SubscribeStar Saturday: Baccalaureate Service 2026

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Tomorrow night I will give the sermon for my school’s baccalaureate service.  This church service is for the graduating seniors, the Class of 2026.  After hearing a sermon based on Romans 12:9-21 this past Sunday, I thought the passage could prove fruitful as a “blueprint,” of sorts, for graduating seniors (and all others in attendance).  Here is the text of the sermon I’ll deliver tomorrow:

Good evening families, faculty, staff, and graduates of the Class of 2026. You are sitting here this evening at a threshold, a moment in your lives when you will soon pass from the world you know into a different one. As you cross this threshold of graduation, a great deal is going to change: your surroundings, your friends, your goals. It is an exciting and even scary process, as you are experiencing both a world in flux and flux in yourself.

The temptation will be great, therefore, to cast aside those things that are most essential, the “first things” that are always steadfast, in favor of the siren song of fleeting experiences and pleasures. The world will tell you, “do this thing and it will make you happy and bring you fulfillment”—and then it will sell some other “thing” next month, and the month after that. That road leads to emptiness and wasted potential.

So what should we do? How do we take this moment, lingering at the threshold, to prepare our hearts and minds for the changes ahead? The answer is love, love reflected through Christ’s Love for us.

Romans 12:9-21 (NKJV) offers some insights:

9 Let love be without hypocrisy. Abhor what is evil. Cling to what is good. 10 Be kindly affectionate to one another with brotherly love, in honor giving preference to one another; 11 not lagging in diligence, fervent in spirit, serving the Lord; 12 rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation, continuing steadfastly in prayer; 13 distributing to the needs of the saints, given to hospitality.

14 Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse. 15 Rejoice with those who rejoice, and weep with those who weep. 16 Be of the same mind toward one another. Do not set your mind on high things [or, “Do not be proud,” GNB], but associate with the humble. Do not be wise in your own opinion.

17 Repay no one evil for evil. Have regard for good things in the sight of all men. 18 If it is possible, as much as depends on you, live peaceably with all men. 19 Beloved, do not avenge yourselves, but rather give place to wrath; for it is written, “Vengeance is Mine, I will repay,” says the Lord. 20 Therefore

“If your enemy is hungry, feed him;
If he is thirsty, give him a drink;
For in so doing you will heap coals of fire on his head.”

21 Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

The Word of the Lord—Thanks Be to God. Let us pray.

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Phone it in Friday CXXX: YouTube Roundup CXC: Breakfast

The Portly Politico5 Comments

Yours portly is pro-breakfast. Yes, yes, it’s not the most controversial take; if you grew up in the 1990s, commercials and classrooms bombarded you with the mantra “breakfast is the most important meal of the day.” Our teachers always told us to eat a good breakfast before standardized tests (advice I repeated to my own students).

Breakfast offers so much. It can be sweet (like the breakfast featured in today’s video). It can be savory. It can be a glorious mish-mash of both.

For quick breakfasts, I prepare one of two simple meals:

  1. An English muffin with a layer of crunchy peanut butter, a layer of plain Greek yogurt, and a layer of sliced bananas (very filling)
  2. An English muffin with spinach, a little lunch meat, and a boiled egg chopped on top (also filling, but much lower-calorie than #1)

Sometimes Dr. Wife will make a glorious breakfast of scrambled eggs, sourdough bread, and turkey bacon on Saturday mornings. She puts spinach and sometimes onions in the eggs, too, so they’re really tasty.

Growing up, breakfast was the classic bowl (or, in my case, multiple bowls) of cereal. Cereal is a problem food for me, as I will keep pouring more because “I need to use up the milk in the bottom of the bowl.” Next thing I know, I’ll have eaten half a box of Golden Grahams. I’m The Portly Politico for a reason.

Also, in the days of penny-pinching and fear of staleness (and, by extension, food waste), my mom would pay us a quarter if we finished a box of cereal (and we were soft-locked from opening a new box until the current one was consumed). Being both food- and money-motivated, that incentive presented a dangerous scenario for a budding chubster. Keep in mind, too, that these were the days when the government assured us that eating a ton of grains and very little red meat was supposed to be the key to good health. Of course, I’m sure Kellogg’s and General Mills loved that (and probably paid for the “research” that resulted in the food pyramid). It was not a good time to be a little fat kid (or it was the golden age of childhood obesity, depending on your perspective).

Regardless, today I’ve got a very short Short showing my breakfast unfold in two seconds:

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TBT^2: Mystery in the Blogosphere

The Portly Politico6 Comments

What happens when a blog dies, especially a long-established one? Further, what happens when the blog’s author also goes missing, leaving no digital footprint behind?

The latter question seems almost impossible in our hyperconnected world, but it’s the case with Trinidadian blogger Renard, the proprietor of the now-gone Renard’s World. Renard and his little avatar, which looked like a character from The Boondocks, was so ubiquitous, he seemed like the unofficial mascot of WordPress. Here was a writer who churned out quality content every day, and like “Tom” on MySpace, he seemed to follow and be followed by everyone on the platform.

Then he disappeared.

The mystery has, as I wrote last year, “endured.” In attempting recent searches for “Renard’s World,” the same speculative blog posts show up as did last year. I even hopped onto Substack to see if our boy had made an appearance on that platform, but no dice.

Could Renard be blogging under a completely different identity? Or did he hang up the work for good?

There are, of course, the darker speculations, that Renard met with some unfortunate fate beneath the Caribbean sun. But the coordinated shuttering of all of his social media and online presence seems like something difficult to do if you’re dead and your relatives are fumbling to get into your accounts.

I pray that Renard is okay. I didn’t know him that well, of course, but I wish no ill upon anyone.

That said, if any readers have any updates on Renard’s whereabouts, leave a comment or contact me. I’m intrigued to know, although I suspect none of us will know for sure on this side of Eternity.

With that, here is 15 May 2025’s “TBT: Mystery in the Blogosphere“:

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Midweek Koi Pond Update V: Alive!

The Portly Politico2 Comments

The koi pond is really coming alive as we head deeper into spring. Other than the ramshorns I added a few weeks back, there have been no new additions to the pond. The koi themselves, though, are way more active, and Dr. Wife and I both the think the water is clearing up slightly thanks to the Japanese Trapdoor Snails and some recent top-ups with fresh water. At any rate, we can see maybe an inch deeper than we could before, and it helps that the koi are coming closer to the surface more frequently.

As the weather warmed up earlier this year, the koi would splash up only when I tossed food into the water. The most intrepid of them, Sunny, would occasionally pop up when he heard my approach, my feet treading on the gravel as I shook the bag of koi food.

Sunny, the King of the Pond

Now, I’ll frequently catch multiple koi skimming the surface even outside of feeding times. When I do get home in the evenings and bring out the feed, they are excited. They’ll start swimming over each other to get at the good stuff, and some will even swim to the edge of the pond and start flapping their big fish lips at me.

It’s really satisfying to see the pond coming to life. With the water getting a bit clearer, we’ve been able to make out more details on the fish. We’re also able to spot them swimming more easily.

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New Music Tuesday XIII: “Loach”

The Portly Politico4 Comments

Finally—some new music for New Music Tuesday! I’m still working on “Japanese Trapdoor Snails,” but I took a quick aside yesterday to jot down a quick little piece.

You see, dear readers, the pond hobby creates an insatiable appetite for more aquatic critters. My next planned addition to the pond is a trio of weather (or “dojo”) loaches. These are cold-hardy bottom-dwellers that look like an eel and a catfish had a baby, but the baby is somehow cute and not a hideous monster.

Naturally, I had to write a trio depicting these odd but adorable (oddorable?) creatures, three of which I hope to add to the koi pond soon.

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ceramic object on display

Wabi-Sabi

The Portly Politico8 Comments

Yours portly is brainstorming some book ideas. Right now, there are two in the hopper: the long-anticipated poetry collection Offensive Poems: With Pictures, which will include a collection of haiku with hot takes on the dystopian nightmare of modernity; and a collection of my writings about fast food.

Somewhere amid all the boxes rests my sketchbook, full of detailed doodles that will make it into Offensive Poems. Much of the poetry is written on the backs of those pictures. Once I find that bad boy, I’m firing up the scanner and getting those pictures uploaded.

In the meantime, I’ve been tinkering with some haiku here and there. I’m drawn to the form because, in my midwittery, it’s the easiest poetic form to remember: three lines in a five-seven-five syllabic pattern. No keeping track of iambic pentameter or the like (I was never good with the stress-unstressed thing, even though as a musician I possess a good sense of rhythm) or the like.

Of course, haiku, like all poetic forms of any quality, is more than just following a syllabic pattern. The form in its purest sense also calls for subject matter that reflects its naturalistic feel. The haiku in Offensive Poems won’t really follow the spirit of the form, but today’s little poem hopefully will.

The poem, “Wabi-Sabi,” is based on the Japanese concept of the same name. The concept broadly refers to an imperfect beauty; imperfections are, like a beauty spot on a woman, what paradoxically make something beautiful even more so.

In the poem below, I frame the concept of wabi-sabi in contrast to the Platonic theory of Forms, in which Plato proposed that all things aspire to be the ideal “Form” of what they are. A tree, for example, strives to be like the Platonic Form of a “tree,” which only exists on a higher plane of existence (or, for Christians or Neo-Platonists [not the same thing], exists only in Heaven and/or God’s Mind). Another way to think of Forms is the inability of the artist to capture perfectly what is in his mind’s eye (which, as an unskilled, untrained doodler, I experience frequently.

I’m also fascinated by the Japanese process in ceramics of kintsugi, in which cracks or breaks are repaired with gold, creating a (very wabi-sabi) piece that is even more beautiful because it’s been broken and repaired. There is something beautiful and even profoundly Christian about that concept: God Fills our cracks and Heals our brokenness through the Blood of His Son and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit; an idea to develop further, perhaps, another time.

Well, I’ve done what bad artists always do: written an essay to explain a work that should be able to speak for itself. So, with that, here is “Wabi-Sabi”:

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Lazy Sunday CCCLXXXVII: Against Darwinism

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The topic of Darwinian evolution and its staggering inaccuracies and inconsistences has been on yours portly mind of late. As such, it seemed appropriate to look back this Lord’s Day to some posts about (or at least related to tangentially) Darwinian evolution:

Happy Sunday!

—TPP

SubscribeStar Saturday: The Renaissance

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Today’s post is a SubscribeStar Saturday exclusive.  To read the full post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.  For a full rundown of everything your subscription gets, click here.

To finish out the school year, I put together a three-day mini-unit for my World History students to familiarize them with some of the major movements in Europe between circa 1300-1600.  The idea is to bridge the gap between the High Middle Ages (specifically, the end of The Hundred Years’ War and the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453) and the Age of Exploration.  That will allow them to start United States History in August with a broad, albeit brief, sense of the context for European colonization of the New World, which is where the US History course begins (along with some history about pre-Columbian native tribes and civilizations).

My “three-day mini-unit” really worked out to be about three-and-a-half days, as I’m attempting to cover some huge changes in European society and faith.  The mini-unit covers the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation (and the Catholic Counterreformation), and European exploration and colonization (the last  of which is a very cursory introduction).

Readers should be able to access the slides here.  They primarily pull information from McDougal Littell’s World History: Patterns of Interaction (2005; that’s an Amazon Affiliate link; I receive a portion of any purchases made through that link, at no additional cost to you), supplemented in my lectures with my own insights, pulled from various sources.  I add quite a bit about the Reformation, for example, in my lectures, and we look at a good bit more Renaissance art than appears in the slides.

Indeed, the Renaissance constitutes over one-third of the slides, because it’s such a transformative movement in its own right.  Literally meaning “rebirth,” the Renaissance represented a fundamental shift in the medieval mind.  Rather than creating art and literature primarily for the glorification of God, the humanism of the Renaissance sought to better understand and to celebrate humanity itself.  The movement’s interest in classical Greece and Rome sought to move beyond mining insights into Christian theology from those pre-Christian sources, but to understand the values of the ancient Greeks and Romans on their own terms.  That represented a shift away from the Aquinian scholastic project of reconciling pre-Christian (and pagan) Greco-Roman philosophy with Christian theology and the revealed Truth of the Bible towards a more historical approach.

That said, the Renaissance was not dominated by atheists.  Indeed, Renaissance humanism was very Christian in nature.  While the emphasis of art shifted to the human, it was in a context of the human as a reflection of God; after all, we are made in His Image.  Michelangelo’s famous painting “The Creation of Adam” on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel demonstrates that God Is firmly Sovereign.  Adam reclines, his hand extended somewhat limply, while God, surrounded by a heavenly host of angels, extends forward, His Finger extended in the act of creation:

“The Creation of Adam”; Image Source: https://www.pickpik.com/sistine-chapel-vatican-michelangelo-museum-rome-143433, accessed 8 May 2026 (image is in the public domain)

Indeed, God’s entire Body is in action, almost Moving towards His Creation.  While Adam’s form is certainly idealized, he is clearly the recipient of the creative act, not the initiator.

The Catholic Church was a major sponsor of the Renaissance, sometimes to its detriment:  one source of complaints from the Protestant reformers was the extreme luxury and decadence of the popes and cardinals.  Many popes embraced the earthier sides of the Renaissance, with its celebration of good food along with good art, and engaged in all manner of sinful activities.  But God Uses even wicked men to His Ends, and in its corruption and venality the Catholic Church of the Renaissance patronized the creation of numerous devotional works of exquisite quality.  In music, for example, a Reformation-chastened papacy would shift away from the garish theatricality of late medieval sacred music and re-embrace the ethereal beauty of composers like Palestrina, whose Pope Marcellus mass is a masterpiece of choral writing.

The humanist genie was out of its bottle, however, and did much to fertilize the soil from which the Reformation would spring.

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Phone it in Friday CXXIX: YouTube Roundup CLXXXIX: Video Absurdism

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Yours portly possesses an abiding love for absurdity.  Chalk it up to years of watching [adult swim] in the early 2000s and growing up watching The Simpsons, but my artistic output visually—which consists almost entirely of unskilled doodling—leans heavily into the cartoonish and absurd and weird.  Indeed, I wrote an entire book based on that premise (that’s an Amazon Affiliate link; I receive a portion of all purchases made through that link, at no additional cost to you).

YouTube provides an outlet to unlock that visual and aural absurdism, and today’s Shorts are indicative of the kind of ridiculous, sometimes contextless, silliness that I like to tart up and present as some kind of philosophically abstract absurdism, when it’s really just me being a goofball.

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TBT^256: SimEarth

The Portly Politico1 Comment

Yesterday I wrote about how bogus Darwinian evolution is as a theory.  It’s one of those concepts that sounds both so radical and logical that it must be groundbreaking and true.

Then you start to examine it more closely and realize it requires a lot of suspension of disbelief.  There’s an entire Facebook page that just shows weird animals with hyper-specific “adaptations” that are so outlandish, there’s no conceivable way they could have gradually “evolved” to that state.  Any median point in the process would have made the creature unfit for the conditions.  Sometimes, the animals have some odd characteristic that doesn’t even do anything in particular.

That said, the concept of evolution is fun in video games and science fiction.  Sure, maybe that’s just pro-Darwinist propaganda embedded into popular culture, but evolution works well in the context of a video game, where progression is encouraged through rewards.  I’ve always liked games with a grand scope that require incremental improvements over time.

Of course, even those games prove intelligence:  the development of a species, or a civilization, or someone’s neighborhood in The Sims, is itself a process of intentional, ordered choices.  Granted, players aren’t God, but they get to guide development over many turns or rounds or what not.

That’s all to say that I loved playing SimEarth back in the day.

With that, here is 8 May 2025’s “TBT^16: SimEarth“:

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