Civilization

I was watching TV when I saw a familiar commercial for Buffalo Wild Wings.  In it, a football referee looks into a replay hood, and instead of the Buffalo Wild Wings crowd seeing the ref standing on the field, they suddenly see the ref's face looking straight at them.  He asks the BWW crowd what they thought about the play being reviewed.  One of the patrons says "We're not ready to go yet; is there any way you could send this thing into overtime?"  After a dramatic pause, the ref says "No problem." 

This is a fascinating description of the movement to encourage children to spend more time outside.

Leave No Child Inside | by Richard Louv | Orion Magazine March-April 2007

Similarly, the back page of an October issue of San Francisco magazine displays a vivid photograph of a small boy, eyes wide with excitement and joy, leaping and running on a great expanse of California beach, storm clouds and towering waves behind him. A short article explains that the boy was hyperactive, he had been kicked out of his school, and his parents had not known what to do with him—but they had observed how nature engaged and soothed him. So for years they took their son to beaches, forests, dunes, and rivers to let nature do its work.

The photograph was taken in 1907. The boy was Ansel Adams.

When I can't put my own thoughts into any better words than others already have, I just blog about and link to them...

FIRST THINGS: The Fear of Being Viewed as Insufficiently Progressive

People who are not intimidated by the fear of being thought insufficiently progressive can also consult their common sense. They may even be so bold as to protest that it is morally repugnant to subject children to a social experiment that is manifestly driven by the desire of adults to satisfy their disordered emotional and erotic appetites.

Banned in Boston

"How much of the coming threat to religious liberty actually stems from same-sex marriage? These experts' comments make clear that it is not only gay marriage, but also the set of ideas that leads to gay marriage--the insistence on one specific vision of gay rights--that has placed church and state on a collision course. Once sexual orientation is conceptualized as a protected status on a par with race, traditional religions that condemn homosexual conduct will face increasing legal pressures regardless of what courts and Congress do about marriage itself."

FIRST THINGS: On the Square » Blog Archive » Death on Demand

A number of months ago, as the small group I'm in was reading an article about the biblical basis for opposing animal cruelty, we read about how Sweden banned confinement in animal production.  Some people in the group tried to argue that this is an example of how Europe has a better society than America because they don't have the death penalty, they have universal health care, etc.

I tried to point out that insofar as any of these things is desirable, we should notice that they are not arriving at these conclusions by biblical logic that acknowledges the existence of God and takes its cues from the way He created the world and still sees the world today.  Instead, Europe's current culture has derived the logical basis for its choices primarily from an atheistic viewpoint that has elevated the value of animals (largely a good thing) as it has lowered the inherent value of human beings (a very bad thing).

From the article:

“We sit by and watch the Barbarian, we tolerate him; in the long stretches of peace we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence, his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creeds refreshes us; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond: and on these faces there is no smile.”