Gnosce Te Ipse

I wrote about Zane here, not long ago. I haven't talked to him again, but I did talk to his ex-wife today, for something like three hours. I called just to get Zane's brother's number again. Zane's brother, I'll call him Bill, called me back as we were out the door for SF, and I lost his number by the time I had a moment to call again. He was a good man, a friend as well, and someone I thought could give me another perspective on Zane. Not content to just give me the number, Zane's ex, I'll call her Susan, wanted to talk. About Zane, about Estella my first wife, whom she saw at a wedding last summer (with Robert and two children in tow; that took some time for me to process, though I didn't write about it here; it was the first time I heard for sure they were married and had children). There was more of the same sad and dark from Susan's life as well. Her church, my old church, kicks any member out for initiating divorce barring abandonment ...

I found this quiz at Sandalstraps' Sanctuary . You scored as Emergent/Postmodern . You are Emergent/Postmodern in your theology. You feel alienated from older forms of church, you don't think they connect to modern culture very well. No one knows the whole truth about God, and we have much to learn from each other, and so learning takes place in dialogue. Evangelism should take place in relationships rather than through crusades and altar-calls. People are interested in spirituality and want to ask questions, so the church should help them to do this. Emergent/Postmodern 71% Neo orthodox 68% Evangelical Holiness/Wesleyan 64% Roman Catholic 57% Modern Liberal 46% Classical Liberal 43% Reformed Evangelical 32% Charismatic/Pentecostal 18% Fundamentalist 4% What's your theological worldview? created with QuizFarm.com I am surprised I came out postmodern emergent. This surprises me since I know almost nothing about emergent. I think I'm a liberal Episcopalian, deeply con...

Laying on my office floor this morning (a truly comfortable way to read in my eight by six foot cell, though I am sitting up to type), I am trying to make sense of Heidegger's Dasein , which I hardly understand at all; then I suppose I don't need to understand it because I am immersed in its being-stream, and his Geschichte , which I sort of understand from reading biblical criticism if nothing else. The question is how am I going to, at 1:00 today (and with a composition class in between) tie what little I know of Heidegger into the idea of the hermeneutic circle, then into Gadamer's idea of tradition; above all, how to contrast this with the 'conventional' criticism of the American E.D. Hirsch. (In case I sound like a scholar, all this is in fact taken from Chapter 2 of Terry Eagleton's remarkable little book Literary Theory ). That the questions these individuals pose about textual meaning are genuine I have no doubt. And so I'll start here: does the ...

Fall, and its wonderful wind, are very much with me. Work has been very busy. Getting ready for winter in the mountains also takes lots of work (which I put off over the summer) and I haven't had time to write at all. I read my post below again, and feel like it will take me some time to get to What We Are 2.0 (though who knows; it was fun to write). One thing I believe is that I need an actual NT education. My conclusion to that essay is lacking without one. N.T. Wright is only one voice, and a very distinctive voice at that. I want to read Meier and L.T. Johnson; also the more skeptical critics like Crossan. Not to mention those with large historical value, like Wrede. I can't yet offer a scholar's assessment of the NT, only a personal one. But right now I don't have time even for that. Hopefully soon, though. As I said, I enjoy the work. If I were in grad school now I already know the two papers I'd like to write: one would be an examination of Wright...

I dedicate this (overlong) post to my near-brother Michael, his gracious wife and beautiful baby girl. *** One of my great pleasures in life is eating and drinking with friends. Dinner parties, especially, are warm and memorable times, and something I've only learned to appreciate in the last six or seven years. A good friend, a man who is nearly family (and whose family is a large reason I learned to love dinner parties) invited my wife and me over to his house a little while ago to eat and to hold his tiny baby girl! His parents, whom I love, were coming. How could we not go? The pork ribs were excellent. My friend Michael makes his own marinades, as his father did and does, and some ingredients were easy to taste: molasses, for one, and fresh rosemary. The spontaneous genius-touch, though, which I give away on the web itself (without asking) was coffee grounds. A few coffee grounds in the marinade added a smoke-pleasure to the meat that's hard to describe. Ah. And I...