I gotta have my orange juice.

Asher’s been perfecting his cribbage board technique:

The NKJV has a clause in Ephesians 3 that is missing from the Alexandrian texts:

For this reason I bow my knees to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, from whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named. (Ephesians 3:14-15 NKJV)

This made me wonder about the referent of “whom.” But “family” is patria, so clearly it is the Father. Family is fatherdom.

On the Continent, the ship of State did not move on a sea of troubles such as faced the Englishman when he sailed the five oceans of the world. The object of the recurrent and never-ceasing care for a territorial ruler in Central Europe was the forest. After a thousand years of chopping and cutting, 27 per cent of the area of Germany is still covered by forests. More than one quarter of a country where every square inch has been “cultivated,” furrowed, turned, is covered by trees even today. Forestry was a national concern for the German rulers. The notorious word “Kultur” carries, to begin with, the notion of Landeskultur, cultivation of the soil. A German thinks of planting trees whenever he hears the word “Kultur.” Trees take a long time to grow. It is this long period of cultivation that constitutes the outstanding privileges of a government’s economic policy as against that of the individual. The far-sightedness of a paternal government has protected the German woods. “Paternal” means being unmoved by immediate profits; “paternal” stands for patience and indifference to the incentives of the day. Sports, movies, radio, newspapers, take advantage of our childishness. The German individual State was rigid and austere, its people unswayed by the demagogue; it was paternal because it took thought for a long future. It restored the chief wealth of the soil: its trees. For a poor, sandy, rainy and foggy land, it is the greatest of all services to foresee and discount the results of any waste far in advance. In a rich country waste is less disastrous. In a poor district, where tomorrow is as poor as today, any encroachment of today upon tomorrow leads to destruction. . . .

The likeness of man in all his dignity to a tree in the forest is an everlasting German concept. (Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution, 423-424)

The forest is an eternal task, never a garden, never a desert. It bears fruit, but never for the man who plants it. Always it asks for patience and thrift, and prays to be spared from greed, haste, or carelessness. (Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution, 426)

In Numbers 2 it is significant that God’s people constitute an army arrayed around him. But it is also significant that this army is constituted of households. The church is central, the one family that will endure forever; but the earthly family is part of what serves to guard it.

If everyone is special, then no one is special. That’s because to be special is a competitive thing, often fleshly. It isn’t nothing. But spiritual things are not zero-sum. If all God’s people are holy, then so they are.

Man is Adam, earth, dirt. I was listening to some old DC Talk this week and it struck me that the range of skin color and earth color is roughly the same.

Trust me, you should buy yourself every Jamie Soles album:

Evangelicals taught this trick to the world by our obsession with introspection and sincerity and humility. But salvation is by faith in king Jesus and not faith in our own sincerity; navel gazing is a fool’s errand: