As famed science fiction author Frank Herbert wrote in his epic series 'Dune,' "fear is the mind-killer." In other words, fear makes you stupid.

COVID panic has for two years made a great many of us very stupid. And a select few among us have found our niche in playing off the fear of the rest. But it is well past time to say enough, and reclaim our wits. 

Being overweight greatly increases your risk of serious illness or even death due to COVID. So does stressing out about whether COVID or our fear of man issues are more dangerous.

We should not be controlled by fear of would-be tyrants any more than we should allow ourselves to be controlled by fear of a virus, however deadly and dangerous it is or is not.

On the first day of the New Year, I finished copying notes from 2021 from Lauren's and my Ink+Volt personal organizers into a Word document on my computer. The finished document contains 11,008-words and is 29-pages long. Gleaning the big takeaways may yet take a few more days at least, but for now I am trying to break everything into major categories.

Family, church, work, friendships, podcasting, book-reading, trips taken, current events - all of them affected and were affected by our choices and attitude. It stands to reason then that goals set for the new year should be informed by a strong commitment to personal growth and maturity through the good, the bad, and the ugly.

At the end of the day, week, month, and year, we want to make better decisions. And avoiding tired platitudes or truisms which may fail to engage our hearts and minds fully, we have to be honest about where we have been, what we have done, and who we are. Only through that honesty can we humbly move forward in strength and confidence.

Yet again - and I cannot stress this enough - our ability or inability to execute perfectly is not the point. And in point-of-fact, meditating on God's grace in Christ can set us free to learn the lessons we need to in order to achieve more faithful stewardship of what the Lord has entrusted to us.

Now I begin to do both things at the same time, since we are in January already. Analyzing last year systematically while at the same time beginning to put down intentional goals and expectations for myself, my family, and my engagement in every other sphere, all parties concerned will be better served in the coming months.

Picking up where we left off in our last episode, the remaining 30 titles I finished in 2021 were as follows:

This year, I set my Goodreads 2021 Reading Challenge to 55 books. With just two days left to the year, I am three titles short and do not think I will have the bandwidth to meet my goal. Yet for all that, I got closer to my goal than I perhaps would have without setting the goal. 

For that matter, 95% is still an A in most grade scales. So an A for effort will have to suffice, and 52 titles seems like quite enough given the circumstances.

But as the year draws to a close, let me share with you what I read and a brief takeaway for each title. Perhaps in the course of this rundown you will get some inspiration to join me on Goodreads and set a reading goal for 2022. Or perhaps you will just get some good ideas for titles you might be interested in reading, or not reading, in the year ahead.

Without further adieu, here in the first part I will talk about the first twenty-two books in the sequence they were finished.

Stay tuned for a treatment of the remaining thirty works.

As 2021 draws to a close, my wife and I continue our annual tradition. Listing the major events of the past year, we strive to understand our lives better so as to be more intentional in the coming year.

Another pregnancy, all our children growing older, homeschooling, striving to achieve and maintain the right work-life balance; going places, cultivating relationships, and investing ourselves; building a godly legacy, trying to influence those around us toward a fuller love for God and toward deeper faith in His unchangeable character of purpose - all of this and more goes into the mix. 

Making sense of it all can feel a bit like searching for needles in haystacks.

The whole year is made up of four quarters. Each quarter is made up of three months. Each month is broken down into days on which major events happened in our family life. 

Compiled from the record-keeping we have done together a week at a time throughout, it all goes together into a timeline. And from this timeline, we are able to study certain trends. 

Sometimes those trends are happy to reflect on. Other times, we wince with pain and regret about situations we wish we had handled differently.

All together, the whole process is predicated on one simple truth. Life is a gift from God, and we are stewards entrusted with that gift by a Master who calls us to invest ourselves in loving Him and one another truly and comprehensively.

Thankfully, the expedition does not succeed or fail on our ability to execute perfectly. Instead, by God's grace we overcome all manner of trials and temptations and the testing of our faith which develops perseverance. At the end of it all, our hope is receiving the crown of life which God has in store for us in Christ.

In the meantime Lauren and I will be busy from now until the official close of 2021 striving to catalog and assess our recent investments and their returns. How did we spend our time, attention, and money? And what was the result? The answer to these questions sets the stage, we hope, for yet wiser investment of our talents in the years ahead.

"God willing, we will live and do this or that."

Frustrated with censorship, I deleted my Facebook account November 25, 2020. Yesterday, I returned. 

The whole business bothers me. In an effort to sort through why, this episode is dedicated to unpacking the whole messy situation.

Facebook is so Meta now. And where the Metaverse is concerned, we need informed opinions rather than emotional outbursts and tired platitudes. The practical reality for the foreseeable is that Big Tech owns the lion's share of the internet. There is no living in the modern world without maintaining some kind of presence in this space.

But I want to do more than rail against infringements on free speech. No one will be charmed or won over by begrudging and bitter engagement on this subject, and that includes me. 

The simple fact when it all boils down is that my reasons for both leaving and returning to Facebook are the same. Our first responsibility is to love the Lord our God with all our being, and to love our neighbor as ourselves.

When I left, my hope was to do both better by leaving than I could by staying. So also, my return is predicated on the belief that to continue on being a conscientious objector and abstainer under the circumstances would be less than the best I can offer, and that I can love God and my neighbor better if I rejoin.

The trouble with boycotts is as it always has been. Where do we draw the line, and how far are we willing to go in forsaking all interaction with an organization based on their objectionable practices? And what if all the alternatives, or near enough, become similarly objectionable?

Whatever valid objections a person might have to the corporate policies and practices of Walmart or Amazon, it is very hard to buy groceries or nearly anything at a reasonable price apart from them right now. And starving, though an option, is also objectionable.

So also with the technology by which we stay in touch and communicate with one another. Will I forgo a cell phone and internet if all the available service providers have dirty hands and hearts? And what if the power and water companies go woke? 

At a more basic level where the Christian conscience is concerned, I don't believe we are commanded to by God. If anything, the requirement that a man provide for the needs of his household may require that we have to buy our necessities from people we profoundly disagree with, and who even loathe and resent our believing as we do.

Just as I readily refuse to become enslaved by newfangled social media technologies, neither can I afford to become a slave to protesting them. And this holds true particularly if engagement with them is a precondition for reforming society and seeking the welfare of the city, which seems to be the case.

Often over the past year and a month of being off Facebook I have meditated on why God would tell exiled Jews in Babylon through the prophet Jeremiah to "seek the welfare of the city" to which they had been brought. And what I conclude is that however pagan Babylon truly was, it pleased God to be represented in those circumstances by His people continuing to live in a way that brought glory to Him. In other words, God commanded His people to continue loving Him and their neighbors - and even their enemies - despite the idolatry and wickedness of Babylon.

So I hope I am not a dog returning to my vomit, and a fool returning to his folly. Yet even more hopefully I am not wise in my own eyes, nor self-righteous, nor tired and embittered.

As James tells us to have the proper attitude where plans are concerned, we do well to remember the principle in this context. "God willing, we will live and do this or that." 

Therefore, when God leads us underground, we go underground. And when he leads us back into the open, we follow Him there also.

Lauren now "great with child," as they say, Christmas feels a bit different in our household this year. 

Few of our countrymen are having children these days. And very few indeed are having more than two if they can help it. My wife and I thereby find ourselves receiving the gift of commentary from time to time. Much of the feedback from broader society is congratulatory, albeit puzzled and bewildered.

But population growth in America last year was the lowest it's ever been in this country's history - a mere 0.1% due in part to a perfect storm of conditions and attitudes which have persuaded most people that now is not a good time to increase their family size.

Psalm 127 rings in our ears all the same.

"Behold, children are a heritage from Yahweh,

All the while, it would seem the mainstream folks are more in the mindset described in Isaiah 3.

"My people—infants are their oppressors..."

All the more, Christmas is wonderful for the fact that the fulfillment of the promise of God to redeem His people was the birth of the Messiah to the virgin Mary. This innocent babe wrapped in swaddling cloths and laid in a manger would save his people, lifting the curse of sin and death.

King Herod saw the child as a threat, sending soldiers to Bethlehem to find and kill him. But not taking any chances, Herod ordered his lackeys to murder every baby boy under the age of two. 

Tragically, far too many Americans have more the mindset of Herod than of Joseph in this regard.

Yet we should admire Joseph and Mary all the more. Rather than bemoaning that this was hardly the best time, or that they weren't in the best position to have and raise a child right now, Joseph and Mary saw the greatest fulfillment of their God-given potential as humble obedience to the perfect and holy will of the Most High. 

Though their country was under foreign occupation, the wicked king of Judea would hunt them, and people might talk, they would diligently care for this baby boy entrusted to them, even though it meant fleeing to Egypt until the threat had passed.

All the more we should see in God warning Joseph in a dream a comforting truth about the Lord that the unchangeable character of his purpose will not be thwarted, whatever cruelty and malice would try against those who belong to God.

We are in the position of the shepherds here, to whom the angel appeared as they were keeping watch over their flock by night. As Luke 2:10-14 records,

"...The angel said to them, “Fear not, for behold, I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord. And this will be a sign for you: you will find a baby wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger.”

And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying,

“Glory to God in the highest,

and on earth peace among those with whom he is pleased!”"

December 18, 1997 an episode of Seinfeld aired titled "The Strike" in which George Costanza's father Frank celebrates a made-up holiday called Festivus to protest Christmas and all its attendant pressures and consumerism. 

Fast forward 24-years, and I find myself encountering people at work hedging their bets when varying their holiday greetings and well-wishing. "Merry Christmas" no longer suffices. Now more than one coworker in a week's span has floated references to the "Festivus for the rest of us."

Replacing colorful lit-up ornaments-filled evergreens with an aluminum pole, or substituting feats of strength for gift-giving, or airing grievances with one another in place of reading the Christmas story. All of it is so very post-modern.

As such, I find myself sad about it rather than amused. 

Enter Bradford Littlejohn at American Reformer with his essay 'Reimagining a Christian America,' published December 22, 2021. And now is as good a time as any to explore the ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future where Christianity in public life is concerned.

With the loss of Christian America celebrated in too many quarters, Littlejohn's article is a breath of fresh air. Common sense should tell us if our theology no longer does that life in Christ is to be lived out publicly.

"This little light of mine," went the song. "I'm going to let it shine." 

And didn't Jesus tell us to not hide our lights under a bushel, but to let them shine before all men? He did indeed.

And so we come to a more thoughtful and intentional extrapolation of that command in Jeremiah 29:7 where the exiles in Babylonian captivity are commanded to "seek the welfare of the city" in which the Providence of the Almighty has seen fit to place them.

I may differ with Littlejohn in his call to reclaim American public education for Christ. That ship has sailed, in my view, and it is time to give up on it once and for all, preferring Christian private and home education as the new institution which will revive our national religion.

All the same, Festivus is as good as any a proof of the need for us to speak to the broader culture publicly and boldly about telos again in light of God's Word.

So Merry Christmas, you filthy animals. And put away your aluminum poles and post-modernism already.

December 20, 2021 Sukhayl Niyazov published a piece for Public Discourse titled 'Is Marxism Self-Defeating or Self-Fulfilling?' In it, Niyazov explores the historicist tendency of presuming that currently observed conditions have always been so and always will be so. 

A kind of confirmation bias will have us finding proofs in our view of both the past and the future based on our limited, finite understanding of the mechanics  of the present.

Just so, Marx presumed a kind of inevitability to the socialist revolution and programme based on the conditions he was then observing. And insofar as the ideas Marx promulgated took hold in some places - Russia and China, for instance - the freer-thinking world took note, and the ruling class made concessions over the past century to institute welfare states which approximated a kind of communist evolution.

Yet we would do well in our study of history to incorporate a biblical understanding of God and man, and humbly concede as Gandalf the Grey does in Lord of the Rings. "For even the very wise cannot see all ends."

There is no new thing under the sun. And James tells us to be content with saying "God willing, we will live and do this or that."

On that note, I would encourage you to watch and listen to Elon Musk's interview with The Babylon Bee podcast. Who but God could have seen that coming? And who knows what the end-result of it will be?

The point is not to hitch our hope-wagon to the horse of South African billionaires, however much we may and do admire them, becoming friends of Jesus like the rich man Lazarus. But the point is to say that Musk clearly sees in Christians a bulwark against the threat to civilization posed by Wokism.

Neither unbridled optimism nor fatalistic pessimism about the future should dominate our plans and purposes. The character of God's purpose remains not only unchanged but unchangeable. And in that, we can continue to labor and love and work and play and relate with humble, sober, faithful hope.

And thank God for that.

My wife and daughter attended a birthday party yesterday afternoon into the evening. That left my sons and I home. To celebrate, we moved four bookshelves upstairs from the room formerly known as the library to my office. And from the office, we moved two desks and attendant computers downstairs. And to unwind at the end of it all, I ordered pizza and we watched Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.

One of the newest entries into the Marvel superheroes movies franchise, Shang-Chi was lively, interesting, and entertaining. But I found myself thinking, as I often do, about what the political implications of the film might be. More to the point, how did the film play in China?

It would seem from the Wikipedia article at least that it has not. 

"In September 2021, Deadline Hollywood reported that a theatrical release in China was unlikely due to comments Liu made in an interview with the CBC in 2017, referencing negative comments from his parents about living in China."

If the reports are true, then, this film was not shown in China because the CCP objects to the main star, Simu Liu, having referenced his parents views in an interview four years ago. And without looking those comments up, one could reasonably surmise that those comments from Liu's parents were contrary to the party line.

There is, then, a philosophical and metaphysical conflict here. And I would draw your attention on this point to an article published yesterday in WORLD Magazine by Carl R. Trueman titled 'Dueling Ideas of Reality' in which the divide in America over abortion and LGBTQ really stems from a more fundamental divide over what it means to be human. This divide in turn stems from a more basic disagreement about God.

It always comes back to what we believe about God and ourselves and one another, it seems. And CCP censorship of major American corporations is no exception.