Entries Tagged 'Personal' ↓

So what do you do for New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day? The one ritual I have is to go over one or more of those month-by-month Year in Review stories, thinking about the year gone by, including thinking about the year gone by in my life. We never, ever go out on New Year’s Eve, but we do stay up until midnight. (When our kids were little, we let them stay up until the ball dropped on Times Square, not explaining that we were in Central Time and New York City was an hour ahead. They thought they were staying up until midnight, but they were only staying up until 11:00 p.m. CT. That was very wicked of us, I admit, to let them be deceived.)

On New Year’s Day, the custom in Oklahoma was to have black eyed peas for good luck. Then we moved to Wisconsin where good luck comes from eating pickled herring. Even though Wisconsin, on the whole, has had better luck than Oklahoma, we continued to have black eyed peas, which were hard to even find up north. I’m not sure what people eat for luck in Virginia. (If anyone knows, please tell me. At least it’s easy to find black eyed peas here.) We also eat junk–dips and such–on New Year’s Eve and throughout the next day, though by then, after the Christmas feast, we are pretty much tired of such fare and eager to get back to normal. That’s about it. Surely some of you have some better ideas, don’t you?

This Christmas tide I offer you blogs from Christmas past. Just as TV goes into re-run mode with all of those Christmas specials that have become family traditions, so I will do with this blog, re-running Christmas posts that left an impression.

I start with two contrarian posts that left many readers indignant. Then I move to a series that makes the case that Christianity was NOT derived from a pagan holiday and that December 25 just might be the true date of Jesus’s birthday. Then I give some other Christmas treats, culminating in some quotes from Luther relating Christmas to the overarching theme of this blog, namely, vocation.

So put “Christ” back in Christmas. And put “Mass” back in Christmas. Also put “Holy” back in holiday. You can do all of these by going to church. (As my youngest daughter the deaconness intern explained to me, the Biblical reckoning considers sunset to be the end of the day, with the new day beginning that night. “And the evening and the morning were the first day.” So Christmas Eve is actually part of Christmas. So Christmas Eve services count for going to church on Christmas day–this would normally be fodder for a separate post, but let’s get to the reruns. . . )

Merry Christmas to all, and God bless us every one!

[HT to Cheryl Banks for making my archives more accessible.]

Thanks again to Cheryl Banks for helping with the design and features of this blog. You can now buy books from EITHER Concordia Publishing House OR Amazon.

We also have a box featuring the writings of my other colleague at the Cranach Institute, Angus Menuge, who has written widely on the philosophy of science, intelligent design, apologetics, C. S. Lewis, and evangelism.

We also have a box for books on our major theme here, the doctrine of vocation. It includes the essential book on the subject by the Swedish theologian Gustav Wingren, “Luther on Vocation.” The other classic book from a Swedish theologian, Einar Billing’s “Our Calling,” was available just a few weeks ago, having come back into print at least briefly, but I see it’s not available now. You can still find it on some used book sites. But the icon is still there, in hopes it will reappear on Amazon. I also list, in addition to my own “God at Work,” a relatively new anthology of writings on the subject going back to the days of the early church. There are other books about vocation, of course, but some of them don’t quite “get it,” in my opinion. In the future, I hope to review some of these, and, if they pass muster, list them in this box with my recommendation.

Also, notice the Amazon.com portal now on this site. If you do your Amazon searching and subsequent buying from the Cranach blog, we will get a commission! We also get a cut every time you click one of the Google ads, which I hope are not too annoying. So that’s a way you can help us pay the rent for this online real estate.

Notice the Cranach blogroll below and to the right. This is a somewhat unique one, since it mostly consists of the blogs that are run by this site’s readers and commentors. If you are intrigued by someone’s comments, see if they have a blog and get more.

I also transferred MOST of the “community blogs” from the old site at WORLD. Again, some of the links were dead and some of the blogs were apparently discontinued, with no posts except from long ago. If you were on that roll and have an updated location, send it by putting up a comment on this post. Also, most of those sites have not updated their links to this new Cranach site! Let’s follow the Golden Rule here, folks, so link unto my site as I have linked unto you.

And I am aware that this roll is not complete. If you are a reader and want your blog included, post a comment with your link here and I’ll probably add you.

But also browse through these blogs. You are likely to find some you really like. Interestingly, they are not always about theology and culture, though many are. Some are about science, education, high-tech, and just life. That is to say, they are have to do with the doctrine of VOCATION.

As I construct my new site for this blog, it’s time to work on the blogroll. Many of the blogs I listed on the old World site no longer exist or are no longer active. This is my chance to bring everything up to date.

In particular, I would like to list the blogs of people who regularly comment here on Cranach. That way, readers are intrigued, for example, by tODD’s combination of confessional Lutheranism with relatively liberal politics, or Lars Walker’s literary reflections, they could go to their blogs for more. Bruce has a new blog that I like to visit. (Then there is Frank Sonnek. We urgently need a blog from him!)

My software keeps track of sites that link here. If you have a blog and link to Cranach’s new address, I’ll know, and then I’ll link to you. Assuming, of course, your blog is appropriate.(Since this Cranach blog is at a new address, www.geneveith.com, it’s important that you update your link to it, just as I need to update my links to you.)

As you may know, the number of links a blog has affects how soon it comes up on Google and so attracts more readers. Let’s help each other out here.

Yesterday at 3:20 p.m. our electricity went out, as did that of 10,000 of our neighbors. It didn’t come back on until 9:25 p.m. Fortunately, we had our Thanksgiving Feast just after noon. We built a fire in our new fireplace, lit candles, and spent the evening like the pilgrims and our other pre-electricity forebears for thousands of years did. Well, they probably didn’t play Lord of the Rings Monopoly by firelight, but still. It was actually a very pleasant evening.

But my heart goes out to everyone here who planned to have their Thanksgiving dinner in the evening! I don’t know what they did or how they coped. Everywhere else in the country where I have lived, power outages have been taken care of within an hour. This is the third time in the year and a half since I’ve been in Virginia that we’ve had a power outage of six hours or more. I realize that Dominion Power must have had its workers off for the holiday, but that would not have been the problem those other times. And we didn’t even have a bad storm, just some wind that would be a stiff breeze in the midwest. So I don’t know why Virginia’s power grid is so fragile and why it takes so long to put it to rights.

Still, I am thankful for the gift of electricity.

You can now have your complete fill of Cranach posts: I moved the archives from the other site to a separate page on this one. Click on the “Archive of Old Site 2005-2007″ on the right panel and you will find TWO YEARS of posts, a total of 805 pages! That’s about 4 books worth.

(The regular “archives” section just archives this site, month by month. Also, the “archives” heading at the top doesn’t work. I don’t know why. Also the search function isn’t working for the separate and super-long page of pages of what I am calling “Lucas Cranach the Elder.” Can anyone tell me why or how to fix it? tODD?)

And thanks to my daughter Joanna, who was the first editor of World’s blog, I have learned how to add other features. Thanks too to Rich Shipe. He pointed out that if I open this site to some discreet advertisements by signing up with Google’s Adsense and letting them place their ads, I could probably earn enough to pay for this online real estate and this would be a not-so-expensive hobby. So I’m trying that. I tried to filter out any truly objectionable ads. Some of them that come up–for example, those about getting a Mormon wife (because I must have said something about Romney)–are kind of a hoot. And they probably won’t be as bad as some of those on my World site, for which I wasn’t even getting paid. You don’t think I’m selling out, do you?

Some of the rest of you might want to do likewise on your blogs. Just do a search for Google AdSense. It’s very easy, and you get a cut of Google’s billions.

Sorry–my grandson Sam got to my computer and typed the above. Since this is his first blog entry, I don’t have the heart to delete it. I wonder what he meant by six brackets, a semi-colon, and a backslash.

Last Thanksgiving he had just been born and I flew to Australia to see him. Now he and his parents are here with us. Here is Sam’s picture:

Well, we finally bought a house and, after a year of upheaval, are settling into our new location in Virginia. Our pastor offered to do a house blessing for us, so we had that this weekend. We had some people over, and the rite had everyone traipsing through the house, with Bible readings and prayers appropriate for each room: the entryway (hospitality), the living room (positive conversations), the bedroom (rest and peace), the study (wisdom), the family room (the “whatevers” of Philippians 4), the kitchen (daily bread), even the bathroom (reminders of baptism; the cleansing of the Holy Spirit).

It was a wonderfully meaningful service. As someone who attended commented, “it reminds us how Christianity relates to ordinary life.” Exactly! That’s what the doctrine of vocation is all about.

As I had said was going to happen, WORLD’s sub-blogs have had to find new homes. It’s kind of a good feeling, in this era of virtual real-estate to have my own domain! (Seinfeld jokes, at this point, are not allowed.) I went ahead and gave it my own name, for various reasons, but it’s still the Cranach blog, independent and unbound!

This means that this old dog has to learn a new system, so please be patient. Yes, I’m working with a template so the design might be a little clunky at first. I’m not REALLY Lucas Cranach, so my artistic gifts are lacking. But I’m going to ask for help. And I need to, as they say, “populate” this new site, re-doing the blogroll and (most importantly) moving the archives here. The site also apparently looks different on different browsers. The point is, please be patient as we move into our new home.

This new site has some advantages. It looks like I’ll be able to do more with images than I could before. The software seems better and easier to use, once I figure it out completely. I’m hoping the comments work smoothly for you. I believe you have to “register,” but that is really not a big deal and I hope that doesn’t inhibit anyone from joining our conversations.

The old site at WORLD will still be up for awhile, as discussions there continue to rage, but please set your bookmarks to this site and we’ll start some new ones.

And a big tip of the hat to Rich Shipe for helping me do this.