You will hear conventional Christians, Catholics and Orthodox in particular, talk about asceticism and detachment from worldly things.

And up to a point, they have a point.

Thou shalt have no other Gods before me and so on.

Lay not up treasures on earth, where rust doth corrupt and so on.

Fasting.

Repentance with sackcloth and ashes.

But what if you go beyond that point?  What if you try complete asceticism and total detachment so you can better focus on God? Or at least feel that your failure to do so makes you less? Many Christians do feel that way

Then you are making a big mistake.

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Job 38 — what an electric chapter!

Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?…

When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?…

Hast thou entered into the treasures of the snow? or hast thou seen the treasures of the hail?…

Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion?

Our doctrine and practice makes God approachable.  That is good.

But the point of approaching him isn’t to make him our Buddy Jesus.  It’s to stand in awe of all that He is, from intimate familiarity with him.  Instead of holding his greatness beyond measure at a comfortable distance as some kind of murky abstraction.

In summer both rain and drought melt the snow.

An adult will spend their accumulated youth, whether in good or in evil.

Your sin becomes either misery or repentance.

One reason I believe our work on virtue sets is intellectually valid is because it is valid to my experience. It accurately reflects what has happened.

Mellow ambition, carefree hunger, easygoing striving, Type-A hippy, all sound like contradictions in terms. But it is a real thing. It isn’t just moderation between being happy go lucky and being a plucky goal guy. Its somehow capturing the good element in both at the same time and rejecting the bad element in both at the same time.

When I was in college there were guys who desperately wanted to get married and tried supremely hard and they got no where.

There were guys who were apathetic and they got nowhere.

Eventually you reached this state where you cared but didn’t care, where you were easygoing about the whole thing but also focused on your goal . . . and then you got married, often times through what seemed like purest happenstance. I half believe because being able to capture the virtues of being easygoing and being hungry at the same time is a conspicuous display of mastery. Very impressive.

Carefree —–> VIRTUE <—–  Ambition

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Most Tanner Greer is well worth reading, but I would elevate his latest to the top of the stack.

It’s not his most thorough or most scholarly piece, but it is on a topic that is incredibly important even for people who don’t care about current events and politics (which I hope for your sakes is most of you).

The piece is about stagnation. It’s real, and it has been going strong for decades. https://scholars-stage.org/has-technological-progress-stalled/ 

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Three crows were sitting on a fence.

The first crow said, “You should trust us.  We will always, always, tell you the truth.”

The second crow was surprised.  “We will?”

The third crow said, “What is truth?”

Moral: In a sense, you should trust the crows.

I dreamed that I was away for business.  Some kind of conference.  But I had to leave early for another conference in a small city about 60 or so miles south of where I work.  I flew out early in the morning and was going to be in that city for a day until the conference started bright and early the day.

I had planned to go to the historic library down town, which I’ve been too before.  But there was some special kind of food court that I and some other guys in the same boat–they were pretty glum about being stranded there for the day–decided to wander through first.  They had a booth dedicated entirely to chocolate-dipped strawberries.  They had a big counter dedicated to turtle soup.  And there was a Mexican place which wasn’t open yet that was also apparently dedicated to Mexican turtle dishes.

Then it occurred to me that I was close enough to home, I could just go home for the day.  So I did.

An internet resource provided by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that I spend a fair bit of time with is the old map page:
classic.churchofjesuschrist.org/maps

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We have been entrusted before with the true story of the Emperor’s New Clothes and true story of the Good Samaritan (Not just one true Good Samaritan story, but lots of them!  All of them true, true, true, and true.) Now we bring you the true story of the Grasshoppers and the Ants Bees.

Why bees, you ask?  Hmm. Hard to say.

In the original story, the grasshopper fiddled and laughed, the ant worked and saved, and when winter came the ant thrived while the grasshopper starved.

The reality is more complicated.

With no further ado, my honies, the true story of the Grasshoppers and the Bees:

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There are weeks left in the summer.  We still have many days of swimming pools and glasses of ice on the front porch and heat waves and overgrown gardens and praying for rain and mowing the grass and trips to the mountains and swatting mosquitoes.

But I am ready for fall.  Saturday breakfast with the clear light of a fall morning, toast from my wife’s bread, local chicken eggs, green chile, applesauce fresh from the stove where it’s simmering down.

From Jordan Petersen.  Worth thinking about.

It’s amazing how many advocates for being non judgmental, reaching people where they are, being inclusive, etc.  get uncomfortable when its not socially approved victim categories.  Include . . . young men?  Affirm . . . their identity?

We live in a golden age of gross hypocrisy.

(Btw, what is that background?  A trendy cubicular display bookshelf and a stack of firewood)

Ezra and Nehemiah appealed to me in ways I didn’t expect.

First, there was the obvious care the princes and the rich had for their people, including feeling ashamed and voluntarily renouncing debts owed them when they were told that they had freed their people from one captivity only to bring them into another, including ruler and servant alike sharing tents and sleeping on their swords.

Second, the scene where they read the book  of the law to the people who weep, and they celebrate the feast of the booths for the first time.  I was overcome with the sense that for the very first time, never before in their history, they had become a people.  Having their nation destroyed, living in captivity among strangers, and then the trek back to destroyed Jerusalem surrounded by hostiles.  They finally became a people.

For us the pioneers were the ones who made us a people through endless troubles.  I was very saddened yesterday to see not a peep about it on the Church website.

They are still worthy of honor and recognition from those who are still their people, and I do honor and recognize them.

If faith is what you still believe when you can’t see it, is hope only for when things seem hopeless?

Hope isn’t the same as optimism. Optimism is a belief that the probable outcomes are going to turn in your favor.  It is like a very mild form of Napoleonic belief in one’s own star.

Hope is knowing there are miracles.

Mormon founder Joseph Smith’s photo discovered by descendant after nearly 180 years

There is a book review on how humans evolved to speak.  I can take or leave the theory.  So can the reviewer.

What really got to me was the section on cradling.  I think that got to the reviewer too.

Only humans cradle. Cradling means the mother and her child’s eyes are close together—they share each other’s gaze, called “intersubjectivity.” From immediately after birth, mother and child engage in a complex interaction, in which the child imitates the mother, and vice versa, sharing affect. This leads to “joint attention,” where they share perceptions of objects in the world other than mother or child, with their intersubjectivity making it possible for them to communicate they are seeing the same object. (This is different from “gaze following,” which does happen in other species.) This leads to the ability to “share intentionality,” that is, to cooperate. (Apes cannot cooperate or share to achieve joint objectives.) From this flow words,

If words don’t come from cradling, I bet sociality does.  That is just as important.  It’s amazing to me how important God made men and women and fathers and mothers.