7 Quick Takes

--- 1 ---

I have some new movie reviews up for the movies State of Play, Star Trek, New in Town, and the TV series The Tudors. Mostly positive, but with a major warning about The Tudors!

--- 2 ---

Yesterday morning I cut my hand when I automatically reached over to flip the light on as I entered the kitchen and slammed my hand into a wine glass on the counter underneath the light. I never panic initially, but when I do get injured or sick I get fixated on it and talk about it and look at the injuries all the time. Isaac makes fun of me. :) That morning I was supposed to be cooking soup for an office lunch and unloading the dishwasher, but it was sort of complicated to do with one hand! I don't know, there's just something traumatic about glass slicing skin. Ew.

--- 3 ---

Our roommates' cats crack me up. This morning I walked into the bathroom and Stank was in the bathtub, fixated on the dripping faucet, waiting until a drip came down and then trying to bat it with her paw. If she did catch it, she'd lick it off and then wait for the next drip. She also just came in the living room and tried to jump to the top of the easy chair, lost her balance, frantically grabbed and scratched the whole way down, and then looked totally embarrassed as she quickly slunk out of the room. SO FUNNY.

--- 4 ---

I Finished reading John Krakaur's book "Under the Banner of Heaven - A Story of Violent Faith" and reviewed it here. Man. It was quite a book, and very thought-provoking. The Mormon faith is very much built on personal religious experience (though that may be changed in their institutional church now), and I've been thinking a lot about emotional religious experience. When are they healthy and helpful? Emotions are so arbitrary and misleading - can we ever trust an emotionally experience? I gotta write about that but each time I've tried to start I haven't been able to satisfactorily organize my thoughts.

--- 5 ---

My Jr. High girls group is now a Freshmen girls group, and we started meeting again this week. I've missed them! I am SO excited to begin the high school church program with them - the jokes and games of the Jr. High program were definitely feeling too little kidish for my girls.

From spring 2009

--- 6 ---

On my theology blog I wrote about stages of marriage that someone presented to me this week. They're different than any categorization I've heard before, and by this categorization at four years of marriage I'm still in the "infancy" stage. Stage: newlywed, infancy, adolescent, middle-aged, and then a sense of maturity.

--- 7 ---

I have learned SO much recently about Catholic theology and the reasons why people move from the Protestant Church to the Catholic Church. This week there was a discussion of the Catholic practice of confession on Cheeky Pink Girl's blog. A couple of weeks back I discovered the blog Called to Communion, which is a group of scholars and church leaders that have moved from the Reformed tradition into Catholicism and are discussing theology there. Also this week, Lerin at Beautiful Chaos is writing the story of how she came into the Catholic church. I am learning and processing in all of this.

As I have said before, I have gained a deep respect for the Catholic church and discovered that contrary to what so many Bible church Protestants say, many, many people find Christ in the Catholic Church. On the other hand, I remain pretty stumped and sometimes shocked by a few key points of theology between the two churches. On that note, I read a review yesterday for Mark Noll's (my husband's fav historian) latest book, titled Is the Reformation Over? An Evangelical Assessment of Contemporary Roman Catholicism. That question is very pertinent to what I'm thinking about. Noll has a unique perspective - a somewhat jaded evangelical who is a professor at Notre Dame but still remains an evangelical. The review I read had this quote from Noll:

In sum, the central difference that continues to separate evangelicals and Catholics is not Scripture, justification by faith, the pope, Mary, the sacraments, or clerical celibacy - though the central difference is reflected in the differences on these matters - but the nature of the church. For Catholics, the visible, properly constituted, and hierarchically governed church is the principal God-given agent for the world of apostolic ministry. For evangelicals, the church is the body of Christ made up of all those who have responded to the apostolic proclamation of the God-given offer of the forgiveness of sins in Jesus Christ.

Interesting. It's all heavy on my mind.