Pre-Game Coin Toss Makes Jacksonville Jaguars Realize Randomness Of Life
Category: Humor
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Bush Tours America
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The Bluesman
This is a picture from the Gordon College Talent Show, circa 1987. I’m performing my biggest hit ever, “The Major Minor Concentration Undeclared Blues.” Ah, the bright lights, the applause, the groupies — at least that’s how I remember it.
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Glory Days
This is my brother and I on our college baseball team, when I was a senior and he was a freshman — 20(!!) years ago. The school has a Facebook page for the 20th reunion and all sorts of old photos are showing up there. Was I ever that young, skinny and fresh-faced? Too bad I never learned to hit a curveball.
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Statistics You Did Not Know
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Boating Accidents?
I’m taking the New Jersey boating safety course (required to operate a boat in NJ or NY). This entry in the student manual is particularly helpful:
Causes of Accidents / Striking a Submerged Object:
…Plain bad luck, as many times there is no way to see a submerged or partially submerged object before striking it.
Gee, thanks for the tip!
And this one:
Every boater should take a first aid course, including CPR and treatment of hypothermia. Being able to provide minimum first aid may prevent you from having to cut short your boating day.
Yeah, we wouldn’t want grandpa’s heart attack to ruin our boating day!
Here is the manual’s graphic for dangers when fishing or hunting from a boat (seriously):
Here’s a lengthy quote from a recent book that touches on epistemological debates within evangelical Christianity. Who wrote it?
On the face of it, we seem set, at least in America, for an unyielding confrontation between foundationalism and postfoundationalism — a ‘take no prisoners’ war in which there can be only winners and losers.
But there is another way. A chastened modernism and a ‘soft’ postmodernism might actually discover that they are saying rather similar things. A chastened or modest modernism pursues the truth but recognizes how much we humans do not know, how often we change our minds, and some of the factors that go into our claims to knowledge. A chastened postmodernism heartily recognizes that we cannot avoid seeing things from a certain perspective (we are all perspectivalists, even if perspectivalists can be divided into those who admit it and those who don’t) but acknowledges that there is a reality out there that we human beings can know, even if we cannot know it exhaustively or perfectly, but only from our own perspective. We tend to slide up to the truth, to approach it asymptotically — but it remains self-refuting to claim to know truly that we cannot know the truth. To set such a modest modernism and such a chastened postmodernism side-by-side is to see how much alike they are. They merely put emphases in different places.
So who said it? D. A. Carson, in his interesting new book Christ and Culture Revisited. I think Carson says some very valuable things here. In fact, he seems to be reflecting the sort of “critical realism” that I think is the most fruitful contemporary approach to epistemology. I might not endorse all of Carson’s critiques of the emerging church, but the sort of perspective he offers here is most welcome, in my view.
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Splogging for Ontology
The splogs are getting sublimely absurd. A splog, or spam blog, is a fake blog filled with advertising links and/or links to malicious software. In order to create traffic, splogs link to the comments and trackbacks of legitimate blogs using web crawling algorithms. This site, which linked back to a post in which I talked about ontology and creation, is an accidental work of art, given these link titles (do not click on the splog’s links, BTW, unless you want a virus):
“Looking for ONTOLOGY?”
“Get ONTOLOGY here for free!!!”
“Best ONTOLOGY videos!”
“Shopping for ONTOLOGY?”
Hmmm…. What kind of world will I end up in if I follow one of those links?
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"Good Morning!"
Early this morning I was walking my dog. It was a beautiful morning, brightening skies, soft warm breezes, but I was deep in thought about some set of personal issues. I must have been frowning. A guy I’ve never seen before comes walking the other way, apparently out for his morning smoke. I pull up on the dog’s leash, step to the side, and nod a curt “good morning.” He stops, steps in front of me, spreads out his arms, smiles widely and shouts, “Goood morning!!” I laughed out loud. What a gift! He must have noticed how wound up I looked, and in that wacky gesture, he reminded me that this blue-sky day is a gift of grace, not a problem to be solved.
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The Evil-lution of Google's Motto
Google’s corporate motto is “don’t be evil.” I leave the theological issues relating to this aside and just note that this review of the evolution of how Google views its motto is very funny.