Actually, it was Abraham Lincoln who said that. I’ve seen the poster myself. Unmistakably his picture. You should check your sources, Liam. 
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Well I picked up my copy of the Odell book How To Do Nothing today and came across this in the introduction:
Nicknamed the “Grandfather” or “Old Survivor”, it’s Oakland only old-growth redwood left standing, a miraculous five-hundred-year-old holdover from the time before the Gold Rush.
I’ve driven by here on my way to other hikes in the redwoods for years and never knew about this. Apparently it is a twisted old thing perched in a difficult place both for it to grow and for loggers to access. That sent me looking for more info and eventually this video which is as much about the Eastbay Regional Park system of which I’m a fan and frequent visitor. But I haven’t yet paid my respects to this elder, an omission I intend to address soon. I considered posting it in the Creation Photos but find more reason to put it here. It’s about 20 minutes long. Got to make sure our chief naturalist @SkovandOfMitaze gets a chance to see this.
Not much insectlife, @LM77 but we do have a big, beautiful banana slug who makes a cameo.
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I’ll definitely watch it. YouTube , and Tubi ( which is a free streaming service ). Tons of good older films and random independent films including documentaries.
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Perhaps not a pithy quote to all, but to some…
“Though these bodies may indeed continue in their orbits by the mere laws of gravity, yet they could by no means have at first derived the regular positions of the orbits themselves from those laws.
Thus, this most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the council and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being” Sir Isaac Newton General Scholium to the Principia
Oh YAY!!! How delightful. I hope you enjoy O’dell’s book at least as much as I did. Her sense of place is nearly as deep as Berry’s.
Thank you for the video. I’m looking forward to watching past the first 5 minutes!
I was asking my girlfriend at work, who was an Environmental Studies major at U of C, if she had ever read anything by Berry, and she had, of course, non-fiction. She talked about buying the book at City Lights. This turned our conversation to our perceptions of such places. For me and my friend, Diane, SF and Berkley are mythical places in the realm of places like Valhalla, Olympus and Middle Earth. (I bet you didn’t know that, Mark.) Although this evening I did confirm that they do acctually on the U.S. map and are much closer together than I had imagined.
They are the places you read about in books like O’dell’s, where things happen that are famous and remarkable. And even the unremarkable and unfamous are known, because they happened or reside in that place. Diane and I are from places that are not, or when they have their 15 minutes of fame, it’s not good. We were wondering together, if the students she’d been in college with who were from the area had any awareness of the uniqueness of the fame of the place they were from and if they recognized the gaze from outside, and how they processed it. In spite of our very different life experiences, it was interesting that that same question was on both our minds - had been for quite a while.
Believe me I feel lucky to live here mostly for the natural beauty of the place and the generally benign climate. (The new fire season brings the number of seasons up to 3: wet, dry and burning.) As a navy brat I was born in Oakland at the now closed navy hospital. But we moved frequently and another perspective you acquire from that is to see local norms and mindsets as nominal. We moved from San Diego to Maryland where I discovered a windbreaker wouldn’t cut it in winter. I liked something about all the places we lived but the Bay Area is my home now and I never want to move again. (Every military brat should make a garden; real roots.). Living in a university town adds a lot too. We can go to talks there and the bot garden is world class. Plus many university folks live in town. One who I’ve chatted with more than most teaches Irish Lit and has written two books on James Joyce. We went to City Lights to hear her talk talk about her first one and she came to show of Lia’s at the Richmond Art Center. Oh and dogs can walk off leash almost everywhere in the East Bay regional parks. In the North bay almost no parks are open to dogs.
If you ever come out this way it would be fun to meet up.
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Absolutely though there may be differences in development or injury which might result in more than ordinary variation.
I tend not to think there is any centralized hive mind or linkage between beings we recognize as conscious that allows or causes them to act in concert for some greater purpose. I could absolutely be wrong about that but nothing I’ve seen, experienced or read has lead me to think otherwise.
But I do think we as organisms are processing much more life experience than we are ever aware of in our waking minds. Life would be overwhelmingly busy if we had to monitor all our life processes and adjust our breathing or heart rate deliberately. Or if we walked around absorbing all the detail of all the sense data we take in. We should be grateful that so much screening and prioritizing takes place on autopilot.
In addition to responding to our environment to procure what we need, maintain relationships and keep safe, our consciousness also provides us with a sense of continuity of self through time, an identity as an enduring unitary self. I think if that as a product of consciousness. But I suspect it can do more. For one it maintains a similar sense of an enduring self in those we are closest to and even in fictional characters in books and movies. Writers of fiction (which you and I are not but know exist) I understand develop a vivid imaginal awareness of the characters they create. I think this capacity which we all have to some degree is what I think allows people to develop and mai rain a relationship with a deity. But I don’t think it’s creation is arbitrary or deliberate. If is culturally transmitted and unconsciously created just the way our own identities are at a level beneath our waking state, another product of consciousness rather than our deliberate confabulation. How exactly the shared outline of the character of God gets defined I imagine evolves over time but I do think it serves a purpose.
Our capacity for representing the world in language allows us to imagine the outcomes for various courses of action -even sometimes novel ones- and to plan with others to carry them out. I imagine us as having evolved from a state in which our imaginal and communicative powers were far less powerful. Doing the right thing socially would have been more hard wired for us as it is for other primates. Of course some would be more dominant and others more docile. But as with dogs that would simply be the natural way of things and not a cause for resentment or unhappiness. A trade off our increased imaginal powers is to imagine alternatives to the natural way of things. In a world where anything can be imagined much becomes possible. With the natural checks and balances gone I believe belief in a higher power helped to put limits on what should be imagined in favor of the greater good. I think our psychic harmony required some means to restore balance and our obliging consciousness channeled energy into producing another product whose presence could be as real to us as what we take to be our self. Given that there are deeper levels of consciousness scaling down what comes to our attention for waking deliberation, I imagine this product could in fact actual interact with us as wiser and helpful.
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Mark, thanks for taking the time to put your thoughts together so clearly for me. This was really helpful, and you answered the question that was nagging me, as well as others I failed to think of. I need to read some parts over a few more times, I think, to make sure I am getting it all.
Hacking back lilac bushes today and weeding. I have been very negligent for a long while. So, I will be away from the forum much of the day.
Also found a population of fern in the wild part of our property today, where I don’t go in the summer once the grass is up and the mosquitos are bad (April to late September). I want to spend some time with one/some of my id (not ID) books out in the weeds, and see what I can figure out.
Getting back to listening to a wonderful book I had “dropped” before I finished; on doctrines of Communion. Beautifully written academic prose, and relates well to thoughts we shared related to your second poem.
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We love him because he first loved us."
1 John 4:19There is no light in the planet but that which proceedeth from the sun; and there is no true love to Jesus in the heart but that which cometh from the Lord Jesus himself. From this overflowing fountain of the infinite love of God, all our love to God must spring. This must ever be a great and certain truth, that we love him for no other reason than because he first loved us. Our love to him is the fair offspring of his love to us. Cold admiration, when studying the works of God, anyone may have, but the warmth of love can only be kindled in the heart by God’s Spirit. How great the wonder that such as we should ever have been brought to love Jesus at all! How marvellous that when we had rebelled against him, he should, by a display of such amazing love, seek to draw us back. No! never should we have had a grain of love towards God unless it had been sown in us by the sweet seed of his love to us. Love, then, has for its parent the love of God shed abroad in the heart: but after it is thus divinely born, it must be divinely nourished. Love is an exotic; it is not a plant which will flourish naturally in human soil, it must be watered from above. Love to Jesus is a flower of a delicate nature, and if it received no nourishment but that which could be drawn from the rock of our hearts it would soon wither. As love comes from heaven, so it must feed on heavenly bread. It cannot exist in the wilderness unless it be fed by manna from on high. Love must feed on love. The very soul and life of our love to God is his love to us.
“I love thee, Lord, but with no love of mine,
For I have none to give;
I love thee, Lord; but all the love is thine,
For by thy love I live.
I am as nothing, and rejoice to be
Emptied, and lost, and swallowed up in thee.”*
*Madame Jeanne-Marie Bouvier de la Motte-Guyon
Well … and what was it … “Table talk with Luther” or something like that where he did actually invite students and friends over to his place (probably to enjoy a meal and some beer) and then shoot the breeze?
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Merv, thanks for looking into the book. I hope you find much of value in it.
After our family’s experiences and those of others I know, I deeply appreciate Horton’s refusal to accept the common advice that we should seek to find what God wants us “learn from our suffering” and that Horton flatly states that God is not going to answer our questions about “why” but continues to tell us to trust Him, that He is trustworthy, that He loves us and that those are enough to meet our needs. The horrible burdens that these lift from our shoulders, when we can barely carry what we already have.
Horton did seem to me a very interesting mix of traditional, and yet some still very needed exhortation against what has become tradition too - along the lines you mention: of thinking that since God is sovereign, therefore all our suffering must be directly from him for some pedagogical or “higher meaning” purpose.
I was fascinated to see that he (Horton) followed what I think might be a minority suggestion among authors who address this: of distinguishing Elihu (the fourth friend of Job’s) from the prior three friends in terms of who got rebuked at the end. We’ve discussed this here before long ago, but a lot of people see all Job’s friends - including Elihu - all lumped together in God’s rebuke at the end, whereas some (including Horton) distinguish what Elihu said as being “spot on”. And it is technically true that in the last chapter of Job, only the first three friends are specifically named as needing to come back and “apologize to Job” as it were. So it may be left up in the air as to whether Elihu then can be considered a singularly commendable friend or a rebuked one for what he said. It’s always enlightening about people to see which way they choose to defend that and how they tease it apart then. Maybe that’s part of the genius of that book too.
Horton did stay the course on sticking with very rigid (and I would say relatively ‘modern’ - if we can call St. Anselm ‘modern’) atonement interpretations that contain content and assumptions I’ve learned now to hold at arm’s length, in terms of understanding of who God is. I didn’t hold that against him as most authors would probably choose to just “stay the presently rehearsed course” on those dogmas, especially if the author’s focus isn’t on that in the first place. But … as central and close as some of that is to what he was addressing, I would love to have more discussion with Horton about some of that.
But this book is part of all the needed antidote to the dismissiveness of present suffering that those just outside of that experience unintentionally heap on the sufferer.
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It’s been a few years since I read it, so I need to look back over Job. I’ll look back over the discussion of Job here, too. I don’t think I was paying attention to it, if I was around at the time.
Horton is Reformed and confessional, so I think many people from many not-particularly-confessional (like mine) or non-confessional backgrounds would find Horton’s theological logic pretty rigid.
I really have no solid understanding of Anabaptist traditions or Mennonite views on atonement (or anything else, I guess). So, I don’t know what doctrinal assumptions you may be working under and how yours may vary from the “standard issue” if such a thing exists. I’ll look back over the PSA discussion to see if there might be indicators. (I ended up just not paying attention to that one – as well as many others – when it felt like it was mostly noise. I need to learn to filter better/read more targetedly.)
I’ve been listening to Horton’s radio show, The White Horse Inn for a long time. And sometimes read the accompanying magazine (with different content) is Modern Reformation. It would be a one-way discussion, but you 'd at least find out more of his thoughts on questions you have. Whenever it comes up, I think you will find Horton uncharitable toward the Anabaptist tradition. Sorry about that. If there are ever shows or articles you need but can’t get, please, just say so. I have access.
Gee whiz, Merv! I can’t believe how much you and Mark D and many of the rest around here read (and retain) and process well. And that’s on top of reading in the Forum, thinking it over and writing more about it–regularly, frequently and well. So, thanks for taking the time on yet another book from another person confronting you with another title: Hey! This book has the answers I was looking for at the time. And on another response, too.
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If you enjoy the White Horse Inn you may also enjoy The Mortification of Spin podcast put out by Carl Truman, et al. It is a bit more relaxed that WHI, and so slightly less polished at times, but I really enjoy it.
Granted, it was better when Aimee Bird was a cohost but she was forced to leave (not by the hosts I might add) by the Christian platform that hosts the show. So you may like to dive into the archives.
Available on most good podcasting apps.
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Thanks, Liam!
In return, I’ll give you one, that I learned about from Aimee Byrd as well: Theology Gals. It’s a thrill to hear WOMEN involved in more than parenting concerns and being better wives.
Makes me want to shout!
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Oh nice. If you like hearing women talk theology*, check out Shealogians. Also Reformed - an very conservative (!) - but they put out some good stuff.
*and frankly there isn’t nearly enough choice in this area.
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Had to look up “who we are” on their website. This gave me a laugh.
We are twenty-something, with backgrounds in English and mansplaining.
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Well - he didn’t waste any powder or shot on small fry like us in this book anyway. It doesn’t bother me in the much to be among suspicious or hostile theologizers. In fact, strangely enough, many of us probably feel more at home among the fringes, and more ill-at-ease thinking how mainstreamed we’ve become.
Will look forward to any insights you share if you pick up on any reflections about Job and his friends.
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Regarding Job, I looked for a thread that might fit your description, but I eludes me. I’ll look back over that section of Horton’s book though. Also need to look over the PSA thread.
All when I have more brain power.
Liam, this from their “about us” warmed my dislocated little church librarian’s heart:
It started in the summer of 2016, when Summer Jaeger pontificated about the broken worldview Christian artists often employ in their poorly worded Amish romance novels and Joy the Girl from Apologia Radio couldn’t agree more.
Blockquote
This is the truth.
I am now a subscriber.
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