There's Beauty in the Bellow

Love Your Neighbor With Your Vote

2012-01-18T16:00:00.000-08:00

Voting and the 10 Commandments

This is the great commandment, you shall Love the Lord your God will all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself. And the second is like unto it: Love your neighbor with your vote.

I would like to vote for a Christian. However, I would quickly vote for a small-government non-Christian over a Christian socialist. The former is more considerate of your neighbor than the latter.

6. Does he honor the life of his neighbor? This applies to abortion, as well as gun rights; it even applies to defense issues. Pacifism often loves the neighbor abroad at the expense of the neighbor next door. "Speak softly and carry a big stick" means that we show respect for sovereign nations but that we will intervene to protect our people.

7. What is his stance on obvious public sexual sins? How about his personal life? There's only so much you can do here. You don't know if the wife is photo-shopped in and the mistress or male lover has been photo-shopped out. Opponents will run smear campaigns and we are better off in the long run if we do not accept charges of wrong-doing too quickly. And the media hubbub may shout down the contrary testimony of friends.

8. Do not vote for someone who intends to steal from your neighbor's paycheck or wallet. Not even for charity. (Especially not for charity. Give it voluntarily. Don't be a Warren Buffet hypocrite on this one.)

9. Examine his words and his actions throughout his past career. Are they consistent? Are there good reasons for inconsistency. Is it truly an inconsistency? Does he explain himself? Does he just back away and deny his past publicly stated opinions? He's trying to paint a particular picture of himself.

10. We can't search his heart. But we can examine the rhetoric: is he appealing to envy and covetousness in you? Note: capitalism wants self-interest to motivate you to get off your butt and work. The rhetoric of class warfare and envy wants you to ask the government to serve you.

I'm for Newt Gingrich in this election. I know that many of my fellow Christians are hesitant to vote for him because of his past infidelities. But here's the thing. He's been faithful to Callista for over a decade. He's publicly repented. We cannot refuse to extend grace lest grace be denied us. He's been faithful to all of his other principles. (I think the consulting thing is BS. Getting paid for advice is not evil. Advising stupid companies is not evil. Frank-Dodd is a much greater evil.)

I've overheard a couple people say that they're voting for Ron Paul "to send a message." What message is that? Is it really what you think it is? Even if he is marginalized and misunderstood, is your message going to get through? Paul seems to be spending more and more time tearing down his fellow candidates than really espousing a message. His main message seems to be: "distrust everyone--except me!" He preaches the Constitution but doesn't teach patriotic love or loyalty. The loyalty of the Ron Paul club is directed towards a person, not principles. What is going to happen to you when he dies?

Foreign policy has become a much greater issue for me in the last year with my brother in the USAF. Paul's isolationist stance leaves our country and our people vulnerable. Do you remember when T.R. sent the "great white fleet" around the world? He intended it as a demonstration of strength, but it turned out to be a goodwill tour and a great marketing event. People thronged to see the ships and welcomed them with joy. We must rebuild our reputation internationally. America has long been a refuge for the nations: the tired, poor, the masses yearning to breathe free. I want her to continue so.

On the Giving of Gifts

2011-12-28T17:56:00.000-08:00

Excerpts from "Forced Merriment and the True Meaning of Christmas," an essay by Christopher Hitchens printed posthumously in the December 24 edition of the Wall Street Journal.

First of all, Mr. Hitchens takes a swipe at the Protestant Church:

The original Puritan Protestants regarded Christmas as blasphemous.

Yet this is hardly subversive at all. Religious sermons against the "commercialization" of Christmas have also been a staple of the season ever since I can remember. A root-and-branch resistance to the holiday spirit would have to be a lot tougher than that. It's fairly easy to be a charter member of the Tom Lehrer Club, which probably embraces a fair number of the intellectual classes and has sympathizers even in the most surprising families.

But the thing about the annual culture war that would probably most surprise those who want to "keep the Christ in Christmas" is this: The original Puritan Protestants regarded the whole enterprise as blasphemous. Under the rule of Oliver Cromwell in England, Christmas festivities were banned outright. The same was true in some of the early Pilgrim settlements in North America.

Last year I read a recent interview with the priest of one of the oldest Roman Catholic churches in New York, located downtown and near Wall Street. Taking a stand in favor of Imam Rauf's "Ground Zero" project, he pointed to some parish records showing hostile picketing of his church in the 18th century. The pious protestors had been voicing their suspicion that a profane and Popish ceremonial of "Christ Mass" was being conducted within.

Now, that was a time when Americans took their religion seriously. But we know enough about Puritans to suspect that what they really disliked was the idea of a holiday where people would imbibe strong drink and generally make merry. (Scottish Presbyterians did not relax their hostility to Yuletide celebrations until well into the 20th century.) And the word "Yule" must be significant here as well, since pagans of all sorts have been roistering at the winter solstice ever since records were kept, and Christians have been faced with the choice of either trying to beat them or join them.

However, that said, Mr. Hitchens rather sympathizes with the Puritanism's reputed objection to merry-making. He throws in his lot:

You would have to be religiously observant and austere yourself, then, to really seek a ban on Christmas.

However, his Real Objection to Christmas is the gift giving:

But it can be almost as objectionable to be made to take part in something as to be forbidden to do so. . . . . One of my many reasons for not being a Christian is my objection to compulsory love. How much less appealing is the notion of obligatory generosity. To feel pressed to give a present is also to feel oneself passively exerting the equivalent unwelcome pressure upon other people.

I don't think I have been unusually unfortunate with my family and friends, but I present as evidence my tie rack. Nobody who knows me has ever seen me wear a tie except under protest, and the few that I do possess of my own volition are accidental trophies, "given" to me by the maitre d's of places where neckwear is compulsory. Yet somehow I possess a drawerful of new, unopened examples of these useless items of male apparel.

Nobody derived any pleasure from either the giving or the receiving, and it's appalling to see what some stores feel they can charge for a tie. Do I blush to think of some of my reciprocal gestures? Sure I do. Don't pretend not to know what I am talking about. It's like the gradual degradation of another annual ritual, whereby all schoolchildren are required to give valentines to everybody in the class. Nobody's feelings are hurt, they tell me, but the entire point of sending a valentine in the first place has been deliberately destroyed. If I feel like giving you a gift I'll try and make sure that (a) it's worth remembering and (b) that it comes as a nice surprise. (I like to think that some of my valentines in the past packed a bit of a punch as well.)

It seemed odd to me that a bachelor would give so much grief over "forced generosity." Except that I did my research and found that Mr. Hitchens' has been married twice. At any rate, he has been free to make his own traditions and his friends should know him sufficiently well enough not to expect him to follow convention. But a further absurdity than that: consider the irony of a man who has made a career out of independence from, and not caring for, silly cultural conventions now objecting to being forced into anything.

Here's a fun counterpoint from Dan Ariely:

Is It Irrational to Give Holiday Gifts?

Many of my economist friends have a problem with gift-giving. They view the holidays not as an occasion for joy but as a festival of irrationality, an orgy of wealth-destruction.

Giving comes in many forms, including lending a hand, donating to charities or buying gifts. WSJ's Christina Tsuei looks into their health benefits in the latest installment of the "Is It True?" series.

Rational economists fixate on a situation in which, say, your Aunt Bertha spends $50 on a shirt for you, and you end up wearing it just once (when she visits). Her hard-earned cash has evaporated, and you don't even like the present! One much-cited study estimated that as much as a third of the money spent on Christmas is wasted, because recipients assign a value lower than the retail price to the gifts they receive. Rational economists thus make a simple suggestion: Give cash or give nothing.

But behavioral economics, which draws on psychology as well as on economic theory, is much more appreciative of gift giving. Behavioral economics better understands why people (rightly, in my view) don't want to give up the mystery, excitement and joy of gift giving.

In this view, gifts aren't irrational. It's just that rational economists have failed to account for their genuine social utility. So let's examine the rational and irrational reasons to give gifts.

If your goal is to maximize a social connection, don't give a perishable gift like flowers or chocolates.

Some gifts, of course, are basically straightforward economic exchanges. This is the case when we buy a nephew a package of socks because his mother says he needs them. It is the least exciting kind of gift but also the one that any economist can understand.

A second important kind of gift is one that tries to create or strengthen a social connection. The classic example is when somebody invites us for dinner and we bring something for the host. It's not about economic efficiency. It's a way to express our gratitude and to create a social bond with the host.

Another category of gift, which I like a lot, is what I call "paternalistic" gifts—things you think somebody else should have. I like a certain Green Day album or Julian Barnes novel or the book "Predictably Irrational," and I think that you should like it, too. Or I think that singing lessons or yoga classes will expand your horizons—and so I buy them for you.

A paternalistic gift ignores the preferences of the person getting the gift, which tends to drive economists crazy, but it may actually change those preferences for the better. Of course, you might mess up by giving a paternalistic gift that someone hates, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't try.

A holiday gift can straddle these categories. Instead of picking a book from your sister's Amazon wish list, or giving her what you think she should read, go to a bookstore and try to think like her. It's a serious social investment.

The great challenge lies in making the leap into someone else's mind. Psychological research affirms that we are all partial prisoners of our own preferences and have a hard time seeing the world from a different perspective. But whether or not your sister likes the book, it may give her joy to think about you thinking of her.

My final category of gift is one that somebody really wants but would feel guilty buying for themselves. This category shouldn't exist, according to standard economic theory: If you really liked it and could afford it, you'd buy it.

For me, fancy pens meet this description. I don't use pens that much, but I'd be pleased to get a really nifty one (a Porsche 911 would be OK, too). When my students defend their dissertations, I ask everyone on the Ph.D. committee to sign the required forms with an expensive pen, and then I give the pen to the student. It's a prototypical good gift, because it's something that they would probably feel guilty about buying for themselves, plus it has positive associations as a memento of the day.

Behavioral economics has one more lesson for gift givers: If your goal is to maximize a social connection, don't give a perishable gift like flowers or chocolates. True, people enjoy them, and you don't want to impose by giving something more permanent. But what are you trying to maximize? Is your goal to avoid imposing on them or for them to remember you?

For a durable impression, better to give a vase or a painting. Even if your friends don't like it that much, they'll think about you more often (though maybe not in the most positive terms).

Better yet, give a gift that gets used intermittently. A painting often just fades into the attentional background. An electric mixer, when used, gets noticed.

I like to buy people high-end headphones. They get used intermittently, so I can imagine that every time you put them on, you will think of me. Also, they're a luxury—the kind of thing that people have a hard time buying for themselves. Best of all perhaps, they're intimate: When I give someone headphones, I can think of myself whispering in their ears.

And maybe, when they use the headphones, they'll remember you whispering to them or even kissing their ears. Has anyone ever thought of a kiss after you hand them cash?

We have reproduced here in full "Is It Irrational to Give Gifts?" by Dan Ariely from the Wall Street Journal. We have an online subscription, so I don't know if you can access it. (I don't have the password, so I'm not logging out to see! Our subscription lapses soon, so I'm taking advantage of whatever I can.) I imagine that you can find both Ariely and Hitchens' writing somewhere.

But don't you love it when you are inscrutable to computers, logarithms, mathematical models and scientific explanations? Oh yes, humans are cool.

Keep your eyes open

2011-12-20T19:03:00.000-08:00

and no telling the little pieces you'll pick up.

The Wall St Journal discusses Vera Wang . . . and we find out that Michelle Obama wore Vera Wang last week. Remember how Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich got in trouble for their spending? "Beyond Bridal: Vera Wang's New Look," Christina Binkley. December 15, 2011, Wall Street Journal.

And who are John Huntsman's daughters hanging out with?

One evening early this year, a red Ferrari pulled up at the U.S. ambassador's residence in Beijing, and the son of one of China's top leaders stepped out, dressed in a tuxedo.

Bo Guagua, 23, was expected. He had a dinner appointment with a daughter of the then-ambassador, Jon Huntsman.

The car, though, was a surprise. The driver's father, Bo Xilai, was in the midst of a controversial campaign to revive the spirit of Mao Zedong through mass renditions of old revolutionary anthems, known as "red singing." He had ordered students and officials to work stints on farms to reconnect with the countryside. His son, meanwhile, was driving a car worth hundreds of thousands of dollars and as red as the Chinese flag, in a country where the average household income last year was about $3,300.

"Children of the Revolution," Jeremy Page. Nov 26, 2011, The Wall Street Journal

Die before you die. There is no chance after.

2011-12-16T12:53:00.000-08:00

Lewis' quote out of Till We Have Faces has been echoing in my head all morning since learning of the death of Christopher Hitchens.
I followed the debates between Doug Wilson and Hitchens, watched "Collision," and was once privileged to hear Peter Hitchens live.

Hitchens' last piece for Vanity Fair
Read Hitchens' reflections on his cancer--they are harrowing, horrifying and heroic. He was intellectually honest--to the point of self-immolation. Just the headshot of Christopher's chemo-swollen face, bald head, the skin aged 10 years in only one year, makes one grieve for the strong voice in the quickly slackening body. He knew Who he was fighting--the Mighty God, the Judge of all the earth Who does rightly, the Ancient of Days, the I Am, the Creator and Maker and Sustainer. He denied all those titles, but he did not belittle them.

Pastor Wilson's obit for Christianity Today
"[Hitchens] He was fully aware of the authority an enfant terrible could have, provided he played his cards right, and this was a strategy that Hitchens employed very well indeed. One man who delivers a terrible insult is banned from television for life, and another man, who does the same thing, has people lining up with invitations and microphones. In case anyone is wondering, Christopher was that second man.
"Ironically, the branch of the faith most interested in getting the 'cultured despisers' to pay us some respect is really not that effective, and this is a strategy that can frequently be found on the pointed end of its own petard. Respectability depends on not caring too much about respectability. Unbelievers can smell accommodation, and when someone like Christopher meets someone who actually believes all the articles in the Creed, including that part about Jesus coming back from the dead, it delights him. Here is someone actually willing to defend what is being attacked. Militant atheists are often exasperated with opponents whose strategy appears to be 'surrender slowly.'"
A very Wilsonian bon mot:
"He wanted to carry on the grand tradition of doubting what had been inherited from Christendom, and to take great delight in doubting it. This worked well, or appeared to, for a time. But skepticism is a universal solvent, and once applied, it does not stop just because Christendom is gone." . . . and then he quotes the Moody Blues: "I think I am, therefore I am. I think."

Obit from his friend Christopher Buckley

Peter Hitchens' obit for his brother honoring his courage:
"Here’s a thing I will say now without hesitation, unqualified and important. The one word that comes to mind when I think of my brother is ‘courage’. By this I don’t mean the lack of fear which some people have, which enables them to do very dangerous or frightening things because they have no idea what it is to be afraid. I mean a courage which overcomes real fear, while actually experiencing it. . . . Courage is deliberately taking a known risk, sometimes physical, sometimes to your livelihood, because you think it is too important not to."

Christopher Hitchens demonstrated an intellectual honesty and courage for a false cause. How much more should we be courageous and intellectually honest for the Truth?

Interesting thoughts from Alan Jacobs, a.k.a. @ayjay, via Twitter:
Hitch was a great journalist and a fine critic, but he's not being celebrated for that. The outpouring of grief is for a lost mythmaker.
Hitch's primary myth was himself, and that's the kind of myth late modernity most craves and celebrates.
By contrast, the death of Russell Hoban, whose mythmaking was vastly creative but not centered on himself, was barely noticed.

Russell Hoban was half of the Russell-Lillian duo who wrote Frances the Badger. So now I need to rediscover one of my favorite childhood authors (Egg Thoughts and Other Frances Songs was my favorite). Wikipedia tells us that he wrote magic realism.

More Fun with HTML

2011-12-15T12:32:00.000-08:00

H

Debussy
my nutty cat

Is there a simpler recipe for a photo?

Hipster Christianity: the intersection of Church & Cool

2011-12-06T16:02:00.000-08:00

Travis Cooper's book Hipster Christianity has a website: http://www.hipsterchristianity.com/index.php. The website also features a free chapter (actually intro & first chapter) in pdf. I appreciated Cooper's handling of the nuances of this relationship between two cultures and loved the questions he raised. I will pursue this book for future reading. Good questions to think about.

Catalyst or Catastrophe

2011-11-30T12:29:00.000-08:00

by Steve Watters

When I was a kid, I had an electric racetrack. I’d line up my racecars in the little track grooves and zoom them around the track over and over again. After a while, I got bored with just circling the track. I took the track apart and built ramps. At the bottom of the ramp, I would hold a car in place, letting the engine rev a little and watching the tires spin before releasing it and watching it fly over the ramp. Sometimes the car would land safely, but often it would fly off and hit my bed or dresser and get banged up. What ultimately totaled my racecars, however, was the way I was holding them in place while the engine was running. I didn’t realize that was stripping the gears. The car wasn’t meant to be held in place while its engine ran. It was supposed to go somewhere.

I thought about that old racetrack recently in the context of romantic love — a powerful force driven by the twin engines of a desire for companionship and the sex drive.

This force of romantic love, I worry, is too often underestimated and misunderstood in the Christian community. It has been the driving force that has led many into the dangerous course of sex outside of marriage or many others into the destructive course of sex outside of their marital commitment. For this reason, singles are often counseled to just stay focused on growing closer to God and to avoid the temptations that could drive them to the catastrophic ends of sexual sin, childbirth outside of marriage, STDs and affairs.

But the drive is still there. You can follow the wisdom of not prematurely stirring or arousing love (Song of Solomon 2:7) and still struggle with a drive that doesn’t go away. God created us body, mind and spirit. The physical and earthy aspects of our body include hormones that produce emotions and sexual desire.

We cannot underestimate this drive. God designed it for a purpose — to move us beyond ourselves and into other-centered relationships. God doesn't call us to kill this drive. Instead, He calls us to be transformed by the Gospel in order to kill the evil desires distorting our drive (Colossians 3:1-17). All the cautions about sexual sin in the Bible are in recognition that something so powerful needs guardrails and direction.

In his book Romantic Love, Dr. James Dobson shows how the sexual drive of individuals can be constructive when it's directed toward God’s design for marriage and destructive when it's not:

Sexual drives urge a man to work when he would rather play. They cause a woman to save when she would rather spend. In short, the sexual aspect of our nature — when released exclusively within the family — produces stability and responsibility that would not otherwise occur. When a nation is composed of millions of devoted, responsible family units, the entire society is stable, responsible and resilient. If sexual energy within the family is the key to a healthy society, then its release outside those boundaries is potentially catastrophic. The very force that binds a people together then becomes the agent for its own destruction.

The sexual drive is not neutral; it’s a force that can build or destroy. According Kurt Bruner, a pastor and author who worked with Focus on the Family for 20 years, the same is true of the emotions behind romantic love.

"Our attraction to one another is intended to yank us out of self-focused isolation into the kind of intimacy that reflects God’s communion with His beloved," writes Bruner in his book The Purpose of Passion. "That’s why the desire for romantic union is imprinted on, programmed into, and seeded within our very souls. It’s the reason we yearn to meet and marry that special someone." Bruner goes on to describe how this desire can either be a catalyst or lead to catastrophe:

Whether we find true love or ache from its absence, whether we treat sex as a gift or a game, our love life drives us toward or away from God. The forks encountered along love’s path literally lead to heaven’s highest joys or hell’s deepest miseries, a dream come true or a living nightmare.

It turns out that romantic love, dating and relationships are a lot more spiritually significant than Christians often realize. We shouldn’t minimize the power and goodness of the drive God has given us for connection that can lead us upward toward Him. And we also shouldn’t overlook how our spiritual enemy will go after us at this point. Satan understands the link between romantic love and God's love for His people better than we do.

"The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy," Jesus told His disciples, "I came that they may have life and have it abundantly" (John 10:10, ESV). Satan can’t create. He can only counterfeit, twist and distort what God has created. And so he seeks to drive our desires in deceitful and sinful directions, like a racecar taken off the track and steered toward a dangerous cliff. What was meant to drive us beyond ourselves and toward others, he seeks to drive toward isolation, selfishness and manipulation.

This is one of the reasons the Apostle Paul so often warns about sexual immorality. His first letter to the Thessalonians is especially instructive in this area:

For this is the will of God, your sanctification: that you abstain from sexual immorality; that each one of you know how to control his own body in holiness and honor, not in the passion of lust like the Gentiles who do not know God; that no one transgress and wrong his brother in this matter, because the Lord is an avenger in all these things, as we told you beforehand and solemnly warned you. For God has not called us for impurity, but in holiness. Therefore whoever disregards this, disregards not man but God, who gives his Holy Spirit to you (1 Thessalonians 4:1-8, ESV).

Paul is saying, "be sanctified — don't let sexual immorality de-sanctify you." And notice how the last part of this text goes to the issue of our relationship with God: "whoever disregards this disregards not man but God." The ESV Study Bible commentary on this verse says, "To reject the giver of the Holy Spirit is to cut oneself off from the sanctifying power that enables the Christian to be blameless in holiness."

Sex and relationships propel people to the crossroads at which they determine they will trust God’s good plan for them or at which they will disregard God and trust Satan’s distorted offerings. In his book Souls in Transition, researcher Christian Smith shows just how practical this point of decision is for young adults:

[E]merging adults who are serious about their faith and practice have to do one of three things: choose to reject heavy partying and premarital sex; dramatically compartmentalize their lives so that their partying and sexual activities are firmly partitioned off from their religious activities in a way that borders on denial; or be willing to live with the cognitive dissonance of being committed to two things that are incompatible and mutually denying. Not many emerging adults can or will do any of these things, so most of them resolve the cognitive dissonance by simply distancing from religion.

This is a great catastrophe — a turning point of eternal significance. Without guardrails and direction, you are vulnerable to the catastrophic ends Satan intends.

Christian singles who recognize the reality of their drive toward companionship and sexual fulfillment as well as the reality of an enemy seeking to manipulate that drive are left with only one option: to give their bodies as living sacrifices, to hold their desires for companionship and sexual fulfillment up to God, and ask that He use them for His purposes. Doing this will push them outside of themselves and into meaningful relationships with those around them, into fruitful life in the church body and as God leads, into fruitful marriages.

Reprinted in full from Boundless.org: www.boundless.org/2005/articles/a0002493.cfm#share

Fun with HTML

2011-11-30T10:16:00.000-08:00

Winter: When Our Internal Fires Cry For Tending: "color: rgb(51, 102, 255)"
Just a line I wrote once that I like. The "y" in "cry" echoes the "i" in "fires." The "e" in "tending" echoes the "e" and a little bit of the "i" in "internal." "color: rgb(102, 0, 204); font-family:georgia;"

I wish I could get the text to go from right to left.

The Requirements of History

2011-09-18T13:07:00.000-07:00

History is the people's discipline—the only academic subject that demands no special professional training. Some of my favorite history books are by lawyers, journalists, scientists and nuns. To write well about history you do not need a Ph.D., just a few rare but accessible qualities: insatiable curiosity, critical intellect, disciplined imagination, indefatigability in the pursuit of truth and a slightly weird vocation for trying to get to know dead people by studying the sources they have left us.

. . . . . . . . .

I suspect, however, that the very virtues of my discipline are responsible for the vices of the writers who abuse it. Because history is the people's discipline, books about it are relatively salable—invitingly so, to indolent cupidity. History's accessibility to non-specialists makes it seem dangerously, delusively easy.

From "Faulty Navigators," a review and entertaining rant on four (inadequate) books on Columbus by Felipe Fernández-Armesto for the Wall Street Journal

Why I Have a Quote from Buddha:

2011-09-13T18:44:00.000-07:00

The eye, O priests, is on fire; impressions received by the eye are on fire; and whatever sensation, pleasant, unpleasant, or indifferent, originates in dependence on impressions received by the eye, that also is on fire. ~Buddha

Well, first off. This speech by the Buddha has great rhythm. The rhythm sets me on fire. Which he would disapprove of.
Secondly, I like the picture that it creates: a world scorching with beauty, music, flavors and colors. Mr. Buddha implies that all this profligate glory is a very bad thing. He forbids getting fired up about anything
Think of all the other pictures associated with fire: a face burning with any number of emotions: anger, joy, passion, love; burning eyes, blazing eyes. "Fiery" is often a complementary adjective . . . . except when applied to "pit," of course. Dorothy Sayers said: "If I had found a man to my measure, I would have set a torch to the world." Not to be confused with watching the world burn.
You can't make fine gold without fire. You can't make bread without fire. You can't have good coffee without fire, for pete's sake!

One of my favorite pictures comes from Longfellow's "Excelsior":
Then a voice fell, like a falling star,
Excelsior!

I'm going to quit now. And I'm going to remove the quote from the "About me." But anyway, I like fire in words.

"The Buddha" is such a pretentious name.

Cabbages and Kings . . .

2011-02-12T07:50:00.000-08:00

Currently reading:

Economics in One Lesson, Henry Hazlitt. Assigned by my boss. Very cool. Obama is an economic dunce measured against Hazlitt's principles.

The Book of Common Prayer. Why don't we pray prayers like these anymore? The BoCP is full of prayers for victory, for aid in "running after" God's promises. It seems that we pray only for our own advancement and blessings; we are continually praying for health (we have so many people ill and in distress!). But I'm also reading the book of Job. Why don't we pray for outcomes like Job's?

The Tristan Chord: Wagner and Philosophy, Bryan McGee. About a pompous bore by a pompous bore.

Majesty: Elizabeth II and the House of Windsor, Robert Lacey. Fun read. God was very gracious to England in bringing George VI and the present Queen to the throne. England might not exist at all if Edward VIII had continued his reign into World War II.

In other news, I have a diploma now. And the GRE is a week from this Monday. My study guide has been taking priority in my reading, so all the above mentioned books are going very slowly.

Breakfast

2011-01-03T18:55:00.000-08:00

Well, I ate roasted brussels sprouts with toasted walnuts and a dollop of plain yogurt. What did you eat? Crackly, salty, creamy, crunchy, warm, cool, and plenty of umami. Hey, they needed to be eaten and this morning was my window to cook them. I was going to save them for lunch, but after sampling one, they couldn't wait.
If you can find brussels sprouts still on the stalk, grab 'em. They stay fresh much longer than the ones already cut off. Plus the stalk makes a fun little totem.
I used Ina Garten's recipe for roasted brussels sprouts--so simple: just evoo, salt, pepper, the cute mini cabbages (the larger ones cut in half) all roasted at 400. They converted several people at the last church supper to brussels sprouts.

More thoughts while scanning groceries . . .

2010-12-07T19:28:00.000-08:00

All sorts of odd responses to food and ideas as to what's "healthy."

Turkeys were more expensive this year. One woman rather complained about it, saying something to the effect of "I don't even know why we eat turkey." "Well, maybe we'll switch to eating pork someday," I replied. "I hope not," she said, "that's even worse for you." Huh? Who comes up with these distinctions? Maybe I have been suckered by the "Pork: the other white meat" campaign. I've heard about the evils of all animal protein, or the relative healthiness of fish or poultry over red meat, but this was new.

Another woman, pushing a toddler in her cart, bought coconut milk. I asked about it, since it was new to me and looked yummy. "Well, I wasn't going to feed her cow puss, and I didn't wan't to do soy because it's been so genetically modified, and I didn't want to do almond milk because it has nuts in it, but coconut's a vegetable." Cow puss? What a revolting term. Is that how you think of your breast milk? immediately popped into my head.

I enjoy reading gluten free or dairy free or vegetarian or raw or vegan recipes, just to see the creativity enforced by these restrictions. But it is troubling to see folks become catagorically prejudiced against entire food groups and speak scornfully of the gifts of creation and the wonders around us.

Two good salads +

2010-12-06T17:07:00.000-08:00

#1: Slice asparagus stems in half lengthwise and steam. Pile asparagus, thinly sliced radishes, sliced pears, toasted walnuts, and your last dollop of ricotta onto a plate. Sprinkle with fresh thyme, salt and a splurge (ie, a copious rain) of black pepper. Drizzle with balsamic vinaigrette. Sit down at the table with your salad. Inhale. Make sure to try different combinations of flavor and texture. Radish and asparagus. Pear and radish, with ricotta. Pear and asparagus, then with a walnut, then with ricotta. Ricotta and asparagus, swirled in the balsamic vinager.

#2: Slice and saute a couple mushrooms with a little butter and salt. Once you have them in the pan, make a phone call: by the time you have gotten off the phone, the shrooms will be well underway. Wilt some spinach in the microwave for about 30 seconds. If you have gotten distracted and your mushrooms have gotten a bit cold, include them in the last step. Top with your mushrooms, thinly sliced radishes, chopped grapes, walnuts, fresh thyme, salt and pepper, balsamic vinaigrette. Finish off with a crumbling of goat cheese. Grapes and goat cheese are heavenly together!

And tonight's dinner: Pineapple chunks sauteed with evoo, salt, pepper, and balsamic vinegar until gooey; roasted asparagus; a nice crunchy slice of whole wheat toast. (White bread is just too pale to carry so much umami. Nothing compares to 100% whole wheat flour for wheatiness and chew.) Top a bite of toast with a bite of pineapple. Rejoice.

My next plan: top a smallish circle of pizza dough with thinly sliced pears arranged in a radiating flower, drizzled with evoo, more salt and pepper, maybe a drizzle of honey. And something I found by following a trail from the newspaper (WSJ, to be exact) to the internet, from Christopher Kimball on Julia Child to Lynne Rossetto Kasper: I'm going to add some clippings of rosemary leaves. I'll eat it with more of those toasted walnuts. You do keep a jar of toasted nuts in the cupboard at all times, don't you? Essential to one's well-being. And for more of that umami.

I just can't get enough freshly cracked black pepper. Next I'll need a recipe for black pepper cookies--we'll call them "biscuits" so that your sensibilities aren't violated.

As I scan groceries . . .

2010-12-01T11:40:00.000-08:00

If we cannot control our appetites for food, then how are we to discipline our appetites for violence, sex, pleasure (caffeine, drugs, alcohol, etc) or the accumulative appetite? Obesity is entirely our own fault. We are individually responsible for whatever "conditioning" leads us toward this "disease."

Between Experience and Exposition

2010-11-22T06:52:00.001-08:00

Critics depend upon structured arguments to make their points. A novelist primarily structures not arguments for the reader but experiences. Unlike our more random encounters with the actual world, the experiences we find in a novel are entirely verbal in origin, and they are shaped by their creator specifically with us, the readers, in mind. As we progress through a novel, we live in its world with an intense, imaginative participation very rarely, if ever, generated in us by any kind of purely expository writing. Thus somewhere--exactly where, no artist and no critic has ever discovered--between the immediacy of a lived, concrete encounter, and the limited intellectual engagement created by expository prose, exists the mysterious participatory experience offered by imaginative literature.

The Religious Dimension of Jane Austen's Novels, Gene Koppel, 122.

Grapes + Cilantro

2010-11-15T18:39:00.000-08:00

Wash, rinse and dry grapes. Wash, rinse and dry cilantro. Pick a firm grape. (Usually the firm ones fall off first when you shake the bunch.) Tear off a few leaves of cilantro. Deposit cilantro and grape in your mouth. Bite into the grape with your back teeth so that it bursts in your mouth. Press the cilantro against your tongue as you eat.

"so intensely sacramental a poet"

2010-11-15T18:29:00.000-08:00

Her method was just that: the intensification, or concentration, if meaning in words until they glowed "as no sapphire"---until, that is, they became, in mutually supportive combination, the Word, a poem that could "dwell among us," alive, a corporate fusion of meaning and (like human life) mystery. This sense of life is the most difficult of all things to create---and she knew that, too. This is one reason, surely, why many of her poems seem cryptic, incomplete, barely reducible to coherent statement, as if she was conscious of an element of the ineffable, even in usual things, like hummingbirds of sunsets.

~The Life of Emily Dickinson, Richard B. Sewall

Subcreation

2010-11-10T19:04:00.000-08:00

Then I was beside Him, as a master workman;
And I was daily His delight,
Rejoicing always before Him,
Rejoicing in the world, His earth,
And having my delight in the sons of men.
Proverbs 8:30-31

Isn't this what poets, artists and writers are supposed to do?

from Emily . . .

2010-11-02T16:50:00.000-07:00

447

This was a Poet — It is That
Distills amazing sense
From ordinary Meanings —
And Attar so immense

From the familiar species
That perished by the Door —
We wonder it was not Ourselves
Arrested it — before —

Of Pictures, the Discloser —
The Poet — it is He —
Entitles Us — by Contrast —
To ceaseless Poverty —

Of portion — so unconscious —
The Robbing — could not harm —
Himself — to Him — a Fortune —
Exterior — to Time —

455

TRIUMPH – may be of several kinds –
There’s triumph in the room
When that Old Imperator – Death –
By Faith – be overcome –

There’s Triumph of the finerMmind
When Truth – affronted long –
Advance unmoved – to Her Supreme –
Her God – Her only Throng –

A Triumph when Temptation’s Bribe
Is slowly handed back –
One eye upon the Heaven renounced –
And One – upon the Rack –

Severer Triumph – by Himself
Experienced – who pass
Acquitted – from that Naked Bar –
Jehovah’s Countenance –

"Our hearts are trim"

2010-11-01T19:23:00.000-07:00

Essays into poetry:

Let me fill this pot --
Roots thickening, moist, whitish flesh--
Then move me, make me face
The shock of Transplant
Then grow again--
Moderating my sun,
Spritzing my leaves.
Master Gardener:
Prune me, let me thrive;
Tend me, let me live.

Star-gazing
Warm hood--
Watching the darkness:
Bright foreigners
Stare back.

The leaves bleed out their chlorophyllic green
Flutter to the ground in gold, parchment-brown litter--
The old strews the stable for the new, mulch and fruit
Somehow-- Something grows underneath
Pressing the earth. Maybe that's it:
The leaf leaps precipitous from the branch to meet it.
The arbor lifts and sun shines direct into the nest
For a short time.

I think it was Ted Kooser in his Poetry Home Repair Manual who defined poetry as words with funny line breaks. I'd like to discipline my lines more. But since these are not assignments, I'm not squeezing my brain to push the words around. (And when you are doing it for an assigment, editing a poem does feel like some giant hand is mashing your brain like a sponge.) But with the last poem, some the sounds seem to have fallen into complimentary positions.
I've been reading so much Emily Dickinson lately that looking at the pages of spare stanzas,
The words flagged with capitals
-- Isolated by dashes--
The scrabble bag inside of me shakes--
The words, longing, press,
Flap against my chest,
Fling themselves to wing
Confused from my throat:
Leap to answer
Her words with mine.

I've suddenly begun to appreciate her more fully and I'm devouring her poems quickly, where reading just five at a time was a chore.

The Beauty of Politics . . .

2010-10-14T16:43:00.000-07:00

As usual, some tidbit from the New York Times"

That’s a refrain heard inside the White House as well: it’s a communication problem. The first refuge of any politician in trouble is that it’s a communication problem, not a policy problem. If only I explained what I was doing better, the people would be more supportive. Which roughly translates to If only you people paid attention, you wouldn’t be kicking me upside the head. Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, laughed at the ever-ready assumption that all problems stem from poor communication. “I haven’t been at a policy-problem meeting in 20 months,” he noted.
"The Education of President Obama," Peter Baker

Science?

2010-10-08T16:49:00.000-07:00

Mopping-up operations are what engage most scientists throughout their careers. They constitute what I am here calling normal science.
~Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

More from Thesis research

2010-09-20T14:13:00.000-07:00

Like countless educated women in the late nineteenth century, Vinnie (Lavinia Dickinson, sister to Emily) faced the problem of vocation, as finance capitalism and the Industrial Revolution did away with the domestic economy that had dominated colonial and early national life. With the middle-class home transformed into a center of consumption by the mid-nineteenth century, the home because the "women's sphere," but what was a woman to do in it? If, as Vinnie said late in life, "Austin had Amherst" and "father believed," what were the women to do?
In assuming her role as a poet with "title divine," Emily found her vocation and made her home, at least for herself, a center of production in a unique, new form of domestic economy. Mrs. Dickinson took upon herself the work of love, ailment, and complaint. That left Vinnie with the job of looking after all of them. ("I had the family to keep track of.")

~Emily Dickinson and the Art of Belief, Roger Lundin, 131. It comes highly recommended.

Note the argument that the industrial revolution changed the home from a place of production to a place of consumption. Can you see Betty Friedan and her sisters bored and depressed, asking themselves, "Is this all there is?" Can you see the American dream and the Puritan work ethic falling into consumerism and materialism? We have to still to learn how to think and change when presented with these cultural paradigm shifts.

Friday Harbor Labs, San Juan Islands, Wash.

2010-09-16T13:26:00.001-07:00

At Cattle Point. Feather duster worms. You poke them and they shrink back into their tubes.

Bread crumb sponge (the green stuff) and pink encrusting algae.

Aggragating anemone

A little Isopod

Barnacles. They were everywhere! Really quite handsome.

More anemones, above tide. They've pulled in their tentacles to conserve moisture. Their bodies are very soft and gelatinous.

My friend's feet. She finds shoes inconvenient. Well, she did grow up in West Africa where she did everything barefoot!

I just couldn't stop taking pictures of the anemones! They were so lovely. They spread out everywhere in whatever wet crevice was availible during the nice low tide. (Nice for us at least.)

And then I dropped my camera in a tiny shallow little pool. So I didn't get pictures of the rest of the trip. (The following were taken earlier on.) But I took the battery and memory card out, left it open for a couple days and the camera works just as well as ever--to my great relief!

Flotsam and Jetsam

Cattle Point!

My bed in the dorm. I loved the bed lamps.

From the dining hall looking down to the labs

On the island

Friday Harbor Labs, seen from the ferry.

The ferry deck

On the parking level of the ferry between Widby island and Friday Harbor.

I tend to wait until the memory card in my camera is full before loading pictures onto my computer. So if I only occasionally photograph something, the card fills slowly.

More Thoughts from Thesis

2010-09-16T13:23:00.000-07:00

I don't rebel at being a helpmeet, nor at being the glory or crown of the man. But I want my work to adorn his, not just inspire it (either as a muse or another reason to kill dragons), not just to nurture it (by cooking good food, creating a welcoming home, and building him up with praise). Can my work go beyond the domestic, beyond serving his appetites? Can the crown go with him, shedding glory in public places, beyond the energy and confidence bestowed by receiving respect at home or “sugar cake for you to take for all the boys to see”? I love stories of husbands and wives who are collaborators, where her research and knowledge strengthens, increases, sustains his project. In a sense I want to be a Deborah to a David—if it is possible for those two characters to create a peaceable union.
Pagan religions at once deify sex and its offspring while also despising the woman herself, her organs and her blood.
What dies the Church do? She is our Mother, she is Christ's Bride. She disciples the nations, she inspires art. She is the Crown of her Husband, His Ambassador to Earth, His Representative housing His representatives. As a woman crowns her husband, they both in turn adorn the crown of Christ. The Church adorns and cultivates the world.

Women and Miniatures

2010-08-12T17:26:00.000-07:00

Frida Kahlo is famous for her self portraits--she painted around 200 of them. Looking at the parade of faces, hair rarely varying, posture hardly altered, the stare emerging out of the canvas, the number seems to have little to do with vanity. It's more as if Kahlo is trying to simultaneously reveal something about herself to the world while trying to discover something about herself.

Some of her odd externalized internal landscapes are rather obscene, though I am tempted to excuse them for their intensely visceral personalness. For me, her paintings are like miniatures of her own psyche (which probably is narcissitic, but she did suffer some intense pains).

Flavor combos

2010-08-10T11:11:00.000-07:00

The other day I took a bite of canteloupe with some basil leaves that were lying on the counter. Would be very good as a salad with toasted almonds (sliced would have best texture to go with the softness of the melon and the chewiness of the basil), lemon juice, lemon zest, a pinch of salt, and some black pepper. I tried fresh papaya for the first time this summer, and the basil treatment works beautifully with that as well. Papaya/basil and canteloupe/basil would make good sorbet--someone's probably already beat me to it. Papaya, basil chiffonade, toasted nuts and spinach make a delicious salad--and don't forget the papaya seeds! They have the texture of pomegranite seeds with a peppery bite, very fun to eat on your salad.

You can salvage a disappointing piece of fruit by sprinkling it with lemon juice, salt and honey/agave nectar. Try it with just the lemon and salt, and then add the extra sweetener. I ended up dressing the papaya this way fairly often. Even when it was ripe enough and sweet enough, the papaya just didn't have much flavor. But I still enjoyed it and I know that if I were to eat it in its native environment, it would have lush and intense flavor.

Right now I'm eating roasted potatoes and beets with some peas, a fried egg and leftover fruit salad. I'm happy!

Education vs. Training

2010-07-14T18:55:00.000-07:00

I just came across an interesting op-ed piece in the New York Times by Brent Staples on plagiarism in academia. Of course, blogger won't allow me to cut and paste it. The Irony. So I will most laboriously type out the passage I wanted to highlight:
Staples quotes a professor-friend: Nonchalance from students towards plagiarism "represents a shift away from the view of education as the process of intellectual engagement through which we learn to think critically and toward the view of education as mere training. In training, you are trying to find the right answer at any cost, not trying to improve your mind."

Is this ideal of self-improvement and mental freedom unique to Western education? Eastern thought and pedagogy seems to strive for detatchment as opposed to independence. I could be wrong; I find Eastern philosophy rather convoluted and I retain only impressions and snippets of it. But I am thinking of the prominence of our Asian and Indian ("India-Indians" I mean) friends in math and science. The story we often find touted is this or that individual striving to better his economic station, not necessarily ars gratia artis or even liberal arts for liberal arts' sake. (Of course, most Americans have still to be convinced of the latter.) But the focus on economic gain could be a function of the relatively recent participation of Asians and Indians in our culture. I was reading an article in today's Wall Street Journal on the popularity of spelling bees among Indians and South Asians. Someone decided to pitch spelling bees to them in order to help them advance their English and the spelling bees have been enormously popular with Indians. The more power to them! But it seems another instance of training over education, simple input-output. Can they make sense of William Faulkner? His sentence structure challenges more than his vocabular)y. And whiz spelling doesn't help you determine paragraph breaks (as I look over this paragraph and wonder whether I've put too many points in one paragraph--I have a beastly time trying to keep points neatly packaged! they just ooze into one another).
Do you see how I have a tendency to think myself out of a point?

But it's interesting that whenever I've had opportunity to tell college profs about my education at New Saint Andrews, they've been nodding agreement all the way.

Is the emphasis on getting the right answer one of the reasons why students often hate multiple choice tests? Often multiple choice presents several nuanced answers and I usually find them blurring together in meaning and giving me a headache.

What are you learning about Jesus?

2010-06-23T12:20:00.000-07:00

While bagging for one of my fellow cashiers last week, we met a very interesting person. She is the mother of Patrick Warburton and an abstinence advocate and activist, beautiful, elegant, and passionate. She told us that she is always looking for young people to talk about abstinence and encourage parents to talk to their children: "they'll listen to you, they won't listen to me."
But as a cashier in a grocery store, communication in families is frequently rude, ungracious, impatient and tense in very small matters like "what are we doing for dinner?" "did you get everything on the shopping list?" If grace and courtesy have become alienated from everyday discourse, why should it be any better in more serious matters?
If I did do a talk for Ms. Warburton, I could say "Talk to your kids," but I'd also have to say, "Go to church, get right with God, improve your communication with God, else why should they listen to you?" Just "talking" won't get you anywhere. You talk enough already! And you often sound grumpy and pouty when you do.

And while we're on the subject of communication, here's a lovely piece by Ted Tripp, "Dazzle Your Teen." It seems that often there's a disconnect between parents and their teen-aged children because the parents emphasize the doing and the teens want to emphasize the being. It's easier to lecture than to inspire. It goes back to what my pastor says, parents must teach their children to love the standard, not just mind it.

2010-06-17T18:31:00.000-07:00

Today we hosted a little birthday luncheon for Teri, who's been our neighbor and surrogate grandmother for several years now. We made Ina Garten's incredible crab cakes (Daddy said they taste better than the expensive ones he once ate in some fancy restaurant), spinach salad with cucumbers, strawberries and roasted almonds and cherry balsamic vinaigrette, pinot grigio wine spritzers, and buttermilk biscuits from the Gluten-Free Girl's recipe. The biscuits turned out beautifully! As Momma was pulling them out, she exclaimed, "Oh, they look like real food!" I used a store-brand lactase milk (milk with the lactase enzyme added) and added lemon juice to substitute for regular buttermilk.

We also followed Ina's philosophy and bought the dessert, a fruit tart from The Fresh Market. Since the tart has gluten and dairy, I wanted to make sure the biscuits wouldn't add any discomfort to what Momma was going to experience. I skipped out on the tart, made our favorite custard with the lactase milk, and ate it with berries and a chocolate syrup made from agave nectar and cocoa powder. (The chocolate syrup tasted lovely--nothing of the raw flavor I was expecting.)

Here's Shauna's recipe for the biscuits. They work! They taste good! They look good! And the texture is biscuit.

BUTTERMILK BISCUITS, GLUTEN-FREE

Of course, the only problem with baking biscuits in this house after hearing that song is that gluten-free biscuits simply don't rise the way that regular biscuits do. Why? No gluten. That doesn't mean they can't be darned fine, however.

I've been baking biscuits for days around here, cutting butter into different flours and waiting in anticipation for the moment I could open the oven door. The first batch was horribly disappointing — the expected gluten-free hockey puck. But I love this trial and error process. Every batch taught me something different. And by the time I crafted the recipe you see below, I really was jumping and shouting to see them, like Raffi sings in the song.

The egg white takes the place of the protein gluten provides to a baked good. Lately, I've been finding that just a bit of egg white gives strength and structure to gluten-free goods.

I'm pleased with the softness of these biscuits, the fluffy center with air holes, and the crispness of the bottoms. They're a little bit pillowy, and a little bit crusty. Frankly, I'm glad I found the recipe I like, because I have to stop eating so many biscuits now.

1/2 cup sorghum flour
1/2 cup tapioca starch
1/2 cup potato starch
1/2 cup sweet rice flour
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon xanthan gum
1 1/4 teaspoon kosher salt
4 tablespoons butter
1 egg white
3/4 cup buttermilk (give or take a bit)

Preheat the oven to 450°.

Combine all the flours, the baking powder, and the salt. Stir them up well so they are one. Sift them into a large bowl.

Cut the butter into small pieces and drop them into the flour mixture. Using a pastry blender (also known as a pastry cutter), or two forks if you don't own the fancier tool, cut the butter into the flours. You should have a good blend, with the butter the size of small peas, by the end.

Froth up the egg white with a fork or small whisk. You are not looking to make meringue here. Simply whip some air and volume into the egg white.

Pour the egg white and the buttermilk into the dry mixture. Stir them in slowly with a rubber spatula, taking care to not overwork the dough. When the liquids are incorporated into the flours, stop stirring. Bring it all together with your hands.

Drop small balls of the biscuit dough onto an ungreased cookie sheet. (I prefer these biscuits small, about the size of a plum, to help the middles bake through.) Slide the tray into the oven.

Bake the biscuits for about 20 to 25 minutes. Test for your own version of doneness.

Makes about 8 biscuits.

Dangerous Women

2010-05-30T19:23:00.000-07:00

Blogger has been acting impossible and refusing to let me copy and paste. But hopefully this link will take. Before steam starts coming out. Nancy Wilson just gave a commencement address to a Christian school not too far away from me--the class was all girls. And she describes the kind of person I've been wanting to become.

2010-05-17T15:58:00.000-07:00

From Pastor Wilson's Twitter:
"Never forget that the wife is not the head, the husband is. This means the wife is higher than she is--she is the crown."

Although I'd like to see "Twilight" banned . . .

2010-04-04T17:46:00.000-07:00

We are expected to be broadminded about literature, to put aside prejudice or conviction, and to look at fiction as fiction and at drama as drama. With what is inaccurately called 'censorship' in this country--with what is much more difficult to cope with than an official censorship, because it represents the opinions of individuals in an irresponsible democracy---I have very little sympathy; partly because it so often suppresses the wrong books, and partly because it is little more effective than Prohibition of Liquor; partly because it is one manifestation of the desire that state control should take the place of decent domestic influence; and wholly because it stems from custom and habit, not from decided theological and moral principles. Incidentally, it gives people a false sense of security in leading them to believe that books which are not suppressed are harmless. Whether there is such a thing as a harmless book I am not sure: but there very likely are books so utterly unreadable as to be incapable of injuring anybody. But it is certain that a book is not harmless merely because no one is consciously offended by it. And if we, as readers, keep our religious and moral convictions in one compartment, and take our reading merely for entertainment, or on a higher plane, for aesthetic pleasure, I would point out that the author, whatever his conscious intentions in writing, in practice recognizes no such distinctions. The author of a work of imagination is trying to affect us wholly, as human beings, whether he knows it or not; and we are affected by it, as human beings, whether we intend to be or not.

"Religion and Literature," T.S. Eliot, from Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode.

Happy families and unhappy families

2010-03-21T10:54:00.000-07:00

Tolstoy begins Anna Karenina with one of the falsest first lines of literature; he writes that "happy families are all alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." With novels and memoirs full of dysfunctional families of perverse individuals, perhaps we are congratulating ourselves in our unhappiness that at least we are not like those boring happy folks. But perversion, being parasitical, is capable of only so many permutations. Every happy family has found its own way of creating an organic being from a few vagrant individuals.
"Dysfunctional family" must be a cliche by now. The "Books" section of The New York Times is probably the most boring part of the paper after "U.S. News." But I love invites to family dinners, to watch the members speak to, and listen to them speak of, one another, to see their different methods of life.
Last night, I listened to a wife talk about her husband's annual spring itch to drive to Washington and back, that it was past their young daughter's bedtime, but that she was being kept up until her daddy got home, and later on in the evening, when he did get home, happy with his adventure and happy to come home again, the way the wife listened to her husband's tired mumbles, the tiny stud in her nose glinting under the light, his tattooed knuckles folding and unfolding, stacking and unstacking, on the table, an almost visible current running between them. Once he was a hobo, now he has two children and a wife, and they live together in a home.
I read once that unhappiness is easier to write about, being universal, but that happiness is private, personal, individual, and thus more difficult to capture in a way that speaks broadly to the outside world.

For finals week

2010-03-06T07:51:00.000-08:00

I came across this hymn:

God be in my head and in my understanding;
God be in my eyes, and in my looking;
God be in my mouth, and in my speaking;
God be in my heart, and in my thinking;
God be at my end, and at my departing.

Setting by Sir Henry Walford-Davies

Wedded Ecstasy

2009-12-24T16:26:00.000-08:00

From a classmate's wedding, right before I left Moscow to come home. Dr. Leithart gave the exhortation.

Song of Songs 2:16a: “My beloved is mine, and I am his”; 6:3a: “I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine”; 7:10: “I am my beloved’s and his desire is for me.”

“How are you feeling today?” someone might have asked you. How can you answer? Happy? Excited? Overjoyed? Nervous? None of the normal words is big enough to express the magnitude of this day. You reach for something bigger, and you’re tempted to try something faux-German like “Uber-happy” or faux-Greek like “Hyper-excited.”
The emotion of this day is best captured, I submit, by the word “ecstatic.” That’s big enough to get at the joy and delight of your wedding, and, more importantly, it highlights deeper dimensions of what’s happening today, and what you’re committing yourselves to for the unforeseeable future.
Etymologically, the word “ecstasy” means “to stand outside,” and that’s what the English derivative meant for centuries. When Ophelia laments that Hamlet’s “unmatch’d form and feature of blown youth [is] blasted with ecstasy,” she’s not worried that he’s too happy but that he’s mad. He’s “beside himself.” We don’t have to be insane to experience this. “I can’t believe this is happening to me,” we sometimes say. “I feel like I’m standing to the side watching myself.” That’s ecstasy. In the ecstatic moments of life, you can’t hold yourself within your own body; you feel you are both yourself, and not yourself. With so many weddings, it’s easy to get confused about which one you’re attending, but when you realize with a shock that we’re now halfway through your wedding, you’ve had an “ecstatic” experience.
That experience may be comparatively rare, but ecstasy – standing outside yourself – is not. Ecstasy is the human condition, the condition of all creatures. We are vapor, most vaporous vapor. We have no life in ourselves, no resources of our own, nothing that is not gift. “In Him we live and move and have our being,” Paul tells the skeptical philosophers on Mars Hill. In Scripture, this is often described in terms of breathing. Living things are breathing things. The flood destroyed “all flesh in which is the breath of life.” Conversely, death is breathlessness: When the patriarchs died, they “breathed their last,” and when Israel carried out the ban against the Canaanites, they were to leave nothing that breathed. “My life is but breath,” Job says, and if that’s true, then life is not our own but comes from elsewhere. From the moment Yahweh formed Adam from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils, human life has been outside humans. We all live ecstatically, on “borrowed breath” (David Kelsey).
The life of redemption is, if anything, more radically ecstatic. Through His death, Jesus abolished death and brought life and immortality to light. He died for all, that they who live might live for the One who died. On nearly every page of Paul’s letters, he reminds us that we live not in ourselves but “in Christ.” “I have been crucified with Christ,” Paul says in his most elaborate statement of this reality, “and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me, and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and delivered Himself up for me.” As creatures, we live on borrowed breath; as redeemed creatures, we live through Another’s death (Kelsey).
When you say “I do” in a few moments, you’ll be committing yourselves to life-long ecstasy. Ryan, you’ll no longer be simply Ryan; from this day on, you have to learn to live as Ryan-and-Courtney; Courtney, you’ll no longer be yourself, but will be standing outside yourself, living your life in Ryan’s life as he lives his in yours. That’s what being in love is: The excitement of falling in love is learning to identify yourself not just with yourself but with your beloved; it’s grafting your beloved into your own identity. Falling in love is like meeting Jesus: “It is no longer I who live, but another lives in me.” Human existence is ecstatic, redeemed existence is ecstatic, and in marriage, that living icon of creation and redemption, you’re committing yourself to being beside yourself til death do you part.
Ecstasy is the normal state of man because ecstasy characterizes the eternal life of the God in whose image we are made. The Father does not desire to stand alone as God; He doesn’t want to possess His divinity for Himself alone. Out of love, He eternally begets His Eternal Son as an “expression of the [His] ecstatic love” (Mark McIntosh, and the following paragraphs), and that same love produces “the eternal filial response of the Son towards the Father.” The Father is Father because of “his eternal desire to pour out the divine life for the Other-in-God (the Son),” and the Son is Son insofar as He “desires eternally to speak forth the Father’s giving life.” Son and Father both say, with equal totality and intensity, “I am my beloved’s, and He is mine.” Father and Son are each beside themselves with love. Such is the ecstasy of God.
This God, this ecstatic Trinity, chooses to be more ecstatic still. The Father stands outside Himself in the Son, and the Son in the Father, but together they stand outside themselves in creating and sustaining a world that is other than both. The Father eternally speaks His Word, but He chooses to speak His Word not only as Word but as world. For His part, the Son desires His love for the Father to resound not only in the enclosure of perfect divine communion but “from within all creatures.” Father and Son make a world they don’t need, in order to take up this world into their mutual love. The world becomes part of the “love language” of Father and Son (David Field). Creation too is an expression of God’s ecstasy.
But this God, this ecstatic Trinity, chooses to be more ecstatic still. The world doesn’t cease to be the mutual love-gift of Father and Son simply because sin and death enter: In defiance of sin and death, the Father is determined to express His love in the creation, and the Son is still determined that creation will respond to His Father in obedience, faith, and love. In the perfect obedience of the Son, the Son’s love for the Father resounds more richly than ever, for in the incarnate Son “the Word speaks even in the final silence of the cross.” In the incarnation, the Father sends the Son to stand outside God as man, and in His life, death, and resurrection, the incarnate Son renews creation, so that creation can stand outside itself, in God.
All this is done through the Spirit, who is the Love, the very ecstasy of God. “Beguiled” by the Spirit, the Father eternally begets an eternal Word and in the Spirit the eternal Word vocalizes eternal praise. The Spirit is the living breath who energizes the Word by which the Father creates the world, and the Spirit gives life to the creatures through whose praise the Word sings to His beloved Father. In the fullness of time, the Spirit drove the Son into the wilderness of the world, drove Him to the cross, rescued Him from the grave, and now is the Love that is the presence of Jesus, the breath by which we live. Through His Spirit, the incarnate Son stands outside Himself, orchestrating creation, tuning it to praise the Father.
Two days from now is the Fourth Sunday of Advent, the last Sunday in the season celebrating the coming of the Son. Advent discloses the God who is abounding love, whose love abounds even in creation, abounds even to sinful humanity, the God of Love who has determined that, no matter how much the world, the flesh, and the devil try to derail it, His work will stand and His love triumph. Though a cross stand in the way, this God, this God of Advent, this ecstatic Trinity, determines that through the Spirit creation will yet be a gift of love from the Father to Son, and from the Son to the Father. Our prayer is that your Advent wedding will be an annual, a constant reminder that together you serve a God who freely stands outside Himself to create and re-create us.
Advent is also a reminder of your responsibilities, privileges, and joys as husband and wife. The Uber-ecstasy you feel today won’t last forever, but if you are going to have a successful marriage, ecstasy must be the theme of your marriage from this day until you breathe your last, because ecstasy is the form of your life, and of your life together. You have died, your life is hid with Christ in God; you no longer live but Christ lives in you. As those who are centered in Christ, you’re called to a marital love that mimics God’s ecstasy, a love that breaks open the enclosure of self-possession; you’re called to embody what Solomon describes in a chiasm of mutual possession – I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine; my beloved is mine, and I am his; I am my beloved’s, and his desire is for me –; you’re called to a mutual possession that depends wholly on your continuous ecstatic dispossession. Our confident prayer is that God will grant you grace to live out the ecstasy of the living God, to lose the life that is not really yours to begin with, so that you may find it not in yourself but in God in each other.
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

I can grow older in my sleep.

2009-11-24T21:49:00.000-08:00

So for my birthday I roasted brussel sprouts with olive oil and balsamic vinegar (from an Ina Garten recipe, though I didn't add parmesan and toasted pine nuts--although I would have loved too). And I made a soup with all my favorite things in it: rutabaga, sweet potato, rosemary, red wine, wild rice, thyme, garlic, carrots and onions. I also added kale ribs while it was simmering for extra flavor. And then for dessert I made brownie pudding/Denver chocolate pudding.
I found a Williams Sonoma recipe online, and instead of just plain old boiled water over the top, I first poured the water through Lauryl's aeropress. We have a family version that uses instand coffee powder in the topping, but I was not going to buy instant coffee just to get a tablespoon or so. So I used real coffee. And then I whipped cream with a little brandy (to go with the homemade vanilla extract made with brandy). The cream didn't really whip up--maybe it had been open too long. But it still tasted awesome. I also managed to get some friends together practically last minute. That with Shanna's Turkish groove music saved the day. Happy Birthday to me.

This is the site where I found the brownie pudding recipe: www.mybakingadventures.com (And by the way, I had better success typing in "Denver chocolate pudding" than "brownie pudding."

2009-10-24T21:25:00.000-07:00

I suppose I'm technically being lazy since I haven't been posting much of my own writing, thoughts or pictures over the last couple entries. Technical life has gotten a bit more tricky since my computer has been out of commission over the last few weeks. But the quotes I've been putting up from my pastors and teachers have also expressed thoughts that I found wonderful and freeing and wanted to share.
I have been writing short pieces for my teachers, but generally they need recontextualization to make them appropriate for a broader audience.

So here's another from Dr. Leithart:

Carey Ellen Walsh (Exquisite Desire) points to the difference between classical responses to desire and the account of desire in the Song of Songs. Using Odysseus and the Sirens as an illustration, she notes how this scene reveals the Greek instinct that desire “harbors danger by rendering its victim under its spell.” To counter desire, one needed to exercise rational management and control: “The Greek philosophical tradition placed desire under the care of rationality. Hence, Odysseus did just what desire calls for; he bested emotion with a reasoned plan. Under this classical influence, Foucault argues, desire became for the West largely something to manage, dominate, and even defeat.” Sexual desire needed to be control, and that control is what makes someone virtuous.
The Song doesn’t minimize the power of desire to control us. On the contrary, it emphasizes that potency even more than the Greeks. It isn’t just possible that desire will escape our control; it’s the very nature of desire to burn like the flame of an uncontrollable fire. Yet “that is no reasons to avoid it.”
“The Hebrew writer might see the classical attempts to secure reason’s mastery over desire as futile and misguided. Flames and the grave have, as it were, a life of their own. Desire’s muscled, tried independence is seen in the Hebrew writer as an essential and not correctable facet. It is most vitally an utter, thrilling loss of control, a giving over to the sensation of want, a foregrounding of that exquisite, aching sense of yearning, while everything else blurs, falling to the wayside. In a real sense, it had better be out of control, or it is not desire.” We our “helpless in desire” and the Song makes “no attempt to domesticate desire, to rid it of its risks, either through moral legislation, shaming, or reason’s mastery.”
Wisdom and virtue are not found in mastering desire, but in the maturing of desire. For the lovers, the “journey through desire is an education between them and for them.” One of the bits of wisdom is precisely about the power of desire: “Desire envelops people, coloring and reorienting their world and their worldview.” Another insight is that “any force that all-consuming has the power also to wound, through exhaustion, disintegration, or despair, dangers for which a person might likely be ill-equipped.” The woman’s education also involves a “cautionary wisdom” that connects love with death and also, importantly, focuses on timing: “do not stir up or arouse love until it delights.” This is not an insight that comes from confining and controlling desire, but comes along the pathway of desire.
Behind all this is, I think, an anthropological point. Desire is extroverted, ecstatic; Narcissus is a case at the margins, and even he falls in love with his image, desires himself as other. Yet desire is intimate, arising (so the Bible says) from the innards, the “reins” or “kidneys.” Desire tells us that at the heart of who we are we are not ourselves; desire teaches us that what is most inner in us is turned inside out. We don’t like to be destabilized that way, and Greek wisdom is largely the wisdom of trying to keep myself to myself, keep my inner self properly inside, under the watchful eye of reason. For the Bible, human beings are much more radically social creatures, oriented without ourselves, finding ourselves not by keeping our “reins” in but finding ourselves along the journey out.
This is also a social and political difference, and a cultural/literary one. Odysseus is curious, but rationally so; and he wants to head home, so he get things back under control. Christianity invented adventure, the journey out and out.
And this, finally, is a difference, as all are, of theology proper. For our God is radically, eternally ecstatic. The Father finds Himself and knows Himself in the Son and by the Spirit. Christianity honored desire because it worshiped a God who went outside Himself. Christianity invented adventure because it proclaimed a gospel of advent.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Pastor Wilson in one of his wedding exhortations charged the groom to "want way more than you do" and said that the desire for marriage is just the "training wheels of desire." As a female, emotional and desiring marriage, family, and many other things, I continually wonder how my emotions and desires fit into the world. I sympathize more with the squashing of emotion than letting it all hang out, but still, hearing that desire does not have to act destructively is a relief and a freedom. Even the more untamed parts of me have a place and purpose in the order of things.

On Experience

2009-10-05T12:43:00.000-07:00

To enjoy life rquires some husbandry. I enjoy it twice as much as others, since the measure of our joy depends on the greater or lesser degree of our attatchment to it. Above all now, when I see my span so short, I want to give it more ballast; I want to arrest the swiftness of its passing by the swiftness of my capture, compensating for the speed with which it drains away by the intensity of my enjoyment. The shorter my lease of it, the deeper and fuller I must make it.
Montaigne, "On Experience."

Food for thought

2009-08-16T12:34:00.000-07:00

From today's eucharistic meditation:

Many unbelievers have dismissed this Table before us as a great superstition. Two thousand years after Jesus lived and died, here we are gathering to eat His flesh and drink His blood. What kind of sense does that make?

The first thing to note about this charge is the truth of Chesterton’s observation—a man who refuses to believe in something does not believe in nothing, but rather he eventually come to believe in anything. The cavalier dismissal of this Table as the center of the world has not banished superstitions; rather, it has opened the door wide open to them.

Unbelievers instinctively know that we are saved by what we eat. That is quite true. But we have to eat the body of Christ, drinking His blood, and we have to do this by true faith in the Word that is declared over it. If you refuse to partake of this, then there may be a brief period of food atheism, or perhaps food agnosticism. But when that brief period is over, the superstitions will come flooding in, and people start trying to align themselves to some arbitrary standard of righteousness by what they put in their mouths. It is inescapable—you will either put salvation in your mouth through evangelical faith, and it will come in the form of bread and wine, or you will try to justify yourself by some other form of salvation food, some other kind of false gospel food.

If you eat and drink grace, then it will go down the way grace always does, smoothly, and you will be doing it with deep gratitude. If you eat and drink works—and this is the only alternative to grace—you will be trying to choke down sawdust cakes, molded and shaped by carpenter’s glue. So come, here, now, in true faith. The Table is set before you. God’s grace is before you.

"Pain is your goldmine"

2009-08-12T18:32:00.000-07:00

says a writing teacher to his students.

Let's see.

Two weddings. Two funerals (and another one coming this week). My brother getting ready to leave home; for us, a complicated process. Many friends moving away. Difficulty finding a job (along with plenty of my peers). Biblical Horizons conference. A ridiculous number of engagements. A family reunion. Grandfather with cancer. His wife with a brain hemorrhage. A wrongful arrest. A suicide.

Real life is not wished, it is lived; stories and novels, whose subject is human beings in relationship with experience to undergo, make their own difficult way, struggle toward their own relationships. Instead of fairy immunity to change, there is the vulnerability of human imperfection caught up in human emotion, and so there is growth, there is crisis, there is fulfillment, there is decay. Life moves toward death. The novel's progress is one of causality, and with that comes suspense. Suspense is a necessity in a novel because it is a main condition of our existence. Suspense is known only to mortals, and its agent and messenger is time.

Eudora Welty, "Some Notes on Time in Fiction," On Writing, 96.

Food

2009-06-10T19:15:00.000-07:00

Well, here's some of my culinary output in the last two months or so.

Baked ricotta, with lemon and black pepper. Good on bread.

French lentils: beautiful itty bitty ones, mottled grey and green and even a little blue. Not the average drab dust-colored ones. I cooked them with caramalized red onions and lots of red wine, and I think cumin. They turned out marvelous, simultaneously sweet and savory. So good!

Fried egg in a corn tortilla, simmered black beans from the NY Times recipe (now one of my favorite recipes---you must never never never buy canned beans again!), avocado, and paprika sprinkled over top. I love paprika; it's now one of my favorite spices, up there with ginger and cumin and white pepper.

Homemade pizza with all the works. My dad especially liked this one. I think it was the little bit of sugar in the Penzey's pizza seasoning. (Usually I add the salt before I remember the pizza seasoning; and since the pizza seasoning already has salt in it, I forego it.) Oh, the other spice I've discovered I really like: fennel seed. Good on pizza too.

Company appetizer platter.

My brother's graduation cake, from an Ina Garten recipe.

Half-frosted: see the dark cake underneath? I didn't care too much for the frosting (my mom really liked it though) but the cake was lovely. It would work particularly well in an icecream cake. I would just like a bit with some melted chocolate, berries, and some almonds.

In the early stages. One of my best frosting jobs, actually. The frosting was very forgiving. I just don't particularly care for frosting: too much extra stuff. Just give me the chocolate.

remind me to read this

2009-05-24T19:07:00.000-07:00

Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work, Matthew B. Crawford.

From his essay for the New York Times, May 21:

A good job requires a field of action where you can put your best capacities to work and see an effect in the world. Academic credentials do not guarantee this.
Nor can big business or big government — those idols of the right and the left — reliably secure such work for us. Everyone is rightly concerned about economic growth on the one hand or unemployment and wages on the other, but the character of work doesn’t figure much in political debate. Labor unions address important concerns like workplace safety and family leave, and management looks for greater efficiency, but on the nature of the job itself, the dominant political and economic paradigms are mute. Yet work forms us, and deforms us, with broad public consequences.

I wonder if I could make myself do it

2009-05-24T18:22:00.000-07:00

From ND Wilson's blog:
As is the case with most things that I say, this is stolen. But this isn’t stolen from another writer, this is stolen (and adapted) from a music video/film guy friend.
If you want to be a writer (professionally and not just as a hobbyist), here’s a litmus test for your dedication. Can you get up early and write a short creative sketch of the sunrise (oh, say, 250 wds)? Then can you do it again tomorrow? And the next day? Can you write 30 descriptive sketches of 30 consecutive sunrises? The simple exercise in discipline is hard enough, and it will tell you just how much you actually want to write. But on top of that, the writing component is quite difficult as well. How do you see the sunrise in a new way every morning? How do you express it in a new way? Can you get through the verbal cliche-flailing, and actually create 30 distinct scenes?
Adapt the exercise if you want. Stand in the same place every night and try to sketch 30 consecutive midnights. I have one student doing daily sketches of the same glass of wine. If you do try to do this (no matter how good you might already be), you will learn a lot about yourself as a writer, and you’ll have to move in new ways through the English language. Get off the worn footpaths of description. Kick through walls. Climb fences. Trespass.
As is the case with most things that I say, this is stolen. But this isn’t stolen from another writer, this is stolen (and adapted) from a music video/film guy friend.
If you want to be a writer (professionally and not just as a hobbyist), here’s a litmus test for your dedication. Can you get up early and write a short creative sketch of the sunrise (oh, say, 250 wds)? Then can you do it again tomorrow? And the next day? Can you write 30 descriptive sketches of 30 consecutive sunrises? The simple exercise in discipline is hard enough, and it will tell you just how much you actually want to write. But on top of that, the writing component is quite difficult as well. How do you see the sunrise in a new way every morning? How do you express it in a new way? Can you get through the verbal cliche-flailing, and actually create 30 distinct scenes?
Adapt the exercise if you want. Stand in the same place every night and try to sketch 30 consecutive midnights. I have one student doing daily sketches of the same glass of wine. If you do try to do this (no matter how good you might already be), you will learn a lot about yourself as a writer, and you’ll have to move in new ways through the English language. Get off the worn footpaths of description. Kick through walls. Climb fences. Trespass.

http://ndwilson.com/blog/

Yogi tea-worthy

2009-04-24T20:19:00.000-07:00

A gem of wisdom from my Greek professor: In giving an answer, "if you don't know what the question is, you're just blogging."

He has filled the hungry with good things and the rich He has sent away empty-handed

2009-04-07T23:03:00.001-07:00

Look you Floridians: see that sky? There's nothing in the way. It's like the roof got lifted. No haze of humidity pressing down on you; you just stare up into the sky and it makes you giddy.

I still think of this cute spot as my little house, even though I only live in the upstairs apartment. And see the lawn? It's actually green. Rob (downstairs) plowed amd seeded it with the help of his brother-in-law; last year it was a mess of dirt, rocks, and weeds.

Yellow crocus.

Purple crocus. They are actually a deeper purple than this, but my camera isn't able to capture their intensity.

I wish I could take pictures like Georgia O'Keefe painte, but my camera doesn't like getting too intimate with its subjects.

Last bits of snow.

They're just too fabulous; I can't ignore them.

Cooking adventures: tomato soup with lots of spices. Those are soy nuts and cilantro on top. I've been putting soy nuts on everything; they have a lovely toasty-golden flavor and add a nice crunch.

Jambalaya

Fantastic canteloupe with plain yogurt, cinnamon, and peanut butter.

Granny smith apples and almonds on oatmeal. They were just too pretty and I was sick that day. I never liked granny smiths until rather recently. (There's a lot of things I haven't really liked until rather recently, specifically since I began my college career: paprika, cilantro, green tea, dark chocolate, red pepper flakes, plain yogurt, eggplant, squash . . .)

Tiffany stained-glass can't rival a cantaloupe.

My life has just somersaulted. So here are some lovely things to be thankful for.

Thinking about poetry . . .

2009-04-03T22:20:00.000-07:00

This is a poem my professor read the other day; we're studying Thomas Aquinas and he thought that the poem rather echoed some of Aquinas' metaphysics. (Mr. McIntosh stated that he thought that good metaphysics and good poetry are essential to one another . . . could I say essential to one another's existence?)

Every Riven Thing
by Christian Wiman

God goes, belonging to every riven thing He’s made
Sing his being simply by being
The thing it is:
Stone and tree and sky,
Man who sees and sings and wonders why

God goes. Belonging, to every riven thing He’s made,
Means a storm of peace.Think of the atoms inside the stone.
Think of the man who sits alone
Trying to will himself into the stillness where

God goes belonging. To every riven thing He’s made
There is given one shade
Shaped exactly to the thing itself:
Under the tree a darker tree;
Under the man the only man to see

God goes belonging to every riven thing. He’s made
The things that bring Him near,
Made the mind that makes Him go.
A part of what man knows,
Apart from what man knows,

God goes belonging to every riven thing He’s made.

We got to see (and hear) Mr. Wiman read this poem aloud at our weekly student-body meeting. I wasn't able to keep up with the reading (I generally like poetry for its visual cleanness more than for its aural qualities) but it was a fair treat. I liked his presence.

the Latest

2009-02-22T17:10:00.000-08:00

First, in the crafting department: some valentines. The heart folds into an envelope.

And then the mask I made for the school's masquerade ball:

For my culinary escapades:

Roast turkey. There are no vegetables left in the bottom because I ate them. Onions roasted with turkey, oh . . . .

From that turkey came this soup.

Egg baked in a corn tortilla. It looks rather like a cabbage (which is after all, a flower).

Isn't it pretty? Cranberries cooked with merlot, sugar, and pinch of salt. Soooooo good! Between a chutney and a jam, and good on everything. The cranberries had enough pectin of their own: the texture turned out much better than I thought it would.

On oatmeal.

On toasted tortillas. I also thinly sliced a sweet potato and baked the slices. The cranberries were an agreeable condiment.

My beautiful asparagus!

With rice pelof. I also made a red wine sauce which you can't see. It turned out a little too thin (it was actually intended to go over fish) and the rice absorbed it. Which just made the rice better.

It's so breath taking.

What's the Story?

2009-01-26T14:40:00.000-08:00

From an interview with Barbara Nicolosi in Salvo magazine:
A story "haunts you because of its paradoxes. How do you haunt an audience? How do you create paradox? What is the nature of paradox? These are the stories that Christian storytellers should be asking themselves. Unfortunately, most Christian filmmakers are just trying to figure out what will sell; they're trying to find the next Facing the Giants. But Facing the Giants is supremely unparadoxical. It's just porn for Christians. It's easy; it makes you feel really good; and it's a fantasy lie. What is that except porn?

This made me think of another movie popular with Christians, Chariots of Fire. But Chariots of Fire is not just a feel-good movie about someone who "stood up for what he believed in." The story of Harold Abrahams is almost totally ignored. What gets overlooked is that Abrahams and Eric Liddel are in the same struggle. Abrahams, as a Jew albeit nominally so, did not have any problem running on Sunday because Saturday was his sabbath. (It took me years to figure this out!) We see that he is discontent, and we blame him for it. But his discontent lies in that, as a Jew, he is treated with prejudice within the "halls and corridors" of a Christian society. It is that same Christian society that gives Liddel a hard time for wanting to bow out of a race on Sunday. The cracks in the society are already apparent. That is the paradox, and I believe it largely goes unnoticed because Liddel is a cool guy who wanted to become a missionary and run for God's glory, and we really like the music as the guys run on the beach.

Snow

2009-01-26T09:01:00.000-08:00

On the way to Spokane back in December.

Looks like the moon, doesn't it? But it's only Washington.

From the plane. On the way back north, we flew over the Rockies and the Cascades. All beautiful.

In the Seattle airport. It was Russian-looking in style, I thought. It was thrilling to step into the airport and see this after coming off the cold runway (there wasn't actually a gate open, so we had to walk across the cold tarmac).

We have sunshine today! Right now it's -4 degrees outside--up from -8 just an hour earlier. The snow is so beautiful.

I Heart the Liberal Arts

2009-01-02T20:58:00.000-08:00

From a discussion on the New York Times website as the value of a BA

To the Editor:
Charles Murray needs to recognize that the liberal arts degree, at its best, validates its holder as one who has skills needed for some of our biggest jobs.
A good half of the liberal arts curriculum is about thinking analogically. The degree says this person has studied “humane letters” and so knows his or her way around a metaphor: how it opens up vistas, alters viewpoints, both frees and constrains thought and affects decisions.
No one should try to motivate a work force, lead a corporation, plan military strategies or run a government who does not know how a metaphor works.
Math and science, the other half of the liberal arts curriculum, develop skills that are scarce, yet needed, in our society. They are all about knowing a fact from a factoid, reasoning from data to underlying patterns and practical implications, all while feeding careful observation through the strainer of valid logic.
The liberal arts degree says, or should say, here’s someone who has skills we deeply, powerfully, urgently need.

Jacques Jimenez
Stamford, Conn., Dec. 28, 2008

Confession: I love reading the NYTimes.

Food relates to everything

2009-01-02T20:12:00.000-08:00

Adrienne Sandvos says in a piece for Radiant magazine (based in Orlando, for Christian twenty-something females).

We tend to fall back on song when we want to worship. It’s easier, I suppose, than employing other art forms which require a whole lot more materials than a voice and the memory of the song you want to sing. But relying on those songs is like ordering the exact same dish every time you go out to eat. There’s a whole world of food out there, and you keep settling for spaghetti. In the same way, seeking variety in our worship allows us to connect to God in a totally different way.

What she doesn't point out is that we draw our worship practices from observing worship in the Bible, specifically formal worship. (David's dance at the return of the ark was not formal worship.) We aren't "falling back" on music, we are following the pattern laid out for us. Generally the church has taken the second commandment as a warning against the visual arts in the sanctuary. Singing "Lord I Lift Your Name on High" every week is like always getting spaghetti. But flipping through the Cantus is more like reading the menu at West of Paris. (And an interesting choice of verbs--that Sandvos uses the vocabulary of ordering rather than of giving and receiving or being ordered. That paradigm in itself needs examining.) Besides the main meal is the bread and the wine.

Nice Cheery Post-Christmas Wonderings

2008-12-28T14:49:00.000-08:00

Passing one of the local churches here in South Carolina, the signboard says "Is it safe to die?" I don't know--I never thought of whether death is "safe" or not.

And also, will the Church ever reach a point where she can emphasize the resurrection, ascension, victory and reign of Christ over the passion and crucifixion? Of course, we can only speak of the humiliation of the Christ with such complacency because of His triumph. But we also need to work harder at realizing what His kingdom should look like and how we are to emulate it. My music professor tells us we should all be interested in singing because we are going to spend eternity singing and so why not start now?

My grandfather is listening to various opera arias--Madame Butterfly and Figaro's pompous trilling incredible ode to himself in the Barber of Seville.

2008-12-18T19:43:00.000-08:00

My chocolate molasses cookies. I took my Cook's Illustrated recipe for molasses cookies, substituted 1/2 cup of cocoa powder for 1/4 cup of flour and added chocolate chips. They were spectacular.

Sunday: and we've gotten more snow since then.

Now some pictures of Seattle from Thanksgiving break:

In front of the Seattle Art Museum. The arm with the hammer goes up and down. I didn't like it very much: too Ayn Rand.

In the ticketing area. There were a couple cars hanging from the ceiling in different positions of a frozen flip with tubes of lights inside bundled like star bursts. My friend pointed out the the car used was the same make and model as hers. Nice comforting thought.

I love taking city pictures with all the layers of architecture. Brick and glass make my heart pitter patter.

Found shattered auto glass in the parking lot outside school. It makes nice votives with tea lights and tea cups.

2008-12-12T23:05:00.000-08:00

In the last year or two, I've taken up reading recipes for enjoyment. Recipes are short, light reading, not at all taxing to the intellect, and they can appease one's creative urges when there is no time to fulfill one's creative urges.

At any rate, all this week, some insistent little region in my brain has been telegraphing me chocolate and molasses, chocolate and molasses, chocolate and molasses. Surely, this is a rather unusual marriage, thought I, and it might take some convincing with others, but I think, I really think, that those two rather strong personalities could work together. Not in equal proportions, but rather that biting into a molasses cookie with a chocolate note, or a chocolate cookie with a molasses note, the passerby would have to stop and ask What was that?! Lo, and behold, it appears from scrounging around the dregs of the internet that chocolate and molasses is a classic Dutch combination. Maybe that genetic .32% Dutchness somehow communicates to my unconscious? Tonight, I could take that goading chocolate and molasses, chocolate and molasses no longer and I heated up a bit of molasses in the microwave and added some chocolate. And yes folks, it works!

The virtues of masculine bristles

2008-12-12T22:42:00.000-08:00

From Ovid:

the giant, Polyphemus of Homeric fame, tries to woo the recalcitrant Galatea:

A forest of hair towers over my strong stern features and shades my magnificent shoulders.
Don't think me ugly because my body's a bristling thicket of prickly hair.
A tree is ugly without any foliage; so is a horse, if a mane doesn't cover his tawny neck;
birds are bedecked in plumage, and sheep are clothed in their own wool.
Men look well with a beard and a carpet of hair on their chests.

Metamorphoses 13: 845-850

2008-12-05T18:16:00.000-08:00

Winter is here, my computer is healthy again, and I can share some autumnal high points:

Hokkaido squash soup with white pepper, peanut butter, red pepper flakes, and cumin. Sweet and spicy--so good, something inside me does triple axles, quadruple jumps (a la Tara Lipinski), triple salchows, back flips, twists, the whole shebang.

The obliging squash: she was much more beautiful than the lighting reveals.

Bell pepper soup: just some white wine vinegar, red pepper, chili powder, and salt. The peppers were sweet enough that no brown sugar was needed. (This spicy kick is totally new with me.)

When there are so many types of trees, fascinating confetti combinations result.

It's all gone now.

My eggplant. I didn't know I could like eggplant. Notice the gold and burgundy galaxies in the skin. It's like seeing eternity in a grain of sand.

Beautiful plums/pluots; they were scattered on the sidewalk like unpolished citrine, yellow opals or topaz, left out for trampling. It's a crime, really, how much fruit gets walked over. It's as commonplace as roadkill is back home; it's treated like roadkill.

Beautiful, aren't they? And just the four of them made my bag so heavy. A bag of eight nearly pulled my arm out of its socket.

Note the blogs on the sidebar. The Chocolate and Zucchini gal became a personality merely by starting a blog--she has fabulous recipes and enjoyable prose, and now she has a publisher and three books out.

I've been following Mark Bittman ever since I got addicted to the New York Times. I've gotten several recipes or inspiration for several things from him.

Commonplace

2008-10-23T21:29:00.000-07:00

Does anyone believe that Kenneth Grahame made an arbitrary choice when he gave his principle character the form of a toad, or that a tag, a pigeon, a lion, would have done as well? The choice is based on the fact that the real toad's face has a grotesque resemblance to a certain kind of human face--- a rather apoplectic face with a fatuous grin on it. This is, no doubt, an accident in the sense that all the lines which suggest the resemblance are really there for quite different biological reasons. The ludicrous quasi-human expression is therefore changeless: the toad cannot stop grinning because its 'grin' is not really a grin at all. Looking at the creature we thus see, isolated and fixed, an aspect of human vanity in its funniest and most pardonable form; following that hint Grahame creates Mr. Toad--an ultra-Jonsonian 'humour'. And we bring back the wealth of the Indies; we have henceforward more amusement in, and kindness toward, a certain kind of vanity in real life.

~ "On Stories" C.S. Lewis

The McIntoshes' have a beautiful birch in front of their home. I love the shape and lightness and delicacy and translucency and kinetic quality of the leaves. All through recitation we talked about Aristotle on sense perception using the "yellowness" of the tree as an example. The birch has turned an intense golden yellow and its leaves float down in small drifts.

It hasn't all been school . . .

2008-10-10T12:08:00.000-07:00

Hats for the Fall Jolly

Fabulous bread dough, the richest I've ever made, thanks to the Best Recipe

I gave away the cinnamon rolls unbaked. But they sure turned out lovely, thanks to the precision of dental floss.

The peaches were starting to turn to vinegar, so I baked them in bread dough

The cake turned out too dry (The recipe was for tres leches cake, but of course I don't have any rum) But it's pretty and made fairly decent french toast.

Zucchini, tomates, basil and keilbasa on pizza dough

I overloaded the dough, so the middle turned out a bit soggy. But otherwise it was fabulous. I did long for some parmesan though. I'll make it again.

The beauty that is Idaho

Pensees

2008-10-07T07:10:00.000-07:00

Man is not worthy of God but he is not incapable of being made worthy.
It is unworthy of God to unite Himself to wretched man, but
it is not unworthy of God to raise him out of his wretchedness.
~ Blaise Pascal

This is kind of cool

2008-09-30T08:39:00.000-07:00

Create your own lavendar mist:
http://www.jacksonpollock.org/

2008-09-12T21:43:00.000-07:00

I knew them first as the chrome

and ochre yellows that seemed

to scream from the brush of the man

who cut off his own ear.

But here, so affectionate,

the lionheads turned upwards

to follow the movement of their beloved, until

their necks are limp and wrung,

their spent gold drooping heavy on their shoulders .

O Lord, I cannot hear You
For the ticking of the clock,
For the humming of the refridgerator,
For the sighing of the air conditioner.
Speak, shatter these dim voices,
These clattering machines
With their incessant insistent grey din,
Explode into the dimness of the world.

Block Party at the NuArt Theater!

2008-09-09T19:08:00.001-07:00

Sidewalk art: advertising the local yoga studio

Crazy balloon hats

Funny balloon people

A rapt audience

Jousting

The all-important jumpy castle

Some cute people

Flipping hamburgers

Dressing hamburgers

Pretty good for just a dollar

. . . and a friend

A local oddity

Behind the scenes: somebody ain't too interested

The light is fading . . .

And we got ourselves some moosick. The Afters are supposed to be a big deal. And they were pretty good. But they also came right on the tail of Pastor Wilson's sermon on effeminacy in Christian men. And I wondered what the weird hairstyles and deconstructed clothes in varying degrees of drab were for. I wasn't able to stay long enough to hear any rank cliches, but they probably existed somewhere among the general what's-the-point. But still, I enjoyed them. I just didn't find them terribly original creative. But Bryan Duncan was better--though of course he represents a whole 'nother sandwich filling of culture that comes with its own doubts over mustard and mayonaisse.

And speaking of effeminacy, there were two lesbians making out in the back of the crowd. They were both short and ugly and looked like they hadn't seen the sun in several years. One was skinny with blue hair and the other was pudgy and wearing a shirt with the legend, "Don't piss off the voices." I tried to be fair and kept looking back to make sure that I hadn't misidentified a male, but everytime I checked, sure enough, they were both female. So that was exciting.

2008-08-13T15:12:00.000-07:00

http://www.amconmag.com/2008/2008_06_30/article.html
Good article, especially in light of Doug Wilson's commentary on food

If They Knew that I Get High on Zucchini

2008-08-09T17:17:00.001-07:00

Zinnias from the Farmers Market :

Zucchini and tomatoes. The tomatoes look rather palid, but they are sweet with hardly any acidicity. Just lovely.

My basil plant

My rosemary

Sing hey nonny Nonny

2008-08-03T22:05:00.000-07:00

It was all figured out. His persona drew from the previous waves of the punk rock movement while defining the new. He picked a suitably raucous punk name for himself (Darby Crash) and a suitable rockous punk name for his band (the Germs--you don't want to catch them!). They would release just one album, leaving their fans tantalized and aching for a more tangible way to capture their punk rock experience. And then he would die, ensconcing him in the Young Dead Olympians (YDO for short) a shimmering star in a glowing world, the firmament of Marilyn Monroe and James Dean and Elvis (granted, a not-so-YDO, but we waive that point, we pass over it).
And it panned out beautifully, except, that the young man got upstaged. Someone died right after him in a more dramatic fashion. John Lennon was murdered (by someone else, note) while Darby Crash could only aspire to the cliched heroin overdose. And the world, in their shock over Lennon, forgot to talk about poor Darby Crash, they forgot to elevate him to that demigod status, they forgot to build a temple and to offer sacrifices. And he never made it. He wasn't immortal after all.

Forgive me for rubbing it into your face: God has a sense of humor.

And this is just as funny. A new biopic of Crash features the boy from A Walk to Remember and he is so convincing that I quote on the authority of the New York Times (as I often do), that Shane West has captured him so perfectly that he "was formally inducted as the band’s new lead singer. . . . the first band to embrace the actor from the biopic as their singer and then go on to perform together like nothing happened.” We hope that he doesn't play him so perfectly that we can expect him to commit suicide when his height is acheived.

(And now, back to my normal voice)
**** Solzhenitsyn just died. That's a death worth remarking ****

Summer reading

2008-06-16T18:15:00.000-07:00

So far . . .

Theodore Rex, Edmund Morris. Still in progress, but I love it. I've been looking for a bio of Theodore Roosevelt that is more than a collection of annecdotes. I wanted more details of the way Roosevelt acted with his cabinent, his family, the press, his friends, fellow politicians, his behaviour during major decisions.

Complete Collected Stories, Flannery O'Connor.

The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco

The Girl in Blue, PG Wodehouse

Dandelion Wine, Ray Bradbury

As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner

I want to see the South Pacific revival!

2008-05-17T20:36:00.000-07:00

Some sites I don't want to lose track of (and I'm not on my computer to bookmark them)

http://www.marklamoreaux.blogspot.com/

http://faculty.owc.edu/math/liu/Watercolor(03-07)/Preface.htm

Imagine

2008-05-07T22:40:00.000-07:00

John Lennon's "Imagine" is playing on Pandora. Has it occured to nobody that the song's imaginary world is boring? As in neither hot nor cold so I will spew you out of my mouth.

2008-05-07T20:49:00.000-07:00

I'm reading Philip Jenkins' The New Faces of Christianity for Theology. And it occured to me, about halfway through his chapter "Women and Men" that the Bible gives few restrictions on women and the types of roles or jobs they should hold. It says that a woman should be submissive to her husband, it says that a wise woman looks well to the ways of her household, and that younger women are to be keepers at home, but it has more to say on a woman's behavior. Nothing about no college, split ends down to the ankles, flowery sack dresses, barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen. The strongest statement on feminine roles is that a woman is not permitted to speak in church--but there are plenty of other places that she can speak!

Lovely Woman reigns supreme

2008-05-05T20:11:00.000-07:00

I found an online edition of Sanditon. I love it--I've never laughed out loud so much reading an Austen novel.

Meet Sir Edward Denham:

"Do you remember," said he, "Scott's beautiful lines on the sea? Oh! what a description they convey! They are never out of my thoughts when I walk here. That man who can read them unmoved must have the nerves of an assassin! Heaven defend me from meeting such a man unarmed."
"What description do you mean?" said Charlotte. "I remember none at this moment, of the sea, in either of Scott s poems.
"Do you not indeed? Nor can I exactly recall the beginning at this moment. But -- you cannot have forgotten his description of woman -- Oh. Woman in our hours of ease -- Delicious! Delicious! Had he written nothing more, he would have been immortal. And then again, that unequalled, unrivalled address to parental affection -- Some feelings are to mortals given With less of earth in them than heaven -- etcetera. But while we are on the subject of poetry, what think you, Miss Heywood, of Burns's lines to his Mary? Oh! there is pathos to madden one! If ever there was a man who felt, it was Burns. Montgomery has all the fire of poetry, Wordsworth has the true soul of it, Campbell in his pleasures of hope has touched the extreme of our sensations -- Like angels' visits, few and far between. Can you conceive anything more subduing, more melting, more fraught with the deep sublime than that line? But Burns -- I confess my sense of his pre-eminence, Miss Heywood. If Scott has a fault, it is the want of passion. Tender, elegant, descriptive -- but tame. The man who cannot do justice to the attributes of woman is my contempt. Sometimes indeed a flash of feeling seems to irradiate him, as in the lines we were speaking of -- Oh. Woman in our hours of ease -- But Burns is always on fire. His soul was the altar in which lovely woman sat enshrined, his spirit truly breathed the immortal incense which is her due."
"I have read several of Burns's poems with great delight," said Charlotte as soon as she had time to speak. "But I am not poetic enough to separate a man's poetry entirely from his character; and poor Burns's known irregularities greatly interrupt my enjoyment of his lines. I have difficulty in depending on the truth of his feelings as a lover. I have not faith in the sincerity of the affections of a man of his description. He felt and he wrote and he forgot."

Jane Austen is tops for writing puppies and poppycocks.

Sanditon has an unusual amount of description for Austen. Even some descriptions of clothes, as well as shells and seaweed. I think that if she had lived to finish it, she would have cut out, streamlined, or put much of the description into dialogue. There is also an unusal amount of mystery. The last time there was any mystery was Frank Churchill or Mr Elliot. I think Jane was starting to get addicted.

One of my favorite lines:
Sir Edward's great object in life was to be seductive. With such personal advantages as he knew himself to possess, and such talents as he did also give himself credit for, he regarded it as his duty.

the people fail for lack of vision

2008-05-01T23:00:00.000-07:00

This was curious. I occasionally drop by Boundless webzine--Focus on the Family's webzine for college students.

Is "Transforming the World" Biblical? by Motte Brown on Apr 30, 2008 at 4:04 PM
Ted just sent me this link from freerepublic.com about the United Methodists changing their mission statement this week at conference.

Previous mission:The mission of the Church is to make disciples of Jesus Christ.

New mission:The mission of the Church is to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world.

Rejected amendment:The mission of the Church is to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the salvation of souls and the transformation of the world.

Now I don't want to read too much into this. I mean, I'm a marketing guy so I understand wanting a pithy mission statement. But it seems they should have rejected the latter phrase of the rejected amendment, not the former. It's just too man (and earth) centered. You know, how about something like, "... for God's glory."
As freerepublic.com notes,"transforming the world" sounds more like a political agenda than a church mission. And from my experience, it will likely be a leftist political agenda.
Anyway, it appears my optimism about the "conservative governing majority" was a little premature.

Is transforming the world Biblical?!!!!!! Obviously Mr. Motte Brown would not like Mr. Doug Jones--too liberal-sounding. To my mind, the disciples part is a duh! The church is supposed to be discipling its members for the good of their souls. But I like the transformation of the world part. It recalls Adam's original call to husbandry. It embraces and celebrates the power of the gospel over all the world.
Of course, I don't know much about the committee that put this all together, and many Christian denominations are becoming increasingly liberal. But don't choose narrow phraseology out of fear of the other guys. Go with what's Biblical! Even if it means making fuzzy labels!

Further, Boundless featured an article from the editor of Brio. And that was another one that bothered me. Brio looks at Seventeen and other chick confetti and says "How can we put a Christian spin on this piece of crap?" That's ultimately unsatisfying. Why not ask, "how can we write a distinctively Christian story?" Don't shoot so low!

Tongue twisters

2008-04-29T23:17:00.000-07:00

Assignment for Declamation: write a tongue twister. I found these two gems of Wikiwisdom. Be careful where you attempt them!

I'm not the pheasant plucker, I'm the pheasant plucker's mate,
And I'm only plucking pheasants 'cause the pheasant plucker's late.
I'm not the pheasant plucker, I'm the pheasant plucker's son,
And I'm only plucking pheasants till the pheasant pluckers come.

I'm a sheet slitter
If sheets need slitting,
Sheets I slit.

the Owl's new roost

2008-04-25T23:04:00.000-07:00

Hello World. Welcome to the virtual residence of an out-of-body me.

And something from my commonplace book:

You ask why can't Clarissa hold her tongue.
Because she fears her fingers will be stung.
from Gerard Manley Hopkins' Seven epigrams

Ball and Cross Books is relinquishing its downtown space and thus is having a sale this weekend---Buy 1 Get 1 FREE! I bought a little biscotti cookbook, a nice hardback of Quentin Bell's biography of his sister-in-law, Virginia Woolf, and a cool book of orgami.
But the best so far is the Tassajara Bread Book by Ed Brown. Tassajara used to be a resort near our favorite part of the USA--that would be Monterey California--and Brown was working as a cook when the place got bought up and turned into a Buddhist monastery. The cookbook is printed in 1970 and it shows--lots of honey and whole wheat flour and raw bits. I looked the book up on Amazon and it has lots of good reviews, and testimonials that this book got the reviewer baking bread for the first time. Most of the cookbooks I've used have been very precise, but this one is filled with recipes like the big bang. It's great fun.