This & That

My semester is officially completed! I turned in my last paper for 1 of my 2 classes last night and must admit it feels pretty good. It was certainly not the best paper I have ever written but it completed my semester nonetheless. Now I've got about 3 weeks before I head down to the HUGE metropolis of Wilmore, KY for my next class. A week long intensive of Church History I. Should be good times.

So I did something I've never done before, I subscribed to a magazine with the intent of actually reading it. My first Newsweek arrived earlier this week. I've worked my way about half-way through it so far and am glad I decided to pick up a subscription. Should provide plenty of things to think and blog about. For example, there is a short piece commenting on the book Going to Extremes: How Like Minds Unite and Divide by Cass Sunstein. One of those comments reads, "The Web unites - and it polarizes. Online, it's possible to filter news into what Sunstein calls the "Daily Me": a flow of information that only reinforces one's previously held opinions" (pg. 17).

This really makes sense to me and even scares me a little because we do the exact same thing with the Bible. How often have we run into people (or been those 'people' ourselves) that use bits and pieces of the Bible to "reinforce [our] previously held opinions" about God, the Church, right and wrong, morality, etc. We have the opportunity to bring people together, to display unity, to serve the Body of Christ by understanding what the Bible is actually saying in the context of God's story or we could keep trying to shove our opinions in people's faces and see what happens.