December 2009
20 posts
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The Tent
For the First Sunday after Christmas, December 27, 2009 at Saint Francis Episcopal Church, Potomac, Maryland. Based on The Gospel according to John, 1: 14 – 18. [PDF] Et la parole a été faite chair, et elle a habité parmi nous, pleine de grâce et de vérité; et nous avons contemplé sa gloire, une gloire comme la gloire du Fils unique venu du Père. — Jean 1: 14 Growing up in Texas and New Mexico,...
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Nobody Understands This At All
For The Feast of the Holy Nativity of our Lord Jesus Christ, Christmas Eve, December 24, 2009 at Saint Francis Episcopal Church, Potomac, Maryland. Based on the Gospel according to Luke, 2: 1 – 20. [PDF] Under what circumstances were you born? I wonder. As for me, my parents were on their naugahyde couch in Fort Bliss, Texas, watching Major Seth Adams, Flint McCullough, and a cheerful, comical...
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What Sweeter Music
What sweeter music can we bring Than a carol, for to sing The birth of this our heavenly King? Awake the voice! Awake the string!
Dark and dull night, fly hence away, And give the honor to this day, That sees December turned to May.
Why does the chilling winter’s morn Smile, like a field beset with corn? Or smell like a meadow newly-shorn, Thus, on the sudden? Come and see The cause, why things...
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After Annunciation
This is the irrational season When love blooms bright and wild. Had Mary been filled with reason There’d have been no room for the child.
— Madeleine L’Engle
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Quoting Elwood
“Years ago, my mother used to say to me, ‘In this world, Elwood, you must be oh, so smart or oh, so nice.’ Well, for years I was smart. I recommend nice. And you may quote me.”
Elwood P. Dowd in Harvey, by Mary Chase. Hat tip to Pauli and Sandy Muir.
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WatchThis is the kind of thing seen where my folks live on Lake Gogebic in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Hat tip to Rick Galliher.
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Earl Cooley, smokejumper, died on November 9th,...
From The Economist:
Mr Cooley’s training for that first jump was minimal. He was fit enough: an outdoorsman raised in “awful” poverty in the Bitterroot mountains of Montana, after his family had lost their homestead in a bank collapse in the 1920s. From his hardscrabble boyhood he could hunt, set a trap-line, build with timber and make trails, skills he put to use for the Forest Service to see...
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Scots' Form in the Suburbs
“When somebody says ‘history teaches’ no matter what is said next that person is lying. History doesn’t teach anything. Historians do.” That is one of the crumbs that fell from Mark Noll’s table when I read Historiography with him at Wheaton College. Mark taught at Wheaton for 27 years. He is now the Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History at the University of...
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A sermon preached at Saint Francis Church 22...
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A Twinkle in God's Eye
I wrote these iambs for my son Gabriel, born 4 May 1989, to announce his birth.
What will you do, God, when I lie Unfurled at mother’s breast and sigh For breath? What will you do when my Face lights upon my father’s eye? I am your gift, the grace you ply; You give yourself away with me.
Am I to them Promethean, Unbound? Am I to you? Yet when Was I unknown to you who can Not miss a...
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Mena Hartvigh, 19 September 1912 — 26 November...
My sister Vicki writes:
How fitting that God would choose Thanksgiving Day to bring our wonderful Great Auntie Mena home to heaven! She so personified a grateful heart to everyone who knew her. Her cheerful way, her servant’s heart, her positive outlook in every part of her life could only come from someone truly thankful for all that God had given, even through the difficult times. When...
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Kevin Gallagher is Mr. Yale
Kevin Gallagher writing in the YDN:
Ludwig Wittgenstein’s quip that “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world” comes far too quickly to the lips of undergraduates who want to sound clever — but it’s completely correct. The words we have determine what arguments we can make and what counter-arguments we can imagine. And so a question about our terms for the sexes is inevitably a...