One Third of all Married People on FB Attended the Same College

Posted on October 8, 2013 by PaulVK

BuzzFeed. 15% attended the same high school.

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Phil Vischer Podcast Links Episode 72

Posted on October 8, 2013 by PaulVK

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Atheist Sunday Assembly Links

Posted on October 8, 2013 by PaulVK
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“is Jesus Greater than the stuff Jesus cared about?”

Posted on October 7, 2013 by PaulVK

Great question from In a Mirror Dimly: Ed Cyzewski  

My comment.

This is a terrific question. One of those questions that it worth returning to again and again.

THE question that launched Christianity is “Jesus, what is he?” After the resurrection monotheists worshiped him, but some doubted. The church has been doing this ever since.

Paul begins to write about us being “in Christ”, not language we normally use with regular folk.

It’s also important to ponder that this Jesus is a resurrected Jesus. He’s the embodiment of the fulfillment of the stuff he cared about. He healed the sick, multiplied loaves and fishes, stilled the storm, spoke gently and healingly to a Samaritan woman, and cast out money changers. All of this is embodied in that fish eating body that got into locked rooms and declared “all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.”

Ideally there can of course be no separation because his resurrected body is the stuff of the new heaven and earth where racism, hunger, illness, injustice and all the separate us from the perfection we are made for has been undone. The conflict your question elicits bears witness to our failure to see that reality.

The title of your blog comes to mind. 🙂

Thanks for pondering and sharing. pvk

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“My Hosanna is born of a furnace of doubt”

Posted on October 7, 2013 by PaulVK

Fyodor Dostoevsky

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From Miley Cyrus to Confirmation

Posted on October 7, 2013 by PaulVK

How does the church facilitate “coming of age”. Hermeneutics

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Wife of a Queer Man on RHE

Posted on October 6, 2013 by PaulVK

RHE

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Bernard of Clairvaux

Posted on October 6, 2013 by PaulVK

Grateful to the Dead

Quote:

Throughout his career, Bernard’s teaching focused on love—in a positive, personal vein, but not a sentimental one. He talked about the relationship between the self and God. Borrowing a good deal from Augustine, Bernard, in his treatise On Loving God, sets forth four degrees of this love. He sees the self first of all loving only itself, then loving the neighbor and God for its own sake. Third, the soul comes to love God for God’s sake, normally the highest plane of love. But there is a fourth level, in which the soul loves itself for God’s sake. This is found only fleetingly on earth but will be the constant state of the dead after the resurrection of the body.

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Wisdom: What is It? by Tim Keller (What is the Fear of the LORD: Negative Fear vs. Positive Fear)

Posted on October 5, 2013 by PaulVK

Notes from Tim Keller’s Sermon “Wisdom: What Is It”

(First my own comment. These notes that I take on Keller sermons are always somewhere between transcript and paraphrase. Do you want to know which one? You’d have to listen to the sermon and compare, which is probably not worth your time. I take these notes as notes, so I can record and go back to ideas I have and get while listening. If you’ve got time to do one, just listen to the sermon. 🙂 )

Wisdom is about learning how the world works. You need to make a decision that will be a fork in the road for your life but the options are not necessarily morally different. How do you choose?

We are all born simpletons. We care too much about what others think and because of that we are too swayed by our peers.

Fools are people who don’t care enough about what others think. They can’t benefit from the learning of others and therefore take broader learning into account. They are too wise in their own eyes.

Tim referenced Jerome Kagan a developmental psychologist who did work on temperaments. He referenced an article in The Atlantic. This one seems to be it from 1994. The title of the article is “How We Become What We Are” . There is also a good piece in the Boston Globe by Kagan on the same subject.  Continue reading →

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The God Pharaoh Should Have Been

Posted on October 4, 2013 by PaulVK

Maat

In Appreciation of Pharaoh

Pharaoh always gets a bad rap in the Exodus story and that’s too bad. Dialing back our judgmental posture towards Pharaoh might afford us a bit of enlightenment.

I always wondered why Pharaoh didn’t just kill Moses and Aaron or throw them into prison. That would seem to be an efficient and obvious solution to his troubles, but he does not.

If you recall Moses had committed a capital crime during the reign of the previous Pharaoh and that Pharaoh wanted Moses dead. The warrant for Moses’ arrest, however, wasn’t revenge, it was justice.

Ma’at

No great civilization can endure without justice. The Egyptians had a strong sense of justice which gave strength to their empire. The word for the concept of truth, justice, order, law, balance or morality in ancient Egypt was “ma’at”. Here’s a quote from Wikipedia on the concept: Continue reading →

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