From: How to Become a Legalist | TheResurgence.
theology
I recently re-titled my blog, and therefore had to re-subtitle it as well. For years I had used the title “The Organ of Meaning” from the C. S. Lewis quote that still hangs out in my sidebar. The reason for this was a re-direction of my intention for my site.
For years (since my LiveJournal days in April of 2001) I’ve pretty much used my blog as a personal log of things that I’ve done or was doing, but I’ve wanted to create some direction for my writing and had to think purposely about what I wanted to do with it. So, as the subtitle now says, here’s the new deal:
Theology | Social Networking | Web Strategy | Whole-Life Integration
So, here’s what I’m thinking that means:
Theology
Obviously, with the nature of my work as a campus minister, I do a lot of natural theology. I’m constantly talking with students, coworkers and friends about beliefs regarding God and spiritual matters and their importance to life. I think a lot about theology, so I’ll probably have a good chunk of it spill over here.
Social Networking
I know, buzzword of the decade. But, really I do think about this a lot.
This contains the web-type and the real-life-type.
My undergrad degree is in interpersonal communication studies, so a lot of my personal processing surrounds that. I think about meta-type things, the thoughts behind the thoughts, the interactions behind the interactions, the insert-here behind the insert-here. And all of this tends to tie into how we network and interact socially.
I also will write about topics orbiting Facebook, blogging, Twitter and the like…
Web Strategy
Why is there no place to unsubscribe from your newsletter on your website?!!!??!
A lot of these might be rants with screenshots of bad webpages.
Whole-Life Integration
My biggest value is consistency. Not necessarily regularity (as you’ll see from my posting patterns), but consistency.
By consistency, I mean that every part of life lines up with every other part of life. Everything is already integrated – consistency is striving to live and think that all the way out. It’s beliefs, values, thoughts, words, actions and strategies all working together and in the same direction.
Chemistry is math is art is conversation is quantum physics is theology is warfare is neighborhoods is family is friendship is cobbling is meta-communication. It’s all interconnected, even if it’s not (strictly-speaking) the same thing.
If I were to go back to school to study something what would it be?
Everything.
No, seriously. I want to learn about everything- sociology, color theory, the origin of the universe (multiverse?), wave and/or string theory, education, geography… the list goes on.
Whenever I learn about about a piece of any of them I feel like I gain an insight on a piece of another, if not on all others. All of them are intertwined; we’re all defined by particle and wave physics (we’re all defined by the whole list again).
It also has everything to do with faith too. If I didn’t believe that we are all at some level eternal (and therefore important) then I couldn’t believe that we were important at all. Only that which is important at the End is really important. The Christian faith says that we’re all going to do something for eternity, we’re all going to be somewhere – either with the God that we pursue or apart from the God that we do not. I don’t believe that when the Bible speaks about heaven that it’s referring to some “pie-in-the sky, up-yonder” ethereal netherworld where it’s nothing but singing songs and not thinking sad or bad thoughts… it’s completion. It’s integration and it’s present continuous perfection. Perfection that already is and is constantly increasing.
This is where my want for knowledge and a pursuit of a grand unified theory comes in. While I don’t believe in the harps & clouds version, I do think that heaven will be something that encompasses continual worship of the Triune God; sometimes in song, but always in the carrying out of every action and thought while living out a kind (though an utterly different kind) of life that somewhat resembles this one (though complete and perfect[ing?]). It’s there that I want to go back to school and minor in figuring how it all works together.
I want to look at all of Creation (every spiritual, physical and ideological “thing” in existence) and show how they have all worked in chorus to glorify God in all of their mechanisms and variances – every good thing does this in its existence, every perverse thing in its defeat or redemption.
I believe that in all things God will be praised – I want to show the How and the Why. If all things will praise Him then those things must compromise one larger and complete whole. It’s that whole that I want to catalogue and discribe, dissect and detail, explore and explain, diagram and show each connection and correlation.