Religion

40 years ago Monday

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NASA marks Apollo 11 mission to the Moon 40th Anniversary

Do I remember what I was doing when man first walked on the moon?

Indeed I do.

I was traveling that summer with a team from Lutheran Youth Encounter, a “parachurch” ministry that sent teams of college-aged Lutherans to work with the youth in various congregations. We usually spent a week in each church, but we’d had a cancellation for this week, and our team’s leader (a Type-A overachiever of whom I was in awe at the time) had put us to work cold-calling churches all over the Ohio District (because that was where we were). Finally we’d found an urban Cleveland church that was a little desperate because it was between pastors, and somebody apparently thought bringing us in would provide “something for the kids.”

As I recall it, it was a pretty bad fit, and I’m not at all sure they felt they got their money’s worth. Continue reading 40 years ago Monday →

Fiction, Publishing

Radio: Trends in Christian Fiction

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From Crossway Books blog: “Justin Taylor, Crossway’s Editorial Director, will be on the Albert Mohler Radio Program this afternoon [5:00 p.m. eastern]. Russell Moore will be guest hosting a discussion on Christian-fiction publishing trends and what they reveal about Christian culture.”

Religion

Bishop discovers heresy in the church

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Albert Mohler reports on how Dr. Katherine Jefferts Schori, Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, has finally found a teaching in the church so awful, so scandalous and offensive, that she’s willing to apply the term “heresy” to it.

Denial of the Trinity? Denial of the Virgin Birth? Denial of the Resurrection?

No, no. It’s much worse than that.

She’s found that some people actually believe that Jesus is Lord.

The overarching connection in all of these crises has to do with the great Western heresy – that we can be saved as individuals, that any of us alone can be in right relationship with God. It’s caricatured in some quarters by insisting that salvation depends on reciting a specific verbal formula about Jesus. That individualist focus is a form of idolatry, for it puts me and my words in the place that only God can occupy, at the center of existence, as the ground of being. That heresy is one reason for the theme of this Convention.

She goes on to describe a further, related heresy–believing that Jesus is the one way to God.

Tip: Dr. Paul McCain at Cyberbrethren.

Authors, Fiction, Publishing

New Books by Dead Authors

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Slate’s Juliet Lapidos reports she has read the unauthorized sequel to Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye and that we needn’t bother with it. “California’s allusions contain little charm, but his original material is far worse,” she says.

That isn’t really a book from a dead author. In fact, Salinger isn’t dead and doesn’t like the book. But a real dead author has a new book coming. An unfinished work by Graham Greene, newly discovered at the author’s archive in the University of Texas, will be released in The Strand as a serial, and someone is to be commissioned to write the ending. The Strand has published other lost works previously. (via ArtsJournal)

Uncategorized

Long thoughts

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Today, when I came in from my walk, I came in to warm up, not cool down. Clouds had blown in on a puff of fall-like air. It looks like rain, but the guy on the radio says it’s not supposed to do that tonight.

I love this Global Cooling, at least in July. Speaking as the guy who pays the air conditioning bill around here.

I’m seriously tackling the Archives Room in the library now. I spent today organizing old magazines and shelving them in boxes.

This is a process that induces long thoughts. “Long thoughts” is the phrase that comes to my mind. I have the idea it’s a Norwegian idiom. That would be “lange tanker.” I have no specific memory of ever encountering those words in my Norwegian reading, but my brain insists it must be so.

“Long thoughts” (whether a genuine Norwegian phrase or the effluvient of my own imagination) are a combination of memory and melancholy. The kind of thoughts old people think when they look back over their lives. Sad memories are sad, but good memories are sad too, because they (and many of the people in them) are gone forever. Continue reading Long thoughts →

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Necessary life skills taught here

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Last week a pastor friend of mine asked to borrow my mail shirt, as he wanted to do a demonstration on “the full armor of God” at a youth conference. I had to refuse because a) my mail is rusty and oily right now, as a consequence of the recent zinc removal, and b) I needed it myself this past Sunday.

As it turned out, he borrowed a shirt from someone else. Which meant he had the unpleasant experience of trying to take it off for the first time without knowing how. Getting out of mail the wrong way (that is, trying to take it off like a sweater) is a splendid method for inducing claustrophobia and giving yourself nights of bad dreams. Getting out of it the right way is easy and fun.

Ragnar in mail

So, for future reference, this is how you do it.

1. Having removed your belt, bend forward at the waist.

2. Grab a handful of the mail behind your back, and pull it forward.

3. Keep pulling it forward until most of it is bunched up around your shoulders and neck.

4. Now pull it all off over your head. Because the weight of the shirt is now forward of your body, the whole thing will fall to the ground by force of gravity, without any further effort on your part (unless it gets caught on something). The side of the shirt that was inside will now be outside, but since there is no inside or outside (nor any front nor back), that doesn’t matter in the least.

(Photo credit: Emily Chesley)

Book Reviews, Creative Culture