A Living Text

Over the weekend I finished reading Five Forks to Appomattox by Shelby Foote. He does a good job of tying threads together and staying out of the way as an author. It’s a sad tale on all sides, from Lincoln’s last days to the Army of Northern Virginia’s starvation and retreat/march to Appomattox. Lee sheds tears as he surrenders, liberated slaves sing hymns before Lincoln as he walks through evacuated Richmond, Edmund Ruffin puts a bullet in his head at the news of Lee’s surrender and John Wilkes Booth incarnates Virginia’s motto. What scenes of desolation and rebirth are on display for us. 

It makes me marvel again as I drive daily past the site of Longstreet’s wounding. All these little moments on which the fate of our nation and the wider world turned. Longstreet might have driven Grant back across the Rapidan, Lee might have driven into Philadelphia if not for the lost order. The whole thing might have been averted at different times. This book shows the grim ending to this grisly war, and takes all glory from the conflict. It was a very good read.

I compare Opus Dei to the early Methodists. They are focused on holiness in daily life - in one’s vocation. This view of life seems absent in most Protestant sermons that I hear. This article says:

“It is in the midst of the most material things of the earth that we must sanctify ourselves, serving God and all mankind.” With those words, St Josemaría summed up the objective of Opus Dei, a personal prelature of the Catholic Church he founded in 1928. When he started Opus Dei, which means “Work of God,” and is commonly referred to as the Work, St Josemaría wanted to spread a way of living one’s faith by sanctifying work and daily tasks.

During his life, through his lectures, writings, travels and simple way of life, St Josemaría taught that everyone can be holy by giving glory to God in all the little things they do, and by doing those things as well as possible. On its website, www.opusdei.org, the Work describes its mission as “helping people turn their work and daily activities into occasions for growing close to God, for serving others, and for improving society”.

I’m going to break the cardinal rule of not blogging about blogging and say that if you see my blog roll shrinking, it’s because I’m adding all the blogs to Google Reader, which is where I read them now anyway. So the links list will shrink as I move blogs from here to Reader. 

Now that is an entertaining post.

I am reading Mormonism in Dialogue with Contemporary Christian Theologies. The Christian sections of the book are next to worthless, so I am skipping most of them, but the LDS responses are a rich source of material for understanding current Mormon thought. Roger R. Keller wrote a response to a piece on Karl Barth, in which he offers one of the best short summaries of what the Mormon faith is about that I have seen. He writes:

Any sense of predestination or determinism is totally absent from Latter-day Saint theology. Instead, what holds a prominent place in Latter-day Saint thought similar to election in Barth’s theology is the “plan of salvation.” Essentially, the plan of salvation holds that Christ covenanted with the Father in the premortal world to enter history and atone through his suffering and death for the sins of all Heavenly Father’s children. This atonement allows humans to return to the Father as they repent of their sins. Upon this foundation, premortal spirits were and are willing to enter earthly life. They know the plan of salvation before they enter mortality, but a veil of forgetfulness comes over them as they come to earth, and they must rediscover the plan once on earth. People find Christ, rediscover the plan of salvation, and learn of their divine destiny through the teachings and preachings of the LDS church:

(he quotes Madsen’s Eternal Man) “Such a learning process recollects more than it researches. It is the opposite of amnesia. It is less discovery than recovery…One begins mortality with the veil drawn, but slowly he is moved to penetrate the veil within himself. He is, in time, led to seek the “holy of holies” within the temple of his own being.

If we just had this kind of thing front and center in our discussions, I think it would be much easier for all to see why historic Christians of the Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox camps do not consider the LDS church to be Christian. This idea of a finite Jesus, premortal spirit people, and recovering a past consciousness of yourself prior to entering mortality is utterly foreign to the creeds, liturgies, and thought life of the people of God throughout history, unless one accepts LDS Scripture as true.

I read this today:

Exxon paid $30 billion in corporate taxes in 2007, a tax rate of more than 40%. In fact, Exxon paid more in income taxes than the bottom 50% of individual taxpayers!
According to Tax Foundation data cited in Investor’s Business Daily,
from 1977 to 2004, U.S. oil companies’ average corporate income tax rate
(federal and state) was 45%. The remaining after-tax profits of companies like Exxon Mobil are distributed among their shareholders, and that’s just about everyone with a pension, IRA, 401k, or any equity mutual fund investment.

It’s been fun to listen to sports talk this week as delusional Redskins talkshow hosts ginned themselves up into thinking that they could somehow hang with the Patriots. I doubt these clowns believed it, but they lived the fantasy. Well, 52 points later, they ought to be singing a different tune tomorrow.

For some reason I associate going to the beach with reading the New Yorker. Since I don’t go to the library much due to moving away from my favorite library at NNU in Nampa, I don’t really read the New Yorker ever. But in my mind’s eye I see sun, sand, an umbrella, and a copy of the New Yorker as essential beach material. We’ll be out there this weekend, and although it feels too late in the year for it, I bought a New Yorker last night to take with me.

It seems like true beach goers are back in school or at work, and that all the hussle and bustle of the summer is past. So we’ll be in a melancholy place, grasping at the last straws of summer leftover. In a way it’s sad, but the beach is still the beach. I just feel like you should rush out there during June-August and follow the hordes. Going out of time doesn’t feel right to me, but that’s what circumstances dictated this year.

Something I have seen lately is how much people love lies and resist the truth – I am including myself in this calculation. Some people will go to their grave actively supporting what they once knew to be a lie simply to save face. “I’m not wrong. I didn’t do that. I don’t have a problem.” Why? Why is it so hard for us to embrace the truth? It takes humility and maybe a loss of face, but in the end it is so liberating.

I don’t understand the attitude of people who are confronted with something about themselves and who choose to attack and destroy in response. I’d like to think that if have problems and someone brings them to my attention I can at least acknowledge that there is some validity in what they are claiming.

In my own life anger is the demon I struggled with the most. Especially when I was heavily into arguing for Reformed theology. I don’t know what the correlation was but I was angry a lot, thinking I needed to be studying or writing the sequel to Institutes or something. But even when I am angry I don’t sit and think “I don’t have an anger problem” – I just don’t care to do anything about it. So do people who are confronted with the truth and deny it really know deep down that they are wrong? Or are they so self-deceived that they can’t see it? I feel like the whole world is in love with lies.

I’m kind of sick of blogs - no offense to anyone. I consider myself a harbinger of the zeitgeist, so this could herald the end of blogdom at large! Rather than worrying about post post-modernism, we should worry about post-blogdom ~ what follows the blog?

I started reading blogs probably in about 2000 or 01. Back then you could count them on one hand. I have stayed constant with Barlow and Horne, and I mourn the absence of Scott Cunningham and Jim Hart (JH3K).

I’ve never had much to say. And that’s what I realize about most blogs - we’re all ranting about the same limited set of issues. We all have our unique and exciting spin on events, that sounds just like everyone else’s unique spin. I am sick of my own blog, it’s dull and pedantic. I often think of shutting it down, but it would just be more of a hassle to fire it up again later. (this is called “going garver” for those not in the know). Nowadays, every newborn is issued a blog and starts in at about 18 months documenting his/her life. Can you imagine the immense task facing future historians when they have to sift through trillions of pages or pixels of information about our age? Meaningless entry after meaningless entry of repetitive flotsam - future historian, I salute you!

Anyway, I do think the net and blogs are revolutionary in a way similar to the printing press. I think their effect on church and politics are already apparent. I think the orthodox resistance inside the Anglican Communion is much more effective due to the net for example. But we have chaff with the wheat. I think that over time people will lose interested and drop out of blogging - how many of us really have anything novel to say? The blogs that are left standing will be widely and frequently read, and balance will return to the Force. But for right now, I am feeling some major blog fatigue. blogatigue - a new word?