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Via the Smithsonian Libraries. Let’s just say that all together: The Old Fashioned Beer which makes friends on first acquaintance and holds them forever in the spell of its exquisite flavor. Ah, there were giants of advertising copywriting on the earth in those days!
DAY 1: Let there be light, God said, and there was light.DAY 2: Let there be morons, God said, and there were morons.
DAY 3: Hey, morons, God said, I created LIGHT.
DAY 4: I mean, I’m just saying, God said. None of you guys could have created light. You’re too stupid! Hey, you want me to part the earth from the waters? OH WHOOPS BECAUSE SOMEBODY JUST DID HEY WAIT THAT WAS ME.
DAY 5: [God performs subtly aggressive victory dance.]
DAY 6: What, God said, you don’t like the way I’m doing things? Oh, right, like you morons could RULE THE FRICKING UNIVERSE.
DAY 7: You … you what? God said. You want me out? You know what, FINE. I would rather rest anyway. Enjoy creation, suckers.
[gallery] classicpenguin:
blackballoonpublishing:Penguin Books Founder Allen Lane with a Penguin and, ah, a penguinThanks blackballoonpublishing! A happy birthday indeed to Mr. Lane!
Happy Birthday, Penguin and Thanks for Inventing the Modern Paperback Book
As comedian Penn Jillete elegantly pointed out, the way people avoid giving offense to Islam amounts to a damning condemnation in itself. It is perhaps the worst Western insult offered to Islamic people in the Middle East that we almost universally assume there’s not much point in asking them to recognize the human rights of Christians.We don’t even expect polite reciprocity. Italy is expected to welcome one of the largest mosques in the world, funded by Saudi Arabia. But no one can build even a modest church in Saudi Arabia. In Egypt, Christians can’t even repair a wall in a church without explicit permission from the sovereign. Qatar has laws that punish people who convert from Islam to Christianity with death, but there’s no planned boycott of their upcoming World Cup because of it. We watch ISIS blow up what many consider the tomb of the prophet Jonah and just sigh, helplessly.
The new regime is not totalitarian, fascist, socialist, capitalist, conservative, or liberal, according to the accepted and common definitions of those terms. It is not even adequately described as corporatist, although corporatism is very much at home within it. The “pink police state” is not a police state in the sense that George Orwell would be familiar with, but one in which a militarized, national policing apparatus is woven into the fabric of trillions of transactions online and off. Nor is it a “pinko commie” regime in the sense of enforcing “political correctness” out of total allegiance to Party; rather, it enforces the restrictions and permissions doled out by its sense of “clean living.” To invoke Michel Foucault again, ours is an age when governance is inseparable from hygiene in the minds of the elite that rules over both the private and public sector. To them, everything is theoretically a health issue.
[gallery] bookpatrol:
Lynd Ward - master of the wordless novelmuspeccoll:Lynd Ward’s sinister wood engravings for Madman’s Drum, 1930
Lynd Ward produced wordless graphic novels in the 1920s and 1930s, creating stories made up entirely of illustrations. Although the genre was pioneered by Frans Masereel, Ward is perhaps the most influential of the early wordless novelists. Art Spiegelman, Will Eisner, Allen Ginsberg and many others have cited him as an inspiration in their own work.
Ward worked primarily in wood engraving, which allowed for a refined line and detail. These images are from Madman’s Drum, the story of a slave trader, an African drum, and a devastating family curse.
Ward, Lynd, 1905-1985. Madman’s drum, a novel in woodcuts by Lynd Ward. New York, J. Cape, H. Smith [c1930]. MERLIN catalog record
- Kelli Hansen
local culture
Which form of contemporary Christianity is best suited to living out the time of exile that is fast approaching American Christians?
This is the question that my buddy Rod Dreher asks, in response to the Trueman article that I mentioned in my previous post. As you could probably guess if you read that post of mine, I’m not happy with the formation of the question, because it encourages the kind of braggadocio that I think Trueman manifests.
But also for another reason. When people describe a faith tradition that they admire, especially if they belong to it, they tend to describe it in its ideal form. But: Trueman’s list of Reformed virtues won’t be embodied fully by all Reformed congregations — indeed, many such congregations won’t consistently embody any of those virtues.
Now, if you point this out, you’re likely to be told that true Reformed (or Catholic, or evangelical, or Mennonite) congregations will indeed do all these good things, and that those that don’t aren’t truly Reformed ( or whatever) — see the “no true Scotsman” fallacy for how this line of argument works. But even if we were to accept the logic, it wouldn’t get us very far, because we wouldn’t know how likely it is that a given congregation in a given tradition will be “true.”
So in my judgment, there is no reliable or useful answer to Rod’s question. If indeed we are entering a time of exile — and again, I think that’s an open question — then what’s going to matter is not the ideal form of any given tradition, but how congregations are living out the Gospel in the places where they are planted. And the ones doing that most faithfully in my neighborhood might belong to very different traditions than the ones that are doing it most faithfully in your neighborhood.
So I would suggest a different approach: Look at the churches in your town that are flourishing, and by that I don’t mean in attendance numbers, but in living out the Gospel message. What are they doing right? How are they strengthening their own members and reaching out to people in the community who are in spiritual or material need? Let’s figure that out, and then compare notes. Then we might figure out what virtues and practices we need to survive a time of exile.
Riding my "Christian unity" hobbyhorse, one more time
Yesterday I got a number of responses to this tweet:
Is *any* situation is dire enough to make some Christians think of what we share, rather than “My tradition is best”? http://t.co/YVMWznMd3A— Alan Jacobs (@ayjay) July 30, 2014
Some people seemed to be misunderstanding me, so let me expand and clarify.
The key issue here arises from the title of Carl Trueman’s article: “A Church for Exiles.” Trueman’s argument grows out of his first sentence: “We live in a time of exile.” Now, I am not sure that we do: I’d like to bring back Daniel the Prophet and ask him what he thinks. (And that’s a serious, not a snarky, comment.) But for the sake of argument let’s grant the claim. We — by which Trueman means “those of us … who hold to traditional Christian beliefs” — live in exile. What is the proper response to exile?
It seems to me that the proper response would be for us to look earnestly for every possible way to draw together, to make common cause, to pray together, to build one another up, and especially, if possible, to share the Eucharist.
It seems to Carl Trueman that the proper response is to explain how his Christian tradition is better than all the other Christian traditions: “Of this I am convinced: Reformed Christianity is best equipped to help us in our exile.” Then follows a long list of traits that make Reformed Christianity superior. For instance:
- “We do not draw our strength primarily from an institution, but instead from a simple, practical pedagogy of worship: the Bible, expounded week by week in the proclamation of the Word and taught from generation to generation by way of catechisms and devotions around the family dinner table.”
- “In the church service, the minister reads the Decalogue and brings words of judgment down on God’s people, reminding them of their death in Adam. He leads them in a corporate confession of sin and then reads words from Scripture, pointing toward the promise in Christ of comfort, forgiveness, and the final resurrection to come. Fall, death, forgiveness, resurrection: The basic elements of the Christian message find concise and precise expression in Reformed liturgical practice.”
- “Robust confidence of our life in Christ lies at the heart of what it means to be a Reformed Protestant…. We know who we are. We belong to Christ.”
I wasn’t aware that only Reformed Christians know that they belong to Christ, or trace in their liturgies the arc from Fall to Resurrection, or proclaim and study the Word of God. But Trueman seems to think that these riches are to be found only in his tradition.
Yet … he can’t think that, can he? He must know perfectly well that none of these traits is unique to the Reformed tradition, that instead they are shared by many varieties of Christianity all over the world. But in that case, why list them as Reformed distinctives, evidence of the superiority of the Reformed Way?
And — to return to my earlier point — why seek to emphasize what’s distinctive about any one tradition now, if, as Trueman believes, “those of us … who hold to traditional Christian beliefs” are all entering a period of exile, and entering it together? Is that really a time to be saying “Here are all the things we Reformed people do better than the rest of you”?
There’s a saying in Alcoholics Anonymous, one that struck David Foster Wallace, who was always the smartest guy in the room, especially forcefully: Your best thinking got you here. Well, if we Christians are going into exile, our best theology and worship and practice got us here. This is not a time for boasting about how much better my way is than yours. This is a time for all of us to say, Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on all of us sinners.
We should all own our share of responsibility for this situation, and not succumb to the prideful delusion that if all the other Christians just did things our way everything would be fine. It’s time for us to say to our fellow Christians, not “Here’s what I have to teach you,” but rather, “What can we all — what must we all — learn from one another?” If even going into exile can’t teach us to pursue a common wisdom, forged in collective prayer and shared penitence, I don’t know what ever will.
[gallery] publicdomainreview:
Double-page spreads from Adriaen Coenen’s Visboek (Fish Book), an epic 800+ page tome on all things fish and fish-related. See more at: http://publicdomainreview.org/collections/adriaen-coenens-fish-book-1580/
[gallery] Tim Bobbin’s Rap at the PYRATES
