Exploded Clown

Brilliant.

I just posted a little script I use to keep track of a few sites still old or young enough to not have syndication feeds. You can find out all about it at the official Atomizer page.

In response to my younger brother Ben’s recent blog post.

First off, I hope you feel a little better, Ben. Getting back into the flow of things can be tough. But that’s not what I wanted to write about.

What I wanted to write about was New Testament class, and studying for it.

Yes, you will need to hunker down and work to get through that class. But I can tell you from experience that it’s worth it, but not in the way they sell it to you, and not in the way that your study session went wrong with it.

In other words, New Testament class will probably not make you a better Christian. It will, however, make you think. It will ask you questions about what the Bible means, and it will make you examine how that impacts your life. And that’s not easy. It’s incredibly difficult.

It is far easier to dodge and try to make it a Bible Study. The people that surround you at Westmont are comfortable with Bible Studies, because they are used to having the three answers that they know work in Bible Studies (”Jesus”, “Sometimes God tells you to Wait”, “The Lord works in Mysterious Ways”) and they are comfortable interacting with people who follow a narrow interpretation of the easy parts of the Bible.

It’s the hard parts that get you. But it’s also the hard parts that are the most powerful, and the most expressive, and the most interesting. It’s the reflections you find between New Testament and Old that make you wonder in both senses of the word. It’s the things that Jesus says that aren’t of the format “Blessed are those who X for they shall Y” and are instead along the lines of “Some have told you A, but instead I say to you B,” because the A’s are what you’ve heard for most of your childhood in Christianity.

What’s happening is that you’ve outgrown your childhood Christianity and you need to discover a larger Christianity that still fits. And I encourage you to go out and see what’s available, because it’s a much larger selection than what you’re likely to find in your Youth Group-esque Study Session. Talk to your professors, and I don’t mean just the RS profs. Talk to VanderLaan; he’s amazing. Read the material if you’re getting something out of it. Read other material if you’re not.

But most of all, seek to understand. New Testament class is much more interesting when you are asking questions as a part of the active conversation, not only because it keeps you interested but also because it keeps you thinking. And thinking is what it’s all about. Thinking is what you’re paying so much for.

Oh, and Xeno’s Paradox? Calculus solves it.