For the intellectual sci-fi fan...

If you're like the men in my family, you have a habit of nit-picking over the plausabilty of movie scenarios. You also probably enjoy science fiction. So here's a fun nit-picker's look at ten ridiculous moments in recent sci-fi blockbusters: MSN Entertainment - News - 10 Dumb Moments in Sci-Fi Cinema

Sermon Archives online!

I've often been asked when I'll finally get my sermon archives online... well, the answer is, "Now!" Every sermon I've got a copy of, right up until yesterday's, is posted there. I'm going through and re-reading them myself, now that I've got them all sorted out, and it's an odd experience. Some of what I wrote really works, and I'm excited when I read it. Sometimes I can't hardly believe I wrote something that good at all. Other times... well, even though I believe God uses our proclamation as a jumping-off point to move people how he will, some weeks I've given him a better hand than others. Since these go back to before my internship, I imagine as I read farther I'll notice developments in my style. One thing I've already been amazed at - how wordy I was! Some of my internship sermons were practically twice as long as my sermons are now. Not sure if that's a good or bad trend to have moved away from...

Anyhow, if you're needing something to kill the time and just didn't feel like you got enough preaching last time at church, now you've got the cure. ;)

Continuing education... continues

I'm posting from Concordia College this evening, where I'm enjoying a conference as part of my continuing education requirement. I'm at the Summer Theological Conference, titled "God and Science." Obviously, these are both subjects that fascinate me, and today has been a very stimulating (if sometimes overwhelming) series of lectures. Our keynote speaker is Dr. Ian Barbour, the 1999 winner of the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion in recognition of his achievements in just exactly this area. Dr. Barbour has Ph.Ds in both physics and theology, and it was a privilege to attend a lecture of his.

Today's sessions focused on the physical sciences; tomorrow's will tackle the life sciences.

I'm having a good time, and it's nice to be back on campus at Concordia for a while. I was thinking last night how much I really enjoyed my years here.

New Look!

In case you happen to link directly to my blog, without passing through the main site, you really should pop in! I've just published a complete overhaul to the design, along with some structural changes. Since I have to recreate all of the old content from scratch (back-up goof on my part - doh!), there are still gaps. But it shouldn't be too long before I've got those filled in, and even the long-awaited archive of sermons. ;) Or so he says tonight, anyway...

So, take a look and let me know what you think!

Dog Town

A really innovative idea from the HappyPaws Farm, the shelter I adopted Nikki from: Dog Town. Please support their efforts!

More on the Noot family

There are quite a few more details in this article from the Fargo Forum, including the fact that Mr. Noot's sister is Cindy Baasch of Hutchinson, Minnesota. Small world.

Local family loses farmstead in tornado

Sunday night's surreal weather produced something like half a dozen tornados in southeastern North Dakota. One, which was classified as an F4 (and possibly could have been an F5, the most destructive classification on a scale of 0-5) touched down on a farmstead less than ten miles from here.

The Noot family of rural Marion, who are underinsured, lost everything. Lucinda tells me their home was leveled, grain bins were torn apart, dozens of cattle were killed or had to be put down, and no one can even find the bricks of the elevator that stood on the Noots' property.

As the Valley City Times-Record mentions, a fund for the Noots has been set up at Wells Fargo bank. If you're able to contribute to help them out, Lucinda says that finances are a big worry right now.

Also, of course, your prayers for the family are greatly needed.

Congratulations, Mom and Dad!

Mom and Dad have finally closed on their new townhouse - the first change in real estate for them since the 1970s, and the first time in their lives they've had the experience of building a home from scratch, with all of the decisionmaking and personalization that goes with it. Moving begins today, and ends just as soon as they can lug the last box to the other side of town.
 
You can send them your best wishes at parents@bobschaefer.com.*
 
Congrats, Mom and Dad... hope you have many happy years in your new home!
 
 
* You should probably be aware that this is just a forwarding address that passes through my Inbox. It's not private, but this way, you can send your greetings to my folks without me putting their personal e-mail address in a public blog. Just don't send anything embarassing, OK? ;)

Renewing Worship

I've been looking at the provisional liturgies in the ELCA's Renewing Worship project. For those of you not in the loop, Augsburg Fortress is preparing a next-generation worship book at the request of the ELCA. Provisional (i.e., sample) materials from the new book have been released periodically for evaluation for over a year now, and a vote on whether to procede with the project to the next step - publishing a hymnal to replace the venerable Lutheran Book of Worship - will take place at the churchwide assembly next summer.
 
I'm pretty impressed with the communion liturgies, by and large. I think the single best feature about them is that each of the two proposed settings includes three unique arrangements of the music - a "traditional," organ based version; a "contemporary" arrangement featuring keyboard, drums, and flute; and a "jazz" version that could use your local jazz quartet, if you have one. This strikes me as practically brilliant.
 
See, I'm pretty sure that in the next five years or so, at least one of my congregations will be moving in the direction of using "contemporary" music in worship. With a resource like this, I can teach them the new liturgy, and we can sing it to the "traditional" arrangement to our hearts' content. When the time comes to try other styles in our worship, it would be possible simply to introduce the new musicians and their talents into our worship, without having to learn a new "contemporary liturgy. The words and tunes are identical - only the accompaniment will have changed!
 
I also think of my home congregation - Faith Lutheran in Hutchinson, MN - and their start-up church, Faith on Grove. The original church still tends toward traditional, liturgical worship, while Faith on Grove has adopted a praise-and-worship style service without much liturgical structure. If the two Faiths were to each learn this liturgy, they would all be able to sing together, and there would be a wonderful spiritual unity in their worship, even though the two congregations worship at different times, in different buildings, and in different musical styles. They would share words and songs, and worshipers from one congregation would immediately feel at home in the worship of the other congregation. In fact, the two congregations could even benefit from once in a while sharing each other's style.
 
There are lots of possibilities here. I hadn't expected to be this enthused about the new hymnal project, but I think it's really shaping up to be a solid, well-thought-out volume. I'm looking forward to the final product!

Greetings to a reader!

Every once in a while I get a note from someone who's been reading on my site. A fellow named Nik dropped me a line mentioning that he read my site sometimes, and had noticed my blog entry on Gmail. He was wondering whether I had an invite to spare. It's on its way, Nik. =) I'm glad to hear from you, and hope you enjoy using Gmail!

MSNBC - World Court rules against Israel on barrier

MSNBC reports that the World Court (whose rulings have no binding legal authority, but do have moral and historical weight) has ruled what anyone with a lick of common sense can see: That whatever the purported reason for Israel's "security barrier," the wall has the practical effect of annexing land - it is, for all intents and purposes, an illegal land grab, the court ruled.

The World Court also ruled that the lands Israel has controlled since the 1967 war in which it snatched them are properly described as "occupied" territories, including East Jerusalem. Israel does not recognize Jerusalem as occupied. Here again the court shows common sense - nations are not allowed to expand their borders through warfare, and so Israel's "new" boundaries, which are held against the will of the conquored people, are clearly "occupied."

This is an important decision, since the World Court is the final arbiter of international law. For this court to say so boldly that Israel is transgressing in this manner should cause the Bush administration to reconsider its unconditional support for Israel. Tellingly, the votes on the various paragraphs of the court's ruling were mostly 14-1... the lone dissenter being the American judge.

It's true that America has a good friend in Israel, but good friends need to be corrected when they're in the wrong, just as surely as an enemy does. Ariel Sharon, however, has brilliantly couched his land grabbing in terms that he knows President Bush has already used to describe America's "war on terror." He has painted this barrier as a primary front in that "war," and has parroted Bush in arguing that Israel [America] has the right to take whatever steps are necessary to protect herself from Palestinian [al-Qaida] terrorists. Because Bush has advocated an "anything goes" policy of warfare against whatever he wants to call terrorism at this particular moment [aka, Saddam Hussein], he's hard pressed to do much more than swallow hard and grimace when Ariel Sharon does exactly the same thing - even when American foreign policy would be much better served by a less imperious Israel.

It's a good thing that the World Court has the cojones to do what the Bush administration cannot or will not do. Let's hope the United Nations puts some teeth to the ruling, and that the United States does not, in pompous self service, veto any such UN action.

Legislative shenanigans

What do you do if you're voting on a bit of legislation and you're down 200-220 as the buzzer goes off? If you're the House Republicans, you abuse your leadership of that chamber, and give yourself as much extra time as you need to twist ten arms really hard.

In a vote to block the portion of the USA PATRIOT Act (it's an acronym, folks) that allows the government to access your library records without probable cause, the Republicans kept the vote open 23 additional minutes after the normal 15-minute time limit for a roll call vote had expired, not closing the voting until the House leadership was able to persuade ten Republicans to change their votes to defeat the measure.

As Republican C.L. Butch Otter, who was a sponsor of the legislation (one of the good guys) put it after the vote, "You win some, and some get stolen."

As the NY Times article points out, this is not the first time the House leadership has pulled this trick. Sad.

The New York Times > National > Republican-Led House Defeats Effort to Curb Patriot Act

Politics and the War on Terror

Click here to visit The New Republic and read about the Bush administration's pressure on Pakistan to deliver high-value targets (like bin Laden and his associates) before election day - and specifically, to announce such captures during the three days of the Democratic National Convention. Yet Bush maintains that he would never, ever use the "war on terror" as a political tool to win reelection. Right...