Random Colin

Moving Day...

2009-09-26T10:10:00.001-07:00

The time has come to move Random Colin over to Wordpress. I've been thinking about it for awhile, and after looking Wordpress over it seems of offer all of the features that Blogger has plus a few, and I like the dashboard layout better too. So off I go. Posts and comments have all been moved over, and some new stuff has already been posted on the new blog. I'm still working on moving the blog list, but I'll get it done in the next couple of days I'm sure. I do hope that people will take the time to adjust their blogrolls and RSS feeds and links accordingly. So here's the new address:

www.randomcolin.wordpress.com

The Bible isn't a bible...

2009-09-24T20:26:00.000-07:00

A while ago Julia O'Brien had a post where she noted that in our culture we use the word "Bible" to refer to instruction manuals of all kinds. She suggested that as long as we keep labeling the Bible as such people will think of it as an instruction manual and avoid it as literature. She's right of course, but there's an even bigger problem for those of us who are Christians. The bigger problem is that people will think of the Bible as an instruction manual and ignore it as Scripture. No, the two things are not the same.

The Bible is a collection of a wide variety of literature which was written over a very long period of history (hundreds of years). The primary unifying qualities of the Bible are that it all has to do with the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and that over the course of time these books came to be thought of as revelatory literature by the broad community of faith. That is to say, the Bible is about God and it was "chosen" (not in the sense of one time conscious decision, but in the sense of a long and organic progression) by the Church. The consequence of this is that the Bible has many witnesses that often stand in deep tension with one another. There is tension between the prophets and the Torah, between the prophets and the lament literature, between the Apocalyptic literature and the Gospels, and between the letters of Paul and the catholic letters. There is tension all over. The Bible does not have one, single, easily summarized, unitary message. It is not an instruction book. Your Bible is not a bible.

I have heard it said that all biblical passages fall into two categories. They are all either 1) promises, or 2) instructions. Wrong. Are there promises in the Bible? Sure. Are there instructions in the Bible? Sure. But there is a whole lot more as well. There is poetry that describes pain. There are narratives that tell tales of conflict and confusion, and of triumph and joy. There are longing love letters. There are instances of purest hate. In the Bible you will find a wide variety of literary genres, a wide variety of themes, a wide variety of people, a wide variety of really almost everything. That shouldn't be scary, but for some reason this scares evangelicals. It scares us so much that we aren't allowed to critique the Bible, we aren't allowed to ask it difficult questions. We accept it all dogmatically because we think it's all dogmatic, but it isn't. There is room to question and challenge the Bible. Do you know how I know this? Because the Bible questions and challenges itself. Ezekiel questions the Torah. Lamentations questions Deuteronomy and the great deuteronomistic history. Jesus questions the Law, even as he says that he does not set aside even one jot of it.

The great power and theological depth of the Scripture is found within these points of tension, and again within the tension between our lives today and the various parts of this ancient collection of books. The Bible is like a stringed instrument in this respect. It only works because of great tension. Stop trying to take the tension out of the Bible. If you take away the tension, smoothing over and dumbing down and making everyingthing instructions and promises, all you get is a poorly tuned instrument and really bad music.

Hmmmm, Perhaps Jim West is Right about Wikipedia....

2009-09-16T08:09:00.001-07:00

My friend Beth tipped me off to this Wiki entry for L. Gregory Jones (Dean of Duke Divinity School). Written perhaps by his eldest son?

Enoch and Daniel...

2009-09-13T10:53:00.001-07:00

I've been plugging away at a second draft of my recent CSBS paper "(Re)Visionary History: Historiography and Religious Identity in the Animal Apocalypse," trying to get some extra research done so I can polish it up for publication in the volume of essays that are being published from the historiography seminar. In the course of this process I got a good tip to check out one of Michael Knibb's essays called "The Exile in the Literature of the Intertestamental Period" (pp.191-212 in Knibb's Essays on the Book of Enoch and Other Early Jewish Texts and Traditions). It's a great essay, but Knibb makes a move that's pretty common for Enoch scholars who analyze the AA that I've always thought was unnecessary and difficult to defend. He says on p. 194:

"The use of animals to represent human beings was probably directly influenced by the symbolism of Dan 7 and 8, although the fact that Jacob and his descendants are depicted specifically as sheep no doubt reflects the idea, widespread in the Old Testament, that Israel is the sheep of God's pasture."

Both of these statements are problematic, though the first much more so than the second. I won't give my full rebuttal here (I've got a full appendix on the subject in my MA thesis), but the parallels between the AA and Dan 7 and 8 are almost non-existent in my opinion. I'd go so far as to say that they are little more than parallels in genre (though the author of the AA probably knew Dan 7-12). The specific content as well as the rhetorical drive of the AA and Daniel are totally different, and the use of animal imagery is also completely different. Note that animals never represent specific people in Dan 7, and in Dan 8 none of the specific people represented is a Jew. Moreover the animals of Dan 7 are all composite monsters (i.e. creatures with bits from lots of different animals), and not at all reminiscent of the animals found the AA. The same could be said for the animals of Dan 8 which, though they are not composite monsters, are decidedly fantastical as they roam over the whole world. Again, not particularly reminiscent of the AA.

The second bit, that the use of sheep is connected to the common imagery of God's people as sheep in the OT isn't wrong so far as it goes. Certainly the sheep/shepherd image permeates the OT and is particularly important in later prophetic works (Zech, Ezek). But the assumption that this is the primary reason that the author of the AA selected sheep and rams as the image to represent the people of Israel ignores completely the fact that all of the antediluvian fathers and the eschatological people are not represented as sheep but as bulls. This suggests to me that, though there may be a tangential connection to the sheep/shepherd metaphor in the AA, some other factor is driving the selection of animal imagery in the AA generally.

What is that other factor? Simply put, the AA is all about clean/unclean divisions. Who is clean (i.e. elect) and who is unclean (i.e. non-elect) is possibly the single most important idea in the AA and is used as the criteria for the selection of all of the animal imagery in the allegory.

Oooo, Gots me an Endorsement...And On Officialization...

2009-09-11T11:37:00.000-07:00

Bryan Bibb over on Hevel.org gave me a very kind plug. Thanks Bryan! And of course my readers should make a point of visiting Bryan's blog as well. And not just Bible nerds. Bryan's also a techie, and he's got stuff about Macs and iPods and such as often as anything else, and I know I've got Mac nerds who lurk here. So go check out Hevel, worth your time for sure.

He also makes a kind comment, saying that I'm a good member of the biblioblogging community. I do try to make the rounds on the blogs I enjoy, and I comment when I feel like it. I know how much I like to interact through comments with my readers (all three of you), and I'm also obscenely outspoken (in the sense of quantity, not content), so that bit is easy. This does make me think again about the idea of defining the biblioblogosphere. It's a topic that's been making the rounds partly due to the latest discussion of sexism that April kicked off, and partly due to Jim's announcement that there will now be an official biblioblogging session at SBL and an official relationship between SBL and...well and what? John Hobbins and Chris Heard have raised some concerns on this front already, Chris most vehemently. I'm not so against the idea of a biblioblogger/SBL connection as Chris, but I agree with all of his points. The reason I'm not against the relationship is because the biblioblogosphere is going to keep on being what it is, regardless of official connections. It isn't a definable entity, no matter what anybody says. It's made up of bloggers and commentators and lurkers, not just bloggers alone. I also doubt very sincerely that it's one definable community or blogosphere, but is instead probably a bunch of different communities that overlap here and there. I know that I hardly ever read a ton of the blogs on the Top 50 list. I don't even have all of the top 10 on my blogroll. It's not because I have a problem with those blogs, it's just because they don't pique my interest. I'm guessing that's how most bibliobloggers work. So what is it that is being officially affiliated with SBL?

I'm not really upset by this, and it's entirely possible that it will be a very good development. Mark Goodacre is certainly right that there's no harm in trying it (and I'm very happy with Jim's steering committee). So I'm not vehemently opposed to the association like Chris appears to be. And though I don't think anybody should try to define the biblioblogosphere "officially", I don't care about the issue all that much because such attempts at definition are doomed to failure. That just ain't how the internet works.

A New BH Resource...

2009-09-09T17:30:00.001-07:00

HT to John Hobbins for pointing out Matthew Anstey's Hebrew Portal. It looks to still be in production, but the bibliography alone is worth the visit. Just getting through the whole bibliography (not the books mind you, just the list) is a daunting task...it's that long. I'm adding it to my bookmarks for sure, and so should you.*

*Unless you don't read or study Hebrew, in which case, nevermind.

Updated blogroll...

2009-09-08T11:40:00.000-07:00

I've added a bunch of new blogs to the blogroll today, mostly as a result of the recent discussion among a number of bibliobloggers regarding women and biblioblogging. Thanks to April and Pat for pointing several of them out. I'd already been visiting some (especially Boulders to Bits, which is a favorite that just never got added for some reason), but others were brand new to me and a couple of them even deal with Hebrew linguistics and discourse analysis, and so are particularly welcome. I freely admit that I cherry picked the blogs that talk about stuff I'm interested in, cause that's how my blogroll rolls (hehe, get it? get it?).

An aside regarding the conversation about sexism in the biblioblogosphere. Though I think that the conversation has gotten a little nasty on both sides at times, Judy reminds us men that we just don't have as much invested in this issue as women do. That may seem obscenely obvious, but it's something that I know I often forget. That said it's not too surprising that some of the women who blog about academic biblical studies are a little pissed. But why are some of the men?

As an aside to the aside. April writes, "I have to say that it is striking how immediately aggressive and sexualized some of the male reaction to my gender blogging has been, and how the humor used (including the cartoons and some of my colleagues reactions to those cartoons and circulation of them) turned women like me into either bitches, madams, or dominatrixes." First of all, I agree that a lot of the vehement reaction from some bloggers was striking and aggressive (and not in a good way). Second, with regard to the cartoons, I assume she's referring to these cartoons posted by Jim Linville. The reason I mention these specifically is because I linked to them and noted they were funny in my previous post and I wanted to clarify. I don't think they are funny because they portray women as bitches or madams. I took them ironically, as attacks on men who think of women as "bitchy" when they behave in a way that would get a man the label "aggressive." In other words I saw them as ironic feminist digs at a sexist culture.

Theology v. Religious Studies...

2009-09-04T11:24:00.001-07:00

There was a recent round of discussion among some of the bibliobloggers regarding the old distinction between theology and religious studies. Seems it was sparked to a large degree by Kurt Noll's "The Ethics of Being a Theologian." I could go on about what I think, or give you all the links to all of the various conversations, but I'm lazy and don't want to do either, so I'll just skip to the end. Tyler Williams' response was the one I agreed with the most, and also has the single funniest response of the day by Dr. Jim Linville (who also wins a prize for his post regarding women and biblioblogging).

Why John Hobbins and Alan Lenzi are Awesome...

2009-09-03T13:39:00.000-07:00

Speaking of blogs I really like, I just read a great comment response over on John Hobbins' Ancient Hebrew Poetry. The post itself is, of course, excellent and stimulating as usual, but his extended response to one of his commentators is just brilliant. Reading it was, for me, one of those moments when you find somebody else articulating perfectly thoughts you've been mulling over for a while but just couldn't quite spit out. I have this experience regularly on John's blog. Though, I should also note, he remains mistaken in his belief that Hebrew has a tense-based verbal system ;).

Update: Not surprisingly John's response led to an extended discussion regarding the nature and respective merits of deism/theism and agnosticism between John and a reader (and scholar) named Alan Lenzi. On the substance of the discussion I tend to come down on John's side (not very surprising), but I appreciated Alan's point of view and the way that he expressed himself. Very often discussions like this are filled with invective and varying levels of unkindness. John and Alan, however, manage to have a discussion in which they disagree strongly without (to be blunt) behaving like jackasses. This is rare and refreshing. I wonder if the reason for their ability to converse civilly on such an incindiary subject is a product of both intellectual humility and intellectual rigor. I think that it is.

Lurking...

2009-09-01T08:05:00.001-07:00

I have a pretty extensive blogroll off on my sidebar there, and it represents a lot of the blogs that I frequent, but there are a few brilliant blogs out there that for whatever reason I haven't gotten around to including. I mostly get to those blogs only irregularly and via other people's blogrolls (especially Jon's and Jim's). But I've been thinking that those blogs deserve the very, very little bit of press that I can give them in the hopes that others will find them as entertaining and challenging as I do. So, here's where I lurk (I comment every once in a while, but mostly I lurk), check them out and enjoy:

First up is the thoughts of forrestsaurus. I don't think I know Forrest herself, but I'm pretty sure I know her in-laws. In any case she is an absolutely wonderful poet and photographer. I strongly recommend you go surf around and check out her work.

Next are two blogs that belong to a couple of Jon's old profs from Briercrest, Scatterings and Theommentary. Fun, eclectic musings on life and theology and academia.

One of the best biblioblogs out there (again inexplicably absent from my blogroll) is Scotteriology, Scott Bailey's blog. He is very smart, outrageously funny, and used to be an NHL goalie. Especially good are his hermeneutics videos.

Another biblioblog I hit once in a while is Clayboy. A fun read from an Anglican minister in the UK.

Finally there's Matt Wilkinson's sinnersbleeders. A delightfully eclectic blend of indie film and music, with some cultural criticism thrown in for good measure. If you're looking for new music and new films you've never heard of but should watch, sinnersbleeders is a good place to find them.

There you are, a little PR plug for some blogs you should all try. Happy surfing.

Whose Metanarrative?

2009-08-20T09:40:00.001-07:00

I've been watching TED lectures during my breaks for the last couple of days, and just now at lunchtime I watched this talk by Alain de Botton. The talk, if you don't feel like watching it yourself, is about redefining success in modern culture. de Botton says an awful lot of things that I agree with very deeply.

His most interesting point is that, no matter how much we like to pretend they are, our societies are not strict meritocracies but that there are many accidental factors that go into the making of the life of any given person. This means that just because someone isn't "successful" in the minds of the general public (rich, famous, blah blah), it does not follow that they are intrinsically unworthy.* De Botton goes on to suggest that we should show much more something to people who are not "successful" in the popular sense. I say something because he never really defines what he means. It's like being nicer to those people, but without the sense of patronizing them. It's like understanding those people and understanding that given a different set of circumstances you or I could be in that self-same situation, but with the additional burden of also loving them. What he's talking about, though he never uses the term, is grace. Not ballet-dancer kind of grace, but the grace-of-our-Lord-Jesus-Christ kind of grace.

De Batton also talks about the importance of strong father/mother role models in the lives of men/women respectively, and how what we need in a father (or mother) is a combination of firm discipline to instill in us the sense that we are responsible creatures, and deeply compassionate love to remind us that we are also subject to the vicissitudes of life. He is describing, whether he knows it or not, the Christian conception of God and also the Christian conception of good human parenting.

When I had this thought during his talk it struck me that, though de Batton explicitly characterizes himself as a secularist, I was listening to the Christian metanarrative (that is, the Christian story or worldview). Note that when de Batton cherry-picks from another thinker he doesn't go to Nieztche or Plato, he goes to St. Augustine of Hippo. I was tangentially involved with a conversation on Jon's blog a few months ago where the claim was put forward that Christianity is basically just a religiousy version of the culture in which it is found. This is certainly true some of the time, but it is important to note that the waters run both ways on this issue. Whether he would admit it or not de Botton is, in this talk, pinching a Christian idea and dressing it in a secular waistcoat. The problem, I would contend, is that disassociating the idea of grace from God robs the concept of both its legitimate philosophical underpinnings and also of its ultimate power and authority.

*I freely grant the tension here between this and my recent post on personal responsibility. The tension is important, but that's not what I want to talk about here. Perhaps in a future post.

TED...

2009-08-18T19:00:00.001-07:00

My father-in-law put me on to this great site called TED (Technology/Entertainment/Design...though they've branched out into other disciplines now). It has short presentations on all sorts of topics (from world poverty to physics) given by experts and public figures, some of whom are rather well known (e.g. Michelle Obama on education). The best part? They're all absolutely free. I've only tapped bits and pieces so far, but what I've seen has been very interesting indeed. The catch-phrase for TED is "Ideas Worth Spreading." Seems to me spreading interesting ideas is a practice worth pursuing.

Personally I'm going to start with this presentation by Alisa Miller on modern news-media, and then this presentation by Ken Robinson on creativity-centred education.

Update:

Well I've listened to both talks now. Miller's was short and she clearly felt a little nervous, but her point was excellent and her visuals particularly drove it home. What she said, in a nutshell, is that the American news-media is almost entirely worthless if one wants to know anything apart from whether or not Britney Spears is sticking with her current diet. This is something I already knew, but it is always worth repeating.

Robinson's talk was quite a bit longer, almost 20 mins, and was exceptional. His presentation was funny, engaging, and (most importantly) powerful and pursuasive. His point in a nutshell is that we need to radically rethink the way that we approach education. One of the most important and telling truths that he pointed out is that in the modern education system the "best" product that an education can produce is a college professor. Speaking as a doctoral student and somebody who someday wants to be a college professor, this is a very bad thing. It's not that college professors are not valuable, it's just that being good with (a very select and narrowly defined part of) your brain should not be the gold-standard for worth in young people (or any person). Performance in school is one of the primary ways that we evaluate a person's worth in our culture, and with our school systems designed as they are we are doomed to underevaluate brilliance in children who are great at something other than mathematics or language. In any case, this lecture in particular is worth your time.

Learning...

2009-08-17T09:26:00.000-07:00

Bryan Bibb has a link to this excellent essay on pedagogy and the concept of learning. There are any number of striking and intriguing bits in the paper, and I strongly encourage you to read it whether you are a teacher, student, or anybody else for that matter. Which parts jumped out at me most strongly?

"Intellectual growth has been characterized as the progression from ignorant certainty to intelligent confusion" (15). I don't think I know anybody with an advanced degree or similar expertise in their field who would disagree with that statement. The whole section in which this quotation is found is about how our attitudes to knowledge and learning change and develop throughout the educational process. Very interesting stuff.

The other bit that hit me really hard was a the point-by-point comparison of A and C students right at the end of the paper. There are two tables on pgs. 24-25 that compare the skills, attitudes, and habits of successful and unsucessful students. After reading these I would suggest that these tables aren't just about students, but in many ways could be re-applied to a variety of other social situations (the workplace and the home for instance). What struck me most about these comparisons is that C students generally see themselves as victims and tend to take on passive roles. This is especially notable in the second table. Passivity is a major component in every "unsuccessful" box on that table. This drives home an important truth that I think a lot people generally, and not just students, need to reflect upon. Your education, your job performance, your family life...you have the ability to affect all of these things. I'm not so naive as to suggest that these social situations are totally within a person's individual control, but it's equally ridiculous to think that they are totally out of our control. Your boredom with your classes, your complaints about your teachers, your whining about your boss or your co-workers, these are all things that you have the ability to affect. They are, to some degree, your responsibility. You will never find, in other words, an A student who doesn not take responsibility for her own education. You just won't.

In any case, read the whole article, particularly if you're an educator in any capacity.

District 9...

2009-08-14T21:16:00.001-07:00

Thanks to some generous friends we had chance for a night out this evening and went to see District 9, a new film produced by Peter Jackson and directed by Neill Blomkamp. My thoughts in brief? Go see this movie. There, now if you like you can just skip the rest, which are my thoughts at length.

The basic plot is pretty simple. An alien spaceship comes to halt in the sky above Johannesburg. It doesn't move for a long time so the government cuts into the ship and finds a whole host of aliens who appear to be starving. They are ferried down to the surface where a refugee camp is set up. When the story proper picks up the aliens have been in the camp, which has now taken on the form of one of the worlds worst ghettos, for some 20 years. The government of South Africa has contracted a company called Multi-National United (a private paramilatary firm, a la Blackwater) to clear the aliens (derogatorily called Prawns) out of the current camp in Johannesburg to a concentration camp hundreds of kilometers away. The main character is Wikas van de Merwe, an MNU employee who is heading up the team serving eviction notice to the Prawns. Things obviously get more complicated from there, but I'll let you go watch the actual film.

First of all the direction is superb, and I don't think I've ever seen a better use of CG in a film. Additionally, Sharlto Copley, who plays van de Merwe, is excellent and carries some very powerful scenes. He also provides a performance that convincingly captures every moment along a pretty extended arc of character development.

Some of the "bad guys" are a little too typical, and there are elements of the plot that might have felt formulaic in another movie. The thing is, those two issues are very easy to ignore in this film, because it is so conceptually original. I can honestly say that I've never seen an alien movie, or a sci-fi movie, anything like this. The whole thing just felt so completely real in a way that sci-fi and fantasy never quite do.

The one point of difficulty thematically is something that seems to afflict an awful lot of movies that explore otherness. It's the human being (read White Male) who saves the alien (read African, Asian, Woman, insert subaltern here). I'm never quite sure what to do with this problem. These kinds of films are trying to challenge oppression, and are particularly interested in creating a sense of filial love in the oppressor for the oppressed. District 9 does this very well by humanizing characters who are, quite literally, not human. And it's also necessary to humanize van de Merwe, who represents the oppressor, in order that we the audience might identify with him. And it's even necessary for the oppressor to be the main character because that's who we as the audience must identify with most closely. We are the oppressors, so we must see our oppression. But how can you encourage an audience, particularly in Western culture, to identify with a completely non-heroic character?

Even taking this issue into account District 9 is a brilliant piece of work that everyone should go see. If this film doesn't garner at least a whole host of award nominations, to say nothing of actual awards, it will just serve as further evidence that Hollywood is filled with dilettantes and tools.

Me Read Hebrew Good...

2009-08-11T09:39:00.001-07:00

In my continual attempt to break myself of some of my bad Hebrew habits (over reliance on Logos being the worst) I'm working on Hebrew pretty extensively this month. Currently this is taking the form of working through Ehud Ben Zvi's excellent workbook, Readings in Biblical Hebrew. One of the great things about this workbook is that it requires that you have an actual Hebrew text open as you work through because the readings are not provided for you. I'm using my trusty hard-copy BHS (no Logos allowed, except for checking GKC and BHRG which I don't have in print...yes, even BDB is hard-copy, we're back in the stone age here), and I just committed one of the sillier, though probably not totally uncommon, mistakes that one makes when reading Hebrew. I was trucking along in 1 Sam 1, reading v. 12 which ends the first left hand page of 1 Sam in my BHS, and when the page ended I did what I always do when I finish a left hand page...I looked up and over and the right hand page. Then I spent a couple of minutes being very, very confused. Why is there a 3mp pronomial suffix here? What the hell is that 'sr doing? Huh? What's going on here?!?!

Then I stopped, scratched my head sheepishly, and flipped the left hand page over where I found a perfectly sensible clause that fit very nicely indeed with the first part of v. 12. Yes Colin, Hebrew reads right to left. My lesson for the day. Sigh.

Uh-Huh...

2009-08-10T08:34:00.000-07:00

John Hobbins has a great post over on Ancient Hebrew Poetry about comparing and contrasting texts from different cultures (Genesis and Atrahasis are his examples). Anybody interested in the relationship between the Bible and other surrounding cultures should read and think through what he says there, particularly the bit about contrastive approaches. And the dialogue with Angie Erisman (whose excellent blog seems to have gone the way of all flesh) is also very valuable. I like John's description of intertextuality as a cultural web. This serves as a corrective to those who use the term "intertextuality" to refer to any and every kind of allusion or reference and who constantly ascribe authorial intention to such connections. Sometimes allusions are intentional, but a lot of the time they are just a consequence of cultural (or inter-cultural) meta-data, and discussions of intention and ascription and dependence are illegitimate.*

Also John's notes regarding cultural divisions are very important. "Culture" is a tough concept. Where does one culture begin and another end? How do we know? Are these divisions simply arbitrary? Just heuristic devices we use to keep our questions and answers straight? I think they are probably more than arbitrary but it's hard to know where to draw those lines. One significant corollary for me is the question of the relationship between various levels of social interaction (family, community, culture, etc) and various sub-divisions of language (register, idiolect, dialect, language, etc). One of the papers I'll be writing in the near future will explore the possibility of using linguistic markers in concert with literary form in order to help identify and delimit passages in the Latter Prophets. I still haven't the faintest clue if it will work, but the problems inherent in inter-cultural relationships that John identifies in his post are the same problems that I'll be facing as I try to eke out my methodology in that paper (albeit my questions will probably be more intra-cultural).

The moral of the story? Whether inter or intra-cultural, these kinds of questions are difficult and lend themselves to tendentious arguments. Great care is required.

*As a brief side-note, there are notable post-modern authors (e.g. Umberto Eco) who do make intentional use of intertextual irony, but even here I think such authors (Eco for certain) would admit that there are significant and important instances of intertextuality that are not a product of conscious authorial intention. To extend John's web metaphor, some strands are woven on purpose, and some strands are not.

A Three Hour Tour...

2009-08-10T08:08:00.001-07:00

Well we're back from our visit to Saskatchewan. It was wonderful to be home with our families, and to let Grandma and Grampa, and Oma and Opa, and all of the aunties and uncles, dote on and spoil Liam. We had an early birthday party for the little man while we were home and needless to say the only grandchild/nephew in either of our families made out like a bandit. The vacation as a whole was lovely and relaxing and lots of fun. And the trip back to Hamilton was a gong show.

If one were to catch a direct flight from Saskatoon to Hamilton (an impossibility with Westjet, by the by), that flight would probably take about 3.5 hours. With airport waits and such the whole trip would probably take less than 5 hours door to door. But there aren't any direct flights from Saskatoon to Hamilton. Instead you have to fly to Calgary (an hour's flight in exactly the wrong direction) and catch a connector. So our initial itinerary for the trip home included the one hour flight to Calgary (that left at 6:10am, which meant we were at the airport at 5:10), a two hour layover, and then the 4 hour flight to Hamilton. The first bit went fine. The layover was going fine as well. We were keeping Liam happy and busy with various toys, stroller rides, and some strategic use of the portable DVD player Jin's parents gave us (thank you!). Then, with about 30 mins to go, we heard an announcement over the PA system. Our plane had been (no I'm not kidding) struck by lightning. Needless to say our flight was cancelled. So we trundled off to get our lugguage and then went to the Westjet counter to see what they were going to do with us. After standing in line for over an hour (where I chatted with some nice folks from Abbotsford) we were informed that Westjet could get us on a flight to Pearson Airport in Toronto with the promise of some kind of transport to Hamilton once we got there. They very kindly gave us some food vouchers good in any of the airport's restaurants, and we went off to wait some more.

We finally boarded our flight to Toronto at 12:30 or so (we'd been in the Calgary airport since shortly after 7am), and took off just before 1pm. Liam was great the whole time. He played well in the airport, and ate and played well in the restaurant, and when the plane finally took off he fell asleep on Jin's lap straight away. He slept for almost the whole flight, only waking up in time for the descent into Toronto.

We picked up our lugguage (which took forever...I hate big airports) and climbed aboard the shuttle bus Westjet had wrangled for us for the hour drive from Toronto to Hamilton. Traffic was mercifully light and we pulled in to the Hamilton airport at around 6 Central time (8 EST, which we were now on). Our friend Connan was kind enough to come pick us up, so we loaded up his minivan in the pouring rain (Hamilton rain, not Saskatoon rain...which to say real rain, not wussy rain) and set off for home. On the way home we got a flat tire. No, I'm not joking. Mercifully the rain had stopped, and Connan and I didn't get any wetter as we changed the tire. We finally arrived at home at around 7:30pm Central (9:30 EST), having been travelling since 5:10am Central time.

And the funny thing? Though we were horribly tired and rather hungry by the time we got home, it hadn't really been all that bad a trip. Liam was a trooper, Jin and I were mostly laughing about it by the end (the tire was particularly funny), and everyone got home safe (with the exception of Connan's tire). Still, I think I would have preferred the direct flight from Saskatoon to Hamilton.

Deadwood and Deep v. Surface Structure...

2009-07-20T19:52:00.001-07:00

I've been watching the first season of HBO's Deadwood. One of the bits of controversy that has surrounded this story of an old-west town is the use of profanity. Deadwood is the story of the real historical town of Deadwood, an outlaw settlement in the Black Hills of Montana in 1876. But here's the thing, the characters in the TV show swear like sailors. The language is so offensive that I won't even give examples. Of course these words that the writers use are not words that people really used in 1876. But the profanity of 1876 would sound silly to people in our time and culture, and so the writers decided to import modern profanity as a creative anachronism. On a visceral level at least, this works very well indeed.

This goes to the heart of an issue in linguistics that I've been thinking about lately. Linguists talk about deep structure and surface structure. Surface structure is the actual grammatical structure of a particular sentence or phrase or utterance as found in reality. Deep structure is the so-called "kernel" sentence or essence that underlies the surface structure. A passive sentence is the classic example. According to this thinking sentences 1a and 1b have different surface structure but identical deep structure:

1a: Wild Bill Hickok was shot by Jack McCall.
1b: Jack McCall shot Wild Bill Hickok.

Linguists who believe in deep structure say that the semantic value (the meaning for lack of a better term) of these phrases is identical. Linguists who don't believe in deep structure might deny this.

In Deadwood the use of anachronistic language assumes that modern swearing has essentially the same deep structure as the swearing of 1876. Therefore replacing one with the other is actually a faithful way of translating. But I wonder, and here is where deep structure becomes a problem, if there isn't something else going on apart from semantics and if that something else might not be the same from 1876 to 2009. Like I said, I'm still thinking about it.

Half-Blood Prince the Movie...

2009-07-20T19:16:00.000-07:00

**spoiler alert**

Jinny and I had a rare night out on Friday night and went to see the newly release Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. This movie is based on one of my favorites of the 7 book Potter series and so I was curious (though frankly not excited) to see what they'd do with this one. My one word review? Mediocre. This film is more evidence that these kinds of books just don't translate well to the big screen.

There was, however, a lot to love in the film. Dan Radcliff, Emma Watson, and Rupert Grint (the actors who play Harry, Hermione, and Ron) seem finally to be coming in to their own. Grint's physical comedy was particularly good, and he and Radcliff had a number of great scenes together. All in all the dynamic between the three friends was very good, much better in fact than in any of the previous five films. Additionally, Michael Gambon's Dumbledore is a vast improvement over the absurdly intense Dubledore of Goblet of Fire and the ridiculously stoic Dumbledore of Order of the Phoenix. Gambon does a much better job this time out capturing Dumbledore's odd combination of brilliance, intensity, ferocity, and oddball goofiness. It's that eclectic nature that people like about Dumbledore, and I think that Gambon's failure to capture it represents one of the key failures of films 3-5. Here he gets it right.

But those good things are not enough to make this a good film. It is just too choppy, too disjointed to ever be great. This choppiness notwithstanding it may have been a much better movie had it not been for the two worst adaptation decisions I've ever seen in a film. You'll have to watch the movie to know what I mean, but let me just say that for the life of me I don't understand what the Christmas scene was for, nor why they removed all of the action from the climax of the movie. Those writing/directing decisions were just plain weird.

If you're a Potter fan by all means go and see the movie. There are enough fun bits to make it worth your money. If you're not a Potter geek, just wait for the DVD, you'll be glad you did.

Buyer Beware...

2009-07-16T06:45:00.001-07:00

A discussion has been making the rounds regarding whether or to what degree amateur biblical scholarship is a legitimate enterprise. You can see the relevant history (and trace the backlinks for the longer backstory) on Matthew's page here, Jim's here, and Doug's here. Though I find Jim's position (leave the Bible to the experts alone) to be extreme, I certainly sympathize with his point. There is an awful lot of nonsense out there that pases for "biblical scholarship." And it's not just silliness like ex-firefighters chasing down the "treasure" of the Copper Scroll. AKMA pointed to a new Bible software system the other day, and I must say that the list of "biblical scholars" who contribute to the expert videos was very worrying. I mean, I've got nothing against Max Lucado, but he isn't a Bible expert of any kind. He's a very good preacher, and I'm sure a good pastor, but his reflections on Scripture in his books tend to be rather shallow to be frank. But people assume he's an expert because he's written and sold a lot of books. I'll let Jim and the others fight it out over whether Lucado is a bad guy because he hasn't got a PhD (I tend to think not), because I want to make a slightly different point here.

As much as non-specialists can be dangerous when they spout off, the fact is that they are only dangerous if people listen to them. The responsibility lies, in the end, with the reader to make good judgments about what is being read. Credentials don't equal correctness, but credentials do tell you one thing. They tell you that the person who's work you are reading has done his or her homework (literally). I don't care what anyone says, a PhD or ThD is not an easy get. So, dear reader, if you want to know about the Bible and you want to avoid the dangers of being misled by people who may or may not know what they are talking about, let me recommend the following:

Ask why the person you're reading has the authority to say what he/she is saying. Why are his/her ideas more valuable than your own? Google the author, know who it is that you're trusting.
Ask where and to what degree the author is educated...and in what field for that matter (a PhD in Chemistry doesn't make you an expert in Biblical Studies).
Remember that the person who wrote the book you're reading probably borrowed some of those ideas from other books. Find out which ones and maybe read them too.
Get to know an expert personally and ask that person for advice. Most of the churches I've been a part of over the years have had at least one or two professors of theology or biblical studies hiding somewhere. If there's nobody in your congregation, then email a prof at your local denominational seminary. I'm betting you'd get a very cordial reply.
Instead of reading popular Christian literature about Jesus or the Bible, try reading a commentary along with your regular Bible reading. I'd recommend a very accessible series like NIV Application or Interpretation, or the New International Biblical Commentary. I talked my wife into doing this once and she said it was one of the richest devotional experiences she's ever had.

The long and the short of it is this: buyer beware. Getting a book about the Bible published is no harder than getting a self-help book published, and we all know what nonsense those things can be. If you are a Christian you should take the Bible very seriously indeed, so consider your supplimentary reading carefully as well. And by the by, all of this goes doubly and triply so for internet sources and blogs (including this one...I don't consider myself an expert on anything yet).

The Road and Adaptation...

2009-07-15T18:10:00.000-07:00

Early this summer I finished the best work of fiction that I've read in a long while. It was The Road by Cormac McCarthy (No Country for Old Men). It is simultaneously the most haunting and most powerfully touching story I've read in ages. A post-apocalyptic journey tale, it seemed like an odd fit for McCarthy (admittedly I only know some of his other work), but he elevated the genre to perhaps its highest point. He sidesteps all of the post-apocalyptic clichés with grace. McCarthy's greatest accomplishment in this work is his ability to make you feel, down to your very bones, the emotions that his characters feel. Their dread is your dread. Their loneliness is your loneliness. Their despair is your despair. And most importantly, their fragile, precious, tenuous (even tendentious) hope belongs to the reader as well. I've never had an author capture me emotionally in that way.

One of the thoughts I had when I picked the book up at first was, "I bet somebody's gonna make a movie out of this." After all, post-apocalyptic stories are all the rage, and McCarthy's last book-to-movie adaptation was essentially perfect (No Country). But as I was reading I became more and more convinced that The Road is un-adaptable to the big screen. Or maybe it's better to say that Hollywood could never adapt it, because they would be unwilling to do what would be necessary to make the adaptation true. What makes an adaptation true? It isn't necessarily about detailed accuracy, making sure all the little characters and side-stories and inside jokes make the cut. It is about spirit. It is about ensuring that the emotion of the film, the themes, the main characters, the ethos and pathos mirror the book. The Road is, it turns out, being adapted into a film. I've only seen the trailer but I knew immediately that it will not be a good adaptation. I won't run down the specifics, but let's just say that all of those clichés that McCarthy side-steps, the film very clearly blunders straight into. It might be a good movie, and it will probably be a popular movie (maybe even critically successful), but I cannot see how it could ever be a good adaptation.

Let me put this another way. All of the things that the Coens did to make No Country perfect, Hillcoat (director for The Road) has clearly failed to do. It's too bad nobody got Joel and Ethan on board for The Road.

Crap...

2009-07-15T15:55:00.000-07:00

Crap, I've been added to a list. I commented on a post over at Hebrew and Greek Reader and in reward for my thoughts Daniel and Tonya (they are two people right?) put me on their list of student bibliobloggers.* Which means that now I have to actually pay some attention to my poor old blog. For the past three weeks or so I've been right on the verge of taking randomcolin off the air for good, but I suppose that, now I'm on a list and all, I should try to live up to this great trust. Though on an upnote, I did make their top ten list for their favorite comments recently, huzzah!

If you're into Greek and Hebrew or linguistics generally (and who isn't?!) go check out Daniel and Tonya's blog, it's excellent. Plus they like Derek Webb and so must be very nice people indeed. Plus they go to school at Stellenbosch and study with Christo van der Merwe, which is unassailably cool.

*For the record I hate this term, but as there are whole websites and tracking systems and rankings devoted to biblioblogs (a blog devoted, at least in part, to biblical studies), to say nothing of the annual SBL bibliobloggers' dinner, the name is clearly here to stay.

CSBS...

2009-05-28T11:22:00.000-07:00

Jin and I just got back from Ottawa where I was attending the annual meeting of the Canadian Society of Biblical Studies. I had the opportunity to present my first paper at an academic conference. The paper is called "(Re)Visionary History: Historiography and Religious Identity in the Animal Apocalypse," and is based on some ideas that I worked on in my MA thesis. I presented it in the Ancient Historiography session, and in it I discuss the use of pseudonymous authorship and clean/unclean divisions in the imagery of the Animal Apocalypse of 1 Enoch 85-90. I won't publish the paper here as I'll be submitting it for publication in the edited volume that the session puts out each year, but if anyone wants a copy feel free to drop me an email.

It was a great conference over-all. My presentation went very well, and the paper was well received. I had the chance to argue with Prof. John Van Seters, which was an honour. There were any number of other interesting and enjoyable papers during the conference. I think that my two favorites were Ehud Ben Zvi's paper on whether the label "Deuteronomistic" is anything more than a modern scholarly construct, and John Kessler's paper on the "Empty Land" motif in Persian period Yehud. It was also great to meet some well-known OT scholars, as well as many other grad students. I got to put faces to a lot of names, which is always nice. Everyone was tremendously welcoming and though I was quite tired by the end, it was an excellent experience and I look forward to going again.

As a side note, I was involved in an online discussion with AKMA and Mark Goodacre a few weeks ago over whether it is better to read from a manuscript or to use skeletal notes during academic presentations. Though I argued there for manuscripts, I decided to take Dr. Goodacre's advice and try presenting from notes alone. I must say, I believe that he was very right. I was able to hit all of my major points, I didn't get bogged down in the complicated technical language you find in lots of presentations, and my friends tell me that mine was one of the more relaxed and accessible presentations they saw. I think that I'll try the "notes only" formula again in future and see if it keeps working for me.

This Too...

2009-04-19T03:52:00.001-07:00

I've been listening to Derek Webb again today. His song "This Too Shall be Made Right" off of The Ringing Bell did what it always does to me; it took hold of me, shook me, beat me, and embraced me all at once. Here are the lines that cut the deepest, for me at least:

There's a time for peace
There is a time for war
There's a time to forgive
and a time to settle the score
A time for babies to loose their lives
A time for hunger and genocide
and this too shall be made right.

Oh I don't know the suffering of people outside my front door
And I join the oppressors of those I choose to ignore
I'm trading comfort for human life
And that's not just murder it's suicide
and this too shall be made right.

The world in which we live is broken. I am a part of that brokenness. I am a collaborator. I don't want to be, and I try not to be, but I am. Even that wasn't really true. I try to try not to be. I want to try to try not to be. You get what I mean. That's where this song cuts. But it heals as well. It heals with an honest belief in the possibility, the hope, that the God who made the universe still cares for it, and that he has determined that his creation shall be made whole.

This is the tension of true apocalypse. I'm not talking about Left Behind garbage, but about the late prophetic and early apocalyptic literature of the Bible. Joel, Obadiah, Micah, Daniel, and Revelation (among many others). This is the message of the writers of the apocalypses and the so-called proto-apocalyptic literature. God will intervene. Not just will, but must. The world is irrevocably and intrinsically broken, and though we try, and we try to try, and we want to try to try to fix it, to reconcile it, to be reconciled to God himself, we are unable. So he does it.

An honest appreciation for this biblical literature, and an honest attempt to hold it in tension with the rest of the canon, leads to the kind of paradoxical but true sentiment of Webb's lyrics. The world is filled with horror. We must be conscious of it, we must act against it, but we must also understand that it is God who will, in the end, bring it to an end.

12 Hours Ago...

2009-04-04T20:32:00.001-07:00

I'm just getting ready to pack it in for the day and as is often the case I popped open my browser to check on my blogroll. I looked down the list at posts I had read earlier, around dinner time, and then I saw the most recent post over on 4712. It's a wonderful little question that I found in one of the comment threads and I encourage anybody who is interested to wander over there and check it out. What surprised me when I was looking at my blogroll just now is that I posted that question 12 hours ago. Twelve hours ago I was taking a 15 minute break from working on my major linguistics paper (pragmatic fronting of non-Predicate constituents in Obadiah...yeah, I know how to party). I just now finished working on it for the night. Twelve hours ago. This is just silly. Didn't quite finish either. I still have to write the conclusion. In theory that should be easy, so I'm gonna leave it till tomorrow when I go back to the library and work for another 16 hours. Two more days, two more days, two more days....

Goodnight.

Never Again?

2009-03-26T07:40:00.001-07:00

Just the other day AKMA was lamenting about his perceived lack of impact in the theological guild. There are some good encouragements and some very astute observations in the comments from that post that I strongly recommend you read. That post and those comments, in concert with conversations in the TA room here at Mac and some other stuff that's going on around the College, have gotten me thinking about the nature of the biblical and theological guild these days.

There was a time, especially in the late 19th and early to mid 20th centuries when the work of a single scholar could bust the whole enterprise open. Gunkel, Bultmann, even Childs who's work is often dismissed...all of these people and more blew the doors off of the scholarly community. I wonder if that's even possible anymore.

One of the things that is constantly on the mind of a PhD student is how to make that friggin dissertation work. Every institution that I know of has listed as an explicit requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy that the disseration "make an original contribution to the field of X." Of course there's a part of me that agrees that this is absolutely necessary. How can you be an expert without demonstrating that you can push the discussion forward? Another part of me is forced to admit that "pushing the discussion forward" means an entirely different thing now than it has before. There was a time when a single scholar could actually "push the discussion forward." Now all one of us can hope to do is to nudge the monolith half a milimeter one way or the other.

Take the work of Cristo Van der Merwe. Chances are even some biblical scholars out there don't really know his name. The fact is, however, that Van der Merwe, in his relentless attempts to engage OT/HB research with the latest in modern linguistics, has made serious contributions to our understanding of Hebrew. In my opinion his Biblical Hebrew Reference Grammar should be the standard text in the field. But it ain't. It ain't, and there are two reasons for that. In the first place there is the "old school" that needs to defend the validity and importance of its work, and so upstarts need to be put in their place. In the second place there's me, the (hopefully) up-and-coming scholar who's job it is to show why my work is better than the last guy's. And so what should be a sea-change, is instead just one more stiff breeze.

I don't know if there's anything to be done about all of this. I don't even know if anything should be done about all of this. Even as I'm writing this I feel ambiguous, conscious of the fact that even nudging the conversation is a pretty incredible accomplishment. Having said that there is a part of me that is also working to redifine success in the field of academic biblical studies. We need to move success beyond publishing contracts and good reviews, beyond the glory of 5,000 super-specialized uber-nerds relishing our work, and toward the grace of 30 undergrads who are shocked and challenged by the biblical texts, or the honour of bringing our humble contribution to the community of faith in worship services and bible studies. This isn't just about academics either. As a whole our culture has so badly mis-difined success.

Is it true that the academic landscape will never again be redrawn by a single hand? Yes, it probably is. But who says that's a bad thing?

What Words Do...

2009-03-17T12:39:00.001-07:00

I've been thinking a lot about language and linguistics lately. It's possible that this is a by-product of the fact that I'm taking a rather challenging course in advanced grammar and linguistics. Just a guess, it's hard to say why I think what I think. In any case, one of the most interesting and engaging concepts that I've come across lately is related to the question of what language is for. There's a linguist out there, a guy named Halliday (I quoted him about a zillion years ago in my last post), who suggests that language has a whole bunch of different functions. That is to say, language does a lot of things. Most of these things (I won't bother listing them all, it's kind of complicated) eventually clump together as we grow older. Eventually the most important clump, or meta-function, is the informational function. Language for adults is mostly about communicating information, about telling something to somebody that he/she doesn't know (or that we think he/she doesn't know, whatever).

Here's the thing, though. For kids this is one of the least important functions that language performs. I'm not sure exactly when this happens, I haven't read all of the relavant research, but early on in life when we are learning language we don't really think about language as a tool to give others new information. If you have little kids who have only recently learned to talk watch them and see if this seems right or not. It works with my son. If he sees a picture of a cow he says "Cow!" I'm pretty sure he's not telling me it's a cow. He knows I know that. What he's telling me is that he likes cows. He's using language to communicate not information, but emotion. He's engaging with me relationally.

This is, I think, why we have so much difficulty with poetry. We are so fixated on what the poem means that we completely miss what it is that poems are for. Poetry is trying to do something other than give information, it is trying to create an emotional encounter.

Let me put it another way. If I come home and my wife looks at me angrily and says "You're late," she is not using the informational meta-function of language. She is not trying to inform me of the fact that I am late. If I assume that her words are being used to communicate information the evening is likely going to go badly for me.

Your words do a lot of things, and though communicating information is an important one of those things, it isn't the only one. As an excercise today, try being more conscious of the relational aspect of your language and the language of those around you. Be attentive to what your words do and not just to what they mean. It is, at the very least, a fun experiment.

Surprised by the Successes...

2009-02-03T18:40:00.001-08:00

Michael Halliday, the renowned linguist, once wrote: "[Rather] than being surprised at the failures [of language], given the complexity of modern cultures, it seems to me we should be surprised at the successes." - Language, context, and text, pg. 9.

We so often become upset, even angry, that we are misunderstood. The fact is, it takes only a very little time studying the theoretical structure of language before one starts to realize that it is a miracle of the most profound order that anybody understands anything said by anybody else at all. Human language is a cultural sign-system of such monumental complexity that studying linguistics (that is, studying the nature of language) is one of the more difficult philosophical and socio-scientific tasks out there. But for all of that, the fact remains that language works in the world every second of every day. You are using language right now, in order to read this post. Though you, whoever you are, are nowhere near me right now, you understand me. Even the errors of grammar that are likely present in this post matter very little. Your mind is simply too fluent, to magnificent, to be stopped by what should, by all accounts, be an all but impossible task.

So perhaps we should be slower to anger when we are misunderstood. Perhaps we should be more joyful when we feel that another person has grasped what it was that we meant. Let us not be surprised by our communicative failures, but let us be surprised, and delighted, by our successes.

Ridonculous...

2009-01-31T09:27:00.001-08:00

I'm writing today and tomorrow, and that title is simply the only way to describe my current outline. Before I write a paper I always create an extensive outline to make sure that I stay on track (I have a tendency to rabbit-trail [mostly a by-product of my love for parenthetical remarks {which is probably due to my constant need to over-qualify every statement that I make (which is, I'm sure, evidence of some kind of deep-seeded psychosis or neurosis)}]). Today's outline is officially totally and completely out of hand. It is currently 3,949 words long. The paper is supposed to be 5,000 words long. Did I mention that the outline isn't done yet? It's hardly 2/3 done in fact. Ya, this is gonna end well.

Update: How's this for perverse? As I mentioned in the comments yesterday, my final outline was around 6,800 words. The final paper? 7,173 including bibliography, so really more like, 6,500 words. Ya, that's right, the outline was longer than the paper. Well, kind of. As always you can game stats almost interminably. When you add the footnotes to the word count of the final paper it's actually 9,600 words or so. Ya, I've got 3,000 words in the footnotes, got a problem with that? Also, I just want to reiterate that I love Endnotes. Without Endnotes I would have been up until 1:30am writing my bibliography, instead of just 12:30am. I can't believe that nobody ever told me about Endnotes, or anything like it for that matter, until last year. Typing out footnotes and bibliographies is for suckers!

Indeed.

2009-01-29T06:03:00.001-08:00

Indeed.

Miami's Worst Cop...

2009-01-17T19:04:00.001-08:00

I can't stand CSI: Miami. The reason is pretty simple; Horatio Cane is an ass. I'm sorry to put is so bluntly, particularly if you're fan,but there it is. It's hard to know if Cane's many irritating idiosyncrasies are the product of David Caruso's influence, or the influence of the writers and directors of the show. It's probably a combination of the two (though the rumours of Caruso's troubles on NYPD Blue may be some indication). Caine's bizarre manerisms and idiotic dialogue are enough reason to dislike him as a character, but that's not why I call him the worst cop in Miami.

I've never seen a single episode of CSI: Miami where Caine does not at least draw his weapon, and he fires it almost as often. CSI: Miami is currently running its 7th season. As of January 19/09 they will have produced 155 episodes. If we figure Caine's weapon-drawing ratio at once every second show (a wildly conservative estimate), then he has drawn his sidearm at least 72 times in 7 years. That's more than 10 times per year. I'll be even more conservative with my estimate of the number of times that Caine has discharged his firearm. Let's say he shoots at someone only once every four episodes. That means that he has, in seven years, fired his sidearm roughly 38 times. Though he does not always hit what he shoots at, I'm sure that he has shot at least one person per season (again, a wildly conservative estimate). So let's summarize our estimates of the good detective's stats. In seven years Caine has drawn his sidearm 72 times, discharged it 38 times, and killed or injured more than 7 people.

I personally know three police officers. To the best of my knowledge between the three of them, only one (a now-retired city cop) fired his sidearm in the line of duty, and that only one time in his entire
career. Granted none of them worked in Miami-Dade county, which does have a reputation for crime, but I still think the comparison is meaningful.

If Caine were a real cop can you even imagine the number of times that he would have been investigated by IA? Is there any chance at he would still be a lieutenant? Is there any chance he would still have a job at all?

The point that I'm trying to make here is that good cops don't pull their guns every second day. Good cops don't fire their weapons in the line of duty on a regular basis. Good cops don't shoot lots and lots
of people. In fact, good cops seem to do the opposite of those things. Someone might object that Caine is just a television character and that I'm taking him too seriously. He may be fictional, but the
place he holds in American life is as an icon of justice and that troubles me. It tells me that justice in the minds of many Americans can be achieved through rampant violence. That strikes me as a very bad thing. It reminds me of an episode of the West Wing where Toby is arguing with somebody about gun control and he asks the rhetorical question "What? Are Americans just more homicidal by nature?"

If Horatio Caine is an American hero, then Toby's question is worth exploring.

4712...

2009-01-10T16:21:00.001-08:00

Just a quick plug: the first post of the new year is up on Four, Seven and Twelvefold. For those of you who don't know, 4712 is a collaborative blog exploring conversations about evangelicalism and Christianity in the 21st century. If you haven't been, check it out and feel free to jump in to the conversation.

Hooray for Empty Rooms...

2009-01-10T10:46:00.001-08:00

I love weekends at the beginning of the semester. Nothing is due tomorrow so there are no undergrads using up all of the plug-ins in the library. Including me and the staff it looks like there are about 12 people at the Mills library today. Hooray for empty rooms filled with books.

Locating Inspiration...

2009-01-08T08:35:00.001-08:00

Where does divine inspiration lie in relation to the biblical text? Was the author inspired tying it to authorial intent? Are the words inspired tying it to the text? Is the interpreter inspired tying it to reading strategy? More importantly, how does the idea of inspiration and the location of inspiration relate to hermeneutics? Do questions of inspirational location even matter if the hermeneutical considerations overshadow the problem? For instance, if inspiration is tied to authorial intent but authorial intent is hermeneutically impossible to recover apart from the text itself, is it at all meaningful to call the individual authors inspired? Or, if the text is inspired but texts are only interpreted (and perhaps even constructed) by readers, then is it at all meaningful to call the text inspired? Or, if the reader is inspired then how does that inspiration proceed and of what purpose is the text at all?

These are the questions that are currently consuming my days as I attempt to write a paper about the relationship between biblical scholarship and Christian Theology.

At It Again...

2009-01-08T05:12:00.001-08:00

The Christmas break is over and as of last Monday I'm officially back to school for semester #2. So far it's been less overwhelming which is not surprising but still nice. Though I enjoyed my classes last semester (particularly my OT in the NT class) this semester is much more exciting. I'm taking Advanced Semitic Grammar and Linguistics, and Biblical Theology. Biblical Theology in particular is a passion of mine, and linguistics is a discipline I've brushed up against a couple of times in the past and found very helpful (especially with some hermeneutical problems).

I also feel like I have a better handle on how to make this doctoral thing doable. My research has gotten much more efficient and my focus much sharper, both of which are essential. Hopefully that translates into better writing and less stress. I'm not super hopeful about the second bit, but oh well.

The other thing I've noticed is how happy I am to be back at it. I was totally exhausted by November last semester that the last few weeks were just a blur, like that final dash at the end of a long run. But after a nice long break I was getting a little bored and stir crazy and it's nice to be working again. After you train yourself for months and months to work all the time it becomes difficult to do anything else. That's something to watch for I guess.

The Joy of Cooking...

2009-01-01T07:54:00.000-08:00

As some of you know my main hobby is cooking. I spend an awful lot of time cooking, creating recipes, watching cooking shows, reading cooking books, etc. I got some money for Christmas this year from my parents and my Gram J, and I used it to buy two more lovely knives, thus (basically) completing my collection. I bought a Wusthof-Trident paring knife, and a Kasumi titanium 13mm chef's knife (which is really more of a utility knife). Here they are on the left. I got them both for a wicked awesome price at the Boxing Day sale at The Casual Gourmet here in Hamilton.

Yes, the Kasumi (the bottom knife) really is titanium...well, kind of. The knife is actually a Molybdenum-Vanadium alloy (a super hard steel) with a titanium coating. That's why it's black. They say the titanium creates a non-reactive coating on the blade so there's no flavour transfer from the steel to the food. I've heard this argument before with regard to ceramic knives, and it still sounds like utter bunk to me, but the titanium does seem to provide an excellent strength to weight ratio for the knife. In any case, it's absurdly light. A little bit too light honestly. I do like the knife, and it's vastly superior to the crappy old utility knife I've been using up until now, but my Global Chef's Knife and Santoku Knife are in no danger of being replaced. My other criticism is that the angle of attack on the handle is a little bit too steep. It feels like I'm putting my energy in the wrong place when I cut. That might be my imagination or it might just be a comfort issue. Overall I'd only give the knife a B rating.

Though it was the Kasumi that I was excited about, the Wusthof turned out the be the real treat. I went to the store with the intention of buying a MAC paring knife, but nothing in stock really turned my crank plus I've heard some mediocre things about MACs of late. Then the manager showed me the Wusthof Culinar series knife. She's not planning to stock that line anymore so the display models were 50% off, which seemed like just he right price to me, plus the all-steel look blends nicely with my Globals, so I went for it. I'm not generally a fan of German knives. I hate my Henckels knives, especially my five-star paring knife. It doesn't sharpen very well and can't keep an edge at all. It was also rather pricey which only adds to my deep bitterness. I've also tried some Wusthofs before and never been overly impressed. With all of this I wasn't expecting a lot from the paring knife, but it is awesome! Wonderfully sharp, lovely balance and hand feel, cuts like a dream...the perfect knife so far. The only test now is the durability of the edge, but it will take quite a while to finish that test (I hope). Without accounting for durability I'm happy to give this one an A+, though that will drop down to a B if the edge won't hold.

On the subject of cooking, Jin had an idea that I like. She suggested some kind of recipe exchange with my friends, so I thought I'd start on the blog. I've got quite a few recipes that I'm happy with at this point, many of which are my own, and I thought it would be nice to share the wealth. I'd also love to see your recipes, be they your originals or riffs on someone else's work. Here's a start from me.

BBQ Tangerine-Marinated Chicken:

1 medium roasting Chicken
1 small onion
3 cloves garlic
2 tangerines (may substitute orange or any kind)
1/4 cup good olive oil
1/4 cup good honey
2 Tbsp molasses
1 Tbsp dijon mustard
bunch of fresh thyme
BBQ sauce for basting

Remove the breast and back-bones of the chicken so that you have two equal halves (alternatively have your butcher do this). Clean and dry the bird. Season all sides liberally with salt and pepper. In a bowl combine the zest and juice from the tangerines (strain out any pulp or seeds) and oil with the honey, molasses, and mustard. Quantities of honey and molasses are approximate, use enough to balance the acidity of the juice. Roughly chop the onion and smash the garlic and place in a large ziploc bag along with several sprigs of thyme. Place chicken in bag, pour marinade over chicken. Remove any excess air from the bag and ensure that all of the surfaces of the chicken are in contact with the marinade. Leave the marinating chicken in the fridge for at least 2-3 hours, and preferably overnight.

When you're ready to cook, preheat the outside burners of your BBQ (if you only have 2, preheat one side). Place chicken skin-side down over the hot flame until it's achieved a nice golden colour (be very careful not to burn, there's a lot of sugar in the marinade), then transfer to a spot off of direct heat and close the lid. Baste the chicken several times throughout the process with BBQ sauce (I use homemade, but a good store bought variety will do). It's difficult to suggest a precise cooking time as BBQs can vary dramatically in temperature. Instead use a meat thermometer and cook until the temp is about 170-175f (the recommended temp for chicken is 180, but the meat will continue to cook a little bit while it rests). Remove to a plate and tent with foil, let rest approx 10-15 mins.

You can carve the chicken into four pieces if you like, or if you have a couple of people with hearty appetites, go ahead a serve the halves as they are. I like to serve this with homemade fries and either a salad or a nice veg.

Words of (Sci-fi) Wisdom...

2008-12-14T17:21:00.001-08:00

I've been watching a lot of sci-fi lately, and even reading some. All of this science-fiction exposure has led to some words of wisdom that I think would apply if you were ever to find yourself caught in a science-fiction story. It is important to note that these bits of advice don't apply to the real world, but only to the science-fiction world, and should only be used in that particular reality.

1. If you see a door open, or open a door yourself, and it makes an ominous noise, beware. The door may or may not be dangerous. The best way of knowing if it's immediately dangerous is the tone of the noise. Minor key noises, bad; major key noises...well not good, there are no door-opening-noises that are good exactly, but if the noise is in a major key it's unlikely that a guy with a laser is about to charge through the door.
2. All super-powerful artifacts are intrinsically dangerous. In fact, the danger of the artifact is related directly to its power. That is to say, the more powerful the artifact, the more dangerous it is to the user.
3. If there is a place in the universe that you don't want to be, that's where you will find the person/object/information that you need most.
4. If there is a wise and comforting mentor in your life, she/he will be dead as a door-nail by the third act. Sorry, there's nothing to be done about it.
5. If someone approaches you holding a harmless looking object in a threatening or ominous way, it very well may be an artifact of immense power (cf. item #2) and you should treat it accordingly.
6. Grunge metal music in the background is a bad thing, especially if it's in a minor key and especially if there is somebody nearby welding something.
7. Be very careful who you trust, you never know if it might be a killer robot.
8. That woman/man you can't stand and constantly exchange sarcastic banter with? That's your soul-mate, may as well just get it over with and make out with her/him already.
9. Footsoldiers, peons, and "average" badguys of every description are the worst shots in the universe. If one of them has you in his sights I wouldn't worry too much.
10. Finally, the mystical power or energy that you think is bunk? It's actually the most powerful tool available to you and you may as well just get on board with it.

Again, these pieces of wisdom are offered as a public service to all those of you who might, at some time or another, find yourselves in a science-fiction story. I do hope that you find them helpful.

The Finish Line...

2008-12-07T15:58:00.001-08:00

I'm writing again today. As with the last time I posted on a writing day it's a paper for The Old Testament in the New Testament. This time my outline was in the neighborhood of 2,800 words for a 5,000 word paper. I'm about half done and sitting in the 2,000 word realm, so that's more or less right (the back end of papers are always longer, that's where the meat is). The only problem is that this time I'm much, much more tired than the first time. I've loved my first semester of PhD studies, but I can't pretend I'm not ready for a break. Eventually mental attrition becomes a serious factor and I'm all the way there right now. But I can see the finish line now. My last assignment is due at 3:30pm tomorrow afternoon. I'll give a 5 minute presentation, then I'll fall asleep until Thursday. Seriously, it might actually happen in the classroom while the other students are presenting. Don't anyone take it personally. If you're in the class with me you feel free to fall asleep while I'm presenting, I won't mind at all. Okay, I'm going to take a 30 minute break and then it's back at it until I can't make my fingers type anymore. If things go well (which they generally don't) I'll be done before midnight tonight. Wow that would be nice.

God on Trial...

2008-11-11T06:17:00.000-08:00

Before going to bed last night I was channel surfing for a few minutes and ran across the tail end of a film. It was clearly a holocaust film, set in one of the infamous barrack houses of an internment camp. I watched for maybe 30 minutes, and for that entire time the action unfolded only in that little room filled with shaven-headed Jewish men in filthy prison garb. It slowly dawned on me that I was watching a trial, and that the defendant was God himself. The two dozen or so men had accused God of breaching his covenant with the Jewish people. Men from around the room spoke, arguing their side of the case. Some defended God, calling Auschwitz a test. Others contended that there was no God and that religion was simply a tool used by the powerful. Some said that God was real but had abandoned the Jews.

Near the end came an incredibly powerful and moving moment of the film. All that had come before was mesmerizing, beautiful, and terrible. But this moment will remain branded in my mind.

Just as the judges sit to deliver their verdict one final man stands to speak. He has been silent. He is a rabbi. He begins by asking questions about the history of the Jews, posing them mostly to the other rabbi, who is also a judge. The questions begin with the Exodus and each one challenges the motives of God. What is so powerful is that this rabbi, who knows his Torah in and out, asks questions that require the listener to question, not what God did, but why he did it. This rabbi, named Akiba, accepts that God sent the plagues on Egypt and gave the Promised Land over to the Jews. What he questions, however, is whether this demonstrates God's goodness. "What of the Egyptian children?" he asks. "Was the Promised Land empty?" Then comes the climax of his speech. He inverts the usual Jewish (and Christian, and Muslim) proclamation that "God is Good!"

"God is not good!" he cries. "God was never good! He was only on our side."

That last phrase should be branded onto the hearts and into the minds of every believing person in the entire world. It reminds us of our great sin. The belief that because we are on top, because we are winners, because we are prosperous and happy and rich and comfortable, that God must be on our side. What an evil that sentiment is. What it requires, as Akiba saw so clearly, is a God who is a son of a bitch. It requries a vindictive, feckless, hateful, cruel, and wicked diety who's morality is far surpassed by his creation.

God is convicted of breach of covenant.

Then the Germans come. Half of the men are taken and half left. As the selected men are taken one of them, a quivering, whimpering man, cries out to Akiba, "What now? What do we do now that we've convicted God?" Akiba answers, "Now we pray." And so the half that are taken and the half that remain are shown praying. They each hold one hand over their heads because they have no headcoverings. They pray a liturgical prayer together, witnessing the greatness and mercy of God, and the half that were taken are led naked into a chamber that looks like a shower-room but, of course, is not.

So often artistic attempts to deal with issues like suffering, election, and the nature of God are either reductionist or just stupid. This, thankfully, is not. The film takes seriously the problems associated with true evil and suffering, as well as the sometimes paradoxical and even hypocritical nature of faith in God. For all of that I still felt a sense of hope in the end. I didn't feel distant from God but drawn to him. The sense of horror at the sight of those men in that stark "shower" room was balanced with an equal sense of love for their nobility and their faith.

Which Moses?

2008-11-07T05:12:00.001-08:00

As I mentioned some time ago, I have recently written a paper on the way that Luke and Paul see and appropriate the character of Moses, particularly in Acts 7 and 2 Corinthians 3. On Monday I submitted the final revision of that paper. It is significantly improved from the initial submission but still needs a little bit of work. I'll see what my professor says when I get it back and if the changes required look reasonable I may reformat it for publication. In any case, this is one of the reasons blogging has been light lately so I thought it was only fair to reward my handful of loyal readers to read and critique the paper. If you do bother to read it and have any thoughts, please do let me know. Even if you think my argument is total bunk, it would still be nice to hear your thoughts. Follow the URL below to enjoy (or, you know, not).

Toffelmire, Colin. "Which Moses? An Exploration of the Function of Moses in Acts 7 and 2 Corinthians 3," McMaster Divinity College, 2008.

PS though it seems absurd that I need to make this explicit, I will anyways. Please note that all content on randomcolin, including academic papers provided by external hyperlink, are the sole property of Colin M. Toffelmire and shall not be reproduced in any form without the express permission of Colin M. Toffelmire. Brief citations may be used without permission on the condition that such citations include complete and accurate attribution.

A Good Day...

2008-11-03T19:24:00.001-08:00

Today was a good day, and until I'd had it I had no idea how badly I've needed it. As I've shared here a little bit already, PhD studies have been very challenging and the life adjustment involved has been pretty significant. It hasn't been bad. In fact Jinny and I love our new town and our new home, and life here has generally been great.

All of that is true, but the one thing that I've been missing is the feeling of triumph. All of you career students out there know that you really do have to win sometimes. Sometimes you have to do better than you expected. Sometimes you need to be told something was excellent. This is what keeps you going, keeps you thinking that maybe you really do have a contribution to make.

Doctoral programs, however, are not designed to make you feel good. They are designed to push you, to challenge you, to make you think harder and more deeply than you ever might on your own. I don't know about other programs but in my first few weeks at McMaster Divinity College I can't count the number of times I heard some variation of "our job is to push you." Well, the faculty are doing their job and then some. The very best work I ever did in my M.A. is at best acceptable here. All of this is important. I need to be pushed, and as one of my friends reminds me repeatedly, I did pick this path.

But for all of that it still feels nice to win. Today I got back an assignment from the toughest marker I've ever sat under and it was much better than I'd expected. That felt great. Then this afternoon I presented a paper that frankly wasn't fantastic (though the fundamental idea is, I think, great). I was challenged with some really great constructive criticism, but I also received some very kind words and some affirmation that I was going in a fruitful direction. Those things may seem like small victories, but quite frankly victories of any kind feel pretty good, so I'll take it. Only two more significant papers left to write and I'm out of the woods until the Winter semester. Time to stop celebrating and get my head down again.

Something New...

2008-10-17T20:08:00.001-07:00

You'll notice a new blog on the blogroll in the coming days. It's the outgrowth of an idea I had a long time ago and have been trying to get off the ground in some form or another for years. Four, Seven, and Twelvefold is a host-blog for a public conversation about the nature and state of evangelical Christianity in North America. The topics that I hope we'll explore are simply too numerous to mention but if you think a question needs to be asked, then post it in the comments over there or over here and I'll ask it. Feel free to advertise the new blog in whatever medium is available to you. The broader and larger the audience, the better the chances that a fruitful and interesting conversation will ensue.

Election Day...

2008-10-15T03:54:00.001-07:00

Well, the polls are closed out here in Hamilton but if they're open where you are and you haven't gone to vote yet, get going! CBC promises the first election results at 10pm ET, which is in about 5 mins, but I don't think I'll stay up to watch. I personally find the endlessly changing poll numbers rather dull, particularly when I remember that the die is cast and the only really interesting fact left to come is the list of actual winners. I'm fairly sure that my MP will be the NDP's David Christopher again, though there certainly did seem to be a significant Green party presense around the neighbourhood (if lawn signs mean anything). As far as who will form the government? Well if I was forced to guess I'd say another minority Conservative government but I guess we'll see. In any case, to all of you who are waiting up to see the results, do enjoy the moving numbers. If you'd like to see them online, check out CBC's interactive election map here. Looks like the conservatives are in the lead at the moment.

Update: Well, looks like another Conservative minority indeed. The hyperlink above will still take you to the main CBC results page, but just in case you're too lazy:

Con.: 143
Lib.: 76 (29 of which, incidentally, are in the GTA)
Bloc: 50
NDP: 37
Gre.: 0

That's a gain of 16 seats for the Conservatives, a loss of 19 for the Liberals, a gain of 7 for the NDP, and a shocking (oh wait, not at all shocking I mean) showing of 0 for the Greens. In my riding my prediction came true. We re-elected David Christopher by a fairly stunning 26.2 point margin. That has to feel nice.

All that's left now is the slightly sexier USAmerican election in a little under a month. All I can say is that I sure hope it turns out like the polling is suggesting right now.

Election Day...

2008-10-14T19:04:00.001-07:00

The GOBM...

2008-10-02T18:05:00.001-07:00

I have discovered a new scholarly society, the Guild of Biblical Minimalists (this via Jim West). I'm still not entirely sure about the precise level of seriousness, but this post for those seeking nominations for the "Billy" award does seem to give a hint. It is quite an impressive list of scholars, and it appears that joining all but guarantees you some kind of title or office.

It...

2008-09-24T19:48:00.001-07:00

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.

4,471...

2008-09-19T20:18:00.001-07:00

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?

2008-09-19T17:49:00.001-07:00

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!!)...

2008-09-19T09:32:00.001-07:00

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.

Assigned Reading...

2008-09-16T21:22:00.001-07:00

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).

Just in Case...

2008-09-15T20:42:00.000-07:00

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.

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

2008-09-07T19:55:00.001-07:00

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.

Coffee...

2008-09-06T11:42:00.001-07:00

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.

Things That Are Cooler...

2008-09-02T20:16:00.001-07:00

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.

New Addition...

2008-09-01T17:38:00.001-07:00

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

Opinions...

2008-08-31T19:53:00.000-07:00

I haven't been writing lately, in any capacity. This is an unfortunate development for me because, as I've said before, writing is one of the things that keeps me sane and centred. There are some good practical reasons for this drought but as we all know practical reasons never keep us from doing the things we love.

I have been terrified lately of the danger of opinions. This is the product of many varied streams of thought. Partly it has to do with a discussion that was making the rounds on a number of academic blogs that I frequent and partly with the related experience of applying to several graduate programs. In the discussions on the blogs I just mentioned there were some bloggers and commentors who suggested that there is a great deal of danger involved with posting on blogs. The danger is that you will make a statement or present an opinion that will later, and I'm sorry I can't find a more elegant way to put this, bite you in the ass.

The relation to applying to schools seems pretty obvious but I'll spell it out anyway. I have been nervous for some time that I will not be wanted because of who and what I am. I simply do not fit into very many traditional molds and this blog is one of the best examples of my personal oddity. I love whimsy too much. I am not conservative enough. I am not liberal enough. On top of that I know that I make mistakes. Sometimes factual errors and sometimes errors of logic or rhetoric but errors nonetheless.

I am afraid of being unwanted and of being wrong but I know that this is hypocrisy. All statements are fraught with danger and written statements all the more so since they can be referred to at will. But all statements are also powerful and written statements especially so. To appropriate that power an author must be willing to risk, and in many cases to risk all. In my experience authors who are willing to take that risk are either great or awful (and occasionally they are both). That awfulness is the danger that any writer of any kind fears but it cannot be negated or set aside. It is necessary. It must be.

And so here I am, risking myself and my reputation in a forum that hardly anybody reads and anyone can find and hold against me at will. Why? Because I need to write. I need to share and challenge others and even more to challenge and push myself to think more carefully. Writing is the only way I know how to do this.

Hamilton...

2008-08-31T19:02:00.000-07:00

Well here we are in Hamilton, officially starting yet another phase in our lives. I've had the chance to meet with my academic advisor at McMaster Divinity College and I've had the poo scared thoroughly out of me. Jinny and Liam have both officially been sick. We have a wonderful landlady and a great place to live, as well as a fairly odd neighbour who hangs out on his lawn in his boxers during the day and listens to incredibly loud music in the evenings (sounded like Rush just now...is it just me or that band mindnumbingly dull to listen to?).

I'm stoked for school to start. Orientation is on Wednesday and my first official class is next Monday. Thursday, however, I get the joy of sitting in on Intermediate Hebrew. My advisor likes all of his students to sit in the Intermediate Hebrew classes in order to maintain our reading skills in Hebrew. I think this is a great idea though I'm a little worried about that as well. I've been trying to get my head back into Hebrew but my language training at seminary was so hit-and-miss that I still have a little bit of trouble with it. Vocabulary especially is a problem, and that's the kind of thing you can only fix with regular and intensive reading. The reason I'm worried is that I'm going to be a PhD student in a room full of MA and MDiv students and I'm going to suck as bad or worse than anyone. Oh well, can't be helped now.

There are some new additions to the sidebars. Mostly these are so-called biblioblogs (blogs dedicated primarily to Biblical or Theological Studies). Partly this is because I like these blogs and the sidebar is more for my use than anyone else's. Partly this is because while I'm in school I imagine that the content of my posts will tend to reflect what I'm studying.

Don't worry, if you like my bizarre and ill-informed rants on politics, ethics, and church polity those will likely continue. I just suspect that reading lots and lots of biblical literature and books about biblical literature will probably tend to skew my posting a little.

Thoughts, Comments, Verbal Abuse?

2008-06-11T21:07:00.000-07:00

So, any thoughts on the new layout? Check out my new blogroll on the sidebar. I've also added a few new blogs to the links section.

Failing...

2008-06-07T21:30:00.000-07:00

I like to cook. This isn't a post about cooking per se, but cooking will serve as our illustration, so bear with me. I like to cook. One part of cooking well is knowing fundamental skills, techniques, and concepts. You need to know how to use a knife properly and you need to know that cream with a lower fat content is more likely to break...you know, stuff like that. Another important part of cooking, I am coming to discover, is that you need to try and fail a lot.

I've recently been working on my spicy dry rub and my BBQ sauce recipes. It took a lot of permutations of both to come up with something really worthwhile (which I finally did this past week incidentally). A couple of my attempts were pretty bad. Most of them were just mediocre. The final products, if I do say so myself, are pretty damn good. I'm not quite done fiddling yet but I think that now I'm down to final edits as it were.

The problem with this process is that I'm bad at failure. Somewhere along the way as I was becoming the person that I am now I got the idea in my head that I should be good at everything right away. It sounds asinine when said so baldly but I don't think that I'm alone in this silly assumption. I've met a lot of people who feel stupid for doing something wrong when there's no earthly reason they should know how to do it right.

As I noted at the outset, this isn't a post about cooking, this is a post about being better. I am trying very hard to learn how to fail well. Failing well means failing graciously, at times spectacularly, and always learning from my mistakes. And this isn't to say that failing once means never failing again. At times we learn from our mistakes incrementally and many mistakes are required. At other times learning from one mistake produces another, entirely new and novel, mistake that must then be learned from itself. There are probably even some situations (maybe many situations) where mistakes are all there is and you never get it "right," you only get it less wrong.

I want very much to become better at failing. I want to learn to take failure less seriously and more seriously. Less seriously as an infringement on my character and personal worth. More seriously as an excellent way to learn to be better.

Pace Runners and Witnesses...

2008-06-03T21:20:00.000-07:00

If you read the family blog you may know that the Sunday before last I ran my first official road race. I ran the 10km leg of the Saskatchewan Marathon. My sister Terry and her husband Tim, along with their friend Teresa, talked me into going home for the weekend and running (they all ran the half-marathon). I've been running for awhile now and particularly since I decided to do the race, so the actual experience of running 10km wasn't all that big of a deal. I've done it a few times and I knew I would finish (in a time of 64 mins and change if you're curious). What struck me about the race was the power of the community of people who took part in it.

There were of course the runners themselves. Impressive people all, and some very impressive. At one point I was passed by a man who was in his 70s at least and probably running under 6 mins/km to my 6:30 mins/km. The fastest runner in my race finished 10kms in a little over 32 mins. Like I said, impressive.

Beyond the runners, however, were the non-runners. You can hardly imagine the number of people who show up at a marathon to do unpaid labour. There were volunteers and friends and family everywhere. In my race I don't think I ran more than a 1km stretch without seeing somebody who was there to watch, to cheer, to hand out gatoraide or water, or even to sing songs while the runners passed. To put this into perspective the run started at 7AM on a Sunday morning and the temperature was 6 degrees C with periodic rain. But there they were, holding out cups and holding up signs and calling out, "Keep it up!," "Great pace!," "Almost there, keep running!" I'm not kidding it damn near made me cry a couple of times.

There were also "pace-bunnies." At a marathon a pace-bunny trains and trains in order to be certain not only that he/she can run the distance of the race, but that he/she can run it at a precise pace. The official runners follow the 60 min pace bunny in order to finish the 10km race in 60 mins. There were several pace-bunnies, each running a specific time for the runners in each of the races (10k, half, full marathon). I frankly think it's impressive enough to run a marathon at all (hell, a half is impressive...let's see you throw down 21.1 kms), but to do it in the service of others is simply wonderful. And all of this made me think about the book of Hebrews.

In chapters 11 and 12 of Hebrews the author retells the stories of men and women of faith who serve as examples for Christians. Chapter 11 closes and Chapter 12 opens with these words:

Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely,^a and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, ²looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the sake of^b the joy that was set before him endured the cross, disregarding its shame, and has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God.

^aOther ancient authorities read sin that easily distracts

^bOr who instead of

The Holy Bible : New Revised Standard Version (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1989), Heb 12:1-2.

Pace Runners and Witnesses. We need them badly. The examples of the Pace Runners and the encouragement of the Witnesses helps us to lay aside weight and sin, and to run with perseverance. Here's the thing though, you don't have to be dead to do these jobs. In fact, if you're a Christian you should be doing these jobs at some point in your life.

All of us have weak points in our faith. We have moments when our feet falter and our breath fails. All of us also have strong points in our faith. We have moments when the rhythm is strong and our muscles feel tireless and our lungs feel limitless. There are no people who are always weak. There are no people who are always strong. When I am weak I need Witnesses to call out to me along the way, to remind me that I'm doing well and that I can do it. I need Pace Runners to come alongside and to help me find the rhythm again, to encourage me to keep pushing even though I'm terribly tired. But when I'm strong again I need to be the witness, I need to pace my fellow runners. I am responsible for their well-being just as they are responsible for mine.

I owe a great debt to the many Witnesses and Pace Runners in my life. I pay that debt by taking my turn. I know I have friends out there, some who even read this blog, whose feet are failing and whose lungs are faltering. That's okay. Maybe you need to stop and walk for a minute or two and that's fine too. But then you're going to run again. You are. I know you are. You can do it, you have the strength and what you lack Christ will provide. I believe in you.

And if the rhythm is strong for you, and you can feel endless power flowing through you, then it's time to run pace. You need to come alongside someone, encouraging and challenging and helping him or her ahead. We must remember that as the Church we run together or not at all.

And of course in all and above all and before all goes that greatest of the Witnesses and that tireless Pace-Runner, Jesus Christ himself.

Barth...

2008-05-31T07:43:00.000-07:00

While wandering about on Facebook today I ran across a quote from Karl Barth that I have not heard before. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Barth he was born in Basel, Switzerland on May 10, 1886. He was a student in Berne, Tubingen, Marburg, and Berlin and studied with the great liberal theologians Hermann and Von Harnack. He pastored a small parish church in Safenwil, Switzerland and was later a professor in Gotingen, Munster, and Bonn. In my mind one of the most important biographical details of Barth's life is his role as a foundational member of the German Confessing Church (Christians who actively opposed Hitler before and during WWII) and primary author of the Barmen Declaration. He was eventually fired from his position at the University of Bonn for refusing to begin his lectures with the requisite "Heil Hitler!" and for agreeing to take "the oath of allegiance to Hitler only with the qualification that all such allegiance is subordinate to the dictates of the gospel" (Grenz and Miller, Contemporary Theologies, 11). He died in 1968. He is without a doubt one of the most influential theologians of the 20th century and there are some theological discussions that simply cannot be explored without addressing his work. All of this as pre-amble to this quotation:

"In the last analysis what God required of man consists only in the demand that he should live as the one on whose behalf God required the very uttermost of Himself." Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics 2.2, p.166.

What Barth means, of course, is that the way we act should be a response to the way that God has acted. Regardless of how poetic it might be this statement is powerful only in the hands of a person like Karl Barth. It is not theoretical theology but practical theology. It must be underpinned by action.

Barth's own life demonstrated that he truly believed that God indeed "required the very uttermost of Himself" and consequently the very uttermost of Barth. Those of us who believe in the Cross of Christ must understand what this means. Our ethics must be driven not by logic or self-preservation or self-aggrandizement but by the actions of God. For a Christian all other ethical choices are absurd. We are and must be a people of the Cross. That is one of the most powerful and integral components of Barth's theology. I noted above that Barth was one of the most influential theologians of the 20th century. His intricate thought, creativity, and depth of analysis reserve him that honour without doubt.

It was his life, however, that made him not merely influential but great.

Little Boxes All the Same...

2008-05-17T21:43:00.000-07:00

I was sick this past Monday, some weird and nasty crap in my throat. Since I was sick and not allowed near Liam I was effectively useless and sat around watching TV for the afternoon. Because my wife is such a wonderful woman she was kind enough to rent me the first season of Weeds. It's friggin' awesome. It's a wonderful show that airs on Showtime (like so many wonderful programs...Dead Like Me [tragically cancelled] and Dexter for instance) about a 40ish year old suburban house-wife who's husband died suddenly. In order to maintain her standard of living and to support her two sons (11 and 16 yrs old) she sells marijuana. How's that for a concept? I'm guessing that a content warning is a little bit redundant at this point given the channel the show airs on and the concept but in case you care consider yourself content-warned.

I bring Weeds up first of all because it's brilliant and hilarious, and secondly because it dovetails nicely with an essay I've been reading by Keven J. Vanhoozer. The essay is "Does the Trinity Belong in a Theology of Religions? - On Angling in the Rubicon and the 'Identity' of God" from his book First Theology. Vanhoozer's essay is concerned with the totalizing tendencies of both exclusivist and pluralist versions of religious dialog. The exclusivist attempts to reduce all opinions to the Same through some kind of violence or coercion. Pluralism, interestingly enough, does the same, reducing all opinions to the Same through rhetoric particularly with the spectacularly arrogant assumption that we are all praying to the same God. Vanhoozer concludes with the suggestion that the trinitarian nature of God (God as we Christians see him that is) indicates a different way forward in which there are varying opinions and points of view and we discuss and persuade each other without violence, coercion or oversimplification. In other words, I don't have to agree with you and you don't have to agree with me but we can still talk about it. We aren't the same and we shouldn't be. We don't have the same conception of God and that's allowed. "We must remember that our theological formulations are always provisional; none of them catches the sacred fish" (Vanhoozer 68).

Back to Weeds. Maybe the best part of the show (after Mary Louise Parker that is) is the soundtrack. The creators of the program use a fantastic little ditty called "Little Boxes" by Malvina Reynolds as the title track for the show. It's all about the horror of cookie-cutter culture and modern North American culture's all but unstopable attempts to reduce us all to the Same. Almost as beautiful as the song itself is the fact that in seasons 2 and 3 the producers got a different artist to perform Reynolds' song for every single episode. And each performance is a unique re-interpretation of the original.

The moral of the story? You aren't the same as me. I'm not the same as you. Nor should we be. What to do when we disagree? Talk.

Endings and Beginnings...

2008-04-12T21:24:00.000-07:00

It seems that all I ever blog about these days is how I never blog anymore. I do apologize...again. Unfortunately my perennial excuse for not blogging has now gone by the wayside (mostly), so I'll have to think up another one. On Friday last I defended my master's thesis and my thesis has been accepted by the committee with just a few binding comments. That means that I've been passed and just need to make some adjustments to the second chapter before submitting the final copy for publication. I'd cheer but frankly I'm just too damned tired. I get the joy of walking the stage once again on April 25th, this time with a different style of black robe. That, it would appear, is the end of that.

It's strange that after so many years settling in to Calgary (and Okotoks) it's now time to pull up our roots and head off to settle in somewhere else again. It looks like, at this stage at least, that the next place we're off to is Hamilton, Ontario. I've been accepted into the Doctor of Philosophy program at McMaster Divinity College for this coming fall.

The funny thing about this move is that in a way it feels like going back in my life as well as going forward. My supervisor at McMaster is going to be Dr. Mark Boda. Mark was also one of my teachers in college, my mentor and the "floor-father" for my floor when I was a residence assistant, and he also led me and Jinny in our pre-marital counseling sessions. Jinny and I will also be hoping to reconnect with some old friends from college and before, including our good friend Kerry and her husband. Though I am thoroughly petrified about beginning doctoral work and trying to figure out how to live without money and with a child, the anticipation of reconnecting with people that I know and love helps to dull the edge of that fear.

GAHP 4, Wherein We Meet The Hound...um, I Mean Owl...of Heaven...

2008-02-28T22:44:00.000-08:00

"Yet here it was, a letter, addressed so plainly there could be no mistake: Mr H. Potter, The Cupboard under the Stairs, 4 Privet Drive, Little Winging, Surrey."
(Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, 30).

Integral to Christian theology is the concept of calling. We believe that those who come to God do so not because of their own advanced sense of morality or spirituality, but because God has called them. This is key to the idea of salvation by grace. Salvation, that is participation in God's kingdom, is a gift given by God. Why don't I just quote St. Paul on the subject.

"For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast."
(Ephesians 2:8-9).

This is Paul's way of saying that it is God who initiates our relationship with him and our eventual welcome into his kingdom. We do not step out of the world around us simply because we want to or choose to do so. We are called. God enters into our world and calls us out of it into his. Harry's introduction to the wizarding world happens in a similar way.

The way in which Harry discovers that he is a wizard sounds something like the way that many people discover that they are Christians. It actually sounds to me very much like the way that Francis Thompson describes his own encounter with Christ in "The Hound of Heaven." Thompson describes the seemingly inevitable experience of coming to know Christ. Both Harry and Thompson are pursued, they are called, they are chased down by the unstoppable messenger of another world. That chase fills Thompson with fear and apprehension because he knows how it might end. Harry's chase does contain a note of apprehension, but is punctuated with a tone of deep curiosity, again because I think that Harry has a sense of how the chase might end.

Thompson strikes deeply at the heart of his fear of the "unhurrying chase" when he writes "For, though I knew His love Who followèd,/Yet I was sore adread/Lest, having Him, I must have naught beside." Here is the terror and the power of conversion. It is an experience that cannot be erased or removed. The person who has come to the point of decision between Jesus and what can only be called not-Jesus, can never go back. One way or another must be chosen and he must choose. You see, while salvation comes to us by God's grace, it is mediated by our faith. The decision to take up or to let fall God's gift lies with us. When the Hound of Heaven finally catches Thompson, he knows that his decision between Jesus and not-Jesus will finally have to be made.

Again the same is true for Harry. He is coming, at this point in the story, to what will be the defining decision of his life. The Owls and their letters are going to find him, and at that point he will have been called. He will then choose either wizard or what can only be called not-wizard.

The reason that I use the terms not-Jesus and not-wizard is simple. If Harry had chosen not to enter the wizarding world, not to attend Hogwarts, not to take on his role as Voldemort's arch-enemy, he would not, consequently, have been a muggle. Being a muggle is not among Harry's available options. He is not a muggle. Because he has been called, because he has received his letter, he is a wizard by nature. That nature cannot be removed and is not dependent upon Harry's choice. If he chose not to attend Hogwarts he might spend the rest of his life acting like a muggle, but what he would really be is not-a-wizard.

The same is true of a person who has come face to face with Christ. He or she might choose not to accept Christ, but the confrontation cannot be negated. That person must always be not-a-Christian. Why? Because such a person has looked at what Christianity is and like Thompson seen a choice. However, unlike Thompson, that initial fear of relinquishing our so-called freedom is simply too much. And so there is no recourse. One can no longer pretend that he or she hasn't heard the call, but the call has not been accepted and so what remains is simply not-Jesus.

And so we run, like Francis Thompson or Vernon Dursley. We try to escape from the inescapable. But, whether foot fall or wing beat, the messenger follows hard after us "with unhurrying chase and unperturbed pace...."

Sigh...Yet Another Meme...

2008-02-26T16:21:00.000-08:00

If you read the comments on my last post you will see that I was both heckled for never posting on my blog, and tagged by my wife once again. In the interests of pacifying my friend and my wife, I shall take up the meme torch once more. So the idea is things in groups of eight. Off we go:

8 Things I'm Passionate About:

God as revealed in Jesus Christ
Jinny
Liam
Family
Friends
The Bible and Theology
Literature
Cooking

8 Things I Want to Do Before I Die:

Get my doctorate
Be a great husband and father
Go to Italy (Bologna in particular)
Write an academic book
Write a non-academic book
Open a restaurant (as a retirement project, if I get that far)
Live in one place long enough to become part of the community and see my son (and any other future kids) grow up.
Train and challenge a new generation of pastors for the Church

8 Things I Say Often:

Hello Monkey!! (to Liam usually)
I love you (to Jin or Liam or both)
Holly, shut up.
Okie dokie
If you say so
No, I haven't heard back from any grad schools
Sure thing Leslie (Leslie is by boss)
Damn, I make good food!

8 Books I've Read Recently (or am reading now):

With the Grain of the Universe - Stanley Hauerwas
Old Testament Theology - Gerhard von Rad
The Night Watch - Sergei Lukyanenko
The Day Watch - Sergei Lukyanenko
Resident Aliens - Stanley Hauerwas
The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana - Umberto Eco
On Food and Cooking - Harold McGee
De-constructing the Dish - David Adjey

8 Movies I Could Watch to Over and Over (this used to be songs I could listen to, but I like movies better):

Memento
The Matrix (the whole series)
Sideways
Unforgiven
High Fidelity
Harry Potter (the whole series)
Star Wars (the original series)
Indiana Jones (the whole series)

8 Things I Like in a Friend:

Humour
Intelligence
Honesty
Sense of fun
Good taste in movies and books :)
Kindness
Grace
People who challenge me

And as always, not doing the end bit where I tag other people. This blog is where memes come to die.

I'm It...

2008-01-16T21:51:00.000-08:00

I've been tagged by my wife, and am therefore it. Seven weird things about me. Here we go.

1. I love Iron Chef: America. No really, I'm not kidding. I watch Iron Chef every night before I go to bed. In fact, since there are only 7 spaces in which to hold my considerable weirdness, I'm going to cram my general love of Food TV into this item. If I'm watching television (excluding DVDs) I'm almost certainly watching Food TV. Actually I was watching Iron Chef when I posted this.

2. Like my wife, I'm a huge sci-fi/fantasy nerd. I do try to mask this obsession a little, but at the end of the day it simply cannot be hidden. In fact when Jinny says in her post that she can beat almost anybody at Harry Potter SceneIt...I'm the almost. The same goes for Star Wars Trivial Pursuit.

3. I think that semiotics and literary theory are fun. I am, in fact, the only person I know who has a favorite semiologist. My favorite semiologist, for the record, is Umberto Eco.

4. I like school.

5. I am the only person I know who liked both Happy Gilmore and Punch Drunk Love.

6. I love to cook. Sometimes I actually like the cooking even more than I like the eating.

7. I watch movies and read books over and over and over again. Some people do this, and some people don't. I do.

There ya go, the 7 requested pieces of personal weirdness. I won't be tagging anyone else on this little meme, mostly because I'm tired and don't feel like blogging anymore. If you read my blog and feel like doing this particular bloggish thing, knock yourself out. Cheers all.

Co-opting the Church...

2008-01-11T22:38:00.000-08:00

I have a question. I mean this as an open question, one for which I have no real answer and would be perfectly happy to hear one.

Why is the Evangelical Church in North America so firmly entrenched on the conservative end of the political and economic spectrum? When I ask "why" I'm not looking for answers that explain this away, I'm looking for a defense of this logic. I know the theoretical reasons why evangelicals generally vote conservative: abortion and gay rights. But these are red herrings, smoke screens, false problems. In Canada at least, these questions have essentially been settled. There are no politicians, no political parties, no government hopefuls, who will make good on a promise to repeal laws legalizing abortion or gay marriage. It's not going to happen. I'm not defending this, in fact I'm actively anti-abortion, I'm just facing facts. If someone disagrees with my assessment, then by all means correct me. You're going to need a fair stack of hard evidence, though, because our current government campaigned on a platform of social conservatism and hasn't done one single thing to change the nature of either of these evangelical hot-button issues.

I suppose what I'm really looking for is a justification from evangelicals for their insistence on voting for and running as economic conservatives. Economic conservatives believe (in an extreme form) in a laissez-fair free market economy. Such right wing thinking is founded upon an individualist ethic. That is to say that in this ethic we are operating on the fundamental assumption that every individual should act in such a way as to protect his/her own interests above all else, and that the consequence of this kind of behavior will be a prosperous and harmonious society. I'm not joking, this is really the foundation of conservative economics. If you ask a Milton Friedman-style economist he/she will propound this very ethical system.

So how the hell did the Church get married to this ethical system? According to all of Scripture and all of Christian history (and I'd say all reason and common sense, but we'll set those aside for now) individualism is bad. Very bad, in fact. Not just bad or very bad, actually, but downright evil. How did we, the very people of God, get sucked into such a deep association with a system that is, at its very rational foundations, wicked and evil? Again, correct me if you think I'm wrong, but it seems to me that we've been co-opted people.

Let me put this as starkly as I can. I won't be a conservative stooge anymore. I'm against the pillaging of the poor. I'm against unrestricted free markets. I'm against policies that benefit the rich and the super-rich while crushing the middle-class and the poor. I'm against tax-cuts for corporations. I'm against the privatization of essential industries and services like the police, the fire department, hospitals, education and the military. I'm against for-profit wars. I'm against war in principle.

I'm against all of these things and all of their cognates for one reason, and only one reason. I'm a Christian.

So, Mr. Harper, Mr. Bush, you've taken something that belongs, not to me, but to God. You've taken his Church and co-opted her, deceiving her to gain power in order to execute agendas that run completely and incontrovertibly against her express purpose (Phil. 2 anyone?).

I'd like to say, therefore, on behalf of myself and Christians everywhere, that we'd like to have our Church back now. Please and thank you.

Riffing, Stewards and the Concept of Christian Economy...

2007-12-15T19:22:00.000-08:00

Consider this post a riff on my wife's recent thoughts concerning Christianity and environmentalism.

In her post Jinny is essentially asking whether or not environmentalism should be at the core of a well constructed Christian morality. My answer to this is, not at all surprisingly, yes. It seems to me that God has created the world and that, as the most intelligent of his creatures, we have been given the responsibility of taking care of that world. This is a very easy case to make if I'm allowed to refer to the Christian story. All I have to do is tell the story of Genesis 1-2. If I were to have any trouble convincing people that taking care of the natural world is humanity's responsibility, one would consequently imagine that it would be people who don't believe in the Christian story. Strangely enough, however, that is not the case.

The people that I most often hear condemning environmental activism are conservative Christians. Please don't take this to mean that all conservative Christians are anti-green, or even that most of the conservative Christians I know are anti-green. I'm just saying that if I meet someone who thinks global warming and climate change are lefty propaganda, that person is usually a conservative Christian. This strikes me as not only wrong, but weird.

It seems that some Christians have lost touch with their own story. I think that this loss of connection might be related to the concept of stewardship that I grew up on. I'm not sure where exactly I picked it up, but at some point in my young, evangelical Christian life, I was given the impression that stewardship and being cheap were essentially the same thing. I was taught that as Christians we are supposed to be good stewards of the money that God has given us, which seemed to entail not being materialistic, getting good deals on everything, saving wisely, and, of course, giving to the church. That all sounds great on the surface, and some of it is perfectly good financial advice, but it doesn't really have much to do with stewardship.

Stewardship has nothing in particular to do with saving money or hoarding money or spending money or money at all for that matter. The relationship between stewardship and money is tangential at best. A steward takes care of someone else's possessions, that's his job. As I just mentioned, the argument for suggesting that humanity is meant to steward the earth and all that is in it is pretty easy to make if I can just quote Genesis 1:26-30...so I will.

26 Then God said, "Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth." 27 And God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. 28 And God blessed them; and God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky, and over every living thing that moves on the earth." 29 Then God said, "Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the surface of all the earth, and every tree which has fruit yielding seed; it shall be food for you; 30 and to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the sky and to every thing that moves on the earth which has life, [I have given] every green plant for food ";and it was so.

Now perhaps some daft fool will argue that this passage indicates that we as humans are allowed to do with nature as we will. Strictly speaking this may be true, a steward does indeed have the opportunity to piss away all that has been entrusted to him, but I feel fairly confident that the true master of this world will not look kindly on a race of stewards who destroy his creation. The world does not belong to us. It never did and it never will. It is someone else's possession, and consequently it seems to me high-time that we start treating it that way.

Do you know the Greek word that we translate as "steward"? It's oikonomos. Sound like any English words you know? Economy perhaps? Coincidentally it is this word, economy, that is most often sounded as the trumpet-call against more stringent environmental regulations. "It will destroy business," we are told. "It will damage the economy," cry the naysayers. Which economy? We have allowed the meaning of the word economy to be reduced to one single context, the world of capitalism. What if there are other kinds of economy? The Greek concept of economy has more to do with the management of a task or of a divine mandate. Maybe we as Christians need to untangle ourselves from our political and material task-masters and realize that their economy is not our economy. Our economy, the task for which we have been given responsibility, is to manage God's world in a way that honors him as its creator.

Given this alternative Christian economy, the question now becomes: How can we not be environmentally minded?

Done...

2007-12-02T19:53:00.000-08:00

Yes, it's true, the time has come...I'm finished my thesis. I hit the final keystrokes tonight and tomorrow morning I'll put all of the Word documents together into a single pdf and email it off to my supervisor for him to review. All I can say is that I'm happy and that my brain hurts. No promises of blogging anytime soon, my creative faculties are pretty much pooped out right now. Plus I've got a whole lotta renos and house work to catch up on. But when the inspiration and drive hit me again I'll be sure to let y'all know. Cheers everyone.

Intertextualilty...

2007-11-16T22:49:00.000-08:00

Intertextuality is a concept that floats around the worlds of literary studies and semiotics (the study of signs, from literature to clothing labels). Here's how Jonathan Culler describes intertextuality:

Intertextuality thus becomes less a name for a work's relation to particular prior texts than a designation of its participation in the discursive space of a culture: the relationship between a text and the various languages or signifying practices of a culture and its relation to those texts which articulate for it the possibilities of that culture (The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature and Deconstruction).

A little while ago at work I listened to the entire The Dark Tower series by Stephen King. I'm not a huge King fan, mostly because I don't go in for horror as a general rule. The fact remains, however, that King is really quite a good writer. One of the things that makes me think he's a good writer (and almost a great writer) is the magnificent intertextual layering of the Dark Tower books, particularly book one, The Gunslinger. By the close of book six King's "participation in the discursive space of [our] culture" does start to collapse into a much more self-conscious use of outside cultural and literary material. King spends less time building characters and events that we know from our cultural-creativity-soup and more time tracing the lines of where each one of those characters comes from. I suppose you could condemn King for this, but I wonder if the problem isn't that Culler's concept of intertextuality is a little bit too narrow. Umberto Eco, for instance, has stated explicitly that many of the intertextual layers of Name of the Rose were created intentionally (see his essay "Intertextual Irony" in On Literature), and this from one of the world's leading novelists, literary critics and semioticians.

The above is a fairly meandering way to suggest that both intentional homage and completely unintentional intertexture are fun. They both make reading interesting and immediate and they help to tell so much more story than is on the page. For those of you still not quite getting the intertexture thing let me give you an example from King's The Gunslinger.

The main character in The Gunslinger is the Gunslinger. He does have a name, Roland, but the character is really the Gunslinger. King describes him as tall, thin, he has hard, cold, blue eyes and is a single-minded, all-but-invincible warrior. He carries two big revolvers, one on each thigh, and has two belts of bullets criss-crossed over his chest. He wears a flat-topped hat and looks old, as though he was chiseled out of bare rock. Picture this character, place him in your mind's eye. Is there any chance that he looks an awful lot like this?

In my very first reading of the very first description of Roland the Gunslinger, all I could think of was Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven (absolutely his best acting role and arguably his best directorial offering, which is really, really saying something). I know now that King actually did have a modified version of Eastwood in mind as he designed Roland, but that the idea of Eastwood would come so completely and perfectly to my mind is, I think, a product of an intertextual relationship. It's not just that King meant me to think of Eastwood that makes this relationship intertextual. He just wanted me to think of an archetypal character and in my culture (and King's as well) that archetypal character has found its most complete representation in Eastwood's various portrayals of the darkly aberrant yet honorable anti-hero. Cool hey?

What, you might well ask, is the point of all of this semiotic gibberish? Our lesson of the day from literary criticism: intertextuality is fun. That is all.

Required Reading...

2007-11-05T21:22:00.000-08:00

I've been pounding away at my thesis with a little more gusto than usual over the last little while and have consquently been neglecting my poor little blog and its faithful band of readers. I know I say this a lot, but sorry about that. I don't have a lot to write at the moment, but I do have some reading assignments for you all.

Recently Fred (aka Slacktivist) has been posting extensively on North American Evangelicalism's obsession with the morality of homosexuality. Regardless of where you stand in this particular debate you need to read all seven posts in his Gay Hatin' Gospel series. I'll start you off here, with the very first in the series. This is an issue that Christians need to examine more critically than we have been. It's time to stop towing party lines (whether liberal or conservative) and start finding an honest and loving way to be Christians to the gays and lesbians in our lives.

For those of you who have been following, and perhaps even shaken by, Richard Dawkins' anti-religion apologetics, you need to read Nicholas Lash's response in the New Blackfriars. In a relatively short article Lash rips into Dawkins' argument to a rather astonishing degree. I haven't read Dawkins' book, but from the excerpts I've read here and there it seems to me that Lash is right to indict Dawkins for being ignorant of the copious amount of research and literature available on religious and theological topics.

In any case, since I'm not writing anything here, you may as well go and read some of the above.

GAHP 3, Wherein MOTORBIKES DON'T FLY!...

2007-09-15T21:23:00.001-07:00

"'I had a dream about a motorbike,' said Harry, remembering suddenly. 'It was flying.' Uncle Vernon nearly crashed into the car in front. He turned right around in his seat and yelled at Harry, his face like a gigantic beetroot with a moustache, 'MOTORBIKES DON'T FLY!'"
(Harry Potter and The Philosopher's Stone, 24).

Except, it turns out, that they do. In Jo Rowling's world of wizards and muggles motorbikes do, in fact, fly (though in flagrant violation of Ministry of Magic laws concerning the enchantment of muggle artifacts, cf. the Weasley's flying Ford Anglia). What is more, Vernon Dursley knows that they fly, or at least that they very well might fly if a wizard got hold of one. Vernon Dursley knows about the wizarding world. He knows that it exists, he knows that Harry's parents were wizards, he knows about Albus Dumbledore, and he also knows by now that Harry is a wizard too. Why, then, does he continually close his eyes to the relentless truth that magic is a part of the fabric of reality in his world?

One of my good friends is an honest to goodness magician. It's what he does for a living. He makes tables fly and women vanish and he can change an ace of spades into a jack of diamonds. His name is Derek and he is the person, more than anyone else, who has helped me to see the danger and horror of that accompanies the death of the imagination. He helped me to understand how to look at the world with a greater sense of wonder. He showed me that above all we choose to see wonder, we choose to experience magic in our lives. I have no interest in knowing how it is that Derek makes things fly. People who need to know a magician's tricks have completely failed to understand what it is that magicians do. They don't understand that knowing won't make it more magical. The magic, the wonder, is in the choosing. We experience the magical and miraculous when we adjust the way that we see the world.

It was Chesterton who said "the world will not perish due to a lack of wonders, but due to a lack of wonder." All of the great accomplishments of civilizations, all of the glory and wonder of creation, and all of the art and literature the world has to offer, every miracle ever performed, are so much nonsense and waste in the hands of a person who is unwilling to see them. The same is true of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

This is Vernon Dursley's great sin. He has no interest in living a life of wonder. He chooses to live a mundane life.

GAHP 2, Wherein We Meet Albus Dumbledore...

2007-09-13T21:28:00.000-07:00

"Nothing like this man had ever been seen in Privet Drive."
(Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, 12).

Jo Rowling has explicitly stated that Dumbledore was never intended as a "Christ" figure. I can't see why anybody would ever have thought him one, but it's always good to get such things out of the way.

What Dumbledore is, is a wizard. He is, I would say, the wizard. Though it may be the case that "everything from his name to his boots was unwelcome" in Privet Drive, it is equally true that "everything from his name to his boots" epitomize what a good wizard can be. Though one might fixate upon Dumbledore's great moments of power and authority (and there are indeed many) in trying to understand the character, all that we need as readers is found on the 12th page of The Philosopher's Stone. Dumbledore is a kind, whimsical, joy filled man. He knows laughter, but he also knows pain (the broken nose, we will finally learn, tells us this). He is a man of great depth, but he does not take his own depth too seriously. What a wonderful way to live.

One of my friends once said that though Socrates and Jesus never met, they would have been great friends if they had. I would suggest the same thing about Jesus and Dumbledore. Though the Gospels never tell us that Jesus laughed I have always imagined him as a man who could live honestly in both despair and joy. He could eat and drink and enjoy all that life offers in one moment, and in the next he could lift the suffering and self-tortured up out of their mire.

There are a great many things that can be said about Jesus, and I think that all of the true things we can say are very good, but my favorite thing about Jesus is what a wonderful human being he was. In much the same way that Dumbledore is the wizard, Jesus was (and is) the human.

Not surprisingly Jesus is also, like Dumbledore, seldom welcome in the bourgeois world that we inhabit. But, again like Dumbledore, he is here nevertheless.

Wise Justice...

2007-09-06T21:09:00.000-07:00

Fred Clark has another great post over on Slacktivist (even if the title is a little bit on the nose). He questions, once again, the Bush administration's so-called "just war" in Iraq and the potential for a just war against Iran. Bush and co. have consistently claimed that the US invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq were and are just. The reasons that I've heard usually have something to do with Weapons of Mass Destruction (or WMD-related weaponish-type kinds of programs) or the tyranny and aggression of Sadam Hussein's totalitarian regime. Fred rightly notes that even if Bush's claims about WMDs or Hussein's tyranny are accurate (and we know now that the former claims were certainly not accurate by any stretch of the imagination), these still do not qualify for the traditional definition of a "just war."*

One of the real troubles in attempting to wage a just war is that you need to be able to determine the potential damage the aggressor may cause, the likelihood of being able to avert that potential damage, and the possibility a war might actually cause more suffering than it averts. When determining whether or not a war is just you need a very important faculty. You need wisdom.

One of the kids in my youth group back in Regina once asked me about the difference between wisdom and intelligence. I gave the fairly pat answer that wisdom is the ability to apply intelligence correctly. He didn't buy it, and rightly so. A better understanding of wisdom is found in the biblical Proverbs. Wisdom in Proverbs is a moral faculty. It is the ability to make not only good decisions, but right decisions.

The unjust invasion of Iraq is not only an intellectual failure (though it is that), it is first and foremost a moral failure. It is unwise and therefore unjust. George Bush has always been something of an enigma to me. On television he sounds, to be frank, like a bumbling idiot. But I don't believe that a truly stupid person could be a governor and then a president. I do, however, believe that a fool could do those things. What the war in Iraq, and current American foreign policy in general, demonstrates is not that Bush and Cheney and their advisers are stupid. It demonstrates that they are fools.

*I'm pretty sure that his Catholic definition for a just war is actually Thomas Aquinas' definition, but I don't have any of Thomas' works close at hand so I can't be positive.

Redemption, Dependence and Question Number 11...

2007-08-30T21:54:00.000-07:00

When I first conceived of the previous post, 10 Questions, one of the questions that I was planning to use was, Who is your favorite obscure bluegrass/gospel musician? For some reason I just forgot to include the question. The answer is Derek Webb. A little while ago I decided to stick one of Webb's songs on a mix CD. I hadn't listened to that song or any of Webb's solo music for a long time and I started jonesing for some more Webb. Consequently I've been listening to Webb's first solo effort, She Must and Shall Go Free, while driving to and from work.

There are very few musicians, particularly musicians who have come up through and become famous in the Contemporary Christian Music industry, who have the ability to create deeply meaningful lyrical creations. Derek Webb is one of those few. Listening to a Derek Webb song is a lot like reading Bonhoeffer or Barth or Grentz or Chesterton, but with a catchy guitar lick in the background.

My favorite song on She Must and Shall Go Free (for the time being) is called Nothing (Without You). Check out the lyrics:

I’ve got the dress, i’ve got the ring
i’ve got a song that i can sing
i’ve got the bread, i’ve got the wine
but i’ve got the life i’ve left behind
i’ve got everything, but i’ve got nothing
without you

i’ve got the law on my heart
i’ve got your love tearing me apart
i’ve got a vow that i can’t keep
but i’ve got your promise getting me to sleep
i’ve got everything, but i’ve got nothing
without you

i’ve got your works, i’ve got my faith
i’ve got all the wine that you can make
i am the kiss of your betrayer
but i’ve got your grace on every layer
i’ve got everything, but i’ve got nothing
without you

(bridge)
‘cause you see it’s all just a show
you either hate it or you don’t
and only time will tell the difference
if you get it clearly or with interference

i’ve got the race, got the election
but win or lose, i’ve got protection
i found a lobbyist in the devil
but i got salvation in a rebel
i’ve got everything, but i’ve got nothing
without you

What Webb understands about Christianity, and what he communicates so powerfully with all of those familiar inconsistencies that often devour our lives, is that the redemption promised in the Scriptures absolutely requires dependence. By this I mean to say that I cannot redeem myself.

In the letters of Paul the English word redemption is a translation of the Greek apolutrosis (anybody have a good Greek font that works in Blogger?). What many people don't know is that the origins of the word are found in the slave trade of Jesus' day. At that point in history slavery was simply a cultural fact. Slaves were everywhere. Anybody could become a slave if his or her life just took the wrong turn.* But any slave could be freed if his or her life just took the right turn. The act of freeing a slave generally involved purchasing the slave (you really can't free what you don't own), and that is where the word apolutrosis comes from. It means the act of buying back, or redeeming, a slave. This is the concept that Paul is co-opting in Ephesians 1:7 when he says that in Christ we have "redemption through his blood." He is saying that we were captive, held in slavery, and have now been redeemed, purchased and set free. The cost of this freedom was the life of Jesus. This is why I can't redeem myself. I just don't have the requisite capital.

When Derek Webb sings "I've got everything, but I've got nothing without you," this is, I think, what he is trying to say. He is saying that the brokenness of the world, the brokenness in my heart and my life, cannot be healed by my efforts or yours. The redemption, the release from slavery, is dependent upon Christ. I am, and must continually remain, dependent upon Christ.

*For an entertaining (albeit horribly violent) look at pre-Christian culture, including the practice of slavery, check out HBO's hit-series Rome.

10 Questions...

2007-08-28T20:44:00.000-07:00

Every once in a while I get an email (usually from my lovely wife) that asks a bunch of fun little questions (my favorite food, etc.). I tend to find such quizzes silly and I always wish I was as witty and quick as my friends who twist every one of their answers into some hilarious (though often crass) pun. What I really don't like about these emails is that the questions are rather mundane and don't really tell you much about a person. I have decided, therefore, to create my very own 10 question quiz designed to tell you something about me. I'm not emailing this to anyone, but my readers are welcome to publish their own answers to these 10 questions (or any 10 questions really) on their own blogs or in the comments. Off we go.

1. Who is your favorite existentialist philosopher?

Soren Kierkegaard. I should provide the caveat that I haven't read an awful lot of what people call existentialist philosophy, but I've read Kierkegaard and he is often considered the father (or perhaps grand-father) of all existentialist philosophy. Nietzsche gets similar credit at times, but I've read him too and tend to think he's something of an evil bastard, so Kierkegaard wins. For the record I've also read some Heidegger and like most people I'm just proud to have understood most of the sentences.

2. What is your favorite literary guilty pleasure?

Harry Potter. I know these books are intended as children's literature, but I love them. These are some of my very favorite books in recent years and the fact that they're a little cotton-candy just makes them more fun to read again and again. I also tend to think that Rowling hits some pretty deep and important themes in her work. See my GAHP post below.

3. What is your favorite Clint Eastwood movie?

Unforgiven. This is, quite simply, the ultimate western.

4. Who is your favorite Harry Potter character?

Neville Longbottom. If I ever get to posting more of my GAHP series you'll get to know why. If not it will remain a mystery forever.

5. What are your hobbies?

I like to cook, I like to read and I like to write. For the time being these are all hobbies, though if I have my way they will all, someday, be things I get paid to do.

6. What is the best book you've read recently?

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard. I'm actually still reading this book and I simply can't put into words what a wonderful writer Dillard is. This book is pure brilliance and everyone should read it.

7. What is your favorite blog?

Slacktivist. I've plugged Fred Clark's blog quite a few times before and I'm sure I'll do it quite a few times in the future. He is a magnificent op-ed writer, a very talented amateur theologian and his brilliant and scathing critiques of pre-millenial dispensationalism and the Left Behind books should be mandatory reading at every Bible College in North America.

8. What is the worst book you've ever read?

The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown. This book was awful. The prose was awful, the plot was awful, the characters were awful, and the pseudo-history was simply laughable. Though I am against all book burning in principle this literary turd may just be exception-worthy.

9. Who is your favorite British Science-Fiction author/humorist?

Douglas Adams. Everybody should read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series and the Dirk Gently series. If you haven't read them yet go out and read them now. I have only one warning: read these books alone. If you don't you'll feel like a tool for inexplicably laughing out loud every ten minutes or so.

10. Who is your favorite person in the world?

My wife, Jinny. She is beautiful, loving, brilliant, fun, kind, responsible and (not at all surprisingly) a damn good mommy. I should note that my little boy, Liam, runs an unbelievably tight second to his mommy in this race.

Drumroll Please...

2007-08-14T22:08:00.000-07:00

It is my great pleasure and honor to finally announce the birth of our first child, our new son Liam Milton Toffelmire. Sorry but no pics right now, I'm a tool and forgot the camera at the hospital. Liam was born at 4:30pm, August 13th by emergency c-section. He and Jinny are both doing wonderfully now, though Liam had a bit of a rough start. He coded in the operating room and spent the first hour or so of his life with a tube down his throat. He's doing great now and shows all the signs of a happy, alert little baby. He's even starting to breastfeed pretty well. Incidentally the pregnancy, imminent birth and last minute renos on the house (which were because of the imminent birth) are the reasons I've been away from blogging for so long. I'll probably be off for a little longer, but I'll try to keep Liam updates coming. Cheers all.

Update: I've uploaded a whole bunch of pictures to our family blog. Check out the link on my sidebar.

The Gospel According to Harry Potter

2007-07-23T19:38:00.001-07:00

I know of no story that has been so publicly denigrated in recent years by the Christian right than J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series. By "recent years" I suppose I mean in the past decade. Here at the end of the series it seems like most of the seriously negative publicity has died off. That being said I know that in an awful lot of Christian circles (including my own church at times) Rowling's books are considered a mere half-step above the work of Anton Lavey. This is, of course, because Harry Potter is a wizard. But what people continually fail to understand is that the magic of Harry Potter has absolutely nothing to do with the kind of witchcraft condemned by the Bible. Rowling's magic is, in my mind, a metaphor for mystery, for all that is wondrous and glorious in the world and yet remains beyond our rational understanding. And what is more, the themes of Rowling's books are deeply Christian. Her explorations of exclusion, racism, chosen-ness, grace, love, courage, heroism and redemption are almost all cribbed straight from the Judeo-Christian tradition. Which leads me to today's post. Welcome to the first installment of The Gospel According to Harry Potter.*

Wherein we meet Vernon Dursley, aka the world's biggest jerk...

"Mr and Mrs Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much." (Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, 7).

Normal. It is the overcoming drive towards normalcy, the status quo, the mundane, the ordinary and everyday, that drives the social movement we call conservatism. Due to a relatively strange confluence of historical, social and political factors we live in an age in which Christianity is considered a conservative religion. But it hasn't always been that way. There was a day when Jesus and his followers were considered threats to the status quo, rebels and renegades who consistently stood against the injustice of the established order. But the world doesn't see us that way anymore. Now the world sees us as a great pack of Vernon Dursleys.

Vernon, or Uncle Dursley as he will soon come to be known, is a ridiculous, absurdity of a man. He is self-righteous, he is blustering, he is pompous, he is in short, a jerk. Imagine Polonius adjusted for inflation and driving an Audi through the streets of London. At every turn Dursley seeks to do only one thing: maintain the status of his family. And this is where our lesson about Christianity and conservatism takes shape.

As the name implies conservatism is an attempt to maintain an existing situation. The general tendency of truly conservative Christianity (I'm speaking more of socially conservative Christianity, but similar critiques could be leveled at some brands of theological conservatism) is to maintain the status of Christianity within our society. Unfortunately that's not how Jesus himself approached the world. Read the Gospel of Luke in particular. In Luke Jesus stands in the tradition of the great 8th century prophets, condemning injustice, lifting up the poor and the downtrodden, and basically just scaring the piss out of the political and religious establishment.

One of the great dichotomies that Rowling will set up for us throughout the Potter series is between the Dursleys of the world and the Potters of the world. It is, in my mind, very much akin to the synoptics' dichotomy between the pharisees and Jesus. One of the many questions we must ask ourselves as Christians is whether we are on the side of the established order or the side of the weak and the downtrodden. The fact of the matter is that we were never called to be the dominant religion of the world and we were never called to maintain our own wealth, power and influence. We were called to serve, to sacrifice and to die. Perhaps James the brother of Jesus said it best.

"This is pure and undefiled religion in the sight of [our] God and Father, to visit orphans and widows in their distress, [and] to keep oneself unstained by the world." James 1:27

*I originally intended to make this a weekly series, but what with Liam's arrival and my more and more pressing need to finish my actual work (aka my thesis) the series is likely to be a little hit and miss to start with. Hopefully there's more to come.

12:36 AM...

2007-07-21T09:56:00.000-07:00

Last night at 11:30 or so I was in a parking lot that was completely full. I'm sure if you're imagining the lot in your mind's eye you are seeing it properly. It is enormous. It caters to a strip-mall that contains several small retail stores, four restaurants, a multiplex theater...and one other store. On any other day one would assume that at 11:30 on a Friday night the hundreds upon hundreds of cars in this parking lot would belong to customers of the theater and the restaurants. I'm only guessing, but last night I'd be surprised if more than 15% of the cars in that parking lot belonged to patrons of any but one store. That store, that one other store, is Chapters. Of course it is.

Last night at 11:30 I went to Chapters in south Calgary to pick up my copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.* I was there a full half-hour before the book went on sale. Jinny and I had long-ago pre-purchased our copy, so I went to the pre-purchase line to get my bracelet and then they sent me to the queue to pick up my book. It took me a little while to find the end of the queue. It snaked down the main aisle, through the magazine section, and then in and out of every row of books in the children's section. That's where the end of the line was when I got there. Thirty minutes later when they finally started giving people books I was right around the middle of the line. I have no idea how many people there were, but lets just say lots. By "lots" I mean hundreds and not dozens. And this is to say nothing of the many, many people who had not pre-purchased the book and were waiting in a different line to buy their copy that night. While I was in line I heard more than a couple of people express shock and amazement, and even some amusement, at the fact that so many people had come to a store in the middle of the night just to pick up a book.

Why is it that people in our culture believe that this kind of attention is perfectly reasonable for a club or a new movie, but ridiculous for a book? Say what you want about Rowling's books, but they have done one wonderful and incredible thing for an entire generation (or two, or three)...they have elevated reading. This isn't to say that kids didn't read in my day, but they sure as hell didn't stand in line for an hour at midnight to pick up a book. Harry Potter is a massive, almost overwhelming, cultural phenomenon. In my mind that's a good thing.

I got my copy at 12:36 AM and was reading about thirty minutes later. And for the record, the first 17 chapters are fantastic.

*This is normally where I'd insert a hyperlink to Amazon or HP.com or something, but today there will be no hyperlinks. Logging on to Blogger to post is the very most I'm willing to do online until I've finished reading the book on the off chance that some bastard out there is posting spoilers where I might read them. Such people should be drawn and quartered.

Busy, Busy...

2007-07-11T19:03:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the lax blogging, as the title of this post suggests, I've been busy. I've also been tired. I've also been on holidays. Consequently my poor little blog has suffered terribly. I suspect my readers have therefore been spared considerable suffering, but since this blog is really here to give outlet to my personal opinions and to help me practice writing well (something I think we can all agree I need rather badly), I don't really care about that. I have nothing at all to say, so I thought I'd participate in Jon's little iPod game for fun. Here's today's random 10:

1. Going Down/Love in an Elevator - Aerosmith
2. Sympathy for the Devil - The Rolling Stones
3. #41 - Dave Matthews Band
4. Under Pressure - Queen
5. My Favorite Mistake - Sheryl Crow
6. Suspicion - Okay, I have no idea who wrote or performed this song, and I've never heard it before. I had no idea it was in my iTunes or where it came from.
7. The Luxury - The Tragically Hip
8. Driving South - Jimi Hendrix
9. Glad All Over - The Beatles
10. Traveling With the Experience - Jimi Hendrix

Setting aside the Suspicion thing (where the hell did that song come from??), I must say that my list kicks Jon's list's ass. Can I say "Jon's list's" and not cause people to fall into a grammatical coma? But really, the Stones, the Beatles, DMB, Queen, Hendrix...my taste rules. Even Sheryl Crow and Aerosmith are legitimate picks I think. And just in case you think I got random lucky, here's the top ten from my 25 Most Played:

1. Stone Cold Crazy - Queen
2. Don't Panic - Coldplay
3. The Hounds of Winter - Sting
4. One of These Things First - Nick Drake
5. Hurts to Love - The Philosopher Kings
6. Caring is Creepy - The Shins
7. The Only Living Boy in New York - Simon & Garfunkel
8. Fields of Gold - Sting
9. Shape of My Heart - Sting
10. T.N.T. - AC/DC

Not bad at all if I do say so. Though I'm not sure how T.N.T. made #10. It's a good rock anthem, like all AC/DC, but I don't remember listening to it on my iPod...well, ever now that I think of it. Odd.

There you go, some more random nonsense to tide you all over until my next brilliant post. Cheers.

In Print...

2007-06-27T20:32:00.000-07:00

It is official, something I wrote has been published...in print...in an actual book. How did this happen you ask? Well it helps that it's not my book and that I had no idea that the book was being released until about a month ago.

A couple of years ago I was doing a google search on one of my professors, a gentleman named Mabiala Kenzo. He is a brilliant theologian who specializes in narrative theology, post-colonialism, and the works of Paul Ricoeur. One of the sites that I found was A New Kind of Conversation. The site was essentially a kind of blog where a group of theologians, philosophers, counselors and writers (including well-known author Brian McLaren) were interacting with questions about the relationship between post-modernism and the Christian faith (particularly evangelical Christianity). The really cool bit about this was that every post had an open comments section where anybody could interact with what these authors had posted. Like all blogs the unregulated posting sometimes wandered pretty far off-topic, but there was also a lot of insightful and interesting interaction as well.

So the long and the short of it is that I contributed a number of comments to the discussion and about a month ago I got an email from the book's publisher asking for my home address so that they could send me a free copy of the finished book. It arrived today and it looks like all of my comments were included (woohoo!). I did get siced by the editors in one post, but it was just for using "dunno" instead of "don't know."

You can check out the full conversation on the web site or buy the book in your local book store or on amazon. Why buy the book when I can read it online for free, you ask? The joy of the book is that the original posts and subsequent comments have been edited and organized into a much more coherent whole. The book also includes some very helpful sidebars and definitions to some of the more technical language that's being used.

So there you are, a little bit of shameless self-promotion. Setting that aside it really is a good book and some of the essays and comments are very worth the $20 or whatever it costs in stores. I leave you with the bibliographic info.

Penner, Myron Bradley and Hunter Barnes ed. A New Kind of Conversation: Blogging Toward a Postmodern Faith. Paternoster: Colorado Springs, 2007.

Brevard Childs...

2007-06-25T11:31:00.000-07:00

Brevard Childs died on Saturday. For those of you who don't know of him, he was one of the great biblical scholars of the 20th century. He was a pioneer in the fields of Biblical Theology and Canonical Criticism and a long-time professor at Yale Divinity School. You can find the full obituary here. May his memory be for a blessing.

The Tale...

2007-06-24T20:55:00.001-07:00

There is no H in the standard western musical scale. There are only 7 notes, which we we name with the first 7 letters of the alphabet, A to G. I don't remember where I heard it, and I don't remember who said it, but a well known thinker once said that because of the finite number of available notes, scales and keys the world would soon run out of original music. That was a couple hundred years ago. What this thinker failed to take into account was the near infinite potential for new combinations of and variations on old themes.

There are also only a finite number of tales in the world. I don't know how many there are, but it is a finite number. Every story you've ever heard, like every song you've ever heard, is a variation on a theme. It is an author riffing on a scale. Some people find this troubling, even disquieting. I do not. I love it. I love that I can see an author taking a well known tale, a cultural pillar, and interact with it, caressing it, re-telling it in a way that makes us perk up our ears again.

I watched El Laberinto del fauno (English title Pan's Labyrinth) tonight, and that is exactly what Guillermo del Toro does in this wonderful film. Not only does del Toro weave his own fantastic vision in and out of an ancient tale, he weaves it in and out of The Tale. I call it The Tale because it is, I believe, the most important tale that the world has ever known. We have known this tale for as long as tales have been told (it is found in the Ba'al cycles and the OT) and in many different cultures (Persian, Greek, Hebrew, Babylonian, etc.). It is the tale of the innocent suffering servant. It is the tale of one who is prepared to sacrifice his or her own blood in order to stave off the darkness, in order to drive away the night once again. This is The Tale that strikes at the very heart of our fear and our hope. It has been told a thousand times, ten thousand times, ten thousand times ten thousand times. It is a tale that God himself once told. It is the tale, of course, of Christ. If you'd like to see this tale told again in a wildly creative, disturbing and beautiful way please watch El Laberinto del fauno. That, my friends, is how stories should be told.

Degrees...

2007-06-20T21:11:00.000-07:00

We are each, so I am told, separated from every single other person on Earth by no more than 7 degrees. By how many degrees, I wonder, are we separated from the lives we might have lived and the people we might have been.

A couple of days ago Jinny and I got in touch with an old friend from high-school and college named Kerry (via facebook of course). For whatever reason this set me to reminiscing this evening. I met Kerry in high-school while I was involved with a youth program called Bible Quizzing. Bible Quizzing is exactly what it sounds like, a youth program based on Bible memorization and competition. It is every bit as hip as...well, as the word hip I guess. Nevertheless it was a formidable force for good in my life and I am deeply grateful that God nudged my path in that direction. I was involved with Quizzing from the beginning of the 7th grade until one year after I graduated from high-school (one year, incidentally, longer than most people are generally allowed to keep participating). In my second to last year the strangest, and in retrospect most wonderful, thing happened. Three of my friends who had always kind of looked down on Quizzing decided to join up.

Trevor, Trevor and Jon were all my age and the four of us were very nearly the oldest group of teens in our entire district (which was and is made up of all of the Christian and Missionary Alliance churches in Saskatchewan and Manitoba). We were a ridiculous lot to be sure. It is important to note that my friends did not join up due to a sense of confederacy or brotherhood. They joined for the same reason that teen-aged boys do everything. They wanted to meet girls. And they did. Which is actually the point of this story.

Trevor S. met nobody, he ended up marrying somebody from our church. Good guy but not a factor in this particular story (sorry Trev). Trev P. and Jon, however, both met girls. Trevor met Kerry and Jon met Carrissa. Trevor and Kerry dated for years and that Kerry is the same as the Kerry I started this post with. She's a wonderful woman who has always made me laugh and pushed me to be a better Christian than is my wont. She is, in fact, almost directly responsible for my current theology of Scripture and my leanings towards post-evangelical/post-liberal theology (but that's a story for another day). Jon and Carrissa have now been married for about the same amount of time as me and Jinny. Through our newfound friendships with Kerry and Carrissa my friends and I met John (aka Potsy). John became (and remains) one of my very best friends and stood up for me at my wedding (and I for him at his, and both of us together for Scott at his).

That was a long paragraph with a lot of names in it. Very few people who read this blog know or care about any of those people (my friends don't really read my blog, they've had enough years of my BS already). The thing that I want to emphasize is that the simple decision that Trevor, Trevor and Jon made to join Quizzing had a profound effect on my life (and on theirs as well, but that's a good deal less important to me). Indeed without that decision I doubt very much that I would be married to Jinny today. The existential moment when I decided to actively pursue Jin was the direct result of some good old fashioned teen dating drama involving people I knew only because of that Quizzing decision. That existential moment, just in case any of you are curious, occurred on the toilet as all good existential moments do.

And so I wonder by how many degrees I am separated from the me that I might have been. What might that me be like? Without Jinny I have some suspicions that he'd be something of an annoying, selfish bastard. Even more than the me that I am is I mean (how's that for an unnavigable sentence?). Every moment of our lives we step into a new room with new doors. Each door we walk through leads to another room with one less door. Most people are relatively comfortable with this concept because it implies that we all choose our own fate. What we forget is that each door we walk through limits not only our own future choices, but the future choices of every other person in the world, regardless of the number of degrees of separation.

My life, your life, Trevor's and Trevor's and Jon's and John's and Kerry's and Carrissa's lives and all of the other lives of all the other people you know and don't know are connected. Meta-data, intertextuality, chaos theory, call it whatever the hell you like, we touch each other. We are determined by each other. And we are determined by God. By how many degrees am I separated from my theoretical spacial/temporal other self? I have no idea but I thank God for each and every one them.

Silly Usage...

2007-06-14T21:31:00.000-07:00

I was going to call this post "Useless Words" or "Silly Words" but at the end of the day words can't actually be useless (agreed upon usage is all that meaning really is anyways), and I'm not sure it's fair to call any given word silly. It isn't the word's fault that people don't know how to use it consistently. That being said the phenomenon I'm thinking about is real. There are a great many words in the English language that are no longer sensible in their popular usage. I'm not one of those people who thinks languages should be static, unchanging, immovable. On the contrary I think the evolutionary nature of language is what makes it so fun and fascinating. What annoys me is people who say that a word means one thing but use it as though it means something else. I'm going to pick on two particular words today. I'm not going to pick on any particular person or publication, this is a general observation on my part. If you think I'm wrong or being overly general, feel free to disagree in the comments.

Scientist. I'm sick to death of the ubiquitous "scientists say" or "according to leading scientists" that we hear on television and read in newspapers. If I were to ask the average writer who uses this word what he or she means, my guess is that I would hear something about observable, empirical, reproducible evidence, about unbiased research and perhaps even something about facts or truth. All of those things are well and good so far as they go. I'll set aside in depth comments about competing epistemological points of view and the role of scientific method in the search for truth. My real complaint today is that when news outlets (and people in general for that matter) talk about scientists they are not referring to people who observe the world in a particular way and then comment on those observations (which is what scientists do). The rhetorical subtext of the common use of the word "scientist" is far more closely related to older uses of the word "priest." That is, it refers to a gatekeeper at the fortress of truth. Instead of being just a person using particular methodology a scientist is now someone who holds facts in his or her hands and dispenses them to us mere mortals who can never understand the universe in a meaningful way. I wonder if we wouldn't be better off scrapping "scientist" and speak of people who do research according to scientific methodology as physicists, chemists, sociologists, biologists, etc.

Literally. This one annoys me far more than "scientist." That's mostly because when people use it they often mean exactly the opposite of what the word means. Just this evening I heard a woman say that her friend had a baby who's head was flat, "literally like a wall." How can a boy's head be literally like a wall? Was it made of rock or brick? What this woman meant, of course, was that the child's head is similar to a wall, in that it is decidedly flat in much the same way as a wall. This use of "literal" and "literally" is particularly dangerous when people read the Bible (and other sacred texts I'm sure). People who insist on the literal truth of the Bible don't really mean to say that every single word in the Bible contains only denotative (and not connotative) value. That would be ridiculous. Take the simple example of Jesus' words concerning the person with a plank in his or her eye attempting to remove a grain of dust from the eye of another. How can these words possibly be literal? No person could ever place an actual plank into his or her eye. It is a metaphor and must be read metaphorically. Somewhat might object and say that so called "biblical literalists" only mean that the Bible should be taken at face value. If someone can tell me what "face value" is, precisely, then perhaps we can have a conversation about that. All I know is that nobody can read the whole Bible literally.

But it's late now, and scientists say that a person should try to get at least 8 hours of sleep. Plus I'm so tired I could sleep like the dead...literally.

Triumph or Triumphalism...

2007-06-06T18:49:00.002-07:00

I play electric guitar in the band at my church. Yeah, I know, it kicks ass, but let's set that aside for a moment shall we? Just a little while ago our worship pastor introduced a new song to the congregation called My Savior Lives by the Desperation Band out of New Life Church. It's got this great little riff right at the beginning that I get to play very loud and very distorted, which is a lot of fun for me. The first time I really thought about the words of the song, however, I realized both the danger and the beauty available in the simple lyrics. I'll quote the meat here.

Our God will reign forever, and all the world will know his name.
Victory forever, is the song of the Redeemed.

I know that my Redeemer lives, and now I stand on what he did. My savior, my savior lives.
Everyday a brand new chance to say, Jesus you are the only way. My savior, my savior lives.

The king has come from heaven, and darkness trembles at his name.
Victory forever, is the song of the Redeemed.

Like all modern worship music the actual song goes on a good deal longer but it pretty much just repeats the above over and over again. As I'm sure you've noticed the theological...well I was going to say crux but I suppose that wouldn't be quite accurate. The theological key to this song is the resurrection. Though I tend to harp on the vital importance of the Cross in Christian theology, the empty tomb cannot be minimized. It is central to the Christology and to the anthropology of our faith. The most notable biblical argument concerning resurrection is of course Paul's words in 1 Corinthians 15. This passage is also the inspiration for My Savior Lives (check out vv. 1-2). It's a beautiful passage about hope, meaning, drive, and finally triumph. When Paul co-opts Hosea 13:14 and turns it on its head saying "O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?" (15:55 NASB) he reaches down to us struggling with our most basic fears and pulls us up out of the darkness to stand alongside Christ. Triumph is a wonderful thing, and as Christians we must embrace it.

But there is danger here. The danger is that we begin to sacrifice real triumph, the power and victory of the Cross and the empty tomb, for the emptiness of Christian triumphalism. What's the difference? Triumph is about grace and the gift of new life offered to all of humanity through Christ (1 Cor. 15:22). Triumphalism is about winning, about pushing an earthly agenda, a political agenda, a social agenda that raises up "Christians" while pushing down everyone else. I put the quotation marks around Christian in that sentence because this brand of church-ianity reminds me an awful lot of some things Jesus said about the Pharisees in Matthew 23.

When we sing songs like My Savior Lives we have an opportunity. We can set aside the temptation to think in terms of earthly victory, of political agendas, of the kinds of victory that can be measured in dollars or votes or asses in the pew. We can move beyond triumphalism. We can live instead in the hope and grace of triumph, knowing that we serve a God who wants more than anything that death might die.

Thoughts About Thinking About Faith...

2007-06-01T17:00:00.000-07:00

I ran across the following quote via Steven Harris who gets it from this interview with a gentleman named Liam Goligher.

Liam is concerned that the works of these theologians [advocates of the New Perspective on Paul, e.g. NT Wright] are overly complex, and that it seems it simply isn’t possible to popularise their teaching. To him, theology should be capable of a simple explanation that even a child can understand, whilst, of course, it can also be explored and discussed at much greater levels of complexity.

I don't know this man, and have no idea about what his credentials may or may not be (though I did see at another site that he uses the title Dr.). That being said this sentence is absurd and dangerous.

It's absurd because theology has always been difficult and complex. The writings of the OT prophets and poets, the theology of James and Paul and Peter and the author of Hebrews, the teachings of Christ himself...they're all complex. There is a reason why there is so much disagreement concerning the teachings of Scripture. Those teachings are sometimes very dense and require prolonged analysis and consideration, and developing a systematic theology from the Bible necessarily involves some intellectual heavy lifting.

It's dangerous because it suggests that anyone speaking in complex sentences and using polysyllabic words is somehow a less able or devout Christian. NT Wright is a great man, a great thinker and as far as I can tell a great Christian. He even writes some great devotional material that I think more Christians should read. Goligher's opinions above don't make me second guess Wright's faith or theology, they only make me think that Goligher is in over his head when he's reading Wright's academic works.

There are a great many academics in the world who believe that complex discussion about hermeneutics, the Historical Jesus, the Historical Paul, textual criticism, literary theory, etc., is important and are also devout Christians. This world doesn't need fewer people critically engaging complex issues, it needs more. This isn't intellectual snobbery. I don't think that you need to read Greek and Hebrew in order to be a thoughtful Christian, but being able to read ancient languages and complex theology doesn't preclude faith either.

Having faith like a child isn't the same thing as thinking like one.

Mishmash...

2007-05-30T20:25:00.001-07:00

Sorry for the sparse blogging lately. I've been both busy and preoccupied with other things. Nothing in particular to say today so I figured I'd just put together a little of this and that from the blogosphere.

Consequently I am flying the face of number 2 on John Lyons' list of the 7 Deadly Sins of Blogging. This is actually one of the things I disagree with on John's list. I rather like blogs that serve primarily as collating services for some topic or another. Paleojudaica is, of course, my favorite of these. Getting caught up on everything in the news that is even vaguely associated with early Judaism is generally as simple as clicking on to Davila's site.

For those of you who don't wander about on Slacktivist regularly, shame on you. But for now just check out his last couple of posts on the roles and rights of women around the world. Make sure you follow the link to Joss Whedon's post on this topic as well, and make note of his points concerning the soon-to-be-released Captivity. And while you're over on Slack don't forget to read Fred's second footnote on his most recent post. I would like to know precisely what precipitated the second encounter with Bishop Tutu.

Finally, I want to weigh in very briefly on Simcha Jacobivici and his "documentary" The Lost Tomb of Jesus. If you want the whole lowdown on this film I strongly suggest that you go over to Mark Goodacre's NT Gateway Blog and read everything that you find on the Talpiot Tomb, it's all here. The article I want to mention, however, I ran across via Jim West's blog (another blog worth daily reading). The Canadian Jewish News gives a report about Jacobivici's film and the resulting controversy, asking him questions about the rather harsh backlash that the film has received. Jacobivici seems to key in on people who take issue with his film on religious grounds, playing the Search for the Truth trump card on these objections. "What I am doing is reporting objectively about an archaeological discovery," he says. Later in the article he summarily dismisses the objections of archaeologists by saying "I’ve noticed that archeology is not a science. It’s a body of knowledge" (can somebody explain to me what the hell that means?!). What both he and the CJN completely fail to mention is that more or less the entire scholarly community, including theologians, archaeologists, philologists, paleographers, historians and biblical scholars have explored the possibility that the Talpiot Tomb belonged to Jesus of Nazareth is highly unlikely. There are serious scholars (e.g. James Tabor) who do buy that the tomb does contain the remains of Jesus, but so far as I know not many (readers should feel free to correct me on this). It's not that I think Jacobivici is ridiculous because of what he believes, but the fact that he dismisses the scholarly community on this subject by citing his journalism credentials just annoys me.

So, there it is. An avalanche of meaningless junk. Cheers all.

Better Men (and Women) or Willful Ignorance...

2007-05-10T22:40:00.000-07:00

I'm reading some more of the platonic Dialogues again right now, partly because Socrates is good fun and partly because I really need to return Mike's books to him and this is one of the ones I borrowed around (cough, cough) two years ago. Anyhoo, I came across a wonderful little quote. The parenthetical (and women) is my editorial nod towards inclusiveness.

Socrates: I think so too, Meno. I do not insist that my argument is right in all other respects, but I would contend at all costs both in word and deed as far as I could that we will be better men (and women), braver and less idle, if we believe that one must search for the things one does not know, rather than if we believe that it is not possible to find out what we do not know and that we must not look for it.
-Plato, Meno, 86b (trans. G.M.A. Grube; Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1981).

Ignorance is a fact of life. Willful ignorance is a sin.

Gordon Matthew Thomas Sumner...

2007-05-03T20:49:00.000-07:00

I've been listening to a lot of Sting lately. For whatever reason over the past few years popular music has become less and less interesting to me. There are still a few bands here and there that I love, bands that speak to me, but they are few and far between. Among them, however, there is Sting. There are two songs in particular that have reached me in a powerful way. It isn't that I resonate with either of them. I don't. They have nothing to do with my life. But they are wonderful stories and there are very few things in life that I like more than a wonderful story.

I Hung My Head is the story of a man who accidentally shoots and kills a stranger. Not surprisingly this song was also performed by Johnny Cash on his American IV album. Though at first glance the song is apparently about death it is really about regret and the powerlessness of much of our lives. It is a heart-wrenchingly beautiful drama and I love hearing it over and over again. It is also written in 9/8 time. Ya, you heard me.

I'm So Happy I Can't Stop Crying is the story of a man who's wife has left him. Never have I experienced a song that walks the fine line between sadness and hope so well. And the truly great joy of this song is the perfect marriage between the tone of the music and the one of the lyrics. So few major recording artists truly have the ability to marry a complex emotion like loss with a musical score, but Sting does it marvelously here. The movement from a major to a minor progression in the chorus following verse 3 hits me particularly hard.

This may seem like an odd post for me (though those who know me well know that I love music), but I'm going somewhere with this. It would appear that a lot of people I know are tired and sad right now. I understand, I'm just coming out of a pretty deep valley myself. These songs helped me because they are so deeply human. They touched me with both sadness and the promise of hope. In the spirit of hope then, I leave you with a line from I'm So Happy.

I saw that friend of mine, he said,
you look different somehow
I said, everybody's got to leave the darkness sometime.

Visceral...

2007-04-26T22:20:00.000-07:00

Jinny and I had a nice little date night tonight. A pleasant walk, some ice-cream from the local shop (a wonderful woman who sells right out of her house) and a movie. The movie was Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men, a near-future drama/action film (generally called sci-fi, but the label doesn't fit here in my opinion). The premise of the film is that in the year 2027 no children have been born on the whole planet for about 18 years. In Cuaron's vision of the future the political and social strife present today in much of the developed and developing world has been drastically exacerbated by the progressive realization that this is the last generation of humans the world will ever see.

The film has received mixed reviews and I know people who have loved it and hated it. I don't know that I loved it, but I do think it was very good and occasionally brilliant. What this film provides better than anything is an immediate and visceral experience of political and cultural conflict. All of this comes to a head in the climactic confrontation between government and rebel forces. That sentence may sound cliche, and certainly a plot line like this in the hands of a lesser director could have been badly botched, but in this case I really felt that this moment allowed us as viewers to experience what it might mean to be on either side of a violent ideological conflict. There's also a fantastic moment where we glimpse the great wonder and the great absurdity bound up in being human, but I won't spoil that bit (it was my favorite part of the film). This one is definitely worth a try.

Walking...

2007-04-19T21:20:00.000-07:00

Two days ago, in the early evening, I walked to the bank. This may not seem like a very interesting event. Honestly in and of itself this isn't an interesting event, but it meant something to me. A realization that I suspect has been brewing for a while now finally popped to the surface of my consciousness, kind of like the little toy boat that you used to hold under the water in your bathtub as a child just so that you could watch it jump through the surface when you released it. The S.S. Insight in this little story was this: there is no better way to connect with the place you live than walking. Our society doesn't walk well. We work too far away, we shop too far away, our friends and our family and all of our entertaining little distractions are too far away. Consequently we end up driving a lot. Unfortunately driving removes our ability to experience the sights and sounds and smells of the cities and towns in which we live.

Walking to the bank was a way for me to connect to my town. One of the reasons that Jinny and I bought the house we live in is its proximity to downtown and to the river. I run by the river all the time, but that's not the same as walking downtown to the bank. Running reconnects me to God, his creation, my body, the fact that I'm terribly out of shape and the current selection of music on my Ipod. Walking reconnects me to my community. It makes me love the place where I am, and that seems important to me.

I also learned the other night that a statistically disproportionate number of late-model Sunfires and Cavaliers are owned by twenty-year-old girls.

Via...

2007-04-16T18:44:00.000-07:00

Been busy, so no big blogging likely to happen this week. I do, however, have a quote via Slacktivist for you to mull over. Try this one on for size (and don't forget to read the whole post here):

[The] shared motto of preachers and journalists: "Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable."

A New Venture...

2007-04-14T14:34:00.000-07:00

I've added yet another new blog to my sidebar. Called "White Bulls and Wild Goats" it is a second blog that I've started for posting concerned specifically with my academic interests. It will include reflections concerning my own thesis work in particular and the discipline of biblical studies in general. It is, I suppose, a "biblioblog" of sorts. For those of you unfamiliar with the terminology "biblioblog" has become the generally accepted name for blogs devoted to the Bible and biblical studies (I didn't coin the term, but for better or worse that ship seems to have sailed). I will still be posting here, probably far more regularly than at the new site. If you're interested in the academic study of the Bible than you might enjoy the new site, if not...well you're always welcome here.

Without a Trace...

2007-04-12T20:29:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite weekly reads, which you'll fine on the links sidebar, is Fred Clarke over at Slacktivist. Most of Fred's posts deal with politics and social justice, all delivered with a post-liberal Christian twist. The real gems on Slacktivist, however, are his weekly(ish) posts deconstructing the bestselling pseudo-novel Left Behind.

For those of you unfamiliar with Left Behind and its authors Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, this novel and its many sequels are fictional stories about a future in which the rapture has occurred and the Great Tribulation is in full swing. For those of you to whom that last sentence didn't make any sense at all, don't worry, just wander around Wikipedia for a little bit (starting here). Anyways, one of the major premises of Left Behind in particular and premillennial dispensationalism in general is the belief in an instantaneous and bodily disappearance of every faithful Christian on Earth seven years before the physical return of Christ (called the Rapture). This is one of the points in Left Behind that Fred rips on the most. Though he certainly takes theological issue with the Rapture, a lot of his complaints about Jenkins and LaHaye's books are stylistic, especially when it comes to this miraculous vanishing. Let me give you a quick taste from his latest LB post:

Left Behind, pp. 259-261
This section of the book reads like a flashback, as though it were set years ago. Apart from the absence of Rayford Steele's wife and son, nothing in this section seems like it could possibly have occurred after the Event. But it's not a flashback:

Rayford pulled into his driveway with a sack of groceries on the seat beside him. ...

Nothing unusual about any of that. And that, of course, is the problem -- there's nothing unusual about any of that.

Rayford buys gasoline and groceries and it's all perfectly routine. The supermarket and the gas station are fully stocked and supplied and everything seems normally priced. No gas lines, no run on canned goods and bottled water. Not even the kinds of temporary shortages you might expect when snow is forecast. One might think that hundreds of rail and plane crashes one week ago might still be affecting supply lines. That the sudden disappearance of tens of thousands of workers from every step along the way -- from field to shelf, from refinery to pump -- might cause at least a hiccup in prices. That every worker at every stage is suddenly and inexplicably dealing with the loss of their children might also have some affect on the economy and the availability of goods. But no. Rayford is able to purchase everything he wants, at normal prices, and without delay (his errands, we are told, took only half an hour).

Fred is right of course, this represents some of the most mind-numbingly atrocious writing that the planet has ever seen (these guys make Dan Brown look Nobel worthy). But here's my question about J+L's rapture scenario. In any number of cases it would appear that nobody left on earth really seems to notice that all the Christians everywhere are gone. What does this say about J+L's vision of the Church and its role in the world? For that matter what does it say about their general knowledge about the way the world really is?

I don't know a whole lot about charity work, but I do know that if you took every single Christian out of the world in an instant a whole hell of a lot of people would go hungry, unsheltered and uneducated. You can rag on the Church all you like, but the fact remains that Christians represent a massive percentage of all the charitable work that goes on in the world today. We serve, we organize and we give. I don't know if we do it more or less than any other community or group in the world, but I've gotta believe that we at least make up a noticeable percentage of what goes on in the world.

Which brings me to my point. Left Behind isn't just a crappy book, it is dangerous and insidious. It's authors don't believe that the Church does anything to help the world because they don't believe that the Church should do anything to help the world beyond pure proselytization. This is just one more example of the "saved from" theology I mentioned below.

Am I the only person who thinks its sad that Tim LaHaye's and Jerry Jenkins' Church is able to vanish from the world without a trace?

5 More Reasons...

2007-04-11T19:44:00.000-07:00

As of today I have just a few more reasons to love Kurt Vonnegut. I listened to A Man Without a Country today, which is a peculiar little book that Vonnegut wrote only two years ago. Though Vonnegut is generally known for his fiction (Slaughterhouse 5 in particular) Country is a short work of non-fiction in which the author basically tells us his views on life. In a meandering and roundabout way he talks about art, politics, love, kindness, death and how to piss of your parents. It's a lot like listening to a very wise and very articulate grandfather give you advice for a morning, except in this case your grandfather is one of the greatest novelists of the modern era. As I was listening I decided that there are now a few more reasons for me to love Vonnegut. Here they are:

1. He's funny...really funny. And not in a stupid way like an Adam Sandler movie, but in a dark, witty, and even hopeful way. I laughed an awful lot this morning.

2. He has no use for modern life or technology. Okay, I know that this sounds a little hypocritical coming from a guy who's blogging on a laptop while watching a TV show on DVD and not looking forward to going to work at his Oil and Gas Industry job tomorrow. I'm not quite the Luddite that Vonnegut is, but I also seriously question the need and importance of the society we've designed in North America in particular. Vonnegut rags pretty hard on our current dependence on fossil-fuels and he's right about a lot of it. The fact of the matter is that most people do indeed need their cars, but that's because we've designed cities and towns and a society in general that is completely unconscious about how unnecessarily large the distances involved in our everyday lives really are. Don't think so? Check out the general nature of life in more densely populated industrialized nations where people walk and take transit more than anything else.

3. Like me Vonnegut sees music as the only necessary proof for the existence of God.

4. Even though he's a secular humanist with no belief in heaven or hell or judgment of any kind, Vonnegut still believes that it is important to be good to each other. I've never understood how somebody with that particular metaphysical outlook can come to that particular ethical conclusion, but I'm sure glad he did. The world is full enough of people who don't care about anything other than themselves. One more person who believes in the importance of acts of self-sacrifice, grace, peace and love is just fine with me. To be honest it strikes me that Vonnegut has grasped the Gospel more firmly than a lot of Christians I've known and read (and been some days too, I'm ashamed to say).

5. Finally the great Mr. Vonnegut knows how to write. Every sentence and word is chosen and arranged with care and attention. Whether I agreed with everything that he wrote or not, reading this book was a pleasure from start to finish. A great many writers in the world today would do well to take a lesson from this master of the written word (you're damn right I'm looking at you Dan Brown!).

All of this to say that you should go read A Man Without a Country for yourself. And anything else that Vonnegut has ever written for that matter.

Update: Though I did not know it at the time of this post, the great Kurt Vonnegut passed away yesterday, apparently due to complications from a head injury. May his name be for a blessing.

Happy Easter...

2007-04-08T08:51:00.000-07:00

Okay people, whether you post in the comments regularly or not I want to hear you this time. You know the response.

He is risen!!

Upon the Fulcrum...

2007-04-06T07:59:00.000-07:00

My time reading Neo-Orthodox theology a few years ago, particularly Barth, has driven home to me the centrality of the self-revelation of God in the incarnate Christ. Particularly it began to change my conception of the nature of history and the vital importance of the Cross.

It is Good Friday today. This is the day. This is the day that we celebrate what is roughly the 1970th (depends on a few dating factors) anniversary of the crucifixion of God Incarnate upon "that old rugged cross." This is the day. This is the day upon which all of history turns, the point at which God's all important program of salvation tilted towards the good. This is the day, this death day, this day of suffering and darkness, the bleakest point in the history of the world. This is the day that God changed the very course of history, and he did it in favour of his creation. Today is the fulcrum.

We stand upon the fulcrum of history when we celebrate the Cross. The day of light and life and promise is coming, but it is this day of black horror that God chose to tip the balance. We must acknowledge it. We must acknowledge that all we are - our vocation, our hope, our love, our calling, our righteousness, our power, our very gospel - is wholly dependant upon this day.

"For whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes" (1 Cor. 11:28, NIV).

"He who testifies to these things says, 'Yes, I am coming soon.' Amen. Come, Lord Jesus" (Rev. 22:20, NIV).

Jubilee...

2007-04-04T14:25:00.000-07:00

As previously mentioned I've been a little under the weather this week. Nothing serious, just a little bout of the flu or a bad cold or something. If, however, I lived in a country other than Canada there is a reasonable chance that this little bout of the flu would have killed me. Liberia, for instance, has a literacy rate of 56%, an average life expectancy of 42 years and an HIV infection rate of 8%. Oh ya, I forgot to mention that this country of 3 million people spends $7 million per year on health care. As a point of comparison Canada, a country of roughly ten times Liberia's population, spent $148 billion on health care in 2006 according to the Canadian Institute for Health Information. For the math deficient among you $148 billion is not even roughly ten times more than $7 million (though I'm pretty sure that the Liberia stats are in US dollars, so that pretty near evens things out).

One of the reasons that I'm picking on Liberia here is that it is one of four countries held up as examples by the Jubilee Debt Campaign of nations that are not eligible for international debt forgiveness. This isn't just a bad thing, it is actively criminal. It is, in my mind, the equivalent of forcing a homeless person to repay me for the $5 I dropped into his hat last week including interest at prime plus one. When the person next to you is dying from hunger and you give them money to eat you've done a good thing. If you turn around a take them to debtor's court after they've eaten...well I don't even know what to call that. Despicable, reprehensible, disgusting, horrifying...oh ya, criminal, I already used the word criminal so lets just stick with that.

I'm not sure if the Jubilee Debt Campaign is an organization with Christian or Jewish origins, but either way they're using one of our words. The year of Jubilee was instituted as a part of the Law in order to create social justice within the Israelite community. The bit that the JDC is making particular reference to is Leviticus 25:28. "But if he does not acquire the means to repay him, what he sold will remain in the possession of the buyer until the Year of Jubilee. It will be returned in the Jubilee, and he can then go back to his property" (NIV). That is to say, if a person has sold his land to another and does not have the means to recover it, after 49 years that land must be returned to the original family for free, with no strings attached.

Usually this is the point where I talk about how I want our word back, about how I think that Christians should reclaim the terminology that someone in the world has stolen. Not this time. Don't get me wrong, I want Christians to take this concept more seriously, but anyone who is willing to fight for a cause that will help millions of poor and disenfranchised people around the world is welcome to any damn word of mine they can find. That being said I think that perhaps we need to find more ways to support causes like the JDC. Check out their website if you're looking for ways to help.

God takes seriously our treatment of the people around us in this world. So should we.

Sick Day...

2007-04-03T14:47:00.000-07:00

I am now nearing the end of day two of my spring bout of the flu (or whatever this bloody thing is). I did try to do some actual work (thesis work that is) but I was just too sick and miserable yesterday to get more than half a page read at once. It really is true that men are giant babies when they're sick. I am at least. Either way, today I felt well enough to fiddle with my blog a whole bunch. It turns out that the new Blogger has a new layout feature thingy so I don't have to be any good with HTML (which I'm not) to do cool stuff with the page. So, check out my new lists on the side. You'll have to pardon me that pretty much everything on those lists got a rating of 8 or better. That's mostly a by-product of the fact that these are lists of things I like and making the cut of things I like, though not the hardest thing in the world to pull off, does require a rating of 7.5 or better. At least, so it would seem. Either way, I do recommend pretty much everything on those lists, though it should be noted that much of it is definitely "viewer discretion advised" stuff.