Saying, Singing, ...

I'm following a discussion of the ancient practice of giving voice to poetry. The modern question: "did Mary speak or sing the Magnificat" probably imposes an alien distinction. Many students of antiquity believe that the accent marks in the texts of Greek and Hebrew for instance, indicate tone and pitch for reading / chanting.

Okay, they even have a "Society for the Oral Reading of Greek and Latin Literature." This page has a recording of a guy reading from Homer's Iliad according to their reconstruction of the ancient practice:

http://www.rhapsodes.fll.vt.edu/iliad1.htm

You wonder how they know such things.

And you wonder how this would work for the Scripture Reading on Sunday mornings...

What is it about kids and mud puddles?

Puppets

After a stretch of working with puppet sketches for the kids Christmas program, I'm now able to return to real life, dig out, and clean up. My puppeteers all did good work and I was generally pleased with the result. We prepared as much as we had time to prepare, and we performed at the level of our preparation. A broad-stroke success, even though I always see more, tweaks and polishing and such.

During the course of the effort, the puppeteers did a good job creating characters for their puppets. They were able to invest them with some personality that contributed to the liveliness of the production. So I'm boxing up the puppets for storage, and I pick up the Innkeeper's Wife and I lay her on top and close the lid, and all I can think of is those Twilight Zone episodes about the ventriloquist and his dummy, when the dummy starts talking back on his own and eventually takes over. Not that the Innkeeper's Wife would do such a mean thing. But I didn't like the idea of telling "her" that she was going in a box, the lid would close, and the box would be shut in the dark now.

The moment was instructive. Humans have a capacity and tendency to invest objects with personality. The child's teddy bear receives affection, hears secrets, and bears an emotional load that makes him hard to part with.

With that in mind, consider again the command of God not to make images for religious use. You make an icon of old Saint Soandso, you greet him, you talk to him, you set his picture in a place of honor, he receives affection, hears your prayers, and bears an emotional load that the command tells us belongs to no one but God. Humans have a capacity and tendency to invest objects with personality. But the personal God demands that we not give impersonal objects any place in our devotional expression which is due to him alone.

Global Warming Science

No, really, we are SCIENTISTS and all we care about are the FACTS. Believe us. Seriously. All the data that fits, we print.

Before the Fall

It is too easy to skip over creation as created in order to get to the more immediately important concerns about creation as fallen and redeemed. Of course we do live in the fallen creation, and matters of redemption have, well, life-or-death implications. But that does not mean that we have nothing to learn from the consideration of pre-fall creation.

If we look at the pre-fall creation only from the vantage point of our fallen-and-redeemed world, we are apt to miss some things that God gives us in the the first two and a half chapters of Genesis.

For instance, what did the long-range prospect for unfallen Adam look like? And did creation itself have a telos? Was there a built-in eschatology that awaited God's perfect, but immature man and creation?

Now, some guys get very uncomfortable when it is suggested that since God made every tree in the garden as good for food, and then later stipulated that Adam would die in the day he ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, that we can reasonably infer that in a non-fallen world, a day would have come when God finally told Adam to eat the good fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and in so eating die a "good death" that would somehow move creation forward towards its eschatalogical goal.

Speculative, but reasonable.

Whatever you think of such an inference, my real question is, why should such speculation be so unacceptable, so threatening to many?

Anger

One of the best scenes in Analyze This is where the Billy Crystal character is coaching the Robert DeNiro character through a phone conversation with one of DeNiro's mob rivals. DeNiro is trying to deal with the situation using all the counseling and analysis tools Crystal has given him. He tells the other mob guy something like, "... I know that has made you angry ... [coaching from Crystal] ... and that anger is a "blocked wish" ..." Of course the mob guy on the other end can't make heads or tails of talk like this.

Is personal anger always a "blocked wish" as the counselor defines it? In our living room we were musing on the nature of anger in the light of Analyze This and pastor Stu's recent sermon on "Do Not Kill" in which he walked us through Jesus' teaching that if you are even angry with your brother, you have broken the commandment.

Questions arise. What about "Be angry and do not sin"? We are created in God's image, and God gets angry, so shouldn't we properly respond in anger in some circumstances?

Our discussion got us about this far:

1) The "blocked wish" kind of anger is usually the kind of thing better called "frustration." It doesn't have much of a moral component. I have this anger when the tool and the task are at odds: the nail bends, the wrench strips the nut, the tax form is unintelligible.

2) The wicked kind of anger is one where I indulge my selfish wishes over another. He has disrespected me, he has taken from me, he has crossed me.

3) The image-of-God kind of anger is a reaction to injustice or wickedness in which I have no self interest. The bad guys are exploiting the widow and orphan over there, and my involvement in the situation can only cost me; I get no advantage.

Of course situations of anger do not fall neatly into these three categories. In most situations it's hard to argue that one has no self interest at all. But these seem like useful categories in thinking about anger.

gummint skools

You think you've heard it all in the slow, comic, tragic, suicide of government schools.

But wait. There's more.

Yesterday I heard that the New LPS Policy coming down from those who are responsible for Thinking up Ideas is that student grades may no longer to take into account factors such as student attendance and behavior.

That's right. Teachers are being told that whatever grade they give Johnny must not be influenced by the fact that Johnny is nothing but attitude and sass when he shows up, which is only half the time anyway.

Well, honestly now, don't you feel like we've finally hit on a policy that will really get things going in the right direction?

The Back of Mount Rushmore

Everyone has seen the front. Now you know what's behind it.

Out of the Frying Pan

Poor Lithuania. Suffers for years as part of the Communist Block.

Then Communism falls and they're a free country now, right?

But wait. Now Lithuania must suffer the New Tyrrany of the EU:

The argument began with passage of a Lithuanian “Law on the Protection of Minors against the Detrimental Effect of Public Information” which prohibits promotion of “homosexual, bisexual, polygamous relations” among children under the age of 18. While the Lithuanian president subsequently vetoed the measure, the Siemas overturned his veto and the law is slated to go in effect next March.

As a consequence, in September the European Parliament (EP) voted 349-218 to condemn the new law and ask the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights to review it.

So, the EU can't allow a nation to NOT push the homosexualist agenda on children; you MUST do it.

The Lithuanians insist they are free to enact such laws and that the European Institutions have no “competence” in them. Many Europeans have long feared what they see as inevitable EU interference in life and family matters.

News story from Touchstone.

Europe is consistently depressing. Western civilization slowly circling the drain.

Not that the U.S. is far behind...

Church Calendar

Most of my Christian life, I have been in churches that do little, if anything, with the church calendar, beyond Christmas and Easter. Today I read one feller lamenting the lack of a church calendar as he observes, "The 'unofficial' Hallmark-Baptist Church Calendar, where the Fourth of July and Mothers Day are more important than Epiphany and Transfiguration, dominates the scene ..."

That, at least lets the discussion begin with an uncomfortable fact about our actual practice.