far180 blog

1. Finding Good Seed

   

   The other day I listened to an online discussion among three prominent public intellectuals. They were lamenting the current destruction of what they considered the positive aspects of Christendom. In their initial academic pursuits, they each had been attracted to the foundational principles of what we could call secular humanism as the substrate that could provide what was needed to produce a moral and ethical society. Now they weren’t so sure, in that the ideas rooted in that substrate were not producing the fruit that they had hoped for but a crop of poisonous ideologies that were hollowing out Christendom.

2. The Cookies They Comfort Me

   

   The future Benedict XVI wrote this in his now-classic book Introduction to Christianity. The Cross, he wrote, "expresses the primacy of acceptance over action... Accordingly, from the point of view of the Christian faith, man comes in the profoundest sense to himself not through what he does but through what he accepts.”

3. The Gospel of Luke – Introduction

   

   This presentation is from a series of talks on Luke’s Gospel. It contains some points to consider before starting to go through the Gospel, chapter by chapter. I’m indebted to the insights of Gil Bailie, for some of the material in this study.

4. Normal Spoilage

   

   At one point I was in the business of setting up accounting software used in inventory management. The Cost of Goods Sold calculation had a factor called “Normal Spoilage” which was set at 2 out of every 100 units in inventory. That 2% was always written off in the profit calculations as either being lost or unsellable goods.

5. Gathering and Scattering

   

   In Luke 11:23, Jesus says, “Whoever does not gather with me scatters.” What is Jesus talking about? A journey into linguistics might help. When we use the word ‘symbol’ in English, we usually mean that something just represents something else, as when we say that a flag symbolizes a nation. In practice, we tend to make an absolute distinction between the symbolic and the real, but this is not the case with linguistics! The opposite of the symbolic is not the real but the diabolic. Symbolic means to throw together (to gather) and diabolic means to throw apart (to scatter). Our word ‘devil’ comes from the Greek word diabolos. Proverbs 6:19 refers to the devil (or diabolos) as, “A lying witness who testifies falsely, and one who sows discord in a family.” The devil wants to make us scatterbrained, unable to function as true sons and daughters of God. In the story of the Gerasene demoniac in Luke 8, Jesus casts out the devils from a truly dysfunctional fellow. At the end of the story, we see him sitting at the feet of Jesus “in his right mind”. His scatterbrained days are behind him.