Rainey Blogs on Some Days

"The mass of men live lives of quiet desperation." Henry David Thoreau After watching Dead Poets Society over the weekend and hearing Thoreau's quote, I cannot get it out of my head. The weight of its truthfulness is bearing down on me. I think I am living a life of quiet desperation, the grand ambitions of youth replaced by "the resignation that living brings" to quote Jackson Browne's " Before the Deluge ." I think resignation and desperation go hand-in-hand. Desperation is the feeling. Resignation is one of its sources. Maybe most us reach that place where we resign ourselves to making a living because our families need us to do that. We step aside and let the next generation have their shot at life. "Happily ever after fails, we've been poisoned by these fairy tales" (Don Henley,  End of the Innocence ). Life never delivers what it promises, and this hollow ringing sound of resignation is even found among the famous and the su...

“Jewish law prefers that Jews pray communally rather than privately.” Joseph Telushkin, “Minyan,” in  Jewish Literacy , 719. I’ve been thinking about this notion for a few days after I read it because I get the impression that most of the Christians I know pray individually and about their own self interests more than anything else. I know this is true of me. But Telushkin, reiterating the teachings of the rabbis in connecting Jewish prayer to the concept of  minyan , where the minimum number of males required to conduct a worship service or say certain prayers is ten, says that public prayer prevents such personal expressions of self-interest. He says:  " . . . the rabbis apparently felt that public prayers are more apt to be offered for that which benefits the entire community, whereas individuals often pray for that which benefits only themselves, even if it be at the expense of someone else" (719). In Evangelical or Pentecostal services that I've attended, at some...

Growing up in Southern Illinois , I had never met a vegetarian. We were meat lovers. We felt like we were supporting local industry when we indulged eggs, ground beef, brisket, steaks, or pork chops since many people who lived in our area were farmers. We never talked about cholesterol either. But one night in college, it all changed. Marcia, my wife, had painstakingly worked on dinner for Mark and Victoria, a couple on our small Bible College campus in Springfield , Missouri that we had met on campus. Mark grew up in a missionary family and was a Missions major, so we figured that missionaries-in-training would eat anything. Marcia brought out one of her specialties: gorgeous lumps of ground beef wrapped with a strip of bacon. We called them "Bacon Wraps" and we thought they were beautiful. We later learned after moving out East that wraps were actually an uppity kind of sandwich that was supposed to be healthy, but being from a small Midwestern town we had never seen ...