Chesterton on dogs:

But there is something deeper in the matter than all that, only the hour is late, and both the dog and I are too drowsy to interpret it. He lies in front of me curled up before the fire, as so many dogs must have lain before so many fires. I sit on one side of that hearth, as so many men must have sat by so many hearths. Somehow this creature has completed my manhood; somehow, I cannot explain why, a man ought to have a dog. A man ought to have six legs; those other four legs are part of him. Our alliance is older than any of the passing and priggish explanations that are offered of either of us; before evolution was, we were. You can find it written in a book that I am a mere survival of a squabble of anthropoid apes; and perhaps I am. I am sure I have no objection. But my dog knows I am a man, and you will not find the meaning of that word written in any book as clearly as it is written in his soul.

It may be written in a book that my dog is canine; and from this it may be deduced that he must hunt with a pack, since all canines hunt with a pack. Hence it may be argued (in the book) that if I have one Aberdeen terrier I ought to have twenty-five Aberdeen terriers. But my dog knows that I do not ask him to hunt with a pack; he knows that I do not care a curse whether he is canine or not so long as he is my dog. That is the real secret of the matter which the superficial evolutionists cannot be got to see. If traceable history be the test, civilization is much older than the savagery of evolution. The civilized dog is older than the wild dog of science. The civilized man is older than the primitive man of science. We feel it in our bones that we are the antiquities, and that the visions of biology are the fancies and the fads. The books do not matter; the night is closing in, and it is too dark to read books. Faintly against the fading firelight can be traced the prehistoric outlines of the man and the dog.

Something a bit lighter for a Friday.

Hubbard posted this at 3:13 PM HKT on Friday, February 1st, 2008 as Animal Kingdom Strikes Back, Grace

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I disagree with Ramesh Ponnuru often, but he’s right about New Jersey and the death penalty:

New Jersey is on track to become the first state to abolish the death penalty since the Supreme Court allowed it in 1976.

I think New Jersey legislators did the right thing, in the right way. If the state can protect citizens from a murderer without killing him, that’s what it ought to do. And since New Jersey doesn’t execute people anyway—the last execution was in 1963—having a formal, but practically meaningless, death penalty was an expensive charade.

I’m glad that it was the legislators who voted to abolish the death penalty and not the judges. On an issue where neither the federal nor the state constitution clearly sets a policy, it should be up to the people and their elected representatives to decide. I hope that other states will follow New Jersey’s lead—but not under judicial duress.

From his lips to God’s ears.

Hubbard posted this at 9:47 AM HKT on Saturday, December 15th, 2007 as Grace, Philosophy, Politics

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• I try to repress my Scrooge tendencies around Christmas, although this year it’s been tougher than most.  Some recurring health issues (personal but nothing major; for the sake of this blog post, I’ll call them “me troubles,” MT) came back to bother me for much of the past few weeks.  I deal with MT semi-regularly, and I did what I usually do: take some over-the-counter medication and wait to feel better.

• This time around, though, it took longer than the usual day or two for MT to go away.  “I have places to go and people to see and things to do!  This is no time for MT,” I kept thinking.  Nobody likes being sick, of course, but I was in a hurry to get well.  Unfortunately, we can’t make our bodies heal faster.  Perhaps this is why St. Francis of Asissi called his body an ass.

• So I spent much of the past few weeks waiting.  I loathe waiting, but ’tis the season.  I did my best to stay pleasant, but failed miserably.  At one point last week, a co-worker dropped by with a question.  On the phone, I said nothing to her, but glared and she slunk away.  If I knew how to intentionally look so intimidating, then I’d probably glare like that more often to drive people away when feeling anti-social; it’s probably good for everyone around me that I can’t.  That glare appears in trying times; one resolution for next year is to try not to glare like that even when tried; how long will that last, I wonder?  Probably not long enough.

•  It looks like I’m not the only one feeling a bit down right now.  Part of it is the Winter.  Part of it is the enforced cheeriness of Christmas.  Part of it is missing people we care about.  It’ll be my first Christmas without Grandpa O., and even though he was cantankerous and eccentric, he also cared and did what he could to show it.  So much of his last few years were spent waiting in hospitals and dialysis centers; he doesn’t have to wait in such places any more.  Through the years we all will be together—if the fates allow. . .

• The flags in DC are at half-mast today, probably for Pearl Harbor, 1941.  That lead to Grandpa O. and his family losing everything and going to the Jerome, Arkansas, internment camp until the war was over.  That’s a long wait.  He remembered many things: that the food made them sick (putting MT in perspective right now); that when they were let out to go shopping, Southern bus drivers treated the Japanese—interned as potential enemies—better than blacks; that he wouldn’t have finished high school if he hadn’t been sent to Jerome.  He filled his waiting with education.

• The sermon series during Advent is about waiting.  Advent tends to get excised in the Christmas hoopla, rather like the children Want and Ignorance in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol.  We don’t like waiting any more than we like the creepy figures that the Ghost of Christmas Present showed Scrooge.  But something is lost when we bowdlerize Dickens and expand the Christmas season to labor day.  Waiting prepares us for greater goodness.  In want and ignorance, we try to rush through: get healthy, get rid of troubles, get open the presents.  The fatherly cliche—that something bad is building character—sometimes does contain a nugget of truth.

• More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. —Romans 5:3-5

Hubbard posted this at 12:53 PM HKT on Friday, December 7th, 2007 as Grace, I don't know--but it's a Tradition, Ourselves

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Dennis Kucinich on his wife:

Dennis Kucinich wears the look of a man who’s just won the sweepstakes. He says a colleague from the House told him it didn’t matter how he did in the presidential race because he’d already won.

He’d won Elizabeth.

“I responded, ‘Now you know why I think I can be president?’ ” Dennis says. “If I can marry this incredibly brilliant, beautiful woman, I mean, why wouldn’t I think I can be president of the United States?”

His policies might be awful, and the rest of the article shows that he’s more than a little kooky—but his heart’s in the right place. (H/T)

Hubbard posted this at 10:30 AM HKT on Wednesday, December 5th, 2007 as Audacity of Hype, Excruciatingly Correct Behavior, Grace

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I’ve often thought that many atheists are motivated less by love of reason than by hatred of God.  The people who simply cannot bring themselves to believe usually don’t write polemics as Richard Hawkins or Christopher Hitchens have.

One of the rare agnostics without a loathing of God, Theodore Dalrymple, just wrote about the new atheists.  A sample:

Lying not far beneath the surface of all the neo-atheist books is the kind of historiography that many of us adopted in our hormone-disturbed adolescence, furious at the discovery that our parents sometimes told lies and violated their own precepts and rules. It can be summed up in Christopher Hitchens’s drumbeat in God Is Not Great: “Religion spoils everything.”

What? The Saint Matthew Passion? The Cathedral of Chartres? The emblematic religious person in these books seems to be a Glasgow Airport bomber—a type unrepresentative of Muslims, let alone communicants of the poor old Church of England. It is surely not news, except to someone so ignorant that he probably wouldn’t be interested in these books in the first place, that religious conflict has often been murderous and that religious people have committed hideous atrocities. But so have secularists and atheists, and though they have had less time to prove their mettle in this area, they have proved it amply. If religious belief is not synonymous with good behavior, neither is absence of belief, to put it mildly.

In fact, one can write the history of anything as a chronicle of crime and folly. Science and technology spoil everything: without trains and IG Farben, no Auschwitz; without transistor radios and mass-produced machetes, no Rwandan genocide. First you decide what you hate, and then you gather evidence for its hatefulness. Since man is a fallen creature (I use the term metaphorically rather than in its religious sense), there is always much to find.

The thinness of the new atheism is evident in its approach to our civilization, which until recently was religious to its core. To regret religion is, in fact, to regret our civilization and its monuments, its achievements, and its legacy. And in my own view, the absence of religious faith, provided that such faith is not murderously intolerant, can have a deleterious effect upon human character and personality. If you empty the world of purpose, make it one of brute fact alone, you empty it (for many people, at any rate) of reasons for gratitude, and a sense of gratitude is necessary for both happiness and decency. For what can soon, and all too easily, replace gratitude is a sense of entitlement. Without gratitude, it is hard to appreciate, or be satisfied with, what you have: and life will become an existential shopping spree that no product satisfies.

Read the whole thing.

Hubbard posted this at 10:06 AM HKT on Monday, October 29th, 2007 as Excruciatingly Correct Behavior, Grace

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Rod Dreher (H/T) writes about his mixed feelings for pedophile monk:

I am glad it is not given to me to judge him. By one standard, Father Benedict deserves a millstone lashed to his neck for eternity. That’s what I’d have given the old buzzard, but God’s a better Christian than I am. And yet, I’m forced to admit that from Sam Greene’s wicked deeds, my beloved family sprung. I can’t help wondering: no fake icon, no visit to Austin, no meeting my true love.

This mystery throws everything off balance. It offends my sense of order and righteousness to recognize it, but the mere existence of my children is evidence that however miserable and mean and degraded, that dirty old monk, probably in spite of himself, was once an instrument of grace.

Did other good fruit emerge from this poisoned vineyard? Who knows, and who can say whether it counts for anything? But when Sam Greene is judged, there my little family stands, however reluctantly, as silent witnesses for the defense, pleading on his behalf for the same thing every one of us will one day need: mercy.

In such situations, where a bad person has (perhaps inadvertently) done good, I think of Chaucer’s Pardoner from The Canterbury Tales.  The Pardoner is a corrupt figure who preaches against the sins that he cheerfully admits to, and he sells “saints’ relics” that are actually pig bones.  Yet the foul man might well have encouraged many sinners to repent, thereby saving their souls.  Just because it’s a cliche doesn’t make it any less true: God works in mysterious ways.

Hubbard posted this at 5:30 PM HKT on Tuesday, October 2nd, 2007 as Grace

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So Radiohead decided to release their new album as a download from their website, ostensibly for free. You can choose to pay whatever you like for the download or order a $80.00 box set complete with all kinds of extra goodies.

I’m just pumped that I can get the album in 9 days – I was expecting to wait until March.

Jamie posted this at 11:06 AM HKT on Monday, October 1st, 2007 as Grace

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Andrew Sullivan gets married.  I think the best comment came from, of all people, K-Lo:

I wish Andrew Sullivan every happiness. We disagree on a whole host of issues, obviously. I’m endlessly frustrated that the MSM refers to him as “conservative.” But he’s my brother, ya know? He’s human and he boldly lives life with a fascinating honesty we watch on that blog. He’s said some awful and ridiculous things about folks here and elsewhere but we keep reading and that’s because he is a talent — even when he’s wildly wrong. And he reminds us that behind public-policy debates are people just as struggling and vulnerable as any one of us is — his doing it so openly, when it doesn’t drive us crazy, makes us stronger. God bless you, Andrew Sullivan.

From her lips to God’s ears.

Hubbard posted this at 11:16 AM HKT on Friday, August 17th, 2007 as Grace, What Ever Happened to Andrew Sullivan?

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I don’t usually push my musical beliefs on this site but everyone needs to watch this:

http://live.video.rainbow-media-online.com/ifcvideos/henry_show/ThomYorkeWithTitles.swf

The video is a year old but still – man that looks incredibly complicated to play.

Jamie posted this at 11:06 AM HKT on Monday, July 23rd, 2007 as Dirty Hippies, Grace, Ourselves

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Interesting. I suppose I need to read Karl Barth and P.T. Forsyth now. . .

You scored as Neo orthodox, You are neo-orthodox. You reject the human-centredness and scepticism of liberal theology, but neither do you go to the other extreme and make the Bible the central issue for faith. You believe that Christ is God’s most important revelation to humanity, and the Trinity is hugely important in your theology. The Bible is also important because it points us to the revelation of Christ. You are influenced by Karl Barth and P T Forsyth. Neo orthodox 79% Evangelical Holiness/Wesleyan 64% Reformed Evangelical 64% Roman Catholic 61% Charismatic/Pentecostal 43% Emergent/Postmodern 39% Classical Liberal 39% Modern Liberal 21% Fundamentalist 4% What’s your theological worldview? created with QuizFarm.com

Hubbard posted this at 11:05 PM HKT on Saturday, June 16th, 2007 as Grace, Ourselves, Random Bloggish Things

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From WSJ’s Political Diary (no link):

George W. Bush never got anywhere close to the 200 or so demonstrators who gathered in a square here on Monday evening to protest U.S. Plans to deploy an anti-ballistic missile system in the Czech Republic.  But he did come face-to-face the enxt day with a different set of protestors—genuine dissidents from Sudan, Syria, Iran, Egypt, Palestine, Belarus and Russia, who know something about what it really means to speak truth to power.

They were gathered for a conference on democracy and security organized by former Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar, former Israeli Minister Natan Sharansky, and former Czech Preside Vaclav Havel.  Mr. Sharansky, who spent nine years in the Soviet gulag, envisioned the conference as a way of brining together what he described as a “dissidents’ trade union”—a networked, globalized Solidary movement for the 21st century.

In a well-delivered address punctuated by frequent applause, Mr. Bush—who called himself “a dissident president”—sounded familar themes about the universality of freedom and promised U.S. support “for the forces of conscience.”  Noting the story of a crippled Iraqi man who had been quoted in the press saying he would have crawled through the streets to vote in Iraq’s first free ballot, Mr. Bush asked rhetorically: “Was democracy imposed on this man?”

Mr. Bush’s speech did not lack for specifics.  Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan “have a great distance still to travel” on the road to democracy.  In Russia, “reforms that were once promised to empower citizens have been derailed.”  The Chinese government, he added, believes it can give people economic freedom without political rights: “We disagree.”

Less publicized—because the media were excluded—was a closed-door meeting between the President and the dissidents after the speech, including Russia’s Garry Kasparov and Egypt’s Saad Eddin Ibrahim.  “The president took his time with each of us,” said one of the participants, who had spent years in an Arab jail and was moved to tears by the encounter.  “He listened.  He really wanted to hear what we had to say.”

Let’s pray great things come from this mustard seed.

Hubbard posted this at 1:50 PM HKT on Wednesday, June 6th, 2007 as George Bush Rules!, Grace

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Who wrote this fine prayer?

And so, in this poignant hour, I ask you to join with me in prayer:

Almighty God: Our sons, pride of our nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion, and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity.

Lead them straight and true; give strength to their arms, stoutness to their hearts, steadfastness in their faith.

They will need Thy blessings. Their road will be long and hard. For the enemy is strong. He may hurl back our forces. Success may not come with rushing speed, but we shall return again and again; and we know that by Thy grace, and by the righteousness of our cause, our sons will triumph.

They will be sore tried, by night and by day, without rest — until the victory is won. The darkness will be rent by noise and flame. Men’s souls will be shaken with the violences of war.

For these men are lately drawn from the ways of peace. They fight not for the lust of conquest. They fight to end conquest. They fight to liberate. They fight to let justice arise, and tolerance and goodwill among all Thy people. They yearn but for the end of battle, for their return to the haven of home.

Some will never return. Embrace these, Father, and receive them, Thy heroic servants, into Thy kingdom.

And for us at home — fathers, mothers, children, wives, sisters, and brothers of brave men overseas, whose thoughts and prayers are ever with them — help us, Almighty God, to rededicate ourselves in renewed faith in Thee in this hour of great sacrifice.

Many people have urged that I call the nation into a single day of special prayer. But because the road is long and the desire is great, I ask that our people devote themselves in a continuance of prayer. As we rise to each new day, and again when each day is spent, let words of prayer be on our lips, invoking Thy help to our efforts.

Give us strength, too — strength in our daily tasks, to redouble the contributions we make in the physical and the material support of our armed forces.

And let our hearts be stout, to wait out the long travail, to bear sorrows that may come, to impart our courage unto our sons wheresoever they may be.

And, O Lord, give us faith. Give us faith in Thee; faith in our sons; faith in each other; faith in our united crusade. Let not the keeness of our spirit ever be dulled. Let not the impacts of temporary events, of temporal matters of but fleeting moment — let not these deter us in our unconquerable purpose.

With Thy blessing, we shall prevail over the unholy forces of our enemy. Help us to conquer the apostles of greed and racial arrogances. Lead us to the saving of our country, and with our sister nations into a world unity that will spell a sure peace — a peace invulnerable to the schemings of unworthy men. And a peace that will let all of men live in freedom, reaping the just rewards of their honest toil.

Thy will be done, Almighty God.

Amen.

The answer is that notable bible beater, Franklin Roosevelt.  I’d imagine the ACLU would have a conniption if a modern president gave it.

Newt Gringrich quoted the prayer in its entirety at his commencement address to Liberty University.  A highlight:

To be sure, the Truth of the Bible is not identical with the truths of the Declaration. But the two orders of truth do overlap, and where they overlap, they powerfully reinforce each other. Indeed, the Declaration assumes many of the central teachings of the Bible.

When our Declaration of Independence asserts “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” it makes some key assumptions.

It assumes that God is sovereign over the universe.

It assumes that God created man.

And it assumes that man must obey an order of justice which God Himself has instituted.

That order of justice requires all men to honor each other’s natural rights, because these rights are the unalienable endowment of the Almighty. When someone violates the rights of another they are not merely breaking the law. They are violating God’s grant of protection. These are the truths of the Declaration of Independence, and they reflect the Truth of the Bible.

They are truths to which we must bear witness. They are the lamps which we must keep alight before our neighbors and before the world. These are the lamps which must be kept upon their stands.

As is typical of the Newtster, however, there’s a lowlight, too:

Washington and the other Founding Fathers feared that the weakening of these religious supports would undermine the very republican institutions under which all Americans find their liberties.

It is in this tradition that I wrote Rediscovering God in America to outline the truth of Washington’s words as evidenced in the monuments and buildings of Washington.

Even with the annoying self-promotion, the speech is a gem.  Read it all.

Hubbard posted this at 8:50 PM HKT on Monday, May 21st, 2007 as Amer-I-Can!, Grace, Philosophy

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I once encountered a gay man who left the Episcopals for the Catholics because “the Episcopalians believe in hippy-dippy voodoo.”  He had other evocative adjectives for them—all too colorful even for us—but I’d imagine my readers get the point.

If I were an Episcopal, I might have to leave the church on the grounds that skeevy McGreevey is entering an Episcopal seminary (H/T).  I believe that Eric Hoffer once noted: Passionate sinning has not infrequently been an apprenticeship to sainthood. Many of the insights of the saint stem from his experience as a sinner.  Nevertheless, American Episcopalianism is a mushy faith to begin with, and I doubt that it’s rigorous enough to push anyone to sainthood.  I know seminaries tend to winnow out the men unprepared for ministry; I wonder what will happen to McGreevey.

Since I’m on the subject of Episcopalians, my favorite definition of a Christian gentleman comes from the Episcopal authors of Being Dead is No Excuse: “The Episcopalian ideal of a gentleman is a man who, if a lady falls down drunk, will pick her up off the floor and freshen up her drink.”  Perhaps McGreevey will become a gentleman, perhaps a saint.  After all, if Chuck Colson can reform, anyone can.

Until I see evidence of a change, however, my opinion of McGreevey will parallel G. Gordon Liddy’s assessment of Colson: “If he’d run over his grandmother for Nixon, imagine what he’ll do for Jesus.”

Hubbard posted this at 5:41 PM HKT on Thursday, May 3rd, 2007 as Dirty Hippies, Grace, Lord, What Fools These Mortals Be!

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The priest was still on his way, and finally I was bound to voice my deep regret that such delay threatened to deprive my comrade of the final consolations of Our Church.  He did not seem to hear me.  But a few moments later he put his hand over mine, and his eyes entreated me to draw closer to him.  He then uttered these words almost in my ear.  And I am quite sure that I have recorded them accurately, for his voice, though halting, was strangely distinct.

“Does it matter?  Grace is everywhere. . . .”

I think he died just then.

From Georges Bernanos’s Diary of a Country Priest.

Hubbard posted this at 7:05 AM HKT on Tuesday, May 1st, 2007 as Grace

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LA Times sportswriter Mike Penner is getting a sex change.  He’ll be back as Christine Penner.  Coming out like that is tough—I’m not sure I could’ve make such a bold statement in a major newspaper.  I hope she doesn’t have trouble when she’s back on the sports beat, but I’d imagine that there will be some.  So good luck, Christine, and God bless.

[A note on grammar: transgender people really make pronouns difficult.  Since Penner is now male, and will be until the surgery, some of my pronouns reflect that.  But in a few weeks, Penner will be female, so my future tense reflects that.  Being gay may sometimes be a hassle---which one of you is the wife?---but I'll take it over being transgendered.]

Hubbard posted this at 11:58 AM HKT on Thursday, April 26th, 2007 as Excruciatingly Correct Behavior, Grace

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