You might think you know your coffees inside and out – but this little poster has a bunch of coffee drinks I’ve never heard of…
Author: Nathan Campbell
Nathan runs St Eutychus. He loves Jesus. His wife. His daughter. His son. His other daughter. His dog. Coffee. And the Internet. He is the pastor of City South Presbyterian Church, a church in Brisbane, a graduate of Queensland Theological College (M. Div) and the Queensland University of Technology (B. Journ). He spent a significant portion of his pre-ministry-as-a-full-time-job life working in Public Relations, and now loves promoting Jesus in Brisbane and online. He can't believe how great it is that people pay him to talk and think about Jesus. If you'd like to support his writing financially you can do that by giving to his church.
World’s most expensive beer: just nuts
This is the world’s most expensive beer. It comes stuffed in a squirrel. A taxidermied squirrel. Which is important.
It’s called “The End of History”…
This 55% beer should be drank in small servings whilst exuding an endearing pseudo vigilance and reverence for Mr Stoat. This is to be enjoyed with a weather eye on the horizon for inflatable alcohol industry Nazis, judgemental washed up neo-prohibitionists or any grandiloquent, ostentatious foxes.
The End of History: The name derives from the famous work of philosopher Francis Fukuyama, this is to beer what democracy is to history. Fukuyama defined history as the evolution of the political system and traced this through the ages until we got the Western Democratic paradigm. For Fukuyama this was the end point of man’s political evolution and consequently the end of history. The beer is the last high abv beer we are going to brew, the end point of our research into how far the can push the boundaries of extreme brewing, the end of beer.
Unfortunately it’s sold out. It was just 500 pounds a bottle… but no animals were harmed (by the brewers) in its production…
“Only 12 bottles have been made and each comes with its own certificate and is presented in a stuffed stoat or grey squirrel. The striking packaging was created by a very talented taxidermist and all the animals used were road kill. This release is a limited run of 11 bottles, 7 stoats and 4 grey squirrels. Each ones comes with its own certificate of authenticity.”
Shirt of the Day: make a pig of yourself
The magical mystery animal. The pig. It’s all good.
Confessions: #2 sometimes I fake literary conversance
Making references to great literary works is a surefire way to impress educated people. Sometimes I do it even if I haven’t read the book – I find knowing a book’s opening and a little about the protagonist is enough to get by. Great literature often opens with a great, and memorable opening. It’s often possible to fake a workable knowledge of the classics just by paying attention to how other people use them.
For instance, this week, in Ben’s quiz, I made a “call me Ishmael” joke even though I’ve never actually read Moby Dick.
Do you have anything to confess?
Confessions: #1 penvy
As a trained, former professional, writer I can, at times, feel a little superior when reading other people’s writing. Stuff like “Oh. That idiot used the wrong there!” is a bit passe. It’s more issues of style and vocab that I start to develop my own personal writing hubris. And then I read stuff written by truly brilliant writers and crawl back into my hole. Or, I sit there stunned and try to deconstruct their work thinking “I could totally do that”… worse still are cases of “penvy” wishing that I had penned that exquisite sentence, or paragraph (it rarely applies to a whole novel – sustained great writing is difficult it’s more a flash of brilliance amongst sustained goodness).
Check out some of these essays from magazines compiled by Wired founding editor, and blogger, Kevin Kelly as the best of what’s around. Including this heartstopper from David Foster Wallace about the metaphysical, almost religious, experience of watching Roger Federer play tennis at his peak…
Look how he sets the scene for a match he’s describing (the Wimbeldon Final in 2006 between Roger Federer and Raphael Nadal).
“Plus it’s in the cathedral of Centre Court. And the men’s final is always on the fortnight’s second Sunday, the symbolism of which Wimbledon emphasizes by always omitting play on the first Sunday. And the spattery gale that has knocked over parking signs and everted umbrellas all morning suddenly quits an hour before match time, the sun emerging just as Centre Court’s tarp is rolled back and the net posts driven home.”
And this peerless description of Federer’s game:
A top athlete’s beauty is next to impossible to describe directly. Or to evoke. Federer’s forehand is a great liquid whip, his backhand a one-hander that he can drive flat, load with topspin, or slice — the slice with such snap that the ball turns shapes in the air and skids on the grass to maybe ankle height. His serve has world-class pace and a degree of placement and variety no one else comes close to; the service motion is lithe and uneccentric, distinctive (on TV) only in a certain eel-like all-body snap at the moment of impact. His anticipation and court sense are otherworldly, and his footwork is the best in the game — as a child, he was also a soccer prodigy. All this is true, and yet none of it really explains anything or evokes the experience of watching this man play. Of witnessing, firsthand, the beauty and genius of his game. You more have to come at the aesthetic stuff obliquely, to talk around it, or — as Aquinas did with his own ineffable subject — to try to define it in terms of what it is not.
That’s pretty high-brow. Rants can also give me a bit of penvy – like this rant about Twitter from McSweeneys. This is a massive sentence.
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by brevity, over-connectedness, emotionally starving for attention, dragging themselves through virtual communities at 3 am, surrounded by stale pizza and neglected dreams, looking for angry meaning, any meaning, same hat wearing hipsters burning for shared and skeptical approval from the holographic projected dynamo in the technology of the era, who weak connections and recession wounded and directionless, sat up, micro-conversing in the supernatural darkness of Wi-Fi-enabled cafes, floating across the tops of cities, contemplating techno, who bared their brains to the black void of new media and the thought leaders and so called experts who passed through community colleges with radiant, prank playing eyes, hallucinating Seattle- and Tarantino-like settings among pop scholars of war and change, who dropped out in favor of following a creative muse, publishing zines and obscene artworks on the windows of the internet, who cowered in unshaven rooms, in ironic superman underwear burning their money in wastebaskets from the 1980s and listening to Nirvana through paper thin walls, who got busted in their grungy beards riding the Metro through Shinjuku station, who ate digital in painted hotels or drank Elmer’s glue in secret alleyways, death or purgatoried their torsos with tattoos taking the place of dreams, that turned into nightmares, because there are no dreams in the New Immediacy, incomparably blind to reality, inventing the new reality, through hollow creations fed through illuminated screens.
Online Greek Bible
Who needs fancy (and expensive) bible software when you can google “Greek New Testament” and come up with an absolutely gold site like greekbible.com in the first page of results. It parses every word with a hover and click.
Brilliant.
It does require an internet connection though…
Apologetics inside the church
Kim Dale is a Pressy minister in Queensland, he does a fair bit of thinking on apologetics, and in particular the issue of worldviews. He was essentially converted through apologetic dialogue with a Christian. He’s our guest lecturer today. These are my notes – unless indicated they are rough or direct quotes from Kim.
Apologetics: The written and spoken defense of the Gospel where there is opposition, and it’s done in love.
This definition prevents apologetics just being “argument” for argument’s sake. There may be times when it might seem like that.
On Walk Up Evangelism: One of the drawbacks is that you don’t actually want to get engaged for a long time – we need to think about the relationship between apologetics and evangelism. There’s an organic relationship between apologetics and evangelism.
We have to be ready and prepared to give answers – but we need to be doing that in a loving way.
Francis Schaeffer, in The Mark of the Christian calls love “the final apologetic” – if we aren’t demonstrating love then we may get really frustrated in the attempt of sharing the Gospel. Schaeffer says we need to be able to give the message of the gospel and be prepared to actually give it when the situation arrives. Schaeffer uses John 17.
Apologetics needs to take place, where possible, in a community of Christians – there needs to be some exposure to the nature of Christian relationships and Christian people in order to see the genuineness of Christian love. That’s part of the deal of apologetics. Sometimes it may seem artificial to get people involved. Even if it seems that way at first they need to see the genuine love of God – which is often beyond us as individuals.
There can be situations where we don’t want to bring anybody to our churches – because of the presence of hypocrisy – where all our arguments will, as a general rule, fail on the basis of love.
There might be times where what you’re going to do, so far as apologetics is concerned, is just show love. Rather than rehashing old arguments. Getting to know people and where they’re coming from is a good move. We can get overly defensive or offensive when it comes to the gospel.
Where do we do it?
Normally we would think of apologetics as something we do outside the church, with non-believers. But we have to defend the gospel in the church. It has an important place inside the church. The overwhelming amount of information available in modern culture can be overpowering. We have to expose ourselves to this information, and it can be enjoyable. But we have to be prepared to take a break.
The religious and philosophical scheme is so diverse that it’s inevitable that the church is effected on the inside by what is happening on the outside. We need to defend the faith from the pulpit – people within the life of the church will doubtless call on you to make such a defense.
We’re to be “on guard,” but it’s not just defense – we need to be prepared to correct or destroy ideas (in love) to dismantle and break down harmful ideas both within and without. There’s “knowledge” that sets itself up against God. And that has to be dealt with. Sometimes these moves should be in public (and we see books published addressing anti-God arguments). There is an offensive strategy that we need to embrace.
Part of apologetics is clarifying other people’s thinking for them – asking “how can you make the judgment?” and “on what basis?” Get people to question basic assumptions.
Areas where having thought about apologetics have helped Kim.
- Going through the membership vows – and the person says “I believe that, but I also believe in reincarnation”… where do you go from there?
- Some people wanting to become members said “we used to belong to the Presbyterian Church, my wife taught Sunday School”… and in going through things like the divinity of Christ and they say “yes, in the same way that I’m divine too, as a son of God.” Where do you go if they’re not going to change on those positions. You explain the faith, and you deal with the consequences.
- When receiving an email after a sermon that said “when you were preaching there was a halo around you and three angels standing behind you” and then went on with a bunch of numerology stuff…
- “God can’t act until we pray” said from the pulpit when doing prayer in the morning.
What if he’d said “yes” to all of those – you need to make sense and be doctrinally consistent. That’s the necessity of apologetics inside the church. We need to have some interactions with the other ideas that are out there.
How do you deal with people when you know they have odd ideas?
Try to get to know them, outside of the Sunday morning context, get them in a situation where they’re learning (eg a Growth Group), it can, for individuals, take a tragedy or difficulty and you being there pastorally.
Wrap text with style with CSS Wrap Text
CSS text wrapper is a cool little webapp that generates shaped text frames for your website. You can customise them. This might prove useful if you’re doing something like a Christmas card and want to make a bunch of little baubles or something… or if your landing page has pictures. Check it out. Here are some samples.
A weighty rug
This is a pretty cool idea. Scales are both aesthetically unpleasing and cold to touch.
Did ancient Israel do mission?
I’m working on an Old Testament essay at the moment. On the wisdom literature. And I’m wondering if the wisdom literature – particularly Job, Ecclesiastes, and Proverbs functioned as pro-Yahweh propaganda for the surrounding nations. Other nations had comparable wisdom literature (and indeed Israelite wisdom literature borrows directly from some of these surrounding documents providing a bit of a theological corrective – namely that knowledge starts with the fear of the Lord). Solomon’s dispensation of wisdom to the nations (in 1 Kings) seems to be the most fitting pre-Christ fulfilment of the Genesis 12 promise that Abraham’s descendants would be a blessing to the nations.
Part of my thinking is that Ecclesiastes and Proverbs are either written by Solomon, or presented as being written by Solomon, which I think makes a pretty compelling claim for reading them alongside the accounts of Solomon’s reign – where nations gather to experience his wisdom (somewhat vicariously – at the very least rulers of the other nations come to see Solomon).
Trouble is, I can’t find anybody (in the academic world) who agrees with me yet. And unfortunately, the question is “evaluate the proposal that Ecclesiastes and Job are protest literature” – some scholars think they’re basically a corrective of Proverbs – particularly the idea that material blessings flow from our actions (it’s called the acts-consequences nexus). So I have to show that I think the three are theologically united and serve this missional purpose. If I still think this is the case tomorrow.
What do you reckon the place of mission was in Israel? There were provisions to look after “sojourners” there are Psalms about the nations coming before God… that was also part of the messianic framework that developed in Israel prior to Christ. But, other than Jonah, there doesn’t seem to be too much direct preaching to gentile nations in Old Testament times (Obadiah’s prophecies about Edom might be an exception).
Ferris Club
While I’m posting this string of YouTube mashups, here’s Ferris Bueller meets Fight Club. A little language warning in this one… Alan Ruck (Cameron) does look a bit like Edward Norton too.
Lord Spice: Old Spice Christian style
Could this be the first Christian Old Spice Parody? It’s pretty impressively made, and at least as good as the Library parody… and it was made between the ad being made and Old Spice’s day of viral madness.
Thrilling Seinfeld
Did you hear about the Seinfeld movie? It’s a thriller stitched together from existing Seinfeld episodes. Here’s the trailer. Another quality mashup.
Unempowered competition
Dave from CafeDave sent me this link of a competition that is just about impossible to win, Australia’s Most Powerful Tradie competition… the “don’ts” rule out just about any interesting entries – they start in about the 46th second. The challenge is to win an unbreakable Hilux ute by performing a “power move” – the power move can’t be fun, interesting, dangerous, at work, in public, with tools… I’m left wondering what it can possibly involve.