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Ron Paul

Steve's Essential Albums You've Never Listened To But Really Should

In no particular order, with no regard to genre, and with only rock, pop, country, folk, and indie included, here is my list (to be altered continuously if anyone cares to read it)

Neutral Milk Hotel, "In the Aeroplane Over the Sea"
Joanna Newsom, "Ys"
TV on the Radio, "Return to Cookie Mountain"
Sonic Youth, "Daydream Nation"
The Hold Steady, "Boys and Girls in America"
Johnny Cash, "American IV," "At Folsom Prison"
Rosanne Cash, "Black Cadillac"
Gram Parsons, "Grievous Angel"
Emmylou Harris, "Red Dirt Girl," "Roses in the Snow"
Gillian Welch, "Hell Among the Yearlings"
Neko Case, "Fox Confessor Brings the Flood"
John Prine, "John Prine"
Lucinda Williams, "Car Wheels on a Gravel Road"
Wilco, "Summer Teeth"
Uncle Tupelo, "No Depression"
Steve Earle, "Transcendental Blues"
Son Volt, "Trace"
Drive-By Truckers, "Brighter Than Creation's Dark"
Mastodon, "Blood Mountain," "Leviathan"
Lamb of God, "Sacrament"
Sleep, "Dopesmoker"
Lightning Bolt, "Hypermagic Mountain"
The Flaming Lips, "Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots"
Yo La Tengo, "I Can Hear the Heart Beating As One"
Brian Wilson, "Smile"
Sleater-Kinney, "The Woods," "All Hands on the Bad One"
Sigur Ros, "Takk," "Aegetis Byrjun (An Alright Start)"
Bjork, "Vespertine"
My Morning Jacket, "Z"
Sufjan Stevens, "Illinois," "Seven Swans"
Modest Mouse, "Good News for People Who Love Bad News"
Dropkick Murphys, "The Meanest of Times"
LCD Soundsystem, "The Sound of Silver"
The Arcade Fire, "Funeral" and "Neon Bible"
Iron and Wine, "The Shepherd's Dog"
Amy Winehouse, "Back to Black"
Animal Collective, "Feels"
Bright Eyes, "Fevers and Mirrors," "Cassadaga," "I'm Wide Awake It's Morning," "Digital Ash in
Digital Urn"

This Can't Happen to Me

They say that the great ideas occur to one while one is in one's early to middle twenties. I'm starting to understand why: with a baby on the way, a new job that is higher paying but also much more demanding, etc., at 28 I'm discovering that I am rapidly becoming that most despised thing: a bourgeois. Yes, one of those dreadfully conventional middle-class bores whose mind has calcified. I sense the borders of the universe contracting until the cosmos begins to resemble a cubicle; I greatly fear that soon I shall not be able to distinguish between the two. Suddenly the critiques of both Marx and Nietzsche make so much more sense to me, which is frightening in itself.

The worst part of this is the dearth of those who understand or care. "Dude, I'm becoming a bourgeois" is not the sort of complaint most otherwise interested persons would find intelligible, so one finds one's bourgeoisification advancing at a rate proportionate to the general lack of interest in the malady. Simultaneously, of course, one finds oneself becoming more inverted and idiosyncratic as one struggles to cope with bourgeoisification on one's own. My only solace is that the bourgeois mind seems to consistently lack cognizance of its own constriction, so I wait patiently for the Lethean waters of conventionality to o'erflow me. Soon the depths from which I longed to speak will no longer exist as a memory, or even as a theoretical possibility, and I will have become an adult.

Building a Legacy

The Last Day is not a topic often broached in discourse these days, regardless of the discoursers. The "legacy" that one leaves behind is, though. The oddity of the current situation is that the preparation currently urged for leaving an honorable legacy is similar to the preparation that used to be urged for a successful appearance at the Judgment Seat of Christ. It is as though history has become a convenient secular stand-in for the Ultimate Justice which all men long for.

The irony of the anti-Christian Judgment Day is that it is cruel, merciless, and unforgiving. As is typical of non-Christian thought, there is no room for redemption--which is painfully appropriate in the particular case of Judgment, since it is precisely the Redeemer who has been removed.

Matthew 25 is bleeding heart pandering when compared to the New York Times editorial page.

Frere Jean

Johnny Calvin, we hardly knew you. We thought we did, but you never played by our rules, so we wrote you off as a theocratic sadist, or perhaps as a sainted prophet descended from the heavens--a sort of Aryan firstborn, a demiurge, a minor deity. Both without paying much attention to the actual content of your thought--beyond the P-word, of course--times 2. Most of us hated it. The ones who liked it were generally somewhat disturbed persons of slightly below average inteligence who, with occasionally good intentions, made cornmeal mush of your exquisite dogmatics. But at least your beard was timeless. The skullcap, however--that skullcap made you look like a meanie-head. Very bad PR, for which I expect Beza is to blame, as Farel would never have approved. Never trust the sensible ones when it comes to image control.

American Philistine Celebrates Black History Month

Edward the Black Prince (1330 - 1376)

Although Edward never became king - he died before his father, Edward III - he is remembered as a great medieval military hero, with notable victories against the French in the Hundred Years War.
Edward was born on 15 June 1330 at Woodstock in Oxfordshire, the eldest son of Edward III. He was created prince of Wales in 1343. He showed military brilliance at an early age, playing a key role in the defeat of the French army at the Battle of Crecy when he was only 16. In 1355, he was appointed his father's lieutenant in Gascony and the following year led another significant victory against the French at Poitiers, taking the French king prisoner.
In 1362, Edward married Joan of Kent and was created prince of Aquitaine and Gascony by his father. Edward and his wife went to live in his new French domains. In 1367, Edward led an expedition to Spain, to restore the deposed King Pedro of Castile, and proved himself again with victory at the Battle of Najera in northern Castile. Edward returned to Aquitaine, where he made himself unpopular with the nobility by levying taxes to pay for his Spanish expedition. They rose in revolt against him and in 1370 Edward besieged the city of Limoges. When it fell 3,000 of its inhabitants were massacred. A year later, Edward returned to England.
Edward died aged 45 on 8 June 1376, probably from an illness contracted in Spain, and was buried in great splendour in Canterbury Cathedral. His young son Richard succeeded his grandfather Edward III a year later.
During his lifetime he was known as Edward of Woodstock; the title of Black Prince developed after his death and may refer to black armour that he wore.

-courtesy of the BBC (Black Broadcasting Corporation)

Five Years Later

After 5 years, the Orthodox Presbyterian Church (OPC) has finally announced a denominational position on the “New Perspective on Paul” (NPP) and its subsidiary, the "Federal Vision/Auburn Avenue Theology " (FV). I commend the church for taking a definite stand on this, and I believe that the OPC’s decision to side with the Westminster Standards and the traditional Protestant reading of Paul, rather than with the latest theological trend, is a judicious one. I wonder just how ecclesially helpful this stance will be, though, coming as it does some years after the outbreak of a fairly serious controversy in conservative Presbyterian circles. It appears to me that most people affected in any way by the FV dispute made up their minds years ago as to what they thought of it. This new effort would seem rather to open old wounds than to heal them.

Furthermore, although I am encouraged by the denomination’s stand, which was announced by a series of articles on justification in the current issue of the official OPC organ, New Horizons (NH), I must admit that I am cringing at the poor quality of the various responses. Let’s remember, folks, that the NPP/FV theology, as equivocal and incoherent as it may be (especially in its FV manifestations), is being advanced by some of the brightest minds in conservative Presbyterianism--which, these days, isn’t saying much, but the fact remains. The several essays, all of which I have at least cursorily perused, seem more to represent a well-intentioned showcase of disputational no-nos than anything else. This would be a great resource for a high school logic teacher: “Alright, class, please identify the formal and informal fallacies present in each essay (there are at least two). Bonus points if you can make any one argument formally valid.” Sadly, this is true even though the essays focus on justification and (apparently) on these two main criticisms: 1. The NPP/FV position is not confessional, and 2. The NPP/FV position is not truly Pauline. One would think that such a narrow purview would facilitate honed, biting essays. One would think.

Reading the NH essays this morning, my mind kept wandering to the prospective carnage that will be wreaked on these poor professors, pastors, and elders. Don’t these guys read Credenda/Agenda, or at least remember the “Morecraft-a-roni and Cheese” spoof from Round 1 of this same debacle? And, to my shame, I determined to immediately re-subscribe to Credenda. Wrong or not, the FV boys just had an effortless slaughter hand-delivered to them, postage paid by the OPC.. Entertainment value aside, I sincerely hope that the denominational report, which comes out next month, will be more substantive. But I suppose you know where my money is.

Romantic Anarchists

I'm starting to wonder if we've truly moved into a "post-modern" age. The current obsession with "the margins," to regurgitate the Derridean metaphor, appears to me more and more like a continuation of the Romantics' infatuation with le bon sauvage. In the narratives of these latter-day Rousseauians, the championed always seem to be exotic in some way or other, the current favorites being non-white, non-Christian immigrants of various types, who are seen (accurately, I'm afraid) as naturally subversive of whatever vestiges of Western Christendom remain. In the NY Times article below, notice how the perspective of the long-time area residents is not even considered except as an object of ridicule. Apparently, the continuation of any kind of coherent, traditional identity, even of the most general kind, is not something that is to be permitted these benighted folks, who labor under the delusion that it is "their" community. One wonders, though, if this "more-diverse-than-thou" snobbery would be sustained if the "Fugees" were relocated to Upper Manhattan instead of suburban Atlanta.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/21/us/21fugees.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&ref=todayspaper