East of Eden by John Steinbeck

 "It's hard to split a man down the middle and always reach for the same half"- Samuel, 163.

"Now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good." --Lee

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

 Seems like there's so many of ways of knowing, of gleaning knowledge from nature. One typical Western way is to completely ignore the thing and look at a screen. It seems a Native way may be to animate the thing. I think a Christian way might be to see the thing as a signpost. 

Jesus and John Wayne by Kristen Kobes Du Mez

 "Although Wayne occupies a prominent place in the pantheon of evangelical heroes, he is but one of many rugged, and even ruthless, icons of masculinity that evangelicals imbued with religious significance. Like Wayne, the heroes who best embodied militant Christian masculinity were those unencumbered by traditional Christian virtues. In this way, militant masculinity linked religious and secular conservatism, helping to secure an alliance with profound political implications."

The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry by John Mark Comer

 "Sabbath is a way of saying, 'Enough.' Buying isn't always bad, but most of us have more than enough to enjoy a rich an satisfying life. As the psalmist said, 'I lack nothing.'"

"Your time is your life and our attention is the doorway to our hearts."

Bearing God's Name by Carmen Joy Imes

 She pointed out that other ANE (though I cannot remember if she used that term) deities made many demands of their followers as well, but they didn't know exactly what those demands were, they just lived in constant fear of displeasing them and being punished. In that light, God's revelation of his commands is merciful, showing the people the way to blessing. 

The Covenant Code or "The Book of the Covenant" is Exodus 20:22-23:19

Exodus 23:20-21--there is an angel that will continue to guide

All the people were sprinkled with blood because they were part of the covenant and called to be priests. Usually covenants were between suzerain (great kings) and vassals

Exodus 32:14- God repented

Leviticus 18-20- moral purity; Leviticus 11-15- ritual purith

liminal spaces (limen= Latin for doorway)

"Liminality exposes all our rough edges" (105).

"Jesus has no patience for those whose verbal proclamations do not match their agenda" (138).

"Lip service to Jesus without action that flows out of an intimate relationship is falsely bearing his name" (143).

"Peter's extended quotation from Joel includes the words, 'everyone who calls on the name of the Lord (kyrios) will be saved' (Acts 2:21; cf. Joel 2:32). In Joel, that name is Yahweh, signified in our English translations by "the LORD" in all caps. For Joel, Yahweh brings salvation to the remnant. Since kyrios is the Greek word that normally translates Yahweh in the Old Testament but also designates the 'Lord' (or 'master') Jesus in the NT, the significance of Peter's quotation is not immediately evident. Is Peter saying that those who call on Yahweh will be saved? Or those who call on Jesus?

"Later in the narrative Peter clarifies by healing a lame man 'in the name of Jesus Christ' (Acts 3:6) and declaring, 'Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to mankind by which we must be saved' (Acts 4:12). Appearing so soon after this quotation of Joel, Peter's statement presents a paradox: no other name but Yahweh and no other name but Jesus. The salvation available only to those who call on Joel's kyrios, Yahweh, is now found exclusively in Peter's kyrios, Jesus. Peter is convinced that Jesus of Nazareth is Yahweh in the flesh, 'God with us.'

....

"The hymn of Philippians 2 ascribes to Jesus the 'name that is above every name' (v. 9). Significantly, it also echoes Isaiah 45:23, one of the most important monotheistic texts in the Hebrew Bible. Yahweh had announced, 'I am God and there is no other' (Isaiah 45:22), adding, 'Before me every knee will bow; by me every tongue will swear' (45:23). In Philippians 2:9-11, Paul applies these words to Jesus (emphasis added):

"Therefore God exalted him to the highest place

and gave him the name that is above every name,

that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow,

in heaven and on earth and under the earth,

and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord,

to the glory of God the Father.

"Here Jesus is drawn to a role that Yahweh himself was expected to fulfill. Bearing Yahweh's name (the 'name above every name'), Jesus receives worship that belongs to God alone, and yet somehow God the Father is still glorified. As explained earlier, kyrios stands for the proper divine name, Yahweh, throughout the Greek Old Testament and into the New Testament. Therefore, the 'name above every name' is not 'Jesus.' Rather, he is given 'the name' LORD (kyrios), which is Yahweh. Knees will bow at the name that belongs to Jesus, that is, Yahweh" (152-153). 

"According to Colossians 1:15, Jesus is 'the image of the invisible God.' He represents the Father perfectly, but he is not the first image of God. The first humans were designated as God's image in Genesis 1:26-27. Scholars have suggested a variety of possibilities for what this might imply. Rather than an indication that they looked like God or shared some of his characteristics (e.g. creativity or relationality or eternal nature), I read Genesis as saying that humans function as the image. Humans are not like God's image, they are his image.

"In the ancient world, and 'image' or tselem was something concrete. Every deity had a temple, and every temple had an image. The image was a physical representation of the deity, a visible sign of his or her dominion. John Walton argues that the creation account in Genesis is meant to remind us of a temple dedication. Yahweh has build the cosmos as the temple in which he resides and the domain over which he presides. Rather than setting up a statue of himself, he makes men and women. We function as the sign of his rule to the rest of creation. 

"This sounds quite similar to bearing God's name: Covenant members are also representatives of God to the nations. However, there's an important difference between the concepts of being the image and bearing the name. Discussing it here will help clarify the implications of each and offer a fuller picture of biblical theology.

"Both being the image and bearing the name relate to the concept of election. God has chosen people and given them a job to do.

"Too often we think of 'election' as a matter of 'being picked to be saved.' But in Scripture, election is more like a game of blob tag, where if I'm 'it,' and I tag you, then we're both it. We run around together and try to tag as many others as we can, who join hands with us and continue tagging others until everyone has been tagged. In this game, the essence of 'it-ness' is to tag others. So, too, the essence of election, and therefore the essence of the believer's vocation, is to represent God by mediating its blessing to others. Once we are 'it' we don't lean back in our recliners, glad that someone picked us. No, to be 'it' is to tag others. And to be elect--to be his--is to bear his name among the nations, to demonstrate by our lives that he is king and to mediate his blessings to others. That is the whole point of being the elect...

"Every human being is an image bearer, whether conscious of it or not. As the crown of creation, humans bear witness to the majesty of our creator God. We extend his rule over creation by caring for it and bringing order to it.

"Name-bearing, on the other hand, is restricted to those in covenant relationship with Yahweh. It's the second dimension of election involving only a subset of humanity. The purpose of covenant election is to provide a visual model of people rightly related to the creator God, Yahweh.

"Jesus fills both dimensions of election by perfectly imaging God and bearing his name with honor. He is the human par excellence as well as the faithful covenant member through whom others can be reconciled to God" (164-166).

"For Moses, those who obey God's commands and worship him alone are considered 'faith-full,' and those who do not are 'faith-less.' Obedience and faith could almost be considered synonyms. To claim belief in God without obeying him--to bear his name in vain--would be an unthinkable contradiction for Moses" (179).

"Liminality exposes all our rough edges."

How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell

"Usefulness does not equal worth... despite what capitalism says, productivity does not equal value."

"I am opposed to the way that corporate platforms buy and sell our attention, as well as to designs and uses of technology that enshrine a narrow definition of productivity, and ignore the local, the carnal, and the poetic. I am concerned about the effects of current social media on expression, including the right not to express oneself, and its deliberately addictive features. But the villain here is not necessarily the internet or even the idea of social media. It is the invasive logic of commercial social media, and its financial incentive to keep us in a profitable state of anxiety, envy, and distraction. It is furthermore the cult of individuality and personal branding that grow out of such platforms, and affect the ways we think about our offline selves and the places where we actually live."

"Our citizenship in a bio-region means not only familiarity with the local ecology, but a commitment to stewarding it together. It's important for me to link my critique of the attention economy to the promise of bio-regional awareness, because I believe that capitalism, colonialist thinking, loneliness, and an abusive stance toward the environment all co-produce one another."

"Simple awareness is the seed of responsibility."

"I'm sort of the quintessential California atheist."

"If we think about what it means to concentrate, or pay attention at an individual level, it implies alignment. Different parts of the mind and even the body acting in concert, and oriented toward the same thing. To pay attention to one thing is to resist paying attention to other things. It means constantly denying and thwarting provocations outside the sphere of one's attention. We contrast this with distraction, in which the mind is disassembled, pointing in many different directions at once, and preventing meaningful action."

"As I noted earlier, there is a significant portion of people for whom the project of day-to-day survival leaves no attention for anything else. That's part of the vicious cycle too. This is why it's even more important for anyone who does have a margin, even the tiniest one, to put it to use in opening up margins further down the line. Tiny spaces can open up small spaces. Small spaces can open up bigger spaces. If you can afford to pay a different kind of attention, you should."

"I don't know what a personal brand is, other than a reliable unchanging pattern of snap judgments. 'I like this, and I don't like this,' leave little room for ambiguity or contradiction."

"I worry that if we let our real-life interactions be corralled by our filter bubbles and branded identities, we are also running the risk of never being surprised, challenged, or changed, never seeing anything outside ourselves, including our own privilege."

"Eventually, to behold is to become beholden to." 

"It's pretty intuitive that truly understanding something truly understanding something requires attention to its context. What I want to emphasize here is that the way this process happened for me with birds, was spatial and temporal. The relationships and processes I observed were things adjacent in space and time. For me, a sensing being, things like habitat and season helped me make sense of the species I saw, why I was seeing them, what they were doing, and why. Surprisingly, it was this experience, and not a study on how Facebook makes us depressed, that helped me put my finger on what bothers me so much about my experience of social media. The information I encounter there lacks context, both spatially and temporally.

"For example, let's take a look at my Twitter feed right now as I'm sitting inside my studio in Oakland in the summer of 2018. Pressed up against each other in neat rectangles, I see the following: an article on Al-Jazeera by a woman whose cousin was killed as school by ISIL; an article about the Rohinga Muslims fleeing Myanmar last year, an announcement that At Dosharee Zone, a joke account, is selling new T-shirts, someone arguing for congestion pricing in Santa Monica, California; someone wishing happy birthday to former NASA worker Katherine Johnson, a video of NBC announcing the death of Senator McCain, and shortly afterward cutting to people dressed as dolphins appearing to masturbate on stage; photos of Yogi Bear mascot statues dropped in a forest; a job alert for director of the landscape architecture program at Morgan State University; an article on protests as the Pope visits Dublin; a photo of yet another fire erupting, this time in the Santa Ana Mountains; someone's date visualization of his daughter's sleeping habits during her first year; a plug for someone's upcoming book about the anarchist scene in Chicago; an Apple ad for Music Lab featuring Florence Welch. Spatial and temporal context both have to do with the neighboring entities around something that help define it. Context also helps establish the order of events. Obviously, the bits of information we're assailed with on Twitter and Facebook feeds are missing both of these kinds of context. Scrolling through the feed, I can't help but wonder, 'What am I supposed to think of all this? How am I supposed to think of all this?' I imagine parts of my brain lighting up in a pattern that doesn't make sense, that forecloses any possible understanding. Many things in there seem important, but the sum total is nonsense. And it produces not understanding, but a dull and stupefying dread."

"Presented with information in the form of itemized bits and sensationalized headlines, each erased by new items at the top of the feed, we lose that which was spatially and temporally adjacent to that information. But this loss happens at a more general level as well. As the attention economy profits from keeping us trapped in a fearful present, we risk blindness to historical context at the same time that our attention is ripped from the physical reality of our surroundings."

"...much necessary work is ignored or devalued as caregiving, a gendered after thought to the real dynamos of the economy, when in reality, no shared life could do without it."

"It's tempting to conclude this book with a single recommendation about how to live, but I refuse to do that. That's because the pitfalls of the attention economy can't just be avoided by logging off and refusing the influence of persuasive design techniques. They also emerge at the intersection of issues of public space, environmental politics, class, and race. Consider two things in tandem: first, people in wealthier neighborhoods almost always have more access to urban parks and to park land, on top of the fact that such neighborhoods are often in the hills or by the water... Second, consider that while seemingly every kid in a restaurant is now watching bizarre, algorithmically-determined children's content on YouTube, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs both severely limited their children's use of technology at home. As Paul Lewis reported for The Guardian, Justin Rosenstein, the Facebook engineer who created the Like button, had a parental control feature set up on his phone by an assistant to keep him from downloading apps...without personal assistants to commandeer our phones, the rest of us keep on pulling to refresh [like on Twitter, a feature the creature is 'penitent' about bringing into the world], while overworked single parents juggling work and sanity find it necessary to stick iPads in front of their kids faces. In their own ways, both of these things suggest to me the frightening potential of something like gated communities of attention--privileged spaces where some, but not others, can enjoy the fruits of conemplation and the diversification of attention."

Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi

Like the deeply introverted Gifty, I held my experiences with God and the Scriptures I had memorized sequestered inside my being as I went into a world both full of wonder and discovery and also set against the idea of there being a God if his existence implies any bit of relevance or answerability.

"This is something I would never say in a lecture or a presentation or, God forbid, a paper, but, at a certain point, science fails. Questions becomes guesses become philosophical ideas about how something should probably, maybe, be. I grew up around people who were distrustful of science, who thought of it as a cunning trick to rob them of their faith, and I have been educated around scientists and laypeople alike who talk about religion as though it were a comfort blanket for the dumb and the weak, a way to extol the virtues of a God more improbable than our own human existence. But this tension, this idea that one must necessarily choose between science and religion, is false. I used to see the world through a God lens, and when that lens clouded, I turned to science. Both became, for me, valuable ways of seeing, but ultimately both have failed to fully satisfy in their aim: to make clear, to make meaning."

 

"My mother crawled out of her deep, dark tunnel, but perhaps this phrasing is too imprecise, the image of crawling too forceful to encapsulate the relentless but quiet work of fighting depression. Perhaps it is more correct to say that her darkness lifted, the tunnel shallowed, so that it felt as though her problems were on the surface of the Earth again, not down in its molten core."

 

"'I think it's beautiful and important that to believe in something, anything at all. I really do.'

"She said the last part defensively because I was rolling my eyes. I'd always been annoyed by any whiff of the woo-woo, faux spirituality of those who equated believing in God with believing in, say, a strange presence in a room. In college, I'd once left a spoken-word show Anne had dragged me to because the poet kept referring to God as a 'she,' and that need to be provocative and all-encompassing felt to trite, too easy. It also went counter to the very concerns of an orthodoxy and a faith that ask that you submit, not in the kumbaya spirit of the Earth, but in the specific. In God as he was written, and as he was. 'Anything at all' didn't mean anything at all. Since I could no longer believe int he specific God, the one whose presence I felt so keenly when I was child, then I could never simply 'believe in something.'"

 "We read the bible how we want to read it. It doesn't change, but we do."

 "Like everyone else, I get a part of the story, a single line to study and recite, to memorize."

"I'd once been like that, so lonely that I craved further loneliness." 

"I think we are made of stardust and God made the stars."