C.S. Lewis--odd on love

I've been recently re-reading some portions of The Four Loves. I don't remember having very strong views about this book when I read it years ago. There certainly are some excellent parts, especially when he talks about the love of God.

But on the subject of love and marriage, it simply will not do. I think the biggest underlying problem here is that Lewis had at that time too rigid a view of what it meant to love one's spouse. He may (we can hope) have gotten more information later when he fell in love and got married himself. But at the time of writing The Four Loves, he seems to have thought of love between man and wife as either a mere tempest of emotion--hence, transient and unimportant--or as the settled unity of many years--hence, and by definition, impossible at the beginning of marriage. This view of Lewis's is quite evident in the following passage from a letter (April 18, 1940):

No one is going to deny that the biological end of the sexual functions is offspring. And this is, on any sane view, of more importance than the feelings of the parents....Surely to put the mere emotional aspects first would be sheer sentimentalism....The third reason [for marriage in the Prayer Book] gives the thing that matters far more than "being in love" and will last and increase, between good people, long after "love" in the popular sense is only as a memory of childhood--the partnership, the loyalty to "the firm", the composite creature. (Remember that it is not a cynic but a devoted husband and inconsolable widower, Dr. Johnson, who said that a man who has been happy with one woman cd. have been equally happy with any one of "tens of thousands" of other women. i.e. the original attraction will turn out in the end to have been almost accidental: it is what is built up on that, or any other, basis wh. may have brought the people together that matters.)

One finds the same near-contempt for love between newlyweds as mere emotion and the same implication that love between married people ought to grow over time as opposed to being sought before marriage in this passage, put into the mouth of Screwtape:

From the true statement that this...relation was intended to produce...affection and the family, humans can be made to infer the false belief that the blend of affection, fear, and desire which they call "being in love" is the only thing that makes marriage either happy or holy....In other words, the humans are to be encouraged to regard as the basis for marriage a highly coloured and distorted version of something the Enemy really promises as its result. Two advantages follow. In the first place, humans who have not the gift of continence can be deterred from seeking marriage as a solution because they do not find themselves "in love," and, thanks to us, the idea of marrying with any other motive seems to them low and cynical. Yes, they think that. They regard the intention of loyalty to a partnership for mutual help, for the preservation of chastity, and for the transmission of life, as something lower than a storm of emotion.

This false dichotomy between love as unimportant emotion and love as a settled feeling built up over years even makes him write the following, to my mind highly distasteful, passage from The Four Loves which goes so far as to praise sexual intercourse without love.

Most of our ancestors were married off in early youth to partners chosen by their parents on grounds that had nothing to do with Eros. They went to the act with no other "fuel," so to speak, than plain animal desire. And they did right; honest Christian husbands and wives, obeying their fathers and mothers, discharging to one another their "marriage debt," and bringing up families in the fear of the Lord.

This is quintessentially and self-evidently a passage written by a male, and I would say, written by a male who knows little about women. It entirely ignores the strong connection for many women between emotions like affection and a feeling of being cherished, loved, and protected, on the one hand, and sexual desire, on the other.

Moreover, Lewis assumes that there is nothing even remotely morally questionable about a husband's having intercourse with his wife when he does not love her and when she does not love him. The Catholic Church itself, which I consider fairly representative of (at a minimum) a paradigmatically conservative view on sexual subjects, holds that the sexual act between man and wife is supposed to serve, inter alia, a "unitive purpose," which would seem to raise questions about having intercourse with a spouse for whom you have no feeling, whom, perhaps, you scarcely know at all (which is at least one plausible scenario invoked by Lewis's picture of arranged marriage), and who has no feeling for you.

Then there is the question of the validity of marriages undertaken without the true freedom of the two principal people involved. Lewis's casual implication that untold numbers of young people perfectly validly married other people for whom they had no affection solely out of obedience to their parents is open to some question. Indeed, the abuses during the ages of marriages made in just that fashion are the entire basis of the present concern with due maturity and full freedom in enacting the marriage sacrament. Lewis simply o'erleaps all such worries and, in effect, says, "You're not going to say that all those people who married only semi-willingly and got on with the marital act willy-nilly, out of a sheer sense of duty, were wrong, are you?"

There is something rather brutal and even foolish and crude about Lewis's whole approach to this subject. The nuances of feeling between members of the opposite sex--including various degrees of kindness, affection, protectiveness, trust, and spontaneous commitment--seem lost on him. He seems not even to realize that all of these can be and to no small extent ought to be present prior to marriage, though they do, of course, grow over the years. To him, love between husband and wife is relatively unimportant because it is just an emotion. What's love got to do with it? It's all about duty, obedience to parents, and the desire to have children, and that's it.

Some time ago, I read an interesting article by Gilbert Meilaender in First Things about in vitro fertilization. (At least, I believe it was Meilaender. I am going by memory.) He made the excellent point that one problem out of many with in vitro fertilization is that it denies the primacy of the relationship between husband and wife. The existence of the child grows out of the parents' love for one another and is a result of the sexual expression of that love. The existence of a child is not an end for which one's wife (or husband) is to be used simply as a means. Exactly and precisely. Much better than "on any sane view, offspring are more important than the feelings of the parents." Meilaender, I suspect, could have taught Lewis a thing or two on this entire subject.

A somewhat longer version of this post, including an imaginary Lewisian marriage proposal, has been cross-posted at What's Wrong with the World.

Merry Michaelmas

I figure it's late enough on Michaelmas Eve for me to put up a Michaelmas post here. Be sure to look over at What's Wrong with the World tomorrow for a deluxe version with the reading from the Apocalypse for Michaelmas in both English and Latin.

The thing I like about the above image of St. Michael the Archangel is that he looks undeniably masculine. It's true that he looks maybe a bit too much like a fantasy hero on the cover of a book, but even if so, he's a classy fantasy hero. Too many St. Michael images, even those with a really cool picture of Satan being stabbed by Michael's spear (which unfortunately this one lacks), make Michael's face look feminine. That drives me crazy, because if there is one masculine person in the Army of Light, it's St. Michael.

As C. S. Lewis said, the true opposite to Satan is not God but St. Michael. Both of them are angels, only Satan is a fallen angel, and Michael is a good angel. It looks, if we take Revelation relatively literally, as though God has given to Michael the special job of defeating Satan, and even though the reading refers to Satan's original fall, I wouldn't be a bit surprised if St. Michael were heavily involved in the final binding and throwing into the Lake of Fire at the end of the story when the good guys finally win.

I have a quarrel with John Milton: When he does the war in heaven, he has the Son come in a chariot and throw Satan out of heaven. Now, it's surprising that Milton should allow himself to be unbiblical, Puritan and biblicist that he was. But I think that here Milton's Arianism got the better of him. For in Milton's theology, the Son is the true opposite of Satan. The good angels are not able to defeat him, and heaven is getting all ripped up and such, so the Son has to come with irresistible might and fling him and his armies over the battlements of heaven. The flinging over the battlements ("with ruinous combustion down/Who durst defy th'omnipotent to arms") is great. But it should be Michael who does it.

Michaelmas--specifically, the reading from Revelation--reminds us of several important things: 1) At the end of the book, we win. That is, if we are on the side of God. 2) It's not wrong to win by fighting. Evil should be fought. 3) Things aren't going to be pretty between now and the end, because Satan has been given the freedom to roam around down here on earth and cause all kinds of trouble. 4) From a God's-eye view, Satan's remaining time is short. That's a comfort even for those of us whose threescore years and ten will be long over before it's all over.

Blessings to all my readers, and in particular, a Merry Michaelmas!

Hymn of the Week--"Deck Thyself, my Soul"

This morning we sang in church one of the loveliest communion hymns the 1940 Hymnal contains: "Deck Thyself, My Soul, With Gladness." I've been searching around the web for something that gives the harmony correctly.

The cyberhymnals have all the words--indeed, an extra verse I didn't even know--but the music just sounds so awful. The best way to show anyone who doesn't know the hymn the way it should sound is to link this Youtube video of an Episcopal congregation and choir singing it during a procession. The only PC change I detect in the words is in the second verse. The line "Joy, the sweetest man e'er knoweth" has been altered to get rid of 'man'.

The hymn tune and, I assume, the harmonization, are by Cruger (with an umlaut over the u). Bach apparently wrote several things "based on" it, but while this one is very beautiful, I have to confess that I can detect only a distant relation to the original tune.

If you sing the hymn with attention, it's really impossible to come away gloomy. It has the effect that its words intend--inviting us to "leave the gloomy haunts of sadness" and rejoice in the opportunity to come and receive the Holy Communion, which Christ has provided for us by his great goodness and humility. Here is the first verse:

Deck thyself, my soul, with gladness,
Leave the gloomy haunts of sadness;
Come into the daylight’s splendor,
There with joy thy praises render
Unto Christ Whose grace unbounded
Hath this wondrous banquet founded.
Higher o’er all the heav’ns He reigneth,
Yet to dwell with thee He deigneth.

New W4 post on the Problem of Evil

This is my blogging contribution to the world for the moment. I was away all day Friday, which is of course most unusual.

Autobiography--My debt to the Rev. Frank Buckley

I've neglected this personal blog a bit lately, but for those of you readers who check in from time to time or trickle by, I've decided to start to be a little more autobiographical.

Many a year ago (but not too many) I was a bratty, funny-looking small child. My parents were not wealthy, not by a long shot. They always insisted that we were middle-middle-class, but looking back now, I don't think I would say that. My dad was a wood finisher and unionized in Chicago, so he made a decent-enough wage for someone with no education beyond high school--the kind of job that I understand is increasingly rare nowadays. But sending two children to Christian school was a huge drain on the family finances. So in dealing with my peers I had to contend not only with my own unpleasant personality but also with the odd clothes which were the only things we could afford. For several years, when I outgrew a dress, it became a shirt, to be worn over pants.

I have a tiny, dark, black-and-white photo of myself at age seven or eight, in one of these dresses-turned-shirts, my hair in two ponytails, sitting on the knee of Rev. Frank Buckley, a child evangelist who came every year to the camp we went to in the summers. (As you can see, the photo above is not this one but a clearer one.)

That camp, Camp Manitoumi in Lowpoint, IL, was the most beloved, beautiful spot on earth to me. I won't go on about it at the moment but may do so in a later post. Suffice it to say that my greatest sympathy for people who talk about "patriotism as loving the soil" comes not when I think about my actual home, which was in the ugly and smelly megalopolis of Chicago, but when I think about the place where I spent every possible moment in the summer--Manitoumi.

Pastor Buckley must have been in his forties at that time, though it was hard to tell. His very short, dark hair was just greying at the temples. He loved children as I think it is given to few active, handsome men in their forties to love children, especially when the children are not their own. Every year, year after year, he came to camp and spoke twice a day to large numbers of assembled children for a good, long time. He had a dummy named Charlie, and I never once got tired of their routines, even though I had them memorized after a few years. He led the singing, he did the ventriloquism act, and he gave the sermons. He was the whole show. One man. Occasionally he brought his grown son, and they played snappy trumpet duets, but I don't remember much about the son. As I remember it, Pastor Buckley ran the children's programs for family weeks for many years. That would have been a large age-range, from perhaps seven years old until the children were old enough that their parents took them into the adult services. He did junior weeks for eight- and nine-year-olds, and I was thrilled to find by the time I was in the 11- and 12-year-old weeks that he was doing those, too.

Pastor Buckley was a fundamentalist of the old school. The only type of clothes I can ever remember seeing him wear were dark pants and a blindingly white, starched shirt, sometimes with a tie. As I recall, he dressed like this--without the tie--even when playing softball or riding a horse. There was no air conditioning at camp, and his only concessions to the heat were to unbutton his cuffs, roll his shirtsleeves up, and unbutton the top button of his collar. He gave amusing sermons against women's makeup, sermons that were impossible to take offense at because he wasn't ranting, just telling "stories" (the factuality of which I rather doubt) like the one about the time he said to a woman wearing green eye-shadow, "Excuse me, ma'am, but I think you have something growing on your eyelids." (He had a soft accent that I, Yankee that I was, called "Southern." I would now say it was probably a southern Illinois or a Missouri accent.) Nonetheless, I knew he meant it about the silliness of makeup, and I took it to heart, sort of. When I was twelve, some of the other girls in the cabin shared their eye makeup with me. This insanitary activity made me feel quite grown up and pretty (though I must have looked ridiculous), until I ran into Pastor Buckley. I was petrified. Would he say anything? He wasn't the sort of man you wanted to trifle with. He gave me a hug and chatted a bit. Didn't say anything about the makeup. I was tremendously relieved to think he hadn't noticed. But looking back and remembering his penetrating eyes, I'm pretty sure he noticed everything. And understood, too.

The thing about Pastor Buckley was that he stood no nonsense, but he loved the children so much that they trusted and respected him entirely. He never had the slightest trouble with discipline, no matter the size of his child audience. I do not know how it was with other children, because I didn't pay much attention to other children, but I knew that I could tell that he loved me, personally. He watched me grow up to the age of about fourteen or fifteen, when I saw him last. At that time he was still doing the 11 and 12-year-old weeks. I was a worker at camp. That meant, if I could stand the rather physically strenuous regimen, and if I didn't do anything to get myself in trouble, that I could stay there and work all summer long. I remember now playing a piano solo one of those years for chapel. And Pastor Buckley said to the whole group, "I remember Lydia when she was little. All the other kids picked on her. And look at her now." Little did he know (or maybe he did know, after all) that there was still more than a bit of tension between me and my peers. I still had a long way to go to grow up. But the unconditional love and pride in his voice made me feel that I'd come a long way already, and it helped me to keep going.

May God bless all His servants, including Pastor Buckley, who work to bring children to a knowledge of Himself.

Update: I've managed to scan and upload, above, a different picture from the one I describe. The scan of the black and white turned out very fuzzy, and this one is better. I suppose I am ten or eleven here. The quality still is a bit fuzzy. I see from the picture that Pastor Buckley is not wearing the trademark white button-up shirt here, so obviously my memory on that point was faulty.

Update #2: Commentator Lori, below, reminds me, and my parents confirm, that Pastor Buckley's dummy was named Daniel, not Charlie. Extra Thoughts is happy to correct the error, and it's really neat to have someone stop by whose life was also touched by Pastor Buckley.

"The Touch of the Master's Hand"

I apologize to my long-suffering readers for what appears to have been a couple of weeks' hiatus. I've now finished drafting the article I was working on, and I also put up several posts at What's Wrong With the World.

I woke up yesterday with this song running through my head and started croaking it even before I'd had enough hydration to limber up the voice. If you are from any sort of fundamentalist or evangelical Protestant background you will probably have heard it. I'm not sure what year it was put out, but I remember hearing it quite a bit in the 80's. I heard it on the radio the other day. If you drive the car just right here in my town you can pick up the signal from the fundamentalist radio station Rejoice Radio out of Pensacola, FL, at 91.7 FM. I believe their nearest signal tower is in the city about an hour to the north of us. It's in my opinion the best Christian radio station around here. The others are all going screamy. Eldest Daughter complains a lot about the devolution of her favorite moderately contemporary Christian radio station at 91.3, which is becoming steadily less moderate and playing lower and lower quality music.

Anyway, here is a very nice dramatized Youtube version of the song, made apparently by the Mormons, of all things. I don't go to auctions, but it seems believably done. I especially like the portrayal of the man who appears to be stopped from committing suicide in the last verse, though the hand on his shoulder looks a bit odd. "...auctioned cheap to a thankless world" is a particularly telling line. And the statement that the crowd has trouble understanding the worth of a soul is neither more nor less than the truth.

Eldest daughter opines that the song would be even better without the final verse, leaving us to draw the moral for ourselves. I see her point, but the last verse has some good words, too.

It's a catchy tune, too. I hope you like it and get it running through your head. It will do you no harm.

How compromise changes us

I have a new post up at What's Wrong with the World. Since we have at least one very strong McCain supporter on our roster there, and for other reasons too, I have hesitated to put up any free-standing posts on the subject of what's wrong with voting for McCain as the "lesser evil." That he is the lesser evil is not something I dispute. But my position that pro-lifers (and conservatives generally) should not vote for him could have been easily inferred from my comments on many other threads, both some on What's Wrong with the World and some on Zippy Catholic's blog.

In this post, I discuss a little-known series of events in which the National Right to Life Committee voluntarily decided to shut up about the use of tissue from aborted fetuses in scientific research--an issue they had been very vocal on for many years before. I imply, not so subtly, that a factor in their shut-down was their support for George W. Bush, who made it clear early on in his presidency that he had no intention of trying to restore the ban (from the era of Reagan and of Bush, Sr.) on federal funding for such research. In fact, he and his NIH officials considered themselves required to fund such research, or at least not to refuse to fund it because the tissue involved had come from aborted fetuses. And NRLC defended his stance. And now we hear nothing more about the issue from them, nor will we. It's dead.

And why did they do this? They said, because ESCR was so, so, urgent, so wildly important, that everything else must go to the wall for that. But now...now. Now they support a candidate who supports not only the existence of ESCR but federal funding for it. So what will they shut up about next?

What does compromise do to us? What it does in the political arena is not unimportant, but fundamentally, what it does in the political arena is a function of what it does to us, of how it subtly changes our priorities, our agenda, our speech, and finally, our worldview.

Hymn of the week--Beneath the Cross of Jesus

We sang "Beneath the Cross of Jesus" for our Communion hymn this morning. An excellent pick, and kudos to the rector (who is on vacation) for picking it before he left. This verse especially jumped out at me:

Upon that cross of Jesus mine eye at times can see
The very dying form of One Who suffered there for me;
And from my stricken heart with tears two wonders I confess;
The wonders of redeeming love and my unworthiness.

As I sang it, almost against my will, this story came to mind. Via Dawn Eden, I learned this week of an "artist" (I use the term with some hesitation) in Australia named Adam Cullen who was at least short-listed for (and it appears may have won) an award known as the Blake Prize for his deliberately mocking and cartoonish painting of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.

One judge, Christopher Allen, resigned from the judging panel in protest when his colleagues insisted on including Cullen in the short list. I find it at least notable that originally Cullen was not on the short list and that Allen resigned when the other judges changed their minds and included him. I wonder if the clue to this about face might be found in the words of the chairman (I assume, of the judging committee), "The Blake Prize...embraces diversity in its entries and it is important to us that we remain open to the many styles through which artists engage with the subject area." Uh-huh. Perhaps we could rightly interpret this as, "Even if it means giving prizes to work of no artistic merit, we have to include at least one and maybe more works mocking Christianity every year to prove our transgressive credentials." Hats off to judge Allen. Is it just barely possible he was making an artistic judgement here? (Side note: Somehow I missed the Christian riots over this deliberate offence to what they hold holy. Perhaps someone could give me the links to those news stories...)

But the story doesn't stop there. As Dawn Eden says, the real kicker is in the final line of the Telegraph story, when Cullen gives us his response to the brouhaha: "How can he be so offended? It's just a Jew on the cross."

Um, yeah. Huh. And that's supposed to mean what, exactly?

The more you think about that line, the more unintentional resonances it has. It reminds me of what St. John tells us about Caiaphas--that when he said it was expedient that one man should die for the people, he prophesied though he did not know it. And when Jesus died he said, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." "It's just a Jew on the cross." Pontius Pilate himself couldn't have said it better. Shaking it off. Telling himself it doesn't matter. How could it matter? How could this obscure Jewish teacher, crucified by the Romans in the first century A.D., matter? Just another of the victims of the cruelty of man in history. Lots of Jews were crucified by the Romans. It's just a Jew on the cross. "All they that see me laugh me to scorn. They shoot out the lip, saying, 'He trusted in God that he would deliver him. Let him deliver him, if he delighteth in him.'" "Come down from the cross, if thou art the son of God."

Cullen is in a long line of the mockers of Jesus on the cross. And all their mockery God Incarnate, the Jew on the cross, took upon himself, and by it they did the will of God against their own will. "Yet it pleased the Lord to bruise him; he hath put him to grief: when thou shalt make his soul an offering for sin, he shall see his seed, he shall prolong his days, and the pleasure of the Lord shall prosper in his hand. He shall see of the travail of his soul, and shall be satisfied: by his knowledge shall my righteous servant justify many, for he shall bear their iniquities."

Upon that cross of Jesus, mine eye at times can see the very dying form of one who suffered there for me. (And for Adam Cullen, too, hard as that may be to believe.)

And by his stripes we are healed.

Ad blocking software--highly recommended

For some time now I have been getting increasingly annoyed, not to mention alarmed, by the nature of the video ads coming up on Yahoo. I use Yahoo a lot, both for e-mail and especially for weather. (I have a touching and irrational conviction that if I stare at the fancy Yahoo weather report and maps long enough, I can make it rain. It's the modern version of a magic rain dance and is doubtless the result of some atavistic racial memories that have been passed down to me from paleolithic forebears.)

I'm not going to go into detail on these ads, but suffice it to say that the girls dancing the Achy-Breaky or whatever it is to celebrate the current mortgage rates are not my chief concern, though that's mildly annoying in its own right. Some of the worst came up when I was innocently shopping for a new bread machine, on consumer's review sites.

So I tried turning off all pictures and other multimedia possibilities on the advanced internet options for IE. That just made the perfectly inoffensive lighthouse on this very blog disappear, as well as all the buttons on blog comments boxes and other legitimate and useful items, but video ads on Yahoo were still swimming into view--literally, because in that case it was a fish swimming around in a bowl. No problem in itself, but an indication that the problem was not solved.

My beloved husband said, "Ask Todd." Well, I tried to be independent for a while but finally gave it up and asked the all-things-computers-omniscient Todd McKimmey via e-mail. And sure enough, he immediately informed me that there is (who'd a thunk it?) ad blocking software out there. He recommended Ad Block Plus for Mozilla Firefox. (I rather gather that his attitude is, "Who would use IE when you could use Firefox?" I have to admit to seeing that point of view.) In the process of stumbling about, I more or less accidentally also downloaded Ad Block Pro, which is for IE. That one is only a 30-day free trial, but it looks like it's just $19.95 to register it after the 30 days, which is nothing for the service. I got the one for Firefox, too, which appears to be free.

Well, I can't begin to say how much nicer a web experience I am now having. All the tacky junk, and even just the ugly and annoying junk, is gone. Even though it isn't exactly bad, I really was getting tired of seeing all the ugly "avatars" I could choose from by clicking on some ad. I would rather be caught dead than be represented by any of the females pictured there! And I hate all that blinking stuff in my face. Plus I don't have to worry about having the kids in the room when some ad for Victoria's Secret ("Mommy, why does that lady have no clothes on?") or something worse comes up. Youngest Daughter is just learning to read, too, and reads everything she sees. Phew! It's a great relief. And the ads disappear nearly without a trace, too. It's not like there are big white blocks in the visual field on the weather site. You really have to look to try to figure out even where those ugly ads would be. Not that I care. I'm just glad they are gone. It's great!

It doesn't solve all Internet problems, but it's one big step in the right direction, especially for those of us who are careful about the sites we go to anyway.

Varia--Clothes, Pharisees, etc.

The gospel reading today was Jesus' parable of the publican and the pharisee. (The epistle was I Cor. 15, which is tremendously important and about which I've been talking recently elsewhere, but I'll stick to the gospel for this post.)

In the 70's and 80's I was a big fan of Ken Medema, and I still like his old material. It's very hard to find anymore. His version of this parable is "Mr. Simon." I love the 70's recording, which I have on both tape and CD, but unfortunately it's not available anywhere that I can find on-line to link to. Ken has re-recorded the song with, in my opinion, a much inferior musical accompaniment. The 70's accompaniment was just piano and illustrated Ken's inimitable piano style. The vocals on the new version are also not as good, IMO, being exaggeratedly sarcastic rather than letting the words speak for themselves. But you can't get around the words. I'll let you listen to it in the new version if you're so inclined. The last lines are the best: "Two men walked into the church upon that Sunday morn. One left slightly wrinkled; the other left reborn." Ouch.

One of the best fictional treatments of the parable comes from an unexpected source. Agatha Christie wrote a number of straight (i.e., non-mystery) novels under the pseudonym of Mary Westmacott. Her novella Absent in the Spring, written under that name, makes excellent use of Christ's parable. The main character actually thanks God that she is not as an old schoolmate whom she meets again unexpectedly after many years. I highly recommend the novel, without claiming that it is great literature. But it is well-crafted and unexpectedly convicting.

Finally, I hope this will not play into the "Pharisees" theme in any ironic fashion, but I do want to tell my lady readers about another clothing site I have found that has the potential to supply a lot of clothing needs, not just dresses. No children's clothes, unfortunately, but they have a good line of petites that really are petite, which is useful to know for present or future teen daughters. The company is Blair, and they have classy, modest jeans for women as well as nice dresses and skirts. I've just bought several pair of excellent-fitting jeans for Eldest Daughter in their smallest petite size, which is smaller than the smallest petite size I've been able to find anywhere else. This skirt is really nice--the cloth a little thin, but the style modest and pretty, and incredibly comfortable. (A good price, too.) It reminded me (and this is high praise) of what C.S. Lewis says about clothes in Narnia: "In Narnia your good clothes were never your uncomfortable ones. They knew how to make things that felt beautiful as well as looking beautiful in Narnia: and there was no such thing as starch or flannel or elastic to be found from one end of the country to the other." I have to admit that this does have an elastic waist, but it's a gentle one, and the skirt sounds nice and swishy when you walk. I recommend the navy floral. The selection at the site is wide-ranging, and the clothes remind me roughly of the clothes you could buy, but can't find there any longer, at J.C. Penney's some fifteen years ago.

I found Blair linked from a sort of link consortium at one woman's site to which I wish I could give a hat tip, only I didn't save her URL. She had a whole bunch of "modest clothes" links. Lilies Apparel, which I have featured here before, was mentioned there, but none of the others except Blair seemed super-useful, especially since it's not clear that they are active sites. (I e-mailed a query to one of them and didn't get a reply.)

The resurrection and self-commitment

There are probably very few readers who read this personal blog but not What's Wrong with the World, the group blog to which I contribute. But it just so happens that a couple of the possibilities I can think of are among those most likely to be interested in this post that I've just put up at What's Wrong With the World.

I was motivated to post it because of a couple of things. For one thing, I've heard for many years--since back when I was a teenage presuppositionalist myself--the phrase, "You can't argue people into the kingdom of God." This was always said with great solemnity in the context of the debate (with which some of you may be familiar) between evidentialists and presuppositionalists in apologetics. It was taken to be a knock-down argument. And even when I became an evidentialist, I would still say it, because it was the kind of thing that seemed common-sensical and true, yet I couldn't see anymore why it was supposed to be an argument against evidentialism. Over the twenty-plus years since then, I've verrry slowwwly figured out, I think, why it was supposed to be an argument and what, precisely, is wrong with it.

And then I was reading N.T. Wright's book--which is very good in many sections, by the way--and came across this unfortunate and somewhat confused passage about how the proposition that Jesus rose from the dead is a "self-committing" proposition and how, therefore, there is no epistemological neutral ground in discussing it (huh?), and that provided a good opportunity to discuss the whole thing.

I'll let you read the other post to get the full scoop. But the core idea of my post is just simply that believing in God isn't the same thing as being a committed Christian. You could conclude that God exists and decide to be several other things instead--e.g., a rebel against God, a completely nominal believer whose faith makes no difference to his life, and so forth.

Something I didn't say in the other post is this: I think that one reason we don't see this nowadays is that we apologists are so seldom arguing with a Jewish audience. The first Christians weren't trying to "get people to believe in God." They were Jews, and their original audience was composed of Jews. They all believed in God.

Collect of the Week--Trinity X

I apologize for being so silent lately, as well as for the fact that there has been no collect or hymn featured for quite some time.

Today really is Trinity X. I always feel a bit sorry for Catholics because they no longer have a Trinity season. I think they used to but could be mistaken here. Perhaps this has always just been called "ordinary time." Here is the collect for Trinity X:

Let thy merciful ears, O Lord, be open to the prayers of thy humble servants; and, that they may obtain their petitions, make them to ask such things as shall please thee; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

When I was a child, I used to ask my parents why we always ended our prayers with, "In Jesus' name." I was given to understand that we should always be praying according to the will of God, praying things that we could ask in the name of Jesus, requests that would be honoring to him. This makes a lot of sense. You can hardly say, "Dear Father, please make that jerk who nearly hit me at that intersection have an accident and learn his lesson. In Jesus' name, Amen." Doesn't work.

This collect emphasizes the same point. If we want our prayers answered in the affirmative, it's a necessary, though not a sufficient, condition that they be prayers for the right kinds of things. God might still say "no" in some given circumstance, for reasons he knows, but that principle of asking for things that will please God should make us alert when we pray. I do not believe that it is wrong to pray about small things. It's much better to pray about small things--especially for those of us to whom nothing monumental ever happens--than not to pray. But to distinguish the small from the trivial and purely selfish, it doesn't hurt to ask oneself, "Is this request for the kind of thing that is likely to please God?"

Here's another collect, on which I don't think I shall have any comments. But it deserves to be better known. It's from the back of the American 1928 Prayer Book, from the Family Prayer section. I have heard speculation that these prayers were written by, or modified from some written by, the late 17th century divine Tillotson, but I do not know what the evidence is for that hypothesis. The style is notably different from Cranmer's, but the writer of these collects has, like Cranmer, the genius to interweave phrases from Scripture in his prayers. I wish some of the prayers from the Family Prayer section were used in the liturgy, and I do try to use some of them at home with my family. This one is labeled "In the morning," but I find it makes a lot of sense to pray it at night, too:

Almighty God, who alone gavest us the breath of life, and alone canst keep alive in us the holy desires thou dost impart; We beseech thee, for thy compassion's sake, to sanctify all our thoughts and endeavours; that we may neither begin an action without a pure intention nor continue it without thy blessing. And grant that, having the eyes of the mind opened to behold things invisible and unseen, we may in heart be inspired by thy wisdom, and in work be upheld by thy strength, and in the end be accepted of thee as thy faithful servants; through Jesus Christ our Saviour. Amen.

What is the essence of a pillow?

Okay, enough serious stuff. True story:

We took two pillows to the cleaners to be cleaned, because if you try to wash pillows and dry them in your home dryer, they end up all clumpy, plus you nearly start a fire in the dryer. I've tried this and swore never to try it again. The cleaners told us that it would take about a month. So we waited patiently for a month and finally got the long-expected call: "Your pillows are ready to be picked up."

My husband picks up the pillows and is slightly weirded out by the fact that they sure look an awful lot different from the way that he remembers them. He remarks on this to the girl, who checks the name and assures him that they are, indeed, his pillows. He brings them home and asks me what I think. I concur: They aren't our pillows. The cloth is totally different. It's not soft. It's sort of crinkly feeling and not nearly as nice; there is stitching I don't remember along the edge. They're definitely not the same pillows.

So I call up the cleaners this morning and also, after getting the number, the leather company to which the cleaners sent the pillows to be cleaned. (I guess that's why it took a month.) They both explain patiently to me what this is all about. See, cleaning your pillows doesn't mean cleaning your pillows. It means that they literally take the pillow completely apart, take out the stuffing, put the stuffing through an (unnamed) "process," then put that stuffing in totally different cloth, throw the cloth part of your pillow away, and send the result back as "your pillow," cleaned.

What I want to know is this: How do they decide that the stuffing is the essence of the pillow? What makes them conclude that, in order for them to be carrying out the cleaning of "your pillow" that you requested, the stuffing must be processed and sent back to you, but the cloth--which is, after all, what you encounter more directly on a daily basis--is disposable, so that it's the same pillow if it has the same stuffing but has totally and recognizably different cloth? I mean, this is a sort of deep philosophical question. And why should they assume that I will agree with them that the stuffing, stuffed into totally different cloth, is in essence the same pillow?

There's a practical question, too. I would have thought that the cloth, being the kind of thing that normally can be dry cleaned anyway (right? you send clothes made out of cloth to be dry-cleaned?) would actually be easier for them to process than the stuffing. If they have a fancy way of processing the stuffing, which ought to be the hard part, why don't they just dry-clean the cloth in the ordinary way and put the two back together?

It's all beyond me. But I don't think I'll be sending any other pillows to the cleaners. They never come back again. Just these strangers.

Laws against abortion with exceptions--an analogy

Caveat: What follows is not intended to mean that I endorse a democratic ideal of the family nor that I think that husbands have to defer to wives when it comes to forbidding their children to do things. It is meant for illustrative purposes only.

Suppose that you and your wife become alarmed by the fact that Junior is starting to do some bad things that you never had to have explicit rules about before. In particular, he's doing X and Y, which you quite reasonably regard as species of the same wrong act. In fact, if you prohibited someone from doing X, he'd probably assume he was also prohibited from doing Y unless you expressly stated otherwise. Your wife thinks that Junior should be stopped from doing X but should be allowed to do Y. You and she go back and forth for a while and can't come to any nearer agreement. Meanwhile, Junior is merrily going on doing both X and Y without the slightest fear of reprisal, fear of God not being Junior's strong suit, and fear of man (namely, his parents) not having been brought to bear on the situation. It seems to you rather important that he should be stopped, right away, from doing as much of this stuff as possible. So after one more conversation with your wife, you go to Junior and give him the following speech:

Son, we've not been stopping you from doing X and Y, but that situation is about to change. From now on, if you do X, you will receive such-and-such a punishment. You are hereby forbidden to do X. Unfortunately, your mother and I cannot agree about Y, so for the time being you are not threatened with any punishment from us for doing Y. This doesn't mean that Y is not wrong or that you shouldn't be punished for doing Y just as much as for doing X, and the situation with regard to Y may well change later on. Meanwhile, we're going to make good and sure you get in big trouble if you do X. Got that?

Now, I don't think anyone could say that you were authorizing or endorsing your son's doing Y. Nor does there seem to be any important distinction here to be made between the "author" of the prohibition thus stated and its other supporters. In this case, even though you are the one who wants to prohibit both acts, you are the "author" of the speech to Junior, and your wife is its supporter, rather than vice versa, but it seems to me obvious that that fact does not put you in the wrong. That is to say, you would not be in any morally better situation if your wife made a parallel speech to Junior and you "voted" for it or endorsed it in some other way. In fact, by putting yourself forward as the "author"--the one actually to speak to Junior--you can be especially careful that nothing that even looks like an endorsement of the moral licitness of Y gets into the speech, and you can warn Junior that his days of freedom to do Y may be numbered.

I think this is actually quite a good analogy for the situation of a pro-life legislator who gets an opportunity to write and propose a law outlawing abortion in some cases but allowing exceptions in others, where such a law will vastly improve the legal protection for the unborn in his jurisdiction, and who does so.

It might also be worth pointing out that the heinous and iniquitous court decision Roe v. Wade is not analogous to either of these things--to the pro-life legislator writing a law with exceptions or to the parent speaking to his child. For Roe really did attempt to lock the states into a situation where they could not protect unborn children, and it did so by saying (which was patently false) that abortion is a constitutional right. In so doing Roe's intention and effect was to strike down state laws that protected the unborn. Roe in that sense really did "authorize" abortion in a very specific way, and it is to Roe most of all that we should apply statements about the evil of "laws" (or in this case, the quasi-laws that are court precedents) that authorize abortion.

See here and here for the background to this post.

Q: What kind of celestial body...

...is niggardly with light?

A: A black hole.

Kudos to Lawrence Auster for a great new joke. (I find it very hard to invent jokes, myself.)

His was prompted by what he calls the latest "niggardly" incident in which a county commissioner for Dallas County (one John Wiley Price) interrupted and tried to correct a fellow commissioner (one Kenneth Mayfield) who likened a collections office in the county to a "black hole." To make matters worse, a judge who was present at the meeting (one Thomas Jones) chimed in and tried to make Mayfield apologize for his "racially insensitive analogy." Good for Mayfield, who refused and even attempted to, er, enlighten them on the meaning of the phrase. But apparently the light he was shedding was never reflected back. It just got lost...in the black hole of their ignorance. The report says that the other commissioners hurriedly got the meeting back on track. I suppose we should hope that we hear no more of it, because if we did, it would probably be the mayor offering to fire Mayfield and demanding an apology from him. Or perhaps race riots.

A judge. Can you imagine trying a case before someone that totally ignorant and with that kind of agenda and love of power?

Phonics material now available in PDF

I have now turned about two hundred and fifty pages worth of phonics material that I have written for teaching young children to read into a single PDF document. (I also have it on my own computer as a single Word Perfect document.) The single PDF is available here.

This material previously existed only in the form of over sixty separate Word Perfect files, because I have a separate file for each list or set of lists on a separate phonics concept, as well as separate files for the four short chapters of a book I had begun writing on how to teach your young child to read by phonics.

As I say repeatedly in the material itself, these lessons are for parents who want to teach their own children to read. If somebody takes them and republishes them under his own name, obviously, he's a louse. That's why I put the "copyright" symbol on the title page. (I've called the document, fairly unoriginally, A First Phonics Course for Young Children. Titles were never my strong point, as the name of this blog shows.) But I'm not out to make money on it, and I don't anticipate ever trying. For one thing, it has a very unfinished look about it. I broke off abruptly in Chapter 4 while describing how to teach your child to read blends, because at that point I got too involved in actually teaching my child to read blends. I try to make up for this sudden halt by including, as a separate item, several pages of notes on what it was like to teach Youngest Daughter to read the various phonics lists. These notes contain the same sorts of tips I was writing out at more length in the chapters before I stopped, and they also describe how my lessons are connected with the lists in the back of Rudolf Flesch's invaluable book Why Johnny Can't Read, and What You Can Do About It. But still, what I have written is more a bunch of materials than a book.

If you want to get the file as a zip file in Word Perfect for use with your children, you can e-mail me for it, and we should be able to do that. I have now successfully used the zip function at least once for sending a folder of these things when they were all in separate files. Perhaps this means I've joined the 21st century! The point of having a Word Perfect version is that you can make changes to it for use with your child. These might involve just adding more words at some point, but they also might involve changing the font size if it's too big or too small for your child, or putting the list into a different color.

One of the best things about having the materials in a single file is that I've included a Table of Contents. This allows you to see more or less at a glance what is there. I've also discussed what is there at greater length in a little introductory note at the very beginning. Some parents may want to pick and choose lists for types of words their children are having special trouble on, though the course is cumulative, so if your child hasn't had some of the earlier concepts, he may not be able to read the later lists if you simply jump forward. Still, feel free to browse and use what you find useful.

I would say that the course has a little bit of a "Christian" feel to it, but not strongly so. The words 'God', 'sin', and 'church' are all used, and several of the illustrative sentences when the student is learning the "ch" blend refer to going to church. All of these words are regular and phonetic, so they make excellent illustrations for phonics reading. But the majority of the materials have no special ideological "flavor" at all, that I can see, unless (in the later lessons) you consider "somewhat hard" to be an ideological flavor. :-)

I trust it will be of some value to parents.

Prayer to Allah comes to UK public schools

As you've probably seen elsewhere on the blogosphere, two boys in a public school in the UK were punished with detention for refusing to kneel down on prayer mats and pray to Allah as part of a "religious education" lesson.

But although you've no doubt seen it elsewhere, you haven't heard my two cents, so I might as well give you those two pennies, unasked, just because you were kind enough to drop by.

I think it's a big deal. And I don't think the teacher is going to get in trouble. I think the school officials are going to do precisely nothing to reprimand the teacher but are merely going to tell her that she has to make it clear to her students that this is "role-playing" and that therefore they are, you know, pretending when they kneel down on the prayer mats and pray to Allah. And that will make it all okay.

As you also probably know, there is already a similar curriculum in place in California, which our courts, always so very solicitous to avoid any appearance of an establishment of religion, have declared constitutional on the grounds of role-playing, a ludicrous defense that would never pass the laugh test were the religion in question Christianity. About the only thing that I can see that is missing in the California curriculum is the prayer mats, but I understand that the teachers have some leeway in how they teach it, so I'm sure some enterprising and creative teacher somewhere in the U.S. will stash some prayer mats in her cupboard and whip them out at the right moment to make the "role-playing" that much more real, just like the teacher in the UK. And woe betide the young Christian who refuses.

If you are a Christian parent, is this the sort of role-playing you would want your child to be doing?

Yet another reason to home school.

(Crossposted to What's Wrong with the World)

Moshe Plesser and the Jerusalem terror attack--Updated

In the recent terror attack with a front-loader in Israel, a young off-duty IDF soldier named Moshe Plesser shot the terrorist three times in the head, putting an end to his rampage. It appears that the terrorist may have previously been wounded by a police shot from the ground. Plesser says himself in the interview that at first, when he got onto the cab of the front loader, the terrorist appeared to have "fainted." But then he revived, shouting, "Allahu Akbar," and began driving forward again. At that point Moshe got a gun from another bystander, local security guard Oron Ben-Shimon, and managed to shoot the murderer repeatedly without harming the policeman who was also in the cab. Moshe gave a statement to the media of the "just doing my job" variety, and Ben-Shimon confirms his story here. Moshe thanks God ("G-d") for helping him. Coincidentally, Moshe is the brother-in-law of David Shapira, also in the IDF, who ran into a yeshiva earlier this year and killed a terrorist there, stopping his murderous rampage.

If you go to the very bottom of the entry here, you will find the LiveLeak video of the incident, which is the best one I've seen and gives a clear picture of Moshe shooting the terrorist in the cab. It is after Moshe shoots him several times that a SWAT officer comes up behind him. Reports indicate that the SWAT officer also shot him after Moshe did, but there is no particular reason to think that he was still alive by that time.

This information is all over the Internet, but one reason I am posting it here is because there has been a bizarre Israeli court gag-order banning the publication of Moshe's name. (The Israeli court appears never to have heard of the Internet!) His face has now been blurred out in various pictures of him from the videos (but is clear in the LiveLeak video). And a Jerusalem Post article that previously named him and published part of his statement has now had to redact its article to remove his name. See a quote from the unredacted JPost story here, along with a good still shot from the video. The redacted story is here.

Some have speculated that the ban on Plesser's name and picture may be a result of security concerns, since Plesser is in an elite IDF unit. But my own take is that a real security person would realize the pointlessness of such a ban from a security perspective, given the wide availability of the information and of Plesser's picture. A petty bureaucrat who begrudges the man credit in his own country, however, might have a slightly different perspective. This impression is borne out by the publication of an Orwellian foreign ministry article on the subject that leaves out any mention of Plesser at all, even under an initial, and states that "police shot and killed" the terrorist.

An irony in all of this is that Plesser was beaten senseless by Israeli police when he was photographing protests against the expulsion of Jews from their Gaza homes in '05. So far from holding a grudge against his country for this police brutality, he argued the IDF into letting him in and, yesterday, saved more of his countrymen from an Arab murderer. The Arab murderer, on the other hand, has apparently never been beaten senseless by Israeli police, but international media are falling over themselves, disgustingly, making excuses for him.

Finally, I wish to note that the point I made in this comment, and in the surrounding thread generally, about how it is healthy to have heroes who defend the innocent by fighting, applies in spades to Moshe Plesser, whom I mention in the comment.

Update: Haaretz reports that it was Plesser himself who put the request in for a gag order. His brother-in-law, David Shapira, had advised him to stay away from reporters, and apparently this was one part of his attempt to stay out of the limelight. Assuming this report is true, it still seems rather pointless, given the fact that his name was already widely known. Information can't be constrained in that way in the information age, especially given the heroic nature of the act.

Be a Vegan, Kill Bambi!

From Wesley J. Smith, Here's a perspective on veganism that had never occurred to me before, I being a city slicker and knowing next to nothing about farming. I think Foxfier's vivid account in the first comment of trying to chase fawns out of the field before the harvesting machine gets them--an effort that is sometimes sadly not successful--brings the point home very well.

Conservatives must decisively reject Buchanan's Holocaust revisionism

It just gets worse and worse. I am exceedingly disappointed in World Net Daily for publishing this article by Pat Buchanan. If WND has a long-running relationship with Buchanan such that it feels it has to publish such things by him, then this is the time to sever any such relationship.

In the interests of full disclosure, I must admit that long ago--I can't even remember for sure how long ago, but I think it was in 1988--I once voted for Pat Buchanan in a Republican primary. Well, that was then; this is now. I'm certainly older and hopefully wiser now, not to mention better informed. And I don't think Buchanan was spewing this vicious nonsense then, though even then I had a vague feeling of disquiet about what I knew was his dislike of Israel. That, of course, was before the blogosphere and very nearly before the Internet, so information was not as widely available then as it is now.

What is the worst thing Buchanan says in the above linked article? This:

But for the six years before Britain declared war, there was no Holocaust, and for two years after the war began, there was no Holocaust. Not until midwinter 1942 was the Wannsee Conference held, where the Final Solution was on the table....The Holocaust was not a cause of the war, but a consequence of the war. No war, no Holocaust.

You get that? Buchanan says there was no Holocaust before the Wannsee Conference in midwinter of 1942. And if nasty old England and presumably America hadn't kept going with the war, if they had found some way to end the war before midwinter of 1942, there would have been no Holocaust at all. Hence the article's title: "Was the Holocaust Inevitable?"

Perhaps it is from reading Buchanan's sort of unblushing balderdash that some people have gotten the impression that there were no concentration camps in 1939. (See the discussion here and here.)

As the quotation shows, Buchanan claims that there was no Holocaust prior to midwinter of 1942 by defining "the Holocaust" as not beginning until the Wannsee Conference. This redefinition is so misleading that it is hard to refrain from calling Buchanan an outright liar. Indeed, he probably in one sense knows more than I do about the events of 1939-1942, yet he makes such a bald claim without so much as a qualifier or explanation. I make no claim to expertise, but I do know how to use Google and read a timeline. So let's look at a few facts.

(Note: The dates in what follows are all taken from the Yad Vashem timeline, which can be accessed by clicking through a couple of links starting here. For some strange reason, there are no separate URLs that appear for the different links, nor even for the separate timelines for groups of years--e.g., 1939-1941. I find this rather frustrating, as it prevents me from putting in links to each of the facts I cite separately. In the absence of such different links, I will give dates for each item. To check the timeline, go to the general link, click on "Chronology," then click on the group of years in question and scroll down to the particular date. The dates are also clickable, and I am getting my specifics from the brief paragraph that comes up when you click on the date.)

Jews in Poland were forced to begin wearing the Jewish badge on November 23, 1939.

The Lodz ghetto was sealed on April 30, 1940.

The Warsaw ghetto was sealed on November 15, 1940.

The Auschwitz-Birkenau camp began construction on March 1, 1941

German Jews were forced to wear the Jewish badge beginning on September 19, 1941.

The first experimental gassings took place at Auschwitz on September 3, 1941.

The Zhitomir ghetto in the Ukraine was liquidated on September 19, 1941.

In Kiev, the Germans liquidated over 30,000 Jews by gunfire after forcing them to march in ranks towards the guns, on September 29-30, 1941.

The Vitebsk ghetto in Belorussia was liquidated on October 8, 1941.

The Germans began deporting Jews from Austria and Germany to Eastern European ghettos on October 15, 1941.

Eichmann approved the use of mobile gas vans as killing machines on October 25, 1941.

The gas vans began to be used at Chelmno by December 8, 1941.

And all of this is only a sample. I could have given even more examples of massacres, mass deportations, and mass imprisonments of Jews in concentration camps, all before the Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942, where officials discussed how to make the systematic murder of European Jewry better organized and more efficient.

If you knew of someone who was killed in one of the liquidated ghettos before the Wannsee Conference, would you not say that he died in the Holocaust? What about the Jews systematically murdered in Kiev and elsewhere? If you heard of a child who escaped from one of the sealed ghettos and was taken in and passed as a Christian child by a Catholic family and survived, would you not say that he survived the Holocaust? Were not the building of extermination camps, the requirement for the Jewish badge, and the quarantining of Jews in ghettos in the first place obviously part and parcel of the Holocaust even before the actual murders of those specific Jews took place? The questions are hardly worth asking.

I can't help wondering not only how Buchanan can square his conscience with such blatant falsehoods as those he tells in his article but also how these falsehoods are intended to help his case. In what way is the ever-more-fervent murder of European Jews supposed to have been a response by Hitler to the fact that the war was going badly for him? It makes no sense to say, "Ah, Britain won't make peace with me. I know what I'll do. I'll start sending Jews to extermination camps by the trainloads. That will help." Yet this is, bizarrely, the thinking Buchanan apparently attributes to Hitler, while at the same time having the gall to refer dismissively to the "Hitler madman theory." Are we to think that, if England had made peace with Hitler and acquiesced in his rule over the places he had conquered prior to 1942, he would have stopped all massacres of Jews (like the ones already sealed in ghettos but not yet liquidated)? Or is the theory simply that the slaughter would have taken place more gradually? Hardly a comforting thought.

I hate to have to say this, but someone who can say what Buchanan says in this article is seriously out of touch with reality and, I believe, with the sheer evil of the Holocaust itself. I would not be overwhelmingly surprised if he sinks yet lower in the years to come in his revisionism of the events of World War II. He who hears will understand.

Modest Clothing moment--Lilies Apparel

I like to get out tips to people about modest clothes for girls. It's one of my things. Moms can waste a lot of time looking in the stores for modes girls' clothes. My advice is that for the most part you can write the stores off, except for buying boys' clothes. I buy lots of boys' shirts and shorts for my girls. But for dresses, fuhgetaboutit.

So it occurred to me that I should used blogdom to promote Lilies Apparel, a dress-making business from Kansas run by what appears to be a Mennonite family. The products are very nice. More details in the sister post (can posts be sisters?) at W4.

Oh, one nit-picky detail I didn't mention there: If you are trying to figure out what size to order, measure across the shoulders and chest of a dress that the person in question wears, and then be willing for the dress from Lilies to be a little bigger in those measurements, given that women's and girls' clothes these days tend to be rather too tight. But don't measure the girl herself. The inches given in their size charts are the inches for the relevant parts of the dress.

A very important paper bag

I just got back from the grocery store with a bag that says (Lydia is not making this up), "This is a recyclable bag that will reduce greenhouse gases and save our planet."

I'm not sure which is worse, the writer's naivete about environmentalism or the fact that he probably has no idea that what he wrote means that one paper bag will save the planet.

L.A. right on the money

There is an excellent thread about Buchanan's "unnecessary war" nonsense, about which I'm not sure I can speak without saying something flaming, at VFR here.

I've run into the "unnecessary war" thesis before, from (where else?) the paleo right. I first got an inkling of how far it might go from the highly uncomfortable discussion of WWII in Thomas Woods's otherwise very good libertarian-flavored Politically Incorrect Guide to American History. He more or less asks the question asked of Auster in the thread, "Just how many Jews did World War II save anyway?" Not in so many words, but by implication. Woods says something to the effect that, hey, most of the Jews of Europe were dead anyway by the time the allies liberated it so...(So what?)

And I've seen the whole spiel in other paleo contexts and in personal conversations. It makes me angry. It also, obviously, makes Auster angry, and he's better than I am at answering it, instead of just (as I'm tempted to do) spluttering in horrified fury and wanting to blast or ban somebody for even toying with the idea that we all should have appeased Hitler more, that what Hitler did was none of our business, and so forth.

But let's not kid ourselves. Of course this all has a contemporary edge to it, doesn't it? One of the best things Auster says in that thread is that we should not talk about Hitler as if he was rational. Yes. Precisely. But isn't this what one runs into the twisty-dovish paleo right with regard to our enemies now? And Israel's enemies, too. The "Palestinians" are to be thought of as rational, rather than (as every bit of evidence coming out of their mouths, official pronouncements, published maps, and TV programing indicates) insanely committed to the destruction of Israel. The Iranians, of course, are to be thought of as rational. Even Osama bin Laden is grist to their mill. (The leftists are in on that one, too.) Why, didn't you know? Saudi Arabia is holy ground to Osama, who is from a Saudi family, and America had (gasp!) troops stationed there. Why, if we would only understand ol' Osama, we could deal with him. He has his goals, and they are at least somewhat understandable. And so forth. So we get to the R.P. theory of 9/11--It was the fault of American foreign policy.

The paleos sometimes get angry when the neocons make 1939 analogies about the rantings of the man Auster calls "Johnnie," old "Israel must disappear," of Iran. Yet they themselves positively invite such comparisons by showing the rest of us that they are prepared to regard anyone, however evil, however committed to genocide and destruction, as merely another rational actor on the foreign policy scene, and to be negotiated with (aka appeased) as such. When they hail a revisionist history that says what a great thing it would have been if the West had treated even Hitler himself in this manner, why should they complain when we connect the dots?

It all makes me ill. I'll have none of it, and nothing to do with it. But I applaud Auster's and his readers' dissection of it.

To my comrades in the cause of the unborn child

Byhrtwold grasped his shield and spoke.
He was an old companion. He brandished his ash-spear
and most boldly urged on the warriors:
"Mind must be the firmer, heart the more fierce
courage the greater, as our strength diminishes...."

"The Battle of Maldon," Anglo-Saxon poem, translation by Kevin Crossley-Holland

When a cause is losing, that is the very time when it is most worth fighting for. In fact, it may well be that the only causes worth fighting for are those that are, or appear, to be lost in earthly terms. That your side has seen no results of the sort it hoped for, even for many years, is in no way an argument for endorsing the other side. If the Enemy can say that he has won the souls of the last defenders of the innocent, will that not be his greatest triumph of all?

Why missions matters

To the debate about Muslim takeovers of Western countries, that is.

I wrote to a correspondent recently in e-mail that the low-church Protestants are the canaries in the mine for Muslim oppression of Christians in erstwhile free Western nations. As an exhibit I offer the case discussed in my recent post on W4 concerning two Baptists (Americans long-resident in England) who were forbidden by a Muslim policeman from passing out Christian literature and trying to engage Muslims in religious conversation in a so-called "Muslim area." In the thread on that post, M.Z. Forrest, one of the commentators, actually said, "Why is it always American martyrs? Perhaps they deserve it." (He later said in the thread that this comment wasn't "completely serious.")

Now, I wonder if there is a hint there, too, of the idea that anybody who goes standing on street corners passing out Bible extracts and trying to witness to Muslims cold-turkey "deserves what he gets," because that's such a weird and crass thing to do. Of course, M.Z. didn't say that, and I won't put those words into his mouth.

But it is certainly true that Baptists and their like are a lot more likely than, say, Catholics, to engage in that sort of street evangelism. And it's also true that a lot of people, myself included, are not huge fans of that sort of evangelism, feeling vaguely that it's a little tacky, unlikely to be effective, a case of "bugging people," and so forth.

But the more I have thought about it the more I realize that the matter of evangelism is crucial for the whole question of dhimmitude. While Our Lord didn't say, "Go ye into all the world and pass out tracts on street corners," he did say, "Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel." While some people are called to missions more than others, and some people are called to engage in evangelism in different ways than others are, the Great Commission hasn't been rescinded.

And it's flatly incompatible with dhimmitude. I made that point in this exchange with Jim Kalb on the subject of whether Islam "has room for" Christianity. This is something I've never heard anyone else say: Christians are supposed to try to spread their faith. Islam makes converting from Islam to Christianity punishable by death. It is thus no accident that Christian missions are illegal in Muslim countries like, say, Iran. So in a sense, anti-dhimmitude is built into Christianity. We aren't allowed to ask nothing more of the world than to be let alone. We are called upon by the very nature of our religion to stand up, be men, and try to lead others to the light of Christ.

The trouble is unfortunately that some Christians don't realize all of this. Some Christians think that Islam "has a place for" Christianity so long as one is sophisticated and sensitive enough to keep quiet and to leave other people alone, not to do offensive, low, uncouth, things like standing on street corners passing out tracts and preaching to total strangers.

But this isn't true. Consider this story from Iran. An Iranian Christian woman gave sewing lessons. In the course of her sewing lessons, some of the women she was teaching came to know about her Christianity and were attracted to it. One of them, from a fanatical family, converted. The convert had to run away, and the seamstress was punished by the family for her role in the conversion. She had no legal recourse. The judge told her it was her fault and that she should be happy nothing worse had happened to her. So even quietly testifying to your faith in a natural manner to interested people is not permitted. And understandably enough. Remember, the penalty to one who converts is death, so there must be some penalty for being deliberately instrumental in conversions.

Worse, some Christians think that we are not called upon to try to witness to people, to try to get them to (as the negative phrase now is) "change their religion." And I am afraid that some "interfaith efforts" have contributed to this confusion. Once again, the fundamentalist types are the ones warning us about this. Maybe they have a point. Maybe we should listen.

So it's an interesting connection: The confused ideas about evangelism and the negative image of evangelism (now sometimes called "proselytizing," which indicates the shift) among some Christians have arisen independently of the rise of Islam in the West. But that negative image has left a weak spot, so that when low-Protestant missionaries get into trouble, I fear that there is a feeling of "that doesn't have that much to do with me" that goes around and that enables people to say that Islam "has a place" for Christianity. But actually, it doesn't, because it has no place for proselytizing, and we are called to proselytize.

Y.D. Blogs

Y.D. being Youngest Daughter.

Not really, of course. But she expressed herself rather forcefully about a matter of public policy today, so Eldest Daughter tells me that I should blog it to make sure that this young Michigander's voice is heard--she being a future voter.

We just learned today that effective July 1, all children under age 8 who are not yet 4' 9" tall will have to sit in a special car booster seat. Y.D. has been very happy to be a big girl and use a seatbelt, and I've been very happy not to lug about a special carseat, transfer it from car to car when necessary, and figure out the convoluted way it's supposed to be fastened. It's also been nice for her to be able to clip herself in and get herself out. But now it's back to the old grind for several more years.

Y.D., upon being told the news, informed us in loud tones, "That's darn-goned nonsense and balderdash!!!" Also, "I'll make them not have that law!"

Now you know that I use the same silly euphemisms at home that I use on the Web, though I don't recall ever actually using 'darngoned' before, but it's close to 'doggoned', which I do use frequently.

So the darngoned thing is ordered from Target. At least the reviewers tell me it's lightweight. We must be thankful for small blessings. The old carseat, long since sent to carseat heaven, weighed a ton. Sigh.

The FLDS fiasco and the lust for power

I've been following the FLDS fiasco at Jeff Culbreath's blog. His latest post on the subject is here.

I admit to being the kind of person who fantasizes about making the world right. From time to time I realize that this is not really a healthy habit of mind. But sometimes I get exceedingly upset about people who, for example, raise their children to hate Jews so much that they idolize suicide bombers and hope to grow up to be like them. Some of the things coming out of Palestinian media are beyond depressing. I've got a whole file of the links, including interviews with and Palestinian media depictions of the children of Rim, a woman suicide bomber. "How many Jews did Mommy kill?" and so forth. It's almost too much to bear, watching these children's minds be corrupted. LGF sometimes has stuff about Hamas children's television. It's just about beyond belief. And I have sometimes toyed with the idea that people who are going to teach their children these twisted ideas could, quite justly, have all their children taken away from them so that they couldn't poison their minds like this anymore. The children could be raised by, I don't know, Mother Teresa's nuns or something.

But even though I would stand by the idea that Hamas's Jew-eating bunny (they had a Mouse and a Bee, too, but in the TV show's imaginary world the Israelis killed them), the various horrific inciting commercials, and the school curricula and school programs that glorify murder to the children may and should justly be suppressed, the terrible mess caused by Child Protective Services' power trip in our own Texas, U.S.A., has caused me to realize that you have to let parents mess up kids' minds. That is to say, it is not just cause for removing children forcibly from their parents that the parents are teaching the children pernicious ideas, even if they really are pernicious ideas. Most of the time I'm sufficiently sane to realize this and am, indeed, something of a parental rights watchdog, but sometimes (after I've been reading too much about Muslims and Palestinians), it's good for me to be reminded.

I have no doubt that the CPS workers were sincere. That's part of the problem, isn't it? Lawrence Auster is always pointing out that conservatives should take liberals more seriously. What he means is that liberals aren't just doing what they do to aggrandize themselves. Many of them are true believers. I suppose I'd say that self-aggrandizement and sincerity are compatible. The CPS workers decided that this cult was just bad, bad, bad, that children shouldn't be raised in it, and they went in with no deference to the rule of law and grabbed over 400 children of all ages, every single child down to the infant born yesterday, in one fell swoop! By their own representation, what was supposed to be so bad was that underage girls were being married against their will. Even granting this, what the dickens does this have to do with newborn babies? Since when do the laws of the United States or the State of Texas permit the confiscation of infants on the grounds that they may be raised to sanction or participate in underage or even forced marriage? But all the indications are that the CPS just decided that this whole sub-society had to be brought to an end. Finis. Done.

Frankly, if I had breathed a word of the idea that Palestinian children should be taken from their death-cult-teaching parents so that they would not be raised in that fashion, the word "genocide" would not have been long in coming to the lips of readers. But oddly enough, the fact that CPS was trying, by the confiscation of the next generation, to wipe this weird polygamist sect from the face of the earth was not called this by anyone that I know of. Fortunately, though, there still is a rule of law in the state of Texas, and it looks as if CPS and Judge Barbara Walther may get a bit of a slap-down from the higher courts over their abuse of power.

Lord Acton was undoubtedly right: "Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely." And the power to snatch children is somewhere pretty high up on the scale towards absolute power.

So I don't want it, and I'm glad I don't have it. And perhaps we should pray for the souls of the CPS workers who think they do have it, and who think they can wield it to wipe out bad ideas. For it is surely a corrupting thing.

What's a vote? New post at W4

I have a new post at W4 that has been the product of much thought, though I had for a while decided that it would never actually be written. It's on the nature of the vote. It has been prompted by the crazy news that some so-called pro-lifers are considering voting for Barak Obama. To my mind the best comment on this was by my co-blogger Zippy in a combox:

This may be our first genuinely postmodern election cycle. "Zionists for Hitler!"

I couldn't have said it better myself. But as I do have more to say on the meaning of voting, I've said it, here.

But feel free to comment here, if you like. :-)

Comments moderation removed

Dear readers,

I have removed comments moderation and the requirement for blogger ID for the time being. You will have to do one of those things where you type the word you see. I hope that this will work well.

A joke about penguins

I had been drafting a really depressing post about a book I'm re-reading (In the Beginning, one of his third-tier ones) by Jewish novelist Chaim Potok and about how Israel isn't defending herself and stuff, but it will have to wait. I got so depressed trying to write it that it's still in draft.

So to go along with the extremely profound post below about ziploc bags, herewith a joke I found on Dawn Eden's blog:

A policeman is out on patrol when he sees a man driving a convertible with a bunch of penguins in the back seat. The cop pulls him over and says, "Hey, you can't drive around with a bunch of penguins like that. I want you to take those penguins to the zoo right now!" The driver says, "Sure thing, officer. Right away. I don't want any trouble." And the policeman lets him drive off. The next day the policeman sees the same guy out with the same penguins, only this time they're wearing dark glasses and bathing suits. So he pulls him over. "Hey! I thought I told you to take those penguins to the zoo yesterday." The man looks a little puzzled. "Yes, sir, officer. I did just as you said. Today they want to go to the beach."

I really like that one.

Ziploc bags--Supply creates its own demand

I tried really hard to think of something profound to say about Pentecost, today being that feast. But nothing came to mind. So rather than bore you with my uninspired thoughts about the Holy Ghost, or even about the collect for Pentecost, I thought I would talk about something I know a lot more about. Ziploc bags.

Why in the world? (I hear you ask.) Well, because I was putting something into a ziploc bag the other evening, and it suddenly occurred to me that I understand now the good sense in which supply creates its own demand. (This, as all of you know, is a saying in economics.) Now, we all have heard people talk about how terrible it is for manufacturers to create by advertising a desire in people for something they never previously wanted. It's supposed to be a form of stimulating lust and so forth. It can be made to sound faintly indecent--making people think they need something that they manifestly don't need. It's easiest to make it sound bad if you get on a roll talking about bigger cars or about food that is probably going to make people fat and isn't good for them anyway. Whiny kids and breakfast cereal commercials are another good target.

But I would bet that I'm not that much over the average age of the people in my audience of, oh, two to five people who will ever read this post. And so I'll bet most of you can remember a world without ziploc bags. Remember? All my toys used to be tumbled into a big padded white toy box. It was like I was putting them away in a padded cell. A very messy padded cell, and one that got dirtier and dirtier as the years went by, so that eventually it was grey and the plastic torn, and I would find pieces of long-forgotten toys rattling around inside. Even if my parents had wanted to be good citizens and give away my toys to the poor(er) as I outgrew them (I having no younger siblings), they couldn't have, because every set and everything with parts was separated into its component parts, which were scattered to the four winds. Or piled into the toy box.

Leftover food had to be kept in tupperware. This was after tupperware. But if it got forgotten in the fridge, the tupperware had mold on it, which might or might not wash off. You couldn't just throw it away. You had to try to scrub it. And sometimes the tupperware lost its seal, or the plastic wrap didn't cling, or one was foolish enough to use tinfoil, which didn't really seal out air, and stuff got completely dried out. (I just recently got rid of a lot of old tupperware.)

And don't even get me started talking about what one did with the pieces from half-finished jigsaw puzzles, nuts and bolts that were no longer in their blister packs, or tiny little lego pieces.

The world needed ziploc bags. The world didn't know that it needed ziploc bags, but it did. Big ones, medium-sized ones, and small ones.

Is need relative? Sure it is. I would rather have the food (that gets dry if not well-sealed) and no ziploc bags to seal it in than have the bags and no food. Right. Check. I'm there.

But the minute whoever-he-was (I haven't googled to try to find out) invented ziploc bags, the world woke up and began to think about how, if it could afford this new product, it could solve a lot of niggly, annoying, practical problems in storage.

My kids have a building toy called Wedgits. I recommend it, with the proviso that if you have more than one child of any age from two to fifteen years old, they will probably squabble over these things. They are very cool. You can build all kinds of fascinating shapes with them. They come in an interesting box that has a plastic storage piece in the bottom. If you put the set of Wedgits together perfectly into the three-dimensional shape of a diamond, the diamond, containing all the Wedgits in that set, will fit back into the storage unit it came in. But who has the time to figure out how to do that every time? And I want the four-year-old to be able to pick up for herself. Ziploc bags.

In other words, and to put it prosaically, this was a case where people did not lust over something that was bad for them or that they should not want as a result of the desire-creation of the market. They looked at something, ingeniously designed, that would help make their lives more efficient, they discovered that it was cheap enough for them to afford, and they rationally decided to buy it. Supply created its own demand, and the rest is history.

I'm for it.

Blessed Feast of the Ascension

The feast of the Ascension has been one of my favorite church holy days for a long time. It celebrates all that great stuff from the Epistle to the Hebrews: Jesus is both man and God. Therefore, when Jesus goes back to heaven where he "sitteth on the right hand of the Father," man has actually been exalted to the heavens in Christ. This was the first time that a resurrected human body had gone to heaven. Even though Elijah had apparently been taken up living into heaven, he didn't have a glorified body. We aren't told what happened to his ordinary body, but presumably he has to wait for the resurrection of the dead along with the rest of us for his resurrection body. Jesus was, as Paul says in I Corinthians, "the firstfruits of them that sleep." He was the first one to be risen in a new body that will never die. So when he ascended into heaven, he took that glorified humanity back to the Father, where it had never been before. From there he intercedes for us, for as Hebrews says, he is a fitting high priest for us, having both offered himself for our sins and also being human as we are.

My impression is that Ascension did not always have an octave. Cranmer wrote his own collect for the Sunday after Ascension, basing it on a song that the Venerable Bede is supposed to have sung on his deathbed. Here are both collects for Ascension.

Grant, we beseech thee, Almighty God, that like as we do believe thy only begotten Son our Lord Jesus Christ to have ascended into the heavens; so we may also in heart and mind thither ascend, and with him continually dwell, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end. Amen.


O God, the King of glory, who hast exalted thine only Son Jesus Christ with great triumph unto thy kingdom in heaven; We beseech thee, leave us not comfortless; but send to us thine Holy Ghost to comfort us, and exalt us unto the same place whither our Saviour Christ is gone before, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the same Holy Ghost, one God, world without end. Amen.

P.S. On a mundane note, and in case anyone else has this problem, I figured out how to turn on "sent items" in Yahoo mail. George was no help. The relevant thing to click is hidden over in mail options.

New Post on W4 plus the Amazing Disappearing Sent Items

My blogging time this week went into a new post at What's Wrong with the World on a disturbing thing--disturbing to me anyway--I'm starting to learn about forced upward mobility in the corporate world. It's here.

Plus, my conservative soul is vexed to find that Yahoo has changed my e-mail format. Why do they do that? It was fine. Of course, they play it as a great improvement. Can't say I see it. One nifty new aspect is the disappearance of the "save sent items" feature. The "sent items" folder is still there. You just can't turn it on. I haven't found out yet if this is a judgement for my having had it turned off. I don't like to save everything I send, so I usually have it off. Now there's no way to turn it on anymore. I've written to Yahoo help about this three (count 'em, three) times. Each time I get a cute note from what is obviously a computer calling itself George (I hate computers with names) telling me that, because Yahoo likes to provide fast and efficient service, they aren't going to answer my question. It's a pretty simple question: "Has the save sent items feature really disappeared, or is the button just moved? If the former, could you please put the feature back again? I was using it sometimes." But no answer. Just a repeated link to a help page which, of course, doesn't mention this topic.

I definitely think they need to get some good, capitalist customer service going at Yahoo. And they should fire George. I don't think he has a wife computer and baby computers at home to support.

Easter IV

The collect for the fourth Sunday after Easter reads as follows:

O Almighty God, who alone canst order the unruly wills and affections of sinful men; Grant unto thy people, that they may love the thing which thou commandest, and desire that which thou dost promise; that so, among the sundry and manifold changes of the world, our hearts may surely there be fixed, where true joys are to be found; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Why is this such a great collect? I'm gilding the lilies even to talk about it, but I feel that not enough attention is paid to the great collects of the Prayer Book and that they deserve that we should stop and think about them and, of course, pray them.

Verbally, it is one of those works of liturgical genius which really cannot be improved upon--or at least can't be improved upon anymore. Cranmer translated it from the Latin, but in 1662 the Restoration Prayer Book revisers added the invocation "O God, who alone canst order the unruly wills and affections of sinful men." As is so often the case with the Prayer Book, it is amazing that men spaced hundreds of years apart in history should have worked so well together to create the final product. Any sensible person nowadays should shudder at the words "liturgical revision." But the 1662 guys could put something in that really worked.

For the rest of the collect asks God to do something for us that we know from experience is very hard to do. Do we most of the time love and desire what we are commanded by God to love and desire? "Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness..." Oh, bother the kingdom of God and righteousness! I want another cup of coffee! I want some potato chips and a fun book! I want some time to myself. I want lovely weather. I want a day off. I want, I want, I want. Not bad things. But not the kingdom of God, either. "If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above....Set your affections on things above, not on things on the earth. For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God." (The epistle reading for Easter Day.) But how can I seek those things which are above, when I can't even picture them? I don't know what heaven will be like. I don't know what I'll be doing. I don't know what, exactly, it means to desire union with God or the Beatific Vision. So how do I set my affections on them and not on things on the earth?

And so forth. So the revisers were on to something when they put that bit in there about how God is the only one who can order our unruly wills and affections. And Cranmer describes, then, what we want God to do for us--make us love the things that God commands, and desire what God promises. To fix our hearts there where true joys are to be found.

What does God promise? That he will wipe away all tears from our eyes; that there will be no more death nor crying. That he will make us holy and like himself.

Sometimes we have to take it on faith that these are the true joys, because we don't naturally feel that way. Other times, it's easy. It doesn't matter. As Lewis said, our feelings are only things that happen to us. But our hearts are more than our feelings. Our hearts include our unruly wills. And that's why God sends so many sundry and manifold changes into the world. Or at least allows them. They make us long for the patria: "They confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth. Wherefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he hath prepared for them a city."

What that means is that praying this collect may be inviting some unpleasantness in life, as unpleasantness does, unfortunately, seem sometimes to be required in order to make us love what God commands and desire what he promises. But part of the genius of the collect is that it works, like all great rhetoric, upon the emotions and will. Praying it quiets one's heart and makes one realize that, yes, indeed, true joys are to be found somewhere else, and we should desire to have them, whatever that takes.

So I offer you the collect for the fourth Sunday after Easter, which the editors of The Collects of Thomas Cranmer call "one of the high points of Anglican theology." And I hope it will be of value to you.

It's okay to push molecules around

I apologize to my long-suffering readers here at Extra Thoughts, if I retain any, for my silence in the last couple of weeks. Spring has finally come to this part of the world, very beautifully indeed. This does not make me any more busy, but it does lead me to drink my afternoon coffee outside and soak up a little sunshine instead of blogging. Which is probably all to the good.

You will see another post or two in the next couple of days, especially since tomorrow's collect is one of the very best in the whole Prayer Book, so I have to blog it. (There, I'm committed.)

But over at What's Wrong with the World I have a deliberately provocative post up about divine and even human intervention in nature. Not very profound. More in the nature of a rhetorical sock to the jaw for people who get all icky about the idea that anybody might push molecules around. Molecules, in my opinion, were meant to be pushed.

Hymn of the Week--Onward, Christian Soldiers

About five years ago a friend said to me, quite confidently, "Do you know what the subtitle of 'Onward, Christian Soldiers' is? 'Crusader's Hymn.'"

It's surprising that so short a statement can contain more than one egregious falsehood, but this one manages it, rather as if I were to point across the room and say, "My uncle over there is a dentist" when in fact I have no uncle and the man across the room is a hockey player.

To begin with, and as my readers probably know, hymns do not have subtitles, and the words under the title of the hymn actually are the name of the tune. Tune names make it easy for hymnodists to mix and match. The practice of naming tunes separately and writing words for them evidently goes back at least as far as the Psalms, where we sometimes find directions at the top of a Psalm along the lines of, "For my chief musician. To be sung to the tune 'Lilies'." The connection between tunes and hymn words is exceedingly varied, and most of the time the tune name has nothing whatsoever to do with the content of the words with which we most often sing the tune.

But it doesn't end there. The actual name of the tune to which we now sing "Onward, Christian Soldiers" is not "Crusader's Hymn" but rather the entirely unmilitary and humorous "St. Gertrude." The words were originally sung to a different tune, until the famous Arthur Sullivan wrote this tune to go with them in 1871 and facetiously named it after the wife of a friend of his. I don't know whether he told everyone that this was the origin of the name or whether he was trying to create a puzzle for posterity as everyone hunted for a fictitious connection to St. Gertrude, but if the latter, he has been foiled by, inter alia, the information age. (Search "Gertrude" on the page.)

As a matter of fact, "Crusader's Hymn" is really the name of the tune to "Fairest Lord Jesus," than which nothing less militaristic can be conceived, either musically or in terms of content. Just to make things thoroughly confusing, this tune is also sometimes called St. Elizabeth. I have no idea why the one tune has two different names.

As Darwin observed, false facts are an injurious thing. I never did find out where my friend got that particular factoid. I must assume that it circulates along with other unchecked statements in a sort of spoken version of Wikipedia among slightly leftish evangelical Christians who dislike military language.

By the way, I discovered my favorite verse of this hymn last evening when someone chose it at our hymn sing. Here's verse 2:

At the sign of triumph Satan’s host doth flee;
On then, Christian soldiers, on to victory!
Hell’s foundations quiver at the shout of praise;
Brothers lift your voices, loud your anthems raise.

I like that image of hell's foundations quivering and Satan's host fleeing. May it be so.

Latimer supporters threaten Mark Pickup

...but he does not submit. See Mark's story about Robert Latimer, who murdered his disabled daughter and is proud of it, here. I've also blogged about the attempts to silence Mark at What's Wrong With the World, here.