The whole Ted Haggard thing makes me sad. Not only for its own sake, but because it strikes a nerve around here.

I wasn’t actually involved with the church body I now work for, back when it happened, except in the sense that the church I grew up in had joined up. I got the news from a friend (now a former friend) who derived considerable pleasure from the discomfiture of those disgusting pietists.

It was several years ago now, back when the Very Large Lutheran Church Body Which Shall Remain Nameless was coalescing like a lump in a batch of Cream o’ Wheat (“Hey! You guys don’t believe anything anymore, and we don’t believe anything anymore either! No reason we can’t do whatever it is we’re doing all together!”). Lots of churches that hadn’t gotten the Postmodern Memo were looking for a new affiliation, and our group looked pretty good to many of them. We (and by “we” I mean “they,” because I wasn’t involved yet) were doing great, adding congregations almost on a weekly basis.

But the scandal threw all that in the dumper for a while.

The president of our fellowship, a man widely liked, respected and admired, was discovered to be living a double life. He was, as it turned out, a secret bisexual. He couldn’t hide it anymore when his wife was diagnosed with H.I.V.

I came on staff some time later, when the wounds were beginning to heal. But the pain remained; the betrayal was far from forgotten. The man himself was still alive when I came in. He was a member of my church. I never met him as such, but I saw him often, a tall, gaunt man whose skin was darker than his genetics had intended. His wife had already passed away by then. He had repented and accepted discipline. He was on the sidelines, off the roster. I never heard him speak.

I know two of his daughters, both of them members of my church. Lovely, smart, godly women. I can’t even imagine the kind of emotional suffering they’ve been through.

I don’t have much point in writing this, except to remind people of the personal tragedy that accompanies scandals of this sort. Somebody’s in a lot of pain today, and could use your prayers.

Cartoonist Doug TenNapel has reached a million hits on his blog, and (if I understand correctly) has retired from posting. Good luck, Doug. I’ll miss you. Your blog was one of my daily treats.

Another treat (though not daily) is Yucky Salad With Bones, a Minnesota blog. It’s not the kind of blog I ordinarily like, being mostly day-to-day reports of family life written by the mother. But this woman has such a mordant sense of humor I can’t resist her. She’s my kind of gal. Unfortunately she’s already married.

I’m not doing Halloween. Instead of putting out a pumpkin I’m hiding my house light under a bushel. I have two main reasons:

1. I consider it prudent for any unmarried, middle-aged man to avoid contact with children as much as possible.

2. The Wiccans have pretty much appropriated the festival, aided and abetted by Christians. As I’ve said before, I don’t believe in magic and I don’t believe in witchcraft. But that doesn’t mean I want to encourage these people. I can remember when Halloween was fun. I can remember a lot of things that aren’t true anymore.

I pretty much agree with Joe Carter at Evangelical Outpost. Especially on Jack Chick.

Happy Reformation Day!

The sky was dimming as I left work today. It wasn’t evening yet, but the afternoon was effectively shot. That’s how it is in Minnesota, the first Monday after the time change. It’s always a shock, like somebody dropping something on your roof with a thump.

One of these years the first big blizzard will occur on the first Monday after Fall Back. And when that happens, half the population of the Great Plains will commit seppuku in concert.

The guy who runs the used book shop I patronize recommended the author Phillip Margolin to me, noticing that I’d pretty much run through all the Jonathan Kellerman. So I picked up Wild Justice.

Short review, after 45 pages: Hackwork. Uninspired writing and flat characters. I’m not going to finish it. Since I’ve decided to stop buying books for a while, to save money, I’m going to finish Volume Two of C. S. Lewis’ Letters now, and then I plan to re-read The Lord of the Rings.

On Saturday I drove down to Faribault to join Aunt Ada and Uncle Ralph, along with several of their children and grandchildren, for a committal service for an uncle and aunt I’ll call… oh, George and Martha. George passed away recently and was cremated, and while cleaning out his apartment Cousin Brian found Martha’s ashes in a cupboard. So they arranged to inter them together in my maternal grandparents’ plot.

My brother Moloch, who as you may recall is a pastor in The Very Large Lutheran Church Body Which Shall Remain Nameless, led a short service. We sang “Abide With Me” and “Amazing Grace” in a chilly breeze.

Moloch is sanguine about George and Martha’s final destinations. He’s a sacramentalist, believing that once you’re baptized you’re pretty much guaranteed salvation unless you perform a black mass and storm the heavens or something. I found the occasion rather more melancholy than he did.

Not that George and Martha were awful people. Martha, my mother’s sister, was an extremely amiable person—desperately amiable. She was as insecure as I am, but she handled it in an equal and opposite manner. She was an incessant talker, saying anything that came into her mind anytime the conversation threatened to slacken. She believed (I always suspected) that silence would give people an opportunity to think bad things about her.

I remember her saying, one day at Grandpa’s house, “The point of any religion is to do the best you can, after all, isn’t it?”

I didn’t correct her. Kids didn’t correct adults’ theology in our family. Perhaps her blood is on my hands because of that.

George probably led a pretty good life, according to his lights. He didn’t like to work and he did like to drink. He worked some years for an agricultural implement company. When they closed down and laid him off, he gave up working, living off Martha’s small income. He had enough money to pay the rent on their shabby apartment, play some golf and drink pretty steadily. He seemed content with that.

I’d like to say something more profound about him, but I really didn’t know him. He wasn’t the kind of man you had conversations with, not sober anyway.

I’m going to stop this post here, because there’s nowhere to go that isn’t depressing.

Happy Autumn.

Penelope Keith is in a production of Entertaining Angels at the Theatre Royal in Bath, England. I just want to say that I, an American, know who Penelope Keith is. Will that get me anywhere?

This post is offered as a service to our readers (If I had an Amazon Tip Jar, I’d direct you to it).

Daylight Saving Time ends tonight. Set your clocks back one hour before you go to day or you may be late for church tomorrow.

Next time we do this, we will do it sooner. “Beginning in 2007, Daylight Saving Time is extended one month and begins for most of the United States at 2:00 a.m. on the Second Sunday in March to 2:00 a.m. on the First Sunday of November.”

I don’t expect this to affect the Christmas shopping season.

Update: These cuckoo clock museum owners in London will take all weekend to turn back their 500+ clocks.

Update: Dave Lull directed my attention to this humorous article on the origins of Standard Time and Daylight Saving Time. When Standard Time was proposed to meet the desires of the railroad industry, some said it was “puzzling, saddening, or infuriating [to assume] that time was arbitrary, changeable, susceptible to the whims of the railroads or defined by mere commercial expediency. Surely the world ran by higher priorities than railroad scheduling.”

I would television scheduling to that.

Seattle, Washington, hopes to draw tourists and new residents by calling itself “metronatural.” For those of you in the back row, that’s like metropolitan with a part of that word replaced by another word so that the final word is–I don’t know–kewl.

What does “metronatural” say to you? If it doesn’t say, “Visit Seattle for your kind of vacation,” then you can add it to your list of ways to spell “failure.”

This reminds me of a breifly lived slogan my city did while I was away in college. In print with designed letters, it’s attractive enough that you may miss the words: “Live it, love it, it’s Chattanooga.” That’s close to “like it or lump it.” Perhaps others agreed with me, which is why the city’s current tagline is “The attraction’s only natural.” Similar to Seattle’s, when you think of it, but less hokey.

My mind is sterile, tonight, clean as a boiled sheet. All I can think of to do is to post a picture and tell you about it.



This comes from my last trip to Norway. There’s a place called Flåm, on a beautiful fjord. A funicular railroad runs up to a mountain station from there. Some people take the train for practical purposes, but much of its business is tourists (like me, on two occasions).

This picture shows a place on the route where they stop the train so people can take photos of the waterfall. The first time I took the trip, with my dad, we got out and took pictures, but they were a little disappointing. In two dimensions, it just wasn’t as dramatic as it is in real life.

This last time the tourist people had jazzed it up. When a crowd comes out to gawk, a girl in folk costume comes out and stands on the rocks. She mimics singing while a loudspeaker plays a haunting folk song. At one point she disappears behind the rocks, and another girl dressed just the same pops out of a building nearer by, as if she had magically transported herself. Clearly she’s a huldre, an elf maiden, trying to lure us to our deaths in the fast water.

It’s hokey and corny, but you know what? It works. Not just for the drama, but because including the girl in your photo adds perspective to the whole thing and makes the waterfall look much more dramatic. In other words, the fake thing makes it more real.

I don’t know what the moral of this is. Perhaps it means it’s OK to go over the top now and then, as long as it works and nobody’s fooled.

Thoughts thought while preparing to go to church for the meeting last night:

“Looks like rain. I’d better wear my trenchcoat.

“If I wear the trenchcoat, I’ll have to wear a tie.

“You cannot wear a trenchcoat without a tie. If you do, you look like a pervert hanging around a playground, not the International Man of Intrigue you bought the coat to resemble.”

Dave Lull sent me this link to a Reason article by Jonathan Rauch which explains Honor Cultures (one of my current obsessions) pretty clearly.

I don’t have much time tonight. I’ve got to go to church to participate in a long, boring, meeting. I know it’ll be long and boring because that’s the only kind we do.

I agreed a couple years back to serve on a constitutional revision committee. Since then we’ve held zero meetings. I came to look on the obligation the same way we Boomers think back on the atomic bomb scares of our childhoods, something we feared then but need not worry about now (oh, wait…)

But the call finally came.

I’m pondering whether to attend the meeting or just kill myself.

Decisions, decisions.

Being dead is an acceptable excuse for non-attendance, right?

I drove up to Fargo, North Dakota on Saturday, for a meeting of the Sverdrup Society (I edit their journal and newsletter). It’s about a four hour drive, with stops. Getting to Fargo from here involves passing through Fargo’s sister city, Moorhead, Minnesota. That reminded me of a story told by my brother Moloch (whose birthday it is today, by the way. Remind me to call him).

Moloch and his wife were visiting Concordia College in Moorhead, their mutual alma mater. They took a guided tour led by a young female student. As they passed by a small hill on campus, Moloch said, “There’s where the biology lab used to be. They tore it down and put in that hill.”

The student said, “No. That hill has always been here. The students talk about it. There’s an Indian legend about it and everything.”

Moloch and my sister-in-law assured her that the hill was modern and man-made, and they’d spent a fair amount of time in the old biology lab on the site.

Afterwards Moloch said to his wife, “You know what this means, don’t you?

“It means we’re older than the hills.”

I thought I’d link to a couple more Viking photos. Since I’m constitutionally incapable of balance in thinking about myself, I need to alternate my nihilist and pessimistic posts with posts of a more full-of-myself, “look at me!” nature.

This first picture is from the Viking Meet in Elk Horn, Iowa. The sinister gang I’m posing with is not my own Viking group, but the Skjaldborg guys from Omaha. And no, I did not tease the big guy about his pink tunic.

This one is from two weekends ago, in Dallas, Wisconsin. Here we see me demonstrating graphically to the others exactly how far my fame and fortune as an author take me in terms of… well, fame and fortune.

Credit to Eric and Shari Anderson for the pictures.