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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.

This.

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 found it all very strange. Fun. But strange.

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.

—
Video from another venue:

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.

Some of you have jumped on the Calvin reading bandwagon. Good for you! I’m excited about that. Maybe we can post comments here now and then about what we read (yes, with some trepidation regarding time, I’m considering it).

If you REALLY want to maximize the value of this time, you may want to consider supplementing your reading with Dr. David Calhoun’s Calvin class from Covenant Seminary. Though I was never able to take this class when I was in seminary, it was one about which I heard marvelous things. The great thing is that the entire class can be downloaded as .mp3 files here. The study guide will give you an idea of when to plug in a lecture that corresponds with your reading.

If you can work it into your disciplines, it would be worth it.

If you are not inclined to read through Calvin in a year, or if you would like a challenge in addition to that, I have posted a few variations on some bible reading schedules. By clicking, you can download a schedule that will help you

– read through the Bible in a year

– read through the Old Testament once and the New Testament twice in a year

– read through the Bible in two years

My philosophy on this is that such schedules can often become more a burden than a joy. And yet at times, we need the external discipline to keep our nose to the grindstone.

I set up the schedules so that there is no reading scheduled for Sundays. I encourage people to use the Sundays to catch up with reading they missed during the week. I also arranged them so that one reads through a whole book before moving to another. You do not read multiple books of the bible at the same time.

If you think these might be helpful, feel free to download one or all of them.

Oh… you still have time to start. My schedules don’t begin until the first Monday of the year.

I have some great research assistants who push interesting articles too me through the week. Often, I don’t have time to read what I’m sent. But this week has produced some very interesting – and entertaining – fare.

Does everyone go to heaven, regardless of religion? Apparently, most people in America think so, as do most Christians.

Speaking of going to heaven, here is one guy who believes that he is not headed there. He is atheist by profession. And yet, he makes the best case for the necessity and impact of conversion that many of us have ever heard. As he reflects on his time living in Malawi he says this:

“In the city we had working for us Africans who had converted and were strong believers. The Christians were always different. Far from having cowed or confined its converts, their faith appeared to have liberated and relaxed them. There was a liveliness, a curiosity, an engagement with the world – a directness in their dealings with others – that seemed to be missing in traditional African life. They stood tall.”

And finally, if you’ve ever had the kind of ‘fun’ I’ve had in dealing with a phone company, you will appreciate this. One of my best friends was once one of those guys you would get on the phone if you called Verizon. He was the exception to the rule.

(If you are required to register with the NYTimes to read the articles, do so. Registration is free.)

I trust you all will have a Happy New Year! We will be celebrating at Busch Gardens to live music and then a synchronized fireworks display which, a couple years ago, ended with “Joy to the World” accompanied with fireworks. No knowing if the designer of the display meant anything by it, but it gave me chills!

The pictures from our Christmas morning are back from the developers. Here are some sample shots of those who gathered in our living room for that delightful morning.

Deserved or not, to some the word ‘Calvinist’ conveys the imagery of stubborn, graceless, coldly logical Christians who expect everyone but themselves and a select few others to be in hell. That’s a shame, because by that characterization, many, including John Calvin, would make rather poor Calvinists!

John Calvin was a man of deep scholarship and deeper piety. He understood joy and he understood suffering. He had a deep passion for the glory of God and a deep compassion for the plight of men. He was one who knew what it meant to be a Christian, what it meant to live as a Christian, and had that rare giftedness which enabled him to convey with clarity what he knew.

Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion has been enshrined in two lists:

1) as one the Great Books of western civilization and

2) as one of the books which, therefore, almost no one reads.

That is a great loss. I read the institutes a number of years ago, and found the experience deeply, deeply rewarding. Calvin’s insights into the Christian life still resonate with me, and I have returned to him often and recommended passages to others.

A friend has put me on to an organization which is encouraging others to join with them in reading through Calvin in 2009. You can get the details here. Even if you do not commit to read through this in a year, if you request one, the folks at this site will send you a reading schedule which has broken down Calvin’s massive book into bitesized portions. That would be worth having, even if you read the book at a slower pace.

Now, what about violins?

When a child begins to learn a musical instrument, many parents make what is to me a grave mistake. They provide their child with an inferior (i.e. ‘cheap’) instrument. While this makes good economic sense, the child, unskilled to begin with, will meet early frustration because he just won’t be able to make the instrument sound good. I think that a good instrument, more costly at the outset, will pay rich rewards as it will be that much easier to learn, easier to play, and more likely to keep the child’s interest.

If you decide to read Calvin, you have the same options before you. You can lay hands on an inexpensive translation (Beveridge) and think that you have stumbled upon a bargain. But the translation is old, tedious, and dry, and you will bog down quickly. Your reading will not sing.

I would suggest that instead you take on this noble task with a worthy instrument. Spend the money and buy the Ford Lewis Battles translation. It is modern, well annotated, and well bound. It stands a much greater chance of keeping your interest.

I know very, very little about Kate DiCamillo other than what I have read in her book The Tale of Despereaux referenced here, and a few things that I’ve picked up along the way (that she used to work at Half-Price Books is of particular interest to my daughter-in-law who works at Half-Price Books). I know as well that she lives someplace cold and is single. That’s about it.

That’s her picture here. She has curly hair. But I don’t know her spiritual commitments.

Now, the passage I quoted earlier could be read to be a clear reference to the Christian’s understanding of Christ’s substitutionary atonement. Did she mean it? or am I right in seeing it there?

Irrelevant questions, those, ultimately.

I’d love to hear that this wonderful writer is a Christian. But at the level of her storytelling, it really does not matter. God has woven his character and his story into the fabric of the universe in a way that it is hard to avoid. And he sometimes graces unbelievers with such rich gifts of insight and expression that they cannot help but see it.

As she in this case simply notes that a mere ‘goodbye’ cannot hold a candle to a ‘let me die for you’, she need not be a Christian to observe this. She speaks truthfully and in her truthfulness, God gives us a gift.

My point should be obvious. If we read only those things written by those claiming to be Christians, we will miss some of the most wonderful insights that God himself has for his people.

This principle applies to music and other forms of art as well.

You agree?