The Previously Unpublished Thoughts of Brownie the Explorer

world wide wendell?

noreply@blogger.com (Wendell) — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 04:58:00 +0000

On Monday morning I launched a new website. As I mentioned in a previous post, I have been experimenting with ways to share my music with friends around the world, and I decided to use (drumroll please) The Internet.

That led to the rather quick and undramatic creation of this new site--wendellk.com. I decided it was better to go ahead and take the plunge, register a URL, and try to set up a simple site that I can manage.

http://www.wendellk.com/

There it is. Unnerving to look at, I know. It makes me nervous just thinking about it. But there it is.

Wendellk.com will also become the site where I host my blog from now on. That is, assuming I can figure out how to update the page and keep it online.

I think that's all I have to say tonight. I am going global. Hang on to your suspenders.

Christmas Eve

noreply@blogger.com (Wendell) — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 19:21:00 +0000

If you look to the right, you'll see a new song link. Pardon the slow download speed. Let me know if it's unbearably slow. I'm using a somewhat sketchy free file hosting service that I probably will not keep long term.

I wrote Christmas Eve on December 24, 2006. I consider the song a gift that I received to help me close a chapter in my life, embrace lessons learned from a difficult season, and celebrate the friends and family that blessed my life at that time.

I made the recording within a couple of days of writing the song using bare-essentials equipment--all sounds came in through the built-in mic on my iBook (circa 2002) . The bass/beat is provided by an old electronic organ I found in the Presbyterian church in Moss Point, MS.

The Songs I Write

noreply@blogger.com (Wendell) — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 22:50:00 +0000

For the last ten years or so, I have been writing and playing music. I have shared many of these songs with close friends and family by sending mp3s over email, passing out the occasional burned CD, and performing whenever an opportunity arose. (You may look to the right of this page and see where I posted a link to a song last Fall and many of you listened to it. Thanks, by the way).

In the last couple of years, two things have happened with the music I write. First, the role of song writing in my life has grown. Writing and playing music increasingly helps me think, relax, emote, and simply be myself. I process life experiences by writing songs about them, and I have found this to be healthy for me. As a result, I have been writing and recording more music than in the past.

Secondly, in the last few years it has grown more difficult to share the music I write with friends using my traditional means. It is no longer feasible to fill inboxes with large mp3 files that people may or may not want to listen to; it is no longer easy to pass out burned CDs to friends I see only once a year or less; and opportunities to perform for friends scattered from Washington DC to Mississippi and around the country are few and far between.

More songs, less sharing. What to do?

I have never taken an aggressive approach to promoting my music. I never wanted to follow the passionate, self-driven rock star route: drop out of school, put thousands of dollars into studio time and begin touring the country promoting a CD that may or may not be all that great. That just never felt quite right to me. Maybe I'm not a risk taker, but I never wanted to sink so much time, money and energy into music that I would be forced into heavily promoting for the sake of justifying my up-front investments. Nor did I want my friends and family to ever feel like they had to buy my music in order to keep me afloat or make me feel good. I just like to write songs as I live my life and make those songs the best that I can.

That does not mean that I do not want other people to hear my music. I may not want to pursue a career as a rock star, but that does not mean that I don't get tickled to death when someone else likes a song I write or someone manages to feel the same delights or sorrows I feel when I write those songs. It is immensely satisfying when someone enjoys my music, and I want very much the opportunity to share my music with people who might like it.

So I have been thinking a lot lately about ways to distribute and share my music with friends, family, and anyone else interested, without making music the end-all-be-all of my existence. After a lot of pondering, I arrived at the same general conclusion already reached by millions of more saavy and forward-thinking creative entrepreneurs before me: why not use the internet?

Long story short, I want you to be able to hear my music, and I think I am going to begin using this blog as a way to share it with you. I haven't figured out all the logistics of that yet. It will probably involve some sort of free downloads and optional donation system similar to what Radiohead did recently, only with less hullabaloo.

This is what I'm thinking about the songs that I write. What do you think?

Thoughts on Community

noreply@blogger.com (Wendell) — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 16:36:00 +0000

When I began this blog, I envisioned it as a place for trying out ideas. The scheme being that I would post my developing thoughts in some form (kind of like beta versions of new software) and glean wisdom from those friends and passersby who would offer wise commentary. This has pattern has been largely successful, and I am glad for the dialogue that you, my friends, have generated by responding to my posts.

You may have noticed that I have not really posted many ideas in some time. This is best explained by the fact that I have been thinking in a realm that is new to me. And when an idea is truly in its infancy, trotting it out for critique can be scary. So I have been thinking, imagining, and speculating about a set of issues for the last couple of months and keeping it mostly quiet. But I think I am ready now to begin cautiously tossing some of these ideas around more publicly. What follows is me trying to 'get at' a set of thoughts and ideas that have been on my mind for a while. Please pardon the disorganization.

I grew up in a small town. Mt. Olive, Mississippi was a place where you could literally get to anyone’s home on foot or on a bike in a matter of minutes. Everyday when I came home, I returned to a place where meaningful human interaction was naturally present.

In college I discovered loneliness. It was so strange, honestly, to know that people were all around me, and yet I felt isolated. I spent a lot of time freshman year sitting alone in my room trying to figure out why I felt the way I did. I had never felt lonely before, because for the first 18 years of my life I had always returned from school to a home that was alive and inviting. As a freshman, I returned often to a room where I was alone.

Fortunately, by the end of college, I managed to squeeze most of this loneliness out of my life. I was busy and involved, but more importantly I lived in an apartment with three great friends. When I returned to my dwelling place at the end of the day, I usually found good company. Our apartment was a gathering spot for friends, who found it convenient and easy to simply “drop in” and say hello. Our apartment was rarely unoccupied, and loneliness was left almost unfelt that year.

For many people, like myself, senior year in college is a pinnacle of life, and it is easy to see why. We look back fondly on the friendships we had, the proximity we had to those friends, and the time we spent with them both delving into intellectual subjects and simply goofing off. Who can help but smile? As a friend of mine once told me, “College was so great because whenever you wanted to go do something, you could just grab ‘the guys’ and go.”

College campuses, college towns and college residences tend to provide two things that we take for granted—proximity to friends and the daily opportunity for meaningful interaction with strangers. Because in college we lived near or with our friends, contact with them was easily built into our daily schedules. Even on the busiest days in college, I had good interaction with friends because it was so easy and natural to do.

One thing that seems to return for many of us after college, however, is loneliness. Perhaps those who relocate to a new city in order to land a job experience this resurgent loneliness the most. But even for those who go to familiar cities, the adjustment to life out of college can be tough. Senior year we were surrounded by friends; first year out, we likely are not. In the post-college demands of jobs and bills, career advancement, marriage, and moving, we tend to gradually lose many of the things we valued about college. First to go is proximity to friends—our new residences are selected based on availability of employment and (as much as we can afford it) personal aesthetic desires. We want to live in “a nice neighborhood,” be close to our jobs, and we want to live comfortably. In the process of satisfying this matrix of requirements, it is hard to keep track of much of anything else.

It is easy to be lonely that first year out of college. With a world of greener grass close in our rearview mirrors, living alone and going to work with strangers can seem pretty bleak by comparison.

But most people grow out of that loneliness, right? After a year or so on the new job, don't most people make friends with their coworkers, maybe get married or find a church or other social group to interact with? And then, doesn't loneliness just dissipate like fog in the sunshine of our new lives? I think for some this may be the case, but not for everyone.

I've had the growing impression lately that most people in America are kind of isolated and probably struggle with loneliness with at least some frequency. Some may feel it more accutely than others. Recent college graduates, for instance, are very aware of being lonely if they were surrounded by friends while in college. And maybe others feel it less acutely, simply because they have become accustomed to being lonely. I know people like this.

Of course, I'm still only one year out of college, and I'm merely piecing together observations that could be skewed. But there is a body of literature that supports my general idea: that many Americans struggle with loneliness and isolation. I’m not one who puts tremendous weight on social science statistics, but I do think good studies, viewed with humility, can shed light on societal trends. And a recent study ( http://www.asanet.org/galleries/default-file/June06ASRFeature.pdf) suggests a trend toward isolation and lack of community over the past two decades. The study is based on a survey given in 1985 and 2004 that tries to uncover who people talk to about "important matters." Since 1985, the trend has been toward talking to fewer and fewer people about things that are important. And there has been a significant increase in the number of people who talk to only 1 person or no one at all.

As most of you know, this year I’ve had the bizarre and beautiful experience of living in an intentional community with 11 other people my age who share the same core religious convictions. I did not know any of these people when I moved here, and now seven months later, I find they are able to listen to me and speak truth into my life in a powerful way.

Of course, the kind of intense community that I have experienced at the TFA--12 people in one house--is not for everyone, and it is not really sustainable over the long term. But the great positives of my time here this year have made me wonder why more American Christians do not place priority on building some level of community and fellowship into their lives. Is it because we value privacy too much? Are we too concerned with owning land or big houses? Is it just because being alone is the easiest thing to do in suburban America? Is it the design of our cities?

I hope to develop these thoughts more later, but here is a start. I'm intersted in your feedback. Do you know loneliness? Are your friends lonely? Are you isolated? If so, why is that the case? Can you imagine a better way of living life?

a movie for your consideration

noreply@blogger.com (Wendell) — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 14:37:00 +0000

I will not often use this blog as a place to promote a film, but today I have great reason to do so.

Back in November, I was given the opportunity to do something I have never done before. Because of a connection the TFA has, we were able to prescreen a major motion picture. The film was Amazing Grace, and it is being produced by Walden Media, the same company that is making the Narnia films.

Amazing Grace is about William Wilberforce, the British member of parliament who devoted his life and political career to the abolition of the slave trade in the British Empire. He was good friends with John Newton, a pastor and former slave trader, who is also the author of several of the best hymns in the Christian tradition--Amazing Grace being the best known.

The film is well written and acted, beautifully filmed, and thoroughly enjoyable. It is a top quality film, comparable to other period British films like Pride and Prejudice. In fact, I plan to go see it again this weekend, when it opens.

I also had the opportunity this winter to spend some time with Micheal Flaherty, the president of Walden Media, and we discussed the film. He said that a film like this, which is released on a relatively small number of screens nationwide, really has one shot at gaining a wider audience. If the movie does well on opening weekend at the few theaters that show it, then it may be picked up by additional theaters. But if it doesn't thrive on opening weekend, even the few theaters that are showing it will drop it after a couple of weeks. This is a function of the movie market that makes it difficult for a small film, even one of high caliber, to be successful. Having seen Amazing Grace, and being convinced of its quality, I am recommending that anyone interested in Wilberforce, the abolition movement, black history, social activism, or faith and politics should go see this film on opening weekend--February 23.

If you go, let me know what you think! I found it to be a wonderful film. If you have any questions about the film, please feel free to post a comment in response to this entry.

For more information about the film, go to http://www.amazinggracemovie.com/
There you can find a list theaters where it is showing.

Chris Thile & Edgar Meyer

noreply@blogger.com (Wendell) — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 04:36:00 +0000

One of the features of life in Maryland that I enjoy is my proximity to large urban centers in which fascinating musical acts perform frequently. Whereas in Mississippi I was ecstatic if once a year an act I enjoyed made it to Jackson, in Washington D.C. there are more exciting concerts than I have time and money to attend.

I recently had the privilege of seeing Chris Thile (formerly of Nickel Creek) and Edgar Meyer (the undisputed world's greatest virtuoso on upright or "double" bass). This was possibly the most amazing musical performance I have ever seen, and I decided afterward that I wanted to try to capture in written words what I experienced at the Center for the Arts of George Mason University. Here is the "concert review" I came up with:

When Chris Thile straps on a mandolin, several things tend to happen: Jaws drop, infants cease their crying, mountains crumble and players of acoustic instruments feel at once speechlessly awed and painfully inadequate. Given my prior experiences at Nickel Creek concerts, I expected to see a similar phenomenon when I went to see Thile perform with renowned double bassist Edgar Meyer in one of a short series of nine concerts. Fortunately, my expectations proved to be naïve.

Allow me to explain. Before the show, I was thinking in terms of mathematical addition. I knew from word-of-mouth that Meyer is to the bass roughly what Chris is to the mandolin (its daddy). So I was thinking: take Chris Thile, the mandolin prodigy, and add something similar to him, Edgar Meyer the bass virtuoso. One plus one equals two. My math was simple, but it was wrong.

The concert began quickly when Thile in his gray suit and Meyer in his black suspenders and yellow necktie jaunted happily onto the stage. As they played through the first piece, I was duly awed, but not too surprised. Thile bobbed around like a small tree in hurricane force winds, cradling his mandolin, while Meyer more or less stood there and accompanied the mandolin. The music was impressive and technically faultless but it remained within the horizon of my expectations.

It was in the second song that I began to realize the criminal inadequacy of my earlier mental math. Thile began playing a brisk rendition of Bridal Veil Falls (from his Not All Who Wander Are Lost album on which Meyer is a guest), at first carrying the melody on mandolin. But when Thile stopped playing the melody and Meyer picked it up on bass, I began to worry. “No, that’s not going to work,” I thought. “That melody was written for the tiny scale of a mandolin and cannot possibly be played on a double bass. The scale is too long.”

This mounting tension in my mind promptly shattered as Meyer not only performed the melody with ease, but also began moving his body around the bass in a most unusual manner. It was as if he was dancing with it, or perhaps making love to this large wooden projector of sound. He reached for notes in the range of a violin and slid up and down that 41-inch scale as if the bass and bow were extensions of his body. It was music to the eyes as much as to the ears.

I understand now what I could not have known before: what Edgar Meyer does with a bow and his fretless double bass cannot really be compared to what anyone does with any other physical object. It is a phenomenon all its own. My mental formula was wrong. This was not addition; it was exponential explosion. Chris Thile plus Edgar Meyer equals something much larger and more magical than merely the sum of their parts. Their collaboration is like a musical Titanic setting sail—it is an expansion of what was previously thought possible. Let the music world hope that this too brief Thile/Meyer tour cultivates a long and consistent musical friendship.

Life is Beautiful

noreply@blogger.com (Wendell) — Thu, 28 Dec 2006 04:47:00 +0000

I like to tell stories. Writing about the Christmas tree fiasco was a lot of fun. Maybe I'll do more of that soon.

For now, though, I have some slightly more abstract thoughts. I have been thinking a lot lately about the concept of beauty. I’m sitting in my parent’s house looking around the room at my mother’s artwork, and I’m astounded by how lovely it is (witness the example posted here). I grew up immersed in this ever-evolving display of color and light expanding from my mom’s paintbrush, and I think it has profoundly shaped me as a person.

But over the last few years, I somehow developed a deep skepticism toward beauty, whether it was beautiful people or beautiful places like Furman’s campus. Beauty is often a veneer used to hide ugly things. People, men and women alike, often sculpt their bodies into “perfect” forms while maintaining eating disorders or other obsessive, self-destructive habits. Sometimes, it even seems like some of the most physically attractive people are also among the most unbalanced and self-centered (just read People magazine for examples).

Furthermore, over the last few years I began to develop concern for the marginalized and disadvantaged members of society. And with that development, I also tended to see gorgeous homes and immaculately landscaped lawns as mere manifestations of the greed and injustice that characterize this broken world. Nowhere was this more apparent than in South Africa—I traveled there with Furman in winter 2005—where some of the most beautiful resort locations on earth were crafted under the laws of the apartheid regime that constructed luxuries for the privileged whites on the blood, sweat, and tears of the black majority. Because of things like this, I was becoming very wary of any manifestation of beauty, simply because of the sin for which it often serves as a disguise.

These experiences shaped my outlook on life. I was beginning to think of the creation of beauty as an activity that was unrelated to the work of social justice. True confession: I guess I felt a little self-righteous about it. Those who work in the most beautiful places typically only serve the richest of people, and I wanted no part of that.

Ironically, in September I found myself at Osprey Point, where the Trinity Forum Academy is housed, in a breathtakingly beautiful environment on the Chesapeake Bay. I could not have landed in a more awkward place for someone who was wary of any sign of beauty. Not only is the place naturally beautiful, but also my work at the OP retreat center could all be called “beautification”: making the bathrooms spotless, polishing the silverware until it looks like little mirrors, and preparing/serving delicious, impeccable plates of gourmet food for often wealthy guests.

Being at Osprey Point has forced me to reconsider some of my blanket skepticism toward beauty and those who work to achieve/create it. This happened both on a purely practical level—it’s hard to despise people who work to make things beautiful when you and your friends are those very people—and on a more theoretical level.

I’m thinking specifically about what is often called “the cultural mandate” in Genesis 2. God creates humans, male and female, in His image to “have dominion” over the earth—both living creatures and non-living matter. He tells them to be fruitful and multiply, to fill the earth and subdue it. What does this mean? Well, one could accuse me of projecting my ideas back onto the text here, but it seems that Genesis 2 is saying something like this: humans were created to make the earth more beautiful by ordering and subduing its forces and materials in a way that gives glory to God and extends his image. He made a beautiful, good earth, yet he told Adam and Eve to tend the garden, to fill and subdue the earth. Before the fall, this must have meant creative, artful acts like animal naming and landscape architecture (Gen 2:15); in other words, ordering and arranging God’s good creation in such a way that made it even more beautiful.

This, of course, would change dramatically after the fall and God’s curse of both humans and the earth. In Genesis 4, there does not seem to be any time for dedicating to the beautification of the created world. Cain murders his brother and is banished to wander and build a city. Crime and social injustice is cropping up everywhere (Gen 5). This is more like the world that we live in now. How can anyone today concern themselves with cultivating gardens and making things beautiful when the world is full of social injustice?

So the question is: what does the cultural mandate look like now in a world that is so fallen and full of injustice? Are we supposed to ignore the pre-fall impetus to make the earth more beautiful and glorifying to God? I do not think so. It’s only that now, social justice work has become prerequisite to the fulfillment of the original mandate. The two seemingly separate pursuits, art/beautification and social justice, are actually contiguous tasks on a continuum toward the fulfillment of God’s design for human life.

The fact is, you cannot ultimately make beauty and simultaneously neglect the work of justice, because the decay of the world—war and crime specifically—will corrupt and destroy your art. Just as the thorn and thistle will overcome your garden, graffiti or theft or war will eventually shatter the environs you have worked to make beautiful.

So I am starting to see the creation of beauty (or the creative ordering of existing things in beautiful ways) as a fulfillment of the cultural mandate and as a task that is complimentary, not opposed, to the pursuit of social justice. The goal of social justice work cannot simply be the alleviation of poverty. It has to have some greater aim in mind or it dies in implementation (look at the last half-century of social welfare legislation for confirmation). The aim of social justice work has to be greater. It should ultimately be the creation of a beautiful society and earth filled with human beings who are free to live creative, artistic lives.

I’m still in my parents’ living room surrounded by beautiful artwork. And I do not think it is a coincidence that, after growing up in a household filled with beautiful artwork and beautiful living, I have grown to care about social justice. Maybe tasting and seeing what is beautiful has helped me see why we have to care for the needy—not merely to alleviate suffering, but to help others to enjoy and participate in what is good and beautiful about God’s world.

O Tannenbaum

noreply@blogger.com (Wendell) — Fri, 22 Dec 2006 05:18:00 +0000

I am home for Christmas break. Since arriving in Moss Point, I have been enjoying the sundry items that accompany a trip home: visits to the dentist, barber, lenscrafters, and shoe stores. Don't you do such things when you return home?

The climax of this running around came Tuesday when my father and I spent the greater part of the day searching in vain for a Christmas tree. We began the day by driving to a tree farm 35 miles north of home in Lucedale, MS. Upon our arrival, we encountered a sign that directed us to “honk horn” and wait for the owner to arrive. After honking our horn repeatedly, we investigated and discovered that the proprietors of the farm were simply not home. We waited for over an hour, perused the many trees available, and picked out our favorite, but no one ever appeared. So we left.

Bozo’s Market in Pascagoula, where we got our tree last year, was sold out and closed down. Lowe’s in Pascagoula was sold out, as well. By this point, it was late afternoon and we were growing increasingly uncertain of our ability to complete this seemingly simple task of finding a tree. Surely Lowe’s in Biloxi, 30 miles west, would have one. Being the quick learners we are, we called ahead this time to ask. Sure enough, the lawn and garden manager at Lowe’s confirmed that they, indeed, had four trees left.

We arrived in Biloxi half an hour later to find four of the most dry, decrepit, diseased evergreens you have everseen. (sorry, couldn't resist the play on words). Now, of course, we all have that Charlie Brown impulse that tells us to purchase the poor pathetic tree and “give it a home” (as if the inside of someone’s house could ever be an appropriate home for a pine tree). But let me tell you, that impulse was absurd in the presence of the leftover trees Lowe’s had in stock. Those four trees were likely cut sometime in early November and shipped down from Canada to the Lowe’s parking lot where they have been sitting waterless for almost two months while ambitious tree shoppers picked over them, jostled them, and certainly maligned them verbally. Beneath each nearly naked tree laid a neatly swept pile of jettisoned needles approaching 16 inches deep. Had we loaded one on top of our car and driven it home, we would have strewn pine needles along the interstate all the way back to Moss Point and arrived with a brown skeleton from which to hang our beloved ornaments. My father and I assessed this situation, repressed the Charlie Brown adoptive impulse, and went home empty handed.

The situation was resolved the next day when my dad, faced with the blatantly un-American prospect of a treeless Christmas (I think this was outlawed in the Patriot Act?), made a return journey to the Lucedale tree farm. Fortunately, this time the owners were present, and he was able to return with a strapping young leland cypress.

So at long last, today, on December 21, four days before Christmas, we actually have a tree. Oddly though, when I helped move it into the house, my arms broke out in a rash. This is an unprecedented event in my epidermal history.

If I were Pat Robertson, and I insisted upon interpreting all the events around me as being coded messages from God, I think the moral of this story would be pretty clear. Christmas trees are of the Devil, and we should stay the heck away from them. Don't you agree?

Stay tuned. More posts to come soon.

Thanksgiving and New Testament Documents

noreply@blogger.com (Wendell) — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 19:47:00 +0000

And then a month of silence passed on Wendell’s blog. For those 3 or 4 of you who have been on the edge of your seat: sorry about that. Life at the Trinity Forum Academy suddenly got busy. Each time I post, I think to myself, “well, I’ll just do that again in a week.” And then a month of silence passes. Good intentions…

I spent much of last week in Washington D.C. for two conferences: the first was the Evangelical Theological Society proceedings, and the second was an apologetics conference at McLean Bible Church. At the McLean conference, I heard a talk titled “The Historical Reliability of the Gospels.” This lecture coincided with our most recent classroom readings and discussions at the TFA. We have been addressing questions like “Was Jesus really divine? Did he even claim to be? Is Jesus the only way to God? Was Jesus really resurrected from the dead?” On several of these questions we read two authors giving opposing answers, and then we discussed the arguments at length in class, trying to reach some consensus. The combination of classroom discussions at the TFA and lectures at the apologetics conference has left me thinking hard about the above questions.

Furthermore, last week I read the first half of Sam Harris’s Letter to a Christian Nation, in which he argues that Christian faith is foolish and dangerous. I hope to discuss the book in greater detail at some point in the future (including a discussion of some things Harris and I may agree on), but for now I want to compare the information I received at McLean with one of the general claims that Sam Harris makes. Harris thinks that Christian faith is groundless and irrational, not suitable for a civilized and enlightened people. In making this argument, he seems to assume that there is no legitimate evidence or reason why anyone could possibly believe the Bible to be true.

Craig Blomberg, in his talk on the historical reliability of the gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) spoke to this very challenge, although without naming Harris. In his argument, Blomberg presented the case against the books and then commenced a discussion of the historical evidence available to us and the several reasons why he believes it testifies to the gospels’ trustworthiness. Some of what he said I had heard before, but much of it was new. Here is a brief summary of some of the points I found most significant.

1. We (the royal academic “we”) have vastly more manuscripts of the gospels than we do for any text from close to the same time period. That means that if someone in the first or second century wanted to alter the book of Mark, for example, he or she would have needed to change a whole lot of documents, because there were so many floating around. (Of course, this doesn’t make any of what the gospels report actually true, it just means we have vastly greater reason to believe these are the original texts than we do for any other documents from the period).

2. The authors of the gospels were in good positions to report accurate information. Mark was a traveling companion to Peter and Paul. Matthew and John were among the 12 disciples, and Luke was Paul’s physician. So these were people close to the events they reported.

3. The gospels, even by the most skeptical estimations, are dated in the mid to late 1st century, a time when many eyewitnesses of the events in the gospels would have been alive. Had the gospels been fabrications, given their offensiveness to the predominate Pharisaic Judaism, we might expect to find documents protesting their claims. But we don’t.

4. Instead of documents protesting the record of the gospels, we find 12 separate historians outside the Christian faith who corroborate the general contours of the gospel accounts (although some of the sources account for Jesus’ miracles by calling him a “sorcerer.”) The most prominent of these accounts is by Flavius Josephus, who published his History of the Jews in AD 90.

5. This was news to me: One of the traditions of first century Judaism was compulsory elementary education for young Jewish boys. It started around age 3 and consisted almost entirely of rote memorization of massive passages of Hebrew Scriptures. We live today in a culture where memorization is a lost skill; but in a culture without a printing press and a premium placed on the preservation of Holy Scriptures, the capacity of the human brain to memorize spoken and written material was stretched to its limits. (My Greek professor at Furman explained this to me as an account of how books like the Iliad were eventually written: oral tradition and massive amounts of memorized material.) Why is this significant? It is significant because it gives us great reason to believe that the gospel writers had capabilities, far above and beyond what we do today, that would allow them to memorize and record the words of Jesus. If there was ever a culture from which trustworthy accounts of a leader’s spoken words could be recorded, it was 1st century Judaism.

6. The gospels contain numerous “hard sayings” of Jesus that presented interpretive difficulties to the 1st century church (and the 21st century church, for that matter). If the gospels had been merely fabricated by the 1st century Christians, why would they have attributed such controversial sayings to Jesus (example: John 6:53)? These passages would not have been conducive to the growth and political power of the Christian movement.

7. Conversely, the gospels do not contain pronouncements from Jesus on issues like circumcision, which would have been very helpful to the 1st century church. Had the gospels writers felt the liberty to put words in Jesus mouth, why would they not have taken the opportunity to resolve the great controversies of the 1st century church by simply having their master give a decisive word? The presence of “hard sayings” and lack of pronouncement on 1st century controversies both speak against theories that claim the gospels were inventions of the early church.

This is only a brief summary of Blomberg’s presentation, but it makes a general point. There are many scholars, Christian and non-Christian, who look at the historical evidence and conclude that the gospels are reliable accounts of a real first century religious figure: Jesus. It is certainly possible to doubt them, to say Jesus was not real or that his followers grossly embellished accounts of his deeds, but that is not where the evidence seems to point.

After Blomberg’s talk, I was reflecting on what has been, to my mind, the best argument against the gospels: that Jesus’ followers hid his body and then propagated myths about his life, making up all the claims we now associate with Jesus—deity, miracles, resurrection, etc. We’ll call this the “fabrication hypothesis.” There may not really be any evidence that such a thing happened, but it has always seemed a formidable doubt in the back of mind. But after Blomberg’s talk, I reconsidered this explanation and found it to be more lacking than I had ever before realized.

Jesus’ disciples, during his earthly ministry, thought he was going to be a political leader. Their devotion was to the hope that he would lead a political revolution in which the Jews would throw off Roman hegemony and establish an autonomous Jewish state in the name of Yahweh. These were the politics of the day and the hopes of the Jews following Jesus. That they had this view is made apparent in the gospels.

Given these hopes, we have to ask ourselves, how would the disciples have viewed Jesus’ seizure and conviction to death by the Roman governor Pilate? It certainly was not a confirmation of their faith in Jesus. In fact, Jesus’ crucifixion would have marked the total failure of Jesus to do what they had hoped he would; it was like a signpost informing them that they had made a mistake to follow this guy.

Now, according to the fabrication hypothesis, at the point when the disciples’ hopes in Jesus were utterly shattered, instead of scattering and growing disillusioned about him, they decided to pretend he had been raised from the dead and exalt him as a God. Then they established a new religion in Jesus’ name, for which they and their followers were beaten and imprisoned and often martyred over the next century. When I put myself in their shoes, I cannot imagine having this response. I cannot imagine dying for a religion I knew I had fabricated in the name of someone who had utterly failed to do what I expected him to do.

To my mind, Jesus’ actual resurrection seems a more likely explanation for the transformation of the disciples from Jewish patriots into spokesmen for a new religion of God’s love and grace for all nations. I do not see how or why they would have overcome their own disappointment and motivated in themselves such zeal if there were not a real event that inspired their change.

In conclusion, I'll say this: I think there is sufficient evidence to legitimately protest the claims by many that Christianity is all wishful thinking and irrationality. Christian belief is, no doubt, a long leap for a naturalist, and it unequivocally does require a leap of faith—but it is not a leap into the dark, unenlightened and absurd. It is a leap in the direction of much evidence.

What do you think of these arguments? I think they are perhaps useful, informative and helpful, but limited. If you’re a Christian reading this, do you buy it? If you’re an unbeliever reading this, what do you think? Is it all smoke and mirrors?

Thank you for reading so far. Sorry my posts are ridiculously long. It takes me a while to get my thoughts out. I’ll hopefully take up some more philosophical concerns with the notion of “evidence” and “rationality” in the next post.

noreply@blogger.com (Wendell) — Sun, 15 Oct 2006 02:30:00 +0000

Ain't it just like a friend of mine to hit me from behind

Autumn came upon me today. With it came feelings of past autumns at Furman. I received a long letter from a friend who’s still there, and it drew my thoughts back to being in college. Last spring when my friends and I were dressed in caps and gowns, walking around smiling and taking pictures, many of us said that we thought graduation would "sink in sometime in the Fall.” I think today was the day. Today I realized I have graduated. It’s not a sad feeling, really, just a strong remembering. I remember where I have been the last four times Summer became Autumn, and I am conclusively aware that I am no longer there.

That said, rather than feeling alienated or longing to return to places in my past, I think I am beginning to settle in here. I have not felt more comfortable or at home since my arrival in Maryland than I did today. This is probably due in part to the fact that we’ve been here 6 weeks and patterns are becoming established. But it is also due to the point we at the TFA have reached in our curriculum. We spent the first several weeks talking about how we approach and know God, highlighting two points: a) the limits of our reason/logic in understanding God and b) the importance of the fact that the Gospel is a narrative. That is, we know God first by the story he has told us of himself, not by a set of facts about him.

To follow and supplement this introduction to knowing God, we have entered a segment of life stories. We read Augustine’s Confessions as a model for how to tell a life story, and now each of the fellows gets an hour and thirty minutes to share his or her life with the group. This has been a monumental and wonderful endeavor. The task of trying to survey, comprehend, and narrate your entire life to others is daunting, yet it is so rewarding! Honestly confessing my life, my successes and failures, has been like rediscovering that I am free, like a reprieve from pretending. Of course, since my arrival here, it was always okay for me to be myself, but it was difficult to do so. (The new environment and unfamiliar faces have forced me to think a lot about what it really means to be myself). But telling my life story was like saying, “Okay, this is me, these are my issues; I am no more or less than this!” It was relieving and freeing to self-disclose.

Telling my life story was great, but better than that was hearing the stories of other fellows. I mentioned earlier “the point we at the TFA have reached in our curriculum,” and this is what I mean: Calvin said that knowledge of God and knowledge of humanity are dependent on each other. We cannot know God unless we know humans, and we cannot know ourselves if we do not know God. I have always given intellectual assent to this idea of Calvin’s, simply because it sounds true. But in sharing life stories we have tested Calvin's idea. We are attempting to understand God better by looking closely at one another.

And, lo and behold, I have realized that Calvin was right. In hearing these life stories, my view of God is being reinvigorated--I am seeing how God cares for and pursues people. I knew from my own life how I have treated God with bitter suspicion and distrust, only to have him love and heal me. And I knew how I have fought to be autonomous and self-righteous, only to have him humble and quiet me. But I have never heard stories in such intimate detail of other believers who have rebelled in different ways and yet found God’s love persistent. Some of us were born in shattered homes where chaos reigned, some of us were obssessive perfectionists clinging to our self-centered plans, some were born with everything we could ever want and yet somehow grew angry at the world. This week I have heard how God broke into the various and sundry defenses that my friends and I have constructed against him—how he has pursued people who run from him. It has given me personal and experiential insight into who God is and how he loves—knowledge that is not readily accessible in the academic study of theology.

The past week has made me wonder why I never sat my close friends down and made them tell me the stories of their lives. I have wondered at great length how to “foster community” and encourage intimate relationships between believers. One would think I might have stumbled upon this brilliant idea before: tell life stories!

Last week’s post was a bit abstract. I may have been thinking a bit too hard. Your comments have been invaluable to me, clarifying what is unclear in my brain. Thanks for helping me stay real. This post is a bit less academic, a bit more personal. I’m still trying to figure out how to blog. Oh, and the sunset is the view from our backyard a week or so agao. That is the Chesapeake bay in all its glorious colors.

What Makes Sense to Me at 23

noreply@blogger.com (Wendell) — Sun, 01 Oct 2006 19:37:00 +0000

Above is a photograph of the twelve fellows and the TFA staff. It has nothing to do with my post, per se, but I love the photo. Here we are in all our silly and intellectual glory. Soon, I will put up profiles of each of the fellows so you can get to know my new friends. For now, let's proceed with the issue I left dangling in my last post.

Last time, I hurried through a summary of the talk Os Guinness delivered to us at the TFA three weeks ago. In this post, I want to set off on a rather large venture: I am attempting to understand the concept of Calling and explain it in a useful way. But before I go any further, I must remind you that I am 23 years old. I am barely able to consider myself an adult, and anything I have to say about this topic (or any) should be taken with qualification. I ask you to read this as a work-in-progress by a young individual thinking perhaps too hard about a set of ideas. Fortunately, the blog format allows you to tell me if you think I’m crazy or uninformed. My thinking is only helped by your comments.

I ended the last post with a question: How do I go from being just another person trying to live my life, pay my bills, and avoid loneliness to being someone who lives with purpose and identity before God? Now, this is not the sort of question that one simply knocks down. It is more the type of question that one may poke holes in from many angles so that some light shines through. And that’s what I’m trying to do.

But perhaps the best way to begin poking holes in this question is to discuss how it is that many of us slip through much of life without engaging the question of calling. What do we do wrong?

College graduation is a time of upheaval and adjustment. We leave behind our friends of 4 years, and unlike high school graduation where the next step was obvious (college), there is less apparent direction as to what is next. Should you look for a spouse? Should you get a higher degree? Should you work? Travel? In my last post, I emphasized the paralysis that can come from having too many options. But there is another side of this college graduation conundrum. Although there are many options, there also tends to be a set of imperatives for most of us, the chief of which is financial. We have or seem to have infinite options in life, but we still stare into the unflinching face of some definite imperatives: we have to find somewhere to live and someway to pay for that place.

So it’s time to get a job. And we all want to be happy and fulfilled in what we do, but at the end of college, with those imperatives staring us down, it is much more important to simply have something to do than it is to be engaged in meaningful work. So we get a job using what menial skills our educations have provided us; we work, and we pay our bills. Then, over the next several years, we keep our eyes opened looking for better jobs, better salaries, better uses of our skills, more rewarding work. Maybe we meet someone and get married; then we start paying bills together.

I keep talking about bills because they represent to me the imperatives of life. We have desires and needs: shelter, electricity, water, netflix, you know, the essentials. And those things all come with bills. Bills require income. These are the paths of least resistance, the paths of necessity. We set out to meet our immediate needs with a job and a place to live; then we go about improving that situation. And if you’re like me, these imperatives tend to eminently shape your decisions about life. For instance, one of the practical reasons I came to the Trinity Forum Academy was because it was an easy answer to the two questions: where will you live and how will you support yourself? Yes, I had many other, better sounding reasons for coming here, but killing those two birds with one stone was a huge bonus.

The point I am getting to here is that we easily slide into a way of life that is determined not so much by Calling as by necessity. Then once we get settled into a “normal” life, we ask as secondary questions: why am I here, what is my purpose, how can I serve God in what I’m doing? I want to suggest a different priority in sorting through these questions.

I think finding a Calling is approximately the same as finding a set of problems that you want to and are able, by God’s grace, to engage. Another element is not just wanting to and being able to work on a set of problems, but also have a lifelong commitment to do so. Living with a calling is living humbly committed to redeeming/healing/engaging a set of problems.

What does this look like? Let me illustrate with an example from Os Guinness’s life. Toward the end of his talk, I asked Os about his own sense of calling and how he came to it. He replied that while he was completing his dissertation at Oxford he noticed a gap in the world of Christian thought that he calls “the missing middle.” He saw that there were many Christian scholars writing useful and enlightening material, but they were writing primarily for an audience of academics or “eggheads” as Os called them. At the same time, he observed that the average faithful everyday Christian was not benefiting from that Christian scholarship because it was not written for a lay audience. Os decided to commit his life to bridging this gap in the Church. Rather than writing for the academic world, he decided to write, lecture, and think toward the end of bringing thoughtful Christian scholarship to a lay Christian audience.

Os pointed out that this calling could be pursued in different ways in many different jobs. He has worked for many organizations with several different jobs from which he has attempted to close the gap in this “missing middle.”

The experience Os described seemed to me like it set out a sort of pattern. Os saw a set of problems—the disconnect between much Christian scholarship and the faithful lay people of the Church—and he dedicated himself to resolving those problems. It was not a problem for which an apparent singular cause or solution was apparent, but it was a problem that Os considered to be important enough to be his life’s work.

This sent me into a set of questions (moving from the most large-scale to the most personal): What problems do I see in the world that need to be addressed in my lifetime? In what ways is my world most broken and in need of repair? How must the American church and my denomination change and grow in order to be “the Church” God intends it to be? What problems exist that Wendell might be able to engage and address? What gifts and training has God given to me that may give me a responsibility to approach particular problems?

So I ask you: using the lens of Scripture and your own experience, what do you see that is wrong about the world you inhabit? It could be something truly large-scale like AIDS in Africa, or it could be something very immediate and local like the way everyone in your neighborhood is lonely and afraid. Is your church dead? Is your city fragmented along rigid socio-economic boundaries? Is your denomination out-of-touch? Are your friends all addicted to various “harmless” substances?

There are so many problems that one may easily get overwhelmed. But don’t just think about the problems. Think about who you are and what God has given you; make it personal. Which of these problems do you have eyes to see most clearly? What talents, training, and experiences do you have that you might be able to apply toward a solution for some of these problems?

We are a critical people. My liberal arts education taught me a lot about how to critically analyze the world—to see what is wrong with people’s ideas or actions. Furthermore, Christians tend to be really good at critiquing society. Read one issue of WORLD magazine, and you’ll see Christian journalists pointing with great clarity at things that are broken in the world.

Discovering a calling means moving from being merely the critic to seeing yourself as part of the solution. Being a Christian means being the Body of Christ, the Church, the physical presence of God on earth. That means that when we see things in the world that God wants to change, we are called to change them. To be a Christian is to be called to engage what is wrong with the world and dedicate your life to fixing it. We are God’s hands and feet.

This is a long entry with perhaps too many loose ends. So help me pursue those loose ends. What do you think? What happens when you ask yourself these questions about the world, the Church, and you? Do you see problems you could engage? Do you see too many problems? Too few? Is the notion of Calling any clearer now or only more muddled?

I would love to know what you think!

Of Os

noreply@blogger.com (Wendell) — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 02:15:00 +0000

On Tuesday of the week past, we at the TFA enjoyed a visit from Dr. Os Guinness. Some of you are excited to hear this, others are wondering who Os is. Well, Os is a remarkable man: he has a PhD in the social sciences from Oxford, he has authored more than 20 books--most of which are centered around astute cultural analysis-- he is a wonderful and warm speaker and conversationalist, and his family is the namesake of the Guinness brewery. So I had plenty of reasons to be excited about Os's visit, but it turned out to be even better than I anticipated.

Os set up his talk by putting into perspective the uniqueness of our present age in the context of human history. He listed many factors that make our period of time unprecedented, but the foremost was this: we in the West have greater choice than any human society before us has ever possessed. What does this mean? Throughout most of human history, people's lives were mostly determined by circumstances beyond their control. Where you would live, what you would believe, and whom you would marry were largely determined by where you were born.

But in the wealthy consumer culture of the modern West, we have unprecedented self-determination. Those lifestyle choices that used to be determined by birthplace are now matters of individual preference. Do you want to live in Haiti? Then move there. Do you want to be a Buddhist? Read the “How to become a Buddhist” guide on Wikihow, and go for it. Even our sex can be changed if we have the money for surgery. We have the money and technology to remake ourselves into virtually anyone we want, and our culture does not give us any clear directions on what we should do with that freedom.

Rather than liberating, though, the result of this freedom tends to be confusion and identity crisis. My generation, my peers—we do not know who we are, and we have a very difficult time determining who to be. As Joni Mitchell says, there is a level of “crazy you get with too much choice.” And I think Os and Joni are right about this. Nietzsche spoke of the power to self-create as the ultimate freedom; but what I see in my own life and the lives of my peers is that this “freedom” tends to act more like a cage than a liberator. For two reasons: 1) there are no agreed-upon answers to the questions of identity. Who should you be? No one can say, so you are left alone in a noisy universe to decide who to be, and 2) even with all this power to be self-determining, we are still unable to change a lot of things about ourselves that we would like to make different—our fears, longings, weaknesses and needs.

What will help us in this situation, this identity confusion my peers and I were born into? Well, Os’s response is one word, but it is not simple. His answer is Calling. Even as I type this, though, I know it sounds trite. "Calling, what's that?" It looks like some Christian-ese word loaded with connotations that are apparent to no one save a select few. Well, it is a kind of squishy concept in some ways. But I think it is worth your time and mine to try to make sense of it. I hope I can unpack the set of concepts in that loaded word over the rest of this entry and the next.

Calling is the intersection of purpose and identity. Discovering a Calling is discovering who you are now, who you are meant to become, what you should work toward and hope for. Sounds good, doesn't it? But how on earth does anyone get a solid set of answers to such questions?

Os argued that in the kingdom of God we have the option to either a) reject God and go our own way or b) accept God’s love and give our lives to him for his purposes. There is no third option “C” in which we accept God’s love and yet go our own way. Thus, everyone who claims Christ also has a call on his or her life. "Come, follow me," Jesus said.

But what does that mean for me today? What does it mean for me or you to be a Christian and accept God’s calling on our lives? How do I go from being just another person trying to live my life, pay my bills, and avoid loneliness to being someone who lives with purpose and identity before God? Does this all sound like fancy words from a whimsical religious world?

These are questions that have burned in my head for the last couple of years. And only in the last month of my life have I started to see some clear answers. Os’s talk added come clarity to a set of ideas that was already starting to coalesce around me. I will take up those in my next post. I hope to explain what has been swimming in my head this summer and what I am trying to figure out while I’m here at TFA.

That next post will be up soon. But until then, let me know what you think. Do you think Os is right? Especially I ask this of my peers: do you think that we recent college grads suffer from some of the "crazy you get with too much choice"? Do you think there's a real issue of identity confusion in your life or in the lives of your friends? I think I see it, but I'd like to know what you think.

Oh, and the song I wrote a week ago is now recorded and available at kevandem.com. My new friend Brad Bell here at the TFA engineered the recording, so it's a bit more polished than some of my other recordings. Thanks, Brad! Thanks also to Kevin and Emily Smith--two of my favorite people on earth. They have agreed to host the audio file. I hope you enjoy it. Feedback is always welcome.

This is Wandering

noreply@blogger.com (Wendell) — Mon, 04 Sep 2006 22:10:00 +0000

I arrived in Maryland on the wings of Hurricane Ernesto and 5 days without a visible sun. Those who know me understand that this is a daunting way for me to begin my time in a new place: sunless weather tends to deliver depression on my doorstep. Fortunately, however, the pace of the first 3 days did not allow much time for the sort of self-reflection from which despair blooms. In fact, my initiation into the community life of the Trinity Forum Academy has been punctuated with joy, excitement, and contentment.

The eleven “fellows” who have committed to spend the next 9 months at the TFA with me are the sort of people that inspire and encourage. By all counts they are intelligent, sociable, and self-motivated—the kind of people who will make our close-knit community both lively and constructive. That said, at this point most of my estimations of the community and the people are just that: estimations, projections of what will be. So while I am bolster by thoughts of the kind of community that we are creating, I still do not really have any sense of knowing or being known here.

We are a fun bunch. We laugh loudly and share stories of ridiculous things we have done with friends in other stages of life. And though I am a prominent participant in the mirth and beauty produced by our times of fellowship, I have withdrawn quickly many times afterward. I have spent a lot of time isolated in the Chapel taking stock of my demeanor—wondering at how I can feel deeply connected at one moment only to feel utterly alone in the next. These are the stark contrasts of my new life in Maryland: I have felt alive and engaged in a new and exciting way, but I have also felt the pangs of loneliness that I thought were buried artifacts of my freshman year in college.

I do not think I am alone in these feelings. Although no one has said as much to me, I suspect when I see other fellows quietly retreating away from the group that they are dealing with similar mysteries in their souls. I hope so. My struggles have forced me to seek refuge in my heavenly father and friend, and he has proven faithful to meet me in distress.

The sun came out on Sunday, helping to make my Sabbath a needed source of hope and rejuvenation. I spent the entire afternoon in the Chapel and outdoors reading scripture, praying, and writing a new song. The new tune, my first in several months, is about loneliness and love: I think they are both overworked words that we use, for lack of better descriptions, to categorize the most confusing experiences of our souls. I am happy with the song. Do any of you know a good way I could host an mp3 recording on this blog?

On this site I intend to share explorations of my personal and interpersonal experiences here at the TFA, but I also plan to provide a window into the academic study I do here. And already, Dallas Willard’s The Spirit of the Disciplines has begun shaping my thoughts concerning the Christian life. I will post another article shortly containing that set of thoughts.

For now, however, I will close. I hope I have painted an honest and somewhat clear image of my thoughts. I want you to know my excitement and joy, but I want you to understand how frail and scared I can be, as well. That’s all from Maryland today.

That's Why I'm Here

noreply@blogger.com (Wendell) — Tue, 22 Aug 2006 22:20:00 +0000

Four years ago I left behind a group of friends for a new life at Furman University in South Carolina. During my first 9 months there, I published a humble online record of my activities which was then called a "freshman journal." Since that time, the term "blog" has entered the American vernacular, and I have realized in retrospect that, unbeknownst to me, I was acting as a pioneer blogger.

Now, at the end of my undergraduate experience, I am again leaving all that is familiar for a new environment. In less than a week, I leave for the cold, hostile wasteland ironically called "Maryland." As if anyone could be "merry" in so cold a place. Of course I jest, but having spent the first 23 years of my life in Mississippi and South Carolina, I am mentally preparing to be cold. How many ways can I articulate the simple sentiment, "it's cold here" or "presently, my body is uncomfortably cool" in the coming months? We shall see. My wiry, 140-lb frame was not built for braving temperatures below 50 degrees fahrenheit.

What is important about these cold temperature? Only this: they demonstrate to me that I am moving again, and I would like to keep in touch. To that end, I have acquired this small corner of the digital universe as a host for the thoughts I wish to relate to my beloved friends and family. This is my "freshman journal" for 2006/2007.

I have been blessed to receive a fellowship to live and study at the Trinity Forum Academy for the next 9 months. "What does it mean," you might ask, "to be a fellow at the Trinity Forum Academy?" To this question I respond: stay tuned. You see, the TFA is an intentional christian community where 12 college graduates will live, read, study, and think together for the duration of an academic year. This means that the nature of the experience will depend greatly on the thoughts emerging from the 12 fellows. So what does it mean to be a fellow at the TFA? I will find out as I go. And if you would like, you may follow the posts on this blog to discover the answer as I do, for here I will record my thoughts.

A closing comment: Brownie is the automobile that has accompanied me from age 8 until the present. She is a treasure trove of familiar feelings, smells, and thoughts in my 23-year-old mind. When I depart for Maryland, Brownie, for health reasons, will be remaining in the warmer climate of the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Hence the title of my blog. No, these are not exactly her thoughts; but they are tribute to her.

Stay warm, Brownie. I'll be home soon.