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Pagan Moontide of Februus 10, Anno Domini 2020

This Week in Madness...

  • 8 Days until Without Flesh Release
  • Curses and Cussing, Part 4
  • Kids These Days... and the World Their Parents Gave Them
Epiphania Lux Mundi 6:
Blood Sanctifies

Alleluia! Jesus said, "This is my blood of the covenant." Alleluia!

You did not ask for burnt offerings.
How blessed is everyone who trusts in the Lord.

I speak of your faithfulness and salvation.
I do not conceal your righteousness deep in my heart.
I do not hide your mercy and your truth from the great assembly.

Let your mercy and your truth always protect me, although troubles without number surround me.

From Psalm 40

Coming down from the Mount of Transfiguration, we enter the Valley of the Shadow of Darkness and Death. There we find, at the base of the mountain, the God who speaks words to us, insisting on the need of his covenant with us by blood on our behalf. As Moses and the people of Israel received such promises by the word of the Lord, so we too find our Lord Jesus more concerned with the work he comes to do on our behalf than with the expectations we set up for him. The gods of wood and stone are made in the image of men. The spirit of the Lord anoints the Christ with the religion of God.

With the descent into darkness, so also comes the rejection of Jesus, which we will see increase over the coming weeks. In the meanwhile, exiled in darkness as we are, we nonetheless have the full revelation and knowledge of the glory of God from the mountain top. Therefore, we commit ourselves even more to walking with Jesus, all the way to the cross, because we know that on the other side of this darkness is the light of a new dawn, founded on an empty tomb.

Let us pray: Jesus, upon whom the Spirit of the Lord rests, who mediated the new covenant of the Lord’s favor, open our eyes, that we would not be blinded to the oppressive temptations of this age, accept your visitation as our final prophet, priest and king, live and reign with the Father and the Holy Spirit, one God, world without end. Amen.

Kobe Bryant, Virtual Grief, and the Kids are Not All Right

I've always had a special affinity for Kobe Bryant, even though I am not a Lakers fan (Blazers all the way, thank you!) especially when I learned several years ago that we were the same age and share the same birthday. I gave up on my dreams of playing professional basketball, but Bryant's long career always kept me hopeful.

Coming to terms with aging is different than coming to terms with your own end, and with the tragic death of any public figure, our entire society is forced to face that kind of music. This article analyzing how social media has impacted grief in the Post-Enlightenment age is a very helpful reflection, and every bit as practical as investigations into dangers of helicopter crashes.


Speaking of the impact of social media...

Spying on Your Kids... is Your JOB

This insightful article from Wired magazine should behoove more Christian parents to take action in addressing the challenge of monitoring their media literate children. While protecting our kids from being absorbed into the hive mind of online addictive behaviors and patterns, you might not adopt every rule set out here, but their guidelines are pretty darn good.


Speaking of what kids are doing online these days...

TikTok, Ya Don't Stop... ("I wanna sex you up")... 

and We're Not Kidding

Are you relieved your kids have moved from YouTube and onto TikTok? Or do you even know? Honestly, TikTok may as well be the favorite TV program for the aliens on the planet Zofar based on Team MadMonday's (in)ability to understand its appeal.

What we do know is that "sex education" has always been the weapon of choice for progressives to capture the minds of youth with carnal sexual ethics. Under the guise of preparing them for real life, sex ed is a Trojan horse by which everything you don't want your kids to believe about sex will be taught to them. We're not advocating that parents search every child's browsing history every day but then again... have you ever searched at all?

Fisk Shakes Hands with Papists...

Recently I was privileged to give plenary talk at a local life breakfast in celebration of the March for Life and unbeknownst to me a papistic reporter caught me fraternizing with the enemy, the local Bishop. He was a very pleasant man and I hope to meet him again in the future to discuss what organizational church life looks like in the middle of a collapsing civilization and how his congregations are preparing for the next decades. In the meantime, I'll settle that the RC church in my area is maintaining its stance on life.

Sweetness You May Have Missed...
This Week Preached

Blood Sanctifies

Recent Release

A Faith Worth Marrying For

Podcast 0143

The China Dystopia

Throwback

A Lutheran, a Charismatic, and a Liberal Walk into a Bar

My Money is on the Epigenome 

It was only two and a half years ago that I was seriously considering paying the $300 to 23andMe to provide an outline of my genetic code. I'm still curious about it but what stopped me at the time was learning that once you consent to the sequencing of your genome, you no longer own that information. It becomes the property of the private company you paid and I didn't want that this early in the game (the more that I learn about epigenetics the more I wonder if we're playing the right game anyway).

All the same, it saddens me to hear that companies dedicated to ameliorating future pain and illness are having a difficult time in the dog-eat-dog market of pharmaceutical feudalism.


From big pharma to big aero...

Boeing Wings are Clipping Themselves

And more problems for one of America's last leading industrial giants, Boeing. Forget the 737 production issues and its impact on Rockford (see this past newsletter). More worrying is a corporate climate filled with loopholes and confusion, trying to supply massive government contracts.

This has led to an entire series of flying metal boxes, capable of destroying skyscrapers, being built with a sniff and a hat tip to regulation. With a singular focus on playing the market and self-promotion, it seems that Boeing should start believing their own [bad] press.


From problems to tech in the sky, to solutions on the ground...

Self-Driving is Flying High

Yet again, self-driving vehicles are in the news and the (wink wink) headlights. A new fleet of driverless trucks is being unleashed in New Mexico and Texas, while General Motors is betting its chips on self-driving public transportation (along with the electrified Humvee), envisioned for the future cities of Tomorrowland. The idea of your car shooting lasers at mine, as we speed towards each other on a dark road at night, instills a bit of dystopian fright, but at the same time, anything to make night time driving safer seems like a worthy investment.


As if having tech in the sky and on the ground is not enough....

Cool and Smokin'

Why wouldn't you want to sleep in the middle of a giant video game console? That's what Atari is banking that men my own age are wanting in order to fulfill latent 8-year-old Space Invaders/Combat/Joust fantasies. Who knows what the interior looks like, but I must admit this is one of the coolest hotels I've ever seen.

Two weeks ago, I spent some time in Indianapolis, getting things done for my quarterly review and was blessed with the happenstance discovery of the "Cigar Haven". Consider me the weaker brother if you need to, but I have been to more than my fair share of cigar lounges and I'm always on the lookout for a good one.

While I have visited some of the best, nothing prepared me for the through-the-looking glass miracle that happened while walking from the front VIP lounge to the man cave nestled in the back. If not for the big screen TV and the free wi-fi, you could be forgiven for thinking you'd stepped off the grid and into the 19th century, with an awesome British-Americana steampunk fusion. Truly, if you're in the area and you enjoy a fine stick you must visit. Hand me my smoking jacket, my good man!

Millenials

In theory, I'm not a millennial. Although the generational boundaries seem arbitrary to me, being born in 1978, I'm supposed to be part of Gen X as the cut-off is apparently 1980. Boo hoo, for me. With that said, I identify with millennial thinking and style and frankly, I can't stand everything Gen X has been and more honestly, failed to be.

I have no particular love for snowflakes, but I enjoyed these articles suggesting that the current problem with our culture might not just be "the millennials" but the world we've been handed and expected to live in. Are we lazy and full of ourselves? Absolutely, but it brings to mind a proverb I once heard: 

A son who says his father is a fool has only his own genes to trust in.

Without Flesh: Snippet of the Week
Continue Reading

In American Christianity, the "change or die" refrain has become a creed. Unless the Church finds a way to adapt to a changing culture, Christianity is fully and rightly doomed. Our times are nothing new. And Jesus gave us a specific plan.

When you buy Without Flesh, use the code REVFISK at check-out to recieve 20% off your purchase off Echo:  Unbroken Truth Worth Repeating, Again from CPH.

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Next Week in the Exile:
Substitution Atones
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Missed last week?  Read from the beginning.

On Curses and Cussing, Part 4:  Meanwhile, back on Caprica. . .

Last time, I talked about how, sadly, Battlestar Galactica’s attempt to create futuristic swearing broke the Fourth Wall. It asserted that after hundreds of years, the only development to the English language was the F-word. Worse, its evolution was a novelty that any grammarian or lover of English would find awkward. It would be very difficult to progress from the F-word to the word “Frak” in any native or natural way. Such a change in use of language would have to be imposed from the outside, as indeed it was, by the producers of the show.

With that in mind, I’ve endeavored in Dust to replace all human emotion, slang and swearing with words that are not our modern words but that serve the same purpose. Much of this is done with spelling and my reflection on the way the extinction of written language would impact how words are heard, repeated and passed forward over time. The details are fascinating to me, though I will admit, they may bore you.

At the end of the day, anybody who desires to write a story for the readers of the present age, or to impact future generations, can’t afford to be precocious with his use of language. If one is to develop a believable dystopian future in which the catastrophic results of human sinfulness are depicted, pretentiousness needs to be put aside. If Christians want to tell meaningful fictional stories that honestly depict both the ongoing struggle for life and the redemptive arch of providence and salvation from truly disastrous lives, then we can’t be preachy about the world's vocabulary while we do it.

As a result, Dust most definitely involves “cursing” as we define the term today. The main character (without question a psychological projection of myself, as most first novelists must do), will continually make use of common language from the world in which he lives. This is to emphasize the guttural depths of his own sinful condition, the fusion of his personal fears, doubts and passions with a believable character. 

I’m not saying that I personally cuss all the time in my head. I am saying if I wasn’t a Christian, and lived in a world where there were no grammarians, but only weapons and starvation, I most certainly would.

More soon…

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