Give Me A Break!

This blog will not be updated for the next month or so.

See you in August!

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The Broken Church: Reformation Part 2

Read Part 1  here . This past week was the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, when Martin Luther famously posted his 95 theses , a list of topics of debate that had been bothering him. He was not expecting to start a new denomination of churches, he just wanted to start a conversation about some problematic aspects of the Medieval Catholic Church. I wonder if he would have still posted them if he knew that this one act would splinter the Church and result in the loss of millions* of lives? Luther posted those theses because he saw a need for reform in the Catholic church, and he was not alone--other contemporaries of his, such as Erasmus, were also calling for reformation within the Church. Eventually even the leadership of the Catholic church recognized a need for reform, and initiated a Counter-Reformation, beginning with the Council of Trent in 1545. But it was too late. The Church had already splintered. Pandora's Box had been opened. The  documentary series ...
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Hearing God

This weekend, I attended a seminar on hearing God held at my church. Some might think that such a seminar is an exercise in wishful thinking, and yet, I believe nearly everyone who was there was able to share at some point some story of how God had communicated with them. Sometimes it was through circumstance, sometimes it was through someone else, sometimes through a dream or vision, and sometimes through the Bible, but the most common way was through the 'still, small voice'; an authoritative prompting or strong sense that one ought to be doing something, and somehow you just know it came from God.  "The  Lord  said, 'Go out and stand on the mountain  in the presence of the  Lord , for the  Lord  is about to pass by.'  Then a great and powerful wind  tore the mountains apart and shattered  the rocks before the  Lord , but the  Lord  was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the  Lord ...
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Underlying Assumptions

Have you ever heard a debate where the two sides seem to be talking past each other? Each side presents their argument, and although everyone thinks they're arguing about the same thing, something doesn't quite connect. I saw this in a set of papers we were required to read for the Analysis and Argumentation course (nicknamed A&A) in our department .  These papers were part of an ongoing conversation, and included specific replies to each others' arguments. But one of the most surprising parts of these papers is how much trouble they had finding common ground. One of the things we talked about while discussing these papers in class was that they couldn't come to a consensus because they never realized that they were working with different underlying assumptions. One of the authors assumed language worked a certain way, while the other assumed it worked another way, but neither one came right out and explained what they were assuming. It was only by reading betwe...
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