There's Beauty in the Bellow

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 f...

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 ...

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."

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.

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.

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