Clipmarks | chetler's clips

Temptation strategies

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 20:50:51 GMT

clipped by: chetler
clipper's remarks: I'm an abstainer, unless I'm busy enough that it forces me to moderate.

A successful strategy to facing this temptation may depend on whether you’re a moderator or an abstainer when trying to resist temptation.

You’re a moderator if you …
— find that occasional indulgence heightens your pleasure—and strengthens your resolve
— get panicky at the thought of “never” getting or doing something

You’re an abstainer if you …
— have trouble stopping something once you’ve started
— aren’t tempted by things that you’ve decided are off-limits

In my experience, moderators and abstainers are hard on each other. Moderators always say things to me like, “You should have a little fun!” “It’s not reasonable to be so hard on yourself!” “You’re too rigid about what you eat, you worry too much about your weight, it’s not healthy.”

And I have the urge to say to moderators: “You’re not sticking to your resolutions!” “Why don’t you just give up that [whatever it is] altogether?”

Tags: temptation, food

re:Jesus review

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 20:32:38 GMT

clipped by: chetler
clipper's remarks: This is one of the things i hope to research. What are other ways to approach Scripture?

Clip Source: www.christianitytoday.com

the authors challenge the underlying assumptions that have shaped Western Christianity. For example, they believe we have been heavily influenced by a Hellenistic worldview rather than the Hebraic worldview of Jesus. As a result we approach the Bible primarily to gather information, assuming that right information will lead to right belief and eventually right behavior. By contrast, a Hebraic perspective "requires obedience in order to truly comprehend what is being revealed." To re-Jesus our churches means addressing even the basics we take for granted—including how we read the Bible.

Tags: bible, multi-cultural

Joy

Mon, 07 Dec 2009 22:03:01 GMT

clipped by: chetler
clipper's remarks: for me is walking in fresh snow, picturing the cleansing blood of Jesus.

Clip Source: www.christianitytoday.com

"It's Cana of Galilee, the first miracle," says Father Paissy in The Brothers Karamazov. "Ah, that miracle! Ah, that sweet miracle! It was not men's grief, but their joy Christ visited. He worked his first miracle to help men's gladness."

G. K. Chesterton

A person is fully human, he says, "when joy is the fundamental thing in him, and grief the superficial. Melancholy should be an innocent interlude, a tender and fugitive frame of mind; praise should be the permanent pulsation of the soul. Pessimism is at best an emotional half-holiday; joy is the uproarious labor by which all things live."

Tags: joy

Sarah Palin poetry

Mon, 07 Dec 2009 21:32:33 GMT

clipped by: chetler
clipper's remarks: Is she insightful or insipid?

Clip Source: www.slate.com

Yet let me flap this bug with gilded wings,
This painted child of dirt that stinks and stings:
Whose buzz the witty and the fair annoys
Yet wit ne'er tastes and beauty ne'er enjoys.
So well-bred spaniels civilly delight
In mumbling of the game they dare not bite.

Tags: politics

Spirituality vs.Religion

Sat, 05 Dec 2009 13:29:14 GMT

clipped by: chetler
clipper's remarks: It's in corportate practices that our spirituality is consistent, non-self-focused and non-contradictory

Clip Source: markdeymaz.com

Somehow separating yourself from the organized practice of faith is not spiritual; it’s syncretistic. What is syncretism? Webster’s defines syncretism simply as the combination of different forms of belief or practice. According to Wikipedia, syncretism is the attempt to reconcile contrary beliefs, often while melding practices of various schools of thought. The term may refer to attempts to merge … several originally discrete traditions and thus assert an underlying unity allowing for an inclusive approach to other faiths.

1. Christ taught not against religion, but rather taught a devout, disciplined faith (Matthew 5:17-21)

The corporate, organized practice of ancient faith in Christ as expressed through proven forms and practices (Christianity, our religion) is something we cannot or should not dismiss or denounce in our rush to define ourselves as spiritual in a post-Christian society.

1) Sabbath

2) The Liturgical Year

3) A Sacred Meal

4) Pilgrimage

5) Tithing

6) Fixed-Hour Prayer

7) Fasting

Tags: spirituality, church

Why Wood fell

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 19:58:15 GMT

clipped by: chetler
clipper's remarks: you can't portray one image while living differently. Our true nature comes out eventually.

Clip Source: www.slate.com

So now that the "real" Woods has been revealed as a wild bone-daddy who behaves more like your out-of-work, alcoholic brother-in-law than an object of worship, we feel cheated. Aside from the hundreds of millions he's earned from golf tournaments and endorsements, turns out he's a lot like the rest of us. Our hunger for salacious news about him isn't necessarily about voyeurism. We're embarrassed by the gap between who we believed Woods to be and who he really is; and, having put Woods on that pedestal, we want to bring him down where he belongs—with the rest of us sinners. We're like the kid who, upon learning that there is no Santa Claus, conducts a wide-ranging investigation to determine how such a fraud was perpetrated on him. And we'll keep consuming Woods news until our picture of him more closely conforms with reality. We love to crown kings and cultivate messiahs. And then kill them.

Woods decided to exfoliate from his public image of all things base, carnal, and even personal.

Tags: personality

Charismatic emphases

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 22:33:11 GMT

clipped by: chetler
clipper's remarks: evidence of the Holy Spirit's work makes results an indication of blessing. it also seem to suggest the smallest question or slow-up stops God's work. Does this make God too small?

Clip Source: www.christianitytoday.com

"If you are such [a] judge of this, what gives you the credentials? What moves of God have you led? What have you built?" Joyner wrote in an open letter to Grady.

Because of their strong emphasis on spontaneity and spiritual venture, the charismatic and Pentecostal movements rarely breed internal critics, says Russell Spittler, provost emeritus of Fuller Theological Seminary.

Candy Gunther Brown, a religious studies professor at Indiana University who researches the movement.

"Whenever there's a movement that's seeking to have Spirit openness, there's always going to be a tension—a fear of losing the vibrancy and of being regulated,"

Tags: religion

Purpose of creeds

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 21:19:46 GMT

clipped by: chetler
clipper's remarks: there's a comforting, clarifying sense to this image.

Clip Source: evangelicaloutpost.com

When we look at the sun with naked eyes, it appears to have dark spots on the surface. But we know that, in reality, it does not: when we look through a dark film, the sun can be seen as it is, free of spots. Creeds serve a similar purpose as that dark film. When Christianity seems absurd, inconsistent, and unbelievable, we can hold to the creeds as reminders of truths that we cannot trust ourselves alone to see accurately.

Tags: theology

Limits of science

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 20:12:10 GMT

clipped by: chetler
clipper's remarks: can you answer these questions?

Clip Source: www.slate.com

we may never find an explanation of consciousness because (to oversimplify a bit) we are trapped within consciousness.

Computers, after all, do not get any nearer to being conscious as the inputs are more complexly related to their outputs, however many stages and layers of processing intervene between the two. There is nothing, in short, that will explain why matter in a certain form will go "mental".

First: Why is there something rather than nothing? And second: What exactly is the crucial difference between nonliving and living entities?

Tags: philosophy, science

How the Mighty Fall- collins

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 01:42:16 GMT

clipped by: chetler
clipper's remarks: reviewed by gordon macdonald

Clip Source: www.christianitytoday.com

How would you know that your organization is heading into trouble when things on the surface appear to be so good?

Hubris born of success

"We do ourselves a disservice by only studying success,"

Undisciplined pursuit of more

Collins admits that when he started to study organizational decline, he expected to find complacency at the root of most trouble. But he found that he was wrong. Overreaching (in some ways the opposite of complacency) was the real issue.

Denial of risk and peril

Collins's third stage of decline emerges when leaders and organizations ignore or minimize critical information or refuse to listen to things they do not want to hear.

Grasping for salvation

gimmicks almost never worked. Only when we went back to caring for people, disciplining teachable leaders, introducing people to Jesus, and worshipping with a hearty spirit did things get back on track.

Capitulation to irrelevance or death

If businesses run out of cash, organizations like churches run out of faith and spirit.

Tags: leadership, church

Clinton on Truth

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 01:18:57 GMT

clipped by: chetler
clipper's remarks: I believe I know Jesus as truth, yet because I see dimly, and am still growing, there needs to be a certain humility.

Clip Source: www.foreignpolicy.com

What I always said was that if you are religious it meant by definition there was such a thing as Truth, capital T. So to make it work in a world full of differences, you had to recognize that there was a big distinction between the existence of Truth, capital T, and the ability of any one human being to understand it completely and to translate it into political actions that were 100 percent consistent with it. That's what you had to do; all you had to do was accept human frailty. You can't tell people of faith to be relative about their faith. They believe there is a truth. But the question of whether they can know it and turn it into a political program is a very, very different thing. That is an act of arrogance.

Tags: truth, relativism, philosophy

The Princess and the Frog

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 16:51:54 GMT

clipped by: chetler
clipper's remarks: life is more beautiful when you're working with a full pallette!

Clip Source: www.salon.com

a movie delicately addressing race makes stirring use of light and dark interplay. A G-rated girl film that will move crazy amounts of dolls and lunchboxes may not have an in-your-face political agenda, nor should it. But the glow of streetcars, the light glinting off stars and fireflies in the night sky -- the way that every element, every shade, is more beautiful in context of the other -- that is some powerful, lovely stuff. And you don't have to be 5 years old to be captivated by it.

Tags: movies, multi-cultural

parenting

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 19:30:36 GMT

clipped by: chetler
clipper's remarks: how do I judge if I have "successful" as a parent?

Clip Source: www.doublex.com

But as the phenomenon moves into freak-show territory, something different is taking hold. The more children a woman collects, the less her relationship with any particular child counts. Now, it seems, we are fascinated with the extremes because we suspect they are the opposite of the ur-moms who oppress on the playground. It is impossible to imagine Kate Gosselin having quality flash-card time with any of those sextuplets, or Michelle Duggar worrying that Jinger isn’t getting enough out of her private art lessons. Maybe we are fascinated because they offer a vision of liberation, avatars from the approaching age in which overparenting is dead, as this week’s Time magazine heralds.

Tags: parenting

4th grade learning

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 18:40:13 GMT

clipped by: chetler
clipper's remarks: Erik is starting to get these concepts.

Clip Source: southbendtribune.com

"And that text, starting around fourth grade, is very, very dense," she says. "It is full of new concepts, new vocabulary that students have to master. But also the tasks, then, that students have are not just to retell what they've read, but to apply what they've read to real life or a situation that has been set up by the teacher, or to analyze what they've read."

1. Design models of two simple weather instruments you could make. Explain how they work.

2. Annie Aardvark's dinner was all ants. One half of the ants she ate were black, one quarter were red, and six were brown. How many ants did Annie eat?

4. Why do geographers divide areas into regions, and what are some of these regions?

5. List two ways a physical map is different from a political map.

6. What are two ways human activities affect the environment?

7. What effect does the author create by breaking the story down into days?

Tags: education

Healthy arguments in marriage

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 15:11:20 GMT

clipped by: chetler
clipper's remarks: would this work for other relationships as well?

Clip Source: www.doublex.com

Pennebaker speculates that since participants are listening to each other’s stories and trying to come to terms with them, a woman’s articulation might help a man see complexities so that he feels less stressed. But since women generally spend more time than men analyzing relationships—and talking to others about them—they may have already sorted through the angles on their own. “He might be at square one, and she’s saying, ‘Duh! I knew this all along,’ ” offers Pennebaker. Thus, his cognitive contribution didn’t create enough of an emotional response to disrupt her cytokine levels.

It’s a disconcerting commentary on men’s role in relationship talks, but her chemical nonreaction doesn’t necessarily mean she’s not taking him seriously. Many women place a high value on such discussions and might be more focused on the fact that one is taking place rather than the particular language used, explains Deborah Tannen

Tags: marriage, reconciliation