Here's an interesting interview with Dave Bazan, of Pedro The Lion fame. I wrote an article on him some time ago you can find it here and I think I pretty much got the story straight.

I like what he has to say about creativity and apologetics in the context of art ,for the Christian.

Earlier this year, the head of the Evangelical Theological Society, Francis Beckwith, announced that he'd re-entered communion with the Roman Catholic church.

For many Protestant Evangelicals, this move was tantamount to apostasy, and the uproar over this guy has, at times, been deafening.

This morning an acquaintance forwarded to me an interview with Beckwith where Beckwith talks about some of the reasons he went back to the Church of Rome after so many years away.

It's worth looking at, and I welcome a good discussion around the issues he brings up. Of particular interest to me is his discussion of Justification and his argument regarding the early Church Fathers.

I love Radiohead, and I wish they'd harken back to being a pop/rock band. I love the experimenal stuff too, but unrealeased tracks like this make me long for the Bends days. . .Enjoy it.

excerpts from this week's New Yorker....

Anthony Lane on Nicolas Sarkozy: "Awaiting your hero for more than two hours is no hardship to the faithful; standing for two hours without earplugs, however, while the cream of soft Euro-rock is hosed into your consciousness, is another matter."

Norman Mailer on losing his memory as he gets older: "It's awful--I'm absolutely without detail memory now. I keep referring to one metaphor: an old man who's still steering a course is analogous to the captain of an old freighter that may or may not make it to port. You keep throwing ballast overboard. So the hearing goes. The eyesight. The knees. This goes. That goes. ...For a novelist, you really have to retain a memory of how things felt even if you're not reporting them directly. My memory for detals of where something took place, when it happened, is very spotty. What I will remember is the emotional tone of a meeting. Facts you can always lookup somewhere."

And Here is an article worth reading about the growing hysteria over people of faith. I just heard that the new Rush album is all about how bad Christians are for the world. Neil Peart needs to stop reading Hume.

Wikipedia. . .democracy in action or Colbert's "truthiness" in action? Both?

For those of you not in the know, Wikipedia generates encyclopedic definitions by way of general consensus. That is, what passes for truth on Wikipedia is none other than the overwhelming opinions of the majority of people who decide to care enough to write and critique the work of others. . . on Wikipedia.

At first blush this sounds like a wonderful idea. Give everyone a shot at defining a topic, and let the rest of the world critique them and argue over what they've said. History, no longer written only by the winner, but also informed by the perspective of the loser! A chance for egalitarian thinking writ large!

Yes. Yes. But wait, how much does the general populace acting as a collective really know anyway? Who's version of the truth are we willing to accept? My experience has been that true democracy of thought often means settling for the lowest common denominator. I think I'm more of an advocate of the free play of the minds of experts than I am the petty infighting of the masses.

Nevertheless, however you come down, Wikipedia raises some interesting questions about the nature of truth, the usefulness of experts in a given field, and the general veracity of a mob.

A few questions that come to mind for me: 1) Is truth nothing more than the consensus of the majority? 2) Is the communication of actual events corrupted more or less with this type of format... as opposed to an encyclopedia of the past? 3) If power was a complaint with regard to the veracity of past texts, what does it say about Wikipedia that Colbert can have all his fans go onto Wikipedia and literally change the definition for a given topic to something completely fallacious?

this is too funny.

“The most important human endeavor is the striving for morality in our actions. Our inner balance and even our very existence depend on it. Only morality in our actions can give beauty and dignity to life.”

-----Albert Einstein

My new personal goal is to read (in this order) Robert Fagles' translations of Homer's Odessey and Virgil's Aeneid and then move onto Dorothy Sayer's translation of Dante's Divine Comedy. Anyone interested in joining me for some discussion around these three books and how each successive one builds on the other?

McLuhan vs. Mailer

Check out this google video with McLuhan and Mailer. Good stuff, especially watching it 40 years later! Who wins in hindsight?

"Around 1965, I went to church and heard a priest describe Vietnam as a holy war. That's when I walked out. Something told me he's dead wrong."

-----Martin Scorsese, from Rolling Stone interview (40th Anniversary edition)

Why we continue to ascribe God's name to ventures that run counter to His explicitly stated desires is beyond me. I wonder how many others have shut the door on God for similar reasons?

"It was only toward the middle of the twentieth century that the inhabitants of many European countries came, in general unpleasantly, to the realization that their fate could be influenced directly by intricate and abstruse books of philosophy."

-----Czeslaw Milosz, from "The Captive Mind"

"As I see it, it probably really is good for the soul to be a tourist, even if it's only once in a while. Not good for the soul in a refreshing or enlivening way, though , but rather in a grim, steely-eyed, let's-look-honestly-at-the-facts-and-find-some-way-to-deal-with-them way. My personal experience has not been that traveling around the country is broadening or relaxing, or that radical changes in place and context have a salutary effect, but rather that intranational tourism is radically constricting, and humbling in the hardest way--hostile to my fantasy of being a true individual, of living somehow outside and above it all. (Coming up is the part that my companions find especially unhappy and repellent, a sure way to spoil the fun of vacation travel:) To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impose yourself on places that in all non-economic ways would be better, realer, without you. It is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathesome, an insect on a dead thing."

-----David Foster Wallace, from the essay "Consider The Lobster" in "Consider The Lobster"

"We come here from Georgia. Our family did. Horse and wagon. I pretty much know that for a fact. I know they's a lots of things in a family history that just plain ain't so. Any family. The stories get passed on and the truth gets passed over. As the sayin goes. Which I reckon some would take as meanin that the truth can't compete. But I don't believe that. I think that when the lies are all told and forgot the truth will be there yet. It dont move about from place to place and it dont change from time to time. You cant corrupt it any more than you can salt salt. You cant corrupt it because that's what it is. It's the thing you're talking about. I've heard it compared to the rock--maybe in the bible--and I wouldn't disagree with that. But it'll be here even when the rock is gone. I'm sure they's people would disagree with that. Quite a few, in fact. But I never could find out what any of them did believe."

-----Cormac McCarthy, "No Country for Old Men" (Sherriff Bell monologue)


"In those first years the roads were peopled with refugees shrouded up in their clothing. Wearing masks and goggles, sitting in their rags by the side of the road like ruined aviators. Their barrows heaped and shoddy. Towing wagons or carts. Their eyes bright in their skulls. Creedless shells of men tottering down the causeways like migrants in a feverland. The frailty of everything revealed at last. Old and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and night. The last instance of a thing takes the class with it. Turns out the light and is gone. Look around you. Ever is a long time. But the boy knew what he knew. That ever is no time at all."

-----Cormac McCarthy, "The Road"

“We would rather be ruined than changed. We would rather die in our dread than climb the cross of the moment and let our illusions die.”

-----W.H. Auden

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its labourers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children."

-----Dwight D. Eisenhower, Speech in Washington, April 16, 1953

"I ask you! [Lewis] put away three pints in a very short session we had this morning, and said he was 'going short for Lent.'"

-----J.R.R. Tolkien forcefully responding to an article in the Daily Telegraph that characterized his friend C.S. Lewis as the "ascetic Mr. Lewis."

"I think the trouble with me is lack of faith. I have no rational ground for going back on the arguments that convinced me of God's existence: but the irrational deadweight of my old sceptical habits, and the spirit of this age, and the cares of the day, steal away all my lively feeling of the truth, and often when I pray I wonder if I am not posting letters to a non-existant address. Mind you I don't think so--the whole of my reasonable mind is convinced: but I often feel so. However, there is nothing to do but to peg away. One falls so often that it hardly seems worth while picking oneself up and going through the farce of starting over again as if you could ever hope to walk. Still, this seeming absurdity is the only sensible thing I do, so I must continue it."

-----C.S. Lewis, Letter to Arthur Greeves, (24 December 1930)

"To interpret the Bible truly, then, we must do more than string together individual propositions like beads on a string. This takes us only as far as fortune cookie theology, to a practice of breaking open Scripture in order to find the message contained within. What gets lost in propositionalist interpretation are the circumstances of the statement, its poetic and affective elements, and even, then, a dimension of its truth. We do less than justice to Scripture if we preach and teach only its propositional content. Information alone is insufficient for spirital formation. We need to get beyond 'cheap innerancy,' beyond ascribing accolades to the Bible to understanding what the Bible is actually saying, beyond professing biblical truth to practicing it."

-----Kevin J. Vanhoozer, from "Lost in Interpretation? Truth, Scripture and Hermeneutics" in the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society (March 2005)

Three cheers for the new democratic congress signing off on unprecedented debt relief and benefits packages for Africa. You can read about it here. Finally someone is funding Bush's commitment!

The tremulous scrupulosity of those who are obsessed with pleasures they love and fear narrows their souls and makes it impossible for them to get away from their own flesh. They have tried to become spiritual by worrying about the flesh, and as a result they are haunted by it. They have ended in the flesh because they began in it, and the fruit of their anxious asceticism is that they "use things not," but do so as if they used them.

In their very self-denial they defile themselves with what they pretend to avoid. They do not have the pleasure they seek, but they taste the bitter discouragement, the feeling of guilt which they would like to escape. This is not the way of the spirit. For when our intention is directed to God, our very use of material things sanctifies both them and us, provided we use them without selfishness or presumption, glad to receive them from Him who loves us and whose love is all we desire."

-----Thomas Merton, "No Man Is An Island"