German

"Destruction of the embryo in the mother's womb is a violation of the right to live which God has bestowed upon this nascent life. To raise the question whether we are here concerned already with a human being or not is merely to confuse the issue. The simple fact is that God certainly intended to create a human being and that this nascent being has been deliberately deprived of his life. And that is nothing but murder."

--Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Glory

“This, then, is the mark of the man, the beard. By this, he is seen to be a man. It is older than Eve. It is the token of the superior nature….It is therefore unholy to desecrate the symbol of manhood, hairiness.”

St. Clement of Alexandria, 2.276


Read more here:
Beard

"There are two kinds of people in this world that go around beardless—boys and women, and I am neither one".

Picking up chicks

It's morning, I shouldn't have even turned on the computer, I should respond to Pete's comment below, but I don't have the time, so I offer this up instead...




Jack Chick is awesome. I am not endorsing any of his messages, but he almost single-handedly got thousands of middle-aged baptist women to read comics. That's cool.

God-bearer, certainly, but...

The Confessing Evangelical has also been spending some time reading Ratzinger documents. Read some of his thoughts on John Paul II's dedication of the world to Mary....

Fatima: the other stuff

Right on.

Curious?

Now that Valerie of kyriosity has made herself known on a couple of my friends' blogs, I'll confess that I've known of her blog for a long while, and now wish to share with you the very best of it. (yes, I freely confess that I'm a lurker. I've lurked just about everywhere.)

Hear Valerie Sing!

testing

Take it as gift

Pete has got to be having a birthday sometime in the next year. Here's a hat that I know he'll wear with pride.



Get your very own hat right here.

Rats? Ratz!

Everyone's talking about the new Bishop of Rome. I'm trying to ignore the buzz and go straight to the sources, so I've been reading some Ratzinger documents.

Just woke up this morning and read the declaration:

Dominus Iesus - On the unicity and salvific universality of Jesus Christ and the Church

Ratzinger certainly qualifies what he writes so as not to be misinterpreted (though I'm sure that he still is), and there is much good in this document, but I still have problems.

Qualify it how you may, I can't accept a defense of language like this:
"The Second Vatican Council, in fact, has stated that: “the unique mediation of the Redeemer does not exclude, but rather gives rise to a manifold cooperation which is but a participation in this one source”.43 The content of this participated mediation should be explored more deeply, but must remain always consistent with the principle of Christ's unique mediation: “Although participated forms of mediation of different kinds and degrees are not excluded, they acquire meaning and value only from Christ's own mediation, and they cannot be understood as parallel or complementary to his”.44 Hence, those solutions that propose a salvific action of God beyond the unique mediation of Christ would be contrary to Christian and Catholic faith."


Then again, who am I to question a document from the Vatican, given the seal of apostolic authority?

mea culpa

I'll be reading more Ratzinger in the days ahead.

Referral

I was catching up on reading Spike's blog tonight, and decided that I'll refer you to him instead of writing anything original tonight. He captures well the feeling of discussing theology with a loved one. Read his whole post here.

"I am not offended by Mr. Brown’s book, because he looks in on our feast and says that it does not exist. But when I eat the cracker and ask myself, “Is this the symbol of the flesh divine or is it the flesh divine itself?” his no-doubt jolly fun book pales to schoolboy giggles about pistil and stamen. Lest we forget how important those giggles are, because we are older now, and we seek the God of older men, remember that we seek knowing we must approach as children. He is risen, indeed. He is risen in deed. We worship a Living God, which is an unfathomable weight, but a lighter burden. We worship a fact more stable than gravity, a fantasy more ethereal than ghosts in sunlight. And whether that worship is given to us or by us, it is a discussion held between brothers on an open porch."

Donut Man and Daughter

That's who this post is for.

Here's a video clip of Ann Coulter, handmaiden of the Right.

Height has nothing to do with it.

"The Church is not something imposed externally on civil society; the Church is civil society when through the baptism of all its members it has reached the terminus of its potentialities. When Church and State have thus become one, humanity has at last found its home in a social organism for which it has been longing since creation; it is a home which is supernatural, one which embraces every side of man’s life and prepares him for his home in eternity. The Church is the climax of man’s longings as a social being."
...

"Their knowledge of the Fathers had made High Churchmen familiar with the conception of history as an ordered process working from creation towards a certain end, the restoration of all things in Christ. The Incarnation is not something new. The Word made Flesh is the same as He who was in the beginning with God, by whom all things were made, the Light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world. Christ came not to destroy but to fulfil the process begun by Him in the primitive civil and religious society of Genesis. As the Convocation Book puts it, the platform of Church government in the New Testament can be lawfully deduced from that laid down in the Old. [Ibid., p. 141.]"

from The High Church Tradition, by G.W.O. Addleshaw

"The Incarnation is not something new." I don't know what to make of that sentence. Of course the Incarnation was something new, but I won't hold Addleshaw accountable to that kind of wooden literalism. I think that his point is that Old Covenant reality was incarnational reality, no less than our post-Word-made-flesh reality is. In context, it is important to note that Addleshaw here stresses the continuity between the church prior to Christ's coming, and its development and continuing perfecting since. He obviously doesn't deny the "ordered process" "working toward the restoration of all things in Christ," so doesn't belittle the Incarnation, but that statement, "The Incarnation is not something new," is jarring nonetheless.

Incarnational reality of the Old Covenant. Something to think about.

Garden-City

David Hegeman has responded to Chad Degenhart's post.

"I want to say for the record that I state quite clearly that I do state in Plowing that the Garden of Eden is paradise. This does not mean that it is impossible for something good and perfect to reach an even higher (or different) state of perfection. (Didn't Jesus Christ grow and mature?) God gave men and women the privilage of embellishing (="dress") and uncovering the potentialities invested in the original. It is part of the imago dei."

29th

Today I would blindfold Spike, drive him 400 miles (Spike can roll a cigarette blindfolded in a bumpy car, I'm sure), take him out of the car, walk three miles, spin him around 29 times, remove the blindfold, and allow him to gaze upon the strange wilderness that we had entered. He would gaze and gaze until his eyes finally settled on the glorious cabin built for him, rocking chair placed prominently on the porch, pipe stand beside it. Muted typewriter closed up, patiently, inside.

And Spike may very well settle for 204 Krazy Kat dailies.

I sure hope that no one is singing "happy birthday" to you today, Spike, because doing so would be a clear infrigement of copyright laws, and should be punished accordingly.

A Card up my sleeve

Orson Scott Card is one of my favorite sf/fantasy authors, because he brings a strong moral voice to everything that he writes (Card is a Mormon), and because he's a jolly fine storyteller.

In a recent installment of Uncle Orson Reviews Everything, Card reviews two current films and finds them lacking. I haven't seen the two films, but I trust his opinion, and remain no more than mildly interested in either one. I'm linking to his review here, though, because I think that the critique that he makes of these two films applies to an overwhelming majority of recent cinematic fare.

After discussing ways in which the two respective filmmakers do damage to their stories by shattering any "illusion of reality," Card has this to offer:

"It's not that the sexual or gross-out "humor" makes these two movies offensive or evil -- it doesn't.

It just makes them stupid and dull."


I can't remember where he said it, but C.S. Lewis wrote somewhere that he didn't find most dirty jokes offensive, he just didn't find them funny.


The antidote to this insipid onslaught: Bust out the Buster Keaton.

Imputed Gnomz

Yesterday, or the day before, I came across a blog posting that discussed a Dilbert comic, and how if one were to simply change a few words around, the Dilbert strip would become a highly amusing take on the (relatively) recent Auburn Avenue/N.T. Wright furor.

Alas, this morning I tried to find this same blog post, but could not. So right now, I can't give credit to the person that came up with this idea. If anyone reading this knows who it is, please let me know!

I took the liberty of implementing this person's idea by creating a gnomz strip. I want to stress that the concept was not my idea, and that I cannot now find the original source to give credit.

Also, I need to note that I lifted the wording entirely verbatim (with the exception of the changed words) from the Dilbert strip. The words and the wording are not my own, and I take no credit for either the words themselves or for their inspired wisdom. I (obviously) have no intent of making any money from this silly little gnomz strip. I made it simply for my own enjoyment and any others that might enjoy it. I have nothing but the highest respect for Scott Adams and his Dilbert strip. If he or anyone else responsible for the strip asks me to take this gnomz strip down, I will do so immediately.

That's a lot of disclaimer for a shabby looking gnomz comic.

Here it is: Auburn Avenue

Set Your Gnomz Ahead

Here's my latest Gnomz comic. I created it as a little something extra to put on an assignment that I was turning in for my Marketing class.

Marketing Disaster

(I know that if I keep doing this long enough, it's bound to catch on, and one of you will soon delight me with your own gnomz)

Comics are dope.
....

Writing in The New Republic in 1948, Marya Mannes referred to the form as “intellectual marijuana.”

“Every hour spent in reading comics,” she asserted, “is an hour in which all inner growth has stopped.”

(via Backwards City)