"Take up the cudgels for the cow"

Wisconsin State Senator Joseph Quarles on March 27, 1902 arguing for butter and against oleomargarine:

Things have come to a strange pass when the steer competes  with  the  cow  as  a  butter  maker.  When the hog conspires with the steer to monopolize the dairy business, it is time for self-respecting men to take  up  the  cudgels  for  the  cow  and  defend  her time-honored prerogatives.... We ought not now to  desert  her  or  permit  her  to  be  displaced,  her sweet  and  wholesome  product  supplanted  by  an artificial compound of grease that may be chemically  pure  but  has  never  known  the  fragrance  of clover, the freshness of the dew or the exquisite flavor which nature bestows exclusively on butter fat to adapt it to the taste of man.... I desire butter that comes from the dairy, not the slaughterhouse. I want butter that has the natural aroma of life and health. I decline to accept as a substitute caul fat, matured  under  the  chill  of  death,  blended  with vegetable oils and flavored by chemical tricks.

In the "Dairy State" the dairy industry had a lot of political clout but "even the state’s dairy lobby failed to push through legislation that would have required margarine to be colored pink or brown." Wisconsin did have laws prohibiting margarine from being died yellow [although butter often was]. In the 1960's this prohibition came under political attack.

A great moment in Wisconsin political history...occurred in June 1965 when a blindfolded state senator named Gordon Roseleip stood in the Senate chambers and tried to distinguish butter from oleomargarine.

He failed.

“That’s oleo,” Roseleip said after being fed a small amount by a Senate colleague, Marty Schreiber, who later became governor.

It was butter. .... [more]

Most of the state senators who took part in the blind taste test (the choices: butter, margarine and a spread developed at the University of Wisconsin) identified them correctly but Senator Roseleip got it wrong. "After Roseleip’s death in 1989, one of his daughters revealed that the Senator truly had been handicapped. Worried about his health, his wife had, without his knowledge, substituted margarine for butter on the family table."

The “Oleo Wars”: Wisconsin’s Fight over the Demon Spread, Doug Moe: Epic battle in history: Butter vs. margarine

Mysteries and the rule of law

From "Detective Stories, Democracy, and Rule of Law" by Allan Griffith:

In his classic book on Golden Age mysteries, Murder for Pleasure, the critic Howard Haycraft makes the claim that the detective story can exist only in a democracy. The reason for this, he states, is that autocratic governments don’t care about punishing the right person, the individual who actually committed the crime. And of course autocratic governments don’t provide any protection for individual rights, whereas in a democracy there are strict rules of evidence and other means of protecting the rights of individuals.

In fact Haycraft is confusing democracy with freedom (or what we call a liberal democratic republic, using the older sense of the word "liberal"--ed.), a mistake most people make. The thing that guarantees the rights of the individual is the rule of law, not democracy as such. ....

It is important to note that Haycraft is talking about the actual detective story, not crime fiction in general. ....

It’s interesting that the puzzle type of detective story reached its peak of popularity in the 1930s. It remained very popular for some decades after that, but it is certainly no longer the dominant form of crime fiction. Does this reflect a change in society? .... (more)

W.H. Auden argued that the true detective story required not only "rule of law" but:

...an innocent society in a state of grace, i.e., a society where there is no need of the law, no contradiction between the aesthetic individual and the ethical universal, and where murder, therefore, is the unheard-of act which precipitates a crisis (for it reveals that some member has fallen and is no longer in a state of grace). The law becomes a reality and for a time all must live in its shadow, till the fallen one is identified. With his arrest, innocence is restored, and the law retires forever. ....

His criteria for the authentic detective story were rather strict:

Completely satisfactory detectives are extremely rare. Indeed, I only know of three: Sherlock Holmes (Conan Doyle), Inspector French (Freeman Wills Crofts), and Father Brown (Chesterton). The job of the detective is to restore the state of grace in which the aesthetic and the ethical are as one. Since the murderer who caused their disjunction is the aesthetically defiant individual, his opponent, the detective, must be either the official representative of the ethical or the exceptional individual who is himself in a state of grace. .... (more)

My reading for pleasure encompasses thrillers, noir, police procedurals, etc., and detection proper, which latter does, I think, require a society with the rule of law and the story ought to end with the just restoration of order.

Detective Stories, Democracy, and Rule of Law | The American Culture, W.H. Auden: The Guilty Vicarage

Abortion extremism

Putting Texas into context: there are only four countries in the world that allow abortion after viability for any reason whatever:

...[T]here are nine nations that permit abortion after twenty weeks: Canada, China, Great Britain, North Korea, the Netherlands, Singapore, Sweden, Vietnam, and the United States.

...China, North Korea, and Canada [and the United States]...are the only in the world that allow the killing of a child after viability (usually calculated at twenty-four weeks) for any reason, or for no reason at all.

Only Canada, China, North Korea, and U.S. Allow Abortion After Viability for Any Reason » First Thoughts | A First Things Blog

"People will...turn away from listening to the truth...."

Matthew Lee Anderson has been reading Roger Scruton's The Uses of Pessimism and the Danger of False Hope which has resulted in a post "On Authority, Tradition, and Millennial Evangelicals," from which:

...[T]here’s an inherent modesty required both to speak authoritatively and to discern and respond to authorities.  When Jesus speaks “as one with authority” in Matthew 7, he teaches within the context of an established and authoritative body of work, the Torah.  He illuminates various aspects in new and distinctive ways, and the whole teaching is reframed around the advent of the Messiah.  Yet his teaching is authoritative only because it comes from within a tradition, in the first place, rather than because it questions or subverts that tradition.  He’s able to wrangle with the Pharisees in the Temple at the age of twelve because he knows his stuff. He’s done his due diligence, you might say.

.... There is within the progressive temperament that is now en vogue among many “millennial Christians” the temptation to make skepticism the fundamental posture toward religious authorities.  Never mind that authorities in other disciplines, like science, are somehow immune.  The disposition does not look at our received tradition as an inheritance to be enjoyed and lived on so much as a burden that has to be subverted and deconstructed.  Progressive Christians are not interested in measuring our  judgment against the tradition; rather, the progressive temperament judges the tradition against a conception of “reason” or “experience” that is currently popular (“we now know….”).

The difference between the progressive temperament and what Scruton describes above is not simply one of emphasis, then, but one of substance.  The person who places himself under authority is necessarily more interested in the gifts they have received than the gifts they have to give–and inasmuch as they are able to speak authoritatively (and not simply popularly, which is an important difference) they will speak out of that sense of deference.  To put it bluntly, theological progressivism has to speak from a posture of pride.  The progressive question is the theological “humblebrag”:  it refuses to give the benefit of the doubt to stances that we have inherited while treating the world as a blank canvas which we then get to “create” on.  Assimilation by a surrounding culture isn’t a bug of theological progressivism so much as a feature. .... [more]

On Authority, Tradition, and Millennial Evangelicals | Mere Orthodoxy | Christianity, Politics, and Culture...

Edith Nesbit

"In those days Mr. Sherlock Holmes was still living in Baker Street and
the Bastables were looking for treasure in the Lewisham Road.
C.S. Lewis, The Magician's Nephew

The Bastables were six children — brothers and sisters — who figured in a series of children's books by Edith Nesbit beginning with The Story of the Treasure Seekers (1899). Certain similarities to the Narnia books have been noted. Today The Guardian's children's library column celebrates the enduring appeal of the Nesbit books:

.... The secret of her perennial appeal is the fine balance she strikes between the exotic and the down-to-earth, the exalted and the humorously mundane. Her child protagonists, stolid, bumbling middle-class kids with the best of intentions, narrowly avoid the worst of outcomes through their own good natures and occasional magical intervention. But whether they're dealing with amulets, firebirds, railway porters or incensed uncles, they show a native imagination and shrewdness familiar to every child reader. They know how to coax favours from authority, how to turn away wrath with a soft answer, and how to fall from grace and be redeemed.

Nesbit also retains her popularity because she wears her learning and her large intelligence so lightly. The Story of the Amulet is rich with her deep, careful research into Egyptology, but she never overburdens her pages or her reader. Like Kipling, she lets her characters encounter towering historical and mythological figures – Caesar, Pharaoh, the Queen of Babylon – in a straightforward way that lets her young reader, too, hold immediate and arresting conversations with the past. Reading her books helped confirm me, and many others, in an early love of mythology, fairy tale and folklore far and wide. Occasional sour notes, like the large-nosed Jewish stockbrokers the children encounter in London, might make the contemporary reader wince, but they don't efface Nesbit's evident joy in the stories and peoples of the world.

Nesbit's personal life, uniquely turbulent and often contradictory, is idealised or reimagined complete in many of her books – most notably in The Railway Children, wherein the breadwinning, story-selling Mother remains the linchpin of the family after Father is unjustly imprisoned. Mother is funny, clever and kind, but she is invariably a respectable lady, even though jam AND butter on the same piece of bread now represents "reckless luxury". .... [more]

The book links above were not in the source article but added by me and are to the electronic versions of the books at ManyBooks.net where those and a great many other Edith Nesbit books can be acquired without cost.

Edith Nesbit's enduring magic — Guardian

"If a man is not to believe in himself, in what is he to believe?"

From the chapter titled "The Maniac" in G.K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy:

.... Once I remember walking with a prosperous publisher, who made a remark which I had often heard before; it is, indeed, almost a motto of the modern world. Yet I had heard it once too often, and I saw suddenly that there was nothing in it. The publisher said of somebody, "That man will get on; he believes in himself." .... I said to him, "Shall I tell you where the men are who believe most in themselves? For I can tell you. I know of men who believe in themselves more colossally than Napoleon or Caesar. I know where flames the fixed star of certainty and success. I can guide you to the thrones of the Supermen. The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums." He said mildly that there were a good many men after all who believed in themselves and who were not in lunatic asylums. "Yes, there are," I retorted, "and you of all men ought to know them. That drunken poet from whom you would not take a dreary tragedy, he believed in himself. That elderly minister with an epic from whom you were hiding in a back room, he believed in himself. If you consulted your business experience instead of your ugly individualistic philosophy, you would know that believing in himself is one of the commonest signs of a rotter. Actors who can't act believe in themselves; and debtors who won't pay. It would be much truer to say that a man will certainly fail, because he believes in himself. Complete self-confidence is not merely a sin; complete self-confidence is a weakness. Believing utterly in one's self is a hysterical and superstitious belief.... And to all this my friend the publisher made this very deep and effective reply, "Well, if a man is not to believe in himself, in what is he to believe?" After a long pause I replied, "I will go home and write a book in answer to that question." This is the book that I have written in answer to it.

G.K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy

Why he is/is not a Fundamentalist

Reviewing Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism, a book about the history of fundamentalism, Paul Miller explains:

I am a fundamentalist. I believe in the “five fundamentals” that originally defined the term: the divine inspiration of the Bible, the virgin birth of Christ, the atoning work of Jesus’ death on the cross, Jesus’ bodily resurrection, and the historicity of Christ’s miracles. These five beliefs were spotlighted by The Fundamentals, a series of books published starting in 1910 about the core doctrines of Christianity from which the word “fundamentalist” was coined.

But I am not a fundamentalist—not in the sense that most people use that term. The “five fundamentals” are actually a pretty bad summary of the Christian faith. I’ll take the Apostle’s or Nicene Creed, plus the Reformation “solas,” over the fundamentals any day. The “five fundamentals” omit, for example, the divinity of Christ and the Trinity, which are sort of important. ....

The original fundamentalism emerged in the second half of the 19^th century:

Urbanization, the Civil War, immigration, and new intellectual movements confronted the Evangelical establishment with insurmountable cultural challenges. “Higher criticism” seemed to challenge the inspiration of the Bible. Evolutionary theories seemed to challenge its accuracy. Science, generally, seemed to make supernatural explanations of the world unnecessary and quaint.

The evangelical movement split: one wing of Christians abandoned traditionalism in favor of theological liberalism. They jettisoned belief in supernaturalism, miracles, or even Christ’s divinity. They tried to reduce Christianity to a core of admirable moral maxims—and abandoned any semblance of historic Christianity in the process.

The other wing became the fundamentalists. ....

Miller says that two doctrines have come to define modern Fundamentalism and that explains why he is not a fundamentalist (emphasis added):

First, fundamentalism means a belief in seven literal days of creation, and it means believing that Charles Darwin’s scientific theory of biological evolution by natural selection is fundamentally anti-Christian. ....

The other issue that has come to define fundamentalism is its adherence to dispensationalism and preoccupation with end-times prophecy. .... [more]

Why I Am Not a Fundamentalist

Knowing the good is not enough

This year is the 200^th anniversary of Kierkegaard's birth and consequently his thought is getting more attention than usual outside scholarly circles. Here, from "The gospel according to Kierkegaard: Sin, guilt and the offense of forgiveness," how Socrates got it wrong through no fault of his own:

.... Many atheists today claim that Christianity is "offensive" in some way or another. Kierkegaard would say this is quite in order — Christianity is offensive and must be so in order to remain what it is. The offensive aspect of the difference God makes to goodness is one that Kierkegaard thought Socrates missed, as he believed anyone without the benefit of revelation would have done, no matter how wise they were in other respects.

One area where Socrates and all human reasoning that carries on its work without the benefit of revelation falls short is in accounting for why people are so often not good. For Socrates all evils are simply the result of ignorance of what is truly good. If people only knew what was just, Socrates reasoned, they would automatically do what was just. ....

So the really interesting question to Kierkegaard would not be whether people can be good without God, but a twofold problem of how to explain why so often they are not good, with or without God, and what to do about that failure. That they will fail to be good is a reality to which all parties must concede. Take the most depleted moral code you care to posit, set the bar as low as you like, and the universal experience of all human beings, from the most morally ambitious to the most scandalously indolent, is failure.

No one is as "moral" — regardless of how they define being moral — as they aim to be. ....

For Kierkegaard, the first article of Christian faith as opposed to pagan philosophy is not the reality of salvation but sin, which logically has to come first as that from which we stand in need of salvation itself. And for him sin meant wilfulness, of a kind and to a degree that even the great Socrates would never have imagined possible. Religious revelation shows us, Kierkegaard thought, that, while it is certainly the case that people can be good with and without God, with shocking frequency they are not good, and they are not good not because they simply lack knowledge of what is good but because they don't want to be good.

Socrates could never have believed that people were capable of knowing the good and simply refusing to do it. Kierkegaard, on the other hand, thought that the Christian tradition taught that all too often people do what is bad because it is bad. If you are as convinced as he was that perverse, wilful evil is not only possible but commonplace, then Socrates's view is bound to appear dangerously naive. It is also a view that you could predict human beings would come up with to suit themselves; the Socratic view can be perceived as conveniently self-exculpatory: No one is that bad, just a bit confused.

This is one reason Kierkegaard thought the idea of sin had to be revealed. Nobody spontaneously thinks to himself "I really am a lousy jerk" even if he is a lousy jerk. It takes a God to tell us that we are lousy jerks, not because we are not lousy jerks and God is around just to make us all feel bad about ourselves, but precisely because we are lousy jerks, and lousy jerks are the last people who will recognize themselves to be lousy jerks without someone to tell them they are. .... [more]

The gospel according to Kierkegaard: Sin, guilt and the offense of forgiveness – Opinion – ABC Religion & Ethics (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

"One wants something to engross the attention without tiring the mind."

Three of John Buchan's Richard Hannay adventures are available, free, at ManyBooks.net: The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915), Greenmantle (1916), and Mr Standfast (1919). The only one missing is The Three Hostages.

A former head of MI-5 had this to say about "John Buchan and The Thirty-Nine Steps":

.... He (Buchan) was convinced that civilisation’s crust was thin; that hard and cynical men, operating on a global scale, were using liberal sentimentality as a stalking horse for activities which could eventually derail liberal institutions. He was not alone in thinking and warning about that, and there are many even today who would agree with him.

Against those nightmarish possibilities, Buchan champions the things he thinks best in British civilisation – education, gentlemanly and ladylike conduct, honesty, an adventurous questing, a self-sacrificing spirit and plenty of fresh air, long walks and cold baths. Could it be that these unfashionable virtues are what accounts for his enduring appeal?

The Thirty-Nine Steps introduces the reader to Richard Hannay, a man of action who puts his own safety second to the safety of his country. Hannay’s activities incorporate much of Buchan’s own experiences. ....

All the Hannay books involve a chase across wild country with the life of the hero and/or the villain at stake. And what villains they are. In addition to their strange eyes and penchant for libraries, they share an insatiable greed for power, a near-hypnotic control of large numbers of bad men and a kind of magical immunity, right up to the moment the end comes. ....

Buchan’s technique as a writer is simple enough and well displayed in The Thirty-Nine Steps. He understood that in a thriller, as opposed for example to a detective story, what matters above all is to keep the reader focused on what is going to happen next, irrespective of where things may end up. And also to keep him convinced that what he is reading here and now could really happen. ....

The Thirty-Nine Steps is more like a series of exciting episodes strung end to end than a carefully plotted tale. The speed is breathtaking, with each successive scene gripping the reader’s imagination, and with every place, actor and motive indelibly sketched.

It doesn’t matter that the reader has no clue where he is being taken or, when he gets there, how the thing happened as it did. All that matters is that once you’ve started, you can’t put the book down.

Buchan wrote in his autobiography, Memory Hold-the-Door, that he had no purpose in shocker writing except to please himself. Nevertheless, he must have been delighted to learn that The Thirty-Nine Steps had greatly pleased one important section of his contemporary readership. An officer at the Front in the First World War wrote: “It is just the kind of fiction for here. One wants something to engross the attention without tiring the mind. The story is greatly appreciated in the midst of mud and rain and shells, and all that could make trench life depressing.” ....

The free ebooks by John Buchan are here formatted for a variety of e-readers including Kindle.

John Buchan and The Thirty-Nine Steps - Telegraph

Why am I a Baptist?

In "Is Jesus a Baptist?" Timothy George (who is a Baptist) explains why that is not the right question:

.... While I recognize myself as a Protestant, an Evangelical, and a Baptist, none of those labels defines my spiritual and ecclesial identity at the most basic level. Being an evangelical Protestant, a Baptist, indeed a Southern Baptist, are all important markers of my place within the community of faith, but there is a more primary confession I must make: I am a trinitarian Christian who by the grace of God belongs to the whole company of the redeemed through the ages, those who are “very members incorporate in the mystical body of Christ” (Book of Common Prayer).

Far from being a new construal, this way of putting things goes to the very heart of what it means to be a genuine Protestant, a true Evangelical, and an authentic Baptist. Central to each of these commitments is a desire to be faithful to the Scripture-based apostolic witness of the early church. When Polycarp of Smyrna, a disciple of the Apostle John, was brought before the Roman tribunal before being cast into the arena with wild beasts, he confessed publicly the faith which he knew would lead to his certain martyrdom. In that critical moment, Polycarp did not say: “I am a Paulinist. I am a Petrist. I am a Johannian.” Neither did he say, “I am an Ignatian” (after his great contemporary Ignatius of Antioch), nor “I am an Irenaean” (after his famous disciple Irenaeus of Lyon). Rather he confessed: Christianus sum. “I am a Christian.” ....

So why am I a Baptist? I am a Baptist because it was through the witness of a small Baptist church that I first heard the gospel of Jesus Christ. Many of the things I still believe in I first learned in that modest Baptist community of faith.... Through the loving nurture I received from that congregation, I confessed my personal faith in Jesus as Savior and Lord of my life. I was then baptized in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. ....

It is important to say that all of this came to me as a gift from beyond myself. It is not as though I had studied carefully and weighed objectively every religious possibility before committing myself to the Baptist cause. My experience was rather of a person who finds himself standing, wading, and eventually swimming in a flowing mountain stream. The Baptist formation I received as a young Christian was a gift, unbidden and undeserved, for which I can claim no credit. Later as I studied the Bible more deeply and became aware of many other church traditions, doctrines, and denominations, my Baptist convictions grew stronger. I gradually came to understand the meaning of what I believed: Fides quaerens intellectum, a quest that continues still. What I first intuitively grasped or only dimly glimpsed, I came to own with greater clarity and confidence. I came to see that being a Baptist was for me the most faithful way of being an Evangelical, a Protestant, and a Christian.

Being a Baptist is a blessing but also sometimes a burden. From time to time I have considered the possibility of becoming something else. I once prepared a talk called “The Confessions of a Catholic-friendly, Pentecostal-admiring, Reformed Baptist with a Hankering after Lutheranism and a Strong Affinity for the Book of Common Prayer.” Each of these ecclesial traditions, among others, has enriched my life and calling to serve the Body of Christ. Each brings distinctive treasures to our common labors—pro Christo et ecclesia. Being a Baptist gives me all the freedom I need to appropriate as fully as I can the gifts they offer without abandoning the Baptist principles and ways that I cherish. .... [more]

Is Jesus a Baptist? | First Things

I'll Fly Away

Via Mere Comments



Some bright morning when this life is over
I’ll fly away
To that home on God's celestial shore
I’ll fly away

I’ll fly away, oh glory
I’ll fly away in the morning
When I die hallelujah by and by
I’ll fly away ....
Lagniappe - Bill Monroe and Ralph Stanley - Mere Comments

When God spoke Greek

Timothy Michael Law is the author of When God Spoke Greek: The Septuagint and the Making of the Christian Bible. In this interview he suggests reasons that Greek translation might be preferred to the Hebrew texts then available to either Catholic or Protestant translators:

...[T]he Septuagint, and not the Hebrew Bible, explicitly shaped some early Christian theology. For example, it was the Septuagint version of Isaiah, not the Hebrew Bible’s version, that shaped the most theologically profound book in the history of Christianity, Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. The primacy of the Septuagint continues after the first century, and one could not imagine the development of orthodoxy without it. None of this would be terribly significant if the Septuagint were merely a translation of the Hebrew; however, the Septuagint in many places contains a different message. Sometimes the translators of the Septuagint created new meanings in their translations, but there is also another reason the Septuagint is often different.

An alternative, sometimes older, form of the Hebrew text often lies behind the Greek. When the Reformers and their predecessors talked about returning to the original Hebrew (ad fontes!), and when modern Christians talk about studying the Hebrew because it is the “original text,” they are making several mistaken assumptions. The Hebrew Bible we now use is often not the oldest form of the Hebrew text, and sometimes the Septuagint provides the only access we have to that older form. ....

The Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century put the final nails in the Septuagint’s coffin for the West. They followed Jerome’s logic, believing that the medieval text of the Hebrew Bible was indeed the most original text of Scripture. There were some exceptions—Zwingli, for example, had argued that the Septuagint version of Isaiah was superior to the Hebrew—but for the most part Jerome and the Reformers can be credited with burying the Septuagint in the West. .... [more]

When God Spoke Greek | First Things

Now the day is over, Night is drawing nigh

The Sabbath begins in Madison, Wisconsin:

The staff of life

I like bread. I'm conscious of my need to limit carbs, and consequently limit my consumption, but I do like good bread. I'm acquainted with people who can't eat wheat at all and so am grateful for the much greater availability of gluten-free foods. At the same time I don't get the avoidance of wheat by those who neither suffer from celiac disease nor from an allergy to wheat. I found a Slate article from last February helpful in making some distinctions:

According to USA Today, up to one-quarter of all consumers now want gluten-free food, even though only one person in 100 has celiac disease, the autoimmune disorder worsened by gluten ingestion. Going gluten-free seems somewhat faddish. ....

To understand the proper role of gluten-free diets requires untangling three separate and unrelated medical problems blamed on gluten: celiac disease, wheat allergy, and gluten intolerance. Here’s the thing: The first problem is almost certainly underdiagnosed, but the latter two are likely to be overdiagnosed. ....

...[T]he most confusing problems arise with the third problem blamed on gluten: so-called gluten intolerance. This condition is neither an autoimmune disorder, like celiac disease, nor an allergy, like true wheat allergy. There’s not even a mediocre blood test for gluten intolerance. The diagnosis simply relies on someone’s subjective feelings of bloating, bowel changes, or mental fogginess after eating gluten. This is a set-up for all manner of pseudo-scientific self-diagnoses, especially when you consider that 2 percent of people believe they have illnesses caused by magnetic fields. ....

...[T]he data suggest that almost two-thirds of people who think they are gluten-intolerant really aren’t. .... [more]

The avoidance of wheat by those who don't need to is particularly odd when it is remembered that people in western and African civilizations always ate bread [and often little else]. From "Bread in the Middle Ages":

...[I]t was the staple of life for the ancient Mesopotamians and Egyptians, and was eaten throughout the Roman Empire.  It was made by grinding cereal grains, such as wheat, millet or barley, into flour, then kneading it with a liquid, perhaps adding yeast to make the dough rise and lighten, and finally baking. Bread comes in all shapes and sizes, but in his book Bread: A Global History, William Rubel notes that Europe has had a “loaf-bread culture” for the last 2,000 years, while flat bread remained popular in the Middle East and Africa.

By the beginning of the Middle Ages the preference was to eat white bread made from wheat - medieval physicians also recommended it as being the healthiest – but poorer peoples would bake darker breads with oats or rye. If one needed too, people could also add rice, peas, lentils, chestnuts, acorns or other foods into the mixture. In medieval France, most people would eat a type of bread known as meslin, which was made from a mixture of wheat and rye. ....

Terrence Scully notes “that bread was the basis of the medieval diet” and the amount that people ate throughout Europe was remarkably similar. He finds that records from England, France and Italy that workmen, soldiers and even patients in hospitals were supposed to get about two pounds of bread per day.

Like today, breads made in the Middle Ages came in all shapes and sizes. For example, in the Polish city of Wroclaw the people could buy and eat breads such as common white bread, common rye bread, black rye bread, wheat rolls, bagels, crescent rolls and flat cakes. Besides using bread just for food, medieval people often used it as their plates: known as trenchers, these were breads that were cut into thick flat slices. Then other foods like meats or thick sauces would be served on top of them. Once the meal was finished, the bread could then be eaten, or, if you were wealthy or generous enough, was given to the poor or to animals. .... more]

And then there is John 6:35.

Gluten-free diet: Distinguishing celiac disease, wheat allergy, and gluten intolerance. - Slate Magazine, Bread in the Middle Ages

"Praise should be the permanent pulsation of the soul"

From G.K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy:

Man is more himself, man is more manlike, when joy is the fundamental thing in him, and grief the superficial. Melancholy should be an innocent interlude, a tender and fugitive frame of mind; praise should be the permanent pulsation of the soul. Pessimism is at best an emotional half-holiday; joy is the uproarious labour by which all things live. (as quoted in Matthew Lee Anderson's introduction, and the book is available, free, here)

Orthodoxy (Moody Classics)

“An open mind, like an open mouth, should close on something”

George Weigel shares some quotations he collected but thus far has not used elsewhere:

• Getting the conversation started properly: “How doth truth prosper in thy parts?” (an old Quaker greeting).
• The evils of French revolutionary weights and measures:“If God had wanted us to use the metric system, he’d have given us 10 apostles” (an angry worker, struggling with metric tools).
• Rarely an argument lost: “He can persuade most people of most things, and above all he can persuade himself of almost anything” (W.E. Forster on William Gladstone).
• The limits of openness: “An open mind, like an open mouth, should close on something” (G.K. Chesterton [of course]).
• Social ineptness: “Bore. A person who talks when you wish him to listen” (Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary).
• Good government: “When Dr. Johnson defined patriotism as the last refuge of a scoundrel, he was unconscious of the then undeveloped capabilities and uses of the word ‘Reform’” (Senator Roscoe Conkling).
• A culture without reality contact: “We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men” (George Orwell).
• The earthen vessel of the Church: “No merely human institution conducted with such knavish imbecility would have lasted a fortnight” (Hillaire Belloc on Catholicism).
• Our task: “The Gospel must be preached by men. The angels have other duties” (plaque found in an old church). [more]

Zingers, Previously Unused | First Things

Does the music serve the Word?

I suspect that my frequent links to posts like this one are annoying to at least some who visit this site. There are a great many people in evangelical churches — boomers and their children — who have seldom experienced worship that doesn't follow the pattern that Kevin DeYoung calls the "New Evangelical Liturgy" and a central part of that experience is a particular approach to worship music. Rather than simply following the pattern that has become the received way of doing things, pastors and worship leaders should seriously consider why they do what they do, and whether it best serves the purpose. In "On Whales and Worship Lyrics" Jen Wilken's concern is with the music. Her discussion group has been reading Bonhoeffer's Life Together.

.... The discussion centered around this quote concerning worship through corporate singing:

“All devotion, all attention should be concentrated upon the Word in the hymn…the music is completely the servant of the Word {Scripture}. It elucidates the Word in its mystery.”

We asked each other, is this true of church music today? Can we say of modern worship songs that the music serves the words of Scripture? Or do the words of our worship songs serve the music? Can we say that we, the worshipers love the words more than the melodies? How can we tell? ....

Bonhoeffer’s point is simple: When the words serve the music, we gratify self. When the music serves the words, we glorify God. In a culture that consumes music on an unprecedented scale, the church faces an uphill battle to maintain the high ground that the music must serve the words. Ten years ago, contemporary worship songs were plagued with the “I-Me-My-Mines”, every line filled with the knowledge of man. We have come some distance since then, praise God, with a shift back toward lyrics that extol the character of God. But we have further still to go.

If I supplied you with a copy of the lyrics to the 6500 hymns of Charles Wesley, two things would happen to you as you read it. First, you would be deeply moved by the truths the lyrics contained, whether you knew the melodies associated with them or not. Second, you would know your Bible better. Could the same be said if you read through the lyrics of our modern worship offerings?

Wesley composed his hymns during a time in church history when the music served the words, or more precisely, the Word. We live in a time when music, church or otherwise, serves our personal taste, and where lyrics are often an afterthought. Combine this with rampant Bible illiteracy, and we find congregational...shows so glutted on the wealth in their melodies that they ignore the poverty in their lyrics. A worship song is “anointed” if it moves us deeply, whether the words communicate anything coherent or not. Don’t make me give you a sloppy wet example.

What Bonhoeffer and Wesley would say to us is that church music must do more than move the emotions: it must feed the understanding. In doing so, it accomplishes its purpose of preparing our hearts and minds for the pinnacle of the worship service, the proclamation of the Word. We wrongly believe that the worship set should fill our hearts and the sermon should fill our heads. Corporate worship should enliven both heart and head, preparing us for a sermon which does both as well.

So, to my fellow worshipers, let’s consider together whether our adoration is given to music or through music. And to those worship leaders composing church music today, God bless you — you endure enormous pressure to create “worship experiences”. Consider Bonhoeffer’s message: whether your gifting runs toward hymnody or poetry, write lyrics that teach so much truth they can stand on their own. And then set them to music that magnifies their beauty. .... [more]

On Whales and Worship Lyrics – TGC Worship

Thrillers

D.G. Myers, writing about thrillers, explains their appeal to readers:

A powerful work of fiction transports you into a different life, a different place and time, instilling in you the absolute conviction that what you are reading about, what you feel in the hairs on your skin, is real and is happening to real people.

A Commonplace Blog: Two thrillers

What is the chief end of man?

Bethany Blankley responds to a symposium about how to pass on the faith with "Learning Theology through Catechism, Imagination, and Song":

.... The first question of the Westminster Catechism runs through my mind often: What is the chief end of man? The answer: To glorify God and enjoy him forever. God should be at the center of my universe at all times. This truth, that I learned as a child, has stuck with me throughout my life—no matter what circumstances I have endured, I had the foundation, the knowledge, the conviction, that God was with me, he loved me, and that he created me for a purpose: to glorify him and enjoy him forever.

The catechisms formed a foundation, a structure, for me to formulate my beliefs and calm my soul. But the reading of literature reinforced what I knew by awakening my imagination to learn about character and virtues to which I could aspire.

Children can learn much from literature. As a child I learned who God was through the eyes of Christian as he battled various temptations in Pilgrim's Progress, and through the eyes of Princess Irene who held fast to her grandmother's admonition during difficult times in George MacDonald's masterpiece, The Princess and the Goblin, and through the eyes of Lucy, who walked side by side with Aslan, as he comforted her during her adventures in Narnia. My imagination and spirit were enlivened by these characters as I saw how their faith guided their lives throughout difficult and frightening circumstances. I also learned the virtues a child should aspire to have: honesty, hope, trust, faith, perseverance, and selfless love, which brought me much joy. I knew that God was good through the lives of these characters and that I needed to trust him. Many children can relate to the struggles the characters face and can apply lessons of character development to their own lives. .... [more]

Learning Theology through Catechism, Imagination, and Song

Chesterton, the Distributist

I like G.K. Chesterton: in particular his fiction and much of his Christian apologetics. He was also an advocate of an economic regime called "Distributism" that he considered a Christian alternative to both Socialism and Capitalism. It has some attractive elements summarized here by David Deavel:

Last week I outlined the views of distributists, identifying four areas of thought in which they offer some wisdom: 1) objections to the divorce of economics and ethics, 2) objections to the collusion of large business and government and the resultant concentration of power, 3) advocacy for entrepreneurism and widely distributed wealth, and 4) objections to the welfare state and its effects on the citizen’s relationship to government. Sadly, distributist thinkers don’t stop at these solid insights.

Deavel goes on to elaborate the deficiencies of Distributism, and they are serious deficiencies. The headings for the areas he addresses:

• Willful Ignorance of Economics
• Borrowed Infallibility
• A Secret Lust for Big Government, from which:

.... Founding distributist Hilaire Belloc did not propose that all property be taken and redistributed by the state—though he was not in principle opposed to this, which explains his and Chesterton’s defense of the French Revolution; he believed that it was essentially a seizure of property that was returned to the peasants. ....

...[T]he devotion of distributists to freedom is open to question. Belloc and Chesterton were beguiled by Mussolini and his promise of corporatism. ....

...Chesterton gradually woke up to the fact that Mussolini was merely using distributist rhetoric to mask a totalitarian state. Belloc and many of the other distributists were fooled for longer. And no surprise: to repose so much power in a central government to regulate and redistribute wealth and property is a dangerous game. ....

Hudge and Gudge, the names by which Chesterton called big government and big business, are not twins, but perhaps they are brothers. The trick is to keep big business, or any business, from using the coercive power of its big brother, big government, to win, or even survive. ....

• Are You a Price Slave?
• Free Will Distributism in which Deavel explains that Distributism is fine if not politically coerced:

If you agree with distributism’s goals, you should spend your money that way and encourage others to do so. If enough people make those choices, that will help support an ample, thriving sector of independent farms and businesses....

The last thing that people who oppose concentrations of power, and who seek to keep alive the vital freedoms we cherish as Americans, should favor is a government that interferes in every decision we make as workers and consumers. Experience tells us that power does not elevate fallen men; it tends to corrupt them. .... [more]

What’s Wrong with Distributism | Intercollegiate Review