Gardener

The cartoon in today’s Sioux City Journal shows a man labeled NCCA pulling down a statue labeled “Culture of Football First.”   I certainly find some truth in that assessment of the Penn State conspiracy to shelter Jerry Sandusky and thereby allow him to continue to abuse young boys.   I just happened upon something I wrote six years ago when Dordt was devoting oodles of attention and publicity to its newly created football program.   In response to an email critical of my criticism of this policy, I wrote: “You know, on many college campuses, football teams act as if they can live by their own set of laws.   What promotes that?   Well one thing might be the inordinate amount of attention we lavish on them.” So, the cartoon makes a valid point.   Still, it seems to me that the NCAA is, to a certain extent, a pot calling the kettle black.   For it has done as much as any group to promote this insane sports culture that governs many colleges and uni...

There’s an old cliché that says “Those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it.”   I have never found this idea particularly insightful or accurate.   Sometimes people who fail to learn from past mistakes simply make new bad choices.   And the verb condemned suggests that what people experience is always bad. Surely that is not always true.     But maybe what the old cliché really means to say is that our history—at least the significant events of our past—should be remembered because the act of remembering can be instructive.   And with that I whole-heartedly agree.   So does the Bible.   When the children of Israel come through the Red Sea, Joshua has each tribe take out a stone, twelve stones in all, and set them up as a memorial—a memory stimulator.   Jesus gave us the bread and wine and the ritual of The Lord’s Supper and told us to enact the ritual in remembrance of him—of his suffering and death.   There are m...

Here’s a bit of advice from Fredrick Manfred: “Let’s start a cult in which we make heroes out of such ornery cusses as we may still have around—out of our lone wolves, go-it-aloners, dissenters, hermits, screwballs, aginers.   Such a fad, the fad of the ornery cuss or the oddball, might save us.   It is still a truth that the health of a society can be measured by the size and the vigor of its minority group. “In fact, I’d like to recommend that every village and town go out of its way to make sure it still has an ornery cuss in its midst.   At least one.   And should any village discover it doesn’t have an honorable dissenter around, I’d like to suggest that the mayor declare a state of emergency until such a citizen can be found.” A small college is a village, so a college ought also to have its dissenters and aginers.   Especially in the faculty and student body.   Among administrators it is considered treason to go against authority.   A...

A pomegranate is a fruit somewhat roundish in shape, but not round like an apple—though the poma part of its name means apple.   The pomegranate is roundish but flatter than an apple—something like a football, but that does not quite describe it either.   It’s more like---I’ve got it—like a grenade.   Aha!   That’s it.   In fact, the word grenade comes from the second half of the word pomegranate.   Pomegranates are sometimes called grenades, for short.   To the inventor of the grenade—and who would want to take credit for that?—the shape of this devastating little bomb must have suggested the pomegranate, and hence the name.   But a huge irony lurks in the word grenade, for this instrument of death comes from a word that signifies life.   From the very earliest times and in many cultures, the pomegranate has been a symbol of life, of resurrection, fertility and plenty.   In Greek mythology, Demeter is the goddess of the harvest, ...

The word cruciform means in the shape of a cross.   Almost anyone could figure that out.   And if you heard that there was a class of plants called cruciform   plants, would you know what they were?   Perhaps if you are a gardener, you would.   You would have identified cabbage and broccoli and cauliflower plants as cross-shaped.   The young plants of these and other vegetables are shaped like a cross—specifcally, the Hugenot cross. Broccoli, cabbage, kale, Brussels sprouts, Swiss chard,   baahk choy, cauliflower, radish, kohlrabi, collard and turnip greens are just some of these cruciforms.   All of them have been found to be crammed with anticancer power. To paraphrase a pharmacist I know, If we ate nothing but cruciferous vegetables and fish we would nearly put the pharmaceutical companies out of business. But we want to talk about their names.   Let’s start with broccoli.   It is the diminutive form of an Italian word, brocco...

God’s Care for the Poor -- Martin E. Marty The text for today’s meditation comes from The Wall Street Journal , a quotation provided by a major novelist, whose newest work was being reviewed. The quote, first: “The Lord commands us to ‘do good to all men,’ universally, a great part of whom, estimated according to their own merits, are very undeserving; but here the Scripture assists us with an excellent rule, when it inculcates, that we must not regard the intrinsic merit of men, but must consider the images of God in them, to which we owe all possible honour and love.” The reviewer is Thomas Meaney, co-editor of The Utopian, who assumes that readers will be surprised to find that the author of that quotation, so typical of liberal Protestant rhetoric, “as improbable as it may sound, is John Calvin.” Not marginal to the Reformer’s thinking, this sentence appears in his classical, most deliberative, most studied and most frequently quoted book, Institutes of t...

            I spent some time on the road the other day, and since it was April and the weather was warm and dry, tractors and farm implements were everywhere--gearing up on farmyards, already at work in the fields, and crawling along the highways.   Sometimes, when I get behind a tractor pulling a disc or a harrow or some other implement, I get impatient, especially if I'm going up a long hill.   I will occasionally pass on the hill in those circumstances, and, if a car is coming from the other way, that can be a harrowing experience.             You may have noticed that I used the word harrow twice in the previous sentence:   Once to designate a farm implement and once to describe a frightening experience.   Let’s look at harrow a bit more closely and also at some other farm implement words.         ...