Booze, the Bible, and Bad Theology

As I promised in last night’s mes­sage Booze, The Bible, & Bad The­ol­o­gy, here are some resources out­lin­ing what the Bible says about fer­ment­ed bev­er­ages.

* First, a list of every pas­sage in the Bible that dis­cuss­es alco­hol.
* Daniel Whit­field has a good essay Alco­hol and the Bible–well worth read­ing.
* Daniel Wal­lace wrote The Bible and Alco­hol, an extreme­ly help­ful arti­cle from a very sol­id schol­ar.
* The Chris­t­ian Coun­ter­cul­ture project has an insight­ful col­lec­tion of arti­cles in their What Would Jesus Drink? col­lec­tion.

There is diver­si­ty with­in the Chris­t­ian camp on this issue, and a sim­ple google search will find argu­ments from all cor­ners. The ones I list­ed above are the ones I find most cred­i­ble.

UPDATE: I just ran across a fas­ci­nat­ing arti­cle at Chris­tian­i­ty Today that gives a sol­id his­tor­i­cal overview — Amassed Media: The Drink Debate.

Retreat Messages Online

The mes­sages from Col­lege Win­ter Retreat are online now in Win­dows Media for­mat.

I would have put them in MP3 for­mat, but every time I tried to con­vert the file sizes swelled by an order of mag­ni­tude and I could­n’t fig­ure out how to change it.

If you want to give it a go, feel free.

Chi Alpha blogring on Xanga

I just stum­bled across a Chi Alpha blo­gring on Xan­ga. It’s pret­ty small now and every­one seems to be from one cam­pus (the one I min­is­tered at pre­vi­ous­ly), but it’s still cool.

If you’re on Xan­ga sign up!

Retreat Rocked

Col­lege Win­ter Retreat was great, but I’m just now recov­er­ing from all the work. I was real­ly pleased with out every­thing turned out. Our speak­er, Sam Hud­dle­ston, real­ly con­nect­ed with the stu­dents and chal­lenged them deeply. The stu­dents were respon­sive to the chal­lenge and were touched by God. Every­thing was good! Num­bers were up (a lot), the loca­tion was phe­nom­e­nal, and the core goals were accom­plished. Woohoo!

You can check out our retreat pho­tos–some of them are quite good.

Off to Retreat

I’m coor­di­nat­ing the dis­trict col­lege win­ter retreat this week­end, so Paula and I are head­ing up today to start get­ting stuff set up.

I’m pret­ty excited–our atten­dance is up by about 60% over last year and so it feels like we have a lot of momen­tum going into it.

On a more per­son­al note, around half of our Stan­ford Chi Alpha group will be head­ing up. Paula and I are deeply excit­ed about that. In our expe­ri­ence, few things cause a group to bond as much as a road trip to and from retreat along with all the fun things that hap­pen while there.

Flannery O’Connor on writing Christian fiction

Take heed, all you bud­ding nov­el­ists — Flan­nery O’Con­nor has shown the way! Read all about it in O’Con­nor v. the Antichrist.

A few quotes from O’Con­nor tak­en from the essay:

“If you live today you breathe in nihilism. In or out of the Church, it’s the gas you breathe. If I had­n’t had the Church to fight it with or to tell me the neces­si­ty of fight­ing it, I would be the stinkingest log­i­cal pos­i­tivist you ever saw right now.”

In her most famous state­ment about her work, she explained that “to the hard of hear­ing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and star­tling fig­ures.”

“All my sto­ries,” she wrote, “are about the action of grace on a char­ac­ter who is not very will­ing to sup­port it.”

O’Con­nor once wrote that “more than ever now it seems that the king­dom of heav­en has to be tak­en by vio­lence, or not at all. You have to push as hard as the age that push­es against you.”

Check out the essay (or at least check out some of O’Con­nor’s books).

Photo Gallery Updated

Pho­tos from the crab boil are now in the pho­to gallery.

We’ve got some pret­ty good shots this time, if I do say so myself.

By the way, you can call Nathaniel “Fred­dy” from now on.

Happy New Year

Paula and I got back from our hol­i­day trav­els yes­ter­day. We’ve been busy lit­tle bees.

We vis­it­ed San Diego with Bri­an and Cecilee Orme (they lead Chi Alpha in Salt Lake City) and had a blast! We were actu­al­ly work­ing (inspect­ing poten­tial con­fer­ence sites), but it was a lot of fun.

Then we got home, fin­ished our Christ­mas shop­ping, and hopped on a plane to New Orleans Christ­mas Eve. We had a great time with our fam­i­lies (and they had a good time exam­in­ing Paula’s preg­nant bel­ly), and then turned around and came home.

If you’ve emailed me in the last two weeks, rest assured that I’ll get back to you. I have a few hun­dred mes­sages to plow through, so it may take a lit­tle while.

Hap­py New Year!