Grace

I'm pretty grateful today. I've been sick the past couple of days, and am back at work today. Knowing that my work partner is gone today, I thought I'd have a crazy day, having to do the work of two people in my short morning. But when I arrived to work today, it seems that another worker had mercy and decided to fill in for my partner, thus eliminating all of the stress I was anticipating. This is a small little occassion, but I'm very grateful!

Oily Mess: this is not subduing the earth...

When God commanded Adam to subdue the earth, I doubt he meant, "Lubricate my fish in a slimy haze." But that is what has been happening the past few days. Resulting from an explosion on an off-shore oil drill on April 20, 750,000 litres of oil spew up into the Gulf of Mexico every day. This spill hasn't yet reached the catastrophic levels of the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska in 1989 (40.9 million litres spilled), but it is expected to become the worst in history if a solution isn't found soon. Today the placement of a compression dome is being attempted to cap the leak in the underwater oil well. (See Vancouver Sun's article for more.)

Hopefully this sort of diaster will get people moving on the fuel cell so we can leave behind such a nasty dependence on crude oil. Sorry, little fishes.

Congratulations, Grads!

Illinusian Excursion

Last week Jenn and I jumped in the car and drove the 20 hours down to Wheaton, IL to visit Tyler and Tamara and to take in Wheaton College's 19th Annual Theology Conference: Jesus, Paul and the People of God: A Theological Dialogue with N. T. Wright. Click here to listen to/watch/download audio and video from the presenters. There was quite a good cast this year, including N.T. Wright (of course), Dr. Kevin Vanhoozer (whose paper I strongly recommend), Jeremy Begbie, and Richard Hays. Most notable for me was to hear, in his own words, why N. T. Wright does what he does (you can hear if for yourself in his first lecture).

Since we got to Wheaton a day early, I was able to tag along with Tyler to a couple of classes: Hebrews with Doug Moo and Systematical Theology: Atonement with Kevin Vanhoozer. Very excellent. Hebrews felt familiar as I've taken a lot of exegesis classes, and Atonement was a lot of fun because of the jovial nature of Kevin Vanhoozer.

As at most of these 'academic resorts,' as Jenn put it, there was a fairly good book sale. Not a huge amount of publishers were there, but a few: Baker, Wm. Eerdmans, IVP, and one more that I can't recall. I'm the happy owner of a few new friends: Holmes' Apostolic Fathers, N.T. Wright's NTPG, the Dictionary of the Old Testament: Pentateuch, Snodgrass' Stories of Intent, Bailey's Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes, and Perrin and Goodacre's Questioning Q (one of the free books for being one of the first 400 to check in!).

We also had a load of fun traipsing around Wheaton and area, exploring and eating funny American food, like a Buffalo salad, which was a Buffalo burger patti slapped onto some lettuce with a little US flag sticking out of it!

All in all, a super time in Illinois!

Caronport is on the (Google) Map!

Does this look familiar to anyone?

View Larger Map

While looking ahead to our upcoming Wheaton trip, I accidentally clicked a link bringing me to a "street level" view of Caronport, which I didn't think would actually load. But lo and behold, it appears the Google Cam has made its way through our little town. All of Caronport is navigable. A little creepy, perhaps, but very interesting. This would be an excellent tool for the school's website, I bet, to give newcomers a virtual walk-around. Google, you amaze me more and more every day.

Seminoid

I'm in! This morning I received my confirmation email telling me I'm an official seminary student. Good news to receive on the day I found out that I can have the week off of work to take Wes Olmstead's Gospels class. Full steam ahead!