Author: albrooke

Matthew handouts, part 2

Posted on August 18, 2015August 18, 2015 by albrooke

Here are the next 8 Matthew handouts:

Again, I would be happy to have any feedback (corrections?) you may have.

Fractal Compassion

Posted on August 16, 2015August 21, 2015 by albrooke

From the biggest picture to the smallest interaction

Matthew 9:35-36

Math Class!

Okay, so you take a triangle, like so. A simple equilateral triangle.

Now you connect the midpoints of the sides to divide it into three triangles that are ½ as big. (There really are four, plus the original one, but it looks like three.)

Now you take each of the three, and you divide them. You have nine triangles, each the 1/4 the size of our original.

Do it again! Now you have 27 triangles, each 1/8 the size of the original. You can
keep on doing this, and the patterns are not the same, but they are similar, on a smaller and smaller scale.

This is one of the simplest illustrations of the concept of fractal geometry, which you may have heard of, and which has all sorts of useful applications in the real world. Some very simple rules (like “connect the midpoints of a triangle”) can result in some very complex and beautiful patterns.

(Don’t worry, this is not a TED talk, there’s a sermon in here somewhere.)

Continue reading Fractal Compassion

Matthew Handouts, part 1

Posted on August 12, 2015August 12, 2015 by albrooke

I am going to begin posting the handouts from the Matthew class here. Once I catch up with where we are in the class, I will probably post them one by one. Here are the general charts and chapters 1-4. Any feedback would be appreciated.

Contagion

Posted on August 12, 2015August 21, 2015 by albrooke

Holy hands, unholy world

Mark 5:21-43

In 1976, a particularly nasty contagion took the lives of 151 people in Sudan and another 280 in Zaire. The disease recurred in Sudan and took the lives of another 22 people. It lay dormant for 15 years, then took 97 lives in Gabon and 254 lives in Zaire from 1994-1997. The virus took two years off. From 2000-2004 Central African countries lost 484 more people to this disease. Two more years without deaths. We are up to 1,288. From 2007-2012, another 291 people died: 1,579 in all. The most severe outbreak of all occurred in December 2013, leading to 11,385 deaths in Africa and beyond. Last week there were another 20 confirmed cases of the disease in Sierra Leone and Guinea.

In all, about 13,000 people have died from one of four strains of the Ebola virus. The most deadly strain — Ebola Zaire — has a 90% death rate. It is a hemorrhagic disease, transmitted by blood, saliva, milk, semen, urine, vomit.

It is a horrible disease. I am not going to explain it. We live in a seriously messed up world.

Let’s pray.

* * *

I invite you to turn to the book of Mark, chapter 5, verse 21. Jesus is in the early part of his ministry, teaching in and around the large lake in the north of Israel which is called the Sea of Tiberius, of the Sea of Galilee. It is about a.d. 30. He had been on the eastern side of the lake and was returning to the western shore, perhaps near the town of Gennesaret or Capernaum.

5²¹And when Jesus had crossed again in the boat to the other side, a great crowd gathered about him, and he was beside the sea. ²²Then came one of the rulers of the synagogue, Jairus by name, and seeing him, he fell at his feet ²³and implored him earnestly, saying, My little daughter is at the point of death. Come and lay your hands on her, so that she may be made well and live.

A great crowd surrounds Jesus, who is in danger of becoming a celebrity. He is in the midst of a large number of people who have heard of his teaching, his exorcisms and his healings — they are interested in seeing what he will do next.

Continue reading Contagion

Rembrandt at sea

Posted on August 9, 2015August 9, 2015 by albrooke

When Rembrandt painted, he (more than occasionally) placed himself in the picture as a literal witness to the events.* When I was studying for Matthew class, I noticed that Rembrandt placed himself in “Christ in the Storm” (Rembrandt is in the pink beret, holding a rope, looking out at us):

1. Rembrandt, “Christ in the Storm” (1632) (stolen from Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 1990) (1):

The nose is a dead giveaway!

2. Rembrandt, Self portrait (1629) (private collection) (2)

3. Rembrandt, Self portrait (1630) (Stockholm, Nationalmuseum) (3)

4. Rembrandt, Self portrait (1630) (4)

*For me, it was Francis Schaeffer who first pointed this out in How Should We Then Live? (1976): “Rembrandt had flaws in his life . . . but he was a true Christian; he believed in the death of Christ for him personally. In 1633 he painted the Raising of the Cross . . . . A man in a blue painter’s beret raises Christ upon the cross. That man is Rembrandt himself — a self-portrait. He thus stated for all the world to see that his sins had sent Christ to the cross.”

Fool’s Talk: The tyranny of application

Posted on August 6, 2015 by albrooke

Os Guinness observes with dismay that the modern Western obsession with “the magic of technique,” leads us to focus almost exclusively on the application question — what preachers call the “So what?” of a sermon:

“All good thinking is a matter of asking and answering three elementary questions. What is being said? Is it true? What of it? Yet one of the curious experiences of speaking in many places in the West is an almost universal preoccupation with the last question, as if audiences were incapable of answering it for themselves. A speaker must therefore provide ready-made ‘take home values,’ ‘next steps,’ ‘measurable outcomes’ and the like. I sometimes wonder if some audiences raise the first two questions at all, and I am far from certain that such insistence on formulas and recipes for action really leads to more decisive action in practice. But the hosts and chairpersons in many events act as if without spelling out all the next steps, audiences would be cruelly short-changed.”

Os Guinness, Fool’s Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion (Kindle Locations 370-375). InterVarsity Press. Kindle Edition.

Fool’s Talk: “The Grand Secular Age of Apologetics”

Posted on July 29, 2015 by albrooke

Everyone defends their viewpoint, says Os Guinness in a fascinating new book:

“From the shortest texts and tweets to the humblest website, to the angriest blog, to the most visited social networks, the daily communications of the wired world attest that everyone is now in the business of relentless self-promotion— presenting themselves, explaining themselves, defending themselves, selling themselves or sharing their inner thoughts and emotions as never before in human history. That is why it can be said that we are in the grand secular age of apologetics.”

Guinness, Os. Fool’s Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion (Kindle Locations 153-156). InterVarsity Press. Kindle Edition.

“Trajectory” and same-sex marriage

Posted on July 28, 2015July 28, 2015 by albrooke

It is sometimes argued that the trajectory of Biblical teaching is such that some things which are permitted in the Old Testament are restricted in the New (e.g., slavery) and sometimes the Old is restrictive where the New Testament is expansive (food laws). Recently we have heard much about this with regard to same-sex marriage. It is a complicated subject.

Darrell Bock has a good post about it today.

Darrell Bock, “The Bible and Same-Sex Marriage: 6 Common but Mistaken Claims,” The Gospel Coalition (July 27, 2015) http://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/bible-same-sex-marriage-6-wrong-trajectories

Leaving Orbit

Posted on July 25, 2015July 25, 2015 by albrooke

“Only when an era ends do you get to figure out what it means.” Margaret Lazerus Dean, Leaving Orbit: Notes from the Last Days of American Spaceflight 69 (2015).

An enjoyable read, covering the end of the shuttle era of American Spaceflight. I wish this book had been out when I was teaching my Beyond Fiction class, because it would have formed a perfect inclusio with Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff. MLD has a comfortable competence as a writer and observer, so it is as though the reader is listening to the experiences of a good friend.

Television and books

Posted on July 25, 2015 by albrooke

This may not be original, but it occurred to me today that “television” is very different than the television I grew up with. It used to be that if you wanted to “follow” a show, you had to make yourself available at the same time every week. You had to be “in the mood” for Cheers or MASH or All in the Family (dating myself, of course) when it was on. (Perhaps this kept me from being much of a connoisseur of television.)

Eventually, there was potential for videotaping, and time-shifting the shows you were interested in.

Now, though, you can pretty much “pick up” any series you want on Netflix or Amazon Instant Video or iTunes or one of the other video-streaming services. Watch whenever you want and go quickly through an old series if you wish.

That was the way I always read books. As a kid, I would read a string of old Hardy Boys or Tom Swifts or Nero Wolfes or Perry Masons or . . . .

And I have to say, this is a better way of consuming television. It probably encourages better television, since it permits longer narrative arcs and more complex character development.

I’d still rather read a good novel.*

*And then read everything else the author wrote.