___

___

___

"I always think I'm right, but I don't think I'm always right."

___

"You have been chosen, and you must therefore use such strength and heart and wits as you have."
Gandalf to Frodo, 
LOTR i.2

___

"Oh, miracle -- thus to be able to give what we ourselves do not possess, sweet miracle of our empty hands!"
Diary of a Country Priest

___

"This is not pleasant to you, Emma--and it is very far from pleasant to me; but I must, I will,--I will tell you truths while I can; satisfied with proving myself your friend by very faithful counsel, and trusting that you will some time or other do me greater justice than you can do now."
Knightly to Emma

___

My writing is like Shakespeare's.  At lease in the sense that I use many of the same words.

___

home

These are the ARCHIVES of the OLD Presbyteer Blogsite.  Change your links to
http://www.presbyteer.blogspot.com

Our on-again off-again travel plans to see son Sam graduate from basic training are on again for March 15-20.  Lincoln to Fort Jackson is a 2-day drive.  We'll overnight with Jana's folks in Kentucky on the way, and then stop in Saint Louis to visit a friend on the return.  Sam has qualified with his M-16 for his marksmanship, though he didn't get as high a rating as he was hoping.  Well, as a friend observed, Sam joined the army with his trumpet to hit notes, not targets.  Still he has had more fun than I think he expected to have during Basic training.  Last week they crawled under barbed wire at night with live machine-gun fire overhead.  You just don't ever have much more fun than that.

We watched The Bourne Identity instead of the Oscars last night.  That is one of my favorites.  For a second feature, we watched one of Sam's DVD's that I had not seen before: Hong Kong 1941 starring Chow Yun Fat (1984).  Two men and a woman in Hong Kong at the time of the Japanese invasion.  It has plenty of that odd, Asian feel to the story.  There's a different storytelling mind at work, and the humans are recognizably human, but their cultural motivations and expressions are not always clear.  And man, how does anyone survive a war?  There's nothing creepier than a society given to corruption and anarchy -- the gangs are at large because the British are gone, the Chinese officials have fled, and the Japanese aren't quite in control yet.  I tell you, people need to be governed and evildoers punished.

 

February 23

We watched Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow and I really liked it. You have to buy into the comic book, 1930's sci-fi genre, because if you don't enjoy that, then this movie won't be fun.  But I love the old sci fi stories; I grew up with Tom Corbett and the Space Cadets, and I love the old 1930's detective and adventure movies, so this movie speaks directly to my heart.  Roadsters and spinning newspaper headlines.  Pure fun.  

The special features reveal that the whole movie was essentially shot on a sound stage: all of the locations are created by artists and added digitally.  That didn't bother me: it adds to the comic book look and feel.  Though some of the images had been so over-processed, it began to remind me of the awful look of Tron, if anyone still remembers that early (1982) digital effects effort.

We also watched Tom Hanks in The Terminal.  Tom Hanks is always worth watching, and this movie has a nice setup: the Hanks character lands at JFK from Krackozia, but his visa is invalid because there has been a political revolution in Krackozia overnight, and the new government has not been recognized by the U.S.  So the Hanks character can't go back, and he can't enter the U.S., so he must figure out how to live in the international concourse at JFK.

This movie is enjoyable, but deeply flawed.  The unsympathetic Stanley Tucci immigration official is contrived, and several plot points along the way are forced.  People in our living room didn't buy the Catherine Zeta Jones romantic sub-plot, and generally the judgment was "once is enough."

Son Sam called from Basic training at Fort Jackson last night.  He "won" the privilege for an extra phone call be being one of the four soldiers in his platoon of 60 to hit a tank with a chalk grenade at a distance of 150 meters.  He said it was a matter of some luck: wind and many variables can mess up a good shot at that distance.  But all the same...  

On the same day, they got to see a demonstration of an anti-tank weapon.  They don't shoot a lot of these things off, since each round costs $6000.  I guess these are the electronically enhanced devices with hardened uranium shells or whatever.  Well, I think $6000 is cheap if you can destroy an enemy tank worth many times that much which is on its way to do damage worth who knows how much.

 

February 21

Once in a while we need to say something obvious, because unless we do, then over time the obvious becomes familiar, and then assumed, and in the end, forgotten.  So it's a good idea to keep saying it.  That's why we repeat things like the Lord's Prayer and the Apostle's Creed, and why an important part of the church's worship is reading aloud the very words of the Bible, even when most of the people in attendance have already heard a given passage many times. 

So even though this topic has been fairly well beat to death, my obvious truth for today is an observation about many of today's worship choruses. (Note: I say "many" -- insert standard disclaimer about generalizations here).  Our problem is not merely that they tend to be shallow -- so that the children who grow up singing them will have spiritual lives about three inches deep -- our problem is that the grownups who sing these choruses find them apt expressions of heartfelt and sincere devotion and worship.  This is a problem because the mature Christian brings a depth of understanding and devotion to the ditties, and so he bristles at the accusation that these are "shallow."  He certainly isn't shallow.  But although he himself is taken care of, what about his visiting neighbor, who may be a new believer -- what is he learning?  And his children: they certainly have no theological depth yet: what are they learning?

In fact, there are choruses that a good Hindu could sing without blinking, because many choruses very characteristically use non-specific references to the object of worship.  It's all about "You" -- but we never say the name.  And it's about "Him" -- but we don't specify who He is.   And we can even sing to the "Lord", but there are many "lords", aren't there?  

Even many classic hymns have such a problem.  As much as I like Beethoven's Ode to Joy, the Joyful Joyful We Adore Thee text is basically Unitarian.  "God our Father, Christ our Brother, All who live in love are Thine"?  Oh yeah?  Where's that in the Bible?

As for me, cut me a chunk of one of those wordy hymns that name Jesus Christ and give him a bloody place in history.  Words that are full, specific, and clear.

Consider: the Baal worshiper of old sang hymns to his lord (adonay) and master (ba'al).  But he couldn't sing along with David, because Israel's music was full of this Yahweh person who not only created the heavens and the earth, but who also led Israel out of Egypt, drowned Pharaoh's army, and smacked down Sihon and Og.  No possible confusion with Baal there.

So one of the questions I want our worship leaders to ask is, "How long would it take a Hindu or a feminist theologian from Harvard Divinity School to feel like she could no longer go along what we're singing?"  Let's get busy and sing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs that name the name of Jesus Christ, quick, loud, and often.  The church has music to sing about blood, death, glory that no one else can or will; let's not mess around singing stuff that pretty much works for the Buddhists, various Presbyterians among the apostate, and other pagans.

Like cool shade in the desert, or like a drink of water to a thirsty man, so is the church volunteer who says "yes."

I'm ready to teach a new Psalm to the ACTION night kids.  We start our winter/spring 6-weeks tomorrow.  Last Fall we pretty much learned Psalm 23.  We'll sing that once a week, too, for review, but the main effort will be on Psalm 121.  This is for 5's and K's up through 5th grade.  The K's in the front row actually pay the best attention, but they can't read yet.  So we'll cue the lines with pictures: hills, heaven and earth, a foot on a slippery rock. ...

And it occurs to me that this is remarkably like preparing a passage for a sermon.  Wiersbe made quite a point about fastening on the images in the text in his book Preaching and Teaching with Imagination.  ("The mind is a picture gallery, not a debating chamber ...")

Which reminds me, I better get cracking on my sermon text for the 27th.

Irreformable Tradition is Idolatrous.

Let me explain.  In order to protect itself against the theological rot that has more or less destroyed most liberal Protestant churches, conservative Presbyterians have struck upon the defensive scheme of Full Subscription to the Westminster Standards.  You cannot be a theological liberal and say honestly that you hold to the Westminster Standards, which are full of blood atonement, physical resurrection, depraved, sinful mankind, and God's grace in Christ as the only hope of salvation.  If the apostate liberals who gave up on such truths would have had the honesty to leave the church instead of gradually replacing the Biblical gospel with another, many battles and much grief could have been spared.  So the surviving conservatives, now mostly in exiled, smaller dominations, have bought themselves some apostasy insurance in the form of Full Subscriptionism.

So far, so good.  But in their zeal to champion the Westminster Standards they have exalted a manmade tradition to the level of scripture.  Too many are now blindly insisting that all theological perfection was achieved in 1647, and that no further theological progress is to be considered.

And whenever you exalt a man-made thing to an absolute status, you just made yourself an idol.  

Thus, irreformable tradition is idolatrous. 

Well, the auto-exposure / auto-focus technology in today's cameras is pretty neat.  Back in the 70's I bought a nice Minolta SRT-201 that had cool through the lens metering and manual prism focus, and I had plenty of fun with that.  It took, and still takes, good pictures.

But the great advantage of digital cameras is you can take as many shots as you like for free and throw them all away if you don't like them.  Thus, a crummy photographer doesn't feel like he's wasting a lot of money on film and developing.  Instead, the memory card from the camera plugs directly into your computer, you open the folder, view the images, and hit the delete key to your heart's content.  

I now have a Minolta DiMAGE Z3 that has quite a few nice features for something in the "point and shoot" category.  Recently I have enjoyed figuring out how to use the Spot Metering feature.  The idea is, instead of letting the camera automatically adjust the exposure according to the light in the entire scene, you point the metering spot at one point in the scene, and let the rest of the shot do what it will.  This is useful when there is a very strong light source that dominates the scene, but you're really not interested in it.  Such as bright outside light from windows in a darker room:

You don't want that side window to expose "properly" or else the rest of the room would be too dark, so I point the exposure spot at the middle of the scene on the pews, letting parts of the wall and the window go a little over.  

Conversely, maybe all you want is the window, and you are happy to let the rest of the room underexpose:

Same room, same time of day, but in this one I point the Exposure Spot at the glass on top of the communion table and let that expose correctly while the rest of the room goes dark.

One of my goals for the upcoming Zion slideshow is to get a shot of the church that shows the Capitol building somewhere in the scene.  Not easy.  No good sight lines.  In normal daylight, the Capitol kind of disappears in the distance.  But the spot metering, auto-focus stuff helped in this long exposure at night, the Capitol tower nicely illuminated in the background ...

I think I'll go back and try again, but we do have some potential here.

Wintery mix, today.  I tried some pictures:

That evergreen tree looks like the right half of a parenthesis for good reason.  It's left half twin was taken out a couple of years ago when a car in an accident at that intersection by the fire hydrant jumped the curb and drove into our front yard, almost exactly between those two trees

And here's the camera on its macro setting:

And as long as we're at it, this camera also has a 12x zoom.  This is an unusual weather vane on top of a house a few blocks from here (taken yesterday, back when the sky used to be blue):

I had not seen Vanilla Sky before tonight.  Tom Cruise plays the cocky unlikable golden boy better than anyone.  He does the ultimate in Magnolia, but his character in Vanilla Sky is similar.  And you have to give him this: not every actor would be happy to play half the movie behind a mask or with a disfigured face.  

My favorite, though, is the Kurt Russell character.  I've never been a KR fan; about all that really sticks with me of his career is the snarling Snake Plissken from Escape from New York.  It seemed for a while like he was choosing movies as far as possible from his Disney child actor type.  But in this movie he plays an utterly likeable, sympathetic and believable psychiatrist.  

The story bends perception and reality, and the screenwriting committee stays a jump ahead of you, always ready with one more twist or discovery.  So in that sense it keeps you watching.  And your second watching will be different than the first; but not in as big a way as The Sixth Sense, which was the best hidden discovery / see it twice movie ever.

And the other plus factor is the way it deals with the Tom Cruise character's need to come to terms with his sin.  When we meet him, he is living the dream.  And then we find out, no, really, he is *living the dream,* and it ain't nice.  And when he finally realizes that the dream is not worth living, he makes a choice that is almost like repentance,-- sort of, at least in sense that whoever seeks to preserve his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life will keep it. 

I don't get out much.  Daughter Anne was trying to convince me that we should get cable (our TV doesn't even get broadcast stations at the moment), and the shows she quoted from the schedule in the newspaper, I've never heard of.  (Okay, she quoted the silliest, and she wasn't exactly serious...)

And take Time magazine.

(Please)

Anyway, here's what their reporters have put together as the top 25 influential evangelicals in the U.S. 

Photoessay ...

Interesting choices.  But I really don't get out enough.  I've never heard of half of these people.  Maybe I just don't have Time.

A delight to hear from son Sam, now in week 3 of basic training at Fort Jackson, SC.  He's in the Army as a trumpet player and will eventually be posted with the Army Band at Camp Zama near Tokyo, but he's first going through 9 weeks of the standard running, pushups, and bayonet drills.   Here are a couple of excerpts:

... Right after that we marched over to the team development course, designed to build teamwork by constructing some difficult tasks that require everyone to help. Very tough stuff. We failed 3/4 of the events. We usually got the concept, but ran out of time. It was fun, but it showed us we have a long way to go. To give you an idea, here is one of the events. In 30 minutes, all members of your team, a casualty on a stretcher, and the rest of your equipment must cross a 30-foot gap on a guide wire. It requires lots of knots and lots of trips across the gap. We got the casualty over and about 3 people. Ouch.

Yesterday we tackled the bayonet assault course. It was cold and rainy, what better time to be running around with a knife on a stick. The course consisted of trenches, targets, and wooden obstacles you have to run through at a rapid pace. It's a lot of adrenaline that carries you through, It's still quite tough. ...

 

This is an almost unbelievable news item from Mere Comments:

The Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister, Pierre Pettigrew, believes the Church has an obligation to remain silent as the nation debates same-sex unions. For more on this and reaction from the Ontario Conference of Catholic Bishops see this story on LifeSite.

Did you catch that name? "Pierre Pettigrew?"  He's a RAT!  He's a TRAITOR!

"I look like my dog" contest.

Peter Kreeft is the kid from Calvin College who ended up becoming a Roman Catholic, writing 40-plus books, and teaching philosophy at Boston College.  He is obviously very brainy and has thought a lot about the state of the divided church.  In one of his talks on reconciliation and reunion in the church he observes that Catholics and Protestants will never get together unless the Catholics become more Protestant (biblical, evangelistic, Christ-centered, real personal faith) and the Protestants become more Catholic (value creeds and history, think in terms of the whole church, think sacramentally...).  I'm not sure of his audience, but I got the idea that he was speaking to an RC crowd, because he was laying a good deal of emphasis on the RC shortcomings.  ("A bishop asks one of his priests, 'how can we increase the number of vocations in our diocese?'  The priest tells his Bishop. 'Nothing would have a greater effect than your canonization.'")  As he discusses the rise of Protestant churches in South America and the decline in RC attendance and strength, Kreeft concludes that this is evidence that God is a loving God: much better that men be drawn to Christ, even apart from "the fullness" of the RC church, than to be lost outside the church or to be neglected and starved within.

Kreeft refers to the current Pope as "John Paul the Great," and agrees with the pope's observation that the first millennium of the church was the millennium of unity, the second millennium was the millennium of division, and hopes that the third millennium will be the millennium of reunion.

I like Tevye's line when Perchek the revolutionary says of the rich "Someday their wealth will be ours!"

"That would be nice.  If they would agree, I would agree."

 

February 02

Happy Birthday, Jana.

For everyone else, happy Groundhog Day.

Blog titles we'd like to see: The Bloggart in the Closet.  (though I just checked and now see that variants already exist.  Alas.  Even when I'm original, I'm copying.  So make that Blog title "Nothing New Under the Sun."  Though I'm sure someone has used that, already, too.  And I'm certainly not even the first one to complain about my original thoughts not being original, either.  Nor, for that matter, am I the first to observe that I'm not the first to complain.

You see how it goes?

Son Joe's sickness seems to have been a 12-hour stomach virus.  (There: that sounds like we know what we're talking about.  We've Named it.)  His muscles are sore from all the puking, but the storm has passed, the sun shines, and he convalesces, quilted on the sofa, dog snuggled nearby, and game controller in hand.

Calvin College brings an impressive roster of speakers to campus for their January Series and generously posts audio of the sessions on the web.  I have listened to some of their N.T. Wright in the past.  This morning on the walk to work, I heard a 1999 offering by Peter Kreeft, a Calvin alumnus who now teaches philosophy at Boston College and writes piles of books.  He read from a manuscript and spoke in soft tones, but it was powerful.  Makes me want to get hold of his book Ecumenical Jihad.

I suffered from a photo-bug condition for a few years away back in the late 1970's.  I bought a nice Minolta SLR 35mm camera and a couple of nice lenses and did enjoy the experience.  I have continued to use that as my "nice" camera through the years, and have some good shots from it.   

It's amazing how quickly a new technology replaces the old.  CD's replaced vinyl in the music industry.  And does anyone still drive a car that still boasts a cassette tape player?

And in the world of cameras, digital has mostly replaced film.  I finally got around to buying a $100 Kodak digital camera last year and have enjoyed it.  Very handy.  Decent pictures.  Easy to view and print snapshots.  And perhaps the best thing: unlimited throwaway shots.  You can shoot a hundred pictures, keep two, and delete the rest without suffering the waste of any perfectly good film or photo paper. 

But now as I take a closer look at the digital camera market, I am newly impressed with the offerings.  To be sure, many professionals still shoot with film for much of their work.  But the technology has come a long ways from the early days of the digital camera.  ("Early days of digital cameras"? -- what -- four years ago?).  

One thing that I hadn't realized is that the optics for digital cameras are much less expensive for comparable quality.  In the old days, the rule was you wanted to spend a lot of money on glass: the lens was very important.  The difference now, however is that the photo plane is physically much smaller inside the camera.  The CCD array is physically only a fraction of the area of the 35mm film area, and so a comparable lens doesn't need to be nearly as large (or expensive) as the lens for the 35mm SLR camera.  Not realizing this in the past, I have looked upon the pea-sized lenses on digital cameras and snorted depreciatively: such a small lens must be producing nothing better than cave-dwelling photos.  But as my camera team sends me photos for our Zion video project, I am duly impressed with some very high quality shots; even from modest, midrange equipment.  (Of course it helps to have a good eye for composition ...)

I guess I feel a camera purchase coming on ...  

ALSO ONLINE...
The New Pantagruel
Covenant Renewal
Theologia
First Things
Touchstone
Biblical Horizons
Credenda-Agenda
CRTA
larknews.com
Townhall.com
OpinionJournal.com

A SHORT BIO ...
movies ...
wish list ...

CONTACT
me