Making the Case for Life: Pro-Life Apologetics from Mark Harrington on Vimeo.
Hat tip: Larry O
Jul 18 2010
A Wonderful Story
This is a truly remarkable story. It has found its way into print in Guideposts magazine, in a lovely little book called “When God Winks” by SQuire Rushnell, and now on this gentleman’s blog. It’s also a very personal story to me.
The Day Weary Willie Smiled
By Phil Bolsta
Emmett Kelly as Weary Willie
I loved Emmett Kelly as a kid. He was Weary Willie, the quintessential tramp clown, an integral part of my childhood. This touching and amazing story by his daughter, Stasia Kelly, of Atlanta, Georgia, appeared in the October 2006 issue of Guideposts. What are the odds of this story ending as it did? Probably one in a trillion. And yet . . .
I sat on the plane, my purse in my lap, waiting to take off from Hartsfield International Airport in Atlanta for Florida to attend my father’s funeral. I had just spoken to Dad the day before. He’d sounded a little down, but I never guessed it would be the last time I heard his voice. “I’m tired, Stasia,” he said. I could hear that tiredness through the phone, could feel it the way so many people had felt the world-weariness in the most beloved character my father ever portrayed.
Emmett Kelly learns he’s a dad
I shifted in my seat—first-class because it was the only available spot on this leg of my trip home. The airline-reservations operator had promised to get me there in time for Dad’s funeral, so she honored my bereavement ticket and gave me an upgrade. I pulled the faded newspaper photo from my purse and glanced at it. The famous picture of my dad, Emmett Kelly. Or should I say of Weary Willie, the sad clown that he had immortalized. Dad was disciplined about Willie’s public persona. Once Dad put his makeup on, Weary Willie never broke character and never smiled, except once, back in 1955. That one time he smiled—beamed, really—a young photographer snapped his photo, and around the globe it went. The only time Willie smiled in public, the world smiled with him.
The plane was almost full and the seat next to me was still vacant. Good, I’d have the row to myself and my tears. I didn’t feel like explaining to some high-powered business type why I was so sad. I folded the picture and slipped it back inside my purse just as a well-dressed, middle-aged man strode down the aisle and took his seat next to me.
“Almost missed this flight,” he said with a sigh, as we taxied from the gate.
Odd as it might sound, in the clowning business Dad was a revolutionary. Clowns were happy figures …zany, wacky, unpredictable and relentlessly upbeat. But that’s not the kind of clown Dad was. He’d created Willie on his drawing board—a rumpled, sad-sack figure, beaten down by the world, Everyman on a lifelong losing streak. In those days, circus bosses were skeptical. Did people want a depressed clown? But they let him try it.
By the 1940s, the sad clown had become a hit and Dad had made it to the big time—Ringling Bros. circus. People cared about Willie and his struggles. They saw that no matter how hard he took it on the chin, Willie never gave up. He became the world’s most famous clown, probably the most recognizable clown ever. Maybe the reason Willie was so easy for people to love was that Dad brought a bit of himself to the character. Not that Dad was a sad sack, but he understood struggle. His early life on the road was tough and often lonely. Then in middle age he fell head over heels in love with a beautiful trapeze artist who eventually became his wife and my mom. They bought a little place in sunny Sarasota, Florida, for when the circus wasn’t traveling. It had a big backyard, a porch and a vegetable garden. For the first time, Weary Willie was a happy man—and happiest of all, I’m told, that day I was born. He and Mom named me Stasia.
Now, staring out the plane window, I tried to be grateful for that happiness Dad had found, and for the life he had led making others happy. How much more blessed could a daughter be than to have Emmett Kelly as her father? Even the airline-reservations operator who managed to get me this last-minute seat said some thing. “I remember Willie! Your dad made so many people smile.” Yet yearning and grief crushed out all my other feelings. I rested my head against the seat. Dear Lord, comfort me. Show me a sign Dad is content with you the way he was with Mom and our home and the backyard where he watched us kids play.
They say the food in first class is better. I wouldn’t know. I didn’t feel much like eating. I kept my tray up and stared into my lap. I just wanted to get home to Florida. I felt the plane slow and then one wing dipped as we started to descend. I couldn’t resist pulling that old newspaper clipping out of my purse and looking again at Dad beaming that incredible smile as he held a phone and heard the news that I’d been born. Immediately, I had to wipe away a tear.
I barely heard the man next to me say, “Excuse me.” He tapped my arm gently.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Yes?”
“”That photo…”
“My dad, Emmett Kelly. He died today. But this is from the day I was born….”
“I know, Stasia. I know. I was there. I’ve never seen a man so happy. I just had to snap that picture.”
My father, Frank Beatty, was the photographer who took that now-famous picture – the only one ever taken of Weary Willie smiling. And what an amazing moment for him to meet Kelly’s daughter that day on the plane. My dad went on to become very good friends with Stasia Kelly, he was even the photographer at her wedding. God does indeed often work in mysterious ways.
Jul 17 2010
The Next Great Awakening part 14: Brains, branes, and the multi-verse
The previous post in this series is here.
Jeff Zweerink at Reasons has been doing a series on the putative multiverse, and the effect that the truth or falsity of a multiverse approach to physics has on Christian belief, called Multiverse Musings.
I think it’s well worth reading, and a useful counter to all the Discovery Channel specials where important sounding scientists are interviewed to try to convince viewers that the multiverse hypothesis undoes any reason to believe in a Creator who caused the Big Bang. There is no mention, of course, of Who caused the multiverse. Somehow, it is assumed to have been uncaused and to be eternal. Reminds me of the smug way 19th-century and early 20th-century atheistic physicists were certain science had proved that the universe we know is eternal, with no beginning and no end. How little they knew.
Some of them think the Big Bang was just a “collision of branes“.
I think some brains may be colliding all right.
Something about the whole multiverse concept smells quite a bit to me like the 19th century physics theory of the ether. It really was a grand idea, and thinking that way explained quite a lot that was difficult to explain otherwise. And it gave a great way to relate the wave structure of light to the wave structure of sound in air, or waves on water, because it provided a “medium” or “ether” for light to move in.
The problem, of course, is that it was wrong.
Convenient theories that appear to explain things we see (or to rescue us from having to explain things we’d just as soon ignore), but which do not make any successful predictions about what we will see in future research, are often quite wrong.
We’d have to pay careful attention to a theory of the multiverse that makes specific predictions about events we can observe in this universe, events we have not seen yet, and which, if we did see them, could not be easily explained any other way. That would be a scientific theory which could rise or fall based on some conceivable future set of observations.
Is one of the currently competing theories of the multiverse such a theory, with predictive, explanatory power? I suppose time will tell. Some are making claims that the LHC could find evidence for multiple universes.
Maybe.
(Update for 2023: The Large Hadron Collider has in fact not provided support for multi-verse theory, 13 years after the original article here was written.)
But as I read what a layman can about the competing theories and claims, it all seems awfully, awfully tenuous. It seems based on “special pleading” at times, and it seems to ignore any discussion of how the multiverse began, basically assuming that it was “always there.” You’d think the physicists would learn from experience. In any case, I know of no prediction of “multiverse” theory that is in principle detectable, and which has no alternate explanation. (Don’t confuse the notion of multiple dimensions with the multiverse. They are distinct ideas, though related in some theories.)
At some point, will the physicists finally stop claiming that they’re just around the corner from the REAL explanation for EVERYTHING? They’ve been making that claim for over a century (some 19th century physicists, good ones, thought physics had learned about all there was to know). They don’t have much of a clue about what either “dark matter” or “dark energy” are, or what they’re made of, or if they really exist. All they really know is that assuming such things makes some things easier to explain (like why the galaxies don’t fly apart). Pretty funny.
They seem to think they’re eating an avocado (which has a definite center) instead of an onion.
I suspect some of them may have been sniffing ether. But God is patient while they keep peeling back layers of the onion, looking for the Center of everything, even if they’re looking in the wrong place. The point is that there is an onion, not what’s at the center of it.
All that fine tuning to make it possible for us to live here is making some scientists nervous, and some of them will pursue just about any explanation that might remove the necessity of acknowledging a Creator.
Good luck with that.
The next post in this series is here.
Jun 27 2010
Multi-culti theology at Claremont
Incredibly, the Claremont School of Theology is getting ready to expand its offerings, just a tiny, wee bit:
In a bow to the growing diversity of America’s religious landscape, the Claremont School of Theology, a Christian institution with long ties to the Methodist Church, will add clerical training for Muslims and Jews to its curriculum this fall, to become, in a sense, the first truly multi-faith American seminary.
The transition, which is being formally announced Wednesday, upends centuries of tradition in which seminaries have hewn not just to single faiths but often to single denominations within those faiths. Eventually, Claremont hopes to add clerical programs for Buddhists and Hindus.
Although there are other theological institutions that accept students of multiple faiths, or have partnerships with institutions of other religions, Claremont is believed to be the first accredited institution that will train students of multiple faiths for careers as clerics. The 275-student seminary offers master’s and doctoral degrees.
“It’s really kind of a creative, bold move,” said David Roozen, director of the Institute for Religion Research at the Hartford Seminary in Connecticut. “It kind of fits, to some extent, California…. I think there will be a lot of us who will be watching that experiment.”
Claremont’s administration sees the multi-faith expansion as the wave of the future in American theological training. But it is straining relations between the school and more conservative elements of the United Methodist Church, which this year was expected to provide about 8% of Claremont’s $10-million budget. The church suspended its support for the school earlier this year pending an investigation.
I’m not sure just what is meant by the phrase, “the more conservative elements of the United Methodist Church.” Would that mean the people who think Jesus was actually the Messiah, the eternal Son of God, who was born to the virgin Mary, died on the cross, and was bodily resurrected by the Father on the third day? Whose sacrifice is the means for our forgiveness, who atoned for our sins by the crucifixion, who demonstrated the He alone has the power of eternal life, as demonstrated in the resurrection?
I suppose that these days only “conservatives” believe these things. For all the rest, who think the “narrative” is what matters, that the “metaphor” of the resurrection is meant to apply in some analogical way to human life and society, nothing much is true enough to fight for. Why shouldn’t Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, etc., get their innings? After all, don’t they have a narrative, too? Don’t they have some of God’s truth? What are we worried about, anyway, if all truth is God’s truth?
In the meantime, I think it’s a safe bet that John Wesley, founder of Methodism in the 18th century, would be beyond appalled. I can’t help but wonder what (few?) remaining United Methodists who believe in orthodox Christian teachings are thinking about this. I would guess the response of the United Methodist Church to this decision is going to tell the tale. I am not very optimistic about it, given its recent history. Essentially, if the UMC doesn’t rise up as a body and resoundingly reject this out of hand, they should just give up, and change their name to Social Justice, Incorporated, or maybe United for Leftist Politicians (ULP). Or they could just join the Unitarians, who don’t believe in Jesus either.
In the mad dash to be a better exemplar of “diversity” than the other guy, look for other (especially denominationally untethered) seminaries to follow Claremont’s lead. One can only wonder where they’ll draw the line. Why not mix in a little Hopi Indian tradition, some voodoo, and a dash of Shintoism? And these multicultural days, what about Zoroastrianism, or, for that matter, cannibalistic fertility cults of the south Pacific, or African tribal rites? Who is to say where some slice of God’s truth may not be found?
When Claremont starts building Aztec pyramids in the parking lot on Foothill Avenue, I’m going to begin sticking to the 210 freeway whenever I drive through the area (well… if the freeway sniper doesn’t make a reappearance, anyway). I don’t think I would be an acceptable sacrifice to appease the Sun God (who, to the surprise of the eco-pagan Cult of Gore, seems to be unusually quiescent this year), but I don’t want to find out the hard way. Hey… maybe the new religion of eco-pagan EarthWorship could get a department at Claremont, too! Oh, I forgot…. they already have one at most universities. They just need to move it into the School of Theology, where it belongs. So maybe Claremont will be ahead of the game.
When this whole Aztec-sacrifice-in-the-parking-lot thing really gets up in high gear, it’s going to do a number on the restaurant trade in the city of Claremont. Talk about eating meat sacrificed to idols….
Jun 04 2010
Did it have to turn out like this?
The next time you get a chance to take a shot at a future conqueror, take it. No, lefty nitwits, I’m not talking about taking a shot at the next Republican president-elect. I’m talking about people whose overweening ambition makes them think they have the right to conquer the world. By definition, no US president qualifies, because all have left office, willingly or not, without coercion, and gone home to write their memoirs, if they lived long enough.
No, I’m talking about a Hitler, or a Stalin, or a Mao, or…. well, you get the idea. Kaiser Wilhelm, without whom World War I would probably not have occurred as it did, is one such, though that seems not to have been immediately obvious to Annie Oakley… a dead shot if there ever was one. Although after WWI started, she seems to have caught on quickly enough about the Kaiser’s character.
THERMOPYLAEHILLBILLY: Annie Oakley and Kaiser Wilhelm II
Where would we be today if Annie Oakley had just a little more to drink in 1889? Kaiser Wilhelm II was the Reich’s new leader and had a box seat to watch Oakley at the Berlin Charlottenburg Race Course. She was appearing with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show and had cleaned her Colt 45 the night before. Annie announced that she would shot the ashes off any man or woman’s Havana cigar. Normally her husband Frank Butler come out of the audience and her speech was just for show.
She never expected anyone, including Kaiser Wilhelm II to take her up on her offer and here came the Kaiser out of his box seat. Oakley had made her dare, there stood the Kaiser and she couldn’t back down. So as she measured her distance the Kaiser took out a cigar and started puffing. The German police thought it was a joke until the Kaiser took up his position. The Kaiser told the police to get out of the way.
Annie Oakley, American sharp shooter, raised her pistol, aimed and blew the ashes off Kaiser Wilhelm II cigar. Had she missed the woman from Cincinnati may have prevented the First World War 25 years later. When World War I started Annie wrote the Kaiser asking for a second chance. Silence followed……………
What If Diaries » What if Annie Oakley had shot Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1889?
One chilly November afternoon in 1889, a fur-coated crowd assembled in Berlin’s Charlottenburg Race Course to enjoy a performance of Buffalo Bill’s Wild Wild West Show, which was touring Europe to great popular acclaim. Among the audience was the Reich’s impetuous young ruler, Kaiser Wilhelm II, who had been on the throne for a year. Wilhelm was particularly keen to see the show’s star attraction, Annie Oakley, famed throughout the world for her skills with a Colt. 45.
On that day, as usual, Annie announced to the crowd that she would attempt to shoot the ashes from the cigar of some lady or gentleman in the audience. “Who shall volunteer to hold the cigar?” she asked. In fact, she expected no one from the crowd to volunteer; she simply asked for laughs. Her long-suffering husband, Frank Butler, always stepped forward and offered himself as her human Havana-holder.
This time, however, Annie had no sooner made her announcement then Kaiser Wilhelm himself leaped out of the royal box and strutted into the arena. Annie was stunned and horrified but could not retract her dare without losing face. She paced off her usual distance while Wilhelm extracted a cigar from a gold case and lit it with flourish. Several German policeman, suddenly realizing that this was not one of kaiser’s little jokes, tried to preempt the stunt, but were waved off by His All-Highest Majesty. Sweating profusely under her buckskin, and regretful that she had consumed more than her usual amount of whiskey the night before, Annie raised her Colt, took aim, and blew away Wilhem’s ashes.
Had the sharpshooter from Cincinnati creased the kaiser’s head rather than his cigar, one of Europe,s most ambitious and volatile rulers would have been removed from the scene. Germany might not have pursued its policy of aggressive Weltpolitik that culminated in war twenty-five years later.
Annie herself seemed to realize her mistake later on. After World War I began, she wrote to the kaiser asking for a second shot. He did not respond.
Annie Oakley, the Butterfly Effect, and You
In the late 1800s, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show was a dazzling display of horsemanship, gunplay and other cowboy skills. One of its acts involved the sharpshooting of the great Annie Oakley. Dubbed “Little Sure Shot,” Oakley had an amazing routine, she would shoot out lit candles, for example, and the corks of wine bottles.
For her grand finale, she would shoot out the lit end of a cigarette held in a man’s mouth at a certain distance. For this, she would ask for volunteers from the audience. As no one ever volunteered, she had her husband planted among the spectators. He would “volunteer” and they would complete the dangerous trick together.
Well, during one swing through Europe, Oakley was setting up her finale and she asked for volunteers. To her shock, and the surprise of everyone involved with the show, she got a real volunteer.
The proud young Prince (soon to be Kaiser) Wilhelm bravely stepped down from among the spectators, strode into the ring and stuck a lit cigarette in his mouth.
Reportedly out late the night before enjoying the local beer gardens, the unexpected appearance of this famous volunteer unnerved her. But the show must go on.
She took aim and fired… putting out the cigarette, much to Wilhelm’s amusement.
Thus, she also created one of historians’ favorite “what if” moments. What if her bullet went through the future Kaiser’s left ear? Would World War I have happened? Would the lives of 9 million soldiers and 6.6 million civilians have been spared? Would Hitler have risen from the ashes of defeated Germany? All sorts of questions come to mind…
Many historians think that the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, leading to the Soviet Union, would not have occurred without World War I to weaken the Czar (who was made by Lenin and Stalin to seem rather a nice fellow, by comparison). Nazi Germany is difficult to credit as a likely outcome of a Germany that didn’t fight in WWI, because no great German angst would been present about a non-existent Treaty of Versailles, and no not-quite-imperialistic Kaiser would have tolerated Hitler in the feckless way German proto-democracy did. In any case, without the agony of the post-war years, Hitler would have been only another anti-Semite, with no way to get traction with the German public at large.
World War II is hard to imagine without World War I. Germany simply wouldn’t have had the drive to do it, absent the peculiar circumstances of the end of WW I. At most, Japanese imperialism might have been a problem… but strong British Empire, not weakened by WWI, would have been in a clear position to oppose Japanese aggression in China and elsewhere, and probably given the Emperor so much to consider that attacking the USA would have been a very low priority.
So imagine a 20th century without two world wars, without a cold war, indeed, without communism, which would have meant no Korean War, no Vietnam War, etc. Imagine a still-strong British Empire still ruling the waves, shipping around the world the incredible output of American industry.
I know that cultural trends are present in history. But I’m also pretty sure that without specific deeds by specific people, everything would have been different.
All of which occasionally leaves me wondering, in a much more pedestrian way, what deeds or words of everyday folk can sometimes have an effect that is seemingly far disproportionate to their obvious impact?
May 31 2010
Memorial Day
I ran across this at Michelle Malkin’s site.
It is a tribute to a single soldier, but I think it stands for them all.
May 24 2010
More potpouri
It’s unseasonably cold at my house today, too. It snowed this morning, a little, very unusual for this time of the year.
Why Israel Can’t Rely on American Jewish “Leaders”
This is what passes for “leadership” in American Jewry. A kabuki dance is orchestrated by an Obama fan to gather other Obama fans to air the mildest criticism and to avoid challenging the factual representations of an administration that is the most hostile to the Jewish state in history. As one Israeli hand who definitely isn’t going to be invited to any meetings with this president put it: “They may be fine rabbis, but they are out of their league here.” And by not directly and strongly taking on the president, they are, in fact, enabling the president’s anti-Israel stance. It is, come to think of it, more than an embarrassment; it is an egregious misuse of their status and it is every bit as dangerous as the quietude of American Jews in the 1930s.
Indeed.
Read Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy first, then read The Cost of Discipleship… again, if you’ve read it before, through the lens of knowing more about Bonhoeffer.
Apr 26 2010
What if YOU had a close encounter with the seemingly incredible?
How would you convince anyone it had happened?
Consider: if you were dropped off by a time machine a couple millennia back, and you witnessed the events leading up to the Crucifixion, and then saw incontrovertible evidence of the Resurrection (like, you took a walk with Him, or had dinner with Him, or even touched Him), what would you do in order to convince other people, and posterity, of what you had seen yourself?
You might tell a lot of people. And you’d be fearless about it, because you’d KNOW what you saw, and with Whom you had talked. People wouldn’t be able to shake your faith in what you’d seen, for the simple reason that you wouldn’t doubt what you had personally experienced.
You might start to connect up small groups of people with whom you’d shared your experiences (and some teachings that would flow from it), to keep alive the memory, and simply because you’d be so excited about it all that of course you’d follow His instructions…. which were basically to tell lots of people about Him, to love each other, to teach each other and remind each other what He had taught, etc.
You’d probably write some letters to people you hadn’t seen for awhile, to keep in touch, and remind them of the truth of what you’d experienced and what He taught, about the Father and Himself.
Some of your friends with similar experiences would write other letters, some would write biographies and histories, etc.
You’d be convinced to your dying day that what you saw really happened, that He had risen from the dead, just as He prophesied.
You would know, by the time you’d told a few people, that it was going to be very hard to convince people of the truth of what you’d seen. And you would learn to recognize that, for reasons only He understands, some people will respond to hearing the truth, and some won’t. But you would know that you should not give up, and that some people may respond later, so you’d keep trying.
You would wonder how future generations will respond, when the original witnesses are no longer on Earth, so you’d be careful to keep the books and letters they wrote intact as long as possible, and put them in faithful hands for safekeeping to the next generation. You’d be concerned, though, because knowing the history of how one generation is faithless in keeping to the teaching of the previous one (since you read the Old Testament), you know that it will take absolutely faithful people, with Divine insight and motivation, not to utterly corrupt the whole thing within a generation or two.
You might be surprised at how much effort subsequent generations have put into keeping the teaching intact…. and if you knew about it, you would count that fact as evidence of something in operation in people’s hearts and minds all that time, since, having read the Old Testament, you know it wouldn’t have happened any other way.
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