Cream bassist Jack Bruce dies, aged 71

Jack Bruce, bassist from 1960s band Cream, has died aged 71, his publicist confirms.

Legendary supergroup Cream, which also included Eric Clapton and Ginger Baker, are now considered one of the most important bands in rock history.
They sold 35 million albums in just over two years and were given the first ever platinum disc for Wheels of Fire.
Bruce wrote and sang most of the songs, including "I Feel Free" and "Sunshine Of Your Love".
Born in the Glasgow suburb of Bishopbriggs in 1943, his parents travelled extensively in Canada and the USA and the young Jack attended 14 different schools.
He finished his formal education at Bellahouston Academy and the Royal Scottish Academy of Music, to which he won a scholarship for cello and composition.
He left the academy and Scotland at the age of 16 and eventually found his way to London where he became a member of the influential Alexis Korner's Blues Inc, where Charlie Watts, later to join the Rolling Stones, was the drummer.

He played in a number of bands throughout the early 60s, including John Mayall's Blues Breakers and Manfred Mann before joining Clapton and Baker in Cream.
Cream split in November 1968 at the height of their popularity, with Bruce feeling he had strayed too far from his ideals.
Bruce never again reached the commercial heights he did with Cream but his reputation as one of the best bass guitarists in the business grew throughout the subsequent decades.
In May 2005, he reunited with his former Cream bandmates for a series of concerts at London's Royal Albert Hall.

Jack Bruce (left) with Ginger Baker and Eric Clapton in Cream in the mid-1960s

Bruce's death was announced on his official website, and confirmed by his publicist Claire Singers.
She said: "He died today at his home in Suffolk surrounded by his family."
A statement from his family said: "It is with great sadness that we, Jack's family, announce the passing of our beloved Jack: husband, father and granddad and all-round legend.
"The world of music will be a poorer place without him, but he lives on in his music and forever in our hearts."

Stevie Ray Vaughan A.A. meeting speech - Part 1

I remember reading in a biography when Stevie went into recovery and accepted Jesus Christ, this is a blessing to hear him talk about the grace of God. Listen to Part 2 Stevie Ray Vaughn Listen to part 3 Listen to part 4

Bob Dylan’s 71st birthday - To commemorate here’s a Peanuts strip from this day in 1971…

Its also my daughter Jessica 21st birthday

Ernest Hemingway and the Failure of Art

From Paul Johnson’s amusing and enlightening book Intellectuals, a lengthy summation of the tragic façade that was the life of Ernest Hemingway:

“Why did Hemingway long for death? It is by no means unusual among writers. His contemporary Evelyn Waugh, a writer in English of comparable stature during this period, likewise longer for death. But Waugh was not an intellectual: he did not think he could refashion the rule of life out of his own head but submitted to the traditional discipline of his church, dying of natural causes five years later. Hemingway created his own code, based on honour, truth, loyalty. He failed it on all three counts, and it failed him. More seriously, perhaps, he felt he was failing his art. Hemingway had many grievous faults but there was one thing he did not lack: artistic integrity. It shines like a beacon through his whole life. He set himself the task of creating a new way of writing English, and fiction, and he succeeded. It was one of the salient events in the history of our language and is now an inescapable part of it. He devoted to this task immense resources of creative skill, energy and patience. That in itself was difficult. But far more difficult, as he discovered, was to maintain the high creative standards he had set for himself. This became apparent to him in the mid-1930s, and added to his habitual depression. From then on his few successful stories were aberrations in a long downward slide.
If Hemingway had been less of an artist, it might not have mattered to him as a man; he would simply have written and published inferior novels, as many writers do. But he knew when he wrote below his best, and the knowledge was intolerable to him. He sought the help of alcohol, even in working hours. He was first observed with a drink, a ‘Rum St James’, in front of him while writing in the 1920s. This custom, rare at first, became intermittent, then invariable. By the 1940s, he was said to wake at 4.30am, ‘usually starts drinking right away and writes standing up, with a pencil in one hand and a drink in another’. The effect on his work was exactly as might be expected, disastrous. An experienced editor can always tell when a piece of writing has been produced with the aid of alcohol, however gifted the author may be. Hemingway began to produce large quantities of unpublishable material, or material he felt did not reach the minimum standard he set himself. Some was published nonetheless, and was seen to be inferior, even a parody of his earlier work. There were one or two exceptions, notably The Old Man and the Sea, though there was an element of self-parody in that too. But the general level was low, and falling, and Hemingway’s awareness of his inability to recapture his genius, let alone develop it, accelerated the spinning circle of depression and drink. He was a man killed by his art, and his life holds a lesson all intellectuals need to learn: that art is not enough.”

Johnson is – like the inestimable Waugh – a Christian in the Roman Catholic tradition. To that end he intuitively understands what Hemingway did not:  we are lawmakers by our own design, little gods creating little idols that will always fail us. How grateful we are to know that in Christ we have a Saviour who delivers us from the bondage of our own sin and brokenness.  The Law had indeed left Papa Hemingway broken; his only hope – our only hope – is not in manly triumph of the Nietzschean ubermensch, but instead in the defeated carpenter on Calvary.
As St. Paul says:
“So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin.
(Romans 7:21-25 ESV)
Mockingbird

Charles Colson (1931-2012)

Charles Wendell (“Chuck”) Colson went home to be with the Lord this afternoon (April 21, 2012). He was 80 years old.
The announcement is here.
Some obituaries and reflections:
Sarah Pulliam Bailey at Christianity Today
Emily Belz at World
Jonathan Aitken at CT
Tom Gilson at The Gospel Coalition
Ed Stetzer
Rich Lowry
Mr. Colson’s memoir Born Again was published in 1975. Earlier that year he had been released from a seven-month stint in federal prison after pleading guilty of obstructing justice in the Watergate investigation. He had converted to Christianity in 1973 after serving four years as Special Counsel for President Richard Nixon. C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity was pivotal in his spiritual repentance and awakening. The memoir was made into a 1978 film starring Dean Jones.
In 2005 Jonathan Aitken—himself a former politician turned prison turned convert to Christianity turned author—penned an authorized biography, Charles W. Colson: A Life Redeemed (WaterBrook Press).
Justin Taylor

Levon Helm dead at 71: Drummer for The Band succumbs to cancer

Levon Helm died Thursday at the age of 71, and a piece of the rich roots music now called Americana should be buried with him.
Helm, who was best known as the drummer for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame group The Band, had been suffering from a recurrence of the cancer that cost him his singing voice a decade earlier.
Larry Campbell, music director for the Levon Helm Band, said he died peacefully at Memorial Sloan-Kettering, "surrounded by friends and bandmates and family."
Helm won three solo Grammys over a 65-year career in which he blended all the music he heard as a youth in Turkey Scratch, Ark.: country, blues, bluegrass, gospel, R&B, pop and rock 'n' roll.
"He was just a great rock 'n' roll drummer," said his long-time friend and admirer, radio host Don Imus. "He was also a genuinely sweet person - a true angel. There was no one like him."
Helm and The Band played for 600,000 fans at the 1973 Watkins Glen music festival, but his focus the last decade was the intimate weekly jam sessions he called Midnight Rambles at his studio/ barn in Woodstock, N.Y.
Artists like Emmylou Harris and Elvis Costello often dropped in for the sessions, which were open to the public. Helm said he modeled them after late-night performances by the traveling medicine shows he knew as a child.

Levon Helm, of 'Band,' in 'final stages' of cancer

Legendary musician Levon Helm, who was part of The Band, is "in the final stages of his battle with cancer," according to a statement his family posted on his website.
Helm, 71, was known for his soulful voice and for his involvement in The Band as drummer and backing vocals.
His daughter, Amy, and wife Sandy posted the following message on his website:

 "Please send your prayers and love to him as he makes his way through this part of his journey,"   Thank you fans and music lovers who have made his life so filled with joy and celebration... he has loved nothing more than to play, to fill the room up with music, lay down the back beat, and make the people dance! He did it every time he took the stage…

Helm was previously diagnosed with throat cancer -- on his vocal chords -- in 1998, CBS News reported. The disease nearly took away his voice, leaving him able to speak at just a whisper.
Helm was a smoker, and he smoked as many as three packs every day, according to CBS News.
"I think there's that secret little spot back there in your mind where you know something's wrong, but you don't want to admit it," Helm told the Albany Times Union in 2000. "You put it off, you know. But my family and friends made me go to the doctor, and that's when you start dealing with it."
 
Arkansas-born Helm was the only non-Canadian member of the Hawks, a group that first backed early rocker Ronnie Hawkins, and then gained fame in the mid-1960s accompanying Bob Dylan when the singer and songwriter "went electric" to the consternation of many hardcore folk music fans who'd previously supported him.
The Band worked closely with Dylan after he went into seclusion following a near-fatal 1966 motorcycle accident, recording a batch of influential songs that were widely bootlegged and only surfaced in official form in 1975 as "The Basement Tapes." The Band released its first album on its own in 1968, "Music from Big Pink," to broad critical acclaim. It included one of the group's signature songs "The Weight." It followed with the even more highly lauded sophomore album "The Band," which included "Up On Cripple Creek," "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" and "Rag Mama Rag."
As one of three lead singers for the band, along with Richard Manuel and Rick Danko, Helm was the dominant voice on such signature songs as "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down," "Rag Mama Rag," "Ophelia," "Don't Do It" and "Daniel and the Sacred Harp." Manuel committed suicide in 1986 and Danko died of drug-related heart failure in 1999.
Members of the Band decided in 1976 to quit touring, and threw a gala final concert they called "The Last Waltz," which was captured on film by director Martin Scorsese.

Why Do So Many Great Talents Die Young?

Here we go again. Another superstar, one graced with undeniable talent, has spiraled out of control and met a tragic end. Whitney Houston has died at the age of 48.
Do you notice a pattern? Whether it’s the bluesy voice of Elvis Presley (dead at 42), silky smooth alto of Karen Carpenter (dead at 32), tortured genius of Kurt Cobain or soulful voice of Amy Winehouse (both dead at 27), the pattern is the same. Amazing talent brings fame and fortune which then swallows up these artists in a whirlpool of sin, addiction, and death.
Just a Cautionary Tale?
Whenever we watch these stories unfold, we are inclined to view them all as cautionary tales. Fame and fortune do not bring happiness. They had the world and lost their souls. Don’t set your heart on money or you could end up the same way. 
There is indeed something to be learned from these tragedies and the horrible consequences of sin and idolatry displayed before our eyes. But considering how thousands line up for days to audition for American Idol, it seems clear that American society is not heeding the warnings. Despite the obvious unhappiness of so many celebrities, throngs of aspiring singers still clamor for the world’s accolades and for the chance to be gossiped about in sensationalist magazines.
So yes, the early death of so many talented individuals does expose the emptiness of riches and success. But there is another lesson to be learned here, and it has to do with common grace. You see, the Evil One is not content with keeping people from hearing of God’s saving grace; he also wants to steal from the world those unusual gifts of common grace.
Common Grace
Consider how people talk about Whitney Houston. They speak of her voice as being “a gift.” Her voice was a gift from God (she was born with the talent), and her voice was a gift to the world (she shared it with us).
Notice also how people use terms like “awe” and “wonder” when describing her vocal prowess. “I was in awe of her.” “Her voice was magnificent.” “She was one-of-a-kind.” These are the kinds of descriptions we attach to majestic landscapes we see in creation.
People found a certain level of joy in Houston’s talent, which is why thousands of people who never knew her personally are devastated at her demise. And once you trace back the path of joy, you wind up moving from the gift to the Giver. The language of awe points us back to a God who is truly awesome and majestic.
It’s easy to follow the path from being awed at Houston’s talent to being awed at the God who grants talent in the first place. Whenever we see people in this world whose gifts inspire wonder, we are seeing signposts that point us to the God who loves the world enough to shower us with gifts of common grace, even as His greatest expression of love is demonstrated through the blood-drenched cross of His Son.
Robbing the World of Common Grace
So why do so many of these gifted individuals perish tragically? Certainly the perils of idolatry – money, fame, power – play a role.
But there’s more. The Evil One not only hates it when people find joy in God. He also hates it when people find joy in God’s gifts. So if he can snuff out the brightest lights of common grace, he will try. And that’s one reason we see a pattern of sinful squandering, self-destructive behavior that leads to the silencing of golden voices.
Don’t get me wrong. The superstars are always complicit in their own demise. In fact, in Houston’s case, she confessed that her sinful struggle with drugs was caused by her own heart. In a candid interview in 2002, Diane Sawyer listed a number of drugs and asked Houston which one was “the biggest devil” for her. Houston’s response?

“That would be me. It’s my deciding. It’s my heart. It’s what I want and what I don’t want. Nobody makes me do anything I don’t want to do. It’s my decision. The biggest devil is me.”

It’s an honest confession, and one that reminds us how intertwined are the causes of temptation (Satan and self). Houston’s story also reminds us that – just like in the story of the prodigal son – sin leads to the squandering of the Father’s good gifts. The Evil One is not content merely to hold people in spiritual bondage and lead them to hell. He wants to diminish even the contributions they make to the common grace we benefit from in society.
The Takeaway
So remember, sin always affects more than the individual who commits the offense. And that’s true for you and me too. Whenever we sin, we are consciously or unconsciously affecting those around us.
A pastor who fails morally is stealing more than another man’s wife. He is also robbing those around him of the opportunity to benefit from the particular gifts God has given to him. Satan loves for people – Christian and non-Christian alike – to squander good gifts from above and deprive the world of the joy of common grace.
That’s why the bright lights of common grace go dark before their time. It’s also why Satan wants to render ineffective in the church the gifts of those who have tasted God’s saving grace. Beauty is anathema to the Evil One, because all goodness and beauty finds its source in God.
Hope
The good news, of course, is that for the Christian, “greater is He that is in you than he that is in the world.” There’s no need for any Christian to serve as a cautionary tale. Nor do we need to be an example of Satan’s thievery of the gifts we contribute to Christ’s church. We hope in the One who has conquered sin and death and lavished His grace and gifts upon His children.
Trevin Wax

Demi Moore’s Deepest Fear

Are you insecure? Hate your body? Fear the sheer unknown-ness of your future? Lay awake wondering if you’ll end up alone? Would it help if your father was a famous race-car driver? And if you’d been married to the bassist for one of the biggest bands of the 1980s and were now married to the guitarist for a big indie rock band? What if you turned a career as an actor into a career as a sought-after photographer? And you had three attractive kids. And you were rich and beautiful?
Not enough? Let’s try another route. What if you were not only rich and beautiful, you had been married to two of the most famous actors in Hollywood? What if you had made millions in movies, at one time being one of the highest paid in your field? What if you had homes in resort areas in Idaho, California, and Maine? And what if you also did all kinds of great charity work for some really worthy causes? Would that help?
Apparently not. Amanda de Cadenet (the first person described above) and Demi Moore (no introduction needed) recently announced plans for a TV interview show called The Conversation, to air this spring on Lifetime. The origin of the show? De Cadenet “looked around and saw women in the media who looked like they were doing it all perfectly, and I thought, ‘Well, I’m not doing it perfectly. Where are the women like me? Why isn’t anyone being honest?’”
To promote the show, Demi and Amanda discussed their lives in this month’s Bazaar. Their candid revelations strike a nerve. Talk about honesty!
Here’s one exchange:

DM: All right, so what scares you?
ADC: Infidelity scares me. It scares me when it happens to my friends; it scares me that it’s going to happen to me. And I’m scared of dishonesty. I just really don’t know what to do when people are dishonest. It is alarming to me.
DM: What does it mean to you?
ADC: It’s like an ultimate fear, you know. Of being rejected, of being betrayed. I guess dishonesty and betrayal. Those are the things I’m afraid I wouldn’t recover from.

And here’s a scorchingly self-revelatory response from Demi:

And I think there is no way to reach your fullest potential if you don’t really find the love of yourself. If I were to answer it just kind of bold-faced, I would say what scares me is that I’m going to ultimately find out at the end of my life that I’m really not lovable, that I’m not worthy of being loved. That there’s something fundamentally wrong with me (emphasis added).

So people that have achieved enormous wealth, fame, and power—the cool kids in the high school cafeteria of life—are terrified that they are unloved.
The sentiment itself—the fear of unworthiness—is not uncommon. We’ve heard things like this before. The surprise is that these feelings are coming from people so successful. They’ve attained all the things we relentlessly chase in order to keep our insecurities away. They’ve got the full array of things one needs to justify oneself, to say “I matter!” But the fear only gets worse. The two women go on about their connection to a vague and undefined Spirituality, and how that takes the edge off. But for the most part, they’re still stuck in their fears.
I, for one, need more than Spirituality. I need the One who while I was dead in my trespasses, made me alive (Ephesians 2:5). I need the One who takes away my unworthiness and grounds me in the Unshakable. I need the Friend of Sinners. What was it that he said? Oh, yes. “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest” (Jesus in Matthew 11:28).
That’s a message that never gets old. And I hope Amanda and Demi get to hear it.
(And in a totally non-ironic way, pray for Ms. Moore, who just checked into rehab.)
Mockingbird

Mass hysteria and weeping in North Korea at the death of Kim Jong Il

The news of the North Korea's leader death has put the 24-million population on the verge of insanity, hyped up by unceasing TV broadcast of mass mourning throughout the country. ­North Korea's national flag is flying at half-mast today on every flagpole in the country. As Johnny Cash sang, sooner or latter God's gonna cut you down.

Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011)

Christopher Hitchens died on Thursday night at the age of 62, after a 18-month battle with esophageal cancer.
He was a brilliant and entertaining man. He was enormously gifted, and in his final years he took those gifts and used them to mock God, using his considerable wit and sharp tongue to convince as many people as possible to do the same.
When I had a crisis of faith my freshman year at a secular university studying religion, I was deeply convinced that there were only two options: full-blown Christian orthodoxy or atheism. Liberal theology—with its fantasy of rescuing the “kernel” (or essence) of Christianity from the (disposable) “husk” of dogma—had no appeal to me. And this is one of the things I appreciated about Hitchens. He once expressed incredulity at the platitudes of a Unitarian minister who saw the beauty of Jesus’ moral teachings while rejecting his divinity:

I would say that if you don’t believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ and Messiah, and that he rose again from the dead and by his sacrifice our sins are forgiven, you’re really not in any meaningful sense a Christian.

He was no admirer of C. S. Lewis, but he did agree with Lewis’s statement about Jesus: “Either this man was, and is, the Son of God; or else a madman or something worse.” Hitchens wrote:

Absent a direct line to the Almighty and a conviction that the last days are upon us, how is it “moral” to teach people to abandon their families, give up on thrift and husbandry and take to the stony roads?
How is it moral to claim a monopoly on access to heaven, or to threaten waverers with everlasting fire, let alone to condemn fig trees and persuade devils to infest the bodies of pigs?
Such a person if not divine would be a sorcerer and a ­fanatic.

He saw the choice before him, and he rejected the Savior.
Hitchens suspected there would be rumors of a deathbed conversion—but even more he feared that he might actually call out to God. Speaking perhaps truer than he knew, he sought to give a preemptive strike against such a possibility, explaining that would not be the real Christopher Hitchens doing such a thing:

Even if my voice goes before I do, I shall continue to write polemics against religious delusions, at least until it’s hello darkness my old friend. In which case, why not cancer of the brain? As a terrified, half-aware imbecile, I might even scream for a priest at the close of business, though I hereby state while I am still lucid that the entity thus humiliating itself would not in fact be “me.” (Bear this in mind, in case of any later rumors or fabrications.)

The section that sticks with me most from the Hitchens/Wilson debate-documentary Collision is the final scene. It is a telling moment, especially given that the subtitle of his bestselling book God Is Not Great effectively summarized the thesis of the book: How Religion Poisons Everything. More specifically, he wrote that organized religion is “violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism, tribalism, and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children.” But in the back of this car with Doug, he reveals a difference between himself and Richard Dawkins:

Our heart and prayers go out to Christopher’s younger brother Peter—the author of The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith—in his time of grief and sorrow.
Douglas Wilson’s obituary is worth reading, especially as he explores the possibility of Christopher turning to Christ at the end.
Justin Taylor

Dying without Christ

From Christopher Hitchens’s latest article in Vanity Fair, written from a cancer center in Houston where he is undergoing chemo:

I am typing this having just had an injection to try to reduce the pain in my arms, hands, and fingers. The chief side effect of this pain is numbness in the extremities, filling me with the not irrational fear that I shall lose the ability to write. Without that ability, I feel sure in advance, my “will to live” would be hugely attenuated. I often grandly say that writing is not just my living and my livelihood but my very life, and it’s true. Almost like the threatened loss of my voice, which is currently being alleviated by some temporary injections into my vocal folds, I feel my personality and identity dissolving as I contemplate dead hands and the loss of the transmission belts that connect me to writing and thinking.

When our identity and our idolatry become one and the same, the prospect of death can only lead to “unyielding despair.” Let us continue to pray for mercy and grace that would open the eyes of this enormously gifted man to see the Lord and Savior of the world, Jesus Christ.

Justin Taylor

An Important Person Who Died Last Wednesday (That wasn't Steve Jobs)

In honor of Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth

From Wikipedia…

Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, born Freddie Lee Robinson, (March 18, 1922 – October 5, 2011) was a U.S. civil rights activist who led the fight against segregation and other forms of racism as a minister in Birmingham, Alabama. He was a co-founder of theSouthern Christian Leadership Conference, was instrumental in the 1963 Birmingham Campaign, and continued to work against racism and for alleviation of the problems of the homeless in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he took up a pastorate in 1961. He returned to Birmingham after his retirement in 2007.

 22words

The Gospel According to Steve Jobs

It’s worth re-reading Andy Crouch’s essay on Steve Jobs, written in January 2011 upon his resignation, excerpted below:
* * *
Apple made technology safe for cool people—and ordinary people. It made products that worked, beautifully, without fuss and with a great deal of style. They improved markedly, unmistakably, from one generation to the next—not just in a long list of features and ever-spiraling complexity (I’m looking at you, Microsoft Word), but in simplicity. Press the single button on the face of the iPad and, whether you are five or 95, you can begin using it with almost no instruction. It has no manual. No geeks required.
Steve Jobs was the evangelist of this particular kind of progress—and he was the perfect evangelist because he had no competing source of hope. In his celebrated Stanford commencement address (which is itself an elegant, excellent model of the genre), he spoke frankly about his initial cancer diagnosis in 2003. It’s worth pondering what Jobs did, and didn’t, say:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It’s life’s change agent; it clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now, the new is you. But someday, not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it’s quite true. Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice, heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become.

This is the gospel of a secular age. It has the great virtue of being based only on what we can all perceive—it requires neither revelation nor dogma. And it promises nothing it cannot deliver—since all that is promised is the opportunity to live your own unique life, a hope that is manifestly realizable since it is offered by one who has so spectacularly succeeded by following his own “inner voice, heart and intuition.”
Jobs was by no means the first person to articulate this vision of a meaningful life—Socrates, the Buddha, and Emerson come to mind. To be sure, fully embracing this secular gospel requires an austerity of spirit that few have been able to muster, even if it sounds quite fine on the lawn of Stanford University. Upon close inspection, this gospel offers no hope that you cannot generate yourself, and only the comfort of having been true to yourself. . . .
But the genius of Steve Jobs has been to persuade us, at least for a little while, that cold comfort is enough. The world—at least the part of the world in our laptop bags and our pockets, the devices that display our unique lives to others and reflect them to ourselves—will get better. This is the sense in which the tired old cliché of “the Apple faithful” and the “cult of the Mac” is true. It is a religion of hope in a hopeless world, hope that your ordinary and mortal life can be elegant and meaningful, even if it will soon be dated, dusty, and discarded like a 2001 iPod.
. . . Steve Jobs’s gospel is, in the end, a set of beautifully polished empty promises. But I look on my secular neighbors, millions of them, like sheep without a shepherd, who no longer believe in anything they cannot see, and I cannot help feeling compassion for them, and something like fear. When, not if, Steve Jobs departs the stage, will there be anyone left who can convince them to hope?
Justin Taylor

Steve Jobs (1955-2011)

“No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it.”


“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life.”
“Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.”
“Death . . . is Life’s change agent.”
—Steve Jobs, Commencement Address at Stanford University (June 12, 2005)

Much will be said tonight and in the days ahead about this entrepreneurial genius. From a spiritual perspective, this much can be said with certainty: Steve Jobs, created in the image of God, was a remarkable example of God’s common grace in his aesthetics and creativity and productivity.
And we can all hope that in his final days, this recipient of so much common grace found rest in God’s sovereign saving grace.

Justin Taylor

The Best Of Sparky Anderson - Hall Of Fame Manager Dies At 76

Not only was Sparky Anderson a great manager, but he was also a great sound bite. You could always count on Sparky to give you a soundbite, he had a million of them. The best of Sparky:

• "Me carrying a briefcase is like a hot dog wearing earrings."
• "He's (Willie Stargell has) got power enough to hit home runs in any park, including Yellowstone."
• "My idea of managing is giving the ball to Tom Seaver and sitting down and watching him work."
• "I've got my faults, but living in the past is not one of them. There's no future in it."
• "We averaged 96 wins my nine years in Cincinnati. We had Bench, Rose, Morgan, Perez, Foster, Griffey, Concepcion and Geronimo. Imagine what I could have done if they (the Reds front office) had given me some players!"
• "If I ever find a pitcher who has heat, a good curve and a slider, I might seriously consider marrying him, or at least proposing."
• "You give us the pitching some of these clubs have, and no one could touch us, but God has a way of not arranging that because it's not as much fun."
• "Just give me 25 guys on the last year of their contracts; I'll win a pennant every year."
• "I don't believe a manager ever won a pennant. Casey Stengel won all those pennants with the Yankees. How many did he win with the Boston Braves and Mets?"
• "Players have two things to do: Play and keep their mouths shut."
• "I only had a high school education, and, believe me, I had to cheat to get that."
• "I can't believe they pay us to play baseball something we did for free as kids."
• "The only reason I'm coming out here tomorrow is because the schedule says I have to."

USA Today

•  

A Great Announcer and a Great Man Dies

NOVI — Ernie Harwell, the acclaimed Tigers broadcaster whose eloquence and kindness made him a beloved Michigan institution, died tonight after a nearly year-long bout with cancer. He was 92.

He died in his apartment at Fox Run Village, a retirement center in Novi, with Lulu, his wife of 68 years, at his side. His death came eight months to the day after he revealed to his fans, in an interview with the Free Press, that he had a cancerous tumor in the area of his bile duct and that in late July he had been given only a few months to live.

“I’m ready to face what comes,” he said at the time. “Whether it’s a long time or a short time is all right with me because it’s up to my Lord and savior.”

In the ensuing months, in an emotional farewell ceremony at Comerica Park, in his columns for the Detroit Free Press and in interviews with national media, Harwell referred to death as his next great adventure, a gift handed down by God.

This is his farewell speech from last September:

Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy

65 years ago today Dietrich Bonhoeffer was hanged to death—stripped naked and strangled by a thin wire at Flossenbürg concentration camp. Three weeks later the Soviets would capture Berlin and Hitler would commit suicide. Three months later the Allies would assume control of Germany.
Eric Metaxas, the NYT-bestselling author of Amazing Grace (a biography of Wilberforce), has a new biography out on Bonhoeffer. The nearly 600-page biography is the first major biography of Bonhoeffer to appear in 40 years. I’ve only been able to read the first few chapters thus far, but Metaxas is a clear and engaging writer. Tim Keller writes the foreword for the book. It’s worth picking up.
For families who want to learn together about Bonhoeffer’s life and witness, I’d recommend Focus on the Family’s Radio Theatre audio drama, Bonhoeffer: The Cost of Freedom. ($10 at Amazon, for the three-hour production.) It’s very well done.
Justin Taylor

The Sandra Bullock Trade By DAVID BROOKS

Two things happened to Sandra Bullock this month. First, she won an Academy Award for best actress. Then came the news reports claiming that her husband is an adulterous jerk. So the philosophic question of the day is: Would you take that as a deal? Would you exchange a tremendous professional triumph for a severe personal blow?
On the one hand, an Academy Award is nothing to sneeze at. Bullock has earned the admiration of her peers in a way very few experience. She’ll make more money for years to come. She may even live longer. Research by Donald A. Redelmeier and Sheldon M. Singh has found that, on average, Oscar winners live nearly four years longer than nominees that don’t win.
Nonetheless, if you had to take more than three seconds to think about this question, you are absolutely crazy. Marital happiness is far more important than anything else in determining personal well-being. If you have a successful marriage, it doesn’t matter how many professional setbacks you endure, you will be reasonably happy. If you have an unsuccessful marriage, it doesn’t matter how many career triumphs you record, you will remain significantly unfulfilled.
This isn’t just sermonizing. This is the age of research, so there’s data to back this up. Over the past few decades, teams of researchers have been studying happiness. Their work, which seemed flimsy at first, has developed an impressive rigor, and one of the key findings is that, just as the old sages predicted, worldly success has shallow roots while interpersonal bonds permeate through and through.
For example, the relationship between happiness and income is complicated, and after a point, tenuous. It is true that poor nations become happier as they become middle-class nations. But once the basic necessities have been achieved, future income is lightly connected to well-being. Growing countries are slightly less happy than countries with slower growth rates, according to Carol Graham of the Brookings Institution and Eduardo Lora. The United States is much richer than it was 50 years ago, but this has produced no measurable increase in overall happiness. On the other hand, it has become a much more unequal country, but this inequality doesn’t seem to have reduced national happiness.
On a personal scale, winning the lottery doesn’t seem to produce lasting gains in well-being. People aren’t happiest during the years when they are winning the most promotions. Instead, people are happy in their 20’s, dip in middle age and then, on average, hit peak happiness just after retirement at age 65.
People get slightly happier as they climb the income scale, but this depends on how they experience growth. Does wealth inflame unrealistic expectations? Does it destabilize settled relationships? Or does it flow from a virtuous cycle in which an interesting job produces hard work that in turn leads to more interesting opportunities?
If the relationship between money and well-being is complicated, the correspondence between personal relationships and happiness is not. The daily activities most associated with happiness are sex, socializing after work and having dinner with others. The daily activity most injurious to happiness is commuting. According to one study, joining a group that meets even just once a month produces the same happiness gain as doubling your income. According to another, being married produces a psychic gain equivalent to more than $100,000 a year.
If you want to find a good place to live, just ask people if they trust their neighbors. Levels of social trust vary enormously, but countries with high social trust have happier people, better health, more efficient government, more economic growth, and less fear of crime (regardless of whether actual crime rates are increasing or decreasing).
The overall impression from this research is that economic and professional success exists on the surface of life, and that they emerge out of interpersonal relationships, which are much deeper and more important.
The second impression is that most of us pay attention to the wrong things. Most people vastly overestimate the extent to which more money would improve our lives. Most schools and colleges spend too much time preparing students for careers and not enough preparing them to make social decisions. Most governments release a ton of data on economic trends but not enough on trust and other social conditions. In short, modern societies have developed vast institutions oriented around the things that are easy to count, not around the things that matter most. They have an affinity for material concerns and a primordial fear of moral and social ones.
This may be changing. There is a rash of compelling books — including “The Hidden Wealth of Nations” by David Halpern and “The Politics of Happiness” by Derek Bok — that argue that public institutions should pay attention to well-being and not just material growth narrowly conceived.
Governments keep initiating policies they think will produce prosperity, only to get sacked, time and again, from their spiritual blind side.
New York Times

What Evangelicals Can Learn from Saint Patrick

To our shame, most evangelical Protestants tend to think of Saint Patrick as a leprechaun. As we watch the annual drunken parades and pop-culture consumerism of the March holiday, no one could seem more removed from biblical Christianity than Patrick. And yet, Patrick’s life was closer to a revival meeting than to a shamrock-decorated drinking party named in his honor.
In his volume, St. Patrick of Ireland: A Biography, Philip Freeman, a professor of classics at Washington University in St. Louis, lays out a compelling portrait of Patrick, the theologian-evangelist. In accomplishing this, Freeman attempts to reconstruct Patrick’s cultural milieu—that of a world that had “ended” with the fall of Rome in 410 A.D. This collapse of Roman power had unleashed savagery in the British Isles, as thieves and slave-traders were unhinged from the restraining power of Caesar’s sword. Patrick’s ministry was shaped by this new world, not least of which by Patrick’s capture and escape from slavery.
Freeman helpfully retells Patrick’s conversion story, one of a mocking young hedonist to a repentant evangelist. The story sounds remarkably similar to that of Augustine—and, in the most significant of ways, both mirror the first-century conversion of Saul of Tarsus. Freeman helpfully reconstructs the context of local religion as a “business relationship” in which sacrifice to pagan gods was seen as a transaction for the material prosperity of the worshippers. Against this, Patrick’s conversion to Christianity was noticed quickly, when his prayers of devotion—then almost always articulated out loud—were overheard by his neighbors.
The rest of the narrative demonstrates the ways in which Patrick carried the Christian mission into the frontiers of the British Isles—confronting a hostile culture and institutionalized heresy along the way. With this the case, the life of Patrick is a testimony to Great Commission fervor, not to the Irish nationalism most often associated with the saint. As a matter of fact, Freeman points out that Patrick’s love for the Irish was an act of obedience to Jesus’ command to love enemies and to pray for persecutors.
This biography gives contemporary evangelicals more than a pious evangelist to emulate. It also reconstructs a Christian engagement with a pagan culture, in ways that are strikingly contemporary to evangelicals seeking to engage a post-Christian America.
Patrick’s context was a Celtic culture deeply entrenched in paganism, led by the native earth religion of the Druid priests. This is especially relevant in an era when pseudo-Celtic paganism is increasingly en vogue in American and European pagan movements. Freeman sweeps away the revisionist historical claims of the Druid revivalists: there was no “golden age” of equality among the sexes within the Druid cult, for example. Instead, Freeman shows that Patrick’s Christianity actually brought harmony among the genders with his teaching that women were joint-heirs with Christ.
Any evangelical seeking to kindle a love for missions among the people of God will benefit from this volume’s demonstration that the Great Commission did not lie dormant between the apostle Paul and William Carey. Patrick’s love and zeal for the Irish may also inspire American evangelicals to repent of our hopelessness for the conversion of, say, the radical Islamic world—which is, after all, no more “hopeless” than the Irish barbarians of Patrick’s era.
Gospel Coalition