Slow Blogging Week…

Hey people.

The short work week, normal job stuff, along with writing the weekend sermon will keep me absent from the blog. In other words, this is it. I’m preaching Sunday about forgiveness (the whys and hows). I plan to use “Positively 4th Street” by Bob Dylan as my starting point. Hilarious song – here’s a link if you’ve never heard it. Some of the funniest lyrics of all time:

“Yes, I wish that for just one time
You could stand inside my shoes
You’d know what a drag it is
To see you”

If you’ve got any input, I am always open to it…

Why I’m Not on Facebook…

I really don’t know the answer to this question, though I plan to use all my brain power in the next few minutes make up an answer (Wow! I swear the lights above me just dimmed…).

I have a general aversion to all things popular, particularly where Christian culture is concerned. In many ways I am proud of my Christian snobbery. Purpose Driven Life? Your Best Life Now?  Never read them. Max Lucado? Beth Moore? Ignore ‘em. Their popularity ensures that I will not join in. I read The Shack before it became popular, so I actually take pride in the fact that I read it when it was obscure. Same with music. I point out to people that I saw P.O.D. in concert before they became famous…like I had anything to do with their rise in popularity. In fact, one of my co-workers told me I was a theological snob last week (thanks Chris). Of course this was said in a spirit of love…  :)

Truth is, in some warped way, I find identity in resisting things that others do so easily. Like being counter-cultural for identity’s sake. But statistically I’m not counter-cultural at all – I’m the most average guy in America. And that makes being counter-cultural…well, stupid.

So why am I not on Facebook? Blogging is much more time consuming and personal if you do it right. I dunno – I feel like signing up for a social network like Facebook would “expose” me in a way that I’m not comfortable with. There are some people I don’t want to find me, you know. At the same time, social networks make you feel like you’ve sat down and had a conversation over coffee with someone when, in reality you have a surface understanding of them at best. More “small talk.” I can shake somebody’s hand at a party and do that – why carry it over into cyber-space? Weird huh?  Anyone else boycotting Facebook?

New Church Website Back Online

It’s been a long time coming, but First Methodist’s website is back online: www.tfumc.com. I think you’ll like the new look.

On a personal note, I start a new Sunday school class this Sunday that focuses on the “tough” questions in Christianity – things like seeming contradictions in the Bible, the role of the supernatural and miracles in modern society. cultural clues to the gospels, and all those fun “why” questions like “Why does God let bad things happen.” Stuff like that. It’s should be fun and a good way for me to scratch my teaching “itch” since I only get in the pulpit every couple of months.

I stole my name from Robert’s blog: “Inquiring Minds.” Robert, hopefully you think imitation is the best form of flattery…

Repeats and Re-runs

Okay, I have put up over 120 posts in the last 10 months. Most of these are not posts like, “Hey I was watching Gossip Girls on the CW the other night and…” They are long, in-depth (read tedious ) reflections on some rather heavy topics. So, I plan to re-post them along with new material over the next several months. Why? Well, first off – they have some good stuff in there that more recent viewers have never seen. And secondly, I’m slightly burned out and there’s no internet/blogging police that says I can’t. So there. Enjoy the new material along with the old (new) material together. Better yet, see if you can guess which is which…

Critical People Are Not Credible People

I am so sick of critics.

Between political opinions and religious self-appointed doctrine police, I’ve heard more negativity in the last few months than I can remember. Though I like WordPress, I can’t get over the amount of negative blogs they feature on their front page – as if denigrating and slandering others is meritorious. Our society has conjoined the concepts of criticism and credibility at the hip. We’re not legitimate until we disagree with a Palin or an Obama or a Bentley or a Boltz. To find nothing wrong with someone or something has become a sign of ignorance or presumption. And because of that, we just may be the most opinionated society in the history of humankind. And we’re under the delusion that our opinions are worth something. But really we’re just taking the Western cultural paradigm to the extreme. Being critical does not make you credible. Before you write this post off as someone being critical of critics, let me explain where our “culture of suspicion” originated…

Everyone knows about the Enlightenment and the rise of rationalism as the guiding hermeneutic (to use a theological term) for secularism. Descartes introduced a new paradigm for Western society – one where evidence must be presented for a hypothesis to stand. Leibniz and Spinoza followed behind applying Descartes’ ideas to social and political theory. Empiricists like Hume, though disagreeing with the rationalists on many points, carried their negativity to the extreme in areas of anthropology and religion. Now, Cartesian methodology is fine as a foundation for the scientific method (though some may feel that’s gone too far as well – go read Appleyard’s Understanding the Present to balance what you find in most conventional histories of science), but this Enlightenment ”method of suspicion” guides our approach to everything from politics to religion to media to relationships. After all, where there’s smoke there’s always fire, right? This Enlightenment based approach has also affected our understanding of scripture, specifically in the area of demythologizing the gospels to make them more “accessible” to the modern mind.

As Americans, we are constantly steered toward this critical paradigm. I like what social historian Keith Thomas said about it in regards to our understanding of the supernatural: “Most of those millions of persons who would laugh at the idea of magic and miracles would have trouble explaining why.  They are victims of society’s constant pressure towards intellectual conformity” (emphasis mine). And it’s a more widespread epidemic than just the belief in miracles. At the core of this issue is our inability to trust. Cartesian method quickly moved out of the laboratory and now influences dinner table conversations, news and political opinion, and has decimated our ability to treat people with honor and respect. We feel we need “evidence” to trust anyone. And that’s a very sad thing. That approach to life also eradicates faith – the belief in something beyond our explanation or full understanding. Rather than believing the best about another until proven wrong, we chose to expect the worst, while waiting for the slight chance that someone might actually do the right thing. We value the 10% bad and discard the 90% good about each other.

Here’s the funny thing about all of this: people who adopt this critical approach to life assume that they stand on the bedrock of human understanding. Most humanists I know feel this way. And who knows, maybe they have arrived at the pinnacle of intelligence. But really, the Western Enlightenment paradigm is only about three hundred years old. Rationalist thought didn’t fully permeate Western thought until about 250 years ago. And there were hundreds of paradigms that came before us. Presently. most other world cultures see our modernist suspicion as faddish and a sign of immaturity. After all, people saw things differently before the 1700s. And we now have the corner market on comprehension after 250 years? Is it possible we think too much of ourselves?

The Bible says we should believe the best about each other. That’s hard to do as we attempt to control others by labelling and distorting information to confirm our suspicion of others. I believe that’s called making a mountain out of a molehill. That type of criticism is only a reflection of deeper negativity inside the critic. Critics are unhappy people. Chances are good that a critic spends as much time in personal negative self-talk as they do talking about someone else. The truth is: we’re all okay. Not perfect. But most people have good intentions when not backed into a corner. We can choose not to believe that and let the “hermeneutics of suspicion” guide us. But if we do, we’ll be so busy criticizing the mistakes of others that we’ll miss thousands of chances to witness the good intentions of those around us. And that’s something I personally don’t want to miss.

Blogroll Update

I just updated my blogroll with a few blogs I have been reading. My brother is now on there (Jamie Nunnally), and well as a couple of biblical archaeology blogs I enjoy (Bible and Ancient Near East and Bible Places Blog). I also added OT professor Claude Mariottini and Trinitarian scholar C. Baxter Kruger. Hopefully you’ll like them – particularly the last two if you are into theology.

You’ll be happy to know that I resist the popularity/hierarchy blogroll thing that travels through the blogosphere. I just link to who I enjoy, not particularly because there’s anything that “qualifies” one blog to be special over another. I think that’s stupid. Imagine that?

I passed 12,000 “reads” about a month ago. Respectable I suppose. I’m not exactly changing the world one blog at a time or anything, but I do get a good bit of random traffic. If you’re a regular reader, let me know who you are – I’d love to check out what you have on your blog as well…

3 Reasons for Blogging Meme

Robert over at weirdthinkers tagged me with an extraordinary opportunity of self-indulgence with the followings questions:

Rule 1) List three reasons for your blogging.
Rule 2) List these rules.
Rule 3) Tag three others with the thread.

Here you go:

1) I have been “unavailable” for about two years with schoolwork and child-rearing. Blogging is a way for me to start focusing my thoughts again by finding a way to speak/write on a popular (non-academic) level as well as find a way to converse without using phrases like “please stop crying” and “go back and wash your hands.”

2) When I began to ready myself for full-time ministry again, I thought, “How am I gonna help people outside of a local audience learn more about me and my approach to Christianity?” Blogging was my answer.

3) It’s fun. No one really cares what I blog about so I can talk about any range of topics. This approach fits my lifestyle as well. I may be talking about Napoleon Dynamite (heck yes!) one minute and Meister Eckhart’s ontological use of the “ground of being” in medieval mysticism the next. Or, better yet, how they are the same. hmmm….. My blog reflects that bizarre behavior and, hopefully, that makes it entertaining for others as well…