Thoughts on the Blogosphere

I've been traveling a lot the last week on vacation and have not been able to keep up on my reading. So I'm a little behind but wanted to comment on an interesting article I just read in the "Ideas" section of Sunday's Boston Globe with the title, "Lost in the Blogosphere."

The author, Sven Birkerts, is concerned with the effects of the blogosphere on literary culture. He notes that in the last several years newspapers like the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, and even the Boston Globe have all cut back on book reviews on their pages. When the Atlanta Journal-Constitution eliminated the editor for book reviews in favor of wire service reviews, it caught people's attention.

Embedded in the article are a couple of paragraphs that I thought particularly insightful and reminded me of Philip Rieff's thoughts in his classic book, The Triumph of the Therapeutic, and his discussion on the function of culture and it's regulating and boundary setting function. Birkets writes

My impulse is to argue that if the Web at large is the old Freudian "polymorphous perverse," that libidinally undifferentiated miasma of yearnings and gratifications, unbounded and free, then culture itself--what we have been calling "culture" at least since the Enlightenment--is he emergent maturity that constrains unbounded freedom in the interest of mattering.
But this mattering requires the existence of a common ground, a shared set of traditions--a center which is the collectively known picture of private and public life as set out by artists and thinkers, and discussed and debated not just by everyone with an opinion, but also most effectively by the self-constituted group of those who have made it their purpose to do so. Arbiters, critics...reviewers.
The blogosphere, I would argue, works in the opposite direction. There are arbiers aplenty...but the very nature of the blogosphere is proliferation and dispersal; it is centrifugal and represents a fundamental reversal of the norms of print culture.

In a culture that increasingly worships the sovereign self and rejects any kind of "authority," I wonder how most people will receive Birket's argument As a lover of print, I found the article compelling. What do you think?

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Thought for the Day

If we offer our ultimate loyalty to the political community and its goods, we suppress the desire fro God that marks the deepest reaches of our humanity.
--Gilbert Meilaender, The Way That Leads There

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Thought for the Day

What oxygen is to the lungs, such is hope to the meaning of life.
--Emil Brunner

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Sunday's Prayer

O Lord my God, to you and your service I devote myself, body, soul, and spirit. Fill my memory with the record of your mighty works; enlighten my understanding with the light of your Holy Spirit; and may all the desires of my heart and will center in what you would have me do. Make me an instrument of your salvation for the people entrusted to my care, and let me by my life and speaking set forth your true and living Word. Be always with me in carrying out the duties of my salvation; in praises heighten my love and gratitude; in speaking of You give me readiness of thought and expression; and grant that, by the clearness and brightness of your holy Word, all the world may be drawn to your blessed kingdom. All this I ask for the sake of your Son, my Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
--The Divine Hours

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Saturday's Poem

Madeleine L'Engle is not only an award winning author of more than 50 books, she is also a very fine poet. I am currently reading through her collected poems, and want to share a part of one that I find not only clever, but true. It's title is, "Testament."

O God
I will do thy will.
I will
to do thy will.

How can my will
will to do thy will?
If I will
to know thy will
then I fall on my own will.
How can I will
to love or obey?
My very willing vars the way.
Willingness becomes self-will

...

Help me to lose my will.
Each day
let my will die
so will I
be born.
New born will I live
willingly lovingly
and will
will be no more

will be thine
O God
if thou will. (The Ordering of Love, 21-22)

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Thought for the Day

Because our turning toward happiness is a blind seeking, we are, whenever happiness comes our way, the recipients of something unforeseen, something unforeseeable, and therefore not subject to planning and intention. Happiness is essentially a gift; we are not the forgers of our own felicity.
--Josef Pieper

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What Lies Ahead

The New York Times had an article today with the title "A Thaw in Investment Prospects for Sex-Related Businesses? Maybe." Apparently some business people are hopeful that there is a lot more money to be made through pornography and sex-related business.

The author of the article, Matt Richtel, informs us that whereas over the past ten years sex-related businesses have not had the ear of venture capitalists, a possible change is in the air. He writes, P. Holt Gardiner, a partner of Ackrell Capital, an investment bank, "that investors were intrigued that the digital era is permitting a range of new distribution models--from the Internet to digital television--that are creating many opportunities to profit from making and delivering pornographic content...Investor reticence about the sex industry is changing notably..."

According to a former hedge fund manager, Francis Koenig, and now the CEO of AdultVest, an investment banking company that focuses on pornography, "Accessibility breeds acceptance." Remember that pithy phrase. I think he is correct and that is not good news for what lies ahead...

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Thought for the Day

Faith embraces itself and the doubt about itself.
--Paul Tillich

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Home Again--Momentarily

We returned home last evening after a brief but wonderful time at Mohonk Mountain House. My blood pressure drops the moment we turn onto the grounds because I find it not only incredibly beautiful, but serene as well. While the past three days were jam-packed with activities like hiking, golfing, tennis, running, and eating (you have to do the all of the others so that you can enjoy the eating and not gain weight big time), I normally get a lot of reading done as well. And I generally try to write a poem or two while I am vacationing there. Actually, about eight or so years ago as I was becoming interested in poetry, I went to a poetry workshop there that helped motivate me to take the of risk actually writing poetry.

For the next two weeks I will be on vacation. While I will attempt to keep up on my blog, I suspect that my ability to do so will remain spotty. We actually return to Mohonk for about 10 day on August 3rd, so we will have a good chance to unwind and enjoy its beauty .

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Thought for the Day

Art addresses us in the fullness of our being--simultaneously speaking to our intellect, emotions,
intuition, imagination, memory and physical senses. There are some truths about life that can be expressed only as stories or songs or images.
--Dana Gioia, Commencement Address at Stanford University, June 17, 2007

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Thought for the Day

Constant kindness can accomplish much. As the sun makes ice melt, kindness causes misunderstanding, mistrust and hostility to evaporate.
--Albert Schweitzer

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Heading Out

For the next several days my family is heading out to Mohonk Mountain House. We first visited about twelve years ago and have spent time there every year since. It is a beautiful resort in the Hudson Valley in the Shawangunk (you try to pronounce the name) Mountains. It is a great place to unwind and slow down for me. I always take a stack of books and do a lot of reading there. I'm not sure if I will be able to blog for the next couple of days, but will give it the old college try.

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Thought for the Day

Inspiration is the act of drawing up a chair to the writing desk.
--Anonymous

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Prayer for the Day

Give to your Church, O God, a bold vision and a daring charity, a refreshed wisdom and a courteous understanding, that the eternal message of your Son may be acclaimed as the good news of the age; through him who makes all things new, even Jesus Christ our Lord
--The Daily Office

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Saturday's Poem

I am involved in a writing group in which we share poems, essays, and other occasional things we write for the purpose of improving our writing skills. Sometimes we share whimsical writing to insure that we keep humor alive and well in our group. After reading several articles about DNA, and some of the new discoveries about "Junk DNA" Margi Goetz wrote the following poem.

Swim in my Gene Pool

Come and swim in my gene pool--
it's usually fun.
Blond hair, blue eyes,
and skin that gets crisp when

out too long in the sun.
I'm not saying my genes
are better than yours,
we know it's all junk anyway.

It we could take off our genes
and be just you and me
maybe all of that stuff
wouldn't get in our way and

you could swim in my gene pool--
the water's just fine.
And when we get tired of
splashing around,

we'll put on our genes
and share cheese and wine--
there are no cholesterol problems
in my gene pool!

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Thought for the Day

He who has imagination without learning has wings but no feet.
--French Proverb

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Harry Potter

I have faithfully read all of the Harry Potter books and signed up with Barnes and Noble last winter to have them send it to me on the release date. Yesterday I received an email from them informing me that it is on the way! The only major problem that I foresee is that the rest of my family is going to get to it before I do.

For those of you who may have missed it, Matt Aucoin, whose family joined our church this past year and who will be a senior at Medfield High School, had an essay in last Sunday's Boston Globe. If you haven't read it, I encourage you to go to the Globe's website and read the article. I thought that it was not only well-written, but very interesting.

I was wondering if there are any other Harry Potter fans out there?

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Thought for the Day

No one can bar the road to truth, and to advance its cause I'm ready to accept even death.
--Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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Thought for the Day

Kindness has converted more sinners than zeal, eloquence, or learning.
--Frederick W. Faber

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Seen Any Chimeras Lately?

I found the article in the Op-Ed section of yesterday's Boston Globe, The Chimera Question by Vivek Ramaswamy, a recent graduate of Harvard pretty frightening. A chimera, a human-animal hybrid, has been present in science fiction for some time. You might be surprised to learn that chimeras are no longer the fanciful invention of science fiction writers.

Ramaswamy informs us that "Unbenownst to most Americans, today the creation of human-animal chimeras represents a valuable experimental tool that could revolutionize science and medicine." The author informs us that some of the greatest potential advances of creating chimeras lay in the area of neuroscience. Scientists at Stanford have already created a mouse that has some human cells as part of its brain.

Without the understanding of humans as being spiritual beings, the ethical limits of what science is allowed to do I think will almost assuredly lead to terrible results. I think that people of all faiths need to be intimately involved in what is going on and not leaving it up to the scientists nor the professional ethicists or we may well live a world that is even scarier than science fiction.

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Thought for the Day

To speak kindly does not hurt the tongue.
--French Proverb

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Thought for the Day

Patience is the companion of wisdom.
--St. Augustine

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The Monday Morning Quarterback

In yesterday's sermon I focused on the nature of spirituality, particularly Christian spirituality. My own experience is that spiritual and spirituality are used indiscriminately in our culture and that they means pretty much what you want them to mean.

I argued that there is no such thing as a "generic" spirituality which I think is a common assumption. I quoted Robbert Webber from his very fine book, Divine Embrace: "All spiritualities are based on a story. You have to know the story of a particular religion to understand its spirituality" (14). The Enlightenment tried to reduce all religions into a single essence. If we could get rid of the offensive particularities of each religion, it was thought, we could get to the truth which all religions share. The problem is that when you apply this reductionistic approach to religion, you end up throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Spiritualities emerge out of their religious story, whether or not the story is considered part of organized religion or not. And just like there is no generic animal, there is no generic religion or spirituality.

As Christians, our spirituality is fundamentally, in Webber's words, God's embrace of us and our embrace of God. We need to live out of this story which means that we need to know this story. The grand sweep of the Christian story is: creation, fall, covenant, incarnation, crucifixion, resurrection, recreation, the new heaven and the new earth. Webber writes,

Christian spirituality...is God's passionate embrace of us; our passionate embrace of God. These two aspects of Christian spirituality are like the two sides of a coin--inextricably linked together, unable to exist apart. One one side we find the divine initiative, referring to what God does to make us spiritual. On the other side we find our response, referring to our reception of the union [our mystical union with god accomplished by Jesus Christ through the Spirit.] These two sides of a single coin tell us that God makes us spiritual, and we live the spiritual life (16).

Christian spirituality is not fundamentally about the self and what the self experiences and feels, but about God, and what God is doing and wants to do in our lives. Many spiritualities focus on the self and the self's experiences. In my estimation, Christian spirituality has tended to incorporate the self-focused spirituality that is everywhere present in our society.

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Thought for the Day

Christianity is most powerful when it is fearless about truth.
--Darryl Tippens, Pilgrim Heart

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Prayer for the Day

Dear Jesus, help us to spread your fragrance everywhere we go. Flood our souls with your spirit and life. Penetrate and possess our whole being so utterly that our lives may only be a radiance of yours. Shine through us, and be so in us, that every soul we come in contact with may feel your presence in our soul. Let them look up and see no longer us but only Jesus! Stay with us, and then we shall begin to shine as you shine; so to share as to be a light to others; the light, O Jesus, will be all from you, none of it will be ours; it will be you, shining on others through us. Let us preach you without preaching, not by words but by our example, by the catching force, the sympathetic influence of what we do, the evident fullness of the love our hearts bear to you.
--Cardinal Newman (Prayed daily by Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity)

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Saturday's Poem

I am slowly working my way through Scott Cairns book of poems, Compass of Affection. He is a Christian who weaves his faith into his poems subtly much of the time and sometimes more directly. I wanted to share a few stanzas from his poem, "Possible Answers to Prayer," (91) which I read this past week and found the ending very bracing. Take a moment and meditate on it.

Your petitions--though they continue to bear
just the one signature--have been duly recorded.
your anxieties--despite their constant,

relatively narrow scope and inadvertent
entertainment value--nonetheless serve
to bring your person vividly to mind.

....

Your angers, your zeal, your lipsmackingly
righteous indignation toward the many
whose habits and sympathies offend you--

these must burn away before you'll apprehend
how near I am, with what fervor I adore
precisely these, the several who rouse your passion.

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Thought for the Day

Justice without force is powerless; force without justice is tyrannical.
--Blaise Pascal

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Tour de France

Over the last 10 to 15 years I have enjoyed following the Tour de France. Some years ago we were actually touring parts of France ourselves during the Tour de France. Our French hosts tried to take us to a point where the Tour was passing on one very hot day, but unfortunately the bikers were a head of schedule and we were a tad late, so that all we experienced was a big traffic jam as people were leaving the town.

With all of the doping scandals and disqualifications that have occurred as a result, I have, sadly, lost interest in it. This is the first year in a long time that I have not looked forward to getting the morning paper and seeing who is in first and how the course is going. I really don't know the names of any of the front riders and frankly I have forgotten to even look at the standings in the morning paper.

I wonder how others feel about the Tour this year and if you are as interested in it as you have been in the past.

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Thought for the Day

If thou thinkest twice before thou speakest once, thou wilt speak twice the better for it.
--William Penn

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Flash Forward

The sermon this week has the title, "What's Your Story?" and the texts are Psalm 105:1-6, I Corinthians 15:1-5, John 3:16,17. As I have mentioned on a number of occasions in sermons and in conversations, the word spirituality appears everywhere. But what does it mean?

In the field of psychology religion and spirituality were seen as a big negative during the last century, but somewhere in the late 70's that began to change. Now "being spiritual" is seen as a good thing, and many people think of themselves as spiritual but not religious. Religions are bad, but spirituality is good. In our current climate all spiritualities are of equal value, just so long as one "floats your boat." I find the current usage almost meaningless, but I don't have an alternative word to use.

So in Sunday's sermon I want to explore this "in" term and see how the Christian faith intersects it and what a genuine Christian spirituality might look like.

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Thought for the Day

Nothing will content him who is not content with a little.
--Greek Proverb

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Thoughts on the Pope's Statement about the Church

The Boston Globe had an article today on the Pope's latest document saying that the Roman Catholic Church provides the only true path to salvation and that all other churches are defective or not true churches.

I was saddened to see that he had done this. I have had great respect for Pope John XXIII who called the the second Vatican Council and who referred to Protestant's as "separated brethren." Clearly, in my opinion, this is a step backward. As the article notes, the World Alliance of Reformed Churches put out a statement saying, "It makes us question whether we are indeed praying together for Christian unity...It makes us question the seriousness with which the Roman Catholic Church takes its dialogues with the reformed family and other families of the church."

I would suggest that you visit Scot McKnight's blog about his latest statement. I think that he has some interesting thoughts about it and he includes some verbatim parts of the statement. What do you think about the Pope's statement and do you think this will significantly impact ecumenical dialogue?

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Thought for the Day

When things are steep, remember to stay level-headed.
--Horace

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Einstein & Faith

I finally got around to reading an excerpt from the new biography on Einstein by Walter Isaacson that was in the April 16, 2007 issue of Time. As many others do, I find Einstein a fascinating person especially in what he believe about God.

Einstein grew up in a non-practicing Jewish family, and actually attended a Roman Catholic school when he was young. Around 12 years old, though, he jettisoned religious faith. However, he couldn't not be impressed by the orderliness and mystery of the universe and so ended up with a kind of Spinozan faith in a kind of Deistic god that orders the whole universe including human beings. He believed in causal determinism and at one point said, "Human beings in their thinking, feeling and acting are not free but are as causally bound as the stars in their motions." On the other hand, he did hold people accountable for their actions even though his intellectual position didn't support this.

Unlike atheists like Freud and Bertrand Russell who made fun of those who believed in God, Einstein tended to criticize the atheists. He said, "What separates me from most so-called atheists is a feeling of utter humility toward the unattainable secrets of the harmony of the cosmos." One of his more famous quotations is, "The situation may be expressed by an image: science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind."

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Thought for the Day

The wishbone will never replace the backbone.
--Will Henry

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God and Country

I read an interesting article in yesterday's Globe, God and Country by Charles Marsh, a professor of religion at the University of Virginia. He criticizes evangelicals mainly but also includes Christians of all flavors who mix up God and Country, for their uncritical support of Bush's policies especially concerning the war in Iraq.

Referring to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Marsh believes the American church has greatly compromised itself. He writes,

Like Bonhoeffer, I fear that the gospel has been humiliated in our time. But if this has happened, it is not because the message--the good news that God loves us unconditionally in Jesus Christ, that we are freed and forgiven in God's amazing grace--has changed...The gospel has been humiliated because too many American Christians have decided that there are m,ore important things to talk about. We would rather talk about our country, our values, our troops, and our way of life...

What do you think about what he says?

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The Monday Morning Quarterback

In yesterday's sermon entitled, "Discipleship Diet," I worked with the extended biblical metaphor of hungering for God and for God's word. Just as we God has made us to hunger for physical nourishment, God has made us to hunger for spiritual nourishment. But our appetite for God can go astray even as our physical appetite can go astray.

One of the ways that we can feed ourselves on God's word is through the ancient practice of Lectio Divina, Divine Reading. There are four aspects of lectio divina: lectio (reading), meditatio (meditating), oratio (praying), and contemplatio, (contemplating). The process is not linear, one can move back and forth between the four parts. One of the things that scholar Eugene Peterson points out is that contemplatio "means submitting to the biblical revelation, taking it within ourselves, and the living it unpretentiously, without fanfare. Contemplation means living what we read not wasting any of it or hoarding any of it, but using it up in living...(Eat This Book, 112-114). The European monk, of the 12th century, Guido the Second, wrote, "Reading, as it were, puts the solid food into our mouths, meditation chews it and breaks it down, prayer obtains the flavour of it and contemplation is the very sweetness which makes us glad and refreshes us" (91). There's a healthy meal for you!

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Thought for the Day

Everything should be made as simple as possible...but not simpler.
--Albert Einstein

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Prayer for the Day

O Lord, you have taught us that without love, whatever we do is worth nothing: Send your Holy Spirit and pour into my heart your greatest gift, which is love, the true bond of peace and of all virtue, without which whoever lives is accounted dead before you. Grant this for the sake of your only Son Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
--The Divine Hours

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Saturday's Poem

As I mentioned in an earlier blog, I am currently reading the poetry of Scott Cairns. The more that I read his poetry, the more I like it. I wanted to share a bit from a rather long poem, "Disciplinary Treatises," under the subheading, "10. A Recuperation of Sin" taken from his new book, Compass of Affection.

I suppose we might do away with words like sin.
They are at least archaic, not to mention rude,
and late generations have been pretty well schooled

against the presumption of holding anything
to be absolutely so, universally
applicable, especially anything like

sin, which is, to put it more neatly, unpleasant,
not the sort of thing one brings up. Besides, so much
of what ignorance may have once attributed

to sin has been more justly shown to be the end
result of bad information, genetic flaw,
or most often, an honest misunderstanding....

In fact, we could probably forget the idea
of sin altogether if it were not for those
periodic eruptions one is quite likely

to picture in the papers, or on the TV--
troubling episodes in which, inexplicably,
some giddy power rises up to occasion

once more the spectacle of the innocents' blood (74-75).

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Thought for the Day

The longer I live, the larger allowances I make for human infirmities.
--John Wesley

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Pictures for the Senior High Fellowship Mission Trip

Wendy sent me some pictures that were taken on the SHF mission trip to Queens, NY. According to the leaders, it was an exceptional trip: the youth worked hard, well, and together, and God's love was lived through them. The picture immediately above is of the whole group--youth as well as the leaders, and the picture on the top is of two of the youth with an elderly person that they were serving.

If you run into anyone that went on the mission trip, please thank them for going and ask them how they liked it and what they learned.

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Thought for the Day

Good ideas need landing gear as well as wings.
--C. D. Jackson

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Flash Forward

I recently read an interesting article, "The Science of Appetite," in the June 11 2007 issue of Time. I am interested in biology in general and also curious about how our biochemistry affects our appetite. Having observed my own appetite and ways of trying to manage it, I often find it a kind of "mystery." Just when I think I have things figured out, I find that I don't.

Appetite also applies to the spiritual life, I believe. So I want to explore physical appetite as an analogy of our "spiritual appetite." What exactly do we hunger for, spiritually? So we fill ourselves with things that are nutritious or with spiritual junk food?

The texts for the sermon are: Psalm 63, I Peter 2:1-3, and Matthew 5:6, and the title is "Discipleship Diet."

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Thought for the Day

I used to ask God to help me. Then I asked if I might help him. I ended up by asking him to do his work through me.
--Hudson Taylor

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Happy July 4th

I hope that you have a wonderful July 4th holiday!

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Prayer for July 4th

God of the nations, guide our people by your Spirit to go forward in justice, righteousness and freedom. Give our leaders vision to see far into the difficult issues of our time, courage to uphold what is right, and integrity in their words and motives. Give us what outward prosperity may be your will, but above all things give us faith in you that our nation may give glory to your name and blessings to all peoples; through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.

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Thought for the Day

Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die.
--G. K. Chesterton

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Thought for the Day

I never give 'em hell. I just tell the truth and they think it's hell.
--Harry S. Truman

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Photo For the Day

This Dominik Barstein photo I got off the internet reminds me of Psalm 121: I lift up my eyes to the hills--from where does my help come? My help comes from the Lord who made heaven and earth. He will not let your foot be moved; he who keeps you will not slumber. He who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep...

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Spirituality

It is not uncommon for me to experience the "intersection" and "cross-fertilization" in the books that I read. During the last six months or so I have read a couple of Eugene Peterson's books about spirituality, Eat This Book and The Jesus Way, I recently finished Dallas Willard's book, The Great Omission, which is on discipleship and spirituality, and I am currently reading an excellent book by Robert E. Webber, Divine Embrace, which is explicitly about spirituality.

I am very interested in the Christian spiritual life and helping people to both embark and grow in the Christian spiritual life. One of the problems I have, though, is that over the last couple of decades the word "spiritual" has entered our common language and has replicated itself so completely that I find it nearly a useless word. It can mean just about anything. It is not uncommon for me to hear a person say, "I'm spiritual" or "I'm a spiritual person." I have to confess that that statement means virtually nothing to me.

I think that for most people who use the term there is the assumption that there is a generic spirituality that just happens to manifest itself differently: yours might be Christian, his might be Muslim, hers might be Wicca, theirs might be Buddhist, others might be New Age, etc. It is all basically variations on a theme. No one's spirituality is better than anyone else's--they're just different. A Newsweek article in its September 5, 2005 issue defined spirituality as "the passion for an immediate, transcendent experience of God" (as quoted in Webber's book, 15).

Robert Webber disagrees with this definition and assessment. He writes in his book, "All spiritualities are based on a story. You have to know the story of a particular religion to understand its spirituality" (14). He argues that while spirituality involves experience, "the experience is always in keeping with the story from which it arises" (15). The purpose of his book which I intend to cover in this blog over the next several weeks "is about the Christian story of the divine embrace, the spirituality that proceeds from it, and how this spirituality may be recovered in a relativistic, postmodern world where spirituality is viewed as a common, contentless experience of otherness" (15). Stay tuned...

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Thought for the Day

Never let the fear of striking out get in your way.
--Babe Ruth

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Picture of the Day

As I mentioned in an earlier blog, I am attempting to increase my technical ability so that I can do more things in my blog. So I will be posting pictures so that I can become more adept at it.

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Prayer for the Day

O Lord our God, to you and to your service we devote ourselves, body, soul, and spirit. Fill our memory with the record of your mighty works; enlighten our understanding with the light of your Holy Spirit; and may all the desires of our heart and will center in what you would have us do. Make us an instrument of your salvation for the people entrusted to our care, and let us by our life and speaking set forth your true and living Word. Be always with us in carrying out the duties of our salvation; in praises heighten our love and gratitude; in speaking of You give us readiness of thought and expression; and grant that, by the clearness and brightness of your holy word, all the world may be drawn to your blessed kingdom. All this we ask for the sake of your Son, our Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen.

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