i'll stay with the fathers and sisters

lucian tapiedi (1921 - 1942)

anglican teacher/evangelist in papua new guinea
after japanese invasion during wwII, fled into the jungle with fellow priests and missionaries for protection
axed to death by hivijapa, a native orokaiva
hivijapa later converted to christianity, and took on the name lucian
built a church in embi and dedicated to the memory of lucian tapiedi


more info:
westminster abbey 20th century martyrs
church of england: 60th anniversary of the end of wwII

pakistani evangelist

esther john (1929 - 2 February 1960)

born qamar zia to a muslim family in india
converted to christianity as a teenager
hospital worker
missionary/evangelist in pakistan
brutally murdered in her bed


more info:
westminster abbey 20th century martyrs

a royal nun

grand duchess elizabeth of russia (1864 - 18 July 1918)

royal blood
member of russian nobility during the revolution
husband assasinated
sold all of her luxurious possessions and became a nun
opened the Mary and Martha home to help orphans and the poor
fostered prayer and charity among women
murdered by the bolshevicks

canonized by Russian Orthodox Church in 2001 as new-martyr elizabeth


more info:
westminster abbey 20th century martyrs
orthodox christian information center
orthodox england
orthodox america

the archbishop who stood up to a tyrant

janani luwum (1922 - 17 february 1977)

archbishop in uganda
publicly opposed the dictator idi amin
arrested
murdered (reported as car crash by government)



more info:
westminster abbey 20th century martyrs
dictionary of african christian biography
readings of the episcopal church

i shall be baptized with my own blood

manche masemola (1913-1928)

a pedi of south africa
baptismal canidate
murdered by her parents

martyr of the anglican church of southern africa


more info:
westminster abbey 20th century martyrs
dictionary of african christian biography

real heros

maximilian kolbe (1894 - 13 august 1941)

franciscan priest
prisoner in auschwitz
gave other prisoners his food
heard confessions and celebrated mass secretly in prison
gave his life as a sacrifice for a fellow prisoner

beatified as confessor in 1970
canonized as martyr in 1981


more info:
westminster abbey 20th century martyrs
saint of auschwitz
jewish virtual library

My Celebrity Look-alikes

My cool celebrity look-alike collage from MyHeritage.com. Get one for yourself.

alex gordon is my hero

subjective universality

to take a step back from my last post (the language of theology), i want to look at aesthetic judgments in general, not just from sibley's perspective.

david hume and immanuel kant were really the first ones to analyze aesthetic judgments, which they called judgments of taste.

judgments of taste come from an inner subjective aesthetic experience. this is in one sense an empirical observation. the same object may be called ugly by one person and beautiful by another, or they are just left simply confused (think jackson pollock). there seems to be as many different aesthetic opinions as there are peoples, or at least cultures.

but when a person ascribes the quality of beauty to an object there is the intention of universal application. we want others to call beautiful what we have called beautiful. there is also the example that david hume gave:

whoever would assert an equality of genius and elegence between ogilby and milton, or bunyan or addison, would be thought to defend no less an extravagance, than if he had maintained a mole-hill to be as high as teneriffe, or a pond as extensive as the ocean. though there may be found persons, who give the preference to the former authors, no one pays attention to such a taste; and we pronounce without scruple the sentiment of these pretended critics to be absurd and ridiculous (hume, of the standard of taste)

the point being that who has ever heard of addison or ogilby? there seems to be a universality to the statement "milton and bunyan are aesthetically pleasing."

so how does one reconcile this subjective universality? how does one make a justified judgment of taste?


is there a subjective universality to theology?

universality is easy to admit of. yes we live in the meta-narrative of YHWH's creation, redemption, and restoration. the statement "jesus is lord" does not change to "buddha is lord" when we find ourselves in a different context.

subjectivity in theology? maybe a little tougher to swallow. we want there to be an objective truth to our theological claims. we want there to be a definite rightness or wrongness to what we believe and say about god. but i think if we are honest, our theological convictions have a lot to do with our own experiences in the world and in church (some healthy and some painful). our convictions may have more to do with what denomination we grew up in than any actual adherence to the truth.

i don't know, these are just thoughts to play with.


articles for further reading:
aesthetic judgment by nick zangwill
hume's aesthetics by ted gracyk
kant's aesthetics and teleology by hannah ginsborg

the language of theology

frank sibley in his paper "aesthetic concepts," makes the claim that aesthetic terms are fundamentally different than non-aesthetic terms. this means that any aesthetic term cannot be further explained by a non-aesthetic term. in other words there are no necessary and sufficient conditions to define an aesthetic term such as 'graceful,' 'delicate,' 'gaudy,' or even 'beautiful.' aesthetic judgments are in a sense metaphors with no truth-functionality, meaning that a particular aesthetic judgment can not be true or false. but sibley does not want to commit to complete subjectivity here, he wants to say that there cann be 'good' or 'bad' judgments. a fine line.

aesthetic judgments are much like ethical judgments. they are grouped in what are 'value' judgments. so here is my question: are theological judgments value judgments?

if the language of theology could be analyzed like the language of aesthetics, many things would change.
we may no longer feel the need to use scientific techniques to prove the validity of scripture or our religion. we may not feel the need to distinguish ourselves from other christians because they interpret a passage of scripture differently than us.

maybe we could actually find beauty in the diversity of christian thought.

here begins my rambling.

isaac, the photographer

man of faith

last year one of my professors saw me walk into class, and he exclaimed, "now there is a man of faith." he said this because of the shirt i was wearing. and no, it was not a christian t-shirt.

wearing a royals jersey in october sets you apart, even in kansas city.

why do i still believe in the royals?

- my earliest memory is watching bret saberhagen pitch in game seven of the 1985 world series.

- my sons wanted to read the 2006 royals program guide before bedtime tonight.

- being from nebraska, how can i not believe in alex gordan?

- the odds are, at least one decent pitcher will come through the ranks. maybe this year.

- maybe this year.

and so i ask, who cares if the fantasy top 100 players include a total of 0 royals?

who cares if we have to face the red sox on opening day?

who cares if you could field just about an entire all-star team of former royals now playing elsewhere?

who cares if i like powder blue?


i believe.

isaac, the photographer

my son likes to grab the camera and take about 40-some pictures.
this is my four year old's art.

happy birthday to me

so here i am at 27.

am i supposed to be having one of those quarter-life crises? it didn't even dawn on me to consider it today, but now as i think about, a crisis enters my life.

it has been just over 9 years since christ said "i love you, dave," in the middle of snow covered fields. nebraska tends to make you feel small when you drive out away from the city (not very hard to do considering there is very little city to be in). there is a vastness to the plains that makes everything look big except for you. the moon is special. that night was special. there was blue all around.

skip forward to the summer and i am at a midnight hardcore show at cornerstone in bushnell, ill. god says, "serve my church." oh crap!

i have become the principle horn player for the university of nebraska-omaha's chamber orchestra. god says, "go to new orleans; learn how to serve my church." my mom says, oh crap!

new orleans has amazing clouds. they are huge. new orleans has amazing people. rich mullins said that the best way he knew how to identify with jesus was to identify with the poor. midnights in the french quarter i listened to people. i watched a homeless man give my friend a tie, just because he wanted to do something nice for him. i watched as this same homeless man was stopped by campus security while he was walking to our bible study we held in the dorms.

on the ground staring at the night sky, god says, "not music, i've got something else for you."

what?

youth ministry?
teaching?
social justice?
pastor?
academia?
theology?
philosophy?
writing?

how many wrong decisions have i made? how many right?

to try to live in abba's embrace is what is needed.
grace.

happy birthday isaac

you only turn 4 once. today is the culmination of a week of cake, ice cream, family, and curious george.


Let mercy lead
Let love be the strength in your legs
And in every footprint that you leave
There'll be a drop of grace

- rich mullins

revelations of divine love fragment (ch. 5)

at the same time, our lord showed me a spiritual vision of his familiar love. i saw that for us he is everything that we find good and comforting. he is our clothing, wrapping us for love, embracing and enclosing us for tender love, so that he can never leave us, being himself everything that is good for us, as i understand it.

in this vision he also showed a little thing, the size of a hazel-nut in the palm of my hand, and it was as round as a ball. i looked at it with my mind's eye and thought, 'what can this be?' and the answer came to me, 'it is all that is made' i wondered how it could last, for it was so small i thought it might suddenly have disappeared. and the answer in my mind was, 'it lasts and will last for ever because god loves it; and everything exists in the same way by the love of god.' in this little thing i saw three properties: the first is that god made it, the second is that god loves it, the third is that god cares for it. but what the maker, the carer and the lover really is to me, i cannot tell; for until i become one substance with him, i can never have complete rest or true happiness; that is to say, until i am so bound to him that there is no created thing between my god and me.

we need to know the littleness of all created beings and to set at nothing everything that is made in order to love and posses god who is unmade. this is the reason why we do not feel complete ease in our hearts and souls: we look here for satisfaction in things which are so trivial, where there is no rest to be found, and do not know our god who is almighty, all wise, all good; he is rest itself. god wishes to be known, and is pleased that we should rest in him; for all that is below him does nothing to satisfy us; and this is why, until all that is made seems as nothing, no soul can be at rest. when a soul sets all at nothing for love, to have him who is everything, then he is able to receive spiritual rest.

our lord god also showed that it gives him very great pleasure when a simple soul comes to him in a bare, plain and familiar way. for, as i understand this showing, it is the natural yearning of the soul touched by the holy ghost to say, 'god, of your goodness, give me yourself, you are enough for me, and anything less that i could ask for would not do you full honour. and if i ask anything that is less, i shall always lack something, but in you alone i have everything.' and such words are very dear to the soul and come very close to the will of god and his goodness; for his goodness includes all his creatures and all his blessed works, and surpasses everything endlessly, for he is what has no end. and he has made us only for himself and restored us by his blesed passion and cares for us with his blessed love. and all this is out of his goodness.


julian of norwich. revelations of divine love. trans. by elizabeth spearing. penguin books, 1998.

being jackson pollock

here is a great space to paint like jackson pollock.
have fun creating and being.

instructions: move your cursor around on the page, click to change colors.

hiv/aids test

test your knowledge of the hiv/aids pandemic here.

plato, pt. 2

"education in music is most sovereign, because more than anything else rhythm and harmony find their way to the inmost soul and take strongest hold upon it, bringing with them and imparting grace, if one is rightly trained, and otherwise the contrary?"

what implications does this have for theological and spiritual formation? just because descartes says the only way to certain knowledge is through the rational mind does mean that we in the church have to base our training and formation on such a "heady" pursuit.

might our training be more holistic if music and the arts were used in our formation? what might our sunday schools look like?

commenting on plato's aesthetics

in these next couple of meditations i wanted to comment on plato's republic. the first is on a claim that is rather quite disturbing to my conemporary mind, and the second is a psychological claim that i think has further implications for theology.

"is it, then, only the poets that we must supervise and compel to embody in their poems the semblance of the good character or else not write poetry among us."

why is it that we are so afraid of poets? why do they often make us uncomfortable? In another dialogue (the ion), plato/socrates reaches the conclusion that poets are divinely inspired by the muses. poets are vessels for the gods to impart truth and knowledge. but it is not only the poets that are inspired, the intepreter and the audience are also inspired by the muses. so why in plato's ideal society, would he want to, in contemporary terms, censor the vessels of divine "revelation," the bearers of truth, or the prophets.

societies and religious groups like to silence prophets while they are walking about on this earth. often prophets do not come from the established elite. they don't say or do things that would be considered the norm. but we are comfortable with the norm. we like to think that our accepted teachings and morals are the truth. when a poet/prophet challenges us to look beyond ourselves for the truth, we fidget and squirm and do everything possible to shut them up.

it is only after we have banished, hurt or killed the poet/prophet that we realize we were wrong.

and so i offer this challenge to christendom. stop being so arrogant and let the poet/prophets into our presence. let them reveal truth that gets beyond our social constructs that we deem holy and righteous.