One of the joys of having my two daughters is being able to watch Little Bear on Noggin with them. Somehow, I completely missed Little Bear with my sons, which is a shame. It is such a wonderful show – like the classical music of the cartoon world. It’s literature for the preschool set. This was one of the stories I watched with my girls … Continue reading I love Little Bear
The Las Vegas Review Journal recently ran an article about a survey of parents in Nevada and their attitudes towards the state’s public education system. This is crazy: Just 11 percent of Nevada residents who responded to a recent survey on educational issues said they would send their children to public school if they had the freedom to choose any available option . . . … Continue reading Unpopular Public Schools in Nevada
I’m in need of a little help. I have recently begun building a freelance writing business. Several months ago, I was hired to be a regular contributing writer for a start-up Christian Lifestyle magazine which is available in 30 states in Walmart, Borders and other national outlets. I’m not making money doing it, but I figured it’s a real magazine with good production values, run by people who, business wise, know what they’re doing and that it would serve as a good launching point to begin marketing myself to other publications.
At any rate, I got a copy of the magazine with my first column in it. And those of you who have some experience probably know what I discovered. Continue reading “Any professional writers out there?”
If you are homeschooling or interested in homeschooling, be sure to stop by the Carnival of Homeschooling hosted at Life on the Road. It’s a trip around the homeschool blogosphere without having to spend hour searching for something interesting. Of particular interest to me was a review of the latest Caldecott award winner – The Invention of Hugo Cabret. These sorts of awards have gotten … Continue reading The Carnival of Homeschooling Is Up!
I love Dr. Sears. When my oldest son was a couple of months old I found a copy of his The Baby Book and felt like I had found a kindred spirit in parenting. I remember reading a part in his book about how unnatural it was for us to put our babies in carriers, swings and strollers. He spoke of babies cuddled by plastic … Continue reading Infant “Container Syndrome”
Wendy’s has decided to stop running those awful commercials with guys wearing red pigtail wigs. The world just became a little better place to live in. Continue reading Praise God!
As my family and friends who read this blog already know I was raised Catholic. I stopped considering myself Catholic over a decade ago because I believe the RCC to be in error on a great number of issues. However, I do think that the Catholic Church has managed to hold on to some old wisdoms about and tools for the Christian faith which most Protestants aren’t well aware of. An example of this would be some of the old, stuffy prayers which Evangelicals in particular tend to scoff at. While praying from the heart is essential, using a written prayer can be like giving a lover a love poem written by Shakespeare or Elizabeth Barret Browning rather than writing your own. Continue reading “A prayer to begin your day with”
This afternoon my 8 year old was annoying me so I suggested that he play his zoo tycoon game on another computer. This is one of those games where you have to set up a business and run it well to make more money to re-invest into the business and grow it, etc. Part of the game format is that if you screw it up, … Continue reading So does this mean they’re going to grow up to be terrorists?
Now, as some of you might have figured out by now, I tend to be pretty conservative in my thinking. Which means not that I’m always thrilled with Republicans, but that I typically don’t like Democrats so much that I vote Republican (although not for George W. Bush in 2004, I’m proud to say!). However, I must admit that I’m actually kind of excited about the prospect of Barack Obama running for president. I even find myself thinking from time to time that I’d like it if he were elected president. Which is weird because I disagree with almost all of the man’s policies. And I don’t think I’m alone. But I do think I’ve figured out why that is and why it makes more sense than it would seem. Continue reading “Why we’re all a bit gaga over Barack Obama”
In my last post, I looked at how the emerging church movement is trying to re-construct Christianity in regards to praxis, or the living of a Christian life. Today I’m going to look at the emerging church’s approach to doxology.
To start, I want to acknowledge that I’m using the word “Doxology” in an unorthodox way. Technically doxology refers to a statement of praise and glory to God. The two we are most familiar with are “Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, both now, and ever, and unto the ages of ages. Amen” and the commonly sung:
For my purposes, I am using the word doxology in the sense which Geoffrey Wainwright expresses it in the title to his 1978 book: Doxology: The Praise of God in Worship, Doctrine and Life. Doxology is how we live out our theological belief in Christianity when we gather and worship, pray and meditate and then take that experience out into the world we live in. J.I. Packer in his book God Has Spoken (which I haven’t actually read, for the record) puts it this way:
“Theology, as I constantly tell my students, is for doxology: the first thing to do with it is to turn it into praise and thus honor the God who is its subject, the God in whose presence and by whose help it was worked out. Paul’s summons to sing and make music in one’s heart to the Lord is a word for theologians no less than for other people (Ephesians 5:19). Theologies that cannot be sung (or prayed for that matter) are certainly wrong at a deep level, and such theologies leave me, in both senses, cold: cold-hearted and uninterested.”
So for this discussion I am using the word doxology to indicate those ways that we as Christians practice our faith when we worship, gather together for church, meditate, read scripture or engage in other spiritual disciplines.
One of the features of Protestantism is that it is reactionary in nature. Continue reading “The Emerging Church Promise and Failure Part 2”
The Upside Down World 