There is Reformed chatter of late over the season and its reason, or non-reason, depending on who you ask. The arguments for the latter are well formulated enough. I’m hoping that those inclined to put the kabosh on nativity-ism and advent-i-osity might press their arguments into the contemporary service of re-thinking Reformation Day Calvinpalooza’s. (There is just something painfully ironic about throwing parties for a guy buried in an unmarked grave.) Will the same ones who brag about staying home next Friday morning to sip eggnog also be found bobbing for apples on October 31? Here’s hoping.

Meanwhile, I continue to enjoy my own family reputation for sitting all lumpenleisure-like while my more outgoing father, younger daughter and wife deck the Christmas Tree. My oldest has inherited my contrarian inclination. Our refusal has less to do with any principled protest against Christmas goings on (I love Christmas-time) and more with just not liking forced cheer and fun. This year we were told if we didn’t participate we’d get no cookies. I have a brutal sweet tooth, so I hoisted the youngest as she topped the tree with an angel. I must say, the Tree looks great, and I plug it in every night. And, hopeless midwesterner that I was born and bred to be, I also brave the frigid temperatures to plug and unplug the outdoor lights, which I insisted on stringing this year. And I do lots of other festive-y stuff. Still I am branded the family Grinch, simply because I have some sort of thing about the blessed Tree. But as I read the Bar Jester’s latest entry, and find myself feeling like the protagonist to his antagonists, maybe there’s more to it?

If enough people call you “Scrooge” or “Grinch,” and if they do it enough times, you can almost believe that they’re trying to flatter rather than compliment you. But then if you attend to them a little more closely than you promised yourself you would, you begin to realize that they think they’re actually insulting you. They think your disaffection with Christmas is a bad thing.

Then the pieces begin to fall into place. They keep saying they want “Christ” put back in “Christmas,” whereas you’d settle for putting the “mass” back in “Christmas.”

They want to go to their worship auditoriums and reenact the nativity, complete with hay and oxen and asses; you want to partake the holy birth.

They make a point of saying “Merry Christmas” to all the Secular Humanists who wish them “happy holidays”; you just shrug your shoulders, spike the eggnog, and deviate not a hair’s breadth from making your holy days as happy as propriety allows.

They call Jesus the “Greatest Gift of All” (who came “wrapped in ribbons of love”) and snatch for themselves a metaphysical sanction for the annual Visa-borne glut; you unwrap yet another unrequested coat, which the Greatest Gift of All commands to you to give away, and sigh in affected gratitude as your thoughts drift toward the beneficial uses of arsenic.

They think “Silent Night” is a great song; you think it’s sentimental schlock.

They want to go on and on about “the true meaning of Christmas”; you’ve been meditating it your whole life and still couldn’t say for sure what it is.

They express the mystery of the Incarnation in “Happy Birthday, Jesus”; you consider reading St. Athanasius again but think better of it and reach instead for all the pills in the medicine cabinet and a bottle of Absolut.

Or so say the poli-tainers employed to stir things up and make a nice living. And so believe the masses and hoardes who lap it up, unawares of their own manipulation. But this clip reminds of how theocrats ape the Rushies and Beckies not only in their political opinions but also accuse two-kingdom theology of making the world safe for another Third Reich.

The Cresecent Moon is looming over your waters. Well, at least according to one of our favorite raving theonomists in his riveting rip-off, er third-rate cover of “The Screwtape Letters.”  I can’t wait to see how the jihadists sneak money into the coffers of a Protestant seminary. Oh! the five-and-dime intrigue of it all.

These things are a dime a dozen, and I normally don’t pay much attention for a host of what I hope are obvious reasons. But for kicks and giggles while the office’s machinery was firing up I took the test. The curious thing is that when I got to the question, “Do you know what God did so that you wouldn’t have to spend eternity in Hell?” I answered “Yes.” But I was told anyway, the same as if I had answered “No.”

This isn’t to taunt those who seem to be well intentioned. But insofar as this is the cyber version of the cold caller at my front door, or the sweet gal from the Somewheresville Bible Church float who handed me a similar tract at this year’s Fourth of July parade, it is to wonder if anybody’s really listening when they are going about these things. Whatever else making me an object of conquest to notch up on one’s spirtitual bedpost entails, did the sweet gal realize she may be trafficking in sheep poaching?

To wake you up on a Monday morning, here’s some good-natured fun at our expense from an Arminian (who takes equal-opportunity potshots at his own camp).  It’s interesting to see what “we” look like to the outside, although if the stereotype includes obsessions with Mars Hill (the “good” one) and John Piper, it would seem that he’s aiming more at Young, Restless, and Reformed than at us (i.e. Calvinists, but not necessarily the Historically, Confessionally Reformed).

He missed a few targets for some easy points.  For instance, we like not just the ESV translation, but we loves us some ESV, Study, Bible.  (I know I got mine, and this year, I switched the Daily Confession scripture proofs from BibleGateway.com into ESVStudyBible.org)  Also memorizing the Shorter Catechism (but only Q&A 1, and maybe 33).  Also paedobaptism — and even more, arguing about paedobaptism, and TULIP, and everything else that goes with the “Cage-Stage”.

I was a little disconcerted, however, about this one:

Second Generation Calvinists are highly esteemed because there are so few of them. Most children of Calvinists become either non-Calvinists (the Schaeffer route) or hyper-Calvinists (the Sproul route).

Is this an actual phenomenon, or even a prevalent stereotype?  I know about Frankie, I don’t know about Sproul Jr. (or would that be III?), but I had never heard of any kind of widespread phenomenon like this.  It seems to me that if catechesis does what we believe it does, the Reformed would have a very low attrition rate.

Some people demand that their news, like glossolia, come with interpretation (subtle and not-so-subtle).  So they watch Fox News. Or The Daily Show. The problem with this is that one must take in news daily, which anymore I find kind of hard to do. (Last night the top three local stories here were about case of animal hoarding, another GM plant closing and a double-homocide. And the jaw ready to tell us all about it seemed just this side of too pleased. “She can tell you about the plane crash with a gleam in her, it’s interesting when people die, give us dirty laundry.” I got that 45 for my 10th birthday.)

But, if you like your news weekly (here in southwest Michigan Saturday’s at 11 AM), and you’re more Daily Show than Fox News, I highly recommend NPR’s Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me!  It’s taped live in downtown Chicago and even features a former Daily Show correspondent, Mo Rocce. Host Peter Sagal is a comedic delight. It’s a great way to get the weekly news in a gameshow fashion, with worldly and sarcastic humor laced in and out:  “Each week on the radio you can test your knowledge against some of the best and brightest in the news and entertainment world while figuring out what’s real news and what’s made up.”

Winners get Carl Kasell’s voice on their outgoing voice message systems.

The dolphin ate it.

If you haven’t rented all seasons of the critically acclaimed TV series Arrested Development (gone cancelled because the American masses are stupid sheep-lemmings) you are ordered to go out and do so. Until then, take this quiz for kicks.

Weird. I thought I’d be Michael, hands (ahem) down, or at least George Michael. Turns out I’m Buster. Story of my life.

Many wonder what the value is to FaceBooking. I’m one of them. But after getting hounded enough by friends to get jiggy with it, I reluctantly jumped in. (Reminds me how this Outhouse thing got started.) Some call this mode of communication “re-connecting,” as if something meaningful or human is actually happening. But I still loath the telephone, so I’m not persuaded that Facebooking is anything close to being human. I think it’s just vaporous fun. How else to explain a bit of inward glee when I see that I have more Facebook messages in my Inbox?

This was no exception. Becky was a good friend of mine in high school. She kept threatening to find and upload a picture of us when we won a Halloween costume contest. She finally got around to it. I honestly cannot recall that get-up or anything about that evening. But Becky reminded me that the contest was at northern-lower Michigan’s hottest under-age 80s dance club called “The Beat.” I think it’s a City Hall now. Halloween and dancing, legalists beware (boo!). Granted, secularism reduces Christmas to consumerism. But one of the advantages of a secularized culture gutting cult of its import is that Halloween really isn’t invoking demonic forces, it’s just a fright party. I still do Halloween. But I have never danced in my life because, as Jerry Seinfeld said, dancing is stupid.

The second picture displays the fortunes of our victories. Becky being the off-beat Cyndi Lauper type took a gift certificate to a place called “Irreverence” and got herself that purple thing she’s wearing. I being not so Cyndi Lauper-ish took the gift certificate to the more staid and sophisticated “Hamiltons” and got that sweater. Sweaters were cool then so shut up. Bill Cosby wore lots of them.

This concludes my shot at Facebook-y self-indulgence and vaporous fun. Though I realize this blast from the past means more to me than any Outhouse reader, I hope you at least kind of liked it. And thanks, Becky, for reminding me that I can’t say that I’ve never won anything in my life as I am wont to do.

I hope it is no secret that I am under-political. Maybe that is why I always find it so curious that American religionists are also highly likely to be just as politically and ideologically minded as they are theologically persuaded. That Constantinian association makes me wonder for hours on end. After all, why aren’t religionists known for their views on sign language? The Bible makes reference to deafness, so why no immediate religious association with one side or another on this one? The last time I was on the campus of Gallaudet the hands were a-flyin’ over whether American Sign Language was the right school of communication or, some other one, I don’t know, I was paying as much attention to the in-house fight as I do to that of Constantinians and evangelicals. Plus, I understand sign language as well as I do culture wars.

But I digress. I point out my being an under-realized ideologue so that this post isn’t read to be a political comment. Don’t get me wrong, I surely have my politics and views. But I just found Slate Magazine’s Top 25 Bushisms really funny. I have always loved Bushisms. Granted, he has been doing it since 1999, so he should probably be afforded some bona fides. But I am not sure I agree with Weisburg’s ranking. For example, number three, “Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?” should probably be higher for the, ahem, embedded irony (you remember the word “embedded,” don’t you? It was all the journalistic rage in 2003-04).

Like David Letterman said after running the last Great Moments of Presidential Speeches, “I’m gonna miss that fella.”

I was going to share my list of great movies from 2008 to celebrate the new year, but as I reflected on the films of 2008 my thoughts turned to the best movies from the best decade for movies. So here is my list of best movies from the nineteen-nineties:

The Muted Heart Stars Glenn Close and Sally Field. My wife dragged me to this movie right after we got engaged. I wanted to see Firestorm.

Prognosis Negative One of the best movies of the 90’s no matter who you ask.

Chunnel A classic. “Everybody out of the Chunnel!” And who can forget this dramatic line; “Mr. President, your daughter is in the Chunnel.” One should neither laugh nor lie while watching this film.

Sack Lunch This film was overlooked because it was released around the same time as The English Patient. I saw this as the in-flight movie on a trip to Tunisia. Dabney Coleman stars.

Blimp: The Hindenburg Story Like Titanic we know how it ends, and boy does it hurt! I tried to see this on Puerto Rico day but some jerk with a laser pointer ruined it for me.

CheckMate Also a classic. “The King is always in jeopardy.” Only a game? We had a hard time getting everyone to the theater at the same time to see this one. About half as good as Ponce de León.

Rochelle, Rochelle A young girl’s strange, erotic journey from Milan to Minsk. A foreign movie…a film, is what it is. It was later made into a Broadway musical starring Bette Midler. Then Bette was in that horrible softball accident and the show lost steam. Warning: Sideal nudity.

Mountain High An R-Rated film starring Kevin Bacon and Susan Sarandon. “There’s no higher place than Mountain High.”

Flaming Globes of Sigmund I often dreamt about a scene from this sci-fi classic; “It’s just as you prophesied! The planets of our solar system, incinerating. Like flaming globes, Sigmond. Like flaming globes.”

Death Blow I saw a bootlegged version of this film. Quite action-packed. Do not miss the Death Blow!

Blame it on the Rain I saw this when Means to and End was sold out. My disappointment didn’t last long, I really enjoyed it.

Cold Fusion Saw it alone because my friend was working late that night. He missed a great movie.

The Pain and the Yearning A 192-minute film. An old woman experiences pain and yearning. One of Vincent’s picks. Much better than Weekend at Bernie’s II(a Gene pick).

Means to an End I did finally get to see it. It helps to have an attractive woman with you. It lived up to all the hype.

The Other Side of Darkness This one went straight to video but I thought it was brilliant. It featured some woman in a coma and her husband played by Eric Roberts. The film is long and concludes with the woman regaining consciousness. Before I saw this movie I didn’t know it was possible to come out of comas.

Ponce de León Much better than Prognosis Negative which came out around the same time but to less fanfare. The film concerns the Spanish conquistador Juan Ponce de León and his mythical search for the Fountain of Youth. The most memorable and emotional scene is when Ponce and his men splash around in the supposed Fountain of Youth, only to realize later that it didn’t work. Twice as good as CheckMate. My favorite explorer is still de Soto.

Cry, Cry Again You cry, then you see the dancer, and you cry again. The dancer doesn’t seem to fit but I liked it anyway.

Firestorm. This movie has it all, Harrison Ford jumping out of a plane shooting back up at it while falling, the underwater escape, and that helicopter landing on top of a car. It’s one heck of a picture. Not to be confused with the movie of the same name starring Howie Long.

Honorable mention:

Agent Zero

Brown-Eyed Girl

Chow Fun

Cupid’s Rival

This clip was passed along to me by a co-worker. It’s a gag on the current bailout debacle, which is pretty darn funny for those of us dolts who, along with the pundits and lawmakers, cannot make heads nor tails of the evening news.

But, being the contrarian that I am, my mind immediately went to two other places these days: first, late nights with my fifth grader who has begun to ease out of the standard first-few-weeks-of-previous-year review (balanced calendars NOW!); second, how it feels to try and explain confessional Reformed truths. But no matter how you look at it, this is just plain hysterical for anybody who gets that odd, creeping feeling he is trying to describe a color.

This is a re-post from last year. The holidays bring family get-togethers. And since my family can break down along lines of a drinking culture on one side and a dry culture on another, it makes things interesting. Unfortunately for me, the lapsed Episcopalian and mom will be staying in Florida this year, leaving me with the dry side. Looks like Welch’s sparkling cocktails and soda pop for me. That’s okay, I have a brutal sweet tooth.

A rearing in secular unbelief, first converting into broad evangelicalism and then converting again into Reformed confessionalism is nothing if not packed with all sorts of interesting changes. In the first conversion, I met up with a rather clear if unstated expectation that certain social, political and cultural mores were to be quickly adopted. Not only was it obvious that one must get cozy with a certain narrow band of activist politics and cheer on fairly bleary-eyed rightist rants about a damnable media, one also had to understand that the consumption of certain substances was obviously not for the truly pious. World-flight not only meant that attempts at worldly involvement were about throwing rocks from inside the cave (read: “culture war”), but also that certain things ought never be touched. Having been reared by a pair that included the man in the picture (circa 1975), that was all a bit much for this newbie to swallow. But for various reasons, one of which was that I wanted to be truly pious, I did my level best to keep certain balloons under water. Being male, I’ve always been pretty good at silent desperation.

The second conversion to the Reformation did a lot to release a whole host of balloons. Fully affirming the material world, it was quite a relief to find out that the world in which I had always lived and enjoyed really wasn’t so fundamentally evil and retreat was actually more impious than pious. Yet, as I have gone on in certain circles that share with me the second conversion from broad legalistic-evangelicalism into Reformed libertarian-confessionalism, I keep finding that the capped man sitting by the pool has known a few things all along without missing a beat. He may not yet be aligned with me on many theological and confessional specifics, but he gets what I think many in both my conversions still don’t grasp very well. Contra my first conversion, he always knew the material world was “very good” and there was absolutely no reason to fear it and every reason to pursue it. Contra my second conversion, he knew there was absolutely no reason to have to prove any of that to anybody.

Weaving in and out of my conversions, I have found it crowded with more or less two types: ascetic legalists and sophomoric libertarians who used to be ascetic legalists. I find myself more and more pulling up a seat next to the bearded man as they both do silent battle. It’s a fun show. Here is what I observe:

The legalists are mostly the kinder and gentler variety anymore. Soft legalism is a good term, I think. The brute moralism of their forebears has morphed into user-friendly advice which still “cannot be refused.” Since ordinary is anathema to the therapeutic age, they seem to justify their austerity by appealing to the fashionable and extra-ordinary trinity of “happy, healthy and whole.” It is a sort of silent legalism, one a lot like silent theocracy. Just as some may talk a good game about “the separation of church and state” yet really believe that the gospel has a direct bearing on and obvious implication for the ordering of society, the unspoken rule in silent legalism is that true piety can indeed be measured by abstinence even as charity is feigned.

Then there is the liberty camp. Blowing smoke into the faces of their past, these find true piety to be measured by relative consumption. There seems always something to prove to some phantom somewhere in the individual or collective self, real or imagined. The way an adolescent speaks a bit higher on the phone so her parents know she is fraternizing with the neighborhood bad boy, certain libertarians want the details of their consumption known to their phantoms. It is sometimes to the point of absurdity: I recall reading an account of one Reformed pastor proud of the fact that his fourteen-year-old son had taken up smoking, making some lame anti-Prohibition argument. But for any who still care about the category of authority and the sovereignty of God in the left-hand kingdom and all that, such behavior is against the law. And for those with any common sense left, it is not a little asinine for a parent to actually encourage a child to smoke. Many Reformed seem to think legalism is only about substance use. Many seem unable to recognize that, since legalism is based upon general principles, it can come in various forms. But try advocating for public education or suggesting problems in the pro-life culture and one will get a crash course in the equal-opportunities of Reformed political correctness.

I suppose it is all in a day’s experience within certain quarters of American religion. But when it comes to the rather negligible issue of substance use, I’d rather take my cue from the lapsed Episcopalian who has long since decided tobacco isn’t his cup of meat anymore and prefers only a nightly shot of Chardonnay, sometimes more on the weekends and holidays.

Cheers, Dad…or not…evidently it doesn’t really matter either way.

When the 4th of July falls on a Sunday in North America, watch out.  What can happen in not a few churches in our land can boggle the mind. With that in mind and in the context of a complaint about what was perceived to be a butchering of the National Anthem by Patti LaBelle before the start of Game 4 of the World Series,  I am relaying this exchange, in red, from a forum I frequent.

Q. A better question [than why do they let Patti LaBelle sing] is why the hell do we have the national anthem sung at baseball games or SuperBowls? Why?

A. Because most of us have a sense of patriotism.

Q. And why is patriotism associated with sports?????

Q. And how come we don’t sing the national anthem before every TV show? And every commercial as well? Why don’t we play it in movie theaters before the show? Why not everywhere all the time?

A. If you have to ask…. Nevermind.

Q. I do have to ask. Many seemingly automatic associations don’t come to me automatically. I never quite got the automatic tie-in between Harley-Davidson and Freedom. I don’t get the automatic connection between fire engines and the flag. What’s patriotic about baseball? Where does the Confederate Flag fit in modern America? In today’s world, the rebel south would be viewed as terrorist, no?

Just because we grew up with a habit, does not mean we are bound to continue that habit. There may be no harm in doing so, and it may even reveal itself to be a good idea. Just the same, I think it is a good practice to review your behavior occasionally and make a determination as to its continuing value.

It’s convenient to dismiss me with a blithe, “….if you have to ask……” put down but I think the question is valid and warrants an honest response from anyone who feels he has one.

A. Ok, fine. I’ll give you an honest response.

I don’t know what country you guys live in, but every country I know of has (or SHOULD HAVE) a certain amount of honor, and tradition among its citizens. You aren’t respecting your flag when you ask “why now”? The answer isn’t “why now,” it should be, “why not more often”?

What better opportunity for a country’s citizens to show their mutual respect for the flag than when there’s tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of like minded people in attendance, PLUS the people watching on TV? Now you’re talking millions of like minded individuals reciting the same words at the same time staring at the same flag. What better way to show unity than at a sporting event? So, it’s ok for millions of us to get together to watch a ball bounce around a field of grass, but we can’t UNITE with a common goal? You’re right…Why don’t all countries have their Nation Anthem at the local theater? EXACTLY. Why not?  Are we all getting lazy? Are we embarrassed?  One guy here has told us that he stands during the Anthem. I assume this in his own living room? How patriotic is THAT? Yea, big time!

Why don’t you drive down to your local biker bar and question the first biker you see and ask him “When and where should we fly our flag,” and oh…by the way…”what’s up with this Harley/freedom thing, too”? I guarantee you won’t be getting a “Convenient, blithe, dismissal” for an answer. After you recover from that beating, go down to your local firehouse and ask them why they fly a flag. Better yet, why don’t you hop on an airplane and fly to New York City and ask THOSE firefighters why they fly a flag on their firetrucks. Let me know what they say.

Personally, I find anyone that “questions” when and where they should wave their country’s flag a disgrace to their country regardless of what country that is.

Q. Anyone can stand for the National Anthem . No biggie there .Paying your taxes … now there’s a patriotic act.

A. It all depends on what’s in your heart.

End of quotes.

That’s right; it’s that time of year again: National Punctuation Day. Do you think an ellipsis is when the moon moves in front of the sun or that the only use for a colon is, well, a private matter? Then you need an in-service with Jeff Rubin.

I’ll be the first to admit that I am not always the best practitioner of the stated rules, but that is no excuse to go soft on them.  Anyone who has the audacity to write anything without aid of credentials or all things professional and legitimate and make it public (i.e. blog) should at least be familiar with the holiday which falls on September 24. Personally, I think the exclamation point is way over used. It appears Jeff might agree.

For those of you who think this Calvinist-Amillenial-Two-Kingdom-Confessionally-Reformed-Christian-Secularist is too under-realized in his eschatology as evidenced in his disdain for all forms and expressions of activism, sacred and secular, over more institutional means (deep breath), here is my idea of a better way to wag fingers in faces. If I must promote a cause to prove that I don’t ignore the third use of the law, here you go. Quit calling me antinomian.

If nothing else, you must admit, National Punctuation Day sure beats National Ten Commandments Day.

I know the concept is a rip-off, but I’m nothing if not consistent: I stole both the Lapsed Episcopalian’s image and nickname for the purposes of blogging.

I have found that most Who-Said-That’s seem to be code for Guess-The-Bad-Guy. That makes it so much duller and predictable—the bad kind of predictable, not the good, Presbyterian kind. Let’s change it up a bit. So far I have dropped two hints, a trait I come by more honestly from my mother who can diffuse Christmas and birthday anticipation like a pro.  Anyway, who said:

“I never call myself a ‘Fundamentalist.’ There is, indeed, no inherent objection to the term; and if the disjunction is between ‘Fundamentalism’ and ‘Modernism,’ then I am willing to call myself a Fundamentalist of the most pronounced type. But after all, what I prefer to call myself is not a ‘Fundamentalist’ but a ‘Calvinist’ — that is, an adherent of the Reformed Faith.”