I thought I might share with you this wonderful encounter with a Yellowstone bull elk. I am shooting the video and you can hear my surprise when the elk starts bugling.

Corndogs Are Next!

The story of LSU's corndog smell

...Sadly, by an Auburn alum

LSU fans smell just like corn dogs.

Yes, it is often said, but so, so true.

LSU fans do smell like corn dogs.

I would never tell them that to their face though. This is something better said at internet distances.

Even now, I am afraid. I am afraid that they'll know I said it. I'll walk past an LSU fan someday, and he'll see that look in my eye that gives it away. That look that says, "gee, what is that smell? Is it corn dogs? "The next thing you know, I'll have flat tires on my car.

If you only learn one thing from me today, remember not to tell LSU fans how they smell - you know, like corn dogs. LSU fans seem, somehow, sensitive to that whole corn dog issue.

Read it all here...

Identity

“Philosophy had set the individual free, and had discovered a human being in the common citizen. By the blending of states and nations, which coalesced to form a universal empire, cosmopolitanism had now become a reality. But there was always a reverse side to cosmopolitanism, viz. individualism. The refinements of material civilization and mental culture made people more sensitive to the element of pain in life, and this increase of sensitiveness showed itself also in the sphere of morals, where more than one Oriental religion came forward to satisfy its demand.”
- Adolph von Harnack The Mission and Expansion of Christianity

“You are born alone and you die alone. Life gives you a bunch of rules to make you forget. I never forget.”
- Don Draper from the AMC series Mad Men

These two quotations help me in narrowing my understanding of human identity to a practical level that identifies with human experience. That is, how one defines himself as other than finite.

Just for a second today (I am going to ask you to do this because I’m a little too frightened to), close your eyes and consider all the parts of your identity… the way you (and/or others) perceive yourself. What does your identity consist of? What is your alma mater and how does that influence who you are? Are you a self-made businessman? What is your social status in church or at the club? How about your sorority? Are you a proud working man who sees yourself as more honest and productive than the wealthy? A brilliant contributor to the arts or sciences? A pious follower of ethical norms? A priest in the church? A bishop?

Take a moment then and move all of these things aside. Just for a moment. What then do you have? When you are on your deathbed, which of these things will last? What portion of your identity will take you over into the great abyss?

Mike Leach

"Basically I'm a religious person, but with some clear obedience and discipline issues..."
- Mike Leach, Head Coach of the Texas Tech Red Raiders

Living Biblically (or not)

Watch this video. It is quite insightful.

Thanks to Jacob Smith for this little nugget.

A Little Glory

This is touching.

Retread

Christian scholarship is the Church's prodigious invention to defend itself against the Bible, to ensure that we can continue to be good Christians without the Bible coming too close. Dreadful it is to fall into the hands of the living God. Yes, it is even dreadful to be alone with the New Testament.

- Soren Kierkegaard

This is so true given the impact of Biblical Theology and the New Perspective on Paul. The goal is to detach oneself so clinically from the text so as not to read oneself into it. This is the New Perspective's critique of Luther. They believe he exegeted the Bible through his own existential guilt and suffering which is correct.

The problem with these new waves of scholarship is that they believe that they can dissect Scripture as clinically as a biologist dissects a frog. In the process, they attempt to stifle their own psychology and encourage pastors to do the same in their teaching and preaching. There is then no connection with humanity as it is and Christianity renders itself irrelevant.

1 Corinthians 15:9-10 For I am the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me was not in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God which is with me.

Are these people here to tell me that Paul was not writing from a standpoint of liberated guilt? He was hunting people down as persecuting them in a vicious way. Then, the Lord appeared to him and showed him that the ones he persecuted were in the right. Clinical Paul just laying out the fundamentals of the faith? I think not. If that is so, he was a sociopath.

When you read and study Scripture out of your need, pain, anger, and guilt, you are reading a book that has been addressed to you. It is a book for you, offering liberation on an eternally high scale. - DOB

Townes Van Zandt

"We all have holes to fill and those holes are all that's real."

- Townes Van Zandt To Live is to Fly

Heavy Quote

"You are born alone and you die alone. Life gives you a bunch of rules to make you forget it. I never forget it."

- Don Draper from the AMC series Mad Men

This is a really incredible and intense show. I highly recommend it. - DOB