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White barn, uploaded by jakebouma on flickr.

Kester Brewin on theology and the new physics

Kester Brewin (@kesterbrewin), provocative thinker and author of Signs of Emergence: A Vision for Church That Is Always Organic/Networked/Decentralized/Bottom-Up/Communal/Flexible/Always Evolving, is currently writing a series of blog posts that falls flawlessly in line with much of my recent thinking and research. The series, called Theology and the New Physics has two posts thus far: Uncertainty and Dimensions, with more forthcoming. UPDATE: The third post, Engaging The Maze, is now available.

If theology is even a casual pursuit for you, this is a series you must read. Here’s a snippet of what Brewin says in the first post:

What are the implications [of the new physics] for theology? Primarily, I think the argument between classical and quantum physics parallels quite nicely with the interaction between ‘classic’ and ‘emerging’ church. My experience in the 90’s, with Toronto etc. was that people in the charismatic, evangelical wing of the church really believed that they would soon achieve total immanence with God. God was almost touchable. If only we could sing that bit harder and be zapped that tiny bit more we would actually achieve full communion. When this didn’t happen, it precipitated a crisis among many of those of my generation. We felt cheated, and retreated into ‘alt.worship’ where we explored a ‘quantum theology’ where God was pure equations, transcendent and immensurable.

It seems now that both positions are wrong. While Einstein is yet to be vindicated, most physicists are skeptical about the ‘hard’ quantum model, and feel that some new theory will supersede it, even though Heisenberg’s principle is unbreachable. God, I think we are learning again, is both immanent and transcendent, but never entirely one or the other. Uncertainty remains.

In the second post, he talks about Flatland, which Rob Bell discusses in his Everything Is Spiritual lecture; but think of this blog series as Everything Is Spiritual with balls (to borrow from Stephen Colbert).

Anyway, if you’re eccentric like me and you think this stuff is really kinky (to borrow from a beloved college professor), I also recommend John Polkinghorne’s brief and relatively easy-to-read Quantum Physics and Theology: An Unexpected Kinship. Happy reading!

Evernote tip: Easier web clipping using Readability

I’ve previously written about how I use Evernote to organize my youth ministry, and my use of the program has only expanded since then. Consequently, I am constantly tweaking the way I use Evernote to make both the program and my time as efficient as possible.

I recently discovered a killer (and super simple) method for using Evernote’s Web Clipper in tandem with arc90’s Readability to import articles/blogs into the program. Here’s how it’s done.

I’ll be using this article from Youth Worker Journal as the example throughout. Here’s what the page looks like in a browser (you can click any of the images below for a full-sized version):

The article that I actually want to save and clip into Evernote is surrounded by tons of noise that I don’t want. If I use the Web Clipper to clip the entire page, here’s what I get:

If I scroll about halfway down the note, I am finally at the start of the text I want to save, but it’s still surrounded by all the noise from the original page:

At this point, some of you might be wondering why I don’t use one of the most useful features of the Web Clipper — text highlighting. One can highlight text and/or images from any page and clip it all into Evernote with ease, which is really handy, but in this case even if I highlight all the text and clip it, there’s still an advertisement stuck in the middle of my note:

Utilizing Readability, there’s no need for highlighting text in the browser and no unnecessary removal of unwanted text or images once the article has been clipped into Evernote. In fact, just two clicks does the trick.

Once I’ve added the Readability bookmarklet to my bookmark toolbar, I visit the page I want to clip into Evernote, and click the Readability bookmarklet. Doing so results in something like this:

Now, instead of a great article surrounded by distracting noise, there is only the text of the article itself — and without that pesky advertisement. I click the Web Clipper on my browser to clip the resulting page into Evernote and I get the following result:

Voilà! A clutter-free version of the article I want imported into Evernote with just two clicks. I hope you find this helpful; let me know if you do!

• Following in the footsteps of The Boston Globe’s The Big Picture and The Wall Street Journal’s Photo Journal, Christianity Today has launched Imago Fidei, a photoblog that bills itself as “a daily view of Christian life.” While not strictly photos, there are some gems in the archives. 05/15/2009

Bonhoeffer on youth ministry

Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes these words on Christian community, which are rather applicable to smaller youth ministries:

In the Christian community thankfulness is just what it is anywhere else in the Christian life. Only he who gives thanks for the little things receives the big things. We prevent God from giving us the great spiritual gifts He has in store for us, because we do not give thanks for daily gifts. We think we dare not be satisfied with the small measure of spiritual knowledge, experience, and love that has been given to us, and that we must constantly be looking forward eagerly for the highest good. Then we deplore the fact that we lack the deep certainty, the strong faith, and the rich experience that God has given to others, and we consider this lament to be pious. We pray for the big things and forget to give thanks for the ordinary, small (and yet really not small) gifts. How can God entrust great things to one who will not thankfully receive from Him the little things? If we do not give thanks daily for the Christian fellowship in which we have been placed, even where there is no great experience, no discoverable riches, but much weakness, small faith, and difficulty; if on the contrary, we only keep complaining to God that everything is so paltry and petty, so far from what we expected, then we hinder God from letting our fellowship grow according to the measure and riches which are there for us all in Jesus Christ.

Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Life Together. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1978. 29.

Words that are just as convicting as when they were penned 71 years ago.

May we have the courage and humility to give thanks daily for the ministries we find ourselves in, however modest.

• C. Wess Daniels, a Quaker, discusses Denominations and Traditions: Thoughts on Differences. Just for the fun of it, I’ll replace the word ‘Quaker’ in a section of his post with ‘Lutheran’: “I have very little interest in Lutheranism, in as much as it is an ism. These things that are the “way we’ve always done them” can actually becomes obstacles to our believing in the power of God’s Spirit. The denominational nitty gritty, when it is left to its own devices and not rooted within the life of the tradition, only sustains structures often reinforcing the church’s role as a placeholder for our belief rather than a bottom-up community of people following God’s mission in the world. I want to be a part of a community that not only tells but also lives into the stories of those we call Lutheran.” 04/30/2009
• Nate Phelps, the son of faux-Christian hate peddler Fred Phelps, recently presented a paper at the American Atheists Convention titled The Uncomfortable Grayness of Life. There is simply too much good stuff to quote here, so just go read it for yourself (it’s lengthy, but totally worthwhile). Oh, heck, here’s a tasty morsel:

  His desire to get back in shape was, in and of itself, a good and even necessary thing. However, true to his character, my father took a personal desire to improve his health and turned it into an obsession that impacted the entire family. Soon, we would arrive home from selling candies, only to get back in the cars and head over to the high school to run 5 or 10 miles around the track. Charts were hung up all around the house, tracking progress and setting new distance goals. Running the marathon became my father’s Holy Grail; learning of a marathon that was coming up nearby, he stepped up our training to run 15 and then 20 miles. As grueling as this regiment was, none of the children dared complain.

  Related: The Church of Hate and Westboro Baptist Lawsuit 04/28/2009

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Goodmorning (45/365), uploaded by jakebouma on flickr.

• Philosophy’s great experiment. “A dynamic new school of thought is emerging that wants to kick down the walls of recent philosophy and place experimentation back at its centre. It has a name to delight an advertising executive: x-phi. It has blogs and books devoted to it, and boasts an expanding body of researchers in elite universities. It even has an icon: an armchair in flames. If philosophy ever can be, x-phi is trendy. But, increasingly, it is also attracting hostility.” 04/13/2009

The Monday brief

Highlight of the week: The First Annual St. Mark Sale Barn & Silent Auction was an amazing success. In addition to raising 20% more than our goal, the event was unbelievably fun — at one point I was laughing so hard I was in tears. Oh, and it’s wonderful to have the Cubs playing regular season baseball.

Book(s) I’m reading: I finished The Invention of Air by Steven Johnson which was interesting but not incredible, and I’m now reading The Chemistry of Joy: A Three-Step Program for Overcoming Depression Through Western Science and Eastern Wisdom by Henry Emmons. I wrestled with depression in college, and never took the time to actually understand the disease. I’m only 60 or 70 pages in, and it’s already eye-opening. I also picked up Bill Bryson’s A Walk In the Woods for my bedtime reading.

Music I’m digging: Three Flights from Alto Nido (link opens in iTunes) by Greg Laswell. If you like indie rock, you’ll like this album.

Something(s) that blew my mind: This video of a guy beatboxing while playing a kalimba.

Ministry update: As I said earlier, the auction was a total success. And since we just served our annual Easter breakfast, all of our fundraising for the summer trip to New Orleans is finished. Phwew!

Seminary/ordination update: Nothing new to report.

Looking forward to: I am extremely excited for the silent retreat at the end of this week. I’ll post more on it later.

Photo of the week:

Opening day (34/365), uploaded by jakebouma on flickr.

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That’s it for the Monday brief. Feel free to leave a comment, and if you’re feeling extra frisky, check out the Monday brief archives.

A Holy Week parable from Peter Rollins

The Last Supper

It is evening, and you are gathered together with the other disciples in a small room for Passover. All the time you are watching Jesus, while he sits quietly in the shadows listening to the idle chatter, watching over those who sit around him, and, from time to time, telling stories about the kingdom of God.

As night descends, a meal of bread and wine is brought into the room. It is only at this moment that Jesus sits forward so that the shadows no longer cover his face. He quietly brings the conversation to an end by capturing each one with his intense gaze. Then he begins to speak:

“My friends, take this bread, for it is my very body, broken for you.”

Every eye is fixed on the bread that is laid on the table. While these words seem obscure and unintelligible, everyone picks up on their gravity.

Then Jesus carefully pours wine into the cup of each disciple until it overflows onto the table.

“Take this wine and drink of it, for it is my very blood, shed for you.”

With these words an ominous shadow seems to descend upon the room – a chilling darkness that makes everyone shudder uneasily. Jesus continues:

“As you do this, remember me.”

Most of the gathered disciples begin to slowly eat the bread and drink the wine, lost in their thoughts. You, however, cannot bring yourself to lift your hand at all, for his words have cut into your soul like a knife.

Jesus does not fail to notice your hesitation and approaches, lifting up your head with his hand so that your eyes are level with his. Your eyes meet for only a moment, but before you are able to turn away, you are caught up in a terrifying revelation. At that instant you experience the loneliness, the pain, and sorrow that Jesus is carrying. You see nails being driven through skin and bone; you hear the crowds jeering and the cries of pain as iron cuts against flesh. At that moment you see the sweat that flows from Jesus like blood, and experience the suffocation, madness, and pain that will soon envelop him. More than all of this, however, you feel a trace of the separation he will soon feel in his own being.

In that little room, which occupies no significant space in the universe, you have caught a glimpse of a divine vision that should never have been disclosed. Yet it is indelibly etched into the eyes of Christ for anyone brave enough to look.

You turn to leave – to run from that place. You long for death to wrap around you. But Jesus grips you with his gaze and smiles compassionately. Then he holds you tight in his arms like no one has held you before. He understands that the weight you now carry is so great that it would have been better had you never been born. After a few moments, he releases his embrace and lifts the wine that sits before you, whispering,

“Take this wine, my dear friend, and drink it up, for it is my very blood, and it is shed for you.”

All this makes you feel painfully uncomfortable, and so you shift in your chair and fumble in your pocket, all the time distracted by the silver that weights heavy in your pouch.

Commentary from Peter Rollins:

This reflection was on outworking of my first interaction with the enigmatic figure of Judas. Here I wanted to play with our tendency to identify with the favorable characters in the Bible. For instance, when reading about the self-righteous Pharisee and the humble tax collector, we find it all too easy to condemn the first and praise the second without asking whether our own actions are closer to the one we have rejected than the one we praise.

Judas is here a symbol of all our failures, and Christ’s action to demonstrate his unconditional acceptance. Judas helps to remind us of Christ’s message that he came for the sick rather than the healthy, and that he loves and accepts us as we are.

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Be sure to check out Peter’s forthcoming book, The Orthodox Heretic: and Other Impossible Tales which is available from the publisher at 40% off if purchased before April 15.

Anger as entertainment

I came across this quote the other day, and thought it too good not to post:

If you want to be angry about something, get pissed at a media culture that goes beserk [sic] about bonuses one week and forgets all about them the next. And be worried, quite worried, about a society for whom anger is a form of entertainment.

It’s from Time political columnist Joe Klein’s blog post Populist Rage? …Never Mind, and for some reason it struck a nerve.

Perhaps it’s because I’ve been listening to disproportionate amounts of public radio lately (my iPod died a while back… R.I.P.), but all I heard about last week was the AIG bonuses. Interestingly, the news was originally about the bonuses and how unbelievable/absurd/ludicrous/etc. they were, but then the news subtly shifted from the bonuses themselves to the anger about the bonuses. As I was driving one afternoon, I listened to a debate between two seemingly well-informed people about “how mad” people should be about the bonuses. All I came away with was knowing how mad I was that I had just listened to that segment.

We need to be careful to not take the bait and accept anger as a form of entertainment. Anger can be turned into something useful if it is handled appropriately, but when anger becomes a steady flow of fleeting fads, we become conditioned to be angry at something all the time. Finding this week’s scapegoat won’t make you feel any better, I promise.

• New poll from Gallup: “Despite suggestions that the economic recession might cause religiosity among Americans to increase, there has been no evident change over the past 15 months in either Americans’ self-reported church attendance or the importance of religion in their daily lives.” 03/26/2009
• Godless America? Say Hello to the “Apatheists”. “It appears that most of the unaffiliated individuals [in recent surveys] are not atheistic or anti-religious in any activist sense, but are rather apathetic toward organized religion and reluctant to join any particular denomination or sect. Perhaps an appropriate term to describe such individuals is ‘apatheist,’ a person who is not interested in trying to prove or disprove God’s existence or any other religious dogma.” 03/19/2009

The Monday brief

Highlight of the week: Is it pathetic to say that the highlight of my week may have been receiving two boxes of Caramel deLite Girl Scout cookies? Yeah, they’re that good. Also, late last week I shaved my facial hair into a Fu Manchu (Dad, if you’re reading this, try not to fall out of your seat when you realize that’s not a portrait of you).

Book(s) I’m reading: Still working on The Invention of Air by Steven Johnson. It’s totally fascinating thus far.

Music I’m digging: No new music this week, but I did re-enjoy The Damnwells’ One Last Century which you can still get for free.

Something(s) that blew my mind: John Stewart’s interview of Jim Cramer was really, really good. As Andrew Sullivan said, “you almost had to look away.”

Ministry update: I’m focusing this week on doing tons of prep work for the First Annual St. Mark Sale Barn & Silent Auction. T-minus 19 days!

Seminary/ordination update: Nothing new to report.

Looking forward to: Brandon Barker and his wife may be joining our budding tradition of Wednesday night bowling — if so, it will undoubtedly be hilarious. I’m super pumped about the NCAA tournament, which starts on Thursday, and I’m making a trip to Omaha on Friday night to see the masterful William Fitzsimmons. Again. Add the gorgeous weather forecast for this week on top of all that, and it could shape up to be an incredible week.

Photo of the week:

We can talk about the street lights, uploaded by jakebouma on flickr.

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That’s it for the Monday brief. Feel free to leave a comment, and if you’re feeling extra frisky, check out the Monday brief archives.

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