the_sentry's Xanga

Wednesday, January 25, 2006

Wed, 25 Jan 2006 05:12:16 GMT

On Sufjan Stevens and the "born-again" phrase. On the expression that sends some into mystery while others into repulsion: born-again. Once while hearing a Catholic priest speak, I witnessed him almost crawl out of his skin at this phrase, at the question "Are you born-again?" Somebody in his past asked him, and and he responded, "I come from Poland. I have been all over Europe. People don't ask you there if you are born-again Christian or not in Europe. Yet when I came to America 6 years ago that is a familiar question that has been posed to me. And every time I am asked, I remain thinking 'Is person unsure of his faith, that he has to ask of mine?'"

I don't think it is the best phrase, and I think it is overused, yet I feel one cannot dance around the centrality, the magnificence, the starting point of salvation. And if slogan-obsessed Christians continue insisting on making the phrase an obese, uncomfortable elephant in the room, than woe to them to sticking to their borrowed, rusted guns.

The Ssss Ssss the man the Sss ss: Sufjan Stevens (an Episcopalian) has been building a bonfire in the music industry of late adding the delicate folk, intricate choral pieces, banjo whispers, and high school cheers that has been burning so mightily that its fire has won him many diverse listeners. I have listened to several music acts lately from Emmylou Harris to Old Crow Medicine Show to Nirvana to Nico to Common. Yet Sufjan's album "Seven Swans" has now a special place in my heart. "Seven Swans" is the only album that allows me to mystically drift through the music. Too many albums make you tense by the end while this album eases the tension, and unchains you to glide in the wind. It has been weaving its way into my character, and along with N.T.Wright and occasional visits to the Episcopal churches in town, the majesty and reverrence of Anglican Christianity is becoming increasingly appealing. Reading the Lord's Prayer, singing the Hymns, surrounding each other in God's symbolism, acknowledging God's grandeur in architecture, all in unison of the worshipping community, is is is is is... purificatory and joyfull, people! Well enough about this, and let's hear what Sufjan Stevens had to say on the meaning of being born-again:

Sufjan Stevens, from the Oct/Nov 2005 issue of Plan B Magazine:

This is what it means to be born again: to fully and completely disengage with the preconceptions and preoccupations of the adult world and its religions, to dismantle all laws - of physics and society - and yield yourself to the birth canal, and what comes after, in which everything begins to shake and tremble with all senses fully turned to the centre of the universe, the creator, God the Father, in whose cultivation we begin to know and understand our true selves, our real selves, as a reflection of God's image, his creation, like newborn babies, full, fresh, suckling, elated and laughing at everything... I'd like to spend less time talking about God and more time being in God's presence. I think that would put an end to this conversation, once and for all.

Tuesday, January 24, 2006

Tue, 24 Jan 2006 04:31:31 GMT

A brand new semester brings professors of geology who put "Reminder" in the middle of the first page of syllabus to remind us what they think education is. Here's what my geology professor came up with:

"The essence of education is an attempt to model beliefs and opinion in accordance with reason and facts, so far as they are known. The intensity of a belief does not make it correct or valid no matter how widely shared."

Hmmmmm...... I guess he does not believe in miracles.

Tuesday, January 24, 2006

Tue, 24 Jan 2006 04:26:26 GMT

I was on the Internet today and I found all of this, somehow:

 "What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and; anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding." — Friedrich Nietzsche, On truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense

 "I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives." — Leo Tolstoy

Graduate student commits suicide

Dec. 4, 1997

By Lori Lenarduzzi

Staff Writer for The Baylor Lariat

Oatman 'Mike' Green, a 47-year-old Georgetown philosophy graduate student, died from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head on Nov. 22, according to Sgt. Pete Hughey, an investigator for the Williamson County Sheriff's Office.

Green left behind a wife and two children, ages 17 and 14. Funeral services were Nov. 25 at Gabriel Funeral Home in Georgetown. A burial with full military honors followed at a cemetery a few miles from there.

Green had a bachelor's degree from Dallas Baptist University and two master's degrees from Southwestern University. He was an active-duty army chaplain who was completing a master's degree in ethics, according to Lydell Stike, an Austin graduate student. Stike was also sent on orders by the army to participate in the same program. He was a friend of Green's and spoke at his funeral.

'Mike's death was very unexpected and just a tragic death,' Stike said. 'It's hard to understand.'

Stike said Green's family was doing as well as could be expected. He said they were appreciative of the kindness from students and friends.

Dr. Robert Baird, chairman of the philosophy department, said the department is grieved over Green's death.

'We thoroughly enjoyed having Mike in class,' Baird said. 'He was much appreciated.'

Chris Blakley, a Garland graduate student said that Green will be missed in the department.

'Mike was a nice guy with a lot of great stories,' Blakley said. 'His death really makes you think about how precious life is.'

Comments or Questions can be sent to The Lariat

Wednesday, December 28, 2005

Wed, 28 Dec 2005 22:12:39 GMT

“All those years of Jacques Derrida and we still got George Bush.” -some smart guy

Wednesday, August 31, 2005

Wed, 31 Aug 2005 18:51:18 GMT

"Thinking can never answer its own ultimate 'Why?' because each answer only generates a new 'Why?'"

-Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Friday, August 26, 2005

Fri, 26 Aug 2005 21:23:43 GMT

Some people think they have the choice to try God before one buys God.

Thursday, July 21, 2005

Thu, 21 Jul 2005 02:20:51 GMT

"For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries." -Dr. Robert Jastrow, Director Emeritus of Mount Wilson Observatory and founder of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies

1. Jastrow, Robert God and the Astronomers
W.W. Norton & Company, New York 1978 p. 116. For more on Jastrow's comments on the Big Bang, see http://www.leaderu.com/truth/1truth18b.html

Friday, June 10, 2005

Fri, 10 Jun 2005 18:28:51 GMT

Footnote

By Sheldon Vanuaken

His first poem about the '60s

(Written in 1959, published in 1967)

Spectacled little scholar

Scribbling away in the stacks

Walled off from life in the library

Turning out lifeless books

Books about books that live

Forming the learned footnotes

Concepts to classify

Label but never believe

Sonnets and songs to dissect

Muting both music and meaning

Adoring nothing at all

Not life or the Christ or the poem

Branches and trunk without leaves

Lost in a lifeless limbo

Of ambiguities

While kids cry freedom and cops

Strike blood at the barricades

And about the buttressed towers

Is the roar of the rising wind

"...against the timid and, above all, against the sort of scholar who never connects up ideas and life- who talks about freedom without believing in it, who deals learnedly with the New Testament accounts of Jesus but thinks his objectivity would be impaired by belief. Strangely enough, he never supposes that disbelief mars objectivity." Sheldon Vanauken

Wednesday, June 01, 2005

Wed, 01 Jun 2005 16:25:55 GMT

C.S. Lewis writes the following to a young man included in the book "Severe Mercy":

"No: a glimpse is not a vision. But to a man on a mountain road by night, a
glimpse of the next three feet of road may matter more than a vision of the
horizon. And there must perhaps be always just enough lack of demonstrative
certainty to make free choice possible: for what could we do but accept if
the faith were like the multiplication table?"
-C.S. Lewis

From the book "Under the Mercy":

"If we deny the existence of beauty, we don't disprove the dawn and lilacs;
we disprove our ability to see." -Sheldon Vanauken

"The only reason for asking is to get an answer. The only reason for seeking is to find (not to maintain one's 'Seeker's Status'). The only reason for an open mind is to fill it with truth- as open eyes are to see with. Or an open mouth to snap at a bit of steak. Otherwise, a mouth that just hangs open indicates vacuity; and a mind for ever open on all the great questions is no less a mark of vacuity. But when one finds- finds love or finds truth- it becomes (or ought to become) a constancy in one's life. Those questions are answered, and one needs no longer be concerned with them, except to help others seeking answers. But new questions pose themselves. If one discovers that the meaning of existence is to be found in Christ, then the question of what is the Church, irrelevant before, may become urgent. So a further answer must be sought."

-Sheldon Vanauken

Tuesday, May 17, 2005

Tue, 17 May 2005 19:28:30 GMT

"No man ever sank under the burden of the day. It is when tomorrow's burden is added to the burden of today that the weight is more than a man can bear. Never load yourself so. If you find yourself so loaded, at least remember this: it your own doing, not God's. He begs you to leave the future to him, and mind the present."

~ George MacDonald