Defiance - movie

When is the man with the gun in his hand the kind of man to be??

Lots of Links, or Following Fun

I am still alive here in Pittsburgh, for all 2 of you reading. Here are some links to neat online things I've discovered recently.

Cheap travel and a neat way to meet people(maybe)

Ansel Adams in color

Road trip!! (Oh for gas money!)

And take a look at that gazebo - strait out of Rivendell? Where do they find this stuff?

A Warm Blanket for an Early Morning

Full recording of Avett Brothers newest albumn

Closer to love

Its (a beautiful) Sunday here in Pittsburgh, and someone just started a blasted lawn mower. I was trying to partake of food, beauty and quiet before going to work. I think I'll still succeed, but I wouldn't mind if the lawnmower wasn't running in the background. There was a wonderful church service this morning. We sang quite a few old hymns: Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee; On Jordan's Stormy Banks; God, Be Merciful to Me; Great is thy Faithfulness. The pastor spoke of "God Behind the Scenes," God at work in the world and in our lives even when we cannot see how He is working or to what end, for what profit or purpose, using as his text Exodus 1:1-2:10. During the sermon, I had a small epiphany. Hebrews tells us that Christ can sympathize with our experiences, our temptations, in every way, because of the incarnation. I realized that, because of the cross, Christ can also identify with the separation from God that we feel as fallen and sinful creatures.

Insomnia

Half an hour after trying to go to sleep, here I am. My mind is too hard at work on stupid stuff: composing an email to complain about an inappropriate anecdote a presenter shared in the classroom, thinking about all of the work I need to do tomorrow, Monday, and through the rest of this week. And there is nothing to be gained from being awake right now... Oh, God...

TED

You can, if interested, find some fantastically thought provoking, short lectures, here: http://www.ted.com/talks

Most of the lectures are 15-30 minutes.

Time

I desperately need something to occupy my time, yet I shall be in some measure inconsolable when my time is no longer my own. My days are spent alone in my apartment, repeatedly checking email and Facebook, and reading. This is not exciting enough for me! Landmarks: one week, then two weeks!

Full Moon

Admittedly, this post is being written mainly to keep the streak going. Here I am in Pittsburgh. Nothing much has changed. Today was a pretty good day in which I got out more than I have all week. I took a drive, finally rode the bus, and visited two libraries and the grocery store. I am sleepy! Reading and bed...

Warm, Fuzzy Thoughts (AKA Hard Reality)

Don't complain too loudly: this is again a series of links. I stumbled upon several intelligent articles regarding graduate study in the humanities.

Original Jumping-off point Here are posted responses, to the following linked article, by several Christian Ph.Ds

Original Chronicle article, part 1

Original Chronicle article, part 2

Here are links to two longer responses to the above article:

Brett Foster

Carmen Butcher

Being and Becoming

Recently I began reading a book, Twentysomeone, that was loaned to me back in April. Early in the book, the authors emphasize the importance of taking time to find out who we are as people (human beings) before becoming intent upon filling our lives with activity. While not exactly directly correlated with their point, their argument made me think of the ancient philosophical dichotomy of being and becoming. I have spent much of this summer being: reading and thinking about myself and my life, without engaging in lots of activity. I am headed into a year that will not easily again afford me so much time for reflection by the time I satisfy the demands of school, an internship, and a part-time job. Perhaps I am headed into a time of becoming? But I think that reflection is also critical to the process of becoming: mere activity itself will not suffice. So much, at times, and so little, at others, has happened during the past year (August-August). I wonder, what does this coming year hold?

Mistakes

I need the freedom to make my own mistakes!

A Parable by Thurber

Nostalgia

When I moved to Pittsburgh on Saturday, I brought with me 9 small jars of canned peaches and one jar of applesauce that Mom gave me about a year ago. I have decided that I'll eat them, one by one, when I feel lonely and homesick. Then I began to wonder if I'll ever feel lonely and homesick. I know that I will miss certain people, but will I miss Lancaster? The question really is whether I will be consciously aware of such feelings, or simply experience periods of crankiness and the blues without realizing the cause.
The couple that moved out of my apartment left a few scattered cleaning supplies. I found a Softsoap dispenser, with the fishy sticker, and some Target liquid hand soap under the bathroom sink. It was a powerful reminder of the days at 25A W. Cottage with Scott, Scott, Danny, and later, Jon.

Loans and Lemonade

This is my second full day in Pittsburgh. At present I am recovering from a 10 mile bike ride about the city. Some places there are bike paths; on some roads they are absent. According to my brother's observations on a recent walk through Crossgates, I am too heedless of danger. He couldn't believe that I kept walking on the road instead of moving into the grass when cars went by.

I have finally got my loans finalized, so the first term's tuition will be paid as soon as they are disbursed. I feel like I'm gambling and hope that I'm making a wise decision, not wasting time and money. As I started out on my bike ride, several young boys manning a lemonade stand on my street solicited my business. I told them, "Maybe when I come back!," so when I returned, hot and tired, I stopped by their card table. They had 3 sizes of plastic cups. I settled for a "large," which got me 10 ounces of icy lemonade for $.75. Capitalism lives among the young! They said they'd made $24.00 so far.

I wonder how many people will come out here to visit me in the course of the next year (August to August)? I predict, for the record, that no more than 4 people, not to include my parents, will.

King of Links

On Failure

Happy Danes

A Loose Sketch of Recent, Sometimes Cynical, Thoughts

The following strands and sketches of thought could each be developed into several paragraphs on their own, had I the patience and inclination.

Mennonites and Homosexuality

There was an article run in the Intelligencer Journal at some point during the past two weeks which covered a demonstration, by "Pink Mennonites", outside of the 2009 Mennonite Church USA conference in Columbus, OH. Roughly 100 "Pink Mennonites" gathered outside the conference to protest the "exclusion" of GLBT people from full membership within the Mennonite church. They wrote an open letter and, like a small snowball, it gathered ~1,400 signatures. Their position and approach are disturbing. The open letter that they wrote is vague, but in a further explanation of the letter on their website, it is clear that they want full rights within the Mennonite church:

What, concretely, are you asking for? I don’t see any specific goals in this letter. What does “radical hospitality” or “full welcome” mean? Our church already welcomes everybody, including LGBT people.
The second paragraph of the letter ends with this sentence: “We believe that all people are invited to faithful fellowship in this Body, blessing for our deepest relationships of love and care, a spiritual home for ourselves and our children, and the opportunity to fully express the gifts for ministry that God has given us.”

In other words, the authors of this letter – Weldon, Cindy and Sheri -- call MCUSA to accept into membership, marry and ordain all people, regardless of sexual orientation. The letter does not specifically say how this will come about or next steps are in this process. But these are the goals to which the letter points. We believe that anything less than this “full welcome” ends up treating LGBT people as second-class citizens within the church.

Whew!! Mennonite Church USA is currently not opposed to GLBT people entering Mennonite churches and participating in worship, but there is the expectation that, in order to fully participate in the body, they acknowledge homosexuality as a sin and take the steps appropriate to deal with it as sin. The "Pink Mennonites" make no mention of such personal change. They clearly want full inclusion and acceptance just as they are, which is hardly biblical.

So what do we, the church, do with homosexuals? Derek Webb to the rescue with a song from his new album! I hope that he does not believe homosexuals should be unquestioningly accepted into membership without a loving insistence that they repent and turn from sin.

Weddings

By the end of this summer, I will have personally attended 7 weddings within the past 2 years. I sincerely hope that each of these couples "beat the odds" against them, but cannot help wondering to myself how many marriages, out of the total number of weddings that I have been invited to, will have dissolved in divorce 25 years from now?

Long winded

So far this billing period (ending July 13), I have spent 33 hours on the phone. This is leaving out 40 minutes which should more than account for any voicemails left for me during that time.

I defy anyone to beat this.

How do you argue?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=teMlv3ripSM

At what cost celebrity?

Jon and Kate Gosselin are divorcing. I wonder, would this be happening if they had never been on television?

How sad.

Experience

Wow. That was something! Three years out and I just attended my first ever college party, complete with very loud, drunk people, a keg of cheap beer, and a decent selection of liquor. Kudos to Mike and John. They would put many Christians to shame with their friendliness and hospitality, even when considering that some of it might have resulted from inebriation. John mixed Captain Morgan with Diet Coke, half and half, and gave it to me. Very generous, in several ways. I drank half of it (definitely my limit on an empty stomach) and stuck around for 15-30 minutes. Now what did I accomplish? No one there knows that I'm a Christian. I didn't tell anyone. I didn't give a persuasive speech to the assembly in order to convince them that getting smashed isn't the best way to spend their Saturday nights. I suppose the best thing that could possibly come out of this is that I might have an "in" for further conversations with Mike and John, should I see them around Millersville in the future. Maybe when they're not drunk I could try to share Christ in some way. But how? It may be only superficial, but it feels to me like we're coming at life from opposite ends of the spectrum.

Waiting

I despise waiting. I'm waiting for people to email me back about apartments in Pittsburgh. I'm waiting for other people to return my phone calls. I'm waiting for this evening to get here. I'm impatiently waiting for specific dates in the future.

The greatest crime and most confounding truth is that I am not enjoying the moment!!

Are you?

Think on these things!

Take a moment to contemplate the word "responsibility." Think about what the word means. To whom are you responsible? What are you responsible for? Do you have "responsibilities"? What are they? How are you at fulfilling them?

To what end do you do what you do?

I recently finished reading Habits of the Mind, by J.W. Sire. Here is a quote that he used within the book:

"Altogether, I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book we are reading doesn't shake us awake like a blow on the skull, why bother reading in the first place? So that it can make us happy, as you put it? Good God, we'd be just as happy if we had no books at all; books that make us happy we could, in a pinch, also write ourselves. What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that makes us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is what I believe." -Franz Kafka, in a letter to Oskar Polak

Troubling: NYT article on our first "Muslim" president

http://washingtontimes.com/news/2009/jun/09/americas-first-muslim-president/

See also: http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=M2JmNDJlYTBiMGY2MzNkZDg2ZWM4ZTYzNjVhODU3YmI=

On Obama's contempt for truth: http://article.nationalreview.com/print/?q=OTAyNzFjMmMwOWJjYmFmMTA2ODdjODZmZmQ0MWE1Mzg=

Thinking

I am spending the day reading Habits of the Mind: Intellectual Life as a Christian Calling. It is a book about thinking. This use of my day strikes me as far less futile than the time I spent yesterday finishing Gaiman's Good Omens. Sire spends quite a bit of time on the need for unity between knowing and doing. "We only know what we act on. We only believe what we obey." He argues that this is the difference between the secular and the Christian intellectual: the secular intellectual can divorce knowing from doing, while the Christian intellectual must embody "known" truth in action and, in so doing, shows that he or she truly "knows."

Griping!

Happily, I am done with my teaching job!! Unhappily, I am now in what will hopefully be a very brief period of unemployment. The search for an apartment in Pittsburgh continues. As I change my living situation, there are several key things which I am hoping to avoid:
-a toilet that requires me to jiggle the handle after every flush
-a shower head that sprays water only in a very concentrated stream
-a nasty bathroom
-doors that stick and won't close properly
On the positive side, I am hoping that I can find a shower head that produces a wide enough spray of water that it covers my whole back without my having to move under it. I would also like a clean and completely finished bathroom, as well as someone who keeps a clean kitchen. I am hoping for a place with a back porch and a small yard, but I think that this will be a stretch. I am also hoping for a landlord that is pet friendly, but I doubt that this will happen. I like the idea of getting a rabbit within the next year but, like the kayak that I was hoping to get this summer, both may turn into a pleasant fiction...

I am excited for the weekend, a wedding, and Pittsburgh!!

My List

I feel stressed by the things on my to-do list right now. I need to:
-grade 48 notebooks tonight
-bake some sort of a snack for Bible study
-call about apartments in Pittsburgh to try to find a good place to live before they're all gone
-find a job for less than 2 months this summer!!
-do a massive amount of laundry

Life

Why all at once, why now? I am tired, I have a headache, and the week isn't even half over yet!

" GELLBURG: Hyman . . . Help me! I've never been so afraid in my life.

HYMAN: If you're alive you're afraid; we're born afraid - a newborn baby is not a picture of confidence; but how you deal with fear, that's what counts. I don't think you deal with it very well. " -Broken Glass, Arthur Miller

I am still alive. I am anxiously anticipating June 5 when I will be finished with the current short-term teaching job that is presently stressing me. I am sick of living for the weekends and dreading every morning.

http://www.marshillaudio.org/pdf/documents/ChristianityCulture.pdf

"It is about ensuring that scientific data is never distorted or concealed to serve a political agenda - and that we make scientific decisions based on facts, not ideology." President Obama, quoted in an AP article regarding his signing an executive order freeing up more embryonic stem cell lines for research purposes. Unfortunately it is too late for such high sounding rhetoric: scientific data is almost always manipulated to serve a political or ideological agenda. Another quote from the same article: "Promoting science 'is about letting scientists, like those here today, do their jobs, free from manipulation or coercion, and listening to what they tell us, even when its inconvenient - especially when its inconvenient,' Obama said." What about listening to the ethicists when they tell you that using embryos for research is destroying human life? That has evidently been found inconvenient, and no one has listened. The record does NOT support the idea that we listen to that which we find inconvenient.

Sunshine

Writing an entry here was on my "to-do" list but, unlike some other things also written there, it is getting done!! I think that I am writing this mostly for myself, as I can think of, at most, three people who will read it. I am listening to Brad Paisley's 5th Gear album. Good stuff. I got a late call to sub at LS today. I haven't been subbing much lately, but neither do I feel much pressure to do so. I am currently concentrating on finishing the dozen books that I have lying around my room before I no longer have time to read. I am doing a short term sub position which will start at the end of the month. I am sure that this will make me too busy to read anything.
It is Lent, in case you didn't notice. I have decided that for Lent I will abstain from doing everything that I never do anyway. In all seriousness, it seems to me that Lent should be seen as a time for doing things instead of not doing them. I think that everyone should spend more time just sitting still and thinking. "What the hell is the point?," while perhaps a rather flippant and irreverent question, seems also like it might be a good place to start...
The sun is shining outside. It can snow as much as it wants to as long as the sun is shining. A stanza in anticipation of spring:
"For winter's rains and ruins are over,

And all the season of snows and sins;

The days dividing lover and lover,

The light that loses, the night that wins;

And time remembered is grief forgotten,

And frosts are slain and flowers begotten,

And in green underwood and cover

Blossom by blossom the spring begins." -Swinburne

Jack Black Jesus, etc.

All in a day.... Last night a friend brought this video to my attention. It was the collaborative effort of quite a few actors and actresses who sought to derail Proposition 8. It is troubling.

And in other news, someone has finally answered the old, seemingly silly but nonetheless irritating objection, "How did all of the animals fit on the ark?" "Each according to its kind...."

Sigh

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=180319

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=177026

"Every event in the play happens as a result of other events in the play, but also every event happens because the poet wants it to happen." -Lewis, Miracles

Caffeine makes me sleepy.....

I am so sleepy! Actually, its a combination of sleepiness and a headache... I was just in at Prince Street and managed unexpectedly to be drawn into conversation with a 70-something retired trial lawyer. Why do I attract crazy? I really must look approachable, and I think that the fact that I listen encourages them. Ah, but insinuating that he was crazy probably isn't totally fair to him. He seemed intelligent, but when he found out that I was reading Miracles, by C.S. Lewis, he started posing questions to me which seemed less productive queries and instead more like excuses to start a fight. He was probably just lonely. I would have thought a lot more of him if he'd never mentioned December 2012 and the end of the Mayan calendar. "Does man exist for God or does God exist for man?" What is the point of the question? What is the agenda of the questioner? Of what value to ponder this? I myself settled very quickly on an answer.

Things I Have Been Silent About - Quotes

"Other families talked, we wrote: what we felt or hoped for, our complaints - we wrote all of this, as if we could not bear to look into one another's eyes and just talk." -170

"She turned that man into a god; no man deserves that." -284

"Pain and loss, like love and joy, are unique and personal; they cannot be modified by comparison to others." -313