Painting Elephants

Check out this video of an elephant painting a precise picture of other elephants! By the way, this is no joke. I've been doing a lot of reading about the intelligence of various animals-- chimps, apes, dolphins, elephants, etc. It is truly amazing what other animals can do.

Hell Freezes Over As Earth Heats Up

I came across very two interesting headlines this week:

"Southern Baptists change their stance on global warming!"

"Vast Antarctic ice shelf on verge of collapse"

Immediately I thought, hell must have frozen over for the southern baptists to admit global warming. Ironic, the earth is heating up and hell is freezing over!

We Are Moving To Chicago!

I found out this past week that McCormick Theological Seminary will be giving me a $25,000 scholarship each year to attend their school (tuition is $11,000). I will be pursuing a joint MDiv/PhD between McCormick and University of Chicago. Sarah and I will be moving their this summer where she will be looking for a job in Marriage and Family Therapy. McCormick is in Hyde Park surrounded by University of Chicago.

I visited McCormick back in February to interview for the scholarship and had been anxiously (a very big understatement!) waiting to hear if I got the scholarship. This will allow me to truly focus on my studies and really dive into research. My two areas of focus are liturgical studies and Christian ethics/moral theology, especially in the intersection of the two.

I will also be pursuing ordination in the Presbyterian Church (USA). It takes three years to get ordained in this denomination, and the PCUSA has the most difficult ordination requirements of any Protestant denomination in the world. This makes them a very educated crowd. Since I have been working at a PCUSA congregation during the past four years, I have come to have a deep respect for the wide-range of theological perspective, an inclusive set of social ideas from conservative to liberal, and wide-spectrum of worship elements from emergent to traditional to contemporary to Gregorian chants and Taize services. I even like the Book of Order-- the Presbyterian rules for how a congregation and the denomination should function!

I'm very excited to be pursuing ordination. With my attendance at McCormick, I am able to see a glimpse of how my life over the next five years is going to play out. That is very refreshing!

Pissing and Preaching

Check out this video of an independent Baptist KJV-Only Preacher (if you don't know what that is, you will definitely have an idea of what that can look like after watching this) "preaching" to his congregation.

Theologically Confusing

If you look over at my side bar, you'll find a theological worldview quiz results. I think I completely confused this quiz wizard... it had a really hard time placing me. It even gave me a tie-breaker question at the end that made me Evangelical Holiness/Wesleyan. The real results were 61% Evangelical Holiness, 61% Roman Catholic, and 61% Emergent. To tell the truth, I was really suprised at such results... I figured it would call me Emergent, Neo-orthodox, and Liberal as my top three. Where I most confuse these quizes is with my insistence that Scripture must be taken very, very literally while also saying that scripture is very human and not inerrant, while also saying that scripture must be taken as completely authoritative, while also saying that the world was not made in seven days. Also, I placed a huge emphasis on holiness in the survey while also placing a high degree on church tradition, academic knowledge, etc. Thus.... this quiz didn't know what to do with me. Mostly because I refuse to accept its categories and definition of words. Am I an arch conservative? An arch liberal? A confused fence-rider... or perhaps I'm actually near the center. I think I will take the quiz again and see if I get the same results.

Googling Yourself

Have you googled yourself lately? What I'm about to say will seem very narcissistic-- perhaps it is, but I google myself with some regularity. Today, I googled myself and found that Nathan Black (someone I assume that I do not know) at The Christian Post had written an article about my latest article If These Walls Could Talk. I think everyone should google themselves. It's always interesting what you find out about yourself and others who have your same name-- a hockey player, a race car driver, and someone from some band all have my name-- or perhaps I have their name-- nope, my blog is the first hit that comes up on Google-- they have my name... at least for now. ----Disclaimer: I thought I would try writing a random post that doesn't go along with the theme of my blog. If this post seems out of character for the author, your senses are not fooling you because it is very out of character. Indeed!