How to Get Government to Subsidize One's Favorite Charity (Updated the links.)

April 15 is next week.  Ugh.  However, a couple I know made a gift last year to their church, and the government will reimburse them this year a substantial portion of the value of their gift.  They could have paid the gift in cash and received part of that reimbursement.  Instead of paying cash to their charity, however, they made a donation of marketable securities (common stock in this case), securities that had appreciated in value between the time they purchased those securities and the time of their donation.  This increased the government's reimbursement.  Finally, the couple did not have to deal with a single government bureaucrat, but with people who liked them and wanted to serve them, the church treasurer, their accountant who prepared their tax return, and their stock broker.

The reimbursement from the government came in the form of the "tax benefits" that they will use this year with respect to the gift they made last year.  That is to say, they will pay less in income taxes next week than they would have paid had they not given the stock to their church.  The benefits arose from the application of two provisions of the Internal Revenue Code.

The first provision applies so that a gift of appreciated stock will avoid the income tax that the couple would have paid on the capital gain, had they sold the stock first and then donated the net cash proceeds of the sale.  The fair market value of the stock at the time of the gift to the church is the value of the gift that they may claim as a charitable deduction on their income tax return.  They are not required to offset that value by the tax they would have had to pay on the capital gain.

The second provision applies so that  the couple may deduct the value of their gift in computing their taxable income.

What is the extent of the government's reimbursement?  I do not have the couple's tax return to review, so I cannot tell you precisely.  But I can refer you to this discussion on the Fidelity Charitable website, to this discussion at that site and, finally, to this page where Fidelity Charitable will crunch the numbers for you.  (Incidentally, using Fidelity Charitable's  services for making charitable gifts greatly simplifies the process of obtaining the government's reimbursement.)

Turn Me Loose!

A very elderly man from our church, a man in his nineties, died earlier this week in the hospital after at least three weeks in intensive care. Not only was he sick, he had dementia. One week before he died, he went into cardiac arrest. The cart-team descended and brought him back, so he could live another week in a semi-comatose state, and finally die this week of pneumonia, the old person's friend. One more week of suffering in the cardiac-intensive care unit of a for-profit hospital. He had no insurance but Medicare.  That must have been enough.

Note to kin: I do have a place to go when I die - the body to a med school and the spirit for awhile asleep in the Lord (such sweet sleep) until he comes back, and I have a new body.  If I should suffer from dementia, the only treatment I want is from the poppy.  No feeding-tubes, no antibiotics, a little comfort care, and an audio book or Bach playing nearby.  Plus now and then a visit from my peeps.

We've Seen that Kind of Knife Before

Karambit.  From the film just out, "The Raid (2)"

Well, At Least This Lawyer Didn't Lie in Her Deposition.

An Atlanta in-house lawyer was jailed for 24 hours by a Georgia judge for contempt after she complained to him in an email about being selected for jury service in a personal injury case.
 
Wilma Elizabeth Beaty was also fined $500 by DeKalb State Court Judge Dax Lopez after she sent him the email. 

In the email, she said she would "blame" the plaintiff in the civil case for the work she would have to do on nights and weekends during the trial to keep up with her in-house job, says the Daily Report (sub. req.) in a lengthy article.

-from the ABA Journal's News Website, April 7, 2014

This is so outrageous that there must be something we don't know about these circumstances.  If true, however, I would say that if she is able to avoid disbarment, she gets off lightly.

Luther on What Makes a Good Preacher versus What the World Demands of a Good Preacher

First, a good preacher should be able to teach well, correctly, and in an orderly fashion.  Second, he should have a good head on his shoulders.  Third, he should be eloquent.  Fourth, he should have a good voice.  Fifth, he should have a good memory.  Sixth, he should know when to stop.  Seventh, he should be constant and diligent about his affairs.  Eight, he should invest body and life, possessions and honor in it.  Ninth, he should be willing to let everyone vex and hack away at him.  .  .  .

The world demands six qualities of a preacher:  1. that he have a good speaking voice; 2 that he be learned;  3.  that he be eloquent;  4. that he have a handsome exterior  .  .  . ;  5. that he take no money, but give money to preach;  6. that he say what they like to hear.

-as quoted in Kittleson, Luther the Reformer: The Story of the Man and his Career (Fortress Press Edition 2003), pp. 249-250.

The Work of the Law. The Law as a "Spiegel"

Luther's picture of the human condition in the presence of God was bleak indeed.  But it was here [as a new professor of theology at Wittenberg] that he also began to develop a different understanding of humility from that which had filled his lectures on the Psalms.  He still saw this state of being utterly drained of self-worth as being necessary for salvation, but now he insisted that it was God himself who graciously taught and provided humility.  "The whole task of the apostle and his Lord is to humble the proud and bring them to a realization of this condition, to teach them that they need grace, to destroy their own righteousness, so that in humility they will see Christ and confess that they are sinners, and thus receive grace and be saved." [Footnote omitted]

Here was what Luther called the "proper" work of the law, which he often described as a hammer or an anvil that smashed down upon human pride and made room for God's love.  Luther loved plays on words and here chose to refer to the law by using the German word Spiegel.  God's law was a Spiegel (which could also mean "mirror") that reveals his human beings what they truly were – in need of grace.  Thus, when God was most terrifying and most righteous, he was in fact most gracious.  God's mercy was a loving hand with an iron fist.

-from Kittleson, Luther the Reformer: The Story of the Man and His Career, (Fortress Press edition, pp. 93 - 94).

"Though I desire to extend religious freedom, yet I want some recompense for my troubles."

So wrote William Penn, according to John Steele Gordon in a speech Gordon delivered in San Diego, California, November 15, 2013, at a Hillsdale College Free Market Forum.  An adaptation of that speech, entitled "Entrepreneurship in American History," is reproduced in the February 2014 edition of Imprimis, to which you can find your way through this link.

Gordon states that it "has not been nearly well enough noted that the American colonies, while many ended up in royal hands, were not founded by the English state.  Several, such as Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, and Virginia, were founded by profit-seeking corporations.  Others, such as Pennsylvania and Maryland, were founded by proprietors.  To be sure, many of these enterprises had non-entrepreneurial motives, such as providing a refuge for religious dissenters," but the founders sought "some recompense" for their "troubles."

Gordon writes further:

New York, of course, was founded by the Dutch, not the English, and profit was the sole reason for settling on Manhattan.  Indeed, so bent on moneymaking were the Dutch that they did not get around to building a church for 17 years, worshiping instead in the fort.  When they did finally build a church, they named it for St. Nicholas, and Santa Claus has been the patron saint of New York ever since.

God's common grace abounds through entrepreneurs, and he blesses a country that gives them the liberty to exercise their gifts.

Repent vs. Do Penance

Luther pointed out [in the  controversy over indulgences] that by working with Erasmus's edition of the Greek New Testament, he had discovered that Staupitz [the vicar general of the Augustinians for Germany and Luther's friend] had been right [in his emphasis of "the inclination of the heart rather than particular sins or particular good works as a determinant of the status of the soul"]and that common confessional practices had no basis in the Scriptures.  The Latin translation of Jesus' command at Matthew 4:17 read, "Do penance, for the kingdom of God is at hand."  But the Greek said, "Be penitent.  .  .  '"  Therefore God demanded not outward deeds but a changed heart and mind.  "Doing" had literally nothing to do with salvation, particularly with regard to indulgences.  "To repent" and "to do penance" were two different things.

-from Kittelson, Luther the Reformer: the Story of the Man and His Career. (Fortress Press edition 2003) at p. 113.

The Douay-Rhems 1899 American Edition continued to translate, "Do penance, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand."

The New Revised Standard Version, Anglicised Catholic Edition (NRSVACE), however, translates, "Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand."

Kittleson's 1986 biography is a worthy successor to Bainton's, Here I Stand, a Life of Martin Luther, a 1950 work, but I would never, ever forgo the opportunity to read Bainton.

Ultralight Radios

Glenn Reynolds links to a story in the New Yorker magazine entitled The iPod of Prison.  The story is about a Sony portable radio in use in the prison systems, the SRF-39FP, and the usages and customs that have grown up around it. 

I have always had an eye on "ultralight" radios, and the New Yorker article refreshed that interest.  The article refers to what appears to be the main website that serves this topic, DXer.CA, "Canada's Original Radio Site", and this page on ultralight radios on that site.

The article also quotes Gary Debok, an authority on ultralight radio DX and, it so happens, a ham radio operator.  I found my way to two posts that Gary made to the eHam website.  I visited that site a lot when the K4JSU radio shack was up and running.

"Politics and the English Language"

Orwell's famous essay, which Mary introduced to me years ago, is simply a gem.  I return to it from time to time.  Orwell's particular recommendations about good writing are helpful and easy to remember.  His larger point, however, that the decline of written English connects to the rise of totalitarianism, continues to be important nearly 70 years after he made it.

As to Grace, it is all Common

According to Carl Bangs, Arminius held that

free will in man as sinner is "addicted to evil, and "it will not be bent to good except by grace."  Grace is as a form which brings into actuality the potentiality of the free will to goodness.  In a sinful man the free will is sufficient for only evil choices.  Thus Arminius says that "grace is present with all men [as a result of the work of Christ], by which their free will may be actually bent to good; but there is in all men such a will as is flexible to either side upon accession of grace."

That grace of which Arminius speaks is common grace, common to all, not "peculiar grace" or "special grace," as it might be applied to and limited to those whom God has predestined to receive it.  Arminius rejects a distinction between common and peculiar grace.  There is only common grace.  All men have the free will to accept Christ or not, free will in that respect only.

Predestination, as Arminius sees it, is simply this: God predestines those who have faith in Jesus Christ, those who have made the choice to believe, to constitute his elect.  This common grace of Arminius, then, sometimes referred to as "prevenient grace" (Bangs does not use that term), is available to everyone.  However, not everyone will exercise the will, now liberated by grace, to choose the good, that is to have faith in Christ.  Some will decide not to believe.  God has predestined those who choose not to have faith not to be among his elect.  We have then, conditional election.  Being part of the elect is conditioned on one deciding to believe.

Calvinists (Bangs would say "later" Calvinists), on the other hand, will not admit of any flexibility in the will bent to evil.  We are totally depraved.  (The "T" in Tulip.)  God's election, then, is not and cannot be conditioned on one's will, made free to choose by grace, making the choice of faith.  God's election is unconditional.  (The "U" in Tulip.)  Christ did not die to put everyone in a position to make a faith choice - or not.  Christ's atonement was limited to the unconditionally elect.  (The "L" in Tulip.)  Even to think about choosing requires God's grace, much less actually to make the choice to believe.  Furthermore, God's grace is irresistible as far as particular, chosen people are concerned.  (The "I" in Tulip.) Once grace is set upon us, like some hound of heaven it will get us, and we are as unable to resist it as we were to obtain it before God set loose his hound.  We cannot be just a little bit graced, graced just enough to make a choice.  It is all or it is nothing.  Because our will is not involved in our election, it cannot, after our being saved, be bent away from Christ.  As God's chosen we shall persevere in our blessed position.  (The "P" in Tulip.)

Hmmm.

Hard Physical Effort a Condition of Normalcy and a Demand of Design

Over and above any consideration of performance for sports, exercise is the stimulus that returns our bodies to the conditions for which they were designed.  Humans are not physically normal in the absence of hard physical effort.

-Mark Rippetoe in Starting Strength - Basic Barbell Training (3rd Ed. 2013),  p. 1.

Arminius and Good Works

Carl Bangs writes that in 1593, the enemies of Arminius accused him before the Consistory of Amsterdam  (something like our session) of three errors.  One of the alleged errors concerned Arminius' view of “works.”  He was accused of teaching that

too much could not be ascribed to good works, nor could they be sufficiently commended, provided no merit were attributed to them. 

At a hearing on the accusations, Arminius simply stood by that teaching.  The consistory cleared him of all three charges.  Bangs, Arminius - a Study in the Dutch Reformation, p. 143.

Johannes Cuchlinus: a Tough Man, during Tough Times, with a Tough Faith

Carl Bangs writes that Arminius

was ordained on Saturday evening August 27, 1588, in the Old Church, which was the center of church life in Amsterdam.  .  .  .  The long process of preparation was now at an end, and he was about to enter into the full exercise of his pastoral ministry in Amsterdam, a ministry that would run for fifteen years.

Arminius joined a staff of five other ministers, and Bangs gives us a profile of each of them.  One of them was Johannes Cuchlinus. 

He was the first pastor from the time of the Alteration [of Amsterdam, the Alterie, when in 1578 Reformed Services first began in that city], and he was the only German minister.  Three of his wives had died, and in 1587, he married an Amsterdam widow.  In another nine years he would marry his fifth and last wife, the sister of Arminius’ father, thus becoming Arminius uncle by marriage.  He was a Calvinist, but not of the new sort that would make so much trouble in later decades.  The Belgic Confession and Heidelberg Catechism defined his faith, and he was not one to speculate on the order of decrees.  He was only forty-two years old, but in that time forty-two was a ripe old age, and Cuchlinus functioned as the senior minister of Amsterdam.

"Judaizers:" Where did that term come from?

The problem was that "the Galatian converts," Stott writes, "who had received [from the Apostle Paul] this gospel of grace , were now turning away to another gospel, a gospel of works.  The false teachers were evidently 'Judaizers', whose 'gospel' is summarized in Acts 15:1: 'Unless you are circumcised according to the custom of Moses, you cannot be saved.' "  Stott, The Message of Galatians (IVP 1968) at p. 22.

I wanted to track down the verb "Judaize" and focus on it as part of the lesson.  So I looked in my Strong's to see where Judaize appears in the KJV.  Nowhere.  So then, to my NIV concordance.  Not there either.  Then on to Biblegatway.com where I did a search for that word through the various English translations available at that helpful site.  I could not turn up a scripture reference where the word is used.  The word is not new to me.  I have known and understood that word for over 50 years, it is commonly used to describe the source of the problem that the reader encounters in Galatians and elsewhere in the NT, but  the word itself did not seem to be in the Bible.  Where did it come from.

I have The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (1971).  The editors approach to a given word is to identify the earliest written English source of its use, to provide a context-giving sentence fragment from that source that includes the word, then to follow with the next oldest source and fragment, and to the next, and so on.  (For a great read on the development of the OED see Winchester's  The Professor and the Madman.) 

Here is the OED's definition of Judaize and the earliest source and fragment for that definition:

To play the Jew; to follow Jewish customs or religious rites; to follow Jewish practice.  1582 N.T. (Rhem.) Gal. ii: 14. How doest thou compel the Gentiles to Iudaize?

A Judaizer, then, is someone who would force a Gentile to follow Jewish practice.  In the context of Galatians, the Judaizers were Jewish Christians who would compel Gentile Christians to follow Jewish customs.  Well, I knew that.  But what of that source, "Rhem."?

I recognized that word Rhem.  It refers to the Rheims-Douay Bible (1582-1610).  We Protestants are all about our English language Bibles, and fail to acknowledge that making the Bible accessible in English was part of the Counter-Reformation as well.  Bruce Metzger, in his The Bible in Translation: Ancient and English Versions, writes that English Catholics, fleeing persecution by Queen Elizabeth, found refuge in Flanders.  In 1568, they established a seminary in Douay, where scholars "undertook, for the first time in the history of the Roman Church, to replace the available Anglican and Genevan Bibles - unacceptable from their point of view - with an English version of their own.  This project . . . was completed at Rheims in France to which city the college had transferred itself in 1578  .  .  .  "  (Metzger at pp. 67-68) Rhem., then, refers to the Rheims-Douay NT of 1592.

Metzger writes that the translation was made "not from the original languages but from the Latin Vulgate [and] was painstaking and reached a high standard of consistency, but was often too literal to be used in public worship.  There was a strong tendency to retain technical words  .  .   ."  Ah, like Judaize.

I think it ironic that Stott, an Anglican priest, adopts "Judaizers" as a term of art for the people troubling the Galatian Christians.  That word comes from the first Roman Catholic, English version of the Bible.  It was translated by scholars fleeing persecution because they were Roman Catholic, persecution by Queen Elizabeth, the head of the Anglican Church.   How many Protestants, who might look at Galatians narrowly as a sort of rebuke of the Roman Church, use that word, ignorant of its source?

Studying Galatians

In the adult Sunday School class that I teach, we have been using as our texts the small books written by N.T. Wright in the Paul for Everyone series, following the lead of Macon and Walter when they taught their Sunday School class at West Lake.  They started with Wright's study on Romans, and we followed, then to the Gospel of John, and now to Galatians.  With each of these studies, I used other commentaries and texts. I have been able  to acquire most of these other books in used editions at a reasonable cost through either  half.com and abebooks.com.  I buy the N.T. Wright texts new from Amazon, however.  At the end of a study, most of the students will give the Wright texts back to me, and I put them on half.com and recover about 40% of their cost.

To supplement the Galatians study, I am using Stott's The Message of Galatians in The Bible Speaks Today series published by Intervarsity Press.  I would use a Stott study as the main text, in preference to Wright's, in every case, but the IVP editions are more expensive than the Wright texts, and many of the people in the class pay for their class text.  Furthermore, Stott doesn't necessarily have a study for each book in the NT.

I am also using Luther's Commentary of the Epistle to the Galatians, which, according to Stott who quotes often from this commentary, is based on lectures delivered by Luther in 1531.  Amazon publishes a Kindle edition of this commentary and charges nothing for it.  I also have John Brown's An Exposition of Galatians, which Stott also cites from time to time.  John Brown was a Scottish minister, born in 1784, who "entered the University of Edinburgh at the age of 13, and in three session in the Arts faculty, gained such a command of Latin as to read it in like his mother tongue," according to the introduction in the reprint edition of this commentary published by Sovereign Grace Publishers in 1970.

Greenberry Jefferson Stokes

Later in life.

Go here for more details.

Whom does he resemble? Put your thumb under his nose and note the upper part of the face:  the large nose, deep set eyes, bushy brows, large head.

Bananas under Grave Threat

In Central America:

The government in Costa Rica, one of the biggest suppliers of the fruit, has already declared a “national emergency” over the state of its crop.

The country’s half-a-billion-dollar banana export industry has been hit by two separate plagues of mealybugs and scale insects, with up to 20 per cent of its produce written off.

Magda Gonzalez, the director of the agriculture ministry’s State Phytosanitary Services (SFE), told The Tico Times last week that climate change had boosted insect populations in recent years, making plagues increasingly likely across the world.

In Asia, Africa, Jordan, and Australia:

Meanwhile, a Scientific American report warned of a variant of banana-eating fungus which is currently threatening key plantations around the world.

Scientists believed the disease, caused by the fungus Fusarium oxysporum f. sp.cubense (Foc), was limited to parts of Asia and Australia. Yet it has now been found in Jordan and Mozambique, and in a new strain to which the vast majority of bananas are susceptible.

“It’s a gigantic problem,” said Rony Swennen, a breeder at the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

-from Britain's The Independent, noted on the current Drudge Report, and brought to my attention by Carol.

Here's the link to the Scientific American report.

Meanwhile, we have two stalks currently on our trees, but our little grove is in grave need of some TLC.  I'll get on it.

The Bitter and the Sweet of Learning

1633 portrait of Johannes Wtenbogaert by Rembrandt.

Arminius as a youth may have attended St. Jerome School [Sint Hieronymusschool] in Utrecht.  Carl Bangs connects him to that school because of his friendship with Johaness Uitenbogaert [Wtenbogaert], “who was to become a lifelong, intimate friend of Arminius.”  Bangs is certain Uitenbogaert attended that school.  Bangs writes:

Of his teacher [Cornelius] Lauerman, Uitenbogaert later said, “I still remember that the teacher often said to me and my fellow students that the root of study is very bitter to bite into but that the fruit is very sweet.”

-from Carl Bangs, Arminius– A Study in the Dutch Reformation, Second Edition (Frances Asbury Press 1985) p. 35

Timer to Turn on and Off an Outside Faucet

We have some plants outside that can't be reached by our current sprinkler system, and we hand- water them with the hose.  What do you do when you go out of town for a couple of days?  You first go to Home Depot and buy gadgets.  This time its a Melnor "Automatic [Digital] 1 Outlet Water Timer" (SKU 558-026) ($30) and an inexpensive Oscillating Sprinkler (SKU 619-344) ($7).  (I already have the hose.)

The timer unit is encased in a sturdy little plastic box, runs off two AA batteries (not supplied) and has an input port that fastens to the faucet and an output port to which the hose fastens.  Before installing the unit, however, one programs it - which is a snap, with some simple written instructions.  The unit has an LED screen to assist in the programing that is easy to read.  

When I first installed the unit, which I had programmed to be "off" but to turn on 15 minutes later for 30 minutes, the water poured through it when I turned on the faucet.  The instructions had a "trouble-shooting" chart, and the first thing on it was that problem.  The valves, the chart advised, may have come "open" during shipping.  Take out the battery holder, wait 30 seconds, and re-install.  I did that and then needed to slightly touch up the programming.  Back on the faucet it went, and no water ran through.  I installed the hose, fastened the sprinkler to the other end, and waited the 15 minutes.  Bingo.  Problem solved.

The timer is an elegant little work of applied technology.  The timer I bought was Melnor's basic digital timer product.  It makes more involved ones in its "Aqua-Timer" line.

Eight million dollar man

Associated Press/Photo by Brian Kersey

Zac Vawter

Zac Vawter’s right leg is a mechanistic marvel: Made of aluminum, it has a computer, two motors, and 13 sensors to measure movement or pressure, and weighs less than his left leg. For Vawter, who lost the bottom half of his right leg in 2009 after a motorcycle accident, walking comes as easy as thinking.

 

Too bad he’s not allowed to take the leg home just yet. The bionic leg is part of a project at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, funded by about $8 million from the Defense Department. Electrodes fitted to Vawter’s right thigh sense muscle movements associated with walking or bending an ankle, and read his intention to bend an ankle, walk, or climb stairs.

The smart leg, according to a September report in the New England Journal of Medicine, cuts falls and unnatural movements nearly in half, compared to regular prosthetics.

-from World Magazine's issue of 11-2-2013.

Here's the "preview" for the NEJM article to which World Mag refers.

Jay Leno's Interview of George and Laura Bush: Terrific and a Must-See

Ann Alhouse links to it here.

The Film "Pacific Rim" and Climate Change

I finally saw this movie, via Amazon, when the price finally dropped into the realm of reasonableness.  (Do people really pay $12.99 and above to watch a non-Prime Amazon movie?)

Inside all the fantastic photography and sympathetic characters and competent acting, the producers tuck a  climate change theme.  The aliens who climb out of the Pacific Rim and wreck havoc on the West Coast, are aliens who, millennia before, introduced the dinosaurs to our planet as a sort of guinea pig species.  Those creatures died out, however, because the atmosphere was not toxic enough.  So the aliens waited until humans polluted it to the extent that Earth is ready for them.  So here they come.

Please.

On the other hand, humans and their technology defeat the aliens in Act 3, using a nuclear device.

So what's the moral here?  Are humans and their polluting technology bad or are they good? Or do we have a mixed bag?  Or are the creators of the movie just sloppy or cynical?  I vote for sloppy.

Maybe we will find out in the inevitable sequel.  I sure hope del Toro is doing it.

The Bangs, Father and Son, the Dutch Reformation, the Pilgrims, and Jacobus Arminius.

The November - December edition of The University of Chicago Magazine, presents a profile of Jeremy Bangs, X'67, entitled "Going Dutch."  It not only introduces me to that gifted scholar,  but also to Leiden in the Netherlands, the Reformation as it took place in that country, and reintroduces me to the Pilgrims, "yes, those Pilgrims" as Lydialyle Gibson, the article's author, writes.  (What a beautiful name, Lydialyle.)

The article also introduces me to Jeremy's dad, Carl Bangs, PhD'58,

a church historian and theology professor, and an expert of the 16th-century Dutch theologian Jacobus Arminius.  Carl Bang's biography, Arminius: A Study in the Dutch Reformation (Abingdon Press), is a definitive text. 
 
Arminius!  But he was so wrong!  Isn't that just like a UChi scholar, picking such a subject to write about?

But over to Amazon, to look at that book.  Here's a great review:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Unique, Enlightening, and Rewarding Study (Especially for a Calvinist)., June 18, 2006

By 

Nelson Banuchi "atdCross" (Concord, NC USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Arminius: A study in the Dutch Reformation (Paperback)

Mr. Bangs presents a very systematic and, sometimes, personally affective account of James Arminius. Not only does he present Arminius objectively as a pastor, theologian,and professor but also a few yet essential insights of a man who has had his share of sorrow.

I was warned many years ago not to read this book. I was told by Calvinist-leaning individuals that it would upset my faith and cause me to fall away. I have read this book 5 times and filled it with highlighting and notations. Apparently, the one who warned me never read the book. And I think that is a big problem with those who adhere to Calvinism when discussing issues regarding election and predestination. I would encourage every Calvinists to read this book not for the purpose of changing their view but to understand what Arminius really taught as, it seems, many books by Calvinist theologians misrepresent terribly the teachings Arminius espoused. To call him a heretic is to be wholy misinformed or uninformed about the man Arminius and his teachings.

Reading "Arminius" has helped me to understand the significance of Arminianism, it's value and importance in Christian theology, the essential issues that divide two camps of believers (one, Calvinism, and the other, Arminianism), and it has provided me with an alternative (and better, in my estimation) understanding of certain "problem" texts in the Bible.

Most important of all, to me, it has brought me closer to a man after my own heart; a man who knows the pain of lose, still trusts in God, and seeks to present God in a way that makes Him available for all sinners to embrace in repentance and faith.

I highly recommend reading this book. If you do not, you will miss a very important phase in Christian history. It has gotten to a point that when I'm going to my study to read this book and his "Works", I tell my wife I'm going to spend some time with my best friend.

Buy it, read it, you won't regret it.

Also, read "The Works of James Arminius", London Edition, 3 vols. So far, I've read all volumes three times. It is a little difficult to read at first, but once you get use to how it is written, you'll find it very rewarding.

Now, over to half.com, to find a $6.00 "Acceptable" copy on sale (although,you never know just what you are going to get with "Acceptable" - other than a real bargain).  Can't wait to read it.

The reviewer quoted above, Mr. Banuchi, writes that he "read 'The Works of James [Jacobus] Arminius', London Edition, 3 vols.  .  .  . three times"!  There are editions of those works at Amazon in Kindle Editions.  Here is volume 1 of the edition published by the Christian Classics Ethereal Library ("CCEL").  CCEL's website is worth exploring.

Luther, the Wedding at Cana, the Three Estates, the Three Wonders, and Marriage

On January 10th, 1529, the lesson was the wedding at Cana of Galilee.  This passage, said Luther, is written in honor of marriage.  There are three estates: marriage, virginity, and widowhood.  They are all good.  None is to be despised.  The virgin is not to be esteemed above the widow, nor the widow above the wife, any more than the tailor is to be esteemed above the butcher.  There is no estate to which the Devil is so opposed as to marriage.  The clergy have not wanted to be bothered with work and worry.  They have been afraid of a nagging wife, disobedient children, difficult relatives, or the dying of a pig or a cow.  They want to lie abed until the sun shines through the window.  Our ancestors knew this and would say, "Dear child, be a priest or nun and have a good time."  I have heard married people say to monks, "You have it easy, but when we get up we do not know where to find our bread."  Marriage is a heavy cross because so many couples quarrel.  It is the grace of God when they agree.  The Holy Spirit declares there are three wonders: when brothers agree, when neighbors love each other, and when a man and wife are at one.  When I see a pair like that, I am as glad as if I were in a garden of roses.  It is rare.

-from Bainton's Here I Stand: a Life of Martin Luther, (Abingdon Press; 1950) p. 352.

Luther and Congregational Singing

[Martin Luther's] last and greatest reform of all was in congregational song.  In the Middle Ages the liturgy was almost entirely restricted to the celebrant and the choir.  The congregation joined in a few responses in the vernacular.  Luther so developed this element that he may be considered the father of congregational song.  This was the point at which his doctrine of the priesthood of all believers received its most concrete realization.  This was the point and the only point at which Lutheranism was thoroughly democratic.  All the people sang.  Portions of the liturgy were converted into hymns: the Creed and the Sanctus.  The congregation sang not "I believe," but, "We believe in one God."  The congregation sang how the prophet Isaiah saw the Lord high and lifted up and heard the seraphim intone Holy, Holy, Holy.

-from Bainton's Here I Stand: a Life of Martin Luther, (Abingdon Press; 1950) p. 344.

Goodby Gatsby, Hello Common Core

For high school [Miami-Dade County Public School] English teachers like [Chris] Kirchner, Common Core is prompting consequential and contentious changes in what students read and how the books are taught: The new standards call for a focus on depth over breadth, more challenging readings, and increased emphasis on nonfiction.

Students will be expected to make written arguments using specific evidence from reading assignments, often pulling together examples from multiple texts. No longer should teachers ask students to write solely based on their personal experience or opinion — arguing for or against school uniforms, for instance.

“It’s encouraged me to give up some practices I had a great allegiance to,” says Kirchner, “specifically, the teaching of whole novels.” -from this morning's print edition of the Miami Herald. The entire article, written by reporter Sarah Carr, is well worth reading.

I remember how much I enjoyed it when my high school English teacher, Ms. Campion, would throw out big, open-ended questions about Gatsby and the class would discuss and argue their answers.  It was so much fun, and it encouraged wide reading.

Read more here: http://www.momsmiami.com/2013/10/18/3696938/good-bye-gatsby-hello-common-core.html##storylink=cpy

Luther, through Bainton, on Vocation

In one respect Luther was more conservative than Catholicism because he abolished monasticism and thus eliminated a selected area for the practice of the higher righteousness.  In consequence the gospel could be exemplified only in the midst of secular callings, except that Luther refused to call them secular.  As he had extended the priesthood of all believers, so likewise he extended the concept of divine calling, vocation, to all worthy occupations

Our expression "vocational guidance" comes directly from Luther. God has called men to labor because he labors.  He works at common occupations.  God is a tailor who makes for the deer a coat that will last for a thousand years.  He is a shoemaker also who provides boots that the deer will not outlive.  God is the best cook, because the heat of the sun supplies all the heat there is for cooking.  God is a butler who sets forth a feast for the sparrows and spends on them annually more than the total revenue of the king of France.  Christ worked as a carpenter  .   .   .

-from Bainton, Here I Stand: a Life of Martin Luther (Apex Books 1950), pp. 232-233

Of course, I know this doctrine and embrace it.  But I did not get it from the pulpits I sat under, and I have sat under a lot of them. Here's more on this from Bainton:

The Virgin Mary worked, and the most amazing example of her humility is that after she had received the astonishing news that she was to be the mother of the Redeemer, she did not vaunt herself but went back and milked the cows, scoured the kettles, and swept the house like any housemaid. Peter worked as a fisherman and was proud of his skill, though not too proud to take a suggestion from the Master when he told him to cast on the other side.    Luther commented:

"I would have said, 'Now look here, Master.  You are a preacher, and I am not undertaking to tell you how to preach.  And I am a fisherman, and you need not tell me how to fish.'  But Peter was humble, and the Lord therefore made him a fisher of men."

The shepherds worked.  They had a mean job watching their flocks by night, but after seeing the babe they went back.

"Surely that must be wrong. We should correct the passage to read, 'They went and shaved their heads, fasted, told the rosaries, and put on cowls.'  Instead we read, 'The shepherds returned.'  Where to? To their sheep. The sheep would have been in a sorry way if they had not."

Chicken nuggets: Please don't feeed them to my grandchildren.

Through a laboratory testing of chicken nuggets from two unnamed major national fast-food chains in Jackson, University of Mississippi researchers found that they contained just 40 to 50 percent meat, the remaining  50 to 60 percent comprised of bits of chicken-by-products such as fat, skin, connective tissues, blood vessels, nerve tissues, organ parts and ground bone fragments.

More here, including a video interview of the researcher.

But didn't Adam have a point? (Just asking)

But Luther's question was not whether his sins were big or little, but whether they had been confessed.  The great difficulty which he encountered was to be sure that everything had been recalled.  He learned from experience the cleverness of memory in protecting the ego, and he was frightened when after six hours of confessing he could still go out and think of something else which had eluded his most conscientious scrutiny.  Still more disconcerting was the discovery that some of man's misdemeanors are not even recognized, let alone remembered.  Sinners often sin without compunction.  Adam and Eve, after tasting of the fruit of the forbidden tree, when blithely for a walk in the cool of the day; and Jonah, after fleeing from the Lord's commission, slept soundly in the hold of the ship.  Only when each was confronted by an accuser was there any consciousness of guilt.  Frequently, too, when man is reproached he will still justify himself like Adam, who replied, "The woman whom thou gavest to be with me" – as if to say to God, "She tempted me; you gave her to me; you are to blame."
There is, according to Luther, something much more drastically wrong with man than any particular list of offenses which can be enumerated, confessed, and forgiven. The very nature of man is corrupt.  The penitential system fails because it is directed to particular lapses.

-from Bainton's Here I Stand: a Life of Martin Luther, (Abingdon Press 1950, page 55)

"For God's Sake, Would You Stop That Coughing!"

On my 10 minute drive to the Metrorail station in the mornings, I'm usually listening to Classical South Florida, 89.7 FM.  The radio station is owned by the people who purchased WMCU from the rascals on the board of Trinity International University years ago, to the dismay of a large, South Florida evangelical audience that had supported the old station for many years, including myself.  That being said, WKCP Miami has proven itself to be first rate.

As I was listening this morning, John Zech, who is tops as an announcer, presented a recording by Julian Bream, the lutist.   It reminded me of a performance of his during my freshman year at Duke.  He played in Page Auditorium, the main auditorium.

The large crowd consisted not predominantly of Duke undergraduates but people from the much wider Duke and Durham community. It was cold outside, and people came in bundled up.

Bream began to play beautifully, of course, gently and with great care.  A sort of intimacy began to fall over the auditorium.  But then someone coughed in the audience.  As if that person gave others permission, coughing began to punctuate the performance.  It would have been a different  thing if the Philadelphia Symphony had been playing Beethoven, and you weren't sitting right by the hacker, but this was Julian Bream and his lute, all alone up there on the stage.  It was bad.

Finally, Bream had enough.  He stopped playing, looked at the audience, and said "For God's sake, would you stop that coughing!"

Absolute silence.  Bream went back to his lute as if nothing had happened.  Nobody moved.  Nobody coughed. Nobody did anything but listen, and with a bit of apprehension.  It was wonderful!

Every time I have attended a concert since then and heard the first cough, I think of Julian Bream and his lute.   Until just a few years ago, he was still giving concerts and producing recordings.  He certainly taught me something.

The Miami-Dade English Dialect. Sounds like home to me!

"What's noteworthy about Miami English is that we're now in a third, even fourth generation of kids who are using these features of native dialect," said Florida International University sociolinguist Phillip Carter, who studies language in U.S. Latino communities. "So we're not talking — and let me be clear — we're not talking about non-native features. These are native speakers of English who have learned a variety influenced historically by Spanish."

-from Saturday's Miami Herald, an article well worth a read.

Supposuvly, it's not just an accent, it is a true dialect, irregardless of what you might think.

More from the article:

Miami has always been home to Latin American immigrants, but the first sizable wave arrived from Cuba during the 1960s, followed by the Mariel influx of the 1980s and then the balseros of the 1990s. They were joined by political refugees fleeing regimes in Nicaragua and Venezuela and by immigrants from Colombia and Mexico and other countries to the south.

Immigrants overwhelmed the city's population so quickly that before long children growing up in Miami were learning English from people who were not native English speakers themselves. This led to a number of nonnative features like Spanish vowels and "L" sounds being incorporated into the language.

The first sizable wave of Stokes kids arrived in the 70s and early 80s.  

On one of the first telephone calls from Macon after his arrival Freshman year at Davidson, he said, "Dad, I feel like a Cuban!"  I said, something like "you are a Cuban; you just happen to look like everyone else up there."

Home as a Better School for Character than a Monastery

After [Luther's] marriage his tone shifted and his concern was much less to establish the necessity of marriage [in light of the otherwise "uncontrollable" sexual impulse] than to portray the home as a school for character.  In this sense it was for him a substitute for the monastery.  All the vexations of domesticity, the tension of the sexes, bawling babies, and of disobedient children led him to say there is no need to go hunting for crosses.  At the same time he was often lyrical over the consolations of the married state.

-Bainton, The Reformation of the Sixteenth Century, pages 256 - 258.

Let's Not Forget Cranmer's Wife

Henry [VIII] for all his effrontery was not unmoved by the unrest among the populace, and the intransigence among the distinguished.  He resolved to hew all the more closely to the line of schism without heresy, and in the latter part of his reign enacted the Six Articles popularly called the "bloody whip with the six strings" whereby a denial of the real presence was visited with death and clerical marriage was forbidden.  Archbishop Cranmer, who had married the niece of one of the Continental reformers, was compelled during this period to keep his wife at home or when traveling to conceal her in a chest; when it was turned upside down she was somewhat inconvenienced – and ought to be included among the minor martyrs of the Reformation.

-more from Bainton's The Reformation of the Sixteenth Century, Enlarged Edition, p. 198.

Calvinism and the Scots

Scotland was the name in Europe above all others in which Calvinism became most firmly entrenched  .  .  .  [I]n no other land did Calvinism effect so tremendous a change in the national character and the national destiny. 

Calvinism transformed the Scots.  In the Middle Ages they were a notoriously rough and disorderly people who preferred to raid rather than to raise cattle .  .  .    The Reformation changed all that.  The Scots were to become a different people and the alteration was effected by the new kirk armed with the Book of Discipline.

-The Reformation of the Sixteenth Century, Bainton, Roland H. (Englarged Edition 1985), pages 178 and 179.  (Google has the book here, but less pages 183-248.)

I would venture the speculation that Reformed Christianity in China has been working a similar transformation since the 19th Century.  Would that God again open the Middle East to the Gospel.

e-Builder and Estate Planning

The Miami Herald's Business Monday of yesterday features e-Builder, based in Plantation [Broward County, just north of Miami-Dade], a firm that

has developed cloud-based software for construction program management that makes it simpler for builders and developers to efficiently manage the enormous complexity of major construction projects, and helps reduce costs.

The company’s Web-based system allows its clients — mostly builders and developers of multiple projects — to see and manage every detail of a project. It also permits other players, such as subcontractors and engineers, to view their particular section of a project and immediately communicate with each other via desktop computers, tablets or smartphones.

Its a great story in so many ways.  Two brothers, Jon and Ron Antevy, from "a family of construction contractors", working together (such a potent sort of partnership) to create a business that serves builders of complex construction projects as far away as California.  Their business bio shows fine educations,  hard work, creative minds.  They wed all that with enterprise software, which, to me, is ideation applied to the marketplace, one reality linked to another in such a productive way.  Plato and Aristotle, together at last.

The software is collaborative, involving people at all levels of the management of a complex construction project.

It fascinates me because where the Antevy brothers live is, on a much larger scale, where I live as an estate planning lawyer, dealing with ideas of what the future should look like, preparing a grand document that expresses that idea and marshaling a client's assets so that, when the contingency, no, the certainty, arises, those assets track the idea efficiently and effectively.  Where the horizon of e-Builder is relatively near and relatively certain, I have to deal with a horizon that is certainly there, death, but just when it will arise is usually of great uncertainty.  Meanwhile, however, we have developed with our client a plan for what should happen when the certainty arises.  And we have assets in the here-and-now that must be linked the plan, and there's the rub: making that link and then, once we make those links, tending those idea-asset links into that future, as circumstances will always change over the balance of the client's life.

I collaborate as well, with the client of course, and sometimes with members of his family, with business partners of that client sometimes, with bankers, accountants, financial advisers, insurance agents, people who also serve the client and ought to be involved with the estate plan build.

I have often thought of using enterprise software on the micro-scale of estate planning.  There are many, many variables in such planning, not only in terms of the potential collaborators, but crucially at the asset level.  It is too expensive for lawyers to do the work at that level. Staff can do that work, however, as long as they are well trained and well-directed.  The well-direction, it seems to me, can largely come from the right enterprise software, it seems to me.  What lives in my head, after 40+ years as a lawyer, ought to be transferable in significant part.  Just as the education and experience of the Antevy brothers, the owners of e-Builder, were transferred to their software, why not something like that being transferred to the loss-leader of all loss-leaders in the trusts and estates world, estate planning.  There is huge market for estate planning, that is, there is a huge need for estate planning, if we could only get the price right.

Little Boy Humor and a Remarkable Mind

Eight-year old grandson is visiting us with his family: a mom, a dad, and little(r) sister.

Last night, at the supper table no less, but at least after we finished eating and were just talking, the children  wandered into the dangerous topic of putting things up one's nose.  It was all just cracking the kids up. 

Finally mother had to warn the small people that if they put something up their nose and it wouldn't come out, then we would have to go to the emergency room, where they would put instruments up one's nostrils to extract the object.

More laughter!

"And what would instrument that be?!!," Grandson chortled, "A viola or a violin??!!"

The American Middle Class: Seeking Like Gentiles

When we turned the American dream into a dream about materialism, we disheartened our young, who now are forced to achieve what we've defined as success in a straitened economy.

-Peggy Noonan in "How Obama Wooed the Middle Class" in today's WSJ.

²⁴ “No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will be loyal to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon.
 
²⁵ “Therefore I say to you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink; nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing? ²⁶ Look at the birds of the air, for they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? ²⁷ Which of you by worrying can add one cubit to his stature?

²⁸ “So why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin; ²⁹ and yet I say to you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. ³⁰ Now if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is, and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will He not much more clothe you, O you of little faith?

³¹ “Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ ³² For after all these things the Gentiles seek. For your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. ³³ But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you. ³⁴ Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about its own things. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.

-Jesus in Matthew 6: 24-34 (NKJV).

Well, I think it's weird.

I'm not sure I could have survived to adulthood had not my dad, granddad, uncles, and various other grown-up men (and a few women) encouraged me to finish my supper with "Eat it!  It will put hair on your chest!"  The subtext was always this:  The amount of hair on one's chest and (by extension) everywhere else on one's body it might grow, has a direct relationship to the amount of manhood.  And being a man, by the way, was always a good thing.

Now this:  All along, Gillette tells us, women have wanted hairless men.  That's what they really want.

Just another reason, I suppose, why people should keep their clothes on until after they marry.

Got Fruit Juice? Got Diabetes?

The fruit juice industry has essentially taken the 'apple-a-day' mentality and used it to sell fruit juices as healthy," said Barry Popkin, a professor in the department of nutrition at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Gillings School of Public Health.

Popkin and other experts would rather see people eating whole fruit. Because most juicing methods remove the produce's fiber, drinking juice omits one of the key benefits of eating fruit, while delivering huge amounts of sugar and calories.

"Every one of the long-term studies of the health effects of fruit juices shows that you increase your risk of diabetes and weight gain" with regular juice consumption, Popkin said.

One 2010 study in the American Journal of Epidemiology followed more than 43,000 adults in Singapore for five years and found that those who consumed two or more servings of fruit juice per week had a 29 percent higher risk of developing diabetes than those who didn't drink juice regularly — not far behind the 42 percent increased risk for weekly soda drinkers.

-from "Fruit Smoothies Dangerous for Your Health?" by Abby Olena of the Chicago Tribune.  (In the Miami Herald home delivery edition today.)

The abstract for the study to which the article refers is here.

About that Old Hard Drive

Today, the WSJ reports that a federal jury found GoldmanSachs trader Fabrici Tourre "liable for misleading investors in a mortgage-linked deal that collapsed during the financial crisis, delivering a historic win for a U.S. regulator [the SEC] eager to prove its mettle inside the courtroom."

According to the WSJ article, smoking guns included emails Tourre sent to his girl friend:

Several emails from Mr. Tourre to his girlfriend, Marine Serres, a Goldman saleswoman at the firm's London office, revealed that Mr. Tourre shared some pessimism about the market.

At his trial, Mr. Tourre translated what he wrote, partly in French, to Ms. Serres: "The entire building is at risk of collapse at any moment. Only potential survivor, the fabulous Fab (as Mitch would kindly call me, even though there is nothing fabulous about me…) standing in the middle of all these complex, highly leveraged, exotic trades he created without necessarily understanding all the implications of these monstrosities."

Mr. Tourre called the note a "silly romantic email to my girlfriend, sent as I was very stressed that day," and said it was referencing a newspaper article he had forwarded to Ms. Serres.

How the government got those emails and others are the subject of this post by Bianca Boscar of the Huffington Post:

Fabrice Tourre (a.k.a. the "Fabulous Fab"), the Goldman Sachs mortgage trader who has become synonymous with Wall Street shenanigans, has now become synonymous with something else: the worst possible way to dispose of an old computer.

Among the more titillating passages in a front-page New York Times expose about Tourre's private correspondence with his lawyers is a disclaimer that the newspaper obtained his e-mails via a computer someone found "discarded in a garbage area in a downtown apartment building."

The computer was then passed on to someone else, who noticed that it continued to pull down fresh e-mails -- messages sent to someone with Tourre's name, a name suddenly in the news. The e-mails, correspondence between the trader and his lawyers, discussed how to handle accusations that he and his employer, Goldman Sachs, had played a key role in engineering a near-financial apocalypse.

Dishonest. Dumb.  Great combination.

The Orange Blossom Special Train Wreck

Florida insurance regulators unveiled for the first time Wednesday the prices proposed by private insurers for individual health plans to be sold on the state’s federally-run exchange, which is scheduled to launch Oct. 1.

But the proposed health plans and prices — and the state’s analysis that federal healthcare reform would cause premiums to rise — were hardly definitive of the actual costs that Floridians are likely to pay for health insurance next year.

That’s because the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has yet to approve the proposed health plans for Florida’s exchange, and those plans, including the prices, may change as they have in other states.

And while Florida insurance regulators said this week that the Affordable Care Act will cause the price of individual health plans sold in 2014 to rise 30 to 40 percent higher than similar plans sold today, and small group plan premiums could rise by 15 to 20 percent, they also conceded that those projections were based on a “hypothetical” health plan that does not exist anywhere in the state.

What’s more, the price projections released by the state do not factor in substantial government subsidies that will be available to many consumers based on household income, which will offset their actual out-of-pocket

-from the front page of today's Miami Herald.

Read carefully the "What's more" paragraph - an editorial gloss by your friendly journalists, who otherwise orchestrate the tone of this article into a "surely it won't be so bad" key.  Those "substantial government subsidies" come from the taxpayers and from those insureds paying the increased premiums, persons to whom those subsidies will not be available "based on household income."

But we shall see, won't we?  Sometime after the mid-term Congressional elections, of course.  One only hopes that the writers of this article (and their editors) will someday bear the full "out-of-pocket" impact of the AFA.