You Know

You know my heart
Have mercy on me

You know my heart
Its need to be free

You know my heart
For You truly see

You know my heart
Its desire to be

You know my heart
Have mercy on me

Redemption

From the hands it came down 
From the side it came down 
From the feet it came down 
And ran to the ground 
Between heaven and hell 
A teardrop fell In the deep crimson dew 
The tree of life grew

And the blood gave life 
To the branches of the tree 
And the blood was the price 
That set the captives free 
And the numbers that came 
Through the fire and the flood Clung to the tree 
And were redeemed by the blood

From the tree streamed a light 
That started the fight 'Round the tree grew a vine 
On whose fruit I could dine 
My old friend Lucifer came 
Fought to keep me in chains 
But I saw through the tricks 
Of six-sixty-six

And the blood gave life 
To the branches of the tree 
And the blood was the price 
That set the captives free 
And the numbers that came 
Through the fire and the flood Clung to the tree 
And were redeemed by the blood

From his hands it came down 
From his side it came down 
From his feet it came down 
And ran to the ground 
And a small inner voice Said "You do have a choice." 
The vine engrafted me 
And I clung to the tree

-Johnny Cash

Rome and America

A loooong article, but informative wrt Rome's decline.  The author misses a clear opportunity to draw parallels between Roman "mos maiorum" and American Judeo-Christian values, but the tie seems obvious to me.

America's current crisis isn't one of politics or economics, but culture.

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/like-rome-america-could-be-ripe-for-tyranny/

Poem by David Solway

A lot happens in that dark place,
the annex to the glittering edifice
where the clients sit
passing the time of day
ordering drinks and trying their luck.
The important work gets done
in that pokey, smoke-filled vault
at the back of the casino
where the real players
chomp on cigars, trade off-color jokes,
shuffle cards, raise the ante,
recount their manifold exploits
in the politics of the underworld,
listening to a blaring radio
while casting an attentive eye on the rigged slots
rolling their fruit on the TV monitors.
Of course, fortunate dupes of the turbulent underlords,
we’re not aware of what goes on
in the room at the back of our innocence,
dingy and apsidal,
home to the clergy of unshaven misfits
where the progress of the game is determined,
where the deck we’re issued is already marked
and where the music and the poetry come from.
There is no reason to complain,
no reason to cleanse the chamber
and expose the racket.
If we only continue playing,
no way we can lose.

- David Solway

Pride

Pride has good and bad connotations, but this is the best positive definition I've heard of it:

“Pride is faith in the idea that God had when God made us.”

- Karen Blixen

Reagan on Healthcare

Good article which challenges some of the mythology of both the Right and Left wrt to Reagan, and sketches out aspects of an approach to health care reform that doesn't fit neatly within the talking points of either party.

https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2017/07/learning-from-reagan-on-healthcare

Life

The point is not that all such situations end this positively, but that we should always err on the side of life and hope.

https://aleteia.org/2017/02/19/little-boy-born-without-a-brain-can-now-speak-count-and-attend-school/

Legalization

I'm ambivalent about legalization: parents need to raise their kids to not choose drugs. But the demographic analysis of policing in the accompanying bill will lead to more crime.  It's been demonstrated that pouncing on smaller crimes like vandalism and littering discourages bigger crimes - it's called community policing.  But if you have an ethnic gang dominating a neighborhood, well...tough luck for that community. If the police are going to be hit with claims of profiling, they will just make fewer arrests of the 'wrong kind', or possibly begin arbitrarily stopping the 'right' colored people to make sure their numbers balance out. These perverse incentives will lead to upwardly mobile flight from the city center and turn Portland 2020 into NYC 1970.

http://herb.co/2017/07/11/oregon-decriminalize-drugs/

X-Rays are there even if I cant see them

The True, the Good, and the Beautiful are objective realities but my comprehension of them are subject to the limits of my senses, perception, and intellect.

Crunchy Conservatism

Reposting something from Rod Dreher that helped crystallize several strains of thought for me about 10 years ago.

A Crunchy Con Manifesto
By Rod Dreher

We are conservatives who stand outside the conservative mainstream; therefore, we can see things that matter more clearly.

Modern conservatism has become too focused on money, power, and the accumulation of stuff, and insufficiently concerned with the content of our individual and social character.

Big business deserves as much skepticism as big government.

Culture is more important than politics and economics.

A conservatism that does not practice restraint, humility, and good stewardship—especially of the natural world—is not fundamentally conservative.

Small, Local, Old, and Particular are almost always better than Big, Global, New, and Abstract.Beauty is more important than efficiency.

The relentlessness of media-driven pop culture deadens our senses to authentic truth, beauty, and wisdom.

We share Russell Kirk’s conviction that “the institution most essential to conserve is the family.“

Politics and economics won’t save us; if our culture is to be saved at all, it will be by faithfully living by the Permanent Things, conserving these ancient moral truths in the choices we make in our everyday lives.

(Super)naturally

"... only Supernaturalists really see Nature. You must go a little way away from her, and then turn round, and look back. Then at last the true landscape will become visible. You must have tasted, however briefly, the pure water from beyond the world before you can be distinctly conscious of the hot, salty tang of Nature’s current. To treat her as God, or as Everything, is to lose the whole pith and pleasure of her. Come out, look back, and then you will see ... this astonishing cataract of bears, babies, and bananas: this immoderate deluge of atoms, orchids, oranges, cancers, canaries, fleas, gases, tornadoes and toads. How could you ever have thought that this was the ultimate reality? How could you ever have thought that it was merely a stage-set for the moral drama of men and women? She is herself. Offer her neither worship nor contempt. Meet her and know her. If we are immortal, and if she is doomed (as the scientists tell us) to run down and die, we shall miss this half-shy and half-flamboyant creature, this ogress, this hoyden, this incorrigible fairy, this dumb witch. But the theologians tell us that she, like ourselves, is to be redeemed. The ‘vanity’ to which she was subjected was her disease, not her essence. She will be cured in character: not tamed (Heaven forbid) nor sterilised. We shall still be able to recognise our old enemy, friend, playfellow and foster-mother, so perfected as to be not less, but more, herself. And that will be a merry meeting."

-CS Lewis

Uncles

The drive back from Twain Harte was difficult.  The reality of Uncle Dick's passing, even though it's been over a month ago, was heavy on, and deeply unsettling to, my heart. 

When I got home last night I wrote down the following words and felt much lighter even amidst tears.

Uncles

I hope you know how much you've meant
the gratitude I have for time spent

talking together, or just hanging out
showing me what manhood was about

And now one's gone and one remains
And I know it won't be the same

Even though we were together less than apart
you both occupy so much of my heart

For since I was a little boy
you've been a comfort; a source of joy

And while it could perhaps be worse
you must forgive my uneven verse

It's just my strange way of confessing
the admiration I wasn't always expressing

And so with this thought, I will close
and hope it's not too 'on the nose'

I give thanks for each to God above
for your displays of fatherly love

Wonder

"...we all like astonishing tales because they touch the nerve of the ancient instinct of astonishment. This is proved by the fact that when we are very young children we do not need fairy tales: We only need tales. Mere life is interesting enough . . . . These tales say that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green. They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water."

G.K. Chesterton

Religion vs. Relationship

"Religion is not the place where the problem of man's egotism is automatically solved. Rather, it is there that the ultimate battle between human pride and God's grace takes place. Human pride may win the battle, and then religion can and does become one more instrument of human sin. But if there the self does meet God and His grace, and so surrenders to something beyond its self-interest, then Christian faith can prove to be the needed and rare release from human self-concern."

Langdon Brown Gilkey

Sad

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/448385/americans-left-right-liberal-conservative-democrats-republicans-blue-red-states-cultural-segregate

Frightening

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/06/bernie-sanders-chris-van-hollen-russell-vought/529614/

Michael Crichton on Scientism

Reposting a quote shared by my friend, Matt:
 

“The ultimate lesson is that science isn’t special – at least not anymore. Maybe back when Einstein talked to Niels Bohr, and there were only a few dozen important workers in every field. But there are now three million researchers in America. It’s no longer a calling, it’s a career. Science is as corruptible a human activity as any other. Its practitioners aren’t saints, they’re human beings, and they do what human beings do – lie, cheat, steal from one another, sue, hide data, fake data, overstate their own importance and denigrate opposing views unfairly. That’s human nature. It isn’t going to change”

― Michael Crichton, Next

At what cost order?

Our collective refusal to acknowledge the need for the governance and control of the flow of individuals across borders will lead, inexorably, to the governance and control of the flow of thoughts and words between individuals.

The Centrality of the Gospel

My Tim Keller kick continues....

http://pca.st/lALS

Motivation

Sometimes I like to sum up my "good" deeds and view them as the cause of my blessings.  This is folly. Even my best actions are marked with a tinge of selfishness.  If it's good, it's grace, and my motivation to do good should be gratitude towards Him, not pride.