Mayor of a small city in Texas (pop. 88,439) quits right after his landslide election to a third term. Reason: he’s in love with a Mexican illegal alien who had to leave the US. Twist: they’re both guys!
Don Heck drew horror comics. Take a look.
Noah speaks out:
Fun Home more or less defines middle-brow, I think, at least for me. I found it really boring and predictable — earnest anecdote, earnest anecdote, moment of clarity, moment of ambivalent trasncendence, earnest anecdote…I felt like she might as well have just cut and pasted the thing from random scenes from This American Life. Yeah, there were literary references, but every time she dropped one I heard the thud. And her art does nothing for me.
Ouch! This might hurt even worse if I had ever listened to This American Life. Did David Sedaris use to do broadcasts on that show? I really liked Naked, but the book doesn’t remind me much of Fun Home.
It was beautiful weather this evening and I was up on Mt. Royal for my constitutional. The centerpiece of my walk is always a few trudges up and down the long, long set of stairs that leads from one of the mountain’s scenic walkways to the mountain’s top. On a sunny day the stairs typically feature a population of tourists and exercise freaks, and today there was also a young couple closely joined at the hip while they were being photographed. I should point out that the great staircase, made of a charming rustic wood, has landings and, like everything else, the landings are shaded by the green trees that crowd about the scene. If you want to pose for a photograph, some very good spots are available. The couple and their photographer had chosen one such spot. I stood still and watched while the photographer took a picture, then I passed on down the staircase, and then, a couple of minutes later, I passed back up.
“Is this professional?” I asked, meaning the shoot. The photographer was as young as the couple, and the three of them were joking back and forth, so they might have been friends just having fun. But he told me, yes, it was a professional shoot. “Do you want to be an extra?” he asked, bringing me into the moment. I said sure, I’d stand in the background and hold a stick. Everyone was in such a good mood that this was considered funny too.
As I passed the couple, I asked if they were getting married. The girl said yes, and I told them congratulations. They were quite a handsome pair: two well-knit mesomorphs with regular bone structure and pleasant expressions.
“Aren’t they nice looking?” the photographer called after me.
“You bet,” I said. “They’re great looking.” Then, to the couple: “Go have some good-looking kids!”
The girl, lively and cheerful: “That’s the plan!” Along with sounding lively and cheerful, she also sounded a bit shy, like someone who doesn’t normally toss out gay quips for the general company. The boy’s smile, as I met his eyes, was a little abashed, and one got the feeling that he did not expect random passersby to be appraising his looks. I guess what I mean to say is that, to be frank, a lot of good-looking people are kind of a pain and that these kids struck me as not being pains.
And that was it, that was the high point of my day. It was a real nice three minutes.
We’ve been hassling about faith and nonbelief here and here at the HU (and special thanks to commenter John Hennings for his Christian point of view on the matter). President Obama’s address at Notre Dame yesterday is being excerpted on the liberal blogs (here’s James Fallows), so of course I’ve stumbled across it. What appears to be a key passage:
… the ultimate irony of faith is that it necessarily admits doubt. It is the belief in things not seen. It is beyond our capacity as human beings to know with certainty what God has planned for us or what He asks of us, and those of us who believe must trust that His wisdom is greater than our own.
I’m a Christian. I entered this fascinating discussion late. I’d like to take it back to the quoted text (Matthew 6:5-6). The common interpretation of this scripture by those who read it in context is that Jesus is forbidding praying for the purpose of looking pious to others, not necessarily all public prayer. The quote is from the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus’ longest continuous monologue in the Gospels. Among other things, the Sermon on the Mount repeatedly calls people to exercise a purer morality, one that comes from a righteous attitude of the heart. In other words, intent matters as much as action. This was revolutionary in an age and a place where the Pharisees, the leading religious sect, were advocating strict compliance to an externally visible, rules-based religion, and using social opprobrium to enforce it. A tendency toward Pharisaical legalism and its accompanying hypocrisy is endemic to humanity and probably all religion. We want to reduce God to a genie in a lamp. If we follow the rules, we get what we want. The God Jesus is talking about wants a real relationship, and He (for lack of a gender-neutral personal pronoun) wants to help us become better than what we are. It’s the difference between an ATM machine and a parent, or between a prostitute and a loving spouse. Correcting this fundamental mistake and enabling real connection with a loving divine creator were what Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection were all about. It’s also why He got so enraged about hypocrisy.
I think communal prayer can be an effective and even instructive part of worship, and it is hugely beneficial to spiritual intimacy and fellowship in smaller groups, as when “two or three are gathered together.” However, trying to please people instead of God is a constant danger in prayer and almost every other aspect of worship or life in general. Consequently, it’s one many of us talk about a lot, like teachers harping on drugs in schools.
Apparent contradictions in the Bible can often be resolved by looking at the text in context — often the immediate context, but sometimes scripture as a whole. That said, Noah makes an excellent point that as in science, there are some things even the most knowledgeable people of faith (e.g., Ravi Zacharias or Norm Geisler) don’t fully understand and can’t adequately explain. I like Noah’s comparison to the mystery of gravity; one of my other favorites is the dual wave/particle nature of light, since it reminds me of the Trinity — a mystery so puzzling that Christians came up with a name for it. It sounds much more impressive to say “Oh, that’s the Trinity,” than to say “We really can’t explain why Jesus talks about God the Father and the Holy Spirit in third person sometimes and first person others, why He claims to be God, and yet He talks to God, and doesn’t contradict Jewish monotheism, etc. It’s a real puzzler.”
Part 2!
First, thanks for the kind words. After all that about pleasing God and not people, it’s ironic that I‘m happy to have pleased you, but I respect your opinions, so I guess it makes sense.
Now on to Tom’s questions.
My argument (with some borrowed bits) that Christ wasn’t forbidding all public prayer goes like this: First, it’s consistent with the rest of the chapter, starting with verse 1: “Be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of people, to be seen by them. Otherwise, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven.” Second, He himself prayed in front of others in Matthew 11, Matthew 27, and Luke 9, although the first two were VERY brief, and in the other, we don’t know what was said. He also strongly implied that group prayer was okay in Matthew 18, verses 19 and 20: “Again, I assure you: If two of you on earth agree about any matter that you pray for, it will be done for you by My Father in heaven. For where two or three are gathered together in My name, I am there among them.” I know one of these was already referenced, but I think the two verses quoted together strengthen the case. Side note: I am walking right past the theological questions this passage raises, like to whom those verses apply and what it means to be gathered “in His name” – at least for now. I have to go to work eventually.
Finally, the Acts of the Apostles (also written by physician/historian Luke) describe the Apostles and other early Christians as praying both privately and communally. There are recorded instances of the Apostles and early believers holding each other accountable on points of doctrine. Consequently, one would not expect this to go without dispute if at least some of them understood Jesus as totally forbidding prayer in front of others. Paul even called Peter on the carpet once. It wasn’t related to prayer, but it was about trying to please people instead of God (Galatians 2).
Finally, in the interest of full disclosure, I should point out that the Gospels portray Jesus as habitually slipping off and praying in private. So He practiced what he preached, to the point frustrating the Apostles and others attempting to track Him down.
… the annual National Day of Prayer and national days of prayer in general are intended to promote prayer, especially prayer for the nation. Congress and occasionally the President have been proclaiming them since 1775, although not unanimously. They’re based on the idea that prayer makes a difference in the real world, and until they were made annual, mostly associated with times the U.S. was in a jam. They’ve always been ecumenical and therefore respecting no particular established religion. Also, they’re resolutions, not laws that people have to follow, so most have not had Constitutional issues with them. Being seen as a supporter of prayer was probably also the right answer politically for most of our history. The history of national days of prayer and their more recent promotion by the evangelical community can be viewed on these sites (http://www.
religioustolerance.org/day_ , andhttp://www.ndptf.org/about/pray2.htm index.cfm ). The problem with all this, obviously, is that it’s difficult to promote prayer without coming across as self-righteous and Pharisaical, or maybe even becoming so (just a little bit?). Jesus managed to do it by living as unpretentious, sincere and unselfish a life as one could live (which must have made the occasional claims of deity simultaneously jarring and more credible). If we had more credibility, as we once did, this would be more accepted. It still is accepted on a peersoanl level from Christians with whom people have personal experience and a relationship of trust.
I just used the official CPI calculator, a great site. My salary in 1989, namely $37,000, would now be equal to $63,628. I can’t believe the difference. So much time has gone by.