I gotta have my orange juice.

A husband is a care-taker. I’ve always thought of this in the sense of exercising care. But there’s also a sense of receiving and relieving care.

“We are not hoping to be saved from the physical world, but for the good of it.”—Duane Garner

Thanks to MHAJ 155 for reminding me of this quote:

The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered (as Christianity was shattered at the Reformation), it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful. For example, Mr. Blatchford attacks Christianity because he is mad on one Christian virtue: the merely mystical and almost irrational virtue of charity. He has a strange idea that he will make it easier to forgive sins by saying that there are no sins to forgive. Mr. Blatchford is not only an early Christian, he is the only early Christian who ought really to have been eaten by lions. For in his case the pagan accusation is really true: his mercy would mean mere anarchy. He really is the enemy of the human race — because he is so human. (G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, ch.3)

Or: every man an integrated man. I think we can own that in order to be complete, every revolution, even the Reformation, needs to be harmonized with the good of what came before.

I’m still reflecting on ERH’s history of revolution. He summarizes past revolutions as establishing that every man is a priest, king, aristocrat, merchant. He sees this as an integrating sequence but it is at least as much a repudiating sequence: “there are no priests; there are no kings.” Perhaps the next stage is an integrating stage: every man a man.

“Grape juice is dead wine”—Duane Garner

If meekness is strength under control, perhaps modesty is beauty—or, pace Duane, glory—under control.

QE2 was likely the most prayed for person in history.

I was looking recently at coffee makers. I was disappointed to discover the existence of Keurig travel bags and mixed drink pod machines. But I was also fascinated to see this:

I could get behind this definition:

The Lord’s prayer has a formative effect on us. The more we pray it, the more we understand ourselves to be:

• Sons and daughters of the Father
• Members of and participants in a glorious and unshakeable heavenly-earthly kingdom
• Those who need not be anxious because we have adequate provision
• Those who are forgiven
• The kind of people who readily forgive
• Those who are protected from and strengthened against temptation and attack

Performing the Psalms is a lot like stepping through the wardrobe into Narnia. Before too long—you spend your childhood doing that—you’re unable to live in the normal world the same way ever again. Why? Because you’ve actually inhabited a larger, grander, more glorious world; a world that’s even more real; a world that transcends everything you thought you knew. You have discovered by participation that there’s more to reality than meets the eye. (Trevor Laurence, Singing the Future)

I’m having great difficulty processing Eugen Rosenstock–Huessy’s Out of Revolution. He recognizes both a demonic but also a God–ordained character to revolutions, so that it is difficult to make a single value judgment or a clear prediction of what may happen. Of course, that is just how complex and multi-layered God’s world is. Here is one startling passage:

The great Revolutions break out whenever the power which has governed heaven and earth dries up at the fountain-head. The great Revolutions seem to destroy an existing order; but that is not true. They do not break out until the old state of affairs is already ended, until the old order of things has died and is no longer believed in by its own beneficiaries. (471)

By this token, what we are seeing right now is not a revolution but the last spasms of the Bolshevik revolution. It has run its course and is gasping its last breath. That is encouraging, though what comes next is not clear. ERH believes that a global economic revolution comes next, but to be fair, he writes this in 1938 and this may have already passed and run its course.

Wilson has recommended Zeihan lately, and while I have not read him, Wilson’s representation of Zeihan’s primary thesis seems like an interesting way to understand how the world might revert to a more tribal or at least nationalistic situation. It is interesting to contemplate a world in which the international exchange of information is cheap but the exchange of goods is costly.

Antonyms: wreck, rectify

Spelling correction of the week: virtually => ritually

From our VRBO lake rental:

Ralph Vaughan Williams’ composition for the coronation of QE2: