Back from Bonn and Darmstadt

Was in Bonn Germany last week for a meeting related to Test Cell Instrumentation for turbine engines. On Friday gave a talk at the Technicshe Universitat Darmstadt at the Center for Smart Interfaces on "Experiences with Phosphor Thermometry". The hilites of that day for me included having lunch with two professors (my hosts) hearing a description of their work, and touring their lab. On the previous Sunday, I stumbled upon Beethoven's birthplace. It is now a museum. I was alone and so could stay as long as I wanted. Was there three and a half hours. Had a wonderful time. What would music be like now if there had never been a Beethoven?

The Liturgical Turn and the YMCA

Great article over at The Church and Postmodern Culture titled The Liturgical Turn: Church and Public of Worship. The article author's thoughts were spurred by the fact that his church now meets in a YMCA gymnasium. That fact attracted me to the article because our group has likewise been meeting in a school gym for 3 and 1/2 years now.

And also, there was a pithy comment at the beginning:

It’s easy to become overly connected to place. It seems better to stay in Egypt instead of making the journey to the Promise Land because there’s a desert in between. It’s easier because it’s comfortable, familiar, and controlled.

Then there was also this:

Reflecting on the fact that we now worship in a community gymnasium is pretty exciting to me because it’s a great way to be missional and to let certain aspects of the nature of worship flourish which have a tendency to be forgotten.


I would like to say more but I've got to get to work. Yes, its only 5:30 am but so many things on the list to do.

After Foundationalism

Am reading and attempting to understand The Postfoundationalist Task of Theology: Wolfhart Pannenberg and the New Theological Rationality by LeRon Shults. One of the things he is trying to do is describe the options between two extremes. On the one hand, there is Foundationalism. It received its initiation by Descartes, Locke, and the ensuing Enlightenment and it viewed that certainty could be achieved by their reasoning from obvious foundational truths (I'm simplifying of course). On the other hand, there is the extreme postmodernism of complete relativism. There is no context-independent truth. Am wrestling with the second chapter where LeRon is describing various "middle ground" approaches of various theologian/philosophers who acknowledge that we have moved beyond the Age of Reason but don't want to go the full distance to the other extreme. The term "postmodernism" often refers to this extreme end and "postfoundationalism" may perhaps capture the idea that there are a range of options being investigated and that perhaps "truth is still in", as he quotes Dutch Theologian Andy Sanders as wanting to believe.

Impact of "A New Kind of Christian" on Me

Jimmy Adcox, minister of the Southwest Church of Christ in Jonesboro, AR asked me what impacted me most about Brian McLaren's A New Kind of Christian. I responded on Facebook with this message and am reproducing it here.

You asked what impacted me most. It is difficult for me to explain. It pointed me to a new view of things where I could hope to reconcile Christianity and Science. This had been a dilemma for me all my adult life and an obstacle to faith and confidence. It set me on a new path to explore and showed me the importance of Story. It shed light on earlier things I'd read by CofC scholars about the role of the Enlightenment in forming Alex Campbell and our particular heritage. As I write this I want to say it gave me better reasons for things, and it did. But, though reasoning is important and plays a critical role, it has its limitations. In addition to that, it also gave me a coherent story of how we arrived at this point and where we are now and a basis for Hope that I can believe in.

Evangelical and Evolutionist 2

Here I go again on one of my favorite things to gripe about.

This is what some thoughtful evangelicals, in my opinion, have to say about the dogged attachment of evangelicals, generally, to anti-evolutionism.

Niki made her Choice by Internet Monk

Evangelicals and Science by Tim Stafford

and a quote from the last one:

A large number of evangelical Christians in America (not Europe) are stuck in an intellectual trap. They live and breathe in a world built on science, but they are fundamentally suspicious of science and think of it as an alien force. Surely this is a problem for evangelicals. They are excluding themselves from our era’s prime intellectual force. It is also a problem for scientists because they are excluded from the resources of a robust, biblical faith, and left to an arid materialism.

I say yes, materialism is dry and arid, as Ken Wilber says, a flatland. I never wanted to believe in materialism. But, when I was younger, I was propelled in that direction by the honest and sincere teaching of Christian teachers, really fine people all of them, who made Christianity and Evolution an either/or choice and by a faith heritage rooted in the rationalism of Locke and Bacon with no role for emotion and spirit and mystery.