Holy smokes. Beloved is not remotely a Christ figure. Claiming as much amounts to literary malpractice.
So far, Potts’ Forgiveness: An Alternative Account seems beautiful…and spurious.
“I just don’t picture myself as a secretary.”
— Carla, substitutes and budget secretary at Delta, to Heather, other secretary at Delta, standing in the Delta office considering a recent College Township job opening for a secretary
Name a movie in which there’s a disagreement between child and parents and the parents turn out to have been unequivocally right.
I’ll wait.
The difficulty in answering this question is representative of a major cultural problem. Filial piety is miles better than whatever it is we’re doing now (just-try-to-keep-the-kids-safe-and-happy-ism?), but it stands zero chance of ever working if it gets zero support from culture machines.
Crucifixes > crosses.
Idea for a novel: Upon His arrest, Jesus goes ahead and does appeal to the Father to send twelve legions of angels. Then what happens?
In response to Brad East, Tyler Hummel, and a baptism I attended today, I feel compelled to say that I, for one, currently detect zero indication—in scripture as well as in observation—that there is magic at work in baptism and the Eucharist. That is precisely why they need to be attended by high ceremony.
O, for hymnody that combines awe, piety, and moral effort.
Surely, Psalm twenty and three shall follow me all the days of my life. ✏️ 🎤 🎵
Just re-listened to: Glo (2000) by Delirious? The technicolor final feather in the caps of this Sussaxon anthemic rock worship band whose early records, more than those of DC Talk or Jars, served as the heart of my enjoyment of CCM from 1994–2002. Delirious? released four more studio albums after this, but none of those hit the spot for me, which implies that my continued enjoyment of their early records may be a matter of nostalgia. But on Glo there’s a combination of the Muse-like sonic pleasures of their stellar 1999 outing Mezzamorphis with the get-really-into-it instrumental worship jams—which, as far as I was concerned, these guys invented—of 1996’s Live & In the Can that made and probably still makes Glo a favorite of mine.
My clipping will be lost on the round trip to Tiny ✏️ 🎤 🎵
Just re-listened to: Like A Rose (2013) by Ashley Monroe. A throwback country-pop gem, alternating well between touching and funny.
Faith, hope, and love can all be misguided.
Hope is:
- an imagined, desired future that you feel could come to pass and which prompts you to act accordingly,
- the supposed bringer of that future, or
- the feeling that accompanies imagining that future
Fear is the undesired version of the same.
I see colors in the dark ✏️ 🎤 🎵
Revive us, O Lord.
But this time, do it right. ✏️ 🎤 🎵
Just listened to: Leonardo da Vinci: La musique secrète (2019) performed by Doulce Mémoire under the direction of Denis Raisin Dadre. Seventy-eight minutes of exquisite Renaissance chamber music selected as an expression of Raisin Dadre’s musicological reflection on ten paintings of Leonardo.
I especially like me the sound of some lira da braccio, an instrument which sounds like a slightly more primordial Italian take on the Swedish nyckelharpa. When nobility is built into the very timbre of the instrument, it’s hard to go wrong.
Bonus points for to whoever decided to allow little to no gap between the tracks on this album, a decision that in my limited experience listening to classical recordings is an interest-propelling rarity.
Karl Barth and Warren Buffet look like fraternal twins and they were/are both polyamorous? It’s all too much.
Just re-listened to: I Want To See Pulaski At Night (2013) by Andrew Bird. Pretty. Mostly just layers of strings loops surrounding the one song in the middle. Thus I’m not sure it’d stand up well to fully attentive listening. But still, quite pretty.
Just watched: A Fish Called Wanda (1988), written and directed by Charles Crichton and John Cleese. It took some time for me to warm up to the humor (or maybe it was the humor itself that took some time to warm up). But once warm, the (admittedly rather broad) comedy came in buckets. All three leads whose lines were written for laughs do it excellently: Cleese does sympathetic pathetic very believably. Kline played a “live-action Daffy Duck”: Annoying at first, then annoying and hilarious. And he won an Oscar for it. Palin manages to play a severe stutterer without, as it seemed to me anyway, playing the stutter itself for laughs. (The stutter does serve as a small plot device sometimes, and it does enable at least one very funny scene in which it is a miracle Cleese and Palin don’t bust out laughing. But mostly it serves to develop sympathy for the character. If the stutter is ever the butt of a joke, it’s a mean joke told by another character and makes you like Palin’s character...
// read full article →Listening to Peter Gabriels’s “Big Time” with the volume cranked up is an excellent way to extract and maintain one’s hold on the verve created by a winning streak but satirically strip out the attendant bigheadedness.
Questions are good.
Answers are better. ✏️ 🎤 🎵
I have concluded that:
- hell as traditionally rendered is biblically indefensible and morally reprehensible,
- everyone will make it to the afterlife party eventually,
- believing in the Trinity and the virgin birth are not dogma but options, albeit ones I believe,
- monogamous same-sex marriage is a societal good,
- the universe is 13.8 billion years old,
- all biblical talk that seems to point to the Second Coming has already been fulfilled in the Transfiguration, the Cross, the Resurrection, the destruction of the Second Temple, and the conversion of the Roman Empire, and/or will be fulfilled for each of us when we die,
- abortion should be legal during some of pregnancy, and
- the Bible contains factual errors,
yet I still feel like a conservative Christian. It probably has something to do with me maintaining in my Christianity a robust vertical dimension. God is real, personal, and knowable. It seems so many who hold positions similar to those I outlined above jettison theology altogether—or at least any theology they feel comfortable sharing or acting on in any social context—limiting their observable Christianity to horizontal, that is, human-to-human relationships.
As such, it’s often hard to feel at home anywhere.
Just listened to: Matthias Goerne’s and Leif Ove Andsnes’ recording of Robert Schumann’s Liederkreis, op. 24 & Kernerlieder op.35 on Harmonia Mundi (2019).
I’m new to lieder. But it’s more than apparent that Schumann was a master at writing them and Goerne a master at singing them. Add to this a world-famous pianist recorded at roughly the same volume level as Goerne’s baritone, and you have yourself a superlative 53-minute recital of German Romantic art songs.
Familiarity breeds laxity.
By this I mean that in my relationships with my wife and kids, I am not consistently stanced to apply the same effort toward socially sensitive demeanor and diction that I do in my relationships with friends, colleagues, and acquaintances. My habitus outside the family is more disciplined and sympathetic than that within. There’s a certain alertness and natural effort to fit with other people that seems to arise only outside the comfortable confines of home.
I’d like to reimport that stance back into my home life. Sure, home is for relaxation. But I sense in myself a slackness of love. Carla, Sullivan, and Éa deserve better.