One more move…

All right, I’ve made a final move. My wife asked me to keep our family domain, raisinglittlecains.com. We use it for a couple things, and I’ve decided that I miss some of those plugins that are available to the “do-it-yourself” blogger. So please visit me at raisinglittlecains.com/jamie.

Posture of fear

I heard an example this morning of how our culture has surrendered to fear. NPR reported on the recall of a soccer net, spurred by the death of a toddler. The child became tangled in the net after sticking its head through one of the holes. The Consumer Product Safety Commission drives recalls like these. One line of the story really got me:

Can’t live…if living is without Goo(gle)

Troubling results in a recent survey of Web users in the UK. According to an article in The Independent, the Web is on most people’s can’t do without list:

A YouGov survey published last week found that Britons suffered from “discomgooglation” – a term used to describe how lost people feel if they can’t get on the internet.

Responding to the survey, more than three-quarters of internet users in the UK said they could not live without the web. More than 50 per cent also found the internet more important than religion.

I wonder what the numbers would be in the US.

A Contemplative Life

As I work my way through Wendell Berry’s Jayber Crow, I’m struck by two things: the strength of the fiction, borne as it is from a thoughtful consideration of life in the membership of Port William; and by how contemplative life in Port William is. I realize that both those things belong to Berry himself. He is the writer after all, the maker of that world and its people.

For love of the future

Owen, asking to finish watching “Meet the Robinsons”:

“I want to see the rest of the future.”

Me, too, buddy. Me, too.

Children as commodity

Dmitry Orlov’s series about how to thrive after an economic crash–he says it will be oil, or lack of it, that brings America to its knees–makes for interesting reading. Whether collapse actually comes or not, his assessment of education in America got me thinking:

What will make matters worse is that most of the children are humans-”lite” – deprived of the stories, the myths, and the trials that human children have been put through for the past few million years, minus a bizarre century or two – and so are gravely ill-equipped for life outside the artificial life support system. They are an industrial product: almost from birth, they are placed in an entirely artificial social context, where they are evaluated, classified, and shoved through a series of institutions, to be readied for a lifetime of service in a system whose feedstock is a commodity human product: Grade A human, marketable skills up-to-date, properly credentialed. Even if their parents and grandparents were intact and able to impart wisdom, their children had not been programmed to process that sort of information.

One of the reasons I’m involved in classical Christian education is to help my children be something more than an industrial product.

Chicken at Church

Rick Saenz pointed me to this Slate article about the rise of the franchise church.

RIP: DISH, and the 100 Thing Challenge

So our long association with DISH Network (for perspective, more than 10% of my life) is over. Looking forward to seeing what’s ahead, and not seeing a lot of junk I can do without.

We’ve decided, however, to do Netflix, thinking we can watch the occasional TV series, and get lots of classic movies to watch on Family Nights.

Inspired again by my friend Dave’s 100 Thing Challenge, the DW and I had a go at the garage over the weekend, which culminated in a full trash barrel (I’m embarrassed to say), some things to give to friends, and a carload of stuff for Goodwill. We’re moving inside the house today, remembering that we’ll have to get back to the garage when we have another, larger chunk of time. We’ve decided nothing is a no-brainer; we’re going to carefully consider everything in the house.

This is going to be easy. And hard. Very, very hard. We’ve been talking about 100 personal things, some set number of family things, and so on. It will be interesting to see how it plays out. We have a LOT of stuff.

You can read Dave’s personal rules at his blog, linked above. But remember, here as with many valuable ideas, the process is at least as valuable as the product. Our goal is not only to have less stuff but to be less attached to stuff in general.

Walmart explosion

Watching the Growth of Walmart Across America

The Thinker Defined

From Harry Blamires’ The Christian Mind:

“[It] is a feature of our culture generally that as we are rich in scholars so we are poor in thinkers. . . .The thinker challenges current prejudices. He disturbs the complacent. He obstructs the busy pragmatists. He questions the very foundations of all about him, and in so doing throws doubt upon aims, motives, and purposes which those who are running affairs have neither time nor patience to investigate. The thinker is a nuisance. He is a luxury that modern society cannot afford. It will therefore naturally, and on its own terms justifiably, strive to keep him quiet, to restrict his influence, to ignore him. It will try to pretend that he does not exist. . . .

But the Church cannot do without thinkers–or prophets, as she is wont somewhat pompously to call them. She cannot afford to ape the secular world in suppressing the thinker, in trying to replace him by the scholar. She destroys herself in doing so. For the secular world is true to itself in rejecting the thinker. It serves the laws of its own preservation in rejecting him. But the Church is false to itself when it rejects the thinker. And therefore, in so far as it adopts the fashion of the secular world and tries to submerge thought under learning, prophecy under scholarship, wisdom under know-how, it strives to secularize itself; in other words to destroy itself.

I am not in general a two-spheres thinker, but Blamires’ designation of secular and Christian thinking is pretty interesting. And whatever you call the two activities–scholarship and thinking are as useful as any terms–his analysis is pretty much spot on. Nothing else explains the proliferation of the ephemeral, and the triumph of the trivial, so well.