By Scott Keith –
I recently finished reading The Revenge of the Analog – Real Things and Why They Matter by David Sax. All in all, it was not a bad book. Sax is not so much making an argument in his book as he is acting as a reporter laying out the facts of what is happening and perhaps why.
By Scott Keith –
(I will be teaching a breakout session at the forthcoming Mockingbird Conference. This blog is a foretaste of that lecture. Enjoy. Please check out the Mockingbird Conference and register. See ya there!)
Dynamite does one thing well; it blows stuff up. Dynamite is no more than an absorbent material, such as sawdust, soaked in a highly combustible chemical called nitroglycerin. The absorbent material makes the nitroglycerin much more stable. Attached to the nitroglycerin-infused sawdust is either a fuse or a blasting cap. Once lit, the fuse or cap creates a small explosion that triggers a larger explosion in the dynamite itself. Once ignited, the dynamite burns extremely rapidly and produces a large amount of hot gas in the process. The hot gas expands very quickly and applies pressure and thus blows up or explodes.
By Scott Keith –
My father died when I was two years old. At the time, we were living in Mountain View, California. My mother had grown up in Palmdale, California, which is where her parents still lived. So, it seemed natural to her to move back to Palmdale for my grandpa and grandma to help raise my brother and me.
By Scott Keith –
This winter has been a whirlwind of teaching gigs for me, most of which being centered around the subject matter of my book, Being Dad – Father as a Picture of God’s Grace. Therein, I argue that being a dad means being a mouthpiece of grace and an obscure voice of empathy to his children. In part, this means that dads are called to provide a little magic. The unexpected yes. The hoped for but seldom granted release from the doldrums of day-to-day life. The “I forgive you” when “I condemn you” is what is expected and warranted.
By Scott Keith –
“They exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.” Romans 1:25
When I’m not traveling for work, I like to spend as much time as possible in the mountains at our little cabin in the woods. Quite simply, it recharges me. The work needed to keep the place up, starting the fire in the morning, the slower pace of life, and the natural beauty all bring me a sense of calm and peace that I don’t always possess when I’m “down the hill.” I have always thought of the mountains as home, and so whenever possible, I follow the well know mantra uttered by Jon Muir: “The mountains are calling, and I must go.”
By Scott Keith –
A few years ago at the very tail end of my vacation, Joy and I took all of our children and Dr. Mallinson’s son, Auggie Mallinson, to Yosemite. While Joy and I have been several times, by mere coincidence of timing and obligation, most of our children have not seen the grandeur of the Yosemite Valley. Joy, Autumn, and I left Dr. Rosenbladt’s house in Portland and drove to meet everyone else (Caleb, Erika, Joshua, and Auggie) at the Bass Lake resort just outside of Yosemite. We had fun at Bass Lake driving Jet Skis and cooling off in the now almost completely empty lake. Bass Lake is fun, but it is no Yosemite.
By Scott Keith –
I am not a pastor. I also have a hard time staying in one place for a long time. As a result, I have spent the last several years visiting many different churches. The sad reality is that, even in the blessed LCMS, “the goods” are not always handed over on Sunday morning. By “the goods,” I mean to say that in my admittedly limited experience, Christ and Him crucified for the forgiveness of my sins is infrequently proclaimed to me at church.
By Scott Keith –
Over the past several years, I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to be a man. I am not talking specifically about gender or what does or does not hang between one’s legs. I am discussing what the essence of man is, or said more simply, what makes a man what he is.
By Scott Keith –
I write quite frequently for The Jagged Word and somewhat less frequently on 1517 The Legacy Project. Admittedly, I design most of my posts to encourage you, the reader, to enact the freedom that Christ has won for you. Inevitably, when I post, I receive comment after comment reminding me to remember the famously over-referenced “Third Use of the Law.”
By Scott Keith –
“We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep into our own history and our doctrine and remember that we are not descended from fearful men, not men who feared to write, to speak, to associate, and to defend causes which were for the moment unpopular.” These are the words spoken by Edward R. Murrow as encouragement to those who would stand up in opposition to then Senator McCarthy’s hearings designed to root out all dissenters, whether they were guilty of being communists or not. Mr. Murrow goes on to remind us all of a simple yet exceptionally difficult reality: “We can deny our heritage and our history, but we cannot escape responsibility for the result.”
By Scott Keith –
My friend Aaron recently introduced me to a website that has shattered my world. No, it’s not a site spouting a new theology. No, it is not even a site promoting a new worldview or philosophy that has got my head spinning. Rather, it is a site dedicated to tools. Yes, tools. The site is John Neeman tools, and they have a rather simple philosophy. All of their tools are made in their small, traditional workshops (in Latvia) using equally traditional methods and techniques. Their focus is on uniqueness and quality, not quantity. They say that they want to help people remember how to use their hands, to relate their own human energy to their tools and achieve the true joy of creating something from humble beginnings.
By Scott Keith –
This is a question that I ask myself all the time. I’m truly interested in knowing what kind of man I am and how others might answer that question. Perhaps it’s narcissistic of me to wonder such a thing. Maybe I ask myself such a question because I more frequently ask it of others. Often, I find answers in the most unexpected places.
By Scott Keith –
I have a dog named Kai, who is a Siberian Husky. At one time, she was a legit sled dog. She, along with her three sisters, would pull me on a small, one-person sled around a 3.5-mile loop in a little place called Hope Valley, California, which is near Lake Tahoe. Kai was what is referred to as the lead dog, which is the dog who is in charge of all the other dogs and the one who listens to the directions of the musher (me). These days, she is a bit older and a lot slower. She still likes to pull, but now her pulling is on a collar, not a harness as we take our daily one-mile walk around the neighborhood.
By Scott Keith –
I know it may seem weird for me to start talking about Doubting Thomas at this time of the year, but I just can’t help myself. Most of us are still reveling in Christmas, New Years, and Epiphany. In a way, I am too. I have spent the last several weeks contemplating the idea of embodiment over disembodiment.
By Scott Keith –
Happy New Year, everyone! As I sit next to a roaring fire in our cabin in Big Bear and write this blog, I am trying to envision what 2017 will be like. The truth is, I have no idea. For me, and I suspect for others, 2016 was a mixed bag of both personal victories and failures. That is life, at least until the Lord comes again to bring us to Himself in glory. This year, I have been quite surprised to learn about all the people who call 2016 the worst year ever. And culling social media toward the close of the year reminded me of a series I binged watch with Joy this year.
By Scott Keith –
I’ve been lucky enough to have been trained under two of the greatest living Lutheran apologists, Dr. Rod Rosenbladt and Dr. John Warwick Montgomery. I’ve even had some tutoring from others along the way. Shaun C. Henson of Oxford University has done some interesting work with the idea of the universality of religious experience, which he shared with me while I was there. I have, in my own time as an apologist, made use of all of the tricks that these fine men have placed in my bag throughout the years.
By Scott Keith –
A few years ago, Dr. Rod Rosenbladt retired from Concordia University in Irvine. Rod’s retirement gave him the occasion to give a final public lecture, which I attended. I had Rod as a theology and philosophy professor and considered him a “theological” colleague. It seemed natural to expect that Rod’s lecture would be on a topic of theology, and I settled into my seat ready for just that. The lecture was not at all what I expected. Knowing Rod for as long as I have, I have come to expect the unexpected. Rod’s lecture, “Education, Gospel, and Freedom,” was more or less on the state of education and the disintegration of academic discourse.
By Scott Keith –
*This blog is by a previous employee and friend, Matt Lawler. He has contributed to The Jagged Word in the past, and the other day he surprised me with a couple of submissions. I love to give aspiring writers a shot at a wider audience, so I’ll be running Matt’s piece in place of mine today. Enjoy Matt’s article.
I tend to spend a decent chunk of my time on the web, getting lost on Wikipedia and reading the most random things imaginable. In the midst of one of these binges, I learned an interesting factoid. During World War II, the United States set up various military bases on islands in the South Pacific to more effectively combat the threat of Imperial Japan. After the war, some anthropologists studying the natives of these islands found something incredible. The islanders, never having been exposed to such incredible technology, had developed an entire religion centered around what they had seen. This religion was labeled by the anthropologists as a “cargo cult.” It consisted of idols in the form of replica airplanes, watchtowers, guns, and crates made out of twigs and leaves by the islanders. They believed that these objects were gifts from the gods, or gods themselves, and worshiped them as such. As a matter of fact, several of these cargo cults persist to this very day.
By Scott Keith –
I understand that what I am about to write is full of irony and perhaps even sanctimony or hypocrisy because this will be published on the internet and shared on various social media platforms.
I recently listened to an Art of Manliness podcast (ha, perhaps another form of social media), which interviewed Christina Cook, author of The Joy of Missing Out. In part, her book recounts a thirty-day period in which she gave up the internet, even email. I say “even email” because that is the work-related medium that I have a hard time eliminating from my daily life.
By Scott Keith –
Not so long ago, right here on The Jagged Word, I made an offer to show up at any church within a reasonable distance of my house and participate in a Q & A session with any group of unbelievers a congregation could gather. So far, I have been invited to one congregation in Los Angeles and one Skype interview with a college from the University of Alabama. Needless to say, I am grateful for the opportunity to speak to real people who have real questions about life, faith, and salvation.
