Amusing Ourselves to Death, Chapter 2

Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman

Chapter 2: Media as Epistemology

"And so I raise no objection to television's junk.  The best things on television are its junk, and no one and nothing is seriously threatened by it.  Besides, we do not measure a culture by its output of undisguised trivialities but by what it claims as significant.  There in is our problem, for television is at its most trivial and, therefore, most dangerous when its aspirations are high.... The irony here is that this is what intellectuals and critics are constantly urging television to do."

Oh, so guilty here.  How often do I feel more enlightened by my viewing choices.  We do better to chose to watch television to be entertained than we do to be educated.  He'll go on to develop this idea much more later.

"...the concept of truth is intimately linked to the biases of forms of expression.  Truth does not, and never has, come unadorned.  It must appear in its proper clothing or it is not acknowledged, which is a way of saying that the "truth" is a kind of cultural prejudice.  Each culture conceives of it as being most authentically expressed in certain symbolic forms that another culture may regard as trivial or irrelevant."

 How truth is presented, the mode of presentation, must be considered and examined.  Not only that, we must recognize the prejudice we bring from our own culture and era.  It makes recognizing the "adornment" of truth in our culture by television more clear.

". . .the equation we moderns make of truth and quantification.  In this prejudice, we come astonishingly close to the mystical beliefs of Pythagoras and his followers who attempted to submit all of life to the sovereignty of numbers."


Think about how often our society determines value or worth based on usefulness or productivity.  It is why the arts are becoming rare in public schools - a beautiful picture or lovely song has no quantifiable benefit to education.  Unless of course they can be used for fund-raising.  Sadly, I've seen this happen even in private schools - those committed to excellent and broad education.  Theatre productions, art shows, musical concerts are put on for the purpose of raising money.  While raising money from a show or concert is not a bad thing, if it is the main purpose than that will affect the end product by dictating what is produced for the public...it will be based on what will "sell".  And thus we have placed productivity over creativity.  

Amusing Ourselves to Death - my notes

Dorothy discovers "the Great and Powerful Oz"

Way back in high school (I'll confess my age by telling you that I graduated in 1988) I read Animal Farm and loved reading it and discussing it in and out of class.

A few years ago I picked up Brave New World by Huxley.  While Animal Farm was a clarifying look at totalitarianism, Brave New World is a prophetic look at our own world of "Freedom from"  rather than "freedom to": freedom from religion, freedom from responsibility, freedom from truth, for example.  I was totally transfixed.  Someone had pulled back the curtain to show the man behind the "Great and Powerful Oz".

In conversations with friends more recently I'd been introduced to Neil Postman's ideas, specifically, his comparison of Brave New World and Animal Farm.  With those two worlds percolating in my mind, I decided I ought to read Postman's book Amusing Ourselves to Death.  And so I finally picked up a copy  last year.  It sat on my shelf for some time waiting its turn to be put in my "reading" pile.  It is a very slow moving pile, admittedly.

Well after a few months, I've finally finished it!

Here are my notes from Chapter 1.  Others to follow.



Ch. 1 The Medium is the Metaphor

"...the clock has the effect of disassociating time from human events and thus nourishes the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences.  ... in the fourteenth century, the clock mad us into time-keepers, and then time-savers, and now time-servers.  In the process, we have learned irreverence toward the sun and the seasons, for in a world made up of seconds and minutes, the authority of natures is superseded. ... Eternity ceased to serve as the measure and focus of human events."

This and some comments from Andrew Kern (wish I could remember where he talked about this - maybe if he reads this he can help?) makes me want to read more about this time period.  But more importantly doesn't this idea just floor you?  That something as innocuous as the invention of the clock, something I am quite partial to, could change a culture so drastically.

Having experience with a culture that is not "pre-clock", but not at all a servant of the clock, it is a hard thing to not feel that we clock-lovers are superior.  Surely, it is a virtue to be where you say you will be when you say you will be there, right?  But then you begin to realize that the other culture is far more free.  They are always on time, because "late" doesn't have a real meaning in their culture.  It allows the freedom to stop and take care of the needs of a friend or stranger when you aren't under the pressure to "be on time".

What more might lay ahead for me in this book.  I'm almost afraid to read on.  I'm not sure I want to know.

Book Review: Lost to the West

Many years ago, my husband and I had a wonderful opportunity to travel to Istanbul.  We stayed at a small hotel just off the Hippodrome and with the "Little Hagia Sophia" (Kucuk Aya Sofya) in view.  How I wish I'd had a fuller understanding of the Byzantine Empire before that trip.  

What does the word Byzantine mean to you?  Does it bring to mind the idea of slothful beaurocracy?  Or perhaps tediously upheld tradition?  Perhaps it just means "old-fashioned", hopelessly so.  Reading Lost to the West  I gained a proper perspective on that word and a clearer understanding of the importance of Byzantium on western civilization: why and how the Renaissance came about, the difficult relationship between Eastern and Western churches, and how the Eastern mindset is decidedly different from the Western.

Lars Brownworth's book,  subtitled "The Forgotten Byzantine Empire That Rescued Western Civilization",  left me with better understanding, but also a deeper curiosity about the Byzantines.  I read the entire thing with a pencil in hand, busily scratching down slips of ideas, underlining curiousities, noting items I'd like to research further, and otherwise engaged in active reading.


Here are some of my favorite bits:

p. 14  "Gallons of scholarly ink have been spilled debating whether (Constantine's) conversion was genuine, but such speculation is beside the point.  The genius of Constantine was that he saw Christianity not as the treat that Diocletian did, but rather as a means to unify, and the result of his vision that fateful day . . .  was a great sea change for the empire and the church."


p. 37  "The future was with Christianity, but no on who considered himself Roman could completely reject the classical world.  Unlike their western counterparts, early Byzantine church fathers recognized the benefits of pagan philosophy, arguing that it contained valuable insights and that careful reading would separate the wheat of moral lessons from the chaff of pagan religion."


p. 96  " Given a proper army and a little trust, there was no telling what Belisarius would have been able to do...perhaps the Western Empire itself could be revived....Europe would have been spared the ravages of the Dark Ages, or at least the intensity of their destruction."




p. 115 " In Byzantium, primary education was available for both genders...virtually every level of society was literate. (...) The old western provinces under barbarian rule, by contrast, were quickly sinking into the brutish chaos of the Dark Ages...the struggle to scratch out an existence made it an unaffordable luxury, and it would have disappeared completely without the church."


p. 122 "...in the West...the distinction between sacred and secular power had become hopelessly blurred.  Forced to wear both the crown and the papal tiara, the pope entered the political arena, bringing the church into direct competition with the state. (...) The struggle between the two would become the defining tension of western history, and make the East - where the original roles hadn't broken down - appear impossibly alien."


On the coronation of Charlemagne as Holy Roman Emperor:
p. 153  "The church , Pope Leo was firmly declaring, was a higher authority than the state.  Such statements struck at the very heart of Byzantine authority. (...) At a stroke Leo had created a rival empire that not only dared to claim equality with the ancient line of Caesars, but also declared Constantinople's throne to be full of impostors, mere pretenders to the throne of Augustus. (...) to bolster his position he trotted out what was surely the most shameful forgery of the Middle Ages - the "Donation of Constantine."


p. 220 "Copies of the literature of ancient Greece and Rome became highly valued, and clergy and laymen alike began to dutifully reproduce the dazzling masterpieces.  This was among the finest gifts that the empire bequeathed to posterity.   ...most of the Greek classics that are extant today come down to us through Byzantine copies of the period."


p.278 -9 "After the events of the Fourth Crusade, the already deep divide between East and West stretched into a yawning chasm that was truly irreconcilable.  The crusading spirit, which has started out as a desire to help Christian brothers in the East, was revealed as a horrendous mockery.  In the name of God, they had come with hardened hearts and cruel swords to kill and main, to plunder and destroy - and in the work of a moment they had broken the altars and smashed the icons that generations of the faithful had venerated.  ...  Watching the crusaders walk their charred and blackened streets, the Byzantines knew that these men with the cross sewn brightly over their armor could no longer be considered Christians at all.  Let the powers of Islam come, they thought.  Better to be ruled by an infidel than these heretics who made a mockery of Christ."


p. 271  "As the empire edged toward extinction, a cultural flowering occurred, a brilliant explosion of art, architecture, and science as if the Byzantine world was rushing to express itself before its voice was forever silenced."

p. 302  "The fall of Constantinople may have extinguished the last vestige of the Roman Empire, but the immense light of its learning wasn't snuffed out.  Refugees streamed into western Europe, bringing with them the lost jewels of Greek and Roman civilization.   ...western Europe was reintroduced to its own roots."


p. 303  "The greatest heir of Byzantium, however, is undoubtedly the Orthodox Church."


p. 304 "...without Byzantium the history of the Middle East and Europe is at best incomplete at worst incomprehensible."

Have you read it?  What did you think?

My Hopeful Book List for 2010

A New Year - all shiny and crystalline like zamboni-smoothed ice - just waiting for us to strap on our skates and give it a go. I'm still lacing up my skates and making resolutions. . . how about you? One of my resolutions (the only one I've decided on so far) is to read more, thus my book list for Twenty-Ten.

It is a modest list, but a reasonable one for me, especially considering I have a habit of adding books to my "To Be Read" list like a preschooler picking up shiny pennies. In fact while making this list I added a few!

Books to finish:

Lost to the West

Divine Comedy

Fiction:

The Art of Racing the Rain

Home: A Novel (sequel to Gilead)

Olive Kittridge

Gulliver's Travels

That Hideous Strength

Collected Stories of Dorothy Sayers

Collected Stories of Flannery O'Connor

Non-Fiction:

Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, Paul Theroux

Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans, Dan Baum

Surprised by Hope, NT Wright

Rallying the Really Human Things, Vigen Guroian

Ten Philosophical Mistakes, Mortimer Adler

The Hidden Art of Homemaking, Edith Schaeffer

Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman

On the Incarnation, St. Athansias

Ascending the Heights, Father John Mack

Apostolic Fathers with Justin Martyr and Irenaeus, Phillip Schaff - or at least as much as I'm able to get through

Of course this does not include the read-alouds we read in our homeschool or family reading.

Got any ideas for books to add to my list?

God's grandchild

from Dante's Inferno: Canto 11

"Turn back again, " I asked, "to where you said
that usury offends the Power Divine,
And pray explain to me this knotty point."

"Philosophy," my master answered me,
"To him who understands it, demonstrates
How nature takes her course, not only from
Wisdom divine, but from its art as well.
And if you read with care your book of physics,
After the first few pages, you will find
That art, as best it can, doth follow nature,
As pupil follows master; industry,
Or art is, so to speak, grandchild to God.
From these two sources (if you call to mind
That passage in the Book of Genesis)
Mankind must take its sustenance and progress.

The moneylender takes another course,
Despising nature and her follower,
Because he sets his hope for gain elsewhere."



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Life and Land

I've just finished two books: The Good Earth by Pearl S Buck and Life is a Miracle by Wendell Berry. The former has been sitting on my bookshelves waiting to be read for a couple of years. The latter I purchased on recommendation and instantly started into it. Both were finished, providentially, within days of each other. Both speak to what happens to the soul when one "degrades...the ordinary life" in the desire for "various kinds of stardom", to quote Berry. These two books seem to be almost like two versions of the same message: one prose and the other poem.

You may know The Good Earth is set in pre-revolutionary China. A man, Wang Lung, starts out with nothing and slowly builds his life. He ends with everything, but then realizes he had more that was real when he had nothing. He pleads with his progeny to heed his error. They promise, but they wink behind his back. The revolution can be heard building in the background. That, in a nutshell, is The Good Earth.

From The Good Earth:
"Thus spring wore on again and again and vaguely and more vaguely as these years passed he felt it coming. But still one thing remained to him and it was his love for his land. He had gone away from it and he had set up his house in a town and he was rich. But his roots were in his land. . . . (...) Spring passed and summer passed into harvest and in the hot autumn sun before winter comes Wang Lung sat where his father had sat against one wall. And he thought no more about anything now except his food and his drink and his land. But of his land he thought no more what harvest it would bring or what seed would be planted or of anything except of the land itself, and he stooped sometimes and gathered some of the earth up in his hand and he sat thus and held it in his hand, and it seemed full of life between his fingers. And he was content, holding it thus, and he thought of it fitfully and of his good coffin that was there; and the kind earth waited without haste until he came to it."

Wendell Berry has a lot to say in his book, Life is a Miracle, about Science and Art and Religion and Life. What struck me, especially as I read it in conjunction with The Good Earth, is that there are things in life that are unexplainable and are damaged in the attempt to explain. Rather they must be experienced. To be experienced they must be loved and if loved, protected. And those things that are loved are worthy to be passed on to, and protected for, the next generation. This is the Nature of Life. Our modern life is an example of too many explanations and not enough experiences, and of disordered and inadequate love.

From Life is a Miracle:
"Unlike the culture of the European Middle Ages, which honored the vocations of the learned teacher, the country parson, and the plowman as well as that of the knight, or the culture of Japan in the Edo period which ranked the farmer and the craftsman above the merchant, our own culture places an absolute premium upon various kids of stardom. This degrades and impoverishes ordinary life, ordinary work, ordinary experience...depricates...the work of the primary producers of goods, and the performers of all kinds of essential but unglamorous jobs and duties...results are that most work is now poorly done; great cultural and natural resources are neglected, wasted, or abused; the land and its creatures are destroyed; and the citizenry is poorly taught, poorly governed, and poorly served."

"But if we are to know any part of the planet intimately, particularly, precisely, and with affection, then we must live somewhere in particular for a long time. (...) One of the most significant costs of the economic destruction of farm populations is the loss of local money, local history, and local names."

"This living procession through time in a place is the record by which such knowledge survives and is conveyed. When the procession ends, so does the knowledge"

Or as Wang Lung says, "It is the end of a family - when they begin to sell the land."

Both of these books made me think about a lot, but particularly Place. How a place can shape us as much as we can shape it. How the sense of Place is lost in modern life with fabricated neighborhood and street names.

My family lives in such a fabricated neighborhood. We often go on the search for a home with a sense of Place. But, do we choose a worthy Place to live or can we make the place we live worthy? Can we overcome this cleaned up modern version? Can we find Place in suburbia and nurture it? And if we can, how do we do that?


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The Book Pile: June 2009

On the book pile for June




Life Is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition





Living Faithfully: As A Prayer Book People





The Wanderings of Odysseus: The Story of The Odyssey - Reading this before giving it to my son to read.



Review of May's book pile

Finished in May:



The Abolition of Man
, CS Lewis - comprised of three essays from a series of talks he gave. This is a classic Christian book looking at modern culture from a Chrisitan perspective: ethics, science, the nature of man. This is a book I've had on my "to be read" list for some time, but finally made a point of picking it up when it was listed as a "must-read" on the CiRCE reading list for this year's conference.




The Egg and I
, Betty MacDonald - Quirky people, sweet stories, vivid descriptions from a 1940s chicken ranch in the American Northwest. Ever heard of Ma and Pa Kettle? This is the book where they had their beginning in American pop culture.


Started in May and still reading:


Anglican Spirit Michael Ramsey



The Adventures of Tom Sawyer Mark Twain


Started in May, but gave up on:



The Religious Potential of the Child Sofia Cavaletti
I have another less philosophical book by Cavaletti that I'm going to try later this summer. Some excellent thoughts about children's approach to religion, but sometimes a bit tedious in its romaticism.


What are you reading?

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The Book Pile - April 2009

How delightful a good book list is! When I find one from a like-minded person it is even more wonderful since I know that I will most likely enjoy or find great value in the books suggested. This is important to me since the time I have to read is quite limited. Do you feel the same way?

Well, if you've been reading this blog, we probably are like-minded. Perhaps you'll enjoy some of the books I've read. I'd love to hear what you've read and enjoyed recently...leave a comment, won't you?


Books read in April:
The Giver, Lois Lowry - read this before I turned it over to my 12 year old. Loved it! A futuristic tale of a world where all needs are met except, perhaps, the most important one. You'll have to read to find out what that is!


The Art of Teaching, Gilbert Highet - an enlightening read that encouraged a sense of purpose for my vocation of teaching my children.


Real Food Revival, Sherri Brooks Vinton and Ann Clark Espuelas - a good place to start for those desiring to eat a more sensible and sustainable diet. The authors take you "aisle by aisle" through the grocery-shopping experience to teach you how to make wise food decisions.

The Aboliton of Man, CS Lewis - comprised of three essays from a series of talks he gave. This is a classic Christian book looking at modern culture from a Chrisitan perspective: ethics, science, the nature of man. This is a book I've had on my "to be read" list for some time, but finally made a point of picking it up when it was listed as a "must-read" on the CiRCE reading list for this year's conference.

Books started in April and still being read:
The Egg and I, Betty MacDonald


Books on my "To Be Read" list for May:

The Anglican Spirit, Michael Ramsey

The Religious Potential of the Child, Sofia Cavaletti

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain


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7 Books for Prospective Homeschoolers

Decided to homeschool, but don't know where to start?

Or been homeschooling and need some re-inspiration or redirection?

Read on for some not-to-be-missed books!


My blogger friend, Jessica at Homemaking Through the Church Year, has just made the decision to homeschool, at least for next year. (Her posts on making the homeschool decision are admirable in their prayerful, reasonable decision-making.) She asked for reading suggestions as she prepares for her homeschool year.

When we decided to begin homeschooling our then 7 year old almost 6 years ago, I spent the spring and summer before we began devouring all the books I could find on the subject. I continute to read on the subject here and there, too. Here are some that I've found particularly helpful over the past 6 years:


1. Should I Home School?: How to Decide What's Right for You & Your Childby Elizabeth and Dan Hamilton - I took copious notes from this book. I found it to be a really well-balanced guide to making the decision about homeschool.


2. The Moore's The Successful Homeschool Family Handbook - a really great place to start. Actually, anything by them (Better Late Than Early: A New Approach to Your Child's Education is another good one)! The Moores are pioneers in the homeschool movement. To miss this book is to miss what many consider to be the "soul" of home education!


3. Cathy Duffy's 100 Top Picks For Homeschool Curriculum
- This book is more than just product reviews (which are excellent, by the way). It begins with an excellent section on the various methods of education, personality and learning types, and a fantastic chart detailing what curricula matches which method of education and personality type. That portion is invaluable...and then come the thorough product reviews!


4. How to Homeschool: A Practical Approach- by Gayle Graham is a fantastic resource as you begin to figure out how you'll get it all done. She covers everything from tacking the laundry to tackling spelling! This book may be hard to find, but if you need help juggling home and education, this is a gem worth digging for.


5. Ruth Beechick has a series of books: Home Start in Reading, Strong Start in Language, and Easy Start in Arithmetic. These are for teaching early elementary. She also has another book: You Can Teach Your Child Successfully: Grades 4-8. These are classics from another homeschool pioneer. If you need to educate on a shoe string or keep homeschool simply and effective, these are not to be missed!


6. For the Children's Sake: Foundations of Education for Home and Schoolis particularly good for those interested in following the Charlotte Mason method. But I'd recommend it for anyone contemplating home education! Susan Schaeffer MacCauley (yes, that is Schaeffer as in Francis and Edith Schaeffer) presents a winsome vision for home education.


7. Climbing Parnassus by Tracy Lee Simmons is an highly recommended book for those interested in Classical Education: "...defense and vindication of the formative power of Greek and Latin. His persuasive witness to the unique, now all-but-forgotten advantages of study in and of the classical languages constitutes a bracing reminder of the genuine aims of a truly liberal education."



Learn more about each of these titles, and see other recommended books, at the Ten O'Clock Scholar aStore.

This post is part of the Carnival of Homeschooling.

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Advent Book Suggestions

Need some idea for good books to help you celebrate your Advent season?

Jotham's Journey: A Storybook for Advent

Christ in Christmas: A Family Advent Celebration

Advent Arts and Christmas Crafts: With Prayers and Rituals for Family, School and Church

Advent and Christmas Wisdom From G. K. Chesterton

We Light the Candles: Devotions Related to Family Use of the Advent Wreath

Advent Storybook: 24 Stories to Share Before Christmas


See more at my Amazon Store!

Or Search for yourself:

Commonplace Book - Oct 14th

Commonplace notes from The Real Food Revival

Chapter 1 ("Aisle 1 - The Produce Bins")

Discussing the industrial food industry's high valuation of uniformity in produce:

"But think snowflakes, autumn leaves. They're more similar than they are different, yet it is their differencets that we value. That's the way nature works. Unfortunately, being different is not a feature that industrial agriculture promotes...the resulting loss of diversity weakens the individual farm and dilutes the food supply."

"Genetic diversity is nature's defense mechanism against extinction."

"The varieties of fruits and vegetables grown commercially and available at the MegaMart are a small fraction of the diversity that was cultivated before the age of industrial agriculture."

This chapter has me contemplating the inumerable ways that modern life seems to offer us a myriad of choices, but really has limited the variety and diversity of life. Odd - in a culture and age so focused on individuality, there are really fewer and fewer ways to truly BE an individual. How high a premium does our entire culture put on uniformity?

So high that my Homeowners Association is actually considering dictating the types and colors of flowers that may be planted in the front yard. Never mind that our houses are all nearly identical to begin with!

So high that the only clothes you can buy are those chosen and offered by people who determine for us what we'll like.

So high that education has become nearly an industry in itself - complete with an assembly line of teachers and students. Lord help your child if he or she doesn't fit the assembly line components. He'll either be crammed in or have some piece "lopped off" to make him fit.

Oh...wait. This book is about food. Uh...yeah - back to that.

"No matter where in the United States you live, nine months out of the year most of the fruits and vegetables that you eat come from California.... Beyond the California season, the majority of our fruits and vegetables are imported.... It takes a lot of fuel to transport these out-of-season items to your area MegaMart."

"Perhaps the easiest and most pleasurable way to enjoy delicious, sustainable, seasonal eating is to buy local. Why?...because the net environtmental impact is less...and it will require fewer "freshness" enhancers...."

Of course that all goes for "organic" produce, too. In addition to the fuel issues, because of transport and storage times our food is less nutritious having been picked too early, artificially gassed to ripeness, and then stored in refrigerators. Also, "Organic" has become such a commodity that of course it is becoming industrialized and once that happens it is only a matter of time until "Organic" loses its meaning.

" ' industrial organic' - large operations that swap out toxic chemical inputs for less noxious ones, but still follow industrial practicies that ignore important environmental and social issues."

"It is more important to support a family-owned and -operated farm that honors the land and community but may not be certified organic than it is to purchase certified organic produce from halfway around the world."

"...take advantage of the lower prices that accompany the season' bounty, the freeze, can and dry everything you're able to...."

Next chapter: Aisle 2, The Meat Counter. Be sure to subscribe via email or RSS to receive my blog updates.

There is a balm in Gilead

Back in March, I won a copy of Gilead, a book with which I was totally unfamiliar, from my blogger friend at Two Square Meals. I recieved it just before we left for a get-away weekend, but didn't get a chance to start it that weekend. We were...uh, busy. Heh.

Finally, earlier this summer, I got a chance to pick up this wonderful, beautiful, book. It is written as a memoir of an elderly pastor to his young son (he married very late in life, yet his wife was quite young).


"Your mother told you I was writing your begats, and you seemed very pleased with the idea. Well, then. What should I record for you? I, John Ames, was born in the Year of Our Lord 1880 in the state of Kansas, the son of John Ames and Martha Turner Ames.... At this writing I have lived seventy-six years, seventy-four of them here in Gilead, Iowa.... And what else should I tell you?"


From there the author, Marilynne Robinson, weaves a tale that stretches through the Civil War, the Great Depression, and World War I and II - and yet, barely leaves the small, dusty town of Gilead where Ames' grows up the son of a pastor and becomes a pastor himself.


What shine throughout this book are John Ames' relationships with his brother, grandfather, son, wife, friend and fellow pastor, Boughton, and his namesake and Boughton's prodigal son. The centerpiece of the story is this prodigal son's return to his hometown of Gilead. John Ames must find the grace to forgive the person that has perhaps caused him the most pain by hurting those he loves. This forgiveness is personally costly to Ames, but certainly an amazing example of Christian grace and love. Marilynne Robinson's ability to express this in the simplest (and yet most profound) passages makes this book such a joy to read. I felt uplifted even in the saddest moments of the story.


Let me share some of my favorite quotes...


"To his mind, all those people in all those churches are the scribes and the Pharisees. He seems to me to be a bit of a scribe himself, scorning and rebuking the way he does. How do you tell a scribe from a prophet, which is what he clearly takes himself to be? The prophets love the people they chastise...."


Ames often comes across his old sermons and here he comments on one:
"...it makes the point that, in Scripture, the one sufficient reason for the forgiveness of debt is simply the existence of debt. And it goes on to compare this to divine grace, and to the Prodigal Son and his restoration to his place in his father's house, though he neither asks to be restored as son nor even repents of the grief he has caused the father."


"Last night I finished 'The Trail of the Lonesome Pine'. It gave me sort of a turn for a while. The old man sees the girl with someone her own age and remarks how well suited they are, and then he starts getting old and shabby and broke, and she's still very beautiful, of course. But it all turns out fine. She loves him only and forever.... It strikes me that your mother could not have said a more heartening word to me by any other means than she did by loving that unremarkable book so much that I noticed and read it, too. That was providence telling me what she could not have told me."


"I don't know exactly what covetise is, but in my experience it is not so much desiring someone else's virtue or happiness as rejecting it, taking offense at the beauty of it."


And that is the word that comes to mind when I think of John Ames, Boughton, and the town of Gilead: Beauty.


Yes, there is a balm in Gilead.


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Notes from The Mark of the Christian

In this age of tatooes, brands, and slogans, Francis Shaeffer's essay entitled, The Mark of the Christian has a lot to say about how we show the world we are Christians. It also has a lot to say in this age of major mainline denomination shake-ups and ever-splitting Protestantism about Christian unity. A lot to say in only 59 very small paperback book pages.

I've had this little book for a few months now sitting on my reading shelf picking it up occassionally and reading a paragraph or two, which no way to read this book. Today is the last day of my short "sabbatical", so I decided to sit down and read it in it's entirety.

Here are some quotes:

"Through the centuries men have displayed many different symbols to show that they are Christians. They have worn marks in the lapels of their coats, ...chains about their necks, even had special haircuts. Of course there is nothing wrong with any of this.... But there is a much better sign - a mark that has not been thought up just as a matter of expediency for use on some special occasion or in some specific era. It is a universal mark that is to last through all the ages of the church till Jesus comes back....'that ye love one another; as I have loved you'...."

"The church is to be a loving church in a dying culture. How, then, is the dying culture going to consider us? Jesus says, 'By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.' In the midst of the world, in the midst of our present dying culture, Jesus is giving a right to the world. Upon his authority he gives the world the right to judge whether you and I are born-again Christians on the basis of our observable love toward all Christians."

"But Jesus is not here saying that our failure to love all Christians proves that we are not Christians. (...) What Jesus is saying, however, is that, if I do not have the love I should have toward all other Christians, the world has the right to make the judgement that I am not a Christian. (...) Of course, the world may be making a wrong judgement because, if the man is truly a Christian...they made a mistake. (...) Here Jesus is talking about our responsibility as individuals and as groups to so love all other true Christians that the world will have no valid reason for saying that we are not Christians."

"But Jesus did give the mark that will arrest the attention of the world, even the attention of the modern man... Because every man is made in the image of God and has, therefore, aspirations for love, there is something that can be in every geographical climate - in every point of time - which cannot fail to arrest his attention. ... The love that true Christians show for each other and not just for their own party."

"The Christian really has a double task. He has to practice both God's holiness and God's love. ... Not his holiness without his love: that is only harshness. Not his love without his holines: that is only compromise."

"What divides and severs true Christian groups and Christians - what leaves bitterness that can last for twenty, thirty or forty years ... - is not the issue of doctrine or belief which caused the differences in the first place. Invariably it is the lack of love and the bitter things that are said by true Christians in the midst of differences. (...) It is these things - these unloving attitudes and words - that cause the stench that the world can smell in the church of Jesus Christ among those who are really true Christians."

"First, we should never come to such difference with true Christians without regret and without tears."

"The church is not to let pass what is wrong; but the Christian should suffer practical, monetary loss to show the oneness true Christians should have rather than to go to court against other true Christians, for this would destroy such an observable oneness before the watching world."

"I want to say with all my heart that as we struggle with the proper preaching of the gospel in the midst of the twentieth century, the importance of observable love must come into our message. We must not forget the final apologetic. The world has a right to look upon us as we, as true Christians, come to practical differences, and it should be able to observe that we do love each other. Our love must have a form that the world may observe, it must be seeable."

"Love - and the unity it attests to - is the mark Christ gave Christians to wear before the world. Only with this mark may the world know that Christians are indeed Christians and that Jesus was sent by the Father."


I know I have at times NOT worn the mark of love. I can think of a few events or moments when I have very clearly not been loving to Christians with whom I've disagreed. I've also been on the receiving end of not being loved and it really hurts - especially when it comes from other Christians. What hurts even more is realizing how damaging this is to the Gospel.

What I've learned today is that while choosing to wear marks to announce our faith is fine, it is good to make sure we are not missing THE mark that Christ gave us to wear.



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Notes & Quotes: The Omnivore's Dilemma (Part One "Industrial - Corn")

Today - more notes and quotes from the book The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan.

Part One "Industrial - Corn"

p. 17 "...a working definition of industrial food: Any food whose provenance is so complex or obscure that it requires expert help to ascertain."

p. 20 "...the food industry has done a good job of persuading us that the forty-five throusand different items of SKUs...in the supermarket...represent genuine variety rather than so many clever rearrangements of molecules extracted from the same plant." (that being corn, of course - so we've traded in true variety of diet for the appearance of variety)

p. 23 " 'When you look at the isotope ratios...we North Americans look like corn chips with legs.' Compared to us, Mexicans (who have traditionally been associated with a diet high in corn) today consume a far more varied carbon diet.... So, that's us: processed corn, walking."

p. 38 "A case can be made that the corn plant's population explosion in places like Iowa is responsible for pushing out not only other plants but the animals and finaly the people, too."

"This diversity (before the industrialization of the farm) allowed the farm not only to substantially feed itself - and by that I don't mean feed only the farmers, but also the soil and livestock - but to withstand a collapse in the market for any one of the crops."

But corn is relatively healthy, right? I mean, sure, it isn't a great idea to have a diet based so solidly on one crop, but if it has to be something corn isn't so bad, right?

Well, for one thing:
p. 41 "Hybrid corn is the greediest of plants, consuming more fertilizer than any other crop." (fertilizers that are largely made of petroleum products - so this crop is one that is particularly loaded with chemicals)

p. 45 "...you find that every bushel of industrial corn requires the equivalent of between a quarter and a third of a gallon of oil to grow it - or around fifty gallons of oil per acre of corn."
So, why this dependence on corn? Well, it all starts with farm policy.

p. 49 "America's farm policy was forged during the Depression not, as many people seem to think, to encourage farmers to produce more food for a hungry nation, but to rescue farmers from the disastrous effects of growing too much food - far more than Americans could afford to buy. ... When it comes to food, nature can make a mockery of the classical economics of supply and demand.... So, going back to the Old Testament, communities have devised various strategies to even out the destructive swings of agriculutral production. The Bible's recommended farm policy was to establish a grain reserve. ... This is more or less what the New Deal farm programs attempted to do. ...(these policies) did a fairly good job of keeping corn prices from collapsing in the face of the twentieth century's rapid gains in yield."

p. 52 However, that all changed with the 1973 farm bill which "...began replacing the New Deal system of supporting prices through loans, government grain purchases, and land idling with a new system of direct payment to farmers. ... Instead of keeping corn out of a falling market, as the old loan programs and federal granary had done, the new subsidies encouraged farmers to sell their corn at any proice, since the government would make up the difference. Or as it turned out, make up some of the difference.... Instead of supporting farmers, the government was now subsidizing every bushel of corn a farmer could grow...."
(therefore, the purchasers of this cheap corn are the true beneficiaries and those purchasers would be the big industrial agricultural companies: ADM, Cargill, etc.)

p. 62 "This system is designed to keep production high and prices low." The result is a "mountain of cheap corn" that needs to be made into a higher-priced and desirable product. "Moving that mountain of cheap corn - finding the people and animals to consume it, the cars to burn it, the new products to absorb it, and the nations to import it - has become the principal task of the industrial food system, since the supply of corn vastly exceeds the demand."

p. 64 " The place where most of those kernels wind up...is on the American factory farm, a place that could not exist without them. Here, hundreds of millions of food animals that once lived on famly farms and ranches are gathered together in great commisaries.... Enlisting the cow in this undertaking has required particularly heroic efforts, since the cow is by nature not a corn eater. ... Enter the corn-fed American steer."

Ok, am I the only person in America that did not realize cows aren't designed to eat corn? I know I'm a city girl, but how did this escape me?

Does this make any sense to feed an animal that which it cannot easily digest? Whether you believe in simple evolution or God's design it seems pretty foolhardy to go against an animal's nature and expect it to stay healthy! But cows aren't the only animals being fed corn - on p. 67: "like the farmed salmon now being bred to tolerate grain."

But what about the praries being ruined by overgrazing? I am sure I remember hearing that this was a problem. Somewhat like we now hear about the seas being overfished. Isn't there something to this? And aren't industrial farms alteast helping to alleviate these problems?

p. 70 "While it is true that overgrazing can do ecological harm to a grassland, in recent years ranchers have adopted rotational grazing patterns that more closely mimic the patterns of bison.... In fact, a growing number of ecologists now believe the rangelands are healthier with cattle on them, provided they are moved requently. ... growing meat on grass makes superb ecological sense: It is a sustainable, solar-powered food chain...."

But... "Cows raised on grass simply take longer to reach slaughter weight than cows raised on a richer diet...tremendous quantities of corn, protein and fat supplements, and an arsenal of new drugs."

p. 75 "Yet this corn-fed meat is demonstrably less healthy for us, since it contains more saturated fat and less omega-3 fatty acids than the meat of animals fed grass."

It is also extraordinarily less healthy for the animals and has led to the heavy use of antibiotics in the feedlots. Pollan explains the biology behind all this, but suffice it to say that corn ruins the health of the cow. Unfortunately, the more antibiotics used the more resistant the germs in these feedlots including E. coli, which is lethal to humans and had never been seen before 1980).

Set aside the biology and consider the environmental impact: an average feedlot cow "will have consumed in his lifetime the equivalent of thirty-five gallons of oil - nearly a barrel." Remeber that in times past, this was an entirely solar-powered enterprise. That is pretty shocking. What is even more shocking is that we are paying for this with our nation's health.

So, that is what happens to the majority of the corn grown in our country...what about the rest of that mountain of corn?

From page 86, it is made into a whole selection of ingredients you may have seen on a food label: "citric and lactic acid; glucose, fructose, and maltodextrin; ethanol (for alcoholic beverages as well as cars), sorbitol, mannitol, and xanthum gum; modified and unmodified starches; as well as dextrins and cyclodextrins and MSG, to name only a few."

p. 90 "...this is where we come in. It takes a certain kind of eater - an industrial eater - to consume (these products), and we are, or have evolved into, that supremely adapted creature: the eater of processed food."

p. 91 "In many ways, breakfast food: four cents' worth of commodity corn (or some other equally cheap grain) transformed into four dollars worth of processed food. What an alchemy!"

At this point in the book, I threw up my hands and said, "NO MORE COLD CEREAL!" Ok, so in my house that isn't entirely realistic. I fix a "real" breakfast many mornings, but sometimes I do resort to cold cereal. And my kids (and I!) do like it. So, maybe the point is to find a good one with *real* grains - I wonder if that is possible.

Processors of food still had to figure out a way to get us to eat all that processed food...the solution was relatively simple once it was figured out: Supersizing!

p. 106 "Researchers have found that people (and animals) presented with large portions will eat up to 30 percent more than they would otherwise. ... Our bodies are storing reserves of fat against a famine that never comes."

And who is the king of "Supersizing"? McDonald's of course.

p. 116 "Some time later I found another way to calculate just how much corn we had eaten that day. I asked Todd Dawson, a biologist at Berkely, to run a McDonald's meal through his mass spectrometer and calculate how much of the carbon in it came originally from a corn plant...the atomic signature of those carbon isotopes is indestructible, and still legible to the mass spectrometer.... soda (100 percent), milk shake (78 percent), salad dressing (65 percent), chicken nuggets (56 percent), cheeseburger (52 percent), and french fries (23 percent)."

And it gets worse - this isn't just about health, or ecology...it is also a justice issue.

p. 118 "I mentioned earlier that all life on earth can be viewed as a competition for the energy captured by plants and stored in carboydrates, energy we measure for calories. There is a limit to how many of those calories the world's arable land cdan produce each year, and an industrial meal of meat and processed food consumes - and wastes - an unconscionable amount of that energy. To eat corn directly (as Mexicans and many Africans do) is to consume all the energy in that corn, but when you feed that corn to a steer or a chicken, 90 percent of its energy is lost - to bones or feathers or fur, to living and metabolizing as a steer or chicken.... But processing food also burns energy....the amount of food lost in the making of something like a Chicken McNugget could feed a great many more children than just mine, and behind the 4,510 calories the three of us had for lunch stands tens of thousands of corn calories that could have fed a great many hungry people."

And a taste issue -

p. 119 "The more you concentrate on how it tastes, the less like anything it tastes. ... And so it goes, bite after bite, until you feel not satisfied exactly, but simply, regrettably, full."

Oh, my have I known that feeling. I've often wondered if this contributes to obesity as well. We don't truly feel satisfied by fast or processed food - perhaps because the taste is lacking. So we eat more trying to reach that point of satisfaction, only to get full in the process.

So, how much corn do you eat on regular basis - corn that doesn't look like corn. I'm pretty shocked to realize just how much we ingest - and we are pretty healthy eaters. For sometime now, I've been avoiding high fructose corn syrup and corn syrup itself, but I had no idea that there were so many other invisible corn products in my food everyday.

For us this means we are going to make a more concerted effort to eat whole, real foods rather than those that have been processed in any way. At first, I thought that wouldn't leave much, but in reality it opens up wonderful doors of diverse menus!

Notes & Quotes: The Omnivore's Dilemma (Intro)

Yesterday, I briefly reviewed The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan with the promise to follow up with my "notes & quotes" from this book. When I read I do a LOT of underlining and "talking back" to an author, so I thought it might be fun to get the conversation started by sharing my thoughts about this book. Please feel free to chime in with your thoughts whether or not you've read this book. (If you have read it, all the better!)

Introduction:

p. 2 - discussing the sudden changes in dietary habits that have occurred since the late 70's and recent years mighty swings of fad diets: "So violent a change in a culture's eating habits is surely the sign of a national eating disorder...never happen in a culture in possession of deeply rooted traditions surrounding food...such a culture would not feel the need for its most august legislative body to ever deliberate the nation's 'dietary goals'...other countries, such as Italy and France, ...decide their dinner questions on the basis of such quaint and unscientific criteria as pleasure and tradition...and lo and behold wind up actually healthier and happier in their eating than we are."

p. 5 "The lack of a steadying culture of food leaves us especially vulnerable to the blandishments of the food scientist and the marketer...it is very much in the interest of the food industry to exacerbate our anxieties about what to eat, the better to assuage them with new products."

p. 7 "Industrial agriculture has supplanted a complete reliance on the sun for our calories with something new under the sun: a food chain that draws much of its energy from fossil fuels instead."

p. 9 "Many of the problems of health and nutrition we face today trace back to things that happen on the farm, and behind those things stand specific government policies few of us know anything about."

There aren't many notes in my book at this point as the author is mostly focused on setting up his objectives. Perhaps these quotes will whet your appetite to read more of my notes and quotes...and/or purchase the book for yourself!

But what do you think so far? Do you agree with his basic premises?

What do you think about his idea that our lack of a common "cuisine" has made us vulnerable to food anxieties unlike other cultures? I think he's on to something very important. We need these common ties and if they are absent, we fill them with something (created ties - dieting, vegetarianism, fad diets or fad foods). Besides, when one looks at cultural cuisines all over the world you'll find healthy, varied diets that provide naturally beneficial food combinations.

Book Review: The Omnivore's Dilemma

How appropriate that I would have finished The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan just minutes before I started to make dinner for my family! Literally, I closed the book and turned to my lasagna ingredients.

The book's introduction opens with the question many mothers find both mundane and challenging: "What should we have for dinner?" Mr. Pollan never presumes to answer the question definitively for us. Instead, he invites us to make that determination ourselves by asking hard questions about where our food comes from. Along the way he does do a lot of the legwork for us by exploring three different "paths" a meal might take to the table: industrial, pastoral, and personal. There are visits to factories, farms and forests to explore each of the various food "paths" as well as a good deal of philosophical and political discussion along the way.

Four hundred and eleven pages later, Mr. Pollan has done an excellent and entertaining job of helping us do some serious thinking about our food choices. And he does it all without even a touch of preachiness!

From vegans to hunters (and the majority of us in between), I highly recommend this book to anyone who eats... and anyone who thinks.

In the coming days, I'll be posting my "Notes & Quotes" from the book. You can subscribe to this blog's feed by email or RSS to get those blog updates.

Next on my reading list is Pollan's book In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto.






Enjoy other book reviews: Semicolon's Saturday Review of Books

Iliad: Wordled

I included a link to this fun new toy, Wordle, yesterday in my "Peter Piper's Picks". Just wanted to show you one I'd done from my Iliad reading! Click on the Wordle cloud and you can see it larger.

Very cool, no? Why is this so much fun?

Book Review: The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Who would have thought poor punctuation and plodding prose could be so absorbing? But in Cormac McCarthy’s book The Road it is. Don’t be misled, the poor punctuation and plodding prose are not mistakes, but techniques which convey the mood of the story in The Roadand enhance the story-telling. And while the story lumbers along, McCarthy’s poetic descriptions of a post-apocalyptic landscape gives one the sense of walking along with the father and son protagonists.

The setting is America after some great catastrophe which has left behind an entirely scorched, physically and psychologically, land. Very few people have survived and those that have struggle to survive both the environment which is utterly devastated and the roaming bands of marauders.

The father and son slowly make their way to the coast where they hope to find … Hope. They don’t know what the form of that Hope will be, but their love for each other keeps them moving.

Within the story, McCarthy’s simplistic third-person, prose style is so (I hate to use the term) monotonous (in a good way!) that when he alters this style (switching briefly to the 1st person in one scene and in others using an almost poetic style) he draws attention to particular parts of the story. These parts are so entirely different they almost scream out from the page.

Here’s an example. Imagine pages and pages (180 to be exact) of this:

“ They went through the last of the cars and then walked up the track to the locomotive and climbed up to the catwalk. Rust and scaling paint. They pushed in to the cab and he blew away the ash from the engineer’s seat and put the boy at the controls. The controls were very simple. Little to do but push the throttle lever forward. He made train noises and diesel horn noises but he wasnt (sic) sure what these might mean to the boy. After a while they just looked out through the silted glass to where the track curved away in the waste of weeds. If they saw different worlds what they knew was the same. That the train would sit there slowly decomposing for all eternity and that no train would ever run again.

Can we go, Papa?
Yes. Of course we can.”

(Then it launches into this – the first of a handful of these poetic moments)

“They began to come upon from time to time small cairns of rock by the roadside. They were signs in gypsy language, lost patterns. The first he’d seen in some while, common in the north, leading out of the looted and exhausted cities, hopeless messages to loved ones lost and dead. By then all the stores of food had given out and murder was everywhere upon the land…the cities themselves held by cores of blackened looters who tunneled among the ruins and crawled from the rubble white of tooth and eye carrying charred and anonymous tins of food in nylon nets like shoppers in the commissaries of hell. The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor and the cold crept down and the dark came early and the scavengers passing down the steep canyons with their torches trod silky holes in the drifted ash that closed behind them silently as eyes. Out on the roads the pilgrims sank down and fell over and died and the bleak and shrouded earth went trundling past the sun and returned again as trackless and as unremarked as the path of any nameless sisterworld in the ancient dark beyond.”

Then back to the simple prose for another 80 or so pages. Does that make the simple prose sound boring? It really isn't - the characters and the story are remarkable!

There are some distressing scenes in this book, so be warned. The food has run out in this world and you can imagine the result.

But there is good and hope and redemption even in this most evil, hopeless, and lost world. Truth and beauty have somehow managed to stay alive in the hearts of some; the father and son call it "the fire", I call it faith.

From my Commonplace Book - June 25th

Last night I read a thought-provoking article from the blog Mere Orthodoxy entitled "Music and the Soul". I'm not going to elucidate too much mostly because I've not had time to really give this more thought than that I want to think about it (how do you like that...I've thought that I want to think - that's sheer brilliance right there), and also because it is almost kiddies' bedtime, but I am curious what some of you might think.

Here are the entries I made into my Commonplace Book from this post....

...human beings have generally lost the perception that we live in a hierarchical universe...(a hierarchy of the Holy Spirit, one's own spirit, the mind [thinking, feelings, will], and the body).

...human beings today do not first respond by asking questions about their spirit or thinking, but mostly always about their emotional and states of will.

Everything is reduced to the level of the ordinary...defined principally in terms of states of feeling and will. - the above was quoted in the post from a Dr. Overman.

From the rest of the article:

Christian love...enables men to think of themselves as something other than a bundle of emotive staes and corresponding impulses; it restores the dignity of being a spirit-and-flesh being in communion with God.

Rather than viewing worship as being an emotional expression, and limiting one's self to emotive music devoid of intellectual and spiritual expressions, the Christian ought to respond to God with the totality of his being.

When it comes to the music that we use to worship God, then, we must not first ask ourselves, "What kind of music do I like?"...but rather, "What music best expresses the full heart of a complete human being to God?

...starting with the question, "What does it mean to be human?" and then moving from this answer to explore the sorts of music most appropriate to human beings in communication with God is a far cry from the common complaint that certain forms of music don't arouse our emotions...

I didn't add this to my Commonplace entry, but I loved how the author ended the article:

The answer to this question might also leave everybody a bit surprised—the hymnodists as well as the hip members of your church praise and worship team.

So, what does it mean to be a human and how do we then answer the question, "What then should we sing?"