Scottish mystic Henry Scougal (1650-1678), author of the spiritual classic The Life God in the Soul of Man included the following prayer in that work:
“Good God! What a mighty felicity this is to which we are called! How graciously hast thou joined our duty and happiness together, and prescribed that for our work the performance whereof is a great reward!”
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Here’s another interesting article on the brain-God connection question. The article is by Michael Brooks and it appears in New Scientist (Feb. 4, 2009). Here’s an excerpt:
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It seems that times of anxiety and change bring out a fair share of clairvoyance in some folks. These like to declare with some confidence the future state of affairs, stating what will work and what will not. I confess I’ve not developed enough discernment to know how to sort through those predictions. I suppose one way to think about it is that any prediction about the future has about a 50% chance of being right (or, wrong, depending on how you want to look at it).
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Polemics against bad teaching and poor education are a staple in social science, philosophy, and education literature. I suspect for two reasons: first, they are effective in getting readers riled up, and, second, I suspect it’s just too easy to sling tomatoes at poor teachers. After all, who among us hasn’t suffered under one? However, I do love a good rant…
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I met a rare kind of person last week. He was what I’ll describe as a genuinely intelligent person. There are plenty of smart or knowledgeable people around, and given that I spend a lot of time around “academic types” I run into a lot of them from all fields. But there’s a difference between being merely smart, and being truly intelligent. And often it takes meeting a genuinely intelligent person to learn the difference.
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I’m not a big fan of sports analogies or metaphors, especially from the pulpit and in reference to matters spiritual. I find them at least irksome and at times insufferable. When in seminary a local church pastor (whose church we visited often only because of proximity to the seminary) used sports analogies as a staple in his sermons. After a while it was evident that he probably spent more time consulting ESPN than the ISBE.* However, it seems that sports analogies have a long history.
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Christian psychologist and therapist Wayne E. Oates wrote, “Two tuning forks that are alike will pick up each other’s vibrations. Persons are prone to imitate people they like. Therefore, change can be created in another person by stimulating the desire to be like you.” (The Psychology of Religion. Word Books, 1973, p. 157). In 1973 Oates uttered this “true” statement from the standpoint of the emotional and the evident frameworks (direct observation) of psychology. Today the neurosciences can make this same statement. But more and more, their frame of reference is the biological and the scientific.
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