Me flying over Peru in a Cessna Grand Caravan. Well, virtually flying — in MS Flight Sim 2004.
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(Note — I’m going to try to revive my regular “Through the Looking Glass” posts. In the past, I had used these to highlight stuff I noticed around the blogsphere. I’m going to try to broaden it to include books, film, music, or anything else I’m finding helpful or interesting at a given moment. I hope readers find it useful — and if not, oh well, it’ll be more of me talking to the wind.)
Through the Looking Glass today:
Received Vol. 1 of The Teachings of Modern Christianity on Law, Politics & Human Nature. I’d been looking for a good reference on Christian views about law and jurisprudence, and this looks as though it may fit the bill. Includes broad discussions of jurisprudence in the Roman Catholic, Protestant (including Reformed, Anabaptist, and others) and Eastern Orthodox traditions. Very thick and substantial. Also very expensive, but I got mine from midtownscholar.com, a used Amazon vendor, for a good price. I’m becoming an online used bookstore junkie.
Received August/September 2006 issue of First Things. Good correspondence on Alan Jacobs’ article in the prior issue about Wheaton College’s decision to terminate the employment of a philosophy professor who converted to Roman Catholicism.
Good Post by Jeff about what it meanst to be “in Christ.”
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Dave the Loudmouth
My father must’ve been cleaning out his attic again. He dropped off this very funny letter to the editor I wrote to my town newspaper when I was about 15. One of my summer jobs was as a little league umpire. This letter responds to a letter from a “concerned parent” complaining about how bad little league umpiring was costing teams games. “Ludicrous,” “childishness,” “injustice” — man, I knew how to hammer home the rhetoric even then, not to mention the snarky “concerned umpire” signature line! My dad also, coincidentally, found one of my old standardized achievement test reports from around that same time: 90th percentile in languages, 70th or so in math. Pretty much the same as every standardized test I’ve ever taken, and probably pretty much what I’ll do on the GRE next month. Sheesh! I guess I’m just genetically a loudmouth and not the methodical engineer type.
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Origen for Today
I recently began collecting IVP’s Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture series. The series collects commentary from the early church fathers relating to a given scriptural text. Currently I’m working through the volume on Romans.
It’s fascinating to see how much of the theological groundwork laid by the fathers survives today. It’s a testament both to their brilliance — they did their writing and research without decent libraries, much less computers — and also to the coherence and power of scripture, which speaks to our age just as it did to theirs.
I’ve been surprised to find that the father whose writings have struck me as the most rich and cogent is Origen. The little I knew of Origen was from some survey courses in college, in which we learned that Origen’s “allegorical” method of interpreting scripture should be avoided and that Origen was eventually condemned as a heretic.
I need to study more about Origen as a historical figure. From what I’ve been able to gather so far, what I learned in college isn’t inaccurate, but it also isn’t the whole story. In the meantime, the snippets of Origen I’m finding in the IVP series show that he possessed a unique blend of intellect, erudition, and practical pastoral instincts — in other words, he was the kind of person I most admire and aspire to become. I haven’t yet seen much of the allegorical hermeneutic for which he later became infamous, although that may be a function of the particular IVP volume I’m studying.
So here’s just one brief snippet of Origen that I found compelling. He’s commenting here on Romans 5:12-21, which speaks of the regin of death since Adam’s fall, and the deliverance from that reign in Christ:
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Picture of the Day
Mosquito larva, captured in the wild backyard, photographed through my son’s microscope.
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LiberJesus
My buddy Tom Girsch of Lean Left sent me this picture, which he took in Memphis. Tom and I disagree about lots of things — stuff like politics (well, sometimes) and religion — but we agree on this: ugh!!! This is wrong on so many levels. If it really cost $260K as Tom reports, that’s a sin. And the message it sends to those outside the Christian faith is awful. Some of us may look at this and think, “yes, Jesus gives freedom to the tired, the hungry, the huddled masses, through the cross.” That’s true, and it’s an important message. But for most people outside the American evangelical subculture, this says “America: by, for, and of Christians, and no one else.” Wrong, wrong, wrong, and wrong! Don’t confuse our national Constitutional liberties with our freedom in Christ. Our Constituional liberties are precious. Iin many ways they are rooted in Christian anthropology, but it is Christian anthropology as filtered through Enlightenment ideals, which are bound in culture and time, and which are not always particularly “Christian.” Our freedom in Christ is far greater, and transcends time, territory and culture. The message of freedom through the cross should be proclaimed without this cultural baggage.
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My Ireland
I’m all packed up and tomorrow morning I fly home to the U.S. This has been a great trip. We had a fantastic group of students who (I hope) learned alot about international intellectual property law. It was wonderful to have my family visit, and I’m excited to get back home to them. After they left a couple of weeks ago, I felt as lonely as I’ve ever felt for a spell. But that’s for another post.
Here I want to talk a bit about the Ireland I’m coming to love. It’s not so much the Ireland many U.S. tourists see, that of Killkenny and the South. It’s more the Ireland of Connemara and the West.
I wish I’d had a quality SLR camera on my hike in the Connemara mountains yesterday. The pictures I took with my little digicam don’t come close to doing justice to where I was. When I walked the Western Way into the Mamturk Mountains, with the deep emerald hills and broken limestone and marble rising up on both sides, the broad valley below, the stone walls and black faced sheep high up on the crags, and the clouds spilling over the summit, all alone without another person in sight, I felt that I was in the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen. There’s an evocative quality to the very air here in the West, never still, tinged with sea salt, rich with peat smoke. I hope I get back here some day.
Perhaps the best I can do is offer these lines from William Butler Yeats, who also was inspired by Ireland’s West. They seem to invoke the soul of those who make places like Connemara their home:
Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
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Today in Ireland
Today I drove all the way down to Killkenny — over three hours — and hiked to the summit of Torc Mountain. Here are some shots of me on the summit:
Today I went hiking in Connemara in western Ireland. I think this was the most beautiful place I’ve ever been. Here’s a shot of me on a steep slope. The picture doesn’t even come close to doing it justice. Hopefully I’ll have one more hike tomorrow, and then it’s back home!
I appreciate Alister McGrath’s work deeply. For those who don’t know of him, McGrath is a prominent British Evangelical who teaches at Oxford University and holds doctorates in biology and theology from Oxford. Here is a preview of McGrath’s forthcoming book titled “Doubting.” McGrath notes that
Deep within all of us lies a longing for absolute security, to be able to know with absolute certainty. We feel that we should be absolutely sure of everything that we believe. Surely, we feel, we ought to be able to prove everything that we believe.
And yet, he observes,
The beliefs which are really important in life concern such things as whether there is a God and what he is like, or the mystery of human nature and destiny. These—and a whole host of other important beliefs—have two basic features. In the first place, they are relevant to life. They matter, in that they affect the way in which we think, live, hope and act. In the second place, they cannot be proved (or disproved) with total certainty. ,,,
To believe in God demands an act of faith—as does the decision not to believe in him. Neither is based upon absolute certainty, nor can they be. To accept Jesus demands a leap of faith—but so does the decision to reject him. To accept Christianity demands faith—and so does the decision to reject it. Both rest upon faith, in that nobody can prove with absolute certainty that Jesus is the Son of God, the risen saviour of humanity—just as nobody can prove with absolute certainty that he is not.
But our faith isn’t blind or irrational. As McGrath notes
There is indeed a leap of faith involved in Christianity—but it is not an irrational leap into the dark. The Christian experience is that of being caught safely by a loving and living God, whose arms await us as we leap. Martin Luther put this rather well: “Faith is a free surrender and a joyous wager on the unseen, untried and unknown goodness of God.”
This is one I’ll definitely add to my Amazon wishlist.