a beautiful idea

Richard Beck's most recent post reflects on a painting of called "Rest on the Flight into Egypt". Many of the ideas he presents there address (in a more positive light) things I complained about in my previous post, so I figured I'd include them.

An excerpt

What I like about Rest on the Flight into Egypt is how it depicts, from the very beginning of his life, the homelessness of the Messiah. God is a refugee, an immigrant, a stranger in a strange land, a person of exile. Rest on the Flight into Egypt is a model for the life of the church. We are people of exile. Strangers among the nations. All we carry across the wastelands of this earth is the Christ Child. We have nothing else to offer.

Galut is a Hebrew word for the situation of living in a state of exile or homelessness...Yoder uses the phrase "galut as calling" to describe the landless missionary existence of Christians. The biblical models for this existence in the Old Testament are Joseph, Daniel and Esther. Joseph, Daniel and Esther each lived as exiles, as resident aliens. Each labored alongside the people of a nation to which they did not belong, each working elbow to elbow "seeking the welfare of the city" (Jer. 29.7).

We can add Mary and Joseph to this list while they lived and worked in Egypt with the baby Jesus.

That is my wish for the church this Advent season, that "non-Christians" find us, in every place, working side-by-side with them, as partners, seeking the welfare of the city. The church isn't a fortress or a gated community or a community of snobbish like-mindedness and self-righteousness. The church is a mission as we live in exile among the nations. Purposely scattered, in jobs and neighborhoods across the world, to work alongside our neighbors to bring peace on earth and good will to all.

"in", but not "of"

I've been reading Conservapedia for fun. For those of you who don't know, it's another user-edited online encyclopedia that hopes to dispel the "liberal, anti-Christian, and anti-American bias" of Wikipedia. It's been in the news recently for attempting the first social media-based retranslation of the Bible (in order to remove non-conservative bias from the text), though previous publicity has been through criticisms in having significant error and bias in it's posts, and being inhospitable to any non-Conservative edits.

Many of the articles are written with a sort of commentary on theologically neutral ideas. An interesting case of this is it's article on diagonalization, a famous mathematical technique (that I just had to use in a homework) - the end of the article questions the validity of the argument because it seemingly disproves God ("diagonalization argues that no greatest idea can exist: quite bluntly, God is infinite, therefore He can be diagonalized to produce an even greater infinite. This seeming disproof of the existence of God has cast doubt on the validity of Cantor's diagonalization.")

Ignoring the fact that this argument is probably bogus, it's a bit worrisome to me to find this sort of commentary - not just that it's wrong or biased or presuppositional, but that it's an example of Christianity isolating itself from the outside world. There are links to other Christian-based website copies on the Conservapedia Wikipedia page. GodTube, MyChurch, QubeTV - each is a knockoff of a secular website. What was wrong with the original website to begin with? Why could we, as the church, not be a part of these? Didn't Jesus say he sent his disciples "into" the world in John 17?

I see a fair number of negative consequences to this trend of self-isolation: for example, the creation of religious subcultures, a very narrow view of God, and a deaf ear towards wisdom from other sources (and in this, an implicit assumption that wisdom from outside a specific church/religious circle is inferior). A concrete example might be faith healing movements against modern medicine - a subculture is created that demonizes non-faith-based healing, creating another way of boasting of works and of distinguishing oneself as being "holier than thou". A narrow view of God working results - I'm of the opinion that such "faith-healing only" movements deny that God would work indirectly (thru doctors, drugs, etc), which can be a severely limiting and damaging viewpoint in its own right. The result of denying outside wisdom from the medical and scientific community is both poorer health for such movement members, harsh criticism from the rest of society, and a lack of witness to the rest of the world as a result.

This might be a stretch, but the anti-dating subculture could stand as a similar example. My pastor mentioned this odd subculture last week, and I'm still digesting and thinking about it.

I haven't thought too much about the positive aspects to these; to be fair, I'm probably a little biased against these "Christianized" secular inventions (and welcome observations on what I might have missed). Overall, I do get the sense that good intentions went into these attempts to be "not of the world"; however, in the end, it seems to result in the creation of another religious clique or cult.

facebook

Hey all - I got removed from Facebook due to my account getting hacked =\. I'm trying to get them to restore my account, but so far have gotten no reply back. More on this later, hopefully.

EDIT :: well, I'm back. And Alan, touche.

the Incarnation

At a recent small group, I posed a series of questions, and the small group leader asked me one in return - "what is the Incarnation?". Jesus became man (the Word became flesh), but why? For most, Romans 8 would lead to the conclusion that he came to save the world. But if the fall never happened, would the Incarnation have still occurred in some form or another?

The Eastern Orthodox church takes the stance that Jesus would've become man even if there was no sin to absolve. Jurgen Moltmann speaks of the Incarnation as a fulfillment of the love of God, of his desire to be present and living amidst humanity, to "walk in the garden" with us". Moltmann favors the idea that Christ would've come down regardless of sin, for the reason that Christ's life on earth holds a deeper meaning under that interpretation.

A part of me feels strange asking "what if the fall never happened?". Another part of me wonders how the analogies that I've used to understand Christ's coming down fit into this. And yet a third part of me wonders - what changes, if this were true? What would change about the way I see God - and what would change as a result of that?

Thoughts? More to come on this later, I hope.

on "God's will"

A post from Pat Hastings on the will of God, and the problem with the way people usually interpret the "will of God". He outlines a few problems with the way we've expected to hear the will of God, and offers, instead of "knowing the will of God", the idea of "having a perspective on the will of God".

Enjoy!

long time no post

as the title reads, I haven't written here for a while - sorry =\. Part of this is because I've been busy; much more of it is just that I haven't given the effort or time for good thought and introspection. It's as if I reached my limit a month ago with deep and thoughtful subjects and instead occupied myself with trivialities. Lets hope that changes.

Anyways, in short, a few updates.

1. I've been a fool. I've been thinking back a lot to what one of my closest friends said - (paraphrased) "thinking isn't the way you reflect God". I kind of took that as an insult, but I think I've learned the truth of it in some sense. For one, the knee-jerk reaction to my friend's constructive criticism should've alerted me that I might be a little oversensitive about the issue - and for what reason?
   
   More so, my de facto response to not knowing a topic seems to be to learn about it enough to seem like I'm an expert. At one time, I think I was desperate to learn in order to genuinely come to a decision on some matters of faith. My resultant point of view diverged from that of my friends around me, and on a few topics, I found that I ended up far more educated and informed than most people. I think this quickly evolved into arrogance, with me needing to always feel like one of the intellectual elites among my circle of friends.
   
   Luckily for me, I have friends whose callings to reflect God DO seem to be through intellectual pursuits. I think I've embarrassed myself around them enough to be alerted to my own folly.
   
   
2. I'm getting used to Austin. I'm nowhere near the social butterfly (or popular guy) I was at Rice, but I'm getting more adjusted to Austin and the fact that I can be happy just as the average Joe here. There's so many people here that it'd be impossible to meet them all, but most people seem content with a smaller group of friends. I've gotten used to that, and I feel like I'm getting more plugged in to my church, Vox Veniae. I'm grateful for the people there and the chances I get to serve.
   
   That said, it seems kind of difficult for me to find a group of people that I consistently see and share my life with. I feel like, out of all the guys in CCF, I somehow became the one who was closed off. So, I'm hoping to 1) learn how to commit better to relationships in Austin (which is a bit diff from Houston, it seems), and 2) find opportunities to do so (i.e. find people).
   
   
3. I'm getting older. Not to lament my age, but being older and out of college seems to have awakened me to the idea that I'm at the last stage of my life (in some sense). There's childhood, primary education, college, and then work. Somehow, I thought I'd have it figured out by now. Faith, purpose, love (yikes - no experience here), identity, but really, I think that the assumption that these things would just work themselves out as I got older has kept me from really digging in and developing each of them. Perhaps that's not as uncommon as we think; after all, we kids often aren't expected to grow up until after our college playtime.
   
   I think that more and more, I feel like regardless of age, so many people don't have it figured out. Given my experience with adults growing up, I had imagined that the average person knows where he or she's going by 30, but I've met so many counterexamples in Austin that show me otherwise. It's a bit scary to know things don't magically work out regardless of what we do (gasp! consequences!), though as I realize this, I can feel myself trying to take life more seriously as well.
   
   
4. I'm improving! To put a positive spin on things, I have to admit, it's nice to be improving on things while I'm here too =). A few things I feel like I've improved on while in Austin
   
   • Cooking - I used to be able to make good dishes. Inconsistently. More so now, I feel like I can whip up a meal without too much effort
     
   • Songwriting - I joined a band in the CAM dept, which has definitely pushed me musically. Likewise, Vox Veniae has opened my ears to a whole new world of music. I hope I'm right in claiming my songwriting has expanded a bit too =). Once I'm over my cold, I hope to record vocals and put some new songs up.
   • Handyman(-ing?) - I've learned basics of fixing/maintaining my bike, running sound, keeping the house clean, even maintaining my car (a little). I feel useful!
     
   • Math - for the first time, I don't always feel like I'm perpetually struggling to catch up with the rest of the class! I'm not devoting all my energy and time to school anymore! And research is actually going alright! I am very grateful for that.

Well, thanks for reading. Hopefully a more topic-oriented, substantial update is to come soon =P.

follow-up to "Christians are jerks"

(This post is a little late - I started it about 2 weeks ago, but my brother has been visiting.)

Richard Beck posted a little while back on Christians being jerks. Here's a follow-up post on why that might be. From the post

Despite what I said in previous post, I don't think most Christians are jerks. Rather, I think Christians tend to behave like jerks due to failures of attention. I just don't think Christians are mindful enough.

I commented a while back on the original post of "Christians being jerks" (and before that, on the related idea of moral bs). Both address the fact that quite often, the world sees Christians (evangelicals especially) as being jerks, hypocrites, etc, and offer explanations of why. I tend to relate to this most recent post most of all - from my experience, most Christians I know are very genuinely and passionately trying to be the salt of the earth, but somehow end up leaving a funny aftertaste.

The main idea Beck offers is that much criticism directed towards Christians is the result of sins of ignorance or inattentiveness. Previously, he offered the example of Christians going from church to Sunday lunch - they're often known as a group of impatient, haughty, dismissive, lousy tippers. This time around, he qualifies it by explaining why this behavior isn't something done purposefully, or even consciously, but that in not paying attention, we let our default setting (our sinful self, if you will) get to us. He gives examples of, say, standing in a long checkout line at Walmart and letting frustration and impatience get to us. We can become angry at people we don't even know (road rage, anyone?), dehumanizing the person without ever thinking about their own struggles and what might be going on in their life, simply by not being attentive to our own state of heart.

(as a culturally-specific note) :: To be fair, among the Chinese-American crowd, I haven't often seen rude crowds of Christians leaving lousy tips at restaurants (probably because the Chinese culture emphasizes politeness, or because our parents emphasize cheapness - i.e. going to places where we don't need to tip), and many of my friends really go out of their way to love and care for whomever they meet. However, I do remember when we held small groups or house church meetings at friends places, often the guests would leave a fairly large mess of dishes (and sometimes stains) for the hosts to clean up afterwards. I don't believe this was rudeness, but simply an immaturity/inattentiveness and ignorance of the trouble we bring to others unconsciously (and as a personal comment, I'd like to add that Beck's example of the being Christlike at the urinal is a particular pet peeve of mine).

I think the analogy can be extended to many different places. One example I've seen before might be social justice ministries. While research into doing effective social ministry has taken huge strides recently, that area of ministry has historically been (and sometimes still is) less effective than it's practitioners might believe. A book I saw on a blog recently (When Helping Hurts: How to Alleviate Poverty Without Hurting the Poor...and Yourself), for example, talks about the way in which misguided attempts to help alleviate poverty have actually made it worse.

Evangelical Christians are often noted for their passion and focus, a strong point of theirs. However, at the same time, I think this characteristic may tend to lead to inattentiveness towards some other things (this is not to say all evangelicals are like this). Perhaps this is why, when Jesus spoke about the two greatest commandments, he spoke about loving God without divorcing it from loving your neighbor as yourself - so that "turning our eyes upon Jesus" would not cause us to turn our attention from everything else as well.

egads! gay marriage and controversy

EDIT :: fixed a few mistakes I made while typing this at 3AM, and added one more link to a blog post on Piper's post.

Somehow, my entire day today was filled with conversations about about gay marriage. To start it off, John Piper wrote a fairly controversial post on a tornado which struck an ELCA convention that was discussing human sexuality (I encourage everyone to read the post and try to consider the many reasons people think why it was both good and bad).

Some posts on the topic
From what seems to be a theologically liberal view
From what seems to be a theologically moderate view
From a theologically conservative view
From Greg Boyd

Personally, I'm a lot more sympathetic towards the second and third posts. You can say a lot about the wisdom of Piper's post without having to get into the theological debate over gay marriage. In general, I tend to think that Piper's post was unwise and a little shaky logically.

Logically
The first three points are fine - given Piper's assumptions on Biblical authority, these are very sound conclusions for him to make, even if you don't agree with them. However, points 4, 5, and 6 seem kind of like a train wreck to me. There is a major non-sequitur in between points 3 and 4. Point 5, to me, seems to be both a misinterpretation and a point that can be easily misinterpreted by readers. Point 6, the conclusion, just seems to come absolutely out of nowhere.

Point 4 - "Jesus Christ controls the wind, including all tornadoes". Perhaps, but what does that have to do with this (many commenters also noted that in the verse from Mark that Piper cites, Jesus calms the wind and storm. Except for the destruction of the fig tree, Jesus doesn't seem to perform miracles in violent, destructive ways)? Piper believes every action is ordained for a reason, but that still doesn't answer why this particular tornado should have so clear the purpose he interprets (several posts offer examples of why applying his interpretation to other natural disasters and tornadoes is problematic).

Point 5 - "When asked about a seemingly random calamity near Jerusalem where 18 people were killed, Jesus answered in general terms—an answer that would cover calamities in Minneapolis, Taiwan, or Baghdad. God’s message is repent, because none of us will otherwise escape God’s judgment." Piper quotes from Luke 12

There were some present at that very time who told him about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices. And he answered them, “Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans, because they suffered in this way? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish. Or those eighteen on whom the tower in Siloam fell and killed them: do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others who lived in Jerusalem? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.”

I don't see much wrong with the conclusion Piper draws. Applying it to this situation, however, is something I can't follow. The verse seems to be given as a response to why suffering occurs, why people are hurting, and it specifically talks about a group NOT being more sinful for receiving punishment.

Point 6 - There is a lot hidden between the lines to arrive at this point, and I'm not very happy with what Piper did. Even if points 4 and 5 are shaky, they are points I might agree with in general. Concluding point 6 from 4 and 5 is not.

Piper assumes first of all that Jesus would use nature's destruction to warn (which seems akin to threatening), which doesn't seem to be the Biblical precedent with either God (Noah was warned of the flood before the flood, Lot was given time to warn Sodom and Gomorrah before their destruction), the prophets (even Moses' curses were never meant to be warnings; they warned Pharaoh while speaking directly to him, and the curses were given as confirmation that God kept his word), or Jesus. In the cases where nature is actually used by God to destroy, the warnings are usually given before nature arrives to decimate everything. God may have used nature to cast judgment; but God using nature as a big threatening stick seems very petty, and not at all in line with what is Biblically recorded. This is not precluding the fact that there's plenty of Bible references that claim that good and evil happen to both righteous and sinners, and that Piper assumes automatically that this is a case of evil happening to sinners.

Piper then seems to conclude the complete opposite of point 5. Point 5 and the Scripture from which it quotes claims that the ones whom disaster struck were not worse sinners. His point for 5 was that we all are sinners, and have need to repent. Piper then seems to conclude in 6 that, since a disaster struck the ELCA, they are therefore being singled out for a warning. This doesn't make any sense.

A friend asked me for a Biblical response to Piper's interpretation, but I didn't see much of a Biblical basis for his conclusion. It seems as if the specific interpretation that the ELCA tornado was a warning from God came from pretty much nowhere.

Wisely?

Logically, I can excuse Piper - perhaps I'm missing something in his arguments, or perhaps this seemed extremely clear to him at the time (which might have felt like a leading of the Spirit to him). However, I think the post itself was unwise due to its impact on Christians and the publicity of the post itself.

On the impact of Piper on Christians, there is no doubt that he is near idolized among many Christians today. His influence among evangelical pastors is huge. Perhaps he did intend to spur Christians to think like he did in the post. If he did, however, I find that strange, because he has typically not been one to speculate in this faux-prophetic sort of manner, and I don't think his church is one to do so either (and his blog does represent his church, after all). It just strikes me as out of character for him.

On the publicity of the post, let me just say that a post like this gets extremely bad press. Perhaps Piper didn't intend to sound like Pat Robertson. However, he certainly came across similarly. From one of the linked blogs:

Piper should have been more aware, in my opinion, that to the watching world his comments will sound identical (though they are surely not) to Pat Robertson’s unbelievably self-righteous and irresponsible remarks after 9/11. It’s not Piper’s fault that his remarks will be received that way. But it’s where we live, and I believe Piper’s remarks will make it even more difficult to win homosexuals to Christ because he has planted unnecessary stumbling blocks that have nothing to do with the gospel of Christ crucified for sinners.

By now, I'm getting sleepy (it's 3AM), so I'll wrap this up, and hopefully continue this conversation in the comment section.

------------------------------------------------------------

Secondly, a great friend at school talked with me about the Episcopal Church's General Convention meeting, where the issue of human sexuality was brought up in two resolutions, each of which pushed to acknowledge openly partnered homosexuals in the church.

The Episcopal Church is an interesting entity - it's officially tied to the global Anglican Communion, but it gets press for being much more liberal theologically and (church) politically than the rest of the Communion. I was drawn to the Anglican culture through figures like C.S. Lewis, NT Wright, Rowan Williams - all great scholars and thinkers who were, at the same time, very much Orthodox Christians. Rowan Williams, for example, is the Archbishop of Canterbury, the chief bishop of the Anglican Communion (i.e. he's probably the largest figure in Anglicanism globally).

A few things to note - in his earlier years, he held fairly liberal views concerning same-sex marriages. In taking up the title of Archbishop of Canterbury, however, he expressed his public views as being much more Orthodox for the sake of keeping the church united. The Episcopalean church has typically been very American in it's actions - independent, a little bit arrogant - and it has already caused some hints of schism between them and the larger Anglican church (Episcopaleanism in America has already sort of split - many American bishops cut ties to the Episcopalean church in response to their increasingly liberal policies, aligning themselves instead with the more conservative African arm of the Anglican Communion). At their General Convention, the pattern seems to have continued - Rowan Williams himself showed up and essentially pleaded for the Convention to not make decisions that would increase the divide between them and the rest of the Anglican Communion. The Convention didn't seem to listen.

What seems so odd about this is that Williams is publicly known to be sympathetic towards openly partnered homosexuals, but that he was pleading on behalf of church unity for the General Convention to, at the very least, take smaller and slower steps. It seems very disrespectful, to me, that he might merit such a response from the Episcopalean Church. Even if the General Convention believes strongly in the open practice of homosexuality, moving too quickly towards that goal seems rash, irresponsible, arrogant, and inconsiderate of the rest of the Anglican communion, especially for a group that claims individualism is the "great Western heresy" of evangelical Christianity.

Here's a news report detailing the General Convention, with quotes from Rowan Williams and NT Wright.

------------------------------------------------------------

A few thoughts about the issue on a more holistic level
1) It seems as if most people defending the conservative view have moved past the question of whether homosexuality itself is a sin (which I think is a very good thing) and onto questions concerning open practice of homosexuality.
2) While some may claim that the issue isn't central to Christianity, a lot of other issues are tacked on to the gay marriage controversy that would probably be considered much more important; for example, changes in theological views on gay marriage also carry with them questions about the interpretation/view of of Scripture, and possibly questions on the interaction of church and culture. Like it or not, this is an issue we should all probably wrestle with somewhat.
3) This should not be an issue to rush towards a conclusion on (either towards the conservative or liberal conclusion).

Thoughts?

"jerk factories"

A thought-provoking new post by Richard Beck on why some Christians tend to act more like jerks the more "spiritual" they become.

From the conclusion:

My point in all this is that contemporary Christianity has lost its way. Christians don't wake up every morning thinking about how to become a more decent human being. Instead, they wake up trying to "work on their relationship with God" which very often has nothing to do with treating people better. How could such a confusion have occurred? How did we end up going so wrong?

I'd be interested in hearing thoughts/answers to this question.

A few thoughts on the post...

• In broad terms, Beck is criticizing devaluing relational growth in favor of personal spirituality (which I think most would agree with). What he contributes that's new, however, are observations of common ways in which Christians live contrary to this idea.
• Beck critiques one POV; the opposite view can be just as problematic (with different consequences) if taken to the extreme. Most of the time, I think that Beck is simply criticizing extreme/unbalanced views.
• Even when relationships are emphasized, they can be emphasized in a way that devalues the relationship (i.e. "make friends outside of church...*because* you can share the gospel"), which is exactly what Beck's critiquing.
• I'm reminded again of my own Pharisaical behavior - a tendency to get comfortable in my own little group, neglecting others around me.
• In broadest terms, I think Beck is criticizing our tendency as Christians to live at the expense of others, both willfully and unconsciously/out of ignorance.

On a slightly unrelated note, I've noticed this piece is very easy to read, but makes a big impact. My own writing doesn't seem to; any thoughts on why/tips on how to improve?

marriage and religion

A very honest and amazingly well-written post about marriage (and some of my fears about it).

thoughts on being popular

They won't pay a cent to hear you laughing
They might pay a little to hear you cry
If you do it long enough they might even pay attention
But they still won't pay respect until you die
- Jon Foreman, Broken From the Start

fireworks, Michael Bay, and America

I went to see Austin's July 4 celebration. The Austin symphony played for an hour, and then there were fireworks for the next half an hour. A grad friend of mine went with me, and halfway through, remarked that the fireworks were kind of repetitive. I laughed, and then remarked that they resembled Michael Bay's movies as well. And then, after thinking about it, I became sad.

I can't claim to speak for all countries in general, but America definitely seems to have an obsession with the bright, loud, and explosive. I don't think it's a coincidence that while the symphony received only polite applause while the fireworks received "oohs" and "aahs" and excited cheers all the way until the end of the show. As for the Michael Bay analogy, if you haven't heard, Transformers 2 has become the highest grossing in America currently, and probably the highest grossing movie ever with such universally terrible reviews. The idea is that the movie is basically a July 4th show, except with fighting robots instead of fireworks (and not much more in terms of depth).

So, if we can accept the possibility that we as Americans tend to be drawn to things that capture their attention, I'd like to connect this line of thought to America being a consumer culture (and I don't mean the materialistic, greedy consumer culture). In a broader sense, we're expected to act as consumers in every aspect of life - we have so much freedom of choice, that basically everything we do can be seen as giving something of ours in exchange for something else. We give our money in exchange for things we buy, we give our votes to our politicians for their promised support of our interests, we give our allegiance to churches (through membership or just association) in exchange for their vision/goals (or resources, what they can offer), etc. It's all about our choice as the consumer.

In theory, the trick to having this all work is that consumers are supposed to weigh all the different choices to determine the best one. However, in practice, the "best" choice chosen is usually more along the lines of the "most attractive" choice. Given a one-sided deal (the consumer chooses from a group of set choices), these are the same. However, when these choices are allowed to change to pander to the consumer, problems arise.

For example, while this theory may make for a healthy economy, it can be terrible for consumers. Take almost any sector of the economy - food, for example. The junk food business thrives almost entirely by dealing in the equivalent of a fireworks show - quick, cheap, and easy thrills with almost no depth, and the result is a booming business at the expense of the health and lives of a large number of Americans (leading cause of death in Americans is coronary heart disease, after all).

Politics is similar - every political commentary will remark on the need for a candidate to win over different interest groups, but rarely do they actually think about the consequences of such pandering. For example, this article describes a common type of pandering - trying to keep citizens happy by convincing them that you are doing something about ___(insert problem here).

Do you see? More weight is given to consumer appeal then to truth - the question of "what's effective" becomes "what's attractive", with little or no regard for what actually works. This situation reminds me of the idea posted a while ago of BS as disregard for truth (as opposed to lies, which acknowledge the truth, even if only by trying to cover it up), which I believe is the issue at stake here as well.

And herein lies so many of our problems - we're incredibly short sighted. When given the freedom, we tend to choose what feels the best at the moment without much foresight or extra thought.

This trend is prevalent in church culture as well. I don't mean to take shots at any churches, but trends do exist. Austin Stone Community Church is Chris Tomlin's old church, and the production is amazing professional (they fly the sound crew in from Dallas to Austin every week. just for sound). The whole thing feels like a conference of concert. Every. Single. Week. A friend who grew up in another Austin church remarked that even as the high schoolers spoke negatively of big churches and overdone productions (which I think this qualifies for), as they went on to college (and left the pizazz of their hip, cool youth service), they gradually all stopped going to their old church and started going to Austin Stone. I don't believe everyone that goes there is drawn in solely by the fireworks of their service, but I do believe that the flashing lights, rock-star worship team, and concert-type experience play a larger part in most of Stone's constituents decisions than they'd like to admit.

The more telling trend is the fact that so many people tend to base their impression of a church off of their first few experiences - the music, the building, the pastor's ability as a good speaker. We enter the church not as Christians but as consumers, wanting to know whether we should buy into this place - which, by itself, is not a bad thing (it's simply thinking over a decision), but combined with the fact that we seem to be sold by the cheap and easy, it's not good news (ha ha ha).

Just thoughts for now, since I don't have a quick and easy solution. I think there are a lot of different things to learn from this and different ways in which it can be applied, but as for the root problem of being "too cheaply sold", I haven't come up with something substantial yet.

FYI, much of the content of this post seems to have been first thought up by Lewis, in fact (though written in a broader sense).

Other links on the subject
- Sticky theology - emotional selection and sound-bite theology
- C.S. Lewis' Weight of Glory sermon, considered to be one of the greatest ever. He comments on being "too cheaply sold".

in memory of Vincent Chin and of poems written long ago

Lucky Numbers

I saw six children
That might have sat around my chair
and asked their old ye-ye
to sing them songs
and tell them stories

I saw eight years later
where the 90's would have started
where I might have been deemed a
successful
rich
American

I saw nine eight-sided baguas
that might have been at my wedding
that my beautiful bride
might have looked in
to see her reflection

I saw the number four
over and over and over again
as the irony of the pun played
through my head,
as it leaked out onto the street

I saw the character for seven
or perhaps it first saw me
and named me after itself
(but I'm not really gone
you can't get rid of me that easily)

I saw two baseball bats
two blows, to the knee, then the head
two men without two sentences
and the two words of my name
that named a revolution

- June 23, 1982

bullsh*t!

I've recently become obsessed with the blog Experimental Theology by Dr. Richard Beck. I've linked to it before, but the more I read it, the more I wish I had found this blog perhaps a year or two earlier. Nevertheless, I am enjoying it right now. Among it's features - deep thinking outside the box on both obscure and well-known Christian doctrine, a solid understanding of the subjects discussed, and a fantastic sense of humor and sense for seeing God everywhere (see the Theology of Calvin and Hobbes section of his blog).

One post I recently read talked about hypocrisy and Christianity. A few lines from it...

"It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may pertain to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose."

...Lying is a distortion or hiding of truth. By contrast, BS is an indifference to truth. This distinction might make BS appear to be more mild than lies, but Frankfurt would disagree...indifference to truth is much worse than hiding it:

"[The bullshitter] does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are."

The quoted author claimed "liars at least care for the truth, if only to hide it. But when a culture gets saturated with BS then concern for the truth gets lost on a grand scale. What worries [the author] is that people are getting lazy and careless about the truth. And as we grow mentally lazy and careless the truth gets lost. All that remains in civic dialogue is BS, advertising, and spin." With the consequences of postmodernism still affecting culture today, this has never before been as relevant.

...BS is an indifference to truth. This indifference to truth is often caused by a kind of laziness, of failing to do the work to "get things right." This is what I see happening among Christians. I don't see a lot of willful hypocrisy, but I do see a lot of talk about righteousness and holiness and compassion with little energy devoted to examining how all that talking is cashing out in the real world. In short, Christians talk a great deal with little effort expended in moving from words to deeds. Outsiders hear all that Christian moral chatter and they also observe the lifestyle gap. The only word they have for what they are observing is hypocrisy, but I think a better word is BS.

I've often wondered how people could see the genuine, caring, friendly, and well-meaning people I knew in church could ever be construed as hypocritical. For a long while, I just assumed their criticizers were all bitter, angry people (I believe the correct linguistic term for them is "haters") or people that just misunderstood my friends and judged too quickly. I don't think this is the case anymore; I don't doubt my friends intentions, but neither do I believe that the accusation of hypocrisy is completely unfounded either. At this point, it might not even be the moral BS and carelessness that are at the root of criticisms, but simply a matter of priorities.

For example, Mark Noll wrote in "Scandal of the Evangelical Mind" that even great intentions could encourage bad behavior. For example, part of Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus, that "the things of earth will grow strangely dim", might be taken to incorrectly justify gnostic tendencies and irresponsibility towards the physical (taking care of the earth, mercy and urban ministries). If something is considered more important than everything else (i.e. God, Jesus, missions, etc), then logically, we should prioritize our time and effort towards those things as opposed to others. Beck makes the suggestion in another post that this tendency may be why Jesus refuses to divorce love for God from love for people. And loving people...well, that opens up a plethora of applications (including environmental concerns, I'd argue) and places a whole world of callings and responsibilities on the Christian's shoulders.

This is becoming a bit of a tangent, so I'll end with a last paragraph from the post.

The root cause of Christian BS is the disjoint between orthodoxy and orthopraxy in the Christian tradition. Specifically, for a variety of reasons, Christianity came to emphasize "right belief" over "right action." Being a Christian meant one believed certain things (e.g., that Jesus was the Son of God). Assenting to these propositions and mastering the God talk that surrounded them grew to define what it meant to be a Christian. But once orthodoxy became separated from orthopraxy the specter of moral BS entered...The disjoint didn't (and doesn't) emerge because of willful deception (hypocrisy). Rather, the disjoint was (and is) due to a kind of carelessness, a thoughtlessness that entered the Christian faith.

As if the sins I'm conscious of weren't enough, the Holy Spirit is needed to intercede for me on the behalf of these sins of my ignorance as well.

the difference b/w BS and lying

...and how it applies to Christians and morality in this Experimental Theology post.

shifting grounds of debate

A great post on the change in the debate over Christianity by Richard Beck. The main point that he tries to make is that while Christians have caught up to the last cultural shift apologetically, the change in popular thinking dominated by postmodern thought has caught us unprepared. In more concrete terms - we're prepared to argue the reasonableness of Christianity, but the debate has now moved on to arguing the trustworthiness of religion. Instead of arguing about whether or not Christ rose from the dead, the question has become more centered around "why would you feel the need to believe in life after death? what need is it fulfilling?" From the blog

Let me be more specific. What is the challenge posed by the question "Why do people believe in God?"? And what is so different about this question compared to the classic epistemological questions concerning the reasonableness of religious belief?

The destabilizing nature of the question comes from the fact that the query shifts the conversation from reasons to functions. In the classic apologetics debate the focus was on reasons, the warrants and epistemological justifications for belief. But during the Enlightenment a new critique emerged, a question that swept past reasons and asked about the social and psychological functions of belief. Might religion be doing some kind of useful social or psychological work for us? Perhaps religion was vital to keeping order or keeping the unwashed masses docile? Perhaps religion allowed us to be happier, more productive, hopeful and cooperative? Maybe, in short, religion had a function. A social and psychological reason for its existence and ubiquity. Religion isn't about metaphysics but about coping, socially and psychologically.

The sentiment is one I definitely have felt running underneath conversations I've had with a lot of people - an inherent suspicion of motives. However, the problem of underlying presuppositions influencing the way we think seems to be common to people of faith and nonreligious alike. I've heard Lewis answers this one way in Miracles by giving reasons why naturalistic worldivew may not be more philosophically attractive than a belief in God (and why belief in the Christian Triune God makes sense and can be trusted); Beck answers it a different way by examining different scientific theories used to "explain away" religion.

The primary goal of these essays is to examine the debate concerning the function of belief at the level of the critique itself. That is, we won't cede the sociological or psychological territory by responding to the critiques with theology. At least not until the data is in. That is, we'd like to not cede the facts to Freud prematurely, resigning ourselves to theologically spinning inhospitable data if things in the laboratory don't come out the way we like them to. Such a move might be logically coherent but, via Occam's Razor, would appear rather defensive. Rather, we'll wade into the empirical waters and deal with the claims at their most basic level: The function of religious belief inside the minds of believers.

James Emery White encourages all readers in "A Mind for God" to have at least a cursory knowledge of apologetics, the defense of the faith. 1 Peter 3:15ish commands us to "always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect, keeping a clear conscience, so that those who speak maliciously against your good behavior in Christ may be ashamed of their slander." So, I hope this article helps us meet these encouragements and commandments by noting that while the command stays the same, the debate is not what it used to be.

ideas and action

From Os Guinness' "Long Journey Home"

[A] focus on ideas is in contrast not only to emotions but also to our craving for "practical action." Although ours is a pragmatic age, impatient with discussing mere ideas, we need only remember that ideas have consequences, beliefs influence behavior, differences make a difference. Seekers whose whole lives are invested in the outcome of the search know well that choices based on these ideas will not be useless or insignificant. The concepts we explore and articulate are like maps - they're only representations, but they point to solid realities just as maps lead to very real places and destinations.

With attention spans shortening (to 140 characters...) and openness to new, deep ideas closing (or at least not increasing), this kind of struck a chord with me.

Death is nothing at all

Death is nothing at all

I have only slipped away into
the next room
I am I, and you are you,
Whatever we were to each other,
that we are still.

Call me by the old familiar name.
Speak of me in the easy way
which you always used
Put no difference into your tone.
Wear no forced air of solemnity
or sorrow.
Laugh as we always laughed
At the little jokes that we
enjoyed together

Play, smile, think of me,
pray for me.

Let my name be ever the
household word that it always was.
Let it be spoken without an effort,
Without the ghost of a
shadow upon it.

Life means all that it ever meant.
It is the same as it ever was.
There is absolute and
unbroken continuity.

What is this death but a
negligible accident?
Why should I be out of mind
because I am out of sight?
I am but waiting for you,
for an interval,
Somewhere very near,
Just around the corner.

All is well.

- Henry Scott Holland

I dug through my house a few days ago and dug up the poetry I had written throughout middle school, high school, and the first year of college. In my middle school poetry journal, this poem (actually an excerpt from a sermon) is pasted onto the first page. I think I was much more fascinated by death when I was younger. At the very least, I glamorized the idea of dying, as it is still glamorized in movies, stories, cheap novels, and so on.

Either way, I've discovered that suddenly, I'm older now, and somewhere along those 10 years that went missing between middle school and now, my attitude towards death changed. Maybe I could think of death so easily then because it was so far from me, similar to the ways we can gossip about celebrities or people we don't know personally. But things change. You meet people and they might tell you how they've had to deal with life and the alternative to life.

Ever since my last college year, I feel like I've been scared. Scared to leave friends, home, and especially family now. I feel like I'm fearful all the time now, anxious about passing my tests and staying in school, finding a job in the future, finding friends to be with or someone to love, losing friends and family and loved ones, and (if this weren't bad enough) fearful of coming to the end of my life and realizing that I've wasted so much of it while being scared of everything.

I'm reading a book by Os Guinness, and the first few chapters talk about the human condition, and sort of the strange situation we find ourselves in. It mentioned life, death, the hard questions, and yet so did many books that I read during college. I find it kind of odd that before this, I had a grandparent and a freshman from Wiess both die, yet I never thought about it too hard then (maybe I couldn't back then). But now...it's as if everything hits harder, is more personal, is a little more painful to think about.

I used to think about my own death rather calmly, what people might say at my funeral, what I might say to them right before I die. Nowadays, I'm scared to think of the idea at all, for fear that I might have to consider that some day, I might have to say a eulogy for those I love - friends, grandparents, even my mother and father. The idea absolutely terrifies me, makes my heart ache so much I wish I could just turn off my conscious thought sometimes.

I don't know what exactly changed. Perhaps it's because I had things taken away from me during that last year of college - relationships, family, purpose, comfort, familiarity. Maybe I started to worry about losing things that I didn't think I could bear to lose. I think that after things started being easy, after Rice stopped providing me with everything I needed, after I got sent out on my own, I started being scared. During Rice, I felt the death of a relative and a freshman at Wiess, but recovered fairly well. However, after Rice, I've started to feel and fear deaths that haven't even come close to happening yet. I'm paralyzed by a fear things that may happen in a future that I won't change because I feel paralyzed, and so life goes by, I get nothing done, and time ticks ever on. Great.

I've heard pastors claim that the Bible's most often given commandment is "do not fear", and to paraphrase what Paul once said, the law is there to show me what sin and imperfection is. If this phase I'm going through is one that everyone hits eventually, I can understand why God would give this commandment so often.

I'm working on it.

Darwin's sacred cause

An interesting article. Right at the intersection of theology and science, with interesting tidbits reminiscent of the current state of events in the God-science debate.

ironic that...

...I'm posting this in a place many might consider nothing more than a distraction.

horses and human bodies

A quote from Lewis' "Miracles", which I just finished (except for the epilogue and appendix). On God's and our earthly bodies

Who will trust me with a spiritual body if I cannot control even an earthly body? These small and perishable bodies we now have were given to us as ponies are given to schoolboys. We must learn to manage: not that we may some day be free of horses altogether but that some day we may ride bare-back, confident and rejoicing, those greater mounts, those winged, shining and world-shaking horses which perhaps even now expect us with impatience, pawing and snorting in the King's stables. Not that the gallop would be of any value unless it were a gallop with the King; but how else - since He has retained His own charger - should we accompany him?

on our educations

Originally posted by Tiff Yeh. The Disadvantages of an Elite Education.

Kind of strange though; I feel like time spent in grad school has helped me overcome some of the issues described here. I hope all you Ricers read it and let me know what you think.

ditchkins?

A great post from a friend on responses in the NY Times to Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. I like these a lot - rather than arguing with what Dawkins and Hitchens write as a starting point, they take a step back and argue that Dawkins and Hitchens have missed the point completely. From the post (which took it from a blog)

And, conversely, the fact that religion and theology cannot provide a technology for explaining how the material world works should not be held against them, either, for that is not what they do. When Christopher Hitchens declares that given the emergence of “the telescope and the microscope” religion “no longer offers an explanation of anything important,” Eagleton replies, “But Christianity was never meant to be an explanation of anything in the first place. It’s rather like saying that thanks to the electric toaster we can forget about Chekhov.”

In the same way, lets be careful that we as Christians don't turn Christianity into something it's not either.

Christianity and non-Christian authorities

I went to a debate tonight between Hugh Ross/Fazale Rana and Michael Shermer/some UT professor Sahotra Sarkar. It was basically evolution vs intelligent design - Ross/Rana presented what they called a testable model of creation by design, and Shermer/Sarkar attacked it in favor of naturalistic evolution. To those who were curious, the debate was OK/not that great, and some decent points were made by both sides, but I still feel like there were unanswered questions and holes in each presentation that were covered up by the use of numbers and big words.

While my interest in these topics have subsided, the debate did get me to reflect on the idea of authority and the interaction of Christians with secular authorities and experts. Obviously, intelligent design is one of them - Christians (some in science, some not) disagree with secular experts on macro-evolution and the development of the human species. However, this is a fairly extreme and polarizing example.

More commonly, I feel like I can see Christians disengaging themselves from human authority in less outrageous ways. Broadly, I've wondered how commonly Christians consult experts in the different fields relating to their ministries? For example, urban ministry is closely intertwined with sociology, missions with cultural studies (many Christians strive to do this well; some not so much). When we consider restructuring the church, does the thought of studying human interaction ever cross our minds? In preparing for ministry or thinking about Christianity in general, does it ever cross our minds to pick up anything but a Christian book on the subject?

One example of this taken to the extreme would be, say, end times speculation (spurred on by the Left Behind series and such) - instead of carefully analyzing and thinking in a Christian manner about a series of events, the events are simply seen as (only) the fulfillment of eschatological prophecy and treated as such - as supernatural events that are far beyond us. In doing so, we distance ourselves more and more from culture. Instead of offering a Christ-like analysis of the situation, wrestling with secular analysis/opinions and presenting a Christian response, end-times speculation simply causes the church to withdraw further into itself, muttering amongst ourselves of things that only we understand. This is negative on two fronts - we refuse to interact with culture and confront it with our convictions, and two, we appear more and more like lunatics than revolutionaries to the culture we're called to influence. (This is not ruling out that the end times are being heralded - only that the response we commonly give is probably not optimal)

To some extent, I can understand the separation - Christian counseling and Christian psychology, for example, have flourished as fields on their own, and there is a genuine need for them, since non-Christian counselors and psychologists typically evaluate progress/success/health via different metrics than the ones a Christian would use. However, in some cases, the tendency for Christians to ignore secular authorities on subjects just seems baffling, or worse, ignorant.

I tend to believe any church trying to influence culture should still listen to its critics and to people outside itself. There's genuine danger of any good Christian body becoming an isolated society of zealots, and examples of such are fairly numerous. While we as Christians may often claim to follow the truth, it'd be going a little to far to say we have a monopoly on all truth in every area.

I see my current applied mathematics department as an analogy: we are an interdisciplinary department focusing on real world problems through 1) accurate physical modeling of the problem, 2) sound pure mathematical formulations, and 3) accurate numerical solutions to the problem. We manage large databases of code that run our numerical methods and simulations, but while there is much emphasis on good mathematics and solid engineering/modeling, we seem to have ignored all of what computer science has to say about good coding practices (global variables everywhere, illogical function names, few comments, FORTRAN, no object oriented programming, etc). The result of engineers coding without any consultation of the field of computer science is a code that is mostly functional, but is inflexible, extremely hard for anyone to get used to, difficult to modify and change without breaking lots of things, and very tedious to understand. Likewise, if a church is functional but yet similarly unrelatable and inflexible, I feel like culture might acknowledge what we can do but would never really want to get involved with us.

In the end, I'm reminded of Jesus' admonishing us to be wise as serpents and yet innocent as doves.

horribly delicious

http://thisiswhyyourefat.com/

Keller on idolatry

A video of Keller speaking at the Gospel Coalition on Idolatry (written notes here
).

I thought this was a very good message on the whole, and definitely challenging. Gave me a lot of things to think about, some related to the message (my own idols, family, possibly treating a relationship as an idol), and some related to concepts (penal substitution, differences b/w Reformed and other theologies).

Perhaps I'll blog about them sometime if I can get to it, but for now, I hope you enjoy the video (and I hope you leave comments on how you think it is!)

reaching my weekly math joke quota

Title: Countably infinite
Caption: "I can count the ways". =P

a Ph.D fable

In lieu of a thoughtful, well-written post, I give you - stuff I found on the internet!!

The Rabbit, the Fox, and the Lion

One day, a rabbit was casually hopping back to his hole when, just as he was about to jump into his hole, he was grabbed around the neck by a fox, bent on eating him.

"Oh, please don't eat me," said the rabbit to the fox, "For I am just about to finish my dissertation."

"Why should I care about your dissertation?" asked the fox.

"Because," replied the rabbit, "I think the subject would fascinate you. It's entitled, 'Why Foxes Can't Eat Rabbits.'"

"That's a stupid dissertation," declared the fox. "Of course foxes can eat rabbits. In fact, I'm going to eat you right now!

"But wait," said the rabbit, "Just come down to my hole for a minute. I'll show you my dissertation, and, if you're not convinced, you can eat me. But, I promise you, I will prove to you that my thesis is, in fact, true."

Reluctantly, the fox agreed, and he followed the rabbit down into the hole. There, in the rabbit's hole, the fox saw a pile of bones in one corner, and a lion typing on a laptop in the other.

"What's that?" the fox asked, gesturing at the pile of bones.

"That's my research," replied the rabbit.

"Well, what's he doing here?" asked the fox, looking at the lion.

"Oh, he's my advisor," said the rabbit, at which time the lion pounced and ate the fox.

Moral: The subject of your dissertation really doesn't matter. All that matters is who's your advisor!

searching

I just now thought of a church in a different way: a place in which to belong, in which to learn and grow and serve. A sanctuary unto which an individual entrusts his current and future self - a place he can belong and can identify with, but also one in which he can grow as Christ intended him to.

Now the question I find myself asking - what if said individual doesn't know either what exactly he believes (and thus/or) what type of person he hopes to be? What does a church search look like then?

To be precise, said individual knows a few things he believes, but they tend to be very basic and fairly broad (and said individual is me, in case that wasn't clear). For example - the physical resurrection of Jesus Christ, the existence of God, etc...things that tend to be taken for granted in most churches I've visited, though even these were big steps I had to take/retake.

More nuanced beliefs - conservative/liberal tendencies, specific doctrines, attitudes towards social issues, science and faith, controversial issues, etc. - I am less sure of myself on, and the same is true for other issues such as race. As I try to make a checklist of things that I believe a church should have, I'm finding it difficult to write down more than two things, and thus to really narrow down my choices.

I was going to write a post listing churches I've visited and reviewing each one, but I nixed that one - it seemed as if I was writing pros and cons of each one, but not drawing any closer to finding a church home. And so instead, I write this, and instead I feel wishy washy. Not plugged in. Still kind of wandering around Austin, even after having visited 7 churches so far, but fearful also of settling down somewhere because I'm unsure of whether or not I want to go down that path and not another one. I hope I can ask for your prayers on where to go from here.

"And I still
Haven't found (or figured out)
What I'm looking for."

busyness

A few congratulations are in order -
1) congrats to Jimmy and Deborah Jessup on their new marriage! It was a blast playing at your wedding.
2) congrats to Peter Yang for passing his defense!

Other than that, studying for qualifying exams, visiting churches, dealing with real estate, and other miscellaneous activities (wedding, beer bike, etc etc) have kept me busy these past few weeks, but hopefully I'll find some time to blog some thoughtful things soon.

Until then, ciao!

two years

I like to think I'm allowed one heavily emo post every couple of months, so here's mine for the spring semester.

going home to houston, I had a wonderful talk with an close old friend, during which he made the comment that I haven't been the same person he knew in college ever since the end of my first relationship, that all the joy that defined my first 3 years at Rice had somehow vanished, replaced by an unacknowledged cynicism and skepticism masked as "careful reasoning".

After that one relationship, from February to March, two years ago now. How does one month change someone so much? I'll try to answer that...by starting with a seemingly tangential non-sequitur.

After reading the most recent post on Matt Dunn's blog about "initiative evangelism" and a non-Christian's view of Christians, I have to admit that over these last two years, I think I've been looking at my own faith through that sort of perspective.

And I think that all started with the line "I think God is leading me to break up with you".

The way it had happened was that she had a few doubts about the relationship, so we took 3 days apart to pray and ask for guidance to see if we should continue. I thought yes; apparently God told her differently. For the first week, I took it seriously. A week later, not so much. After talking to several sympathetic Christians, I started to think there might have been more hidden in that line than just the prophetic hand of God intervening in a relationship. Eventually, I think I started to wonder if God was even present in that line at all.

Maybe this is what started the downward spiral. For the first time, I could look at the Christian life and see contradictions and issues, fallacies, things that didn't make sense. Talking with non-Christian friends about the breakup made me feel better, since they all basically shared the exact same reaction - shock and incredulity at the way she ended the relationship. It felt so good to be able to feel like I'd been wronged somehow, that somehow she had taken God's name in vain. Eventually, this evolved into the thought that she had just done something irrational and dishonest, using God as a cover.

And so it started. I began to remove the hand of God from my interpretation of events. The breakup was because she didn't feel confident, and therefore invoking God was an excuse to cover up her real reasons. Someone's "led by the Spirit"? Just a combination of their emotions and their own thoughts. Even better, this easily explained stupid, hurtful, or violent actions done by the leading of (and in the name of) the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit without having to directly attribute them to God. And so I started to distrust the way Christians take things as the action of God, without mystery or uncertainty, applied to their personal lives.

Admittedly, the breakup hurt like nothing had ever hurt before, so negative feelings associated with that probably exacerbated my growing skepticism. Don't get me wrong, though - my battle with doubt is something completely different. Doubting God, creation, Jesus, etc originated elsewhere and was resolved apart from this issue (though the condition of my heart probably had something to do with both).

I do believe Jesus was the Son of God, physically resurrected from the dead to redeem us from our sins. I believe that God has called us to live morally upright lives, serving each other in love, being his hands and feet into the world, sharing our faith with others, and being salt and light to a veiled and decomposing world. I have more trouble believing God continues to work in blatantly supernatural ways: not that he can't; but that he chooses instead involved in the natural processes that guide our paths, our actions, our thoughts - that he (usually) interacts with us in a quiet, nuanced, mysterious way, and not just crudely, directly breaks into our lives and picks us up, forcefully turning us to go a certain direction.

Therefore, I still believe God is at work in the world. I just don't know if he works in the way I naively imagined him to do early in my Christian life. A good artist doesn't just force the theme of his art upon you brusquely; they guide you in a nuanced way to a given interpretation. Most of the time, good art may look like nothing at first glance, but upon a closer inspection, the genius behind the piece comes out. In terms of engineering and mathematics, I wonder if God's taking action in the world is a little like creating a function (the action) that satisfies certain conditions (purposes). There is often an easy, straightforward way to construct a valid function, but that function usually ends up being either trivial or useless for any application purposes without continual tinkering with the function and its processes. The construction of a useful function (action) is usually much less straightforward, and may seem to take several paths that seem completely unrelated to the problem, but ends up giving you a function that has a distinct purpose, yet isn't something that's completely alien to (and thus useless in) the natural settings.

(Theologically, if God works in this way, I believe it has very interesting applications to the way we as Christians should interact/approach the world, consider science, etc...but that's another blog post)

...

(Here, I realize that I've started to ramble and need to connect it back to what I started the blog post about)

I'd be willing to bet that these ideas about God's action in the world aren't impossible to swallow for most Christians - I've heard these metaphors and ideas before, and I don't think that they're out of line with the Bible (at least, I think if there are verses against it, there are also verses supporting it). However, it looks like somehow these ideas got twisted by my feelings about the breakup. Pride in me makes it easy enough to see someone who doesn't hold this similar (intellectual) view as being overly conservative, sheltered, and slightly backwards. However, throw a breakup and one misspoken line about God's guidance into the picture, and pride combines with fear into distrust, and I think that if I've changed for the worse these past two years, it's because of this.

Truth be told, two years later, I'm still reliving parts of the breakup, and unfortunately, I'm also still having trouble trusting other Christians "led by the Spirit". I think I'm slowly coming to the point where I can say things like "God taught me" or "God worked in my life" again, but after experiencing the consequences of taking God's name in vain, I find that I still hesitate in taking God's name at all anymore.

on a controversial topic

An incredibly poignant, thought provoking article on homosexuality, written by an openly gay Christian.

placeholder

I've been visiting churches for the past few months, and I've promised to do a thorough sweep of them all. I haven't forgotten, but I do have one more church I'd like to visit before I do a broad sweep of the Austin area congregations. A brief trailer for each church I've seen - large/mainstream Evangelical, Episcopalean, emergent-but-not-really, Korean...so stay tuned.

In addition to this, I've been reading one of the best books I've read in a while - C.S. Lewis' "Miracles". I hope to write on this one in a bit too - I wish I had read this sooner, like at Rice when I was questioning the validity of Christianity (instead of the random slew of poor-quality literature that I read instead). In particular, I took a humbling message from one of its chapters that talked about the validity of ideas despite misinterpretation (I confess I've probably been a bit of in intellectual snob in my treatment of other Christians =\ not something I'm proud of). Anyhow, in a future post, I'd like to do my best to convince any readers of this blog to read this book as well, because I found it very stimulating, with just the right balance of intellectual rigor and accessibility.

----------------cue beginning of actual post----------------

Thus, this post acts as sort of a placeholder, awaiting more important and thoughtful posts. Ironically, my time in Austin (cue sermon-like tie-in to actual content!) seems to feel much the same - for now, my years here at UT feel like they're just being used to wait it out until I get a job, or (God willing) get married, or move back home, or experience a more important event in my life than just work and grad school.

As the novelty of being somewhere new wears off, I'm finding myself spending more and more time alone. It feels hard to go out and meet people - there hasn't been a Friday night large group for post-grads, and investing a chunk of time into hanging out with one person can be awkward if they're not someone you know well/feel comfortable with. I don't feel like I should try to invest in a college group on campus either, otherwise I could see myself just trying to relive college instead of moving on and growing. Whatever the reasons (and I'm still sorting thru these), I find myself alone at home a lot, doing a social thing maybe once a month at best. Currently, I'm blogging because I feel fairly lonely, which is a pretty terrible reason to blog (still, perhaps something constructive may come out of this - especially if anyone has any comments/advice, they'd be much appreciated).

In trying to reason why I feel so lonely here, I came up with the following chain of logic: I don't feel very connected to Austin (tied in to investing in Austin is the church search as well...), so I'm not too motivated to connect myself to Austin either, and therefore have not built a stable group of friends to be around here either.

I got an email from a friend commenting on how hard it was to invest in a solid church community given that he would only be around the area for a few months. Somehow, though I will probably be here a good few years at least, I seem to have motivations similar to someone who's just passing through a town. Since I have friends in Houston, family in California, it's difficult to see myself giving either of those up to stay here long-term. The whole feel of Austin seems much too "cool" as well, and I don't really feel like I fit in well with "cool" kids (hence I loved Rice).
In the end though, I still believe I should make the most of my time here. While I don't THINK I'll have the college experience all over again, forming deep friendships everywhere I go, I KNOW I won't get anything done isolating myself either.

Any thoughts/experiences/advice on adapting to a new place?

old (therefore young) version of billy graham

http://theologica.blogspot.com/2009/03/billy-graham-at-harvard-47-years-ago.html

Here's a set of audio clips I found interesting for the following reasons - one, they're Billy Graham at Harvard, speaking to a much different and more academically oriented audience than he typically does. Secondly, it's interesting to hear what kind of talks evangelicals gave 47 years ago compared to today. Graham's style has definitely carried over to most churches, and you can hear that in the talk as well. You can see the way he approached and interpreted issues of his time as well (Communism, moral flippancy, etc).

good Neo-Reformed post

Featured: a good post on the recent Neo-Reformed discussion.

For those not familiar with the whole Neo-Reformed issue, here is a summary from the article introducing Scot Knight, a Christian author who recently wrote a heated blog post on the subgroup of evangelical Christians he calls the "NeoReformed"

Who are the NeoReformed? According to Scot, the NeoReformed represent a particularly aggressive group of people who embrace Reformed theology and demonstrate an attitude of exclusion reminiscent of pre-evangelical Fundamentalism. The NeoReformed see anyone outside of their circle as unfaithful to the gospel and only pseudo-evangelical. Therefore, they exalt peripheral doctrines to “central status” and then ”demonize” others that disagree.

While a lot of others wrote of Scot as an arrogant raging lunatic, I couldn't do so completely. I agree that while a lot of his accusations of the group seem like over-exaggerated blanket statements, I have interacted with a lot of people who fit a similar description.

The article does a great job of sifting carefully through the issue fairly. I hope you find time to read it and leave some comments/thoughts if you have anything to say.

blog etiquette

so, a question - when someone comments on your blog, is the correct blog etiquette to
1) comment on your blog in response and expect them to check the post again?
2) comment in response on their blog (which would be on an unrelated post)?

thoughts?

nostalgia

I came back to Houston for LNY yesterday, and I miss it here. A lot more than I realized while in Austin. UT's college experience seems very different from what I experienced during college, and I think I know more of why I was so drawn to Rice now.

There's a sense of welcome here that stems not only from Rice, its atmosphere, and the friends I still have there, but from the 20+ years of my life that I invested here. I know this place, and in some sense, it knows me - the house I grew up in is still here, and though Jimmy and Pat have made changes to it while they've lived here, I can still remember when my parents and I built parts of it. Austin is so new; but new is not the way most people would want to describe their home.

Since then, it seems things have been pulled apart with family and I both moving away. Nostalgia hits hard whenever I come home and open up old boxes to find old memories that I had nearly forgotten, and I toy with the idea of either transferring to Rice for grad school or finding a job in order to move back home.

Is it easier for people who moved away from home for college and then stayed in the same town after graduation? Is it as difficult adjusting to post-college life?

foodie habits

I've recently discovered this manga called "Mixed Vegetables". The story involves two students at a culinary school, one who is a prodigy at sushi working in a pastry shop, and the other one a pastry lover working in a sushi shop. And there's a comedic romance between them too involving their chef dreams - I couldn't believe it. Cooking and comedy and romance. Together in one manga. It's like a dream come true (incidentally, I am not gay).

But seriously, after starting to really watch what I eat and focus intently on cooking healthy good food, I think I've become a foodie. Telltale signs...

1. All the movies I watch more than once nowadays are food related (God of Cookery, Ratatouille, Babette's Feast, Chocolat). I have a lead on several others that I want to check out as well now...
2. I follow several cooking mangas/animes (Addicted to Curry, Mixed Vegetables, Cooking Master Boy, Yakitate)
3. I actually taught my mom how to cook something this Winter Break, and she got me a wok for Christmas.

I'm not sure what it is about having a weird obsession with food - there's something I really enjoy about it, not just eating it, but sharing it with others too, and even the whole preparation process is fascinating to me. I feel as if I could fall asleep listening to the sounds of a kitchen (dishes being laid out, the sounds of whisking, iron spatulas clanging against frying pans, gas stoves burning hot, soups and sauces boiling, onions sizzling, etc etc). Every part of the food preparation process seems much more glamorous than it used to =P.

Does anyone else identify with this, or am I just weird?

"high school never ends"

I've noticed UT feels a lot like high school. Not academically, but in the social environment. To put it a little differently, take Rice: it's been described as being a school for all the kids who weren't cool in high school. All the nerds and geeks and such suddenly congregate together in this safe haven, and voila! a new social order is born. Suddenly, it's alright to suck at sports, to really enjoy learning, to have weird random hobbies, to be different.

Admittedly, this wasn't perfect. Rice would probably be perfect for someone who is really enthusiastic, outgoing, a little geeky/nerdy/quirky/etc. However, though these kids fit in at Rice, others often didn't - for example, I know that a lot of athletes felt out of place because they were different from most of the Rice population. Different senses of humor. Different goals in life. Different worldviews and senses of fun. However, in my opinion, the people at Rice tried to reach out to everyone, and even if the athletes didn't fit in, I've seen students trying to reach out and befriend them, talk to them. The atmosphere at Rice felt, for the first time for me, welcoming.

UT is not Rice. If Rice is welcoming, open-minded idealism, UT seems more like efficient, result-driven pragmatism. Example: Rice has no business major and emphasizes research heavily. Even its engineering program is criticized for not exposing students to "real-world" materials by focusing too much on a theory-heavy curriculum. I get the impression that some Rice students would balk at the idea of "schmoozing", resume-padding, and getting a job through connections as opposed to merit. (For the nerdy reader) I get the impression that at Rice, it was OK to write code in Matlab, because it was for *research* and didn't have to have a specific industry application. None of these impressions strike me as being true for UT.

The reason I think this is a problem goes back to the types of people who are at Rice. You didn't often find mean or cold people; you didn't often get the impression that people would step all over each other for. I'm not saying I find that here at UT, but unlike Rice, I hear premed stories where students are so cutthroat towards each other that I'd fear any of them becoming doctors. And most unlike Rice, I don't see a welcoming hand extended from people towards others below them. I'm sure this happened at Rice too, but I feel like it's much more common at UT for an IM basketball team to make fun of their opponents if they're winning. There's a lot less good sportsmanship, and in general respect for others than I'd like here.

Perhaps I'm just glamorizing Rice too much. I loved it there, and felt like I was really a part of Rice. I feel kind of like I'm just at UT; it hasn't especially welcomed or taken me in, and I haven't really invested myself in it. Maybe UT is just a large school and I haven't found the right sorts of people yet. Perhaps it's just a matter of examining how I perceived things at Rice psychologically. Whichever it is, though I'm glad to be at UT, I miss Rice.

Footnote: "High School Never Ends" is a song by Bowling for Soup. It's pretty funny.

From a good read

They say that it is fear of death and of what comes after death that makes men turn to religion as they advance in years.

But my own experience has given me the conviction that, quite apart from any such terrors or imaginings, the religious sentiment tends to develop as we grow older; to develop because, as the passions grow calm, as the fancy and sensibilities are less excited and less excitable, our reason comes less troubles in it’s working, less obscured by the images, desires and distractions, in which it used to be absorbed;

whereupon God emerges as from behind a cloud; our soul feels, sees, turns towards the source of the light; turns naturally and inevitable;

for now that all that gave to the world of sensations it’s life and charm has begun to leak away from us, now that phenomenal existence is no more bolstered up by impressions from within or from without, we feel the need to lean on something that abides, something that will never play false - a reality, an absolute and everlasting truth.

- Cardinal Newman, as quoted in "Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley

churches and choices (and then less serious stuff)

I talked with Kati Li during winter break and had an interesting conversation on the sociology of religion. I feel like, after reading Mark Noll, I've tried to make myself somewhat of an amateur sociologist of religion, analyzing groups, thinking about what characterizes them and their particular brand of Christianity. I mention this because, I think for a while, in response to my questions on faith and the lack of answers I found, that I became obsessed with doubt, evidence, thinking about things and making sure they were right. This habit has relaxed somewhat, but I find that even now I tend towards this more than I used to (which I guess is normal, considering I'm an applied math grad student).

So, like Matt Dunn, I've been looking around for churches recently. I've been going to Vox Veniae in Austin, an emergent-ish church that carries heavy emphasis on social action. It's very hipster, very cool, and very much not like a typical evangelical church (good?). It does some great stuff around Austin; however, I don't think it stresses especially good thinking habits. Mark Noll remarked that a key feature of the evangelical church is a "call to action", that the world's troubles were the demands of the hour that needed to be met *now* (without too much time thinking). Vox may be different from evangelical churches in a lot of ways, but they retain this trait in some form. Even in their thinking and reflection, it seems focused on how to do something, how to achieve some goal or help some group. How.

I visited Austin Stone, the largest evangelical church in Austin, and was impressed by the setup, the attendance, the band - most of the things that don't seem to matter to me much anymore. But at least from a cursory glance at things, I didn't find the depth of thought that I valued from either the people I knew there or the pastor, and I felt a little out of place in the large-Christian-conference type of emotional band that I have grown wary of.

I have visited Ted Lee's church as well (Acts), and I'm impressed - had I come to Austin 2 years and 1 crisis of faith ago, I probably would love to have joined this church. It's solid; there's good, correct (I think) teaching, and a friendly, open community. I may go back - it reminded me of HCC, and perhaps it has people like HCC too who will dig deep into a subject and really ponder over it - but before I do so, I wanted to look beyond the types of churches I've been to before.

When I talked with Kati, we talked a lot about habits of the mind, thinking habits of Christian groups. This is primarily the focus of both "Scandal of the Evangelical Mind" and "A Mind for God", the latter which I'd highly recommend to any Christian. We both remarked that we enjoyed groups that emphasized and encouraged careful thinking, and somehow she commented that I seemed somewhat Anglican/Episcopalean.

I'm going to visit an Episcopal church that one of my friends goes to. He's a fellow grad student I really admire for his thinking/reading and intellectual habits, and I'm fairly excited given that he admires the level of thinking in this church (it's close to a seminary, so there's interplay similar to how Dunbar Heights Baptist Church and Regent seminary in Vancouver are). I'm a little nervous too - I admire the liturgy from a distance, but I wonder how I will respond to it longer term, when the novelty wears off. It's so different from what I've experienced before - Episcopalean, large, non-Asian. I hope I don't get scared off by these differences before I have a chance to grow as a result of them.

So...long boring stuff over. I'll update with more long boring stuff in the next few weeks if I get another free night like this one.

--------------------------------------

On a side note, recent life updates

1. I went swing dancing at a place nearby. It's great - a lot of fun. For me. I can't be sure that other girls dancing with me aren't bored out of their mind - I can only do the most basic steps, can't hear the music and rhythm clearly sometimes and thus go off beat, and often fail when trying to actually spice things up (and a lot of these dancers can REALLY spice things up). Girls, any thoughts? I'd like my partner to enjoy the dancing as much as I do, so I'd like to know a girl's perspective on this.

2. I'm getting old - I injured myself. I don't think I'm exercising too much or too hard in cardio, but I think my bike seat was too high when I biked 5 miles somewhere. At the very least, I'm finding that unlike my high school days, I can't just push myself mindlessly (like some action anime character) and expect good results.

Elegy for an Ipod

After 2 (or 3? or 4?) years, the original 4GB Ipod Nano I purchased from Sam Feng at Rice has powered down for the last time, it seems. Ah little Nano, we had some good times together while you were alive.

We were perpetual running buddies; no one else would accompany me on midnight or 2AM runs at Rice, but you; you never called me crazy.

Alas! we were apart for a such a long time after I let Henry borrow you because he thought he had lost his forever. I never knew how much I missed you until he returned you, but I guess even then I really didn't use you for the next 3 months until I moved here to Austin.

I even bought my car because of you; it had a little 1/8in plug through which I could hear your lovely voice, which was really someone else's lovely voice piped through your lovely circuits.

Ah, who will keep me awake on long car rides now? Who will keep me motivated and pumped as I run? The younger generations of your kind may someday replace you, but they will never be you. Sleep in peace, little child of Steve Jobs.

R.I.P. Jesse's only Ipod
2007(?)-2009

friend in me

A little fun in my free time here at UT, dedicated to the good friends I have in Houston and elsewhere.

returning to normal

Houston was fantastic. I really felt like a Rice student again for a little while. It was amazingly fun and great to share good conversation with old friends all over again, and thanks to all who shared time in their busy schedules to spend time with me. I'm exhausted though, and glad somewhat to be back in Austin where it's definitely a bit more relaxed =P

Random tangent - as a musician and wannabe singer, I am immensely jealous of the singing talent and songwriting prowess of these 3 artists. Check out their videos if you have time - they're fantastic.

Anoop Desai (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRunoqV-IQA)
Winter Song by Sara Bareilles and Ingrid Michaelson (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUO0gd7cr9o&feature=channel)
The Way I Am (Live) by Ingrid Michaelson (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCFRnPKlxPo&feature=related)

makes me think

I don't know what it is about it, but returning home always makes me think about the "big questions". Whether home to CA, or home to here in Houston, I feel like I enter into some sort of cognitively-dissonant phase of questioning whenever I come back to an old familiar haunt. When I'm not exciting nostalgia, flipping through mementos of memories that have gathered dust while I've been away, I sit down, become oddly philosophical, doubtful, and temporarily load up my Amazon cart full of books that I hope will cure my current state.

Odd things seem to trigger thoughts on topics, but the topics are ones that I'm sure anyone can relate to: death, the meaning of life, the existence and identity of God.

1. Death: I enjoyed my time with my parents in CA, which makes the thought of their aging all the scarier. I was conceived late - my parents were past 30 by the time I was born, so they are rapidly approaching 60. As I read obituaries and hear of deaths, I can't help but reflect that they're rapidly approaching a human's average life span. Nothing paralyzes me more than to think about this - I love them, have so much I want to tell them, and depend on them for so much advice that I need at this point. And more so than ever, I've begun to understand how family is precious: their relationships with you are unique, stronger than any others. While they may not identify with me as well as others, they share memories of and know me far better than maybe anyone else on this planet ever will.
   
   Just in terms of time spent, they've been around far longer than even my closest friends, and leaving my closest friends for Austin has only reinforced these thoughts; making new friends and building new relationships is difficult. How much more so to build a family.
   
   
2. Meaning of life: I didn't use to think this was a difficult question. Glorifying God, obviously. Sure, the realization of this end was difficult to characterize since it was unique for everyone, but at least that was far off and I had a long time to consider it. Almost 10 years have passed since then, and I think I'm less certain of how to achieve this goal in my life. How do I do so in my job and career? Do I need to be passionate about what I do? What if my passions change? What about serving outside my job and in the community? What about my beliefs and thoughts? What about family?
   
   Over all of this, the end question still looms - is glorifying God the correct meaning of life? I don't often question the goal itself, but that's probably due to the fact that, given a broad view/definition of God and a broad view/definition of glorifying, almost any positive activity can be said to strive towards this goal. At the very least, I have to question the way that I answer this question at any specific moment in time and ask if my criteria for glorifying God is even correct.
   
   
3. The existence and identity of God: such an interesting question. I always keep coming back to the science-and-religion discussions. Just thinking about it can waste a good hour of time (as evidenced by my writing of this blog post). My views seem to have become much more "liberal", to use the umbrella term. I can never be completely sure of any view, so at any time, I guess I tend to rate the views I know by some rough estimation of how likely it is that that view is true (given current knowledge). The existence of God is hard enough; the identity and nature of God are even more difficult.
   
   The question of evolution is especially interesting. Ray always gives great points I can't answer, but there's so much evidence and a massive scientific consensus behind macroevolution as well. Yet, questions arise; not necessarily complicated theological questions and consequences (though those exist too), but simple ones as well. What do we do about the first 11 chapters of Genesis if humans evolved? How does this tie into evolutionary psychology and psychology's interface with ethics and morality? What does this tell us about the dualistic idea of an immaterial soul? And many more.
   
   Thankfully, like Dr. Greg Boyd and a German theologian whose name escapes me now (EDIT: Jurgen Moltmann), I feel like I can always approach Christianity and God through Jesus whenever the rest of the science-religion discussion becomes too much for me to handle. For the moment, it seems as if Jesus is a concrete example of a historical anomaly, an event that changed much about the world. I may not know what I believe about science and religion, but I think I believe in the Resurrection, and I finally am beginning to understand why Paul writes that without the Resurrection, our faith is in vain.
   

At the same time, at the encouragement of my Dad, I've started trying stocks, thought about getting a job, wondered about how I will make new friends, wondered about how I will ever meet a girl, and on and on and on. It's difficult growing up - I don't know exactly what changed, but somewhere along the line, whatever box wrapped up all my thoughts into a nice simple package ended up tearing, and everything just fell out, expanded, and made a very complex mess.

Yet, at the same time, I don't think I could go back to the way I used to be. Everything's more complex, everything's messier after coming out of the box, but things become more accessible. Once things come out of hiding from that simplistic box, they're there to examine more closely, understand more fully, and interact with more wholly.