Posts tagged "Romans"
Everything Is Not OK (on Parenthood)… the Bad Thing Is Already Happening
Prayer / Relationships / Suffering / TV

Everything Is Not OK (on Parenthood)… the Bad Thing Is Already Happening

by Matt Schneider on Oct 4, 2012 • 10 Comments

Have you been watching the new season of Parenthood? This show continues to deliver the goods, which mostly come in the form of true-to-life suffering, chaos, loss, and grace, love, and peace amidst it all—very much in line with the Mockingbird conference last week in Charlottesville.

Spoiler alert! Don’t read on if you are a Parenthood fan but aren’t up to speed.

The most recent episode’s title says so much: “Everything Is Not OK.” It refers to the startling news that Kristina Braverman has received (I used to find Kristina’s character fairly annoying, but she has been endearing…

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Artificial Intelligence, Imputation and the Desperate Need to be Heard
Grace in Practice / News / Psychology / Science / Social Science / Technology / Theology

Artificial Intelligence, Imputation and the Desperate Need to be Heard

by R-J Heijmen on Mar 15, 2012 • 6 Comments

In 1966, MIT computer science professor Josef Weisenbaum wrote a very simple computer program named ELIZA. ELIZA was designed to mimic an empathetic psychologist, mirroring back key words to users in the form of questions, encouraging them to go deeper with their emotions. For example, if the user mentioned, in passing, that they were feeling a bit depressed, ELIZA would ask them why they were depressed. If the user mentioned a family member or significant other, ELIZA would ask them to elaborate on that particular person.

Weizenbaum intended ELIZA as a very rudimentary experiment in artificial intelligence, but was shocked to…

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Hannah Arendt Explains Paul’s Discovery
Bible / Law / Philosophy / Theology

Hannah Arendt Explains Paul’s Discovery

by David Zahl on Jul 18, 2011 • 2 Comments

By popular demand, a couple more quotations taken from the chapter “The Apostle Paul and the Impotence of the Will” in the second volume of her The Life of the Mind:

The Apostle Paul’s discovery, which he describes in great detail in the Letter to the Romans, again concerns a two-in-one, but these two are not friends or partners; they are in constant struggle with each other. Precisely when he “wants to do right (to kalon),” he finds that “evil lies close at hand” (7:21), for “if the law had not said, ‘You shall not covet,’” he “should not have…

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The Subjective Power of an Objective Gospel
Religion / Testimony / Theology

The Subjective Power of an Objective Gospel

by Mockingbird on Jul 12, 2011 • 7 Comments

This little reflection by Mbird’s Jacob Smith and David Zahl has made the rounds recently, first in Logia: A Journal of Lutheran Theology and second on The Gospel Coalition (where it generated quite the conversation!). We thought we’d repost it here for, you know, posterity:

The great Southern novelist Walker Percy once asked in his essay “The Delta Factor,” “Why does man feel so sad in the twentieth century? Why does man feel so bad in the very age when, more than in any other age, he has succeeded in satisfying his needs and making the world over for his own…

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Living Bread not Living Dead
Bible / Humor / Theology / TV

Living Bread not Living Dead

by David Browder on Jun 22, 2011 • No Comments

Romans 5:6-8 For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. For one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die— but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

One of the great moments of the television show The Walking Dead comes in Episode Two when a bunch of survivors are trapped in a building by what seems to be the entire zombie population of post-zompocalyptic Atlanta, GA. The zombies know they are in the…

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Do You Have A Zombie Plan? Part V
Bible / Film / Humor / Psychology / Social Science / Theology / TV

Do You Have A Zombie Plan? Part V

by David Browder on May 19, 2011 • 7 Comments

As I promised in the last post, we now venture into the many fearful layers of our psyche … the land of the walking dead.

Sigmund Freud once wrote an interesting little ditty called “The Uncanny“.  In it, he set up an inner conversation between what he called Heimlich and Unheimlich. Heimlich, says Freud, is what one would call the “homely” or how one feels as one returns to the “old home fires” of the psyche.  The equivalent of the Norman Rockwell painting in your life or the old Christmas fire with green and red textures, scarves, top hats, and…

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Fat Children Took My Life
Children / Food / Law / News

Fat Children Took My Life

by David Zahl on Mar 15, 2011 • 2 Comments

A provocative piece on the obesity epidemic via Slate’s new Hive project, in which author Daniel Engbar compiles a startling amount of data about the ineffectiveness of ‘tough love’ when it comes to dealing with this issue. In fact, the evidence of “the law increasing the trespass” (Romans 5:20) is pretty egregious here. A classic example of the civil use of the law (healthy weight being undeniably in the best interest of individuals and society as whole) backfiring completely, i.e. regardless of the intention, the law in this area is only ever heard/received in its moral capacity, therefore producing its…

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What Noel Gallagher Is Not Supposed To Feel
Celebrity / Music / Reviews / Suffering

What Noel Gallagher Is Not Supposed To Feel

by David Zahl on Mar 1, 2011 • 1 Comment

It’s high time we reappraised Oasis’ underrated fourth album, the hungover Standing on the Shoulder of Giants. When it was released, the expectations were astronomical – Oasis were still the biggest band in the (rest of the) world, albeit weighed down by/wrestling with the question of how to follow-up the relative “failure” of Be Here Now (it only sold eight million copies), a record which has rightly come to symbolize the utter hollowness of 90s Britpop hubris/excess. If you’re Noel Gallagher, you toss your brother a few swaggering anthems and spend the rest of the disc getting introspective.

There’s always been…

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Against This, I Cannot Fight
Addiction / Music / Theology

Against This, I Cannot Fight

by Lauren R.E. Larkin on Feb 18, 2011 • 2 Comments

I love classical music. It calms me, it always has. So, when my little Q man was born and all he did was SCREAM (okay, unfair…maybe 2% of the time he ‘tried’ to sleep), I quickly developed a habit of turning on the classical music…for me, really. So, more often then not, if you stop by our house in the middle of the day you will typically hear classical music (and, maybe, me yelling over the top of it…).

However, when I work out, it’s a whole different story in music genre. Out goes Bach and in goes Rage Against the…

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Nietzsche, Socrates, Seneca and The Philosopher’s Stone
Books / Philosophy / Psychology / Suffering

Nietzsche, Socrates, Seneca and The Philosopher’s Stone

by David Zahl on Jan 26, 2011 • 3 Comments

A fascinating if somewhat downbeat review of James Miller’s new Examined Lives: From Socrates to Nietzsche appeared in this past weekend’s NY Times Book Review, containing more than a few gems about human nature and the search for meaning. In particular, the book details how various philosophers have negotiated, or failed to negotiate, the impossible gap between the ideal and the real (known to us as, well, sin) in their own lives. Lots of prime divided-self/Romans 7-material in here:

If the proof of a pudding is in the eating, and the proof of a rule is in the exceptions,…

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PZ’s Podcast Double-Feature, Part One: Inside Looking Out
Literature / Psychology

PZ’s Podcast Double-Feature, Part One: Inside Looking Out

by Mockingbird on Jan 10, 2011 • No Comments

EPISODE 23 So I was standing in line at the Hess Station the other day and began to be critical of everyone else who was standing in line with me. I thought about lottery tickets and poor people, Jerry Springer, obesity, ‘Joe Six-Pack’, the few free individuals who were purchasing cigarettes, Little Debbie, Black Coffee (in Bed), the Spanish language, the excellent Mexican restaurant I frequent Mondays because of the Lunch Specials, the ads blaring from the gas pumps themselves, and so on and so forth.

Talk, Talk (“It’s My Life”); and What is the Meaning of Life? (I even got…

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One Last Jab at New Year’s Resolutions
Bible / Humor / News / Psychology

One Last Jab at New Year’s Resolutions

by Bryan J. on Jan 4, 2011 • No Comments

Just one more quick good-natured jab at New Year’s resolutions: a crowd-sourced New Year’s Resolution Generator. Users sent in their personal resolutions, which were added to a randomized display of things we all should be doing in 2011. Some are fun and good natured, like the Vanilla Ice inspired “Stop. Collaborate (and Listen).” Others revealed a deep sense of guilt and shame about how off track their lives were.

Some more poignant examples of guilt-inspired New Year’s Resolutions: Forgive her (also: Forgive him), Carpool, Learn to Cope, De-Clutter, Learn to Commit, Avoid Drama, Be Spontaneous (ironic?),…

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Conditional Forgiveness and Unconditional Unforgiveness
Forgiveness / Philosophy / Psychology / Religion

Conditional Forgiveness and Unconditional Unforgiveness

by David Zahl on Jan 3, 2011 • 3 Comments

A provocative article appeared over the break in the NY Times by Charles Griswold entitled “On Forgiveness”. It’s a wide-ranging if not entirely sympathetic (read: par-for-the-course and predictably/instinctively Pelagian) discussion of our favorite subject, raising some interesting questions, the bits about conditionality in particular. Griswold certainly succeeds, however, in painting the like-it-or-not explicitly Christian notions of “preemptive” Romans 5-style forgiveness in even more radical colors. The notion that the “conditions” for genuine forgiveness could be met by another – a substitute, if you will – seems refreshingly antithetical to the whole outlook on display here. Imperfect forgiveness, indeed! A few…

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Perfect Power Casts Out All Love: Joseph Stalin, Behavior Modification and Christmas
Christmas / Politics / Religion / Theology

Perfect Power Casts Out All Love: Joseph Stalin, Behavior Modification and Christmas

by David Browder on Dec 23, 2010 • 11 Comments

Two excerpts from the biography Young Stalin by Simon Sebag Montefiore chronicling the early religious education of Joseph Stalin:

The Empire’s seminaries were “notorious for the savagery of their customs, medieval pedagoguery, and law of the fist,” comments [Leon] Trotsky. “All the vices banned by the Holy Scriptures flourished in this hotbed of piety.”

The seminary was to pull off the singular achievement of supplying the Russian Revolution with some of its most ruthless radicals. “No secular school,” wrote another seminarist, Stalin’s comrade Philip Makharadze, “produced as many atheistsas the Tiflis Seminary.” The Stone Sack (nickname for the seminary – DB) literally…

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The Secret History of William Axl Rose, Pt 3: Left So Far Out From The Shore
Art / Celebrity / Identity / Law / Music / Relationships

The Secret History of William Axl Rose, Pt 3: Left So Far Out From The Shore

by David Zahl on Dec 7, 2010 • 8 Comments

Concluding our three-part series on Axl Rose. Read part one and part two.

“The name [Guns n Roses] helped the music [on Chinese Democracy] more than you could ever know, and I’m not talking in regards to studios and budgets. I mean it as in being pushed by something, and having to get the music to a place where I can find my peace regardless of what anyone says.” – Axl Rose, 2009

We come now to the third act, or what some might call the epilogue of the story. With the original band having gone up in smoke sometime in the…

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