Blogroll

Fr. Jake encourages us to listen, offering a wonderful faith story.

Learning to see how God is constantly redeeming this world requires a little practice. It requires us to set aside our view of our lives as a series of good times and bad times, with shades of both in between. Instead, we seek out the movement of God. And the movement of God is always from glory to glory. Our task is to set aside our perceptions of what is going on, and then move with God, from faith, to faith, and so become partners in God’s work of redemption.

If we are to be evangelists, it is important that we learn to look out at the world from the perspective of redemption. What is God doing in this situation? How will this be redeemed? It is from this perspective that we can let go of our mission, and begin to participate in God’s mission.

Fr. Tim goes to a dog show.

I guess what really turned me off was that the dogs involved weren’t actually acting like dogs. There was no mischief or nipping at the judges’ heels or inappropriate scratching. They were all too perfect: perfectly behaved, perfectly coiffed, perfectly cute. Like Stepford dogs.

It’s the same reason I cringe whenever I hear about those JonBenet Ramsay-style kiddie pageants. There are no tantrums or whining or begging for chicken nuggets. Sure, the stage mothers are full intrigue and back-stabbing. But the kids involved don’t actually act like kids. Read the comments.

Radosh distills the Bishop Williamson event.


Questioning Christian: Keep your identity small.

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Nicholas Taleb

I love this guy. Skeptic, statistician, Christian, public intellectual, he has a perspective that is compelling. Here is a blog that refers to some of his recent academic debates.

From This biographical article: Let me introduce you to Brooklyn-born Fat Tony and academically inclined Dr John, two of Taleb’s creations. You toss a coin 40 times and it comes up heads every time. What is the chance of it coming up heads the 41st time? Dr John gives the answer drummed into the heads of every statistic student: 50/50. Fat Tony shakes his head and says the chances are no more than 1%. “You are either full of crap,” he says, “or a pure sucker to buy that 50% business. The coin gotta be loaded.”

Taleb’s top life tips

1 Scepticism is effortful and costly. It is better to be sceptical about matters of large consequences, and be imperfect, foolish and human in the small and the aesthetic.

2 Go to parties. You can’t even start to know what you may find on the envelope of serendipity. If you suffer from agoraphobia, send colleagues.

3 It’s not a good idea to take a forecast from someone wearing a tie. If possible, tease people who take themselves and their knowledge too seriously.

4 Wear your best for your execution and stand dignified. Your last recourse against randomness is how you act — if you can’t control outcomes, you can control the elegance of your behaviour. You will always have the last word.

5 Don’t disturb complicated systems that have been around for a very long time. We don’t understand their logic. Don’t pollute the planet. Leave it the way we found it, regardless of scientific ‘evidence’.

6 Learn to fail with pride — and do so fast and cleanly. Maximise trial and error — by mastering the error part.

7 Avoid losers. If you hear someone use the words ‘impossible’, ‘never’, ‘too difficult’ too often, drop him or her from your social network. Never take ‘no’ for an answer (conversely, take most ‘yeses’ as ‘most probably’).

8 Don’t read newspapers for the news (just for the gossip and, of course, profiles of authors). The best filter to know if the news matters is if you hear it in cafes, restaurants… or (again) parties.

9 Hard work will get you a professorship or a BMW. You need both work and luck for a Booker, a Nobel or a private jet.

10 Answer e-mails from junior people before more senior ones. Junior people have further to go and tend to remember who slighted them.

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