The Wedding was Yesterday

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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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).
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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

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

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.
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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

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

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"

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

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

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

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.