On church, again

He who loves his dream of community more than the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter, even though his intentions may be ever so honest and earnest and sacrificial.... The man who fashions a visionary ideal of community demands that it be realized by God, by others, and by himself. He enters the community of Christians with his demands, sets up his own law, and judges the brethren and God and himself accordingly.

- Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together

oof. ok, rev. bonhoeffer, you win this time. seriously, that just demolished me.

(hat tip to mickey)

On distance

i've heard it said that distance reduces a relationship to the essentials. that is totally a lie. what distance really does is reduce a relationship to words.

i miss you people.

Get the story

• tragedy! i twisted my ankle (slightly) playing basketball today. verdict is i need new shoes. alas: shoes are expensive, and i am cheap. seriously, this is going to wipe out my entire clothing budget for the year, and eat into entertainment, too.


• comedy! halloween is coming, and there's gonna be a philosophy costume party. and i need to come up with a costume. if you have any suggestions, do tell.


• epic! the mereology conference last weekend was much fun. i ended up utterly disregarding my classwork and going to all the talks. and i even got to eat lunch at the grown-ups' table!


• romance! since the conference, i've been working on a new project that requires me to do math! lovely topology and measure theory sorts of things! i am reunited at last with my old amour.

More thoughts on church

maybe i'm just being hard to please.

first off, turns out i totally misdiagnosed christ community church (where i went three weeks ago). in reality, the leadership is a good bit reformeder than me (which, granted, isn't saying that much). and, as if to drive the point home, today's sermon was a nice yay-luther-boo-catholics session on justification by faith. sigh.

(ok, i should be fair. it wasn't exactly "boo catholics"--certainly much, much more charitable than some i've heard. the pastor didn't question their salvation or nonsense like that. he mentioned that he had a smart catholic friend read over the sermon before he gave it, which was definitely a good move. he was really trying hard to play fair, and he deserves credit for it.

but when he tried to make clear contrasts between protestant and catholic doctrine, i think he maybe tried too hard--because his catholic version sounded so obviously more correct! more biblical. honestly, a lot of what protestants say about justification make god sound just silly and arbitrary. he also (like most everyone on this topic) slippery-sloped wantonly--you know, "doctrine X can lead to error Y; (therefore X is false)". i got news: the truth is always on a razor's edge in a sea of error. if i may mix weird metaphors.

it is true, by the way, that catholics say some stuff about "merits" that sounds pretty weird to me. but i suspect i may just be misunderstanding some medievalese, because the conclusions they draw from the logic of merits sound perfectly sensible ("Man's merit...is due to God", Catechism par. 2008).)

but i digress. point is, i seem to find myself somehow landed with a mess of views (how did this happen? i always thought i was mister know-nothing ecumenical!) that are gonna knock any church i set foot into out of the running. between views and church, which shall give way? the views, of course. how they give way remains to be seen.

Emotion

once in a while, i feel homesick.

Talk about the weather

tonight we have a glorious thunderstorm that started in the middle of my class at princeton, and the building lost power, so we canceled class and went to a bar instead. and now i'm at home listening to the rain and thunder, and it's wonderful.