Posts

Posted on

The three-martini Bible study

This humorous bit today from TechCrunch, a news site that follows web companies:

Traditionally, booze and social networking have always gone hand in hand. During the 20th century, men and women would leave their homes and visit drinking locations called “bars” and “pubs.” There they would imbibe various beverages and, if the fates intervened, would go home with each other for coffee and perhaps a moment or two of Bible study. Those, friends, were simpler times.

With the rise of electronic social networking, however, we find that the boozing imperative is sorely lacking. You could potentially send a friend a virtual beer on Facebook and most MySpace pages require ether or nitrous to truly appreciate in their gaudy brilliance but there is no one place you can go to meet some folks with similar interests and, ultimately, meet for coffee and/or the aforementioned Bible study. That was until CocktailMatch…

Riiiiiiiiight.

Photo credit

Posted on

Generous people just don’t get it, eh?

I’ve been reading God in a Cup: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Coffee, a pretty recent book by Michaele Weissman. It’s a travelogue and history of the most recent (2000 – present) rise in the specialty coffee industry. She spends a lot of time interviewing the roasters and barristas at ultra-hip joints such as Stumptown, Intelligentsia, and Counter Culture. She also spends quite a bit of time following them around in Central American and Africa as they visit the poor coffee growers face to face. It’s been a good read, though a little slow at times.

Anyway, these specialty folks really want to get their hands on better coffee. They have invested a lot of time and money into training the farmers in modern pruning, picking, and drying techniques to achieve a better product. Another way they’ve promoted quality is by holding contests in the countries of origin. A farmer whose beans place high are rewarded a premium at the following auction. This encourages competition and is an incentive to do a better job in the fields.

The largest of these yearly contest is called the Cup of Excellence. Remember, these farmers and their families live in tiny huts and make just a few cents an hour. They are some of the poorest folks in the world. The author had this to say about some of the contest winners:

It’s hard to imagine what $20,000 or $60,000 can mean to a impoverished coffee farmer. One year the top winner in Honduras was so poor that he couldn’t afford a bus ticket. He had to hitch a ride to the auction is Cup of Excellence earnings enabled him to get out of debt, purchase another small plot of land, and buy drying racks to prevent his coffee from rotting on the ground. In 2005 one of the top winners in Nicaragua, a small, spirited woman, used half her earnings to build a guest house; now her coffee plantation is an ecotourism destination, and she has diversified revenue stream. Not all the growers “get it,” of course. One bought a Hummer. Another gave all her winnings to her church. (p.49)

There is the heart of secular capitalism right there. The lady who gave all the money to her church just doesn’t “get it”.

And He sat down opposite the treasury, and began observing how the people were putting money into the treasury; and many rich people were putting in large sums. A poor widow came and put in two small copper coins, which amount to a cent. Calling His disciples to Him, He said to them, “Truly I say to you, this poor widow put in more than all the contributors to the treasury; for they all put in out of their surplus, but she, out of her poverty, put in all she owned, all she had to live on.”

– Mark 12:41-44

Now I applaud the farmers who got out of debt and invested in their future. That was a very wise thing to do with the money. That’s probably what I would have done! By upgrading his farm, he might now make thousands of dollars a year instead of a few hundred.

Oh, and a guest house for ecotourism. What a great idea! (Says the white Prius-driving, Berkley-educated English prof.) I’m booking a stay this summer!

The guy who bought the Hummer is obviously an idiot. It will take 3-months wages to fill it up with gas. Oops.

But the lady who gave all the money to her church just doesn’t get it. No she doesn’t. But she may “get it” more than anyone can imagine. The world is not worthy of her.

Photo credit

Posted on

Jesus the Phoenix? (Or lost in translation)

Early Christians often cited the myth of the phoenix as a powerful representation of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. This magnificent bird self-destructs in a ball of flame, but from the ashes it rises again, immortal. Here is a picture of one from Aberdeen Bestiary, an illuminated manuscript from the 12 century.

It’s a very old legend of Greek origin. How did it every get applied to Christ? It kind of works, but maybe there is more to it then that:

In some early Christian circles the analogy was thought to be sanctioned by the LXX of Ps. 92:12, where, in the phrase ‘the righteous shall flourish like a palm-tree’, the word for ‘palm-tree’ is ‘phoinix’, the same as the Greek for the legendary bird.

-N.T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, footnotes on p. 482

So when the writers of the Greek Septuagint (the LXX), were doing their translations of the Hebrew old testament in 2nd century BC, “palm-tree” got translated as “phoenix”. See, the Phoenix myth is actually about Jesus! It’s right there in the Bible! Well, sort of. There are some obvious parallels even without the scripture reference, but it’s hard to imagine people taking the analogy as seriously throughout the years if it were not there.

Posted on

Answer: The Library of Alexandria

My first week as a freshman in college, I was given the swift kick in the rear that is Dan Bukvich’s music theory and ear training course. 5 days a week. Very intense. No whining. I loved it, though I fell into some of the traps he sets for students early on.

I remember the very first lecture. After no introduction and with 80 students cramped together on the rehearsal room floor, we were taught a rhythm and concentration exercise involving plastic cups. After 30 minutes of this, he gave a short introduction and wrote a few notes on the chalk-board. He quickly mentioned that we would be learning a lot of something called “solfege“, and also said that the Library of Alexandra, which held all the knowledge of the ancient world, was burned in 391 AD as collateral damage when Emperor Theodosius had all pagan temples destroyed. Just an anecdote.

Back for class the next day. Chairs all out in rows. Exam! Test! Your first test of the semester already. This WILL count heavily in your grade. Etc. Take out a piece of paper. Write you name down. The test is pass or fail. One question: What year was the Library of Alexandria burned? OK, times up, hand you test into one of the TAs.

The collective murmer of “oh crap…” that went up from the room was a CLASSIC moment. From then on, my eyes and ears were glued to Dan. You learn to love him. Or not. Within a week, the class was down to about 50. They decided they didn’t really want to study music after all.

Posted on

On deadly books and the labyrinths they hang out in

Who can resist the fascination of a labyringth of books? Piles of ancient tomes on either side. Treasures and mysteries to be uncovered behind every bin. Some of the best bookstores and libraries are messy ones with dim light, cramped ceilings and cryptic sorting. Or soaring shelves with ladders and vast collections. I’ve read three books recently that all feature this very environment at the center of their plots. Be careful with the volumes you pick up out of these joints. They might be bad news. Barnes and Noble would be a safer bet.

Continue reading “On deadly books and the labyrinths they hang out in”

Posted on

Merton on Gossip

The function of gossip is, among other things, to permit people to enjoy danger vicariously, at no greater risk than that of being misled.

-Thomas Merton, Mystics and Zen Masters, p.258

Photo credit

Posted on

Throwing your children to the hyenas

On the necessity of good Christian schools:

I am overwhelmed at the thought of the tremendous weight of moral responsibility that Catholic parents accumulate upon their shoulders by not sending their children to Catholic schools. Those who are not of the Church have no understanding of this. They cannot be expected to. As far as they can see, all this insistence on Catholic schools is only a moneymaking device by which the Church is trying to increase its domination over the minds of men, and its own temporal prosperity. And of course most non-Catholics imagine that the Church is immensely rich, and that all Catholic institutions make money hand over fist, and that all the money is stored away somewhere to buy gold and silver dishes for the Pope and cigars for the College of Cardinals.

Is it any wonder that there can be no peace in a world where everything possible is done to guarantee that the youth of every nation will grow up absolutely without moral and religious discipline, and without the shadow of an interior life, or of that spirituality and charity and faith which alone can safeguard the treaties and agreements made by governments?

And Catholics, thousands of Catholics everywhere, have the consummate audacity to weep and complain because God does not hear their prayers for peace, when they have neglected not only His will, but the ordinary dictates of natural reason and prudence, and let their children grow up according to the standards of civilization of hyenas.

– Thomas Merton, The Seven Story Mountain, p.50

And this recently from Bob Myers, a pastor and Boar’s Head Tavern fellow:

My congregation mostly thinks that sending their children to schools where Jesus is never considered and fairly often slammed, letting them immerse themselves in popular culture movies, music, etc. is basically neutral, and an hour or so of exposure to Jesus every couple weeks is potent enough to tip the balance in Jesus’ favor.  Then, they are sometimes horrified, other times in denial, when their children start expressing unbelief and expressed resistance to their one hour every week or so.    I want to tell them, “don’t come crying to me”… but then again, who do I want these parents to come crying to? (emphasis mine)

Both my wife and I had a mix a private and public schooling. I was also home-schooled for a time. We would like to send both our children to a private Christian school. There are several good ones here in town. Now I just have a couple of years to come up with the extra $600/month to pay for it. Gak.

Photo credit

Posted on

N.T. Wright on reading scripture and trying to meet with God

Reading scripture, like praying or sharing in the sacraments, is one of the means by which the life of heaven and the life of earth interlock. (This is what older writers were referring to when they spoke of “the means of grace.” It isn’t that we can control God’s grace, but that there are, so to speak, places to go where God has promised to meet with his people, even if sometimes when we turn up it feels as though God has forgotten the date. More usually it’s the other way around.) We read scripture in order to hear God addressing us – us, here and now, today.

– N.T. Wright, Simply Christian, p.188

Posted on

Missing the picture for the paint

In the afterlife, our narrator speaks with the ghost of a gifted painter:

“When you painted on earth-at least in your earlier days-it was because you caught glimpses of Heaven in the earthly landscape. The success of your painting was that it enabled others to see the glimpses too. Light itself was your first love: you loved paint only as a means of telling about light.”

“Oh, that’s ages ago,” said the Ghost. “One grows out of that. Of course, you haven’t seen my later works. One becomes more and more interested in paint for its own sake.”

“One does, indeed. [He replied] I also have had to recover from that. It was all a snare. Ink and catgut and paint were necessary down there, but they are also dangerous stimulants. Every poet and musician and artist, but for Grace, is drawn away from love of the thing he tells, to love of the telling till, down in Deep Hell, they cannot be interested in God at all but only in what they say about Him.

– C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce, p.78

This is a huge trap that artists of all kinds fall into. I have known MANY guitarists who fret over their gear to no end. They save up their money to buy that $4000 acoustic, or maybe even the Brazilian rosewood one. They’ve got the best strings, the best pedals, the TC Electronics reverb, no, scratch that, the Lexicon reverb is better. The best… oh, except they never practice. They haven’t learned a new tune in 3 years. Where was the energy back when they used to rock that pawn shop Harmony?

Apparently this is a classic snare for photographers as well. The discussion here is enlightening. Someone posted this quote:

“Amateurs worry about equipment, pros worry about money, masters worry about light.”

-Unknown

When I dabbled in music history at graduate school, we were given a 20-page scholarly journal article that concerned the opening trill to one of Beethoven’s violin sonatas. That’s it. The whole mountain of work and footnotes was on how to play the first note of the piece. And it was actually in someone’s job description to write this kind of over-analysis on a regular basis. What happened to making music? (I would link to the article here, but it’s behind a closed access library site.)

It’s so easy to get wrapped up in the details of art. Half the magazines on the rack feed of this weakness in us. It effects every discipline. Oh, does it ever effect theology! Check out the quote again:

Every poet and musician and artist, but for Grace, is drawn away from love of the thing he tells, to love of the telling till, down in Deep Hell, they cannot be interested in God at all but only in what they say about Him.

Lewis saw this as a twisting of love. A corruption of loving and finding joy in a piece of God’s creation. It is “bent” as he would say in some of his other works. It is our temptation. Shake it off and live. Go create something.

Photo credit