Posted on September 29, 2006 by Steve Weaver
At the end of last month I posted links to some of the lectures/sermons in my MP3 player. Now as another month comes to a close I will recommend a few more lectures/sermons to which I’ve listened lately.
Filed under: Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
Posted on September 29, 2006 by Steve Weaver
While reading a section in
The Modern Researcher (6th edition) by Jarques Barzun and Henry F. Graff, I was struck by the thought that everyone is a historian. Everyone believes that history is important! Everyone is interested in history (no matter how much they may protest)!
In short, every use of the past tense – “I was there”; “He did it” – is a bit of history. True, false, or mistaken, it expresses our historical habit of mind. We have newspapers to read the previous day’s history. We call up our friends to tell them what has happened to us since the last time we spoke and to hear their story in return. People keep diaries to preserve their memories or to impart their doings to posterity; or again, they delve into their genealogies to nourish pride in their roots. The phsician arrives at a diagnosis after asking for the patient’s history – previous illnesses and those of the parents. Every institution, club, and committee keeps minutes and other records, as stores of experience: What did we do last year? How did we answer when the question first came up? Lawyers and judges think with the aid of precedents, and their research makes our law. All this remembering and recording is conveyed by the written word. (7)
Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »
Posted on September 27, 2006 by Steve Weaver
In their classic work on research and writing titled
The Modern Researcher (6th edition), Jacques Barzun and Henry F. Graff outline six indispensible qualities of a researcher (this list is found on pages 10-14):
- ACCURACY:
No argument is needed to show why. If history is the story of past facts, and report, account or news story is a piece of recent history, those facts must be ascertained. Making certain implies being accurate – steadily, religiously. To this end, train yourself to remember names and dates and titles of books with precision. . . .
- LOVE OF ORDER:
. . . Some people may overdo orderliness, but most of us underdo it, usually from groundless self-confidence. You may think you know what you are doing and have done. The fact is that as you get deeper into a subject you will know more and more about it and less and less about your own steps in mastering its details – hence the value of the system, which keeps order for you. . . .
- LOGIC:
. . . The logic considere here is not the formal art of the philosopher but its ready and practical application to the perplexities of the search for sources. . . .
- HONESTY:
Elsewhere, honesty may be the best policy, but in research it is the only one. Unless you put down with complete candor what you find to be true, you are nullifying the very result you aim at, which is the discovery of whatever is in the records you are consulting. You may have a hypothesis which is shattered by the new fact, but that is what hypotheses are for – to be destroyed and remolded closer to the reality. The troublesome fact may go against your purpose or prejudice, but nothing is healthier for the mind than to have either challenged. You are a searcher after truth, which should reconcile you to every discovery. Even if you are pledged to support a cause, you had better know beforehand all the evidence your side will have to face. For if one fact is there obstructing your path, you may be fairly sure others to the same effect will be turned up by your adversary. It is the nature of reality to be mixed, and the research scholar is the person on whom we rely to chart it. Accuracy about neutral details is of little worth compared to honesty about significant ones.
- SELF-AWARENESS:
. . . You, the searcher, need it – first, to make sure that you are not unwittingly dishonest and, second, in order to lessen the influence of bias by making your standards of judgment plain to the reader. No one can be a perfectly clear reflector of what one finds. There is always some flaw in the glass, whose effect may be so uniform as not to disclose itself. The only protection against this source of constant error is for the writer to make all assumptions clear. . . .
- IMAGINATION:
. . . The researcher must again and again imagine the kind of source needed before it can be found. To be sure, it may not exist; but if it does, its whereabouts must be presumed. By that ingenious balancing of wish and reason, which is true imagination, one makes one’s way from what one knows and possesses to what one must possess in order to know more. . . .
Filed under: Uncategorized | 3 Comments »
Posted on September 23, 2006 by Steve Weaver
Posted on September 23, 2006 by Steve Weaver
An awesome message on the long-neglected doctrine of hairology. If you are or ever have been or never have been in the Fundamentalist movement (ok, everybody) you need to hear this message.
Click here. (HT:
SharperIron)
Filed under: Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
Posted on September 22, 2006 by Steve Weaver
This are some important/informative posts/stories that you need to know about:
Filed under: Roadkill | Leave a Comment »
Posted on September 19, 2006 by Steve Weaver
Having coached my son’s Little League baseball team earlier this year, I can identify with the coach in
today’s “In the Bleachers” comic. As a pastor, I can really identify!
Filed under: Baseball | Leave a Comment »
Posted on September 18, 2006 by Steve Weaver
In an Op-Ed in Friday’s THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, Phillip Kevin Goff (director of the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis) comments on the way “Christian” television has changed the way church is done today. His concluding three paragraphs are telling:
If American culture has moved toward evangelicals’ practice of making the personal public, so religion has moved in the direction of the broader culture. The way worship is conducted in growing numbers of evangelical congregations now replicates what once was confined to the TV screen. Sitting in your living room, you may feel just as close to the pastor as you would at the 5,000-person megachurch down the street. Unless you join one of the megachurch’s cell groups, these institutions can be as impersonal as mass media. Moreover, a visit to your local megachurch–including Starbuck’s coffee, entertaining music and drama, and a short talk that seems less like a sermon than an inspiring self-help lesson–will not seem much different than a trip to the mall.
Those who worried during the advent of Christian radio in the 1920s and the dawn of television in the 1950s that church attendance would drop were dead wrong. What these things did change was the way church is done. In their attempt to transform culture, evangelical Christians found they had to imitate it in order to attract an audience.
These changes indicate something important. First, American culture, even in its most secular forms, may be quite religious in its growing focus on the interior life. Second, because of mass media, religion in America is increasingly tied to secular culture in its presentation. Looking back, the ’80s slicked-up televangelists don’t look as strange as they do prescient.
To read the article in its entirety, click here.
Filed under: Uncategorized | 7 Comments »
Posted on September 10, 2006 by Steve Weaver
In Timothy George‘s recent article in First Things about “Southern Baptists after the Revolution“, he identifies five distinct groups which formed “an odd coalition of diverse subgroups within the Southern Baptist Convention that came together in Greensboro to register their concerns.” This odd coalition, George argues, resulted in the election of Frank Page as the president of the SBC. Among these five diverse groups are the “Baptist Bloggers” whom George describes as follows:
These are younger, Internet-savvy pastors who represent diverse views across the spectrum of Southern Baptist Convention life. But they all have one thing in common: They aren’t veterans of the Baptist wars over the past few decades. Some of them have been influenced by the Willow Creek and Saddleback mega-church models of church life. They are mostly conservative in belief and committed to sharing the gospel in today’s culture, which, they are quick to remind you, is not the culture of the 1950s. The bloggers are not a well-defined group, but they are adept at agitation and networking, key elements in any emerging revolution. These Baptist bolsheviks are intelligent, articulate, aggressive, and a force to be watched in the future.
To read the entire interesting article, click here.
(HT: Denny Burk)
Filed under: SBC Life | Leave a Comment »
Posted on September 9, 2006 by Steve Weaver
Today, my wife Gretta and I celebrate our eleventh anniversary. After four (soon to be five) kids, she is still as lovely as ever. Amazingly, she is even more beautiful inwardly! The following words in the song “God Causes All Things to Grow” which was sung at our wedding have proved to be prophetic:
Words and music by Steven Curtis Chapman and Steve Green
Copyright 1994 Birdwing Music (a div. of The Sparrow Corp) and BMG songs, Inc. (ASCAP)/Careers-BMG Music Publishing, Inc. and Sparrow Song (a div. of The Sparrow Corp)/Peach Hill Songs (BMI). All rights on behalf of Birdwing Music admin. by BMG Songs, Inc. All rights on behalf of Sparrow Song and Peach Hill Songs admin. by Careers-BMG Music Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Used by permission.
Dreams dressed in white
Vows made by candlelight
Hoping to find out what true love is all about
A quiet fear
Where do we go from here
So many wake and see love slowly disappear
Chorus:
God causes all things to grow
Through every season we know
He will guard the life
That He’s planted in our souls
And when we feel the cold winds blow
We’ll hold to what we know
God causes all things to grow
You know where I’ve failed
My weakness has been unveiled
And yet by grace you choose to love and to forgive
So come what may our home is here to stay
A witness to the lasting promise He has made
Chorus (2 times)
And we know God causes all things to grow
Filed under: Uncategorized | 10 Comments »
