The Thinkulum

Back when I was doing my audio sermon project (which is technically still open, though I haven’t worked on it in months), my friend Rob asked me if it had worked, if I felt more spiritually vital. I told him not extremely, and that was that; but it got me thinking. I didn’t expect the sermon project to fix my spiritual life, but it was useful to ask what I still needed that these audio sermons weren’t giving me.

The first thing I needed was a way to internalize what I was hearing. I have that now with my morning devotions.

The other thing I needed was a system, a set of interrelated concepts that I could drop each sermon into. Without a system to give context and balance to the pieces, I feel lost. I tend to get tunnel vision when I try to take any particular spiritual principle seriously. I either forget about anything else (less often now than in the past) or I ward off doing that by wondering what principles I’m forgetting or how this principle relates to others I do remember. It hinders my willingness to act on those principles or to be confident in explaining them to others.

So I intend my next major project to be a systematic New Testament spirituality survey. I want to assemble a fairly detailed framework of Christian spirituality made of the NT’s comments on the subject. I won’t attempt to go very far below the surface; I just want to get a good idea of the raw material we’re working with when we discuss Christian spirituality. I have actually had this project in mind for a number of years. Now just seemed to be the right time to do it.

When I mention this project to people, they sometimes ask what I mean by spirituality. I mean anything that has to do with humans’ relationship to God. In Christianity that covers a whole lot. So studying the spirituality of the NT is more like looking at the whole NT from a spiritual angle than looking at a specific, limited topic like baptism, which would involve examining only a few passages. Looking at the whole NT from one vantage point like this will mean studying every passage to some degree and will mainly affect what details I select to concentrate on in each case and the kinds of connections I make between concepts.

With a framework, when I think about, for example, John 6:37, I’m hoping my mind will easily move to somewhere like Matthew 7:21, and I will be more able to discuss how they fit together and how a person would land themselves in the John 6 crowd and avoid being in the one from Matthew 7, especially given a scary verse like 7:13.

I will also be able to hear a verse like Mark 12:30 and have my mind move more easily down to the specifics and out to the motivations for obeying these commands.

And I will be more easily able to pinpoint the passages that are the most appropriate for my own spiritual needs or for other people I’m talking to.

So primarily I want to have a rough mental map of the Christian spiritual life for the good of my own. One other reason I want to do this project is to have a starting place for my broader historical study of Christian spirituality. I want to be able to connect the teachings of Christian spiritual writers with the Bible’s framework of spirituality so I can know the biblical context of those teachings and thus understand them better. Knowing their connections with Scripture will also help me evaluate them.

I’ve nailed down the first half of my procedure. In order to get a clear idea of all the pieces of the text and how they relate, I’m going to do a quick and dirty discourse analysis of the whole NT in English. I’ll use the WEB for my translation because it’s in the public domain, and I’ll use CmapTools to create the discourse analysis diagrams because it’s free and has a handy XML format. I have already done a few chapters.

As that’s moving along, I’ll be working on the other step in the process, which is actually assembling the system. This will be either a normal prose description or something more formal and programmable like a concept map. I’ll decide that as the project progresses. It took me several months to settle on using discourse analysis.

I plan to post the results on the site, probably as I go along. I have no idea how long this project will take.

I’m sort of sick right now, and I went to be semi-early last night, aiming to get around 10 hours of sleep, but my body decided it was done with that after 7 of them, so I am taking the opportunity to blog.

These next few posts are a continuation of my “What’s been going on” series, but I’m titling them differently because they’re also in a category of their own, my latest projects. As some of you may know, my life revolves around my personal projects, which usually involve researching things, writing, or creating things, usually computer programs or some other kind of tool.

Right now I am in a period of transition between projects. A couple of weeks ago, on Good Friday at 3:12 in the morning to be exact, I finished a project that I had dragged out over a year and a half, editing my friend Brandon’s Lord of the Rings parody. The first half of this project was editing the text, and then I recorded and edited his readings of it over Paltalk, plus his reading of The Tugger, which is his Hobbit parody, and a couple of other shorter readings.

If you want to listen to it, here’s the TheologyWeb thread where I posted the files. The thread contains links to the other threads that contain the text files, if you want to read it. At the end of that thread, Brandon posted some of the funny grammatical, logical, and other problems I caught while editing the text, along with the frustrated or sarcastic remarks I made about them while editing and his comments on my comments. I also posted a link to yet another thread for the audio bloopers. Unfortunately, the forum I posted it in is only accessible to TWeb members. I may repost those sometime in one of the public forums. The audio and textual errors were the best part of the whole project. 😉

Warning: This parody is very long. Together the Lord of the Beef and the Tugger make up about 14 hours of reading. For that reason it is not the kind of project I’m going to be volunteering for again anytime in the near future.

Another warning: The parody might not make much sense to you unless you understand TWeb culture. It’s really less of a parody and more a set of TWeb inside jokes that use the Lord of the Rings as a framework. But Brandon included a preface that explains the major characters and jokes and should give you an idea of what’s going on. The Hobbit is called the Tugger, for example, because the central feature of Brandon’s TWeb parodies is the teasing of a member named RumTumTugger, who plays a female version of Frodo in the Lord of the Beef.

Even though the LotB isn’t a typical parody, Brandon has a remarkable ability to make connections, and I was impressed by the sheer number of elements he was able to pack creatively into the story, not only from TheologyWeb, but also Star Wars, Monty Python, Pirates of the Caribbean, probably other movies I can’t remember, various Internet memes, and many random American cultural features. It’s worth reading just for that.

So now that project’s done, and my mind has been freed. I will post about my upcoming projects tonight or tomorrow.

I am now watching my favorite sitcom of all time, which is *finally* on DVD … Perfect Strangers! 😀 The first two seasons anyway. Hopefully they will release the rest. It came out on Feb 5, and I got them from Netflix as fast as humanly possible. I just watched the second episode. The first episode was a little disappointing, not as funny as I remembered, and I thought maybe I was remembering the series through child-colored glasses, but in the second episode they got more into their familiar roles, and I liked it much better.