Wow! A great response from Dad McMains, who has clearly thought through these issues more deeply and thoroughly than I have:

OK, I’ll jump in-

I had an interesting discusssion with my room mate on the India trip in March. He was a scientist from England who had worked on some intellectually challenging stuff like figuring out the DNA helix. His observation was that the more intellectual, scientific folk in England tended to be believers while US scientists semed to be more atheistic. We considered several possible reasons for this phenomenon including: the pragmatic, materialistic, and relativistic rationism that are unquestions assumptions of our intellectualism; the narcicssistic, ego-oriented psychology that is basic to our country’s character (better known as radical individualism); and the fact that the US has not experienced the limits of our own power the same way that Europe has, so we have not ever really believed that we needed others or anything outside ourselves (how about that war in Iraq?).

 

Dallas Willard argues in the Divine Conspiracy that our materialism has divorced God and the spiritual from our intellectual communities to the point that there are no professional training/education that seriously tries to integrate the spiritual reality/competence into their program. This is a reflection of our philosophical and political assumptions. We seperate church and state and we assume that the spiritual is not real. Materialistic assumptions about purposeless and meaninglessness are interesting but in and of themselves are just that, assumptions. There is no way to prove them. However, they do have consequences for our political, economic, education and political systems as well as our spiritual life.and in our society they lead to atheism.

 

I have a friend who is a minister who was asked when she was new in the ministry if she had lived long enough to suffer enough to know what grace was. At the time she did not know. When I talked with her, she had just lost her thirty-eight year-old husband to cancer and had two young children to raise by herself. She was ccertainly understanding the finiteness of the human condition and the need for grace, then.

 

In the Transforming Moment, James Loder argues that each of us have life defiining/changing moments in which we look into the pit ( when we are facing death for one reason or another) and have to decide if we can do it on our own or if we need something beyond ourselves to live for. Otherwise, Camus is right when he says that the only real philosophical question is why not commit suicide. Intellectually competent people, in my experience, often face their transforming moment later than others and they tend to live in their heads where the illusion of  self sufficiency and control is easier to maintain than in the real world. 

The reason that there are no atheists in foxholes is the same as the reason that ground zero is Holy Ground. War and 911 force us to look directly into the pit and to struggle with the meaning and purpose of life. The ultimate question opens us to the possibility that our self sufficiency is not enough and that the eternal/God might be needed to live at all, never mind to live well.

 

 A few thoughts from : Dad M

Emily arrived home last night about midnight after Kathy picked her up from the Austin airport. She and Kathy were both soaking wet after having “fallen in the river” on the way home. Abigail and Maggie were both thrilled to see their sister; Liam was so deeply asleep that we eventually gave up on alerting him to his sister’s triumphal return.

I have a couple of friends who harass me regularly about not posting more often on this weblog. One of them is a prolific blogger himself, and manages to write more often and better than I find room in my life for. The other needs to get off his hinder and start a weblog of his own before he can give me too much grief. (I’m talking to YOU, Kelly!)

In any case, the reason I don’t post terribly often is twofold: I think there are enough people out there just posting a pile of links, while adding little to them. News aggregators have their place, of course, but there are plenty of people out there doing that sort of thing better than I’d be able to. I want to wait to post until I have something of substance to say, but it takes a while for those sorts of things to come together in my head, especially given that my life has fairly little contemplative time these days. (This would likely not be a problem if I’d shake the video game habit, but sometimes a guy has to shoot something at the end of the day, you know?)

So, in the interest of keeping a bit of dialogue going here, I’m going to post a few nascent thoughts with less thinking-through than I usually do. (And that’s saying something!)

Thought the first: I’ve been recently watching a show by Penn & Teller, the prestidigitators, called “Bullshit!” While vulgar at times (shocking given the title!), it’s an entertaining debunking of a variety of popular topics, including psychics, PETA, recycling, etc. In the course of these shows, P&T mention repeatedly that they are atheists. Penn further goes on to mention that he’s never had a drop of alcohol, and has never dealt with addiction of any sort. (Their approach to “12 step programs” is a bit unsympathetic — “Just stop doing it!”)

It struck me as I watched these shows and reflected on my experience with people of faith that the acknowledgment of need, of the insufficiency of ourselves, is one of the things that often distinguishes those who turn to “a higher power” from those who don’t. Penn & Teller seem confident that they’re up to the task of dealing well with life on their own. One of the central tenets of the gospel message, as I (and John Calvin) understand it, is that we humans are pretty messed up and need help. The aphorism “there are no atheists in foxholes” seems to mirror this idea as well, as certainly one becomes keenly aware when the enemy is firing artillery at you that there’s not much you can do to change that situation yourself.

I have a number of friends who are atheists, and most of them are smart, capable people. I wonder if being a smart, capable person makes one less inclined to seek the divine, as one feels the need for something beyond oneself less frequently. Please feel free to chime in on the topic — as I mentioned, my thought here are still ill-formed.

Thought the second: I’ve been reading The Chronicles of Narnia to Abigail and Liam and whomever else wanders by while the reading is in progress. (I read them with Emily many years ago, so she’s not feeling neglected.) I was thinking that, when they have kids of their own, I’d like to read some books aloud, record them, and give them to my grandkids to be able to listen to when I’m not around.

I then got to thinking about the mechanics of recording stories well, and came up with an idea that would make it pretty painless. (Those of you who listen to podcasts will note that the editing often leaves a bit to be desired; this idea would help with that as well.) The idea is this: to have audio software that will allow on-the-fly editing by setting “bookmarks” as you record by pressing a key on the keyboard. One would set a bookmark at the beginning of a paragraph, or when one moves on to a new idea. Then if one makes a mistake during the course of recording that section, one simply taps a key to erase the recording since the last bookmark and immediately starts rerecording it. If a section goes well, then the next press of the bookmark key would commit the section and start a new one. When finished, the sections would then be spliced together with quick cross-fades (to prevent pops), and one would emerge with a finished product.

Does anybody know of any software that does something like this yet? If not, I hereby release the idea into the public domain. Somebody go write it, because I’m too lazy to do it myself.

This morning Christina posted a photo of a little toy that Emily made for her out of stray items around the house. What a creative lot of kids we’ve got!

We’re very much looking forward to having our most senior offspring back in Texas. (She returns this Saturday around 10:30pm.)

My dear friend Daniel recently departed for Canada to be with his lady-love Fanny for the months before they tie the marital knot. I was sad to see him go, as he has been one of my closest coconspirators here in San Marcos for the last few years, and is inevitably a stimulating person to share a coffee and conversation with. (Or more likely, in our case, a beer and a theological debate studded with Simpsons references.)

He has found in Fanny someone who seems uniquely well-suited to be his partner in life (and vice versa). She is charming, warm, funny, thoughtful — generally a delight; if the price of Daniel getting to hold her hand is his being in British Columbia, I’ll be the first to say “Go North, young man!”

And that is just what he did. Over on his weblog, there’s a travelogue in progress detailing their Big Road Trip from Texas to Victoria. Some nice photos and amusing vignettes from the road. Enjoy!

This past Thursday, we enjoyed a spectacular dinner with Jason and Erin Young, a couple we met last March, and with whom we’ve gotten to spend far less time subsequently than we’d like. We met up at The Clay Pit, a great Indian restaurant up in Austin, and enjoyed an evening of delightful food and company.

Jason and Erin are the sort of people who, upon meeting, I instantly launch into a three-hour long conversation which leaves me tired, happy, and smarter on the other side of it. This visit was no exception. This was Jason’s first exposure to Indian food, which added a nice bit of adventure to the already-excellent cuisine. We were very glad for the time with them, and look forward to a reprise in the future!

Jason’s too-kind account of the evening is here.

Tuesday afternoon the phone rang. Kathy answered to hear a worried voice on the other end. “Has anybody talked to you about your mammogram yet? No? We found a calcium deposit and some other stuff that looks pretty serious. We want you to get in for a biopsy right away, by the end of this week at the latest.” Since Kathy’s last mammogram had been many months ago, she thought the timing of the call a bit odd, but was of course quite worried by this call, and immediately tried to schedule an appointment with a surgeon for the biopsy. Unfortunately, her doctor’s staff had called a few scant minutes before 5:00, and she was unable to get an appointment with the surgeon (the estimable doctor who took out my gall bladder) before his office had closed for the day.

I stayed home from work the next morning while she called the surgeon’s office again. “I’m sorry, but the doctor’s already double-booked all day, and is in surgery tomorrow and Friday,” said the secretary. “We’ll see if we can work something out and will give you a call back.” An hour later, she still hadn’t heard anything, so called the office again. “Come in now! No wait! Come in at 4:30” the staff eventually decided. I biked off to work late, and cut the work day short so that I could be back to take care of the kids while she went off to the doctor.

The children and I went down to the river, partially to keep our minds occupied and partially because it was a hot, fine day for river swimming. Maggie insisted that I carry the feathers she gathered up for her “feather collection.” “I don’t have any free hands right now,” I told her, as I was gathering up river trash with one hand and skipping stones with the other. “Keep them in your hat!” she told me, so I took off my hat, let her fill it with feathers, and replaced it on my head. Later on forgetting its contents, I doffed my cap to reveal a bedraggled, feathery scalp, which made me look like some sort of demented balding bird-man with a comb over. The kids found it very amusing.

After a couple hours of river frolic, we returned home to find a bemused Kathy. “How did it go?” I asked worriedly. “I’ve never been so relieved and so frustrated all at once!” she responded. When she’d gotten to the surgeon’s office, he looked at her mammogram and looked at Kathy. “This doesn’t look bad at all,” he said. “What is it I’m supposed to be looking for?” “I don’t know,” said Kathy. “So, why are you here?” he said. “I’m not sure,” Kathy said. “My doctor made worried noises and told me to come.” “Let me talk to your doctor,” he said, picking up the phone. She was in surgery, as it turned out, but her office staff eventually figured out that there was somebody else with the last name McMains who should have gotten a call instead of Kathy. They had called the wrong person, and given Kathy 24 hours of worry about cancer for nothing! (Not to mention presumably failed to notify someone else who needed prompt attention.)

We were, of course, all very much relieved, though still quite miffed with the doctor who had sent us on this goose chase. But that night during prayers, without any prompting, Abigail said “…and God, please help mama not to be mad at the doctor who made the mistake and got her all worried, because we all make mistakes sometimes.”

So, I guess a lawsuit’s out of the question then. Out of the mouths of babes…

We spent a good deal of time this past weekend huddled over schedules, maps, tour books and timetables planning for our impending jaunt to Britain this summer. Plans are starting to come together nicely: it looks as though we’ll be spending some time in Edinburgh, Cardiff, Exeter, Bath, and of course a good deal of time in London. As a bit of a train nut, I’m particularly excited about getting to do the Settle-Carlile route — purportedly one of the most beautiful stretches in England. (Sadly, we probably won’t be able to get over to the bit in Scotland where the memorable “train meets flying car” scene in Harry Potter was filmed.)

In addition to the England trip, Emily is off to New York today to spend some time with our relatives up there. While we always miss her when she’s gone, she has a great time visiting with that portion of the family, and we’re glad she’s getting to do that.

Speaking of New York, we’ve been so pleased with the way that doing a Home Exchange is working out for London that we signed up for the Home Exchange website over the weekend and listed our home with an eye toward working out an exchange somewhere near Buffalo/Niagara Falls for Christmas this year. (Given how much lodging for a family of 6 costs, the $99 fee for three years seems a very reasonable deal.) We have high hopes for a white Christmas this year — especially the younger kids, who have had very little experience with snow.

This will be one of my fairly rare geeky programmer posts. Fair warning, non-technical folks.

So, does anybody out there in tech-land know anything about Quartz Composer? It’s apparently a graphic programming environment for Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger), and while it has gone utterly unpromoted by Apple, it looks to be extremely interesting.

According to its web page, “Quartz Composer brings together a rich set of graphical and nongraphical technologies, including Quartz 2D, Core Image, Core Video, OpenGL, QuickTime, MIDI System Services, and Real Simple Syndication (RSS), which is a lightweight XML format.” What I’ve read of the docs so far appear to back this up — you could create a screen saver that not only downloads RSS feeds, but also composes and plays MIDI songs based on the contents of those feeds. (Admittedly, they’re not likely to be good songs, but that’s up to you.) The good bit, however, is that it’s all visual — you don’t have to write any code to do it.

It appears that this has much of the same approach and power as Isadora, which has long been one of my favorite tools for creative fooling about with audio and video on computers. I’m very interested to take some time to play with this and see if it lives up to its early promise.

This past weekend, Kathy and I went down to San Antonio for a 10th anniversary getaway. I had been plotting the trip for a couple of weeks with the invaluable help of Christina, who stayed with the kids while we ran off to have a little bit of exclusive couple time, and was pretty excited to finally be able to set the plans in motion.

We started off by checking into the Travelodge downtown. While not palatial, it is clean and only a couple of blocks from the Riverwalk, where we spent much of our time over the next 48 hours. We then embarked on a quest to find “Dolores del Rio”, a funky Italian place I had heard of, but had never actually been to. Given that all of the reviews of the restaurant I’d found on the internet included directions, and that those directions seemed to bear no relation to each other whatsoever, I had expected locating the place to be a good deal more challenging than it actually turned out to be. We were quickly seated, and joined a few minutes later by Chris and Becky, who were in town to pick a place to live when they move to San Antonio in the fall, and Lana and Meara. The evening was great — wonderful food, scintillating company, and a jazz band nominally led by my friend Barry at the keyboard, who graced us with an alternately ethereal and funky version of “Tea for Two” in honor of our ten years. Then the belly dancers came out, draped me and Chris in feather boas, rounding off the dining experience nicely. We had only expected to stick around the restaurant for a couple of hours, but were having such a good time that, by the time we finally parted company after dinner, it was time for bed.

The next morning we lazed about for a while, enjoying the luxury of sleeping in — an opportunity rarely afforded the parents of four children. We then embarked on a driving tour of the San Antonio Mission Trail, a series of four missions (five, if you count the Alamo) established by Spanish Franciscans back when the New World was first seeing European colonization. Though I think every child in San Antonio is required to go on field trips to the missions several times over the course of his public school education, I had very little memory of the sites, and enjoyed them every bit as much as Kathy, for whom this was her first visit.

Incidentally, I can hardly think of a life I’d rather lead than that of one of these monks who helped to establish these remarkable communities. What a wonderful thing to be so intimately involved with helping people meet their physical needs, while at the same time providing a place for cultivating their spiritual lives and working together to build places that are so beautiful.

After the missions, we went and pottered about downtown for a while, enjoying a late lunch at Casa Rio, a restaurant with colorful umbrellas over its riverside tables that largely define the visual look of the Riverwalk for me. We then enjoyed the air conditioned promenades at Rivercenter for a while and ducked into an arcade for a bit to race cars and play motion capture boxing games. (Visiting Rivercenter is always a bit nostalgic for me, as my high school choir sang there when it opened. “You just add water…at Rivercenter!” I’m still not sure what unholy business dealings resulted in our presence at the opening of a shopping mall, but it was fun at the time.)

Our original plan for that evening included a trip to the San Pedro Playhouse for a musical show. However, by the time we left on Friday, they had not responded to my request for tickets on their website. (I finally got an email back this morning saying “Oops. You went to our old website. Here’s the address of our new website, which, by the way, doesn’t offer online ticket ordering anymore.” Nimrods.) So, we Plan-B’ed, and got some coffee at a local coffee shop with indifferent coffee but the most extraordinary service I’ve ever seen. The pink-clad fey man behind the bar, when Kathy asked if they happened to have a newspaper handy, said “No, but I’ll get you one” and sprinted out the door before either of us could respond effectively. He went across the street to a gas station, but found their newspaper rack empty. He then proceeded to run further down the street until he found a place with a paper handy, purchased it, and brought it back for us to review. (All we wanted to know was movie times!) Truly above and beyond the call of duty, and thus earns a heartfelt recommendation of Timo’s Coffehouse on San Pedro. (Just don’t ask for anything tricky with decaf.)

We capped the day with a visit to The Quarry, a site that, while I was growing up in San Antonio, was a wretched, filthy eyesore of an abandoned industrial site, ironically next to one of the richer neighborhoods in San Antonio. Several years back, however, it was made over as an upscale commercial space, and now boasts many interesting stores, a microbrewery or two, and a huge movie theater. We pottered around Borders for a while, and I picked up P.J. O’Roarke’s latest, which I perused while Kathy dropped by Whole Foods. We then watched “Cinderella Man”, which was a lovely, moving film (even though it was about boxing) and drove back to the Travelodge.

We slept in a bit more on Sunday, ran a few errands, and returned to our home, to be greeted by the excited shrieks of our kids (and a few, truth be told, from me as well). The trip was a great time which Kathy and I both enjoyed a great deal and got a lot out of. It was super to devote some time to just cultivating that relationship, away from our workaday concerns, and to slow down and celebrate getting to 10 years.

Thanks for your patience and persistence, my dear Kathy. I’m glad we’re making this journey together!

(See my photostream for some more pictures.)