Category Archives: Blogs, Socials

Blogs, Socials, Music

Coming in Humility to Conquer and Blogroll Links

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Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion!
    Shout aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem!
Behold, your king is coming to you;
    righteous and having salvation is he,
humble and mounted on a donkey,
    on a colt, the foal of a donkey.
 I will cut off the chariot from Ephraim
    and the war horse from Jerusalem;
and the battle bow shall be cut off,
    and he shall speak peace to the nations;
his rule shall be from sea to sea,
    and from the River to the ends of the earth.
As for you also, because of the blood of my covenant with you,
    I will set your prisoners free from the waterless pit.
Return to your stronghold, O prisoners of hope;
    today I declare that I will restore to you double. (Zachariah 9:9-12 ESV)

Our Lord comes in humility and cuts off the warcraft of his enemies. Should that apply directly to our public discourse, to our perception of the culture war?

Bach’s greater Passion has a lot of moving parts: two choirs, four soloists, a narrator, an orchestra, and an organist. And in last week’s performance [2019], there was also the audience, as Saint Thomas participated in the German Lutheran Good Friday tradition of singing congregational chorales surrounding the main musical event. Saint Thomas’s associate organist, Benjamin Sheen, played Bach’s prelude to Johann Böschenstein’s “Da Jesu an dem Kreuze stund” (“When on the cross the Savior hung”), and then the audience was encouraged to sing along in English.

Prayer: Can prayer make your anxiety worse? “My self-centered pity party lamented my situation always instead of rejoicing in the Lord always.”

Jesus: How is Jesus the Bread of Life?

Tapestries: Here is some beautiful tapestry work by Ukrainian artist Olga Pilyugina

Manhood: There’s a new book that claims it’s good to be a man, and it’s isn’t that the world still needs isolated rebels with personal agendas.

Photo: Rube & Sons Shell gas station, Kingston, New York. 1976. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Blogs, Socials, Music, Non-fiction

A Tall Anniversary, Beautiful Things, and Conversations

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Thursday was the anniversary of the completion of Paris’s iconic ironwork project, The Eiffel Tower, named for the owner of the company that proposed and assembled it by March 31, 1889. They were aiming to have it up for the 1889 World’s Fair to be part of the centennial gala of the French Revolution. Philadelphia held a similar one in 1876.

The architect proposed using large stone monumental pedestals at the base and glass halls on every level of the tower. It’s final, simplified design was constructed in 18,000 parts in Eiffel’s factory about three miles away. The measured every piece carefully and mathematically configured the lattice work to minimize wind resistance. Two and half million rivets hold together the 1083-foot tower. 

Viewing the construction for a few weeks before completion, journalist Emile Goudeau wrote, “One could have taken them for blacksmiths contentedly beating out a rhythm on an anvil in some village forge, except that these smiths were not striking up and down vertically, but horizontally, and as with each blow came a shower of sparks, these black figures, appearing larger than life against the background of the open sky, looked as if they were reaping lightning bolts in the clouds.”

More on the 1889 World’s Fair from Marc Maison.

Beauty: Where would we be without beauty? It enlivens the heart; we value it, even if the beautiful thing isn’t useful–putting aside the inherent beauty of some useful, well-designed things.

Symphony: Robert Reilly says, “There is a steadiness in Haydn’s music, a sense of normalcy. At the same time, it is filled with wonder at what is—at its goodness.” Haydn was told his sacred compositions were too cheerful; he replied that his heart leaped for joy at the thought of God. As an example, here’s a performance by the Chiara String Quartet of Haydn’s “Seven Last Words of Christ.”

Sounds: Cambridge’s word blog is talking about rustling and howling type words.

Isaac Adams: “The race conversation often feels like talking to each other at the Tower of Babel. We may be trying to build together, but we’re frustrated and speaking past one another.” Adams’s book, Talking About Race, intends to inspire healthy conversations on this subject and bring us together.

Gene Veith: The popular Lutheran blogger is moving to a subscription model at $5/month.

Photo by Karina lago on Unsplash

Authors, Blogs, Socials, Non-fiction

Unable to Define Our Terms, Good Podcasts, and the Nazis We Are

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Know then thyself, presume not God to scan,
The proper study of mankind is man.
Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,
A being darkly wise, and rudely great:
With too much knowledge for the sceptic side,
With too much weakness for the stoic’s pride,
He hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest;
In doubt to deem himself a God, or beast;
In doubt his mind and body to prefer;
Born but to die, and reas’ning but to err;

Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man, Epistle II

I may have some entertaining posts for you soon. The links below have a couple bits of entertainment, but the rest are about matters to grave to laugh over.

Hunter Baker: “We cannot extol being a ‘wise Latina’ in one instance and then remain ambiguous on what a woman is in the next instance.”

Old Books: A collector talks about the books of William Strunk, Jr.

After Gettysburg: Meade and Lee at Rappahannock Station

Maria Stepanova: The Russian novelist, poet, and publisher has written about the war and her country. “Dreams about catastrophe are common in what was once called the ‘post-Soviet world’; other names will surely appear soon. And in these recent days and nights, the dreams have become reality, a reality more fearful than we ever thought possible, made of aggression and violence, an evil that speaks in the Russian language. As someone wrote on a social media site: ‘I dreamt we were occupied by Nazis, and that those Nazis were us.'” (via Books, Inq)

Podcasts: I think I told you before how good World’s Effective Compassion podcast series is. The third season on prison ministry has just concluded–ten compelling episodes. Next week World will begin a true crime series on the horrible story of Terri Schiavo.

This episode of the Hillsdale Dialogues with Hugh Hewitt and Larry Arnn is provocative in clarity, especially if you’re inclined to believe the ill-considered conclusions Tucker Carlson has drawn lately (see the comments here). How closely will Zelensky follow the footsteps of Churchill?

Photo: Hanks Coffee Shop sign, Benson, Arizona. 1979. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Authors, Blogs, Socials, Coffee, Tea, Drinks, Fiction, Poetry

Heeding the Dark Side, Janus-headed Poetry, and Serpents in the Classroom

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“Nature’s dark side is heeded now–“

Herman Melville wrote a poem in 1860 of his “Misgivings” before The Civil War.

“With shouts of the torrents down the gorges go,
And storms are formed behind the storm we feel:
The hemlock shakes in the rafter, the oak in the driving keel.”

We’ve had storms and rumors of storms for about a month.

This week, the Russian army bombed a large theater in Mariupol, Ukraine, trapping over a thousand people who were sheltering from the siege. Last week, The Guardian ran an article reporting that some believe such destruction is an intentional effort to wipe out Ukrainian heritage and identity, to steamroll their country into Soviet-era sameness with Russia. (via Prufrock)

It’s difficult to take my mind off of the rattling, explosive thunder from the other side of the world. But here are a few other things.

The Complete Review reads The Runes Have Been Cast by Robert Irwin (not a recommendation to our readers, but still of possible interest):

With its colorful characters — notably Raven and Wormsley, but also, for example, Molly (who admits: “I don’t want a happy life. I want an interesting one”) — and a composed-seeming Lancelyn who finds himself coming apart in a world he can not readily categorize and impose an order on, much of The Runes Have Been Cast is tremendous good fun.

Poetry: “De la Mare (1873-1956) was among the first poets I read as a kid. Much of his verse is Janus-headed.” (via Books, Inq)

Coffeehouse Renovation: The Christian Study Center of Gainesville, Florida, is raising funds to renovate Pascal’s, their university community’s coffeehouse.

Education: Thomas Korcok’s Serpents in the Classroom reveals the religious agenda of many who formed how we think of education today. He shows how “these pillars of today’s education rejected Christianity and offered their approach to education as a way to undermine its influence and instill in young people something better.”

Camus: Albert Camus’s The Stranger “was first published in an underground edition in 1942, during the Nazi occupation of France, a time of widespread killing without emotion or remorse. It excited controversy from the start; Jean-Paul Sartre admired the novel but called it ‘unjustified and unjustifiable’ …”

Pilgrim’s Progress: “Bunyan gives us four ways to engage in the mental and spiritual fight. We have to fight thoughts with thoughts, words with words, untruths with truths.”

Photo: Belmont County Courthouse, Saint Clairsville, Ohio. 1995. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Blogs, Socials, Non-fiction

Dulce et Decorum Est pro Patria Mori

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War has a glory to it. We marvel at Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy for refusing to fear Russian invaders. The mayor of Kyiv, Vitali Klitschko, has shown similar valor. They have inspired thousands of people from other countries to join their fight, including a man known as the deadliest sniper in the world. This is the fight that’s been handed to them, and they are brave or cocky enough to not shirk it.

For many Russians, the opposite is true. Their leaders are cruel bullies who tell them it is sweet and fitting to die for the fatherland, which is the meaning of the Latin words above. Wilfred Owen’s poem on this idea has stuck with me since my college days. War is an ugly thing many are called to do; the elites who will direct other people in other places so that they will not suffer call it sweet and fitting.

Peace: I was unable to find a published announcement of an event I heard about on the radio, that radio stations around the world were playing Beethoven’s Symphony 9 or at least the last movement, “Ode to Joy,” as a bid for peace in Ukraine. On Wednesday, twenty members of the Kyiv’s orchestra played it in the city square.

Russia: Peter Hitchens says he has been fond of Russia, of the heart he believed he saw in Russian people. “What if this could now be put right, if once again the sweet, low houses of Moscow could be populated by gentle, literate, moral people,” he once thought. He sees no chance for that now. (via Books, Inq)

Russian Orthodoxy: Americans argue and accuse others of Christian Nationalism while the Russian Orthodox Church practices it. Imagine “Onward Christian Soldiers” being sung by Russians about Putin’s leadership.

Freedom Convoy: Why socialists betrayed the working class

Book blogs: Here’s a list of 10 book blogs that spend a bit more time in front of the mirror than we do.

Travel blog: My sister writes a travel blog using her photos from mountain tops and rollercoasters.

Photo: John H. Garth Memorial Library, Hannibal, Missouri. 2003. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Blogs, Socials, Bookselling

War, Words, and the Best Book in Scandinavia

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Ukraine is still under siege. NATO allies are sending ammunition, weapons, and food to Ukraine, but they will not close Ukrainian airspace to Russian aircraft. That would mean acknowledging World War III. I understand the hesitation, but I don’t understand, given everything Putin has said and done, how this isn’t a world war already.

Putin will not stop until Ukraine falls, and Ukraine must not fall. The only way out of this apart from NATO taking an active role in the conflict is either Ukrainian surrender or an uprising of the Russian people. The latter may happen anyway.

In Ukraine, civilians are being targeted despite a ceasefire agreed upon by both sides.

Mindy Belz has this piece on the Christianity of Ukrainians and how Putin is seen as a Christian despite his brutal oppression of them.

In related research, the Cato Institute has released its fourth annual Arms Sales Risk Index. “Selling weapons to governments that treat their citizens poorly increases the power of the state at the expense of its citizens, allowing them to respond to unrest and political challenges with violence.”

But I don’t want to talk about this here. What else do we have?

Word games: Based on under 200,000 tweets of game results, U.S. players rank 18th in the world of Wordle. Sweden, Finland, and Denmark are the top three. Among U.S. players, those in St. Paul, Minn. are #1.

Have you played Wordle? It’s fun, and you don’t have to stay with only one version of it. There’s Dordle, a two-up Wordle, and Quordle, a four-up version. Worldle is a geography version that tells you how far away in what direction is the correct answer. Heardle revives Name That Tune with six guess for sixteen seconds of music. I’ve enjoyed both Wordle and Quordle for a few weeks now.

Shout Down: Ilya Shapiro couldn’t address a college class because the students wouldn’t have it.

Best books in Scandinavia? The list of this year’s potential winners of the Nordic Council Literature Prize has been announced.

Amazon closing bookstores. Apparently, people buy food in physical stores, but books not so much.

Photo: Merced Theater, marquee detail, Merced, California. 1987. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Authors, Blogs, Socials, Music, Non-fiction

Ukraine Has Something to Fight for, and Other Links

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Poet George Herbert reminds us,
“That all things were more ours by being His;
    What Adam had, and forfeited for all,
    Christ keepeth now, who cannot fail or fall.”

Everything I naturally think as mine is Christ’s–my time, my skills, my ambitions, even my sin.

It’s been hard to pull my eyes away from the news since Thursday. I have sought more information than prayer, but my prayers are completed with just a few words. Lord, have mercy on both Ukrainians and Russians, and break of the arms of evil men. Call them to account for their deeds.

God save Ukraine: Before the invasion, many Ukrainians knew what to expect. “Ukraine has been prepared through this crucible of constant pressure that it’s much stronger than people think.”

“Putin’s aggression must not go unchallenged: The invasion of Ukraine should be met with persistence, patience, and confidence”

At 3:03 a.m. Saturday morning, the valiant Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky recorded himself in Kyiv again, saying they would not lay down their arms. This Twitter threads has that video translated as well as the news that Melitopol had fallen. That report is being countered as I write this.

Here are other links you may appreciate.

Cal Thomas on a departed friend from the other side of the aisle.

H. L. Mencken: “People seem increasingly uncomfortable with our essentially contradictory nature.”

Black History Month: Here’s a book I’ve been wanting take up for a few years, because the author is a wise disciplemaker who knows his subject. Free at Last? The Gospel in the African-American Experience by Dr. Carl Ellis has been rereleased as a classic in cross-ethnic, gospel-centered reading.

Jazz Organist: This is not the way I’m used to thinking of organ music. LeDonne remembers jazz organist Dr. Lonnie Smith, who passed away last September. “Is this Mike LeDonne? This is Lonnie Smith and I’m playing at the Village Vanguard with Lou Donaldson and he tells me you have a nice B-3.”

Photo by Max Kukurudziak on Unsplash

Authors, Blogs, Socials, Religion

Normal Christian Living, Giving Cover Credit to Translators, and Blogroll

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When people give detailed definitions of the normal Christian life, I feel something like bumping into a soapbox. Not standing on it yet, but kicking it as if accidentally, not knowing it was next to my foot. When we say all Christians should be doing something, like Bible reading and prayer, we should consider how our recommendations would be applied by different people past and present.

If you take a verse like Psalm 5:3, “O Lord, in the morning you hear my voice; in the morning I prepare a sacrifice for you and watch,” and recommend a morning routine to all believers, consider how the field hand and the factory worker would be able to apply it. How would it work for the tired, young mother or the single mother with a couple jobs?

If our view of the normal Christian life fits mainly a middle class, white-collar lifestyle, we need to broaden our scope, so that our intended encouragement comes through and we don’t drive away those believers who aren’t like us. This goes for our definitions of manhood, womanhood, and modesty, to name a few hot topics.

Let me scurry on to other things.

Translation: There’s a move to add the names of translators to the covers of the books they brought into another language.

Ordinary Life: Matt Rhoades writes about the Holy Spirit working in ordinary life. “We live day to day, not miracle to miracle. And there’s something wonderful about these ordinary days and years spent between the high points. “

Kindness: Jared Wilson says kindness promotes the Gospel. “When was the last time you classified preaching as kind? Do you think, by and large, preaching today could be characterized by kindness?”

Generations: Min Jin Lee talks about many things in this New Yorker interview, including generational differences particularly among immigrants. “The real disconnect is between the first and second or third generation, especially if the second or third generation has done sufficiently well. We’re not interested in just survival anymore. We’re interested in meaning, and that quest for meaning has just as many difficulties, if not more intangible difficulties, than just survival.”

Photo: Post Office, New Ulm, Minnesota. 1981. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Blogs, Socials, Coffee, Tea, Drinks, Publishing

A Bright Age for Dropouts Drinking Coffee and Reading Defunct Lit-mags

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One of my daughters likes spicy food but doesn’t eat it much. She’s willing to try anything hot, and this week it was a dried Carolina Reaper, the world’s hottest pepper. I urged her to prepare for eating it by reading what she could find online, but no, she just scarfed it up and downed a milk shake as a counter measure. She told me she was going to do it but not when she would, so I didn’t know she had until she came to us at 1:30 a.m. to ask for help with sharp stomach pain. She threw up a few minutes later, which I understand is a normal response to eating these peppers.

So what are we linking to today?

Local Coffee: Some poor businessman failed to read the room when launching plans to remodel an Arby’s in Livingston, Montana, into a Starbucks. The community has a number of local coffee shops, like Chadz on N. Main and Eastside Coffee in the historic district, and the Livingston Business Improvement District don’t want Big Coffee to put a squeeze on them.

The Bright Ages: On the latest Prufrock podcast, Micah Mattix talks to the authors of a medieval history that focuses on many of the details we ignore about the Middle Ages. “It was, for the most part, seen as neither a virtue nor a vice that a city or region would contain various people from various places speaking various languages. It was a fact.”

Kudos to Mattix’s revived Prufrock newsletter, which you can subscribe to through the website of Spectator World.

Dropping Out: Hippies and drop outs were afraid, in part, of societal brainwashing and the mind-control everyone was talking about in the 60s. They wanted to know and live their true selves. (via Arts & Letters Daily)

Closing Shop: Literary magazines are being shut down. (Via Arts & Letters Daily)

Racism: A popular anti-racist author claims, “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.” That’s how you fight bad discrimination, friends. You fight it with your own discrimination.

Photo: Newman’s Drugs, Lake Huntington, New York. 1976. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Authors, Blogs, Socials, Religion

The God-Man Jesus, Philosophical Deadends, and Social Media

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Some people would have us believe that Jesus never claimed to be God, but you cannot read the Gospels thoughtfully and come to that conclusion. Christ Jesus made authoritative claims about Scripture and the people around him. He said, you have heard it said … but I say to you. Well, who is he to be claiming such authority of the text and its traditional interpretation? A crowd took up stones at least twice, because they knew what he was saying. “The Jews answered him, ‘It is not for a good work that we are going to stone you but for blasphemy, because you, being a man, make yourself God'” (John 10:33).

But maybe appealing to the reaction of the crowds is deeper in the weeds than we need to go. Jesus’s teaching ministry was not lightweight moralism that could sound true to anyone. He called for repentance and the coming of the kingdom of God.

“A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher,” C.S. Lewis said in Mere Christianity. “He would either be a lunatic—on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God.”

Let me jot down some blogroll links.

Social Media: Chris Martin has been writing a newsletter about social media for a while. Last summer, he wrote, “Social media and the internet are being used to perpetuate sin in ways that some sermon series on ‘technology and the gospel’ isn’t just going to fix.” In November, he said censorship isn’t the big problem with social media among Christians; it’s the way this technology is discipling us.

Martin released a book this month on this topic, called Terms of Service: The Real Cost of Social Media.

Johann Georg Hamann “gives us a way forward from both the deadends of modernism and the deadends of postmodernism.” Hamann calls us ultimately to the Bible.

Trending: Merriam-Webster reports a sharp increase in searches for the definition of infrangible, which means “unbreakable, not able to be separated into parts” or “not to be violated.”

Trueman: “As the medieval world granted tremendous spiritual power to its priesthood and indulged its sins because of that, so we do with our celebrities.”

Photo: Paul’s Market, Franklin, New York. 1976. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.