Saturday mornings this time of year find me working the floor of the gymnasium at our church in Midland, offering halftime devotionals during Upward Basketball games. I was inspired to prepare this week’s devotional by one of many stories coming out of Dallas this weekend as they host the NBA All-Star Game.
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Last week I mused in an entirely speculative fashion on who the culprits behind the recent spate of church burnings in East Texas might be, suggesting that the Feds might want to look for Lords of Chaos- reading, Burzum-listening, Satan-loving Black Metal fans. Others, less attuned to the dark arts than myself, have somewhat drearily suggested Muslims or ‘Sarah Palin hating liberals’. [Read more →]
Have you ever met someone for the first time who seemed really familiar to you? Strangely, this person likely wound up being an important player in your life. This exact scenario happens to Jack in LA X when he recognizes Desmond on the plane. In What Kate Does, Kate’s parallel life is once again setting up the scene for her to have a connection with Claire and baby Aaron. What if the reason for this familiarity is because we are recognizing these people from our future, or from the story of our destiny? [Read more →]
There is a poem by that fine, but neglected poet George Barker called “Allegory of the Adolescent and the Adult.” It has long been a favorite of mine. “It was when weather was Arabian,” it begins. “I walked / Like Saint Christopher Columbus through a sea’s welter / Of gaudy ways looking for a wonder.”
But the wonder proves elusive. Our young speaker tells us that “hollyhock here and rock and rose there were,” but “I wound among them knowing they were no wonder.” A bird with a worm and a fox in a wood fail to meet muster as well, for “I was / Wanting a worse wonder, a rarer one.”
So he goes on, “expecting miraculous catastrophe,” though a bit anxious as well: “How shall I know my marvel when it comes?” [Read more →]
The zipper on my man-purse broke. So I have to find a new one. I devoted not a little of this past weekend, to say nothing of the last couple of weeks, to that aim, and have yet to come up with anything. I know what I’m looking for, and I have seen a few bags that fit the bill, but nothing that’s just right. You see, I live in Los Angeles now, and as a result, no matter what bag I finally decide on, it is certain that there is a better one within an hour’s drive.
There was an interesting report on the AP today about a bunch of churches which have mysteriously gone up in flames down here in Texas since the new year. Well I say down here but actually it’s quite a drive from Austin to East Texas where most of the incinerated churches used to stand. [Read more →]
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a pastor and theologian martyred through his resistance to Adolf Hitler and Nazism, was born on this day in 1906. It was the begining of one of the more significant — if tragically short — lives of the 20th-century. [Read more →]
As soon as I learned of the title of Lost’s Season 6 premiere episode last year, I immediately began to wonder about its implications. Sure, the LA X was a reference to LAX, the abbreviation for Los Angeles International Airport where Oceanic Flight 815 was suppose to land, but why was there a space between the “LA” and the “X”? Like everything on Lost, surely this play on letters was for a reason. [Read more →]
One usually hears Judaism, Christianity, and Islam referred to as “the three great monotheistic religions.” Apparently, however, that noted deity Yahweh would disagree: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me” (Exodus 20, 2-3).
That second verse is a simple imperative; there really is no way of reading it other than literally. Yahweh acknowledges the existence of other gods besides himself. [Read more →]
Saturday mornings this time of year find me working the floor of the gymnasium at our church in Midland, offering halftime devotionals during Upward Basketball games. I was inspired to prepare this week’s devotional by headlines in the sporting news about a young man, a minor league baseball player who was doing so well, that most figured it would be just a matter of time till he was called-up to play in the majors. Well, he answered a call, alright … but it was not the call that many expected. [Read more →]
It’s impossible to avoid the apocalypse these days. Whether we encounter the End in the form of news reports on Global Warming, or fears of Iran getting the bomb, or plague panics such as H1N1, we seem to be living in a high point of apocalyptic anxiety, with horrible Doomsdays lurking round every corner. And yet, the End has never been so much fun. Roland Emmerich released his latest apocalyptic blockbuster 2012 in November, and since then we have enjoyed Zombieland, The Road, The Book of Eli, Legion and even Al Gore’s dreadful poem read aloud on morning TV in the presence of a fawning sycophant. Much more is to come, and this is to say nothing of video games, books, comics, or half the output of the History Channel. [Read more →]
I have been paging through Dag Hammarskjöld’s Markings, which happens to be the first book I reviewed professionally. I don’t know how many people remember Hammarskjöld. He was the second Secretary-General of the United Nations and by far its most effective. Indeed, I would argue that, for all practical purposes, the UN died the day Hammarskjöld was killed in an air crash in what is now Zaire.
Markings was published posthumously. It is a kind of journal. Hammarskjöld himself described it — I am relying on memory — as a white paper concerning his negotiations with himself and God. [Read more →]
The last time I wrote about what I think the appropriate response in Haiti should be, I got drug through the wringer. But the events of the last week have done nothing to convince me that I was wrong and that America needs to be in Haiti.
In Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz today is a story which quotes Syria’s highest Islamic leader.
“If the Prophet Mohammed had asked me to deem Christians or Jews heretics, I would have deemed Mohammed himself a heretic,” Sheikh Ahmed Hassoun, the Mufti of Syria, was quoted as telling a delegation of American academics visiting Damascus.
Hassoun, the leader of Syria’s majority Sunni Muslim community, also told the delegates that Islam was a religion of peace, adding: “If Mohammed had commanded us to kill people, I would have told him he was not a prophet.”
Religious wars were the result of politics infiltrating systems of faith, he said[.]
“Death is the mother of beauty,” Wallace Stevens declares in “Sunday Morning.” Put that together with Keats’s dictum that ” ‘Beauty is truth, truth Beauty’ — that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know,” and it all adds up to a pretty grim poetic assessment of life.
Stevens’s point, of course, is that a satisfying cadence is an aesthetic necessity:
Is there no change of death in paradise?
Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs
Hang always heavy in that perfect sky,
Unchanging …
“To philosophize is to learn how to die,” said the redoubtable Montaigne, and I’m sure he was right. [Read more →]
I know, I know, I know. I can already hear the blood curdling cries of “heartless” and “monster”, but I don’t think America now has any reason whatsoever for being in Haiti. This represents a change from my previous position, immediately following the earthquake, where I was of the opinion that any life-loving individual who was able to help had a moral responsibility to assist. Let me explain…
Saturday mornings this time of year find me working the floor of the gymnasium at our church in Midland, offering halftime devotionals during Upward Basketball games. I was inspired to prepare this week’s devotional by looking into the eyes of a Heisman Trophy-winning, All American college football quarterback, Tim Tebow. [Read more →]
There are not enough fingers out there to count the many, many ways, big and small, that Christians are finding to share the Word of God, and the love of God, with others. It’s a shame, really, that so much time and space — that ANY time and space — will be devoted to this expression of God’s love from televangelist Pat Robertson.
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In my recent column I argued that disillusioned conservatives and libertarians should focus on transforming the Republican Party and taking it back from its ineffectual leaders, its special interest groups, and its Pat Robertson types. In case you weren’t convinced, Mr. Robertson himself has just helped to prove my point.
In response to the devastating earthquake in Haiti that has claimed tens if not hundreds of thousands of innocent lives, Robertson casually opines that Haiti has been “cursed” because it “swore a pact to the devil” during the early 19th century. Yes, I’m serious. Watch for yourself.
In many respects, Christmas is just a memory, now. Variations of “How was your holiday?” are disappearing from our conversation, depleted shelves of Christmas goods (at dramatically-reduced prices) are giving way to shelves stuffed with Valentine’s Day goods, and the ‘fridge has been cleared — one way or another — of the last ripening remnants of Christmas dinner leftovers.
Considering that we’re only now, finally regaining our breath and our sanity from Hectic Holiday Hustle 2009, is this any time to talk of lingering over Christmas?
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