I remember the great Bill Watterson sharing how he created Calvin’s and Hobbes’ frequent sledding runs as a device to provide some visual interest when he basically wanted to devote a strip to an exchange of ideas. The sledding run served merely as a flourish, as scaffolding for what he wanted to say. I just finished The Shack and then picked up where I had left off in Brian McClaren’s The Story We Find Ourselves In. It struck me that having just read a dialogue between God and “Mac” as they climbed a mountain in The Shack, I flipped directly to The Story‘s protagonist waxing philosophical as he hiked a crater with a friend in the Galopogas Islands. In both cases, Mac and ? serve basically . Their exchanges play out more like a tennis player hitting against a practice wall more than a real volley between well matched players.
A backdrop, a skeleton framework for philosophizing, especially a journey.
War is a ritual, a deadly ritual, not the result of aggressive self-assertion, but of self-transcending identification. Without loyalty to tribe, church, flag or ideal, there would be no wars.
Even a cursory glance at history should convince one that individual crimes committed for selfish motives play a quite insignificant part in the human tragedy, compared to the numbers massacred in unselfish loyalty to one’s tribe, nation, dynasty, church, or political ideology, ad majorem gloriam dei. The emphasis is on unselfish. Excepting a small minority of mercenary or sadistic disposition, wars are not fought for personal gain, but out of loyalty and devotion to king, country or cause. Homicide committed for personal reasons is a statistical rarity in all cultures, including our own. Homicide for unselfish reasons, at the risk of one’s own life, is the dominant phenomenon of history.
One of the most fashionable notions of our times is that social problems like poverty and oppression breed wars. Most wars, however, are started by well-fed people with time on their hands to dream up half-baked ideologies or grandiose ambitions, and to nurse real or imagined grievances.
So, let us not be blind to our differences — but let us also direct attention to our common interests and to the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all
inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.
Far from being an act of individual inspiration, what we call creativity is simply an expression of professional consensus. Using Vincent van Gogh as an example, the author declares that the artist’s “creativity came into being when a sufficient number of art experts felt that his paintings had something important to contribute to the domain of art.” Innovation, that is, exists only when the correctly credentialed hivemind agrees that it does. And “without such a response,” the author continues, “van Gogh would have remained what he was, a disturbed man who painted strange canvases.” What determines “creativity,” in other words, is the very faction it’s supposedly rebelling against: established expertise.
everyone’s a critic looking back up the river
every boat is leaking in this town
everybody is thinking they can all be delivered
sitting in a box like lost and found
but i found my place and it’s all right
we’re all searching for a better way
get this off my plate
it’s all right
I got my own way to believe
find a lighthouse in the dark stormy weather
we all could use a sedative right now
holy rollers sitting with their backs to the middle
all alone and sinking the bow
and if you want to have to pray
it’s all right
we all be thinking with our different brain
get this off my plate
it’s all right
I got my own way to believe
it’s okay
sometimes you find yourself having to put all your faith in no faith
mine is mine and yours won’t take its place
now make your getaway
science says we’re making love like the lizards
try and say that fossils ain’t profound
silence says we’re not allowed to consider
silence says stand up sit down you’re out
it’s okay
sometimes you find yourself having to put all your faith in no faith
mine is mine and yours won’t take its place
now make your getaway
science says we’re making love like the lizards
try and say that fossils ain’t profound
silence says we’re not allowed to consider
silence says stand up sit down you’re out
But I found my place
and it’s all right
I’m bearing witness to some better things
get this off my plate
it’s all right
I’ve got my own way to believe
it’s okay
sometimes you find yourself being told to change your ways
there’s no way
mine is mine and yours won’t take its place
now make your getaway
it’s okay
sometimes you find yourself having to put all your faith in no faith
mine is mine and yours won’t take its place
now make your getaway
it’s okay
sometimes you find yourself being told to change your ways
for god’s sake
mine is mine and yours won’t take its place
now make your getaway
Francis Spufford’s Unapologetic is a wonderfully pugnacious defense of Christianity. Refuting critics such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and the “new atheist” crowd, Spufford, a former atheist and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, argues that Christianity is recognizable, drawing on the deep and deeply ordinary vocabulary of human feeling, satisfying those who believe in it by offering a ruthlessly realistic account of the grown-up dignity of Christian experience. Fans of C. S. Lewis, N. T. Wright, Marilynne Robinson, Mary Karr, Diana Butler Bass, Rob Bell, and James Martin will appreciate Spufford’s crisp, lively, and abashedly defiant thesis. Unapologetic is a book for believers who are fed up with being patronized, for non-believers curious about how faith can possibly work in the twenty-first century, and for anyone who feels there is something indefinably wrong, literalistic, anti-imaginative and intolerant about the way the atheist case is now being made. ~ Product Description
A tweedy poetaster who spent his time spinning out parables and Japanese koans, a literary aesthete who toyed with 1st-century deconstructionism, or a bland Jesus who simply told people to look at the lilies of the field — such a Jesus would threaten no one, just as the university professors who create him threaten no one.