Not Of This World

It is Monday again, but I am frayed at the edges. I'm not sure I can write much of anything today. Today, at lunchtime, when I was crying my eyes out, all I wanted to do was be alone with God. So here you are: I will leave you with some of God's words. His words are better than mine, anyhow. The  Lord  is my shepherd,  I lack nothing.        He makes me lie down in green pastures, he leads me beside quiet waters,        he refreshes my soul. He guides me  along the right paths      for his name’s sake.   Even though I walk      through the darkest valley, I will fear no evil,      for you are with me; your rod and your staff,      they comfort me. You prepare a table  before me      in the presence of my enemies. You anoint my head with oil;      my cup  overflows.   Sure...

While I was in Singapore, I visited a mosque. It was beautiful. And, inside, taking advantage of the hordes of tourists that traveled through their doors, there was a series of placards describing some of the beliefs of Islam. Some of these placards felt oddly familiar. They showed the same kind of logic that I write here on this blog, describing a system of beliefs, modernizing it, even, for the modern outsider, peppered throughout with verses from the Quran. I also visited several temples in Thailand and Singapore, but I didn't get the same feeling there. Maybe it was because the Buddhist temples didn't have the user-friendly placards for the outsider, but I don't think so. It all felt very foreign, taking your shoes off, bowing in front of a golden statue, chanting, dropping coins one by one in a row of bowls. The temples were all ringed with statues of Buddha. Dozens and dozens of identical or nearly-identical statues lined the outer walls of the temple. Many old ...

I am fraying at the edges and so so tired. I am presenting at four conferences this spring and I need to finish my dissertation. It is time for a blogcation.* See you in March! *The word blogcation  is a recursive blended word. It is a blend of blog and vacation , while blog  is itself a blend, of web  and log . Yes, I am a language nerd.

Warning: This post contains major spoilers for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.  I was preparing a Bible Study on 1 Corinthians 15, when I came across the following verse: "The last enemy to be destroyed is death." (1 Cor 15:26) This verse sounded so familiar to me. A lot of Bible verses sound familiar to me, because I've studied or even memorized them before. But this one is different. This one, I associated with Harry Potter . Specifically, with the Deathly Hallows. Later, I googled it. And sure enough, it is quoted in Harry Potter . It is the inscription on his parents' tombstone, although it is unattributed to the Bible. Harry Potter contains a lot of Christian imagery (as well as a lot of mythological allusions), but this is different than just imagery. This is quoting it. Ironically, I know some people who were forbidden from reading Harry Potter as children by their Christian parents because it was about witchcraft.* In doing so, they mis...

Have you ever noticed how, when you binge watch a TV series or spend hours reading a book, that it changes how you think? Scientific studies  have apparently found that reading certain types of books increases our sense of empathy. I've spent hours imagining how I would react if I were living in the situations encountered by various fictional characters. I mean, I've hardly watched any zombie movies, but I've already tried to guess how long I would last in a zombie apocalypse if I had to barricade myself in my apartment (at least a month, I think--maybe longer if I could manage to start a garden from the seeds in my fresh produce). And Hollywood knows this. It's kind of obvious when you look at family-based sitcoms. I mean, they were not subtle at all in the 90s when every kid in the TV family happened to have problems that were all related every episode, no matter their age, that all resolved at the end with a single moral lesson. It's also interesting to see...

"Be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of others to be seen by them.  If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven.  So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full.   But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing ,   so that your giving may be in secret. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you." (Matthew 6: 1-4) The spiritual leaders in the time of Jesus had the tradition of fasting a couple of times a week. The purpose of the fast was supposed to be to save money on food, to give to the poor. But some people made a big show of it, sitting in the street, covered in ashes and dressed in rough clothing, without bathing, so that everyone would be able to tell that they were fasting and know how 'holy' th...

I recently watched on Netflix both Thirteen Reasons Why * and The Crown at about the same time, and then The Book of Negroes on CBC shortly thereafter. And, as I watched them, it occurred to me that a common underlying cause of evil is a sense of entitlement. In these shows, it was a sense of entitlement over land (e.g., the Suez Canal), or over people's bodies, especially women's, or over jobs and food that stood out to me. Where does this sense of entitlement come from? This sense of entitlement clearly starts young. My thirteen-month-old niece only knows a handful of words, but one of them is  my , and usually she says it with a screech, while pulling away some object that someone has reached for. These days, usually she is right when she yells  my , but only by chance, and because her little sister hasn't been born yet. When Europeans sailed out over the ocean, and found land that was already occupied, what made them think they could claim it as their own? And w...