Matthew R. Green's Blog, page 105
January 10, 2013
Connecting Two Minds
Hearing that your wife has cancer is certainly not the easiest news to swallow. I spent several days in a sort of shocked state. Both my wife and I did, and we both snapped out of it about the same time, though in completely different ways. I snapped out while sitting on the subway, staring [...]
January 1, 2013
Science!
A short, cute, little video that reminds us that God really did wire us to love one another. Inspire any new years resolutions?
December 18, 2012
There is Nothing to Blog But Fear Itself
My wife just had surgery for invasive ductal carcinoma. Breast cancer. Everything’s gone fine, and while treatment will likely need to continue, things actually look pretty good. The hardest part about dealing with this, though, has been the fear that it creates. And not just our fear, but everyone’s. The moment someone offers up the [...]
November 7, 2012
Pick a God…
I keep running into this idea in my readings lately. It’s been studied that in monotheistic faiths, there seems to be basically four general categories of perspectives on God. God can be seen as authoritarian, benevolent, distant, or critical. The authoritarian God is not necessarily angry, though He can be so if people are failing [...]
October 30, 2012
Werewolves
With Halloween coming, I suppose this post is appropriate, though I didn’t intend the coincidence. I heard a song recently that reminded me of something Rich Mullins once said. It was the tail end of a poem about how frightened he was of the evil in his own heart: “I think, Lord, that we’re all [...]
September 19, 2012
Book Review: When God Talks Back
Take one agnostic anthropologist, add a few Vineyard churches. Mix well. I read an interview with Luhrmann and was intrigued enough to pick up her book, When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God. I was really quite impressed in some ways. Luhrmann is obviously a very dedicated anthropologist, willing to drop [...]
September 11, 2012
Pain and Meaning
“Meaningless, meaningless! Everything is meaningless!” Boy, Solomon must have really had a low threshold for pain… I was reading Dan Ariely’s book, The Upside of Irrationality, the other day, and he mentioned a side experiment he did to slake his curiosity. As a teenager, an accident left him with third degree burns over 70% of [...]
September 4, 2012
Old ________ Die Hard
Facebook the other day recommended I friend someone who’s connected to various other people I know (when did “friend” become a verb?). It was strange; I’d thought about him a couple times since we last saw each other a decade ago. I couldn’t even remember his name until Facebook showed it to me. And in [...]
August 28, 2012
The Problem with Knowledge of Good and Evil
Isn’t the knowledge of good and evil a good thing? Well, yes and no… One of the theologians I’m reading, William Hulme, suggests that it has its definite drawbacks. Once we have the knowledge of good and evil, it puts us in a place where we have to evaluate whether something we do or have [...]
