Land Sakes They're Tasty

Well, I continue in this primitive vein of junior bloggerdom. I feel like I should be using DOS. I probably am. Joshua is so nice not to mock me openly.

So.

Ryan and Seng had a fun wedding, and it was almost as cross-cultural as Matt and Donna's. (Thai is not nearly out there language-wise as Klingon.)

May I just give props to two people? For all the whining and griping he gets, Andrew (Jones) produces, day in and day out, just a great, responsible blog. Yes, there's things he could omit, or remove to email. And sometimes, for a public clearing house it gets too insider. And yeah, the amount of time he's on-line and how techie he is can be alarming if you think about it. But you know, take all that and much more, and he still, I think, does a great job. I'm glad it's there; I'd hate for it not to be and me or somebody else having to think about whether to take on a beast like that just so there would be one.
And the other is John Hammett. John's about twenty parsecs removed from Andrew, but in the first place, Dawn thinks he's Jesus's best friend. And for another, he just gave away a weekend of his life two weeks ago to do nothing but talk nonstop with me about emerging church stuff. And his kids are cool, and he's great to Linda, who has so many needs. And he doesn't gripe and has no obvious sins or faults. But is also totally humble and real. Wow. I would want to be like that when I grow up, but there's zero chance, so I'll just be glad he's part of the world, and part of my world.

I stayed home for Thanksgiving to work. Before I could really get started, I spent a whole day ranting about the unholy alliance between evangelicaldom and the Republican Party. Sigh. Not that there's a lot of choice in this country, but wow: how did it come to this, that Baptists are the leading caesaropapists in the land? The Patriarch of Moscow is not more enamored of the Kremlin than Dobson and Falwell and Chapman are of Mr. Bush.

And then I spent another day getting actually a pretty nice start on something--an article, a pdf file, a booklet?--on the missiology of the emerging church. It's so edifying to read mission stuff instead of insider polemics or church marketing stuff. Especially the old mission stuff. I just love reading the Venerable Bede. I think he really was; it's one of those nicknames that had a good basis in fact, like, like, like Too Tall Jones. I really do resonate even more with his comments about evangelizing the pagan English than I do with the Reformers recovering the faith in Western Europe.

But the official reason I stayed to work is that I'm writing this paper for a conference in the spring on the relationship between love and justice. The most prominent political philosophy today says that we can demand respect but not love from each. Rawls and Habermas say that...Uh. Right. Who cares? Okay. Yeah, so and anyway, my paper based on some stuff from an interesting book by Kierkegaard called Works of Love. Anyhow, there's this quote, and it so much sums up what I'm learning these days, both from philosophy and just in life. Kierkegaard said,

Certainly the highest good shall not be booty. (p.43, translation by H. and E. Hong)

And although I haven't posted this to Beyonce yet for her feedback, I think I can without fear of contradiction say that those, my friend, are words to live by. (What is Danish for "booty"? Can someone babelfish that one for me?)