Artifacts of a Life Once Lived

What is it to become 'human' as a follower of Christ? Life's diversity in conjunction with an understanding that God has created diversity demands that I consider life in its totality of relationships with all races, cultures, and systems of thought. Why have I limited my life-span of experience to a culture, and even more narrow, a Christian sub-culture, which changes with the seasons? Do I really want to look back on my life and see how disgusting is my loyalty to my immediate social constructs? I do not speak this way because I have pent-up frustration or because I have been wronged by my subculture, rather I speak this way because in my encountering life, I have happened upon wise and tempered dissenters who have challenged me to look beyond my particular temporal cultural setting and see my experience as a world-corporate experience. This brings me to my first problem. One issue I must sincerely address is the role of experience in my development of thought on life and...

Quotations from Father and Son: Biographical Recollections by Edmund Gosse (chapter 1) I cant help but compare my adolescence to such a one as this: "The peculiarities of a family life, founded upon such principles, are, in relation to a little child, obvious; but I may be permitted to recapitulate them. Here was perfect purity, perfect intrepidity, perfect abnegation [denial of self] ; yet there was also narrowness, isolation, an absence of humanity ." He follows: "So confident were they of the reality of their intercourse with God, that they asked for no other guide. They recognized no spiritual authority among me, they subjected themselves to no priest or minister, they troubled their consciences about no current manifestation of 'religious opinion.' They lived in an intellectual cell, bounded at its sides by the walls of their own house, but open above to the very heart of the uttermost heavens. This, then, was the scene in which the sou...

If there is anything that we can learn from our society consumed with excess passions of lust, greed, and power, we can learn that something is horribly wrong. However, it’s one thing to simply just describe the problems of the world, and it’s quite another to prescribe a solution to the problems. Just yesterday I held a discussion with a dear friend who has live significantly longer than I have, at least fifteen or more years. Somehow our discussion turned from discussion theological grids of truth, to cultural issues directly related to the grids of understanding. I was not necessarily trying to solve the world’s problems as many young arrogant students like myself do, rather I was simply trying to understand why our culture continues to burrow into the soils of destructive passions represented by our lust for money, sex, and control. Things that were discussed were serious problems, mainly having to do with the ideal of the American Dream, yet we seemed unshaken by the difficulties ...

My generation is a generation consumed with self-fulfillment, self-indulgence, self-satisfaction, self-realization, we are a generation consumed with ourselves. We seek, at all costs, to find the happiness (at the expense of all others) that we have been taught we deserve. My generation has found that its only hope lies in finding that fulfillment, satisfying one last desire, consuming one last product, finding the right one, the one that will make us happy and make us proud. Never has a generation of humans experienced so much psychological dysfunction, never has a generation of youths struggles so much with serious battles with depression, never has a generation had to struggle with determining sexual orientations as has ours. Our generation’s culture of sex and materialism has simply fueled the fire of self-love. In the midst of this upheaval of disoriented minds and passions, ours is a generation which finds its ultimate telos in the “making of yourself.” This tragedy of horror is ...

The title of my blog takes on a bit more meaning at this hour as today represents the end of my 25th year of existence and tomorrow begins my 26th. A new year, a promise of new adventures, new relationships, new dreams, new challenges, new passions, a year of new life. I am a bit frustrated maybe even dissatisfied at the state of my life in its present form, I have found that I am of little use to anything. I dont mean to say that I am useless, but that I have found no place where I may be used. I have done nothing significant with my life at this point other than graduate high school and college which, quite frankly, were not even challenges, actually, the challenge was getting through without getting expelled. The point is that so far I have nothing of significance to show for the work that I have done for the past seven years and a half of post-high school education. Though it may seem to be a bit negative, I must state that I am excited about the fact that school has been a catalys...

"Theology is in essence the conversion of the heart, but its end is a life which can by example inculcate pure doctrine and wisdom in others." - August H. Franke Theology is the bending of the soul toward knowledge of God. Theology is holisitc, involving all of the person: body, mind, and heart. The Life of God in the Soul of Man.