the song in my head

After singing Jekyll and Hyde tunes all week, this is now stuck in my head:

So I’ll drive so f-ing far away that I never cross your mind
And do whatever it takes in your heart to leave me behind

This is really helping with the exegetical paper. Just like having Kick Out The Jams as the soundtrack to my first sermon was helpful.

crusading atheism

NYTimes:

Why, then, are the enlightened so conspicuously up in arms these days, reiterating every possible argument against the existence of God? Why are they indulging in books — Daniel Dennett’s “Breaking the Spell,” Sam Harris’s “Letter to a Christian Nation,” and Richard Dawkins’s “God Delusion” — in which authors lampoon religion or rail against the devout under the banner of a crusading atheism? [...] the popularity of the current counterattack on religion cloaks a renewed and intense anxiety within secular society that it is not the story of religion but rather the story of the Enlightenment that may be more illusory than real.

I've got thoughts on this that I might post later, when I've had another cup of coffee. Of course, there's always this.

word of the day!

trencherman, n

A feeder; an eater; usually qualified, as good, stout, valiant, etc., one who plays a good knife and fork; one who has a hearty appetite.

(can also be 'trencherwoman,' for the genderedly correct in the crowd.)

duh

">What Kind of Reader Are You?
Create Your Own Quiz

What Kind of Reader Are You? Your Result: Obsessive-Compulsive Bookworm You're probably in the final stages of a Ph.D. or otherwise finding a way to make your living out of reading. You are one of the literati. Other people's grammatical mistakes make you insane.

ben witherington: da bomb

Seriously, I want to marry this guy when I grow up*:

...the alliance between Evangelicals and the hard line conservatives in the Republican party has made it difficult for many Evangelicals to see the difference in our time between being a Christian and being an American, and in particular being a certain kind of an American—namely a Republican. The problem is that this reflects a certain kind of mental ghettoizing of the Gospel, a blunting of its prophetic voice on issues ranging from war to poverty, and sometimes this even comes with the not so subtle suggestion that to be un-American (defined as being opposed to certain key Republican credo items) is to be un-Christian. But Christianity must and does transcend any particular cultural expression of itself, otherwise we have the cultural captivity of the Gospel which leads to a form of idolatry...

...Yes I said war. The Book of Revelation is a huge warning to leave justice in God’s hands and he will sort things out in his own time and way. It is a call to be prepared to be martyred, not a call to arms. Indeed, there is no call to arms in the NT. Instead there are warnings about those who live by the sword will die by the sword (hmm, what does that imply about gun control), and a call to personal pacifism in order to emulate the non-violent behavior of Jesus. There is nothing even remotely to be found in the NT that supports war as an act initiated by one country against another. Nothing!

Witherington makes me excited to be an evangelical.

*Even though he pissed me off over here. Nondenominational mega-churches may be hard to hold accountable, but that's no reason to slam all of us... the Wesleyans have their problems too, buddy.

help me with my homework!

This request is directed mainly at my nonESR friends, although I'll take advice and comments from anyone. I'm working on an team exegesis project, focused on Acts 16:16-24, and I need to say something about how my religious community interprets the passage and how it affects their understanding of Christianity.

Well, religious community. That's a sticky phrase. I don't think I'm going to have much luck with 'relatively progressive yet rabidly evangelical pentacostal' as a search term on ATLA, so I've decided to define my religious community as 'people I know.' I'm taking the passage into the Roadhouse and making friends there give me opinions, emailing folks from Pentecostal circles back home, and... asking for erudite commentary from y'all.

So, even if your response is something like 'gosh, Paul sounds like a jerk,' or 'oh, that's how Paul and Silas ended up in jail,' or 'stories that wierd should really be moved to 2 Chronicles where nobody will notice them,' leave them in the comments.

If your comment is extra special, you might get a footnote in the paper. Then, you'll have the distinct pleasure of knowing that my professor is aware of your awesomeness.

poem

when snow is gone
from the street
and from ground beyond

– the snowbank
reveals its gritty self
grows black and hard
with sand and silt

these seasons of life
we pass through
time and again

the interval between snow
and excess of daffodils
is the interval
we crave
and dread

the ugliness of life
hidden in winter
overwhelmed
by spring
follows us

waiting
just here, just now
to remind us
just who
we are

-James Zoller

this one's for the ecumenicists in the crowd

Lately, I had desperately pondered,
Spent my nights awake and I wondered,
What I could have done in another way to make you stay,
Reason will not teach a solution,
I will end up lost in confusion,
I don't care if you really care as long as you don't go.

So, I cry and I pray and I beg,
Love me, love me, say that you love me,
Fool me, fool me, go on and fool me.
Love me, love me, pretend that you love me,
Lead me, lead me, just say that you need me,
I can't care about anything but you.

Crazy theologians, they.

says it all

poem of the day

Going Blind

She sat at tea just like the others. First
I merely had a notion that this guest
Held up her cup not quite like all the rest.
And once she gave a smile. It almost hurt.

When they arose at last, with talk and laughter,
And ambled slowly and as chance dictated
Through many rooms, their voices animated,
I saw her seek the noise and follow after.

Held in like one who in a little bit
Would have to sing where many people listened;
Her lighted eyes, which spoke of gladness, glistened
With outward luster, as a pond is lit.

She followed slowly, and it took much trying,
As though some obstacle still barred her stride;
And yet as if she on the farther side
Might not be walking any more, but flying.

-Rainer Maria Rilke

stayed up too late listening to NPR

From Cheers and Jeers:
Mid-week Rapture Index: 156 (including 3 false prophets and one Democratic House) Soul Protection Factor 16 lotion is recommended while you're transferring your food and supplies from the house to the bomb shelter.

Glad to see that Upstate NY provided three of those pickups. On the not-so-good side in terms of getting today's work done, NPR has all sorts of interactive maps to play with.

From NPR:
"We took a whuppin' last night and we understand that," said Tom DeLay, the former GOP House majority leader, whose old Texas seat switched to Democrats, too. DeLay, who resigned from the House after being charged in connection with a campaign finance scheme, said many conservatives chose not to vote.

"The Democrats didn't win," he said, "Republicans lost."

Why isn't this fellow irrelevant yet? Sure, I'll be even more thrilled if we pick up the Senate seats in Montana and Virginia, but how can Democrats winning across the nation not be classified as a win for the Democrats?

quickie

I have lots of profundities in my head about the Eucharist, lentil mashes, Greek oracles, the Day of the Lord, State Space Semantics, all the stuff I never got around to processing about going home back in September, something that happened in Sunday afternoon worship that really touched me, and, oh, mudpuddles. Someday soon, all these profundities will converge, and that will be one awesome lentil mash. I think I'll bring lentil mash to potluck next Sunday afternoon, but I don't know if it will be the conceptually awesome one of my dreams.

For now, though, I just want to say that it rained pink lemonade last night at the Roadhouse. I had to put out buckets to catch it, like I would in a leaky house.

And of course: Go Spitzer!

poem

(connected to reflections during class this morning on transformation, which I may at some point organize well enough to write)

A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto
-Czesław Miłosz

Bees build around red liver,
Ants build around black bone.
It has begun: the tearing, the trampling on skills,
It has begun: the breaking of glass, wood, capper, nickel, silver foam
Of gypsum, iron sheets, violin strings, trumpets, leaves, balls, crystals.
Poof! Phosphorescent fire from yellow walls
Engulfs animal and human hair.

Bees build around the honeycomb of lungs,
Ants build around white bone.
Torn is paper, rubber, linen, leather, flax,
Fiber, fabrics, cellulose, snakeskin, wire.
The roof and the wall collapse in flame and heat seizes the foundations.
Now there is only the earth, sandy, trodden down,
With one leafless tree.

Slowly, boring a tunnel, a guardian mole makes his way,
With a small red lamp fastened to his forehead.
He touches buried bodies, counts them, pushes on,
He distinguishes human ashes by their luminous Japer,
The ashes of each man by a different part of the spectrum.
Bees build around a red trace.
Ants build around the place left by my body.
I am afraid, so afraid of the guardian mole.
He has swollen eyelids like a Patriarch
Who has sat much in the light of candles
Reading the great book of the species.

What will I tell him, I, a Jew of the New Testament,
Waiting two thousand years for the second coming of Jesus?
My broken body will deliver me to his sight
And he will count me among the helpers of death:
The uncircumcised.

timewasters

Via Crooked Timber:

in three minutes, the largest dot will travel around the circle once, the next largest dot will travel around the circle twice, the next largest dot three times, and so on.

the dots are arranged to trigger notes on a chromatic scale when they pass the line

Go here to play. The handcrank version wasn't as fun as I expected it to be, but variation 11 was great! Usually if I want to get dizzy in the computer lab I have to spin in my chair- it's nice to have the work taken out of dizziness for once.

Also, these games might be more fun for those of you who read French, but I'm enjoying not knowing how poorly I'm doing.

PS: The only thing worse than being the audio-visual techie at a conference with lots of tech problems is being the audio-visual techie at a conference with almost zero tech needs. I am bored... bored enough to play silly internet games, the directions to which I can't read because they're written in French.

sailing

My dad got a sailboat while I was in high school. It wasn't much of a boat, just big enough for him and me and a lunchbox. We used to take it out on the reservoir near my house, sail it up one way and down the other.

Or, sort of sail. My dad is 5'11'' and big, even now, and he weighed close to 300 pounds at the time. He would sit at the back of the boat and run the mainsail, and I'd sit at the front and run the jib- if we tried it the other way around, the nose of the boat stuck in the water. He'd holler directions at me, I'd get confused, he'd helpfully yell detailed mathematical explainations, I'd get angry, and then we'd run aground somewhere for lunch.

We never actually crashed the boat- I left that job for Kim, when she and Dad were out sailing after I left for college. Once, though, on a particularly windy day, we nearly tipped it.

Ok, I'm sorry, that was boring. Let me try that again, with more salacious detail:

The cold northern wind blew across the resevoir, tossing our small bark upon the waves. Sky gray like sheet metal stretched overhead, scuffed by wrathful, speeding clouds. My father and I wrestled with the wet ropes, shouting over the furiosity of the storm...

That's not at all accurate, although it's more exciting. It was a sunny day, just with a strong wind... and really, the wind wasn't even that strong. I just held on too long.

I mentioned that Dad controlled the mainsail while I controlled the jib. The means of control was a rope threaded through a grommet on the sail, with which I could control the tension of the sail and the direction in which it pointed. Ours was a small boat, though, so when the wind blew particularly hard we would let go the ropes and wait out the gust- too much wind would capsize us.

So, we're 'speeding' down the resevoir, probably not at a particularly fast rate but more quickly and smoothly than we had gone before, when a blast hit us from behind. Dad let go of his rope and told me to let go of mine, but I didn't hear him. The boat pitched foward, then sideways, as my little sail took the brunt of the gust.

"Let go! Let go of the rope!"

I heard Dad, that time, but I couldn't process what he was saying. The boat was at enough of an angle that the mainsail was brushing the water, and my dad was sitting up on the top edge to try to balance it- I had my body braced against the boat, pulling for all I was worth to hold the sail against the wind.

"Let go! You have to let go!"

I could feel my arms (and legs) tiring, and the rope started sliding between my hands. The sail was still taut, and the wind was still driving us foward, but the the rope was slipping, slipping, slipping... and then it was gone. My jib floppped free in the wind, the boat sat suddenly upright in the water, and I fell backward in the boat. My dad, not quite so lucky, fell backward out of the boat.

"Why didn't you let go?"

Dad was annoyedly dogpaddling in the resevoir, as the wind died down, trying to figure how he would get back in the boat. He was annoyed to be unexpectedly on a swim trip, but more so annoyed with me for having ignored clear and sensible instruction. He tossed the lunchbox back into the boat and repeated himself:

"Why didn't you let go?"

For the same reason that I still hold things, I guess. I was too busy playing tug-of-war with the wind to hear or realize that holding on was the problem, not the solution. The blisters on my hands were not only hard won, but useless.

So, an odd story, and I don't doubt it makes more sense when I tell it than when I write it. But there it is.

the song in my head

I love rock and roll!
...and something-or-other about a... jukebox, baby!

I don't know the rest of the song, and no matter how many times I look up the lyrics I forget again exactly what is going on with the jukebox. So it's just those two lines, incomplete and looping in my head.

Perhaps ironically, this song fragment makes me hate rock and roll.

Last night was more fun, though- I pulled the Audio Adrenaline out of hiding, cranked it and danced in my living room to Underdog:*

I am so weak and I'm so tired
It's hard for me to
Find enough strength to feed the fires
That fuel my ego
And consequently all my pride has up and died
Which leaves me
Down on my knees
Back to the place I
Should have started from...

I'd put a dime in a jukebox for Audio Adrenaline, any day.

Unfortunately, this version of the lyrics doesn't transcribe the sermon out of the middle, which is the awesomest part of all.

oh no!

No more New Pantagruel. I feel like I should hold a calling hours.

"We believe life is eucatastrophic: a joyous catastrophe." That's a good epitaph.

Oh, and I updated the list of articles on the right, if you're interested. Are the headers in ridiculously large type? I've been trying to make them smaller, but now I'm wondering if it's just the ESR computers that make them look so big.

milk

Via What Would Jesus Blog: Buy your milk at Amazon.com

Or don't, but do read the reviews.

However, when I put that cold, white substance to my lips...
...Well, lets just say that I passed out to to the overwhelming almost-ninja-like greatness. It made me splash all the water out of the tub. My mom told me to stop.

This milk was so good, I passed out. When I woke up 3 weeks later, apes ruled the earth.

This milk tastes pure, wholesome, and makes me ecstatic toward the world in general.

This milk was prescribed to me by my spiritual leader. Each week we order gallons and gallons of this Milk and bless it. Once it is blessed we pour it all into tubs so that we can baptize and save members of our congregation.

Like i haven't felt this good since eating 'shrooms with my peanut butter in 78'!

Wacky people.

I've posted this already

...but it's been on my mind again.

Lot's Wife

They had no time—the just man
hurried across the bridge,
followed God’s magistrate
along the black ridge.

His grieving wife lagged behind
as if she had no will,
arms heavy with useless things,
heart heavier still.

She couldn’t recall if she’d shut the door,
turned off the iron; worse guilt,
she’d left behind the baby pictures,
her mother’s ring, her wedding quilt.

One arm raised as if to gather
her whole life in that embrace,
tears blurring the view,
without much thought she turned her face,

became what she had shed. Who grieves
for this nameless woman, Lot’s reflective wife?
I grieve.
I know holding on can cost a life.

quote 2

And clue 1: It's not a Christmas book.

That's what liberty is, I thought. To have a passion, to amass pieces of gold and suddenly to conquer one's passion and throw the treasure to the four winds.

Free yourself from one passion to be dominated by another and nobler one. But is not that, too, a form of slavery? To sacrifice oneself to an ideal, to a race, to God? Or does it mean that the higher the model the longer the tether of our slavery? Then we can enjoy ourselves and frolic in a more spacious arena and die without having come to the end of our tether. Is that, then, what we call liberty?