The Op-Ed by David Brooks in the NYT today said what I've been thinking for some time about the nascent popularity of tattoos. Here are some excerpts from the piece entitled Nonconformity Is Skin Deep:

"The problem is that middle-class types have been appropriating the symbols of marginalized outcasts since at least the 1830's. This is no longer a way to express individuality; it's a way to be a part of the mob. Today, fashion trends may originate on Death Row, but it takes about a week and a half for baggy jeans, slut styles and tattoos to migrate from Death Row to Wal-Mart.

What you get is a culture of trompe l'oeil degeneracy. People adopt socially acceptable transgressions---like tattoos---to show they are edgy, but inside they are still middle class. You run into these candy-cane grunge types: people with piercings and inkings all over their bodies who look like Sid Viscious but talk like Barry Manilow. They've got the alienated look---just not the anger.

And that's about the most delightful thing about the whole tattoo fad. A cadre of fashion-forward types thought that they were doing something to separate themselves from the vanilla middle classes but are now discovering the signs etched into their skins are absolutely mainstream. They are at the beach looking across the acres of similar markings and learning there is nothing more conformist than displays of individuality, nothing more risk-free than rebellion, nothing more conservative than youth culture.

Another generation of hipsters laid low by the ironies of consumerism."

-----David Brooks, 8/27/06 NYT

"I love my church, and I'm a Catholic who was raised by intellectuals who were very devout. I was raised to believe that you could question the church and still be a Catholic. What is worthy of satire is the misuse of religion for destructive or political gains. That's totally different from the Word, the blood, the body, and the Christ. His kingdom is not of this earth."

----- Stephen Colbert

"America is a culture of mass consumerism and an ideology of privatized self fulfillment. . . .A climate of this kind is not well suited to extending American democracy to other parts of the world because it lacks the higher-order principles that serve as the foundation for morality, decency and the resolve to sacrifice self-interest for the good of others. This consumerism and privatization undermines the very institutional basis of democracy.

It is a strange time for America to take on the responsibilities of empire. A time when our own society from the family to the corporation shows signs of deep inner incoherence."

-----Robert Wuthnow, Princeton Professor of Sociology, from his speech at Vanderbilt entitled "In America, All Religions are True: Implications of the New Pluralism for Democracy"

Quotations from "All The King's Men"
"How life is strange and changeful, and the crystal is in the steel at the point of fracture, and the toad bears a jewel in its forehead, and the meaning of moments passes like the breeze that scarcely ruffles the leaf of the willow." p.26

"'Wanting don't make a thing true. You don't have to live forever to figure that out.' That was so true I didn't reckon it was worthwhile even to agree with him." p.117

"Maybe the things you want are like cards. you don't want them for themselves, really, though you think you do. You don't want a card because you want the card, but because in a perfectly arbitray system of rules and values and in a special combination of which you already hold a part the card has meaning. But suppose you aren't sitting in the game. Then, even if you do know the rules, a card doesn't mean a thing. They all look alike.. . .for God and Nothing have a lot in common. You look either of Them straight in the eye for a second and the immediate effect on the human constitution is the same." p149-150

"We see a great many things and can remember a great many things, but that is different. We get very few of the true images in our heads of the kind I'm talking about, the kind that become more and more vivid for us as if the passage of the years did not obscure their reality, but, year by year, drew off another veil to expose a meaning which we had only dimly surmised at first. Very probably the last veil will not be removed, for there are not enough years, but the brightness of the image increases and our conviction increases that the brightness is meaning, or the lengend of meaning, and without the image our lives would be nothing except an old piece of film rolled on a spool and thrown into a desk drawer among the unanswered letters." p177

"Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud." p.235

"Man is prone to evil as the sparks fly upward." p.242

"Some summer bastard in white flannel pants with vowels that clicked like dominoes." p.451

"That is was why I came to lie on a bed in a hotel in Long Beach, CA, on the last coast amid the grandeurs of nature. For that is where you come, after you have crossed oceans and eaten stale biscuits while prisoned forty days and nights in a storm-tossed rat-trap, after you have sweated in the greenery and heard the savage whoop, after you have built cabins and citites and bridged rivers, after you have lain with women and scattered children like millet seed in a high wind, after you have composed resonant documents, made noble speeches, and bathed your arms in blood to the elbows, after you have shaken with malaria in the marshes and in the icy wind across the high plains. That is where you come, to lie alone in a bed in a hotel room in Long Beach, CA. Where I lay, while outside my window a neon sign flickered on and off to the time of my heart, systole and diastole, flushing and flushing again the gray sea mist with a tint like blood. I lay there, having drowned in West, my body having drifted down to lie there in the comforting, subliminal ooze on the sea floor of History." p464-465

"I had not understood then what I think I have now come to understand: that we can keep the past only by having the future, for they are forever tied together." p.467

"For the truth is a terrible thing. You dabble your foot in it and it is nothing. But you walk a little farther and you feel it pull you like an undertow or a whirlpool. First there is the slow pull so steady and gradual you scarcely notice it, then the acceleration, then the dizzy whirl and plunge to blackness. For there is a blackness of truth, too. They say it is a terrible thing to fall into the Grace of God. I am prepared to believe that." p.516

"For either killing or creating may be a crime punishable by death, and the death always comes by the criminal's own hand and every man is a suicide. If a man knew how to live he would never die." p.531

"If anything is certain it is that no story is ever over, for the story which we think is over is only a chapter in a story which will not be over, and it isn't the game that is over, it is just an inning, and that game has a lot more than nine innings. When the game stops it will be called on account of darkness. But it is a long day." p534

"There is nothing women love so much as the drunkard, the hellion, the roarer, the reprobate. They love him because they---women, I mean---are like the bees in Samson's parable in the Bible: they like to build their honeycomb in the carcass of a dead lion....Out of the strong shall come forth sweetness." p.550

"Reality is not a function of the event as event, but of the relationship of that event to past, and future, events. We seem here to have a paradox: that the reality of an event, which is not real in itself, arises from other events which, likewise, in themselve are not real. But this only affirms what we must affirm: that direction is all. And only as we realize this do we live, for our own identity is dependent upon this principle." p.578

"The creation of man whom God in his foreknowledge knew doomed to sin was the awful index of God's omnipotence. For it would have been a thing of trifling and contemptible ease for Perfection to create mere perfection. To do so would, to speak truth, be not creation but extension. Separateness is identity and the only way for God to create, truly create, man was to make him separate from God Himself, and to be separate from God is to be sinful. The creation of evil is therefore the index of God's glory and His power. That had to be so that the creation of good might be the index of man's glory and power. But by God's help. By His help and in His wisdom." p.659

"A man's virtue may be but the defect of his desire, as his crime may be but the function of his virtue." p.660

"Soon now we shall go out of the house and go into the convulsion of the world, out of history into history and the awful responsibility of Time." p.661

My favorite place to eat in Buffalo, NY is "Charlie The Butcher" for some Beef on Weck. Beef on Weck, for the uninitiated, is thinly sliced roast beef on Kimmelweck bread. The only way I can describe Kimmelweck is to say it's like french bread, but more chewy, with lots of salt sort of embedded into the top. Sarah is mortified that I eat at Charlie's nearly every day when I go to Buffalo. I can't get enough of the stuff.

A little Karl Barth for your Sabbath.

Barth held that the true church had it's existence in some sense separate from the human institution because of the natural opposition of the Gospel to the church as human institution. Yet paradoxically this didn't lead him to advocate non-participation in the institution. As I understand it, for Barth, the failures of the institution preclude us from ever fully putting our trust in it, and warrant an ever-skeptical eye, but the presence of the True church (of which Christ is the head, the one visible only through the power of the Holy Spirit) in the midst of the institution warrants our acceptance and participation. As Timothy George points out in the latest issue of Touchstone, for Barth "it was necessary to be so decisively against the Church precisely in order to be so unreservedly for it....only by sharing the church's anguish are we able to pray for revival and work for reformation."


"We must not, because we are fully aware of the eternal opposition between the Gospel and the church (institution), hold ourselves aloof from the church or break up its solidarity; but rather, participating in its responsibility and sharing the guilt of its inevitable failure, we should accept it and cling to it."

"He who hears the gospel and proclaims it.....knows that the church means suffering and not triumph....He sees the inadequacy of the church growing apace, not because of its weakneess and lack of influence, not because it is out of touch with the world; but, on the contrary because of the pluck and force of its wholly utilitarian and hedonistic illusions, because of its very great success, and because of the skill with which it trims its sails to the changing fashions of the world."

-----Karl Barth, from his commentary "Romans"

"It is not in the nature of politics that the best men should be elected. The best men do not want to govern their fellowmen."

-----George MacDonald

To have discovered Robert Penn Warren this late in life is like seeing a glacier for the first time at 40 years old. Warren has to rank among the top five American fiction writers of all time, and I haven't even read any of his poetry yet. Three pulitzer's, the national book award, the national medal for literature and America's first poet laureate. How come no one talks about this author??? Anyway, I just saw a trailer for the movie "All The King's Men". Do yourself a favor and read the book before you see the movie.

"'He is a romantic, and he has a picture of the world in his head, and when the world doesn't conform in any respect to the picture, he wants to throw the world away. Even if it means throwing the baby out with the bath. 'Which,' I added, 'it always does mean.'"

-----Robert Penn Warren, "All The King's Men"

"[Radical Postmodernists] insist that there is no 'text' external to the interpretive traditions and practices of particular reading communities.. . .this position--if rigorously and consistently articulated--is true neither to the actual function of Scripture in the theological discourse of classic Christianity nor to the general human conviction that texts have determinate ranges of meaning. It is, of course, true that all interpreters are embedded in cultural contexts and traditions, but to acknowledge that is very different from saying that there is no text or that the text itself has no power to generate or constrain interpretations. Historically the church has looked to Scripture as a word extra nos, a voice that can correct or even challenge tradition; such a view of Scripture was foundational to the Reformation. One may, of course, repudiate this construal of Scripture's role in the church, but not without far reaching theological consequences. At the same time, those who have immersed themselves deeply in Scripture repeatedly bear witness to the experience of hearing the text say things that they did not know or expect, things not borne to them in the ecclesiastical traditions in which they were raised, things that they perhaps did not want to hear. How are such experiences to be explained? Self-deception? The revelatory power of the Word of God? Or--more modestly--the commonsense acknowledgement that texts do have determinate ranges of semantic possibility and that a text's world of signification can be meaningfully distinguished from the tradition's construal of it?"

-----Richard B. Hays, "The Moral Vision of the New Testament"

"What should a Jewish Christian write on if not the Law? But notice that the choice of subject [the ten commandments] means no relapse into mere Judaism, not that need alarm the most Pauline of us. The author knows quite as well as any of us that Mr. Legality will never bring us to the Celestial City and had got over the fallacies of Moralism fairly early in life. She had good opportunities for studying it at close quarters. She knows that only love can fulfil the Law. That, I think, is the answer to a criticism which someone is sure to make of this book; that in most of its chapters we have much more about diagnosis than about cure. In reality , of course, a 'cure' in the sense of some recipe added at the end of each chapter--some 'law to be a fence about the Law' and inveitably breeding more Law--is not really being offered at all. The author is not a quack with a nostrum. She can only point, as in her concluding chapter she does point, to the true Cure; a person, not a set of instructions. Pending that, she is no more inhibited than her ancestors about diagnosis; one might frankly say, about denunciation. A Jeremiad? But should we never read Jeremiads? If it comes to that, should we never read Jeremiah himself? The Canon judges otherwise."

-----C.S. Lewis, from his introduction to "Smoke on the Mountain" by Joy Davidman, his then friend, and sometime later wife.

"The end of man is knowledge, but there is one thing he can't know. He can't know whether knowledge will save him or kill him. He will be killed, all right, but he can't know whether he is killed because of the knowledge which he has got or because of the knowledge which he hasn't got and which if he had it, would save him. There's the cold in your stomach, but you open the envelope, you have to open the envelope, for the end of man is to know."

-----Robert Penn Warren, excerpt from "All The King's Men"

"Viewing people from the perspective of who God is making them into in Christ transforms our entire attitude. And focusing on our interdependence as the body of Christ transforms our commitment. Scripture doesn't envision Christians apart from a local church, nor the local body apart from the entire church."

-----Notes on 1 Corinthians 1:4-9, from the Faith in Action Study Bible (World Vision)


"I don't want God to accept me the way I am. I want God to transform me, to make me perfect. Of course, the church rightly says to people, 'We want you to know the joy of the life of what it means to worship God.' But you're going to need a lot of transformation to be part of this kind of community because your life cannot remain the same when you become a member of the church of Jesus Christ. All your desires and loyalties must be directed to the worship of God, and that means, for example, you're not going to be a good American anymore. You're not going to believe that church and flag go easily together. And it may well change your friendships. You may not be able to be friends with some because their way of life is corrupting.

I don't believe in the 'you are accepted' ideology. It is a way of our escaping the necessity of judgment on ourselves and a way to ensure we will have shallow souls. I'm not for accepting people the way they are. As Mark Twain observed, 'About the worst advice you can give anyone is to be themselves.'"

-----Stanley Hauerwas

"For Leigh Fermor, literature is not something simply to conjure with, still less something to theorize about; it is both incantatory music and a body of accumulated wisdom, and one can live by its ordinances, or on its wealth of suggestion, much as a minister lives by the Scriptures."

-----Anthony Lane, from the New Yorker. May 22, 2006: "An Englishman Abroad: Patrick Leigh Fermor's journey through the twentieth century."

"Quite often [he] would not speak at all, not out of any hostility but simply because the capacity for random conversation seemed to him less a grace than a certain expression of a weak mind. . ."

-----Joan Didion, "Run River"

Sorry for the lack of posts. I just got married and went to Tahiti. Here are a couple pics.

"He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep, to gain that which he cannot lose."

Tom Fox

“Why is God landing in this enemy occupied world in disguise and starting a sort of secret society to undermine the devil? Why is He not landing in force, invading it? Is it that He is not strong enough? Well, Christians think He is going to land in force; we do not know when. But we can guess why He is delaying: He wants to give us the chance of joining His side freely….God will invade. But I wonder whether people who ask God to interfere openly and directly in our world quite realize what it will be like when He does. When that happens, it is the end of the world. When the author walks on the stage the play is over.”

-----C.S. Lewis, “Mere Christianity”

"All your dissatisfaction with the Church seems to me to come from an incomplete understanding of sin. What you seem actually to demand is that the Church put the kingdom of heaven on earth right here now, that the Holy Ghost be translated at once into all flesh. The Holy Spirit rarely shows Himself on the surface of anything. You are asking that man return at once to the state God created him in, you are leaving out the terrible radical human pride that causes death. Christ was crucified on earth and the Church crucified in time. . . The Church is founded on Peter who denied Christ three times and who couldn't walk on the water by himself. You are expecting his successors to walk on the water. All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful. Priests resist it as well as others. To have the Church be what you want it to be would require the continuous miraculous meddling of God in human affairs."

-----Flannery O'Connor, from a letter to a fan who was complaining about the church

"If we take the imagery of Scripture seriously, if we believe that God will one day give us the Morning Star and cause us to put on the splendour of the sun, then we may surmise that both the ancient myths and the modern poetry, so false as history, may be very near the truth as prophecy...We cannot mingle with the splendours we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumour that it will not always be so."

-----C.S. Lewis, from "The Weight of Glory"

Notes on Isaiah 58 and the book of Micah from the Spiritual Formation Bible:

Isaiah 58:5-7
the fast that I choose...Here the prophetic tradition advocates an understanding of religion that is focused primarily on neighbor love. A fast is a religious discipline, but the kind of "fast"--religious discipline--God would like to see has to do with the breaking of oppression and with concern for the suffering of those who lack food, clothing, and shelter. Indeed, the last phrase of verse 7, in Hebrew, goes beyond calling the poor and the homeless "your own kin," as in English, to calling them "your own flesh." That is, the ones addressed by the poetry must stand in profound solidarity with the needy. This imagined scenario of true religion (echoed in James 1:27) is contrasted by the preceding verses (vv 1-4), in which a phony kind of religion is punctilious about liturgical and pious practices, but at the same time is economically exploitive of workers who work for low pay and are gouged by high interest charges. Thus the negative critique of verses 1-4 and the positive alternative of verses 5-7 articulate a profound either/or that is at the heart of prophetic understandings of the covenantal faith. It is clear that this either/or is still on the table for men and women of faith in the Christian tradition, for there is a great temptation to make religion a nice, sweet thing that is detached from economic reality. The sentiment of this poem would find that scandalous and unacceptable.

Isaiah 58:9
the Lord will answer. ...The consequence of true religion as it is detailed in verses 5-7 is the immediate attentiveness and presence of God. The implication of verses 5-9, taken all together, is that neighbor love is a precondition of the attentiveness of God, who will hear prayers and intervene according to the practice of the faithful.


Micah "Fundamentals of a Redeemed Life"
Against the backdrop of endemic evil, Micah outlines the essentials of a righteous life. The Lord is a God of Mercy (7:18), compassion (7:19), and faithfulness (7:20). On his side, God forgives sins (7:18-19); redeems from spiritual bondage (4:10; 6:4); bestows righteousness, or right standing with Himself (7:9); and blesses with peace (5:5). On the human side, one must exercise continual faith (7:7-9), remember God's mighty deeds (6:5), devote oneself to prayer (7:7), and bless others as the dew graces the grass (5:7). Perfecting holiness and godliness is the stuff of spiritual formation.

"For their part, God's people must uphold the rights of the poor and downtrodden in society, embody good-heartedness and mercy in relations to others, and live in close communion with God. Christian spiritual formation ought not and, indeed, cannot be divorced from compassionate social engagement."