So I was just recently (as in last night) Confirmed into the Anglican/Episcopal Community. This has of course turned my thoughts to confirmation itself and why do we do it? So these are some thoughts I formed this morning in a email to a friend. Any thoughts on the matter?

It all started with a simple enough question. “Do you feel like you have a new identity?”

So it doesn’t feel as if I have a new identity per se, but I can definitely feel the weight of importance of the decision. It feels like you have a new set of responsibilities. You officially renounce evil and vow to follow Christ and repent of evil every day you sin. It’s not that I didn’t have the responsibilities before, but now I am fully accepting those responsibilities. It feels like this, when you are saved/accept Christ as Lord, you are doing this out of faith, love, and fear of one who is Mighty. At this point you may not even really be thinking about the consequences. You just know that God is God; you are who you are, an unworthy creation loved by the creator, and you can do nothing but call him Lord. Then the next step, you get baptized and you do this because you love your Lord and he has commanded you to follow in the steps of baptism. You are His, and now you must take on the sign of his covenant and his Lordship. The next step after this is conformation, and in some ways this is the weightier of the steps. This one should be taken on with full awareness. This is the point were you say, I have realized the consequences of my decisions and I am prepared to make known my resolve to follow through, not in my own strength but in the Holy Spirits. I confirm that God is my Lord, his will is my command, and I am a member of his covenant community. You again say, “I do renounce evil. When I fail I will repent and seek his strength. When I am lost He shall guide me.”

That’s about the best way I can describe the difference I feel after being confirmed. I don’t know yet if I am correct in my observations, but that’s kinda how it feels looking back on my experiences and trying to reconcile them with what I know of the Scriptures.

“Individualism and socialism are in truth not antagonistic but correlative. Where the domain of the one principle ends that of the other begins. And although the motto Laissez faire has been taken as the watchword of an individualism that tends to anarchism, and so-called free traders have made “the law of supply and demand” a stench in the nostrils of men alive to social injustice, there is in free trade nothing that conflicts with a rational socialism. On the contrary, we have but to carry out the free-trade principle to its logical conclusions to see that it brings us to such socialism.”

Henry George – “Protection or Free Trade”

So here’s a good recipe for some quick and easy Veggie Burritos that a friend made recently.

Food:

Vegetables (I use Onions, Green Peppers, mushrooms, and sometimes random peppers)
Olive Oil
Garlic Salt
Italian Seasoning
Cheese (I use Feta, my friend likes Mozzarella)
Optional: Tofu (I just tried it with tofu and it’s a good addition.
Tortillas

Directions:

1. Cut up the Vegetables
2. Place in plastic bag and add a dash of oil, and your seasonings (plastic grocery sacks work amazingly) and shake up
3. Turn oven on Broil, Line baking pan with Tin foil and cook vegetables until slightly starting to brown
4. Place Vegetables and cheese in Tortillas then either fry in a pan or bake in the oven.

We don’t have a TV tag, y’all!  High-fives all around.

I just finished Season one of The Wire, which is a show that ran for five seasons on HBO, and is no longer on air.  Everyone talks about The Wire as if it is perfection, it is idolized, lionized, immortalized, you name it, people talk about it that way.  The show pulls no punches, offering a look at Baltimore as corrupt, dark, and the way that so many people must live.  At a basic level, the show is cops and robbers, only the cops are no idolized heroes, and the robbers are drug dealers born and bred into “the game.”  Some cops are good cops, but it’s a job like any other job, filled with politics and lazy people.  The drug dealers are that way because there is no other way that makes any sense for them, they have always lived this way, generation to generation.  In one telling moment, one of the main drug characters is helping a younger kid with his math, and finds that the kid can’t follow a word problem involving buses, but if it is put in terms of a drug count, he gets the math immediately.  When asked why, he says that if you mess the count up, they mess you up. The lesson is clear, when it’s worth your life and means something to you, you learn quickly.

The show is entrancing, a sprawling character drama that unfolds upon itself, taking it’s sweet time to get where it’s going.  There is a tendency to like it just because it is so foreign, but the show is compelling for other reasons.  Give it six or seven episodes, which is how long it took me to get everyone straight, and you will find yourself awake at 2 in the morning, unable to go to sleep until the disc ends and all is quiet.  The first season is basically an 11 hour movie, full and complete, no shortcuts.  It can be somewhat daunting to launch into a five season show, but just give yourself the first season.

A must see, complex and haunting.

I’ve added a new category called “Wisdom from Authors We Love.” My thought is that we can all share bits and pieces, with comments, from books we’re reading or have read under this heading. Also, I wanted to point out this category making feature on this blog. It’s especially helpful if you want to publish a serious of posts on a single subject over a long period of time and/or want to have others contribute on the same subject. Years later we will be able to click on the category and sort out all the blog postings under that category. So feel free to create new categories as you see fit.

And since I have a few minutes more to write I’ll begin with some wisdom from the American philosopher Henry George, writing against nineteenth century progressivism in his most famous work Progress and Poverty:

It cannot be said of the Hindoo and of the Chinaman, as it may be said of the savage, that our superiority is the result of a longer education; that we are, as it were, the grown men of nature, while they are the children. The Hindoos and the Chinese were civilized when we were savages. They had great cities, highly organized and powerful governments, literatures, philosophies, polished manners, considerable division of labor, large commerce, and elaborate arts, when our ancestors were wandering barbarians, living in huts and skin tents, not a whit further advanced than the American Indians. While we have progressed from the savage state to Nineteenth Century civilization, they have stood still. If progress be the result of fixed laws, inevitable and eternal, which impel men forward, how shall we account for this?

But it is not merely these arrested civilizations that the current theory of development fails to account for. It is not merely that men have gone so far on the path of progress and then stopped; it is that men have gone far on the path of progress and then gone back. It is not merely an isolated case that thus confronts the theory – it is the universal rule. Every civilization that the world has yet seen has had its period of vigorous growth, of arrest and stagnation; its decline and fall.

George is often criticized for his utopian philosophy, for too much hope for the way things could be if only. But the popular view of his day was a blind progressivism. An idea that science and reason had set in motion an unstoppable linear progression toward an ever better world. Compared with this George is the pragmatic realist. He his wise enough to see that the progressive is not progressive enough. There is no evolutionary impulse driving man forward but rather a long history of progress and regression. THAT is the general rule. The truly progressive civilization, as George will later point out, is the one that retains the Hebraic version of equality, freedom, and justice for all men.

Many defend the idea of a mechanized progression by appealing to greed and Adam Smith. George writes, “We are apt to assume that greed is the strongest of human motives, … that the fear of punishment is necessary to keep men honest – that selfish intersts are always stronger than general interests. Nothing could be further from the truth. Carlyle (?) somewhere says that poverty is the hell of which the modern Englishman is most afraid. And he is right. Poverty is the open-mouthed, relentless hell which yawns beneath civilized society. And it is hell enough. The Vedas declare no truer thing than when the wise crow Bushanda tells the eagle bearer of Vishnu that the keenest pain is in poverty. For poverty is not merely deprivation; it means shame, degradation; the earing of the most sensitive parts of our moral and mental nature as with hot irons, the denial of the stongest impulses and the sweetest affections; the wrenching of the most vital nerves.”

George continues to reason that “From this hell of poverty, it is but natural that men should make every escape.” It then comes naturally that the rule of modern man is summed up in the popular phrase of his day “Get money – honestly, if you can, but at any rate get money!”

No, greed is not what powers the mechanized progression of capitalism. Rather it is the fear of poverty, and in George’s view this base progressivism so popular in his day should be reformed into a truly Progressive state based on justice, freedom, and equality for all men – one in which man would reap the full fruit of his labor and few would fear the cold hand of poverty.

Today is Cinco de Mayo, and my legs are still a bit sore. I am hoping the margaritas Amanda and I are about to share will loosen me up, make me feel a little better. Not that I haven’t had some booze in a while; actually I just spent the weekend sitting around a campfire drinking good, ole, canned American lager: Busch, Old Milwalkee, Pabst Blue Ribbon. And walking. Boy, did I walk. The reason for the sore legs.

Michael, our coworker and newly-made friend Taylor, and I left work at noon Friday. After cashing in some aluminum cans we’d been saving for the last few months  (some from my house, some from Michael’s, some from the recycling bin at work) we jumped in Taylor’s dad’s minivan $22. 50 richer than we were before we went to the local iron & metal works. That helped pay for the Pall Malls. It was then off to the my parents’ house, about two hours north.

The occasion: Spring turkey hunting.

Last time I wrote on the ethics of hunting, it was November, and Michael and I had gone deer hunting. One difference between that trip and this – besides that this time we brought an extra body, we were hunting a different animal, and we were more active — was that my dad had arranged for us to stay at a cabin owned by his neighbor down in an idyllic setting near the 2200 acre Fiery Fork Conservation Area. One room. Water pumped from the creek that runs in front of the porch. Fire pit.

Best part of all was we didn’t have to drive a half hour at four in the morning to get to our hunting grounds; we simply rolled out of bed and entered the woods.

First day, running on no sleep from staying up too late, we sat in blinds and sounded stupid trying to call in some gobblers. I guess we did the job, though, because we heard them call back. That’s always exciting. Not long afterward,  Taylor, who I shared a blind with, leaned over, whispering, “There’s two of them. A gobbler and a hen.” Sure as shit, there they were. They spent some time walking behind us as Taylor kept his barrell pointed their direction and I clumsily attempted using a boxcall to stop them from their ascent up the hill, away from us. No luck. Got away.

A while later, Taylor again leans over to tell me of a new find. (We had our backs to each other, he facing the woods where all the action was, me facing the bordering field staring at a rubber turkey decoy.)

“There’s a coyote,” he said. Looking behind me, I saw a dark, scruffy, wild canine running around, followed by another, sniffing, stopping to scratch his neck, just like a regular house dog. We had probably lured them in with our attempt to sound like turkeys, and they probably then smelled the scent of the real ones that got away. They came from the opposite direction but went the same way as their feathered cousins, their soon-to-be lunch. Probably no luck now snagging one ourselves. Nothing from the other blind either, which contained my dad and Michael. They didn’t even get to see or hear anything.

[...]

A good post from The Distributist Review.

When we think of persons associated with the phrase “social justice,” any number of images might spring to mind. Some might think of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Workers Movement. Others might conjure up an image of revolutionaries seeking to overturn the capitalist system, or of reformers trying to change it. And some might simply regard the term as a fixation of fuzzy-headed liberals, with little connection to the real world of business and economics. But one person we rarely think of is precisely the person whose role might just be the most critical, and that is the cost accountant.
[...]

Ok, get ready. Are you set? Swallow your coffee or you will spit it all over your keyboard.

Link.

A few years ago the Swiss added to their national constitution a provision requiring “account to be taken of the dignity of creation when handling animals, plants and other organisms.” No one knew exactly what it meant, so they asked the Swiss Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology to figure it out. The resulting report, “The Dignity of Living Beings with Regard to Plants,” is enough to short circuit the brain.

A “clear majority” of the panel adopted what it called a “biocentric” moral view, meaning that “living organisms should be considered morally for their own sake because they are alive.” Thus, the panel determined that we cannot claim “absolute ownership” over plants and, moreover, that “individual plants have an inherent worth.” This means that “we may not use them just as we please, even if the plant community is not in danger, or if our actions do not endanger the species, or if we are not acting arbitrarily.”

Hat tip: Rachel Lucas

The plant community.

Who called it? I’ll tell you who. A guy named Gilbert called it in 1904, and I will quote his work at excessive length because I find the entire thing so side-splittingly funny. G. K. Chesterton, in his work of satire, The Napolean of Notting Hill:

The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children’s games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up. And one of the games to which it is most attached is called “Keep to-morrow dark,” and which is also named (by the rustics in Shropshire, I have no doubt) “Cheat the Prophet.” The players listen very carefully and respectfully to all that the clever men have to say about what is to happen in the next generation. The players then wait until all the clever men are dead, and bury them nicely. They then go and do something else. That is all. For a race of simple tastes, however, it is great fun.

For human beings, being children, have the childish wilfulness and the childish secrecy. And they never have from the beginning of the world done what the wise men have seen to be inevitable. They stoned the false prophets, it is said; but they could have stoned true prophets with a greater and juster enjoyment. Individually, men may present a more or less rational appearance, eating, sleeping, and scheming. But humanity as a whole is changeful, mystical, fickle, delightful. Men are men, but Man is a woman.

[...]

I might be applying for a job with this website, doing audio and video production type things.  Can you guys take a look and give me some feedback about this?  It’s run by the Oxford Centre for Religion and Public Life, which is in England.

getreligion.org

I am always spreading the “good news” about homebrewing. I actually have a website explaining the process at the most basic level. I just added a page to it exploring the idea of homebrewing on a budget: Instead of the usual $100 start-up cost for equipment you can use plastic soda bottles to make 2L batches. In addition to the ingredients (which come out to about 50 cents per beer) I estimate you would need about $5 to $10 of equipment to do it this way.

Also:
This website is better than mine.
This place has everything you would ever need and $7 flat rate shipping.
These guys can answer all your questions.

Go forth and tell all nations!

The Lincoln Land Institute is a Georgist leaning policy and research institution that, I am happy to say, is seeing much success in terms of getting financing for research and publishing papers on land policy issues. They are becoming a leading resource for policy makers and practitioners dealing with these issues. And now they have a new website worth checking out at http://www.lincolninst.edu/.

So much of what we talk about and advocate for here is represented by such a small minority either politically or academically. It’s nice to see some real success once in a while.