A treadmill of the soul
September 30, 2006
I suspect many of us outside of the Jewish faith wonder about fasting as a religious discipline. This article provides some interesting insights into the practice that should be helpful to anyone concerned about the health of their souls.
Some of my Jewish friends will approach Yom Kippur next week a bit as if they were running in a marathon. Once a year, they gear up for the big race: an all-day service at synagogue along with a fast that calls for no food or water for more than 24 hours.
Even among the most secular of Jews, fasting on the Day of Atonement is one religious tradition that has somehow managed to survive. It is as if this fast were a bridge linking old-world religion with New Age devotion to health and fitness: Even those who lack religious fervor will approach the prospect of not eating or drinking once a year as a kind of extreme work-out — a treadmill of the soul.
That last sentence is a particularly felicitous turn of phrase. I probably could benefit from such an extreme workout.
Dave, who suspects a certain flabbiness of the soul.
The boys of summer
September 29, 2006
If I was an Englishman, I would no doubt be a cricket fan, but I’m not, so it’s baseball for me. Listening on the radio (remember that?) to the St. Louis Cardinals slug their way through a 162-game schedule from April through September is a big part of my summer. It’s obvious by now that summer 2006 will not go down in Cardinal Nation as a particularly memorable one, but that’s okay. It’s baseball at the professional level (most of the time), and that’s enough.
But what a spectacle I’ve witnessed this summer, seeing a starting rotation dwindling to a single arm; power at the plate to a single bat. As I continued to listen with morbid fascination, the Cards’ central division lead has shrunk to half a game after holding a lead all summer, and I rather imagine that it will disappear completely tonight.
I’d say that I’m starting to feel like a Cubs fan, except that they actually enjoy their adversity. Or a Royals fan who is learning to enjoy it.
Hark! Is that really a boo-bird I heard as Jason Marquis slinks away from the mound to an early shower?
Dave, hoping for a chance to say “sticky wicket,” but not knowing what it means.
Spinning off the Presbyterian Publishing Corporation
September 23, 2006
Michael Kruse is a member of the General Assembly Council, and I was glad to hear him say that it is time to sever the relationship between the Presbyterian Church (USA) and the Presbyterian Publishing corporation.
Kruse Kronicle: Time to Drop “Presbyterian” from the Presbyterian Publishing Corporation
After two years on the General Assembly Council, I have come to a conclusion. It is time for the Presbyterian Church (USA) to sever its relationship with the Presbyterian Publishing Corporation (PPC) and take back the Presbyterian name. The PPC has effectively demonstrated that they are not capable of make sound decisions that honor the denomination. I will present two episodes to illustrate why I believe this to be the case.
With the mainline PC(USA) feebly entering its end game, the additional irritation of the PPC connection is not welcome and not needed. At First Presbyterian, Quincy, IL, we are struggling to decide whether the path of obedience to our Lord Jesus leads toward leaving the denomination or toward remaining as a faithful remnant. Spinning off the PPC can not begin before 2008, which mercifully takes it off our current list of concerns.
Thank you, Michael, for sharing your mind on the matter.
Dave, whose personal Presbyterian platter is full to overflowing.
Peggy Noonan: Answer Chavez
September 22, 2006
I’m not all that sure that Peggy Noonan is right here, but it’s worth reading.
But the temperature of the world is very high, and maybe we’re not stuck in a continuum but barreling down a dark corridor. The problem with heated words now is that it’s not the old world anymore. In the old world, incompetent governments dragged cannons through the mud to set up a ragged front. Now every nut and nation wants, has or is trying to develop nukes.
Harsh words inspire the unstable.
Coolants are needed. Here is an idea. Don’t try to ignore Chavez, answer him. With the humility that comes with deep confidence, with facts, and with some humor, too.
There is an opportunity for the Democratic Party. Some Democrats responded with spirited indignation the day after Chavez spoke. It was rousing. But Chavez’s charges were grave, and he claimed America’s abuses could be tracked back a century. If the Democrats seek to speak for America, why not start with a serious and textured response, one that isn’t a political blast-back but a high-minded putting forward of facts? This would take guts, and farsightedness. Rebutting a wild-eyed man who says you can find redemption reading Noam Chomsky is a little too much like rebutting a part of your base.
As for the administration, it is so in the habit of asserting, defending and repeating, it barely remembers how to persuade and appeal. It speaks starkly and carries a big stick. It feels so beleaguered on a daily basis, and so snakebit, that even its mildest players have taken refuge in gritting their teeth and tunneling on. They take comfort in this: They think Chavez helps them. See what we’re up against? But that’s not a response, it’s a way not to respond. It doesn’t help, because it doesn’t even try to cool things down. Which is no good, because the temperature of the world is very high.
I think a lot of us hunger for high-minded, straightforward words from our leaders, and I don’t need to tell you what we get. I know, it’s the political silly-season, but when it comes to the world it’s time to get real.
Dave, getting a tad worried about our overheating world.
The pope said what?
September 20, 2006
I’ve been mildly curious about what the pope said to pull the Islamist chain, but not curious enough to actually read his lecture. The talking heads have now had their say, and I hoped that soon someone would say something about the brouhaha that actually makes sense.
Kathleen Parker of the Trib finally came to my rescue:
Translating the pope | Chicago Tribune
All this just because the pope had the audacity to suggest that some Islamists tend to prefer violence to reason. Whatever gave him that idea?
…”The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God’s nature,” he said.
Think fast: Who wants to spread faith with violence? Not missionary nuns in Somalia. Who wants to slit the throats of infidels? Not the Southern Baptist Convention.
Contrary to what fanatics have insisted, the pope was as critical of the West as of Islam, if not more so. While Islam suffers from faith without reason, he said that Western culture suffers from reason without faith.
His point was that the two cultures cannot enter into a productive dialogue unless they both recognize that faith and reason are inextricably bound. Islam has to drop its sword and the West has to make room for the divine.
Pope Benedict’s view is that by ignoring faith, the West–but especially Europe–is ill-equipped to engage a culture that is so firmly entrenched in faith.
Now that makes good sense, in my eyes, and the Muslim world seems to proving the pope’s point.
Dave, now ready to put the subject to rest.
It’s sausage-making time
September 19, 2006
Or so they tell me. So where do I start? Well, with some pork, I guess. Anyway, the first recipe I came across was in Robert May’s The Accomplished Cook, 1685.
Take four stone of pork, of the legs the leanest, and take away all the skins, sinews, and fat from it; mince it fine and stamp it. Then add to it three ounces of whole pepper, two ounces of pepper more coarsely cracked, whole cloves an ounce, nutmegs an ounce finely beated, peter-salt, an ounce of coriander seed finely beaten, lard cut an inch long (as big as your little finger). Mingle all the foresaid together and fill beef-guts as full as you can possibly; and as the wind gathers in the gut, prick them with a pin and shale them well down with your hands. . . . This is the most excellent way to make Bolonia sausages, being carefully filled and tied with pack thred and smoaked or smothered three days that will turn them red; then hang them in some cool cellar or higher room to take the air.
That sounds simple enough. Perhaps Admin over at Riverside Rambles would be a good one to test the recipe.
Belated attribution: Jefferey Kacirk first discovered this recipe for his Forgotten English Calendar.
Dave, remembering how good such high grease food used to taste.
The Hard Drive Turns 50
September 14, 2006
I know I’m getting old when I can remember the first big platters.
The Hard Drive Turns 50 - Yahoo! News
Today, the hard drive is found everywhere–from the PCs we use daily to MP3 players and memory keys so small you can toss them in your pocket and forget you’re carrying around a hard drive. But when the hard drive was first introduced on September 13, 1956, it required a humongous housing and 50 24-inch platters to store 1/2400 as much data as can be fit on today’s largest capacity 1-inch hard drives.
ADVERTISEMENTBack then, the small team at IBM’s San Jose-based lab was seeking a way to replace tape with a storage mechanism that allowed for more-efficient random access to data. The question was, how to bring random-access storage to business computing?
Dave, finding self in factoid business this morning.
Five years after
September 9, 2006
As the anniversary of 9/11 approaches, everyone is putting on their wise-retrospective beanies and pontificating about the significance of the twin-towers attack. Now it’s my turn, but first read this:
Five years ago, I cared for little outside my own circle of friends and family. Caring was for fools and patriotism mostly nostalgic in nature. I thought that things would continue as they always had. I was unaware of the existence of our enemies or their plans, and blissfully so.
All of that changed in a white-hot second on the morning of 9/11. Like so many other Americans, I was ripped from my comfortable womb and delivered against my will into a world where complete strangers hate me and would happily sacrifice their lives to kill me. Should I have mourned the loss of my ignorance?
I’m not sure that many had such an epiphany on the morning of 9/11 and after, but the writer makes a good point. Everything did change; the political landscape not the least, as the article points out.
I submit that no one with a Christian worldview should have been totally shocked, as so many around us say they were. The fact that people who will gladly sacrifice their lives to kill us without even knowing us should not come as a surprise. There is ugly evil in the world that we see that is being orchestrated in a world that we cannot see. It’s true. Get used to it.
I think we get our eyes opened to the existence of evil in a number of ways. One is learning to accept as reality events like terrorist attacks. Anyone exposed to TV news cannot avoid seeing what is happening in the world, even though most of the nasty stuff still happens on the other side of the world.
There are also a few books around that do a pretty good job of rubbing our noses in reality.
Here’s a gratuitous plug for a series of novels by Joel C. Rosenberg. One of his latest is The Ezekiel Option. How’s this for opening lines? “Boris Stuchenko would be dead in less than nineteen minutes. And he had no idea why.” Those nineteen minutes took only ten pages to arrive, and I would bet that every person reading them started feverishly reading and flipping pages to see what would happen. I’ve read many-many current events thrillers, but never anything like Rosenberg’s stories. He somehow maintains a frantic pace steadily from the first to the last page. Amazing!
I might add that the books are a good family-read; no sexual episodes, no profanity, no heavy-handed moralizing - just fast-paced action that has the ring of truth.
Okay, where was I?
Oh, yes. Most of us need a wake-up call of some sort, expecially if we live comfy lives in the Western world. Until we come to grips with the fact of evil in the world (and the answer to it), we are pitifully vulnerable to those times, prayerfully few, when evil stares us right in the face. It doesn’t have to be that way.
Dave, pontificating from his own little cocoon of safety.
The Problem with Prophets
September 8, 2006
Sometimes it takes a whack with a two-by-four alongside the head before I wake up. Several people have told me I have to read this article in Christianity Today, so maybe I really should. In the meantime, here is how Michael Kruse responded to a commenter to his post about the C-T article:
Kruse Kronicle: The Problem with Prophets
What some on the Left do now is chastise Christians for bringing their religious values in to the public square. (And I share some their frustration at some of the values that are brought into the public square in the name Christianity but not the legitimacy of bringing their religious values into the public square.) Christians are supposed to be a counter-cultural witness and not become entangled in matters of the state. But then on other issues they cozy up to politicians, start PACs, partner with political groups, seek organize and sway votes, as they seek to advance a political agenda. They are no longer prophets but political partisans.
It strikes me that what is going on is not prophetic witness but “proof texting” positions with one theological perspective in one place and another perspective in another place. What that says to me is that there is a predefined political agenda in search of theological justifications, not a political stance that has emerged from a consistent theological framework.
Again, not having yet read the C-T article, I agree with Kruse that one of the biggest challenges we have as evangelicals is learning to bring our beliefs into the public square in a consistent and God-honoring way. If we do it right, the result will be transparent and winsomely attractive to our pagan friends.
We’re clearly not there, yet.
Dave, moving Christianity Today to the top of his reading stack.
What do these numbers mean?
September 8, 2006
Don’t ask how I happened to find myself at Aljazeera.net, but they are conducting this poll:
Are fears over Iran’s nuclear ambitions justified?
Yes :
51%
No :
49%Number of pollers : 26627
Anyone care to tell me what these numbers may mean?
Dave, who answered “yes.”
