Reflections from Seminary Students

If you could go back in time to change our current future, would you?  And even more importantly what would you change?  This is the very question posed to 30-something, divorced, High School English teacher Jake Epping by his odd frycook friend Al.  Al discovers a “rabbit-hole” in the supply closet of his restaurant that leads to Tuesday September 9, 1958 at 11:58 AM.  After Al sends Jake in the past for a root beer he explains a bit about the rabbit-hole. » Read the rest of this entry «

One of my favorite theological concepts to study is eschatology.  Eschatology, or the study of “last things,” centers around what we as Christians believe will happen at the end of time, what happens to our souls and bodies after death, and what the afterlife might look like.  While the questions that eschatology asks may seem nothing more than esoteric speculations for the future, I am fully convinced that our beliefs about eschatology deeply impact how we live our lives.  As Karl Barth writes in Dogmatics in Outline eschatology is the most practical of theologies:

The Christian hope does not lead us away from this life: it is rather the uncovering of the truth in which God sees our life.  It is the conquest of death, but not a flight into the Beyond.  The reality of this life is involved.  Eschatology, rightly understood, is the most practical thing that can be thought.  In the eschaton the light falls from above into our life.  We await this light.

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One thing that I have done, to keep my sanity throughout seminary is to read novels.  Thanks to a very good recommendation from Josh I just finished The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss, which can be described as a poetic Harry Potter meets The Lord of the Rings.  In The Name of the Wind there is a very interesting foil to the gospel.  I have always been a fan of the argument that the story of Jesus is true because it does not have the same elements as a fictional story. No Jewish man in his right mind would have women be witnesses to Christ’s resurrection as women were not seen to give credible testimonies. » Read the rest of this entry «

Throughout  my time in Seminary I cultivated a love of creating assemblage sculptures.   Assemblage is a form of sculpture where instead of cutting away at a chunk of stone, the sculpture is built up, typically using previously formed objects.  My work tends to focus on ordinary objects (terracotta pots, empty wine bottles, cement, copper wire, wood, glass, brick, and various other odds and ends).  My work also is largely religious in theme and is very, very amateur.  I have no formal training in assemblage, sculpture or art.  But it is a thing that I love and I find that creation in a visual sense lends to a concreteness of previously esoteric theological concepts.   I think of faith, community, sorrow, salvation, the imago dei, and compromise all in terms of sculpture.

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Stieg Larsson’s 2005 The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a multi-layered crime/mystery novel.  Interestingly enough the entire Millennium Trilogy, or series, was published in Swedish after Larsson’s death in 2004.  The American version of the movie recently went to theaters, while the 2009 Swedish version is instant streaming on Netflix.  The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was originally titled “Men Who Hate Women,” which perhaps is a more accurate title due to the large number of misogynist characters and abuse of young girls and women.

The novel focuses around the mysterious Vagner family.  Henrik Vagner the patriarch of the Vagner family and retired CEO of the Vagner Cooperation hires a defamed journalist/reporter  Mikael Blomkvist to wirte a family biography and discover what happened to Henrik’s grandniece, Harriet.  Harriett disapeared in 1966, on Sweden’s Hedeby Island, and since then Henrik has been obsessed with discovering what happened to this young girl of 16 who was very much like his own daughter.  To compound his grief someone, presumably Harriett’s kidnapper, sends Henrik a framed flower every year on his birthday.  Mikael begins his very literal cold case in the dead of Swedish winter.

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