— Aaron Zimmerman
Q171: Try Harder
"[...] so many pulpits are filled with preachers who are telling one-legged people to run faster and jump higher."
Q170: The White Horse
"[...] hasty and ad hoc decrees that addressed immediate national problems without taking the time to reflect on and consider the eternal principles of justice were fated to end in villainy and abuse. Only those laws that had been founded on the eternal principles of justice, had stood the test of time, had been passed on from generation to generation, and had received the approval of the wisest counsellors should be enacted and enforced by a just king."
— Ben Merkle
— and —
"And though skies alter and empires melt,
This word shall still be true:
If we would have the horse of old,
Scour ye the horse anew."
— G. K. Chesterton
These (and some other recent quotes) have come from Ben Merkle's life of King Alfred the Great called The White Horse King. I recommend it to you highly.
SQF Radio #7
How 'bout some music? Here's SQF Radio #7. (Spin the big list here.)
- Sufjan Stevens - Casimir Pulaski Day. A sad song if ever there was one. "Oh, the glory that the Lord has made, and the complications you could do without...":
- Blitzen Trapper - Stranger in a Strange Land. I'd stop putting Blitzen Trapper on these lists if they'd just stop writing excellent songs. They refuse to do so, however, so here you go. Some great lines in this song. If there is ever a film-student type documentary on the band, I think "All My Love Songs Fall on Wasted Ears: the Music of Blitzen Trapper" would be an awesome title. Also, can we all get together and have Bob Dylan cover this?
- Counting Crows - Mercy. Speaking of great lines, I nearly wore this song out when it was released, just to hear the line, "but there is a train bound for Gilead" line over and over. If you need some new listening material, you could do far worse than the band's recently-released album of covers.
- Spirit Family Reunion - Alright Prayer. Note to Spirit Family Reunion: you're doing it right. They are a New York-based band, and I'm not even sure they've released an album yet, but they combine bluegrass, Americana, folk, and old-time gospel influences into some feel-good music. Here's a sample:
Post-Christian Justice
Al Mohler on how "post-Christian" culture is confused about criminal justice (in light of the Breivik trial in Norway):
Full article...
ht: Vitamin Z
And yet, in another statement from his commentary on this text, Westermann points straight to the reason that a post-Christian culture loses its moral confidence in the punishment of murderers. He states: "A community is only justified in executing the death penalty insofar as it respects the unique right of God over life and death and insofar as it respects the inviolability of human life that follows therefrom."
Once those convictions and moral intuitions are lost, the death penalty no longer makes sense. Eventually, even the idea of punishment itself loses all cultural credibility.
Full article...
ht: Vitamin Z
Monumental failure?
Michael J. Lewis on the problems with recent monument-building in the U.S.:
"A painful literalism set in, which is hostile to figurative language in speech and to abstract allegory in art. Nowadays we tend to think literally rather than literarily, which explains why Frederick Hart had to portray the American military experience in Vietnam by means of three men of three distinct races—and why a women’s memorial was subsequently added. The fear of leaving someone or something out is hostile to the allegorical impulse, which seeks not to itemize but to generalize, and to speak not specific truths but great truths. It is not surprising that a culture ill at ease with the notion of absolute truth would find it very difficult to make monuments that show urgency and conviction."Full essay...
Q166: The Rain King
Just finished Saul Bellow's Henderson the Rain King, and here are some quotes that stood out:
"[...] in an age of madness, to expect to be untouched by madness is a form of madness."
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"A brave man will try to make the evil stop with him. He shall keep the blow. No man shall get it from him, and that is a sublime ambition."
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"Oh, death from what we do not want is the most common of all the causes."
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"[...] if I wasn't going to abide by that one sentence, what good would it do to read the entire book?"
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"[...] it's love that makes reality reality. The opposite makes the opposite."
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"More or less the same fear, more or less the same desire for thousands of generations. Child, father, father, child doing the same. Fear the same. Desire the same. [...] Well, Henderson, what are the generations for, please explain to me? Only to repeat fear and desire without a change? This cannot be what the thing is for, over and over and over. Any good man will try to break the cycle."
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"But maybe time was invented so that misery might have an end. So that it shouldn't last forever? There may be something in this. And bliss, just the opposite, is eternal? There is no time in bliss. All the clocks were thrown out of heaven."
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"The repetition of a man's bad self, that's the worst suffering that's ever been known."
Happy Easter
" [...] we rejoice in the fact that it was in the beginning that our Lord cried out it is finished."
— Douglas Wilson
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