A Thought on Eternal Destiny

From the Christian perspective, you've got three choices (simplified).

• Exclusivism: You must say the name of Jesus in this specific way in order to be saved.
• Inclusivism: God knows the hearts of everyone living and dead and will be the final judge.
• Universalism: God will save everyone.

I realized today that both Exclusivism and Universalism are really two sides of the same coin. They both purport certainty about something that cannot be truly known. They're both ultimately judgemental. Inclusivism isn't really even in the middle of these two; it's a whole different game (yes, this is where I fall on this issue). Also, it's kind of funny to think of a fundamentalist right-winger and a loosy-goosy left-winger as one and the same.

Advice From Jayber Crow

This is a reading from Jayber Crow, a novel by Wendell Berry. Anyone who interacts with kids about school and academic performance would do well to listen. The passage describes Jayber's adolescent experience in school.

Although I can't say that I liked school, when I wanted to be I was a good enough student.I liked learning, especially learning that could be got by reading. I made fair grades, but I and my teachers knew that I could have done better. I was, they said, like a good horse who would not work; I was a disappointment to them; I was wasting my God-given talents. And this gave me, I believe, the only self-determining power I had: I could withhold this single thing that was mine that I knew they wanted.

From Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry

Kierkegaard Opens Up a Can

...the parsons canonize bourgeois mediocrity. We Protestants have done away with the Catholic canonization of ascetics and martyrs, etc.--as a substitute those interested in the bourgeois corporation are canonized and of course they are canonized by the last clerical order to appear in Protestantism: the office seekers and place hunters.

From Christ the Offense

Zoinks!

Carry the Fire

I read The Road a few years back and have begun rereading it for a book discussion I am hosting in a few weeks. The book is about a father and son on the road after the apocalypse. So basically, it has my two favorite things in it: significant and meaningful relationships and an exploration of "the end times." I grew up in a faith system that was moderately preoccupied with the "end times," prophecies found in the book of Revelation, and our faith group's important role in this. Relationships, particularly family relationships, have always fascinated me. The book focuses on the survival of this pair, physical, emotional, spiritual. Throughout the story, the father reminds his son that they are people who"carry the fire." They remain good in a bad world. They choose right when wrong is everywhere. They go hungry instead of eating people (yes, this is a dark, dark book). On the eve of father's day (and my youngest son's first birthday), I am faced with this question: If I carry the fire (and I hope I do), how do I help my kids learn to carry it? Thanks to my three littlins for reminding me there is a fire. Thanks mom and dad for teaching me to carry the fire. Thanks Cormac McCarthy for writing such an amazing and haunting book. Thank God for the fire.

A Walker Percy Formula

A Lover of Man=Thoreau
A Technician of Man=Skinner
A Lover of Man + A Technician of Man=Hitler

John Steinbeck on the Progression of Mystery

I guess we're all, or most of us, the wards of that nineteenth-century science which denied existence to anything it could not measure or explain. The things we couldn't explain went right on but surely not with our blessing. We did not see what we couldn't explain, and meanwhile a great part of the world was abandoned to children, insane people, fools, and mystics, who were more interested in what is than in why it is. So many old and lovely things are stored in the world's attic, because we don't want them around us and we don't dare throw them out.

John Steinbeck from The Winter of Our Discontent

I don't know why, but the religion/science question has heated up in my circle lately. Everything I've been reading has been coming back to the question. Even when I'm just trying to read a novel, there it is.

Today, I was thinking about what I was like when I was a teenager. Regrettably, I was one who knew it all. It wasn't until my early twenties that I was able to make decisions out of my vast knowledge and wisdom...and it wasn't until the last few years that some of these decisions have come home to roost. I wonder if science (I'm talking about the ideology/religion of science that pervades our culture) is in that early twenties phase. The knowledge has been met with resources and now it's on like Donkey Kong.

A list of scientific accomplishments whose conseqences are mostly unknown:

1. Genetically coded plants who only respond to proprietary fertilizer and herbicide.
2. Cell phones vs. brain health
3. The long-term effects of an industrialized diet
4. The internal combustion engine and its possible link to climate change

I'm not saying we throw out science, scientific progress, and cell phones, I'm just wondering what science's 30s will look like. Will we be too far gone?

Goodbye Tree

I expanded my garden this year by cutting down a Leyland Cypress. Cutting down a thirty foot tree with a chainsaw is manly...in case you were wondering.