Peter gets praised by Jesus for perceiving early on, even before the Holy Spirit has descended, that he is the Christ, the son of the Living God. John the Baptiser gets there even earlier with an equivalent understanding at the very beginning of Jesus's ministry. Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world. John 1:29-31

Once one has learned this and sung it, it is hard not to sing along. And is always the case with Handel, each part is quite sure that it is the one George intended to be dominant.

Lewis's approach, likely descending from his analytic gifts, is to notice where the misconception and muddled thinking is and clear that up, as one removes weeds from a garden or a board from the lawn in hopes that the health of the plant will be restored by that alone. If feeding or watering or healing from disease is still needed, at least the plant will have more vigor to help this along. Yet odd things occur along the way with that. I read The Pilgrim's Regress long before I read Lewis's own comments three decades later on the weaknesses of that first book. He spent too much time exposing the weaknesses of philosophies which were popular at the time, mentioning in particular TH Green among those at Oxford. Those were already being outcompeted, whether by other weeds or by healthy plants, and were important only as historical influences on others by the 1950s. I didn't know the half of it, and innocently believed that if the august Lewis was taking the time to refute them, there must be plenty of people out there still believing them. I suppose it is nice to have the argument against them stored in memory in case it ever comes up again, but some of what he patiently corrects are ideas no one is submitting anymore.

We see another example of the popular mistake changing somewhat between his age and ours. In both The Abolition of Man and Mere Christianity he argues against the prevailing belief that there is no ultimate truth, as they are all merely culturally conditioned opinions. At the conclusion of Abolition, he lists common moral precepts from traditions worldwide. He finds the Law of Reciprocity, or of Duty to Parents or Duty to Posterity in Vedic texts, in Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism, in Norse religion, Greek and Roman writers, and in Zoroastrianism, as well as the Abrahamic faiths, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. He is making an argument from Natural Law. He calls this the Tao. I have read Christians criticising this name as too distracting and too much of a nod to the modern fascination with Eastern religions. I think that is misguided. The fashionableness for Westerners of adopting Hindu and Buddhist practices was just getting under weigh in his day, confined to a few of the wealthy and cranky. He likely chose it because it has some accuracy - as much as we might hope for when using a term from one religion to describe something common to all of them. Lastly, I suspect he was also being quite intentional in choosing a nonchristian term to drive home the point that he was not in any way relying on Christian assumptions here.

Side Note: Paul makes similar reference to Natural Law in the first few chapters of his Letter to the Romans. It should be noted that not all Christian theologians subscribe to the idea of Natural Law, however.

Lewis thinks a belief in thoroughgoing moral relativism is self-refuting in much the same way that any disbelief in ultimate truth is sawing off the branch one is sitting on. If reasoning is all so vague and unreliable, how would we know it? The assertion that there are no absolutes is itself an absolute. I have a mild disagreement here. I think that holds true for the group beliefs, where many minds over many years can contemplate the core beliefs, discarding and improving. But I am not sure we can apply that to individuals. All of us rely on an approximate reasoning, not likely useless, as whatever it is has allowed us to survive. Existence is not proof of truth, but it is preliminary evidence. Nor is the genetic ruled out, as Lewis thinks, simply because that would imply an unacceptable arbitrariness and meaninglessness. If something is common to the wisest thinkers of all cultures, then it may as easily be an inborn genetic attribute as cultural, without having to bring in any hint of general revelation. There is already evidence that reciprocity has some genetic base. In earlier constructions we imagined things in terms of a few key genes for selflessness or cooperation versus competition and selfishness, but we now think there there are many interacting genes, so that all of us have tendency to both reject and welcome strangers, to be altruistic or self-protective, interacting with cultural directives in odd ways. We seem to not only have a preloaded Plan A and a Plan B for our responses, but an Asub1, Asub2...Asub9 interacting with Bsub1, Bsub2, etc. That our fallen state might push us towarrd all the A's while God constantly intervenes to make sure some B's are always present is not logically ridiculous. To be very Lewisian at this point, I will note that the existence of neither the A's nor the B's proves anything for or against the existence of God. They are just not incompatible with belief.

Yet that is only partially the question now. Lewis tries to undeceive us on this point while it is still fairly early in its popularity. At that point, this was believes by relative few who were deeply involved with the ambiguous disciplines: philosophy, arts and literature, social sciences. The great mass of western humanity was only beginning to think that we might have anything like individual truths. We are at the other end of the fad now. Beginning with those born at about the time Lewis was writing these works in the '40s and continuing for five decades this became a majority view, that morality was 100% culturally variable. To assert, as I often did, that we in fact shared many moral beliefs but ordered them differently was regarded as impossible and puzzling outside the church. We are entering a new era, in which there are moral absolutes and they are based on political and even identity status. Not for nothing is it called political correctness. It cannot easily defend itself on grounds of"correctness" per se. It relies entirely on the power formulations of "Your truth is founded only on your power. Yet our truth is really, really true and must rule. Therefore, our first aim is to take your power. Arguing our own righteousness is irrelevant. We know these things are true and reject all your arguments out of hand."

While there were intellectuals at Oxford and among the philosophers and artists who had a fascination for the Marxism that gave birth to wokeness, that was not the part of communism they were attracted to. They liked the impressions of sharing, justice for the poor, and sheer modernness of socialism. The absolute truth part they would have rejected. Lewis argued against them, poking holes in their self-deception. We are in a different situation now. Those still exist and are still greatly the majority in our societies. But a new heresy is springing up.

I am reading A Preface to Paradise Lost, one of Lewis's academic works, and find the same approach right off the bat. Lewis believes that most readers of his day have a wrong expectation of Milton's poem because they do not understand what epic poetry is supposed to be. That garden must be weeded before we can have any expectation of understanding and appreciation. He discovers another set of weeds almost immediately, the idea (following Eliot) that only great poets can be a 'jury of judgement' of Milton or any other poet, which must be attended to before the first overarching question can even be attempted.

I intended to discuss Till We Have Faces, with is entirely concerned with self-deception, but I have already gone too long. So there will be more to come.

An Unfortunate Number of Lawn Ornaments

In our search to downsize, we looked at townhouses, small houses, and apartments, but nothing seemed quite right. We eventually decided on a home all on one level in a 55+ co-op on the other side of town. We noticed immediately when we first looked in it that there was more light there than the other places, even though the sun was going down at the time.We have become even more convinced of the importance of this as the year has gone on. All on one level is nice – we are used to the phrase “age in place” by now. Having less lawn and driveway to tend to is good as well. The place is friendly and after seven months we know our neighbors here better than those in our old neighborhood after thirty-three years. It’s a bit like being at summer camp all year. But light in the house has turned out to be of enormous importance. Take note. However, there are an unfortunate number of lawn ornaments in the neighborhood.

Fording the Mighty Connecticut River

We were able to travel a little, remaining in NH and driving deep into the less-populated, and less-infected northern parts of the state and staying at a lakeside cabin in Pittsburg. We took our time, stopping at every covered bridge and historical marker on the way up and back, eating at charming little family places that did not have especially good food. Liver and onions is still on menus up there and David almost sprang for it. We took a good look at intervales and notches and bought local postcards to send to the grandchildren. We weren’t allowed to cross into Quebec but were close enough that Tracy’s phone gave her a sudden “Welcome to Canada” notice. We had heard years ago that the Connecticut River that far up is narrow enough to step over, which is almost true.We did get to a spot between the Second and Third Connecticut Lakes where David could leap from stone to stone and Tracy could wade across, about four hundred miles upriver from New Haven.

Don’t say that! “Retired” is so much older than “semi-retired.”

I (David) retired abruptly one Monday morning after reluctantly concluding that close air-sharing issues were not going to be resolvable in my department. After forty-two years at New Hampshire Hospital you’d think it would be more of a wrench. Nope. Still a little boring. I have added another volunteer gig and am looking for more.Thus far they all involve physical labor, including being one of the trash guys (remember trash guys?) at the co-op. For her part, Tracy is never happier than when driving around for some contest.She wins artwork and t-shirts. She won a year’s supply of organic free range eggs. But mostly, she gets the honor of having won.Update: She just won again. 600ドル+ worth of prizes

We’ve Had a Lot of Zoom Calls

Everyone has a CoVid story, so we won’t tell you ours, because it has not been as difficult as many have experienced.As we made more of an effort, we had more online meetings with all family together – ten time zones from Norway to Alaska - than we likely would have otherwise, so that has been good.

Bella Aria Wyman was born to John-Adrian and Jocie in Nome in January, our fifth granddaughter after having had five sons. Tracy is getting very impatient about getting to hold this baby and seeing Aurora and Quinn after a year. We do get to see Emily and Sarah in town and even read to them, for which we are not often enough grateful.

Also on the impatience list is getting to meet Jen, Ben’s girlfriend down in Houston.She is a children’s librarian who drinks tea and carries around multiple and various types of water, so she seems very promising for us as one who will fit in nicely.She even joined the family fantasy football league this year, though I can’t say she is enjoying the experience. David got to meet Jen in January, when he was down help Ben fix things around the house, and even make a guest appearance on his podcast. Chris’s girlfriend Maria finished her degree in Norway this year and works with teens who are going astray.David has told her this is a terrible idea, but she likes it, and it’s too late now anyway. Kyle finished up his six years in the Army reserve and has a serious girlfriend Amy from his unit to show for it. Works for us.

We Have Done All the Ancestry Work We Are Going to Do

We inherited all the genealogical info from both families and added to it beginning in the 1970s. Our interest waned over the years and disappeared altogether when we adopted sons who were not biologically related but were much closer to our lives than the names on documents in a big box.The internet has made research ten times easier and fortunately cousins on both sides started putting in labors of their own, so we picked things up again a few years ago, in order to put all our records and knowledge out there for others. Our DNA is exactly as expected, and most family legends turned out to be partly true.We did learn a few disquieting things and would remind people to be careful what you wish for.Eventually, we pushed as many lines back across the Atlantic as we could and did not pursue most of them any further. We assembled a family museum for a weekend while Ben was home, displaying old photos, letters, and newspaper clippings. There were a few treasures, such as David’s great-great grandfather’s Seaman’s Book in Swedish and his great-grandfather’s inscribed wedding ring from 1894. The granddaughters were barely interested in any of this, being much more interested in pictures of Tracy at her dance recital in 1960and the like. We let our online ancestry membership expire and put all the culled and organized records in boxes.We are done.

Our friend, the father of one of our closest friends, died in the NH Veterans Home in Tilton today at 102 years old, of CoVid. One can quibble and say that people that old have a host of vulnerabilities and it is not reasonable to attribute the death to the recent pandemic, but the reality is that the home usually has about 40 deaths/year and they have had 30 in the last 2+ weeks. He had rallied for a bit earlier this week but then went beneath the waves. His daughter was with him at the time of death, a blessing.

He had served in North Africa, France, England, and I think Belgium during WWII. As he was French Canadian, he was useful in France for sneaking into towns and finding supplies and getting information. He liked to tell stories. I assume most of them were true, or nearly so, which can be unusual for wars so far away and long ago. His grandson's favorite was that his most frightening experience of the war was crossing a field at night and being surprised by a cow. The last story he told me was of briefly being a prisoner of war very late, but such was the poverty and desperation of the German soldiers at the time that he bought his way out by having a guard look the other way - for a pack of cigarettes.

While looking for something else I saw my whole month of posts for January 2011.

It was the month that Jared Loughner shot Gabby Giffords, and includes media bias discussions. (Hint: He wasn't one of those antigovernment right wingers, nor did he see Sarah Palin's website, nor did her website have Giffords in the crosshairs - that would be Obama about Wayne LaPierre - but you would think so from the reporting.) I described the puzzle hunts I used to design. We had discussions about whether it was ever proper for Christians to run up the score, and lots of other topics I had forgotten. Chesterton humorously on Buddhism vs Christianity. Ignore the posts about my songs, unless you really like Arthurian legends. Also, I linked to earlier years, as was common for me then, as I would do "best of" posts four years later in those days. Skim at most. Though you could go down the rabbit hole to all sorts of stuff.

Sad that I find myself so fascinating, yes. But I am amazed at how much sense I made in the old days whenever I visit them. More than now, really. Except not always, when I think "that wasn't my best now, was it?"

After my post on traditional worship, it occurred to me that someone might have put the various pieces from the old "Red Book" up on YouTube even though they are no longer used in the churches. I was correct, and this is one that we sang in the car in parts for years after the Green Book came out and indeed, long after we had left the Lutheran church to become Covenanters. Though my children grew up on this - the car version, that is - I doubt they remember it much.

This is not how reasoning is done.

You don't start by assuming that the election was basically fair and just dismissing all complaints.

Nor does it start by assuming that the election was stolen and then going looking for the evidence.

If you do the former, you start finding your pals saying things like "There is no fraud, don't be ridiculous," followed by "We should seriously consider paying people to move to Georgia." Those two things don't er, go together very well. Also, rolling your eyes about possible software vulnerabilities when you made the exact same complaints yourself a year ago doesn't engender trust either. Corporate media will help you bury that, but the few who remember won't trust you going forward.

If you do the latter, you believe that every rustling in the undergrowth is a wolf, even when it's squirrels. (Squirrels are destructive, of course, and I hate 'em. They're just rats with pretty tails. "A rat in a prom dress" as a young friend said. But they aren't wolves.) Things look strange to you as you stroke your chin. Even after ten in a row have gone down to having a reasonable explanation, you are pretty sure that eleventh one is going to be the killer.

On the other hand, it's not a very tenable situation to say it's impossible when fraud has in fact happened in the past. When things look strange, it is honorable if nothing else, to at least admit that "Yeah, it does look strange. I'm confident there's a good explanation, but I see why it looks suspicious." You might even buy yourself some unity if you take that approach. Even if you are just pretending in order to be polite. Otherwise it looks like you have something to hide and aren't all that confident after all - which makes the suspicious ones even more suspicious.

I have been seeing a lot of motivated reasoning about the election.

Here was my expectation going in. Most of what we call fraud is really "gaming the system." You pass rules in your favor beforehand. You make it hard for people to hold you accountable. You study the system and its vulnerabilities and exploit them while technically remaining in the rules. As the mail-in voting rules were changed I recognised that as classic gaming. People can yell and scream and cry foul, but no one is going to jail.

I did expect that there would be some fraud, because there always is. The claim that there would be more fraud this time, because the Democrats hate Trump even more I found unpersuasive. If you have a trick you are used to getting away with, you use it every time, so it would only be 1) New Tricks or 2) Improved ways of finding Old Tricks. The only way that "massive fraud" was going to show up would be under the new tricks. Trump's strategy for detecting fraud was to shoot at everything that moved and be tenacious.* I actually did think his strategy was going to reveal more fraud, simply because people were looking harder and not letting go. Also, maybe something new, like vulnerable software might have shown out and been a big-ticket item. I didn't think it was likely, but I thought it was possible.

So I thought it was 90% likely that at least some chicanery was going to be exposed. That had dropped to 75% in a couple of weeks, to 50% by three weeks ago, and about 25% by last week. Something could still pop, and I hope so. There are still a few things out there that do not yet have good answers. But if there were a coordinated effort, stuff would be leaking out - innocents who were part of the process who didn't know they "shouldn't tell the election commission about this," or people who got double-crossed when the machinery wasn't used for their favorite also. Or, if it was a series of unrelated frauds some of the scattershot would have hit. The corrupt political machines in cities are there for the local elections and are built to do that job. I'm thinking Atlanta and Detroit, here.

I probably shouldn't be focusing my energy on the noisy ones. The sites I frequent and even their commenters are pretty reasonable, even in parlous times (okay, not Ymarsakr. But he's schizophrenic, so I don't count that). This isn't aimed at them. (Okay, exception again. Some of the commenters at Maggie's fall into the category I'm about to mention.) But I am seeing those words "obviously," "definitely," "unquestionably," all over the place. We've been over this a hundred times. When people say that they mean "I don't have evidence, but I'm really intense, and I want to shove off any possible objections." If the fraud is there it's not obvious, it's not definite, and it is not unquestionable. Draw your fingers back from the keyboard when you are about to type one of those words or their related concepts. It may be so. You may, upon reflection, go forward. But when those words are flying around they start meaning the opposite. I have said up until this year that those have been more common tactics among liberals, but not in 2020. That type of emphatic absolutism, itself a bad sign, has been ours this year.

*A better strategy would have been to be prepared and be smart. I was told today that one of Trump's cases was dismissed because the attorneys filing forgot to pay the fee. Folks, if he had a case he pissed it away. If you know what places are likely trouble spots and don't have top-shelf guys in place a month beforehand you just aren't doing your job. That's the regret I'm going to take away, that a dent in the chronic fraud could have been made, and wasn't.

In the Ransom series, the number of self-deceived people in the first two books is small, because the number of characters is small. In Out of the Silent Planet, Devine has been deceived by Weston, but seems to have participated in this and embraced it. It is Weston who is entirely self-deceived, fixated on his own importance at first, but tinged with the idea that he is accomplishing some great work that will benefit all mankind. While this great cause seems a mere excuse at first for his personal ambitions, it is clear by the end that he does believe a great deal of it. Lewis uses a clever device of having Ransom translate Weston's pompous speech to the Malacandrians into Old Solar, in order to lay bare the vacuity of the underlying ideas of colonising unfallen planets. It is a foreshadowing of Perelandra, in which Weston is now very much convinced of the idea of bringing the evil of earth to unfallen Venus. We see rapidly that Weston is not entirely his own master by this point, infected or even inhabited by something darker. Yet we know that this conquest of his soul has been with his entire cooperation, and even near the end, after Ransom has suddenly turned in surprise and asked "Are you Weston?" he believes he could still come free by an act of will if he would only make some effort. "Pull yourself together. All that stuff you've been talking is lunacy. Say a child's prayer if you can't say a man's."

The third book of the series That Hideous Strength is awash with people deceiving themselves, most of them academics and fringe science-y people. Small wonder that Lewis, very used to watching academics deceive themselves could capture them so convincingly. The main two stories (of seven, as I recently noted) revolve around Mark and Jane Studdock, nice enough young people who have been on the road to deceiving themselves these last few years but are not yet far gone. (I will have to write soon about how the intrusion of the Merlin/Logres plot, which Tolkien felt was due to the influence of Charles Williams and the destruction of an otherwise decent book, creates the most unfair criticism leveled against Jane. A topic for another day.) Jane brings some self-deception from her own beliefs of what a modern woman in general should be like, which prevent her from seeing some obvious things about herself individually. Yet it is Mark who is deeper in, more vulnerable, and more in need of rescue. The various players at the N.I.C.E. are attempting to deceive and manipulate him, yet they are playing off his ambition and need for flattery to achieve it. He gets warnings along the way, including from the only first-rank scientist in the bunch, Bill Hingest, who resigns and tells Studdock to get clear as soon as possible. Mark is being invited, not for his academic value as he supposes, but because of his own facility with words, to be used to manipulate local opinion. (Also, so that they may get at his wife's mystical abilities, part of another plot.) It is in this context that Mark has it explained to him by the head of the rapidly-growing secret police of the N.I.C.E. that the target of this is not the common people he believes so susceptible to manipulation in the press, but his own people, the educated. It is likely the most often quoted section in the book.

Why you fool, it's the educated reader who CAN be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they're all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the high-brow weeklies, don't need reconditioning. They're all right already. They'll believe anything.

I was as surprised as Mark was when I first read that, but I have seen the truth of it repeatedly over the decades.

The Great Divorce is entirely about self-deception, beginning with the title which is a reply to Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Lewis's counter is that however things may appear confused and muddled in this fallen world where good and evil are often mixed, that is not their ultimate state, and the split between them is entire in the end.The structure is that Lewis has a dream about the edges of Hell and Heaven, where residents of the former are brought, if they allow it, to the latter to hear one final appeal to give up their illusion and enter in. These include a bishop who believes his heretical opinions were all about free inquiry and intellectual courage, only to be reminded by a heavenly soul who was a colleague on earth that these in fact advanced his career and made him famous. The bishop wants to continue to teach heresies about what God is like to those who know know God firsthand. His colleague points out that this is not so much forbidden as just silly. It is a nice touch when the bishop goes back to the bus to return to hell, he is humming a hymn: City of God, How Broad and Far. There are women who want to set conditions of control over their son or husband before they will enter, and man who tries to emotionally blackmail his wife that if she truly loved him she would come share his misery in hell.

Yet you likely have already read this and know these characters, so I won't attempt anything complete. I will give you something of an assist, however. There are (at least) three ways to read the book. The most common is to accept the dream as some approximation of what heaven and hell are really like. That Lewis specifically forbids this interpretation near the end has not prevented this. It is such an engaging idea that we want it to be symbolically true. We might fairly ask why, if Lewis does not want us to take this approach he does not stress that more at the beginning, instead saving it for the last pages. In the last section the narrator is watching all these invitations and debates of others in the company of George MacDonald, who answers his intellectual objections about them. We might reasonably think that the narrator is speaking for all of us, asking the questions anyone would. Only at the end are we reminded that the narrator is also one who has come to the edge, and this one's problem is that he has a host of theological objections why the place right in front of him shouldn't and couldn't really be this way. Lewis is making fun of himself here, as one more character who has reasons that are mere excuses for not entering in.

This leads us in to the second way of reading The Great Divorce. All these debates are taking place within ourselves. Lewis uses the older form of dream-narrative, as in Dream of the Rood or Piers Ploughman but readers always knew those images were symbolic forms to teach a lesson. No one in the 10th C thought the cross of Christ was by then encrusted with gems. It pays then, to view each of these debates as something happening in ourselves. This is unpleasant, as we prefer to think about how much that obnoxious boss who is demanding his rights is like a man we knew years ago, or the woman worried about her appearance is reminiscent of so many of the women we work with. If I were to write a group study guide for the book it would be simple. After every encounter all the way back to the bus stop I would ask "Who does this remind you of?" and allow time for discussion. I would then ask "How is this like yourself?" and when no one wanted to discuss that*, I would ask them to quietly write it down and keep it, deeply hidden somewhere. At the end of the study, I would tell the group that they should find some one person to share some of these with.

The third way is to regard the bus ride and encounters as what is happening on earth. God delivers people with excuses to various Solid People, his children here, and we are to help them past their illusions.

*Well I might, but you're not in a group with me.

The update from the NH Veterans Home is that they are up to 20 deaths. Our 102-year-old friend is still alive, but failing. It's tough for the staff, it's tough for the families, and it's tough for the vets who live there, getting moved from place to place and seeing their friends die.

Bsking sends me interesting stuff from Massachusetts. After an initial brutal surge of cases and deaths at the beginning of the pandemic, the state has not had any excess deaths since June 6. You can look at the Worldometer graphs illustrating the C19 deaths. Or here are the numbers over the last few years from CDC. The clarity isn't great, but the spike on the right is February through June. If you just look at deaths per million overall, Massachusetts is one of the highest, but that is largely the early surge. My reading, for what it's worth, is that the huge number of cases came from lots of international contact and lots of contact with New York, which has even more international contact. Since then, they have been very cautious and they have lots of medical personnel and very good hospitals. They know what they are doing, and even with the recent spike in number of cases they have had only a slight rise in deaths.

Instapundit is increasingly selective in its reporting. If you go over it's all "Gee, we hate masks, and they probably don't do much," and "Those Democratic politicians are such hypocrites about not following their own rules," and the continued complaint that the experts haven't covered themselves in glory and have squandered the public trust. Lots of experts said lots of things in February and March, and Reynolds's crew has chosen to focus on the ones who got things wrong and since then, quite intentionally undermined the public trust in the whole group. So where are the deaths coming from, then, now that we are almost up to almost 300,000? There is conveniently very little discussion what should be done, only what shouldn't. Big help.

I like to take different looks on data, so I invite you over to the Worldometers breakdown by state. Click on the "Deaths per million" column and scroll to the bottom. Vermont (130) and Maine(169), very very low. That's northern New England (we'll get to NH in a moment). The Canadian Maritimes right across the border are similarly low. Quebec is not. Next are Hawaii(185) and Alaska(198), which have such low contact with the outside you'd think it would be even better - but still very low. The numbers jump up fast from there to Oregon (248), Utah (296), and Washington (389). Pacific Northwest and Mountain West. Mountain West was very low all along and has just started to spike. New Hampshire at 416, and when we remember that SE NH is the farther suburbs of Boston, that's pretty low. The rest of the state is not quite as low as VT and ME, but more in line with that. Then another jump to two from Appalachia, KY and WV. Note that Virginia is not much farther up the list despite having half the suburbs of DC up top and North Carolina just a bit further up despite its urban Golden Triangle, so being up in the mountains seems to a considerable advantage. Wyoming, Idaho, and Colorado are in there, more Mountain West states. Is level of interaction going to turn out to be the dominant factor? You can't catch it if you don't see anyone I suppose.

California? I don't know. The top half might be like the Pacific Northwest, but huge Los Angeles has got to dominate the numbers, wouldn't you think? Oklahoma is an outlier, doing better than all the states that border it. So that's the best 15. Northern New England, the separated states, the Pacific Northwest, Appalachia, and the Mountain West. Moving to the top of the chart, it is largely the big urban centers of the Northeast, but it is worth noting that they hit the top of the chart with lots of deaths early on but have leveled out. the rest of the country has been catching up with them. Louisiana and Mississippi are in there - that seems related, and the two Dakotas went from near the bottom to near the top over the past two months. Does that mean the Midwest or Mountain West are going to be hit hardest next? If you think yes, what's your theory about that?

Just some links to Lewis giving examples of people deceiving themselves. I will comment going forward, but it's better to let the man speak for himself.

With regards to becoming a churchgoer and what that means, Screwtape has some advice to Wormwood about what state of mind the patient should have about church. Chapter II

From the book Undeceptions, the problem of people not wanting to think of themselves as Miserable Offenders.This is an ongoing problem. The last Anglican sermon I heard thought that the church has emphasised this too much and that we should focus on thinking how good and worthy we are. Perhaps pitiable will open it up to you.

Lewis gave an address to students warning them against the dangers of wanting to become part of The Inner Ring.

I used the phrase in the last post, and I think people get what I am saying and roughly assent to it. But our impression is still often strongly conditioned by what we hear and think we know. Let me give a common example. There is a prevailing myth that keeps showing up that Appalachian English is closer to, and a preserved version of the Elizabethan English of Shakespeare, and perhaps even farther back, to Chaucer. I seems that every ten years since 1860 some person with a degree stumbled upon a feller in West Virginia saying "afeared" or a woman in Tennessee saying "britches" and leaped to the conclusion that there is something purer and older about it. I will note in fairness to such folks that the accent in Appalachia, while not identical to older forms of English, is likely the closest thing we have. The Great Vowel Shift primarily occurred in the 15th C, but there were waves of it up until 1700. Yet the northern dialects and certainly the Scottish were much less affected throughout that whole time. The English Borderers and the Scots-Irish were the primary settlers of Appalachia, but there were always some African-Americans and Germans in there bending the language in unpredictable ways as well. All off those were less affected by the vowel shift, all waves.

But isolated languages can go through more change, not less. Peoples trading up and down the coast using a half-dozen regional dialects will tend to draw closer to each other, especially in vocabulary, not get farther apart. There is a counterforce that the traders also have contact with people speaking other languages, which will pull them farther from the dialect of their grandfathers, mostly in vocabulary, but somewhat in syntax. The isolated (mountain or island) folks won't hear that as much. In the main, isolated groups tend to get more and more distinct, as in Papua New Guinea or the Caucasus. They do preserve older forms - but each valley preserves different older forms. So in Appalachia there is the nice old word "poke," meaning pouch or pocket (clear cognates) as in not buying a pig in a poke - not buying something you haven't looked at closely.

The coastal people also preserved older forms that the mountain people dropped. Like what, you say? Like everything else. All dialects preserve some old things and drop others. The 90% majority doesn't notice - it's just normal talk. Only when they encounter the isolated minority do they notice.

My son's podcast this week (First Methodist Houston, Episode 97) was a discussion of the false dichotomy of traditional versus contemporary worship - especially music. I liked it, but there was one point that they had not really covered in the half-hour that I would like to bring in. There is no traditional worship in the sense people think. It has become a commonplace to notice that what was contemporary worship in 1980 is different from contemporary 2000 and contemporary 2020. This seems to amuse people and many think it proves something-or-other. Yet it is just the same thing as has always happened, just on a somewhat shorter time-scale.

I wrote the 100th anniversary history of the Lutheran church I was attending in 1981, the congregation of my mother, my mother's mother, and her mother's mother. One goes through old records, of dinners celebrating the new building or the retirement of a pastor, or of the 25th and 50th anniversary celebrations. I also knew the oldest parishioners or knew of them, and they beamed at me, Louise's grandson (or Augusta's great-grandson) doing the history. They were quite willing to be interviewed and talk. I pulled out a very early bulletin from a dinner and pointed to hymn titles - insert Swedish Chef talk here - asking if they remembered it. Usually, none of them did. Occasionally, we would grab an old hymnal and look it up and try to pick out the melody and a light would dawn "Oh yes, I remember that tune, I think." These women (and one man, I think) would not have been thrown that it was in Swedish, as a few still preferred that. Yet a hymn important enough to a congregation to have sung it at the dedication of a building in 1888 was generally not recognised by people born around 1900. They remembered old Swedish hymn and still loved them, and were they to travel to that time and sit around a piano they would doubtless find much that was shared. But not all.

One can attribute this to switching from Swedish to English in the 1940s, which happened in many other immigrant congregations, but this doesn't begin to cover it. The hymns I sang in a music traditional Congregationalist church in the 1960s overlap only slightly with what they are singing now, and that is in a full-choir/big organ/4 verses hymnal/no-screens-ever church now. We sing an old favorite like "Guide Me O Thou Great Jehovah" and think Ah, just as in the days of my youth. They don't do this nowadays in other churches, more's the pity. That is a partial truth. Some still carry forward among the Presbyterians, the Episcopal, the Baptist, and other English-speaking churches, and the Methodists still do sing some Charles Wesley. But they don't sing quite what they used to a hundred years ago. Churches vary hymns week to week and some just drop out. As with so many things, we don't notice what is missing.

The music for holidays hold on the longest, yet even those get weeded. I have a fantasy of what will happen when the youth croup comes to carol me at the nursing home or when I am shut in, and they ask me if I have any favorites. The fantasy itself is now dated, as I don't think youth groups do this much anymore. But just pretending, I will smile in innocence and say "Yes! Once In Royal David's City," and when they look alarmed, or blank, I will offer "Lully, Lullay?" "Good Christian Men, Rejoice?" I think those are all on those little sheets you've got there."

The Catholics switched out from Latin at Vatican II, but otherwise we would think of them as exemplars of continuity, and this is true in many ways. But the music is quite different these days. The Anglican Book of Common Prayer is similar now to the 1928 version...but not quite. They did hold one version from about 1662 to 1840, which is quite a long run. Yet in that time the music changed as well, as well as what feasts and fasts were prominent. The Liturgical Year has anchor points, but is flexible. We think of long-held traditions, but Presbys of 1900 didn't sing what Presbys of 1800 did, nor is the order of worship the same. When they crossed from the old country to here they came in contact with other hymns and adopted them over time. "How Great Thou Art" was Russian, then Swedish. Episcopalians visiting England find that they know the tunes and the words, but they are mixed up. Go to YouTube and find a long selection of old hymns. You won't know

Much does hold. The Mass retains similarities across centuries, but not entire, and national differences have always been there.

What is happening is not Contemporary vs Tradition. Those that say they are trying to hold on to longstanding traditions in order preserve truths of the faith are not accurate and I fear, not even always honest. They attempt to lay claim to the entirety of the historical faith and ask "Well, you don't want to give up that, do you? So here then, keep these hymns. They've got all that, and this new music doesn't."

What underlies it all is Everyone Has Preferences, no two alike. So what will we do about that? Some of my favorites are not sung anywhere anymore, I don't think. No one is singing Bob Stromberg these days, are they? (He mostly does comedy now.) We have pieces from the liturgy in the Lutheran Book of Worship (Red Book: LCA Augustana) that I'm sure not Lutherans even do anymore. The Agnus Dei ffrom the Chicago Jazz Mass circa 1970? Didn't think so. Yet I find plenty to like, wherever I go. Some things are silly, yes, with people trying to recapture some folky image from 1960 or 1980 - the songs they worshiped with when they first knew Christ, yes, those are always dear, or clinging to a camp meeting motif that only the very oldest in the congregation even remember. Mine are different.

What will we do is the real question?

Though David French's new piece on Christian Celebrity is not based on CS Lewis, he is referenced and quoted, and I thought it a propos to our discussion here. I had offered the opinion this morning that non-denoms were likely particularly vulnerable because there is little or no accountability structure, but the examples French gives include denominational offenders. His point that celebrity itself can make you think you are above the rules. I also wonder if those prone to mania are more susceptible.

Moreover, the celebrity’s apparent talent and relevant success teach him to do the things he must not do: to trust himself, to believe that he is a person of virtue, to believe that he is important. This is particularly dangerous when talent and success almost always create both opportunity and motive for serious sin.

French writes about the qualities that offer some protection, the first of which is humility. He closes with an aside about his time in Iraq during The Surge as a lead in to an interesting version of a Christmas carol.

The opinion pieces I see referenced from the NY Times, the New Yorker, Slate, etc seem to have become a sort of genre fiction, like romances or even more, westerns. The reader knows what to expect but enjoys having the repetitive experience, and in the end is reassured that their desires, their intuitions, their values, their heroes and heroines are the right ones. Everything is put nicely in place by the end. The current fashion is that the bad orange man has been banished, and all's right with the world. But that is only one variant. It has been going on for some time. It's the Hallmark Channel for urban liberals. I wonder if opinion pieces in the major corporate outlets have always been genre fiction?

This is sometimes an Alto-Soprano duet, because of the range. She's not the only one who does this by any means, but it's still an added level of impressiveness.

Not at all like a goose-step, actually. This is a traveling act from the Netherlands. You can have them at your festival, if you like. Well, likely not in North America you can't.

I wouldn't try it with chickens, by the way.

I see over at Althouse that the idea of a straight actor playing a gay person is called "gayface" and is now forbidden. It is rapidly becoming clear that there is only one solution. As an actor, you can only play yourself. Everything else is insulting.