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seeing the road ahead: Tifosi GS Tyrant cycling glasses

December 17, 2009 by David Baer

Though I tried on the highly-recommended Oakley Jawbones in my local bike store, I told myself I needed a few more months of serious riding to prove to myself the cost aligned with my commitment. Having drawn that rather philosophical line in the sand, I moved on to shop’s low-end alternative: the Tifosi.

Having now broken them in via cold-winter riding in Indianapolis, I can say that they are a comfortable, solid, and more than adequate armament for the cycler’s eyes. I attach an adjustable mirror to mine. The Tifosis provide a solid platform for this gizmo and do not shift at all on my head under the added weight. Continue Reading »

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right here: Around Me (iPhone app)

December 12, 2009 by David Baer

This handy little app is a marvel for finding out the nearest pharmacy, gas station, coffee shop, and a shortlist of other categories based on its discernment of your present location. Some categories display a bit of mysterious overlap. If you’re suffering from chest pains, however, your dash to the nearest ‘hospital’ might take you through a couple of veterinary clinics before you get to somebody who knows about human hearts. Nonetheless, a helpful little icon for your iPod screen!

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a door-opener: Al-Qur’an/The Quran (iPod app)

December 12, 2009 by David Baer

Non-Muslims who need to know the Quran could do worse than begin with M.M. Pickthall’s English translation, here formatted for the iPhone. Scholars and the pious debate the merits of Pickthall’s renderings, but this handy and inexpensive app opens the door to those less interested in the minutiae who benefit from having Islam’s most holy book a tap or two away.

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Jerusalem descending: Revelation 3

December 12, 2009 by David Baer

From time to time the course of events hands to us a particularly pleasant fruit encased in a most bitter shell.

The genre of biblical literature—it is of course to be found outside the biblical text as well—that is called ‘apocalyptic’ addresses itself to the faithful who have lost control. Words like ‘power’, ‘influence’, and ‘clout’ have meaning in a society and an historical moment in which the pious can share in the shaping of their space, their time, their shared destiny. Often this privilege is denied. Then, apocalyptic speaks its word. Continue Reading »

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inheritance of dominion: Revelation 2

December 11, 2009 by David Baer

The letters to the churches that occupy the early chapters of the book of Revelation are a study in nuanced assessment. The Lord Jesus, who speaks in these letters embedded in an apocalyptic neighborhood, metes out both praise and rebuke in roughly equal measure. Not unusually, the reader is stunned by how severe and encouraging the dominical voice can be with regard to the same listening church.

Thyatira, for example:

Now I say to the rest of you in Thyatira, to you who do not hold to her teaching and have not learned Satan’s so-called deep secrets (I will not impose any other burden on you): Only hold on to what you have until I come. To him who overcomes and does my will to the end, I will give authority over the nations— ‘He will rule them with an iron scepter; he will dash them to pieces like pottery’—just as I have received authority from my Father. I will also give him the morning star. He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches.

The italicized words come from the second psalm, which contains a message from YHWH to his human delegate on Zion that is routinely quoted by the New Testament and early Christian literature as an anticipatory description of Christ’s dominion over the nations. Continue Reading »

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soft landing: 24 (Season Six)

December 11, 2009 by David Baer

By the time Jack finds himself walking away from his beloved Audrey and staring at the ocean over which a new sun rises, neither guns nor brains can save him. Jack has come to his end.

Or so we would conclude if we did not know the penchant of 24 writers for making the impossible become plausible.

Along the way, Jack has saved a blooded United States of America and, arguably, its constitution. One of the elements that makes Season 6/Day 6 powerful is the insight into ‘politics as the art of the possible’ when the possible has been circumscribed beyond precedent by men who are prepared to do anything to advance their cause.

Action, it seems, begets contemplation which begets drama. Continue Reading »

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bridle: 2nd John

December 11, 2009 by David Baer

We take for granted at this late evening of Enlightenment’s day that truth is to be discovered by the earnest, individual seeker. Nothing stands above his range of movement as independent investigator, no truth looms larger than he, no calculation of danger is to be admitted. Continue Reading »

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terrifying purposefulness: Daniel 7

November 30, 2009 by David Baer

Committed fans of sweetness and light need not consult seventh chapter of the biblical book of Daniel.

Placed in the time of the weak-kneed Babylonian king Belshazzar—it is notable how much the brute power of empire compensates for frailty at the top—the story shows us the Judahite exile Daniel terrified by his bizarre night-time visions.

They are not, to put it mildly, a pretty sight. Waves of animalesque imagery flood the man’s brain. These are interpreted as the comings and goings of great empires, a theme that ought to have made Belshazzar’s knees knock still more. Empires, after all, presume and when necessary insist upon their own permanence.

The exile’s dreams say otherwise. Continue Reading »

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commands and the commanded: Daniel 5

November 28, 2009 by David Baer

Badly as Babylon’s King Nebuchadnezzar comes off, he is the moral equivalent of a rock star when placed alongside his pitiable son Belshazzar. For all his overweening pride, the pater familias of this dubious tribe at least learned the lesson that ‘the God of the heavens is sovereign over the affairs of men and gives rule and power to whomever he wills’. Thought it took becoming an animal to figure this out, the biblical book of Daniel at least credits the now defunct Nebuchadnezzar for his tuition.

Not so Belshazzar the son, a man who earns that lamentable historical badge of being the last leader of an empire. Belshazzar will learn nothing and will die in the very night his chickens come home to roost. Continue Reading »

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flirting with (epistemological) disaster: Psalm 119

November 27, 2009 by David Baer

One should spare a merciful thought for the writer of an acrostic.

Whether required to bend his pen to the task or the victim of his own enthusiastic but self-incarcerating ambition, the man or woman who sits down to write a poem wherein each sequence of lines begins with the same letter of the alphabet does not merit our scorn. If his result sounds wooden or inauthentic he deserves, at worst, our pity and, more charitably, the benefit of our aesthetic doubts.

Take the writer of the exceedingly long one hundred and nineteenth psalm, for example. Some ninety-seven verses into his long, parallelistic slog, he wrestles with the glories of YHWH’s revelation, on the one hand, and the letter mem (the Hebrew equivalent of our English letter m) on the other. Continue Reading »

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