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.

_______________
[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

____________________
[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.

__________
[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

_________________________
[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.

An Erie Wedding Day

I have apologized many times for my awkward, overly sentimental, pseudo poetry...most substantially, here. But we just went on a 'vacation' that took us across the country by plane, to 3 states, 6 different sleeping arrangements, 2 weddings, >700 driving miles with a 2 year old and a 6 month old produced many frazzled moments, many fine memories, giga-bytes of pictures and a poem. Here is the poem:

An Erie Wedding Day

I usually forget that I’m Italian,
though only one generation removed
from Apennine grapes
and German bombs.

But for Erie weddings
I’d simply default
to my Father’s line,
American since Bradford…of the Mayflower.

To me, Erie is the most Italian place on earth.

Today I’m Italian.
The summer wedding
of the youngest daughter
of four immigrant sisters.

The last wedding of a generation.
Next time it will be a funeral.

The cavernous nave of St. Pete’s
half full with affection,
the artistic making
of a generation born an ocean away.

Steal money earned the hard way,
carefully saved, proudly given
in a cultural moment
when one’s prized things
were held in common
in a great stone building
on 10th and Sassafras.

Peter’s translucent form
looks on, engulfed by the tumult
of an unnaturally blue sea.

Other beatific figures
also stand silent, spectral witness
rendered anonymous
by narrative vacuum...

twice martyrs
the cumulative calcareous carcasses
declare God’s glory
through the death of one and millions.

A spattering of communicants
step forward to receive the host
dodging reverse traffic
of toddlers deprived of naps.

Prayers are offered for the dead.
I am startled to hear the name of my Father.
I don’t pray for the dead.
Luther wouldn’t approve…
Calvin even less.
But as the priest intones
a request that they join us
at the eschaton’s great reception
I feel the wet wind
of an ‘Amen’ pass my lips.

Great wedding bells chime
but are twice drowned
by the sound of sirens
in a cacophony of joy and pain.
I can think of no purer symbol
of the life that awaits the bright young couple.

Picture Credits: Spire & Statue

This post was written while listening to: Pachelbel’s Canon

One Year Later: Thoughts on the Blogging of Stanford Gibson

There is a great line at the beginning of the Scrubs clip episode. JD gois into his whimsical flashback face and says:

“I know I’d like to forget all of the terrible things that happened to me, but unfortunately I keep replaying them in my head like some clip show from a bad sit com, to lazy to come up with a fresh story line.”



Then the clips begin to fly.

I have to admit, this post feels like that. But I have been blogging for a year now and I figured I’d do a little retrospective. I am trying to evaluate if blogging is something I want to keep doing. So here is my personal evaluation of my first year of blogging.[1]

Lets start with a highlight reel. Here are my top 5 posts of the year. Since I have only started tracking hits recently (as part of the evaluation of if I want to keep blogging) I don’t know which ones have actually been most popular. But these were my 5 favorites[2].

Top 5
1 My Problem With Religion: A Quantitative Analysis[3]
2 What the F#$% is Wrong With Me: The Proto-Christian Anthropology of Linkin Park[4]
3 Briony’s Unsatifying Atonement
4 Would Chuck Love Me?
5 What do Measles, Urban Density and Anal Sex Have in Common?

And these were the 5 most commented on.

Commented 5
11 Comments - Fragments and Links 4
10 Comments - Revenge of the Paste Eaters: Anatomy of an Undecided Voter
9 Comments - My Problem With Religion: A Quantitative Analysis
8 Comments - Monthly Evangelical Metamorphosis into Gnostic Materialists: 8 Thoughts on the Lord’s Supper
7 Comments - How I Stopped Hating Church


You will notice that there is only one post on both lists. That almost certainly means something about my abilities to self evaluate…but I have no idea what.

So here is my analysis and hoped for adjustments from taking a look back at a year of posts:

I posted over 40 times. That is short of my goal of once a week, but more than every two weeks. I am pretty happy with that. I think if I keep blogging, every two weeks is my sustainable pace. But the more interesting/disturbing trend was what I will call ‘post creep’. I have plotted the word counts of my posts with time (including data on the footnote word count) in the plot below.

It appears that over the course of the year, posts have gotten less frequent and longer. I am not happy with that trend. Long posts are tedious to read and quiet blogs are read less. So one corrective I would like to make is to not be afraid of actual blog posts. At this point, almost everything I am putting up here is essay length. I would like to post more 300-1000 word idea entries (my footnotes are currently approaching that on their own). The ‘Fragments’ posts have become bloated. There were at least 2 things in the last one that should have been their own posts.

Anyway, that is my analysis. I’d love feedback on what the 15 to 20 of you that read this blog think.

Here are some posts I have in the works[5]:

Stories the Bible Doesn't Tell: Reading the Bible with Respect to Genre…Highlight Reel Genre
Thoughts on the new mewithoutYou Album (and concert)
Hikes 1-11
Augustine as Comedian
Multiple part series on Christian Music
-What is Christian Music?
-Why does so much of it Suck?
-The KLOVification of Christian Music.
Do Artists Get Better With Time?: The Killers v Simmons
Lessons from a Year of Preaching
The Spiritual Arc of Modest Mouse
A Couple Mediocre Poems
Freedom vs Happiness: Implications for Marriage
Geology of the Eschaton
__________________
[1] I’d like to think of it as a cultural artifact post (like one of my posts about TV, music or movies) where my blog is the cultural artifact analyzed. If that seems pathetically self referential, well, it probably is.
[2] They also happen to give a thematic sampling of what I have written about. I do some philosophy, quite a bit of music and film, early church/patristics stuff and the occasional out of left field post that doesn’t really fit a category. The only major topic I seem to write about that didn’t make the top 5 is ecclesiology. I have tried to stay mostly away from politics.
[3] This is also, probably one of my most difficult posts to get through, but I am really proud of it.
[4] Music and film posts did not seem that popular, but I liked them.
[5] I put lists like this up from time to time. You might notice that surprisingly few of the pieces I start make it to the blog. I think that that is mainly because they don’t end up to have enough substance to turn into essays…but there is definitely enough there for a blog post. That is another thing that I want to change.

"You mean why is there silverware in the pancake drawer. Wa Ha" -Turk

Guyana: The Sequel

So I am back in Guyana, and I'm keeping a blog.

http://stanfordinguyana.blogspot.com/

Fragments and Links Five

I have once again collected a number of ‘mini posts’ that, if I was actually a blogger and not an on-line essayist, might have been individual posts. Instead, I group them and post them as ‘Fragments and Links.’ Previous versions are here: 1, 2, 3, and 4.

KwOD is dead. The only radio station I could listen to without my ears bleeding, suddenly, and without notice, simply ceased to exist one Friday morning in May after 18 years of modern/alternative rock. And as if to add kick us when we were down, it is now a soulless 90's station. Way to replace the best music since Bach with the worst.

In the absence of a descent radio station I’ve been listening to a lot of Rise Against lately. I have a favorite line:

“I don’t ask for much
Truth be told I’d settle for
A life less frightening
A life less frightening
Is there a God tonight
Up in the Sky
Or is it empty just like me.” Rise Against – Life Less Frightening

While we are surveying redemptive, musical, pericopes:

“I’m not alone cause the TV’s on
I’m not crazy cause I take the right pills….every day”
-Jimmy Eat World - Bleed American

I think it is fun that Word wants to spell check ‘pericopes’ as ‘periscopes’.

It reminds me of my Masters Thesis where a previous version of Word constantly wanted to change ‘boreholes[1]’ to ‘brothels’. I sincerely hope that some late night editing session didn’t let one of those slip in.

So I expect to do a full post after I go to the concert on tomorrow, but just another brilliant album by Aaron and the boys from mewithoutYou. Though, ‘It's All Crazy! It's All False! It's All a Dream! It's Alright’ (their latest) is so different from ‘A-->B’ (their first) that at this point, I think it would be fair to say that mewithoutYou is actually my two favorite bands. The ‘A-->B’ and ‘Catch For us the Foxes’ mewitoutYou was a transcendent screamo/dissonant poetry band. The ‘Brother Son, Sister Moon’ And ‘IACIAFIAADIA’ version is a hardish, whimsical, folkish, storytelling band. I can’t say I don’t miss the former band, but I can’t say I would have wanted to miss out on the latter band. What they have in common, is the lyrical genius (and I do not use that word lightly) of Aaron Weis. Here is one of my favorite lines from ‘IACIAFIAADIA’:

“When they swear their love is real
They mean I like the way you make me feel” –Every Thought of You

I was struck recently by the structural parallels between two excellent but thematically antithetical songs. ‘World at Large’ by Modest Mouse and ‘Passing Afternoon’ by Iron and Wine are both aesthetically transcendent and thematically engaging. Each is built structurally around the passing of the seasons as the verses investigate the sequential rhythms of a climatic year. But as these two great artists stare deeply into the rhythms of the earth’s rotation they almost could not see them more differently. Isaac Brock (MM) sees in them the ticking clock of his discontent. They are the metronome of his boredom setting the pace for his wandering:

“I like the autumn but this place is getting old/I pack up my belongings and head to the coast.”

“The days get longer and the night smell green/I guess its not surprising but it’s spring and I should leave.”

Samuel Bean, (I&W), on the other hand, vests the seasons with rhythms of a grounded existence. The repetitive details of life are not the trigger of existential crisis but the irreducible components of beauty and meaning.

“There are things that drift away like our endless, numbered days
Autumn blew the quilt right off the perfect bed she made
And she's chosen to believe in the hymns her mother sings
Sunday pulls its children from their piles of fallen leaves”

“There are sailing ships that pass all our bodies in the grass
Springtime calls her children 'till she let's them go at last
And she's chosen where to be[2], though she's lost her wedding ring
Somewhere near her misplaced jar of Bougainvillea seeds”

I love both of these artists, both of these albums and both of these songs…but my personal existential quest is to cross the thematic line from the former to the latter.

I am pretty sure that if you looked up the word ‘horrifying’ in the dictionary, this is what you’d find.

My friend Jason just got on Facebook. He is still evaluating if it is something he is going to do, but he has enjoyed seeing the different ‘groups’ recommended to him, presumably because his friends are in them. He said ‘it is fun to see some religious group that you are in, next to the ‘I love morning sex’ group that is probably because of some other friend.’ Now I have been accused of being easily offended…which I have challenged. I am really difficult to offend. Upon reflection, my friends have reconsidered and suggest that offense is projected upon me[3]. But this time I was offended. While I don’t have a lot of use for the ‘group’ and ‘fan’ features in Facebook, I would almost certainly join an ‘I love morning sex’ group far before ‘some religious group.’

Speaking of my friend Jason, we were walking through downtown Davis and walked by a particularly annoying street preacher the other day. I said, “There are very few people I would like to pummel. That guy is on the list.”

Also, on the topic of Facebook, on my last two business trips, I have gotten together with two high school friends and my college roommate. I have to say with pseudo-poetic vagueness, that each of these connections significantly augmented my humanness…and none of them would have happened without Facebook. As a technology, social networking is at worst, morally neutral. Curmudgeonly technophobes[4] wine about how our generation is missing out on life because of our technology. What most of them don’t realize is that our generations value human connection and community more than the last few. The spatial boundaries of those connections are just more difficult to discern.

With that said, I do not foresee myself getting onto twitter. That is not a moral statement…just a practical one.[5] Facebook taxes the limits of my ability to process information. While twitter optimizes what is unquestionably the most valuable feature of Facebook (the status update) – twitter culture generates more of this valuable content. It is more than I can process.

“What information consumes is rather obvious: It consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.” – Herman Simon NY Mag

And then there is nano-blogging.



Can’t wait for pico-blogging. That is when I’ll get back into it. My day was brought to you by the letter ‘w’.

Many who read this site regularly also frequent my brother’s blog. But I really enjoyed this link he featured a couple weeks ago.

Now, to be fair, I have a lot of respect for several of the guys lampooned[6] in these images, but the satire does get at some of the weaknesses of the emerging/emergent/relevant approach

I used a clip from Beautiful Mind in a talk the other day[7]. But I had forgotten what a fine film it is. I would never list Russell Crowe as one of my favorite actors, but would re-watch many of his films given the chance. But here is one quote that caught my attention:

Nash: Find a truly original idea. It is the only way I will ever distinguish myself. It is the only way I will ever matter.

This reminded me of Tim Keller’s frequent quoting of the original Rocky film where he tells Adrian that he has to fight because it ‘is the only way I’ll know I’m not a bum.’ Keller calls these things ‘identity factors,’ the things we vest in that give us value. We all have them and they are not benevolent masters. The incite pride by generating feelings of superiority and despair by crushing us for not attaining them. They are what the Bible calls idols.

Keller usually goes on to say (following Luther) that the human heart has the propensity to make ‘identity factors’ of arbitrary moral criteria leaving us with ‘moralistic religion’ which is an idolatry as insidious as hedonism[8]. But here is the interesting thing…moralism as an identity factor can be (and increasingly is) secular[9] in nature. Consider the following excerpt

“What is most interesting to the anthropologist is the ease with which puritan outrage can be displaced from one topic to another and the equal ease with which the thing formerly disapproved of can be overnight exonerated from all taint of sin. This has been particularly evident in the case of sex… When sexual taboos were lifted…it looked around for other pleasures that it could forbid, not because God was offended by them but because they offended the thing that had replaced God in the Puritan conscience — namely the Self. Any pleasure harmful to the self must now be subject to the same absolute condemnation as had been directed against the pleasures of sex. Hence the hysterical campaign against smoking, which has not taken the form of advising against something harmful, but the far more alarming form of condemning that thing as a sin. You can portray young people on the screen as engaging in sexual orgies, beating each other up, swearing and exhibiting every kind of nastiness. But you must never show a young person with a cigarette in his hand, since that will be condoning and encouraging sin.”[10]

What the author of this passage calls the puritan legacy, Keller (pejoratively) calls religion in distinction to the cosmic, unilateral rescue of the gospel, which leaves us with no moral high ground from which to condescend.

I was talking to a couple work friends about the phenomena I encountered in Guyana (and Nepal) where the cows wander the streets. We were trying to come up with a cultural equivalent, in our context. I offered the following: “I guess we have dogs that we let wander around…but we don’t exactly worship them.”

Uncomfortable silence followed as Mark looked at Cam and then said with a smile ‘Sorry Stan, I think you might be in the minority here.’ Ah, Davis. He added good naturedly, ‘I think you could do worse.’

I have slowly been making my way through the original Stargate Series on Hulu. I quit watching it at least 3 times because it was so bad. But people I respect enjoy it, so I kept giving it another try, and it has gotten better. The interesting angle the stargate contributions take to the Star Trek narrative structure is to send contemporary humans with contemporary technology to other worlds[11]. I think the most pressing question about the series is as fllows: “Richard Dean Anderson can’t act his way out of a paper bag…so why is he so watchable?” Why do I laugh at his one liners?

But I have found that 10 years has translated into a fascinating thematic evolution. Consider the exchange during a season 2 episode (1998) where the arch villain sought sanctuary on earth. He was unrepentant and declaring his intentions to wipe out humans even as earth faced destruction for harboring him. Yet they declared him a prisoner of war extending protections of the Geneva Convention to him. They refused to give him up or allow him to be tortured for information, though he was dying. He mocks the humans for not giving him up:

Apophis: A single human life is worth so much you would risk a world
RDA[12]: That’s right. That’s why they call us the good guys.

My question: Can you imagine Jack Bauer saying anything like this? The constant entertainment exposure to the rarest, most extreme moral dilemmas has seared our consciences and made us moral pragmatists that would condone practices we executed[13] the Japanese for as war criminals after WWII.

I have been into the work of Bryan Fuller recently. ‘Dead Like Me’ was intriguing, but didn’t really work. (I suspect it was miscast, but mostly it was hopeless in the most literal sense of the word.) I didn’t get through season 1 and it didn’t get through season 2. But Wonderfalls was good[14] (canceled after 4 episodes, but there are 12 available on DVD) and Pushing Daisies was great (just canceled after essentially[15] one season of episodes).[16] Sooner or later networks are going to stop giving him opportunities, and we will be worse off for it.

The reason I think Pushing Daisies worked where Dead Like Me didn’t, despite the dark themes of both series, was that Dead Like Me matched the dark themes with a dark tone, resulting in an oppressive, hopeless package. Daisies gave its protagonist a more hopeful future, but the series’ brilliance was that it offset the dark themes with an almost cartoonishly light, innocent tone. This worked. I am sad to see it go.

Bill Simmons on the 2009 Red Sox: “The best way I can describe Fenway during any Papi at-bat is this: It's filled with 35,000 parents of the same worst kid in Little League who dread every pitch thrown in the kid's direction. There is constant fear and sadness and helplessness. Nobody knows what to do.” Silently nodding.

The second paper I submitted from my PhD work was provisionally accepted to the ASCE Journal of Geotechnical Engineering, provided I reduce it from >10,000 word equivalents (figures take up the space of 150-600 words but, as you know, are worth 1,000[17]). I find cutting to be far more difficult than writing.[18] So I took up Augustine’s advice as my motto for the task:

“From now on, therefore, I shall do my best to control my pen so as neither to include anything superfluous, nor to omit anything necessary…” (p 712)

Though, the word ‘irony’ comes to mind since the Bishop of Hippo[19] included this quote in a 1,100 page book with about 250 pages of value.

I know there are already way too many of them, but I want to start a new academic journal. I would call it JOFER – The Journal of Failed Engineering Research. I would read that journal. There is no mechanism in academia to transmit the positive information that emerges from ‘failure,’ so failure is more likely to be repeated than success. Plus, doesn’t that sound like fantastic Friday pub reading…’They tried to resolve and RFID tag through how many feet of water??? I feel better about my week.’

I mentioned this to a friend and he pointed me to the Journal of Irreproducible Results, which I have found entertaining.

My friend Tiffany posted the following course evaluation from a Professor at Columbia University[20]:
Part 1: "What book in the course did you most dislike?"
Part 2: "What flaws of intellect or character does that dislike point up in you?"

I am preaching on Acts 10 (Peter and Cornelius) in 5 months. I am so excited about it that I already have a rough draft[21]. It is going to include a long anecdote about urban youth ministry and my experience forging an affectionate, deferential relationship with the youth leader who had only been out of jail a couple years. But my goal is to make it through the whole talk without using the phrase ‘comfort zone.’

On the topic of cliché. I just finished ‘In Cold Blood’ by Truman Capote. The thematic juxtaposition between incalculable depravity and a deeply familiar humanness makes the book worth the time in its own right. But that is not why I read it. The following excerpt from Steve Turner’s book Imagine has set the recent agenda for my reading program:

“Poetry, for example, is a useful antidote for the poison of sloganeering, spin and double talk. It helps words retain their meaning because it acknowledges that corrupt language results in corrupt thinking. If the best words can no longer be said, the best ideas can no longer be thought. “If a nation’s literature declines,” said Ezra Pound, “the nation atrophies and decays.” -turner

My craft and ministry[22] is one of words and ideas. I was beginning to feel like I needed a diet of well crafted words (on any topic); a reservoir, if you will, out of which I could summon well crafted words. Not big words, but surprising, sublime, winsome and poignant words. There are just very few places, inside or outside the church, where one is just going to happen on a source of these kinds of words. I have been crafted by a cliché and sound bite culture. The antidote to this is a diet of beautiful words. Despite his grizzly, dark (though starkly human) topic, Truman Capote’ words fulfill this criteria transcendently.

Do I undermine the previous 3 paragraphs by confessing that I followed In Cold Blood with Downtown Owl, Chuck Klosterman’s first novel?

No…no I don’t.[23]

This post was prepared while listening to ‘Sing the Sorrow’ by AFI

___________________________
[1] A word that appeared roughly 5 million times in the document…give or take.
[2] This line in particular is a striking explicit contrast to the Discrete Rodent as the latter song’s protagonist has selected contentment over restlessness, while the former has allowed yielded to his wandering heart.
[3] I think this is pretty interesting. I honestly don’t know what it would take to offend me. I got riled up once over a Freakenomics discussion and made a fairly impassioned case that the way abortion services were provided in our country is maniacally racist. But I think that is as close I have come to ‘being offended.’ I fully accept the ‘post-Christian’ nature of my culture. I don’t tend to take it personally.
[4] And, as someone who doesn’t own a cell phone, I do not use that term lightly.
[5] Like my resistance to cell phones…a resistance whose days are numbered.
[6] This movement is so adverse to labels that I can not find a single person that claims it…including me. But it would be disingenuous to say anything other than: ‘I have found many of these folks insightful, helpful and encouraging.’
[7] I used the clip of Nash trying to hit on the woman in the bar, but also enjoyed this one on the same theme:
Nash: Alicia, does our relationship warrant long-term commitment? I need some kind of proof, some kind of verifiable, empirical data.
Alicia: I'm sorry, just give me a moment to redefine my girlish notions of romance.
[8] Capable of similarly luring us to condescension with pride and crushing us with despair.
[9]And often political positions. I am continually astounded how much moral superiority people feel (on both sides) over which lever they pull, as if this cost them something.
[10] For more thoughts along this line, check out this link, that I got from the very good blog, Ladder on Wheels.

[11] If you use a spaceship instead of a worm hole to send humans to other worlds, you need to send a more advanced form of humanity. The worm hole mechanic means that contemporary humans with contemporary technology interface with alien cultures…which is potentially more interesting (though not budgeted accordingly).
[12] Richard Dean Anderson
[13] There are many aspects of the coalition between the American church and the religious right I am uncomfortable with (though I am finding myself less and less encouraged about the left) but I am pretty sure the low point of this was broad evangelical support of torture.
[14] Though, for me, much of its charm was its setting in the ‘greater Buffalo area.’
[15] The halved strike season and then half of the following season.
[16] In each series the protagonist is a flawed ‘spirit guide’ that, respectively, usher people to their death, intervene in some minor detail of their lives that has huge consequences, or tie up the loose ends of their death. These turn out to be fertile mechanics for worth while themes and engaging stories.
[17] I am constantly intrigued by the relative precision of this cliché. My Dissertation is going to come in around 400 pages with no less than 200 figures. Some of these figures are worth something on the order of 8,000 words…others are closer to 50...but they still provide the reader a break. Also, my MS advisor once chopped an entire paragraph of approximately 250 words and replaced it with an equation. I have done this several times since, and find that, a simple, 4-5 variable equation is worth on the order of 100 to 400 words. Anyway, I would love to plot a distribution of the value of images in words and find the central tendency. I suspect it would come pretty close to 1000.
[18] Though, I have had a lot of practice recently, as I generally write 50 minute talks for my 30 minute slot and then cut everything that is not essential…and then rearrange my perspective on what is essential and cut some more. It is a good exercise in repenting of self importance.
[19] I can’t seem to mention Augustine without referring to his town, since it is, without a doubt, the funniest named town in all of church history.
[20] Source: Edmundson's _Why Read
[21] 2 points: 1. God Challenges Peter’s Moralism and 2. God Challenges Homogeneous Christianity
[22] I have another post percolating on to what extent preaching is craft and to what extent it is a mystical spiritual transaction.
[23] The back to back chapters about the Catholic Women’s Bible Study and a flirtatious conversation in which he started each exchange ‘what he/she said’ (followed by 1 sentence) ‘what he/she meant’ (followed by two paragraphs) were classic Klosterman. There are actually surprising parallels between Downtown Owl and In Cold Blood. They are both stories told by New Yorkers and based in a small town in a rectangular mid-American state with disturbing endings. Sure Capote may be as transparent as Klosterman is present, and the former is genius while the latter is merely clever…but I like Chuck and feel like I can learn language from him.