Ben McDonald

This is the Ben McDonald 1990 Score Rookie Card. When I was young I absolutely loved collecting and trading baseball cards. This one was one of my favorites. I loved it not because I had any particular affinity to Ben McDonald, or because he played for the Orioles, but because I wanted a necklace like his really, really badly. I showed this card to my mom that winter so that she would have a visual image of my Christmas list.

I ended up getting a necklace, sort of like this, a little less pricy I'm sure. I loved that necklace and wore it all the time. I'm not sure what happened it to it. I guess I eventually moved on to beaded necklaces, which were made with tiny beads and fishing wire. They were all the rage in 5th grade.

Merry Christmas!

Books

I've really enjoyed the recent post about intuition and knowledge over at Scot McKnight's blog (written by one of his guest bloggers), and the discussion that followed in the comments has been really good also. Good talk about God-of-the-gaps theology (as well as what seems to be Darwin-of-the-gaps thinking by some commenters).

I finally started reading Phyllis Tickle's The Great Emergence. I haven't gotten very far in the book yet, but chapter two on the three strands of society - spiritual, corporeal, and moral - is worth the price by itself.

I want to start a discussion in the next week or so about some slight differences I noticed between NT Wright's Surprised By Hope and Rob Bell's Jesus Wants to Save Christians. In short, the two seem to have different reasonings about why we as Christians should care about the world. Wright uses an illustration of a signpost throughout his book, where Christians are supposed to be the signpost to what is coming when God recreates the physical world. Bell, on the other hand, writes about us making this world into a better place here and now. I think both men obviously want the same thing, but they same to have different reasonings. In Wright's book, he even argues that this world is not getting better (i.e. evolutionary progress) or worse (i.e. some fundamentalist thinking). But since Anna has my copy of Bell's book, I can't get too deep into it right now.

Oh, and Maroon 5 apparently just put out a remix album. Now I am by no means a maroon 5 fan, however I am a big proponent of remix albums and have been a little pissy for two straight years that I can't find my Bloc Party remix album. I listened to some of it on iTunes a little while ago and I like what I've heard. Of course, that would mean having a Maroon 5 album in my library, so I'm in a bit of a quandry.