Entries from November 2007 ↓

Kansas lost to Missouri on Saturday, marring their undefeated season and shot at the national title. But still, that the Kansas Jayhawks came out of nowhere–being completely unranked at the beginning of the season–to having had a legitimate shot at the national championship is a testimony to coach Mark Mangino.

The massively obese coach is a football genius, just as the massively obese Nero Wolfe is a detection genius. Mangino has specialized in raising teams from the dead. He helped turn even Kansas State into a good football team while he was on the coaching staff. Then he served as the Offensive Coordinator for the Oklahoma Sooners. Back in the 1990s, the Sooners, gutted by NCAA program and recruitment penalties, were mired in mediocrity. They went through several hapless coaches before bringing on today’s Bob Stoops. He, in turn, brought in Mangino, and in 2000, the Sooners–pretty much unheralded until they crushed a powerful Texas team–won the national championship.

Now Mangino is the head coach at the University of Kansas, and he again worked his magic. (Nebraska should be taking up collections from school children to lure him there.) You have to remember that teams like Kansas do not have the benefit of all of those blue-ribbon recruits that the powerhouses do.

“He is doing what Bill Snyder did,” said [Mark] Stallard, who wrote “Tales From the Jayhawks Gridiron.” “Take three-star players and coach them into four- or five-star players that Texas A&M or Texas overlooked.”

COACH them into five-star players! Taking someone of modest ability and TEACHING him to be great! That is the sign of a first-rate coach, a vocation that, we sometimes forget, is a subset of the TEACHER.

Frank Sonnek, in the discussion still raging on the post “YHWH, El, and the Golden Calf,” cites this sermon by Rev. William Cwirla, one of our synod’s great preachers. It’s about how Christ was forsaken on the Cross. It deserves to be printed as an evangelistic tract. The sermon, given at the Higher Things youth gathering, defies paraphrase or even selective quotation. Read it here.

This morning, as I write this, I am watching the recording we made of the Packer game before the power went out. When I called my brother last night, he let slip that the Packers won, and today’s paper told me that this victory over Detroit was another career highlight for Brett Favre, who completed 20 straight passes, setting a team record, and tying his career record with seven 300-yard games in a season.

As I watch this game, knowing how it will end, Favre’s first quarter fumble didn’t bother me. Nor did the way Detroit dominated the first quarter. I am enjoying it in a different way, free of anxiety.

This is the way life should be for Christians. We know how all of this ends. We have a happy ending ahead of us. We should not be paralyzed with worry or defeated by our troubles. From the aspect of eternity, our problems are not going to mean all that much.

True, this is not the best way to view football, since a big part of the fun is the suspense, tension, and agonizing, all of which accentuate the hope, the relief, and the joy that we also experience in the game as it unfolds in time. And this too speaks to us of life and why we go through what we do.

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.

My friend and colleague Mark Mitchell has written a piece for, I believe it is, “Modern Age” as part of a series on “Why I Am a Conservative.” Dr. Mitchell articulates a not-just-political philosophy based on gratitude. He is a conservative because he is grateful. Do you see the connection?

It’s not published yet, so it isn’t online. I’ll try to put it up when possible. Anyway, I thought Dr. Mitchell’s point is fitting to contemplate on Thanksgiving.

Chesterton said one of the saddest things about being an atheist had to be not having anyone to thank when you feel truly grateful. So do atheists celebrate Thanksgiving? Yes, they do. This guide for non-believers encourages atheists to celebrate the day by thanking farmers and modern scientists for the abundance they make possible. What is missing (besides the doctrine of vocation, in which God gives us our daily bread and our Thanksgiving feast through people like these an others) is the even deeper gratitude for being, for just the joys of simple existence. I still feel sorry for the atheists.

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.

A good discussion is getting started below, at the YHWH, El, & Golden Calves post. Michael the Boot is asking why God “needs” to be worshiped, going on to debunk original sin and other “old arguments.” Join tODD in helping him out.

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:

The “Washington Post” had a startling front-page headline this morning: Advance May End Stem Cell Debate. Two mainline scientific journals have published breakthrough and now accepted findings showing how ordinary skin cells can be turned back into stem cells. No embryos or human eggs are harmed in the making of these stem cells.

Says one scientist, “This is a tremendous scientific milestone, the biological equivalent to the Wright brothers’ first airplane.” Credit–and a future Nobel Prize–goes to James Thompson, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

I predict that Pro-deathers will STILL call for the “harvesting” of developing infants. They have been using the prospect of commodifying, industrializing, and desacralizing human life for this noble humanitarian cause to give moral legitimacy to abortion. They will find a way to continue that line of propaganda.

Meanwhile, this breakthrough, which eventually will save untold numbers of lives, is something else to be thankful for!

A court in Saudi Arabia has condemned the victim of a gang rape to 200 lashes with a whip. Her seven assailants were sentenced to two years in prison, but she is also being punished for being out with a man not her relative.

There was a time when we acknowledged certain culture’s practices as “barbarian,” “savage,” or “uncivilized.” Now that we are supposed to be multi-culturalists, we are not allowed to use those terms. I hasten to say that many if not most cultures in less-developed and non-western parts of the world are highly civilized, full of restraint, courtesy, and a finely-tuned sense of what is appropriate. In fact, we postmodern westerners are often the ones who behave most like barbarians. So I prefer to use the word for individuals. But societies that legally punish not just the criminals but the victims are, literally, lacking in civilization.

A new study by the National Endowment for the Arts has found a big decline in reading among young people. I lament this decline of reading actual books, but I disagree that young people are not reading at all, as if literacy is becoming obsolete. Every time someone logs onto the internet he or she has to read. Without reading, there can be no Facebook socializing. Text-messaging requires reading. Arguably more letter-writing and letter-reading is going on than ever before in the form of e-mail correspondence.

The problem is that online reading tends to be in little bites. Books require–and create–long attention spans, with long chains of reasoning and sustained acts of the imagination. The new media encourages that kind of minimalistic condensation of discourse exemplified in the kind of spelling used in txt mgs typed on a tiny screen with your thumbs.

But reading is not going to go away. And reading books cannot go away for Christians, since they know the God who communicates Himself to us not through visions or experiences or feelings but precisely through a Book.