Bent Notes

R. C. Sproul on the loose ends left at the final session of the Council of Trent (and background for understanding what they were).

I’m still feeling my way back to a consideration of the notion of revealed religion.  Sometimes as I immerse myself in something like this lecture, I realize how postmodern my insistence upon spirituality as an immediate experience has been.  I begin to see how I, and so many boomer-age seekers, looked over and over again for a road-to-Damascus (or under-the-Bodhi-tree) experience in a meditation technique, or a pill or a pipe.  It’s that old “give-it-to-me-now-and-according-to-my-specifications” mentality.

Of course, I still have major questions.  When, say, a Hebrew prophet such as Isaiah or Malachai, or a Gospel author such as Mark, or even an apostolic letter-writer like Paul committed “the word of God” to parchment, how, specifically, did that person’s role as a conduit for said word work?  Did they have some kind of wham-bam surrounded-by-light experience?

But I digress, which is easy to do for a question-filled seeker like me.  Great lecture that sheds light on some important historical as well as theological matters.

As longtime BN readers know, I am basically an agnostic with very ecumenical mystical leanings, but have lately become, for a variety of reasons, drawn to the premise of conventional Christianity.

A while ago, while randomly poking around on the Web (Hmmm; if you read the linked item, I may come to regret the potential for that phrase to be interpreted as a pun.  No matter; let’s not be distracted!) I chanced upon a February post at one of my favorite blogs, The Anchoress.  I know we’re in the run-up season to the birth of Christ, but this Lent-season essay is about the most compelling outlining of why one ought to adopt the Christian take on reality that I’ve ever encountered - and you’re getting this from a guy who plums the Bible and C.S. Lewis daily and is currently reading No One Sees God: The Dark Night of Atheists and Believers by Michael Novak.

The key is to say to our omniscient Creator, I’m so sorry.  I love you like I’ve never loved anything or anyone, and I fully let your love into my heart, soul and life.

Now, how long will I be able to keep that up?

Little Green Footballs, a blog I check at least daily and hold in the highest regard, links to David Frum’s statements about some choices the GOP will have to make about where its center of gravity will be.  True to his east-coast chin-rubbing orientation, Frum says the Pubs would be well-advised to make the “painful choices” in favor of sticking with fiscal and foreign-policy focus and cut the social conservatives loose.  LGF pretty much concurs, saying that “fundamental Christianity, creationism, hard-line anti-abortionism and [an] aggressively anti-gay rights [stance]” will be detrimental.

Let’s not be applying a broad brush where a freshly sharpened scalpel  - or, if you’d like, a microscope - is needed as we unpack this observation.

Perhaps this is the opportunity for true clear-thinkers to take back a perfectly good word that cultural leftists had co-opted: nuance.

Frum’s not a complete goner.  He’s somewhat infected with east-coast pointy-head-ism, but he has made some insightful contributions and he’s no Reasonable Gentleman (our term here at BN for Pubs who appease the left).  He does seem here, though, to be channeling his inner David Brooks, saying that a permanently less religious and more pragmatic young adult American is a foregone conclusion.

Even if the fanciest studies in the world bore this out, it would be a devil’s bargain on our part to proceed in accordance with it.  The God revealed in the world’s great scripture (you can interpret that as broadly or narrowly as you’d like; for my part I’m excluding the Quran) must be central to the shaping of any kind of conservatism we get behind.

Now, that said, let’s look at where Frum and LGF do indeed have a point.  In our image-driven post-modern culture there is no denying the power of stereotypes that form in the mind of the citizenry.  Simply put, cornball yee-haw-ism will get us nowhere.  I was listening to Sean Hannity’s radio show yesterday and he was attempting to bouy listeners’ spirits by exhorting them to come out to his Freedom Concert tour.  He excitedly listed the lineup, headlined by Lee Greenwood (have I ever stated for the record that I hate that “God Bless the USA” song nearly as badly as I hate John Lennon’s “Imagine”?) and Charlie Daniels.  Sorry, Sean, but that ain’t gonna cut it.  These are people who, while their hearts and minds are admirably inclined, do not generally put a super-fine point on the above-mentioned matters.

And a fine point is required.  Let’s give our scalpel a fresh sharpening and proceed. 

We’re always correct about everything here at BN, and we say unequivocally that abortion is wrong.  We also say that the phenomenon of homosexuality is some kind of  - brace yourselves, this is going to take a little digesting - crippling of normal, natural human sexuality.

What is unfortunate and leads to the kinds of pronouncements Frum and LGF are making is the undeniable fact that quite legitimate conservative problems with such matters as abortion and the treatment of homosexuality as normal does get mixed up with the wacko stuff like creationism and fundamentalism in general.  The radio show after mine on Saturday mornings is all about creationism.  A lot of the host’s guests are very commendable pro-life activists, but they serve the show’s agenda of saying that our culture’s devaluation of life has its roots in an embrace of evolution.

We have to take our internal debate to this level of exactitude, people.  For one thing, we began to see as this year unfolded indications of some demographic types that fly under the radar screen - rock and rollers, distinguished actors, a playwright or two and even the odd (I’ll be the first to admit it) jazz and blues guitarist and arts journalist like your present blogger - that want a place at the table of conservatism.  They will be turned offto some degree by either snobbery or yee-haw-ism.

I’m not saying anyone I’ve mentioned in this entire post should be denied such a place at the table.  All I say is, come prepared to sort this out with as much courage, clarity and comity as you can muster.

Quite by coincidence, today’s blogosphere offerings bring us two items on the same theme.  Mike S. Adams at Townhall tells the tale of the young woman who, only after being referred by a Christian counselor with religious porblems with the young woman’s lesbianism to a counselor who had no such problems and did a fine job according to the young woman, decided to sic the leviathan state on the Christian counselor.  Bookworm gives us an account of a similar situation involving a San Diego fertility clinic.

Bookworm does an admirably effective job of spelling out the distinction between situations in which market choices prevail and those in which monopolyy conditions set the parameters.

And for heaven’s sake, you didn’t croak because you had to drive to another office for your fertility test, okay?

For some reason, as thoughts have been rattling around in my head this morning, a theme has emerged, along the lines of putting on my amateur-anthropologist hat and ponderiing how it is that religion becomes an element of every society.  I know it’s often considered to be an institutionalized way for human beings to inquire into death, its meaning, and what might follow.  Something occurred to me today, though, that I think is worth sharing: It may also be seen as an attempt to get a handle on just what human nature is and how to over come it.

The whole concept of focusing on the now, the present moment, has, like so much else worth looking into, been bastardized and trivialized in our modern culture.  The New Age star du jour, Eckhardt Tolle, wrote a book a few years back called The Power of Now.  The pop-culture interest in the subject actually goes back a few decades, through Ram Dass’s first book in 1970, Be Here Now, and on back to Alan Watts’s Beat Zen, Square Zen.  But the notion of investigating the potential of now has a more serious pedigree; it forms the basis of Buddhism and Taoism.

The general idea is that all creation, all ongoing development of the universe, happens in the present moment.   Who you are, what the blades of grass constituting your lawn are, and for that matter, what the rock at the corner of the flower bed is, can only be defined completely in this infinitesimal pinpoint on the trajectory of all multiplicity.  What you were or what they were five minutes ago is merely the stuff of history.

I kind of think that’s why a lot of modes of spiritual inquiry, from New-Thought Christianity to Eastern thought to even the fluffiest forms of New Age-ism don’t have much to say about sin.  If there’s only this universe full of particles in motion and they are what they are in any given snapshot, where’s the record book of transgressions against any human being for which he or she will be called to account?

Now, if it’s all just a matter of where things stand during this now, and this now, and this now, why can’t the human race choose a now, a particular moment, and, with everybody on board, just collectively drop all its problematic baggage - the stuff like lust, cruelty, brutality,  greed, sloth, dishonesty - the stuff Western religion calls sin - as well as its anxiety and need to defend any number of things and its misplaced sense of what is valuable?  Just drop it all and wipe the slate clean and begin anew?

Is there something about time that causes what we call human nature to kick in and make that impossible? 

I think one reason we as a species could never pull that off is fear.  It’s, to coin a term, human nature to hold in reserve in some little corner of our minds the concern that someone somewhere would not be on board and our dropped guard would spell our demise.

So the parade goes on.  And permit yourself to kick this one around for a moment:  any given snapshot of the parade, any of these nows, depicts a set of conditions brought on by the previous choices of human beings, who as often as not cut moral corners that led to the unplesant, even horrifying, parts of that snapshot.  Now, any human being of any decency who has made such a choice - or, to put it differently, used his or her power of creation to bring about an unpleasant aspect of now - has, on some level, in however a minute degree, regret about having done so.  And since there’s no stopping the space-time continuum to wipe the slate clean, cranking it back up again, and starting fresh in the same old realm, some other form of relief for that regret is necessary if there is any kind of resolution to human existence. 

That brings us down to the question of whether you think there is any resolution to it or not.  If you think there’s not, there’s no point to your decency.

I may have not thought this through with perfect thoroughness, but it looks to me like the only other possibility is a sovereign creator outside space and time, a creator who can grant us forgiveness.  And that, of course, leads us back to the Western model for spirituality. 

That’s about as far as I’ve gotten in this current train of thought, but I feel like I’ve gained ground that was still in front of me before today.

Frank Turek’s latest Townhall column, “Jesus and the Case for War.”

The last few days have presented me with a confluence of ideas and developments which have made for some challenging sorting-out.

Let’s start with Little Green Footballs’ report on the squabble going on at National Review Online between one of its regular columnists and one of its guest contributors.  You’ll see if you read the LGF post and/or the linked NRO materials that Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal fits into the whole thing.

I’m inclined to agree with LGF and Derbyshire.  This looks like a sneaky way to try to get public education in this country to legitimize the idea that the earth was created in six 24-hour days. That just plain didn’t happen.  No less an apologist for conventional Christianity than C.S. Lewis characterizes the first two chapters of Genesis as a folk tale.

I know some creationists and they have an intricately worked out set of reasons why everything else about the Biblical narrative hinges in the actuality of a six-day creation and an actual man and woman named Adam and Eve and an actual serpent and apple.  I’d recount for you here what that cosmological line of reasoning is except that every time I try to remember what the ostensibly key parts of it are, they evaporate from my mind.

There’s a theology blog that I’ve been immersing myself in lately called Parchment and Pen.  A recent set of posts there has to do with defenses for and arguments against the doctrine of Sola Scriptura, that is, the idea that the Holy Bible is the lone authority for what a Christian needs to know about reality and where he fits into it.  This was a key point over which Luther broke with the Catholic Church, opening the way to Protestantism.

My problem for the last forty years with Sola Scriptura has been that so much of the Bible, such as the Genesis creation story screams allegory and metaphor, begs for interpretation.  Lake of fire, throne of judgement, trumpets and clouds of glory, church as bride, etc.  For years I’ve felt that a number of these things were so exquisitely perfect as poetic depictions of aspects of the human condition and humanity’s relationship to God that it made me cringe to see them taken literally.

My question for lo these many decades has been this:  If humankind’s knowledge of such things as physics, biology, geopgraphy, and even our species’ own ways of behaving and engaging the world, such as language and social formation keep advancing, why wouldn’t our knowledge of that which created us do likewise?  Put another way that runs the risk of sounding a bit heretical, why should this 66-book volume that was compiled millenia ago be the last word on the subject?

That said, I must here reiterate something I’ve gone into many times in BN posts on religion and spirituality.  Much of what has come down the pike in the last 40 years - not just the ridiculoulsy juvenile New Age fads, but even the more serious  attempts to find a postmodern spiritual approach strike me as atempts to skirt something about our condition that ain’t so comfortable to squarely face: the moral component of our choice-making function and the matter of accountability.  The more I’ve thought about the place of that aspect of it all, the more I’ve been drawn to look anew into conventional Christianity.

A few posts ago, I mentioned Oprah Winfrey’s having placed copies of Echart Tolle’s A New Earth on graduates’ seats when she gave the commencement address at Stanford.  I’ve looked through that book as well as copies of Tolle’s earlier works.  As far as I’m concerned, there’s nothing either groundbreaking nor horridly blasphemous about what he’s up to.  It’s a bit grandiose (”new Earth?” Oh, please) and there’s something a little suspect about a guy who doesn’t say more than he does about what he was doing up to the time of his supposed epiphany or enlightenment or whatever it was, and who co-opts the name of a medieval Christian mystic for his show-biz handle.  Still, the actual content of his tomes is mostly the same warmed-over amalgam of Christianity, Buddhism and generic nicey-nice that many another in the field is peddling.  All multiplicity ultimately boils down to oneness.  Get your ego out of the way and act out of “awakening” and compassion.  Tune your consciousness into the here and now.  It’s that odor that wafts off such espousings, that appeal to the girly-girl chit-chat, Upper East Side, arugula-and-mineral-water, self-congratulatory, feel-first-think-later vibe that has me curling my lip from the get-go.  As I say, Oprah digs this stuff.

It’s some kind of contribution to the human race’s conversation about spirit and meaning and reality, but, as I say, it’s woefully inadquate in addressing the matter of right and wrong.  Oh, he does acknowledge that there are certain objective facts of the two-plus-two-equals-four variety, but he says even these become clouded by attempts to defend them out of a need to be right.

Well, some things - and I don’t mean just mathematical equations - are right and wrong.  There’s pretty much worldwide consensus about things like lying, stealing, murder, cannibalism and bestiality, for instance.

The tricky thing, it’s starting to seem to me, is maeuvering through the minefield of claims to doctrinal, indeed basically philosophical, infallibility.  I think a good starting place for ferreting out Big Truths is the whether they make immediate sense or not.  That’s not the final destination, of course, but they ought to pass the hoss-sense smell test to warrant further investigation.

A lot of good it did for Rev. Wright to retire.

When looking for moral clarity, you can’t do better than Dennis Prager.  Today, he lays out the scope of magnitude of the California Supreme Court’s recent decision on gay “marriage.”

Crispin Sartwell on the cultural legacy of LSD.

David Stokes on MLK’s April 1967 sermon on Vietnam at the Riverside Church, and the sermon he was working on a year later when he died.

The Christian religion has a major challenge: the politically correct, candy-ass tendency within its midst.

http://www.townhall.com/blog/g/01d9afa6-85c1-4cf0-a0d7-982e1b7ee34f

I’ve been thinking about how I would have a discussion about all this with - ummm, let’s just say, any number of people who are in the inner circle of my life.  I think I would enter into it with this: ”That Jesus of Nazareth was arrested on a Thursday night while praying in the garden at Gesthemane and spent the next sixteen or so hours undergoing the most horrible torture and humiliation imaginable is an established historical fact.  So is the fact that on the following Sunday morning, his tomb was found empty and he was later found to be in the company of several of his disciples and followers.  It may take the human race the rest of its existence on this planet to completely get its brain around the significance of that, but one has to start with accepting and engaging it.  Anything less is mere fooling around.”

It’s one I’ve been having in my head all day.  Let’s label the participants A and B.

A: The thing that puts me off about conventional Christianity is this notion that I’m sullied by sin from the get-go.  That all humannkind is.  Orginal sin, Calvin’s doctrine of the Total Depravity of man, all that stuff.  I’m a pretty good guy.  On balance, I’m inclined toward good. I consciously strive to cultivate virtue within myself.  What is this sin business all about, anyway?  It looks to me like human behavior falls along a continuum from evil to good.  You just get the ones at the bad end of the spectrum to get with the program and stop being jerks.  That’s the end of the story, isn’t it?

B: What does the Bible have to say about how you should live?

A: Oh, for heaven’s sake.  Pun intended if you care to take it that way.

B: Just trying to answer your question about “this sin business.”

A: Alright, then.  Well, let’s see.  Here in Deuteronomy 5 is The Ten Commandments.  And in Deuteronomy 6 is The Great Commandment.  And here in Matthew 5 it says to love your enemies.  Here in 1 Corinthians 7 it says that if you can’t resist the urge to touch someone of the opposite gender, marry her or him and rule over each other’s bodies.  Hmmm.  Now I’m finding all kinds of places where it says to do this and not to do that.

B: And do you follow these various commandments, and admonishments to the letter?

A: No, certainly not.

B: How does that play out in your life?

A: Well, I think there’s a pretty direct correlation between that and the fact that sometimes I feel empty inside, alone, confused.

B: You have lots of friends and loved ones who care about you.  Could any of them give you perfect advice as to a way out of those feelings?

A: Well, no.  They fall prey to them, too.  In fact, everyone does.

B: So what kind of being could provide such guidance?  Have all your years of meditation and materially induced mystical states provided such guidance?

A: They have not.

B: How about God, as depicted in the Bible?

A: Well, dang it, nowhere in the Bible does it once and for all say, “In a nutshell, here is the essence of what or who God is, fully defined in the way that water is defined as two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen.”  This God of the Bible, you can’t see him!  It’s absurd to invest energy in communicating with a being no one has ever seen.

B: Moses saw him.  He conceived a baby with Mary.

A: Well, a lot of good that does the millions of us who have come down the pike in the thousands of years since.  How can I learn more about the nature of this God no one can actually see?

B: May I suggest this Bible that has figured so prominently in our conversation?  A good deal of it is in fact devoted to describing Him, providing indications of His nature.  Psalms is full of such stuff.  Rock and Redeemer, Most High who knows the number of hairs on your head.  Likewise the Gospels: a Father who loves you in spite of your waywardness.

A: But in what sense is this Bible the word of this God?  I mean, what did the inspiration that infused the humans who wrote it down - over the course of many centuries, I might add - look like?  What is the scientific explanation of how that happened?

B: You and I may not know the details of that, but there are only two possibilities: either they really were inspired by God, or they had some set of lesser, merely human motives - in other words, they were jiving us.

A: Ah, I still can’t take literally certain things.  I’m just not a fundamentalist.  The most glaring example of that is the six-day creation depicted in genesis.

B: Fine.  You’re in solid company.  C.S. Lewis doesn’t do creationism, either.  But does that get you out of either adhering or not adhering to the broad and consistent outline of what the Bible tells us about God and our relationship to Him?

A: No.  There is indeed a coherent story that is told throughout the course of the sixty-six books, even though they were written under disparate circumstances.  I’ve definitely thought enough about this to see that the New-Thought-there-is-no-sin-or-need-for-redemption denominations are glossing over what they want to in the Bible, and in some cases adding stuff to it.

B: Anything else still bugging you?

A: Well, the fact that there’s no way I can comply to the letter with all the laws and instructions God has handed us in this Bible.  By ten o’clock every morning of my life, I’ve taken his name in vain.  I cut all kinds of moral corners.  Not a day goes by that I don’t see some fellow human being of the female persuasion and think to myself, Man, what bliss she would be in the shower!

B: Again, you’re in good company.  There’s a few billion of us throughout history who are in the same boat.  Think about this: the only perfect person who ever existed suffered the full consequences of everything we’ve ever done.  We’ve been sort of sleazing along, kind of getting away with our rebellion against He who created us, in the sense that we rise to face another day, get our three squares and such.  That one perfect guy, though, on a Friday afternoon that, everywhere else in the world besides that hilltop at Calvary, proceeded much like any other Friday afternoon, took the full heat for us and made it all okay with The Big Guy.

A: Wow.  da–

B: Don’t, man.

In his Townhall column today, Paul Greenberg says that in fundamentalists’ insistence on taking every last word of the Bible literally, they diminish its stature as a deep, rich, towering work of literature.  He says it’s like reading Shakespeare for the plots only.  Great literature, he says, mines every aspect and nuance of human existence, and employs every tool of communication to do so.

Roger Kimball has characteristically insightful things to say about actor Will Smith’s remarks about Hitler to a Scottish newspaper.

The whole imbroglio revives for me a component of my ongoing quest to get at Unassailable Spiritual Truth: the nature of evil.  I went through a period during which I viewed it as misperception.  This was the notion that if the person embracing evil would just get his take on reality right, he would no longer harbor a desire to disrupt the Great Cosmic Balance.  That sort of seems to be where Smith (and, I think, Kimball) is coming from.  I’m now starting to skate over (how’s that for a winter metaphor?) to the view that there’s something intrinsic about it.  Still not willing to say that the references in the New Testament (Jesus, James) to the devil are more than metaphorical, because then you get into the whole array of questions about what kind of being can exist and not occupy geographically pinpointable space.  I do, though, think that not only for those who engage in petty cruelty (murderers with no ideological axe to grind, for instance), but those to whom Smith and Kimball are referring, those who advocate meanness in the service of a grand vision, cross a line on some kind of conscious level.  That is, they give in to an impulse, a cosmic suggestion, that has an existence unto itself.

Chuck Colson offers a concise and compelling declaration of just who Jesus Christ is in his Townhall column today.  Ultimate reality incarnated as a human being.

I do wish I’d come across a theological explanation of this notion of the total depravity of humankind, though.  Original sin, the Fall.  Don’t send me back to reread my Genesis.  What really happened?  And why do the little pamphlets say “Your works are as filthy rags before him?”  I don’t understand a cosmology in which one’s volitional inclination toward God wouldn’t be a good thing.  I guess I’m still hung up on this notion that the Great Scorecard is binary, that you either confess faith in the saving blood or you’re done for.

To harken back to what I said about the West in yesterday’s post, though, there’s no doubt that conventional Christianity brings real hope and a changed way of life to millions of people.  There are parts of the world that are becoming more Westernized, in that sense, than some places that have been central to Christendom for centuries.

I am having a nice Christmas Day so far.  Just had some killer coffee cake that one of Mrs. BN’s clients made. This afternoon I’ll curl up with Surrender Is Not An Option by John Bolton, the most memorable of my gifts.

I wish I could say that I was in an unmitigatedly Christmas Eve frame of mind.  It’s kind of odd, because throughout December, I have been feeling fittingly seasonal: equal parts festive, reflective, and open to truths only so far faintingly glimpsed at best.  Parties and gigs at night, scripture and C.S. Lewis in the mornings.

Today, though, something has emptied out  of me.  Maybe it’s this garbage weather.  (Perhps my very least favorite kind of day in the year is a cold, bare-trees winter day with no snow and an unsparingly bright, cloudless sky throwing everything into open relief.)  Maybe it’s the fact that I’ve already had my fellowship with those who mean the most to me.  (Well, except my wife, who is at the other end of the house right now, tidying up the kitchen.)  Maybe it’s all the physical stuff going on with me: acid reflux, eyes swollen from some kind of allergy.

I suspect it’s something deeper, though. 

I’ll cut to the chase.  I still don’t feel like a sinner in need of grace and therefore grateful for the birth of a human unlike any other, who sacrificed his mortal life that I might avoid Hell. 

Readers of BN posts under the category “Religion and Spirituality” know a bit about my progress in this area throughout my life: a childhood grounded in NCC-style mainline Protestantism (Presbyterian), high school immersion in Christian Science, college days spent in the lysergic trenches and serious study of Hinduism and Buddhism, some aimless years, a conversion to conservatism that included a spiritual component (in the form of a reawakened respect for the broad unfolding of Judeo-Christian tradition), and a sincere desire to see just how that tradition formed the foundation of this Western civilization that I love so much.

I hesitate to tackle this thing once again from the mystical-versus-revealed-religion angle.  It’s mainly still what I am indeed focused on, but it just seems to run the risk of taking things in a fluffy and inconsequential direction - and not just because of the way New Age-ism has co-opted so much of that discussion, but because I suspect that even in more serious pursuits of what we might broadly call Eastern approaches, there is something about West-aversion involved.

Still, there is something throughout even the unfolding of Christianity that reveals a dichotomy.  Origen, Meister Eckhardt and Tielhard on the one hand and Calvin, to employ shorthand for what I’m talking about, on the other.  Divine-spark-at-the-core-of-the-descernible-universe versus sovereign-God-in-a-Heaven-separate-from-creation.

If one puts his efforts of inquiry into the mystical side of the dichtomy, there is at least the hope of a direct experience of the divine.  When one goes the sovereign-God route, one is left offering prayers to a creator one will never see, at least in this realm.

Ah, say the sovereign-God Christians, that is the whole point of Jesus Christ.  The Lord of all once interjected himself into this plane, there were witnesses to that, and they scripturally documented it.  Through faith in that documentation, one can be sure that God is real.

Their account of what they saw and this being from whom they received these high teachings is not to be taken lightly.

It’s not like I dismiss the notion of sin out of hand.  One reason I’m no atheist is because, as I’ve had clarified for myself in countless arguments with nonbelievers, I can see no other explanation for the natural human aversion to what we commonly call moral violation and, indeed, revulsion and horror at diabolical and cruel commissions.  There is something in us setting up our moral preferences, and that is the basis of law and codes of behavior.

It’s just that I’m sitting here wondering, as afternoon prepares to give way to evening and I get ready to finalize the plates of finger food I’ll offer to guests, why I feel this sense of the deeper holiday sentiments and impulses that had been building for me since Thanksgiving having drained away over the course of the day.

I guess the place to start on the road back to a Christmas state is to be gentle with myself and ask the God whose basic existence I’m sure of to be likewise.  I mean no harm.  I want truth and love for all.

Maybe a state of emptiness is the perfect place from which to ask to be filled with the old wine.  In that case, I offer to you, Father, the only me have to offer, and ask you to look upon me kindly.  My desire to draw near has never been more sincere. 

The sequestered decade of the British imam’s daughter.

Didn’t get to see or hear Mitt Romney’s faith-and-freedom speech, but I just read it.  Still wiping the tears.  Astounding. 

I’d been leaning toward Fred, and, if he can overcome the perception-of-sleepiness thing, I still find him to have the most overall appeal.  But Mitt’s moving in on him in the BN way of looking at things.

I’m just plain blown away by his understanding of the sociopolitical climate in the colonies in the early 1770s, his awe at the depth of John Adams’s ponderings on the subject of liberty, his understanding of what is required in the way of a response to evil, his generous willingness to find a real inclination toward spirit in so many of humankind’s religious approaches, and, most of all, his forthright declaration that Jesus Christ is key to our reconciliation with our Creator.

You can talk landscaping crews all you want to.  This guy may be our very best bet against the totalitarian Freedom-Haters who foam at the mouth at the prospect of occupying the Oval Office.  He certainly has the vision, the intellectual chops and the moral bearing to handle the battle.

I just watched the slate of GOP presidential candidates at their debate in Florida field a question from a citizen about whether they take every word of the Bible literally.  It was interesting to watch the candidates who offered answers dance around the question and still strive to be forthright.  Even Huckabee pretty much said that certain passages and stories in the Christian holy scripture can be interpreted as allegory.  I did think he effectively brought that debate segment to closure by saying that we are still woefully short on compliance with the clear and simple teachings such as doing unto the least among us as we would to the Nazarene, and that the sticky points can wait.