Egregious Reader

For the last ten years or so (really forever) I have felt very strongly that there is something you see or understand in reading good fiction that you can find no other way. I know some people only read non-fiction. Especially some Christians will read book for "knowledge". This morning it dawned on my as I was re-reading the end of Marilynne Robinson's Gilead  what is happening and why it can be explained no other way. Have you ever heard of Michael Polyani or the concept of Tacit Knowledge? His most famous example is the Stradivarius violins. No one can make an instrument like them any more. It is because that kind of knowledge is transferred orally through apprentice training and is so complex and rich that you could never put it all to words, much less write it all down. Another example is farming. Another might be cooking. There are things that Marilynne Robinson explains through her fiction that are true a thousand times and yet, to write them down in such a w...

The latest episode interviews Pastor Michael McBride and to me brings up many important ideas for the conversations we are all having right now. Examples of what is touched on: White as a category is false and is itself a system of oppression. McBride said "God did not create folks who identify as white people as white. God created them: Irish, Polish ... a cultural connection to a land and a place and a story ... whiteness is a creation of modernity." This race hierarchy enslaves all of us. We are not post-racial although many, many people wanted to believe that were when we elected President Obama. McBride says "I tell my white friends, don't you think I want a post-racial society, if I could get one by winking my eye ... " Hari comments that the only thing that has come out of post racial society is the term "post racial society" McBride says "White people need to be delivered from whiteness ... and really reach for the beauty of t...

“Even if a wall was constructed, it’s not a cure-all. When any human being is facing starvation and unimaginable violence, he or she will do nearly anything to survive—including scaling a wall or crossing an ocean, as we’ve witnessed among the throngs of Syrian refugees escaping Europe. If a wall is the only thing that stands between near-certain death and the possibility of life, you and I would risk everything to climb over it, because the risk of staying put is far greater than the fear of being caught. ‘Show me a fifty-foot wall,’ former secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano once said, ‘and I’ll show you a fifty-one-foot ladder.’”

I started a new blog as I have been working on writing longer essays. I decided to call it Frontera because it is Spanish for border and more and more I want to write to explore borders of all kinds. The obvious one that comes immediately to mind is our Southern border. My friend Samuel asked me once United States citizens talk about being American when what they mean is United Statian. (Obviously we need to work on that term). Where else do countries pretend to represent the entire continent (two continents) while clearly excluding other nations on that continent? But, the are borders everywhere and there is borderland around those borders. What is it like to enter the borderland? Borderlands are also the places where new things are born. Many explanations of Jazz say it was when classically trained Creole musicians joined Delta blues ... Yo Yo Ma in a recent interview said this about the borders (boundaries): Pablo Casals used to talk about — the great cellist from Spain, ...

I have been on a Chesterton kick lately after I found Eugenics and other Evils in my podcast app as a free audiobook. And then I finally got from the library Schumacher's Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered . I am only no chapter two, but lets start there. He quotes the famous Lord Keynes. Schumacher tells us that in 1930, during a time of world-wide economic depression he felt moved to speculate on the "economic possibilities for our grandchildren" and "concluded that the day may not be far off when everybody would be rich." I see us free, therefore, to return to some of the most sure and certain principles of religion and traditional virtue – that avarice is a vice, that the exaction of usury is a misdemeanour, and the love of money is detestable, that those walk most truly in the paths of virtue and sane wisdom who take least thought for the morrow. We shall once more value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful.  But he con...

Picture from D'Aulaires' Book of Norse Myths Desert dust. Or Eden mud. Or, in the forests of Finland, ash and alder become man and woman. But this is the primordial beginnings. Today there is a curly-headed, two foot, quick, agile baby boy who is all of two and one half in his mis-matched pajamas. He easily slams his fists in rhythms on the table, one, then the other, feeling his power, expressing his dominance over the five year old who has to watch the baby show on the computer. Next he balances his tummy on the edge of the table so he can lean within 4 inches of the screen, its white glow lighting up his little face. When he does this the hand-me-down jammy shirt is too short and shows his lower back. What a wonder life is. All life. Human life.