• Comments on my short story I’ve received from my Creative-Writing classmates. “This smugly written tripe is an affront to the craft of writing and fails to meet even the most generous definition of adequacy.” 12/21/2006

A Parting Blessing

May the road rise to meet you.
May the wind be always at your back.
May the sun shine upon your face.
May the rain fall soft upon your fields
and until we meet again,
may God hold you in the palm of his hand.

- Traditional Irish prayer

Previous employment experience:

This past Monday I began the eleventh job I have ever had. I am working for two weeks (winter break) at a warehouse for Excell Marketing. It got me thinking about all the various jobs I have had over the years, so I sat down and wrote them down. Here, presented in reverse chronological order, is a list of my employment experience.

Excell Marketing: Warehouse worker, winter break 2006
Valley Church: Youth ministry intern, summer 2005 and 2006
Hidden Acres: Camp counselor, worship leader, summer 2004
Aéropostale: Retail, summer 2003
Luther College Theatre/Dance Dept.: Student worker, 2002-2007
Iowa State Fair (Admissions/Parking): Ticket seller/taker, gate captain, barricades, 2001-2004
Performance Display: Display assembler, summer 2001
Buca di Beppo: WA (Waiter’s Assistant), singer, 2000-2001
Wynnsong Theatre: Concessions, summer 2000
Burger King: Cashier, team leader/morning manager, on-and-off 1998-2003
Monsanto: Corn detassler, summer 1998

That’s eleven jobs in nine years, folks.

Best Job Award: Valley Church (even though I was hospitalized for part of it)
Worst Job Award: Performance Display

• Brian McLaren has posted his winter update. “I had two opportunities to preach in pulpits where Dr. King preached… quite an awe-inspiring experience.” Also, the follow-up to The Secret Message of Jesus is tentatively titled “Everything Must Change: Jesus, Global Crises, and the Revolution of Hope” and is slated for a late ‘07 or early ‘08 release. 12/13/2006
• 33 names of things you never knew had names. Obdormition is the numbness caused by pressure on a nerve; when a limb is ‘asleep’. 12/09/2006
• Here are some great parody videos of Apple’s Mac vs. PC campaign but with Christian and Christ-follower instead. 12/08/2006
• How did I miss this? Dave Eggers, author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, has just come out with a new book, What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng (@ Amazon). “This book… is the novelized autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng, from his pre-war life in Marial Bai (a trading center in south-central Sudan), to his resettlement in the United States.” Looks like I found the perfect accompaniment for Nordic Choir tour in January. 12/05/2006

Richard Dawkins, Atheism, and Christianity: Part 2

Because there were several thoughtful responses to the the original post, I have decided to write a follow-up.

To do so, I shall enlist the help of Marilynne Robinson, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of Gilead. Robinson recently wrote a review of The God Delusion for the November edition of Harper’s entitled Hysterical Scientism: The ecstasy of Richard Dawkins. Although Harper’s doesn’t have any articles online, a full transcript is available here. I encourage you to read the article in full, but I will be quoting it much in this post.

Robinson begings by summarizing Dawkins’ crusade against religion:

There is no doubt in Dawkins’s mind that the evils of the world are to be laid at the doorstep of the church, mosque, and synagogue, and that science must be our salvation… because Dawkins implicitly defines science as a clear-eyed quest for truth, chaste as an algorithm, while religion is atavistic, mad, and mired in crime.

She theorizes that The God Delusion is published at a time when the “tectonics of culture are suddenly active”:

This view [that religion is the "great Satan"] is commonplace now, in part because the institutions of religion, like the institutions of journalism and government, have done a great deal to trivialize or disgrace themselves lately.

Although she doesn’t provide any specific examples, I agree with her, and this is more of what I was getting at in my last post. I would also add that the media has had a forceful hand in this so-called tectonic shift. No specfific vein of Christianity is at fault (although some get more attention than others¹), and to say so would be pointing out the speck in someone else’s eye while ignoring the log in my (our) own.

Robinson continues to point out that science is not without its own historical blunders, namely Hitler and the use science (in the form of genetics) to justify the systematic eradication of the Jews. Dawkins tries to cover this by calling it “insane” and “unscientific”, but Robinson sees otherwise. “Bad science,” she says, “is still science in more or less the same sense that bad religion is still religion.” If religion is to be scrutinized under a microscope, science should be held to the same standard:

To set the declared hopes of one against the real-world record of the other is clearly not useful, no matter which of them is flattered by the comparison… If by “science” is meant authentic science, then “religion” must mean authentic religion, granting the difficulties in arriving at these definitions.

It was refreshing to see Robinson espousing some of the same arguments as myself. In my previous post, I said “Developments in quantum physics and other disciplines have pointed to an ever-increasing (and perhaps fluctuating) complexity of the universe. I simply don’t find it necessary to look to science for answers that science isn’t apt to provide.” Robinson agrees (and does so much more eloquently):

The finer-grained the image of reality physicists achieve, the more alien it appears to every known strategy of comprehension. The odd thing about Dawkins’s work, considering his job description, is that it does not itself seem the product of a mind informed by the physics of the last century or so.

Maybe I’m on the right track after all.

I am aware that this post contains little analysis on my part. In Part 3 of this series, I will examine more closely how Dawkins effectively traps himself in modernity and consider whether or not his theses are effectual in our postmodern age.

1. E.g., the “caricaturized-psycho-Christian” to whom I referred in the previous post. ↩

Heroes hysteria

Tonight is the mid-season finale of Heroes until it returns on January 22. This is only the second television drama (excluding reality shows) I have ever faithfully watched. The other, of course, being 24. I am so obssessed that I even read a Heroes blog.

Did you know that Claire the cheerleader (real name: Hayden Panettiere) is a budding pop star? Check out her Myspace page. Her debut album comes out next spring.

If, like me, you can’t even wait, here is a five minute preview of tonight’s show care of Access Hollywood.

• Andrew Hamilton on incarnational vs. attractional mission. “The overwhelming majority of smaller churches attempting to be Hillsong clones continue to haemorrhage members every week because they cannot offer the same quality of music, preaching or other services that their mega-mall comrades down the road are able to provide.” 12/01/2006

Yukon Cornelius?

Are you familiar with Yukon Cornelius from Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer? You know, the “greatest prospector of the North” in search of silver and gold who wields an axe and a big red beard? Well, apparently I look like him:

Also, have you ever wondered why he licks his axe? (Wow, that’s a treacherous sentence.)

• Luther’s student newspaper has published an article about my a cappella group, Undeclared. “Bouma commented on why the group does what they do, ‘This is an optional thing for everyone in the group, so our drive is when we perform and when people say they love us,’ he said. ‘It’s when people look forward to us singing — It’s rewarding, and if it weren’t rewarding, we wouldn’t be doing it.’” 11/30/2006
• Becoming A Millionare God’s Way. “The Bible teaches that God blesses the work of your hand, but if your hand isn’t doing anything, there is nothing for Him to bless!” This is disgusting. 11/28/2006

Richard Dawkins, Atheism, and Christianity

Richard Dawkins is omnipresent.

His new book, The God Delusion, is currently #6 on the Amazon.com bestselling book list, and lately his name has been popping up everywhere in my life. I first saw his name on kottke.org a while back, and about a week ago I read an article that mentions him at TSK (which I posted as a digression). I have subsequently seen several stories about him on Digg, most notably one entitled Atheist Richard Dawkins Destroys Students from Jerry Falwell’s University (500+ comments!), which links to a video of a rather lenghty Q&A session with Dr. Dawkins. I probably wouldn’t have thought too much of it, but then during our student-led worship on Sunday night the speaker referenced a recent issue of Time magazine that features him in the cover story, God vs. Science. And just to top things off, I passed a professor today who was holding a book of his under her arm.¹

Here’s how I feel about the whole situation.²

Read the rest of this entry »

1. I could actually only see “ichard wkins” because her arm was covering half of the book, but who else would it be, right? ↩
2. To be fair, I haven’t read his book, and I am not very familiar with any of his arguments or agendas. At this point I just want to provide an overarching reaction to and analysis of what I think is happening. ↩

• The Abominable “O Holy Night”. “Whether the song is intentional or not: if the origins of this version are based in the Church, it may be the most glorious three minutes and thirty-nine seconds of comedy the American church has ever produced.” 11/27/2006

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