So Much to Think About

I am encouraged regarding the pandemic. We have gotten our first vaccine shot and are anticipating a gradual return to normal activities. Thankfully our return from Florida as been met with good weather. Hello Spring!

The eccentric kingdom of God
Richard Beck says,
“The eccentric Kingdom doesn’t claim territory over against the world. The eccentric Kingdom doesn’t erect walls to create a gated community… The eccentric Kingdom is the embedded, pilgrim, landless, possessionless, homeless, sojourning, itinerant missionary community called and commissioned to live lives of radical service and availability to the world.”

The church
“The church must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state. It must be the guide and the critic of the state, and never its tool.”
Martin Luther King, Jr

Pretty
My mom and dad both had terrible singing voices, but I would give anything to stand beside them in church and hear them again. We are a culture fixated on “pretty” which is fleeting and plastic and slick and fades with the seasonal fads. We miss what is beautiful because we have been conditioned to “pretty.” And we need to be aware of this and that is why I Love Bob Dylan. His voice is not pretty but man is it beautiful when he sings,
I was born here and I’ll die here against my will
I know it looks like I’m moving, but I’m standing still
Every nerve in my body is so vacant and numb
I can’t even remember what it was I came here to get away from
Don’t even hear a murmur of a prayer
It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there
Matt Redmond

Good things
When we turn good things into ultimate things, when we make them our greatest consolations and loves, they will necessarily disappoint us bitterly. “Thou hast made us for thyself,” Augustine said in his most famous sentence, “and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in Thee.” The 18th-century hymn writer John Newton depicted God as saying to the human soul, “These inward trials I employ from pride and self to set thee free, and break thy schemes of earthly joy that thou would find thine all in me.”
Timothy Keller
The above quote from Keller is from his article “Growing My Faith in the Face of Death. It is a worthy read.

Hot Take
Simon Maloy of The New Republic offers one definition of a hot take as “a piece of deliberately provocative commentary that is based almost entirely on shallow moralizing.” That’s not bad, but I think there are other forms of hot takes, and myriad other forms of takes more broadly. By a “hot take,” I don’t simply mean an unconventional or surprising opinion. Rather, I mean a style of commentary that parasitically feeds off someone else’s argument or work almost instantly.
Jonah Goldberg

Dependence
We need to embrace our dependence. We are creatures and not gods. And yet we cannot depend upon each other, not fully or completely. We are too needy to be sturdy platforms. Too prone to using each other for our own purposes and projects. Dependence is only safe with God, in the gift that requires no return. Grace is our only path toward sanity and joy.
Richard Beck

The Gospel
For the gospel is a a two-edged sword. Where it is proclaimed and heard, and not believed, it is a savor of death. It destroys the words by which men seek to make their leap into darkness tolerable. If what it gives in their place is rejected, man has nothing. Western civilization is the civilization which has heard and not believed–and now faces nothingness. 
Robert Jensen

Idolatry Is Always Polytheism
Once man has lost the fundamental orientation which unifies his existence, he breaks down into the multiplicity of his desires; in refusing to await the time of promise, his life story disintegrates into a myriad of unconnected instants. Idolatry, then, is always polytheism, an aimless passing from one lord to another. Idolatry does not offer a journey but rather a plethora of paths leading nowhere and forming a vast labyrinth.
–Pope Francis

Calculating a tragedy –
Josef Stalin once observed that, “The death of one is a tragedy, the death of a million is a statistic.” While dark and cynical, Stalin’s observation about human nature is fundamentally true. We attach meaning to narratives. The more people involved, the more abstract and difficult to relate to that narrative becomes, thus inviting doubt, disbelief, and a strange indifference. 
Stalin would use this quirk of human nature to his advantage during his reign of terror. Today, it just kind of explains why people lose their collective minds over a public shooting or a terrorist attack that kills a few, but their eyes glaze over and hit the back button when confronted with statistics of hundreds of thousands (or millions) killed by an invisible virus. 
Mark Manson

Emotivism
…because there is no shared moral framework in these national conversations, they end up not being conversations at all, with pros and cons evaluated based on a shared moral framework. Rather, they end up as staged shouting matches where we just yell at one another. [Aladastar] MacIntrye called this descent of ethics into shouting in the twenty-first century Western world “emotivism.” He described emotivism as the point you reach when “all morals are nothing but expressions of [personal] preference” or “expressions of attitudes or feelings.”
via Timothy Tennant

Conspiracy Mindset
The conspiracy theory is often the symptom of an underlying disease—a disease of hate or fear that robs a person of joy. The fierce anger and furious purpose of the conspiracy mindset is a hollow replacement for the peace and faith found not just in truth, but in truth communicated by a loving and empathetic family and friends. 
David French

Do we care enough about our angry relatives that we’re willing to love them back to spiritual health?
David French

LISTEN FOR THE WEEK

Still working on my funeral playlist. I like this one but I’m not it sure it will make the cut.