The Presbyteer

Confused

2011-12-07T10:10:00.001-06:00

It can be so confusing. Are we supposed to have masses and pray for the dead, or do we ask them to pray for us? Which is when and how do you really know?

Hermeneutic Proximity

2011-11-09T18:14:00.003-06:00

I recently saw some comments from a man who was criticizing the short historical suit in the Protestant hand, and urging a greater respect and deference to "those who followed on from the apostles, with a hermeneutic proximity that we can only envy and access from afar..." I'm pretty sure he was talking about the Early Church Fathers there, and while I agree that characteristic Protestant ignorance of the Fathers is lamentable, I can't imagine a less convincing appeal.

Okay, on the one hand, all honor to the men of the early church who had to deal with persecution, fresh converts from pagan idolatry, and crazy heresies and schisms. They did an amazing job of holding things together and maintaining an orthodox, unified church. Give thanks.

On the other hand, they practiced a freestyle and improvisational kind of argumentation and hermeneutic that may have answered the need of the day well enough, but in a large percentage of instances, does not hold up at all. I mean, whether Catholic or Protestant, if you tried to preach today like Justin did about the horns of the unicorn prefiguring the cross, you would get well-deserved counsel of concern from your bishop.

Enviable hermeneutic proximity?

In Old Times

2011-10-19T09:53:00.003-05:00

Eusebius, the father of church history, lived at the time of the Emperor Constantine in the fourth century. As he brings together all the material he can find about the history of the church, he talks about Clement of Rome, bishop at the end of the first century.

(Hist. Eccl., iii. 16): "There is one acknowledged Epistle of this Clement (whom Eusebius has just identified with the friend of St. Paul), great and admirable, which he wrote in the name of the Church of Rome to the Church at Corinth, sedition having then arisen in the latter Church. We are aware that this Epistle has been publicly read in very many churches both in old times, and also in our own day."

I can't help but smile at the way he distinguishes between Clement's time and the present as "old times" and "our own day."

An Old Man for Old Men

2011-10-19T08:39:00.004-05:00

Bishop Irenaeus of Lyons, stomper extraordinaire of Gnostic heresies, lived a short hundred years after the last of the apostles. Some report that he was schooled by Polycarp of Smyrna whom some report had seen the apostle John. Whatever the connection, Irenaeus was writing in the latter half of the second century, around 170 or 180.

Ireneaus is famous for his work against the Gnostic heretics and he argues at length against their errors and logical inconsistencies. Bishop Irenaeus is also famous for his odd take on the chronology of Jesus' life. (Book 2.22) He believed that Jesus lived to be an old man, aged fifty or more at his death:

For He came to save all through means of Himself--all, I say, who through Him are born again to God--infants, and children, and boys, and youths, and old men. He therefore passed through every age, becoming an infant for infants, thus sanctifying infants; a child for children, thus sanctifying those who are of this age, being at the same time made to them an example of piety, righteousness, and submission; a youth for youths, becoming an example to youths, and thus sanctifying them for the Lord. So likewise He was an old man for old men, that He might be a perfect Master for all ...

He seems to have this idea at least in part because Jesus was a Master, and would therefore have been of the age of a Master, which in Irenaeus' calculations, pretty much had to be fifty or more, evidently.

Irenaeus urges this point because of some silly chronology that the Gnostics held. But it is instructive that Irenaeus bolsters his argument by an appeal to apostolic tradition:

from the fortieth and fiftieth year a man begins to decline towards old age, which our Lord possessed while He still fulfilled the office of a Teacher, even as the Gospel and all the elders testify; those who were conversant in Asia with John, the disciple of the Lord, [affirming] that John conveyed to them that information. And he remained among them up to the times of Trajan. Some of them, moreover, saw not only John, but the other apostles also, and heard the very same account from them, and bear testimony as to the [validity of] the statement. Whom then should we rather believe?

Granted, you might say that Irenaeus appeals to apostolic tradition only to establish that Jesus was a Teacher/Master, which in Irenaeus' view requires an age of fifty or more. But it hardly seems necessary to make the personal connection appeal to establish a fact which it seems unlikely to have been disputed. Rather, the apostolic appeal seems to be for Jesus living to an old man age. If that's the case, barely 100 years after John's death, the value of appeals to apostolic tradition are severely depreciated.

Icons and Irenaeus

2011-10-13T16:35:00.003-05:00

I'm still picking away at my reading project in the Early Church Fathers. Much of it is impressive. Parts are edifying, most is instructive, some is unfortunate. (Such as the bits about the phoenix and the unicorn.) I keep an eye open for the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox distinctives, which are essentially absent, at least in the first hundred years, which is about as far as I've gone. But that is enough to depreciate the value of the RC and EO claims that all these things go all the way back. Uh, no, actually, there's no Marian devotion, no prayer to the saints, no purgatory, no indulgences ... these things are later developments and have no claim to demonstrable apostolic tradition.

For instance, I've finally come across a reference to the religious use of icons, which I find in Irenaeus, the bishop of Lyons, writing in A.D. 180 or so, probably a hundred years after the last apostle died. As you may know, the main work of Irenaeus was to combat the plague of Gnostic heresies, and he begins with a thorough description of the varieties of Gnostic beliefs and practices.

Book 1.25.6 They style themselves Gnostics. They also possess images, some of them painted, and others formed from different kinds of material; while they maintain that a likeness of Christ was made by Pilate at that time when Jesus lived among them. They crown these images, and set them up along with the images of the philosophers of the world that is to say, with the images of Pythagoras, and Plato, and Aristotle, and the rest. They have also other modes of honouring these images, after the same manner of the Gentiles.

This is a telling description. Like all of Irenaeus' descriptions, it is conveyed with a tone of ridicule that tilts towards scorn. Can you believe it? They set up *images* and *crown them* and have other modes of *honoring them*, just like the *Gentiles.* You can feel the shock and revulsion.

Of course, if Irenaeus had know of any acceptable and legitimate practice of icon veneration in the catholic church, you would expect him to make a distinction like, "of course the Gnostic practice, repellent as it is, is nothing like our holy and true practice in the church."

So. Claims that icon veneration has early apostolic tradition behind it are very thin at best. And in fact, when an early father did encounter the religious use of images, he cited it as an example of lamentable folly.

No Innovation

2011-09-12T14:27:00.002-05:00

In the Roman Catholic / Protestant dialog, the RC's often cite the Church Fathers for support of their concept of Apostolic Tradition. There's more, they say, than just the Bible, Prots. From the earliest days of the church, the Fathers were fighting schism and heresy with 1) Scripture (it is written), 2) Reason (how fallacious this heresy is), and 3) Tradition (it has always been thus in the churches that follow the Apostles).

As I read the Fathers, however, the modern appeal to tradition seems quite different from what the Fathers were doing. In Patristic practice, the appeal to tradition is always against innovation: "These crazy Gnostic ideas are all new, and there was never anything like it in the Apostolic Tradition." So, we don't follow the innovators in the things they add.

And actually, with such an argument, Protestants are happy to agree, saying, "these doctrines of Mary, and reserving the Host, and venerating Saints are all new, and there was never anything like it in the Apostolic Tradition." So, we don't follow the innovators in the things they add. Peter did not bow to the Host. Paul did not pray to Saint Stephen the first martyr. No innovation.

"The Virgin Shall Conceive ..."

2011-05-29T23:02:00.003-05:00

Justin Martyr argues against Trypho the Jew for messing with the translation of Isaiah's prophecy. Justin says it is very clearly "the virgin shall conceive" and it properly and obviously has a fulfillment in Jesus' virgin birth. Justin berates the Jews who reacted by thereafter translating Isaiah as saying "the young woman shall conceive" taking away the prophetic connection to Christ.

How interesting that in the 1950's the National Council of Churches, turning from the legacy of the KJV and ASV, followed Trypho, not Justin, in their translation of the RSV, using "young woman" instead of "virgin."

Pseudo-Fathers?

2011-05-28T16:07:00.003-05:00

Another thought on the Early Church Fathers.

One of the arguments that Roman Catholics make is that the Early Church Fathers (ECF) are so *catholic* all the way back to the earliest days. How, they ask doubting Protestants, could all these Roman Catholic distinctives have appeared so *soon* after the days of the apostles unless the apostles themselves were teaching these things. The Protestant answers that if such things were important for us to believe, God would have made sure they got into the Bible. The Catholic replies that the *tradition* of the apostles that accompanied their writings have been preserved in the ECF.

So, I'm reading along with my eyes peeled for any mention of Mary's perpetual virginity, or prayers to departed saints, or veneration of holy icons, and the the writers are getting farther and farther away from the time of the apostles, and there's nothing of the sort.

Suddenly there's a letter from Ignatius to the apostle John, full of stuff about Mary, and how they'd all love to come and visit John and Mary, and how he'd also like to see James, because he's practically the twin of Jesus, even though he's just a cousin like Jude.

Ignatius is early, martyred in 108 maybe, and he either did or did not have personal acquaintance with John, so such a letter would strengthen many a Roman Catholic claim.

But it turns out this was written not by the *real* Ignatius, but by somebody they call "Pseudo Ignatius" who wrote several things like this near the end of the 4th century.

So much for early attestation of the Mary stuff.

And that leaves me with two questions:

1) Is Pseudo-Ignatius an early church father or is he an early church pseudo-father? Is a guy who writes under an assumed name really the kind of guy we want to honor in the church? If I wrote something in George Washington's name and tried to pass it off as authentic, would I have a place of honor among historians? Don't tell me that this was common practice in the day. Tell me if you think it is Honest and Right.

2) If the Mary stuff that Pseudo-Ignatius wrote to support were really current in the first generation after the apostles, why did he feel the need to backfill history? It seems to me that the obvious conclusion here is there *was* no such doctrine in the first generations of the church, P-I was troubled by that lack, so he had to invent some in the late 4th century.

Eucharist as Sacrifice in Justin Martyr

2011-05-28T15:24:00.002-05:00

I'm reading along in volume 1 of the Early Church Fathers. I've been here before, but now seems like a good time to take a long straight run through the Ante-Nicene fathers.

Here's a recent observation. When we argue, we always argue in context. It was in the *context* of the confrontation with early heresies that the best and clearest thinking about the Trinity emerged.

Sometimes, the argument truly connects with a universal and lives beyond the immediate, so, articulations of doctrines like the Trinity usually stand in any context; we can quote them again and again without problem.

But that's not true in every case. We make some arguments in a current clash that in the long run don't prove as universal, or at least they cannot be universalized without some kind of qualification or modification. Such an argument may happily win its day, but it cannot necessarily be applied in every time and place; it doesn't *fit* new and different questions.

For example. Justin Martyr is arguing with Trypho the Jew and showing again and again how Christ is the true fulfillment and end of all the OT scriptures. First, let me say that Justin had a surprising grasp of OT content, and not many Christians today have anything like his command of the Bible. Not every citation he makes is good, and not every application he makes strikes a guy like me as well-chosen, but this is the year 150, after all. Within 90 years of Peter and Paul, and withing 60 years of John, there were churchmen who had an impressive command of OT scripture.

That being said, Justin's thought and argument is affected by the times. In the year 150, the world was still filled with pagan temples and bloody sacrifice. The temple in Jerusalem was long gone, but the Jews still had a strong theology of continuing sacrifice based on the way the Psalms in particular talk about making "sacrifices of praise" or thanksgiving. Significantly, that is the point Justin is addressing when he argues that the OT sacrifices are fulfilled in the sacrifice of the Eucharist. His point to Trypho is that the blood sacrifices in Jerusalem's temple are superceded not by sacrifices of praise in the Jewish synagogue, but by the sacrifice of the Eucharist in the Christian churches.

So here's what I see. The Eucharist as Sacrifice language continues in the Roman Catholic churches today, but not in the Protestant churches. The Protestants say let's go back to the Bible; the NT just doesn't talk about the Lord's Supper as a sacrifice except as it points to Christ's once-for-all work on the cross. But the Romans say that the church has talked about the Eucharist as sacrifice all the way back to 150 at least. And so I'm just saying that in his *context*, Justin Martyr was arguing in a world that was fixed on the idea of sacrifices, and he made a connection and application that seemed to answer the day. Good for him, I guess, but times have changed, and everything is subject to review according to scripture.

I'm not ready to jump on Justin and say he never should have made his Eucharist as Sacrifice arguments. (I do think he probably could have done better and different, but that's off the point at hand.) But I am saying that the church should not just scoop up every argument from previous generations and hold them all up without question as universals.

Everything is subject to review, and for me the Protestant point still prevails. The church is bound by what scripture says, not by how Justin argued with Trypho.

I Sit Beside the Fire and Think

2011-05-26T16:23:00.001-05:00

I sit beside the fire and think
of all that I have seen,
of meadow-flowers and butterflies
In summers that have been;

Of yellow leaves and gossamer
in autumns that there were,
with morning mist and silver sun
and wind upon my hair.

I sit beside the fire and think
of how the world will be
when winter comes without a spring
that I shall ever see.

For still there are so many things
that I have never seen:
in every wood in every spring
there is a different green.

I sit beside the fire and think
of people long ago,
and people who will see a world
that I shall never know.

But all the while I sit and think
of times there were before,
I listen for returning feet
and voices at the door.

--J. R. R. Tolkien

Early Church Pseudo-Father?

2011-05-25T11:15:00.003-05:00

Does pseudo-Ignatius count as an Early Church Father, or is he just a pseudo Church Father?

Amateur Science

2011-05-20T10:37:00.004-05:00

I recently read At Home, by Bill Bryson. Engaging and informative stuff. I enjoyed it all.

One of the things Bryson pointed out was the enthusiasm for amateur science among the English gentry in the 19th century. Many clerics and country gentlemen lived on the incomes associated with their positions, and then kept themselves busy with other pursuits. Bryson notes that many of the journals were full of contributions by clergy for sciences like botany, astronomy, and other disciplines that could be done "from home". And, it is clear from Jane Austen that the likes of Mr. Collins were certainly not very busy with what we would consider actual pastoral care, study, and sermon prep, so it is not surprising that many just coasted through their clerical duties and spent large chunks of time in scientific pursuits.

I've just started The Pickwick Papers, and here the same idea is presented from another perspective. Mr. Pickwick is an amateur scientist of a comic sort: he presented a paper to his society about his "discovery" the source for some local lakes, plus a theory of his about bats. The Pickwick society is very impressed and encourages his further scientific and natural explorations, and so he and his companions begin their travels, which provide the narrative excuse for the episodes of the book.

Anyway. It is fun to see how science was such a popular, low-threshold pursuit in the 19th century in a way that has almost disappeared now. Yes, we do have garage tekkies doing this and that as hobbyists and entrepeneurs, but it doesn't have the stature and place that Amateur Science had in the 19th century.

Everybody pretty much watches TV instead, I guess.

Ereaders ... again

2011-05-19T21:12:00.002-05:00

I've had the Kobo ereader for a while now. Naturally the longer I live with it, the more I become aware of its limitations. Some of these are because it's inexpensive. But others are because they just did it wrong.

Because it is inexpensive, the Kobo ereader does not have a touch screen. But because they did it wrong, navigation can be frustratingly tedious. For example, Most ebooks have a linked table of contents page. The expensive touchscreen ereaders let you touch a link on the screen, and jump to the target, say, Chapter 23. Inexpensive ereaders let you move a cursor around with your arrow buttons and when you get to the Chapter 23 link, you press Go. But on the Kobo, there is no way to get to that link. If you want to get to chapter 23, you have to just start paging. Oh, Kobo does have a popup navigation menu that offers "next Chapter" so you could open that menu 23 times, arrow down to "next chapter" each time and press Go, but that's it. There is no "jump to page" or "search" that you could use to jump to a peculiar word in Chapter 23.

Because it is inexpensive, Kobo's menus are don't have cool icons and touch selection. But because they just did it wrong, the menus don't remember your preferences. I have 150 books on the thing, and I want to browse by Author. The default is browse By Title, so I open the menu, arrow down to By Author, and then arrow the cursor through the alphabet selection till I get to T for Twain. But next time I want to select a book, Kobo has gone back to By Title, so I have to reselect By Author again. Every time.

The features I really want are notation and bookmarking. There is no way to dog ear a page so that when Jana gets home I can read her the funny paragraph I passed earlier.

Okay, the Kobo is only $99, but the Kindle's comparable WiFi model is only $20 more, and it is not nearly as stupid. The Kobo might be worth $49, but they are waaay short on features to be as close as they are in price.

I'm looking at the BeBook Neo. FINALLY there is an ereader that is aggressively open source. It reads ebooks from every store in every format. Buy an ebook from Amazon, it reads the Kindle format. Buy from Barnes & Nobel, it reads the silly mutant B&N epub format.

I'm still a fan of ereaders over the tablet PC's and iPads. Those are bigger, more expensive, much shorter on battery life, and have to be read away from daylight.

The Real Mother Goose

2011-05-19T13:29:00.003-05:00

We had a copy of The Real Mother Goose when our kids were little. We wore it out and it fell apart. Now I see that Project Gutenberg has an illustrated copy online.

As I flip through the pages, I realize that I can still sing this one:

Ladies and Gentlemen, come to supper!

Hot boiled beans, and very good butter!

Elliptical

2011-05-19T09:49:00.005-05:00

The basement makeover is pretty much finished: new stairs, wall and ceiling paint, floor patching, and carpet squares.

This is now the home of an older elliptical trainer I found on Craigslist. It was a deluxe machine in its day; still works just fine as far as I can tell. (SportsArt 807p if you're curious.)

Everybody says that ellipticals give a good low-impact cardio workout: make the heart beat and the brow sweat without pounding your joints. So far that feels right.

This morning I was running Program 3, one of the built-in variable resistance routines, and decided to try it backwards part of the time. They say going backwards works a whole 'nother set of muscles.

They are right. I was immediately impressed with how much harder it is to go backwards. And I was struck with how much the backwards action feels like a stair stepper. When I had my club membership last year, I used the step machine a lot: like walking up the down escalator. My idea is that such workouts will help my occasional mountain hiking endeavors. I'm pleased to discover a kindred workout on this elliptical.

Vinegar and Brown Paper

2011-04-27T08:10:00.002-05:00

In the legend of Jack and Jill, we learn early in the account that Jack fell down and broke his crown. Thereupon, up Jack got and home did trot, where, he went to bed to mend his head in a way that always seemed odd to me (let alone the way Jack selfishly deserted Jill without a second thought), "with vinegar and brown paper."

Today, the brown paper seems less odd to me, having read in Dickens' Martin Chuzzelwit, that when Mr. Pecksniff fell, his daughters attended his bruised head with "patches of pickled brown paper." Ah, now history begins to come into focus. So this remedy, evidently, was all folks had in primitive times, before the BandAid.

I can remember my dad singing this to me at bedtime when I was but a wee tyke. I'm sure he meant to calm me and get me to sleep. But I just lay there worrying about Jill and wondering about brown paper.

Plus, why was Jack wearing a crown? Was he a young prince or something?

Something New

2011-04-25T17:11:00.002-05:00

I just finished Something New, a short, early novel (1915) by P. G. Wodehouse. It is the first in the Blandings Castle saga, and introduces Lord Emsworth, the fuddy squire of Blandings who just wants to putter in his garden. (No pigs in this story).

It is interesting to see the early Wodehouse work a silly story set on a country estate. Many of the same features that are used in later stories (I know only the Bertie and Jeeves stories), are here in early manifestations. The old aristocrat has a collection with a recently acquired object (this time an Egyptian scarab, not a cow creamer) which must be stolen; an visiting dyspeptic American millionaire's beautiful daughter is in a hopeless engagement; and various author characters are producing silly works of popular fiction. Freddy Threepwood, son of Lord Emsworth, is a member of the Drones, and will be mentioned by Bertie in The Code of the Woosters.

Fun stuff, but Wodehouse was a only developing talent in 1915. Nothing like the precise and extremely well-tuned stories he did later.

This was a free epub that I got for my ereader. Now it's back to Dickens.

Hmmm ...

2011-04-21T11:34:00.001-05:00

Somehow this just struck me funny. Enjoy the irony.

(I know, I know ...)

Poems into Haiku

2011-04-13T10:38:00.002-05:00

My daughter did these. I must brag on her. Her idea: take a poem and condense it into haiku.

----------------------
I came to a fork--
One path slightly less travelled.
I chose to take it.

Our rat problem’s solved.
Piper worked as advertised.
Hey, where are the kids?

A ruined statue
Advises kings to despair.
Pretty ironic.

Tyger burning bright,...
Yes, I spell it with a “y.”
Tygers are awesome.

I’ve read a lot of books.
Just found Homer in English,
And I am in awe.

Cherry trees in bloom.
Not getting any younger.
Think I’ll take a walk.

An owl and a cat
Sail off together, get hitched,
Dance in the moonlight.

Tertullian and the Phoenix

2011-04-07T20:24:00.004-05:00

I've been in a discussion with a man who has become enamored of the "Roman Catholic Paradigm" and who has been listening to those who urge the doctrine of the church-which-absolutely-cannot-err. Of course the early church fathers are large in such thinking.

We Presbyterians, he accuses, read "our" church fathers very selectively. We like *some* of Augustine, but we don't follow him on everything. How inconsistent!

But seriously. Everyone picks and chooses in the church fathers, because they are a severely mixed bag. Tertullian, for example, Wikipedia tells us "has been called "the father of Latin Christianity" and "the founder of Western theology." Though conservative, he did originate and advance new theology to the early Church. He is perhaps most famous for being the oldest extant Latin writer to use the term Trinity (Latin trinitas), and giving the oldest extant formal exposition of a Trinitarian theology."

Of course Tertullian later became a Montanist. Too, there's this bit about the Phoenix from "On the Resurrection of the Flesh"

If, however, all nature but faintly figures our resurrection; if creation affords no sign precisely like it, inasmuch as its several phenomena can hardly be said to die so much as to come to an end, nor again be deemed to be reanimated, but only re-formed; then take a most complete and unassailable, symbol of our hope, for it shall be an animated being, and subject alike to life and death. I refer to the bird which is peculiar to the East, famous for its singularity, marvelous from its posthumous life, which renews its life in a voluntary death; its dying day is its birthday, for on it it departs and returns; once more a phoenix where just now there was none; once more himself, but just now out of existence; another, yet the same. What can be more express and more significant for our subject; or to what other thing can such a phenomenon bear witness? God even in His own Scripture says: "The righteous shall flourish like the phoenix;"(1) that is, shall flourish or revive, from death, from the grave--to teach you to believe that a bodily substance may be recovered even from the fire. Our Lord has declared that we are "better than many sparrows:"(2) well, if not better than many a phoenix too, it were no great thing. But must men die once for all, while birds in Arabia are sure of a resurrection? (Chapter 13)

So there you have it. One of the ablest apologists of the second century brings in evidence for the resurrection from the Phoenix.

To his credit, I believe Tertullian never tried to prove anything from the faun, the satyr or the unicorn.

Okay, all I'm saying is that the church fathers are a mixed bag, and everyone picks and chooses. What they believed and what they taught is important, instructive, and too often ignored. But everything is subject to review.

Speaking of Apostacy ...

2011-03-31T16:14:00.003-05:00

Speaking of apostate churches, I notice that our local First Plymouth had ex-"bishop" Spong (who denies the virgin birth and the resurrection of Christ) come give a talk "Beyond Heaven and Hell: New Visions of Eternal Life."

And I don't think it was about the resurrection of the body and life everlasting in the new heavens and the new earth.

In the name of ...

2011-03-31T15:55:00.000-05:00

From the website of a certain liberal church around here:

At [this church] people are baptized in the name of “God, our Creator, Christ our Savior and the Holy Spirit”.

That flatly fails the Matthew 28 great commission. I believe such a person has not received Christian baptism. If they came to Zion, we would do it, not "again", but for the first time.

"Merit"?

2011-03-10T14:08:00.001-06:00

The word "merit" does not appear in the English Bible. Reduces my enthusiasm for theological systems that go into great detail about the "merits" of Christ. Introduces the idea of brownie points. I don't see the God of the Bible ever dealing on the point system; especially not between the Father and the Son.

Catholic Catechism

2011-03-03T17:21:00.002-06:00

841 The Church's relationship with the Muslims. "The plan of salvation also includes those who acknowledge the Creator, in the first place amongst whom are the Muslims; these profess to hold the faith of Abraham, and together with us they adore the one, merciful God, mankind's judge on the last day."

Soooo ... according to the Roman Catholics, the Muslims, who deny the Trinity and Christ's resurrection, are saved ...

Huh. I never knew that.

Two Phone Calls

2011-03-03T16:54:00.002-06:00

Consider two phone calls to the church:

1) "I'm a single mom, I have 4 kids; the baby has a hole in her heart and I have no money. My apartment has mice and bugs because of the neighbors upstairs, but the landlord refuses to spray. I want to get my kids out of this apartment now. I called the City Mission, but they don't have room because somebody brought bedbugs there. And so I want a hotel room or something for tonight."

The guy in the church office who gets a call like this feels his resistance mounting; he hears entitlement and blaming and a definite agenda: this is how you need to help me.

2) "I'm a single mom, I have 4 kids; the baby has a hole in her heart and I have no money. My apartment has mice and bugs. I know I have made a mess of my life. I have children but no husband; I am sorry for my sins there, and especially sorry because my sin has caused my children to suffer. Sometimes I wonder if God is punishing me; there is a hole in my baby's heart and I feel like it's my fault. I have come to the end of myself. I hate myself. I don't deserve help; everything bad in my life is the result of selfish choices I have made. But I'm ready to do anything. I'll do whatever it takes to be the mother I should be and provide for my children."

The guy in the church office who gets a call like this ...

Wait. Ha-ha! I fooled you. The guy in the church office NEVER gets a call like this.

Prayer to Mary

2011-02-06T19:53:00.002-06:00

Anthansius argued against the Arian heretics that Jesus Christ, God the Son, was "begotten, not made." That's the view that the church affirmed in the Council of Nicea and that we keep in the Creed.

One of Athansius' lines was that if you hold that the Son was created, then you collapse the idea of the eternal Father. If there was a time "before" there was a Son, then there was a time when the Father was not the Father.

Another of his lines was that if the Son were not properly and eternally God, then it would be a sin to offer him prayer; everybody knows that it is unthinkable to offer prayer to any created being.

To which argument nobody said, "yeah, but what about our prayers to Mary?"

Every time I think about the Roman Catholics, I get so far, and it just seems like an alternate universe and a different God. It is utterly alien to me to think of a God who somehow promotes dead humans in heaven, granting them a kind of limited omniscience that enables them to hear millions of simultaneous prayers directed to them.

I can see how you might develop this idea if you were starting with the pagan ideas of ancestor worship common in the Roman Empire. But I can't see how anyone could develop this idea starting with the Bible.

Kobo

2011-02-03T10:49:00.003-06:00

I got a Kobo ereader while they were on sale for $99. I've had it almost a week, and so far, so good. I hope they keep developing the ereader / e-ink technology. Most of the buzz is on the tablet PC / iPad side of things. The Barnes and Noble Nook Color, for example, is an "ereader" in name only; it's really a color LED tablet PC running Android.

But the Kindle, Kobo, and Sony ereaders are still giving 10 days instead of 10 hours of battery life by using e-ink screens, and you can read them in strong light, such as in the car or outside on the porch. Good luck seeing a tablet screen in those conditions. The first-generation readers had 8-levels of grayscale. Now they all have 16 levels, and the contrast is better. Still, the "white" background is only "mostly white", and it's a bit dull. I'll be glad when they get whiter whites.

The great thing with the Kobo is how easy it is to carry and hold. I've been reading the letters of C. S. Lewis, volume 3, a 1000-plus page hardback, and it is not a thing you can hold in one hand or take along on your day without planning. By contrast, now I'm reading Bleak House on the Kobo. The hardcopy version is 1000-plus pages, but on the Kobo, it fits in my inside coat pocket and goes everywhere easily.

I still would have liked to get the Sony 950, which has touchscreen and other nicer features than the Kobo, but I just couldn't justify 3x's the $$. I'll use the Kobo for a few years while the technology get better and the prices come down.

Kobo has an online bookstore, and so does Borders, the Kobo partner. But I've been using books.google.com, which has a great selection in epub format. (I wasted a lot of time downloading free ebooks from Amazon; even their public domain titles have DRM locks that prevent conversion and use on non-Kindle devices. W.h.y.

The 100 pre-loaded titles are:
http://www.visibleresults.com/whitcoulls/2010/may/Kobo_books.pdf

It was easy enough to add free copies of Bleak House, Augustine's Confessions, and City of God; Calvin's Institutes; a KJV, more G.K. Chesterton ... I've got close to 150 books on there now, and if I read 2 books a week, I'll be at it for more than a year. It's kind of like a "Great Books" reading program.

And I'm really enjoying Bleak House. C. S. Lewis' letters are languishing for the nonce.

The Conscience of a Cat

2011-01-25T20:08:00.000-06:00

‎"We were talking about cats and dogs the other day & decided that both have consciences but the dog, being an honest, humble person, always has a bad one, but the Cat is a Pharisee and always has a good one. When he sits and stares you out of countenance he is thanking God that he is not as these dogs, or these humans, or even as these other Cats!" -- C. S. Lewis

Why America Must Win

2011-01-03T11:59:00.001-06:00

Debt Forgiveness

2010-12-31T08:19:00.000-06:00

Scrooge says, "What's Christmas time to you but a time for paying bills without money; a time for finding yourself a year older, but not an hour richer; a time for balancing your books and having every item in 'em through a round dozen of months presented dead against you?"

His complaint seems to be that there was some kind of debt forgiveness device people invoked at Christmas and he couldn't collect.

Does anyone know what is in mind? How did this work? Was there really some kind of jubilee law in England at the time? Debt is a huge theme in Dickens. Hey, Little Dorrit *lives* in the debtors prison. What is Scrooge complaining about?

Childhood's End

2010-12-25T14:53:00.003-06:00

Ugh.

C. S. Lewis exchanged letters with Arthur C. Clarke, who had read and enjoyed Lewis' space trilogy. In 1953, Clarke published Childhood's End. Lewis read and enjoyed the book, recommending it to many friends in his letters.

Ick. As a story, it wanders. There is no character at the center; no one you're cheering for. Every time he begins to follow the story of one particular character, you think, okay, here comes the actual story. But no. Clarke discards characters almost as soon as you begin to become interested in them. Everything is a dead end. And there is no quest or purpose or mission that keeps you turning the pages to see how it turns out. Instead, Clarke seems content to indulge his vague speculations of humanity's destiny, which, as in his novel/movie 2001, involves an evolutionary leap into the indescribable Next Thing. It's always a bad sign when the author introduces vastly superior super-intelligent aliens who can't answer direct questions because all is hidden and you will know in time and you couldn't understand now anyway, at least until the author finally gives them a real preachy chapter near the end where they can mouthpiece sappy philosophy for the author.

I really hate this book.

Why did Lewis like it? Why did it ever get published in the first place?

A Christmas Carol

2010-12-21T18:56:00.004-06:00

I'm reading Dickens' Christmas Carol, partly for the fun of seeing what kinds of bits never make it into the film and stage versions.

(1) A bit of technology: when Scrooge wakes after Marley has gone, the church clock strikes twelve. Scrooge is confused, because he fell asleep after two. (Yes, the times never add up and are always a nagging unreconciled.) Scrooge, lying in bed presses the spring of his repeater to check the hour: sure 'nuff: twelve.

What's a "repeater?" Never heard of such a thing. Obviously, it's what they had before illuminated digital clocks so you could know what time it is when you wake up in the dark.

(2) When Scrooge goes out with the ghost of Christmas present, they pass a baker's shop. I didn't realize that bakers were about more than making bread and such for sale. Bakers provided stove and oven services, especially for the poor whose homes had no such appliances. The poor are lined up outside the bakers with their box dinners, the ghost of CP sprinkles the dinners with the blessing glitter from his horn of plenty, and Scrooge asks why the ghost tries to close up the bakers shops. The ghost says but I don't! Scrooge says, not you exactly, but those who are related to you try to close the bakers once a week, and it is the poor who suffer. The ghost says don't blame me for those zealots.

Interesting to see Dickens rip the strict Sabbatarians. Nice little social jab at the puritans.

Zeal and Orthodoxy

2010-12-08T11:18:00.005-06:00

I still pick away at the collected letters of C.S. Lewis. I'm as far as 1953. After a vacation in Ireland, Lewis wrote to a correspondent and mentioned the Catholic - Protestant strife there. His analysis: both sides mistake lack of charity for zeal and mutual ignorance for orthodoxy.

I laughed aloud.

And then I thought of certain internet theologians of our time, whose zeal and orthodoxy have similar qualities.

Nook Color has been Rooted

2010-11-30T18:32:00.002-06:00

I read that the Nook Color ($249, 7-inch color touchscreen), which has been out for just a couple of weeks now, has been "rooted." That is, the hacker geeks of the world have cracked the Nook's OS and opened it for wider use with the many Android apps that are out there. This is like hacking the Mac OS to make it run Windows programs (without running an entire Windows OS shell).

http://goodereader.com/blog/tablet-slates/barnes-and-noble-nook-color-rooted/

You void your Nook's warranty if you do this, and B&N might take counter-measures in a firmware "upgrade" to seal the gap in the OS wall.

1. This makes the Nook Color into an Android tablet device hundreds of dollars less than anything else available.

2. The fact that B&N built the Nook so as NOT to allow generic Android apps is maddening. It can only be seen as a proprietary effort to force Nook buyers to buy ebooks only from B&N. See, if they let the Nook run an Android app, it could run the Kindle reader app, and then you have a customer reading a book from Amazon on his Nook.

Of course Amazon is just as bad. I'm a consumer here. I'd like you to sell me a reader, not a marketing tool.

People will strip the ebook locks and hack the OS barriers. And all the vendors gain is ill will. Just sell me a reader. Sell me an ebook. Don't wrap everything in restrictions.

DLS

2010-11-23T14:06:00.002-06:00

I have taken a run or two at some Dorothy Sayers in the past. I love her "Mind of the Maker". I have a couple of her essay collections that are good.

Her main claim to fame, however is her work as a mystery novelist. Lord Peter Wimsey is her aristocratic British detective. I have tried a few, but got distracted; can't remember that I ever actually finished one.

But now I'm preparing for a 3-week elective on Sayers at Zion, so I'm giving it another go. I have her 1926 "Clouds of Witness" under way, and I'm enjoying it more than I expected. Someone said that Peter Wimsey is a cross between Bertie Wooster and Sherlock Holmes. It does help to read Wimsey as Bertie. "Clouds of Witness" has runs that are pure Wodehouse. And when Parker goes to France for some background investigation, Sayers provides the dialog in English though it is plain that the original conversation was in French. Her "translation" is delightfully wooden. Not quite the hysterical Anatole -- a much lighter touch -- but it does make you smile.

Blessed are you ...

2010-11-23T11:18:00.003-06:00

The Beatitudes step you through the condition of your heart and ask you to repent: you are proud, not poor in spirit. You tend to scoff, not mourn. You are not meek, you are full of plans to make the right stuff happen. And so on.

Until the last of the eight. Nothing about the heart; nothing that is even under your control at all. Blessed are you if you are persecuted. If you apply yourself to the first seven and learn to practice righteousness, the promise of the eighth is that you will be persecuted for it.

And such receive the kingdom of heaven.

2010-11-21T20:59:00.004-06:00

Deuteronomy 21 contains the Law of a Rebellious Son. If the son is stubborn and refuses the correction of his parents, they can take him to the elders and accuse him:

Deuteronomy 21:20 And they shall say unto the elders of his city, This our son is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton, and a drunkard. 21 And all the men of his city shall stone him with stones, that he die: so shalt thou put evil away from among you; and all Israel shall hear, and fear.

It strikes me that that law must have been in the mind of Jesus' accusers:

Matthew 11:19 The Son of man came eating and drinking, and they say, Behold a man gluttonous, and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners. But wisdom is justified of her children.

They weren't just commenting in a general way on Jesus' supposedly poor conduct. They were making reference to a Law that had serious consequences. They were evoking the memory of this law, and they were implying that Jesus, far from being the obedient Son of God, was a stubborn and rebellious son, who was just one accusation away from a death sentence.

An Imaginary Past

2010-11-20T15:55:00.003-06:00

Dorothy Sayers suggests a line of argument I don't remember hearing before. In an essay titled "Creative Mind" (Letters to a Diminished Church, Thomas Nelson, 2004) she observes that in every work of fiction, the author gives his characters an imaginary past that is not part of the story. Hamlet has been at school in Wittenburg. Doctor Watson was with the army in India. Bertie and Gussie were at school together. Such elements of the past all happen before the story begins, and are mentioned in the story only as background. The truth is, however, that these characters begin their lives with only an imaginary past. Bertie is created with Jeeves at the door; his school past with Gussie never actually happens. The history is imaginary.

Sayers observes that this is always true in every story, and nobody thinks it odd, or complains about it, or calls the author dishonest for referring to a past which never happened. And so, she suggests, why should we think it odd that God created our world with an imaginary past. It should not be objectionable that our story, as it unfolds, contains elements and clues to a past which is imaginary.

If, for his own good reasons, God builds clues to a long imaginary past into our story, he is only doing what every story teller does.

AM Radio

2010-11-20T11:43:00.002-06:00

All commercials. All the time.

Sometimes when I drive from here to there, I'll turn on the radio. 1400, maybe Rush is saying something interesting. 1480, are the sports guys saying anything? 1240, sometimes.

But often, I can get all the way across town on one set of commercials.

Why bother. AM radio: they don't really care if you listen.

Church Courts

2010-11-19T10:47:00.003-06:00

I was thinking about the troublers of the church; the fine-toothed comb guys who hunt heresy in the Presbyteries. They want to get certain guys OUT.

And I do not dispute the principle: there are times when some church leaders need to be put OUT.

Which brings me to Deuteronomy 19:

If a malicious witness arises to accuse a person of wrongdoing, [17] then both parties to the dispute shall appear before the Lord, before the priests and the judges who are in office in those days. [18] The judges shall inquire diligently, and if the witness is a false witness and has accused his brother falsely, [19] then you shall do to him as he had meant to do to his brother. So you shall purge the evil from your midst.

This leads me to think that if a man brings a charge against another with the goal of putting the accused OUT, then the accuser should be told, "Are you sure you want to bring this charge? Because if this Presbytery examines this man and finds him innocent of the charges, then YOU will be put OUT as you wished him to be. Do you wish to proceed?"

I bet things would quiet down if we did things the Bible way.

Julius Caesar

2010-11-18T08:55:00.001-06:00

I read in Wikipedia that in one of his journeys early in his career,

Caesar was kidnapped by pirates and held prisoner. He maintained an attitude of superiority throughout his captivity. When the pirates thought to demand a ransom of twenty talents of silver, he insisted they ask for fifty. After the ransom was paid, Caesar raised a fleet, pursued and captured the pirates, and imprisoned them. He had them crucified on his own authority, as he had promised while in captivity —a promise the pirates had taken as a joke. As a sign of leniency, he first had their throats cut.

Ah, Western Civilization.

No Opinion

2010-11-14T14:06:00.003-06:00

In the spring of 1951, one of his American correspondents asked C.S. Lewis what he thought of MacArthur, who was making headlines in the Korean war and was the subject of some controversy. Lewis wrote

As to MacArthur, i don't feel in a position to have clear opinions about anyone I know only from newspapers. You see, whenever they deal with anyone (or anything) I know myself, I find they're always a mass of lies and misunderstandings: so I conclude they're no better in the places where I don't know.

I wish more people felt the same way about more things.

The Universal Ereader

2010-11-14T13:40:00.003-06:00

The Kindle reads only Amazon ebooks. The eBooks from Barnes and Noble work only on the Nook. The Sony readers are the best, but can't read books from Amazon or B&N.

Except.

All the stores have ereader applications for your computer. And now my netbook is the ultimate universal ereader. I have Kindle for PC, I have the Nook ereader software. I have the Sony ereader app. And of course there is Calibre, which organizes everything, converts between formats, and includes its own ereader.

And on this netbook, Ctrl-Alt-Arrowkey changes the orientation of the display, so when I have an ereader app working and an ebook on the screen, I can Ctrl-Alt-LeftArrow to change the orientation for a book-like aspect. It actually works pretty well. You can't read in strong light, the battery runs down sooner, and it is more awkward physically, but it is the Universal Ereader.

I really like the Barnes & Nobel "download a sample" option. Most of the books that are available as ebooks have two options: Buy Now, and Download Sample, which gives you the first n pages of the book, where n represents a decent teaser percentage. For Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, for example, the sample runs a few pages into chapter 2. For the Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, which has 1810 pages in the printed version, the sample runs as far as page 105 of the print version.

As things stand now, I expect I'll eventually get a Sony reader, but since Barnes & Nobel doesn't want to sell ebooks except for the Nook, I'll download the samples from them, read them on the netbook, and then if I decide to buy the book, I'll get it from the Sony store or some other.

The Imitation

2010-11-13T13:04:00.003-06:00

I believe I have never read The Imitation of Christ before now. Thomas a Kempis was a monk 600 years ago and wrote this Christian classic of how-to advice for those considering or entering the monastic life. Some of it is good and preceptive, of use to all Christians who want to live faithfully. But I'm a bit surprised at how much of it is spoiled by pre-Reformation superstitious Romanism. For instance, as Thomas gives advice on living soberly in view of the uncertainty of life and the ever-present possibility of death, he warns against a careless attitude he had undoubtedly seen at work:

Do not put your trust in friends and relatives, and do not put off the care of your soul till later, for men will forget you more quickly than you think. It is better to provide now, in time, and send some good account ahead of you than to rely on the help of others. If you do not care for your own welfare now, who will care when you are gone?

In other words, don't rely on friends and family to pray you out of purgatory; they can't be counted on.

I have never thought the doctrine of purgatory made any sense, and have not thought it worth much attention. So it had never occurred to me what the effects of living with such a doctrine might be. But here it is: if you believe in purgatory, and if you believe that things like prayers and masses for the dead are effective in shortening a soul's time in purgatory, then you are at risk of falling into lazy and careless practice.

But let's not stop by shaking our heads at those poor medieval Romanists, because every doctrine offers the occasion for sinful abuse. In my own theological back yard, I can see how the Calvinist doctrine of election dulls the urgency of evangelization, and can produce lamentable hermeneutic gymnastics in attempts to avoid the plain force of scriptural warnings against apostasy.

That's just one of the things in my back yard, and I can see it pretty clearly. But I fully suspect there are also similar dangers right in the room with me that I cannot see, but will be laughably plain 600 years from now.

ePub, ebooks, ereaders .... eeeeemess

2010-11-09T09:10:00.006-06:00

I've made some dismissive comments about Kindle because of it's proprietary ebook format. With a Kindle, you can buy only from Amazon and only in the Kindle special format. And if you buy an ebook from Amazon, you can't read it on any other ereader device. That's the kind of proprietary arrogance that instantly and permanently turns me away. Kindle will not read ebooks in the widely used ePub format, such as from CCEL or Project Gutenberg, or Google Books. Or the growing number of ebooks that you can download from your public library's website.

Okay, so Kindle is evil.

But it's not that simple. It turns out that Barnes and Noble is also doing some bone-headed proprietary nonsense, too. Good: B&N has ebooks in ePub format. Bad: The B&N ePub format won't work on any ereaders other than the B&N Nook, such as the Sonys.

Huh?

So now if you don't buy a Kindle because it can't read library books, and if you don't buy from Amazon because they don't want to sell ebooks for any other reader, and if you don't buy from B&N because you don't have a Nook, well, now we're down to Borders, and the Sony Store, and I begin to wonder how long before I'll want a book that the smaller vendors don't have.

The good news is that the free Calibre ebook management software for the PC, can convert ebooks between the formats used by the different readers. So for example you can take a generic ePub and send it to your Kindle in the Amazon format. BUT. You cannot take a B&N ePub and send it in ePub to your Sony reader. !! B&N has some kind of security lock that will not transfer. On the other hand, it seems that you can buy from Amazon in the Kindle format, and then use Calibre to convert it to ePub for you Sony reader. (edit: not) Or you get a free ePub from CCEL or Gutenberg (but still not the public library) and convert it to the Kindle format.

The problems all have to do with copy protection, which is a legitimate concern. Publishers don't want digital copies of their books copied and recopied again and again. They must have some way to make sure every device is using a single, paid-for copy. It's just that so far the protection schemes they have implemented have the unfortunate effect of preventing a single paid-for copy from being used at all in many cases. You are likely to lose all you ebooks when your Kindle breaks and you decide to replace it with a Sony.

Okay, it's a young technology and understandably chaotic. At some point one hopes the players will look around the circle and agree that it will be better for everyone if they agree on some common, portable standards. Until then, you have to do a lot of calculating before you commit; you don't want to be unpleasantly surprised to find out that what you thought you'd be able to do, you just can't. Such as get a Sony reader and expect to be able to buy books for it from B&N. Can't happen.

eReader

2010-11-08T08:21:00.002-06:00

Best Buy improves their eReader shelf display every time I happen by. It's a new category for them and they haven't got it quite figured out yet. They still have the security alarm cables on the shelf models, and it's hit or miss whether or not a given model is even powered on so you can play with it.

I was surprised to see the new Sony models out. The older 300, 600, and 900 models had been the only things available. But yesterday they not only had the 350, but also the 950, which has an official release date next week, I think. No 650 on display, though. But the 950 is the Wifi / 3G model, and the one that is of first interest for me at this point. It is physically not much bigger than a Kindle, but instead of the dot button keyboard of the Kindle, it has a bigger display.

Hallelujah

2010-11-05T09:20:00.001-05:00

Time Lapse #2

2010-11-04T11:27:00.002-05:00

Dare the Unknown

2010-10-28T21:12:00.003-05:00

In his early 50's C. S. Lewis began to feel his age and treated the subject frequently in his letters. One of his comments on death and resurrection turned my thought again to the reality of death that we all face. I have never lived with a daily sense of my mortality; there may be some who say daily prayers with something along the lines of "if I should die before I wake", but most of us spend most of our days just assuming another day will come to us tomorrow.

But there will come a day that will be my last. And I may know it. Of course, I could die in an unexpected accident or sudden heart attack or brain explosion, but it seems more common to experience a more gradual decline with the attendant sense "this will probably be It."

If I know that This is It, I hope I am ready to say something from the edge like, "well, here goes." Everybody does it. Everyone gets born. Everyone dies. How hard can it be? [Insert joke: a comedian lay on his deathbed. Someone asked if dying were hard. He said "dying is easy. Comedy is hard."]

It occurs to me that much of what we are doing in life is preparing for that Last Step. And I bet that those who learn to take chances, to dare the unknown in daily life, somehow will find it easier at the end. You have to die to ask a girl on a date. It just kills you to go to the audition. It is murder putting yourself out there to find a job. It is death to risk your safety and comfort and dare the unknown.

But we're born to die. And so much the better if we learn lots of little deaths along the way. So pick up the phone and make the difficult call. Make the appointment and say the hard thing. The things you fear are difficult because they are unknown: after you make the call or say the hard thing, you don't know what will happen next.

Right. "Well, here goes."

Organ Installation

2010-10-28T14:36:00.001-05:00

Time lapse #1:

Give me Liberty!

2010-10-21T15:50:00.004-05:00

When the Fed is as broken and dysfunctional and wicked as it is, and America doesn't stand for what America used to stand for, and no matter who gets elected, the slide just continues, is it time to entertain thoughts of secession? What if Texas or somebody just declared independence? No more Federal taxes. No more Government Regulations. (And no more Federal Aid.) Imagine all the industry they'd attract. Talk about a boom economy. Not long before a bunch of other states would follow suit. Finally, the last states in the old union could pay off the national debt and close Washington.

Hey, let's Balkanize!

All the Baal worshipers could move to the states of Samaria. All the sane people would migrate to states that wanted to do things Right.

It's the only sensible solution.

How cool is that ...

2010-10-21T14:26:00.002-05:00

In 1947 an Italian priest read the Italian translation of The Screwtape Letters and was determined to write to C. S. Lewis. The priest knew no English. He had no expectation that Lewis knew Italian. So he wrote the old fashioned way: in Latin. Lewis answered in Latin, and the two maintained an ongoing correspondence Latinae.

Running Errands

2010-10-21T14:09:00.003-05:00

Out on errands of mercy and necessity, I side-tracked for an errand completely unnecessary. Best Buy has three of the leading ereaders on its shelves: Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, and Sony's three models. Kindle is pretty cool, but I won't buy it just because it is a closed platform. No way to check out ebooks from the Library, for instance. Nook is nice, but I'm not sold on the LED touchscreen control panel at the bottom. If it's on, it's running down the battery. If it's off, it's kind of in the way, like the Kindle's dot-button keyboard. The Sony's full touchscreen capability frees the rest of case for the cleanest, best design for my taste. But the Best Buy display shelf doesn't feature the newest Sony models. The older 600 model, for example, has a clunky touchscreen overlay that depreciates clarity of the display slightly. The new 350 and 650 models have a different touchscreen technology that requires no overlay and gives crisper display.

We'll see. I'm holding off and saving up. The SONY models are $200-plus compared to the $100-plus Kindle and Nook.

And Thank You

2010-10-19T10:23:00.004-05:00

C.S. Lewis maintained a life-long friendship with Arthur Greeves, a neighbor boy from his childhood. Greeves remained in Ireland; Lewis lived in England. Lewis looked forward to holidays when he could enjoy trips to Ireland and visits with Greeves, but as time passed, such travels became increasingly difficult to arrange. Lewis felt himself getting older and even wrote in a letter to Greeves, "If only you and I (or you or I) doesn't go and die before we have a chance to meet!"

Lewis immediately follows that morbid speculation with "And yet if we did [die] no doubt there wd be some good and loving reason for it... We shall meet and be happy together if it is good for us: otherwise not." (Collected Letters, vol. 2, Jan 5/47)

Lewis was quite convinced of the fact: all that comes to us in life is from love and for good, as hard as that may be for us to see now. The things we struggle with, and suffer through are for our good.

If that is true then, if I were in my right mind, I would choose for myself the very things I complain and worry about. One who knows all things and loves me perfectly has given me this lot. If I knew better and really wanted the best for me, my choice would be identical. As if, before I were born, if there were a conscious pre-life Keith, God would show the pre-Keith what was in store, and the pre-Keith would say, "Oh yes, I see. That is excellent. Let that be for me. And thank you."

Ebook Desktop Organizer

2010-10-12T22:05:00.002-05:00

I see something like this and I just say "wow". It is soooo pleasant to see a project that has been so carefully thought out and so, well, .... right. This is right. Done right. Works right. Just right.

C:/>copy con lpt3

2010-10-09T08:45:00.004-05:00

Wow. It's been years since I entered commands at the DOS prompt.

Replaced a printer. XP couldn't find it on my parallel port. The Windows troubleshooter suggested testing your port. I tried LPT1, LPT2, and LPT3 thus:

C:/> copy con lpt3
showpage
^Z

Voila. LPT3 turns out to be the printer port. Once I tell the Printer Properties that the port is LPT3, everything works.

What a thing this technology is.

2010-10-05T18:34:00.002-05:00

Shakespeare is not easy for me. It takes some effort. Today I spent some time with audio Shakespeare in my ears and the play text before my eyes. And like every time I take the time and effort, I am repaid. Shakespeare is really good.

I listened to /read The Merry Wives of Windsor. It's on the C list, but still it's fun. The French Doctor is played with an Inspector Clouseau accent that is, by gar, lots of fun. It somehow pleases me that 400 years ago, the English thought men speaking broken English with a French accent comic. Pepe Le Pew, Peter Sellers, and the cook Anatole confirm it: that's entertainment.

Now I'm into Henry IV, Part I. Hotspur's wife pleads with him to tell her what he's up to. She pleads like Delilah: "don't you love me?"

Do ye not loue me? Do ye not indeed?
Well, do not then. For since you loue me not,
I will not loue my selfe.

(The online version I'm following has a bunch of antique spellings.)

This is just a passing remark on her part, but it contains one of the facts of life that appear so regularly in Shakespeare's plays. The wife who feels unloved by her husband will soon hate herself. As will the child who is unloved by his parents. As will the man who feels unloved by God. How much more basic do you want it? Either be loved or hate yourself. You are made in the image of God to delight in the other and to be the object of delight. Anything less is misery.

And Shakespeare just drops stuff like this in without trying.

As I re-open the old Tragic History of King Saul project, I'm trying to think how to paint with some of the same colors and shapes. So. Where in the King Saul story does one of the characters belittle another with a nice torrent of abuse: "Thou jot! Thou tittle! Thou least stroke of the pen! ..." Is there a place for a John Falstaff? Is Saul's wife Ahinaom a Lady Macbeth? Can we have some intercepted letters? That are misunderstood? Where will the audience know more than the characters? This guy is lying to that guy, who in turn is representing himself with a false identity...

ePub 1, Kindle 0

2010-10-03T20:29:00.004-05:00

I'm still on the sidelines, watching the e-reader game. I'm kind of rooting for the open-format readers and against the Amazon Kindle. Today I read a book review in Touchstone magazine, and I wondered if it would be available in an ebook format. I looked at Amazon.com. They have the paper book, but no Kindle version. They offer a button on the book's page: "Tell the publisher! I'd like to read this book on a Kindle."

Next, I went to the Barnes & Noble site. They offer the paper book AND an ebook version in the open ePub format, which is good on Nook, Sony, Kobo, ... just about every e-reader except the Kindle.

Okay, I do shop at Amazon, and I have bought stuff there. But I just don't like the Propriety Format and the Closed System. Just like I've had Apple stuff, but cool as it is, it is overpriced. Their proprietary hedge is a legal and legitimate choice; just don't expect to see me in line.

And as long as Amazon tries the same exclusive approach with its e-reader, I'll look elsewhere.

ALSO

Of course I still love paper books. You interact with a paper book in many ways that are not possible with an e-reader. So I fully expect to buy and keep many paper books, even if/when I ever get an e-reader. There's a nice moment in the Disney animated Beauty and the Beast, when Belle is shown into the Library. Bookshelves on all four walls, floor to ceiling. She is in heaven. All these are yours to read.

If the beast had handed her a Kindle with 20,000 books on it, somehow the effect would not be the same.

So I guess I see the e-reader for the kind of book you really don't want for your bookshelf long-term. Something topical and read-once, rather than a favorite that you would return to again and again.

Library Epub books ...?

2010-09-27T09:46:00.006-05:00

I'm still attracted by the idea of an eReader and the current front-runner in my considerations is the Sony PRS 650. It has a full touch screen (unlike Nook and Kindle), an SD slot (unlike Kindle), support for the open ePub format (unlike Kindle), an eInk pearl display (unlike Nook). The lack of wifi / 3G is not a big deal for me; none of these devices are any good at web surfing, and just how often do you really need to go online for book downloads, anyway?

The open format support has some real advantages. 1) Google Books has zillions of free old public domain titles in ePub, and 2) many public libraries have a process for loaning books from their collection in Adobe DRM (Digital Rights Management) format. You browse their current offerings, select a book, download the DRM "copy", and after three weeks, the magic runs out and it "expires." I don't know how they do it, but that seems to be the idea.

So now all of a sudden, you can read current books for free on your eReader with a library card.

So I go to the "find a library" page on the Sony Reader site, and ask for "Nebraska" and get a list of about 50 public libraries around here ...

... but not the Lincoln Public Libraries.

Huh?

So maybe I drive to Omaha or Beatrice and get a library card there ...?

Where are my keys ...

2010-09-22T10:34:00.002-05:00

Tuesday morning I couldn't find my keys. I looked everywhere I should look. I finally decided that maybe I left them in the car Monday evening.

So I got my other stuff together and went out to the car. My keys were not only in the car ...

It was *running*.

OCR

2010-09-17T17:04:00.003-05:00

It's been years since I have had occasion to use OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software. You scan a page of text, and the OCR software recognizes the images of the letters on the page and gives you a stream of text that you can paste into your word processor as though you had entered it from the keyboard.

The best OCR software includes spelling checkers, "learns" the font as you work, and tries to recognize formatting in the original page, such as multiple columns, sidebars, and text that flows around images.

So today I want to convert an old paper document of mine, the computer file for which is long lost. I had already made TIFF files from a scanner. I wondered if there is such a thing as free OCR software?

Oh yes there is. And the free, simple version (called FreeOCR, by the way), is every bit as good as the OCR software that came bundled with a scanner I bought some years ago. In fact, Google is in the OCR business in a big way now (see Google Books), and they bought one of the best OCR engines out there, put the SDK into the public domain and they maintain it now.

So. Easy free OCR.

What a thing this technology is.

State Churches

2010-09-12T18:12:00.005-05:00

Tim Keller addressed students at the University of California-Berkeley on the topic of this then-new book "The Reason for God." That talk including the Q&A afterwards is one of the first things on the list when you Google "Tim Keller" and look for videos. It's on Youtube.

Keller talks about the strategies that have been tried for getting rid of religion. The first strategy is "hope it away." He says that there was a sense not too long ago that as people increased in education and prosperity, religion would become milder and milder, and finally pretty much go away. Keller points out that the this strategy fails, as in every region of the world, especially among emerging economies (South America, Africa, and Asia) religion is much stronger now than it was a generation or a century ago.

He remarks that the one exception is Europe, and he drops the passing comment that the reason for the decline of the church in Europe is the State Church.

Well. There's a claim I hadn't heard before.

I guess I wouldn't argue that the state churches of Europe are any kind of good model for a working, robust Christian society. There are no current examples of success in Europe, which generally has pitiful, compromised state churches and only small, orthodox evangelical free church minorities.

But I am not sure that Keller's summary dismissal of the State Church is correct. I still am of a mind that Jesus' rule over the nations will have some kind of formalized aspect: the church advises and even directs the king in some way. I don't mind saying that the ways Europe has tried that don't work. But that doesn't mean that there is no way such a thing can work. I'm not ready to agree that State Churches Can't Work.

Well, we don't have to decide today how it has to be.

Defrag

2010-09-08T09:45:00.003-05:00

Somebody donates an old desktop XP system.
So I clean out all the old apps and data.
Run CCleaner a few times.
Now start defrag. It will take a while, so I walk away.
Three hours later I come back.

Oh. The computer went into sleep mode. I'm sorry, did you want to *finish* the defrag?

Don't Eat the Fruit ... Yet

2010-09-08T09:29:00.003-05:00

Genesis 2:16-17:

And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, "You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die."

A similar law comes in Leviticus 19:23:

"When you come into the land and plant any kind of tree for food, then you shall regard its fruit as forbidden. Three years it shall be forbidden to you; it must not be eaten. And in the fourth year all its fruit shall be holy, an offering of praise to the Lord.

We may consider: (1) The prohibition and penalty for eating from the tree in the garden was likely to be lifted after a probationary period. Adam and Eve were certainly new to the land, as Israel was new in the land of Canaan. So one thing a newcomer must do is abstain from the native fruit for a period.
(2) Israel was given a chance to re-enact the trial of Adam and Even in the garden. God's first Son Adam disobeyed and took fruit. God's new Son Israel is given the same test.

Wilson

2010-09-07T15:22:00.001-05:00

"... the god of American civil religion is not a god who speaks. He has no opinions, no laws, no revelation. He has no son, and he sent no mediator. He can be safely appealed to by all parties, or blithely ignored by any party...."

from Blog and Mablog

Lepers

2010-09-07T10:47:00.002-05:00

Leviticus describes seven types of leprosy. It occurred to me that maybe one of the Gospels showed Jesus meeting seven different lepers.

Nope. One.

One leper at the beginning of his ministry, "If you are willing you can make me clean."

Well, okay, ten more in Luke, "Were not ten cleansed? Where are the nine?"

But I was surprised. I thought there were more discrete cases.

e readers

2010-09-06T10:33:00.002-05:00

Amazon's Kindle e-reader comes in a new version that is really attractive. Prices have come down to a reasonable $139 for the model with wifi connectivity, improved display, lighter weight, and loooong battery life. Reviewers such as PC Magazine give it a clear "win" against the competition.

But.

While you can copy etext and save it to a clipboard for quoting in your blog or dissertation, some users complain about hitting a hidden Clip limit, and after that, nothing you can do will ever let you copy anything else from that book.

Kindle reportedly has uneven support for PDF format and otherwise everything is pretty much locked into their proprietary format. (Where is the e-reader with a slick interface to the growing Google Books list?) Amazon talks about thousands of free books, but you can't get a free copy of Shakespeare's complete plays for Kindle, which has been free etext practically since the beginning of the internet. Though it looks like you can get at least some of the plays for free one at a time. You can't even get a free King James Bible.

C. S. Lewis' Mere Christianity is $9.99. (Okay, ALL of C.S. Lewis is way overpriced by his estate managers ...)

A Kindle volume of N.T. Wright is cheaper than the hardback, but more expensive than a new paperback version.

I am underwhelmed.

Looking at the competition, Barnes & Noble's Nook is very good, though a generation behind (bigger, heavier, slower, poorer display). Still, the Nook is not locked into a proprietary format, and it lets you expand storage with a micro SD card, and replace the battery. Amazon has no battery replacement: you send the whole unit back to Amazon and they send you a replacement.

I'm a sucker for gadgets. I wonder how much I'd really use one. Like all of a sudden I'd be this voracious reader.

400mm/6.3mp vs 300mm/10mp

2010-08-31T16:26:00.003-05:00

Last week in Colorado I set up two cameras with telephoto lenses to shoot pictures of the full moon rising behind Long's Peak.

Camera 1 was an older 6.3 megapixel camera wearing a 400mm telephoto lens.
Camera 2 was a newer 10 megapixel camera with a 300mm zoom lens.

I got to wondering which image would actually have a bigger moon. You smart guys can do the arithmetic and figure it out. The 400mm lens has a greater magnification, but you lose a lot of that with the smaller image array. The 300mm lens has a smaller magnification, but a whole lot more pixels for the image. As a wild card to complicate things, the 300mm zoom was made for the digital camera, while the 400mm telephoto is an old 35mm film lens. You're supposed to get an effective increase in magnification / narrower filed of view that way.

To make a long story short, the full moon with the 400mm telephoto was 438 pixels across. The full moon with the 300mm zoom was not far behind: 404 pixels across.

Translating Idiom

2010-08-25T15:22:00.004-05:00

One of the toughest choices a translator faces is what to do with idiom. When Hebrew says someone is angry, it often says "his nose burned." That doesn't do much for the English reader. The translator just about has to say "he was angry."

Still, there are places where keeping the idiom might be a better choice, even if it's a bit confusing in translation. When Jacob decides to move his entire family and possessions without saying goodbye to Laban, the ESV says he "tricked" Laban. The Hebrew idiom there is he "stole the heart of" Laban. This is complicated, because Jacob actually was leaving with all the stuff Laban loved -- Jacob really did steal his heart, his daughters and grandchildren, and all those flocks. When Laban finally catches up with Jacob, he makes a complete inventory list of the stuff Jacob has: "mine, mine, mine, mine." So did Jacob "trick" Laban, or did he "steal his heart"?

In Genesis 50:23, the ESV says "The children of Machir, son of Manasseh, were counted as Joseph's own" for purposes of inheritance. The footnote tells us that the Hebrew there is the children "were born on Joseph's knees." Aha. To "be born on the knees of" means "received inheritance rights."

Which helps us with 48:12. Joseph brings Manasseh and Ephraim to old Jacob for a blessing. Jacob promotes them from grandchildren to sons, giving them full shares with Joseph's brothers in the inheritance. And Joseph "removed them from his knees." They weren't little boys sitting on Joseph's lap; they were at least in their twenties. Rather, Joseph disinherits them to give them full inheritance status with Jacob.

Two Witnesses

2010-08-25T15:14:00.003-05:00

The double dreams in the Joseph story serve as two witnesses that confirm a matter.

Joseph's double dream at the beginning has his sheaf being bowed to by his brothers' sheafs and the sun, moon, and stars bowing down to him.

Pharoah's double dream of the fat/skinny cows, and the fat/parched grain is explicitly interpreted by Joseph as One Dream with a double witness that makes it sure.

At which point, it may have occurred to Joseph that *he* once had a double dream, and if things are going to track in that direction, maybe he should recommend to Pharoah to set up a ruler to administer the years of plenty and famine.

Favoritism and Jealousy

2010-08-25T15:06:00.004-05:00

Joseph's brothers hate him because Jacob has treated him as a favorite. We often blame both Jacob for not being "fair", and the brothers, for their jealousy.

But the Bible never condemns Jacob for his favoritism. The only blame is the brothers' jealous hatred. When the brothers come to Joseph in Egypt the second time, bringing Benjamin, Joseph shows Benjamin special favor to test their reaction. Benjamin gets 5x's the table portion (43.34), and 5 suits of clothing (45.22). There is no moralizing about the sin of favoritism. Life is unfair. Jacob have I loved but Esau have I hated. The fact of life is favoritism. The question we face is do we react with sinful jealousy.

Sexy Laughing

2010-08-25T15:00:00.002-05:00

Good for the ESV. Isaac's name means "laughter", and so when king Abimelech sees Isaac with Rebekah and from the way they are carrying on realizes immediately that they are married, ESV says accurately that he saw Isaac "laughing" with Rebekah.

Again, when Potiphar's wife makes her play for Joseph and fails, she tells the servants, and then husband Potiphar, that this horrible Hebrew slave came in to "laugh" at her.

(I don't have the Hebrew here to check, but I bet it's the Isaac word.)

So. Sex is funny.

moonshot

2010-08-25T14:34:00.001-05:00

moonshot
Originally uploaded by Presbyteer

The Mosque at Ground Zero

2010-08-18T14:04:00.003-05:00

I don't have much to say about this.

1. It's an incredibly stupid idea by the mosque builders. At best, they are completely insensitive. WHO could think this is a good idea.

2. It's a judgement on the U.S. We are determined to be a land of All Cultures which means we are a land of No Culture. We are determined to be Neutral on religion, which means we will have an increasingly anti-Christian state. Why the outrage over plans for a mosque while there are no Christian groups rushing to build churches at ground zero? We are standing by a cultural and political choice about religion that is unsustainable and events like this mock our foolishness. Either we repent our commitment to the false gods we have chosen, or we watch others build temples to the false gods of their choice.

3. If this mosque stands long enough, it will eventually be a church. The early Christians converted pagan temples for church use. It will happen again. So let them build a nice mosque. If it's still there, we'll receive it for the church in God's good time.

ooops

2010-08-18T10:39:00.003-05:00

I switched internet providers. After many years with Internet Nebraska, I took the speed upgrade and package price that Windstream was offering. So far so good.

Wooops. That means I lose the Internet Nebraska ftp space associated with the old account. That's where I had the Presbyteer banner image and all the old Presbyteer pre-blog pages.

Thus, at the top of this page, there is a missing image error. And the sidebar link to the Old Presbyteer leads nowhere.

duh.

Running on AIR

2010-08-17T13:50:00.003-05:00

Adobe has a product called AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) that provides the environment for desktop applications that use stuff from the internet. A developer could theoretically do all the same stuff in a browser app using Flash and whatnot, but doing the same thing on the desktop without a browser has some advantages, such as making it really easy to have lots of local data and settings.

I had never seen AIR before downloading ... here we go again ... the Photographer's Ephemeris. In its program window, TPE has a Google Maps view that is nicely integrated with all the other program features and controls.

And now AIR wants me to update it every so often.

Okay. TPE runs on AIR.

Campsites and Camera

2010-08-15T17:34:00.007-05:00

I'm planning a week in Colorado next week, and I'm of a mind to do some back country camping in the National Forest west of Grand Lake. The idea is to hike up into the woods and find a spot, pitch my tent, and do some hiking.

I have been thinking about picking spots that put me close to some interesting photo opportunities. Using The Photographer's Ephemeris software, I believe I may be able to get some good shots of sunrise and moonrise over Long's Peak.

Here's the current plan.

Sunday: drive in and get there late evening. Instead of taking 34 up from Granby to Grand Lake, I'll hook around to the west on 125. Then turn west on Grand County 4 along Willow Creek. Somewhere along the river across from Cascade Mountain, I'll take one of the National Forest campsites and pitch camp for Sunday night.

Monday: Drive further up Grand County 4 and take the Forest Road 107 fork. Park at the Lost Lake trailhead and load up the backpack. Hike up the Wolverine Bypass Trail to the Blue Ridge trail and find a spot to camp along the ridge near treeline. The idea is to be close enough so I can get to the proper spot in the early evening for moonrise over Long's Peak. There should be a clear view of the Peak, which is about 15 miles east. Weather permitting, with a 400mm telephoto, I might be able to get a Giant Moon right behind Long's (my vantage point marked where the blue line intersects Blue Ridge on the map). Other itinerary for Monday: follow the blue ridge trail north and summit Cascade Mountain (12,303). Depending on time and conditions, I might go farther into the Never Summers.

Tuesday: Hike Gravel Mountain and the Porphyry Peaks. I may move camp to somewhere nearer the ridge on the northern Porphyry Peak; that's where the moonrise over Long's shot will be in the evening. The full moon is Tuesday night. So the evening moonrise shots all week could be really nice. While I'm there, I also want to check the vantage into Grand Lake from the Porphyry Peaks. If we're in Grand Lake for the 4th next summer, I'd like to get shots of the fireworks from a vantage over there; from Google Earth, it looks like the best shot of the lake with Mount Craig as the backdrop will be from one of the Porphyrys.

Wednesday: back to the car. Drive back to 125 and up to Willow Creek Pass. Park at the pass and hike up the Continental Divide Trail and summit Parkview Mountain (12,296). Parkview has one of the best 360-degree vantages: striking ranges North, East and South. Google Earth links to user photos on many locations: I saw a really impressive panorama montage from Parkview. Then I'll drive down to Cabin Creek Road and find a campsite up on Elk Mountain. The sunrise shots behind Long's line up on Elk Mountain Thursday, Friday and Saturday; with a moonrise thrown in to boot. I don't plan on getting the moonrise Wednesday eve: I want to attend a planned Get-together in Rocky Mtn Natl Park of some folks from the RMNP online forums. And by the way, as online groups go, the RMNP forums group is a good one. Lots of kind interest and helpful information. If you want info and pictures about hiking and camping in RMNP, this is the group.

Dynamic Sensitivity Metering?

2010-08-13T07:50:00.004-05:00

There are three elements to control the exposure of your photograph:
1 - shutter speed: slower shutters speeds let in more light.
2 - aperture: wider apertures let in more light.
3 - sensitivity: or film speed in the old days. Higher ISO's are more sensitive to light.

I was reading my camera manual the other day and the camera offers a selection of ways to meter your shot and adjust the exposure.
1- You can meter just at the center of the view.
2- You can meter the whole view, but "weighted" at the center.
3- You can meter the whole view by segments and let the camera do some magic averaging.

Now waitasec.

If the camera is smart enough to meter the whole view by segments, then you have all the information you need to suppress the brightest portions, which tend to blow out to white, and enhance the darkest portions, which tend to drop into black.

The sensor is a whole lot of little electronic pixel-sized elements, right? If you do whole-scene metering, why not use that info to electronically tell the sensor to dial back sensitivity on the bright spots, and dial up sensitivity on the shadows? In effect, you would have ISO 100 for one part of the view, ISO 200 for another part, and ISO 800 for another.

Why not?

HDR

2010-08-11T10:15:00.004-05:00

The human eye does a great job seeing a wide range of light in a scene: bright puffy clouds, and the shades in a forest. The eye takes it all in.

But point your camera at that scene and you will have Exposure Problems: either the sky and the clouds blow out and become totally white, or the shades of the forest get completely lost in the dark.

Since the advent of digital photography, a technique called High Dynamic Range (HDR) imaging has been developed to fix the problem. Here's how it works.

1. When you take a picture, you actually take three pictures in a row, click-click-click. Your digital camera needs to have a mode for "continuous" shooting, and you need to set it up for "exposure bracketing". That is, the camera automatically changes the exposure for each shot: -1 underexposed, 0-regular exposure, +1 overexposed. The first picture will look "too dark", but the bright puffy clouds will be just right. The second picture will look mostly okay, though you're beginning to lose the clouds, and the darkest forest shadows are just black. The third picture will look too bright: the sky is totally blown out, but the forest shadows actually show up okay.

2. Take those three pictures to your computer and run an HDR program. The software magically takes the best exposures from of all three pictures and produces one well-balanced result.

HDR software is getting better. It's been a couple of years since I looked at what's available. Yesterday I found a new option called Picturenaut, which, significantly, is free / "donationware".

I mean to start shooting exposure bracketed 3-shots, and see what I can get.

Of course HDR has problems. If you are not shooting with a tripod, then your camera will move slightly between each shot, and so the pictures won't align exactly; then you can get "ghosting." And this only works on static scenes: a swooping bird or a jumping fish cause problems because they will be in different positions in the three frames.

I guess what you really need is a camera with three lenses that do exposure bracketing simultaneously ... but then you'd have to adjust for the very slight difference in viewpoint and angle ... the stereo effect...

There's an HDR group on Flickr that has some examples.
http://www.flickr.com/groups/hdr/pool/with/2803848284/
Some HDR has a kind of gaudy over-saturated look. I think you can dial that back for a more natural look in the software.

Microsoft Update: AAAAAUUUGH

2010-08-07T12:09:00.000-05:00

I haaaaate programs the run themselves in the background without asking. #1 offender: Microsoft Update. Turn OFF Automatic Updates. it is SLOW. It HOGS all the resources. Especially on the marginally old and slow system. Everything else slows to a crawl. You can't even drag a window. And I can't understand why a simple check for the last updates on your system should be so resource intensive. WHAT is the DEAL?

Okay. I'm better now.

Capitol Sunrise

2010-08-06T10:39:00.002-05:00

My first use of The Photographer's Ephemeris software, which shows you a map with time and locations of the sun/moon rise/set. This is from the other side of Denton, on SW 125th street.

Language Rules

2010-07-28T14:59:00.003-05:00

One of the key advances in recent years has been the demonstration of precisely this causal link. It turns out that if you change how people talk, that changes how they think. If people learn another language, they inadvertently also learn a new way of looking at the world. When bilingual people switch from one language to another, they start thinking differently, too.

Wow. What a fascinating article.

Language makes a difference in the way you understand and think about the world in ways that can be measured.

I believe it makes a real difference, therefore, on one of my favorite rant topics: scripture translation. And by extension: the liturgy and lyrics we use in worship. The old rule is Lex Orandi Lex Credendi: the law of prayer is the law of belief. In other words, what you say and do in worship determines what you actually believe -- sometimes even though your official, creedal commitments are different.

What do we sing together. What do we repeat together. Those are strong factors in what we end up believing. If you teach the church goofy choruses then you jellify the faith of the saints. How much better to trust God and sing the Psalms he gave us, whole.

pop riveter

2010-07-27T20:30:00.003-05:00

Some years ago I bought an inexpensive pop rivet gun for some project or other and never used it. I pretty much forgot I even had one. Today I was working on repairing some strappage for a hiking pack, and I thought of using rivets to back up the hot glue. I almost bought a new rivet gun at the hardware store, but then I remembered, "I *have* one of those somewhere."

Later, faced with two strap ends that I wanted to overlap and rivet, I held the tool in one hand, a new rivet in the other and wondered, "how this is supposed to work." How do you put the ... where does the ... I have never seen anyone use a rivet gun. I looked at the rivet and the gun and wondered and wondered.

Finally I went to YouTube.

You can get a video of almost anything on YouTube. I have been thinking about getting a certain kind of camping tent. YouTube has a guy with that model explaining things and setting it up in his side yard. I was looking at a certain backpack. There's another guy on YouTube who flips that pack all around and unzips all the zippers and shows you what's what. Back when I was looking for a camera holster, the YouTube videos on a couple of the brands out there almost sold me.

And behold, there is a guy on YouTube who shows you how a pop rivet gun works.

Ohhhhhhhh.

Drama

2010-07-23T15:55:00.003-05:00

I have a long history of association with the stage: I've been an audience member for many performances. I have performed and directed ... and even written some.

So I have had lots of time both to experience and to reflect on play acting and performance.

One thing I observe (with no risk of being original in this), is that the theater seems to attract more than its fair share of weirdo's -- outsiders and the insecure. At first, that seems counter-intuitive: if you feel rejected and are hungry for approval and acceptance, exposing yourself in a performance venue seems like it would be a high-risk solution.

But actually, theater works perfectly. You learn your lines and rehearse the play. You know exactly what to do and you know exactly what will happen. So actually, if you just stick to the plan, there is absolutely no risk. And you are virtually guaranteed applause and approval.

Much easier than real life. Let's put on a play.

"Today I have begotten you"

2010-07-23T15:45:00.003-05:00

The Father speaks to the Son in Psalm 2 and says "today I have begotten you". In Acts 13, Paul connects that moment to the resurrection.

The idea of begetting, of being born, is here obviously not about some act of creation or procreation. Obviouisly Jesus the man was biologically begotten at a point in time decades before the resurrection; and the divine Son of God was begotten of the Father from all eternity. So in Psalm 2, referring to the day of resurrection, "begotten" refers to something else. As I look at it this time through, I believe the begetting refers to doing the deeds of the father.

In John 8, remember, Jesus argues with the Pharisees; they say "Abraham is our father"; but Jesus says if Abraham were your father you would do the works of Abraham.

It seems that that is the sense of Psalm 2: the Father says of the Son, "this day I have begotten you"; it is particularly on the day of resurrection that the Son does the works of the Father. It is on the day of resurrection that the Son receives all rule and authority over the world. It is the risen Christ who fulfills his sonship by taking possession of the ends of the earth, proving in that work, his singular begetting by the Father.

The Dark Frigate

2010-07-20T16:39:00.002-05:00

1923 Newbury Award winnner, The Dark Frigate caught my eye on the shelves of the local library several times when I was a kid. The library copy had a really cool pirate illustration on the cover. I'd check it out, take it home, and just couldn't read it. Too hard. I'd take it back. Then some time later I'd see that pirate illustration on the cover and just know there was a great story inside. I don't know how many times I checked it out. I never read it.

But just added it to my Amazon wish list. And if you decide to buy it for me, see if you can find that edition with the same cool pirate illustration that was at South Branch library in the early 1960s.

Children Believe

2010-07-18T21:56:00.002-05:00

Jean Cocteau's 1946 version of Beauty and the Beast was on TCM tonight. This is the restored version, which has Cocteau's prologue. He tells us "Children believe everything you tell them" including things about a magic rose, or a beast's hands that smoke after he has killed. Cocteau asks his audience to become like children as they watch the film. (Which ends with the beast resurrected as a prince, taking his bride with him into heaven, by the way.)

Anyway, the prologue reminded me of the time Jesus took a child and set him in their midst and that unless you become like children, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven. Everyone knows that children believe: simply, gladly, without argument or reservation.

The Unhappy Man

2010-07-16T16:50:00.002-05:00

The man who is unhappy in and with himself is most miserable. He has not learned to delight in another, and has learned that he cannot delight in himself. There is no other in whom he takes a simple delight that brightens his day. He has no happy enjoyment of the other, so he is unhappy without remedy.

Theology and Physics

2010-06-30T13:07:00.002-05:00

The Genesis creation account is both Theological and Physical. The text does not invite us to separate them. If the account is not physical, its theology is irrelevant. If the account is not theological, it's physics are unimportant. God always works in history, by word and deed, in symbol and stuff. You cannot separate or discount one without breaking the whole-i-ness of what he gives us.

Naming

2010-06-30T13:01:00.002-05:00

In Genesis 1, God names Day, Night, Heaven, Earth, and Seas. These define his sphere of dominion.
In Genesis 2, Man names livestock, birds, beasts, and woman. These define his sphere of dominion.
In Genesis 3, the woman he named and one of the beasts he named show man's failure to exercise his appointed responsibility.

Okay, Why Not?

2010-06-03T12:03:00.001-05:00

Buried and Raised

2010-05-30T16:57:00.004-05:00

Col. 2:11-12 (ESV) In him also you were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, by putting off the body of the flesh, by the circumcision of Christ, [12] having been buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through faith in the powerful working of God, who raised him from the dead.

Some baptists point to this passage as support for their practice of complete submersion: you've got to be buried in the water and then raised up out of it in order to represent the burial and raising that Paul describes here.

First, on the mode question, I am happy enough to be in a denomination that recognizes the validity of sprinkling, pouring, and submersion, so I don't have a problem with baptist submersions in the way that the baptists have a problem with Presbyterian sprinkling or pouring.

Second, I think there are good places where pouring/sprinkling, water-from-above is associated with baptism, so I couldn't in good conscience be a good baptist and heartily contend for the submerse-only view.

Finally, on this question of Colossians 2, it struck me this time through that Paul's circumcision/baptism point in the argument here marks the beginning of a series of dead/alive contrasts. You were dead, now you're alive. Heretofore Paul had not used life and death language to describe the Colossians' conversion: they had been aliens, they had been reconciled, they had been forgiven. But starting in 2:12 he picks up the death and resurrection language, and he keeps using it:

2:13 And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses,
2:20 If with Christ you died to the elemental spirits of the world, why, as if you were still alive in the world, do you submit to regulations—
3:1 If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God.
3:3 For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.
3:5 Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry.

The death & life, burial & resurrection language is sustained here in a way that weakens the force of the baptist argument that baptism must picture a down below the surface of the water burial and an up from the water resurrection. Paul's larger argument is that your baptism marks the transition from death to life, so it is not the water of baptism that you come up out of, but the habits of death. God makes you alive with Christ in your baptism, so leave behind all the ungodliness and sinful patterns of your old life, which was no life at all, and begin to live the life of resurrection.

That Hideous Strength

2010-05-17T15:42:00.006-05:00

My C.S. Lewis reading project bumps along. That Hideous Strength is the third in Lewis' "space trilogy" and I remember not liking it much when I first read it so many years ago.

Part of my difficulty was my expectation: the first two books were interplanetary sci-fi with creative and new visions. THS is earthbound and almost parochial.

You have to "buy" Lewis' story baseline: the ultra-humanist (anti-human) worldview that Lewis had recently attacked in The Abolition of Man is projected into a story where its logical institutional manifestation and social program is the creepy N.I.C.E. organization, which, once we get to the heart of it, is raw demonism.

Funny thing: when Lewis writes stories on Mars and Venus, they are more believable. This N.I.C.E. institute is basically a story vehicle for holding all the character types and philosophies Lewis sees as dangerous.

Okay, make your allowances. Grant the general story idea without complaining.

Then, actually, this is a pretty good reading experience. Lewis is of course sharpest at describing the deceptiveness of the human heart. When Mark is being drawn into the N.I.C.E., he deceives himself in many ways. When they prevail on him to write a false story for the newspapers, I liked this:

This is the first thing Mark had been asked to do which he himself, before he did it, clearly knew to be criminal. But the moment of his consent almost escaped his notice; certainly there was no struggle, no sense of turning a corner. ... for him, it all slipped past in a chatter of laughter, of that intimate laughter between fellow professionals, which of all earthly powers is strongest to make men do very bad things before they are yet, individually, very bad men.

And since Lewis is dealing with raw demonic forces, he has some chilling visions that echo Screwtape as he traces the destruction of Dr. Wither:

The last moments before damnation are not often so dramatic. Often the man knows with perfect clarity that some still possible action of his own will could yet save him. But he cannot make this knowledge real to himself. Some tiny habitual sensuality, some resentment too trivial to waste on a blue-bottle, the indulgence of some fatal lethargy, seems to him at that moment more important than the choice between total joy and total destruction. With eyes wide open, seeing that the endless terror is just about to begin and yet (for the moment) unable to feel terrified, he watches passively, not moving a finger for his own rescue, while the last links with joy and reason are severed, and drowsily sees the trap close upon his soul.

But perhaps my favorite thing in the book is the section told from the point of view of Mr. Bultitude, the good bear.

Now--in the early afternoon--he had approached the garden wall. There was a chestnut tree within the wall which the bear could easily climb, and from its branches he could drop down on the far side. He was standing looking up at this tree. Mrs. Maggs would have described his state of mind by saying, "He knows perfectly well he's not allowed out of the garden." That was not how it appeared to Mr. Bultitude. He had no morals; ... One met bees in the garden, but never found a bee-hive. The bees all went away, over the wall. And to follow bees was the obvious thing to do ...

A nicely drawn section.

Islam

2010-05-15T10:24:00.004-05:00

Yesterday I read the summary of a paper that argues that Islam needs to be understood as God's rebuke to the church. Here is the description:

Open Book No. 24: Mirror of Christendom: Why Islam Exists and what to do About It, by Peter J. Leithart. An argument that Islam was raised up by God as a scourge of Christendom in the same way that God raised up various pagan nations against sinful Israel during Bible times. The specific evils of Islam mirror similar evils in Christendom, and until we shape up, God will not defeat Islam.

You can order the paper from Biblical Horizons.

You can see the latest form of Islam's rebuke to the unrepentant Christian world here, in the news that there will be a new mega-mosque built in NYC at ground zero, due to open 9/11, 2011.

The Inner Circle

2010-05-15T09:46:00.003-05:00

One theme that works its way into C. S. Lewis' work again and again is the Inner Ring: the informal clique of insiders in any organization that have an envied privilege viewed by outsiders. Outsiders wish they could be In, and Insiders are usually not fully easy in their privilege, because they have become aware of an Inner Inner circle that is more exclusive yet.

I'm reading That Hideous Strength in which the Mark character has as his primary motivation a desire to be In at his college, and then at N.I.C.E. He is always measuring his standing, and either enjoying his progress towards the Inner Circle, or suffering the miseries and anxieties of being Out.

I have to say that while I have been aware of school cliques in my experience, their pull and privilege has nothing like the strength Lewis gives them. This is almost certainly due to the difference between America and England. America is at heart egalitarian and democratic. England has a long history of aristocratic clubbiness of which we have no experience here in the colonies.

To his credit, Lewis was able to recognize the evil and soul-destroying side of this feature of his society, and he never gave it a pass in his writing. It doesn't register with us Yanks in the same way, but I suppose we should be about the business of seeing and calling out the evil and soul-destroying side of our more egalitarian bias.

Who is doing that?

Context

2010-05-13T15:23:00.002-05:00

In a recent online discussion, some Protestants charged the Roman Catholic side with direct disobedience of Scripture in the matter of Rome's forbidding priests to marry. Come on: how can Rome so blatantly contradict the Bible:

1 Tim. 4:1-3 Now the Spirit speaketh expressly, that in the latter times some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits, and doctrines of devils; Speaking lies in hypocrisy; having their conscience seared with a hot iron; Forbidding to marry, and commanding to abstain from meats, which God hath created to be received with thanksgiving of them which believe and know the truth.

Well, golly. Forbidding to marry is a doctrine of devils. What about that, Rome?

"Oh," they reply, "Paul was writing to a very specific CONTEXT, ..." blah, blah, blah.

The appeal to "Context" is the nuclear option in debate. "Context" is the escape hatch for Romans 1 on homosexuality, 1 Timothy 3 on women pastors, and any place else where the modern man is more comfortable being shaped by the world than by the word.

Since "Context" is such a powerful tool, everybody needs to admit that special care needs to be taken with it. You can't just say "things were different then", because by that argument, you can argue that we don't need to repent and be baptized. Maybe before you get to play the Context trump card, you have to show that in a different context *in Scripture* the command you are trumping does not apply.

So, is marriage is forbidden somewhere in a different Biblical context in a way that is like what Rome does?

What does Windows DO with that RAM?

2010-05-13T09:05:00.002-05:00

I had a day job with a software company for many years. The software was for map and image processing, and we dealt with big datasets: airphotos and satellite images. We were always looking for bigger drives and more memory. I remember the day we splurged and bought a 1 gigabyte hard drive and put it on our network. The "Big Gig" we called it, and now there would be plenty of room for all those big sample datasets for testing the software.

A gig was a lot.

So I have a laptop now with 1 Gb of RAM. And WINDOWS, doing nothing but running the desktop, takes 640MB.

Excuse me? 640 Mb??!! Doing NOTHING?

What in the WIDE WORLD is Windows doing with all that RAM?

Needlessly Obscure

2010-05-11T21:09:00.003-05:00

As I feared, LOST is coming down in disappointing ways.

It feels like just bad writing when characters are needlessly obscure. Character M Knows Things but won't answer direct questions. "I can't tell you yet." "you'll know in time." We need a stronger story reason. This is STUPID. She lives with those two for all those YEARS and WILL NOT TELL them anything???? BECAUSE ....????

It really doesn't make sense, and that's just bad storytelling.

I was afraid they had written themselves into a corner, and now that's how it's turning out.

Slavic Reformation Society

2010-05-07T16:27:00.002-05:00

If you want to know what's going on for the faith in Russia, check out these guys:
http://www.slavicreformationsociety.com/joomla15/

There are a lot of good, strong missions things going on. This is one of the goodest.

Oh Yeah

2010-05-07T16:07:00.002-05:00

"Sunday's Coming" Movie Trailer from North Point Media on Vimeo.