Out of the Depths

Book of Knowledge - Automobile Progress

2012-01-26T20:52:00.003-05:00

From an article on Industrial Design. It shows the evolution of automobiles. Was always fascinated by this.

The Book of Knowledge - Milestones in the March of Civilization

2012-01-21T19:21:00.000-05:00

The Book of Knowledge - Milestones in the March of Civilization

Mid 20th century optimism and belief in progress is surely illustrated by this page from my 1952 Book of Knowledge encyclopedia. Notice that the ultimate development shown as an image is a radio tower. Television existed but was not widespread and its eventual significance was not anticipated in the picture; however, shortly thereafter the explosion into virtually all homes occurred. Our family's first TV arrived in '53 or '54, I think. Anyway, the importance of technology and the inevitability of technology advancement was impressed on the young Steve.

The Book of Knowledge - The Children's Encyclopedia

2012-01-15T12:16:00.000-05:00

Left Inside Cover Page

Right Inside Cover Page

This volume of the Book of Knowledge dates to the early fifties, the copyright of this copy is 1952. I cannot remember when we did not have it. I spent many hours looking at the pictures before I could even read. The world it projected defined for me what the world out there is. The message was one of progress and endless mysteries and fascinating people. It portrayed a world that was getting better and would always do so. It must have fed my early interest in science. It was decidedly Christian. It was my first exposure to Evolution, which it affirmed. For more information, there is a short description at Wikipedia. The encyclopedia is arranged according to the following categories. It is not arranged in a mechanical, alphabetical way but is more like a place to play. One can pick up any volume and thumb through all kinds of interesting things. It is a favourite in home schooling circles.

The Earth
Science
Wonder Questions
Animal Life
Plant Life
Own Own Life
Familiar Things
All Countries
The United States
Other Countries
Fine Arts
Literature
Famous Books
Stories
Poetry
Golden Deeds
Men and Women
Things to Make and Things to Do

Note Added later in the day: I just now heard this quote on "Criminal Minds" and it is very pertinent to this post.

“within the core of each of us is the child we once were. This child constitutes the foundation of what we have become, who we are, and what we will be.”

― Rhawn Joseph (neuroscientist)

Böhme, Tillich and the Gospel of Thomas re: Beginning and End

2011-12-31T11:29:00.000-05:00

Here is something to chew on. The origin and the end are important both in Böhme and the Gospel of Thomas. The following quote is all over the internet:

"Whatever surges beneath thesurface of the Gospel of Thomas, it is not a Syrian Christian wisdomteaching of the second century. The ascetic accepts creation, butalways upon the basis of having fallen from it, and always with thehope of being restored to it. That is hardly the aspiration of Jesusin the Gospel of Thomas. Like William Blake, like Jakob Böhme, thisJesus is looking for the face he had before the world was made. Thatmarvelous trope I appropriate from W.B. Yeats, at his most Blakean.If such is your quest, then the Gospel of Thomas calls out to you."-HaroldBloom

-------------------------------------------------------------
Now for representative, mysterious quotes from Böhme's Signature of All Things

CHAPTER III OF THE GRAND MYSTERY OF ALL BEINGS....Courteous reader, observe the meaning right; we understand not by this description a beginning of the Deity, but we shew you the manifestation of the Deity through nature; for God is without beginning, and has an eternal beginning and an eternal end, which he is himself, and the nature of the inward world is in the like essence from eternity.
CHAPTER XIV OF THE WHEEL OF SULPHUR, MERCURY, AND SALT, OF THE GENERATION OF GOOD AND EVIL;...Whatever is risen from the eternalfixity, as angels and the souls of men, remains indestructible in itsfixt being; but whatever is risen in the unfixt being, viz. with themotion of time, that does again enter into the first motion fromwhence it has taken its original, and is a map of its form which ithad here, like a picture, or as an image in a glass without life; forso it was from eternity before the times of this world, which theMost High has introduced into an image, into the comprehensiblenatural life in time, to behold the great wonders of his wisdom in acreaturely being, as we plainly see.

CHAPTER XV CONCERNING THE WILL OF THE GREAT MYSTERY IN GOOD AND EVIL....Every string of this melody exalts andrejoices the other; and it is only a mere ravishing lovely anddelightful hearing, tasting, feeling, smelling, and seeing: WhateverGod is in himself, that the creature is also in its desire in him; aGod-angel, and a God-man, God all in all, and without him nothingelse. As it was before the times of this world in his eternalharmony (or voice), so also it continues in the creaturely voice inhim in his eternity; and this is the beginning and the end of allthings.

---------------------------------------------------------

Now regarding relevant thought from the Gospel of Thomas from the excellent Metalogos website:

Regarding the beginning:

Gospel ofThomas: Verse50 Yeshua says: If they say to you: From whence have you come?, sayto them: We have come from the Light, the place where the Light hascome into being from Him alone; He himself [stood] and appeared intheir imagery.

Gospel ofThomas: Verse18 The Disciples say to Yeshua (Jesus):Tell us how our end shall be.¹||Yeshua says: Have you then discovered the origin°,so that you inquire about the end? For at the place where the originis, there shall be the end. Blest is he who shall stand at theorigin—and he shall know the end, and he shall not taste death.(¹Ps39:4; Isa48:12, Lk20:38, Jn1:1-2, Th1/19,Rev/Ap22:13; Boethius,TheConsolation of Philosophy:‘To see Thee is the end and the beginning’; T.S.Eliot,FourQuartets: Little Gidding*:‘The end is where we start from’; JackKerouac, Visionsof Cody:‘What kind of journey is the life of a human being that it has abeginning but not an end?’; hyperlinear)

*Weshall not cease from exploration
And the end of all ourexploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the placefor the first time.
T. S. Eliot
--------------------------------------------------------------
Google books presented a portion of the following from J. P. Fourley. I would have bought it except it is so expensive. A portion of the section discussing the views of Paul Tillich in relation to Böhme was available:

Paul Tillich, Carl Jung, and the recovery of religion

By John P. Dourley

In a section titled "Tillich and Boehme on eschatology: thelocation and nature of blessedness" Dourley says:

"Theologies of creation and its divinemotivation connect as naturally with eschatology as do origins withends and goals. ....now in the form of the question: how possibly canhistory and its completion in the eschaton bring anything truly newto a self sufficient divinity whose perfect integration is workedfrom eternity? …..

Let us turn now to Boehme on theseissues. In continuity with his thought on creation Boehme'seschatology is less tortured in terms of its own logic and so morecompellingly candid in its honesty to the experience that lies behindit. In fact Boehme's depiction of creation tends to coincide withhis eschatology. A God compelled to create in order to recognize andreconcile its opposites in the creature completes both itself andcreated consciousness in one historical process at once creative andeschatological." (underscore mine - Steve)

---------------------------------------------------------------

The public in general, religious or not, has a fascination with the mystery of creation as well as the end of time. This is reflected in the interest in where science stands on this, what mythology research has documented, and what each person's religion says. The above is food for thought. I plan to continue explorations along this line. It appears that the material that each of us is comprised of was all united into a tiny pinpoint at the beginning, ie. the moment of the Big Bang. This means something.

Böhme, the Mother of all Things, and the Gnostics

2011-12-26T13:31:00.003-05:00

When first reading Böhme's The Signature of All Things, it was apparent that it bore a similarity to certain gnostic writings of the early Christian era. The Apochryphon of John comes to mind where the concern is the origin of the world and how understanding the origin is essential to our discerning who we are and what we should do. However, that text reflects the pessimistic, classic version of gnosticism for whom the world is a mistake and the physical realm deeply flawed. Signature would not go as far as that and has a happier feel to it. Interestingly, they both have a role for the female or mother.

From the Apochryphon of John:

The Father is surrounded by light.
He apprehends himself in that light

........

His self-aware thought (ennoia) came into being.
Appearing to him in the effulgence of his light.
She stood before him.

.....
Arising out of the mind of the Father
The Providence (pronoia) of everything.
Her light reflects His light.

She is from His image in His light

...
She praised Him
For she arose from Him.

[This, the first Thought, is the Spirit’s image]

She is the universal womb
She is before everything
She is:
            Mother-Father
            First Man
            Holy Spirit

From the Signature of All Things:

CHAPTER III OF THE GRAND MYSTERY OF ALL THINGS

Section 32. After the creation of the highestspirits, God created this visible world with the stars and elementsas an external birth out of the mother of all essences; all whichproceeded out of the eternal beginning, and took a temporalbeginning: For here we are to consider, that the eternal pregnatrixmoved itself, and enkindled its own form [or similitude], where thenthe one became corporeal in the other; but afterwards God created theearth, which we are thus to consider of.

CHAPTER IV OF THE BIRTH OF THE STARS,AND FOUR ELEMENTS IN THE METALLINE AND CREATURELY PROPERTY

Section 1. As itis before mentioned, all things proceed out of one only mother, andseparate themselves into two essences, according to the right ofeternity, viz. into a mortal and an immortal, into life and death,into spirit and body; the spirit is the life, and the body is thedeath, viz. a house of the spirit: As the holy Trinity stands in thebirth, so also is the external birth: There is likewise essence andspirit in heaven; a figure of which we see in this outward world,where there are four elements, and yet there is but one only element,which separates itself into four properties, viz. into fire, air,water, and earth, as is above mentioned.

It is not commonly known that in the Aramaic language the gender of the word spirit is feminine. For some early Christians, then, the Holy Spirit was seen as a kind of Mother so that the Trinity was formed by a Father, a Mother and a Son.

I am not a Gnostic. But I find them fascinating in part because I do not understand them and how they came to their place. Some mysteries are worth pursuing and some are not. Maybe this one is. Böhme lived over a thousand years after the gnostics faded away from Christendom. But somehow his feelings overlap in some degree with them. Do they have a shared delusion or some useful insights? The next post will find correspondence with the Gospel of Thomas.

God and the Cosmos in Jacob Boehme's Signature of All Things

2011-12-17T10:04:00.002-05:00

I'm nearing the end of The Signature of All Things. It has been a long and hard slog through it and I never know whether its prose or poetry. Probably both. Most of it inscrutable to me. But somehow it seems significant.

Quotes:

The whole outward visible world withall its being is a signature, or figure of the inward spiritualworld; whatever is internally, and however its operation is, solikewise it has its character externally; like as the spirit of eachcreature sets forth and manifests the internal form of its birth byits body, so does the Eternal Being also
....
So likewise God dwells in all things, and the thing knows nothing of God; he likewise is not manifest to the thing, and yet it receives power from him, but it receives the power according to its property from him, either from his love, or from his wrath; and from which it receives, so it has its signature[156] externally; and the good is also in it, but as it were wholly shut up [or hidden] to the iniquity [or evil]; an example of which you have in bushes, and other thorny and pricking briars, out of which notwithstanding a fair well-smelling blossom grows; and there lie two properties therein, viz. a pleasant and unpleasant; which overcomes, that shapes [forms or marks] the fruit.
...
The Being of all beings is but one only Being, but in its generation it separates itself into two principles, viz. into light and darkness, into joy and sorrow, into evil and good, into love and anger, into fire and light, and out of these two eternal beginnings (or principles) into the third beginning, viz. into the creation, to its own love-play and melody, according to the property of both eternal desires.

On his influence, I found mythosandlogos.com which has this to say:

"His thought has since influencedmajor figures in philosophy, especially German Romantics such as Hegel,Baader, and Schelling. Indirectly, his influence can be traced to the workof Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Hartmann, Bergson, and Heidegger. Paul Tillichand Martin Buber drew heavily from his work -- as did the psychologist,Carl Jung, who made numerous references to Boehme in his writings."

That is quite a lineup.

Can you learn anything after age 25?

2011-12-06T19:08:00.001-05:00

Mike Lofgren is a retired former House and Senate Staffer. I enjoyed reading an interview with him as he related his career and how things have changed and was particularly struck by this quote from him which I take as a word of good advice to me and everyone. Let us not cease learning.

Most people cease learning after age 25 or so, but if you continually question the premises of things, you end up where I am; it depends on how intellectually curious and open-minded you are. There was never a huge contradiction. I wasn't living a double life. I was still a government employee doing the best I could on budget issues.

Once Obscure Jacob Boehme now on You Tube

2011-12-04T22:37:00.000-05:00

A couple of years after I was fresh out of college, Harding U. that is, I was reading an interview with Henry Miller, of Tropic of Cancer fame. Don't remember which magazine. He described how he had recently become so excited because he came across something very difficult to get and rare, a book by Jacob Boehme. So he planted the seed in my head that something mysterious and wonderful awaited a person who would have to be both lucky to make the encounter with him and prepared to appreciate the experience. Way back in the ancient days of the 1970's, it was not easy to get one's hands on rare books. There were no computers and no internet. I suppose the avid person could badger the local library and with some luck and persistence track down less common offerings.

That memory remained lodged in a dusty corner of my mind for a great many years. Boehme is so far removed from the Southern Protestantism of the US and I've had no friend or advocate to surface and awaken the curiosity. Now, some thirty or more years later, the internet has introduced me to many friends and informative sites and made available what was previously inaccessible. So, not long ago I downloaded The Signature of All Things, one of the later books by him and prepared to wade through it.

He lived at the boundary of the Medieval and Modern and is not easy to understand. So, the last two days I've been googling him to see what I could learn to help me through. There are a number of insights to be blogged about later. But for this evening, I will simply link to this You Tube posting that presents him in a way about which he would certainly marvel.

The Illumination of Jacob Boehme

2011-11-29T06:26:00.000-05:00

Am back in town now from the Thanksgiving Holidays. Read some more from Jacob Boehme last night and it was slow going. Will have to do some more homework to understand and appreciate him. Not something that can be done in one sitting or even a few months. So I hit the internet for some help. Here is one of several things. The complete essay by Mark Jaqua is at this link.

Boehme believed that this world is but a shadow play and representation of what occurs in higher dimensions. Everything in this world is the "signature" or symbol of something which exists more concretely in the spiritual world. Since the spiritual world is contained within oneself, the external world and the body could be viewed as a projection from these interior contents. Boehme's insight on this was that:

The whole outward, visible world with all its being is a signature or figure of the inward spiritual world; whatever is internal, and however its operation is, so likewise it has its outward character...for whatever the natural light is spiritually, that the earth is in its coarseness.*

*Jacob Boehme: His Life and Thought, John Joseph Stoudt, Seabury Press, New York, New York, 1968, p. 243,248.

Protestant Mystic Jacob Boehme

2011-11-22T06:50:00.002-05:00

These days I'll read 10 % of a book I've downloaded to Kindle then will download another or two then after a few days download some more. Am reading about a dozen right now. Half my time on Kindle is spent searching for books and reading reviews about them. Sometimes will find something old that is free or $0.99 and will embrace the joy that comes with pressing the button and getting a zillion pages for free. Jacob Boehme is one of those mysterious names I've run across a number of times and some time ago downloaded The Signature of All Things. My understanding is that he is unique in that he is a Protestant Mystic. Made it through the Introduction last night and that was fascinating itself where its author Clifford Bax says:

The purpose of the mystic is the mightiest and most solemn that can ever be, for the central aim of all mysticism is to soar out of separate personality up to the very Consciousness of God.

Jacob Boehme, the last of the great European mystics, having imagined the Spirit which pervades the universe, knew well how little was the stature of his human personality; but he had realised that God was verily within him, and he spoke with the uprightness of a divine being. Unflaggingly he counsels men (as in the Supersensual Life) to turn away from the worthless and separated self which hungers for honour or for bodily comfort, in order that they should rediscover within themselves "what was before nature and creature." And he means by this phrase "that light which lighteth every man who cometh in the world." It is here, he says, now and always: we have but to extricate our consciousness from all that is the effect of our time and place. We have but to quiet our own thoughts and desires, and we shall hear at once the harmonies of heaven.

Storied

2011-11-14T06:45:00.000-05:00

Was in Los Angeles last week on business. Still getting caught up in more ways than one.

Haven't been reading Len Hjalmarson over at his blog Next Reformation lately but he is always good to come back to. Need to do it more often. See this recent post titled "Storied". He meditates on something interesting by Paul Fromont. It is a reflection on narrative theology, something that has given me great comfort in recent years. Should take time to investigate this spiritual thread again soon. Here is the first portion of the post.

A narrative approach to theology has promise. In part, that promise comes because modern approaches to theology tended toward reductionism: lists of propositions abstracted from the living story. But to abstract truth is to do violence to the texture of truth. Truth abstracted from context is a simulacra – it only appears to be real. It is processed food, lacking that which gives life. In his reflections on The Insatiable Moon Paul Fromont writes,

“If the root of art is storytelling, then the taproots are longings. Longings for such things as truth, beauty, romance, adventure. We long to find the true north that will guide us through this life and into the next…”

There is more but I need to get to work. After being gone for 4 business days there will be much catching up to do.

And see this at the Fromont's Prodigal Kiwi's site.

growing up Church of Christ by mike s. allen

2011-11-04T06:26:00.001-04:00

This book is a winsome, lighthearted account of what it was like growing up in the Church of Christ. Mike occupies an interesting place and time since he is the son of a well known minister. The book grew from scrapbook entries and reminiscences. It consists of numerous short vignettes of Mike's experiences. Also included are brief comments by others coming from this same heritage. It is a great format. Easy to read and covers a lot of territory in time and subject.

I liked the good-natured and humorous aspect of the book. Kinda reminds me of Donald Miller, author of Blue Like Jazz.

Like Mike, I am the son of a CofC minister and our dad's are close friends.

The Church of Christ is a branch of what is known as the Restoration Movement. This began in the early 1800's and some have said it was the first indigenous American movement. The DOC, Christian Church, CofC and Int. CofC are branches of the endeavor. The CofC has given the world Pat Boone, Max Lucado, Ken Star, Weird Al Yankovic, Michael Shermer and Pepperdine University.

The only other book I have on growing up in this fellowship is Hearing God's Voice: My Life with Scripture in the Churches of Christ by Thomas Olbricht. Tom is 20 years older than me and Mike is 16 years younger. Geographically we are similar too. Mike and I from Arkansas and Tom just across the border into Missouri. Being in the middle between them I see a lot of commonality and yet some changes too. When Tom and I were growing up there really was no evangelical counter culture and when Mike came along that was just beginning.

Mike closes the introductory Author's note with "By the time you make it to 'The End', I hope you'll have found a connection to some thought or story, and in that connection, I hope you will have been helped a little in your own journey." Many of us will be able to say yes we were helped. I was. Thanks Mike!

Haggis

2011-10-26T20:52:00.001-04:00

Haggis croquettes on lower right of plate

Haggis patties on top of neeps on top of tatties

Haggis is a classic Scottish dish. Wikipedia describes it extensively as quoted below.

"Clarissa Dickson Wright suggests that haggis was invented as a way of cooking quick-spoiling offal near the site of a hunt, without the need to carry along an additional cooking vessel. The liver and kidneys could be grilled directly over a fire, but this treatment was unsuitable for the stomach, intestines, or lungs. Chopping up the lungs and stuffing the stomach with them and whatever fillers might have been on hand, then boiling the assembly — likely in a vessel made from the animal's hide — was one way to make sure these parts did not go to waste."^[12]

Haggis all prettied up

^{Somehow, when I eat a local food, I'm trying to identify with the locals and affirm them and who they are.}

Back from Edinburgh

2011-10-23T14:45:00.003-04:00

Arrived home last night after a week in Edinburgh, Scotland. Was there on business and Dorothy came along. We had a wonderful time during the breaks. In the background is the Edinburgh Castle, first referred to about 1000 years ago and a site of human activity since who knows when. There was something vaguely familiar about this place even though I've never been here before. Simply from a mathematical perspective, some of our ancestors must have come from this place or near here. Edinburgh is sometimes referred to as the Athens of the North. The Scots changed the world with the Scottish Enlightenment of the 1700's. That is when Adam Smith invented Economics, Thomas Reid discovered common sense, and James Hutton founded modern geology and paved the way for later U. of Edinburgh student, Charles Darwin. When a senior at Harding, I wrestled with Electromagnetic Theory. Much of that is based on the 19th century advances of James Clerk Maxwell, also a grad of the U. of Edinburgh.

The University of Edinburgh Divinity School.

It is important to note that Alexander Campbell was a product to some degree of this intellectual matrix. He is even mentioned on the Scottish Enlightenment Wikipedia page as a famous example of that school. And so, my cultural and religious as well as ancestral heritage derives in part from this place.

from Wikipedia

An English visitor to Edinburgh during the heyday of the Scottish Enlightenment remarked: "Here I stand at what is called the Cross of Edinburgh, and can, in a few minutes, take 50 men of genius and learning by the hand." It is a striking summation of the outburst of pioneering intellectual activity that occurred in Scotland in the second half of the 18th century.

They were a closely knit group: most knew one another; many were close friends; some were related by marriage. All were politically conservative but intellectually radical ( Unionists and progressives to a man), courteous, friendly and accessible. They were stimulated by enormous curiosity, optimism about human progress and a dissatisfaction with age-old theological disputes. Together they created a cultural golden age.
— Magnus Magnusson, New Statesman^[9]

Quote from Love Wins and Insurrection

2011-10-14T07:11:00.001-04:00

Ah. With a Kindle one can read several books at the same time. I was comparing clippings from Love Wins and from a book I just started, Insurrection. They present similar thoughts and I agree. This is what religion is all about.

From Love Wins

Religions should not surprise us. We crave meaning and order and explanation. We’re desperate for connection with something or somebody greater than ourselves. This is not new.

And something similar from Peter Rollins' Insurrection

This story presents to us the psychological reality that our pleasure is intimately interwoven with the pleasure (or pain) of those around us. Understanding this can help us unlock something fundamental about the nature of human desire—namely, that the most sought after material in the universe is not some precious metal or limited resource but rather the attention of those whom we desire. We long to be seen by the other and acknowledged by them in some way.

More From Love Wins

2011-10-12T05:34:00.000-04:00

Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived (Rob Bell)

Rob's approach involves an investigation of what the Hebrew scriptures say about where history is going. This must be taken into consideration in addition to the explicit passages in the New Testament regarding hell, it seems to me. The first snippet here is a passage he builds on which is famous and inspiring and which has been used and cited in peacemaking and efforts to convert war technology to peaceful uses.

Direct quotes from his book are in dark blue italics.

The prophet Isaiah said that in that new day “the nations will stream to” Jerusalem, and God will “settle disputes for many peoples”; people will “beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks” (chap. 2).

But that is not all. There is a continuing optimistic theme expressed by the Hebrew prophets.

Isaiah said that everybody will walk “in the light of the LORD” and “they will neither harm nor destroy” in that day. The earth, Isaiah said, will be “filled with the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea” (chap. 11). He described “a feast of rich food for all peoples” because God will “destroy the shroud that enfolds all peoples, the sheet that covers all nations, he will swallow up death forever.” God “will wipe away the tears from all faces”; and “remove his people’s disgrace from all the earth” (chap. 25). The prophet Ezekiel said that people will be given grain and fruit and crops and new hearts and new spirits (chap. 36). The prophet Amos promised that everything will be repaired and restored and rebuilt and “new wine will drip from the mountains” (chap. 9). Life in the age to come. If this sounds like heaven on earth, that’s because it is. Literally.

---

First, they spoke about “all the nations.” That’s everybody. That’s all those different skin colors, languages, dialects, and accents; all those kinds of food and music; all those customs, habits, patterns, clothing, traditions, and ways of celebrating— multiethnic, multisensory, multieverything.

---

That’s an extraordinarily complex, interconnected, and diverse reality, a reality in which individual identities aren’t lost or repressed, but embraced and celebrated. An expansive unity that goes beyond and yet fully embraces staggering levels of diversity.

---

So, overall, there is a definite optimism for the end of history on the part of the Hebrew prophets in these places. And Rob places an encouraging interpretation on them. There are a few places in the Hebrew scriptures that might be interpreted as supporting the traditional concept of Hell, but they are not so explicit nor obvious without traditional assumptions. (Exception: One reference in Daniel which I think was written very late.)

Today's Quote from "Love Wins"

2011-10-11T08:08:00.001-04:00

This from early in the book Love Wins by Rob Bell. This expresses my feelings as well. When I discovered that many years ago, it removed a barrier to my spiritual life.

Often times when I meet atheists and we talk about the god they don’t believe in, we quickly discover that I don’t believe in that god either.

Reunion for the descendants of Bill Ed and Zonie Allison

2011-10-10T18:53:00.002-04:00

The gathering was at the home of Earl and Doris Highfield which is near Powhatan, AR. It was held on Saturday, Sept 3, 2011. Bill Ed and Zonie were my great grandparents. Their son, Cleo, was my grandfather. Bill Ed died before my Dad was born but I remember my grandfather and great grandmother. We had a great time at the reunion. By the time I was born and was growing up, most everyone from this family had left Northeast Arkansas and I never had the opportunity to meet them. It was great meeting everyone.

Surprized by Kuyper

2011-10-01T08:40:00.001-04:00

Somehow I found myself at the blog of John Stackhouse one morning six weeks ago. He is Professor of Theology and Culture at Regent College. I had enjoyed his thoughtful comments from time to time but had been out of the habit of visiting there lately. He is a Canadian evangelical and he wrote a short note recommending Richard J. Mouw's new book regarding the progenitor of Neo-Calvinism - Abraham Kuyper: A Short and Personal Introduction. Richard is president and professor of Christian philosophy at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California.

It is so easy given the wonderful resources of the internet to spend all of one's spare time only engaging sites and books that support one's interests and viewpoints. But I was moved by the recommendation and decided to download the book to my Kindle. It was good that I did. Abraham Kuyper (1838-1920) was a Dutch Reformed theologian who, very briefly, became active in politics, founded a university and eventually became Prime Minister of the Netherlands.

Had heard of the guy before, having encountered a snippet of his thought here and there. I was prepared to encounter a stern 19th century Biblical literalist with a slightly different set of rules to follow and some possibly good insights here and there but another version of why my form of the Christian religion is better than yours.

Was surprized and happy to be jolted out of such dogmatic slumber on the part of myself. Below in italics are direct quotes from Richard Mouw's book which is a short well presented summation of Kuyper's thought.

The fact is, Kuyper insisted, that the true church "can reveal itself in many forms, in different countries; nay, even in the same country, in a multiplicity of institutions." He saw it as a major contribution of the sixteenth-century Reformation that it had "ruptured the unity of the Church," breaking "that one Church into fragments," in order to encourage "a rich variety of all manner of church formations."   Kuyper wanted us to see the "differences of climate and of nation, of historical past, and of disposition of mind" in a positive light - thus acknowledging   a reality that "annihilates the absolute character of every visible church, and places them all side by side, as differing   in degrees of purity, but always remaining in some way or other a manifestation of one holy and catholic Church of Christ in Heaven.

I come from a tradition that values unity. But the above helps me to see that there is a difference between unity and uniformity. So often uniformity has been the goal. It has been confused with or substituted for unity.
...
Kuyper's fondness for pluriformity ran deep. He was convinced   that God himself loves many-ness. Indeed, on his reading   of the biblical account, the Creator had deliberately woven   many-ness into the very fabric of creation. Kuyper even
wrote an essay on the subject to which he gave the telling title "Uniformity: The Curse of Modern Life." Many-ness, Kuyper argued, was necessary for created life to flourish in a "fresh and vigorous" manner.'   Referring to the Genesis creation story, Kuyper noted that the Lord willed "[t]hat all life should multiply `after its kind."' That the concept   of "kind" in that context applied specifically to animal life did not deter Kuyper from making a more general application.   "[E]very domain of nature," he says, displays an "infinite diversity, an inexhaustible profusion of variations." And this many-ness also rules the world of humanity, which "undulates   and teems" with the same sort of diversity, bestowed upon our collective existence by a "generous God who from the riches of his glory distributed gifts, powers, aptitude, and talents to each according to his divine will."'

Reality Isn't What It Used To Be

2011-09-18T19:32:00.000-04:00

Reality Isn't What It Used To Be by Walter Truet Anderson has been on my list for many years. One reason I had not read it sooner was because it dates way back to 1992. So I thought it might be out of date. Well, it pretty much was not out of date but described well the last twenty years, in my opinion. The main theme is that we humans socially construct reality, have always done so, but in the postmodern era we are now in, we recognize that fact (or it seems to me we should).

One habit that I have acquired with using my Kindle is to highlight various passages that jump out at me. It commonly takes two or three weeks for me to read some of the Kindle books. So I do not remember what all I've underscored. Then, when I get the chance, I upload to my computer and read them all. There were quite a few such passages in this book. Here is my favourite.

But religions are living entities, and they live in human minds. And they change as the times change and as human consciousness changes. There is little similarity between the worldview of the fourth-century Nicene Fathers and that of the twentieth-century conservatives who try to keep their faith intact by using the Nicene Creed—no more than there is between the California Indians of a thousand years ago and the people who play the Carlos Castaneda game in the Big Sur mountains. Some kinds of religious change are visible and easily documented, others relatively invisible. We know that Christianity has gone through tumultuous events in recent centuries—the Reformation, the increased power of secular constructors of social reality, the institutionalization of freedom to choose other religions or none at all—and such changes inevitably bring modifications in the actual beliefs of those who still keep the faith. The ancient faith that is advancing into the postmodern world is not quite the faith of our fathers.

I believe there is value in renewal and restoration. In fact my religious heritage identifies itself as part of the Restoration Movement. But, Christianity and religion should grow, adapt, and change. It always has and it always will.

Struggle, Striving, and Happiness

2011-08-16T21:55:00.000-04:00

Haven't posted much this summer. That is about to change. Since buying a Kindle about a year ago, my new reading habit has been to download more books than I can possibly read. A lot them are free or only $0.99 and they arrive few seconds after a click. So, I'm reading several of them in parallel and it sometimes takes months to finish some of them. When I encounter the same thought in two different books within a few days, it seems significant.

Have been reading Arthur Zajonc's "Meditation As Contemplative Inquiry: When Knowing Becomes Love" for two reasons. One, his book "Catching the Light" was marvelous. (Blogged about that earlier here). The other reason is that I'm wanting to explore meditation. Here is a quotation from a section:

Arthur Zajonc

I have long been attracted to the line by Einstein,“I have never looked upon ease and happiness as ends in themselves...." Happiness is really not the goal of life. Einstein’s life was not a commitment to happiness but a long commitment to inquiry. Goethe’s Faust seals his bargain with the devil Mephistopheles promising to go with him if he, Faust, would ever say to the passing moment, “Tarry, thou art so fair!” In other words, Goethe saw striving, not bliss, as the central core of our humanity. Citing Augustine, Thomas Merton described human development as proceeding not in steps but via a sequence of “yearnings.”66
And later, Zajonc says:

Of course, I am not advocating suffering, but it is intrinsic to a life rightly lived. Struggle and suffering are inevitably associated with aspiration and compassionate concern. After all, compassion literally means “to suffer with.”

A few days later, was reading one of Brian McLaren's more recent books,

"Naked Spirituality: A Life with God in 12 Simple Words." And, his thoughts follow the above and expand.

Brian McLaren

Sooner or later we need to accept two truths that both the book of Genesis and the theory of evolution teach us: life isn’t supposed to be easy, and struggle can lead to growth. In Genesis, God creates a universe characterized neither by fully ordered stasis nor complete chaos, but rather by order and chaos in dynamic tension. In that matrix, we experience the stresses of struggle, change, and competition that challenge us to evolve, to grow, to become.

.................

The apostle Paul says that we celebrate our sufferings, because they produce in us endurance, which in turn produces character, which in turn produces hope, which in turn makes us receptive to the outpouring of God’s love in our hearts (Rom. 5:3–5).

................

The apostle James, as we have seen already, says we should receive trials into our lives with joy, because, again, trials work like a fertilizer for the growth of character (1:2–4). Without trials, we would be morally sterile, lacking qualities like endurance, maturity, and wisdom.

.............

There are days, of course, when we wish there could be some other system. We wish there could be a way of developing patience without delay, courage without danger, forgiveness without offense, generosity without need, skill without discipline, endurance without fatigue, persistence without obstacles, strength without resistance, virtue without temptation, and strong love without hard-to-love people. But it turns out that there is no other way. The Creator has created the right kind of universe to produce these beautiful qualities in us creatures. And among these beautiful qualities is interdependence—the ability to reach out beyond ourselves, to ask for help from others and from God, and to offer help as we are able. The whole shebang is rigged for mutuality, for vital connection. The theory of evolution teaches the same lesson. If survival were easy, species wouldn’t develop new adaptive features. If survival were stress-free, there wouldn’t be 20,000 species of butterflies, 300 species of turtles, or 18,937 species of birds (at last count). In fact, there would be no butterflies, turtles, or birds at all, because it was stress, struggle, challenge, and change that prompted the first living things—slimy blobs in a tide pool somewhere—to diversify, specialize, adapt, and develop into the wonders that surround us and include us now. Seen in this light, evolution isn’t a grim theory of “nature red in tooth and claw” it depicts the planet as a veritable laboratory for innovations in beauty and diversity, fitness and adaptability, complexity and harmony.2 It renders the earth a studio for the creative development of interdependence in ecosystems or societies of life. Put beauty, diversity, complexity, and harmonious interdependence together and you have something very close to the biblical concepts of “glory” and shalom.

.............

So both science and faith tell us that we find ourselves in a universe whose preset conditions challenge us to ongoing growth, development, and connection.

Back from Wedding and Vacation

2011-08-07T15:06:00.010-04:00

Been a while since posting. Two weeks ago we were in New Albany, MS for Marcus' wedding. Had a wonderful time. Afterwards, Dorothy and I stayed in their house, watching the dogs and doing chores, while they honeymoon-cruised to Cozumel.

Had a chance to get a few pictures myself but not as many as I wanted as I didn't get the settings right on my new camera. Here's the wedding party. My dad officiated. His first service since back surgery 6-weeks earlier and he did fine. Dorothy spent many weeks planning and working with Suzy for the wedding.

Suzy's family.

Before the wedding in the Church of the Nazarene.

Nice BW pic that Derek took.

After the ceremony, Marcus and Suzy enter the reception area.

Crowd shots at reception.

The couple with two groomsmen in the foreground.

Dorothy, seen here talking with my Dad, was indefagitable. It's taken two weeks for her to wind down.

Below is the very fine video that Derek's wife, Catherine, made of this wonderful event. For more on the wedding go to our Facebook pages.

Marcus and Suzy's Wedding Video by Catherine

We Must Do What is Difficult

2011-07-07T04:19:00.003-04:00

It seems I've followed this advice to an extreme in my life. Just came across an interesting article by Jocelyn K. Glei of the "99%" web site. It is about something that wonderful poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, had written. In Letters to a Young Poet he wrote:

from letter 7:

We know little, but that we must trust in what is difficult is a certainty that will never abandon us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be one more reason for us to do it.

From letter 8 re: embracing difficulty

If we only arrange our life in accordance with the principle which tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, then what now appears to us as the most alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience. How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races, the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage.

Looking back on my life of now 60 years I can see that I did this, sometimes to a fault, actually. Sometimes taking more on that I could handle. But it is the way I've lived. One reason, beside my love for the subject, that I majored in Physics was because it was perceived as being very difficult. Didn't have to go to the U of Va, either, to continue my studies. My Memphis State advisor said it was out of my league. I made it through, however. And so on. Just got back from a nine day business trip, wondering if I've taken on too much. Sometimes now I feel I'm ready to get off the treadmill. Glad to have read this for the pick me up.

On the Nature of Emergent Reality

2011-06-23T23:53:00.001-04:00

Have been glancing at "The Re-Emergence of Emergence: The Emergentist Hypothesis from Science to Religion" edited by Philip Clayton and Paul Davies. A chapter titled On the Nature of Emergent Reality is authored by George F. R. Ellis and closes with:

Strong reductionist claims, usually characterized by the phrase 'nothing but' and focusing only on physical existence, simply do not take into account the depth of causation in the real world as indicated above, nor the inability of physics on its own to comprehend these interactions and effects. Reductionist claims represent a typical fundamentalist position, claiming a partial truth (based on some subset of causation) to be the whole truth and ignoring the overall rich causal matrix while usually focusing on purely physical elements of causation. They do not and cannot be an adequate basis of explanation or understanding in the real world.

I believe the evidence he gives in the chapter backs up this conclusion. At one time it seemed to me that Laplace's statement about all reality being reducible to points and forces on them was, depressingly, true. I wanted a way of escape from that but couldn't see logically how to get out of it. I had no knowledge of the principal of emergence and the possibility of top-down causality. Now I do have a little knowledge of it and hope to learn more.

I’m particularly adept at making mistakes — Dyson Vacuum Inventor

2011-06-04T09:30:00.002-04:00

I’m particularly adept at making mistakes—it’s a necessity as an engineer. . . . I love mistakes.

This is a quote from a Newsweek article ( June 6, 2011, page 61) from James Dyson, the inventor and developer of a famous vacuum cleaner. We have one and we like it very much. Looking back, I see that in both my domestic and professional lives, fear of making mistakes has prevented me from being as productive and fruitful as I could have been. Thanks for this fine sermon, James.

What if I Were Romeo in Black Jeans

2011-05-31T07:02:00.001-04:00

The year 1990 was not a good one in rock music. Reading a list of music titles from that year I remember only a few. But Sunday morning, unbidden, one tune from the era popped into my head. It was the year I was on a leave of absence from Oak Ridge and we lived in Charlottesville, VA where I was doing medical research at UVA. (It is a long story but it was great to be at least a small part of an initial effort that eventually led to the formation of the medical company Stereotaxis). I worked out regularly that year, running and lifting weights. Only one song I recall from the endless cycles of music played in the gyms. It is No Myth by Michael Penn. So that morning I went to You Tube and refamiliarized myself with it. Memorable lines:

She hopes we can be friends

We said goodbye before hello

What if I were Romeo in Black Jeans

She's just looking for someone to Dance with.

Then surfed the net for commentary. Here are some interesting thoughts from the web site titled Stylist. They state that everyone has some special pieces of music in their head that strike a special chord inside of them. The reviewer is Alfred Soto:

Penn’s whiney pipes suit lyrics whose wisdom is encapsulated in the declarative simplicity of the admission, “She hopes we can be friends” and in the useful “We said goodbye before hello.” Handling bass, all guitars, and a galloping drum program that’s the song’s most striking element, the auteur palliates his Dylan-esque sneer with a demo-style directness. That’s the best that can be said about “No Myth”—it’s a demo unsullied by additional tinkering ...

Like all the best rock songs, “No Myth” asks questions it refuses to answer; its creator’s sullenness dovetails with the song’s mystery. We know (and he knows we know) that Penn isn’t Romeo in black jeans; he’s a guy with long bangs and a rather lugubrious self-possession, brother of one of Hollywood’s more masochistically naturalistic actors, too anonymous to be the subject of any myths, be they romantic or aesthetic. The most telling moment occurs during the bridge, in which Penn slings polysyllabic rhymes like Ted Nugent doing scales. It’s lovely, plaintive; bravado replaces snark. . .

After not hearing or thinking of this song for twenty years, I know it will be bouncing around in my head for the next several weeks.

Music as the Language of God

2011-05-22T20:16:00.000-04:00

Marvelous Quote from the movie Copying Beethoven. Been on my tab for so long I forgot where I first saw it.

"The vibrations on the air are the breath of God speaking to man's soul. Music is the language of God. We musicians are as close to God as man can be. We hear his voice, we read his lips, we give birth to the children of God, who sing his praise. That's what musicians are."
— Stephen J. Rivele

History of CO2_Inception.wmv

2011-05-08T12:23:00.000-04:00

Interesting graphic and cool music.

Doubts/Community

2011-04-24T05:06:00.002-04:00

I happened across the blog Everyday Liturgy while looking for something Peter Rollins said. EL lists a number of pithy things heard from Peter at a 2009 event. It actually describes how I've lived my life, i think.

-we all have doubts—the important point is not to always have total belief but to participate in the tradition and belong to community

From Raptitude: Why Your Fears Won't Come True

2011-03-27T22:23:00.000-04:00

I'm suddenly realising that fear has characterised my life more than I thought it had. Why do I procrastinate making that call or doing that chore or planning that meeting? As I was coming to this notion, it was my good fortune to read a wonderful antidote from the blog Raptitude. Here's a snippet. But you should read the entire post here.

...

What you fear can’t really happen

What I’ve come to realize is that all my fears of the future are actually fears of the past.

Each of us has a whole bank of awful moments in our memories, each of which are so painful that we can’t accept that we could experience the same pain again.

If the thought of something you want to do rouses fear in you, think: what is the experience — the feeling — I’m actually fearing here? You don’t have to psychoanalyze yourself and try to figure out the childhood memory it comes from, but it doesn’t take much thought to identify the precise experience you can’t bear to risk happening.

By obeying our fears from arm’s length, we end up cordoning off enormous areas of possibility. Life is inescapably risky and painful, not to mention 100% fatal. So don’t think you can dodge pain, awkwardness or by backing down from something a bit scary.

The real bad stuff isn’t going to be something you had the foresight to worry about anyway. From Baz Luhrmann’s famous speech: “The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind, the kind that blindside you at 4pm on some idle Tuesday.”

...

The Spiritual Meaning of Trees

2011-02-27T20:59:00.002-05:00

Last Wednesday was my turn to do the devotional talk at church. Decided many months ago to do it on the Spiritual Meaning of Trees. The poem of a few weeks ago was the meditation that started me down that path. This post is a result of my study and preparation for that talk.

Trees are in the background and in the foreground of the Bible. From the beginning to end. They are a critical part of the action. The Tree of Life is mentioned early in the Genesis and also in the last chapter of Revelation, for example. There are over thirty kinds of them mentioned in the Bible. Some like the olive tree are mentioned quite often and are well know to us, both as to physical, literal manifestation and some of its symbolic meaning, ie. you know what the olive branch signifies. In some cases it is not certain what kind of tree it is that is being described.

Perhaps you didn't realize it but trees figure in the story of Abraham, in several places. For instance, after the call to leave Ur we are told in Genesis 12: 6 Abram traveled through the land as far as the site of the great tree of Moreh at Shechem. At that time the Canaanites were in the land. "Moreh" means teacher. It was a significant tree for Abraham and the Canaanites. Was some kind of school there? Was it an Oak? Some think it was.

As it turns out, a few days before my talk, the significance of trees for our contemporary culture was illustrated by the recent reaction to the poisoning of the Toomer Oaks of Auburn. There was quite an uproar. Auburn fans are justifiably feeling hurt and disappointment. (Rather than post a link, the reader can google to find various descriptions and pictures.)

Each tree brings its own blessing to us. Not only do trees provide food, medicine, shade, shelter, and other useful items for our lives but many useful images and metaphors to learn from. Hence the admonition for us to be a tree that bears good fruit. Or to be rooted. Or that if we'll be righteous we'll "grow like a Cedar of Lebanon" (Ps 92:12). There are of course many other Biblical examples of this.

Here are some of the links to interesting articles on this subject. Quotes from them are in italics.

The Spirituality of Trees

The tree is one of humankind's most powerful symbols. It is the embodiment of life in all its realms: the point of union between heaven, earth and water. In most mythology and ancient religious imagery, the tree was believed to have an abundance of divine creative energy.

The Archetypal Symbolism of Trees

Trees have long held a literal and symbolic fascination for humanity. Their source as a deep archetype of absorption begins with the earliest epic in the Western World, the story of Gilgamesh and his quest for the plant of life (a symbolic tree) that is snatched away by a serpent, thus illustrating that the use of the tree as a universal religious symbol is incredibly ancient; such utilization can be dated to at least the third millennium B.C.E. as a symbol of a rich cultural mythos, the major archetype being that of the center, the beginning where sacred powers first originated. The tree is the navel of the world, the "cosmic axis" (Axis mundi) standing at the universe's center where it passes through the middle and unites the three great cosmic domains: the underworld, earth, and sky (Roth, Stephanie. The Tree of Life, The Ecologist. Jan. 2000 v30il. TEL. ASAP. 18 Aug. 2003.).

My closing thought:

Amazingly, these ancient pagans got it right. Their mythologies are not literally true but thy intuited something of depth and validity. Even before it happened. The Cross is that Tree. And it cannot be escaped how that event changed the world and the course of history.

The Human Future

2011-02-10T03:49:00.001-05:00

Placed the comment below to this blog post titled The Human Future by Jack Whelan.

Jack said "We're in the habit of looking toward the future in the rear-view mirror, and we assume fundamental continuity with incremental changes."

Yes, that is right. I'm 60 now, and recall thinking with pride and optimism and excitement when I was 10 that now I'm living in a truly modern world. We went to space that year. And I expected technology change in the way usually depicted by the magazine covers of say Popular Science and as science fiction films of the fifties showed it. (recall a futuristic space travelling serial show where they used slide rules!) But not many if any anticipated what has happened and how wonderfully things would unfold. We had the VCR and personal computer revolution in the eighties, the internet in the nineties, social media (bringing with it this blog) in the 2000's. Marvelous medical and communication advances. Don't think many saw it coming about like this. Definitely not me and I'm an R&D engineer with a PhD. Perhaps Teilhard du Chardin. I listened to a book review in Philosophy of Religion Class forty years ago and thought he was crazy. Not looking so much that way now.

See 1959 Popular Science Covers here. I especially recall seeing things like on the July cover - cars without wheels.

Trees - The Most Effective Preachers

2011-02-03T20:52:00.003-05:00

iStockphoto

Trees have always been the most effective preachers for me. I revere them when they live in nations and families, in forests and groves. And I revere them even more when they stand singly. They are like solitaries. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, isolated men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. The world murmurs in their tops, their roots rest in the infinite; however, they do not lose themselves in it but, with all the energy of their lives, aspire to only one thing: to fulfill their own innate law, to enlarge their own form, to represent themselves.

Nothing is more sacred, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree has been sawed off and shows its naked mortal wound to the sun, one can read its whole history on the bright disc of its stump and tombstone: in its annual rings and cicatrizations are faithfully recorded all struggle, all suffering, all sickness, all fortune and prosperity, meager years and luxuriant years, attacks withstood, storms survived. And every farm boy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that, high in the mountains and in ever-present danger, the most indestructible, most powerful, most exemplary tree trunks grow.

Trees are sanctuaries. He who knows how to speak to them, to listen to them, learns the truth. They do not preach doctrines and recipes, they preach the basic law of life, heedless of details.

A tree speaks: In me is hidden a core, a spark, a thought, I am life of eternal life. The experiment and throw [of the dice] that the eternal mother ventured on me is unique, unique is my shape and the system of veins in my skin, unique are the slightest play of foliage at my top and the smallest scar in my bark. It is my office to shape and show the Eternal in the distinctively unique.

A tree speaks: My strength is trust. I know nothing of my fathers, I know nothing of the thousand children which come out of me every year. I live the mystery of my seed to the end, nothing else is my concern. I trust that God is within me. I trust that my task is sacred. In this trust I live.

When we are sad and can no longer endure life well, a tree can speak to us: Be calm! Be calm! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is hard. These are childish thoughts. Let God talk within you and they will grow silent. You are anxious because your road leads you away from your mother and your home. But every step and day lead you anew to your mother. Home is neither here nor there. Home is inside you or nowhere.

A yearning to wander tears at my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind in the evening. If one listens quietly and long, the wanderlust too shows its core and meaning. It is not a wish to run away from suffering, as it seemed. It is a yearning for home, for the memory of one's mother, for new symbols of life. It leadshomeward. Every road leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is the mother.

Thus the tree rustles in the evening when we are afraid of our own childish thoughts. Trees have long thoughts, long in breath and calm, as they have a longer life than we. They are wiser than we, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned to listen to trees, the very brevity and swiftness and childish haste of our thoughts acquire an incomparable joy. He who has learned to listen to trees no longer desires to be a tree. He does not desire to be anything but that which he is. That is home. That is happiness.

by Hermann Hesse from Wanderings: Notes and Sketches

Translation from First German Reader: A Beginner's Dual-Language Book, edited by Harry Steinhauer, page 12-17. Bantam Language Edition published 1964, 6th printing. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 64-7673.

Miserere Mei Deus - Kings College Chapel Choir

2011-01-25T06:18:00.000-05:00

You gotta here this. Relax .......

 You gotta here this.

Depth - from Tor Norretranders

2011-01-17T11:24:00.028-05:00

This is lifted from Edge: The World Question Center

The question is WHAT SCIENTIFIC CONCEPT WOULD IMPROVE EVERYBODY'S COGNITIVE TOOLKIT?

There are many responses and this one jumped out at me as it correlates with an interest of this blog. I snipped out some interesting paragraphs in order to prevent this post from being too long.
---------------------------------------------

TOR NØRRETRANDERS
Science Writer; Consultant; Lecturer, Copenhagen; Author, The Generous Man and The User Illusion

Depth

Depth is what you do not see immediately at the surface of things. Depth is what is below that surface: a body of water below the surface of a lake, the rich life of a soil below the dirt or the spectacular line of reasoning behind a simple statement.

Depth is a straightforward aspect of the physical world. Gravity stacks stuff and not everything can be at the top. Below there is more and you can dig for it.

Depth acquired a particular meaning with the rise of complexity science a quarter of a century ago: What is characteristic of something complex? Very orderly things like crystals are not complex. They are simple. Very messy things like a pile of litter are very difficult to describe: They hold a lot of information. Information is a measure of how difficult something is to describe. Disorder has a high information content and order has a low one. All the interesting stuff in life is in-between: Living creatures, thoughts and conversations. Not a lot of information, but neither a little. So information content does not lead us to what is interesting or complex. The marker is rather the information that is not there, but was somehow involved in creating the object of interest. The history of the object is more relevant than the object itself, if we want to pin-point what is interesting to us.

It is not the informational surface of the thing, but its informational depth that attracts our curiosity. It took a lot to bring it here, before our eyes. It is not what is there, but what used to be there, that matters. Depth is about that.

....

Most conversational statements have some kind of depth: There is more than meets the ear, something that happened between the ears of the person talking — before a statement was made. When you understand the statement, the meaning of what is being said, you "dig it", you get the depth, what is below and behind. What is not said, but meant — the exformation content, information processed and thrown away before the actual production of explicit information.

......

That is also the point with abstractions: We want them to be shorthand for a lot of information that was digested in the process leading to the use of the abstraction, but is not present when we use it. Such abstractions have depth. We love them. Other abstraction have no depth. They are shallow and just used to impress the other guy. They do not help us. We hate them. Intellectual life is very much about the ability to distinguish between the shallow and the deep abstractions. You need to know if there is any depth before you make that headlong dive and jump into it.

a new definition of religion

2011-01-11T04:57:00.002-05:00

From Drew Tatusko of the Notes from Off Center blog:

Religion is an externalized desire for socio-historical coherence and order by appealing to a transcendent source of coherence and order; a transcendent source of coherence and order that is itself an image of that externalized desire.

see the whole article here:

a new definition of religion

I don't like Westerns except for ones like True Grit

2011-01-02T07:04:00.000-05:00

Saw True Grit on New Year's Eve. Read a number of reviews including one by Stanley Fish at the New York Times. Never saw the John Wayne version of 1969 nor read Charles Portis' book. That said, I liked the attempt at realism. The language captivated me. It was formal and with surprising word choices and vocabulary not typical of Westerns. Yet the characters seemed to disclose themselves and their feelings more deeply. Perhaps normal, everyday people back then were like that. I've read a few letters from that time from ordinary people which seem to bear that out. (Think I may take up some reading from authors of that period, the late 19th century.) The most interesting character was Mattie, the fourteen year old whose determination to seek justice for her Father's killer created the story. While many justifiably are fascinated by the role of Grace in the movie, what I keep pondering is the role of belief, certainty, and order. What provided Mattie with the self-confidence to pursue her goal? She is single minded and optimistic that she can accomplish it. Why did she so doggedly desire to do so? Realistically, her talents should have been directed to taking care of her family rather than endangering herself in such a manner. Why did she have such Faith? It seems clear to me that she had a view of the way life is supposed to be. There is an order to existence that calls not only for proper spelling, something very important to her and I'm led to believe a key to her character, but capture and punishment for the criminal who killed her Father. Despite all the danger she has something in her to keep her on the path to this result she deems necessary. A reasonable and rational person in the normal sense of those terms would have weighed the costs and demurred.

Evolutionary Christianity Gives Me Hope

2010-12-16T08:27:00.002-05:00

Somehow learned of this site recently titled Evolutionary Christianity. Michael Dowd is interviewing a number of scientists and religious leaders along the general theme not of reconciling evolution and Christianity but of exploring how evolution can aid, inform, and deepen religious faith. Have listened to interviews with Ian Barbour, Dennis Lamoreaux, Ross Hostetter and Karl Giberson so far. Very interesting, informative, and enjoyable.

Intro 2nd episode season 2 of NBC The Sing-Off "Use Somebody"

2010-12-10T19:22:00.001-05:00

This is pure pleasure.

More Thoughts from Deeper than Darwin

2010-12-02T07:34:00.001-05:00

Haven't posted much lately. Work has been so demanding. My mind in the off moments has settled on the superficial. In some brief moments, however, have been savoring . . . slowly . . . the book Deeper than Darwin by John Haught. Here are some quotes that jump out or me.

This is for the new atheists:

Only cosmic literalists will claim to have read the world all the way down, and what they take for ultimate depth sooner or later turns out to be merely surface.

....

Speaking of Alfred North Whitehead

Physical reality in an evolving universe is made up, he observes, of moments, events or occasions, not chunks of spatialized stuff. It is an illusory abstraction to assume, as old-fashioned materialists do, that the fundamental units of nature are particles of lifeless matter. If nature is a process of becoming, then its reality is temporal; and time, logically speaking, is composed of happenings, not atoms. What we think of as mechanisms or bits of matter are not concretely real, but at best useful scientific abstractions. If nature is in evolution, then its fundamentally temporal character can be broken down concretely only into events, not materialized monads.

As one trained and entranced by science and in particular physics, where one goal is the study and the pursuit of the understanding of the tiny bits of matter that constitute everything, it is little wonder that some of us would see the world as mechanism. But that is not the whole story. The book his helpful in seeing that.

The Narrative Texture of Nature

2010-11-15T06:51:00.002-05:00

Thought provoking reading from Deeper Than Darwin: The Prospect For Religion In The Age Of Evolution

Celebrated academicians, for example, often think of the cosmos as a pointless swirl of mindless stuff on which a patina of life and mind glimmers feebly for a cosmic moment.5 The narrative texture of nature still lies largely unacknowledged. However, once we develop the habit of thinking of the cosmos as a story-as geology, biology and astrophysics now demand that we do-the universe again becomes something to be read, possibly at many levels of depth. We not only now find in nature features analogous to codes, alphabets, grammars and information. We can also make out the outline of a dramatic adventure. But shall we be able to find a "meaning" written there also?

......

Not if we persist in our literalism. Like all texts and stories, nature is susceptible to shallow readings that fail to get to its inner substance. Today, it seems to me, evolutionary materialism is a kind of "cosmic literalism" stuck on the surface of nature, satisfied with groundless claims that there is simply nothing beneath the "fundamental" laws of physics and natural selection. Just as biblical literalism remains content with a plain reading of scripture, the modern decision to understand the universe and the evolution of life as "merely material" is essentially a literalist flight from the depths of nature.

Today, we are all painfully aware of religious literalism and its sometimes hideous consequences. Literalism, of course, is one of the side effects of literacy.

God is moving and working in evolution to reveal his true design for humanity

2010-11-05T07:01:00.002-04:00

The title of this post was lifted directly from Jeff's blog, where he gives profound thoughts relevant to my last two posts. Check it out here. He abstracted his thoughts from two podcasts he heard. I'll be thinking about it today and let take some time to soak in.

The confluence of these two thinkers - Pichon and Wright, one an orthodox Catholic the other a naturalistic agnostic - are encouraging and uplifting - both pointing, obviously unintentionally, to a reality larger than ourselves or our particular concerns but that "derives down" to imbue meaning and power in our individual existence and especially in those places and ways where we live in compassion, stand for justice, and seek to develop and support systems and institutions that advocate for the weak, the poor, the marginal and the suffering.

Scientific Literalism - An insight from John Haught

2010-11-01T20:35:00.002-04:00

Finally, my travels are over for a while. Last week was in Newport News, VA for a meeting related to turbine engine instrumentation. The reception Tuesday night included a chef who made a tasty Bananas Foster on demand. Ummm Good!

On the trip I carried a copy of God After Darwin by John Haught and Exploring Reality: The Intertwining of Science and Religion by John Polkinghorne. Enjoyed both of them but the first book really whetted my appetite for more by that author. So, while in the waiting room for my annual physical exam at work this morning, I downloaded to my Kindle, Deeper Than Darwin: The Prospect For Religion In The Age of Evolution by John Haught. Here is a snippet from an early chapter. He mentions that not only is a literal interpretation of scripture pursued by many religious people but that there is an analog of that within the scientific community.

However, in a parallel way, a literalist interpretation of nature-one that goes no deeper than Galileo's quantitative symbols or Darwin's idea of natural selection-can also lead scientists to dismiss religion for the shallowest of reasons. Scientific deciphering of nature has been the occasion for great gains in knowledge, but it has also permitted the emergence of a most soul-deadening "cosmic literalism." Our recently acquired scientific expertise in reading the text of nature has led us into such a trancelike fixation on surface codes and signifiers, and on life's evolutionary grammar, that we fail to look into the depth that lies beneath them. I hope in the following pages to burrow beneath both religious and cosmic literalism. Only in the depth beneath the texts of nature and holy writ shall we find a way to reconcile science and religion, evolution and the idea of God.

Now that is a new idea to me. And, wouldn't you know that it connects with my previous post, from different authors, about how people in our age are prone to the literal view of things. I'm looking forward to learning how he fleshes out this insight.

Reconciling the Bible and Science: A Primer on the Two Books of God

2010-10-23T22:01:00.000-04:00

At the advice of an Abilene Christian prof, I purchased and read Reconciling the Bible and Science: A Primer on the Two Books of God by Lynn Mitchell and Kirk Blackard. The two authors come from the Church of Christ. Lynn is a religious scholar at the University of Houston and Kirk is a retired lawyer. My prejudice will show here in what I'm about to say. I didn't expect something this good from authors from my heritage. The book is not about science but about interpretation of the Bible and how it relates to science. Their position may be described as falling within theistic evolution which is where I see myself. They find consonance with the idea that there is intelligence behind the unfolding of our universe. But have problems with the Intelligent Design movement for various theological as well as scientific reasons. Much of the content of the book was familiar to me but their organization and narrative was nonetheless helpful to me. The most striking thought came in a section on literalism. Here's a quote:

Modern Americans are generally not very good at non-literal interpretation. Think about how few people enjoy the study of Shakespeare generation, few people enjoy or get much of out Shakespeare now because we've lost so much of our sense of symbolic, metaphorical, and mythological imagination. We are basically literalists who tend to feel that everything not intended to be read literally is not worth spending much time on because it doesn't really tell us much.

It's been a while, but I have tried to read Shakespeare. Maybe it was while helping one of my sons study for school. I'd like to understand it better but it would take some investment and would require personal assistance from some one.

Anyway, my take is that our Anglo-American heritage is very literal minded and most of us received it from the same place as Hobbes, Bacon, Newton, Locke, Thomas Paine, Thomas Reid, Alex Campbell, Foy Wallace, Bertrand Russell, Stephen Hawking, Daniel Dennett, Chris Hitchens and Sam Harris got it.

Discovering What We Think by Writing

2010-09-28T07:05:00.002-04:00

Have experienced blog fatigue this summer and not posted much. Wasn't sure why i took up this blog in the first place. It seemed like an interesting thing to explore. Sure do enjoy reading the blogs of others. My my, how the blog universe has changed these six years. I did know at the beginning that writing is one way to discover and clarify what you believe and how you think. This is backed up by something I read recently on my Kindle in a book titled Jacques Derrida by Nicholas Royle. He says:

In the early essay 'Force and Signification' (1963), Derrida quotes the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–61): 'My own words take me by surprise and teach me what I think'

Max Lucado on Fear

2010-09-17T21:03:00.001-04:00

Am reading Fearless: Imagine Your Life Without Fear (Max Lucado)
- Highlight Loc. 268-73 | Added on Tuesday, September 14, 2010, 10:35 PM

"Jesus doesn’t want you to live in a state of fear. Nor do you. You’ve never made statements like these: My phobias put such a spring in my step. I’d be a rotten parent were it not for my hypochondria. Thank God for my pessimism. I’ve been such a better person since I lost hope. My doctor says if I don’t begin fretting, I will lose my health.

We’ve learned the high cost of fear."

Snip from Kindle from Marilynne Robinson from R. W. Emerson

2010-09-01T09:05:00.001-04:00

Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self (Marilynne Robinson)
- Highlight Loc. 148-54 | Added on Sunday, June 06, 2010, 12:39 PM

Recently I read to a class of young writers a passage from Emerson’s “The American Scholar” in which he says, “In silence, in steadiness, in severe abstraction, let him hold by himself; add observation to observation, patient of neglect, patient of reproach, and bide his own time,—happy enough if he can satisfy himself alone that this day he has seen something truly…. For the instinct is sure, that prompts him to tell his brother what he thinks. He then learns that in going down into the secrets of his own mind he has descended into the secrets of all minds.” These words caused a certain perturbation. The self is no longer assumed to be a thing to be approached with optimism, or to be trusted to see anything truly. Emerson is describing the great paradox and privilege of human selfhood, a privilege foreclosed when the mind is trivialized or thought to be discredited. The clutch of certitudes that, together, trivialize and discredit are very much in need of being looked at again.
==========

Great Insights by Both Authors. I underlined something that jumped out to me.

Jonah from the Deep

2010-07-27T06:57:00.000-04:00

From a battle on top of the water to an internal battle below and from out of the depths. Reading Bobby Valentine's blog series on Jonah calls to mind Jonah's prayer from the fish at the bottom of the sea and underneath the mountains! Jonah says

You hurled me into the deep, into the very heart of the seas....

the deep surrounded me

seaweed was wrapped around my head

To the roots of the mountains I sank down

Don't be fooled by the literal Vacation Bible School story most of us have internalized. He, Jonah, is talking on the spiritual level for all of us.

From the depths of Hell I called for help,
and you listened to my cry.

Sounds a lot like Psalms 130, the inspiration for the title of this blog. Jonah 2 reads to me very much like the Psalms. Jonah cries from "Out of the Depths". He vows to make good. He is all of us is he not?

Lost Species of Feeling: Sleep under an Oscillating Fan

2010-06-22T21:05:00.005-04:00

Don't know if you have felt this or not. But when I was young, very young, I recall Mom having us take a nap during hot summer afternoons on a pallet on the floor in front of an oscillating fan. I have fond memories of the hum, the waxing and waning, the wind on my hair and covering. Sometimes it was while visiting relatives and several of us are sleeping, that is, it was a family communal thing. I remember a feeling of well being. Dreams were pleasant. There was a feeling of special meaning and significance. I don't know why. I was too young to know the meaning of those words but felt them nonetheless. In retrospect the word liminal may describe it, the state of being on the threshold or between two different existential states. Has anyone else felt this?

Bought a Kindle.

2010-06-16T07:03:00.002-04:00

Bought a Kindle a week ago. Am enjoying it. Find the book you want, press a button, and you have it. I downloaded a 4000 page collection of Ralph Waldo Emerson's writings that way. Am reading six things at once. Marilyn Robinson's Absence of Mind, Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther, Some writings of Edmund Burke and Adam Smith, and a Sherlock Holmes collection. Books published a long time ago tend to be free or 99 cents. Newer books often just $9 but many current books are not yet available. Fun to use.

Response to "A Brief History of Time" Post

2010-06-07T19:47:00.005-04:00

S. P. Lunger responded to the original post on "A Brief History of Time". Blogger is doing funny things to the both of us. His response was repeated five times. As I was attempting to delete the extras, it removed all of them. So, I'll repeat his question here and then respond. S. P. said,

I'm curious what you mean by Physicists over-emphasizing physics in explaining the Universe. Are you appealing to the Science for it's realm, Philosophy/Religion for its realm? Or do I misunderstand you?

Sorry to be so vague. My statement was influenced by something I read some four years ago in Nancey Murphy's Beyond Liberalism and Fundamentalism: How Modern and Postmodern Philosophy Set the Theological Agenda. And I was referring to what might be considered physics chauvinism as against the other sciences. When I originally read the following passage, I was taken aback and felt a little defensive. But now I am more of a convert to the point of view, despite my having three physics degrees. From Chapter 6 Metaphysical Holism and Divine Action and the section Scientific Developments she writes:

It is now becoming widely recognized by scientists working at a variety of levels in the hierachy of the sciences that while analysis and reduction are important aspects of scientific enquiry, they do not yield a complete or adequate account of the natural world. In simple terms, one has to consider not only the parts of an entity but also its interactions with its environment in order to understand it. Since the entity plus its environment is a more complex system than the entity itself (and therefore higher in the hierarchical ordering of systems), this means that a "top-down" analysis must be considered in addition to a "bottom-up"analysis.

Science writer Silvan Schweber claims that recognition of the failure of the reductionist program has contributed to a crisis in physical theory:

'A deep sense of unease permeates the physical sciences. We are in a time of great change. . . . The underlying assumptions of physics research have shifted. Traditionally, physics has been highly reductionist, analyzing nature in terms of smaller and smaller building blocks and revealing underlying, unifying fundamental laws. In the past this grand vision has bound the subdisciplines together. Now, however, the reductionist approach that has been the hallmark of theoretical physics in the 20th century is being superseded by the investigation of emergent phenomena. . . .

The conceptual dimension of the crisis has its roots in the seeming failure of the reductionist approach, in particular its difficulties accounting for the existence of objective emergent properties. ' (ref according to Murphy is - Silvan S. Schweber, "Physics, Community and the Crisis in Physical Theory, " Physics Today (Nov. 1993) p 34-40.

My current opinion is that though there is plenty to be learned regarding things at the quark level and below, and despite how fascinating and mathematically beautiful string theory is, and how astrophysics continues to astound us, we can nevertheless learn about the fundamental nature of reality by exploring conceptual developments in biology and elsewhere. And we can derive benefit from other formerly distinct disciplines like philosophy, religion, and literature.

The emergent and relational nature of reality seems to me fundamental and I'd like to learn more about it.

A Brief History of Time

2010-06-01T07:36:00.002-04:00

Picked up Stephen Hawking's "A Brief History of Time" over the weekend and it was quite enjoyable. Was more familiar with the early parts from school and experience. Was quite happy to learn that Black Holes are not forever but gradually decay. Can't say I followed every argument in detail but got the gist of a lot of it. One question, well I have many, is why we haven't been able to harness the Casimir Effect for space travel, energy production etc. Suppose I should google it. Hawking is a brilliant physicist and knows what's going on in the field. However, physicists probably emphasize too much the explanatory power of physics for explaining the universe. I know because I am one too. But, that is not the whole story by any means. There are emergent properties of reality that seem to me to be outside of physics and are very important.

The Spiritual Meaning of Travel

2010-05-27T06:27:00.004-04:00

I did the devotional talk at church last night on "The Spiritual Meaning of Travel." When done right, travel is something that feeds the soul and enriches life. As it says in Col 3:17 whatever we do, we are to do in the name of the Lord. We Americans do a lot of travel so we should do it with spiritual intention. Just as Man was not made for the Sabbath but the Sabbath was made for Man, so Travel was made for us and is a gift for our spiritual formation.

A blessing that accompanies travel is that our senses are heightened. Sights and scenes are more vivid , tastes and smells are more intense, attention is increased, and memory improved. At home we have our priorities, our concerns, chores, commitments to family, work, church and friends. Our senses are dulled or go unnoticed because of the business at hand. When we leave the routine for a trip, short or long, we leave that behind.

I recounted memories of forty years ago when I was on a mission trip with a Harding U. group in the Netherlands. Gave a food story.

The Bible is one long travelogue, really. The characters travel for a variety of reasons: to deliver messages, engage in commerce, visit family, perform government business, escape danger, perform religious observance, attends feasts, weddings, and go on missions. Gave examples of some of these. But, there is risk in travel. Travel benefits us but there are times when accidents and bad things happen. The Good Samaritan had some bad luck. The Man of God of I Kings 13 too. He believed a lie and was killed. Finally there is the family of David Lipscomb. When he was young, his Dad and Uncle left Tennessee for the North in order to release their slaves. While there, some pestilence came through and killed a third of the group. Yes, there is risk in travel, but the risk brings benefits to others. I brought that out because I'm not a proponent of a health and wealth gospel. But, I do derive comfort from a tweet by Max Lucado "Here is an idea. Assume it's going to work out for the best. Isn't Romans 8:28 still in the Bible?"

Next, before discussing heroes of the Bible and their Transformative Travels I introduced my own list of characteristics of:

The Archetypal Journey

In the Ordinary World
Call to Adventure/Refusal
Crossing the Threshold
Tests/Ordeals/Experiences
Rewards/Promises
The Road Back
Arriving with what is learned and sharing

There are various versions of the above. Joseph Campbell and others have described, argued and enumerated the stages of the heroes journey elsewhere as can be googled.

Examples of Transformative Travel in the Bible

You, dear reader, are probably familiar enough to match the experiences of each of these to the list above. And you are to make all your travels match the above as well. Be the hero of your own jouneys.

Abraham
Moses
Ruth
Israel Wandering in the Wilderness
Israel taken in Captivity and Returning from Exile
The Prodigal Son
Paul to Arabia and Paul on his Missionary Journies
Jesus many travels between and around Galilee and Judea

Travel and Creativity

Recently discovered an article by Jonah Lehrer, the author of "Proust was a Neuroscientist", that discusses travel and creativity. He says "We travel because we need to, because distance and difference are the secret tonic of creativity." Check this out by him. I may expand this in a later post as this post is long enough.

Tips for Spiritually Meaningful Travel - taken from Joseph Dispenza's writings

Take gifts
Close the door - leave the past behind
Name the trip - Recount/review what you learned/accomplished
Tell the story of your trip - make it a journey - relate your experiences
Give thought to a memento - sometimes the finding of it, the mindful selection of it, bringing it back adds to and deepens the experience
Reflect and celebrate it

Conclusion

May all your trips be journeys - opportunities for spiritual formation and growth.

The Wedding was Yesterday

2010-05-18T22:33:00.013-04:00

Been out of town a long time. Left Saturday May 8 for Nashville to be at Derek and Catherine's graduation from Lipscomb University.

Proud parents and brother

Then I drove to Memphis to spend the night with Marcus and fly to Rochester, NY for the 56th International Instrumentation Symposium. I have been laptopless for some time and lost track of a lot of things. The computer in the hotel business center was a big help but still not satisfactory. Arrived in Memphis late Friday night. And drove back to Nashville to get ready for the big event of Monday, Derek and Catherine's wedding.

Dorothy and Catherine

More pictures are on my Facebook site.

Some of my favorite tweets

2010-05-07T00:02:00.004-04:00

1. Virtual J. of Laser

Luminescent properties of Eu3+ activated tungstate based novel red-emitting phosphors http://goo.gl/fb/SkESJ #laser about 7 hours ago via Google

2. Jimmy Adcox

The people dancing are thought crazy by those who can't here the music. @alanhirsch #futuretravelers (via @willmancini) about 11 hours ago via Twitterrific

3. Virtual J. of Laser

Millijoule-class Yb-doped pulsed fiber laser operating at 977?nm http://goo.gl/fb/sbBkg #laser 2:07 PM May 5th via Google I want one of these!

4. Leonard Sweet

Nothing exists until it is called into existence by relationship: thus saith Schroedinger’s cat; thus sayeth Large Hadron Collider (LHC)? 7:40 PM Apr 18th via web

5. Virtual J. of Laser

Femtosecond laser-drilling-induced HgCdTe photodiodes http://goo.gl/fb/536H #laser 10:01 AM Mar 23rd via Google

6. Virtual J. of Laser

High-peak-power subnanosecond passively Q-switched ytterbium-doped fiber laser http://goo.gl/fb/DIdC #laser 4:00 PM Mar 15th via Google and one of these too!

7. Max Lucado

You can't handle the future untli u make peace with your past. Join us now @ oakhillschurch.com 11:38 AM Mar 7th via Echofon

8. Lady Gaga

Isn't it interesting how one singing voice is (while subjective), either good or bad. But a CROWD of people singing, ALWAYS sounds beautiful 3:44 PM Mar 6th via web

9. Adrien apricotica

After several months of being ignored I tried to capture the interest of my former stalker, but it seems there's a 15% restalking fee. :( 10:34 AM Feb 26th via web

10. Verified Account TheBosha

Creativity is just sanctified sneakiness. 1:39 AM Feb 26th via web

11. Max Lucado

Write today’s worries in sand. Chisel yesterday’s victories in stone. 8:26 AM Jan 29th via web

12. Leonard Sweet

“If someone asks me how to find God, I say, find someone to love and you will find God.” late Reuel Howe 7:01 AM Jan 29th via web Retweeted by you and 9 others

13. Leonard Sweet

computers becoming more human & humans becoming more cyborgian; world of matter is animating & world of animation is materializing 12:31 PM Dec 14th, 2009 via web

14. Max Lucado

Make friends with whatever comes next.Embrace it.Accept it.Don't resist it. 8:00 AM Dec 6th, 2009 via API

15. Jimmy Adcox

Tyler Parten died heroically while serving in Afghanistan. His vision was humanitarian https://secure.west-point.org/tylerparten/memorial/ 12:35 PM Nov 18th, 2009 via Twitterrific

16. Jimmy Adcox

You'll never do anything creative,innovative or worldchanging if u FEAR criticism.Pioneers r easy targets 4 arrows!Mt10:28 (via @RickWarren 6:13 PM Sep 21st, 2009 via Twitterrific

17. Bob Chisholm

Henry Chadwick, The Early Church, p. 56 - "The most potent single cause of Christian success … care for the poor, for widows and orphans …" 1:16 PM Sep 18th, 2009 via Ping.fm

18. Max Lucado

Unleash a worry army.Share your feelings w/a few loved ones.Ask them to pray w/ & for you.Less worry on your part means happiness on theirs. 8:01 AM Sep 18th, 2009 via web

19. Leonard Sweet

My fav lines from Welsh poet/tramp W. H. Davies (d.1940): "Time never turns a thought to gold/Unless a tear has made it wet" 7:52 AM Sep 18th, 2009 via web

20. Leonard Sweet

How do we move churches from the defensive mentality of fortification to the offensive attitude of exploration? 12:18 PM Sep 5th, 2009 via web

and my Most Favorite

MaxLucado

Here is an idea. Assume it's going to work out for the best. Isn't Romans 8:28 still in the Bible?

Language Log

2010-05-04T06:43:00.003-04:00

It's time to find some new and interesting web sites. Came across this blog this morning.

Language Log

At that site I noticed that Geoff Nunberg is a contributor. I used to hear him give short pieces on language on NPR. Always enjoyed them. Here is his Berkeley site.

Geoffrey Nunberg

Both these sites have links to other very interesting sites and people. Plan to spend a little more time at these.

On the personal side, our life has been full and meaningful. We trekked to DC last weekend to look for housing for my younger son and his soon-to-be wife. Ate at a good German restaurant. Walked around Georgetown where he will matriculate in medicine come August. Walked around George Washington University where she will be in Law school. They graduate from Lipscomb U. this week end.

Back from San Antonio

2010-03-24T05:07:00.006-04:00

Wife and I visited my sister and her husband in San Antonio over the weekend. Had a great time being with them. Saturday we trekked a little north of there to Fredericksburg, a place settled by Germans in the 1800's. A place of charm and gemutlichkeit. The main street has many interesting places to eat and shop. This caught my attention.

As did this.

Embodied Spirituality

2010-03-15T10:51:00.006-04:00

Re Barbara Brown Taylor's An Altar in the World I found an interesting snippet from a review Here when my search strategy was 'embodied spirituality' and her name.

One of her goals is to abolish the distinctions we make between church and world, sacred and secular, spirit and flesh, body and soul. Any place or thing can mediate the sacred, and so we can make an altar in the world as well as in the church......

From these sources and her own experiences Taylor commends twelve spiritual practices, but to call them "spiritual" can be misleading, for most of all she commends a fleshly, embodied spirituality. She writes one chapter each on vision, reverence, incarnation, groundedness, wilderness, community, vocation, sabbath, physical labor, breakthrough, prayer, and benediction. Taylor's book raised a cluster of interesting questions for me.

I chose that search strategy because of getting a similar feel in the Cornel West reader. Am half way through that book. I am captivated by occasional snippets like this

"..always viewing oneself as embedded and embodied and also indebted to those who came before.."

"In short, a deep blues sensibility that highlights concrete existence, history, struggle, lived experience and joy."

The above is instructive to me because too often I'm like the people for whom Randy Olson wrote Don't Be Such a Scientist. Living in the cold, remote, dull and abstract.

Additional Thoughts about God

2010-02-24T05:43:00.003-05:00

Thanks for the comments Jeff and S. P. Some time the first year of my doctorate program at the U. of VA, have forgotten whether fall of 74 or spring of 75. we would arrive to class to find some one had written on the blackboard "Josh is coming". This occurred throughout campus. Eventually we learned it was Josh McDowell. When the time arrived he spoke to a very large crowd at the school's largest venue. Remember him pointing out his wife and saying "Eat your heart out guys." That was pretty cool for those days. To affirm the goodness of love and desire. One of the other prominent memories of his talk had to do with the inerrancy of scripture. He set the stage by describing a man he knew and respected who was a wonderful scholar of Greek and a Godly man as well. This student of the word dedicated twenty five years to the study of the alledged descrepiencies of the accounts in the Gospels and after that long dedicated period, he was finally able to harmonize all of them to show there were no contradictions. I thought to myself that if that is what it takes, then surely he's working off the wrong model. Square peg round hole. Inerrancy is the wrong model for understanding scripture and frankly differences are what they are.

I finished "The Case for God" by Armstrong on a plane a few months ago. And in concert with S. P. she describes the career and thoughts of Tillich on God. I once had a friend who was a fan of Tillich and he gave me some feel for his thought. Have thought all these years that I needed read up on him more. S. P., what do you suggest I read? You mentioned Dynamics of Faith, is that a good place to start? Anyway, she lifts this from his Systematic Theology:

"God does not exist. He is being itself beyond essence and existence. Therefore to argue that God exists is to deny him." That sounds like Peter Rollins to me.

and she cites this from D. M. Brown's Ultimate Concern: Tillich in Dialogue

"We can no longer speak of God easily to anybody, because he will immediately question: "Does God exist?" Now the very asking of that question signifies that the symbols of God have become meaningless. For God, in the question, has become one of the innumerable objects in time and space which may or may not exist. And this is not the meaning of God at all."

But Tillich was not a complete innovator here. Armstrong in her book A History of God discusses the Cappadocians (two Gregories and a Cyril) saying:

"As Gregory of Nyssa said, every concept of God is a mere simulacrum, a false likeness, an idol: it could not reveal God himself. Christians must be like Abraham, who, in Gregory's version of his life, laid aside all ideas about God and took hold of a faith which was 'unmixed and pure of any concept.' In his Life of Moses, Gregory insisted that 'the true vision and the knowledge of what we seek consists precisely in not seeing, in an awareness that our goal transcends all knowledge and is everywhere cut off from us by the darkness of incomprehensibility."

I will continue to ponder the idea of Tillich's that there can be no such thing as an atheist. One of my Twitter and Facebook friends is a minister in Jonesboro, AR who mentioned that Helen Keller said that she always knew God was there but she didn't know the name for what she felt until later.

The Indirect Approach to Happiness, Truth, God and All

2010-02-13T06:56:00.002-05:00

Am reading a wonderful book, Parker Palmer's The Promise of Paradox. Written thirty years ago but is quite up to date in assessing our culture.

But personal well-being is one of those strange things that eludes those who aim directly at it and comes to those who aim elsewhere. It was best said in the words of Jesus: "He who seeks his life will lose it, and he who loses his life . . . will find it" (Matthew 10:39).

from Parker J. Palmer The Promise of Paradox: A Celebration of Contradictions in the Christian Life - 3rd edition, Ch4 A Place Called Community page 72, published by Jossey-Bass.

It just so happens that I recall several other posts I've made along these lines.

-------------------------------------------------
from June 4, 2008

Genuine Truth in Temporal Existence - K. Jaspers

from a Karl Jasper's lecture in 1935, in the middle of his discussion of Nietsche and Kierkegaard:

Masks: With this basic idea is connected the fact that both, the most open and candid of thinkers, had a misleading aptitude for concealment and masks. For them masks neccessarily belong to the truth. Indirect communication becomes for them the sole way of communicating genuine truth, indirect communication, as expression, is appropriate to the ambiguity of genuine truth in temporal existence, in which process it must be grasped through sources in every Existenz.

From "Reality, Man and Existence: Essential Works of Existentialism" ed by H. J. Blackham. Bantam Books. (I bought this book in 1974 and forgot about it until recently uncovering it while going through my things).
--------------------------------------------------------------------

Monday, February 27, 2006

Kierkegaard Quote

from Soren Kierkegaard*

"First and foremost, no impatience . . . A direct attack only strengthens a person in his illusion, and at the same time embitters him. There is nothing that requires such gentle handling as an illusion, if one wishes to dispel it. If anything prompts the prospective captive to set his will in opposition, all is lost. . . [The indirect method. . . . loving and serving the truth, arranges everything. . . . and then shyly withdraws (for love is always shy), so as not to witness the admission which he makes to himself alone before God - that he has lived hitherto in an illusion."

I have been all these people: attacker, attacked, and the one under an illusion. Wish that years ago I had read this and taken to heart.

*from p. 93 of Mapping Postmodernism by Robert C. Greer, 2003 Intervarsity Press. His footnote is the following: Soren Kierkegaard, The Point of View of My Work as an Author, in The Modern Tradition: Backgrounds of Modern Literature, ed. Richard Ellmann and Charles Feidelson Jr. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 751; cited in Taylor, Myth of Certainty, pp. 25-26

On Crying

2010-01-09T10:15:00.002-05:00

A Facebook friend, Greg Bagley - minister and fellow Harding U. grad, had this quote in a Facebook entry. I thought it was great:

by Washington Irving,

"There's a sacredness in tears. They are not the mark of weakness, but of power. They are messengers of overwhelming grief and of unspeakable love."

He Affirms the Cosmos Will Be Made Right

2010-01-05T08:38:00.004-05:00

This is beautiful. Written by an evangelical Christian man, Steven Garber, who has spent a life ministering in the political realm. Excerpts:

There is not a week in my life when I do not think about the tensions of the now-but-not-yet nature of the Kingdom, where Jesus has made all things new, and yet where we still do not see that reality completely incarnate in history. I have to make peace with proximate justice, even as I ache for hope and history to finally and fully rhyme.
.
.
.
Even after a lifetime of bumping up against the brokenness of life, seeing and hearing the wounds of both persons and polities, I still believe that the vision of vocations as salt and light—John Stott calls them affective commodities, transforming their environments—sends us into the world week by week, year after year, with callings to care about the way things are and ought to be. Bono echoes this vision in his reflection on his own vocation: "I'm a musician. I write songs. I just hope that when the day is done, I'll have torn a little corner off of the darkness."

If that can be true of me, of you, then we will have made peace with the doing of proximate justice. And that is not a small thing for people who yearn for the whole cosmos to be made right, and who know that someday it will be.

Great Book Title: Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway

2009-12-28T07:01:00.003-05:00

Haven't read the book but it is a great title which by itself, even, is an excellent lesson. The Author is Susan Jeffers. Learned about the book from Carl McColman's post at the Website of Unknowing, here.

Have Always Known This

2009-12-14T06:43:00.002-05:00

Another quote from "A is for Abductive"

A change-resistant deacon board once said to their pastor. "The reason we don't want our church to change is that everywhere else in our lives, we are assaulted by change - at work, at home, in the culture at large. We want the church to be the one stable place in our world."

This is from the "K is for Kaleidoscopic Change" section.

The authors make the point that if one resists change, even that will cause them to change.

I say we can't stand still, even if we want to. Move or Die.

Initial Thoughts on "An Altar in the World"

2009-11-30T07:44:00.006-05:00

Back from the Holidays. St. Louis, MO; Memphis, TN; and Jonesboro, AR.

A book I'm savoring right now is "An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith" by Barbara Taylor Brown. So many pithy thoughts and phrases jump off the page and into my head and mind. A few nights ago I started the first chapter. It was close to bedtime. I sat or rather lay too comfortably in my my recliner in my bedroom. Found the first chapter pleasant, though my drowsiness attenuated the experience. Took bite size pieces on successive evenings, not really having time for much more. Then, one night finally had time to read and let it sink in deeper into my psyche. What she is doing is becoming more apparent. Then next, it was a quiet time in the hotel lobby early last Tuesday morning and I re-read the first chapter. Amazing what I perceived that I hadn't earlier. The reason being more familiarity with her approach and how she was feeling it. There's lots of visual imagery. This is cool.

Touching the truth with our minds alone is not enough. We are made to touch it with our bodies.

One thing this book teaches is that the way to the spiritual life is through the sensual, physical world.

On Research - by Zora N. Hurston

2009-11-27T12:26:00.005-05:00

I was in St. Louis on Tuesday with my son who was interviewing for med school at St. Louis University. While there and waiting on him, I wandered down a hallway toward the downstairs bookstore and came across an administrative department concerned with their research program. They had this very interesting quote on their bulletin board. This caught my attention because research and development has been my calling.

Research is formalized curiosity.

It is poking and prying with a purpose.

It is a seeking that he who wishes may know the cosmic secrets of the world and that they dwell therein.

Zora Neale Hurston.

The Liturgical Turn and the YMCA

2009-10-15T05:26:00.003-04:00

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.

Realism - Attachment to the Past

2009-09-24T05:00:00.005-04:00

Realism has for most of my life held a positive meaning for me. But that has changed over the last decade. I came across this through Thomas Barnett's blog which points to an article he wrote for World Politics Review. The insight is offered as a result of the interplay between his two main activities, working in the national security realm and investigating new business opportunities in emerging/frontier economies

I find the perspective it offers invaluable, because it reveals how often what we call "realism" tends to be hopelessly trapped in centuries past.

Kierkegaard and Christianity - Belief or a Means to Change Existence?

2009-08-26T06:38:00.006-04:00

Have not been able to do any sustained reading these past few weeks. A couple of nights ago I picked up John Caputo's book on How to Read Kierkegaard. Forty years ago when they talked about him in school, I had absolutely no interest and no regard for him as he was emotional, subjective, and mushy. But I've changed. I'm fighting to get out of the robot rationalism of my younger days of , say, before age 50.

Caputo in one place has this pithy thing to say. He says that K, and these are Caputo's words

"had written that Christianity is not a doctrine supported by evidence but a command to transform existence that can only be witnessed."

Utterly Humbled by Mystery

2009-08-12T06:46:00.002-04:00

This is from a beautiful "This I Believe" segment on NPR. The author/narrator is Richard Rohr, the founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, N.M.

"When I was young, I couldn't tolerate such ambiguity. My education had trained me to have a lust for answers and explanations. Now, at age 63, it's all quite different. I no longer believe this is a quid pro quo universe -- I've counseled too many prisoners, worked with too many failed marriages, faced my own dilemmas too many times and been loved gratuitously after too many failures."

The rest is HERE.

What An Oak Tree Can Teach Us

2009-08-07T07:17:00.005-04:00

Ah! I like this. From Hillman's The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling

The essence of the oak is all there at once. Theologically, the acorn is like one of Augustine's nationes seminales or seminal reasons. As far back as the Stoics, Gnostics, and Platonists such as Philo, some ancient thought held that the world was filled with spermatikoi logoi - word seeds or germinal ideas. These are present in the world from its beginning as the primordial a priori that gives form to each thing. And these spermatic words make it possible for each thing to tell of its own nature - to ears that can hear. The idea that nature speaks, especially through the voice of a talking oak, remained a vivid fantasy through the ages and was still a subject of paintings a hundred years ago.

Trees fascinate me. When we were looking for a house 19 years ago, mature trees on the land were a requirement for me. Their meaning reaches deep inside me. Hillman's book is an extended discourse on one metaphor or teaching from the mighty oak.

The Acorn Theory

2009-08-02T06:38:00.003-04:00

From the first chapter of The Soul's Code by James Hillman:

"We dull our lives by the way we conceive them. We have stopped imagining them with any sort of romance, any fictional flair. So, this book also picks up the romantic theme, daring to envision biography in terms of very large ideas such as beauty, mystery, and myth."

And Hillman promotes the acorn theory of human biography.

"In a nutshell, then, this book is about calling, about fate, about character, about innate image. Together they make up the "acorn theory," which holds that each person bears a uniqueness that asks to be lived and that is already present before it can be lived."

The 100 Most Useful Websites

2009-07-26T11:30:00.000-04:00

The 100 Most Useful Websites are HERE.

Evolution is like a Muscadine Vine & Jab at Dennett's Skyhook Metaphor

2009-06-29T06:12:00.003-04:00

Been reading back through A Third Window: Natural Life Beyond Darwin and Newton by Robert Ulanowicz. It is a difficult book. I recognize a kernel of value in many of the things he says but I'm not knowledgeable of things in depth enough to connect the dots in many of his arguments. But here I present a useful idea.

One of today's most strident reductionists is Daniel Dennett who says that evolution is a series of machine cranes stacked up on one another and that no skyhook (God) is involved. Here's what Robert says

Overall, however, I eschew his metaphor as misleading. Like Elsasser and Bateson, I believe that many, if not most , mechanical analogies are procrustean, minimalist distortions of the dynamics of living systems. Paraphrasing the analogy of Oliver Penrose (2005), living dynamics only look rosy (mechanical) because most insist on looking at them through rosy (Newtonian) glasses.

Robert describes an observation from his muscadine grapevines that grow in his garden. The vines grow up from the ground to two levels of horizontal support wires and spread sideways. Eventually, at some point, they send down roots at other locations. Next, the original trunk dies.

It struck me like lightning that here was a more appropriate metaphor for the dynamics of evolution! The muscadine plant represents an evolving system across several hierarchical levels. No skyhooks are involved because the system always remains in contact with a foundation of bottom-up causalities that remain necessary to the narrative. ... later, higher structures create new connections that eventually replace and/or displace their earlier counterparts. Such displacement is a key element in solving the enigma of how emergent structures and dynamics can influence matters at lower levels that had played a role in their own appearance.

To read more you can google-book it over to circa page 100 for further details.

The above provides me with an analogy/metaphor that can begin to explain how human thoughts can control physical body actions. We are provided with a way out of bottom up causality. And, Laplace's conjecture can be tossed aside. This is one aspect of an emergent explanation for our existence. Emergence, for me, is a useful concept for reconciling science and religion.

LifeSpirals

2009-06-16T07:19:00.003-04:00

I've been a member of the Stone-Campbell listserve for about 10 years and Harold K. Straughn is likewise a member. His early life involved time at Abilene Christian University and the Herald of Truth. Following many life adventures he is now a Disciples of Christ minister. His book LifeSpirals arrived yesterday. I think I'm gonna like it. Here's what's at Amazon:

Product Description
LifeSpirals assimilates revolutionary discoveries in brain research, learning techniques, and the new field of "wisdom psychology." More than just a self help book, LifeSpirals guides readers through the seven major stages of adult learning that mark the achievements of history's greatest leaders. All the reader needs to maximize his/her own achievement is a greater awareness of how to make use of what he/she knows, which lies buried among your early memories. LifeSpirals shows the reader how to access these lost memories and reconstitute them into a new vision for his/her life that can make the boldest dreams so far seem like tame compromises.

The Case for Working With Your Hands

2009-05-27T06:38:00.003-04:00

Marvelous article, The Case for Working With Your Hands, by a young scholar who is now a motorcycle mechanic.

For me, at least, there is more real thinking going on in the bike shop than there was in the think tank.

I make my living as an engineer and can identify with some of this.

Some Thoughts on the Lost Art of Reading Aloud

2009-05-16T05:20:00.002-04:00

From an NYT editorial.

Reading aloud recaptures the physicality of words. To read with your lungs and diaphragm, with your tongue and lips, is very different than reading with your eyes alone. The language becomes a part of the body, which is why there is always a curious tenderness, almost an erotic quality, in those 18th- and 19th-century literary scenes where a book is being read aloud in mixed company. The words are not mere words. They are the breath and mind, perhaps even the soul, of the person who is reading.

The only reading aloud I experience is the scripture reading at church and in Bible classes. It seems we are afraid to show depth of feeling when we do that. Its as if we are trying to set some kind of speed reading record.

A Scientist's Postive Use of 'Postmodern Constructivism'

2009-05-10T08:10:00.003-04:00

Robert Ulanowicz's view of postmodernism from page 10 of his introduction to A Third Window: Natural Life Beyond Newton and Darwin

He promises to write in the spirit of "postmodern constructivism". About which he says:

However, a relative few among the postmodernists are picking up elements from among the rubble left by deconstructionists and using them to build new ways of visualizing reality. Although narrative no longer requires that one abide by all the Enlightenment restrictions, neither should one forsake rationality in the process. Viewed in a poisitive light, the postmodern critique frees the investigator to search among classical, Enlightenment, and contemporary thought for concepts that can be woven into a coherent rational whole."

This book promises to be pretty good.

Job, Augustine, Nietsche, and Kierkegaard - Truth

2009-03-08T06:51:00.009-04:00

The book of Job, we are told, is about the problem of suffering. Why do bad things happen to good people and vice versa if God is Good? So what, in a nutshell, is the answer that Job gives?

Job does not give us and answer that can be summarized in a nutshell.

I am a modern person accustomed to filtering and distilling information in order to arrive at a succinct and useable conclusion. I often need an easily stated and justified rationale for spouse and employer for decisions and requests. In my occupation as an R&D engineer (a quintessential Enlightenment discipline) I couldn't function without this way of thinking.

So why didn't the author of Job trash chapters 3-41 and replace it with one chapter that gives the standard answer? Which is that if you are good, you will go to heaven and experience bliss for eternity thereby making any suffering endured in a short life insignificant. End of proof, QED.

Evidently such would not have been the right thing to write because we do have these chapters with relentless complaint about pains physical and mental, grasping for explanation, elaboration of images and arguments and wrestling with living in the present world.

And near the end of it all what does God say by way of answer?

Look at the world! It is great isn't it? Aren't the stars, mountains, rocks, rivers, and animals way cool? I think they are. You don't know how I did it do you?

Is this a direct answer to Job's suffering? God does not spell it out to Job, nor to us. And it is not direct because the most important truths cannot be directly stated. It calls to mind my June 4, 2008 blog post which presents a Karl Jasper's lecture quote about Nietsche and Kierkegaard and their use of what he calls Masks.

For them masks necessarily belong to the truth. Indirect communication becomes for them the sole way of communicating genuine truth, indirect communication, as expression, is appropriate to the ambiguity of genuine truth in temporal existence, in which process it must be grasped through sources in every Existenz.

And this correlates with a post by Fr. Stephen's blog titled Augustinian Surprises. He starts with quotes from Augustine.

God is He Whom we know best in not knowing Him. - St. Augustine

It is He about Whom we have no knowledge unless it be to know how we do not know Him. - St. Augustine

I have come to a greater appreciation of paradox, contradiction, and mystery. It seems that the further east one travels within the Christian geographical world, the greater is the appreciation fo rthis sentiment. The Orthodox tradition of "apophaticism" emphasizes the unknowability of God as a means of, paradoxically, understanding God. Further West, Protestants and especially the Evangelical types are taught the facts. We must understand everything and make it fit in tight logical bundles. The syllogism quickly wraps up the issues at hand. List the classical proofs of God and we are done. Little about mystery and the indirect.

How to Enjoy the Book of Job

2009-03-02T05:15:00.004-05:00

Remember that most of the book is poetry. The introduction that sets up the story is prose. The last chapter is prose. In between, we do not have a logical and rational development of the problem of evil. No, we have an ancient middle eastern love for coming at a problem with a profusion of colorful images and metaphors. The same thing is sometimes repeated but in different combinations and permutations.

The author, whoever they were, lived in our world and loved it. They were not a denier of the flesh as some would be in the early Christian centuries. God and all the interlocutors draw upon what we call the natural world for many of their lessons. Notice how God loves his creation and describes the activities of creatures he has created. He derives much joy from them.

The book is about sense. Imagery from and about all the senses is there. Among his many ills, Job complains about not being able to taste.

We men often have difficulty with expressing ourselves, what we see and how we feel. Job, Jeremiah, and the other prophets are ancient examples of men who expended great effort and spoke from out of the depths of their being. They were not evidently afraid to tell God they hurt and they did not like what He was putting them through. These guys were emotional. They were generally way ahead of contemporary ancient literature in this.

Happy Thoughts on the Book of Job: Nature and Theodicy

2009-02-27T04:59:00.003-05:00

My assignment for our Sunday Night Bible Study was Job. Now when you think of Job or you hear that occasional reference to him in a religious setting, you don't usually break out and sing "I'm Happy Today" or "I've Got the Joy Joy Joy Down in my Heart." Or do you?

But in preparation for the class I found something that did make me feel good and start me thinking down a positive and uplifting path. I came across an article by Harry Hahne titled Nature and Theodicy in the Book of Job. His web site links to it.

Here's the opening:

The book of Job has more to say about nature than any other biblical wisdom book. Concepts of nature are woven into the dialogs throughout the book -- in the mouth of Job, Job’s friends, God himself, and in the prologue. Much of the theology of nature is in the form of implicit assumptions that inform the book’s teachings on many subjects.

More later. The morning is moving on, 5:14 am, and I need to get to work.

Experiential Versus Creedal Religion

2009-02-26T05:38:00.003-05:00

From Living Gnosticism: An Ancient Way of Knowing by Jordan Stratford.

Gnosticism is an experiential, not creedal, religion - you can't simply announce that you agree with a list of ideas and be saved from the illusion of our separation from God.

While I have some problems with aspects of gnosticism (a catch all term that covers a wide range of sometimes disparate things) I see some value in this statement. The lists of ideas to believe in serve for boundary maintenance between those outside and inside the approved group. They become internalized so that they become crucial to a person's very identity.

With this I promise to move to more positive and uplifting rather than critical comments in the near future.

A Critique of the Church of Christ

2009-02-11T03:12:00.002-05:00

Here's one perception/critique of the Church of Christ. About half way down in this blog post, Christianity in a One-Storey Universe, Fr Stephen Freeman describes what he calls Christian Atheism.

Surprisingly, I would place some forms of Christian fundamentalism within this category (as I have defined it). I recall a group affiliated with some particular Church of Christ, who regularly evangelized our apartment complex when I lived in Columbia, S.C. They were also a constant presence on the campus of the local university. They were absolute inerrantists on the subject of the Holy Scriptures. They were equally adamant that all miracles had ceased with the completion of the canon of the New Testament. Christians today only relate to God through the Bible.

Such a group can be called “Biblicists,” or something, but, in the terminology I am using here, I would describe them as “practical atheists.” Though they had great, even absolutist, faith in the Holy Scriptures, they had no relationship with a God who is living and active and directly involved in their world. Had their notion of a God died, and left somebody else in charge of His heaven, it would not have made much difference so long as the rules did not change.

I realize that this is strong criticism, but it is important for us to understand what is at stake. The more the secular world is exalted as secular, that is, having an existence somehow independent of God, the more we will live as practical atheists - perhaps practical atheists who pray (but for what do we pray?). I would also suggest that the more secular the world becomes for Christians, the more political Christians will become. We will necessarily resort to the same tools and weapons as those who do not believe.

That's a little harsh maybe but he gives a basis for an observation I've made. From my experience in the past, I think it has been easier for disenchanted ex-church-of-christers to go the way of the skepticism or atheism than perhaps those of other christian groups.

The Modern World

2008-10-07T04:45:00.004-04:00

To help my thinking, here are some notes on "A New Kind of Christian" by Brian McLaren.

This is a summary of what his character Neo says regarding the Modern world.
It was the Era or Age of:

1. Conquest and Control
2. Machine
3. Analysis
4. Secular Science
5. Aspiration to and Confidence in Objectivity
6. Criticism: where you must debunk the others' misperception of what you know to be absolutely and objectively true
7. Modern Nation-State and the Organization
8. Individualism
9. Protestantism and Institutional Religion
10. Consumerism

G. W. "Chick" Allison - 60 years of Preaching

2008-10-01T21:38:00.009-04:00

My Dad preached his first sermon about this time sixty years ago. Here is something I've written about him. (Update note: It has now been published in the Arkansas Christian Herald Vol. 28, No. 11, page 4, November 2008)

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sixty years ago this November 7, G. W. Allison hitchhiked from Searcy to Dover to preach his first sermon. Also recognized by the nickname "Chick" and "George", he is a Church of Christ minister known throughout Northeast AR. He was raised in Pocahontas where at age ten, he nearly drowned in Mansker Creek. Later, he was baptized there. Later still, he performed his first baptism at that site. He declined a football scholarship at Arkansas State University to study the ministry at Harding University. Between terms, while working in Michigan, he met his wife, Frances Van Hooser. They have four children (Stephen W., Ronald M., Paula R., and Timothy S.) and nine grandchildren. The couple served several congregations in Oklahoma and Michigan from 1951-1958. They returned permanently to Arkansas, working with churches in Pocahontas, Rector, Searcy, Corning, Nettleton, Lepanto, and now completing his ministry in Egypt, where he was born.

He was the original host and is a frequent speaker for “Speaking the Truth in Love” on KAIT-TV. He has held over 350 gospel meetings across the eastern U. S. It is evidence of respect and appreciation for him that he has officiated at well over 1,000 funerals in Northeast Arkansas. G. W. has baptized a similar number in baptistries, creeks, and rivers. As you drive along highway 25 near the town of Strawberry, Arkansas look to your north as you pass over the Strawberry River bridge. In Aug of 1960 that was the site where cars pulled up to illuminate the river so that about two dozen souls could be baptized by him. He is unpretentious and free of affectation. He has no interest in nor places a value on status. For him, each human being is a precious child of God and is special. He has counseled many people. His experiences include wrestling a gun away from a man intent on suicide, preaching love and equality to a local African American church in a way that was ahead of his time , and later, helping to integrate them into his congregation.

One way G. W. has reached thousands of people has been through those he brought to Christ and who in turn are spreading the gospel . A well known example is Jimmy Allen, evangelist and long time faculty member of Harding University. Jimmy credits him as a model that one could be a Christian and still be an athlete and a real man. And, referring to him by nickname he says in his autobiography Fire in my Bones:

“One day before chapel began Chick asked me if I were a Christian ... He was the only one who talked to me personally about my salvation. We became friends and have stayed that way nearly fifty-five years.”

G. W. is also noted for his passion and accomplishments in athletics. He was voted Most Valuable Player on his high school football team, achieved All-State in basketball, and started for the Jonesboro American Legion baseball team that included eventual major league star, Wally Moon. Jimmy Allen who played basketball with him at Harding wrote in the above reference “He was as fast as doubled-greased lightning.” Unfortunately, a tragic car accident in 1960 ended G. W.'s sports participation at age 30. That same year, he began coaching his sons and other youngsters, continuing for many years in all these sports. He always brought out the best in his young athletes by his enthusiasm and positive style. This has been another avenue of his Christian influence. Oh yes, he is a lifelong St. Louis Cardinals fan.

The Semiotic Project - from GloboChrist

2008-10-01T05:22:00.002-04:00

Picked up Carl Raschke's GloboChrist: The Great Commission takes a Postmodern Turn. Here's something interesting form a section titled The Semiotic Project.

Western theology has historically been joined at the hip with Greek philosophy, which in turn is built on the Indo-European language structure with its subject-predicate sentence construction, inferential logic, and conceptual classification system.
....

human language is far richer and does far more than the heirs of Aristotle, with their focus on propositions and categories used in rational system building, could envision.

This is exciting to me. It is exciting because it opens up the possibility that there is more to learn and there is room for hope. I kinda think it is this rational system building and language structure that leads to the Dawkins/Hitchens/Bertrand Russells of the world, a world that is a mechanical dead end.

I've struggled enough with German and Greek to know that the language one speaks and knows deeply affects one's World View. The quote and the postmodern turn with its emphasis on language and metaphor provide a new angle that there is more mystery out there.

The Gospel According to Starbucks

2008-09-23T07:49:00.003-04:00

The Gospel According to Starbucks by Leonard Sweet is a fun read. Here are some quotes from the book:

The powers of a man's mind are directly
proportional to the quantity of coffee he drinks
---Sir James Mackintosh (1765-1832)

Coffee, according to the women of
Denmark, is to the body what the
Word of the Lord is to the soul,
-- Isak Dinesen

A cup of coffee commits one
to forty years of friendship
-- Turkish Proverb

Starbucks is less about coffee
and more about community
-- Market Researcher Wendy Liebmann

I'm scheduled to do the Wednesday night
devotional at church in Nov. and
plan to use this book as a guide in
preparation for that.

Victor Frankl Quote

2008-09-12T20:53:00.004-04:00

I read this book when I was 23 or 24. It was great. I wish I had remembered this tidbit. For too many of my middle years did I long for a release from stress, thinking the struggle was for nought.

The quote was in an email from Metanexus.

“What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost, but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him.”

– Victor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

Cao Fang sings the magical GE Olympic Commercial

2008-08-24T08:26:00.003-04:00

This music is simply precious. From the commercial where the guy crashes the local market while he is mesmerized by a woman doctor.

Loving the Storm Drenched

2008-07-26T07:19:00.004-04:00

No one changed his mind on an issue because he was humiliated into it.

This is a quote from an article titled "Loving the Storm-Drenched" by Frederica Mathewes-Green. It is lifted from The Best American Spiritual Writing of 2007, edited by P. Zaleski.

This reminds me of a Kirkegaard quote I noted earlier here.

In Memory of Ada Eddins 1915-2008

2008-02-19T19:16:00.007-05:00

Thank you for coming to help us celebrate the life of Ada Winters Eddins. Who was Ada and what was she like? She started life as part of a large family, the middle child of 11 surviving children. They lived on a large farm in Arkansas and they had to be self-sufficient. This was especially the case since they lost their mother when Ada was only 11 years old. The children divided the chores. Ada rose early every morning to milk the cows and operate the milk processing machinery. She later left home to attend the University of Arkansas for almost 2 years. It was not as common for women in those days as now. Mother lived in the 4-H club facility and paid for her fees by providing canned goods that she prepared herself. Her pictures as a young woman show an endearing vulnerability and humility. Her virtues attracted Tilman Eddins and they were married in 1942. They shared their early years in different locations in the states as he was in the armed forces. The war ended and following his honorable discharge they made Memphis their home some time in 1946.

It was in Memphis that they remained and where they raised their 3 children. Throughout those 62 years, she faithfully served and ministered at the Berclair Church of Christ. Mother was unpretentious, always upbeat, a positive example to all. Mother may have lived in the mid-South’s largest city for all that time but her farm-girl connection to the earth never ceased. She was a lifelong gardener. Mother loved working out of doors with flowers and vegetables. Mother had a specific genius for certain domestic things. For example, her green beans are unmatched by any one anywhere.

She was always there for her family. Mother lived for loving her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren and helped as long as she was able. Only a few weeks ago she rocked her youngest great-grandchild to sleep. And recently, during her last hospital stay, upon hearing that one of her adult grandchildren was under the weather and a little bit sick, she said “He should come over to my house and I’ll take care of him.” That was so typical and characteristic of her. Mother was always taking care of us and providing support and stability. And she will continue to do so as she lives in our hearts and memories.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I read the above at my mother-in-law's funeral on Saturday.

Where I was 10, 20 , 30, 40, and 50 years ago

2007-10-23T19:24:00.000-04:00

I was at James Wiser's blog and surfed to Jeni's web site where the meme of the day is where one was 10 * n years ago where n = 1, 2, 3, ...

Ten years ago I was playing with some really bright light emitting diodes at work for exciting fluorescence from thermographic phosphors. I was running out of projects at work and it was getting kinda tight. The previous few months had been very stressful. I held on by doing various odd jobs and about six months later things took a turn for the better and they have stayed that way ever since. Older son marched in the band at football games.

Twenty years ago I was recovering from an infection that hit me while teaching a short course at Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma City on the effects of Nuclear Radiation on Electronics and preparing to go to do an experiment at Pratt Whitney in Hartford, CT that was later published in an IEEE journal. Read Jung's Man and His Symbols on the airplane there and back. My younger son was 3 months old and as some of you know that point in a parent's life is very intense. The older son was 5. Oh for those days.

Thirty Years ago I was on about the 6th draft of my dissertation and preparing to spend Thanksgiving in Oak Ridge, TN looking for a place to live. I had accepted a job at Oak Ridge. and we are still here! My wife and I were in our third month of living in her parent's camper trailer. Our lease in Charlottesville had ended that August. We were parked at an idyllic campground at the base of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Took walks every day. Marvelous.

Oh no! Forty years ago I was a senior in high school in Rector, AR (population 1600) taking my first physics (there were 3 of us) and chemistry classes. The summer of love had just ended a way far away in San Francisco.

Fifty years ago, I was in the 2nd grade at Guyer Park Elementary School in Lansing, MI. and I can see in my head TV images of rockets blasting off and a cartoon depiction of Sputnik circling the earth.

In commemoration of this meme. Here are the Yardbirds doing "Happenings Ten Years Time Ago" It came out forty years ago. It is the best piece of British psychedelic music there ever was.

August 1962 - Football and Salvation

2007-10-19T08:19:00.000-04:00

Richard Beck has started an internet meme on his blog here. He begins it with a reference to me:

"Steve in his comment to my last post, tells a story from his faith journey when he realized that there were Christians beyond the borders of his faith tradition. I have a similar story. But before I tell it, I'd like to try to start my first internet meme.

There are some psychologists who suggest that our personality and worldview is influenced by and symbolized by evocative childhood memories. Primal memories often loaded with emotion, good or ill. Some have suggested that these early childhood memories affect our theological beliefs."

Then Richard requests we reply to his post with links to our stories on our own blogs. He says

"So, here's the meme. Tell a story on your blog (or here if you don't have one) that you consider to be a primal theological memory in your life. The rules:

1. This should date from childhood to adolescence.
2. It should be a memory that you think symbolizes or has directly affected your theological development. And this could be theological movement forward, backward, sideways, or just different.
3. Encourage others to share their memories."

I have another memory to relate. It was August of 1962 and I was not quite yet 12. We were sitting in the car outside the gym watching senior high school football players emerge from the building. It may have been that we were waiting for them to finish so that we junior high kids could go in and get our uniforms. We had Junior Highs in Arkansas and I was a 7th grader and so the football adventure was just beginning. I recall the star fullback walking out and possibly my Dad commented about him. The young fellow would go on to rush for over a thousand yards and the team would go 8-4. It would be the best year for the Pocahontas Redskins until my youngest brother, then 2, would, as quarterback and safety, lead them to the State playoff semifinals 15 years later. My Dad loves his family and the Lord and just behind that he loves sports. He was leading the state in scoring for this our home town 7 games into his senior season before an ankle injury took him out the rest of the season. At this point he was 32 and could have still shown those football players a thing or two except that a collision that involved an asleep-at-the-wheel trucker ruined Dad's right knee two years earlier. Even now, all these years later that incident still has effect. He had a hip replacement recently and is due for new knee when he can get around to it. He has been quiet about it, but he loved us so much that he endured great pain to pitch us batting practice growing up and even play a little basketball.

Sitting there in the car, Dad began talking about spiritual matters and his desire to teach everyone the truth. I can't remember specifics. That is something he did and does often. He may have said something about desiring that all those healthy young men be taught the truth and be saved. That's part of the gist. It was a heady time for the churches of Christ. We had been growing rapidly for several decades. Not sure where I got this but my impression is that there were 16 congregations in that county of 12,000 people at about that time. And we were beginning to make a splash in the culture. Pat Boone had another hit song that summer, it was about Speedy Gonzalez. This was before he transitioned to a more charismatic style of Christianity, eventually identifying with an ascendant evangelicalism.

It was a great time to be alive. Well, for most everyone, their youth was a wonderful time. Life was so immediate and analog. John Glenn circled the earth 3 times. The Telstar satellite enabled the first live transatlantic broadcast very close to the day I'm thinking about. And I was becoming a big boy, going to high school (grades 7 to 12 in the same building) and was going to play football and march in the band. Guys were talking about girls more. That mystery was beginning to beckon as it never had before.

Its hard to not project back my present feelings to that moment so I won't elaborate too much. But I'm pretty sure I remember feeling some pity for these fine young men and discomfort or puzzlement at the justice of it. And I wondered at my good fortune at being in the right spot to get the right teaching. For sure, I have replayed that scene in my head often in the intervening 45 years. So it was important whatever my first impressions and however my memory may have augmented the situation. It must've been significant in my life and develoment because after so many years a conscious vestige of it is still with me.

What's yours?

Joy at Work

2007-09-22T16:55:00.000-04:00

I found this to be meaningful. From Dennis Bakke's web site. These are the first six of 10 ten items. See the remainder of this list here.

1. When given the opportunity to use our ability to reason, make decisions, and take responsibility for our actions, we experience joy at work.

2. The purpose of business is not to maximize profits for shareholders but to steward our resources to serve the world in an economically sustainable way.

3. Attempt to create the most fun workplace in the history of the world.

4. Eliminate management, organization charts, job descriptions, and hourly wages.

5. Fairness means treating everybody differently.

6. Principles and values must guide all decisions.
....

Madeline L'Engle

2007-09-09T15:05:00.000-04:00

This is lifted from Radical Congruency. I've never read this lady but it now looks to me like I should.

Madeline L’Engle [Daniel]

Posted Saturday, September 8th, 2007 at 8:39 PM by Daniel under News

The ever-wonderful Madeline L’Engle passed away on Thursday. She was 88.

I grew up reading, and loving, the Wrinkle in Time books. She was a beautiful soul.

“Why does anybody tell a story? [It has] something to do with faith - faith that the universe has meaning, that our little human lives are not irrelevant, that what we choose or say or do matters, matters cosmically.”

May her memory be eternal.

(NYT)

Embrace Uncertainty - William James and Me

2007-09-05T06:16:00.000-04:00

Rummaging through my desk at home on Labor Day I found the summer issue of the Wilson Quarterly. Not sure when it arrived, it must have been several weeks at least. It is the case that the last half of each issue's ~120 pages is devoted to short essays and reviews of interesting periodicals and books. As always, I read this entire section first and then worked backwards to the larger full length articles in front of the magazine. After reading for awhile and as dusk dimmed the light coming through my window, I almost tossed the magazine, thinking I'd given it its due. Then I came upon an article on William James.

The title was One Hundred Years of Pragmatism and it was by a doctoral candidate from Yale, Theo Anderson. Having recently read a bio of James as evident from recent posts, Anderson's summary provided me with added perspective on this man's meaningful life. At this juncture in time when America was becoming industrialized, bureacratized, and modernized, James was a forerunner of that post modern humility that notes our human limitations is grasping reality. Anderson gives a quote without specific attribution:

Objective evidence and certitude are doubtless very fine ideals to play with but where on this moonlit and dream visited planet are they found?

It seems that for most of my life I've been pulled in two opposing directions: the orthodox vs the modern Enlightenment. James, who retired 100 years ago this year, found an alternative path that resembles the postmodern. He affirms that life is worth living. His life was a testimony that truth is not a fixed, immutable, and certain thing. It is time dependent. It is a verb. It is a "provisional, evolving relationship between ideas and consequences..." "Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events."

Today's Quote

2007-09-01T07:49:00.000-04:00

As Boccaccio said in his “Life of Dante” (1374), “Everything that is acquired with toil has more sweetness in it.”

From this article suggested to me by George.

A Mother-Sea of Mind - Cosmic Consciousness

2007-08-19T08:06:00.000-04:00

Amidst twelve hour work days, home and church projects, I finally finished the book on William James last night. As usual, I awoke around 3 am, surfed the internet for a while, then took on the final twenty pages or so. It was better reading this book in small chunks so I could spend several days savoring what I'd read.

Man, this is beautiful.

"that we with our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest. The maple and the pine may whisper to each other with their leaves, and Conanicut and Newport hear each other's fog-horns. But the trees also commingle their roots in the darkness underground, and the islands also hang together through the ocean's bottom. Just so, there is a continuum of cosmic consciousness, against which our several minds plunge as into a mother-sea or reservoir." p. 509

Harold Bloom on The Gospel of Thomas

2007-08-11T12:51:00.000-04:00

I haven't said anything about the GThom in a while. Here is a quote from Harold Bloom. It introduces us to a new category of Jesus and thinking regarding the beginning and eschatology.

"Whatever surges beneath the surface of the Gospel of Thomas, it is not a Syrian Christian wisdom teaching of the second century. The ascetic accepts creation, but always upon the basis of having fallen from it, and always with the hope of being restored to it. That is hardly the aspiration of Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas. Like William Blake, like Jakob Böhme, this Jesus is looking for the face he had before the world was made. That marvelous trope I appropriate from W.B. Yeats, at his most Blakean. If such is your quest, then the Gospel of Thomas calls out to you."

Who we are has to do with where we have come from, where we began. That is why we are interested in Genesis. That is why we are interested in the Big Bang. These have everything to do with how we perceive ourselves and how we choose to live.

Below is from the Gospel of Thomas translation and notes from Patterson Brown's website Metalogos. These are probably pertinent verses to Boom's thesis.

18. The Disciples say to Yeshua: Tell us how our end shall be. (Ps 39:4) || Yeshua says: Have you then discovered the origin, so that you inquire about the end? For at the place where the origin is, there shall be the end. Blest is he who shall stand at the origin— and he shall know the end, and he shall not taste death. (Isa 48:12, Lk 20:38, Jn 1:1-2, Th 1; T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets: Little Gidding: ‘The end is where we start from’; Jack Kerouac, Visions of Cody: ‘What kind of journey is the life of a human being that it has a beginning but not an end?’)

50. Yeshua says: If they say to you: From whence do you come?, say to them: We have come from the Light, the place where the Light has originated thru itself— he [stood] and he himself appeared in their imagery. If they say to you: Who are you?, say: We are his Sons and we are the chosen of the Living Father. If they ask you: What is the sign of your Father in you?, say to them: It is movement with repose. (Isa 28:12 30:15, Lk 16:8, Jn 12:36, Th 27; Bhagavad-Gita 6.27: ‘When his mind is tranquil, perfect joy comes to the person of discipline; his passion is calmed, he is without sin, being one with the Infinite Spirit’)

So, where our origin is, our end will be. And, our origin is the light. We come from the light and we return to the light.

Apothegm from Emerson

2007-08-10T05:14:00.000-04:00

We are born believing. A man bears beliefs as a tree bears apples.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

But some of us have a harder time of it than others. Then again the real issue is which apples are good and which ones aren't.