Sun 24 May 2009
ASL doesn’t equal Age/Stats/Location to me anymore.
In this case it means American Sign Language. My mother-in-law communicates mostly using ASL (and especially fingerspelling) and I am endeavoring to learn some. It is actually very interesting, and it is sort of a dance with hands. Some of the signs are fun to do and often they have some relation to the meaning of the word being signed.
Here is a great website with drills for finger spelling. Here is another website by the same guy with lessons to learn signs for words rather than for letters.
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What’s been going on? I moved for the second time in two months, which is more times than I’ve moved in my life, ever. I have relatively few belongings to move, however. It’s the least amount of things I’ve ever lived with in my life, except maybe when I was very little and had none of my own possessions. It is very interesting to be living with less. Living with my family on a bus has been the best training to suit me to living with less; I had to live in a 3×3x6 foot rectangular bunk, and pretty much all my belongings had to be stored there as well as serve as a sleeping area.
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I am in the process of reading Training In Christianity, by Soren Kirkegaard. It is one of my husband’s books that I picked up just to see what Kirkegaard is all about. How interesting!!
I read so many interesting things in the first two chapters that I wish I had taken notes down on them all, but one that I jotted down in the back of my notebook is “Oh, where heart-room is, there house-room is always found.” It is deep reading that takes me much longer than usual to comprehend. Each sentence is one to be read once, and then pondered. One of his laments particularly struck me - how many times do we ask people what their problems are just out of curiosity rather than compassion? How often have I asked people “What’s wrong?” in just curiosity instead of in compassion with a true desire to help?
I am also about halfway through studying Luke with my husband and that has been the most interesting reading ever. We are reading through Richmond Lattimore’s New Testament, which so far I would highly recommend. There are no verse markers, and it is much like reading a book. Very cool, and very interesting. There is something about rote studying of a particular version (in my case, the NIV) that leads to some sort of inoculation of the words. It’s as if passages I have always passed by in a rush with - “oh, I already know what that means” - are coming alive again, and coming to light.
Also, I am reading through Mere Christianity, by CS. Lewis.
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What if Jesus is meant to be taken literally? What are we supposed to do, then?
Posted by Bonnie under Uncategorized
May 24th, 2009 at 8:55 pm
Dear Bonnie,
I am so happy to hear about your marriage and hope you every happiness! Tim
Wecome to highest hall of human happiness. May God bless you. Betty
May 24th, 2009 at 10:59 pm
I didn’t know Porter’s mom spoke ASL. Porter never mentioned it to me. Does he speak it too? I’ve been studying it for about a year, and it’s beautiful but very challenging. Give Porter my best!
May 25th, 2009 at 12:36 pm
ASL is a wonderful language to learn! Our family took classes for it 5 or 6 years ago from a lady whose parents were both deaf. I got to use it at a fast food restaurant recently where one of the employees was deaf. It turns out that he is a believer (one bursting with joy!
) and we were able to carry on a conversation in sign language…even after all these years. I really enjoyed it! 
Where did you move to?
I loved reading Mere Christianity. But I enjoyed reading Francis Schaeffer even more. He and his wife Edith had a wonderful ministry in Switzerland where they both wrote very encouraging books that are truly wonderful! Of course, there is nothing better than reading the Bible by itself!
I personally do not couple my Bible reading WITH devotionals…I like to read the verses directly without adding lenses to the meanings. Separately is fine, but I don’t feel that it is healthy together. I stick to the KJV (NOT the NKJV) for my personal version. I found, to my great disgust, that it can reverse the meaning to EVERYTHING depending on the version. I am not familiar with Richmond Lattimore’s version. I will have to check that one out next time I go to the book store.
And to the question “What if Jesus is meant to be taken literally? What are we supposed to do, then? ”
I have always assumed that I was to take Him literally. And therefore we are to rest in Him and obey when He prompts us to do or say something. But what particular area are you thinking of? Perhaps I am not understanding where you are coming from.
May 25th, 2009 at 5:05 pm
“E-bay everything you own, Paypal the money to some poor people, buckle onto yourself the straps of the electric chair, and then come — walk after Me …”
“Hate your homeland, your belongings, your mother and father, and your life as well — or you cannot walk after Me …”
May 26th, 2009 at 11:35 am
Hi Bonnie,
I would be interested to hear your impressions of Kierkegaard’s writings that he believed faith and reason to be incompatible. When E & C were taking a worldview class recently, they touched upon K’s beliefs and had to write a paper comparing and contrasting K’s beliefs with Hegel’s. I was not impressed with Hegel, but Kierkegaard seemed to get a lot right.
We love you all dearly and remember you all in prayer.
June 1st, 2009 at 12:00 am
Thank you, Tim and Betty!
Fafner, I relayed your regards
He doesn’t much, but we are going to try to help each other learn more.
Dianna, I moved to Pensacola, FL.
Stacy, I haven’t really read a whole lot from him. I guess I’d have to form an opinion on what he said, first, and I don’t know what you’ve been told about his writings, or if you have come to that conclusion yourself from reading them. (Which would interest me! Which writings have you read, if any?) Thank you so much for the support
Love you!
June 2nd, 2009 at 1:44 pm
It would be impossible for me to comment on Stacey’s family’s “worldview class”, of course — but I am prompted to put here some ways Hr. Kierkegaard is popularly misapprehended:
1. Fundamentalists use his name as a personification of or target for all post-modernism — this in spite of his having lived *well before* even *modernism* (he lived before the time of our Civil War) and his having been an opponent of emerging modernist trends of his day. Why do they single him out in this way (and in this very-inaccurate way)? It seems to me that they somehow sense him to have a powerful voice; but, more to the point, they have been misled by their enemies the Existentialists.
2. The Existentialists, casting about for some provenance for their absurd philosophy in the face of hostile modernists who could cite e.g. Hegel and Kant came across the writings of this obscure Dane, Kierkegaard, whose works had been practically lost for a hundred years. (For that matter, Kierkegaard was ignored in his own lifetime.) They translated a few quotes from him and toured Europe and (especially) America incorporating these pieces into their lectures — for patina, as it were.
(However, the pieces they used had been carefully picked out, were far out of context — and they refused to offer any of his works whole. Walter Lowrie, a professor and Presbyterian pastor, caught onto this — and taught himself Danish to commence a *real* translation of Kierkegaard’s works in the last years of his life. He died before he had gotten far, but his bravery was enough to show others who cared that the Existentialists were usually deriving from Kierkegaard *the opposite* of what he’d had to say. And, thanks to his prompting, Princeton University has by now translated almost every work of Kierkegaard’s into English.)
3. Kierkegaard wrote a vast number of books and sermons — thousands upon thousands of pages. He treated of epistemology, aesthetics, psychology (of the ancient, unabhorrent sort), theology, and much more. Over the years, his ideas and emphases changed — most-particularly after his great spiritual transformation three years before his death. And so among all this it is very easy for someone to pull out a sentence or paragraph to demonstrate nearly anything.
4. Kierkegaard wrote unusually: he wrote in a style of his own invention that repeats itself but gradually builds on itself over pages; he wrote ironically — that is, he would write sentences or even a whole book the *opposite* of what he intended in order to illustrate more-vividly the foolishness of ideas he considered false (for this he often attached to pieces pseudonyms instead of his own name); and he wrote sometimes in parables. For a reader who is committed to studying him fully, these things are actually helps to the understanding, but for other readers — ones who will read only a chapter, or hostile readers — these things help a misunderstanding.
June 2nd, 2009 at 1:55 pm
And, yes, to try to answer Stacey’s question, he did write a good deal that can be seen as discussing the relationship between reason and faith. (However, he did not think of them as people nowadays seem so much to like to — as though they are enemies — or as though “science” is reason — or as though faith is unreasonable — &c. — he lived long before Dr. Gould, you know!) I might sum an aspect of his conclusions this way:
(1) Truth and true knowledge come from Jesus; (2) faith in Him is to do; (3) reason, and thus truth, comes after one has begun to do from faith in Him.
The title of one of his sermons is “Purity of heart is to will one thing.” (Compare this with Jesus’s saying “If thine eye is single thy whole body shall be full of light.”)
[oh look -- italics works!]
June 6th, 2009 at 7:32 pm
Here is a nice ASL site http://commtechlab.msu.edu/Sites/aslweb/browser.htm
July 1st, 2009 at 9:27 am
I just happened to check today to see if there was a response to my comment (I rarely check my gmail account, so I didn’t know via that source). Wow, Porter, you are very knowledgeable on the subject of Kierkegaard! Bonnie, I only read a sampling of his work last fall, and don’t remember much beyond inferring what I wrote above about faith v. reason, which Porter addressed in a way that reassured me as much as anyone could w/o my reading it myself. That was a compliment.
Obviously, my knowledge on the subject is very limited, so I’m sorry to say I couldn’t have a deep discussion with you, Bonnie. Our lives are very rushed right now, so I doubt I’ll even try to wrap my head around anything complicated anytime soon. :-p Thank you very much for taking the time to share what you did, Porter. God bless you both.
July 1st, 2009 at 9:31 am
P.S. Their worldview instructor was not anti-Kierkegaard. The instructor is a former debate champion who encouraged the students to think for themselves, while using the Bible as their standard.