Fragments and Links 8

It has been a while since I have done one of these, so it got a little longish. As usual, these are ideas, thoughts or links that I liked but did not warrant a dedicated post.

I love the new alexonfire song The Northern and the video is mildly disturbing but gorgeous.



I was obviously intrigued by the source and motivation of the track. This was what I found:

"Alexisonfire vocalist George Pettit…(said): “We stole all the lyrics from this Methodist hymn called Roll, Jordan, Roll which is believed to be the first track that inspired people to first play the blues. It’s like an acknowledgment of our musical roots. It’s very religious, but we’re by no means religious.”

A couple months ago I mentioned that several students put together a film to promote our campus ministry’s spring retreat that was remarkably executed. Well, apparently, I wasn’t excessively biased in that estimation. They actually submitted the piece to the annual UC Davis film festival and the second episode was accepted and featured with about a dozen other films.[1]

Patch Sloan Episode 2: The Fall Guy from Matthew Francis Pye on Vimeo.

Another student affiliated with our campus ministry had three films in the festival and was the big winner on the night (taking home five awards). His stuff is great.

And on the topic of short film. Ford, an occasional commenter on this blog has put together this brilliant deconstruction of campaign ads:

Last week Amanda came home with a box of velociraptor ‘bones’ and no instructions. We had a fun morning playing paleontologist.

This led us to show Charis the video by They Might be Giants[2] “I am a Paleontologist,”[3] which she loved.



One of my friends reminded me of the xkcd comic that went with this exercise:

The power of the velociraptor in the imagination of those of us who grew up with Jurrasic Park is one of my favorite xkcd themes. I even bought the t-shirt. But I find that I never wear it because I am afraid people who aren’t in on “velociraptor awareness day” will just think I am one of “those Christians” that thinks dinosaurs are a hoax.

This reminded me of a fun story from my environmental geotechnical days. Environmental geotechnics is a fancy way to say ‘landfill design.’ My advisor for my first graduate degree was one of the premier landfill design guys in the world[5]. Two of my colleagues did a lot of field work for him and found that they were having trouble picking up women in bars on the road. The seemed to think the problem was when they had to tell the ladies what they were doing in town…something like “I am studying the landfill.” So they concocted this elaborate alternate story that they were paleontologists.[6] They never did tell us if it improved their chances with the Utah bar women…but it was a fun story.

On the topic of fun videos…Dan and I have been trying to recruit an official YouTube consultant for our preaching. The idea here is that there are some people who can search, metabolize and retain an amazing number of entertaining YouTube clips and seem to find connections to one or another of these any conversation they are in. It seems to me that everyone who preaches needs an 18-22 year old who will look over the manuscript or passage and notes and do some free association with their internalized YouTube database. This seems like a great way to craft the most difficult part of any talk…the illustrations. And it might be a great ministry for someone whose talents are otherwise overlooked by the church. One student in particular has sent me this clip. I am sure it has gotten wide distribution, but it is worth looking at if you haven’t seen it yet.



I cut a bunch of stuff about The Wire from this post because it was getting long and I thought I’d give the material a post of its own. But I have found that my experience of The Wire has mirrored my experience of Mad Men. Both were difficult to get into. I quit on both multiple times and only went back to them based on critical acclaim[7] and repeated friend recommendations. Now I love both of them.

I have come to believe that the reason they were both hard to get into was precisely the reason they are both so good. They are both character driven by complex and interesting characters. But this means that the shows require time to build textured compelling characters before they begin to work from strength.

I felt like The Blind Side and Defiance were oddly similar movies for being from such distinctly different genres. They were both profound true stories, that were impossible to totally screw up…but they both suffered from choppy, heavy handed execution.



I am a Soccer guy. I actually still play. And so, it is no surprise that I love the World Cup. For the last several cups I have taken on a pretty substantial challenge, though: to design a pool that makes the event compelling to follow for other people who may not care so much. This is harder than it may seem. The two stage format makes a March Madness type pool impossible. But a ‘draft’ style pool has to be carefully crafted in order to make the early tournament rounds count for anything.[8] I have converged on the following format. Eight participants pick four unique[9] teams apiece in a ‘snake style’[10] draft. Then the accrue points as follows:

Win (outright) = 3 points
Win (in PK's) = 2 points
Tie = 1 point
+1 point for win margin of 2-3
+2 point for win margin of >3
+1 for Golden Boot (top individual goal scorer)
-0.25 for each red card
+1 for best goal differential that fails to advance out of the round robin stage
+1 for the most goalie saves after the round robin stage
-1 for the worst goal differential after the round robin stage
-10 each for most egregious dive and mullet (ok, that one's a joke, but if there was a way to quantify these I'd include them)

I found the following findings from a study on the correlation between money and happiness really interesting: “If the relationship between money and well-being is complicated, the correspondence between personal relationships and happiness is not. The daily activities most associated with happiness are sex, socializing after work and having dinner with others. The daily activity most injurious to happiness is commuting. According to one study, joining a group that meets even just once a month produces the same happiness gain as doubling your income. According to another, being married produces a psychic gain equivalent to more than $100,000 a year.”

So it turns out Jesus was right. Community is fundamental to humanness. Oh, and sex matters and commuting sucks…but we knew that.

I have heard Matt Chandler tell the story of his conversion a couple times. He usually includes his assessment that the Christian scene in the late 1980’s reminded him of a bad Saturday Night Live sketch feel to it[12]. He then quips:

“that is why I became a Calvinist…because I have no idea how anyone became a Christian in that room outside of a sovereign almighty God.”

I have decided that Calvinists sleep better than Armineans…but have a harder time getting out of bed in the morning.

I love having a three-year old in the house. She comes up with some startlingly fresh observations about life…and general hilarity. Here are a few:

She is on the tail end of toilet training which means she gets to wear ‘big girl panties.’ This has led to an unfortunate new name for my boxer shorts…which are now called ‘daddy panties’ in the Gibson house hold.

When she was 2 she also renamed buggers…to ‘nose snacks.’

And finally, there was this:

I could not be more proud. Surely the hokey pokey is not what it is all about. Much could be learned from a 3 year olds refusal to mindlessly sing false cliché.

I don’t usually recommend blogs until I have been following them for a while. As alluded to a couple posts ago, the hallmark of a helpful blog is consistency rather than virtuosity. But if Vegas offered odds on stuff like ‘will this blog be amazing’, I’d put a huge chunk of money on this one: http://askorimagine.wordpress.com/ [13]

I tried to screen capture 8/9/10 at 11:12 and 13 seconds. I missed.
“Truth must be stranger than fiction because we have crafted fiction to suit ourselves.” -GK Chesterton

Amanda asked me what I thought of the Twilight Mom’s phenomena[14] the other day, essentially asking, “Isn’t it a good thing that mom’s and daughters are spending time together and have a common interest.”[15] I responded in my standard bombastic and overstated manner. “I think it is like a father spending time with his son by introducing him to porn.”

Now that is intentionally overstated, but think about it. By introducing his son to porn a father would be celebrating and propagating a distorted image of womanhood, romance and sexuality. He would be doing a disservice to the son’s future wife by building unreasonable and unhelpful expectations of femininity and romance. Similarly, Twilight offers an impoverished vision of romance and a bankrupt view of manhood.[16] It offers a picture of romance that is narcissistic and juvenile.

Speaking of vampires…Is it more tragic when vampires die? In that scene in Two Towers[17] when the elves arrived at Helms Deep, when the elves started to die it was more tragic than the other deaths even of humans we had come to care about. Why is the death of an elf or a vampire more tragic? If a creature whose life span has no upper bound[18] by natural causes, dies it is more tragic because they are losing more by two measures. They are losing more future years[19] and they are losing more experiences and memories.

…and speaking of intentionally overstated…David over at Signs of Life started a discussion on an author’s assertion that calling a white person “racist” is the equivalent of a white person using the n-bomb. I have come to expect helpful discussions on this blog, but this one exceeded my expectations. I even got involved…as did the original author.

I was going through some old notebooks yesterday. I found my notes from my first day of graduate school. My soil mechanics class was taught by Dr Boscher, a Christian who died tragically of cancer since we left. I was thinking of him…mourning a little as I handled the notebook. Then I opened to the first page. At the very top of the first page of notes…before his name…before his office hours…well before the first equation, was a single quote:

“You are only temporarily not soil.”

This post was written while listening to Sing the Sorrow by AFI

Some stuff I am working on:

Avatar and the Clementian Super Organism Hypothesis
Photo Box Stratigraphy
Thoughts on The Wire
Cross Country with my Late Father
Cities Part 3 and 4: Las Vegas and Madison, WI
The Two Manipulations of our Political Discourse
Why don’t churches have ash trays?

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[1] We got a baby sitter and went to the festival. One of the fun parts of the evening was that only 2 of the films were what I will call functional pieces (they had informational purposes and existed, only secondarily, as art). The other was a health services condom promotion (which was a spoof of The Office and was quite good).
[2] On the whole, the TMBG science podcasts aren’t bad. But the song ‘Science its Real’ is pretty lame…it should have been called “Logical Positivism, it may be philosophically passé but that doesn’t keep the scientific community (and our band) from wielding it like a club." I think my title is more accurate and even catchier, but it is harder to remember.
[3] There is a video title (with no video) spoof of this called “I am a Palin Apologisit.” Someone needs to write that song.
[5] No one gets a graduate degree without studying with ‘one of the premier experts’ in something. Knowledge is so fragmented that if you are at a major university and have a specialty, you are probably one of the top 5 people in that field. But my advisor was really really good at landfill design.
[6] The landfills were usually hazardous waste facilities so they tended to be in the same places you might find dinosaur bones (anywhere in Utah).
[7] Bill Simmons suggested that The Wire was the best ‘film’ of the 2000’s.
[8] Or to give people with late picks a shot.
[9] Once a team is selected it is no longer available…so all 32 teams end up ‘owned’.
[10] The person with the 8th pick also get’s the 9th pick while the person with the 1st gets the 16th.
[12] He describes a weekend in which he went to a Beasty Boys concert on a Friday night and a DC Talk concert on a Saturday night and his entire commentary on the experience is something like ‘Um, what?’
[13] In a recent post she mentions a friend who bought a house without a lawn and sold his lawn mower. I think she is talking about me. I hate mowing. It reminds me of the legend of sisyphus.
[14] For a few lucid comments on what is actually wrong with this narrative shaping our culture, see my brother’s post on it. Oh, then there is also this.
[15] A powerful question from a woman who always wanted more from her relationship with her mother and, from what I can tell, did not share a single common interest.
[16] I cannot remember who to credit this to, but one of my friends said something like “my biggest problem with the Transformer sequel was not the complete lack of narrative or the insult it was to my least functional brain cells. It is that these people experienced extraordinary things and it has not appeared to build their characters in any conceivable way.” This is also my problem with Edward. He is really really old, but rather than living in the wisdom of accumulated decades, the worst distortions of adolescence are magnified in him.
[17] Which made me cry but wasn’t in the book. Enterprising Tolkien truthers did some math to demonstrate that there was no way that even elves could have arrived at Helms deep in time to assist.
[18] I suppose you could say the same thing about Highlanders but because of ‘the game’ they face constant impending doom. In a sense, each day they live is an extra day.
[19] The first of these is one of the arguments I have heard used against abortion. We mourn the death of children more than the death of the elderly because, at least in part, it extinguishes more potential. By some common societal measure, we find deaths tragic in inverse proportion to the potential life extinguished.

Was God Lonely?

Two separate students have asked me in the last two weeks, why God created humans. It seems they independently ran into the objection that if God was omnipotent, omniscience and self sufficient, there would be no need for him to make us. This suggestion always seems to devolve into cheeky anthropomorphism declaring God lonely or board.

It is an interesting argument. But I think Christianity has resources to address the objection that are not available in the other monotheistic religions…namely the Trinity[1]. The objection fails to take seriously one of the most confusing but most fundamental tenets of Christianity. Christians believe that God not only existed eternally but loved eternally. One of Basil’s (that most heterogeneous of the Capadoccian fathers[2]) favorite metaphors for God was a dance. God’s eternal completeness did not emerge from stark unity[3] but his essence as a loving community.

Clark Pinnock takes this idea on in his book Flame of Love: “Atheism is partly the result of bad theology, an unpaid bill resulting from the failures in depicting God. How often have people been given the impression of God as a being exalting himself at our expense! One might be afraid of such a God, but no one would be attracted to love him.[4] So often lacking has been the vision of the triune God as an event of open, dynamic, loving relations…Prayer is joining an already occurring conversation. The Spirit calls us to participate in the relationship of intimacy between the Father and Son and to be caught up in the dance already begun.”[5][6]

A recent experience illustrated this for me. I remember talking to my close friend Tyler the winemaker[7] right after their third child was born. I asked him, ‘So what’s it like having three?’ Now you have to understand, Amanda and I are trying to decide if we are going to have another child. I already feel like I don’t spend as much time as I would like with the two that I have and am nervous to further subdivide my love. So Tyler’s comment really rang my bell. He said ‘It’s so great. Each new child just multiplies the love.’ He could not be more right. By adding Aletheia to our family, we have increased the degrees of freedom of love in our household.[8] The love that passes between Charis and Aletheia that proceeds from Amanda and I but also exists independent of us, is one of the most beautiful and unexpectedly enjoyable aspects of parenthood.

This is the metaphor that I think makes better sense of God’s sentient makings. It is less like a mid 30’s boy-man reluctantly deciding if he is going to get married, weighing the relative virtues of companionship and freedom, and more like a happy family deciding if they are going to welcome another child into the world.

________________
[1] Note: I understand the weakness of positing a philosophical paradox to address a rational objection to Christianity. But my epistemology allows for mystery, defined by one church father as ‘ideas that suffer, not from a deficit of intelligibility but a surplus.'
[2] Being the only one not named Gregory.
[3] The aspect of his nature preferred by the Platonists, and thus, Augustine, and thus, Calvin, and thus American Evangelicals.
[4] I have run into no better articulation of this than Modest Mouse’s Burkowski.
[5] Pinnock’s book deserves its own post…but for now, here is my general reaction. I liked it. Two specific thoughts: (1) I found it interesting that the doctrine of the Holy Spirit is so neglected in Western non-Charismatic Christianity that Pinnock could write what is, essentially, a book on the Trinity and it ends up reading like a book on the Holy Spirit. (2) There was far too much use of the words ‘non-deterministic’ and their synonyms. Um, I’ve taken graduate classes on stochastic calculus. That crap doesn’t sneak by me. There was no reason to put so many references to openness theology in a very good book on the Holy Spirit.
[6] OK, one more, this may be my favorite, though mostly unrelated, quote from this book: “Our language is often revealing-the Spirit is a third person in a third place. At times the Spirit can even sound like an appendage to the doctrine of God and a shadowy, ghostly, poor relation of the Trinity. In the Church year the celebration of Pentecost hardly compares to the observances of Christmas and Easter. Even worse, it may be…eclipsed by Mother’s Day.”

[7] This story has nothing to do with his profession, but I feel like this has become his identity in this blog…so unless he objects, Tyler the Winemaker it is.
[8] Even as it increases the risk of disappointment and rejection by the very nature of adding another independent will capable of love.

A Brief Interlude of Family Blogging

I follow two basic categories of blogs: 1) family blogs and 2) idea blogs. While I deeply enjoy both this blog falls firmly into the latter category. But my creative energy this week did not go into a written piece. It went into a person.[1] The Imago Dei, the image of God[2], seems to be the key to human uniqueness. It is a complex sort of idea that has a number of layers. In my opinion, central to what make us the image bearers of God, is our ability to co-create…to be conduits of beauty and truth. But the more basic act of co-creation…the making of a new person, a new conduit of co-created justice, truth and beauty, is pretty remarkable too. Here is my family which I adore:

This first picture is of Charis greeting her new sister Aletheia. Charis is the New Testament word for 'grace'. Aletheia is the New Testament word for 'truth'. The names were selected to go together. According to John’s gospel, ‘grace and truth’ were two of the primary things God wanted to communicate to us through the incarnation:

“The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth… For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.” John 1:13&17

One of my earliest posts was about my great surprise at loving parenthood. Amanda and I lingered in the newlywed stage for 9.5 wonderful years…and I would not trade them...but I could not have predicted how much I would love being a dad. My brother has been talking recently about the insufficiency of our prediction apparatus for guiding us to actual joy and happiness. Obedience[3] is often much more efficacious at producing the life experiences that were designed to nourish our souls.


People told me that the college years were the best of my life. I refused to believe them. They were wrong. I have found each life stage to bring more intense sadnesses and joys. These are, without doubt, the best days of my life…until the next ones.

More pictures here.
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[1] And my wife put in way more energy than I did. But still, if this post is barely coherent, I’d like to take a sleep depravation mulligan.
[2] The Bible says that human are special because we were created in the ‘image of God.’ Almost no one believes that this refers to the physical image, but many suggestions have been advanced regarding what divine characteristic we exhibit that constitutes this image.
[3] Obedience is a pretty good description of our motivational impulse to have children. Neither of us particularly wanted them. The vast majority of our premarital counseling consisted of Mark Machia trying to talk us into wanting kids. But we finally came to a place where we believed that parenthood was the normative outworking of Christian marriage…and, thus, our responsibility. (We might be the least sentimental people I know). Neither of us thought 'wanting kids' was a good reason to bring them into this world. We had to be able to tell them why they exist. I can now tell them, confidently, 'God wanted you and asked us to take care of you for a while.'

This post was prepare while listenting to: The Pennywise Pandora Station

A Surprisingly Familiar Satisfaction

For years my favorite part of living out west was the hiking and backpacking. Living hours from some of the greatest backcountry in the world and less than a day from most of our country's National Parks was the highlight of our move out here and we took full advantage. When we finally decided to have our first child (a mere 9.5 years into our marriage) we actually picked up the pace. In the 3 years before Charis joined our family we did extended hikes or backpacking trips in Glacier (my personal favorite), the Canadian Rockies, Olympic, Cascades, Sequoia, Kings Canyon, Lost Coast, Yellowstone, Grand Teton, and Yosemite (several times). (This gives me an excuse to post gratuitous backpacking photos.)

We knew that we would enjoy the parenthood life stage and were not mourning the loss of our extended newlywed phase. We just knew that one of our favorite activities would be on hold for a decade or so and we tried to get as much of it in as possible. When 'we' actually got pregnant I started to take existential steps to embrace the new season. I even wore my special, REI, $10/pair, hiking-only socks for other athletic purposes as a personal act of moving on. I was thankful for the life stage we had lingered in but ready to start something completely different. What surprised me was how existentially similar the experiences were.

There are several reasons I love to backpack. I am a big fan of the exercise vacation. I am goal oriented to the point of personality disorder. I enjoy the air, the sounds and the solitude. Amanda and I once covered 15 spectacular miles along the High Sierra trail and encountered more bears than people (final score: bears 1, humans 0). But mostly it is the experience of transcendence. The proximity to bigness. There is a familiar emotional response that comes from staring up at the shear mass of El Capitan, peering out over the jagged peaks of the Palisade range or watching the sun come down over the watery pacific horizon. It is the feeling of transcendence...the strange and terrifying comfort you feel when the confining walls of the ego are shattered and you are overwhelmed with otherness. When there is something else so grand, so lovely, so original you, for just a moment, have an accurately sober self assessment.

But, for me, this was the great surprise of parenthood. It is flush with these same moments. I had expected that in trading backpacking for parenthood I was trading up, but for a qualitatively different experience. What I didn't expect was that my favorite moments of parenthood would remind me of my favorite moments in the mountains. The beauty and wonder of our daughter affects the same experience of joy in transcendence. (This gives me an excuse to post gratuitous Charis photos.)

John Piper believes that our desire to experience the transcendent through sunsets and mountains is a clue to our fundamental nature. We are existentially wired to desire to be near that which is qualitatively greater than ourselves. He actually expands the realm of greatness to include sports. This is why we watch the Super Bowl, the World Series and the Olympics. The reason that I, as a completely heterosexual man, am so drawn to the power and beauty of Kevin Garnett is because I desire the experience of fundamental otherness. I want to celebrate greatness. I have a base code level desire that seeks satisfaction in greatness. I was designed to worship. Lewis famously calls these temporal passes with transcendence 'the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.'

I have always found backpacking satisfying because the greatness of the geologic anomalies we protect as monuments become conduits of worship. I am awed by their bigness and by analogy (or syllogism) I am more awed by their creator. The surprise of parenthood is that I find it satisfying and worshipful in precisely the same way.