[SPOILERS]
The one unified complaint from Star Wars fans about The Force Awakens seems to be that it spent most of the film paying way too much homage to the original trilogy, mostly episode 4.
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The Diderot Effect at Christmas
Who are you? What makes you who you are? Imagine you were inviting someone you just met over to your house. Except that you emptied your house of everything. You just had them come over, sit in a metal fold-out chair beside you. Oh, and your clothes are gone, except for a uniform you had to wear to a job. Now how will you tell this person who you are? How self-conscious would you feel about who they thought you were?
The things we own, the things we use and surround ourself with, become a part of who we are. We let them speak for who we are, even to ourselves. When people gift us with things, they tend to gift us things based on who they think we are. Sometimes they’re right; sometimes they’re wrong.
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“…And then he died…” The Curse of Adam Goes On
Ever read through those passages of Genesis, and get tired of all those people who are introduced, only to die in the next line?
“So all the days of Noah were nine hundred and fifty years, and he died.”
“Jared lived a total of 962 years, and he died.”
“Lamech lived a total of 777 years, and he died.”
“Kenan lived a total of 910 years, and he died.”
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To Pray, or to Politicize? —frontporchphilosopher
Source: To Pray, or to Politicize?
A PicLit
The only way I knew how to share my piclit poem. Through wordpress.
Piclit is a creative tool for using visuals and and a word bank to create a literary poem accompanied by literal imagery.
It’s a neat thing to do in your spare time, but it’s also a great tool for easing students into composing poetry. The visual inspiration is there. A word bank is there. Students don’t have to stress over creating a poem from scratch. They can rely on a set of words and combine them in any number of ways.
I think the tool speaks for itself. I tried it in my classroom once, but I will say that it may work best with middle schoolers. It’s a good digital tool to introduce students to poetry.
What I think when an abortion clinic is bombed during an Islamic terrorism crisis on Thanksgiving
I think to myself, when will we American Christians see the irony?
When we label Islam a violent religion with no teachings of peace, when we use violent rhetoric to attack doctors who perform abortions, when we treat refugees like potential threats to a country defined by mass immigration—what are we missing?
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Jesus and the EyeWitnesses: A Study with a Skeptic Friend–Conclusion- and Reflection
Conclusion and Reflection
Many current critics will argue that the Gospels are obstacles to understanding the historical Jesus, but I believe they are the means. I think what plagues many modern scholars is a distrust of the past itself, an almost disdain for people of the past. We live in an “enlightened” age in which we seem to almost study all the horrible things in the past—colonialism, slavery, sexism, war, ignorance, oppression—as if looking for little happy things that stand out because they are like the values we have today. In this way I think most current historians and textual scholars dismiss the Scriptures. As Bauckham quotes Coady,
“The independent thinker is not someone who works everything out for herself, even in principle, but one who exercises a controlling intelligence over the input she receives from the normal sources of information whether their basis be individual or communal.”
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Jesus and the EyeWitnesses: A Study with a Skeptic , Part 11—Transmitting the Jesus of Testimony
Testimony invites trust.
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Jesus and the EyeWitnesses: A Study with a Skeptic, Part 10—Testimony and Memory
If we can’t trust memory, we can’t trust anything. As Bauckham says, “trust in the word of others is fundamental to the very idea of serious cognitive activity.”
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Jesus and the EyeWitnesses: A Study with a Skeptic , Part 9—Is Oral Tradition Trustworthy?
As with our friend we studied with, we had grown up simply weaned on the idea that since the Holy Spirit directed the writing of the Gospel, God just straight up told each writer what to write word-for-word. This doesn’t explain, for example, why Luke tells Theophilus that he himself researched the Gospel accounts before writing his. So the idea of defending scriptures by appealing to them being well-researched by their authors was actually somewhat new to me. Instead, I was used to them being defended on the grounds that proof of their accuracy was direct proof of their divine origin, regardless of any research done into the story.
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CALEB COY 