We are off to Shanghai today, and I am taking my new Kindle with me. I bought one in spite of one writer’s warning that the font used by the Kindle reader is “grim and Calvinist”–a charge that I reflected upon a while back in a blog posting at Duke Divinity’s fine “Faith and Leadership” site: http://faithandleadership.duke.edu/blog/09-14-2009/richard-j-mouw-calvinist-does-not-mean-grim
2 Comments »
-
I think part of the thing people might be thinking of when they think of Calvinism being grim is stuff like:
Alpha Omega Ministries, which seems to want to be Serious, Serious, Serious all the time. You’re obviously much better than them, but it does seem like at least a few places in the general Calvinistic blogosphere don’t exude as much a balanced joy as rampant amounts of Serious at the situation the world is in. I’ll readily grant that lots of people in St. Blogs do this, too, but they’re not the ones that are fun to read. Bloggers like you and, on a Catholic edge, Mark Shea, are fun, because you’re not set on being 100% serious all the time. But if someone surveyed the general spectrum of reformed blogs, and put it together with general pop-culture ideas about the Calvinist worldview…well, the whole ‘grim’ thing doesn’t strike as totally unfair. (The notable point, then, about corresponding free-will Christian worldviews and blogospheres is that the worldview itself doesn’t strike as quite as grim, even if it be the case–and I’m not convinced that it is–that the blogs therein are actually just as generally set on being Serious as those of the Calvinists. I’m still pretty convinced that the Calvinists are more into being Serious than their Arminian and Catholic brothers.)
-
The entire seminary is broke, you are laying off your future, but it is so nice to hear of your expensive trip to Shanghai and the new Kindle – ALL of which the seminary paid for. This way that hack of a provost you have can continue slashing away at the seminary. You are asleep at the wheel!! How can you separate yourself from all the pain and hard ship that fool of a provost is doing? I guess it is easier to let him do all your dirty, dirty work for you. WHERE ARE YOU? Oh yeah, Shanghai with your new Kindle. It’s FULLER that means grim – not Calvin.
Comment by Your Conscious — October 24, 2009 @ 6:44 am
