Hill Giant!

Happy New Year folks!

My buddy Vince brought me a copy of PC Gamer so I can order the promo hill giant from Wizards of the Coast. Sweet!

Been picking away at my Christmas wish list (to do), still a bit crazy and classes start again this coming Wednesday.

The Crucified God

OK one of my to do items was finish this masterpiece. I was less far along than I thought. This struck a real chord with me, especially since I've been pondering the whole issue of solidarity with the outcast of Christian society. This is in a section on the mysticism of the cross.

"By becoming a 'friend of sinners and tax collectors', he made their enemies his enemies. By claiming that God himself was on the side of the godless, he incited the devout against him and was cast out into the godlessness of Golgotha. The more the mysticism of the cross recognizes this, the less it can accept Jesus as an example of patience and submission to fate." (p.51, Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God)

Holiday Wish List (EDITED)

Ok, this is not what you think. I am not going to list all the 'stuff' I would like folks to buy me for Christmas. Rather I thought it would be fun to list the things I would like to get done over the holidays. Maybe I'll post a progress report later on!

1) Clean house from top to bottom (anyone else have kids?) (DONE, but not as well as I would like).
2) Clean up my office (DONE)
3) Have some quality lone time with my awesome wife (NOT ENOUGH OF THIS ONE)
4) Work on my stamp collection, it is seriously neglected this last year (DONE, had to sort out some Dutch stamps)
5) Buy some kindling so I can burn up the logs in my garage (DONE, BTW I want to do the actual burning in my fireplace, not the garage!)
6) Have a nice toasty time with a fire and my family on Christmas morning (DONE, it was toasty. Note to self, chocolate + infants = bad combination!!!)
7) Bake some muffins (DONE)
8) Work on my Kingdom of God I course material (why oh why don't they give you a deadline!)
9) Turn off water to hose in garage - can you believe I've only half winterized our house and there is already a decent amount of snow on the ground (DONE)
10) Finish reading "The Crucified God" (NOT DONE)
11) Read "Thinking Biblically" (deferred for another book, BTW I read 2 books over the holidays!)
12) Update the Freedom Vineyard website
13) Practice my guitar - I don't do this enough these days (BEEN DOING, BUT NOT ENOUGH)
14) Prepare the rest of the dungeon my players are currently in (DONE)
15) Win at least one decent league or team freeroll - those folks are good (PLACED 9th in our weekly Headhunter on Jetset!)
16) Host a friendly poker night - it has been far too long, I need to know if my home game has improved (SORTA, had our old neighbours over for Settlers of Catan)

Well, I could go on but this is enough to work on for now. It is good to look at what is on your plate. Now excuse me while I work on number one for a while and also prepare a prophetic training session for tomorrow (a local Wesleyan church asked me to do one for a small group they run).

[NOTE: This message is heavily edited to keep you up to date on what is DONE or abandoned]

Done like dinner

Wow what a big day it was. Took me 1 hour to drive to the school for my exam (first good snowstorm). I was up for prayer at 7AM, wrote my exam at 9AM. Looked after kids all afternoon. Played D&D with friends into the evening. By the time I wound down it was 2:30AM!!! Needless to say I am tired today.

It feels good to have that exam done, I chose to write on Teilhard de Chardin and on the Adamic Myth. I think I will do well. Chardin really rocks, "evolution saves Christ." Now there is a statement to get your blood pumping. You will either say to yourself - "how dare he blaspheme like that!" or you will ask the more honest question: "what the heck is he talking about?". For Chardin there is no evolution without involution - or something centering all the the creative potential in life. That centering force is clearly Christ, the same one who holds all things together! Chardin gives us lots to ponder, especially as we seek to understand faith in a scientific age. I've read a bit from him in the past and I am going to read more in the future.

Today is a day of rest.

What is a pastoral question?

OK so I am back to studying. I was working through this one day before yesterday - it is the first question. In what way is the question of humanity (anthropology)a pastoral question?

I thought it might be interesting to throw that up here and see what stirs up.

The way we think about our own humanity is quite complex. Historically you could say one has a soul or an ability to reason or even to develop reflexive language. But now we have to think more of what makes us human is what we do with these capacities. Hence the expression - how inhumane of that person. In fact we see a lot of behaviour in the world that we would want to disassociate with humanity - a young girl stabbed to death on campus just this week comes to mind.

So what is the pastoral dimension that is brought to bear here? I think that question needs to be turned inward to those who seek to be of help to the world. When we express our humanity are we not, in theory, expressing that which is best about us and genuinely longs to make this world a better place? I think that has to be part of how we answer the question of what it means to be a human.

So I put to you readers, drop me a comment. What is the pastoral dimension of the question of humanity?

Monster Flopper

So I've been playing online in a Poker League for a while now and just joined a team. Not crazy about the name but it is fun. I played my first tourney for this team and actually earned our team their first points! I know I should be studying, but I find a good poker tournament to be quite an exciting way to relax.

I play mostly on Absolute Poker, Jetset poker and Poker.com. Absolute (AP) has tonnes of freerolls, games that don't cost you anything to play but you can win money to play with, and I like the style of the players. Jetset is where some of my friends from around here play (Kartel and Mobius) and there are too many chasers at the tables for me to really enjoy playing there (chasers will play really crappy hands all the time) but I love the headhunter games - basically everyone has a bounty on their heads and if you eliminate them you get that much money in your account! Poker.com is a staple poker site, not so good for chatting (both AP and Jetset rock for chatting), but there is a decent quality of play there and my league has freerolls there every week. If you are there and see pomorev playing - please say hello (I might take it easy on ya). I only play freerolls and with the money I win so don't hold your breath on seeing me at a big money table anytime soon.

Anne Rice and Jesus

OK some of you might be wondering what the connection is. I first heard of this from the Christian Gamers Guild. The infamous writer of Interview with a Vampire has gone and switched gears. My buddy Jamie wrote this review of her latest book - Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt. I am thinking this just might be the thing for the Christmas break. Plus it is way too cool to have such a fine author decide to do a treatment of the coolest dude to ever set foot on this here planet - Jesus! Welcome home Anne, welcome home.

One down, one to go

First exam is completed. I was not that happy with it, seems like my notes have more holes than I would like. I usually take verbose notes on my laptop - but my notes from that class were rather thin. One of the questions was really fun though - but hardly a 2 hour exam question (more like a 4 hours one). Basically you were given a quote about how the gospels were wrote the Last Supper account in light of the Eucharistic reality of the church. Now you had to deal with it as if you were addressing an adult education class with fundamentalist tendancies. The issue at stake is that it is saying that the gospel accounts are not necessarily literal history - which can be a stretch for some folks.

Well first off - I wouldn't touch something like that with a group of fundies. That is like asking someone to cut off your left nut without any painkillers! Yikes. I did agree with the statement though - Leverdiere says it much more eloquently than I could. It does get at the heart of the gospels being liturgical texts, even though I think Leverdiere is biased towards this. He sees liturgy everywhere when he reads the gospels. But this does help make some sense of the discrepancies in the Last Supper narratives (John drops us back a whole day even!). Oh did I say there were discrepencies, fundie please ignore I said that. :-)

I think I did ok. I pulled two A+ and an A on the papers. I do hope I keep at least an A for the class. Now on to the next one, by far the more beefy course. Exam is Friday after next - lots of studying to do yet.

Preparing for exams

OK so it starts next Wednesday. I am not too worried about that one, I only have 18 pages of class notes to cover and anyone who has taken a course with me knows I take very meticulous notes. I think I typed out a novel for the other course though! Elyssa was home Thursday and Friday from school and the kids just fought all the time. Today is Sharon's birthday but I'm afraid it was off to a rough start. She did seem pleased with the brilliant b-day cards me and the girls spent yesterday making (one of the moments when everyone got along). Chelsea's card was especially amusing to her, Chelsea is in the stage where big cribbly clouds are the order of the day - nice.