My most recent claim to snooty self-righteousness...

What exactly IS Duck Dynasty, anyway?

Chesterton answers the question, "What's wrong with Islam?"

"It is a test of a good religion whether you can joke about it."

Are You Certain?

"These are only hints and guesses,

Hints followed by guesses;

And the rest is prayer, observance, discipline,

Thought and action.

The hint half guessed, the gift half understood,

Is Incarnation."

"The Dry Salvages" T. S. Eliot

Alert to: Church Pastoral Selection Committees

Martin Luther reminds us: "God rides lame horses and carves rotten wood."

Praise be to God!

Don't hold your breath!

The Best Book I Never Wrote (yet) will be titled: Putting Things Off: A Procrastinator's Guide to Getting Things DONE.

Harvesting Hen Fruit, Big Time

We got ten eggs today, which is a new record from our fourteen (we assume all to be) hens. Ginger commented on what a miracle it is that a big, nourishing, hard thing would form in those little bodies every day! We enjoyed an article from the Mason County Journal, dated November 5, 1909, titled "Mason County Hen Fruit." It gives compete feeding instructions for keeping your laying hens producing throughout our long, short-day winters. To paraphrase the Proverbist, there are now five things too wonderful for me, including the way of an egg from a hen.

Listen to C. S. Lewis on the radio

Our thanks to Peter Lund for this link to rare BBC footage of C. S. Lewis reading a selection from Mere Christianity.

February Book Talk

The Duckabush Study Group is reading C. S. Lewis's Mere Christianity this month. First delivered as radio talks 65 years ago, this collection of essays influenced an entire generation of English speaking people toward the gospel. How does it hold up today? Have Lewis's comments turned out to be prophetic? And will younger people, whose thinking tends to be shaped more by images than words, benefit from being introduced to Lewis?
As you read, make lots of notes, write down your questions and comments, and come to the Mason County Christian School computer lab on Tuesday, February 17, from 7 until 8:30 p.m. to join the discussion.
If you don't plan to be a part of the February event, but want to read ahead, in March we will be reading Jean Vanier's Community and Growth. Vanier writes from a context of mentally disabled adults living in Christian community in homes all over the world. This book will stretch you to ask how his hard-won insights into relationships can be applied in our own homes and churches.

Christmas is the first step.

"Christmas is the first step in our redemption. It prepares the Christian mind and heart for the other salvific events celebrated during the spring-the death and Resurrection of our Lord. As the Christian calendar of the West has always supposed, Advent and the birth of Christ form an appropriate beginning of the year of grace."
Patrick Henry Reardon, Touchstone Magazine. December 2008, p.27

To Sarah Palin from Emily Dickinson

"I'm Nobody! Who are you?
Are you--Nobody--too?
Then there's a pair of us!
Don't tell!! They'll banish us--you know!

How dreary--to be--Somebody!
How public--like a Frog--
To tell your name--the livelong June--
To an admiring Bog!"

A Serious Church Growth Strategy

Three "Don't"s and one "Do".

1. Don't name it.
If a church program or activity needs a name in order to flourish (or even make sense), it probably falls into that spacious category of marginally effective things that fill our lives, leaving no space to love our neighbors. (The only exceptions are small w worship and small i instruction and small f fellowship.)

2. Don't clone it.
Don't plagiarize, don't copy what worked at Willow Creek or Saddleback or Walla Walla or on-line or anywhere else. When we try to reproduce what may (or may not) have "worked" somewhere else, we shield ourselves from that desperate dependence on God's Spirit that is a pre-requisite to blessing.

3. Don't sell it.
Our fundamentalist forefathers were probably wise in insisting that the free gift of the gospel not be compromised by buying and selling. If you have to charge money for it, is it germane to the good news, or just another convenient concession to consumers?

OK, if we can't name it or clone it or sell it, what is left? What can we do? What must we do?

1. Love your neighbor.