Category: Uncategorized

The Chronicles of Narnia (All 7 books), C.S. Lewis (out loud to the kids, 5th time personally)
The Scapegoat, Rene Girard
God in the Dock, C.S. Lewis
Summa of the Summa, Thomas Aquinas/Peter Kreeft (partial)
Captain Alatriste, Arturo Perez-Reverte
Who Will Deliver Us?, Paul Zahl
Bed and Board, Robert Capon
The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien, (out loud to the kids, 5th time personally)
The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Shakespeare, and a bunch of commentary
Joy at the End of the Tether, Doug Wilson
Between Babel and Beast: America and Empire in Biblical Perspective, Peter Leithart
Singing Out: An Oral History of America’s Folk Music, David King Dunaway and Molly Beer
Little House on the Prairie, Laura Ingalls Wilder (out loud to the kids)
Mathematics and Plausible Reasoning: Volume I, George Polya
The Prophet, Kahil Gibran
Small is Beautiful, E.F. Schumacher
Beowulf, translated by Seamus Heaney
Javatrekker: Dispatches from the World of Fair Trade Coffee, Dean Cycon
A History of Ethiopia, Harold G. Marcus
Laying Down the Sword: Why We Can’t Ignore the Bible’s Violent Verses, Philip Jenkins

This passage from near the end of Jenkin’s latest book discusses how we in the west (both conservatives and liberals) have often viewed other religions erroneously through a Reformation-formed lens.

The Protestant inheritance [of sola scriptura] has led later writers to assume that for other religions too the scripture must represent the authoritative core of belief. As the West encountered other faiths during the age of imperialism, scholars published anthologies of thew world’s sacred texts, which set the scriptures of all the great faiths alongside on another. Such efforts made the fundamental assumption that to know a scripture was to understand the religion – although often editors had to struggle to find texts that played the same role in particular faiths that the Bible did in Christianity or Judaism. It was only after encounters with Christians that Hindus decided that the Bhagavad Gita offered a succinct description of their own faith, a counterpart to the New Testaments so freely distributed by missionaries. When Robert Ballou published his World Bible in 1944, he claimed to offer “the gist of each of the world’s eight most influential religious faiths, as revealed by their basic scriptures.”

But do scriptures, any scripture, contain the “gist” or kernel of any religion? One can make such an argument, and the compilers of such anthologies did. But they had a highly subjective view of what that gist might be, and what it “revealed.” Most editors carefully selected and stressed passages that, in their opinion, showed the religions at their ethical and even mystical best, suggesting that members of all faiths could unite in these common goals, whatever their petty differences of ritual or custom. In practice, all the world’s faiths seemed to become varieties of liberal Protestantism.[!!!]

However noble such an interpretation, it has little connection with the ordinary lived reality of any religious tradition, which is so thoroughly conditioned by its particular historical experience and cultural background.

-Philip Jenkins, Laying Down the Sword, ch.11

He goes on to imagine an alien learning the Bible thoroughly, then visiting the earth and trying to make sense out of a Catholic mass in Chicago, a Quaker meeting in London, a pilgrimage in the Philippines and (I’ll add) a Texas megachurch. How completely baffling that would be!

This all sounds remarkably similar to how European colonialism forced African nations to define their borders with a Sharpie – just like us, lest we grab anything that wasn’t clearly marked.

In many ways, this is the same challenge we have reading the Koran. Across the world, the local culture frequently trumps theology proper. Tribal loyalties and traditions often take precedence or strongly shape interpretation. As it turns out, learning to love, understand, or at least live with your neighbor requires many, many things – a fundamental understanding of their religion being just one piece of the puzzle, albeit a very important piece.

 

It looks like I’ve finally hit 1000 blog posts. I started pretty slowly in early 2007 and many of my early posts were entirely quotations or excerpts from what I was reading at the time. Over the years, actual original content has become a bit more predominant. It would be fun to run some more detailed stats on it sometime. Unfortunately, the regx functions in MySQL don’t work quite how I expect and I don’t want to bother with figuring them right now without all my tools handy. Oh well.

Still, I was able to get the following word count for all published posts: 361,272

Now, I have been faithful from the beginning put nearly every quotation or excerpt in blockquotes, making them indented on the page. There are exceptions, but they are few and they are balanced out my exceptions in the other direction I think. Fortunately, this allows me to easily remove them from the word count, revealing how many of those words are actually my own: 182,419.

Looking at this number is encouraging to me. I would someday like to write a book. Could I actually do it? Well, The Hobbit clocks in at 95K – about half of my original output for the past six years. That’s doable.

Why do I blog? Because I want to become a better writer. I was terrible and I wanted to be better. Now I am slightly less than terrible and there are even occasional satisfying sentences and even whole paragraphs to be discovered. It’s a joy – one that has proven more consistent (and possible) than practicing a musical instrument during the last half-decade. I don’t plan on stopping anytime soon, even if there are no readers. We’ll see if I’m ready to tackle something more substantial after 2000 posts.

In reading several chapters of a book on Ethiopian art, I was intrigued by the story of Adamu Tesfaw (b. 1922), a priest turned painter. He came from a family of rural craftsmen – his father was a painter and his brother a sculptor. He studied to be a priest and then also had an arranged marriage to a local girl as a young man. After four years, mostly abroad though, he discovered his wife had been unfaithful. (Perhaps because he was never around?!) So he reluctantly divorced her, but this means his career as a priest was over. He moved to the capital to paint, remarried and had 7 children, 4 of which died young. His work can be seen in churches all over Ethiopia. His style is like that of the ancient icon painters, but with some contemporary inventions of his own. In looking through a collection of them, I especially liked how he carefully how he uses the pupils of the eyes of his figures to add meaning (and occasionally mystery) to the scenes. It seems that he largely made his modest living by painting scenes commissioned by rich Italian tourists.

The author of the book, who befriended the artist and arranged to have his works displayed in a western gallery tour was very interested in the form of the works and the stylistic history. When Adamu was asked to pick seven pieces to send to the museum though, he surprised the organizer by picking what he considered to be the most important religious scenes he had depicted – many of which the author considered rather unremarkable compared to much of his other work. Different criteria indeed!

 

The following is a pile of things from my notebook without a home.

—

“The science of constructing a commonwealth, or renovating it, or reforming it, is not to be taught a priori.” -Edmund Burke

—

Good stuff here, as usual, from Amy Hoy:

Sometimes I think we smartypantses walk around expecting to be given a delicious cookie by The Universe as reward for thinking deep thoughts and soaring above the teeming masses on fluffy intellectual wings.

There’s no point in deep thinking, though, if it isn’t its own reward, if it isn’t helping us & those we love to be happier.

—

My thoughts at a recent mandatory Human Resources meeting/presentation:

No questions pending from the audience doesn’t mean the teacher was successful. It may mean the material was so ridiculous or mystifying that nobody even knows how to begin talking about it.

Also:

Why on earth does everyone have the word “executive” in their job title now? I smell language rot of the same sort that happened to “awesome”.

—

A question I have with regards to a phrase I still here in sermons a lot:

Is “what God designed you to be” simply hindered by our stupidity? What kind of nonsense is this? Is the creator so easily thwarted?

—

I’m listening to Loreena McKennit’s A Midwinter Night’s Dream a lot again this Christmas. Why? Partially because I can’t bring myself to work through the gigantic new Sufjan Stevens Christmas album and partially because I don’t want to buy the new Tracey Thorn Christmas album without listening to it first and none of the services I use seem to have it yet. Oh well.

—

Four more posts until 1000. Can it hit it before the end of the year? No problemo!

—

An absolutely fantastic example here from Taliesin, now calling himself TimothyOne on the differences between formality and spontaneity and why we need both. (The context is Christian worship, but it works for a lot of other things too.)

It’s not either-or.  It never is.  It’s not that spontaneous is authentic while planned is fake.  It is simply both, in their sequence.

Consider a man who arranges an elaborate marriage proposal, complete with memorized recitation, and kneeling, and holding of her hand as if it were the jewel of the raj.   He is not less authentic for all his planning; indeed, to the degree he searches precedent to adopt what others have done, he shows her how much she means to him.  And she will love him more for his trouble and formality.

But of she leaps across his papers to stop the recitation with a kiss, the man who can’t drop the outline and re-write the rite (I think the rubric now says “kiss”) – well, he’s a fool.  And if she doesn’t leap, she is obtuse.  If she doesn’t ruin the rite, she wasn’t worth writing it for, and if there is no rite, he does not deserve her.

—

 

 

In which I am vindicated (sort of) for starting sentences with “so”.

The first line of Beowulf reads: “Hwaet we Gar-Dena in gear-dagum”

Conventional renderings of hwaet, the first word of the poem, tend towards the archaic literary, with “lo” and “hark” and “behold” and “attend” and – more colloquially – “listen” being some of the solutions offered previously. But in Hiberno-English Scullionspeak, the particle “so” came naturally to the rescue, because in that idiom “so” operates as an expression which obliterates all previous discourse and narrative, and at the same time functions as an exclamation calling for immediate attention. So, “so” it was.

-Seamus Heaney, p.xxvii, (Introduction)

—

Where is this from?

Oh, cursed is he
who in time of trouble has to thrust his soul
in the fir’s embrace, forfeiting help;
he has nowhere to turn. But blessed is he
who after death can approach the Lord
and find friendship in the Father’s embrace.

What is this, Psalm 151? Sure could be. Nope. Beowulf again, but translated by someone who definitely reads the psalms.

—

The leader of the troop unlocked his word-hoard;
the distinguished one delivered this answer:

l.258-259

Unlock your word-hoard”. Whoa. That is the sort of threat free-style rappers still make today. Beware!

Think about how much the world has changed in the past century. We went from having no electricity to having space missions to Mars and smart phones. We’ve gone from under 2 Billion people to 6. I’ve heard it said that as a President, George Washington had a lot more in common with Julius Caesar than with George W. Bush or Barack Obama.

I’ve been reading several books about the history of Ethiopia. Probably its most famous figure of all time was the last emperor, Haile Selassie. I’ve been trying to sort out all the different accounts and figure out if he was really an amazing guy or not. What I’ve concluded is that he really was a astounding leader, but that NOBODY on earth could have led a people through all of the last century. He took Ethiopia from 1913 to the 1950s with clever diplomacy, wise ruling, and a culturally aware modernization campaign. In any other century, he would have been beloved for his entire tenure and died a hero. But the 20th century was just too big of a change for any one man to swallow. He’s was getting old by the time the sixties arrived and he just couldn’t swing it. He just couldn’t understand. The world was changing and he knew an older world. He had adapted marvelously, but he couldn’t adapt 100% again. And so he was finally pushed out of power by young brash communist rebels without much of a fight. In hindsight though, everyone that followed him made a giant mess. Now, he is remembered as presiding over the golden age, even though he was very unpopular near the end of his reign. Ras Tafari was a man with problems like anyone else, but he accomplished a rather staggering amount. I guess I dare anyone else to do as good a job.

Reading through this history also caused me to consider a potential weakness of our modern democratic republics. The term limits of our rulers give a different rhythm to political and cultural change than post models. A monarch by birth could have forty or even fifty years to rule with a consistent vision. He does something stupid? Guess what – he has a chance to learn from his mistake and fix things a few years later. In contrast, we in America are on a 6-8 year scapegoat cycle. That’s about how long it takes for us to get fed up with the last guy and remove him in favor of his ideological opposite. Nothing substantial ever happens because NOBODY is in it for the long haul. In the meantime, the crooked financial institutions try to make a quick buck while everyone is busy looking the other way.

It seems that to some degree, secularism (no fear of God) must necessitate this. Despite the great failings of Christian (and even Muslim) rulers over the last thousand years, one thing they DID have was an eschatology. The future meant something. The world had an actual end and they were working toward it. A Godless system has no future. We are blobs of organic matter pretending to have meaning. It naturally (and I mean that in every sense of the word, ‘naturally’) tends toward short-term gains. It may claim to care about the children of tomorrow, but this is really just something it inherited from people that feared God and really did care about their children. Its nihilism is still haunted by the Creator. So now we have short-lived politicians that are hailed today and tossed out tomorrow. Just like maxing out our credit cards instead of saving toward a purchase, we look to the here and now. We build, at best, for our retirement. Beyond that, who cares? Those who fear God care, even if they can’t handle all the challenges and changes that come in their own lives.

* Disclaimer: I am not advocating a return to monarchy, but just questioning the alleged shiny awesomeness of our current setup.

People naturally organize themselves into families, tribes, cultures, nations, etc. based on commonality- friendship, shared goals, shared beliefs, shared loves, and above all, shared dirt – geography. Political boundaries reflect this properly to the degree they are not manipulated by outsiders with money and power. An empire may be made by conquest, but it is still a collection of individual peoples. A nation-state though, purports to be a unity. What it is in reality though can vary widely. Only distant Europeans could have created the modern state of Iraq – a place where Sunnis and Shiite Muslims are thrown together to pretend to get along. Even the Kurds in the north get a piece of the action – like someone invited to the wrong party who spends the whole time playing with his smartphone. Syria is an even more artificially diverse state these days. That is why their civil war there is shaping up to be just about endless. America is often spoken of as some sort of great “melting pot” where distinctions melt away. Perhaps they have melted away here more than in any other previous large nation in history, but the heat is not nearly as total as some people assume. There are still some large solid chunks floating around in the pot – chunks that may be plenty happy to be scooped out on their own.

Reading the history of the last 500 years of Ethiopia has been something of an eye opener for me. I never realized how tribal and natural many of the borders have been for most of its long history. Border maybe isn’t the right word for it. Where in the south does Ethiopia stop and Kenya start? The people gradually change their identities over hundreds of miles. Families mix. Religions mix. There are no lines – it’s all blur. Sometimes the lines are hard. The red sea divides Ethiopia from Yemen and nobody even pretends like they could be part of the same club. Cultural differences are stronger along the Sudan border in the northwest as well. It hasn’t changed much in a millennia. The other borders though? Like the one with Somalia? All over the place. Just about every generation it changed. Actually, what it did was just remain fuzzy. It had always been fuzzy.

So why, when you look at a modern globe are there all these hard lines between every nation – thick boldface borders? Western colonialism is the answer. The British and Dutch and French and Spanish pushed and pushed and pushed to try to grab and rule as much as they could. And they wouldn’t take fuzzy for an answer. Everything fuzzy could be dominated and taxed by a European garrison and magistrate. So Africa was forced to chop itself up into hard-edge shapes to assert itself against the modern political scientists. Modern Ethiopia is really three very different people groups – The Amhara in the north, descendants of the ancient Abysinnian Empire (from Bible times), the Oromo in the west and south – a tribal and pastoral people with maybe more in common culturally with rural Kenyans or Ugandans, and the Somali people in the east. To this day, much of the country resents and resists the official Amharic language and the few metropolitan centers, such as Addis Abeba stand in contrast culturally to the rest of the country. The Orthodox church also hails from the north and has only ever made limited influence in the areas outside of the old empire, geographically. Christianity in these regions is much more syncretic and literacy is low. The modern country of Ethiopia came into being in the late 1800s. It’s all still there – glued together better than many African countries actually. But why should it’s borders not still be fuzzy? We don’t let it. We in the west need clean passports, clean currency, clean trade agreements and high-contrast maps.

The United States has stayed glued together for nearly 240 years. Every couple of election cycles, Texas starts making noises about striking out on its own. I don’t think we’ll actually see any of that any time soon, but I have real reservations that some our state borders can stay intact another 240 years. Some of them are just far too contrived, phoney, and short on meaning to the people that live on them. Some day, things will change. It may take another century for our population to become dense enough that some of these cultures can reach a local critical mass. Still, everything necessary for them to do so is already in place. People want to rule themselves. When the capital is one thousand, or even three thousand miles away, more than a few people start to feel like their on a long chain, no matter how fast their internet connection is.

Things change. Northern Ireland, according to a recent report, maybe now contains a Roman Catholic majority. Ethiopia has not been dominated by Islam like nearly all the rest of northern Africa, but it’s more a factor today than ever before. Here in the U.S., people point to maps of “red” and “blue” states or discuss the conservative “bible belt” or liberal New England. Still, we are melted enough for now.

From Victor Hugo in 1847, after the death of his daughter.

Ecrit au bas d’un crucifix

Vous qui pleurez, venez à ce Dieu, car il pleure.
Vous qui souffrez, venez à lui, car il guérit.
Vous qui tremblez, venez à lui, car il sourit.
Vous qui passez, venez à lui, car il demeure.

You who weep, come to this God, for he weeps.
You who suffer, come to him, for he cures.
You who tremble, come to him, for he smiles.
You who pass, come to him, for he remains.

HT: Mockingbird

each man on the bench who had sailed with Beowulf
and risked the voyage received a bounty,
some treasured possession. And compensation,
a price in gold, was settled for the Geat
Grendle had cruelly killed earlier –
as he would have killed more, had not mindful God
and on man’s daring prevent that doom.

-Beowulf, l.1050-1056, Seamus Heaney translation

Asleep by the bench at the mead-hall I lay, minding my own business. Why such wanton killing and why only me? What did I do wrong such that my name is not even remembered? As if any amount of gold could cover my loss of life. My captain knew my name and grieved at my death, though none saw it. He went on to immortal fame while I languished in a pool of blood, my flesh in the belly of a monster. I was originally excited to beam down to this exotic local. Our ship was strong on the waves, I was thrilled to tag along. Now I wish I had stayed home.