It is well understood that nothing so excites the glands of a free-market capitalist as the offer of a government subsidy.
— Wendell Berry, Conserving Forest Communities
The tale can now be told — besides being a boring, geeky software engineer by day, I’ve also been working on an exciting entry into the world of Christian private investigation.
Just see here: The Case of the Theotokos Thief, Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.
Kudos to Dale for being such a great mentor, and of course to Chris Johnson, Anglican Investigator, for saving the world (again!) and for being such a great guy to work with.
As of today, I am now the father of a (shudder) teenager!
God have mercy.
Seriously, happy birthday to Son #1! Thanks for both making me feel old and helping to keep me young all at the same time.
He was, in his own words, a “sick f**k” — but, behind the comedy, lurked a serious, insightful, and I think idealistic man.
On Ignorant Americans:
On Soft Language and Euphemisms (my favorite):
If you’re too tender to listen to it all, here is the key discourse:
I don’t like words that hide the truth. I don’t like words that conceal reality. I don’t like euphemisms, or euphemistic language. And American English is loaded with euphemisms. Cause Americans have a lot of trouble dealing with reality. Americans have trouble facing the truth, so they invent the kind of a soft language to protect themselves from it, and it gets worse with every generation. For some reason, it just keeps getting worse. I’ll give you an example of that.
There’s a condition in combat. Most people know about it. It’s when a fighting person’s nervous system has been stressed to it’s absolute peak and maximum. Can’t take anymore input. The nervous system has either (click) snapped or is about to snap.
In the first world war, that condition was called shell shock. Simple, honest, direct language. Two syllables, shell shock. Almost sounds like the guns themselves.
That was seventy years ago. Then a whole generation went by and the second world war came along and very same combat condition was called battle fatigue. Four syllables now. Takes a little longer to say. Doesn’t seem to hurt as much. Fatigue is a nicer word than shock. Shell shock! Battle fatigue.
Then we had the war in Korea, 1950. Madison avenue was riding high by that time, and the very same combat condition was called operational exhaustion. Hey, we’re up to eight syllables now! And the humanity has been squeezed completely out of the phrase. It’s totally sterile now. Operational exhaustion. Sounds like something that might happen to your car.
Then of course, came the war in Viet Nam, which has only been over for about sixteen or seventeen years, and thanks to the lies and deceits surrounding that war, I guess it’s no surprise that the very same condition was called post-traumatic stress disorder. Still eight syllables, but we’ve added a hyphen! And the pain is completely buried under jargon. Post-traumatic stress disorder.
I’ll bet you if we’d of still been calling it shell shock, some of those Viet Nam veterans might have gotten the attention they needed at the time. I’ll betcha. I’ll betcha.
I don’t think we have his like anymore — with the possible exception of Stephen Colbert (who proves that it can be done without those seven words).
God’s mercy be upon your soul, George.
New blog! (OK, not that new, but I’m slow…)
Our friend Mary Lund is now blogging at A Homestead Daughter about her life as, well… it’s pretty obvious from the title, now isn’t it?
This is beautiful:
Be united but not closed off. Be humble, but not fearful. Be simple, but not naive. Be thoughtful, but not complicated. Enter into dialog with everyone, but remain yourselves.
— Pope Benedict XVI, Address to the youth of Genoa, May 18, 2008
(via Amy Welborn)
Compare this:
LOS ANGELES – The Bishop of the Epsicopal diocese of Los Angeles has issued an apology to Hindus worldwide for what he called “centuries-old acts of religious discrimination by Christians, including attempts to convert them” reports India Abroad. The apology was given in a statement read to over 100 Hindu spiritual leaders at a mass from Right Reverend J John Bruno. The ceremony started with a Hindu priestess blowing a conch shell three times and included sacred chants.
This meeting was the result of a dialogue, started three years ago, between Hindu leaders and Rev. Karen MacQueen, who was deeply influenced by Hindu Vedanta philosophy and opposes cultivating conversions. “There are enough Christians in the world,” she said.
With this:
Each Sunday morning, Kumar sits in a folding chair, waiting for the rock band to start up, and the preacher to give a seeker-sensitve sermon. The chairs are partly filled, in a school gymnasium, just outside Washington, D.C.
He’s a small man, from Chennai, India, and here, in the rows for the audience, he’s part of someone’s Big Vision. Like many others, the church start-up has a visionary, who hopes it becomes the next Willow Creek, even hoping to buy 40 acres in suburban D.C. (Anyone got a half-bil for that?)
And Kumar, who’s 36, drives each day to his office job at Sun Microsystems, where he spends a lot of time checking urgent email from very far away.
Friday night, I walked with Kumar, and our mutual friend, Woody, to a crowded Whole Foods Market in Alexandria. I made a salad about four times bigger than his, but when we got back to the hotel room, it took him a couple hours to finish. I kept asking questions. He kept answering.
————-
Kumar was on a crowded bus in Chennai, India. He heard God’s voice. “Unmistakably,” he says. I heard God say, twice, ‘Seek Me.’ That was it. Twice.”
Just “Seek Me”?
“Just ‘Seek Me’. And I knew it was God, but which God? I was Hindu. Was it Vishnu? Calli…? No idea. I just knew it was God. Somehow, I knew it. Unmistakable.”
And Kumar isn’t the gullible type. He has multiple advanced degrees in Aero Engineering and Physics, for starters, from the M.I.T.-equivalent in India.
He studied and researched, but just wasn’t satisfied that it was one of his familiar gods, and eventually found a friend with a Bible — a “good luck charm” — and traded a textbook for it. He started reading, got confused, but eventually was pointed to Jesus.
He became a Jesus-follower. Costly decision.
————-
His parents weren’t happy. They scheduled an arranged marriage. Kumar met his wife-to-be on Friday, told her and his parents on Saturday about his Jesus decision, and got married on Sunday. “They thought it would blow over,” he says. It didn’t.
Six months later, there was an intervention. Her family, his family, neighbors, friends — 150 people strong — all telling him to repudiate his faith. He refused. His parents, fearing for their reputation, said he should leave the area immediately. They would tell everyone that he was dead.
…
A few years later, he went back to India. Kumar took his vacation from Sun, and headed over with no plan. He just went door-to-door, and told people about Jesus.
The first day, 45 people decided to become Jesus-followers. How’d THAT happen?
“I don’t know. I just went door to door, and neighbors would introduce me to others, and I was amazed.”
————-
Kumar still takes his vacations, two weeks a year, and heads to India. But things have grown. From those first 45, and from his trips over the past seven years…
More than 100,000 conversions. 139 communities. More than 100 pastors. Model orphanages for children suffering from AIDS Schools for Dalit children, the lowest-of-the-low in India. Shelters for little girls, now rescued from prostitution. Food. Medicine. Jesus.
Read the whole thing. Seeing both of these stories on the same day, well …
“To be sane in a mad time is bad for the brain, worse for the heart.” — Wendell Berry.
What could be more mad than to be a Christian who doesn’t want to tell people about Jesus?
And yet … in the grand scheme of things, I’m far more like +Bruno than like Kumar.
Mea culpa. Kyrie eleison.
“The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; prayer therefore the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.”— Luke 10:2
Ann Arbor: following the lead of Ypsilanti!
Ann Arbor Council Member Stephen Kunselman is championing the right to have your own all-natural eggs, which he says taste much better than store-bought variety.
At a council retreat Saturday, Kunselman, D-3rd Ward, brought up changing city laws to allow chickens back in the city. He says there is a group of local business people and residents who support the idea and he plans to bring a resolution once he gets the local support organized….
At the retreat Saturday at the new W.R. Wheeler Service Center, the chicken issue livened up a discussion that focused mainly on bricks, mortar and taxes. When broken into discussion groups to talk about city priorities, Council Member Stephen Rapundalo, D-2nd Ward, questioned Kunselman on the chickens.
“What’s with the chickens?” Rapundalo asked.
“Chickens lay eggs,” Kunselman said. “I want fresh eggs. It’s just a simple ordinance change.”
“I want to have fresh milk,” Rapundalo said. “Let’s change the ordinance to allow cows or goats.”
Of course, we can’t mention urban chickens without mentioning pioneering micro-eco-urban farmer Peter Thomason:
The issue popped up earlier this year in Ypsilanti, too, where a resident is challenging that city’s law against keeping farm animals on his property….
Ypsilanti resident Peter Thomason had his request to keep 12 chickens in cages in his back yard rejected last year by the Ypsilanti City Council.
Thomason said Saturday he still keeps the chickens on his property.
And Peter, like myself, doesn’t think that Councilman Rapundalo’s question about milk animals should be left a rhetorical one:
“And I’m picking up two pregnant goats tomorrow,” Thomason said.
Yes, I know, this story is a few weeks old now, but I’m a lame blogger. Sometimes, you get what you pay for.
For cooler coverage than I provide about the Underground Poultry movement in Ann Arbor, see Teeter Talk.
Last night, I dragged the kids through the Tour de Fresh in Ypsilanti, which was a showcase of cool things happening locally to promote local food production.
Weird synchronicity #1: At tour signin at the Ypsilanti Farm Market, the table next to us was being operated by David’s old Cub scout leader and fellow den member. I had no idea they sold stuff at the farm market. Maybe my boys should be there with their extra tomatoes …
After leaving the market, the first stop — only a few blocks from downtown — was Peter Thomason’s backyard chickens.
Weird synchronicity #2: While I don’t remember meeting Peter before at our homeschool co-op, a quick roster check proved that yes, we’re in this together. The co-op isn’t that big (“only” 150 kids), but obviously I still haven’t met all the other parents.
Yes, chickens. In addition to an amazing display of heirloom tomatoes trellised along the fenceline and some very nice raised-bed veggie gardens, the Thomason’s have a chicken coop.
When people ask me, and they frequently do, why we have chickens living in the yard of our Ypsilanti home, I usually answer, “for the eggs.”
But the truth is, the main reason we have them is that it pleases my wife. And, if my wife is happy, most of the time, I am too. What I’m referring to is the inestimable value of pleasure that philosopher-farmer Wendell Berry speaks of in “Economics and Pleasure,” an essay that should be required reading for anyone who refuses to accept the idea that a monetary bottom line is the only “real” bottom line.
For several years we tried to sell our house, move to the country and start a farm, but the times and the market were against us and we finally accepted that, at least for the time being, we were going to have to stay where we were. Not that we had a problem with being here, we just felt a need to reconnect with our agrarian roots. The thought that we were not going to be able to do that was depressing, but we did our best to let go of it and to focus on growing as much of our food as we could on our one-tenth-of-an-acre city lot.
Then one day it just got to her and she said, “I don’t ask for much. I don’t want jewelry or fancy cars, I just want to have some chickens.” My wife’s distress about this weighed on me for weeks until it finally occurred to me one day to check the city’s animal control ordinance…
Read the whole thing.
For more details on the politics of urban chickens, plus being a philosopher-carpenter, and building coffins (yes, coffins), see this “Teeter Talk” interview with Peter:
HD: Something I would sort of like to explore is that, as best I can tell, it’s not that you’re somehow obsessed with chickens per se, it’s that chickens factor into this broader context of sustainable living, and even that has a much broader context of stemming from a Christian belief system that includes stewardship of the environment as an important component of your faith.
PT: And it’s more than stewardship of the environment. It’s what I think of as building a whole culture of life. The late John Paul II was excellent at re-presenting traditional themes in new language, so he sort of coined the idea of building a civilization of love as a way of talking about building the kingdom of God, which was a more traditional Christian way of talking about it. He talked about building a culture of life, and building a civilization of love. The components of that–certainly stewardship of the environment is a component–but also economics as if people mattered. And that is something that was largely talked about in my generation, among people that I grew up with because of the work of E.F. Schumacher. Small is Beautiful was a rallying cry for a whole generation of people I grew up with, the other two books in the trilogy being Good Work, and A Guide for the Perplexed. And from his perspective on sustainable economics, that what you can do in your own yard–in a cottage industry, what you can do to not just be a unit of consumption, but a unit of production, even in your own urban neighborhood–then counters so many of the negative and depersonalizing aspects of, if you will, a money-based economy, and makes economics human again. It’s no longer just the exchange of money, it’s the exchange of goods and services between people who’ve learned to trust each other and give people things of value. So there is a bigger discussion that, in my mind, that all of this is part of. But what it comes down to practical things that one can do–keeping chickens, or using worms under your sink to help compost organic material–it sort of brings it home. Chickens are in one sense emblematic of being somewhat independent, but they’re also pragmatic. They’re also a very real way in which you can make your own home economy sustainable. Not only are they pets, but they give back to you, you know? Your dog might be a pet, which you enjoy, but your dog may also guard your house. You may enjoy your cats, but your cats might take care of the mice that are a problem. Well, chickens also give you back food. And they eat compost, and they eat kitchen scraps, so they’re more than just symbols. They are …
HD: … good examples.
PT: They’re good examples. They’re good citizens [laugh]. They give enjoyment and they give food back. So they really fit nicely into the idea of the home economy being a producing economy, not just a consuming economy. And to me, all of that is a big part of building a civilization of love, and replacing the impersonal exchange of goods and services for money. I mean, what’s money? It’s just a dead thing, it represents something. It’s replacing it with real exchange of things that are of value and meaningful to people, because they’ve invested their time, their labor, and their love in them. So a money-less economy is not just something that communists or Marxists have a right to talk about, but people who have a Christian world-view, and who believe that it is possible to build a civilization of love.
Also worth a full read.
Anyone who can quote both Wendell Berry and John Paul II like that is all right in my book.
P.S.: David sampled one of their Amish Paste tomatoes, and is now praising heirlooms as tasting better. And Rachel was inspired to plead “Dad, can we have chickens?” in the same tones she usually reserves for “Dad, can I have a horse?”
Today is the one-year anniversary of Pope Benedict XVI’s Regensburg Address.
As part of our homeschool co-op responsibilities, I find myself about to teach a class on logic.
Using Son #1 as a guinea pig for the class, I ran through the intro with him last night, and needed to find some explanation of why logic and reason matter, and most especially, why they should matter to us as Christians.
My shower-powered inspiration this morning was that I’ve already seen such an explanation, and just need to look up Regensburg. It was a nice coincidence to find out that today is the talk’s anniversary.
Go, read. It’s more lucid (and more important) than anything I have to say.
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