2007 January » JakeBouma.com

I am a huge fan of high quality desktop wallpapers, and this wallpaper of the Yaquina Head Lighthouse is absolutely stunning. In my opinion it does exactly what a wallpaper should; it’s beautiful and serene while being unobtrusive to desktop icons and widgets. 01/31/2007
Singer/songwriter Keller Williams is going to drop a bomb on February 6 by the name of dream. “The concept of this recording was to collaborate with my heroes and make a record that I would be proud to crank in my pimped out golf cart when I’m 80.” The resulting album features 16 tracks, with Keller backed by a dream team of musicians including Béla Fleck, Bobby Read, Bob Weir, Charlie Hunter, Derrek Phillips, Fareed Haque, Fleming McWilliams, Jeff Sipe, John Molo, John Scofield, Martin Sexton, Michael Franti, Modereko, Samir Chatterjee, Sanjay Mishra, Steve Kimock, The String Cheese Incident, and Victor Wooten. 01/31/2007

Spring semester classes

January 31st, 2007 | Comments (1)

This is my last semester at Luther, and I have satisfied most of my requirements for everything; all I need to do now is gather a few remaining credits. Here is my list of classes for this semester.

PE-100: Personal Fitness & Wellness: “This course will focus on the knowlege and skills necessary for developing and maintaining a healthy, physically active lifestyle throughout one’s lifespan. General topics include major health issues such as physical fitness, nutrition, stress management, substance abuse and disease prevention.”

PCAP-450: Stewardship & Sustainable Development: US Energy Policy: “Since energy is vital to all dimensions of life, patterns related to energy production and consumption pose a host of social, political, and environmental challenges that require moral deliberation. This course draws upon the Christian stewardship tradition and the concept of sustainable development to examine U. S. energy issues. The course gives special attention to the energy policy of the Bush Administration, the potential of renewable energy sources, and the long term disposal of high-level nuclear waste.”

GRK-202: Readings in Greek: I am one of two people in this class, and I’m fairly certain we’ll be doing lots of New Testament study.

HIST-139: Modern Middle East History: “Students in this course investigate the history of the Middle East, including Iran, Turkey, and northern Africa. With a focus on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the course allows students to understand the cultural and material processes that inform current events. The course provides important historical context for intellectual discussion among the Abrahamic traditions and requires students to consider social, economic, and cultural factors that may find expression in religious canon and practice.”

PHIL-230: Philosophy of Science: “A study of the nature of scientific methodology, which has entitled the sciences (especially the natural sciences) to their authoritative status as reliable sources of knowledge and rational belief. This involves issues such as the relation between theory and evidence, the nature of confirmation, explanation, probability, and rational considerations in delivering and consuming scientific information.”

REL-490: Religion Senior Paper: As I mentioned last October, I’ll be writing my senior paper on the emerging church. I’m not yet sure of the focus of the paper - whether it will be an overview or a more focused topic within the emerging church. I have quite the reading list, though, and I’ll likely post that later.

Academics | Comments

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Just in case I needed another reason to be angry at Verizon, apparently they passed up a deal for the Apple iPhone. “We have nothing bad to say about the Apple iPhone. We just couldn’t reach a deal that was mutually beneficial.” 01/29/2007
What I’ve Learned: Jack Bauer. “If you don’t have a Taser gun, the wires from a lamp will deliver the current needed to shock your subject just enough to get him to give up the information you need without doing any permanent damage.” (thx, John) 01/28/2007
Scot McKnight has written another great article regarding the emerging church for Christianity Today entitled “Five Streams of the Emerging Church”. The five streams are: prophetic, postmodern, praxis-oriented, post-evangelical, and political. Related: Senior paper shift (has a link to another of Scot’s articles). 01/20/2007
Philosopher and cultural critic Slavoj Žižek reacts to the film Children of Men. “The changes that the film introduces do not point toward alternate reality, they simply make reality more what it already is. I think this is the true vocation of science fiction. Science fiction realism introduces a change that makes us see better. The nightmare that we are expecting is here.” Žižek on Wikipedia. 01/16/2007

Calling it “The Sunshine State” was a good choice.

January 14th, 2007 | Comments (3)

It’s late on day six of tour and I am writing from a house in Fort Myers, Florida. While on tour, the choir splits up in the evenings and stays with host families (which we call “homestays”). We’ve had two hotel nights thus far and the rest have been homestays.

Tonight we are staying with a nice couple who have a beautiful home with the biggest screened-in porch I have ever laid my humble eyes upon. Let’s be honest, it’s basically a screened-in backyard with a pool and a hot tub. Speaking from experience, homestays can go either way - but we have really lucked out thus far.

We have sang in some really beautiful places, both visually and acoustically. Spivey Hall at Clayton State University may be the most acoustically rich place I have ever sang with a choir. Our director informed us that Robert Shaw elected to record all his Chorale’s music there, and his decision is entirely justifiable.

I suppose there is no need to ramble on. Tomorrow we are headed to West Palm Beach via Alligator Alley (check out this picture) and then up through Georgia thereafter. And again, you can look at a Google map of the entire tour if you wish.

Oh yeah… and have you seen the iPhone? Dang.

Travel |

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Nordic Choir tour

January 8th, 2007 | Comments (0)

I am off tomorrow morning on a two-and-a-half week tour of the East coast with the Nordic Choir. The dates and locations of our performances can all be found on Luther’s website, and I also took the liberty of creating a Google map with all of the stops as well.

I will be adding a few cities to my personal list of places I have been, including: Atlanta, GA; Ft. Myers, FL; Tampa, FL; Chapel Hill, NC; Boston, MA; and Pittsburgh, PA.

I used the Google map of the tour and the drive time estimations it provides and calculated that we are in a bus for 4 hours and 52 minutes per day on average. This gives me ample time to read Dave Eggers’ new book What is the What and to watch some movies on my iPod (which I have never done before; I’ve only watched TV shows and music videos).

I hope to post several times on the road, but I can’t make any promises.

Nordic Choir videos on YouTube

Music, Travel |

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Great photo of Earth taken by Voyager 1 in 1990 that was used in a lecture given by Carl Sagan. “That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived… The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines… every creator and destroyer of civilizations… every young couple in love… every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.” 01/08/2007
The new season of 24 begins airing soon, and it promises to be a good one. “Let me put it to you this way: There are more thrills and suspense in the first four hours than most series can pack into a single season. Or an entire run of show, for that matter.” 01/06/2007