Football?

It's also football season. Here's an article from Touchstone from last year when I still had a subscription. I'm going to have to scrounge up enough money to renew.
Anyhow, here's a quotation to get you to read the article, for all of you, that like me, are not interested in professional sports.

"And what are the insights to be gleaned from this strange but obvious spirituality of football? This for one: Priests must be men. I do not say males. I grow weary of the brittle arguments that rest two thousand years of our tradition, which is to say two thousand years of common sense, upon the arcana of sexual symbolism. The only way the sexual symbolism can work, for us embodied human beings, is if it reminds us of sexual reality anyway. If a priest is a male but not much of a man, I had rather he were a woman; at least I’d know where I stood."
-Anthony Esolen

Read the entire article here.

Baseball?

Once again, it's time for the World Series. I like baseball, even though I can't stomach watching professional sports on television. Anyhow, I thought that since it's that time of year, I'll share Douglas Jones' reflections on the sport.

I like Douglas Jones because he's the first reformed guy that Abigail really loves listening to as much as I do.
She makes fun of everyone else, and probably rightly so, but has a grudging respect for the intellect of Jones.

Maybe she will let me name a son MacDougal.

O afflicted city, lashed by storms and not comforted, I will build you with stones of turquoise, your foundations with sapphires. I will make your battlements of rubies, your gates of sparkling jewels, and all your walls of precious stones. All your sons will be taught by the LORD , and great will be your children's peace. In righteousness you will be established: Tyranny will be far from you; you will have nothing to fear. Terror will be far removed; it will not come near you.

tip o' the hat to spike's current photo spree 


Here am I, and the children the LORD has given me. We are signs and symbols in Israel from the LORD Almighty, who dwells on Mount Zion.

Derivative

Spike's recent blog entries have had me thinking about the book of Ecclesiastes a lot, but his recent post in particular, has me thinking about creeds. The best popular book that I know of in defense of the early creeds and dogma in general, is Dorothy Sayers' Creed or Chaos?

"The Christian faith is the most exciting drama that ever staggered the imagination of man-- and the dogma is the drama. That drama is summarized quite clearly in the creeds of the Church, and if we think it dull, it is because we either have never really read those amazing documents, or have recited them so often and so mechanically as to have lost all sense of their meaning. The plot pivots upon a single character, and the whole action is the answer to a single central problem: What think ye of Christ?"

So here's a clip of me reading a little bit of the book to you. Sorry if I've got my best answering machine voice on, murmuring and all. Call it blog fright. Anyhow, my reading of this is a tip of the hat to Joel Dunham, the man that once sent out voice recordings of himself reading from The Brothers Karamozov and Ecclesiastes.

ZORK!!!!

YES!
Abigail is chanting "addicto, addicto!" to me as I sit and laugh, trying to kill a leaflet.

Not too long ago, for some reason either Ben or Spike brought up favorite text-based games, which reminded me of my love for Zork. Tonight in class I remembered this and wrote ZORK in BIG letters on my hand. I came home and the first thing I did was download Zork. You should, too.

Download Zork at Infocom.

what's your favorite text game?

aint no daisy

A while back, I found an interesting examination of the "5 points of Calvinism," by popular Roman Catholic apologist, Jimmy Akin. As he "tiptoes" through the TULIP, he tries to show how a Roman Catholic could accept a majority of TULIP. It's interesting to me because it's a Roman Catholic (Presbyterian convert) announcing that much of "Calvinism" was already there to be found in the general Catholic tradition. A lot of his criticisms, as well, are only valid in regard to unhealthy American baptistic distortions of Reformed soteriology. But even John Piper, the very best of the "reformed baptist" crowd understands that Perseverance of the Saints, for example, does not mean "once you're in, you're in." Piper has said, "I believe in a doctring of the Perseverance of the Saints in which John Piper can lose everything and make a shipwreck of the Faith." (This is from his Cowper bio lecture.). Anyhow, to treat TULIP as the sum total of "Calvinism" is to ignore a large part of Reformed tradition. And isolating TULIP from its broader Reformed, covenantal context is not to deal honestly with the reformed tradition. Both Roman Catholics and many who would claim the moniker "reformed" are guilty of this reductionism.

I'm already late for work. Sorry that my thoughts are rambling.

For better and for worse, we have numerous popularizers of Reformed theology around today. The result is that what most of us think of as ‘Reformed’ is greatly truncated. American Reformed theology is like a bad cassette recording of the real thing.
-Rich Lusk, from Covenant and Election FAQ (version 6.4)

From somewhere else...

I've been waiting for Tim Rizzo to start blogging for a long while now, and I'm sad to report that he still isn't. Maybe if he knew about AudioBlogger, he'd blog some music for us. I commissioned him to do a Psalm for me a while back, I can only dream that he'll surprise me with a finished composition via blog.

Anyhow, this post isn't a gripe. It's to announce Tim's site devoted to cornbread. Even if you don't like cornbread (I don't), you'll wish you did after visiting his site.

Cornbread.

Untitled Banter (today's UB)

During my 505 intro class, our prof was asking us what kinds of books we read when we were in 5th grade (the context is irrelevant to my story). An eager student in the front row calls out "TinTin."

Dr. Library Prof looks befuddled, and he asks "what's that?"

As there was momentary silence, I piped up, "A French comic book."

"Oh," says Dr. Library Prof, "Okay."

And as he's acknowledging my answer, another voice comes from the rear of the room, "Belgian!"

But for whatever reason, no one chose to acknowledge this voice. Others begin to add aloud their 5th grade reading.

This voice had corrected me, to my shame. Of course TinTin is a Belgian comic, I know that.

So, as the story ends, in my evening 506 class, I see the girl that I believe to be the voice of the "Belgian!"
I approach her and ask, "are you the person who shouted out Belgian!?"

This girl looks at me, confused, but soon shakes her startle, and replies in the affirmative. I thank her for having corrected me, and tell her that I truly should have been more precise in my answer and said that TinTin is a French-language Belgian comic book, not a French comic book.

Comics Paradise

For a while, I thought that Scott McCloud's website was the greatest comics related place on the whole world wide web. Now I know that the truly greatest comics related website belongs to Lambiek.

Their Comiclopedia is quite simply awesome.

-a reference for any serious comic book art lover
-the greatest comic book artist index anywhere, web or print (I know I’m gushing)
-over 5,000 international comic artists listed
-listings include biographies, artwork examples, and links to any official websites related to the artist
-hosted by one of the most respectable antiquarian comic shops in the world-includes links to the Lambiek store where one can buy comics or original artwork.

I first found it while doing research for my internet class. Providentially, I happened to be doing that work in Spike's room. Spike and I had fun thinking up somewhat obscure artist names and searching for them. If I hadn't had to finish my work and if we weren't going out to a show, then it is altogether possible that we would have spent all night combing the depths of Comiclopedia.

Restored

My computer's back up and running, so much so that Abigail has begun selling my grandmother's Barbie dolls on Ebay. My grandmother's name was Mildred Heck, and, yes, that's where Mildred Elise Owen's name comes from and, yes, my Mildred has a little bit of Heck in her, too, though not strictly speaking. Abigail is feeling mighty fine that she has put all of those Barbies up, and she's bragging about it right now.

My latest "non-book" review for my internet class is up at audiobookreview.blogspot.com.
That's the last of the non-book reviews, and I'm grateful because they're hard to write; so much information to cram into one paragraph.
Anyhow, here's the best part of the reviews for those of you that don't care to actually read the reviews. My prof insists that the most important part of the review is the "qualifications of the reviewer" at the end of the review. So here are my qualifications for each of my reviews:

From the review of Elizabeth Cotten's Freight Train CD:

-The reviewer has a degree in English and continues to pursue his avid interest in folk history and musicology through acquiring, studying, and preserving the music of local singer/songwriters through his own field recordings.

(for anyone who doesn't know, while i was at houghton i constantly had a tape recorder with me, so much so that i found a belt holster for it. i would record anything. the above is an embellishment of this fact. and for the record, yes, joel dunham and i would pretend to be alan lomax recording fields, and occasionally recording farts.)

From the review of SpellBound:

-The reviewer has a Bachelor’s degree in English with a concentration in Secondary Education. As a young child, he was winner of his third grade spelling bee and constant runner-up in subsequent spelling bees. He has yet to surpass these achievements in his professional career.

(all true)

From the review of PasteMagazine:

-The reviewer of this article has a Bachelor of Arts degree in English and a long history of spending too much money on CDs. Now in the throes of tending to a family, working full-time, and going to school full-time, he finds himself in a budget crunch. Paste Magazine gives him enough of a music fix to get by while he waits for the time in the future when he can freely buy any CD he desires once again.

(paste magazine is great)

And, most recently, from the review of Jim Weiss' audio interpretation of Henty's The Cat of Bubastes:

-The reviewer has a B.A. in English with a concentration in Secondary Education. He is currently pursuing his MLS degree. Naturally drawn to stories of the fantastic, talking trees and the lot, he was pleasantly sucked into the all too realistic fiction of G. A. Henty after hearing Jim Weiss’ performance.

(this isn't entirely true because i had read henty before i heard jim weiss)

...
The tech. difficulties with my computer remain undiagnosed. I don't know what caused my computer to malfunction. I brought it into the store where I purchased it and have a warranty, and they told me I would have to have them send it out to Compaq for two weeks. I told the tech. man that I couldn't do that and he showed me how to reformat my computer. So I did so, my hard drive has been erased, and all of the programs reinstalled. My computer acts like a brand new baby.

i'm having technical difficulties. my new computer has crashed.