Playmaker's Theater:
Here I am performing the classic Fig Newton Pose in front of Playmaker's Theater in Chapel Hill, where I went to undergraduate school. I took one course in drama, Drama 35, entitled "Beginning Acting for Non-majors." It was great. We took a trip there a month or so ago. This was our first trip to Chapel Hill since we moved to North Raleigh three years ago. I miss my time there as a student, even though I got bored with most of the classes, and could not find an interesting major to do. I was probably too much into training as a middle distance runner to be interested in formal schooling. Plus, they did not have a theology major at that time, and that was overwhelmingly my dominant academic interest: Theology, Queen of the Sciences.
From Got Questions Dot Org, we leave you with the following quote:
Although the scholastic standard has changed in our world, a Christian’s belief in biblical inerrancy supports theology as “queen.” The Bible warns us to avoid “the opposing ideas of what is falsely called knowledge” (1 Timothy 6:20). Rather, we should strive to “correctly handle the word of truth” (2 Timothy 2:15). Theology truly is the starting place for learning. “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge” (Proverbs 1:7).
Our Sunday school teacher today asked us whether we had had the experience of receiving a thought which we knew did not originate with us. He gave an example of doing counseling and you have a question come to you to pose to a troubled person; it is the perfect question to ask in that context, turning him to God and away from himself; and you are darned sure you have never thought of it before.
Conversation Stopper:
His wife, sitting on the second row, chimed in, "But how do you know you have not heard of this thought before? You have been reading Scripture daily for decades, and you might well have read this in the Bible and forgotten it." He seemed to acknowledge that she had a point, not that he snapped his fingers and pointed to her with his index fingers, saying, "Good point, Sally!" Rather, he said that this was a serious concern, "How can we know that God told us to do something? As soon as somebody says, 'God told me to.', that is the end of the conversation. There is nothing more you can say."
Heat in the Kitchen:
I have read where people accuse others of being homophobic or racist, and after hearing this quite a few times, it occurred to me that this accusation does not really contribute anything to the end of engaging another person in honest conversation. Given that there was usually no plausible evidence in the reported conversations I had read that the accused possessed any convincing preponderance of the qualities normally associated with a homophobic or a racist person, it thereby seemed clear that the accuser was not truly interested in discovering truth in a fair interchange with an "authentic other" (Think "Buberesque I/Thou quality of respect") so much as he had evidently begun to feel that his argument was not so water tight as he had initially perhaps assumed. It seemed he had gotten in over his head, and now had two dominant goals: 1) to end the conversation as soon as he could, and 2) to retain a sense of self-respect, using an ad hominem attack to deftly deflect the focus of attention away from himself.
Out of the Blue:
I have had the feeling that a thought came to me utterly out of the blue. I remember getting these thoughts when struggling with the task of coming up with a new pattern in juggling (team club passing) choreography. I sat with my buddy, Tom, and we would churn our puzzlers (brains) to devise a solution to a problem in our passing routine we were working on creating, such as how to make a smooth, elegant transition from one pattern to another, or how to make a whole new pattern work. Occasionally, we would have to leave it alone and then a solution would come to me while I was doing something else, running, biking, walking down the streets of Boone, NC, or even while sleeping! It was a splendid feeling, as though I were part of something greater than I.
Statecraft:
I have also had the same feeling when I was working on the creation of a game, Statecraft. That took four or five years, and over the course of that time, my inspiration would come and go. When it came, it was eerie how much it felt that I was just a vessel through which the Holy Spirit worked in the act of creation. That was some of the toughest thinking I have ever had to do, and I would puzzle over certain apparently unsolvable problems for so long that it finally seemed as if the problem were lifted from me, and thereafter I was but a passive, engaged witness to the continued process of the solution discovery.
Grass and the Good Neighbor:
I cut some of my neighbor's grass today, after we got home from church. It had gotten pretty tall, over a foot, and I think he may be in jail; I saw a host of police cars lined up outside his house a couple of years ago, and he has been gone pretty much since then. They were hauling plants out of the house which looked remarkably similar to photos I have seen of marijuana. As a mere passerby, I paused to ask one federal agent if that was marijuana they were taking out of the house, and he said, "I can't say it is and I can't say it is not." It took that to be a Yes.
One Third:
The real question is whether this plant, cannabis, was around in its current form before the Fall, or whether it acquired it current intoxicating constitution after the Fall. In an article in Business Week from along about 2003 a Harvard economist stated that one third of prisoners in U.S. men's prisons were there for minor marijuana possession charges. He said they learned helplessness and other bad traits while in prison and when they came out, this made them far less likely to contribute positively to the economy, while making them far more likely to commit a crime which would return them to prison.
Radical Cultural Incommensurability:
Prison culture, as I understand it, is rather different from the external culture at large. I am not a full believer in the crowing of anthropology which avers that all actions of a certain culture are moral with respect to that culture. Rather, I believe there is a greater morality, transcending cultural barriers, and from that, we can make judgments, saying certain cultural practices reflect a lower moral awareness. I would rank headhunting, live wife burning (when the chief dies, in tribes of India) and clitoradectomy among this sort.
Love, Nathaniel
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