Lift Up Your Hearts!

It's been harder than I thought to write the "why I blog" post that's been on my backlog for ages.  So I'm just going to do it.

I suppose my blog can most charitably be called "eclectic."  Some blogs are political, some personal journals, some accumulate interesting articles and news stories, some keep far-flung families in contact, some are formed around a specific cause or issue.  I aim to be jack-of-all-trades, and if that means being master of none, I see nothing wrong with that. It depends on your audience.  Five-star restaurants require highly-trained and gifted chefs, but I'd take my mother's home cooking and the family dinner table any day.  Fine.  But why?  Why do I put so much time and effort into blogging?  What do I hope to accomplish? (More)

I've often noted that there is a significant generation gap between my siblings and me; even seven years makes a big difference.  Not that it keeps us from being a closely-knit and loving family, but it's noticeable.  Although for a number of reasons my upbringing was somewhat different from theirs, that's not what I'm talking about, but rather changes in the surrounding culture and "conventional wisdom" between my formative years and theirs.  Perhaps change always happens this way, and I only noticed it because there is that half-generation gap between us.  It does serve as an interesting bridge between our generation and that of our children.  It was a bit of a shock when I realized that certain customs...that our children thought of as "the way it's done" were those of my siblings' era, and quite different from my own views of "normal."

That's what I wrote in a comment on a previous post. Now I've learned that I'm not the only one to notice the half-generational difference.  Apparently those born between 1954 and 1965 are now being differentiated from the rest of us Baby Boomers by their own designation:  Generation Jones.  I don't set much store by this idea of naming generations; as with many attempts to classify people, I believe individual characteristics are more important than mere demographics. Still, patterns are interesting, especially when they relate to something I've observed myself.

I shouldn't be surprised when what is said in comic strips mirrors opinions expressed by essayists in more serious venues.  After all, both get their inspiration from the same human condition, and humor is an efficient and effective way to make a point.  Nonetheless, I always take note when I hear the same message from widely divergent sources, as happened when I read in close succession Francis Schaeffer's The God Who Is There and John Taylor Gatto's The Underground History of American Education. When an evangelical Protestant theologian living in Switzerland and a self-described lapsed Catholic schoolteacher from Pittsburgh, writing on issues that apparently differ markedly, make the same historical and philosophical point, perhaps I had better listen.

The conjunction of Mallard Fillmore and Mike Thomas, about which I wrote yesterday, is less portentous, perhaps, but today's has signficant social and philosophical implications. (More)

As I wrote earlier, one important idea I took from Marcus Buckingham's The One Thing You Need to Know is the value of expending more energy in our areas of strength than in where we are weak.  Self-evident?  Maybe, but in practice we often tend to do the opposite.

John Stackhouse's review of another Buckingham book, Go Put Your Strengths to Work, inspired me to reserve it at our library.  Although the "I gotta be me" philosophy taken to extremes can lead to unwholesome, selfish attitudes and dereliction of duty, we err in the other direction by not recognizing that God made us who we are and not someone else for a reason.  To ignore that design is not only to insult our Creator, but also to risk missing out on the good he would do to and through us. (More)

In an earlier post on the Lisbon Treaty, I stated

[I]n the U.S. we have seen state laws gradually subsumed more and more by national regulation, so that fleeing to Pennsylvania from a repressive law in New York is not as easy as it once was.  I'm not saying this is always bad, but it can be, and bears watching.

I"m watching, and here's an example I saw today.  The U. S. Supreme Court has nullified a Louisiana law allowing for a sentence of the death penalty following conviction for the rape of a child under 12. (More)

The role of joking in the way we deal with one another is a concern of mine, as I've said before.  Thanks to Groshlink I've found another excellent essay on the topic, The Gospel and Humor by Tim Keller, pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City.  Unfortunately, the article is in PDF format, and you have to weave amongst some other articles to read it, but it's worthwhile.  To get you started—and to give those who won't follow the link a taste of what he says—here are some excerpts. (More)

I've never heard the American Public Media program Speaking of Faith, but somehow (I've forgotten whom to credit) came upon this transcript of Quarks and Creation, an interview with the physicist/priest John Polkinghorne.  If you can ignore the annoyances of a word-for-word transcript of an audio program, it's a fascinating interview.  (For those who prefer an audio format, that's also available.)  Polkinghorne touches on subjects as diverse as beauty, truth, quantum physics, prayer, free will, and the dangerous brilliance of creating a world that creates itself. (More)

I did place an order on Amazon.com this morning...but somehow I doubt that's what brought down the system.  Whatever; it has been unavailable for a few hours now:  "Http/1.1 Service Unavailable."  Just another reminder that we are too dependent on infrastructure over which we have little or no control: water, sanitary services, electrical power, grocery deliveries, police protection, mail, phone, and Internet services.  Our ancestors had plenty of worries that we don't, but they dug their own wells, buried their own sewage, grew and/or hunted their own food, and protected their families with their own weapons, and lived among neighbors who could help out when needed.

Communities still share what they can during times of trouble, but for the most part, if we lose one or more of the basic services, so do our neighbors.

As I said before, I'm not always curmudgeonly.  Here, for your morning's delight, is an inspiring story from the blog, "Et tu?"  What happens when an introverted mother of three children under four, whose only much-needed time for solitude comes when all three kids are napping simultaneously, finds this time interrupted again and again by neighborhood pranksters who repeatedly ring her doorbell and run?  No, this is not a sordid tale of mass murder; I said it was a happy story.

Read the What first, then the How (with further details). (More)

Here's a scary article for you:  Emily Gould's Exposed, from the May 25, 2008 New York Times Magazine.  Andrew Keen (The Cult of the Amateur) would definitely appreciate this story of one woman's venture into a world of publishing unfettered by editorial oversight and subsequent free-fall into the Dark Side of Blogging.

I slumped to the kitchen floor and lay there in the fetal position. I didn’t want to exist. I had made my existence so public in such a strange way, and I wanted to take it all back, but in order to do that I’d have to destroy the entire Internet. If only I could! Google, YouTube, Gawker, Facebook, WordPress, all gone. I squeezed my eyes shut and prayed for an electromagnetic storm that would cancel out every mistake I’d ever made.

Another sad story about a naïve teenaged girl molested by someone she met on MySpace? Not at all. Just an imprudent adult woman seduced by the delights of seeing her thoughts in print.  Scary.

In a previous post, which was primarily about something else so I won't link to it here, I said:

Having experienced the higher-level coinage of Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Switzerland, and the European Union, I wish the United States had the sense to supplant (not just supplement) the dollar bill with dollar coins.  (And maybe the $2 and $5 bills while we're at it.)  But the mountain of paper used to print dollar bills comes from Massachusetts, where the Crane Paper Company has a stranglehold monopoly on the business.  The $1 bill has a lifespan of under two years and represents about 45% of the U. S. currency production, so it's no surprise that Massachusetts politicians don't like dollar coins.

I've mentioned the idea of getting rid of the lower-denomination bills in favor of coins, and while women generally don't seem to mind, I am likely to get a negative reaction from men.  I think this is because women's wallets almost always have a place for change, but men's wallets rarely do.  Porter carries his change in a small coin purse (something like this) which keeps the coins handy and protects his pocket.  But most men I've talked with tend to keep their change loose in their pockets and then dump them in a jar or on a dresser at the end of the day.  This system works because our coins are worth so little. (More)

My feminism tends to be of the on-again-off-again sort.  As a child—thanks to parents who encouraged me—I never considered any good character trait, activity, or occupation to be off limits because of my sex.  I didn't think much about feminism back then; I just acted, becoming the first girl to break the sex barrier in my high school's stage band, and the only or one of just a few girls in some of my science classes.  This sounds tame and silly from a 21st century perspective, but it was a big deal back then.

When Feminism became a movement, however, I soon had to distance myself from it, largely because it distanced itself from me.  I was (and am) all for equality of opportunity—as much as is physically possible; I don't ever want to see men getting pregnant—but when Feminism veered into being anti-man and pro-abortion, when it denigrated the role of homemaker and made the two-income family first common and then in some cases necessary, and when it invoked "political correctness" over the very words we speak and even started calling God "Our Mother," that's when I turned away.  Not from my beliefs, which hadn't changed, but from the movement and the label.  Women were now included, and succeeding, in nearly every possible opportunity; it was time, I believed, to give feminism a rest. (More)

I like academia. I love college campuses, chem labs, and the smell of libraries with old books. Places and institutions dedicated to the advancement of knowledge, to study, investigation, and discussion. In an odd way, I feel more at home on a college campus than in most places. They feel exciting, challenging, and yet as comfortable as a pair of well-worn shoes. That my own college experience differed significantly from my theoretical ideal did not do much to diminish my belief that a college professor had a near-perfect job in a near-perfect setting.

Pausing to let my professor friends recover from their choking fits.... (More)

I recently finished reading a book called The Marketing of Evil: How Radicals, Elitists, and Pseudo-Experts Sell Us Corruption Disguised as Freedom.  That's not what this post is about, because while the author, David Kupelian, does have some important insights into how our culture got to be the way it is, his tone is too strident to allow me to recommend the book with particular enthusiasm.  However, he cites his sources well, and thus I am able to give full credit for what is perhaps my favorite part of the whole book, the following great quote from G. K. Chesterton.

Sex is an instinct that produces an institution; and it is positive and not negative, noble and not base, creative and not destructive, because it produces this institution.  That institution is the family; a small state or commonwealth which has hundreds of aspects, when it is once started, that are not sexual at all.  It includes worship, justice, festivity, decoration, instruction, comradeship, repose.  Sex is the gate of that house; and romantic and imaginative people naturally like looking through a gateway.  But the house is very much larger than the gate.  There are indeed a certain number of people who like to hang about the gate and never get any further.

— G.K.'s Weekly, January 29, 1928

It is a great tragedy of our day that we have been all but convinced that the gate is all there is, that the house and fields beyond it are, and have always been, no more than a romantic, imaginative dream—at best.  Perhaps we need a Puddleglum to stamp on the enchanted fire and clear our heads.

Perhaps the strident tone of Kupelian's book is, after all, just the un-enchanting smell of burnt marsh-wiggle.

I tried to save the Shire, and it has been saved, but not for me.  It must often be so, Sam, when things are in danger: someone has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them.

— Frodo to Sam, at the end of The Return of the King (J.R.R. Tolkien)