Creeper! Rando! Sketchball!

Sounds like my kids talking.

Fools fall in love

Fools fall in love.
It is a near perfect pop song:
Atlantic rhythm and blues.
Lieber and Stoller.
Early Drifters.
Great lyrics.
Wonderful vocals.

Why does the minor third make us feel sad ?

Here is an article that tries to explain:

Here's a little experiment. You know "Greensleeves"—the famous English folk song? Go ahead and hum it to yourself. Now choose the emotion you think the song best conveys: (a) happiness, (b) sadness, (c) anger or (d) fear.

Almost everyone thinks "Greensleeves" is a sad song—but why? Apart from the melancholy lyrics, it's because the melody prominently features a musical construct called the minor third, which musicians have used to express sadness since at least the 17th century. The minor third's emotional sway is closely related to the popular idea that, at least for Western music, songs written in a major key (like "Happy Birthday") are generally upbeat, while those in a minor key (think of The Beatles' "Eleanor Rigby") tend towards the doleful.

The tangible relationship between music and emotion is no surprise to anyone, but a study in the June issue of Emotion suggests the minor third isn't a facet of musical communication alone—it's how we convey sadness in speech, too. When it comes to sorrow, music and human speech might speak the same language.

Read the rest here .

God allows us to perish as if He had forgotten His promise #2

Luther's comments on Genesis 37: 18-20, where he comments on God's apparent abuse and neglect of his children. (From Vol. 6, American Edition, p. 360-362.)

All this is for no other reason than that the flesh, our own senses, understanding, and wisdom may be mortified and that we may accustom ourselves to trust His promises with simplicity and with eyes shut, even though He pretends to be exercising no care for us and appears to be quite different. It is as the bride says in Canticles ( Song of Sol. 2:9): "He stands behind our wall." He creeps into a corner, He hides behind the curtain, and like the 12-year-old boy in the temple withdraws from His parents (Luke 2:43). He conducts Himself in the same manner toward the godly, so that it seems that He does not know us at all. Even after the promises which have been given, even after the covenant which has been most certainly concluded with us, He nevertheless allows us to perish as if He had forgotten His promise and as if He did not for care us but regarded us as being rejected.

This is therefore the wisdom of the Christians, to endure the plans of God and to persevere by faith in the promise that has been given, for it is indeed sure and firm, and the Lord's covenant is faithful, according to the statement of Ps. 121:4: "Behold, He who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep." But human reason replies: "These things are indeed excellently and beautifully spoken, but I am experiencing the contrary. He is not only sleeping but even snoring; to be sure, there is plainly no God at all to care for us and have regard for us." Thus Jacob is free from care and sure of the promise of God and also of the immovable agreement and covenant, yet he is treated by God in such a way that neither he nor his son seems to have guardian angels to resist the fury of a brother. All are silent and allow the devil to rage against the holy church. Where is God now?

We are often reminded and taught by examples of this kind that the promise must be apprehended by faith and that one must not doubt God when He makes promises. For as God cannot lie ( Titus 1:2), so it is impossible for Him not to exercise care for us, especially if we adhere to the promise. For if this is firmly apprehended, it is impossible for us to be forsaken, because God is true. Accordingly, when He allows us to be tried, to be led down to hell, to be mortified, as we learn in this example of Jacob, we must always turn back to the promise, and that horrible scandal by which we are being crucified must be removed from our eyes.

Jacob and Joseph are submitted to a very hard trial in a manner plainly different from and contrary to the promise. Nothing at all can be seen of God's care and concern. He does not send an angel and, to be sure, not even the leaf of a tree by which the devil is checked, but He even opens the window for him that he may rage against the father and the son.

…

Why, then, are such awful experiences thrown in our path at the hands of our flesh, sons, and offspring? My reply is that this is the manner of God's government, and such is the life of the saints in this world. Therefore there is need of wisdom and doctrine exceeding the whole grasp of human reason, by which I am able to say: "I have been baptized; I have been absolved from my sins; I have eaten the body and drunk the blood of Christ; I have the most certain Word of God; He will not lie and not deceive me, however much all things seem to be carried in a contrary direction."

Jacob thinks: "I seem to be deserted, since my son of whom I expected the promise is carried off. This promise is now being called into doubt, but it is only a trial." But how many are there who could take up this attitude? Therefore the flesh and the understanding of the flesh and reason must be mortified, and all human wisdom must be reduced to nothing. It must finally come to this! All things have been made and are restored through the Word; we are created from the Word, and we must return to the Word. …


This is easily said speculatively, but practically it is work and toil to be reduced in this way, to die, and to pass away into nothing so that nothing seems to be left either of life or of carnal feeling except the Word. When I die, I descend into hell; I perish! What am I to do? No help remains except the Word: "I believe in God, etc." To this I firmly cling, however angry He may be, however much He may forsake, kill, and lead me down to hell. Why? Because I have been baptized and absolved; I have made use of Holy Communion. I believe this Word. God grant that even though heaven and earth break apart, etc., the promise and the sacraments are not on that account rejected or denied, even if I should be cast down into hell!

These are not speculative matters, but they are taken out of the midst of the real experiences of life, and they should not only be heard or contemplated once in life but should be repeated and practiced often. I have been baptized once; I have been received into God's promise; daily I am absolved and hear the remission of sins announced to me; I am encouraged by the Word of God; I am in the kingdom of grace and salvation!

What happens? So many great evils and monstrous experiences are my daily lot that if I had not other help or counsel than reason and my flesh, I would end my life immediately either with a noose or with some other weapon, so infinite are the tricks of the devil. All corners are full of a thousand kinds of death, snares, swords, etc.; and yet, whatever clouds and darkness may stand in our way, we should break through into the light of the Word and the promises and say: "In the name of God I confess that I have sinned, but I still believe that I have been baptized and that Christ is sitting at the right hand of the Father."

God allows us to perish as if He had forgotten His promise

Who wrote that? Martin Luther. In his Genesis commentary.

Reading Luther's commentaries on Genesis is an amazing, fearful treat. Luther is brutal, honest and radically centered on the Gospel, radically focused on what it means, what it feels like, to live by faith.

Living by faith is no platitude for him. Some of the passages are breathtaking in their ferocity and Gospel centered-ness. Luther hones in on what it means to live by faith, that is, with no assurance for God or for his goodness, save a promise.

In this passage Luther writes of :

God pretending to exercise no care for us
God creeping into a corner
hiding behind a curtain
seeming to not know us at all
He allows us to perish as if He had forgotten his promise
He regards us as being rejected

Christians must "endure" the plans of God

Luther notes how we often feel as if:

God not only sleeps He snores
that it seems as if there is no God at all to care for us

Luther goes on :

God allows us to be tried to led down to hell, to be mortified
He sends no angel but opens the window for Satan to rage

Luther's answer to such a God who allows and perpetrates such things is alarmingly simple. There is no theologizing to get around it, no hop, skip and jumping around the Scriptures to try to build an apologia for God. He doesn't try to construct a system where it makes rational sense.

His answer is: the promises of God, the promises and sacramental proclamations. To all the evil and all the suffering, all the doubt and all the silence of God we experience, Luther says, we must stand on the Word of God. This is no rationalistic, Biblicistic stand; it is a life or death, Satan tearing at my flesh full of despair desperation cry to God, "I have your promise."

In fact Luther does not shy away from attributing all the action, all the doing of the affliction, doubt and despair directly to God. God drives us there on purpose. He abandons us, on purpose. He opens the window for Satan. All to mortify us, to kill us, to leave with us with nothing, absolutely nothing, but the promise. "I am baptized," is the cry of one who has nothing else to grasp.

One of Luther's favorite examples of this is death itself where the saint finally is literally killed and can do nothing but trust for he has no other abilities left.

In the next post I will post this passage of Luther's Commentary to illustrate what I am writing about.

The Illinois Central and the Great Migration

The Warmth of Other Suns is an excellent and important book. It is also well written, a pleasure to read. Isabel Wilkerson documents in an accessible, human yet carefully researched way the plight of black Americans in the Jim Crow South and the historical migration to Northern and Western cities that occurred from WWI to the 1970's. Here is a bit on the role of the Illinois Central railroad in this migration.


They rode in the darkness on an old train called The Rebel, a mule-headed relic of
the Confederate South, rattling toward something they had never seen
and did not know. Over the course of the next twenty-four hours. they
would have to collect their belongings and change trains in Jackson,
Tennessee, to board the Illinois Central Railroad, the legendary rail sys-
tem that, for a great portion of the twentieth century, carried upward of
a million colored people from the Deep South up the country’s central
artery. across the Mason-Dixon Line, and into a new world called the
Midwest. It carried so many southern blacks north that Chicago would
go from l.8 percent black at the start of the twentieth century to one-
third black by the time the flow of people finally began to slow in 1970.
Detroit`s black population would skyrocket from l.4 percent to 44 per-
cent during the era of the Migration.

It would not have occurred to them that they were riding history.
They were leaving as a family, not as a movement, on the one thing
going north. But as it happened, the Illinois Central, along with the At-
lantic Coast Line and Seaboard Air Line railroads, running between
Florida and New York, and the Union Pacific, connecting Texas and
California, had become the historic means of escape, the Overground
Railroad for slavery`s grandchildren. It hurtled its passengers along the
same route and under the same night sky as the Underground Railroad,
the secret network of safe houses leading north that had spirited slaves
to freedom the previous century.

Even before the first anxious sharecroppers boarded the Illinois Cen-
tral, sometime in the early stages of World War I, the railroad had a
pedigree that made it inadvertently synonymous with freedom to black
southerners who could manage to secure a ticket. The Illinois Central
Railroad was founded in 1850 as a connector between Chicago and
Cairo, a river town at the southern tip of the state, adding steamboats
down the Mississippi and ultimately rail lines to New Orleans and the
Gulf of Mexico. For a time, Mark Twain piloted the railroads steam-
boats up and down the Mississippi. and Abraham Lincoln was a rising
attorney on retainer to the railroad before his election to the White
House.

The Civil War brought an end to regular passenger use, and the rail-
road was pressed into the service of the Union Army, Tunneling troops
and supplies from the North to the South for the war effort. At war’s
end, the railroad laid or acquired tracks into the more isolated precincts
of Mississippi, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Louisiana and unwittingly
made the North a more accessible prospect for black southerners des-
perate to escape. Each train route of the Illinois Central had a name of
its own. The trains were called The Planter, The Creole. The Diamond,
The Panama Limited, and, most famous of all, the one that Ida Mae
rode. The Louisiane, later renamed The City of New Orleans, which
went straight up the country's spine from the Mississippi Delta to the flat wheat prairie land and Chicago itself.

The Warmth of Other Suns, Wilkerson, p. 190-191.

The History of Medicine

THE HISTORY OF MEDICINE

2000 B.C. Here, eat this root.
A.D. 1000 That root is heathen. Here, say this prayer.
A.D. 1850 That prayer is superstition. Here, drink this potion.
A.D. 1920 That potion is snake oil. Here, swallow this pill.
A.D. 1945 That pill is ineffective. Here, take this penicillin.
A.D. 1955 Oops . . . bugs mutated. Here, take this tetracycline.
1960-1999 39 more "oops." Here, take this more powerful antibiotic.
A.D. 2000 The bugs have won! Here, eat this root.



Saw this on Facebook.

Dont talk about the underwear!

I am in the midst of a series of evening adult education sessions on different religions of the world. We have done Judaism, Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism. Tonight we tackle Mormonism.

As I have been preparing, I have been trying to brush up on Mormon teaching. I have such a hard time trying to distill Mormonism into a coherent system. Buddhism I understand. Hinduism, as large and diverse a system as that it is, makes sense. Mormonism, seems to me, is just a random, quilt work, mish-mash of a bunch of ideas current in the early part of the 19th century.

It has doctrinal flexibility built into it (divine revelation is said to be ongoing and resides in the current prophet) so it can adapt to the times. It de-emphasizes or eliminates unpopular doctrines. So, a very strange, pentecostal, visionary, radical, often violent, polygamous movement can morph into straight laced, conventional, pro-family, smiling "church" and can market itself that way.

Then I ran across this hilarious little statement from the official LDS folks about the sacred under garments that Mormons wear:

The Mormon Church has issued an official statement on temple garments, identifying the sacred clothing as a topic inappropriate for casual conversation.

Ha, ha! Don't talk about the underwear!

I am reading "The Warmth of Other Suns"

I am reading The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson. Very good book on the epic migration of African Americans from the South, escaping the Jim Crow laws of the first half of the 20th century, to the cities of the Northeast, Midwest and West.


Here is a review from the NY Times:

In the winter of 1916, as Americans read the news of unimaginable slaughter in a distant yet rapidly spreading European war, it was easy to overlook stories like the one in The Chicago Defender reporting that several black families in Selma, Ala., had left the South. A popular ­African-American weekly, The Defender would publish dozens of such stories in the coming years, heralding the good jobs and friendly neighbors that awaited these migrants in Chicago, even printing train schedules to point the way north. Smuggled into Southern railroad depots by Pullman porters, dropped off by barnstorming black athletes and entertainers, The Defender emerged as both cheerleader and chronicler of an exodus that would lead about six million African-Americans to abandon the states of the Old Confederacy between 1915 and 1970. “If all of their dream does not come true,” it confidently predicted, “enough will come to pass to justify their actions.”

Prophetic words, indeed, Isabel Wilkerson insists in “The Warmth of Other Suns,” her massive and masterly account of the Great Migration. Wilkerson, who won a Pulitzer Prize for feature writing at The New York Times in 1994 and currently teaches journalism at Boston University, has a personal stake in the story. Her mother left rural Georgia, her father southern Virginia, to settle in Washington, D.C. Wilkerson knows well the highly charged nature of this field. For many years, commentators routinely demeaned these migrants as the dregs of a failed society. Even the distinguished black sociologist E. Franklin Frazier fretted over the “ignorant, uncouth and impoverished” throngs that had invaded his beloved Chicago. Arguments raged for decades about the tangled pathology of black families divided from their rural roots and thrown together in dead-end Northern slums. “The migrants were cast as poor illiterates,” Wilkerson says, “who imported out-of-wedlock births, joblessness and welfare dependency wherever they went.”

But the more recent scholarship, which Wilkerson embraces, tells another story. Today, these black migrants are viewed as a modern version of the Europeans who flooded America’s shores in the late 1800s and early 1900s. What linked them together, Wilkerson writes, was their heroic determination to roll the dice for a better future. It is no surprise, therefore, to find census data showing that blacks who left the South had far more schooling than blacks who stayed. Or that the migrants had higher employment numbers than Northern-born blacks and a more stable family life, as shown by lower divorce rates and fewer children born outside of marriage. Put simply, Wilkerson says, the well-known “migrant advantage” has worked historically for Americans of all colors.

“The Warmth of Other Suns” is Wilkerson’s first book. (Its title is borrowed from the celebrated black writer Richard Wright, who fled Jim Crow Mississippi in the 1920s to feel the warmth of those other suns.) Based on more than a thousand interviews, written in broad imaginative strokes, this book, at 622 pages, is something of an anomaly in today’s shrinking world of nonfiction publishing: a narrative epic rigorous enough to impress all but the crankiest of scholars, yet so immensely readable as to land the author a future place on Oprah’s couch.

Wilkerson follows the journey of three Southern blacks, each representing a different decade of the Great Migration as well as a different destination. It’s a shrewd storytelling device, because it allows her to highlight two issues often overlooked: first, that the exodus was a continuous phenomenon spanning six decades of American life; second, that it consisted of not one, but rather three geographical streams, the patterns determined by the train routes available to those bold enough to leave.

People from Arkansas, Alabama and Mississippi boarded the Illinois Central to Midwestern cities like Cleveland, Chicago and Detroit; those from Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas and Virginia rode the Seaboard Air Line up the East Coast to Washington, Philadelphia and New York; those in Louisiana and Texas took the Union Pacific to Los Angeles, Oakland and other parts of the West Coast. Wilkerson is superb at minding the bends and detours along the way. She notes, for example, that some migrants, unfamiliar with the conductor’s Northern accent, would mistakenly get off at the cry of “Penn Station, Newark,” the stop just before Penn Station, New York. Many decided to stay put, she adds, giving Newark “a good portion of its black population.”

The first of Wilkerson’s three main characters, and plainly her favorite, is Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, a sharecropper’s wife from Mississippi. Married at 16, the mother of three, Ida Mae lived to serve her husband, George, whose dire prospects reflected the feudal Southern agriculture that had replaced slavery after the Civil War. Each December, at “settling time,” George would meet with Mr. Edd, the white landowner, to learn how he had done. In a malevolent ritual, played out across the cotton South, Mr. Edd would open his ledger book to prove that the annual debt for supplies bought on credit almost exactly matched the value of George’s annual crop. George Gladney didn’t know much about arithmetic, but he did know the dangers of challenging a white man’s figures. So he’d thank Mr. Edd and return to his shack with a few dollars to show for a year’s worth of backbreaking toil.

In 1937, a cousin down the road was beaten almost to death by a white posse that wrongly suspected him of stealing a few of Mr. Edd’s turkeys. Fearing he’d be next, and tired of working dawn to dusk for pennies, George told Ida Mae to pack up the family. A few days later, they boarded the Jim Crow car of an Illinois Central train heading north.

They eventually settled in Chicago, where George found work in a Campbell Soup factory, Ida Mae in a hospital. There no longer were “colored” and “white” signs to degrade them, but the specter of racial caste was omnipresent. The Gladneys survived by exploiting the small but significant advantages of Northern life, while retaining the work ethic of their rural Mississippi roots. In one especially telling episode, Ida Mae had to decide whether to join a strike against her hospital or cross an angry picket line in order to pay the monthly bills. It wasn’t a hard decision, Wilkerson explains. “The concept of not working a job one had agreed to do was alien to Ida Mae.”

The other main characters, George Swanson Starling and Robert Joseph Pershing Foster, also had compelling reasons to leave the South. Starling, the valedictorian of his “colored” high school class in central Florida, had dropped out of college when his money ran out and gone to work picking citrus in the fields. Appalled by the conditions, he tried to organize a work stoppage; a friend warned him that the local growers, backed by a homicidal sheriff, were planning to lynch him. In 1945, Starling boarded the Silver Meteor bound for New York.

Foster, from Monroe, La., had the most privileged background of the three. The son of demanding middle-class parents, educated at Morehouse, the most prestigious black college in America, trained as a surgeon, Foster wasn’t about to waste away in the small-minded South, delivering sharecroppers’ babies and being paid with “the side of a freshly killed hog.” Monroe was known for sending its migrants to California, a route taken by the parents of the future basketball star Bill Russell and of the Black Panther leader Huey Newton. In 1951, Foster joined that western stream.

Both Starling and Foster represent the contradictions of the Great Migration. Starling took a porter’s job on the same Silver Meteor that once brought him north. The life he led in Harlem was richer than anything he could have imagined. But he also knew that the migrants now riding his train would reap the blessings of a civil rights movement that were unavailable to him: history had come too late for the once promising student from the citrus groves. Foster, for his part, matured into one of Los Angeles’s finest surgeons. But his rejection of his Southern roots was so exaggerated, Wilkerson says, as to leave him adrift, nursing ancient wounds, unable to relish the blessings of his life.

The book is not without problems, however. One is repetition: a number of anecdotes and descriptions appear more than once. Another is omission. Though she relies on many sources, Wilkerson ignores Nicholas Lemann’s classic 1991 account of the black migration to Chicago, “The Promised Land,” which paints a somber portrait of its impact upon the migrants and their progeny. In contrast, Wilkerson has little to say about the following generation or its problems beyond a cheerful listing of politicians, athletes, musicians, writers and film stars who got the opportunity “to grow up free of Jim Crow and to be their fuller selves” because their parents had joined the Great Migration.

Some historians, moreover, may question Wilkerson’s approach to her subject. She tends to privilege the migrants’ personal feelings over structural influences like the coming of the mechanical cotton picker, which pushed untold thousands of Southern blacks from the fields, or the intense demand for wartime factory labor, which pulled thousands more to manufacturing cities in the North. Wilkerson is well aware of these push-pull factors. She has simply chosen to treat them in a way that makes the most sense to her. What bound these migrants together, she explains, was both their need to escape the violent, humiliating confines of the segregationist South and their “hopeful search for something better, any place but where they were. They did what human beings looking for freedom, throughout history, have often done. They left.”

In 1998, Wilkerson accompanied Ida Mae Gladney on a visit to Mississippi. It was October, and cotton was still in the fields. “We cross a gravel road,” Wilkerson writes, and “Ida Mae said, her eyes growing big, ‘Let’s go pick some.’ ” Wilkerson wasn’t thrilled by the prospect of two black women trespassing on what was very likely a white man’s plot of ground, but Gladney insisted. “It’s as if she can’t wait to pick it now that she doesn’t have to,” Wilkerson writes. “It’s the first time in her life that she can pick cotton of her own free will.”

The experience fired old memories. “I just couldn’t do it,” Gladney confessed. “I’d pick and cry. I ain’t never liked the field.” The next day found her at the local cemetery, surveying the headstones of people she left behind long ago. “Ida Mae, you gonna be buried down here?” her brother-in-law asks. “No, I’m gonna be in Chicago,” she replies. The South is behind her. Chicago is home.

David Oshinsky, a frequent contributorto the Book Review, is the author of ­“Polio: An American Story,” which won the ­Pulitzer Prize for history in 2006.

The faith of a child

Why does our earliest childhood always seem so soft and full of light? A kid's got plenty of troubles, like everybody else, and he's really so very helpless, quite unarmed against pain and illness. Childhood and old age should be the two greatest trials of mankind.

But that very sense of powerlessness is the mainspring of a child's joy. He just leaves it all to his mother you see. Present, past, future--his whole life is caught up in one look, and that look is a smile.

Diary of a Country Priest, Georges Bernanos, p. 18-19.

Write your own academic sentence... it is great fun

This site allows you to write your own gradute school, academic, jargon filled sentences to impress colleagues.

Try it, it is a lot of fun.

Here a few of mine:

The poetics of pop culture asks to be read as the fantasy of the gendered body.

The culture of the public sphere gestures toward the ideology of post-capitalist hegemony.

The invention of the gaze carries with it the emergence of linguistic transparency.

Reformation Week at Issues Etc.

Issues Etc. has a big week planned for Reformation. Watch this video for all the info.

Issues, Etc. Reformation Week will run October 18-22.

You can also download a special church bulletin insert (insert hyperlink http://issuesetc.org/support/) for Issues, Etc. Reformation Week. Please note that there are four different bulletin inserts for each time zone.

Warren Smith profiles Tim Goeglein, an LCMS former advisor to George Bush

My friend, Warren Smith, profiles Tim Goeglein, an LCMS, former advisor to George Bush.

Wins & losses: Even in politics, falling down can lead to a new kind of strength.

Since 2001, Tim Goeglein had helped run the White House Office of Public Liaison, a heady job that gave him almost daily access to President George W. Bush. All that came to an end on Feb. 29, 2008.

Read the whole story here.

10 Things You'd Hate about John Wesley

This is from First Things which got it from The Thinklings which got it from Monday Morning Insight.

I actually like #5.


10 Things You'd Hate about John Wesley

John Wesley: inspiring preacher, inspired organiser, relentless social activist, challenging writer, historic church builder, world-shaking reviver... but would you actually want to be in his church? And would he let you in?

He rode 250,000 miles on horseback, preached 40,000 sermons, gave away ?30,000 and left behind 132,000 followers. A hero maybe, but is he someone better appreciated at a distance? You decide.


10 things you'd hate about John Wesley

1. Despotism ? Even Wesley's own preachers called him "Pope John". He ruled his followers like an enlightened despot, and his beloved brother Charles plotted to "break his power". John expected every Methodist society to follow his rules like a McDonalds franchise, and took personal charge over every member's private life, expelling them for laziness or selling spirits.

2. Superstition ? He saw rain storms as God's punishment on him - or the Devil's attack. He made decisions by opening the Bible at random for God's guidance, and even decided whether to marry by pulling bits of paper out of a hat.

3. Copyright ? Wesley was a plagiarist and pseudepigrapher - he passed other people's writings off as his own and his own as other people's. He got into trouble for ripping off an anti-American tract of Dr Johnson's. And he attacked a book by Toplady (of "Rock of Ages" fame) by publishing a cheap caricature of it at the same time under Toplady's name. Toplady denounced him as a common crook worthy of deportation to America.

4. Grief ? He didn't believe in it, as Christians should be happy when someone goes to heaven. "I believe the death of your children is a great instance of the goodness of God towards you," he told his sister. "You have often mentioned to me how much of your time they took up. Now that time is restored to you, and you have nothing to do but serve the Lord without carefulness and without distraction."

5. Drink ? He wasn't against alcohol, actually, unlike later Methodists. While he forbad spirits, he loved wine and beer, published home brewing tips and campaigned for real ale. He also allowed tobacco for medicinal purposes. But he discouraged Methodists from drinking tea, being a waste of time and money.

6. Charismania ? Wesley often reduced his hearers to ecstatic convulsions, screams and groans, fainting, beating the ground and uncontrollable laughter. He claimed exorcisms and healings, and once thought he might have raised the dead. You might like that kind of thing or you might not.

7. Narrowness ? After his evangelical conversion, he considered all non-evangelicals "almost Christians". Though one of the most devout believers alive before then, he had been "an heir of hell". In later years he mellowed a lot.

8. Women ? Despite great services to the role of women in church, even his greatest admirers admitted that Wesley had "an inexcusable weakness" for the prettily devout. Nothing sinister, but as a married man, his gushing and intimate letters to his circle of young female acolytes was neither good matrimony nor good pastoring. And his treatment of a quasi-fianc? in Georgia led to him jumping parole and fleeing the state at night.

9. Perfection ? Throughout his life, Wesley preached the thoroughly eccentric doctrine that Christians can be perfect, full of love and without sin. Later he came to see it as a miraculous sudden change, like salvation, though he was as surprised as anyone when Methodists started to claim it had happened.

10. Plain-speaking ? Wesley believed in the importance of pointing out others' errors and faults with utter candour. As "one of the greatest instances of friendship", he told an old friend whose only child was dying that she was the most spoiled he had ever seen, "Happy would it be for both her and you if God would speedily take her to himself!"

Submit yourself forever to this lowest one

Here is a bit of Luther on Jacobs ladder where he speaks at some length on the theology of the cross. In this part, he points out that the angels act as if God is not in heaven but adore Christ in the depths and down in the dregs of human suffering. The angels, the highest creatures, adore and submit to the lowest one for there is God.


This then is the ascent adn descent of the angels of God and of the blessed who look on this, pay attention to it and proclaim it, as can be seen on the day of the nativity. They descend as though there were no God up in heaven. They come to Bethlehem and say: "Behold, I announce great joy to you. The Lord has been born for you ... They adore him as he now lies in the manger at his mothers breasts. Indeed they adore him on the cross, when he descends into hell, when he has been subjected to sin and hell, when he bears all the sins of the whole world. And they submit themselves forever to this lowest one.

Luther, Commentary on Genesis, Vol. 5 220.

Henry Melchior Muhlenberg on doctrinal error

Henry Melchior Muhlenberg died on this date in 1787. Widely regarded as the father of American Lutheranism or at least its greatest early organizer and pastor, he founded many Lutheran congregations mostly in Pennsylvania. He helped to found the first Lutheran synod in America: The Pennsylvania Minsiterium. He was also instrumental in creating the first American Lutheran liturgy.

Here is something he wrote about confronting error in a a pastoral manner:

Error must be refuted. Since our church members dwell among all kinds of hostile sects, controversy cannot be avoided; yet you should not mention names. The matter should be so treated that the unholy founts of heresy and sectarianism are exposed with due humility and moderation. As many parties dwell together, intermarry, and have business relations with one another, a dangerous indifferentism easily arises. Therefore it is necessary at all times to point out [doctrinal] differences, as otherwise the suspicion of indifference may also fall upon the preacher. Carefully inquire into the moral condition of the members, and let it be a guide in the preparation of sermons. Above all, let us sow with tears, and have the edification of each individual at heart, and take heed unto ourselves and unto the doctrine."


Cited in William Keller Frick, Henry Melchior Muhlenberg:Patriarch of the Lutheran Church in America, Lutheran Publication Society, 1902, 92-93.

Soldiers of Christ

I have been taking part in a pericope study group with area pastors at Lenior Rhyne University. It has been very enjoyable and fruitful for study and sermon preparation. We take turns preparing short papers on the appointed lessons. Here is a bit from my work on the epistle lesson for 20 Pentecost, Series C, 2 Timothy 2: 1-13.



Paul goes on to point out to Timothy that the office he holds, the ministry of preaching and teaching the Gospel, is one of struggle and suffering and toil. He presents three pictures of that office to his young charge: soldier, athlete and farmer. Note that while there is a different emphasis in each image, central to all of them is struggle and labor and great effort. A soldier is faithful to the one who enlisted him, throwing all other concerns aside. An athlete is disciplined, competing “vomimws”, lawfully, according to the rules, adhering to the pattern of sound words given to him and exhibiting that godly life called forth by the Holy Spirit through that same Gospel. It is only the hardworking farmer who can expect the rewards and results of the harvest.

Central to Paul’s message to Timothy is the expectation of suffering. “Share in suffering as a good soldier of Christ Jesus” he says. And he then lifts up his own situation as a pattern for Timothy. Paul is suffering for the gospel of the risen Jesus Christ. He is in chained and bound yet that very Gospel for which he is suffering is not bound. That good deposit which he has given to Timothy brings with it suffering, imprisonment and persecution but it cannot be hindered. The circumstances of the preacher do not affect the course of the Gospel. We may be down hearted, discouraged, convinced of our failure, yet the Word triumphs still. While Paul is shackled, the message is not. Paul endures all things for the sake of the salvation of the elect so that they may obtain eternal glory. The preacher is a type of Christ who suffers so that the faithful may obtain salvation. He is not the Christ (his sufferings are not meritorious) but he follows in the footsteps of Christ. His life reflects that crucified life of the One whose death and resurrection is the one final sacrifice.

Memory work, uh, I mean distributed practice is back in fashion

So says the New York Times in this article.

BRTFSG, LOL, ICTHYS, BFF

Acronyms, they are taking over ...


Perhaps the perfect modern movie is the cult classic “Office Space”. The anti-hero, Peter, begins his working day with a dressing-down from a droning boss about forgetting to put the cover-sheets on his TPS reports. We never find out what a TPS report is. Nor do we have to; the name alone tells us all we need to know about the life seeping out of Peter’s days, three capital letters at a time.

Acronyms have become so prevalent that they suffer what anything does when coined without end: devaluation. “Oh, my God” still packs quite a punch in the right circumstances. “OMG”, by contrast, is barely effective as a plaything any more. (“OMG he’s cute.” “OMG is it ten already?”) LOL began life as “laughing out loud”, a way for internet chatterers to explain a long pause in typing. Now, LOL means “you just said something so amusing my lip curled for a moment there.” And how many BFFs will truly be best friends forever? Teens, with their habit of bleaching once-mighty words (from “awesome” to “fantastic”), can quickly render a coinage banal.


Read more ...

Heroic LCMS Pastor Saves Pope

Not for real but in a what looks like a unique and fun novel: Warrior Monk: A Pastor Stephen Grant Novel.

Here is the Amazon link.


Russ Saltzman describes it this way at First Thoughts:

Here is a fun adventure romp, a first novel by former Newsday columnist Ray Keating. Stephen Grant is an ex-CIA agent with notches on his pistol who, with a little bit of angst, turns his back on his secret life and becomes, get this, a pastor of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod.

We first meet Grant as he dispatches an opposing agent within the nave of a French Catholic church (because for discreet meetings between rival spies, the empty churches of Europe are ideal). Grant next shows up as pastor of St. Mary’s Lutheran Church on the east end of Long Island, where he slays an eco-terrorist who is trying to shoot choir members at rehearsal (not, from the description in the novel, that choir’s rendering of A Mighty Fortress didn’t give the effort some merit).

Well, after that, one thing sort of leads to another thing and pretty soon Pr. Grant saves the life of Pope Augustine from a knife-wielding priest shouting “apostate,” shares “decaffeinated black currant tea” thereafter with same (um, the pope, not the assailant), and at different stops along the way vanquishes liberal theologians, spars with arrogant media-types, and incidentally helps the Vatican advance an ecumenical initiative called “A Public Mission of Mere Christianity.” St. Mary’s, by the way, seems to be a parish that functions well in the pastor’s absence.

Somehow, honest, it all seems to hang together. This sort of protagonist, after all, is not entirely unknown. The “Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod pastor/member as hero” genre was introduced to American literature by Paul Maier, a present vice-president of the LCMS. He has previously introduced readers to Missouri Synod figures of sizable proportion. Of course, in the real world, there have been Missouri Synod pastors, former at any rate, who did once or twice take lunch in the papal apartment at the Vatican.

Oh. I said it hung together. It does, almost. While Pr. Grant does read Touchstone magazine regularly, apparently he has never heard of First Things. On this point, obviously Keating’s novel is, like, way, way removed from any plausible reality.

Suburbs and exurbs home to much religious diversity

That is the point of this little article on how much the religious scene has changed in the outskirts of our cities. Most of us have probably felt this already. Suburbs and rural areas that were once exclusively the home to Christian churches and mega-churches are now also the place for Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and other faiths.

Read "The Suburbanization of Religious Diversity" here.