Category: Longform
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Some serious time travel going on here
I’ll confess - I did almost all my Christmas shopping via Amazon this year. Amazon is usually bang on with shipping, but they clearly get bogged down in the Christmas rush. Exhibit 1: the tracking on this package of mine from yesterday.
Delivered just before noon.
Left Amazon facility: 7.5 hours later.
But hey, if my choices are have the package get to me on time or have the website shipping info be accurate, I’ll happily accept the fact that the box was sitting on my doorstep when I got home yesterday.
A little piano music for the season
A couple years ago I recorded a little album of solo piano Christmas music. Here’s one of my favorite tracks from it:
You can download the whole thing from the original post if you want. Merry Christmas!
Deliver Us
I’ve felt a need for Advent far more keenly this year than I recall from previous years. Perhaps it’s the tumult of the times - with religious violence abroad and racial tension at home, it is so clear that we need the peace, deliverance, and salvation that Jesus brings now more than ever.
That brings me to Andrew Peterson’s Behold the Lamb of God. It’s long been my favorite Christmas record; in my estimation it’s one of only two or three perfect Christian records to have been made. Early in the record as Andrew tells the story of Christ, the song “Deliver Us” introduces the longing cry of God’s people for God’s salvation. And the lyrics seem as appropriate today as ever:
Our enemy, our captor is no pharaoh on the Nile Our toil is neither mud nor brick nor sand Our ankles bear no calluses from chains, yet Lord, we’re bound Imprisoned here, we dwell in our own land
Deliver us, deliver us Oh Yahweh, hear our cry > And gather us beneath your wings tonight
Our sins they are more numerous than all the lambs we slay
These shackles they were made with our own hands Our toil is our atonement and our freedom yours to give So Yahweh, break your silence if you can
Deliver us, deliver us Oh Yahweh, hear our cry > And gather us beneath your wings tonight
[Response:] ‘Jerusalem, Jerusalem How often I have longed To gather you beneath my gentle wings’
Come, Lord Jesus.
The War of Christmas
@pegobry with a great post about the subversive and challenging nature of Christ’s advent:
Is there a war on Christmas? No, there’s no war on Christmas. There’s a war of Christmas. Because that’s what Christmas is: a declaration of war. Against all the thrones, dominions, principalities and powers who hold creation in bondage. Saying there’s a war on Christmas is like saying the Germans fought a war on D-Day–of course there’s a war on Christmas. How do we fight this war? Not by yelling at Walmart greeters who say “Happy Holidays.” Not with consumerism. Like Jesus fought his. With increased penance and asceticism and prayer and reception of the sacraments. With corporeal works of mercy. With peace, mercy, some truth-telling, and a very large heaping of loving-kindness. This is our D-Day: this is the most stupendous claim of Christianity.
PEG sounds like he’s been reading his NT Wright. Really good stuff.
I'm not really an opera guy but this is still amazing:
Amazing control, making the ridiculously high notes seem really easy, and putting such personality into the role… brilliant stuff.
Resonating strongly with me this morning:
Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: ‘Give me leave to do my utmost!’
-- Karen Blixen, writing as Isak Dineson, in Babbette’s Feast (1958)
[HT to @DavidDark for the quote]
Winnie the Dude
On the topic of my previous post, I had this Twitter interaction with Stephen Granade:
But then I started wondering… what about Lebowski?
So then I had to do it - casting The Big Lebowski using Winnie the Pooh characters.
The Dude
This one is pretty obvious. Winnie the Pooh himself gets to play The Dude. His laid-back personality is nicely analogous to Jeff Bridges’ beloved stoner.
Walter Sobchak
Based on my Twitter assertion, I’m gonna commit to it. Tigger is the only Hundred-Acre Wood inhabitant with a personality big enough to play a John Goodman character. Think of it as the grittier side of Tigger. You know he’s not always been such a jovial tiger.
Donny
Who’s gonna be the weasely, nervous sidekick to Tigger’s Walter? I think it’s gotta be Piglet.
The Big Lebowski
A large, pompous man with a big attitude? Owl gets to play this role, no question about it. And then to serve his needs:
Brandt
This nervous young assistant (played brilliantly by Philip Seymour Hoffman in Lebowski) goes to Rabbit. You can just see him puttering around straightening all of Lebowski’s photos and trophies outside his office.
Minor Characters
- With Kanga being the token female in the Hundred-Acre Wood, we’ll give her the role of Maude Lebowski.
- Christopher Robin would have to paste on a mustache and work on his Texas accent, but we’ll give him the role of The Stranger.
- And where’s Eeyore in this whole thing? Based on his general outlook on life, I think he’s one of the Nihilists. However, as my friend Andy said:
https://twitter.com/The_Pulpiteer/status/530449494027296769
O Bother, Where Art Thou?
You gotta love this: an artist created movie drawings based on movie title typos found on Reddit.
This one is titled “O Bother, Where Art Thou?”
I’m thinking a Coen Brothers / Winnie the Pooh mashup has potential.
Living the Bachelor's Life
My wife and kids have been gone for the past two days. They planned a trip to visit Grandma for dates where I had planned to be on a business trip. The business trip got cancelled, but the trip to Grandma’s remained. So, for the past two nights I’ve had the house entirely to myself. As far as I can recall, this is the first time such a thing has happened since we’ve had kids.
So how have I lived it up as a bachelor for the past two days?
- Worked late both days
- Read a book while eating out at my favorite restaurant one night
- Take-and-bake pizza the second night (hey, I got to choose the toppings I wanted!)
- Rented two DVDs from the local video store and proceeded to watch other movies on Netflix instead
I have managed to get the trash out on the correct day, the dishes washed, and the mail brought in from the mailbox. Haven’t done much else, though.
The house is really quiet with everybody gone. I’ve burned through more podcasts in the past two days than in the prior two weeks just to have something to break up the silence. I think the cat is taking it harder than I am - he has actually acknowledged my presence these past couple of days, and while he still refuses to sit on my lap, he has been willing to sit up on the top of my chair while I’m sitting watching TV.
The family returns to the house this afternoon, and all the lovely noise and chaos along with them.
I wouldn’t want it any other way.
Yeah, I only gave Augustine''s "Confessions" 4 stars
I went on a quick business trip this week which gave me several hours of airplane time to do some reading. I finished up both Confessions by St. Augustine (a foundational bit of Christian theology from a millenium ago) and The God Who Risks: A Theology of Divine Providence by John Sanders (a rather dense defense of open theism from not too many years ago).
I read a lot, and being the nerd that I am, I keep a log of my reading over on Goodreads. And when you add a book to your shelves on Goodreads, it prompts you to rate the book, using a 1 - 5 star rating system. Being the nerd that I am, I can’t not rate them. And so as I add the books to my “read” shelf and to the shelf for the current year, I also give them a star rating, and those star ratings are automatically tweeted on my Twitter account.
So, back to this week. Not only did I finish both Confessions and The God Who Risks, but I gave them both 4 stars. Having the temerity to even assign a star rating to St. Augustine got me a bit of good-natured flack on Twitter. So I figured it was time (for my own sake, at least) to explain how I assign star ratings. (To the 3 of you who want to continue reading past this point: seek professional help.)
Whether I’m rating fiction or non-fiction, I tend to value similar traits in a book: well-written prose; an engaging topic; a coherent plot or argument; an appropriate length. I’ve gotten choosier over the years and more willing to give up on lame books. (It’s getting harder and harder to find fiction that’s worth my time.) When I’m reading non-fiction, and particularly theology, my rating isn’t based at all on the relative importance of the work in history (I’m actually not well-qualified to judge that) or whether I agree with the position being argued. I will base my rating, though, on how even-handed the author was in argument, how well I felt like the case was made, and how well the book kept my interest. I also like to reserve 5-star ratings for books that are really top-notch, can’t-beat-em volumes. The ones that make a significant impact on me, that I want to read again or buy copies for other people.
So, Augustine got 4 stars for Confessions. The translation I read (downloaded for free from Project Gutenberg) was a little big of a slog, but significant chunks of it were (in my untrained opinion) quite brilliant, and kept me thinking. Definitely glad I read it. Quite certain I don’t have the seminary education I’d need to understand how it molds the next thousand years of Christian thought.
But Sanders also gets 4 stars for The God Who Risks. It’s also a bit of a slog. (At one point in the text he refers back to an earlier section in the book by its section number, something like 3.4.6.2-5. That’s some serious outlining going on.) Still, Sanders makes a reasonable argument for openness and I felt like he dealt fairly with the topic and opposing viewpoints. I don’t know that I completely agree with him, but I’m glad I read the book and gained a better understanding of that perspective of the topic.
Mid-way through writing this post I went and counted up the number of 5-star reviews I’ve given on Goodreads. Of 530-ish books I’ve read, I’ve given 5 stars to about 70. (That’s more than I would’ve thought if you’d asked me.) I’ve given 5 stars to more non-fiction than fiction; some history and biography, a lot of theology, and a bunch of classic fiction. Upon reflection, does Augustine deserve 5 stars for Confessions? Yeah, probably. Maybe I should go do a re-read and see if I have a better appreciation for it after another go-round. On the other hand, maybe if I’m allowing myself the cheekiness of assigning reviews at all I shouldn’t be ashamed of just assigning scores as I see them.
In the end, I’m glad to have that list of books and the associated ratings, if only to look back and remember some favorites, help me recommend books to others, and to find some re-reads. And, I suppose, because I’m a nerd. Somethings never change.