.....

2009-06-08T19:09:00.000-07:00

I just read the Communist Manifesto for the first time. This pamphlet adds so much clarity to our social situation, and we could learn much from thinking along the lines of bourgeoisie and proletariat.

As a starting point, I saw Michael Moore's "Sicko" a few days ago. This movie fit so well with Marx's general argument against capitalism: when the means of production, the capital, accumulate in the hands of a few, it is only a matter of time before everyone else is put in subjugation. Control of the means of production is power: if you have it or if you work for the man who does, it provides a livelihood. But when you have a company built on super-efficient, mechanized production (as companies surely will so that profit can be maximized), less labor is needed (and even the labor that is left is often unspecialized so that men become so many cogs in a machine). Necessarily, many are left in destitute positions and the rich get richer.

I can attest that there is a wide disparity between rich and poor. It is clear that the discrepancy is widening dramatically as time goes by. The fact is that many people need lots of help, and though there are some in positions to help many of those in need, most don't (and none seem to help as much as they could). Marx gives a reason why, and it is one of his most important insights into the nature of capitalism: an economic framework based on self-interest and self-focus degrades how we view each other. He says that "no other nexus between man and man" remains other than "naked self-interest". "Egotistical calculation" is the icy water that drowns any other approach to decision-making. Capitalism has "resolved personal worth into exchange value."

Much of the Communist Manifesto propounds courses of action that I cannot agree with, and indeed strike me as self-defeating. (For example, Marx asserts that the oppressed class, the proletariat, must rise up and finally defeat their oppressors and, by defeating its rival class, can also abolish its own position of hypocritical supremacy.) I disagree with a large majority of Marx's solutions. But, as the Manifesto asks, "does it require deep intuition to comprehend that...man's consciousness changes with every change in his material existence?" In other words, it is readily apparent that a system based on self-interest will breed men who are thoroughly self-interested.

And it is now that your mind should turn to the torn and wretched fabric of our current economy. Is this argument not intensely and eerily relevant?

Consider a health care industry who at every turn must interact with and solicit support from insurance providers. It is a perfect picture of a profit-driven echelon of elevated individuals welding enormous power over vast numbers of dependent people.

However, the plot has become more convoluted than Marx could have dreamed due to the proliferation of debt. The market economy met every need of the common man long ago; but according to Marx, the controlling class of the elevated few can only remain in control by constantly revolutionizing both the means and the ends of production. It is at this point that the burden is on capitalists to invent products and convince us we need them. Welcome to the age of marketing, of commercials and celebrity endorsements and sales executives; we are very familiar with this epoch, aren't we? And we have now mastered the art of convincing ourselves that we need 'this' and 'that' (at least until the new 2.0 versions are out) so completely that we have exhausted our means. Our consumption has outpaced our income; we cannot logically spend money we do not have, but we have found another way to accomplish it. And now, banks and other money-lending corporations (headed by these same elevated capitalists) literally control our future incomes. As Marx would say, those who control the means of production (and are already therefore in control of the masses) have now found a way to control the majority of its income (both present and future); if you are a have-not, this is an undeniably scary recipe (either a true have-not with bad credit or an illusory have-not saddled in debt).

The Communist Manifesto offers a clear narrative in which to place America today; the relevance of its arguments and the light it sheds on our current economic condition is a refreshing break from the cacophony of jumbled and disjointed opinions forced through American air waves.

For an interesting Christian perspective on this topic, see Rob Bell's discussion of the term 'anti-kingdom' in his new book "God Wants to Save Christians". Also, Michael Moore's discussion with retired British Parliament member Tony Benn in the special features section of Sicko; he expounds on how money has become a religion.

2009-06-02T10:11:00.000-07:00

I think it's important for people to consider themselves in historical perspective, and I've been thinking recently that this is harder and harder to do. I just finished reading Angels and Demons, and despite the many liberties it takes with both science and history, it brings up some solid points about how the past two hundred years have drastically tipped the scales in favor of science. Because of the scientific advances of a short amount of time, conventional wisdom has long since proved inadequate; this is one of the reasons for the modern movement. Can you imagine living in a world that didn't understand the causes of lightning, that couldn't explain why children inherited certain traits of their parents, that understood so little of the human body that certain types of death were attributed to madness? How much differently would we regard ourselves (and a religion that asserted our utter centrality in the grand scheme) if we believed that Earth was the center of the universe?
It is more and more difficult to believe that God is the reason for lightning, and since I now believe that my body operates according to the laws of science and it would be illogical for it to suddenly stop, it is harder to believe that God sustains me and that he does so for a purpose.

Max!

2009-05-04T14:18:00.000-07:00

William Butler Yeats

2009-04-21T15:56:00.000-07:00

A great quotation from William Butler Yeats, a poet whom I hold close to my heart because he is tattooed on my arm. So hopefully he stays close to my heart...

"When I try to put all into a phrase I say, 'Man can embody truth but cannot know it.' The abstract is not life and everywhere draws out its contradictions. You can refute Hegel but not the saint."

This is sort of what I was discussing a few posts ago and it jives with what I've been learning lately; I guess I'm just increasingly interested in that practical active God-fearing saint.

A Tragedy

2009-04-02T13:08:00.000-07:00

Imagine two men sitting in a library.

The first man clearly thinks he is teaching, speaking with an air of genius superiority and delivering didacticisms in the reclined manner of a vanguard who is at the forefront of his profession. This man expects his words to be regarded as ascendant profundities by his hearers.

The second man is pitched forward, leaning into the lecture with evident wholeheartedness. His mien conveys fascination in the subject matter and gratitude for the experience. It is apparent that the listener desires to be nowhere in the world but rooted to his chair by the lengthy discourse being provided by this clearly brilliant scholar.

Now, be sure to catch aaaaaaall the sarcasm, and you have secured a proper allegorical depiction of my current British Literature course.

I don't want to spend my time concocting bull shit, but if I must, at least let me do it for free.

2009-04-01T19:39:00.001-07:00

A few weeks ago, I started working at Starbucks (that's a Rorschach statement to bloggers, I'm sure). This company consistently ranks near the top of lists that measure employment desirability, and part of the reason why is the thorough training process; a solid 8 days are reserved merely for training, and I can tell you that much of that time is spent educating a new hire about the nature of coffee: how it grows, what the coffee distribution process looks like, how to sample a coffee and with what it should be paired. During training, I became unshakably aware of something: my brain has the palate sensitivity of strong and sturdy plywood. As other baristas around me commented with appreciation about the refreshing floral notes and robust body of whatever unpronouncible African coffee was being sampled, I focused on the searing blisters developing on my tongue due to what I considered an impractically hot beverage. I'm not joking - I nearly drowned during my first coffee tasting. You're supposed to smell the coffee pretentiously (or at least I smell my coffee pretentiously. Which is actually pretty difficult; it's not easy to smell with pretense), but I sniffed too deeply and began choking on the distinctive cocoa bouquet I was supposed to be appreciating. This is accurately microcosmal of my first eight days.

That said, I've managed to learn that coffee appreciation is the ability to notice the complex interplay between various palate components. On one sip, notice body; on the next sip, pay attention to acidity. And it is at this point that my blog once again becomes about books, so let those eyes roll.

I notice the same complexity, the same interplay between ideas, the same need to take multiple 'sips' in order to approach from another perspective. I just read Hemingway's short story "Hills Like White Elephants", and it can be read from beginning to end any number of times and it has this organic way of creating something new; how does Hemingway use symbolism? How does he use language to manipulate his reader's emotions, and what does he do with them once captivated? I've heard of a university course named "Twice-Read Novels". I think this sort of class is a great arena to learn the tools of literary composition, and it acknowledges the fundamental motion, the inherent activity, of literature.

The fourteenth English mystic Julia of Norwich had a vision of a tiny hazelnut seed rotating in her palm, and she asserted that it was a true representation of the world (specifically, because it was created and maintained by God). Within a component of the system is found the system itself; and to me, this is the resplendent and ineffable beauty of literature (and art more generally). Within a part we find the whole, ever-expansive and dynamically active.

This is another in a series of attempts to elucidate my basic beliefs. I feel a siren call towards writing, but I don't know what to say, whom to write to, or why I should. Hopefully, simple practice will help pull it all together....

Poems...

2009-03-28T20:30:00.000-07:00

Reading some poems for homework and I came across some fascinating ones I thought I'd post...the first two are both nineteenth century Roman Catholic priest Gerard Manley Hopkins.

God's Grandeur
THE WORLD is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;	5
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;	10
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Pied Beauty


GLORY be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;	5
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:	10
Praise him.

And this one is a satirical chastisement of gossipy women by ee cummings. so you know it's good.

the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls

are unbeautiful and have comfortable minds

(also, with the church's protestant blessings

daughters,unscented shapeless spirited)

they believe in Christ and Longfellow, both dead,

are invariably interested in so many things—

at the present writing one still finds

delighted fingers knitting for the is it Poles?

perhaps. While permanent faces coyly bandy

scandal of Mrs. N and Professor D

.... the Cambridge ladies do not care, above

Cambridge if sometimes in its box of

sky lavender and cornerless, the

moon rattles like a fragment of angry candy.

That's all - love this stuff. Take that as a personal comment or a threatening command.

2009-03-27T20:21:00.001-07:00

I was driving to Starbucks tonight (I work at Starbucks now - what a good job it is!) tossing around the light and frothy subject of whether or not religion is manufactured by humanity or not, and do you know what hit me? I started considering that, inasmuch as Christianity manifests itself in a truly selfless way, I believe it. I think that's why we get so frustrated by consumer comfortable Christianity and pastors in the 95 American wealth percentile and salesman evangelists: what's so supra-human about protecting number one? Scientific materialism would say that our psyches are conditioned entirely by our evolutionary history, and even though there are a thousand places in my life where I find it so easy to believe this, how do the true examples of 'turning the other cheek' fit into that? In some ways, religion is more compelling than science is easy because it's more difficult to explain the occasional holiness in man than his prolific brutality. If I am truly interested in seeking out answers rationally and analytically, if I am truly searching scientifically, then the exception of man's charity should keep me searching (even if his selfishness proves to be the rule on my every side). And it is in this place that Christ begins to speak: turn the other cheek, the last shall be first, give a thief more than he attempts to take, love your enemies.

At the end of the day, the crucial question is this: Is religion merely a complicated form of selfishness (a desire for self-preservation in one's relation to an omnipotent God), or is it something more?

Epiphany

2009-03-02T19:56:00.000-08:00

Dear world,

It hit me today. I have such a tortured relationship with writing, and with most things, because I am simply too self-involved. I'm a remarkably selfish and self-conscious person.

So, I'll write when I can, but in the meantime I'm going to try and figure that out.

Current read: Tess of the d'Urbervilles

2008-12-26T16:03:00.000-08:00

A few weekends ago, my girlfriend and I stopped by the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in downtown Kansas City for their 75th anniversary celebration. The commemoration was three days long and included free admission to their current exhibit feature Art in the Age of Steam, a collection of painting and photography that offered a myriad of ruminations regarding the advent of industrialization and technologically-driven modernity. (This nostalgic subject interests me greatly because it grants a much-needed historical perspective: it's so easy for my culture to forget about yesterday! I suggest reading Steinbeck's novel The Winter of Our Discontent and Hawthorne's short story The Birth-Mark for further discussion of the theme.) Largely, the exhibit struck a somber note; I believe it is a Rob Bell book that points out how the invention of the lightbulb gives mankind the option to divorce himself from the rhythms of day and night, just as a temperature-controlled indoor environment has enabled separation from the hardships (and joys) of four revolving seasons. As railways began appearing in landscapes across America and Europe, many artists responded with lamentation as they saw the New indiscriminately replace the Old, and their works now hanging at the Nelson reveal the prophetic warnings they proffered to a world increasingly entranced by the siren song of Industrialization.

It is here that Tess of the d'Urbervilles is philosophically situated. It deals with a host of themes (as any good novel will), but I have so far appreciated the way that Thomas Hardy considers the approach of the 20th century (and the ideals that would come to define it). He stations two characters, Tess and Angel (both in their early twenties), between a generation still steeped in the decidedly-unscientific superstitions and belief systems of pastoral rusticism, and an ever-encroaching modern culture. And these two characters are ever so confused.

Moreover, it is interesting to read Thomas Hardy as an author in literary suspension. His books were criticized by his genetic society as offensive and immoral, particularly due to his treatment of sex and marriage. Even as he pens biting diatribes of Victorian culture and practices, it seems that he is nearly too modern for his own good, which is to say that he is often pretty un-Victorian himself. Though he isn't quite the experimental morally-relative modernist, he certainly marks a departure from many traits of 19th century literature.

All in all, I'm thoroughly enjoying this book. Portrayal of social hypocrisy is always fun to read, and Hardy presents nature in such glory that somewhere Barbra Kingsolver is at this very moment surely sighing in gratitude.

(And, since I haven't blogged in nearly 6 months, I believe I'll keep typing...)

It is interesting to see how Thomas Hardy uses adjectives (I know, what a lame thing to say). I'm someone who, to a fault, takes words at face value. Where others may think that 'fine' is some sort of red flag when used to answer the question 'how was your day?', I tend to use it frequently because, of course, the word is itself a positive one (meaning anything from 'of high quality' to 'satisfactory'). I'll try to avoid arguments that will surely come across as high-minded and condescending (such as, since words are supposed to be vessels of specific meaning, perhaps we should endeavor to use them to communicate instead of hoping that "I'm just fine" will somehow indicate that there's something wrong): suffice it to say, I tend to trust words as they come to me. However, Hardy often uses adjectives rather loosely in order to create an impression instead of perfect image, as in "the mixed, singular, luminous gloom in which they walked". I read once about how this is very Faulknerian, that he did the same thing. And, I suppose, words are still being used to impart meaning; the meaning comes however when taking a phrase as a whole and not by dissecting words individually. How difficult it must be to achieve this effect without falling into linguistic ambiguity such that the mind cannot extract any meaning! I tend to have the opposite problem of using too MANY words and losing my meaning along the way.

It's good to be reading again! Glad the semester is over....

much to learn!

2008-07-17T17:40:00.000-07:00

I've been reading Fyodor Dostoevesky's The Brothers Karamazov for the past few weeks; I so very highly recommend it. It's one of the most masterful books I've ever read. The plot is so very logical and constructed with perfection, and this alone is fascinating to me. I visualize plot construction as a sort of literary juggling; to think that an author can start with a single starting point (almost like a period on an empty sheet of paper) and out explodes perhaps dozens of different lines, twisting and curving in every direction and getting more and more complicated as the book progresses, and bring it all back to a period at the end of the book so that the plot (conceptually) looks a bit like a diamond on its side. That is how Dostoevesky has constructed this plot. And the way that he weaves in the discussion of so many themes, or the development and existence of so many complex characters, and makes the whole chaos of seperate ideas intertwine and play off itself: it's a veritable masterpiece and I highly recommend the investment that reading and digesting the book necessarily is.

But one of the central themes of the book is the supremacy of love, and the crucial centrality of it in the words of Christ and Christian orthodoxy; it isn't a byproduct of the Christian life - it's the lifeblood. More particularly, the book champions that a prerequisite to loving your neighbor (that is, loving any man) is accepting his sin as your own. For me to love those around me, it is essential that I recognize my own sin in theirs.

For me, it took days for the profundity of that to sink in, but I am beginning to see that this might in fact be the sine qua non, the essential condition, without which I cannot love others fully. And accepting responsibility is assuredly not in my nature...I find that I tend to believe my thoughts or actions are shaped by various forces working upon me. For me, the question is often if what I have thought or done is 'understandable, given the situation' - a far cry from accepting responsibility for them!

I feel like I'm droning on and on in the spirit of explaining myself, and to be honest I simply want to say a few things. So here is the point I want to make:
I am learning that I am the ugliness I see in other people. The sins of others are my sins, and if any one is responsible then so am I. I still have much to learn about how all of this works, but I am learning that all are responsible for all. And more importantly, I am becoming acquainted with this - the wretchedness I see in the world around me is in every corner of my being, even in my best of moments. I conclude with excerpts from Aaron Weiss's online journal:

"The other day i got this thought: I'm very prone to judge people when they do things they shouldn't, but I realized (again) that someone else's problem is my problem, their sins are my sins, and what i see wrong in others is there in my own heart. I am part of you and you are part of me and when I judge you I judge myself. We are more connected that i think, I think."

"I don't mean to give cheap advice, 'forgive everyone everything' that is my advice, if you want it plainly, but grace doesn't seem to come naturally to us, so what do we do? If you feel unable to forgive someone who's hurt you please at least desire to forgive, and pray to God for help. We have the teaching that "the measure to which you forgive, you will be forgiven" (this is extremely powerful) all the parables to instruct us and the example of St. Stephen in Acts and Christ on the cross, who did not wait for an apology but prayed for mercy for the very ones who killed them. May we fix our eyes there, not only for a single decision but a perpetual life of unconditional grace. May God grant us such scandalous love!"

"This world is full of darkness and we alone are to blame. There is a paradise in our hearts right this moment, as I type this, as you read it, sleeping in our hearts is the paradise of the glorious, peaceful kingdom. The lion lies with the lamb, every tear is wiped from every eye, and this paradise is waiting to be found. My life is a shit storm - I don't care about anyone at all. People are a means to satisfying some desire of mine. You can live or die for all I care, my best friend can live or die, I don't care about anyone. But can I tell you something that's more Good than I am Bad? God is Good! By 'God', mind you, I mean the Intelligence that created the universe. And by God I mean the power that sustains all life, the force of life that is so much everywhere that we don't see it at all, like fish swimming in the ocean searching for water! The Beginning and the End of all things, the Healer of the heart, the Physician to the sick, the Father to the fatherless, the Mother Hen to us baby chicks, the Great Unchanging Eternal Existence, the reality next to which our lives are vapors, the Light, seperated from which our lives are shadows, the Beauty and Meaning and Goodness that is, and there is a single word that points to (but can never contain) this, the word I tell you is LOVE. Love, though, is only a word; the reality I can never tell. For the reality, there are no words."

inaction...and a diversion into Jewish history.

2008-06-06T15:06:00.001-07:00

I have a lot of cerebral culmination going on....lots to unpack.

I was waiting at the bus stop today after I got off work, and I saw a twenty-something man storming towards his car, clearly furious at someone across the street. I picked up on this undercurrent soon after he yelled 'fucking retard' at the top of his lungs and slammed his car door with guillotine celerity. (I was impressed with his creativity!) He pealed out of his parking spot, sped across the parking lot and out into the street where a very embarrassed girl crawled into the back seat, closing the door just in time for him to drive furiously away.
Thoughts sparked by this event:
- there is such a thing as white trash.
- why do people knock stereotyping? I'm fascinated by how many times people fall so effortlessly into a ready-made mold that is assembly-line generic.
- how can I intervene?

The other day, I was riding my bike down the street and began hearing the catcalls and whistles of an old beer-bellied man. A bit further down the street walked two girls in the opposite direction, assuredly not 20 years old, ignoring the man completely.
Thoughts sparked by this event:
- there is such a thing as white trash.
- this man is perpetuating the cycle that is so pernicious for much of our society (particularly our urban society): he whistles at women he objectifies. Because no one stops him, he is one more experience assured that women are in fact objects. Because no one stops him, those girls are one humiliation closer to adopting the types of coping mechanisms that say either "I am truly an object" or "I can't expect anything better from men" - both lies that vitiate, that spoil, the very fabric of our urban (and, unfortunately, all too frequently African-American or Latino) communities. A woman who cannot admit her worth will not expect a man to (whether in word or in deed), nor will a woman who believes men to be incapable of such recognition. This effectively frees a man from all responsibility: it leaves him free to be the selfish child he's always been, free to read Maxim magazine while his wife gets her hair done, free to publicly shame his girlfriend from across the street because he is upset, free for unrestrained, incontinent sexual activity with other women. And here we finally are at the all-too-familiar single-parent home, where a child is not made accountable for homework because a mother is working to pay for rent, where college is an exception, where a woman keeps afloat a household because she believed the lie that she did not have the right to EXPECT from her man, and now that man is gone. I believe the family home is the sine qua non, the essential condition, for a healthy society and here this base and depraved fraud is, whistling away our humanity.
- how can I intervene?

In psychology last semester, we discussed the term 'diffusion of responsibility'. It's the idea that you're more likely to receive help with a dropped dinner plate if you're dining with only one or two people. The more guests arrive for your dinner, the more likely it is that you'll be picking that plate up yourself. There is an incredible and nearly-phantasmagoric story of a woman who was robbed (or raped - I can't remember) and murdered in the broad daylight of New York City. Dozens of people witnessed the entire sequence of events and NO ONE INTERVENED. Does this seem impossible to you? It most certainly did to me, but I was immediately reminded of how often I see a person spinning out on the February ice, clearly unable to drive, and I stand with other strangers and we watch, we 'diffuse responsibility', like we are the dumbest creatures alive.

Now, follow me on a necessary diversion. Last week at Jacob's Well (my wonderful church in downtown Kansas City), we discussed the Old Testament story of David and Bathsheba. In 2 chapters, we see David desire Bathsheba, take her for his own, try and frame the consequent pregnancy as legitimate but ultimately kill Bathsheba's husband: all this during the very ascendancy of his kingly prestige.
To be honest, this story has honestly confused me for most of my life: I never know what David is doing wrong and what was just normal for people back then (and don't even get me started on how confusing that ostensibly contradictory thought gets for me! I trust God where things don't make sense yet).
However, I read a bit of a guidebook last winter, pointedly called How to Read the Bible for All It's Worth (Gordon D. Fee and Douglas Stuart). In the section regarding the Old Testament narratives, the authors explain that those who penned these stories were writing to a Jewish audience; they expected that the sins of the characters would be glaringly obvious to a reader who was familiar with the Torah. Indeed, viewing these stories through the lens of the Torah brings the messages and morals inherent in them to the surface, much like one needs special glasses to find form and order in certain 3-D images. It decodes and defuses our reading.
Our pastor supplied some of this necessary Judaic information on Sunday, and it brought to light some important themes. Monarchical rule was a new development for Israel at this point in their history: they begged God for an empirical, human king (so they could be like their neighbors, largely), and he hesitantly anointed young King David (because God, having made man, understood the danger of absolute power in the hands of man who, twisted by carnal nature, inherently tends towards dangerous declarations of self-sufficiency and self-deification). At one pivotal point in the story, King David does indeed claim moral authority. The King of Israel (the people God chose through Abraham to be His blessing to the world) has claimed moral authority, and the profundity of this moment cannot be overestimated.

Now, to begin my journey back to my primary point. While listening to this story, I began to realize that the church of Christ, the adopted children of Israel, those who God still calls to be his blessing in the world, is substantially in a very similar predicament in America. Make no mistake - I'm not saying that America is a nation originally blessed by God to be his Christian 'city on a hill': but his church in America is in the same position that the faithful Jews were when King David declared himself moral arbitor. We are followers of Yahweh, we believe that he is trying to reconcile all things unto himself and that our world and the people in it want this as well (although God is often the victim of bad marketing, and the Desire of every nation is rarely acknowledged as such), and that this has repercussions with how we live our lives, how we vote, what we buy, how we treat others, and what we strive for. When we are truly and actually fulfilling our roles as God's chosen people, we are extensions of Christ himself, bringing true justice, true love, true peace, true reconciliation to our brothers and sisters in humanity.
But we are faced with the question I ask myself in the situations above and in many others where justice, love, peace, and reconciliation are obviously missing and desperately needed: how do I get involved? I desire to be Christ-like because it is the cure for what ails us, but I myself am stuck in the same mire that King David, the cat-calling old man, and the angry twenty-something are stuck in. When I see injustice, my reaction is to fight for it, to raise my voice and strike down the offender: but the Unquestionable was questioned and made no reply. My desire is to avenge the wronged: but God claims that vengeance is his and that he will repay, and I can't help noticing that my vengeance roots itself in malice, in eye-for-an-eye logic, in the same self-deification and claims of moral authority that King David made. But his vengeance necessarily flows from love and from a desire that all should be reconciled unto him - how different must this vengeance be??

I am tired of diffusion of responsibility. I'm grieved by the terminal illnesses that plague our civic life, our communities - my community! I'm outraged by the disrespect that we often show to one another and I do not want to continue standing aside while women are degraded and humiliated, while children grow up without role models and without opportunity, while some men continue to shirk responsibility and others strain under the weight of broken cycles that continue to feed themselves with the dawning of every new day.

What does it look like to be Christ in our world? How do we bring creative imagination (note that word 'creative' - consider the depth of a social, political, economic imagination that CREATES, that beats swords and spears into plowshares and pruning hooks, from tools of death into tools for life) to our world in the name of our God Yahweh? I yearn for the problems we have today to come face to face with the sufficiency of Christ, and may I have the honor of helping bring that confrontation about, but I am struck by the immensity of the task and the complexity of being both of a son of God and a son of Adam.

God grant me the wisdom, the love, and the humility to know what You would do!

first blog....

2008-06-06T15:05:00.001-07:00

Well, my title really sums things up. The only thought I have is 'this is my first blog' and then it's nothing but meandering half-thoughts; truly, I have no idea what I'm doing. I'm worried however that I'm in a catch-22: I don't want to start writing because I simply don't feel like I have anything to write about. I have questions, not answers, and recently I've been completely content with merely observing things. I have not had, as my girlfriend's father puts it, 'analysis paralysis'. However, I have an inkling that writing is an important part of reflecting and processing. Often it's the self-observations I've journaled about that really stick with me. The books I've written papers or conversed about are the ones that are really full figured. I have a lazy tendency to read something, consider it just long enough to have a single thought about it, and then throw it flippantly into the recesses of mind. Not surprisingly, these far-flung seeds do not fall on responsive soil and the consequence is a general lack of many convictions or ideas I consider worth writing about! I don't write because I'm not inspired, but I remain uninspired because I don't write.Do not expect a smooth transition here, ye breath-bated expectant adorants. To exhaust my knowledge of physics, forming chaos into order requires a skill I do not possess, but I hope that a blog that gets in motion will tend to stay in motion. Work with me, and let's try to get through this together.Upcoming.....some reflections on a recent sermon, and perhaps some essays on beliefs I do hold strongly. I wish I didn't sound like every blogger ever.