Monthly Archives: January 2009

What Father Are You?

You’re Origen!

You do nothing by half-measures. If you’re going to read the Bible, you want to read it in the original languages. If you’re going to teach, you’re going to reach as many souls as possible, through a proliferation of lectures and books. If you’re a guy and you’re going to fight for purity … well, you’d better hide the kitchen shears.

Find out which Church Father you are at The Way of the Fathers!

(h/t Texanglican)

How amusing I should get this response with this verbiage… Since I’m finishing up a PowerPoint presentation for a lecture I’m doing at a local church tomorrow…

Epiphany Hymns Note

Several of us at various points have noted the interesting Gospel Antiphon for Second Vespers of the Feast of the Epiphany:

We keep this day holy in honor of three miracles: this day a star led the Wise Men to the manager; this day water was turned into wine at the marriage feast; this day Christ willed to be baptized by John in the Jordan for our salvation, alleluia.

What I had never quite realized until last night is that this seasonal understanding is further reinforced by the Office hymns: Iesus Refulsit Omnium and Hostis Herodes Impie (known in these latter days in the Urbanized hack-up version Crudelis Herodes).

Thus in Iesus Refulsit Omnium, stanzas 2 and 3 discuss the arrival of the magi and their gifts to the Babe, stanzas 4-6 deal with the Baptism of our Lord, and stanza7 recalls the miracle at Cana.

In Hostis Herodes Impie, stanza 2 presents the magi, stanza 4 the Baptism of our Lord, and stanza 7 the miracle at Cana. Furthermore stanza 5 points to other miracles that take their place within the old lectionaries Epiphany season by noting “he healed sick bodies and revived corpses”.

Crudelis Herodes is similar but the versions in my Liber and ’62 Missal contain fewer stanzas; in this case stanza 2 is the magi, stanza 3 is the Baptism, and stanza 4 is the miracle at Cana.

Suddenly I find myself wondering the chicken and egg question—which came first: did the antiphon produce the hymns, the hymns the antiphon, or do they all derive from an earlier common source?

New Cafe Piece

I’ve got a new piece up at the Cafe. A little background—this one came directly albeit obliquely out of on-going conversations that I’ve been having with Donald Schell (yes, that Donald Schell)  about liturgy, faith formation, and the place of tradition in our reflection.

Christopher will also recognize some key items on liturgy and tradition that we’ve been discussing together for quite some time…

Too often discussions about liturgy and worship fall into a set of stale rhetorical traps that pit binaries against each other: traditional/contemporary; Spirit-led/rubric-driven, spontaneous/over-planned, etc. The simple fact is that these are not helpful as blanket categories any more (if ever). What I’m expressing here is a understanding of Christian theology and liturgy that is a contemporary appropriation of traditional materials rooted in a pneumatology that understands the spread of human history as the playground of the Spirit. “Listening to the Spirit” doesn’t just mean cocking your ear now—although that’s an undeniable part of it.  Furthermore, while liturgy’s principle aim is the praise and worship of God, we must also attend to its secondary purpose of communal Christian formation.

The bottom line is that if our corporate worship is not playing a major role in our transformation into the mind of Christ than there’s a problem. And the problem isn’t necessarily the liturgy, either—sometimes it’s us!

On Love

Lee has pointed to some very good pieces, the first written by bls against the contention made by Philip Turner in “First Things” that a theology suggesting that” God is love, pure and simple”, is “unworkable” (You can read the excerpts she provides there). The second is from Christopher working off of bls’s piece and some questions asked by Lee himself.

I don’t have a whole lot to add that they haven’t already said, and will only offer another bit of gooey liberalism no doubt from a source that no self-respecting “First Things” author would recognize:

221. But St. John goes even further when he affirms that “God is love”:44 God’s very being is love. By sending his only Son and the Spirit of Love in the fullness of time, God has revealed his innermost secret:45 God himself is an eternal exchange of love, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and he has destined us to share in that exchange.

In my short life, I have learned a few things about love. Most of them have been learned since I got over the shallow notions of romantic love that I was taught by the culture and have been truly formed by my on-going relationship with my wife and my children. For it is through those relationships that I am taught ever more deeply what this little four letter word that we take for granted really means.

Love is hard—because genuine love is always transformative. It changes you: how you think and how you act. Sometimes we pull away from that pain and change whether it comes from God or the humans closest to us.And that leads me to my second point.

I think for many of us, the hardest thing to do with love—is to receive it.

We say that God is love. And we are absolutely right.  Now all we have to do is let it into our lives…

Putting the Tech into Home Ec

I’m thinking that the perfect tech app for the up-to-date New Depression kitchen would be a recipe cost calculator.

It shouldn’t be too hard to build a database that contains:

  • the ingredients for the family’s most commonly cooked meals
  • the quantities needed for the recipe
  • the quantities in which the ingredients must be purchased
  • an average cost for the ingredients

A basic html/php interface would allow you to:

  • select a meal from a searchable drop-down
  • do a one-time exclusion of any of the ingredients from the total if you already had them in the pantry
  • handle basic substitutions (say sausage for hamburger, etc.)
  • allow you to enter a one-time or permanent price modification (to account for sales or price increases)

Of course, it would be optimum if there were a readily accessible and continuously updated dbase of grocery store average prices out there that you could periodically download but I doubt such a thing currently exists.

Thus when it came time to plan menus for the week, you could use the tool to get a more precise sense of how much everything is going to cost before you get to the grocery store. I’m always amazed when I do a one-off trip to see how much a basic meal can run you…

Such a thing may already exist. I don’t know; I haven’t checked yet. But it sure would be cool if it did…

More on Religious Art

M is teaching Sunday School again tomorrow and didn’t like any of the activities listed in her curriculum. So we did some brainstorming.

After considering some interesting options like Playdough, etc., she said, “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if we could do a Where’s Waldo kind of picture search? Kids that age like that…” (We’re dealing with a whole group together split about half-n-half between those who read and those who can’t so coming up with an activity for all of them can be tricky.)

So one thing led to another and a nother and now we’ve got a slideshow of images of the baptism of Jesus from the Renaissance to the present and an accompanying sheet with ten little snippets for them to locate. The plan is to go through all of the pictures slowly first—everybody look and don’t say anything if you see something—then go through them again, point out the “found” items, and talk a little bit about the picture and what it does with the story.

I absolutely fell in love with one of them and given the earlier discussion on religious art decided it had to be posted. So, without further ado, a triptych despicting the baptism of OLASJC by G. David (1505):

baptism_of_jesus-008

Now I just need to figure out what I’m going to tell the adults about the Revised Common Lectionary (and try to keep it civil…)

Torture Testing

The list of “phrases you’d rather not hear your spouse say” includes this one which I just heard:

“Hey, honey—I just found your iPod in the dryer. With a load of towels.”

Now, there’s no way that my iPod Shuffle got into the dryer with a load of towels which means that this must have been its second trip around the drum after a romp in the washing machine.

It still works. Needless to say, I’m quite pleased…

The Case of the Crucifix

I’ve recently seen a story floating around of a C of E vicar who took down a large crucifix from the front of his church and replaced it with a shiny modern thing; I rolled my eyes and assumed the worst.

However—over at bls’s place I’ve now seen a photo of the removed crucifix. and I’ll reproduce it here:

creepy_crucifix

Ok, I’d probably take it down too. What bls’s analysis captures though is entirely absent in the Telegraph article that she includes and needs to be said more loudly:

  1. It should be removed not because it’s a crucifix but because it’s bad art.
  2. The reason that it’s bad art is because it’s bad theology.
  3. The reason it’s bad theology is best captured by bls herself:

The problem with this piece is that it’s merely horror-movie scary; the figure on the cross does not look human, but is a monster. You forget the crucifixion entirely because you’re too focused on the hideous monster creature up there.

It doesn’t look human – and that’s the worst thing you could do to Christ on the cross, I think.

Bingo!

Crucifixion is indeed a horrific act and a terrible way to die and, no, we shouldn’t diminish that. However, this crucifix does not look like the suffering of a human and precisely the point is that the God-incarnated-human died a human death.

Thoughts on Food via Lee

Lee’s put up a review of a review of a cookbook which inspires me to think out loud a bit about food.

The points raised about cooking are spot on—that is, cooking is an essential skill that Americans need to know. My mom made me learn when I was young and I got experience in Boy Scouts in planning meals, buying food, and cooking it over propane and open fires (and starting said fires, of course…). Both M and I love to cook and we try hard to make the grand majority of our food from scratch.  The result is food that tastes good and where we have  control over the ingredients.

There’s no question that it takes longer to prepare than take-out—but it also costs less and that’s been a huge factor in the course of our life together given our various situations. Again, workinmg from home gives me some flexibility there; I’ve chopped onions and stirrd risotto while on conference calls.

To get back to Lee’s post and the book to which it refers, I was struck by one of the sensible criticisms of it:

It can be easy for someone like me to forget that many people would see Bittman’s plan as untenable, since the kinds of foods he recommends aren’t sold in affordable chain or fast-food restaurants or available prepared or frozen in every suburban supermarket. Some of his advice — carry nuts and fruit around with you for snacks, so you can avoid vending machines — may be tenable for them, but some of the rest will seem even less practical than the Atkins Diet.

This got me thinking about some of the cookbooks I’ve acquired recently that seem to focus on what I consider novelty foods—fruits and vegetables not easily acquired or found outside of run-of-the-mill food stores.  I wonder what we happen if we took sober account of what actually can be grown locally and what foods would be available at various times of the year. Yes, I can cook quite well—but I’ve never looked at recipes weighing whether I could get their ingredients easily locally at all times. I’ve not given much thought to food preservation cooking. Using fresh veggies is great and preferable—but where do cucumbers come from for a January salad? I see three main options if you’re going to remain committed to low-energy, local food options:

  1. You don’t make salads in January, or
  2. they’re called “pickles”, or
  3. start building your greenhouse…

Now I’ve always been a fan of cooking “peasant food” which I define as basic ingredients with big flavors (we don’t go in for delicate flavors so much here). A perfect example is one of our cold-day favorites: potato soup. Potatoes, onions, and garlic sauteed in bacon fat with broth and the cut-up rendered bacon and croutons. Hmm—all ingredients that could be stored and/or harvested through the winter… Imagine that…

Yes, I think it’d be a good idea for people to start acquiring cooking skills, but I wonder if it wouldn’t help to orient them—and even those of us who already know how to cook—back toward the basic recipes and ingredients that make sense based on where you are and what your climate is.

New Year Prognostications

A number of folks have linked to a quite memorable set of predictions for the forthcoming year from James Kunstler’s Fustercluck Nation blog. I think that 2008 has demonstrated the fragility of our current economic system. In particular I think that the combination of the credit crunch, fluctuations in energy costs and the Madoff scandal have further eroded whatever confidence folks had in Wall Street. Coming as all this does at the beginning of a new president promising change,  that leaves a whole lot of question marks up in the air.

Again, although I think the basic facts underlying Kunstler’s predictions are correct, I’m suspicious of their apocalyptic cloaking. I don’t foresee a collapse of America-as-we-know it in the coming year. I do think things will get worse; I do believe that we will start to see a shift in the MSM from the r-word (recession) to the d-word-that-rhymes that nobody wants to mention yet.

Whenever I reflect on our world situation, my mind keeps getting drawn back to Joseph’s dream of the seven lean years—recognizing here that sven is not intended literally but as a substantial space of time. We’re there.

And, more worrisome than Kunstler’s apocalyptic is this even-toned article from The Oil Drum on Energy Return on Energy Investment. Here’s a quick-n-dirty summary:

  • The energy expended to produce oil energy ratio has been steadily becoming less productive
  • In the 1930’s the ratio was roughly 1:100 (energy expended [in kilojoules]: energy gained)
  • By the 1970’s it was more like 1:30
  • The ratio is now somewhere between 1:18 to 1:11
  • “In fact, if the rate of decline continues linearly for several decades then it would take the energy in a barrel of oil to get a new barrel of oil. While we do not know whether that extrapolation is accurate, essentially all EROI studies of our principal fossil fuels do indicate that their EROI is declining over time, and that EROI declines especially rapidly with increased exploitation rates (e.g. drilling).”

This tells me that whether everything comes to a head in 2009 or not, the oil economy really is on the way out and we’d best get very busy about preparing for its end.

There’s an old saying about “making a virtue out of necessity” which has floated to mind a couple of times recently. In relation to that I think we’d be wise to start cultivating virtues before they become necessities. I do believe that “sustainable” is going to become one of the coming year’s most over-used words that will cease to have any rhetorical force by its over-exploitation by February so I’ll return to less secular and less comfortable words: “simplicity” and “ascesis”.

M and I know that we have too much stuff and are attached to too much stuff than is good for us. Letting go will be a theme this year. Intentionality and discipline need to occur this year especially as they apply to how we structure our time and how we consume.

In short, it means further consideration of a rule of life in personal terms, in household terms, in traditional terms, and outside-the-box terms. We’ll keep you posted on what develops…