Glen and Paula Davis: Our Lifestream

Huh? (Gleaning #3177)

2008-07-02T21:29:02+00:00

If the meanings of "true" and "false" were switched, then this sentence wouldn't be false.

source: Douglas Hofstadter
tags: Language Logic .

Stylistic Variance Does Not Establish Multiple Authors (Gleaning #3176)

2008-07-01T17:33:25+00:00

[The argument goes that because there are marked contrasts in style within the book of Isaiah, there must be multiple authors who each contributed different sections of the book.] ...such differences as there are may be easily accounted for by the change in situation which confronted Isaiah in his later years, and also by the maturing of his literary genius. Numerous parallels to this may be pointed out in the history of world literature. Thus in the case of John Milton, we find far more striking disssimilarities between Paradise Lost, which he composed in later years, and the style of L'Allegro or Il Penseroso, which appeared in his earlier period. A similar contrast is observable between his prose works such as Christian Doctrine and Aeropagitica. Or, to take an example from German literature, Goethe's Faust Part II presents striking contrasts in concept, style, and approach as over against Faust Part I. These contrasts are far more obvious than those between Isaiah I and Isaiah II. In his Dictionary of the Bible (p. 339a), Davis points out that in the twenty-five years of Shakespeare's activity, four distinct periods can be distinguished in his dramatic productions, each period being marked by clear differences in style.

source: Gleason Archer, A Survey of Old Testament Introduction: Revised and Expanded, p 381
tags: Apologetics Bible Isaiah .

Xander on Dana's scooter

2008-06-29T10:34:58+00:00

Xander loves to do everything that Dana does. Here he is riding her scooter after we got back from a bike ride.

Teaching

2008-06-26T23:29:35+00:00

Monday was my first day at my new job. I have been wanting to write a post about it but I have been to tired. I am loving my job. It is fun and the students are great. Many of them leave me thinking, this must be what Glen was like as a kid. One girl I had to ask four times to put her book away so that she could cook with her group.

I am getting the hang of prepping the room each day. I have the best assistant which makes it a lot easier. I am just not used to the physical energy that is needed to stand for 6 hours and supervise 24-27 kids.

I am to tired to think straight so I will try to update more on the weekend. As a mom I had lost all appreciation for the weekends, they seemed like every other day of the week. BUT this weekend will be something special, a break from work. (at least from one job.)

1,825 miles and 841 pages later…

2008-06-26T18:45:47+00:00

Yesterday I flew 1,825 miles and read 841 pages. Yikes.

The last few weeks have been a blur. On Father’s Day I watched an astounding group of graduates celebrate as they received their degrees from Stanford. As I sat in the hot summer sun listening to Oprah Winfrey pontificate at commencement, I thought about their lives and what God might do through them. I also got sunburn.

The day after graduation I hopped on a plane to Springfield, MO to teach at Chi Alpha’s Reach The U institute (that trip wound up being 2,278 miles due to weird routing - I didn’t think to keep track of the pages I read, but I will tell you that Augustine of Hippo is a dense read). Training a new generation of leaders is fun, but exhausting. On the two worst days I taught 6 hours! I’m amazed I didn’t lose my voice.

One cool thing - I shared a bathroom with fellow instructor Pete Bullette, someone I had trained at this same conference years ago. He now leads a ministry of 250 students at the University of Virginia. While I don’t think I can take credit for what he’s done there, I was happy that he mocked me for some of my actions those many years ago - it means I made an impression. Who knows what the new ministers I trained over the last few weeks will go on to accomplish?

All that to say, I have one of the best jobs in the world. I get to help the amazing students at Stanford come to and grow in faith, and I get to train ministers who will multiply this on campuses around the world.

By the way, you can read about one of the aforementioned grads in “The Rhodes Scholar” (the article was published on Father’s Day, in case you’re wondering about the huge fatherly emphasis).

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René Girard: Stanford's provocative immortel is a one-man institution

2008-06-25T12:12:16+00:00

Great article summarizing Girard's theories. If you don't know him, he's a legendary French intellectual who actually esteems the Bible and considers himself a believer.

Marked By Faith: Wordle

2008-06-24T18:54:12+00:00

Excellent word clouds for each book of the New Testament. Would be great resources for a Biblical theology class.

Tricked For Their Own Good (Gleaning #3175)

2008-06-23T12:24:16+00:00

A German nursing home has come up with a novel idea to stop Alzheimer's patients from wandering off: a phantom bus stop....

"It sounds funny," said Old Lions Chairman Franz-Josef Goebel, "but it helps. Our members are 84 years-old on average. Their short-term memory hardly works at all, but the long-term memory is still active. They know the green and yellow bus sign and remember that waiting there means they will go home." The result is that errant patients now wait for their trip home at the bus stop, before quickly forgetting why they were there in the first place.

source: http://www.boingboing.net/2008/06/05/fake-bus-stop-keeps.html
tags: Creativity Deception Psychology .

Christian Audio

2008-06-22T21:01:14+00:00

MP3s from leading Christian thinkers.

It's okay to keep those feelings inside, new study suggests

2008-06-22T20:53:50+00:00

Pop psychology takes it on the chin.

Earth Day, Jesus, and Christian Environmentalism

2008-06-22T02:45:48+00:00

I’m in Springfield, MO at a Chi Alpha conference where I’ve taught approximately 12 hours in the last two days.

Yes, that’s as grueling as it sounds. It’s been fun, though.

Anyway, while here I got to hang with Darrin Rodgers, an old seminary buddy who is now a historian. He told me something that blew my mind: the founder of Earth Day (the first Earth Day, I should say - there are two) is a Pentecostal Christian. His name is John McConnell. If you are a pacifist you will find his story especially interesting - read some reviews of his biography.

I’m encouraged that a follower of Jesus was at the forefront of the early environmental movement. It is easy to grow disappointed in Christianity if you focus on the inactivity of the institutional church and forget that the faith, ultimately, is expressed in individual lives. But when you remember that the church’s business is to not to engage in activism itself but rather to release Christians to serve God’s purposes in the world, you can actually become quite giddy. We still have a long way to go, but we’re doing far better than the world or the church seems to think. When I peek deep into a positive situation I often discover a Jesus-follower (or even a few) at the heart of it.

So if you’re a fan of Earth Day (the original), then remember to thank God for it. And keep your eyes open - God is at work in unexpected places.

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Unexpected

2008-06-20T11:12:12+00:00

Glen and I are what some people may term as over sheltering parents. We did not allow Dana to watch TV until she was two. Once she did turn two we highly monitor what she watched on TV and even listened to on the radio.

Recently I have decided that once a month Dana and I would have Mommy Daughter night. We cuddle up on the couch with an appropriate girl movie and popcorn. The "appropriate" part is the hardest part of Mommy Daughter night. Glen and I try not to let her watch things that may cause her to be afraid and have bad dreams. So we have watched Mary Poppins, Cinderella, and My Friends Tigger and Pooh. I have wanted to show her shows like Little Mermaid, Snow White and other such princess movies since she loves to pretend she is a princess and loves to read these stories. However we feel that they have a few scary parts.

But yesterday when picked I picked her up from school she was telling me about the lion that ate bugs and the scary waterhogs. I asked her if this was something she watched on tv during rest time. She agreed that told me more about it. The more I listened I realized that she had watched Lion King.

The other day I discover that she had watched Toy Story. Neither of these movies or bad I would have preferred to watch them with her first or delayed it a little longer. I guess this will be the story of Dana's life from now on, since we plan to send her to public school. Exposed to things we were hoping she could be sheltered from for a few more years.

Bummer

Update

2008-06-18T10:49:15+00:00

Sorry it has been a while since I updated. Life seems to fly by esp when you are having fun. Here are a few photos with a promise to the Grandparents of more to come.
Here is Xander hard at work on the neighbors computer.

Dana loves to dress herself before coming down the hall. She takes it as a great victory to come down the hall dressed before anyone else. It is an even greater victory if she can get dressed before we know she is awake. this is the outfit she choose for herself in the middle of our 90 degree weather.

If you were not aware, Dana loves the color pink. Everyday her outfit has a little pink on it. Yesterday on the way home from school we had a conversation about her time at school.
Dana: Mom, the other kids at school did not comment on my clothes today.
Me: I am sorry, what would you have liked them to say.
Dana: They must not have realized how special my outfit was. I mean it is PINK!

Monday we went to the Happy Hallow Zoo. Glen is out of town so I am looking for things to occupy our time. Here are a few photos of our trip. Our neighbor Micah came with us.

Unexpected Perspective on Worship

2008-06-11T15:59:23+00:00

I’ve been preparing to teach some sessions at Reach The U (a conference for new campus ministers) and I just read one of the most unexpected little paragraphs while digging through some research:

Across the United States, Asian American groups are pioneering a revival of a cappella singing. On West Coast college campuses, Korean American evangelicals are known for their cutting-edge praise music. Students of other ethnicities commonly note, “Oh, the Koreans have a great worship team.” Indeed they do. Although Asian American evangelicals’ praise is largely similar to other evangelicals, it is often more cutting edge. They use the latest praise music coming out of the United Kingdom as well as the United States—before the other campus ministries do the same. They tend to use more modern musical instruments like electric pianos, bass, and guitar than some of the other traditionally white-dominant campus ministries.

Source: Rebecca Kim, “Asian Americans for Jesus: Changing the Face of Campus Evangelicalism” (pdf, page 4).Rekk

This isn’t a thought I’ve had before. Interesting.

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Why I Don't Live in the Bunker

2008-06-11T13:24:08+00:00

Walt Mueller offers excellent thoughts on Christians and our culture.

taoyue.com: Why I Never Hire Brilliant Men

2008-06-04T15:44:29+00:00

Great article on the problems of working with people who are too smart.

Evil Raccoons and Mendacious Students

2008-06-02T17:29:12+00:00

A few weeks ago, Whitney showed up to Chi Alpha’s weekly meeting with a large bandage wrapped around her hand. I asked her what had happened, and she told me of a ferocious raccoon attack while walking along Lake Lagunita.

This was not surprising to me. Raccoons are evil. All right-thinking people know this in their marrow.

Sure, they look cute with their little paws and their masked face, but even Satan seems to be a beautiful angel. No - raccoons are as evil as a subhuman mammal can be. And given that raccoons roam freely across campus, something like this was inevitable.

Realizing that I was sitting on entertainment gold, I asked Whitney to keep silent until the announcement time, when I would interview her and allow her to regale the entire group with her story.

After worship, I called her to the front and asked her what had happened. As she held her bandaged hand high and said, “I was bitten by a raccoon,” Desirae cried out, “I knew those things were dangerous!” A hush fell over the room as she began to tell her tale.

She and her roommate had been walking around Lake Lag when Whitney noticed a raccoon moving about in the bushes. She turned to her roommate to point it out and saw a flurry of motion out of the corner of her eye. The next thing she knew, she was being lunged at by an apparently carnivorous raccoon. She fended it off, suffering a grievous hand wound in the process.

Her roommate, a pre-med student, gave her some quick treatment and then she headed over to Vaden health center for further medication.

At this point, you could have heard a pin drop in the Chi Alpha meeting. Every student there was thinking of the many times they had seen raccoons rambling across campus, looking at Whitney’s bandaged hand, and thinking, “There but for the grace of God go I.”

At least until Whitney burst out laughing and said, “And you believe me?”

I said, “Bwah?”

Whitney said, “I was making that up. I tripped and hurt my hand. My roommate said that was too boring and that I should make up a better story. So far everyone I’ve told has believed me.”

The room erupted in laughter.

For those keeping score:
Whitney: 1
Glen: 0
Raccoons: negative infinity

And that’s why people should always come to Chi Alpha in person rather than just watching our meetings online - you never know what’s going to happen when the camera’s not running.

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wounded-whitney

2008-06-02T16:42:32+00:00

Whitney bearing a hand wound.
In album Some 2008 Chi Alpha pics

Feeling Tired

2008-05-29T18:11:07+00:00

I’m quite tired.

We had our final Chi Alpha worship meeting of the quarter last night. It went awesome. Worship was phenomenal, I think the message was well-received, and we got to hang out and talk for a while afterwards. Plus we actually ended the year with more numbers than we began the year with. That’s rare in campus ministry. If you average the first three weeks of the year and multiply by about 80%, that’s a more typical number to end with. The growth has been great - but a larger ministry means more people to meet with, which means less flexibility in my schedule.

So I’m tired from the academic year.

I’ve also been teaching an extension class for AGTS in Sacramento every Thursday this month. Tonight is the final course. It’s a 2 hour drive there, a four hour class, and then a two hour drive back. It’s been very fun and I’ve learned a lot through teaching the course (which I’ve heard is the experience of most teachers).

But it’s pretty draining. That’s an extra 8 hour day every week. And that’s if traffic behaves.

And I’m serving on a task force for the Assemblies. We had a video chat this morning which lasted about 2.5 hours. It was rewarding, but also draining.

Finally, I’m supposed to be doing a lot of web stuff for Chi Alpha. I just haven’t been able to prioritize it lately. Yeek. Lots of low-hanging fruit, but no time to reach out and pluck it.

All in all, I’m very much looking forward to the change of schedule that comes with the summer. I’ll still be busy, but at least I’ll be busy doing different things.

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From Eden to Exile: Unraveling Mysteries of the Bible by Eric H. Cline

2008-05-21T00:40:11+00:00

xaglen's review: "Eric Cline's cleverly-titled book, <a href="http://www.librarything.com/work/3371440/book/30731597">From Eden To Exile: Unraveling The Mysteries of the Bible</a> is structured around seven puzzling stories from the Old Testament. He presents the consensus of modern researchers as well as popular amateur theories (the sort you frequently hear espoused in televised documentaries). He critiques these "enthusiast" theories solidly, which I very much appreciated. Given that he consistently engaged both the scholarly world and the popular world, I'm puzzled that he so rarely engaged the world of contemporary evangelical scholarship. He's clearly aware of it (he references evangelical scholars several times), but he doesn't often present evangelical perspectives or arguments (not even to critique them). This weakness seriously undermines the usefulness (and credibility) of the book for a significant segment of his potential audience, many people interested in the archeology of the Old Testament are either pious believers or ardent skeptics. Both groups are quite interested in the arguments of evangelical scholars. He summarizes his conclusions on page 182, "While we may not have located Noah's ark, I believe that we have successfully documented that the Ten Lost Tribes weren't lost after all, that the Ark of the Covenant was most likely destroyed during the obliteration of Solomon's Temple by Nebuchadnezzar and the Neo-Babylonians, that Jericho was probably not destroyed by Joshua and the Israelites, that we can neither confirm nor deny the biblical account of the Exodus, that Sodom and Gomorrah are still missing, and that the Garden of Eden is most likely to have been located in Mesopotamia." It's a fun little volume, but don't let it be the only book you read on the cultural background of the Old Testament."
National Geographic (2007), Hardcover, 256 pages
tags: early reviews, bible, history

Where is my baby?

2008-05-20T16:37:38+00:00

Xander is 18 months old now. He has had his hair trimmed a few times but yesterday he was given his first official haircut. My friend Jen and I cut his hair and with each clump of hair that fell Xander would look at the floor and say "Oh Oh!" And each time it was with more concern in his voice.

When the hair cut was over, Xander wanted very little to do with me. And each time I looked at him I teared up because he no longer looked like the same little baby.

She is so witty!

2008-05-17T18:40:47+00:00

If you know our kids you know that the good times are always close by. We are often laughing at the things they do or in Dana's case says.

The other day I was making a peanut butter sandwich. I asked Dana to carefully carry the butter knife into the kitchen and place it in to the sink. When she returned from the kitchen she was frustrated because her hair was all sticky. After a few probing questions the truth came out that Dana had twirled her hair with the butter knife before putting it into the sink. I told her that we would need to wash her hair when she took her bath.

After lunch Glen told Dana that it was time to go read stories and have a rest time. Dana being the logical kid said "I can't go to rest time now, I will get my pillow all sticky. You wouldn't want that now would you?" Then she looked at Glen and said "Dad how would you like it if you had sticky jelly in your ha.....(thoughtful pause). If you had hair how would you like it if you had sticky jelly in it?"

Later in the week we were listening to CD with children's Bible songs on it. Dana's favorite song this week is Joshua fought the battle of Jericho. But after listening to it a few times she asked "Why did the walls come tumbling down?" I explained the Bible story to her. She then asked "Is God going to make our walls fall down?" No I don't think he will. But for the next few times we went down the hall she would slide with her back against the walls as if trying to hold them up.

We love our Dana and all the funny things she says. If only I could get her to clean her room.

Xander and Dana flipping

2008-05-12T20:11:29+00:00

Xander watches Dana practicing her gymnastics. He tries to copy her. These are videos of Dana and Xander flipping out.

Tyndale Tech: Maps & Geography in Biblical Studies

2008-05-05T22:55:45+00:00

Good resources for using maps and photos in your sermons.

Poll Everywhere - Simple Text Message (SMS) Voting and Polling

2008-05-01T02:01:22+00:00

Pretty amazing web app - you can set up live polls for your meetings where the audience can text in their opinion.

Pre-K

2008-04-29T22:54:39+00:00

Dana started Pre-K two weeks ago. She attends Tuesday and Thursdays and is more than excited to attend.

Here is a picture of her first day of school.

Dana was already in a daycare two days a week, so it was not a big change for her. However, for me it was a little hard to make the sift from daycare to Pre-K. Maybe it is the fact I am packing lunches that makes it seem much more official. Or it could be that she has her first ever school musical this Friday night. I will need to pack a few Kleenexes for this event.

Ouch (Gleaning #3174)

2008-04-28T17:00:46+00:00

Advertising is a tax you pay for being unremarkable.

source: Robert Stephens
tags: Advertising .

Fifteen Minutes and Counting

2008-04-23T14:47:37+00:00

One of our worship leaders, Awa, has some of the most quotable lines of anyone I know.

As exhibit A, I submit the following excerpt from an email to our group last week:

It’s spring quarter people, time to procrastinate so you can enjoy the beautiful warm weather and the beautiful peeps of Chi Alpha. I mean, we are a good looking bunch…I say that in truth and with humility…

How magnificent is that language?

Anyway, at least one reporter at the Stanford Daily agrees with me: Awa was quoted not once but twice in a recent article as was Chris, another of our students.

For context, the article is about a Hawaiian Lu’au on campus.

…kahlua pig … is traditionally prepared by filling the pig’s abdominal cavity with hot stones, then placing the pig in a pit containing hot stones.

“But I’m sure Santa Clara County wouldn’t have been too open to that idea, so we hand-shredded the 40 lbs. of pork ourselves using forks,” said Lu’au Co-Chair Awapuhi Dancil ‘10. “The hardest part was figuring out how much of each item to buy. People at Costco kept staring at us since we had 40 tomatoes, pineapples and pounds of salmon.”

And then later on,

“The members of the Hawai’i Club poured our heart and soul into this event, working at 100 mph,” Dancil said.

And the contribution from Chris:

Perhaps the most interesting side dish was the poi, pounded taro root that is kneaded into a smooth paste, traditionally meant to be eaten by scooping it out of a bowl with one’s fingers.

“I still haven’t made up my mind about the poi,” said Chris Olivares ‘10. “But everything else is absolutely delicious. I came last year and had to come again to support friends and watch the great dances. And how often do you get to have authentic Hawaiian food that’s really good?”

So a big shout out to you both for your 15 minutes of fame.

Although next time you’re talking about slaughtered pigs and root paste try to figure out a subtle way to work in “Chi Alpha Christian Fellowship meets at 7:30pm every Wednesday school is in session in building 300-300.” I’m not quite sure how to do that elegantly, but there must be some way. Maybe something like “Of course, slaughtered pigs cannot atone for our sins. They are merely tasty. However, there is one sacrifice that has already been given on our behalf, and we’ll be talking about it this Wednesday… etc, etc”.

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I Love The World

2008-04-21T14:29:00+00:00

Looking for some inspiration in an unexpected place? Check out this Discovery Channel commercial.

Reminds me of an old Rich Mullins song With The Wonder…

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Carrier Business may be expanding

2008-04-16T16:29:04+00:00

I have been in business for almost two years now. I make and sell baby carriers and infant/toddler sleep blankets. I have loved sewing for other people to meet a need in there life and put a little mad money in my pocket.

Sometimes I am asked to make a specialty order. Like something out of organic cotton instead of fleece. I have also made carriers out of material that the costumer provides. I am flexible and like to work things out so that the customer gets what they want.

Last week I got a request that could change my business. I was asked to make a carrier for a special needs cat. I have never sewn for a animal before but I am up for the challenge.

Here are a few photos of the carrier I may make for "Bobo" the cat. I will keep you posted if the cat likes his carrier.

Seminary Meme

2008-04-15T16:38:03+00:00

Brian just tagged me with this seminary questionnaire. As I’ve mentioned before, seminary is great preparation for ministry. In fact, I think the ideal ministry trajectory is for someone to go a secular university for their undergrad and then to get seminary training. This is more common than many suppose - roughly half the students at my seminary came from secular universities.

Anyway, here’s the meme:

This Seminary Meme is part of a competition sponsored by Going to Seminary and Eisenbrauns. If you’d like to be entered, simply answer the 7 questions below and tag 5 other people. You’ll also need to post this paragraph (links included) with your answers as the links will be tracked back to your blog and will count as your “entry” into the competition. On April 30th, 2008, one blogger will be selected at random to win a $100 gift certificate to the Eisenbrauns online bookstore.

Where did you attend seminary?

The Assemblies of God Theological Seminary
What class do you think has most impacted your spiritual life?

Effective Leadership with Mel Ming.
What seminary professor was most influential while in seminary?

Tough call. Remarkably tough. Every prof I had at AGTS rocked my world one way or another.
What was the greatest challenge you faced in seminary?

Not coasting.
What was the greatest reward you experienced in seminary?

Graduating.
What did you do after seminary?

The same thing I did while I was in seminary - I ministered to students at secular universities.
While in seminary, how many times were asked what you’d do after graduating?

Almost never - I telegraphed my intentions pretty clearly.

I’m supposed to tag five people. The amazing Mr. Zickafoose has not participated, and I don’t think Earl Creps has either. Nor have Lane Douglas nor George P. Wood nor Mark Batterson. Prediction: probability of any of them participating is less than 5%.

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Bad News, Timothy... (Gleaning #3173)

2008-04-09T18:32:38+00:00

Paul refuses to circumcise Titus, even when it was demanded by many in the Jerusalem crowd, not because it didn’t matter to them, but because it mattered so much that if he acquiesced, he would have been giving the impression that faith in Jesus is not enough for salvation: one has to become a Jew first, before one can become a Christian. That would jeopardize the exclusive sufficiency of Jesus.

To create a contemporary analogy: If I’m called to preach the gospel among a lot of people who are cultural teetotallers, I’ll give up alcohol for the sake of the gospel. But if they start saying, “You cannot be a Christian and drink alcohol,” I’ll reply, “Pass the port” or “I’ll think I’ll have a glass of Beaujolais with my meal.” Paul is flexible and therefore prepared to circumcise Timothy when the exclusive sufficiency of Christ is not at stake and when a little cultural accommodation will advance the gospel; he is rigidly inflexible and therefore refuses to circumcise Titus when people are saying that Gentiles must be circumcised and become Jews to accept the Jewish Messiah.

source: Email from Don Carson to Mark Driscoll found on http://theologica.blogspot.com/2007/09/carson-on-contextualization.html
tags: Gospel Missions .

A few videos of Xander and Dana

2008-04-08T20:50:59+00:00

You Will Receive Power (Glen)

2008-04-05T02:07:56+00:00

Or download the mp3.

Each week at Chi Alpha we record our messages in video and/or in MP3 format, and we also maintain a sermon archive (which includes instructions on receiving our sermons as a podcast).

In this message Glen talks about what it means to be empowered by the Holy Spirit and explains what it means to be baptized in the Holy Spirit. There’s a Q & A session at the end. Part of Glen’s response in the Q&A (the bit about Peter and walking on water) was inspired by a sermon from Terry Virgo.

Join us at our next meeting.

This Just In: George Wood is on Facebook

2008-04-01T22:40:30+00:00

It’s truly a new day in the Assemblies of God. George Wood is on Facebook. For those of you from another world, he’s the General Superintendent of the Assemblies of God. So he’s kind of like our Pope. Just with a lot less authority. And without the cool wardrobe. Or a Popemobile. He’s basically in charge, though.

I noticed it by accident earlier today and I thought it had to be a mistake. Once I realized it really was him and not some Bible college kid playing a joke, I emailed him to ask if it was okay to share this publicly - I thought perhaps he had accidentally left his privacy settings too open.

It turns out he’s available on purpose. He accepts friend requests from peons like me (and presumably you).

And on top of that, Dr. Wood has been podcasting like crazy with two separate podcasts: interviews with leaders and studies in the book of Mark.

And he’s not the only one savvy to the digital age. The General Secretary, John Palmer, has a blog. Not only that, his blog is hosted on an official Assemblies of God installation of Wordpress MU: who knew we had come so far?

Not to be outdone, the new (as in beginning his term of office today) General Treasurer, Doug Clay, has been blogging on Blogger for quite a while.

My head is spinning. I don’t know if I can handle all this digitization of our leadership at once.

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Notes from The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb

2008-03-31T23:37:14+00:00

I just finished reading The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Taleb. It’s a fun read, and I think some of the things I learned from it will help me to illustrate Ecclesiastes when we start preaching through it in a few weeks.

Anyway, here are some snippets I thought were worth holding on to. Hope they are as useful to you as I think they will be to me.

The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?” and the others – a very small minority – who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allow you to put there. Page 1

Now if only I could convince Paula that this is the right way to think about book acquisitions…

It was a few years after the beginning of the Lebanese war, as I was attending the Wharton School, at the age of twenty-two, that I was hit with the idea of efficient markets – and idea that holds that there is no way to derive profits from traded securities since these instruments have automatically incorporated all the available information. Public information can therefore be useless, particularly to a businessman, since prices can already “include” all such information, and news shared with millions gives you no real advantage. Odds are that one or more of the hundreds of millions of other readers of such information will already have bought the security, thus pushing up the price. I then completely gave up reading newspapers and watching television, which freed up a considerable amount of time (say one hour or more per day, enough time to read more than a hundred additional books per years, which, after a couple of decades, starts mounting). Page 17

I’ve been struck lately by the number of people I respect who advise us against reading the newspaper on the grounds that it makes you more stupid about things that matter. I even stumbled across a compilation of quotes against news today.

In the arts – say the cinema – things are far more vicious. What we call “talent” generally comes from success, rather than its opposite. A great deal of empiricism has been done on the subject, most notably by Art De Vany, an insightful and original thinker who singlemindedly studied wild uncertainty in the movies. He showed that, sadly, much of what we ascribe to skills is an after-the-fact attribution. The movie makes the actor, he claims – and a large dose of nonlinear luck makes the movie. Page 31 (he footnotes Arthur De Vany Hollywood Economics: Chaos in the Music Industry 2002)

I suspect the same thing is true of megachurches. Don’t misunderstand me - there is a high level of skill involved in building an organization like that. But looking around at ministers I know, many more people seem to have the skills than have the megachurch to go with it. In other words, there are people out there as skilled as Ed Young that the world will never know. I don’t think I’m one of them, mind, but I know that they’re out there. I’ve met them.

Indeed, it is not a well-known fact that the most complete exposition of the ideas of skepticism, until recently, remains the work of a powerful Catholic bishop who was an august member of the French Academy. Pierre-Daniel Huet wrote his Philosophical Treatise on the Weakness of the Human Mind in 1690, a remarkably book that tears through dogmas and questions human perception. Huet presents arguments against causality that are quite potent – he states, for instance, that any event can have an infinity of possible causes. Page 49

Interesting. You can read more about Huet on Wikipedia.

In a famous argument, the logician W. V. Quine showed that there exist families of logically consistent interpretations and theories that can match a given series of facts. Page 72

You can learn more about Quine on Wikipedia.

Indeed, people tend to fool themselves with their self-narrative of “national identity,” which, in a breakthrough paper in Science by sixty-five authors, was shown to be a total fiction. (“National traits” might be great for movies, they might help a lot with war, but they are Platonic notions that carry no empirical validity—yet, for example, both the English and the non-English erroneously believe in an English “national temperament.”) Empirically, sex, social class, and profession seem to be better predictors of someone’s behavior than nationality (a male from Sweden resembles a male from Togo more than a female from Sweden; a philosopher from Peru resembles a philosopher from Scotland more than a janitor from Peru; and so on). Page 74-75

And yet the French remain… Seriously, this reminds me of bone I have to pick with personality testing, namely that it is complete and utter bunk. Different people have different ranges of temperament, sure, but the tools we use to measure those variances are ridiculous.

[Given that the narrative fallacy is so misleading, we should remember that] Only a diamond can cut a diamond; we can use our ability to convince with a story that conveys the right message—what storytellers seem to do. Page 84

Good reminder for sermons - there are times that all the data in the world will lack the impact of a single compelling story.

The researcher Thomas Astebro has shown that returns on independent inventions (you take the cemetery into account) are far lower than those on venture capital. Some blindness to the odds… is necessary for entrepreneurs to function. The venture capitalist is the one who gets the shekels. The economist William Baumol calls this “a touch of madness.” This may indeed apply to all concentrated businesses: when you look at the empirical record, you not only see that venture capitalists do better than entrepreneurs, but publishers do better than writers, dealers do better than artists, and science does better than scientists (about 50 percent of scientific and scholarly papers, costing months, sometimes years of effort, are never truly read). Page 90

And governments do better than taxpayers.

Prediction, not narration, is the real test of our understanding of the world. Page 133

True dat.

For many people, knowledge has the remarkable power of producing confidence instead of measurable aptitude. Page 135

Tragically true dat.

Show two groups of people a blurry image of a fire hydrant, blurry enough for them not to recognize what it is. For one group, increase the resolution slowly, in ten steps. For the second, do it faster, in five steps. Stop at a point were both groups have presented an identical image and ask each of them to identify what they see. The members of the group that saw fewer intermediate steps are likely to recognize the hydrant much quicker. Moral? The more information you give someone, the more hypotheses they will formulate along the way, and the worse-off they will be. They see more random noise and mistake it for information. Page 144

Combine that with this next one…

…in another telling experiment, the psychologist Paul Slovic asked bookmakers to select from eighty-eight variables in past horse races those that they found useful in computing the odds. These variables included all manner of statistical information about past performances. The bookmarkers were given the ten most useful variables, then asked to predict the outcomes of races. Then they were given ten more and asked to predict again. The increase in the information set did not lead to an increase in their accuracy; their confidence in their choices, on the other hand, went up markedly. Information proved to be toxic. Page 145

So if you’re addicted to statistics, lay off! Especially if you’re tracking every nuance of your weekly attendance or the hour-by-hour views of your most recent Facebook ad.

Economics is the most insular of fields; it is the one that quotes least from outside itself! Page 155

I didn’t see a footnote for this claim, but it amuses me to believe that it’s true.

Researchers have tested how students estimate the time needed to complete their projects. In one representative test, they broke a group into two varieties, optimistic and pessimistic. Optimistic students promised twenty-six days; the pessimistic ones forty-seven days. The average actual time to completion turned out to be fifty-six days. Page 157

Read it and weep, students. Read it and weep.

[Unlike biological variables such as age, human ventures exhibit a totally different schedule] Let’s say a project is expected to terminate in 79 days…. On the 79th day, if the project is not finished, it will be expected to take another 25 days to complete. But on the 90th day, if the project is still not completed, it should have about 58 days to go. On the 100th, it will have 89 days to go. On the 119th, it should have an extra 149 days. On day 600, if the project is not done, you will be expected to need an extra 1,590 days. As you see, the longer you wait, the longer you will be expected to wait. Page 159

Eep. Based on this logic, my office will be finally and fully cleaned sometime around 3,000 A.D.

At New York’s JFK airport you can find gigantic newsstands with walls full of magazines. They are usually manned by a very polite family from the Indian subcontinent (just the parents; the children are in medical school). These walls present you with the entire corpus of what an “informed” person needs in order “to know what is going on.” I wonder how long it would take to read every single one of these magazines, excluding the fishing and motorcycle periodicals (but including the gossip magazines—you might as well have some fun). Half a lifetime? An entire lifetime?
Sadly, all this knowledge would not help the reader to forecast what is to happen tomorrow. Actually, it might decrease his ability to forecast. Page 163-164

He not only knocks newspapers, he knocks magazines as well. What’s next, blogs?

In 1965 two radio astronomers at Bell Labs in New Jersey who were mounting a large antenna were bothered by a background noise, a hiss, like the static that you hear when you have bad reception. The noise could not be eradicated—even after they cleaned the bird excrement out of the dish, since they were convinced that bird poop was behind the noise. It took a while for them to figure out that what they were hearing was the trace of the birth of the universe, the cosmic background microwave radiation. Page 168

They made an important discovery about the very nature of the universe while looking for bird poop! Don’t wait for the great moment. The event (conversation, sermon, insight) that changes your ministry forever will likely come at the most unexpected moment, and it probably won’t happen in the limelight. Get out there and clean some bird poop, and be attentive to your surroundings while you do it.

[How hard can long-range prediction be?] I use the example as computed by the mathematician Michael Berry. If you know a set of basic parameters concerning [a billiard] ball at rest, can compute the resistance of the table (quite elementary), and can gauge the strength of the impact, then it is rather easy to predict what would happen at the first hit. The second impact becomes more complicated, but possible; you need to be more careful about your knowledge of the initial states, and more precision is called for. The problem is that to correctly compute the ninth impact, you need to take into account the gravitational pull of someone standing next to the table (modestly, Berry’s computations use a weight of less than 150 pounds). And to compute the fifty-sixth impact, every single elementary particle in the universe needs to be present in your assumptions! An electron at the edge of the universe, separated from us by 10 billion light-years, must figure in the calculations, since it exerts a meaningful effect on the outcome…. Note that this billiard-ball story assumes a plain and simple world; it does not even take into account these crazy social matters possibly endowed with free will. Page 178

Wow. Wow backwards.

We are made to follow leaders who can gather people together because the advantages of being in groups trump the disadvantages of being alone. It has been more profitable for us to bind together in the wrong direction than to be alone in the right one. Those who have followed the assertive idiot rather than the introspective wise person have passed us some of their genes. Page 192

And this is why character and doctrine are always more important when screening ministry candidates than leadership aptitude. Assertive idiots lead people into spiritual disaster.

People are often ashamed of losses, so they engage in strategies that produce very little volatility but contain the risk of a large loss—like collecting nickels in front of steamrollers. Page 204

I can totally see myself being talking into doing that. What a vivid image.

Many people do not realize that they are getting a lucky break in life when they get it. If a big publisher (or a big art dealer or a movie executive or a hotshot banker or a big thinker) suggests an appointment, cancel anything you have planned: you may never see such a window open up again. I am sometimes shocked at how little people realize that these opportunities do not grow on trees. Collect as many free nonlottery tickets (those with open-ended payoffs) as you can, and, once they start paying off, do not discard them. Work hard, not in grunt work, but in chasing such opportunities and maximizing exposure to them. This makes living in big cities invaluable because you increase the odds of serendipitous encounters—you gain exposure to the envelope of serendipity. The idea of settling in a rural area on grounds that one has good communications “in the age of the Internet” tunnels out of such sources of positive uncertainty. Diplomats understand that very well: casual chance discussions at cocktail parties usually lead to big breakthroughs—not dry correspondence or telephone conversations. Go to parties! If you’re a scientist, you will chance upon a remark that might spark new research. Page 209

Of such things are destinies made.

We can have a clear idea of the consequences of an event, even if we do not know how likely it is to occur. I don’t know the odds of an earthquake, but I can imagine how San Francisco might be affected by one. This idea that in order to make a decision you need to focus on the consequences (which you can know) rather than the probability (which you can’t know) is the central idea of uncertainty. Much of my life is based on it.

You can build an overall theory of decision-making on this idea. All you have to do is mitigate the consequences. As I said, if my portfolio is exposed to a market crash, the odds of which I can’t compute, all I have to do is buy insurance, or get out and invest the amounts I am not willing to ever lose in less risky securities. Page 211

The results of an earthquake in San Francisco - bad. Probability - unacceptably high. Tick, tick, tick…

I said earlier that randomness is bad, but it is not always so. Luck is far more egalitarian than even intelligence. If people were rewarded strictly according to their abilities, things would still be unfair—people don’t choose their abilities. Randomness has the beneficial effect of reshuffling society’s cards, knocking down the big guy. Page 232

The race is not always to the swift, and this is by design.

Now why am I calling this business Madelbrotian, or fractal, randomness? Every single bit and piece of this puzzle has been previously mentioned by someone else, such as Pareto, Yule, and Zipf, but it was Mandelbrot who a) connected the dots, b) linked randomness to geometry (and a special brand at that), and c) took the subject to its natural conclusion. Indeed many mathematicians are famous today partly because he dug out their works to back up his claims—the strategy I am following here in this book. “I had to invent my predecessors, so people take me seriously,” [Mandelbrot] once told me, and he used the credibility of big guns as a rhetorical device. One can almost always ferret out predecessors for any thought. You can always find someone who worked on a part of your argument and use his contribution as your backup. Page 256

Ph.D. candidates take note. There are worse people to emulate than Mandelbrot.

The degeneration of philosophical schools in its turn is the consequence of the mistaken belief that one can philosophize without having been compelled to philosophize by problems outside philosophy…. Genuine philosophical problems are always rooted outside philosophy and they die if these roots decay…. These roots are easily forgotten by philosophers who “study” philosophy instead of being forced into philosophy by the pressure of nonphilosophical problems.
He footnotes Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations, pages 95-97.

And theology that is divorced from daily ministry gets wonky. All the greatest theologians in the history of the church have been involved in regular ministry to normal people.

I am most often irritated by those who attack the bishop but someone fall for the securities analyst—those who exercise their skepticism against religion but not against economists, social scientists, and phony statisticians. Using the confirmation bias, people will tell you that religion was horrible for mankind by counting deaths from the Inquisition and various religious wars. But they will not show you how many people were killed by nationalism, social science, and political theory under Stalinism or during the Vietnam War. Even priests don’t go to bishops when they feel ill: their first stop is the doctor’s. But we stop by the offices of many pseudo-scientists and “experts” without alternative. We no longer believe in papal infallibility; we seem to believe in the infallibility of the Nobel…. Page 291

Rare to read such clear thinking about this in a book not devoted to apologetics. Of course, Taleb has it in for the Nobel.

Imagine a speck of dust next to a planet a billion times the size of earth. The speck of dust represents the odds in favor of your being born; the huge planet would be the odds against it. So stop sweating the small stuff. Don’t be like the ingrate who got a castle as a present and worried about the mildew in the bathroom. Page 298

Indeed. I like a book that closes with a call to gratitude, even if it’s unclear to whom your gratitude should be directed.

A fun read. Recommended.

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Congratulations, Greg

2008-03-31T03:26:26+00:00

My brother just got engaged. There are rumors of a YouTube video of the proposal waiting to surface, but for now you’ll have to be content with the written story.

Congrats, bro. Wish you both the best.

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How to Schedule Your Writing Like a Professional Writer

2008-03-30T01:08:02+00:00

How the pros write. Early and isolated, apparently.

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In album Photos from 2008

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When We Live Like Jesus Told Us To…

2008-03-28T21:14:27+00:00

A pretty amazing story from NPR: A Victim Treats His Mugger Right

He was walking toward the stairs when a teenage boy approached and pulled out a knife.

“He wants my money, so I just gave him my wallet and told him, ‘Here you go,’” Diaz says.

As the teen began to walk away, Diaz told him, “Hey, wait a minute. You forgot something. If you’re going to be robbing people for the rest of the night, you might as well take my coat to keep you warm.”

Remind you of anything? I don’t know if Julio Diaz is a follower of Jesus or not, but the Lord approved of his actions. See Matthew 5:38-40

“You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’” But I tell you, “Do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if someone wants to sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well.”

The story has a great ending I won’t spoil for you: read the whole thing (found via kottke).

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STANFORD Magazine: Campus Relationships Survey

2008-03-28T14:00:51+00:00

Dating and hookups.

Impact of the First World Missions Summit

2008-03-27T14:47:32+00:00

The World Missions Summit is coming up at the end of this year, and so I asked E. Scott Martin (czar of the summit) what the long-term fruit of the first summit has been. His answer floored me and I share it with his permission.

He uses a lot of acronyms (he was writing an email to me off the top of his head, not expecting me to post it for the world to see), so let me give you a glossary:

AGUSM/USM - Assemblies of God United States Missions
AGWM/WM - Assemblies of God World Missions
CMA - Campus Missionary Associate (people serving in Chi Alpha as associate staff, usually on a short-term basis [a few years])
MA - Missionary Associate (people serving one to two years)
MAPS - Missionary Abroad Placement Service (people serving 1-11 months, often in construction projects)
MENA - Middle East/North Africa
TWMS - The World Missions Summit
XA - Chi Alpha Campus Ministries

You’ll probably need to refer back to that list several times as you read his email unless you’re very familiar with Assemblies of God in-house lingo.

…here are the hard stats. 661 students filled out commitment cards at TWMS. Neither AGWM, USM, or XA were really prepared to track those who came from TWMS and joined them in mission through MAPS, MA, or fully appointed missionaries. I inquired this past summer with Family Life and Personnel in AGWM about the number of students who had already gone to fulfill their commitment. To the best of their ability they sent me a spread sheet of 78 people who they related to TWMS due to the fact that their applications had the TWMS logo on them. However, of my 13 MAs and MAPpers serving with us in Kyrgyzstan at that time, only 2 of them were on that list and all of them made commitments at the Missions Summit.

I sent this observation back to AGWM and that is when they informed me they only went by the logo. I then began to correlate their list with those Crystal and I personally knew had gone AGWM from TWMS (We had 22 MAs and MAPers in our AGWM Area MENA and Central Eurasia with only 3 of them on the AGWM list being from TWMS) and we came up with 221 students who had gone so far since TWMS. This was the summer of 2007. And believe me, this is not comprehensive. There are more we don’t know about and I know of 3 who followed up their commitments with other agencies and actually informed AGWM of that so that AGWM knew they did not renege on their commitment to go. USM has absolutely no idea what so ever on who has connected in their various ministries after TWMS. We know of 2 who have contacted us who went USM outside of XA.

Here is the other big news. The number of CMAs in XA accelerated dramatically after TWMS. I will ask Bob what the number was prior to TWMS but today we have 168 MAs in the field which is far beyond what we have ever had. Bob and NLT suggest it is the direct result of TWMS, but that judgment is based only on the fact that the numbers leapt following TWMS and on conversations with campus pastors and those MAs.

At this past AGWM Missionary Interview and orientation 10 days ago which is only fully appointed and MAs, not MAPS (which most Chi Alphans go as now) there were 14 who had signed commitments at TWMS. 4 of those were fully appointed AGWM missionary candidates. Every PFO and interview there are more and more from TWMS. They asked who “signed cards” and not “who was at TWMS” so again I don’t think it is an accurate representation but close. Some have gone who made decisions at TWMS but didn’t sign the card. So, we could add these 14 to the 221 in AGWM. And I don’t have the list from October either which would add even more.

Based on this information I can safely and accurately say that at least half of those who signed the card at TWMS have fulfilled their commitments and we still have many in the pipeline right now from the first TWMS.

Wow. Two stats stand out to me.

1) Roughly 15% (661 out of around 4,000) of those at The World Missions Summit committed to give a year and pray about a lifetime of missionary service. That’s impressive but not unprecedented. Lots of people get caught up in emotional moments at conferences and say things that they later reconsider.
2) Over half of those people have already delivered and more are on the way (presumably finishing college first). That’s amazing. I hardly know what to do with a number like that except praise God. For comparison purposes, I would guess that at a youth camp or something the equivalent fulfillment rate is closer to 10%.

Bottom line - the first World Missions Summit rocked. God really used it to advance His plan on earth. I expect great things from the second one as well. Register now and also join the Facebook group to get announcements.

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Historical Jesus booklet by Craig Blomberg

2008-03-26T16:38:51+00:00

A short booklet (28 pages), Jesus of Nazareth: How Historians Can Know Him and Why It Matters was released for free this morning by the Christ on Campus Initiative. It’s written by Craig Blomberg, a well-respected scholar.

One thing I really appreciate about this piece is that Blomberg footnotes his sources well and provides an annotated bibliography at the end. So if he makes a claim someone finds sketchy they are welcome to investigate it more thoroughly. Christian outreach pieces are rarely considerate in this way, and I applaud the decision.

Highly recommended if you (or your friends) have questions about what we can possibly know about a man who lived 2,000 years ago.

found via JT

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The Five Gospels Parallels

2008-03-22T15:31:12+00:00

Helpful tool for doing comparisons between the gospels (also includes some noncanonical stuff).

Higher Education an Elusive Dream For Latino Californians (Gleaning #3172)

2008-03-21T15:57:26+00:00

A report from the Chicano Studies Research Center at the University of California at Los Angeles released last year, for instance, found that of every 100 first-time Latino students in the state, 75 enter community colleges — and only 7 of them will transfer (6 to CSU campuses).

Yet, upon entering community college, 40 percent of these students said they aspired to transfer to a four-year institution.

source: http://insidehighered.com/news/2008/03/21/cctransfer
tags: Campus Ministry College .