Andree Seu writes, “Yet God, who is infinitely wise and for whom ‘nothing is impossible’ (Luke 1:37), chose human speech as the vehicle of communication to us. Was He grasping at straws?”
What’s Wrong With This Statement?
In his entertainment column, Roger Friedman writes, “The ‘Juno’ effect seems to be reverberating all over the place. In the year since Diablo Cody’s screenplay became Jason Reitman’s hit film, ‘Juno,’ we’ve seen unmarried 16-year-old Jamie Lynn Spears, single 22-year-old Ashlee Simpson and now 17-year-old unmarried Bristol Palin all get pregnant and decide to keep their babies.”
Deciding to keep their babies–why should that be abnormal in any way?
Asymmetrical politics
John Hinderaker at Power Line reports on the efforts of Leftist protesters at the Republican National Convention to actually injure (possibly kill) people on their way to participate in the assembly.
Isn’t it fascinating that conservatives, who are supposed to be narrow-minded ideologues who see the world in stark black-and-white terms, did not try to do this sort of thing to the Democrats in Denver?
And that Leftists, who are supposed to be open-minded and tolerant, actually are attempting to prevent the party they oppose from holding a legal assembly necessary to carrying on the constitutional election process?
I know these protesters don’t represent the majority of Democrats. But why isn’t there a noticeable Republican equivalent? And why don’t we hear the Democratic leadership denouncing these acts?
(By the way, on a totally irrelevant note, “Hinderaker” is a Norwegian name. Some of my ancestors lived on a farm named Hinderaker, so it’s conceivable John and I are distant relations.)
A brother beloved
Gaius at Blue Crab Boulevard posts a moving tribute to his brother’s birthday today:
In a cognitive sense, my brother is about eight years old – and always will be. But he is sweet, affectionate, artistic and quite the ladies man. He will tell, with complete sincerity, any woman he meets that she is gorgeous. This is not a hollow compliment, he means everything he says; there is not one dishonest bone in his body. And he can draw some stunning pictures.
Read it all here.
Happy Labor Day
My weekend was a quiet one. I puttered around my gutters a bit and washed my car, but didn’t accomplish a whole lot. Today I had to go in to work for a while, because every year on September 1 it is my obligation to give an orientation lecture on the library to our new students. Such are the sacrifices I make for my calling.
I read Leif Enger’s new book, So Brave, Young and Handsome. I’ll review it tomorrow. I’ll just say now that I liked it quite a lot, and would have been surprised if I hadn’t.
Then I read a Dean Koontz, Ticktock. Delightful. I started another, The Voice of the Night, which is an early book, and quickly gave me hints that it was one of the unpleasant ones he wrote before he found his voice, so I cast it aside into the outer darkness. Now I’m reading Twilight Eyes, and liking it a lot.
Hope you had a good holiday.
Inspired by ‘Christian Charity’
In time for Columbus Day (shortly there after) comes a book on American Puritans and their interesting ways. The Wordy Shipmates may be an eye-opener for those who know little about the puritans than buckle hats and conflicting stories about the first Thanksgiving. Whether it will be a bit frustrating for those of us who love them and their influence on our faith and culture, I don’t know, but author Sarah Vowell has given us several details ahead of time to help us judge her book by more than its cover blurbs. Here’s the first part of our Q&A with Sarah Vowell (sent to us by Penguin Group).
1. Why did you decide to write a book about the New England Puritans?
I can probably pin it down to how I kept thinking about John Winthrop’s 1630 sermon “A Model of Christian Charity” during three events between 2001 and 2004—the terrorist attacks, the war in Iraq, and Ronald Reagan’s funeral. I write about how, as a New Yorker, I was so comforted by the part of Winthrop’s sermon in which he called upon his shipmates to rejoice and mourn and suffer together “as members of the same body.” Then, all of the rhetoric leading up to the war smacked of the American exceptionalism that derives from Puritan notions of New Englanders as God’s new chosen people, Winthrop’s idea and ideal that Massachusetts should be “as a city upon a hill.” And, since no one had adopted that phrase as a personal motto like Reagan, when Sandra Day O’Connor read part of Winthrop’s sermon at Reagan’s funeral, during a time when everyone in the world had Abu Ghraib on the brain, when she stood there in front of the current president and various members of his administration who got us into that whole mess, when she read the part where Winthrop warns that “the eyes of all people are upon us,” it hit home how much Winthrop and his fellows are still with us.
2. It’s commonplace to say that we’re a Puritan nation. But what do you think people really mean by that, and is it in any way related to our actual Puritan heritage?
Generally, Americans call ourselves a Puritan nation as a lazy way of saying that as a culture we are sexually repressed. I think a more interesting, accurate, and important way we’re a Puritan nation is the legacy of Winthrop’s, and then Reagan’s, idea of America as city on a hill, as a beacon of hope, as God’s pet project. Namely, the idea that America is always “good.”
3. Were the Puritans really as sexually repressed as the stereotype would have it? Were they really such killjoys in general?
This book doesn’t particularly deal with that first question much. I do briefly mention the fact that the Puritans were bully for marital sex because they felt God invented it. And I discuss, also briefly, the marriages of my two main characters, John Winthrop and Roger Williams. As for the killjoy thing, these were not the most lighthearted figures in American history. My real answer to these two question is another question. Namely, who cares? What I’m interested in—and this probably makes me a killjoy, come to think of it—is the Puritans’ ideas about freedom and community. I’m interested in their writing on civics and law and religion, their love of learning, their thoughts on God and country. Also, to a person who loves not just ideas but ideas being hashed out and argued over and dissected, witnessing the Puritans of Boston bickering with and banishing each other is, I think, kind of a joy.
4. Why were the Puritans such a “wordy” or literary people?
The short answer is their absolute obsession with reading, dissecting, and discussing the Bible meant that a book was the center of their lives. The long answer is that the people who settled the Massachusetts Bay Colony during the so-called Great Migration between 1630 and 1640 were mostly highly educated, frequently scholarly people. Many of them had degrees from Cambridge. I call them “quill crazy.” Considering they had so many chores, what with building a society from scratch, they did an awful lot of writing—sermons, letters, diaries, religious tracts.
5. Were the Puritans anything like today’s evangelical Christians, to whom they’re often compared?
Some Puritans were like some evangelical Christians—and all dangerous people—in that they believed, they knew, they were right. Other than the obvious Protestant similarities between the two movements, one misconception is that today’s evangelicals are simply modern-day Puritans. This is not true. The Puritans were much more intellectual. Trust me, I just spent years trying to decipher their abstract and brainy theological texts. The Puritans privileged the text of the Bible and scholarly theological expertise and just education in general above all else, above religious emotion, above personal experience. I write in the book that there wasn’t any speaking in tongues going on in the Massachusetts Bay Colony unless you count classical Greek. In fact, part of my book is about the trial of Anne Hutchinson. The magistrates of Massachusetts Bay banish her from the colony for beliefs that are very similar to today’s evangelicals in terms of her personal relationship with God and the way she believed herself to be filled with the Holy Spirit. This was blasphemy to the Puritans—way too emotional. Plus, Hutchinson was just a homeschooled woman. To the Cambridge-educated patriarchy of Boston, the fact that Hutchinson was preaching in her home without any proper theological training was a travesty. And the fact that she was so influential, as well as witty and logical during her trial, made said patriarchs get cracking on building Harvard University so their sons (and future ministers) learned Latin, Greek, and Hebrew and were well grounded in proper theology so that if any more self-taught spiritual piedpipers came along, the sons and ministers could crush them in debate.
Sorrow
O Sorrow!
Why dost borrow
Heart’s lightness from the merriment of May?—
A lover would not tread
A cowslip on the head,
Though he should dance from eve till peep of day—
Nor any drooping flower
Held sacred for thy bower,
Wherever he may sport himself and play.
To Sorrow
I bade good morrow,
And thought to leave her far away behind;
But cheerly, cheerly,
She loves me dearly;
She is so constant to me, and so kind:
I would deceive her
And so leave her,
But ah! she is so constant and so kind.
Beneath my palm-trees, by the river side,
I sat a-weeping: in the whole world wide
There was no one to ask me why I wept,—
And so I kept
Brimming the water-lily cups with tears
Cold as my fears.
from Keats’ “Song of the Indian Maid”
You’re not a heretic. You’re just a moron.
I’m not sure where this post is going. I’m thinking through a thought I had this morning. I hope it will be short.
So I’ll do my best to be superficial.
It seems to me, too often in the church, we disagree in the wrong way. When someone suggests a new thing, our response tends to be, “This is un-Christian. It’s unscriptural. It’s heretical.”
In fact, very often the idea is just stupid.
(These thoughts were inspired by this post over at “Stuff Christians like.”)
Wouldn’t it be better to say, “That’s a stupid idea,” than “That’s a heretical idea?”
It would move the disagreement out of the realm of matters of faith, into matters of judgment.
We’d just be insulting the other person’s intelligence.
I guess that doesn’t help much.
Conflict resolution has never been my strong suit.
John McCain – Sarah Palin
Just in case you missed this earlier.
Regrettable Recipe, Poor Photo
While I don’t want to take any buzz away from Sarah Palin, who is in for the hockey fight of her life, I do want to write this post. A Swedish food magazine published a cake recipe with a typo in how much nutmeg to use. It should have called for two pinches. Instead, it recommended 20 nutmeg nuts. Now, nutmeg nuts aren’t easy to come by, and they’re potent. So you might think like the editors did that out of several hundred recipes, one that calls for a huge amount of nutmeg would not cause a problem. It would be an obvious error. They did the responsible thing and sent a letter to their subscribers and put a page in store copies warning “high doses of nutmeg can cause poisoning symptoms.”
When four women got wind of this and poisoned their husbands with it, the editors recalled the magazine.
In other food related news, the president of Iowa College resigned after the Des Moines Register published a photo that “reflected poorly on the college.” The photo shows him helping a young woman drink from a mini-keg of Coors Light. Obviously, had the beverage been Miller Chill no one would have objected.