Lo, the Beggar Cometh

Six hamburgers, fries and cokes—Doug toddles to his car, fast food bags stuffed between his arms. Setting a drink tray on top of his minivan, he catches a beggar’s empty stare across the parking lot. He fumbles for his keys. The beggar shudders to his feet. Finally inside, Doug locks the doors, drops the keys, and starts the minivan.

“Stay calm,” he mutters. “Don’t know why he’s waving. Can’t see him.”

He drives away, watching the sad beggar in the side mirror. The red light comes up quick, and with his jerky stop, coke sloshes his windshield from above.

(100 Word Short Short or Flash Fiction)

Harbingers of spring, with strawberries

Strawberries Hagens

Photo credit: Wouter Hagens



What was my day like?

Well, it snowed a couple inches last night, so I drove to work using my newly restored four wheel drive, always a pleasure. But the day itself was so warm that the snow is pretty much gone from the driveway this evening. There’s some shreds out there I could shovel out (couldn’t blow it; it’s just slush), but why bother when it’ll be around forty tomorrow?

This is a perfect winter day, by my lights.

My brother in Iowa quotes a member of his church who says, “Once it gets to snow in March, I figure what the Lord giveth He’ll also taketh away.”

That’s not a reliable rule in Minnesota, but it’s working just now.

We had a blood drive at work, and I enriched the national stocks by one pint of rich Norwegian blood. The technicians seemed a little friendlier than usual today. I took that as a sign of bad economic times; the Red Cross is able to recruit a better motivated crop of workers, people who used to have better jobs and haven’t forgotten their people skills. The lady who stuck me was quite friendly, but not, alas, adept with the needle. She even apologized for it. I pretended to feel nothing, needless to say, because that’s the Code of the Walkers.

Bought some strawberries on the way home, and idly checked their calorie value. Wow! I think strawberries are the only thing in the world I really like that are extremely low in calories. Except for popcorn, but I only like that with butter, so it doesn’t count.

The Essence of Lent

Cross of LightLast night, my children were thinking about what they would give up for the next few weeks, and I tried to guide them. First, they were not instruct each other on what to give up. Second, Lent isn’t essentially about giving up stuff.

If we deny ourselves during the weeks leading up to Easter, we do so in order to promote our devotion to our heavenly Father. If we give up using Facebook, drinking colas, eating desserts, watching movies or reading novels, we want to do it so that we put ourselves in a place where we remember our Lord more than we did before. Perhaps when Easter comes, we will have taken an axe to one of our idols because we rejected something during Lent and will have a quieter spirit, a more submissive heart, for our daily routine. We will have tried to let go of trivial supports and leaned more on the Lord.

But maybe giving something up isn’t what we should do over the next few weeks. I mean, maybe it isn’t all we should do, because our intent is to wean ourselves off of worldly things and love Christ Jesus more, see God the Father working around us more, and know the Holy Spirit within us more than we did before. So maybe we should plan to study the Bible or memorize parts of it or learn to pray using the Psalms. Maybe we should find someone willing to meet us weekly for a discipleship study or a few people to help us serve our church and community.

“To suppose that whatever God requireth of us, that we have power of ourselves to do, is to make the cross and grace of Jesus Christ of none effect.” – John Owen (quoted by the Spirit-filled Puritan)

That’s the point of denying ourselves during Lent. We want to forget our own power (or the illusion of it) and rely on Christ Jesus, our Savior and King.

Love Relief

Relief Journal, a Christian fiction quarterly, is raising funds for this year. They say, “If every person that visited our website last month gave us $1, we would have more than enough money to meet our campaign goal.” They are at 13% now.

If the Dead Rise Not, by Philip Kerr

If the Dead Rise Not

Writers, especially lady writers from New York, were thin on the ground at the Adlon that month. It probably had a lot to do with the fifteen-mark-a-night room rate. This was slightly cheaper if you didn’t have a bath, and a lot of writers don’t, but the last American writer who’d stayed at the Adlon had been Sinclair Lewis, and that was in 1930. The Depression hit everyone, of course. But no one gets depressed quite like a writer.

Such delightful passages as this show up pretty regularly in Philip Kerr’s novels, and (in my opinion) If the Dead Rise Not offers more than the average. I liked it. A lot. Not only for the writing, and the fascinating narrator, soul-weary German detective Bernie Gunther, but for something else I think I detect in the text. A spiritual element.
Of course I have to be cautious in saying that. I knew a man once who saw God, not only in every leaf and flower, but in every book he read and movie he saw. All the writers, he was convinced, must be Christians, because he saw Christian messages in all their stories, and it wasn’t possible they’d meant something else altogether and he’d taken it wrong.
But still there’s something here… I think. Continue reading If the Dead Rise Not, by Philip Kerr

Proud To Be Right, edited by Jonah Goldberg

Proud To Be Right



First of all the disclaimer:
I got my copy of Proud To Be Right: Voices Of the Next Conservative Generation from our friend Rachel Motte of Evangelical Outpost, one of the book’s contributors.

Proud To Be Right is an anthology of essays by various young conservative writers, all edited by Jonah Goldberg of National Review Online. At 247 pages, I found it an easy read, and I zipped through it in a couple days. It’s difficult to make a summary statement about the contents, though, because a very wide range of views is showcased here. You’ve got Bible conservatives on one end, and atheist libertarians on the other. You’ve got supporters of the War On Terror, and an isolationist. You’ve got a stay at home mother and a gay marriage advocate. My primary reaction, as an obsolescent Baby Boomer, is that if these young conservatives ever win the political war and kill big government liberalism forever, they will immediately split into factions, and the new political divisions will be as sharp as the old.

There are some excellent essays here. I was impressed with “A Noncomforming Reconstruction” by Justin Katz, a poetic meditation on the preservation of culture, using the restoration of an old house as a metaphor. Rachel Motte’s “Liberals Are Dumb: And Other Shared Texts” is an extremely thoughtful warning to think beyond bumper stickers and slogans; to treat people and arguments with respect: “My generation’s forebears were fortunate in that their elders were willing to tell them when they were ignorant—but for our entire lives, our elders have been too busy trying to emulate us to even realize how poorly they taught us.” (This essay may really be the most valuable of the collection, and I don’t say it just because Rachel’s a friend. The kind of snarky thinking she decries is precisely what’s wrong with some of the other essays in this book.) “Immersion Experience” by Caitrin Nicol is another good essay, a defense of homeschooled kids combined with an appreciation of her liberal friends. I also enjoyed “Ducking the Coffins: How I Became an Edu-Con” by Ashley Thorne, a memoir of her experience as a student at King’s College, a classical curriculum college in Manhattan.

At the other end of the spectrum, there were a couple essays I actively disliked. Pride of place, needless to say, goes to “The Consistency of Gay Conservatives” by James Kirchick. This is a remarkably dysphoric piece, entirely lacking in humor, self-questioning, or charity. His thesis is that many gays have decided that the Republican Party is a more useful vehicle to get them to their goal than the Democratic Party, so they claim this territory in the name of the queens. We’re here, we’re cheerless, get used to it. He makes no attempt to soft-peddle his contempt for the knuckle-draggers in flyover country who refuse to get with the program.

“The Leptogonians: Growing Up Conservative in a Disrupted Decade” by James Poulos, is almost unreadable, at least for someone not current with hipster culture. I suspect it may be a brilliant and tightly-knit rhetorical tour-de-force, but I have no way of telling.

“The Smoker’s Code” by Helen Rittelmeyer performed the almost impossible task of nearly destroying my long-standing sympathy for smokers in a tobacco-hating culture. Its argument seems to be that we should concentrate more on finding ways to look cool than on constructing reasoned and convincing arguments.

The rest of the essays fall somewhere in between. My overall take-away is that the term “conservative” doesn’t seem to have much positive meaning anymore. The only thing these writers have in common as a group is their rejection of big government. Our country could change into something almost unrecognizable, and it would still be considered a conservative victory by the standards of many of these writers.

I wonder what Jonah Goldberg actually thought about this collection (I discount what he says in his introduction, of course). The book is educational. I’m not sure it offers great hope for the future of conservatism.

The Best Time To Write

Stewart O’Nan on writing between other responsibilities: “Some days I’d get a sentence. Some days I’d get two sentences. Some days I wouldn’t get anything. Use your time, steal the time, manage the time somehow.” (Thanks to Ed Champion)

Matus: Boring, Trivial, Mundane

Irvin Leigh Matus, an extraordinary Shakespeare scholar who died recently, said this back in 1989. “Get a 9-to-5 job? No way. When you have a mind like mine, such a wonderful mind, well, to have it virtually imprisoned in the boring, trivial and mundane would be torture.”

Matus was homeless for a long time while pursuing his research. He wrote two critically acclaimed books on the Bard, but would not–perhaps could not–hold a regular job or I guess even an irregular job. I offer you his quote above both to point you to an interesting obit on him and as a writing prompt. What would a wonderful mind do in a regular job? How would a genius handle the everyday humility needed for living under God?

Stop Laughing, It's Not Funny

From our Practical News Desk: Scientists have learned chimpanzees will laugh at things they don’t find funny. Just like people who will laugh in order to share the moment, even when the moment isn’t funny, chimps will laugh in order to bond with each other and no doubt optimize their evolutionary progress in order to whip us up in the next generation–or two.

Chimp Yoga

Laugh at that, you puny man.

The remains of the week

For some reason, the immortal Andrew Klavan’s web site has been down most of the week, but I see it’s up again now. Here’s his report of his attendance at the Tea Party Patriots American Policy Summit in Phoenix.

“Now, this is very high-level intellectual material,” I told the crowd, “and I know you’re just a bunch of knuckle-dragging, Bible-thumping tea partiers who might not be able to understand its subtlties. And some of you may be asking in your simple, silly way, ‘Hey, what’s the difference between post-modernism and lying?’”

What, indeed?

A couple items from Joe Carter’s ever-interesting Thirty Three Things post at First Things blog:

Facebook Blamed In 1 in 5 Divorces in the U.S.

In the end, Facebook is a social tool. For single people, social networks can help them meet that special someone. Even for marriages, social networks can help further along a relationship. Just like with any other social medium, however, even the most innocent of intentions can turn ugly with improper use.

You don’t need to be a psychologist to realize that Facebook can accelerate the process. Stories of people whose marriages were destroyed by affairs that began on social networks abound on the Internet.

You know, I was a conscientious objector in the sexual revolution. Now I seem to be using Facebook and missing all the most… interesting stuff.

I’m beginning to think I’m kind of clueless.

Yoga Is Not As Old As You Think… Nor Very Hindu, either


The reality is that postural yoga, as we know it in the 21st century, is neither eternal nor synonymous with the Vedas or Yoga Sutras. On the contrary, modern yoga was born in the late 19th/early 20th centuries. It is a child of the Hindu Renaissance and Indian nationalism, in which Western ideas about science, evolution, eugenics, health and physical fitness played as crucial a role as the ‘mother tradition’. In the massive, multi-level hybridisation that took place during this period, the spiritual aspects of yoga and tantra were rationalised, largely along the theosophical ideas of ‘spiritual science,’ introduced to India by the US-origin, India-based Theosophical Society, and internalised by Swami Vivekananda, who led the yoga renaissance.

In turn, the physical aspects of yoga were hybridised with drills, gymnastics and body-building techniques borrowed from Sweden, Denmark, England, the United States and other Western countries. These innovations were creatively grafted on the Yoga Sutras—which has been correctly described by Agehananda Bharati, the Austria-born Hindu monk-mystic, as ‘the yoga canon for people who have accepted Brahmin theology’—to create an impression of 5,000 years worth of continuity where none really exists. The HAF’s current insistence is thus part of a false advertising campaign about yoga’s ancient Brahminical lineage.

Maybe those Christian yoga groups aren’t as dangerous as we thought…