While y’all wait for me to complete a new post on evanescent’s carrot & stick article, here’s a link to whet your appetite. (HT: Gene Cook, TNM #864)

This morning on NPR there was a short feature on a Korean immigrant describing why her marriage is more affectionate than is common among other traditional or immigrant Koreans.

The story can be read and/or heard here, although it is disappointing to note that the high point of the story (for me anyways), is omitted from the written version.  The web text says

As a child, she had seen very little affection or tenderness in her home.  Lee decided she wanted her marriage to be different from what was customary in Korea.

But in the audio version, we learn that Mrs. Lee was inspired to have a different marriage by the example of American missionaries (?Bob and Arva?) Pinkston.

I always say that I perceive NPR to be less biased than CBS, but I wonder if here is some liberal bias showing through NPR’s usually polished veneer of objectivity.  Could the writer of the web-summary of the audio interview not wrap their minds around the concept that Christianity (which everybody knows is completely misogynistic) defines marriage as mutual sacrifice and self-deprecation?  Could they only hear the story in terms they could understand — in terms of a woman fighting the good feminist fight against an oppressive, subjective patriarchal tradition?

So anyways, listen to the audio if you have the bandwidth.  Ideology aside, the written summary isn’t as sweet and personal as hearing the story in her own words.

Do Jews wince when they hear Popeye’s blasphemous self-determination, “I yam what I yam, and that’s all what I yam”? Should Christians? (How about when we hear Frank Sinatra singing, “I did it my way”)

The connection between Popeye and God’s name for Himself was made by R. C. Sproul, in Consequences of Ideas CD series, a survey of philosophy from the ancient Greeks on up. In session 3, Sproul discusses the debate between proto-existentialist Heraclitus (“All things are always in flux”, “You can never step into the same river twice”) and realist Parmenides (“Whatever is, is”). This post is basically a blatant rip-off of Sproul’s content.

In a sense, I can truly say (a la Heraclitus)

“You are not what you are”

because in the time span it takes for me to speak (or you to read) from “are” to “are”, you have aged, maybe a hair or two fell out, your constantly-pumping heart has changed the positions of your blood cells (not to mention the translation of every molecule in your body due to a spinning earth which orbits around a sun in an expanding universe), your cells have metabolized sugar into energy, your lungs have exchanged oxygen for carbon dioxide, toggling the status of those molecules between part of you, and not part of you, etc. In that sense, you are not a Human Being, but a Human Becoming. Because of this eternal flux of all things, there is no concrete reality; you can never say that anything IS (obviously, Slick Willie was fan).

But we know that God truly IS, and is not in flux. He does not exhibit the same changeableness as his creation. And we do not have to sink into this morass of existentialism, relativity, illusion, and deconstruction (all modern outgrowths of Heraclitus’ philosophy), because (as Paul explains to an audience no doubt well aware of the Heraclitus / Parmenides catfight), the God who IS, imparts that reality to his creation as well:

In Him we live, and move, and have our being

Recently I’ve heard two great audio pieces on the relationship between consumerism/materialism and spirituality/values, and I thought I’d share them.  One is about China, and one is more about us as Americans.

Two nights ago, Marketplace (on NPR, broadcasting from China this week) had an amazing trio of articles about the emergence of prosperity in China, especially as coupled with the post-communist vacuum of religion/spirituality/values.  If you have the bandwidth to listen to RealAudio over the web, I highly recommend you listen to the audio archive from 1/17/06(pm).  We as Americans can learn a lot from the Chinese in this department — by which I mean we should learn from their mistakes.  The picture painted by this article is that they are just like us, but worse!

The other was an interview on Mars Hill #69 with Vincent Miller concerning his book Consuming Religion: Religious Belief and Practice in a Consumer Culture.  He describes how, in a society where everybody views themselves as consumers, they can only approach religion as a matter of choice (which religion should I choose for myself?), and are by nature unable to conceive of a religion in which they are chosen.  (I think this also has a clear relationship with our culture’s predilection for Credobaptism instead of Paedobaptism (see also an unfinished blog treatment of infant baptism here (and a few subsequent blogs)).

The two effects he predicts (both of which are evident in our modern church) are: church marketing, involving watering down, compromising, and in all possible ways conforming to the desires of the consumer in order to be chosen; and separationism, where churches wall themselves off from the common outside culture (which hampers their ability to outreach).  Miller started talking about a middle road, but it didn’t really resonate with me.  Probably because of the limited time in the interview he didn’t get to fully explain it.  I should read the book.  You should read the book.  You should listen to the tape.  You should listen to all Mars Hill tapes.

(As a side note, that same tape also had an amazing interview with John McWhorter, about his book Doing our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music and Why We Should, Like Care.  You can buy used (in hardcover!) for $0.55 plus shipping — I did, and I can’t wait to start reading it!)