Down in the River to Pray--Take 2

It's difficult to decide which version of this I like best. Posted one by Allan Hall here.

Here is Alison Krauss's version from a concert of the music from O Brother, Where Art Thou?. (Embedding disabled on the video.) Alison's voice is perfect. It's just...there.

There's something about this song that gets to me. It reminds me of the Flannery O'Connor story "The River." A disturbing and powerful story about a little boy who gets baptized.

Looks like a great concert (though I haven't had time to watch it) is available here on Youtube with all the music from O Brother. (Strange-looking movie, but wonderful music.) (Link HT: Southern Gospel Yankee)

"Palestinian" "police" are terrorists

If you're an Israeli Jew and you have the audacity to try to go and pray at Joseph's tomb without carefully coordinating your visit with the IDF, you might just get gunned down by Kalashnikov-wielding "Palestinian" "police" shrieking, "Allahu akbar!" They can't just have people promiscuously praying at a Jewish holy site without special permission, can they? Obviously a highly dangerous activity justifying the immediate use of deadly force. And why not praise Allah while killing a Jew? Especially a Hasid? Sounds like a win-win from their perspective. (See also here.)

This is what the Israelis get for treating the "Palestinians" as a quasi-state entity in Judea and Samaria, aka the "West Bank." No good deed will go unpunished. Except that I'm not at all sure that giving the "Palestinians" partial control over Judea and Samaria was a good deed, if we include "wise, prudent, and good for all concerned" in "good."

Alleluia! He is risen!

The Lord Jesus Christ is risen from the dead. Alleluia! Never has there been such joyful news proclaimed throughout the earth, for because He lives, we too shall live. Our sins can be forgiven, we can be reconciled with God. Here is a link to my post today at W4 in which I give an interesting little evidential argument--just something extra on top of the massive testimony of the witnesses.

If the claim that Jesus rose from the dead is not true, really true, literally true, then we are still in our sins. In which spirit, I give you (not for the first time and probably not for the last) Updike's Seven Stanzas:

"Seven Stanzas At Easter"

By John Updike

Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells' dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that--pierced--died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck's quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.

Good Friday: Behold and see

...if there be any sorrow like unto His sorrow. From Psalm 69, which also contains a remarkable prophecy: "They gave me also gall for my meat; and in my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink." I am amazed to report, what I had never noticed before: None of the evangelists even draws attention to this parallel. Maybe they thought they had enough already otherwise.

Palm Sunday Passion--"Ah, Holy Jesus"

Ah, holy Jesus, how hast Thou offended,
That man to judge Thee hath in hate pretended?
By foes derided, by Thine own rejected,
O most afflicted.

Who was the guilty? Who brought this upon Thee?
Alas, my treason, Jesus, hath undone Thee.
’Twas I, Lord, Jesus, I it was denied Thee!
I crucified Thee.

Lo, the Good Shepherd for the sheep is offered;
The slave hath sinned, and the Son hath suffered;
For man’s atonement, while he nothing heedeth,
God intercedeth.

For me, kind Jesus, was Thy incarnation,
Thy mortal sorrow, and Thy life’s oblation;
Thy death of anguish and Thy bitter passion,
For my salvation.

Therefore, kind Jesus, since I cannot pay Thee,
I do adore Thee, and will ever pray Thee,
Think on Thy pity and Thy love unswerving,
Not my deserving.

St. John's Episcopal Church sings these words (not the messed-up modern version) here.

And when the Passion of Our Lord is read, and the person who has agreed to play Pontius Pilate asks what shall be done with Jesus, the whole congregation joins in crying out, "Crucify him!" It's not something one wants to do, somehow. But it does drive home the point: "I crucified Thee."

Got 'em

Two "Palestinian" young men, entirely unrepentant (of course), have been arrested in the slaughter of the Fogel family. Thanks to Malcolm and Yaacov for the links (here and here). Kudos to the Shin Bet.

It appears (from last names) that they are related to the two Fatah men whose arrest was earlier reported in WorldNet Daily. In fact, it looks like a whole lot of people in the village of Awarta are related to one another and like covering up this particular massacre was something of a family affair. The young murderers may have dreamed up the idea on their own, but their uncle and other family members helped them hide and dispose of the evidence afterwards. Charming people. But give them a state, and I'm sure all will be well./sarc

I continue to say: May the Israelis vote in a death penalty, and may their courts not strike it down. It would be a real advance.

A possibly offensive post

My Catholic readers may want to skip this post. At the risk of offending, but hoping that I will not:

I do not believe that the Scriptures have been written for the purpose of inducing in men a great fear of being damned while at the same time hiding from them the knowledge of what they must do to be saved, which vital knowledge they must then seek from some other source. Yet a certain argument for Catholicism concerning our supposed need for a guide to essential doctrine asks that we take this possibility with the utmost seriousness.

"Journey's End"

This song is on a new album by Ernie Haase and Signature Sound. Yet it's not just by EHSS. For this album, producer Wayne Haun took the voice of the late George Younce off of old masters, extracted it from its background, and added new music and background vocals by the present EHSS. Very impressive, very classy album. The song below was new to me but is wonderful. Here's a review of the entire album. Lyrics for "Journey's End" to follow.



Verse 1

There is a land I long to see
It's across the river wide
It is there my Savior waits for me
Just on the other side

And his gentle calls encourage me
Not to fear the river's bend
But to steer the course he's given me
'Til I reach my journey's end

Verse 2

There is a place I long to be
It is by my Savior's side
He has there prepared a place for me
In his presence to abide

And he navigates my ship for me
Through the storms that life may send
And though the water's deep and wide
He'll be there 'til journey's end

(Bridge)

Oh I need not fear the wind and rain
As they wash away the sand
It is on the solid rock I stand
Waiting for my Lord's command

There is a land I long to see
It's across the river wide
It is there my Savior waits for me
Just on the other side

And his gentle calls encourage me
Not to fear the river's bend
But to steer the course he's given me
'Til I reach my journey's end

Various arrests in Fogel case by Israeli military

Since I fretted here about the dearth of information on the investigation of the Fogel family massacre in Israel, I thought it only fair to post this update. It seems that the Israeli military is in fact making arrests and taking fingerprints and DNA samples from quite a number of people at the "Palestinian" village of Awarta, near Itamar, where the murders took place. Apparently the investigation is being carried out more or less secretly--that is to say, without release of details to the public--by the IDF.

This could mean that the report in WND of the arrest of men from Fatah (hence, plausibly men who had been trained by the U.S.) was correct, though the IDF sweep seems to be trying to catch conspirators as well as for those who actually carried out the murders.

Hmmm. Good luck to the investigators. I still wish they had the d.p. there.

New manuscript, apparently from W.I.M.P.S.

Hah! Some of you may recall the "ancient manuscript" discovered and published here from the Worship! Iconium Ministerial Peace Society, rebuking the Apostle Paul for his confrontational manner.

The satire bug is difficult to resist. A new and similar manuscript has surfaced, in connection apparently with what is known as "hellgate"--the controversy over Rob Bell's universalism. Personally, I consider Rob Bell to be more or less beneath notice, though unfortunately very influential. I suppose (sigh) that someone has to write about him. This new discovery of further rebukes of Paul for being "unloving" (in the book of Galatians) is very funny. Enjoy.

Lent II collect

Almighty God, who seest that we have no power of ourselves to help ourselves; Keep us both outwardly in our bodies, and inwardly in our souls; that we may be defended from all adversities which may happen to the body, and from all evil thoughts which may assault and hurt the soul; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

One of the most beautiful collects in the Prayer Book. It suddenly dawned on me today that I have always interpreted and prayed for myself about the "evil thoughts" in a way that may well be different from that intended by the author. (According to an invaluable book, The Collects of Thomas Cranmer, by C. Frederick Barbee and Paul F. M. Zahl, the "author" in this case is someone, name unknown, writing in the 500's or even earlier. The collect comes to us by way of the Gregorian Sacramentary. Thomas Cranmer translated it for the Prayer Book.) I have always taken the "evil thoughts" to be worries, nightmare scenarios that suddenly assault the mind (and it definitely feels like that), or the inability to stop thinking about pieces of horrible knowledge one wishes one didn't have. The Internet, of course, raises the odds that one will accumulate such pieces of knowledge. In this interpretation I have probably been influenced by Elizabeth Goudge, who takes the phrase that way in the novel Pilgrim's Inn, which deals in part, as so many of Goudge's novels do, with severe mental strain.

I suddenly realized, though, that the original writer probably intended the "evil thoughts" to be temptations--the desire to do evil, the sudden thought of doing evil, perhaps coming to the mind as an assault from the Wicked One. That would be more in keeping with Lent, and I gather that the collect was originally written for Lent.

But one can pray the collect to God with either meaning, or with both.

Criminal Justice

I regularly read (and link in the sidebar) an Israeli blog called Israel Matzav. The blogger, Carl in Jerusalem, is an Orthodox Jew who apparently lives over the "green line." He has been blogging a lot recently about the Fogel massacre, about which I've done a couple of posts here at Extra Thoughts.

The thing that as an American reader I find most frustrating about the coverage of this is the absence of any criminal justice approach to the evil. Carl has recently embedded a video, which I don't intend to watch and advise others to avoid, that contains and is headed by graphic pictures of the slain. (I'm deliberately not linking the blog from this particular post lest an unwary reader go, scroll down, and inadvertently see the picture heading the video.) Carl is trying to stir up appropriate outrage. With that I agree. But the proper response, the active and positive use of outrage, is to demand that evil men be brought to justice as individuals. Even though we in the rest of the world cannot personally do anything, we at least need to have something clearly appropriate, something a healthy mind rightly seeks, to say that others should do. Otherwise dwelling on horror becomes an end in itself, which is not healthy.

I've asked again and again at the site for confirmation of the report that two "Palestinians" have been arrested for the murder--no response. There is, in fact, no discussion of the topic of catching the murderers and of how that is going in any of the posts I have read at the site. It begins to look like the progress of the case and the facts about any arrest are secrets in Israel, even at a "right-wing" blog. In America, of course, whoever was in charge of the investigation would be hounded by the press and asked what progress he was making in catching the murderers. The arrest of the murderers could not possibly be a secret.

Actually, I have to admit that I don't even know how that works in Samaria (aka "the West Bank"), given the semi-independence of the "Palestinian Authority." Is it difficult or impossible for Israel even to make an arrest? But if so, why is there a report of arrests going around? Who would have made those arrests? Even just spelling that out for American readers would be helpful.

Perhaps someone will respond that one should not take a criminal justice approach to terrorism. I'm not sure what the point of such a response in this context would be. The right and natural next step after feeling due outrage is to want these evildoers arrested and punished.

But it's even more frustrating than that, because Israel does not have a death penalty. In fact, Israel has released even horrific Palestinian killers like Samir Kuntar, who also slaughtered an innocent Israeli child, in order to get back the dead bodies of Israeli soldiers. So the whole thing begins to look like a rather bitter game to an American eye. The murderers of the Fogel family will never get anything like justice. At the most they will be arrested and spend some time--almost certainly not the rest of their lives--in prison. And the world may or may not find out about that. It's terribly frustrating.

In that justice vacuum, if I may so call it, one begins to wonder about the point of harrowing readers with an embedded video headed with a graphic image that I, for one, did not want to see. Perhaps the idea is to get some on the left to start to see the darkness in the hearts of the Jew-hating "Palestinians" and the impossibility of making peace with them; I doubt if this tactic will succeed. In any event, the murder of real, concrete people should call forth first and foremost a cry for justice for them, the punishment, individually, of their killers.

I hope that this post will not enrage any Israeli readers and especially that it won't get me banned from commenting on a valuable site. I realize that there may be reasons for the news blackout on the criminal case, reasons that we in America simply do not know. But it may be useful for anyone on the Israeli right who happens to read this to know how these things play out in the minds of those already most sympathetic to "settlers" and most angered by the slaughter of the Fogels.

Anniversary of the beginning of Terri Schiavo's murder [Updated]

Bill Luse points out that March 18 was the sixth anniversary of the beginning of Terri Schiavo's lengthy murder by dehydration. He is kind enough to mention my articles along with others on this topic.

My article in The Christendom Review cites and links several trial transcripts of witness testimony in Terri's case. With the help of some of the lawyers involved in the case, I was able to gather these witness transcripts in one place. I'm not recommending that anyone read through them in their entirety, but I think that as original source documents they are important, and as far as I know they are available in their entirety only on my site. Here is the portal for those documents. Feel free to download them and also to upload and make them available elsewhere. (It would be courteous to link back to my site when you do so and also to give credit to Attys. Bell and Anderson for the material.) It was difficult to get these documents, and they should be able to be found in Google searches by researchers. My Touchstone article on Terri's death (unfortunately not available on-line) is "Road to a Kill," Touchstone Magazine, June, 2009, pp. 44-47, and in it I describe some ways in which the availability of the transcripts is important for understanding the cavalier and biased way in which the court approached Terri's case. The testimonies of Diane Meyer and Joan Schiavo are especially significant. [Update: The ever-alert Bill Luse pointed out to me that I am now allowed to post the Touchstone article on-line. Here is the link.]

Terri's slow death was an agony for her parents, and those who became heavily involved in the case at a distance via the Internet entered in some small and even mysterious way into that agony. Yet it would be an impertinence to imply that in any sense her murder was about the rest of us and what we felt, what we thought. Her murder was about her, about her parents' horrific pain, about those who killed her. It is difficult, but we must pray that they will repent of their great evil.

Here is a wonderful Easter video put together by Bill Luse and featuring pictures of Terri as well as of other people who had died during the year preceding the video.

"America will get at you?"

The murders of the Fogel family in Israel do not exactly reflect glory on the U.S. A report from World Net Daily claims that two arrests have been made in the case and that both of those arrested are members of Fatah forces--the forces that have received training from the U.S. I've been disgusted by this for a long time, and it goes back to the Bush administration. More of this Good Muslim/Bad Muslim nonsense, in which we, the rubes, go in and lavish help on those we've decided to define as "good Muslims." In this case, the Moderate Ones happen to be the PLO.

Anybody remember when Fatah was just called "the PLO" and was openly spoken of as a terrorist organization? Yeah, well, that was a long time ago. Maybe I'm showing my age. We changed our minds about considering them to be terrorists, and instead we trained them to fight the "bad Muslims"--that is, Hamas. And now it looks like the "good ones" are murdering Jews. Great. I've tried to get confirmation of this arrest story from a source other than WND but haven't yet succeeded. I will post if and when I do get some sort of independent confirmation.

There's an expenditure of foreign aid funds I could really get enthusiastic about: Funds spent training and aiding Palestinian terrorists.

Here's another zinger: Benjamin Netanyahu visited the family and friends during their mourning. He spoke to Tamar, the twelve-year-old daughter who came home from a youth activity and found the bodies of her parents and siblings. Guess what she says? "What will happen if you do anything? America will get at you?"

Ouch. Take that, Barack Obama.

Jeff Jacoby on the slaughter of the innocents in Itamar

Here's a good article on the horrible slaughter of most of an Israeli family, the Fogel family, by Palestinian Arabs. Best quotation (emphasis added):

There are those who believe passionately that all human beings are inherently good and rational creatures, essentially the same once you get beyond surface disagreements. Such people cannot accept the reality of a culture that extols death over life, that inculcates a vitriolic hatred of Jews, that induces children to idolize terrorists. Since they would never murder a family in its sleep without being driven to it by some overpowering horror, they imagine that nobody would. This is the mindset that sees a massacre of Jews and concludes that Jews must in some way have provoked it. It’s the mindset behind the narrative that continually blames Israel for the enmity of its neighbors and makes it Israel’s responsibility to end their violence.

The truth is simpler, and bleaker. Human goodness is not hard-wired. It takes sustained effort and healthy values to produce good people; in the absence of those values, cruelty and intolerance are far more likely to flourish.

I'll have a bit more to say about the slaughter of the Fogels in a later post. I'm trying to confirm or disconfirm reports of an arrest in the case. For the moment I'll just say--Israel definitely needs the death penalty.

All these will I give thee

Today's Gospel reading was the temptation of Jesus. I've often mused a bit about the temptation in which the Devil offers Jesus all the kingdoms of the world if Jesus will fall down and worship him. Does the Devil have the kingdoms of the world to offer, or was the offer just a fake?

We know the Devil doesn't actually play fair, but I've always suspected that he really did have the kingdoms of the world to offer. Jesus Himself called the Devil "the prince of this world." Human beings have free will, but they're usually only too ready to listen to the wrong leaders and the wrong promptings. If Satan really wanted to set someone up to rule the world, unless God chose to intervene and stop it, I would guess that Satan could do it.

If this conjecture is right, then Jesus turned down a genuine offer of world-wide rule in place of the road to Golgotha.

And it may be, too, that the Devil sometimes offers us things as well--really offers them to us. If we will only be dishonest, we can get something we couldn't otherwise get. Maybe that's true. Maybe we could really get away with it. Jesus said that the children of this world are wiser than the children of light. If one is wise as a serpent but not harmless as a dove, one may do better than all the doves.

I don't imagine many of us feel anything like a direct temptation to bow down and worship Satan in exchange for earthly rule. But in any life there are temptations to gain earthly advantage by less-than-noble means--lying, fudging, faking, cheating, or even bullying and manipulation come to mind.

It's almost frightening to reflect that for a time, maybe even a long time, these techniques might really work. The Devil is far more likely to promise, and give, tangible success than God is. And the worst of it is that once one has been getting away with something for these many years it becomes extremely difficult to back out of it, especially if other people are involved.

Well. None of this is our business for anyone but ourselves. But it's worth reflecting and asking God to help us hear in the misleading thoughts that occur to us the voice softly whispering, "All these will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me..."

"Good" Muslim Brotherhood vs. Bad al-Qaeda

Here we go again. I hope I'm not the only one who gets sick of liberals (and paleoconservatives) who roll their eyes and tell the rest of us that we're ignorant cretins for not knowing all about how the difference between Sunni and Shiite Muslims somehow means that Islam is not all bad. (Al-Qaeda is Sunni. Hezbollah is Shia. Yep, that's real helpful in distinguishing the good guys from the bad guys.)

Get ready for a new manufactured excuse for the liberals to roll their eyes. The administration is telling us that Al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood (both Sunni) are also very different in this same way. Barry Rubin skewers this:

Get it? Al-Qaeda is bad because it wants to attack U.S. embassies, the World Trade Center, and the Pentagon.

BUT the Muslim Brotherhood is good! Because it merely wants to seize state power, transform Egypt into an Islamist state, rule almost 90 million people with an iron hand, back Hamas in trying to destroy Israel, overthrow the Palestinian Authority, help Jordan’s Muslim Brotherhood overthrow the monarchy, and sponsor terrorism against Americans in the Middle East.

Thanks, Barry. I couldn't have said it better.

HT: VFR

Eco-wackos and dirt

From the last post to this--from the sublime to the ridiculous. But, when inspired...

I've once or twice been asked why I say that environmentalism isn't about keeping things clean. You know those nice young Sierra Club people who come to your door and talk about the Clean Water Act? You know the naive people who still believe that environmentalism is about having a cleaner environment, cleaner air, cleaner water? Well, they're wrong. Environmentalism is about having things less modern, less comfortable, and hence, dirtier. I could give lots of examples, but as a new example inspired this post, here it is, via Drudge:

Those low-flow toilets that the eco-wackos have tried to get installed everywhere to save water? Well, they are causing a terrible smell in San Francisco because of a build-up of bacteria in the pipes when the icky sludge isn't washed down by that small quantity of water. How nice. Get "environmentally friendly" toilets, and now your whole town can smell like a giant Port-a-Potty.

But it's "green." See? "Green" means more like camping out, more like foregoing first-world conditions of life. Which is exactly the opposite of cleanliness. In fact, it means being dirtier, smellier, more insanitary, more unsafe, and less human-friendly. Also expensive. (See the linked article on the cost of smell abatement.)

I think I'm going to tell that to the Sierra Club kids next time they come to the door to collect a donation for clean water: "Oh, you mean like in San Francisco where they now have to dump gallons and gallons of bleach into the water to disinfect it because of 'green' toilets? No thanks."

Said Musa released

Friends who read this blog know that personal reasons have kept me out of the blogosphere for a little while. I'm slowly trying to get things back to normal and will begin here with just the announcement that our brother in Christ, Said Musa, has been released from prison. (Probably all my readers knew this already.) Just a week ago I was praying for God to strengthen him and help him, through martyrdom if that was what it was to be. The report says that he is safe in another country. Praise God! I have heard that another convert to Christianity is still imprisoned and in danger of his life in Afghanistan but have not found out who that is. If you know, feel free to put that information in the comments.

Songs to Die For--Angel Band

My generous husband bought me a new Gospel music CD the other evening at Cracker Barrel--a bunch of hymns hand-picked by Bill Gaither. It contained a country song I'd never heard before called "Angel Band." (I know, I've been living in a cave.)

The particular performance on the CD doesn't appear to be on-line, but it does feature the immortal Vestal Goodman. So here's the nearest thing I could find: Vestal singing it with country legend George Jones. The video has a great story at the beginning about how Vestal "ran off the devil" when Jones was sunk into a severe depression: