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fixed object to portable companion: Garmin Portable Friction Dashboard Mount for Nüvi Series and StreetPilot I Series, C530, C550 and C580 GPS Navigators

April 19, 2008 by David Baer

After discovering this product, one wonders why we ever stuck those adhesive mounts to our windshields to announce to passing thieves, ‘Stop here! Easy hit!’.

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sudden turns: 1 Samuel 27-29 // Luke 17

April 19, 2008 by David Baer

Faith that is shaped and nourished by regular contact with Scripture learns to anticipate sudden turns in circumstances. More often than not a certain merciful lurching becomes our experience as what some call Providence directs our steps in ways that contain equal parts peril and mercy. Continue Reading »

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worthless slaves: Luke 17

April 17, 2008 by David Baer

The institution of slavery and the concept of duty no longer arouse us to noble thoughts. We find the first offensive and the second pedestrian. More often than not our moral aesthetics not only incapacitate us for sympathetic reading. They also betray us by the extreme selectivity with which we assign deficits to the moral codes of other times and other places while skating over the incoherences that afflict us in this time and this place. Continue Reading »

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the abundance of madmen: 1 Samuel 20-21

April 16, 2008 by David Baer

Rarely does an ancient document explore the nuance and pathos of human experience as probingly as the so-called ‘History of David’s Rise’. This deep current in the Deuteronomistic History gives us not only the hero-in-waiting story of David’s encounter with the Philistine miscreant Goliath but also the deeply moving parting of David and Saul’s son Jonathan. Continue Reading »

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a hope worth strengthening: Ian McCallum, Ecological Intelligence. Rediscovering ourselves in nature

April 16, 2008 by David Baer

Ian McCallum worries about the human species. He worries broadly, deeply, poetically, mystically, entertainingly, passionately, and challengingly. We are deeply diseased, McCallum believes, and we are inflicting our plague on the earth we inherit as the evolutionarily privileged human animal. In Ecological Intelligence, McCallum tells us that healing—as opposed to quick-fix mending–will occur only as we remember where we have come from and then learn to look ahead with a new rationality, a new language, and a chastened connectedness to the environment we inherit. Indeed, the ten chapters of his beguiling book are divided into sections entitled ‘Remembering where we have come from’ and ‘Looking ahead’. Continue Reading »

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Samuel’s complex grief: 1 Samuel 13-15

April 14, 2008 by David Baer

The seer Samuel’s proximity to YHWH’s counsel makes him the pivotal figure in the Saul narrative. His gaze penetrates the smoky gray of events, illuminating in forboding sentences the direction that YHWH would have them go.

Samuel must have made unpleasant company, not the kind for smalltalk and hors d’oeuvres. One felt his presence as an interruption. Like the prophets of which he would become a prototype, Samuel was more often than not both late and unwelcome. Continue Reading »

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the last seat: 1 Samuel 10-12 // Luke 14

April 12, 2008 by David Baer

Israel’s first and short-lived king, Saul by name, is arguably the Hebrew Bible’s most tragic figure. He bears that peculiar curse that consists of great things happening to him. He does not invite them. In fact he seems bent on fleeing the tectonic movement of events that bring inexorable fame upon his large, fragile shoulders. Continue Reading »

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family solidarity: 1 Samuel 1-2, Luke 12

April 8, 2008 by David Baer

We believe that faith unites a family. Sometimes it does, though more seldom than we imagine.

Aging Eli felt a deep foreboding when reports of his sons’ comportment as self-serving priests reached his dulling ears. He pleads with them to change their ways, but does not offer understanding on the basis of ‘family’. The language is of covenantal repercussions, of cutting off and being cut off. In a short time Eli’s sons would be dead. Their stolen meat would do them no good then and Eli would be forbidden the unrestrained grief a father feels over righteous sons. Continue Reading »

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my father’s music: Vintage Jazz (Sunday Times Music Collection)

April 7, 2008 by David Baer

The eyes of my father’s generation still light up when the occasion arises to speak of Duke Elington, Harry James, Benny Goodman, and Django Reinhardt. These are the artists who, with their bands, contribute to this remarkable entry in the mid-90’s CD-a-week collection offered to subscribers by London’s Sunday Times.

Frankly speaking, the first four tracks—by the Duke—are enough to make you think we’ve been in terminal cultural decline ever since the likes of ‘Sophisticated Lady’ went silent. This is smooth, sophisticated, textured jazz with an enormity of understatement that commends it to repeated listening. Bombast was out, smooth was in. I have never heard a trombone sound so alive as the one in Ellington’s band on this album.

This remarkable 1994 release brings the sounds back with varying degrees of remastered clarity. No matter, even with a bit of static between some tracks and these ears, the music is golden.

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four men singing: Medieval Music (Hilliard Ensemble, Sunday Times)

April 7, 2008 by David Baer

In the mid-90s, it was possible to receive a CD each week from London’s Sunday Times Music Collection. The eclectic library of music that results now seems a treasure.

One of the finer anthologies and one of the few to record a single collection of artists on a themed CD was ‘Medieval Music’, all of it performed by London’s Hilliard Ensemble (www.hilliardensemble.demon.co.uk). Four-part a capella men’s singing in the style of what will strike the novice as close to Gregorian Chant is an acquired taste. But it can be acquired and there exists no better cluster of singers to help with the acquisition than the Ensemble. Rarely does one hear a more disciplined vocal music than this.

It’s ear candy for disciplined ears.

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