It occured to me that I should write...

This is a photo of the charming birds that attack...er, come to visit us each evening. I never understood that particular Hitchcock film until I moved here. I won't even apologize this time. It's been so long since I wrote a new post, my guess is that no one is even listening anymore! Ah well, I'll just be poetic and shout into the abyss or something.

Well, it has been a bit of a crazy time for me. Starting in mid-February, I feel like my life has been going at light speed. First, my mom and dad came down for a visit. Dad stayed for the weekend, and mom stayed for the week, and that was really, really cool. She redecorated my apartment, made me stew, sat with me and watched Henry V and Much Ado even though she hates Shakespeare...it was amazing. One does get to missing family the first year after a move especially, and having her here made all the difference in the world.

The weekend Mom left, we hosted 13 eligible men applying to the Baylor philosophy program. Now, when I say they were elegible...I mean for the program. Sorry to get you all excited. But, we had a doozy of a good time, taking them from one Texas bar-b-que to another, showing them 'lake waco' and trying to convince them that they could actually survive Texas. I'm one of the few extroverts (or at least mid-tro-verts) in the department, so it was my job with a few others to make the weekend not awkward. I failed miserably on one occasion, but that story you'll have to get from me in person =)

Three days after the boys left, the first annual Philosophy of Religion conference at Baylor University began, and that too was really, really cool. Most conferences are pretty much a crush of arrogant PhD's and bright-eyed grad students competing for eachother's attention, but this conference is specifically intended to rule out that kind of thing. There were only about 7 people contributing, and about 13 others attending, and that was it. This meant, among other things, that I could actually interact with the presenters of the conference, which I never would have done otherwise. I got to know them, and it impressed a few things on me. First, there IS a philosophical Christian community for me to be a part of in the long term, and it might end up being alot of fun. Second, not many of the Christians in this Christian conference were healthy Christians. Seems like the two don't go together well for alot of people. This, naturally, got me thinking hard about what it means to be a Christian philosopher. At Biola, it was all about loving God with my mind, and pursuing the Good, the True and the Beautiful. Now I know, it's not that way everywhere. The trick is, how do I make it that way for me? I think the answer is the community you're a part of. If I try to do philosophy only with people who don't share my worldview, I'll learn a great deal, but I'll just never get a chance to talk about the life of the Gospel with them. The key, I think, is having a balance in your life of interactions with non-believers and believers. Being in the world doesn't mean not having a Christian community to depend on and feed off of. The two have to happen together. Unfortunately, it's hard enough to get one community off the ground, much less two! Who has time to be in two different worlds? It almost sounds like having two different masters. Seems like you'll hate one and love the other. Agch. If any of you have any solutions, I'd love to hear them!

So anyways, after a manic week of trying to catch up after having lost three weekends in a row, I found myself beginning this week, and having survived it I am now on spring break. This is wierd for me, because I'm used to spring break coming in mid-april. I hardly know what to do with myself! What I am doing, though, is going up to a friend's ranch for the weekend. Isn't that awesome? I'll post pictures, not to worry.