“One Little Hour”

This fancy title is just academese for wedding showers. What purpose do wedding showers (and baby showers) fill? Sure, on the individual level they help new couples just starting out by pooling resources from the community. No one individual gives everything, but through the contributions of most everyone in the couple’s community, they end up with most everything they need. Call it small scale Marxism: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”

Jes and I are getting married tomorrow. We had little kitchenware, dishes, or other home furnishings. People better established than us contributed crockpots and silverware to give us a hand. This is nice, especially since I am the beneficiary. The expectation is that we will return the favor to those in our formerly less advantaged position.

But wedding showers and gift-giving serves another purpose; it encourages adherence to cultural norms. If a couple follows the culturally dictated path, they reap economic benefits along with the goodwill of their friends and family. If the couple strays from the accepted tradition, they often lose those incentives.

If Jes and I had chosen to elope, have a child out of wedlock, or spurned our cultural tradition in some other way, we would have lost out on the gifts and goodwill. Though people probably don’t think about these incentives on a conscious level, I wonder what affect this system has on cultural traditions.

A study might examine adherence to cultural norms in families/communities located close geographically versus those who have less contact on a regular basis. Perhaps another look could be taken at couples on the basis of gifts given in proportion to annual income. 

The use of economics to enforce cultural traditions is morally neutral. Morality is contingent upon the traditions being upheld. Not all traditions are created equal.

PS - I am getting married tomorrow and I promise that socio-economics and cultural mores will not be on my mind for the next week!(-;

This past Tuesday the single adults of Grace Bible Church in Northeast Pennsylvania gathered for a singspiration. In between a medley of traditional hymns and modern favorites we took the time to share testimonies and thoughts from the Sunday sermon.

After singing It Is Well with My Soul, I shared what I thought was an accurate version of that hymn’s dramatic history. In lurid detail I recounted how Philip Bliss wrote the lyrics to the song after watching his wife and daughter drown before his eyes when their ship was sunk in a violent storm. What better way to contrast external confusion with the inner peace found in resting in Christ?

Unfortunately, my poetic recounting was nearly completely inaccurate. The author did not witness the sinking, it was his four daughters who drowned, and his wife survived. The ship was not sunk by a storm, but by a collision with another boat. All of these errors are somewhat understandable; it is true that close family members drowned at sea and sorrow inspired the author to write a masterpiece. But all hope for forgiveness is lost when I substituted the hymnist for the lyricist. It was Horatio Spafford who wrote those moving lines, not Philip Bliss!

If forced to offer a defense I can only claim to have told the “dynamic equivalent” of the story. After all, the original autograph was laden with distracting details and was woodenly literal. My goal was to convey the emotions of the author rather than just his original “meaning.” By spicing up the story somewhat I attempted to bridge the gap between 19th century author and 21st century audience. Besides, if Eugene Peterson can do it with the Apostles than who’s to say I can’t do it with the Spaffords?

Maybe I can release a new exciting brand of hymn histories for worship leaders. I call it The Message: Hymn Stories in Contemporary Language, on sale wherever mass marketed pop-Christian books are available.

My co-workers at Third Federal Bank are perfectly willing to imprecate faithless friends, annoying customers, and obstinate family members. Blasphemy, scatology, and vulgarity are the hors d’oeuvres with a liberal sprinkling of f-bombs as garnish. But the main course is Ignorance. (more…)

Listen to a Barack Obama stump speech in Philadelphia or a Hillary Clinton townhall meeting in North Carolina and you will hear both candidates decry the growth in income equality over the past two decades. They would have you believe that the rich have become richer while the lower and middle classes have seen their incomes stagnate. It is of course implied that the wealthy are enriching themselves at the expense of the peons beneath them. So Robin Obama and Maid Clinton will rob from the evil rich to give to the deserving poor. (more…)

Last night me and my roommates watched There Will Be Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson’s Academy Award winning amorality play. I was stunned at the depth, power, and intensity of the story. There were several scenes that left me physically shaking and emotionally shredded. (more…)

The Grand Old Party should lose this year. The first Tuesday in November should be the greatest Republican rout in recent history. America is in a recession, in the middle of an unpopular war, and the incumbent Republican President, who has the highest disapproval ratings on record, is at the end of his second term.

Yet national polling shows Republican John McCain in a dead heat, and at times with a slight lead, over either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. Incroiable! (more…)

Tonight Hillary finally realized that my vote was vital if she wanted to win, so she stopped at the Mayfair Diner a block and a half from my apartment. (more…)

I would rather watch the news on CNN than on FOX.

No, I am not a liberal. I’m a dyed in the wool member of the Religious Right (the metaphor thus being particularly appropriate). (more…)

In 2007 Alexandra Pelosi, daughter of Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, released a documentary entitled Friends of God. She, and a television crew from HBO, toured American evangelical hotspots, mostly in the South and Inter-Mountain West including Joel Osteen’s Lakewood Church in Texas, Ted Haggard’s New Life Church in Colorado Springs, and Lynchburg, Virginia, home to Jerry Falwell and Liberty University.

Pelosi presents an Evangelicalism that is pervasive, politically engaged, passionately partisan, single (or simple) minded, and kinda tacky. (more…)

Last week the Board of Westminster Theological Seminary voted 18-9 for the suspension of Dr. Peter Enns from the faculty effective at the end of the schoolyear. The Board passed the issue to the Institutional Personnel Committee (IPC) reccommending that Dr. Enns’ tenured position be terminated. (more…)