Research Paper

This is but a portion of my bibliography.

My paper is on the common Biblical defenses of the slave trade in the century leading up to the American Civil War.

My Faith Journey

Several times recently I have found myself talking about different chapters in my faith journey.  Some of this has been from several trips back to Harding which is always a time of thought, reflection and growth.  Other times it has been with Logan and others who have been turning things over with me. 

Reflection is important.  I think it is almost everything.

I think that arrogance toward others is the result of the lack of reflection on yourself.  I have a friend who is a good spiritual guy, but he comes down hard on everyone around him for any flaws they may have.  I often say he is one of the least graceful people that I know, which is embarrassing for him because he has some pretty hardcore sins in his past.  Instead of reflecting on them and using those experiences to come to people from a position of experience and grace, he comes at them from a place of arrogance.  I find this sad.

Reflection not only gives you grace, it reminds you of experiences that shape who you are.  If you are not using your previous experience to become better and make the others around you better, then I think you are like a man who experiences himself in the mirror and forgets what he looks like.

This is going to be a series of posts for sure.  They aren’t going to be highly trendy topics.  I am not expecting to generate a lot of traffic from these posts, but I am hoping instead to generate a lot of honesty from them. 

In addition to my stories, I would ask you to share your own.  It doesn’t have to be here or with me, but keep those stories.  Hang on those experiences.  They make you who you are.  And you are who you are for a reason. 

Here are a few of mine.

Stories about Peace By Piece

I could write about this thing all day, but I will give you a few external links that talked about the conference fromt his weekend. 

Peter Rollins wrote a short blurb on his blog

From The Link, a story about some of the struggles leading up to the conference. 

And from Arkansas Times

Weekend @ Peace By Piece

As I mentioned before on here, Searcy has recently hosted as Christian Community Conference called Peace by Piece.  You may remember that there was some turbulance along the way and because of some of the selected speakers, the Conference was kindly asked to find a new venue.  This pushed the conference out into the community and several businesses and churches in the Downtown Searcy area were kind enough to host some of the lectures and conversations. 

Logan and I went down for an informational weekend and a weekend to imagine new things and directions for our lives and seeing if Community living might be something we were interested in.  On top of that we were able to see so many friends that we had not seen in a long time.

Here is the event list that we attended.

Saturday I
Geoff Maddock from Communality
“Leading from below and failing from the front in a missional community.”

Saturday II
Mark Elrod
“Microcredit: Small Loans That Make a Big Difference”

Keynote:  Karen Sloan

Saturday IV
Karen Sloan
“Money, Sex, and Power in Community: Practical Suggestions Towards Healthy Choices”

Keynote: Chris Haw

The weekend inspired a lot of good conversation between Logan and I about how we view Kingdom, Community and our role in the world.  On our way home we listened to a sermon by Mark Driscoll about Church Planting and talked about many of those ideas. 

We had a great weekend.  It was good to see friends and meet new people along the way.  It is always good to feel like you are coming home,  and that is how I feel when I come back to Harding.  It was good to stay with our dear friends Chris and Jessie Fulks as well as catch up with a host of others. 

This is not the only post I will do about Peace by Piece.  There was a lot of substantive material there that I am sure I will work into this blog over the week.

God and Slavery (Part two)

I am working on a research paper about Pro-Slavery arguments used from the Bible in pre-Civil War America. 

One of the more interesting arguments came from a guy named Frederick Ross.  Ross was a Presbyterian preacher who in 1857 made a speech about abolitionists and what they were preaching.

Ross said that Abolitionists could not be finding their justification in the Bible.  He said people who see slavery “in harmony with the Bible” can cling to it more confidently because they were right.  He said that according to them “Paul [was] moved by the Holy ghost to sanction the philosophy of Thomas Jefferson.” 

He said that abolitionists couldn’t “torture” the words out that they wanted so they went elsewhere to learn what they could read back into the Bible. 

–

Now, I think that slavery is evil.  I am glad it is over, but on some points I have to agree with him.  I think in the Bible, due to the cultural context, you have slaves implored to obey their masters.  You have Paul sending Onesimus back to his owner after he ran away. 

That is not to say that abolitionists didn’t have Biblical points as well, but I find this ping pong f religious conversation very interesting.  More to come!

Budget Challenge – The Oregano Fiasco

So, I told you last week that I went grocery shopping.  Well, that post was only the first half of that experience.

I mentioned that  the things that make my food taste good, costed more than the food itself.  I noticed this while buying basil and aregano.  It ran me about $2.00 for a small container of it. 

Well I got home and was looking over my recipt.  I was charged for two containers of aregano, but I had only bought one. 

Normally, I would shrug it off as two dollars and forget about it, but I can’t now because on a $120 food budget, two bucks is quite a bit.  Frustrated, I jumped back into my car and drove back across town to the neighborhood market where I had bought my groceries and walked in.

“Can I help you?”  The customer service representative was a sixteen-year-old girl. 

“Yes,” I said, handing her my recipt.  “I was charged for two areganos and I only bought one.” 

She looked at my recipt, back at me, then down to my recipt again.  “Sir, did you drive very far?”

“Kind of, I live across town, but this is the closest store.”  I said thinking of the gas it takes me just to get to and from the grocery store. 

“Well sir, if you’ll look at your recipt,” she leaned over the counter to show me the very bottom of the recipt.  “She knew she did that, and she took it off here at the bottom.”  Sure enough at the very bottom of the recipt it said:  Oregano -$2.12.

I had driven across town for nothing…  Budget is going so well.

Photos from The Ice storm

Well, the ice is mostly gone now, and today’s high of 45 should take care of the rest of it.  Just wanted to share some pictures from it.  Enjoy.

Every stick in the neighborhood had a good half inch of ice around it, which was very pretty.

This is a frozen fire hydrant outside my house. 

Ice formed on my window the morning I woke up.

God and Slavery

I am working on a research paper. 

I am getting started early because this is a really interesting topic that I want to do justice.  My topic is Biblical Defenses of Slavery.  I am focusing mostly on the ideas promoted from pulpits in the 1800s for the institution of slavery in America. 

They are varied.  Some suggest that America as a Christian nation is just continuing the institution that God set up when he cursed Ham and sent him to Africa.  Others follow a Calvinist idea that slaves were predestined to be slaves and they are what they are because God wanted them to be that.  Some people said flat out, Look the Bible says not to envy each others slaves.  Paul sent a slave back to his master.  If you are looking for writings on slavery to defend you point you have to go out to secular writings of the world and leave the Holy Scriptures out of it.

It is an interesting topic, and a sad one.  The most powerful quote, and the one I believe I will lead off with is from Abraham Lincoln.

“They all read the same Bible, and prayed to the same God…The prayers of both could not be answered.”

Good Cause #10

Tents and Tarps is what my university, Harding University, is doing to combat and help the situation in Haiti.

This is really a combined effort of the Student Association, professors, administration, students and alumni to try to bring relief to Haiti in some small way.

The general idea is, with Haiti basically flattened and only make shift structures housing people, stores, hospitals and everything else, that those people need some sort of make-shift shelters for protection from the sun and elements. 

$50.oo gives shelter to a family.  Donate anything that you can.  I was able to find $9.67 in my budget to donate.  They are on the verge of sending down their first shipment of $400 tents in a few days. 

Watch this video for more information.

Literature and the People Lament

Today is a sad day indeed. 

Sometimes people die.  Or rather, sometimes heroes of mine die and I feel a bit lost.  These are often people who I have never met or seen, but still had tremendous impact in my life.  Sometimes they are singers, song writers, sports stars or politicians.  This happens often enough.  Every couple of months some new person will pass on and I will feel a bit sad for a few days. 

Today however, I learned about two brilliant people who have passed away.  Quite a double whammy. 

J.D. Salinger passed away late Wednesday night.  He wrote several short stories and novels, but will always be known and loved and hated by his only major success, The Catcher in the Rye.  Upon its publication and major success, Salinger hid out, becoming a basic recluse from his fame and popularity.  He never wrote another novel.  Catcher and its main character Holden Caufield were not something that first attracted me.  I read it in high school knowing that it was one of “the new classics” but was pretty turned off by the whole book.  It was not until later in life, toward the end of high school and into college that I really came to love the book.  Holden’s story is everyone’s story.  Especially so for the young college guy.  He feels without purpose, direction and is unsure of his future, and even in going back to the places he was once comfortable, he no longer fits in.  Such was my experience in the early days of college.  I had left my small town and what I had always thought of as its backwardness and gone off to my private college.  Coming home wasn’t coming home any more because more and more I felt at odds with the place I came from. 

Until recently I read Catcher once a year.  I think I need to get back into that habit.  Salinger was 91.

The other person whose loss I lament is Howard Zinn.  Zinn is most popular for his book A People’s History of the United States which he has been editing and adding to since his first draft in 1980.  The book contains many of the stories and points of view that you don’t see in your history books, history classes, or on the the history channel.  The book blew my mind when I read it in my sophomore year of college while writing a research paper on Jimmy Carter. 

Zinn went into World War II but was placed in several situations that were morally compromising, including what he viewed as an unnessicery trial-run of a new substance called napalm that killed some soldiers and many civilians.  These experiences led him to become a pacifist and a staunch anti-war activist.  His main stand was that most wars and actions in war are politically motivated.  This is a theme that runs throughout A People’s History.  Zinn changed the way I see a lot of things: politics, history, war, peace, human rights and minority struggles.  In short, everything.

Zinn died of a heart attack while traveling in California on Wednesday.  His work however, lives on.