Monday, December 31, 2007

another clunky poem

I met the canary of the coalmine
and, considering the health of his song,
the mine is safer than some people say
and the miners do know when to listen.

There are sparrows who think they're canaries
and there are owls who believe that their songs
should be the portent of the darkened sun
and a seeping of blood into the moon

but neither of these are the canary--
though their songs have a certain poetry
they think too much of the songs that they sing
and that their songs stop won't clear out the mine.

Sunday, December 23, 2007

Bremerton man erects Santa crucifix to protest commercialism at Xmas


Tuesday, December 18, 2007






Sunday, December 16, 2007










Saturday, December 15, 2007

a short rumination about the division of the kingdom of Israel



"What share do we have in David,
what part in Jesse's son?
To your tents, O Israel!
Look after your own house, O David!"
So the Israelites went home.







Friday, December 14, 2007

a clunky poem

So that he and his family would not wind up dead
All Elimelech’s house went to Moab for bread.
Naomi, Malon, and Chilion went with him
And left all the things they had known in Bethlehem
For the Lord had afflicted their home with a famine.
Now Isaac, ages before, had sensed the divine
Warning to not depart during the affliction.
Elimelech was of another disposition,
When wavering judges ruled over Israel;
And he had no father like Abraham to tell
Him, “God Himself will provide us our offering.”
Or of God’s promise and the decades of waiting;
Nor did he send his sons back to Judah for wives.
So his sons took the glances a Moabite gives.
There are no books that say what became of our friends
But we know most of them met some untimely ends
And Mara did not hide what she thought of her plight
She went out with blessing and returned from a blight.



natural or social selection??


Monday, December 10, 2007





Sunday, December 09, 2007

Stockhausen dead,,2224073,00.html



Friday, December 07, 2007

What!? Nasa made zero gravity guinea pig porn?








Tuesday, December 04, 2007

culture war as jihad aspiration?




Saturday, December 01, 2007

Schaeffer and Schaeffer part 2





Tuesday, November 27, 2007

down time and more down time


Friday, November 09, 2007

Schaeffer and Schaeffer

Not sure I take the article hook, line, and sinker but it would not surprise me that Francis Schaeffer was as conflicted as any of us. What drew me into his work was not the exposition of doctrine, which frankly now seems a bit simplistic fifteen to seventeen years after I read his famous trilogy; or even his assessment of the arts. It really is possibly he completely screwed up Kierkegaard, for instance. His failure to grasp the difference between atonality and polytonality is understandable.

But in the end what still appeals to me about the work he did is that he bothered ... and by that I mean AT ALL to not just "engage culture" the way his self-appointed or somewhat more literal disciples have, he actually immersed himself in it. He obviously enjoyed all of the arts and did so as a Christian. There were times when he decided he had to not like things for what might be dubbed "theologically correct" reasons. I have had no problem enjoying the works of some modernists Schaeffer felt obliged to dislike. I don't necessarily enjoy the content of all of Dali's paints but his style was something else.

But where I DO agree with the gist of the article is that the Schaeffer that inspired me is obviously not the same Schaeffer that has inspired Tim LaHaye and others who have been identified with the religious right-wing movement. Schaeffer pretty much WAS drafted into a culture war--yet Schaeffer had already warned people in his prime had this culture war been so completely abdicated by Christians fifty years earlier that the battle was not to reclaim the culture for the Christian faith but to understand the culture and speak to it, to even begin to be able to speak to it.

It seems paradoxical for Christians to talk about engaging the culture because the separatist impulse is so strong for some of us that we are trying to reach into the culture while simultaneously pulling ourselves out of it. And in order to do that we have to be some Christian Mr. Fantastic with ever elongating arms.

We aren't in a cultural milleu where Christianity as a culture movement defines much of anything except reactionary and vestigially progressive politics. By so utterly subordinating any sense of art to another goal we get what one of my professors would have called, unflinchingly, ersatz. And it's true, that's what a lot of "Christian" art is, and a lot of Christian "cultural engagement".

Well, I don't feel like blogging THAT badly. :) Sure, I have a couple of lengthy treatises I'm considering that probably won't even turn into very lengthy treatises at all. I'm toying with an examination of Takahashi's comedic staple, the embarrassment of attachment she pins on to all of her characters. And I am still interested in writing a potentially windy treatise on depictions of child abusive dynamics in Eureka Seven. Hey, I freely admit to being a total nerd.

Now, see, the reason I feel okay saying all this is because I really think that what Schaeffer did so well that most of his self-proclaimed heirs really stink at is studying culture with an eye for the Gospel, finding places where they are not only speaking "to" the world around them about what is merely a presuppositional grid of what is or isn't great art and great philosophy or theology, but to actually LEARN. I have learned some rather startling things about myself and people around me through some of the things I have watched and read in the last year, stuff I never would have expected. If Christians of a broadly evangelical stripe and a cultural warrior bent can stop attempting to war with the culture they might find a few snippets of it to quote to the Athenians. It's possible to go so far that direction as to assimilate but then as Koholeth put it in an entirely different setting, it is good to hold on to one and not let go of the other and the man who fears God will avoid all extremes.

Sunday, November 04, 2007

theological changes as an expression of personal change

Many, many years ago I was Arminian at an Assemblies of God church. I was persuaded that we had to have free will because if we did not how would God be just in punishing us for our sins? Over time I came to the observation that while we might be free at some level to choose SOMETHING, choosing Christ did not seem to be a strong part of that, and that even being in Christ one could still struggle plenty with sin. More to the point, if I am a slave to sin unless Christ makes me free then how free would I be to have chosen Christ if I was a slave to sin before He found me? And if I was a slave to sin before Christ found me then how would Christ make me free so that I could immediately choose, if I wished, to go back to sin? I began to wonder if the Calvinist side of things had something going for it.

But to say that I became a Calvinist because the propositional truths of the doctrines were truer and more scriptural is a pretty inadequate way of framing the conversion from one type of Christian theology to another. It would be far more accurate to say in retrospect that I changed horses mid-stream not because either one is an illegitimate expression of genuinely Christian thought but because I became acutely aware of a great failure on my part to appeciate Christ in my own life. This is why once I made the change from Arminianism to Calvinism I remained indifferent to what most of my convert to Calvinism friends obsessed about, proving that where they were formerly was wrong.

It is the common problem of the proselyte within Christendom, a tendency to blame the denomination I left for the spiritual problems of my own walk with Christ. It's a spectacularly obvious but easily missed distinction I have noticed with many an ex-Arminian. They will go through Scripture and claim that the only conclusion you can come to is that Calvinism is true. Yeah, well, if that were REALLY the case there wouldnt' be any Arminians at ALL would there? They'd have all stumbled on to the true inevitability of the Reformed understanding of Christ and gone with it. Yet it isn't so. Now I happen to be a Calvinist and a supralapsarian who holds to an amillenial partial preterist view (and that tentatively) but I see no reason to suppose that an Arminian somehow isn't reading exactly the same Bible any other Protestant (or even Catholic or Orthodox) Christian reads.

If converting from within one camp to another in Christianity helps you in your walk with Christ, cool. That's what I did when I switched from Arminianism to Calvinism. But I also hope that in the process of converting you don't forget that the body of Christ extends beyond the visible distinctions we have made within it and have then retroactively attributed to the sovereign hand and will of God. Despite my youthful opposition to any sort of ecumenism in principle I'll admit to being pretty ecumenical now. I am still pretty conservative in my theology but not quite so much in my politics and denominational distinctions are a rather low priority for me now.

The reason I am not likely to change denominational or doctrinal affiliations at this point is not bbecause I haven't done it in the past but because I know that doing so is not finally a matter of knowing Christ better (though it can help that process, obviously). And changing denominational links has not given me a lesser appreciation for where I have been. I still value the things I learned about Christ from my Arminian days and still have those blessings from Christ with me now. If I were to become Lutheran or Presbyterian over the next ten years I would not then regret the time I have been spending at the church I am at. I don't want to hold my ex-churches accountable for my own failure to seek and love Christ any more than I want to credit the church I am at with my love for and apprehension of Christ now. To do that would be to credit the Body with that which only the Head can provide. Certainly I appreciate the help I receive from my church but it takes discernment to know when the Church acts as Christ's body and when the Church is, well, the sinful yet to be redeemed Church.

If that were easy there wouldn't be so denominations across the world. But there were twelve tribes in Israel so if Israel is one nation with twelve tribes it's not that difficult for me to imagine that there are tribes within the Israel which has been redefined by Jesus. This is why most discussions of which branch of Christendom is the "one true Church" seem absurd to me, as it requires a willfully ignorant summarization of the history of God's people as being more uniform than it has ever been. Even within the time of the Mosaic covenant God added all kinds of people whom the Law would have prohibited from acceptance into God's people. In the same way, the body of Christ includes all kinds of people we Christians frequently don't want in the body because of issues like the nature of sacraments or the level of interaction our will does or doesn't have in bringing about either our justification or sanctification when the main thing that unites us is our king.

Friday, October 26, 2007

Uh, this just seems to constitute cruel and unusual punishment.


memory is a curious weapon

Memory is a curious weapon:
Whether in attack or defense it is
A weapon that wounds the one who wields it
as well as the one on whom it is used.

Thursday, October 25, 2007

the glow of fresh shrimp


Sunday, October 21, 2007

when different gods attack

Isaiah 10:20

Isaiah 19:22



Wednesday, October 17, 2007



a prelude to the poems of Wallace Stevens



Plus this article explains why Yoda is a moron. ;)

Would someone stop Lucas, please?


Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Genetically modified poplar trees being designed for soil cleaning



Deut 22:


11 Do not wear clothes of wool and linen woven together.




Monday, October 15, 2007




Sunday, October 14, 2007

honor as an extrinsic quality in biblical literature, a sloppy rumination

Luke 14: 7-11













editing music, part 4




Wednesday, October 10, 2007

the poem in the link is just too funny!


Sunday, October 07, 2007

music and writing










Wednesday, October 03, 2007

as an amillenial partial preterist I find this amusing


and these people are ... ?


Alcorn, Randy C. (who?)
Alexander, Shaun (who?)
Arterburn, Stephen (who?)
Beers, Ron (who?)
Blackaby, Henry T. (uh ...)
Brunstetter, Wanda E. (who?)
Chapman, Gary (uh ...)
Colbert, Don (no relation to Stephen, I assume)
Collins, Brandilyn (uh ...)
DeMoss, Nancy Leigh (who?)
Dungy, Tony (who?)
Eggerichs, Emerson (who?)
Eldredge, John (Wild at Heart dude, right?)
Ethridge, Shannon (uh ... )
Gregory, David (uh ...)
Heavilin, Marilyn (no idea)
Henderson, Dee (no idea)
Jeremiah, David (uh ... )
Kingsbury, Karen (who?)
Lewis, Beverly (uh ... )

McGraw, Robin (who?)
Meyer, Joyce (urm, can't say I'm a fan)
Moore, Beth (sounds familiar for reasons I don't recall)
Oke, Janette (who?)
Osteen, Joel (never bothered to investigate this guy)
Piper, Don (no relation to John I assume)
Rice, Helen Steiner (who?)
Rivers, Francine (uh ... )
Rosenberg, Joel C. (uh ... )
Shepherd, Sheri Rose (never heard of them)
Warren, Rick (heard of him, never read him)
Weaver, Joanna (who?)
Wick, Lori (who?)
Yancey, Philip (lighter reading but some okay stuff).



Monday, October 01, 2007

end of vacation





Saturday, September 22, 2007

a short gripe about academic theological debates

Specifically I'm annoyed with the persistence of the imparted versus imputed righteousness debate. Anyone who can't see why this is a false dichotomy must be a moron who doesn't remember the cumulative testimony of the Bible.

Here's why--if Jesus' righteousness is imputed to us then what is the means of that imputation? If we aren't saved then the imputation is meaningless and if we are not saved except by the leading and prompting of the Spirit then how does that work? Last I checked Jesus said he would return to the Father and the Comforter would be sent (i.e. imparted). This is particularly annoying to see coming from Reformed folks reacting to Catholic teaching because the sad truth is that if righteousness is not simultaneously imparted through the work of the Spirit and imputed on the basis of faith in Christ then if we don't have the both/and we have neither.

Not that polemicists on either side tend to be interested in highlighting that rather obvious observation. Certainly there are problems if we suppose that righteousness is primarily imparted if by this we mean that righteousness is imparted on the basis of criteria that can be independently obtained by humans. If we are not dead in our sins and not slaves to sin then on what basis could Jesus ever say that he who the Son makes free is free indeed? Obviously at that point if you could choose Jesus of your own ability Jesus wouldn't need to be your savior or set you free or make you alive when you have been dead in your sins.

On the other hand, no one seriously proposes within orthodox Christian thought that once you have Jesus' righteousness imputed to you that you can do whatever you want. Jude doesn't say for nothing that those who pervert the grace of God are devoid of the Spirit, let alone that despite saving a people out of Egypt that God destroyed those among Israel who did not believe. Covenant membership in God's people does not automatically insure salvation. It's a weird and bitterly funny historical irony that some Protestants seemed to reject Romish ideas of salvation through corporate membership only to reinvent the wheel themselves. The credobaptists might have been on to something but never mind that tangent.

It seems that just as it's crazy to separate Jesus' life, death, and resurrection (per Bonhoeffer's great exposition in Ethics) it seems equally crazy to separate impartation and imputation of righteousness. Why tell believers that they should pray in the Spirit or be full of the Spirit or not quench the Spirit if there is no impartational element of righteousness? Isn't that, well, odd?

This hardly means I don't have an appreciate for solid theological debate, just that lately I've seen some debates about things that some people think really matter. And I don't disagree but I disagree with how the whole framework of disagreement happens because it seems as though Christians have a tendency to invoke false dichotomies that Scripture doesn't attest to.

My favorite one would have to be the question of whether God exists inside of time or outside of time as if God couldn't exist inside and outside of time simultaneously. I mean, one God in three persons? How hard would it be for that God, assuming He exists, to exist inside and outside of time simultaneously. To really hammer the point with a silly phrase, is it so hard for God to exist inside of time and outside of time at the same time?

But I digress and I figure it's bed time, really. I might try to blog about other stuff later on. I've watched a few Japanese cartoons that I've alluded to on another on-line avenue. I might write about some of the admittedly esoteric/academic interests I've taken in anime that have personally appealed to me. If anyone is actually up for a rambling analysis of how Eureka Seven [Psalm of the Planets] depicts child abuse I might throw that up here some time in the future ... but then I said I'd analyze Koshkin's flute/guitar sonata at some point and THAT hasn't happened yet. And I still feel like a shmuck for not writing more about the Corona Guitar Kvartet's great CD of Tamulionis.

I've just had enough stuff going on and have tried to have something like a social life that I admit I haven't written nearly as much as i kept telling myself I would. And the truth is that in addition to all this otherwise unmentioned stuff I've got some musical contacts I've very excited about lately. No details here but I am hoping to cultivate some contacts in the music scene that may eventually lead to my sonatas getting played, which would be a barrel of monkeys worth of fun. Okay, forget that with the exception of Mojo Jojo I don't like monkeys, that was a bad figure of speech and was probably a mixed metaphor.

Yeah, and that's not even counting that I haven't gotten around to doing that writing on Jude I meant to get around to. Feh, I'm not usually a goal-oriented person by temperament so it feels weird to think that I have bitten off what seems to be more than I can chew in terms of what I would like to do. It's just easier to stick with biblical literature and composing lately. Blogging about stuff is fun but I have to pace myself.

Thursday, September 13, 2007

down time





Monday, August 27, 2007

the blogging of cultural criticism as displacement

Sometimes I wonder if there's something to be said for blogs critical of the evils of society as a form of displacement. As a pastor I've met once put it, you can hear a lot of fat Baptist preachers complaining about the intemperence others have in the use of alcohol or sex. Perhaps this is just as indicative of a tendency to have an extravorted approach to blogging.

Not necessarily, of course, but every once in a while I come across blogs and on-line journals where enough time is spent looking out at the world and finding it wanting that I wonder what people are doing in their own lives to make their lot better, or if they can. Not that we can't all appreciate a bad review, as Anton Ego puts it in Ratatouille, because bad reviews are often easy to write and just as often fun to read. In fact the staple of criticism would not be what it is, we would not recognize the word "criticism" to even signify what, colloquially, we all understand it to mean if we all thought criticism was about liking every new restaurant in town.

But to defend the new, well, that's tough, and not half so tough as defending the old and demonstrating how the best of the new preserves what is good in the old. As a musician I know that nothing is going to replace the ability to (and inevitable need for!) committing a score to paper the old fashioned way. But this doesn't mean we can't use every technological tool at our disposal to make the job easier. The technology of making music is never necessarily the enemy of creativity, our own minds are all the enemy we ever need! Our own lack of committment to the craft of being an artist and actually working on what we think we're into is our greatest obstacle.

To some degree the reason I don't blog much now is because I have enough to do in my own life I have other things to do. It's not that I don't have an interest in blogging about Jude and non-canonical literature but personal commitments can't be ignored. But personal commitments can also be the way to forsake the artistic vocation, the thing I can use to postpone working on a project I could have finished a year ago if I had the mind to. Personal loyalties can be the facade we embrace because our heart is not really in being an artist at all. At times like this it could have been tempting in the past to listen to the radio and hear something I didn't like and think to myself that it doesn't make sense why so and so is on the radio writing that crap and getting it published. I don't listen to the radio.

Withdrawing from popular culture doesn't have to be complete and it doesn't have to signify a lack of artistic relevance. Withdrawing from an engagement of the world of the arts can be selective. If Atanas Ourkouzounov has a new CD coming out or someone plays Nikita Koshkin's guitar concerto (please, SOMEONE do it and put it on CD) then I'll get those discs. I'm still pining for Shin-ichi Fukuda's next CD of Takemitsu and I have it on fairly accurate authority the d'Amore Duo has a CD coming down the pike eventually. But as to bands on the radio, meh, whatever. An artist has to engage in the arts that will help him or her continue in his own craft and the rest can go hang. This means that I can subsist on old Stevie Wonder without having to get his latest album. It means Vespertine will suffice until two or three friends tell me I "should" get Volta or anything Bjork has done more recently.

As the Preacher puts it in Ecclesiastes, there is really nothing new under the sun so keeping up with the latest fads in the arts hardly means you're artistically relevant. Artistic and cultural relevance, in a way, is irrelevant. If there is such a thing as truth and it also is relatively unchanging and steady from generation to generation (which I, obviously, do believe) then I don't need to keep up with what the various Joneses are doing. As a fellow once told me in my college days, you have to be careful not to use your own reading as a validation for or a rationale for your writing. You can't make your own work as an artist contingent on your own consumption of cultural artifacts. I hardly ever write poetry any more but as a composer I think I've managed to learn this lesson. The artist will keep working regardless of the direction of the creative tide. I'm trusting that Aimee Mann knows what she's talking about when she says that you need to keep working on your art as though no one were ever going to listen, or is listening, because if you're actually any good eventually someone WILL listen.

Which is why, in case it hasn't been apparent, the few times I use this blog I try to focus almost entirely on what I WANT people to read or see or hear or engage. If few people join me that's just the nature of blogging.

If I were to settle into complaining about all the things that I don't like or don't interest me it would feel like a betrayal of such artistic vocation as I have. It would be like Peter turning to Jesus and pointing to the beloved disciple and saying, "What about him?" Well, so what about him? He's going to write the fourth Gospel, a few epistles, and an apocalypse. Peter gets to write a couple of epistles (or at least have his name attached to him, an excurses I will merely allude to) and be a major source of information for another gospel, according to church tradition.

Which is to say that Peter gets stuck wondering what others will do when the opportunity to follow Christ himself is freely given. I could make bitching my mistress or my artistic muse and I even know of whole genres of literature and music devoted to such things. It's too tempting already!

Seeing how Christians sometimes (no, often) engage "culture war" issues it seems as though we too often lament in others what is finally a weakness in ourselves that we would rather not confront. Sure, public schools can be lame but is it also possible Christian parents have so abdicated their own role in education they don't realize that six hours in a public school can't really compete in the end with filial bonds, regardless of what Christians like to quote from secular pundits in the past? Sometimes what Christians consider realism can be a lack of faith and I don't merely speak hypothetically on this subject, even if I'm not going to belabor the point with a personal illustration. If you've read this blog for any length of time you know I'm not prone to using personal illustrations like that very often.

Soemtimes I think secular liberals may have had a point in proposing that a lot of conservative Christians 20 years ago felt disenfranchised and that they lacked the pathways to power. I'm not sure any secular liberals are complaining about that now! But it's possible conservative Christians of the theological and cultural persuasion (as opposed to those who are merely in the former camp) still feel that they do not have the cultural weight or respect in society they ought to have. Biblically speaking, should they, ever?

It seems the answer is basically 'no'. We've done enough damage to the cause of the actual Gospel by using the good news of the culture war. I don't want revival in America so that America can be a great nation again. If the United States collapses in the next fifty years that would really suck, don't get me wrong, but faith in Christ means that if that happens I can write my own personal jeremiad about the fall of a great nation if I feel like it. Sometimes I feel as though Christians can be obsessed with coveting things they don't need and spiritualizing it by invoking something like a culture war. Did the apostles need society on their side in the culture war to transform the world? Last I heard they didn't.

It can certainly seem as though things are worse now than they were in the past but the Preacher doesn't merely warn against us buying into the idea that something that is on the radio now is new, but also warns us that nostalgia is foolish. There's no point in wishing for long-gone days that were better than what we have now because it is not from wisdom we ask where those old days were. I don't want to go back to a time when America was great because when America was great the kind of interracial marriage that brought me into the world wouldn't have happened much even where I live. The musical past I would have grown up into would not have had the richness of the musical past I can see now, and I would have died at birth, more to the point. Sometimes it seems that the single greatest challenge a Christian can face is simply to display some gratitude.

Well, withstanding my own many problems of character and circumstance I'm glad to live in the time in which I live. I don't begrudge the existence of TV or computers or things that Christians seem to think will rot the brain because none of those things rot the brain better than one's own sinful thought life. You don't have to watch South Park to have evil thoughts. You don't have to listen to secular music. You don't have to read works by atheists. All you need are the sinful desires of your own heart and the religious gloss you put on them is more damning than any use of four letter words.

It can be tempting for a guy to sit down and find fault with the rest of the world when his own life has its problems caused by his own frailty, vanity, and weakness. This is why it seems most helpful to point to what is good and beautiful in the world, as Sam puts it in those movies (never could finish the books so I'll try to accentuate the positive here). Bemoaning the loss of what is beautiful is not the same as affirming their value even as they merely seem lost. Even when the psalmist bewails the loss of any good things in society he comforts himself with this knowledge, that the greatest good can never be lost and that this is the basis of singing new songs to the Lord.

Of course the song doesn't have to be new in the sense of keeping up with the times or being in the latest style and it won't be new in terms of its theme but that, too, is not especially important. Especially for an artist living today there is quite literally nothing truly new you can contribute to the great big world of the arts that spans millenia and the entire globe. If I can find and purchase a CD of Chinese folk music in Seattle and I do it then I have access to cultural artifacts that were literally inconceivable to a person in my place in society a century ago, let alone two centuries ago.

We live in interesting times but we have fun complaining about how interesting those times are. As an old song puts it, these are the days of miracles and wonders, but Christians seem uninterested in this too much of the time. As a comic book geek I find it funny and fascinating that the technology to make an actual Doctor Octopus apparatus work in real life may be a generation away. Scientific research is finding possibilities for treating Alzheimer's disease. I just can't help but wonder if some cranky Christians getting into wars against political correctness or the culture war against traditional values are not so much bemoaning the death of a society that has been post-Christian for even longer than Francis Schaeffer said it was may really just be bemoaning their own death without realizing it.

Are we complaining that the godless culture is not letting us engage issues or are we complaining that our lives have no hope and no direction because we have not come to a point in our lives where we have become all the things we dreamed we would be? I'm in my early 30s and I think about how many people I know are married and having kids and think about the college dreams of becoming an artist or a writer or a politician or a professor or an athlete or a businessman. All these dreams we embraced in our teens and twenties can evaporate in the midst of our actual lives and we can secretly become immensely bitter without even realizing it. We can blame the flow of life for these things but in a way it seems useless because if we want to do something, even if there are obstacles in the way and prices to be paid, we live in a society in which it is possible.

But if we make our goal as, say, an artist, to write a hit single and live off those earnings for the rest of our days is the goal in that to be an artist or to get the hit single? I'd like to have it both ways, obviously, but the artist part has to come first. We live in a media culture that covers the silver bullet fired from the gun of someone who, as the culture might retroactively put it, got lucky. Or the person firing the shot had so many connections as to have a path laid out for them, in which case we can ask if that lucky shot was really all that they wanted. The number of celebrities bemoaning the price of their fame suggests it's often not what they really wanted and we non-celebs, no matter how much we persuade ourselves otherwise, can easily find ourselves coveting that which was not asked for by anyone.

Whoever loves money never has money enough, whoever loves power never has enough of it. This is why unbelievers have some justifiable fear of politically activist Christians. They understand a biblical truth much better than we usually do, and they have millenia of history to appeal to as to why they should fear what so many Christians think would be a sign of a great blessing from Jesus. It might seem like that but it might actually be a judgment from the Lord for seeking to make His kingdom of this world and not the age to come.

I think about this often because I'm an amateur composer and an amateur guitarist who would one day like my music to be performed, recorded, and published. Am I doing all this stuff because I want "success" or whatever passes for that? Sure, but if I don't love the simple process of creating things day in and day out and set aside time for it then do I deserve any success? It just seems as though if the work of being an artist is not at some fundamental level its own reward then you're just not embarking into the arts to be an artist. After half my life so far has come and gone (i.e. I've been playing guitar and making music for sixteen or seventeen years) I don't think that I'm in a place where I'm some teenager who thinks that because he picked up a guitar two months ago and has written a song that he's going to be the next big rock star who can use that celebrity as a bully pulpit to plug whatever causes seem to need winning that day.

I have heard about great artists who got screwed over by management in days of yore. Ellington got ripped off a few times. A lot of blues players were paid in booze and not money. What did these great musicians do? They kept writing their music even after they got ripped off time and again. Why? Well, because if you keep writing it doesn't matter how many times you get ripped off by someone if you can keep cranking out the music faster than they can rip you off. Ideally I don't ever want to be ripped off but it also feels like, on the flip side, there's something sad to be said about a guy defending the integrity of his work so much no one listens to it. Sometimes artistic integrity comes at the price of artistic death. Who outside the esoteric circles of classical music nerds knows who Pierre Boulez is? And, seriously, who cares? He's a great conductor but at his highest level of acclaim average joe doesn't care.

But that's obviously not what Pierre Boulez gets out of bed every morning and it isn't why any of us should, either.

Now I have let it be known here that I like Japanese cartoons. I've named a few of the ones I really like and something that has been on my mind lately is that even though a lot of Japanese cartoons are steeped in pantheism and other views I frankly don't subscribe to there is something beautiful about Japanese cartoons and the best stories I've come across in them. I sometimes feel I have learned more through Miyazaki's love of nature and willingness to see good things in people than I have from preachers on Christian radio warning about this or that over the years. It hardly means I endorse the spiritual world espoused by the film My Neighbor Totoro, and that Miyazaki has to imagine a hypothetical world in which world war 2 didn't happen speaks to severe problems in his ideas.

And yet, and yet there is a sense of wonder at the beauty of the world we live in, as broken and destructive as it so often is, that I can pick up in some of the anime I've seen that reminds me that without the help of the Holy Spirit every man, woman, and child on earth is liable to take one true observation and take it so far as to have it stop being anything like truth because it is not held in the context of the whole. The world Christ has created is both uglier and more beautiful than we can appreciate. Sometimes I feel like we Christians are all secret Ivan Karamazovs who talk about how we have no problem with God but cannot accept His world. We are grateful to God for all the things we think God should get credit for and then find things that God has included in our world that aren't what we like and then decide to not be thankful, even though Scripture says that we should be thankful in, um, everything. This isn't necessarily a call to thank God for really awful stuff like getting stabbed or raped or robbed, obviously, but a call to recognize that the world, as steeped as it is in our sin, still reflects on the goodness of Christ. We are Jewish law experts who are constantly needing the reminder of who our neighbor is.

Saturday, August 18, 2007

or not ... yet


Saturday, August 11, 2007

maybe revisiting Jude here in a bit

I'll see about possibly collecting my thoughts about Jude down the line, and also see about maybe using this blog as a starting point for a project in examining how authors of biblical texts use non-canonical literature throughout the New Testament. So, yeah, it means I may dust off my Jeffrey Burton Russell books if I can find them and look at how the Gospel writers appropriate ideas that aren't technically laid out in the documents themselves. That could take quite a bit of time, actually. Then there's the Cretan poet and one of the poets, so to speak, Paul cites to the Athenians.

The greatest line I've heard in a movie in years

"Risking my life to save people I hate for reasons I don't quite understand."

It's not just the line but who says it. After 18 years there's a reason it's still one of the greatest shows ever made.

One of the things that I still appreciate about The Simpsons is that while there's always that element of satire the central character, Homer Simpson, is a macrocosm in microcosm of the best and worst aspects of Americans. It's not too far off to say that Homer Simpson has no pride whatsoever and that this is true in both the best and worst senses of the word "pride". It's something to ponder in more detail but not right now as I should get some sleep.

Saturday, August 04, 2007

I can't help but post a link to this!


Monday, July 30, 2007

composing little things can be fun



Sunday, July 29, 2007

Duo Guitarinet







The label is Dux, by the way.

Monday, July 23, 2007

the curiosity of a personal what-if apologetic





I promise I will blog again




Sunday, July 22, 2007



























