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Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket--safe, dark, motionless, airless--it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation.

C.S. Lewis

Big snow in the social media age

After looking at photos of other people’s snow-covered streets on Twitter and Instagram all day, it is both startling and rather comforting to venture outside. Up and down the block, at night under the streetlights, I see my neighbors, nearly all of them strangers, shovelling out their cars and driveways and sidewalks. We smile at one another and laugh, exasperated, and say the usual things you say in the face of such terrible weather. Sometimes we pause to take pictures of all the snow with our phones; some of them will be up on Facebook before long, but we won’t be seeing each other’s, since we aren’t really friends. Thankfully, though, other people we know elsewhere in town are doing the same thing, and we’ll hear about it soon.

- Ian Crouch

150208 주일예배

 The Lord who rescued me from the paw of the lion and the paw of the bear will rescue me from the hand of this Philistine.” Saul said to David, “Go, and the Lord be with you.” (1Samuel 17:37)
 
David said to the Philistine, “You come against me with sword and spear and javelin, but I come against you in the name of the Lord Almighty, the God of the armies of Israel, whom you have defied. This day the Lord will deliver you into my hands, and I’ll strike you down and cut off your head. This very day I will give the carcasses of the Philistine army to the birds and the wild animals, and the whole world will know that there is a God in Israel. All those gathered here will know that it is not by sword or spear that the Lord saves; for the battle is the Lord’s, and he will give all of you into our hands.” (1Samuel 17:45-47)

사랑하는 하나님 아버지, 믿음은 overwhelming한 상황에서도 당신을 보는 눈이라 배웠습니다. 크고 작은 훈련을 통해서 모든 일 가운데 당신을 볼 수 있길 기도합니다. 지금 제 눈 앞에 해결될 수 없을 것 같이 보이는 여러 challenge들이 있지만 sword나 spear나 javelin이 아닌 오직 당신의 손에 제 humble한 도구를 맡겨드림으로 믿음을 배워가길 기도합니다. Lord, the battle is yours. Please help me to accept this simple truth, and praise you as my Lord in every moment of my life. 



 

The problem (or promise?) of American liberalism

What Nordic life tells us, in other words, is how steep and ambitious the path of American liberalism is. Conservative social ideals are notorious for their mercenary spirit and wishful self-justifications—the Thatcherite talks of neighbors helping one another and themselves as homeless people fill the sidewalks. Yet a certain hardness of heart rests in the practice of modern American liberalism, too. We have registered our willingness to make the Faustian deal that the Swedes have not. The possibility of having a truly Iranian-American life, or enjoying deep-Appalachian bluegrass, is important to our national variety. And, to let these cultures thrive on their own, we’ve agreed to let some of our people, by our withheld intervention, be thrown under the bus.

Because this is America, we hope for better. But we aren’t hung up on our tendencies to fall short. A Boothian observer of the U.S. would notice its capacity to overpromise and underdeliver. (By contrast, when the Finns are confronted with their educational achievements their impulse is apparently to doubt the data.) Like many Enlightenment-born nations, we declared our principles at the start—liberty, equality, the pursuit of happiness—and trusted that any friction among these ideas would be sorted out, eventually, in the churn of civic life. The trust continues. Progress is slow. While Nordic people have made the best of what they have, Americans persist in gambling on something better, and yet settling for something worse.

Nathan Heller, Northern lights: Do the Scandinavians really have it all figured out? 

The history of loving to read

Romance structures literary life, and to be a reader is, often, to follow its choreography, from susceptibility and discovery (“I just saw it there in the bookstore!”) to infatuation, intimacy, identification, and obsession. We connect with books in an intellectual way, but the most valuable relationships we have with them are emotional; to say that you merely admire or respect a book is, on some level, to insult it. Feelings are so fundamental to literary life that it can be hard to imagine a way of relating to literature that doesn’t involve loving it. Without all those emotions, what would reading be?

. . . Some readers read because they want to know about the here and now. But, when a young person’s favorite book is “The Great Gatsby” or “Jane Eyre,” something else is going on. That sort of reader is, as Lynch puts it, “striving to bridge the distance between self and other and now and then.”

. . .  One might imagine that e-books and the Web could deromanticize reading. But, far from being on the wane, it’s possible that our romantic relationship with literature is bleeding over into other parts of cultural life. The rise of TV and movie fandom, for example—with its generous affection turning, when it’s betrayed, into lavish scorn—seems to be an extension of our love affair with books. It’s a way of loving a canon in the present tense.

Joshua Rothman, Review of "Loving Literature: A Cultural History" by Deidre Shauna Lynch

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