The Simple Dollar » The Little Things Do Matter: Twelve Little Hacks That Add Up To A Lot

The Simple Dollar » The Little Things Do Matter: Twelve Little Hacks That Add Up To A Lot

12 Things I Learned By 42 That I Wish I Knew At 22 | The Wisdom Journal

12 Things I Learned By 42 That I Wish I Knew At 22 | The Wisdom Journal

Possible Democratic voters prefer MCCAIN??

So, I've heard a couple of times of possible Democratic voters who are vaguely dissatisfied with the field of Democratic candidates stating that they'll vote for McCain, as if he's the closest Republican candidate.

What the heck??

Are these people paying attention? Are they real Democrats? How many Democratic voters are crypto-Republicans, NIMBY Democrats? People (you) need to engage in the issues and get traction and realize that if you don't cough up some sort of sacrifice, this country (and world) will continue its slide into evil. You know that thing about evil flourishing when good people stand by.

Sorry. I don't feel like cleaning that up. Where are Amos and Micah when you need them?

Getting Tired of Post-

So, I heard the term "post-racial" used to describe Democratic party politics on NPR today.

I have to say, I'm tired of "post-" this and "neo-" that.

Cisco's Big Switch - Forbes.com

Cisco's Big Switch - Forbes.com

The return of the Glass House. Will Microsoft be the new IBM, or will its competitors use this development to edge them out? Are we always destined for "good enough", where "good enough" is usually far short of what could be?

The world is destroying itself

Just read an essay in the October Harper's on "disaster capitalism". It's basically about the systematic pitting of the haves against the have-nots.

I just heard back-to-back news stories on the BBC (radio) of the violence in Kenya (which I think is regarded as Africa's most "civilized" nation, apart from South Africa) and violence in India between Hindu nationalists and Christians.

And I'm thinking of ethnic "cleansing" (as if) in places around the world.

And I'm wondering if that sort of thing will ever to this nation (the United States). My next-door neighbors are a couple in which he is white and she is Indian (or Pakistani, maybe).

Do we (the world) have to go through this? Is the Age of Enlightenment over? Or has it simply not reached into every corner of the world yet?

Are evil times coming? What sort of world will my children live in?

What should I do in prep for this? Build relationships with people like me (white)? Establish a better relationship with God/Jesus and prepare to follow in His footsteps, meaning: I should be ready to sacrifice myself for what's right?

Prayer in church last Sunday

Went to church with my parents last Sunday. Presbyterian church in a conservative-ish middle-class city in North Carolina (no, they're not all conservative and middle-class, but this one is).

This was the prayer that Sunday, and I like it so much I'm putting it in here:

O God of such truth as sweeps away all lies, of such grace as shrivels all excuses, come now to find us for we have lost ourselves in a shuffle of disguises and the rattle of empty words. We withdraw in arrogance, hide in timidity, disappear in fear rather than reaching out in hope, engaging in humility, risking in faith. Let your mercy move in and through us now, freeing us to love honesty [honestly?], live joyfully, and claim the audacious revolution of Christ and your kingdom. Amen.

Myths of postmodernity and the Emergent Church

Myths of postmodernity and the Emergent Church

Ok, commentses as I reads.

He sez:

If we are trying to figure out postmodernity, we really have only the first part. Who truly can stand outside of the context?

I sez: People in the 3rd world, baby. "Postmodernism" is just that: post modern. Take a look at Uganda or Peru or Appalachia.


He sez:

The Postmodern response is, “Exactly, and we like it that way!”

I sez: Hmm, can we distinguish between "I like" and "I'm comfortable"? I think we would all like things to be less chaotic and more predictable, but maybe some can find a way to function and make progress in chaos.

Actually, come to think of it, I think there might be a famous Rudyard Kipling poem about this. Something about "...then you'll be a man, my son." Kind of off-putting, but isn't that about making progress in chaos? And isn't it from the 19th century?

He sez:

Myth: One can become a Postmodern.

Reality: You can try, but it is difficult.

I sez: I don't know why he put that in there. I totally believe one can "become" postmodern. If postmodernism flows from modernism, then we can become postmodern. I understand the rest of his text about checking off checkboxes and following procedures. As long as you want to be Zen, you can't be. So? Does that mean you can't achieve it? No.



The rest of the thing is actually pretty good, and, no, I'm not damning with faint praise.

reyes-chow :: FAITH: Can I BE any more rambling, I don't know, well maybe I can but, oh I don't know

Made me laugh. :)

reyes-chow :: FAITH: Can I BE any more rambling, I don't know, well maybe I can but, oh I don't know

reyes-chow :: FAITH: Number 1 reason why PC(USA) churches are dying a slow, painful, sad, drawn-out, death and other happy thoughts

Okey dokey.... Good post, imo. I'm sure there are similar thinkers in other denominations. I wonder where they are?

reyes-chow :: FAITH: Number 1 reason why PC(USA) churches are dying a slow, painful, sad, drawn-out, death and other happy thoughts

Birthday of a Preacher Man: Elmer Gantry Turns 80

From an article in the Wall Street Journal. I think this essay is so good, I'm lifting it in its entirety.

By WILFRED M. MCCLAY
December 28, 2007; Page W13

You probably didn't notice it, but that old rogue Elmer Gantry turned 80 this year. A surprising thought, perhaps, given what a fixture Sinclair Lewis's 1927 fictional portrait of a bogus and amoral itinerant Midwestern preacher has become in both our speech and our imaginations. Was there really a time when we didn't have Elmer to kick around -- or to kick others with? It is hard to imagine. No less than the camp meetings on the frontier or the Scopes Trial or the stadium revivals of Billy Graham, the character Elmer Gantry has shaped the world's impressions of American religion.

Burt Lancaster as Elmer Gantry in the 1960 movie.

A crude, profane, hard-drinking and oversexed football player from Paris, Kan., Gantry, using his histrionic gifts and his "arousing barytone," latched onto the ministry because of the power it gave him over others. The book related Gantry's picaresque wanderings from one ministry to another, always looking out for the main chance, always complicating his life with amorous dalliances, always ready to beat a hasty retreat, always emerging from his scrapes with ambitions undimmed.

His creator was a gloomy alcoholic Midwesterner with a personal life just as rootless and messy as Gantry's. But Lewis (1885-1951) gave us a cultural icon whose name is invoked every time there is a scandal involving sex, money and a preacher.

Not many writers can claim similar success in adding to our storehouse of powerful archetypes -- or our cupboard of easy clichés. But this is the chief consolation for a literary career that has otherwise faded into obscurity. Lewis's reputation peaked in 1930, when he became the first American to win the Nobel Prize in literature. With this award and the invention of two cultural icons -- Gantry and the crass businessman George F. Babbitt -- Lewis has a secure place in the history books. But that does not mean that, except as cultural artifacts, his books are much worth reading today.

The textbooks assure us that Lewis is one of the great satirists of modern American life, telling hard truths about the shallowness and hypocrisy of Middle America through a series of important novels -- from "Main Street" (1920) to "Babbitt" (1922), "Arrowsmith" (1925), "Elmer Gantry" and "Dodsworth" (1929). There is some truth to this. But the adult reader is likely to tire quickly of Lewis. His descriptions of even the simplest scenes are permeated with snobbishness and juvenile editorializing; his plots are studded with absurd and implausible twists. And his characters are as simplistic as those in comic books. They sometimes change, but they do not grow or develop. And there is no larger view behind his criticism, no sense of what kind of world Lewis would favor over the gimcrack one that he loathed so much but could not stop writing about.

In short, there is plenty of obsession but almost none of the marks of high novelistic craftsmanship in Lewis's books, particularly "Elmer Gantry." As Rebecca West wrote in a scathing contemporary review of the novel, Lewis's satire fell short because he did not "possess, at least in the world of the imagination, the quality the lack of which he is deriding in others." In other words, the narrowness he described was as much his own as that of the people he depicted. He lacked vision and generosity of spirit precisely because he was still fighting the intramural battles of his native world.

That is not to say that he could not write vividly. "Elmer Gantry," observed sociologists Jeffrey K. Hadden and Anson Shupe, "was as loathsome a character as has ever been born in the mind of an American writer." Completely cynical, without a shred of genuine religious faith or natural piety, Lewis's Gantry is an engine of social-climbing ambition. By the book's conclusion he has made himself into "Dr. Gantry," a major national religious leader whose sermons are broadcast on the radio and who holds an influential pastorate in New York. Even at the end, he barely escapes blackmail by a secretary with whom he has had an affair. But the book closes with Gantry's congregation loudly affirming his innocence and his promise that "We shall yet make these United States a moral nation!" -- even as he is taking note of a new singer in the choir, "a girl with charming ankles and lively eyes, with whom he would certainly have to become well acquainted."

With such gibes directed against not only the sawdust trail but the clergy in general, small wonder that "Elmer Gantry" was so controversial (literally banned in Boston) and such a strong seller (175,000 copies in the first six weeks). It was a deliberate affront to the pious. Lewis had, after all, dedicated the book to the acidulous skeptic H.L. Mencken, "with profound admiration," a clear indication that the book was an intervention in the culture wars of its day. But even its most admiring readers found little to praise in it as a work of literature.

For that reason, the movie version of "Elmer Gantry," made in 1960 and starring Burt Lancaster, was forced to take radical liberties. Director Richard Brooks's screenplay extracted a coherent story from Lewis's sprawling mess, shifting around countless details and slashing away about two-thirds of the text. It invented a significant role for George F. Babbitt himself, transformed another character into a complex agnostic newspaper editor who is both friend and foil to Gantry, and presented established clergymen as men of decency and principle, something that Lewis was loath to do.

It also complicated the character of Gantry, making him a more intriguing human being, a mixture of charlatanism and generosity, of hypocrisy and genuine faith, of self-centeredness and loyalty, of lust and love. The movie also provides development of his character -- all the way up to the conclusion, when a fire engulfs the revival hall, killing scores of the faithful, including Gantry's preaching partner (and inamorata) Sharon Falconer. In the end we see him, seemingly a changed man, walking away from the ruins and quoting Paul's First Epistle to the Corinthians: "When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things."

We cannot tell what he was walking away from, or putting away. Was it revivalistic showmanship? Or religion in general? Or merely that phase of his life? The ambiguity reflects the moral seriousness with which the movie ends -- a notable contrast to the book's flippant and cynical conclusion and a more fitting basis for us to reflect on the meaning of Elmer's 80th year. Sinclair Lewis created a character larger and more interesting than he knew. You will have to look beyond his book to see it.

Mr. McClay is a humanities professor at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.

Tough calls in transplant case - Los Angeles Times

Tough calls in transplant case - Los Angeles Times

Some interesting quotes in here.

ABC News: Tragedy for Teen After Surgery Denied

ABC News: Tragedy for Teen After Surgery Denied

I wonder, if in future cases that are really tough to decide, insurance co.'s will have a doc on the team whose job it is to make the best-informed possible decision about whether the insurance co. will pay for the treatment or not.

I also wonder what the rate of alcoholism among such docs will be.

How to Really Love a Child

(Found in a child psychologist's office.)

You will always have the poor

So, everybody knows that part where Jesus says "You will always have the poor." But, did you know it's also present in the Old Testament? Deut. 15:11:

Since there will never cease to be some in need on the earth, I therefore command you, ‘Open your hand to the poor and needy neighbour in your land.’

Good Psalms

So, I've run across some good psalms in my Bible study, and I should capture 'em here for future reference (and for any other lost (or otherwise temporarily bewildered and/or detouring) souls out there who might benefit) .

• Psalm 51, for when you've done something bad and you feel bad about it.
• Psalm 55, for when you've been betrayed by somebody you trusted.
• Psalm 107, for several categories of being lost.
• Psalm 22 is pretty good, too.
  

And finally, the best one I know, reserved for the end, break glass in case of emergency, use judiciously:

• Psalm 77, for those long, dark, sleepless nights.
  

AP Wire | 12/26/2006 | Military deaths in Iraq exceed 9/11 toll

AP Wire | 12/26/2006 | Military deaths in Iraq exceed 9/11 toll

Quote from the story:

"The president believes that every life is precious and he grieves for each one that is lost," deputy White House press secretary Scott Stanzel said Tuesday.

So, I'm thinking... western military deaths are probably the smallest fraction of deaths in this situation, compared to enemy combatant deaths and civilian deaths. I don't care so much about enemy combatant deaths, but civilian deaths is a little bit different.

It's hard to get an accurate count of Iraqi civilian deaths, but I bet it's pretty darn high. If we subtract out the number of Iraqis that would have died under the old regime, I bet it still far exceeds the number of people killed on 9/11.

So, we, as a nation, have answered violence with overwhelming violence. We responded in anger to an attack, and look where it's gotten us.

Lesson: next time, take a deep breath and get the facts right. And, if you do go in, plan for an after-victory program. We are the world's policemen. Like any New York City cop, we have to treat everybody with a certain minimal amount of civility.

Filioque Controversy

Filioque Controversy

Looks interesting. Part of the split between Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches.

Neo Culpa 2

btw, I heard on NPR that the Iraq Study Group may recommend more troops be sent to Iraq (along w/engaging in dialog w/Iran and Syria).

And I also heard recently that some general (current or recently retired) felt that we needed twice as many troops in Iraq to stabilize the country. I understand we currently have upwards of 120,000 troops there now.

Anybody remember Eric Shinseki getting fired for telling Rumsfeld we'd need 300,000 troops to go to Iraq?

(I should find some links for all this, I suppose.)

Ok, here's one: http://blogs.usatoday.com/ondeadline/2006/11/abizaid_dont_im.html

Neo Culpa

Hmm. Where's Wolfowitz in all this? I sorta thought this whole thing was his baby. The author of this article doesn't mention him. The other neo-cons don't mention him.

Is the author asleep? What kind of magazine is Vanity Fair?

Are the neo-cons purposely neglecting to mention him?

Will the full article in January explain all this?