Surf on over to my friend Mark's blog to read his post Scene from a Checkout Line. It's one of the best posts I've read in some time.
Reading Mark's post just reaffirmed by conviction that one of the most pressing needs in contemporary Christianity is the recovery of basic human decency, the constant battle against the forces of dehumanization in today's word.
I don't recall the first time I heard the term "eschatology." But what I can be fairly certain of is that I likely equated eschatology with "Judgment Day." In your faith tradition eschatology might have meant "the End Times." Armageddon. Thousand Year Reign. Rapture. Anti-Christ. Stuff like that. In my tradition, it was just "Judgment Day." No drama. No signs. No big climatic battle. Just Jesus-can-come-back-at-any-moment-so-be-ready! That was the beginning and end of our eschatology. Pretty simple.
For some reason, I've recently become re-interested in bible translations.
The first bible I ever owned was an New International Version, a Christmas gift from my parents. I loved it. I remember sitting by the Christmas tree in a new Christmas sweater and turning to the Sermon on the Mount. Reading the Sermon on the Mount in my first bible on Christmas morning was the holiest I've ever felt in my life. To this day, when I pick up a new translation the first passage I turn to is the Sermon on the Mount.
Over 10 years in the planning, ACU launched our new General Education curriculum designed to equip students to think about faith and truth from an interdisciplinary perspective. ACU's Core curriculum begins with first semester freshmen in a class called Cornerstone. Kicking Cornerstone off each week is a Spotlight talk in Cullen Auditorium.
This week it was my privilege and honor to kick Cornerstone off by giving the first Spotlight talk entitled "Your Teacher Eats with Tax Collectors and Sinners: You, Cornerstone and the Mission of ACU." The goal of the talk was to introduce the students to interdisciplinary thinking as I talked about my research on disgust and contamination. (And, I guess this is as good a time as any to announce this, I have a book coming out with Cascade on this very topic. The title of the book, right now, is Unclean: Meditations on Purity, Hospitality and Mortality.)
You can see my Spotlight talk at the Cornerstone Portal where you'll also find resource links related to my talk. You can check out the Portal each week to follow the Spotlight speakers and the conversation our freshmen are having this semester in Cornerstone.
It's an exciting time to be at ACU.
Thanks to George for sending along this fascinating link about a recent paper entitled "The weirdest people in the world?"authored by Joseph Henrich, Steven Heine, and Ara Norenzayan. I was able to find a copy of the paper here.
The core argument of the paper, based upon cross-cultural results examining how people play the Ultimatum Game or experience optical illusions, is that Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic (WEIRD) people are, well, weird when compared to the rest of the world.
This will be the final installment in the "The Psychology of Christianity" series, a thirteen part summary of a chapter coming out where I was tasked with reviewing the empirical psychological literature related to the Christian faith.
Throughout these posts (and in my chapter) we've been using the Apostles' Creed as a theological "outline" of the Christian faith. At the start of each of the three (Trinitarian) sections with the Creed there is the refrain, "I believe." Given that refrain we might ask, where do Christians get these beliefs?
The Bible, of course. Consequently, any review of the psychology of the Christian faith will have to grapple with the Christian experience related to "The Good Book."
Programming Note from the Management:
This fall semester I'll be teaching an Honors Colloquium on The Theology of Calvin and Hobbes. The idea for this class was inspired by the series I did a few years ago.
And yes, textbooks for the class include tomes of Calvin and Hobbes comics! We'll also be using some introductory texts on how to think theologically. The main goal of the class will be to learn how to ask theological questions of various cultural texts. You usually see this done with "high culture" texts--art, literature, music, theatre, film--but for our text we are going to go with a comic strip, the great Calvin and Hobbes.
To help the students rely on their own theological resources I've temporarily pulled my own Theology of Calvin and Hobbes posts as my blog is the top Google hit for "Theology of Calvin and Hobbes." After the students have presented their own theological analyses for the class I'll bring my posts back online at the end of the fall semester.
In the meantime, if you are missing Calvin and Hobbes, let me encourage you to go to Go Comics where you can, for free, select one of their comics to show up in your Inbox everyday. Sign up and let Calvin and Hobbes keep you company this fall.
If you are like me, you are lots of things to lots of people. Spouse, parent, sibling, child, employee, supervisor, supervisee, co-worker, friend, parishioner. The list gets very long.
And if you are like me, you enjoy some of these roles more than others.
One of my most favorite roles is "Uncle Richard."
Uncle Richard exists for about a month, cumulatively, a year. Uncle Richard is the role I'm in when my family goes back to my hometown in Pennsylvania, where my parents, brother and sister live.
Jana and I have two boys, ages 13 and 10. My sister and her husband have two boys, ages 12 and 11. And my brother and his wife have four boys, ages 14, 11, 8 and 1. You can do the math: When we visit home there is a gang of seven boys between 14 and 8. And the person usually at the center of this whirlwind is Uncle Richard.
A few months ago a study I conducted with my colleagues Jason Morris, Charles Mattis and Jeff Reese appeared in the Journal of College Student Retention.
The goal of the study, conducted across the 2006-2007 school years, was to see if Facebook usage would predict college retention (defined as returning to the university after your freshmen year). Prior retention studies had shown that social integration--feeling connected and involved with your peers on the campus--was predictive of retention. This makes sense. If you have lots of friends at the school you are more likely to return for your sophomore year. If, however, you feel alienated and lonely, you'd be more likely to stay home or switch schools.
The photo blog from the Denver Post has up some absolutely moving pictures from the Great Depression era (H/T Daily Dish). You have to check them out. From the Denver Post blog:
These images, by photographers of the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information, are some of the only color photographs taken of the effects of the Depression on America’s rural and small town populations. The photographs are the property of the Library of Congress and were included in a 2006 exhibit Bound for Glory: America in Color.Here are three of my favorites (for full effect click to enlarge):
Having discussed the psychology related to God the Father and God the Son, we now turn to the third Person of the Trinity, the pneumalogical experience associated with the confession “I believe in the Holy Spirit.”
Jesus promised his followers that after his ascension into heaven he would send them the Spirit to be a paraclete (“comforter,” “advisor,” or “helper”) for the church (cf. John 14:16, 26; 15:26; 16:7). Christians believe that the fulfillment of this promise occurred on the day of Pentecost as recounted in Acts 2. In the wake of Pentecost the early Christians confessed to experiencing an “indwelling of the Holy Spirit.” Consequently, Christians believe that the Holy Spirit dwells “within” each believer. There the Holy Spirit fulfills its role as paraclete: guiding, empowering, revealing, prompting, assisting, convicting, helping, gifting, and transforming the Christian during her spiritual journey. Theologically and psychologically, then, the Christian experiences her relationship with the Holy Spirit as a kind of spiritual and moral partnership.
In light of my recent email rant I ran across this essay today by Stephen Heiner How I Ended my 6-Year Relationship with my Blackberry (H/T Daily Dish).
From the first part of the essay after he mentions a family who takes "Internet Sabbaths" on the weekends:
This fall I'm co-teaching the college class at my church with my friend and colleague David. We are thinking about starting with a study on the prophets. At David's recommendation, to get ready for this I'm reading Abraham Heschel's book The Prophets.
The book has been great so far. Here's a quote that jumped out at me yesterday:
I have a confession: I'm really struggling in the age of email.
I hate how email has transformed my work life. I don't know about your place of work, but the Inbox dominates where I work. It is the lingua franca of the office.
I've never been able to reconcile myself to this change. I do appreciate how email facilitates communication. But email has created a kind of supernova effect. By making communication so easy we've unleashed a flood. My sense is that we now overcommunicate. Further, the copying feature of email brings me into all sorts of conversations that only tangentially relate to me. But I still have to wade through it all. Add into this all the inconsequential email that fills up my Inbox. For example, after our family vacation I received an email from every hotel we stayed at asking how the stay went.
I was in a Christian bookstore today to pick up a copy of Bradley Wright's new book Christians Are Hate-Filled Hypocrites...and Other Lies You've Been Told: A Sociologist Shatters Myths From the Secular and Christian Media.
While I was in the store I took some pictures of some of the artwork and home decor for sale. Look at these pictures and tell me what they have in common?.jpg)
The last of the Christological doctrines I discussed in my chapter on the psychological experience of Christianity was the resurrection: "On the third day he rose again." The resurrection of Jesus on Easter Sunday is also associated with other confessions in the Apostles' Creed, namely the belief in “the Resurrection of the Body, and the Life Everlasting,” the notion that the Christian believer will share in the resurrection of Jesus.
Obviously, in a chapter on psychology I couldn't get into the historicity or metaphysics of any of this. That is, I didn't speculate on if Jesus' physical body actually walked out of the tomb on Easter Sunday. Nor did I speculate on life after death for Christian believers (or anyone else for that matter). My focus was simply upon the psychological experience associated with these beliefs. What is it like to believe in the resurrection?
When we drove into Montgomery we went straight to the Rosa Parks Museum on the campus of Troy University.
The Rosa Parks Museum is on the spot where Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on the bus. A historical marker marks the spot:
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(Fun fact: On the other side of the marker is a tribute to Hank Williams.)
After visiting Birmingham we turned south and headed for Selma. It was a lovely drive on local highways through Alabama farmland. We got to Selma around 7:00 pm and while looking for our hotel we stumbled across one of the coolest and creepiest cemeteries I'd ever seen: The Old Live Oak Cemetery. The cemetery, one of the few Southern cemeteries on the National Register of Historic places, is full of huge live oaks draped in Spanish Moss. In the twilight it looked like the trees were draped with cobwebs. As the gloaming came we all got pretty creeped out. We haven't loaded the pictures yet, but I'm sure we got some good shots.
In the morning, after having enjoyed a evening in the hotel watching the first episodes of Shark Week on Discovery Channel, we checked out to start a day following the Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail.
We headed west on I-20 out of Atlanta heading for Birmingham, the location of one of the most dramatic confrontations in the Civil Rights movement.
About halfway between Atlanta and Birmingham, around the town of Oxford, we jumped off I-20 for a quick detour toward the town of Anniston. Anniston was the site of one of the most violent attacks on the Freedom Riders in the Summer of 1961. The Freedom Riders started off in Washington, DC planning to drive through the South to New Orleans. Along the way they planned to test the recently passed legislation desegregating interstate transportation, both on the buses and in the bus stations.
Things went smoothly until they met a mob in Anniston. At the Greyhound station a mob attacked the bus and slashed its tires. The bus raced out of town west on Highway 78 toward Birmingham. The mob followed in cars and trucks. A few miles outside of town the bus broke down and the driver ran off in panic. The bus was firebombed and the passengers badly beaten. No historical marker marks the spot of this event, so we just pulled over a few miles west of Anniston and took a picture of the Highway 78 sign knowing that the event occurred in this general area.
During June, on the way to Nashville for a conference, I wrote about taking my family to see the Lorraine Motel (along with the National Civil Rights Museum) where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. This week, on our way home from a week on the beach in South Carolina, we are driving through Atlanta and Birmingham. Consequently, to do a little scouting for a class, we're taking some time to check out some of the Civil Rights sites in these and surrounding cities. Yesterday we were in Atlanta to visit The King Center.
There are a couple of things to see at The King Center. First, the National Park Service has a facility where there is a exhibit documenting the life and achievements of MLK. Outside the building there is a wonderful mural that takes you through his life.
Outside the King Center (which is separate from the National Parks building) is the tomb of Martin and Coretta Scott King. These first four pictures are mine and the quality is poor because they were taken with my iPhone:
Welcome to the blog of Richard Beck, author and professor of psychology at Abilene Christian University (beckr@acu.edu).