I believe that as good solid American Reformed Presbyterian folk we need to oppose this rising tide of liturgical sentiment and save our churches from what is a blatant attempt to get us to pray to Mary, kiss the pope's ring and put statues of saints in our sanctuary and on our lawns.

I base my opposition on two thoughts. First, we have inherited a rich, full-bodied worship tradition from the New England Puritans which has been painstakingly improved upon and nuanced by various Baptist, Revivalist and Charismatic influencers and contributors over the past two centuries and I see no reason why we should ever want to undo all of the work that has been done and return to a worship form that was obviously not good enough to survive in Reformed churches. The worship form that most churches use today is a product of the highest and best scholarship of modern Christianity. Come on, really, do you think that they came up with the idea of putting announcements between the first and second song overnight? You don't come up with something like that on a whim. It took many years of studying the practices of the anciensynagogueses, (which required many trips to the Holy Land) to uncover the secret of the order in which the Jews, and consequently the first century Christians, let everyone know about youth trips, pot lucks and lost mittens. How about the practice of having someone sing a solo accompanied by a cassette tape right before the sermon? That's not the sort of thing that just pops into your head when you wake up in the morning. That is a practice based on minutes and minutes of serious reflection about the best way to please God in worship. We need to return and consult the countless tracts and leaflets have been written defending the office of song leader, the effectiveness of breezy, casual banter between the preacher and the congregation during the sermon and all of the nineteenth century treatises on why pastors ought to wear business suits. I fear these modern liturgists are neglecting a wealth of scholarship in their attempt to get us back to worshipping the way Catholics do. Any attempt to return to a worship form more than fifty years old is both a trampling under of the worship of our ancestors and an attempt to enslave the people of God in superstition and traditionalism, and that my friends, is the road to Rome. And Rome is bad. My dad and my granddad worshipped in Baptist churches all their life. And they were pretty good guys. They never once uttered a Latin word in church nor read one in their bulletin. So why should I do anything different from them?

Second, we don't live in a culture where things like highly ritualized liturgy are really accepted, so why should we even try to force it? Non-Christian people who walk into church and see all of the robes and the kneelers and the big bulletin and the TWO songbooks are liable to run out of there screaming as if their head had suddenly caught fire. I can honestly say I've seen it happen. People running out of church, that is. It is usually the two songbooks bit that does them in. You can't expect your common everyday person to understand when to sing out of the red book and when to sing out of the blue one. Excuse me, but not everyone has the luxury of a seminary education. When people visit a church and they see all of the pomp and the pageantry that they don't understand, it is going to be offensive to them. You can literally hear them "hrumph" every couple of minutes. This is not a sign of their spiritual condition, mind you, nor is it a mark of their lack of humility and teachability, it is the response we should expect when we try to forcibly put words into people's mouths and try to feed them the Lord's supper every stinking week. We need to back off, cool down and rethink what we are doing here. If anything we do makes an outsider feel a little bit uncomfortable, we must immediately stop doing whatever it is we're doing and find a better more suitable way to please them.

And so with these things in mind, I intend to propose a few things to get us back on the straight and narrow:

1. We need to assign each visitor or guest a deacon or an elder to sit next to them and to make sure that they are entirely at ease with everything that is going on. He should constantly check to see if they need the thermostat adjusted, if they would like something from the beverage cart like a pastry or a bagel, if they like the particular song that is being sung or whether they disagree with anything in the sermon. It would be entirely appropriate for the designated visitor-pleaser to raise his hand and ask the pastor to rephrase or take back a statement if the visitor is in any way uncomfortable with what is being said. This is the only way that we can insure that every visitor is 100% happy with everything that goes on.

2. We need to sing at least one Fanny Crosby hymn per week. Our wives will become weak and bitter if they don't have an opportunity to express themselves in the gilded words and precious tunes of 19th century American hymnody. And while we are on that topic, we need to elect a few of them to the session, just to keep the elders honest, on the right track and to help filter out bad decisions before they get to the congregation at large. They can serve in sort of an advisory capacity. That would be good.

3. It is imperitive that we do everything in our power to distance ourselves as much as possible from anything that appears even vaguely Roman Catholic. Catholics wear robes. Our pastor ought to wear a golf shirt. Catholics kneel. We ought to stand and hold hands in a big circle when we pray and say "yes Jesus" and "thank you Lord" whenever the mood strikes us. Catholics worship in big buildings with beautiful architecture that will stand for centuries. We need to move into a High School gym, or better yet, a tent just like the old timey days when people knew what it was like to get a dose of the Holy Ghost. You get the picture. If you see a Catholic doing anything, and I mean anything, I would ask you to write it down and see if we can't find a better way to do it. We must come out from among them and be separate.

In conclusion, the Reformed Church in America is just fine the way it is today. We don't need to change a thing.We are on the right track.

I'm thinking about writing an essay titled "Yankee Hospitality: An Urban Apologetic" in order to dissect the myth that all Southerners and country folk are naturally hospitable and all Yankees and city dwellers are naturally jackasses and to argue that Reformed Christians ought to give more thought to living in cities than they do.

Like I could title one section, "Why goats almost never respond to the gospel, but people sometimes do."

But I already know that no one is going to take it the right way. So why don't I just save myself the trouble?

I've had a cough since September.

He's been around so long that I thought I'd give him a name. Charlie.

I'm addicted to cough drops. It's not that I hold any ill will for Charlie, it's just that I don't like him speaking up in the middle of my sentences. Or in the middle of other peoples sentences. And I don't like it when he talks for like five minutes straight. It's annoying.

Come to think of it, I've had more sinusy-head achy-coughy junk in the last year and a half than I have had my whole life. It has been one non-stop phlegm party.

Maybe if I go soak my head in bleach or something it will kill all the germs and start over. Or something.

You know that "extreme" no longer means "extreme" when it is used to describe tater tots.

Yeah. Sonic is advertising EXTREME Tater Tots. They're like regular tater tots. Only they are somehow more extreme.

I'm curious about Sonic. What is their key demographic? Who are they aiming for? Do you eat there?

For some reason I never have a desire to go sit around and eat in my car, and I'm wondering what kind of person enjoys that sort of thing.

I also hate styrofoam cups and that's how they serve their drinks. So I'm not on board with the whole Sonic scene.

I saw some cows in a pasture chewing grass right next to a billboard that read, "Beef: It's what's for dinner."

It is as if the cows were saying, "(munch munch) Wonder what that sign says? (munch munch)"

I want to walk into a McDonald's with no shirt and no shoes and say, "Hey, I'm just trying to keep my end of the bargain."

Church sign in Bastrop, LA -

"Download your worries and get online with God!"

Huh?

Our parents and our grandparents moved away from the city to the suburbs and to the country. And they bought televisions. Many of them prohibited smoking and drinking while they encouraged the liberal use of the situation comedy and police drama. The implicit invitation was to drink the prime time offering to its dregs. Laugh right along with the laugh track. If you have anything to say, wait until a commercial. They gradually took from us real human interaction, and replaced it with red, blue and green pixels.

Now we don't know how to relate to other human beings. We don't know how to make and keep friends. We don't know how to talk to each other or to enjoy each other or to invest ourselves in people who don't live under our roof. We like our TV people. They don't require anything of us. And they give so much.

The more I think about it, the more I think that if our generation is going to make any substantial cultural advances, it is going to have to stop spending this vast amount of time spectating. We are wrapped up in either real people on television acting out wildly fantastic scenarios or in fantastic characters acting out grossly realistic scenarios. Either way, there is not enough reality. We are immensely concerned with the lives of fake people. People whose names will be nothing more than the answers to trivia questions in a few years.

Let's fix things at the point where our parents went wrong. Let's move back to the city and leave the TV's in the woods.

I've got an idea. Next time you go to pick up the remote to surf around the television, pick up the phone instead. Call somebody. Ask them what they're up to and tell them you are coming over. Load the kids in the car. Stop on the way for a six pack or a bottle. Sing some songs. Light some tobacco. Poke some fun. Wrestle. Raise a ruckus. Stay until the kids fall asleep or until the neighbors call the authorities. (If you are in Louisiana, I'm in the directory.)

Just some thoughts. I know I'm not one to talk. I've got my own ways to waste time. I'm just getting restless with the way things are.

I keep seeing articles like this one from the Boston Globe where TV execs are complaining about low ratings. Jason Garrett had some pretty good comments on this yesterday, and Jon Barlow asked about Letterman's recent ratings drop.

Well, I don’t know why everyone else has stopped watching, but I know why I haven’t followed a single TV series since “Seinfeld” went off the air five years ago. It’s all crap. Every bit of it. There is absolutely nothing worth investing my time in. It has all been done. There is nothing left to do. Like paintings on black velvet, the limits of the medium have been established. Time to move on to other things. I believe Seinfeld successfully deconstructed the entire art form, and now there is nothing left to appreciate or enjoy.

In my literature class on Monday morning, we worked through Alexis De Tocqueville’s comments on the position of art in a democratic society. Simply stated, because there is no aristocracy in a democracy, there are few patrons who can subsidize the sort of skilled artists who produce high art forms. Art, therefore, must be accessible to everyone regardless of their taste or education, because the only way that the artist can make a living is by selling it to the common man. The most valuable art, then, is the most functional. As this principle has worked itself out in our country over the last two hundred years, it has meant the death of the symphony and the meteoric rise of fart-joke movies.

So I asked the boys in my class to look at our modern “stereopticon” (to borrow from Richard Weaver) – the cultural triumvirate of the music, movie and broadcasting industries – and tell me what is the greatest driving factor in the production of the respective arts. The answer of course is not some transcendent art ethic, or an aesthetic sense… the answer is money. The art must sell well, or else the art is worthless to the culture. The television executive doesn’t care about the artistic value or cultural worth of what he puts on the screen, so long as you sit there long enough to watch the commericals.

TV shows are just big shiny wrappers for commercials. The central reason that television networks exist is NOT to provide you with great entertainment or to strengthen your moral fiber or to teach you something. The reason that television networks produce television shows is to get you to watch commercials. So the implied question is that since it is obvious that the people who financially back these productions don't really care about the intrinsic value of them, why should we care about them at all? Why should we invest our emotions into something so insipid and worthless?

My purpose with my class was not to bash them if they like this or that show. I simply wanted them to know what the game is, and understand the rules. They need to know that if they are going to enjoy something, then they need to have a better reason for enjoying it than "I'm watching it because it is on."

I warned them also about the nature of the movie industry. Movies are a product. Just like shoes or tires or cans of corn, the factory has to keep turning their products out in order to stay in business. So why did this studio work hard to produce this movie and release it this week? Because it has an important message to get to the culture? No. The studio is releasing it to theaters because it has been four weeks since it last released a movie. It is time to release another. Irrespective of the quality or artistic worth of the film, it must be released. "Come on, darlin. Load up the kids. There’s a new Disney picture to go see. We must see it. It is Disney, after all." No wonder there is so much pure tripe produced. The production companies can’t wait around until they get a really great concept or a beautiful story, they have to work with what they’ve got. They have got to stay in business.

So these industries churn this stuff out at an incredible pace. There is a ridiculous volume of music being produced. Is any of it really that good? No. Not really. It’s just there. It’s new. It’s catchy today. But it is worn out and passe tomorrow. Who wants to listen to last summer’s top ten pop songs? Forget last summer, what can we do that is going to sell records right now? We’ve got to move these refrigerators. We’ve got to move these color TV’s.

Every once in a while something good slips through, and that’s great. I believe that there really are some good artists out there who begrudgingly play the game in order for their music to get heard or for their message to be seen. They are difficult to find, but they are there. Overall, however, our culture is heaving its last few breaths. It is just not possible to sink much further. The only step downward that we haven’t taken is that we do not yet have a pure gladiatorial form of entertainment where real live humans struggle between life and death, (though we may be close to it with the rise in popularity of NASCAR.)

Western culture will need to die before there can be a resurrection. I’m just hanging around, watching to see which Survivor series or which Farrelly brothers movie is going to be the one to flatline it. In the meantime, I really don't care at all what the networks do. You lost me, and I'm not coming back to you. Thanks NBC, but I'll decide for myself what is "must see TV".

Hey look! The University of Louisiana at Monroe made it onto the ESPN college football poll!

Of course they are ranked in the bottom ten.

Here is a really cool quiz testing your knowledge of 80's pop music lyrics. Let me know how well you scored.