Tags - reflections

Below are all posts tagged with 'reflections'.

Probably the strongest objection to Christianity is the problem of suffering. It is a question that has emotional weight, and intellectually challenging, and it is difficult to find a response to this objection that can meet both the emotional and intellectual demands.

I guess to provide some context to this. This is not a problem that is unique to Christianity. Every worldview must answer this question – the atheist, the Buddhist, the Hindu all need to provide responses to the problem of suffering. So, to dismiss Christianity because of this issue is not really looking at the full picture, because you would also need to show that an alternative worldview would have a better answer to this problem. And this is indeed a problem.

Hindu’s answer to suffering is karma – that this suffering is brought upon ourselves by something we have done, whether in this life or an earlier one. At first this seems to be a satisfactory solution, there seems to be a sense of poetic justice about it. In many ways, this is how ...

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Christianity Today has a great article on how first-person storytelling is the new buzz in the club scene in New York, and its Christian roots.

The simple answer is because we are “storytelling animals,” to use Green’s term. “A hunger for stories is built into our DNA.” Or as Allison put it: “Oral storytelling is so hard wired into the way we make sense of it all and how we find the meaning in our lives.

More encouragement for us to tell our stories of how Jesus has transformed our lives.

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Last month I participated in a discussion in response to a post on Brian Barela’s blog looking at the role that ministry mode evangelism plays in our movements on campus.

I think that ministry mode evangelism is an important element in our movements on campus but I do not think that we are ever going to fulfill our mission unless we can move beyond ministry mode evangelism into the two other modes (natural mode and body mode).

My concerns rest largely on two points. The first is that while ministry mode evangelism is essential in starting a movement, it is extremely difficult to have true spiritual multiplication in a campus setting without natural and/or body mode evangelism. The second is that unless our students learn natural mode evangelism (through us or others) they will be frustrated in their evangelism efforts beyond campus. I want to focus on the first of these points in this post.

Many of you will also be familiar that once a campus ministry gets to a certain size it becomes extremely difficult t...

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At the 2009 World Science Festival Bobby McFerrin participated in a panel discussion on music and the human brain. During this discussion he demonstrated how the audience anticipated the notes of the pentatonic scale without being told and ended with “I can go anywhere in the world and audiences get that.” (watch the video below)

World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale from World Science Festival on Vimeo.

One of the other panelists talked about how he thought our human preference for consonance over dissonance (ie harmony)  seemed to be hardwired or pre-programmed into the human brain. Other animals have no preference for notes to be in harmony, only us.

The idea of universal truths existing in music is not new. The Pythagoreans of ancient Greece thought that music held the secret mysteries of the world, and there is an amazing mathematical structure to musical scales, and the way notes combine.

This got me thinking about the things in our world, and es...

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Check out this visual review of Avatar. You can find more visual reviews at www.hollywoodjesus.com

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