Lets Kill Saturday Night

In folk, country and rock music saturday night has always stood for the carnal illicit side of life. Sunday morning on the other hand, is the spiritual, religous, church side. Witness Ralph Stnaley's two mirror albums , where the first album is a collection of secular good time music and the other is filled with country gospel.

Here are some songs to illustrate that illustrate my point about Saturday ( I am sure there many more I haven't thought of right this minute):


Almost Saturday Night by John Fogerty, with a great sounding guitar to start the song off.

Forty Miles to Saturday Night by Paul Kelly, an Australian who has put out a ton of albums but his best is Under the Sun and this is the best song on the album.

Let's Kill Saturday Night by Robbie Fulks who is probably the best country songwriter around today but you will never ever hear anything of his on the radio.

Can't forget Sam cooke and Just Another Saturday Night.

And Eddie Floyd Saturday Night a great little soul record.

Second gear, lean right

Great song, funny video.

Need Your Pastor? Follow Him on Twitter

A nice little article on pastors who aren't pastoral, on pastors who are caught up with the wrong things in the ministry. Click to read it all.

Here are some highlights:

Hospital visits are considered a chore for some minion to do. Unless, of course, the dying happens to be someone of significance. Yes. You can read that as someone of material means.

Funerals? Everybody knows preachers don't have time for that. "Let the dead bury the dead" is their motto.

Wednesday night visitations? What era did you grow up in? These preachers don't have time to make house calls. And if you want to visit with them, you'd be better off heading down to the local coffee shop than to the church office.

Better yet, just Twitter them. Short conversations are best anyhow. Many of them are ADD and their listening skills haven't improved much since they were in first-grade.

They spend more time studying the latest in market trends and reading Malcolm Gladwell than they do reading Scriptures and the signs of the times.


Every single one of them is writing a book, though they can't explain the difference between an adjective and an adverb.

They don't know the names of the people who live four houses over from them, but twice a year they travel to Africa to minister to the hurting.

Because there isn't enough of them to go around, they are developing a video series that can be downloaded to your iPad or iPhone. This is considered the latest form of fellowship.

Are the days gone when pastors watched you grow up, married you off, watched your children grow up, buried your mama and daddy and then reminisced with you over a cup of coffee on the front porch after a dinner that included peach pie?

72% of Millennials 'more spiritual than religious

From the USA Today:

Most young adults today don't pray, don't worship and don't read the Bible, a major survey by a Christian research firm shows.
If the trends continue, "the Millennial generation will see churches closing as quickly as GM dealerships," says Thom Rainer, president of LifeWay Christian Resources. In the group's survey of 1,200 18- to 29-year-olds, 72% say they're "really more spiritual than religious."

Key findings in the phone survey, conducted in August and released today:

•65% rarely or never pray with others, and 38% almost never pray by themselves either.

•65% rarely or never attend worship services.

•67% don't read the Bible or sacred texts.

Many are unsure Jesus is the only path to heaven: Half say yes, half no.

"We have dumbed down what it means to be part of the church so much that it means almost nothing, even to people who already say they are part of the church," Rainer says.

The findings, which document a steady drift away from church life, dovetail with a LifeWay survey of teenagers in 2007 who drop out of church and a study in February by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, which compared the beliefs of Millennials with those of earlier generations of young people.

The new survey has a margin of error of +/-2.8 percentage points.

Even among those in the survey who "believe they will go to heaven because they have accepted Jesus Christ as savior":

•68% did not mention faith, religion or spirituality when asked what was "really important in life."

•50% do not attend church at least weekly.

•36% rarely or never read the Bible.

Neither are these young Christians evangelical in the original meaning of the term — eager to share the Gospel. Just 40% say this is their responsibility.

Even so, Rainer is encouraged by the roughly 15% who, he says, appear to be "deeply committed" Christians in study, prayer, worship and action.

Collin Hansen, 29, author of Young, Restless, Reformed, about a thriving minority of traditionalist Christians, agrees. "I'm not going to say these numbers aren't true and aren't grim, but they also drive people like me to build new, passionately Christian dynamic churches," says Hansen, who is studying for the ministry. He sees many in his generation veering to "moralistic therapeutic deism — 'God wants you to be happy and do good things.' ... I would not call that Christianity, however."

The 2007 LifeWay study found seven in 10 Protestants ages 18 to 30, both evangelical and mainline, who went to church regularly in high school said they quit attending by age 23. And 34% of those had not returned, even sporadically, by age 30.

The Pew survey found young people today were significantly more likely than those in earlier generations to say they didn't identify with any religious group. Neither are Millennials any more likely than earlier generations to turn toward a faith affiliation as they grow older.

17 Great Fallen Train Stations

A very nice ( and sad) blog post with links to some amazing photos of train stations that are no more and what has replaced them.

We have been harvested by the spiritual sickles of the Apostles

We have been harvested by the spiritual sickles of the Apostles, and have been gathered together into the churches everywhere in the world, as it were into threshing-floors; we have been made into a body by a harmonious disposition of faith, and have been prepared with the salt of teachings from the divine words; we have been reborn through the water and fire of the Holy Spirit—and we are presented to God by Christ, as nourishing, agreeable, and well-pleasing loaves.

Eusebius of Caesarea, On the Celebration of the Pascha, 4.

Be thou exalted

The Ascension of our Lord is still three weeks away but the church begins to turn her thoughts ever so slowly even now to that blessed, saving event. Here is part of a sermon of St. Augustine on the Ascension:

Recall the words of the psalm to your minds. To whom was this said: Be thou exalted, O God, above the heavens'? To whom was this said? Was "be thou exalted"
said to God the Father, who was never humiliated?

No, “Be thou exalted" ...

Thou who hast been enclosed in the womb of Thy Mother;
Thou who hast been formed in her whom Thou didst form;
Thou who hast lain in a manger;
Thou who, in true flesh, as a little Babe hast been nourished at the
breast;
Thou who, carrying the world, wert carried by Thy Mother;
Thou whom the old man Simeon recognized as a Little One and praised as the Mighty One;
Thou whom the widow Anna saw as a nursling and acknowledged as omnipotent;
Thou who wert hungry for our sake, thirsty for our sake, and weaned on the way for our sake. (Yet is Bread ever hungry, or is the Fountain ever thirsty, or is the Way
ever weary?)
Thou who hast endured all things for our sake;
Thou who hast slept, yet slumberest not in protecting Israel;
finally, Thou whom Judas sold, whom the Jews bought and yet did not possess;
Thou who wert seized, bound,scourged, crowned with thorns, suspended on the cross,
pierced with the lance;
Thou who didst die and who wert buried,

'be thou exalted O God, above the heavens.'

'Be thou exalted,' the Psalmist says, 'be thou exalted above the heavens,' because Thou art God. Be enthroned in heaven, since Thou didst hang upon the cross. You are
feared as the Judge who is to come, You who, having been feared, were once judged. Who would believe such things if they were not done by Him who raises the needy from the earth and lifts the poor from the dunghill? He Himself raises His own needy body and places it with the princes of His people, with whom He is going to judge the living and the dead.

Augustine, Sermon 262, Fathers of the Chuhrch Vol. 38, p. 389-390.

What have the Romans ever done for us?

"No, thanks, I'm a libertarian"

Now that is science

Why, just fifty years ago, they thought a disease like your daughter's was caused by demonic possession or witchcraft. But nowadays we know that Isabelle is suffering from an imbalance of bodily humors, perhaps caused by a toad or a small dwarf living in her stomach. --Steve Martin

(Thanks to my friend Tom Fast who posted this elsewhere.)

New book review on PopMatters: Voodoo Histories

Here is my Popmatters review of:

Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History by David Aaronovitch

The first paragraph:

William Occam, a Roman Catholic thinker from the medieval period once enunciated a helpful principle that became known as Occam’s Razor. In simple English, it goes like this: “The simplest solution to any problem is usually the best one.” David Aaronovitch has written a book detailing a long parade of folks who for various reasons have ignored this principle in loud and foolish and often destructive ways. In his book, Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History, Aaronovitch sets out to trace how conspiracies theories entrance and captivate so many into believing the most improbable and dangerous things, and why so often so many so willingly want to believe them.

I think I am with Tolstoy on this

“Dostoyevsky believed that lives are decided at critical moments, and he therefore described the world as driven by sudden eruptions from the unconscious. By contrast, Tolstoy insisted that although we may imagine our lives are decided at important and intense moments of choice, in fact our choices are shaped by the whole climate of our minds, which themselves result from countless small decisions at ordinary moments.”

In a essay, “Prosaics,” by Gary Saul Morson, cited here.

Socialists Say Obama Isn’t a Socialist

From Joe Carter at the First Things blog:

CNN asked the Socialist Party USA if they think he’s a socialist:

Obama’s opponents have long described him as a socialist. But what do actual socialists think about Obama? Not much, says Wharton.

“He’s the president whose main goal is to protect the wealth of the richest 5 percent of Americans.”

He and others say the assertion that Obama is a socialist is absurd.

“It makes no rational sense. It clearly means that people don’t understand what socialism is.”

Definitions of socialism vary, but most socialists believe workers and consumers who are affected by economic institutions should own or control them.

[. . .]

Those who call Obama a socialist, though, point to his policies. Big on their hit list: “Obamacare,” which they call “socialized medicine.”

Socialists scoff at the notion. They don’t applaud the passage of the recent health care bill either. They wanted a national “single-payer” health insurance plan with a government option. The bill that Obama championed didn’t have any of those features.

Wharton said the new health care bill only strengthens private health insurance companies. They get 32 million new customers and no incentive to change — something a socialist wouldn’t accept.

Death Metal lyric or William Blake Quote?

DEATH METAL LYRIC OR WILLIAM BLAKE QUOTE?

BY ELI PETZOLD

from McSweeneys



1. "Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead."

2. "We are Satan's generation."

3. "As I was walking among the fires of hell, delighted."

4. "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom."

5. "The child of burning time has gone. He hasn't come back."

6. "Flames of profligacy, naked bodies flowing in the stream of wild dreams."

7. "The original Archangel or possessor of the command of the heavenly host, is called the Devil."

8. "The sulphur-kingdom, purgatory, hell`s damnation, no man will be perditioned for all time."

9. "Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires."

10. "Every man is therefore guilty of all the good he did."






Death Metal: 2, 5, 6, 8, 10
Blake: 1, 3, 4, 7, 9

The Law according to Peanuts

Sometimes I lie awake at night, and I ask, "Where have I gone wrong?"/ Then a voice says to me, "This is going to take more than one night."
- Charles M. Schulz

The truck is Jesus

I am a sucker for these kind of songs. Longing, yearning for what one does not have. This simple, country song by Canadian singer songwriter Fred Eaglesmith ( I am becoming a bit of a Fred-head!) is full of those desires.

Such emptiness is at the heart of much great songwriting, much great rock and roll. Often the longing is expressed in romantic terms, wanting a girl, being in love, loss, heartbreak. Here it is about a vehicle. No matter, though.

Ultimately, it is all about our longing for transcendence, for God, for Jesus. Underneath all of our heartache, sadness and wishing is what St. Paul pinpoints in Ephesians 5 when discussing marriage and male and female, he says... "I am talking about Christ". So is Fred Eaglesmith and so are we all.

In this song the truck is Jesus.

Listen here: I Wanna Buy Your Truck by Fred Eaglesmith

Here are the words to the chorus:

I wanna buy your truck
I don't like what I'm doing
I wanna give it up
I wanna do something else
I like the way that it shines
Hey, I'm really stuck
In this life of mine
I wanna buy your truck

Why Country Music Is the New Classic Rock

This is an insightful article on why contemporary country music is the new mainstream classic rock.

Some bits:


After all, anyone who spends time with modern country radio understands that the bulk of today’s country hits have way more in common, sonically, with Bon Jovi than they do with George Jones.

...

All of this answers a question on the minds of a major segment of rock fans nostalgic for Van Halen and Journey, which is, “Why don’t they make music like that anymore?” The answer, of course, is, “They do. They just call in country music, now”.

...

It’s one of rock history’s great oversimplifications—Nirvana killed hair metal—but the sentiment points to a prevalent notion that big, catchy, accessible “classic” rock has been somehow, inexplicably, washed from the face of the earth in favor of what these fans see as angsty mook-rock, whiny emo-rock, abstruse indie-rock, crass R&B, and atonal hip-hop. Where these fans have found refuge, beyond their old Zeppelin albums, is in modern country radio, the closest thing out there to the music of their rock ’ n’ roll good-old days.

What these rock fans have to tolerate, obviously, is whatever purely country elements have remained in the music, but in the exodus from a rock radio where Ratt has been supplanted by Rhianna, they’re clearly willing to accept a rural drawl or a buried fiddle as long as they can pump a fist to it. The music follows enough tried-and-true hard-rock archetypes to make inroads into a broad audience’s pleasure centers. At the same time, Nashville has wisely maintained decidedly red-state concerns in song themes, rolling out a steady stream of hits that celebrate small towns, God, the simple life, the way things used to be, farms, partying in the woods, etc.

...

Indeed, modern country radio is the last bastion in pop music of the persecuted guitar solo.

While country music has long produced guitar legends like Chet Atkins and Jerry Reed, only recently have we seen slingers like Keith Urban and Brad Paisley control a near monopoly over mainstream pop. The flashy guitar solo never did quite survive the grunge years, with even bands like Metallica doing away with it, but Urban and Paisley and Rascal’s Joe Don Mooney play the same kinds of fast, dramatic solos that you learned to expect in every song from the guitar-hero-rich metal era.

Chesterton quote

The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried. — G. K. Chesterton

Everybody believes in something

Everybody believes in something and everybody, by virtue of the fact that they believe in something, use that something to support their own existence.
- Frank Zappa

He ripped Himself loose from the power of death

Just as Jonah advised that one should toss him overboard into the sea in the midst of such violent tumult [so that] the sea would become calm. . .so also Christ Himself suggested in the counsel of the Holy Trinity that He wanted to assume human nature to stand in place of the human race and become a curse and cleansing sacrifice on its behalf. He Himself wanted to slash death’s throat so that the huge thunderstorm and huge swells of God’s wrath might be stilled, which then actually did occur. For the divine wrath which washed over all of us was stilled by the death of Christ. And thus, one Man died for all the people so that the entire world did not perish, John 11:50.

Furthermore, as Jonah was in the belly of the fish for three days and three nights, so also Christ was stuck for three days and three nights in the mouth of death. . . But, just as Jonah did not remain in the belly of the fish, so also Christ did not remain in the grave. Rather, He ripped Himself loose from the power of death on the third day, after it became impossible that He could be held captive by him (death), as Peter says in Acts 2:24. Just as Jonah preached repentance to the people of Nineveh after he had been rescued from the belly of the fish, so also Christ let repentance and forgiveness of sins be preached by His Apostles to the entire world after His resurrection, as He Himself testifies in Lk. 24:46.

(Johann Gerhard, Eleven Easter and Pentecost Sermons, pp. 8-9)
in
Gerhard—Theologian and Pastor, by Gaylin R. Schmeling

Issues Etc Marathon

Wednesday, April 14th will be the day, Issues, Etc. will do a live 24-hour marathon broadcast with two hours on various books of the Bible.

Starts at 4 p.m. Check out the video below.

Scrabble heresy

Scrabble's "rule change" gives purists the vapors. The classic board game kicks up outrage by permitting proper nouns. Is it anathema -- or PR stunt?

Two Interesting articles on cremation

The first is an interesting provocative article in the Christian Century: "The holy fire: Cremation: A practice in need of ritual" by Thomas Lynch, a funeral director.

My summary of the article:

The author argues that cremation is lacking because it short circuits the church's burial liturgy. he doesn't argue that cremation is wrong; he argues that it needs a liturgical accounting the body. Practically speaking, the article maintains, the church has allowed cremation to make the body vanish and with it the reality of death. My addition: when death disappears so does the need for resurrection and the need for Jesus.

A bit of the article itself (which, by the way tends a bit in a universalist direction)

The corpse, the grave, the tomb and fire became fixtures in the life of faith's most teachable moment. We learned to deal with death by dealing with our dead; to process mortality by processing mortals from one station to the next in the journey of grief. The bodiless obsequies that have become the standard practice in many mainstream Protestant churches represent not only a shift of mortuary fashions from custom and tradition toward convenience, but also a fundamental uncertainty about eternal life. They lack an essential task and manifest—to assist all pilgrims, living and dead, in making their way back home to God.


Article number two is a blog post at Mere Comments in which Russell D. Moore comments on a recent history of Christianity and its view of the relation between cremation and the foundational beliefs of the church. Read the whole post here.

Here is a bit:

MacCulloch, no conservative, establishes that the unanimous voice of the church, in every sector, was for burial over against cremation, and concludes the traditionalist case (that cremation is a pagan practice inconsistent with historic Christianity) is “unanswerable.”

For MacCulloch, there are several implications of the skyrocketing cremation rates. The first is that the theological and doxological claims against it, once held with unanimity, are not even discussed by cremation proponents. Arguments instead focus on public health, cost (and I would add the American evangelical response: “why not?”).

“The removal of a corpse’s final parting from a church, which is a community place of worship, a setting for all aspects of Christian life, to a crematorium, a specialized and often rather depressingly clinical office room for dealing with death” is a liturgical evolution of massive proportions, MacCulloch suggests.

Moreover, he argues, cremation also has profound doctrinal implications.

“Death is not so much distanced as sanitized and domesticated, made part of the spectrum of consumer choice in a consumer society,” he writes. “The Church is robbed of what was once one of its strongest cards, its power to pronounce and give public liturgical shape to loss and bewilderment at the apparent lack of pattern in the brief span of human life.”