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I keep bragging about Patrick Henry College, where I teach and am provost, to the point of advertising. Please bear with me, but I wanted to make you aware of something some of you parents and your offspring might be interested in. Every summer we have what we call “Teen Camps,” in which young people from 14-18 come to campus for a week (or sometimes more) for fun, yet educational activities. It’s a good opportunity to make friends, expand horizons, develop a skill, pursue an interest, and sample Patrick Henry College. Here are the topics for this summer:

Strategic Intelligence, June 8-14, $625 [Also known as “Spy Camp”]
Music Camp, June 15-21, $625
College Prep, June 15-21, $525
Moot Court, June 22-28, $525
Drama Camp, June 22-28, $525
Debate, July 6-19, $1050
Roots of Leadership, July 6-12, $525
Worldviews in Literature, July 13-19, $525
Strategic Intelligence, July 20-26, $626

You can go here for more information.

Dolly Parton, like other country singers, is self-deprecating enough to allow herself to be turned into a caricature. But Dolly is a great artist. She is a master of those “ancient tones” that come out of mountain music, and she can also bring those same qualities into her contemporary song-writing. Last night, she was the rather unlikely singing coach and song provider for “American Idol,” which, one would think, would prove a tough challenge for these young, pop, rock-tinged singers.

But the test of the songwriter part of a singer-songwriter is that the songs also work when other people perform them. Bob Dylan, for example, has a totally unique voice and totally unique songs. And yet, when other people perform them–from the Byrds to Garth Brooks– they still work!

And Dolly Parton is the same way. The “Idols” did quite well with her songs, I thought, in some cases rendering them in non-country styles but the strength of the songs still came through. (I’m thinking particularly of David Cook’s alterna-arrangement of “Sparrow.” For a non-”Idol” example, listen to what Whitney Houston does with “I Will Always Love You.”)

Hillary Clinton, touting her experience over Barack Obama, has been saying that President Clinton would send her overseas to places that were “too dangerous” for him to go to. Mrs. Clinton specifically has been telling about how she landed in the Balkans under sniper fire:

“I remember landing under sniper fire. There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base.”
–Hillary Clinton, speech at George Washington University, March 17, 2008.

Since then, the comedian Sinbad, who was on that trip along with singer Sheryl Crowe, has disputed the story, saying that that they were never shot at and that the trip was pretty uneventful. So fact checkers from the Washington Post investigated.

Not only did none of the people on that trip report getting shot at, CBS had footage of the landing! Mrs. Clinton was greeting by dignitaries and a little girl read her a poem. (The article links to the footage so you can see for yourself.) No snipers were in attendance.

But this is what gets me:

According to Sinbad, who provided entertainment on the trip along with the singer Sheryl Crow, the “scariest” part was deciding where to eat. As he told Mary Ann Akers of The Post, “I think the only ‘red-phone’ moment was: ‘Do we eat here or at the next place.’” Sinbad questioned the premise behind the Clinton version of events. “What kind of president would say ‘Hey man, I can’t go ’cause I might get shot so I’m going to send my wife. Oh, and take a guitar player and a comedian with you.”

Replying to Sinbad earlier this week, Clinton dismissed him as “a comedian.” Her campaign referred me to Togo West, who was also on the trip and is a staunch Hillary supporter. West could not remember “sniper fire” himself, but said there was no reason to doubt the First Lady’s version of events. “Everybody’s perceptions are different,” he told me.

Mr. West was on the trip and didn’t remember getting shot at, something that MIGHT stick in one’s memory, but THERE WAS NO REASON TO DOUBT THE FIRST LADY? “EVERYBODY’S PERCEPTIONS ARE DIFFERENT”? That’s pure postmodernist dogmatism at its most idiotic. Either she was shot at or she was not. This is a question of fact, not “perception.” And everybody’s perceptions were not different, since no one else–including the person who said this–perceived bullets flying and having to run for cover.

What is the best–or only–construction that we could put on Mrs. Clinton’s speech? Help me out, tODD.

Even the Washington Post, like Slate below, finds itself proclaiming the Gospel today! The very stones are crying out. Read Michael Gerson’s Reasons For Good Friday, which begins with a discussion of a new book by Timothy Keller (a pastor in Manhattan who IS reaching postmodernists and not by making Christianity seem more shallow but by plunging into its richness). (The reference to the Christian poem that converted Simone Weil SHOULD have mentioned the poem: Love III by George Herbert.) But get this conclusion:

Good Friday calls attention to a final argument as to why the God of the philosophers, however useful, may not be enough. In the end, the problem of human suffering cannot be minimized or explained away — but in the Christian story, that suffering has been shared. Perhaps, in our own darkness, we need the imprisoned God, the scarred God, the shamed God, the despairing God. The poet Jane Kenyon grasped at this mystery of Good Friday:

The God of curved space, the dry

God, is not going to help us, but the son

whose blood spattered

the hem of his mother’s robe.

Here is an amusing feature, by Anna Jane Grossman, of things that have become or are fast becoming obsolete. She adds a list of such things as:

Carbon paper
Wite-Out
Lickable stamps
Printer paper with holes on the sides
Walkmans
Tie tacks
Dial-up
Sound of the modem starting up
Non-wireless Internet
Diaper pins
Wall-mounted pencil sharpeners
Calculator watches
Mimeograph machines
Manual car windows
Getting out to open the garage door
TripTiks
Stovetop popcorn poppers
Film
Flash cubes
Mercurochrome
Water beds
High diving boards

What other things in recent memory that we used to think were high-tech or way cool have faded away?

Mollie Ziegler pens a useful and learned survey of the history of atheism at Modern Reformation . The main point: There is nothing new or modern or enlightened about atheism, which has ALWAYS been contending against the faith.

HT: Anthony Scaramone at First Things.

Politico.com features drawings from M. Wuerker that depict the GOP candidates as cartoon characters: McCain is Popeye; Romney is Richie Rich; Huckabee is Huckleberry Hound; Giuliani is Bat Man; Ron Paul is a character whom I can’t identify (is it Calvin from Calvin & Hobbes? does anyone know?) in a flying saucer; and Thompson is Foghorn Leghorn:

There isn’t a Democratic version. Could anyone propose cartoon alter egos for Clinton, Obama, and Edwards?

Finally an article that addresses what I had been wondering about. We know that the Social Security system will be in big trouble when we baby-boomers retire. But what will happen to the stock market once we all sell off our IRAs to fund our golden-year lifestyles? Won’t all those sell orders flood the market and drive the prices down, thus leaving us old-timers with less money after all, despite all that saving and investing? The linked article acknowledges the problem, but offers some hope.

We’ve been on the road for Christmas and will continue to be there until around New Year’s. Since it will be rather hard to keep up my blogging every day, I’ll leave you with some items to discuss until we meet again.

The Tower of Babel must have been build in the style of one of those Babylonian ziggurats with the spiraled ramps. I get that picture when I read about what scientists today are doing with the spirals of DNA.

From the “Washington Post” article Synthetic DNA on the Brink of Yielding New Life Forms:

Scientists in Maryland have already built the world’s first entirely handcrafted chromosome — a large looping strand of DNA made from scratch in a laboratory, containing all the instructions a microbe needs to live and reproduce.

In the coming year, they hope to transplant it into a cell, where it is expected to “boot itself up,” like software downloaded from the Internet, and cajole the waiting cell to do its bidding. And while the first synthetic chromosome is a plagiarized version of a natural one, others that code for life forms that have never existed before are already under construction.

The cobbling together of life from synthetic DNA, scientists and philosophers agree, will be a watershed event, blurring the line between biological and artificial — and forcing a rethinking of what it means for a thing to be alive.
. . . . . . . . .

Today a scientist can write a long genetic program on a computer just as a maestro might compose a musical score, then use a synthesizer to convert that digital code into actual DNA. Experiments with “natural” DNA indicate that when a faux chromosome gets plopped into a cell, it will be able to direct the destruction of the cell’s old DNA and become its new “brain” — telling the cell to start making a valuable chemical, for example, or a medicine or a toxin, or a bio-based gasoline substitute.

Thanks to my trusty assistant Cheryl Banks for setting up the Amazon connection with the sidebar (scroll down and look to the right) linking to my books. The display keeps refreshing with different titles. With links to used book dealers, even my more obscure and out of print titles show up.

My goal at some point is to have another display featuring books by my fellow Cranach Institute fellow Angus Menuge (go to Amazon through my link and search for him), books on vocation, and other titles I’d recommend.

Yes, if you go to Amazon through the link at this blog, we get a cut of anything you buy, part of my plan to support the cost of this domain outside the family budget. I’d also like to set up a separate link to Concordia Publishing House if you want to buy one of my books published there. “The Spirituality of the Cross: The Way of the First Evangelicals,” for example, would be most relevant to our current ongoing discussion about Lutheranism. I’d just as soon you buy CPH books directly from the CPH site, even though I won’t get a piece of that action, since I’d rather that company get the business directly rather than Amazon (which demands such a huge discount, the publisher hardly makes anything).

I happen to be at the CPH board meeting right now in St. Louis, limiting my ability to blog. I realize that now we need to come up with Cranach T-shirts, hats, and coffee mugs for all your shopping needs.

Now that I’ve got Australians in the family, I take a particular interest in that particularly interesting land. Australian journalist John Barron offers an amusing and instructive comparison of how our two countries run elections. The Washington Post article is entitled Elections? Here’s How You Do It, Mate.

Down under, campaigns last just six weeks. Everybody must vote under penalty of law (a $20 fine), so there is no question of turnout or stirring up the base. This cuts down on the extremist rhetoric. On moral issues, members of parliament give a “conscience vote,” in which the party may not dictate how members must vote, which prevents one party from monopolizing moral issues. The bottom line, according to Mr. Barron, is that picking one’s governmental leaders is like picking which accountant you want to do your taxes.

Would any of that work here? Should it?