A New Blogging Venture

I am currently blogging at the …&Following blog.

This project was started at the beginning of February to run concurrently with a class I’m co-teaching at church. We’re working our way through a discussion of N. T. Wright’s Surprised by Hope. The blog will help me organize my thoughts before each week’s class as well as act as a record for where we’ve been.

I am running a series on the blog I call Resurrection Songs. I’m featuring songs that have something to do with the afterlife or the resurrection. It’s a fun way to concentrate on how resurrection has inspired songwriters and poets through the ages.

I am, however, running out of songs. I need your help. If anyone’s still out there, navigate to the …&Following site and leave any suggestions you might have for a featured song. I’ll be eternally grateful. Thanks.

rjjf

Keeping a Reading Schedule During Lent

This year I’ll be again reading from the lectionary during Lent.

Why do I do this? Isn’t this weird behavior, even for an ex-Catholic?

Maybe. Maybe not.

Sometimes I think reading from the lectionary every day gives one the impression of moving through the text too quickly. Keeping that kind of pace through the entire year can lead to a kind of burn-out.

But there are times – Advent and Lent specifically – when moving quickly to get a wide view is beneficial. I’ll still meditate over the one passage for a week at a time. I will, however, also add to my routine extra reading from the lectionary. The lectionary is only a device I use to my reading a bit of structure.

Creativity is not only for the young…

Interesting article here by Malcom Gladwell on the New Yorker’s website.

We generally think that precocity and genius go together. In fact–or so we think–genius appears at a very young age. The old saw that states “if you don’t ‘make it’ by age thirty-five that you never will” is almost universally accepted. But it’s not always true.

Thank God for that.

I find it even more interesting younger people and older people approach the creative process differently: The young favor a conceptual approach whereas older creatives favor an experimental approach.

For those of us advancing in years, this is good news. But it comes at a price. Gladwell quotes University of Chicago economist David Galenson in the middle of a discussion about Picasso and Cézanne:

The imprecision of their goals [by using an experimental approach] means that these artists rarely feel they have succeeded, and their careers are consequently often dominated by the pursuit of a single objective. These artists repeat themselves, painting the same subject many times, and gradually changing its treatment in an experimental process of trial and error. Each work leads to the next, and none is generally privileged over others, so experimental painters rarely make specific preparatory sketches or plans for a painting. They consider the production of a painting as a process of searching, in which they aim to discover the image in the course of making it; they typically believe that learning is a more important goal than making finished paintings. Experimental artists build their skills gradually over the course of their careers, improving their work slowly over long periods. These artists are perfectionists and are typically plagued by frustration at their inability to achieve their goal.

Key takeaway? You gotta love the process if you’re over thirty-five. And you’ve gotta have someone (or a couple of someones) who love you.

In Private

I’m still thinking about “practicing in public.”

I don’t want to make too much of this idea. What we do in public is only a portion of the whole. What we do in private is also important, maybe foundational.

In private is where intimacy occurs. In private is where promises are made. In private is where forgiveness is confirmed, where learning occurs, mistakes are corrected, decisions are made, courage is fostered, faces are set, spirits are strengthened and hope takes root.

In Public

Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail and the soon to be published Free, is quoted in the December issue of Writer’s Digest:

“I don’t come from the book or media world; I’m trained as a computational physicist,” Anderson says. “We in the software world wrote our code in public. That’s what beta testing is all about. Doing things in public is the norm. I took the habits that were most conventional, just like getting peer reviews in science, and applied it to my books.”

Anderson’s quote reminds me of something I read about Bob Dylan:

Dylan said he needed to practice in front of people. He could not sit in a room by himself and play. For all intents and purposes, Dylan practiced in public. He said that what he was practicing was what he was becoming.

I like that. Blogging is like practicing in public. So is Christianity. What we are is what we will become.

Whether we are writers or musicians or Christians, when the thing is done in public, something special happens.

Plantinga’s Book on CCEL

CCEL has just made Alvin Plantinga’s Warranted Christian Belief available on their website.

You may read online for free. You may also download a .pdf for a nominal charge.

For those with a philosophical bent, this is a great book.

Getting Past a Hatred of Mondays

Mondays are always difficult. I need to get up early and re-program myself to my work-week existence. My mind is still in relaxation mode. Last week’s work-week tension just left my body last evening while watching TV.

I suppose, in this day and age, any day can be Monday. I once worked on Saturdays and (sometimes) on Sundays. My weekend was Monday and Tuesday. Wednesday was my Monday.

It doesn’t matter which day of the week Monday falls on, it still feels like Monday. I’m too far entrenched in the culture-wide hatred of Monday to quibble about whether it’s really Monday. Monday–to my way of thinking–is a generic term for the worst day of the week.

I know that’s bad. I’m working on it.

What is writing? Is it paper or process?

What is writing? Is it paper or process?

Most people would probably say paper. I’m not so sure. I’m becoming more and more aware of writing as process, though I’m willing to concede this is somewhat a false choice.

How can I say that writing is process? Writing must be the end result, right? In other words writing is most definitely paper. I’m using the idea of words on paper as a representation of the end result. (I could use “screen” rather than paper to keep current with the idea of writing as it appears in the blogosphere. However, the idea of writing as “screen or process” was not quite as alliterative as “paper or process”.)

Is there a methodology to spiritual formation?

Is this an odd way of approaching this subject? I could ask “What is your preferred method celebrating your anniversary?” or “What is your preferred method of loving your children or or your siblings or your parents or your spouse?”

You’d be able to tell me something that can be indentified as a method. The method, however, is not the thing itself. Relationships are not sustained by a methodology.

Or are they?

Daily Task Completion

I sometimes need help getting things done. I don’t need a lot of help. Once I start, I’m fine. I just need help keeping my focus on whatever it is I’m doing until I finish it. Once I do that, then I need help with deciding what to do next. On and on and on.

I’ve read David Allen’s Getting Things Done and his system works, to a point. He says that you should call something a “project” if it contains more than two tasks. The individual tasks can then be added to a Next Actions list. At any given time, according to Allen, I could have 75-80 projects with God only knows how many Next Actions. These discrete actions, then, should be classified further and placed on lists according to context and labeled: @phone, @computer, @home, @waitinguntildaughtergetsoutofbathroom, etc.

I don’t know why, but I’ve never been able to get the context thing to work like how it’s billed.

I found myself counting the number of Next Actions completed to determine the success or failure of my day. A large number of Next Actions signaled a success, a low number failure. I was running at a breakneck pace for a long stretch of time. I was completing actions like there was no tomorrow. Average task completions per day–a key metric–were at an all-time high. But I was padding the list with relatively insignificant Next Actions. Meanwhile, important projects languished from inattention.

 

NaNoWriMo Plans

I’m working on ideas for a novel for next month’s NaNoWriMo.

The novel may consist of an expansion of posts from this blog. Maybe this one, only longer.

Or, this one.

I’m also thinking about my characters.

And My plot.

But, I can’t use any of the words I’ve already written. By November 30, I hope to have a 50,000 word novel written. That’s approximately 1,700 words a day.

I’ll be posting excerpts. Stay tuned.

Meaning and Politics

It’s time for a return to the archives and repost an entry first posted in May 2007. It seems more approriate today than it did then. If I ask myself whether I still feel this way, I might answer: Yes, even more so.

C. S. Lewis is said to have hated conversations about politics. There was no subject that bored him more.

I have great respect for C. S. Lewis; but this was one area where I disagreed with him. I thought that he was dead wrong about this.

A Look Before the Season

Yesterday, before work, I saw this guy out our kitchen window. I scrambled into the bedroom to grab the camera and, when I went back to the kitchen, he was still there. I needed to hurry the shot because he was trying to decide whether or not he should be watching me through the window or running from the neighbor’s beagle. A few seconds later, he was gone. Life in the suburbs!

Storing Our Selves

Phyllis Tickle has written an excellent book called The Great Emergence: How Christianity is Changing and Why.

I’ll devote later posts to a more detailed discussion of the book, but for now I’ll highlight one idea gleaned from a cursory reading while still standing in line at the bookstore.

She teases an idea about To Do lists being respositories of our knowledge of what we need do next. Calculators become crutches used for running simple sums once run inside our own heads. Part of this, of course, is cultural. The speed at which life happens makes machines necessary for us to keep pace.

Creating in Time

Allow me to provide an overly simplistic paraphrase of an idea Kenneth Atchity puts forward in A Writer’s Time: Writing is nothing more than a transcript of an argument you have with yourself. You begin any writing project by making a decision. A portion of your mind will reject that decision. This causes the creative tension neccesary to write something down.

Advice Before Beginning Spiritual Work

I am compiling information about what we like to call spiritual disciplines. The following is a sober warning to beware about thinking we’re accomplishing too much in the spiritual life.

From a letter C. S. Lewis sent to Arthur Greeves, 15 June, 1930:

Mundane Mondays: Values

Mundane Mondays

My posts on Mondays will focus on the seemingly mundane things related to how I approach work. Today’s post will concentrate on determining VALUES.

Just why DID he write that letter? (2)

We might say the reason John wrote the letter we call 1st John was to refute a kind of proto-Gnosticism. This is not wrong; it is a valid statement. But his reason to write the letter amounts to so much more than that.

Just why DID he write that letter?

John the Apostle

 

Tonight, in our Life Group, we’re beginning a study of the New Testament book of 1st John.

In every study of a book like this, I try to determine just why the author wanted to write the book in the first place. John makes this task easier: He tells us. Twelve times he prefaces a remark with the phrase “I am writing…” These can then be classified into seven distinct reasons for writing:

John is writing the letter to:

Wrestling with the Imagination

Passing years have given me the option to relax about writing more than when I was in my thirties.

I once thought that if I didn’t write something, anything every day, the world as I knew it would end. And it did end. The old world ended and the new world began, with every missed deadline, with every unproductive writing day.

In the new world I was given the chance to view things differently, sideways maybe, or upside-down, but differently. The difference changed the shape of every writing project I ever set my mind and body to
complete. It would become a new project.