Eagle Lake

Cadillac Mountain

Chicago's Southern Soul

Chicagoans’ devotion to their city is mercifully devoid of the smugness so palpable in places like New York and San Francisco and pockets of Uptown New Orleans before the storm. There’s a sense of engagement and civic activism; people are smart without being self-consciously intellectual. By contrast Manhattan seems claustrophobic and cliquish, a place where being embraced in the way Chicago embraced Frances requires a certain amount of gamesmanship and ambition for something more than simply to do good and live a rich life.

http://gardenandgun.com/article/chicagos-southern-soul

Amen.

Second generation Reformed churches

Reformed doctrine had already shown a greater capacity to mobilize popular support than Lutheran ideas when the two were in direct competition in the cities of south Germany. Now it also offered compelling reasons for those drawn to it to separate themselves from the church of Rome. It offered a model derived from the Bible of how to form independent churches in the absence of governmental support. It was firmly ensconced in a number of enclaves that were well situated to serve as bases for wider expansion and that appeared to contemporaries to be admirable models of reformed communities. Its theologians had given expression to its basic tenets in a number of monuments of compelling exegesis. With its diversity of ecclesiologies, it could justify magisterial control of a state church as well as the formation of independent churches under the cross, making it appealing to rulers who had already assumed the supreme headship within their territories.  All of these considerations help to explain why the Reformed churches were poised for a dramatic period of expansion in 1555.

Philip Benedict, Christ's Churches Purely Reformed:  A Social History of Calvinism, 120, summarizing the second generation of the Reformed tradition.  "Churches under the cross" refers to illegal churches meeting in secret in northern Italy.

But there have always been more who began adult life as artists and intellectuals only to find themselves 25 years on somehow being mainly a teacher at a D-list college in a place they never wanted to live.

But there have always been more who began adult life as artists and intellectuals only to find themselves 25 years on somehow being mainly a teacher at a D-list college in a place they never wanted to live. 

--Garance Franke-Ruta, Everlasting Realities of the Bohemian Lifestyle

Chicago, unlike New York, has plenty of affordable housing, if you're willing to live in "up-and-coming" neighborhoods.  But my sense is that the city doesn't have a well-established intellectual class outside of Hyde Park.  Which isn't affordable.

Introducing Robert Murray M'Cheyne

A few quotes from Andrew Bonar's 1845 biography of the Scottish minister Robert Murray M'Cheyne.  M'Cheyne died at the age of 29.  He's best known today for the M'Cheyne Bible reading plan. 

Here's M'Cheyne reflecting on the death of his brother, whom he grieved for the rest of his life:

Pray for me, that I may be made holier and wiser--less like myself, and more like my heavenly Master; that I may not regard my life, if so be I may finish my course with joy.  This day eleven years ago, I lost my loved and loving brother, and began to seek a Brother who cannot die.

On his personal reading:

Read part of the Life of Jonathan Edwards.  How feeble does my spark of Christianity appear beside such a sun!  But even his was a borrowed light, and the same source is still open to me.

And now on his Bible reading at one stage of his life:

How formally and unheedingly the Bible was read,--how little was read--so little that even now I have not read it all!

And finally one more:

Had this evening a more complete understanding of that self-emptying and abasement with which it is necessary to come to Christ--a denying of self, trampling it under foot--a recognizing of the complete righteousness and justice of God, that could do nothing else with us but condemn us utterly, and thrust us down to lowest hell--a feeling that, even in hell, we should rejoice in his sovereignty, and say that all was rightly done.

More quotes might be forthcoming.  One thing that strikes me from such a young man was his intensity.  Perhaps he's too intense at times, but his quest for personal holiness (and doesn't the Bible require such a quest?) seems foreign in a time when the church seems to give more attention to other matters.

Summer List

My reading has slowed down a bit this summer, and I've let more pressing demands (and laziness) turn my attention away from the blog.  I'll try to rectify that with shorter, more frequent posts.  Until then here's a recap of my reading since Wendell Berry's magnificent Jayber Crow.

Alan Moore,Watchmen.  My first venture into graphic novels.  Time placed it on their list of the 100 best novels of the 20th century back when people made those kinds of lists.  I couldn't put it down.  It met my criteria of a good book:  I enjoyed the plot and cared about the characters.  The general premise:  what would happen if there were superheroes in the real world?

Justo Gonzalez, The Story of Christianity, vol 1, The Early Church to the Reformation.  This is one of the standards in church history introductions.  It felt too "textbookish," which maybe is an unfair criticism since it's been a textbook for who knows how many church history courses.

Edmund Clowney, The Church.  Clowney was a professor at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia.  A good book, but I noticed something in common with his book Called to the Ministry which I read a few years ago.  At times his exegesis is more "broad stroke" than rigorous and nuanced.  Similarly, his flow of thought feels jumpy at times too.  That being said, Clowney was a treasure to the church, and this book is worth reading.

David Goldblatt, The Ball is Round:  A Global History of Soccer.  I'm probably not going to finish this massive history of "football," but this foray into the world's most popular sport has been enjoyable and informative.  One interesting fact:  soccer is more or less the same age as baseball.  Kicking games have been around all over the world for thousands of years, but soccer as it exists today developed after British prep schools and the various associations of their alumni started to play each other and thus needed to codify the rules of the game.  This happened roughly mid-19th century, about the same time as baseball congealed into what it is today.