- Soul Train.
- Do they sing the Hymn of the Volga Boatmen?
- Karl Hess, Coiner of “The 99%.”
- No solution = No problem.
- “Next Christianity” revisited.
- Blessing the Wine Grapes.
- Scientist, liquid nitrogen, 1500 ping-pong balls.
On October 30 the train No.175 Vorkuta-Moscow, carrying a church, arrived at the Yaroslavl railway station in Moscow. It was the first missionary trip of a church in a train.
The Prince Saint Vladimir is basically an old boat converted into a floating church that could make the sacred relics on board accessible to people in remote areas along the Volga River.
This isn’t the world’s first floating church, communities living on water have built plenty of them all around the world, but the Prince Saint Vladimir (named after the saint who baptized Russia) is the world’s first self-propelled chapel boat. Built back in 2004, the unique church was designed to reach even the shallowest waters, so that all the people of the Volvograd region could have access to a church and priest.
(Story with many pictures; Song of the Volga Boatmen)
It occurs to me that there are poor, benighted souls who’ve never heard of Karl Hess. Well, here’s your chance to cure that: The Radical Right-Wing Roots of Occupy Wall Street. From speechwriter for Barry Goldwater to anarchist denizen of the underground barter economy, he was quite a guy.
Problems have solutions. If there’s no solution, there’s no “problem.”
Terrorism isn’t a problem, as it has no solution. It’s an evil.
Evil is a mystery, not a problem.
But war is the health of the state, and both parties now love Big Brother, so war we shall have, if only on insoluble evils like terrorism or abstractions like “tyranny” (pace Dubya’s second inaugural).
I blogged yesterday on “The Next Christians,” a conversation on APR as part of a “Civil Conversations Project.” Since the two invited guests were both Evangelicals (one eschews the label while more or less owning the substance insofar as it has a solid substance), I was skeptical for reasons I needn’t repeat.
Well, I set off on my walk, turned up my crap detector and started the podcast.
Though I’m fully aware of the old saw about “sincerity’s everything; if you can fake that, you’ve got it made,” and I’ve seen plenty of Evangelical fakery, I think these guys are real:
- They acknowledge tacitly that the Culture Wars are over and Christendom lost; that is, they acknowledge that culture’s now “post-Christian.”
- They express some appreciation for the “gladiators” that tried to save Christendom.
- They are doing things that, especially in the case of Mr. Daly, can really tick off his supporters with no guaranty that he’s going to achieve a “good result.” They’re stabbed in front and in the back, so to speak. For example, Focus on the Family’s Daly offered to show up to receive a “Shame Award” from the Colorado Springs Independent.
- They’re trying to live life fearlesslessly, because “God has not given us a spirit of fear” according to Scripture. (As an Orthodox, I’d say “I’m already dead and buried with Christ in Baptism; why should I hyperventilate over trifles?”)
Best line of the show, though, probably was the hostess’s’: “Change is stressful. It sends us back to our lizard brains.”
I can stand by everything I wrote yesterday because I did not opine that Lyons and Daly are fakes. I used their personas and the show title to make a point about how Evangelicalism in general is laughably inconstant, tossed to and fro by cultural winds (and marketing data, too), pretexts to the contrary notwithstanding.
Lyons and Daly, though, seem to be actually trying to do the right thing by their lights. I’m not going to forsake Orthodoxy to join them, but they’re the kinds of guys I can wish well to and even hope that, some day, they’ll notice that the light’s better over here.
I recently acquired three of the four volumes of the Orthodox Great Book of Needs, with prayers for various occasions, so the existence of a service for blessing winery grapes comes as no surprise. (The Priest is one of countless converts to Orthodoxy from the Evangelical world, by the way.)
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Tipsy Teetotaler ن 