Saving Graces

2010-05-27T12:29:00.003-05:00

Thursday, May 27, 2010

Psalm 142 (143)

Lord, show me your mercy at daybreak.

Lord, listen to my prayer:

in your faithfulness turn your ear to my pleading;

in your justice, hear me.

Do not judge your servant:

nothing that lives can justify itself before you. ...

Come quickly and hear me, O Lord,

for my spirit is weakening.

Do not hide your face from me,

do not let me be like the dead,

who go down to the underworld.

Show me your mercy at daybreak,

because of my trust in you.

Tell me the way I should follow,

for I lift up my soul towards you.

Rescue me from my enemies:

Lord, I flee to you for refuge.

Teach me to do your will,

for you are my God.

Your good spirit will lead me to the land of justice;

for your name’s sake, Lord, you will give me life.

In your righteousness you will lead my soul

away from all tribulation.

Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit,

as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be,

world without end.

Amen.

Lord, show me your mercy at daybreak.

Psalm 146 (147A)

Let us give joyful praise to our God.

Praise the Lord!

It is good to sing praise to our God;

it is a joy to sing his praises. ...

He heals broken hearts

and binds up their wounds.

He counts all the stars;

he calls each of them by name.

Our God is great and great is his strength,

his wisdom is not to be measured.

The Lord supports the needy,

( but crushes the wicked to the ground.) ...

He covers the sky with his clouds,

he makes rain to refresh the earth.

He makes grass grow on the hills,

and plants for the service of man.

He gives food to grazing animals,

and feeds the young ravens that call on him.

He takes no delight in the strength of the horse,

no pleasure in the strength of a man.

The Lord is pleased by those who honour him,

by those who trust in his kindness.

Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit,

as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be,

world without end.

Amen.

Let us give joyful praise to our God.

– At the break of day I will reflect on you, O Lord.

Lord, make your people know your salvation, and forgive us our sins.

You created humans in your image and in Christ you renewed us:

shape us in the image of your Son.

– Lord, you are our life.

From Pope Benedict’s Homily in Lisbon during Fatima visit May 2010:

Always seek the Lord Jesus, grow in friendship with him, receive him in communion. Learn to listen to his word and also to recognize him in the poor. Live your lives with joy and enthusiasm, sure of his presence and of his unconditional, generous friendship, faithful even to death on the cross. Bear witness to all of the joy that his strong yet gentle presence evokes, starting with your contemporaries. Tell them that it is beautiful to be a friend of Jesus and that it is well worth following him. With your enthusiasm, demonstrate that, among all the different ways of life that the world today seems to offer us – apparently all on the same level – the only way in which we find the true meaning of life and hence true and lasting joy, is by following Jesus.

The latest version of the eschatological hope of modern human progress – but I do, more or less, agree with it. (How could I not?) Hopefully we just don’t destroy ourselves first.

From Matt Riddley in the Wall Street Journal:

“... ideas are having sex with each other as never before.”

Genetic diversity seems good for the species so why not cultural diversity too. Besides, I can’t help it. I think anthropologically.

A new Archbishop in LA - Does this mean anything?

“... in the audience was Cardinal Juan Luis Cipriani of Lima, Peru, a controversial prelate who is said to be a close friend of Gomez. Cipriani, who has clashed with human rights groups in Peru, is the first Catholic cardinal to be trained by the theologically conservative Opus Dei organization, which also trained Gomez.”

The Lord has defeated your enemies for you.

2010-05-25T10:47:00.002-05:00

Monday, May 24, 2010 Monday after Pentecost

From Commonweal.com –

St. Augustine refers in one sermon to the inundatio Spiritus–the flood of the Spirit.

Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Morning prayer -

– Lord, hear my voice: I have put all my hope in your words.

I rise at dawn and cry out to you.

– Lord, hear my voice: I have put all my hope in your words.

Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit.

– Lord, hear my voice: I have put all my hope in your words.

Psalm 101 (102)

Lord, let my cry come to you: do not hide your face from me.

Lord, listen to my prayer

and let my cry come to you.

Do not hide your face from me...

For my days vanish like smoke,

and my bones are dry as tinder.

My heart is cut down like grass, it is dry –

I cannot remember to eat. ...

My days fade away like a shadow...

But you, Lord, remain for ever...

I will say, “My God, do not take me away

half way through the days of my life.

Your years last from generation to generation:

in the beginning you founded the earth,

and the heavens are the work of your hands. ...

The children of your servants shall live in peace,

their descendants will endure in your sight.” ...

2010-05-22T21:53:00.002-05:00

Thursday, May 20, 2010

Psalm 86 (87)

“All my being springs from you.”

Saturday, May 22, 2010

If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Colossians 3:1

If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, then he who raised Jesus from the dead will give life to your own mortal bodies through his Spirit living in you. Romans 8:11

Almighty and ever-living God,

by your will the celebration of Easter

is summed up in the mystery of Pentecost.

2010-05-17T11:21:00.001-05:00

Monday, May 17, 2010

Psalm 83 (84)

Blessed the man whose help comes from you,

who has set his heart on climbing to you.

They pass through the valley of thirst

and make a spring there:

the morning rain will cover it with blessings.

They will go from strength to strength:

they will see the God of gods, in Zion.

John Allen: Now we look to Fatima, which will be the spiritual culmination of this trip. What meaning do the apparitions of Fatima have for us today? When you presented the Third Secret of Fatima in a press conference at the Vatican Press Office in June 2000, you were asked if the message of the secret could be extended beyond the assassination attempt against John Paul II to other sufferings of the popes. Could it also be extended to put the suffering of the church today in the context of that vision, including the sins of the sexual abuse of minors?

Pope Benedict XVI: In terms of what we today can discover in this message, attacks against the pope or the church don’t come just from outside the church. The suffering of the church also comes from within the church, because sin exists in the church. This too has always been known, but today we see it in a really terrifying way. The greatest persecution of the church doesn’t come from enemies on the outside, but is born in sin within the church. The church thus has a deep need to re-learn penance, to accept purification, to learn on one hand forgiveness but also the necessity of justice. Forgiveness does not exclude justice. We have to re-learn the essentials: conversion, prayer, penance, and the theological virtues. That’s how we respond, and we can be realistic in expecting that evil will always launch attacks from within and from outside, but the forces of good are also always present, and finally the Lord is stronger than evil. The Madonna for us is the visible maternal guarantee that the will of God is always the last word in history.

2010-05-15T22:56:00.006-05:00

Saturday, May 15, 2010, the eve of the Feast of the Ascension

Seek him who made the Pleiades and Orion, and turns deep darkness into the morning, and darkens the day into night; who calls for the waters of the sea and pours them out upon the surface of the earth: The Lord is his name. Amos 5:8

Psalm 112 (113)

Praise, servants of the Lord,

praise the name of the Lord.

Let the Lord’s name be blessed,

now and for ever.

From the sun’s rising to its setting,

the Lord’s name is to be praised.

The Lord is high over all peoples,

his glory is above the heavens.

Who is like the Lord our God, who lives on high,

who bends down to watch over heaven and earth?

He raises the weak from the ground,

the poor from the dunghill,

raises them among the princes,

the princes of his people.

He gives the barren woman a household,

makes her the happy mother of children.

Ephesians 2:4-6

God loved us with so much love that he was generous with his mercy: when we were dead through our sins, he brought us to life with Christ – it is through grace that you have been saved – and raised us up with him and gave us a place with him in heaven, in Christ Jesus.

The Phos Hilaron (Φῶς Ἱλαρόν) is an ancient Christian hymn originally written in New Testament Greek.

From the 1979 American Book of Common Prayer

O gracious Light,
pure brightness of the everliving Father in heaven,
O Jesus Christ, holy and blessed!

Now as we come to the setting of the sun,
and our eyes behold the vesper light,
we sing your praises, O God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

You are worthy at all times to be praised by happy voices,
O Son of God, O Giver of life,
and to be glorified through all the worlds.

translation used by the Orthodox Church in America at vespers

O Gladsome Light of the Holy Glory of the Immortal Father, Heavenly, Holy, Blessed Jesus Christ! Now that we have come to the setting of the sun and behold the light of evening, we praise God Father, Son and Holy Spirit. For meet it is at all times to worship Thee with voices of praise. O Son of God and Giver of Life, therefore all the world doth glorify Thee.

As sung in the Ruthenian Catholic Church^[1]

O Joyful Light of the holy glory of the Father Immortal, the heavenly, holy, blessed One, O Jesus Christ, now that we have reached the setting of the sun, and see the evening light, we sing to God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (+). It is fitting at all times to raise a song of praise in measured melody to you, O Son of God, the Giver of Life. Therefore, the universe sings your glory.

From The Cloud of Unknowing:

From DotCommonweal On Not Craning One’s Neck

May 13, 2010, 3:37 am

Posted by Robert P. Imbelli

Christ ascended physically in the presence of all his disciples and sent the Holy Spirit as he had promised...

Beyond the superior symbolic value of rising upward, however, the direction of his movement is quite incidental to the spiritual reality.

The access to heaven is through desire. He who longs to be there is really there in spirit. The path to heaven is measured by desire and not by miles. For this reason Saint Paul says in one of his epistles, “Although our bodies are presently on earth, our life is in heaven.”

Love and desire constitute the life of the spirit. And the spirit abides where its love abides, as surely as it abides in the body which it fills with life. We need not strain our spirit in all directions to reach heaven, for we dwell there already by love and desire.

O God, fill us with rejoicing and reverent thankfulness,

for Christ your Son’s ascension lifts us up with him.

We, his mystical body, are called in hope

to where he, our Head, has preceded us in glory.

Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son,

who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit,

God for ever and ever.

Amen.

2009-08-09T15:11:00.001-05:00

Sunday, August 9, 2009

Pray for Taiwan and China.

August 10, 2009 A Million in China Evacuate Ahead of Typhoon

By MICHAEL WINES

BEIJING — Saying they were taking no chances, Chinese officials evacuated a million coastal residents on Sunday as a weakened Typhoon Morakot swept onto the mainland south of Shanghai after battering Taiwan the day before.

I pulled these words from the blog on Commonweal magazine.

“some lines from Denise Levertov’s poem “The Thread.” ... Christ’s metaphor informs the whole of what I take to be her description of her poetical and religious journey:”

Something is very gently,
invisibly, silently,
pulling at me-a thread
or net of threads
finer than cobweb and as
elastic. I haven’t tried
the strength of it. No barbed hook
pierced and tore me. Was it
not long ago this thread
began to draw me? Or
way back? Was I
born with its knot about my
neck, a bridle? Not fear
but a stirring
of wonder makes me
catch my breath when I feel
the tug of it when I thought
it had loosened itself and gone.

2008-09-26T10:33:00.004-05:00

What a mess! What is McCain thinking? Oh yea! The election. Maybe Sara could pray for us and have Bishop Thomas Muthee pray for us too? Actually, I really believe we should be praying, but with humility and a feeling for justice. Sort of like the Magnificat.

On October 17, 2005 in his blog James Howard Kunstler wrote this:

“Meanwhile, the mortgage industry, a mutant monster organism of lapsed lending standards and arrant grift on the grand scale, is going to implode like a death star under the weight of these non-performing loans and drag every tradable instrument known to man into the quantum vacuum of finance that it creates.”

Prophetic? Maybe a little. I feel uncomfortable, like maybe it is unjust, giving relief to the wealthy, while those “minorities and risky folks” Fox News’ Neil Cavuto refers to get screwed.

Who said racism and class distinctions don’t exist in the United States. How about this comment by a supposed educated, smart newscaster? Fox News' Neil Cavuto said that “Fannie and Freddie are a disaster. Loaning to minorities and risky folks is a disaster.” Is someone going to call him to task for this?

2008-09-25T14:53:00.000-05:00

This is from catholicanarchy:

Sarah Palin: “Al Qaeda terrorists still plot to inflict catastrophic harm on America — [Obama’s] worried that someone won’t read them their rights?”

United States Conference of Catholic Bishops: “No human being should be treated as lacking human rights, and we have no business dividing humanity into those who are valuable enough to warrant protection and those who are not. Even this is not solely a Catholic teaching, but a principle of natural law accessible to all people of good will.”

2008-09-25T14:43:00.000-05:00

How ironic that my last post before leaving on vacation was about racism. Take a look at this from the Oregonian – Effigy of Obama alarms George Fox campus

2008-09-17T11:23:00.001-05:00

How much opposition to Obama is really rooted in racism? One has to ask how someone who is “thinking” about the issues can go from supporting Hillary Clinton to supporting John McCain?

"One parishioner ruled out voting for Mr. Obama explicitly because he is black. “Are they going to make it the Black House?” Ray McCormick asked, to embarrassed hushing from a half dozen others gathered around the rectory kitchen. (Five of the six, all lifelong Democrats who supported Mrs. Clinton in the primary, said they now lean toward Mr. McCain.)"

2008-09-12T11:24:00.001-05:00

“Truth is not inner peace. Truth is a traumatic, painful encounter.” — Slavoj Žižek

Slavoj Žižek is an interesting Slovenian philosopher who wants to enlist Christians to work against the enticement of pop culture and consumerism fueled by global capitalism. Very popular in Europe, he may be a passing fad or an enduring critic.

“Ironically, he is the perfect thinker for global capitalism. He incorporates everything into his philosophy, from Oprah Winfrey to Stephen King. Like a multinational corporation, he will not be satisfied until he penetrates every market.”

2008-09-11T23:40:00.001-05:00

I'm afraid she is not off to a great start for her first time on her own.

2008-09-11T23:19:00.002-05:00

Great name sake.

2008-09-11T11:38:00.000-05:00

Since we (the United States of America) are neither an oligarchy nor a monarchy, nor are we a dictatorship or ruled by our military what are we then? As a democratic republic we governed by a constitution and the various laws established by our legislature. The President is charged with upholding and executing these laws. Following are a couple recent articles related by a broad stroke to this portrait of our Nation’s governance.

First from the Boston Review: Presidential Crimes: Moving on is not an option by Elaine Scarry

“We have at the present time two government leaders, a president and a vice president, who, according to all available evidence, have carried out grave crimes.”

Next from The New Yorker: The Florentine: The man who taught rulers how to rule, by Claudia Roth Pierpont

Odd, that an expert at winning should have lost so much, and then lost it all again. In however perverse a way, Machiavelli was no less a martyr to his convictions than Thomas More, who was beheaded—and eventually canonized—for his refusal to condone the royal power grab that Henry VIII purportedly learned from “The Prince.” Of course, More had the courage to stand in opposition to the moral direction of his times. Machiavelli was his times: he gave permanent form and force to its political habits and unspoken principles. Although it is often said that modern politics begins with Machiavelli, most politicians still run and hide at the mention of his name. In 1972, Henry Kissinger, the most arguably “Machiavellian” counsellor of princes this country has ever seen, recoiled at the insinuation that he had learned anything from the Florentine Secretary, stating, “There is very little of Machiavelli’s one can use in the contemporary world.” (Kissinger’s only competitor in this area, Karl Rove, is the subject of a new biography titled “Machiavelli’s Shadow.”) Yet we continue to flounder in the break between politics and ethics that Machiavelli made impossible to ignore: private life and public life; personal morality and Realpolitik. We insist that our leaders convince us that they are exemplary and (increasingly) God-fearing human beings, who are nevertheless able to protect us from enemies not so constrained. How is this to be done? Do we really want to know?

Most important, as we emerge from the century that gave Utopia a bad name—in which Hitler and Stalin and other genocidal princes believed they were building superior worlds, in which the means was annihilation and the end an illusion—we are still arguing bitterly over the question of whether the end justifies the means. Are there any acts that one’s sense of honor (or conscience, or ability to sleep at night) forbid one to commit—as an individual, as a nation—no matter what the promised end? Machiavelli did not question the use of torture for political purposes, even after he had been its victim. “When the very safety of the country depends upon the resolution to be taken,” he wrote in the “Discourses,” “no considerations of justice or injustice, humanity or cruelty, not of glory or of infamy, should be allowed to prevail.” This has doubtless been the tacit position of many governments throughout history; it is openly the position of a large segment of our government now, with Vice-President Cheney warning of the need for going to “the dark side” in dealing with terrorist suspects, and Attorney General Mukasey undecided about which methods of “enhanced” interrogation constitute torture. There is no question, however, about the method used on Machiavelli, the strappado—also known today as “Palestinian hanging”—which was responsible for the death of an Iraqi detainee in C.I.A. custody at Abu Ghraib in 2003: the prisoner was suspended by his arms, which had been shackled behind his back, and died of asphyxiation. Private morality may be presumed to prevail again when the country is strong and secure, although Machiavelli, unlike those who offer such consolation, admitted that the nature of mankind makes it unlikely that there ever will be such a time. “I love my country more than my own soul,” Machiavelli wrote, yet a full assessment of his work makes that decision far from clear. Then, as now, it is a terrible choice.

2008-09-09T12:02:00.002-05:00

Here are the last words of Pulling the Curtain, (note the reference to the Wizard of Oz you nonKansans) E. J. Dionne's column, published in today’s Washington Post. Note that the McCain campaign trashed the NYT reporter for reporting the truth – instead of owning up to it.

An aside: I just recently watched the A Man for All Seasons, the 1966 Oscar winner for best picture, about Saint (Sir) Thomas More. I think Karl Rove would make a good cynical Cromwellian character in a contemporary political play about our current administration. Rove is the ultimate postmodern Machiavelli. I like this quote by More’s character when asked to give a little: “And when we die, and you are sent to heaven for doing your conscience, and I am sent to hell for not doing mine, will you come with me, for fellowship?”

But anyway, the Republican fear seems to be that Vice Presidential candidate Sara Palin can’t handle a few tough questions from the press. If that is the case, well ...?

It is hugely unfortunate that the first big story about Palin -- other than questions raised about whether she fired the head of the Alaska state police for refusing to dismiss her former brother-in-law -- concerned her 17-year-old daughter's pregnancy. It's not just that Bristol Palin should be left alone, but also that the intense interest in this story gave McCain's bullies an excuse to push aside legitimate questions about Palin's record and knowledge.

Of course, Palin's handlers are being hypocritical: They want to focus on her family life and her identity as a hockey mom when doing so helps them and to push aside any story that mars this perfect picture. Conservatives are always against identity politics until they are for it.

Nonetheless, what matters is not Palin's personal life but whether she is prepared to assume the presidency if called upon. The actions of McCain's lieutenants suggest that they know the answer. And they are doing everything they can to keep the media from finding it.

2008-09-08T21:31:00.001-05:00

Several articles on the Boston Globe’s website brought on by the impending publication of a new book by a member of one of our royal families.

In this brief quote from an interview with Kerry Kennedy she talks about a man, Kofi Woods, who she met in Liberia. Incredible!

[T]he Catholic church there also started their peace and justice program on the Catholic radio station, (which) was really the only voice of opposition throughout the Taylor regime, and the fellow who ran it was a guy called Kofi Woods, he was, because of his work, on those issues, with the Catholic church. He was picked up by the minister of justice and his three thugs during the Doe regime and tortured and left to rot in a prison cell, and then when the Taylor regime came into power...that minister of justice and those three thugs were picked up by Taylor, and thrown into the same prison cell he had been in. And he (Woods) had been freed, and he was a lawyer, and went to visit them, and he said, 'I've come to see if you've been mistreated,' and he said, 'I will take your case for free,' because there is no lawyer in the country who would defend them. So he went to defend his own torturers, and that was his sense of faith.

When will they get it? Justice Anne M. Burke talks of her frustrations with the Catholic Bishops for the little regard many have with the sex abuse problems in the Church.

Burke, who was interim chair of the National Review Board for the US Conference of Catholic Bishops for two years, details the scope of her concern about the American bishops in an interview with [Kerry] Kennedy, a daughter of Robert F. Kennedy, in her book ["Being Catholic Now," which is being released tomorrow].

She says the board "started having problems with individual cardinals and bishops who thought we were too aggressive," and that "bishops got away with concealing crime," and "just when you think these bishops are getting it, they turn around and do something that in any other enterprise would result in their own dismissal."

She also alleges that, after Frank Keating, former governor of Oklahoma, was forced to resign as board chairman because he compared the bishops to the Mafia, the bishops declined to make her the permanent chairwoman because "there was no way they were going to appoint a woman to the position of chair."

HYANNIS PORT - Catholicism ran deep at the home of Bobby and Ethel Kennedy.

Prayers before and after every meal, when a family trip was beginning, when something got lost. Bible readings after dinner. St. Christopher medals around the neck. St. Francis pictures on the wall. Virgin Mary statues in the corner. Mass schedules by the bedsides. And Mass every Sunday, until Bobby was killed in 1968; then it was daily.

So begins a review – of sorts – of Kerry Kennedy’s new book, Being Catholic Now. Looks like an important book.

2008-09-08T15:22:00.006-05:00

An important editorial from the National Catholic Reporter

Ways past the culture wars

The choice of Sen. Joseph Biden of Delaware as the Democratic vice presidential candidate brought an immediate and predictable reaction from those intent on using this election cycle to revive the Catholic culture wars.

Suddenly pundits knew “what kind of Catholic” Biden is and they were eager to frame his deepest motivations on the basis of a vote here and there on “life issues,” which in the world of the culture warrior translates as only one issue -- abortion. And they picked up immediate encouragement from on high when Denver Archbishop Charles Chaput issued the pastoral wisdom that Biden should refrain from receiving Communion.

To take that last matter first, Chaput’s pronouncement momentarily grabbed a portion of the national news cycle, but Catholics shouldn’t overreact. They would do better to read his book, Render Unto Caesar: Serving the Nation by Living Our Catholic Beliefs in Political Life, a far more nuanced and challenging presentation of his view of Catholic responsibilities.

They’d do better, too, by reading the U.S. bishops’ valuable and thorough reflection on political responsibility, “Faithful Citizenship,” which, while placing the protection of innocent life as the central consideration in pursuing the common good, also acknowledges the complexities of political life and the ambiguities that can sometimes confound even the most purposeful legislator.

Mr. Biden is, we suspect, closer to the people most priests face in the pews every week than the culture warriors would have us believe: devout, faithful, prayerful and questioning. The problem for him, of course, is that he plays out his life in public. Most Catholics don’t have to contend with a chorus demanding absolutes where sometimes only compromise and negotiation can serve the common good.

According to a recent Associated Press story, Biden has said in the past that he is “prepared to accept” church teaching on when life begins, but at the same time he believes that Roe v. Wade “is as close as we’re going to be able to get as a society” to a consensus among differing religious and other views on the subject. We suspect that view is held by a lot of ordinary Catholics and more than a few bishops, albeit privately. So the dispute becomes more over political strategy than church teaching. How to attack the abortion problem from the political stump in the political arena -- where compromise is the coin of the realm -- is far different from pronouncing from the pulpit.

The reality, as shown in poll after poll, is that Catholics, like most others in the culture, are looking for a politics on the abortion issue that is far removed from either extreme, a politics that can begin to effectively reduce the number of abortions. Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good released a study Aug. 27 that shows a strikingly direct correlation between the availability of social services and a drop in the number of abortions. (See story on Page 7.)

There is more involved in creating a culture of life than simply seeking the elusive ban on abortion. The culture wars have cost the church dearly in terms of political capital and credibility, and in the election of legislators who promise lots on abortion, deliver little and frequently ignore most of the rest of the bishops’ social agenda. No political party holds the complete Catholic vision of society.

Seeking a significant reduction in abortion will require more from us than protest and vilifying politicians. It will require an approach to the common good that places high value on programs supporting women and children, on assuring access to jobs and education and on dealing with the causes and effects of poverty.

National Catholic Reporter September 5, 2008

Biden’s interview with Brokaw is all over the place now. Let me say I am a Catholic who finds Biden’s view defensible.

Following Chaput into the political fray is the headline of this brief interview. I am looking forward to reading his book Render Unto Caesar: Serving the Nation by Living Our Catholic Beliefs in Political Life, if my local library decides to buy one on my recommendation.

He is easy on McCain. I sense a double standard here.

Good comments by Frank Church in the New York Times. Here is an excerpt:

As The New York Times reported last Tuesday, Palin was sloppily vetted, at best. McCain operatives and some of their press surrogates responded to this revelation by trying to discredit The Times article. After all, The Washington Post had cited McCain aides (including his campaign manager, Rick Davis) last weekend to assure us that Palin had a “full vetting process.” She had been subjected to “an F.B.I. background check,” we were told, and “the McCain camp had reviewed everything it could find on her.”

The Times had it right. The McCain campaign’s claims of a “full vetting process” for Palin were as much a lie as the biographical details they’ve invented for her. There was no F.B.I. background check. The Times found no evidence that a McCain representative spoke to anyone in the State Legislature or business community. Nor did anyone talk to the fired state public safety commissioner at the center of the Palin ethics investigation. No McCain researcher even bothered to consult the relevant back issues of the Wasilla paper. Apparently when McCain said in June that his vice presidential vetting process was basically “a Google,” he wasn’t joking.

This is a roll of the dice beyond even Bill Clinton’s imagination. “Often my haste is a mistake,” McCain conceded in his 2002 memoir, “but I live with the consequences without complaint.” Well, maybe it’s fine if he wants to live with the consequences, but what about his country?

“No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.” Check out this two-part article in The Chronicle of Higher Education

Here is a funny Political cartoon from the Washington Post

One goggle and I chose this site simply because it was the first one to pop-up. Kids, all I am saying is, be smart.

2008-09-05T14:53:00.001-05:00

Troopergate gets more interesting and the possibility of new revelations about Palin

2008-09-05T10:06:00.002-05:00

Interesting situation. Lets see how it turns out.

I have this theory, it’s merely a theory, that I have more in common with my brothers and sisters in Christ at church whom I my disagree with profoundly about some issue than I do with a nonbeliever whom I agree with. I am reminded of something C. S. Lewis wrote – this is a paraphrase from memory which is very unreliable – about how Christians who reside at the heart of their chosen separated sects have more in common with each other than with nominal believers of one’s own sect.

There is an illuminating article in the New Yorker. I too wince a little at this comment.

The Saddleback event illuminated Obama’s greatest liability for faith-based voters: his resolute support for abortion rights. Many, including Doug Kmiec, winced when Obama said, at a town-hall meeting last spring, that he supported sex education because he didn’t want his daughters “punished with a baby.”

An example of “principle” over science. The last 8 years has seen continual politicalization, corruption and manipulation of science unprecedented in American history. The Murder of Nikolai Vavilov: The Story of Stalin's Persecution of One of the Great Scientists of the Twentieth Century by Peter Pringle tells the story of an extreme example of the subordination of science (thankfully we haven’t gone this far) to political goals. Following are a couple quotes from a review of the book.

Stalin hated genetics — and chromosomes in particular, not least because the idea of genes as physical structures passed down through the generations suggested that nature wasn't changeable.

The internationally acclaimed Vavilov was outmaneuvered by the "barefoot scientist" Lysenko, an uneducated peasant whom Stalin no doubt preferred to the unreliably bourgeois professor. Lysenko promised the Soviet leader that he would turn the Russian wasteland into a grain-laden Garden of Eden, using the bogus science of "vernalization" to eliminate the normal two-year growth cycle of winter wheat.

I don’t quite get this “lay off Palin for God’s sake” rhetoric. Even as conservative commentator as George Will is unhappy with the choice.

So, Sarah Palin. The man who would be the oldest to embark on a first presidential term has chosen as his possible successor a person of negligible experience.

Any cook can run the state, said Lenin, who was wrong about that, too. America’s gentle populists and other sentimental egalitarians postulate that wisdom is easily acquired and hence broadly diffused, therefore anyone with a good heart can deliver good government, which is whatever the public desires. “The people of Nebraska,” said the archetypal populist William Jennings Bryan, “are for free silver and I am for free silver. I will look up the arguments later.”

I don’t understand it. Can someone help me?

Something all opponents to abortion should pay attention to. Here is a link to the study. I challenge us all - pro-choice and pro-life to take this study to heart and face the real life difficulties of this world.

2008-09-04T09:48:00.003-05:00

Governor Sara Palin did a super job with her speech last night. She is young and energetic, a good orator, and the crowd was well primed and coached, as was Gov. Palin, both ready for her national debut.

But I wonder:

Why does she denigrate the thousands of people out there who work day in, day out through church and civic organizations to help people and to make this world a better place? She could have been referring to Mother Theresa in this quote: “I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities”

Now I agree that Sara Palin does more than talk the talk, she walks the walk too. I admire her for this. I know many folks in similar circumstances who walk the walk. We don’t give them enough support. But what concerns me is her profound disregard for science and common sense. Evolutionarily speaking women did not have babies at 44 years old very often. This profoundly biological process is likely affected by the degradation of both the male and female reproductive ability with age.

To the best of our ability we need to make good choices, and I am not referring to abortion. Palin has a pregnant 17-year-old daughter and a Downs Syndrome baby. This is not just because she opposes abortion. She shows a blithe disregard for science and common sense. Sexual reproduction is not a magical event. Now, of course, I regard my four children and four grandchildren as magic, but lets get real.

Palin opposes sex education programs that include any information other than teach abstinence. This view is contrary to all evidence and common sense as to what works to reduce the occurrence of teenaged pregnancy and, just as important, the spread of sexually transmitted disease. Abstinence is only part of a good program. Common sense and science clearly point to the necessity of good information about the biology of sex, sexually transmitted diseases, and contraception.

I suppose the next thing in Palin’s way of thinking is to dump biology class, replace it with creationism, and burn all the books we don’t like. Then we will produce a generation of illiterates. Sound a little 1984ish? Or maybe 1560ish? Maybe 1938ish? Barack Obama may not have extensive experience but he is less of an ideologue and more of a pragmatist and he has demonstrated prudence in selecting Joe Biden. Even if you don’t like Biden you have to concede that there is wisdom in the choice. We now have an idea of how John McCain would go about making important decisions. On a whim.

I see I am not the only one to recognize Palin's disparagement of community organizing. Check out this NCR article.

2008-09-03T12:18:00.002-05:00

Wednesday, September 3, 2008, a little later.

Here is Sam Harris in the LA times. I disagree with ole Sam on a number of things. But I think he is on to something here.

Americans have an unhealthy desire to see average people promoted to positions of great authority. No one wants an average neurosurgeon or even an average carpenter, but when it comes time to vest a man or woman with more power and responsibility than any person has held in human history, Americans say they want a regular guy, someone just like themselves. President Bush kept his edge on the "Who would you like to have a beer with?" poll question in 2004, and won reelection.

This is one of the many points at which narcissism becomes indistinguishable from masochism. Let me put it plainly: If you want someone just like you to be president of the United States, or even vice president, you deserve whatever dysfunctional society you get. You deserve to be poor, to see the environment despoiled, to watch your children receive a fourth-rate education and to suffer as this country wages -- and loses -- both necessary and unnecessary wars.
McCain has so little respect for the presidency of the United States that he is willing to put the girl next door (soon, too, to be a grandma) into office beside him. He has so little respect for the average American voter that he thinks this reckless and cynical ploy will work.

And it might.

“John McCain's campaign on Wednesday angrily called for an end to questions about Sarah Palin's background...”

Are we not to fully explore the person who is a “heart beat” (LITERALLY!) away from leading the United States of America? Come on, John. Get real.

Former Kansas Congressman Bill Roy’s take on the lawlessness of the Bush administration.

The Bush administration not only has weakened our nation economically and militarily, but has endangered our basic freedoms by willfully ignoring or denouncing national and international law.

"We have at the present time two government leaders, a president and a vice president, who, according to all available evidence, have carried out grave crimes" writes Elaine Scarry in the Boston Review.

One thing that should distinguish the Government of the United States is respect for our Constitution and the rule of law. Ideology should always have its limits. This administration has little respect for this fundamental aspect of our union.

2008-09-03T09:28:00.003-05:00

Wednesday, September 3, 2008, the third day of the Republican Convention and I am flabbergasted at the anti-intellectualism and selfishness that I see.

McCain – His wife is rolling in dough and won’t even acknowledge that she has two sisters. What sort of Christian behavior is this? Does McCain have any real values?

Palin – Book burner, creationist, Christian crusader (as in a messianic view of the war in Iraq – kill those infidels), vindictive, and laughs at someone suffering from cancer. These are Christ’s values?

I admit I am biased but come on, this is bad, especially the anti-intellectualism and ideolotry (the idolatry of ideology). This sort of thinking is dangerous for our nation. The world is complex and doesn’t bend to one’s ideology. This thinking threatens our freedoms of speech, religion, and association. And its just not nice.

2008-09-02T12:48:00.004-05:00

Tuesday, September 02, 2008, the day after labor day, Gustav, and new revelations about Sara Palin.

Here is a long quote is from an article about Catholic voters showing-up in the September 8th, issue of the New Yorker. Senator’s Obama’s view on abortion expressed in this article is almost precisely my view. Like Ms. Palin, I had a pregnant 17 year-old daughter. My first grandchild is now a wonderful 16-year old young woman. I would never have counseled my daughter to have an abortion and I resent those who would use this situation as an argument for an abortion or not.

Kmiec eventually got an opportunity to air his doubts to Obama himself, at a Chicago meeting with a select group of religious figures. (Among them was the evangelist Franklin Graham, who asked Obama, “Do you believe that Jesus Christ is the way to God, or merely a way?” Obama responded, “Jesus is the only way for me,” and Graham left the meeting impressed.) “I even raised the objection to just talking about abortion as a vehicle for gender equality,” Kmiec recalls. “I said, ‘You know, this is not language that a Catholic will accept, and I don’t accept it. You don’t need to use it, if I understand your position correctly. So tell me your position.’ And out of that I got an answer that said, ‘I would never counsel my daughters to have an abortion. I view it as a profoundly moral decision. It is my purpose to discourage the practice. But it is also my belief that there’s no other actor on earth than the mother who can address this question. And to be pro-choice means that you contemplate that the choice can be the choice in favor of life.’ That suggests to me that he’s got the mental disposition to understand, at least from the Catholic perspective, how abortion is more a tragedy than a method of equality.”

What does the Palin imbroglio tell us? I like this quote from Eugene Robinson in the Washington Post -

We learned last week that John McCain is not who he is -- not, at least, who he claims to be. The steady, straight-talking, country-first statesman his campaign has been selling is a fictional character. The real McCain is either alarmingly cynical or dangerously reckless.

Here is the concluding prayer from today’s divine office –

Lord Jesus Christ, you are the true light that lights all people’s paths to salvation.
Give us the power, we pray you, to prepare for you the ways of peace and justice. Amen.

2008-08-27T12:14:00.002-05:00

Wednesday, August 27, 2008

It seems to me that in the biological process of human gestation where more than 25% of all conceptions end in spontaneous abortions that to insist that a fertilized egg has the same standing as a newborn infant and that the termination of any pregnancy in the first trimester is tantamount to murder is anti-intellectual and possibly disingenuous.

I also regret that the Church and Christians insist on claiming to know the mind of Christ in partisan political debate – i.e. Catholics for McCain or Catholics for Obama or Catholics against Joe Biden.

At the end of the day I think we need a little more humility and a lot more listening in this debate over abortion

Some thoughts, questions...
There is no doubt that the church has implicitly and explicitly made serious errors in the past and has stood courageously as well. But “the church” in this statement remains an abstract concept. Usually it is as individuals – often nurtured by communities – who made courageous stands, such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer or Franz Jägerstätter.

How about freedom of conscience?

Where is the OUTRAGE that nearly 9 MILLION! children in these United States of America go without healthcare? And what of the over 40 million adults – most of whom have jobs, by the way – who go without health care?

And how about the rest of the world?

2008-08-21T13:50:00.004-05:00

August 21, 2008

I am blogging from a new, undisclosed location as of today. Very interesting and significant.

I just finished a book by an author new to me: Being Consumed by William T. Cavanaugh. I am waiting for inter-library loan to secure me two of his other books- Torture and Eucharist and Theopolitical Imagination.

To get the most critical comment out of the way – I wonder if the book is cobbled together from previously written unconnected pieces? It has that feel. That being said this book is an important contribution to the theological critique of capitalism or, as I prefer to call it, neoliberalism.

Maybe there are some Western Christians who think our modern economy is independent of theology, ideology, or history. Either it is ahistorical or is a natural organism evolving according to natural law. Neoliberal-capitalism, the free market, the ability to purchase anything you can afford - but preferably cheap stuff - that you can tire of and discard, then go out and purchase more of it is the natural way of the world; how God intended it. Can’t everybody do this? Doesn’t everybody want to do this? Isn’t this the very definition of human freedom? Cavanaugh doesn’t think so.

2008-07-08T16:11:00.002-05:00

Tuesday July 8th, 2008

Sir John M. Templeton, the “spiritual realities” philanthropist, died today in Nassau, the Bahamas. He was an important promoter of religious understanding, particularly to the illumination of the intersection of science and religion.

Jesse Helms died last Friday. Of course I don’t rejoice in his death but I do think he was a noxious political character encouraging and using race baiting as a political tool. As late as 1990 during a close campaign against a black opponent he used a blatantly racial campaign advertisement where a white job-seeker lost his job to an unqualified minority. Senator Helms won the election. It makes me think of Slobodan Milosevic. I am disappointed in the adulation he is likely to get. He should be a pariah, or at least understood as a racist, misogynistic, homophobic, last gasp of the past.

While I was at the obituary page in the New York Times I discovered an interesting photo feature of “notable” deaths so far in 2008.

In going through the photos I discovered that Maharishi Mahesh Yogi died February 4th, 2008, the passing of a man who helped define an era. I missed this. He was as controversial as Jesse Helms but he didn’t try to divide people and promote hatred. One interesting detail noted in the obituary – at least for a native Kansan - was the observation by the Maharishi that the White House should moved. According to the principles of “Vedic architecture in harmony with Natural Law” a more appropriate location was the town of Smith Center, Kan.

A few folks who were personally significant - George Carlin, Dith Pran, Sir Edmund Hillary, and Suzanne Pleshette, who I had a crush on as Emily Hartley on the Bob Newhart Show. She was so sexy under the camouflage of her character.

2008-07-06T12:39:00.001-05:00

Sunday, July 6th, 2008

I want to figure out how to be this way in the hurly-burly of my days:

St. Romuald's Brief Rule For Camaldolese Monks

Sit in your cell as in paradise.
Put the whole world behind you and forget it.
Watch your thoughts like a good fisherman watching for fish,
The path you must follow is in the Psalms — never leave it.
If you have just come to the monastery,
and in spite of your good will you cannot accomplish what you want,
take every opportunity you can to sing the Psalms in your heart
and to understand them with your mind.
And if your mind wanders as you read, do not give up;
hurry back and apply your mind to the words once more.
Realize above all that you are in God's presence,
and stand there with the attitude of one who stands
before the emperor.
Empty yourself completely and sit waiting,
content with the grace of God,
like the chick who tastes nothing and eats nothing
but what his mother brings him.

Father John’s homily today was about not being governed by social rules but the yoke of Christ – humble, loving, and restful. Not a heavy burden but a yoke of love. Jesus bids us to lay our burdens down and take his yoke, allow him to guide us, even carry us if need be. Jesus’ yoke is the direction of love.

I was thinking at Mass this morning about how I am a follower of Christ, he is my King. Whether I believe in his resurrection or even really believe in God—of course I pray all the time and I identify myself as Catholic—I am, by choice, a follower of Jesus Christ: Blessed are the peacemakers, the humble, those who long for justice, etc. The kind of love that Jesus exemplified, practiced, and called his followers to emulate is my standard.

2008-06-16T11:02:00.002-05:00

Monday, June 16th, 2008

Yea! I’m doing cartwheels in my heart and actually dancing around my office. My girlfriend returns from Mexico today.

I just learned of the recent death of a powerful activist for women and babies. I honor her and her co-activists this day after Father’s day. Here is the Chicago Tribune’s obituary for Edwina Froehlich a co-founder of La Leche League in 1956. "We all felt a mother should listen to her body, her nature" said Ms. Froehlich.

“Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski,” writes Nicolas Carr in the article, Is Goggle making Us Stupid? appearing in the July/August issue of the Atlantic Monthly. That is certainly what this blog is! It is kind of fun, but?

In this quote one gets an inkling what the article is about: ““We are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. “We are how we read.” Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace.” I wonder if it also means we are losing our ability for “deep thinking,” contemplation.

One thing fascinating to me in this article are the connections drawn between Friedrich Nietzsche and his new typewriter, Frederick Winslow Taylor, the father of “scientific management,” and the Internet. I am familiar with Taylor from my years as a production manager in industry. We are in the age of efficiency; I feel it everyday, every time I engage in a conversation I think I must exchange only the necessary information and get on to the next thing. I experience this mainly at work where half of my job is talking with people. But people are not really considered important, efficiency and production rules so the company gets the most out of my time. It is all about the money.

In a recent film, The Visitor, we see this dynamic in a round-about way in a comment of Zainab, the Senegalese girlfriend of Tarek, an Arab musician and illegal immigrant from Syria when—as Tarek heads out with Walter, the sad and lonely college professor, to play drums in a drumming circle in the park—she demands that Tarek return home on time; “no Arab time” she says (see the movie for more). In this mood Carr quotes Lewis Mumford from Technics and Civilization, a book I read many years ago. “Mumford described how the clock “disassociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences.” The “abstract framework of divided time” became “the point of reference for both action and thought.” Maybe we should think of the clock as an evil invention like the atom bomb?

Carr begins his article by recalling that HAL, the malfunctioning computer in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, is sending astronaut Dave Bowman to his death in deep space. He concludes with the suggestion that when, like Bowman in Kubrick's dark prophecy, “we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.”

Go out and get it! Carrie Newcomer’s, The Gathering of Spirits. The opening song is now one of my all time favorites: Holy as a Day is Spent.

I’m still praying. I had a couple answered prayers this past weekend, but they were high-percentage ones, likely to have happened without my praying. I’m still thankful though. They were important to my mental health, so to speak, and made my day when they occurred. So I said, “Thank you Lord, for hearing my prayer.”

2008-06-15T23:36:00.005-05:00

Sunday, June 15th, 2008

A good Sunday. Morning Mass was very good – it always is good even when it isn’t, but it was really good today. How’s that for nonsense? I really love Sundays. It is my first day off work—the beginning of my weekend: I attend Mass, I go to Unity with my girlfriend; it’s just is an all-around fine day.

Today’s New York Times article—In ’74 Thesis, the Seeds of McCain’s War Views—alerts us to the danger of mixing politics with the training of our soldiers. Foreign policy is always the sole prerogative of our civilian government and because of that it will always be contentious. Our soldiers should be trained to stay out of policy and politics, to be loyal to the Constitution above all. The article and Senator McCain’s experience vividly illustrate why torture is always inhuman and bad policy and why the United States must disavow all torture and expect that other nations do the same. Senator McCain is a genuine American hero but he is wrong on both of these issues.

Political Excommunication is the headline for an article in the current issue of America that considers the experience of Doug Kmiec and discusses a significant issue facing the Catholic Church this election cycle. How is the church to treat Catholic politicians who support abortion rights, the Catholics who support these politicians, and Catholics who support non-Catholic politicians who support abortion rights?

The treatment of Doug Kmiec is evidence of an ill wind blowing. A former appointee of the Reagan and Bush I administrations and currently a professor of law at Pepperdine University Kmiec is a longtime pro-life activist. He recently came out in support of Barack Obama for president. In response he was denied communion at a special Mass held to open a meeting in which he was scheduled to speak.

In a similar circumstance Archbishop Joseph F. Naumann, of the Archdiocese of Kansas City in Kansas, my home diocese, has criticized Gov. Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas for her abortion position and requested that she not take communion. She is a prominent supporter of Obama. Also, in New York, Cardinal Edward Egan has requested that former mayor and presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani refrain from communion. And, as this article from the National Catholic Reporter—Church and Politics: The Return of the Communion Wars—indicates, these actions are anything but a smattering of isolated incidents. It has the feel of a concerted effort. The America article aptly suggests, “One must in all honesty ask whether a hard-line pro-life position within the church serves as a Trojan horse for other, more partisan political goals.” It certainly seems to.

2008-06-14T11:49:00.001-05:00

It is now Saturday the 14th, 2008

Friday the 13th, June 2008

I am not superstitious but I do pray. Is that the same thing?

Anyway, I heartily agree with the headline in this NYT editorial: Justice 5, Brutality 4

Quote: “It is sobering to think that habeas hangs by a single vote in the Supreme Court of the United States — a reminder that the composition of the court could depend on the outcome of this year’s presidential election. The ruling is a major victory for civil liberties — but a timely reminder of how fragile they are.” Sobering indeed. We need to elect Obama and hope for something different.

In light of the editorial note how important the coming Presidential election is in the struggle for justice read this article from the New York Times also. McCain and Obama Split on Justices’ Guantánamo Ruling

For some thoughts today, Saturday the 14th:

When does obsession become unhealthy? I have this situation I think about almost all the time. It is an important one to attend to but I need some faith in the situation as well. I will pray about it more.

Prayer: I have always prayed, even during my most agnostic phase—I am still very much an agnostic, so maybe I should say “my conscientiously agnostic phase”—so it seems to me to pray is a deep aspect of my being. It is part of my struggle to understand the mystery inherent in the paradox of the beauty and brutality of the world. It is my effort to hope for the best. Just yesterday I read this quote in Richard Sennett’s new book The Craftsman: “...it seems more realistic to explore how concrete behavior might change or be regulated than to counsel a change of heart.” I agree. But I still pray.

2008-06-06T12:23:00.003-05:00

Monday, June 2nd, 2008

Summer seems to be here. The weather has been warm and humid, and unusually wet. We have had numerous storms, some severe. Everything is so green and lush. This morning has been a relief so far: cool, cloudy, breezy. We are getting thunder, some lighting, and occasional light rain. A thunderstorm is approaching. It might get wild for a while then sunny and hot this afternoon. As I am typing this the wind is rising. We’ll see.

The following quote is from an article in the Guardian by Ian McEwan. Apocalyptic thinking distorts much of our politics and social behavior. We need to learn to learn to think for the long haul. As far as Christian apocalyptic thinking goes, we have been expecting the end of the world-as-we-know-it for a couple thousand years. It hasn’t happened yet. It is about time we learn to love this old world that is ever renewing itself and remains young.

But, as McEwan observes, apocalyptic thinking is immune to contrary data, such as two thousand years of life as usual. Catastrophe thinking is, indeed, prevalent in these United States of America. And its not just the weird fringe that believes it. We have a President who, apparently, is one, as is much of what we have taken to calling the religious right. Since this world is going to be destroyed by fire in the near future and a new heavens and new earth established I guess it is okay to destroy the one we have.

“Contemporary apocalyptic movements, Christian or Islamic, some violent, some not, all appear to share fantasies of a violent end, and they affect our politics profoundly. The apocalyptic mind can be demonising - that is to say, there are other groups, other faiths, that it despises for worshipping false gods, and these believers of course will not be saved from the fires of hell. And the apocalyptic mind tends to be totalitarian - which is to say that these are intact, all-encompassing ideas founded in longing and supernatural belief, immune to evidence or its lack, and well-protected against the implications of fresh data. Consequently, moments of unintentional pathos, even comedy, arise - and perhaps something in our nature is revealed - as the future is constantly having to be rewritten, new anti-Christs, new Beasts, new Babylons, new Whores located, and the old appointments with doom and redemption quickly replaced by the next.”

Friday the 6th of June

St. Thérèse, the Little Flower, had it absolutely right: it is in the practice of love in the small details that we really begin to redirect the world to God’s purposes.

“Jesus does not demand great actions from us by simply surrender and gratitude.”
St. Thérèse of Lisieux

From a blog on the on-line edition of America

“Last night was about more than politics. It was history. Clinton was not the only one to lose last night. Bigotry received a mortal blow. Last winter, many of my black friends cautioned that there was no way a black man could win, that anti-black bigotry was still too strong, too deep. That concern lies in rubble today.”

With Barack the nominee I feel like we, as a nation, have made a tremendous stride towards justice and the transformation of our national shame of slavery, prejudice, and segregation. It was a mere 44 years ago that we finally guaranteed the vote to black Americans and in 1965 we put an end to that odious recipe for oppression: separate but equal. This turn of events got me to thinking about Walt Whitman. Here is a bit from a poem he wrote around 1850, before our bloody Civil War that ended slavery. He was hopeful even then that something like Barack would eventually arrive.

Not a grave of those slaughtered ones,
But is growing its seeds of freedom,
In its turn to bear seed,
Which the winds carry afar and resow,
And the rains nourish.

Barack is the nourished seed of these slaughtered ones bearing its fruit.

Indeed, it is unique and new.

I hope that Hillary is his VP choice. I think she will be. She has earned it if she wants it. And it will make the Democratic ticket even more historic.

From an article in the Times (not the New York version) titled Nassim Nicholas Taleb: the prophet of boom and doom

“The only way you can say ‘Fuck you’ to fate is by saying it’s not going to affect how I live. So if somebody puts you to death, make sure you shave.”

Taleb is a former “trader” and currently a best selling author with his book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. I guess he predicted the current economic decline, was pooh-poohed for it, and is now commanding 60-grand from Wall Street, corporate types for his lectures. He has an MBA from Wharton, and a Ph.D. from the University of Paris.

Here is the best part of the article:

Taleb's top life tips

1 Scepticism is effortful and costly. It is better to be sceptical about matters of large consequences, and be imperfect, foolish and human in the small and the aesthetic.
2 Go to parties. You can’t even start to know what you may find on the envelope of serendipity. If you suffer from agoraphobia, send colleagues.
3 It’s not a good idea to take a forecast from someone wearing a tie. If possible, tease people who take themselves and their knowledge too seriously.
4 Wear your best for your execution and stand dignified. Your last recourse against randomness is how you act — if you can’t control outcomes, you can control the elegance of your behavior. You will always have the last word.
5 Don’t disturb complicated systems that have been around for a very long time. We don’t understand their logic. Don’t pollute the planet. Leave it the way we found it, regardless of scientific ‘evidence’.
6 Learn to fail with pride — and do so fast and cleanly. Maximize trial and error — by mastering the error part.
7 Avoid losers. If you hear someone use the words ‘impossible’, ‘never’, ‘too difficult’ too often, drop him or her from your social network. Never take ‘no’ for an answer (conversely, take most ‘yeses’ as ‘most probably’). (I haven’t been real good with this lately, I used to always say – Never say never.)
8 Don’t read newspapers for the news (just for the gossip and, of course, profiles of authors). The best filter to know if the news matters is if you hear it in cafes, restaurants... or (again) parties.
9 Hard work will get you a professorship or a BMW. You need both work and luck for a Booker, a Nobel or a private jet.
10 Answer e-mails from junior people before more senior ones. Junior people have further to go and tend to remember who slighted them.

The evidence just grows and grows. From the New York Times: Bush Overstated Evidence on Iraq, Senators Report

Go Jayhawks ...err... I mean Celtics. Celtics 98, Lakers 88

2008-05-30T09:12:00.002-05:00

Thursday, May 29th, 2008.

I came of age during the tumultuous 1960s. On one hand I was a typical suburban kid who loved fishing and camping and going through adolescence (girls, of course, being a chief preoccupation) but I was attracted to the views of those advocating for the transformation in our society and culture. So as a teenager I identified with the “radical left” agitating for change and looking for new ways of being during this period: hippies, long hair, rock music, drugs, and free love (though I saw some serious abuse that turned me off instead of on sometimes and all that free love seemed to never involve me), as well as the social and political issues like civil rights for blacks and women, opposition to the Vietnam War, draft resistance, the war on poverty (the War on Poverty was the name given by President Johnson to certain legislative goals introduced during his 1664 State of the Union address), the environmental movement, and free speech to name a few.

Don’t forget there was strong traditionalist opposition during this period as well. The conservative Senator from Arizona, Barry Goldwater, ran for President against L.B.J. in 1964. It is often argued that Goldwater’s loss in 1964 is what stimulated the conservative renewal that resulted in the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and lives on in Bush II. Also, I remember the wild uproar and burning of Beatle albums following John Lennon’s March 4th, 1966 comment about the Beatles that “we're more popular than Jesus now.” Rock'in Roll was the Devil's music. It wouldn't take long though for Rock'in Roll to be sanctified by Christians and recruited to the cause of the Lord. Christians remembered what the reformer Martin Luther, being a musician himself, reportedly said, "Why should the devil have all the good music."

Being conservative is not a bad thing. There is much that needs to be conserved, nature for instance. Families are another for instance of something being crushed under the pressure of contemporary capitalist idolatry and the increasing commodification of our way of life. Reactionary forces, in order to mask the true nature of their programs, have stolen the word. When I think of affirmative conservatives I think of Wendell Berry or Jim Wallis, very different, but both conservative. I have always felt affection for the word, even calling myself one recognizing a strong conservative sentiment in me. Family is very important, preserving ways of life is important, taking care of our communities, defending the commons, preserving the environment, preserving our history—architectural and cultural--all invoke the concept of conserving. When I think of being conservative I think of love not capital.

INTERLUDE: I just recently watched the documentary The U.S. vs. John Lennon about John’s transformation from moptop to peacenik and the Nixon administration’s efforts beginning in 1972 to deport Lennon because of his outspoken opposition to the Vietnam War. Highly recommended. The parallels between Nixon and Vietnam and Bush and Iraq are uncanny and kind of depressing. There is a significant reactionary undercurrent in the United States that continues to wreak havoc. In the latest good news on the frontlines of expanding justice and human rights against vehement reactionary opposition is the announcement that New York State Governor David A. Paterson has directed all state agencies to revise their policies and regulations to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other jurisdictions, like Massachusetts, California and Canada. Praise the Lord!

In addition to growing-up Catholic I think this era is crucial to understanding my thinking and life. It was a radical period in the U.S. and around the world. I don’t remember much discussion of the events and movements of the 1960s with my parents. I don’t remember them being critical of the movements or particularly supportive either way. They were generally anti-war—they didn’t want their son to go of course—and supportive of civil rights—I remember my mother being appalled that a neighbor would buy a house so a black family wouldn’t move into the neighborhood and they certainly allowed (sent me?) me to go to an all black summer camp during the early sixties—and my Dad was certainly a conservationist being a hunter and fisherman. Though my mother would never let me buy Beatle Boots--remember those pointy-toed shoes--but my parents did finally let me let my hair grow long (This was an answer to nightly prayers. Really!) in 1967 during the summer before Ninth grade. It seem that silence is equivalent to agreement at the end of the day. Also, my folks were big on allowing me to make-up my own mind without pressure from them.

I have always believed that the pen was mightier than the sword and that the printing press is one of, if the most, significant invention of all time (splitting the atom might rival it and, of course, there is agriculture). I liked ideas and my ideas where taking shape from a broad range of people.

The fundamental idea I had was that the natural world is a place of pleasure and meaning. It is where humans came from and it is home. This idea has always clashed with the spiritual for me but more on that later. Enough for today.

I think this is my new motto: “Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine.”

2008-05-28T12:20:00.001-05:00

Tuesday, May 27th, 2008. Now it is Wednesday.

Time marches on inexorably. All we really have is now. It is now o’clock. The past is gone and the future may never come.

The story of my life in six words: Loved the world, grew up fast. Loved mom, left bereft, looking around. Life’s simple, complicate, make simple again. Love and disappoint, then accept limitations. Build it and they will come. (Obviously I stole this one.) Change, change again, change back, repeat.

My grandson Caleb and I went to the movies last night to see Prince Caspian and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. $15.50! And that was with two student discounts. I liked Indy better and I think Caleb did too.

I think C. S. Lewis’s Narnia series is more about his experience of WWI, WWII, the horrors of Nazism, and the deep human propensity to glorify and justify the sacrifices required during war as well as the need to honor those who make them than it is about the Gospel. I wonder if the argument can be made that Narnia is a fundamental distortion of the Gospel? Does the Narnia series imaginatively conflate the ancient cultural requirement of honor in war with the Gospel? This is something I will have to think about.

The following quote is from President Bush’s speech at Arlington Cemetery last Monday, Memorial Day 2008.

“I am humbled by those who have made the ultimate sacrifice that allow a free civilization to endure and flourish. It only remains for us, the heirs of their legacy, to have the courage and the character to follow their lead -- and to preserve America as the greatest nation on earth and the last best hope for mankind.”

I am humbled by the sacrifice many have made for our nation as well, and not just the sacrifices of our solders. But a little bit of nationalistic hyperbole here? That’s a rhetorical question. As a Christian I would have to call this nationalistic idolatry, not to mention an expression of linguistic patriarchy.

Back to my story...

What did I bring to this novel conversion and conversation with Jesus?

First was my Catholic upbringing, largely ignored by high school though, but only consciously, intellectually. My basic orientation to the world was a moral one formed by this experience. Simply put, we where to love, all else was sin. This love required action, one had to do what one believed. As President Kennedy said, “ask not what your country can do for you, but what can you do for your country.” I don’t remember this comment myself; Kennedy made it in his inaugural address on January 20th, 1961, when I was 6-years old, turning 7 in 9 days. But it exemplifies the ethos I think I learned via my Catholic schooling. (I have to mention parenthetically that I think there is a sort of fascism-light in this statement, though I do believe public service and elective office can be a high calling.) Love is action and the world was in dire need of action: poverty, hunger, environmental degradation, segregation, freedom from oppression, justice was called for.

Childhood fishing and camping trips, experiences in Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts, summer camp at a nearly all black church camp are the early experiences that I remember as significant in my understanding of the world. My Boy Scout Handbook, the magazines Field and Stream, Sports Afield, National Geographic, and Boys Life, and the outdoor adventure novels My Side of the Mountain and The Pond where my earliest reading that informed me about the world. These created a fundamental idea of the natural world as a place of pleasure and meaning. It was home. It needed to be cared for

As I grew older I was becoming aware of the broader world. I came of age during the 1960s: the Civil Rights Movement, the War on Poverty, the Hippie era, the War in Vietnam, the Free Speech movement, Women’s Liberation, the Environmental Movement (i.e. Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, which I never read, was published in 1962 launching the modern environmental movement), LSD, marijuana, the sexual revolution, the burning of bras, flags, and draft cards. This was the social milieu I was growing-up in and from which I drew my inspiration and ideas of the world as I came of age.

“Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine,” wrote Henry David Thoreau in his 1849 essay Resistance to Civil Government later published as Civil Disobedience, which I read in High School. The Story of My Experiments with Truth, Mahatma Gandhi’s autobiography was another book I read early in high school. I always believed that the pen was mightier than the sword. I liked ideas and my ideas where taking greater focus from a broader range of people.

2008-05-21T12:02:00.002-05:00

Wednesday, May 21st, 2008

To pick-up my story...

So that night in Danny McDowell’s apartment I made a fateful decision, one that has influenced my life ever since. In traditional Christian language I choose to “take up my cross and follow Jesus.” “No one after putting his hand to the plow ever looks back.” “What would it profit a man if he gained the whole world but lost his soul?” Jesus would be my leader. I would follow him wherever he would lead me. I still feel that way today. But what a long, strange trip it has been.

Of course the way I understand this decision and these injunction has changed over the years but it still remains a governing principle in my life. In a way choosing to follow Jesus has been kind of like growing up Catholic. Even when in denial and fighting it every step of the way you can’t get away from it. It seems to always be there, impinging and influencing everything I think ether as reaction or submission.

So, I still follow Jesus today and I am a practicing Catholic too, albeit a skeptical follower and believer. Can’t quite imagine being anything else. It seems that I will be like this till I die, unless the Catholics kick me out first for views such as all abortions aren’t wrong, women should be priests, and homosexuals should be provided the grace of the sacrament of marriage. Then I might be an Anglo-catholic. But the discussion of this comes later. But that evening in Danny’s apartment I made a choice and I haven’t quite been able to turn back from it since.

When I made the decision to follow Jesus I was a typical early 70s post-hippie hippie and Jesus freak. Prior to giving my life to Christ I smoked pot and hashish, ate peyote, and drop acid. By the time I made my radical commitment to Christ I had already quit dropping acid because of an aversion to synthetic chemical highs under the influence of natural health concerns ala J. I. Rodale and Prevention Magazine. With the commitment to Jesus I gave up all altered states of mind. Not so much because they were sinful but they were a distraction. As John Denver would sing a few years later, “sunshine on my shoulders makes me happy.” I wanted to look for those natural highs of love and joy in the moment through the giving of myself to God, loving others, and living wholesomely with the earth and her natural gifts.

I was a young, hopeful, idealistic, high school kid with little life experience but lots of ide3as how the world should be. I need to back a little farther and reimagine who I was and what I thought before this militant commitment to Jesus in 1971. What did I bring to this new conversion and conversation with Jesus? This is necessary in understanding where I took my new faith in Jesus. It will illuminate how I avoided some things, modified others, and eventually ended up where I am now.

The outdoors was my childhood element. Field and Stream, Sports Afield, National Geographic, and Boys Life magazines, the novels My Side of the Mountain by Jean George and The Pond by Robert Murphy, and, of course, my Boy Scout Handbook are the earliest reading that I remember. Later would be Walden by Thoreau, some Emerson, Bradford Angiers and the first Whole Earth Catalog in 1968. I was 14 when it came out. I discovered Wendell Berry and Manifesto: The Mad Farmers Liberation Front in the pages of The Whole Earth Catalog.

Through Junior High and High School I spent much of my time riding my bike with my buddies out to Three Ponds, our name for a series of three ponds about four or five miles from my suburban home in Southeast Wichita and other rural places to fish, camp, hunt, and just hang out. These places were far enough to be “out in the country” in the late 1960s and early 70s. And, of course, in High School we started driving and wandering further afield.

A couple books central to my early thinking that I am rereading: Pro-existence (1974) by Udo Middelmann and Idols of Our Time (1981) by Bob Goudzwaard.

Pro-existence by Middelmann was important in helping me think about material reality, creativity, and work in the world of spiritual thinking I inhabited. Some ripe quotes: “Only in creative activity do we externalize the identity we have as [humans] made in the image of God. This then is the true basis of work.” “[Humans] act rather than react, and [we] can be creative and act beyond the immediate reality.” “When the job is more important than the humanity of the worker, our society is sick.” “More people are looking for entertainment instead of creating entertainment for themselves. We should seek refreshment through playing, imagining, telling stories, digging in the garden, even cleaning [house].”

Idols of Our Time by Bob Goudzwaard was helpful to me in thinking about political and social questions and in helping to sever the presumed “natural” ties between current polities and the ideologies that support them and to envision other possibilities. Goudzwaard challenges the assumptions or, in his language, the ideologies created around concepts such as progress, revolution, nation, material prosperity, and guaranteed security. He argues that ideas can all to easily become idolatries in which we become like them and use them to justify corrupting habits of mind and practice where the end justifies the means and the “job becomes more important than the worker.”

A few quotes: “[M]any nations and groups of people today are possessed by the goal of guaranteed security. Their obsession gives them the impulse to use every means at their disposal and to create new strategies for reaching their all-encompassing end.” This was published in 1981 and likely written during the climate that resulted in the election of Ronald Reagan in the U.S. that year. Our experience during the reign of Bush II only emphasizes the prescient nature of this comment as well as the persistent and pernicious nature of this idolatry. And on the idolatry of progress: “The very progress which we first applauded has now become a problem. It seems that economic progress stimulates inflation, risky energy development, higher accumulation of toxic wastes, ... deforestation, and an unbelievable arms race.” “Yet in no way do the ominous signs of our situation necessitate fatalism or doomsday thinking. ... How can we take the first step? ... Our step will ... be characterized by the word enough, not the words more and more. The words of Isaiah [nations will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks] challenge us with a threefold appeal today. ... reduce defense spending, to channel the unclaimed monies into the poorest nations, and to build an economy of care, an economy of enough.”

Albert Hofmann, the Father of LSD, Dies at 102 Reports the NYT. Albert Hofmann, the “mystic chemist,” synthesized the compound lysergic acid diethylamide in 1938 but didn’t discover its mind-altering properties until five years later, when he accidentally ingested the substance. One article I read suggested he inadvertently got the compound on his fingers. Hofmann remained a spiritual seeker all his life. Much later he ingested Ecstasy and reportedly said, “Ah, at last something I can take with my wife.”

2008-05-13T15:38:00.000-05:00

MAY DAY, Thursday, May 1st, 2008. Well it’s not May Day but Tuesday, May 13th today.

Fecund, laborer; Two May Day words. It is the first day of May and spring is gathering steam. Like a thunderstorm building on the horizon, spring is mounting towards its guaranteed crescendo of renewal, fertility, hope, a natural Easter. And if you are a laborer—or a student—summer vacations!

Anyway, how about that story of my life I was telling?

I’ll pick-up where I left off:

BASIC: Brothers and Sisters in Christ, that famous happening. Well, maybe not famous, but it was a spring from which issued many significant streams of consequence. At least two churches are still functioning in Wichita that grew out of BASIC, a coffee house and music venue (now defunct as far as I know) operated for several years and was an alternative to the drug and music scene. During this era of the Jesus Movement in Wichita hundreds of young people were influenced at BASIC in positive ways that carried over into their lives. Many have continued to live in a manner that honors this brief period and their experience of BASIC. Hundreds of kids came out on Saturday nights to praise the Lord and sing, hear bible preaching, think about what love means, and to see and meet each other. (My little group always went to Big Boy on Kellogg afterwards for burgers and fries.) It was an exciting time.

I had been attending BASIC for several weeks and I was beginning to believe that these folks were on to something with all the Jesus talk. They were joyful, serious, young, pretty, and had long hair like me. I had begun reading the bible daily and I was predisposed to believe in Jesus anyway because of my Catholic upbringing. I liked the singing, I liked hanging out with my friends, and I was a serious kid too. I liked these people and I liked the emotions I experienced. There was a joy and certainty I felt when singing and hanging out at BASIC. It was believable that God was alive and changing lives.

You just had to look at these kids. Many gave-up drugs, unhealthy promiscuous sex, experienced forgiveness and a sense of radical acceptance, began to focus on loving people and themselves, took school more seriously, and generally got outside of themselves and their narrow egos to think about the larger world. The two churches are examples of institutional results. But there were countless ways individuals where changed and motivated to be different. In a way my entire life’s direction was set by my experience at BASIC, as was the direction and lives of many.

One example from my experience at that time illustrates how it affected many kids. My high school was riven with racial tensions. We had fights in the hallways almost daily and security guards roaming the halls. There were unwritten rules one had to learn in order to navigate this minefield. One rule being that white kids and black kids had to use specific restrooms. I discovered this on my first day at school when I went into a restroom and was slammed-up against the wall by a group of black kids who demanded to know what the fuck I was doing in their bathroom? This was 1969 and I was among the first group of white kids affected by desegregation efforts in Wichita. I had to attend the “inner city black high school” and I learned the restroom rules the hard way.

By the time I was a senior the racial climate had calmed but there was still significant tension. I thought I would try to do something about it. Following my “conversion” I decided to organize a club. I don’t remember the club name but the inspiration for it came from Galatians 3:28, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free person, there is not male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” I wanted a place that modeled this passage. Where anyone could come and find “artificial” cultural barriers removed and made irrelevant. I don’t remember it as particularly successful. It didn’t attract hundreds of kids but who knows? It made a difference in my life I suppose and that counts for something.

When did I come to believe myself? It is hard to say. I always believed having been a cradle catholic. I never had a “conversion experience” but I did have a moment I radically committed my life to following Christ, literally. I used to tell the story of the night I was at Danny McDowell’s apartment during the fall or winter of 1971/1972. I had been going to BASIC since the summer and enjoying it. I had been doing some reading—the bible for sure—other specific books I don’t remember. At this time I don’t think other books were important to my commitment. (A few books I read early in my “new life” were C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, Hal Lindsey’s The Late, Great Planet Earth and Thomas Merton’s Contemplative Prayer.) It was more the hymns and scriptures I was reading than books that “changed” me. But I absolutely approached this time all through all I had read and experienced prior to it. My experience of the world and my early reading shaped the way I believed and how lived it.

While the teaching at BASIC influenced me—much of which I was questioning and later would explicitly reject (more on this later)—the central thing was I knew I had to make a radical commitment. This is something I did that night at Danny’s apartment.

2008-04-30T13:23:00.001-05:00

Wednesday morning, April 30th, 2008, and an easy morning so far

I feel like I am taking this uncouth, wild (red in tooth and claw) boy and training him in the basic requirements of living in civilized society.

I am thinking of a eulogy for a tree. This nice poem by Freada Dillon came up on a goggle.

Eulogy http://www.burningword.com/node/694

The mulberry tree has grown crooked, seeking light
from under a canopy
of massive hardwoods and pine sentinels.
Branches,
covered with leaves the size of dinner plates,
sway precariously over the roof.
All attempts to redirect its growth have failed.
Replacements,
sprung from berries broadcast
along with bird droppings,
flourish in better light. But I will not
see them reach full growth.
The chainsaw's grind and sputter
punctuate the air. In moments
the yard is adrift in deadfall.
With the last bite, the chain binds,
jitters,
then releases.
The trunk falls almost gently,
settling into a bed of its own foliage.
Rising sap puddles on the raw stump,
warm to the touch,
bitter on my tongue.
2004

“Falling in faith and falling in love can be understood the same way. People fall in love with no evidence of how a relationship will work out and no real knowledge of who their partner is, let alone who they will be.... We never have any real information about anything important. It takes a lifetime for the ramifications to be worked out. ...

The irony is that we all—secular or religious people alike—make our biggest decisions on faith.... You would have to live a lifetime to be qualified... And since we can’t do that we trust to luck, religion, and the kindness of strangers.”

From Frank Schaeffer’s book Crazy for God.

another day

2008-04-29T18:32:00.000-05:00

Monday, April 21st, 2008. The fifth week of Easter

Today is Monday beginning the third week of Caleb staying with me. I have my 14 year-old grandson staying with me for a while. And I have managed to make just about everyone mad at me. The Pope has been in the U.S. and I missed his visit entirely. Well, maybe not entirely, but I hardly knew it was happening. The last two weeks have been “weird” for sure. Oh well.

Monday was followed by Tuesday and everything changed. So today it is

Tuesday, April 29th, a week later and all is well.

I am thinking about this morning at the coffee shop. My dog Izzy has taken on iconic status at the local coffee shop. Doubtless she has stories told about her to friends and acquaintances. But I am not privy to those.

Here is the dialogue from today’s two-for-Tuesday mocha walk.

INT. COFFEE SHOP—SUNNY MORNING

Woman
I feel so sorry for that dog.

Man
Would it be better for her to sit at home for 2 hours or take a 3-mile walk?

Woman (with back turned, up-raised backhand gesture, derisive voice)
I wasn’t talking to you.

Fade...

That did poor Izzy a lot of good.

Doesn’t it seem more helpful—and potentially more beneficial to the animal you are sympathizing with—if you talk to the human owner instead of self-righteously, dismissively responding to an attempt to communicate? I don’t get it. Like I said, it did Izzy a lot of good.

2008-04-03T13:24:00.001-05:00

Tuesday, April Fools, Second week of Eastertide, 2008. Actually, now it is Thursday the 3rd.

I don’t remember where I came across this prayer:

I am no longer my own, but thine.
Put me to what thou wilt, rank me with whom thou wilt:
Put me to doing: put me to suffering:
Let me be employed for thee, or laid aside for thee:
Exalted for thee, or brought low for thee:
Let me be full, let me be empty:
Let me have all things: let me have nothing:
I freely and heartily yield all things to thy pleasure and disposal.
And now, O glorious and blessed God, [Mother/]Father, Son and Holy Spirit,
Thou art mine and I am thine. So be it.
And the covenant which I have made on earth let it be ratified in heaven.

Again, my memory is fussy, but didn’t I read somewhere that Flannery O'Connor wrote this?

“Subtlety is the curse of man, it is not found in the Deity.”

I got this Franz Wright poem from Knopf’s daily April poem. “Sunlight will win, don’t worry.” That’s a quote, not the title.

Publication Date

One of the few pleasures of writing
is the thought of one's book in the hands of a kindhearted
intelligent person somewhere. I can't remember what the others
are right now.
I just noticed that it is my own private

National I Hate Myself and Want to Die Day
(which means the next day I will love my life
and want to live forever). The forecast calls
for a cold night in Boston all morning

and all afternoon. They say
tomorrow will be just like today,
only different. I'm in the cemetery now
at the edge of town, how did I get here?

A sparrow limps past on its little bone crutch saying
I am Federico García Lorca
risen from the dead—
literature will lose, sunlight will win, don't worry.

The following block is from a book review of Scott Weidensaul's Of a Feather: A Brief History of American Birding and Jonathan Rosen's The Life of the Skies: Birding at the End of Nature by Cindy Crosby in Books and Culture Review (: A Christian Review, that is). The writer internally quoted is Rosen.

Never have I better understood the meaning of Hegel's observation ["the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk"], which essentially means that insight arrives when the end is near, or that cultures peak when they are about to die, than when I started birding." Later, he [Rosen] writes poignantly, "If we don't shore up the earth, the skies will be empty." Birding has changed him for the better: "Dawn and dusk matter differently to me now, and the seasons, tied to the arrival of birds and the departure of birds, bind me to the earth in subtle and important ways."

"Dawn and dusk matter differently to me now, and the seasons, tied to the arrival of birds and the departure of birds, bind me to the earth in subtle and important ways."

I like that. It matters to me too.

Easter Triduum

2008-03-20T10:26:00.000-05:00

Maundy Thursday, March 20th, 2008

Easter Triduum begins: the terrible and the joyful melds in perfect union. This Easter I will be able to attend worship through the entire season.

From Wikipedia:

The week before Easter is very special in the Christian tradition. The Sunday before Easter is Palm Sunday and the last three days before Easter are Maundy Thursday or Holy Thursday, Good Friday and Holy Saturday (sometimes referred to as Silent Saturday). Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday and Good Friday respectively commemorate Jesus' entry in Jerusalem, the Last Supper and the Crucifixion. Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday are sometimes referred to as the Easter Triduum (Latin for "Three Days").

And

In the Christian liturgical calendar, Maundy Thursday or Holy Thursday is the feast or holy day falling on the Thursday before Easter that commemorates the Last Supper of Jesus Christ with the Apostles. It is the fifth day of Holy Week, and is preceded by Holy Wednesday and followed by Good Friday.
On this day four events are commemorated: the washing of the Disciples' feet by Jesus Christ, the institution of the Mystery of the Holy Eucharist at the Last Supper, the agony of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane, the betrayal of Christ by Judas Iscariot.
The morning celebration of these events marks the beginning of what is called the Easter Triduum or Sacred Triduum. The Latin word triduum means a three-day period, and the triduum in question is that of the three days from the death to the resurrection of Jesus.

writer block

2008-03-11T17:02:00.002-05:00

Tuesday, March 11th, 2008

It is the curse of wanabe writers like me. But I am still happy to have finished phase I of my cleaning/organizing. Spring cleaning? Lent cleaning? While cleaning I was listening to John McCutcheon, Tom Waits, Bruce Cockburn, Jars of Clay, Sara Groves, and Chanticleer. Jars of Clay and Sara Groves are new to me.

World Youth Day 2008, Sidney, Australia, and John Henry Cardinal Newman from The Times.

KU-USF football game moved to Sept. 12 for ESPN: I love the Fall and college football season.

morning

2008-03-10T12:09:00.001-05:00

Monday, March 10th, 2008

Lent is drawing to a close. Has it made a difference? Wednesday is my parish penitential service, confession is looming. Am I ready? 5 days till the Ides of March. How is this year going to go? Next Sunday is Palm Sunday. 10 days to Spring (I recently read that Lent comes from a Roman word meaning Spring), 11 days till Good Friday (J. S. Bach’s BD), 13 days until Easter. Enough of this.

Subtlety is the curse of man, it is not found in the Deity. I came across this quote by Flannery O’ Conner somewhere this past weekend. I like it.

Good news. Southern Baptists Back a Shift on Climate Change is the headline to this article in the New York Times.

Slum Visits: Tourism or Voyeurism? An important issue for Christians, and others, who care about justice to think about, and not because I think it slum tourism is wrong or evil.

Altruism: Why are humans altruistic? Jim Holt writes about it in The Way We Live Now: Good Instincts.

2008-03-06T17:58:00.000-06:00

Thursday, March 6th, 2008: Part two

Check out this article by the infamous Richard Owen in The Times (not the New York Times) Pope is warned of a green Antichrist. Kind of interesting. Vladimir Solovyov is interesting too. Never heard of him. Here he is on Wiki.

2008-03-06T17:32:00.000-06:00

Thursday, March 6th, 2008

From March 6th’s concluding prayer at Lauds.

Lord, we are your servants and we pray for your clemency.
Set right by penitence and trained by good works,
may we wholeheartedly follow your commandments
and come unstained to the paschal feast.

What is faith? Check-out Charlotte was Both for a long quote by Pope Benedict XVI.

It is a big place

2008-03-04T17:20:00.000-06:00

Tuesday, March 4th, 2008

Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead!

My soul, O my soul, rise up! Why are you sleeping? The end draws near, and soon you will be troubled. Watch, then, that Christ your God may spare you, for He is everywhere present and fills all things.

From the Great Canon of Andrew of Crete

I got this from the website of the Byzantine Catholic Church in America. I was looking into stories of the kidnapping of Msgr. Paulos Faraj Rahho, Chaldean Archbishop of Mosul, Iraq.

hanging in there.

2008-02-28T13:07:00.000-06:00

It is Tuesday February 19th. The last time I noted anything was 15 days ago.

Well, I didn’t go to the caucus, but Obama was the big winner in Kansas on February 4th.

Now it is Thursday, February 28th.

Headline in the NYTs: 1 in 100 U.S. Adults Behind Bars, New Study Says. This is an amazing stat. I wonder what the incarceration rate for adults was in Great Britain in the early 19th Century?

Faith

2008-02-04T19:12:00.000-06:00

It is Monday, February 4th and a beautiful day it is, sunny and 65 degrees.

It will get cold tonight and tomorrow is forecast to bring up to 5 inches of snow.

This Wednesday is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the season of Lent. A paraphrase from memory of Pope Benedict XVI’s message for Lent:

The work of Lent is prayer, fasting, and almsgiving.

What am I going to do for Lent? I have been thinking about it. Read the classic The Day Christ Died by Jim Bishop. I guess it is a “classic” for its genre. I am also thinking that I should do the things I set as goals during Advent but didn’t do. Contact old friends and family whom I have, or nearly have, lost contact with. Write two hours a day, read two hours a day, and pray more. We’ll see.

What about fasting and almsgiving?

Been reading a bit of John Updike today. Due Considerations is due back at the Library in a couple days and I marked several pieces I want to read before returning it. Today I read his essay about the future of faith written for The New Yorker. Here is a quote:

“Faith is not so much a binary pole as a quantum state, which tends to vanish when closely examined.”

2008-01-29T15:55:00.000-06:00

It is Saturday, January 26th, 2008 and we are going to celebrate Khia’s birthday today. Yea!!!

Wisdom 7:7 - 16

I prayed, and understanding was given me;
I entreated, and the spirit of Wisdom came to me.
I esteemed her more than sceptres and thrones;
compared with her, I held riches as nothing.
I reckoned no priceless stone to be her peer,
for compared with her, all gold is a pinch of sand,
and beside her silver ranks as mud.
I loved her more than health or beauty,
preferred her to the light,
since her radiance never sleeps.

May God grant me to speak as he would wish
and express thoughts worthy of his gifts,
since he himself is the guide of Wisdom,
since he directs the sages.
We are indeed in his hand, we ourselves and our words,
with all our understanding, too, and technical knowledge.

Well, it is now Tuesday, January 29th, 2008, my 54th birthday. Also it is the birthdays of my two youngest grandkids, my home state of Kansas, my girlfriend’s younger sister, my two oldest grandkids’ dad, Oprah, and countless others too. We’ll all have dinner tonight. Well, maybe not Oprah and Pam’s sister will be in New York but you know what I mean.

The above passage from Wisdom is part of last Saturday’s Mass readings, if I remember correctly. I copied it here Saturday because it was meaningful to me during my morning prayers. I’m not sure why now.

I know it is not the Christmas season now but I just listened to Jars of Clay: Christmas Songs by Jars of Clay. It was really a pleasant album to hear. I really liked it. I will be listening to this CD some more over the next few days. Jars of Clay’s sound on this album is a bit how I hear Christmas and winter, so it rests well with me. Though it has some weak lyrics.

I preceded it with brief segments of a few pieces from The Chariot’s The Fiancée. This is some high-energy punk. It hurt my throat to listen to the screaming on this album but Josh Scogin is a great screamer. I doubt I will listen to The Fiancée much after today. Screaming punk is not really my style but this CD is an interesting and wild ride. The lyrics seem a little forced at times just to make a rhyme. Check out this review on Absolutepunk—http://www.absolutepunk.net/showthread.php?t=224905.

Books read so far in 2008:

Pope John XXIII, Shepherd of the Modern World by Peter Hebblethwaite

The Rise of Benedict XVI: The Inside Story of How The Pope Was Elected and Where He Will Take The Catholic Church by John L. Allen, Jr.

Sad huh? I am a little lazy with my reading. I have thirty or so books checked out from the library right now. There are two books I am currently reading:

Marking the Hours by Eamon Duffy and A Secular Age by Charles Taylor

Lets hope I can note these books as read soon.

Human

2008-01-15T19:17:00.000-06:00

It’s Tuesday, January 15th, 2008 and the child Samuel is on his way.

Also, hitting the Roman Catholic news and blog circuit today is the cancellation of Pope Benedict’s planned speech this Thursday at a Rome University because of student and Professor protests. It might be instructive to remember Benedict’s revulsion to the student protests in the 60s and 70s, and, of course, Italian politics.

I am surprised about the Manichean plots so many see in this, possibly including the Pope himself. Actually, I don’t think Pope Benedict sees conspiracies in this situation but given his demonstrated ability to not foresee consequences to his public statements it will be interesting to follow this story as it develops. I will be interested to read the text of his intended talk when it becomes public, which I hope is soon.

The New Year is underway.

2008-01-14T14:29:00.000-06:00

Monday January 14, 2008. A new year and my first post. This almost means my first writing of the New Year. A late start, but a start nonetheless. Where will it go? We will see.

I should note that the New Year really began today for me. It is Monday following the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord. Advent and Christmas are over.

This is not quite my first writing this year. I have been working on my Book of Hours. Anyone out there creating your own Book of Hours for use in prayer?

All we know is this world, in the conventional meaning of “know.” But what is the conventional meaning of know, or any other word for that matter?

The following is from a Steven Pinker piece in this past Sunday’s NYT’s Sunday Magazine. I hope Christians can learn to think about the world and morality in a real, rational sort of way.

“Which of the following people would you say is the most admirable: Mother Teresa, Bill Gates or Norman Borlaug? And which do you think is the least admirable? For most people, it’s an easy question. Mother Teresa, famous for ministering to the poor in Calcutta, has been beatified by the Vatican, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and ranked in an American poll as the most admired person of the 20th century. Bill Gates, infamous for giving us the Microsoft dancing paper clip and the blue screen of death, has been decapitated in effigy in “I Hate Gates” Web sites and hit with a pie in the face. As for Norman Borlaug . . . who the heck is Norman Borlaug?”

2007-11-29T17:01:00.000-06:00

Here is were I pick-it-up today, Thursday, November 29, 2007

I just heard on NPR’s hourly broadcast that Senator Henry Hyde of Illinois died at 2:30 a.m. this morning. An ardent opponent of abortion Senator Hyde is remembered for the infamous “Hyde amendment” to a budget bill in 1976. President Bush, an opponent of legal abortion also is quoted in today’s NYT’s obituary, “This fine man believed in the power of freedom, and he was a tireless champion of the weak and forgotten. He used his talents to build a more hopeful America and promote a culture of life.”

As what follows will indicate, I don’t agree with Mr. Hyde. But there was a time I did. I remember sitting with a group of Elders from the Lawrence Bible Chapel sometime back in the 1970’s discussing how Christians should be politically active. The pro-life anti-abortion agenda was high on my list of crucial political issues at the time and I appreciated Senator Hyde as an ally in this effort. But I have changed my view.

I picked up this fragment of a hymn by Saint Ephrem the Syrian on the blog Charlotte was Both. It is translated from a recent talk of Pope Benedict’s. It is from a hymn on the nativity of Christ (De Nativitate11, 6-8), very advent in nature. I am thinking about what I will do this advent. This is the beginning of the chief scandal and mystery of orthodox Christianity, that God would become human. What does it mean? What if it is true? It is worth meditating on for a few weeks, hence the season of advent.

The Lord came to you
to become a servant.

The Word came to you
to be [quiet] in your womb.

Lightning came to you
without making any noise.

The Shepherd came to you -
and becomes the newborn Lamb
with his submissive plaint.

The womb of Mary
has changed the roles:

He who created all things
took possession in poverty.

The Highest came to you
but he entered with humility.

Splendor came to you,
but dressed in humble rags.

He who makes all things grow
knew hunger.

He who waters everything
knew thirst.

Bare and stripped, he came from you,
he who clothes everything in beauty.

And I wrote this on Tuesday, October 16, 2007.

Beautiful fall day. Sunny, the windows open, 60 degrees Fahrenheit, light breeze from the west rustling the leaves—still green— in the cottonwood just outside my window, kids on the playground. I am sitting at my computer listening as the light crescendos of wind roll in the leaves, feeling thankful, but vigilant. I saw the first true fiery red fall leaf on the Fire Bush yesterday, glowing.

Before I go on with my story I need to respond to some reading I encountered on several blogs today. Also, I want to formally put my thoughts down on abortion. I am Catholic. I am pro-choice. I believe abortion is a woman’s right. The morning after pill should be readily available over the counter, and during the early weeks of pregnancy abortion should be a woman’s right (insert the words “God given” prior to “right” if you want, as in a “right” that the “Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them,” to burrow the words of the Declaration of Independence) to chose along with any other personal health issues she may have. I don’t see a contradiction between being Catholic and pro-choice.

But this position—if I have to call it that—stands in contradiction with the party line laid down by the Pope and publicly supported by all our Bishops (at least all the ones I know of, but I’m not a specialist on the subject), and many Catholics (but not all and possibly not most Catholics). By my way of thinking, the Bishops have got it wrong.

At the very least, I think it is time to accept that we live in a secular and pluralistic society (this is a good thing by the way, as well as a fact and a good political goal) in which many, many Americans (probably most Americans) of good will believe abortion is a woman’s right. Some time I will write at length about abortion and gay rights, two of the areas the Church has it wrong. For now let me mention an op-ed essay that is yet to appear Abortion isn't a religious issue written by Garry Wills in a recent Washington Post.

What got me thinking about this at the moment where some comments posted today (that is last October 16th) on Darwincatholic.blogspot.com.

On with the story... (I copied this from a previous post (October 11, 2007), revised it, and then wrote on)

One thing about this project is its dynamic nature—it is a living thing—it is my life anyway! Foremost it is about my contemporary wrangling about/with God and God’s place in my life and the life of the world as well. My spirituality today is the principal concern here. Does God exist? And if so, what does that mean? What do I do about it?

But it is also a story of my past, a past that in a certain sense never changes even as it intrudes on the present through my memory and becomes a part of my living. This is to imply that it is not fixed in my imagination. The past changes through alchemy of the present. Telling the story is a tedious process and I often lose track of it in the living of it, which is much less tedious and much more important. So, where did I leave off last? Ah, yes.

It is about this time of year, October 1971, cool fall days. Summer is over and a great summer it was. I spent the summer in Colorado camping and backpacking. But I am back home, I am back in school, the leaves are changing colors, and I am a serious senior in High School getting ready to embark on life.

I have been attending BASIC for several weeks and I am beginning to believe these folks are on to something with all this Jesus talk. They are joyful, serious, young, pretty, and have long hair like me. I have been reading the bible, I am predisposed to believe it because of my Catholic upbringing, I like the singing, I like hanging out with my friends, and I am serious too.

A parenthetical moment: I believe that the world is a closed system. So why do I pray? What is prayer—magic, manipulation, psychological trickery? I don’t know, but I do pray. But primarily, I believe it is of vital importance to recognize that what happens in this world is of human origin. This as a fundamental fact. Just as digestion is a fundamental biological fact that has an evolutional history along with the rest of our body so is our consciousness, in every way, a fundamental biological fact. Within our consciousness resides experience, thoughts, beliefs, rationality, religion, language, abstraction, and the list could go on and on. But this whole complex experience is the fruit of a biological process with an evolutional history. This has profound consequences for the understanding of human behavior and it impinges directly on politics, social life, morality, culture, and religion.

Will this project slake my hunger to know? Allow me to doff my skepticism?

Can I believe Christianity is a true myth? How does history, a closed natural system, or materialism relate to ideas of intervention, suspension, violation, or any outside impingement upon the natural system relate to this fundamental belief in human agency and the evolution of that agency?

Francis Schaeffer insisted on the historicity of the fall of humankind. Given what we know of the evolution of the species Homo sapiens, the only extant species of the primate family Hominidae, how can we even think of the historicity of the fall? We can’t. We know nothing about it. It is a myth. The scheme of the fall of humankind is used to explain experience and for pedagogy. And its not a bad idea. The concept of sin is something I always said I believed in during my strong agnostic days.

Back to my story....

I liked these people. There was a joy and certainty that I experienced when singing with them. When did I come to believe myself? It is hard to say. I always told the story of when I was at Danny McDowell’s apartment during the fall/winter of 1971/1972. I really don’t remember much from the actual event; I remember the rudiments of the story I told back then.

2007-10-15T17:23:00.000-05:00

Thursday, October 11, 2007

The following quote-within-a-quote is from a book review titled, Twenty Centuries of Conversation, by Dennis O’Brien in America. The book reviewed is The Secular Age, by Charles Taylor (not that friend of televangelist Pat Robinson, the corrupt diamond peddler and former President of Liberia, but the Catholic philosopher from Montreal and McGill University): “To be heard, the church will have to abandon “a longstanding obsession...to nail down [issues] with ultimate, unattainable and finally self-destructive precision.”” How true. I think the current Pope doesn’t see this (Has any Pope since John XXIII?). Our secular age is as much (more!) gift as bane.

From the article, Apocalypse Now?, by Stephen Holmes in The Nation comes this long quote-within-a-quote. It is something to think about. The article is a review of Chalmers Johnson’s new book Nemesis, the third volume of "an inadvertent trilogy" that includes Blowback and The Sorrows of Empire. Here it is: “Johnson speculates that we have already entered the "last days" of the Republic. America's post-World War II "imperialism," he predicts, will soon put an end to self-government in the United States: "I believe that to maintain our empire abroad requires resources and commitments that will inevitably undercut our domestic democracy and in the end produce a military dictatorship or its civilian equivalent." The destruction of the American Republic may even illustrate a profound historical regularity, he implies: "Over any fairly lengthy period of time, successful imperialism requires that a domestic republic or a domestic democracy change into a domestic tyranny." He even thinks that the American military is now "ripe" for "a Julius Caesar"--that is, for "a revolutionary, military populist with little interest in republican niceties so long as some form of emperorship lies at the end of his rocky path."” This is, of course, an intentional juxtaposing of the Rome Empire with the U.S. Certainly a historical parallel but not a certainty. Though I think we need to reread Jacques Ellul. The end of the Republic is possible.

From the article, The Sting of Death: Why We Yearn for Eternity, by Charles Taylor and published in Commonweal. The article is an excerpt from his voluminous new book A Secular Age. “The secular age is schizophrenic, or better, deeply cross-pressured. People seem at a safe distance from religion, and yet they are very moved to know that there are dedicated believers, like Mother Teresa (I would add such figures as the Dali Lama in there too). The unbelieving world, well used to disliking Pius XII, was bowled over by John XXIII. A pope just had to sound like a Christian, and many immemorial resistances melted. Il fallait y penser. It’s as though many people who don’t want to follow want nevertheless to hear the message of Christ, want it to be proclaimed out there. The paradox was evident in the response to the late pope. Many people were inspired by John Paul’s public, peripatetic preaching about love, about world peace, about international economic justice. They are thrilled that these things are being said. But even many Catholics among his admirers didn’t feel that they must follow all his moral injunctions. And in an expressive, post-Durkheimian world, this is not a contradiction. It makes perfect sense. Such are the strange and complex conditions of belief in our age.” Indeed, it makes good sense.

work day

2007-10-11T12:31:00.000-05:00

Thursday, October 11, 2007

physiognomy precipice mendacious

Today’s news (October 9, 2007); well, yesterday’s news today October 11, 2007. Meaning not October 10th but “yesterday’s” as in passé, old news supervened by events or by the news cycle.

It just gets more complicated. Now Turkey Says Its Troops Can Cross Iraq Border By Sebnem Arsu on the NYT website.

How Baboons Think (Yes, Think) By Nicholas Wade also on today’s NYT website.

The article is about research being done by Drs. Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth on baboon society. Baboon society is matrilineal; it follows mother-daughter lines of descent, hence, it is hereditary from mother too daughter. Data also indicates that there can be eight or nine matrilines in a troop that are ranked as well and this hierarchy can remain stable across generations. There also is a male hierarchy too that can be in competition with the female hierarchy, form alliances with it, or with elements of it, to gain mutual benefits. But the male hierarchy is dynamic with males changing troops and fighting among themselves.

Here is a quote from a member of the British royal family, Princess Michael of Kent, in response to learning of this research, “I always knew that when people who aren’t like us claim that hereditary rank is not part of human nature, they must be wrong. Now you’ve given me evolutionary proof!”

A little folk biology here?

On with the story...

One thing about this project is its dynamic nature—the project is a living thing—it is my life anyway! But it is also a story of my past that in certain ways never changes. Telling the story is a tedious process I often lose track of in the living, which is much less tedious. Where did I leave off last? Ah, yes.

It is about this time of year, I am a senior in High School, I have been attending BASIC for several weeks and I am beginning to believe these folks are on to something with all this Jesus talk. They are joyful, serious, young, pretty, have long hair like me. I have been reading the bible, I am predisposed to believe it because of my Catholic upbringing, I like the singing, I like hanging out with my friends, and I am serious.

A parenthetical moment: I believe that the world is a closed system. So why do I pray? What is prayer; magic, manipulation, psychological trickery? I don’t know.

But I believe it is of vital importance to recognize this as a fundamental fact. Just as digestion is a fundamental biological fact that has an evolutional history along with the rest of our body so is our consciousness in every way. Within our consciousness resides our experience, thoughts, beliefs, rationality, religion, language, abstraction, and the list could go on and on. Breaking it down into smaller pieces. That’s what it does. But this whole complex is a biological process with an evolutional history. This has profound consequences for the understanding of human behavior, hence in impinges directly on politics, social life, morality, culture, and religion.

Will this project slake my hunger to know? Allow me to doff my skepticism?

Can I believe Christianity is a true myth? How does history, a natural system, materialism relate to ideas of any intervention, suspension, violation, or any outside impingement upon the natural system relate?

Francis Schaeffer insisted on the historicity of the fall of humankind. Given what we know of the evolution of the species Homo sapiens, the only extant species of the primate family Hominidae, how can we even think of the historicity of the fall? We can’t. We know nothing about it. It is a myth about the belief of a fall used to explain and for pedagogy.

short today

2007-10-08T16:42:00.001-05:00

Monday, October 8, 2007

I have heard you, Lord,

And my stomach churns within me.

From Habakkuk 3

Maladroit, I am for this project, this work of faith, writing, and exploration of my inner self, not unlike my redoubtable inabilities in relationships. I can become too distrait to do it. The result is exiguous writing and a paroxysm of inactivity. I can be facetious about it, but this is a basic component of my personality just as much as the inevitable supervenes; I resume work. But there is a sense, a feeling, and the possibility, that this project will be, or could be, a bouleversement, a returning to a vibrant faith after a long period of agnosticism.

I used today’s word of the day, maladroit, as well as the last seven days words of the day in the preceding paragraph. Every day I get one from Dictionary.com in my e-mail.

From today’s reading:

Farming With Junk: A Rumination on Fidelity By Kyle Kramer in the October 15, 2007 issue of America. Some quotes:

I recognize the limits of my equipment, which was old when I bought it. I try to be easy on it, not ask more of it than it can deliver—as I would with an elderly person walking gingerly on a trick knee or a weak hip. In fact, my fleet of aging machines reminds me of an elder-care facility.

For all our practicality, I suspect that one of the less-admitted reasons we keep old equipment around is that we have grown attached to it, even as it rusts away. On the deepest level I think we realize—or fancy—that our equipment has been faithful to us and deserves the same from us. To be a good farmer demands fidelity, a degree of patience and commitment that seems out of vogue in a culture always fascinated with the future and the next new thing. We farmers deal with very old things: the ageless cycle of seasons and uncertain weather, the necessary bonds of family and community and the land itself —the source and sustenance of all living things, which might build an inch of topsoil over a thousand years but lose it to carelessness and erosion in just a few.

And what or who, after all, does not get old? We all run down; we all live within ever-encroaching limits of time or energy or health. So how do we respond to this undeniable fact? Do we—as farmers and as a society—pretend we can run and hide from mortality, finitude and age? Do we hide wrinkles or rust, constantly trade in our spouses or our equipment for younger models, look the other way from anyone or anything whose age and infirmity remind us of our own inevitable decline and demise?

Or do we pledge fidelity to the old things—and old people—that have given us much over a long life? Do we recognize that they might still have some life left in them and contributions to make, even as they get crotchety and need more attention and care, even as they struggle with incontinence of mechanical or bodily fluids? Do we honor these long lives and accompany them to the scrap heap or the grave with thanksgiving and gentleness? Do we show a little mercy and tender affection in the hope that as we age, break down and become less able, others might show us the same?

2007-10-03T13:33:00.001-05:00

Wednesday, October 3, 2007

In The Smear This Time by Anita Hill, her Op-Ed piece in the October 2, 2007, New York Times, Ms Hill responds to additional negative comments by Clarence Thomas in his new book. Regardless of the past—I can’t judge—it is a disgrace to the Supreme Court, and to Thomas as well, that he writes this book. He is in a particular position, one of the most prestigious and powerful positions in our Nation, and he fulminates viciously about a former employee. I think he and Bush will be marked by history as equals in one thing.

Jimmy Carter Faces Down Darfur Officials reads an Associated Press headline October 3, 2007. I think Carter is the best President we have had, definitely, the finest former President. Maybe Clinton will imitate him; he is young, popular, still handsome (so is Carter), and morally engaged. We’ll see.

Stanley, I Presume by Paul Theroux in the September 30, 2007 edition of the NYT is a review of the book Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer.

By Tim Jeal. Sounds very interesting.

just what it is

2007-10-02T17:24:00.001-05:00

Tuesday, October 2nd, 2007

Today’s news from my web reading:

Supreme Court Turns Down Cases on Religious Separation is a headline in today’s New York Times about two cases concerning how religious institutions relate to those they serve when that institution works and serves in the “secular” world. Significantly, the U. S. Supreme Court let stand lower court rulings that restricted the religious institution’s freedom by requiring the institution to act contrary to it’s own conscience, if one can imply that an institution has a conscience; Disparities by Steve Coll in the October 8, 2007 issue of the New Yorker about the Jena 6.. Good comments; And Desert Storm: Understanding the capricious God of the Psalms by James Wood in the October 1, 2007 issue of the New Yorker. This is a review by Wood of Robert Alter’s new translation of the Psalms of the Hebrew bible, The Book of Psalms. The translation sounds exciting (The Lawrence, Kansas Public Library is purchasing this translation), but this review is excellent as a read by itself. Wood is one of the best in the business.

Memory, recollection, history; what are they? This is an area I need to think about and discuss.

“Memory is an organism's ability to store, retain, and subsequently retrieve information.” This sentence is a quote from the introduction to the entry titled Memory on Wikipedia. Not a bad scientific definition. But a few things are left out. What about a species ability to remember together? How about the concept of “collective memory”? How does this relate to “history”?

“Maurice Halbwachs argued that memory, despite its seemingly internal nature, could not exist outside a social context. For our individual memories to exist, he argued, they must be constructed and edited against the backdrop collective narratives. Moreover, he argued, we often incorporate accounts other people’s past experiences into the narratives we construct as memory.” The preceding quote is directly from Wikipedia too.

Halbwachs is credited with the invention of the concept “collective memory.” The collective memory of the times I grew-up in and their narratives, imbibed as easily as breathing, influence my memories. I tell my story structured, as it were, through tropes of my times. But the interesting thing is, at least interesting to me, is that I have my own narrative that structures my memories.

It has been a while

2007-10-01T15:41:00.000-05:00

Monday, October 1st, 2007

I have been reading a couple books important in my past history. True Spirituality by Francis Schaeffer and Modern Art and the Death of a Culture by H. R. Rookmaaker. Both of these books, and the type of thinking they represent—antithesis, Reformed, an intellectual defense of Christianity—were significant to me during the 1970s and early 1980s.

True Spirituality by Francis Schaeffer

Schaeffer writes in True Spirituality that he ran up against a reality problem—the reality of what the bible talked about as the result of being a Christian, the reality of love and a spiritual life, were missing from much of what he called historical, orthodox Christianity, and that this reality was, increasingly, missing from his life. He writes: “I realized that in honesty I had to go back and rethink my whole position.” I thought of this statement when I started this project. It is an ingredient in the recipe for my current project. He concluded that “there were totally sufficient reasons to know that the infinite-personal God does exist and that Christianity is true.” He then focused on the finished work of Christ for us and the result was the book True Spirituality. Following are some embedded excerpts:

“Our generation is overwhelmingly naturalistic. There is an almost complete commitment to the concept of the uniformity of natural causes in a closed system. This is its distinguishing mark” That is science by its nature.

He writes, “We must understand—intellectually, with the windows open—that the universe is not what our generation says it is, seeing only the naturalistic universe.” He writes that spirituality only has meaning if we live in a universe that is personal, in which a personal God exists. The Transfiguration confronts us with this supernatural universe.

“The bible says that man fell, at a specific point in history, and as man fell, both man and the world over which he had dominion became abnormal. It would seem, looking at subsequent history, that God’s creation of rational and moral creatures was a failure.”

“But then Christ came, died, and rose—also in history—and the necessary victory was won.”

Modern Art and the Death of a Culture by H. R. Rookmaaker

An important analysis of culture and art from a specific reformed evangelical Christian perspective. This book was important in that it was an illustration of Christian engagement with the world through an intellectual analysis.

Some reading related to the present stage of this project. I can’t forget that the real heart of the project is: How do I relate to God today?

American Catholics: Gender, Generation, and Commitment by William V. D’Antonio, James D. Davidson, Dean R. Hodge, and Katherine Meyer

“Overall, Catholics are not as likely as they once were to grant Church leaders final say; nor are they as likely to agree with Church teachings. They are more inclined to believe they have a personal responsibility to make up their own minds and, while doing so, increasingly distinguish between what they consider core beliefs and practices and what they consider peripheral and optional. Catholics are most likely to comply with teachings they consider essential to being Catholic, and they are most likely to express autonomy on teachings they consider to be peripheral. Secondly, they are more likely to comply in areas they believe church leaders have more expertise than other people, and more likely to think autonomously when they believe that they, and others whom they know, have as much expertise as Church leaders.”

Hence, areas such as the Trinity, the incarnation, the resurrection, the Eucharist, and the Virgin Mary one finds high levels of consensus and agreement between the laity and the hierarchy, while views and practice in areas such as birth control, abortion, the death penalty, and homosexuality are becoming increasingly at variance with the Church leadership. Catholics now believe (and I think we have always had our own ideas) that lay people have as much or more expertise in areas such as these. We now assume the right and the responsibility to disagree, and we insist on our righteousness, our right to be a good Catholic and disagree in these areas.

I was listening to Bruce Cockburn’s live version of Call It Democracy, an old favorite, (if one considers 21 years ago long enough to count as “old”) recorded on the You pay your Money... Live album. It was written in November of 1985 and first released on his Worlds of Wonder CD of 1986. It occurred to me how relevant this is today, especially in light of recent revelations concerning Blackwater (I wonder where this name comes from? It sounds ominous) and other military and civilian contractors in Iraq. But also it is relevant to news of the French Socialist Dominique Strauss-Kahn appointed to head the IMF.

Padded with power here they come
International loan sharks backed by the guns
Of market hungry military profiteers
Whose word is a swamp and whose brow is smeared
With the blood of the poor

Who rob life of its quality
Who render rage a necessity
By turning countries into labour camps
Modern slavers in drag as champions of freedom

Sinister cynical instrument
Who makes the gun into a sacrament --
The only response to the deification
Of tyranny by so-called "developed" nations'
Idolatry of ideology

North South East West
Kill the best and buy the rest
It's just spend a buck to make a buck
You don't really give a flying fuck
About the people in misery

IMF dirty MF
Takes away everything it can get
Always making certain that there's one thing left
Keep them on the hook with insupportable debt

See the paid-off local bottom feeders
Passing themselves off as leaders
Kiss the ladies shake hands with the fellows
Open for business like a cheap bordello

And they call it democracy
And they call it democracy
And they call it democracy
And they call it democracy

See the loaded eyes of the children too
Trying to make the best of it the way kids do
One day you're going to rise from your habitual feast
To find yourself staring down the throat of the beast
They call the revolution

IMF dirty MF
Takes away everything it can get
Always making certain that there's one thing left
Keep them on the hook with insupportable debt

Another song Cockburn recorded on the Live album, Fascist architecture, is an old favorite as well. Written in May of 1980 and released on the Humans album of 1980, it was a significant song for me during the mid-80’s when I was going through, what would turn out to be, the slow dissolution of my marriage and my spirituality. It was a song of hope and personal triumph.

Fascist architecture of my own design
Too long been keeping my love confined
You tore me out of myself alive

Those fingers drawing out blood like sweat
While the magnificent facades crumble and burn
The billion facets of brilliant love
The billion facets of freedom turning in the light

Bloody nose and burning eyes
Raised in laughter to the skies
I've been in trouble but I'm ok
Been through the wringer but I'm ok
Walls are falling and I'm ok
Under the mercy and I'm ok

Gonna tell my old lady
Gonna tell my little girl
There isn't anything in the world
That can lock up my love again

Fascist architecture of my own design.

Bloody nose and burning eyes
Raised in laughter to the skies
I've been in trouble but I'm ok
Been through the wringer but I'm ok
Walls are falling and I'm ok
Under the mercy and I'm ok.

Can it be that again? Could this memory be made present, recreated or new? Is my spirituality returning to my days of old where hope reigned? Is this exercise in recollection my path back to God? Is the experience of the Psalmist relevant as she remembers when she went up to the house of God and encounter/experienced the crowds, the sounds of thanksgiving and joy? Will I praise God still?

My tears are my food, by day and by night,
and everyone asks, “Where is your God?”.
I remember how I went up to your glorious dwelling-place
and into the house of God:
the memory melts my soul.
The sound of joy and thanksgiving,
the crowds at the festival

Why are you so sad, my soul,
and anxious within me?
Put your hope in the Lord, I will praise him still,
my saviour and my God.

Here is the entire Psalm:

Psalm 41 (42) Longing for the Lord and his temple Like a deer that longs for springs of water,
so my soul longs for you, O God.
My soul thirsts for God, the living God:
when shall I come and stand before the face of God?

My tears are my food, by day and by night,
and everyone asks, “Where is your God?”.
I remember how I went up to your glorious dwelling-place
and into the house of God:
the memory melts my soul.
The sound of joy and thanksgiving,
the crowds at the festival.

Why are you so sad, my soul,
and anxious within me?
Put your hope in the Lord, I will praise him still,
my saviour and my God.

My soul is sad within me,
and so I will remember you
in the lands of Jordan and Hermon,
on the mountain of Mizar.
Deep calls to deep
in your rushing waters:
and all your torrents, all your waves
have flowed over me.

By day the Lord sends his kindness upon me;
by night his song is with me,
a prayer to the God of my life.
I will say to God:
“You are my support, why have you forgotten me?
Why must I go in mourning, while the enemy persecutes me?”.
As my bones break,
my persecutors deride me,
all the time saying, “where is your God?”.

Why are you so sad, my soul,
and anxious within me?
Put your hope in the Lord, I will praise him still,
my saviour and my God.

What is memory?

Today’s Gospel reading, Luke 9: 46-50:

An argument started between the disciples about which of them was the greatest. Jesus knew what thoughts were going through their minds, and he took a little child and set him by his side and then said to them, “Anyone who welcomes this little child in my name welcomes me; and anyone who welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me. For the least among you all, that is the one who is great.”
John spoke up. “Master,” he said “we saw a man casting out devils in your so name, and because he is not with us we tried to stop him.” But Jesus said to him, “you must not stop him: anyone who is not against you is for you.”

Two exciting book-related (is there a good word for this?) dealings this past weekend:

The Library’s Fall Book Sale began this past weekend and a trio of interlibrary loan books arrived.

Loosely related to today’s gospel reading is the trio of interlibrary loan books, one by Father Peter C. Phan, Being Religious Interreligiously (under investigation, see The National Catholic Reporter Wednesday, September 12th, 2007, and on their website too), and two by Father Tissa Balasuriya OMI, Mary and Human Liberation and The Eucharist and Human Liberation. I will be looking these over.

Then there was the fall book sale. I got three books important to my personal intellectual history and a couple important by reputation, though I have not read them. Significant in my personal history are, A. W. Tozer’s The Knowledge of the Holy, Albert M. Wolters, Creation Regained: Biblical Basics for a Reformational Worldview (What is a worldview, a thing or a dynamic collection of ideas?), and John Howard Yoder’s The Politics of Jesus. The books known to me by reputation are Faith and Violence: Christian Teaching and Christian Practice by Thomas Merton and The Everlasting Man by G. K. Chesterton.

Putin Says He Will Run for Parliament is a headline from today’s, October 1st, 2007, New York Times. (I believe October is always an auspicious month. I enjoy the fall temperatures, leaves, and football. And October culminates in All Saints Day and Halloween!). But, is the news of Putin’s assuming leadership of the United Russia party darkly auspicious, a portent of an ominous nature? Lets hope for a strong Presidential candidate from another party if Putin becomes Prime Minister! ). Also reported in today’s NYT is a potentially hope-inspiring event occurring within the Russian sphere of influence, the same sphere embodied in the former U.S.S.R. (The Cold War was always in the background of my childhood), is the election of Yulia V. Tymoshenko, the Ukrainian opposition leader. A very attractive woman too.

In other key headlines in today’s NYT: Darfur Rebels Kill 10 in Peace Force—What is happening in Darfur? What can we do; as individuals and a Nation?; Myanmar’s Resources Provide Leverage in Region and Karma Power and What Makes a Monk Mad—What about Myanmar? How can we help with the difficulties in the nation?; Provinces Use Rebuilding Money in Iraq—What about Iraq?; Man and God (and God’s Sick Punch Lines)—The sadness of all kinds of Orthodoxy.; And a glaring absence among the headlines of The New York Times and The Washington Post, nothing on the Jena 6. I hope the media is not losing interest in this story.

timeline

2007-09-11T17:50:00.000-05:00

Writing on Tuesday, September 11th, 2007

Following is a basic time-line of my spiritual development. There is not much detail, but it is a place to start.

· 1954: Born on January 29th. Baptized during the winter of 1954 at All Saints Catholic Church (I presume).

· 1972: Went to BASIC late summer, by fall I had committed to Christ and Christianity.

· 1973: Got married on June 23rd. I listened to a “religious” radio program on an alternative station in Wichita, Kansas. Don’t know what it was. I would like to discover it. Seems like a priest hosted it.

· 1974: Moved to Lawrence, Kansas in August of 1974. Joined with New Life Christian Fellowship at that time. Meet at the Ohio House. Rachael is born Thanksgiving Day, November 28th.

· 1976: Moved to the Bible Chapel (associated with the Plymouth Brethren Movement). Elisabeth is born September 26th.

· 1978: Becky is born April 24th.

· 1979: Hannah is born September 26th.

· 1980: Moved to the Reformed Presbyterian Church.

· 1985: Moved to Saint John’s Catholic Church. Had the kids baptized and the marriage blessed.

· 1986: Joined Coalition for Christian Outreach. Attended training in State College, Pennsylvania, June thru August. Lived as a guest with a family in the White Oak borough (suburb of McKeesport, Pennsylvania) September thru November. My family moved to White Oak in November. Fellowshipped at Immanuel Presbyterian Church in McKeesport where I was the youth director and Saint Angela Merici Catholic Church in White Oak where I ran the pizza kitchen on bingo nights.

· 1987: Failure. Resigned from the Coalition in August and moved to Hope Mills, North Carolina. My faith is seriously challenged. Attended Good Shepard Catholic Church. I really liked this church.

· 1988: I moved to Wilmington, North Carolina mid-summer and separated from my wife. I seemed to have been moving away from Christianity, but was thinking about the meaning of life. The family moved back to Lawrence in August; I followed in November.

· 1990: Separated for good and continued to think about the meaning of life.

· 1993: Divorced in September. Christianity is left completely behind by now, rejected.

· 2000: I am an agnostic graduate student in Anthropology.

· 2006: Started thinking seriously about faith again (I have been for a while. I have been attending Unity Church of Lawrence with my girlfriend for some time now.) and in August I started to attend mass at Saint John’s as an experiment. I started praying the hours, i.e. the psalms, during the summer and have sustained this practice to the present, as well as continuing to attend mass at Saint John’s.

· 2007: In August I started to document my project on my blog.

late

2007-09-11T12:48:00.000-05:00

Reflections, thoughts, writing on Thursday, September 6th, 2007

I didn’t convert to Christianity at some moment in 1971. Rather, I grew into it. Even though I was entering a movement that virtually required an adult conversion experience, I didn’t have one, at least not in the traditional sense. I grew-up Catholic. Christ already kind of fit.

That is not to say I was a conscious and reflective Catholic. I was not. I had not consciously reflected on Catholicism and rejected it so much as forgot about it. In retrospect, I implicitly accepted the possibility that Christianity might be true before I went to BASIC. That was the inheritance of my Catholic childhood.

But this lack of a profound personal conversion experience (a PPCE) always singled me out from so many in the movement, at least for me it did. I felt different. Lacking an experiential conversion, I began reading about this faith I was now believing and voicing to see where I fit in and what I thought. My conversion experience was signified by growth as opposed that of resolution.

Now, to backtrack a bit, at that time of my conversion was reading Walden, National Geographic, and fishing and hunting magazines. Fishing, conservation, living in the woods, living off the land filled my imagination. Euell Gibbons and Henry David Thoreau were my guides here. Ecology was the thing.

Also, I appreciated Martin Luther King, Senator Mark Hatfield, and liberal Democrats. I believed in truth and justice. Make love not war. Changing the world was the thing.

So my Christianity and my thinking was a confluence of all these streams. Additional tributaries would contribute over time. I am constructing a detailed time-line, a picture of the complex flow of my history to better understand how I got to where I am and to figure-out how to articulate it.

untitled

2007-09-04T16:28:00.001-05:00

Reflections, thoughts, writing on Monday and Tuesday, September 3rd and 4th, Labor Day and the day after, 2007

Reflections and responses on August 28, 2007 (I wrote the following last Tuesday)

So, to pick-up the story today, it is late summer/early fall and my friends and I start talking with some girls at Century II Park in downtown Wichita. The girls attended new and powerful Saturday evening worship service called BASIC, an acronym for Brothers and Sisters in Christ. Some might say that God uses everything to draw us in. I thought the girls were cute and I was driven by my adolescent sexual enthrallment to listen politely and follow them off to a church service.

My buddies and I visited BASIC one Saturday night. That night began a slow process that resulted in a radical change in my thinking and life. Over the next several weeks I became a committed Christian, a believer.

Believer: n. One who believes. Believe: v. –tr. 1. To accept as true or real. 2. To credit with veracity. –intr. 1. To have firm faith, especially religious faith. 2. To have faith, confidence, or trust. 3. To have confidence in the truth or value of something. 4. To have an opinion; Think.

BASIC was one of those special, one-off-a-kind episodes. There is a summary of the story of BASIC on the website of the Church of the Savior in Wichita, Kansas, the church that grew directly out of this unique meeting of young people. I attended BASIC regularly for the next couple years.

Labor Day, 2007

I am not going to talk about Labor Day except to mention that it is the symbolic legacy of an important period in American social life, a period that resulted in the creation of new labor laws and the reformation of existing of labor laws in this Nation to produce a more just labor situation for American workers.

Freedom

Haleh Esfandiari, the Iranian-American academic imprisoned for months in Iran who I wrote about on August 21st following her release on bail was permitted to leave the country and rejoin her family Sunday. This shows that pressure from people and nations around the world helps political prisoners secure their freedom. It also indicates, contrary to the views of some, that Iran is a nation whose leadership can be negotiated with and good results will come of it. But the work is not over.

Iran has charged three other Iranian-Americans with spying: Parnaz Azima, a journalist for Radio Farda which is funded by the U.S.; Kian Tajbakhsh, an urban planning consultant working for the Soros Foundation's Open Society Institute; and Ali Shakeri, a founding board member of the Center for Citizen Peacebuilding at the University of California, Irvine. Shakeri and Tajbakhsh are in prison and Azima is out on bail but barred from leaving the country.

Iraq

It is a week away. 7 days away and President Bush and his top national security advisers made a surprise visit to Iraq. I guess a pure military assessment was out of the question from the beginning. Bush’s visit with Gen. David Petraeus today, a week before the American commander is scheduled to deliver his assessment of the situation in Iraq, begs the question of the independence of this upcoming report. I still have hope that there will be good, objective data in the report. It also sounds like the British are beginning their withdrawal.

Kansas

On August 31st, 2007 Governor Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas signed an executive order that instructs state agencies to develop diversity management programs. With this politically courageous order the State of Kansas moves in the right direction. Kudos to Sebelius.

Just a bit from the web

Apparently this is part of an address given at a meeting the American Psychological Association in San Francisco on August 24, 2007. There are some important perspectives discussed in these opening lines. Important to me is what Baumeister alludes to about the purpose of culture and the system and, also, . This lecture is located at the following web address: . The emphasis is in the original. I want to add that I have not read all of this address. In fact, I haven’t read much past what I copy here. It runs for about 25 pages and I have other things to attend to just now. I will also note that my source for this address is that notoriously conservative Reader’s Digest website of the intellectual world, Arts and Letters Daily.

Is There Anything Good About Men?

Roy F. Baumeister

You’re probably thinking that a talk called “Is there anything good about men” will be a short talk! Recent writings have not had much good to say about men. Titles like Men Are Not Cost Effective speak for themselves. Maureen Dowd’s book was called Are Men Necessary? and although she never gave an explicit answer, anyone reading the book knows her answer was no. Louann Brizendine’s book, The Female Brain, introduces itself by saying, “Men, get ready to experience brain envy.” Imagine a book advertising itself by saying that women will soon be envying the superior male brain!

Nor are these isolated examples. Alice Eagly’s research has compiled mountains of data on the stereotypes people have about men and women, which the researchers summarized as “The WAW effect.” WAW stands for “Women Are Wonderful.” Both men and women hold much more favorable views of women than of men. Almost everybody likes women better than men. I certainly do.

My purpose in this talk is not to try to balance this out by praising men, though along the way I will have various positive things to say about both genders. The question of whether there’s anything good about men is only my point of departure. The tentative title of the book I’m writing is “How culture exploits men,” but even that for me is the lead-in to grand questions about how culture shapes action. In that context, what’s good about men means what men are good for, from the perspective of the system.

Hence this is not about the “battle of the sexes,” and in fact I think one unfortunate legacy of feminism has been the idea that men and women are basically enemies. I shall suggest, instead, that most often men and women have been partners, supporting each other rather than exploiting or manipulating each other.

Nor is this about trying to argue that men should be regarded as victims. I detest the whole idea of competing to be victims. And I’m certainly not denying that culture has exploited women. But rather than seeing culture as patriarchy, which is to say a conspiracy by men to exploit women, I think it’s more accurate to understand culture (e.g., a country, a religion) as an abstract system that competes against rival systems — and that uses both men and women, often in different ways, to advance its cause.

Also I think it’s best to avoid value judgments as much as possible. They have made discussion of gender politics very difficult and sensitive, thereby warping the play of ideas. I have no conclusions to present about what’s good or bad or how the world should change. In fact my own theory is built around tradeoffs, so that whenever there is something good it is tied to something else that is bad, and they balance out.

I don’t want to be on anybody’s side. Gender warriors please go home.

Men on Top

When I say I am researching how culture exploits men, the first reaction is usually “How can you say culture exploits men, when men are in charge of everything?” This is a fair objection and needs to be taken seriously. It invokes the feminist critique of society. This critique started when some women systematically looked up at the top of society and saw men everywhere: most world rulers, presidents, prime ministers, most members of Congress and parliaments, most CEOs of major corporations, and so forth — these are mostly men.

Seeing all this, the feminists thought, wow, men dominate everything, so society is set up to favor men. It must be great to be a man.

The mistake in that way of thinking is to look only at the top. If one were to look downward to the bottom of society instead, one finds mostly men there too. Who’s in prison, all over the world, as criminals or political prisoners? The population on Death Row has never approached 51% female. Who’s homeless? Again, mostly men. Whom does society use for bad or dangerous jobs? US Department of Labor statistics report that 93% of the people killed on the job are men. Likewise, who gets killed in battle? Even in today’s American army, which has made much of integrating the sexes and putting women into combat, the risks aren’t equal. This year we passed the milestone of 3,000 deaths in Iraq, and of those, 2,938 were men, 62 were women.

The Story

I remember BASIC as one of those special, one-off-a-kind episodes. There is a nice and very brief history of BASIC on the website of the Church of the Savior located in Wichita, Kansas. The Church of the Savior grew directly out of this unique meeting of young people.

BASIC was a young, energetic, joyful paean to Jesus Christ and was the place where I believed—I meet Jesus and made a commitment to him, to follow him wherever that, or he, led me. BASIC also pointed me to the bible and to Christianity. Christianity would be the idea that guided my life and thinking for the next 15 years or so before taking a back seat (maybe as a back seat driver?) for about 15 years, reemerging in the drivers seat during the last year.

Now, I didn’t convert to Christianity at some moment in 1971. I already believed in Jesus. I grew-up Catholic. That is not to say I had a conscious and reflective Christianity. I did not. In retrospect it seems to me that I had implicitly accepted the possibility that Christianity might be true before I went to BASIC. That was the inheritance of my Catholic childhood. I had not reflected on Christianity and rejected it so much as forgot it.

What I was doing at that time was reading Walden, National Geographic, and fishing and hunting magazines. And I believed in truth and justice. Ecology was the thing. Living in the woods. Living off the land. Euell Gibbons and Henry David Thoreau were my guides.

disowned selves

2007-08-28T19:10:00.000-05:00

Reflections and responses on August 28, 2007

From today’s New York Times: Senator Larry E. Craig, Republican of Idaho, was arrested last June by an undercover police officer in a men’s bathroom at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. He pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct three weeks ago. Note: the plainclothes police officer was investigating complaints of sexual activity in the bathroom. Something had already been happened. I wonder what? But, of course, the Senator is now back-pedaling and denying any “sexual intent.” What did we expect of a hypocrite?

This hiding behind a veil of “family values” and “morality” by so many Republicans makes me wonder? There seem to be a lot of Republicans in trouble these days, criminal charges, caught in flagrante, uncloseted, and often after having taken strong and very public moral stances opposed to the very behavior now being disclosed. Are we seeing a mass exposure of repressed behaviors, of "disowned selves" among Republicans?

In City Journal: In a ridiculously argued piece in City Journal Bruce Bawer imagines a fantasy “peace racket” as if it were a numbers racket from the old neighborhood run by Vinny, who is run by the mob, and which is obviously “opposed to every value that the West stands for—liberty, free markets, individualism—and it despises America, the supreme symbol and defender of those values.” This imagined peace racket is opposed to all that is good and human. Get real! Bawer’s construct is an ideological polemic against any attempt to understand the causes of war and the causes of peace empirically. All that is obvious in this article is Bawer’s antipathy to science and his mysticism.

On with the story...

As I wrote earlier, I spent a lot of time fishing, camping, hunting, and reading about fishing, camping, and hunting, and the natural world. Of course I hadn’t read Silent Spring by Rachel Carson when it was published in 1962; I was only 8 years old. But, when President Johnson announced the America the Beautiful initiative in January 1965, I was on the cusp of turning 11 and in 5th grade at a public school. Passage of the Beautification Act of 1965, was not be easy. The Senate passed a version of the legislation on September 16, and debate began in the House on October 7. It passed at 1 a.m. on the morning October 8, 1965.

Here are some excerpts from an account of the House debate in The Washington Post quoted in a brief history of the debate on the Federal Highway Administration website:

The House passed the highway beauty bill with only minor changes just before 1 a.m. today after another of its wild and wooly midnight sessions. The vote was 245 to 138. Members had been expected at the White House six hours earlier for a Salute-to-Congress celebration, but they stayed at work in hopes of taking the bill with them as a gift to Mrs. Lyndon B. Johnson, its chief sponsor. Republican opponents suggested that the Democrats had been told not to come without it . . . .

Republicans, opposed both to the bill and being kept at work all evening, fought a delaying action by offering amendment after amendment and forcing drawn-out votes on each . . . .

Fifty or more congressional wives decked out in their party clothes watched from the gallery and must have wondered what kind of business their husbands had got into. The House does not take kindly to late sessions, and members hooted and yelled and shouted across the aisles . . . .

At 10 p.m., after the House had been in session 11 hours, Democratic whip Hale Boggs (La.) got up and scolded Republicans for using "dilatory tactics." "We need a responsible minority, but we don't have one," he thundered. "We have a frustrated minority." He said the Republican performance helps explain why they have controlled Congress for only four of the last 35 years . . . .

Rep. Robert Dole (R-Kan.) offered an amendment to strike out the term "Secretary of Commerce" wherever it appeared and insert the words "Lady Bird"--apparently an implication that the First Lady is in charge of the operation. He lost by a voice vote.

Rep. H. R. Gross (R-Iowa) referred to a recent news picture of a Texas billboard advertising the Johnson family's television station and wondered if the President might sign the bill there.

Note the efforts of Rep. Robert Dole (R-Kan). I, for one, believed in Lady Bird; she was my heroine. I was a bleeding heart liberal of course.

By the time I was in Junior High School the ecology and conservation movements were in full bloom. The movements would culminate in the Earth Day teach-in held on April 22, 1970. I was 16 years old, a sophomore in High School. It was a big deal. And it brings me up to the eve of my next big transition.

The next big personal transition was when the Jesus Revolution swept through Wichita, Kansas in the person of a longhaired hippie playing the guitar and singing and preaching about Jesus. The summary is simple. My buddies and I meet some girls at Century Two Park sometime during the summer or fall of 1971. We thought they were cute and so we invited them to go skinny-dipping, but little did we realize, they were witnessing to us.

Witness: n. 1a. One who can give a firsthand account of something seen, heard, or experienced... 3. Law a. One who is called on to testify before a court. ... 5a. One who publicly affirms religious faith.

The girls attended a Saturday evening worship service called BASIC, an acronym for Brothers and Sisters in Christ. My buddies and I visited BASIC one Saturday night. That began a slow process that resulted in a radical change in my thinking and life. I became a believer.

Believer: n. One who believes. Believe: v.

2007-08-27T17:54:00.000-05:00

Thoughts and responses for today, August 27, 2007

From the news

Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales resigns today. Finally. I feel relief.

Whew, I exhale a deep, cleansing breath of relief. I am sure he was an honorable man who sincerely believed in what he was doing. And he did live the American dream. But he was an instrument in the effort to legalize the use of torture by the United States of America.

I believe, and I hope that this act of resignation is a tangible sign that America (i.e. the American people) is rejecting torture as rationally ineffective and humanly cruel. Debasing and damaging to both the tortured and the torturer alike, and, because of legal and ideological justifications, to the people of the tortured and the torturer too. I feel relief as a loyal American that my nation is trying to live-up to it’s higher self, to borrow a term.

I cannot imagine Jesus ever laying hands on another individual except to heal them.

This sense of relief is absent in the early report on the web page of The New York Times, not that a news report should exhibit relief, of course. What it does is frame the resignation as a result of the imbroglio surrounding the firing of the U.S. Attorneys and various claims that Gonzales has not satisfied the Congressional majority investigating the firing of the U.S. Attorneys. Hence, it is a political hatchet job. True. Politics gets results.

Gonzales’ legal efforts to justify torture will be included in later analyses, to be sure. I hope that the resignation is ultimately understood as a blow for justice and love. The real life result of the American people saying no to the use of torture.

In other news

In John Allen, Jr.’s post on Aug 24, 2007 in All Things Catholic located at the National Catholic Reporter’s website, titled “The deathbed friendship between a bishop and an atheist” seems hagiographic in regards to the Italian writer Oriana Fallaci. She seemed racist and incendiary to me, her opposition to Islam reactionary and ethnocentric.

On with the story...

I last wrote about my story that a spiritual rupture and a slow transformation occurred in my spiritual life. The rupture was that I quit going to Mass.

I must have been 11 or 12 when my Mass attendance started to decline. My mom began to attend Mass infrequently, eventually quitting altogether. I had quit going to All Saints School in the fall of 1964 when I entered 5th grade at Griffith Elementary School so I did not have that connection. I would go to Mass occasionally with my sisters and we often went to parishes other than All Saints. It seems that that after my sisters finished college I quit going to Mass. So by 1968 or 1969 I had effectively quit Mass attendance by default when my ride to Mass quit departing.

The transformation was, well, life. I was growing up. This happened in the midst of the tumult of the social and political revolutions of the sixties and seventies. Vatican II, the Vietnam War, Martin Luther King, John and Robert Kennedy, the Civil Rights movement, Chicago 1968, hippies, ecology, and, by High School, LSD and marijuana.

I was reading and going to school. My Side of the Mountain by Jean George and The Pond by Robert Murphy, Boy’s Life, National Geographic, The Whole Earth Catalogue, Thoreau and Walden, Wendell Berry. My world was getting bigger. My worldview was developing.

I also spent lots of time fishing, camping, hunting, and reading about them and the natural world. I hadn’t read Silent Spring by Rachel Carson in 1962. I was only 8 years old. But the ecology movement was important by the time I was in Junior High School.

Mother Theresa’s dark night

2007-08-23T18:46:00.001-05:00

Mother Theresa’s dark night

Time Magazine reports on Mother Theresa’s inner life as revealed in the pages of her correspondence. I quote from the Time article today’s date, August 23, 2007:

“Jesus has a very special love for you," she assured Van der Peet. "[But] as for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great, that I look and do not see, — Listen and do not hear — the tongue moves [in prayer] but does not speak ... I want you to pray for me — that I let Him have [a] free hand."”

Remarkable!

forward

2007-08-23T18:25:00.000-05:00

Thoughts and responses for today, August 23, 2007

The following is the response I pray nearly every day for lauds, vespers, and compline following the reading/praying of the day’s psalms and canticles. At times I use it in my regular prayer.

Glory (or praise or thanks) (be) to the Lord (or God, Almighty God, most merciful God, etc.)—The Mother/Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit—both now and forever. The God who is, who was, and is to come, at the end of the ages.

Picking-up with my story (is this project narcissistic?)

I ended my last entry by bringing up my memories of the mysterious, dark basement that was the sanctuary of All Saint’s Catholic Church, my home parish while growing-up. Attending Mass in the basement “cave” at All Saint’s is a “homey” memory. I liked the muted light of the basement church. The atmosphere was deep and mysterious.

The Church building had not been built yet, other things were more important, like kids’ schooling. So the priests, nuns, and parishioners of All Saints celebrated Mass in a small, physically close, Latin ritual in the dim basement of the two-story brick building that also housed, upstairs, the school where the black-habited nuns comprised most of the teachers. I remember it as really peculiar, out of the ordinary. God was a great Mystery but Jesus and Mary made it easier to understand him. They made him assessable. Also, Jesus and God came to me in a deep and certain way via communion and my baptism.

I must have attended All Saints School for the school years of 1960/1961 thru 1963/1964, 1st thru 4th grade. I moved to my neighborhood public school, Griffith Elementary, in the fall of 1964 for 5th grade when I was 11-years old. I was happy with that move. My grades improved, as I remember it. But my experience growing-up Catholic would be a lasting influence on me. The Catholic Church (and Christ?) had colonized my imagination.

But there would be a spiritual rupture and a slow transformation in my spiritual life beginning during the years of 1966-1968. I quit going to Mass. I guess I was only 12 or 13 when my Mass attendance started to decline. This was not my doing. I don’t remember putting-up a fight in order to avoid going. I remember Mass fondly. But, as I recollect the situation, though I am not sure why it happened, my mom began to attend Mass infrequently, eventually quitting altogether. So I began to go to Mass with my sisters on occasion. We often went to parishes other than All Saints. But it seems that after my sisters finished college they quit going to Mass. So I quit Mass attendance by default when my ride to Mass quit departing.

Tuesday

2007-08-21T17:01:00.000-05:00

Thoughts and responses for today, August 21, 2007

A victory for freedom of thought

Haleh Esfandiari is being let out of jail! But Kian Tajbakhsh, Parnaz Azima, and Ali Shakeri are still in jail. Hopefully, these individuals will be freed soon. Then Iran will need to allow Tajbakhsh, Azima, Shakeri, and Esfandiari along with Parnaz Azima, a journalist, Kian Tajbakhsh, an urban planner, and Ali Shakeri, with the Center for Citizen Peacebuilding at the University of California, Irvine, who are barred from leaving Iran.

What is this all about?

“In academic feuds, as in war, there is no telling how far people will go once the shooting starts.” So reads the lead in a story about J. Michael Bailey, a psychologist at Northwestern University, by Benedict Cary in today’s NYT. We know with certainty this is true in war. As if there ever was such a thing as a “just war” where noncombatants were not targeted (Tell me if you know of one? Maybe in defense?). War and the tactics used have mostly been the result of technology, not morals. But this academic war sounds like a know-holds-barred battle.

It really shouldn’t matter why someone seeks a sex-change operation. It is certain that mistakes happen in nature. It is also clear that human nature is complicated and mixed-up with self-reflection that human choice is always a blended choice, even (and often!) from the perspective of the human person making that choice. Biology, environment, psychology, and individual experience and thought, among many other abstracted elements, enter into a choice to seek a sex change.

I believe we live in a postmodern, post-Christian world. This is not necessarily a bad thing. As I already wrote, I am an empiricist. But I am one with a small “e.” We humans are, most certainly, part of a Universe, or creation—either one will do for now—that has been evolving for billions of years. What is, is what is, and to deny this is futile. Science must be listened to and when it contradicts cherished folk-wisdom that folk-wisdom must be modified and understood as a culturally constructed belief.

It is high time we Christians recognize this and let go of some of our folk-wisdom. Human nature is not so cut and dried. We are made in God’s image, but that image, i.e. being human in this world, is a lot bigger than we believed. And, also, remember we play a huge part in creating this image culturally with our culture-bound language. It is time we recognized that homosexuality and transgenderness are normal outcomes of this fine creation. They are no more flawed than the serial, heterosexual monogamists that many of us Christians seem to be. It is time we treat homosexuals and transgendered people as equals before the law and God. In the end, what are we talking about? Isn’t it love?

Ingmar Bergman

In 1955 “The Seventh Seal,” began a series of seven films explored faith in a post-Holocaust, post-Christian world. This project continued with “Wild Strawberries” (1957), “The Magician” (1958), “The Virgin Spring” (1960), “Through a Glass Darkly” (1961), “Winter Light” (1962), and, finally, “The Silence” (1963).

As I wrote above, I believe we live in a postmodern, post-Christian world. This is a statement about the cultural milieu of the Western (the North, the first, the developed?) world. Maybe I even think like a postmodern? Anyway, Francis Schaeffer made me think about Bergman back in the 1970s. And more so in the early 1980s. I wanted to be an art and film critic from a Christian perspective. Bergman was the filmmaker par-excellence. I will have to watch these movies—I haven’t seen most of them—sometime. But I did see a couple while reading Schaeffer in the late 1970s.

I can’t write much about Schaeffer yet. I am still rereading him.

After this brief excursion into thoughts for today, back to memories of childhood.

My discipline at home was mostly dispassionate, including when I was spanked. If I remember accurately, the only emotion I recollect is one like exasperation (“Jimmy, you are smarter than this.” Or, “Jimmy, you know better.”). And this feeling expressed mostly verbally, as in the aforementioned sentences. I was a growing boy with lots of freedom to explore and, no doubt, a tendency to go too far again and again. But I grew-up healthy.

My memories are of exploring the “cave” of our basement Catholic Church. The Church building had not been build yet because other things were more important. Like the kids schooling. All Saints Catholic Church and School head Mass in the basement of a two-story brick building.

Cooler?

2007-08-20T19:29:00.001-05:00

Early thoughts and responses for today—a little cooler 76degrees [Fahrenheit] with a predicted high of 93 degrees instead of 103 degrees—August 20th, 2007

I have been reading Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont’s Fashionable Nonsense. They write under the heading “Neglect of the Empirical”:

For a long time, it has been fashionable to denounce “empiricism”; and if that word denotes an allegedly fixed method for extracting theories from facts, we can only agree. Scientific activity has always involved a complex interplay between observation and theory, and scientists have known that for a long time. ... Nevertheless, our theories about the physical and social world need to be justified in on way or another. ... [and] there is not much left besides the systematic test of theory by observation and experiment.

I agree. This is a common grace of humanity.

In the August 27th, 2007 issue of America magazine, in the article The Church of Christ and the Churches: Is the Vatican retreating from ecumenism?, Richard R. Gaillardetz writes,

“In the four centuries following the Reformation, Catholic theology tended to identify the church of Christ completely with the Catholic Church. This helps explain initial Catholic suspicion of the ecumenical movement as it emerged in the early 20th century.”

This article reminds me that my Catholic childhood was significant in the development of my early piety. And what else could I call it? My religious sentiment? Sensibility? Belief? Piety sounds personal and old-fashion. I like it. (But I also mean all those other expressions as well.)

Piety is a good way to describe the religious acts and beliefs as I remember my religious practice and experience during my childhood. My childhood, including the Catholic part, is a good memory: secure, nearly unchanging, pleasant and comforting as opposed to the wild vicissitudes of life.

I was born in 1954, on the cusp of a revolution in the Church and came to age during that revolution, both in the church and in a “revolution” occurring in the American culture of the 1960s and 1970s. My piety, religious practice, and beliefs embodied the tensions of this period.

A story from Boy Scouts illustrates my youthful Catholic rigor. At my first Boy Scout summer camp, I must have been in 6th grade, maybe the summer after 6th grade, so during 1965 or 1966 and I must have been about 11 or 12 years old. When it came time to have Sunday worship and prayer service at camp I asked to be excused from the Protestant-style service because I was indoctrinated in Catholic grade school that the one and true Church was the Catholic Church and I should not do this.

By 1969 (The first time I smoked pot was the summer of 1969, the summer after 9th grade before my sophomore year in High School. I was 15) I was by then I was, as I mentioned above, a Kansas hippie. Walden, The Whole Earth Catalogue, Ecology, Conservation, Wendell Berry, and sex, is where my head was.

The next big personal religious transition was when the Jesus Revolution swept through Wichita, Kansas in the person of a longhaired hippie playing the guitar and singing and preaching about Jesus. The summary is simple. As I mentioned, sex was on my mind a lot. My buddies and I meet some girls at Century Two Park sometime in the late summer or early fall of 1971. We thought they were cute and they were witnessing to us. They attended a Saturday evening worship service called BASIC. We visited and I kept going. More later.

Anyway, Vatican II was an upheaval to everyone, a revolution. For some it was an earthquake, for others, a breath of fresh air. As for me, it would end up a breath of fresh air. I hope we can open the doors now.

Intermezzo: I think I am typical of many of the Church’s 21st century lay members. I am educated and I have confidence in my education. I believe that my education in science, history, anthropology, literature, etc., as well as the availability of a much vaster body of human knowledge, is a common grace all humans participate in, unless deprived of it by injustice. I believe/hope that this common grace can be coupled with faith in Jesus without doing violence to either sphere or to the person of Jesus. The result is that I think for myself. In fact, God calls me, and all human beings, to do this as a part of our nature. This is the work of creation-keepers that God gave us in the story in Genesis. It is God’s command!

Today

2007-08-16T18:05:00.001-05:00

News reactions for today, a hot August 16th, 2007

I just read an article, dated August 13th, 2007, on the website of America, the Catholic weekly. Sociologist Andrew Greeley in an article titled, The Church’s Changing Face, reviews the book American Catholics Today: New Realities of Their Faith and Their Church by William V. D'Antonio, James D. Davidson, Dear R. Hoge, and Mary L. Gautier. This book is one of 4 written by social scientists under the aegis of The Life Cycle Institute at The Catholic University of America and based on Gallup surveys from 1987 to 2005.

He writes:

The Catholic respondents knew in each of these studies what is absolutely essential in their religion--Jesus risen, the poor, Mary and the sacraments. After a couple of thousand years of turbulent history, they still get it “spot on,” as our English colleagues would say. This is no mean achievement, especially in these years of “polarization” (which actually doesn’t exist) and sexual abuse crises.

There are other important elements in the Catholic heritage as well. The point is the faithful are convinced of what is, as the young people might say, “totally important.” These key stories and symbols are enormous and indeed invincible resources for the church’s work of evangelization, and they are there for the taking, if only we can realize that religion starts with image and story and not theological dicta and rules, however necessary these activities are.

But Mary? Why Mary? Have we not been told that she is an unfortunate remnant of a patriarchal age? Forget about it! Any story that suggests that God loves us like a mother loves her newborn child will never go away, and any religion that cherishes that image of God will never lose its appeal, not even to the consummation of the world.

He continues,

In another question, the researchers asked about “boundary” issues: what kind of behavior marked one as beyond the boundaries of the faith; what kinds of behavior might exclude one, not completely from Catholicism but perhaps mark one as not “a good Catholic?” Can you be a good Catholic without obeying the church hierarchy’s teachings on marriage and divorce, without one’s marriage being approved by the Catholic Church, without obeying the church hierarchy’s teaching on birth control, without going to church every Sunday?

These questions (and others in the scale) do not indicate that the respondent personally has done such things, but only whether the respondent considers such people to be on the periphery of the church. More than three-fifths of the respondents do not deny the title of “good Catholic” to these people. Thus, you can practice birth control, approve of abortion in some circumstances, remarry after divorce, cohabit in an unapproved marriage and miss Mass routinely and may still be a good Catholic.

I have not seen these polls (nor have I read the findings as the authors report them) but by what I gather from Greeley’s review is that my view from the pew is not unlike the majority view expressed in these polls. One can be a good Catholic and hold views on homosexuality, a male-only priesthood, priestly celibacy, abortion, birth control, and marriage that differ from the party line.

Greeley is quick to point out that these data do not, nor is it intended by the authors that they should, determine doctrine or moral teaching. What they do is paint a picture of how the church lives and of what is important to the church today. American Catholics think for themselves now. We are educated, we respect science, we are global, and we have heard the soul of the church’s teaching—to love God and our neighbor—and we love the church for what only it can give.

So much of the news is immeasurably sad. The deadliest single attack since this Iraq War began happened yesterday in Quhtanlya and Jazeera. I can only be silent for a moment ...

The project.

One idea is to reread, in a sort of a systematic way, the key books that influenced my thinking and life. I want to remember and rethink these important influences and recreate what I thought and felt at certain times in my life. Sadly, I am not a diary keeper. I wish I was, or had been, but, alas, I keep few written records. If I had this project would be so much easier, at least easier to organize chronologically. But because I did not keep very good records I will have to impose an after-the-fact narrative to this story. No doubt we always organize our narratives out of a jumbled mess. To borrow Gregg Brown’s lyrics, “life is a sweet ripe melon, so sweet and such a mess.” In my case I am aware of this and I wish I had to less to remember and imagine.

As I ended my last post, I mentioned I had just begun rereading Francis Schaeffer’s book The God Who is There. Schaeffer was very influential in my thinking because he did not seem to flinch when confronted with ideas and with intellectuals. One could engage art and ideas as a Christian and not be afraid of evil or worldliness. I will be reporting more on this later. Now I want to spend a little time remembering.

I will imagine my story thru memory and reflection. My story begins when? Before I was 5 or 6? I seem to remember riding my tricycle down the basement stairs. I was not seriously injured in this memory. Maybe that’s why I have done other stupid things since, I should have broken a leg. I am not certain this is a memory or a creation of a memory out of stories I heard. For instance, I definitely remember being told in stories that I laid out my tadpoles, whom I had netted-up at the lake and proudly kept in a jar, on the front patio and rode over them with my tricycle. I do not remember ever doing this. I have random early memories of Thanksgiving dinners, Christmas traditions, watching Sunday evening horror movies while standing in the kitchen window close to my dishwashing mom.

Fast forward. I am also rereading Walden by Henry David Thoreau. Rewind. What did it mean to me in my sophomore or junior years of high School? I will be thinking about that. In the meantime, a few random facts: When I was a junior in High School I spent that year’s Kansas State Fair working for Brookshire Leather making belts and purses, smoking pot, and dreaming about the future. The following summer I went with my buddies to Colorado for a big chuck of the summer backpacking, fishing, and smoking pot. During the early fall during my senior year of high school I made a radical commitment to Christ. It only became radical over time. There was no big experience, no testimony, just a slow recognition of Jesus and the radical life he calls us to or, as I believed at the time, he was calling me to. There was tension in this experience over time too.

Maybe my spiritual story begins when I was baptized into the Roman Catholic Church as a baby in 1954? Or with my Irish Catholic Grandparents? Catholic grade school? Christmas? My Godmother’s prayers? In the heart of God from all eternity? I don’t know when it begins, but I will begin during the summer and fall of 1971.

I was a hippie. I knew there had already been a funeral for the hippie and I even resisted being called a hippie. But for Wichita, Kansas circa 1971, I was hippie. But I was a Kansas hippie. Though I grew up in the suburbs of Wichita, the state’s largest city, I grew up fishing, hunting, and camping. But I listened to alternative music, opposed the read the Whole earth catalogue, and dreamed of a future

A hot day in August

2007-08-14T16:55:00.000-05:00

Universal news:

Karl Rove resigned yesterday. It will be interesting to see how Rove is read in(to) the future, and what historians write. Will Rove end up at a trial, and not as a witness, except in his own defense? Aren’t Rove and Cheney two peas in a pod?

Ingmar Berman died July 30th., the filmmaker of death. Not as in death through gratuitous violence, like so many of today’s movies depict—from Mission Impossible to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre—but death as in “that fateful knocking at the door,” as Woody Allen put it in last Sunday’s New York Times. Bergman made me want to be a movie critic. I remember Bergman’s films as profound statements of the human predicament.

The Project:

This project is the construction of a spiritual biography as a method of spiritual exploration, as a spiritual discipline. It is my personal search for meaning, purpose, and love today.

Maybe the movement of the Spirit is like a haunting. I feel haunted by God. Is this the Spirit’s doing? Is it a memory of faith? Is it a chimera? A residue of evolution? An evolutionary strategy? The project is to get to the bottom of this haunting. What is this ghost inside me? Do I need an exorcist or a way to familiarity with the Ghost?

How does one make sense of the world, the welter of human activities? Events do not just happen. Human personalities, beliefs, and actions are the result of millions of years of evolution, the current cultural milieu, and, maybe, the purpose and hand of God.

Culture is an inclusive myth prevailing in a particular space and time. Calling it a myth does not mean it is not real and that it does not have substantive influence on what happens in the world.

Three people who where important to me in the early 1970s where Thomas Merton, Chuck Smith, and Francis Schaeffer. First, Thomas Merton was important for his book Contemplative Prayer. He was one of the earliest religious writers I read after my “conversion.” Merton was key because of his teaching on contemplation and prayer. Secondly, Chuck Smith because of his apocalyptic rhetoric. I found it fantastic, more akin to science fiction than the bible and religious history. He was an anti-intellectual to my way of thinking. What a vision. Thirdly, Francis Schaeffer, because of his intellectual defense of Christianity.

I have just begun rereading Francis Schaeffer’s book The God Who is There. My idea is to reread, in a systematic way, the key books and to remember and rethink the important influences on my thinking and beliefs. This is the beginning. Well, at least the intellectual beginning of the project.

More on the start

2007-08-07T18:25:00.000-05:00

There is a strong autobiographical character to this project. At the heart of the venture is my personal work. Using those old shibboleths, it is my search for meaning, purpose, and understanding. That is the specific and existential motivation for the project.

To complete the project there are a number of areas I will need to cover and a number of tasks I will need to complete along the way. I have to to remember, recollect, and recount my past. Understanding the past is vital to understanding the present. But, still, ahead of the past, is the very real at hand: My everyday life. This project is embedded in the fabric of my daily life. I am living the project as I work on it.

So? What do I do? How do I live? What is the meaning of the world? How do I explain and relate to the social, political, and cultural world I live in? What is God’s will? Is that a relevant question? How do I love? Maybe this is the only question that counts. How do I love in my everyday life?

But for now here are some areas I will need to cover in this project.

Tell my story
Jesus: who is he (history, faith, creed), incarnation or flesh-taking, creator and creation
The creed
God
Church, community
Justice, politics, public policy
Culture: inclusive myth prevailing in a particular space and time
History
Science
Linguistics
Empiricism, rationality, commonsense
Democracy, religion, pluralism, freedom, truth, and God
Anthropology: My Anthropological View
Postmodernism

Here are some authors and books that will need to be reread and rethought. This list is mostly composed of books I read in the past. I will get to the more current ones later. I am focusing on the past just now and these are ones that come to mind at the moment. This list is just a start.

James Sire: The Universe Next Door
Francis Schaeffer: The God Who Is There; Escape From Reason; He Is There and He Is Not Silent; True Spirituality; Death in the City; Pollution and the Death of Man
Edith Schaeffer: Hidden Art
Udo Middleman: Proexistence
Soren Kierkegaard
Thomas Merton: No Man is an Island; Contemplative Prayer; The Silent Life; The Seven Story Mountain
Elisabeth Elliot: Through Gates of Splendor
Frederick Fyvie (F.F.) Bruce: New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable?
C. S. Lewis: The Problem of Pain; Mere Christianity; Miracles; The Abolition of Man;
J.I. Packer: Knowing God
H. R. Rookmaaker: Modern Art & the Death of a Culture
Nicholas Wolterstorff; Art in Action; Educating for Responsible Action; Reason Within the Bounds of Religion; Until Justice and Peace
Robert Short: The Gospel according to Peanuts
Rosemary Haughton
Malcolm Muggeridge
Annie Dillard: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Dorothy Sayers: The Mind of the Maker
Pascal
Calvin Seerveld: Rainbows for a Fallen World
David James Duncan: The River Why
Wendell Berry
Eric Wolf: Envisioning Power
Robert McC. Netting: Smallholders, Householders; Balancing on an Alp

Francis Schaeffer is very important, as is Wendell Berry. Annie Dillard is important, as is J. I. Packer. These are disparate types, but in my imagination they relate to each other through the agency of my life and thought. Also, in a way, this comprises my “favorite books list.”

Faith Journey

2007-08-06T14:45:00.000-05:00

I am going to start posting and, maybe, blogging (in the active verb sense) on faith (and whatever else comes to mind, if I have a mind to[o]). Specifically I will post some of the stuff I create during my current work, what I call my Project. Posting will require me to write something about my project (writing a record of the project is a major component of the project) so I have something to post.

Basically, I am remembering, examining, or reexamining, recreating, reimagining my faith, or really, my whole life. Maybe I am looking for grace or to see the face of God. Or maybe I am just looking for an understanding of the world and my experience that satisfies me. Modestly, I just want to see where I stand and have a record of that.

The idea is to examine God, Jesus, the Christian faith, the Christian right, the world situation, politics, the local and global, the way the world seems to work, and my experience—how I came to be a Christian, left Christianity, came back to Christ and the church—and the practical, intellectual, and theological influences throughout this convoluted, long-winding process.

I will probably keep some of my deepest feelings just between me and God and Pam. But, regardless of this, the project requires me to be honest and open emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually to the trinity of myself, the rest of creation, and God, and my writing should reflect this process truthfully and freely.

This writing will likely be tedious, digressive, disordered (Isn’t recording an effort to order and understand the surfeit and chaos of experience?), and repetitive. It might be boring to others, but it is my project of figuring out my place in the world and, hopefully, becoming something other than I am and more myself at the same time. Paradoxical.

My story, when does it begin? When I was 5? My earliest memories are from somewhere around 4 or 5 years old and they are pretty sketchy. And I am not always sure if I remember the time or only a story of the time that I heard in family conversations.

How about when I was baptized? The church teaches that there was an ontological event that occurred in my baptism. It was a sacrament. I was cleansed from original sin and brought into the body of Christ.

How about when I was born? Does my story begin with my birth? Or when I was conceived? Biologically or imaginatively? And conceived in the imagination of my parents or in the imagination of God (Psalm 139)?

Obviously (and thankfully) my story hasn’t end yet, but how did I get here? Where am I? What about all the injustice and hubris surrounding Christ? Afflicting the world? How about love?

Initial post

2006-04-12T22:13:00.000-05:00

Can you believe the hubris, obfuscation, and disingenuousness of the Bush administration? The latest being the lying about the mobile chemical warfare labs. It is even scarier to think that Bush didn’t know he was not telling the truth. Think about that!

Saving Graces

Monday, May 24, 2010 Monday after Pentecost

From the 1979 American Book of Common Prayer

translation used by the Orthodox Church in America at vespers

As sung in the Ruthenian Catholic Church[1]

From The Cloud of Unknowing:

From DotCommonweal On Not Craning One’s Neck

How ironic that my last post before leaving on vacation was about racism. Take a look at this from the Oregonian – Effigy of Obama alarms George Fox campus

An important editorial from the National Catholic Reporter

Ways past the culture wars

another day

Easter Triduum

writer block

morning

Thursday, March 6th, 2008

It is a big place

Tuesday, March 4th, 2008

Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead!

From the Great Canon of Andrew of Crete

hanging in there.

Faith

Wisdom 7:7 - 16

Human

The New Year is underway.

Here is were I pick-it-up today, Thursday, November 29, 2007

And I wrote this on Tuesday, October 16, 2007.

Thursday, October 11, 2007

work day

Thursday, October 11, 2007

Today’s news (October 9, 2007); well, yesterday’s news today October 11, 2007. Meaning not October 10th but “yesterday’s” as in passé, old news supervened by events or by the news cycle.

short today

Monday, October 8, 2007

Wednesday, October 3, 2007

just what it is

Memory, recollection, history; what are they? This is an area I need to think about and discuss.

It has been a while

timeline

Writing on Tuesday, September 11th, 2007

late

Reflections, thoughts, writing on Thursday, September 6th, 2007

untitled

Reflections, thoughts, writing on Monday and Tuesday, September 3rd and 4th, Labor Day and the day after, 2007

Reflections and responses on August 28, 2007 (I wrote the following last Tuesday)

Labor Day, 2007

Freedom

Iraq

Kansas

Just a bit from the web

The Story

disowned selves

Reflections and responses on August 28, 2007

In other news

Mother Theresa’s dark night

Mother Theresa’s dark night

forward

Thoughts and responses for today, August 23, 2007

Tuesday

Thoughts and responses for today, August 21, 2007

A victory for freedom of thought

What is this all about?

Ingmar Bergman

Cooler?

Today

News reactions for today, a hot August 16th, 2007

A hot day in August

More on the start

Faith Journey

Initial post

As sung in the Ruthenian Catholic Church^[1]