Posts

Showing posts from July, 2017
Image
In the garden of our innocence And the Lord God said, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.” So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken. After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life. (Genesis 3: 22-24, NIV) It’s called The Fall , human kind’s transition from innocence to consciousness. In the creation story, it happens suddenly with the eating of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. In Darwinian evolution, the transition from animalistic to humanistic is gradual, centuries and centuries of the fittest, the most knowledgeable, the ones with the biggest brains surviving and thriving while their fellows perish, so that the species eventually develops the level

. . . and Nothing but the Truth

Image
Sunflowers mentor truth A recent discussion on an NPR’s TED Talk took aim at the meaning of truth and untruth in our day. These conversations aren’t new. Such discussion came up in relation to Literature in the classes I taught—and took at the U of A—, particularly around novel studies. I found that high school students were usually thinking factual when they said, true, as in, “I like true stories!” These concepts are hard to clarify; by the time we reach adulthood, we use the words true, false, lie glibly and with the assumption that we all mean the same things when we use them. The discussion also came up when writers in the 18 th and 19 th Centuries began writing imagined  lives at great length and were charged with publishing lies. In some conservative Christian circles today, reading novels for that very reason is frowned upon. But: “[Early] novelists dropped pretense of writing history, because they were convinced that their new genre was truer than his

"M," "F," or "U?"

Image
A door is a hole in a wall with a cover. (Snerd's words for the birds) USA based Christian Week carried a story about the issuing of a gender-neutral health card to a baby in BC, in Canada. It seems that the parent believes it to be inappropriate for officialdom to pronounce on the gender of a child before the child is old enough for gender preference to be evident. The article opened the door for all kinds of “gender-secure” (cis-gender) persons to weigh in; one terse comment on the Facebook reprint of the article was a simple: “Crapp.” And Franklin Graham weighed in with a complete non sequitur on the subject: Graham argued in his response that the only way for a person to ever be complete is by "trusting Jesus Christ, the Son of God, as our Lord and Savior." "The Bible says we can be 'complete in Him.' He fills the void in our hearts, and can give us the 'peace of God which surpasses all understanding,'" he stated.

What's at the root?

Image
Room to let in Arles; 500 Francs per month.  An envelope arrived in the mail . My summer student and I and a board member were sitting around in the museum and I said, “Hey, it’s money!” when I opened the envelope. “I love it when it’s a cheque and not a bill.” There followed a brief conversation about money, and the inevitable saying, “The love of money is the root of all evil.” It was a short conversation. We seemingly don’t know what to make of our conflicted attitudes around money. For one, the proverb is obviously just a proverb, a saying. Evil has more than one possible root: anger, lust, jealousy, disappointment, ambition, vengefulness, can all lie at its root, very human emotions and longings that can lead to dark thoughts, harmful actions. But if the evil content of our lives can sometimes be measured out in dollar signs, so surely can the good that we do be assigned a root , like, “The love of _____ is the root of all goodness.” With what word would you o

The Order of Things

Image
Rembrandt's Mennonite Preacher and Wife In part, it was a preoccupation of another age, the obsession with the order of things. Who or which is the highest in God’s eyes, who or what is next, is the soldier greater than the blacksmith in the eyes of the Creator who made both? Who or what must show deference to whom or what to satisfy the plan that the Creator established when, for instance, he gave mankind dominion over the animals and plants? Are kings greater than bishops? Are men greater than women? Are children more or less than servants? Would the world cease to function if the established order were ever ignored or discarded? For a description of what was postulated in the Middle Ages to be the hierarchical nature of creation, The Great Chain of Being, click HERE . The result of such a sensibility has been a perception of worth that touches us all; we respect medical doctors more than garbage collectors, the difference reflected in the pay with which we r