There's Beauty in the Bellow

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 l...

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 Protestant...

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 stin...

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 terrib...

H Debussy my nutty cat Is there a simpler recipe for a photo?

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.

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...