Shave and a Haircut

Henry got a haircut yesterday. The cuteness level has exceeded national standards and a state of emergency has been declared in our home.

Quiz Master

I'm reminded of the episode of the Simpsons wherein Homer receives a quiz book, puts a traffic cone on his head (complete with question marks) and assumes the role of "quiz master" for several days...

I couldn't resist taking the quiz that Danny took.

Here's where I wound up. Some surprises here, I guess (save the 96% Wesleyan), but this was just a simple test. Had an actual theological classification been necessary, I would have been properly notifed and coerced to write a statement of faith:

Evangelical Holiness/Wesleyan
96%
Neo orthodox
61%
Emergent/Postmodern
57%
Reformed Evangelical
43%
Roman Catholic
36%
Charismatic/Pentecostal
32%
Fundamentalist
29%
Classical Liberal
11%
Modern Liberal
7%

Good Questions from L'Abri

Dick Keyes of the L'Abri fellowship in Southborough sends out a newsletter a few times a year to keep L'Abri supporters and alums up to date with current events. (Mr. Keyes was the professor of Cultural Apologetics at Gordon-Conwell, a class which won my prestigious "Best Class I've Ever Taken in My Life" award shortly after I completed it. I honestly think about something I learned in that class every day.)

Anyway, Mr. Keyes includes a short essay with each newsletter, and I found his winter newsletter to pose some good, practical questions to bear in mind during hardship viz. framing them in terms of becoming like Jesus (c.f., Heb. 12), which is, of course, our highest goal:

"How can we learn to love like Jesus if we are surrounded only by people who are easy to love? How can we expect to grow in humility without ever being humiliated? To serve as Jesus did if our service is always extravagantly appreciated? To forgive if we are never sinned against? To willingly suffer unjustly without suffering? To learn courage without ever feeling fear?"

What I like about these questions is that they can both bring quiet and disquiet to the soul: quiet to the one enduring hardship, disquiet (perhaps conviction) to the one who is too comfortable too often.

Body World Ethics Pt. II

My good friend Brad refers to the Mars Hill Audio Journal as "the best resource of it's kind." I simply refer to it as "wicked awesome," as is my custom. Read their purpose statement and you'll catch my drift. I received a subscription to said journal when I graduated seminary, and the four days it takes me to finish each bimonthly installment mark the only four in which I eagerly anticipate my otherwise boring commute.

Anyway, my faithful reader will recall a post I made over a year ago about Gunther von Hagen's "Body World's" (or as he no doubt likes to call it, Körperwelten) exhibit at the Museum of Science . My wife and I went the see the exhibit, but were equally parts impressed and haunted by the exhibit: Indeed it is wonderful (educational?) to marvel at the miraculous body our Lord has created, but did the exhibit somehow undermine our value as humans? Ought corpses (however beautifully preserved and displayed) be the subject of an exhibit at a science museum, complete with placards signed by body artist von Hagen?

Mars Hill addressed the exhibit with art professor Michael J. Lewis in this month's journal, and I thought they brought up a two other interesting points, which I will gladly boggart:

1) The exhibit is frightfully clean, dry, and almost playful. One hundred eighty degrees away from anything an actual corpse would be. This is redolent of much of what is found in advertising: images of clean, shinny, happy objects for purchase and/or gawking. When purchased, the consumer finds that image <> reality.

2) The exhibit cannot help but be reductionistic in that humans are wonderful machines, to be dissected and understood. The value, honor, dignity and miracle of the human body is lost in a sea of scientific know-how and intellectual curiosity. A cross section of a working jet engine? Quoth the exhibit patron, "Wow, isn't that something..." A cross section of a human being? Quoth the exhibit patron, "Wow, isn't that something..."

This all brought to the fore of my mind (wait! I smell a segue...wait for it...wait for it...) something originally impressed upon me by a professor at GCTS viz. the tremendous value of the human body:

1) Jesus, God incarnate, walked the earth in a human body*, and lives today in bodily form.
2) We're going to keep our bodies, and will be raised imperishable in a body.

Now, we don't get many specifics on what this all looks like, but suffice it to say that the human body has great value: firstly, because God created it, but equally-so because the testimony of Scripture, again and again, powerfully affirms the worth of the human body. Examples abound (hand-waving, I know, but it's late).

So, while my first post was ambivalent about Body Worlds, I think I've officially swung all the way to saying that Body Worlds makes me very queasy, but for no visual reason.

*I struggled with my wording here: I didn't want to launch into a theological treatise on the divinity and humanity of Christ; still, my wording sounds like God just possessed a human body, like he was in a car or something. Not my intent; please withhold your theological hate mail.

Healthy Tastes

My mother bought Henry some organic teething vegetables for Christmas (we're such hippies), and he's quite taken with them, as evidenced in the video below.



As in earlier posts, I again submit the following: Cutest. Baby. Ever.

In non-baby-related news, the Marchionni family has again been illin' in the physiological sense: I had a cold for about a week, and Catherine's just getting over it, as you can hear in the video above. Whenever I'm sick, I can't help but thank God for all the time that I spend not being sick. If there's anything I'd put in my "top 5 things God has taught me in 2007," it's the fact that every breath is His mercy made manifest. It's a frame of mind in which I wish I could dwell more often, since I can't help but be thankful if I actually take a moment to run down the laundry list of what's good about my life at any given moment, even if these things are otherwise considered "baseline." E.g., I'm breathing, I can walk, it doesn't hurt to swallow, I'm well fed, I don't have a headache, etc., etc. The list could go on forever, not unlike God's infinite grace. Go figure :)