Fragments 6: TV, Quotes and Science

So I’m back to a regular preaching schedule. As usual, I will be posting manuscripts and MP3’s. But I have also managed to collect enough fragments for another Fragments and Links post (something I try to do every other month or so). This week, a spattering of TV thoughts, a few quotes, the standard music commentary and a couple science anecdotes

Television

I am warming to Mad Men[1]. I am one season in and the characters are taking form. The following exchange demonstrates 1) who Donald Draper is and 2) why the show is compelling.

Hippy: You make the lie
You invent want[2]
You are for them.

Draper: There is no lie.
The universe is indifferent.
-Mad Men Season 1 Ep8

I’m not really into the new show Community, but found the this exchange pretty interesting:
Dr. Ian Duncan: I'm asking you if you know the difference between right and wrong.
Jeff: I discovered at a very early age that if I talk long enough, I could make anything right or wrong. So, either I am god or truth is relative. And in either case, boo yah!
Dr. Ian Duncan: Oh, interesting, it's just the average person has a much harder time saying "boo yah" to moral relativism.

Amanda and I have been watching How I met Your Mother lately which is probably the third best sit com on right now…substantially behind Big Bang Theory and the Office[3]. But the premier of season 4[4] had an exchange that left me laughing out loud harder than any dialogue I can remember in a long time. Stella (Ted’s new fiancé – i.e. Elliot from Scrubs[5]) admits to Marshall that she didn’t enjoy star wars (Ted’s favorite movie) leading to this exchange:

Stella: "It's sooo stupid. I mean, first of all, how do they understand that walking bear they hang out with all the time?"

Marshall (dejected and hurt): "Wookie."

Stella: "Yeah. He goes, ‘Arrrrrr,' (trying to imitate Chewbacca badly), and they're all, like, 'that's a good point, bear! Let's try that.'"

'that's a good point, bear! Let's try that.' – I am giggling like a 4th grader just typing that. Perfectly written and perfectly delivered.

Speaking of Star Wars. I have always been intrigued by tauntaun digestion (how tauntaun digest not how one digests a tauntaun). I can't seem to figure out how it would work given the brief glimpse we see of their innards. I mean are the ruminants? Are they omnivores? I can’t imagine they are grazers unless they were imported to Hoth for the purpose of Rebel transport….even then they must be from a frozen biome to be suited to Rebel activities on Hoth. But they don’t seem to have the dental equipment to hunt and kill. And why do they need so many intestines? I have so many questions.

Back to How I met Your Mother, I would like to commend them on being the first major media example I have encountered that has broken ‘The Stan Rule.’ What is ‘The Stan Rule?’ Well I’m glad you asked.

You see I have this theory about my name. It is not a very cool name. In fact – it is anti-cool. So, if you are writing a story or script and need a character who is a geek, a nerd, or a tool, don’t have the narrative space or motivation to develop the character, you just name him Stan and the audience will tap into an unspoken cultural expectation that ‘this guy has some glaring personality flaw.’ I have collected evidence for this theory from sources as diverse as Harry Potter, Three’s Company, Sex in the City and Second Hand Lions. But in Season 4[6] they introduce a character named Stan who is meant to embody all that is cool and smooth and wise. And did I mention he is black? This may be the first confirmed sighting of a black fictional Stan in recorded history.[7] But I am going to label this anomaly ‘the exception that proves the rule’ since I think they are clearly going for irony here. They introduce the Stan character in dialog, allow us to build our culturally programmed expectations, and then reveal him, generating comic tension out of our dissonance. So, ‘The Stan Rule’ is, in fact, alive and well.

Quotes

Flannery O’Conn0r “At its best our age is an age of searchers and discovers and at its worst an age that has domesticated despair and learned to live with it happily.”

I broke out Eugene Peterson’s Christ Plays in 10,000 Places for a talk I am working on. It may be one of the most quotable books I own. Here is a quote I didn’t use: “The usual way to avoid the appearance of crass individualism is through sectarianism. A sect is a form of narcissim…We construct religious clubs instead of entering resurrection communities. Sects are the termites in the Father’s house.” p244

Chad Walsh: the Christian writer ‘gives himself to his task in a spirit of deadly serious playfulness’

“The definition of sacrifice is doing something without appropriate compensation…(Counterintuitively) this can lead to bitterness…and greed.” –Nic

There were two quotable moments from my time with the in laws

The kids were talking about a guide to my father in law’s legendary speeches and decided to call it ‘a guilt trip tick[8]’

Anne – ‘Masons is kind of like girl scouts for grown ups.’ This is particularly hilarious in light of Dan Browns new book.

Speaking of Dan Brown’s new book, I noticed that there is a purchase correlation on Amazon between its buyers and people who bought Glen Beck’s new book. I wonder if this is a statistical artifact of Amazon’s correlation algorithm that simply reflects the fact that they both sold a bazillion copies or evidence that enjoying these authors suggest similar plausibility apparatus. I suspect it is the former, but desperately want to argue the latter.

Music

I think there is something wrong with my ears. Despite several attempts, I have never been able to get into Radiohead. They seem like the kind of band I should like. But I just don’t.

I know I am late to the game, but I have been into Tool lately. Sober appears to be about a friend of the band who could only do art when under the influence:

Theres a shadow just behind me. shrouding every step I take.
Making every promise empty. pointing every finger at me.
Waiting like a stalking butler, who upon the finger rests.
Murder now the path of must we, just because the son has come.

Jesus, wont you f*$^ing whistle. something but the past and done.

Why cant we not be sober? I just want to start this over.
Why cant we drink forever? I just want to start this over.

I am just a worthless liar. I am just an imbecile.
I will only complicate you. trust in me and fall as well.
I will find a center in you. I will chew it up and leave.
I will work to elevate you, just enough to bring you down.

I want what I want...

I love the imagery of that first verse. Tool is trying to paint a picture of a complicated malevolent dependency, but, more and more, I like the metaphor of addiction for the edenic nature. There is a lot about that verse that I see in many facets of my own existence.

Of course my ‘favorite’[9] tool song is "10,000 Days (Wings Pt. 2)" about the lead singer’s religious mother who died after being confined to a wheelchair for years.

I wonder if I am the only person in Pandora history to form a blended Tool/David Crowder channel[10]. But this is precisely the kind of soundtrack I like while writing my talks. We claim our college ministry is supposed to be a place for 2 kinds of people: those who have chosen to follow Jesus and are trying to work out what that looks like and those who are spiritually curious and looking for a safe place to experiment with Christian ideas and community. I find that a tensioned sound track (including a thoughtful opponent to Christianity or agnostic and a thoughtful Christian) helps generate an emotive space that keeps both audiences before me.

Speaking of preaching, I found Bill Simmons discussion of ‘the Adam Carolla Rule’, extremely interesting. It goes something like this: ‘For every hour that you film someone trying to be funny, you will get one minute of usable comedy.’ This is intriguingly parallel to the rule of thumb I follow in preaching prep that it takes 1 hour of prep for every minute you spend talking to put together something worth saying.

Science

My Facebook status from a few weeks ago: I’ve identify the red gravel in his samples...you can imagine my surprise to find that it is probably 'greenstone.' Geologists are adorable.

Overheard in Bio lab: "Wouldn’t it be cool if humans could fix nitrogen."[11]
My response: "You just described the lamest super power of all time."
What followed was a brief but nerdy conversation about what a Halloween costume for Nitrogenese Man would look like…which was followed by me thinking about it for much longer.

I have Dr Don Strong for intro to Evolution and Ecology. Prof Strong is animated and engaging (I started my last talk with an anecdote from this class and he performed not one but 2 death scenes as part of his discussion of the Nitrogen cycle). He does not seem to be a friend of the teleological argument, though. He gave a lecture on epistemology and took the position (without saying it) that positivism has epistemic priority.[12] There have also been backhanded jokes about design[13].

But he made this comment the other day, which I loved: “If I am looking in nature for evidence of supernatural powers I would say, ‘the lord has saved us from ourselves,’ because (fossil fuels) are too diffuse for us to pump out and suffocate ourselves.”[14]

Speaking of positivism.[15] The opening chapters of Wrights New Testament and the People of God has done a masterful job crafting a worldview that negotiates the narrow path between positivism and phenomenologicalism.[16] But his comments about positivism is salient here:

“Though this view (positivism) has been largely abandoned by philosophers, it has had a long run for its money in other spheres, not the least those of the physical science. Despite the great strides in self-awareness that have come about through (for instance) sociology of knowledge, not to mention philosophy of science itself, one still meets some scientists (and many non-scientists who talk about science) who believe that what science does is simply to look objectively at things that are there.”[17]

This is one of the things that bugs me about Dawkins. He does not own his presuppositions, even when they are philosophically passé. How many of his readers do you think could identify him as a positivist, and how many of them realize that positivism has not been considered philosophically viable for decades.

The problem of evil has often been subdivided into categories of human evils and natural evils, with the latter being the more difficult to answer for because it can not be foisted upon human will. But I would like to propose the following argument on Katrina in light of San Francisco, Natomas, and Seattle – In the next 30 years something horrible is going to happen in Natomas[18] (flooding), San Francisco (earthquakes) or Seattle (volcanic devastation) and we will ask, how could God do such a thing. It won’t occur to us to ask, ‘are these really places humans should live’ or ‘how could the local or regional leadership allow such a thing?’

There is a marked proof of first paper[19] online here.

The odd thing about my PhD is that I am primarily a numerical modeler. Secondarily I am a field and project scientist. What I was not, remotely, was an experimentalist. Yet my dissertation is experimental[20]. The cool thing about this paper, though, is that 2 people have already contacted me who will be doing their dissertations, at least in part, on trying to numerically replicate the experimental results from this paper.

There are two numbers that I think are interesting enough to post here from my dissertation: 100 and 600,000. The first is how many tons of sand and gravel I shoveled into and out of my flume[21] in order to set up and clean up the 25 experiments I conducted. The second number is how many sand grains I counted (and color sorted) with a dentist pick and a magnifying glass.[22] I am one of the only people I know who have an intuitive sense of how many 1 million is because I have counted over half way there. It is a LOT. Anyway, this is all to explain what became my motto for the doctoral work. I began to describe my approach to academic innovation with the phrase: “What I lack in ability I make up for in industry.”

The sand counting task made me want to include the following excerpt from The Phantom Tollbooth as an appendix to the work. I refrained:

Firstly, I would like to move this pile from here to there," he explained, pointing to an enormous mound of fine sand; "but I’m afraid that all I have are these tiny tweezers." And he gave them to Milo, who immediately began transporting one grain at a time…

"Quite correct!" he shrieked triumphantly. "I am the Terrible Trivium, demon of petty tasks and worthless jobs, ogre of wasted effort, and monster of habit...There are things to fill and things to empty, things to take away and things to bring back, things to pick up and things to put down, and besides all that we have pencils to sharpen, holes to dig, nails to straighten, stamps to lick, and ever so much more. Why, if you stay here, you’ll never have to think again—and with a little practice you can become a monster of habit, too."[23]

This pretty much sums up my feelings about the PhD. The master’s degree is, by far, the more efficient vehicle of intellectual exchange and development. If you are thinking about getting a PhD, get 3 Masters Degrees in different subjects instead. You will come out of it with the same amount of effort invested and will be better educated.

_______________
[1] As I have mentioned before, I gave up on it at least twice before returning to it after critical acclaim and the recommendations of people I trust.
[2] Draper is in advertising. I love this line almost as much as Drapers.
[3]And Scrubs in its prime, but seasons 7 and 8 of scrubs were not as good as the previous and I am not that hopeful for a season of scrubs that ‘takes the focus off JD’ and only has the main characters signed to 6 episode contracts.
[4] Yeah, I know. We don’t keep a TV so all of our small screen consumption is either Hulu or, mostly, DVD’s so we end up being a year behind. I’m ok with that, but it doesn’t exactly make for cutting edge cultural analysis.
[5] Who was great for the part but not showing a ton of range.
[6] Incidentally, I think the really historic part about season 4 is that both female leads got REALLY pregnant during the shooting (Hannigan even gave birth and disappeared for a few weeks near the end of the season) and they didn’t write either of the pregnancies into the show. There were just a lot of flowing tops and enormous purses. It became a comical sub-plot. This is understandable with the Robin character who supposedly hates kids, but Hannigan’s character is happily married. It makes me sad that there is no room for children in a show like this. Sad but not surprised.
[7] Because, in fiction, black is shorthand for cool as much as Stan is shorthand for uncool…and honestly, rightly so.
[8] My in-laws are a AAA family. Some of you may not remember this, but before Google maps or mapquest you could go to AAA and get essentially the same service. It was called a trip tic.
[9] Hard to call it a favorite since it is so brutally heart breaking
[10] Usually I like the variety and insights into new bands that Pandora provides, but I really wish the David Crowder channel played more David and less others because I don’t know if there is another genre like ‘worship music’ (a horribly self involved moniker) where the top performer is an order of magnitude better than the average band.
[11] The process by which only about 20 Bacteria and Achaea turn atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia which is needed for all life.
[12] Honestly, it is just irresponsible to teach on the philosophy of science without even mentioning Kuhn.
[13] Which, in fairness, have often been apt and enjoyable. My favorite ‘Cyanobacteria forgot to read Genesis.’ Of course, my response, ‘Genesis isn’t about the endosymbiotic cyanobacteria that lives in all photosynthetic organisms…it is about the dark parasitic idol maker that lives in my heart.’
[14] He was talking about the molar equivalency of oxygen and fixed carbon. For every mole of Oxygen in the atmosphere, there is a fixed carbon in the lithosphere. If we had access to all the world’s fossil fuels we could literally turn all of our atmospheric O2 into CO2 and asphyxiate ourselves. Strong’s argument/joke is that it is fortuitous that only a small portion of fossil fuels are in economically viable concentrations.
[15]I am working on a post about the role data selection, presentation and funding plays in destabilizing positivism and why I am an unabashed Khunian in my philosophy of science.
[16] Or, as he puts it, “To one side we can see the positivist or the naïve realist, who0 moves so smoothly along the line from reader to text to author to referent that they are unaware of the snakes in the grass at every step; to the other side we can see the reductionist who, stopping to look at the snakes, is swallowed up by them and proceeds no further.” (p61)
[17] p33 – The presuppositions most likely to derail the scientific enterprise are the unacknowledged ones. Wright says elsewhere, that the claim to neutrality is usually just a clue that one’s biases have not been robustly evaluated.
[18] Or, even more likely, the Sacramento Delta or New Orleans…again.
[19] The paper was published in Sedimentology in August. The second paper is coming out in the Journal of Geotechnical Engineering in February.
[20] Here is how it went down if anyone is interested. I started out trying to design a numerical algorithm for bed mixing and realized that there was no data to base it on. So I got a few experiments funded and 25 experiments, 3 to 6 papers and a 450 page dissertation later, the data set itself, rather than the algorithm is my actual contribution.
[21] A flume is essentially an experimental fake river. Mine was 3ft wide and 74 ft long. Gravel weighs around 120 lbs/ft2.
[22] One of the substantial contributions of my work was to finally hone in on a repeatable method to do this with image analysis, but this technique was not perfected until near the end of the study…so I did a lot of counting by ‘hand.’
[23] Excerpt from The Phantom Tollbooth, by Norton Juster, 1961; pp209-214

Despair and Dread: The Precipice and the Field of Rye

I recently read a little Dostoyevsky primmer[1] that essentially said that FD’s novels are useful as a conduit of teen angst but that if you hadn’t outgrown them by your mid 20’s you simply hadn’t grown up. I could not disagree more. But I have heard very similar things said about Catcher in the Rye and was less sure of their accuracy. Catcher was my second favorite high school read[2] so, I was intrigued when my reading group decided to tackle it as a 3 week breather between City of God and NT Wrights 2000 page, 3 volume work on Christian Origins.

In high school we thought it was a book about authenticity. We resonated with Holden’s perspective that we were surrounded by unreflective phonies. It verified our self perception as unique or profound in our tired self-refuting insights. We identified with his disaffections and his systemic mistrusts. We saw Holden as a champion of nerdy angst and entirely missed Salinger’s clues that our narrator was neither consistent[3] nor well.[4] This, of course, reminded me of a recent xkcd comic:

As I aged I came to see it as a book about despair. I even came up with a catchy phrase to describe its thesis:

“The examined life is not worth living.”

I thought it was a book about the madness of reflection. In a sense an inversion of Pascal’s Pense:

“As men are not able to fight against death, misery, ignorance, they have taken it into their heads, in order to be happy, not to think of such things.”

It seemed to me that Salinger was saying, yes, ‘precisely.’ The Big questions are too big. Their weight will crush you if you live under them continually. The life of resigned coping is more experientially stable. The long stream of characters Holden encountered each seemed to have flawed apparatus to negotiate reality, but in the end, they were each more pragmatically livable than the protagonist's attempt at an authentic, reflective existence. In the end Holden’s world view, though more empirically valid than the others he encountered[5], proved psychologically unsustainable and wrecked him.

But upon a second reading, I don’t think that was right either. The resolving tone of the text is much too hopeful to support this reading. Instead of despair I have come to belive The Catcher in the Rye is about dread.

As is my practice with fiction, I underlined themes in my latest reading of CITR looking for repetition and reoccurrence as a clue to intention and authorial motivation.[6] But it wasn’t until nearly the end of the book that I realized I had missed the most important theme. The book is simply haunted by the ghost of Holden’s dead brother, Allie. This death begins as an incidental detail but becomes increasingly central and, I think, winds up the interpretive key of the book…to the point that I suggested to my reading group that I think ‘the book is actually about Allie.’ Let me cite three passages to build this argument.

The theme of Holden’s underlying dread really gained momentum in one of the most poignant passages, about midway through the book:

“Who wants flowers when you’re dead? Nobody. When the weather’s nice, my parents go out quite frequently and stick a bunch of flowers on old Allie’s grave. I went with them a couple of times, but I cut it out. In the first place, I certainly don’t enjoy seeing him in that crazy cemetery. Surrounded by dead guys and tomb stones and all. It wasn’t too bad when the sun was out, but twice – twice – we were there when it started to rain. It was awful. It rained on his lousy tombstone, it rained on the grass on his stomach. It rained all over the place. All the visitors that were visiting the cemetery started running like hell over to their cars. That’s what nearly drove me crazy. All the visitors could get in their cars and turn on their radios and all and then go someplace nice for dinner – everybody except Allie. I couldn’t stand it”

This idea, that all the visitors could get on with their trivial lives, but not Allie who just lay there with the rain falling on his belly emerges as the interpretive key of the text against which Holden evaluates nearly everything as trivial.[7] We search in vein for another trigger to his angst. His family seems loving and supportive. They seem to intentionally undermine Holden’s caricature of them. The minor interactions we get with his mother and DB are exceedingly positive.[8]

He walks through life under the weight of impending doom. Everyone seems phony, not because Holden is advanced or superior in his observations or insights, but because their daily actions seem absurd given the ever present reality of death. Whether it is Stradlater combing his hair or the army man he is introduced to by Sally…the whole theme of phoniness is really just a macrocosm of the line ‘Ally doesn’t get to go to lunch. He stays in the ground.’ By remaining in the fog of unresolved mourning[9] Holden interprets every action that does not explicitly connect with his dread at the brevity of life as banal or trivial.

Later, he visited the museum which he found soothing in a couple ways. He found it just as he left it. The unaltered life moment of the museum, brought him back to a time when his brother was alive. But he felt more at home among the mummies than he had with almost anyone alive that he had encountered in the book. It was peaceful. It was a place where death received its proper emphasis. It was a place where his internal haunting found an external validation. By stockpiling their goods to be buried with them these strange ancients had lived their lives with their death in view, which was what Holden so desperately wanted from those he interacted with…gravity born of dread.

But when we finally find out what Holden wants more than anything else…when we get to look past his coping mechanisms and his self preservation…when he tells his sister (the only moment where I get the sense he is actually being authentic) what he really wants to do, we get this strange but surprisingly vulnerable description that gives the book its title:

“I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around – nobody big, I mean – except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff – I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch[10] them. That’s what I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be.”

The title comes from this vision he has of being able to overcome his helplessness. Of being able to save innocent kids playing without a care in a field of Rye, from falling off a precipice that they don’t know is there. What Holden wants more than anything else is to overcome the oppressive helplessness he feels in the wake of Ali’s death. It is the image of kids playing carelessly in a beautiful place, totally unaware of the horrific precipice that is just a few steps away. His life is dominated by his knowledge of the precipice. He is unable to forget its existence and enjoy the field. More than anything else he wants the power, not to alert the playing children to the existence of the precipice[11] but to steal its power and diffuse its dread.[12]


Honestly, I think my 10th grad English teacher missed the boat on this text. I recall being told that Holden went crazy in the end. But I don’t think that is how the book ends at all. I think it ends with healing and hope. Holden’s family rallies around him and get him help. He begins to mourn, and he begins to value human connection again. The book ends with:

“I don’t know what I think about it. I’m sorry I told so many people about it. About all I know is I sort of miss everybody I told about. Even old Stradtler and Ackley, for instance. I think I even miss that g-d Maurice.[13] It’s funny. Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do you start missing everybody.”

We leave him on the verge of being able, again, to enjoy the field despite the precipice…or even to allow his knowledge of the precipice to enlarge his enjoyment of the field. This is the utility of dread, in an odd twist, for both the existentialist and the Christian.

This post was written while listening to Absolution by Muse
____________________
[1] A pitiful little book that, in my opinion, simply dismissed FD’s work because it came from a place of belief even if it was tortured belief.
[2] Behind The Stranger which I re-read to my great delight a few years ago…but which is dwarfed by the brilliance of The Plauge. Incedentally, I have heard similar accounts of Salinger – that some of his other work is better. This would be remarkable, because Catcher in the Rye is brilliant.
[3] My favorite clue that our narrator might be less than trustworthy is the fact that the title of the book - the central vision of what Holden wants out of life - is based on a misremembered line of poetry.
[4] After we finished to book Alex (a youth pastor) posed the question, “Is this a book that you think students should read in High School?” I think it is a great book for students to read with their parents and a horrible book to read with other high schoolers.
[5] I am contemplated a second post on religious themes in CITR. There is some hilarious stuff in there. But for now I will settle for my favorite passage on the topic: “Finally, though, I got undressed and got in bed. I tried to pray, but I couldn’t do it. I can’t always pray when I feel like it. In the first place, I’m sort of an atheist. I like Jeus and all, but don’t care too much for most of the other stuff in the Bible. Take the Disciples, for instance. They annoy the hell out of me, if you want to know the truth. They were all right after Jesus was dead and all, but while he was alive, they were about as much use to him as a hole in the ehad….If you want to know the truth, the guy I like best in the Bible next to Jesus, was that lunatic and all, that lived in the tombs and kept cutting himself with stones. I like him about ten times as much as the Disciples that poor bastard.”
[6] I am neither inclined nor qualified to take on the issue of hermeneutics here, but, lets just say, I think Salinger’s intentions matter in answering the question ‘What does this art mean?’
[7] There are important exceptions to this. The guy who beat the drum just once in an entire performace was an important one with substantial existential overtones.
[8] Though there are the faintest allusions to possible prior sexual abuse - which would change things.
[9] Holden never got to go to Allie’s funeral. He was in the hospital from punching out the windows in his garage.
[10] Emphasis original.
[11] Which would be the metaphor for my previous interpretation of the book.
[12] I know it is trite to look for Christ figures in literature. But what Holden wants is to be able to say is: “Where o death is your victory? Where o death is your sting?”
[13] The pimp that beat him up.

Existentialism and Nuance on the American River

I don’t write a lot about my work in this space. But today I start classes for a new degree.[1] In light of that, I thought I’d post this essay I wrote for the Ichthyology class that put me on this path. I am a river modeler[2] so it made sense to me to take a fish class as part of my PhD course work. It was probably my favorite class I took, and, so, here I am getting ready to dive back into academia one more time.

A Walk Down the River

It was an enormous confluence of fish going nowhere, but headed there resolutely. This was my reaction to the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of salmon backed up behind the closed gate of the Nimbus fish hatchery. Nearby a father asked his rambunctious but intrigued sons “What if that was your life, all you wanted to do was swim upstream?” I pondered what he might be trying to teach at that moment. Perhaps that his sons were lucky to have longer and more meaningful lives or maybe that resolve and sacrificial, single minded purpose were admirable traits. I suspect, however, his comment may not have had a precise pedagogical intent but may have rather been an articulated reflection on his own mortality. I allowed myself the smug fantasy that one of the boys turned to his dad and quoted Sartre or Camus in an attempt to actually respond to the deeply existential query. Existential themes, however, did appear to be the topic of conversation as visitors seemed inspired by single minded fortitude but reminded of the brevity and futility of cyclical existence.

The Nimbus fish hatchery was designed to mitigate habitat losses that resulted from the construction of the Nimbus dam. A large fenced structure that spans the width of the river “guides” the fish to a ladder where they back up behind a gate. Periodically the gate is opened and several fish proceed up the ladder to holding tanks where they are allowed to “ripen,” “anesthetized” and “harvested[3].” Eggs and sperm are removed and mixed and the subsequent fresh water life stages of the anadromous fish occur in large concrete tanks. A path proceeded past the visitor center and tanks full of densely packed juvenile fish whose synchronized movements were more reminiscent of shoaling behaviors than anything that might seem preparatory for life as a wild salmon or steal head[4].

Half a mile downstream the river was still thick with fish near its banks. I made my way down to the river edge where a tall, lanky heron had taken its position over viewing the buffet before it. I waited patiently with the bird, for a perfect picture, which I proceeded to take without film (strangely symbolic of the futile struggle I was observing). In my anthropomorphization[5] I suspected that the heron was not happy to share its bank with me. But it was far more patient than I and soon had its fishing location to itself.

The view a little further downstream was the most poignant. Both the dam and the mass of fish came into view together, standing in striking counter distinction to each other. Both were awe inspiring. The dam was massive and symmetrical, bearing a geometric simplicity and representative of human ingenuity. The fish were complex, chaotic and organic on an enormous and moving scale and bore the mantle of temporal priority. A placard about the dam revealed that this was a Bureau of Reclamation structure. I was mildly relieved to learn that it was not the Corps of Engineers’. But the specific facts of this system were incidental, since the Corps is the managing entity in a number of very similar situations. It is the Corps after all that brings us the absurdity of the Columbia River fish trucking program. But this is not distant mockery because, for me, the Corps is not a ‘they’ but a ‘we’.

Reflections on a Managing Institution

I am part of a new Corps of Engineers. Not the institutional “New Corps” with Seven Points of Stewardship, environmental objectives and green rhetoric, but a much more organic entity that is the inevitable result of an organization that expects 50% turnover in the next 10 years. These ‘old guard’ positions are being backfilled by scientists and engineers whose training postdated our nation’s development of a broad environmental consciousness. My colleges and I joke about making careers out of undoing what our predecessors in the organization have done. But there is a quiet dissonance as we continue to manage their legacy looking for incremental, environmental gains while bearing the disdain of environmental groups and negotiating a poor funding environment for restoration projects.[6]

A compelling philosophical argument could be made that the city of Sacramento should not exist given the flood risks of living at the confluence of two enormous, flashy, mountain fed rivers. But, empirically, it does exist and the Nimbus dam provides it some protection. Further argument could be made that flood protection of this sort is actually detrimental to urban areas because it creates a false security of extended periods of safety while only exposing them to infrequent but very large and catastrophic events. This, however, is a nuanced discussion and therefore, like most nuance, not really in play in public discourse. Therefore, we have inherited an impasse between humans and fish. Our predecessors overcame the inertia of dynamic, unpredictable natural systems. Our inertia to overcome is social dependence on engineered systems despite the growing evidence of their detriment. This is more poignant for me since social dependence on engineered systems is not an abstract problem someone else has. Not able to afford a house in Davis, we have made our home behind a West Sacramento levee.[7] [8]

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[1] #5 for those keeping score at home.
[2] I construct numerical models of natural systems…but that does not keep my wife from telling people I model professionally.
[3] This is one of the problems with the hatchery ‘solution.’ by only propagating genetic material from a few founding individuals we create a genetic bottleneck and artificially induce genetic drift and decrease allele diversity (making the population less versatile to respond to changing conditions and disease).
[4] I cut my favorite line here. it was something about being able to purchase fish food for $0.25 and feeling seedily voyeuristic watching the fish frenzy as I threw it in…like some sort of red light district peep show.
[5] I am not sure what the verb for anthropomorphism is.
[6] I cut the following section here because it struck me as bitter. But here it is: ‘Incremental gain’ is the rally call of stewardship minded individuals on the inside. We are still in a phase of institutional reform where the low fruit of obsolete dam removal and structure re-operation are available and helpful for the establishment of precedent. However, population pressures and climate trends give the Nimbus dam an excellent chance of outliving me. The Corp’s will always do what it is funded to do; anything else would literally be a federal offense. So we plug along, looking for our incremental gains, marketing restoration work to the power brokers and deep pockets and working for small, achievable paradigm shifts. In a sense it is a compromised and resigned environmentalism, with little hope of major impact on the Nimbus situation in the near future. For this we are often not thought of as full partners in the environmental movement. But I have always been more interested in action than ideology, and like my position on the inside for exacting meaningful change and synergistic solutions to the greatest extent possible.
[7] This is no longer true. We took advantage of the housing market crash to move to Davis…mostly to unify our lives…but getting out from behind the levee was part of it too.
[8] Professor Moyle started each class with a haiku that he wrote that morning (and an example of fish in art…his wife is an art history prof) so we were encouraged to submit haikus with everything we wrote.

Vikings, Visigoths and Gummy Melchisedech

For several years our small group had a multi-part structure where individuals would sign up to lead different parts of it each week. It broke down into connect, worship, study and prayer portions of the evening. I was ok at leading the study, but what Amanda and I seemed to thrive at was generating connect activities…designed to get people talking, giggling, sharing, and just spending time together before we dive into something as weighty as worship. I have posted about these before here and here. But I found the results of two others particularly amusing and worth putting up here:

Beef Poetry

Amanda was walking through the grocery store one day and noticed that the store’s beef supplier was having a beef poetry contest. You had to include 3 of 5 key phrases (stuff like no antibiotics and all natural) and a monthly winner got $100 in free beef. So we split into groups and wrote a half dozen poems and agreed that any winnings would be used for a small group party.

I partnered up with Rich Below, who I didn’t really know very well at the time.[1] But I think we made a pretty good writing team. The initial conversation went something like this:

‘Hmm, what rhymes with beef?’
“Reef?”
-long pause-
“Fief?”
-long pause-
“Leaf?”
-long pause-
“What about Leif? It could be about a Scandinavian beef eater!”
“An epic Norse limerick about bovine consumption!”
“Viking poetry!”

And this is what we came up with:

There once was a Viking named Lief
Fed on All Natural Premium Beef
Choice of the USDA
So it was anchors away
He rowed strong from reef to reef

There once was a Visigoth name Bjork
Who spent his sad life eating pork
But the hormones and drugs
and tapeworms and bugs
left him feeling a considerable dork.

Leif rowed to the shore of France
and was met by a defiant dance.
The armies did battle
Leif’s strengthened by cattle
kicked the Visigoths in the pants.

I have a few rules in life. One of them is that if you have a chance to write a silly poem about Visigoths...you do it.

Well, Rich and I didn’t win. We suspected that it was our controversial anti-pork message.[2] But Liz, Holly and Rebecca did with a catchy piece called ‘The Night Before Barbecue.’ Turns out that $100 will purchase 7 Tri Tips.

Somehow I ended up cooking them but they were good any ways.

Biblical Gum Sculpture

I handed out a list of about 25 Bible characters from relatively common (and easily depicted), like Moses to relatively obscure (i.e. Melchisedech). The characters were assigned point values between 1 and 4, commensurate with the obscurity with the character (more obscure characters received higher values). The names were also written on index cards and organized (face down) into 4 piles by point value.[3] Each person then drew a random card from one of the piles and attempted to sculpt the name using two pieces of bubble gum. From then on it is Balderdash rules. Each person tried to guess who each sculpture represented. A successful guess netted the point value for both the guesser and the sculptor.[4]

Here are the 'sculptures':

I guessed the Queen of Sheba, but was alone on this. I was wrong. This is David (1 point). What are the other 2 figures…that is his harem. I would have gone with a defining moment in the David narrative. You know…Goliath…Uzziah…Saul and the spear. Julie felt the defining image was his multiple women. Um, can you say complex Biblical character. But at least it gives me the opportunity to like to mewithoutYou’s great new song about him.

Amanda was the only other person who picked a 1 point card. Um…its Moses. Everyone got it, but at 1 point apiece, it was competitive but not enough.

Liz has an art degree and is one of several fine artists in the group. This is Elijah in the flaming chariot…which I somehow failed to get.

This was the winner. I said David. I missed the long curly hair. I probably overvalued it the Queen of Sheba at 4 points, but Gilda did a great job with it.

This was mine. There is a lake and a guy reading a scroll in a chariot and another guy explaining it to him. It is the Ethiopian eunich…and in case you didn’t zero in on the story I included an artistic representation of the fact that it was a story about a eunich.

There were a couple ways you could go with this. I said Nichodemas (John 3). Others said Pilate ('What is Truth?'). It is actually Peter from the 'Do you love me?' narrative at the end of John.


Um, that’s a parking lot. Lot for 3 points. I didn’t get this.


Corrie was sure she got this. She said Adam. She figured it was a rib cage, and one of the ribs was being highlighted…referring to the creation of Eve narrative. As she explained her theory I was sure she was right. She wasn’t. This was a rib cage. Jansen was highlighting a rib. Senacherib for 4 points.

Finally, my favorite. No one had the faintest clue. Apparently it was a 3 part ‘sounds like’ sculpture.


Yup, its Melchisedech for 4 points, which no one got, but was hysterical as Ian explained it.

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[1] This is before we lived with the Belows for 3 months in our Davis move.
[2] Or maybe it was our Visigothiphobia
[3] So Moses, David and all the other 1 point characters were grouped together and Melchisedech, Senacherib and all the other 4 point charecters were grouped together. One of the reasons I did this was because of an experience as a brand new Christian in a youth group. We were playing Bible pictionary. I drew Joshua. I had no idea who he was. So I drew a shepherd (thinking he was probobly in the OT and they were all shepherds, right?) and then I drew a foot ball lineup with X's and O's and circled the tight end because Joshua Davis was our High School's tight end at the time. It was emberassing. So I like to provide teired sorts of challanges in these kinds of things.
[4] So you can accrue points by having a good sculpture or by guessing multiple sculptures well.

Chesterton’s Apple: Thoughts on Empirical Mysticism

Over the summer I submitted my dissertation and, barring a catastrophe of review or logistics, I’ll graduate in the fall. Since I have to pay tuition for the fall quarter and have no real academic commitments[1], I have chosen to take Freshman Bio 2 and 3[2]…pre-recs for the Masters Degree in Ecology and Evolution I have had my eye on for years. Since my time will be limited I am preparing by working through three bio classes through various technological vehicles over the summer.[3] The material has simply left me entranced. I have come to believe that if I had not had a first year teacher for Biology in high school[4] I might not be an engineer today. But my emotive reaction to this data has caused me to reflect on my simultaneous designations as empiricist and mystic and why I feel that these labels are symbiotic rather than competitive.

Remembering that we Forget

The best word that I can think of for describing the content I am digesting would likely cause Dawkins heart burn[5]. I have found it ‘magical.’

Let me turn it over to my second favorite Chesterton quote[6] to explain.

“All the terms used in the science books, “law,” “necessity,” “order,” “tendency,” and so on, are really unintellectual, because they assume an inner synthesis, which we do not possess. The only words that ever satisfied me as describing Nature are the terms used in the fairy books, “charm,” “spell,” “enchantment.” They express the arbitrariness of the fact and its mystery. A tree grows fruit because it is a MAGIC tree. Water runs downhill because it is bewitched. The sun shines because it is bewitched…

…These tales say that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green. They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water…

…We are all under the same mental calamity; we have all forgotten our names. We have all forgotten what we really are. All that we call common sense and rationality and practicality and positivism only means that for certain dead levels of our life we forget that we have forgotten. All that we call spirit and art and ecstasy only means that for one awful instant we remember that we forget[7]…”[8]

And that is why I have found the central dogma of genetics ‘magical.’ This is why I think allopatric speciation appears to be some cosmic incantation. This is why explanation, for me, is faith building rather than faith destroying. Because the central discipline of the mystical empiricist, is to ‘remember that we forget’. The moment it becomes obvious that polypeptide chains must have four levels of chemical and physical structure providing our protein army with the seemingly unlimited structural variability our existence requires…we have ‘forgotten our names’ and are free to be atheists. Atheism isn’t moral failure or a failure of reason[9]…it is totally reasonable and, I believe, can be arrived at with substantial moral credibility. It does seem to be symptomatic, of a diminished sense of wonder, however; organ failure of our apparatus of astonishment.

The Theological Experience of Science

The way I have come to experience science ‘theologically’ has changed with time. For a while I was a proponent of a ‘God of the gaps’ approach. Under this approach, when Nowiki suggests that there is an unsolved paradox in biology that DNA requires proteins to form proteins which can not be formed without the information template provided by DNA, this admission would become the point of the class. Scientific knowledge from this perspective is valuable only as far as it demonstrates what we don’t know in order to exploit these gaps rhetorically. While these puzzles[10] are intriguing and not without theological implications, this is an impoverished way to interact with God’s general revelation. The faith building information is not what we can’t explain but what we can. It is all so much more dramatic and sublime than we could have ever imagined.

Dawkins would have us believe that the more we can explain about our origins and workings the less we need to invoke a supernatural agent. The God of the gaps approach agrees to wage the battle on this field[11]…and then gets its ass summarily kicked as the god it protects gets smaller and smaller and less worthy of worship. But the premise that explanation is inversely correlated with the metaphysical requirement for an external creative agent is not self evident. Only a callus comfort with the data could require disbelief. My experience is that the more of an empiricist I become the more mysticism I am required to accept.

A more robust alliance between science and theology is in the assertion that explanation does not attribute causality. Rather, the more sublime and textured and ‘magical’ the explanation the more it begs for a personal, cosmic cause. Theology is not best served by scientific failure but, rather, by its unmitigated success. Science[12] provides us catalysts of wonder, non-traditional liturgical aids to worship. In the middle ages, the great frescos were designed to draw the worshiper into an experience of transcendence. Art can still serve this purpose, but I have found science can do precisely the same thing. It is the ignored liturgical furniture of our age. The helix does not replace the icon but takes its rightful place along side as a conduit of wonder. From Einstein’s realization that matter and energy are fundamentally the same stuff, to the understanding that space and time are covariant, to the realization that all creatures pass on genetic information using the same essential apparatus, to the implication that, since atoms are composed mostly of nothing, so are we[13]…the only ones who do not marvel that the apple is green are those who have forgotten that it might have been gold.

It is cliché to say that atheism requires as much faith as theism…but let me try to say it this way: Scientifically motivated atheism is not a triumph of data but boredom with it. It is not the triumph of reason but the failure of wonder.

Dawkins assertion that understanding science necessitates unbelief is not an empirical statement it is an aesthetic statement. He is simply stating that he does not find the DNA story sufficiently inspiring. He does not find it to be evidence of benevolent creator. He might be right. But he has no claim to the kind of positivistic certainty he exudes.

Chesterton’s Apple

When I first read the Chesterton quote above, I immediately thought of the fourth grade. I was sitting in my reading group[14] and opened my book to a new story[15]. I have no recollection of the story, only of the illustration. There was a silver unicorn standing on a hill of red grass. A green waterfall was in the background and the crimson ground covering was periodically punctuated with thin but bulbous vertical structures (that I can only imagine fulfill the ecological niche that trees fulfill in our reality). I remember thinking how fantastic it would be to live in such a magical world. A world like that would surely be filled with wonder[16]. But then I realized, that if that was my world, it would be ‘natural’ and, thus, unremarkable.

The quote came to mind again when I was in Kenya. The jarring strangeness of such a completely different ecosystem than any I had experienced was enough, in itself, to ‘remind me of my name’[17]. But it was the zebra that brought Chesterton to mind. The zebra was astonishing not because it was striped, but because it suddenly reminded me that the horses I grew up with were not.

But, most recently, Chesterton’s discussion came to mind when reading Augustine’s city of God where he discusses the phenomena of magnetism:

“The miracles of the visible world of nature have lost their value for us because we see them continually…But things which come before our eyes in everyday experience are little reckoned of, not because they are less remarkable in nature but simply because of their continual occurrence – so much so that we have ceased to marvel at many of the marvels…daily familiarity gradually blunts the edge of wonder…who could fail to be astounded at this property of a stone, which was not merely inherent in it but also passed on through so many object suspended from it, and bound them together by invisible connections?...the natural phenomena know to all men…would be a source of astonishment to all who observe them, if it were not man’s habit to restrict his wonder at miracles to the rarities… this present state of things…has been cheapened by familiarity, but…is in fact much more wonderful” (p 390, 970, 981 and 1026)

Augustine essentially says, when something like magnetism stop making us say ‘holy crap, that’s magic’ simply because it is explainable and predictable, we have lost our way. If we found a rock that attracted water or repelled muskrats, we would find it magical. We discount the multitude of miracles God has worked into our universe by the very criterion that they are in our universe to observe. That seems an odd criterion to exclude an evidence of transcendence.

It seems to me that there are two kinds of scientists: those for whom understanding the details of creation diminishes wonder and accentuates their materialism, and those for whom learning the details of creation amplifies wonder and makes them, increasingly, mystics. This is an aesthetic rather than a rational choice. It is disingenuous to assert that the data requires one or the other. The locus of selection resides in the perception of the data rather than the data itself. The latter is the only way science has ever worked for me[18]. The more of an empiricist I become, the more of a mystic I am transformed into.

This post was prepared while listening to The Question by Emery

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[1] Though I will still have a full time job, three preaching commitments and a young family…so I am contemplating a 10 week blogging sabbatical…which, at my current pace, only means skipping 3-4 posts.
[2] The second and third classes of the series for majors.
[3] These include DVD’s from the teaching company (aquired used), Mp3’s of previous offerings of the UCD class, and online video/audio of MIT’s classes through their open course policy.
[4] My parents were both educational institutions in our school, widely respected as two of the best teachers in the district. In my entire high school career they tried to use that clout only once, to get me family friend and instructor extrodinare, Bill Berry (who, in an uncomfortable unrelated, but hilarious anecdote both Amanda and I call Uncle Bill) for Biology. I got a first year teacher instead.
[5] I have split this post. It originally included an entire point about Dawkins, the New Athiests, and the sociology of belief, but I have decided that the digression was sufficiently diverse and substantial to warrant its own post.
[6] My favorite being the one this blog is named after.
[7] Incidentally, one could claim that ‘remember that we forget’ is the dominant theme of Deuteronomy…but I digress.
[8] That is the best I can do to get the gist without being overly long – though I fear I have failed on both counts in that the quote is too long and misses the gist. Let me just say, “The Ethics of Elfland” in Chesterton’s Orthodoxy is 100% worth the 25 minutes it would take to read.
[9] My biggest problem with Dawkins is not that he thinks that his rehashed ideas have suddenly become definitive or that his rhetorical flair outpaces his insight…it is that he’s a bully. He does not present a case and then allow it to stand or fall…he impunes the opposition that if they do not agree with him they are either (a) not sufficiently educated, (b) morally compromised, or (c) simply not intelligent enough to see his position. With all his positivism and trumpeting of cold rationality, his writings do not seem to primarily exist to change people’s minds, but, rather, to induce shame. That is the primary symptom of intellectual bullying.
[10] And there are many of them. For example, how did we go from single cell life forms to every major body plan in 30 million years (see Gould’s Wonderful Life), how is it that life evolved so quickly after conditions on earth became hospitable for it…but only did so once, or why is is that the statistical explanation of entropy (Boltzmann – which is more satisfying than mechanical explanations) does not account for the temporal asymmetry generally observed.
[11] Much theological reflection on science fights the battle on this indefensible hill. Reflective Christians have built impressive battle works on the many intriguing paradoxes of science, holding insufficient explanation as the apologetic trump card that will carry the day. Then someone uncovers some evidence or designs some clever experiment or simply proposes a credible hypothesis, and the battle is lost (only those who have fought it continue quixotic guerilla warfare for ensuing decades being so emotively vested in defending the hill that they cannot let it go).
[12] I recently appreciated this description of the task of the empirical mystic: “Theologians and scientists both exegete God’s world, which we have been given to study and appreciate. Contemplating this world fills us with wonder and gratitude. Science, based in the freedom of the knower, can along with theology contribute to our understanding. The Spirit itself has formed within us the creative capacity not only to understand the world but also to give it voice and offer it back to God with thankful praise.” Pinnok - Flame of Love p 65
[13] And that it is electrical forces rather than physical resistance that keeps us, for example, from passing through the chair we are sitting on, since both are so unsubstantial.
[14] This seemed to be the universal way to organize the mornings in elementary school, the teacher would meet with the various reading groups (of stratified ability) in the morning while the other kids did seat work and then would teach the whole class the other subjects after lunch.
[15] Incidentally, I have two quasi-philosophical memories of 4th grade reading group. The other was regarding a story about the first woman to swim the English Channel. The story ended with some stats about how the record time required to swim the channel has dropped as more people have done it. Mrs. Reed (my favorite primary school teacher and about the kindest most spiritual lady you’d ever meet) asked if we thought that the record time would ever stop dropping. We all said no, that the more people tried and the better training technology got the faster the record time would be. Mrs. Reed then asked, ‘will the record time eventually be zero then, and what about after that, will it take negative time.’ This bugged me until High School when I realized that, oddly, it was the opposite of Zeno’s paradox.
[16] I have since noticed that it is a ubiquitous convention in science fiction to give a planet two obvious suns or moons as if to say ‘you are not in Kansas any more’ but also as if to say ‘ it is totally arbitrary that we only have one, and if you were not from earth you would find that totally novel.’
[17] If you grew up in upstate NY, the Hippopotamus is intravenous wonder.
[18] It is also why I am addicted to school and the systematic metabolism of new academic disciplines. The discipline of digesting novel facts helps me remember my name. It is a spiritual discipline of my orthodox Christian worship.

The World’s Nerdiest Bike Thief

Anyone who has followed this blog for a few months or heard[1] me preach more than, say, twice, knows I really enjoy xkcd.com. It is a perfect confluence of nerdy science/math/code humor and nerdy pop subculture references. I only ‘get it’ about 70% of the time, with ~10% failure due to not understanding the science and the other ~20% because I missed the cultural reference.[2] Anyway, just a really good example of how the web created pockets of niche excellence that were not previously sustainable.

So you can imagine my excitement when I came up with an idea for an xkcd comic. It fit the criteria. Nerdy, academic, legitimately amusing[3]. But I was disappointed to learn that he does not accept idea submissions. So here it is. My xkcd submission if xkcd accepted submissions.

The World’s Nerdiest Bike Thief

Feel free to propose a tool tip in the comments.

This post was written while listening to The Dear Hunter channel on Pandora.

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[1] I suppose hearing me preach would not be enough to appreciate the extent to which I make use of visual gags…but I have thoughts of the homiletic use of visual humor. Offbeat, single pane comics are preferable. Otherwise they take too long to play out. Hence my preference for getting my visual gags at xkcd, toothpastefordinner, or graphjam. I keep a folder of the best of these and review it periodically to see if there is something promising for an upcoming topic.
[2] You can read xkcd for a while before you realize that each one has a second punch line in the form of a ‘tool tip’ (if you hold your cursor over the image). Sometimes this will give a hint to the reference and, suddenly, the comic is hilarious.

[3] It should be noted, that if xkcd was to base a comic on an idea I submitted, I would not hesitate to list it on the 'publications' section of my CV.

Stories the Bible Doesn’t Tell: The Non-Normative Nature of Normative Narrative

MIT brain scientist Jeremy Wolfe, talks[1] about a fortunate mistake our brains make. When reconstructing the past we actually have very few fixed points of reference and interpolate between them using our imagination. Studies have shown that this causes us to project our current feelings about the event into our historical experience. The problem our brain is solving is that information is ‘expensive’ to store; so we get away with storing less data by having complicated imaginative ‘reconstituional’ software that simulates the past[2] based on our relatively limited points of reference. Therefore, much of what we ‘remember’ is not actually composed of memories, but of imaginative ‘simulations’ based on relatively few actual recollections.

I think this is analogous to one of the biggest problems we have with reading and interpreting narrative. In fiction, it is important not to waste space with mundane details. Stories are told with relatively few points of reference.[3] This is why no one goes to the bathroom in movies and one of the rules of writing fiction is to never describe the experience of waking up, because that is something everyone does and does not tend to move the story forward. These tend to be helpful conventions, limiting stories to the interesting parts and sparing the reader thousands of pages of tedious description.

Normative Non-Fictional Narrative

However, for what I will call, normative non-fictional narrative[4], this is a problem. When we read the Book of Acts, for example, we remember the miracle at the pool, Peter’s great sermon, Paul’s conversion…the dramatic moments. And then, when we compare them to our sad lives, we can feel diminished…disappointed in ourselves and underwhelmed by the acts of God in our generation. There appears to be an empirical disconnect between the dynamic works of God on the pages of Scripture and the repetitive monotony of our daily lives.

But the big mistake we make in interpreting biblical narrative is to read it without respect to genre. Genre gets a lot of attention in hermeneutics, and rightly so, but there is an interpretively important genre that never seems to get mentioned…the highlight reel.[5]

What Biblical narrative necessarily omits[6] is the tedium. The unremarkable MONTHS that passed on the road between Antioch and Ephesus. The lonely hours of chasing elusive sleep on some undulating surface that was as close to horizontal as could be found. The 30 years that the God of the universe spent working as a carpenter. The 40 years Moses spent tending sheep. The 12 years Paul spent quietly in Antioch after his conversion. The 18 years of diapers, spit up, getting out of bed and going to work, that elapsed between Philip’s missionary adventure and his hosting of Paul. These events, and others like them, which make up the vast majority of salvation history, get less than a sentence apiece and mainly reside in the white space of your Bible.[7]

Philip’s Normative Narrative

Philip is the most interesting human character in the book of Acts, as far as I am concerned. He was the first to realize that the gospel was for the Gentiles. He was a multi-cultural pioneer. He was young, adventurous, brash, spiritually sensitive, and slightly impetuous. Acts 8 describes him performing miracles, preaching and healing the sick in Samaria without regard to the bitter racial hatred that should have kept him far away from ‘those people.’ He lived exciting months as a gospel pioneer from city to city; going on adventures and living in the daily the power of God. But the last we hear from him in Acts 8:40 is in Caesarea. He simply disappears from the story. Most people extrapolate from his early adventures and figure he spent his life doing crazy stuff for God in lands so distant that the stories simply didn’t make it back to Luke, due to their shear remoteness. But that is not what happened.

We meet Philip again 20 years after his adventures, when he hosted Paul (Acts 21) and are told that he has four remarkable daughters between the ages of 14 and 18[8]. FF Bruce essentially says, ‘Do the math…Philip met a girl and it put an end to his missional gallivanting.’ The story the Bible doesn’t tell is that the fiery young Philip almost certainly met a girl in Caesarea and live 20 faithful years as a generous, committed, active servant to his local church and community…and as an exceptional father. These are good strong years…the kind of years that the kingdom of God is built out of…the kind of years he should be proud of…the kind of years we could be proud of…but not the kind that ‘make the Bible.’ And, this is what is so widely misunderstood. The fact that we don’t hear the story of these years is evidence that they are more, not less, normative.

Telling the Stories the Bible Doesn’t Tell

But preachers tend to be enamored with Peter and Paul.[9] As full time ministers, they see Peter and Paul as the vocational role models in the Scriptures. And so, they tend to prepare and preach sermons for other full time Christian workers forgetting that they deliver them to churches full of people who are not. What they generally fail to recognize (or at least articulate) that the stories of the Bible are in the Bible, specifically because they are non-normative. Hero stories need to be de-centered in order to instruct the rest of us. The Bible could not do this without becoming overly long and tedious. The responsibility falls on the exegete.

Actually, one of the really interesting things about Acts is that it self consciously undermines the potential for hero worship or cults of personality. Peter himself simply disappears from the story after chapter 15. The story of God’s fledgling church is bigger than any individual. If Acts is the story of remarkable individuals, than most of us will, definitionally[10], be left deflated. We might find in intriguing but can not find it helpful or normative. But if it is the story of God building a community of faithful individuals who got up each day and went to work so they would have money to give to the poor…who raised kids in the faith…who were open with their neighbors and coworkers about the work of God in their lives…who shared their houses with other recently converted (and probably quite annoying[11]) individuals from a variety of unsavory backgrounds…it becomes a story that has the power to inspire and instruct the rest of us. It is incumbent upon exegetes to transcend their own ministerial interest in the text to find the normative narrative for the rest of us.

And that is just Acts. I would love to read a really tedious Bible book called ‘Moses: The Midian Years,’ documenting the 40 years of sheep herding in the desert that God used to form him into the charismatic leader and liberator that we admire. It turns out that boredom is one of the tools that God uses to shape his people. How dramatically does that change the way we look at ‘the Christian life’?

The Bible is textually parsimonious by necessity. Because of that, some of the normative narrative between its covers is in the stories it does not fully tell. The preacher has time to linger where the text does not[12]. By telling the tedious tales of Paul’s 12 years of preparation or Moses’ 40 years of sheep herding or Philip’s 20 years of faithful parenting, the dramatic stories of the text come into focus as the special, episodic, interventions of Yahweh who, on the whole, prefers some measure of hiddeness. The text comes into line with our experience of Him[13]. It becomes the normative story of a people of faith and faithfulness.

This post was written while listening to Sam's Town by the Killers

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[1] http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Brain-and-Cognitive-Sciences/9-00Fall-2004/CourseHome/index.htm
[2] Similarly, psychological studies have demonstrated that we use our imagination to fill out our predictions of the future with the emotional furniture of our present. This, he contends, with Daniel Gilbert in Stumbling on Happiness, is why we are so bad at predicting what will make us happy. But that is another post.
[3] With 24 being the obvious counter example. Though even 24 gets away from mundane detail by switching between parallel story lines and somehow getting Jack Bauer across LA in 20 minutes during peak traffic.
[4] By normative non-fiction I am referring to any body of literature that someone would try to model their own life after. There are a few different examples. But, if you have read this blog before, you will not be surprised to know that I am thinking of the narrative portions of the Bible.
[5] I recently attended a conference on ecosystem restoration. One of the speakers essentially said, “Many of you wish you were getting the kind of money budgeted for the everglades. Well, let me tell you, so does the everglades.” I feel like there is a sense in which people wish their lives were always like those of the characters of the Bible, and my response is, so do the characters of the Bible. With the exception of the life of Jesus himself (the events of which we are told would fill countless books) a detailed account of the life of any Biblical character would likely be relatively tedious.
[6] Because, let’s face it, it is a relatively longish book with a fair number of nap inducing portions as is.
[7] Recognizing that the Bible is authoritative yet incomplete is also the answer to a number of apologetic questions. Consider the following take by Augustine in the City of God: “It may seem incredible that a city should have been built by one man at a time when there were apparently only four men in existence on earth…But those who are worried by this have given too little consideration to the fact that the writer of this sacred history had no need to mention by name all the people who may then have existed.”
[8] The text actually says 4 daughters but the Greek word is woman of marriageable age, meaning that for the youngest to be of marriageable age, the oldest would have to have been born shortly after his arrival in Caesarea (also from Bruce).
[9] This post had a number of working titles including the 2 I used and “Enough with Paul Already: De-Centering Acts for the Church’s Role Players”
[10] Because, as the Incredibles insightfully established, if everyone is special, no one is.
[11] Seriously, could you imagine joining one of the early small groups in Corinth with slaves and temple prostitutes and sailors and some untrained small group leader who just had a couple of letters from Paul to work off of. We romanticize these narratives to our detriment.
[12] Obviously, preaching should focus on the main point of the text. But what I am arguing is that to understand the text theologically and to extract compelling, appropriate applications for a lay audience, the temporal context has to be considered in addition to the historical-grammatical context.
[13] In a recent conversation with a young man I am mentoring I suggested that if I were to experience 5 legitimate, unequivocal miracles in my life (beyond the standard workings of God in birth, rebirth and sanctification) I would consider it a lot. That was a crass extrapolation (I have been a Christian for 15 years and have experienced 1) but gets at what I believe a careful reading of the scriptural narratives tell us. God prefers to work in episodic bursts between long periods of faith and faithfulness. We could call it a sort of ‘punctuated equilibrium’ of divine activity. This, incidentally, is the main point of Lewis’s Prince Caspian which kind of came out in the movie despite the totally unnecessary sexual tension between Susan and Caspian that I am still pissed off about.