several things

The blog is dead. Long live the blog.

2010-02-03T05:59:00.005-06:00

The first thing you should know is: this post has been sitting in a Word document for a couple of weeks now.

The second thing you should know is: I wrote the above note at the same time I wrote this post because I knew I wouldn’t be able to let this go easily.

And lastly:

In the fall of 2004 I was twenty-three years old. I was a recent college graduate unable to find a real job, supporting myself primarily with the meager funds I made playing music, and, shamefully, by accepting the occasional C-note from my dad.

And I’m pretty sure I was depressed.

Now, I don’t mean depressed as in “sad.” I’m pretty sure it was the real deal, a full-blown existential crisis. At least it had most of the symptoms: Long periods of solitude and introspection that always ended with me concluding that I was a useless waste of space. Moping. Moodiness. Bitterness. Bitchiness. Irrationality. Being short-tempered and rude to my friends and family. Basically the only depression-related symptoms I didn’t show were promiscuity and drug/alcohol abuse.

Aside from being a musician (which I pretty much already was), the only thing in the world I wanted to be was a writer. This was not a new revelation. I had wanted that since I was a kid. Throughout elementary school I kept notebooks filled with stories. When my third grade teacher gave us blank hardbacks to write and illustrate our own books, I wrote two--one for the assignment, and a sequel. Mrs. Knight’s English class my senior year of high school settled it for me--both the class itself and her parting words to me on my last day of school: “I want a copy of your first book.”

I can say now what I didn’t dare say five years ago: I pursued an English degree so that I could be a writer. However, I had to learn what I already knew--degrees don’t make writers. It’s not a job you just go apply for. The summer after graduating from college beat this realization into me. By the fall of that year, I found myself in a very weird place, with scattered pages and piles of writing, no goals for the future, and only the vaguest of hopes that I would end up doing something besides fabricating errands and driving loops around town just to be out of the house.

All of that taken into account, the series of events and attitudes that lead to the creation of this blog were:

desire to write; desire to have that writing read; depression/anxiety; new laptop as a college graduation gift; high-speed Internet connection at the rent house I moved into with my two friends/bandmates; the discovery of a free weblog service

So I signed up and Several Things was born. I found it cathartic to not only vent in writing, but to publish that writing on the Internet where other people could (potentially) read it. I had things to say and I wanted people to read and respond to them. I wrote about everything that crossed my mind--rants, pleas, essays, stories, poems; most of it nonsense, and most of it sickeningly solipsistic. As sad as it sounds, during a time when I was at my loneliest and angriest, writing on this blog made me feel like I was a part of the world.

But a lot has changed in five years, and I don’t feel that way anymore.

I enjoy reading blogs, but I have noticed that, aside from the rare exception, successful blogs are written by people in public positions where others want to hear what they have to say--pastors, theologians, editors, agents, established writers, musicians, etc. Their blogs are widely read because there is an existing demand for that particular blogger’s insight, opinion, and expertise. In addition, their blogs are focused, providing information or commentary on one topic or field of interest.

Of course I have no fan base, and my blog has never had any focus or real purpose other than to serve as a public journal of sorts. In fact, it pains me to read some of the older content. I’m embarrassed not just that it’s on the Internet, but that it ever came out of my mouth in the first place. This is especially true of some of my religious ponderings from back in the day when I embodied the cliché of the pompous, generally pissed twenty-something, ripping everybody a new one without a clue as to what my own convictions were. I suppose it could be argued that writing such things helped me work through problems by articulating what was on my mind, which I guess it did, but that brings me to my next problem: Writing in order to help yourself think is one thing; doing it in public is another.

This blog has benefited me personally in a number of ways. It has served as a scrapbook of sorts over the last five years. Etched into each post is my state of mind and soul at the time it was written. Since the blog gave me an ostensibly legitimate reason to write, I have often used it to flesh out my thinking on theology, family, social issues, and other things that are important to me. It has even been the origin of a handful of essays that were published at Relevant Magazine’s website, or as columns in the Richland Beacon.

I have kept this blog because I love to write, but lately as social media has gained ground in its takeover of the human soul, and its outlets have turned from tools of communication to soapboxes for self-exaltation and promotion, I have found that bearing my brain up here for whomever to see has been more troubling than cathartic. I feel like the guy in class who nobody likes, always eager to share his asinine opinion on every topic. The last thing I want to be is one more voice in a chorus of whiners, or one more shout in an angry mob. Nor do I want to be seen as self-important and self-promoting.

After pondering all of the above problems and tensions, I have kept coming back to one solution, a cure-all for both the narcissism that causes me to put stuff up here, and my bad feelings about no one reading it: Kill the blog.

It is time to hang it up.

I won’t be taking the site down, only abstaining from it. I may chime in from time to time with the occasional baby episode (which I intend to keep writing regardless), and I will continue to keep the Matt Chandler Resources page up to date. As for writing in general, I’m going to put my time and energy into other things. If I feel the occasional need to vent I’ll just keep it in the journal and remember that I’ve been writing for my own benefit this whole time anyway.

Goodbye.

2666: The Collective Unconscious

2010-01-28T05:24:00.005-06:00

I am kind of following the online group read of Roberto Bolaño’s massive novel, 2666, which began last week and goes through May. I say "kind of following" because in just two weeks we welcome Lona Blaire to the family, and I have no intention of trying to stay on schedule reading the novel after that point, but do intend to keep reading and to try and follow the blogs as much as possible. I have been interested in this book since the English translation was published in 2008. I bought a copy last year, but was seriously hung over after reading Infinite Jest and Underworld, so I am just now getting around to it.

In the material I’ve read from the blogs so far, what stands out to me is the similarity in reaction to the novel’s first 51 pages among all of the commentators. The same things are standing out to everyone, the same things are striking everyone as peculiar, and even the same extra-textual connections are being made.

What is interesting about this is that when you notice these things as an individual reader, your initial reaction is to question the author’s intentions. For example, I have been having a hard time distinguishing two of the main characters thus far, Pelletier and Espinoza. I go and read the blogs, and lo--everyone is having a hard time keeping them separated. (And that’s just one broad example; there are several others that are only of interest to readers of the novel, and I want to try and make a larger point here.)

One conclusion must be, then, that when a body of readers shares the exact same initial reaction to a text, the author has written with the intention of getting that reaction. And how is it that an author can insure this reaction? I frankly have no idea, but I believe that it depends on the individual writer and the individual book.

Another conclusion is that while we all operate under the general assumption that we are autonomous individuals, distinguished from one another by our personal histories and experiences, education, religious convictions and political affiliations, tastes in art and literature, and so forth, we all respond in the same way to stimuli--and not base, physical stimuli (as in, e.g., it’s a universal truth that if you hit someone on the knee with a hammer they are going to yell out and clutch their knee in pain), but intellectual stimuli-- because of the one thing that we all have in common: popular culture.

Why else would an isolated dream sequence in the pages of a novel by a Chilean author immediately bring, not only to my (American) mind, but the mind of other (mostly American) readers whom I don’t know and have never met, a particular scene out of a David Lynch movie (Mulholland Drive)? When we come to a text, we bring with us our personal body of knowledge that allows us to understand what is being written. This is true of every kind of novel (e.g., Twilight became popular in part because everyone already understands what a vampire is, and can understand the risk in being romantically involved with one). But what we don’t often consider is that our personal body of knowledge has come from the larger body of knowledge available in our culture. We all know the same basic stuff--some of us just know more about particular things than others--and we all process information from the same general worldview.

Authors rely on this collective knowledge base for their works to make sense. In the case of the opening pages of 2666, Bolaño relies on a general understanding of European geography and language. He relies on a general understanding of the complexity of both plutonic and romantic relationships (in the friendship between Pelletier and Espinoza, and the bizarre couplings of first Liz Norton and Pelletier, and then Norton and Espinoza); he doesn’t have to explain why that whole thing is awkward. Finally, Bolaño not only relies on the collective knowledge base, but also on a general consistency in the very way people will read the book--what they will understand when, connections they will make at certain points in the book, references they will and won’t pick up on, etc.

This is by no means a method particular to this one writer or this one book. I’m only using it as an example because of the physical evidence in blog postings and comments. In the end, it is both comforting and a little discouraging. It is comforting to know that we are not alone in our thoughts. It is discouraging to know that we are not original, and that our reactions are easily controlled by the words of an author.

A moon shoot or a power grab?

2010-01-21T06:11:00.009-06:00

“We have to educate our way to a better economy.”
--U.S. Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan

It looks like everyone is chiming in with reservations about the state’s involvement in the national Race to the Top program to reform education. As with everything else related to the public education system, Race to the Top is replete with vague language and intentions as broadly stated as “Making progress toward rigorous college- and career-ready standards and high-quality assessments that are valid and reliable for all students….”

Race to the Top offers schools a piece of the government’s pie. The program is a part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (AKA the Stimulus). And while it is being presented as free money that school systems can use to better themselves, there is a lot of reservation on the part of some to accept it. Most seem to understand that nothing is free. Especially not government loans.

Below I linked to an article and a video of Education Secretary Arne Duncan going on about his hopes and dreams for American education. I want to you to pay attention to what he says and understand that he is not talking about educating children. He is talking about institutionalizing them.

In other interviews (which can be found on YouTube) he points to the societal shift in America, where both husband and wife are working, where there is a large number of single mothers, and where a student getting home from school at 3:00 and “eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich” is a thing of the past. His suggestion is apparently to take advantage of this by keeping kids in school longer--12 hours a day, 11 months a year. Just what exactly he plans to do with them for the 12 hours they’re there is vague at best, but seems to involve extracurricular activities (which are generally already available to most students), and…no one knows what else. Essentially, his plan sounds like free government daycare. They’ll gladly raise your kids for you and mold them into the kind of workforce that can save this country’s economy.

Anyone with a minute’s experience in the classroom knows exactly how well a 12-hour school day would go. It would be horrific. During my last year teaching, the school I worked at went only four days a week, but for 8 hours a day. By the end of fifth period the students were checked out. A body of bored, restless students breeds misbehavior and is counterproductive to educating them. Sitting in class for that long would not benefit even the most patient and intelligent adult. Secretary Duncan is operating on the foolish assumption that more is better, and he is ignoring a key component in education: human nature.

What it boils down to is this: The government wants to repair the economy. They rightly understand that in order to do this, we have to provide educational and professional opportunities to our children. However, they are using the bailout as an opportunity not just to promote education, but to get their thumb into local schools’ business by putting them in debt to the federal government. The “goals” of Race to the Top are not new or groundbreaking. They’re exactly the same as most states’ goals, and are as common sense as the knowledge that keeping kids in school for 12 hours a day, 11 months a year is tantamount to child abuse.

I wouldn’t normally be so vitriolic about this, but having a child who will be in school in the next few years has changed my perspective a lot. I have reconsidered many of the opinions I held as a school teacher. If my daughter was going to be made to be in school for 12 hours a day 11 months a year, she just wouldn’t be there. I value her too much.

And for the record, I don't sympathize with the teachers’ unions. They are the ones primarily speaking out against Race to the Top, but I believe they’re against it for the wrong reasons. These unions are parasitic organizations that feed on the fear and insecurity of teachers. Sure, teachers are underpaid. Sure, they put in too many hours. Sure, there are too many unrealistic expectations put on them. But that’s the nature of the job. Teaching is hard, but the unions take advantage of this and never have the schools’ best interest in mind.

See: "Education Reform's Moon Shoot" at the Washington Post.

When considering Haiti...

2010-01-18T12:48:00.010-06:00

As we here in America can do little more than sit slack-jawed at the magnitude of the tragedy in Haiti, the culture has already been dealing with the question of God’s role in all this. It’s been asked in the media in a variety of ways, from the more blunt “Does God hate Haiti?” to the more diplomatic “What was God thinking?”

I believe that there are a couple of things that we as believers should keep in mind when it comes to God’s involvement in this tragedy.

1. The world is broken.

In Romans 8:18-22, Paul says:

For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now.

We often default to thinking about sin only as a list of don’ts. We forget that as an effect of the Fall, sin is our very nature (Eph. 2:1-3; Rom. 5:12-14). In addition, God did not create the world in a state of brokenness, but in a state of perfection. When man fell, creation fell with him, and both our and the Earth’s only hope of salvation is in Christ. This is what the consummation will be--his making right all things and making creation whole again.

Until that time there are earthquakes. There are hurricanes. There are tsunamis. And people die. We die in a myriad of ways, often by one another’s hands. This is a part of that brokenness. The same state of sin that causes genocide also causes faults in the earth to shift and topple cities.

I am not offering comfort about this fact--no one can. But it is something that we must remember, and we must remember to own the sin. The people of Haiti did not commit some specific sin that caused God’s judgment to fall on them. They are a part of a broken world where terrible things happen. We must remember this because without viewing the world in the context of the Fall, it is easy to blame God when tragedy strikes. Without taking the effects of sin into account, all of the death and destruction in the world seems like an arbitrary movement of God’s hand to strike some people down and protect others.

2. Death is not a concept.

Even those of us who have dealt with death firsthand tend to think about it only as something that happens to other people. In our hearts, we rarely really consider the fact that we are one day going to die. In addition, we put too much trust in the temporal things that we construct to preserve our lives. No one wakes up on a given day and anticipates the very ground under their feet betraying them and killing them with the house that they count on to protect them.

Within a matter of seconds, a hundred thousand or more people were killed. More are dying every day from the after-effects. Haiti serves as a reminder to all of us that life is fragile. What we do with this truth is ultimately up to each of us, but recognizing how quickly any of us could be destroyed should humble us before the God who holds our lives together in every beat of our heart and breath of our lungs.

3. God does all things, and is good in all things.

Isaiah 46:8-11:

“Remember this and stand firm,
recall it to mind, you transgressors,
remember the former things of old;
for I am God, and there is no other;
I am God, and there is none like me,
declaring the end from the beginning
and from ancient times things not yet done,
saying, ‘My counsel shall stand,
and I will accomplish all my purpose,’
calling a bird of prey from the east,
the man of my counsel from a far country.
I have spoken, and I will bring it to pass;
I have purposed, and I will do it.”

We have to remember first that nothing escapes God’s grasp. He was not caught off guard by what happened last Tuesday. He was not surprised, and he is not scrambling in a panic to figure out how to fix it. He knows exactly what is happening and exactly how he plans to use it for his good.

When bad things happen, we tend to want to either give God all the glory and all the blame, or to imagine that he has meticulously planned out all of the good things that happen in the world, and simply “allowed” all the bad. Both of these approaches are only half-right. God does all things (Amos 3:6 says, “Is a trumpet blown in a city, and the people are not afraid? Does disaster come to a city, unless the Lord has done it?”). What we cannot understand is that God has a reason for all that happens. Nothing, no matter how tragic or evil it may be, happens without purpose. The hard part, of course, is really believing this, especially in the midst of so deep a tragedy. We have to remind ourselves, and ask God to remind us, that just because we can’t see the reasons doesn’t mean there are none.

The last thing I want to do is speak out of turn on matters like this. I freely admit that I have no concept of the suffering taking place in Haiti right now. All I know to do is to pray for the people there--both the citizens and those who have flown in to help in giving aid--and to pray that through this, God’s goodness would become evident to us all.

On Biblical Literacy

2010-01-17T07:07:00.005-06:00

David Nienhuis, a professor at Seattle Pacific University, has an interesting article in the latest Modern Reformation on the lack of biblical literacy among evangelicals.

The two paragraphs I've quoted below sum up the problem among younger evangelicals, and touches on a problem with youth and education in general.

There are, no doubt, many reasons for the current predicament. In general we spend far less time reading anything at all in this culture, much less dense and demanding books like the Bible. Not long ago I met with a student who was struggling in one of my courses. When I asked her what she thought the trouble was, she replied, in a tone suggesting ever so slightly that the fault was mine, "Reading a lot is not a part of my learning style." She went on to inform me that students today learned more by "watching videos, listening to music, and talking to one another." She spoke of the great growth she experienced in youth group (where she no doubt spent a lot of time watching videos, listening to music, and talking with people), but her ignorance of the Bible clearly betrayed the fact that the Christian formation she experienced in her faith community afforded her little to no training in the actual reading of Scripture.

Indeed, a good bit of the blame for the existing crisis has to fall at the feet of historic American evangelicalism itself. In his book Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know--and Doesn't, Stephen Prothero has drawn our attention to various religious shifts that took place as a result of the evangelistic Second Great Awakening that shook American culture in the first half of the nineteenth century, key characteristics of which continue to typify contemporary evangelical attitudes. For instance, there was a shift from learning to feeling, as revivalists of the period emphasized a heartfelt and unmediated experience of Jesus himself over religious education. While this strategy resulted in increased conversions and the creation of numerous popular nondenominational voluntary associations, it also had the effect of requiring Christians to agree to disagree when it came to doctrinal matters. There was a corresponding shift from the Bible to Jesus, as more and more Christians came to believe that the key test of Christian faithfulness was not the affirmation of a creed or catechism, or knowledge of the biblical text, but the capacity to claim an emotional relationship with what Prothero calls "an astonishingly malleable Jesus--an American Jesus buffeted here and there by the shifting winds of the nation's social and cultural preoccupations."

Read the article here.

Episode 23: Photo Op

2010-01-13T05:18:00.004-06:00

At Joni’s doctor visit last Wednesday, the nurse did a 4-D ultrasound on Lona and gave us a few pictures. The girl is chunky, and looks just like her sister. She was 5lbs, 9oz as of the time of these pictures. She’s probably around 6lbs by now.

She’s coming four weeks from today.

Speaking the Truth in Love

2010-01-12T05:33:00.009-06:00

I had the pleasure of hearing Voddie Baucham preach on a handful of occasions back in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s. The time I remember most was in 2001 when some friends and I visited one night of the Student Life camp being held at Louisiana Tech. While I can’t remember exactly what Mr. Baucham was preaching on that night, I do remember knowing in my heart and my bones that he had brought it. The preaching was biblical, relentless, serious, him pacing the stage, his booming voice filling up (and shutting up) a room of 2,000+ teenagers without telling a single joke.

A couple years ago, I was looking for some online reading and his name turned up. I read his blog, listened to some of his sermons, and thanks to the passage of a few years, some profound changes in my personal theology, marriage, and the birth of our first baby, I had a better context to fit his preaching and ministry into. I find him to be a strong preacher, a highly principled man, and committed to being consistently, relentlessly, biblical in all areas of his life.

I have taken up reading his blog again lately, going back and looking at the archives, and I have found myself impressed (and convicted) by the things I’ve read. Mr. Baucham holds a number of views on things like theology, family, and church, that, while biblical, are drastically different from most of his fellow evangelicals, and his colleagues (if that’s the right word) in the SBC. Thus, he tends to be controversial. I don’t personally find his views controversial. I think they are extreme, and I mean that in a good way. He has a knack for pointing out things that seem revolutionary on the surface, but should be glaringly obvious to anyone trying to live consistently as a Christian. And what separates him from the herd of others who tout “extreme” views on things only for the sake of controversy and in hopes of gaining a following for themselves is that he lives out what he preaches, even when it costs him popularity.

He is unapologetically Reformed in his theology. He is committed to raising and educating his children in a biblical way (he is, in his words, “radically anti-government education”) rightly identifying the fact that to teach is to pass on a worldview and to learn is to absorb someone else’s worldview. And his church (Grace Family Baptist, near Houston) is known for being a part of what is called the Family Integrated Church movement.

Baucham himself points out that there is no consistent model for the FIC, and that every church that takes on the label of “family integrated” does it somewhat differently, but the idea, in short, is that there is no aged-based segregation in the church. This means no youth group, college group, young marrieds, etc. (Please understand that this is a generalized explanation of the concept, and that some in the FIC movement have taken the idea to bizarre and cultish extremes. Read a brief explanation of Baucham's views here and here.) There are other churches, that while avoiding the Family Integrated label, eschew program-based ministry in favor of doing things like home groups (rather than Sunday school), and integrate the younger people into the larger church body rather than segregating them as a separate body with a different pastor.

Truth is, most people have never given a second thought to something as seemingly innocuous as youth ministry, and would be shocked to know that youth ministry as it currently exists in the American evangelical church is not only absent from the Bible, but is generally unbiblical in the way it is conducted, and tends to discourage discipleship and spiritual growth rather than strengthen them. Personally, having witnessed firsthand for over a decade the stagnancy and general ineffectiveness of youth groups, I find the concept of an age-integrated church fascinating.

All that aside, I suggest you spend some time reading through Voddie Baucham's blog, and let yourself be challenged.

Voddie Baucham on the supremacy of Christ

As (Not) Seen on TV

2010-01-11T05:22:00.006-06:00

Since we found out that Joni was pregnant with Eva, almost three years ago now, I’ve noticed the differences in the things that a mother and a father are primarily concerned about in child-raising. Joni’s primary concern is the care-taking and day-to-day wellbeing--giving medicine, baths, feeding, hugging, kissing, etc. While those things are certainly priorities of mine, they don’t consume my mind. I’m constantly thinking about other things, generally more abstract. What is Eva learning from this? How do we do X and still be sure that Eva learns about Y? When to spank, and when to just give a dirty look? And so forth.

One of the vows I made and broke was that Eva wouldn’t be watching TV while she was little. We let her occasionally watch what used to be the Noggin network (now Nick Jr.). There are no commercials, and most of the shows ran in 15-minute segments, all animated, all geared toward teaching preschoolers. The few shows that we occasionally let her watch were harmless, and she enjoyed them. She eventually started repeating things that she was learning from the shows. And eventually, we could tell by what she said that she was, to some degree, following the narrative of the show. A few weeks ago, thanks to her newest obsession with Dora (and the proliferation of Dora DVDs gained between her birthday and Christmas), she came in our room counting to five in Spanish, albeit out of order.

But in the last few months, her TV viewing time has decreased (at least here at the house--I can’t speak for what the grandparents are doing).^[1] This has been partly intentional, and partly because she is losing interest. I am beginning to notice how little our TV is turned on in the evenings lately. We will turn it on to watch a show we’ve recorded, or the news, but we rarely just leave the thing on and engage in marathon viewing sessions these days.

One reason for this is that Eva is extremely responsive to everything she sees. If the television is on--on anything--she will stare at it, soaking up whatever is happening, whether it’s “Iron Chef America,” or “How I Met Your Mother”. When she was only about nine months old, I had to stop watching movies while I rocked her because I could tell that she was watching too, and I didn’t want her to see people getting shot, or have her first words be of the four-letter variety. Point is we don’t just leave the TV on anymore in part because Eva will surely see and repeat something that she doesn’t need to see and repeat. This learning from TV was all well and good when it came from commercial-less segments intended to teach. It is not good if she happens across “Three and a Half Men.”^[2]

Quick anecdote: When I was in my teenage years, heavily into music, I loved going to my grandparents’ house and watching MTV. This was back when the M still stood for music. I loved the videos and even occasionally enjoyed an episode of “The Real World” (the early seasons, where the people in the house had jobs and social consciences). My mother wasn’t crazy about this, and it was in fact the existence of channels like MTV that factored into us not having satellite in the house until I was too old to be influenced by it or to really care at all. But then, one day not too many years after my own obsession with MTV, I found myself babysitting my cousins, and the oldest, who was eight or nine at the time, wanted to watch it. I wouldn’t let her. She wanted to know why. I tried to explain that it just wasn’t stuff she needed to see. She did not understand, and to be honest, neither did I. Whence my opposition to something I had once loved?

My dilemma with television in the house is that as Eva gets older, she’s going to want to watch shows that are directed at her age group. These shows will increasingly involve advertisements for things she doesn’t need, they will teach her things that are incongruent with the things she needs to learn, and she will be duped into mimicking that behavior.

Case in point: Turn on your TV. Now find the Disney channel (Disney is the next step up from Nickelodeon on the “what kids are watching” list). Now note the following about whatever show you watch:

1. All of the parents are sub-moronic, “out-of-touch,” generally wrong about everything, and/or all-out buffoons--particularly the dads. Now, if you know anything at all about Disney, you will probably retort to this point with a reference to “Hannah Montana,”^[3] wherein Daddy Montana is supportive, somewhat wise, and not too stupid. However, where “Hannah Montana” seems to get one thing kind of right, the show suffers from the next problem.

2. All of the kids are precocious, dress and act well beyond their years, are famous or want to become famous, are children of celebrities (or in the case of one show, the president--I think), and often deal with professional and romantic issues they would never face in reality all with the wit and wisdom that someone decades older than them could only hope to have.

On the surface, I suppose this stuff seems harmless enough. After all, most kids think their parents are dumb, and most kids want to be rock stars. The problem, though, is that kids always imitate behavior. That’s how they learn. Eva repeats every word she hears. She says phrases and makes physical gestures and facial expressions that I initially wonder how she came up with, only to realize that I do or say that thing all the time, only without thinking about it. She imitates speech right down to the inflection. Watch the way a kid interacts with other people, and you are looking at an image of the way his or her parents interact with them.

Seeing all of the things Eva learns and repeats off of the few shows that she watches now, shows that are educational and harmless, it doesn’t take a lot of reasoning to figure out that if she’s eight years old watching “The Cheetah Girls,” her mind and actions are going to be influenced by it--not in an abstract way, where she’s going to have some latent response to it far down the road, but immediately, in the way she acts and the things she thinks are important.

To be clear about what I’m saying, I am not in the camp that says rock music and video games are solely responsible for the bad behavior of children. I’m simply making an argument that should be obvious to everyone--young minds are impressionable, they imitate what they see, and they value what they see valued. This is something that ad executives know well, and use to their advantage in both design and placement of advertising. It’s something that is glaringly obvious to anyone who’s ever taught, or even observed a group of teenagers interacting with one another. It’s something that everyone seems to know well and acknowledge except when it comes to their own children.

All of which leaves me in a dilemma as to how to approach entertainment in the coming years. There are really few good entertainment options to choose from that won’t influence Eva in some negative way. We don’t want her to value fame or celebrity, and I don’t need her thinking I’m a spineless jackass.

It seems to me that the best thing to do is to start curbing her appetite for television now. If I can begin to direct her attention away from TV, even in those times when it seems like there would be nothing better to do than to plop on the couch and watch The Cat in the Hat for the billionth time, then perhaps as she gets older, she won’t see television as the default way to relax and kill time. For now, we’ll see if I’m disciplined enough to discipline.

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1. BACK TO POST One of the big draws of Grandma’s house when I was a kid was that she had cable and we did not.

2. BACK TO POST Which, for the record, has never been watched in this house because frankly, it’s about as funny as watching junior high boys sit around making fart noises with their armpits, and is even less intelligent--but my rant on dumbed-down TV is a different issue altogether.

3. BACK TO POST I know, I know. Joni got on a weird “Hannah Montana” kick while home on maternity leave with Eva. I chalk it up to postpartum hormonal confusion.

Here comes the Rooster

2010-01-08T06:16:00.008-06:00

In April 1996, two and a half years after their last performance, Alice in Chains appeared on MTV’s “Unplugged,” recording what could arguably be the best record they ever released. The band had put out one EP (Jar of Flies, 1994) and one album (self-titled Alice in Chains, 1995) in the time since they had last toured, and had been forced to deal with singer Layne Staley’s heroin addiction and on-again, off-again recovery. Sadly, it would be one of the band’s last shows with Staley, and the last record they would release. Staley went into hiding in the years following, and later died in 2002 due to drug use.

After buying the band’s new album, Black Gives Way to Blue, a couple of weeks ago, I’ve been going back and listening to their other records. Sometimes it’s fun to listen to the stuff we grew up with for the nostalgia because oftentimes we find out that that is really the only value of the music; it wasn’t very good to begin with. But Alice in Chains holds up. At the time they were considered a very heavy band, especially for the mainstream. Their music was dark, and the themes of their lyrics, particularly on their most well-known album, Dirt, dealt a lot with things like addiction and depression in a way that is at times unsettling.

But although I always liked their music, I never really gave much thought to the depth of it. Listening now, the strains of blues, classic rock, and country that I hear in Alice in Chains blows me away. Their unplugged album is an excellent showcase for these traits, and their songs are allowed to take those subtle parts of themselves and show them off more.

Bottom line is this: Put Alice in Chains’ music up beside any popular heavy band today, and you will see in stark contrast the difference between decades. They were able to create heavy, often dark, music that was not whiny, self-pitying, or even necessarily angry. It just was. They just wrote good songs, and they knew how to infuse their actual emotions into them without resorting to rank clichés (e.g. today’s standard rock chorus “I’m breaking away / I’m falling apart / Blah-blah-blah”).

For your enjoyment, I’ve posted a video below from the 1996 Unplugged show. All of the songs from that performance can be found on YouTube.

"Brother"

Episode 22: Five Weeks

2010-01-07T06:16:00.004-06:00

I remember the exact moment that Joni told me when Eva’s actual birth date was going to be. And I also remember the feeling as the weight of it slowly sunk in. In that case, it was three and a half weeks from that day. And what had been coming for eight months was never more real to me than in that moment.

Yesterday, we found out that Lona Blaire McDonald will be joining us on February 10, 2010. Due to some personal medical complications ^[1] Joni is required to have a scheduled caesarean. While recovering from a C-section is no walk in the park (judging from what I read and hear, most women seem to think it is preferable over natural birth, and while I can understand the fear of natural birth, it seems that blind proponents of a section overlook the fact that it is major surgery, requiring an incision completely through your lower abdominal wall--in other words, a big, painful deal), it is nice to know exactly when Lona is coming, which saves me the stress of waking up in the middle of the night to false alarms, and driving to the hospital in a 100-mph-panic, and even though I don’t smoke, I could see that whole process leading me to lighting Camels off of one another ad infinitum.^[2]

Except that this time there is a possibility that Lona will arrive early. I don’t want to get into too much math here, but suffice it to say that Joni’s date doesn’t match up with the doctor’s date--hers is ten days earlier than the doctor’s, and the date of the scheduled section falls square in the middle of those two dates. Which means, there is a possibility that Joni could go into labor earlier than Feb. 10th.

But we’re not thinking about that.

A lot of friends have asked us how it feels knowing that we’re going to have two. To be honest, I’m more nervous than when we were expecting Eva. Then, I had no idea what to expect, everything was new and a learning process. This time, I know exactly what to expect multiplied by ⁿ because not only will there be a newborn to care for, but a precocious, jealous two-year-old who is used to us being able to do anything for her on a whim. Once Eva gets past the fact that Lona is here to stay, I think she will be a great help. She loves babies, and has so far been very good about doing what we ask. She should be a good little helper.

On a final note, we’ve gotten all of the preparation to the house finished. Eva’s new bed is up, the office/guestroom (which will accommodate the rotating host of grandmothers--I hope) is rearranged and in order. And, most importantly, Eva is warming up pretty well to the idea of a sister. She seems to understand at least that Lona is a real person, currently in Joni’s belly, who will soon come out to join us. With that in mind, I leave you with a dialogue between Joni and Eva from yesterday morning.

Joni: We’re going to the doctor today to find out when Lona Blaire is going to come.

Eva: She’s in your belly.

Joni: That’s right, right there.

Eva: Where is her door?

---------------------------------------------------

1. BACK TO POST Joni has a medical condition called a capillary telangiectasia. It’s a small leaking blood vessel located on the pons, close to her brain stem. By itself the condition is relatively harmless, but because of its location, is untreatable and is taken very seriously. She has to base all of her medical decisions, especially those regarding pregnancy and surgery, on how it could affect that condition.

2. BACK TO POST As my Papaw is quoted as saying, "Having a baby is easy. You just go outside, smoke a couple of packs of cigarettes, come back in, and there's a baby."

The Tree of Knowledge

2010-01-05T06:43:00.007-06:00

Some indeed preach Christ from envy and rivalry, but others from good will. The latter do it out of love, knowing that I am put here for the defense of the gospel. The former proclaim Christ out of rivalry, not sincerely but thinking to afflict me in my imprisonment. What then? Only that in every way, whether in pretense or in truth, Christ is proclaimed, and in that I rejoice.
--Philippians 1:15-18 (ESV)

I tend to learn things the hard way, and the hard way for me has generally involved running my mouth too much and embarrassing myself. There are dozens of small examples--I make a snarky comment about tribal tattoos and breast implants only to realize that half the people I’m talking to have tribal tattoos and breast implants; I say something about how stupid and reckless it is to habitually live on credit and then the person I’m talking to says something like, “We adopted five blind Ethiopian children on my American Express” (Slight exaggeration here on my part); or I make some comment on Facebook about Democrats and Republicans only to find that people still use those terms as coded racial slurs, my comment has been construed as such, and I’ve been labeled a “cracker” by someone else on their page (This actually happened).

Over the years I’ve gotten used to the taste of my foot in my mouth. But lately I’ve been trying to speak a little more softly around people. Not that I’ve changed my opinions, but I’ve been more careful of how I give them. I’ve found that, although it takes more effort, it is possible to make your point and not be a jerk about it. One of the places that this problem often shows up is in discussion and debate over biblical matters.

When we used to debate the Bible among the guys in the band, we bantered like brothers. We could be as mean or as smart-aleck as we liked and nobody was offended by it. These discussions were good in a way because they helped us all refine our beliefs and arguments, but they didn’t teach us anything about healthy discourse, and they often lead to me saying stupid and embarrassing things in the presence of other people who did not have the context to understand my mode of delivery.

One time that stands out in my mind is when a youth minister who we played for regularly wanted us to do something that we were not comfortable with. There were sound reasons for our objection, but when we talked to him about it, I resorted to what amounted to mocking his ideas and suggestions. I didn’t mean for it to come off that way. We had known him for a few years, and some part of me felt comfortable speaking like that, but the result wasn’t good and I’m sure he still thinks I’m a raving jerk to this day.

The thing about knowledge is that it can be intoxicating, and it can give us the illusion of power. The more we study the Bible and see that certain things happening in this or that ministry don’t line up with scripture, it’s easy to become arrogant and mocking, to dismiss people for doing wrong. And thanks to our constant connection to friends and acquaintances, the immediate temptation is to make our Facebook or Twitter status a rant, or to blog a quick, 500-word missive about why everyone is stupid but you.

The part of the Philippians passage above that struck me initially was the first part of verse 15, “Some indeed preach Christ from envy and rivalry.” It struck me because not only do I know people like that, but I have at times been like that. I have gone places looking for a debate. I have walked into a room knowing that I would not agree with the people there and that the coming discussion would give me a chance to prove to them that they were wrong. This is cowardly behavior because it is always much easier to make a negative argument than a positive one. In doing that, you risk nothing, you tear down the work that other people have done, and you look like a jerk in the process.

The second part that struck me was verse 18, “What then? Only that in every way, whether in pretense or in truth, Christ is proclaimed, and in that I rejoice.” It is amazing to know that even though he is constantly working to correct and perfect us, God still uses our ignorance and egotism to advance the message of Christ. And that knowledge does not give us license to be more egotistical; on the contrary, it should underscore our insignificance and the inadequacy of our pathetic attempts to appear wise.

If Narcissus had the Internet, he’d still be alive

2009-12-18T06:04:00.015-06:00

We have the Internet to thank for a lot of “good”, or at least helpful things. E-mail. Online shopping. The free dissemination of information by citizens rather than centralized news organizations. But what nearly overshadows all of that good is the fact that the Internet has allowed people to be narcissistic on a broad scale, has allowed them to easily garner an audience for their ego, and has aided them in their delusions of whatever it is that they choose to delude themselves about.

Two pieces of evidence: The first, "Mom Shellie Ross' Tweet About Son's Death Sparks Debate Over Use of Twitter During Tragedy", a story about a mom using Twitter to announce her toddler’s death in the minutes just after the accident, is enough to make you want to go Puritan, burn your computer in the backyard, and take a chemical shower. I don’t really have anything to say about it beyond that because the story itself is so convicting.

The second story, "I do take thee, Facebook and Twitter updates", is less shocking maybe, but equally asinine. A groom interrupts the pastor to update his Twitter and Facebook accounts. It may have been done as a joke, but from the article I get the sense that it probably wasn’t. Most unbelievable to me is the fact that the pastor knew about this and let it happen. It would be his job to keep the marriage ceremony reverent. But the most damning thing about this story is the last line of the article I linked to, where it quotes a post the bride later made on her Twitter: “Can't sleep, very anxious about this new fame. What will become of it?”

These media outlets have legitimate uses. I enjoy being able to keep up with friends and family that I can’t talk to every day. And they are an easy way to get out information that everyone wants to know. But they’re also distancing. We put news on Facebook that we used to actually have to call people and tell them. The biggest problem, however, is that they allow us to parade our egos--even if that’s not what we intend to do.

For example, I don’t care at all whether someone just worked out and is heading to go do homework. I don’t care one bit who someone just ate lunch with and where they’re going shopping next. But they think I do, and so they write it on Facebook. The whole thing allows this elevation of our egos to where we post mundane nothings because in our collective loneliness and fear we’ve constructed the fantasy that everyone cares what we’re doing. Meanwhile, we're ignoring the people right in front of our face, the real world around us. These outlets give us a weird way of hiding in public, and lead us to saying things we would never say to someone in person. I mean, just imagine calling up each and every one of your acquaintances and giving them a list of the things you're going to be doing today. What would their responses be? Now, do you think the response is any different when they read it instead of hear it?

And I’m as guilty as anybody. I have a Facebook account. I keep this blog. When I look back at things I wrote on here four or five years ago, desperate pleas I spit out while in the throws of depression, I want to call up Doc Brown, hop in the DeLorean, go back to 2004 and slap myself in the face. Even me currently giving my opinion on other people’s narcissism is rank and socially unacceptable.

But here I am doing it anyway. Heaven help us.

Matt Chandler Page Updated

2009-12-17T05:50:00.003-06:00

I updated the Matt Chandler Resources page with some new videos, an index of Acts 29-related material, and a print interview by Christianity Today.

As those who keep up with Chandler and the Village Church know, he has been struggling for the past month with a brain tumor. He underwent surgery to have the tumor removed, and on Tuesday was told that "the pathology report revealed a malignant brain tumor that was not encapsulated."

Yesterday, in my search for information, I turned up a blog post that says concisely what those who have been following the story feel. Here is a quote, and a link to the article:

Consider this tweet from before the results were released:

Path report is 2ndary at best…good report doesn’t mean much, bad report doesn’t mean anything…my days r numbered and nt by ths report

This tweet went to more than 19,000 people. His pre-surgery video has been watched thousands of times. This is a man who GETS the Gospel and the Sovereignty of God not just for preaching on Sunday but for bad news from a pathologist on Tuesday. It is obvious that God is raising him up even when he is down for the advance of the Gospel and the glory of His name. May we all be faithful to pray that he would suffer well and herald the goodness of God no matter what lies ahead.

-- From "Why We Should Care About Matt Chandler's Cancer" at Church Planting for the Rest of Us

We'd like to thank Poseidon

2009-12-16T05:30:00.007-06:00

The geniuses at the Grammys have inadvertently given themselves--and the state of the whole music industry--away, and have provided the best evidence for why they shouldn’t be taken seriously.

Among the “legitimate” nominees for Best Rap/Sung Collaboration is the hilarious and pointedly illegitimate "I'm On A Boat," by the Lonely Island (ft. T. Pain)--a song that was originally a Saturday Night Live Digital Short. (See Time magazine: "Why Is SNL's Andy Samberg Nominated for a Rap Grammy?")

So, the Grammys, which have for years nominated and awarded mindless, soulless garbage that only separated itself from rank parody by the amount of money it had supporting it, have now legitimized actual parody by nominating it for an award, showing everybody that 1) They didn’t get the joke and apparently don’t have much of a sense of humor, and 2) Jay-Z and Justin Timberlake are apparently no more legitimate as artists than a white boy in tux tails and shorts singing “I’m on a boat, I’m on a boat / Everybody look at me ‘cause I’m sailin’ on a boat.”

Wrestling With the Fat Man

2009-12-13T07:03:00.002-06:00

I found out the truth about Santa Claus probably a little later than most kids. I guess I haven’t always been a cynic. I’m not sure how old I was, but I had had my doubts about the whole thing, and decided to do some investigating. I did a careful reading of the note Santa left us. It was my mother’s handwriting. And after I put that together, everything else started to fall into place, most notably the KB Toys stickers that were occasionally on the stuff Santa supposedly left us (the response to inquiries about things like price tags and stickers was crafty--“Santa can’t make everything. But he knows where to get it.”), and the fact that, rather than simply leave cookies, our mother always made banana nut bread.

In my defense, there was a sort of random event that kept me believing for that extra year. Our daddy was trying to get us to sleep while mama was in the living room clearing the aftermath of the family Christmas Eve gathering to get ready for Santa. My youngest brother was an infant, and as mama was going about her business, she accidentally kicked a metal rattle that was on the floor. It sounded uncannily like sleigh bells. And daddy played it up. “Did you hear that? He must have been about to stop, but you’re not asleep yet. You better go to sleep so he’ll come back.”

It was a stroke of genius, I must admit. And I couldn’t argue with objective evidence. Even after I figured it all out later, the sleigh bells stayed in the back of my mind, a nagging doubt. I didn’t find out until years later about the rattle.

And here’s the thing: I developed into a fairly stable adult. I don’t hate my parents for letting me believe in Santa Claus. I actually enjoyed it a great deal because it was exciting, and it gave me an excuse to ask for ridiculous things that I would never have asked for otherwise. Since I had two younger brothers, I got to keep on pretending that I believed in the fat man for a few more years after I found out. And I got to continue asking for ridiculous things (e.g., a dummy, which I got).

Still, Joni and I have so far mostly avoided the subject of Santa Claus with Eva. Now, we are not anti-Santa. I do not believe that Santa is evil, or the antichrist (“Jumble the letters and what do you get? Satan!”), or that a belief in him and the inevitable discovery of his nonexistence necessarily scars a child for life (I think that would clearly depend on the child and the parents, and the levels of trust/distrust that already exist there). No, the reason for the avoidance is much more practical and much more personal: I have a very hard time looking my baby girl in the face and telling her a blatant lie.

There are, admittedly, some general problems with Santa these days. Christmas in general has become little more than an excuse to overindulge in everything. We buy more, we eat more, we spend more time on the couch. And there’s no doubt that the story of Santa Claus hugely overshadows that of Jesus Christ. And when you compare the messages of the two, it’s easy to see who’s going to win the attention of a child. Jesus came as a baby to one day save us from our sins. Santa Claus brings me presents--whatever presents I ask for, presents that even my parent won’t buy me.

Even when you make sure a child knows the real Christmas story, the holiday still ends with them surrounded by gifts. Jesus always comes in second place. And my most paranoid fear when it come to this point is that at the same time you have to tell your child that Santa doesn’t exist, you have to ensure them that Jesus does. The child can’t physically see either. If anything, there is more physical evidence of Santa than Jesus.

It’s possible that I’m being too sensitive about this. But there is something that happens inside me when Eva’s face lights up over some small thing that she finds joy in. It makes me happy and breaks my heart in equal measure when she asks me to dance with her, and says things like, “You’re my friend, daddy,” or “You paint my room, daddy? I love you soooo much!”

She is only two years old, but we have tried so far to talk to her about everything we do. We’ve tried to explain everything she sees so that she will always understand what is going on around her. In other words, we’ve just tried to be honest with her at every turn. The thought that she might one day be hurt when she finds out that something I told her isn’t true--well, that thought kind of sucks. And I wish there were a more eloquent way to say it.

I Remember When Vegetarians Were Crazy

2009-12-11T05:39:00.009-06:00

We know fast food is bad for us. That knowledge is as common as the superseding fact that we continue to eat it anyway because it is cheap, and generally pretty tasty. Acknowledging truths like this and failing to act on them, feeling guilt over our failure, wallowing, and protesting loudly while replacing one vice with another, until finally either other people join our team or nobody does and we give up, seems to be the growth process and rite of passage for young ideologues these days. Or maybe it always has been. We know what is right and good, but we repeatedly choose to ignore it in favor of convenience or laziness--which tend to feed off of one another.

I just finished reading Fast Food Nation, by Eric Schlosser. For years there has been an abundance of information available about the high fat and sodium content of fast food, and with didactic exposés such as Super Size Me preaching at us, we often respond to such information by getting defensive about our behavior, and we embrace the fallacy that people speaking out against fast food are nothing but a bunch of Commie granola-crunchers trying to brainwash everybody into wearing hemp and eating tofu. This book, interestingly, circumvents the fatty-food argument and goes for a more interesting angle.

The title itself points to the idea that the result of the growth of the fast food industry over the last 50 or so years has not just been poor personal health, but a homogenized cultural landscape. Fast food (along with chain stores and shopping outlets) has replaced local flavor with a generic one and gained the loyalty of generations of Americans who are as emotionally attached to corporate logos as they are to their own families. It takes the argument against fast food beyond the checkout counter and into the processing plants, slaughterhouses, feedlots, and ranches that provide the meat we eat.

The homogenization of culture and the sameness of America are hard to deny, and maybe harder to avoid. Teaching in Caldwell Parish, I often heard the students lament the fact that their town did not have a Wal-Mart (however, with the four-lane finished, I’m sure it’s just a matter of time). I would always do my best to explain to them why that was a good thing. I would get them to tell me the names of local mechanics, grocery stores, sporting goods stores, gas stations, and pharmacies, and then explain that if there were a Wal-Mart, those businesses would quickly close. Those storeowners and businessmen, not to mention their employees, would have to find something else to do for a living, and Wal-Mart wasn’t going to be able to hire everybody. Ten years ago, my grandfather’s store closed in part because it had become impractical to buy groceries at a small locally owned store, settling for limited stock when the Wal-Mart ten miles down the road had all that and more. You can buy groceries in peace while your kids pummel one another with Styrofoam swords in the toy department.

While the book touched on a lot of different issues on the corporate end of fast food, and made some good points about the corporations’ willingness to do pretty much anything to increase product output and financial income, and decrease the amount of training and compensation they have to give their employees, in the end it’s hard for us to do anything about that. Directly. But, there is something we can do. We can stop buying the food. Because while it is naturally hard for us to sympathize with the plight of people outside the view of our day to day, and it’s hard to condemn greed because we all want to be rich too, we are always motivated by what affects us directly. The part of the book that stood out to me dealt with the sanitation issues in slaughterhouses. The fact that a slaughterhouse is not a “clean” place goes without saying, but we eat the things that are produced there, things that coming into contact with their blades, and belts, and buckets. And to simply say that these places are not “clean” would be a wild understatement. While we might find it difficult to care about the things listed above because we are not directly affected by them, we are directly affected by eating cow manure.

Most American slaughterhouses process cattle at a rate of roughly 400 per hour. The cattle are coming from feedlots where they have been crammed together, walking and eating in their own feces and urine. The feed they ate contained material from dead pigs, chickens, and in some cases horses. Until about twelve years ago, when it was made illegal, they were given feed that contained dead house pets, and rendered leftover parts from previously slaughtered cattle. That is, they were cannibalizing. Chickens are still fed rendered chicken parts along with their grain. On top of that simply being disgusting, keep in mind that cattle are ruminants. They have a complex stomach, are intended to eat only grass and maybe grains, and are intended to eat it at a certain pace. In short, God did not design cows to eat meat.

E. coli, a potentially deadly bacteria, can live in a cow's intestines and is usually passed through contact with feces. Depending on the time of year, anywhere from 1 to 50 percent of cattle in a feedlot may be harboring E. coli in their gut. The cattle leave the feedlots, are herded into the slaughterhouse and killed. When the carcasses are skinned, fecal material often falls onto the exposed meat. Carcasses are then gutted, a process that when done properly requires the intestines to be tied off to avoid the cow’s stomach contents from spilling out. Spillage occurs on roughly 1 out of 5 carcasses, spraying the exposed meat with stomach matter. Ground beef is generally made from remnants, often meat scraped off of bones. It has been known to include pieces of bone, spinal cord, and even metal. A package of ground beef that you buy at a grocery store may contain meat from dozens or even hundreds of different cattle. Odds are that when you eat a hamburger, you’re eating poop, and odds are that poop contains E. coli. To be fair, certain cleaning processes have been implemented that spray the gutted carcass with water at high temperatures in an effort to kill the bacteria. But still.

Schlosser cites a study done by the USDA to test cattle for E. coli. He reports the findings as follows:

In the [1996] USDA study 78.6 percent of the ground beef [examined] contained microbes that are spread primarily by fecal material. The medical literature on the causes of food poisoning is full of euphemisms and dry scientific terms: coliform levels, aerobic plate counts, sorbitol, MacConkey agar, and so on. Behind them lies a simple explanation for why eating a hamburger can now make you seriously ill: There is sh*t in the meat.

Here is the sad thing. While I truly do care about the detriments of corporate greed, the exploitation of migrant workers, the high rate of injury and death among slaughterhouse workers, injured employees deterred by their employers from seeking proper medical attention, McDonald’s advertising its tripe to my children on TV and in the hallways of elementary schools, and very unhealthy foods being sold cheaply to the people who need the most nutrition, those things alone would probably not deter me from continuing to give them my money. But if I know that when I eat a hamburger, chances are I’m ingesting feces--I’ll stop eating hamburgers. And ultimately, this fact about me makes Schlosser’s point better than anything in the book. I always do only what is right by me. We all do. The same attitude that says, “This is America, and if I want to eat McDonald’s three meals a day, I will!” also makes me change my mind about the foods I want to feed myself and my family only when I find that they affect me personally.

My students’ response to my little lesson on Wal-Mart was always the same. “Yeah, but…” and they would proceed to tell me all of the reasons why it would be wonderful to have a supercenter in their town. All of the reasons came down to one factor: convenience. They could get what they wanted without having to drive to Winnsboro or Monroe. They could get everything they wanted in one place. All that sentiment about local business, and keeping money in the community--that was cute and all, but it was terribly inconvenient, and when it comes to modern practices of convenience, what’s good for the goose might just kill the gander.

LINKS
Below I’ve included a couple of links for further reference. There is much more information to be found online, and I would recommend reading not only Fast Food Nation, but any of the other books available on this subject.

Here you can find a list of articles from Time magazine on the subject of beef processing.

Order the Fish is a 2004 Vanity Fair article by Eric Schlosser. It contains some of the same information and investigation from his book.

eatwild.com is a site that explains a little bit about the benefits of grass fed beef. A relatively small percentage of American ranchers currently sell grass fed cattle, but the number is growing. If at all possible, we as consumers should try to support the trend.

Episode 21: VOTE BILL JENKINS

2009-11-24T05:17:00.003-06:00

Growing up, the walls of our hallway were scattered with family pictures. A lot of them. There were several of those frames that hold a variety of pictures of different shapes and sizes with the pictures being of various random children in playpens, graduations, weddings that no one can remember going to. These were the sort slice-of-life pictures that these days end up somewhere in the bowels of Facebook, only seen once by people who’ve been tagged. But the rest of the pictures were the real deal--carefully posed and artfully backdropped Olan Mills portraits of the kids at various developmental stages. I, being the oldest, got the most wall space. You could look at adorably cute pictures of me at two, standard school portraits of me in my early elementary school years, right on into the awkward, slight-hint-of-a-mustache and half-closed-eyelids pictures of me in junior high, a nice senior portrait, and eventually a college graduation picture rounding it out.

My brothers, being born after me and therefore being less important, were given what space they could be afforded. My middle brother, Adam, did pretty well, and you could look through the various portraits and get at least a sketch of a life. My youngest brother, Patrick, however, was basically squeezed in as an afterthought. I can think of exactly three pictures of him that were on that wall: One as an infant, one at maybe two or three years old, and one from his freshman year of high school, wearing a VOTE BILL JENKINS T-shirt.^[*] If an outsider had been looking at the wall trying to assess who was who, Patrick could have been confused for two or maybe three different people. Or maybe a distant third cousin. And don’t think my parents didn’t get an earful over this egregious oversight. Don’t think I didn’t. But it was what it was, and while I used to just think it was funny, I have now come to understand the reasons for it.

Due to the busy-ness of life that comes with having a two-year-old, switching jobs, and just living, I have not taken the time to write about the fact that in February, I will become a father for the second time, to a little girl by the name of Lona Blaire McDonald.

Re the two-year-old: She takes up a lot of time. Which is not a bad thing. We’re happy to spend time with her. But just know that it’s demanding. Which is why I feel a fear this time around that I did not feel when we were expecting Eva. All of my fears the first time around were projected a couple of years into the future (which is now the present), when we would have to start disciplining her, teaching her, etc. These are the things I was worried about because, to a large degree, that’s what a dad does. He teaches, corrects, disciplines. Joni, on the other hand, was worried about infancy--the feeding, the clothing, the nurturing, the diapers. I felt that that stuff would simply work itself out. Feed her when she cries, change her when she poops, try and get as much sleep as you can. But now, now that there are two, I am much more concerned about these early stages.

For one thing, Eva is a light sleeper. Quietly conversing in our room across the hall from her will wake her out of a dead sleep. A cough, a sneeze, a flushed toilet--any noise at all, and the next thing you hear is a monosyllabic “uh,” and when you go to peek in on her, she’s standing in her bed, saying, “I gotta get down.” So I can’t even begin to imagine how little sleep the whole household is going to be getting come late February.

But that’s just one small example of what I’m sure will be the many, many learning curves of this brave new world we’re entering. And for posterity’s sake (because I know no one reads this thing anymore), I’m going to make a point to write about it from here on out.

BACK TO POST Bill Jenkins being the hilariously multifaceted rapper/politician of Patrick’s alter ego perhaps most famous for “ridin’ dirty dirty dirty dirty dirty lincolns.” The shirt was a birthday gift from Adam and me.

Matt Chandler Page Updated

2009-04-30T21:47:00.004-05:00

In light of several new messages and interviews that have popped up recently, I have updated the Matt Chandler Resources page.

If you happen to come across the Matt Chandler page and have a link to something not posted here, please leave a comment and email me so I can add it to the list.

California as a Final Resting Place: The Ridiculous Notion that Roller Coasters Were Not Engineered With Death in Mind

2009-04-27T06:46:00.004-05:00

California as a Final Resting Place for Cliches

California as a Final Resting Place [One Year Later (I would love to disappear and grow a beard)]

California as a Final Resting Place: Two Years Later: The Cheese Blends

California as a Final Resting Place: Four Months Too Late

“Mr. ---------, I’m sorry to keep you waiting so long.”

“I’m sorry?”

“….”

“….”

“Sorry to make you wait, sir.”

Noting the already three occurrences of the word sorry in this still embryonic conversation, I decided to jump the rails and take a shortcut to wherever this was going.

“Who is this and what do you want?”

“I apologize again, Mr. ---------, for the inconvenience.”

Apologize now, he says.

“No, but what inconvenience? I’m at home. I was just eating a sandwich. I’m basically in my underwear. The only inconvenience here is the incessant apologizing. Now why am I talking to you?”

“Sorry again, sir. My name is Mortem Posthelwaite, I’m with the magazine Ink, Inc. We’re a small independent college independent literary magazine.”

“Excuse me, but which is independent?”

“Umm…I think both. Hold on.” There was the clank and clutter of a telephone receiver being held to shoulder under the pretense of muting it and voices in the background signifying some sort of confused/ing conversation over institutional dependence. “Yes, both, sir.”

“Okay.”

“But again, sir, I’m with the magazine Ink, Inc. We are an independent literary magazine, and your novel The Cheese Blends has recently come to our attention. We were wondering if you could answer a few questions concerning the book.”

Before he could finish his sentence, I had before me a page of Googled information concerning this Ink, Inc., and within me a set of serious suspicions concerning the legitimacy of this whole thing. The magazine did not seem to exist.

“Yeah, sure. Do you mind, Mr. ….”

“Posthelwaite.”

“Yes, Mr. Posthelwaite. Do you mind if I ask what possibly independent university you are a student of?”

“You mean, ‘of what university are you a student.’”

“Excuse me.”

“Nothing. Sorry, sir. Umm…I attend [mumbling + weird crunching sound of something grating against the mouthpiece of his phone]--U.”

“I’m sorry, what was that again?”

“[Same]--U.”

“Ah.” I pretended to hear him.

It should be explained here that I was, when this phone call arrived, still basking in the minor success of the now-published The Cheese Blends. As it turned out, going with Option 2^[*], worked to my benefit, and a handful of pages landed in the hands of one Mr. Arthur Pubeleasheir (or Mr. Art Pube, as he is sometimes not-so-affectionately known in certain rogue publishing circles), a moderately wealthy publisher of moderately readable books which have been systematically rejected by other, “mainstream” publishing houses. Mr. Pubeleasheir came back to me on the street corner that very day and offered to publish my book based solely on the three pages I had given him as he passed. Six months later, the book hit the shelves, published and distributed by PageByPage Books, a division of Read-to-Yourself-In-Public, Inc., which was, itself, owned by Viacom.

The point is the book was out, I had made a little money off of it, was now trying to enjoy my turkey and pepperoni sandwich at 2:30 on a quiet Tuesday afternoon, basically in my underwear, now having to pause my new DVR so as not to miss the upcoming ballistic elephant video on World’s Most Shocking…, but was being interrupted by this ---- of a reporter whom I had serious suspicions about.

“Okay. So what do you want to know.”

“[Again, fumbling, cluttering, clanking, etc.] Okay, Mr. ---------, let’s begin.”

“Let’s.”

“Let’s start with inspiration. Inspiration being the thing that all artists need to be inspired. What was your inspiration for writing this book?”

“I ate too much cheese and suffered several painful bowel impactions after which point I sued the figurative pants off of a third-rate chain restaurant whose niche was different types of cheeses, all of which were available plain, fried, or melted depending on your appetite and whether you wanted to shell out an extra sixty-five cents for something to dip your fried cheese into, or an extra four bucks for something to dip into the melted cheese. And again, I litigated the place basically into the ground for doing irreparable damage to my colon area, which is the reason that my aforementioned sandwich that you are interrupting is cheeseless. But you already know all of that.”

“….”

“Don’t you?”

“I, uh,…I, yes, I suppose some of that is common knowledge.”

“Common knowledge?”

“Written about in other articles, other sources, etcetera and so forth and so on.”

“Nope.”

“….”

“The only other existing article about my book is a review in my hometown newspaper, and I had them sign a waver saying there would be no question about nor mention of my bowels.”

“….”

Of course I knew that the Cheese Hut had, some two years ago, shortly after the litigation, and when I began working on the book, employed a small band of vagabondish college-aged indie-music-beard-and-horn-rimmed-glasses enthusiasts with a penchant for groundless snobbishness (but who yet ironically and for a pretty negotiable already low price were more than willing to do this kind of “investigative reporting”) to follow me around and chart my every move. Of particular interest to them was the frequency and efficiency of my BMs. I would see them slipping into public bathroom stalls as I washed my hands. I could hear them in my back yard at night, digging into my sewage system, feel them following me down the pharmacy aisle at Wal-Mart. And now this ridiculous interview.

“Mr. Posthelwaite?”

“Yes. Yes sir. I apologize, sir. But do you mind answering a few more questions.”

“Sure.”

“How have you recovered from this gastro-intestinal, digestion--your personal medical problem?”

“I will repeat: I cannot have cheese on this now cooling toasted turkey and pepperoni sandwich because it would render me rectally wrecked and utterly gutturally incapacitated. That’s how I’ve recovered.”

“[Sound of pen scratching wildly on pad unnaturally close to the phone receiver] Right.”

“[Crowd noise. Screeching. Silence. Crowd noise. Screeching. Screaming] That is ridiculous.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Oh. Sorry there, Postagestamp. I’m trying to watch the television and they just showed some seriously disturbing roller coaster footage.”

“Oh. Yes sir. I’m sorry.”

“Again, why are you apologizing? Do you have some sort of personality deficiency?”

“Deficiency? Sir, I--“

“Quiet. Listen. [Again, Crowd noise. Screeching. Screaming] Did you here that?”

“I did, sir.”

“That’s DVR. I can rewind my television.”

“That’s very impressive.”

“I don’t know that I like your tone, there Postalweight.”

“No. I’m legitimately impressed.”

“Well, look, this roller coaster got to the top of its loop--which, let’s just be honest: I can think of no circumstance in any context where feeling like I’m going to die a horribly violent public death could be considered fun--but the thing got to the top of its loop and just stopped.”

“Wow, that’s--“

“But then--that’s not all--then, the front car and the back car both fell away from the rail and were dangling loose, like two ends of a shoe string.”

“That sounds terrible.”

“No one was hurt. You believe that?”

“I do not.”

“I think it’s time that we--the society, I mean; not necessarily you and I, although we would be included--give up this ridiculous notion that roller coasters were not engineered with death in mind. They had to have been built by a sadist or something.”

“Very good, Mr. --------. [Long and awkward pause] Do you have time for a couple of more questions about The--“

“[Click].”

BACK TO POST Passing the novel out page by page on a busy street. See “California As a Final Resting Place: Four Months Too Late.”

John Wesley Ford

2009-02-27T05:32:00.002-06:00

Mr. Ford was our neighbor and friend whom we got to know right after getting married. He was one of the kindest men I've known, and we're sad to see him go.

Funeral services for Mr. John Wesley Ford, 88, of Monroe, LA will be held at 10:00 AM Saturday February 28, 2009 in the chapel of Mulhearn Funeral Home, West Monroe with Pastor Shane Warren and Pastor Butch Pilcher officiating. Interment will follow at Mulhearn Memorial Park Cemetery under the direction of Mulhearn Funeral Home.

Mr. Ford served in the United States Army during WW II. He was a member of the First Assembly of God Church of West Monroe and the First Assembly of God Church of Farmerville. He owned a gas station and hardware store in Bastrop early in life and later owned and operated two auto repair shops in Bastrop and Collinston. He was loved by many and will be missed by all.

He is preceded in death by his wife of over 50 years, Mary Ford and grand children, Jessica Hubbard and Justin Ford.

Survivors include his wife, Dixie Ford; children, Betty Yarbro of West Monroe, James Ford and wife, Ruthie of West Monroe, Elizabeth Ford of Monroe, Margaret Atkinson and husband, Mike of Fort Collins, CO, Barbara Patterson and husband, Mike of Monroe, Paul Ford and wife, Rita of West Monroe, Emmett Ford of West Monroe, and Stephen Ford of Houston, TX; step sons, Scott Bennett and Stephen Thrasher; thirteen grandchildren; and fifteen great grandchildren.

Visitation will be held from 5:00 PM until 8:00 PM Friday at Mulhearn Funeral Home, West Monroe.

Online Condolences/Registry: www.mulhearnfuneral home.com

Source: thenewsstar.com

A Failure

2009-02-15T08:06:00.003-06:00

"Faith according to our Lord’s teaching in this paragraph [Matthew 6:30], is primarily thinking; and the whole trouble with a man of little faith is that he does not think. He allows circumstances to bludgeon him. … We must spend more time in studying our Lord’s lessons in observation and deduction. The Bible is full of logic, and we must never think of faith as something purely mystical. We do not just sit down in an armchair and expect marvelous things to happen to us. That is not Christian faith. Christian faith is essentially thinking. Look at the birds, think about them, draw your deductions. Look at the grass, look at the lilies of the field, consider them. … Faith, if you like, can be defined like this: It is a man insisting upon thinking when everything seems determined to bludgeon and knock him down in an intellectual sense. The trouble with the person of little faith is that, instead of controlling his own thought, his thought is being controlled by something else, and, as we put it, he goes round and round in circles. That is the essence of worry. … That is not thought; that is the absence of thought, a failure to think."

--Martyn Lloyd-Jones

Source: www.challies.com

The full measure of happiness.

2009-01-21T20:57:00.005-06:00

"The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history; to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea, passed on from generation to generation: the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness."

--Barack Obama, Inaugural Speech, January 20, 2009 [Full Transcript]

"We know that five men don’t know better than women and their doctors what’s best for a woman’s health. We know that it’s about whether or not women have equal rights under the law. We know that a woman’s right to make a decision about how many children she wants to have and when--without government interference--is one of the most fundamental freedoms we have in this country. We also know that there was another voice that came from the bench--a voice clear in reasoning and passionate in dissent. The voice rejected what she called, quote 'Ancient notions of women’s place in the family and under the Constitution. Ideas that have long been discredited.' Unquote. One commentator called the decision in Gonzales, “An attack on Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s entire life’s work.” And it was. But we heard Justice Ginsburg and we know what she was saying. She was saying, 'We’ve been there before and we are not going back. We refuse to go back.'"

--Barack Obama, before Planned Parenthood, July 17, 2007 [Full Transcript]

"Many Americans see Barack Obama as a kind and compassionate candidate. However, Mr. Obama's compassion does not extend to our most vulnerable members of society--unborn children."

--Political writer Laura Echevarria

Case Studies in Ignorance: Problems in Traffic Management and Basic Driving Etiquette

2008-12-23T07:34:00.004-06:00

To be fair, everyone is prone to bursts of ignorance. I’m sure even Ben Franklin occasionally left home without his wallet, or, without thinking, returned his jug of milk to the pantry as opposed to the fridge.^[1] But there is a difference between these small moments of absent-mindedness, of being distracted from the task at hand and as a result mildly messing up something that can be easily fixed, and of being just outright ignorant 24/7 regardless of circumstance or state of mind, and not just being ignorant, but actually enjoying and being proud of being ignorant to the point of flaunting it (the ignorance) like some kind of badge of honor bestowed on you at birth to use at will to ensure that you can get the attention you “deserve” any time you feel you are being slighted. The latter is inexcusable, and ultimately such a debilitating burden on society that it will often drive otherwise sane, reasonable, and Non-Chronically Ignorant people to violence.

For the sake of clarity, I think it would be helpful to set some parameters around the word ignorant and define Chronically Ignorant. Most people abuse ignorant in one of three ways: 1. By using it interchangeably with stupid; 2. By using it in cases where a much stronger word would have been more appropriate; and 3. By assuming that ignorant is always offensive. For the sake of our purposes here it is most important to differentiate ignorant and stupid (abuse #1, above). Very simply: Ignorant implies that a person simply does not know some information, e.g. I am ignorant of thermodynamics. I will allow this definition of ignorant to include the not-knowing of abstract, and/or in-flux, and/or culturally arbitrary things such as social codes, manners, etiquette, common niceties, etc. Stupid, a much stronger adjective, implies that the subject is beyond simply not knowing, and one of two things is taking place: 1. The subject knows full well what he/she should do in any given social context, but refuses to acknowledge the right way to act/react, and instead chooses their own way, which they believe to be superior even though all objective evidence would say that it is not. 2. The subject is somehow physically/mentally/emotionally incapable of retaining and utilizing knowledge of any kind.^[2]

Chronically Ignorant is somewhat of a gray area, but basically breaks down like this: There are some individuals who act consistently ignorant on a day to day basis. They never know anything in the world besides the events taking place within 50 ft. of their nose. They never think through any decision, but always act on their first instinct, which is usually wrong. They have an aversion to knowledge (are repulsed by it, in fact), do not want to be corrected concerning anything, do not want to know what is the right thing to do in any given case but instead put in extra effort to make the wrong thing work. And they truly, deeply believe that they are the most important person on the face of the earth, and that everyone else exists to serve them. Basically, Chronic Ignorance is like a consistent display of the symptoms of stupidity without the actual diagnosis. But to be fair, real stupidity is unmanageable; even Chronic Ignorance can be fixed through the teaching and learning of social norms and behaviors.

There are many types and manifestations of this ignorance, and to give an exhaustive list with examples for each would be a much greater task than I am capable of. I simply want to point to the one or two types which have affected me directly as of late, and ponder ways that we (the Non-Chronically Ignorant public)^[3] can bring an end to the nonsense.

C.I. BEHAVIORAL CASE STUDY 001:
PROBLEMS IN TRAFFIC MANAGEMENT AND BASIC DRIVING ETIQUETTE

One of the first things they teach you in driver’s ed., and one of the most important things a driver can know, is that you can’t turn left at a red light.^[4] This is as elementary as using your blinker when planning to turn, turning on your headlights when it gets too dark to see, hitting your brakes when you need to stop, turning on the heat or a/c as needed, etc. I’m no statistician, but I would guess that turning left at a red light would end in disaster and/or death something like 99.99% of the time due to the fact that the cars driving in a direction perpendicular to yours, those who have the right-a-way, are exercising their right to the road by cruising at or above the legal limit through said traffic light and not expecting to have to deal with some C.I. case pulling out in front of them like they own the world.

If you think all of this goes without saying, I do too--which common acknowledgement makes it all the more ridiculous that I have to say it. In fact, the need to state the obvious to or regarding someone is generally a clear initial sign that you are dealing with a C.I. case of the highest order. There is something about the C.I.’s brain construction or worldview^[5] that obscures what is otherwise obvious information. I contend that this is a manifestation of some level of narcissism, i.e. in the case of driving, the person is so concerned with No. 1--their own personal drama, daydream, telephone conversation, money, dog in their lap, kids in the backseat, or whatever--that you, the laws of the land, and society in general take a backseat to their Ego,^[6] and may in fact (depending on the level of narcissism we’re dealing with) exist solely to serve that person, their Ego and their drama, daydream, telephone conversation, etc. At any rate, these people’s self-involvement not only keeps them from seeing, but even from comprehending the obvious purpose and necessity of things like traffic laws.^[7]

And so I, Joni, and E.K. found ourselves, on the day before Thanksgiving, headed to Biedenharn Gardens to take pictures for Christmas cards.^[8] We were sitting at the very busy intersection of N. 18th and Forsythe, trying to turn left off of 18th. (For those unfamiliar with the territory, 18th crosses Forsythe to become Marie Place, so cars are coming from/going in four different directions. To compound the busyness and danger of the intersection is the fact that, when turning left from 18th onto Forsythe, there is no green arrow giving you the right-a-way, there is only a green light, which also gives traffic coming from Marie Place straight over to 18th the right-a-way, making the left turn from 18th difficult.) And as we were sitting there, second in line at the red light, minding our own pre-holiday business, surely chuckling at something E.K. was doing or saying, we began to hear this HONK. I ignored it at first, assuming that there was some sort of exchange HONK going on somewhere in line behind us. I did not know or HONK care if it was a friendly exchange, or a contentious HONK one, but I figured I was safe in assuming that since I was HONK minding my own business and hadn’t committed any traffic offenses HONK on my way up 18th, and that at the moment I was stopped HONK at a red light and therefore incapable of doing anything that could be offensive to HONK anyone, the interaction did not involve me in any way.

The longer we sat (second in line, I’ll remind you) at the red light, the more frequent the HONKing got. Finally, the light turned green, and the truck in front of us had a hard time making the turn due to the heavy flow of traffic coming across from Marie Place. The truck finally squeezed through as the light turned yellow and left me, my nose sticking out into Forsythe Ave., first in line at the red light. And the HONKing continued. It gained in frequency and intensity, the only good thing being HONK that the consistency of the racket enabled me to pinHONKpoint the culprit. It was the S.U.V. directly behind me. A woman--white, middle-aged, upper-middle class--behind the HONK wheel. The light finally turned green, and I, being more careful than I normally would have been due to the precious cargo in tow, eased my way out into the melee in the middle of the intersection, waiting for a good opportunity to make my move.

Now, up until this point I had given this woman the benefit of the doubt, mainly because the thought that she could be HONKing at me for not turning left at a red light in a busy intersection was so absurd as to be beyond either comprehension or belief. I would allow room for the legitimacy of the HONK^[9] if I had somehow offended this woman prior to stopping at the red light, but no incident had occurred between her and me. Regardless, she was not holding back at this point. The HONKs were coming rapid-fire, so fast that they were almost forming syllables and words of their own profane language. Finally, I squeezed through the mess, and unfortunately, so did the psychotic C.I. case behind me.

Now, what I did next was not nice, but was, I think, called for, and, due to the fact that it was retaliatory, cannot be considered socially equal with HONKing at a stranger for no good reason.^[10] I got in the right lane and simply let off of the gas pedal. I did not touch the brake, but I let the thing go as slow as it would go, refusing to put forth any effort to make the vehicle move. After following behind me at 10 or 15 mph. for a few seconds, the woman finally passed me. At this point, I let it go. I’d had my say, and as baffled as I was by the whole encounter, I reminded my self that some people are just that way. And then, the woman, this insufferably irritable human being, put on her blinker to turn right. Naturally, I got into the left lane to pass her and go on about our merry way. In the process of making the pass, Joni turned to the woman (who is now rolling down her window), and gave her a very animated and well-deserved, “What-is-your-problem?”-type shrug. TO WHICH (and I am using all CAPS here because this is just too unbelievable) THIS WOMAN RESPONDED BY STICKING HER TONGUE OUT AT US, and followed up that juvenile gesture with the more adult, yet getting-pretty-boring, standard old one-fingered salute.

Now, there are several symptoms of Chronic Ignorance on display here: 1. The woman flouted all applicable social codes by not only ignoring herself, but insisting that I ignore an obvious law (which exists in order to preserve the safety of the driving public) in order to do something which would suit her. Which brings us to 2. She was obviously acting out of self-interest. This alone is really only human, but what makes it symptomatic of C.I. in this case is that her self-interested activity infringed upon me, and requested that I put myself and family in danger in order to serve her purposes. And 3. She, a grown woman, stuck her tongue out at us.

Treating this particular type of Chronic Ignorance--that involving fly-by encounters that offer zero opportunity for correction and follow-up--can be tricky to the point of being impossible. It is unlikely that I will ever share the same stretch of road with this woman again, and even more unlikely that if I did, I would even know who she was. So, what we have to focus on in these cases is Education and Prevention. Following are some simple principles/guidelines for educating others in order to prevent occurrences like this from happening again.

1. Set a good example on the road. Too many people drive like maniacs, like a five-year-old playing Pole Position^[11] who isn’t tall enough to see the screen, but who drives like a scalded Bat out of Hades because it is just awesome to go fast, showing no regard for the boundaries of the road, or the game’s point system, which obviously does not reward bad driving. This is both ridiculous and ridiculous. Wherever you’re going will be there when you get there, and it will do the world a service if you don’t add to the madness but rather, through your actions, let everybody know that it’s okay to slow down.

2. Do not acknowledge, in any way, blatant displays of ignorance. Our fatal mistake in the case above was to acknowledge this woman’s erratic and ridiculous behavior by driving slow in her lane, and then by giving her the shrug. Had we ignored her, she would have had no opportunity for further offense, nor would she have gotten the last word.^[12] To ignore someone’s assault is actually more proactive that reacting with an assault of your own because if there’s anything worse than being cussed out or flipped off, it’s being ignored.

3. Publicly mock bad and reckless drivers as often as possible. This is a very simple suggestion. What it will do is let your friends, family, and anyone else who listens know that people think this kind of thing is ridiculous, because heaven knows that some of them have been guilty of the same things.^[13] The hoped-for effect is that the next time they do something ignorant on the road, they will remember your harsh words directed at people like them and feel deep shame and regret over their actions. This will continue until they have eventually broken their own bad habit from not wanting to feel like a jerk anymore.

I realize these are small things, but remember, if we can keep even one person from being a menace to public safety and common sense, we are doing our job.

NOTES

1.[BACK TO POST] As we have all done at one time or another, and yes, I know that refrigerators were not around in Ben’s day. But you get my point.

2.[BACK TO POST] I want to make clear here that I am not referring to legitimate cases of mental handicap. I’m more talking about a nurture thing as opposed to a nature thing, wherein the subject was most likely raised to not give a crap about anything or anyone that was not him/herself.

3.[BACK TO POST] The obvious danger of putting myself in the category of Non-Chronically Ignorant (N.C.I.) is that I run the risk of also putting myself in the category of Arrogantly Competent (A.C.), and if there’s anything worse than ignorant people, it’s smart people who wield their intelligence--or at the least their competence at getting along in society--like some kind of club used to beat the Chronically Ignorant (C.I.) masses into submission.

4.[BACK TO POST] The one exception being if the red light is at an intersection of a one way street with the flow of traffic going left. But this is like Driving 401 information, upper-level stuff that you really only learn through experience.

5.[BACK TO POST] Again, a classic nature/nurture-type quandary.

6.[BACK TO POST] It’s complicated, but capitalized here because in these cases the Ego becomes a proper noun--its own entity to be dealt with separately from the person.

7.[BACK TO POST] Examples of bad driving due to C.I.-related behavior: Not using a blinker, ever; driving below speed limit in left lane; tailgating; not knowing how a 4-way stop works; turning left when the sign clearly says you can’t; driving in excess of 10 mph above or below the legal limit. There are more, but you get the idea.

8.[BACK TO POST] An endeavor which failed due to the fact that yours truly forgot to charge the battery on the camera. It is worth noting that I bought a camera with a rechargeable lithium battery precisely so I wouldn’t have to deal with things like batteries dying at inconvenient times.

9.[BACK TO POST] Much to my wife’s chagrin, I am known to employ the HONK in various types of vehicular confrontations, and on a pretty regular basis. When driving it is one’s only communication with rest of the herd, and let’s be honest--nothing screams “You’re an idiot!” quite like the sweet, bovine-like bellow of a Toyota horn. Point is, the HONK is a useful tool when warranted; when unwarranted it is the cultural equivalent of the glove-slap across the face. Or, to use a more timely example, someone throwing their shoes at you.

10.[BACK TO POST] Did I mention that this psychotic and Chronically Ignorant woman was HONKing at me for NOT turning left at a red light?

11.[BACK TO POST] A car racing video game released in 1982 by Namco. An intentionally anachronistic reference.

12.[BACK TO POST] Now, the “last word” in this case is meaningless to me because, again, it was the sticking out of a tongue, but I’m sure that in her mind this signified a win.

13.[BACK TO POST] Mea culpa. I will refer you back to note 9.

The Apologist: Test? What test?

2008-11-17T08:04:00.013-06:00

It was the year 1998, and I, a senior, found myself in the first semester of Fine Arts (a sophomore class) due to a missing credit that was crucial to my attaining TOPS. While at first I was perturbed by having to take the class, I did like the teacher, and I did have at least one Sr. friend in the class.^[1] Further, I could not complain about a class that was basically arts and crafts, amped-up to appeal to jaded teenagers who certainly did not not enjoy arts and crafts, but who had to pretend as if they didn’t in order to maintain their already shaky social status--which begs the question of, why bother?

Most of the class’s work was your basic building-things-out-of-random-unrelated-materials type of arts and crafts work. The best part about the class, though, was building things out of clay. Now, this was not the spin-wheel and water, Ghost kind of clay. It was more like just a chunk of grown-up Play-Doh, dry and gray, and we were given assignments like, “Build a jar like this:” and the teacher would show us how we were to go about doing the assignment and we would all mimic it, allowing ourselves room for some personal interpretation along the way.

I can’t remember exactly which jar it was, but I’m pretty sure that it was my green jar (made using small loops of clay stacked on top of a base to form a unit, with small circles being placed vertically in the front of the jar to make two eyes and a mouth, giving the jar a pseudo-Mayan look) that Mrs. Knight wanted us to write a story about. We were to write a small composition about the origin of our piece of earthenware. I was excited about this because, while I humored Mrs. Knight about the clay, it was not my first passion. I really liked to write, and at this time in my literary life I particularly enjoyed attempting to force a Vonnegutian^[2] type humor on my writing that most of my peers in Eng. IV (also taught by Mrs. K., a fact that I clearly exploited in the execution of this writing assignment in Fine Arts) not only didn’t appreciate, but I daresay (and not out of arrogance) didn’t get.

So I wrote my story. I wrote my little paragraph on the origin of my pseudo-Mayan jar. I explained, in detail, the jar’s Irish beginnings. I don’t remember much now, except that the story of the jar had something to do with caves and leprechauns, and to be quite honest I’m sure it really wasn’t that funny. But to expect everything to be fall-out-of-your-seat hysterical is really not fair even to the idea of humor. I am sure, though, that it was at least mildly funny. It should have at least elicited a few grins and giggles. So when my turn came, I stood proudly and somewhat stupidly in front of this class of sophomores who barely knew me, and whom I barely cared to know, read my paragraph for them like a good little monkey, finished all smiles, and looked up ready for the response that I was sure was coming.

….

What I got instead was dead silence. Not even a chuckle. I got Mrs. Knight with a big smile on her face, turning her head side to side to see if anyone…anyone, Bueller, anyone thought what I just said was even remotely in the same emotional ballpark as humor. When the silence did not yield, but instead began to gain exponentially in intensity and weight,^[3] Mrs. Knight broke it by saying, “Matt is in my English four class. He likes to write using surrealism.” Now, I have every respect for Mrs. Knight (her class being the single reason I majored in English in college and continued to even try to write once I graduated high school) but she had to know that this comment was not helpful to me or my situation. What’s surrealism to a tenth grader? Furthermore any time you throw out an -ism to a group of teenagers you might as well have just spoken in Mandarin. Be prepared to be met with blank stares, twisted brows, and screwed-up mouths all asking themselves, you, anyone, “What’s that mean?”

In the decade since, I have gotten more comfortable with being misunderstood.^[4] I have accepted it as my yoke, a thing I have to bear. I could be walking down a crowded hallway carrying two armloads of unmanageable objects: a large paper bag filled with lunch plates, two cans of paint, a bowling ball, a stack of loose papers, and two full Styrofoam drink cups. I could walk up to the door that I need to enter obviously physically incapable of opening it myself, say to the nearest person, “Could you get that door for me?” and be looked at as if I just fell naked through the ceiling, jabbered in a foreign tongue, set my hair on fire, cursed everyone’s mother, ate a live cat, and…(you get the idea). The person I spoke to would say, “What?” and then there would be a moment or two of this kind of dance that people do when neither knows which way the other is trying to go. We would each step left, then right, then left again, until we were both infuriated with the situation. I would say again, “Could you please get that DOOR for me?”

“What?”

“The DOOR. I’ve got an armful here.”

“I’m sorry…?”

“&$%#!”

“You got a problem?”

“YES. JUST OPEN THE DOOR!”

“Oh. Man. Sorry, dude. Why didn’t you just say so.”

I have suffered extreme anxiety and almost chronic aggravation over the years at this inability to communicate. So of course I grow up and become a teacher, a profession that requires, if nothing else, an ability to communicate clearly with other people. To compound the problem, though, is the fact that teenagers are not real people. If the thing that separates us from the animals (according to science) is our ability to reason, then I can’t see how teenagers can possibly be defined as human. They are odd little sub-human organisms with no conscience, no capacity for patience or good will, no desire to know anything outside of what immediately affects them at the moment, innate hostility toward authority figures of any kind, no sense of community or brotherly love, and no emotion at all toward anything remotely educational.

So do this simple equation with me if you will: (inability to communicate + the resultant anxiety) + teenage ignorance/apathy ÷ educational objectives = y.

To sum this up, there is nothing more frustrating than to come in, take roll, give everyone a minute to finish their journal, then make the quick decision to start class by saying, “Now on the test this Friday…”

Heads began to snap around. Papers are shuffled.

“We got a TEST TODAY?”

“TEST?”

“WHAT’S IT ON?”

The slow one: “Oh, a test? On that stuff from last week?”

When I finally get a chance to sneak in a word, it’s never pleasant.^[5] “No, no. We don’t have a test today. Did I ever say that we had a test today? What did I say? We have a test Friday. Not today.”

And so goes the workday. So goes the year.

NOTES (click on number to return to post)

1. One Luke G. who, on my absence one day, took it upon himself to paint the two-headed man (one head young, the other old, with the young head’s hand holding a “go” sign, the old head’s hand holding a “yield” sign) that I had made out of clay, baked in an oven, was extremely proud of and looking forward to painting myself.

2. i.e. humor like that of writer Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

3. While not containing mass, and therefore not an “object” subject to the laws of physics, silence nonetheless acts as a sort of psychological/emotional object that can be used as any number of tools--bludgeon, hammer, vice, pry-bar, drill, etc. It also has some kind of ability to grow, as noted, in intensity and weight the longer it is left sitting in one place. If I could footnote a footnote here I would say: Okay, okay, I’m not a scientist and I scraped through physics in high school, but come on, you know what I’m talking about.

4. I do NOT mean this in the wear-all-black, pout-around-listening-to-obscure-indie-rock-for-attention-I-claim-I-don’t-want way of being “misunderstood.” I mean, much more literally, that I am used to saying things that make sense to me, but do not make sense to the receiver because of a failure on my part to clearly communicate.

5. There is a teacherly tone that cannot be communicated in writing. It is some mix of frustration, exasperation, rage, and condescension. However, parts of the emotional tones cancel one another out so that it comes together as a unique and distinct emotional expression.

The Right to Life

2008-11-07T05:17:00.003-06:00

The backdrop for every recent presidential election has been the issue of abortion. The historic mistake of many on the left, and the recent misunderstanding of some people (specifically some “evangelicals”) on the right is that abortion is one issue of many. For some folks it falls a little bit ahead of economy, war, and foreign relations on the priority list, but they see it, as Barack Obama suggested in the last debate, as an issue that we (the two parties) can find some middle ground on. To adopt this “understanding” of the issue of abortion is to completely miss the argument that the issue is grounded on. The huge moral question with regard to abortion is not the granting or restricting of maternal rights--i.e. “freedom of choice,” “reproductive rights” (Which, by the way are exercised when one consents to sexual activity which one knows may result in the conception of a child. The argument that “reproductive rights” can somehow be extended past the point of conception is as nonsensical as saying that you’ve decided to build a house after you’ve already laid the foundation and put up the frame), and so on--but rather the question of the rights of the life being snuffed out.

So if the question that hangs in the balance is not the life or death of a choice, but the life or death of a human, it makes no sense to say that it is an issue on which we can reach “middle ground.” Murder is not a gray area, no matter how postmodern you may fancy yourself. Liberals know this. They know what the central question is, and that is why they reframe the issue with such euphemistic language as that shown above. If they can keep the focus off of the baby and on the rights of the mother, they dodge the moral question. But again, they make a mistake by underestimating the intelligence of the vast majority of people for whom abortion is an issue (anyone of childbearing age).

To frame the issue as a choice or an exercise of reproductive rights is to degrade the child, the act of conception, the period of gestation wherein the mother and child grow together, and the beautiful event of birth. It is also to put ourselves in the place of God, where we can decide when to give and take life. In truth, we have no reproductive rights. Every child is given or withheld by the hand of God. This is why I chuckle when newly married friends of mine talk loudly about how long they’re going to wait before they have kids. I tell them that they will wait until they become pregnant. That may be in six years, or six months, but it is something that they don’t have as much control over as they think.

There is also the sort of red herring of a question that we have all placed in the abortion argument: Does life begin at conception, or some time after? I understand that the intention of the question is to find out if there is a time during the pregnancy when it would be morally permissible to have an abortion. First, this question answers itself. I always tell my students that if they have to question whether something is right or wrong, then it is wrong. This question of when life begins cannot possibly work for the pro-abortion side. It admits that the life of the child is the central question. Second, it is a moot point. I have seen an ultrasound at seven weeks. You can’t see much at seven weeks. The baby does not so much look like a baby as it does a bean. But the bean, the tiny, formless human does have one distinct characteristic: a heartbeat. The only thing you can clearly make out at an early ultrasound is the glow and pulse of the baby’s heartbeat. Now, I am no scientist, but I know two things: 1. You cannot make a convincing argument that something that has a heartbeat is not alive. 2. Most women do not even know that they are pregnant for the first seven or eight weeks (I know that I am not a woman, and do not want to speak out of line on this point. I am simply speaking from experience of the women that I know and know of who have had babies). So then, if most abortions would take place well after conception, and after the baby has a distinct heartbeat, the question of when life begins is not relevant.

Yes, this is a sensitive moral issue. But it is not one on which middle ground can be reached. There is no concession when it comes to the taking of innocent, defenseless life. And because of this issue, my vote is predetermined. Regardless of whatever a candidate promises my voting for him will be precluded if he is pro-choice. I am bound morally. I also understand the argument that we should look more holistically at what it means to be “pro-life”--i.e. with regard to war, genocide, etc.--but then no one supports genocide, and war is, at times, a necessary evil. Abortion is an unnecessary atrocity.

Episode 20: Dugh!

2008-10-17T15:58:00.004-05:00

A baby’s first year is like falling down a mountain. It’s slow-moving at first. It takes several hundred yards (several weeks) of uncontrolled flailing and falling, screaming, crying and garbled pleas for help (pointless, meandering calls to [grand]parents in which you really didn’t call to ask anything specific, but rather to generally inquire, through your rambling stories and references back to what you remember of your siblings’ infancy, “What the #$%& are we supposed to do about such and such?”), to get started. But it’s slow-moving. After a while, the panic subsides and you fall into a steady roll, consistent and slow, while still suffering the painful bumps and bruises (chronic and life-threatening sleep deprivation, various waste management crises, trips to the pediatrician, after-hours clinic, and ER), that come along with any good fall off the side of a mountain.

Then, just as you’ve gotten used to this, and have found the rhythm in your roll, you drop over a precipice (she begins crawling), and things speed up exponentially. You are now no longer casually rolling, but have broken into a full-on fall, your progress measured by milestone after milestone (pulling up, sidling, “She said ‘duck’!” She said ‘Dinah [the cat]’!” etc.), and before you know it, you have landed at the bottom (one year!^[*]).

And so here we are. It was roughly one year ago when Joni called me as she was leaving her weekly doctor visit to tell me that they had set a date for Eva to be born (by planned C-section). It was roughly a year ago that all of the possible outcomes of parenthood became very real in my mind and I began, for the first time, to show something like fear where Eva was concerned. I have been happy that many of those fears went (thankfully) unrealized, and the ones that were realized have been more educational than damaging. The truth is that we have been very blessed with Eva. She has been in good health (a few nasty ear infections not withstanding), she has developed on schedule, and even though she began her little life gaining weight faster than most babies, and got to be big very quickly, her weight gain has leveled off. She’s still a chunk and a half, but she’s doing the thing kids do where they grow into their weight and redistribute it so that they go from looking big (as in chunky) to looking big (as in proportional, but still all around larger than normal).

Also, this past week we’ve reached a new milestone (and I am as ashamed to note this as I am excited): Eva has been sleeping through the night in her own bed. Now, for those of you who would snottily reply, “My child has been sleeping in his/her bed since three weeks before he/she was delivered,” I would say: “I hope your next child never lets you see a mattress for the first three months of his/her life.” I would also say: “Keep bragging. So far, everything we said that we would never do, we’ve done. Multiple times.” And putting her in our bed was on that list. It was probably number one on that list. But, when your newborn lets out bloodcurdling screams every time you lay her down and walk away, and when you spend a month taking turns sleeping in the bed or the recliner, stoking yourself up for a night spent on-duty, and looking ahead on the TV schedule to see when Fresh Prince is coming on, you do what you have to do. By the end of December, we would have been willing to sleep hanging upside down with our socks on fire if it would have meant more than two hours of solid, R.E.M. sleep. And so, Eva piled up in our bed. And she slept. Sometimes up to five or six hours at a time. And Mama and Daddy were simply ecstatic. And because it worked, and was easy, Eva continued to pile up in our bed.

But now we have made the move to her bed, and she has taken it pretty well. She only really screamed for two nights, and since then has simply whined herself to sleep while we, paranoid as we are, actually probably sleep less comfortably due to worry that Eva has somehow managed to get herself into a dangerous situation within the confines of her baby bed. So we wake up compulsively and check on her, which only disturbs her otherwise deep and peaceful sleep. I have accepted the fact that parenthood will give me no peace of mind. I have come to grips with the realization that my mind will not know rest until I die, and I will worry gladly.

*BACK TO POST While normally sufficiently expressive, English grammar has no punctuation mark signifying bittersweetness, which would be much more appropriate here than the not-at-all-subtle exclamation point.

Open Apology

2008-09-18T05:33:00.002-05:00

The Christian apologist may have a new job on his hands these days. Maybe a true apology is in order. I found this list of things that we need to apologize for. Having spent a large amount of time in church over the last few years watching youth ministers jump through hoops to impress teenagers while managing to avoid the Gospel and Jesus altogether, I can, unfortunately, identify personally with a lot of these things on the list. (I linked to the source at the bottom of the page.)

1. We’re sorry for treating Jesus Christ as a life-enhancement product.

2. We’re sorry for funding and listening to crooks and liars on TV and sending them money.

3. We’re sorry for attending churches where live motorcycle stunts are performed onstage.

4. We’re sorry for having 3rd rate ethics while claiming to follow Christ.

5. We’re sorry that neighbors had to call the police because our church sound system blew out their windows.

6. We’re sorry for supporting a deranged “evangelist” who kicks people in the stomach to cure their cancer.

7. We’re sorry for wearing/selling/buying stupid T-shirts that blaspheme God and thinking that would impress non-Christians.

8. We’re sorry for spending billions of dollars on music downloads and CD’s of our favorite Christian pop stars and funding their demise.

9. We’re sorry for blowing off Sola Scriptura and returning to medieval mysticism.

10. We’re sorry for buying books from heretical wolves like Brian McLaren who deny hell, the substitutionary atonement and the Second Coming.

11. We’re sorry for adopting Hindu worship practices as a Christian means of encountering God.

12. We’re sorry for buying trash like The Shack that redefines the Trinity and introduces goddess theology to evangelicals.

13. We’re sorry for following the Rupert Murdoch-sponsored Pied Piper into his latest church campaign because we refuse to think biblically.

Source: Slice of Laodicea

Share the Wealth

2008-09-17T05:39:00.004-05:00

“I believe that America's free market has been the engine of America's great progress. It's created a prosperity that is the envy of the world. It's led to a standard of living unmatched in history. And it has provided great rewards to the innovators and risk-takers who have made America a beacon for science, and technology, and discovery…We are all in this together. From CEOs to shareholders, from financiers to factory workers, we all have a stake in each other's success because the more Americans prosper, the more America prospers.” --Barack Obama, New York, NY, September 17, 2007

There are a lot of rich, white intellectuals who avidly support Barack Obama. I have to think that this is primarily because Obama embodies idealism. He fancies himself a wordsmith, and he’s morally and ideologically relativistic enough to make room for a lot of people with varying personal beliefs. Rich white intellectuals love this. Obama has a way of speaking so that, if you’re trying to hear yourself in his words, it is very easy to do that. But, if you like your politician’s statements to actually be logical, black or white expressions of belief, you’re out of luck.

One thing about this almost unified backing of Obama among rich white intellectuals is that Obama is, in a lot of ways, a socialist. One part of his economic plan includes raising taxes on the upper class and giving tax credits to the middle class (the link is somewhat vague, but I’ve heard him expound on this idea in television interviews). This is a fine idea, and actually one that I don’t totally disagree with. However, how are all of the idealistic liberals going to start behaving when it’s their money being redistributed through the system and put into the pockets of the working class? I wonder how gracious they’ll be to Obama then. And I have to wonder…do they even get it?

How to Mold Minds: Episodes 3 & 4

2008-09-07T06:44:00.004-05:00

How to Mold Minds: Episode 1
How to Mold Minds: Episode 2

Episode 3:

Student (after reading “The Lottery”): This story’s weird.

Teacher: Humor me; what would be “not weird?”

Student: I don’t know. Somethin’ about mud ridin’ or huntin’ or somethin’.

Episode 4:

Student #1 (to another student while watching Channel 1 News’ coverage of the presidential election): If Barack Obama gets to be president, we can’t keep guns in our house?

Student #2: Nah.

Student #1: Well, where we gon’ put ‘em?

On Molding Minds

2008-08-16T08:39:00.001-05:00

Not long after Eva was born, some time in the middle of last school year, I came to an important realization about fatherhood. I guess I’ve always believed that the different spheres of one’s life overlap; that it is necessary for a person’s faith to inform his family life, his faith and family life to inform his work, and his work to support and confirm all the things that he thinks he knows about himself. In other words, you can’t be a deacon in the church, and be a good father, and run a strip club on the weekends. You can’t be a cutthroat business man, and a loving dad at the same time. Any inconsistencies between spheres will eventually affect the relationship between the spheres and the whole system will break down. So, my realization was this: I think that teaching has helped me learn what kind of father I need to be.

My primary goal at the beginning of last school year was not to teach English. I had been through one hellish year before, constantly being derided and walked on by a group of 14-year-olds whose moral compass had long ago been crushed under foot. I had spent my first year of teaching absolutely helpless in the face of students who knew that all they had to do to beat me was make me question my own authority. And they did that very effectively.

So it was that I entered the classroom last year as a relentless jerk. I spent my first few days assuring the students of how much work was going to be expected of them, of how I didn’t find anything about them to be cute or funny, of how I was not impressed by the boys’ pubescent displays of machismo (to the point where I spent a good deal of time mocking deer hunting--a religious event in these parts). I didn’t laugh at their jokes, I let none of them offend with impunity, and I didn’t start smiling at them for several weeks. And things went much better than the year before. I could count on one hand the number of discipline problems I had between a student and myself.

But my decisions and the students’ reactions taught me something else, too. As much as I love what I teach, and as much as I know that the students need to be good readers, and need to love literature, I know that what most of them need more is someone who actually expects something of them and won’t tolerate their bad behavior, lack of interest, or poor workmanship. I learned that even the most hardened student, who will get so mad at you that they leave the room and slam the door, secretly respects the fact that you didn’t indulge their desire to be disruptive or disrespectful. I learned the value of being hard, and being consistent. And while I lightened up on them, and we eventually had a good time, the groundwork was set, they knew the rules, and I knew what they were capable of. Now, don’t hear me say that the year was flawless. I made mistakes in teaching and in discipline, but on the whole the year was a success.

I truly think that seeing and understanding what these students need has helped me to understand what Eva will need as she grows up. She will need me to laugh with her and play with her, but she will also need me to set boundaries for her and to maintain those boundaries no matter whether she likes it or not, and no matter how many times she tries to find a way around them. Ultimately, she needs me to say “no” more times than I say “yes,” and to make her understand why “no” is the best response in any given case. This will not be easy, but it will be necessary, and teaching is teaching me how to walk the line between being caring and being strict. This is something that I have always known, but through teaching, I’m actually learning how to do it. I just hope that I can remember everything I learn.

...and it ran

2008-07-22T06:11:00.004-05:00

I've been looking at a few things for work this morning, and was reminded about this poem. I found this in my college textbook and used it with my ninth graders last year. It was the only poem we read that received an immediate response from the students. They all thought it was disturbing. They were right. It is maybe the most beautiful, disturbing poem I have ever read. Enjoy.

One threw a dirt clod and it ran
Andrew Hudgins

One threw a dirt clod and it ran, and when it paused,
another threw a rock and it trotted out of range,
so they pursued it, lobbing rocks and sticks,
just to see it gallop, which was beautiful,
then to keep it running, but when it stumbled on barbed wire
and broke a front leg and crumpled to its knees, entangled,
one hit it with a tree limb and hit it again. It fell
and they, laughing, ran up and kicked it, jumped away,
ran off, ran back and kicked it, till they could stand beside it,
kicking. They cheered when one of them pried loose
a broken fence post. They fought for the fence post
and took turns swinging it until the tangled beast’s
slack ribs stopped pumping, heaving. Gasping for breath,
they stared at one another, dropped the post, the stones, the sticks.
They nudged the huge corpse and waited for it to rise,
to rise and gallop over rutted, fenced-off fields
as if there were no ruts, no mudholes, scrub brush, wire,
so they could follow it forever, weeping and hurling stones

Young, Restless, Reformed

2008-07-15T07:54:00.005-05:00

In September 2006 Collin Hansen, editor of Christianity Today magazine, published an article entitled “Young, Restless, Reformed,” bearing the headline, “Calvinism is making a comeback--and shaking up the church.” Hansen subsequently continued the journey he had started in researching for the article, and in March of this year published the book Young, Restless, Reformed: A Journalist’s Journey with the New Calvinists. It is a short volume that reads (by design) much more like an extended news article than a book, and as such it keeps its subject clearly in focus: The beliefs and trends of a growing number of young Calvinists.

While many people might consider the subject matter and shrug their shoulders, it is important to understand why this movement is important. In the book’s prologue, Hansen admits to being uneasy with the perceived popularity of the Emergent movement. As his magazine had previously published an article entitled, “The Emergent Mystique,” Hansen was left bewildered. He didn’t know anyone who considered themselves Emergent. On the contrary, he and all of his friends held to older, more Reformed expressions of the faith, and were unfamiliar with the new Emergent leaders. They still read John Piper and Wayne Grudem. So, in an attempt to reconcile his day to day experience with what he heard was happening, he set out on a journey to find more likeminded individuals that he knew must be out there somewhere.

The book covers the general theological activity in seven important locations, such as the Passion Conference, Bethlehem Baptist Church (where John Piper pastors), Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (where Al Mohler serves as president), and Mars Hill Church in Seattle (where Mark Driscoll pastors) to name a few. In each location, Hansen interacts with both the respective leaders, and the young conference attendees and church members in an attempt to understand what’s being taught, what’s being received, and where it might be headed.

It is a fascinating and comforting read in that it assures some of us that we are not alone and we are not crazy. It is a testament to the fact that theology matters, and that whether now or later, the current theological shifts and trends are going to make a big difference in how the church looks and thinks. I believe, though, that one of the book’s strengths is in the subtle distinction that Hansen makes (although perhaps inadvertently) between a supposed national consciousness and the reality of what is happening on the ground.

Information moves faster than ever and these days everyone is an ideologue. The theological discussions that young people are having are mostly happening on the Web through blogs and social networking sites. The Emergent movement, for example, is making waves, but one has to ask how real of an effect it is having offline. By reading about the movement, one would assume that it is hugely popular in the church at large. But, like Hansen, I believe that very few people would actually claim to know anyone who was Emergent, much less refer to themselves by that name.

If I did not have access to the Internet, I would know virtually nothing about Emergent outside of recognizing the names of a few books relevant to the movement. I spend a lot of time in churches and, outside of college ministries, these ideas are not something that a lot of people are talking about. I believe that Emergent’s popularity is the effect of New Media--a few people latch on to an ideology, then put their thoughts and manifestoes online where ravenous youth who are searching desperately for a sufficient worldview feed off of them, hence birthing a movement. This is the new reality, and it testifies to the depth at which technology, and the web in particular, deeply affects culture.

However, Hansen’s reporting seems to point to a different type of movement among the young Calvinists. While the fringe is obviously fueled through online consumption of podcasts, articles, and other resources, the bulk of the activity is happening on college campuses, at large conferences, and most importantly--as Hansen focuses on in the epilogue--local churches. It is a movement steeped in biblical teaching and church history, and it is having a direct effect on how preachers are preaching, teachers are teaching, and leaders are leading. And interestingly, it is a theology that many individuals are initially embracing independently, then coming together with other young people who have come to the same conclusions. In some opinions, this gives credence to the authenticity of the movement.

Understanding the differences in the divergent theologies is even more necessary to understanding why this is important. While Emergents (generally) hold loosely to any and all truth claims, make a practice of questioning the authenticity, inerrancy and relevance of the Bible, and seem to view Jesus as more moral philosopher and teacher than Savior, Calvinists see things differently. They have no problem making propositional truth claims. They see a high view of the Bible as absolutely necessary for understanding, and growing deeper in, the Christian faith and worldview, and they hold up not only what Jesus did in his life, but what he accomplished in his death. In short, these are two theologies at completely opposite ends of the spectrum that are being fervently and passionately adopted by growing numbers of young people.

Is one movement a response to the other? Perhaps. Many Emergents will readily admit that they are responding to a stale and irrelevant expression of the Christian faith. And I’m sure that many Calvinists take comfort in the belief that the rise in Reformed expressions of the faith may in fact be providential. Will one outrun the other? I suppose only time will tell.

The Vacationing

2008-07-14T07:40:00.006-05:00

We had nixed the idea of a summer vacation pretty early on. We didn’t see the need for, or the benefit in, taking a baby out on the road by ourselves. That wouldn’t really be a vacation. If anything, it seemed it would be more stressful than staying at home. But, when Joni’s dad and step mom told us that they were planning on renting a house in Gulf Shores for a week so that all the kids and their families could come down, a vacation began to sound a little more feasible. We would be in a house and would have lots of people around for tech support. So, with the only remaining fear being the seven hour drive, we hit the road last Saturday headed for the beach.

We realized early on one of our weaknesses in parenting. As we started to take Eva out more, we quickly saw that we were truly, deeply afraid of her. Our biggest fear was being in public and having her wig out and not knowing what to do. We would take her somewhere and hold our breath the entire time, praying that she did not wake up, or start grunting out a poop. But, when we began to understand that we were afraid of her, and that this was probably unnecessary, and when we started paying attention and began noticing the large number of babies present everywhere we went (many of them even smaller than her), we lightened up a little bit. Things are easier now, and I’m not even afraid to take her out by myself. A couple of weeks ago she and I ran out to the mall to do some business and strolled around for a while. She was perfectly fine. We’ve mastered changing diapers in the back of the Forerunner, or, if necessary, on the floorboard, and Eva’s gotten quite comfortable taking a bottle while riding in her car seat. She also loves to go out to eat, and to go grocery shopping. I guess she enjoys sitting up and being able to look around. So, while babies are definitely something to be afraid of, our fears are shifting, and we enjoy taking her out now.

The beach trip was very nice. For the most part, we just hung out around the house and went down to the beach for a little while every day. I opted out of the fishing trip, and we had to skip the tubing/canoeing trip for obvious reasons. We did, however go on a pretty cool dolphin cruise. I realize that a dolphin cruise doesn’t sound like the most masculine event, and it may not be, but it was cool nonetheless. The boats would run side by side, causing a big wake that the dolphins would swim and play in. They showed out, jumping and diving right there about 50 feet from the boat.

I believe, though, that Eva got a little too comfortable with having some 15 people constantly poised and ready to lavish attention on her 24 hours a day. She was very clingy yesterday, which I don’t mind, it just gets a little difficult at times.

Anyway, we’re back to normal now. I start back to work in a month, and so my next few weeks are going to be spent part babysitting and part doing prep work for my classes. I haven’t looked at anything work-related all summer, and I’m starting to feel a bit nervous about it.

Intelligent Christian Rap?

2008-07-03T07:26:00.004-05:00

If I were in an oxymoron writing contest, that would be my prize entry. Please don’t misunderstand. I’m not knocking Christianity or rap, but I do know three things: I do not like to use “Christian” as an adjective, I do not like Christian music, and I dislike Christian rap even more.

I have been reading Collin Hansen’s Young, Restless, Reformed: A Journalist’s Journey with the New Calvinists. Hansen is the editor-in-chief of Christianity Today, who published an article of a similar name back in September of 2006 on the growing trend of Calvinism among young Christians. The book is quite an interesting read, but I will get to that another time. In the chapter I read yesterday, Hansen interviewed two young Reformed Christian rappers, Voice and Shai Linne. Of course I am always interested to hear musicians talk about their work, and listen very closely when Christians talk about their music in nuanced, intelligent terms. Here is a quote from the chapter:

Theologically speaking, Shai argues that hip-hop might be a superior musical form because of the sheer word count. “The power of hip-hop is because it’s primarily a lyrical medium. It has ability to communicate large amounts of information at one time. When you’re able to do that, you’re able to transmit a worldview.”

Only recently have I been able to better articulate to my friends and band mates the many problems I have with seven-word praise songs, doing strictly cover material, and unabashedly playing to the crowd every time you step on stage. The songwriting trend in “Christian music” seems to be that you should write every song to be as generally appealing as possible. That immediately limits your vocabulary and subject matter. Most of the teen and college crowd that worship music appeals to don’t have a broad vocabulary, and know even less about theology. It’s easier to focus on the larger, well-known themes of Christianity in very broad terms: God loves us, God is good, we need God. To get down to the marrow of what these things mean would take too much time, too many (big) words, and generally wouldn’t be understood.

These implicit assumptions about your audience stifles your creativity, and rather than perform honest songs that deal with things that may not be as accessible, it’s easier to just throw in “holy, mighty, majesty” and be done with it. Of course, this is not a new problem in music. Much of popular music is and always has been banal and useless. However, it is a particularly bothersome problem in the Christian realm because the message of the music is anything but banal and useless. It is ultimate truth. And when you dumb down ultimate truth, you get music that has been neutered, stripped of the ability to create affections and life in those that hear it.

That said, I did a little online research of Shai Linne, and turned up some very interesting material. In February, he released The Atonement. The album is basically a 19-track exposition of the cross. It gives a whole new meaning to both the term and concept of contextualization. Not only is Linne’s rapping good, but his lyrics are some of the densest, most theologically heavy lyrics I have ever heard in my life. He deals with heavy subjects in a very palatable way without sacrificing content or style. This goes against the common understanding that in “Christian music” one has to choose between writing God-centered lyrics, or writing good music, but one cannot do both because if the music is too good it detracts from the lyrics.

For example, in the song “Atonement Q&A,” Shai Linne answers questions concerning God, Jesus, and the cross. He does so by rapping using classic biblical and theological language. This is extremely hard to do. Most “Christian artists” who attempt to do such things inadvertently dumb down the message by dumbing down the language. Shai Linne doesn’t play that game.

Below, I’ve listed several links to his materials and two videos of an interview he did about the record, The Atonement. He is a very thoughtful guy who not only puts a lot of effort into his music, but is unafraid to take risks. To be this brave in “Christian music” is almost unthinkable. It’s as if he’s genuinely unconcerned whether the weight of the album will turn people off to it. He made the record because it was a passion of his and the only way to do it was to do it without pulling punches. This kind of attitude is going to be absolutely necessary if we are going to pull “Christian music” up out of the mire that it’s in. Please check out Shai Linne. Even if you don’t like rap music, pass him along to people who do. This stuff needs to be heard and encouraged.

Shai Linne's MySpace page

The Atonement Mp3 download on Amazon

The Atonement on iTunes

Lampmode Records, Shai Linne's label

The Atonement Interview with Shai Linne (1 of 2)

The Atonement Interview with Shai Linne (2 of 2)

Free Will and Election

2008-06-30T07:50:00.001-05:00

“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God.” (John 3:16-18)

“…because, if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” (Romans 10:9)

“O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you would not!” (Matthew 23:37)

I am well aware that there are many passages in the Bible that speak to man concerning his choice to either accept or reject God. I understand that if someone is going to consider the subject of free will vs. predestination/election, the entire Bible needs to be taken into account. I want to make a note on this very briefly, and then I will officially drop the subject.

First, I think it is false to assume that since the Bible speaks to both predestination and free will that both carry the same weight, and so the subject should be dropped altogether. Many people play that card. “The Bible says both are true, so it doesn’t matter.” If I wanted to be inconsiderate, my knee-jerk response to that would be to say “No, you’re right. If you don’t want to think about it, then you’re right. If you don’t want to study it, then you’re right. They’re both true to an extent.” But I personally think that such an answer is a copout. I think it is an attempt to dodge having to look eye to eye with truths that are not pleasant to look at.

The fact is that in the New Testament, the terms elect or election appear 15 times in the NIV, 19 times in the ESV, and 23 times in the KJV. The term predestined appears 4 times in the NIV, 5 times in the ESV, with the term predestinated appearing 2 times in the KJV. The topic is not one that Calvinists are inventing, or going out of their way to construct an argument for. It is obvious both in the text of the New Testament, as well as in the Old. It must be dealt with for what it is.

The question is not “Does God elect, or does man have free will?” The question is, “Since God elects, and man has free will, how do they work together?” The assumption that people from the Arminian side seem to jump to is that if we have free will, God’s elective activity takes a back seat to our choice. They will argue fervently that either God elects based on our choice, or that the two work together in some mysterious fashion. I don’t see it to be that complicated.

Eva Kate is only seven months old as I write this, but within the next year, she is going to gain a lot of freedom. She will learn to walk, and will be able to get around the house without the help of Joni or me. She will be able to play more and in more interesting and exciting ways. She will be much more free to do what she wants than she is now. However, her freedom will have limits. There will be things that she will not be able to do, either because she is physically unable or because we will not allow them. It will not be okay for her to jump off of the counter on top of Dinah, our cat. She will not be allowed to write on her walls with a permanent marker. She will have to operate in her freedom under our control as parents.

If we believe that God is sovereign and in control in any sense, then we must understand how our freedom works underneath God’s sovereignty. It wouldn’t make much sense for God to create beings that he could not control. If we were ultimately free, we would be able to overcome God, and we know that is impossible. Besides, we have no problem admitting certain limitations of our freedom. We can’t fly. We can’t breathe under water. These things limit the free choices that we can make. In the same way, we have to understand our freedom as it relates to God’s sovereignty, and see that we operate with as much freedom as he allows us to.

Also, when it comes to election, there is the assumption that God’s actively saving us is some kind of human rights violation against our will, as if we do not respond as humans but rather as robots. This is a misunderstanding of the idea of salvation. Before coming to God we are under the control of our sin. We do what we want to do. When we finally hear the gospel for the first time, when it finally catches our hearts and we respond to it, God, through the Holy Spirit, has simply enlightened us to the truth of the gospel. He has made it clear to us for the first time, and we do respond--we respond positively by acknowledging God and what Christ did for us, and we are saved.

Election doesn’t negate human response, but it does change the way that we understand it.

Two significant passages on election

2008-06-25T15:58:00.004-05:00

Election can be defined as “an act of God before the creation in which he chooses some people to be saved, not on account of any foreseen merit in them, but only because of his sovereign good pleasure” (Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology, 670).

According to the doctrine of election, God chose (elected, predestined), before the foundation of the world, those who would come to him and be saved. He knows whom he will save, as well as the time and means of their salvation. The decision to save is a divine one, not a human one. Man’s role in salvation is to respond to the Holy Spirit with faith in Christ.

Following are brief analyses of two texts that deal explicitly with election:

Ephesians 1:3-11

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love he predestined us for adoption as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the Beloved. In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace, which he lavished upon us, in all wisdom and insight making known to us the mystery of his will, according to his purpose, which he set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.

In him we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to the purpose of him who works all things according to the counsel of his will, so that we who were the first to hope in Christ might be to the praise of his glory.

Verse 4 says that God “chose us in him [Christ] before the foundation of the world.” This verse gives some time frame to God’s act of election, saying that before the creation of the world, he had chosen those who would be his. This same wording turns up in other places as well, most notably Revelation 17:8:

The beast that you saw was, and is not, and is about to rise from the bottomless pit and go to destruction. And the dwellers on earth whose names have not been written in the book of life from the foundation of the world will marvel to see the beast, because it was and is not and is to come.

By explicitly saying that those who “have not been written in the book of life from the foundation of the world will marvel to see the beast [my emphasis],” it is implied that those who are saved were written in the book “from the foundation of the world.” The fact that the wording in these two passages, written by different authors, is nearly identical is very significant. It tells us that an understanding of the concept and general nature of election was apparently common among early believers.

In the passage from Ephesians, Paul states that this choosing and predestining was done “according to the purpose of his will” (v. 5), and “according to the purpose of him who works all things according to the counsel of his will” (v. 11). We will see the same language used in Romans 8:29. Paul’s repeated reference to God’s will solidifies a point: Election--who will and will not be saved--is not based on anything in man, but solely on the purposes of God, and his will. Man’s purpose and man’s free choice are nowhere in view in this passage, not even with respect to man’s choice to accept the gospel.

Some people use this passage from Ephesians to try and prove that believers are not predestined to salvation, but rather to certain blessings. This idea is drawn from verse 3: “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places.” This is not a logical argument, however, because all Christians receive the blessings that are in view in this passage, namely “that we should be holy and blameless before him,” a blessing that was purchased for believers by Christ on the cross and that all believers receive at salvation; and “adoption as sons,” which is another way of stating the idea of salvation (Rom. 8:23; Gal. 4:5).

Romans 8:28-30

And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose. For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. And those whom he predestined he also called, and those whom he called he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified.

In verse 28, Paul comments on God’s intentions for “those who are called according to his purpose.” First, it is important to note that the “calling” in view here is not a reference to the general preaching of the gospel. There are specific people (“those who love God”) who are called to something specific. In verse 30 we see that “those whom he called he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified.” The calling then, according to Paul, is to salvation. Second, God called these people “according to his purpose.” This is the same point that we saw made in Ephesians 1:5, 11 (and is also made in Rom. 9:11), and again is a fact that negates the possibility that it has anything to do with human purposes.

Verse 29 says that God predestined those whom he foreknew “to be conformed to the image of his Son….” The use of the word foreknew, in this verse (as well as Rom.11:2, and also foreknowledge in 1 Peter 1:2), have commonly led people to argue that God elects people based on his knowledge of their future faith--that is, he knows whom will be saved because he knows our future responses to the gospel, and in light of this knowledge, he predestines us for salvation. This assertion is not supported by the text. The passage here does not say that God foreknows an action, but rather the people being spoken of in the text. This argument concerning foreknew also undermines the meaning of the word predestined. If God reacts to our future decision to follow him, this is not predestination, but merely an acknowledgement of our decision.

Verse 30 gives a list of the things that will happen to those whom God predestined. They will be called (to salvation), justified (made legally right before God), and finally glorified (made perfect with God in Heaven). This verse makes it very clear that the thing we are “predestined” for and “called” to is not a set of special blessings, as discussed above, but rather to salvation itself.

From the passages in Ephesians 1 and Romans 8, we see the following:

1. Predestination occurred “before the foundation of the world” (Eph. 1:4).
2. God predestines people to salvation (Rom. 8:30).
3. For the human, predestination occurs before calling, justification, and
glorification (Rom. 8:30).
4. God does all of this according to his own purposes (Eph. 1:5, 11).
5. Predestination is not done according to man’s decision to accept the gospel,
but according to the purposes of God.

Three essential truths, part 3: God is all-loving

2008-06-25T12:08:00.007-05:00

God is all-loving: All Christians believe that God is love, but disagree as to what is the supreme object of his affections.

The reason that most discussions about the Calvinistic understanding of the sovereignty of God never get very far without somebody getting angry is because of one statement: “God is love” (1 John 4:8, 16). “If God is love,” goes the argument, “then why would he choose to save some people, but not save all? That doesn’t sound very loving.”

My first problem with this “argument” is that it is not really an argument against God’s sovereignty at all, but simply a conversation stopper. From the side of the person making that claim, they see God’s love as his first and only attribute, and they understand love in the terms that we as humans have come to understand it. From the side of the one being shut down, do they really want to be caught arguing against God being a God of love?

I would never argue against the statement “God is love,” but I have learned to be careful about ending my description of God with that one attribute. He is love, but he is also many other things (including wrathful, just, and merciful, among others), and therefore his love must operate with and within those other attributes. What is usually implied by the use of this statement is that God loves us no matter what we do (which is true, in the context of grace and salvation), and that rather than punish us for our sin, he simply chooses to forgive us for what we’ve done. He shows his love for us in everything we do, and never punishes sin. Besides being cutely naïve, this belief is also terribly wrong.

I am currently reading Timothy Keller’s new book The Reason for God, a somewhat academic (but highly readable) response to what is being called the New Atheism. In a chapter titled “The (True) Story of the Cross,” where Keller explains the necessity of the cross in the forgiveness of God, he begins with an illustration that I think is helpful:

Imagine that someone borrows your car, and as he backs it out of the driveway he strikes a gate, knocking it down along with part of a wall. Your property insurance doesn’t cover the gate and garden wall. What can you do? There are essentially two options. The first is to demand that he pay for the damages. The second is to refuse to let him pay anything. There may also be middle-of-the-road solutions in which you both share the payment. Notice that in every option the cost of the damage must be borne by someone. Either you or he absorbs the cost for the deed, but the debt does not somehow vanish into thin air. Forgiveness, in this illustration, means bearing the cost for his misdeed yourself. (187)

Keller goes on throughout the chapter to further explain how the concept of forgiveness is not one where wrongs that have been done to someone simply vanish into thin air, but where the pain and punishment of them are borne by someone involved, either the transgressor or the transgressed. Even in a situation where someone has been emotionally wounded, forgiveness means taking that pain on yourself rather than taking vengeance on the person who wronged you.

The question is, how does God’s love fit into his justness? In our sin, we have wronged God. We have turned our back on him. This offense, even if forgiven, cannot go unpunished. Paul Washer often illustrates this point with the story of a judge who lets an obviously guilty murderer walk free. Word would get out that there is a judge on the bench more vile than the criminals he is supposed to be prosecuting. The public would hang such a judge. He would not be “just” in any sense of the word. In the same way, the crime that we have committed against God must be punished in some way in order for God to remain just in any sense.

How does God do this? The justice of God is demonstrated in two ways: The punishment of sinners in hell, and God’s wrath put on Jesus in place of those who will be saved. Jesus goes to the cross and bears the punishment for our sin, removing that punishment from us and justifying us in the eyes of God. This is a display of both forgiveness and love. Christ goes to the cross as God the Son, and is crushed by God the Father, and that act is a manifestation of God’s love and his wrath, his mercy and his justice. There is nothing unloving about it. The fact that not all are saved, then, does not mean that God’s loving nature is somehow marred. To quote Washer, “God loves people, therefore he must hate sin.” The two emotions are not mutually exclusive.

The accusation that the doctrine of election somehow makes God unloving ignores the same issue in Arminian theology. Anyone who believes that God has exhaustive knowledge of the future must also believe that when God created the world, he knew man would fall into sin. He knew that many people would die not believing and go to hell. Yet he still went ahead with his creation. By the same standards that Arminians would judge Calvinist theology, does this appear to be any more “loving?” There had to be a reason then, that God went ahead with his creation. What was it?

Scripture makes it clear that God’s reason for acting is always the glory of his name:

Concerning Abraham’s faith, Romans 4:20-21
Why God did not destroy Israel in the desert, Ezekiel 20:5-9
Why he saved men, Psalm 106:6-8
Pharaoh’s heart being hardened, Exodus 14:4, 18
The beginning of the monarchy, 1 Samuel 12:19-23
For thy name’s sake, O Lord pardon my guilt for it is great, Psalm 25:11
He leads me in paths of righteousness for his name’s sake, Psalm 23:3
Solomon’s dedication of the temple, 1 Kings 8:41-45
Why Israel was great, 2 Samuel 7:23
Why God did not destroy Israel, Isaiah 48:9-11
They do not lay it to heart to give glory to my name, Malachi 2:2
Jesus’ life and ministry, John 17:4, 7:18,4:34
Jesus’ death, John 12:27-28
We are saved to the praise of his glorious grace, Ephesians 1: 3-6
The Christian life, 1 Corinthians 10:31, 1 Peter 4:11, Matthew 5:16
The second coming, 2 Thessalonians 1:9-10
The consummation, Revelation 21:23

Man is certainly important to God. But what is more important than our fate is that the name of God be known and honored. God knew, for instance, that Pharaoh would not believe, yet he sent Moses and cast the plagues on Egypt to show Pharaoh that he was God. Pharaoh was not saved, but he did have to reckon with the revelation and knowledge of God.

If it is true that God acts for his own glory, what prevents him from being a narcissist? God is the end-all be-all. He is ultimate reality, and only in him is true happiness, fulfillment, and peace. This means that as God saves men, he is doing what he knows is best for them, as well as what brings glory to his name. God’s wanting us to be saved and to worship him is both for our ultimate benefit, and his ultimate glory. As John Piper puts it, “God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him.”

And there is the difference between the two views of God’s love. One theology holds that man is the ultimate object of God’s affections. He created us for fellowship, and he does everything to serve us. The other holds that God’s glory is the ultimate object of his affections. He loves us so that his glory may be shown through us. We are saved, and he is honored. If I am going to err, I would much rather err on the side of defending God than defending man. I would much rather make more of him than more of us.

Three essential truths, part 2: God is all-knowing

2008-06-24T06:11:00.008-05:00

God is all-knowing: All Christians believe that God has exhaustive knowledge of the future, but disagree as to how he has this knowledge.

There is no debate among orthodox Christian believers that God, as a part of his essence, knows not only everything that has ever happened, but everything that ever will happen. Scripture is full of passages that clearly communicate this. An easy example is the passage from Isaiah that I referenced yesterday:

Remember this and stand firm, recall it to mind, you transgressors, remember the former things of old; for I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like me, declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times things not yet done, saying, ‘My counsel shall stand, and I will accomplish all my purpose,’ calling a bird of prey from the east, the man of my counsel from a far country. I have spoken, and I will bring it to pass; I have purposed, and I will do it. (Is. 46:8-11)

But again, there are differences in how orthodox believers understand God’s knowledge of the future. The general Arminian view is that God knows the future because he can look down into time and see what man will freely do. In this view, both God and man win. Man has free will to do as he pleases without being infringed upon by God, and God has complete knowledge of the future. This view creates many questions, though.

First, this does not satisfy the Arminian desire to avoid some kind of determinism. God’s knowledge is perfect, and therefore the future must come to pass as God sees it. Otherwise, God would be wrong, and that is not possible. In this view, we are still bound to a certain, predetermined future, the only difference being that it is determined by us rather than God.

Secondly, in this view God knows exactly what I will be doing at any moment in the future. He knows this because he can see all of the decisions that I will make from now until then, which will lead me, circumstantially, to that exact moment. The paradox is that knowledge of the future gained in such a way would be of no use to God if he couldn’t interact or involve himself in the events of my life. If I have complete free will, there is no guarantee that any of my free choices will add up to anything meaningful. God is restricted from guiding me to make this choice as opposed to the other. He is restricted from causing circumstances in other people’s lives that would affect mine, therefore leading me in a certain direction. Everything is up to me, and I have no reason to even pray that God will guide me to do certain things. God simply knows the future, but does nothing to actively bring it about.

It is this view that leads to a common, rather confusing interpretation of biblical passages that speak directly to predestination. Take, for example, Romans 8:28-30:

And we know that for those who love God all things work togetherfor good, forthose who are called according to his purpose. For those whom heforeknew he alsopredestinedto be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might bethe firstborn among many brothers. And those whom he predestined he also called, and those whom he called he alsojustified, and those whom he justified he also glorified.

Verse 29 says that God predestined those whom he foreknew “to be conformed to the image of his Son….” The use of the word foreknew, in this verse (as well as Rom.11:2, and also foreknowledge in 1 Peter 1:2), have led people to argue that God elects people based on his knowledge of their future faith--that is, he knows whom will be saved because he knows our future responses to the gospel, and in light of this knowledge, he predestines us for salvation. This assertion is not supported by the text. The passage here does not say that God foreknows an action, but rather the people being spoken of in the text. This argument concerning foreknew also undermines the meaning of the word predestined. If God reacts to our future decision to follow him, this is not predestination, but merely an acknowledgement of our decision.

What is shocking about this is that, in people’s minds, fixed determination of the future by our own choices is acceptable in place of, and even preferable to, fixed determination of the future by God. What does this say about our feelings toward God? We trust him, but only insofar as we can maintain control of our relationship with him? This point only underscores our pride and sinfulness. While the prospect of completely letting go of any control and recognizing God as the final authority in all things is frightening to us, I think that there is ultimately much more freedom in it. If we believe that God is just and loving, then we should have no moral objections to admitting his control. We only have to repent of our pride.

On the other hand, the Reformed view of God’s knowledge makes sense of predestination, prophecy, prayer, and human decision-making. If we believe that God knows we will be saved because he has personally predestined us for it, we see then that he is pointing everything in our lives toward that. There are many stories of people who would never have come to know God outside of some event in their lives that happened so perfectly, it could only have been put together by God. And after salvation, we can trust that God will finish the work he has started, and that he will not abandon us.

You can apply this understanding of providential knowledge to any significant event in your life, good or bad, and eventually make sense of that event. God’s providence gives great meaning to everything that happens, even suffering, because we can know that God is putting us through something, and it must be for a greater reason. The events in our lives should work together to create a heart sanctified and growing in Christ.

Finally, God’s prophecy is surely a sign that he not only knows the future, but ordains it and brings it about. Consider the following passages from Acts:

‘Men of Israel, hear these words: Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by Godwith mighty works and wonders and signs thatGod did through him in your midst, as you yourselves know--this Jesus, delivered up according tothe definite plan andforeknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men.’ (Acts 2:22-23)

…for truly in this city there were gathered together against yourholy servant Jesus, whom you anointed, bothHerod andPontius Pilate, alongwith the Gentiles andthe peoples of Israel, to do whatever your hand andyour plan had predestined to take place. (Acts 24:27-28)

I believe these passages are very important for understanding not only the cross, but also God’s ordaining work in general. Notice in the first passage, Peter says that Jesus was “delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God,” and then also tells the crowd that they “crucified and killed [him] by the hands of lawless men.” In this passage, God’s knowledge, his planning, and man’s free will are not presented in contrast to one another, but rather as cogs in a wheel, all playing a part in the events that cause Jesus’ death.

The murder of Christ was an inherently sinful act committed for wicked reasons. It was a lynching. The men and women involved did it out of the hatred of their hearts. They did not send Christ to the cross knowing that he was dying in our place to save us. They sent him to the cross to kill him. But what man was doing for evil reasons, God had predestined to happen, and had planned it for good. Had God planned that these people sin in this way? While it is difficult to think about God ordaining sin, these passages seem to imply that.

Some people would argue that God knew that these people would be hateful towards Jesus, and that he decided to use this hate to bring about this good. That sounds like an out, but it still puts the ball in man’s court, making us, not God, responsible for the salvation Christ bought on the cross. No, this was an act that was planned out by God from the beginning of time. Consider the claim of Isaiah 53. It was the plan of God to send Jesus to the cross. “It was the will of the LORD to crush him…” (Is. 53:10b). God did not decide to do this only after creating man and realizing that he was sinful. He did not then see that the Gentiles and people of Israel would hate Jesus and kill him, and decide to use that act to redeem man. No, God is proactive, not reactive. The death of Jesus on the cross was God’s idea, not ours.

But put into perspective, what is learned by the nature of Jesus’ death? The fact that a week before they killed him, the same crowd were laying down palm leaves and praising his name should tell us something very important about human nature. The fact that one of the Roman centurions that crucified Jesus would look at his dead body and say, “Truly this was the Son of God!” (Matthew 27:54) tells us that there is truth to be learned in the murder of Jesus. Sure, God could have taken Jesus to a hill and killed him himself, made a huge spectacle and explained to all who saw it what was happening. Instead he let us kill Jesus. He let us realize and wrestle with what we had done. He allowed us to literally kill God, the ultimate act of pride and sin, in order to show us our true nature. I doubt there has ever been a parent that never deliberately let their child do something that they knew was harmful so that the child would learn from it. Failure is a valuable teaching tool. I have to think that, to some degree, the purpose of our involvement in Christ’s death was to teach us some important things about ourselves. But if God had not ordained it, that would not be the case. It would just be a random act, used by God but with no real purpose.

I believe that for our actions to be meaningful, and for God to be in control, he must be guiding our paths. He must be leading us to this decision or that, putting us where he wants us to be. As Paul taught in Acts 17:26: “Andhe made from one man every nation of mankind to liveon all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods andthe boundaries of their dwelling place….”

God knows us. He knows who we are and who we will be. He knows it because he planned it long before any of us were ever born. And we should take comfort in this, knowing that we are not random, and that, if we listen to God and obey him, we will be what he wants us to be.

Three essential truths, part 1: God is all-powerful

2008-06-23T09:20:00.007-05:00

A while back, Dusty asked me if I would come teach a Sunday school lesson on the doctrine of election to his college class. Over the summer he is having several guest teachers come in to talk about different doctrinal aspects of the gospel and church, and I am, as he put it, “his Calvinist.” So I both excitedly and nervously said yes. I am excited because I am finally beginning to enjoy teaching. Over the past year, I began to find pleasure in explaining things, sharing ideas with students, and getting feedback. Also, I think there is a certain kind of pressure-release involved in being able to explain something that you’ve rolled around in your head pretty continuously for quite some time. I am nervous, though, because I have never really taught the Bible before. I have spoken at this or that church event, but never on something this serious. I am well aware of what the Bible says about false teachers, and I am fearful that I will say the wrong thing. So, I am approaching this with trepidation, but also excitement to share something I believe is essential.

In preparation for the lesson, I ended up putting together a 14 page document dealing with scripture and also some of the moral/philosophical questions that go along with such a subject. What I want to do here on the blog is go through each of the sections one by one, and expound on them in writing.

I want to start with the first of what I believe are three essential truths:

God is all-powerful: All Christians agree that God is sovereign, but disagree as to the extent of his sovereignty.

There are several philosophical ways to view the sovereignty of God. They all understand God’s sovereignty as the extent to which he is active in the world. I will focus on the Arminian and the Reformed (Calvinist) view:

Arminian theism:
God created, and is active in, the world. God is active in the processes of the world, and has exhaustive knowledge of the future because he exists outside of time. God (exercising his sovereign choice) has given man free will to either choose or reject him. While God is all-powerful, he does not interfere with the actions of man either in regard to salvation or physical activity.

Reformed theism:
God created the world, is actively involved in all of the world’s natural and biological processes, and is in control of man and human history. Man has free will in the sense that he does what he most wants to do. Man is bound by a sinful nature, and God actively calls and saves some men.

The major underlying difference between these views is the way God expresses his power. Is his power best expressed by his decision to give man free will, and be satisfied to merely know the outcome of history, as in the Arminian view? Or is his power best expressed by his decision to willfully guide human history in a certain direction, as in the Reformed view?

Arminians will balk at the suggestion that man’s free will undermines God’s sovereignty because they believe that it was God’s sovereign choice to endow man with a free will. In this view, the idea that God would encroach on man’s boundaries and act on man’s will is offensive because it appears to make God less loving and less respectful of man. Love, they will argue, is only love if it is based on a willing choice.

Calvinists will be quick to point out the glaring flaw in Arminian theology, the fact that man’s choice trumps God’s desires. The Calvinist view argues that if man can freely accept or reject God, then God is not the active agent in the universe, but is constantly reacting to man. Love toward God, they will argue, is a response to God’s love--an act initiated and completed by him.

The most important thing to remember when considering the supposed conflict between God’s sovereignty and man’s free will is that there is no conflict at all. To even make the statement that God’s encroaching on our “human rights” is offensive is to say that we have no understanding of the nature of God nor the nature of man. The concept of God as creator automatically assumes that he has control over his creation. This is seen in the teaching of Paul:

What if God, desiring to show his wrath and to make known his power, has endured with much patiencevessels of wrathprepared for destruction, in order to make knownthe riches of his glory for vessels of mercy, which hehas prepared beforehand for glory--even us whom hehas called, not from the Jews only but also from the Gentiles? (Rom. 9:22-24)

No child has the right to speak back to or question the authority of his parent. The child’s reasoning and intellect are not yet on par with an adult’s. They cannot fully understand the reasons behind rules and discipline. Nor can they understand the reasons behind love and kindness. The fact that a child’s parent is loving towards them is just as mysterious to the child as the parent’s discipline. Until the child can reason with his parents, he is in no position to question them. So we are with God. His understanding as the creator of, not only the universe, but also us trumps whatever level of understanding we can achieve. Even more than that, the very faculties that allow us to even think about or understand God were created by God, and can therefore be limited or expanded at his discretion.

I’ll take it a step further. Paul uses the analogy of us as pots and God as the potter. In this illustration, we would not only have no right to respond, but we would not be able to respond at all without being acted upon by God. Pots are inanimate objects with no regard or inclination one way or the other. They are exactly--no more or no less than--what the potter wants them to be. This means that we are each created a certain way, with certain abilities and purposes, and that we are in no position to question those purposes. When talking about the relationship between a sovereign God and his creation, it is important that we keep this in mind.

Isaiah 46:8-11 says this about God’s power:

Remember this and stand firm, recall it to mind, you transgressors, remember the former things of old; for I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like me, declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times things not yet done, saying, ‘My counsel shall stand, and I will accomplish all my purpose,’ calling a bird of prey from the east, the man of my counsel from a far country. I have spoken, and I will bring it to pass; I have purposed, and I will do it.

There are many passages in the Bible that speak explicitly about God’s control in the world, but this is one of the most striking, being plain about the fact that God has a plan and a purpose which will not and cannot be shaken. God is not sitting and patiently waiting, hoping that the world will come around. He has enacted a plan of restoration to the world through Christ, and his plan will be accomplished. It does not depend upon the decisions of mankind in order to be brought about. If that were the case, we, in our sinfulness, would tell God to his face that we will not do what he wants us to do, and what could be his retort? I personally refuse to believe that God is powerless over the will of man.

Episode 20: Father's Day

2008-06-19T10:08:00.006-05:00

Sunday, I had my first Father’s Day. I’ve been spending so much time with Eva lately that, to an extent, the whole summer has felt like what I imagine to be the point of the holiday: spending time with, and honoring your father. Okay, so I’m not sure about the “honoring” part yet. I’m pretty sure she likes me, judging by the way she pats me on the shoulder, or laughs when I make a face at her, but I don’t want to get ahead myself.

We had a good day. Joni sprung a huge surprise on me in the gift department. While I generally suck at gift-giving (I think because I don’t know how to pick up a hint), Joni remembers everything that I mention in passing and always springs something on me that I want, but would never buy for myself. The study Bible she bought me, and my iPod come to mind as examples. Lately, every time we found ourselves wandering through Target or Wal-Mart, I’d see the bicycles and make some comment about how I’d like to get one, knowing full well that if it were left up to me, I would never go buy myself a bicycle because I wouldn’t be able to justify the expenditure. So, on Father’s Day, I opened my presents in our room with Joni and Eva, who got me a couple of games to play (“The Singing Bee” DVD game--awesome), and afterwards we were going into the kitchen to get breakfast, when I turned the corner and saw a bike. I was truly surprised, and truly pleased. I took it for a ride Tuesday morning, and I must say, I had a good time. My legs weren’t quite used to it, but I still had fun, and I got chased by a weenie dog and yelled at by two ducks and a goose.

For Mother’s Day, I had gotten Joni a new wallet from slaughterhead. They are a husband and wife company from here in Monroe that makes wallets, purses, clothes, etc. Joni had seen their work at an art fair recently and liked what they did. For Father’s Day, Joni returned the favor and bought me a man-wallet. I’m still waiting for it to come in, but I’m looking forward to it. My wallet was dying.

We were able to make it to the early service at church to sit with Joni’s dad, and Eva sat through the entire service (a first), even after dropping a huge diaper bomb about two-thirds of the way through. We then went down to Archibald and tried the pool out again, which Eva absolutely hated. All in all, it was a good first Father’s Day, and I’m looking forward to many more.

California as a Final Resting Place: Four Months Too Late

2008-06-13T13:50:00.005-05:00

California as a Final Resting Place for Cliches

California as a Final Resting Place [One Year Later (I Would Love to Disappear and Grow a Beard)]

California as a Final Resting Place: Two Years Later: The Cheese Blends

“You missed it.”

“Excuse me?”

I was standing, penniless, shower-less, and pleasantly-smelling-less on the corner of two streets whose names I can’t remember, going to an office somewhere in the area to drop off some work I had been doing (I’m sorry to be so vague, but people are reading). And this guy kept talking to me.

“You. Missed. It." He punctuated his words with bold periods, the way a child whispers after you’ve told him ten times that you can’t understand what he’s saying.

“I. Missed. What?”

The “walk” light turned green and we walked across the street never breaking eye contact. I had to look because he kept on with the bold periods.

“You’re. Four. Months. Too. Late.”

“Four? For what?”

“Four. Months”

“For what?”

“Months.”

Stupid homonyms. “I know months. What am I four months late for?”

“The. Printing.”

Now at this point, I should tell you that this particular part of town was heavily biked--as in, an inordinate number of people rode their bikes around from place to place. I didn’t necessarily mind it, dodging them dodging me kind of helped me to stay in shape. It was the closest thing I did to exercise besides tote around a three-hundred page manuscript that I’m not supposed to tell you about.

“The printing?”

“Yes. The--” And one of the number of bikers hit the guy. Pummeled him. He and the biker became one ball of human limbs, fumbling and rolling down the sidewalk like the bagel in that Ignatow poem. I watched them roll out of sight, around a corner, and I would have gone to help the poor guy, but the truth was he was giving me the creeps and if I had known the biker’s name I probably would have bought him lunch.

When I finally arrived at the building, they were closed. There was no one there that I could tell, and no sign of the publishing house that had once operated there. There was only a sign:

CLOSED: 2/18/08
FOR RENOVATIONS
FOR HELP CONTACT
123-456-7890

This was bewildering, to put it mildly. I had spoken to someone on the phone that morning, and they had not mentioned an address change. With my frustration at the peak level, I decided, then and there, that it was time for The Cheese Blends to officially see the light of day. In these days of such rapid technological advances, there is no sense in someone’s hard work not being read and appreciated by millions of people. That is, after all, every American’s right. It’s what America’s all about--personal recognition for mediocre accomplishments. Having people read my novel was my birthright!

However, having no home, and therefore no access to technology of any kind, I saw that I had two options: 1) The soapbox. I could perform a public reading of the novel from start to finish, here on this very street. I considered this and did not see where there should be anything illegal about it, figuring that it would at least get my name out there. 2) Pass it out. I could turn The Cheese Blends into performance art by passing it out, page by page, to all of the people walking and biking down the street. I would be a pamphleteer of sorts.

I weighed these options out. Either way, people would be getting only a portion of the novel. With option 2, they would be able to actually take home a piece of it for themselves, and may even be inclined to seek out the other 341 people who got a page that day, and piece the novel together for themselves. I felt that, in the end, this would actually be more flattering than having someone read the novel outright. With option 1, it would certainly be more controlled, but I ran the risk of getting arrested, not to mention publicly berated and called down.

So, after much deliberation, I chose option 2. And what happened next was unprecedented.

One word: elephants.

Episode 19: The Teething

2008-06-10T08:53:00.004-05:00

Last Monday, breakfast did not go well. Even when she’s very hungry, it normally takes Eva a few bites before she changes the focus of her attention from the toys on her tray to the oatmeal-fruit concoction we’re trying to feed her. I just thought she was having a slow morning. She reluctantly took a couple of bites, but didn’t seem the least bit interested. After a minute or two, I got up and walked over to the counter for something, and by the time I returned Eva had gotten hold of her bowl and dumped its contents out in a pile right in front of her. And if that wasn’t enough fun, she was running her hand through it, slapping it, and smiling gleefully. I wasn’t sure if this was protest, or just her idea of a good breakfast, but she didn’t eat much more after that.

After she also skipped lunch, Joni suggested that I call the pediatrician. Eva had been acting like she didn’t feel great the day before, but she had also missed a nap, and sometimes babies can just have off-days. But for Eva to turn down not one, but two meals--that was genuine cause for concern.

So early that afternoon me and Little E. rode across town to the doctor’s office. She behaved herself very well in the waiting room, and even better when we saw the doctor. Concerned about the eating, the first thing the doc checked was her throat, and lo and behold, poor Eva had ulcers in the back of her throat, a condition formally called Coxsackie Virus (and informally called Hand, Foot and Mouth Disease--neither name sounds like anything you’d want to have). The prescription: a mix of medicines to take to numb the pain, and the order to wait it out for a few days. And so we did, not eating food for the next two days, and reluctantly taking bottles. For the most part, she seemed to be in a pleasant mood, until it came time to eat or sleep. Her new favorite complaint, it seems, is to scream violently--and I mean violently--when you have the audacity to assume that she is tired and try to rock her when she is really not tired. How dare you.

As if the virus didn’t make for a bad enough week for her, we had to wake up Saturday morning and go get our six month shots. We felt very guilty about this because, not only had she been sick, but she was in such a sweet mood Saturday morning. She was laughing, and smiling, and singing on the way to the clinic. I won’t go into detail about the shots, but let me just say that the girl has a set of lungs on her. They gave her three shots in her legs, and the poor baby screamed her head off.

And then came the tooth. We rode down to Archibald late Sunday afternoon so Eva could visit Grandma and Grandpa. Mama made the observation that her gums were looking very white. We agreed, but the truth is we’d almost given up hope on a tooth at all. The girl’s been “teething” since she was two months old. She’s been teething in the same way that I’m going bald: not really at all, but I’m sure it will happen one day. Apparently these days the fact that something will one day happen in the future means that it is in process right now. At any rate, we agreed that the gums were white, but thought little of it.

Later that night, I was in the back of the house, and Joni called for me, “We have a tooth!” Of course I had to investigate. And sure enough, barely poking out from the bottom left of her gums was the top of a tooth. You can feel it the most when she bites on a toy or a spoon that you’re holding. She’s taken now to sticking her left hand in her mouth and doing something that involves a chewing motion and an odd clicking sound, and getting her to take a bottle in one sitting is like how I imagine calf-roping to be. So, we have our first tooth, and we have twenty-something more to go. Wow.

American Idolatry: Barack Obama

2008-06-04T15:08:00.003-05:00

Let's just get everybody together; let’s get unified; the sky will open, the light will come down, celestial choirs will be singing, and everyone will know we should do the right thing and the world will be perfect. Maybe I’ve just lived a little long but I have no illusions about how hard this is going to be. You are not going to wave a magic wand and have the special interests disappear.
-- Hillary Clinton; Providence, Rhode Island

I have been increasingly disturbed by the media love-in with Barack Obama. Let me first say that I understand, on the surface, what attracts people to Obama: he is young, articulate, passionate, and intelligent. All of those qualities are undeniable, and they are qualities that are truly attractive in a potential president. What disturbs me about Obama is the public’s reaction (or lack thereof, in some instances) to a candidate who has made his affable personality and oratorical wit the focal point of his campaign without having to deal directly with very many issues (outside of race). In short, I can understand the attraction, but it wreaks of naiveté and an adolescent idealism.

One of America’s most significant traits is its diversity--racial, social, economic, religious, ideological, and even sexual. If any one person has set as their goal gaining the approval of a majority of 304 million people from as many various ideologies as could be possible, that person could never speak the whole truth of his own ideology without distancing himself from millions of people. The numbers and the logic alone make it obvious that with each absolute moral, political, economic, or social belief that the person were blatantly honest about, the number of his supporters would fluctuate drastically.

Therefore, when a politician speaks, one should realize that he is keeping 304 million people in view. He is trying to reach as many of those people as possible in one sweeping statement. One should then take it for granted that what this politician says is fraught with half-truths and appeals to the lowest common denominator. One should keep in mind the reasons that a politician would have for choosing such broad and subjective terms as “change” and “hope” as the backbone of his message, and should not succumb to being swept up in an emotional fervor simply because someone’s speeches move them.

No, the choosing of a person for the office of president should be a rational and intellectual endeavor, a choice made only after scrutinizing the policies, beliefs, and past political activity of a candidate. I am frightened by what it might say about us as a people that we are more apt to choose a leader by using his vague promises as our primary criteria. I am disturbed by our fickleness, our burning desire to have our ears tickled, and our utter refusal to acknowledge truths that blatantly contradict the vagaries this politician rolls off of his tongue with such ease.

The Paradox

2008-05-31T07:46:00.002-05:00

In reading John Piper’s Desiring God, I came across the following quote in a footnote:

Moral striving is paradoxical because we shall never love God unless we make a conscious effort; and yet because we must strive for legal righteousness, we prove that we shall never be righteous. If our affections were a fruit of the moral and spiritual environment, we should fulfill the law with the same unconscious necessity with which we breathe.

The paradox can perhaps be illustrated by a painter who deliberately tries to become great. Unless he strives, he will never be an artist at all, let alone a great artist. But since he makes genius a deliberate goal of striving, he proves that he is not, and never will be, a genius. A master artist is great without trying to be great. His abilities unfold like the petals of a rose before the sun. Genius is a gift of God. It is a fruit, not a work.

-- E.J. Carnell, Christian Commitment, 160-61.

At the risk of sounding like one of my students, and getting hung up on the details of the example, I found the observation about the artist to be deeply true, and deeply convicting. Although I play music and write on the small scale, there is intense pressure to do good work. Granted, most of the pressure comes from myself, but that may make it even more difficult to work under. Also, this observation articulates what I have always known about great artists. Their greatness was gifted to them, and comes out without any control on their part. Perhaps this is why they often do brilliant things despite otherwise debilitating mental and physical breakdowns.

American Idolatry: David Cook

2008-05-28T12:09:00.004-05:00

I like to study pictures. Not art. Pictures: metaphor, analogy, simile, symbolism. I enjoy these things because they imply, and attempt to make sense of, depth. Where there is a metaphor, there is a truth being communicated. Where there is a symbol, there is an idea being translated. The truly interesting thing about symbols is that they can have many points of reference on two levels--the material, and the immaterial. They can be references to other material things, and/or to abstract ideas and concepts.

Take, for example, the American flag. Materially, the flag represents many things. It represents the United States of America. Its thirteen stripes represent the thirteen original colonies. Its fifty stars represent the current fifty states. Conceptually, it also represents many things. It represents freedom, honor, pride, the political ideals of democracy and equality, and one could go on and on. It can be a symbol for all of these things, some of these things, or one of these things depending upon the context of its usage, and the intention of the one employing it as a symbol. The same could be said of thousands of different objects and events that give us physical pictures of some deeper truth.

I have been watching American Idol for three years now. At first, it was begrudging submission that brought me to it; Joni enjoyed watching it, and I enjoyed mocking it. But, when I found myself feeling a cheesy sense of pride and personal connection at having seen Carrie Underwood’s original audition, I realized that, at some point, I had actually begun enjoying it. Luckily, the show is so consistently cornball, and gives a platform to ridiculous “talents” (such as Renaldo), that I am able to both truly enjoy it, and sincerely mock it. For the cynic, American Idol is the most fulfilling form of entertainment. It can easily be viewed as a tongue in cheek send-up of everything that is wrong and soulless about the music industry (and the nation), and therefore the viewer can be alleviated of the guilt he feels at giving his attention to such a spectacle of stupidity and vapidity.

And it is on this vapidity that I wish to comment. This season took the merciless slaughter of what was once a pure and honest art form to a degrading new low with the crowning of one David Cook as the contest’s winner. It is not worth it at this point to go into detail about the fact that there were two Davids competing, one of which was a dorky Mormon teenager, and the other was a cool, hip, awesome, rock and rolling, bartending heartthrob. It is worth pointing out, however, the damning effect that the choice of David Cook (the cool, hip, awesome, rock and rolling bartending heartthrob, for those of you not in the know) as the winner had, not only on music, but on the nation in general.

Let me first point out that this was supposed to have been a singing competition. At least, that’s what American Idol is billed as. That is also the guideline that the “judges” reference continually throughout the first rounds as the wheat is separated from the chaff. “As long as this remains a singing competition, “Simon Cowell will smarmily say, “I think you’ve got a good chance at winning.” The sick irony is that, by the end of this season, all of the “judging” panel’s principles about keeping this a singing competition were thrown out the window as everybody developed various kinds of sick crushes on the talent-less void that is David Cook (if you require proof to support my “talent-less” claim, just visit this page and watch any of the available videos of his performances). There was not one performance where Cook A) stayed in anything resembling a key; B) did anything original (while the “judges” claimed that every performance was original, and “brilliant,” I contend that there is nothing patently original about starting every song over a quiet, contemplative keyboard or guitar part and then building to a loud chorus sung over a distorted guitar. Nothing original about having a gravelly “singing” voice. Nothing original about a leather jacket. Nothing original about a white leather jacket. Nothing original about crapping all over a classic rock anthem. Nothing original about arrogance. Nothing original about condescension. Nothing original about hair gel. Nothing original about attracting perverted older women. Nothing original about getting not-gay eye bats from Simon Cowell. Nothing original about “moving…the…heartbeat of…you are brilliant and everything…amazing…want to make me cry…America” not-crazy comments from Paula Abdul. Nothing original about playing the guitar left-handed. Nothing original about playing the guitar. Nothing original about sucking at playing the guitar.); C) was humble; D) did not act smug; E) did not come off as a desperate rock and roll wannabe with less talent than a Nickelback cover band (as if that could even be possible).

By the end of the competition, everyone was able to look right over the fact that when it came to singing--not looking cool, not prancing around the stage sprinkling rock and roll fairy dust on all the preteen girls who wouldn’t know good music if it instant messaged them on Facebook, not playing to the crowd to get votes--but actually outright singing, the other David, the weird, pasty-faced, doesn’t-know-what-to-do-with-his-hands-when-he-sings David, was far, far better. He may have been a nerd, but the kid could hold a tune. And he could sing anything you threw at him, no matter how awkward it might have been for him. He had raw talent. The affect, the look--all that can be made. You can repackage anything as long as there is content to it. But nobody makes great sculptures out of Play-Doh. Nobody plants beautiful gardens in the middle of a desert. There has to be something there to work with. Or at least, one would think.

But no. That is not the case anymore. All you need these days is a pretty face and the ability to move a crowd. You don’t necessarily have to move them to anything, but you have to move them. Depth and content are optional. Having the ability to conjure emotional palpitations is where the money is. If you can tickle the eyes and the ears, nobody gives a hoot what you’re saying. I know that this is always how it’s been in music. It’s part of the reason why the best never make it out of their basements, and often die young, sad deaths. What’s to be gained by success if success means writing sugary pop songs and, even then, having your sugary pop songs sold out to car companies and tacked onto commercials to make a living for some yuppie whom you will never meet?

No, I know it’s not new, but I’m afraid this kind of ideological wading in the shallow end has hit a new low, a new low that David Cook is only a more topical picture of. He is a symbol. He is the perfect representation of someone being all form and no substance, and being eaten up ravenously by a public that shamelessly prefers the shallow end of the pool. Disturbingly, his “election” as the new American Idol points to the same problem taking shape around a far more important candidate in a far more important contest, who so far has succeeded in conjuring the same swooning from much of the public.

David Cook is Barack Obama.

Episode 18: Those Lazy(?) Days of Summer

2008-05-27T08:26:00.002-05:00

The best part of teaching is the summer. I’m not sure if that’s an old saying, but if it’s not, I’d like to make a motion that it become one. While there are many good things about being a teacher, the schedule is definitely high up on the list. There was a time when I had the same attitude as everyone else--indignant that teachers would have the gall to complain about their salaries when they only work two-thirds of the year, and get a week for Thanksgiving, and get two weeks at Christmas, and get a spring break, and get various three-day weekends throughout the year in honor of any national pseudo-holiday that they could find on the calendar. “Ridiculous,” I thought. “Most of them don’t work anyway.”

Turns out that the latter part is true. There are a lot of teachers that don’t work. And, from what I hear, a lot of teachers for whom the definition of “work” is “to spend the majority of the work day gossiping with students, flirting with students, or otherwise not doing what it is they are paid to be doing, on the taxpayers’ dime, and at the expense of an entire generation of illiterate wannabe criminals and prostitutes.”

Listen. If it sounds harsh, it’s not the kids’ fault. It’s really not. I used to think it was, but now I understand that where there are no parents, a teacher’s workload is tripled, and where the teacher fails, the student fails. Therefore, teachers who do not do what it is they are paid to do should be held as responsible as the parent. They are an adult in a position to help a child. Quite unreasonably, most teachers haven’t put it together that this group of hoodlums they’re currently neglecting to discipline will the be people running the town, the city, and the state, in twenty years.

Back to my original point: teaching is hard work. The time off is balanced by having to spend your day disciplining a hundred or so teenagers; getting them to do any amount of work; motivating them to care even a little bit about what it is you’re trying to teach them. So I don’t feel so bad about having the summer off. Especially not this summer. I’m playing Mr. Mom this year. It’s going to be me and little E.K. most of the summer. Now, I’ve had her by myself for a day at a time, and at spring break I kept her the whole week, butI must admit that the thought of two and a half months makes me a little nervous.

Part of my nervousness comes from the fact that she is starting to get a little unpredictable. For the past several months, she’s run on a pretty solid schedule: bottle, nap, bottle, play, bottle, nap, play, bottle, Mama or Daddy picks her up (with diapers randomly throughout). But now, it’s getting all thrown off. She’s literally doubled in size within three months, so she’s a little harder to handle when she gets fussy. And she doesn’t always like to play. Sometimes she wants you to hold her so that she can “stand” in your lap, and that’s it. She laughs at you and grabs your face, and the minute you sit her down, she’s crying with her arms up in the air. I think you call that “spoiled rotten,” because she knows full well that you’re going to pick her up. And if she begins to doubt it, she won’t just cry harder, she’ll make herself choke and cough until you pick her up.

So I’m not necessarily afraid of doing something wrong. I know all the procedures. I’m just afraid I won’t know what to do. But we’re going to have fun. She’s getting very good at sitting up. She’s learned how to catch herself when she starts to lean over. And since she’s sitting up, she’s been having fun in her playpen. And, oh yeah, she’s talking.

Okay, we’re not sure if she’s really talking, but when she’s hungry she let’s out a series of noises that sounds like: “baba…bababa…baba.” If you model it for her, she will mock you, and say “mama.” She’s also taken to throwing her feet up in the air and grabbing them when she’s lying on her back. With a little help, she can chew on those toes, which is what she’s trying to do. The most entertaining thing is when she’s mad, fussing and grabbing at her feet. She usually does this right when she wakes up, so she’s got her eyes shut tight. It’s fun to watch her get aggravated, and if you imitate her she’ll usually stop her fussing long enough to laugh at you.

But, while we do like to laugh about her fussiness, she’s really not a fussy baby. She stays happy and grinning most of the time. And I really am looking forward to our summer together. Maybe we can blog it together. Like nerd, like child. I’ve got to wrap this up while she’s still napping.

Cat 1993-2008

2008-05-19T18:37:00.000-05:00

In the spring of 1993, my household was undergoing some changes. Having three boys approaching teendom, my parents decided that it was time for renovations. They added onto our three bedroom house, building a new living room, laundry room and bedroom. And in the midst of that change, we also got Cat.

Cat was a feisty little gray fellow that ran and climbed in the back of the freezer immediately after setting foot in the house. My brothers and I were used to having dogs, but we’d never had an inside pet, and this curious little thing was fascinating to us. Besides the freezer incident, my earliest memory of Cat is when, after having only been with us a week, he was neutered and de-clawed. Now, after having gone through the de-clawing process as an adult with a cat of my own, I understand how absolutely horrific it is, but at the time, I didn’t get it. Actually, I think that’s when Cat snapped. That’s when he lost any potential for being a cute, cuddly kitten. I mean, come on. Cats are made to procreate and claw things to pieces. He had now been robbed of the ability to do either. Imagine what would happen to James Bond if, in one scene, the villain robbed him of his super-computer watch that had lasers in it, and brutally emasculated him. Is there a stronger word for depression? No doubt, Bond would become something more like Ted Bundy. Insane and unstoppably violent. So it was with Cat.

Cat had a uniquely sour disposition, which isn’t all that uncommon in cats, but was made more entertaining by his massive size and inability to act on his violent desires. I remember the joy he took in sitting in the window, staring at our dog Daisy, as she crazily barked and growled at him. His attitude may also have been shaped by an early mistake he made, wandering outside and under the hood of my mama’s van and taking a trip to the bank and back.

We loved Cat. We loved him so much that we wanted to play with him. Our favorite game was to scare him, make him run and hide in the back of the house, and then go find him, laughing like hyenas when he would be buried under the bed, eyes on fire, hissing cat profanities at us. We were mean little turds, but we weren’t doing it because we hated Cat--he had become our play pal, our new toy.

I’m not a hundred percent sure, but I am pretty certain that it was this early abuse that caused him to attack children for the rest of his life. My little cousins were deeply afraid of Cat, and would walk wide circles around him. Just the sound of their voices caused the hair on his back to stand on end, and he would hiss and growl through clenched teeth. My favorite incident was when Cat attacked my friend Josh’s girlfriend. I didn’t want any harm to come to her, but it was very entertaining when he went into such a ballistic fit simply at the sound of her voice that he treed her on the ottoman.

As Cat got older, and grew to a solid 20 pounds, we wondered if something was wrong with him. He stayed pretty agile for such a big fellow, though. He went through a few quiet years being petted and handled appropriately, and he eventually calmed down. The last test of his patience occurred when Mama brought a Jack Russell terrier home. The little spaz loved to torment Cat, and they would “play” together, Chloe chewing at his ears, and him swatting at her while laying down, refusing to give the twerp the respect of actually getting up to destroy her. He was getting to be an old man, a little more slow to move, and quicker to forgive.

As of late, Cat had become incontinent and had stopped eating. I’m not sure if the weight had finally gotten to him, or if he was just old. Mama was debating having him put down when he was finally found dead this past Friday. Cat had a good life, and whether he knew it or not, he was loved and respected by us siblings. He will be missed.

Episode 17: Six Months

2008-05-17T08:29:00.006-05:00

Eva Kate is now half a year old. Half a year. And it has been the fastest half year of my life. There is a lot of truth the old adage “time flies when you’re having fun,” and while it hasn’t all been peaches and cream, it has been fun, and we have been very, very busy. Babies keep you moving.

I told Joni early on that having Eva has given me a new, deep respect for single mothers. I always knew it had to be hard, but I had no idea. It’s hard for us to keep up and we both have solid jobs and plenty of family around to help out. I have no idea how anyone does it alone. And it’s not just the baby herself. Everything gets amplified simply because of her being here. There is more trash, more laundry, more dishes (this one makes no sense because she doesn’t even eat off of dishes), more stuff strewn around the house, and less time to take care of it.

Eva had her six month doctor visit yesterday, on her sixth month “birthday”. I wasn’t able to go with Joni, but the report was good. Her weight (20.9 lbs) is in the 95th percentile. Her length (27 inches) is in the 90th percentile, and her head circumference is in the 75th percentile. Being an Archibald, she’s going to have a big head, but at least right now she’s keeping it modest. Last week my uncle made the observation that the diameter of Eva’s head is the same length as that of her thigh bone. If you applied those same proportions to an adult, it would be ridiculous. You’d be a bobble-head doll. A walking caricature. But somehow, with babies, it just doesn’t look that funny.

I think my favorite part of the doctor visit is this conversation that Joni recounted for me:

Doctor: She’s probably about to start waking up more often in the night because she’s able to roll around, and she’ll wake herself up. Don’t go get her, let her get herself back to sleep. If you start picking her up every time, you’re going to have a baby in the bed.

Joni: ….

Doctor: You already have a baby in the bed, don’t you?

Joni: Yes.

Doctor: Get. Her. Out. Of. Your. Bed. She needs a good night sleep, and so do you.

For the record, I think that was the first vow we made about baby care: “She is not sleeping in the bed with us.” That haughty, ignorant promise was thrown out the window some time in late December after a month and a half of one of us sleeping in the recliner every night. It was a decision we made out of sheer necessity, but that has since become comfortable. It’s easy to get Eva to sleep when she’s right there. You just open your eyes, pop a pacifier in her mouth, pat her belly, and she’s out. No getting up. If you’re good, you can even do it so well that you hardly remember it in the morning. You slept right through it. Plus, it’s just sweet to have her right there. She likes to wake up in the morning and grab your face to wake you up, and then laugh heartily about it. But, apparently it’s time to make a change. While it may be sweet now, neither of us wants a two year old in bed with us. And if we can make a clean break while she’s still too young to know what’s going on, that will be all the better. Here’s hoping.

I have a feeling that the next six months are going to be interesting in a whole new way. She’ll be crawling before too much longer, and talking shortly thereafter, and I can’t wait. I’ve always loved kids for their attitudes and strange senses of humor. I’m going to thoroughly enjoy cultivating that in little Eva.

New Pictures

2008-05-11T15:47:00.002-05:00

I finally updated the flickr page. Click here to see the new pics.

Episode 16: Food! Fun! Drool! Multicolored Poops!

2008-05-07T05:32:00.006-05:00

I haven’t updated the baby episodes lately because I haven’t updated anything lately. Time has been a precious commodity, and I have been bankrupt. Thankfully, things are beginning to slow down. Also, to be quite honest, the thought of organizing my baby thoughts and pointing out the important things is daunting because there is so much. She’s been growing, as the cliché goes, by leaps and bounds, and she hasn’t shown any signs of slowing down. So in order to help me organize my thoughts, I’m going to use my title as an outline.

Food!
Eva has assembled a nice little arsenal of foods for herself: green beans, peas, carrots, sweet potatoes, bananas, apple sauce, and (begrudgingly) peaches. She’s not too fond of peaches, for some reason. I don’t think baby peaches are quite as sweet as the real deal.

What makes the feeding process so entertaining is the first four or five bites. Apparently, the mystery of never knowing what she’s being fed until it hits her lips is not something she takes joy in, and those first bites are always met with a lot of eye-squinting, and are choked down through some pretty heavy frowning. Once she gets a taste for the mystery food, she enjoys the rest of the meal.

I was feeding her when she finally figured out that, if she situated the food correctly on her lips, she could blow out and spit it across her tray. Luckily, I was feeding her cereal at the time, and it didn’t spray like a good spoonful of green beans would have.

Fun!
A little over a month or so ago, I decided to risk letting her “play” on her belly for a while. I say I decided to risk it not because of any potential danger to her, but because it had historically put her in a very bad mood. Normally, tummy time always ended with Eva face down, her hand shoved in her mouth, grunting and drooling. When you picked her up, she would give you the look of a mad bull--brow furrowed, nose curled, smoke billowing out of her nostrils--and then start to cry.

However, on this particular night, she propped herself very confidently on her elbows, swayed side to side for a bit, and finally tipped over, clumsily, onto her back. She looked surprised by this, and even more that we were cheering and making a lot of bizarre noises to celebrate this accident. Since then she’s gotten pretty proficient at the roll. It took her longer to figure out the back-to-belly roll because she likes to keep her hand in her mouth, and couldn’t get over her own arm. She finally got the hang of it, though.

Besides rolling, she’s also showing a lot more personality. She has a very sly and knowing grin, and she has absolutely figured out how to make you pick her up. A while back, she was laying in her little swing/seat, and had slid down so far that her fat little legs were hanging off the bottom. I got up and scooted her back up in her seat. She immediately kicked her fat little legs until she slid back down to where she was, looked up at me, smiled slyly, and cooed. Of course I had to pick her up.

Joni and I always laugh that some people say she is a solemn baby. She grins and giggles all the time for us. We finally decided that, not unlike her parents, she has a particular sense of humor. She doesn’t waste a laugh on just anything. She might even have a bizarre sense of humor, judging by the fact that she cackled and laughed like crazy when I threw a little stuffed ball at her, hitting her in the stomach over and over.

Drool!
This is pretty self explanatory. I will offer one small example: Sunday morning, we had her in her Baby Einstein bouncer while we were eating breakfast. We noticed that she was having trouble jumping, that her feet kept sliding around on the floor. When she had finally had enough and started getting fussy, I went over to pick her up and saw the problem. There was a puddle beneath her feet. A slippery, slimy puddle of spit that she was running her feet around in.

Multicolored Poops!
My dad chided me recently for making a poop comment at the dinner table, but the fact is that poop, pee, puke and drool have become as much a part of everyday life as eating, reading or driving. It has nothing to do with an attempt at scatological humor. Bodily functions just are what they are with a baby. Modesty was thrown out the window when everybody snapped pictures of me changing her first dirty diaper.

Anyway, things have gotten crazy in the waste management department lately. No schedule. No consistency. Orange food means orange poop…and it might mean a trip to Brookshire’s for a bottle of bleach.

Hey, Jude...

2008-04-26T12:51:00.000-05:00

Advance of the "Christ-follower"

2008-03-27T06:43:00.004-05:00

“The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words.”
-- Philip K. Dick

The book of Hebrews devotes itself to one subject: The deity of Christ. The goal of the book is to make Christ’s sacrifice on the cross distinctive from the sacrifices of the Old Testament by explaining who Jesus is, and the effect, finality, and scope of the atonement. Hebrews, in my opinion, rounds out the Bible’s presentation of Jesus. The Gospels focus primarily on his actions, and while they definitely discuss his divinity, they say very little about the effects of the cross. That is left up to the epistolary books of Paul and others throughout the rest of the New Testament, and Hebrews does an excellent job of separating Christ from the religious fold and explaining his work and significance.

The book also implies another truth: Jesus Christ is more that an ethical guru. He is more than a man who had good thoughts on morality and gave good teachings on how to live. He lived the life we should have lived, but also died the death we should have died, serving as a propitiation for our sins, standing in our place and receiving the wrath that God had toward us, thereby saving us from that wrath, and its punishment.

Our culture is currently undergoing an assault on language. It is very subtle, and has been going on for some time, but it seems to be advancing lately, and is creeping into the church. As younger, hipper, more socially aware Christians continue to separate themselves from the practices of their parents, the music and the methods are changing, and along with them, the language and theology are also changing. For instance, not only is the deity of Jesus being downplayed, but we’ve resorted to using very weak and clichéd language when describing him. Jesus is “cool” or “awesome” (not, by the way, awesome in the sense of awe-inspiring, but awesome in the sense that an adolescent boy would use the word to describe a NASCAR wreck). There is also pervasive use of uncertain declaratives: “You need to bring your Bibles because, like, it’s where we learn about Jesus and stuff?” (I’ll refer you to this video for further clarification on the uncertainty issue).

Language is an interesting tool. While at times I feel that it is insufficient to describe every aspect of our lives (this would be the reason I find it incredibly hard to write about my family), I also know that we must work with what we’ve got, and that there is great power in words. More importantly, words mean something. You can debate philosophically for hours about why or how they mean something, but the fact is that each word we string together goes along through history accumulating a meaning, and at whatever point in history that word is used, it conveys clearly and distinctly its meaning(s), both denotative and connotative. If I need to prove my point, simply turn on MSNBC, or FoxNews, or CNN for two minutes and watch the talking heads pick through every single syllable that Hillary, or Obama, or McCain mutters.

So, if Hebrews is right, and if it’s true that words mean something, I am comfortable having a problem with hearing Christians refer to themselves and others as “Christ-followers.” I’ve heard this term often lately, usually from church folk in the mid-twenties crowd, folks who are trying desperately to distance themselves from the religion of their parents. If I may, I think that I understand what they are trying to do in using that term, and I’ll admit that it has both positive and, I think unintentionally, negative connotations.

The intended positive is that the term certainly implies a more active faith. If someone says they “follow” Christ, they are saying that they are involved, acting, living out their faith. The negative implication, however, is that in this way, the term is used to separate oneself from “Christians,” those holier-than-thou hypocrites who do nothing but spout off rules and regulations, bicker about the color of carpet, and yell at people for listening to secular music.

That is the implication, at least, and, I suppose, my thesis. To throw off the term “Christian,” (“one who professes belief in the teachings of Jesus Christ”), and replace it with “Christ-follower” is simply a move to separate oneself from one’s own historic faith in a way that smacks of arrogance. It is also a sharp turn into dangerous semantics, where, if we take the term at face value, we are not left with what being a “follower of Christ” really means. To simply “follow” Christ is not enough. To walk in the way Jesus walked and to do the things he did is empty and useless without his regenerating our hearts, saving us and giving us the ability to follow him. It’s not enough to simply model our lives after Jesus. We have to model our hearts after him.

Why all the fuss over a word? I believe that these are dangerous days for our culture, our language and our church. Teaching English, I see day after day the abuses and manipulations forced upon the words we use. I see students’ inability to see the power of language in shaping thought, and as a result succumbing to the negative effects of its most popular abuses. These same students are in church, and when we start divvying up the language, when we start avoiding explanation of old terms, and simply replacing them with more “relevant” terms (I have a long and venomous rant stored up concerning the word “relevant”) we are slowly and subversively undoing the groundwork of people’s faith. Words are tied to meaning is tied to thought is tied to belief. When we start undoing language, it has the same effect as pulling a loose thread on a sweater. At first it is the harmless removal of a nuisance, but soon the whole thing starts to unravel.

As I once heard one of my favorite English professors tell a student who was nit-picking her comments: “Don’t be afraid of language.” Don’t fear words. Don’t change what we know because of a fear that the old has become offensive. You’re not doing anybody any favors, you’re simply ignoring the problem, putting duct tape over a hole in the wall, putting a tourniquet on a severed head. Deal with the problem. If there is a problem with the old terms, correct the problem, but don’t just pick a new term and paste it on top. If we continue to do that, language will become less and less effective as more and more terms get piled on top of one another until none of them mean anything anymore.

Matt Chandler Resources

2008-03-24T13:35:00.020-05:00

LAST UPDATED 2/1/10

Matt Chandler is the pastor at The Village Church, in Highland Village, Texas, just north of Dallas. He is young, theologically Reformed, and devoted to the preaching of scripture. I've been trying to keep a resource page here, indexing his videos and sermons, but as his online presence has grown and more and more people have posted material, I've found it hard to keep up. Still, this should provide at least a good place to start. I have included a permanent link to this post on the sidebar for easy reference.

Audio
The Village Church Sermon Archive
The Village Church Podcast
Gravity: The Weight of Pastoring and the Knowledge of Christ
Preaching the Gospel in the Center of the Evangelical World
Vision of a Church Planter
Q&A with Matt Chandler and John Piper
Resurgence Interview 2008
Courage and Calling of a Church Planter
What is Missional Living?
Creating Pathways for Spiritual Formation for Our People
Unplugged Teaching Q&A - Part 1
Unplugged Teaching Q&A - Part 2

Video
Gravity: The Weight of Pastoring and the Knowledge of Christ
Preaching the Gospel in the Center of the Evangelical World
Vision of a Church Planter
Q&A with Matt Chandler and John Piper
Resurgence Interview 2008
Advice for Preachers
Knowing and Preaching the Authoritative Scripture
Matt Chandler at Focus 2006, Pt. 1
Matt Chandler at Focus 2006, Pt. 2
Matt Chandler at Focus 2006, Pt. 3
Matt Chandler at Focus 2006, Pt. 4
John Piper Interviews Matt Chandler (2009)
Mark Driscoll Interviews Matt Chandler (2009)
Preaching the Gospel to the De-Churched
Interview by Acts 29 Director Scott Thomas
Chandler on Planting, Preaching, and Leadership (1 of 2)
Chandler on Celebrity, Diversity, and Burnout (2 of 2)

Print
"The Good Fight"--print interview with Chandler on Christianitytoday.com
"Suffering well: Faith tested by pastor's cancer"--AP news article about Matt Chandler's struggle with brain cancer.
"Suffering well with Matt Chandler"--Companion piece to the AP story by writer Eric Gorski.

Acts 29 Network
Index of Matt Chandler Sermons and Articles at Acts 29

Drop/Add

2008-03-22T10:56:00.002-05:00

Craig dropped today 2/11/2008.
He said his books are at the
alternative school. We will
check and put them in your box.

This is the poem that greets me
from my inbox. The sound of it
hitting my chest was enough to nearly
turn my students’ heads.

I shudder because

these streets are already filled with
Craig. I saw him yesterday, before
this even happened, down on Louisville
pulling at a cigarillo stuffed with weed
and leaning into every step, tugging at the
crotch of his pants as if it were attached
to a mechanism that made his legs
move--one giving, one swinging out
and around to propel him forward.

He was also in the news last week. Robbed
a guy outside an apartment complex and
ran away. He turns up here and there periodically:
a mugging, a beating, statutory rape, a
shooting at a south side youth center. And I
shudder because Craig always answered all
of my questions. Always smiled. Said yes sir.

I watch as teachers pray a silent thanks
for that empty space walking the halls, that
ghost who can’t fight anymore, can’t smart
off and waste our precious time. Craig,
that punk, thug wannabe, mock gangsta,
product of mass black culture that guns
down its children and smiles through gold
grills 'cause you gotta get paid.

I shudder while these prisons grow, a toilet for
the schools to use, flushed into the streets,
an open sewer. Thank you, Board of Education.
Thank you for ridding our halls of another
useless child.

New Pictures

2008-03-16T06:31:00.001-05:00

I added some new pictures to the flickr page.

Midday Haiku

2008-03-14T17:16:00.001-05:00

Quiet sounds in the
classroom: The sound of a boy
asleep, dropping pens

off of his school desk
while the teacher stares
dumbly at his book.

The sound of a blind
clicking away at the glass,
shoved by the spring breeze.

And finally a
ring declaring the end of
tedium, boredom.

I'm not a math guy.

2008-03-08T07:49:00.001-06:00

Testify

2008-02-24T07:45:00.000-06:00

As I’ve said before, I’m not a very political person. But lately I have found myself enamored with the uselessness and vapidity of the current presidential “race” (more like a slow death march). I am, by nature, a fairly cynical person. It’s an attitude that was born into my Archibald blood and cultivated over years of loud and passionate disbelief by my mother and uncles during Sunday dinner, then further substantiated in college facing naïve partygoers, ridiculous frat boys, mindless rednecks, the pseudo sexual-political philosophers that roamed the halls of the English department, and the thoughtless youth ministers, parents and pastors I have seen pushing empty religious practices on children in place of biblical teaching. So, I am not at all moved by a thrilling speech. By a vote for change. By a catchphrase as asinine as “Yes, we can.” Nor am I willing to believe that the New York Times would go out of their way to print a story that had absolutely no grounding in fact.

I am struggling slightly, then, with what to do with my vote come November. Not that it matters much in the long run, but if for nothing more than principle I at least want to cast it for someone I care about and agree with. But as it turns out, all of the major candidates seem to really have nothing to say. We will either get the hazy fog of “change” (which, by the way, is an empty slogan considering the fact that an incumbent is not running and whoever wins will, by the simple fact of their being in office, be “change”), the semi-socialist feminist politics of an angry ex-first lady, or the open-bordered war-mongering of a senior citizen. I’m sorry to be rude.

Anyway, I found this video a while back, and thought it was funny. It’s a Rage Against the Machine video that came out back during the 2000 election. Watch closely at the end as the candidates’ words and actions mirror one another, and remember: All they want is your vote. They do not care about your beliefs, your ideals, your family. They want your vote, and they will say anything they have to say in order to get it.

Episode 15: The Tooth Demon

2008-02-16T08:07:00.002-06:00

I’m not sure what it says about how our culture values teeth that when we get them, they hurt exactly like you would imagine a jagged piece of bone slowly cutting its way up through the soft tissue of your gums should hurt, and when we lose them, a fairy visits you in the night and actually pays you to dispose of the tooth. For one thing, I’m surprised that every year there aren’t kids all over America ripping their teeth out one by one to make a few extra bucks. For another thing, there are some parents that are all out stupid enough to pull their kids teeth so that the Tooth Fairy will come and pay them for them, so I’m surprised this hasn’t happened yet. But you watch. This story is going to be on the news one day.

It’s also amazing to me that children simply accept the idea of the Tooth Fairy without question. Santa Claus makes sense. He brings toys so that boys and girls all over the world will be happy. But why in the world does a fairy need to collect teeth badly enough that she will be willing to pay all that money for them? We can assume one of a couple of things:

1) She is a pervert with a thing for teeth.
2) There is some kind of ongoing cosmic struggle that we mortals have not yet been made aware of, and the most precious commodity in this struggle is human teeth. We don’t know if they’re mined for resources, forged into weaponry, or used as a form of currency, but they factor heavily in the struggle.

All that said, the Tooth Demon has been visiting our house for the last couple of weeks. Eva started getting very fussy again in the evenings, something she hasn’t done since she got over her gassiness. She’s been drooling like a fountain, and chewing on her hands non-stop. She was also running a low-grade fever, which concerned us. We read up a little on the symptoms, and eventually took her to the doctor, and sure enough: teething.

The interesting thing is that this is no guarantee that teeth will be coming any time soon. She is simply in the process of teething. She is only, after all, three months, and teeth usually don’t come in until about six months down the road. So we are, for the next six months, going to have to fight some occasional bouts of anger from the little one. But that will be okay. She’s become much more animated lately, and loves to play and watch her little Baby Einstein light-up star flash colors and play music. And she laughs like a banshee when you change her diapers and make fart sounds at her, so the fun we’re having definitely outweighs the fussiness.

And we can always take comfort in the fact that her tooth harvest will aid the fairies in their battle. I’m just hoping that the fairies are the good guys.

Sears Portraits

2008-02-16T07:27:00.003-06:00

A couple of weeks ago we went and had some portraits made at Sears. This one is called "Daddy and Baby (with Beard)." There are some really cute ones of Eva just by herself, though. You can see them by clicking here.

The Sheep

2008-02-12T17:58:00.000-06:00

I read one time a narrative that a guy had written:
What if Jesus were standing in his kitchen?

He said, in short, that he would tell Jesus all the
things he didn’t believe about him. And in the very
clever narrative, Jesus only responds over and over
with: Feed my sheep.

I thought about that. The work it takes to strip a
message bare of context, to place it in a different
frame and apply to it a new meaning.

The absurdity of partially believing in God.
Partially believe in anything.

Truth, for instance,
when tainted with the
smallest trace of untruth
becomes an absolute lie.

God, therefore, when
stripped of his Godliness,
becomes a concept. Becomes
defined by the believer.
Created in man’s own image.

Feed my sheep.

See, Jesus, I will do that if and only if the following:
I decide who you are.
I decide who the sheep are.
I decide what feed means.
I am allowed to define God rather arrogantly in terms of my
present culture and mock viciously those
that define him in any other terms.

Now, Jesus.
I’m cool with that.
Totally cool.

It doesn't matter. / Nobody cares.

2008-02-09T07:59:00.001-06:00

As a teacher, you have all different kinds of classes. Some of them sit quietly under your tutelage, making only pertinent comments and rarely, if ever, questioning your certainly questionable authority over them. Other classes do not care at all for you or your state-sanctioned authority and are aggressively apathetic and very open about their feelings from the beginning. And then there are those that fall somewhere in the middle. They respect you as a teacher, are mostly willing to be taught, but still find it necessary to occasionally challenge you, especially when they feel that you’re exposing a weakness.

Never let anyone fool you: teenagers are actually kind of intelligent in their own way. They may sit there for weeks staring at the wall, fidgeting with their hair and rolling boogers between their fingers, but the minute you border on illogical or irrelevant, they’ll pull philosophy out of their butt pocket and pummel you with it. And when that happens, it’s on.

As a part of reading The Outsiders, I had my class involved in a discussion of the different social groups that exists there at the high school. We were discussing the nature of each group, the criteria that the groups were divided on, and how the groups interacted. In discussing this, I had amassed a list of the school’s different social groups on the board: preps, jocks, nerds, punks, rednecks--the usual stereotypes that are produced by high school society. And suddenly, as I was asking a question, a student accused me of over-generalizing and making obvious observations.

This irked me for several reasons: 1) I wasn’t making the observations; the students composed the list. 2) I was trying to make a point that the student in question hadn’t let me get to yet. 3) The thing that people often forget about stereotypes is that they exist because they are, on some level, true. 4) The student that made the accusation spends much of his time and energy not only categorizing people himself, but waging a silent war between all the groups in school, letting his assigned social status define his entire existence within the walls of the school, and determine his level of contentment on any given day.

I tried to ignore the glaring hypocrisy of his assertion and responded to the accusation like a calm, professional adult. I told him that I was merely asking questions. These aren’t my observations, they’re yours as a class. I’m not asking questions because I don’t know the answer, but rather to get you to think (this is a common misunderstanding among ninth graders).

“Yeah,” he responded. “But it doesn’t matter.”

He was saying, I believe, that the distinctions that the students were drawing were arbitrary above all else, thereby implying that they weren’t important. We talked back and forth for a minute more, me keeping a playful smile on my face to choke down my frustration. It wasn’t that I wasn’t enjoying the back and forth--I found it quite refreshing when compared to the dead silence of most classes--but I was becoming frustrated with the student’s unwillingness to see himself in what we were talking about.

He continued, saying, in his own way, that nobody really cared about these distinctions. I tried to explain to him that he cared about these things more than anyone else. I tried to explain that conflict between high school social groups was a senseless waste of time and energy because in the span of four years it all dissipates into the larger picture of your life. Which group you were in in high school eventually becomes about as important as what you had for breakfast the morning of your ninth birthday.

“Mr. McDonald,” he said at one point, “you’re old--”

“I’m twenty-six.”

“Okay. Older. When you get out of high school, do you change the way you look at things?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. I don’t want to get out of school, then.”

And he made my point while not even realizing it.

Elie Wiesel said, “There is divine beauty in learning….To learn means to accept the postulate that life did not begin at my birth. Others have been here before me, and I walk in their footsteps.” I would agree with Mr. Wiesel, and I would add that learning also means to accept the idea that the world is bigger than you right now. It’s bigger than where you are chronologically and geographically. If I can get one student to understand this, my job is, in a sense, done because it will breed in them the desire to learn and they will do most of the work then on their own.

Recess

2008-02-05T16:41:00.001-06:00

We sit and spin, sing and stutter a skittering melee of
minutiae-filled ranting and mindless jibber-jabber, the
push of one another into walls and over concrete tables
built for relaxing.

The sing-song cadence of once-thriving brain cells now
living off of a different oxygen, made different, made
quite different, made in the image of God.

This is my day. I am amazed. Earth is new to me.
“Do you know if they have harnessed anti-matter?
Maybe this is how we can travel through time.”

I will sit and smile, stand and push and laugh and jump
and yes, I am retarded, isn’t that what you said?

You keep your self-fulfilling teenage prophecies and
ordinances of tradition, hormonal rage, degenerate youth.

Go choke on your money, your clean clothes, the fact that you
can drive and I am only, after all, a word that my mother calls me.

You’re a word that your father calls you but only behind your
back, and I am a world that my Father calls me to my face.

Can you reconcile this? My happiness, bliss, retarded in the face
of truth, and you a miserable young thing with only a girlfriend
and a pair of black eyes to show for your place in the world.

The Road

2008-01-21T15:54:00.002-06:00

He knew only that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.

Most books are written to play off of an immediate emotional response. There is a protagonist, usually personable. A conflict, usually relatable. And a resolution, usually satisfying to our moral and emotional code, judged right by an intuition. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is no such book. It is beyond that simplicity by leaps and bounds, and its greatness does not lie necessarily in a character or a plot, and certainly not in a resolution, but rather in a deep, abiding understanding of humanity that most authors wouldn’t dare to touch even if they were able.

The protagonists are an unnamed father and son who find themselves traveling the road in a scorched and unpopulated America. It is the relationship between these two that forms the foundation of the story. As opposed to most post-apocalyptic stories, which often focus on the act of the world ending, or present an action-based plot centered around the survival of a group of people, McCarthy gives us only two short sentences on the event: “The clocks stopped at 1:17. A long shear of light and a series of low concussions.” Even more interesting is that the itself event does not matter. An unspoken truth of the book is that when everything is gone, there is no past to calculate into meaning. There is nothing before or after. And so the man is left with only his son, and the boy with only his father.

Another fascinating aspect of McCarthy’s approach is the totality of the destruction. He leaves you with an understanding that, in such a world, there is no true chance of survival. People and animals are all dead. The earth is burned, unable to produce food. What food was left behind has been scavenged by survivors, and now, the “bad guys” as the boy calls them, roam the roads enslaving, killing and cannibalizing in order to survive.

McCarthy keenly observes that such a catastrophe would not only kill the earth, but would wreak immeasurable havoc on humanity. He appears to understand the depravity of man, and how our seeming morality is held together by the grace of God in order that we, as inherently sinful people, might still be able to function in societies. When the common need for goodness is gone, all good will goes straight to hell, leaving us all violent murderers bent on our own survival.

This is the conflict that the man must help his son work through. McCarthy carefully begins to make this point after a tense scene in which the father is forced to take a life in order to protect their own. The boy is left dealing with a new moral quandary:

Are we still the good guys? he said.
Yes. We’re still the good guys.
And we always will be.
Yes. We always will be.
Okay.

It is with great efficiency that McCarthy creates the image of the “bad guys.” With very few words in just a few scenes he offers descriptions that ultimately highlight an evil selfishness in their behavior. They are the product of a world without God, a world where there is no longer any tangible reason to be moral and no real incentive to survive, but in which the selfish desires of men’s hearts have every opportunity to be set free. It’s this truth that McCarthy presents most effectively and disturbingly.

Ultimately, it is a story about a father and a son. The son, in a way, prevents the man from becoming one of the “bad guys.” He provides a reason for the man to think twice before acting on his own selfishness. Without the son’s incessant moral questioning, the father would have had no reason to consider the larger meaning of his own actions.

All in all, this is an outstanding book, layered with meaning. It is both sad and somewhat hopeful, and always true.

Marxism, presidential campaigns, and those crazy fundamentalist evangelical Christians, or I’m due one naïve political essay just like everyone else

2008-01-09T05:57:00.000-06:00

As a result of both teaching The Outsiders, a perfect portrait of teenage class struggle taken to the extreme, and of simply finding it interesting, I’m dipping my toes into the ever-pretentious pool of Marxist literary criticism in hopes of bringing to light some of the finer points of S.E. Hinton’s novel. I’ve believed for years (or at least ever since 12th grade when I registered as an independent and began to fancy myself pseudo-political) that, on paper, Communism is a great idea; practically applied, it never works.

It’s easy to find Marxist philosophy interesting because of the stark contrast that it provides to our corporate-owned capitalist culture and the shallowness of life that a society such as ours ultimately cultivates and values. In much of America, the driving ideology is that everything should be more, faster, and better; people should give me mine and get out of my way. Our American philosophies of self-worth, self-actualization and self-esteem have created a culture that cares very little about the “us” and the “we.” We have raised generations of teenagers fixated on the “I” to a disturbingly Freudian degree. There are plenty of people willing to do whatever it takes to make sure that “I” come first, that “I” get what I want, and that “my” dreams, desires and wishes are fulfilled. This is, at least in part, why our crime rates have risen, why divorce is rampant, and why abortion is seen as a viable alternative to being responsible.

On a more practical level, this selfish mindset is also the basis for corporate greed and worker exploitation. The caricature of the slave-driving company man pushing the factory workers and pocketing all of the money they make is not unrealistic at all, but rather a part of the American story. This idea permeates the literature of the industrial world. We’ve all known people on the bottom of the ladder whose jobs, lives, and families are expendable for the sake of the corporation’s greater good. After seeing some ridiculous commercial last night about a nameless, faceless office worker upping his “productivity” I made the comment to Joni that I guess it’s the socialist in me that always rejected the idea of giving my time and energy to helping a corporation make money. The thought of giving my life to caring about a company’s production and bottom line, when all I get out of it is a paycheck and a free trip to Vegas during the yearly associational meeting, is depressing and sad, not to mention completely offensive.

Don’t get me wrong. I love America. I am deeply thankful that I have the freedom to opt out of such ridiculous employment, and to simply drive from town to town selling homemade blenders, if I so choose. But the sad irony is that it is this same freedom that leaves many people in our nation helpless and broke. The conflict is that while some of us have the resources to apply our freedom to bettering ourselves, others do not, and the ones who gain often gain at their expense.

There is, of course, a deeper problem with all of this. Karl Marx said, “Consciousness does not determine life: life determines consciousness.” The implication of that statement is this: atheism is a necessary component for true Marxism. It was Marx’s contention that society is the end-all be-all, and the goal of a society is physical, economic perfection and social equality. There is no God, no higher truth, and no overarching moral structure. Marxism requires one to put every energy into making a better material world while denying spiritual reality. Such an outlook is, in the end, quite bleak. It begs the question: “why bother?” If material happiness is the ultimate goal, then why not be an anarchist, seeking out our own pleasure at whatever cost?

A modified Marxism could possibly be compatible with religion, but it would require a different understanding of society and economy. For Marxism to be compatible with a belief in God and a greater spiritual truth, society and economy would have to be viewed as merely a tool in fulfilling an immediate need. They would be seen as necessary for proper community among people, and necessary to sustain organized life for any amount of time, but would be viewed within a greater spiritual framework where their perfection is not as important as their simple functionality.

Contrary to popular belief, which states that our Americanism is equal to, and may, in certain circumstances, trump our Christianity, it can be argued that capitalism equally removes God from the equation. It does so by placing first importance on the material (rather than the social). Capitalism depends upon a self-centered worldview, a greedy disposition--a feeling of entitlement that is absolutely self-serving, rather than equalizing.

Although you wouldn’t be able to tell from perusing the shelves of our bookstores, which boast all sorts of self-help, and “How to Become a Billionaire God’s Way” types of books; or from sitting in on many of our church services where self-help lectures have replaced the preaching of scripture, theology and sound doctrine, both Marxism and capitalism stand diametrically opposed to the principles of Christianity. True Christianity requires an admittance of sinfulness, a denial of the self, and an understanding that the only way to begin to be perfect is by depending on the person and work of Jesus Christ to make us so. This should pose an interesting political, social and economical conundrum for professing Christians. The problem though, I think, is that most evangelicals are fed on the type of preaching I mocked above, and so it never occurs to them that spending too much, wanting too much, and not giving enough back might be just as sinful as stealing outright.

A true “Christian” economic and political system would be one that served the society equally as a whole while maintaining that the material world and material good are means to an end rather than ends themselves. It is my humble opinion that, in the same way that there can be no pure Christian Marxists, there can be no pure Christian capitalists. The system is built to operate on a sinful desire for the accumulation of goods at the expense of other people.

All of this poses some interesting questions for the Christian who is trying to be conscientious about how to spend his or her vote in the presidential election next fall. The solution isn’t as easy as finding a party that we agree with on three or four core issues and sticking with them come what may. We have to be smart enough to realize that, in the current political climate, the “evangelicals” in the nation are a people group to be courted solely for their vote, not to be respected for their beliefs. Blindly supporting an entire party simply because they line up with Christian morality on some issues, and make a habit of campaigning in mega-churches is as ignorant as not voting at all.

The simple problem for me is this: I line up with the Republicans on many moral issues--issues that I refuse to waiver on. At the same time, I see the benefit of some more Democratic social and economic issues. My ideal party would be somewhere in the middle, where currently no party exists. And then there is the issue at this point of which person will garner the nomination for either party--an issue which will certainly be a deciding factor for me, and should be for anyone wanting to make an educated decision. While I’ve traditionally leaned Republican, there are a couple of potential candidates on that side that I don’t know if I could vote for in good conscience.

All that rambling to say that it is sometimes difficult to live responsibly as both a Christian and an American. We need to be reminded more often where our true loyalties lie, and remember that our “first allegiance,” to quote Derek Webb, “is not to a flag, a country, or a man…it’s to a King and a Kingdom.”

Episode 14: Staging a Coo, or The Beard Cometh

2008-01-04T15:05:00.003-06:00

Eva is getting big. Last week at the doctor she clocked in at 11lbs. 7oz. Quite a difference from 8lbs. three weeks prior. Joni read that babies hit a growth spurt around six weeks, and on top of that we had been putting rice cereal in her bottle for three weeks to help temper her reflux. We took her off of it last week and she’s been doing much better, just normal baby spit up now instead of the grown-man-collapsing-behind-a-bar projectile vomiting she had been doing. Still, she’s growing up on us.

She is also starting to coo and smile. I guess she’s smiling. I just know that sometimes when you make a fart sound, or gently bop her on the nose with your finger, she giggles and laughs. I enjoy that. She’s becoming altogether more animated and lively, moving her arms more, looking around, grabbing at stuff. You can tell that she is actually aware now of what she is looking at. The other day, while Joni was taking a shower, I sat on the couch with Eva while she fought a stuffed cow. The cow had some pretty tough Matrix-style ninja moves, but ultimately Eva was able to get the cow around the throat and body-slam her into submission. I think she enjoyed it.

On a slightly different note, there is the issue of my pending beard. I only draw attention to it because I have noticed that there is something intrinsic about a male’s desire to grow facial hair this time of year. And not just any facial hair. Goatees have been relegated to overuse by youth ministers and coaches. Mustaches are making a comeback, but they’ve got a lot of recovering to do after their abuse in the ‘80s. Sideburns were never really cool to begin with, and the chin whiskers-sans-mustache is usually only worn seriously by Camaro-driving rap-metal fanatics. No, I’m talking about the full beard.

Recently, nearly every guy I know has given it a shot, and quickly abandoned it. The only chronic beard-wearer I know is Tim, and I think he pulls it off pretty well. The rest of us only try. What’s more interesting to me is that, every two years, I will try the beard again, and after about three or four weeks I’ll realize how bad it itches, and shave. There is apparently something about the two-year span that makes me forget how uncomfortable it is. Right now, I’m at about two-week’s growth and I’m not suffering too bad yet. I’m determined to give it a fair shot, and when it goes I’ll take comfort in the fact that 2010 is only two short years away.

Episode 13: Bringing Home Baby

2007-12-23T08:17:00.002-06:00

We have successfully survived our first month of parenting. The following is a short list of some of the things that we have learned in the past four weeks:

1. Babies make their own rules about everything.

2. Sleep, while certainly beneficial, is not absolutely necessary in order to function in society.

3. Newborn babies smell sweet, no matter how many times they poop their pants or puke on themselves.

4. Babies are capable of pooping/peeing in a sneeze-like explosion that can travel several feet away.

5. Babies reorganize your priority list to an unimaginable degree.

It’s been a month since I’ve written and I’ve been missing it. The largest reason for this is that I haven’t had the time, but also there was the gnawing feeling that whatever I would have to say about Eva Kate just wouldn’t be good enough. How do you put the last month into words? I’ve been a little intimidated by the subject matter.

Joni and I both feel as if we’ve been living in a suspended state of reality for the last month. It is a completely enlightening and bizarre experience to suddenly have your every action determined by a little 8-pound girl--a sweet little bundle of bodily functions, as I like to call her. From my week at home following Eva’s birth, I can attest that the world becomes a blur very quickly. You operate on a 12-hour day. Two o’clock in the morning becomes no different than two o’clock in the afternoon, you become way too familiar with television programming, and you stop caring who sees you in your pajamas. Joni’s world has revolved solely around Eva Kate, primarily in the confines of our living room. She has been here mothering on top of trying to recover from her c-section, a process that is much slower than what we imagined it would be. Lugging around a baby isn’t conducive to healing from surgery.

Eva has been doing pretty well. At two weeks, she had a bout of what we assumed was colic, followed by a week of not being able to hold down any food. We took her to the doctor, and after an unfortunate upper-g.i. test, had to change her eating habits, putting a small amount of rice cereal in her bottle to help it stay down. Her puking spell scared us to death on a couple of occasions where she puked more than I would imagine a grown man could, and then started choking on it. Sorry for the graphic nature of this, but that’s something else that changes--nothing, and I mean nothing, grosses you out after the one-two punch of witnessing a birth and caring for a newborn.

A few weeks before Eva’s birth, I wrote about Joni’s and my fears concerning parenting. I mentioned how most of my fears had to do with things that were years away. I was arrogant enough to believe that taking care of a newborn, while a large task, was something that wasn’t worthy of true fear. I apologize for that. I was wrong. The first couple of nights at home we had the help of Joni’s mom one night and mine the next. There was a point early in the evening on that third night when everybody went home and just left us here with Eva. A certain fear ran through me at that point, a fear that I’m not sure I’ve felt before. It was a deep fear, a deep insecurity. A million “what ifs” shot through my brain, and so we sat and cried together for a moment.

We have been learning a lot, and loving little Eva Kate to death. She is unbearably sweet no matter if she’s sleeping, smiling, pooping, or puking. There aren’t words good enough to describe the feeling of her burying her nose in your neck as you try to burp her, or her grabbing your finger tight while she lays in your lap. It’s quite the experience.

Episode 12: Face First Into Fatherhood

2007-12-01T11:37:00.001-06:00

Note: I started writing this on the Sunday we were still in the hospital. It's incomplete, but since I haven't had a chance to write since then, I thought I would post what I had of it.

“What’s it feel like being a dad?”

I’ve been asked that quite a few times now, mostly by friends of mine and Joni’s that are our age, getting married soon, thinking about getting married, or expecting babies themselves. It’s a very legitimate question, and one I’m proud to be asked, but it’s one that I haven’t been able to work out a concise answer to yet. Being a dad already feels like a lot of things, all of them good, and all of them too big for words. The closest I can come to summing it up is to explain that, while I’ve been around a lot of babies in my life, it’s hard to get my head around the fact that Eva is my baby. The feeling is too big to explain.

Joni and I were looking forward to a quiet morning with us and Eva Kate, and at about 8:30 our pediatrician came in and told us that she was looking a little jaundiced, and needed to be under the light today. She said it looks like she caught it pretty early, and she wanted to treat it today so that it wouldn’t get worse. This isn’t a serious condition except for the fact that we haven’t gotten to see Eva all day except when she’s being fed. We don’t like not seeing her. All the experienced mothers and fathers keep telling us to let the nursery have her because we’re going to be seeing a lot of her when we get home, and while we fully understand what’s being implied (Sleep while you can!), we still want to hold her.

So far fatherhood has been a wonderful experience. I’ve been the designated burper and diaper-changer while Joni’s recovering. There was something special about having my first diaper-changing experience with my own baby. I was not expecting the stuff to look like black tar, a wad the size of a small hamburger patty stuck to Eva’s bottom. And, to borrow a thought from Uncle Bob, cleaning it up is like trying to wipe up caulk.

I’ve been proud of Joni. She’s fallen into this very naturally. She handled the surgery extremely well, and has been very easy at nursing and taking care of Eva. She’s recovering well from the section.

My New Favorite Photo

2007-11-21T08:03:00.001-06:00

We had a hard time getting her in the car seat right when we left the hospital. Her look says it all.

Episode 11: Eva Has Arrived

2007-11-17T12:32:00.002-06:00

Eva Katherine has arrived. Everything went very smoothly yesterday morning. We're getting a little r&r right now while Eva's napping, and while I haven't had time to write about it, amazingly she has.

Baby Day Photos

2007-11-15T05:19:00.000-06:00

Just wanted to let everyone know that we will post some photos of Eva Kate and the hospital stay over on the flickr page: www.flickr.com/photos/mattmc

We'll try to have some up asap, but things will be a little busy, I'm sure, so I'm not sure exactly when that will be.

Keep Joni and Eva Kate in your prayers.

Episode 10: The Home Stretch

2007-11-14T05:46:00.001-06:00

I have a million other things I should probably be doing right now besides this, but my mind needed to sit and write, quietly with a cup of coffee and a cat in my lap. My days at work lately have been hectic, my night classes are going to give me ulcers, and I think I’ve really been such a nervous, jittery wreck these last few days because this time Friday morning, Joni and I will be in the hospital getting ready for the stork to come. I don’t know what to do with that nervous energy, so I walk fast down the halls of Caldwell High School, I talk fast and nonsensically to students who ask me questions, I shuffle papers with the intensity and purpose of a law office clerk, I get Hulk-pissed when my night class instructor tries to show us how to use a spreadsheet (I understand neither numbers nor charts) to analyze, item by item, tests that we’ve given, and I keep a running list of to-dos in my mind at all times. And when Joni and I are finally able to sit down for a while, I’m able to be calm, at least in those moments, and it helps keep me sane.

Everybody keeps asking me if I’m excited, or if I’m scared. The excitement goes without saying. Of course I’m excited. But yes, I’m excited in the way that I was right before the wedding. I’m excited in the same way that one is before bungee jumping for the first time. I’m excited and nervous at exactly the same moment, in the same emotion. The tricky thing is, though, I’m not sure what to be scared of yet. Yes, I’m probably frightened to death on the inside, but I can’t show it because I don’t know what it’s a fear of. At this point, my immediate fears are that the procedure goes well, that Joni is ok, and able to get through it safely, and that Eva is in good health when she gets here. Beyond that, I have no identifiable fears because I don’t know what to fear.

But we are ready. Heaven knows Joni is ready; Eva’s been a little hard on her these past few weeks. She’s literally gotten too big for Joni’s britches. We’re ready to see her, to hold her. We’re ready for all of that, and our excitement does outweigh our fear. That reminds me. I do have a deep-seated fear of baby vomit. I know it’s something I’m going to have to deal with, but that sour milk smell turns my stomach. So there. I identified another fear.

Belly Shots

2007-11-13T18:08:00.000-06:00

There's more on the Flickr page.

Black Hole Sun

2007-11-01T05:36:00.000-05:00

This news piece was on the front page at Yahoo, and while, for whatever reason, I never consider Yahoo to be a credible news source, I had to read it simply because it talked about black holes.

I have always been fascinated with space. I would almost consider devoting time to better understanding math just so I could study space more. It’s one of those things about our universe that should never fail to capture a person’s imagination.

And I know what you’re asking yourself. Does he believe in aliens? I’m not saying I do, I’m not saying I don’t. All I’m saying is that that is a lot of room for there to be only us.

Episode 9: The Reckoning

2007-10-25T05:58:00.001-05:00

I was almost home when I got Joni’s text message: Friday, Nov. 16 at 7.

It was Eva’s birthday. Joni was at the doctor for her regular baby checkup (I’m not going to be explicit, but apparently they get more and more horrific the further you are into the pregnancy). I smiled big when I got the message. I jumped a little inside, and for the first time, I really felt an immediate sense of nervousness. Up until then I had felt a vague future nervousness, where I knew that something big was coming but my nerves just didn’t know how to respond yet.

The nerves were felt even more clearly when I called my mother. “Let’s see,” she said. “That’s…three weeks from this Friday.”

“Yes,” I said as the thought settled in. “It is.”

Recently, Joni has been feeling the nerves a little more strongly than I have. She’ll ask me, with a worried look in her eye, “How are we going to know what to do?” And I, with all the stoic, alpha male bravado I can muster, will say, “We’ll know.”

The truth is, the words “three weeks” have never been heavier. I am nervous, and I think it’s perfectly safe to admit it. I’m excited, and nervous, and outright scared, and insanely happy. And I’m not even so much nervous about what we’ll do immediately. Even though I’ve never changed a diaper, let alone a little girl’s diaper (Before we knew the baby’s gender, Joni said she was nervous about changing a little boy. I told her, surely there was nothing to it. You just hose them off.), and although I’ve never had to functionally rock a baby to sleep (I’ve gotten to rock borrowed babies, but it was always only for about five minutes at a time), or had to venture into public with a baby in tow, that’s not really the stuff I’m worried about.

I’m more worried about what I’m going to do the first time I catch her telling a fib; the first time we have to choose whether or not to spank her; the first time she shows her rear end in public (an act that I made performance art as a child); the first time I tell her to clean her room and she says “no”; the first time she gets a bad grade on a report card; the first time she brings home a guy named Zane, wearing a goatee and a Slayer shirt.

I guess these are the things a dad thinks about. Maybe that’s the natural division of labor. Not to say that I won’t change my fair share of diapers, or spend my fair share of nights rocking a gassy baby, or that Joni won’t have to correct a million little misbehaviors, and bring the rod from time to time. But maybe naturally, those are the things that a dad worries about, while a mom worries about feeding, and clothing, and nurturing.

Truth is, we don’t know how it all works yet. We can only hope that we figure it out some time in the next 20 years.

The Writing Baby

2007-10-23T21:23:00.000-05:00

Joni went to the doctor yesterday and the doc scheduled us for delivery (for health reasons, she's having a planned c section). The official date is Friday, November 16 at 7 am. The nerves have officially set in.

Like any proud parent, I wanted to take a minute to brag on my little girl. Amazingly, still in utero, the little booger has taken the initiative to start her own blog. She wrote her first post about finding out what her birthday will be. Check it out: www.thewritingbaby.blogspot.com

Things I Probably Shouldn't Say

2007-10-12T17:40:00.000-05:00

I turned this questionnaire in to my university supervisor at ULM as a part of my program work. I probably shouldn't have.

Matt McDonald
Accountability and Testing
October 1, 1007

When are tests given?
March.

Who takes the tests?
All freshman and sophomores.

When and how are the scores reported?
The scores are sent to school administration.

Who gets the score reports?
First administration, then teachers get the grades for their grade-level students.

How do teachers interpret and communicate the reported scores?
Teachers see which subjects and tests were passed and at what level, informing them of student performance in each specific aspect of the subject being tested.

How are the scores used?
The scores are used as a weapon to either reinforce effective teaching by allowing the school more access to funding and making the school more attractive to quality teachers, or to condemn poor teaching by removing funding and making the school appear less attractive to quality teachers sending it on a trajectory that it will follow until it is consolidated into a much larger and much less well-run parish school that will cost the school system and the parish citizens considerably more financially and socially than hiring qualified teachers ever would have.

How can you use the scores?
I can use the scores to focus my curriculum and teaching for the next school year.

2001 Pontiac Grand Am

2007-10-07T08:11:00.000-05:00

White 2001 Pontiac Grand Am was born a factory car in mid-2000. Sporting an only two-year-old body design, it was one of the better looking compacts of its time. Grand Am was abandoned at a young age, and purchased in early 2002 by Matt McDonald of Archibald, Louisiana. The car resided with McDonald until its passing on September 28, 2007.

According to friends and family, some of Grand Am’s hobbies included not working, kind of working most of the time, and breaking down. The car once decided to stop making its radio work, a decision that it upheld until its death. It loved to run hotter than Texas asphalt, and to wear out brakes faster than a newborn goes through diapers.

Grand Am will be survived by its owner, Matt McDonald; his wife Joni; their daughter Eva Katherine; their two cats, Alli and Dinah; and Joni’s 2000 Toyota Forerunner. It has been immediately replaced by a 2001 Toyota Tundra.

Services were held Friday, October 5 at 5:30 p.m. at Van-Trow Toyota in Monroe.

Episode 8: Photo Shoot

2007-10-03T05:49:00.002-05:00

When I was a kid, your first time taking pictures was a big ordeal. You got dressed up in your Sunday clothes, combed your hair, wore those black shoes that felt like they were made out of cast iron, picked out your favorite Transformer toy to take with you and keep you mellow so you wouldn’t flip out on the photographer (a greasy-haired ex-car salesman named Glenn or Gary who told stupid jokes, talked a lot about his kids, and generally gave you the creeps), packed up and headed for JC Penny.

Things have changed a bit since my day. Now you don’t have to do any of that. All you have to do is show up, in utero no less, and smile at the camera. Joni and I had read about and seen some pictures of the new 4D ultrasounds that are available. They allow you to not just see a black and white rendering of the baby’s profile, but to actually see the baby. You can look at her face and actually see her features. So we decided to have one done, and I must say it was an experience.

I was hesitant at first because I wasn’t sure that I wanted to see little Eva yet. I debated whether seeing her now would ruin some later surprise. But I ultimately decided that it would not. I’m sure there’s no amount of foreknowledge that will “ruin” the surprise of seeing your new baby. And at 32 weeks, she’s going to look a good bit different than she will by the time she gets here.

We knew going in that, as with all first-time photo shoots, the success of the ultrasound depended completely upon Eva’s willingness to let herself be photographed. And, in keeping with family tradition, she was pretty ornery about it. We’d gotten a kick out of her behavior at previous ultrasounds. On one of the first ones, just after she’d gotten big enough to make out her features (she looked like a bean up until then), she flipped around and put her back to us the minute the nurse cranked up the machine. This time she was pretty cooperative for about the first ten minutes. We got some good shots of her face, her chubby little cheeks. But when she decided she’d had enough, she put her left foot up in front of her face. In a lot of the pictures you can only see her nose, right eye, and part of her mouth. Despite all of Joni’s and the nurse’s best attempts to make her move, she wasn’t budging.

I wasn’t frustrated by this at all. I found it kind of cute. She’s going to be born a free-thinker, going to have a rebel spirit. She’s not going to do things like pose for pictures just because everyone tells her it’s what she should do. Now, I’m sure that I’ll find that attitude exponentially less cute in about two and a half years, but for now I like it.

How to Mold Minds: Episode 2

2007-09-27T05:31:00.001-05:00

Test question concerning Gabriel Garcia Marquez's short story, "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings": Why did the people flock to see the girl who had been turned into a spider?

Student answer: Because she was a freaking spider.

I’ve Been #^&%*+ed!

2007-09-25T06:02:00.001-05:00

You read that right. I’ve been -------- by the school board. They’ve decided that I can’t teach the book ----- by ---- ------. They said it would be too ------------- for -------- Parish. If this isn’t ------ship, I don’t know what is. I guess they would rather have their students live and --- ignorant than they would have them learn about the ----- outside the parish lines. Heaven forbid you teach them about WW-- and the ---------. There’s no need to teach them -------, or -------. I knew everyone was touchy these days, a little too easily --------, but this is ----------. I joked yesterday that I was going to teach The --------- --------- instead, and I just might do it. Forget the fact that when you’re teaching ------- year olds, it’s difficult to find anything age-appropriate that’s any ----. But, I will survive.

There Are No Dumb Questions...

2007-09-19T05:56:00.000-05:00

...Just questions that will get you slammed to the ground and tasered while you're already handcuffed.

I'm familiar with the self-obsessed goofball who wants to ask too many questions and make things uncomfortable for everybody (see this post), but when even goofballs are asking good questions they deserve to be heard out.

You can read stories about this incident of a student getting tasered at a John Kerry Q&A all over the news sites online, but take a look at the video. I fully understand the desire to keep things orderly at a meeting like this, but let's just admit that this was excessive. There is something eerily big-brotherish about this.

¡Viva la Revolucion!

2007-09-10T06:06:00.001-05:00

A couple of years ago on this page I pretentiously “defined” rock and roll as “that language that is shouted by drunkards and poets, and translated by children, chiseled into the stone face of our great history.” While that verbose definition was a little on the idealistic side, I have to say that to a large degree, I still agree with it. It is the same large part of me that agrees with that statement that also gets violently ill at the thought of having to listen to even a snippet of most of what passes for pop music today. It would be an understatement to say that musicians don’t have anything to say anymore. Or maybe they never did. Or maybe I’m just a snob.

Enter (or re-enter) Rage Against the Machine. I started listening to Rage back in 1996 when their second album, Evil Empire, came out. At the time I’m pretty sure it was guitarist Tom Morello’s unstoppable riffs and other-worldly solos, along with the funk/hip-hop element that they threw into an otherwise heavy metal mix, that pulled me in. They’re a band I’ve gone back to occasionally over the last decade, but here recently I’ve become a fan all over again.

Having gotten my hands on a copy of their first album, Rage Against the Machine, I was able to grasp more fully what this band was about. Of course I’ve always known they were political--they made no bones about it. I’ve always known they were way left leaning--way past Gore and Clinton. But I also knew that their idea of political rock went far beyond lifting a middle finger and saying that the war sucks. They were intelligent. They sang about stuff that I had never heard of and couldn’t possibly understand. To a degree that was cool, but it also freaked me out. I remember my friend Bob, as I was looking at the liner notes to Evil Empire, saying, “Dude, why do you like them? They hate America.”

As I’ve gotten older I realized that they don’t hate America. They never did. They were just a group of four guys with keen insight. They spotted corruption and greed and pointed it out. They spotted double-talking politicians and pointed them out. I recall a particular episode of “Saturday Night Live” that Rage got kicked off of after only having played one song. Before their second song, they had covered their equipment with upside-down American flags, a silent protest having to do with the fact that they were sharing the show that night with host Steve Forbes, one of the wealthiest men in America who also ran for president in the mid-‘90s. Rage was a band that cared about things, knew how to articulate their thoughts, and did it without apology. That, to me, is what rock and roll is really about, regardless of your political beliefs.

For example, recently I dug up a song of theirs that appeared on the 1998 soundtrack to Godzilla. Check out the backhanded slap that the lyrics delivered. And this appeared in a major motion picture. I’m ashamed I never caught it before.

No Shelter
Rage Against the Machine

The main attraction--distraction
got you number than number than numb
Empty you pockets son; they got you thinkin’ that
What you need is what they’re sellin’
Make you think that buyin’ is rebellin’
From the theaters to malls on every shore
The thin line between entertainment and war
The frontline is everywhere, there be no shelter here
Spielberg the nightmare works so push it far
Amistad was a whip, the truth was feathered and tarred
Memory erased, burned and scarred
Trade in your history for a VCR

Cinema, simulated life, ill drama
Fourth Reich culture--Americana
Chained to the dream they got you searchin’ for
The thin line between entertainment and war

There be no shelter here
The frontline is everywhere

Hospitals not profit full
Yet market bulls got pockets full
To advertise some hip disguise
View the world from American eyes
The poor adore keep fiendin’ for more
The thin line between entertainment and war
They fix the need, develop the taste
Buy their products or get laid to waste
Coca-Cola is back in the veins of Saigon
And Rambo too, he got a dope pair of Nikes on
And Godzilla pure…filler
To keep your eyes off the real killer

Cinema, simulated life, ill drama
Fourth Reich culture--Americana
Chained to the dream they got you searchin’ for
The thin line between entertainment and war

American eyes, American eyes....
View the world from American eyes
Bury the past, rob us blind
And leave nothing behind

Just stare
Relive the nightmare

Episode 7: The Sound of Settling

2007-09-09T08:37:00.002-05:00

A couple months back I was talking to Alan, the new director at the NCM, and I asked if he was settled into his new house yet. He replied only with a laugh. There is a difference, he pointed out, between being moved in, and being settled in. I have found this out myself.

I’ve only moved two other times in my life, but this one has by far been the biggest. Not just the fact that we’re moving into a house that we’re buying (a first for both of us), but the volume of the move itself. It wasn’t just my clothes and CDs that I had to worry about this time, it was everything we owned. The difficulty was compounded by the fact that we had some boxes that we had not opened since we moved into the other house over a year ago. Our second bedroom there tripled as an office and a storage room as well as a guest room. Thankfully, we actually have closets in the new house, and two storage sheds out back.

We have made good progress in the two weeks we’ve been here, though. Most of the rooms are in order. At this point, the only boxes we have left are pictures and our china. And we’ve enjoyed the house so far. It’s a quiet neighborhood, just out of town, but still close enough to be convenient.

Joni and Eva are still doing well. This week, Joni was diagnosed with gestational diabetes, that is diabetes that lasts until the baby is born. It’s not all that uncommon in pregnancy, and luckily not too threatening as long as she adheres to a strict diet. The most important thing, apparently, is that she eat more often. In the last few weeks, she’s known that she needed to eat, and would even be hungry, but at the same time disgusted at the thought of food, and only able to eat a little at a time. And the bummer is that she has to stab herself in the finger four times a day to check her blood. But she’s handling it very well.

Right now we’re trying to soak up a last couple of “quiet” months before Eva comes. I say quiet, but we’re steadily dancing around work, night class, playing music twice a week (and on the weekends), and just generally being beat down. I know that something will have to give with my schedule come November, I just don’t have the energy to think right now about what that might be.

How to Mold Minds: Episode 1

2007-09-06T05:34:00.001-05:00

Student (while trying to read Edgar Allan Poe's "A Cask of Amontillado"): This guy must've been on something when he was writing this.

Teacher: He was.

Episode 6: Still a Girl!

2007-08-21T05:58:00.002-05:00

We went back for a visit with the specialist two weeks ago, knowing we would have another ultra sound. While we were very happy to get to see Eva again, we were a little apprehensive, quietly hoping that she was still Eva, and not Hunter (the baby’s name, had she been a boy).

Was this an irrational fear? Maybe, but not really. At the same time that we found out we were having a girl, Joni’s co-worker, who is as far along as Joni, found out that she was having a boy. A few weeks later she returned to the doctor, had an ultra sound, and listened to the nurse say, “Looks like we’ve got a little girl.” You can imagine the reaction.

Now, I’m not going to share the “sensitive” picture, but we have one that proves for sure that we’re dealing with a little girl. At this point, I’ve set myself up to expect a girl, and as much as I would love to have a little boy to play army, and have fart contests, and climb things with, I’m also looking forward to spoiling Eva rotten, no matter how many times I’ll have to watch “Dora the Explorer,” or High School Musical. I’m also going to have fun over the next 15 or so years coming up with all kinds of ways to destroy the little boys that think they’re going to date her. I will be legend in the halls of her high school.

Also, we are currently getting finished with the work we are doing on the new house--putting down floors, painting walls--and are about to start moving in this week. It’s been very busy, but it will be worth it when it’s all said and done.

Featured Article of the Day

2007-08-16T05:28:00.000-05:00

My article, "The Worldview of Materialism," was the feature on relevantmagazine.com yesterday. Go check it out.

I Guess I’m a Flaming Fundamentalist

2007-08-09T08:34:00.000-05:00

I always thought that "apostasy" was one of those words that I’d never have any personal use for, but I have been proven wrong. Lately, I’ve been working hard to move my personal beliefs and theology from something that I decide upon for myself out of my own opinions, to something that God through the Spirit and scripture decides for me. Scripture has become an indispensable foundation of thought for me. I feel like I am finally learning how to read the Bible, I am finally seeing that it does make sense, it is not contradictory, it is strong, forceful, objective, and final, and if I am going to hold to any theology at all as a Christian, then it must be one built out of scripture.

The video below is something that I came across on another blog, and it is pretty depressing to watch. It is a video promoting Solomon's Porch, a Minnesota church lead by Emergent pastor Doug Pagitt. It is unnerving to see people who otherwise seem to be bright, young, intelligent folks make such immature statements as, “There's no, like, umm, like statement of belief at this church, or statement of faith; there's not like a set-in-stone theological writing that everyone in this church has to adhere to, umm, because everyone does have different ideas and those ideas are important and valued…,” and, “I see the Bible changing. I don't see it as stagnant, and so for us as a community of Christians to say 'We need to believe this one thing and hold it tightly and make sure that it is never questioned'...That's a real waste of energy with all the things we could be doing in the world.”

Click here to view: Solomon's Porch promotional video

I can’t understand the desire to even be called “Christian”--a very exclusive personal claim concerning a very exclusive belief system--if you are uncomfortable “holding tightly to one thing.” To me, statements like this concerning the Bible seem to come from an ignorance of the Bible. If it is read as it is, then the only two options are to fully embrace all of it, or completely reject all of it. There can be no in-between. I do not understand why people who seem so passionate about many other things, and so unswerving in their convictions concerning social issues, are unwilling to put the same strong convictions into their personal faith.

It is certainly true what Paul wrote to Timothy, “As I urged you when I was going to Macedonia, remain at Ephesus so that you may charge certain persons not to teach any different doctrine, nor to devote themselves to myths and endless genealogies, which promote speculations rather than the stewardship from God that is by faith. The aim of our charge is love that issues from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith. Certain persons, by swerving from these, have wandered away into vain discussion, desiring to be teachers of the law, without understanding either what they are saying or the things about which they make confident assertions” (1 Timothy 1:3-7; emphasis mine). And also, “For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths” (2 Timothy 4:3,4; emphasis mine).

For more of what the “pastor” at Solomon’s Porch, Doug Pagitt, believes specifically, click here to listen to an interview that was conducted with him on a podcast that I came across recently. It’s a little long, but it helps clarify the clearly heretical type of belief “system” that he and his Emergent cohorts promote.

Song A Day

2007-08-07T07:49:00.000-05:00

My brother Adam, who usually takes every chance he gets to poke fun at blogs, has started a blog himself. Song a Day is a good idea if you ask me. While I once prided myself on my musical knowledge, I haven't really heard anything new in the past two years that excites me that much, and so my knowledge is old school knowledge. Adam, however, has kept up with what's current, and should be able to offer some good insight. I encourage my five readers to check it out.

Episode 5: Housing / Happy Anniversary

2007-08-06T08:57:00.004-05:00

The day after we found out that Joni was pregnant we were sitting here just kind of soaking in the news, figuring out what exactly it meant, what all we would have to do now, and one of the first things that one of us said was, “I guess we need to start looking for a house.”

Now, we like our little rent house. We like the insanely cheap rent, the quiet neighbors, the big window in the living room that the cats love to stare out of all day. It’s not a bad spot, and we were very fortunate to get it as newlyweds. However, there are a couple of things that we do not like. For one, it’s a little small to start having kids. With a baby, we’re going to need some elbow room, and right now both our laundry room and our second bedroom-slash-office also operate as storage rooms. Aside from the closets in each bedroom, there is no storage space, and so even though we’ve been living here for a year, it still looks like we haven’t really moved in yet. We’ve learned a lot about keeping stuff that you think you may need one day, only to find out that you never will.

Two, we do not think that it’s wise to keep renting. While the low monthly rent has been a blessing, there is something very temporary about the idea of renting a house. We wanted to avoid getting settled in here only to move in a year or two. We were hesitant to do all that it would take to get this house ready for a baby when we were planning on moving in the near future anyway. And besides the feeling of temporariness, there is the fact that, as renters, we can’t make major changes to the house on a whim. Lately, I’ve taken to watching the house hunting shows on HGTV and last night a guy, after he and his wife had finally found a house, wrote “ours” on the wall with a Sharpie, just because he could. While that sounds a little goofy, I fully understand where he’s coming from. We wanted something that we could call ours.

So we looked. We started out with our price range in the low hundred thousands (shocked at the fact that, 30 years ago, our parents had built their houses for about $40,000). It was hard hunting. We found a couple here or there that were ok, but their was always some small part of the house that dealt it the death blow. We looked at one early on that was in our price range, and in a very nice neighborhood; it had a nice yard, a covered garage, it was a solid brick house. But there was no storage. No laundry, no pantry, no room to move around. After that, the more we looked, the more our price range seemed to go up, and where once $150,000 had once seemed ridiculously high, more and more it began to look reasonable, and eventually even cheap.

We spent a couple of weekends doing nothing but viewing houses. We lived and died by the idea that when you buy a house, you buy a neighborhood. While we like living close to town, and really liked some of the houses in town, the location would be terrible; either butted up to a busy street, or in a neighborhood where crime is on the rise. I lived just off campus for two years, so a neighborhood with a rising crime rate doesn’t necessarily affect me, I guess, but with a wife and a baby on the way, safety is a major concern. We would look at houses that were pretty on the outside, but riddled with bizarre architecture on the inside. Houses that looked pretty at a glance, but on closer inspection were falling apart. We looked and looked, and finally, we found one that we wanted.

It was a nice big house just out in the country. It was huge, and even though it was priced too high, we figured we could bid low and see what happened. So we did, and were promptly rejected. Now, I still haven’t figured out why someone who is trying to sell a house would flat out reject an offer. It would seem to me that anyone interested enough to put an offer on it would be willing to negotiate a little. In fact, we bid low fully expecting to negotiate with the owner. But, no such luck.

So we looked around for another month. And on the fourth of July, Joni’s dad called and said that he had seen a house for sale by owner that we needed to look at. It was in the same area as the too-small house, but was significantly bigger, and within our newly-revised price range. So we caught up with the owner, looked at the house a couple of times, and decided to put an offer on it. For certain reasons of the owner’s (the circumstances of which I should probably not write about for legal reasons), we would be getting a very good deal on the house. There was, however, one major oversight that we were making: we were doing this sans realtor, and we did not know what in the crap we were doing. We drew up a purchase agreement that looked like something a ten-year-old would use when playing banker, and made our offer (the circumstances of which I should probably not write about for legal reasons). Then we waited…and waited…and waited…and waited for a response (the circumstances of which I should probably not write about for legal reasons). But the response never came.

We finally decided we were done waiting, and called the owner of the house to tell him our decision. He talked me into giving him a few more days, and when I talked to him two days later, he talked me into giving him five more (the circumstances of which I should probably not write about for legal reasons). And after those days had passed, we were truly over it to the point where we wouldn’t even want the house anymore, even if we could have bought it outright for twenty bucks. And on the day we finally made up our mind to really be done with it, I called our realtor and set up an appointment to look at another house.

This house seemed to be promising. It was in a neighborhood where we had really wanted to find a house, but every time one came up for sale there (which wasn’t often) it was always priced upwards of $200,000. This house was well within our price range; in fact, it was cheapest house we had seriously looked at since the beginning of our search. Since we had become notorious for being extremely picky, willing to say no to a house if we didn’t like any small thing about it, we had often wondered how we would know when we saw the right one. But, amazingly, we knew the minute we set foot in the door.

Laundry room? Yes.
Big kitchen with cabinet space, counter space, electric range, pantry? Yes.
Open floor plan with no walls cutting off the kitchen from the living room? Yes.
Big bathrooms? Yes.
Updated master bath? Yes.
Carport? Yes.
Nice big yard? Yes.
Room between us and the neighbors? Yes.
Sufficient distance from/close proximity to town? Yes.

This place had nothing more or less than exactly what we wanted, and in an area where we had been hoping since the beginning to find a house. We made an offer that night, and it was accepted the next day. That was last Monday, and things are moving along nicely between us, the owners, and the bank. We’re finally going to be moving out.

Now, I’m not a big prosperity guy, but I am a big sovereignty guy. I believe that God works out those things for us that he wants to work out, and I believe that his sovereign work goes down to the smallest minutiae of the believer’s life. I believe that there was a reason our offer on that first house was not entertained by the owner. If it had been, we would have negotiated and bought a house that we probably could not afford. There was another house that we had looked at early on and really liked (it was second on our favorites list behind the first house we put an offer on), and so decided to go back and look at it again, fully prepared to make an offer this time. But when we looked at it a second time, it didn’t have the same appeal that it had originally. For some unidentifiable reason, we didn’t like it this time. Then we waited for four weeks on the second house we put an offer on (the circumstances of which I should probably not write about for legal reasons), only to find that it wasn’t going to work, and on the heels of that, and in the midst of deep frustration, found a house that perfectly fit our criteria for what we wanted. Pretty cool.

All that said, we hope to be moving here in the next couple of weeks. It will be difficult with me starting work again next week, but we’ll make it work. I’m not going to complain at this point. And hopefully, by the time Eva Katherine gets here, we’ll be settled.

Finally, yesterday was our one-year anniversary. Neither of us could believe that it’s been a year. It’s been a good one. We’ve both learned a lot, and have had an excellent time. I can say for myself that it’s pretty amazing knowing that I was blessed enough to marry my best friend. A lot of people can’t say that. Here’s looking forward to sixty more.

Doing Justice

2007-08-03T08:01:00.000-05:00

Because he says it better than I could ever think of writing it, I am posting a link to an impressive message titled "Doing Justice" by Tim Keller that I originally heard by way of the Resurgence podcast. Enjoy: Doing Justice

Pulpit Crimes: Come on Down!

2007-08-01T06:03:00.000-05:00

Below I have posted a quote that I copied from a blog that printed it from the book Pulpit Crimes by James White. I post it here because this is something that I have always felt strongly about. I've never been comfortable with the idea of calling as many people down to the front as possible, nor with the talk of numbers of baptisms that I hear often from people in the church. I have seen too many students "make decisions" that they did not understand. They were marked up on some evangelist's list of converts, and left by themselves to sort out whatever it was that may or may not have happened to them. All that said, I'll let the quote speak for itself.

Anyone who has endured the end-of-the-year push to meet a goal of baptisms for a year knows well what takes place. Entire sermons on baptism, all aimed at getting as many bodies through the baptistery as possible, along with "bring a friend" drives, all end up producing what can only be called Christian mutations: baptism without conversion, religiosity without repentance, non-discipled disciples, moistened but now guilty of religious hypocrisy as well. The numbers may look good, but what do they represent?

Some of the largest, conservative denominations are particularly guilty of inspiring this pulpit crime in their ministers and churches. The rampant assumption that the work of the Spirit of God can be plotted on graphs and charts has created an entire mind-set that refuses to recognize God's own sovereignty over his church and that it is the Lord, not man, that adds to the church daily those that are being saved (Acts 2:47).

The idea that God could actually have a purpose in a church with a growth rate less than double digits but where he is praised in purity, his truth proclaimed with clarity, and those in the fellowship are growing in the grace and knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ, needs to be championed again.

"Church growth" can become an idol when viewed outside the balance of God's Word just as any other good and proper concept. While the church should never be complacent about the proclamation of the gospel and the salvation of sinners, in many places today, that singular goal has become the only calling of Christ's people, and that concept cannot be substantiated by a fair reading of Scripture.

The "numbers" mentality has resulted in egregious abuses of baptism at the hands of ostensibly orthodox men. In recent years a large church in the United States became known for having a children's baptismal service featuring the firing of cannons with confetti and lights and a siren going off when the child was baptized. Though the church later attempted to put a biblical spin upon this blight on their reputation, the fact remains that the only reason the concoction ever saw the light of day was to seek to encourage young folks to make a profession of faith followed by baptism.

We are truly brought back to a fundamental question by such out-of-balance practices: who saves, and for what purposes? Those who make human autonomy and free will definitive of their theology have little consistent basis for avoiding such excesses, but those who rest upon the sovereignty of God and His divine ordination of both the ends and the means are in a position to do honor to all of the biblical revelation.

A child drawn to baptism out of a desire to be baptized is being put in spiritual danger for the rest of his or her life. Those who have had "their tickets punched" and have been assured, mistakenly, of their eternal salvation solely due to something they did, a card they filled out, a prayer they recited, are some of the hardest people in the world to reach with a real message of repentance and faith. It is a pulpit crime indeed to encourage such shallow "conversionism" that is not born in the heart by a mighty work of the Spirit of God resulting in repentance and faith in Christ.

An example from my own experience will always remain fresh in my mind. I was in attendance of one such push for baptisms at a very large evangelical church a few decades ago. the entire service was focused upon getting as many people as possible into the baptistery at the end of the service (and it just so happened the church reporting year ended next weekend). Fifty or sixty people made the trek upstairs to the front, and we all dutifully stayed in our pews to observe the lengthy service. Of course, a grand total of possibly ten minutes had passed between the time these people "came forward" and when they entered the waters, so these folks were operating on nothing more than the instruction found in the sermon itself, which was hardly in depth, and was focused primarily on baptism, not upon the theology of the gospel. As the people filed through the baptistery, a woman came down to be baptized. The pastor was standing behind, preparing to baptize her, quoting the standard formulary he used to do so. He could not see that the woman, right as he was about to baptize her, crossed herself in typical Roman Catholic fashion. the entire congregation could see it, even the television cameras caught it, but the pastor had no idea.

Now surely, this woman could have been a life long Roman Catholic who had been converted and was simply going on instinct, and I like to hope and pray that it is the case. But, it is as likely, if not more so, that the woman had no concept of whatsoever of what that church professed to believe nor how that was relevant to her faith as a Roman Catholic. She was simply doing something religious. And given that I later learned that in a particular congregation 83% of all those baptized were simply "gone," without contact, without connection, within a year of their baptism, that is probably what happened in that situation.

I fully understand that, thankfully, only a small number of men actually go into the ministry thinking they will use to their own ends and will happily abuse even the ordinances (Baptism and The Lord's Supper) of the church as long as it leads to their own satisfaction and self-aggrandizement.

Even some of the worst examples of ordinance abuse came about because of a slow and all-too-common process. The young minister goes into his task with high motives, but, he is not alone in the fellowship. He is under pressure from those in his church to meet certain expectations, some of which are not godly nor are they biblically grounded. There is the pressure of other ministries in his association or denomination. There is inevitable comparison of "success" in ministry with those in his area, down the street, across town. At first the compromises do not seem that major, just small matters of "freedom." The initial step down the path may be quite defensible in some contexts. "It won't hurt to do this one little thing, we have the right motives." But then that is followed by another small step, and eventually the non-compromised minister finds himself staring at a situation he never dreamed would come to fruition in his experience. What began with good motives but what still involved a "minor" infraction of god's revealed will ends up a full blown pulpit crime, and once again God's wisdom in revealing his will within clarity is vindicated.

From: Pulpit Crimes by James White

I Can't Read

2007-07-31T06:12:00.000-05:00

When I would get bored with looking at my paper for research class, I would seek distraction by reading an article, a blog, listening to a song, or searching for clips from Russell Simmons' "Def Poetry Jam." I know that sounds odd, but it just so happens that YouTube has quite a library of them, and if you're into writing and poetry it can be an interesting thing to watch. Some of the poets are good, some are not. Some of the poems are sharp and intelligent, some are crude and juvenile. Overall, it is an intersting collage of worldviews that is painted throughout the clips.

Since I was writing my paper about standardized testing, and had a bit in there about marginalized students, I thought it was fitting that I came across this clip yesterday. This poet's name is Lamont Carey. His poem, "I Can't Read," is a fairly simple, but powerful statement about how hard it is to be young, in school, and feel inept. To me, the poem reflects the situation of many kids at the school where I teach, and many more at the school where Joni used to do counseling as a social worker. I don't know when we're going to realize that students' problems are not always students' faults, and when we're going to remember how hard it was for us when we were 11, 12, and 13 years old just trying to get through the day without anybody bringing attention to our flaws--our big feet, gapped teeth, stutter, lisp, unwashed hair, unwashed clothes, shoes with holes in them....