Saturday, June 25, 2022
What the Heck?
Friday, April 1, 2022
I Think I Am
A guy walks into a bar. The bartender is a horse. He says, "Oh, hey Rene, you want the usual?". Rene says "Yeah sure. Why the long face?". The horse and bar disappear because they were never, in fact, real and the only thing that definitely did exist was Rene.
Descartes: Umm..I think not. And he disappears.
Tuesday, March 1, 2022
More Choices
Friday, December 3, 2021
Quote from St. Nick
Friday, October 1, 2021
Birds' Nests
"Temptations, of course, cannot be avoided. But because we cannot keep birds from flying over our heads, there is no need that we should let them build a nest in our hair." -- Martin Luther's Large Catechism, "Explanation of the Sixth Petition" ("Lead us not into temptation.")
Wednesday, September 1, 2021
Unity
Culture Wars
--Phil Vischer, creator of the Christian cartoon series VeggieTales, on evangelical Eric Metaxas, whom he once employed as a writer.
Thursday, July 1, 2021
What's Your Path?
Some quotes to ponder as you hike this summer... or not 😉
"Only those who wonder will find new paths." --Norwegian Proverb
Tuesday, June 1, 2021
Happy Father's Day!
Saturday, May 1, 2021
Happy Mother's Day!
This month, I'm putting in part of a poem by English Jesuit poet, Gerard Manly Hopkins. I am not putting in on my other blog because, while it's got nature in it and expresses a form of Christianity, it has many specifically Roman Catholic ideas I do not agree with. Hope you enjoy it!
The May Magnificat*
May is Mary’s month, and I |
Muse at that and wonder why : |
Her feasts follow reason, |
Dated due to season—** |
Candlemas, Lady Day ; |
But the Lady Month, May,** |
Why fasten that upon her, |
With a feasting in her honour ? |
Flesh and fleece, fur and feather, |
Grass and greenworld all together ; |
Star-eyed strawberry-breasted |
Throstle*** above her nested |
Cluster of bugle blue*** eggs thin |
Forms and warms the life within ; |
And bird and blossom swell |
In sod or sheath or shell. |
All things rising, all things sizing |
Mary sees, sympathizing |
With that world of good |
Nature’s motherhood. |
Their magnifying of each its kind |
With delight calls to mind |
How she did in her stored |
Magnify the Lord. |
Well but there was more than this : |
Spring’s universal bliss |
Much, had much to say |
To offering Mary May. |
This ecstasy all through mothering earth |
Tells Mary her mirth till Christ’s birth |
To remember and exultation |
In God who was her salvation. --Gerard Manley Hopkins, SJ, 1844-1889 *The "Magnificat" is a name given to Mary's song from Luke chapter 1. She sang it when the angel told her she was going to become the mother of the Savior. It starts out, "My soul magnfies [makes great, praises] the Lord..." **There are other feast days honoring Mary. The Roman Catholic Church has set May aside as a month to honor her since the17th century. Pope Francis recently declared the Monday after Pentecost to be a feast day for her, since she seems to have been present at the coming of the Holy Spirit. In 2021, it falls on May 21st. A saints day for her that some Protestants also recognize is August 15th; Catholics take this as the commemoration of her being taken up alive into heaven. The Annunciation, marking of when the angel Gabriel came and announced her divine pregnancy is in March (nine months before Christmas). Candlemas is February 2nd and celebrates the Presentation of Jesus in the Temple, coinciding with the end of forced ceremonial confinement that a Jewish woman had for 40 days after the birth of a child. He seems to be saying that nature gives many signs that this month honors Mary. Interestingly, though the US and many other countries celebrate Mother's Day in May, the UK celebrates it in late March. ***Throstle: old-fasioned word for "thrush" ****Many birds' eggs are blue. Blue was chosen as a symbolic color for Mary, representing faithfulness and purity. This is saying, as the eggs warm and nurture life inside, Mary did this as Jesus grew within her. |
Friday, April 2, 2021
What's Important
20 But Christ has, in fact, been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep... 22 For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive. --St. Paul, I Corinthians 15
Tuesday, February 2, 2021
Exceptional?
What's the point in arguing about the term "American exceptionalism?" We're a nation of imperfect people, founded on some amazing ideas of a democratic republic, enshrined in our Constitution. We've done some very noteworthy things; we've done some things that were stupid and even cruel. Accepting all these facets doesn't make us [1] less American, nor [2] less willing to accept or work on problematic parts of our past. Can we unify on this, too? --Marie Byars
Sunday, January 3, 2021
Try a New Tool
It's well past time for the "sides" [mostly referring to the culture wars] to think they can use the political system as a sledgehammer to "smash" their opponents into oblivion.
No one's going anywhere, folks. You're wasting a lot of energy, a lot of political capital, and a lot of your ability to try persuasion, instead. --Marie Byars
Tuesday, December 1, 2020
Grammatically Correct
Tuesday, November 3, 2020
Pro-Life Bona Fides
Being pro-life, really being pro-life, means realizing you wanted these lives in the world when you see disagreeable toddlers in the grocery store or are seated near crying children on a plane. Oh, and blaming it on bad parenting (as in "I'm pro-life, and the mother should definitely have had these children, but they're only being awful because she's a bad parent") doesn't count. It also may not be true.
Being pro-life isn't easy for anyone. It's not easy for the mother who bore children at times that weren't convenient for her. But it's also not easy on the rest of society. If you're Christian and pro-life, it doesn't fit the full Biblical ethic to make it solely "that woman's problem." Be pro-life in the best sense of the word, and embrace the messiness that comes from children being in the world!
Wednesday, September 2, 2020
Sunday, August 2, 2020
The Second Coming
*Widening gyre: cycles or circular motions; Yeats was referring to his belief in cycles of history. He felt that an orderly one that came with the birth of Christ was about to give way to chaos. [This writer, looking at history, would not agree it had been all that orderly since Christ's birth.] The times just after First World War, with the concurrent 'flu pandemic, brought a lot of "apocalyptic" thinking about. The devastation of those two events was enormous.
**"The center cannot hold" is taken by some political scientists or laymen to suggest that a third, centrist party cannot take off in places like the United States. The touchstone for the metaphor may actually be military: The center of a battle line being broken through. It may also be Yeats' sense that society's ties to religion or other traditional cultures or worldviews are being torn apart. In this sense, it would be things that "center people" rather than a Centrist view.
However, in our current tribalistic political times, it's sad thing that a Center once created by compromise cannot be heard. It's not totally gone (though it seems more and more people are taking sides, and the rude voices try to drown the Center from both sides), but it doesn't have voice in our current society. Note, also, Yeats saying the worse are "full of passionate intensity."
(I would argue that our "First past the post" election system, the winner takes all idea, is a big part of the problem. With ranked choice voting, more people risk voting for others in multi-party systems, not feeling they're going to "throw the vote" to the candidate they really DON'T like. They put that person 2nd, and if their preferred candidate is taken out of competition, their #2 vote still counts for something. And it can go beyond #2, as far down as ranking is deemed feasible.)
***Spiritus Mundi: spirit of the world; the collective spirit of humankind. According to Yeats, it is a mystical concept, ''a universal memory and a 'muse' of sorts that provides inspiration to the poet or write."
****Apparently the AntiChrist, trying to mock and mimic Christ with its birth in a figurative Bethlehem. Interesting, how is it slouching before birth? Is this an accidental oversight? Or is this a description of something so horrific it forces whatever its maternal creation is to slouch off in an evil journey before birth that mocks the holy one of Mary (pregnant with Jesus) and Joseph? [Thoughts of Voldemort in Harry Potter, before he gets his body back. come to mind. Also, a shadowy Tash overtaking Narnia in the last of the Chronicles of Narnia.]
Wednesday, July 1, 2020
The [Slave's] Complaint*
[written to be sung to the popular ballad, Admiral Hosier's Ghost]
Afric's coast I left forlorn;
To increase a stranger's treasures,
O'er the raging billows borne.
Men from England bought and sold me,
Paid my price in paltry gold;
But, though theirs they have enroll'd me,
Minds are never to be sold.
Still in thought as free as ever,
Me from my delights to sever,
Me to torture, me to task?
Fleecy locks, and black complexion
Cannot forfeit nature's claim;
Skins may differ, but affection
Dwells in white and black the same.
Why did all creating Nature
Make the plant for which we toil?
Sighs must fan it, tears must water,
Sweat of ours must dress the soil.
Think, ye masters, iron-hearted,
Lolling at your jovial boards;
Think how many backs have smarted
For the sweets your cane affords.
Is there, as ye sometimes tell us,
Is there one who reigns on high?
Has he bid you buy and sell us,
Speaking from his throne the sky?
Ask him, if your knotted scourges,
Matches, blood-extorting screws,
Are the means that duty urges
Agents of his will to use?
Hark! He answers!—Wild tornadoes,
Strewing yonder sea with wrecks;
Wasting towns, plantations, meadows,
Are the voice with which he speaks.
He, foreseeing what vexations
Afric's sons should undergo,
Fix'd their tyrants' habitations
Where his whirlwinds answer.**
Saturday, June 27, 2020
Changes Prompted by 1918 Flu Pandemic
The 1918 global flu pandemic, coming in the wake of WWI, was a travesty. So many people were shaken by it, and by their responses (sometimes more selfish than they would have thought of themselves), as well as their survivors' guilt, that first-hand accounts of the flu largely disappeared.
However, the whole tragedy prompted some positive changes that stay with us. Here is a slide show accounting of some of those changes:
Daily Mail: 10 Major Changes Resulting from the 1918 Flu Pandemic
I was really surprised this event was given so much credit for countering "eugenics." Eugenics was the study of how to arrange human reproduction to increase the passing down of "desirable" inherited characteristics. That meant so-called less desirable people were forcibly sterilized (including in the U.S.) There were attempts to promote abortion more heavily among the poor. The 1918 pandemic helped people realize that the conditions of poverty, not personal "defects", allowed diseases to spread more rapidly among the poor.
Francis Galton, an Englishman, was largely responsible for first developing this line of thinking. In the U.S., Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, came to believe in eugenics. (It's not true, however, that she did it for racially motivated reasons. In "The Eugenic Vale of Birth Control Propaganda" (1921), she wrote that "the most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective." Eugenics was finally dealt its death blow after the Nazi's abhorrent use of it.
Friday, June 5, 2020
Juneteenth
Juneteenth -- a blending of the words June and nineteenth -- is the oldest known US celebration of the end of slavery. It commemorates June 19, 1865. That's the day that Union Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger rode into Galveston, Texas, and told slaves of their emancipation from slavery.
"In accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free," Granger read to the crowd that day. It came more than two years after President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation.
In 1980, Texas was the first state to make Juneteenth a state holiday, although it had been celebrated informally since 1865.