Just listened to: two appealing recordings of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony (1824), mostly while lollygagging in Spring Creek Park in the late evening, both upon David Hurwitz’s recommendation:
The latter is like in that episode Star Trek: The Next Generation where Data claims people say his violin playing is technically flawless but lacks soul. To describe the Vänskä exactly like that would be to overstate things—otherwise, I wouldn’t have liked the recording at all—but its primary appeals are its tightness of execution and the clarity and dynamic range of the recording itself. You’re basically hearing the sheet music in brilliant lucidity. With Beethoven, that’s not a bad thing.
The former is a volcanic ripsnorter of a performance whose only drawbacks are the audibility of recording hiss during the quiet parts and the inaudibility of the alto soloist admist her cohort.
My son just revived our old Tivoli Model CD and gave it to my daughter as a birthday present along with a pair of cheapo computer speakers. I’m doubly gratified: He used his skills to bless her, and she is now interested in my CD collection.
Just finished reading: Solito (2022) by Javier Zamora. I am dubious about most movie, music, and book recommendations from friends. Only book recommendations from Josh and, now, after reading this book, maybe book recommendations from Ruth, will I take without hesitation. (Although she did recommend The Night Watchman, which wasn’t for me.)
Solito is a thirtysomething Salvadoran immigrant’s memoir of his illegal migration to California at the age of 9. It’s a hard travelogue told in the historical present tense and in the voice of his 9-year-old self. It tempts me to go find and read a bunch of think pieces so I can tell myself I have an educated opinion about borders and immigration policy.
But no, I won’t concern myself with things to big for me, although I will say that the cats-and-mice act at the Mexican border just seems so very silly. I do hope multiple someones better positioned than me to make a difference in this arena read this book. And me, I’ll just recommend donating to...
If I were granted a do-over for the whole establish-a-household-and-rear-children thing, I’d equip my house with a corded landline and then bar cellphones from anywhere indoors other than the mudroom.
Just finished watching “What’s in your bucket?,” a sermon given by Greg Davidson Laszakovits this past Sunday at University Baptist & Brethren Church, because I was out of town but want to drink from the same wells as fellow UBBCers when I’m away. Its point is simple: In light of James 2:14-20, your bucket list ought to contain goals of service.
I write about it neither because it was an amazing piece of oratory, although it was perfectly fine, nor because it changed my life. I’m not even necessarily recommending anybody else watch it, although it is only fifteen minutes long. Instead, I write about it because:
of how well it jibes with a drumbeat I’ve been trying to sound since my period of religious doubt in 2015–2016 and how happy it makes me to hear this sort of thing from a pulpit: What God really wants from us is good fruits and the good works that lead to them. Moral performance, or at least earnest moral effort. Following Jesus is first a moral demand, not an affective...
Saw this. Did you find that Luke’s approach was different from other gospel writers?
self:
Yes, although this video makes a soteriological mountain out of a textual molehill. In Luke, the temple curtain is torn literally the verse immediately before Jesus is reported to breathe his last. Besides, elsewhere in Mark, repentance is quite explicitly tied to forgiveness in Mark: That’s how Mark starts.
They say this piece is one of the pinnacles of sacred Western classical. They are right. It is spaciously majestic. It features two of my favorite modes (Dorian and Mixolydian). It’s not overweighted with Beethovian repetition, about which I have mixed feelings, usually depending on how I feel about the charm of the theme. (For example, the theme of the first movement of the Fifth Symphony? Unplesantly, incessantly intense. “Waldstein”’s first-movement theme. Pure charm.)
Plus, it’s anything but solemn. (Apparently, “solemn” in musical settings means “lengthy...
As I recall, on the basis of a misinterpretation of Romans 4:17b (“calleth those things which be not as though they were”), Charismatics have been trumpeting fake news as a disciplined, God-mandated spiritual practice for decades. This makes them unusually comfortable with and skilled at newspeak and doublethink—about current events and moral performance both—as well as prone to interpreting everything they claim and hear as being of heavenly import.
This helps me understand part of our current national political scene.
A way to actionably summarize part of my June 1 post: If it’s not for the sake of someone else, then do it in thanksgiving. If I stick that two-part rule for behavior, I’ll be doing everything in love.
“For others.” As I was concerned last night about whether my inclination to stay home on a Saturday night instead of socializing—not that I had an invitation—and in a more general sense about whether my current stance of what seems to me to social passivity, at least relatively speaking, as well as my choosing to read books or listen to recorded music by myself is OK, I went to bed pondering how to rephrase “Let everything you do be done in love” to be more incisively helpful in making daily decisions about what to do.
“For others” is the thought I woke up to this morning, as in, “Let everything you do be for others.” I have since expanded that slightly for clarity to “for the sake of others.” Let everything you do be done for the sake of others.
Staying home last night in particular fits this criterion just fine: I’ve been underslept since hearing about Frank’s cancer last Tuesday, and I’m well aware that sensitivity to suboptimal sleep volume is my behavioral Achilles’ heel. Going to...
The distinction I’ve been seeking between the kind of amends the Father has declared no longer necessary by the cross of Christ and the kind of amends still required may be well captured by calling the former “symbolic” and the latter “proving.” Apologies, gifts, animal sacrifices, and Jesus’ cross are symbolic. That doesn’t mean symbolic amends aren’t necessary: It is impossible to prove repentance immediately. Hence, a token that’s symbolic of our repentance often must be extended in order to proceed, and hence, our impulse to make cultic sacrifices to God is a good instinct.
But God desires to skip such symbolic amends, which run too high a risk of masking an absence of true repentance, preferring instead to get straight to the heart of matters. He wants us to live lives characterized by earnest attempts at obedience to the law of love—amends that proving, not merely suggestive, of repentance.
The problem of divine hiddenness doesn’t bite as much when you consider that despite God’s hiddenness, over seventy percent of the world’s population is probably monotheistic, pluriform monotheistic, or henotheistic.
“Pay close attention to yourself and to the teaching; persevere in these things, for as you do this you will save both yourself and those who hear you” (1 Timothy 4:16).
The only way this makes sense is if salvation is transformation by the renewing of your mind (and all that flows from that).
“Law is laid down not for an upright person, but for…slave-dealers…“ (1 Timothy 1:9a,10b). How have I never seen this before? At least some followers of Christ have been opposed to slave trade since at least near the beginning?
Just finished reading: The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World (2024) by Christine Rosen. Its main idea is that it’s inadvisable to allow the ascendance of smartphones and similarly attention-sucking entertainment and communication technologies to extinguish the non-mediated experiences they often replace, all of which have benefits. The threatened experiences she covers are:
face-to-face communication,
working with your hands,
waiting, idleness, and boredom,
interpreting our emotions with our own senses,
expressing our emotions with our own bodies,
direct intake of pleasures (travel, art, sex, cooking, eating) instead of their simulacra or attendant digitalia (constant communication with one’s existing social network while traveling, repros, pornography, and cooking shows),
serendipity, and
a sense of place.
This is one of those reads that’s preaching to the choir. But I’m in that choir, and I like it. It prepares me to make my case with evidence. Here are...
There’s nothing I can write about Beethoven’s great works that’ll be any great addition to the conversation. I think I’ll just stop trying, sit, and continue listening slack-jawed.