http://www.datempo.com/
Listening to this online radio via iTunes.
sazzy, but at times the songs are a bit too eclectic for me...
Tuesday, September 26, 2006
::: Datempo, the sweetest sound is here . . . :::
http://www.datempo.com/
Listening to this online radio via iTunes.
sazzy, but at times the songs are a bit too eclectic for me...
on a fine monday night dining out...
yeaps, had a great time dining out with one of my friends out at Cream Bistro last night. Here are some of the memorable stuff:
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Anyway, received another SMS in the morning yesterday. Because my friend changed his mind, we then need to "aim to meet at" 6pm instead. :D unfortunately, I was rushing some work at another of my friend's place. So in the end, had to message him that I'll be late. So in the end, we only got to the restaraunt at 7pm. :D talk about cosmic jokes ah...
2) My friend was surprised when I ordered a bottle of Hoegaardens' at the restaraunt. He said he didn't know I have to drink beer during dinner. Actually I don't have the habit of drinking wine or beer during dinner. Am not "chic-chic", as my other friend would put it. But somehow I always end out ordering a glass of Hoegaarden's at Cream Bistro**.
Ended up he also bought a bottle of Hoe. I was just teasing him that he doesn't need to do so, because "this ain't some business dinner", and that he have to 陪酒...
4) Eh, the dinner didn't end on a perfect note, however. As we were just mulling over the last dregs of our beer, suddenly there was this pungent smell of sewage water (in an air-conditioned environment). It seems that the piping beneath the sofa we were seated burst, and the waste water from the kitchen was leaked onto the dining area. The bottoms of our bags were slushed and made wet, as we had placed them on the floor. Thank God it wasn't a flood of deluge that came pouring out of the seats, as then we would have to go home stinking on the public train and bus smelling like garbage.
The parting shot for the night was that my friend remarked if we never had ordered the beer, we probably would have a free meal on the house...
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*Pardon for the bimbo-y tone in that sentence.
^ Don't get me wrong, I have a couple of friends in civil service, and man, they are great friends. It's just something the language they used takes a life and lingo of their own...
** eh, last night was only my 3rd time there, so I am not an alcoholic, nor turning into one... :D
on A Story to Die For....
Epilogue
A Story to Die For
No one would die for one of Don Cupitt’s stories. Indeed no one in their right mind would die for the Christian story – unless it was true. To say that it is true is not to demonise other world religions, nor to bind us to some epistemology that is untenable. The fundamentalist theory of inerrancy, for example, binds us not to the story, but to a theory about the divine inspiration of the story which is probably false.
To talk of the truth is to come clean and admit to its givenness – the belief in revelation over and against the whispers of reason. This is not to deny the legitimate search for the philosophical foundations of Christian faith, but it is to assert that we may not find them. There may be no going back behind the back of Jesus to certain truth claims about him
In practice, however, Christians come to believe in the truth of the gospel on quite different grounds. Wolfhart Pannenberg, for example, thinks that Popperian science would reveal as a matter of fact that the resurrection did occur as an event in time and space. Others take to the story that a whole because of their trust in the witness of the apostles and the saints down the ages. For some it is a question of experience: Leslie Newbigin believes that he was saved by grace, and that God rubbed his nose in reality; Metropolitan Anthony is convinced that he was confronted by the risen Christ in his own room.
To say that the gospel is ‘the one short tale we feel to be true’ is another way of talking about something to which we will commit ourselves; something which for us is of ultimate concern; something – or to be more exact, someone – for whom we would be prepared to die. The gospel story is really about a God who poured out his life for the world, and who calls us to follow him by taking up our cross. This is more than a pious invitation to selflessness or ego loss; it is an appeal to our idealism, our best nature, our love for all humankind.
Martyrdom as the ultimate sacrifice, most of us hope, is not something that will be asked of us. But the tragedy of the story in our culture is that it no longer rings with the conviction of absolute truth, because it is not presented as a matter of life and death, hope or despair, heaven or hell. It has been trivalised beyond recognition, to become a success story, a decent story, one of the many stories of world faiths, a tall story – but never a true (or false) story. By contrast, postmodernist society will no doubt allow us to say that the story is true for us. It will respect out epistemic distance from the other stories that tell a different tale, as long as we keep our distance and do not encroach upon their linguistic territories.
As modernity fades behind us, we Christians can say that we have passed through it and survived, but in Leslie Newbigin’s words, we have been ‘very hard pruned’. We came close to losing our story, the ‘one short tale we feel to be true’, and if we had done so, we would have nothing left to offer to the future. In the event, chastened by our experiences, we have woken up in a world that no longer believes in the God of our fathers, and we find that we have become missionaries to our own culture. In order to prosper in our own unfamiliar role, we will have to return to our first love of God, forswear our timidity, and become in the third millennium like the missionaries of the first.
Lord, help us to discover the fervor of the early Christians
And the power of the first evangelization,
That morning of Pentecost, as it started
In the cenacle of
Where your disciples, with Mary, gathered in prayer,
Awaited, Father, the fulfillment of your promise.
Gives us the grace to be renewed
‘In the Spirit and in fire.’
Teach us to speak to the world in tongues of fire,
Let us bring to an end this time of uncertainty
Where Christians are timid and mute
Discussing anxiously problems of today,
As in the past on the road from
Without realising that the Master is risen and alive.
Cardinal Leon-Joseph Suenens,
extract from ‘Prayer for the year 2000’.
Excerpt from:
Walker, Andrew. Telling the Story. Gospel,
Odd Jobs: Portraits of Unusual Occupations
| Rating: | ★★★ |
| Category: | Books |
| Genre: | Arts & Photography |
| Author: | Nancy Rica Schiff |
some examples:
Page Turner (p.4)
Foot model (p.26)
Golf Ball Diver (p.32)
Coin Polisher (p.48)
Solfeggist (p.58)
Semen collector (p.68)
Diener (p.74)
Ocularist (p.86)
Poopy Scooper (p.92)
Fish Counter (p.100)
Oyster Shucker (p.106)
Riddler (p.112)
Monday, September 25, 2006
On transformation of theology to therapy...
From Chapter 5 "The Modern Age and the Gospel" (pp.118-121)
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In one of the most telling chapters in his book, American Evangelicalism, James Davison Hunter shows how modern Evangelicals have unwittingly adapted to the privatized, individualist and subjectivist trains of structural pluralism, and recast Christianity not as an inculturated and grand narrative for the modern world, nor even as a domesticated sitcom for the local churches, but as therapy for the lost and the sick, the unhappy and the repressed.
Strictly speaking, he is referring to the later modernity, where individualism has been tainted by narcissistic features absent from classical modernity. Nevertheless, what he describes has its origins in the privatization of religion determined by structural pluralism. He trawls some title from Christian bookshelves, which demonstrate what happens when the grand narrative has been interiorized to the point of disappearance. We could augment them by many similar titles from our own bookstores, the demonic and the dysfunctional figuring more largely these days. At random, some of Davison Hunter's chosen titles read:
Transformed Temperaments
Defeating Despair and Depression
God’s Key to Health and Happiness
Release from Tension
Feeling Good about Feeling Bad
You and Your Husband’s Mid-life Crisis
How to be a Happy Christian
How to become Your Own Best Self
This transformation of theology into therapy, where the language of the scripture has been translated into psychological discourse, and where stories have been replaced by prescriptions, has prompted Professor Harold Bloom to doubt whether American culture is Christian at all – although as a Jewish agnostic, this causes him no regrets. He argues, in The American Religion, that in reality American culture is a mixture of gnosticism and orphism (mystery religions), where the concept of redemption has been replaced by the American wish fulfillment of self satisfaction. For Bloom, Christianity has become a delicious solipsism where we are never happier when alone with our God. He cites the line from the favorite nineteenth-century Evangelical hymn, ”I came to the garden alone”, as being quintessentially what American Christianity in its Southern Baptist incarnation has become.
Bloom’s thesis is controversial and exaggerated, but he has highlighted the logical extension of religions of the heart, of piety without normative sanctions, of rampant individualism without community control, of revivalistic fervor slewed-off from the historic tradition, of a grand narrative left behind in the struggle for spiritual satisfaction. In so doing he has touched on the larger question of the communal disconnectedness of cultural pluralism to which we now turn.
Excerpt from:
Walker, Andrew. Telling the Story. Gospel,
Saturday, September 23, 2006
The Banquet 夜宴
| Rating: | ★ |
| Category: | Movies |
| Genre: | Other |
okay, after knowing this is an adaptation of Shakepseare's "Hamlet", it doesn't raised my opinion of the show. I'm not sure how Kurosawa did with the dialogue in "Ran" (an adaptation of ole Willie's "King Lear"), but the way the scripting of modern mandarin into the line of "The Banquet" grates on my ear.
Ge you was a great actor, just being let down by the corny lines and abrupt way his character was send off.
Daniel Wu just said everything in a low monotonous voice. Zhang Ziyi's and Zhou Xun's character was pretty forgetable.
okay, maybe i'm just biased, or had my expectations raised too high...
Official site:
http://www.thebanquetthemovie.com/
七剑下天山
| Rating: | ★★★ |
| Category: | Books |
| Genre: | Literature & Fiction |
| Author: | 梁羽生 |
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