I’m currently reading Dan McKanan’s book The Catholic Worker After Dorothy: Practicing the Works of Mercy in a New Generation. A review is coming, but for now, I highly recommend it. Through it I’ve learned about Casa Juan Diego and the Houston Catholic Worker Newspaper. On their site I found Peter Maurin’s “Easy Essays” which I’ve quickly added as meditative reading on my Ipod.
I’m reading online today about Missouri’s history of the Civil War. I was born and raised in Missouri, moving from St. Louis to Central Missouri, and finally living in Southwestern Missouri for a number of years. When I think back to the people and places where I lived I can’t help but feel the effects in my mind’s eye of the ghosts of the atrocities committed across the state. There is no other name for the Missouri bushwhackers but terrorists. And yet, I see that their actions were in retaliation in-kind, tit for tat, for what they’d suffered. When I look at the Middle East today, Gaza and Israel, Iraq, Afghanistan, I see a land ravaged by terror. Missouri can teach us about military occupation, neutrality, and how violence never completely spirals down until all are dead. There are humans everywhere. . . and always memories. William T. Anderson and William Quantrill were a few of Missouri’s most notable guerrillas. The families of the innocents who died in their raids are still very alive. The sense of injustice and bitterness, the culture of mistrust and fear are still very much alive generations later. Wikipedia has this on Missouri’s plan before the war to keep peace.
Armed neutrality
By 1860, Missouri’s initial southern settlers had been supplanted with a more diversified non-slave holding population, including many German and Irish immigrants. With war seeming inevitable, Missouri thought it could stay out of the conflict by remaining in the Union, but staying neutral—not giving men or supplies to either side and pledging to fight troops from either side who entered the state. The policy was first put forth in 1860 by outgoing Governor Robert Marcellus Stewart, who had Northern leanings. It was reaffirmed by incoming Governor Claiborne Jackson, who had Southern leanings. A Constitutional Convention to discuss secession was convened with Sterling Price presiding. The delegates voted to stay in the Union and supported the neutrality position.
The rest of the page tells you how well that turned out. A state with bitter allegiances to both sides doesn’t sit out the fight just because the authorities call in the National Army and gives them the guns. Does this sound familiar? It should? Mission Accomplished? Ask Missourians.
Christianity Today recently posted an editorial titled “The Problem with Juicy Memoirs,” directed pointedly at Frank Schaeffer, asking, “What does it mean to honor one’s father and mother in this therapeutic age of the self?” If you haven’t been following along, CT and Books and Culture have volleyed back and forth with Frank in open letters and reviews that have been, well, depressing.
Son of a Preacher Man by Betty Carter
Full Disclosure by Frank Schaeffer (Frank’s response with a rejoinder to fess up, Os!)
I’m bemused by all this coverage. If anything, this volley lacks any real content, and CT’s pedantic call to “honor father and mother” will certainly fall on deaf ears to Frank. In Frank’s rejoinder to Os he says,
Os has built a career on an evangelical reputation based in part on his association with my late father, Francis Schaeffer. Os has a continuing stake (in every sense of that word) in the Schaeffer brand name.
I think this comment, more than anything else, reveals what this is all about. Publicity. Reputation. Brand Name. It’s ironic to me that Frank would go on Cspan Book TV telling the world about what’s wrong with Binny Hinn and the Evangelical personality cult, even as he knows that the celebrity he now seeks from mainstream press exposure is devoted to forming his own following.
Frank’s problem lies in his easy readiness to speak for his mom and dad. To reframe their legacy the way he wants, all the while admitting that he waited until they were out of the picture to do so! For instance, when Frank says, “Dad could have easily been a tool of the left as he was for the right. There was nothing about him that would have kept him out of that camp.” Ahem, other than the fact that the household was crazy fundamentalist?
The book publishing world these days is all about starting a movement. Get people talking, get them spending. I sort of wonder what Frank meant by “Almost All” in his subtitle: “How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back” I wonder whether what he won’t take back are his beliefs about money. (Is Capitalism Christian? Toward A Christian Perspective on Economics, 1985) His book on economics was a flame at socialism in all it’s hidden forms. (Ooh scary.) If Frank has ever been anything, he’s been an opportunist. He helped “found the Religious Right as a teenager because he wanted to make movies.” Maybe it’s time we stop funding his little mid-life crisis the way we funded his teen angst.
I can safely say I’m actually now proud of my middle name. . . Lawrence. When I was a child I read the story of a martyr who gave his life in behalf of his flock of Christians from Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. This man was the Martyr Lawrence of Rome. Here is the account according to Ambrose:
For when the treasures of the Church were demanded from him, he promised that he would show them. On the following day he brought the poor together. When asked where the treasures were which he had promised, he pointed to the poor, saying: “These are the treasures of the Church.” And truly they were treasures, in whom Christ lives, in whom there is faith in Him. So, too, the Apostle says: “We have this treasure in earthen vessels.” What greater treasures has Christ than those in whom He says He Himself lives? For thus it is written: “I was hungry and ye gave Me to eat, I was thirsty and ye gave Me to drink, I was a stranger and ye took Me in.” And again: “What thou didst to one of these, thou didst it unto Me.”What better treasures has Jesus than those in which He loves to be seen?
I remembered this story, but couldn’t remember the name until today. My middle name is Lawrence because it’s my dad’s name and my grandfather’s. But I love the story of the Martyr Lawrence of Rome. I love the reminder that our true treasure is the people of God! BTW, Lawrence died at the ripe old age of 33.
If you’re like me, nothing is more exciting, more liberating, than theology texts without cost. Oh yes, I know, those who can afford to pay should, but on a sliding scale, free is about right for me. This is why I love websites like religion-online.org and archive.org. I was delighted to learn that there are quite a few Karl Barth texts, such as Church Dogmatics: A Selection on archive.org for free download right now! Here’s a link index of what’s there now. Let others quibble about intellectual property and ethics. The rest of us on a budget will get what we can when the copyright expires!
Wow. Just noticed two Bonhoeffer titles as well! Act and Being!
I was out walking yesterday with Jon and we were talking about great forms of exercise. I told him that there is a part of me that really misses hard work. Like wood chopping with an ax. “Oh yeah!” He said. “Do you know how many calories you burn doing that?” This morning I’m thinking about it again and, after a hard day’s work in our community kitchen, cooking for a few hundred people, I’m remembering what wood chopping really looked like the few times I did it. If I had to pick just one thing I really thank my dad for it’s instilling in me a hard work ethic. I remember him trying to teach me the proper way to use a felling ax—in the yard next to our house in the city! Neither of us were very good at it, but it was fun. I must have been eleven or twelve, my son’s age now. I remember blisters that never quite became callouses, until I started working in sheet metal. Then it was severe cuts, stitches and burns. And now it is all just memories. My hands are turning that ghastly pale pasty white color peculiar to musicians and typists.
I found this cool online book on the history and methodology of axes on the federal highway department’s website. An Ax to Grind: A Practical Ax Manual. Poring over this stuff reminds me that words and type and ideas are things, yes, important things, but they create the illusion of action. My body remains largely inert. This has so many applications. I for one am sick to death of the truth in all its forms without any intention toward action. Theories are important, for what they are. We must also remember what they are not. Next time I glory in the idea of doing, somebody please stop me and say, “Stop talking, start chopping!”
I have so much to be thankful for. Whoever you are, if you really stop and think about it, you do too!
1. work that satisfies and delights me
2. mentors and advisors in my field with far more wisdom/experience than I.
3. living in the Chicago area, where I can enjoy the world’s greatest Public Library collections and Hot Dougs, The Sausage Superstore and Encased Meat Emporium. Click on the picture for the theme song!
To me it’s much more honest to reference the personal theologically rather than the universal. So, let me tell a humorous but serious story about our family devotions this morning. The topic was Jesus’ hard work for sinners. We use the tried and true devotional Little Visits with God. My parents used the 1960s version and that’s what we use now. Anyway, I got to asking my youngest daughter what a sinner was.
“Someone who sins.”
“That’s right. Who’s a sinner?”
“We are.”
“But are you a sinner?”
“No.”
“Really? Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“What about when you fight with your sister and say mean things. Aren’t you a sinner then?”
“No. I’m not a sinner.”
My wife and I looked at each other and did our best not to break into laughter. Somehow I guess she imagines that she’s too cute to be a sinner. On Sunday in our small group in church we prayed for her that she’d come to know Jesus. I made a little remark about her being a heathen to my old friend and he seemed uncomfortable with that. He knew that she wasn’t a heathen. It must be hard to consider a six year old a heathen. I suppose that especially with our children this business about sin is difficult to talk about.
I wrote about sin last year. It takes faith to believe in sin. That old idea that sin is the one universally self evident truth is dangerously untrue. This is why coercing someone into a “sinners prayer” is unhealthy, because the faith to understand our status before God has to be cultivated. In many ways this is why it is delightful to teach children about Jesus. They hear me talk about sin and then they see me sin and confess and repent. Last night I was grumpy with my daughter because she was so antsy and high strung and I was feeling sick. I lay in bed last night and repented for making her feel like I didn’t want her around. This morning when she came into the room the first thing she heard me say was that I needed her forgiveness.
To learn to have faith in Jesus is not the same thing as learning social mores in order to keep from getting into trouble. But I think that all children spend time thinking that way. I once overheard my older daughter saying to her younger sister, “Did you know there are people who don’t know Jesus? Isn’t that scary!?! They’re going to go to hell!” That alarmed me because I realized that she begins learning about faith in terms of the in-group (those saved) and the out-group (those yet to be saved). I tried to explain to her that we shouldn’t fear people who don’t know Jesus, but I think she still struggles with that.
Maybe the biggest struggle for raising children in the faith is teaching them that Jesus called his disciples to take up their cross and follow Him, and that in our own Scriptures to share in Christ’s sufferings is part of the privilege of faith. Six year olds called to suffer? Yes, this will take some time.
Rom. 5:1 (NRSV)
Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ,
2 through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God.
3 And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance,
4 and endurance produces character, and character produces hope,
5 and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.
6 For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly.
The year was 1991. Johnny Cash hadn’t been “discovered” again by Rick Ruben yet. Punk hadn’t been “discovered” by the Christian world yet. The cowpunk and Alt. Country idea was sorta kinda taking off, but certainly not yet reflected in sales. Anyway, a group from Houston Texas known as One Bad Pig asked Johnny Cash to record his “Man in Black” with them. Check out the song on their MySpace page. If you haven’t heard it you may agree with me that their cover was something special. No Depression should put it on their next sampler if they’re still going to do those.
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