Talking about creativity
Creation ex-nihilo implies that it is impossible to talk about the creative process. You can stand outside it and talk about appearances, but you can’t stand inside it and talk about it. Creation has an inherently apophatic element.
Tim’s Credo
Some people read things I’ve written and may miss the irony, sarcasm, or some other tone. They wonder if I’ve become a zen jedi druid or something. For the record and for anyone who cares, here is what I believe until another memo is officially issued:
I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible.
And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds; God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God; begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father, by whom all things were made.
Who, for us men and for our salvation, came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the virgin Mary, and was made man; and was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate; He suffered and was buried; and the third day He rose again, according to the Scriptures; and ascended into heaven, and sits on the right hand of the Father; and He shall come again, with glory, to judge the quick and the dead; whose kingdom shall have no end.
And I believe in the Holy Ghost, the Lord and Giver of Life; who proceeds from the Father and the Son; who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified; who spoke by the prophets.
And I believe one holy catholic and apostolic Church. I acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins; and I look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Amen.
I was tempted to say “any questions?” but then remembered that I don’t actually care about all the questions beyond this. I spent decades achieving this level of apathy and would not go back for anything. I haven’t the slightest interest in thinking outside this box.
Corporate Entropies
The first step downward loses all that is distinctly human. So the person, experiencing entropy, deteriorates first into a machine. So also, any organization of persons deteriorates, first, into a bureaucracy. And often intentionally.
Bureaucratic features in an organization are usually the result of attempts to elevate outcomes by standardizing procedures. If you’ve been any kind of manager, you know how necessary this feels as you try to cope with the idiocy of lazy workers. You must — must! — build a machine. Just make sure you give the workers who want to remain human an approved pathway to subvert your own machine.
A stray thought about laziness: most laziness in a service company is not in the form of a reluctance to work. It is, rather, in the form of a reluctance to treat customers like humans. The lazy people on the front lines of your company will actually LOVE to work by doing all the impersonal processes that constitute their jobs. When they have to step outside the machine to make an encounter truly human, that takes more energy in 5 minutes than the previous 7 hours 55 minutes took.
So, when I wrote “lazy” you may have thought it an odd word choice, but “lazy” is actually the accurate term for “hiding behind policy and procedure”.
“All this fairy gold” (attributed to Raymond Chandler)
No doubt I have learned a lot from Hollywood. Please do not think I
completely despise it, because I don’t. The best proof of that may be
that every producer I have worked for I would work for again, and every
one of them, in spite of my tantrums, would be glad to have me. But the
overall picture, as the boys say, is of a degraded community whose
idealism even is largely fake. The pretentiousness, the bogus
enthusiasm, the constant drinking and drabbing, the incessant
squabbling over money, the all-pervasive agent, the strutting of the
big shots (and their usually utter incompetence to achieve anything
they start out to do), the constant fear of losing all this fairy gold
and being the nothing they have really never ceased to be, the snide
tricks, the whole damn mess is out of this world. It is a great subject
for a novel — probably the greatest still untouched. But how to do it
with a level mind, that’s the thing that baffles me. It is like one of
these South American palace revolutions conducted by officers in comic
opera uniforms — only when the thing is over the ragged dead men lie in
rows against the wall, and you suddenly know that this is not funny,
this is a Roman circus, and damn near the end of civilization.(source unknown)
Bring the toddlers to the Word (Douglas Wilson)
Pastor Wilson speaks for those of us who think that “seeker sensitive” started in “children’s church” and ends in Ipod Church, where every person just downloads their own church service and plays it into their ear buds.
Many years ago we made the decision to disband our children’s church and nursery, and go to a system of parents training their little ones to worship with us. We have cry room, and so on, but the intent is to have our children grow up into the worship of God. We have had many reasons to rejoice in that decision, and we don’t regret it at all.
At the same time, the point of this exhortation is to let you parents know that we know how much work you do, and to encourage you in it. It is good work, work that will bear fruit for many years, over many generations. It is sometimes easy to lose sight of the long view, especially if you have five children under the age of seven, and all of them are squirmy. It is easy to lose sight of that when you haven’t heard more than ten minutes of a sermon at a time in three years, and you wonder if you will ever be able to listen to a sermon again.
But the life of Christ is not best represented by listening to a lecture, undistracted by anything. The life of Christ is pulled in many directions, just like you are being, and you are willing for this to happen so that your children may come to worship the Lord. Laying it down for someone else this way is our glory. It is a sacrifice to bring them to the Word, to the psalms, to the wine and to the bread.
So don’t measure what you get out of these worship services with carnal balances. The weight of glory you are carrying is far beyond the weight of toddlers in your lap.
“Vanished on the altar of therapy” (Victor Davis Hanson)
Works and Days » Ten Random, Politically Incorrect Thoughts
The K-12 public education system is essentially wrecked. No longer can any professor expect an incoming college freshman to know what Okinawa, John Quincy Adams, Shiloh, the Parthenon, the Reformation, John Locke, the Second Amendment, or the Pythagorean Theorem is. An entire American culture, the West itself, its ideas and experiences, have simply vanished on the altar of therapy.
Fatherlessness
This generation of evangelicals really is fatherless and adrift. They know that, they ache over it, they cannot pretend not to know it, but they have no intention of turning back to their fathers. And that means repentance has not yet been given.
– Douglas Wilson, reviewing The Shack.
Evangelicals have lost fatherhood, because they lost husband-hood, because they denied gender. You can have “parents” all day without gender, but not “fathers” and “mothers”. The fact is that evangelicals are EMBARRASSED by Paul’s clear assumption that men and women have different functions, within marriage, in parenting, and in general. Evangelicals are MORTIFIED by Paul on gender.
You can’t have fathers when the two spouses cannot be differentiated in their gifts. And we can’t have such differentiation because it leads inexorably to functional hierarchy, which we cannot have, because we know it is not true (it does not match our EXPERIENCE). So, evangelical exegetes routinely tell us that any NT text which seems to reflect marital hierarchy actually means… the opposite.
We actually still have motherhood, but fatherhood has been re-defined…as the same thing as motherhood. So fathers are nothing more in the life of the child than stand-in and second-rate mothers.
Evangelical women have been relieved to hear their secular sisters have been right — and previous generations of believers wrong — about the misogyny of the New Testament. They get the salvation part but none of those pesky careless moments where the writers lose touch with God and lapse into telling us how to live — er, “law” and / or “cultural prejudice”.
So when men and women live together as married people they submit to each other, which is harmless, because there is no female or male role — just a common vague practicum we can regularly confess together our mutual and equal failure at.
The generation gap is because of weak parents. All parenting is weak which includes no distinctively MALE parenting. Weak fathers were first weak men. And we are weak because we threw away biblical authority, because it said some practical things we thought insulted our dignity.
Congratulations, evangelical women. You have your dignity. Use it to solve your befuddlement that your children laugh at your authority, and see how far you can define normalcy down.
see also this.
The Audacity
If Sarah Palin had just killed Trig in the womb then no leftist in the world would mind her standing near some dying turkeys.
“There is a brilliantly worded explanation for this.”
CЯЦISIИG DOШИ ТНЕ СОДST OF THE HIGH БДЯБДЯEE
“Lots of people are secure in their religious beliefs using rationale akin to, “There is a brilliantly worded explanation for this.” The problem is that mutually exclusive beliefs can all claim this. I Either every belief with such an explanation is truly a reasonable thing to believe, or absolutely unreasonable things can be brilliantly defended to the point where our minds think them sane and reasonable. Another problem I have been running to, especially as I discuss religion with others, is that I have noticed pagan Hindus and heathen Muslims are just as capable of brilliant religious philosophy as we are. Not being of the disposition to find Christ hiding anonymously in the heart of every intelligent person, or Trinitarian theology lurking beneath the leaves of every eloquently written text, it has made me ask why we as a race are capable of so brilliantly deceiving ourselves. And the fact is that even if the Lutheran or the Catholic is right, then the Hindu is brilliantly and eloquently self-deceived, as much as a man who has absolutely convinced himself using the most brilliant arguments that the sun orbits the Earth.I suggest that we humans are much more easily amused than we give ourselves credit for. A vast system of thought is like a room filled with shiny toys. If the system is vast enough, has enough complicated trains of reason, enough technical definitions, and at least occasionally lifts itself into the poetic, our minds will stay occupied with it and therefore amused by it. As long as the mind is occupied and engaged, it believes and accepts. This is even more true when set in the context of a religion with its various practices, rules and rites. Our whole selves are engaged, making our beliefs appear that much more true to us, as long as we don’t entertain too often the idea that someone else might be equally engaged by an opposite religion. That someone else might have just as total a foundation to his own belief is a little too much for us, so we go back to playing with our shiny toys and imagine that ours is the only such room in the world.
We are leaves floating on the wind.”
Do you see what I see, little lamb?
Since the world was broken, can I trust beauty — or am I Eve? Do I pronounce the pasture-scape “good” just because it is? Or am I Eve, I say; am I forgetting, in the instant act of seeing, something mysterious that God told me to do when He first woke me?
November sings carols again for my 52nd time. For my 52nd time I am preached the gospel of the coming Child by the spitting snow and the huddled hawk. Do I sing along with abandon, or do I refuse to be distracted by the signs in the stars, distracted from my twilit watch for some ghostly and stern pilgrim, who will turn in passing and scold me: “I go to Jerusalem, to be crucified.”
