Tuesday, October 31, 2006
Zombies and the Bible
Happy All Hallow's Eve!



Your dead shall live, their corpses shall rise. O dwellers in the dust, awake and sing for joy! For your dew is a radiant dew, and the earth will give birth to those long dead (Isaiah 26:19, NRS).

I now return to writing a paper about the problem of evil.

Where's Woody Allen when I need him?

UPDATE: As Jackie notes below, we missed the reenactment over the weekend in downtown Lexington.

posted by Peter at 2:14 PM
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Monday, October 30, 2006
Making space & Eucharist


Working on a paper to articulate a theology of hospitality.

This is from Exclusion and Embrace by Miroslav Volf:
The Eucharist is the ritual time in which we celebrate this divine "making-space-for-us-and-inviting-us-in." Eating the bread and drinking the wine, we remember the body broken "for us" who were God's enemies, and the blood spilled to establish a "new covenant" with us who have broken the covenant (1 Corinthians 11:24-25). We would most profoundly misunderstand the Eucharist, however, if we thought of it only as a sacrament of God's embrace of which we are simply the fortunate beneficiaries. Inscribed on the very heart of God's grace is the rule that we can be its recipients only if we do no resist being made into its agents; what happens to us must be done by us. Having been embraced by God, we must make space for others in ourselves and invite them in--even our enemies. This is what we enact as we celebrate the Eucharist. In receiving Christ's broken body and spilled blood, we, in a sense, receive all those whom Christ received by suffering (129).

posted by Peter at 12:34 AM
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Saturday, October 21, 2006
Training for ministry


One of my favorite books I've been working on this semester has been Henri Nouwen's Reaching Out for my hospitality class. In a chapter entitled "Hospitality and the Host" he tells the story of an African minister, who after several years in the ministry, entered into some formal theological training. The experience led the man to a place of more questions than answers and to a place of much un-learning of his previous practice of ministry. As Nouwen says,
This story illustrates that well-educated ministers are not individuals who can tell you exactly who God is, where good and evil are and how to travel from this world to the next, but people whose articulate not-knowing makes them free to listen to the voice of God in the words of the people, in the events of the day and in the books containing the life experience of men and women from other places and other times. In short, learned ignorance makes one able to recieve the word froms others and the Other with great attention (105).


Ah yes, I am in seminary to articulate not-knowing and to learn ignorance.

He continues with something that I just might have to sloganize as the purpose for this here seminary thing I find myself embroiled in:
Training for service is not a training to become rich but to become voluntarily poor; not to fulfill ourselves but to empty ourselves; not to conquer God but to surrender to his saving power (108).

posted by Peter at 11:45 PM
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Beautiful



Found this while doing some research for tomorrow morning's study on Amos 5. This is from the Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture: The Twelve Prophets (p. 99). Sometimes I really wonder how the editors make the connections, because this bit really doesn't speak much to Amos 5:1-17.

Anyway, this is John Chrysostom from "Homilies on 1 Timothy 16":
I made heven and earth, he says, and to you I give the power of creation. Make your earth heaven. For it is in your power. "I am he who makes and transforms all things," says God of himself. And he ahs given to people a similiar power, as a painter, being an affectionate father, teaches his own art to his son. I formed your body beautiful, he says, but I give you the power of forming something better. Make your soul beautiful. I said, "Let the earth bring forth grass, and every fruitful tree."

posted by Peter at 5:09 PM
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