"Christianity" Today Magazine

Christianity Today has long ceased espousing a biblical Christianity for a cultural Christianity more in keeping what the NY TIMES says, rather than what St Paul says. The title of the magazine almost gives away its chronological relativism.

The New Social Justice

A man has just been sentenced 15 years for burning a LGBTXYZ (just covering myself for the next categories sure to come up to extend the acronym) flag. The flag was hanging from a Church of Christ which I guess takes its cultural Christianity quite seriously over any old fashioned biblical one. Anyhow, I thought burning flags, at least the American one, was a constitutional right. I guess the rainbow flag must be more important. I guess one must beware these days of killing any cloth that has totalitarian threads woven in it.

The Descriptive "Climate Change"

Isn't the phrase "climate change" about as descriptive as saying "days go by" or "minutes elapse" or "time passes"? I think breath is important and shouldn't be wasted: this is why I still hold to the more descriptive "global warming" because this actually says something. Although my tendency in how December is going so far that it is "global cooling" that is happening because of course we aren't using enough fossil fuels. After all the trees must be quite content with the increase in carbon dioxide. So if you are an arborphile like I am you want to see the birches and swamp maples happy. Therefore I for one would hope that more people would employ more cows for their very valuable emissions.

Greta Thunberg Person of the Year

So sixteen year old Greta Thunberg, the Swedish "Environmental Activist", has become Time's "Person of the Year". Well. I expect it won't be long that someone of her rich resume will provoke the powers that be to nominate her for the NOBEL PEACE PRIZE. Certainly one could make the case simply for her erudite teaching of those of us who are so dull as to resist such unmistakable evidence that CNN, MSNBC, NYTIMES, and HUFFINGTON POST and all the climate justice scientists continually remind us of---not to mention all the irrefutable graphs that clearly without any qualification show us who have eyes to see and ears to hear that the globe is warming up, warming up with the influx of carbon dioxide poison that will kill us all in twelve short years by AOC's incontrovertible reckoning. I certainly have no reason to doubt the media's reporting. After all they are quite responsible in their truth telling. We have seen that in the past three years haven't we? Surely one would have to be visually and audibly impaired not to be privy to all their truthtelling about Trump. We just aren't paying enough political attention after all if we aren't awakened to all the whoremongering of the President's past. Why, didn't Stormy prove this? Anyhow, I expect Greta will one day take a tangent away from her noble work for an Edenic environment to take us fossil fuel fools to task for our support of President Trump. "How dare you?!" I can hear her scold. "How dare you support such a racist, bigot, womanizer, xenophobe, a keeper of children in conservative cages, a wall builder, a hater of Hitlarian magnitude?" Then after a moment of pregnant pause she will announce herself as the democrat candidate for President of the United States. No matter that she is foreign born, or sixteen years old. Certainly the Constitution provides an exception in such cases as someone who has the title of a Time's Person of the Year.

Bureaucratization of the Bible

I love language. I love the Bible. I love the Church. It is this love propels me to critique the academiceze that has infected translations. The word from the pulpit should not read like it was written by a bureaucracy rather than the apostles and prophets inspired by the Holy Ghost. Unfortunately the bureaucracy of bishops (USCCB) has brought to the table a bowl of pablum instead of the filet mignon feasted upon by diners of previous times.
I won't be giving up my Elizabethan English menu any time soon.

Thanksgiving

I'm thankful for Thanksgiving, a holiday begun by our first president and codified by our sixteenth. I particularly like it because it has largely escaped commercialization and is likely to remain free of that financial frenzy that has unfortunately become Christmas. May it always remain so. Likely it will---only so much turkey and stuffin will fit on a plate.

Yes, may we be grateful. May we be grateful for even the everyday things. The flurry of snow that comes down in the night and makes magic the morning windows when we get up. The cranberry sauce a friend makes you along with all the fixings, but especially the cranberry sauce that has wedges of oranges within what is like a crimson creme with a dash (my friend tells me) of a vanilla liqueur. Gratitude for the day itself spent with other friends and the traditional feast and delicious talk. Gratitude for the simple things. What would we do if we couldn't walk in a wood? What would we do if we couldn't wade out into the ocean and stretch our eyes with distance? A bicycle ride on a forest path? Being able to hear? Hearing and watching the birds in the arborvitae as they come for the black seed? Watching your cat stretch as he wakes at the foot of the bed? Making a new acquaintance of a pure black shepherd border collie mix named Gunner? Yes, what would we do? And the truly amazing thing: there will be even more things tomorrow

The Columbo Angst Once Again

I must be a conspiracy theorist. I don't know. Sometimes I just have this Columbo angst. I feel like I have to ask a question just to settle my mind. First it was Russian Collusion. Then it was the Kavanaugh hearings with Miss Blaisey Ford testifying with her "little voice" how she wanted a cup of coffee to make her more comfortable before she gathered up her courage to testify thirty years after the of Bret's lechery. And then what testifying! Wow. Quite a Tony Award performance. Then the drama ends and no reruns! Again my Columbo angst wants to ask, Why? I mean why would she suddenly let such injustice go? And then all the other ME TOO victims that came forth like ants to a drop of pure high fructose corn syrup aren't heard from anymore.

Next we leave the Judicial branch back to the Executive. Russian Collusion morphs into a charge of obstruction of justice. Then it changes venues. Russia becomes Ukraine. Vladamir Putin becomes Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Then a bit of Latin comes into American parlance. Well it was there already but let us say now it was ubi-quit-ous. Quid pro quo becomes something of an overnight sensation, a celebrity as phrases go. And something that is quite novel. Something that no one remembers ever happening in the pure field of politics. As I remember I think the definition in Webster's is something like: when you as a school accept money from the state you must teach transgenderism; Or, if you are a religious organization like Catholic Charities and receive state aid you must allow same sex couples adopt your kids. Or if you are Roman Catholic nuns you must in order to get your health insurance you must accept contraception, abortion and other necessary women's health care into the bargain. Yup, quid pro quo. Somehow it seems not too rare an event as I was led to believe. But fame is fickle and I'm afraid quid pro quo has already outlasted its usefulness. Now it seems to be that the president's son, Barron, has become the new issue. Why his name! It surely is a giveaway to a Trumpian dynasty of reversing the American revolution and setting back up a kind of English monarchy. We can only just hope. I wouldn't mind that a bit, actually.

Enchanting the Disenchantment

I couldn't agree more with Professor Anthony Esolen. Beside getting the kids out of the public schools which these days serve only to indoctrinate into disenchantment making the little tots into little communistic community organizers. Instead of making little ungrateful jaded Gretas out of them, may we instead encourage them in their natural inclination to the true idealism of goodness and nobility and chivalry. May we encourage wild eyed wonder. May they stare wild eyed at weather rather than be consumed with the anxiety of climate. May we permit them to jettison their jadedness and return them to the hopeful innocence of enchantment! As one step toward this deprogramming I would suggest Dickens (as Tony mentions in his essay). Yes, indeed. I would particularly recommend the novel Dickens especially loved as his own child: David Copperfield. The characters are pure delight. And another to nourish wonder: the Narnia tales by C.S. Lewis. No one could escape Lewis's seven books without being freed again into the land where Aslan reigns. Both of these works, Copperfield and Narnia, are charged with the high voltage needed to light again what can be the very perilous path of childhood. You couldn't ask for any more potent antidotes for the ubiquitous jadedness that has so eroded the enchantment that God must have meant for a Trotwood, a Peter, a Susan, an Edmund a Lucy to possess in abundance.