You never know what you’ll find when you pull up the carpet on a 114 year old house. Someone covered a hole with a peanut lid. We plan to leave it; the bookshelves will cover it anyway.
You never know what you’ll find when you pull up the carpet on a 114 year old house. Someone covered a hole with a peanut lid. We plan to leave it; the bookshelves will cover it anyway.
We’re pulling out the carpet in the front half of the house today. In every project Rachel and I have worked on she has three essential tools: needle nosed pliers, a crowbar, and a butter knife. If it can’t be done with one of those three, she says, it doesn’t need to be done.
Rachel is repainting the front half of our house. All the books (plus some records and CDs) had to be moved to the dining room. Quite a pile! I’ll be taking this opportunity to thin the collection and rearrange them before reshelving when the project is done.
My wife and I left the Holiness churches at the beginning of 2004 and joined the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod (LCMS). I was already a heavy reader of theology at that time (both books and blogs), which is partly why we left Holiness. Once I no longer had to hide my growing and serious disagreements with the churches of my childhood, I started my own blog. My first post was an explanation of why I left Holiness. The post was titled “The Given Life” after the Wendell Berry poem. I’ve thought about reproducing it on this blog but it’s so badly written that I can’t bear it. While I’m not a great writer now, I was much worse then.
Ten years after that I wrote an essay cleverly entitled “Ten Years Out of Fundamentalism.” That one is a bit less embarrassing.
Since this is the twentieth year since we left, I’ve often thought over the last few months of writing a new version of the essay but never got started. So rather than trying to write a single, long piece, I’ve decided to make it easy on myself and write a series of shorter posts, which I’ll gather under a category “The Given Life”, named after that first essay.
First, who are the Holiness people?
I’ll tell you now: you’ve never heard of them. You may think you have but you’re very likely wrong. Not only are they an obscure branch of fundamentalist Christianity, they’re fiercely independent and don’t have a single denominational identifier. Say what you will about the alphabet soup of Christian denominations; at least they’re identifiable.
The Holiness people are a group of independent, traditional Pentecostal Holiness churches.
I should note that I’m explaining the Holiness people as they were when I was among them 20+ years ago. I suspect, based on what I see of them today, that they are not quite so strict as they used to be.
I think that will serve as a decent introduction to the Holiness people. Feel free to add comments or questions, and if anything significant comes up I may edit this post to include it. The next post will shift to my experience in the Holiness churches.
We are five days from “pencils down” on the audit. It’s been a tough one. No problems, just a lot lot lot of detailed questions and follow-ups. My plan is to have a few four day weeks followed by a week off in October. Then we replace our general ledger about a month from now. Shew.
I won’t pretend that I have a sophisticated understanding of AI or a nuanced idea of where and how it can be safely used. I do, however, have some principles that will guide my own personal approach to the technology. And, unsurprisingly, they can be found in a passage from Wendell Berry (from Life is a Miracle):
And so I would like to be as plain as possible. What I am against–and without a minute’s hesitation or apology–is our slovenly willingness to allow machines and the idea of the machine to prescribe the terms and conditions of the lives of creatures, which we have allowed increasingly for the last two centuries, and are still allowing, at an incalculable cost to other creatures and to ourselves. If we state the problem that way, then we can see that the way to correct our error, and so deliver ourselves from our own destructiveness, is to quit using our technological capability as the reference point and standard of our economic life. We will instead have to measure our economy by the health of the ecosystems and human communities where we do our work.
It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.
Creatures before machines. That’s the crux of it for me. Machines are useful tools, but the health of creatures is far, far more important. We are in the age of unconstrained machines and we creatures are suffering for it.
And in this age of unconstrained machines, the old boundary markers are unimportant. What matters now is not whether you are liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican, Christian or Muslim or Buddhist or atheist or pagan. What matters now is this: are you on the side of life or are you a servant of machines? As a leftist pagan, I find more in common with some traditionalist conservatives than I do with mainstream liberals–despite having more agreement with them on the traditional political topics. Many mainstream liberals seem perfectly content to serve the machines and nod sedately along with whatever the “realist” technocrats say is necessary.
Creatures before machines.
Creatures before machines.
Creatures before machines.
Righteousness is a hell of a drug.
Tomorrow Rachel and I will have a slightly early equinox celebration. The persimmons I’ve been posting about will be part of it. Pictured below is the antique Foley food mill (technically a ricer) she used to process them. Also, she arranged some flowers from our garden inside a pumpkin.
Look at the beautiful color of that persimmon pulp
It’s persimmon season here in southern Indiana! The persimmons we have here (diospyros virginiana) are distinctive and sweet. You can eat them straight off the ground if you don’t mind brushing away a few insects. Rachel is processing a grocery bag full we gathered from my in-laws’ property today.
Ray Bradbury’s story of meeting Mr. Electrico is wonderful, wonderful, wonderful.
Disincentivize information warfare.
The thing about Rachel is, she doesn’t take long to decide on something—and then once the decision is done, it’s done. In the course of the last two hours, she’s decided we’re now tearing up all the remaining carpet downstairs and refinishing the wood floor underneath, plus painting the walls. 😂
It may seem, from the infant’s point of view, that he’s achieving something. But in fact, the mother is doing almost all the work. However, the reactions of that infant are part of the birth process. He doesn’t have to know what to do, though. But if you were a stillbirth, the birth would be a lot harder. So the aliveness of the baby being born is actually helpful to the birth process. And the same is true of our aliveness. And all of our anguished desperate and hopeful attempts are futile attempts to invent rituals and invent myths. They do not create the real rituals and the real myths that we will live in. But they are part of the creation of the rituals and the myths that we will live in.
The wheel of time has brought us back around to the earliest cathedrals, built into the landscape. We’ve returned to Lascaux Cave. The next stage of our spiritual development could just as easily take place—has probably already begun—in dark tunnels etched with strange graffiti, among the standing stones of unfinished overpasses. Initiates will follow hidden voices into cement chambers lit by candles; spray-painted sigils will hold mysteries for contemplation; the ceiling will disappear into the shadows above, stretching higher than the dome of any basilica, and it will be more than enough.
I saw a hawk pin down then carry off a pigeon in the garden today. A few days ago I saw a hawk (probably the same one?) on a power line overlooking our yard but all the birds were wisely hidden or gone. Today he must have gotten the drop on them.
Really interesting presentation this evening at the Lawrence County Museum about the history of newspaper printing—including physical copies of papers from the past few hundred years.
Content warning: paganism
I’ll be linking to this post (partly jokingly, partly seriously) when I write something about paganism.
It’s always tricky writing about religion online. Thankfully I’ve had no particularly bad encounters here–and I’m posting this only because I want to ensure that continues.
Why do I write about paganism?
A promise: I will never attempt to convert you.
An intention: I will remain curious about your beliefs and experiences. I’m a religion nerd and this interest is sincere and in no way patronizing.
Some background: I grew up in a sect of extremely fundamentalist Pentecostal Christianity. (Don’t worry: you’ve never heard of them.) From there I moved into the Lutheran church and then to the Episcopal church. After that I spent some time in what was basically a house church. Around 2014 I stopped calling myself a Christian. I was a Sam Harris-style atheist for a couple of years until I found it insufficient as a worldview. Since then, I’ve been a pagan.
Nevertheless, I’m not mad about Christianity. I’m also not hurt or attached to some secret sin or uninformed. Actually, I was pretty theologically sophisticated for a Christian layman. I probably know something about your particular Christian tradition. I say that because I want you to understand: it’s unlikely I’ll be converting back to Christianity.
At Thanksgiving one year, my wife’s uncle asked me which was my favorite football team. I said I wasn’t a sports fan. He then offered to explain the rules of football to help me out. I replied, “Oh, I know the rules pretty well. It’s just not for me.” Same for Christianity.
To sum up: I want to talk to you about religion in an attitude of friendly curiosity. If you post something about your religion that interests me, I may reply with a comment or a question meant to engage in that shared interest. I will not, however, make comments that are dismissive or sarcastic, even if I strongly disagree with something you’ve said. All I ask is the same in return.
If I ever make comments critical of monotheism or Christianity, it will be because I find it necessary to some point I’m making. I will always attempt, however, to make such criticisms in a fair way. Such criticisms will never be made from a place of mockery or superiority. I may not worship your god but–as much as it may annoy you to hear it put this way–I recognize your god as one god among the many and, therefore, worthy of respect. I know you can’t reciprocate that for theological reasons. We can, however, be friendly while remaining in disagreement.
The Old Farmers Almanac says that late summer drought conditions can lead to an early shutdown of the trees and a less colorful fall. It’s been dry here for weeks.
I’d like to find out more about this Divine Glory brand sandpaper I pulled off this old belt sander but all the search results are Christian allegories.
Dahlia with bees plus Pete, one of the neighborhood cats who sometimes stops by to look over our doings.
Showy sunflowers
For a few years now, our two cats have had nice high spots to get away from it all. From the chair they go up the stairs to the top of the bookcase. A piece of plywood holds up those white drapes (leftover from the previous owner) and forms a bridge to the other bookcase. Rory sleeps on the bridge.
“We have the wrong type of undead culture.” No ghosts; only zombies. Good post from Paul Watson.
John Michael Greer, A World Full of Gods: An Inquiry into Polytheism:
Much of polytheist theology can be seen as the application of ecological thinking to religion.
This snaps together several pieces in my mind. There has been a revival (relatively speaking) of polytheism in the years since the rise of ecological thinking. The dominant model of monotheism is of a king and the ruled, which has sometimes had what we might call poor historical consequences. A polytheism rooted in ecological thinking could be a shift from a hierarchical “great chain of being” to a relationship of reciprocity.
My friend and neighbor has a new book out today from Ancient Faith: Holy Fools: The Lives of Twenty Fools for Christ.