Notes from a wandering blogger
Well, my church body, the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, messed up big time at its convention in St. Louis. Re-electing revisionist President Gerald Kieschnick, it gave him just about a complete slate of officers and everything he wanted in his continuing drive to convert a church body known for its solid, confessional Lutheranism into basically a high-church variety of generic "Evangelicalism." I sense schism in the wind, which is always a tragedy. But as of now, only the tiny Evangelical Lutheran Synod (ELS) and the small Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod (WELS) remain as mainstays of traditional, confessional Lutheranism- and there are serious problems with WELS. Nor does even the ELS have its case completely together.
God is still running His church, but these are sad times for confessional Lutheranism in the United States.
Meanwhile, John Edwards, I see, is John Kerry's running-mate, and the Democratic Hate-Fest will be opening in Boston shortly. We will see how far a campaign based pretty much entirely on name-calling and vitriolic scorn for George W. Bush can get. The Good Guys, meanwhile, assemble in New York at the end of August.
Looks like my Cubs- who are about to fall eleven games behind the Dirty Birds in the NL Central- will have to settle for a Wild Card at best. The injury bug appears to have been fatal to their hopes for a repeat as division champions. Since I don't believe in the Wild Card (and consider teams who win the pennant and/or the World Series as Wild Card teams to be at best "cheese champions"), I am very conflicted about this. I want the Cubs to win the World Series as much as anybody- but I want them to get there because they deserve it (having established their credentials over the course of the regular season by winning their division), rather than through a gimmick.
Finally, I am living in the Washington, D.C. area now. Not that this will affect my blogging (which I hope will begin to be regular again sooner, rather than later), but it's at least existentially interesting to be writing this blog from the Nation's Capital, rather than from the capital of Iowa!
God is still running His church, but these are sad times for confessional Lutheranism in the United States.
Meanwhile, John Edwards, I see, is John Kerry's running-mate, and the Democratic Hate-Fest will be opening in Boston shortly. We will see how far a campaign based pretty much entirely on name-calling and vitriolic scorn for George W. Bush can get. The Good Guys, meanwhile, assemble in New York at the end of August.
Looks like my Cubs- who are about to fall eleven games behind the Dirty Birds in the NL Central- will have to settle for a Wild Card at best. The injury bug appears to have been fatal to their hopes for a repeat as division champions. Since I don't believe in the Wild Card (and consider teams who win the pennant and/or the World Series as Wild Card teams to be at best "cheese champions"), I am very conflicted about this. I want the Cubs to win the World Series as much as anybody- but I want them to get there because they deserve it (having established their credentials over the course of the regular season by winning their division), rather than through a gimmick.
Finally, I am living in the Washington, D.C. area now. Not that this will affect my blogging (which I hope will begin to be regular again sooner, rather than later), but it's at least existentially interesting to be writing this blog from the Nation's Capital, rather than from the capital of Iowa!
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