Stephen Hayes's Blog, page 80
July 30, 2011
The honourable and life-giving cross
August 1, 2011
Today's commemorated feasts and saints
Procession of the Honorable Wood of the Lifegiving Cross of the Lord (First of the three "Feasts of the Savior" in August). Holy Seven Maccabean Martyrs: Abimus, Antoninus, Gurias, Eleazar, Eusabonus, Alimus, and Marcellus, their mother Solomonia, and their teacher, Eleazar (166 B.C.). The Holy Martyrs of Perge in Pamphylia: Leontius, Attius, Alexander, Cindeus, Minsitheus (Mnesitheus), Cyriacus, Mineon (Menæus), Catanus, and Eucleus (3rd c.).
1 Corinthians 1:18-24 (Epistle, Cross)
18
For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.
19
For it is written:
20
Where is the wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the disputer of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of this world?
21
For since, in the wisdom of God, the world through wisdom did not know God, it pleased God through the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe.
22
For Jews request a sign, and Greeks seek after wisdom;
23
but we preach Christ crucified, to the Jews a stumbling block and to the Greeks foolishness,
24
but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.
From the OCA website.
For the world, the cross is a symbol of a dishonourable and shameful death.
Christians invert this, by speaking of the cross as "honourable" and "life-giving".
July 27, 2011
From Ukraine to Zimbabwe
A religious information service in Ukraine has helped to start a similar service in Zimbabwe.
Andriy Kozlov writes: RISU Becomes a Mother:
In its ten years of existence, the Religious Information Service of Ukraine has achieved many firsts, going from little public awareness to the number one religious news agency for Ukraine.
And now for the first time RISU has become a mother. The screaming little info-baby was born just two months ago-in Africa. A group of development communicators (including yours truly) with RISU experience launched RelZim.org, a web portal on religion in Zimbabwe.
Why follow the RISU model? The lack of reporting on religion in Ukraine and its one-sidedness were a meaningful reason to diversify the mediascape of our country. The Southern African country of Zimbabwe has been suffering from all-pervasive one-party-propaganda for almost three decades and is one more example of how religion gets downplayed by politics and sports reporting.
So if you're looking for news and information on religion in Ukraine or Zimbabwe, you now know where to go.
Religion in Zimbabwe
Religion in Ukraine
Christian school children more tolerant than their secular peers
A recent study in the UK has found that Christian children in schools are more tolerant than their secular peers. Hat-tip to The Western Confucian: Religious Tolerance
New research released today from the University of Warwick's Religions and Education Research Unit demonstrates that churchgoing young Christians give much more support to their Muslim peers, in comparison with young people who have no religious faith.
The survey was led by University of Warwick researcher Professor Leslie J Francis, Jennifer Croft, Alice Pyke and Mandy Robbins and involves 10,000 13 to 15-year-old pupils, 2,000 each from England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales and London.
According to the report, however, the researchers conclude that religious education in schools is important in this. As one of them put it, "If we stop investing in religious education we are fuelling religious discrimination and religious hostility into the future."
That raises some questions that are not answered in the article, however. Presumably the irreligious children attend the same religious education classes at school that their Christian counterparts have done, but it doesn't seem to have made them more tolerant. What makes the Christian children more tolerant is more likely be something that takes place at home and in church, rather than at school. Having said that, however, I must confess that the home I grew up in was entirely secular, and I only really learnt about the Christian faith at a church school.
July 24, 2011
Why right-wing nuts hate Norway
New Statesman – But in Norway, the state is still grandpa:
Is Norway Europe's last surviving socialist country?
Almost half of Norway's GDP is produced by the public sector, the highest proportion in western Europe. The state owns majority shareholdings in the two largest companies – Norsk Hydro and Statoil. A universal, tax-financed health service is used by almost all Norway's 4.5 million people. The welfare system provides peace of mind from cradle to grave: not for Norwegian pensioners the indignity of having to surrender a lifetime's savings to get into a privately owned old people's home. State education is excellent; only a small minority are educated privately. Nearly a quarter of the adult population takes advantage of the numerous continuing education courses offered by the local authorities, among others.
'nuff said.
July 20, 2011
Militant atheists, Christianists, and the idolatry of the West
I recently observed a discussion between some mildly militant atheists on the futility of religion and such. It wasn't an acrimonious debate, as such things often are, because it took place in an internet forum devoted to English usage, and so the discussion of religion was tangential to the main purpose of the discussion. Most of the participants in the forum are academics in one discipline or another, and the discourse is generally quite civilised. I have noticed, however, that the atheists in the group are far more outspoken about their atheism than most of the "religious" people in the group, though for the most part they are only mildly militant.
I was therefore interested when Fr David MacGregor drew my attention to this article in his blog Contact Online Weblog: Turning Virtues Into Vices: The New Inquisitors. The title and the opening paragraph seemed to resonate with my own experience.
Turning Virtues Into Vices: The New Inquisitors | Bill Muehlenberg's CultureWatch:
Such is the nature of the radical secularists that they are managing to turn previous virtues into today's vices. And in the process they have unleashed a new Inquisition. In a perfect illustration of the prophet Isaiah's warning, the new social engineers are turning our world upside down.
This is what Yahweh said through Isaiah two and a half millennia ago: "Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter" (5:20 ). This describes to a T what we are experiencing in the West today.
I was going to say "post-Christian West", but a more accurate term would be "anti-Christian West". All over the Western world there is a war going on against the very values and ideals which made the West great in the first place…
And that is where I stopped reading.
I am heartily sick of reading arguments like this about how Christianity and Christian values "made the West great". I couldn't care less about the greatness of the West, and such arguments are always based on idolatry. It reminds me of Bob Dylan's song With God on our side.
Oh the history books tell it
They tell it so well
The cavalries charged
The Indians fell
The cavalries charged
The Indians died
Oh the country was young
With God on its side.
Muehlenberg quotes Isaiah, and that's fine, but Isaiah and the other Old Testament prophets devoted quite a bit of their time to railing against similar attitudes in Israel — that with God on its side, Israel could be great.
What is the source of Western "greatness"?
Samuel Huntington, who studied and analysed power relations between nations and groups of nations (which he called "civilizations") said that the dramatic increase in the power of the West, so that by 1920 the West ruled almost half the land surface of the world, had three main causes:
the social and class relations of the West, with the rise of cities and commerce, and the dispersion of power in Western societies between estates, monarchs and secular and religious authorities, and the development of state bureaucracies;
the technological invention of the means of ocean navigation for reaching distant peoples and
the development of the military capabilities for conquering those peoples.
As Huntington put it, "The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do" [1].
Militant atheists and radical secularists like to blame Christianity for that, and Bill Muehlenberg, far from contradicting them, provides ammunition for their contention.
In the first of the 10 commandments God says "Thou shalt have no other gods before me" — and that includes "the West". A lot of Western Christian rhetoric implies that God is welcome because he makes the West great. So Christianity is coopted in the pursuit of Western greatness. [2]
To return to the militant atheists (the mild variety), one of them suggested that I should read the works of Richard Dawkins. I replied that I preferred not to, and they then accused me of being critical of works that I had not read. But I wasn't being critical of the works. I'm unqualified to criticise them because I haven't read them, and have no intention of doing so. What I am critical of is Dawkins's frequently and publicly expressed prejudice and bigotry, and I think that is a sufficient reason for not reading his books. Of course it is possible that Dawkins's prejudice and bigotry are exaggerated by the media, who love to promote a good fight, but he doesn't seem to have objected very much to this portrayal of him.
I did come across, in a bookshop, a book by one of the other well-known militant atheists of our day, Sam Harris, and I flipped through it very quickly. I saw nothing in it that hadn't been said, more clearly and concisely, by Bertrand Russell in his essay Why I am not a Christian. I could think of a lot of other books that I'd be happier to spend R250 on.
A few years ago an agnostic friend of mine tried to join an online atheist forum. He was blackballed, because he not only didn't accept, but was rather scornful about their conditions, among which was the stipulation that he had to read and agree with the writings of Sam Harris, and that the only god that could be discussed was the god that Sam Harris didn't believe in.
Such an attitude resembles, and is sometimes called, "fundamentalism", though I don't think it is the best term. Fundamentalism was a particular movement in Protestant Christianity, mainly in the early twentieth century, in which people demanded a return to earlier doctrinal formulations, and rejected certain theological trends. Among the "fundamentals" was belief in the plenary inspiration and inerrancy of the Bible, and I suppose the disciples of Sam Harris that my agnostic friend encountered could be said to behaving in a similar way by insisting on the plenary inspiration and inerrancy of the works of Harris.
Samuel Huntington predicted the increase of such religious militancy (even when it is irreligious), by defining his "civilizations" in religious terms.
So Militant Muslims are called Islamists, and militant Christians are called Christianists, and militant secularists seem to behave in a similar fashion. What Huntington didn't foresee, perhaps, was the way in which "the West" would be divided into Christianists and Militant Secularists battling for supremacy. But I suspect that the majority of people in the West find the battle rather amusing and entertaining, but will soon tire of it, and ignore it.
Nearly fifty years ago a Western theologian, Harvey Cox, wrote a book called The secular city. I don't think it was a very good book, because it was rather one-sided, and Cox seemed to think that the Western secular worldview should prevail globally. But seen in a Western context it did have some good points, and one of the best was the distinction Cox made between secularisation and secularism.
While secularization finds its roots in the biblical faith itself and is to some extent an authentic outcome of the impact of biblical faith on Western history, this is not the case with secularism. Like any other ism, it menaces the openness and freedom secularization has produced; it must therefore be watched carefully to prevent its becoming the ideology of a new establishment. It must be especially checked where it pretends not to be a world-view but nonetheless seeks to impose its ideology through the organs of the state.
I suspect that that is the kind of process that Bill Muehlenberg was trying to warn us about, but Cox's warning of half a century ago comes across more clearly:
We should oppose the romantic restoration of the sprites of the forest. It may seem pleasant at first to reinstate the leprechauns, but – as Hitler made all too clear – once the Valkyries return, they will seek a bloodthirsty revenge on those who banished them. We should also be wary of any attempt to resacralize politics. Political leaders and movement should never be granted any sacred significance, and all efforts to use public authority to support traditional religious beliefs or the quasi-religious beliefs of ideological secularism must be resisted.
____
Notes and references
[1] Huntington, Samuel. The clash of civilizations and the remaking of world order, (London, Touchstone, 1998), p. 98.
[2] I am not saying that Orthodox Christians are immune from this particular disease, though it takes slightly different forms, such as the fatuous statement that "Hellenism is Orthodoxy and Orthodoxy is Hellenism". Zionism (which is the Jewish equivalent of Islamism, Christianism and Hindutva) does the same thing when it promotes slogans like "Anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism".
July 17, 2011
Forty years ago today: The Lutherans stuck their necks out
Forty years ago today the Lutheran Churches in Namibia (there were two of them — the Evangelical Lutheran Church of South West Africa and the Evangelical Lutheran Ovambokavango Church) — made public two letters. One was an open letter to the Prime Minister of South Africa, B.J. Vorster. The other was a pastoral letter, read in all their congregations.
The open letter had been released to the press, but the pastoral letter had not.
Both said much the same thing, however: that South Africa had violated human rights in South West Africa, and that South West Africa must be a free, unitary and independent country.
These letters were the first official response from the Christian Churches to the previous month's judgment of the World Court that South Africa's presence in Namibia was illegal (see Notes from underground: Namibian turning point – forty years ago today). It was an unexpected blow to the South African government, and together with the World Court judgment constituted a turning point for Namibia.
Back in 1966 the World Court had been asked to make a ruling on South African rule in South West Africa, and declined to do so, saying that those who had brought the case (Ethiopia and Liberia) had no legitimate interest in the matter. The result of that decision was that the National Party government in South Africa went all out to incorporate South West Africa into South Africa as a fifth province. On 1 April 1969 a lot of government functions were transferred from the local territorial authority in Windhoek to Pretoria, and South Africa took direct control, even of such things as the Department of Water Affairs. The "homelands" policy was pushed ahead with all speed, and resistance to it was vigorously crushed. The World Court judgment and the Lutheran letters put the brakes on, and marked the turning point.
For many years the South African government had told Christian churches that criticised apartheid, like the Anglicans and the Roman Catholics, that they should be more like the Lutherans, who kept quiet. The Lutheran Churches "kept out of politics", and so, as far as the South African government was concerned, they were well behaved.
So the Lutheran Open Letter, and the simultaneous Pastoral Letter, were a great shock to the South African government. It was the last thing they expected. And the Lutheran Churches together represented more than half the Christians, and half the people, of Namibia. Actually there was a third Lutheran Church in Namibia, the German Evangelical Lutheran Church, but it had nothing whatever to do with the two letters, and indeed rejected them).
For a long time the South African government had also been urging the Lutherans to split their joint theological seminary at Othjimbingue into separate seminaries for different ethnic groups. The government wanted the Ovambo to be trained in their "own" seminary in Ovamboland, the Hereros to the trained in another, the Damatra in another, and the Namas in yet another, in accordance with the concept of "ownaffairs". At Otjimbingwe they were all trained together, and, horror of horrors, the Anglicans were discussing the possibility of moving their seminary from Ovamboland to Otjimbingwe in a kind of arrangement similar to that of the Federal Seminary in South Africa (where Anglican, Congregational, Methodist and Presbytarian colleges shared the same campus, had a joint library and so on).
The South African government was too late. To split up the seminary would aid its policy of "divide and rule". But it was the students at the seminary at Otjimbingwe jointly who had played a significant part in the drafting of the Lutheran Letters. They had formed friendships across ethnic lines, and could see no threat in the concept of "one nation, one Namibia", which National Party doctrine taught was the worst possible evil.
And so the Lutherans stuck their necks out, and Namibia was never the same again.
And the changes thus wrought also had an influence on the liberation of South Africa itself.
July 14, 2011
Pacifism, Orthodoxy and the "just war"
Most people who know anything about the Orthodox Church know that it is not a "peace church", like the Quakers or the Mennonites. But Western Christians who know something about theology are often puzzled when they discover that the Orthodox Church also rejects the theological notion of the "just war".
Orthodox Christians don't get involved in great ethical discussions about whether a particular war is "just", and therefore whether it is "legitimate" for Christians to fight in it. In Orthodox theology there can be no such thing as a "just" war.
Hat-tip to Fr Obregon (the Orthocuban) for pointing to this site where the matter is explained clearly and succinctly: OCA – Q & A – War and non-violence
total pacifism is not only possible, it is the sign of greatest perfection, the perfection of the Kingdom of God. According to the Orthodox understanding, however, pacifism can never be a social or political philosophy for this world; although once again, a non-violent means to an end is always to be preferred in every case to a violent means.
When violence must be used as a lesser evil to prevent greater evils, it can never be blessed as such, it must always be repented of, and it must never be identified with perfect Christian morality.
In Orthodox theology there is no such thing as "justifiable homicide". The soldier who kills in battle needs to repent of that and confess it. Perhaps the difference is that in Western theology legalism tends to be prominent. The concept of "justification" is very important, so that it has long been central to Western soteriology, leading to debates about "justification by faith" and "justification by works" and "justification by grace". Whatever the parties to such debates disagree about, the one thing they are all agreed about is the importance and centrality of justification. Hence the concern with such concepts as "just" war and "justifiable" homicide.
SS Boris & Gleb, Passionbearers. Honoured for refusing to fight.
The same applies, mutatis mutandis to Western arguments about abortion. The thing that it is wrong with abortion, for many Western Christians, is that it is the taking of "innocent" life — so legalism intrudes yet again. If it were "guilty" life, then the killing might be "justified". In one of the classic examples of a moral dilemma, the obstetrician who is faced with the choice of saving the life of the mother or the child, and there is no possibility of saving both. If the obstetrician has to kill the child so that the mother may live (or vice versa), in Orthodoxy there is no question of either killing being "justified". Whatever happens, the need to repent remains. "Justification" means that there is no need for repentance. For the Orthodox, killing someone, even accidentally, always requires repentance. And so it is with the soldier who kills in battle.
And so the Orthodox Church has among its saints both pacifists and soldiers; those who fought and those who refused to fight, and those in between like St Boris and St Gleb, the Passionbearers, who were selective conscientious objectors.
But pacifism is a "more excellent way".
For more, have a look at the web site of the Orthodox Peace Fellowship.
July 12, 2011
No takers
Last week I challenged people to join a discussion on "spiritual warfare" — a term that different groups of Christians seem to use with wildly different meanings. I was prompted to so so by a comment made on a blog that implied that South African churches were more concerned about spiritual warfare than Canadians ones.
I suggested a sutable forum for such a discussion might be the Thandanani mailing list, which is for Christians of different backgrounds and traditions to learn more about their similarities and differences in an atmosphere of love and respect (Thandanani is Zulu for "Love one another").
But there were no takers.
No one seems interested in exploring the differences between Canadian and South African Christians (and others) in their understanding of and attitudes towards spiritual warfare. No one seems interested in learning whether others use the term in the same way as themselves, or with a completely different meaning.
Oh well, perhaps this blog is like the children playing in the marketplace, calling one to another, and saying, We have piped unto you, and ye have not danced; we have mourned to you, and ye have not wept (Luke 7:32).
July 7, 2011
On spiritual warfare
Have Canadians won the battle against the world, the flesh and the devil? Or have they lost the battle? Or have they just run away from it and given up the fight?
This post on Urban Ministry Live And Unplugged: Mennonite Missionaries made me wonder:
I met this morning with Canadian Mennonite missionaries Andrew and Karen Suderman. Among other things, they are establishing an Anabaptist network in Southern Africa. I asked them what theological differences they have found between Canada and South Africa. Among other things, they said that spiritual warfare is big in our local Churches, yet typically doesn't feature in Canada.
That comment raises all sorts of questions, the most obvious of which is "what do you mean by 'spiritual warfare'?"
And then, as I said, I wonder if it means that Canadians have won, lost or copped out.
It is a statement that begs to be unpacked.
Yesterday we had a synchroblog about the Wild Goose festival, and this puts me in mind of one of the very early synchroblogs, which was on the topic of spiritual warfare, and, interestingly enough, very few of the bloggers who participated bothered to define the term or say what they thought it meant. And, perhaps also significantly, most of them were Protestants from North America.
My contribution to that synchroblog is at Notes from underground: Thoughts on Spiritual Warfare (synchroblog) and I still think it is one of the best blog posts I ever wrote.
I'd like to invite Andrew Suderman (and others) to read that, and then to explain what he means by "spiritual warfare", and say whether he thinks the reason it isn't big in Canada is that Canadians have won, or lost, or copped out — or something else.
And, as always, anyone else can comment too (though spam comments, will, as usual, be deleted).
July 5, 2011
Wild goose chase?
I've skipped the last couple of Synchoblogs, partly because I didn't have anything to say about the topics. I thought I'd better join in this month's one, but when I got notice of the topic, I was completely nonplussed; altogether minused, one might say.
The Wild Goose is a Celtic metaphor for the Holy Spirit. In less than 24 hours, the first Wild Goose festival will be opening near Chapel Hill, NC. This festival is a North American arts, music, justice and spirituality festival debuting June 23-26, 2011! Inspired by Greenbelt in the UK, the festival hopes to provide a space to deepen growth for those who want to connect faith and justice, and provide inspiration and energy for fresh expressions of Christianity in today's world. For more information about the festival check out The Wild Goose blog.
My response to that was like that of Tom Lehrer, when faced with the task of writing his first original paper: "Bozhe moi! This I know from nothing. What I'm going to do?"[1]. For starters, I'd never heard of the wild goose as a Celtic metaphor for the Holy Spirit, and if we're to blog about something we surely need to know something more about it.
For another thing, I'd never heard that there was going to be a festival and learning that it was happening in 24 hours half a world away didn't help much.
Anyway, I decided that if I was going to participate in the Synchoblog I'd better learn something about what it was about, so I googled for information on the wild goose as a Celtic metaphor for the Holy Spirit, and it took me, perhaps unsurprisingly, to the Wild Goose blog, which didn't tell me much about the festival but did say: The Holy Spirit, the Dove, the Wild Goose (an geadh-glas): DID CELTS CALLTHE HOLY SPIRIT "WILD GOOSE"?:
Scholars have not yet found any textual evidence that either 'Wild Goose' or 'an geadh-glas' were used by ancient Christian Celts (435-793 AD) to refer to the Holy Spirit. The presence of geese in Celtic art does not itself constitute proof. Celtic Christians drew many animals and art without an interpretive key can be quite ambiguous.
It is also sometimes said that ancient Celtic Christians did not speak of the Holy Spirit as a dove. Yet Celts, both ancient and modern, did and do write of the Spirit as a dove and of that we have proof.
We do know the metaphor of the Holy Spirit as Wild Goose was in use about 1940 by 20th century visionary George MacLeod and /or his contemporary sources.
That's not very reassuring. I mean, how can I blog about an alleged metaphor that turns out to have very little evidence for it, but is a theme for a festival in another country half a world away, about which I know nothing? The Wild Goose Blog, incidentally, didn't say anything about the festival, or at least not that I saw.
But we live in an information age, and even if you don't go looking for information, information comes looking for you.
And information came looking for me in the shape of The Steve Hayes Daily. That's a daily digest of the interesting or might be interesting stuff from people I follow on Twitter. It saves the hassle of having to look at Twitter several times a day. And so it comes to me as The Steve Hayes Daily is out! http://bit.ly/bW5FzW ▸ Top stories today via @grahamdowns @misseagle @gailhyatt.
And that leads me to Anti-Christian Christian movements? | GetReligion. That turns out to be a critique of an article in The Economist on the Wild Goose Festival. Well, that's getting warmer. Though it's not telling me much about the festival, it's a critique of someone else's critique of the festival. But what stands out is the picture.
Hang on, isn't that a picture of the cover of Time magazine? And isn't the article a critique of an article in The Economist?
"Curiouser and curiouser," said Alice.
Is Time now writing about this lot as if it is a revival or a rehash of the Jesus Revolution of 40 years ago? They produced a similar cover story back then? Have they done a repeat story now, with a similar cover? Or is The Economist now masqerading as Time.
Anyway, the GetReligion article is complaining about what the Time/Economist article didn't tell us. Never mind that – I'm now more worried about what the GetReligion article is telling us.
I don't know if the Wild Goose Festival is a rerun of the Jesus Revolution of 40 years ago, as the Economist/Time/GetReligion thingy implies, but I thought the Jesus Revolution back then was pretty cool, despite the efforts of a bunch of suits (several bunches, in fact) to hijack it for their own purposes. Quite a lot of people involved in the Jesus Revolution ended up in the Orthodox Church, not least among them Jack Sparks of the Christian World Liberation Front.
Well, if you really want to know about something, why not go to the source. George MacLeod is apparently the source of the wild goose as a metaphor for the Holy Spirit. I Google for George MacLeod and I discover this:
I RECALL wandering around the streets of Govan as a wee boy. On Sunday nights we always used to go to Govan Cross, where there was a sort of speakers' corner. George MacLeod was always there, talking about the yards and campaigning for better conditions. He used to get hundreds of people listening.
The first time I heard him I went home and asked my father who this man was. He said: "That's the minister, son." And that impressed me: that the minister should be out there, talking to the people. The man had a huge impact on Govan, and he was a great campaigner. I never actually met him, but I'm sure that if I had been older I'd have been grasped by him: he had that kind of power.
Even as a small boy, though I could not really understand what he was saying, I was impressed that here was this minister, reaching out beyond his church and his pulpit, reaching out to the people.
There's missional for you.
That tribute comes from no less an authority than the greatest football coach of our era, Alex Ferguson, OBE, who was born and bred in Govan. He played football for, among others, Rangers and Dunfermline. His distinguised managerial career has taken him from East Stirling to Manchester United, via St Mirren and Aberdeen. And you can read tributes from others here: George MacLeod: visionary, crusader, impish iconoclast – Herald Scotland.
I think that's enough of a wild goose chase for today.
____
This post is part of a monthly Synchroblog, in which a group of bloggers share their thoughts on a common theme, usually from a Christian point of view. Any Christian blogger is welcome to join in.
In a day or two there'll be a list of links to the other posts in this month's synchroblog, so you can surf from one post to the next, and sample some of the variety.
Notes
1. Tom Lehrer's first original paper was on analyic and algebraic topology of locally Euclidian metrization of infinitely differentiable Riemannian manifold.
Remembering the advice of his adopted mentor, Lobachevsky ("In one word he told me the secret of success in mathematics: plagiarize!") Lehrer goes on a wild goose chase to Siberia and back:
I think of the great Lobachevky and I get idea!
I have a friend in Minsk
who has a friend in Pinsk
whose friend in Omsk
has friend in Tomsk
with friend in Akmolinsk.
His friend in Aleksandrovsk
has friend in Petropavlovsk
whose friend somehow
is solving now
the problem in Dnepropetrovsk.
And when his work is done
Ha ha, begins the fun!
From Dnepropetrovsk to Petropavlovsk
By way of Ilisk
And Novorossiysk
To Alexandrovsk to Akmolinsk
To Tomsk to Omsk
To Pinsk to Minsk
to me the news will run.
And then I write
by morning, night
and afternoon
and pretty soon
my name in Dnepropetrovsk is cursed
when he finds out I published first.
