See you in few . . .
Thoughts on Blogging
Almost every friend I have who blogs usually says the same thing to me after they?ve done it a few weeks. “Who am I to think that people want to read my thoughts? It?s kind of arrogant isn?t it?” I always answer, “Yes, it?s very arrogant, but don?t worry, that feeling passes.”
It passed for me a long time ago. Blogging is no longer something I?m trying out or experimenting with. It has become a part of who I am.
I?ve been blogging for just over four years. The first blog I remember reading was Jordon Cooper?s. Fifteen minutes later I was over at Blogger starting up my own. There was something about blogging that resonated with me immediately. I liked the idea of being able to give people a look behind the scenes of a preacher?s life. I know that sounds incredibly dorky and more than a bit presumptuous, but when I was growing up, preachers didn?t seem real to me. It?s always been important to me for people to know that in so many ways I?m just like they are, except that I?m arrogant enough to want to stand up in front of them and tell them what I think and on some days tell them what they should think. I also saw it as a great way to share resources and stimulate thinking.
As I review my archives, I see that I?ve gone through some predictable stages. There was a time when all I did was link to other people?s stuff on the web. Then I got into reporting every funny thing my boys said. Then I started writing more serious reflections. I also like to give lengthy quotes from books that I like. There have also been posts about movies and the required comments from other Christians who can’t believe I’d admit to watching, much less recommend a movie that has “x” number of f-bombs in it. (Does someone actually sit in the theatre and count each bad word?) Lately, I haven?t had much energy for anything at all. It?s almost vacation time though and I?m hoping to re-appear in a few weeks with a fresh burst of energy. Seems to me I could do a better job of mixing up the posts a bit. The blogs I like to read have a nice variety of random links, humor, thoughtfulness, and book references.
Blogging has been a tremendous blessing for me. I?ve met people online and in person that I would have never met otherwise. I?ve been able to field test some ideas that weren?t ready for a sermon or a class yet. I?ve participated in a larger conversation about life, culture, and Christianity that would have been impossible to formally coordinate.
Thanks for reading.
April 27, 2006 By
I Think I May Be a Crunchy Con
I’ve been glued to Rod Dreher’s book, Crunchy Cons. It was given to me by a friend who kept recommending it and could tell that I wasn’t going to read it unless he bought it for me. By the way, if you can perfect such a response to all book recommendations, you can get a lot of free books.
I’ll blog more about this book later. It has some killer quotes within.
For starters, here is Dreher’s Crunchy Con Manifesto.
A Crunchy Con Manifesto
By Rod Dreher
1. We are conservatives who stand outside the conservative mainstream; therefore, we can see things that matter more clearly.
2. Modern conservatism has become too focused on money, power, and the accumulation of stuff, and insufficiently concerned with the content of our individual and social character.
3. Big business deserves as much skepticism as big government.
4. Culture is more important than politics and economics.
5. A conservatism that does not practice restraint, humility, and good stewardship-especially of the natural world-is not fundamentally conservative.
6. Small, Local, Old, and Particular are almost always better than Big, Global, New, and Abstract.
7. Beauty is more important than efficiency.
8. The relentlessness of media-driven pop culture deadens our senses to authentic truth, beauty, and wisdom.
9. We share Russell Kirk?s conviction that “the institution most essential to conserve is the family.”
10. Politics and economics won?t save us; if our culture is to be saved at all, it will be by faithfully living by the Permanent Things, conserving these ancient moral truths in the choices we make in our everyday lives.
April 25, 2006 By
The Last Word
Here are a few of my favorite passages from The Last Word.
Much would-be Christian thought (including much would-be “biblical” Christian thought) in the last two hundred years has tacitly conceded these huge claims, turning “Kingdom of God” into “the hope for heaven after death” and treating Jesus’s death, at the most, as the mechanism whereby individual sinners can receive forgiveness and hope for an otherworldly future–leaving the politicians and economists of the Enlightenment to take over the running, and as it turns out the ruining, of the world. . . .Scripture itself, meanwhile, is muzzled equally by both sides. It is squelched into silence by the “secularists” who dismiss it as irrelevant, historically inaccurate and so on–as you would expect, since it might otherwise challenge their imperial dreams. Equally worrying, if not more so, it is squashed out of shape by many of the devout, who ignore its global, cosmic and justice-laden message and treat it only as the instrument of personal piety and the source of the true doctrine about eternal salvation. Secular and sacred readings–and the scholarship that has jostled between the two–have connived to produce shallow readings which, as we saw in the prologue, constitute our immediate problem. pg. 89-90.
What does it mean, within this setting, to appeal to “the authority of scripture”? This phrase is used as a way of saying, “A plague on all your scholarship; we just believe the Bible.” This is simply unsustainable. Without scholars to provide Greek lexicons and translations based on them, few today could read the New Testament. Without scholarship to explain the world of the first century, few today could begin to understand it. Scholarship of some sort is always assumed; what the protest often means, unfortunately is that the speakers prefer the scholarship implicit in their early training, which is now simply taken for granted as common knowledge, to the bother of having to wake up mentally and think frest thoughts. Again and again, such other scholarship, and such older traditions of reading, turn out to be flawed or in need of supplementing. Today’s and tomorrow’s will be just the same, of course, but this does not absolve us from constantly trying to do better, from the never-ending attempt to understand scripture more fully. . . .To affirm “the authority of scripture” is precisely not to say, “We know what scripture means and don’t need to raise any more questions.” It is always a way of saying that the church in each generation must make fresh and rejuvenated efforts to understand scripture more fully and live by it more thoroughly, even it that means cutting across cherished traditions. pg. 91
There is a great gulf fixed between those who want to prove the historicity of everything reported in the Bible in order to demonstrate that the Bible is “true” after all and those who, committed to living under the authority of scripture, remain open to what scripture itself actually teaches and emphasizes. Which is the bottom line: “proving the Bible to be true” (often with the effect of saying, “So we can go on thinking what we’ve always thought”) or taking it so seriously that we allow it to tell us things we’d never heard before and didn’t particularly want to hear? pg. 95
April 19, 2006 By 11 Comments
Invisible Children
Invisible Children Screening
Garnett Church of Christ
Wed, April 19, 7 pm
April 19, 2006 By 3 Comments
Telling Stories, Asking Questions, Learning Lessons
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