Speaking of not being minimalist, as I was yesterday (speaking of, I mean), today I’m going to face the Great Clothes Change Over of 2016. That is, I’m going to start to face it, by first walking down into Sheol and looking around. How much do I loath Sheol? It’s hard for me to quantify it. It’s always been my least favorite place in the world. But I have, a couple of times, conquered my loathing and gone down there... Read more
I’m sure I ought, for the sake of posterity or someone, to do a full Holy Week after action report, but I’m still way too tired to remember what happened, and by the time I do remember, no one will be interested in hearing about Easter any more. The Internet is too rushy. No, instead of that, I wanted to remark upon this excellent article from the Atlantic. Minimalizing and Kondo-ing your stuff is all very well and good, Ms.... Read more
The beginning of the book of Isaiah is pretty dismal. Isaiah spends one verse introducing himself and enumerating the kings under whose reigns he has prophesied, and then he leaps right in. “Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth; for the Lord has spoken: Children I have reared and brought up, but they have rebelled against me. The ox knows its owner, and the donkey its master’s crib, but Israel does not know, my people do not understand….they have... Read more
I have got to run off and buy flowers and then Clean All the Things and Bathe All the Children and Practice All the Acolytes, so there are just a few links this morning. First up, another Peventing Grace Podcast in which we chat through some of the comments that I didn’t put up this week. So if you commented and it didn’t show up on the site, but you want to hear my response, this half hour will be your... Read more
My pending box is as full of ugly comments as my house is full of sick children. To my great delight, some people who are deeply offended by my brand of Christianity read my post of a couple days ago and were utterly repulsed. I say delighted, of course, because it looks like outrage produces clicks, and if there’s one thing I’m addicted to, it’s stat checking. So I went carefully over “my brand of Christianity”, just to make sure... Read more
The Liturgical week is off to a clanging start. My loud noise at Tenebrae could, at most, be described as “adequate”. Think of those as scare quotes. I couldn’t get all my metal pans to fall down the stairs in a cascade. It turned out to be a sort of a dull thud. Most disappointing. Also, new candelabras meant an increased number of candles, which meant laboriously reconfiguring my detailed instructions to myself on how to put them out, only... Read more
After posting my lament yesterday, my limited Facebook/Twitter moments turned out to be a bombardment of #prayforbrussels and even some #sendinggoodthoughts along with the sort of usual grief that is the ubiquity of every terrorist attack. And so I spent the rest of the day wondering, ‘why bring Jesus into it’? Sure, it’s what I do. It’s my schtick. Want to know what’s wrong with the world? We are. What can we do to fix it? Fling ourselves into the... Read more
My favorite airport in the world is the Brussels Airport. In the shadowy distant past of my childhood, that airport was the gateway to many particular kinds of bliss–the stark, brisk rush of cold air, so different from the heavy bright humidity of Abidjan and the fierce dry heat of Bamako. You climb out of the plane and the world outside is all concrete and stone, petrol fumes, elegance, and frites avec mayonnaise. You gather your luggage and your exhaustion... Read more
Here we are, into Holy Week, hopefully ready to endure all the delights it has to offer. To kick off the week, I wanted to pick up the thread so well articulated over at Ponder Anew about children in church. The title has the words Sunday School in it, along with Killing the Church, and as I am am morbidly embroiled in Good Shepherd’s Sunday School and have been for over a decade now, I was rather intrigued. Am I... Read more
Preventing Grace
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