Well welcome to the weekend!  With basketball season over for the kids, that means I more time on Saturdays to compile a few items for you to enjoy and skim over.  Here’s the weekend reading…

Gonna lead off with this thought-provoking piece from the Wall Street Journal: Did My Mom Have ‘White Privilege’? She arrived from Italy in 1911 and then at age 14 went to work in a factory sewing ladies’ coats.  Key excerpt:

The legal immigrants who came through Ellis Island had to have medical exams and a clean criminal background, not to mention a job and a sponsor. This guaranteed the new arrival wouldn’t be a burden on the country or its citizens. And they weren’t. Ellis Island’s immigrants received nothing from taxpayers. Not a cent. That’s why my teenage mother worked in a factory instead of going to school.

Honestly, I haven’t spent much time thinking existentially about the lives of the generations of Americans who came here and gave up many comforts and dignities we’d unwillingly surrender now in order to make a life in America.  This short Op-Ed provoked my imagination and maybe it will yours as well.

This looks…interesting…’The NBA’s Secret Wine Society’

I was more shocked to learn this wasn’t a real headline: Media Announces Brief Moratorium On Calling Trump A Brutal Dictator To Praise Kim Jong Un’s Sister. But in truth, here’s a real story on the CNN slobber fest over Kim Jong Un’s sister.

Looking back on this article I read about Olympic Jet Lag makes me think that maybe there’s something to this (especially if the American snow boarders did it!).

If you haven’t thought about “enjoying God” for who He is and not just what He provides, then I think this article by John Piper might be a good click for you today.

I thought this was a fascinating article from a perspective that many conservatives might not normally hear: Why the Center-Left Became Immoderate: In polarized times, those without a clear guiding ideology become the most vicious partisans. One of the key excerpts:

The idea of a Trump dictatorship may be compelling, but that doesn’t make it right, particularly when it distorts how one perceives actual tyranny.

Something I didn’t know about Korea: What City Was Once “The Jerusalem of the East?”

Comment Magazine republished an article from Marilynne Robinson from 2011 this week called ‘The Book of Books: What Literature Owes the Bible’.  I like the attempt here (though ironically I think its not as clear as it could be in making the point) to show how one of the heritages we have from the Bible is its rich influence of the drama of life and salvation in our literature. Robinson gives several examples of this and that is the funnest part of the article. Her summation at the end is pretty much what I just wrote about the Bible’s role in enriching literature, but just prior she says, “In its emphatic insistence that the burden of meaning is shared in every life, the Bible may only give expression to a truth most of us know intuitively.”  I’m unsure exactly what “the burden of meaning” means, but I think that the shame of this article is that it doesn’t go on to explain what it is that makes the Bible worth using as an enrichment agent in the first place.  Why are the images and the story and the Man at its center so compelling that they transcend its cover and enrich other great literature?  I think the “why” isn’t answered here, and it ought to have been the first question she asked and the one she came back to at the end….what do you think?

A good piece of writing here from someone formerly in the scientific/medical community: Be Skeptical of Those Who Treat Science as an Ideology.

Something posted a while back by Ligonier that I thought was worth checking out again from R.C. Sproul: Do we have free will? Today on this special Ask R.C. edition of Renewing Your Mind, R.C. Sproul answers your questions about predestination, God’s providence, and free will.  I think I posted this mainly because it never ceases to amaze me how often I’m in some kind of meeting or discussion and someone says something like, “not to offend the Calvinists here, but I think people have to make a choice (in this that or the other thing)” – as if the importance and reality of choice and agency are stripped completely from the minds of orthodox reformed Christians. These are more or less statements of ignorance rather than barbs of serious debate, hence the importance of thinking through the core issues of human liberty and freedom and what is entailed in, and meant by those terms/ideas.

An interesting article by an author of a new book on transgenderism says, ‘The Sex-Change Revolution Is Based on Ideology, Not Science’.  Of course I agree with him, but I’m unsure I agree with his conclusion that this cultural moment is “fleeting”, though I hope he’s right.

Books…

This week I confessed to Kate that I’m on a bit of a distracted reading spree. I seem to be picking up old favorites and reading five pages here, a chapter or two there. It’s probably a healthy thing to do every now and again, but it doesn’t help make progress through the books I’m working on!

The main thing I persevered through this week was William L. Shirer’s classic ‘The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich’.  This is really a story of Adolph Hitler, and his cronies. I’m only 170 pages in, and its truly a fascinating read – actually not as laborious as I imagined it would be after the slow start. If you’ve read anything about Hitler’s rise (and I have), then you’ll not be as shocked at a book like this which exposes all the ignorance of the masses and the willingness to go along with the dictates and philosophical shallowness of men like this. But it doesn’t mean that the well-read won’t (or at least shouldn’t be) shocked again, and refreshed again in those ancient lessons of original evil, and the fallen state of man’s mind and reason.

I’m unsure I have written a post since finishing Lovecraft’s ‘At the Mountains of Madness’, but it was a very interesting and freaky.  I’m surprised I’ve never seen a movie about this one! It’s not overly long, but the powers of description prevent a speed read of any kind. I’m unsure if its the kind of thing one recommends, its sort of a cross between thriller and horror, salted with out of date scientific observations that can seem quaint at best, and farcical at worst.  Yet its an interesting thing to read someone you’ve never read before, and Lovecraft is well known for being influential in this genre, so I’m glad I checked it out.

I’m working on a host of books right now, and hope to finish up ‘A Good Walk Spoiled’ in the coming week.

That’s it for now – I hope you have a great weekend!

PJW