needs nothing, loves into existence wholly superfluous creatures in order that He may love and perfect them. He creates the universe, already foreseeing--or should we say "seeing"? there are no tenses in God--the buzzing cloud of flies about the cross, the flayed back pressed against the uneven stake, the nails driven through the mesial nerves, the repeated incipient suffocation as the body droops, the repeated torture of back and arms as it is time after time, for breath's sake, hitched up. If I may dare the biological image, God is a "host" who deliberately creates His own parasites; causes us to be that we may exploit and "take advantage of" Him. Herein is love. This is the diagram of Love Himself, the inventor of all loves. C.S. Lewis

On Lenten hiatus

2007-02-19T16:32:00.000-06:00

For what it's worth. Here is a post I wrote last year at the beginning of Lent.

Cavemen

2007-02-13T23:39:00.000-06:00

In the interest of bringing a little levity to this blog, I thought I might post a link to a favorite commercial of mine.

Walden Media to Produce Cinematic Version Of Screwtape

2007-02-13T20:06:00.000-06:00

Apparently, Ralph Winter and Walden Media are into C.S.Lewis. Together, they’re producing a movie version of The Screwtape Letters that is expected to be out in 2008. Read more here.

Choral Treasure

2007-02-07T09:35:00.000-06:00

If you are at all into church choral music, Gregorian chant, polyphony, etc., the new link to the right, Choral Treasure, is wonderful. It streams choral music 24/7. Give it a listen.

The Presentation of Our Lord

2007-02-03T14:06:00.000-06:00

I forgot to post this yesterday...February 2nd is the day that Christians for centuries have remembered Christ's presentation at the temple i.e. The Presentation of Our Lord. At his presentation, sacrifices were made for Mary's purification and for Mary and Joseph's first born son. Thus, Christ, from the very beginning, has come to fulfill the Law. Also, at the presentation, a man waiting for the coming Messiah, Simeon, held the Christ child in his arms. The one through whom all things were made was held by one of his creations. Immanuel, God is with us!

I spoke about The Presentation in chapel on Thursday to my school's lower grades. Afterward, one first grade teacher jokingly reminded me that February 2nd is also Groundhog Day. We both had a lighthearted chuckle at this fact and went about our days. However, as I thought about it later, her observation did once again remind me of the importance of the church calendar. We have many other calendars--fiscal, academic and otherwise--competing for our attention, and most institutions recognize the easily overlooked fact that we live in time. Thus, they restructure their calendars--the time constraints within which they must function--based on what their corporate bodies are centered upon. Thus, financiers have their fiscal calendars, schools their academic ones, and so on.

The Church's calendar is restructured to be centered upon the Word made flesh--the One who is our access to the End of all things. By living with and by the church calendar throughout the year, we are acknowledging that the other calendars we must live by during our day-to-day lives are not the ultimate way we interpret time. Ultimately, our interpretation of time does not have at its center money, academics, etc. The Church's way of living in time--i.e. its calendar--has Christ at its center. The church calendar tells the story of Christ, sin, and redemption beginning every Advent season. As I am more and more convinced that it's the stories we live by that shape the way we reason about things and feel about our experiences, what better way to keep the story of "the way things are" in our imaginations and hearts than by living through it each year. We can have six more weeks of winter as long as the Messiah has come to us.

Read more about the Presentation of Our Lord.

The Making of a Commercial

2007-02-03T11:23:00.000-06:00

I forgot to add this to my post from yesterday. Comes from JT's blog again...the making of that Sony commercial mentioned in yesterday's post is here. It's pretty amazing.

Do you know Jose Gonzalez?

2007-02-02T15:19:00.000-06:00

I found this link at my friend JT's blog Exit 78 (BTW: Jt's blog is primarily a photo blog with some nice shots on it). This is a commercial for the Sony Bravia TV using Jose Gonzalez's cover of a song entitled "Heartbeats" (by a Swedish group called The Knife?). This is footage of Jose Gonzalez performing "Heartbeats" live. I haven't heard of this guy before, but I like this song. Very nice and melodic.

You can find Jose Gonzalez's MySpace Music page here.

The Police to Perform Surprise Gig at 2007 Grammys

2007-01-29T12:05:00.000-06:00

Not much of a surprise anymore.

Sean Michel: The Next American Idol

2007-01-27T22:10:00.000-06:00

About a week ago, I saw an advertisement on TV for the upcoming episode of American Idol. As the images were flashing by, I thought I caught a glimpse of a guy I knew from college named Sean Michel auditioning there in front of Simon, Paula, and Randy. And wouldn't you know, sho' nuff, it is he. I'm a big fan of his beard and he sang Johnny Cash's "God's Gonna Cut You Down." What more could you ask for? GO SEAN! You're going to Hollywood dawg!

Watch the audition here.

Here's another link.

Cruise 'is Christ' of Scientology

2007-01-23T14:28:00.000-06:00

The Messiah?

The Right Not to Know

2007-01-20T09:47:00.000-06:00

A few posts back, I quoted Alexander Solzhenitsyn at length on politics and the perils of having a society dominated by only the legal level of reality. I found this interesting article which highlights another part of the Soviet Russian exile's 1978 Harvard commencement address. The writer of the article, Darryl E. Owens, makes the claim that the media is doing a lot to encroach upon our right to privacy. Here's a sample:

Once, some things were private. But today unmentionables routinely are aired on The Today Show.
But the practice seems all the more disturbing in a case like Shawn's, yet another reminder of America's schizophrenic mind-set.
In a day when Big Brother eavesdrops on our chats, satellites can read our tattoos, and our most private moments can earn a very public airing on the World Wide Web, we vociferously bemoan our withering privacy.At the same time, an insatiable, vaguely prurient curiosity has yanked down the veil that once cloaked private life from the searing public eye and replaced it with a clear curtain.

The "Shawn" mentioned above is the Shawn Hornbeck--the now young man who was abducted four years ago in Missouri. Owens is critical of Oprah Winfrey's having Hornbeck and his parents on her show just days after his being rescued, asking the boy himself if he had been sexually abused. After Shawn opted not to talk about his experience, Oprah went to his parents--she "went there"--and asked if they believed Shawn had been abused.

As America hung on every word, the parents of the Missouri boy looked the Queen of All Media in the eye, slowly bobbled their heads, and answered, "Yes."Yes, indeed. After all, wasn't that the burning question that inquiring minds wanted to know? Isn't it what we deserved to know?

It's this right to know that bothers Owens, me, and Alexander Solzhentisyn. Don't we have the right not to know, and doesn't Shawn Hornbeck have the right not to relive a painful experience on national television. Here are Solzhenitsyns' thoughts:

Because instant and credible information has to be given [ in the media], it becomes necessary to resort to guesswork, rumors and suppositions to fill in the voids, and none of them will ever be rectified, they will stay on in the readers' memory. How many hasty, immature, superficial and misleading judgments are expressed every day, confusing readers, without any verification. The press can both simulate public opinion and miseducate it. Thus we may see terrorists heroized, or secret matters, pertaining to one's nation's defense, publicly revealed, or we may witness shameless intrusion on the privacy of well-known people under the slogan: "everyone is entitled to know everything." But this is a false slogan, characteristic of a false era: people also have the right not to know, and it is a much more valuable one. The right not to have their divine souls stuffed with gossip, nonsense, vain talk. A person who works and leads a meaningful life does not need this excessive burdening flow of information.

One must wonder if Oprah and other journalists who are so quick to nab the story and get the scoop think of what they're doing in these cases as "gossip, nonsense, [and/or] vain talk." I think Oprah probably has good intentions, but you know what they say about those.

Human Body Adventure

2007-01-17T10:05:00.000-06:00

In China they have this exhibit for kids called Human Body Adventure. Each piece in the exhibit reveals the functions of the body. I think this is what I think it is....Don't do it kids! It's a trick!

Scientists reconstruct Dante's face

2007-01-17T10:00:00.000-06:00

Read about Dante's makeover here.

Solzhenitsyn and Politics

2007-01-05T22:04:00.000-06:00

As I implied in a post months back, one of the reasons I tend to steer clear of politics is best summed up by Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his 1978 Harvard commencement address. There, he warns against understanding reality in a purely legal way. That is, the legal level of reality becomes the predominant one, thus pushing the religious and spiritual levels to the fringes. And, as long as you are right according to "the letter of the law," no other considerations need to be examined. Here are his words:

People in the West have acquired considerable skill in using, interpreting and manipulating law, even though laws tend to be too complicated for an average person to understand without the help of an expert. Any conflict is solved according to the letter of the law and this is considered to be the supreme solution. If one is right from a legal point of view, nothing more is required, nobody may mention that one could still not be entirely right, and urge self-restraint, a willingness to renounce such legal rights, sacrifice and selfless risk: it would sound simply absurd. One almost never sees voluntary self-restraint. Everybody operates at the extreme limit of those legal frames. An oil company is legally blameless when it purchases an invention of a new type of energy in order to prevent its use. A food product manufacturer is legally blameless when he poisons his produce to make it last longer: after all, people are free not to buy it.

I have spent all my life under a communist regime and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is not quite worthy of man either. A society which is based on the letter of the law and never reaches any higher is taking very scarce advantage of the high level of human possibilities. The letter of the law is too cold and formal to have a beneficial influence on society. Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relations, there is an atmosphere of moral mediocrity, paralyzing man's noblest impulses.

Throughout the rest of the speech, Solzhenitsyn continues to call for "voluntary self-restraint" as the way to save society from the mediocrity he mentions above. In a society governed by the rule of law, there must be sacrifice and temperance. Societies governed by an "objective legal scale" are indeed great, but do we dare to continue to promote such societies if all moral or religious law is forced out of the public sphere? Out of all discussions regarding public life?

Irony, or Politics as Usual

2007-01-05T09:34:00.000-06:00

The political world, for the most part, is not a realm that I often find myself that enthused about. However, I couldn't help but see the irony in this story from the Washington Post. The article's about Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats taking over our legislative branch. By the way, is she doing the Arsenio Hall up there?

Here's an excerpt:

Despite the promised "new direction for America," getting the money out of politics and all of that, some facts of Washington life appear immutable and eternal.

"One hundred hours to make this the most honest and open Congress in history," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi declared at the beginning of a history-making day -- which ended last night with the Democrat from California presiding over a glitzy fundraiser open to anyone with $1,000 for a ticket.

Thank God for the Language Police

2006-12-31T18:58:00.000-06:00

Language is powerful. Without its mediating role, we would be unable to grasp reality. Did you know there was a Language Police out there? Someone needed to do it. Words are misused, overused and a-bused here in the Information Age. Lake Superior State University has been compiling a list of banned words worn slick with overuse for the past thirty years. I think the official list comes out tomorrow. You can read about it here as well.

Here's What I Want For Christmas...

2006-12-22T13:39:00.000-06:00

I want the Giant Swiss Army Knife. Just think of the jams MacGyver could have gotten out of with this beast. You can read more abou tthe Giant below or read the full story here.

Just as you can't be too rich or too thin, I'd always thought, so you can't have too many tools on your Swiss Army knife - but that was before I took delivery of the new Giant Swiss Army knife. Grotesque, if superbly engineered, the Giant weighs nearly a kilogram and features 85 devices in all. Unload this mother into the plastic tray as you walk through security at Heathrow and just see what happens.

The Giant is supposed to feature every blade that has ever been incorporated into Swiss Army knives as made by Wenger, one of the two firms that make them . "We've sold 20 to retailers so far, and we can't get them in fast enough," says Garry Woodhouse of Whitby and Co, sole importer of Wenger knives into Britain. "They're assembled by hand in Switzerland, and I'm told that the man doing it is working his fingers to the bone."

From Cross to Crescent

2006-12-07T22:02:00.000-06:00

I just found this at Touchstone's Mere Comments blog. I just can't help but think that the people who sold the church building to the Islamic association must not have any sense of church history--in addition to possessing a poor theology.

Catholic relations with Orthodoxy bring pope to Turkey

2006-11-28T06:48:00.000-06:00

Just found this.

"St. Clive's Day"

2006-11-22T13:28:00.000-06:00

Of course, today is the day that we remember the assassination of JFK. It is also, as many already know, the day that C.S. Lewis (and Aldous Huxley) died. I heard once--and it may well be more legendary than factual--that Lewis had always prayed that he would die in anonymity. With JFK's being struck down here in Dallas, he was granted that prayer. I don't necessarily doubt that this story is true. Lewis knew that at the heart of all reality there is a fundamental self-denial and humility--a giving up of a lesser good for a greater. Here's one of my favorite quotations by the Oxford don:

For in self-giving, if anywhere, we touch a rhythm not only of all creation but of all being. For the Eternal Word also gives Himself in sacrifice; and that not only on Calvary....From before the foundation of the world He surrenders begotten Deity back to bgetting Deity in obedience...From the highest to the lowest, self exists to be abdicated and, by that abdication, becomes more truly self, to be thereupon yet the more abdicated, and so on forever. This is not a heavenly law we can escape by being saved. What is outside the system of self-giving is not earth, nor nature, nor 'ordinary life,' but simply and solely Hell.

Brown University Suspends PCA College Group

2006-11-21T21:59:00.000-06:00

Brown University has suspended the Reformed University Fellowship (RUF) at Brown from using campus resources and has given vague reasons as to why. Apparently, there are some rules against "proselytizing" and "harassment" that groups allowed to use university facilities are supposed to abide by. David Sherwood (who, I believe, used to be a PCA pastor here in N. Texas? Maybe?) had this to say:

"My impression of Brown is it's a liberal institution in the best sense: it's a marketplace of ideas," he said. "All we've ever wanted is a place at the table."

You can read more here.

Young people in developed countries unhappy, survey says

2006-11-20T00:06:00.000-06:00

Found this interesting piece tonight. Here's one provocative line from the article:

"The happier young people of the developing world are also the most religious," the survey said.

I recently read Alexander Solzhenitsyn's 1978 Harvard Address with a group of students at school. There are some real resonances between his words and what has apparently been discovered through this study.

Orthodox priest beheaded in Iraq

2006-10-13T13:49:00.000-06:00

Just found this.

An Excerpt from Benedict's Lecture

2006-09-19T12:55:00.000-06:00

The emperor [Manuel Ii Paleologus] goes on to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable. Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul.
God is not pleased by blood, and not acting reasonably is contrary to God's nature. Faith is born of the soul, not the body. Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats... To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death....
The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God's nature. The editor, Theodore Khoury, observes: "For the emperor, as a Byzantine shaped by Greek philosophy, this statement is self-evident. But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality." Here Khoury quotes a work of the noted French Islamist R. Arnaldez, who points out that Ibn Hazn went so far as to state that God is not bound even by his own word, and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us. Were it God's will, we would even have to practice idolatry.

Those last few sentences are of chief interest. Sure, God's transcendence should be guarded, and He is not bound to reveal himself--especially through any material means. But He does. That's central to the Gospel. God uses the familiar to reveal the unfamiliar--particularly, Himself i nthe form of a man. This is scandalous to anyone with a dualistic worldview.

Rushdie, Hirsi Ali, the Pope -- Who's Next? and Benedict's Lecture

2006-09-19T12:40:00.000-06:00

Here's an interesting article from the German Der Spiegel online. It recounts some of the history of Islamist threats towards those who offer any criticism of their policies of history.

An excerpt:

There are -- few -- critical voices that should be taken seriously when it comes to the pope's comments. Shouldn't Benedict XVI have known that the quote he included in his speech -- a passage he himself described as "brusque" -- might be misunderstood? Couldn't he have made his meaning a bit clearer? Even if he had, it should be welcomed by all, including leftist atheists and agnostics, that we now have a pope who can pose challenging academic questions. In any case, a close reading of his speech reveals not a single insult directed at a single Muslim.

Also, here's a link to Benedict's speech. There is nothing inflammatory in it.

The Man Who Claims To Be Jesus

2006-09-18T21:27:00.000-06:00

There's a man in Florida who claims to be Jesus Christ. Seriously. He preaches no sin, no restrictions--just puredee indulgence. No, that's not indulgences--as in the medieval church practice that allowed one or a loved one a little less time in Purgatory--that's indulgence--as in indulge your senses. He's beyond heretical. He's delusional and cultic. Read more here.

Read more about Jesus Redux here.

Contemporary McCarthyism

2006-09-18T21:07:00.000-06:00

The Path to Hysteria
My sin was to write a screenplay accurately depicting Bill Clinton's record on terrorism.
BY CYRUS NOWRASTEH

...In the era of McCarthyism, the merest hint of a connection to communism sufficed to inspire dark accusations, the certainty that the accused was part of a malign conspiracy. Today, apparently, you can get something of that effect by charging a connection with a Christian mission.

Read more here.

The Pope must die, says Muslim

2006-09-18T20:44:00.000-06:00

A notorious Muslim extremist told a demonstration in London yesterday that the Pope should face execution.
Anjem Choudary said those who insulted Islam would be "subject to capital punishment" [...]. Choudary's appeal for the death of Pope Benedict was the second time he has been linked with apparent incitement to murder within a year.
The 39-year-old lawyer organised
demonstrations against the publication of cartoons of Mohammed in February in Denmark. Protesters carried placards declaring "Behead Those Who Insult Islam".

Read the rest here.

Nun gunned down in Somalia

2006-09-18T20:30:00.000-06:00

I have found the response to Pope Benedict's remarks by the Muslim community a bit ironic. I do believe that we must seek to understand their position and love those who are our sworn enemies, but the plausibility of this story makes it a bit difficult.

Muslim fury grows at Pope's speech

2006-09-15T13:31:00.000-06:00

Take a look at this article. Also, be sure to note the comments at the bottom of the page. I tend to agree with their sentiments.

Thomas Kinkade: Angel of Light Part 2

2006-09-08T13:45:00.000-06:00

This is a bit of old news about Kinkade. It's from the LA Times, Aug. 29 2006:

The FBI is investigating allegations that self-styled "Painter of Light" Thomas Kinkade and some of his top executives fraudulently induced investors to open galleries and then ruined them financially, former dealers contacted by federal agents said. Investigators are focusing on issues raised in civil litigation by at least six former Thomas Kinkade Signature Gallery owners, people who have been contacted by the FBI said.

The ex-owners allege in arbitration claims that, among other things, the artist known for his dreamily luminous landscapes and street scenes used his Christian faith to persuade them to invest in the independently owned stores, which sell only Kinkade's work."They really knew how to bait the hook," said one former dealer who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the case. "They certainly used the Christian hook."Kinkade has denied the allegations in the civil litigation.

Hurt

2006-09-03T19:05:00.000-06:00

I pulled out my guitar tonight to strum a little. I was trying to figure out this one chord (I'm still pretty much an amateur after ten years of wielding my axe) in Johnny Cash's cover of Sting's "I Hung My Head". I found a site that provided the chord. I thought I was right: It was the D Minor I kept missing. As I perused the other songs, I found a link to the "Hurt" video--the one in which Cash covers the Nine Inch Nails song. I had never seen the video before; I had only heard about it. I was moved to tears...the juxtaposed footage of the young, confident Cash with the old, ailing Cash; his "House of Cash" museum--his "empire of dirt"--sitting vacant.

I think what moves me so much in Cash's music is his insistence upon the fact that one cannot escape the consequences of his actions (this is especially important in a culture where celebrity ethics are dominant--you know: you can cheat, steal, and sleep around, but you always have an out with the creation of a new image). It's apparent in "Hurt" and also in a song like "Delia's Gone." The tone of "Delia" is lighter than its content. The song is about the narrator's paying a visit to his lover in Memphis who's "low down and trifling/ And [...] cold and mean." After binding her to a chair, he shoots her in cold blood. The mood that the tune creates laid along side of the mood created by the words is chilling. Nevertheless, the murder isn't glorified in any sense. In his jail cell, the narrator sings, "But jailer, oh, jailer/ Jailer, I can't sleep/ 'Cause all around my bedside/ I hear the patter of Delia's feet." The song ends with this lesson: "So if you woman's devilish/ You can let her run/ Or you can bring her down/ and do her Like Delia got done/ Delia's gone, one more round/ Delia's gone."

However, this "lesson" has lost much of its effect in light of the narrator's inability to shake off the memory of his murdered lover. The dead are present in "Delia" and death is imminent in the "Hurt" video. This is the second reason I admire Cash's music. In his music, death is real but not glorified. From what I remember reading, the viewing of the "Hurt" video caused a hush to fall upon the crowd at the MTV music video awards in 2003, where Cash won for "Hurt." There is not much that can cause a hush in our culture anymore. As Christians, we are called to die to ourselves everyday. I think God knew that death would always hush the maddening crowds screaming for their rights and insistent upon their happiness above all else. Perhaps that's why he made it the means to life and perhaps that's why he calls his followers to it daily. You can click here to view Hurt.

Exodus Ministry Applauds Anglican Head's 'Stand for the Truth'

2006-09-02T14:58:00.000-06:00

In an interview with The Sunday Telegraph, [Rowan] Williams said, "Ethics is not a matter of a set of abstract rules, it is a matter of living the mind of Christ. That applies to sexual ethics."I don't believe inclusion is a value in itself. Welcome is. We don't say 'Come in and we ask no questions'. I do believe conversion means conversion of habits, behaviors, ideas, emotions."

You can read the rest of this article here. You can also read about Exodus.

He-Man Jesus

2006-08-11T21:18:00.000-06:00

Traditionally, the church has understood Jesus to have been "unlovely" based on certain passages in Isaiah, etc. Nevertheless, to me, it does seem plausible that he would have had muscle mass sufficient to meet the demands of his occupation--that of a carpenter (or stone mason, as some have hypothesized). That may indeed be plausible, but this is ridiculous. This is from Purgatorio (see sidebar for link).

A Dose of Dorothy Sayers

2006-08-11T13:26:00.000-06:00

"A society in which consumption must be artificially stimulated in order to keep production going is a society founded on trash and waste, and such a society is a house built upon sand."

Dorothy Sayers
Source: Creed or Chaos, Sophia Press, 1949, 1974, pg. 64
(you can find more quoatations on wealth and poverty here)

Regardless of how extreme one may consider Sayers' view in this quotation, it should at least make him consider how his light is spent.

Real scientists are poetic

2006-08-11T10:36:00.000-06:00

I found this article through Arts and Letters Daily (see the sidebar for link). It's a great reminder that even scientists--with all the precise and seemingly exhaustive (but flattened) language they use to describe reality--still must resort to metaphor. Man still--even in this scientific age--must use symbols to try to grasp his world.

From the article:
"I love analogies most of all, my most reliable masters who know in particular all secrets of nature," Kepler wrote in 1604. "We have to look at them especially in geometry, when, though by means of very absurd designations, they unify infinitely many cases in the middle between two extremes, and place the total essence of a thing splendidly before the eyes."

Inspiration and Incarnation

2006-08-08T08:57:00.000-06:00

I am putting together a theology curriculum for my new job. I found a review by Susan Wise Bauer on Peter Enn's book Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament. I have not read the book, but Wise Bauer's review of it causes me to believe that it would be a helpful resource for biblical study. Here's an excerpt from her piece on Enns' book:

[The] God who spoke to man through Christ also speaks to man through Scripture, and in much the same way: he enters into our world and uses our own cultural patterns to reveal himself. We cannot insist that there is a separate, ahistorical, all-divine message in any part of the Bible that somehow triumphs over all contemporary thought and custom. This, Enns writes, is a modern version of the ancient Docetic heresy, which held that Christ only seemed human. "What some ancient Christians were saying about Christ," he writes, "… is similar to the mistake that other Christians have made (and continue to make) about Scripture: it comes from God, and the marks of its humanity are only apparent, to be explained away.

To insist on an "a-historical, all-divine message in any part of the Bible" is--as Wise Bauer says of Enns book--to fall prey to the Docetist impulse (a brand of Gnosticism particularly influential in the early church) and fail to see the fundamental nature of the Incarnation not only to the Christian faith but also to all of reality and knowing.

Leithart on Why Evangelical's Can't Write

2006-08-07T11:25:00.000-06:00

The most recent edition of Credenda Agenda is chiefly about Flannery O'Connor. An article that struck me the most was Peter Leithart's Why Evangelical's Can't Write. His thesis:

Here is a thesis, which I offer in a gleeful fit of reductionism: Modern Protestants can't write because we have no sacramental theology. Protestants will learn to write when we have reckoned with the tragic results of Marburg, and have exorcised the ghost of Zwingli from our poetics. Protestants need not give up our Protestantism to do this, as there are abundant sacramental resources within our own tradition. But contemporary Protestants do need to give up the instinctive anti-sacramentalism that infects so much of Protestantism, especially American Protestantism.

The reference above to Marburg is there because Leithart opens his article with the 1529 Colloquy at Marburg where Zwinglians and Lutherans met to debate and come to an agreement on Luther's doctrine of the real presence in the Eucharist. After agreeing to fourteen of the fifteen propositions put forth by Luther, the Zwinglians--once they were home, after the colloquy--took up the cudgels once again for the Eucharist as mere memorial and the Lutherans once again fought back with their real presence position.

Leithart's argument for why evangelicals can't write goes back to this historical occasion. When the Zwinglians and Lutherans finally parted ways for good at the Diet of Augsburg in 1530, the Protestant mind would forever be influenced by the rift:

Marburg is important not so much for what it achieved but as a symbol of what it failed to achieve. It provides a symbolic marker not only for the parting of the ways between Lutheran and Zwinglian, but also, for Zwinglians, the final parting of the ways between symbol and reality. J. P. Singh Uberoi claimed that "Spirit, word and sign had finally parted company at Marburg in 1529. For centuries, Christian sacramental theology had held symbol and reality together in an unsteady tension, but that alliance was ruptured by the Zwinglian view of the real presence. For Zwingli, "myth or ritual . . . was no longer literally and symbolically real and true." In short, "Zwingli was the chief architect of the new schism and . . . Europe and the world followed Zwingli in the event."
For many post-Marburg Protestants, literal truth is over here, while symbols drift off in another direction. At best, they live in adjoining rooms; at worst, in widely separated neighborhoods, and they definitely inhabit different academic departments.

More reflections on a culture's twilight years.

2006-08-06T14:13:00.000-06:00

I thought I would add this post due to the arguments (10 non-scriptural arguments against same-sex marriage) Anthony Esolen has been developing at Mere Comments.

As far as I can discern, the strongest argument against same-sex marriage (SSM) seeks to deal with the assumptions of the SSM position--namely, that our bodies matter little and what is really essential is the "heart" i.e. what a person feels, thinks, etc. apart from what they do. Of course, what one does has largely to do with the limits placed upon them by their bodies. But in a society where gender--i.e. the body--is downplayed to make room for pure choice (choice in the abstract divorced from the body), bodily limits matter little.

I just ran into Harvey Mansfield, a long-time professor of government at Harvard, on the web. I am sure his views are controversial, but I am interested in reading more of his works. Here's an excerpt from a June 2006 article he wrote for Imprimis, the newsletter of Hillsdale College:

Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (1949), an earlier and more fundamental book than [Betty] Friedan's, had argued that women were not different from men by nature, but only by history. It was a history of oppression by men that kept women from being as aggressive and assertive as men are. With the title of her book, Beauvoir implies that men live a better life than women, that manliness is better than femininity. Since women are perfectly capable of manliness, that quality should no longer be named for one sex. Beauvoir renamed it “transcendence,” a gender-neutral term. The gender-neutral society was born and manliness as the quality of a sex was demoted to masculinity, a title that signifies such homely features as the hair on your chest and your face.

Thus feminism, in its eagerness to claim manliness for women, destroyed femininity. We began to see gangster movies with lovely actresses playing the role of hit men. Some feminists denounced the manly passion for competition and war, but in doing so they had to be careful not to imply that women are unsuited for business or for the military. Since the Sixties, we have become used to seeing women in men's occupations. Yet the gender-neutral society created by today's feminism is not in fact as neutral as it claims. Despite its dislike of the word manliness, it is on the whole friendly to the quality, now under a new name, more neutral and prosaic, such as “leadership.” On the one hand, the world seems to have been feminized, yet on the other hand, it is still a man's world, and in a strange way even more so, because both sexes are now engaged in employments that reward the manly qualities of aggression and assertiveness.

With the push for a gender-neutral society, not only is masculinity and femininity diminished, or "destroyed" as Mansfield says, but language is abused and loses its ability to carry meaning. Just look at how vague and un-concrete the words transcendence and leadership are. They are attached to nothing in our concrete experience. They're abstractions and their popularity today--or at least leadership's popularity--reveals just how threatening the particular is to our culture. Particulars--such as bodies--ostensibly restrict freedom. Notice Mansfield suggests that when the "more neutral and prosaic" term leadership was preferred over manliness, a shift in society began. But this shift was not merely about gender differences, it was a shift in language and imagination. So maybe we should say that when a language begins to lose its particular-ness, the loss of a collective meaning is not far behind--nor is all sorts of confusion--especially, the confusion of male and female.

The Evolution of a Worshipper

2006-08-05T20:21:00.000-06:00

I found this cartoon at Texanglican's blog. It's a simple, yet apt, illustration of the change many have undergone in their discipleship. There are more at cartoonchurch.com.

More from Anthony Esolen

2006-08-03T17:45:00.000-06:00

Anthony Esolen at Mere Comments has added to his "non-scriptural arguments against homosexual marriage." His #5 is especially compelling. I once had a professor at the University of Dallas make the comment that those of us living in a post-Freudian age can no longer enjoy deep friendships among people of the same sex. The reason? Freud's musings have pathologized all such friendships. One cannot have a friendship such as the one David had with Jonathan in the Old Testament without a suspicious eye immediately darting their way. Esolen's thoughts are similar:

If homosexuality is at the least not publicly condoned, then that may clear away sufficient ground for men to forge the emotionally fulfilling friendships that they once enjoyed in the past. Such friendships have been at the base of many a cultural renaissance [...]. But the point is that the prohibition is public, and helps constitute the meaning, to oneself and to others, of one’s attachment to a member of the same sex. Not so long ago, it was conceivable to suppose that two men might share an apartment merely as close friends; if Oscar and Felix of The Odd Couple did the same thing now, homosexuality would be the first thing to cross your mind, whether you support the homosexual agenda or reject it [...].

The effect upon boys is devastating; it is hard for women to understand it. Their own friendships come easily, and in general are not based upon shared conquest, physical or intellectual. It is simply an anthropological fact that male friendship is essential for the full development of the boy’s intellect: the history of every society reveals it. But now the boys suffer under a terrible pincers attack. The sexual revolution causes them to rouse themselves to interest, or to pretend to interest, in girls long before they or the girls are emotionally or intellectually ready for it; and now the condonement of homosexuality prevents them from publicly preferring the company of their own sex.

Flu besets badminton 'birdies'

2006-08-01T19:45:00.000-06:00

As one who was introduced to the smashing game of Badminton in college --I took it twice for P.E. credit--I believe this to be important news.

Here's an excerpt:

Chinese geese have been destroyed by the millions to prevent the spread of the disease, and that has left a shortage of the fine feathers used to make shuttlecocks.
Only the thickest, heaviest goose feathers from northern China are used to make premium shuttlecocks and sometimes as few as two feathers per goose make the final cut.
But now, shuttlecock makers are having to settle for substandard feathers -- and that's leaving players a little ruffled.
The sport's devotees in Southern California say the latest projectiles -- also called birdies -- just aren't the same.

Marriage is a Kind of Death

2006-07-28T14:30:00.000-06:00

I thought I would continue my posts on family/marriage. I found this article from Touchstone magazine today while perusing Park Cities Presbyterian's website. Peter Leithart from New St. Andrew's College in Moscow, ID wrote a wise and much needed article on marriage where he quotes Alexander Schmemann. The article's central theme is that marriage is a kind of death--but good death. Here's how Leithart closes out the article:

Nearly four decades ago, Alexander Schmemann argued that the problem with modern marriage "is not adultery or lack of ‘adjustment’ or ‘mental cruelty.’" Instead, he wrote, the problem is the "idolization of the family" that identifies "marriage with happiness" and refuses "to accept the cross in it." God’s presence as a "third party" in the marriage spells "the death of the marriage as something only ‘natural,’ and directs it to its true end of the kingdom of God.

In short, Schmemann continued, with characteristic elegance, the glory of marriage is "that of the martyr’s crown. For the way to the Kingdom is the matyria: bearing witness to Christ. And this means crucifixion and suffering. A marriage that does not constantly crucify its own selfishness and self-sufficiency, which does not ‘die to itself’ that it may point beyond itself, is not a Christian marriage."

What's a sign that your culture is nearing its twilight years?

2006-07-27T11:47:00.000-06:00

Anthony Esolen over at Mere Comments has begun a series of entries to that blog defending traditional marriage, but his reasons for his defense, as he clarifies it, do not come from his religious convictions:

Most people believe that the principal objections, or even the only objections, to the drive to legalize homosexual “marriage” spring from religious faith. But that is simply not true. Beginning with this post I'll offer ten objections that have nothing to do with any religion at all, except insofar as the great religions of the world happen to reflect the nature of mankind. These objections spring from three sources.

Those three sources are the common sense observation of man, a consideration of history, and logic. He posts his first two objections today, which are 1) The legalization of homosexual “marriages” would enshrine the sexual revolution in law; and 2) [The legalization of homosexual marriage] would, in particular, enshrine in law the principle that sexual intercourse is a matter of personal fulfillment, with which the society has nothing to do.

Esolen teaches English at Providence College and his literary and erudite observations are needed in this fight against the dissolution of marriage and our culture. As Esolen says:

Some people reckon up the losses from this [sexual] revolution in terms of percentages: of unwed mothers, of aborted pregnancies, of children growing up without a parent, usually the father. It will take artists of the most penetrating insight to reckon up the losses as they ought to be reckoned, in human misery.

Pics from Anniversary Trip to Six Flags

2006-07-24T17:17:00.000-06:00

Wife and I thought a trip to Six Flags would be a fun way to spend our anniversary time together. It proved to be true. Notice from the photo above that, in marriage, we have so completely become one that I have begun to sprout her arms as headwings.

Not everyone who rode The Conquistador had as much fun as we did.

Anniversary

2006-07-24T16:53:00.000-06:00

Two years ago today, my wife and I were married. It's good and still getting better. Here's the poem that I asked a good friend of mine to read at our wedding. It's by Richard Wilbur.

Wedding Toast

St. John tells how, at Cana's wedding feast,
The water-pots poured wine in such amount
That by his sober count
There were a hundred gallons at the least.

It made no earthly sense, unless to show
How whatsoever love elects to bless
Brims to a sweet excess
That can without depletion overflow.

Which is to say that what love sees is true;
That this world's fullness is not made but found.
Life hungers to abound
And pour its plenty out for such as you.

Now, if your loves will lend an ear to mine,
I toast you both, good son and dear new daughter.
May you not lack for water,
And may that water smack of Cana's wine.

Here's a bonus poem by Wilbur.

Having Misidentified A Wildflower

A thrush, because I'd been wrong,
Burst rightly into song
In a world not vague, not lonely,
Not governed by me only.

Dallas Diocese Joins Protest against New Episcopal Head

2006-07-07T16:30:00.000-06:00

From Christian Post.com:

The Episcopal Diocese of Dallas on Wednesday joined a growing rejection of the church's newly elected bishop because she supports same-sex relationships.
Bishop James M. Stanton, the head of Dallas' diocese and its 40,000 members, wrote a letter asking Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams for a "direct pastoral relationship" from overseas instead of being under the American church and its new leader.

Hybrid Hondas, Hybrid Fords...Hybrid Hamburgers.

2006-06-28T22:10:00.000-06:00

"I'll have the hybrid combo that's completely meatless and tastes like chicken, beef, pork or turkey and a Diet Coke. Thanks."

Texas Episcopal Megachurch to Leave Denomination

2006-06-28T22:03:00.000-06:00

I have been occasionally following the problems in the Episcopal church in America. Christ Church in Plano (just north of where I am in Dallas) has decided to leave the Episcopal Church because of the recent election of Nevada Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori as its first female presiding bishop. "Jefferts Schori supported the 2003 consecration of V. Gene Robinson of New Hampshire, the first openly gay Episcopal bishop. She also supported the creation of locally authorized blessings for gay unions." Read more here.

Western Conference Champs!

2006-06-04T15:48:00.000-06:00

Pentecost

2006-06-04T15:33:00.000-06:00

From The Daily Gospel:

Saint Anthony of Padua (around 1195 – 1231), Franciscan, Doctor of the Church.
"Sermons for Sundays and the Feasts of the Saints"

Tongues as of fire appeared.” Tongues – those of the serpent, of Eve and Adam, had given death access to this world… That is why the Spirit appeared in the form of tongues, opposing tongues with tongues, healing the fatal poison by means of fire… “They began to speak.” That is the sign of fullness; the full vessel overflows; the fire cannot contain itself… These diverse tongues are the various lessons that Christ left us, such as humility, poverty, patience, obedience. We speak in these various tongues when we give our neighbor an example of these virtues. The word is alive when the works speak. Let us make our works speak!

How 'Bout Them Mavs!

2006-05-22T21:28:00.000-06:00

It feels like the Mavericks just won the entire championship with the way this series went. Go Mavs!

Dr. Gene Scott: Pastor, Scholar, Cigar Aficionado

2006-05-21T11:24:00.000-06:00

(I am posting this mostly for the benefit of my wife who has never had the pleasure of viewing a Gene Scott television show.) Just thought I would post a little something on one of the true televangelists ever to grace a T.V. screen: Gene Scott. He's was a "pastoral teacher," scholar (with a Ph.D. in education), philanthropist, vineyard owner and lover of fine wines...well, you can read the rest here.

I'm not selling forty-pound Bibles, or water from Jordan, or 4,000 plastic crosses made by the Japanese and sold to Arabs. I don't send out 'healing cloths' or tear up my shirt. I say: what's what I've done worth? Whatever the meal I've fed you is worth, pay up. I'm not trying to save anybody. I think if you reject Christianity, you should do it intelligently.

-- Gene Scott (1929-2005)

Saddam Hussein: The Next Salman Rushdie?

2006-05-20T14:30:00.000-06:00

Apparently Saddam has always had a penchant for writing novels. Seriously. This latest installment of his was supposedly written just before the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003. It has just been published in Japan. Those crazy Japanese. You can read about it here.

The Da Vinci Code secret is out: critics hate it

2006-05-17T09:49:00.000-06:00

I haven't been a very vocal critic about The Da Vinci Code: not because I am a latent fan of Dan Brown's fiction but because I have not had time to read any of it. Nevertheless, I find this article from Reuters interesting. Da Vinci has apparently gone over like a lead balloon with some critics at Cannes. Here's an excerpt:

At a screening late on Tuesday in Cannes, members of the audience laughed at the thriller's pivotal moment, and the end of the $125 million picture was greeted with stony silence.

Here's another article with these comments:

Other critics said the two and a half hour film was confusing to those who hadn't read the book.
"People were confused, there was no applause, just silence," said Margherita Ferrandino from the Italian television Rai 3.
"I have only read half the book, and then I got bored. It's terrible," she added.
"It was really disappointing. The dialogue was cheesy. The acting wasn't too bad, but the film is not as good as the book," added Lina Hamchaoui, from British radio IRN.

Muslims and Catholics Together

2006-05-16T22:39:00.000-06:00

Catholic Christians in India have threatened to stage a large protest at the premiere of The Da Vinci Code and consequently have forced a temporary halt on the opening of the film. Muslims have even joined in.

In India, complaints against the film forced the government on Tuesday to put a temporary hold on the release of “The Da Vinci Code,” in order to address concerns before the film is opened to the public. Prior to the decision, several Catholic groups threatened to stage street demonstrations and even to shut down cinema halls screening the film. Joining in the call on Monday was the All-India Sunni Jamiyat-ul-Ulema, a powerful organization of Indian Islamic clerics, which promised to help Christian groups launch protests if the authorities did not ban the screening of the film. The clerics said "The Da Vinci Code" is blasphemous as it spreads lies about Jesus, who the Koran recognizes as a prophet.

You can read the rest here.

Bible literalism 'pagan superstition'?

2006-05-07T14:46:00.000-06:00

Vatican astronomer Guy Consolmagno says believing God created the universe in six days is a form of "pagan superstition."

Consolmagno told the Scotsman the idea that religion and science are competing principles is a "destructive myth."

Read the rest here.

Love and Marriage

2006-05-06T20:16:00.000-06:00

I found this great quotation that Anthony Esolen posted at the Mere Comments blog on April 29. It's from Sir Philip Sydney: I know him for a work called A Defense of Poetry. I also know of him because C.S. Lewis was well acquainted with his work. The quotation is below, and you can read Esolen's musings on it here.

"A happy couple: he joying in her, she joying in herself, but in herself, because she enjoyed him: both increasing their riches by giving to each other; each making one life double, because they made a double life one; where desire never wanted satisfaction, nor satisfaction ever bred satiety: he ruling, because she would obey, or rather because she would obey, she therein ruling." From Sir Philip Sidney, Arcadia (1593).

T.V.

2006-04-28T14:00:00.000-06:00

I have an ambivalent attitude toward TV. I watched TONS of it as a kid and read little. My wife was just the opposite: she looks at me as though I'm speaking a foreign language when I begin to reminisce about my TV viewing in the '80's. At times, I hate the TV--with all its commercials and mind-numbing flickering--but then, at other times, despite the flaws it possesses as a medium, there are some things I really enjoy watching. Here's a cleverly written and insightful article expressing some of these very same sentiments. In fact, here's as snippet:

Of course, TV has always been mostly awful. “Boob tube” did not begin as an anatomical observation. The myth persists of a Golden Age of Television in the 1950s, but the blurry surviving kinescoped evidence yields a baser metal. Way back in May 1961, Newton Minow, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, called TV “a vast wasteland.” Well, the landscape is a lot vaster 44 years later, and still wasted, but how could it not be? TV never stops any more; there’s just too much of it. In the late 1940s, a station played “The Star Spangled Banner” by 10 p.m. and signed off for the night. The citizenry rested—or read or did their bit for the baby boom. There’s not enough talent even in today’s fame-crazed United States to keep TV interesting all the time. Remember: Most books are not worth reading either. And not every play took a prize in old Athens; the relatively few that survive by no means represent the lot that did not.

And I had to include this one just because he mentions one of my favorite shows, King of the Hill...

King of the Hill dates from 1997, but it’s never had the breakout success it deserves, which may be a good thing. Fame hasn’t gone to its head, as happened with The Simpsons. (Fox routinely sacrifices Hill on Sunday evenings to the gods of interminable football games.) The series has stayed steadily on track and low-key hilarious, at once a send-up and an affirmation of red-state America values. The Hill family of Arlen, Texas, may shop at the big-box Mega-Lo Mart, but they’re TV royalty: levelheaded patriarch Hank (the anti-Homer Simpson), purveyor of propane and propane accessories; his wife, Peggy, a substitute high school teacher, sometimes of Spanish, who has to wing it after hola; and their ample, affable, and fitfully adolescent 13-year-old son, Bobby, of Tom Landry Middle School. Good people all, who deserve a more compliant world.

Christianity and the Arts

2006-04-26T21:13:00.000-06:00

I have been leading a class at my church through C.S. Lewis' Screwtape Letters. I found this short article called "TheImportance of the Arts to Christianity" by Louis Markos. It's very insightful. Markos is a Lewisian, and I found it here. Here it is:

THE IMPORTANCE OF THE ARTS TO CHRISTIANITY

by Louis Markos, Houston Baptist University

1. Through a proper use of the arts, we must heal the enlightenment split between religion and science, art and technology, values and facts, myth and history, fiction and fact, emotional and rational, intuition and logic, revelation and reason, secular and sacred, poetry and doctrine. We need a re-synthesis, one that will allow us to worship God with our minds and hearts. We need to use the arts to heal what T. S. Eliot called “the dissociation of sensibility” that set in c. 1800. A proper use of the arts may even help us to re-integrate the modern Christian divide between a too-rigid focus on systematic theology and an overly-emotional emphasis on spiritual gifts.

2. We need the arts to make Christian theology come real. Art comes closer than systematic theology at expressing and capturing the mystery inherent in the Trinity. Art, in bringing together the abstract and the particular, the universal and the concrete points to the Incarnation—the central belief that Jesus was FULLY Man and FULLY God. We can learn from the Eastern Orthodox focus on icons as proclaimers of the Word made Flesh. The Incarnation baptized physical matter as a fit receptacle for divine meaning and presence. We need not be iconoclasts or fear representations of holy subjects (as do the Muslims and as did the Jews)

3. The producing, absorbing, and interpreting of the arts exercises the mind to under-stand the many levels of meaning in Scripture. Augustine and Aquinas both felt that God purposely made the Bible difficult so that we would have to wrestle with it (Bible is not stream-lined, not all slick packaging). A full wrestling with the arts and the stories that underlie them helps us to perceive and to engage sacred history. It helps us to see and understand that God works THROUGH history; Bible is mostly told from man’s perspective. (Dream of the Giant; Dante forces us to learn history.)

4. We must be salt and light in the world; we must engage our culture through the arts. The arts speak to people on a deep level; they form people’s opinions and attitudes in a way that is often not seen. The battle is often won through images, for it is around images that people often hang their beliefs and goals. The influence of rap, heavy metal and MTV is far more harmful than anyone gives it credit for.

5. The arts are vital to the artist, for we MUST use our gifts (Matt 25). Even if no one reads/hears our work, through the very fact that we produced it, we praise God. We must strive for excellence—not just be good enough to sing on Sunday morning.

6. The arts help us to perceive and/or build connections everywhere. By so doing, they allow us: a) to rebuild the sympathetic universe that the medievals saw and that Dante embodied most fully; 2) to see that Christ fulfills not only the Jewish Law/Prophets but all the deepest philosophical, theological, and aesthetic yearnings of mankind; 3) to be better evangelists and apologists through an ability to re-incarnate the Gospel in a variety of different cultures; 4) to praise God through a symphony of voices.

Louis Markos, Houston Baptist Univ., lmarkos@hbu.edu,

http://fc.hbu.edu/~lmarkos

Another from The Daily Gospel

2006-04-20T17:52:00.000-06:00

The early church doctors' and fathers' poetic understanding of Scripture and salvation history is beautiful:

Commentary of the day : Saint Peter Chrysologus (around 406 – 450), Bishop of Ravenna, Doctor of the Church Sermon 81

“Jesus came and stood before them. ‘Peace be with you.’”

Rebellious people had chased peace from the earth… and thrown the world into its primordial chaos… Among the disciples as well, war was waging; faith and doubt fought furious assaults on one another… Where a storm was raging, their hearts could find no peaceful harbor, no calm port. At the sight of that, Christ, who plumbs the hearts, who commands the winds, who is master over the tempests and who with a simple sign changes the storm into a serene sky, strengthened them with his peace, saying: “Peace be with you! It is I; fear not. It is I who was crucified, who was dead, who was buried. It is I, your God become man for you. It is I. Not a spirit clothed with a body, but truth itself become man. It is I, the living one among the dead, who have come from heaven to the heart of hell. It is I before whom death fled, whom hell feared. In its terror, hell proclaimed me to be God. Do not be afraid, Peter, you who denied me, nor you, John, who fled, nor all of you who abandoned me, who thought of nothing but betraying me, who do not yet believe in me, even though you see me. Do not be afraid, it really is I. I have called you with grace, I have chosen you with forgiveness, I have upheld you with my compassion, I have carried you in my love, and I am taking you today solely because of my kindness.”

Deconstructing Lewis Part 3

2006-04-20T17:44:00.000-06:00

I'm having to backtrack a bit on the last post. I've come to a better understanding of Kathryn Lindskoog (now deceased) and her position in the wars between her and the estate of C.S. Lewis, with its literary advisor, Walter Hooper. This article explains the whole thing. While I still have my doubts about Hooper, I have come to understand Lindskoog a little better. Her zeal for Lewis and his works was admirable, but it seems that it often led her to hasty judgments and conclusions.

Deconstructing Lewis Part 2

2006-04-17T15:12:00.000-06:00

Last week, I had a beef with Adam Gopnik's critique of Alan Jacob's The Narnian, which was published in the The New Yorker a few months ago. Gopnik relies heavily on A.N. Wilson's biography of Lewis. The picture Wilson paints of Lewis lack credibility: just read this article by Kathryn Lindskoog where she not only highlights Wilson's numerous factual errors but also reveals the agenda that is at back of those errors.

Good Friday

2006-04-14T15:56:00.000-06:00

God, who needs nothing, loves into existence wholly superfluous creatures in order that He may love and perfect them. He creates the universe, already foreseeing--or should we say "seeing"? there are no tenses in God--the buzzing cloud of flies about the cross, the flayed back pressed against the uneven stake, the nails driven through the mesial nerves, the repeated incipient suffocation as the body droops, the repeated torture of back and arms as it is time after time, for breath's sake, hitched up. If I may dare the biological image, God is a "host" who deliberately creates His own parasites; causes us to be that we may exploit and "take advantage of" Him. Herein is love. This is the diagram of Love Himself, the inventor of all loves. -- C.S. Lewis

George Herbert's "The Sacrifice"

2006-04-13T22:11:00.000-06:00

Anthony Esolen posted this today at the Mere Comments blog. It's a very good poem and by the author who wrote the poem from which the name of this blog comes.

....My cross I bear myself, until I faint:
Then Simon bears it for me by constraint,
The decreed burden of each mortal Saint:
Was ever grief like mine?

O all ye who pass by, behold and see:
Man stole the fruit, but I must climb the tree;
The tree of life to all, but only me:
Was ever grief like mine?....

Lo, here I hang, charged with a world of sin,
The greater world o' th' two; for that came in
By words, but this by sorrow I must win:
Was ever grief like mine?....

But, O my God, my God! why leav'st thou me,
The son, in whom thou dost delight to be?
My God, my God ----
Never was grief like mine.

From George Herbert, "The Sacrifice" (1633)

Maundy Thursday: The Institution of the Eucharist

2006-04-13T11:28:00.000-06:00

This is an appropriate quotation from C.S. Lewis for today, Maundy Thursday:

"I do not know and can't imagine what the disciples understood Our Lord to mean when, His body still unbroken and His blood unshed, He handed them the bread and wine, saying they were His body and blood...I find no difficulty in believing that the veil between the worlds [heaven and earth], nowhere else (for me) opaque to the intellect, is nowhere else so thin and permeable to divine operation. Here a hand in the hidden country touches not ony my soul but my body. Here the prig, the don, the modern, in me have no privilege over the savage or the child...The command, after all, was Take, eat: not Take, understand. Particularly, I hope I need not be tormented by the question 'What is this?'--this wafer, this sip of wine. That has a dreadful effect on me. It invites me to take 'this' out of its holy context and regard it as an object among objects, indeed as part of nature. It is like taking a red coal out of the fire to examine it: it becomes a dead coal." (from Letters to Malcolm, Ch.19)

See the previous post (below) for another good meditation for today in the church calendar.

Maundy Thursday: Love One Another As I Have Loved You

2006-04-13T10:57:00.000-06:00

Here's a wonderful meditation from Guerric of Igny (around 1080 – 1157), Cistercian abbot. 1st Sermon for Palm Sunday from www.dailygospel.org

“He had loved his own in this world, and would show his love for them to the end.”“Your attitude must be that of Christ.” … “He was in the form of God,” equal to God by nature, since he shared in God’s power, God’s eternity and God’s very being… He did the job of a servant “by humbling himself, obeying his Father even to death, death on a cross.” (cf. Phil 2:5-8) One might consider it to be trivial that, as God’s Son and his equal, he served his Father as a servant. More than that, he served his own servant more than any other servant. For the human being had been created to serve his Creator. What could be more just for you than to serve him who made you, without whom you would not be? And what could be more blest than to serve him, since to serve him is to reign? But the human being said to his Creator: “I will not serve.” (Jer 2:20)Then the Creator said to the human being: “So I will serve you! Go sit down at the table; I will serve. I will wash your feet. Rest. I will take your pains upon myself; I will carry your weakness… If you grow tired or are burdened, I will carry you, you and your burden, so as to be the first to fulfill my law: ‘Carry one another’s burdens’ (Gal 6:2)… If you are hungry or thirsty…, here I am, ready to be sacrificed so that you might eat my flesh and drink my blood… If you are taken into captivity or if you are sold, here I am… Redeem yourself by paying the ransom you will get from me. I give myself as ransom… If you are sick, if you fear death, I will die in your place, so that from my blood you can make for yourself a life-giving remedy…”O my Lord, what a price you paid to ransom my useless service!… What a way you had, full of love, of gentleness and of kindness, to win back and submit this rebellious servant by triumphing over evil through good, by confounding my pride with your humility, by filling this ungrateful person with your kindness! This! This is how your wisdom triumphed.

Deconstructing Lewis?

2006-04-12T14:27:00.000-06:00

This is old news, but I think it's worth bringing up...I just found this review of Alan Jacob's book The Narnian, which came out just before the movie this past Christmas. This review is by New Yorker critic Adam Gopnik. I found his review to be a poor piece of journalism. I say this not because of the dirt he uncovers on Lewis (Lewis doesn't hide his dirt, and what he does hide is out of a sense of propriety), which comes from A.N. Wilson's biography of Lewis' life (one that relies on the "hermeneutic of suspicion"). I say this because Gopnik's write up is dripping with a preunderstanding of Lewis that is reactive to Lewis' reception in America by conservative Christians. It's so reactive that it gets the most basic of details wrong. Consequently, his review is so biased with a desire to deconstruct Lewis that it fails to offer a fair reading.

Here's an example:

Converted to faith as the means of joy, however, Lewis never stops to ask very hard why this faith rather than some other. His favorite argument for the truth of Christianity is that either Jesus had to be crazy to say the things he did or what he said must be true, and since he doesn’t sound like someone who is crazy, he must be right.

Compare this to a letter from Lewis to Sheldon Vanauken published in Vanauken's book A Severe Mercy (pp.89-90). This is a long quotation but worth reading:

What you really start with [in the history of religion] is ritual, myth, and mystery, the death and return of Balder or Osiris, the dances, the initiations, the sacrifices, the divine kings. Over against that are the Philosophers, Aristotle or Confucius, hardly religious at all. The only two systems in which the mysteries and the philosophies come together are Hinduism and Christianity: there you get both Metaphysics and cult...That is why my first step was to be sure that one or the other of these [Hinduism or Christianity] had the answer. For the reality can't be one that appeals either only to savages or only to high brows. Real things aren't like that (e.g. matter is the first most obvious thing you meet--milk, chocolates, apples, and also the object of quantum physics). There is no question of just a crowd of disconnected religions. The choice is between (a.) The materialist world picture: wh. I can't believe (b.) The real archaic primitive religions: wh. are not moral enough (c.) The (claimed) fulfillment of these in Hinduism (d.) The claimed fulfillment of these in Christianity. But the weakness of Hinduism is that it doesn't really join the two strands...It is only Christianity wh. compels a high brow like me to partake in a ritual blood feast, and also compels a central African convert to attempt an enlightened universal code of ethics.

How one can say that Lewis really did not think through the "Liar, Lunatic or Lord" argument and can imply that he used it as a catchy word device to sum up his faith is beyond me. Moreover, Lewis did, in fact, look into Hinduism before converting to the Church (as the quotation above implies).

I am not for enshrining Lewis in the stain glass of churches--and undoubtedly, Lewis would not have wanted anything like this either--but at least give him a fair reading and be more careful in your journalism, Mr. Gopnik.

Collect for Wednesday

2006-04-12T13:15:00.000-06:00

This is the collect* for Wednesday of Holy Week taken from the Book of Common Prayer:

O Lord God, whose blessed Son our Savior gave his back to the smiters and hid not his face from shame: Grant us grace to take joyfully the sufferings of the present time, in full assurance of the glory that shall be revealed; through the same thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

* Collect: From the Latin word collecta, meaning "assembly." The word is normally used to refer to the prayer near the beginning of the Eucharist that precedes the lessons. The collect was supposedly designed to "collect" the thoughts of the lessons and bind the thoughts together, back in the days when only one lesson and a Gospel were read. A collect is actually any short prayer that contains an invocation, a petition, and a pleading in Christ's Name (in that order).
(You can find more Episcopalian/Anglican terms at http://www.holycross.net/anonline.htm)

Poetry Exercise

2006-04-11T22:08:00.000-06:00

"The Hound"

Life the hound
Equivocal
Comes at a bound
Either to rend me
Or to befriend me.

I cannot tell
The hound's intent
Till he has sprung
At my bare hand
With teeth or tongue.
Meanwhile I stand
And wait the event.

--Robert Francis (1901-1987)

What does this poem mean? Post you comments and we'll see what happens.

St. Peter and Language

2006-04-11T15:41:00.000-06:00

I started receiving this email called The Daily Gospel. It's quite good. It always has a commentary from an early church writer, father, doctor, etc. included at the end.
The gospel reading for today is from John 13.21-38. Can't we all identify with Peter?

Commentary of the day : Saint Maxim of Turin (? – around 420), Bishop CC Sermon 76, 317

“The cock will not crow before you have three times disowned me.Turning around, the Lord looked at Peter. And Peter, become aware of what he had just said, he repented and wept…; he broke into tears and remained mute… (cf. Lk 22:61-62). Words can not be successful in expressing a prayer, and they can never succeed in expressing tears. Tears always express what we are feeling, but words can be powerless. That is why Peter did not have recourse to words. Words had pushed him to betray, to sin, to deny his faith. He preferred admitting his sin by means of tears, since he had denied through words…Let us imitate him in what he said elsewhere, when the Lord asked him three times: “Simon, do you love me?” (Jn 21:17) Three times he answered: “Lord, you know that I love you.” Then the Lord said to him: “Feed my sheep,” and he said it three times. That word made up for his previous aberration. The one who had denied the Lord three times, confessed him three times; he had become guilty three times, three times he obtained grace through his love. See therefore what benefit Peter drew from his tears!… Before shedding tears, he was a traitor; once he had shed tears, he was chosen as pastor, and he who had behaved badly received the responsibility to lead the others.