I recently read Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday.  I loved and love it.  There is a sentence near the end where one of the characters asks, “Why does each small thing in the world have to fight against the world itself?  Why does a fly have to fight the whole universe?…So that each thing that obeys law may have the glory and isolation of the anarchist.  So that each man fighting for order may be as brave and good a man as the dynamiter.”  I often feel a sense of loathing for contemporary culture, but I have never looked at it as a gift to live in an age of intellectual anarchy.  If one fights for the God who is the way the truth and the life, then one’s position is presently bequeathed the dynamism of the anarchist.  Michael Horton once wisely quipped that there has to be an option apart from dead orthodoxy or dynamic heresy.  The option of course is dynamic orthodoxy.  2006 makes that possible.  We now live in an age where slothful thinking is no longer rebellious but the expected norm.  To assert that truth exists and can be known is to cloak oneself in the romance and spirit that intellectual sloth has abandoned.  Back in its day, an intellectual despising the truth was novel and daring.  Now it’s as safe and unquestioned as the geocentric vision of the universe in the Middle Ages.  Strangely, those that propagate it think they’re still being cutting edge.  It’s like some tired 70-year-old matronly prostitute showing her leg, thinking she’s alluring.  I like the sheer aggression of Paul in 1 Corinthians 1:19-20 “For it is written, ‘I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.’”  Then Paul throws down the gauntlet to those that would profess (to borrow from Stoppard) the “stale revelations of the newly enlightened.”  “Where is the one who is wise?  Where is the scribe?  Where is the debater of this age?  Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?”  Paul has no room for this, true for me, crap.  It’s true-period.  And the stuff you think is wise is foolishness! Heywood Broun with startling sensibility once wrote “not all the steadfastness of the world belongs to heretics.”

Near the end of Chesterton’s novel one of the characters holds a lantern with a cross worked into it.  Perceiving an army of anarchist descending upon him, he confronts them.  He might just as well be confronting the perpetual cynicism and intellectual anarchy of Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucalt.

“’Do you see this lantern?’ Cried Syme in a terrible voice.  ‘Do you see the cross carved on it, and the flame inside?  You did not make it.  You did not light it.  Better men than you, men who could believe and obey, twisted the entrails of iron and preserved the legend of fire.  There is not a street you walk on, there is not a thread you wear, that was not made as this lantern was, by denying your philosophy of dirt and rats.  You can make nothing.  You can only destroy.  You will destroy mankind; you will destroy the world.  Let that suffice you.  Yet this one old Christian lantern you shall not destroy.  It shall go where your empire of apes will never have the wit to find it.’

            “He struck the Secretary once with the lantern so that he staggered; and then, whirling it twice round his head, sent it flying far out to sea, where it flared like a roaring rocket and fell.” 

The proposal of answers instead of questions has become the property of the aggressive underdog.  In an age of breezy contradiction, it seems fitting that we are granted the opportunity to rebel against established rebellion.

These are new paintings for the apartment.  The color on the first is a little off because they're photos and the light was pretty yellowy.

Instead of doing a drawing and then painting over it, this one is just directly painted.  Because of that she seems stretched a little.  Sort of like an El Greco painting or Stretch Armstrong.  Actually, let me say she's stretched more like Gumby because although he's not as cool as El Greco, he's vaguely more classic than Stretch Armstrong.

Found this behind my sister's organ. Did it a year or so ago to illustrate the following quote.

"Man's greatness and wretchedness are so evident that the true religion must necessarily teach us that there is in man some great principle of greatness and some great principle of wretchedness."  Blaise Pascal -- Penses.

I like that Pascal asserts some correlation between theory and reality.  The raw facts we encounter in the world must have some corresponding explanation in our religion.  It isn't as though religion is second story metaphysics and reality/living is first story nature.  Pascal's holistic approach guards from placebo type explanations that give us existential satisfaction, but that aren't rooted in truth (self deception).

It's sort of funny.  I've been playing a good bit with my almost-two-year-old niece, Brienne, and I've noticed that girls assign significance to their toys in entirely different ways then boys.  This is probably common knowledge, but I've been slow to discover it.  Brienne wants me to put a diaper on her dolls, or cram her teddy bear's feet into her dress shoes, or put a barrett on its ear.  In short, she wants to remove their distinctives as animals and treat them like humans.  She wants to put her green spanish singing frog in the baby swing, and pat her stuffed cat on the back.  By contrast, boys seem to have little desire to assign personhood to bears.  Bears eat people.  Muscle men use their muscles to lift cars and punch stuffed animals in the face.  Giant stuffed cats exist to pounce on muscle men, provoking muscle men to deliver a death blow to the cat's stomach or throat.  For boys it seems that toys have significance when they dominate other toys.  With girl's it seems they have significance when they can imitate people--when they can break the bounds of what they intrinsically are and can become what girl's want them to be.  It's slightly creepy that that impulse starts so young.

Edit.  "Creepy" is a poor word choice.