It's Not About Me

Another (Good) Day At School

"Marriage brings out the worst in both husbands and wives. They must choose whether to stay in that school of character or drop out. The Bible made divorce difficult because one does not learn much by quitting a challenging school. The only way to make monogamy work is to value love above pleasure, to pursue holiness and humility rathater than power and personal fulfillment, to find grace to repent rather than condemn, to learn sacrifice and patience in place of indulgence and gratification. The modern world was created by countless couples who did just that in working to presereve their marriages and provide for their children, they invested in the future of civilization itself."    - Vishal Mangalwadi

Speaking Of Hungry

"To say, "I love you!", gives food, not information."  - Douglas Wilson

Climbing?

"The symbol of the Christian faith is not the ladder, but the cross."                                                                                                                   - Mark Bates

Dog Days Are Over

My dear wife recieved a birthday card with a border collie on the front. Inside: "You're how old?? Wow, that's like...dead, in dog years!"

Freedom's Just Another Word...

"(Jonathan) Edwards began to probe more deeply into the dimension of human choices and the fundamental principle of his analysis was this: choices do not occur in a vacuum. Choices are not uncaused effects. They do not just pop up like Athena from the head of Zeus. All choices have a cause, and the antecedent cause for every choice we make is what Edwards called inclincation or disposition. He set forth the principle that not only do we choose according to our desires, but we must choose according to our desires, and we always choose according to our strongest desire at the moment of choice...

Once we understand that, we will realize that never in our lives have we chosen to do something that we did not want to do... Every choice we have ever made, even though it might have seemed repugnant, was chosen because not choosing it was even more repugnant... 

If our choices are caused by the greatest inclination we have at any given moment, our choices are determined. Our choices are determined not by the stars or the fates but by what we desire. We call this self-determination, which is just another word for freeedom. The essence of freedom is to be able to determine our own choices and the essence of our fallen condition is that we determine our sinful choices.”   - RC Sproul, "Romans"

Sweet Lyrics #5

"I have come to listen for the sound 
Of the trucks as they move down 
Out on 95,
And pretend that it's the ocean, 
Coming down to wash me clean, to wash me clean, 
Baby do you know what I mean? 

I would rock my soul in the bosom of Abraham. 
I would hold my life in his saving grace. 
I would walk all the way from Boulder to Birmingham 
If I thought I could see, I could see your face." 

                                  - Emmylou Harris, "Boulder To Birmingham"

d-Con

"Embracing bitterness is like eating rat poison, then waiting for the rat to die."  - Doug Wilson

Sweet Lyrics #4

"If you're lying on the beach 
With the transistor going,
Kick off the sandflies,
Honey, the love's still flowin'. 
If your head says forget it,
But your heart's still smoking, 
Call me at the station 
The lines are open."
                                                  - Joni Mitchell, "You Turn Me On, I'm A Radio"    

Best o' Twenty-Eleven

Ah, the "best of lists", for a blogger it's like popping ducks on a pond...  As usual, some of this stuff has been around for years, but it's new to me!

BEST NEW MUSIC:

Our new house band - Elephant Revival. Have been enjoying this Nederland, Colorado based group most of the year. Their genre? Try on "psychedelic country" or "transcendental folk" for a starter. I'm thinking maybe "grassgrass". We enjoyed them live just last night along with lots of old and young space-dancing hippies as we groooved to a 3-hour, end-of-the-year concert. You can get a little flavor on this YouTube, "Remembering A Beginning".

 

 

Continuing the alt/grass theme, I've also fallen for the Swedish group, Väsen. Got to see them this past spring touring with Mike Marshall & Darol Anger. This band features national champion fiddle and guitar players plus Olov Johansson on the nyckelharpa which looks like a cross between a fiddle, lap dulcimer and accordion. You'll pick up a decidedly Swedish flavor on this piece, Eklunda Polska #3.

  

 

FAVORITE QUOTES:

"History may not repeat itself, but it rhymes."   - Mark Tain

"Everywhere the human race goes, it drags a bell curve around with it."   - Doug Wilson

"Ignore the environment. It will go away."   - bumpersticker

"If God does nothing random, there must always be something to learn."   - John Calvin

"They lived outside. They lived with horses and cattle and dust and snow and moved all around a country they somehow could not learn to love because another geography was already inside them."  - Mark Jenkins, "Off The Map"

"If you're tired of parties, you go to the wrong church."   - Matt Barley

"When suffering restores us, burns away the empty shallowness,
And softening the heart, to be broken break and poured out wine...
When it rains it pours, turns life into a chalice,
There to nourish every soul, one at a time."

                                           - Phil Keaggy,  "Chalice" 

 

FAVORITE READS:

 

Patrick O'Brian continues to weave a spectacular tale. How can one man know so much sea faring history? How can one man write so many incredible sentences?

 

 

 

An absorbing adventure of a trek across Siberia by bicycle. I learned a new Russian word: "balota" болото (for "swamp"). I also got a peek inside of late 20th century Russia. Not many smiles there.

 

 

 

 

What a perfect storm of men and women that came together in late 18th-century America. Oh that a few stray bands of such weather would blow over us today.

 

 

 

 

RC Sproul walks you through the book of "Romans". A book that has literally changed the world (and more than once).

 

 

 

 

 

SCREEN FAVORITES: I did find Sherlock and Capt. Jack Sparrow to be entertaining. ("You walk like a girl." "You should know!") But really not much to be excited about on the big screen. There were however some jewels you can find in DVD sets such as "John Adams" for starters. Even better is the HBO adaptation of "The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency" and the BBC's "Foyle's War". 

                                     

Hitchens

Lots of buzz this weekend over the death of Christopher Hitchens, contrarian gadfly, writer for the Atlantic and one of the most noteable of the New Atheists. He was almost loveable in his pomposity, a caricature of British snobbery. The poor man however was Exhibit A as global/village atheist, you know, "there is no God and I hate Him". Doug Wilson points out that he carried the additional burden of his name, Christopher (ie. Christ-bearer). How unpleasant to carry the name of the one you hate.

Despite Hitchens' long list of unpleasantries, the man could certainly write and apparently did so until almost the bitter end. I love this remembrance by British lawmaker, Denis Macshane, "He would drink a bottle of whisky when I would manage two glasses of wine and then be up in the morning writing 1,000 perfect words. He could throw words up into the sky and they fell down in a marvelous pattern." Or this from Vanity Fair editor, Graydon Carter, "There will never be another like Christopher. A man of ferocious intellect, who was as vibrant on the page as he was at the bar."

Hitchens was not invincible on the page however as evidenced in one of the more interesting debates on theism I've ever read. Don't miss the fascinating exchange. You can start here.  

There have been many eulogies published in the last couple days. It is not surprising that I've enjoyed Doug Wilsons' the most. Despite their coming at each other from across the table, there was plenty of sorrow in Wilson's words. Never the less he points to the real fruit from Mr. Hitchens' life:

"G. K. Chesterton once pointed to the salutary effect that the great agnostics had on him—that effect being that of "arousing doubts deeper than their own." Christopher was an heir of the Enlightenment tradition, and would have felt right at home in the 18th-century salons of Paris. 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. "I think, therefore I am. I think." We pulled out the stopper of faith, and the bathwater of reason appeared undisturbed for a time. But modernism slowly receded and now postmodernism is circling the drain. Our intelligentsia needs to figure out how to do more than sit in an empty tub and reminisce about the days when Voltaire knew how to keep the water hot."