Archive | January 2005

The Singer by Calvin Miller

Jan24

I’ve been re-reading The Singer by Baptist pastor and poet Calvin Miller. The book and its two sequels, The Song and The Finale are subtitled “a mythic retelling of the New Testament.” The Singer stars Jesus as The Singer and Satan as World-hater. Here are a few quotes to whet your appetite:

Humanity is fickle. They may dress for a morning coronation and never feel the need to change clothes to attend an execution in the afternoon. So Triumphal Sundays and Good Fridays always fit comfortably into the same April week.

Earthmaker set earth spinning on its way
And said, “Give me your vast infinity
My son; I’ll wrap it in a bit of clay.
Then enter Terra microscopically
To love the little souls who weep away
Their lives.” “I will,” I said, “set Terra free.”

Decision is the key to destiny.
“God, can you be merciful and send me off to hell and lock me in forever?”
“No, Pilgrim, I will not send you there, but if you chose to go there, I could never lock you out.”

 

In Memoriam

Jan23

Yesterday was the 32nd anniversary of the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade that eventually legalized abortion throughout the United States. Today many churches celebrate Sanctity of Life Sunday both to affirm the value of human life and to remember the staggering loss of so many children over the past 32 years to abortion.

What Next at Baylor?

Jan21

Eldest Daughter tells me that Robert Sloan, President of Baylor University, resigned today, effective at the end of May. From the statistics in an article from Waco TV station KWTX, almost everything at Baylor had improved under Sloan’s leadership.

Enrollment has grown from 12,202 in Fall 1995 to 13,799 in Fall 2004, an increase of 14 percent.

In Fall 2001, Baylor Regents endorsed Baylor 2012, the University’s 10-year vision that calls for Baylor to become a nationally prominent research institution while simultaneously strengthening its Christian mission.

Faculty additions have brought credentials from some of the world’s great universities, including Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Yale, Princeton and MIT. Overall faculty has grown from 644 in 1995 to 780 in 2004.

Three Schools —Engineering and Computer Science (1995), Honors College (2002) and Social Work (2004)— have been established.

Annual gifts to the University have grown from $18.5 million in 1995 to more than $45 million in 2003 , the University’s fourth-best giving year, with more than 3,500 first-time donors. Gifts to the University during the Sloan administration total almost $400 million. Endowment has almost doubled, from $341 million in 1996 to $722 million in 2004

The average SAT score of entering freshmen has improved from 1160 in 1995 to 1190 in 2004.

The five-year, $500 million Campaign for Greatness begun in November 1999 finished successfully one year ahead of schedule and exceeded its goal by $27 million. More than 35,000 individuals, foundations, companies and organizations committed their support during the endowment campaign.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Read the news report. So what’s the problem., and why is Dr. Sloan resigning? Well, if I understand what’s going on (and I very well may not), there’s a contingent of faculty who want Baylor to remain a sleepy little semi-Baptist, semi-Christian university out in Waco. Let’s not make waves. Let’s not be vocal about that “Christian” label, in particular. The university under Sloan has been hiring professors from many different Christian traditions (Catholic, Methodist, Episcopal, even Baptist) who are actually serious about applying their faith to their academic studies. Some think the problems started over a tragedy in the summer of 2003 (just before Eldest Daughter arrived on the scene at Baylor) when a basketball player murdered another basketball player. However, I think it started with this:

Baylor University in October(2000) terminated well-known Intelligent Design scientist William Dembski as head of the Michael Polanyi Center for Complexity, Information, and Design. The center was placed in limbo, without a name or certain future at the university in Waco, Texas. Dembski, who retains his Baylor professorship, says he was overwhelmed by politicking within Baylor.

Some people were afraid that the serious study of “Intelligent Design” would damage the reputation of Baylor. Sloan and others thought it would strengthen that reputation in the long run and would honor the Author of Design.

I am praying that Baylor will retain and even strengthen the vision for a first class university with a distinctively Christian worldview—even under new leadership.

Charlotte Macleod, d. 2005

Jan20

” She has said to me many times that she would continue to write her books even if nobody read them, because she really enjoyed doing them,” Baxter (MacLeod’s sister) said. “It was a very exciting and satisfying thing for her to produce a novel.” (Exactly the way I feel about my humble little blog)

Mystery novelist Charlotte Macleod died last Friday. I only have a handful of mystery writers for whose names I search the shelves when I go to the bookstore. Macleod was one of the handful. I especially enjoyed her series of books about Bostonian Sarah Kelling and her eccentric family. I tend to like books with eccentric characters.

George W. Bush’s Second Inaugural Address

Jan20

Some quotes I found moving and true:

So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.

The great objective of ending tyranny is the concentrated work of generations. The difficulty of the task is no excuse for avoiding it. America’s influence is not unlimited, but fortunately for the oppressed, America’s influence is considerable, and we will use it confidently in freedom’s cause.

I ask our youngest citizens to believe the evidence of your eyes. You have seen duty and allegiance in the determined faces of our soldiers. You have seen that life is fragile, and evil is real, and courage triumphs. Make the choice to serve in a cause larger than your wants, larger than yourself and in your days you will add not just to the wealth of our country, but to its character.

We go forward with complete confidence in the eventual triumph of freedom. Not because history runs on the wheels of inevitability; it is human choices that move events. Not because we consider ourselves a chosen nation; God moves and chooses as He wills. We have confidence because freedom is the permanent hope of mankind, the hunger in dark places, the longing of the soul.

History has an ebb and flow of justice, but history also has a visible direction, set by liberty and the author of Liberty.

The Blessing of Children

Jan19

The Blessing of Children is the story of Valerie, the mother of ten children, who sounds like someone who has gained a lot more wisdom than I have–and she’s gained it the hard way, through suffering. Hear what she says about having a large family:

I sometimes hear Christians say that they cannot have children soon or in close succession or in large numbers because it would be hard. And then I wonder where we, the Church, ever came to the conclusion that God has determined rest for us in all ages!

For the Christian life, God uses the metaphors of a soldier, a slave, and an athlete. Is it from these metaphors that we obtained the no-sweat, no-trouble, no-pressure model for Christian living and ethical decision-making? Wherever did we get the idea that discomfort is a sign that we should retreat to the safety of the trenches and not proceed in hope and faith?

Explaining Away the Poetry

Jan19

One of the students in my American Literature discussion group says he doesn’t understand most poetry, especially modern poetry. It seems meaningless to him, words strung together with little or nothing that makes sense. This complaint is not uncommon, and some of the problem is laziness, I’m sure. I find myself trying to explain the particular poem we are studying and what it means. But to some extent this explanation process leaves some of the meaning out of the poem. There is so much more there than I am able to explain in my own prose. So the student comes away with a poem partially explained and no experience of the poetry itself. Suggestions?

Edgar Allan Poe

Jan19

Last year on Poe’s birthday, I posted my favorite poem of all poems, Annabel Lee. This year my Poe birthday gift to you is the first verse of The Bells, which uses one of my very favorite words: tintinnabulation. Isn’t that a wonderful word? What are some of your favorite words? Don’t you have some that you just like the sound of?

Hear the sledges with the bells
Silver bells!
What a world of merriment their melody foretells!
How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle,
In the icy air of night!
While the stars that oversprinkle
All the heavens, seem to twinkle
With a crystalline delight;
Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells
From the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells
From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.

Note: You must read this poem out loud. Most poems are meant to be read aloud, but this one is especially meaningless unless you read the sounds in full voice.
More favorite words: rhubarb, melancholy, ragamuffin, ubiquitous, felicitous, cacophony, nemesis, ornery, burgundy, joy, bellicose, pickaninny, cantankerous, delicious . . .

Made to Worship

Jan18

Feast by Edna St. Vincent Millay
I drank at every vine.
The last was like the first.
I came upon no wine
So wonderful as thirst.

I gnawed at every root.
I ate of every plant.
I came upon no fruit
So wonderful as want.

Feed the grape and bean
To vintner and monger;
I will lie down lean
With my thirst and hunger.

All joy (as distinct from mere pleasure, still more amusement) emphasises our pilgrim status; always reminds, beckons, awakens desire. Our best havings are wantings.
C.S. Lewis, Letters, 5 November 1959

The experience is one of intense longing . . . This hunger is better than any other fullness; this poverty better than all other wealth. And thus it comes about, that if the desire is long absent, it may itself be desired, and that new desiring becomes a new instance of the original desire . . . The human soul was made to enjoy some object that is never fully given – nay, cannot even be imagined as given – in our present mode of subjective and spatio-temporal experience.
C.S. Lewis, The Pilgrim’s Regress, Preface.

If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

In a film series we are watching at church, Ted Tripp says the we are all made to worship. There is no question as to whether or not we will worship—only whom or what we will worship. We can try to be satisfied with wine or food or wealth or ______________, but we can never be truly satisfied in the object of our worship until we find ourselves in eternity in the prescence of I Am Who I AM. In Him is fullness of joy; it is to be found nowhere else.

The Most Important Book I Read in College

Jan18

Lessons from a Bear of Very Little Brain by Sam Torode.

“In four years of college, the most important thing I did was read Winnie-the-Pooh. My saying this will surprise many of you, and it is with no small shame that I admit it. How, you ask, could I have made it through childhood, and all the way into college, without reading Winnie-the-Pooh?”

I linked to this article in Boundless last year on A.A. Milne’s birthday (b.1882), and this year I can’t resist it again. What was the most important book you read while in college? I think I read some of C.S. Lewis for the first time while in college, and if so, I would have to count those as my most important books. However, maybe I read all of C.S. Lewis while still in high school; in which case I would choose Les Miserables by Victor Hugo. I stayed up until 3:00 AM to finish Les Miserables, and I had an 8:00 AM class that morning. For me, staying awake until 3:00 in the morning was an unusual occurence; my head usually hit the pillow at 10:00 PM every night. Only a very good book could keep me turning pages until the wee hours. Anyway, back to Pooh, I agree with Mr. Torode that for one who was never introduced to Pooh as a child the meeting would be a Momentous Occasion.

Winnie-the-Pooh was first published in 1926.