Category Archives: Blogs, Socials

Blogs, Socials, Religion, Uncategorized

Toward a More Reasonable Faith and Words Written or Generated

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My all-time favorite song is Michael Card’s “God’s Own Fool,” published in 1985 on the Scandalon album. That may have been the first album I bought with my own money. It’s a song about Jesus being misunderstood during his earthly ministry. The last lines are:

So, surrender the hunger to say you must know;
Have the courage to say, "I believe." 
Let the power of paradox open your eyes
And blind those who say they can see.

I could understand if someone took lines like this to encourage blind faith, a faith that doesn’t question what we read in Scripture or what our ministers teach, but Christian faith isn’t blind. It’s reasonable and fits the real world He created.

When Jesus tells Peter to check the mouth of a fish for a coin to pay their taxes, Peter believes Him and checks the fish’s mouth. When Jesus tells a couple of His men to go into town, find a donkey and colt tied up, bring them to him, and if anyone asks what they’re doing, say that the Lord needs them, they go into town expecting to find exactly what He has said. That’s a reasonable faith. It’s one that recognizes the limits of our knowledge, not one that denies knowledge altogether.

But what else do we have today?

Art & Literature: David Platzer writes about a Paris exhibit on Gertrude Stein and Pablo Picasso. “Edmund Wilson—who was generally sympathetic to her work and compared it to Yeats, Proust, and Eliot—noted in a 1923 Vanity Fair article that her word-portraits of Matisse and Picasso published in Camera Work made it ‘evident that Gertrude Stein had abandoned the intelligible altogether.'”

Words: If you or someone you know have shown symptoms of being a witcracker, call the number on your screen. You are not alone.

American Words: American pioneers had to make up words for a new world. Rosemarie Ostler writes, “Often these simply combined a noun with an adjective: backcountry, backwoods (and backwoodsman), back settlement, pine barrens, canebrake, salt lick, foothill, underbrush, bottomland, cold snap.” “Yankee is also almost certainly a Dutch contribution. Various theories have been suggested for the word’s origin (for instance, that it’s a Native American mispronunciation of English), but the most likely one derives the word from Janke (pronounced ‘yan-kuh’), a diminutive of John that translates as something like ‘little John.'” (via ArtsJournal)

Artificial Intelligence: Tech companies are hiring writers and poets to compose somewhat refined work, particularly in Hindi and Japanese. “It is a sign that AI developers have flagged fluency in poetic forms as a priority, while refining their generative writing products.” To what end? (via ArtsJournal)

Photo: Fairyland Cottages Minnesota, 1980. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Blogs, Socials, Bookselling, Reading

Lighting Up Your Neighbor to Recover Your Book and Other Useful Ideas

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In his 1912 book about books and bookselling, Joseph Shaylor repeats a story about bookdealer in Barcelona who had particular methods for maintaining his inventory. “Don Vincent, . . . on his own confession was arraigned for the murder of customers who had bought from him rare and precious editions which he thus recovered, and on more than one occasion ‘set fire to the house of a rival, so that in the confusion he could secure some unique rarity of which he could not otherwise have been possessed.'”

He said there was another collector who bought a rare book at a high price. When someone suggested he bought the book in order to reprint it, the collector said, “Heaven forbid! If I were to, it would no longer be scarce and would therefore be valueless; besides, I doubt if the volume is worth re-printing.”

Friends, if you feel the temptation to do something like this, get help. Don’t live with the shame of bibliomania alone. Share it with others.

These home library ideas may also help. Number 2 is so moving it’s hard to scroll past it. Architectural Digest has warm-warming ideas too.

Chekhov: Hai Di Nguyen points to some stories in which Chekhov humanizes his characters through shame. We probably need more shame, more human humility, in real life.

Religion: A year ago today, “22-year-old Mahsa Amini died after being arrested by Iran’s morality police for wearing her hijab ‘improperly’.” Now, millions of Iranian women reportedly refuse to wear a hijab in public.

Evangelism: Here’s a post on a book about making “evangelism a less intimidating” by rethinking the goal and asking questions.

Authors, Blogs, Socials, The Press

Old Words May Help Us Understand a Minnesota Bridge

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D’you mind if I share some things I read in the S pages of a massive Webster’s Second International? Thanks. You’re a peach.

Obsolete meanings of common words

Sorry is used as a noun in Scottish and some English dialects to mean “sorrow.” It was also once used as “to grieve.” And sorry grace was once a phrase meaning “bad luck” or “ill fortune.”

Sorrow once had a subtle use of causing actual damage, not just emotional stress.

Sore as an adjective once had a sense of criminal or wrong. As a noun, it once was used to mean disease, affliction, pain, or grief. As a verb, it used to mean “to wound.”

Sound was once used in the sense of understanding or relevance, as in, the speech had no sound for me.

Word combos

Also, on these pages are lists of combinations, like these archaic ones for sore: sore-beset, sore-dreaded, sore-taxed, sore-vexed, and sore-won.

These for sorrow are not marked archaic but have an unfamiliar sound to me: sorrow-blinded, sorrow-bound, sorrow-closed, sorrow-seasoned, sorrow-shot, and sorrow-streaming.

For soul, there’s a long list, including soul-benumbed, soul-blind, soul-boiling, soul-cloying, soul-fatting, soul-gnawing, and soul-thralling.

The Internet doesn’t have natural discoverability like this old dictionary. We could lose a lot of knowledge by limiting our systems to giving us only the answers to the questions we’ve asked, because if we ask what else we might want to know, the Internet just asks us what else we want to know.

Now that I’ve played the philologist for a minute, what else do we have?

More Words: Here are a couple videos on old words that should be brought back.

Journalism: There’s a pedestrian bridge crossing I-494 just west of the Minneapolis Airport that connects Bloomington to Richfield. Tyler Vigen wanted to know why it was built. Some of the readers of this very blog may be asking the same question, so Vigen did the research and has given us a full report (with excessive in-text notes).

Authors: C.S. Lewis versus T.S. Eliot with sharpened opinions

Naturalism: Does unnatural behavior exist? Is it true that “whatever is possible is by definition also natural”?

Photo: The sign on the old hotel by the tracks, Gulpwater, Wyoming. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Blogs, Socials, Coffee, Tea, Drinks

A Con Artist, Betrayal, and Artificial Intelligence

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If the Christian life is one of continual repentance, then what do we do with a minister who has lived in sin for many years, justified his sin with spiritual abuse, and disqualified himself from ministry–most of which was learned after his death?

One of my friends brought up an apologist who recently passed away and was subsequently exposed as having lived an abusive life for years. Before his death, we thought he was a great Bible teacher. Now, we slough off his books at the used bookstore. Aren’t his books still as good as they were before? He compared the apologist to King David, who sinned far more extensively than we usually give him credit for. We overlook Solomon’s gross sins too.

I didn’t say anything this time. I’ve argued my case before, and maybe it doesn’t sit well with me.

The comparison to David doesn’t work. He and Solomon are categorically different. We look to them and see the Lord’s saving grace unbound.

Should we reject a man’s published work for a pattern of sin mostly uncovered after his death? Does known sin raise any theological questions? The man wrote a book on living the faith we profess, and we should consider its merit on the words of the books, not the life of the author? If this were a local pastor, would we continue to distribute his books, studies, and recordings as if it’s all academic? No. If he were a local pastor, we would expect him to be excommunicated were he still alive. The filth of his sin touches everything.

But that argument doesn’t sit easily with me, because I think of readers down the road who won’t know of the sin. They’ll only know the books, and perhaps the Lord will demonstrate his unbounded grace yet again.

I assume you know whom I’m talking about. It still hurts to remember it. Why do I feel betrayed by someone I didn’t know personally? I don’t know. It isn’t academic for me.

What else do we have today?

Deception: I recently listened to the first season and a little more of a well-produced podcast by Brian Brushwood called “The World’s Greatest Con.” Brian is a good storyteller, and this show is dynamite. The first season is on Operation Mincemeat, a scheme from WWII to deceive the Nazis into thinking the Allied would attack Italy.

Artificial Intelligence: “With every passing day, OpenAI looks more like Napster or the many defunct piracy platforms—it relies on the creativity of others to make a buck. And there are plenty of laws against that.”

This rings true to me. Microsoft’s Bing AI presents itself as if you’re talking to an intelligent friend, but it doesn’t give answers any better than regular search results. Microsoft seems to think we all want to search as if we’re talking to someone IRL, but if it doesn’t understand us like a friend could, it’s pointless.

Orthodox Church: St. George’s Church in Drohobych, Lviv Oblast (west Ukraine), is a gorgeous work. It “is a unique monument of Galician wooden architecture of the late 15th – early 16th centuries. It is one of the best preserved monuments of old Ukrainian sacral architecture.”

Also, St. Andrew’s Church in Kyiv (via The Cultural Tutor).

Coffee: I don’t mind pumpkin spice, but I don’t drink it either. “Six bucks is a small price to pay (apart from still being scandalous and highway robbery) for the appearance of agency.”

Photo by Matthew Henry on Unsplash

Blogs, Socials, Poetry

A Ruined City in Old England and Some Language

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Lars has been talking about poetry this week, which provoked me to consider it for the Saturday post.

A 700 A.D. Anglo-Saxon poem called “The Ruin” speaks of a city that was gorgeous even when destroyed. 

Well-wrought this wall-stone which fate has broken
The city bursts, the work of giants crumbles.

In this translation by Michael O’Brien, you can see what is and what once was: frost on the stones, brightly color scraps of wood, bath-houses, and attractive homes. It had been a welcoming, beautiful home–a “haven.” Skilled soldiers lived here “proud and wine-flushed.” The baths were obviously luxurious. Only one wall remained standing.

Many men fell in the days of wrath;
Death took all the valor of earth.

Did invaders sack this city? No, it was the curse on all creation that eventually wore it down. One way or another, we all see the day of wrath. How do we live today in the light of what’s to come?

What else can we get into today?

Poetry: David Oates has a few verses on “farthing” and going too far.

Language: “We are lucky that English is our language because it’s better than, say, French for poetry. All those millions of words and all those different ways of saying the same, or similar, things. And new words all the time.” 

Parting Quotes: Here are a couple of statements pulled from Joseph Addison’s 1716 play The Drummer.

“That is well said, John, an honest man, that is not quite sober, has nothing to fear.”

“I should think myself a very bad woman if I had done what I do for a farthing less.”

Photo by K. Mitch Hodge on Unsplash

Blogs, Socials, Fiction, Music, Reading

Witnessing to Social Media Scammers, Good Novels, and the Legal Power of Music

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Social media is something of a minefield. It’s easily misused, partly because it’s easy for people to write poorly and misunderstand what they’ve read. People do that with books, and they misspeak and misheard live conversations. Some of us are astonishingly accomplished at misunderstanding what people say. There ought to be annual awards for that level of skill.

And the socials have another aspect that complicates communication— anonymity.

I had an interaction with a new follow on Twitter/X, which I noticed and returned the follow even though the profile and activity were sparse and a little sus. I played the Benefit of the Doubt card this time—not my usual strategy. She slid into my DMs saying she wanted to be my friend (also sus). I say “she” because that’s how the profile was set up, but I can’t confirm that. I found two other profiles with the same or similar names, images, and profile descriptions, so I figured I wasn’t dealing with an honest individual. But I didn’t ignore her this time.

She DMed me in an overly friendly way, so I asked about the username, which didn’t fit her name or profile. It was like Cindy @kergu_addict. I asked what @kergu_addict referred to. She said it was just something she filled in earlier. I responded by praising the Lord’s mercy and goodness and asking if she knew Him. That question was ignored.

The next day after another DM checking up on me, I told her she needed in-person friends. Online connections can’t keep up with daily living. She responded with one of those statements you see in spam, like it was cut from two separate sentences.

“I’m not sure what you’re saying,” I said. “In person, we have proximity–people in the same room. We can talk with our voices and body language, and that’s a big difference. Online, we can only type and wait for the other person to read our message.”

“So that you wish you could find someone like that?” she asked.

“I have people like that,” I said. “I also have a close relationship with Jesus Christ. Do you have a Bible? Do you know something about Jesus?”

“I’m an atheist. I believe in what I do.”

“You don’t have to stay that way. This life, this world, are not there is. We were made for eternity.”

“Why? Don’t you believe in what you’re doing?”

“Because God, the creator of everything, and Jesus, the incarnation of God, are real. I believe in them because they exist. It’s reality.”

“Of course, I respect you. Faith is a good thing.”

She unfollowed me after that, which is what I expected. I wonder if anything I said will stay with whoever is on the other side.

What else can we look into?

Fantasy: The Queen of Ebenezer is “a dreamlike but intense story of two lost teenagers trying to find their way through a mysterious swamp—and that’s just the beginning of what they’re trying to find.” Gina Dalfonzo talks to author K. B. Hoyle about her latest novel.

Novels: John Wilson reminisces about his early novel reading in light of “Joseph Epstein’s just-published book The Novel, Who Needs It? If, like me, you are an incorrigible reader of novels, you should make haste to acquire it. . . . Most readers besotted with ‘the novel,’ as I am, will get their money’s worth.”

Music: Ted Gioia on how musicians gave the ancient world law, taken from his new book Music to Raise the Dead. The whole story isn’t spelled out and remains unclear, but “it’s indisputable that ancient communities frequently turned to people outside of the ruling class for their laws.”

Photo: Bomber gas station, Milwaukie, Oregon. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Blogs, Socials, Religion, Uncategorized

They Need an Explanation to Feel a Level of Control

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I read one time that Hitchcock wasn’t going to end the movie Psycho the way he did, but his producer insisted he provide an explanation. The story couldn’t end with a wrap-up of the crime. It needed a psychiatrist to give the audience a reason for it. This is because Americans want to know why an evil thing occurred and how could it be prevented in the future.

I felt this need while listening to a couple crime stories this week. In one story, four boys in rural Vermont decided to break and enter a remote home. Two of them said they would murder anyone who happened to be home, and they all carried knives to help, if the need arose. It did, but only the original two attacked the mother and daughter they found. The story was mostly told by one of the two in police interviews. He was an emotionally distant Mormon kid who lacked friends and was beginning to explore gang activity.

In the other story, an elderly couple was kidnapped in an effort to rob them. He said he would kill them after he’d obtained all the money. The wife was able to tip off the cops, who located the man through his car. This culprit was a family man, described by a church member as a Christian who had it all. He had been even a church elder at some point. But along with all of this, he was also a constant manipulator.

If evil like this can come from both social outcasts and respected members, what can be done to foresee or prevent it? We need a healthy understanding of our common depravity, and that out of the heart these and other great sins come. We are not good people. Only the Lord can make us so.

What other things can we say today?

Great Musician: Tony Bennett died this week. Ted Gioia writes, “I probably own 30 or 40 of his albums, and his singing has been part of my life since childhood—when my Sicilian father played Tony Bennett records at our family home. At times, it almost felt like Bennett was a member of my extended family.

… “I could fill up an entire article just with stories of his acts of kindness. He radiated decency and generosity of heart. That showed up in his life and his music.”

Against Apathy: “Artists endure who attend to the world. Details are precious. Art is collecting and arranging them.”

New York City: “As for libraries, the sad truth is that, precisely because of the abandonment of broken-windows policing, those sheltered spaces are havens for the homeless and drug-addicted more than they are resources for the scholarly and intellectually curious.”

Found Music: The Kiffness takes internet videos and makes music with them. The one from July 15 seems appropriate to add here.

Photo: Christie’s Restaurant sign, Houston, Texas. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Blogs, Socials, Non-fiction, Poetry, Reading

Liberty Is a Growing Hunger, Like a Long Book

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What is liberty? Is it different from freedom?

Do Americans know more than the first verse of “America, the Beautiful,” specifically the second verse with the words:

“America! America!
God mend thine every flaw
Confirm thy soul in self-control
Thy liberty in law!”

In one simple line, we see the law, not as the source of our liberty, but as a tool for protecting it against those who would take it away. But what “it” is remains a question.

It’s that loosely defined something we can’t get enough of.

“More liberty begets desire of more;
The hunger still increases with the store.”

John Dryden

Fred Bauer has a piece on the different views of freedom we’ve had since the colonial days. We had Puritans’ “ordered liberty,” Quakers’ “reciprocal liberty,” Virginians’ “hegemonic liberty,” and Appalachians’ “natural liberty.” These are taken from David Hackett Fischer’s book, Albion’s Seed.

“Ethical concerns,” Bauer writes, “factor into the notion of freedom as ‘elbow room.’ Patrick Henry argued that the centralized Constitution would threaten both ‘the rights of conscience’ and ‘all pretensions to human rights and privileges.’ That ethical strand offers a counterpoint to arguments that American freedom is simply about material prosperity. The genealogy of freedom is more complicated.”

Moving on to the links, we face a new frontier for ethical freedom in the choices we make with our technology. In other words, if we can do it, should we? How is using AI as described below not plagiarism?

To repeat the July 13, 2023, tweet above for preservation, Courtney Milan (@courtneymilan) says, “One of the major reasons I think we need to stand against AI as authors specifically is I suspect a lot of publishing house CEOs are looking at it and thinking ‘you know, why do we pay all these editors anyway?'”

She retweets Maureen Johnson (@maureenjohnson) from earlier that day, who says, “Authors: we need to stand up with the actors. AI is ALREADY HERE in our work. I just spoke to a Very Famous Author who has to remain nameless for legal reasons. They are held up in a contract negotiation because a Major Publisher wants to train AI on their work.”

I’d think training a computer to mimic a popular author’s work would fall within the bounds of plagiarism. If not that, fan fiction.

Running: In Good for a Girl: A Woman Running in a Man’s World, Lauren Fleshman describes what she saw of a sport that interested in recognizing or catering to female athletes as the women they are. Nike, the shoe company, can be especially cruel.

Poetry: “Who Furrows? Who Follows?” by Joshua Alan Sturgill. Here’s the first stanza.

Who furrows? Who follows?
             The owl in the hollow
            The hawk in the meadow
           The jay in the hedgeapple tree
Who follows the farmer who furrows his fields?
Who furrows?  Who follows?
           We three.

Fiction: It may be common for online chat to express a desire for short novels, but do readers want them? Nathan Bransford talks about the dangers of writing shorter works. “When writers are grappling with bloated word counts, physical description tends to be the first to go. Tastes vary, but in my opinion, cutting too much physical description is almost always a mistake. We’re already in a physical description drought, please don’t make it worse!”

Trapped: In other news, 100 people were trapped for hours yesterday in Agatha Christie’s old home by a large tree that had fallen across the only access road. They hung out mostly in the tea room. One witness reported the staff were “doing a great job, they are giving us free tea’s and things. It’s a bit bleak.”

Photo by Priscilla Gyamfi on Unsplash

Authors, Blogs, Socials, Poetry, Reading

Amelina: ‘My Heroes Will Not Stop Dying’

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Ukrainian novelist, activist, and winner of the Joseph Conrad Literary Award for 2021 Victoria Amelina was in Kramatorsk, a city in the Donetsk region of Ukraine. She was “with a delegation of Colombian writers and journalists on June 27 when Russian forces fired two Iskander missiles at the city, hitting a popular restaurant downtown,” The Kyiv Independent reports.

The IT professional-turned writer, 37, had lived in the States for a few years before returning to Ukraine to research war crimes.

In September 2022, “Amelina went to the liberated village of Kapytolivka in Kharkiv Oblast and found the diary of her colleague, the children’s book author Volodymyr Vakulenklo, along with his father,” The Kyiv Independent reports.

“Vakulenko had buried the diary under a cherry tree in his yard before he was abducted by Russian occupation forces that March. The diary is now kept in the Kharkiv Literary Museum for posterity.”

In this 2020 interview with PEN Ukraine, Amelina offers this optimism (which I’ve had to translate via Google): To write Home for Home, I quit my favorite job, ruined the career I had built since I was seventeen. It was painful, and I’m still not sure if I did the right thing – I gained a lot, but I also sacrificed a lot.

“I would not advise making decisions motivated by something external. There must be an inner readiness to live by texts, to turn oneself into texts, to write even when no one reads. No publisher can refuse this. If literature is your way of interacting with the world, miracles will happen.”

She also lists the New Testament among the books that have influenced her the most. “It seems that in the near future my heroes will not stop dying for others, but this is not about death, but about resurrection.”

Here are some other things to read.

Poetry: Last year, Steve Moyer wrote about Ukrainian poetry having depicted the corruption of war for decades. “Many of the poets writing today in Ukraine, however, compose in free verse, relying more on repetition, word play, juxtaposition of images, and rhetorical devices than on traditional forms and meter to convey the harsh reality they’re witnessing. Images such as rotting fruit occur and recur. Debris lying in snow and crumbling bridges make their appearances.”

Reading: Do you write in your books? President John Adams did, and Joel Miller offers five reasons for doing it too.

“When I was working on my Paul Revere book, I remember hesitating over Charles Ferris Gettemy’s biography, The True Story of Paul Revere. The book was over a hundred years old. I can’t write in it, can I? It felt like some sort of aesthetic crime. But then, no. I need to keep track of ideas and details. Why did I have it to begin with? To use. Once I ditched my reservations, the payoff was immeasurable.”

Reading: Chekhov said, “I divide all works into two categories: those I like and those I don’t. I have no other criterion.” Yes, but maybe there are other legitimate categories.

Photo: Sigurdur Fjalar Jonsson/Unsplash

Blogs, Socials, Fiction

No Fear of Sleep, the Internet Gone to Pot, and Hollywood Noir

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Lee Yong-ju’s 2021 film Seo Bok is a standard sci-fi thriller about a cloned man with telekinesis. It opens with an ex-secret service agent, Min Gi Heon, being offered an outside job, one that’s dangerous enough to require deniability if it goes wrong. He’s asked to deliver an asset, and when he arrives at the lab to pick it up, he learns the asset is a young man, Seo Bok, whom the scientists introduce as undying. He is a lab-created human being who will not die if properly cared for. They say his cells are the key to healing many, if not every, human disease. Not only that, his brain waves are off the charts, enabling him to push and guide material around him. But, what could go wrong with that, eh?

I could tell you more of the plot, but I bring up this movie because of a couple minutes that appear right before the final act.

At one point, Seo Bok reveals he doesn’t need to sleep. Later, when exploring part of his backstory, he and Gi Heon go to a Christian mausoleum. With several crosses on the walls and light shining through stained glass, Seo Bok asks, “Do you believe dying is really like sleep?”

“Maybe,” Gi Heon replies.

“Then how come people aren’t afraid of falling asleep? It’s like dying a little while.”

“Because they’ll wake up the next day.”

“How do they know that?”

“They just believe it. They believe they will wake up in the morning.”

In the context of the story, that dialogue had me wondering if this was the seed for the whole. The scientists think they’ve created a cure for disease and even natural death in one man, and in the mausoleum another man suggests we can wake up after death if we put our faith in the cross. It’s subtle but stands out as the moral of the film.

Let’s move on.

Internet: 30 Signs You Are Living in an Information Crap-pocalypse. Here are the first two.

  1. “Create a society that rewards influencers more than truth-tellers—and turn every digital platform, large or small, into a boosting pad for these influencers.
  2. “Make plagiarism, cheating, and deception totally acceptable, so nobody gets fired from a media job, even for the most egregious violations of journalistic ethics.”

Also from the signs above, over 33% of people hired to train AI for better, more truthful output are using AI software to do the training faster, folding in errors that will be baked in if they aren’t removed soon enough.

Democracy: “This spring marks the 30th anniversary of the paperback release of Francis Fukuyama’s controversial book, The End of History and the Last Man.” How has his argument that democracy had and would continue to win over world civilizations panned out?

Hollywood: Brian Patrick Eha recommends the work of Alfred Hayes. “Money promises to give substance, in Hayes’s novels, to those without it; for those with it, though, material wealth proves unsatisfying, even oddly insubstantial. The vast sums that flow from the movie business have a ‘phantasmal quality.’ . . . Laboring for America’s dream machine, his men and women are made to bear, in the end, too much reality.”

(Photo by Hammad Siddiqui on Unsplash)