For those who don’t know, Sufjan Stevens is streaming his five Christmas albums over on the Asthmatic Kitty website. Take a listen to awesome renditions of classics, often with interesting twists on their titles. (I’ve put the title of the album on which the songs appear for easy reference.) “Away in a Manger” (Vol. 4, Joy) with a banjo? Fantastic! “Holy, Holy, etc.” (Vol. 1, Noel)? Splendid! “O Come O Come Emmanuel” (Vol. 3, Ding! Dong!)? It’ll make you cry. He busts out nearly obsolete carols and hymns like, “I Saw Three Ships” (Vol. 2, Hark!) and “Lo! How A Rose E’er Blooming” (Vol. 5, Peace) with such gentle craft that you wonder why they ever went away. And then there are his original compositions. I recommend “Put the Lights On the Tree” (Vol. 2, Hark!), “Come on! Let’s Boogey to the Elf Dance!” (Vol. 3, Ding! Dong!), “Did I Make You Cry On Christmas Day? (Well, You Deserved It!)” (Vol. 4, Joy), and “Get Behind Me, Santa!” (Vol. 5, Peace).

Listening to these songs gets me in the right Christmas spirit, i.e., a worshipful and awed posture in considering Jesus’ incarnation. I think Stevens has created some of the best Christmas music of the past few decades. Actually, one could argue it’s the only good original Christmas music from a major artist for decades—admittedly, some good covers of classic songs do exist. If you want to argue that Paul McCartney’s “Wonderful Christmastime” should be considered as a good original Christmas tune, you’re going to get a knuckle sandwich from me. To employ a phrase from Anne Lamott, that song makes “Jesus want to drink gin straight out of the cat dish.”

Last week, we had arguably the most unique Thanksgiving I’ve experienced. First, Carey and I hosted our families, which we enjoyed. We loved having family in our home, relaxing, laughing, and eating.

Second, we had to call a plumber on Thanksgiving. The line from the bathroom to the sewer backed up, bringing some lovely afterthoughts back out the drains in our bathtub and shower—our house didn’t have a clean-out since it was built almost seventy years ago.

Because it is the only bathroom in the house and we had my mother and brother staying with us that evening, we had to call the plumber, which carried an extra charge due to the holiday. The plumber came and snaked the line, finding roots in it. I’ve heard that the day after Thanksgiving is the busiest day for plumbers, but that is usually due to people putting things down the drain that shouldn’t be there, like potato peels. Our problem had no relation to Thanksgiving or human error; it was one that was building and just happened to percolate on a holiday. Unfortunately, the problem wasn’t solved on Thursday since the root problem was greater than what the plumbers could solve with the snake. They had to come back out twice more to clear the lines with heavier equipment. That’s another story that I don’t feel like recounting. Let’s just say you’re all getting my best wishes for Christmas and that’s it. Also, instead of Christmas lights on the house, I think I’ll put lights around the cap to our new clean-out.

The most unique aspect of Thanksgiving, however, was the noticeable missing presence of my dad. Because Carey and I have alternated the holidays with our families, I’ve spent a few Thanksgivings apart from Mom and Dad. This year was different. Mom celebrated with us this year and Dad didn’t. And Dad won’t celebrate a Thanksgiving with us ever again. After Dad died, someone wise said to me that this next year will be a year of firsts. Our first Thanksgiving without Dad, our first Christmas without him, our first birthdays without him. We already celebrated his birthday without him. Mom will have her first Valentine’s Day and anniversary without her husband. Each important event and holiday brings a new kind of pain with it. Another wise person said to me that even though everyone eventually loses their parents, the loss brings unique pains. I can honestly say I’ve never felt a pain like the pain I feel in losing Dad. It’s not a matter of degree, but of kind. It’s not that it simply hurts more than anything else I’ve felt—trust me, it does—but it hurts differently than any other pain I’ve experienced.

A couple of articles for you to enjoy.

Richard Mouw, “A Teaching Moment for Mormonism,” on his blog. Some are calling for Mitt Romney to offer a “Houston speech” concerning his faith and how he governs. The “Houston speech” is an allusion to John F. Kennedy’s speech in which he said that his baptism didn’t exclude him from holding office and in which he assuaged worries that he would take orders from the Vatican. Mouw doesn’t want a Romney “Houston speech,” but a pronouncement from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints of how Mormons and Mormonism can engage within a pluralistic democracy without damaging their church or democracy. He draws on the Roman Catholic Church’s pronouncement along the same lines that emerged from Vatican II.

The fact is, however, that the Kennedy position did not really solve the problem. The real objection was that there was something basically incompatible between Catholicism and American pluralistic democracy. What Kennedy was clearly implying in his Houston address was that he would not be influenced by his Catholicism, which actually reinforced the notion that Catholicism was intrinsically incompatible with democratic values.

Virginia Heffernen, “Sweeping the Clouds Away,” in The New York Times Magazine. The first few seasons of Sesame Street are being released on DVD. With parental warnings. “These early ‘Sesame Street’ episodes are intended for grown-ups, and may not suit the needs of today’s preschool child.”

I asked Carol-Lynn Parente, the executive producer of “Sesame Street,” how exactly the first episodes were unsuitable for toddlers in 2007. She told me about Alistair Cookie and the parody “Monsterpiece Theater.” Alistair Cookie, played by Cookie Monster, used to appear with a pipe, which he later gobbled. According to Parente, “That modeled the wrong behavior” — smoking, eating pipes — “so we reshot those scenes without the pipe, and then we dropped the parody altogether.”

Which brought Parente to a feature of “Sesame Street” that had not been reconstructed: the chronically mood-disordered Oscar the Grouch. On the first episode, Oscar seems irredeemably miserable — hypersensitive, sarcastic, misanthropic. (Bert, too, is described as grouchy; none of the characters, in fact, is especially sunshiney except maybe Ernie, who also seems slow.) “We might not be able to create a character like Oscar now,” she said.

I recently ran across Virtual Parks, a cool website where users have uploaded interactive 360 degree panoramas from different national and state parks, mostly in California. Here are some of my favorites:

Mt. Whitney summit.
Yosemite Falls.
Guitar Lake (on the western side of Mt. Whitney).

My small group has embarked on an interesting series. Most of us grew up in churches and we’ve decided to read biblical passages that were told to us as kids, but have since been untouched. We realized that we spend little if any time considering these passages either in our individual study, in group settings, or in sermons. Strangely enough, most of the passages we’ve discussed and want to discuss are narratives from the Old Testament. So far, we’ve looked at David and Goliath, Samson and Delilah, and Moses’ birth.

Why is it that we relegate certain biblical passages to being “children’s stories?” Perhaps it is because kids understand and remember stories better than they would some of Paul’s more expository discussions in his epistles. I could embrace that, but it seems we seldom look at these passages again later in life. I wonder if there is within our system something of a bias against narratives and the Old Testament. It’s as if we say, “Stories about the Hebrews are good, but simplistic kids’ stuff. The real meaty theology is expository and in the New Testament.” Do we not have something new or deeper to learn about God through reading Samson’s story again in our adult years? Are not Jesus’ parables just as rich and shocking now as they were when we could barely tie our shoes? My small group saw this week that the story of Moses’ birth and trip down the Nile in a basket works on many levels—one couple whose first child is just about to have her first birthday saw the choices of Moses’ mother in a whole new light. Just because children can appreciate the story doesn’t mean it is beneath me as an adult. I believe our devotion to God can only grow with repeated listening.

Carey and I went on vacation a couple of weeks ago. We first went to see my family for what would have been my dad’s 65th birthday. As a family, we went to Yosemite, ate lunch at the Ahwahnee, and baked a chocolate cake. It was agreed that Dad would have designed the day himself if he were around. Carey and I then went camping and backpacking in Big Basin Redwoods State Park near Santa Cruz. We came home and went to Disneyland and California Adventure to close out the vacation. It was a great week. I’ve posted some of the pictures at my Flickr page. I plan to add more as I finish editing them.

Slideshow.

In case you were wondering, UC Davis beat Sacramento State in football last weekend 31-26. That makes eight straight Causeway Classics the Aggies have won. Go Ags!

No, no, no life?
Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life,
And thou no breath at all? Thou’lt come no more,
Never, never, never, never, never.

—King Lear in William Shakespeare’s, The Tragedy of King Lear, Act V, Scene iii

This season of grief has brought some of the strangest emotions and ideas I’ve ever felt or thought. Some have been quite shocking.

I quote the bit from King Lear above because I can relate to it so profoundly. I knew that bargaining was one of the five stages of grief, but when I had seen others bargain, it was usually along the lines of them saying they should have died instead. I had no such thought. Instead, I found myself, like Lear, asking, “Why does that thing or that person get to live when my dad had to die?” I would look at people far older than my father or who didn’t take care of themselves and wonder, “Why not them instead?” I said to God more than once, “Why not take someone who has had a full life? Dad wasn’t through yet.” This bargaining with other peoples’ lives surprised me and I must admit feeling some guilt for thinking this way.

I’ve been listening to Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run album the past couple days. I bought it on tape when I was a kid after I had fallen in love with Born in the U.S.A. I didn’t appreciate Born to Run then aside from the title track as it wasn’t full of radio-ready hits like Born in the U.S.A. was. Today, all I can say is wow. Eight big songs that make up a whole that is much larger than many double albums.

In July I wrote a post regarding Frank Pastore’s opinion in TownHall.com, “Why Al Qaeda Supports the Emergent Church.” I said the title of Pastore’s opinion was “one of the more ridiculous statements of the year.” Not to be outdone, this Sunday’s Los Angeles Times ran an opinion by Garry Wills entitled, “Abortion Isn’t a Religious Issue.”

Wills writes, “[Abortion] is not a theological matter at all. There is no theological basis for defending or condemning abortion.” He quotes Catholic theologians who said in the past that the issue of abortion was in the realm of natural law, not in special revelation. Wills goes after Evangelicals on the matter, as if they were the only group opposing abortion on religious grounds. It seems strange for him to use so much Catholic theology to make his point. Who in the past 30 years has been a stronger opponent of abortion than the Vatican? I fear that in his arguments he has made something of a caricature of the position many evangelicals hold.

Wills is correct in stating, “The question is not whether the fetus is human life but whether it is a human person, and when it becomes one.” All cells are living organisms. To say that life begins at conception is something of a non sequitur. We are at a question of human personhood, not of biological life. The issue of personhood is a deeply religious question in Christian and Jewish traditions.

Wills writes,

If we are to decide the matter of abortion by natural law, that means we must turn to reason and science, the realm of Enlightened religion. But that is just what evangelicals want to avoid. Who are the relevant experts here? They are philosophers, neurobiologists, embryologists. Evangelicals want to exclude them because most give answers they do not want to hear.

It seems strange to me that if this is a realm of natural law, that theologians would be excluded from the discussion, especially since natural law has much theological discussion concerning it. In the West, natural law concepts funnel through Thomas Aquinas, a Doctor of the Church. If it is a matter of natural law, then special revelation may not have a role, but all areas of expertise are welcome to the table. I’m not one to draw such a distinct line between philosophy and religion since they often swim in each other’s waters. I’m also not sure who these evangelicals are who want to exclude the other experts.

While it is true that the Christian Scriptures (the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament) say nothing directly about abortion, the followers of these traditions have been against abortions for millennia. There are Diaspora Jewish texts from the Second Temple period decrying Roman and Hellenistic practices of chemically ending pregnancies and abandoning unwanted children in the wilderness (think of Sophocles’ play, Oedipus Rex). So while there may have not been a Scripturally revealed mandate to protect the unborn, the communities of faith rooted in Judeo-Christian traditions applied their beliefs in being created in the image of God and in protecting life to the issue of the unborn.