Not that any of this matters, but as I sit here vegging on a Sunday night I was pleased to see that the TV series John Adams won the Golden Globe for best mini-series. And Tom Hanks, in accepting the award, said that we all should go read David McCullough’s book. Here here!
Here’s rooting for Paul Giamati, Laura Linney, and Tom Wilkinson to make it a clean sweep!
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UPDATE: Whoa, it’s a two-fer. One of my favorites, Laura Linney picked up the award for playing Abigail Adams. Horray!
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UPDATE 2: I’m amazed – Paul Giamatti has won for his role as John Adams. I’m watching a bit behind real time, and may not stay up for the rest. But this is amazing that this series would be so well recognized. Worth seeing if you have not.
If you are still considering reading Calvin this year, there is yet time to start. If you miss this week you will only have missed the address to the French king and will not have missed any of the substance of the Institutes.
As an encouragement to consider at least beginning read this from Sean Lucas, a professor at Covenant Seminary, who has himself begun reading Calvin afresh. He comments:
One of the things that has struck me afresh is how the Institutes really are what Calvin (and what I in class) say they are: a manual on piety. Over and again, Calvin preaches, cajoles, directs, persuades and urges; he calls on us to “lift your hearts up” to heaven in order to mediate on the grace and glory of God. He wants us to be changed through a genuine love of God our gracious and loving father. It has been quite refreshing spiritually to do this.
That was my impression when I read them 20 years ago. It’s not too late to jump on board.
Also, if you were thinking about listening to the Covenant Seminary lectures on Calvin on your iPod, I have converted them all to audiobook format. In contrast to normal mp3s, audiobooks remember where you left off when you sync your iPod or switch for a time to a song or some other recording. Let me know if you are interested, and we’ll figure out a way to get these to you. Email me here.
UPDATE; I have been made aware of another site – Princeton Seminary – which has its own schedule for reading the Institutes and has been given permission to post the excellent McNeill/Battles translation in daily increments so that one can read without having to buy the actual book. Also, there is included in this site a podcast of an audio recording of the Institutes. (However, be warned that the audio changes Calvin so that he writes as one who is gender inclusive.) Because of copyright issues, the readings only stay posted for a few days, so you will need to keep up.
My son asked me the other day, with a certain challenge in his voice, why I had the blog of James Fallows linked on this blog. My son and I share the same generally conservative politics. So, he is, understandably, a bit puzzled to find Fallows’ blog listed as something worth checking out.
That’s a great question. So, what’s my answer?
1) He is a good writer. I learn from good essay writers, and am challenged by them. Obviously blog posts are not classic essays, but they still reveal a certain compositional skill which I not only enjoy, but learn from.
2) He has diverse interests which overlap mine, and which stretch me. In addition to politics, he often posts about computers, language, China, productivity, and a host of other things. This is what I want my own blog to reflect – the diverse interests of its author.
3) He takes a different political spin from most of those I am around. Though I differ, I am challenged by his thought, which is always well reasoned and carefully phrased.
My last post, titled “For Parents of Girls” prominently displayed the cover art from the girl lit sensation Twilight. The article referenced in the post was an article stimulated by the Twilight phenomenon, but which was more about girlhood than it was about the novels. The question the author was addressing was not so much the merits of the books as what there was about being a girl that so resonated with these books.
That is what I find fascinating. What is there about this or that that makes it all so appealing? What do things which we embrace say about us? I have read recently about (and even watched highlight reels of) MMA (mixed martial arts). I have no interest in attending an MMA bout of any kind. But the popularity is off the charts. Why? What is there in people that makes these fights so popular? These are the kinds of questions which interest me.
Hence, my post really said nothing positive or negative about the series. But it did say something intriguing, I thought, about girls and the process of growing up.
I happen to know all those who commented, and they all commented about the books, and not the substance. That’s okay. I like the conversation, and I like to hear what people think, even if it is not directly along the line of what I was thinking. Someday I may have something to say about the books.
But the interesting thing about the comments to the post “For Parents of Girls”, which no doubt means nothing at all, is that if we were to put all the children of all those who commented in one room, in that room there would be nine boys, zero girls!
Not having time to explore the whole Twilight phenomena (huge book sales, blockbuster movie release, and impact nearly solely among young females), I read what I can when I can about it. This is an interesting take from the Atlantic Monthly. This is not a Christian assessment, of course. But very telling and intriguing for those of us who have or have had girls is this observation:
AS I WRITE this, I am sitting on the guest-room bed of a close friend, and down the hall from me is the bedroom of the daughter of the house, a 12-year-old reader extraordinaire, a deep-sea diver of books. She was the fourth person through the doors of the Westwood Barnes & Noble the midnight that the series’ final volume, Breaking Dawn, went on sale, and she read it—a doorstop, a behemoth—in six hours, and then turned back to page one as though it were the natural successor to the last page.
Posted on this girl’s door—above the fading sticker of a cheery panda hopping over a pink jump rope, and one of a strawberry and a lollipop (their low placement suggesting the highest reach of a very small child), and to the right of an oval-shaped decal bearing the single, angry imperative STOP GLOBAL WARMING—is a small, black, square-shaped sticker that reads MY HEART BELONGS TO EDWARD. In the middle is a photograph of a pair of shapely female hands proffering a red Valentine heart. Also taped to this girl’s closed door is a single piece of lined paper, on which she has written, in a carefully considered amalgam of block letters and swirly penmanship and eight different colors of crayon:
EDWARD’S FAN CLUB YOU MAY ONLY ENTER IF YOU KNOW THE PASSWORD
That she had made her declaration for Edward on such a pretty, handmade sign was all-girl—as was her decision to leave up the old stickers from her childhood. One of the signal differences between adolescent girls and boys is that while a boy quickly puts away childish things in his race to initiate a sexual life for himself, a girl will continue to cherish, almost to fetishize, the tokens of her little-girlhood. She wants to be both places at once—in the safety of girl land, with the pandas and jump ropes, and in the arms of a lover, whose sole desire is to take her completely. And most of all, as girls work all of this out with considerable anguish, they want to be in their rooms, with the doors closed and the declarations posted. The biggest problem for parents of teenage girls is that they never know who is going to come barreling out of that sacred space: the adorable little girl who wants to cuddle, or the hard-eyed young woman who has left it all behind.
Kinda scary, huh? Yep. Reason #31 parents should be on their knees more than we are.
Being a closet geek, I downloaded a specialized web browser/search agent Monday. It is not a free product, so I thought I’d try it for the allotted 60 hours of use to see what sets it apart.
So, how does one check out such a product? Among other things, if your name is Randy Greenwald, you search for “Randy Greenwald”. At least that’s what I did.
This brought up all the usual links, and one very interesting one.
I had written an article for the Bradenton Herald last September based loosely on this blog post. the author of this blog read the article, and excerpted these paragraphs.
I am a 52 year-old pastor, husband, and father. I have little free time, and the free time I do have, I spend with my wife, my wife who is a great fan of movies, but not much of a fan of live music, and especially no fan of jazz or blues.
I am not complaining. We have a great deal in common. Just not this.
So, last weekend we visited our son and daughter-in-law in Ft. Lauderdale, and Seth informed me that he wanted to take me to a jazz club for some music on Friday night.
Bless him.
As the guy who on normal days is going to bed between 9:00 and 10:00 o’clock at night, I found myself leaving the house at 9:15. This is not me.
We headed for Miami Beach, to a restaurant called the Van Dyke, which has an intimate upstairs venue for live music. We joined about forty or fifty other patrons, with no cover charge (a one drink minimum requested), and a blues band burning up the place. They clearly were doing what they absolutely loved doing. And the crowd loved it.
The drummer looked like he was an accountant by day. (That was Seth’s read. I have him pegged as a middle school music teacher.) The guitar player/vocalist played at times with such gusto that his hand blurred. And in addition to the bass player, the group was rounded out by a fiddler.
Now, we determined that this gal was Allison Krauss turned to the dark side. She seemed the same size and age as AK and played a mean fiddle. But there, the similarity ended. Her fiddle was an electric model, and her clothing revealed tattoos on both arms and filling her back.
We left, reluctantly, at 11:30, knowing our time at the parking meter was just about up.
What a great time. (Eat your heart out, JM! I know you are listening.) Thanks, Seth, for the wonderful gift.
If any of you ever have a chance to see the Nouveau Honkies, by all means do so.
But not you, Barb. I love you too much to subject you to such torture.
Is that a word? Trepidatiously? No? But I think it a good word.
I proceed at the beginning of any new year with trepidation. I make no commitments, publicly. I am too aware of my own inability to keep broad and ambitious resolutions, and so I don’t make them. To do so sets me up for failure.
However contradictory it may sound, I at the same time find the start of a new year a good, though artificial, time to rethink my habits and consider new ones.
Such has been my thinking regarding the whole ‘read Calvin‘ blitz and buzz. My desire here is nothing new. I read (and outlined) the Institutes in 1989, twenty years ago. I’ve commended portions to many and the whole to some, and have harbored a desire to read it again.
So, tentatively I’m going to give this a shot. But don’t be surprised, as I will not be, a week from now to see the whole idea crashed and burning in a smoldering pile.
If on the other hand I do persevere, you, faithful readers (Calvin’s language), will be subjected to quote after quote. In the introduction to the McNeill/Battles edition – the one we should all use – we read some helpful thoughts about Calvin’s work, this one regarding the nature of this work itself:
“One who takes up Calvin’s masterpiece with the preconception that its author’s mind is a kind of efficeent factory turning out and assembling the parts of a neatly jointed structure of dogmatic logic will quickly find the assumption challenged and shattered. The discerning reader soon realizes that not the author’s intellect alone but his whole spiritual and emotional being is enlisted in his work. Calvin might well have used the phrase later finely composed by Sir Philip Sidney, ‘Look in thy heart, and write.’ He well exemplifies the ancient adage, ‘The heart makes the theologian.’ He was not, we may say, a theologian by profession, but a deeply religious man who possessed a genius for orderly thinking and obeyed the impulse to write out the implications of his faith.” (li)
This has been my observation. This is a work of devotional piety. If you read it well, your heart, not just your mind, will be touched.
Early Saturday morning, after a late Friday night, and battling a cold to boot, our eight year old son came out with this: “I feel like an empty bag of sausages.”
If there is a more creative simile out there, let me hear it. I have no idea what this one means, but in the context, it certainly conveyed his meaning.
