“There Is a Fountain” performed by Timothy Seaman on hammered dulcimer
“On that day there shall be ja fountain opened for the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem, to cleanse them from sin and uncleanness” (Zech. 13:1 ESV).
This popular hymn, published under the title “Praise for the Fountain Opened,” was written by the gifted and troubled Englishman William Cowper (1731-1800). For the last several years of his life, he worked with John Newton on many hymns and pastoral duties. Newton is likely the reason we have Cowper’s hymns. (Cowper is pronounced “cooper.”)
1 There is a fountain filled with blood, Drawn from Immanuel’s veins; And sinners, plunged beneath that flood, Lose all their guilty stains, Lose all their guilty stains, Lose all their guilty stains; And sinners, plunged beneath that flood, Lose all their guilty stains.
2 The dying thief rejoiced to see That fountain in his day; And there may I, though vile as he, Wash all my sins away, Wash all my sins away, Wash all my sins away; And there may I, though vile as he, Wash all my sins away.
3 Dear dying Lamb, Thy precious blood Shall never lose its power, Till all the ransomed Church of God Be saved, to sin no more, Be saved, to sin no more, Be saved, to sin no more; Till all the ransomed Church of God Be saved, to sin no more.
4 E’er since by faith I saw the stream Thy flowing wounds supply, Redeeming love has been my theme, And shall be till I die: And shall be till I die, And shall be till I die; Redeeming love has been my theme, And shall be till I die.
5 When this poor lisping, stamm’ring tongue Lies silent in the grave, Then in a nobler, sweeter song I’ll sing Thy pow’r to save: I’ll sing Thy pow’r to save, I’ll sing Thy pow’r to save; Then in a nobler, sweeter song I’ll sing Thy pow’r to save.
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?
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?” https://t.co/hVbrO31fKj
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.
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.”
“Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing” performed on hammered dulcimer
Today’s hymn is one of my top three favorites. “Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing” was written by Robert Robinson of Norfolk, England (1735-1790). It’s testimony to God’s sustaining grace has always appealed to me.
Hymnary.org says the tune for this hymn has been ascribed to many different people as well as no one at all. The Trinity Hymnal cites it as the one written or distributed by Asahel Nettleton (1783-1844), an American preacher who left a strong legacy with his publication of Village Hymns. “Nettleton’s hymnological work centred in the compiling of his Village Hymns, from which more hymns of the older American writers have passed into English collections than from any other source.”
Another good thing Nettleton did was to oppose Charles Finney in 1827. Bully for him.
1 Come, thou fount of ev’ry blessing, tune my heart to sing thy grace; streams of mercy, never ceasing, call for songs of loudest praise. Teach me some melodious sonnet, sung by flaming tongues above; praise the mount! I’m fixed upon it, mount of God’s unchanging love.
2 Here I raise my Ebenezer; hither by thy help I’m come; and I hope, by thy good pleasure, safely to arrive at home. Jesus sought me when a stranger, wand’ring from the fold of God: he, to rescue me from danger, interposed his precious blood.
3 O to grace how great a debtor daily I’m constrained to be; let that grace now, like a fetter, bind my wand’ring heart to thee. Prone to wander – Lord, I feel it – prone to leave the God I love; here’s my heart, O take and seal it, seal it for thy courts above.
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.”
“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.”
One of the books I’ve been reading this year is Carl F. Ellis Jr.’s Free at Last?: The Gospel in the African American Experience. It’s good history of African American movements and an exposition of the goals and promises they have held over the years. It’s a wealth of information and trivia that would make a great text for a semester course. The trivia mostly comes within the sixty-page glossary of people, places, and terms that may have been referred to in main text.
One of the terms explained in this glossary is the myth of the “curse of Ham.” It’s an idea I’ve known about for years, but I can’t remember how I first heard it. It came up several weeks ago on Twitter by one of those accounts that reads like a gateway drug to radicalization. It’s based on a few verses in Genesis 9, which read: “And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done unto him. And he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren” (Gen. 9:24-25 KJV).
It’s a weird passage because of the unclear reason Noah is provoked to curse his grandson and bless two of his three sons. But you see when reading these two verses that Ham is not the one cursed. It’s Canaan, his son. The narrative at this point emphasizes Ham being Canaan’s father, and in the next chapter it spells out the Canaanite peoples and some of the cities they founded, including Sodom and Gomorrah. It’s easy to see the setup for the wrath God would pour on them when bringing Israel back to the promised land.
But the myth is that Noah’s curse was on the father, Ham, touching every one of his descendants in every generation. Ellis says those who paint Christianity as a white man’s religion use this as a proof. Some of them argue it’s a good reason for African Americans to convert to Islam, but aside from this being a foolish interpretation of Genesis, it comes from a ninth-century Muslim apologist.
Ham the son of Noah was a white man, with a handsome face and figure, and the Almighty God changed his color and the color of his descendants in response to his father’s curse. He went away, followed by his sons, and they settled by the shore, where God increased and multiplied them. They were the blacks . . .
Ibn Qutaybah, Kitāb al-maʿārif, p. 26
That, friends, is not Biblical theology. It misreads the written word of God and imagines an explanation to fit some human conclusion. If Christian orthodoxy is anything, it’s bound to God’s word (let the reader understand). Ellis adds that this idea was used to justify slavery within White Christianity-ism (an idolatrous civil religion that uses the language and forms of Christianity for its own ends).
In The Custom House essay that precedes The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne chafes at his inability to write and laments the dulling effects of his day job.
Suffice it here to say that a Custom–House officer of long continuance can hardly be a very praiseworthy or respectable personage, for many reasons; one of them, the tenure by which he holds his situation, and another, the very nature of his business, which—though, I trust, an honest one—is of such a sort that he does not share in the united effort of mankind.
An effect—which I believe to be observable, more or less, in every individual who has occupied the position—is, that while he leans on the mighty arm of the Republic, his own proper strength, departs from him. He loses, in an extent proportioned to the weakness or force of his original nature, the capability of self–support.
. . .
Why should he toil and moil, and be at so much trouble to pick himself up out of the mud, when, in a little while hence, the strong arm of his Uncle will raise and support him? Why should he work for his living here, or go to dig gold in California, when he is so soon to be made happy, at monthly intervals, with a little pile of glittering coin out of his Uncle’s pocket? It is sadly curious to observe how slight a taste of office suffices to infect a poor fellow with this singular disease. Uncle Sam’s gold—meaning no disrespect to the worthy old gentleman—has, in this respect, a quality of enchantment like that of the devil’s wages. Whoever touches it should look well to himself, or he may find the bargain to go hard against him, involving, if not his soul, yet many of its better attributes; its sturdy force, its courage and constancy, its truth, its self–reliance, and all that gives the emphasis to manly character.
Even with this, he didn’t quit his day job. He was fired.
What do you think? Does a regular paycheck pull a man away from self-reliance, or this just the way creative types talk when they can’t sell something?
“God of Our Fathers” sung by the congregation of St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church of New York City
Today’s hymn, “God of Our Fathers, Whose Almighty Hand,” was written by New York Episcopalian Daniel C. Roberts (1841-1907) to commemorate the centennial of the Declaration of Independence. It was accepted by an Episcopal hymnal committee and given a fresh tune by organist George W. Warren for the commemoration of the United States Constitution.
1 God of our fathers, Whose almighty hand Leads forth in beauty all the starry band Of shining worlds in splendor thro’ the skies, Our grateful songs before Thy throne arise.
2 Thy love divine hath led us in the past; In this free land by Thee our lot is cast; Be Thou our ruler, guardian, guide and stay, Thy word our law, Thy paths our chosen way.
3 From war’s alarms, from deadly pestilence, Be Thy strong arm our ever sure defence; Thy true religion in our hearts increase, Thy bounteous goodness nourish us in peace.
4 Refresh Thy people on their toilsome way, Lead us from night to never-ending day; Fill all our lives with love and grace divine, And glory, laud and praise be ever Thine.
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.
“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.
“Make plagiarism, cheating, and deception totally acceptable, so nobody gets fired from a media job, even for the most egregious violations of journalistic ethics.”
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.”
Today’s hymn was written by American William Croswell Doane (1832-1913), the first bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Albany, New York. He wrote this hymn for the bicentenary of the City of Albany, 1886.
1 Ancient of Days, who sittest throned in glory; To Thee all knees are bent, all voices pray; Thy love hath blest the wide world’s wondrous story With light and life since Eden’s dawning day.
2 O Holy Father, who hast led Thy children In all the ages, with the fire and cloud, Through seas dry-shod, through weary wastes bewildering; To Thee, in reverent love, our hearts are bowed.
3 O Holy Jesus, Prince of Peace, and Savior, To Thee we owe the peace that still prevails, Stilling the rude wills of men’s wild behavior, And calming passion’s wild and stormy gales.
4 O Holy Ghost, the Lord and the Life-giver, Thine is the quickening power that gives increase; From Thee have flowed, as from a pleasant river, Our plenty, wealth, prosperity, and peace.
5 O Triune God, with heart and voice adoring, Praise we the goodness that doth crown our days; Pray we, that Thou wilt hear us, still imploring Thy love and favor, kept to us always.
People ask on social media to share gifs of the superhero they imagine themselves to be (when they aren’t fetching coffee for the office team or replying to emails from people who hadn’t read the original email). I don’t join the sharing, because I don’t daydream in previously defined types like this.
Sometimes I imagine catching a falling meteor and it setting my body ablaze, and maybe that’s the signal flare from an extraterrestrial being needing my help. Or I imagine I’m the one who can talk to either large, invisible beasts or poltergeist-like forces nearby, telling them no to tear up the door I’m walking through.
Lately, I’ve taken a different tack. I’ve imagined confronting the bad guys with their full names, telling them they’re on my list, and saying no one would die here except them. If they run, because maybe they shoot at me to no effect, I follow them, like the stalking killer of a horror movie. I’m not so much a superhero in this line of thought as a force of nature, literally an agent or ambassador for the office of Death. No power to use or abuse; only select authority dispassionately exercised.
That sounds like a boring character or a side character at best. But thinking on those lines got me thinking of the flipside, of someone who can heal anything. I’ve imagined putting a hand on the back of someone’s neck and getting an expanding, somewhat undefined sense of their nerves, tissues, and organs, recognizing broken parts or dead cells, and restoring them to life. Sometimes it hurts the healer, sometimes the patient. Sometimes emotional pain rushes out causing both to weep.
There may be a story with a character like that, but more likely it’s fruitless imagination.
Batman: Tim Burton’s Batman was released June 23, 1989. Michael Keaton donned the cowl in that film and again in the sequel, Batman Returns. He and Burton would have returned for a third film, but the studio didn’t like the results of the second well enough to allow it. Now that Keaton is Batman again in the recently released The Flash, Jesse Schedeen tells us what Burton had intended to do in a third film and what the DC Comics series Batman ’89 does to fill in the story.
BTW, it was Keaton who gave us the line, “I’m Batman,” when he was scripted to say, “I am the night,” according to All the Right Movies on Twitter.
Super Movies: What are the best superhero movies, in your opinion? ScreenRant has the original Superman with Christopher Reeve and Blade with Wesley Snipe at the top of their list.
Novels: Superhero novels aren’t big sellers, from what I can tell. I’ve heard writers say the boom in movie sales hasn’t translated into book sales. I heard another writer recommend against any new writer attempting to sell a superhero novel. FWIW, here’s a list of superhero novels that aren’t graphic novels.
Favorite Books: No doubt, you were asking yourself just the other day what would be Umberto Eco’s favorite books. His son, Stephano, provides few titles, including “one of the most beautiful in the world,” Francesco Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili
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