Category Archives: In memoriam

Remembering Louie

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Three years ago today, Louie Heckert died from injuries suffered when he was attacked by a rogue bull moose.  Louie was a long-time member of the congregation I served in Colorado, and he was the most universally beloved man I have ever met.  He was the character in chief in a town full of them, but unlike so many of the others, he was a gentle and welcoming man who always seemed to have a good word for everyone he met.

I will never forget telling my oldest daughter, who was then five years old, that he had been hurt and was probably going to die; her face grew sad and solemn, and she said, “I like Mr. Louie. He’s a nice man; he gives me candy.” There are a lot of things people will remember about him, and the candy is certainly one that children of all ages will remember fondly. There are others that stick in my mind as well, like his standard response when I asked him how he was doing: “Can’t complain, and nobody’d listen if I did.” I knew he had to be joking, but he said it as seriously as he ever said anything, with that twinkle in his eye.  I wish I’d heard all his stories.  I wish I had a good enough memory to recall all the ones I did hear.  I’m glad I got the chance to get to know him.

After his death, folks in Grand Lake put a couple videos together, to help raise money to restore his old black Jeep and to advertise the town (something Louie would have considered an honorable tribute, given how much time and effort he put into advertising the town himself).  Here’s the longer one, which includes interviews with Gene, John Cook, Steve Cormey, and others:

Pride (in the name of love)

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This video was produced, as far as I can tell, as an ad of sorts for the History Channel’s show on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.; it features John Legend’s version of U2’s “Pride (In the Name of Love)”—which is a rare accomplishment: a cover of that song that’s actually good—accompanied by footage and photos of Dr. King and other participants in the civil-rights movement.  Ad or otherwise, it’s a worthy tribute.

John Updike, RIP

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If you’d asked me yesterday who was America’s greatest living writer, I probably would ultimately have come down for John Updike; as the Wikipedia article on him puts it, “Updike was widely recognized for his careful craftsmanship, his highly stylistic writing, and his prolific output, having published more than twenty-five novels and more than a dozen short story collections, as well as poetry, art criticism, literary criticism and children’s books.”  He seemed to do everything, as a writer, and if not always brilliantly, he consistently managed to do it with insight and wit.  I particularly appreciate his willingness to be unfashionable in his opinions (as seen for instance in his piece “On Not Being a Dove”).  Like the rest of his contemporaries, he was no longer at his best as a writer, but his death today of lung cancer is a great loss to the republic of American letters—with his independence of mind, I think, being the greatest loss of all.

Richard John Neuhaus, RIP

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Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, founder of the Institute for Religion and Public Life and founding editor-in-chief of First Things, died this morning at the age of 72, of complications from cancer.  I never met him—I’ve wanted to for years, but I knew it was highly unlikely that it would ever happen—and can’t say I knew him, apart from the occasional gracious correspondence by e-mail (I don’t know if my own experience is typical, but if it is, he has to have spent a lot of time e-mailing random readers), but I truly grieve his death.  As a winsome, insightful, grace-bearing advocate for the gospel of Jesus Christ in our contemporary Western culture (and he was that, even as he never backed down from a fight he deemed worthwhile), he had few equals and fewer superiors over this past century.  His death, coming so soon after that of Avery Cardinal Dulles, impoverishes not only the Catholic theological scene, but the whole church, in America and around the world.  I have no doubt that First Things will continue strong under the leadership of Joseph Bottum, but as my wife pointed out when she called to give me the news, his own voice and perspective will never be replaced.  I appreciate what Bottum had to say, which I think is just about perfect:

My tears are not for him—for he knew, all his life, that his Redeemer lives, and he has now been gathered by the Lord in whom he trusted.I weep, rather for all the rest of us. As a priest, as a writer, as a public leader in so many struggles, and as a friend, no one can take his place. The fabric of life has been torn by his death, and it will not be repaired, for those of us who knew him, until that time when everything is mended and all our tears are wiped away.

It is good and right that Bottum has chosen to repost today Fr. Neuhaus’ 2000 article “Born Toward Dying,” which the Anchoress rightly calls “deep, open, thoughtful, funny, moving and wise. Typically, so.”  My only objection to her use of the word “typically” is that this really is Fr. Neuhaus at his best; it is, I think, a profoundly important piece, especially for our death-denying, thanatophobic culture.The Anchoress also posted a video of the Kings College Choir singing the seventh movement, “In Paradisum,” from Gabriel Fauré’s Requiem in D minor, which suits beautifully here:

Requiescat in pace, Fr. Neuhaus.

Samuel Huntington, RIP

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I’m working with a fairly limited connection here at the moment, but I wanted to note the death of Harvard political scientist and author Samuel P. Huntington. Over the last decade, Dr. Huntington took a pounding from his fellow members of the liberal Western intelligentsia; when they wanted to join Francis Fukuyama in celebrating The End of History, he had the guts in his article “The Clash of Civilizations?” (and the resulting book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order), to point out how foolish that triumphalism was. As Mark Steyn put it, Dr. Huntington’s key point was that

the conventional western elite view of man as homo economicus is reductive—that cultural identity is a more profound indicator that western-style economic liberty cannot easily trump.

As a consequence, he argued that the post-Cold War era would not see the end of major conflict, but rather would see a shift from wars of ideology to wars driven by conflicts between cultures—and particularly by the conflict along “Islam’s bloody borders.” He was pilloried for his argument, but it seems to me that history has validated his analysis, where Dr. Fukuyama’s position has fallen by the wayside. For those interested in reading more, Power Line has a good short roundup of pieces on Dr. Huntington, including Robert Kaplan’s excellent profile of him in The Atlantic. For his insight, his capacity for independent thought, and his willingness to follow out his analysis in the face of the conventional wisdom, Dr. Huntington will be greatly missed.

Avery Cardinal Dulles, RIP

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I’m not sure how I missed this, though part of it is that I had gone a week or two without checking the First Things website; his death last Friday wasn’t surprising, given that he was 90 years old and in poor health, but it’s still a loss for the church.  As Joseph Bottum summarized his career,

Created cardinal for his theological work by John Paul II, Avery Dulles was one of the great figures of the twentieth century: a theologian, an intellectual, a teacher, a writer, a lecturer, and a kind and gentle man.In his long life, he wrote more than 700 articles and twenty-two books, and it is hard to imagine how anyone today can fill the roles he played in the Catholic world and American public life. As the disease that took his life progressed, his final months were a trial that took away his powers to speak, write, and move. But he seemed, in those months, to live even more serenely, more spiritually, and more beautifully. May God welcome him home.

Bottum’s obituary of Cardinal Dulles expands this, and tells in brief the story of a remarkable life.  It is a strange thing that the great-grandson of one Secretary of State (John Watson Foster), great-nephew of a second (Robert Lansing), son of a third (John Foster Dulles), and nephew of a Director of Central Intelligence (Allen Dulles) should become known not as a government official but as a Catholic theologian, but such was the mystery of God.  A profound thinker and a man of grace both in his theology and in his life, he, like the pope who ordained him cardinal, represented the Roman church at its very best.  Requiescat in pace, Avery Robert Dulles.

For those who served, and serve

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I am the son of two Navy veterans, the nephew of a third, and the godson of a fourth. One of the earliest things I remember clearly was the time in second grade when I got to go on a Tiger Cruise—they flew us out to Honolulu where we met the carrier as it returned home at the end of the cruise, then we rode the ship back to its homeport in Alameda. I grew up around petty officers and former POWs. When one of our college students here described her chagrin at asking a friend if she would be living “on base” this year—and her friend’s complete incomprehension—I laughed, because I know that one; my freshman year in college was the first time I had ever lived anywhere outside that frame of reference.In short, as I’ve said before, I’m a Navy brat; for me, “veterans” aren’t people I read about, they’re faces I remember, faces of people I know and love. They are the people without whom we would all be speaking German, or Russian—or, someday, Arabic—but they’re also the people for whom we give thanks every time we see them that they came home, and those we remember who never did. They are my family, and the friends of my family, those who taught and cared for my parents and those my parents taught and for whom they cared in their turn. They are the defenders of our national freedom, and they stand before and around us to lay their blood, toil, tears and sweat at the feet of this country to keep us safe; and for me, and for many like me, their sacrifice and their gift is not merely abstract, it’s personal. May we never forget what they have done for all of us; may we never fail to honor their service; may we never cease in giving them the support they deserve.Dad, Mom, Uncle Bill, Auntie Barb, all of you: thank you.Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.—John 15:13

Saying goodbye

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What shall I render to the Lord for all his benefits to me?
I will lift up the cup of salvation and call on the name of the Lord,
I will pay my vows to the Lord in the presence of all his people.
Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints.—Psalm 116:12-15 (ESV)I tell you this, brothers: flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. Behold! I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep,
but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed. For this perishable body must put on the imperishable, and this mortal body must put on immortality. When the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written:
“Death is swallowed up in victory.”“O death, where is your victory?
O death, where is your sting?”The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God,
who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.—1 Corinthians 15:50-57 (ESV)It’s been a long couple days. Sunday I had a meeting after church and places to be all afternoon, and then yesterday was my first funeral here in Indiana, as we buried one of the lovely old saints of this congregation, someone who’d been a part of the church here for 44 years. On the one hand, it was a real celebration of a woman who’d lived a remarkable life and blessed a great many people; we did not grieve as those who have no hope, nor did we weep for her, because no one had any doubt at all that she died in Christ. On the other hand, that doesn’t make our loss right now any less real, and it was a very emotional service.Still, I would have loved to have been able to bear witness to the Resurrection the way Sir Winston Churchill did at his state funeral in St. Paul’s Cathedral. For most of the service, it was a very traditional Anglican funeral, but after the benediction, a bugler positioned high in the dome of St. Paul’s began to play Taps: “Day is done, gone the sun from the hills, from the earth, from the sky. Go to sleep, rest in peace, God is nigh.” Not typical procedure at an Anglican funeral, but normal for a military funeral, and so certainly fitting for Churchill. But no sooner had the last note faded to echoes than another bugler, positioned across the dome from the first, began to play Reveille—“It’s time to get up, it’s time to get up, it’s time to get up in the morning!” It was Churchill’s final testimony, that at the end of history, the last note will not be Taps, it will be Reveille—a Reveille to wake the very dead, as the trumpet will sound not an end but a beginning, not death but resurrection, and the end of all death. That is the promise of Easter; that is our hope in Christ.

Seven years ago today

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Please take a few moments today to remember those who died on 9/11, and to pray for those they left behind; to give thanks for the courage and heroism of the passengers who took down the hijackers of Flight 93, and for those who gave their lives to save others in the Twin Towers and the Pentagon; to pray that those who plan such attacks would be brought to repentance; and to give thanks, in the words of Hugh Hewitt, for “the men and women of the United States military and their civilian counterparts who have fought so hard and sacrificed so much to prevent another such attack.” (NB: the link is my addition.)

Your next car will be powered by termites

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Well, OK, not your next car, and not directly—but I’m willing to bet that’s the way things are heading. I’ve been betting on hydrogen fuel cells as the future of power generation (and not just for your car, either) ever since our time in Vancouver when I first heard the story of the remarkable Dr. Geoffrey Ballard (who died early this month at the age of 76) and the company he founded, Ballard Power Systems. The potential for replacing the internal combustion engine and vast coal plants with a power source that produces nothing but water (which in many parts of the world would qualify as a secondary benefit) is staggeringly wonderful—if we can solve two problems: one, storage of hydrogen, which is of course a highly volatile element; and two, finding a way to produce hydrogen that doesn’t cause its own set of environmental problems (as, for instance, cracking natural gas would).I think we might now have a leading contender for solution #2: termites. In an article in the latest Atlantic titled “Gut Reactions,” Lisa Margonelli reports on recent discoveries about how termites break down plant material into food in their third gut (or, more accurately, about the microbes, many of which exist nowhere else, which do it for them) and the exciting possibilities those discoveries raise. She of course, and quite rightly, takes this in several different directions, but the line that caught me was right in the beginning:

Offer a termite this page, and its microbial helpers will break it down into two liters of hydrogen, enough to drive more than six miles in a fuel-cell car.

I understand that scientists want to take each one of those tens of thousands of microbes and study each one thoroughly—there’s a lot of knowledge there, and a lot of doctoral theses to go with it. Along the way, though, I hope they don’t forget to do the most practical thing: follow ArcTech’s example.

The Virginia-based company ArcTech trained termites to eat coal, and then rummaged through their guts to find the microorganisms best at turning coal into methane. It cultured those microorganisms and now feeds them coal; the company plans to use the methane they produce to make electricity, and is already selling the by-products, including one used by farmers as a soil additive. ArcTech says this method eliminates virtually all greenhouse-gas emissions from coal-based electricity production.

Let’s go and do likewise to provide fuel for our fuel cells, and maybe sooner than you think, you’ll be able to look down at your brand new car and think, “This is powered by termites.”