Yesterday Michael Medved played a recording on his show of a group of some sort singing a song called “Santa Claus Will Take You to Hell.” It put me in mind of anti-Christmas Christians I’ve encountered in the past.

I do not trust such people.

I remember one guy I met years back who was (I’m not making this up) an itinerant Bible teacher and vacuum cleaner salesman. He had inside information informing him that the Christmas tree is not a pretty, festive symbol of eternal life, but a Tammuz Tree, an idol devoted to the Babylonian god Tammuz (whose festival, oddly enough, was in the summer). Anyone putting a “Tammuz Tree” in their home was delivering their household over to Satan, he informed us.

He said that Easter was a heathen festival as well.

I have a lot of respect for the Puritans, whose contribution to our national development has been, I believe, undervalued for a few decades. But they had their blind spots. One was their rejection of Christmas, on the grounds that the Bible nowhere commands the celebration. The logic is simple—we’re only allowed to do what the Bible specifically permits. Thus the principle (which I’ve read as being a Puritan one; correct me if I’ve been misinformed): “Everything not forbidden is mandatory.”

We Pietists had the same problem. “When in doubt, forbid it.” It fostered an attitude toward life that made people reflexively fearful and reluctant to enjoy God’s gifts.

I think we need to remember that the Bible’s picture of Heaven is not an eternal Bible study, nor even an eternal church service.

It’s a party. A wedding feast. And not a Norwegian Lutheran wedding feast, but a Jewish one, where there would be wine and dancing.

I told the vacuum cleaner salesman, before I stormed off in a cloud of cowardice, “I don’t believe Christ came so that we would celebrate less.”

Once again, the eyes of the nation are fixed on Minnesota. Something strange, almost unprecedented, is going on here.

It’s cold out.

The rest of you know nothing of such things, so I thought I’d bring you up to date.



Tonight, as I was checking out at the grocery store, a guy at the end of the conveyer asked me, “Paper or plastic?”

In Minnesota (oddly, I can’t recall how it was in Florida) our major grocery chains all (by which I mean “both”) have “self-service” bagging. This was supposed to save us money back in my youth when it was introduced, but now it’s The Way Things Are Done, and anybody who suggests change is just a troublemaker. So I was confused to have somebody offer to bag my groceries for me. I told him plastic.

“Are you going to want a tip?” I asked, in my best Scrooge voice (and face), as he packed the sacks.

“No,” he said.

“Do you represent some organization?”

He gave the name of the youth group of a Lutheran church I wasn’t familiar with. By an odd coincidence, though, there was a table with a tip jar near the exit, and I felt obligated to drop a buck in as I left. (Which I could have technically avoided, since these people are supposed to ask first. “Would you like me to bag your groceries?” Not, “Paper or plastic?”)

I bet he’s a salesman. I bet he does well at it.

I bet he has no friends.

Anyway, I figure that, statistically, the church I gave the buck to is probably part of The Very Large Lutheran Body That Shall Remain Nameless.

So my money probably went to send the kids to a Transgender Sensitivity Camp or a Jihad Understanding Conference.

Humbug.

“>

Today is St. Thomas’ Day, and is the 980th anniversary of the death in battle of Erling Skjalgsson, hero of my novel, The Year of the Warrior.

This evening they are holding a commemorative concert at Sola Church, near Stavanger. Wish I could be there.

On an entirely unrelated note, I’ve complained about Earthlink customer service enough times that justice demands I should make it public that I actually had a good experience with them last night, when I finally had to call about my connection problems. I only spent about a minute in call waiting, and the customer service rep got me connected again in about five minutes.

The title of this post comes courtesy of my late father. It was the name he gave to a concoction he sometimes put together for our lunch, when Mom’s job had turned him into a sort of farmer/househusband. He’d clear all the leftovers out of the refrigerator, stir them together in a frying pan, and call it Slumgullion.

Now that I’ve typed it, it occurs to me that I’ve never written that word down in my life before.

Anyway, the idea is that this is a disjointed post, composed of random events out of a random day.

I note with pride that my next door neighbor is grilling his supper out by the garage right now. After the below zero temperatures we’ve endured this week, today’s 20° high felt positively tropical, and he is responding in a manner typical of the bulldog (or bull seal) Minnesota breed.

I’d do the same thing myself, only I don’t happen to own a grill. Otherwise I’d be out there just like him. You betcha. Continue reading Slumgullion →

I’ve heard the call go out to concerned Christians recommending they avoid those retailers who refuse to wish them a very, merry Christmas. Certainly I would be annoyed as an employee if the word came down from Corporate that we must not let those words slip passed our lips. I would probably ignore it until provoking their wrath, and then I don’t know what I’d do. But you and I aren’t working their now; we’re shoppers. Should we avoid certain stores over this?

No. I suggest it would be far better to teach and encourage Christian shoppers to shop as an act of worship to the Lord who provides for them. Some will take that to mean they should buy a verse for their wall, but whatever the learning curve, leaders of the church should lay aside trivial squabbles like merry-christmas-wishing and teach their congregations, radio audiences, and subscribers how to worship the Lord God wholeheartedly in everything–including shopping. We should shop at places providing good products, ones that treat their people well and invest in their community, ones where people we know and trust work.

This essay on reading The Great Books, or joining the Great Conversation, may be addressed to an audience other than the one typical of BwB, but Professor Peter Lawler makes many good points. He argues primarily against those who believe we, the people of the 21st century, are far superior to the people who came before us on many levels.

From my postmodern view, maybe the chief purpose of higher education, is then to counter the dominant view of who we are-–which is partly true and partly degrading prejudice—of our time. Our tendency is to view human beings as free and productive—as autonomous individuals with interests. This means that we don’t regard anyone as less than a being with interests—or as existing merely to serve others. We all have a right to look out for our own interests, and so to be treated as individuals and not merely as part of some larger whole. That means that it’s not really news to any of us that racism, sexism, classism, and so forth are wrong, and we usually think that it’s an affront to our dignity to be thought of as merely parents or citizens or creatures. We tend to be all about autonomy and self-definition.

But we’re weak—often very weak—in thinking of people as more than productive or self-interested beings. We tend to think that human distinctions that can’t be measured quantitatively aren’t real, just as we tend to think that a true meritocracy is based on productivity. We tend to think that because the great authors of the great books of the past must have been racists, sexists, and classists and, of couse, not as technologically advanced or as productive as we are, they have nothing real to say to us. So our prejudice is to study them critically—or condescendingly—as remnants of discredited prejudices.

In weather like this, you pretty much have to blog about the snow and cold. But how to do it? Tell harrowing stories of my near-death experiences shoveling my driveway, or fighting traffic on Teflon streets? Fortunately I avoided both those activities today. Employ quirky and creative similes and metaphors, like James Lileks? I could try a weak emulation, but it’s late and I want to get to my Christmas cards. Casual wit takes a lot of hard work.

So I’ll talk about my Grandpa, Clarence Walker. I thought of him as I unloaded my groceries in the cold wind tonight. I remembered that Grandma Walker once told me that he had saved his brother’s (or brother-in-law’s) life, when they both got caught in a snowstorm in the woods. It was one of those classic situations where one guy wants to sit down and rest, and the other guy says, “No, you’ve gotta keep walking. If you fall asleep, you’ll die.” (I understand that’s not entirely true. You can sleep just fine in the snow if you’re well bundled up, especially if you let the snow drift on top of you like a blanket, as long as you’re not physically exhausted. It’s the exhaustion that kills you. I have to assume they were both exhausted that night).

This is Grandpa and Grandma Walker, with (reading left to right) my brother Moloch and me. Must have been around 1953. It was taken in the house in town to which they retired after Dad got married.

Continue reading The Saga of Clarence →

Just to let you know, I’m having connection problems on my home computer, and depending on how long I spend in Customer Service Purgatory, I may or may not get a real post up tonight. Or tomorrow. Or this week, or year.

Update: My connection miraculously regenerated itself while I was gone at work. This does not make me complacent. I know well that once a connection starts acting this way, complete breakdown will follow as night the day. But for now, I’m in business.

I had a bizarre dream last night. Bizarre enough to tell you about.

Like most dreams, it was sparked by an incident during the preceding day. I had checked my mailbox and found it completely empty, even of junk mail. Which is a fairly uncommon thing, especially this time of year.

In my dream, I went out to check the mailbox again, and found it full of stuff. Not only mail, but packages. And there were packages, some of them Christmas wrapped, lying on my front step.

So I gathered what I could, took them inside, and went out to get the rest.

And there was Santa Claus, standing just outside the front awning. This was a huge Santa Claus, maybe twelve feet tall. I couldn’t actually see his face, but I recognized him from his outfit.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “but these packages were meant for another address.”

So I went in to bring them out again, and that’s when I woke up.

I got a note today from an acquaintance who is a European and is involved in a sort of rear-guard action to attempt to salvage some scraps of European culture out of the ongoing slow deluge.

Thinking about that noble, perhaps quixotic, effort, I had an epiphany. I think I know why European intellectuals hate the U.S.

(I’m not saying that all Europeans hate us. I believe [on the basis of limited personal contact and some reading] that most Europeans like us just fine, at least as individuals. A lot of them probably believe our country is the root of all evil, but they don’t mean us to take it personally.)

It occurred to me that the “native” European is under tremendous cultural pressure. The orthodoxy of our time proclaims that all evil in the world—without exception—is the fault of old Christian civilization. Which essentially means Europe. Therefore the conscientious European feels obligated to despise himself.

Well, what does a person do when he’s full of self-hate?

He looks for a scapegoat.

America is the scapegoat. When the European intellectual feels at his worst, his most sinful and guilt-ridden, he still has the satisfaction of pointing at America and saying, “Well, we may be evil, but we’re not as evil as that!”

This concludes my epiphany.