graduation...

is less than 3 weeks away! I can hardly believe it... :-)

A challenge to Americans...

I would like to challenge every American who reads this blog, and encourage you to spread the challenge to everyone you know, to do the following:

Take your "tax rebate check" and donate it to a reputable charity helping those in places like Myanmar, Haiti, Sudan, and other countries that are experiencing extreme suffering. Imagine the message it would send if thousands of Christians in the U.S. actually did this... spread the word.

Here are some charities worth considering:

http://www.worldvision.org/
http://www.mercycorps.org/
http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/
http://www.wr.org/
http://www.samaritanspurse.org/
http://community.ob.org/site/PageServer
http://www.redcross.org/

Thanks.

Live from the PNW-AAR...

Hooray! I presented a paper today and it didn't suck! :-) I'm here on the campus of George Fox University, where the Pacific NW regional conference of the American Academy of Religion is being held this year. I'll be hanging out, listening to papers, and enjoying conversation with other scholars of religion, etc. But the best news is, I was accepted to present a paper today, and I made it through! I was really nervous prior to presenting the paper, but it wasn't nearly as frightening once I got going. Everyone seemed to enjoy the presentation and overall the feedback was fairly positive, even those who disagreed with some of my ideas were gracious and said I'd done a good job. So, I'm going to take them all at their word. :-) Anyway, the paper was titled "From finitude to fallibility: Viewing anthropological evil though a Ricoeurian lens." If you're interested in reading it, just give me your email and I'll forward a copy to you. It would be too much to post on here. Anyway, that's also the reason I've been a bit quiet in the blog-world lately... between working on this paper, and doing my homework, I have little free time! But, I just wanted to let everyone who reads this know that my presentation was a success. Ok, that's all for now.

the Gospel and culture...

Well, it's my last quarter, and I graduate in June! Woohoo! But, in the meantime, I'm gonna be reaallly busy with my last two classes and presenting a paper at the NW AAR conference in a couple weeks. Keep me in your prayers! Anyway, just thought I'd post a little blurb I recently wrote on the message board for my New Testament class:

I think our culture is struggling to live somewhere between "modernism" and "postmodernism." We're trying to have our cake and eat it too. We still want "proof" when it comes to believing what people tell us, but we want the individual freedom to pursue our own agendas in a manner that is very subjective and experiential. But the Gospel, I think, cuts against both: We will never have enough "proof", we must have faith, and that faith is never meant to be just an individual faith, but the faith of a community. In spite of our culture, I think that the Christian community must continue holding onto the pronouncement of Jesus as Lord, and trust that the transformative power of the Gospel is what really changes people, not "proof," whether rational or experiential. Of course, how that might look practically... I'm not entirely sure. The Gospel should clearly impact the way we live, and treat other people.

Thoughts?

new music I'm excited about...

So, haven't done this in a while... here are some new CDs I've been enjoying - and YES, I still buy CDs. I haven't gotten into the whole 'just download everything' phase yet. And, hopefully, if artists keep releasing cool packaging, I won't ever have to. But... the way the industry is going, it looks less and less likely. Anyway, here we go.

Punch Brothers - Punch (File Under: Experimental Bluegrass. Never was a big fan of Nickel Creek, but this new CD featuring former member Chris Thile is just phenomenal. It's like a classical composition for bluegrass instruments, and that doesn't even begin to capture the beauty and complexity of the music.)

Ministry - The Last Sucker (File Under: Industrial Metal. Al Jourgenson is one of the founding fathers of industrial rock, and this is the last official Ministry CD. It's been a long time since "Thieves" and "N.W.O.", and it's nice to see Ministry end on a good note... er... noise.)

Meshuggah - Obzen (File Under: Technical Death Metal. This band is just amazingly freaking heavy. And amazingly freaking talented. And in large doses, will probably damage your brain. Not for the faint of heart.)

Once - Music from the Motion Picture (File Under: Sad, Pretty Irish Indie Pop. Yeah, it's not brand new, and yeah, everybody and their brother loves the film and music now, but still... I can't get over how great these songs are. And sad. And pretty. I love me some melancholy.)

Next week... NEW PORTISHEAD!

John D. Caputo on "the gift"...

"The gift, if there is such a thing, is the event, the impossible, the undeconstructible. The gift is what we love and desire with a desire beyond desire, in which we hope with a hope against hope...

Love is its own 'why'; love is for its own sake. It does not demand a further or external reason...

There is, there ought to be, something that we do in life that is not for a return but just because what we are doing is life itself, something a little mad. That is the gift."

this got me thinking... (about the Iraq war)

If you're not interested in talking about the Iraq war, just ignore this; otherwise, follow along, please...

Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense of the United States, said before the Senate Armed Services Committee on July 9, 2003:

"The coalition did not act in Iraq because we had discovered dramatic new evidence of Iraq’s pursuit of WMD; we acted because we saw the existing evidence in a new light — through the prism of our experience on 9/11."
(From http://www.usiraqprocon.org/)

This quote tells me a couple of things. First, apparently it wasn't Saddam himself that was ultimately the main reason for the decision to go to war with Iraq, it was the 9/11 attacks. Second, if this is in fact the main reason for the Iraq war, then what should concern us the most (in critiquing the decision to go to war) is not whether Saddam had WMD, or even whether he was an evil dictator, but whether or not he was connected to 9/11.

Since the connection between Saddam and Al Queda has been shown to be all but nonexistent, according to most of the evidence found since the war started (and some from before it began), it seems reasonable to say that the Iraq war was a mistake, because the actual aims of the war were misguided, according to the administrations own claims. Does this make sense?

Now, of course, Saddam had links to terrorists, but then, so do most countries in the world. The question is, did he have substantial links to the people who attacked us? The answer to that seems to be 'no'. So was it just bad intelligence that got us into this war, or something else? I don't want conspiracy theories, I'm just trying to figure out how/why this whole mess got started. Am I missing something?

I am aware that, given our presence in Iraq, it almost doesn't matter how it started, we have to clean up the mess we started, and hopefully that will happen. I just hope people don't think that just because we may end up stabilizing the region, that the war was justified, because if we are going by what the administration had as their "evidence", the war was a mistake from the start.

Ok, that's all... as you were.