Tim Keller, Trespassing, and Tai Shan

Tim Keller on Preaching the Word and Quoting the Voice in the NYTimes Sunday: “The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and his compulsion is our liberation.” Scott has a capture of the front page. Pretty cool, as he says.

Redeemer and TVC, a Redeemer plant, are engaged, relevant to their immediate cultures, and they don’t water down the gospel message. I love that the people I know at these churches struggle. They know personal loss, and they are learning redemptive joy. They’re real.

Now I go to Rez here in DC. We were at retreat in VA all weekend. It’s a very young church. I remember thinking, This church is in the first blush of God’s blessing. There’s contentment, unity, a great deal of hope. May this season be long. It’s also full of southerners, which translates to hospitality, friendliness, manners, heck, even chivalry (Joshua says he saved my life this weekend–I didn’t notice, but he told me immediately after it happened, so I’m inclined to believe him). I find myself struggling more with what not to say down here. Mandy, who is from Mississippi, said I might not like it there, because people are so polite you never know what they really think. But God’s people work for graciousness, and I hope it will be shown me, too, as I adjust. Never did have much of a filter. Thank God for the instruction to speak the truth in love (Ephesians 4:1-16).

Retreats are for rest in God, and in a very communal weekend, I got mine mostly when I went off by myself walking on some pasture surrounding the retreat center. I was looking for a hiking trail, but I couldn’t find it, so instead climbed over a downed section of barbed wire fence and crossed through some fields. I like to pretend to be intrepid sometimes, and I kept thinking someone might come out with a shotgun and ask me why I was trespassing on their property, but nobody ever did. I think that makes me the city hick, actually. It was pretty, the sun just over the horizon, pine groves behind me, flattened brush, a few farmhouses, nobody in sight. I like open spaces.

Shawei and Ed are visiting from New York in the midst of all my packing. We left the house at 7:30 this morning to go visit the Giant Panda cub, Tai Shan, at the National Zoo just down the street.

Cute, eh? He’s quite big, now. Apparently he was the size of a stick of butter when he came out last summer and his mom didn’t eat for two weeks while she held him in her paw, close to her chest. This morning, I watched him roll on his back eating green bamboo leaves, climb trees and his mother, and follow her around. I keep thinking that he is going to be traumatized when they return him back to China without Mei Xiang. He doesn’t know anyone else.

Truman Capote

I saw Capote today after finishing In Cold Blood. I have no words for the effect of the simultaneous intimacy and arm’s length with which Capote describes the calmly executed murders of four family members in a quiet Kansas town–the victims, the town, the hunt, the killers, the psychology. The movie was affecting, but the precision of the book’s tone was so fine that I believe my vision was colored.

As I watched Capote illustrated on the large screen in often unflattering form, I realised that the equanimity of his writing was enhanced for me by the cinematic portrait of an author ruthlessly, quietly circling his prey, uncertain of–and potentially unconcerned with–his own humanity. Capote works to keep the killers alive on death row so that he can continue interviewing them. He sees them as intensely human, but he is ultimately more attached to the brilliance that will meet his artistry of them. When their appeals drag out for years, he says they are torturing him.

After a period of intense study with the killers, he says to Harper Lee that it is as though one of the killers and he were raised in the same house, only one day Perry Smith woke up and went out the back door, and he walked out the front. A disinterested way of saying, “There but for the grace of God go I.”

Private: The struggle for Islamic identity

There is something sad and grave about this article from the NYTimes, the interior of a world rending apart, voices in the wilderness under arrest, nothing is easy: Furor Over Cartoons Pits Muslim Against Muslim.

And from the LATimes, a compelling article from an American Muslim of Pakistani ancestry.

The second truth — one that the West needs to come to grips with — is that there is no such human persona as a “moderate Muslim.” You either believe in the oneness of God or you don’t. You either believe in the teachings of his prophet or you don’t. You either learn those teachings and apply them to the circumstances of life in the country you have chosen to live in, or you shouldn’t live there.

[…]

In fact, the most glaring truth is that Islam’s mobsters fear the West has it right: that we have perfected the very system Islam’s holy scriptures urged them to learn and practice. And having failed in their mission to lead their masses, they seek any excuse to demonize those of us in the West and to try to bring us down. They know they are losing the ideological struggle for hearts and minds, for life in all its different dimensions, and so they prepare themselves, and us, for Armageddon by starting fires everywhere in a display of Islamic unity intended to galvanize the masses they cannot feed, clothe, educate or house.

Keep reading.

Related posts:
Jihad on cartoons ridiculing Mohammed
Violence over cartoons escalates
The gospel of peace
Just the fuse
This is completely out of control
On democracy across borders

Cheese, landmines, the stuff that wears you out

“Go to England if you are going to do that to cheese!” (Anne-Laure, who is French, to Laurel, who was aggressively spreading my favorite, Humbolt Fog, on a seeded loaf, after we ganged up on her for planning a honeymoon in England)

“You can’t even cross the street; I don’t trust you not to hit a land mine.” (Steve, on my potential travel plans)

“Any idiot can face a crisis. It’s the day to day living that wears you out.” (Anton Chekhov)

Maintaining Religious Freedom

Review of Seamus’s The Right to Be Wrong at the Washington Times and here.

She can’t stop cooking

Yesterday, Apryl started cooking at 2pm, right after church. She made:

• braised pork shoulder with red wine, grapes, and dried figs over scallopped potatos and onions
• steamed mussels with aioli
• squash with the last of the Armenian paprika
• spicy sauteed shrimp
• quartered tomatoes
• chilled leeks with vinaigrette
• roasted garlic and mushroom crostini
• and by special request from Nicolas, incredible financiers (from scratch!)

And she is coming over this morning to make brunch with the ham and cheeses that Katie got from Murray’s. I told her I was meeting with my prayer partners this afternoon, and she said, Oh, good! I’ll make them lunch.

I’m worried she’s depressed. Just kidding.

We screened “Being There,” with Peter Sellers and Shirley Maclaine last night. Steve said it was what “Forrest Gump” tried to be. He was right. and it was funny.

Now Dorothy is having breakfast midtown, Tom is late for his acting class in favor of reading us poetry out loud, and Gabe is lying on my sofa refusing to listen to Haydn because she says it’s like being at work. I am no longer jealous of professional musicians. No Haydn in the morning? What kind of existence is that?

She can’t stop cooking

Yesterday, Apryl started cooking at 2pm, right after church. She made:

• braised pork shoulder with red wine, grapes, and dried figs over scallopped potatos and onions
• steamed mussels with aioli
• squash with the last of the Armenian paprika
• spicy sauteed shrimp
• quartered tomatoes
• chilled leeks with vinaigrette
• roasted garlic and mushroom crostini
• and by special request from Nicolas, incredible financiers (from scratch!)

And she is coming over this morning to make brunch with the ham and cheeses that Katie got from Murray’s. I told her I was meeting with my prayer partners this afternoon, and she said, Oh, good! I’ll make them lunch.

I’m worried she’s depressed. Just kidding.

We screened “Being There,” with Peter Sellers and Shirley Maclaine last night. Steve said it was what “Forrest Gump” tried to be. He was right. and it was funny.

Now Dorothy is having breakfast midtown, Tom is late for his acting class in favor of reading us poetry out loud, and Gabe is lying on my sofa refusing to listen to Haydn because she says it’s like being at work. I am no longer jealous of professional musicians. No Haydn in the morning? What kind of existence is that?

Saturday and Sophie Scholl

We saw Sophie Scholl at the Film Forum tonight. It was very good. Most of the screenplay was constructed from transcripts of Gestapo interrogations (the precision!) and her trial (hystrionic!–the Nazis, not her–one reviewer said it was so mad as to be unbelievable, were it not verified by transcripts). The director said in an interview, “As a child, Sophie Scholl had a picture of Hitler in her room. Her father didn’t force her to take it down. He just said that if she wanted to hang up his picture, she’d better make sure she knew all about the man. She went and found out, and she took the picture down herself.”

I was sort of taken aback by the overt presentation of her Protestant faith. It’s clear she never waivers from her beliefs, even when she is afraid, because she has the conviction of goodness in God, the belief that there is something worth dying for, the knowledge that what we have here on earth is the temporary shadow of what is to come. She says to her parents when they come to see her on the day of her execution that they will meet in eternity, and it’s not even all that hokey. She just means it. It doesn’t make the separation from her parents, or the sorrow of loss, any better, it only gives it sense.

I could hardly ever see such an uncynical presentation of belief in any American film. Maybe all this reflects is just the truth that all Christians are sinners, or maybe the televangelists and the politics (and our own inevitable daily hypocrisy, seen without grace or mercy by the viewer) ruined it for us, but in most American films, Christian clergymen and believers are hypocrits, deluded, evil, or all three; occasionally you get the humanistic saint, which isn’t much better. The last American film I saw that had a reasonable portrayal of clergy was Footloose, with John Lithgow as the uptight, law and order clergyman father who realises he has gone too far in his attention to the law when parishioners respond by attempting to burn offensive books; it’s more realistic to my experience because his character is at least sincere, and learns. We stumble finding our way, but at least it didn’t caricature the search.

The rest of the day started delightfully with Apryl bringing Claude’s croissants by, and coffee from the new Bialetti. Dorothy decided to get her second haircut in two weeks while waiting for me at Amy’s Fringe. We picked up Nicolas, Apryl, and Steve again in Nolita and LES, including stops at Mayle (of course), Eileen’s Cheesecake, Economy Candy, and a mad flurry at Lola y Maria on Rivington (where I found yet another slightly off-kilter silk shirt to wear under my uptight suits–I just get bored with The Uniform). Some of my favorite neighborhood walking.

Heard and read in the last 24 hours:

• “They have Oreos dipped in chocolate. That’s a little redundant, but….” (Nicolas)
• “It was ideal apple-eating weather; the whitest sunlight descended from the purest sky, and an easterly wind rustled, without ripping loose, the last of the leaves on the Chinese elms.” (In Cold Blood, Truman Capote)

Oh, and more Dutch Blitz has convinced me that, much to my shame, I can compete with the madness.

95-10 Initiative

The 95-10 Initiative is sponsored by Democrats for Life of America. It aims to reduce abortion rates by 95% in the next 10 years.

I haven’t read about it very closely, but you can, here. The initiatives appear to focus on educational and economic solutions.

The abortion debate has a wide spectrum of positions, and I am very curious who will join this initiative, because it promotes contraception education and other programs that many abstinence-only pro-lifers have traditionally opposed. There are also plenty of pro-choicers who believe abortion to be a moral wrong and that we should work to reduce the rates of abortion. Those ranks are the swing vote here, I think.

Some in the pro-choice camp argue that there is nothing morally wrong with abortion and this is part of the argument that it should be legal. I wonder whether they will feel that supporting an initiative to reduce abortion hurts their position (after all, if there is nothing wrong with abortion, why try to reduce them?). The more interesting question is whether Republican pro-lifers will stand with a Democratic movement that is not working to make abortion illegal but will clearly reduce abortions.

Bodies of fetuses, newborns clog Harare’s sewers

From CNN:

HARARE, Zimbabwe (AP) — The corpses of at least 20 newborn babies and fetuses are found each week in the sewers of Zimbabwe’s capital, some having been flushed down toilets, Harare city authorities said, according to state media Friday.

Town Clerk Nomutsa Chideya said the babies’ remains were found among a wide variety of waste and garbage cleared by city council workers unblocking sewers and drains in Harare. “Apart from upsetting the normal flow of waste, it is not right from a moral standpoint. Some of the things that are happening now are shocking,” the state Herald, a government mouthpiece, reported Chideya as saying.

Acute shortages of revenue and gasoline in the nation’s worst economic crisis since independence in 1980 have crippled public utilities and garbage collection services across Zimbabwe.

Hospital fees and charges for scarce medicines have soared. Church and charity groups blame economic hardships for an increase in illegal back-street abortions.

Chideya said workers removed at least 20 tons of sand from sewers every day. Inflation is running at 613 percent and many impoverished Zimbabweans, unable to afford cleaning materials or detergents, use sand to scour cooking pots and household dishes.

Salt is also used as a substitute for toothpaste.

Plug: Feminists for Life, which addresses the reasons that women choose abortion, including sponsoring the Elizabeth Cady Stanton Pregnant and Parenting Student Service Act, which would provide funding to student parents before, during, and after pregnancy in areas like student health care and family housing.