Marilynne Robinson

This novelist, author of Gilead, has the only book at the Fort Collins library listed under "Calvinism in the United States."

So, I looked it up, and it's called The Death of Adam, and after further investigation on the internet, I have decided to check it out.

Here's a quote from the book (as found in the New York Times Book Review): "The modern fable is that science exposed religion as a delusion and more or less supplanted it. But science cannot serve in the place of religion because it cannot generate an ethics or a morality. It can give us no reason to prefer a child to a dog, or to choose honorable poverty over fraudulent wealth. It can give us no grounds for preferring what is excellent to what is sensationalistic. And this is more or less where we are now.''

Leaving.

Dammit. My aunt has banished me from her office...

I have a laptop but it spends most of its time overheating and making loud whirring noises so it sounds like a bomb about to explode.

I may not have Internet for a while. Weep.

To summarize some of my plans for the future:
- I want to work at the place I'm working at until next summer.
- During the summer I want to take six credits at Front Range Community College.
- During the semesters I want to take four classes at Front Range (starting next year).
- I want to transfer into Colorado State University and take a B.A. in Philosophy (of Religion?).
- I want to go to graduate school at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas, and take an M.Div.
- I want to return to Palm Springs, California, and pastor to the Southern Baptist church there. I'll live near Tahquitz Creek.

Americans, read this!

'God's Country'

Wendell Berry on Christianity

'If, because of these discrepancies, Christianity were dismissable, there would, of course, be no problem. We could simply dismiss it, along with the twenty centuries of unsatisfactory history attached to it, and start setting things to rights. The problem emerges only when we ask, Where then would we turn for instruction? We might, let us suppose, turn to another religion--a recourse that is sometimes suggested by the anti-Christian environmentalists. Buddhism, for example, is certainly a religion that could guide us toward a right respect for the natural world, our fellow humans, and our fellow creatures. I have a considerable debt myself to Buddhism and Buddhists. But there is an enormous number of people, and I am one of them, whose native religion, for better or worse, is Christianity. We were born to it; we began to learn about it before we became conscious; it is, whatever we think of it, an intimate belonging of our being; it informs our consciousness, our language, and our dreams. We can turn away from it or against it, but that will only bind us tightly to a reduced version of it. A better possibility is that this, our native religion, should survive and renew itself, so that it may become as largely and truly instructive as we need it to be. On such a survival and renewal of the Christian religion may depend the survival of that Creation which is its subject. '

http://www.crosscurrents.org/berry.htm

2nd post

I'm quite happy to be off of LJ.

I was reading blogs before I ever heard of LiveJournal, so this is a more natural environment for me.

The reason I wanted to post was that I went to a Southern Baptist church today.

Wow, it was so good. The music was so emotional. I think it's true that what the arts in the United States need is an underpinning of religion.

There was no organ; it was a simple rock band. The instruments were played by teenage parishioners.

It was beautiful, sweet like Appalachian honey-dew.

It was truly religious; it probably goes without saying that there was nothing annoying or preachy about it. (The change was probably more in my head than in reality; I was never open to this music before and now I was listening to it with an understanding of the feeling behind it.)

The kids were not attempting to self-consciously create something --

(I just want to say here right now -- there is a possibility, however slight, that I had previously simply ignored this Christian pop-culture parallel world out of an intentional ignorance...)

-- more pure than secular pop music.

I found this religious music so satisfying because it sounded like emo. Really. But it was motivated by less cynical emotions (not to bag on emo, but I think wrist-cutting depression is the reason this subgenre is so Bad and Hated). I find that God is a sufficiently deep and authentic motivation for emo melancholia. Come to think of it, it reminds me of the very traditional music of religious melancholia that is so deep in Eastern tradition.

Western religious music is traditionally more heavenly. But this sweet gritty Baptist emo-country-folk (with electric guitars) was more sweet than Eastern holy music, thus fitting nicely into the Western tradition. But it hit me on a gut-punching visceral level, not unlike mind-damaging Muslim wailing, the heavy metal of religious sounds.

In Hinduism, bhakti is a type of worship about separation from God. How bittersweet it is. On how sometimes it is more beautiful than connection. I disagree, but appreciate the sentiment. And I appreciate a musical understanding of how tough it is to find God, sometimes.