I’m over at Stand Firm today. It is both Valentine’s Day, as everyone knows, and the Feast of the Transfiguration, because Ash Wednesday is just around the corner, and that is how the church calendar works. I was wandering around the readings last night, feeling especially bad for Elijah in all his disappointments, when, distracted for a moment by Facebook, I came across this gem that I cannot pretend I didn’t read to the very end. A long while ago (was it last year... Read more
I know it’s Friday because I’ve lived all the other days this week. Friday is now my “lived experience.” Let’s see if there are any Takes. One Matt sent me this sometime yesterday and I started to read it and then stopped because I felt sick. Just when I start to feel cheerful about human nature, I am immediately thrown off course by the worst kind of examples of how terrible it can really be. Two I feel like I... Read more
I thought I was going to post a video today with more of my #thoughtsandprayers about Jesus and John Wayne, but I saw this in the middle of the night and so I guess I’ll save the other thing for another snowy day. The link goes to an excessively long New Yorker puff piece about Glennon Doyle so you may not want to bother. On the other hand, you may have all the time in the world, and nothing clever... Read more
Well, we just got through another birthday successfully. Bit of a break now until April–of course, a break that includes Lent and then Easter, so we shall be very busy all the same. Also, in my little post yesterday I called that great American educational reformer, Dr. Mann, “Thomas” in one place and “Horace” in the other. Of course, his name is Horace, not Thomas. So sorry! Thomas is a novelist of some note, but both of them are dead,... Read more
My child says it’s easier to draw a man’s face than a woman’s. [Used by Permission] This is sort of interesting, in a desultory kind of way. It’s a bunch of writers I’ve never heard of pondering what happened to art and music under the Era of Trump. No one really said anything definitive, other than that it was a great great time for memes. And TikTok. That went really well. Other kinds of art not so much, and comedy,... Read more
As usual, it is a cold and gray day here in Bing. We’ve celebrated with a bit of a podcast about the Super Bowl, what’s wrong with advertising and kidz these days, that John Wayne and Jesus book, and how the gospel still hasn’t been tried. I tried inelegantly to compare the way Matt argues with the way Kristin du Mez writes and I don’t think I did a very good job. I meant to say that she doesn’t even... Read more
I’m over at Stand Firm this morning. In all the reading I did a while ago about Cancel Culture, and then after that Virtue Signaling, the thing that interested me most was the shift to what one might call a New Evangelism. I mean, no one has called it that. It is only occurring to me this moment as I contemplate the readings for today but I think it is exactly the term I have been searching around for. Abram in the Old Testament... Read more
It doesn’t look like this today… It is an excessively gray day here in Binghamton. It looks like snow but the weather websites all insist that it doesn’t, so that’s very curious. Let’s see, are there any takes floating around here? One I know that February is technically the shortest month of the year, but I always find it the very longest. The rigor and usefulness of Lent haven’t yet arrived, but the snow and cold and slush remain interminably.... Read more
Me thinking about how I will collect Grace Livingston Hill books in the future. Well, as was my worry, that cool video of the person dancing while the army took over the government of Myanmar is probably not real. Can’t remember where I saw the sad news yesterday, so I can’t link it. I’m sure you can probably search and find it fairly easily. In the spirit of facts bending to my feelings, however, or alternative truth or whatever, I’m... Read more
In the interest of grievance-mongering, which I feel I might as well try out because it appears to be both interesting and profitable, I’d like to complain about something. I’m not actually sure which term I want, maybe someone can remind me of the word I’m looking for. Basically what grieves me is one group of people taking their assumptions and worldview and lathering them over another group of people and their world view as if the first group is... Read more
Preventing Grace
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