Is it wrong to think this blog is funny?

My question is sincere, since some pictures seem to capture situations leading to major injury if not death.
This picture’s the funniest, in my opinion. I sincerely hope this woman did not suffer scarring.

Sexuality and the Paradox of the Gospel

From Lisa Graham McMinn’s Sexuality and Holy Longing: Embracing Intimacy in a Broken World (pp. 6-8):

1) We were created by God to long for relationships, and yet are incapable of satisfying our longings in relationships.

2) Living in grace bridges the chasm between our longings and our inability to satisfy those longings.

While we wait for completion in eternity, we love and learn and find easement from our loneliness in relationships with others. When we acknowledge that our yearnings will never be fully satisfied, we can welcome God into our disappointment and then turn toward the abundance yet available through the temporal blessings of relationships, knowing they were never intended to completely satisfy our longings.

Genesis and Vegetarianism

We’re studying Genesis in my small group. One of the discussion questions, after we had looked at what Gen 1-2 tell us about life before the fall, was “what steps could we take to live closer to this story?

I asked them what they thought of vegetarianism as such a step – hedging this about with all sorts of qualifiers that I don’t think this story FORBIDS eating meat and I recognize that the consumption of meat plays a very important role in the Bible. Still (I didn’t say this at the time), I think it’s possible to distinguish between certain things that God is willing to put up with in certain cultural contexts, like slavery and polygamy, but also recognize that they are not ideal, and that we can move beyond them. (Granted, God never told anyone to commit polygamy or own slaves, and he did tell people to eat meat. But on the other hand, meat was so important because it was related to sacrifice, which was a response to sin, and since Jesus was the ultimate sacrifice to end all sacrifices, is there any longer any theological significance for Christians to eating meat? Nope. Our symbols are bread and wine.)

I may be reaching here b/c I’m personally uncomfortable with eating meat (though I do do it) – because I love animals, I feel unabashedly sentimental about them (I’m not a subsistence farmer living on the edge of existence and I have that luxury) – and yet I eat them anyway, because I don’t have the strength to resist cravings.  My suggestion didn’t win any support in the small group discussion, but I’m still chewing on it as a possibility.

To back up my suggestion, I noted:

- 1) God explicitly gave the plants as food to both men and animals; he said nothing about men eating animals.

- 2) Several lines are devoted to Adam’s naming the animals, nothing is said about his naming plants. This is in the context of Adam’s being lonely and God having decided to make him a helper – animals are then brought to Adam to name, but none of them is a suitable helper – the Bible is emphasizing the difference between animals and people. But I wondered if one could also tease out the fact that the Bible also recognizes a difference between animals and plants – animals here seem to have a relationship with Adam that plants don’t.

- 3) Nothing is said about animals being killed until Adam and Eve have sinned and God kills them to make clothes for A&E. How could anything that happens as a consequence of the first sin be ideal?

- 4) See this description of the eschaton, the consummation of all things:

The wolf shall dwell with the lamb,

and the leopard shall lie down with the young goat,

and the calf and the lion and the fattened calf together;

and a little child shall lead them.

The cow and the bear shall graze,

their young shall lie down together;

and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.

…

They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain.

- Is. 9: 6-7, 9

(It just occurred to me that this could be an entirely human-centric passage – maybe the point is not that humans won’t kill animals, but that the predators of the animal kingdom won’t kill anymore. And it is important not to forget, as my dad pointed out, that there are also passages that describe an eschatalogical feast of tables piled high with meat.)

Someone is probably going to say that I’m taking these symbolic passages too literally…but I guess that’s a besetting weakness of mine. I understand that symbols point to something beyond themselves, but I’ve never understood why they can’t be taken literally as well (at least, when they’re symbols used by God) – why shouldn’t Genesis and the parts in the prophets say (if indirectly) something about eating meat as well as what eating or not eating meat symbolizes?

A New New Wave Gem

This (Someone Great by LCD Soundsystem) is an awesome song, which I want to share with anyone who likes this type of music and may not already know about it.  It took me a long time to track it down – I first heard it on Gossip Girl, then in Urban Outfitters, where I was mistakenly told that it was by Interpol.

(By the way, Interpol’s The Specialist is good in much the same way.)

But let me just say that, though I’m glad for the revival of what’s been my favorite pop musical aesthetic since it was the 80s, I still don’t think these hip new new-wave sounding songs hold a candle to the originals, because they rely almost purely on the repetition of cool sounds, beats and “hooks” – they lack the contrapuntal richness of, say, A-ha.  Why has that band never gotten the recognition they deserve?

Inbreaking

I just heard the choir of King’s College, Cambridge perform in our very own Hill Auditorium. It brought back memories of being in Cambridge last spring, the only place I’ve ever been apart from Jerusalem where I felt like Heaven was breaking into earth. It was a “thin place,” kind of like Battle Hill in Descent into Hell (but not nearly as scary). My first, unexpected sight of the College, while wandering aimlessly through the narrow, twisted streets of the commercial section of town, burst onto me like a foretaste of the beatific vision.

I went for the songs by Gibbon, Weelkes and Tomkins, but my favorite part of the concert turned out to be Benjamin Britten’s Antiphone, set to the words of this poem by George Herbert.

Ah, grammar. Has anyone ever thought *it* could save the world?

Sometimes I want to express something like this when I hear the academic’s favorite put-down – “that’s simplistic!”

Fundamental to human cognition is the ability to conceptualize experience at different levels, to process the world around us to varying degrees os specificity and detail. The notion of granularity (Hobbs 1985) — the rendering of reality to a more course- or fine-grained level — is introduced to describe this basic characteristic of cognition, and so, of natural language …. When a speaker conceptualizes an event, he does so with a certain level of precision. At this arbitrary level of precision, as Croft (1991: 164) explains, some concepts are presented as irreducible even though they may be further reduced at some finer-grained level of conceptualization. By choosing to re-construe the event at this finer-grained level, additional details and distinctions emerge. Alternatively, the speaker may choose a coarser-grained level and focus upon the bare essentials of an event, ignoring much of the detail. (73)

–Christopher Woods. The Grammar of Perspective: The Sumerian Conjugation Prefixes as a System of Voice. Brill, 2008.