Daylight Stupid Time

The secular humanist conspiracy to keep Christians out of Sunday worship was successful in the case of at least one family in our congregation this year. (When people miss worship, the pastor always charitably assumes sudden and grave illness.) As much as I hate shilling for the federal government, I try to make sure a warning appears in the bulletin the week prior to the initiation of Daylight Satan Time, but it caught me by surprise this year; I only learned the dread tidings on Wednesday of last week.

In light of my omission, I was sent this hymn, which I will in turn recommend to the OPC's Psalter-Hymnal committee:

What goes on in my marriage counseling sessions

Thanks, Brewster Rockit!

Let that Weight Go

"The Moth" is a story-telling cooperative and competition which puts out a weekly podcast: all stories are autobiographical, often anecdotal, and occasionally profound. Two weeks ago it posted a story by Walter Mosely, famous mostly for wildly popular detective fiction. In just around 10 minutes, Mosely summarized the difficulties of living as a black man in these United Stated in the 20th century, and the corresponding difficulty of bringing that experience into the 21st.

Warning: there are a whole bunch of potentially offensive words in his narrative, but no cussing.

Advertisement: this is the most insightful, witty, and provocative 10 minutes on race I can remember hearing since my heady college days when I was immersed in Malcolm X, John Hope Franklin, and Spike Lee. I will be thinking about the questions he raised for a very long time. Strongly recommended.

Pro-life because of biology

In a comment to my post "So what if abortion ends a life?," Anonymous asked, "When do you believe that life begins and what is your biblical basis for your belief!" I should let Anonymous know that, as a presbyterian, while my understanding of the world is shaped and controlled by the Bible, I do not believe that every fact which I believe must be explicitly stated in Scripture. For example, I believe I live in the great state of Colorado, which fact can be found nowhere in the Bible.

In this regard, I point my vast readership to Great American Hero Nat Hentoff, who says he is a pro-lifer "not for religious reasons, but because I'm an atheist who can read biology." For me, my high school biology class and the 6th Commandment are sufficient to believe abortion is murder.

So what if abortion ends a life?

Mrs. Curmudgeon forwarded me the link to this essay at Salon.com. I have a hard time figuring out how to respond to an adult who, like Mary Elizabeth Williams, insists on presenting herself as an intellectual and emotional adolescent. She no doubt considers herself quite brave for writing,

Here’s the complicated reality in which we live: All life is not equal. That’s a difficult thing for liberals like me to talk about, lest we wind up looking like death-panel-loving, kill-your-grandma-and-your-precious-baby storm troopers. Yet a fetus can be a human life without having the same rights as the woman in whose body it resides. She’s the boss. Her life and what is right for her circumstances and her health should automatically trump the rights of the non-autonomous entity inside of her. Always.

She is, of course, not brave, but a moral monster who, despite (or perhaps because of) her self-congratulatory liberal credentials, has fallen into the exact same line of eugenic reasoning which was once openly proclaimed in this country until the discovery of German gas chambers at the end of World War II drove it underground.

And that's the worrisome bit. This shameful diatribe didn't appear underground, in some sloppily xeroxed newsletter or, as is more common these days, on an amateurishly constructed blog littered with broken hyperlinks. Instead, it appeared on Salon.com, which passes for a respectable media outlet. This kind of thing can be said right out in the open, it seems, without shame or fear of being judged immoral by polite and sane people.

Sixty years on from the war, and we've not simply forgotten its lessons: our society has laid the groundwork for it to happen all over again, as it has been happening since Roe v. Wade became the law of the land.

Freedom from Religion

Don't be misled by the title. R.R. Reno's response to a public appearance by retired Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama is not, no matter how justifiable it may be, a comment on how confusedly religious interests are handled by U.S. administration officials these days. Instead, it's a trenchant analysis of mankind's headlong flight from God, as aided and abetted by religious authorities who should (and probably do) know better.

Netflix offers help to the graduate student

It turns out those mid-90s Disney cartoon films were so boring because they were biographical documentaries. If only they had hired Ken Burns...

An odd confluence on abortion availability

One doesn't expect Time and First Things to agree on much regarding abortion rights. However, this week I read articles in both magazines which discussed how the pro-choice movement has declined since the passage of Roe vs. Wade.

The Time piece, "What Choice?," notes that the Roe decision not only energized abortion opponents, it also instilled complacency in the pro-choice movement. In Kate Pickert's narrative, this allowed abortion opponents to chip away at the national abortion-on-demand license with various restraints passed by state legislatures, such as 24-hour waiting periods or mandatory information on prenatal development. As one might expect, the article evokes in the reader a faint but definite taste of moral repugnance as it recognizes that each passing year brings more irrefutable scientific evidence of the fetus' humanity, and simultaneously strikes the standard liberal pose that there is something inherently distressing about a decrease in the number of abortions in this country.

In "Roe's Pro-Life Legacy," Jon A. Shields begins with the same observation as Kate Pickert. From there, however, he attributes the decline in abortion numbers not to legislative triumphs, but to the ever declining acceptability of abortion itself among the American public. This he attributes to the pro-life movement's commitment to moral argument and care for individual women and their families.

The confluence of topic is no doubt the result of the Roe decision's upcoming anniversary. The divergence of analysis is attributable to a more fundamental difference in worldview. The modern American liberal regards the state, and in particular the national government, as society's primary, and in some senses only, institution which can mediate among individual citizens. Liberals thus believe gaining control over legislatures and courts will enable them to steer society according to their liking. Sadly, this blinds them to the fact human society has any number of mediating institutions, and that most people organize their lives not primarily with regard to the state, but instead toward other people. Relationships open the door to genuine conversation, and conversation to the possibility of conversion to other points of view.

Returning to the subject at hand, the primacy of individual relationships in ordinary life forces us to recognize our shared humanity; and once you start recognizing human beings, it's hard to stop at those who have already been born.

Baptism books

2013 started off well for me, as I got to perform my first baptism of the year on Epiphany, which had the good manners to fall on a Lord's Day this time through the liturgical calendar. This gave me the opportunity to cram in two sacraments after the sermon, which in turn meant I got to go from Epiphany to Pentecost to the new heavens and earth within about 45 minutes, and pulled off the whole liturgy in just 90 minutes. A pretty decent land speed, if I say so myself.

For a number of years now, I've made a practice of gifting baptizands with an age-appropriate book. For infants (as this last one was), I've been giving copies of Water, Come Down! by Walter Wangerin. It anthropomorphizes elements of the creation to teach the child about the significance of his or her baptism. Read repeatedly (as any children's book must be), it will help said child interpret Biblical imagery and appropriate her or his identity as a child of God.

I also pay a home visit during the week before the baptism. For a first child, this gives me the opportunity to instruct the new parents on the reasons we baptize our children. (Sadly, those who grew up in presbyterian or reformed homes are often the shakiest on these.) For subsequent children, it's a chance to help the older sibling(s) view the upcoming celebration less as yet another occasion on which s/he will be ignored in favor of this new interloper and more as the first time to really improve on one's own baptism. To that end, the board book Things I See at Baptism by Julie Stigmeyer explains the sacrament by emphasizing important key words and by emphasizing baptism as the entry point into Church membership. I usually ask the parents to read it with their child(ren) every day before the baptism.

My discerning readers will have already searched Amazon for these titles and noticed they're both written by Lutherans, for Lutherans. Given our robust doctrines of covenant and, therefore, infant baptism, one would think presbyterians would have produced any number of children's books on baptism. One would think; however, after much searching, I must tell one that one is incorrect.

I trust someone in my vast international readership will soon correct this grievous oversight.

UK still has 13,000 black-and-white TVs

Maybe it's because we still had a black-and-white set at least until I turned ten, but I find this fact oddly inspiring.

Or maybe it's because I'm a curmudgeon.

Whatever.