Hullo!
I've been terribly busy of late, unfortunately not with anything interesting. Friday night I went laser-tagging with a group of highschool/middleschool aged kids, most of whom go to our old church. Nice kids, most of them, many of them friends of mine. But they made me a bit sad, as does spending time with kids so deep in the evangelical subculture. Great people, but so intent on making themselves look "cool" and "in," bowing to the culture in order to get people into the church, that they really only know complex vagueries about what they actually believe in so strongly. Perhaps I was feeling depressed anyway, as happens at this time of year (weather, lack of light, etc.). Anyway, the next night I stayed up till 2 writing a fifteen hundred word story about... well, hard to explain. It was depressing, at any rate.
This sort of leads into the next topic. I thought of something a while ago, and was talking with my dad about it. So we know the Contempory Christian Music scene largely sucks, and there are many reasones why--bad lyrics, mediocre music, etc. etc. My theory, which applies to bands still trying to work in "the message"(as opposed to the other kind, the ones that just play pop music and prominently don't swear), is as follows. These guys don't believe in their music. Oh, they know the words they're saying are true, but the music, the art, is not an end-it's just a means by which "the gospel" (which is often more like the law) is proclaimed. They have a foot in each camp, as my dad says, in art and in preaching, but that will produce at best mediocrity.
So I finished this book American Gods. And this, dear reader, is the one brilliant fantasy book that makes slogging through a hundred bad ones worthwhile. This is the first uniquely American mythology I've ever seen. The old gods (Odin, Eostre, tribal gods, etc), the ones settlers brought with them when they came here, are dwindling, and the new gods of Money, plastic, TV, etc, decide to start a war with them and wipe them out. Without giving away too much, there is lots of Christian symbolism, etc, as seems to happen anytime an author gets into the sort of 'deep myth' territory this does. There's one line, in which a character is talking about a shaft from a sort of magic tree, "This stick is a spear because it represents a spear. In this sad world, the symbol is the thing." Kind of made me think of Christ on the Cross.
Oh yeah, and my church is starting a youth group. We actually have like eight youth now (we had less than half that a year ago).
Well, that's all for now.
Slainte!
Ethan
(Exit, pursued by time-warped bear)
