Passaggio, originally written for piano by Ludovico Einaudi
All posts by Phil
Praying the Bible
Correctly handling the Word of God does not permit making the text say what we want. To understand the Bible accurately, we must discover (or “exegete”) the single, God-inspired meaning of every verse before us. The text of the Bible means what God inspired it to mean, not “what it means to me.”
When praying the Bible, our primary activity is prayer, not Bible intake. Bible reading is secondary in this process. Our focus is on God through prayer; our glance is at the Bible. And we turn Godward and pray about every matter that occurs to us as we read.
Don Whitney, “What’s the difference between interpreting the Bible and praying the Bible?”
Rewriting the Portrait, Coffee
Atlanta pastor John Onwuchekwa has a side angle in trying to start a coffee business in the city’s west end. They got off the ground just before the shutdown hit us.
“Initially our business plan and marketing were built off this idea of building community through pop-ups and in-person events,” founder and barista Aaron Fender said. But with those options shot for a few months, they considered other ideas.
“We started doing a lot of Instagram Live interviews with entrepreneurs, artists, and thinkers to build community. We started a coffee delivery service to your doorstep. We made a coffee club coffee subscription.”
Onwuchekwa explained the vision of Portrait Coffee to Atlanta Magazine. “One of the first things Frederick Douglass did when he finally learned how to read and write was [to write] a narrative of his life. It was a way for him to insert himself back into a history that was often too eager to forget the people who helped build it. As we think of coffee, we tend to feel like the industry as a whole is the exact same thing. We wanted to start a shop, trying to pour a new narrative of the picture that comes to mind when you think of specialty coffee.”
Plantations Rebranding: Tea, Rum, and Plimoth
Several days ago, I wrote about Osayi Endolyn’s questions about products that brand themselves with the word plantation. She was specifically interested in Plantation Rum, an excellent French brand with a pineapple rum she loved. I heard her story on an episode of The Sporkful, and today I learned Plantation Rum would be rebranding to get away from the negative connotations of that word in American markets (also via The Sporkful).
Bigelow Tea has changed the name of it’s Plantation Mint to Perfectly Mint. It owns the Charleston Tea Plantation brand, which it has now rebranded at the Charleston Tea Garden.
Changing brand names looks like a step in the right direction, but I’m not sure about changing living history museums and state parks, like Plimoth Plantation changing to Plimoth Patuxet. This reminds me of a tweet I saw this week, saying we are asking for civil equality and they are just naming things Martin Luther King crabs.
Defining Racism as Anti-Racism
Samuel Sey is a Canadian writer who has recently taken up criticism of some of those who would speak for African-Americans today. One of those voices is Robin DiAngelo and her current bestselling book White Fragility. I’m not sure Sey and I would agree on the problems and solutions for American, if not human, racial tension and relief, but I am willing to agree that this is not the book to read about it.
In the book, DiAngelo says: “[white fragility] is rooted in the false but widespread belief that racial discrimination can only be intentional…the simplistic idea that racism is limited to individual intentional acts committed by unkind people is at the root of virtually all white defensiveness on this topic.”
That is a complete rejection of the biblical and logical definition for racism. Racism is biblically defined as a form of partiality or hatred against another person because of their skin colour. The Bible says: “show no partiality as you hold the faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory…have you not then made distinctions among yourselves and become judges with evil thoughts? (James 2:1, 4)
Sey says the book is essentially racist in his definition of race and anti-racism. Have you read from this book or heard the author interviewed? What do you think?
If you want more context on Sey’s experience with police, he wrote about that last month.
Glimmerglass, by Marly Youmans
Who didn’t have ghosts? And she was diminishing, changing–her face momentarily strange in the glass. She had hold of the tail end of middle age; she was an attractive woman, often mistaken for one much younger. Her hair still shone black, with only sparse threads of snow, and her skin was unwrinkled. There might be something left for her, here in the gatehouse beyond the village. Hadn’t she long ago combed her hair with the teeth of pain, eaten the poisoned apple, and married the prince of fire? What more could hurt her now?
I picked up Glimmerglass by Marly Youmans, thinking it was a fantasy written by a poet. That’s exactly what it proved to be, but it took reading three quarters of the book to get there. Most of the time the fantasy might be simply metaphor. I mean, a house with seven doors and talk of Snow White doesn’t actually bring dwarves into the story. But elements of fairy magic and oddness, as we read in Lars’s novels and other deep-rooted fantasies, abound.
Cynthia Sorrel arrives at the village of Cooper Patent on the southern tip of Glimmerglass lake (a fictional variation of Cooperstown, “America’s Most Perfect Village,” on the southern tip of Ostego Lake in New York. Village and lake call back to James Fenimore Cooper). She’s open to renting the gatehouse but has no real plans for anything yet. She’s just lost. The spritely, frail-looking caretaker who gives her the keys talks her into staying by assuming no alternatives.
Cynthia keeps to herself for a while and slowly begins to connect to the quirky people in the village, the vicar’s wife first, the Wild brothers, and later the vicar himself. The Wilds turn out to be her landlords, and with them come the main fantasy elements. Their mansion is a labyrinth of rooms that butts into the forest hill. There’s a locked door into the hill, a curious aura radiating from it. One of the Wild cousins went through that door many years ago and was never seen again. And there’s a pale, shirtless boy who stares at her from the woods before disappearing into them. Is that the ghost she felt must be lurking in a house or village like this?
Glimmerglass the novel may be like Glimmerglass the lake. It’s beautiful from the shore, warm, inviting, even with hints of danger and mystery, and alien, if not weird, under the surface. When Cynthia falls into the icy lake, metaphorically speaking, she emerges among chain-smoking ghosts, feathered angels with parasols, minotaurs, and palace dance halls. Sure, it sounds trippy, but it works beautifully well.
Read about this and her many other books on Marly’s blog.
Photo by Parker Amstutz on Unsplash
Voces8: “Be not angry, O Lord”
Ne irascaris Domine satis,
et ne ultra memineris iniquitatis nostrae.
Ecce respice populus tuus omnes nos.
Civitas sancti tui facta est deserta.
Sion deserta facta est,
Jerusalem desolata est.
Be not so terribly angry, O Lord,
and remember not iniquity forever.
Behold, please look, we are all your people.
Your holy cities have become a wilderness;
Zion has become a wilderness,
Jerusalem a desolation. ( Isaiah 64:9-10 ESV)
Losing Liberty
When the taste for physical pleasures in such a nation grows more speedily than education or the habit of liberty, a time occurs when men are carried away and lose self-control at the sight of the new possessions they are ready to grasp.
Casey Chalk quotes Tocqueville above in an article on digital minimalism and how we can reclaim our attention and improve our country.
Americans engage in self-congratulatory, pseudo-civic activism on social media simply by clicking the “like” and “share” buttons or changing their profile picture—activities that amount to little. “Men travel faster now,” observes a character in Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop, “but I do not know if they go to better things.”
What Is Meant by Branding a Product “Plantation”?
When someone introduced food writer Osayi Endolyn to Plantation Pineapple Rum, she says she was immediately suspicious. Plantation was not a neutral word for her because her grandparents had fled from the Jim Crow South years ago. But the rum was good enough to put those thoughts aside for a while.
Later she asked a bartender for the name of the pineapple rum in her drink. The woman seemed embarrassed to admit it was Plantation Rum.
Why would anyone be embarrassed about a brand called plantation? What would a company mean by choosing that name? Bigelow sells a Plantation Mint tea and Charleston Tea Plantation sells a variety teas. Plantation Peanuts of Wakefield sells gourmet peanuts grown in Virginia. Carolina Plantation sells rice. Many recipes have plantation in their name, such as Plantation Skillet Cake and Auntie Crae’s Plantation Chews, so surely the word connotes an idea or mood the owners wish to convey to others. (This is has begun to change.)
Endolyn dug into the meaning of the rum brand by talking to its owners and learning a bit of French and Barbadian history that supported using the word plantation over the equivalent farmland. What would you expect from those words in food brands? Are they interchangeably applicable to rice, butter, peanuts, leaf tobacco, bread flour, and beef?
For a short time, you can listen to an episode of The Sporkful in which they ask about this idea to as many brand owners as will take their questions. Bigelow, for example, wouldn’t talk about it. But some people said the word calls back to an easier way of life. When you think of it that way, you may start to ask whether life was easier and for whom.
Secret Wars, by Jonathan Hickman
What would you do with omnipotence? What would you do if the universe had collapsed around you, everyone and everything had died, and you were now the omnipotent being who could put something back together again?
That’s the question in the final collection of issues in Jonathan Hickman’s lengthy story of Avengers, Illuminati, alien doomsdays, and multiversal collapse. (Finally, the end! See all previous posts by searching for Jonathan Hickman or other tags to this post.)
At the end of Time Runs Out, the Illuminati team run out of options and devised a lifeboat that they hoped would save enough people to restart the human race, if that chance ever presented itself because they weren’t equipped to recreate anything. The man who was equipped for the task was the Fantastic Four’s arch-rival Victor von Doom. You could say he was in the right place at the right time.
With the help of Doctor Strange and The Molecule Man (who were with him at the aforementioned right time), he pulled together as many fragments of the multiverse as he could or wanted to into a small, planetary reality lamely called Battleworld. What I read in this Secret Wars collection is the metanarrative that holds many other stories together. I had thought to say the world wasn’t filled with battle and you could hardly call what happens here a secret war, much less wars, but I didn’t read the many other issues tied to this this set. Who knows what madness ran around in its diapers over there?
But here Doom, having reconstructed bits and pieces of Earth and the known universe, reigns as a god. He seems to have gotten everything he’s always wanted–worship, unbridled power, and Susan Richards, his enemy’s wife. But after a few years, scientists discover a lifeboat ship and Thanos and his crew are onboard.
The story works, and I’m glad it’s over. The only unsatisfying part of the conclusion for me is the complete avoidance of the rebirth and reconciliation of Captain America and Iron Man. Since so much time was spent on them in the third act, I thought Hickman would bring them into the fourth act. But the story shifted to the Fantastic Four characters, which was compelling on its own, and the inclusion of two Spidermen added a nice spice.