Blindness and Beauty in a Young Mother’s Story
Published on May 12th, 2012.
Here’s a video from a young mom who understands from conviction and from experience the infinite value of human life. Her baby boy was born with a cleft lip and without eyes. Here’s her story:
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Here were are reminded that human beings are both beautiful and ugly. We are beautiful for who we are as human beings. Children are not beautiful for their ability to see or close their mouth. They are beautiful because they are human beings. And this mother is a beautiful person, created in God’s image, loving her child before he was born, just like God made her to do. And she wasn’t wearing makeup. What is more beautiful than that?
But we also have the ability judge the value of another human being’s life on the basis of their relative “quality of life,” or outward beauty. What could be uglier than that? Nothing is uglier than a spiritual blindness that cannot see beauty in a child unless he has eyes.
Praise God for the cross, where the source of all beauty and the worst of all ugliness met, where God became ugly for our sake, that we might be made beautiful in him.
I hear that there are a lot of videos on YouTube. I don’t need to watch them all to know that this is one of the best.
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T4G Affirmations and Denials, This Time with More Cowbell
Published on April 24th, 2012.
In April 2006, Mark Dever, Ligon Duncan, C.J. Mahaney, and Albert Mohler published a statement, “Affirmations and Denials,” as a basis for unity around the gospel as friends and Christian leaders, and as the basis for the formation of a new biannual conference, Together For The Gospel. T4G has become something of a rallying point and a point of identity for pastors who resonate with these affirmations and denials.
I find this statement clarifying, concise, courageous, and convictional. Now, through these videos, the statement is also cool.
Article 1: On The Bible
Article IV: On Expository Preaching in the Church
Article V: On The Extent of God’s Attributes
Article VI: On the Trinity
Article IX: On Evangelism
Article XI: On Law, Grace, and the Gospel
Article XII: On Justification By Faith Alone
Article XV: On Congregations, Associations, and Denominations
Video and audio from this year’s T4G conference is available at the T4G site.
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Nothing Breaks the Law of Entropy: Artistic American Ruins
Published on April 21st, 2012.
The Economist has published an interesting photo essay of photography and commentary on a number of abandoned and all-but-ruined American ruins. Even as we progress in our understanding and mastery of the material world, everything we touch is still subject to the decay of a fallen world.
Here’s from the introduction:
Abandoned buildings are in mourning. They grieve for the lives that their damp and empty rooms have left behind. In their prime, these monumental breakers, lead works and turbine halls presented a public face to the world. They were the arena where men and women toiled and enterprise ended in success or failure. Now they are shut away, left to mourn in silence.
The columns and pilasters of these immense buildings recall a more assertive past. In that foreign country, powered by coal and steam, the 20th century was young and dynamic. The future held an intoxicating vision of progress. Now the future has arrived and that promise has been left strewn across the tarmac, mingled with broken glass, rusting iron and the encroaching scrub of the woods.
Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre, the photographers who took these pictures, have built their professional lives on ruins. Both born in the 1980s, they started photographing derelict buildings in the outskirts of Paris, where they grew up. Since then they have shot America’s abandoned cinemas and its empty office blocks. At first each had his own camera; now they use just one. “Often”, Marchand says, “we cannot remember who took which shot.”
Nothing breaks the law of entropy. View the slideshow here.
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Wanting The Very Best for Our Wives
Published on April 13th, 2012.
Here’s an interesting description of Brad Pitt’s pursuit of a ring suitable for his new fiance, Angelina Jolie. There’s a picture here of the kind of attention and care that husbands are called to give to their wives throughout marriage.
After years of endless speculation, it appears that Hollywood’s Golden Couple, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, are finally engaged. According to the several reports, it was the couple’s jeweler who spilled the beans that he designed a ring for Jolie, 36, in conjunction with Pitt, 48. Jolie was photographed wearing the ring on April 11 at a private viewing of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Chinese Galleries, according to the Hollywood Reporter.
The design process was a reported yearlong collaboration between Pitt and Procop.
“He wanted every aspect of it to be perfect, so Robert was able to locate a diamond of the finest quality and cut it to an exact custom size and shape to suite Angelina’s hand,” the rep said in a statement.
“Brad was always heavily involved, overseeing every aspect of the creative design evolution. The side diamonds are specialty cut to encircle her finger. Each diamond is of the highest gem quality.”
The couple had previously asserted that they would not get married until gay marriage was legalized. But earlier this year, Pitt, who has six children with Jolie, hinted at a change of heart. Pitt told CBS News that their children were putting pressure on them, which caused him to reconsider his earlier position.
“It means something to them,” he said. “We will [get married] someday, we will. It’s a great idea. ‘Get mommy a ring.’ ‘Okay, I will, I will.’”
Of course, there’s no small amount of irony in that last line.
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Man Ticketed for Yelling Obscenities at Cat
Published on March 23rd, 2012.
I have some thoughts about this article from CBS Minnesota:
A man who was heard yelling obscenities at his cat was cited by police in Chaska, Minn.
According to the city’s police department, neighbors called in, complaining of the noise.
The man, who was not identified, admitted to authorities that he had been swearing loudly at the cat.
His defense to officers was that he is “human.”
Police said this is not the first time the man had been warned or cited for disorderly conduct.
He was issued a new citation for disorderly conduct for the recent incident.
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Mark Coppenger on Civil Disobedience
Published on March 16th, 2012.
As those who are “waiting for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells,” (2 Peter 3:13), our eyes are fixed on that final horizon. We wait eagerly with great hope. So we should not make too much of any trouble we face in this age. Jesus himself would have us expect persecution. After all, we follow a crucified man.
But our final horizon does not mean that we don’t engage our present situation with great seriousness. We are on the downside of the great Constantinian arc and the gospel and its many entailments are increasingly abhorrent to the culture at large.
In his article, “When Should Christians Engage in Civil Disobedience?“, Mark Coppenger has captured well the challenge presented the Health and Human Services Department’s policy requiring institutions to provide contraception, sterilization, and abortifacients to their employees, even this is in immediate contradiction to the religious commitments of those institutions.
Here’s an excerpt from his article:
. . .America is no Iran or Saudi Arabia, where Christian conversion and gospel preaching land you in prison, and even the grave. We’re a liberal democracy, a pillar of Western civilization, with its constitutive freedom of conscience.
But that status is tenuous. Classic liberalism (following Adam Smith and Edmund Burke, not Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid) is dying in the mainline Western nations as paternalists, cultural relativists, sensitivity police, and decadence-normalizers move in with their speech and tax codes to cow the faithful.
Of course, this raises the question of when it is appropriate to take a stand, and when it is better to simply retire from the field, as did Catholic Charities in Massachusetts, when it stopped its adoption ministry because the law said it could not discriminate against same-sex households. After all, obedience to the law is the default position for Christians. That’s the teaching of Romans 13:1-7, which Paul wrote when the government was in many ways unsavory. But this is not an absolute duty, for we rightly celebrate the stand of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in Daniel 3 and Peter and John’s defiance in Acts 4:1-21, where they ignored an order to stop preaching and teaching in Jesus’ name.
. . .As we make our case for liberty, we need to show our logic, expose the illogicality of our foes, link arms with co-belligerents, exhibit dignity in the face of indignities, and make it very clear that there are limits to our flexibility. The five ministers who testified before the House committee—Meir Soloveichik, Matthew Harrison, Craig Mitchell, William Lori, and Ben Mitchell—served us well in this regard. But the public debate continues, and it may well happen that Representative Connolly and his ilk will not grasp the gravity of the situation until the jail doors slam on dozens, hundreds, and even thousands of clergy.
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Marimba Solo: “White Knuckle Stroll”
Published on March 9th, 2012.
We have many reasons to be thankful for computers, for the internet, and for YouTube. This is one of them:
In light of yesterday’s post I should say that it is very unlikely that I would have experienced this without technology.
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Happy Birthday Dear Telephone!
Published on March 8th, 2012.
Some things are easy to take for granted. They are common. Everything seems to depend on them. Roads would be in this category. Refrigerators would be in this category. We don’t often let our imagination run to a world where we these things don’t exist.
The telephone is certainly in this category.
Today is the telephone’s birthday and this is the first time in my own life of 31 years that I’ve taken a moment to pay some respect to this fabulous device. And many thanks to The Atlantic for the notice.
Here’s a excerpt from a fun article by Rebecca Rosen, “The Magical, Revolutionary Telephone.”
On this day in 1876, the U.S. Patent Office awarded Alexander Graham Bell a patent for his “improvement in telegraphy,” or, as we now know it, the telephone. . . .The telephone, and the reaction to it, rolled out over the course of years, not minutes.
A peek back into the tech writing of yore always serves as a good reminder that concerns about how technology is changing our world — distracting us, destroying established industries — are nothing new. But it is also more than that: it is an invitation to imagine a time when our quotidian habits (e.g. talking on the phone) were quasi-magical.
On July 10, 1874, the Times published one of the first accounts of the forthcoming telephone. The Times’story, “Music by Telegraph,” concerns Elisha Gray, whose claim as inventor of the telephone remains in question. The Times explained the new invention:
About two months ago Mr. Elisha Gray, of Chicago, a gentleman well known in the electric telegraph world as a maker and inventor of some of the most valuable instruments now in use, conceived an idea which would be an extraordinary development of telegraphic science if he could only succeed in practically demonstrating it. … Mr. Chandler says that he regards it as the first step toward doing away with the manipulating instruments altogether, and that he believes that in time the operators will transmit the sound of their own voice over the wires, and talk with one another instead of telegraphing. … What this will all lead to, or where it will all end, is one of the most extraordinary problems of the day.
Aside from the intense interest which this discovery will naturally excite in the scientific world — as to the causes which produce this extraordinary electro-physiological phenomenon, and the gratification it will afford to all lovers of the marvelous — it is evident that, although the practical used to which it may be put cannot as yet be recited, quite enough has been demonstrated to show that, from its basis, a new system of telegraphy, both for aerial and submarine lines, of a simple, rapid, and economical character, can be introduced.
Did you understand that last paragraph? Maybe that’s because it was one sentence. In this case, the content and the form are from a previous era.
Rosen then cites another article about a similar invention from the Times, March 22, 1876:
The universal use of the telephone will, of course, be viewed with disapprobation by the sound-producing part of the community, just as the introduction of labor-saving machines was met by the hostility of the laboring classes. No man who can sit in his own study with his telephone by his side, and thus listen to the performance of an opera at the Academy, will care to go to Fourteenth street and to spend the vening in a hot and crowded building. In like manner, many persons will prefer to hear lectures and sermons in the comfort and privacy of their own rooms, rather than to go to the church or the lecture-room. … Thus the telephone, by bringing music and ministers into every home, will empty the concert-halls and the churches, and the time may come when a future Von Bülow playing a solitary piano in his private room, and a future Talmage preaching in his private gymnasium, may be heard in every well-furnished house on the American continent.
We truly aren’t the first to wrestle with how technology will transform the things we love, even how we experience the preached Word together as God’s people.
There’s a conversation to be had about how the internet and video and other media have not only extended but in some cases replaced the biblical commitment of God’s people to gather together and to hear the Word preached. But it is enough to say that for the Christian we can thank God for electronic speakers of every kind in as much as they do extend the reach of the preached Word into places where it otherwise could not go.
Happy Birthday dear Telephone.
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What is sin?
Published on February 4th, 2012.
I came across the following quote by John Piper in college, printed it out, and hung it in my room. The utter folly and sinfulness of sin is most clear against the backdrop of the manifold glory of God.
What is sin?
It is the glory of God not honored.
The holiness of God not reverenced.
The greatness of God not admired.
The power of God not praised.
The truth of God not sought.
The wisdom of God not esteemed.
The beauty of God not treasured.
The goodness of God not savored.
The faithfulness of God not trusted.
The commandments of God not obeyed.
The justice of God not respected.
The wrath of God not feared.
The grace of God not cherished.
The presence of God not prized.
The person of God not loved.
That is sin.
John Piper, Let The Nations Be Glad: The Supremacy of God in Missions, 206
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Getting to Know Your Environment: The Best US Map Ever
Published on January 12th, 2012.
My wife likes maps. Our honeymoon involved a lot of driving, including a few days with about 10 hours of driving each. For many of those hours my lovely new wife sat with her hand on a point on an Atlas map, watching the road signs. When we passed a significant marker, she would look down at the map, move her finger, and then continue watching the road.
This was another confirmation that I had married someone different from me.
The world is a colorful, textured, diverse, cultured, and populated place. We could all appreciate maps a bit more for their help in acquainting us with our shared home. This is, after all, our environment.
Thanks to a mapmaker named David Imus, we now have what has been called “The Greatest Paper Map of The United States You’ll Ever See.” His map, a product of some 6,000 hours of work, recently won the most prestigious honor in the mapmaking field.
Here’s Slate’s description of what his map special:
…the big mapmaking corporations of the world employ type-positioning software, placing their map labels (names of cities, rivers, etc.) according to an algorithm. For example, preferred placement for city labels is generally to the upper right of the dot that indicates location. But if this spot is already occupied—by the label for a river, say, or by a state boundary line—the city label might be shifted over a few millimeters. Sometimes a town might get deleted entirely in favor of a highway shield or a time zone marker. The result is a rough draft of label placement, still in need of human refinement. Post-computer editing decisions are frequently outsourced—sometimes to India, where teams of cheap workers will hunt for obvious errors and messy label overlaps. The overall goal is often a quick and dirty turnaround, with cost and speed trumping excellence and elegance.
By contrast, David Imus worked alone on his map seven days a week for two full years. Nearly 6,000 hours in total. It would be prohibitively expensive just to outsource that much work. But Imus—a 35-year veteran of cartography who’s designed every kind of map for every kind of client—did it all by himself. He used a computer (not a pencil and paper), but absolutely nothing was left to computer-assisted happenstance. Imus spent eons tweaking label positions. Slaving over font types, kerning, letter thicknesses. Scrutinizing levels of blackness. It’s the kind of personal cartographic touch you might only find these days on the hand-illustrated ski-trail maps available at posh mountain resorts.
Learn more about Imus’ map or to purchase, go here.
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