Flotsam and jetsam (5/11)

May 11, 2012 in Flotsam and jetsam with 5 Comments

Good Reads

  • Success That Exceeds Sanctification: And so I ask the Lord not to give me success that exceeds my sanctification. And then I ask that he will make me increasingly holy, that he will grow my Christian character, sanctify me in greater measure, that I may have more success and steward it wisely and for his glory.
  • Evolution Is a Lousy Story: While admitting that human existence is bursting with plot and story, the grand scheme of scientific naturalism is plotless, or perhaps better the plot is anchored in futility. We exist as sentient beings constrained by the laws of physics and in some 7 or 8 billion years the earth will die as the sun dies.  More than this, the expansion of the universe will eventually reach a point where life anywhere will be completely impossible. Not only will each individual die along the way, but life itself will simply vanish – no more sentient beings to wonder about the plot.
  • Desmund Tutu: ‘We need to be able to listen’: Because we live in a pluralistic, global world we need to be able to listen to other viewpoints, place ourselves in the shoes of others, and respond fairly, magnanimously and pragmatically.

Continue Reading…

Another Book Giveaway: The Cradle, the Cross, and the Crown

May 10, 2012 in Uncategorized with 82 Comments

It’s been a couple of weeks since we’ve done a book giveaway, so it’s time for another one. This time we’re giving away a copy of The Cradle, the Cross, and the Crown: An Introduction to the New Testament by Andreas Kostenberger, L. Scott Kellum, and Charles Quarles (B&H Academic). This looks like an outstanding resource for anyone wanting to dig into New Testament studies a bit more. So, if you’re interested, scroll down to see how to enter.

Here’s the information from the publisher:

Although Scripture cannot be reduced to a mere piece of human writing, there is much to gain by paying careful attention to the historical, literary, and theological dimensions of the biblical text. For this reason, The Cradle, the Cross, and the Crown is offered to the serious New Testament student who seeks to better understand and share God’s “word of truth” (2 Timothy 2:15). Across nearly one thousand pages, it thoroughly introduces all twenty-seven New Testament books and closely examines Christ’s incarnation and virgin birth, the heart of His ministry shown so vividly in the Gospels’ Passion Narratives, and the triumphant return of Jesus and our eternal reign with Him as depicted in Revelation. “Simply an outstanding work. Its up-to-date research alone makes The Cradle, the Cross, and the Crown an invaluable resource. Add to this its comprehensive survey of the crucial issues related to New Testament studies, and you have a textbook well suited for the college or seminary classroom.” –Daniel L. Akin, president, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, Wake Forest, NC. Continue Reading…

The Loss of Generosity and the Rise of Tribalism

May 10, 2012 in Culture with 1 Comment

I‘m reading through Marilynne Robinson’s collection of essays When I Was a Child, I Read Books. As always, she offers some interesting ideas on a range of issues. But I was particularly struck by a couple of quotes on the nature of public discourse in America today.

The language of public life has lost the character of generosity, and the largeness of spirit that has created and supported the best of our institutions and brought reform to the worst of them has been erased out of historical memory. (Kindle Locations 105-107)

I found it interesting that she thinks there is a “largeness of spirit” that has characterized public dialog in America historically, even though she fears that we have lost it today. And I completely agree that any meaningful dialog needs to be characterized by generosity, and that this is often lacking in what passes for discussion and debate today.

Continue Reading…

The Top 10 Most Read Books in the World

May 9, 2012 in Culture with 3 Comments

Here’s an interesting infographic showing the 10 most read books in the world. No surprise that the Bible tops the chart by a fair margin. But the other books might be a little more surprising, and revealing.

via visual.ly (HT Tim Challies)

Flotsam and jetsam (5/9)

May 9, 2012 in Flotsam and jetsam with 0 Comments

Remarkably accurate graph of life's stresses over time

Good Reads

  • Why Bible Study Doesn’t Transform Us: Much of what passes for Bible study in Christian bookstores and church resource libraries just isn’t: while it may educate us on a doctrine or a topic, it does little to further our Bible literacy. And left to our own devices, we pursue a host of unsavory (and un-transformative) self-constructed approaches to “spending time in the Word.” Here are several that I encounter on a regular basis.
  • Do as I Do, Not as I Say: It’s election season, and once again Democrats are flummoxed by evangelical voters. They think that “those people” vote against their own self-interest. They cannot believe that same-sex marriage matters so much to so many people. They don’t get why Obamacare is controversial. To them, evangelicals don’t make sense.
  • Feedback Is Scary – But You Need It: The worst person to be leading an organization is a person who is insecure. Yes, we’re all insecure to differing degrees, but there’s a type of leader who is deeply insecure and avoids all feedback in order to not be hurt, threatened, our found out. That is sin. That is pride. And that is incredibly dangerous for the leader and for the people being led.
  • New Form of Christian Civic Engagement: Christian Millennials are now coming of age and recognizing the flawed strategies and broken agendas embraced by their forebears. They’ve seen how the religious right (and the religious left, for that matter) has used the Bible as a tool to gain political power and reduced the Christian community to little more than a voting bloc — and they are forging a different path.

Continue Reading…

The Baby and the Bathwater: Reflections on My Recent Brush with Philosophy

May 8, 2012 in Uncategorized with 7 Comments

Last week I attended a conference at the Center for Philosophy of Religion at the University of Notre Dame. The conference intentionally brings analytic philosophers and theologians together to discuss issues of relevance to both. And the hope is that the discussions will be mutually sharpening as each group brings its own resources and perspectives to bear on the issues.

It was a fascinating experience. Although I enjoy enjoy philosophy, I’m not a philosopher. And it’s not often that I get to sit and talk with people who study and teach philosophy for a living. At times, I was thoroughly confused. Concepts like four dimensionalism, stage theory, phenomenology, fundamentality, and thin/thick particulars are a little outside my normal frame of reference. But most of the time I was intrigued to watch the interplay of philosophy and theology as we all wrestled with what it means to be a “human person.” Overall it was a great experience, and one that I would repeat without a second thought.

In my next post, I hope to reflect more generally on the nature of the philosophy/theology relationship itself. But today, I’ll just offer a few observations from the dialog that I got to be a part of last week. And, since the conference focused specifically on analytic philosophy as a resource for theology, my comments reflect only that branch of the philosophical tree.

As with many such interactions, we need to note both the baby and the bathwater, appreciating the former and guarding against the latter.

Continue Reading…

Get More Out of Google: Tips & Tricks for Students

May 7, 2012 in Misc with 0 Comments

If you haven’t seen this infographic yet, you should definitely check it out. It’s a great resource for helping anyone use Google more effectively, but it’s particularly helpful for students.

Continue Reading…

Flotsam and jetsam (5/7)

May 7, 2012 in Uncategorized with 0 Comments

Good Reads

  • Forgive Us Our Student Debts: Who wants to study four years just so you can work a job the next 20 to pay for it? Student debt isn’t worth the price of freedom to follow God in your career, marriage, and family choices.
  • How the Unrelenting Threat of Death Shapes Our Behavior: hundreds of published academic papers have shown that worrying about death affects everything from our prejudices and voting patterns to how likely we are to exercise or use sunscreen….People deal with death by upholding worldviews that are larger and longer-lasting than themselves, and opposing anyone or anything that violates these “cultural anxiety-buffers.”
  • Defending the Bible Literally: ll these years later, I’m learning that understanding the literal meaning of the Bible is a more nuanced adventure than my college friends and I imagined. We’d been blithely unaware that there is more than one genre in the Bible, or that literary context profoundly matters to meaning.

Continue Reading…

Flotsam and jetsam (5/4)

May 4, 2012 in Flotsam and jetsam with 0 Comments

The Cycle of Life

Good Reads

  • Muscular Christianity: In the drive to make churches more guy-friendly, we risk confusing cultural (especially American) customs with biblical discipleship. One noted pastor has said that God gave Christianity a “masculine feel.” Another contrasted “latte-sipping Cabriolet drivers” with “real men.” Jesus and his buddies were “dudes: heterosexual, win-a-fight, punch-you-in-the-nose dudes.” Real Christian men like Jesus and Paul “are aggressive, assertive, and nonverbal.” Seriously?
  • Fiction and Literature: I’ve found that most people who tell me that fiction is a waste of time are folks who seem to hold to a kind of sola cerebra vision of the Christian life that just doesn’t square with the Bible. The Bible doesn’t simply address man as a cognitive process but as a complex image-bearer who recognizes truth not only through categorizing syllogisms but through imagination, beauty, wonder, awe.
  • It’s a Brain Puzzle: When we look at prayer through the lens of neuroscience, we can make an interesting observation: Talking to God is not really different from talking to one’s friends and neighbors.
  • Were the Church Fathers Universalists? I’ve read more than once the claim that most early Christians were universalists. And this is occasionally supported by the further opinion that several early (first six centuries) theological schools were universalist in their teaching. This seems implausible to me. However, I’m certainly not someone who is a student of the history of the early church. So what am I to do? I’m to look for evidence.

Continue Reading…

Heading for Notre Dame

May 2, 2012 in Uncategorized with 5 Comments

I realized after writing that title that someone might think I’m announcing some major job transition. Nope. I am happily entrenched in sunny Portland, OR. But I am heading for Notre Dame this afternoon to spend several days at a philosophy of religion conference. The theme of the conference is “Minds, Bodies, and the Divine.” And here’s the description of what we’re supposed to be doing:

Various ancient religious/philosophical systems (Orphism, Pythagoreanism, and Stoicism) maintained that the divine mind ‘embodied’ itself in the world in much the same way in which immaterial souls are supposedly embodied in human organisms. Christianity has likewise traditionally endorsed a duality of mind and body, and maintains that, in becoming incarnate, the Son of God somehow took on both a human soul and a human body.

In the 20th and 21st centuries mind-body dualism has come under heavy fire; philosophers in the Christian tradition have begun to explore what implications contemporary materialism might have for their doctrines of incarnation and afterlife; and other philosophers have begun to explore naturalistic and materialistic variations on panentheism.

In this workshop, we bring together philosophers and theologians with interests in contemporary philosophy of mind to explore questions about the nature of embodiment and about the relations between minds (human and divine) and the material world.

You can read more about the conference and the papers being presented here. If you’re curious, I’ll be presenting a paper on Jonathan Edwards and how he viewed the human person. It’s a little too complicated to summarize quickly, but basically it focuses on summarizing Edwards’ understanding of “created reality,” how it relates to God’s existence, and what implications this has for how Edwards’ understands the human person. I know that’s not a terribly helpful description, but it’s the best I can do in one quick sentence.

And as usual when I attend a conference. I’ll try to post some highlights from the various sessions when I get back. So you can (hopefully) look forward to that sometime next week.

Page 2 of 193«12345»102030...Last »