North Western Winds

It's been a busy week for me! Between longer work days and toying with the new Mac, the blog seems to have fallen out a bit. As mentioned, another problem has been losing the composition tool that I used to use (w.bloggar) on the PC. I realized some time in the middle of the week that I could use blogger's "publish by e-mail" feature, and, what's more, that I could send post in via G-mail. That means all my work could be done in one application. It also offers spell check and online backup of my posts. Very nice. Also, it was probably an obvious solution to many people long before I figured it out. Because I've been so busy, I've just now gotten around to trying it out. And since my wife is making diner and not DVDs at the moment, it's carpe diem time. But what to write? I spent yesterday afternoon going over the documentation related to my new work chores with the goal of finding variances between what I really do , and what I'm scheduled to d...

Making the move I've been going through some issues at work that I won't go into here - what's relevant is that my time is less than it was. I'm happy to be back blogging again, but it's a fact posting is going to be spotty going forward. That is, unless my muse doinks me about the head and sets my pants on fire. That's the less happy part of this post. The happy part is the buried lede that starts here. Rebecca and I caved into iCulture in a big way this weekend and bought an iMac. I'll confess to wanting one in the worst way since before Christmas. Heck, my curiosity goes back to the OS X rollout. Anyway, it's here, I'm sharing it with Rebecca, and it's beautiful as all get out. The screen is fabulous and the built in speakers are surprisingly good. It's amazingly less cluttered than a PC, and that's with a wired keyboard and mouse. We are only just beginning to understand what Bluetooth and Airport could do. I'm more than a l...

In an unrelated matter, this is to point out that Lileks is a funny guy : ... then I remembered he's more of a control freak (and there's another term I can't stand, mostly because of the "freak" part. I'd prefer situation administrator or perhaps orderliness enthusiast. "Freak" has sixties / seventies vibe. [As does "vibe," for that matter. Half the slang used by aging boomers was tired when it was used by some guy in a white jump suit and aviator-framed sunglasses, nodding his head to the Love Unlimited Orchestra as he made his way across the fern bar with a White Russian in one hand, fingering the coke spoon around his next with the other. I do not belong to that era. I do not belong to any era, except perhaps the era when all your friends' dads looked like Bill Cullen.] It was a term of approval: let your freak flag fly! Shock the man! Make Anita Bryant wet herself in fear and disgust! Why don't we do it in the road? Oh, I don...

David Warren adds his two fine bits to the topic of tradition and apocrypha here .

I'm continuing where I left off Saturday by placing questions and "new angles" about the Christian story along side Orthodoxy as I know it. These Davinci Code sort of questions are all the rage at the moment, and the fire is helped along by scholars like Bart Ehrman feeding the flames by pointing to supposed problems in the Bible itself. My favourite Gnostic is on it, and so is Scott Adams over at The Dilbert Blog : Just to give you a flavor of the magnitude of the problems, according to Ehrman, there are more changes (both intentional and unintentional) in the Bible than there are words in the New Testament. The estimates range from 200,000 to 400,000. Yesterday I read that half of the people who voted for President Bush believe that the popular King James version of the Bible is the literal word of God. How does one reconcile that belief with the fact that experts know the Bible is riddled with human additions and errors? Here are the only arguments I can think of:...

Wondering what Screwtape makes of The DaVinci Code? Wonder no more! My dear Wormwood, ... another extremely admirable facet of this book is the author's intimate knowledge of his audience's skyscraping ignorance, which he exploits to devastating effect. One must ever endeavor to capitalize upon ignorance, Wormwood. This is one of the chiefest weapons in our arsenal, and let me observe—and not without some glee—that the ignorance of contemporary Western Society in matters of history and theology both, is of an absolutely unprecedented greatness. Never before have so many known so little about so much of great importance. Ask your average fellow in the street the slightest detail of a daft sitcom of forty years ago and he will move heaven and earth to supply you with the answer, and then will likely prate on with other similarly inane details—as if knowing who lived at 1313 Mockingbird Lane was his very passport to the Elysian Fields. Ha! But ask him to tell you abou...

An Easter reflection for you: The Person which assumed human nature was not created, as is the case of all other persons. His Person was the pre-existent Word or Logos . His human nature on the other hand, was derived from the miraculous conception by Mary, in which the Divine forshadowing of the human spirit and the human Fiat or the consent of a woman, were most beautifully blended. This is the beginning of a new humanity out of the material of the fallen race. When the Word became flesh, it did not mean that any change took place in the Divine Word. The Word of God proceeding forth did not leave the Father's side. What happened was not so much the conversion of the Godhead into flesh, as the taking of manhood into God . There was continuity with the fallen race of man through the manhood taken from Mary; there is discontinuity through the fact that the Person of Christ is the pre-existent Logos . Christ thus literally becomes the second Adam, the man through whom the human rac...

Regular readers know (and irregular readers have probably guessed) that I am of central european extraction. I can claim physical ancestors from Austria and Germany, and spiritual ancestors from Italy and probably Hungary as well. The culture in this house is undeniably Germanic once you scratch the maple syrup. Deutsche Welle is carrying a nifty photo essay on Germany that I enjoyed a lot. Here's to us!

During this quiet time there has been no blog that I have enjoyed more than Gagdad Bob's One Cosmos. He has simply been on fire for the past month. Here is my collection of hits from his post today (with the addition of a cartoon link from the comments thread): Science, of course, proceeds on the basis that the cosmos is ultimately a closed system. While there may be local entities that temporarily escape that fact and become open systems--such as biological organisms--in the end, it is all nothing more than a brief and futile reprieve from the iron hand of entropy. From death you arose and to death you shall return. It's funny how science starts out with such admirably modest aims and methods, but soon makes such grandiose pronouncements. I yield to no one in my respect for science as science, but at the same time, when philosophically unschooled scientists start leaping to unwarranted metaphysical pronouncements, we should all be concerned. Through a sleight of language, s...

Lent is almost done and so I'm going to let slip this one wee post. Rod Deher's Crunchy Conservatism has been talked to death on NRO and other US conservative sites. The points he raises are not specific to the U.S., however. With a new conservative government and all, Canadians might want to hash these over. An important point for Canadians to consider in this environment is that the US Republican party is not the criterion of what conservatism is all about. Other examples and traditions do exist. I recently finished Steven Ozment's A Mighty Fortress , which is a history of the German people, and one of the things I took away from it was the role of Christian Democrats as a strong moderating force in that part of the world. You can read some of that story here . The current Merkel led German government might be considered the current heirs to role of the Center party. Rod's points and the German examples I've linked are useful because of the Canadian Tories...