Reintroductory Post, Part 2

Yay for bullet-point overviews.

Last semester:

• I started getting a handle on this whole "English major" business. Mostly through total immersion (three classes at once!). Huzzah for "close readings," low(er) grades, and DOOM.
  
  
• There's many, many incarnations of the Christian life. And many takes on what "in the world, not of it" looks like. I figured out where I fall, and what camp I want to live in. "Let every man be firmly convinced in his own mind" -- I'm glad I finally am.
  
  
• Rootedness.
  
  
• Old friends. New friends. A very dear friend.
  
  
• Trusting God about the present and the future. One of those easy things to know theoretically, and hard to know practically.
  
  
• Why do you say, O Jacob,
  and speak, O Israel,
  "My way is hidden from Yahweh,
  and my right is disregarded by my God"?
  Have you not known? Have you not heard?
  Yahweh is the everlasting God,
  the Creator of the ends of the earth.
  He does not faint or grow weary;
  his understanding is unsearchable.
  He gives power to the faint,
  and to him who has no might he increases strength.
  
  
• Figured out which church I'm attending up here, and why.
  
  
• Figured out (erm...as much as one can) the proper relationship of reason, experience, and revelation.
  
  
• I figured out what I want to do after I graduate. Or at least narrowed it down.

Christmas break:
I got a job working the cash register at Chic-Fil-A. The employees there are great people (though sometimes a bit crazy :)), and I had a blast. If you ever go there, get the chicken breakfast biscuit and a cookies and cream milkshake.

I also took a lot of long walks around the Air Force Base (some of them in possibly off-limits places). I saw a way of Christian living work and validate itself. I learned to understand and appreciate my church back home. And I got some cool presents.

This semester so far:

• "Virtue is in action." (Cicero)
  
  
• Wise men are slow to speak. They don't get angry easily. And I think they walk slowly, too, and take notes slowly. ("They know how to think about time," as Michelle says). All of these, I need a lot of work on.

Reintroductory Post, Part 1

So...yeah. It's been a while.

I took a good semester off. And a Christmas break. 'Twas a most beneficial and necessary thing.

I'm sure I had some good thoughts about something during that time. It's all pretty much a blur, though, and I wish I'd kept a better record of it than scattered longhand scribblings.

I'll let my sister Emily help summarize the situation:

Emily: "So...Ree! What have YOU been doing at college (besides exams and stuff)??"
Me: "Mmm...growing up, mostly."
Emily: "That sounds rough."
Me: "Yeah -- it kinda is."
Emily: "Well -- just think. In February you'll be 21, and able to DRINK! And that will be the biggest step of all."
Me: "I love you, Em."

So -- hey y'all (again), and hopefully I'll occasionally have something somewhere worth saying here. ;)

Hillsdale Construction

Red has been amusing herself by labeling photos of the construction going on up at the Hillsdale campus:

Here's a blank picture.

Here's her first one.

Here's the second one.

Perhaps more to come.

Absolutes and Stuff

::lightbulb:: You don't have to understand "absolutes" to understand absolute allegiance.

Now I've got to figure out exactly what I mean by that. That may take a while. Something along the lines of, "you don't have to make people philosophers to make them Christians" and "you're banging your head against a brick wall trying to explain sin and morality and responsibility that particular way (at least to the average person alive today)...there's a much more direct and accessible and understandable route available."

I'm getting closer, I think...and one day I'll finally write my 666 page critique of presuppositional apologetics and apologetics in general (as they're normally done, at least), and get rich and famous. :)

Hmm. And considering I rather despise slogans, I probably shouldn't go about making them. But, hey. If you can't beat em', join em...or something like that.

Initial Thoughts on My Summer Reading (Finally!)

I've done a good bit of reading this summer...and not terribly organized, either. I'm rather at a loss to summarize much of anything, so I'm just going to go "link happy," and throw out a scattered list of some of the better (or cooler, or more interesting, or more noteworthy, or funnier, or more influential, or more random) stuff I've run across.

There's of course Peter Leithart. And Mark Horne. And the whole Federal Vision gang. On the FV deal...I've fallen quite heavily on one side of it (at least when people start forcing there to be sides), and am staying there for a while. It's been immensely helpful to me, drawing together and giving viable, livable solutions to many many nagging questions and concerns.

On to books...there's Leithart's Against Christianity. It's most certainly biased, one-sided "theological haiku." But, like Chesterton, he at least knows he's exaggerating. And of course I rather like his emphasis on the church as a counter-polis, "salvation" being saved INTO something, and theology as something other than systematic philosophy. :)

You can find the article it was based off of here...but the book definitely presents it a bit better. Or at least a bit more beautifully.

I have a love-hate thing going with Doug Wilson. But he hits the nail dead center with this.

This was pretty cool, as well.

And of course I'm partial to everything in this book -- so much so that I'm not reading any more of it until I can think a bit more objectively about the whole matter, and endure solid disagreement to some of the things I'm so knee-jerkedly attracted to.

And then there's Deuteronomy. God reveals himself and his character through his actions and promises. Israel was a foothold of a sweeping redemption stretching from Abraham to the eschaton. And we're supposed to anthropomorphise. Among other things. :)

There's James Jordan's Through New Eyes. He certainly seems to go a bit off the deep end in places. But for every one of those, there's something like this:

To help us understand the nature and purpose of the world as God created it, let us imagine an alternate world. Let us imagine an infinite, or at least nearly infinite, flat plain. This flat plain is inhabited by people. These people exist to glorify God. They do this by praising Him, and by developing in their social relationships with one another. These people never need to sleep, and so there is no alternating of night and day. These people get their energy directly from the Holy Spirit, so there is no need for food. There are no animals, plants, or gemstones in this world. There are only people, interacting with God and with other people, on a nearly infinite flat plain.

He reads the Bible like a poet, and it is beautiful. Read it even if you think Jordan is pretty much utterly whacked -- he's probably still got some very good and useful and helpful counterbalances. (Shucks -- read it even if you could care less about the Bible, but want to see some darn good worldbuilding and poetic material. :))

Apparently, Leithart considers his own Old Testament survey -- A House For My Name as "Through New Eyes for Dummies."

Steve Wilkins preached the two of the most amazing sermons I've ever heard. A good bit of the material seems replicated in this book.

I've no link for this...but "allegiance" is a freaking awesome conceptualization of the Christian life. So is "union with Christ."

There's also this piece, which summarizes some of my own re-conceptions of many OT passages pretty well. Or at least gets across what I mean when I say, "fighting sovereignty."

And, yeah...N.T. Wright is amazing. Not perfect -- who is?, but still one of the best apologist-theologians out there. Here's him on Easter, and on the Christian imagination, and on the virgin birth. I've included the last one as an example of his basic apologetical method, which is miles ahead of that of most Christian writers out there. At least in terms of persuasiveness to those "outside the tent"...take my word for it on that one. ;)

Leaving off theology for a second...Lim is back (YAY!!!), and is sounding like Dr. Stewart. :) Also, I finally read her Hounds of Spring novella (continued here). ::jawdrop:: Ignore the karma mumbo jumbo (and the lack of decent red herrings). It's a story about sin and evil and justice and grace, and differing responses to the bentness of a fallen world. (Or maybe I was just tired and reading WAY too much into it. :)) If nothing else, the worldbuilding is unique (as always).

Favorite movie review read this summer: this one, on A. I. It talks about love, and I needed a good whap upside the head about that. Also, I was one of the stupid people who thought the weird things at the end were aliens. :)

This was just plain funny. So is this.

And, still having in the back of my mind Laura C.'s comment -- "all the writers we admire seem to be Catholic or high church!" -- here's one of the better analyses I've seen to date of why evangelicals "can't write".

If I remember anything else, I'll tack it up later. But that should be enough for now. :)

Arthur Farwell...Deja Vu

Remember Arthur Farwell? And his grand dream of nationalistic "community music pagents"? And his absolute conviction that they would be the wave of the future?

I've seen one.

On our vacation to the Outer Banks of North Carolina last week, we stopped by several touristy sites, including Roanoke Island. There's an outdoor theatre production running there during the summer, entitled The Lost Colony. It's been playing since the 1930s -- the only time it didn't run was during WWII, when the stage lighting would have been visible to Nazi submarines off the coast.

It was originally commissioned by the island residents to celebrate the history of the area and the American founding. Then, riding on the coattails of the New Deal, the producers received a grant from the government to continue staging it, and even got a theatre thrown in to boot. (As my dad remarked, "timing is everything.") There's more on the history of the production here.

Watching that thing was amazing, if only because it was seeing the second half of my research paper in action. Everything was there -- nationalism by the bucketload, hymns and songs and choruses, and connection to the local community.

Aside from that...it wasn't so amazing. The plotting and pacing and music were decidedly mediocre. There's a rather horrendously imposed romantic subplot. And the historical accuracy leaves a quite a bit to be desired. One can make the costumes more accurate over the years (they drastically improved the Native American ones), but the narrative is still bleeding the 1930s and its concerns and prejudices all over the place. There's a heavy dose of "YAY AMERICAN VALUES! YAY AMERICA! YAY PIONEERS! YAY TURNER THESIS!" So you pretty much have to watch it as a fascinating snapshot into the era in which it was written, not as a closely accurate (or even well-produced) docu-drama.

Still...wow. I wasn't expecting something like that, going in, and it was pretty cool to get a belated epilogue to my semester of research. :)

News

Most recently, I have...

• learned to play a scale on the trumpet.
  
• pretty much mastered all the white-belt stuff I'll need for the Tae Kwon Do testing next Friday (bwahaha)
  
• transformed computer paper into elegant stationary. (Water does amazing things).
  
• started a zoology course at Hampton University (and greatly contributed to the campus's racial diversity...)

Admittedly not as exciting as the lives of many of my friends, who are off galivanting around in foreign countries. :-P But you take what you can get. :-)

Tae Kwon Do (Woh-Pah!)

I've been attending Tae Kwon Do classes for about a month.

One of my brothers started taking lessons several years ago; my other four siblings picked it up last fall. I finally gave in after coming home and realizing that they knew how to kill me 27.5 different ways, and that I didn't even know how to land a punch.

Plus, roundhouse spinning back kicks are just plain cool. I defy anyone to watch them being practiced day in and day out, and not get even a slight bit jealous.

So, hoping I wouldn't have to break too many boards, or do anything else that would splinter the little tiny bones in my hand I rather desperately need to play the piano, I trudged along with them to class.

Grand list of accomplishments so far:

• I can count to eight in Korean!
  
• I can do a roundhouse kick (and hit the target 40% of the time!)
  
• I can make my littlest brother collapse on the floor laughing as he watches me practice my fighting moves! ("No, no, silly -- not like THAT! The guy is over there!")
  
• And I can make it through the white belt form. :) And, yeah, I've broken the obligatory board.

So...assuming I don't do anything stupid at testing at the end of the month, I'll be a yellow belt by the time I get back to college. (Bwahaha!) And someday I'll finish hacking out how TKD has cemented my views on liturgical worship and the sacraments... ;)