Just read this quote on another blog and was struck by the timeliness of it as I am in a constant state of worrying about all the things I need to write.  My problem is that I can not really act on this advice because everything is due in a week and a half.  But for the future, I would like to incorporate this into my work in terms of writing – sermons, articles, and school related assignments:

The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next. If you do that every day … you will never be stuck. Always stop while you are going good and don’t think about it or worry about it until you start to write the next day. That way your subconscious will work on it all the time. But if you think about it consciously or worry about it you will kill it and your brain will be tired before you start. – Ernest Hemingway

(HT: Write to Done)

A Writer's Writer

Check it out here

Who needs to be subsidized?

Check out my friends Craig and Megan Dunham’s blog Half Pint House to register for a chance to win Jerram Barrs’ new book, Through His Eyes:  God’s Perspective on Women in the Bible.

New Book by Jerram Barrs

Click here for entry.

As hectic and fast paced as my life already is, I certainly hope that this quote does not reflect the totality of our future literary reality.

Sophisticated forms of collaborative “information foraging” will replace solitary deep reading; the connected screen will replace the disconnected book. ["People of the Screen" by Christine Rose, in The New Atlantis]

The “solitary deep reading” may be inconvenient, but its also  the only activity that actually makes me stop, ponder, wonder, think, and rest.

As much as I love technological advances, I need depth in my life, not just the collective breadth of common ignorance waxing eloquent on topics we just read as we scanned our Google reader.

Context…

Its being talked about alot these days.  In Christian ministry circles there’s no little debate on the issue of contextualization - how much should we try to reflect our specific context it in order to speak into it – as well as original context – what was happening in the setting that the Biblical authors were writing into.

I find it interesting that often times, there are people who can speak intelligently into this conversation who often times have no direct tie in to it.  One such person is David Brooks, a New York Times Op-Ed Columnist.  Yes, that David Brooks, who as you all know wrote Bobos in Paradise and On Paradise Drive, and who I undoubtedly heard about from, you guessed it, Tim Keller).

Here’s an interesting thought from his recent column regarding the current economic crisis:

Markets tend toward efficiency. People respond in pretty straightforward ways to incentives. The invisible hand forms a spontaneous, dynamic order. Economic behavior can be accurately predicted through elegant models

This view explains a lot, but not the current financial crisis — how so many people could be so stupid, incompetent and self-destructive all at once. The crisis has delivered a blow to classical economics and taken a body of psychological work that was at the edge of public policy thought and brought it front and center.

In this new body of thought, you get a very different picture of human nature. Reason is not like a rider atop a horse. Instead, each person’s mind contains a panoply of instincts, strategies, intuitions, emotions, memories and habits, which vie for supremacy. An irregular, idiosyncratic and largely unconscious process determines which of these internal players gets to control behavior at any instant. Context — which stimulus triggers which response — matters a lot.

You can see this reality in everything – from the debate of Christians regarding the role and place of culture in the context of ministry, to Oprah falling off the wagon of her diet and physical transformation of six years, to the current financial state our country finds itself in.

What amazes me about Brooks’ piece is that he bases his argument in human nature, not financial policy or historical trend.  Maybe one way of contextualizing the “cultural mandate” is to say that everyone is responsible for and a responder to their cultural environment.  Or, everyone is subject to external and internal triggers that stimulate a response, of which, only reason can be considered one such trigger.

I wonder, if this is universally held to be true, how this would effect our understanding and appropriation of older models of codified knowledge, such as systematic theology, or matters of  contemporary contextualization?

I’m asking this as a guy who loves his Christian heritage of the Reformed tradition, even the formulations of Christian doctrine found in the Westminster Confession of Faith.

I do believe, however, that noting is context-less, and these invisible stimuli are more important and impactful then perhaps we have historically assented to, both in discerning the original context within which various issues and doctrines were raised and formulated, as well as their current usage and appropriation.

Context matters, alot.

One Big, Growing Happy Family

Merry Christmas and have a Happy New Year!

The Gensheers

Chris, Maggie, Maya, Alex and Jack

(check out our family blog or leave a comment and ask for our Christmas letter)

Penn Says: A Gift of a Bible

Thanks to Ed Stetzer (and countless others) for linking to this video. Makes you want to have the strength of your own convictions, doesn’t it?

Go here to find out how?  Keller’s on there, so what are you waiting for?