Archive for July, 2005

My Faith So Far
A Story of Conversion and Confusion
by Patton Dodd

Two aspects of this autobiography stood out to me: Patton’s awkward
testimony and description of his experiences at Oral Roberts
University. The descriptions of ORU are very familiar and very
accurately capture the experiences students have while attending. His
descriptions of chapel, classes, wing devotionals, revival services,
symbolic architecture, "name it, claim it" prosperity theology,
missionaries’ kids, overwhelmingly conservative politics, and 11th hour
tuition payment miracles are similar to what most students observe.

Some students happily attend classes and readily embrace the school’s
teachings. Others proceed more cautiously. Many start asking serious
questions. And a few entirely abandon everything resembling their
previous beliefs. After seeing the blind faith, contradictory logic,
and hypocrisy displayed by many other students, Patton’s beliefs are
sent into a free fall:

When the bottom falls out, you fantasize about what life might be like
if you had no faith. You could smoke pot without guilt. You could read
whatever you want to read and see whatever you want to see. You could
experiment with alternative lifestyles. You could have sex with
multiple partners. You could make the most of life here on Earth,
pursue fame and wealth. You could vote Democrat. You could spend all
your time playing Frisbee golf.

When the bottom falls out, you want to reconstruct it however you can.
You think that the best days of your life were the day you believed
with full, complete, unmitigated faith. You long for those days. You
want a return to them. But they are gone, and you fear they are never
coming back.

Many students at ORU encounter the thought process and deconstruction
of faith Patton describes. Relating the experience of attending this
school for four years (or even one year) to others is somewhat
difficult. At church, you can avoid or tolerate people you disagree
with, but this is harder to do in an environment where you are forced
to live with them all day long. You notice more faults, cliches, and
flimsy arguments supporting your beliefs. The results do not always
lead back to stronger faith.

Towards the beginning of the book, Patton’s testimony is more chilling
than relatable. He flatly describes the meticulous planning of his
conversion from evenings of marijuana and beer to mornings of Bible
study and prayer. This isn’t a familiar "crisis point" or "something
missing" testimony you would see on The 700 Club. His decision seems
more like one you make to take up yoga or the South Beach Diet:
something you do to improve an aspect of your life, rather than
dramatically change your reason for getting up in the morning.

In launching this decision, he finds himself at a charismatic
megachurch; quite different than the Southern Baptist congregation he
attended with his parents as a child. Teachings and worship here
convince Patton that emotional sacrifice is an integral part of
Christianity. He isn’t instantly comfortable with this, but accepts it
and joins in. His newfound faith grows as he picks up the mannerisms
and peculiarities of the congregation. As he seeks to continue this
growth, he transfers out of community college and enrolls at ORU, where
a whole new chapter of his testimony begins.

As an ORU alum, the only thing I found odd about the book was Patton’s
account of the school’s extensive set of rules. It is surprisingly
short (one and a half pages), considering the controversial
authoritarian enforcement style employed by the administration. Since
Patton was very idealistic at the time of the recounted Honor Code
chapel, these rules were not a major issue for him. Had he stayed
longer than a year, this portion his book would probably have been significantly
longer.

Lottery loses $850,000 in lightning strike.

What’s Joe doing in hot, muggy weather like this?

Making a piping hot batch of cajun chicken gumbo. (As if I followed the recipe).

For an introduction to podcasting, this article
in the Washington Post seems pretty dour. The author seems to have
found every current fault with the new medium and spent most of an
article whining about each of them. There are a few points where he
describes a nice part of the recent iTunes interface, but not without a
counterbalancing gripe. To his credit, he does make one allusion to
some of podcasting’s benefits without a matching complaint:

Good podcasts, on the other hand, compete with anything you can hear on
AM or FM. They’re more than just one person’s yammerings; they’re built
of lots of different bits weaved together artfully.

However, this is the most postive thing he has to say on the topic.
Instead of highlighting flaws with the medium, wouldn’t it be much more
interesting to profile a few of the successful independent podcasts?
What motivates these people to spend hours recording and preparing this
content? How does it differ from the programming offered by Clear Channel and other commercial broadcasters?

For those of you unfamiliar with podcasting, it’s what happens when you
cross a blog with a home-taped radio show. Instead of writing journal
entries, you record mp3 files and put them online where people can
download them. If your listeners have a music player such as iTunes,
they can lookup your podcast and set it to automatically download your
latest episodes. This way, neither you or your listeners are bound to
any sort of schedule. When a new episode is downloaded, it can be
automatically copied to an iPod (hence, "pod"casting ) for listening
wherever desired.

My favorite content management system is getting a much anticipated upgrade. I logged into the backend of the live development installation
(user and pass are admin/admin) and was thrilled to see that they’ve
now implemented AJAX methods for the backend interface. This makes it
possible for you to start using the page before everything has fully
loaded.

I’ve been wrapping up some extra contract work, wrangling with a 2 hour
(each way) commute, and looking for a place closer to the city.
Meanwhile, I’ve also been working on a couple of book reviews. The
first one will be of particular interest to my ORU friends. Stay
tuned…

Pittsburgh now has a Mills Mall.
For those of you unfamiliar with the chain, these monstrosities are
about 4-5 times the size of an average metropolitan mall and have a
heavy emphasis on "shoppertainment": integrating massive theaters, food
courts, convention space, and "sports" stores like Bass Pro where
people can fish indoors.

What happens when you write a condescending job advertisement? People let you know all about it!

Seriously, while searching craigslist
for a job, I ran across many postings like the one above that tried to
"filter" the wave of job applicants by adding extraneous
discouragements. Doing this certainly does not improve the quality of
applicants, it simply reduces the number.

For anyone out there getting ready to post a job advertisement: sell
your job opening! Job seekers already know you’re probably at the point
where you cannot find the person you’re looking for from within your
network of contacts. Padding your ad with pomposities makes it seem as
though you’re in denial. You’re better off with a shorter ad simply
stating the basics, rather than a long diatribe against would-be
applicants.

There are three reasons why my blog is here instead of a service like Xanga or MySpace:

1) I like having everything at my jlleblanc.com site. Go narcissism!

2) Those services make people sign up before posting comments. It’s
really annoying when you stumble across a friend’s blog and want to say
‘hi’, only to be forced through a registration process where you’re
given a blog you don’t necessarily want.

3) Xanga and MySpace do not offer RSS feeds. If you do not know what
I’m talking about, please keep reading as this is aimed at you. If you
click on one of the little buttons to the right labeled "RSS 1.0", "RSS
2.0" or anything similar, you will be presented with a
specially-formatted page containing summaries and titles of all my
current blog postings.

You can download programs referred to as "newsreaders" (I use Thunderbird as
it also handles my e-mail) which will take these specially formatted
pages and turn them into nice little folders. Now, instead of going to
my blog everyday, you can open up the newsreader and all of my new
articles will appear as messages in a folder. If you find an article
you really like, you can add a little flag to it so it’s easy to find
later. Also, you can mark things as "unread" so that you remember to go
back and read or comment on an article when you have more time.

If you don’t want to bother with downloading a newsreader, there are more accessible options. My Yahoo! and My MSN
allow you to do the same things through a web-based interface. I’ve
added a button for each on the right which will allow you to add my RSS
feed without copying and pasting links.

Blogs aren’t the only websites offering RSS feeds. All of the major
news websites offer them, as well as community bulletin board sites
like craigslist. Look for little orange buttons around the web titled "RSS" or "XML".

…to buy a book of stamps. Since that costs $7.40 and I only had ones
and a twenty, I put the twenty in the machine. What do I get for
change? A dozen  dollar coins (both Susan B. and Sacagawea). I
dumped six of them off at the local Thai restaurant (sorry guys). The
farecard machines at the Metro station should let me put the rest on my
SmartTrip (fingers crossed).

Update: Sadly, the Metro vending machines do not take these wretched dollar coins.