BHT Josh on the exegesis industry
No matter how trivial, simple, and painless a saying of Jesus might be, there is always someone out there with a complicated theological justification for why we should do the exact opposite of what Jesus said.
Another flat-earther
No smoking hot spot | The Australian
I am the rocket scientist who wrote the carbon accounting
model (FullCAM) that measures Australia’s compliance with the Kyoto
Protocol, in the land use change and forestry sector……There is no evidence to support the idea that carbon emissions cause significant global warming. None.
“But we have editors”
This is not so important for its subject matter as for the pattern it illustrates: professional journalists cannot be trusted to report something any more accurately than, say, people picked at random from your own phone book.
Sketchbook: Lilac
Quick sketch while sitting on my front porch on a Saturday morning. The text work pretty much sucks, but the foliage itself is not bad for negative space technique and 15 minutes with a brush and no preliminary sketch. If I do say so.
Krauthammer
I just want to go on record as a devotee of Charles Krauthammer.
Fathers are jovial and open-handed
I’m sorry to seem like a fanboy of Doug Wilson’s, but basically, I am. This is ostensibly about food, but read and think about parenting in general, and specifically Christian parenting of the strict sort. The function of the father is to GIVE. The level of his giving is what distinguishes him from a sperm-donor.
What are fathers called to? Fathers give. Fathers protect. Fathers bestow. Fathers yearn and long for the good of their children. Fathers delight. Fathers sacrifice. Fathers are jovial and open-handed. Fathers create abundance, and if lean times come they take the leanest portion themselves and create a sense of gratitude and abundance for the rest. Fathers love birthdays and Christmas because it provides them with yet another excuse to give some more to the kids. When fathers say no, as good fathers do from time to time, it is only because they are giving a more subtle gift, one that is a bit more complicated than a cookie. They must include among their gifts things like self-control and discipline and a work ethic, but they are giving these things, not taking something else away just for the sake of taking. Fathers are not looking for excuses to say no. Their default mode is not no.
The canard that is frequently applied to the Puritans does not apply to the historical Puritans, but it does apply to a certain kind of dour, pinched personality. This is the kind of person who says that God is up in heaven, looking down on us, trying to find someone who is having a good time. When he finds such a one, He tells him to stop it right now. H.L. Mencken defined puritanism as the haunting fear that somehow, somewhere, someone might be happy. That is, as I said, a slander on the Puritans, but there is a kind of person that it does apply to. That kind of person fills up the lives of others with “this is bad for you,” “so is that,” and “so is this,” and “that too over there.” I ache for children growing up in such homes, not because they are “eating healthy” (because they usually aren’t which is another subject), but because the spiritual environment is so unhealthy. What statement is being made in all this about fatherhood and provision? The kids grow up in “a garden,” but not the Father’s kind where all the trees are permitted but one. They grow up in something called a garden, where all the trees but one are forbidden, and the one that is allowed grows ricecake-like globules that taste like bits of styrofoam glued together in a nutrient ball. And so the children are surrounded by delightful fruit that their father could afford, but refuses to provide them, and which other kids get to eat freely. They have a father who does not provide, although he could, which means that he must not want to. They have a father who does not provide, who does not bestow, who does not overflow. They come to think that God the Father is like that, and they conclude that they must not be worth very much. That sense of guilt for just existing carries over into adulthood, and they then do the same thing to their kids. We need more guilt over sin, and a lot less guilt over breathing, maintaining a temperature of 98.6, and needing a certain amount of glucose for the brain. Slandering the character of God is one of the sins we need to reject as sin. There are people who need to start feeling guilty for feeling guilty all the time, if you follow me here.
Such folks still need to have a father who delights in them objectively. They need a father who delights in them the way Joseph delighted in Benjamin, by heaping up his plate. But with a lot of these people, that’s not going to happen any time soon. How many children in Christian homes think that the universe is governed by a pinched, censorious face because that is the face that is presented to them? Many Christian parents need to confront the fact that they are no fun at all, and that when the kids show up at dinner for their gruel such a dinner is a fitting metaphor for what is going on everywhere else in that home.
The prodigal son famously veered off into excess. The older brother was a dutiful fusser. The yearning father was the one who had kept the fatted calf for just such an occasion as this return, and directed that it be prepared for his wayward son, now repentant. Did the returning prodigal really need to go to another party? Yes, apparently he did, but it needed to happen in his father’s house.
the Trinity: that friendship reifies the self
Feuerbach wrote that the Trinity “is the secret of the necessity of the ‘thou’ for an ‘I’; it is the truth that no being – be it man, God, mind or ego – is for itself alone a true, perfect, and absolute being, that truth and perfection are only the connection and unity of beings equal in their essence. The highest and last principle of philosophy is, therefore, the unity of men with men.”
Owen Barfield on the language of poetry
Leithart quoting Barfield. Bold is mine.
leithart.com » Blog Archive » Technical terms
They express, as nearly as any word can do, a concrete, particular thing, and not an abstract, generalized idea. . . .it may be worth pointing out here an instinctive tendency in poets, and others, to use general term of things which they are ignorant of or despise, or in which they can discern no poetic value, and particular – even technical – terms of things which really inspire them. Love is the begetter of intimate knowledge; for what we love it is not tedious, but delightful, to observe minutely.”
He continues: “No genuine lover of poetry and of words can pick up a book on, say, Botany or Metallurgy, and read of spores and capsules and lanceolate leaves, or pearly and adamantine lustres, without feeling poetically enriched by that section of the new vocabulary which actually impinges on his own present consciousness of Nature. Nor can he even listen to a circle of enthusiasts – sailors, golfers, wireless men, actors, and the like – riding, as they do, their special hobby-horses idiomatically over all departments of life, without being delighted, without being frappe (for a short time only) by the result.”
Your Child is Your Own D*** Fault
There is something counterintuitive here, something that fathers with problem children must embrace as the first step out. However much your child’s behavior is displeasing you, you have to come to grips with the fact that the behavior is something which, at some level, you have required of him. This is another way of saying that the first step out is confession, not accusation. If your child is your adversary, then make your accusations. But if your child is still your child, then the place to begin is confession. You don’t have to confess how you required this of him (because you don’t know that yet), but you should confess to God as sin the fact that you did require this of him.
