2. South Carolina is considering allowing people to bring guns onto school campuses, as long as they leave them locked in their cars. Rep. Senator Shane Martin of Spartanburg: "[The bill] allows permit holders to pick up their child from school or attend a teacher's meeting without leaving their gun at home." Sometimes I am glad to be leaving this state.
5. The 10th anniversary of the release of The Matrix - the movie which revolutionized special effects and sermon analogies - was March 31st, 2009.
Actually, I take it all back. The number one thing which has blown my mind recently is the fact that I have three days left in Clemson, my home for the past seven years. On Sunday Erin and I will drive up to DC and on Monday I will begin my new job at Arete Associates. The last week has been full of hard goodbyes and gut-wrenching "lasts." This is one of those strange times (I can only remember a handful of them in my lifetime) when I don't know how to express how I feel.
As usual, hat-tip to Harrison for some of these links.
At any given time I've got a few unanswered questions rolling around in my head, as most people do. This one has been puzzling me for a while.
The Question: Is the following quote true?
"Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised." Marilyn Manson
Don't let the source throw you. Is it true? I have been raised on a firm belief in perpetual moral decay - that everything is steadily getting worse. Every day we grow more and more immoral. Every year we have less and less regard for the value of human life. Certainly modern horrors like genocide, school shootings, abortion (depending on your beliefs), rampant crime and corruption seem to support this.
But consider the past. War, hate, murder, and racism are not new. On Sunday morning my pastor told how 6,600 followers of Spartacus were crucified along a road by Roman general Crassus. Try to imagine that happening today. Imagine if we were to equip the ancient armies of Rome, Greece, Egypt, or Sparta with the military technology of today - can we really say nuclear holocaust wouldn't be the result? What about the gladiators? Or the widespread practice of slavery?
It just so happens I found the following TED talk today on this very subject. It is characteristically eye-opening, and sheds a wealth of skepticism on the widely held belief that we are more violent now than we ever were. Steven Pinker argues the opposite is true.
Now certainly there is more to morality than a lack of violence, and more to immorality than murder. But I don't necessarily see why the likelihood of murder isn't a good measure for the immorality of a society. If laying down your life for your brother is the ultimate act of love, why shouldn't taking his life be the ultimate act of evil? If violence has steadily decreased over recorded history then can we really say immorality has increased? It seems there is a lot to be said for civilization.
I encourage you to give Pinker's lecture a listen if this topic interests you - he provides a lot of interesting theories as to why we believe violence has gotten so much worse. One of the theories is Manson's - thanks to the media we know more about the violence in our world.
Then there's the trouble of implications - if things are getting better all the time, what does this mean? Specifically, what does it mean for my faith?
My hands are blistered from slamming them into the key bed for my last Easter service at downtown community fellowship. Words cannot describe how I will miss spending this day there. Praise the Lord, he is risen indeed.
It's tradition at this point - here's a word from Rev. Lockridge.
I don't usually take to this kind of stuff, but the beauty of the melody in this song never fails to move me to recall the dark glory of today. I hope it does the same for you.
Bebo Norman and Sixpence None the Richer - Beautiful Scandalous Night
I have been hinting about this here for a while now, but I've never come out and said it. Erin and I have felt for some time that God was leading us away from Clemson. We came here for the dual purposes of serving the dcf community and having it in turn serve us in the difficult, fledgling years of our marriage. We knew it would be temporary. We didn't know how life-changing it would be. In two and a half short years God has radically changed both of us, through everything from the incredibly wise voices he placed in our lives to radically exposing our own selfishness to us.
But beginning last August, God began to swiftly remove many of the members of our community who we felt closest to. As he did that, he began to place questions in our minds - what does it mean to serve people through where you choose live? Through what vocation you choose? Through the wages you earn? Through how you practically structure your life?
Answers to these questions have not been easy to find. In fact, I wouldn't say we've found them. I'm not sure I even know how to find them. I have resigned myself to the fact (and this realization didn't come without the help of a few good friends) that perhaps God isn't leading us into any particular place. Maybe he just wants us to pick somewhere, and see what he would do.
So we did. After confronting a lot of fear which had been stalemating my progress, I began looking for jobs in January. Erin and I picked the top two cities which excited our sense of adventure the most - San Diego and Washington DC. I searched for jobs in those locations. I was turned down for a few. Then, after only a few weeks, a job popped up in DC. To make a long story short, almost everything about the job was a good fit for us. I applied, flew up for an interview, spent five hours chatting with my future boss, and landed an offer.
I feel God has directly told me very few things in my lifetime. In the absence of what appears to be a direct phone-line to God which other people possess, I have developed the theory that perhaps God sometimes leads by circumstance - putting you in specific situations which cause you to make decisions that ultimately lead you in a direction which you never could have planned and ultimately works to his glory and your good. So I cannot say, specifically, why God is moving us to DC. I can say he is moving us away from Clemson. I can say that from all that has happened, if it is not his will that we move in this direction than he must be maniacally trying to trick us by making it so easy. I can say that we are trying to live lives which are open to his leading, and despite my eternal desire for concrete justifications just out of reach – we think this is it.
So we're here. I'm so excited about the prospect of moving to "the district." Oh, to be near live jazz again. To be near the steps of the Lincoln memorial, the birthplace of Duke Ellington, the epicenter of American political thought, Erin's extended family, friends new and old... To ride the metro to work and hear NPR being brodcast from down the street. I'm getting so excited just typing this.
But of course there will be pain in this move too. Pain in leaving so many people who are dear to us. Pain in leaving a place where God changed who I am. A place where I met some of the most incredible people I have ever known. A place where I learned so much about the beauty of God’s world, his community, and his character. A place where I asked my wife to marry me. A place where my wife and I struggled through our first year of marriage and emerged intact by the grace of God. A place where God did so much good through me and redeemed so many things I screwed up. A place where I was allowed to dance before God once a week with my family. I leave here a completely different person than the one who first stepped foot here in August of 2002. He has done great things.
So the move is here but the search continues. Great decisions have been made and yet the answers aren’t that much clearer. Sometimes they feel just as hazy as they’ve always been.
I have so much more to write – about the pain of leaving so many dear friends here who have poured so much life to me. About our future in DC and what it holds. About specific things I will miss about this strange, strange college town. About all the ideas and questions swirling around in my head. This is enough for now.
Unless you have your head under a rock, you've heard of Twitter. It's an online service which lets you send 140-character messages to your friends through the internet or your cell phone. Either you love it or you hate it.
Well ok, I don't hate it - but I think it's a pretty useless waste of time, a perfect example of the way technology sometimes disconnects people it's meant to connect. That is, until today. Recently some genius inventor came up with a box called "Baker Tweet" which lets bakeries update their Twitter feed when an item on their menu has just come out of the oven. Customers can subscribe to updates from their local bakery and always know when fresh cupcakes are ready to eat through text messages to their trusty cell phones.
The obvious application: KRISPY KREME FRESH HOT NOW. Imagine it. A text message on your cell phone the minute your local Krispy Kreme has fresh, warm, original glazed doughnuts rolling off that childlike-wonder-inspiring mechanical assembly line.
These are the days that make me happy to be an engineer. When absolute proof that technology is making our world a better place is discovered.
My senior year in college, the great Drew Norris and I hosted a radio show on Clemson University's much maligned radio station, WSBF. The station has strict rules which ensure that only esoteric crap is played on their airwaves, which include a ban on any artist who has ever had a hit in the Top 40 or is a "household name" (a term which has expanded so far as to include Modest Mouse). An exception is made for "specialty shows," which focus on a certain genre, artist, or other theme.
Drew's and my specialty was "oldies pop" which stretched from the late 40's to early 70's. It was a two hour show, once a week. Drew crafted sensational mixes for the first hour (he has a gift), and I focused on a single artist the second hour - playing their tunes and reading interesting facts about their history. Our first show we played Sgt. Pepper's in its entirety.
We named the show "Radio Carolina" - an homage to Radio Caroline, a pirate radio station that was broadcast from a ship off the shore of England in the 60's to avoid restrictions on pop music. This became incredibly ironic when after our sixth show, we were informed we did not meet the station's goals as educational radio because our music wasn't obscure enough (read: crappy enough - we played plenty of songs which most of our generation hasn't heard). We were told to cut our single-artist hour and play less "Time Life classics."
I responded to this in the most upstanding, mature way I could think of - I played all 8.5 minutes of "Hey Jude" on our next show and introduced it as a "Time Life classic." We were kicked off the air. I continued my prudent response by blasting the station in an article entitled "WSBF DJ Plays Good Song, Has Show Cancelled" written for the satirical online newspaper I created at Clemson. It was subsequently published in the college newspaper (though they butchered my headline, but what can you do).
I hope I don't sound too bitter, I really can't thank WSBF enough for kicking me off the radio for playing "Hey Jude." I'm pretty darned proud of it.
I tell you all of this not just to feed my need to feel I've done something remotely rebellious in my life, but more importantly because I've decided to provide Radio Carolina's entire archive here for download. If you're ever in the mood for some deliciously melodic oldies pop, here's 14 hours that will do your ears good.
