Tolkien: Ogre Hotels

Even more alarming: goodness is itself bereft of its proper beauty. In Faerie one can indeed conceive of an ogre who possesses a castle as hideous as a nightmare (for the evil of the ogre wills it), but one cannot conceive of a house built with a good purpose - an inn, a hostel for travellers, the hall of a virtuous and noble king - that is yet sickeningly ugly. At the present day it would be rash to hope to see one that was not - unless it as built before our time.

JRR Tolkien, Tree and Leaf, p.65

Tolkien: Faerie and 'real life'

'On Fairy Stories' is a sometimes esoteric discussion of the subject - but towards the end of the essay JRRT turns his attention to the modern denunciation of the imagination. I really enjoyed this bit!

Not long ago - incredible though it may seem - I heard a clerk of Oxford declare that he 'welcomed' the proximity of mass-production robot factories, and the roar of self-obstructive mechanical traffic, because it brought his university into 'contact with real life'. He may have meant that the way men were living and working in the twentieth century was increasing in barbarity at an alarming rate, and that the loud demonstration of this in the streets of Oxford might serve as a warning that it is not possible to preserve for long an oasis of sanity in a desert of unreason by mere fences, without actual offensive action (practical and intellectual). I fear he did not. In any case the expression 'real life' in this context seems to fall short of academic standards. The notion that motor cars are more 'alive' than, say, centaurs or dragons is curious; that they are more 'real' than, say, horses is pathetically absurd. How real, how startlingly alive is a factory chimney compared with an elm tree: poor obselete thing, insubstantial dream of an escapist!

For my part, I cannot convince myself that the roof of Bletchley Station is more 'real' than the clouds. And as an artefact I find it less inspiring than the legendary dome of heaven. The bridge to platform 4 is to me less interesting than Bifrost guarded by Heimdall with the Gjallarhorn. From the wildness of my heart I cannot exclude the question whether railway-engineers, if they had been brought up on more fantasy, might have done better with all their abundant means than they commonly do. Fairy-stories might be, I guess, better Masters of Arts than the academic person I have referred to.

Much that he (I must suppose) and others (certainly) would call 'serious' literature is no more than play under a glass roof by the side of a municipal swimming bath. Fairy tales may invent monsters that fly the air or dwell in the deep, but at least they do not try to escape from heaven or the sea.

JRR Tolkien, Tree and Leaf, p.62-63

the year of living sabbathly

Part of an interview with AJ Jacobs, author of The Year of Living Biblically:

What did taking a Sabbath do for you?

I had been a workaholic, so I would work 24 hours a day. The first thing I would do when I woke up was check my Blackberry. The Sabbath is a great thing, because the Bible is saying you can't work. You can't check e-mail. You have to spend the day with your family. It's a real smell-the-roses type of day. I found it to be a day for joy, for just really reconnecting with my life and realizing that work is not everything. I loved it, but it was a huge struggle. I had to do it in stages. I still practice the Sabbath now. I'm Jewish, so I do it on Saturday. It's a day where I spend time with the family and refuse to work.

CT Leadership 8/4/08
http://www.christianitytoday.com/le/2008/001/18.17.html

Bilbo's walking song

The Road goes ever on and on

Down from the door where it began.

Now far ahead the Road has gone,

And I must follow, if I can,

Pursuing it with eager feet,

Until it joins some larger way

Where many paths and errands meet.

And whither then? I cannot say.

Keller: Gospel

I'm reading The Reason for Belief, but not blogging from it for the same reason it is difficult to blog from CSL: 50% of the book would end up on the blog, and that's overdoing it a bit. But here is one paragraph that really struck me:

When my own personal grasp of the gospel was very weak, my self-view swung wildly between two poles. When I was performing up to my standards - in academic work, professional achievement, or relationships - I felt confident but not humble. I was likely to be proud and unsympathetic to failing people. When I was not living up to my standards, I felt humble but not confident, a failure. I discovered, however, that the gospel contained the resources to build a unique identity. In Christ I could know I was accepted by grace not only despite my flaws, but because I was willing to admit them. The Christian gospel is that I am so flawed that Jesus had to die for me, yet I am so loved and valued that Jesus was glad to die for me. this leads to deep humility and deep confidence at the same time. it undermines both swaggering and snivelling. I cannot feel superior to anyone, and yet I have nothing to prove to anyone. I do not think more of myself nor less of myself. Instead I think of myself less. I don't need to notice myself - how I am doing, how I'm being regarded - so often.

p181.

Dawn: subjective

...emotions are not best addressed by focussing on cosy feelings into which all worship participants may not be able to enter. Instead let us convey glorious and wonderful truths to which we might all respond with genuine emotions of our own. Subjectivities cannot be shared; telling you about my feelings will not bring about the same feelings in you. Only if I tell you what aroused my feelings can you respond to that same stimulus with subjective reactions of your own.

Dawn p175.

Persecution & silence

This raises significant questions: Where is God when millions of his children are being persecuted in the most brutal ways? Why does he keep silent in the middle of persecution but speak loudly in the middle of conferences with famous speakers and worship bands? I have prayed many times like Luther: "Bless us, Lord, even curse us! But don't remain silent!"

This reality forces us to take another look at what Paul means in Romans 8:28 by "our good." If our good is a stable, safe, healthy, happy, and reasonably wealthy middle-class life, then logically one can conclude that God really does not work for the good of the largest portion of the global church today.

Ziya Meral

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2008/march/29.41.html

More figures

In a 2007 edition of the New Oxford Review, Dr. A. Patrick Schneider II, who holds boards in family and geriatric medicine and runs a private practice in Lexington, Kentucky, did a statistical analysis of cohabitation in America, based on the findings of a number of academic resources. Here are five conclusions Schneider draws from his studies:

Relationships are unstable in cohabitation. One-sixth of cohabiting couples stay together for only three years; one in ten survives five or more years.

Cohabiting women often end up with the responsibilities of marriage—particularly when it comes to caring for children—without the legal protection. Research has also found that cohabiting women contribute more than 70 percent of the relationship's income.

Cohabitation brings a greater risk of sexually transmitted diseases, because cohabiting men are four times more likely to be unfaithful than husbands.

Poverty rates are higher among cohabitors. Those who share a home but never marry have 78 percent less wealth than the continuously married.

Those who suffer most from cohabitation are the children. The poverty rate among children of cohabiting couples is fivefold greater than the rate among children in married-couple households. Children ages 12–17 with cohabiting parents are six times more likely to exhibit emotional and behavioral problems and 122 percent more likely to be expelled from school.

source: A. Patrick Schneider II, "Cohabitation is bad for men, worse for women, and horrible for children," www.lifesite.net (10-4-07), reprinted from an original article in the New Oxford Review
http://preachingtoday.com/illustrations/weekly/08-03-10/10031008.html

Marriage figures

One of the common myths about marriage in America is that "50 percent of all marriages end in divorce." But that figure is derived, not from long-term analysis, but from the fact that the raw number of new divorces each year is roughly 50 percent of the raw number of new marriages. These numbers are distorted by the fact that people with successful marriages usually marry only once, while people with failed marriages have often married and divorced multiple times.

Fortunately, new data from pollster George Barna included a more meaningful statistic. Of all Americans who have ever married, only one-third have ever been divorced. This two-to-one ratio of marital success should encourage young people who may actually fear the "50-50" marriage myth.

Another misconception is that a person's religion and values have nothing to do with marital success. Barna found that the percentage of people who have been divorced after marrying is lower among Catholics, evangelicals and conservatives than it is among non-Christians and liberals. That's not to mention the fact that more born-again Christians (84%) have been married in the first place than atheists and agnostics (65%).

from Pastor's Weekly Briefing, April 4th 2008

NTW: reclaiming God's time

The church that takes seriously the fact that Jesus is Lord of all will not just celebrate quietly every time we write the date on a letter or document, will not just set aside Sunday as far as humanly and socially possible as a celebration of God's new creation, will not just seek to order its own life in an appropriate rhythm of worship and work. Such a church will also seek to bring wisdom to the rhythms of work in offices and shops, in local government, in civic holidays, and in the shaping of public life. These things cannot be taken for granted. The enormous shifts during my lifetime, from the whole town observing Good Friday and Easter, to those great days being simply more occasions for football matches and yet more televised reruns of old movies, are indices of what happens when a society loses its roots and drifts with prevailing social currents. The reclaiming of time as God's good gift (as opposed to time as simply a commodity to be spent for one's own benefit, which often means fresh forms of slavery for others) is not an extra to the church's mission. It is central.

NT Wright, http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2008/april/13.36.html?start=3

Dawn: Narcissism & Community

Narcissism in parishes is both a cause and a result of community deterioration. Because churches are not truly communities, many believers seek fulfilment elsewhere. I share Arthur Just's conviction that "if a renewal of biblical theology allows the people of God to see themselves as first and foremost as a community of saints, then they will no longer tolerate metaphors of their life that reflects the individualism of today's culture which has become pervasive in their lives".

Dawn, p134.

Dawn: Memory

Research studies show that the earliest memories are retained longest in people's minds. How important it is, then, to fill children's memories with hymns, songs, prayers, Scripture verses, and creeds!

I want to emphasise this point doubly because of my own experiences with chronic illness and life-threatening crises. Last year a retinal haemorrhage in my good eye made reading barely possible only for very short periods with a double set of magnifiers. During seven months of near blindness, I thanked God constantly for my 8 years at a Lutheran elementary/junior high school, during which I memorised hundreds of hymn verses and passages of the Bible. This background enables me to participate almost fully in worship even when I cannot see the words. In times when I have been near to death, those songs and texts have flooded my brain and brought enormous comfort and strength.

In crises, old age, blindness, or other infirmities, our faith and hope continue to be nurtured by what we have stored in our memories.

Dawn, p.120.

Liberal cynicism

...I return to my dreary classroom, populated, it often seems, by under educated but deeply committed Phi Beta Kappa ideologues - leftists who believe in class warfare but have never opened Das Kapital and certainly have never perused Werner Sombart, hard-line capitalists who accept the inerrancy of the invisible hand but have never studied Adam Smith, third-generation feminists who know that sex roles are a trap but have never read Betty Freidan, social Darwinists who propose leaving the poor to sink or swim but have never heard of Herbert Spencer or William Sumner's essay on The Challenge of the Facts, black separatists who mutter bleakly about institutional racism but are unaware of the work of Carmichael and Hamilton, who invented the term - all of them our students, all of them hopelessly young and hopelessly smart and thus hopelessly sure they alone are right, and nearly all of whom, whatever their espoused differences, will soon be espoused to huge law firms, massive profit factories where they will bill clients at ridiculous rates for 2000 hours of work every year, quickly earning twice as much money as the best of their teachers, and at half the age, sacrificing all on the altar of career, moving relentlessly upward, as ideology and family life collapse equally around them, and at last arriving, a decade or two later, cynical and bitter, at their cherished career goals, partnerships, professorships, judgeships, whatever kind of ships they dream of sailing, and then looking around at the angry, empty waters and realising they have arrived with nothing, absolutely nothing, and wondering what to do with the rest of their wretched lives.

Or maybe I am just measuring their prospects by my own.

Stephen L Carter, The Emperor of Ocean Park, p.109

One bit of Bible

This approach of focusing on one specific passage in counseling settings is one I learned from my friend David Powlison, articulated in his article “Think Globally, Act Locally.” He writes,

In a nutshell, connect one bit of Scripture to one bit of life. In other words, always ask two questions for yourself and others: What is your current struggle? What about God in Christ connects to this? … Apply one relevant thing from our Redeemer to one significant scene in this person’s story. Bring one bit of Bible to one bit of life. You can’t say it all at once. (The Journal of Biblical Counseling, Fall 2003, p. 3)

Well, you cannot and should not say it all at once, but that hasn’t stopped me from trying in the past! My impulse is to help others by downloading as much information as possible. But I’ve learned this is not wise and really unhelpful. Those we counsel can contemplate and apply a limited amount of information, so in caring for their souls—and especially in the immediate situation—I want to provide counsel they can easily consider and remember. And that’s where David’s wisdom proves so valuable.

In these situations, we must restrain the impulse to bury others under vast amounts of theological information.

CJ Mahaney
http://www.sovereigngraceministries.org/Blog/post/Shifting-Ground-Finding-Joy-in-Adversity.aspx

Deserving Poland

That little whisper - "You deserve it" - comes, I believe, from the worst part of our sinful natures, the part that always wants another cookie, a bigger house, a nicer TV. I'm pretty sure it's the same voice that told Hitler he "deserved" Poland.

Phil Vischer, Me, Myself, and Bob p215-216

Psalms of darkness

The use of theses 'psalms of darkness' may be judged by the world to be acts of unfaith and failure, but for the trusting community, their use is an act of bold faith, albeit a transformed faith. It is an act of bold faith on the one hand, because it insists that the world must experienced as it really is and not in some pretended way. On the other hand, it is bold because it insists that all such experiences of disorder are a proper subject for discourse with God. There is nothing out of bounds, nothing precluded or inappropriate. Everything properly belongs in this conversation of the heart. To withhold parts of life from that conversation is in fact to withhold part of life from the sovereignty of God. Thus these psalms make the important connection; everything must be brought to speech, and everything brought to speech must be addressed to God, who is the final reference for all life...

Walter Brueggemann, The message of the Psalms, quoted in Dawn p.92

Veggie suicide

Read this a while ago I realised I should post it here in case the original post ever vanished.

In spite of all my best efforts at self-destruction, I have been told by others that I somehow managed to be a fairly decent father to my children. Even today, that provides me with some small comfort when I look back on the Federally declared disaster area that my life had been. I guess my main reason for even trying to be a good dad was so my offspring would have it better than I did. I wanted them to be smarter than I was, richer than I was, and healthier than I was.

Most of all, I didn't want to see either of them where I was going.

I guess that is why I broke down and bought the Veggie Tales Silly Songs VHS tape from the Christian book store that was across the hall from the dry cleaners where my wife worked. That, and it was on the bargain table. Whatever. My daughter loved it and that was all the endorsement I ever needed. Slowly, I acquired every title in the Veggie Tales series, first on VHS, then again on DVD, and I have never had a reason to regret it.

My wife and I have both lived by the motto that only a totally unfit parent does not know what their children are watching on TV. So, naturally, I have seen every single Veggie Tales episode over and over again and each one (except for Esther, The Star of Christmas, and An Easter Carol) ends with Bob the Tomato and Larry the Cucumber telling us that "God made us special. And he loves us very much."

Bob the Tomato is voiced by a man named Phil Vischer, who is also the co-founder and CEO of the company that makes the videos. Sometimes on the tapes, but more often on the DVDs, he would come on and talk. Mostly he would talk about upcoming shows, but sometimes about why he started the company and about his faith. That really bugged me.

It bugged me that he was so certain about God's existence, God's love, and God's plan for all of us that I wanted to fast forward through his talking. But I never did. I let him talk because he was talking to my kids, teaching them something I never could have at the time. It didn't take me long to hear that same certainty come through the little CGI tomato at the end of each show. That's when I started to get angry.

I actually wanted to punch a tomato in the face.

About two months before my decision to end my life, I knew why: I was jealous of Bob the Tomato. I wanted his certainty. I wanted his confidence. I wanted to experience the same love he was experiencing and it was making me furious to the point where I almost stopped watching the shows with my kids. I say almost because they had become my children's favorite shows by now and I wanted to cherish each moment I had with them, because I had decided on some level that they would be my last, so I had to watch the shows.

When I had decided to take the final step, I was desperate for someone to stop me. Clever me, for having made sure that my children were at school and my wife was at work. I am not going to flatter myself by saying that I hit rock bottom, but I could definitely see it from my seat on the roller coaster and I was going straight down. The only other thing that I saw, and heard, was a stupid little tomato telling me over and over again that 'God had made me special and He loves me very much.'

Really? He loves me? Even after all the stupid stuff I had done, God still loves me?

I had to know, so I went on my knees and asked Him. He answered.

I read somewhere once that sometimes angels have the faces of strangers. Another time I read that they have the faces of kids. Now I know for a fact that sometimes angels have faces of tomatoes.

God bless you, Bob.

Cliff


(original post:
http://cliffslnf.blogspot.com/2007/09/why-blog-iii-tomatoes.html)

Vischer: kid's media values

By the mid-1990s, the media industry had consolidated so aggressively that the vast majority of children's entertainment was controlled by just three companies - Viacom, Time Warner, and Disney. Each employing more than 50,000 people, these companies were now so large that one industry analyst described working with them as more like working with nation-states than companies. The problem with these giant, publicly traded goliaths isn't that they are immoral, but rather that they are profoundly amoral. They are valueless. They are simply too big to focus on any specific value system or moral code, and instead must be all things to all people. So Warner Brothers sells Bugs Bunny with one hand and Snoop Doggy Dog with the other. Viacom sells Blue's Clues with one hand and MTV with the other. Disney sells Mickey Mouse with one hand and Desperate Housewives with the other. We're not talking about companies in the business of selling blenders or farm implements here; we're talking about companies in the business of selling images and ideas - the business of influencing beliefs. And each is valueless! Why do they sell good values to preschoolers? Because there is money in it. Why do they sell lousy values to the same kids ten years later? Because there is money in it. When faced with the choice between doing what is beneficial and doing what is profitable, these companies choose profitable every time. Their shareholders require it.

I sat at a media conference in New York and listened to Viacom chairman Sumner Redstone explain to a roomful of Wall Street analysts how he intended to hook kids with Blue's Clues, then lead them through Nikelodeon straight to MTV. When I passed the eighty-year-old billionaire in the men's room a few minutes after his speech, I noticed how small he was. I could take him, I thought to myself. not for the fun of it of course, but for the sake of America's kids. The world's kids.

I decided that probably wasn't the solution God had in mind.

Phil Vischer, Me, Myself and Bob, p.144-145

Stott on miracles

IS NOT the most helpful way to approach the gospel miracles to place them within the familiar and inescapable tension between the already and the not yet, kingdom come and kingdom coming, the new age inaugurated and the new age consummated? To the skeptical (who doubt all miracles), I want to say "but already we have tasted the powers of the age to come." To the credulous (who think that healing miracles are an everyday occurrence), I want to say "but not yet have we been given resurrection bodies free from disease, pain, infirmity, handicap, and death.

John R. W. Stott, Evangelical Essentials

Don't make worship useful

An emphasis on what we "get out" of a worship service - above all, that we feel good about ourselves - displaces the theocentric praise of God with anthropocentric utilitarianism. Since the worship of God is an end in itself, "making worship useful destroys it, because this introduces an ulterior motive for praise. And ulterior motives mean manipulation, taking charge of the relationship, thereby turning the relation between Creator and creature upside down."

Dawn (quoting Keck), p88.