A friend on Facebook linked to this remarkable collection of some of the most tasteless Nativity Scenes that ever unaccountably failed to bring down the wrath of angels.
Except for the Dog Nativity, of course. The Dog Nativity is awesome.
Category Archives: Religion
Links of interest. To me, anyway
Photo credit: Jorge Barrios.
The picture above is intended to induce holiday cheer, and possibly petit-mal seizures. Also because I haven’t gotten my own tree up yet.
Under the tree, a few links, just for you.
At First Things, Joe Carter points us to an interesting article from First Principles, on the true worth of the Puritans and Puritanism.
At City Journal, Andrew Klavan has a short story. Not Christmasy.
Mike Gray at The American Culture links to a Telegraph report on a debate on religion, between Tony Blair and Christopher Hitchens.
And Standpoint has an excellent (what else?) review of a new book about Chesterton, with an appreciation, by the inestimable Paul Johnson. I forget who pointed me to it.
What is Sin?
In a letter to John Wesley in June 1735, his mother Susanna Wesley wrote these words:
The beauty, pleasures, and ease of the body strangely charm us; the wealth and honours of the world allure us; and all, under the management of a subtle malicious adversary, give a prodigious force to present things; and if the animal life once get the ascendant of our reason, it is the greatest folly imaginable, because he seeks it where has not designed he shall ever find it. But this is the case of the generality of men; they live as mere animals, wholly given up to the interests and pleasures of the body; and all the use of their understanding is to make provision for the flesh to fulfil the lusts thereof, without the least regard to future happiness or misery.
I take à Kempis to have been an honest weak man, with more zeal than knowledge, by his condemning all mirth or pleasure as sinful or useless, in opposition to so many plain and direct texts of Scripture. Would you judge of the lawfulness or unlawfulness of pleasure; of the innocence or malignity of actions? Take this rule: whatever weakens your reason, impairs the tenderness of your conscience, obscures your sense of God, or takes off the relish of spiritual things; in short, whatever increases the strength and authority of your body over your mind, that thing is sin to you, however innocent it may be in itself.
(from Susanna Wesley by Eliza Clarke LONDON: W. H. ALLEN & CO., 1886)
No irony deficiency in my life
I made a mistake today. I did a web search for an old friend.
Sometimes it’s better not to know.
This was a guy who, once upon a time, was (to quote Proverbs) “closer than a brother” to me. A guy I shared long road trips with, prayed with, shared confidences with, and sat up late with over pizza, talking about Jesus and how to win the world for Him.
I haven’t been in contact with him in years. We were drifting apart even then. I knew he was a pastor. I now learned that he’s been, for some time, an aggressive advocate, within the Very Large Lutheran Church Body Which Shall Remain Nameless, of what’s called “gay issues.”
My thoughts went back, inevitably, to an evening long ago, when I’d had dinner with him and his wife. The subject of homosexuality came up and I (on the basis of some very superficial recent reading) said that I thought I could make an argument for evangelical Christians supporting the homosexual movement.
“They seem to be just fighting for the right to be different from everybody else,” I said. “I think maybe we ought to support that. We can’t be confident that America will always be a Christian country. Someday we may be the ones who are different. We need to make sure that there’s a right not to conform in this country.”
My friend and his wife disagreed, spiritedly. I don’t clearly remember what they said, but I have the idea they pointed out that homosexual activists showed no particular inclination to respect the rights of those who disagreed with them. They pointed, I think, to the shameful treatment received by Anita Bryant, who paid with her career for daring to oppose their agenda.
In hindsight, I think it’s clear that they were right and I was wrong. I did not cling to that point of view much longer.
But, in one of those ironies that seem to me so common in life, today I’ve taken their side, and they’ve taken what was mine at the time (and gone far beyond it).
And I have to wonder, was that conversation the beginning, for them, of their movement to feelings-based ethics and zeitgeist-uber-alles theology? Or a significant step on the way?
I honestly can’t recall any argument I’ve ever won, in my whole life.
Is it possible the only one I did win was one in which I was completely wrong?
The weight of heroism
Wild Bill Hickok
I’m reading a novel right now, by a very good author, which is taking me forever to get through. (I won’t say what novel—maybe I’ll review it at the end of the line.) It’s a pleasant story with an interesting narrator. But it’s so… languid. It starts with a murder, but then the plot takes the hero (and the villain) to an entirely different location, and the villain proceeds to do nothing very sinister for a considerable time. The hero is wearing himself out trying to catch the villain at something, but there seems to be nothing to catch. Thus the book lacks that sense of urgency that drives the reader to keep turning pages, and pick the book up anxiously whenever there’s a free moment.
It’s slow.
My analysis of the problem is this—the author has failed, thus far, to raise the stakes. In order to keep your audience’s attention, you need to keep the villain busy doing bad stuff. And that stuff must be devastating and costly. People who matter to the reader, and to the hero, need to be placed in imminent, horrifying danger (unless it’s the hero himself who’s in peril). The good characters’ awful pain and fear are the very elements that transfix the reader.
I think there are very few authors who don’t have a problem raising the stakes like this (I know I do). Most of us are nice people. We don’t enjoy inflicting pain. Raising the stakes is emotionally hard.
This relates to life too. I’ve written more than I have a moral right to about heroism. I believe in the necessity of heroism. I believe that faith and heroism are closely related (all heroism isn’t faith, but all true faith is heroism).
It’s easy to forget that heroism has a high cost. Continue reading The weight of heroism
Super apologist, supertaster
Today is C. S. Lewis’ birthday (1898-1963). In honor of the occasion some of us have been posting quotations from his writings on Facebook. I’ll post this one here:
“The minimal religion in fact cannot, while it remains minimal, be acted on. As soon as you do anything you have assumed one of the dogmas.” (From “Religion Without Dogma” in God In the Dock)
I should have posted this yesterday so you’d have all day to celebrate, but do I have to do everything around here?
I made my special pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving, besides the turkey, and while enjoying the leftovers I’ve been taking particular pleasure in breaking the edge crust off and throwing it away. I used to get in trouble for doing that when I was a kid. But what do you know? Now doctors say it’s a good idea, because it reduces fat. I was right all along. My parents could have avoided so much unpleasantness if they’d just realized earlier that Lars Is Always Right.
I’ve told you before that I’m a picky eater. So I’m delighted to discover that this may be a sign that I belong to a special, elite subspecies of humanity, the Supertaster. We Supertasters have more taste buds than you ordinary folks, and our extreme finickiness about things we won’t eat is actually due to the fact that we are tasting stuff you can’t detect.
Unfortunately, this article (tip: Joe Carter at First Thoughts) says that Supertasters tend to be skinny people.
From this I can only conclude that I belong to an even more select group—Fat Supertasters.
Thanksgiving Links
Jared has seven great ways to crush the Thanksgiving spirit, such as freaking out over everything, like a late family guest, and practicing practical atheism.
Bill talks about communal living and productivity.
One of my earliest professional experiences involved leaving a job at a government-run municipal utility to take a job at a private-sector energy company. At the utility, it didn’t much matter what you did, you were going to get paid and keep your job. There was a lot of waste, shoddy work, and sloth at that company. Don’t get me wrong, I worked with good people. But the very structure of the place was set against big productivity gains, risks, improvements or innovation.
Loosely related to these is this post from Tullian Tchividjian on counterfeit gospels: “ways we try and ‘justify’ or ‘save’ ourselves apart from the gospel of grace. I found these unbelievably helpful.”
Rise up and walk. And say thank you.
Thanksgiving tomorrow. I doubt I’ll post anything that day, as I’ll have family prowling the place like roaring lions, seeking what they may devour. Tomorrow morning comes my annual D-Day, when I face the challenge of roasting a turkey. I’ve done this four straight years now with unbroken success, but I still feel incompetent.
What am I thankful for? There’s a question to make me guilty. “A pack o’ blessings lie on my head,” to paraphrase Romeo and Juliet, and yet I spend most of my life (as you may have noticed) bemoaning the things (some of them quite important, you have to admit) that I’ve missed out on.
But I’ll tell you one thing I’m thankful for. It’s this.
Tip: Conservative Grapevine.
I love this stuff. A walking wheelchair—a way for paraplegics to enjoy a more normal life. A way to regenerate damaged spinal tissue would be better, of course, but I think we’ll have that too, before long. (And I’d bet you money it will be through a method that doesn’t involve embryonic stem cells.)
I think things like this are part of (note I said, “part of”) the answer to the question of theodicy—“If God is good, why is there so much suffering in the world?” If you’re wondering why God isn’t doing anything about suffering, I say He’s doing this. He’s working through people to overcome suffering and evil, which is a more glorious thing than starting out with perfection.
That leaves lots of questions, of course. Plenty of undeserved suffering goes unrelieved in this world. I don’t have the answer to the whole question. I’m just saying this seems to me a hint, a relevant fact.
And I would note (because I can’t help myself) that this happened in Israel, a country within the western tradition. Obfuscate all you like, but the great non-western civilizations never came up with the kind of science that does this sort of thing. The machines may be manufactured in Japan or China, but left to nothing but Shintoism or Taoism, those cultures would have gone on until the heat death of the universe without developing the scientific method and modern medicine. Because they don’t believe in a God who made a real world out of nothing, as Christians and Jews do. That doctrine made the examination of nature a praiseworthy thing, rather than blasphemy. It was Christians, who believe that physical matter was made noble in the Incarnation, who figured out thoracic surgery and penicillin.
And for that I’m thankful.
An alloyed golden rule
For most of my life, I’ve been aware of a particular conflict (there are many, of course) between liberal and conservative Christians. I’m going to try to shed some light on this particular difference of opinion.
Which means, of course, that I’ll just make people mad. But I persist.
The disagreement, I think, springs from a misunderstanding of the Golden Rule.
Liberal Christians (I believe) tend to think the Golden Rule says something it doesn’t actually say. They think it says, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you—and they will treat you the same way.”
But the text doesn’t actually say that. What it says (I’m quoting the NIV here, despite my recent criticism of that translation, because we’re kind of chained to it on this site, through our associated Bible Search app) is, “So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets.” (Matthew 7:12) Continue reading An alloyed golden rule
Hat tips to Veith
Gene Edward Veith, of the Cranach blog, provides today’s subject matter.
First of all, he links to this article, which tells how the Beatles, John Lennon especially, tried to make a deal to film The Lord of the Rings back in the 1960s.
According to Peter Jackson, who knows a little something about making Lord of the Rings movies, John Lennon was the Beatle most keen on LOTR back in the ’60s—and he wanted to play Gollum, while Paul McCartney would play Frodo, Ringo Starr would take on Sam and George Harrison would beard it up for Gandalf. And he approached a pre-2001 Stanley Kubrick to direct.
Fortunately, Prof. Tolkien was still alive at the time, and he put his brogan down firmly on the idea.
Prof. Veith also writes about the new NIV Bible, which (most of us weren’t aware, I’m sure) is now going to supersede both previous versions of the NIV.
…But still there remains lots of interpretations for the sake of modern readers in place of simply rendering what these non-modern texts literally say, this being part of the translating philosophy of the NIV. Here too is that tendency in American evangelicalism to cut itself off from the church of the past (eliminating “saints”?). Not to mention the presumption of correcting the Bible’s “sexist” language.
This seems like an excellent opportunity to publicly thank Dale Nelson, for his generous gift of a copy of the new The Lutheran Study Bible: English Standard Version