Category Archive: Miscellaneous

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April 14, 2007

Portland

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As part of my imimigration process, I had to go to Portland to have my “biometrics” taken this week.  For those of you who aren’t familiar with immigration-speak, that’s fingerprints, signature, and a photo.  Yes, for all of that I had to drive four hours to Portland, stay overnight, and then drive four hours back.

The trip was uneventful.  Well, except for the event at the start.  I tried to play a CD and discovered that the player was jammed somehow.  It’s been doing that on occasion recently, but this time I couldn’t even make it eject my six-pack of CDs so that I could start over.  I’ll have to see if I can get the dealer to do it for free as they did the first time it happened.

So instead of listening to the CDs I’d picked, I had to listen instead to some old cassettes.  Several of these I hadn’t heard in years.  I started off with The Rainmakers’ The Good News and the Bad News, which I’d remembered (and still enjoyed) for Bob Walkenhorst‘s clever lyrics, moved on later to The Innocence Mission‘s self-titled album, which I appreciating more now than when I first bought it.

On the way home, I played Elvis Costello’s Spike and Peter Case’s great Peter Case Sings Like Hell.  When I was in my late teens, I wanted to be Peter Case.  I saw him in concert at the Edmonton Folk Festival, where other performers included Lucinda Williams, Sugar Blue, T-Bone Burnett, Roger McGuinn, Bob Neuwirth, David Mansfield, and a whole bunch of other people who had played on albums together and who sat in on each other’s sessions during the festival.  Ever since then, I’ve been playing my own version of “Walkin’ Bum,” which I heard Peter Case perform, though my performances out on Whyte Avenue in Edmonton weren’t nearly as good as his version on this cassette.  No wonder I didn’t really make a lot of money by busking.

I arrived at the USCIS office in downtown Portland at about 7:30 and had to wait in the cold wind until they opened the doors at 8:00.  I had expected that, in spite of my 8:00 AM appointment, I’d be there until at least noon.  Imagine my surprise when I walked out the doors again at 8:19!

But as I stood in line inside the building, waiting for my appointment, I noticed something which struck me as funny at the time.  Inside, where the prospective immigrants sat waiting to be called and fingerprinted, there were some rows of chairs, all facing a television.  What would you expect to be on the TV?  Perhaps you’d expect something about what it means to be an American citizen.

Well, yes and no.  It turned out to be the movie Footloose.  The title song was playing as I stood in the line, and by the time I sat down we were hearing the sermon that opens the movie.  The movie, in case you haven’t seen it, is about a fundamentalist town and a boy who moves to town and introduces dancing to the teenagers and breaks apart the fundamentalist culture that had prevailed.  When you think about it, perhaps this movie really did reveal something of what American culture is all about.

Instead of heading straight home, I walked a few blocks and a few blocks over to Powell’s City of Books where I waited a few more minutes in the cold until they opened at 9:00.  I spent about five hours there, not only because there are so many books to look at but also because it was remarkably hard to find what I was looking for.  I’d made up a list of books I wanted to look for and had checked the online database to find where the books were located, but a database is one thing and a book shelf is another and the two didn’t always correspond.  In the end, though, I walked off with a glorious haul.

After a brief stop at the Whole Foods store, I poked around Everyday Music, where I picked up James Hunter‘s People Gonna Talk, All the Roadrunning by Mark Knopfler and Emmylou Harris, and Joe Henry‘s wonderful Scar, which I’ve been listening to again and again today.  And then I headed for home.

Oh, along the way, I heard to a couple of Biblical Horizons conference lectures by Peter Leithart, one on Calvin’s view of the state and the other on how revivalism shifted the church’s story from the theocratic one about Jesus’ ruling as king over the world to the democratic story about the growth of individual freedoms.  I also played some old Mars Hill tapes, one of which opened with a helpful discussion of sentimentalism by Alan Jacobs.

I’ve often heard people criticize sentimentalism, but I haven’t always been sure they know what they’re talking about.  For instance, the charge of “sentimentalism” often gets levelled against Charles Dickens but I’m not persuaded the charge really fits.  Jacobs defines sentimentalism as a wallowing in emotion for the sake of emotion and doing so in a way that cannot stand up to evaluation.

He was reviewing The Bridges of Madison County, which is not only sentimental but downright maudlin, and pointed out that the reader isn’t supposed to think about the story; he (or more likely, she) is simply supposed to feel something.  The more you think about it, the less it “works.”  Is it really possible, for instance, that this four-day affair could help strengthen the woman’s marriage?  If you’re contemplating adultery, Jacobs said, you might want to think so and this book might encourage you in that direction, but it doesn’t stand up to evaluation.  If assessment kills an emotion, he said, then it deserves to die.

And then I arrived home to my wife and daughter, whom I’d missed.

Posted by John Barach @ 3:42 pm | Discuss (1)
April 3, 2007

Web Browsing

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* 10 Ways to Avoid Building Community in the Church.  [HT: Mark Horne.]

* 10 Ways to Keep Me From Discovering Your Church.

* 10 Ways to Draw Me to Your Church.

* Alan Jacobs on serendipity, which has a lot to do with why I fliip through the pages of Greek and Hebrew lexicons to look things up instead of relying on Bible software to give me the “right” answers.

* Jeffrey Overstreet asks “Are movies increasing your capacity to see?”  

Posted by John Barach @ 12:01 pm | Discuss (3)
March 29, 2007

Who Keeps Time?

Category: Church Year,Miscellaneous :: Link :: Print

In his very enjoyable A Dresser of Sycamore Trees: The Finding of a Ministry (the title is taken from Amos 7:14-15), Garret Keizer describes his work as the clock-winder of the church clock in the town in Vermont where he serves as the lay pastor of Christ Church (Episcopal).  Just as you start spotting Hondas as soon as you buy a Honda yourself, Keizer has become aware of mechanical clocks all over the place.

He points out something worth considering:

I also realized that the public keeping of time has passed from the church and possibly the municipal building to the branch bank.  In most towns of any size, that is the place to look for a digital display of the right time.  The location of the public clock has something to say, I think, about the way a culture gives meaning to time.  It was logical for a church to tell people the time when one of the things they needed to know time for was when to pray, and when church feasts and holy days colored the calendar.  Equally logical is it that the bank should tell the hours to a populace for whom time is not liturgical but financial, who inhabit a fiscal year broken into quarters and the maturation periods of certificates of deposit (p. 86).

Posted by John Barach @ 1:35 pm | Discuss (3)
March 24, 2007

Slow Reading

Category: Literature,Miscellaneous :: Link :: Print

Recently, on a couple of my friends’ blogs, I’ve seen mention of this article about doubling the speed with which you read.  [HT: Alastair and Pete.]  There’s some stuff in that article which would probably be helpful for a lot of readers (e.g., finding your motivation and eliminating distractions).

Still, I wonder a bit about the value of speed reading.  True, there are certain things that are worth only a quick read.  There’s no point in slowly, painstakingly working your way through a lot of novels.  And if you’re just reading for information, then it’s fine to skim or speed-read, looking for answers to your questions: “When was this town founded?  What was its population then?” and so forth.

But not everything ought to be read at breakneck speed, and though (as this article points out) subvocalizing is the number one thing that slows down your reading, there are times when subvocalization is best, as the follow-up article says:

Subvocalization can be useful. Just like it isn’t always wise to read fast, sometimes it makes sense to subvocalize. My article focused on how to read faster, but sometimes you need to read slower. Better reading comes from having a brake and a gas pedal not just one or the other. If you are having trouble comprehending, slowing down so you start subvocalizing again can eliminate distractions and refocus your mind on the material.

I have to admit that I’m a notorious and unrepentant subvocalizer.  I can read some things quickly and I don’t subvocalize all the time, but a lot of the time I’m saying the words in my mind as I read them.

I blame it on Walter Wangerin.  Years ago, when I was just a teenager who wanted to be a writer, I read an interview with him, probably in Christianity Today.  I can’t recall whether Wangerin said he subvocalizes when he read because he loves the sound of words and the way a good author puts them together or if he said it was the fact that he subvocalized as a kid that contributed to his love of words and good writing.  One or the other: it doesn’t matter.  I may have subvocalized before reading that article, but I did it deliberately after because I wanted to write and to write well and so I wanted to hear how good writing sounds to the ear.

I’m unrepentant, I say.  I still love the sound of words and words together.

If I were to speed-read Dubliners I could get the gist of what James Joyce is saying, but I wouldn’t hear the stories and in particular I wouldn’t hear the voice of the narrator or the various characters speaking.  Joyce used to write down conversations he overheard, I’m told, so that he could learn how to write dialogue the way it actually sounds.  It must have worked: I was in Bible college with an Irish girl and I hear traces of her voice in everything Joyce writes.

I can’t imagine wanting to speed-read Joyce.  Or Larry Woiwode, whose writing is always bordering on poetic and whose descriptions are so real it’s hard to believe that he hasn’t actually lived through exactly what he’s talking about himself.  Or P. G. Wodehouse or Raymond Chandler or Ross MacDonald, all of whom use striking metaphors you don’t want to speed past.

Or Gene Wolfe, whose writing in many of his books is fairly easy to read and might fool you into thinking you can pick up the pace, but who is hiding clues in plain view.  You could read through The Book of the Long Sun in a couple days if you wanted, especially if you’re reading 900 words a minute the way the writer of this article can.  But you would miss the symbolism and all the puzzles Wolfe loves to include, and all you would get is a bare sense of the basic plot but little of what makes Wolfe worth reading.

And can you imagine skimming a poem?  Yes, you could do it.  You could catch the basic gist (“This one’s about how his love is like a red rose and this other one is about growing old”) but you’d miss the poem itself.  Poetry depends on you listening to the words and even sounding them out.

It’s like food.  You can wolf down a Big Mac and be out of the restaurant in a matter of minutes.  But should you try to do that with your filet mignon and your glass of pinot noir in a classy restaurant?  Or with the meal your wife made for dinner?  No.  Fast food has its place, but slow food is better.  It’s better to take your time with a meal, to savor it, to visit with your family and friends and guests over the meal, to linger.

It’s okay to skim something quickly.  It’s okay to speed-read some books.  It’s sometime wise to skim a book first, get the gist of the argument and where the book’s heading, and then go back and read it more carefully.  And sometimes you have only so much time and so all you can do is read as much as you can as quickly as you can.

But if you’re reading Scripture, read it slowly.  In fact, the command in Scripture is not to read the Bible; it’s to hear it. And if you’re reading something beautiful, if you’re reading for the pleasure of words and the way they’re put together and to savor the writing or pick up the author’s clues or follow his arguments, slow down.  Sound out the words in your head and enjoy them.

Speed reading?  It has its place.  But let’s hear it for the slow reading movement.

Posted by John Barach @ 3:37 pm | Discuss (5)
March 18, 2007

Irony or Immaturity

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The setting: An Episcopal monastery.  The characters: Brother Philip, an aged and frail monk, given to coughing, and Garret Keizer, 26 years old, who is wondering what to do with his life and whether to enter the ministry and has just asked Brother Philip for prayer about that matter.

The next day, after Sunday Communion, Brother Philip rushed past me toward the refectory with a purposeful energy that, in him, seemed nearly supernatural.  For an instant I think I may have wondered if he had some prophetic thing to shout into the abbot’s face.  He burst past several other monks and guests before stopping abruptly at the breakfast buffet, where he filled his plate with an almost obscene helping of bacon.

Over the years I have grown increasingly fond of this image, the memory of this monk, and bacon.  At the time I saw nothing but irony — that young man’s sense of “Ah-ha, I see you!”  For people such as I was, and have all I can do to resist being now, life is ablaze with epiphanies revealing the falseness all around us, when often nothing is revealed so much as our own immaturity.  What we take for another eruption of the painful truth is just another pimple breaking out on our young soul’s face.  Perhaps Brother Philip was teaching me an important lesson, the corollary to renunciation, that when you have chosen asceticism for your life’s work, and find yourself feeble and close to death, and the Lord deigns to provide you with some bacon, load up. — Garret Keizer, A Dresser of Sycamore Trees: The Finding of a Ministry, pp. 8-9.

Posted by John Barach @ 5:28 pm | Discuss (0)
March 8, 2007

Surfing the Web

Category: Miscellaneous,Theology :: Link :: Print

I came across a few interesting items while surfing the web in the last couple of days, so I thought I’d pass them on to you:

The universe is stranger than we thought: Here are thirteen things that don’t make sense.  [HT: Alastair]

77 Ways to Learn Faster, Deeper, Better.  [HT: Alastair]

Ros Clarke on the Song of Songs.

Peter Leithart, “Humanism and Health Care” (you’ll have to scroll down to March 6 to find it), with a follow-up here.

Toby Sumpter, “Classical Education is Christian Education” and “You are the Curriculum

When the Scriptures Fell Open” is a snippet from a book by C. Veenhof, translated by Theodore Plantinga, about the 1940s in the Netherlands.  It strikes me that there are some similarities to certain debates taking place in the Reformed world today.

Also by Veenhof: “The Word of God and Preaching” (translated by Nelson Kloosterman).  Kloosterman assigned this to us when I was in seminary, and I’m glad to see it online now.

N. T. Wright, “Simply Lewis,” a very helpful review of C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity.

Posted by John Barach @ 1:58 pm | Discuss (0)
February 15, 2007

The Presbyteer

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Two good blog entries by The Presbyteer: “I’d Say It Differently Now” and “This Is All I Remember of College Math” (which makes me even more pleased that I didn’t take any math after high school!).

Posted by John Barach @ 4:02 pm | Discuss (0)
February 1, 2007

Dirt & Anchovies

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At our Wednesday night Bible studies, I often start with a short story or a brief essay, partly because I like reading to people (well, maybe that’s the main reason, but let’s keep that a secret) but also because I want the members of my congregation to have a sense that what we’re studying in the Bible is tied to the rest of life and because my calling here is not simply to “plant a church” but to build a culture.

I’ve recently been enjoying Brian Doyle’s collection of essays entitled Leaping: Revelations and Epiphanies and so, last night, I read to the group this essay, “Eating Dirt,” which begins like this:

I have a small daughter and two smaller sons, twins. They are all three in our minuscule garden at the moment, my sons eating dirt as fast as they can get it off the planet and down their gullets. They are two years old, they were seized with dirt-fever an instant ago, and as admirably direct and forceful young men, quick to act, true sons of the West, they are going to eat some dirt, boy, and you’d better step aside.

Alas, this version of the essay is shorter than the one in the book.  Only traces of these paragraphs appear in that earlier version:

It occurs to me that we all eat dirt.  Fruits and vegetables are dirt transformed by light and water.  Animals are vigorous dirt, having dined on fruit or vegetables or other animals who dine on flora.  Our houses and schools and offices are cupped by dirt and made of wood and stone and brick — former dirt.  Glass is largely melted sand, a kind of clean dirt.  Our clothing used to be dirt.  Paper was trees was dirt.  We shape dirt into pots, plates, mugs, vases.  We breathe dirt suspended in the air, we crunch it between our teeth, on spinach leaves and fresh carrots, we wear it in the lines of our hands and the folds of our faces, we catch it in the linings of our noses and eyes and ears.  Some people are driven by private fires to eat dirt, often during pregnancy — the condition is called pica, from the Latin word for magpie.

In short we swim in an ocean of dirt, yet we hardly ever consider it closely, except to plump it for its treasures, or furrow it for seed, or banish it from our persons, clothes, houses.  We’re suckers for dramatic former dirt — cougars, lilies, bears, redwoods — but don’t often reflect on the basic stuff itself: good old simple regular normal orthodox there-it-sits-under-everthing dirt (p. 92).

And, speaking of Brian Doyle, who knew anchovies were so interesting?

Posted by John Barach @ 11:26 am | Discuss (2)
January 30, 2007

Not Ready Yet….

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You don’t need to be in a canoe to have this experience:

Because of the offset in the shore at the creek mouth, there was a large eddy turning in the river where we put in, and we began our drift downstream by drifting upstream.  We went up inside the row of shore trees, whose tops now waved in the current, until we found an opening among the branches, and then turned out along the channel.  The current took us.  We were still settling ourselves as if in preparation, but our starting place was already diminishing behind us.

There is something ominously like life in that.  One would always like to settle oneself, get braced, say “Now I am going to begin” — and then begin.  But as the necessary quiet seems about to descend, a hand is felt at one’s back, shoving.  And that is the way with the river when a current is running: once the connection with the shore is broken, the journey has begun. — Wendell Berry, “The Rise,” The Long Legged House, p. 96.

Posted by John Barach @ 1:40 pm | Discuss (0)
January 26, 2007

Institutions and Charity

Category: Community,Ethics,Miscellaneous :: Link :: Print

A couple quotations from Wendell Berry’s essay “The Loss of the Future” (in The Long-Legged House):

I cannot avoid the speculation that one of the reasons for our loss of idealism is that we have been for a long time in such constant migration from country to city and from city to city and from neighborhood to neighborhood.  It seems to me that much of idealism has its source in the relation between a man and the place he thinks of as his home.  The patriotism, say, that grows out of the concern for a particular place in which one expects to live one’s life is a more exacting emotion than that which grows out of concern for a nation.  The charity that grows out of regard for neighbors with whom one expects to live one’s life is both a discipline and a reward; the charity that, knowing no neighbors, contributes to funds and foundations is, from the personal standpoint, only an excuse.  It is patriotism in the abstract — nationalism — that is most apt to be fanatic or brutal or arrogant.  It is when charity is possible only through institutions that it becomes indifferent, neither ennobling to the giver nor meaningful to the receiver.  Institutional neighborliness can function as the very opposite of neighborliness, without impairing the moral credit or the self-satisfaction of the supporters of the institution.  There is good reason, for instance, to suspect that the foreign mission programs of certain Christian denominations have served as substitutes for decent behavior at home, or as excuses for indecent behavior at home; in return for saving the soul of Negroes in Africa, one may with a free conscience exploit and demean the lives of Negroes in one’s own community (p. 49).

In a society of ghettoes many of the vital labors of our duty to each other cease to be personal.  They are necessarily taken over by institutions; the distances between the giver and the receiver, the asker and the answerer, are so great that they are simply no longer negotiable by individuals.  A man living in the country or a small town migiht aid one or two needy neighbors himself; the most obvious thing for him to do would not be to phone some bureau or agency of the government.  But what could he do if he were to try to exercise the same charitable impulse in an urban slum, or in Appalachia?  The moral dilemma is suggested by a walk on the Bowery, equipped with common decency and a pocketful of change.  What is the Samaritan expected to do when he meets, instead of one in need, hundreds?  Even if he had the money, he would not have the time.  Now, in America, I think he is likely to feel that he is expected to do nothing.  He is able to reflect that there are organizations to take care of that sort of thing.

My point is not that these agencies do their work badly, but that having contributed to one of them, or even having heard of one, the citizen is freed of a concern that is one of the necessary disciplines of citizenship.  And the institutionalization of charity has its counterparts in all aspects of life, from the government down (pp. 52-53).

I suspect that Berry is right, that there has been a loss of community, due in part to increased mobility but also to television, which keeps people home at night and away from their neighbors, and to other factors, not so easy to trace.  Elsewhere in this essay, Berry also talks about specialization and the way that specialists tend to form their own ghettoes, all focused on the same area, even if they don’t actually live in the same vicinity.  A lot of what Berry is getting at is that life in cities tends to be relatively impersonal, and that has effects on our charity and our care for our neighbors.

If Berry is correct, one might think the solution would be to have everyone move to small or medium-sized towns.  But Berry himself recognizes that that isn’t possible or likely.  So what is the solution?  In particular, what is our responsibility as Christians?

Let’s face it: the church can become another ghetto.  We can talk a lot about community and build community with each other, and that may be attractive to those who long for community.  But it’s also possible that in building the church community we turn our backs on our own neighborhoods.  Isn’t it often the case that Christians don’t have non-Christian friends, that all our close relationships are with others in the same church community?

Let me hear your thoughts: In the face of the impersonalization brought on by charitable institutions, in the face of the general lack of neighborliness in our larger “communities,” what should we as Christians be doing to reverse these trends and to create not only close-knit relationships with each other but a true community that is attractive and healing for our larger towns and cities?

Posted by John Barach @ 12:29 pm | Discuss (2)
December 12, 2006

Rubik’s Cube

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For those of you who remember the Rubik’s cube craze of a couple decades ago, and especially for those of you who struggled and tried to complete the puzzle by hand, let alone complete it quickly, here is a video for you, starring Michel Gondry, the director of Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind.  Quite a feat!  Or should I say: Quite some feet!  (HT: Jeffrey Overstreet)

Posted by John Barach @ 7:41 pm | Discuss (2)
November 3, 2006

Proportion

Category: Literature,Miscellaneous :: Link :: Print

St. Ives had always felt at home in Captain Powers’ shop, although he would have been in a hard way to say just how.  His own home — the home of his childhood — hadn’t resembled it in the slightest.  His parents had prided themselves in being modern, and would brook no tobacco or liquor.  His father had written a treatise on palsy, linking the disease to the consumption of meat, and for three years no meat crossed the threshold.  It was a poison, an abomination, carrion — like eating broiled dirt, said his father.  And tobacco: his father wuold shudder at the mention of the word.  St. Ives could remember him standing atop a crate beneath a leafless oak, he couldn’t say just where — St. James Park, perhaps — shouting at an indifferent croud about the evils of general intemperance.

His theories had declined from the scientific to the mystical and then into gibberish, and now he wrote papers still, sometimes in verse, from the confines of a comfortable, barred cellar in north Kent.  St. Ives had decided by the time he was twelve that intemperance in the pleasures of the senses was, in the main, less ruinous than was intemperance along more abstract lines.  Nothing, it seemed to him, was worth losing your sense of proportion and humor over, least of all a steak pie, a pint of ale, and a pipe of latakia (James P. Blaylock, Homunculus, pp. 22-23).

Posted by John Barach @ 2:23 am | Discuss (0)

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