Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Archive for December, 2008

a veces fuego y a veces cieno: Camilo Sesto, Serie 20 Éxitos

Posted in reseña, tagged , , on December 13, 2008| Leave a Comment »

This collection of twenty of Camilo Sesto’s hits from the 1970s and 1980s is an excellent introduction to the Spanish-born love balladeer’s work. Largely unknown in the English-speaking world, Sesto is a mega-star with a voice well suited to the stage.

His lyrics are all about women and the love they inspire, reject, nourish, and protect. Rich orchestrations back up a strong, supple, capable voice. In the Spanish-speaking world now middle-aged people often locate formative experiences in their young lives by pegging them to a Sesto song the was current at the time, much as might happen among English speakers via the music of the Eagles or, say, Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. More than one young love will leap to mind when a Sesto ballad arrives unexpectedly over the airwaves.

Though the genre is not my favorite, one has to respect Camilo Sesto as a master of it.

Read Full Post »

a different scar for every song: Over the Rhine, The Trumpet Child

Posted in reseña, tagged , , on December 13, 2008| 1 Comment »

This CD is my entrée to the beguiling art of Over the Rhine. If impressions count for anything, this is going to be a long, pleasant, even coquettish courtship.

The music is difficult to classify, yet adjectives abound. My first: inviting. The lyrics invite you in and reveal new depths with every return. You don’t quickly get beyond an OtR tune, you don’t quickly figure it out and move on. There is captivating suggestiveness to each line, the insinuation that there’s here than meets the eye if you’ll just stick around long enough to allow disclosure to happen on its own terms. (more…)

Read Full Post »

meat and malbec in Seattle: the Buenos Aires Grill

Posted in two hippos make an island, tagged , on December 13, 2008| 1 Comment »

Not for the faint of heart is the effort to discover a true Buenos Aires dining experience outside of that Argentine capital. The middle-aged men who wait on table there are not moonlighting on, say, their day job as a CPA. They are meseros. ‘Always been, always will be. Serving you your Argentine beef is what they do. They respect the meat, smile only as necessary, and never say, ‘Hi, my name is Trish, I’ll be taking care of you tonight.’

So it was with a little fear and trepidation that I turned a recent business trip to Seattle into an opportunity to take my Latin America-raised son (now a sophomore at Seattle Pacific University) to the Buenos Aires Grill, an establishment he’d scoped out during a city food tour with his mother. (more…)

Read Full Post »

the fear of man: Proverbs 29

Posted in textures, tagged , , on December 13, 2008| Leave a Comment »

Our predicament is on display from several angles. All that is productive, good, and joy-crafting in us is marred, dented, even chained. We are not what we could be and we cannot will ourselves out of this mess.

Nor are we doomed.

One of the angles of approach that provides a clear view on our damnable situation is the fear of other people that we suffer. It seems not to matter whether they possess the authority—moral or otherwise—that would make us subject to them or even eager to please. Nor does our own personal and professional coming of age solve our dilemma. We still live anxiously in the presence of other flesh, as the biblical dialect styles other human beings in order to bring out the limping, provisional, conditioned fragility of them. (more…)

Read Full Post »

PhDs in the pulpit: escaping the claustrophobia of academy-only expectations

Posted in clarity, denkschrift, missio dei, tagged on December 12, 2008| 6 Comments »

We need thoughtful people in the pulpit.

Around the dinner table, a friend and his wife decry the insipid aridity of much that passes for Christian proclamation. These are not cultured despisers, these hosts of mine. They are decades-old friends who have been around the block and around the world, have celebrated life and been beaten up by it, have served and been served in proportions that overweight the first of the two.

They are veterans. All of their life together has been lived out under the sound of a voice from a pulpit. Whether in San José or Aberdeen or Wheaton or Cambridge, Christian preaching has been a contextual envelope for the grit of getting on with things. They have always lived within range of the pulpit’s voice.

Much of it has been very bad. (more…)

Read Full Post »

no choice: Amos 7

Posted in textures, tagged , , on December 12, 2008| Leave a Comment »

The prophet Amos found himself walking the turf of No Man’s Land in a way that seems almost characteristic of the biblical prophets. In the face of indignation and hatred, he delivered a message to the northern kingdom of Israel in which he himself found no pleasure.

His work, like that of the more famous Jeremiah, disgusted him. (more…)

Read Full Post »

self-restraint: Proverbs 29

Posted in textures, tagged , , on December 10, 2008| Leave a Comment »

It is almost impossible to overvalue self-restraint. This is particularly true of the spoken word. When in doubt, a quiet pause is almost always a good idea. To think rather than speak right now is rarely a mistake.

Proverbs 29.20 gets at the matter from the negative side:

Do you see someone who is hasty in speech?
There is more hope for a fool than for anyone like that.

Not often is ‘hope for a fool’ the more likely of two outcomes. So does the proverb-teller underscore the disastrous path of what Seinfeld might have called the ‘fast-talker’.

It’s odd that creatures with an organ of speech planted right in the middle of our faces should inhabit an environment where using it is more often than not a bad idea. The Proverbs bear a second burden, that of teaching us to speak well. But before we can accomplish that, we must be taught to say less.

Read Full Post »

two I’s: Revelation 1

Posted in textures, tagged , , on December 9, 2008| Leave a Comment »

Rarely does the identity of a drama’s principal players come so clearly stated. At the beginning of the apocalyptic scroll that we call John’s Revelation, both the Lord God and the work’s human author declare themselves. It is a most pregnant juxtaposition:

‘I am the Alpha and the Omega,’ says the Lord God, who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty. I, John, your brother who share with you in Jesus the persecution and the kingdom and the patient endurance, was on the island called Patmos because of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus.

The Lord God declares himself earlier and later than all reality that is knowable from our human perspective. He is its antecedent and its epilogue. There is no seeing beyond him, no shape or substance outside of him and his creative will. He has no shelf date, no competitor in the race of time.

This is conventional stuff, though hardly superficial. Faith in one God is capable of absorbing these statements without violence to its tissue, although the knowing of God in the flow of time will absorb all the energy, conviction, and life of those who determine to know him here. (more…)

Read Full Post »

Sammy the self-confident jostler: the Story of a Rescued Rhodesian Ridgeback

Posted in fauna, tagged on December 8, 2008| Leave a Comment »

Now these many months on from the Saturday morning he came to us as a quivering shadow of himself, Sammy has become a jostling, tail-wagging mainstay of the family mix. Take stairs, for example.

Stairs are everywhere in this 1930s-vintage house of ours. Two sets of the things lie between the basement (where Dogs Sleep and Dad Works), one outside and one inside. Then there are the stairs that take us from the ground floor to the second, where People and the Cat Sleep and where Dogs Must Not Go. (more…)

Read Full Post »

refusing reduction: Jude

Posted in textures, tagged , , on December 8, 2008| Leave a Comment »

It is the nature of pragmatism to reduce the task to a single thing. Whether this be ‘to save souls’ or ‘to plant churches’ or to ‘show compassion’, the allure of reductionism is—like the poor—seemingly always with us.

It is perhaps most important for those who strive to be ‘biblical’ and who find an identity marker in the urgent purity of their faith to pause over the multifaceted nature of the task as the biblical materials themselves present. (more…)

Read Full Post »

« Newer Posts - Older Posts »