The Feast of St. Andrew

Today is the feast of St. Andrew, patron saint of Scotland and Tim has a wonderful posting over at Tale Spin. Please check it out here.

Winter is Here

The Shape of University Education

Patrick Deneen has a very interesting post on the university education over at What I Saw in America:

Today's article only further attests to the staggering absurdity of our current college admissions game: students are now "branding" themselves - a term we used to use for differentiating cattle herds and is now used to describe slick and often superficial ways that advertisers and marketers distinguish nearly identical products. This same term is now embraced by both institutions of higher learning and their potential students in the effort to differentiate themselves - and may have just as much substance as the marketing techniques to which they refer.

Read the rest here.

Sad Day

Okay, I thought I was conflicted about the Grey Cup. And I was. I started cheering for Saskatchewan and half way through realized that I really wanted Milt Stegall to get his ring and for Troy Westwood to be able to cut off that rat's tail of a pony tail. So I decided that since Saskatchewan voted in the Saskatchewan party they didn't deserve the Grey Cup and started to cheer for Winnipeg wholeheartedly. Sigh...Saskatchewan won...and I could have basked in the reflected glory except I committed an act of apostasy at halftime.

Favourite Stories

It has been interesting reading the comments on my last post. It reminded me of the evening my roommates and I were sitting around talking about what four books of the Bible we'd take on a desert island with us (Psalms, Luke, Genesis, Corinthians [1st and 2nd - I'm cheating]). The phone rang and it was our landlady who was Jewish. We asked her what four books she'd take and she said she could live without Leviticus. Obviously if the first five books of the Bible are the most important to you then choosing four is less of a problem.

But Aaron's question remains: what stories of Jesus are your favourites?

Personal Canon

I had a prof who said we all had our own personal canon of Bible stories that we loved and that we rooted ourselves in. He had a theory about what gospels groups preferred too: liberals he said preferred Luke, Catholics Matthew, evangelicals John, Lutherans Paul, and fundamentalists Revelation.

Aaron, over at Aaron's Head, makes an interesting observation about the way in which people's favourite story of Jesus says something about who they are. My favourite stories are the prodigal parables from Luke's gospel. Part of the reason they resonate so deeply with me is that these were the stories my grandma told me over and over again when I was little. Part of it is because the story of the lost sheep came alive for me in my conversion when I was seventeen. Part of it is because I had a confessor who read me the story of the prodigal daughter once. I have known what it is like to be lost. I have known what it is to have been found. I have known what it is like to wait hopefully for the lost to return. I have known what it is like to go searching for the lost. And I've known what it is to be the resentful older brother. If I had only this chapter and the story of the disciples on the road to Emmaus I think I'd have the heart of the gospel.

I know that it is important to teach people to read Scripture critically (in the proper sense of that word and not the negative sense), but I like what Aaron asked his study because I don't know if we encourage people to read with love enough in mainline churches. I think I'm going to ask the folks in our bible study the same question to see what they say.

The Cost of Food

Patrick Deneen has another really good post, this time on the impact of the rising cost of oil on the cost of food. It is really worth reading here.

A friend of mine who farms nearby talks about the costs of eating iceberg lettuce off season. He factors in the cost of the pesticides, the fertilizers, the water, and then the oil to truck it here in refrigerator trucks. He concludes that it is extremely expensive to eat something that doesn't even have nutritional value. Here is good reason to eat frozen and canned local produce.