Julie & Julia (No spoilers)

Decent movie, although not quite as good as I expected.

I do most of the cooking in the home, so this was an easy film to like. Good characters, although I thought the movie tried a bit too hard at times to humanize Julia Childs by having her do or say "Shocking!" things (meaning things that the public persona of Julia Childs would ever be caught dead saying or doing.

"No man is a hero to his valet de chambre," as Hegel wrote. It's too easy to puncture the public persona by showing scenes from private life.

District 9 (No spoilers)

Good movie -- although quite a bit of gore and language.

I went in with fairly high expectations, although I wasn't entirely sure what to expect.

In science fiction films (and stories) I usually enjoy the set up more than the ending. While I was a bit skeptical during the first third of District 9 -- while it ultimately worked, I thought the screen play "almost" stumbled once or twice in the story's setup -- by the midpoint of the movie the story had sucked me in entirely.

In any event, good movie. I think it's a legitimate Oscar contender.

Gin and Tonic

I don't drink much hard liquor. Maybe a margarita once or twice a year. (I found an excellent recipe that I make on my wife's birthday.) Or a single-malt scotch when it's offered to me -- which it is much less than once or twice a year.

But some combination of heat and humidity arises in the weather between about August 15 through about September 7 that impels me to buy a bottle of gin, some limes and tonic water, and mix them all up with ice. The drink cuts through the heat and humidity like nothing else. It cuts through the burden of August heat like a cold blast from Canada. It reminds me that the heat will break in only a few weeks.

Gin and tonic.

Ahhh.

What's wrong with this sentence?

Megan has been pestering me to let her start calculus (precocious soon-to-be-seventh grader that she is). So I brought my old college textbook home from the office, and began reading the introduction.

Here's the first sentence from the textbook's introduction: "Calculus is the mathematical tool used to analyze changes in physical quantities."

What is false in that sentence?

For extra credit, provide a specific counterexample and solve it.

The Banality of the Evangelical Mind

Can anything be much more insipid than this "evangelical response" to Caritis in Veritate?

Revisionist View of Atticus Finch

A colleague of mine at work drew my attention to this article in The New Yorker. It provides a revisionist view of Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird. It's challenging on several different levels; well worth the read.

Christianity -- Not

"A mild-mannered person, talking to other mild-mannered persons, encouraging them to become more mild mannered."

(HT: Marlin Wismer)

"Behold, all things are clean for you"

Jesus' teaching in Luke 11.41 always sounds so refreshing to me: "Give that which is within as charity and, behold, all things are clean for you."

I wonder if there is an irony in the passage. Jesus is teaching against thinking that food made the Jews unclean on the inside. (Not to minimize things, Jesus' upshot is that humans do not need food to make us unclean -- our hearts are sufficient for that.) So I wonder if the thrust isn't something like this -- it's not the food that fills us on the inside that makes us clean, but rather it's unfilling ourselves that makes us clean, i.e., giving away that which is inside.

Mt 13.44-52 – You are God’s Treasure

[Last month I started sending out a newsletter to the group of folks at church to whom I have been assigned as an elder. I call it "Elder-ly Meditations." Below is the meditation I sent out this month -- based on a blog entry I posted a while back.]


So often it seems that the picture Christians have of God is that of a grim, disapproving father who deigns to save us in spite of the disappointment he feels toward humanity. To be sure, he loves us even though he disapproves of us, and so he goes to the cross to save us. Yet in the background we think we hear the complaint, “I do and I do for you kids, and this is the thanks that I get.”

The parable of the prodigal son is certainly an antidote to this common misperception of God’s attitude toward us. And so are the “kingdom parables” in Mt 13.44-52. (They’re called “kingdom parables” because Jesus begins each one with the words, “the kingdom of heaven is like . . .”)

The thing is, however, that Christians have traditionally misread the kingdom parables and so have misapplied by thinking that they are supposed to describe our experience rather than God's experience.

These parables are well known. So well known that I was a bit surprised to discover that the traditional understanding of the passage – which was the way that I understood the passage – is almost certainly wrong.

Let’s first read what Jesus said:

"The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure hidden in the field, which a man found and hid again; and from joy over it he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.

"Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant seeking fine pearls, and upon find one pearl of great value, he went and sold all that he had and bought it.

"And, again, the kingdom of heaven is like a dragnet cast into the sea, and gathering fish of every kind . . . So it will be at the end of the age; the angels will come forth and take out the wicked from among the righteous . . ."

Now the question concerns “who” Jesus speaks of when describing the man who finds the hidden treasure in the field and buys it, the merchant who finds the pearl of great value, and the fisherman.

The traditional view is that the man who finds the hidden treasure is the Christian believer. We discover the kingdom of God, and it is so precious to us that we give all that we have to obtain it.
I've been wont to take the field-buyer and the merchant as speaking of the believer, in a "count-the-cost" sort of admonition. I believe that this is the traditional and popular view on the passage.

There is, of course, nothing at all wrong with that attitude, indeed, we should all have it. But as commendable as the attitude might be, it’s not what the passage is about.

A conference paper I read last year by a faculty member at Concordia Seminary (I forget who the professor was), made a simple and compelling argument that the traditional take on the passage has it wrong.

The argument begins with the claim that Jesus speaks of the same thing in each of the parables. That seems pretty obvious.

Now consider the last of the three kingdom parables – the one about the fisherman and the fish.

Let’s read it again:

"And, again, the kingdom of heaven is like a dragnet cast into the sea, and gathering fish of every kind . . . So it will be at the end of the age; the angels will come forth and take out the wicked from among the righteous . . ."

In that case, it's obvious that the fish are believers (and nonbelievers) and the fisherman is Jesus at the end of the age. It’s really obvious.

But remember now that the fish parable is just providing a different take on the same theme from the earlier two parables.

But that means that the first two kingdom parables are descriptions of Jesus’ attitude toward the people he saves, not the attitude of Christians toward the Kingdom of God. That is, what the parables describe is the joy he has over the kingdom, and his willingness to suffer loss of all things in order to establish it.

Let’s read the first two again through this lens:

"The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure hidden in the field, which a man found and hid again; and from joy over it he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.

"Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant seeking fine pearls, and upon find one pearl of great value, he went and sold all that he had and bought it.

So these parables, rather than being about "us," are about Jesus. And provide us illustrations of how it is that Jesus "who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame" (Heb 12.2).

The point is that Jesus rejoices over us. We are his treasure; we are his pearl of great price. God gives away everything on the Cross for his people, not because he disapproves of us, but because he loves us, and rejoices in saving us.

Megan Tests out of 7th & 8th Grade Math

I guess this is the week for boasting about the kids.

Megan is switching schools (and school systems) this fall as she starts seventh grade. She'd been getting A's in math in elementary school, and has been doing Kumon math as well. When she heard about the opportunity to test out of seventh and eighth grade math, she said she wanted to do it.

I was a bit skeptical. I'm not a huge fan of skipping classes based on exams -- usually there is a lot of background that is taught that one exam cannot test for. Beyond that, while Megan is an excellent student, she has a high variance of success with standardized tests. I didn't want her mathematical confidence (and enjoyment) to get shaken by a mediocre performance on a standardized test.

Nonetheless, she really wanted to attempt it, and I figured that either Kumon or I would cover any areas left weak by getting passed out of the grades. So we said yes.

There were four, three-hour exams administered over a two-day period. The first day covered seventh-grade math; the second day covered eighth-grade math. Megan finished the first three exams in a little over one hour. She finished the last exam in about two hours. (That includes the time spent checking her answers.) She said that the first three exams were easy; the fourth was a bit more challenging -- somewhat more difficult story problems, and some rather more advanced geometric problems.

Students needed to score at least 90 percent on each of the individual examinations (not cumulatively over the four exams) in order to pass out of the respective grades.

She nailed all four exams. The only exam the came even close to the 90 percent threshold was the fourth exam, which covered topics from the second semester of eighth-grade math. All the other exams scored in the upper 90s.

So way to go, Megan!