Mundane Work for Christ -- George Herbert

All may of thee partake: 

Nothing can be so mean, 

Which with his tincture (for thy sake) 

Will not grow bright and clean.

A servant with this clause 

Makes Drudgerie divine: 

Who sweeps a room, as for thy laws, 

Makes that and th' action fine.

This is that famous stone 

That turneth all to gold: 

For that which God doth touch and own 

Cannot for lesse be told.

-- George Herbert

" ... merely desiring to act "for thy sake" is enough, not because of any power or merit in human will, but because "his tincture" (this tincture, but also his tincture, Christ's own attitude - his own speech infused into the speaker) has already transformed the unworthy to "gold"'. But the other meaning of 'his' is not 'this' ... but rather 'its'. In other words the tincture 'for thy sake' belongs not merely to Christ but also to the action; the motive of the doer is also 'for thy sake'. The ambiguous 'his' attributes the transformation of the deed to both grace and good will.

"Herbert had a precedent for a pun turning on the vexed paradox of free will co-operating with grace in Spenser's Faerie Queene. After the Red Cross Knight has defeated the dragon, Una thanks him:

Then God she prais'd, and thank't her faithful knight,

That had achiev'd so great a conquest by his might.

(I.xi.55.8-9)

"As A. C. Hamilton remarks in his edition of The Faerie Queene (London and New York, 1977), 'There is a deliberate ambiguity in his: it refers to both God and the Knight. Man's might and God's grace merge as the Knight is revealed in the lineaments of Christ...' "

"Christ as the philosopher's stone in George Herbert's 'The Elixir.'.." Retrieved Dec 11 2021 from

 https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Christ+as+the+philosopher%27s+stone+in+George+Herbert%27s+%27The+Elixir.%27.-a055015201

APA style: Christ

Truths Out of Favor

"For, dear me, why abandon a belief

Merely because it ceases to be true?

Cling to it long enough, and not a doubt

It will turn true again, for so it goes.

Most of the change we think we see in life

Is due to truths being in and out of favor.

As I sit here, and often times, I wish

I could be monarch of a desert land

I could devote and dedicate forever

To the truths we keep coming back and back to."

––from "The Black Cottage" Robert Frost

Every Meeting we Meet a Stranger

"We die to each other daily. What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during which we knew them. And they have changed since then. To pretend that they and we are the same is a useful and convenient social convention which must sometimes be broken. We must also remember that at every meeting we are meeting a stranger."

T.S. Eliot, The Cocktail Party

Binge Reading the Bible

"I borrow my basic concept from binge-watching television series. In other words, set a ridiculous goal, a goal that seems a few steps beyond what’s reasonable or doable. Try to get through the entire Bible in as short a span as possible."

The author discusses how important it is to see the Bible as a whole book. How easy it is to forget one part by the time one gets to another part. First he suggests doing it in three months, then one month. And then finally one week. Which he did -- 

What will reading the Bible in a week do to you?

For the very interesting rest of the story go here: 

https://www.biblestudymagazine.com/novemberdecember-2021-arnold

a Silly Ritual -- Changing Clocks

"In the coming days, tens of millions of Americans and their children will participate in a silly, unhealthy annual ritual rooted in mysticism and superstition. And they’ll also celebrate Halloween."

https://capitolism.thedispatch.com/p/enddst

Organic Farming Imposed

"Sri Lanka’s organic farming mandate leads to food shortage, economic emergency.

"One needn’t take a position on organic farming to see the folly in Sri Lanka’s decision. This is a classic case of fatal conceits run amok — of lofty ideas and one-dimensional strategies that hold little regard for localized knowledge and the complexity of the human person.

"In April, the Sri Lankan government banned the import and use of fertilizers and agrochemicals, including insecticides and herbicides, marking a significant step in their goal to become the world’s first country to produce 100% organic agriculture.

"According to President Gotabhaya Rajapakse, the move was necessary to reverse the country’s overuse of harmful chemicals, which he says has led to “environmental degradation, water pollution, and has caused increased greenhouse gas emissions.”

"Now, just months after the decision, the country’s food supply is already in crisis.

On Afghanistan Biden still blames Trump

The Biden administration has consistently blamed the Trump administration's 2020 Doha agreement with the Taliban for the Afghanistan debacle. The agreement, the Biden team insists, left the president no choice but to remove U.S. forces unconditionally from Afghanistan by Aug. 31. In fact, President Biden's failure to hold the Taliban to the terms of the Doha agreement contributed to this disaster.

The agreement promised the Taliban an earlier U.S. departure, by May 1, 2021, in return for a pledge that they would prevent the use of Afghanistan soil by any group against the security of the U.S. and its allies. Mr. Biden managed to extend the date by four months but was still bound by the basic terms of the agreement. The Biden administration believed that if the U.S. failed to remove forces by Aug. 31, the Taliban could renege on their commitment and allow attacks on U.S. troops remaining in the country, so the only way for the U.S. to avoid this danger was to withdraw, honoring its end of the Doha deal in the hope that the Taliban would spare American forces.

The Biden administration has made this contrived argument repeatedly, and Mr. Biden reiterated it at a press conference last week, following the deaths of 13 U.S. service members in Kabul. But the administration misrepresents the Doha agreement. The U.S. promised to withdraw from Afghanistan by May 1, 2021, but only if the Taliban met commitments of their own. One of them was a pledge to participate in an "intra-Afghan dialogue," to achieve a "permanent and comprehensive ceasefire" and to agree upon a "political roadmap" for Afghanistan's future. If the Taliban didn't honor this commitment, the U.S. had no obligation to withdraw.

Trump administration officials emphasized the conditional nature of the U.S. commitment when the Doha agreement was signed. As Defense Secretary Mark Esper put it in March 2020, Doha "is a conditions-based agreement." If "we assess that the Taliban is honoring the terms of the deal," including "progress on the political front between the Taliban and the current Afghan government," the U.S. will "reduce our presence toward a goal of zero in 2021." But Mr. Esper made clear that the American withdrawal wouldn't be automatic. "If progress stalls," he warned, "then our drawdown likely will be suspended, as well."

The Taliban didn't honor its political commitments and ultimately took Afghanistan by force. The Biden administration's claim that the Doha agreement left no choice but to quit Afghanistan unconditionally is false. Given the Taliban's behavior, the U.S. wasn't obligated to withdraw by May 1, by Aug. 31, or any other date. Withdrawal was a choice. And the Biden administration's announcement of this choice in April triggered the Taliban offensive to retake Afghanistan and set the disastrous U.S. departure in motion.

Neither the Doha agreement nor its implementation was perfect. Even former members of the Trump administration argue that it failed to protect the interests of the Afghan government adequately and put too much faith in the Taliban's willingness to share power. In addition, these critics maintain that President Trump's determination to reduce U.S. forces, despite the Taliban's failure to honor its commitments, undermined the agreement and strengthened the Taliban's position. But under the terms of the agreement, Mr. Biden could have insisted that the Taliban meet its obligations or face renewed U.S. military pressure.

The Biden administration's hope to succeed where others had failed, finally ending America's long war in Afghanistan, apparently blinded it to the pitfalls of committing to an unconditional withdrawal from Afghanistan by a date certain. The administration's subsequent attempts to shift blame to the Trump administration have led it to misrepresent the Doha agreement and to claim falsely that it made an avoidable disaster inevitable. This falsehood has exacerbated the current crisis.

By S. Paul Kapur  Sept 1 AD 2021

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Mr. Kapur is a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution and is a Vandenberg Coalition Adviser. He served on the State Department's Policy Planning staff, 2020-21