In my free time, I enjoy making things with rocks, doing patio jigsaw patterns in quartzite around my house (I have one patio where three stones that made an excellent map of California are in the middle of the patio, and have rays of rock extending out from it; and another that is a kind of rock whirlpool around a Japanese maple); I also am stacking and re-stacking a drywall lake front at my wife’s family place in Maine, made of glacial cobble so that every winter the bad work I do slumps back into the lake, while the good work holds longer.All this rock work, I realized, is like doing novels that I can actually see, which is why they give me such pleasure. My conclusion is that everyone should make things for the fun of it.
Teenagers can feel religious longings just as powerfully as they do romantic ones. There is nothing sinister in teens talking in the language of faith. Quite likely Koenig once had similar thoughts—about personal integrity, moral seriousness, responsibility in relationships—just in more abstract and secular (and I would say, less exact) terms.It’s hard to remember just how hysterical our teenage selves could sound. I realized this a few years back when I stumbled upon an old diary in which I talked about, yes, my faith and relationships. I hardly recognized the voice in those pages, but I also didn’t want to dismiss it. There was something in the passion of my teenage self that I needed to relearn.
Adnan may well be a murderer (the series leaves this fact unresolved). Whether or not he is, there is nothing murderous in his expression of the universal tension between old loyalties and new loves. Serial’s suggestion that talk of sin and the devil might be homicidal is pure prejudice.
the origin of the great errors
There can be no doubt that all the great errors which have overtaken the preaching and theology of the community in the course of its history have had their true origin, not so much in the studies of the well-known errorists and heretics who have merely blabbed them out, but rather in the secret inattention and neglect, the private drowsing and wandering and erring, of innumerable nameless Christians who were not prepared to regard the listening of the community to the Word as their own concern, who wanted privacy in their thinking, and who thus created the atmosphere in which heresy and error became possible and even inevitable in the community. Conversely, there can be no doubt that the revivals and quickenings continually granted to the preaching and theology of the community have had their basis, not so much in the bearers of the great names which have come down to us in Church history as representatives of these movements, but effectively, if secretly, in the community from which they sprang, by which they were surrounded and as the mouthpiece of which they spoke, and therefore again in the innumerable nameless Christians for whom the question of correct doctrine was a burning one which they tried to address to the right quarter, and who then quietly if inarticulately found and espoused the relevant new and better answers until someone was found to bring them to expression.
Is it true, this talk of a loving and good God, who is more than one of the friendly idols whose rise is so easy to account for, and whose dominion is so brief? What the people want to find out and thoroughly understand is, Is it true?
I have not been on a fascinating journey of self-discovery recently, and I would not like to share it with you. Thanks be to God, we have far better things to talk about.
Some common reasons they gave for not buying e-textbooks were that screens make their eyes tired, working on a computer makes them prone to distraction, and it’s easier to mark up a printed page than a digital one.
I also know that Messiah is among my favourite works to perform each year. How could this be? Why doesn’t this extreme familiarity (I have memorized the entire thing note for note) breed contempt?The academic answer is that Messiah is Handel at his most brilliant, a well-paced blend of aria and chorus that perfectly matches the arc of the Christian story, a liturgical calendar condensed into three hours.
But the real reason I and other singers love Messiah because we truly know it like no other work. Since it has become an annual Christmas tradition, most choristers have sung it in every venue, in every iteration, with every instrumentation and in every tempo, no matter how deranged or pseudo-experimental. And in that time they have come to know the strange miracle of Messiah: after years of the good and the bad and the ugly, there is always something new, something breathtaking, to be rediscovered in Handel’s writing and Charles Jennens’s libretto.
Getting a bad review is no longer an elite experience. Writers and non-writers, mandarins and proles, we’ve all been trolled, oafed, flambéed in some thread somewhere, at the bottom of some page. Scroll down, scroll down, take that Orphic trip into the underworld of the comments section, and there they are — the people who really object to you. Their indignation, their vituperation, is astonishing. It seems to predate you somehow, as if they have known and despised you in several former existences. You read their words and your body twitches with malign electricity. You must get out of this place immediately, run toward the light. Let the dead bury their dead. And don’t look back — because if you do, like Orpheus, you’ll lose what you love the most.
And it’s not just what we write or make that’s under scrutiny — it’s our whole lives. Over the last couple of weeks, I have read, with increasing dismay, a series of articles and blog posts in which evangelical Christians take it upon themselves to judge the life of a young woman who works for my former employer, Wheaton College, solely because she describes herself as a gay Christian. Some of them, with gracious condescension, deem adequate her decision to remain celibate; but they don’t like her self-description and inform her that she is foreclosing the possibility of being changed by God.
This young woman didn’t ask for any publicity, didn’t present herself as a role model, didn’t seek the approval of strangers. And yet her fellow Christians don’t hesitate a moment before reviewing her life as though it were this week’s new movie. We’re all fodder for other people’s “journalism” and blog posts. All that crap about motes and beams is so first-century.
For Whitefield, clearly, one can be aware of, and even repent of, particular sins without having a clear understanding of one’s spiritual and moral condition, and therefore without recognizing the One Path to salvation. That I commit this or that sin is not my problem; what afflicts me, rather, is this inborn, as it were “natural,” “perverseness of the heart” that sets my own will at “enmity” with the will of God. As he would put it, even more bluntly, in another sermon, “If you have never felt the weight of original sin, do not call yourselves Christians. I am verily persuaded original sin is the greatest burden of a true convert; this ever grieves the regenerate soul, the sanctified soul.”It was Whitefield’s experience — and this, I think, should seem reasonable even to those who share none of his theological beliefs — that while this message was consistently offensive to people who held some status in the world (whether the Duchess of Buckingham or Mr. Benjamin Franklin) it could be a message of great comfort to the insulted, the degraded, and the poor. Not all of them, of course: Whitefield was often mocked and heckled by at least a portion of his crowds, and in his journal makes the inadvertently slightly comical comment that he considered it an honor to be pelted with rotten fruit and “pieces of dead cats” for the sake of the Gospel. (The more dignified and scholarly John Wesley did not like the idea of outdoor evangelism precisely because he preferred not to be subjected to such possibilities, but eventually Whitefield talked him into it and he had some success.) But Whitefield also records in his journal a moving account of his experience preaching to coal miners near Bristol in 1739. The preaching did not go well at first — very likely there were some dead cats at hand — but gradually more and more of the miners came to hear his messages. “Having no righteousness of their own to renounce, they were glad to hear or a Jesus who was a friend to publicans, and came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance. The first discovery of their being affected, was to see the white gutters made by their tears, which plentifully ran down their black cheeks, as they came out of their coal pits.”
Having no righteousness of their own to renounce — this is the heart of the matter, and a thought deeply consistent with the Catholic Rosenstock-Huessy’s celebration of the feast of All Souls’ as the “universal democracy” of sinners under judgment. These coal miners, who knew that they were not thought worthy of education, or the vote, or perhaps even admission to the local Anglican church, heard from Whitefield that their condition was truly dire — but no more dire than his own, or that of the local Lord, or the owners of the coal pits. One of the great hymns of later (nineteenth-century) evangelicalism is Charlotte Elliott’s “Just As I Am” —
Just as I am, without one plea,
But that Thy blood was shed for me,
And that Thou bidst me come to Thee,
O Lamb of God, I come, I come— and this was the word of comfort that Whitefield brought to the miners: that God loves them just as they are, and asks for nothing more than their repentant hearts, which is what he asks of everyone, even the Duchess of Buckingham. Really, it’s no wonder they wept.
On the 300th birthday of George Whitefield, an excerpt from my book Original Sin: A Cultural History.
I mention the Duchess of Buckingham here because of her response to an aristocratic friend who had shared with her the message of the “new evangelical preachers”: “It is monstrous to be told you have a heart as sinful as the common wretches that crawl on the earth. This is highly offensive and insulting; and I cannot but wonder that your ladyship should relish any sentiment so much at variance with high rank and good breeding.”