Religion

Public service announcement

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To retailers who started putting out Christmas merchandise in October, and radio station programming directors who are already playing “seasonal” music, and homeowners who’ve put out their holiday lights, even though it isn’t Thanksgiving yet.

I understand. I’m a Boomer too. I know that Christmas was the most wonderful, magical time of the year when you were a kid. It was for me, too. I, too, would love to recapture that feeling.

However. You’re not a kid anymore. You’re an adult, too beaten up by life to be taken in by glockenspiel music and colored lights. Especially when you strung those colored lights yourself.

You will never get the magic of Christmas back by making the holiday longer. You’ll only get it back by making the holiday deeper.

The people who invented Christmas actually believed that God became man. That means that all our highest aspirations, dreams and hopes are not fantasy, but fact, and that Ultimate Truth came down to hang out with us a while. And then died for us. And then defeated death.

When you get that, you’ll get Christmas back.

Just thought you’d like to know.

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eHarmony forced to provide same-sex matches

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From Chris Field at Townhall.com, by way of Culture and Media Institute:

The California-based company will begin providing same-sex matches as part of a settlement with New Jersey’s Civil Rights Division. Garden State resident Eric McKinley filed a complaint against the online matchmaker in 2005.

Under terms of the settlement, the company can create a new or differently named Web site for homosexual singles. The company can also post a disclaimer saying its compatibility-based matching system was developed from research of married heterosexual couples. …

Because the “gay rights” movement is all about, you know, just letting people alone.

Here’s the post.

Fiction, Reviews

Frankenstein: Prodigal Son and City of Night, by Dean Koontz, Kevin J. Anderson and Ed Gorman

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A few years back, as Dean Koontz explains in an introduction to the first book of this series, Frankenstein: Prodigal Son, he made a deal with the USA Network to write a contemporary television series based on the characters of the old Frankenstein book. One assumes that the network execs either misunderstood his script, or understood it all too well, since both parties agreed to go their own ways in the end, each party producing a Frankenstein after their own heart.

The conceit in this series of books is that, although Mary Shelley’s famous novel is based on fact, she got the ending wrong. The monster did not kill Dr. Frankenstein, nor did he die himself. Instead, endowed with extremely long life through being struck by lightning during his creation, he has lived on, mostly in hiding because of a facial injury, gradually learning to control his rage. At the start of Prodigal Son he is residing in a Tibetan monastery. He does not yet know that Dr. Frankenstein has survived the last two centuries as well, his life extended through a series of self-designed surgeries. When he does learn this, the monster leaves the monastery and travels to New Orleans, where Dr. Frankenstein now lives the life of a biotech millionaire and VIP, under a new name. Continue reading Frankenstein: Prodigal Son and City of Night, by Dean Koontz, Kevin J. Anderson and Ed Gorman →

Non-fiction, Religion

The Life After

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Makoto Fujimura writes:

N.T. Wright, the Bishop of Durham, wanted the title of his new book to be “Life after Life after Death.” Harper Collins, his publisher, decided the title would be a bit confusing, so they re-named it as “Surprised by Hope,” surely more conventional, but an appropriate nod to C.S. Lewis’ classic book “Surprised by Joy.” I prefer Bishop Wright’s initial instinct; for the audacious reality of the resurrection claim does not invite easy, conventional titles. The claim of Christianity was, and is, a Jewish carpenter from Nazareth who redefined life, death and, the Life thereafter. The expression “Life after Life after Death” invites us to a severe paradigm shift in our thoughts on life and death. What we think of as the end, is only a pause,: and the pause is only the beginning; a beginning of a new beginning.

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Suppressed

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Tonight, another bleak and self-absorbed post about my unhappy childhood. I’ll hide the body of it behind the fold, so as not to bum you out too much if you’re not interested in going on.

But I should mention that this won’t be a war story. I’m talking statistics and news reporting tonight. Continue reading Suppressed →

Fiction

D’Artagnan’s tomb located?

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The original D’Artagnan (or one of them; Alexander Dumas actually conflated the adventures of two different relatives in The Three Musketeers and its sequels) died in battle in the Netherlands, during the siege of Maastricht, in 1673. Now Dutch archaeologists think they’ve located his place of burial.

The story is here.

Tip: Mirabilis.

Fiction, Writing

Exposition lesson, Part 2

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Last night I set up a scene from an imaginary novel, in which a police detective says too much to his superior officer (a guy he doesn’t get along with). The imaginary author (who would appear to be me. I’m not sure how that works) is trying to give us some background on the tragic roots of our hero’s (his name is Slade) obsession with an unsolved child murder. But the method he chooses—having Slade unburden his heart to a guy he doesn’t even like (and certainly doesn’t trust), rings false for any reader with a minimal amount of human experience.

So how could the author convey this information to the reader more naturally? Continue reading Exposition lesson, Part 2 →

Fiction, Writing

Exposition lesson, Part 1

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I filled up my car today for less than twenty bucks. (It should be noted that my car has a pretty small gas tank.) What a good feeling that was! That’s a genuine economic stimulus payment. I can’t help thinking that people all over this country are enjoying the feeling of extra weight left in their wallets, and are getting ready to do some spending they’ve been putting off.

I’m probably wrong, but it feels that way to me.



I’m reading another Dean Koontz novel (I’ve pretty much read all his books now). It’s one of his re-issued early works and, typically, shows numerous marks of artistic immaturity. Particularly notable are the lame jokes (his jokes tend to be a little lame even nowadays, but he’s made great progress).

But what really caught my attention was his problem with exposition, a problem I’ve discussed before in reference to other early efforts. I’m not going to excerpt any of his scenes here, but I’ll compose a Koontz-like chunk of dialogue. Continue reading Exposition lesson, Part 1 →

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I’m so proud

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Augsburg College, in Minneapolis, is my alma mater.

Founded in the 1870s, Augsburg was for most of its early history the center of Free Lutheranism, an effort to build a pietist Lutheran church movement exercising a congregational form of church government. These principles were abandoned entirely when the Lutheran Free Church entered a merger with other Lutheran bodies in 1962. The small rabble of churches who refused to go along with the merger began the Association of Free Lutheran Congregations, for which I work.

The point of all this is that, in spite of its historical heritage, Augsburg today is just another mainline Lutheran school, indistinguishable, except by geography, from all the other mainline Lutheran schools.

Which explains this story, in which we see contemporary academic standards of tolerance and the free exercise of thought demonstrated for all.

Tip: Power Line.

Book Reviews, Creative Culture