You'll be able to keep your insurance? Probably not.

We all know by now that Obama's line is that if you like your insurance, you'll be able to keep it. Nothing to see here, folks. Move along. The only things that will change are the things that need to change. It's just a matter of helping people not presently covered.

This assumption makes it intensely frustrating to discuss this issue with liberals and even with some "conservatives." Which is why I'm posting about it here. When conservatives point out the provisions in the health care bill for a committee and a powerful Commissioner (always capitalized in the bill) to set benefits, payments, etc., and express worries about rationing, liberals shrug it off. On their view, this is simply a limitation on something that is going to exist on top of what we already have, so how can it be giving us less than we already have? On their view, it's a win-win situation. People who don't have coverage now can hardly be worse off by getting coverage they don't have, and if it isn't all they could wish for or desire, well, they are still better off than they are now. And people already covered by insurance should have no worries, because giving coverage to other people can't possibly harm them. What are we, envious of the good fortune of the presently unfortunate?

There are enormous problems with this line of reasoning, starting with the fact that there is more reason to believe that under the new bill even the people presently using Medicare would have their benefits restricted more, and restricted by invidious criteria such as whether or not they have dementia or their quality of life. Here is just one example of restrictions on benefits: As this analysis--with quotations from the law--shows (read point #1), readmissions for particular conditions will not be paid for until and unless a hospital has discharged a certain number of other patients within a certain period of time for that same condition! This is apparently not a regulation presently in place, and this is therefore new rationing of the most blatant kind. So the "win-win" implication is highly dubious right from the get-go. Update: (8/13/09) On this particular point and on further study of the bill, I have decided to correct the details of John David Lewis's analysis here. It appears that the way the rationing would work, rather, would be that the government would have an abstract and complex ratio worked out for how many readmissions for that condition the hospital had in excess of the "expected" readmissions. The hospital would then be penalized for that excess by having its payments cut for the year as a whole by a particular sum of money worked out, again, in an abstruse fashion by the bureaucrats. This is a slightly different mechanism from the "discharging a certain number of other patients" mechanism Lewis implies, but it still is, obviously, direct rationing of readmissions. It motivates hospitals by punishment not to readmit patients.

Moreover, as the same analysis shows (point #3), catastrophic-only policies, such as some prudent and non-wealthy Americans presently have (I know some myself), appear to be outlawed altogether. So if that's your plan, you will certainly have to drop it. And (see point #4) employers will be pushed toward dropping employer coverage and pushing people into the "public option," because the tax the employer has to pay if it does not cover its employees for health insurance will often be less than paying for the present health insurance benefits.

But the problems with the liberal win-win assumption, which is just a variation on the perennial problem in which liberals make false "all else being equal" assumptions, seem to me to go even farther than that.

To see why, let's start with something that Investors Business Daily brought up--the question of enrolling new people in an insurance plan after the new law goes into effect. As reported here, IBD noticed that the bill outlaws, somehow, enrolling new members in health insurance plans after the bill goes into effect. This point was to some degree corrected and finessed by the Heritage Foundation, here, by pointing out that what is actually outlawed is enrolling new members in plans other than "health care exchange" plans. So insurance companies can enroll new members after the law goes into effect, but they can only enroll them in plans that conform to heavy new federal regulations.

The Heritage Foundation rightly points out the heavy costs and economic problems with these regulations. What they don't expressly mention is this: The benefits packages of insurance programs in the health care exchange are set by the same committee that sets the benefits package for the "public option" (the federal health care for people without any insurance), and they appear to be set in such a way as to be identical to the parallel public option plans (with names like "basic," "premium," and "premium plus"). What this means, as far as I can see, is that once the legislation is in effect, all private insurance companies will be able to enroll new people only in plans that are exactly the same as the similarly-named government plans in terms of benefits--clones, in fact, of the government plans, with benefits decisions being made by the very same people that decide the benefits levels, etc., for government plans. In other words, "private" insurance will be indistinguishable from "public option," by regulation.

Now, one could argue that the insurance plans can cover people at higher levels if those people happened to be enrolled in the plan before the new legislation goes into effect. But that is enormously unlikely. And it is also enormously unlikely that employers would cover old employees differently from new employees. The union negotiators would not allow it, if nothing else. I cannot imagine that Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan (my insurance company) will continue ad infinitum to maintain a separate plan with better benefits operating on "old" rules--which, however, are dying out in the nature of the case because they can't enroll any new customers--for people like me who happened to be enrolled before Year One of Obamacare while setting up an entirely different, heavily regulated plan for all new enrollees. Obviously, they will just accept Health Care Exchange status for their present plans and conform them to the new regulations.

The only real question is this: Are the benefits settings for health care exchange plans minimum requirements or maximum? Liberals seem to assume they are minimum requirements. Even Obama's stumbling analogy to the Post Office and Federal Express seems to imply the same--that the private sector will still be allowed to offer better plans than anything the government is offering, and pay doctors accordingly, if they can get people to buy them. But I have my serious doubts. Let's look at some of the language of section 203 of the bill. To see the full language of the bill at this point, you will need to go to section 203. Under the "public option," the bill already has three levels of coverage, called "basic, enhanced, and premium." The benefits for these plans under the "public option" are set by the Commission, as stated already in section 123 of the bill. That these are maximum benefits under the "public option" is not in question--the whole point of having the commission set these benefit levels under the public option is to define what people are entitled to and to place some limitation on this entitlement. The new plan is going to break the bank as it is.

Now, when it comes to the exchange participating plans (that is, the only private plans that will be allowed to enroll new members after the law goes into effect), here is some of the language:

(A) IN GENERAL- A basic plan shall offer the essential benefits package required under title I for a qualified health benefits plan.

(3) ENHANCED PLAN- A enhanced plan shall offer, in addition to the level of benefits under the basic plan, a lower level of cost-sharing as provided under title I consistent with section 123(b)(5)(A).

(4) PREMIUM PLAN- A premium plan shall offer, in addition to the level of benefits under the basic plan, a lower level of cost-sharing as provided under title I consistent with section 123(b)(5)(B).

The appearance here is very much that these plans are being set up as clones of the public option plans. But there is more evidence to that effect when it comes to the supposedly gold-plated "premium plus" plans:

(5) PREMIUM-PLUS PLAN- A premium-plus plan is a premium plan that also provides additional benefits, such as adult oral health and vision care, approved by the Commissioner. The portion of the premium that is attributable to such additional benefits shall be separately specified. [Emphasis added]

Do you see that? The only mention of the possibility that private plans might offer additional benefits not included in the government plan specifies that such additional benefits have to be approved by the Commissioner. I cannot see any way to interpret this except that the benefits levels otherwise are maximum benefits levels and that any way in which the benefits in the private sector are better than those in the public sector must be pre-approved by the government bureaucrat in charge of the system as a whole. And the examples given, vision and dental care, are pretty minimal thus far. The idea that the entire high quality of the health care system (not rationing re-admissions, not limiting physician payments, and so forth) might be carried by such extra benefits and might be allowed by the Commissioner, is highly, highly dubious. And in any event, when the extra benefits of ostensibly private plans require the permission of a government bureaucrat before they can even be offered, this is hardly a continuation of business as usual beyond some government-guaranteed minimum!

But there's more evidence that the government will set a ceiling as well as a floor to private packages. In section 203b it is specified that the exchange-participating entities may not offer more than one plan of each kind in a defined "service area." This certainly looks like a limitation on competition. It appears that the Commissioner will be able to guarantee that there are only a limited number of "private" plans (the scare quotes are becoming increasingly appropriate) available for any given area, which certainly calls into question the idea that people will simply be able to keep receiving insurance of the kind they already have without any benefit limits set by the government.

But there is still more evidence. At the end of section 203, there is a paragraph on state-mandated benefits which may go beyond federally mandated benefits. One might think this section irrelevant to the question at issue, but it isn't.

(d) Treatment of State Benefit Mandates- Insofar as a State requires a health insurance issuer offering health insurance coverage to include benefits beyond the essential benefits package, such requirement shall continue to apply to an Exchange-participating health benefits plan, if the State has entered into an arrangement satisfactory to the Commissioner to reimburse the Commissioner for the amount of any net increase in affordability premium credits under subtitle C as a result of an increase in premium in basic plans as a result of application of such requirement.

Why is this evidence that the government will be setting ceilings on coverage under private plans? Because when a state mandates coverage of benefits the federal government hasn't approved, the state has to pay the federal government the difference in premiums brought about by the additional required coverage. Think about that. This is supposedly talking about private plans. Why is the state having to pay the federal government the extra money rather than just paying the higher premiums to the private plans? After all, that's what the liberals are telling us it would be like for us individuals: If you can pay the higher premium, you can get a better plan, as good as you like. But this section makes it evident that exchange participating plans (the only ones allowed to enroll new members after the law goes into effect) have their premiums effectively capped by the federal government. The federal government enters into a contract which the Commissioner negotiates with the insurer to provide the coverage (this is spelled out in detail in section 204), and no provision is made for private people simply to pay more for whatever better coverage they can find. If additional coverage is required by the state, the state must pay the additional premium that coverage requires to the federal government, who presumably pays it to the insurance company with which it has entered into a contract. No similar provision is even made for private individuals, and in any event, the existence of the federal government as a middleman makes it absolutely evident that this is by no means business as usual. Think about it: Does the federal government contract with UPS and Fedex? In order to get a service from Fedex, do you have to pay the additional cost to the federal government who then passes it on to UPS, with whom it has a contract for offering mail services to the public? Of course not. This is nothing even remotely like private free enterprise, even in the supposedly private plans.

And since the federal government is negotiating the contracts, and since the exchange plans operate only under federal contract and by federal permission, the federal government will have every motive and full power for capping premiums and hence capping benefits.

It seems to me that the case is very strong: So-called private plans that can enroll new members under Obamacare will not be permitted to compete simply by offering better benefits than the government plan offers, with such benefits paid for by willing individual customers or even employers.

So I don't think you'll be able to keep your insurance, or your health care system, for that matter, even if you like it.

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, nor do I play one on the Internet. This is entirely my own analysis, except for the portions expressly noted as coming from other people. It makes me a tad nervous that no one else has said already what I am saying here, and I am open to correction. But the more I look at the bill itself, the more convinced I am that I am right.

Obamacare post

I don't know how many of these I will do. The whole thing is very discouraging.

First, here are links to some of my comments and one post about the end-of-life counseling provision in Obamacare. No, it's not technically mandatory. Yes, it is very disturbing, especially given that the doctors initiate it and that there is no doubt at all that doctors will be pressured to keep costs down. Here I want to link again, as I do in one of the comments, to a post Wesley Smith did on a "model" advance directive. It is as objectionable as can be. The default language has the patient refusing artificial nutrition and hydration and even consenting to be experimented on. The patient must cross out anything he doesn't want; otherwise when he signs it becomes ostensibly "his wish." This is beyond all doubt the kind of thing that would be used in these doctor-initiated counseling sessions. Much too complicated for people to be left to get together with a family lawyer and write their own, you know!

In my comments here I note that Charles Lane of The Washington Post, while doing us a service in pointing out the non-benignity of the end-of-life counseling, has probably even underestimated the danger, since he shows no understanding of what it means to refuse nutrition and hydration.

In my comments here I talk about David Blumenthal and Ezekiel Emmanuel, already very important advisers to the Obama admin on healthcare, and their panting and drooling desire to ration care and to get physicians to stop worrying about that pesky and costly Hippocratic oath. This is especially important, because Section 123 of the Obamacare Bill (yes, I just read the section myself, in case you are wondering) sets up a committee that will have the power to decide on what benefits will be covered by the government health care plans and also by "private" plans that are brought under government control through the "Health Care Exchange" (sections 201-203). Anyone who cannot see that a) such a committee, including its commissioner, will be staffed by the likes of Blumenthal and Emmanuel and that b) this committee will have enormous power over health care in America once this bill passes is just simply a fool.

More later. I hope this is informative and helpful as far as it goes. Sorry for all the links.

Update

Dear friends,

As most of you learned from the comments below, it turned out that I had a much more serious problem with my ankle and foot than the original reaction to the insect sting. Apparently some nasty germs (either strep or staph) got into that tiny little wound, perhaps with the initial sting, and I've been in and out of the ER and doctor's offices over the course of the week getting large doses of antibiotics for a subcutaneous infection. I've learned a lot of medical stuff I never knew before. I'm beginning to think that a certain amount of medical knowledge is necessary for any layman these days.

I thank you all for the prayers I've been assured of. It appears that we are on the upward trail, now, but it's a rather slow and even somewhat unnerving trail. Wearing a shoe, and especially walking with a shoe on, is still a challenge, and the question of the County Fair, to which we always go on the second Monday in August, is looming rather large in the mind of Youngest Daughter, who wants to go see the horses, pigs, sheep, goats, etc., etc.

I've been working on that "offering up" thing. It turns out that it doesn't seem to make a whole lot of psychological difference, or at least not a bad one, if one prays in the tentative way I suggest in the comments in the previous post rather than expressly designating a recipient for one's "offering up" and telling God how to do it. Also, being up in the night unable to sleep does allow one to pray for other people. I'm very grateful for getting good sleep the last few nights, though.

I will probably be putting up a few posts about Obamacare on this blog. It wearies me to discuss it with the many liberals, not to mention socialist-sympathizing conservatives, on a larger blog, and there have been a number of items I've wanted to put up on the subject. So stay tuned.

Offering up?

So it turns out I'm quite allergic to bee and/or wasp stings. Got stung a week ago today for the first time in my life, as far as I can recall, and the local allergic reaction (on the foot) is a good deal worse today than ever before, though all the web sites say that the itching and rash is supposed to go away by a week. But someone I spoke to yesterday (my riding teacher, to cancel the riding lesson because of the foot) says she knows someone who reacts for two to three weeks before it "gets out of his system." How many hours a day can one sit with ice held on one's foot? Perhaps there's a world's record or something I could aim for.

I'm a wimp, and this kind of thing really bugs me, especially the trouble sleeping at night part. "Stoical" is just not the word that springs to mind when friends think of me.

Now, into the midst of this comes this quasi-mystical thought from the books of Elizabeth Goudge, whom I've discussed here. Goudge was really into this idea that one could "offer up" the annoyances of life, including the minor ones, even offer them up for other people. It's apparently a form of Catholic piety that was popular in the mid-twentieth century. Dawn Eden has discussed it a bit. Goudge was Anglican, but about as high as she could be without crossing the Tiber.

I'm about as low as I can be, so I shouldn't be sympathetic to any of this stuff at all, but it is an attractive idea. It's attractive, because everyone hates the feeling that suffering, even minor suffering, is meaningless. I think Christians especially are attracted to the idea that one can give meaning to the things one goes through that are unpleasant.

Well, that's Biblical enough. We have ample biblical evidence that God is "working all things together for good" and that things we don't like can be purifying if accepted as from the hand of God.

But Goudge is taking it a step farther and implying that we can help someone else by this "offering up" mental act. That I'm much less sure about. For one thing, it smacks a bit of making a deal with God: "If I take this well and try to adopt an accepting spirit about it, Lord, you will help out so-and-so. Deal?" And that's obviously not right.

But I'm not ready entirely to throw out the idea that the mental attitude of accepting what God allows and offering that acceptance back to Him is what Paul calls a "good and acceptable" form of service. Whether it helps anyone else...Well, perhaps at least those around are helped by our taking a better attitude than snarling. Lord willing.

P.S. If this post is too personal and uninteresting, look down one for something related to current events and ideas.

Be careful what you pray for

I've been watching on Facebook recently as some friends (who almost certainly don't read this blog, and who are unknown to anyone who does read this blog) advocate Obamacare. I've kept my mouth shut. I'm not overwhelmingly surprised to see them do so, for various reasons, just a bit inclined to sigh. One of them said, "If Obama thinks he can do better, why not let him have a shot at it? It can't be worse than it is." How is one to respond to such a comment? Obama--like a kid with matches and gasoline. But hey, if he thinks by lighting the gas in the middle of the living room he can improve the decor, why not let him have a shot at it? It can't be worse than it is.

Sigh.

They should be careful what they wish for. They might get it. So, for the "can't be worse than it is" file, here is a story of the experience one family had with the wonders of socialized medicine up north in Canada. Short version--their daughter had to wait for hours with a horribly broken arm while stony-eyed receptionists made them stick to their place in line behind the sore throats. Then she was put on morphine for hours. Then she was sent immediately into surgery, where the combination of morphine for hours followed immediately by general anesthesia nearly killed her. She survived and is fine now, but none of it should have happened.

I do really wish that people who want to go in with an axe, or let our Reckless Reformer-in-Chief go in with an axe, and "try to make things better" would stop a little and count their blessings first.

HT VFR

There is no "them"

Those of you who have ever been involved in a project involving a small group, or perhaps in a small church, may be familiar with the phenomenon: You start out doing things, and you do some work and help, and then the time comes when you say to yourself, "Okay, that's enough. I've done enough for them. I'm sure they have other people who can do the rest. They can't expect too much from me."

The moment when you grow up in your interaction with that group is the moment when you admit the obvious. There is no them. Or, to put it alternatively, you are them. There is just that group of people. It may be ten, it may be two dozen. But what gets done is what that group of people, including you, does. There isn't some gigantic organization that exists apart from you, to which your contribution is just a drop in the bucket, which will continue getting just as much done without you. This is a small church, a small organization, a volunteer group. If you don't do it, it doesn't get done.

The fiction of "them" is very comforting. And unfortunately, it is fostered by our present societal arrangements in which so many things seem to be done by big groups--be they corporations, charities, churches, or government. Everything is big. And so being a mere fellow traveler and doing only, and only temporarily, the amount that seems reasonable (read "easy") is all too easy. Because after all, they can't expect too much, and they were doing just fine before you came along, and they will do just fine if you leave, or drop your involvement, or whatever. It doesn't really matter.

Now, the truth is, even in big organizations or agencies, everything that gets done for good gets done by human beings. But certainly in for-profit arrangements, or even arrangements where some people are paid, the "them" idea is easy to maintain. What do you mean by "them"? Why, the employees of the corporation, of the charity, or of the government agency. They are official. They get paid to do this stuff. Anything you add is lagniappe, gravy, extra.

But in the pure volunteer organization, this is just false. There is no distinction. In a very small church, there is at most a very small paid staff--perhaps only the priest or pastor. That's it. And it's hard to keep up the lie to oneself that one pastor can do everything that needs to be done. In some groups, there isn't even that. There are just a few people who have stepped forward and been willing to be on the board (for free) or even, in a totally informal fashion, to do most of the work. And that's it. They're happy for your help, but no one should be under any illusions that his work is extraneous. There are so few of us that all of our work is important. If we don't do it, it doesn't get done.

This has all been borne in on me as I have been involved in a signature-gathering campaign in my local area. And it's rather a nuisance to have to come to that grown-up conclusion and to abandon the fiction of "them." But salutary, nonetheless.

On a similar theme, there are some passages in Annie Dillard's rather diffuse but at points very good Holy the Firm:

God...leaves his creation's dealings with him in the hands of purblind and clumsy amateurs. This is all we are and all we ever were; God kann nicht anders. This process in time is history; in space, at such shocking random, it is mystery....Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? or who shall stand in his holy place? There is no one but us. There is no one to send, nor a clean hand, nor a pure heart on the face of the earth, nor in the earth, but only us, a generation comforting ourselves with the notion that we have come at an awkward time, that our innocent fathers are all dead...But there is no one but us. There never has been. There have been generation which remembered, and generations which forgot; there has never been a generation of whole men and women who lived well for even one day....Who shall ascent into the hill of the Lord? or who shall stand in his holy place? "Whom shall I send," heard the first Isaiah, "and who will go for us?" And poor Isaiah, who happened to be standing there--and there was no one else--burst out, "Here am I; send me."

Cross posted at What's Wrong with the World

Bibi Tells 'Em

I remember during the Olmert administration in Israel there were all these questions as to whether Olmert had agreed (shamefully, with the Bush administration) to halt Jewish building in East Jerusalem. For Israel to agree that Jews should not be building in its own capital is disgraceful. Well, Bibi is not leaving us in any doubt about where he stands on this, when Obama tries to force him to agree to a move in the direction of the ultimate goal of dividing Jerusalem and making the east portion once more Judenrein:

Jerusalem is the "unified capital of Israel and the capital of the Jewish people, and sovereignty over it is indisputable," Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said Sunday, responding to an American demand to put an end to a housing project to be built in east Jerusalem.

"Hundreds of apartments in the west of the city were purchased by Arabs and we didn't get involved. There is no prohibition against Arab residents buying apartments in the west of the city and there is no prohibition barring the city's Jewish residents from buying or building in the east of the city," Netanyahu added at the weekly cabinet meeting. "That is the policy of an open city that is not divided.

"We cannot accept the notion that Jews will not have the right to buy apartments specifically in Jerusalem. I can only imagine what would happen if they were forbidden from purchasing apartments in New York or London; there would be an international outcry. This has always been Israel's policy and this is the policy of the current government," the prime minister added. [Emphasis added]

That's telling 'em. I couldn't have put it better.

Comments on this post are closed, with some regret. I find that whenever I put up a post about Israel even here on my obscure little personal blog I get someone or other trying to tell me about "Israeli atrocities" and the like, however undeniable the content of my post itself, and sometimes giving me links to lefty Palestinian advocacy groups as credible sources. Frankly, I'm not interested in putting up with that today. My dear friends and readers all have my personal e-mail and are always welcome to write me there.

HT Israel Matzav

Walking

I just had a lovely evening walk. Listened to the doves. Doves are funny birds--slow-moving and seemingly slow-witted. But perhaps for that very reason, they make the most peaceful sound. The whole evening was golden and, mercy of mercies at this time of year, not hot. Some people manage apparently by magic to have lawns so green, even at this dry time of year, that it almost makes your eyes hurt, especially in the sunset.

This was an especially peaceful walk, because I left my petition at home. I'm involved in a petition drive now opposing a local transgender and homosexual rights ordinance. Collecting petition signatures is a painful process for me. I don't mind it too much when I know ahead of time that the people are supportive. Then it's a good chance to talk to the likeminded, tell them what's up with the ordinance in some detail (since I've been following it for six months), and feel encouraged. But asking people whose views I don't know--that's hard. It's especially hard, because I have a lot of good will in my neighborhood. I love my neighborhood, and I daresay that I'm a fairly familiar figure here. I walk the same route nearly every day, though not always at the same time. The people on that route are often out in their yards or gardens; they smile; we wave. A few years ago when I did a brief stint as Republican precinct delegate, I remember that several people who, as far as I knew, didn't even know my name, saw me on my walks and said, "I voted for you! I saw your name on the ballot." (You understand: There was no actual competition for the pair of Republican precinct delegates from this precinct. My husband and I were elected by acclaim by the few voting Republicans.)

What I'm trying to say is that I have exactly the easy, undemanding, apolitical relationship with my neighbors that seems to me ideal. We occasionally exchange mild gossip, gardening tips, local news, and small talk. If, as is the case right now, there is a panhandler known to be doing the rounds of the neighborhood, we warn each other about him. It's friendly, and yet I don't even know most of these people's names. Except for those who live immediately next door and across the street, I know most of them by definite description: The guy who lives catty-corner and is into photography. The lady in the small white house with the finch feeder. The older man with the two little terriers.

In this context, asking these neighbors to sign a petition on an unpleasant and controversial issue on which I don't know their opinions almost seems rude. It certainly risks making them shy away from me for the next few months rather than stopping to chat or smiling and waving. I've been turned down already by a couple of the few neighbors whose names I do know and have tried, I think successfully, to make sure that the exchange ends with no hard feelings. It's all most awkward.

So tonight I took a break and went out with no petition and pen stuffed into my pocket. Just an ordinary walk. As it happened, I did stop to talk to a man ("the guy in the gray house with the kids in Christian school and the pool set up in the back yard") whom I suspected would be supportive and have been hoping to see, and he did indeed say that I can come back later this week and get his and his wife's signatures. But it somehow made it easier that I couldn't collect them right then. We were still just talking.

It is one of the great sadnesses of our age that so many things are politicized. Yet it comes upon us. We do not choose it. It is forced upon us by those who would force our world to give way to theirs, who would force unreality upon us as reality. We did not choose this culture war. As the Lady Eowyn says, it takes but one foe to breed a war. And now that it is upon us, we must fight it as best we can. But please God, neighbors can still be neighbors, and there will still be evenings off with the doves, the sunset, and the cool green grass.

Evidences and Christianity

I encourage my readers to read my latest post at W4. I give a few suggestions of historical evidence ammunition for Christians. This is an apologetic approach to Christianity with which some people are very familiar but which is quite alien to others. But everyone should know that our faith is founded on facts and need not hide behind arationality or irrationality.

In God We Trust

O! thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand
Between their loved home and the war's desolation!
Blest with victory and peace, may the heav'n rescued land
Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation.
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto: 'In God is our trust.'
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!




And here is my July 4 post at W4. If I have any European readers, I want to make it clear that we American conservatives are proud not only of our country but of our country's Christian heritage. I understand this sort of God and country connection is considered bad manners in Europe. Too, too bad.

May God bless America and keep America free, and may America always acknowledge Him, the source of all her blessings.

Hymn of the Week--Take my Life

"And here we offer and present unto thee, O Lord, ourselves, our souls and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy, and living sacrifice unto thee."

Thus the Prayer Book, echoing, of course, Romans 12: "I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service."

And that biblical passage was certainly in the mind of Francis Havergal when he wrote "Take My Life."


Take my life and let it be
Consecrated, Lord, to Thee;
Take my hands and let them move
At the impulse of Thy love.

Take my feet and let them be
Swift and beautiful for Thee;
Take my voice and let me sing,
Always, only for my King.

Take my lips and let them be
Filled with messages from Thee;
Take my silver and my gold,
Not a mite would I withhold.

Take my moments and my days,
Let them flow in endless praise;
Take my intellect and use
Every pow’r as Thou shalt choose.

Take my will and make it Thine,
It shall be no longer mine;
Take my heart, it is Thine own,
It shall be Thy royal throne.

Take my love, my Lord, I pour
At Thy feet its treasure store;
Take myself and I will be
Ever, only, all for Thee.

Hymn sing night tonight at my home, and someone picked that, as someone usually does. We don't have all those same verses in our hymnal, but we have most of them.

I know, it's just a goal. One says, "Hey, here's a thought. Tomorrow I start out with that in mind. I say only those things Christ would want me to say. My voice is his voice. My lips are his lips. My hands are his hands, and so forth. What a concept." And, as Lewis said, within half an hour we are back in some old irritation or temper. Yet, that's the call. So we heed the call. Let us pray one for another that we may heed it well.

Bein' lazy this week

Dear friends,

After catching up on my sleep from the Belgium trip, I felt absolutely wonderful. I went bouncing around for a few days, unable to contain my joy at being home and my sense of well-being.

All good things come to an end. Which is to say that I've been down for the count with a bad cold starting Friday morning. Yesterday it was at its worst. Today I can breathe without struggle, which is an improvement, but tomorrow we'll probably be on to the coughing stage. I resent in excelsis the fact that suddenly in the last two years exceedingly minor illnesses like colds are a big deal. I used to be much tougher than this. What's going on? (It couldn't be that I'm getting older? Could it?)

During this time I've kept up with W4 and with reading Secondhand Smoke (now a First Things blog). If you don't regularly read Secondhand Smoke and are interested in life issues, especially stem-cell research, euthanasia, and suicide, you should. I can't recommend it too highly. My only mild gripe is that Wesley tries to avoid posting much on the subject of abortion, though he does occasionally post on it, especially on late-term abortion and infanticide, and he even had one post arguing that human life begins at conception. I could conjecture the reasons for this reticence but won't. But don't let that put you off. It's an essential blog for information on issues that should be of concern to all men of good will.

Oh, and a Happy Father's Day to all the fathers in readerland. We have tried to give Esteemed Husband a happy father's day here, as well.

Signing off...

Belgium trip--little details

Over at W4 I've put up a post on my Belgium trip. It's good to be home, though the conference was great.

I got to see a little bit of Leuven while walking to and from the conference. Lots of cobbled streets and narrow sidewalks. Watch out for the bicyclists! There was a park we walked through going to dinner and to and from the hotel, and there was some sort of beautiful bird song going on there every time we walked through. I asked several people who lived or had lived in the town what it could be, but no one seemed to know. It sounded a bit like recordings of a nightingale that I have heard, but if so, there are an awful lot of nightingales in Leuven, they sing all day long, and they are very loud. I never caught a glimpse of it. But it would be nice to think that I've now heard a real nightingale, as we don't have them on this side of the Atlantic.

I missed my chance to be shown the little cathedral (as cathedrals go) on the first full-length day of the conference. I had arrived with a bad backache from a combination of the previous Friday's horseback riding lesson and a very long plane ride on Monday-Tuesday. So when a local student offered to conduct a bit of a tour of the town over lunch on Wednesday, I had to decline. I don't know that there would have been time for both lunch and the tour in any event. By Friday, the last day, I felt more like doing a little extra walking and wanted to see the inside of the Cathedral, but at 9 a.m. when we tried the door it was locked, at lunch we barely had time to catch lunch and get back, and at 5:30 p.m. when we tried the door it was locked. So I missed out on that but did get to see genuine flying buttresses on the outside and saints in their niches all up and down the sides of the town hall just across the square. I also heard (from the same student) the story of how and why the Nazis burned the university library there in Leuven to punish the Belgians for resisting the Nazi invasion, on the orders of their king and as a matter of principle.

We met likable philosophers, brilliant philosophers, interesting philosophers, and curmudgeonly philosophers, but if I start giving descriptions, they might read them sometime and be embarrassed, even if the descriptions are complimentary.

Airplane travel is absolutely not my bag. By the time I got to sleep last night, I felt like I had in actuality awakened from a slightly boring nightmare in which one walks endlessly along long passages and around huge halls, looking for something undefined, sits forever in dingy rooms on uncomfortable seats, and answers never-ending security questions. The feeling of having no true privacy or relaxation for something on the order of fifteen or more hours is unbelievably difficult, I find.

So all in all a very successful conference, and I hope to write some papers on the strength of its inspiration and hope to keep in touch with some of my new friends. I just wish the next one could be at Notre Dame!

I'll Fly Away

A blessed Trinity Sunday to everyone. I don't know if my Catholic readers have Trinity Sunday. If not, it's a shame. Comes right after Pentecost, which makes sense. Then this whole next six months or so is the "Sundays after Trinity."

Here's a wonderful country version of "I'll Fly Away." I'm sufficiently ignorant of country that I can only say, "I think that's a banjo." Lots of fun. It contains a verse I'd never heard anywhere else: "Oh, how glad and happy when we meet. No more cold, iron shackles on my feet."

Gillian Welch and Alison Krauss--"I'll Fly Away"

Ill Fly Away - Gillian Welch

And as it happens, I am flying away, but not to heaven yet (as far as I know). This week we will be at a conference on Formal Methods in the Epistemology of Religion in Leuven, Belgium.

Dale Peeke-Requiescat in pacem

I got word a few hours ago by e-mail that a friend of ours named Dale Peeke died this morning. Dale was a member of my church, St. Patrick's Anglican Catholic Church. He has requested that there be no funeral.

When I first came to St. Patrick's fourteen years ago, Dale was one of its most colorful members. As I recall it (my memory gets worse all the time), he actually drove up on his motorcycle at that time--a big, rough-looking guy, often wearing a leather jacket that said "Christian Motorcyclists Association" on the back. It was funny at a certain time of year, every year, to read a note in the bulletin, put there by Fr. Stephens (may he rest in peace), announcing the CMA "Run for the Son"--this very un-Anglican event. The announcement would always end, "Our own Dale Peeke is very much involved," which for some reason made me want to giggle.

Dale took a delight in each of my daughters--first as babies and then as they got older. He was often ill as time passed, and sometimes when he had been gone from church for a while and came back, he would look at Eldest Daughter and shake his head: "She just gets prettier all the time."

As time went on, he became not only a church friend but also, in a manner of speaking, an ally. The back-story there is of a kind that Trollope or perhaps even Sayers could fit into a novel with great humor. It boils down merely to the fact that musical tastes differ. I, being from a Baptist background, have in my role as organist tried to insinuate some old Baptist or Gospel hymns into the prelude (once we started preludes, about nine years ago, by my reckoning). Dale shared my taste for these, but not everyone else does. Whenever Dale was there I would feel more free to put in something that he would recognize, even if most of the other members didn't, and he would come back afterwards and tell me that he had enjoyed it. One of his favorites, one he mentioned every time I played it, was "Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus." He called it "The Heavenly Vision."

Turn your eyes upon Jesus
Look full in His wonderful face,
And the things of earth will grow strangely dim
In the light of His glory and grace.

A couple of months ago I learned that Dale was in hospice care and had been given only six months to live. By then he hadn't been able to get to church for some while, and at that time I conceived the plan of recording some hymns for him, including of course "Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus." But the whole process was clunky, and all the while I had in the back of my mind a kind of embarrassment--wouldn't it sound incredibly amateurish? Wasn't it a little silly to record myself (and ED) singing things and to put it on a CD? Would he like it? I mentioned the plan to him over the phone once, and he seemed pleased. Nonetheless, I dithered. We got a recording device with quite a good quality mike about ten days ago and used it for a concert ED attended with her dad. It sounded good. Still I didn't actually make any move to record us singing.

Then on Sunday we learned that Dale had accidentally started a fire with his oxygen tank and was in the burn unit. This morning he passed away.

Now he doesn't need to hear "The Heavenly Vision." He has something better to do by far--enjoying the heavenly vision. I think I'm the one who lost out by not being more on the ball.

Rest in peace, Dale. I hope Our Lord gives you a new motorcycle and leather jacket someday to go with a new body that never, never needs an oxygen tank. And maybe we can sing some of those songs when we meet again.

The things which belong unto thy peace

[This is a re-post from a few days ago at What's Wrong with the World. It was prompted by some of the posts it links from Wesley J. Smith's incredibly important blog, Secondhand Smoke (now at a new location as part of the First Things blog family).]

And when he was come near, he beheld the city, and wept over it, saying, "If thou hadst known, even thou, at least in this thy day, the things which belong unto thy peace! But now they are hid from thine eyes. For the days shall come upon thee, that thine enemies shall cast a trench about thee, and compass thee round, and keep thee in on every side, and shall lay thee even with the ground, and thy children within thee; and they shall not leave in thee one stone upon another; because thou knewest not the time of thy visitation."

We humans usually don't know what's good for us. Jesus addressed the City of Peace and said that its inhabitants would not know the things that belonged unto their peace.

It is often said by conservatives, and rightly, that ideology is a great danger. The ideologue gets hold of one truth and makes it into the only truth, the only thing that matters. He sacrifices all else to that one thing. That one ideal might be equality, beauty, health, or love, but when one makes second things first, the second things always turn vicious, and horrors follow.

But there is another point, compatible with that point, that must be made too: When second things are made first, they destroy themselves. The ideologue does not even know what is best for the ideal he professes.

Take love, for instance. It's been said times without number that the sexual revolution wasn't really about love. But there were people who thought it was. If you had told them that the revolution they were founding would ultimately destroy love, even romantic love, even sexual love, they would not have listened. They would not have believed. Yet it was true, as numerous broken-hearted, broken-bodied men and women, men and women who have tried sex without honor can attest.

And now, in this our day, health is another god, another second thing made first. In the name of health we harvest the dead, we destroy embryos, our scientists promise us cures of all diseases if only we will dispense with ethical limitations on research. They are wrong, of course, and much of the promise is hype. But beyond that, we are in the process of losing all sense of what actually constitutes health. Doctors are under pressure to cooperate in the destruction of unborn infants as part of their profession. How is that serving health? Suicide on demand, for any reason whatsoever, assisted by doctors, is all the rage. What does that have to do with the medical profession's job of helping people to be healthy? Yet restless people whose relatives have had trouble finding people to cooperate in their suicide would actually like writing suicide prescriptions to be mandatory upon doctors. Bodily mutilation of healthy limbs is being considered as a "treatment." This is not serving bodily health and integrity.

In other words, the utilitarian attempt to elevate health as a good above innocent human life and above all ethical restraints has turned out to be profoundly anti-human and, consequently, is undermining the medical profession and the very notion of health itself.

If human beings knew the things that belong to their peace, then their perception of some good--love, health, beauty--would guide them to do the right thing. But they don't. They never seem to see it coming--the self-destructiveness of topsy-turvy priorities. They never seem to realize that when second things are made first, you end up with nothing, not even the second things.

It is time to ask ourselves what things belong to our peace. If we believe in healthy bodies, love, beauty, and human joy, we cannot serve these things best by treating the human body as mere matter. We will lose it all, and our house will be left unto us desolate.

What I've been up to--new horseback lessons

Just in case you all out there in readerland ever say to yourselves, "I wonder what Lydia McGrew is up to in her personal life lately," the latest fun thing is horseback riding lessons. It's still not absolutely clear that I'm going to be able to keep them up, but it's a case of so far so good. I have some minor back trouble that might have flared up and prevented it, but last week I recovered rapidly from the lesson and this week--we shall see. I feel fine just coming home now. Just a little stiff.

I rode a lot of Western trail riding when I was a kid, but there's nothing really "to" Western trail riding. You sit on your horse, and it follows the horse in front of it. If they trot or gallop, you hold the saddle horn. At age 10, I had a few English riding lessons, a very few, until Mom and Dad couldn't afford them anymore (understandably enough). Then it was just going riding with the church youth group now and then, hardly any riding at all, for years and years. And about twelve or thirteen years ago, I foolishly told an acquaintance that I knew how to ride, was given a horse I couldn't handle, and got myself thrown with the horse falling on top. Nobody hurt badly, not even the horse. But not fun. So after that I concentrated on raising children and not getting killed, and I haven't been back on a horse until last week. We're starting English riding from the very beginning.

I'm very fortunate to be having one-on-one lessons with a really good teacher. Last week we used one of the "school horses" from the farm, until she saw that I'm not scared of the horse or likely to freak out. Jake was very calm, but a little hard-mouthed, and with a fast, choppy trot that I could neither sit nor post. So today we had Hailey (sp?), and that was much nicer. Hailey is a tall Appaloosa and a pleasure to look at and ride. She has that long-legged walk straight down from the shoulder to the ground that always somehow reminds me of a lady in high heels. She has a lovely, smooth trot (as smooth as a trot can be, that is) that Barb, her owner and my teacher, calls a "Western" trot. I can sit it or post it, though I was still holding on to keep my balance while posting by the end of the lesson. I expect to be stiffer tomorrow than I was last week. Posting is a workout for a nerdy, sedentary type like me.

My mom called me a couple of days ago. She's nervous about the riding lessons. Ever since "what happened to Christopher Reeve," she says. Thanks, Mom. I told her I'm in far more danger driving to the lessons on a windey road where all the drivers push you if you're two miles below the speed limit than I am up on the horse. And that's the truth.

Hope to be able to keep it up this summer. Should be lots of fun if so.

Blessed Ascensiontide

Well, golly, I wrote such a great post for Ascension Day last year that I'm strongly inclined just to link to it. It's here.

And here are the wonderful collects. We get two, because Ascension has an octave:

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.


For any of you who are Peter Wimsey fans, the first of those (the one actually for Ascension Day) features in my favorite of all favorite Wimsey novels, The Nine Tailors. As you'll recall (if you've read the book), Wimsey first came to the small fen town in the story back in the winter, on a nasty, snowy New Year's Eve, rang a peal with the ringers (because several had fallen sick of the influenza epidemic and Wimsey had turned up providentially to ring bells for nine hours overnight), and left the next day. But just after Easter, a body is discovered unexpectedly, and the rector, Mr. Venables, writes to Wimsey asking him to come and help investigate. So Wimsey is back in the fens in the spring. He is inspired to guess the location of the mysterious emeralds (yes, there are mysterious emeralds) by the rector's sermon on the collect for Ascension Day.

One of the things I like about Ascension as an Anglican feast is that it's the kind of thing a person with a Baptist upbringing and sympathies can be enriched by without changing one whit of doctrine. It's just a set of ideas that simply never occurred to you before: Jesus took our human nature back to the Father's right hand. Jesus reigns with God, so God and man are on the throne together. We sit with Him in heavenly places. He intercedes for us with the Father. If you are familiar with Scripture, all of that comes back. But if you don't have a liturgical background, you usually didn't think of associating it with Jesus' ascension. But that's when that all started. And of course, as Jesus' words to the disciples just before ascending refer to the promise of "the Gift," the Holy Ghost, so the Feast of the Ascension looks forward to next week, Whitsunday, Pentecost.

Lift up your heads, ye mighty gates, and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors, and the King of Glory shall come in!

Lemon-roasted chicken

Okay, enough serious stuff. I offered this recipe on Facebook and had several takers, so here it is. Hopefully, the style will be more interesting than that of the ordinary cookbook. If you are not cooking challenged, pleased excuse the unnecessary details. (Recipe modified from one published in Reader's Digest donkey's years ago.)

Get one (dead) chicken, 4-6 lbs., and 2 fresh lemons. Bring them home.

Put the chicken somewhere where it won't matter when all that gross blood runs out all over everything, and cut open the wrap. Take out all the icky stuff in the body cavity--the giblets-in-a-bag and the neck--and throw it away.

Grab one of the fresh lemons and stab it all over with a sharp knife. Put the lemon into the body cavity of the chicken.

Put the lemon-stuffed chicken into some sort of roasting pan big enough to hold it. (Oh, pre-heat the oven to 375 degrees.)

Cut the other lemon in half. Squeeze the juice of half of the lemon all over the chicken. (Tip: If the lemon half doesn't want to squeeze, make several small cuts in the edge of the skin around the rim of the lemon half.)

Shake dried basil and dried oregano generously all over the lemon-juiced chicken.

If you feel like being fancy, tuck the wing tips of the chicken under its back. But if you don't know how to do this and don't mind the fact that the wings will pretty much be dried up and inedible if you don't do it, don't bother.

Make sure your oven racks are far enough apart to fit the pan with the chicken in it.

Place the chicken in the pre-heated oven and bake for one and one-fourth to one and three-fourths hours, depending on the size of the chicken. While it cooks, clean up the mess from opening up the chicken, etc., with hot soapy water.

Test the chicken for doneness using an instant thermometer stuck into the thick meat of the chicken somewhere (like on the breast). It should read 180 degrees. Or saw off a leg right at the thigh and see if it looks completely cooked and white with clear juices, not pink at all.

Serving suggestion--Serve with Uncle Ben's long grain and wild rice.

Oh, cut up the other lemon half into slices for people to squeeze over their chicken meat and rice.

Enjoy.

Finding leads to losing

About thirty years ago in Chicago I went to a live concert by Ken Medema, a blind Christian pianist and singer. Ken was in rare form that night, and it hardly mattered that we were crowded into an auxiliary room watching on closed-circuit TV. He did the inimitable "Moses" and I think one or two others of his classics, but for the most part his concert was one long ad lib on the life and miracles of Jesus. In the course of it he kept coming back to this little chorus with doggerel rhyme, that I now half suspect he made up on the spot:

Finding leads to losing;
Losing lets you find.
Living leads to dying;
Life leaves death behind.
Losing leads to finding;
All that I can say.
No one will find life another way.

I lost count of the number of times he went back and sang that in the course of the evening. It is, of course, a paraphrase of the words of Christ: "He that saveth his life shall lose it, but he that loseth his life for my sake and the Gospel's, the same shall save it. For what shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?"

The tune has stayed with me all these years, and I can almost hear the guys from the youth group--not a very reverent lot, truth be told--singing it over and over again in the van on the way home.

And somehow, today, I had it going through my head in an entirely different context, a context which may be quite unrelated. (The temptation to blog sometimes has a negative effect on one's logical faculties.) But here is what I thought: The Internet has made it possible for me and for many others to find many friends that we would not otherwise have found--likeminded people, men of integrity whom we respect. Ideological loneliness is a real thing. We Christian conservatives, especially those of us who are traditionally minded, are not in a majority in our country or our world, and so we naturally reach out to allies and new friends, and the Internet has proven a great resource for this purpose. But that finding of friends also means that there are that many more opportunities to lose touch with people. It needn't be a matter of a falling out at all. Someone retires from blogging; a given blog closes down; people become understandably and rightly busy with real life. But just as it is a sad thing to lose touch with an old friend one has known in high school, college, graduate school, in person, it is also a sad thing to contemplate possibly losing touch with a person one has known only on the Internet.

So finding leads to losing. But in the end, whatever happens in cyberspace or physical space, we are not bound to the circles of the world. And in heaven, I think that even those we have never seen, whom we would not now recognize if we passed them on the street or in the store, we will recognize.

So losing leads to finding after all.

Zippy Catholic: Pax

Songs to Die for (and oldies): Amy Grant

I fear that only a small segment of my already-small readership will appreciate this post, but that's as may be. I am self-consciously dating myself here. This first song came out originally, I learn from Youtube, on the album Age to Age in 1982. That was the year I graduated (young) from high school. Amy Grant was considered rather radical in my fundamentalist crowd, a fact Eldest Daughter thinks is absolutely hilarious now. Yet we all listened to her. I have recently learned that she is only five years older than I am and am shocked to think how very young she was in 1982. Anyway, out of the blue today I found myself singing "In a little while we'll be with the Father," and I came home and introduced it to Eldest Daughter, who has found some of Grant's music already through the Internet. Favorite line: "We're just here to learn to love Him. We'll be home in just a little while."

In A Little While - Amy Grant

And then there's "Straight Ahead":

Straight Ahead - Amy Grant - Straight Ahead

The value of gun-ownership

More self-defense stuff: Kudos to the (for some reason) unnamed college student in Georgia who saved himself and his fellow students from murder and the females among them from rape by two armed intruders. The student pulled a gun out of his backpack, shot at one bad guy (driving him out of the apartment), ran into the room where the other bad guy was with the women, and shot him. One girl was shot accidentally but is expected to recover completely. And if I were she, I'd be thanking my defender 'til the day I died.

HT VFR

New issue of The Christendom Review now on-line

A new issue of a relatively new journal called The Christendom Review is now on-line. Bill Luse and I both have articles in it about Terri Schiavo, and those of my readers who are interested in legal issues will, I hope, be especially interested in my examination of the legal issues surrounding Terri's murder. I haven't had a chance myself to read many of the other pieces, but I already knew about the visual art of Timothy Jones and am pleased to see some of it highlighted in this issue. I especially like Bleu Cheese and Beer. (One thing I don't quite understand is where the section of Timothy Jones's page went that used to show his whole gallery, including paintings already sold. Some of them were very lovely, and it was great to be able to see them all.)

Anyway, check out the new Christendom Review, and hearty and insufficient thanks to Todd McKimmey for all the work he does and the space he provides to make each issue possible.

Update: Ah, here it is: Timothy Jones Fine Art (I was forgetting to try .net as well as .com) He should have this link front and center on all his other pages. I especially like Strawberries & Cream.

Don't let this be you

I'm going to touch on a touchy subject--the subject of race.

Larry Auster links and discusses a horrifying recent story of a young mother, out shopping with her baby, who was kidnapped at gunpoint and raped. She did not take precautions against her attacker because she "didn't want to seem racist." Ponder that. Anti-racism is now a religion, and people think that they must risk suffering and death for it. This woman could easily have been killed. As it was, she was "only" kidnapped and raped and lived to identify her evil attacker.

Don't let this be you or one of your beloved female relatives or friends. Whatever you may think of the religion of anti-racism, don't be a martyr to it. This woman saw a black man loitering in the parking lot of (of all places) Babies "R" Us, wearing a tattered coat. She felt uneasy and suspicious about him, but she simply walked to her car as usual, past him, because she "didn't want to seem racist." He came up behind her with a gun and threatened to kill her baby if she didn't drive away with him to wherever he directed her.

What else could she have done besides stifling her misgivings and going to the car? She could have gone back into the store and shopped more, checking from time to time to see if the suspicious man was still in the parking lot. She could have used the cell phone that almost everyone has to call her husband or a friend and ask to be met at the store. Best of all, she could have gone back into the store, told the manager about a loiterer who made her feel uneasy, and requested a male escort to her car. She could have done many things. But instead, she walked straight into the trap. And this is by no means the only incident of this kind that has occurred.

Use your brains, your knowledge, and your instincts. Don't stifle them as wrongthought. Better safe than sorry.

Sheep-herding performance art

This is cool:



The dogs are so impressive.

HT: Secondhand Smoke

Welcome, Happy Morning

I haven't had a hymn post for a long, long time. This morning we sang "Welcome, Happy Morning" to the catchy tune "Fortunatus" by none other than Arthur Sullivan. The text is a translation of the ancient Easter hymn by Venantius Fortunatus, which some of you may know in its incarnation as "Hail Thee, Festival Day." Call me a Philistine if you will, but I like the Sullivan version better than the Vaughan Williams one! Perhaps this is partly because "Hail Thee, Festival Day" is a stinker to play and for the congregation to sing, jumping back and forth as it does on the hymnal pages. But I also prefer the text translation that goes with the Sullivan tune. Here are the words:

“Welcome, happy morning!” age to age shall say:
“Hell today is vanquished, Heav’n is won today!”
Lo! the dead is living, God forevermore!
Him, their true Creator, all His works adore!

Refrain

“Welcome, happy morning!”
Age to age shall say.

Earth her joy confesses, clothing her for spring,
All fresh gifts returned with her returning King:
Bloom in every meadow, leaves on every bough,
Speak His sorrow ended, hail His triumph now.

Refrain

Months in due succession, days of lengthening light,
Hours and passing moments praise Thee in their flight.
Brightness of the morning, sky and fields and sea,
Vanquisher of darkness, bring their praise to Thee.

Refrain

Maker and Redeemer, life and health of all,
Thou from heaven beholding human nature’s fall,
Of the Father’s Godhead true and only Son,
Mankind to deliver, manhood didst put on.

Refrain

Thou, of life the Author, death didst undergo,
Tread the path of darkness, saving strength to show;
Come, then True and Faithful, now fulfill Thy Word;
’Tis Thine own third morning; rise, O buried Lord!

Refrain

Loose the souls long prisoned, bound with Satan’s chain;
All that now is fallen raise to life again;
Show Thy face in brightness, bid the nations see;
Bring again our daylight: day returns with Thee!

Refrain

I've been slow all these years: I just this morning realized that "Come, then True and Faithful, now fulfill Thy Word" refers to Jesus' predictions before His death of His own resurrection.

As you can see, this is one of those Northern Hemisphere hymns. Having a reader from New Zealand particularly brings this home to me. Christianity originated in the hemisphere where it is dark and cold at Christmas and getting to be spring at Easter. In fact, the whole dating of Easter in the Western church calendar is predicated on the connection to spring. Easter is the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after the first day of spring! And so many hymns reflect this, particularly during Advent, at Christmas, and at Easter, from the gorgeous "Lo, How a Rose" ("She bore to men a Savior, when half-spent was the night...") to the one above.

The incorporation of the seasons into Christian symbolism, liturgy, history, and hymnody has been incredibly enriching. But I do have to admit that it must be harder to appreciate if you have lived all your life in a country where the seasons are the opposite, where it is just getting to winter at Eastertide and is the height of summer at Christmas!

Ugly clothes

In less than two months, Esteemed Husband and I will be winging our way to Belgium for a short conference in Leuven. This is a Big Deal, because we almost never travel. Fortunately, we have found someone nice and efficient to stay with the girls, and Eldest Daughter will be a great co-babysitter as well. So we're going.

I wanted another skirt for the conference, and after shopping fruitlessly on-line, I ordered one from Lilies Apparel, which I have mentioned before. The skirt should be pretty, though I've never ordered a skirt from them before, but I won't see it for a few weeks. Ordering a skirt from Lilies is a little like ordering a book from Lulu. They don't start making the physical item until you order it. This is nice, because I got mine customized for length and waist size. I think it will come in time, though.

It's a bit pricey, and after ordering it I was seized with a sudden qualm: What if unbeknownst to me my local Meijer superstore had in the meanwhile started selling nice women's clothes and had a skirt I could have bought for much less?

But I needn't have worried.

I had to go to Meijer for something else and took a gander at the women's clothing section. With the exception of a few shelves of T-shirts, all the clothes there had been made in strict accordance with standards provided by the Federal Bureau of Ugly Clothes. I'm sure there is such a bureau, and if you doubt it, go look at the women's clothes at a local superstore sometime.

They were absolutely hideous. I'll start with the skirts, because that was what I was shopping for. The only ones I really looked at were the super-long ones, because the only other kind were the super-short ones. Nothing in between, of course. The super-long ones were called "peasant skirts," but any self-respecting peasant woman would, I'm sure, rather wear a garment made out of a cornmeal sack. They were made of something that I believe is called "crinkle cloth," and it looks just like you would think something called "crinkle cloth" would look--like the tissue paper that comes out of a gift bag and has been wadded up and then partially smoothed out again. Somehow this "crinkle" appearance made even white look like a dirty color. The other colors were a flat, dusty black and various shades of industrial sludge. And on top of everything else, they were see-through. How nice: A pseudo-modest skirt so long that it places a woman in danger of falling flat on her face when she walks while at the same time making Superman's X-ray vision superfluous for purposes of seeing through her clothes.

(While I was looking at these skirts, a young woman was wailing over the radio overhead, "I get so emotional, baby!" Over and over. Should she maybe see somebody about her problem?)

On the way to the skirts, I caught sight of the tops. I see these on women all the time. Most of them are what I would call the maternity camisole look, only often they are brown, which isn't a usual camisole color: Exceedingly immodest, thin little straps or a halter top, deep cleavage, and an ugly sort of bunched-up bodice-formation, with a maternity-style loose skirt underneath the bodice to form the rest of the top. Or, for the squeamish among us, there is the "wear your underwear on top of your clothes" look: The foregoing maternity camisole with a still rather plungy T-shirt sewn underneath it.

Who thinks of these things? Who would actually want to wear them? I suppose some women wear them because they can't find the T-shirt shelves or perhaps even because they buy their clothes without thinking. But the clothes are so, so ugly. The ugliness is in some ways even more striking than the immodesty.

So, reluctantly, I tore myself away from the women's clothing section, muttered something under my breath about the emotional girl on the radio, and took myself off home.

Excellent rant against PC-speak

Do you hate PC-speak? Do you hate all the deceptive, cloying, mind-befogging, euphemistic mental manipulation to which the self-styled Guardians of Culture want to subject you by means of telling you how you must talk?

You will love this post. It's a rant. It's a self-styled rant. Warning: It uses one bad word in the course thereof, once. (He says he will hereby redefine it, since language changes and we can make words mean whatever we want them to mean.) It's hilarious. Here are just a few quotes, but you will want to read the whole thing:

Unless you can tell me, off the top of your head and without looking it up, the name in any Eskimo dialect for a Virginian, I suggest your concern for their concern for our names for them is illegitimate...

...

Maybe if I video-taped myself with a kidnapped and innocent civilian journalist, one to whom I’d falsely promised safe conduct, and battered in his skull with a thurible while dressed in miter and alb all the time singing GLORIA IN EXCELSIS DEO, my tender feelings would be nourished and guarded. Or is it only the deadly enemies of their own culture the death-cult members of the death-culture Left wish to see lauded, aided and abetted?

Let me explain that I regard political correctness as worse than a lie.

A lie is a straightforward attempt to deceive a victim. It [is] almost honest by contrast. Political Correctness is a corrupt attempt to poison thought and speech, and to impose upon the nobility and courtesy of its victims to get them to deceive themselves. A frequent side effect of PC jargon is that it renders rational conversation difficult, indirect, or even impossible.

Innocent and well meaning people are actually fooled by this simple trick. Sad to say, most people think like magicians. They believe in the rule of true names. They think (or rather, they feel) that when they are calling one thing by another name, that the actual nature of reality changes. They put themselves in a position where they can no longer talk about real things. Words are severed from referents.

...

If you successfully substitute the word 'Inuit' for 'Eskimo' on the grounds that 'Eskimo' is an insult, you will have successfully convinced the next generation that all their forefathers who used the word 'Eskimo' deliberately meant and fully intended an insult, or were foolish or negligent enough to utter an insult by accident. That conviction will be false, a lie, and you (in a small way, one more straw on the camel's back) will have helped to perpetrate it.

And there's more. Yes, he gets to feminist revisionist language, too. No one is spared. It's a tour de force (a few misspellings notwithstanding).

Bonus link: If you have never read P. J. O'Rourke's glorious rant on this same subject (politically correct language), the one containing the sentence, "I feel a spate of better writing coming on," do yourself a favor and read it, too.

HT: Scott W. at Romish Internet Graffiti

Y.D. on Infinity

Tonight at supper, Youngest Daughter (age 5 1/2) asked me, "What is the name of the biggest number?"

With some excitement, I told her, "There isn't one! If you name any number, there is always a bigger one." After talking about this for a while, and using the word "infinity" a few times, I asked her, "Do you understand?"

"No," she said, fairly cheerfully. End of subject for the time.

After supper, she got out a pencil and paper. "I'm writing the numbers up to infinity," she told me.

"But you can't!" I said. "It's not possible."

"Yes, I can," she insisted. "I have a paper and pencil, and I'm going to write them." A little later, she added, "I'm going to write the numbers up to 500."

"That's not infinity," I said. "Do you know what 'infinity' means?"

"No."

"If a thing goes on forever, that means it goes on to infinity. Numbers go on to infinity, and that means they never end."

A little later, she told me that she was trying to write, "The fact is that things go on forever. They never end." But, she added, she couldn't remember how to spell "things." I suggested that "numbers" is easier to spell than "things." We talked for a bit about how to spell "numbers."

Then I said, "Besides, it depends on what things you're talking about. Some things do come to an end, but others don't."

"Cups come to an end!" she said.

"That's right. Cups come to an end. But numbers don't."

Next stop: Actual and potential infinities.

Bill Luse's great Easter Youtube

I don't do enough linking from here to my friends' blog pieces. There are a lot of reasons for that, and I'm not promising amendment of life. It's sometimes hard enough to put up something original of my own. (Hey! Maybe I don't have to, if I fulfill my sense of blogging responsibility at this personal blog by linking more frequently to other people's neat posts. Gotta think about that one.)

But it suddenly occurred to me that, since I enjoyed Bill Luse's Youtube video for Easter so much--and I e-mailed the link to a couple of people who definitely wouldn't have seen it otherwise--I should link it from here for any of my readers who don't go over to Bill's page regularly.

I won't tell you what the song is ahead of time. See how many of the people in the pictures you can identify. I got dry-eyed as far as Terri Schiavo.

Enjoy.

How do you pedal backwards so fast, Rick?

I always knew I disliked Rick Warren. Read about his backpedaling on supporting Prop. 8. Simply disgusting. Nothing like handing the keys of the city to the sodomites just when they are on the attack. I've got a clue for you, Rick: If you want Larry King and his friends to like you...you'd better not be a Christian. Not one to whom Christianity means anything about, y'know, the real world.

HT Rick Pearcey

Because He Lives

Imeem beats Youtube, hands down for selection of songs. I spent a lot more time a year ago looking for a good version of this on Youtube, and every single one had something wrong with it. It took a while on Imeem too, but here's a nice, classic version.

Happy Easter!!!

Because He Lives - Heritage Singers

Christus Dominus Hodie Resurrexit

Alleluia! He is risen!

Christ The Lord Is Risen Today - Glad

It's About the Cross

Eldest Daughter found this video and has urged me to embed it for Easter weekend. In fact, she wanted me to do it yesterday, for Good Friday, but I had the other post yesterday. It's actually a Christmas song, and the youtube video is of some people (the Chongs) whom I don't know. They have very cute kids, though.

So there are a number of incongruities--the pictures of the adorable children go for about three minutes before the pictures relate directly to the meaning of the song. And putting up a Christmas song at Easter time may seem a bit odd. But any of you who know a particular evangelical Protestant tradition know that Christmas songs with Good Friday themes are not unknown in that context. (I'm dating myself by mentioning this, but Christine Wyrtzen's "Shadow of a Tree" was pretty popular when I was a teenager.)

I think it's an enjoyable video, and great words to the song. Thanks to the Chongs, whoever they may be, for sharing it.

Baby stays awake, saves her own life

All of you parents out there, perhaps mothers especially, have been through nights when a baby simply will not go to sleep. Fuss, fuss, fuss. Or sometimes, happily wide awake...until you lay him down. Youngest Daughter started out alert in the delivery room and has continued to be alert since then, pretty much non-stop. And she was a night owl. At 3 a.m., she would wake up for a feeding, and no matter how low I tried to keep the lights, I'd see those bright, big eyes looking all around. Head turning. The world was just so interesting. Why would anybody want to sleep? Ever?

Well, now there's a disturbing story out of Canada with a happy ending (or a happy plateau for the moment), because a baby wouldn't go to sleep.

Two-month-old Kaylee Wallace has Joubert Syndrome, which is causing sleep apnea. She breathes fine on her own when awake but is ventilator dependent (to some extent or other) while asleep. Her parents had decided to "let her die" and donate her heart to another child using the non-heart-beating donor protocol. I've written about this protocol here. At Kaylee's hospital, they planned to wait five minutes after her heart stopped before declaring her dead, but in some places where they use this protocol they wait only 75 seconds before declaring an infant dead and taking his organs.

So, in a macabre death-watch, they carted Kaylee off to the operating room around a time when they expected her to go to sleep, took her off her ventilator, and...waited for her to fall asleep and die, or "die"--stop breathing, let her heartbeat stop for five minutes, refuse to revive her, and then harvest her heart for another child. But it was just one of those darned things: Kaylee was too interested in living. Maybe she thought the operating room looked cool. She wasn't ready to fall asleep. No, no, no. Who knows what they tried. It boggles the mind. Did somebody snuggle her to try to make her comfy, so she would fall asleep and die, so they could get her heart? I don't know. It's hard to imagine people participating in such a process. But she wouldn't play ball. The story says the process was supposed to go through if she died in two hours. So I'm guessing she stayed awake for two hours, bless her little heart. (Literally.) Just went on breathing.

The hospital says that Kaylee is "no longer a candidate" to be an organ donor, but that this determination is "subject to change." I assume that at a minimum this means they aren't just going to try this little dance of death over and over again, hoping to catch Kaylee sleeping. But it's unclear what would make her a candidate once again.

Meanwhile, her parents are "scared" by the fact that she didn't die! You see, they've made up their minds that Kaylee is dying (though this is questionable), and now they consider that if she dies without having her organs harvested, they have also "lost" another child who might have received her heart. Says her father, "If she's going to die, we got to keep trying. I want my child to pass on because she can't survive, and to save that child. This is our first child and the dreams of the grandparents, the hopes of the future...have been dashed, yet the hopes of another child doing the same thing is what we live on for here." Get that? What they are now living for is the hope that their baby may die in such a way that her organs can be harvested. And, "That's what scares us right now," Wallace said Tuesday, his voice cracking. "Losing our daughter's OK, I understand that, but I don't want to lose two."

I wonder what they will tell Kaylee if she lives.

Quote of the week--If you don't help Herod, are you "honoring" him?

I usually don't do quotes of the week, but this one was really good.

From a commentator at Zippy's blog, apropos of Obama Catholics who defend Notre Dame in offering him an honorary degree with the "we are supposed to honor our leaders" shtick:

[T]he Magi's circumvention of Herod was in direct contrast to Paul's command to honor leaders.

That just nails it.

Optimistic naturalists

A correspondent was recently asking me about a particular argument naturalists sometimes use. Now, to me, this argument sounds so incredibly lame that I can never understand why smart people are the least bit impressed by it. It's just like saying, "Oh, never mind the evidence. I'm sure we'll figure that out eventually. Move along. Nothing to see here." Why would anybody listen to this?

But it's been put forward very seriously by various people and was worrying my correspondent, so Tim and I responded, and I have a post up at W4 based on that response.

The naturalist's argument basically goes, "Science has made great strides and achievements and has explained lots and lots of stuff that we didn't used to understand. So eventually, whatever it is that you are bringing up as evidence for the existence of God or for any entity that isn't strictly non-naturalistic will also be explained as a purely naturalistic phenomenon."

This is just such a bad argument. The sense in which science has made great strides and achievements--you know, finding the causes of diseases, discovering very small particles and figuring out how they interact, seeing the inner workings of the cell, figuring out the basic laws of planetary motion--in no sense tends to confirm that there is nothing but matter in the world and that everything has a physical cause. How could it?

To my mind, this is just one step up, if that, from the Bultmannian claim that we can't possibly believe in miracles in the age of the electric lightbulb.

But my W4 post is much more dignified than this little rant. (Ahem. Really. Much more dignified.) Enjoy.

I've Got the Joy

The rest of the family is recovered, and I'm on the road to recovery. Being able to breathe again more or less freely is nice.

I hope later to have a post linking and briefly summarizing a contentful post at W4 about science and naturalism. But as I haven't yet written that contentful post...below is a song by the Gofish guys called "I've Got the Joy." Normally I am a "less is more" kind of person in music and tend to look down a bit on fancy effects with electronics--voice altering, stuff like that. But these guys do it all with such an innocent love of fun, and of kids, that I can't help enjoying it. And it sure beats the version of "I've Got the Joy" that we sang in Sunday School when I was a kid!

Eldest Daughter (16) has found several of these Gofish videos on-line and plays them for Youngest Daughter (age 5). This particular one is probably their favorite, but there was a brief tragedy when it disappeared temporarily from Youtube. It's back now, and also safely downloaded in case it disappears again.

"I've Got the Joy" by Gofish:

Inasmuch

2 1/2 years ago or so I read the story below on, of all sites, Little Green Footballs, in a comments thread. I have gone back since then and tried diligently to find that comment with the story, but I haven't been able to find it, so you'll have to take my word for it. I no longer read LGF. It's changed for the worse (to put it mildly). But this story will always remain with me and deserves to be told and heard more widely, even though it is hearsay. The comment author said that a family friend used to tell this story about herself--that is, she was the woman in the story--at meals with his family. And here it is, in my words, and as I remember it. I am not sure that the city was Odessa, though it was in that part of the world.

**************************************************************************

Once there was a woman who lived in Odessa. The Nazis came, and they began killing the Jews. One early morning, the woman went out with a basket on her arm to shop. As she was walking across a square in the city, she saw a large group of children coming, marshaled by a soldier. When they got near, the soldier said to her, "Ma'am, can you take any of these children with you? Perhaps even just one? They are Jewish children, and where I am taking them, they will die." One beautiful little boy broke away from the group and ran up to her. "Auntie," he said, "Please take me with you. I promise I won't eat much." She looked down at him for a moment, and then she slowly shook her head and hurried on. A few streets away, she was suddenly horrified at herself. She ran back to the square, but the children and the soldier were gone, and she never saw any of them again. And later in life, the only thing she could do to make amends was to tell what she had done.

**************************************************************************

And Jesus took a little child, and set him by him, and said unto them, "Whosoever shall receive this child in my name receiveth me: and whosoever shall receive me receiveth him that sent me."

Then shall the King say to those on his left, "Inasmuch as ye have not done it unto the least of these, ye have not done it unto me."

They really do want your children

Most of you will have seen this post of mine already at W4, but for anyone who hasn't...My husband found an incredible, amazing quote from the well-known (now late) philosopher Richard Rorty openly bragging about discrediting Christian parents in their children's eyes, about reprograming them, and the like. I want to point out for those of you who are (understandably) hesitant about quoting what you see on the web that Tim verified this quotation from the "look inside" function for the book itself on Amazon. It's legit, and in fact the full version is even more shocking than the portion quoted on Wikipedia. Here's a teaser to get you to go to W4 if you aren't a regular W4 reader:

The fundamentalist parents of our fundamentalist students think that the entire “American liberal establishment” is engaged in a conspiracy. Had they read Habermas, these people would say that the typical communication situation in American college classrooms is no more herrschaftsfrei [domination free] than that in the Hitler Youth camps.

These parents have a point. Their point is that we liberal teachers no more feel in a symmetrical communication situation when we talk with bigots than do kindergarten teachers talking with their students....When we American college teachers encounter religious fundamentalists, we do not consider the possibility of reformulating our own practices of justification so as to give more weight to the authority of the Christian scriptures. Instead, we do our best to convince these students of the benefits of secularization. We assign first-person accounts of growing up homosexual to our homophobic students for the same reasons that German schoolteachers in the postwar period assigned The Diary of Anne Frank....I think those students are lucky to find themselves under the benevolent Herrschaft [domination] of people like me, and to have escaped the grip of their frightening, vicious, dangerous parents.

And there's more, here.

Schiavo case trial transcripts available on-line

I am blogging this in multiple places to bring it to the attention of the Google bots for searching researchers. My thanks to Zippy who has put it up on his blog.

I have just finished an article for the forthcoming issue of The Christendom Review on some legal aspects of the Terri Schiavo case. In the course of doing research for it, I managed (by dint of much and persistent e-mailing) to get hold of the trial transcripts of all the witness testimony in the Schiavo case. As far as I have been able to tell, these transcripts are not available elsewhere on-line.

Because people will be studying and discussing Terri Schiavo's death (murder, I would say) for many years to come, it seems to me extremely important that the witness testimony be available. The judge's job was to decide that there was "clear and convincing evidence" that Terri would have wanted to be dehydrated to death. Judge Greer's opinion is on-line here. (Greer's opinion, unlike the testimony transcripts, has been available on-line all along.)

Greer's opinion does not quote the witness testimony he is using. He just alludes to it, sometimes extremely vaguely, and sometimes even erroneously. News stories usually contain only bits and pieces, and their sources are unclear.

Greer dismissed Diane Meyer's testimony on the basis of his erroneous belief that Karen Ann Quinlan died before 1982. It is interesting to see how Meyer stands up to George Felos, the opposing attorney, who tries to put words into her mouth and confuse her. She did an especially good job given that Felos apparently succeeded in temporarily convincing everyone at Terri's trial that Quinlan actually died in 1976 when her ventilator was removed. In fact, she lived until 1985.

On my personal web page I now have

--A PDF scan of the testimony transcript of Diane Meyer
--A PDF scan of the testimony transcript of Scott Schiavo
--A PDF scan of the testimony transcript of Joan Schiavo
--A complete transcript of all the witness testimony, including the testimony of Michael Schiavo and Mrs. Schindler, in a web page html form.

These five were the witnesses who claimed to have had conversations with Terri about end-of-life issues.

I owe the Diane Meyer transcript directly to Pat Anderson, one of the Schindlers' lawyers. I owe the complete transcript to Atty. Joe Bell, who took a PDF that he had from Pat Anderson and made a careful project of translating it into searchable text.

My hope is that now when people search "Schiavo" and "trial transcripts," "Diane Meyer," and other such phrases, they will have more luck than I did in finding these important documents on-line.

Cross-posted

Very miscellaneous

We, corporately, have a cold. That is, my family is now passing around a real doozy of a cold. So far I have been mostly spared, except for a pretty bad earache (of my own) and fatigue from going pointlessly into Youngest Daughter's room in the middle of the night when she's coughing her head off and saying, "Do you need anything? Do you need to go potty? Are you okay?"

However, this just adds to the general lack of inspiration for posts here at Extra Thoughts which seems to have been afflicting me for some five weeks or so now and for which I apologize to any readers I have retained. Over at W4 I have a new post about the latest and craziest manifestation of what I call the "choice devours itself" phenomenon: "Suicide assistance" as outright murder. The person who supposedly wants to die gets his hands held down by his "exit guide" if he changes his mind and tries to tear the plastic bag off his head. I can't help thinking, "They can't come up with anything worse than this," and then they do.

In other news that looks like satire but isn't, the AP just put up a headline this morning, "Karzai Welcomes Obama Call to Reach out to Taliban." That's right. You read that right. We're supposed to "reach out" to the Taliban. I suppose that's what they mean by Hope and Change--acting like liberal fools towards some of the most evil people in the world, people who have devoted their lives to figuring out how to murder more American civilians. Oh, wait, I missed it: We're supposed to be reaching out to the moderates in the Taliban. Well, that's different, of course. Glad we got that cleared up.

And finally, I had a mildly interesting technical thought in church this morning. (Priest: "The Lord be with you." Youngest Daughter: "Coughcoughcoughcoughcoughcoughcough." Eldest Daughter, "It looks like C. [Middle Daughter] is crying." Me (whispering to Middle Daughter): "What's wrong, honey?" Middle Daughter: "I'm losing my voice." Me: "Do you need anything now? Please don't cry." Middle Daughter: "I'm not crying." Priest: "Lift up your hearts..." And so forth.) Anyway, the technical thought was that probability theory is neutral as between substantive conclusions. There isn't such a thing as a "Christian" probability theory. That, I already knew. But people may be confused into thinking that it isn't neutral when we notice that some correct form of probabilistic modeling (like, say, Bayesian probability theory) helps us to model evidence accurately in a way that prevents certain confusions that anti-religious skeptics like to exploit.

I played "I Have Decided to Follow Jesus" for the postlude. I wonder if anyone besides my family recognized it. Years ago a friend (who is now Eastern Orthodox but was then Baptist) asked me, "Do Baptists have any Lent hymns?" Well, yes and no. It seems to me that all the dedication and devotion hymns are absolutely perfect for Lent. "Have Thine Own Way, Lord." "Take My Life and Let It Be." And especially, "Must Jesus Bear the Cross Alone." But not hymns any more specifically about Lent than that, for obvious historical reasons. Still, it would do some stuffy Anglicans good to learn, "I Have Decided to Follow Jesus" ("no turning back..." "the world behind me, the cross before me...") and all those others. And to sing them and enjoy them, too. And a good Lenten meditation into the bargain.

Okay, ththththat's all, folks.

A conjecture

I conjecture that the present economic difficulties of the U.S. will strengthen the grip of political correctness in both business and in higher education. People will be afraid either of losing their jobs or of not being hired in the first place and hence will be more susceptible than ever to intimidation, more careful than ever not to say anything to offend the noisiest and nastiest of the bullies in their fields. I would think the effect might even be stronger in the business world than in the academy. In the business world you can't even say, "I have tenure."

What do you think?

Crossposted at W4