Some Good Petitions

I’ve been using John Baillie’s famous Diary of Private Prayer the last while. (Baillie died in 1960 and his prayer language can seem archaic–by turns charming and off-putting, not least because he writes before inclusive language. But I’m sure you will just translate as you go.) Here’s a particularly good set of petitions for certain days–not every day, to be sure, but some:

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Let me now go forth, O Lord my God, to the work of another day, still surrounded by Thy wonderful lovingkindnesses, still pledged to Thy loyal service, still standing in Thy strength and not my own.

Let me today be a Christian not only in my words but also in my deeds:

Let me follow bravely in the footsteps of my Master, wherever they may lead:

Let me be hard and stern with myself:

Let there be no self-pity or self-indulgence in my life today:

Let my thinking be keen, my speech frank and open, and my action courageous and decisive.

I would pray, O Lord, not only for myself but for all the household to which I belong, for all my friends and all my fellow workers, beseeching Thee to include them all in Thy fatherly regard. I pray also–

for all who will today be faced by any great decision:

for all who will today be engaged in settling affairs of moment in the lives of men and nations:

for all who are moulding public opinion in our time:

for all who write what other people read:

for all who are holding aloft the lamp of truth in a world of ignorance and sin:

for all whose hands are worn with too much toil, and for the unemployed whose hands today fall idle:

for those who have not where to lay their head.

O Christ my Lord, who for my sake and my brethren’s didst forgo all earthly comfort and fullness, forbid it that I should ever again live unto myself. Amen.

Wikipedia: until definition: ”’chiefly Scottish”’ to. →

Yes, Faithfulness DOES Include Effectiveness–and MAXIMUM Effectiveness

This post comes in response to people who raise a perennial issue, that of whether Christians should be concerned only with “faithfulness,” while “effectiveness” is seen by such folk to be merely a worldly concern we should set aside.

One friend simply put it that way: “faithfulness” means doing what God says, regardless of considerations of efficacy.

To such good people, and to you, I offer this revised version of a passage in my Making the Best of It: Following Christ in the Real World:

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Some Christians quite firmly maintain that “it is not our job to be effective—that’s God’s business—but to be faithful.” Alas, how convenient it is for certain Christians to fly the flag of faithfulness as their numbers dwindle, their evangelism languishes, and their social ministry remains unwelcomed by others. I grew up in a conservative tradition that reassured itself in this way: “We’re small, and uninfluential, and disparaged by others, but that’s just because we are so true to the gospel.” Nowadays I hear such rationalization also from those on the religious left, who congratulate themselves on their “prophetic faithfulness” even as they effect no change in the world worth mentioning.

Other people, however, are not rationalizing. They’re good people earnestly trying to live in the light of the Gospel. To them I say, I share your fears, but not your response to them.

Thanks for Reading!

As 2011 gives way to 2012, I want to raise a glass of Veuve Clicquot (I’m saving the Dom for my birthday in a week) to toast you, my faithful/occasional/hostile readers. WordPress tells me that this here site got 130,000 views this year and SiteMeter tells me that the blog averaged about 7500 visits per month. These statistics might mean something to you, but I’m afraid I’m still so ignorant about the blogosphere that I have no idea what they signify–except that some of you are out there reading, and that’s all I need to know.

Your comments on the blog and your e-mails to me off it tell me that what I’m writing is doing some of you some good, even as it is annoying others, a few to extremes. Sorry about the annoying: I’d much rather you just be convinced of the shining rightness of my views and cheerfully join the side of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. Failing that, however, I am sincerely grateful that you sound your disagreement with me forthrightly, even wittily, and I trust you feel you are being heard when you do. I have even been known to change my mind, or at least my tone, once in a while–although let’s not make a big thing about that or I’ll lose my blogger’s license.

This month marks the fifth anniversary for this weblog. Yes, you ought to celebrate by opening your own bottle (or can, or keg, or jug) and reading meditatively through the previous 300+ posts as a sure way to becoming wiser, better informed, and more spiritual–or, at least, soundly convinced that you’ll never, ever read this dreck again. (You won’t need to read all 300+ for that latter outcome, however.)

My sage wife thinks I spend too much time blogging, and I have indeed cut back some this past year. But it is a lot of fun interacting with you, I hope to interact with more (come on, lurkers, how about at least hitting the “Like” button or saying, “Yes, Professor Stackhouse, you have put the matter so pithily I have begun cross-stitching it on my pillowcase”–is that too much to ask?), I enjoy finding out what I think about things by writing on them, and it gives me the opportunity to sit down in a chair, an experience otherwise quite rare in my profession.

So onward, comrades, fellow travelers, sympathizers, and deadly nemeses! Here’s to continuing the conversation into 2012–unless Jesus returns tonight, in which case we’ll continue the conversation, yes, but in far more salubrious circumstances…

As St. Nicholas Would Agree, So Much More and Better

Friend Dennis Danielson, professor of English at the University of British Columbia, sent along this passage from the seventeenth-century English clergyman Thomas Adams to raise our sights above the tinsel, presents, food, and fun of a “Santa Festival” to what is really on offer at Christmas:

How the Baby Protects Us

There is nothing like truth to extinguish pride: Here is the way things really are. Here is the way I really am. This is what really matters, and that is what doesn’t. This is the real source of my life and strength, and that is really not.

There is nothing like truth to ground faith and foster hope: Here is the way things really are. Here is what I can be, and shall be. This is who controls things, and that is who and what really doesn’t. This is the real source of my confidence and aspiration, and that is really not.

There is nothing like truth to awaken and magnify love: Here is the way things really are. This is who loves me and will always love me. This is who really matters, and that is what doesn’t. This is the real source of  joy and peace, and that really isn’t.

The Baby is the Truth. Look at him. See what he is, and what he means. Behold the Statement, the Message, the Word: Here is the way things really are.

Thus may resentment give way to gratitude, envy to prayer, irritability to solicitude, selfishness to care, ambition to enthusiasm, self-pity to patience, anxiety to trust, distraction to purity, confusion to vocation, and loneliness to love.

As Walter Hilton reminds us, in the Bible the truth is a shield, a shield against pride, and doubt, and worry, and all manner of temptation to feel and think and speak and act as if the world were other than it truly is. The Baby protects us from all that as we tear our eyes away from what frightens or seduces us to stare at the Truth of our Universe, to read the Love Letter from God enveloped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger.

“Let us go now to Bethlehem and see this thing that has taken place, which the Lord has made known to us.” Let us go now, and on Christmas Eve, and on Christmas Day, and on every day, world without end. Amen.

“I Want to Be in Jerusalem”: More from Walter Hilton

I’m very much enjoying David Jeffrey’s edition of Walter Hilton‘s 14C spiritual writings. Today I came across this parable and wanted you to hear it, too:

There was once a man who wanted to go to Jerusalem. Because he did not know the way himself, he went to another man he expected would know the way, and asked him how he should proceed to come to that city. The other man said to him that he could not hope to get there without great difficulties and much travail, because the way was long and imperiled by hordes of thieves and robbers, as well as many other hindrances such as can beset a traveler. And there was a great diversity of routes, so it seemed, leading there, along which people were killed and despoiled every day, and prevented from coming to their coveted destination. Nevertheless, one sure way existed. Whoever would take that road and keep to it, the man guaranteed that he would come to the city of Jerusalem, and never lose his life through murder or peril along the way. True, it was likely that he would be robbed and beaten a number of times, and suffer much distress in the going, but he would keep his life safe.

All We Need Is Love–but Like This

I’ve been reading the fourteenth-century spiritual advisor Walter Hilton of late. He seems just the right sort of advisor: realistic, patient, encouraging, and yet uncompromising when it comes to what it means truly to follow the path of Jesus Christ.

In a season of the year in which it is easy to get sentimental and silly, Hilton offers this powerful diagnostic tool to assess whether we really do love each other, and particularly whether we can say to Jesus that we are obeying his repeated commandment to love our enemies:

What it really comes to is this: if you are not stirred up against such a person in anger while faking an outward cheer, and have no secret hatred in your heart, despising him or judging him or considering him worthless; if the more shame and villainy he does to you in word or deed, the more pity and compassion you show toward him, almost as you would for someone who was emotionally or mentally distressed; and if you are so compelled by love that you actually cannot find it in your heart to hate him, but instead you pray for him, help him out, and desire his amending (not only with your mouth, as hypocrites do, but with a true feeling of love in your heart): then you will be in perfect charity toward your fellow Christian.

Well, that’s a pretty tall order. But then Brother Hilton presses his point with an Example that smacks us in the chest:

Top Ten Christmas Albums

Just in time for Christmas shopping, and just in case you’ve missed them, here are some suggestions from the World’s Largest Family Collection of Christmas albums:

Carolyn Arends, The Irrational Season–This album combines the whimsical freshness and realism of Carolyn’s own compositions mixed with some well rendered classics in her beguiling folk style. (“Do Not Be Afraid,” however, is a song for all year ’round: powerfully comforting.)

Steve Bell, The Feast of Seasons–This was my first “favourite Christian Christmas album,” and it’s still one of my favourites. The T. S. Eliot-evoking “Old Sage,” the plaintive “Magnificat,” the smooth guitar solos–no one who likes music can’t like this album.

Bob Bennett, Christmastide–just listened to it again this morning, and it’s a multifacted jewel of composition, arranging (way to go, Roy Salmond!), and performance. It takes several listens to get into the subtle layers of this deceptively “folky” album.

Canadian Christians and the New Office of Religious Freedom

Canadian readers of this weblog will know that the current federal government has been considering establishing an Office of Religious Freedom. The Cardus Centre for Public Policy, a Christian think tank, got a handful of us to write articles for a special publication aimed at the politicians, civil servants, and other interested parties. The journal was published today, and you can look for a print or e-copy here.

Remembering C.S.L.

Many Americans look back today to the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963. I was too young for the event to have any impact on me, although having read about it later, I had a thrill of horrified recognition when Kari and I once took a wrong turn in Dallas years ago and I found myself suddenly looking up at the Texas Book Depository from exactly the spot where JFK took the first bullet.

Many more people around the world, however, have been touched by C. S. Lewis, who died the same day. In his memory, I set out here an edited excerpt from my chapter on “Uncle Jack” Lewis in Making the Best of It:

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I grew up in a home in which C. S. Lewis was revered. My parents bought a book that depicted Lewis’s life through photographs and text, and I remember musing over it as a thirteen-year-old already entranced by the idea of “university.” I had moved through school quickly and was already in Grade 10. High school had few intellectual charms for me. But university: that’s where cultivated people sipped tea—or even wine! (I was raised in an abstinent tradition)—and conversed wisely and wittily about great things. The Gilbert and Kilby volume, C. S. Lewis: Images of His World, nicely filled in my mental pictures of such life with photographs of Lewis’s college rooms, exteriors of Magdalen College and the “dreaming spires” of Oxford, and the High Street on which walked the demigods of one of the world’s great universities.

Is LinkedIn Worthwhile to You?

I’m a “late adopter.” I used to be an early adopter, but that was between 1985 and 1995. I got my first Mac in 1985–the “Fat Mac,” the big one, the one with 512K of RAM instead of the original 128K. And I was the first PhD student at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago to petition to write my comprehensive examinations on a personal computer. I was turned down, of course: the committee was worried, in those early days, that I would bring in a library via floppy disks. Instead, they left me alone in a room for four hours, on each of five days, during which I could have simply carried in dozens of books and notepads without anyone noticing…. The next student who asked, of course, was allowed to do so. Yes, I was a groundbreaking, trail-blazing pioneer in those olden days, sonny.

But a decade of trying to keep up with technological changes that weren’t always for the better, at least not for me, soured me on perpetually lusting after The Next Next Thing. So I’ve hung back, needing to be convinced of new ways to spend time typing on a keyboard.

My sons first prompted me to get on Facebook, so I am, and I enjoy seeing photos of friends here and there (my main use of it). One of my former students convinced me to start a weblog, and I’ve enjoyed that a lot. Friends of Len Sweet talked me into Tweeting a year ago, and I’ve enjoyed that, too, although my followers are few (but of exceedingly high quality, I’m sure): @jgsphd.

Now I’ve finally succumbed to LinkedIn, since lots of people I like and respect are on it–and I’m so easily led. I’ve caught up with the several dozen invitations I’ve been sent over the last while. But I’m not at all sure what the point of it would be for a bloke like me.

So what do you use LinkedIn for? Has it helped you much, or at all? Could it be useful to people like me, or is it really a business-0riented application?

More on the Math GRE for PhD Students

I’ve written to friends today in response to the helpful pushback I received in the comments on my original post. Here’s what I’ve learned, in a kind of executive summary:

1. I was wrong to say that the GRE Math score doesn’t matter in philosophy. In departments that stress the analytical (rather than the continental) mode of philosophy, the Math part of the GRE counts–as so much of analytical philosophy is conducted in a quasi- (and sometimes not-so-quasi) mathematical manner.

Still, there is something lazy, I think, and even perverse about leaning on a test that requires master’s students in philosophy to blow the dust off their high school math books and bone up on the finer points of basic calculus and algebra in order to get entrance into a philosophy doctoral program. Students should be working forward, not backward. (None of my philosophical colleagues disagreed with me on this point, and basically shook their heads and said, “But that’s the way it is.”)