Be sure to click the link at the end to view the complete article.

 

Suppose you’re traveling to work and you see a stop sign. What do you do? That depends on how you exegete the stop sign.

1. A postmodernist deconstructs the sign (knocks it over with his car), ending forever the tyranny of the north-south traffic over the east-west traffic.

2. Similarly, a Marxist sees a stop sign as an instrument of class conflict. He concludes that the bourgeoisie use the north-south road and obstruct the progress of the workers on the east-west road.

3. A serious and educated Catholic believes that he cannot understand the stop sign apart from its interpretive community and their tradition. Observing that the interpretive community doesn’t take it too seriously, he doesn’t feel obligated to take it too seriously either.

4. An average Catholic (or Orthodox or Coptic or Anglican or Methodist or Presbyterian or whatever) doesn’t bother to read the sign but he’ll stop if the car in front of him does.

5. A fundamentalist, taking the text very literally, stops at the stop sign and waits for it to tell him to go.

6. A preacher might look up “STOP” in his lexicons of English and discover that it can mean: 1) something which prevents motion, such as a plug for a drain, or a block of wood that prevents a door from closing; 2) a location where a train or bus lets off passengers. The main point of his sermon the following Sunday on this text is: when you see a stop sign, it is a place where traffic is naturally clogged, so it is a good place to let off passengers from your car.

via Hermeneutics in Everyday Life.

Hilarious!

“Mr. Mallory, I have to ask, do you know anything about resumé as a genre?”

“A genre? I don’t quite follow.”

“Well, I’ve studied the genre of the resumé for many years, and I can show you multiple examples of a standard feature known as padding.”

“Yes, I know about padded resumés. Lies, of course.”

“Lies? Well, now I know you don’t understand. You’re not a literary scholar, are you?”

“Why, no, I’m a personnel manager…”

“Well, you can take it from me, it is a standard feature in the resumé, as a genre, to have a mixture of fact and legend.”

via Everything Is Satis-Factual. – Theologica.

Image via Wikipedia

By Professor Gleason A. Gumby

“Mary had a little lamb”

All of us are familiar with this line from childhood. Many may recall seeing pictures of a little girl with a prancing pet lamb at her feet. You may not be able to hear these word, even now, without that mental image in your mind. As charming as the iconic scene may be, this is simply not what the poem is about.

Th poem was first published in Boston in 1830. It is essential, then, to understand that it is an ancient New England (ANE) text, and needs to be interpreted in that milieu. The ANE world was not in the least interested in the activities of small children, and social interaction with livestock was not at all their concern. Rather the focus of the age was on health and hygiene. The now-familiar Graham cracker was invented in this era as a health food, for example.

See below for the rest of this interesting post.

via Mary, Quite the Contrary – Theologica.

we Christians need to stop being afraid of scientific explanations especially since Science is God’s hands. The very smart people (who incidentally are much smarter than us) have told us that the impossible is just that and if it’s physically possible it’s infinitely more probable than the impossible. We need to stop being unscientific, embrace the sciences which are also God’s revelation, his second Bible as it were, and teach that Christ’s resurrection was natural, spontaneous, physical even if ultimately belonging to God.

In conclusion, we must embrace this lest Science, and the world, moves on in their Copernican revolution leaving us behind mumbling about our magical myths. If we truly want to engage the world and not be relegated to a position of non-importance, we must employ robust scientific thinking with the defense of our faith proving that God is not only reasonable, he is constant. We cannot allow Christianity to become a cult—but this is what will happen if the Church continues to turn its head from scientific explanations!

via Spontaneous, Natural, Physical Resurrection – Theologica.

Awesome!  That’s all I can say.
Be sure to click through and read it all.

Joel has confessed to collecting beanie babies.

Jim has confessed- well, what does he have to confess?  He’s Jim.  But he does cry at movies.

Christian confesses that he likes for his wife to call him “pretty boy”, or something similar.

My confession, @pastormark, is that I am like a little old lady who loves to gossip.  Thus it is that I have helped spread the word that Jim, Christian, and Joel are effiminate, and I used that part of my nature to help you (and them) out.

Yup, I’m being what my momma used to call a “smarty-pants”.

Oh, @pastormark, did I confess that I wear the pants at my house, and that my wife tells me which ones to wear?