Bengals and steelers at church

Bengals and steelers at church
Originally uploaded by 5 Ms In SoCal

Our annual Oktoberfest Root Beer Festival at Conejo Church brings out the best in everyone...even Steelers & Bengals fans.

Marcus' New Tie

Marcus' New Tie
Originally uploaded by 5 Ms In SoCal

Marcus has been wanting a bow tie for months (since July I'd say). This week his Mimi and a neighbor both sent him bowties! He is in heaven. Here he is wearing the one from Mimi. You can see his proud smile just glowing.

Does this sound familiar?

It's hard to believe this rose to the level of a lead national story at Yahoo! News today.  Quite sad...


Hundreds leave pioneering Fla. megachurch - Yahoo! News

Lunch w/ George Clooney

Today I took a colleague out to lunch at a favorite Malibu dive.  About 10-minutes into lunch a trio of bikers pulled up, dismounted, and took the table next to us.  Among them...George Clooney.  The first time I've seen him in my 5+ years in the Bu.  Nice.

The Center for Faith and Learning

Pepperdine University this week announced that I will be the Interim Associate Director for the Center for Faith & Learning over the next academic year. The Director is in Germany this year and the Associate Director is on sabbatical.

The announcement was accompanied by a spot on the PU home page and a press release and podcast interview. I'm looking forward to the challenges and opportunities this will bring.

Sacred Doubt...

I preach at our home church once or twice a year and I greatly enjoy it. Like playing guitar, I get much more pleasure from the process than my limited skills reveal. I agreed to preach the last Sunday in August way back in March and I've been thinking about it for some time. Mostly my sermon dealt with my summer reading.

This summer I read Voltaire's Candide and Dawkins' The God Delusion and together they pushed me to think much more deeply about my faith and to wrestle more intensely with some of my intellectual doubts. After completing them both I found myself in quite a spiritual funk for several weeks. Seeking some intellectual comfort, I found Tim Keller's Reason for God. I found it encouraging and helpful for addressing many of the intellecutal and philosophical quandaries raised by Voltaire and Dawkins. The first half of RfG is a philosophical response to athiesm and the second half is a basic introduction to the theological pillars of orthodox Christianity.

Given the contours of my spiritual journey over the past eight weeks it seemed appropriate that I would talk about doubt. So, here it is...I don't know if there will be an audio version available or not. If you don't have time to read it I will summarize with this quote from Tennyson,

There is more faith in sincere doubt than in all your creeds.

Enjoy, and my God grant you mercy in your journey.

A great week at camp

We just returned from a wonderful week at King's Kamp. Too much fun!