The title of this post comes courtesy of my late father. It was the name he gave to a concoction he sometimes put together for our lunch, when Mom’s job had turned him into a sort of farmer/househusband. He’d clear all the leftovers out of the refrigerator, stir them together in a frying pan, and call it Slumgullion.

Now that I’ve typed it, it occurs to me that I’ve never written that word down in my life before.

Anyway, the idea is that this is a disjointed post, composed of random events out of a random day.

I note with pride that my next door neighbor is grilling his supper out by the garage right now. After the below zero temperatures we’ve endured this week, today’s 20° high felt positively tropical, and he is responding in a manner typical of the bulldog (or bull seal) Minnesota breed.

I’d do the same thing myself, only I don’t happen to own a grill. Otherwise I’d be out there just like him. You betcha. Continue reading Slumgullion →

I’ve heard the call go out to concerned Christians recommending they avoid those retailers who refuse to wish them a very, merry Christmas. Certainly I would be annoyed as an employee if the word came down from Corporate that we must not let those words slip passed our lips. I would probably ignore it until provoking their wrath, and then I don’t know what I’d do. But you and I aren’t working their now; we’re shoppers. Should we avoid certain stores over this?

No. I suggest it would be far better to teach and encourage Christian shoppers to shop as an act of worship to the Lord who provides for them. Some will take that to mean they should buy a verse for their wall, but whatever the learning curve, leaders of the church should lay aside trivial squabbles like merry-christmas-wishing and teach their congregations, radio audiences, and subscribers how to worship the Lord God wholeheartedly in everything–including shopping. We should shop at places providing good products, ones that treat their people well and invest in their community, ones where people we know and trust work.

This essay on reading The Great Books, or joining the Great Conversation, may be addressed to an audience other than the one typical of BwB, but Professor Peter Lawler makes many good points. He argues primarily against those who believe we, the people of the 21st century, are far superior to the people who came before us on many levels.

From my postmodern view, maybe the chief purpose of higher education, is then to counter the dominant view of who we are-–which is partly true and partly degrading prejudice—of our time. Our tendency is to view human beings as free and productive—as autonomous individuals with interests. This means that we don’t regard anyone as less than a being with interests—or as existing merely to serve others. We all have a right to look out for our own interests, and so to be treated as individuals and not merely as part of some larger whole. That means that it’s not really news to any of us that racism, sexism, classism, and so forth are wrong, and we usually think that it’s an affront to our dignity to be thought of as merely parents or citizens or creatures. We tend to be all about autonomy and self-definition.

But we’re weak—often very weak—in thinking of people as more than productive or self-interested beings. We tend to think that human distinctions that can’t be measured quantitatively aren’t real, just as we tend to think that a true meritocracy is based on productivity. We tend to think that because the great authors of the great books of the past must have been racists, sexists, and classists and, of couse, not as technologically advanced or as productive as we are, they have nothing real to say to us. So our prejudice is to study them critically—or condescendingly—as remnants of discredited prejudices.

In weather like this, you pretty much have to blog about the snow and cold. But how to do it? Tell harrowing stories of my near-death experiences shoveling my driveway, or fighting traffic on Teflon streets? Fortunately I avoided both those activities today. Employ quirky and creative similes and metaphors, like James Lileks? I could try a weak emulation, but it’s late and I want to get to my Christmas cards. Casual wit takes a lot of hard work.

So I’ll talk about my Grandpa, Clarence Walker. I thought of him as I unloaded my groceries in the cold wind tonight. I remembered that Grandma Walker once told me that he had saved his brother’s (or brother-in-law’s) life, when they both got caught in a snowstorm in the woods. It was one of those classic situations where one guy wants to sit down and rest, and the other guy says, “No, you’ve gotta keep walking. If you fall asleep, you’ll die.” (I understand that’s not entirely true. You can sleep just fine in the snow if you’re well bundled up, especially if you let the snow drift on top of you like a blanket, as long as you’re not physically exhausted. It’s the exhaustion that kills you. I have to assume they were both exhausted that night).

This is Grandpa and Grandma Walker, with (reading left to right) my brother Moloch and me. Must have been around 1953. It was taken in the house in town to which they retired after Dad got married.

Continue reading The Saga of Clarence →