The Burial of the Dead

April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

—T.S. Eliot

Sometimes I think Eliot is right on this. Certainly I agree with Chaucer that April is a month of longing. I think it can be a cruel longing at times. Perhaps part of that is from my past, rather than anything intrinsic to the month. But, at any rate, I walked around the neighborhood surrounding Covenant for about thirty or forty minutes this morning taking in the spring weather. It was great. And yet, something was missing. A few years back, I walked around Lindenwood on April days much the same way, but then joined by a dear friend I have mentioned here before. The quiet seriousness of Lindenwood's gothic architecture amidst the linden trees, and we would just walk and talk — about nearly anything. This time was solo.

Thursday afternoons are my “Marriage and Family Counseling” class. It is a great class. There has been lots of practical advice on counseling, thought provoking ideas and I appreciate Dr. Zink's humor and anecdotes. It is also a hard class. Not in terms of workload, but rather emotional toll. It is interesting, while discussing problems with marriage, the class has actually had the opposite impact on me you might expect. I mostly find it highlights in my mind my status as single and makes me wonder if I should ever be otherwise. Not only do we hear problems, but we hear solutions to many of those problems. The class has made me more optimistic about the prospects of a healthy marriage, and yet…

I have to say sometimes I wonder what God's will is for me. Sometimes, I wish life were like a book with nicely titled chapters. Even if you could only preview the table of contents, you could get some idea of where things were going. I do not think I would really want that, but I have to say there are some chapters it would be nice to know were only a couple chapters ahead.

Some days, at least. April days, certainly. April is the cruelest month.

Post-Modern Absolute Truth

I recently read a book on Francis Schaeffer for class. Being a thorough look at Schaeffer, it inevitably spent time on Schaeffer's critique of Barth — indeed, it expanded the attack. It also applied Schaeffer's critique of culture to argue that Postmodernism is not a friend to Christianity.

Part of Schaeffer's issue with Barth was that he believed that Barth was agreeing to isolate faith from reason — that Barth accepted Kant's division between noumena and phenomena. However, I believe the fundamental misunderstanding on the part of Schaeffer and those like him is that they do not realize how far the postmodern critique goes, and therefore assume this is a discrediting of Christianity.

Rather, leaning heavily on Spirit-authentication and witness to the Word is acceptable, because it offers more certainty within a postmodern framework than we can provide to anything else. Postmodernism critiques not just religious knowledge, but also scientific knowledge. While Barth (and Calvin) both appeal to the primacy of what we might call a subjective authentication of God's Word, this is not relegating religion to some undesirable country, but rather showing it's uniquely authoritative status. Christianity has the singular status of being authenticated by the ever elusive center to which we otherwise are forced merely to circle around. Science, while remaining worthy, is not given such a handy escape and is left to continue to fend itself off from epistemological attacks.

To me, this seems like a satisifying answer to Schaeffer's critique, but I have only started to mull this answer over the last few days. What do you think?

Economics and the Environment

KMOX today featured Dr. Ken Chilton, director of the Institute for the Study of Economics and the Environment (ISEE) at Lindenwood University, on its program talking about global warming and what economists can tell us about that subject. Take a listen here. It is an excellent interview that is well worth your time.

Dr. Chilton is a mentor, a friend and a dear brother in Christ. I first met Dr. Chilton six years ago, when he happened to be the advisor on duty at Lindenwood taking care of working up a first semester schedule for freshmen business students — he helped me come up with my first semester schedule. I had the honor of being one of Dr. Chilton's students in a couple of classes, as well, one two years after that, and another a year later. The neat thing about this interview is it gives you a real taste of what he taught in his “Economics and the Environment” class (BA 383) in just twenty minutes. Now if only his complete lectures were online, but even this is an exciting opportunity for you to “meet” Dr. Chilton. Check it out.

Answers to QOTW

Well, I meant to reply to my own meme earlier, but… the best laid plans… Since I took so long, I thought I'd just use my answers for another blog post.

Q - What is your favorite part about the month of April? Reciting Chaucer, no doubt. Actually, I'd probably say the nice spring air.

O - Is it raining right now? No, but it soon will be.

T - Do you have a memory of a favorite April? What was it? Yes, April 2005. I spent a lot of time with a particular friend I am no longer in contact with (sadly) having a series of delightful outdoor conversations while enjoying the aforementioned spring air. I miss those conversations.

W - Did anyone fool you on April Fool’s Day? Yes, several people did, in fact. sniff

QOTW: April

Once more, I thought I'd try reviving the old Question of the Week meme. Feel free to answer in the comment or own your own blog. If you do the latter, please trackback or leave a comment about where you posted your answers.

Q - What is your favorite part about the month of April?

O - Is it raining right now?

T - Do you have a memory of a favorite April? What was it?

W - Did anyone fool you on April Fool's Day?

I'll put my answers in the comments section tomorrow.

Accordance

I've been using the Accordance Bible Software package for a number of months now in preparation for a review on OFB. I've liked it enough that I bought several modules that were useful for seminary studies. After years of trying to contend that SWORD was a nearly ideal Bible software system, I finally have to admit it isn't — no wonder I typically didn't even use it. Accordance blows it away and works well enough I've finally all but kicked the habit of preferring BibleGateway to my copy of MacSword. That's not to be harsh on the SWORD folks, they are a dedicated and talented bunch — they are simply working at some what of a disadvantage.

But the big point is that Accordance is really amazing. Accordance just gets a lot of things right with its unique, well thought out interface, and they have a lot of the best, most authoritative study resources available.

All that to say, I attended an Accordance all day seminar on Monday and am even more impressed having been introduced to more of what this program can do. Case and point: using Accordance's nicely designed drag and drop query builder, you can build a rule that will search for occurrences of the Granville Sharp Rule (two singular nouns governed by a single article and a conjunction). Unfortunately, my Greek text does not have nouns tagged as being common or proper, otherwise it would be perfect, for Accordance supports throwing in the final condition of Granville Sharp, namely that the nouns must be common. I suppose if you buy a different Greek module, then, it would be quite possible to run the full rule through. But even with that limitation on the standard Nestle-Aland/UBS module, this still demonstrates a breakthrough in easy, powerful searching — it's surely saves a lot of time when trying to do textual analysis!

I'm just amazed.

The Dems Should Bowl for the Nomination says Clinton

Check out this important announcement from Sen. Clinton.

On the Lighter Side

So I was talking about coconut being in something today. Therefore, Harry Nilsson:

Brother bought a coconut, he bought it for a dime
His sister had another one, she paid it for the lime
She put the lime in the coconut, she drank 'em both up
Put the lime in the coconut, she called the doctor, woke him up, and said

Doctor, ain't there nothin' I can take, I said
Doctor, to relieve this bellyache, I said
Doctor, ain't there nothin' I can take, I said
Now let me get this straight

Happy Easter!

He is risen!

I hope all of you had a great Easter.

Pilate's Truth

For Good Friday, I republished on OFB a meditation entitled “Pilate's Truth” which I originally presented during a Good Friday service two years ago and subsequently posted here. You can find it over at OFB.