Pseudo-capitalism and pseudo-hunting

Over on What's Wrong with the World, we've had another thread about the bailout. I've come out firmly on the side of government's not bailing companies out and not insuring everybody and his uncle. My basic position is that we only think that government can fix these things, whereas in fact the attempt to have the government make wealth out of nothing to save people from the consequences of their actions only makes the bubbles bigger and the falls harder in the long run. I suppose occasionally we might get away with doing stupid things, but you keep doing stupid things long enough, expecting Uncle Midas Sam to create gold out of lead and save you every time, and eventually it catches up with you. Basic Austrian economics stuff, which I gather appears totally crazy to most people. (And which I realize, if applied, would cause a lot of pain to innocent people as well as careless ones, simply because our present economy has been built on a bubble of national debt and empty government promises, and it would be highly unpleasant to admit that to ourselves now rather than pushing it off onto future generations, forcing them to admit it after the illusion is bigger still.)

Anyway, among other things, some of our commentators (and at least one of my fellow contributors) at W4 want to blame the financial crisis on "unregulated capitalism"--that is, the risky derivatives market that is crashing down. Scorn is heaped on what seems to me the perfectly reasonable point about the push to lend to those who are not credit-worthy and the way this spread into the mortgage market and the economy as a whole. But beyond that, no attempt is made on the part of those who say this is the fault of capitalism to factor in the perverse incentive of the expectation of bailout. Sure, people are greedy. And they may do unsustainable and economically foolish things, hoping to get personally rich, if they think they can get away with them because the government will catch them when they fall if their shenanigans get so big and complicated that their fall would harm lots of innocent people. Basically, it's holding the nation hostage for a bailout. Nice. Very human. But not capitalism, by a long shot. In this context, I typed the following comment, with which I'm very pleased, but for which I haven't quite gotten the standing ovation I was hoping. So here it is, for my small and discerning reading audience here at the ol' personal blog:

It hardly seems reasonable to call it "capitalism" when financiers do crazy, unsustainable things having the "too big to fail" idea in the back of their minds. One of the whole points of capitalism as I have always understood it is precisely that it takes advantage of the hard facts of cause and effect rather than trying to make consequences go away. Bailouts negate the entire real-world, reality-check idea that is absolutely fundamental to capitalism. Calling speculative, unsound money transactions undertaken with the assumption that the government will borrow money and get you out of the soup if things go wrong "capitalism" sounds to me like saying that Junior is "hunting" if he goes out, shoots wildly at trees, shoots himself in the foot, Dad pays the medical bills, and finally a dead 10-point buck that somebody else shot is delivered to the front door with "Junior's deer" on a tag attached to its antlers.

Biblical arguments against suicide

Suppose you were confronted with a Christian, a self-styled fundamentalist, who told you that he does not think suicide is wrong or that he thinks suicide may not be wrong. You know that this person will not accept any pure natural law arguments but only arguments directly from the Bible. What argument could you make?

Soul-losing risk-taking

Over at W4 I've put up a post on the subject of how kids lose their Christian faith in college. Actually, I'm looking for information more than giving it. One theme that comes up again and again in the responses is the theme of the entire atmosphere of a secular college and how the Christian student feels immersed in it, feels lonely as a Christian, perhaps wants to try out some of the hedonistic experimenting his peers are trying, and is therefore almost looking for excuses to throw out his Christianity.

This leads me to wonder seriously about parents who deliberately send their children to live on the campus of a secular university. Nowadays, we have all heard the horror stories about the brain-washing PC residence hall sessions. But even aside from that, as one commentator put it,

It takes a lot of personal fortitude to hold onto what you believe in when everyone around you operates entirely on the presumption that it doesn't even exist. You have to be able to go home at night and think about it, you have to be able to drag yourself out early in the morning and go to church, you have to be able to say "eh, not this time" when good clean fun goes bad.

Right. So surely living in the dorms must make this effect particularly strong. Or so it would seem to me. I mean, what if there is no "home" to go to in order to get away from the atmosphere and think about it?

So I was thinking over reasons why parents and children agree to do this. These seem to me to include things like this: 1) The assumption that going away and living in dorms at college is a necessary part of growing up, an absolute rite of passage that it would be cruel to have your kids miss out on. 2) The worry that sending your child to a Christian college will not get him a good enough education and/or will not allow him to get a job. 3) The worry that sending your child to a local college, so that he can live at home, will not get him a good enough name on his transcript to allow him to get a job. 4) (Related to 3.) The assumption that, despite post-modernism and the death of the academy, there is enough objective difference in quality across disciplines between a more "elite" secular school and a secular school that no one has ever heard of that your child really will get a good education at the former and not at the latter and that you therefore have a duty to send your child away from home to go to the former.

I certainly understand that parents agonize over such decisions, and I don't want to sound harsh. But there is that whole thing in the Gospels about gaining the whole world and losing your own soul. This is not meant as an advertisement for Christian colleges. Christian colleges often have their unique problems, some of which arise from the fact that young people and parents go in trusting them and are therefore particularly vulnerable to faith-attacking professors and trendy movements (like the Emergent Church movement, for example). But I would say this: Question all of 1-4 if you have a decision of this kind to make. And try to do something other than sending your children away to be immersed in the "college experience" of a secular college. For what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?

A little pick-me-up to make you feel Glad

I don't know what it's like where you are, but around here there's a scurry of snow. It's cold, gloomy, and getting dark early in the evenings. I, for one, find it hard to keep the happy feelings that the eye-hurting blue skies of last week brought with them.

I found this video when I watched "Just As I Am," which you'll find in the post below. I'm told it was one of Keith Green's greatest hits, but now I've seen both versions and like Glad's better. This should make you smile, if you don't dislike Christian contemporary music circa 1980 on principal. It's upbeat, high quality musically, and fun. Enjoy.



And the Imeem version:

You Put This Love In My Heart - Glad

A couple of great songs

As I am still working on the proofs (though I see the light at the end of the tunnel), I give you a couple of wonderful musical clips in place of anything more profound. First, "Just As I Am" by Glad, courtesy of Eldest Daughter. Does anyone know if Glad writes its own tunes? This has a sound of an Irish folk tune to me, very much, but I think it is probably original with them. We sing this at Communion at my church. (Not like Glad does it, though!)



Then, via Dawn Eden, here is "Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet." See Dawn's post for the story behind this one.



Update: The video I have embedded of "Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet" appears to have been taken down from Youtube. Unfortunately, the only other Youtube I've been able to find that gives that same version of the song has a fairly weird artsy video to go with it, and I don't want to link it. But the story at Dawn's blog is interesting nonetheless.

Punishments for copy editors

I am correcting page proofs for our 69-page resurrection article (cum additional pages for the bibliography). I am seeking reader input on the following question: What punishment should be reserved in Dante's hades for copy editors who...

--occasionally add commas that make one's sentences mean something different (and silly)?

--don't know that the proper possessive meaning "belonging to Jesus" is "Jesus'"?

--replace the written number "three" in the phrase "after three days" (referring to Jesus' resurrection) with the numeral 3, making it look ridiculous ("after 3 days")?

--replace, uniformly, all one's uses of the word "though" with "although," throughout a 69-page article, apparently using a robotic find and replace function, and without one's knowledge or consent?

--take out the word "to" in the phrase "stands in a relation to," which changes the meaning of the sentence so that it does not make sense?

...

Okay, that's enough. I can't bear to keep listing them. And I'm going to have to induce the publishers to change all this stuff back. I've gotten this far in life with relatively few grey hairs. I expect to have a few more after the next couple of weeks.

I believe in the communion of saints

I was teaching Youngest Daughter the Apostles' Creed a couple of weeks ago. No, not making her memorize it (though she probably could) but just going through it. I always stick a bit at "he descended into hell," because frankly, I don't know what it means. Wish I had ol' Peter here (who is to blame for the phrase) to tell me what it was all about. But by the time I got to "I believe in the communion of saints," I had picked up speed.

And here is approximately what I told her: When Christian people die and go to heaven, we can't see them anymore, and they can't talk to us. But they are still worshipping Jesus Christ. In fact, they are worshipping Him better when they see Him face to face in heaven than they were able to do here on earth. And we are worshipping Jesus Christ, too. So even though we can't be with one another anymore like we are here on earth, we are connected by the fact that we are all followers of Christ, loving Christ, and with Jesus Christ loving and knowing about all of us, whether we are here on earth or in heaven. That is the Church--the Church Militant here on earth and the Church Triumphant in heaven. I reminded her of the part in the liturgy where it says, "And we also bless thy holy name for all thy servants departed this life in thy faith and fear." And finally, I reminded her of that great verse of the hymn "For All the Saints":

O blest communion, fellowship divine.
We feebly struggle; they in glory shine.
Yet all are one in thee, for all are thine.
Alleluia!

I should add, what might (or might not) seem at first blush irrelevant, that my husband has a wonderful annotated bibliography of apologetics works from centuries ago. It's located here. He tells me that he often thinks of those old divines fighting the good fight in their own time when we come to that part on Sundays that says, "And we also bless Thy holy name for all Thy servants departed this life in Thy faith and fear." And I should add that it goes on, "And give us grace so to follow their good example."

Cranmer's collect for All Saints captures perfectly what I regard as a sort of essence of the Anglican via media. It emphasizes the example of the saints and our union with them as servants of the Lord. I cannot forbear noting that neither the collect nor the preface contains any reference to invoking the prayers of nor venerating the saints nor to anything at all distinctively "high church." They are the kinds of bits of liturgy that I would like to offer to evangelicals as an example of what the Prayer Book contains that might enrich their own worship, if only their private worship.

The collect for All Saints:

O Almighty God, who has knit together thine elect in one communion and fellowship, in the mystical body of thy Son Christ our Lord; Grant us grace so to follow thy blessed Saints in all virtuous and godly living, that we may come to those unspeakable joys which thou has prepared for those who unfeignedly love thee; through the same thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The proper preface, with the Sanctus:

Who, in the multitude of thy Saints, hast compassed us about with so great a cloud of witnesses, that we, rejoicing in their fellowship, may run with patience the race that is set before us, and, together with them, may receive the crown of glory that fadeth not away.

Therefore with Angels and Archangels, and with all the company of heaven, we laud and magnify thy glorious Name; evermore praising thee, and saying,

HOLY, HOLY, HOLY, Lord God of hosts, Heaven and earth are full of thy glory: Glory be to thee, O Lord Most High.

Calling all Michiganders--No on Proposal 2

Calling any pro-life Michiganders who happen to be in my reading audience: Next Tuesday, be sure to go to the polls to vote no on Proposal 2. You can get the low-down on Proposal 2 here. The short version is, it would amend the Michigan state constitution so that early embryo-destroying research and experimentation must be allowed to take place in the state unhindered. In other words, if this were put in place, no state or local laws could be passed and enforced at a later time (apparently no laws presently exist) prohibiting, restricting, or even "discouraging" such research.

I was surprised to find one pro-life e-mail correspondent a few weeks ago, a Michigander from the Detroit area, who knew nothing about Proposal 2. So I flatter myself that I got two more votes (assuming I can count his wife as well) against it.

As a side note, there is also a ballot proposal (#1) on this year to legalize "medical marijuana" in Michigan. Vote no on that one, too. My own guess (though I've seen no poll numbers) is that it is slated to go down in flames, but I fear Proposal 2 may be a closer call, though I have there only the general statement that "the polls are close" received in an e-mail, not any hard data.

A Must-See Video

Kleenex alert. You will want to have some on-hand. This is very moving. I do not know where the satellite missionary TV station "Life TV" is based. It broadcasts programs in Arabic all over the world comparing Islam and Christianity with the clear intent to convert Muslims to Christianity. This clip is from a call-in show called "Daring Question." The hosts take a call from a woman named Sana, calling from the UK, who wants to become a Christian but is terrified of her husband. She believes that if he discovers her faith in Jesus Christ, he will divorce her and take her children away. The hosts pray for her and with her.



It is sometimes hard to know what we can do about the Islamic threat to the West. Our leaders seem suicidally bent upon capitulating to the gradual warping of our laws and culture by the introduction of Islamic law (sharia) and culture. In the UK, sharia courts have even been given some sort of quasi-official status, though supposedly both parties have to "agree" to abide by the decisions of the sharia courts. (Wanna bet?) Conservatives propose that we refuse to accommodate Islam in our laws and customs and even that we limit or stop Muslim immigration, but pigs will fly before these suggestions are heeded.

But these men know that they are not helpless. They know that here we have no continuing city, and they are attacking the ultimate "root cause" of the problem--Islam itself--by direct missions efforts. I'm afraid our President really doesn't know what he's talking about when he talks about "winning hearts and minds." But these guys do. They are inviting people to Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the Prince of Peace. May God bless and protect them.

HT: Jihad Watch

Crossposted at What's Wrong with the World

Bob Hope on Zombies

Just in case anyone reads this blog and doesn't read What's Wrong with the World, I just posted this to give us a little comic relief in a tense election season:

Collect of the week--In the morning

I'm sure I've said it before, but the section at the back of the 1928 Prayer Book called "Family Prayer" is unjustly neglected. I would love to see some of the collects from it incorporated into Anglican worship services. The collects have a different feel from those by Cranmer and those translated from the Latin. I have read that this section was published free-standing before it was incorporated into the American 1928 BCP and that its prayers have been attributed to the late 17th century divine Archbishop Tillotson.

The particular one I have in mind here is designated to be prayed in the morning, though it makes just as much sense to pray it at night or at any other time.

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.

This collect has that quality that all good collects have: It says it for you. I have not the slightest bit of trouble praying this collect as a real prayer. It never tempts me to regard it as an empty form of words, because it says so well and so exactly what I truly wish to ask of God.

How many times to I begin an action without a pure intention? Lots. But even if I do begin it with a pure intention, sometimes I continue it when I should backtrack or rethink. I certainly would like the Holy Spirit to nudge me at those times. And then, it's very easy to be weary in well-doing, so when I'm doing what I ought to be doing, what I most need is to be inspired by God's wisdom and upheld by His strength, most particularly by "beholding things invisible and unseen"--being reminded what it's all about.

Great collects, by the way, always pack in biblical allusions. This one is alluding to Paul's prayer for the Ephesians in Ephesians 1, "The eyes of your understanding being enlightened; that ye may know what is the hope of his calling, and what the riches of the glory of his inheritance in the saints, and what is the exceeding greatness of his power to usward who believe..."

And all of that--the opening of the understanding, the strength of God, the intention of the act, and the continual guidance of God in continuing the action--is the path to follow in order to hear that "Well done, thou good and faithful servant."

Recipe--Mama Mia's Pork Chops Italiano

This is the first recipe I have ever published on "Extra Thoughts." I shall have to add a new label. It's me own. I hope the vagueness will not bother readers too much, but I don't, for this particular recipe, measure the spices. I'm publishing it because it is not only easy and tasty but also cheap, which is hard to beat, these days.

Mama Mia's Pork Chops Italiano

*1 1/2 to 2 pounds pork chops (These can be the kind they call "assorted pork chops" in the store--hence, not very expensive.)
*1 can tomatoes, undrained, cut up
*1 medium onion, sliced
*Several tablespoons of vegetable oil (for browning)

Fairly generous amounts (as desired) of...
*salt
*pepper
*garlic powder
*basil
*oregano

Season chops on both sides with all spices. Heat oil. Brown chops on both sides. Arrange in a 9 x 13 pan. Pour tomatoes with liquid over chops. Place onions on top. Cover and bake 30-35 minutes (depending on the thickness of the chops) at 325 degrees.

Serving suggestion: Serve with garlic rolls or garlic bread.

Mark Pickup on the Christian meaning of suffering

I have mentioned Mark Pickup before. (See also here.) He is a Canadian Catholic blogger with multiple sclerosis who writes on issues such as disabilities, suffering, and Christianity. Here he has the notes for a talk he gave on the Christian meaning of suffering.

Whether you are Protestant or Catholic, there is much in what Mark has to say that will have value for you. Here are a few quotations:

If there is no God, then there is no purpose to suffering. The logical response to suffering is suicide. If there is a bad God, then the response of Job’s wife is reasonable: “Curse God, and die.” If, however, there is a good God then there must be is a redeeming value to human suffering, for no good God could possibly permit it were there not.

...

People who advocate or participate in assisted suicide act with the logic of darkness … they are brutes prowling and sniffing over the waiting graves of the defeated. Any civilized society must always condemn assisted suicide in the strongest terms and never legalize or permit it.

...

An atheist once told me that Christianity is a crutch for weak people. He sneered and referred to Jesus as my imaginary friend. Having aggressive multiple sclerosis I know a thing or two about weakness, crutches and wheelchairs too. Jesus is not my imaginary friend – his presence has come into clearer focus the sicker I become. He is truer and more faithful to me than I have ever been to him.

...

The reason for Christ’s Passion and death on the Cross was to settle with God the problem of human sin and evil. Sin and evil kill goodness. We must not overlook or discount this truth. People suffer whenever they experience evil; the ultimate suffering is the loss of eternal life.

Hide Me Behind the Cross (II)

Here are the lyrics.

Verse 1

Lord as I seek to serve You,
May You find in me what's pleasing to Your heart.
I leave my will at Calvary,
Taking on a nature humbled by Your scars.

For I know it's only through Your love,
That who I am is hidden by Your grace.
Let my desires be overshadowed,
As I recall the purpose of that place.


(Chorus)

Hide me behind the cross,
Where my gains become as loss.
And only Your glory is in view.

Your power will be revealed
The more that I am concealed.
Hide me behind the cross
So the world sees only You.

Verse 2

If I rely on my strength
To be a source of hope for those in need,
The only profit I would gain
Would be the empty honor of my deeds.
But with all of self behind Your cross,
The splendor of Your love stands free to shine.
Illuminating with Your power,
Reaching souls so You alone are glorified.

Now, I would be the last to claim that this is high poetry. But when I heard the song for the first time in the car the other day (from this station), it really struck me.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who has repeatedly felt a desire to be of value to other people coupled with a sense of gloom about the probable outcome. "I'll probably annoy so-and-so, or not put it right, or something." And a parent feels this in spades. I don't know about other parents in my wide reading audience, but it happens an uncountable number of times a week that I feel it my duty to tell one of my girls to do things differently, or I have to explain something that they don't understand, and they are annoyed. Mom is the nit-picker. Mom explains about everything from table manners to moral views. Mom has to decide exactly what punishment to mete out to Youngest Daughter (age 5) for, say, lying about whether she did or whether she did not spit on the piano bench and scratch the softened finish off with her fingernails. This is not a popular position to be in. And often the time comes when one just wants to say, "I'm doing more harm than good. I don't know how to do this right."

Now, the Bible, especially in the Pauline epistles, contains plenty of talk about this very odd idea that we do not do things ourselves, that in some sense Christ lives through us. This would no doubt creep out the New Atheist crowd very seriously. "So you mean you're, like, possessed by your imaginary friend?" One can just hear them. Paul says, "I am crucified with Christ. Nevertheless I live. Yet not I, but Christ liveth in me. And the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me."

Wouldn't it be a tremendous relief to be hidden behind the cross? Okay, so we can't literally get out of that human stuff. One still has to tell the kids what to do, to try to be wise about guiding them and reproving them. One still has to try to find the right words to say in a blog thread, or to make the right decision about when and how to give the other guy the last word. We still have to try to get it right, and we still have the fear of failure. But if, somehow, all that could be given to Our Lord, and he could be invited truly to live his life out through me, it seems like it ought to make a difference.

It comes back, I suppose, to that uncomfortable stuff about the practice of the presence of Christ. Would I say this, would I do that, would I refuse to do this other thing, if I were truly conscious that Jesus is here, with me, within me, and that I am supposed to be his hands and feet, not to mention mouth, in the world?

Yikes. So maybe this idea about being hidden behind the cross isn't such a relief after all. Maybe it just raises the stakes.

I think, myself, it's both a relief and a challenge. And that's why I like the song.

Hide Me Behind the Cross (I)

This is just to get this recording out there. I hope to have more to say later. Heard this song for the first time on Rejoice Radio the other day in the car and have been looking for a good link to it. I never heard of Hyles Anderson College before, but their men's gospel team sure can sing.
[Update: January 30, 2010]--Well, imeem has disappeared, and with it, the embedded song. I have found the song on Grooveshark with Gold City, which did it first. Heretically, I like the tiny Christian college men's group's version a bit better than the pros, but this is a very nice recording of a good song, and I'd hate for this post to be without the song. So here's the new embed:

Positive words about Facebook

Last week my former college roommate (and maid of honor for my wedding) tracked me down after twenty years or so, which pleased me very much. She invited me to join Facebook to see more pictures of her and her family. Being the paranoid person I am, I asked around about how much personal info. I'd have to give and who could see it. Reassured, I joined, and I've been very glad that I did.

I won't name any names, because I wouldn't want people getting my info. from Facebook and publishing about me on their personal blogs, but I've been touched and surprised by the number of old college friends who have noticed that I am on Facebook and have sent me friend requests. These are people, in several cases, about whom I've thought often over the years and wondered, but after the manner of lazy human beings, have done nothing about locating.

I realize now that one reason I have left my college years behind me is because I am not entirely proud of my own behavior in college. I went to Baptist Bible College in Clarks Summit, PA, at the age of 16. And a half. Don't blame my parents. They didn't know what to do with me at home, I had knocked myself out finishing high school early for the express purpose of going to college early, and I would have given them no peace if they had tried fairly pointlessly to keep me in Chicago. Plus, I was more or less unemployable. They probably hoped that this would change if I got a bachelor's degree. So, at considerable expense to them (a point I did not appreciate nearly enough at the time), I went the 900 miles to a small Christian college.

It really wasn't nearly as rough for such a young student as it might have been. The atmosphere was carefully monitored and quite wholesome; the entire student body came from conservative Baptist churches and was expected to behave accordingly, which they more or less did. So there were no shocks, just the general feeling of defensiveness at being at least two years and more younger than everyone around me, looking younger still, and being something of a nuisance.

My solution was to glom onto anyone who was nice to me and pour my largely imaginary woes and largely indefensible prejudices and opinions into the ears of such patient people as fulfilled that description. And to the credit of human nature and Christian charity, several did. I had friends, almost all of them juniors and seniors when I arrived (hence, something on the order of four years older than me, and therefore perhaps even more mature and kindly than the freshmen).

Now, yea, these years later, a surprising number of these generous people have made contact with me voluntarily, and I've been able to find out what they've been up to. In several places, that information has been especially humbling: One family has adopted a son with many special needs, another family has nine children, and another former college mate travels abroad every year to make films of the poorest of the poor for the hunger relief organization he works for.

So I've just added a link to this blog to my rather spare Facebook profile, and if any of y'all come over here, this is just to say--Thanks, guys! And I'm glad to be back in touch. Feel free to comment, if you want. (Hint, hint.)

I should add that, as advertised, Facebook is a very low-key site and appears to be very safe. I have received no spam from them, and I've seen only one inappropriate ad in the margin. You don't even have to give your address, etc., when you sign up, because there is a "skip this page" option for all of that info. that you might not want to pass around too much. The only thing they definitely require, besides an e-mail address, is date of birth, presumably for legal reasons. So I recommend it.

P.S. I am in the far bottom right corner of the above picture, which a Facebook friend found and uploaded. This was our drama team. All names have been omitted to protect the innocent.

Blog housekeeping--starting to label

I was just at a friend's blog and realized how useful his post labels are when I'm coming new to a blog. So I've decided gradually to start going back through my posts and labeling them. Should have done that to begin with, of course. What this means is that for the time being, the labels won't show you complete lists. So if you go to "hymns," you'll probably be thinking, "I know she has way more posts than that on hymns." Hopefully I'll get them all in there eventually, unless this fiddly project falls by the wayside.

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.