disciple, husband, father, college minister
I rarely look at the King James translation, but today I happened to glance at it while preparing for a conference:
Wherefore lay apart all filthiness and superfluity of naughtiness, and receive with meekness the engrafted word, which is able to save your souls. James 1:21, KJV
That’s right: we are to avoid a superfluity of naughtiness.
What beautiful phrasing.
I’ve been meaning to mention this for a while, but my brother is half-blind in Bangkok right now. He’s on a mission trip and got some sort of infection behind his eyeball (yuck).
It sounds like he’s going to be A‑OK, but I’m sure it’s quite disturbing to fall ill in another country. Especially a non-Western one.
On the plus side, he had travel insurance and so everything is paid for. It’s far better for him financially than it would have been in America. And whatever he has isn’t something he got in Thailand–it was developing before he left.
Anyway, he should be coming back this weekend. Until then, I’ll keep thinking about Murray Head’s One Night In Bangkok.
I listen to MP3s when I bike to campus. Not music, as I really don’t like music all that much; rather, I soak up lecture/seminar/sermonic stuff. I get a lot of them from Discipleship Library and I’ve recently started downloading some from IT Conversations.
Anyway, I recently listened to Ben Saunders’ amazing story. He made a solo expedition to the North Pole and really knows how to spin the tale. I was agog. Highly recommended.
One of our alumni, Elizabeth, emailed me this fascinating NYT article: On a Christian Mission to the Top. It’s an article about ministry at the Ivy League schools focusing on a group called Christian Union
. There’s a related NPR story.
I really appreciate their vision. I’ve often thought that someone ought to establish evangelical ministry centers at the top tier universities, so I’m glad to see that they’re running with it.
Anyway, this paragraph leapt out at me:
By the 1970’s, Assemblies churches were sprouting up in affluent suburbs across the country. Recent surveys by Margaret Poloma, a historian at the University of Akron in Ohio, found Assemblies members more educated and better off than the general public.
I’m speechless.
The Assemblies of God and education are not two concepts that are often linked in the minds of the populace at large (with reason, I might add: I’ve actually heard these words uttered at a ministerial gathering with absolutely no hint of humor, “The problem with the Assemblies is all this eddikashun.” Moreover, I saw several heads nod in agreement). Perhaps that instance has unfairly tainted my perceptions of the movement as a whole, but I’ve never been particularly impressed with our intellectual prowess in the Assemblies.
On the flip side, one of our AG ministers in San Francisco is a Harvard grad who lives in a bus and ministers to the homeless. And of my three district officials (bishop-equivalents) one has his doctorate and another just needs to finish his dissertation. A pastor I know in the San Joaquin valley was once nominated for a Pulitzer. Come to think of it, I know lots of sharp, well-educated ministers and even more sharp, well-educated laypeople.
I just always assumed they were a minority. I should really rethink that.
Shaowei just emailed me the link for the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe trailer
.
It was stunning. I can’t believe how good it was from a purely cinematic perspective.
And from a theological perspective it looks as though they’re keeping way more of Lewis’ symbolism than I thought possible. “In this house there are many rooms” “only one door leads to another world”… those are explicitly Biblical allusions.
Sean Wat has emailed me what may well be the apex of geek humor: the Klein Four Group performing “Finite Simple Group (of Order Two)” (Windows media file)
I’m not sure whether it’s cooler in my context to pretend that I get the parts that I don’t or that I don’t get the parts that I do…
I think that says a lot about me, my context, and society at large.
Periodically I get a chance to sit in a live studio audience for a CCN broadcast. I’ve seen Doug Fields, George Barna, Larry Osborne, Henry Cloud, etc. The best part is I can bring students and expose them to some of these leaders.
Anyway, I was particularly excited about the recent Worship In The Emerging Church seminar with Dan Kimball (he blogs!) and Sally Morgenthaler. If you’re going to hear two folks talk about this subject it’s hard to pick a better team. You can get the notes in PDF (although there are blanks).
Some thoughts I had:
David Gellertner has a great article in the Weekly Standard called Biblical Illiteracy in America. I liked the article well enough, but the last few paragraphs swept me off my feet:
My guess is that our next Great Awakening will begin among college students. College students today are (spiritually speaking) the driest timber I have ever come across. Mostly they know little or nothing about religion; little or nothing about Americanism. Mostly no one ever speaks to them about truth and beauty, or nobility or honor or greatness. They are empty–spiritually bone dry–because no one has ever bothered to give them anything spiritual that is worth having. Platitudes about diversity and tolerance and multiculturalism are thin gruel for intellectually growing young people.
Let the right person speak to them, and they will turn back to the Bible with an excitement and exhilaration that will shake the country. In reading the Bible they will feel as if they are going home–which is just what they will be doing.
via GetReligion
I stumbled across this cheeky little observation at Glenn Vanderburg’s Quotations page:
[The French] have always hated us, of course … but now they REALLY hate us, because our culture has become so dominant that they’re having trouble completing so much as a single sentence without using American words. They’re always blurting out statements like: Le software de la hardware est un humdinger! And then they get so mad that they could spit.
I searched and discovered that it’s from one of the funniest Dave Barry columns I’ve seen.
Dana (who has new photos up on our gallery, although the one you see is from the Chi Alpha @ Stanford gallery) has been developing more and more of a demanding personality lately.
The one that amuses me the most concerns her cereal. She has a bag of Cheerios that contains some dried strawberries and blueberries. She’s decided that she likes those much more than the little toroids, and so she’s begin eating just the fruit and then screaming at us in the hopes that we will produce more dried fruit. In the event that we don’t immediately bring forth said fruit, she begins scattering her Cheerios over the floor.
She’s also very particular about when she wants to be picked up.
All in all, it’s very charming. It can get draining, but it’s really quite charming.