Out of the Comfort Zone A Little

This is an odd one. This is a Finnish group called the Leningrad Cowboys. They are joined by the real Red Army Choir in a rousing rendition of "Sweet Home Alabama". The crowd consists of Russian youth. Talk about a sublime statement on identity.

Am I naive in assuming the hair is real?

Easter vs. Christmas

The following is taken from this article in Slate. - DOB

Even the resurrection, the joyful end of the Easter story, resists domestication as it resists banalization. Unlike Christmas, it also resists a noncommittal response. Even agnostics and atheists who don't accept Christ's divinity can accept the general outlines of the Christmas story with little danger to their worldview. But Easter demands a response. It's hard for a non-Christian believer to say, "Yes, I believe that Jesus of Nazareth was crucified, died, was buried, and rose from the dead." That's not something you can believe without some serious ramifications: If you believe that Jesus rose from the dead, this has profound implications for your spiritual and religious life—really, for your whole life. If you believe the story, then you believe that Jesus is God, or at least God's son. What he says about the world and the way we live in that world then has a real claim on you.

Easter is an event that demands a "yes" or a "no." There is no "whatever."

Three of the Best Bands You Have Never Heard

Mofro


Tishamingo


North Mississippi All-Stars

A Blog Post by Jady Koch

Annie Hall and The Denial of Death

The recent posts about Woody Allen and Lucian Freud reminded me of a scene in Annie Hall where, shortly after explaining that “I feel that life is divided into the horrible and the miserable,” Alvy recommends Ernest Becker’s book The Denial of Death to Annie. Written in 1973, it is Becker’s evaluation of human psychology from a Freudian and post-Freudian perspective. In it, he argues that Freud’s (in)famous argument that people are fundamentally libidinal—that is driven by sexual desire—was descriptively accurate but specifically misguided; the real motivation behind people’s subconscious maladies lies not in the hyper-sexual realm but rather in the existential reality of their own mortality.

As he states in the opening pages: "The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity—activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny for man (ix)."

While it is intellectually fashionable to argue that people are fundamentally different than they were 2000 years ago, or even 200 years ago, one can’t help but notice parallels between Becker’s psychological analysis of this primal fear and the very thing that St. Paul believes that the Gospel addresses. In 1 Cor. 15:55 he states: "O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?"

Read the whole post here.

This is a piece by my friend Jady Koch who is in Germany working on a PhD at Humboldt. He has an incredible insight and you will hear from him in the future. - DOB

Viktor Frankl

"Our generation is realistic, for we have come to know man as he really is... After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord's Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips."

- from Frankl's book Man's Search for Meaning

Frankl is a survivor of the Nazi concentration camps. This is a powerful undergirding of the doctrine of total depravity. Man is inherently both Jekyll and Hyde all in the same body. - DOB

Bulgakov on Freedom

"The spiritual life requires one condition, a negative condition, but invaluable and irreplaceable: freedom. Ethical self-determination cannot but be free, and, conversely, only free self-determination can have an ethical goal. It would be superfluous to try to demonstrate this self-evident truth. But perfect freedom belongs only to pure spirit, which is free from all external influence and open only to interior motivation."

Sergius Bulgakov was a Marxist-turned-Russian Orthodox priest and theologian who sort of lived in hot water from the Orthodox hierarchy. This quote from his essay, "The Economic Ideal" is a help from an unlikely place. - DOB