FW wrote this comment on yesterday’s witnessing post:

I literally got goosebumps reading this post.

I daily am forced in my vocation ( ok i am a sinner and do few things that are NOT self centered by choice) to deal with and witness to homosexuals, transgenders, drug addicts, very religious pentecostals who are in reality terrified of God, truly good and pious people who do not have Jesus and all those other people who look exactly like me in some way or other.

I feel utterly unprepared, unworthy and deficient for this task.

What you write is wonderful. Tell us more please. Can you share some personal experiences of what this looks like to you in practice?

Actually, I can, but while I sometimes tell about it in person, I hesitate to write it on as public a forum as a blog without that person’s permission. But, hey, this is an anonymous forum for most of you.

Sometimes “witnessing” is a cursory canned presentation void of both law and gospel, an annoying attempt to manipulate someone into registering a decision that they may well do just to get rid of you. Sometimes the whole process ties into a simplistic conversionist mindset unconnected to the Word and Sacraments of the Church. Still, the Bible speaks much of conversion, and, with so many people today utterly without a background in the church, God is very likely to reach them via one-on-one contact.

Do any of you have any accounts of someone bringing Christ to you or of you bringing Christ to someone? Anything to help Frank and the rest of us witness effectively to our faith?

Thanks to Frank Sonnek for alerting me to this piece by literary critic Stanley Fish, trying to figure out what the value is of literary study.  He begins with a fine reading of some lines from George Herbert, and he nails Herbert’s Reformation emphasis on how Christ does EVERYTHING for our salvation.

Fish became a big postmodernist theorist, but he was also a first-rate George Herbert critic.  In fact, he was, like me, an early promoter of a Reformation reading of Herbert’s spirituality, in contrast to the Roman Catholic interpretations that dominated the scholarship until then.

So Fish tosses off this brilliant little example explaining a line from Herbert.  And, in fact, his overall discussion shooting down the various claimed uses for this sort of thing (to change your life?  not really.  to make you a critical thinker?  other things can do that too.  to enrich your conversation in the culture?  or make the conversation duller.  to promote liberal thinking?  but conservatives read the same texts) is pretty much true.

But what he is no longer able to do, given his postmodernist worldview–which makes him have to explain everything in terms of a “community of discourse”–is to use classical, Aristotelian analysis, whereby some things, such as a poem and studying a poem, are good IN THEMSELVES.  Not everything HAS to be “useful” (good because it leads to other goods).   The pursuit of things good in themselves was also the hallmark of a classical, liberal arts education (as Cardinal Newman explains).

An Iranian filmmaker has made a movie depicting the life of Jesus according to Islam. The film, “Jesus, the Spirit of God” depicts Him as a prophet, not as the incarnate God, and it denies that He was actually crucified. According to the movie and to the Koran, God snatched Jesus up to Heaven at the last minute and put Judas on the cross instead. According to Islam, God did not die for sinners; sinners have to die for God.

Nevertheless, the filmmaker said that he made the movie to show how much Christians and Muslims have in common. Another similarity is that Shi’ite Muslims believe that when the 12th Mahdi returns to earth to set up his kingdom, Jesus will come with him.

I wasn’t really planning to get into American Idol again, but here I am. I’ll live-blog it:

Not stories! They are doing to a talent show what they did to the Olympics, giving all this human-interest background so we’ll get involved with the characters rather than concentrating on the performances. A guy who lost 200 pounds. . . An immigrant who loves America. . .A teenaged girl who has to take care of her wheel-chair bound mother. . .

A greater variety of music? A guy does a Hispanic song. I like that genre. Beautiful melodies, and Spanish is the loving tongue.

Some of the bad ones receive mercy. The girl doing it for her mother is sweet, so cries, hugs, and commisserations all around, even from Simon.

Memorable line: “I WILL be victorious.”

Whoops. My Tivo is switching to record two better shows: “Life on Mars” (a GREAT high-concept mystery on BBC) and “Comanche Moon” (which I will watch for the sake of the saga it is prequel to “Lonesome Dove”). This “Idol,” unlike last year’s, is not drawing me in. I’m not even going to watch the rest of it. Let me know what I missed and if I should give it another chance.