Am I the only one who had these records as a child? I don't remember much from them, but they ARE fun to listen to now.

Lesson from children's choir:

We took the kids into the sanctuary last night to practice being on stage for their upcoming gig on Sunday (BTW, I'm a "helper", I don't actually lead the tykes). We ran through their song once, with most of the kids swaying and making faces, many not singing at all, etc. Then the director gave a short speech about how important it is not to distract the congregation from worship during the service. She also told me that on the next run-through, I was to find the three children who were doing the best job at standing still and watching the director so that they could get a piece of candy after the rehearsal. Suddenly all the extraneous behaviors stopped. All of the kids really paid attention well. I identified six who never took their eyes off the director at all, so those six got the candy. I was amazed at the enormity of change precipitated by a tiny little contest.

One thing strikes me as very wrong with this, namely the fact tht someone would name a child "Jinger."

I hereby declare that all govt in Oregon is stupid until such time as they prove otherwise.

For some reason this big story doesn't seem to match well with this. Of course the bad news of the latter is that it holds out the possibility of a repeat of the 2000 election.

My brother points out something (which he admits he didn't think up himself) about the establishment of pornography in our society. Has anyone had an ideas about this? Should we refuse to stay in hotels which have signed deals with porn providers? Are there any major hotels which haven't? I'm not interested in ideas about self-control here, but about whether there is something proactive we should be focussing on.

Had a long weekend out of town, ergo no posts. Some good visits with friends. One complaint, and I won't mention names or places here, but at the (PCA) church we went to Sunday, the pastor was completing a sermon series on an OT book and barely made passing reference to the text in the sermon. I always hate it when I see christian teachers who don't find the scriptures interesting enough to talk about. This is an area that my own church is very strong in. I guess what Chesterton said is true about the purpose of travelling being to give you an appreciation for home.

I don't have any way to push this other than just saying it again: I'm still raising money for my mission trip to Ukraine in July. I would love to have some support from a few blog buddies out there. Last year we had one couple we only knew from the 'net send us some support, which was fantastic. I just ran the budget numbers for this year's trip and it came out at about $2600, which is higher than last year and higher than I had originally anticipated for this year, so I'm feeling a bit pressured now. If you are at all curious about what we'll be doing, I'd love to tell you more. Just pop me an email or leave a comment with your email on it and I'll be glad to let you in. The ministry we are working with has the most amazing results--about 90% of the participants from summer projects come back for continued bible studies in the fall.

Small contributions are just as welcome as big ones too :)

Someone should invent a smell-sense equivalent to the word "deafening". "Overpowering" just seems to generic.

I guess I could turn this into just a book report blog.

Yesterday I read Will D Campbell's booklet, Race and the Renewal of the Church, and I was surprised to find it the best and most cogent piece of writing on race I've ever seen. What surprised me about it was that it was written in 1962. I tend to imagine that all progree in thinking about race in this country has happened since then. One of the stiking points he makes is how, after the 1954 integration decision, liberal churches started saying that we should practice integration because it is the law. Why does the church need a law to tell it to ignore race?

He also highlights a key point which I have seen brought out by much later theologians, which is that the church is not primarily a social reform institution, but a community. "The sin of the church is not that it has not reformed society, but that it has not realized self-renewal. Its sin is that it has not repented. Without repentance there cannot be renewal."(p. 4)

He also talks about how the Romans considered Christians to be a "third race". Coincidentally, I heard Orson Scott Card on the radio last night take up that same theme speaking of Mormons. Card was quite open in saying that many common social rituals of our culture would be one's he could only imagine rather than experience, such as having coffee with someone. I wish I could link to that interview, since he so wonderfully stated so many things about how the church should see itself vis a vis the United States.

I was reading von Clausewitz last week. I didn't get much out of it, frankly, but I decided it had been collecting dust for too long. What I was really struck by was the opening:

We must first define war. We shall not begin with a pedantic definition, but confine ourselves to wasr's essence: the duel. War is nothing but a duel on a larger scale. If we would unite in one conception the countless uels of which it consists, we should imagine two wrestlers. Each seeks by physical force to overthrow the other, render him incapable of further resistance, and compel his opponent to do his will.

War is thus an act of force to compel our adversary to do our will.

He goes on to speak of how the use of force has no theoretical limits and that the side which does not limit it's brutality will thus have an advantage.

Finished reading The Brothers K last week (among a bunch of other stuff). This easily goes on the list of best novels I have read. It was certainly better than any novels I read last year. Were it not so plainly (though not faithfully) based on a Russian novel, it would be a contender for the mythical Great American Novel. Stan Hauerwas recommended it to me (though I'm sure my brother had done so years earlier as well), by saying it was about the only important things in life: God and Baseball.

On the not so serious side I also recommend Noah Adams' (of NPR fame) little book Piano Lessons, a diary of the author's attempts to learn piano as an older adult. Includes plenty of piano trivia which was new to me. I'm halfway through, but it has been engrossing so far.

I supose I've been remiss in not mentioning my own brother's recently resurected blog.

News in our country still stinks. How is it that I didn't hear that the president of Chechnya and a bunch of other people were blown up two days ago at a public ceremony? And yet and on the little news scrawl on CNN yesterday I saw info about the new Jessica Simpson tour. I guess the Chechens haven't paid their bribes to the reporters to get top coverage.

35 today

If you are one of the first 165 people, you could go buy me something from my wish list.

Just had an interesting three hour meeting with an acoustical architecture consultant. Our church is looking to build its final sanctuary and our in-house architects decided, wisely I think, to hire an acoustical specialist. David Egan literally wrote the book on architectural acoustics and was quite a source of ideas and knowledge. It's nice to have people in our church who think ahead about these sorts of things.

Putting two and two together:

Some recent email exchanges with Todd, coupled with a few of the comments here, got me thinking about Nehemiah. Nehemiah, to put it bluntly, kicked ass among "God's people". He said "what on earth do you think you are doing." He made them consider that if they wanted to be called God's people, they needed to start acting like it. And this at a very perilous time, a time when the existence of the nation was hanging in the balance, a time when most would say ,"we have more pressing issues right now." To my mind, this is the proper context to view the violence of Jesus in the temple. Jesus was the new Nehemiah. Jesus spoke to "God's people" without holding anything back, even knocking some things around in the process to get some attention. This is decidedly NOT, as I understand it, a justification for the use of violence, speaking generally, among followers of Jesus, unless by violence you mean following the examples of Jesus and Jeremiah. It is certainly not an example of making war.

God's sense of humor?

Why is it that I am a shy person who really loves meeting new people?

If this isn't the ultimate use of the web, I know not what is. That is, if you define best use of the eb as an outlet for bored people.

A now for a finalist! I hate making this choice. I think I'm going to have to go with the Singer book. Mark's entry (Wittgenstein) was really equally as good, but there just wasn't as much of it. I'm not really biased against shorter books. It's just hard to choose sometimes. Round two should be after I come back from Lviv, Ukraine (Early August). (No, I'm not leaving now, just need time to collect the other books and stay within my book budget)
Looks like there are some good titles for round two, so I have high expectations.