Fire and Knowledge

NPR : Stop the Madness: Make Your Own Salad Dressing

A fun and interesting way to stop purchasing stuff you can do yourself (namely, making salad dressing). This is also a good way to know what goes into what you are eating. Too bad they didn’t list a ranch recipe, though. An excerpt:

In a country where people routinely purchase premade versions of easy-to-make foods like croutons (seasoned toast), pancake mix (flour and baking powder) and even pre-buttered garlic bread, it shouldn’t be a surprise that they also unthinkingly squander money on sugared-up, bottled salad dressings.

Look at the labels of brand-name dressings and, almost invariably, a prominent ingredient is high-fructose corn syrup.

Making your own salad dressing is embarrassingly easy — and cheaper than buying it in the store. Of course, preparing vinaigrette every day could become a nuisance, especially, if, like me, you often forget to make it until the last minute when hot food is already on the table. My solution: Make big batches of the stuff and store it in wine bottles or mason jars.

(via Paulo)

Taking the Tube Underground

Anne Marie Waters writes about her reasons why to remove television from the family hearth. I could not agree more. An excerpt:

I recall the evening my husband sat on the floor, packing up as we prepared to move out of our apartment and into our first house, fingering some of the great classics of literature he owned as he pulled them from shelves and placed them into boxes. “I never have time to read this stuff,” he mused. “But, back when I did, it really stuck with me, you know? You don’t forget the great books—they change who you are.”

I begrudgingly had to admit to myself that I couldn’t remember one issue from all the political debate and commentary programs I had watched that had really changed my life meaningfully—or even at all. Of all those countless hours I had spent watching television, nothing remained, not one memory of having learned anything true or valuable or lasting. I couldn’t even remember the topics of the shows we had watched just the night before….

As the older boys ran ahead, we were sad to notice that almost every single house we passed in our neighborhood had the curtains drawn, every light in the house off but for the iridescent glow of the big-screen TVs dominating the front living rooms.

It struck me that we don’t even need to do much to be very different from the world, to offer something better than the mediocrity that the world offers. And those of us who want to transform the culture around us need not be known just for our opposition to a corrupt culture.

We can offer something better and richer: homes that beckon with the glow not of our enormous TV sets, but of lives in which imperfect people strive to love and engage with one another by the power of the gospel–homes offering good music, great books, warm conversation, reflection and authenticity and laughter and service and children and activity and true hope . . . the kind of lives not found anywhere but in real life.

We still (sometimes) remember that we cannot be free if our minds and voices are controlled by someone else. But we have neglected to understand that we cannot be free if our food and its sources are controlled by someone else. The condition of the passive consumer of food is not a democratic condition. One reason to eat responsibly is to live free.

—Wendell Berry, “The Pleasures of Eating,” in The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry (2002), p. 323

He is praying to a God whose works he is prepared at any moment to destroy. What could be more wicked than that, or more mad?

—Wendell Berry, “Christianity and the Survival of Creation,” in The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry (2002), p. 319

Peace? It may bring other gifts, but is there a single Londoner to whom Christmas is peaceful? The craving for excitement and for elaboration has ruined that blessing. Goodwill? Had she seen any example of it in the hordes of purchases? Or in herself?

–E. M. Forster, Howards End (1910), p. 71

Modern Christianity generally has cut itself off from both nature and culture. It has no serious or competent interest in biology and ecology. And it is equally uninterested in the arts by which mankind connects itself with nature. It manifests no awareness of the specifically Christian cultural lineages that connect us to our past. There is, for example, a splendid heritage of Christian poetry in English that most church members live and die without reading or hearing or hearing about. Most sermons are preached without any awareness at all that the making of sermons is an art that has at times been magnificent. Most modern churches look like they were built by robots without reference to the heritage of church architecture or respect for the place; they embody no awareness that work can be worship. Most religious music now attests to the general assumption that religion is no more than a vaguely pious (and vaguely romantic) emotion.

Modern Christianity, then, has become as specialized in its organizations as other modern organizations, wholly concentrated on the industrial shibboleths of “growth,” counting its success in numbers, and on the very strange enterprise of “saving” the individual, isolated, and disembodied soul.

—Wendell Berry, “Christianity and the Survival of Creation,” in The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry (2002), p. 318

Next Tuesday: Replacing “Lord, help me trust in You” with “Lord, I trust in You”

This was good for my soul.

I said to Jesus, “Help me trust in Your unfailing love.” And then I sank again into morbidity, to hunker down until such time as He saw fit to answer me. No rush, I thought. He is the Lord. What can I do until He acts?

A friend objected to my piety. Not “Lord, help me to trust in You” (quoth he) but “Lord, I trust in You! Yea, by Your grace I trust in You!” There’s something psychologically different here, my chastened soul took note: The first prayer has a pious sound but never gets around to business, letting me postpone the joy it seeks a month or two, the meanwhile dithering in unbelief while waiting for divinity to bring me ’round robotically. The second prayer enlists the mind and soul and will, no more defaulting into foolish thoughts of Tuesday next.

Paul commands, “Rejoice!” (Philippians 3:1). David says, “Rejoice!” (Psalm 32:11). But that will have to wait a week or two ’cause now I’m in a stew. There’s something I want badly and I must be anxious till it’s mine. A major life decision has me tied in knots until it’s made. And Satan has a laundry list of reasons why I should not sing (Zechariah 3:1). So pray excuse me from the banquet of His joy: “I have bought a field, and I must go out and see it. . . . I have bought five yoke of oxen, and I go to examine them. . . . I have married a wife, and therefore I cannot come” (Luke 14).

No. This nonsense stops today. Not “I’ll rejoice someday,” but “I’m rejoicing now.” Not “I will trust someday,” but “I am trusting now.” I have decided that William J. Reynolds’ hymn, “I Have Decided to Follow Jesus,” is not Arminianism but decisiveness. Once a day or 50 times a day, as needed, I will fight off fear with praise.

“To be parted from your house, your father’s house—it oughtn’t to be allowed. It is worse than dying. I would rather die than—Oh, poor girls! Can what they call civilization be right, if people mayn’t die in the room where they were born?” [Mrs. Wilcox]

–E. M. Forster, Howards End (1910), p. 70