Jubilee!

I'm back from my whirlwind trip to Pittsburgh for the Jubilee Conference run by the Coalition for Christian Outreach. It was a fantastic weekend for a number of reasons - especially catching up with old friends! The theme of Jubilee this year (and every year) is connecting your faith to what you do in the classroom, the gym, the club, the grocery store, and anywhere else (sound familiar Calvin people?). The difference is that the CCO is often giving people their first exposure to this. As a campus ministry organization that works on both secular and Christian campuses, they're teaching people for the first time that a Christian doctor does things differently because he or she is a Christian (and that doesn't mean just praying for patients either). The Saturday afternoon seminars are chosen by area of academic interest, so you can learn about teaching as a Christian, business as a Christian, politics as a Christian, etc. (Check out the list of seminars here) Again, this is nothing new for Calvin folk, but what was new and refreshing was watching other people respond to it. Their passion reminded me why this stuff is so important. We've beat the idea of a Christian worldview to death at Calvin, but the truth is that it's an important concept. Being told to engage culture with discernment causes a gag reflex for us, but I saw people this weekend being freed from a lifetime of watching and listening to crap simply because it's "Christian." I also saw people genuinely struggling to understand why the most important thing for a talented musician who is a Christian might not be to preach about Jesus in their songs. I don't want to sound to high on Calvin here, but we often take it for granted.

The main plenary speakers were the highlight for me. Again, nothing revolutionary, but solid, Biblical teaching that encouraged us to be forces for positive change by interacting with the world in the name of Jesus. The lineup included Elaine Storkey, a lecturer at Wycliffe Hall in Oxford and president of Tearfund - a international charity, Saleem Ghubril, a one-time Lebanese refugee who is now the head of the Pittsburgh Project and actually got to deliver the eulogy at Mr. Rogers' funeral (yes, that Mr. Rogers), and John Perkins, the Mississippi civil rights activist and community development worker who really needs no introduction. They were all excellent in their own ways: Storkey for raising awareness of prominent global issues (specifically international debt and global warming) and discussing a Christian response to them, Ghubril for his heartwarming and convicting challenge to get involved, and Perkins for his inspiring call to be a force for change in our communities and churches. (For more detailed bios check this out).

One of the seminars I went to was by Carl Trueman, a professor at Westminster Seminary. Now I'm not really high on Westminster, but this guy spoke on a topic that is near and dear to my heart: the idolatry of the theological practice. Scholars of theology need to talk about how to be a Christian theologian because it's not as simple as it seems. How do you keep a balance between talking about God and talking to God? How can you be a good parishioner when you know more about theology or the bible than your pastor does? And, most importantly, how do you prevent the subtle shift from worshipping God to worshipping knowledge of God? Trueman did a very nice job with his discussion, though it had the overtones of a conservative who sees himself as in constant battle with the ultra-liberal academy.

I also had another big question answered for me this weekend: yes, it is possible to modulate eight times in one song. Don't get me wrong - the worship leader was terrific and thoughtful, his band was tight, and everything was well done - but the man simple loved to modulate! He was good at it and it always felt very smooth and appropriate. Yet, I can't help wondering if it was too much. I wonder if I was the only one who noticed (I'm pretty confident I'm not). And I also wonder why nobody ever modulates down. Why can't we drop a song of confession down a half step before the last refrain to add that extra depth of despair? Can't we throw a few downward modulations in the next kyrie we sing? This is lent after all!

So, all in all, I had a wonderful weekend of Jubilee! I even got to spend an hour walking around the 'Burgh feeling homesick for Pennsylvania. Maybe I'll try to post some of my pictures later.

it's back!

On yet another unrelated side note, I'm proudly wearing my L.A. Dodgers t-shirt because pitchers and catchers report for spring training today. The Dodgers themselves don't report until the 18th, but I couldn't help myself. Only 45 days until opening day!

a word about my title

Several people (well, at least one) have asked me about the name of this blog. The Oxford English Dictionary defines bemusing as, "making utterly confused or muddled, as with intoxicating liquor; putting into a stupid stare, stupefying." Now I have a thing for syntactic ambiguity in sentences. Sentences like "Kent is cooking in the kitchen" are particularly delightful. Is Kent stirring the pot, or is he in the pot? So, back to my title, that wonderful little apostrophe leaves the meaning up for grabs.

Depending on if the "s" is possessive or the contraction, it could mean the content of this blog is stupefying, or that I am personally the intoxicating liquor. Or, with a little creativity, it could even refer to the fact that I'm "Given to or characterized by meditation; contemplative, thoughtful, dreamy" (the adjective form of musing). (On a side note, I've always wanted to be dreamy...) But my point here is that between this sort of ambiguity and the incredible synonymy of English we have an amazing language to play with and enjoy. (Another side note, "synonymy" has three "y"s in it. I can't think of any other three-"y" words, let alone a word with more than three. Anybody else have one?) So seeing English as a merely functional thing is a tragedy. As for which of those meanings I was going for when I named this blog? That's right, all of them.

KJV God?

Two thoughts from my Reformation Theology lecture:

1) Today we were told that the late Middle Ages was a time of "great upheaval and turmoil." While I'm sure this is true (Bubonic Plague, corrupt Papacy, rise of the nation state, the first rumblings of the renaissance, etc.), I feel like I've now heard every era of human history described this way. You can move straight from the Late Middle Ages into the Reformation era and on into the Enlightenment and you still have turmoil and upheaval. Then you get the Romantics and the Moderns with their vast attempts to recreate society before arriving at the wars and Postmodernity and finally our current information age - still plenty of "upheaval and turmoil" as far as I can see. When are we going to get the fact that these will be a part of life as long as we're on this side of the eschaton?

2) We got into a discussion of the importance of having scripture translated into vernacular languages which prompted our professor to talk lovingly about the King James Version he grew up on. He claimed he still has trouble addressing God as "you" (as opposed to "thou") and suggested a return to "thee"s and "thou"s might be advantageous to the church because we have no formal language for God today. The direct quote is, "We talk about God as we might talk about a rock star." I agree with him that we have no such formal language, but is a return to KJV English really the solution? Is this really a problem? When does reverence trump clarity? Can we be reverent while speaking the way we usually do? One of the things everyone says about my grandfather is that he preached in a different voice than he normally used. I'll admit that makes a lot of sense to me. I'm not advocating "thee" and "thou," but can we do something to our language that can instill a sense of awe to our worship?

objectivity in biology

This morning I sat through my first biology lecture in 6 years. It's been a while, but it's all coming back to me - especially the phospho-lipid bilayer. Today, however, we laid a little groundwork for our future discussions of cell biology. Part of that was Del Ratzsch's definition of science:

"Science is a theoretical explanatory discipline that objectively addresses natural phenomena with the general constraints that theories must be rationally connectable to generally specifiable empirical phenomena and that it normally does not leave the natural realm for the concepts employed in its explanations."

Besides being a mouthful, this brings up some interesting questions for me, primarily with my professor's view of objectivity. He claimed that in the scientific realm objectivity meant examining and addressing all data available, not just data that supports your claims. For him objectivity was not necessarily about approaching a question without prejudice or bias, except when they prevent you from examining certain data. The more I think about this way of looking at objectivity, the more I like it. We obviously have our prejudices, but objectivity is lost when they blind us to information out there.

It's got me thinking about objectivity as a form of humility. In the scientific sense, we lose it when we start to think we don't need data from certain sources. An unbiased person has the humility to acknowledge and evaluate information from all sources. Any thoughts from the peanut gallery?