The End of Blue Like Jazz

It was really easy to get through Blue Like Jazz compared to some of the other books we've read.  Once I got past the first few chapters and started to feel a connection with Miller, I started to read the book out of pleasure instead of for homework.  I truly enjoyed how he wrapped up the end of his book with his theory on love and how we need so much more to be given to us and to be given by us.  I really liked his account of him and his friend Paul hanging out with the hippies in Oregon, where he could truly be himself.  I think to be yourself is an incredibly important part of whether we can truly love each other.  If we are always trying to impress or conform to a group, we can't jump totally in to the concept of love.  Love is always something that is both very hard and very easy to give.  I think it is most important that we try our best to give love to those that are harder to love because they are the ones who need it more.  I really agree with Miller on his views of who we should love, and I think his book really opens up a lot of good conversations that every Christian should talk about.

Blue Like Jazz

In reading the first couple chapters of Blue Like Jazz, I really didn't enjoy the book that much.  But in the second go at the next couple chapters, I actually started to really enjoy the book.  The thing that I liked best about this part of the book is because he talked so much about problems that many Christians have but hesitate to bring up.  He talks of faltering beliefs and questioning the church's motives.  This is stuff that I do all the time.  It's always nice to know that you're not the only one out there.  My favorite party in this reading was the paragraph about his conversation with his friend Tony about who he would die for.  I thought it was really cool how Tony points out that it's a lot easier to die for something than to live for something.  I think this is a really good point and I believe it to be true.  To live for something is to dedicate your ENTIRE LIFE to one certain thing or person or belief, to die for it is to give one moment.  It may seem like I'm making death look that bad, but maybe death isn't that bad.  None of us really know cause we're still alive.

Final Project Update

Right now, my project is going pretty well.  I just emailed the four people I want to interview yesterday and I already got two answers back.  They both agreed to be interviewed over the phone and I'll be calling them both sometime later this week.  I think that the five questions that I'm going to ask are pretty legit and will be really great to show to the class.  As for my presentation, I think I might do a powerpoint that contains five pages for each person and their answers to each of the questions.  I'll probably just read right off of it I guess, and this way it might be able to be used for future classes.  Hopefully, my two other contacts will get back to me and I think it's going to be pretty cool interviewing them.

The End of Neumark

I was very happy that Neumark had a happy ending, or as happy as it could get in their situation.  I liked how throughout the whole book she talked about all these terrible problems that are present in the South Bronx, but in the end still left hope with the reader.  I was actually not surprised to learn she was leaving the congregation.  I feel like no matter how hard we try to not get tired of something, we always do.  I think she lasted a lot longer than just about anyone else could, but sometimes you have to change things up for the better.  I know that God ask us to live our entire lives in pursuit of justice and to not really care where we are or how well off we are, but it's just human nature for us to want to be in the best situation possible for ourselves.  Now with that said, I believe that her whole book was simply a way to make people truly feel for the people who aren't as well off as ourselves.  She did a great job too.  With her numerous allusions to Bible stories and her dreadfully true statistics, it really made me think that we need to do something to change how America treats it's people.  Sure, some of us have no problems, but in my eyes, none of us should have problems and we need to try to get to that point as soon as possible.

Neumark

Probably my favorite part of this reading had to be the story about Deshawn.  It was pretty cool that he told Hiedi that God had given him an announcement to make and it ended up being him saying sorry to his friend Trevor.  This seems simple but the way I think about it is that he is truly doing God's will.  It's these simple things such as forgiving and loving each other that God expects us to do at all times, no matter what situation.  This is also one of the things that I think the world has the most trouble with.  We can't get over things that aren't really that important and end up making them much more of a hassle than they need to be.  Another thing that I thought was a good point in this reading was the idea of rest.  We are only human and we can only do so much.  At this point, it seems like Heidi finally found that out and that sometimes she needs to rest up too.  I think that we should love as much as we can, but at the same time we should love with all our hearts and sometimes our hearts need some reenergizing.  Once again, I enjoyed how Neumark paralleled her own story with that of Joseph and Mary fleeing for Egypt in the bible.  It makes it easier to imagine how both she was feeling at this time and maybe even how Joseph and Mary we're doing back in the day.  With that said, I think that I'm going to get some rest and reenergize my heart so I can love people more.

Heschel on Justice

This chapter has been my favorite in The Prophets by far.  I feel like Heschel really went straight to the point in this chapter and I think he did a really great job in explaining justice in the sense of man and in eyes of God.  The first words that made me pretty psyched was to hear that God demands justice, he doesn't ask for it.  To me, it makes justice seem like it should be the norm, not something that puts others on higher ground.  Living just lives should be only way we live our lives, and God doesn't hesitate to say that.  Heschel goes on further to describe justice as something that does not only consist of deeds to be done, but should be practiced with all of your heart behind what you are doing.  This is real important to me, because I personally believe that we shouldn't do anything without putting everything we've got into it, and I guess justice is no exception.  The final point on justice that I thought to be interesting was the idea that it is an "interpersonal relationship".  I took this as meaning that we should expect justice for ourselves, but also expect ourselves to provide justice for others.  He makes a few remarks on how we sometimes have to disregard self-interest and self-respect, and it makes a lot of sense to me because we are always focused on our own problems when others are dealing with ones that are a lot worse.  Thinking this way can really put things into perspective.  This chapter will definitely be the most help for me in our final papers, cause I feel like it truly touched on the importance of justice in the eyes of God and man.

Final Project Prospectus

I've kind of totally changed my idea for my project.  I was thinking in class today and how so many people who are just like us rise above and become so well-known for their pursuit of justice because of the passion we can put into it.  This made me think that it would be cool to find some modern day people around America who aren't very well known but have committed their lives to justice, like Charlie Strobbel kind of people.  I plan on finding four different people to read up on and make a poster for each of them that contains their stories and what they do today.  The biggest challenge for me will probably be finding these people so if you have any advise that would help.  I really just thought of this idea so I don't have anything started yet.  My to-do list is really just find these people who exemplify the fight for justice and become intimate with their stories and lives and then present it to the class.  I just think that this would be a good way to show that anyone can be important to the world through passion for doing what is right.

Heschel

Some words of Heschel that really got to me in the interviews that we listened to this week was when he said that he is always surprised when he sees violence.  I started to think about this and I really think he's on to something.  We've talked about in class before how we have become so ignorant to violence and see it as something that is necessary or not bad.  It's obvious in video games, TV, at school, and at home and we don't look at it as something totally messed up.  We should definitely start looking at violence as something that is incredibly terrible, no matter at what level.  The next thing that they talked about was his openness to everyone's other religious views even though he was such a hardcore Jew.  This reminded me a whole lot of the convo we went to for Understanding the Bible, because the Rabbi that talked had a similar view that every religion should be accepted and unite as one under God.  I feel like it would be super hard to accept other religions if you're so passionate about your own, but he somehow does it.  After hearing some of these people talk about Heschel and reading The Prophets, I'm pretty sure that I believe that Abraham Heschel is a prophet of his own.  Some of the ways he describes prophets in his book makes me look at people like himself and MLK as modern day prophets for the way they despise violence and evil and simply are never content in their pursuit for justice.

King

Martin Luther King is a beast.  He can really put things into words that are easy to understand and that really make sense.  In his "Letter from Birmingham City Jail", King makes some really important points.  The first thing that I thought was really cool was the four steps to a nonviolent campaign.  Before he even thinks of taking "direct action", which consist of parades and marches to bring attention to problems, he plans on collecting information to prove that there are injustices, attempt to negotiate, and to self-purify.  It's pretty amazing that before being non-violent, he shows ways to even avoid being that "obnoxious" about it.  And he points out that even when it comes down to direct action, it is simply used to get back to the act of negotiating and bringing the problem to the forefront of a community.  Another point that I thought was pretty awesome was the different kinds of peace.  I'm pretty sure Professor LaLonde mentioned something about it in class, but he says how there can be negative and positive peace.  He describes negative peace as the absence of tension, while positive peace is the presence of justice.  This makes a lot of sense to me.  I think that we should always be questioning ourselves and others, just like in the dilemma of just war, so that we can come closer and closer to true justice.  If there is no tension, that we either have the perfect peace or we are to complacent in the face of injustice.  And it's obvious that we're not perfect so there must be injustice.  In this letter, King really makes me question my views on justice, and I'm sure he made the clergyman he wrote it to do the same.

Just War

Just War is very hard to define.  There are sooooo many questions that have to be answered before you can decide whether war is necessary, and most of them cannot be answered concretely but change with every situation and every perspective.  I thought Daniel Bell has lined up how we should approach just war in the simplest way possible.  He challenges every aspect of just war and it's validity in the world and comes to the conclusion that we need to take up the challenges and be just people before we can consider making choices about just war.  I totally agree with this statement.  I think that you need to be just in order to choose when just war is necessary.  Bell talks about how we can't consider ourselves to be the true authority on these kind of situations and that God is the only one who can decide the fate of man.  This is pretty intense and I think it's also the thing that people have the most trouble believing in.  This kind of happens in Isaiah, when the Assyrians attacked Judah and the Jews ended up ditching thier faith in God and allying with the Babylonians, which just led to bigger problems in the future.  Just war is really the decision that we make when we have to take authority over God, which seems crazy, but must be necessary in some situations.  I believe that maybe we shouldn't always believe God will magically make everything right, but that he has left us the tools to approach war and other violent situations in the most God-like way possible.

Dorothy Day

The chapter "Community" was the part of Dorothy Day's book where I think the key idea of the whole book is discussed.  In my eyes, this idea is "making love".  This is not referring to sex as many may assume but actually to the act of giving and receiving in order to show people's appreciation for each other.  I totally agree with this statement.  Just like in Claiborne, Day talks about how love simply consist of the small acts that we can do for each other.  It's pretty crazy the similarities between how Claiborne lives today and the hospices and farmhouses that Dorothy and Peter helped set up throughout the country.  They both seem like places you go when you want to simply live.  I really think that she has it right saying that we don't need a lot of things that we get and that we're pretty simple.  All we really need is food, love, and shelter, not movies, alcohol, and drugs.  As I've said before, I don't think I could ever live that way, but I believe that it would probably make you appreciate the quality of how we live today.  It's hard to think that some people live without the necessities provided for them everyday.  Personally, I think that the hospices that Day and Peter created are a lot more important than the paper.  Writing is just writing and people can simply read it and forget, but the hospices show people through actions how to live and love.  This would give me more hope, knowing that people care for me and that if we work together we can support each other.  I really wish that I could have met Peter because I think that he was someone who had a true belief in the good of all people.  I don't know if they still have places like these today, but if they do they should definitely keep it going.

Final Project

I'm still very unsure about my final project.  I'm pretty much down for anything, but I'd like to do something pretty cool just for the sake of it.  One thing I think might be pretty awesome is if I did a documentary about people's view on how just America is before and after I say some facts about some very unjust things that our country does (which I haven't compiled yet).  I thought it would be cool to let people know about some situations that they could help change for our country and its people.  If this doesn't work out, I would maybe like to do a project that involves notifying people about the little things they can do to make justice more prevalent in our society.  And by little things I mean the stuff that Shane Claiborne talks about such as simply "going down" to the level of others and loving and caring for people.  But I would also like to point out many things that you can do in more of a charity sense, such as places to volunteer at around Nashville and around the world.  I'm not really sure what kind of project this will be (i.e. poster, website, or whatever) but I think it could be cool.

Isaiah

Isaiah must have had a crazy hard life.  From reading Heschel, you can just tell that this guy is so passionate about both God and the people on Earth that he is torn between the two.  I'm still trying to understand the fact that Heschel believes that these profits were acquantinces of God.  I mean, where do people go now a days if they start saying they've had conversations with God? to the insane asylum.  I bet you if I was there when Isaiah was preaching I probably would have thought he was crazy.  Just like we talked about in class, I think that the Bible is so intriguing because the people in it make the same mistakes that we make all the time.  In this case, it was not trusting solely in God.  There were a few lines that I did like a lot that were in Isaiah and I thought helped me understand why this God of the old testament seems so much meaner than the God of the new testament.  My favorite is "He is both smiting and healing", or as Heschel puts it "There is no redemption with affliction."  It kind of started to make sense to me that living for God isn't the easiest thing to do, but although it seems like he's doing something very wrong at some points, that it's all for good in the end.  This is quite a way to go about things, but it's definitely a way to find out who truly is faithful and believes that God is almighty.  As can be seen in Isaiah, both kings were not faithful enough in the Lord to not rely on other nations.  This brings us once again to the fact that the people in the Bible are so similar to us today, cause we really do the same thing now.

I thought that Rabbi Flip was the man.  His views on the bible and life were pretty amazing.  I really enjoyed how he didn't try to glorify anything in the bible and just told it how it was.  I agree with him in the sense that not everything in the bible should be taken literally and that the Bible was written by humans inspired by God and not by God himself.  I really don't read the bible at all, though one time when I got back from Church camp I read the whole thing.  I really didn't understand anything at all and I think Rabbi Flip had a good idea on how to look at many stories of the Bible.  I liked the Jewish terms he used to show how the clergy tries to dissect the Bible and find hidden meaning, but even more I enjoyed his way of putting the Bible into today's perspective because we are more than 2000 years past the time it was written.  I wasn't able to check out Ecclesiastes, but I did read Esther.   I tried to follow the technique that Rabbi Flip had been talking about but had a little trouble.  I got the main story down cause it's pretty straight forward, but I was having trouble figuring out what the "hidden meanings" were and how to apply them to life.  In my opinion, it seemed to me like the Jews were kind of hypocrites when it came to them stopping Haman's decree and making their own.  They straight up killed all of these people and it seems like an unjust act because as we all now "two wrongs don't make a right".  But anyway, anyone have better luck with Esther?

Irresistible Revolution

Shane Claiborne definitely called out a lot of people in his book and I'm glad he did it.  Not to say that I am anywhere close to his radical standards, I still believe that some things just had to brought to attention.  As a Catholic church-goer for my entire life, I feel that I have experienced the church as it is today, the one that Shane disapproves of greatly.  I have the same kind of view about these churches.  When I think about my church back home, I immediately think of hypocrites and fakes.  I strongly agree with his idea that the church has to be redefined and become what it is truly meant to be.  One of the facts that got me a little infuriated about churches was that they keep 85% of the offerings given to them for buildings and staff.  Claiborne mentions how this borders of embezzlement.  I personally do not believe going to church is even necessary for someone to be a good Christian.  Today, if you don't go to church, you are automatically assumed to be a bad person, while on the other hand church-goers are considered great people.  We shouldn't judge people just by whether they zone out at speaker every sunday or not.  Irresistible Revolution talks about making church have more action other than words.  Anyone can sit and listen and then go home and do nothing.  Church should be a place where acts of God happen regularly, just through kindness towards each other.  Though I truly believe that Claiborne's idea of giving up everything is just simply impossible for the average human, I also believe that the church can change for the better by listening to his words.  These predisposed assumptions of how Christians are good people can even scare away others by making them think they are not good enough.  I thought that Shane's story about the kid who only started to believe he could be a Christian when his youth minister cursed at a tire shows correctly how Christians are viewed.  We are all people and we all make mistakes and we should all give an effort to show that no one person is really less sinful than the next.