For Father’s Day, productive and insightful way to read the transition from Judges to Kings, led by Samuel,  is to read it as a change from one mode of authority to another.  This is not a strain on  the text–that is basically what it is about.

My own summary is that the rule of the judges was lighter and looser.  It required Israel to obey without compulsion, which in practice meant going to the  judges to resolve disputes and voluntarily flocking to the judge’s banner when there was an invasion.  Judges were selected by charisma and competence, since following them was a choice.  This worked really well when it worked.

But by Eli and certainly Samuel’s day, the system no longer worked.    Eli and Samuel had lots of prestige but weren’t war leaders or really even leaders at all (not even in their own households).  My personal speculation why is that they didn’t try because they knew they would be ignored.  What isn’t speculation is that the people clamoring for a King gave the shirker problem as their reason for wanting one.  They said  they needed someone to force the hold-outs  and shirkers to go to war, and I think we should believe them.

So the evils of a monarchy that the Lord tells the people through Samuel, were also the goods.  Conscription and taxes allowed for the overbearing tyrannical rulers we see later (and even Saul and David had their lapses) but also meant that Israel was no longer hamstrung by coordination problems and defections in the snake-pit of Middle Eastern state violence.  Notice that this wasn’t just a solution for the shirkers.  Even the people who wanted to rally like in the days of old suffered from a lack of recognized leader–because if you rallied and no one else did, at very best you wasted a bunch of time and effort for nothing, traveling to the gathering place and sitting around and then futilely going back home again–and at worst you would get crushed by the invaders–so likely even the people who wanted to help sat around waiting to see if anyone else would.

Let’s liken this to ourselves.

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It’s a very strange experience to have a talk that doesn’t apply to you at all–you wrack your brains, nothing–you look for inspiration, nothing–but you are still moved by it.

Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, in the midst of UAP/UFO disclosure efforts, told people “Read the Book of Enoch”. As men and women of scriptural distinction, it is obvious to us, she meant First Enoch. If the US Govt has to tell me to read my scriptures, it is probably time for me to read my scriptures, so let’s investigate this.

Nothing beats actually reading the word of God, no matter how corrupted.

(I am still working on Isaiah – we will get back to that eventually!)

This source has non-standard chapters. In other texts, this is ch. 6-16 in the standard way. But this is easier to read.
Next time, chapter 4! (more…)

Yesterday in the cool of the morning the Lovely One took me out to the back yard to cut my hair, despite her physical struggles.

It is a meditative thing, getting your  hair cut.

It was her I was meditating on.  Our courtship, early married life, children, struggles, the joys big and small, her grace in her current difficulties.

I said, “I like you.”

She said, “thanks.”

Following up on our recent post on Jeff Strong’s new marketing blitz

1. Surveys are not scientific
2. We have lots and lots of other churches that have hit a secularization trend and responded the way Strong advocates.  It didn’t work out for them.
3. Little known, but we have had secularizing moments before–trying to be more accommodating wouldn’t be the main way you would describe our successful response.
4. In fact, our society over all has had decades of generally adopting these therapeutic approaches to problems.  I struggle to think of a single success story.  Mostly the therapeutic approaches have made everything much worse.
5. Everyone is looking for a formula, for someone to tell them what to do, for the next new shiny object.
6. What we need is a demand for greatness.

When you have babies and toddlers in your life you get introduced to the world all over again.

I just saw a video of a one year old grandson watching leaves get trimmed and the sounds of the snips snipping and the sight of the leaves falling made him laugh with abandon.  He would pause to admire himself in the screen of the phone and then he would go back to cackling.

It’s pretty great that we all come from heaven and get a body and our reaction is this is so cool, I am so cool, this is so cool, I am so cool

On the sweetness of Mormon life–

You are traveling.  You stop by a little branch for the sacrament, arriving in plenty of time before the meeting starts.  You walk in.  In the one-room meetinghouse, the branch is already seated, stone quiet.  It is the most reverent, quietest prelude you have ever seen in any LDS meeting, bar none.  No prelude music even.  Just absolute contemplation.

You smile and head to the bathroom at the back of the room.

When you come out, they are singing the closing hymn.

You were off by an hour.  Your quiet prelude was the end of testimony meeting.

The branch is amused.

A thought-provoking read.  An excerpt:

Between roughly 1850 and 1920, return migration was a defining feature of transatlantic mobility. The return rate of European immigrants during this period was 25–40%. In some decades it reached 60–75% (Bandiera et al., 2013). Italians are the canonical case: between 1890 and 1920, more than half returned to Italy (Klein, 1983). This return migration was negatively selected — the poorer and less successful immigrants were the most likely to leave (Abramitzky et al., 2019). What we now remember as “successful assimilation” is partly explained by survivorship bias. America did not lift entire populations into the middle class. It retained those who were already capable of doing well and quietly shed the rest.

…

This brings us to another truth about the Ellis Islander wave of immigration that is rarely spoken: the nativists of the time were correct. Specifically, they were correct about the political impact these new arrivals would have.

Your normal best is the type of family you really are.

https://www.zazzle.com/manifest_destiny_t_shirt_photo_white_text-256859226909192821

There seems to be little buzz about the 250th, and most of what I hear of on the national level seems fractured and lame.

I have no specific plans yet but I’m looking to do something at least a little out of the ordinary.

What are you seeing out there?  What are you thinking of doing?

Three and a half years ago Gérald Caussé, at that time Presiding Bishop of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, spoke in General Conference on “Our Earthly Stewardship.” He started with a family visit to a garden in Giverny, a little town in France. “This amazing place is the result of the creative passion of one man: the great painter Claude Monet, who, for 40 years, tenderly shaped and cultivated his garden to make it his painting workspace. Monet immersed himself in nature’s splendor; then, with his paintbrush, he conveyed the impressions he felt with strokes of color and light. Over the years, he created an extraordinary collection of hundreds of paintings, directly inspired by his garden.” Later in that talk Bishop Caussé quoted Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, best known as author of The Little Prince: “When by mutation a new rose is born in a garden, all the gardeners rejoice. They isolate the rose, tend it, foster it. But there is no gardener for men.”

Listening to that talk, my mind thought: “To some are given tales of rednecks getting themselves into trouble in the desert, and to others French culture, that all may be edified and find something to draw them into lending closer attention.”

Seven years before Bishop Caussé’s Conference talk, there was another in 2015. (more…)

On the sweetness

Oh, that Danny.  Say what you will about him, tiny bowler and a one piece glove shirt is certainly a look.

• Interesting point on ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’:  yes, that is very different if you think of that as the pursuit of moral happiness, or the search for meaning.  Man’s Search for Meaning.
• The Constitution as a ‘heavenly banner’ is a much different thing than the Constitution as a set of rules and procedures
• “common principles…. that promote pluralistic societies”–the more pluralistic, the less common principles there are, by defintion.  Or the more the principles become bland generalities

But what really stood out to me was the end.

they were finishing up, at least Elder Cook thought so, but apparently President Christofferson wasn’t done, because he added one last bit.

Quoting John Adams, he said that the Constitution was made for a moral and religious people and cannot work with any other.

But we do not have a moral and religious people.  We are not going to have one any time soon.  It won’t be from missionary work–neither we nor anyone else is trying the social gambles that could result in mass conversion.  So, what now?