Here’s an inspiring article on a church in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, who took up their pastor’s challenge to turn $50 into $100 for their missions funding.

“Sheer madness,” sniffed retired accountant Wayne Albers, 85, to his wife, Marnie, who hushed him as he whispered loudly. “Why can’t the church just collect money the old-fashioned way?”

Because this isn’t about collecting money.

Some of us were sick this morning, and others of us were up all night, so we didn’t make it to the worship service or Sunday School. I hope your last service before Christmas was wonderful and nurturing.

Anyone planning to read the Bible through next year? I often plan and fail because it’s hard for me to trot over the words at the needed pace without stopping to stare at some of the diamonds and gold along the path. Still, I may try it again this year.

Andree Seu has a beautiful article on faith in the Lord in the latest World Magazine. She writes,

In October I had the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Vern Poythress of Westminster Seminary. He gave me two delicious hours and we ended up talking about the Holy Spirit. I was sharing with him a wonderful insight of women’s Bible teacher Beth Moore, in which she compared the work of the Spirit in us—His “resonating” with our spirit (Romans 8:16; 1 Corinthians 2)—to the resonating of all the “C” strings of a piano when middle “C” is struck.

“Many times the resonance of the Spirit is thought of as being passive,” said Dr. Poythress, “but He calls on us to be creative because He is sovereign. . . . A trust in God says, ‘I’m going to venture on this. I know my motives are not perfect but I’m going to try it because I know God loves me.'” The Spirit in us gives us “freedom of exploration.”

Non-subscribers may find the link through this post will reveal the whole article.

So let me ask a political question, the same question twice over. Is it right to vote against Mitt Romney because he’s a Mormon?

Is it right to vote for Mike Huckabee because he’s a Christian?

By way of Powerline: A splendid piece in the Chicago Tribune, by Barbara Oakley (an agnostic and author of a book on Evil Genes). Looks like evidence of Original Sin to me.

More coming tomorrow. Snow, I mean. My old bones tell me we’re getting an inch or two more snow.



That’s a lie, by the way. My bones are indeed old, but they’re as surprised by the weather as I am most of the time. I get my weather off the radio and the internet these days, and those portents agree that it’ll probably snow tomorrow.

It looks very much as if our White Christmas is secure for 2007. Or “White Holiday,” as they say nowadays. I suppose singers make it, “White Season,” so it’ll scan. Anything to avoid the embarrassing, shocking word, “Christmas,” containing, as it does, the foul, profane syllable, “cris,” which must be kept at all costs from the ears of our children. (Or your children, anyway. I’ve done my bit for carbon neutrality and the maintenance of the gene pool by keeping my DNA to myself. No need to thank me. Just send a present.)

I’ve noticed there’s been some uproar from Christian groups over the Christmas advertising of the Kohl’s department store chain. The Kohl’s commercials (which star a very attractive woman who’s got a sort of Terri Hatcher thing going, I couldn’t help noticing) feature trappings and symbols that look Christmas-y in a generic, non-sectarian sort of way, but the music they use (to one’s amazement once one realizes it) is Cole Porter’s “De-Lovely,” hitherto never considered a trademark of the season.

All in all I disapprove. But I can’t help noting a certain irony in the situation.

Because I’m old, as mentioned above, and I can remember back in the 50s and 60s, when all the stores had Christmas sales, and Christmas decorations, and they played Christmas carols over the loudspeakers—and some of them even had crèches in their display windows.

And you know what? Christian leaders hated it. You’d hear it in their sermons, and read it in their letters to the editor. “Christmas is a holy festival of the Faith!” they’d say. “How dare these merchandisers hijack this blessed season for sordid gain!”

Which should be a lesson to all of us to be careful what we ask for.

Because the merchandisers have now done just what we wanted them to. They divorced their business entirely from our religious festival.

And we’re not happy at all with the result.

I nearly hit a deer tonight, while driving home from work.

It should be noted that my commute is not a rural one. It’s not even outer-ring suburb country, with lots of big, wooded lots. I drive from one inner-ring suburb to another inner-ring suburb, with one or two inner-ring suburbs in between. This deer jumped from behind a wooden fence at the edge of a tiny little park along 42nd Ave. in New Hope. Fortunately, my tiger-like reflexes allowed me to jam on the brakes before I hit it, and the driver behind me’s tiger-like reflexes allowed him to avoid rear-ending me.

I think maybe we need to re-think this whole business about restricting deer hunting to a limited season. I say we’ve got plenty of deer, and people who need cheap protein should be able to shoot ‘em any time they like.

I hasten to add that I don’t think we should be allowed to take our hunting rifles to urban deer, such as the one who touched my life this afternoon. Those stray bullets are made of a toxic substance, you know, and might be bad for the environment.

We might give bowhunters a shot, at them, though.

Speaking of mayhem (and that’s an unusually labored transition, even for me) I have a thought about mysteries and solutions tonight.

I’ve gotten into the habit of watching CBS’s “48 Hours Mystery,” which runs on Saturday nights, often after a re-run of “CSI.” The juxtaposition of the two shows intrigues me, mostly because of the differences between the fictional mysteries and the real ones.

What strikes me about the real mysteries covered on “48 Hours Mystery” is that they generally lack a really satisfactory resolution. In a fictional mystery, you almost always end with a solid solution to the problem. The detective brings out his damning evidence, and the accused can do nothing but hang his head and say, “Yes, I did it and I’m glad. She made my life a living heck” (or something equivalent).

But in real life, to judge from “48 Hours,” that scene almost never happens. The detectives gather evidence that they consider conclusive, and they arrest the suspect, who generally says nothing except to ask to call his lawyer. As the court proceedings go on, every piece of evidence is contested by the defense, and plausible explanations are put forward. The evidence against the accused may be strong, but it’s almost never absolutely, 100% definitive.

So in the end, the jury is left with a judgment call. Has the prosecution proven guilt beyond a reasonable doubt? In real life, it seems there’s always some room for doubt. Often it comes down in part to a subjective impression—“I just didn’t trust him.” “He gave me the creeps.” And you’re always left with a nagging doubt. “Maybe we condemned an innocent man.” Or, “Maybe we let a guilty man loose to kill again.”

You know what? That’s life. It’s very, very rare that you get to make a choice where you have absolute, 100% proof of the right way to go. (If you did, would it really be a choice?)

I think that goes for matters of faith too. Don’t misunderstand me. I don’t think truth is relative, or that the Bible isn’t God’s revealed truth.

But those who look for 100% certainty—an argument that will answer all objections and silence all doubts—will hover forever at the crossroads.

Choices—including the choice to believe—ultimately come down to a conviction in one’s soul; “the testimony of the Holy Spirit.” Perhaps that’s another name for what’s theologically called Election.

And even then, don’t expect all doubts to disappear. They won’t.

We see through a glass, darkly.

The weather has turned on us, like a girlfriend (I’ve read about such people) who suddenly won’t talk to you, and you ask her what’s wrong and she says, “If you don’t know, there’s no point in me saying anything.”

What I mean is, the weather turned to the winter side today. Oh, it’s not freezing (not quite). And it’s not snowing (although Lileks says a few flakes fell this morning). But the winter attitude is there. We’ve got a wind, sharpened with a carborundum stone. It wants to blow my hat away. It wants to give me a cold, or the flu if I let my guard down. And in combination with sunset coming an hour earlier now, we all know it’s time to stop lying to ourselves and to admit that summer was an aberration, a parole. This is the real world. This is Life, unpainted and raw.

Once again we have offended God with our ingratitude. That’s why we schedule a day at the end of the month for giving thanks, as a student gives the teacher an apple or a box of chocolates toward the end of term, in hopes that his previous slacking will be forgotten.



Iowahawk has posted scans of a book by Munro Leaf, most famous for the pacifist classic, Ferdinand the Bull. In 1942, Leaf sang a much more martial tune.

Dinesh D’Souza offers a spirited rebuttal today to the argument that “Hitler was a Christian,” noting quite properly that Hitler hated Christianity but adored Darwin.

In my novel Wolf Time, I noted that Nazism was compounded of Darwinism and Romanticism. I’m a big fan (as was C. S. Lewis) of much of the stuff that went on in the Romantic period in art and literature. That was the age when the Icelandic sagas gained thousands of readers, when the Grimms collected peasant fairy tales and Edvard Grieg worked Norwegian folk music into haunting orchestral works. Various European ethnic groups rediscovered their cultural histories, and—and this was very important—began to look at the common person, the peasant, as something more than a beast of burden. This helped to advance education and democracy.

But there was a downside. The celebration of the ethnic too easily overflowed into plain racism and xenophobia. The Norwegian, reading an Icelandic saga and saying, “We are as great as the Romans,” often went on to say, “…and we’re much better than the Poles.” The Darwinian idea of the survival of the fittest provided a scientific veneer for theories of racial superiority, and Nazism was born.

I’ve read that there are strong elements of neo-Nazism among some (not all) groups of Asatru (Thor and Odin worshippers) today. I’ve known several Asatru. We used to have them in our Viking Age Society, before our Great Schism. Some of them were people I liked, and some I didn’t like so much. I never heard any of them express racist views, but I never discussed the issue with any of them, either. So I can’t accuse them in this matter.

But I will say this. There is, within the Christian scriptures, ample authority for rejecting any view of human superiority on the basis of race. I see no such authority within the traditional documents of Norse mythology. I think that the Asatru (and all moderns who reject Christianity) are depending on the basic goodness of themselves and their friends to protect them from racism.

I don’t believe in the basic goodness of myself or my friends. I believe in the restraint provided by the authority of the Word of God.

Yesterday, of course, I should have titled my post “Happy All Saints’ Eve,” or “Happy All Hallows’ Eve.” Eve, not Day. Today’s the Day. Today is the Feast of All Hallows. I should have noticed that at the time, but I often miss things, don’t I?

S. T. Karnick has a nice tribute to the festival on his blog here, along with a video link and everything.

We ought to pay more attention to All Saints’ Day. You don’t have to be a Catholic to believe that we’re part of the universal Body of Christ, and that “a great cloud of witnesses” is watching from Heaven, like spectators at a ball game, cheering us on (as the author of Hebrews writes). Or, to use another metaphor, that we are part of a great host (“Like a mighty army moves the Church of God”) that’s on a long march through history. The army’s so big that we can only see a small part of it from where we stand in time. I often slump into a worldly point of view, imagining that I’m standing at the end of Christian history. All Saints’ Day helps us remember that we’ve been through worse before, and it sets up good examples for us to follow. This is a day to pick up a book on church history and meditate on the sufferings and victories of our forefathers in grace.

Here’s a bit of a hymn by Charles Wesley that pleases me very much:

One family, we dwell in Him;

One church above, beneath;

Though now divided by the stream,–

The narrow stream of death.

One army of the living God,

To His command we bow:

Part of His host has crossed the flood.

And part is crossing now.

Martin Luther posted these comments: “This unbridled preaching of indulgences makes it difficult for learned men to guard the respect due to the pope against false accusations, or at least from the keen criticisms of the laity.

They ask, e.g.: Why does not the pope liberate everyone from purgatory for the sake of love (a most holy thing) and because of the supreme necessity of their souls? This would be morally the best of all reasons. Meanwhile he redeems innumerable souls for money, a most perishable thing, with which to build St. Peter’s church, a very minor purpose.” Continue reading Today in History →