o1mnikent

“Sentimentality is subtle. C. S. Lewis once told a young writer: “Instead of telling us a thing is ‘terrible,’ describe it so that we’ll be terrified. Don’t say it was a ‘delight,’ make us say ‘delightful’ when we’ve read the description. You see, all those words (‘horrifying,’ ‘wonderful,’ ‘hideous,’ ‘exquisite’) are only saying to your readers, ‘Please, will you do my job for me.’” Lewis complains that authors of gushy and sentimental words are tyrannical because they tell the readers how they must feel rather than letting the subject work on them in the same way it did the author. Sentimental worship-leading works in exactly the same way that Lewis describes. With typical comments—“Isn’t he just wonderful?” “Isn’t it such a blessing?”—the leader tells people how they ought to feel about God instead of telling them about God.”

—Tim Keller, in Worship by the Book, ed. D.A. Carson

[These words are especially timely for worship planners and leaders during the Advent and Christmas seasons.]

[Sorry for the week-long hiatus. I’ve been out of town for Thanksgiving.]

We can scarcely believe it, God,
this story of love’s birth in the world.
We rationalise and reason,
we read the headlines and we doubt
and yet, oddly, we hope, desperately,
that it just might be true.

If we’ve come here disbelieving, God
unwrap our doubt to make a space for love
If we’ve come here despairing
unwrap our grief to make a space for joy
If we’ve come here angry
unwrap our resentment to make a space for peace
If we’ve come here nostalgic
unwrap our sentimentality to make a space for life
If we’ve come here cynical,
unwrap our scepticism to make a space for hope

Let your story be real in this space tonight.
Amen.

-Cheryl Lawrie

St. Olaf Wrestles With Milton’s Angel, and Prevails – Chronicle.com
Milton is not as boring as you think. Paradise Lost has something for everyone: Hot but innocent sex! (You thought Adam and Eve spent all their time in Eden gardening?) Descriptions of hellfire that would make The Lord of the Rings’ archfiend, Sauron, weep with envy! Epic battles, with angels hurling mountains at their demonic foes! This is edge-of-your-seat material.

It’s admittedly a rare gift to produce a paragraph in which whole clumps of words could be removed without noticeably affecting the sense, if any.
The Wild Wordsmith of Wasilla – Dick Cavett Blog – NYTimes.com

At ‘Home’ With the Past

If you want to understand how different Marilynne Robinson is from other contemporary novelists — how different, in fact, from most contemporary human beings — all you need to do is walk into her dining room.

“These are my favorite books in here,” says the author of “Housekeeping,” “Gilead” and the recently published “Home” as she motions toward the bookcase that fills one end of the small space. “See, look: Calvin, Calvin, Calvin.”

Sure enough, here are the multivolume “Commentaries” of the great 16th-century Protestant theologian, whom Robinson considers one of the most falsely caricatured figures in history. Here are the two volumes of Calvin’s “Institutes of the Christian Religion,” without which she thinks you can’t understand Herman Melville. Surrounding these are a multitude of other theological and educational works, few less than a century old.

“Look at this,” she says, flipping through the pages of a densely illustrated family Bible picked up in an antiques store. She points to a clutch of McGuffey Readers, then to “one of my treasures,” a 19th-century biographical encyclopedia filled with “people that have dropped out of history.”

There’s not a modern novel in sight, though if you were to wander into the living room, you’d find a few on the coffee table. Robinson hasn’t read them.

The Traffic Guru
Monderman envisioned a dual universe. There was the “traffic world” of the highway, standardized, homogenous, made legible by simple instructions to be read at high speed. And there was the “social world,” where people lived and interacted using human signals, at human speeds. The reason he didn’t want traffic infrastructure in the center of Drachten or any number of other places was simple: “I don’t want traffic behavior, I want social behavior.” The social world had its limits; at some intersections in Drachten, Monderman said, he “wouldn’t trust this solution.” The removal of signs and other visual markings could only be done after careful study of conditions such as traffic volume, the geometry of the intersection, and the mix of cyclists and cars. It is precisely this delicate attention to context that Monderman felt many of his colleagues lacked in installing traffic controls in the first place: “I call them copy machines. They always do things by the book.”

The Plan – Jack Handey: The New Yorker
The plan isn’t foolproof. For it to work, certain things must happen… . Most of the customers in the bank must happen to be wearing Nixon masks, so when we come in wearing our Nixon masks it doesn’t alarm anyone.

FIRST THINGS: On the Square » Blog Archive » The Coming Kulturkampf
Christians [in America] want to be useful in their Babylonian captivity. They follow the counsel of the prophet Jeremiah who urged the children of Israel to seek the peace of the city of their exile, for in its peace is also their peace. The great danger, then and now, is that, in being useful to the city of their exile, they forget the New Jerusalem, the city of their destination. It really is not terribly gratifying to be a “religious vote” eagerly sought by the partisan factions of Babylon when we remember that he called us to be the salt of the earth and the light of the world.

Does Religion Make You Nice? – Slate Magazine

Arguments about the merits of religions are often battled out with reference to history, by comparing the sins of theists and atheists. (I see your Crusades and raise you Stalin!) But a more promising approach is to look at empirical research that directly addresses the effects of religion on how people behave.

Google Flu Trends
We have found a close relationship between how many people search for flu-related topics and how many people actually have flu symptoms. Of course, not every person who searches for “flu” is actually sick, but a pattern emerges when all the flu-related search queries from each state and region are added together. We compared our query counts with data from a surveillance system managed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and discovered that some search queries tend to be popular exactly when flu season is happening. By counting how often we see these search queries, we can estimate how much flu is circulating in various regions of the United States.