Gardener

The Anti-Bootstrap Religion I recently read a letter in the Sioux City Journal bemoaned the cost of government entitlements. By entitlements I assume the writer means programs such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, Veterans Administration programs, Food Stamps, school lunch programs, and the list goes on and on. The letter writer is rightly concerned about entitlements. Anyone serious about cutting down the national debt has to recognize the need to cut back the funding to some entitlement programs. But the letter writer seems to have it in for all entitlement programs. He expresses the belief that everyone ought to swim on his or her own feathers without help from the government or anybody else. “We start with nothing, and no one owes us anything. Parents graciously give,” he says. And he concludes by saying, “America was built on self-reliance. It’s time we return to that value.” He’s wrong about parents and wrong about America. Parents owe their children food, clothing, she...

A while back I said that I thought the novel Gilead by Marilyn Robinson would make a fine devotional book. Take this paragraph, for example, from page 27-28: "There was a young couple strolling along half a block ahead of me. The sun had come up brilliantly after rain, and the tree were glistening and very wet. On some impulse, plain exuberence, I suppose, the fellow jumped up and caught hold of a branch, and a storm of luminous water came pouring down on the two of them, and they laughed and took off running, the girl sweeping water off her hair and dress as if she were a little bit disgusted, but she wasn't. It was a beautiful thing to see, like something from a myth. I don't know why I thought of it now, except perhaps because it is easy to believe in such moments that water was made primarily for blessing and only secondarily for growing vegetables or doing the wash. I wish I had paid more attention to it. . . . This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attent...

I did not see Jesus Christ Superstar—the movie or the musical—when it first appeared in the sixties, and I have never felt any desire to see it in the almost fifty years since. But a friend who saw it at Stratford’s Shakespeare Festival this summer raved about it, and since my wife and I were planning to stop in Stratford for a couple of plays in early October, we thought we would book some tickets. Easier said than done. The play has been sold out for almost its entire five and a half-month run, and the only tickets my wife and I were able to book in August for an early October date were two single seats with obstructed visibility. We grabbed them. What accounts for this old (1969) rock drama’s immense popularity now, we wondered. Is the audience comprised of a bunch of old coots hungry for a nostalgia buzz? Or is there, perhaps, a legitimate Jesus hunger in the culture? We got to the theatre early and sat on a bench near the door in the lobby as people entered (people-watching is its...

An Open Letter to Cal Thomas Dear Cal Thomas, In my early years as a college English instructor at a Christian college, I would receive in the fall a mailing from a Christian organization (I have forgotten the name of it) urging me to have my students enter a contest to write an op-ed piece that presented a Christian perspective on a current issue, included a Bible text, and was published in the mainstream press. The winner would receive a significant monetary prize. So I had my students attempt to write such an op-ed piece—and I even submitted a piece myself one year. But neither I nor my students ever won. Most years, as I remember, you were the winner. You were, apparently, the gold standard for Christian op-eds. I have read your columns in my newspaper over the years, but a funny thing happened on the way to the present: your columns became less and less recognizably Christian and more and more bitter, fearful and negative. Often it seemed that you were concerned much more with pro...

October 16 Single-Heartedness Not content with having spent all summer pumping out giant crookneck squash (some weighing more than seventeen pounds), this old (in vegetable time) squash plant continues her work as blithely and confidently as if it were early June instead of late October. Wide green leaves flutter on the fence, small squash curl fetus-like under warm green leaves, and three bright yellow blossoms, full of purpose and ignorance, grin into the late afternoon sun. They do not know that the television soothsayers have looked into their bird entrails and seen hoar frost on tomorrow’s lawns and death’s wilt and shrivel on every growing thing.

I see my last blog entry was March 21, five months ago. Well, Rip Van Winkle slept for 25 years, so my five month snooze was a mere power nap. I remember a couple of years ago, a student asking me to recommend a book for devotional reading and I didn’t know what to say, for I am not a reader of devotional books. After a few moments of thought I recommended Lewis’ Mere Christianity , a book I have been going back to my whole life, a book that continues to surprise, inform, challenge and delight me. I also recommended Philip Yancey’s What’s So Amazing about Grace . And I might have said the Psalms, a book that has been a steady presence in my life for most of my 69 years. Lately, I have been re-reading Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, the best novel of the decade in my opinion, and it has occurred to me that the book makes for wonderful devotional reading. (Yes! A novel for devotional reading.) If the purpose of a devotional reading is to bring about reflection on matters of faith, to...

In a recent news item in my church magazine, The Banner , I read about a newly elected member o f the House of Representatives who said when asked why he had run for office, “I’m not satisfied with the world my children are inheriting and am adamant about cleaning up the mess that has been created.” Ah, I mused, a Christian politician who recognizes that we are called to care for the creation, to clean up the environmental mess that our wasteful, consumptive lifestyle has created. But I wanted to be sure so I did a little background check and to my dismay read that this Michigan Republican endorsed the party position on environmental issues. I know what this “party position” is because the news lately has been about the Republican budget cuts, especially the gutting of all issues connected to the care of the creation. One of the first things the Republican controlled House of Representatives has done in 2011, ostensibly to cut back on President Obama’s budget, is to propose a budget...