"Lord of the Rings" and "Narnia"

Tolkien acknowledged that The Lord of the Rings would not have been completed without C.S. Lewis's encouragement. Lewis loved LOTR and published favorable reviews to promote it. But Tolkien disliked Lewis's Narnia books intensely. From "The Birth of Narnia and Why Tolkien Hated It":

Tolkien hated [The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe]. His criticism went beyond evaluation and suggestion to the level of insult. The idea of mixing Father Christmas with fauns repelled him, because these two figures come from different traditions separated by time and space. Tolkien was a purist on such matters. The Norsemen would never have included Father Christmas or fauns in their stories. When he heard that Lewis had shown the story to [Roger Lancelyn] Green, Tolkien turned on Green with vehemence and declared: “It really won’t do, you know! I mean to say: ‘Nymphs and their Ways, The Love-Life of a Faun’. Doesn’t he know what he’s talking about?” ....

Lewis was writing a fairy story for children who lived in Britain just after World War II. They lived with trains, airplanes, radios, and tourists. They read the tales of King Arthur and Hercules. Their culture had inherited the stories from around the world. Children are not professors of Anglo-Saxon. As much as Tolkien talked about the boundary between our world and the world of faerie, he did not write stories that involved crossing that boundary, but Lewis did. Tolkien worked hard at imitating a style of elevated language and duplicating a form of storytelling that predated the Norman invasion of 1066. As monumental an achievement as The Lord of the Rings may be, it is not a fairy story. By contrast, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is a fairy story for children in 1950 who inherited the global collection of stories of the fading British Empire. For them, Santa Claus, or Father Christmas, was the magical figure who remained in the modern world and helped form a bridge to the world of imagination. .... (more)

Excerpted from a passage in The Completion of C.S. Lewis: From War to Joy (1945–1963) by Harry Lee Poe

Harry Lee Poe, "The Birth of Narnia and Why Tolkien Hated It," Crossway, Oct. 13, 2022.

Providing an educational edge

Bryan Garner offers "A Dozen Ways to Boost a Child’s Education: Part 1":

.... Like almost all other parents, I was committed to doing what I could to give my children an educational edge. My approach was anything but desultory: I researched child development and tried purposefully to apply what I’d learned. The following pointers (six this time, six more next) result from both what I discovered through research and my own innovations.

• From the day they’re born, speak maturely to them. The literature advising against baby talk is voluminous. Whether or not baby talk really stultifies, my approach was to talk to my children tenderly but professorially from the day they came home from the hospital. On the first day, I explained all that I could about the family they’d been born into and gave them a tour of the house. .... I don’t for a moment think they were absorbing my words. But they were hearing the language used decently enough, in complete sentences, with fully elaborated thoughts.
• 
  Read nursery rhymes — with great repetition. Does it really work? Here’s what Drs. Sally and Jonathan Shaywitz say in the 2020 edition of their book Overcoming Dyslexia: “Children’s familiarity with nursery rhymes turns out to be a strong predictor of their later success in reading. In England, researchers asked three-and four-year-olds, ‘Can you say “Humpty Dumpty” for me?’ Regardless of intelligence or family circumstances, the children who were most familiar with nursery rhymes were also top readers three years later. Conversely, children who demonstrate reading difficulties may show early signs of insensitivity to rhyme.”
• Own plenty of books, for both children and adults. Reading specialists have adopted the initialism HLE to denote “home literacy environment,” which measures parental involvement in reading with the child and the quality of parent–child interactions. In one category of HLE, “book exposure,” homes are evaluated according to how many books are there. In some studies, the lowest score is given to households with 30 or fewer, and the highest to households with more than 200. Study after study has emphasized the importance of book exposure. With books around, you create opportunities to read. And you accustom children to the old-fashioned type of reading — with a codex in hand. .... (more)

Bryan Garner, "A Dozen Ways to Boost a Child’s Education: Part 1," National Review, Oct 13, 2022.

We've always done it that way

From Jonah Goldberg's newsletter at The Dispatch, "Hold Your Horses":

In the early days of World War II, Britain struggled to get on a war footing. It had to scrounge old equipment—and the old men who remembered how to use it. They de-mothballed some light field artillery that dated all the way back to the Boer War, fought at the turn of the 20^th century. It required a five-man crew, and they found some old vets who remembered the routine. Three seconds before firing the thing, two of the men would move to the side and snap to attention until all was silent again. But no one could remember why they did that. It seemed like useless movement and detail. They finally brought in an old artillery colonel. He watched the exercise for a bit, and then suddenly the memory came to him. “I have it. They are holding the horses.”

Until that moment, it didn’t occur to anyone because the artillery had been towed out by truck. But back in the old days, you had to hold your horses lest they get scared away by the boom. ....

I first read about this story in one of my all-time favorite books, Robert Nisbet’s Prejudices: A Philosophical Dictionary .... “Persistence, fixity, and the clutching gratefully for habit and convention lie in all areas of thought and action,” Nisbet wrote. ....

“Habit and convention are so native to human beings, as to every other organism,” Robert Nisbet writes, “because all behavior is purposive and adaptive. It is aimed at the solution of problems which beset the person or organization from the environment or from within.” If something works for you, particularly if it keeps you alive, you get attached to it. For a long time in human history, “we’ve always done it this way” was a pithy encapsulation of a survival strategy. This is because an enormous number of traditions and customs were discovered to “work”—or work, without scare quotes—before anybody had a rational explanation for why they worked. Kashrut (Kosherism) is about more than safe eating practices, but the fact that if you stuck to the rules you had a better chance of avoiding bowel-stewing diseases probably helped it take root.

Societies bound together by strong religious commitments survived better than ones that didn’t, all other things being equal. But that rational explanation for religion’s durability—one of many—doesn’t capture the full meaning or importance of religion. ....

...I think one of the reasons our culture is so unsettled these days is that too many people think that offering some superficially plausible explanation for why this or that tradition, custom, or phrase needs to go is enough cause to tear it down. ....

I’ve written about cultural path dependence many times and in many ways. One of my favorite examples is traffic lights. Making “red” mean stop wasn’t an arbitrary decision like railroad gauge widths. But even if it was, and even if you could convince me that we should have made “green” mean stop, it would be folly to change things now. Society has a huge interest in the status quo of traffic lights. Switching them would produce chaos and death. Announcing, almost overnight, that men can get pregnant and all that is the cultural equivalent of switching the color of traffic lights. And when you declare that anyone clinging to the old understandings is a bigot, you’re inviting a backlash far more harmful than the harms currently suffered by a handful of transgender people.

A little respect and humility for the cultural costs—replacement costs, sunk costs, etc.—of treating society like an Etch A Sketch is not merely prudent and not merely moral, but rational. Sometimes there’s a good reason to hold your horses. (more but probably behind a subscription wall)

Jonah Goldberg, "Hold Your Horses," The Dispatch, Oct. 14, 2022.

The need for roots

Andrew Wilson:

A few years ago I noticed how many of my favourite authors were writing during or immediately after World War II. ....

Their works are...marked by a deep awareness of radical evil, which is hardly surprising given the times in which they lived. It gives their essays an urgency, and their poetry and fiction a cosmic drama that few writers before or since have achieved: think of Big Brother and Room 101, Sauron and Saruman, Lord of the Flies, the White Witch, Animal Farm, and the role of sin and the devil in Graham Greene’s novels.

So it is fascinating how often their responses to radical evil involve an appeal to history. Sometimes this comes as a direct address to the reader, like James Baldwin’s writings on race, Hannah Arendt‘s on revolution, Leszek Kołakowski’s on communism, Isaiah Berlin’s on liberalism, or Dorothy Sayers’s Creed or Chaos. T.S. Eliot and W.H. Auden do it through their numerous references and allusions. Greene and Flannery O’Connor draw on their Catholicism. C.S. Lewis makes the point through essays on why we should read old books, and by skewering chronological snobbery at every opportunity, from That Hideous Strength to the fates of Uncle Andrew and King Miraz in the Narnia stories.

J.R.R. Tolkien does it through his medieval language and setting, his complex prehistories, and his plot: remember Sam on the edge of Mount Doom, reminiscing about the Shire and reminding Frodo of the old stories long before totalitarian evil seized the world. Simone Weil’s greatest work is entitled L’Enracinement, usually translated The Need for Roots. Most powerfully of all, George Orwell creates worlds where nobody remembers the past, and where those in power, from the pigs in Animal Farm to the Party in 1984, are free to manipulate it for their own purposes, throwing unwanted recollections down the memory hole. “History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.” All of these writers had witnessed the near-collapse of the West in recent memory, and they knew the dangers of losing their history, and the importance of not allowing it. .... (more)

Not a bad reading list.

Andrew Wilson, "The Need for Roots," Think, Oct. 12, 2022.

"I believe..."

Our congregation once used the Seventh Day Baptist Statement of Belief, along with scripture and hymns appropriate to each affirmation, in our weekly worship service. We also sometimes repeated together the Apostles' Creed. Today I ran across a useful definition of "creed" included in "5 Things You Should Know about Creeds":

The word “creed” comes from the Latin word credo, which simply means “I believe.” The plural form is credimus, which means “we believe.” In short, when we recite a creed, we are simply making a statement concerning what we believe. What this means is that if you believe anything, you have a creed. What if you say, “I believe in no creed but Christ”? Well, then, that’s your creed. It’s a short creed, but it is a creed. When we understand that creeds are human statements of faith, it also helps us better understand the relationship between Scripture and creeds. Holy Scripture is inspired. The Greek word in 2 Timothy 3:16 is theopneustos, which literally means “God-breathed.” Scripture is the inspired Word of God. Creeds are non-inspired words of men. In the Scriptures, we hear God saying, “Thus saith the Lord...” In the creeds, we respond, “We believe you...”

That is the first of the "5 Things." All five:

1. The word “creed” comes from the Latin word credo, which simply means “I believe.”
2. The Bible itself uses creed-like summaries.
3. The Apostles did not write the Apostles’ Creed.
4. The Nicene Creed was written in order to defend the biblical teaching concerning God against heretics.
5. The use of creeds is not a slippery slope to Roman Catholicism.

The Apostle's Creed from "Morning Prayer" in The Book of Common Prayer, 1559:

Keith Mathison, "5 Things You Should Know about Creeds," Oct. 10, 2022.

A daring book for girls

This morning I read about The Daring Book for Girls (2007). About fifteen years ago I bought The Dangerous Book for Boys. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I just noticed that there is a more recent The Double Dangerous Book for Boys (2019).  I thought the book for girls  sounded pretty good, too:

.... While it certainly doesn’t contain everything, this book is packed with enough wisdom and fun to keep a reader busy for hours. Want to build a scooter? They’ve got a template for you. Curious about the rules of softball? That’s covered. Need to know the Latin or Greek root of a word? Look no further. Building a fire, pressing flowers, poetry, camping — there’s something for every type of girl, in every mood, and on every occasion.

While the craft projects were more in line with my early interests, it’s my memory of the biographies scattered throughout the pages that stands out. More than for any activity, I pulled out this book to learn about Boadicea, Florence Baker, Ginnie and Lottie Moon, and many others whose lives are detailed here. Powerful women from ancient civilizations aren’t forgotten, and neither are female Olympians, inventors, and explorers. ....

Among the many topics that are handled wonderfully in this book, however, is the page (and there’s only one, mind you) on boys. Short and clear, this section is a practical guide for dealing with the other sex. The authors finish it with the perfect summary:

Overall, the truth is that there’s no great big mystery about boys. Boys are people. And like all people they are complicated. And that’s what makes being friends with other people interesting: you get to learn about how other people think and act, and, in the process, learn a little bit more about yourself.

Besides the fun, there’s also the practical. CPR basics, the Periodic Table, basic French phrases, reading tide charts, and negotiating a salary are all detailed here. The book avoids dry lists or flowery excitement, giving history, advice, and maybe a story to make the information come alive. .... (more)

There is also The Double Daring Book for Girls (2019). I haven't read reviews of either of the more recent books.

Sarah Schutte, "Marvelous Deeds of Derring-do," NRO, Oct. 9, 2022.

An intellectual polemicist

Patrick Kurp's son, a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps, has been reading G.K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy.

Tradition may be defined as an extension of the franchise. Tradition means giving the vote to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who are walking about.

.... Chesterton is not a systematic thinker; more of an intellectual polemicist. He revels in paradox and writes aphoristically. Like his hero, Dr. Johnson, he is eminently quotable, and Orthodoxy is rich in memorable sentences, like this:

Art is limitation; the essence of every picture is the frame. If you draw a giraffe, you must draw him with a long neck. If in your bold creative way you hold yourself free to draw a giraffe with a short neck, you will really find that you are not free to draw a giraffe.

.... Chesterton is no saint, though some admirers have called for his beatification. His occasional anti-Semitism cannot be pardoned. The late Terry Teachout described it as “the only blot of any significance on the character of the man George Bernard Shaw described as ‘friendly, easy-going, unaffected, gentle, magnanimous, and genuinely democratic.’” ....

Getting back to the centrality of tradition to his thinking, Chesterton writes in Orthodoxy: “It is obvious that tradition is only democracy extended through time. It is trusting to a consensus of common human voices rather than to some isolated or arbitrary record.”

Patrick Kurp, "The Most Obscure of All Classes," Anecdotal Evidence, Oct. 8, 2022.

The Lamb and Flag

A pub in Oxford:

I’ve just bought Tolkien’s pub in Oxford. Well, to be more precise, I and more than 300 fellow drinkers have bought the Lamb and Flag, the 400-year-old Oxford pub where the Inklings group of writers – including J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis – drank.

Like so many pubs across the country, the Lamb and Flag closed, in January last year, thanks to the pandemic trading slump. Across the road, the Eagle and Child pub also closed, in 2020, because of Covid. Tolkien and Lewis drank there, too – they called it ‘the Bird and Baby’. It remains shut.

What rare survival stories these two pubs are – or were. The Eagle and Child, owned by St John’s College, opened in 1650. The Lamb and Flag, also owned by St John’s, opened in 1613....

We reopen our pub at 6 p.m. on Thursday 6 October 2022, which is possibly, or exactly, 111 years to the day that J.R.R. Tolkien arrived in Oxford.

As Tolkienologists will know, the first volume of The Lord of the Rings, The Fellowship of the Ring, opens with Bilbo Baggins’s 111th birthday – or his eleventy-first birthday, as Bilbo put it. ....

The Lamb and Flag will have a renovated snug, celebrating the original Inklings in the spot where they liked to drink. The Georgian front room has been returned to its original dimensions, with an ugly 30-year-old bar removed. Events will be held in this room for the public, including talks by scientists, politicians and Oxford dons, and book launches.

It’s easy to mythologise pubs and never go near one. I certainly don’t drink in pubs nearly as much as I did at university, because it’s so much more expensive now. And some pubs aren’t really very nice, with unbearably loud music and other unwelcome additions. Tolkien and Lewis moved their pint glasses from the Eagle and Child to the Lamb and Flag when the landlady installed a dartboard – you can imagine their reaction to today’s modernising horrors.

But a good pub – particularly a really old one with these unique literary connections – is irreplaceable. Thank God the Lamb and Flag hasn’t been replaced. (more)

Harry Mount, "Fellowship of the Lamb: how we’re saving Tolkien’s pub," The Spectator, Oct. 8, 2022.

Trinity

I came across the illustration below on the right this morning and consequently went looking for posts here about the Trinity. From among those I found I select two:

 

In 2002 Fred Sanders was interviewed by Biola Connections about the doctrine of the Trinity.

Q. What are common analogies people use to explain the Trinity that are misleading?

A. Almost all analogies for the Trinity end up being misleading. Usually they each have one point of helpfulness and that’s it. Legend has it that when Saint Patrick was explaining the Christian faith to the barbarians of Ireland and got to the part about the Trinity, they said, ‘How can that possibly be true?’ And he picked up a shamrock and converted the whole nation of Ireland. So, it was good enough to get an incredible piece of evangelistic work done. But if you continue thinking about a shamrock, it gets less and less like the Trinity. It would be similar to using the analogy of a pizza that is cut into three pieces (like the three shamrock leaves). God the Father is not a third of God. Each person of the Trinity is fully God.

Another common analogy is water. It can exist in three forms: liquid, ice or steam. The major problem is you can’t have the same piece of water being liquid, solid and gaseous at the same time. But the Bible shows the three Persons of the Godhead existing simultaneously.

Q. What is the simplest way to accurately explain the Trinity?

A. As soon as you use an analogy to explain the Trinity, you introduce complexity. It’s ironic, but the simplest way to explain the Trinity is to tell the story of Jesus Christ. Jesus is sent by the Father to earth where He is empowered by the Holy Spirit. When he ascends to the right hand of the Father, he sends the Holy Spirit to us.

A good analogy can be helpful sometimes, but can’t possibly please God when the word ‘Trinity’ makes us think primarily about ice cubes and shamrocks rather than the incarnation of the Son and the outpouring of the Spirit.

Q. What is a common misconception people have about the Trinity?

A. Probably the most common misconception is the fear that it really doesn’t make sense. That somehow we became Christians and that committed us to believe in certain things and, unfortunately, one of those things is rationally impossible.

But the Trinity is not irrational in any direct sense. I think the main intellectual problem with the Trinity is that it’s so dense. When we say ‘the Trinity,’ we are really saying all the basic elements of the gospel at once. So it’s a very dense formula, sort of like e=mc2 is difficult to understand — not because it’s logically contradictory, but because there’s so much information packed into it.

The Trinity would be irrational if it were self-contradictory — for example, if it said that there are three persons in God and yet only one person. Or if it said that God is one being and God is three beings. But for God to be one Being who is three Persons in no way contradicts the laws of logic. Now, it may be beyond our understanding in some way because we don’t know of any other being like that. It’s a mystery, but a mystery is not an excuse to stop thinking. A mystery is something that is bigger than our minds can take in and invites us to a lifetime of intellectual wrestling.

And also this:

The term "Trinity" doesn't appear in the Scriptures but Kenneth Samples contends that there is certainly a Biblical basis for the doctrine:

1. There is only one true God (Deuteronomy 6:4; Isaiah 43:10; John 17:3; Galatians 3:20).
2. The Father is called or referred to as God (Psalm 89:26; Ephesians 4:6; Colossians 1:2–3; 2 Peter 1:17).
3. The Son (Jesus Christ) is called or referred to as God (John 1:1; Philippians 2:6; Colossians 2:9; Titus 2:13).
4. The Holy Spirit is called or referred to (or granted the status) as God (Genesis 1:2; John 14:26; Acts 13:2, 4; Romans 8:11).
5. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are distinct persons and can be distinguished from one another (the Father is not the Son; the Father is not the Holy Spirit; and the Son is not the Holy Spirit) (Matthew 28:19; Luke 3:22; John 15:26; 16:13–15; 2 Corinthians 13:14).
6. The three persons (Father or God; and Son or Christ or Lord; and Holy Spirit or Spirit) are frequently listed together in a triadic pattern of unity and equality (Romans 15:16, 30; 1 Corinthians 12:4-6; 2 Corinthians 1:21–22; Galatians 4:6).

The Scriptorium: For Saint Patrick: Two Cheers for Trinity Analogies, The Trinity’s Biblical Basis | Reflections

Dillard

The quotation in the last post reminded me of Annie Dillard. I once owned and read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. I looked online for quotations from her work. Some of what I found:

• 
  I know only enough of God to want to worship him, by any means ready to hand.
• Those of us who read carried around with us like martyrs a secret knowledge, a secret joy, and a secret hope: There is a life worth living where history is still taking place; there are ideas worth dying for, and circumstances where courage is still prized.
• I cannot cause light; the most I can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam.
• As soon as beauty is sought not from religion and love, but for pleasure, it degrades the seeker.
• There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by. A life of good days lived in the senses is not enough. The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less; time is ample and its passage sweet. Who would call a day spent reading a good day? But a life spent reading — that is a good life.
• On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke?
• I've been thinking about seeing. There are lots of things to see, unwrapped gifts and free surprises. The world is fairly studded and strewn with pennies cast broadside from a generous hand. But — and this is the point — who gets excited by a mere penny? If you follow one arrow, if you crouch motionless on a bank to watch a tremulous ripple thrill on the water and are rewarded by the sight of a muskrat kit paddling from its den, will you count that sight a chip of copper only, and go your rueful way? It is dire poverty indeed when a man is so malnourished and fatigued that he won't stoop to pick up a penny. But if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days. It is that simple. What you see is what you get.

Worshiping

Chesterton wrote that “If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.” I came across this on Twitter this morning:

Annie Dillard on worshiping in her small Northwest town with awkward preaching, embarrassing singing, and experiencing the presence of Christ. Good reminder for today:

A high school stage play is more polished than this service we have been rehearsing since the year one. In two thousand years, we have not worked out the kinks. We positively glorify them. Week after week we witness the same miracle: that God is so mighty he can stifle his own laughter. Week after week, we witness the same miracle: that God, for reasons unfathomable, refrains from blowing our dancing bear act to smithereens. Week after week Christ washes the disciples' dirty feet, handles their very toes, and repeats, It is all right—believe it or not—to be people. Who can believe it?

That is not to say that we shouldn't really try to do it well

Loyalty

Peter Meilaender recalls a story I remember and then reflects on the meaning of loyalty:

.... Based on a true story, Greyfriars Bobby tells of a Skye terrier, Bobby, whose master, a poor shepherd named Auld Jock, was released from work and went to the city of Edinburgh, where he quickly fell ill and died. The grieving Bobby then snuck into Greyfriars Kirkyard, where Auld Jock was buried, to watch over the grave. Despite one challenge after another—attempts to reclaim him by his actual owner, the farmer for whom Auld Jock had worked; repeated efforts to expel him from the kirkyard, where no dogs are allowed; a mean-spirited plan to seize him for not having a proper license; and even getting locked inside the grounds of Edinburgh Castle one night, high above the city on Castle Rock—the faithful Bobby returns night after night.

The handsome and good-tempered terrier is happy enough to play with the poor children of the city’s tenements, whose hearts he quickly wins, and to be fed by the kind and sagacious innkeeper, Mr. Traill. But Bobby is unwilling to sleep anywhere but on Auld Jock’s grave. Eventually his loyalty is rewarded when the city’s Lord Provost gives him a license, a collar, and the run of the city, and Lady Burdett-Coutts erects a statue in his honor across from Greyfriars. ....

Loyalty is, by and large, a good thing, but we do not always admire it. One can be loyal to wicked people or false gods, can wrong one person out of loyalty to another, can fail to see when loyalty is leading one astray. In order to admire acts of loyalty, we want them to be combined with a certain kind of good judgment. Indeed, this might make it even more puzzling that we would admire the loyalty of a dog, which is incapable of such judgment. .... The dog’s loyalty really is blind. ....

If we sense that a pure and unreserved loyalty seems to belong to another and better world, so too do we sense that only those capable of loyalty will ever attain to that world. Committing one’s self in love and fidelity involves a risk, a risk of getting things wrong. But without that commitment, Bobby’s perfect loyalty, for which we long, remains out of reach. ....

When in Edinburgh I visited that graveyard and the statue.

Peter C. Meilaender, "Man’s Best Friend: Lessons in Loyalty from Greyfriars Bobby," The Dispatch, Oct. 1, 2022.

"Two to three cups of coffee a day"

I really like studies that affirm the health value of one of my habits. CNN:

“The results suggest that mild to moderate intake of ground, instant and decaffeinated coffee should be considered part of a healthy lifestyle,” said study author Peter Kistler, head of clinical electrophysiology research at the Baker Heart and Diabetes Institute and head of electrophysiology at Alfred Hospital in Melbourne.

Researchers found “significant reductions” in the risk for coronary heart disease, congestive heart failure and stroke for all three types of coffee. However, only ground and instant coffee with caffeine reduced the risk for an irregular heartbeat called arrhythmia. Decaffeinated coffee did not lower that risk, according to the study published Wednesday in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology. ....

Drinking two to three cups of coffee a day was linked to the largest reduction in early death, compared to people who drank no coffee, according to the statement. Ground coffee consumption lowered the risk of death by 27%, followed by 14% for decaffeinated, and 11% for instant caffeinated coffee. ....

"Coffee lowers risk of heart problems and early death, study says, especially ground and caffeinated," CNN, Sept. 29, 2022.

"Count your blessings"

I have thus far had a comfortable life. An important reminder:

“Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?” (Matt 6:27).

What is accomplished by worrying? Gray hair and ulcers! Oh, and telling God you don’t trust him.

What should we do instead of worry? “Seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well” (Matt 6:33). How do we do that? By doing everything he’s taught before this — shine your light so that God is glorified, practice real righteousness, love your enemy, and do your acts of piety for God’s approval rather than man’s. Do these things and trust God to take care of the more mundane things.

That’s what Jesus wants us to do, but will that necessarily keep us from worrying? No, worry will still be a temptation. So what do we do when we’re tempted to worry? Paul gives us an excellent action plan:

“Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God” (Phil 4:6).

Take your requests to God "with thanksgiving." That last part is the key. Don’t just pray for what you need but take the time to thank God for all the ways he’s already provided, for all he’s already done. ....

"Don't Worry, Be Thankful," Homeward Bound, Sept 28, 2022.

Ritual

From Thomas Howard:

Any criticism of ritual arrives not from a non-ritualist (there are none) but only from another sort of ritual. That is, I may say that such and such a ritual looks childish to me (I find it hard, for example, to see the costumes and liturgies of secret societies as serious). But two things need to be said here. In the first place, it is not the idea of ritual itself that I am criticizing, in that I myself can't walk ten steps without doing something ritually (again, standing aside for a lady, waving to a friend, lowering my voice in a museum). And in the second place, I would have to admit that the ritual that I see as silly probably proceeds very logically from the special set of ideas held by the people in that circle (in the secret society, say), so that their bibs and tassels and most reverend titles make perfect sense given their set of categories. If, then, I want to expose them as silly, I will have to show not that their ritual is silly but that their prior ideas are silly.

Thomas Howard, An Antique Drum, Harold Shaw Publishers, 1969.

Hymns that teach

Jonathan Aigner is a parent and considers "What Do I Want My Kids to Sing":

...I find that I cannot escape considering what I would want my own children singing. Which hymns do I want entrenched in their earliest memories of singing in church? Which hymns do I want them to encounter with enough repetition that they become part of their spiritual formation? Which hymns do I want them to take with them in the coming seasons of their life? Time is short. ....

Here’s what I came up with. [at the post, he elaborates and gives examples]

Hymns of Praise That Speak to God’s Character

It should be obvious, but good hymns testify to the transcendent character of Almighty God as revealed in Scripture, and call the church to join in his praise. An overarching theme of worship is that God is God, and we are not. Great hymns remind us of this, and set our minds on God’s greatness. ....

Hymns That Proclaim the Gospel

I want them to sing hymns that talk about the love of Christ as shown through his redemptive work. Christ crucified for sinners is the greatest theme the human voice could possibly sing. ....

Hymns That Draw from Holy Scripture

Great hymns don’t apologize or cloud the truth of Holy Scripture, nor do they seek to make it more palatable to modern ears. Some of the greatest hymns are simply Scripture in poetic form. Take the wonderful hymns of Isaac Watts, for instance. ....

Hymns That Teach Good Theology

The hymnal is many things. One of those things is a theological textbook. (I think I said this in a post a long time ago…) Choose hymns that teach the truths of the Christian faith strongly and beautifully.

Hymns With a Low Anthropology

Again, God is God, and we are not. There is a tendency in modern hymn-writing to make too much out of human ability, insight, and will.... This is, in part, a high anthropology; it is the notion that, if all external factors are removed, humans can choose to be good and well-behaved, and can turn the world into a nice place. I want to sing hymns that, instead, follow the biblical and orthodox understanding of humanity as fallen, helpless to save themselves, and fully in need of God’s grace. ....

Hymns That Faithfully Portray the Church’s Mission ....

Hymns That Are Beautiful

There are a number of hymns that have some good things to say, but the poetry is so awful it gets in the way. ....

There are many examples of these kinds of hymns. Some are rich theological treasures. Others more simple and stark. Again, the main concern should be whether the hymn is really worth singing, knowing, and committing to memory. Is it true? Does it edify? Does it have enough meat on it to sustain us? Does it give us a realistic view of God, his kingdom, Christ’s work on our behalf, and humanity? If the answer to these is “no,” then perhaps it won’t do us any good at all, and maybe we should choose something else.  (more)

Jonathan Aigner, "What Do I Want My Kids to Sing: How I Choose Hymns," Ponder Anew, Sept. 28, 2022.

Eulogy

I have always assumed that the eulogy is an important part of a funeral service. Eulogies were in both my parents' services. But Jonathan Aigner doesn't like them and I think he makes a good argument:

Eulogies are a recent phenomenon, particularly in liturgical churches. The fact that they’ve come to be expected is due to our individualistic and increasingly de-churched, de-Christianized society. When people don’t have hope in Christ, or don’t understand that the funeral is about his victory over death, the occasions often become “celebrations of life.” You can’t have a celebration of life without a eulogy. ....

Any decent funeral liturgy is not about a celebration of life. At least, not a celebration of the deceased’s life. The point of the whole thing is to witness to the resurrection of Christ, and the victory that Christ has won for us, and the fact that, for those in Christ, death doesn’t get the final word.

I hope and pray that, for my family and loved ones, the promise of resurrection is the most comforting thing for them to hear. If it isn’t, I still want them to hear it, so that they might believe it for themselves. I want them to hear about Christ’s victory over death, not about how much I loved baseball or told dumb jokes or earned a weird combination of degrees.

If they want to sit around and tell stories and reminisce, so be it, but do it at lunch. Remembering the good times will not defeat death. Only Jesus can do that. His life ended in a death which ended with a resurrection. That is the life worth celebrating. His is the life worth eulogizing.

Jonathan Aigner, "Let’s Make Eulogies a Thing of the Past," Ponder Anew, Sept. 27, 2022.

"Rings of Power" so far

I've been enjoying Rings of Power so far. It isn't compelling enough for me to consider re-watching—at least not yet—but compared to much that is available, it's not bad and could get better. I agreed with much of this review at The Spectator:

Why is Amazon’s new Lord of the Rings show taking so much flak? The way I see it, there are two (mostly separate) factors at play: Tolkien fandom and race. ....

This, in my mind, is a travesty, because it’s causing people to miss out on what’s actually a pretty good show so far. Plenty of Tolkien fans have avoided the series altogether, while others have chosen to hatewatch it. And when you watch something with the sole intention of finding things to hate, you’re usually successful. ....

The show is also just nice to watch. There’s beauty and joy to it. After so many years immersed in Game of Thrones (and now House of the Dragon), it’s nice to be reminded that there’s more to life than killing, screwing, and scheming. In one Rings of Power episode, the Harfoot maid leads some younguns out to a clearing full of berry bushes, and they all have a good frolic. I’d forgotten how much I love watching a good frolic. The closest Game of Thrones can get to a frolic is an orgy. .... (more)

Grayson Quay, "The Rings of Power is more than just blue-haired trans elves," The Spectator, Sept. 23, 2022.

A stiff upper lip

From Theodore Dalrymple, "In defence of repression":

.... People can undoubtedly go to pieces under the effect of suffering: and what each person can bear depends upon many factors, both personal and impersonal. For example, if someone is capable of investing suffering with meaning – religious, political or philosophical – whatever has caused it is easier to bear. Meaningless trauma is much harder to overcome. ....

The very claim that there are means to ‘deal with’ or obtain ‘closure on’ the inevitable tragedies of human existence leads, if it becomes widely believed, to the fragilization of the human psyche, especially where there are rewards for fragility. ....

A psychologically fragile population is the delight of bureaucrats, lawyers and professional carers, and resilience and fortitude are their worst enemies. Repression in the psychological sense is deemed by them not only as damaging but almost as treason to the self. A person who does not dwell on his trauma must expect, and almost deserves, later trouble, as does someone who willfully ignores the formation of an abscess. ....

[But] repression can also mean the deliberate putting memories of trauma to the back of the mind so that life can be got on with. It is not that such memories cannot be called to the conscious mind when necessary, or even that they never do harm: but the person who represses in this fashion has an instinctive understanding that dwelling on them is an obstacle to future life, rather than a precondition of it. They do not forget, either consciously or unconsciously; they choose to think of something else. ....

Psychology seems often to forget or disregard the fact that humans live in a world of meaning, and that they are actors rather than mere objects acted upon. In the process, it destroys resilience, fortitude and self-respect.

Theodore Dalrymple, "In defence of repression," The Spectatorr, Sept. 25, 2022.

Blessed are those who mourn

From an essay by Roger Scruton, "The Work of Mourning":

.... We lose many things in our lives. But some losses are existential losses. They take away some part of what we are. After such a loss we are in a new and unfamiliar world, wherein the support on which we had—perhaps unknowingly—depended is no longer available. The loss of a parent, especially during one’s early years, is a world-changing experience, and orphans are marked for life by this. The loss of a spouse is equally traumatic, as is the loss of children, who take with them into the void all the most tender feelings of their parents.

Nevertheless, however grievous the blow, mourning is a therapy that points toward survival. Through mourning we bury the dead. But we also raise them from the dead, not as living beings, but as purified images, washed clean of their faults and transfigured by our mutual forgiveness. ....

.... We are far more likely to be interested in what the deceased person ­owes to us by way of a legacy than what we owe to him or her in the way of mourning. Of course, we still offer funerals to our dead, though we expect them to budget for this while still alive. And we grieve for them as we must. But it is increasingly rare to raise a monument, or even to lay our dead to rest in a grave that we might subsequently visit. The habit of cremating the dead and then scattering their ashes reflects our post-religious conception of what they become by dying, namely nothing. We briefly snatch at their nothingness and then watch them fade from our empty hands. .... Since the obligation is unreal, its fulfillment becomes a kind of ritualized pretense, an opportunity for displays of kitsch emotion. ....

The Western response to loss is not to remove yourself from the world. It is to bear it as a loss, to mourn it, and to strive to overcome it by seeing it as a form of consecrated suffering. Religion lies at the root of that attitude. Religion enables us to bear our losses not, primarily, because it promises to offset them with some compensating gain, but because it sees them from a transcendental perspective. Judged from that perspective they appear not as meaningless afflictions but as sacrifices. Loss, conceived as sacrifice, becomes consecrated to something higher than itself....

.... The loss of religion makes real loss difficult to bear; hence people begin to flee from loss, to make light of it with Disneyfying ornaments, or to expel from themselves the feelings that make it inevitable. .... This is why, in a society without religion, we see emerging a kind of contagious hardness of heart, an assumption on every side that there is no tragedy, no grief, no mourning, for there is nothing to mourn. There is neither love nor happiness—only fun. The loss of religion, one might suggest, is the loss of loss. .... (more)

Roger Scruton, "The Work of Mourning," First Things, Oct., 1022.