(H/T The Senator)
That Word above all earthly powers
No thanks to them abideth
The Spirit and the gifts are ours
Through Him who with us sideth
Let good and kindred go, this mortal life also
The body they may kill, God’s truth abideth still
His kingdom is forever
For the idea behind the church is to give way to the kingdom, to proclaim and enact and finally disappear into the kingdom that Jesus called for, all the while resisting the temptation of confusing itself with the kingdom.
John D. Caputo, What Would Jesus Deconstruct? The Good News of Postmodernism for the Church. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007. p. 35
Even though I am, apparently, and to my immense surprise, the kind of person who tells her husband that she doesn’t want to be married to him any more, I really didn’t think that I was the kind of person to say so in a car park, on a mobile phone. That particular self-assessment will now have to be revised, clearly. . . . For the majority of people, marriage-ending conversations happen only once, if at all. If you choose to conduct yours on a mobile phone, in a Leeds car park, then you cannot really claim that it is unrepresentative, in the same way that Lee Harvey Oswald couldn’t really claim that shooting presidents wasn’t like him at all. Sometimes we have to be judged by our one-offs.
Nick Horby, How to Be Good. London: Penguin Books, 2001. p. 1
H/t Pajiba
Because they are easily identifiable, minority group members also may suffer the stress of collective remorse when a member of their group is portrayed in a negative light. Korean Americans (and many Asian Americans in general), for example, spoke of the anxiety that they felt after learning of the shooting of 32 students at Virginia Tech in 2007, collectively holding their breath, hoping that the shooter was not Korean. Many expressed, almost apologetically, their dismay after learning that the shooter was in fact Korean. The killer was constantly referred to by the media as “Asian,” and later, more specifically as “Korean,” despite the fact that he had grown up in the United States and was fully assimilated. His ethnicity, of course, had no relation to the crime, but for the media, identifying and making repeated reference to it was pertinent. In contrast, consider the media treatment given Timothy McVeigh, who bombed a federal building in Oklahoma City in 1996, killing 168 people. Never was the fact that he was white and born and raised in the United States, ever mentioned; it was simply not a relevant detail. Nor did all “white” people suffer a sense of collective remorse for McVeigh’s heinous crime.
– Marger, Martin N. Race and Ethnic Relations: American and Global Perspectives. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2009. Emphasis mine.
Seriously, how did human culture thrive before people had the time and inclination to do things like analyze rappers’ hand motions? You could pull two dozen doctoral theses from this subject, for real.
Like John Lennon, God imagined a place with no religion. He called it Eden and spoke it into existence.
– Bruxy Cavey, The End of Religion. Colorado Springs: NavPress, 2007. p. 198
The ability of characters in movies to aim at and hit targets is inversely proportional to their firearms’ level of sophistication. To wit, a farmer using a musket who looks away as he fires is far more likely to get an instant killshot (see The Patriot) than a genetically-enhanced clone supersoldier with a laser rifle that can fire hundreds of shots, who will usually miss every single time, albeit just barely (see Star Wars).
I feel like I should say something about turning a corner. I feel like I have. But the fantastic thing about depression is that when you stop feeling like crap for no reason and start feeling normal, the actual, legitimate reasons for feeling like crap (limited social life, no job, etc.) are still there. Last summer, I felt on top of the world and I thought I was healed; instead I was just heading for the inevitable crash the propelled me here. Now I feel like every day is a challenge, but I know I’m heading in the right direction.
Evidence of this? For quite a long time now, my understanding of my own future, in terms of vocation, at least, has centered around two main loci: Christian ministry and writing fiction. Granted, my understanding of those has changed a little bit. Freshman year of college I wanted to be a professor of theology; now I want to find a way to balance community activism with spiritual witness and service “on the ground.” As for writing . . . well, my goals are still basically the same. Publish a novel before I’m 25, hit the bestseller lists, bask in the fame and glory, etc.
The point is, I am currently engaged in work that will hopefully carry me toward those goals. First, I’ve begun volunteering with the on-base chapel youth group. I chill with the middle-schoolers, lead small group discussions after the teaching period, and generally try and help out with whatever little things need taking care of. It’s not much, but I’m having a load of fun.
I’m also participating in National Novel Writing Month for the third time in four years. In ‘06, I wrote about 65,000 words of a sci-fi epic which I never completed. In ‘07 I entered a hypomanic fugue and produced a complete, 100,000-word novel in 30 days. Last year November coincided with my painful exit from Calvin and trip here. This year, since I haven’t been able to get the characters out of my head, I am overhauling the book I wrote in 2007 and rewriting it from the ground up, making some pretty sweeping plot changes, adding and subtracting characters, etc. 12 days into the month, I’m on pace to hit the 50,000 word target several days early with roughly 25,000 words already down, comprising four chapters.
So in two small ways I’m doing the things I want to spend the rest of my life doing. Other things are still waiting to fall into place: getting a job, expanding my social calendar, keeping up with German while I wait for the 201 class to be available in January, maybe brush up on my Greek, keep exercising in the face of constant crappy weather, and spend more time reading to trying and raise the pathetic ~2 books per month average I’ve attained so far this year. But things are clicking together, slowly. Returning to the US next summer to enroll in college for fall ‘10, which has been my goal for a long time now, seems less like a fantasy and more like a potential reality. I don’t know; that’s still a long way off. But it’s not out of reach.
I’ve never been a very good blogger, but I’m going to try and keep this up. I’m not sure I have enough insight on anything I really care about (writing, Christian faith & practice, college football) to make this worthwhile, but I’m going to give it another go. We’ll see what happens.
