Wednesday, September 24, 2008

It...

I am, once again, it; tagged by my wonderful friend Tara so long ago that the original post no longer appears on the front page of her blog.  Of course Tara posts 80-90 times per day so that's not really all that surprising.  I'm supposed to tag a bunch of blogs I love, but as I've said before, this blog is where memes come to die.  If you want to know which blogs I read check my blogroll.  I am supposed to list five unusual things about myself.

1. I love literary theory.  I just took 7 books on intertextuality out of the library and I'm totally excited to read them.
2. I love Kraft Dinner.  I really shouldn't, and I hardly ever eat it anymore cause it's so unhealthy but it is my personal comfort food.
3. I have an inordinate love for Harry Potter.  The books I mean of course.
4. I love school.
5. I don't like berries of any kind.  Not strawberries, not raspberries, not blueberries...you get the idea.

Well, since I'm not tagging anyone else it's time for me to go to bed.

Friday, September 19, 2008

4,471...

Yep, all done.  4,471 words in the main body of the essay.  It's a little shy of the 5,000 words in the syllabus but I think that considering the size of the class and the fact that we all need to read everyone's papers (there are two more like this) I think that everyone will be grateful that I was concise(ish).  Of course if you include the footnotes the word count jumps to 5,756 but what can you do?  Well, time to format the bibliography and footnotes and then go home to bed.  After I've presented the paper and then reworked it in response to comments maybe I'll post it here.  Huh, maybe I'll post it here sooner so that I can get some comments before I present...we'll see.  Nightie night.

But...But I...You Can't...It Isn't...Over? Is it?

It happened.  It finally happened.  The final, hilarious, brilliant, wonderfully written post in the near-eternal deconstruction of Left Behind went online at Slacktivist today.  Bravo Fred, bravo.

2,478 (matey!!)...

I'm writing today.  Before I'm allowed to sleep tonight I must have completed the first draft of my paper "Whose Moses?  An Examination of the Appropriation of Moses in Acts 7 and 2 Corinthians 3."  It's the first written assignment I'll hand in for doctoral studies and it's coming along pretty well so far.  I was fiddling with my outline last night and realized that the outline itself seemed a little long.  So I did a word count.  My outline (for a paper that cannot, under any circumstances, be longer than 5,000 words) is 2,478 words long.  Hmmmm...well at least I shouldn't have trouble getting to the required length.

Oh, and it's national Talk Like a Pirate Day today (ye scurvy curs!!!!), so be sure to talk like a pirate to someone today.

ps I don't think that Kathryn reads my blog, but if she (that is to say you) does (do), please do remember that it's Talk Like a Pirate Day, and not Talk Like an 18th Century Whaler Day.

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Assigned Reading...

I am up at 12:22AM to tell you that you must, without hesitation, read this post at This Side of Sunday.  Jon's clear articulation of a serious problem in North American evangelicalism should be a matter of urgent concern for all of us who consider ourselves members of the Body of Christ (and I don't just mean evangelicals).

Monday, September 15, 2008

Just in Case...

Just in case anybody was wondering, it turns out that PhD studies are hard.  Harder than MA studies were.  Shocking, I know.  Back to work now.

Sunday, September 07, 2008

GAHP 6*: Wherein Harry Is Sorted and We Consider the Question of Determination and the Smell of Asparagus Pee

The last thing Harry saw before the hat dropped over his eyes was the hall full of people craning to get a good look at him. Next second he was looking at the black inside of the hat. He waited.
'Hmm,' said a small voice in his ear. 'Difficult. Very difficult. Plenty of courage, I see. Not a bad mind, either. There's talent, oh my goodness, yes - and a nice thirst to prove yourself, now that's interesting...So where shall I put you?'
Harry gripped the edges of the stool and thought, 'Not Slytherin, not Slythern.'
'Not Slytherin, eh?' said the small voice. 'Are you sure? You could be great, you know, it's all here in your head, and Slytherin will help you on the way to greatness, no doubt about that - no? Well, if you're sure - better be GRYFFINDOR!'
-Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, 90-91
Sometimes, just as a conversation starter, I like to ask people if their pee smells after they eat asparagus. I'm not sure if you know this or not but eating asparagus produces a bizarre little chemical reaction in human beings that makes our urine smell strange. The really funny thing about this is that not all human beings have the ability to smell this particular odor. I'm told it's a genetic thing.** Wikipedia appears to agree.

I bring this up because it has been my experience that people in Western culture are under the impression that their lives are in their own hands. So many of us think of ourselves as free, as self-determined, as the agents of our own greatness or folly. But here's the thing: not all of us can smell aspargus pee. Not all of us can roll our tongues into little tubes. Not all of us can see. Not all of us can walk. Not all of us can run 100 meters in under 10 seconds. No matter what anyone ever tells you, you are genetically determined. There are things that are, and are not, possible for you.

The idea of determination is important to theology. Theologians don't usually speak in terms of genetic determination but in terms of calling and election and the will of God. The cliche theological terms are Calvinism and Arminianism but the debate between people who believe our lives are pre-determined and people who believe that we have free will is far older than John Calvin and Joseph Armin. More than a millenium earlier Augustine and Pelagius were having the same argument. Let's see if we can summarize the oldest debate in Christian theology in a couple of sentences.

Classical theism (aka Calvinism. Though equating the two is pretty inacurate it will serve our purposes here.) holds that God is completely perfect, all-powerful, unchangeable and that he knows all things. Consequently, if God is these things then all things that occur on earth must, by definition and logical necessity, serve his purposes. Thus, at the level of the individual, everything you ever have done or ever will do is a product of the will of God. Free-will theism (aka Arminianism, same caveat) holds that God is perfect, all-powerful, and all knowing. In contrast to Classical theism, however, the Free-will theist holds that though God knows the future and has the ability to bring about his will, he consciously allows his creation to make decisions that are contrary to his will.

Back to Harry and the Sorting Hat. Those of us who have read the entire series (which I assume at this point is pretty much every human being on Earth) know some things about Harry that Harry does not yet know. We know about his heritage. We know that, amusingly enough, he is actually a direct descendant of Salazar Slytherin. Even more interesting we know that a fragment of the soul of one of the most powerful Slytherins ever resides within Harry. Harry is also a pure-blooded wizard. Harry is also a parselmouth. All of these things mean that Harry not only meets the requirements to get into Slytherin, he's actually a perfect fit. But, as Dumbledore will later point out, Harry chooses to become something other than a Slytherin. There is a degree to which Harry's life has been determined. His heritage, his history, his very abilities, all conspire to remove his ability to decide which course he will take. And this determination is not merely theoretical. All of the most important things that make Harry who he is and help to present him with the choices and situations he will face in his life are the product of someone else's decisions. Harry's life has been predetermined, his course has been set, his choices have already been taken away from him. And yet he decides all the same.

You see though we are all of us determined, whether genetically or historically or perhaps even theologically, that determination is not complete. That some of our options have been limited does not mean that all of our options have been eliminated. In what ways are we limited and in what ways are we free? I haven't the faintest clue.

I do, however, like Harry's example. Determined or not I want to live as though I have a choice. If God has predetermined my actions, then so be it and I'm sure he'll take responsibility when the time for that sort of thing comes. But as far as I'm able I think it's important that I live as someone who is responsible before God for his own actions. I think it's important to live as though I have a choice until a situation arises where I really don't.

Are our lives pre-determined? Of course they are, in a great many ways. But, to be frank, I really don't see what that has to do with whether or not I make the right choices in my life. I say, live responsibly, as though you have a choice. If it turns out in the end that you didn't, then who the hell cares anyway right?

*I realize that I skipped GAHP 5. As I've mentioned to a couple of my readers privately I really do want to do a GAHP post about Harry's entrance into the Wizarding World and the idea of conversion but I just can't seem to get my head around the ideas involved. I guess I'm holding the 5 slot in case some day I can get that post right. We'll see.
**For the record, yes I can smell my asparagus pee.

Saturday, September 06, 2008

Coffee...

One of the drawbacks to being back in school is that I now don't really have time for sleep. Add to this my general anxiety over being ready for classes as they come up, particularly my intermediate Hebrew course, and I'm already feeling pretty tired. The solution, I suppose, is that I must start drinking coffee.

I've never been much of a coffee person. I used to say that I despise the stuff, though admittedly over the past few years I've been capitulating more and more, allowing myself to be slowly absorbed into the coffee drinking culture around me. I see this as a kind of betrayal, like I'm waiving the white flag of surrender after vowing for so many years that I did not like and would not drink coffee. Today, it would appear, the final armistice in this long and fruitless war was signed.

Because of the aforementioned fatigue Jinny and I decided that I would purchase some coffee and use that as a drug to keep my poor, addled brain in working order. I thought of this as a kind of necessary evil, a kind of medicine that must simply be tolerated in order to gain the desired effect. Sadly this was not to be so. I enjoyed it. I liked my first cup of La Minita Tarrazu (purchased from Second Cup) and am kind of looking forward to another cup this evening or perhaps tomorrow morning.

Sigh, just another way in which I'm exactly like everybody else. I really am starting to wonder if we shouldn't just take Jerry Seinfeld's advice and start dressing in uniforms like in Sci-Fi movies.

Tuesday, September 02, 2008

Things That Are Cooler...

For those of you who haven't noticed Google launched the beta version of their new internet browser called Chrome today. It looks kind of cool and I really do like the way that the URL box automatically functions as a search engine but overall I am underwhelmed. It doesn't really do anything that Firefox doesn't do and like Jim West I find the lack of a Home Page and the way the shortcuts work irritating. I think that I'm just going to stick with Firefox for the time being unless someone suggests a reason that Chrome is superior.

On the other hand I did come across to online applications that are both much cooler than Chrome. I'll start with the one I found second. This may sound lame but I've never heard of Scribefire until today. While I was reading around about Chrome I ran across Jim's critique (linked above) and he mentioned this app called Scribefire that he uses to blog. I just finished installing it and I'm using it to write this very post and it is cool as all get-out. Links are easier, I don't have to fiddle with the Blogger Dashboard, I don't have to sign out of my wife's account and then sign into mine, this is awesome.

The second (really the first) app that's cooler than Chrome is a Hebrew/Greek vocab program I found a couple of days ago. For some absurd reason I accidentally deleted my Hebrew vocab software a few months ago and I'm in pretty dire need of it right now. This internet app, however, kicks the living crap out of my old software (Teknia in case you were curious). It also kicks the crap out of Greekflash Pro. You can run standard flashcards, you can do fill-in-the-blank quizzes, you can do multiple-choice quizzes, or you can do a combination of these. It runs the quizzes based on part of speech and frequency, and the best part is that if you get a word wrong that word gets cycled back into the mix radomly and appears many, many times. At any rate I'm finding it very helpful.

Both of these apps, which are cooler than Chrome simply by the virtue of being more useful, are now available in the Links section on the sidebar.

Monday, September 01, 2008

New Addition...

There's a new addition to my sidebar in both the Links and Blogroll. My friend Trevor (probably my oldest friend that I still keep in touch with) has started a blog.

Like me and so many people I know he's something of a recovering fundamentalist and so far he's been blending his love for ANE studies with his interests in the primeval history of Genesis 1-7 in a pretty strong challenge to the biblical "literalism" that we were both raised on.*

For anyone who's spent time in serious study of biblical literature nothing Trev says will be all that surprising but there are a lot of evangelicals who hover uncomfortably on the edge of conservatism who will find his thoughts unsettling and maybe even a little bit of a relief. Sometimes it's just nice to hear people agree with your privately held beliefs out loud. Anyways, go give him a read and see what you think.

*I use quotes on literalism there since, as I've said before, the fundamentalist/evangelical readings of Genesis 1-7 are often so bizarre, arcane, and disconnected from reality that even the idiotic misnomer "literal" hardly applies