Joffre Swait, Author at Kuyperian Commentary

On October 29, 2013 By Joffre Swait In Scribblings Like

Joffre Swait: In A Small Community Our Companions Are Chosen For Us

A great post over at Gardens Don’t Launch, a sort of church-planting blog, on living in a small place. For the Christians who don’t live in New York or London.

My grandmother has the coolest name of anyone in America, guaranteed. Olena Sigurros Homfrieder Paulson Stager.

She’s probably also from the least cool place in America: Mountain, North Dakota. The population has never topped 220, and the size has never reached 0.15 square miles.

That is a provincial locale if there ever was one.

“Provincial”, of course, is usually a pejorative term. Backwater. Flyover country. Irrelevant.

I am reading a set of essays by someone who has been called provincial. He is also from North Dakota. As a novelist, Larry Woiwode lived for a time in New York City, but wrote about the North Dakota he felt connected to. Eventually he decided he needed to move back to North Dakota to learn whether the North Dakota he remembered, and the North Dakota that emerged in his fiction, was rooted in a semblance of facticity.

It was, and it wasn’t, as he says.

After living in New York, and in England, the most cosmopolitan Anglophone places on earth, ultimately his family re-settled in that provincial place.

There’s a fantastic Chesterton quote at the end.

On October 23, 2013 By Joffre Swait In Scribblings Like

Joffre Swait: Jezebel’s Rage

Good article by Mark Judge over at The Daily Caller on the deep deep deep seemingly incurable unholy rage young people have against men and fathers in our society, as exemplified by the women of Jezebel.com. This rage exists because fathers are gone.

Deep down, America is a very angry country because of missing, absent, and lousy fathers. The social science is clear and unambiguous about the devastation the loss of fathers causes in terms of drug abuse, promiscuity and loss of self-esteem among young people. The psychological and emotional wounds go very deep.

When reading The Book of Jezebel you are confronted not just with humor and a high level of intelligence, but deep, deep rage. Not anger — rage. It goes much deeper than politics, although in modern America politics is where this rage find its expression. Thus the malevolence towards “dead white males” and the liberal obsession with feelings and personal grievance. The bogus “war on women” is really nothing but liberal women acting out against bad fathers. The frightening thing about this rage is that it is insatiable even as it demands resolution through politics. Before the 1960s and the disintegration of the family, a political revolutionary would map out his plan for correcting the flaws he saw in the political system. Today’s radicals speak in tones that are more personal. Their opponents are not just wrong, or obstacles to get past to attain better living conditions — they are evil, they are guilty, and they are personally culpable for screwing our lives up. Politics can’t cure this wound.

Judge goes on to list several examples of not-anger-RAGE from Jezebel.com’s new book. It’s worth taking a look at the whole article. His conclusion? That this rage is so deep and primal that politics offer no hope of healing or resolution. He suggests no solution.

Enter Jesus Christ and his Church, my brothers.

Consider the rage of your enemies, dear reader, and even as you fight them, have mercy.<> гугла

On October 16, 2013 By Joffre Swait In Scribblings Like

Joffre Swait: Postal Concerns For Your Children’s Safety

The Federal government wants to discourage our daughters from doing handstands without a helmet and our sons from skateboarding without kneedpads.

My state, the great state of South Carolina, does not require that motorcyclists wear helmets.

I’m just saying, it’s a pretty great state.

Meanwhile, from Postal Mag:

With the Just Move! stamp issuance the U.S. Postal Service hoped to raise awareness about the importance of physical activity in achieving a healthy lifestyle. However, according to Linns Stamp News, the USPS will be destroying the entire press run after receiving concerns from the President’s Council on Fitness, Sports & Nutrition over alleged “unsafe” acts depicted on three of the stamps (cannonball dive, skateboarding without kneepads and a headstand without a helmet). (There’s also a batter without a batting helmet, a girl balancing on a slippery rock, and a soccer player without kneepads or shin pads.)

The entire run is being destroyed. Don’t know how much that cost, but it’s more than a penny.

What is the motivation behind something like a national council for fitness? It’s to get our fat kids of the couch and exercising so that they can live happy productive lives of service to the State. Just…when we succeed and the kids do actually go outside to play, let’s make it as much as possible like still being indoors. Video game style. You know, with do-overs and no repercussions for bad decisions. Just keep your fitness up.

I encourage you to not allow your kids to exercise until they’re teenagers. Let them play. Play, kids, play. And when you’re playing MurderBall, try to peg ’em on the head, it’s way more fun that way.<>позиция а google

On October 14, 2013 By Joffre Swait In Politics, Pro-Life Like

When Midwives Become Witches

By Joffre Swait

Midwifery is a noble calling. We’ve had a doula or midwife at four of our five births. The last two births were at home under the care of excellent Upstate South Carolina midwife Elizabeth Randolph. She is strong, competent, thoroughly educated, and very experienced. We have felt very safe in her hands, even during the more difficult birth of our fourth child.

More and more people around the country are turning to midwives, and so more and more women are being trained and apprenticed in this noble, ancient, and wholesome art. Midwives go out as missionaries and charitable workers, saving lives from Mexico to Afghanistan to South Africa, helping to restore and legitimize a calling that statist modern medicine had pushed to the fringes.

But now that the American state finds itself struggling to regulate midwifery away, it is making an unholy pact with witches and the devil. Oh, you thought I was going to say with midwives. No, they’ve made covenant with witches and the devil. Well, let me go back. They’re treating with midwives. Who are witches.

What, you didn’t know that midwives are witches? Historically, many were. Wiccans and open pagans will tell you that the New Testament prohibition against “witchcraft” uses the word pharmakeia, one who uses poisons and drugs. So, they say, it’s not what we call witchcraft, it’s pharmaceutical work. In a way, that’s a load of bollocks, because it casts a modern eye back, pretending that potion-makers didn’t fall under the category of witch then simply because they don’t today. But in a way, they’re quite right. Potion makers is what witches are. Potion-makers, poisoners, and deceivers. Poisoners and deceivers in league with the devil, whether there’s ectoplasm and levitation involved or not.

Much has been made of the connections between midwives and witches in Christendom, and for good reason. There were many many many good midwives throughout medieval Europe. There were also hags, witches, and wild women hiding in groves and back alleys, hunting pennyroyal, hemlock, and mandrake root, making potions to poison babies. These women are still with us today, both the midwives and the witches. And many of these women, the good and the wicked, live in California.

Now witchcraft is becoming law in there.

From October 9th on, there will be in California midwives, and witches calling themselves midwives. Governor Edmund Brown has signed seven bills regarding “women’s health” into law.

The Governor signed the following bills today:

• AB 154 by Assemblymember Toni G. Atkins (D-San Diego) – Permits a nurse practitioner, certified nurse-midwife or physician assistant, who completes specified training and complies with specified standardized procedures or protocols, to perform an abortion by aspiration techniques during the first trimester of pregnancy.

And so California and the United States fall deeper into their compact with Satan. Do not be deceived. All these things are happening around you, and they are not simply “social” or “moral” issues. They are ancient evils. They’re the same evils that give you the creeps when you watch the wrong movie or walk down the wrong dark road. Abortion is the work of devils and murderers, even when it happens in a clinic with a vacuum tube.

Yes, even under the smell of ammonia and ether.

Many are called to combat this evil directly. Pray to God for their success and the downfall of their enemies. But that is not what all the Church is called to do in the face of these evils. It falls to very few to hunt witches. To most of us falls the better task, the be freemen and goodwives in God’s good kingdom. To build a kingdom where darkness flees the light.

O Christians, and O women, will you not do good for us? Have children. Many children. Become midwives and old wives and wise women and prophetesses. Teach your daughters to be wives and midwives. Give us, O women, the Hebrew women, who saved God’s people from out under the devil’s nose.

(cross-posted at Joffre The Giant)<>

On October 9, 2013 By Joffre Swait In Scribblings Like

Joffre Swait: The Greatest Evil Is Done By Quiet Men With Smooth-Shaven Cheeks

“I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of “Admin.” The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid “dens of crime” that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern.”

― C.S. Lewis, from the preface of The Screwtape Letters

Evil creep. It’s a thing. Ancient evils slither into our lives through bureaucracies and policies. The pencil pushers who just want to do their jobs are of the devil.

And sometimes that’s hilarious.

You should watch Codefellas, a short animated series about two NSA agents, one old-school, one new. The mundane creep of great evil can be pretty funny in these writers’ hands. And do watch it until the end. The entire series should take you twenty minutes.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHz7iYMqSZQ&feature=c4-overview-vl&list=PLibNZv5Zd0dwAkwoZtRHfn3tPsdOy-VuF<>проверка тиц pr

On October 8, 2013 By Joffre Swait In Scribblings Like

Joffre Swait: I Briefly Introduce Myself

Hello all you readers of KC, I’m Joffre, and I’m the newest contributor here. I hope I can keep up the fine level of discourse these boys already have going. Since I am by nature a vlogger, I thought I’d say hello via video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMgES5yUjyM<>kontaktmaster.com

On October 7, 2013 By Joffre Swait In Politics Like

Government Shutdown “Unbiblical”

By Joffre Swait

So this is a few days late, but I’ve just gotten around to it. The day after the so-called “government shutdown” began, Jim Wallis of Sojourners fame put out the video above explaining to us all that “what we call ‘correct theology'” meant that the government shutdown was a violation of God’s holy law. Well, he didn’t say that, of course. But he did say it was unbiblical.

“As a Christian, I want to say, shutting down government in unbiblical. Read the thirteenth chapter of the book of Romans. The government’s role is to protect us from evil, to promote the good. We call that ‘the Common Good.’ And Scriptures make clear throughout Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, the book of Kings, that rulers, kings, governments, are responsible for how they treat the poorest and most vulnerable. They’re judged for that by God. Those political extremists…who want to shut down the government are against the poor. They get hostile to the poor because they’re hostile to government.”

There are so many things I want to say in response to this dumbness. Must. Pull self. Together.

Okay. We’ll keep it short.

Let us put to the side any responsibility the government might have to glorify God and submit to King Jesus. Let our eyes slide past any responsibility Christians and the holy Church might have to remind rulers that Jesus is King. Let us focus simply on the commands of the thirteenth chapter of Romans. Be subject. Do not resist. Do good, not evil. Pay taxes. Revenue to whom it is due, respect also, and also honor.

Let us now imagine a political scene in which Christians followed those commands (which, by the way, they do in these here United States). Let us further imagine a scene in which the Church does not insist that our rulers remember God (which, except for the occasional threatened excommunication of Nancy Pelosi, is what it does in these here United States).

In a world like that governments still go bankrupt. Governments still default. Governments can still shut down.

Too many American Christians take Romans 13 to mean “help the government as much as is possible”. There is no such command.

Even without Biblical categories for resistance to government, which exist, why on earth do we suppose we should be helping our governments and rulers in their insanities? If the government votes to shut itself down, let it. What has Washington to do with Jerusalem?

If the government shuts down, you say, maybe evils like abortion and government schools will be defunded. I can get behind that. But what, Joffre, of the poor and oppressed?! Remember what Jim Wallis said about hating the poor! Dear God, what of the poor?!

Exactly. Time for the church to do its job.<>