This “horror story” looks to be both an answer to prayer and call for intercession. May God save Mexico, her children, and Ms. Ribeiro.
Requiem for bank robber
It only got up to about fifty today, with cloudy skies, and tonight it’ll rain. It might turn to snow.
See, I told you. The stab isn’t coming in March as I predicted, I grant you, but Madame March just handed the shiv off to Lady April. Lady April is just as villainous as Madame March, and the more dangerous because we trust her more.
In case you were wondering what happened with the police cordon I reported on Friday, it was indeed a serious business. And it ended in tragedy. Though not as awful a tragedy as it might have been.
According to news reports, a man named David Dahlen, previously incarcerated for bank robbery in California, walked into the Four Seasons Mall US Bank in Plymouth, Minnesota (which is next door to my dentist’s office, as it happens) with a gun. It’s unclear whether he left with the money he wanted or not, but he fled the bank and entered a house in the neighborhood. He forced the woman who lived there to leave at gunpoint. She called the police, and they sealed off the area. And waited.
While they waited, trying to contact him, he called his family. Then he put the gun to his chest and shot himself. After some hours the police entered the house and found the body.
It’s a sign of the depravity of our times that a story like that seems almost sweet. Here was a guy with a gun, on the run. The standard procedure for someone in that situation, in recent years, has been to take hostages or just shoot down innocent bystanders.
Robbing a bank is a bad thing. Pointing a gun at innocent people is a bad thing. I don’t want to be misunderstood on that. And I consider suicide a mortal sin.
But this guy had the chance to end his life like a Tarantino movie, and instead he chose to go out like someone in a Bret Harte story. In my book, that wins him a few sympathy points.
How many times have I heard of a hostage or sniper situation in the last few years and thought, “If you want to kill yourself, just kill yourself—don’t murder people who want to live”?
May the Lord have mercy on David Dahlen.
New Music in the Familiar
Philosopher William Alston on why he believes the claims of Jesus Christ:
I’m a Christian not because I have been convinced by some impressive arguments: arguments from natural theology for the existence of God, historical arguments concerning the authenticity of the Scriptures or the reliability of the Apostles, or whatever. My coming back was less like seeing that certain premises implied a conclusion than it was like coming to hear some things in music that I hadn’t heard before, or having my eyes opened to the significance of things that are going on around me.
Why America Hates New York City
They hate it for “cheap art-world stunts,” suggests James Panero. Clicking that link will show you an article on a chocolate sculpture representing Jesus on a cross. Sure it’s blasphemous, even if you think it’s defensible under our freedom rights, but James asks the right question, “Why have I yet to see a custard Mohammed?”
I heard a variant of that question from a Christian apologist who debated the Rational Response Squad for a few hours. They are group that encouraged people to deny the Holy Spirit on tape so that they were guaranteed eternal damnation according to their misuse of Scripture. The apologist asked if they respected Allah at all, which of course they did not, and why they didn’t encourage people to rant against him or Mohammed. They said they didn’t want to suffer the backlash. “So you are attacking Christians because we’re kinder?” he replied.
Sure they are. It was Jesus’ divine kindness, his focus on the kingdom not of this earth, that turned the crowd who shouted, “Hosanna,” for him on Sunday to shouting “Crucify him,” on Friday. So what do we do with this as Christians? Do we sigh and return to our petty concerns, our consumer needs, our entertainments? Or do we fight back?
“For though we walk in the flesh, we are not waging war according to the flesh. For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds. We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ, being ready to punish every disobedience, when your obedience is complete” (2 Corinthians 10 :3-6 ESV).
The Strength of Thornton Wilder
Following a new collection of Wilder plays from the Library of America, Jeremy McCarter writes this essay on playwright Thornton Wilder.
Great reputations, we tend to think, should be held aloft by imposing columns of major works. But producing one magnum opus after another was never Wilder’s style. Much of his energy went into writing one-acts, the kind of little pieces that many playwrights treat as fodder for the next company that asks for help with a fund-raiser. For Wilder, who disdained kitchen-sink drama in favor of the absolutes — finding the universe in a grain of sand, then reversing the lens to view the whole cathedral of existence — the short plays were as likely to be masterpieces as the long.
[HT to Sarah of Confessions]
More Easter Poetry
. . .
From death to life eternal,
From this world to the sky,
Our Christ hath brought us over
With hymns of victory.
. . .
An early hymn from St. John of Damascus. Read the whole thing on Bartleby.com.
Happy Easter
Discussing How Modern Liberals Think
Here’s a link to a video from a Hollywood guy on how liberals think. In short, any kind of values or culture must not be judged better or worse than any other, relatively speaking. Arguments ensue.
Tilt-A-Walker
More rain today, and it’s supposed to rain even more over the weekend, then snow early next week.
But it’s Friday. I don’t intend to go out any more than I have to over the weekend, anyway.
I stopped for groceries on the way home. A side street at the grocery store intersection had been cordoned off by the police. Cop cars were parked all over. A news helicopter hovered patiently overhead. I don’t know what was going on, but somebody was involved in a life-or-death drama, just a few hundred feet from where I was buying bananas.
It seems wrong, somehow, that we can be utterly oblivious to the sufferings and stresses of our fellow humans, even near at hand. I often remember that episode of Star Trek where Mr. Spock felt a sudden psychic pain when a Vulcan starship exploded.
On the other hand, I have to admit what we’ve got is a mercy—a kind of spiritual and emotional air-lock system. C.S. Lewis pointed out in The Problem of Pain that, by God’s kindness, the greatest amount of pain that can exist in the universe is limited to the greatest amount that one individual can endure. That may be a lot of pain, but there is no accumulation of common suffering.
There’s been some “buzz” around the blogosphere about the proposal in the Minnesota State Legislature to make the Tilt-A-Whirl the Official State Carnival Ride. The proposal was made by a representative from Faribault, where the Tilt-A-Whirl was invented and continues to be manufactured.
Let me state for the record that, as a person born in Faribault myself, I fully support this initiative, and indeed any initiative intended to promote anything or anyone originating in Faribault (pronounced “Fair-boe”).
I plan, in fact, to petition to have myself named Official Minnesota Washed-Up Midlist Author.
The tank is empty tonight
I have less than nothing to say tonight. Anything I said would actually reduce the sum of public knowledge, just as a carbon credit is supposed to reduce global warming (but doesn’t).
Gleaned from a comment at Luther At the Movies: Scenes from Luther’s life done in Legos! That’s what I call culture!
For Aitchmark and other cat-lovers: This piece by Austrialian writer Hal G. P. Colebatch on cats in literature.
Sorry, that’s all I’ve got. Wake me when it’s summer.