Sometimes Life is Crazy

So, obviously by the length of elapsed time since my previously post, life has seemingly taken me by the proverbial horns, preventing me from offering another post. So, here I am with a brief moment, to provide an update. On the last two months - a whirlwind tour as it were.

In April, I went to the Emergent philosophical theology conference in Philadelphia. The rest of the conference went very well and was quite captivating, although I had to leave a bit early from the last session. From there, I traveled to Pittsburgh to interview with the chair of the philosophy department at Duquesne University. Upon that interview, I was given a verbal statement that I would be accepted into the M.A. program... a few weeks later, I got my official letter!

So, beginning in mid-May, Amber and I began making plans to move to Pittsburgh! We've spent many hours getting our house in order and ready to sell. We tried the "For Sale By Owner" route with little luck and decided to finally go with an agent...although we're still waiting for it to sell.

Since then, it seems like just about everything I touch ends up breaking. I sprayed my lawn for weeds: it killed most of everything in the front yard (thankfully, the fertilizer is now kicking in). The home computer crashed (again, thank God for friends, we were able to get our stuff off the computer and on to a band-aid computer for the time-being that was donated to us). Then, my work laptop got infested with adware and popups that took me until today (about a month later) to finally fix. After that, our lawn mower broke, my bike had brake problems, I got poison ivy from a family camping trip, and then I royally bruised (and possibly broke) my foot playing soccer last week. To top it off, our car got a flat tire on the way to an eye doctor appointment this morning. Whew! All on top off the extra time spent making arrangements to move... Needless to say, God has been teaching us patience over the last few days.

Aside from all the craziness, I have signed up for fall classes (am taking an Intro to Moral Philosophy, Aristotle/Metaphysics, and Thomas Aquinas courses), had a great picnic 4th of July party with our small group, and are making plans to look for housing in Pittsburgh this weekend.
Of Late, I've been reading the Gospel of John in the Greek, which really forces one to take a lot more time thinking about the passage. I have really been amazed at the many number of times the crowds wanted to kill Jesus for what he said about himself. John 5:18, 7:1, 7:25, 7:30, 7:44, 8:20, 8:59, 10:31-33, and 10:39 all speak of people who desired or tried to kill/stone/seize Jesus (but to no avail) for some reason or another - because he healed on the Sabbath (5:18), called himself equal with God (5:18), called himself greater than Abraham (8:59), and for blasphemy - Claiming to be God (10:33). If there is any veracity to John's testimony, one must wrestle with these statements about Jesus for they reveal that he was not merely a good teacher. Over and over again, the crowd was divided (schisma - where we get the word schizophrenic) about Jesus. Some believed in him while others thought he a raving lunatic. He was saying and doing radical things that got him into radical trouble with those in power during his day. He wasn't the quite, meek, and mild Jesus that is often portrayed in the movies. He wasn't simply a nice person that practiced nonviolence (although he surely did this as well). He made claims about the world, about the value of the poor, about the tension between justice and law, and about God and himself that people must still wrestle with today.