BarlowFarms

Grandpa Barlow

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 23:40:12 EST

Grandpa Barlow

This is a photo of my Grandfather:

I don't know all the details of the photo, but at some point in his youth he was a model for Hart, Schaffner and Max suits and my Dad thinks this is one of those modeling photos. He was a farmer and an agriculture teacher, and when I was a kid he seemed so big and so wide. I remember that he used hand towels as washcloths and he had thick, hard fingernails. He was a cattle farmer, and he loved to sing. He was Methodist, like most of my family for way back, and his cheeks had big apples when he smiled. He was very old when I was a kid; he was born in 1898, after all. I can still remember how he called his cows - soo cow, sook, sook, sook, sook. I'll try post more about him, but I just got this photo from my Dad and wanted to share it.

#4 Totally Sculpts a Frog

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 14:19:49 EST

#4 Totally Sculpts a Frog

I couldn't believe this frog when he brought it into my office. He just turned six.

Research Blues

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 21:53:00 EST

Research Blues

Man, sometimes it takes four days to write two pages, and sometimes it takes 1 day to write 18. It is amazing how that works. When I'm stuck, I just write while I watch television. Then, at least, a few pages get done during commercials instead of my falling asleep. When I'm unstuck, I can rip off page after page. I think if I had a standing desk, I could probably be more consistent, but the real enemy always seems to be consciousness. Sometimes my mind is racing and it is more of your traditional ADD type problem. Sometimes my mind is not racing and I fall asleep mid-sentence. But some days are just golden; I'm focused, writing, and not agonizing. Here are a few tips:

1. Give yourself permission to write a crappy first draft of anything. You can always revise much more easily than you can compose something from scratch.

2. Don't over-eat. Eat comfortable meals, but not too much at any of them. Then you're a little more alert and a little less prone to be sleepy. You can even have wine with your meal if you don't eat too much sugar or too many calories. But that really depends upon the person. I'm sure my naturalistically minded friends would tell me that this is because I'm hungry and more alert like my ancestors who were scanning the water hole for vulnerable prey. But I think it is just because being well fed makes me feel like a turtle falling asleep in the sun. Oh, did I just play into my naturalistically minded friends' hands with that one?

3. If you smoke, smoke a pipe while you work. It should be a stimulant. I don't smoke, but I always come across people like C.S. Lewis and Popeye the Sailor Man swearing by tobacco as an instigator of brilliant periods of concentration.

4. Don't over-research before you start writing. Get a skeleton down on paper first and flesh it out as you research. Lay down layer after layer of paint. Make an assertion and don't back it up. Later you can back it up or change the assertion, but at least you'll have something to go on.

5. Know thyself. Some people get it all outlined out and then execute their writing as if they were building a bridge. Some people jump in the middle and revise continuously until beauty ensues. There is no right way, though I'm sure we'd all like to be the bridge-builders. Don't beat yourself up for your process. Beat yourself up if you don't get anything done.

6. Don't wait for the perfect time to work. If you work 9-5, there will never be a good time to write the great American novel or finish your dissertation. There will only be times that are slightly less awful than others.

7. Don't do things the way I do them. I can't believe I'm even offering advice. It has taken 10 years to finish a Ph.D.

8. Don't judge your personal worth by how much you've gotten written. You're a busy, wonderful person made in God's image. If you get anything written, that's just lagniappe, as long as you pet your dog today.

A Tale of Burning Books

Sat, 20 Feb 2010 18:19:00 EST

A Tale of Burning Books

In the midst of the Westminster Assembly minutes, you'll find that they discuss a book so heinous that it needed to be burned. So in July of 1645 they published an 8 page decree exposing the errors of the book and asking that it be burned.

In fact, it specifies that they'll burn a stack of them in Cheapside, a stack over in the Palace-Yard, a stack in St. Paul's churchyard, etc. just so everyone can be on notice about how bad the book is. The fact that the book is still extant proves that nothing makes someone want to keep a book like making it forbidden! You'd think that maybe the book would be some kind of antinomian tract or Arminian tract, or maybe even some nascent example of atheism or unitarianism. But in actuality, it was a book titled Comfort for Believers About Their Sinnes and Troubles that argued, essentially, that God works everything for good, even the sins of believers.

The book ran afoul of the assembly's sensibilities, however, because it teaches rather explicitly that God is the author of sin. It must be the case, the book argues, because otherwise the existence of sin would be outside of God's providential guidance of all things. In the assembly's critique, they note that this is just the very complaint that Roman Catholics were making against Reformed churches. This is probably why the book needed to be so publicly repudiated - it was playing into the hands of the critics of true Reformed doctrine which does not hold that God is the author of Sin. Like antinomians who were taking salvation by faith and deducing the non-necessity of good works, the author of Comfort for Believers was deducing divine authorship of sin from God's all-encompassing providential care. This tendency towards hypercalvinism would continue to be a thorn in the side of reformed religion in England in the years following the assembly. At its best, Calvinism grounds its precepts about God's sovereignty over all things in biblical teaching and not in rational deductions about causality. Consistency is nice in some areas of life, but with regard to divinity, wisdom combined with humility tells the pious person to accept A, accept B, and yet be very careful in deducing C.

You might think that Calvinists would treat hypercalvinists (or whatever we want to label those who see God as the author of sin) as cute, slightly over-zealous rascals, but in reality, they took it seriously enough to make a public show of distancing themselves from such nonsense.

(Postscript: Obviously, we hate to think of our theological forebears as book-burners, but this is not really unusual in the historical context. The Westminster Assembly never called for a person to burned, as far as I can tell, so we can be thankful of that.)

Politics and 'Religion'

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 01:40:00 EST

Politics and 'Religion'

This sentiment (that 'civil authorities should keep their noses out of religion') seems reasonable enough until one questions just what it possibly could mean that a civil judge should not get involved with 'religion.' If a divorced parent asks the court to keep the other parent from singing "Singing in the Bathtub" to the child while giving a bath, it seems easy enough to say that this is not a religious matter. But suddenly, if the divorced parent asks the court to keep the other parent from saying "in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit" while bathing the child, it becomes a religious matter. I just do not see a coherent way to divide up life in this way. Pluralism is, at best, a practical and necessary charade that can never really be equitable and which always must hide the source of the values that inform its execution of justice. Whose justice? Which rationality? Somebody's justice and somebody's rationality will prevail by might and we'll just have to, for the sake of argument, define those as self-evident. I just wish our prophets wouldn't promote the pretense. We need for them to irritate us even if life under the sun requires a lot of practical compromise.

Time to Share

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 11:10:00 EST

Time to Share

So, dear readers, I'm eager to hear what you think of:

1. Lost in Austen
2. Ballet Shoes

Just curious to hear about your thoughts on a few of the things I've recommended in the last few months.

Pants on the Ground

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 14:03:18 EST

Pants on the Ground

You've all seen this, but....

Conscience

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 22:20:00 EST

Conscience

Ran across this in some stuff I was reading for my dissertation.

"But the world, the love of money makes all to make shipwreck of a good conscience. The Devil offered Christ all the kingdoms of the world, to worship him: but if he offer us but a groat [English coin worth four pence] or six pence, we are ready to worship him. Money makes all, in church and commonwealths to smother the check of conscience, to nip them in the head, and not to regard them: but though we can put conscience to silence in this life, he will open his mouth against us in the life to come. When we die, as a father observeth, we must leave all books behind us. Saint Augustine's works, Saint Basil's works, the book of the Court, yea and the Bible, the book of books: but the book of our consciences we must carry with us: and that when it is opened, shall either accuse us or excuse us at that day: therefore let us look well to this book here, let us examine it, as the Father willeth us, let us confer it with the book of life, let us put out all the blots that be in it, that it may speak for us, not against us, at the dreadful day of judgement." William Jones, A Commentary Upon the Epistles of Saint Paul to Philemon, and to the Hewbrewes... (London, 1635). I modernized the spelling. He's commenting on Hewbrews 13:17-18 there.

On the Banks of Plum Creek

Sun, 24 Jan 2010 01:52:19 EST

On the Banks of Plum Creek

Been reading this book to the boys lately. It's one of the Little House on the Prairie books. Imagine how cool it would be to live like they did.

1. No cell phones; no phone of any kind
2. No health insurance premiums
3. No electric bill
4. No gas bill
5. No water bill
6. No trash bill
7. No sewer bill
8. No rent
9. You would own a house that you built yourself
10. You would have a spare house (the underground one on the creek bank)
11. You would have a team of horses, a beautiful creek in your front yard.
12. All the free fish you can catch
13. A milking cow with fresh butter, cream, etc.
14. A beautiful prairie right outside of your front door.
15. Town 2 miles away
16. A good day's work
17. A nice fire from wood you cut yourself
18. Very few possessions

That life is so much better than the lives most of us lead, that it amazes me that we don't all strive to live that way. But "the good life" is so situated in the particular place and time in which you live, that longing for the 'good life' of another time looks almost like insanity at worst, or eccentricity at best. That life is very hard, but our lives are very hard too. Their lives were filled with much more death - infant mortality, sickness for which there were no cures, dangerous work. Our lives are filled with less death, but more stomach turning stresses. Their lives were simpler - less entities to organize and keep up with. Our lives require each of us to be managers of a complex of interests, schedules, payments, receipts, locations, etc. Each month is divided into pay periods, each day into work periods, each hour into tasks, each task into records of for whom the work was done and for how long. This work is detached from the earth and its schedules - from seedtime and harvest, even from winter and summer. In order to connect with those natural rhythms we have to be intentional. Just as we have to schedule physical exercise because our jobs give us none, we have to intentionally plan to see nature, note the weather, etc. Power outages plunge us into a half-world, where we have one foot in the desire to have light at midnight and entertainment on any given day, and one foot in the world where night means darkness for the most part, summer means heat, and winter means cold. Maybe I'd hate the life that they had on the side of that creek, but something tells me that I would thrive there.

I Can't See through Muddy Water

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 09:56:40 EST

I Can't See through Muddy Water

When I was a kid and I would rudely stand in front of my parents while they were watching the news on television, they would say "I can't see through muddy water." I thought about this last night (wonder why?) and it occurred to me that your parents probably had a different way of telling you to move. So, readers, tell us what your parents said when you obscured the television screen.

American Idol Guy

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 08:56:00 EST

American Idol Guy

Despite his weird attitude, I thought this guy's voice was really good - resonant, very accurate, had a nice crisp feel to it.

Lost in Austen

Fri, 15 Jan 2010 20:49:00 EST

Lost in Austen

I'm not a Jane Austen purist, so adaptations and derivative works do not really bother me. And so if you're like me and you like Jane Austen books and movies and anything from the BBC about gentlemen and ladies with witty banter and good manners, then I think you'll get a kick out of this BBC movie: Lost in Austen:

Basically, a modern girl who likes Jane Austen goes to her bathroom one evening and finds Elizabeth Bennett in there, telling her that there is a portal from the Bennett house to her apartment. The modern girl goes into the Bennett house, Elizabeth locks the portal, and the rest of the movie is the modern heroine trying hard not to mess up the story of Pride and Prejudice. It is hilarious because they have to write new dialogue, imagine Darcy and Bingley in new situations, and we get a modern girl's take on Mr. Collins. The modern girl has to account for her strange clothing and passes it off as "Otter Hunting Kit." I also think the movie was well casted. The actors who play Bingley, Darcy, Bingley's sister, etc. are perfect choices. We learn Mr. Bennett's first name and Mr. Collins's middle name. The modern girl has a falling out with Charlotte, and there is some hilarity involving lip gloss. It isn't a farce by any means, and the movie is respectful of the source material. They do something really clever with Wickham's character, probably the biggest departure from Austen's vision for the character. And yet, it is really plausible. So don't hesitate to watch it so that we can talk about it next time I see you. The libraries in St. Louis already have it.

I'll leave you with a scene where Miss Price (the modern girl) meets Mr. Bennett. It's not a great scene, but you get a feel for the quality of the dialogue they write for the book's characters: