Jon's Deep and Meaningful

Three Days of New Experiences
Over the past 3 days, Thursday to Saturday, I have had some interesting new experiences. Watching newcastle get annihilated by old rival Brisbane was not one of the most enjoyable.
Attending an Eastern Orthodox funeral on Friday was a cultural education. It was about as foreign as it could be, even when the priests chanted in English. Hard to believe how diverse Christianity can be in its various expressions.
The three day "Chalcedon Conference" on apologetics was very stimulating, especially the forum on Christianity and science led by Dr Alister McGrath (from Oxford) and the contributions by Dr Ross Clifford (Baptist college Sydney) on "new age" and the importance of pastoral care in apologetics. The key speaker, Ravi Zacharias, was also quite interesting, but more preachy. Met some interesting people, including Dr Jim Harrison (Wesley Institute) who was going to help supervise my thesis till deakin stuffed him around. Lots of thoughts to follow up and more reading to do.

Now for my second try

I'm just trying this out, have no idea what I'm really doing. But it's all part of being more up-to-date and computer literate, etc. As a theology lecturer, maybe I'm not expected to be technologically "up there". I certainly am stuck with punctuation and spelling. But I am already ahead of some of my young students when it comes to internet, etc.

Oh but there are pitfalls here. I clicked on "Next Blog" and up came naked women. This isn't good. But I will learn how to manage this is I don't just get sick of it.

How do you start a blog like this?

This isn't really me, but I've now got my own blogspot. But what do you do next? Be serious or funny? Comment on the news or sport? Really be deep and meaningful?

So I thought I'd just share with you what's on my mind right now.

This includes:

the apologetics conference I am going to tomorrow and the next 2 days. Apologetics is something I've been interested in since I was a late teenager, ever since I crossed swords with my PHilosophy lecturers at Sydney University about such issues as the problem of evil. Another issue was the whole creation-evolution debate, now re-emerging as Intelligent Design. I went to an interesting seminar on this at the local Anglican church recently. The speaker was pushing a form of theistic evolution, which is also making a comeback, but I am not convinced. Seems to me that evolution is based on the unprovable assumption of "Uniformitarianism", i.e. all forces work the same as now forever and always have. One of the speakers I'm looking forward to hearing is Dr Alister McGrath, who is a (ex?) scientist as well as a theologian and apologist. Wonder what he thinks?

I am tempted to skip the last session to get home and see Newcastle Knights play Brisbane Broncos for a place in the NRL preliminary finals. Could be a very good game. Do we have a chance? Without danny Buderus, who will get a least 1 week suspension?

Another event will be the funeral of a student at Tabor (where I teach), Lambros Lourandos. Never knew him well, but visited him 3 times as he fought with cancer, and lost! He has a serious but joyful look and I really miss him. Unfortunately his death brings back memories of my dad's death and 2 good friends who dies in spite of fervent prayers in Newcastle in the 1980s.

So please comment on my first blog words!