Beauty and God

I took this photo last weekend on an icy morning at a retreat center in New Hampshire, on Lake Winnipesaukee. 

"Even when the world is at its worst, and when life is at its worst, there is still beauty left, and we should never forget it. It is not that to look at the beauty and to think about the beauty is an escape from reality--far from it. Any such glimpse of beauty should move us to three things.  

It should move us to the memory of God, the awareness that this is God's world, and that not even the sin and thoughtlessness and the selfishness of man can entirely obliterate the beauty of God.  

It should move us to gratitude, and to the realization that there is always something left for which we ought to give thanks.

It should move us to resolution and to action, so that, as far as we can, we may increase the beauty and remove the ugliness that is within this world." ~William Barclay

A Brief Theology of the Academic Vocation

Over at Intervarsity's Emerging Scholars Network I've written an article about the purpose of academic work, and about how that work is informed and influenced by the Christian understanding of the glory of God. Check it out! http://blog.emergingscholars.org/2014/01/a-brief-theology-of-the-academic-vocation/

Isn't Feeling More Spiritual Than Reason?

Right now I'm reading After You Believe: Why Christian Character Matters, a book on Christian purpose and ethics by N. T. Wright. In it he stresses over and over again the need for Christians to think out what it means to be "in Christ." The following quote displays one of the central arguments of the book, and one that should be taken seriously by all of us--we who stumble along through this lovely life claiming Jesus as Lord.

"Part of the problem in contemporary Christianity, I believe, is that talk about freedom of the Spirit, about the grace which sweeps us off our feet and heals and transforms our lives, has been taken over surreptitiously by a kind of low-grade romanticism, colluding with an anti-intellectual streak in our culture, generating the assumption that the more spiritual you are, the less you need to think.

"I cannot stress too strongly that this is a mistake. The more genuinely spiritual you are, according to Romans 12 and Philippians 1, the more clearly and accurately and carefully you will think, particularly about what the completed goal of your Christian journey will be and hence what steps you should be taking, what habits you should be acquiring, as part of the journey toward that goal, right now. Thinking clearly and Christianly is thus both a key element within the total rehumanizing process (you won't be fully human if you leave your thinking and reasoning behind) and a vital part of the motor which drives the rest of that process."