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.
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.
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.
As you may recall, scientists at Duke have figured out a way to wire robot arms directly into a monkey’s brain, and that the monkey can then use the arm quite effectively.
There’s an update: the monkeys seem to view the arm as a part of their own body.
That’s wild.
Expect some absolutely amazing body-enhancement devices faster than you’d think but slower than you’d hope.
It made me think for a second: if I could directly wire control of any technological device into my brain what would I choose?
Assuming I was limited to one, I guess I’d pick a multipurpose wireless I/O device. Like a bluetooth controller but with way better security.
That would rock.
One of my students just sent me the very funny Cows With Guns. It’s a little long, but beyond hilarious. Especially if you find puns funny.
I have to say I loved Constantine, no matter what the reviewers think. The actress who played Gabriel and the actor who played Satan were particularly good.
And its theology, while off, wasn’t nearly as bad as I expected it to be.
Gene Scott died yesterday, and I feel obliged to say something for some strange reason. I guess it’s because I’m always struck by the vaguely overlapping areas of our lives.
First, he was at one time an Assemblies of God minister in my district. He left the denomination years back (in good standing, surprisingly enough), but the connection is still there.
Second, Dr. Scott had a connection with Stanford University–he earned his doctorate here in 1957 and was apparently once profiled for the cover story of the Stanford alumni magazine (this seems to be an undigitized issue or else I would link to it).
Third, his ministry was by its nature a money-asking sort. His methods were way over the line (some allege immoral and illegal), although he was pretty funny about it: “I sometimes get asked about what happens to all the money that comes in to this ministry. Let me tell you what happens to it. I spend it!”
Fourth, he was eccentric. That’s putting it mildly. If you’ve seen his show you know what I mean, and if you haven’t there’s no way you would believe me–for instance, one of his peculiar worship songs was Kill a Pissant for Jesus (I do not, sadly, have the lyrics). While I applaud the use of the underutilized word pissant , the song gives me pause. If you’ve got a few minutes, read over this old article from the LA Times: The Shock Jock of Television to get a feel for his unique ministry style.
The Assemblies of God, Stanford, fundraising, and eccentricity. That’s really all we had in common as far as I can determine (that, and we were both California white males). In some ways I admire him tremendously, and in other ways I shudder when I think of him. Either way, I consider him a distant cousin in ministry.
I hope he’s in heaven. If so, I imagine there are a lot of surprised people having some very unusual conversations with him.
this software helps you find musicians similar to those you love (courtesy The Long Tail)–and they know all the cool Christian artists, too.