I have a new blog. You can find it here. I didn't like the look or title of this one anymore, and I've been wanting to switch to Wordpress for a while. I will keep ChristianThinker.net up a bit longer, if only to keep a record of my ongoing debate with Uncle Skeptic, if he's still out there. =)

Everyone that follows this blog in a feed reader, please update your RSS feeds. That goes for both of you!

I haven't posted in almost 5 months, mainly because I was working on my dissertation during that time. However, the future of this blog is uncertain. I'm currently finishing my Ph.D. at Southern. I'm scheduled to defend my dissertation in two weeks and graduate in May. After that, who knows? I may come back to blogging. I may move the blog. I really don't know right now. Much depends on the next step I take after graduation. For those that have visited this site over the years, I humbly thank you.

And for those wondering, my dissertation is a model of Christian metaethics based on God's Triune nature. It's entitled, "God and Moral Facts: A Trinitarian Realist Model of Christian Metaethics." I may post it here eventually.

Rodney Dunning of Very Important Stuff has been on an anti-Southern Baptist crusade recently, and I've been reading what he's had to say with an interested but cynical eye. One of his recent posts demands more than a mere reading, however. Unfortunately, exaggerations, misrepresentations, and slanderous caricatures of one's theological opponents are nothing new to the "debate" between theological liberals and conservatives, but this attack on Southern Seminary, an institution with which I have been affiliated for the last seven years, surpasses the normal liberal-conservative sniping that goes on in the theological blogosphere. It borders on, for lack of a better term, institutional defamation.

Dunning links to an article in Ethics Daily, a theologically liberal cultural journal that generally speaks of conservative Southern Baptists as if they were the hand-picked agents of Satan on earth. The article, by one Pastor Keith Herron, throws some remarkable and strongly-worded accusations at Southern Seminary. The interesting thing is that Herron offers virtually no evidence in support of these accusations and, as someone intimately associated with the institution, its faculty, and its students, I can safely say that Herron's accusations are nakedly false. They are not only false and unfounded, but Herron (and Dunning, by proxy) turns them into weapons designed to damage the seminary's reputation among Christians, and that I cannot tolerate. The seminary and its officials have publicly taken positions in the past with which I have strongly disagreed, but I love Southern for its gospel-centeredness, its theological convictions, its unyielding pursuit of academic integrity, and for the ridiculously high quality of people that work and attend there.

I've updated the "Reading List" section on the right with some of the books I'm reading this semester. When will I get back to blogging? It's hard to say, since the amount of free time I can devote to the blogosphere seems to be less and less. Hopefully soon, however, since I have quite a few topics I'd like to discuss. Heck, the Lost Season 4 premiere was last night and I'm not even sure I'll be able to post on that. Times are hectic.

Here's one of the Christmas presents I gave to my wife and child:

Just a note for anyone who might be interested: I'll be preaching in the morning service this Sunday at First Baptist Church of Sheffield, Alabama. My text is Isaiah 8:1-9:7 and the title of my message is, "Incarnation and Indignation: A Happy Little Christmas Story About God's Wrath and Messianic Deliverance."

I have great news for all humanity: the wisest, most charming and most beautiful woman in the world is now blogging. Drink ye deeply of her insights and enjoy.

Since I am awash in a sea of schoolwork and know not how to end it, I have no time to blog. So in lieu of an actual post I offer a few words from a mind far more attuned to the beauty of Christ than I:

                                  Across my foundering deck shone
A beacon, an eternal beam. / Flesh fade, and mortal trash
Fall to the residuary worm; / world’s wildfire, leave but ash:
                                  In a flash, at a trumpet crash,
I am all at once what Christ is, / since he was what I am, and
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, / patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,
                                  Is immortal diamond.

from Gerard Manley Hopkins, "That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection"

And now for a bit of flagrant self-promotion poorly disguised as ministerial concern: I know there are many students from Southern who find their way to this blog. For those of you who are new to the Louisville area and are looking for a faith community of like-minded peers, I'd like to invite you to Foundations for Faith, otherwise known as F2. F2 is an Adult Bible Fellowship class for young married couples that I co-teach at the East Campus of Highview Baptist Church. We have a news blog that you can view here.

I think we have a really good group. Our couples range from early twenties to mid-thirties. Some are seminary students and some are professionals in the Louisville area. Some have children, some don't, and three couples are expecting little ones in the next few months. We have a great time together, and we put a high emphasis on three things. First is strong biblical teaching, specifically on the great doctrines of the historical Christian faith. To that end we vary our teaching units. Often we go straight through books of Scripture, but this year we've also included units on basic theology. Our next unit starts in September, and we'll be focusing on theological topics like the doctrine of creation, the doctrine of sin, and the doctrine of last things.

Our second emphasis is on strong Christian fellowship. Our group gets together once a month just to hang out and have fun. The guys and women also have their own get-togethers every other month. For our third emphasis, we want our ABF to be a community of strong Christian support. In a large church like Highview, ABF groups function like mini-churches in themselves. We want to take care of our members in whatever ways they need, whether its putting on a baby shower for an expecting mother, helping someone move into a new home, or just praying with each other in times of need. In this respect we take our jobs in supporting one another in Christian love very seriously.

We meet in room 310 of the East Campus of Highview Baptist. I'll be teaching this Sunday from the last few chapters of Zechariah, and we'd love to see you there.

[Note: the picture above has no relation to the content of this post. It's just one of my favorite images from the great Gustave Dore. I thought it would provide some good eye candy.]

I am currently enjoying family time on the sunny beaches of Alabama (yes, old Dixieland does have a few miles of coastland). Thus, as the saying goes, "blogging will be light."

I am now twittering. There's a box on the left sidebar where I can update what I'm currently doing via web or TXT message. Not that anyone cares, of course, but I think it's pretty cool.

I'd like to give a quick shout out to the hard-working maestros of the Louisville Orchestra. My wife and I attended the orchestra's performance of The Lord of the Rings Symphony at the Kentucky Center for the Arts last night and enjoyed it greatly. I love all things LOTR-related and listen to Howard Shore's ethereal score quite often, so this event was a no-brainer for me. The audience was an assorted hodgepodge of tin-foil hat geeks and symphony-going sophisticates (I'll let the reader guess at to which group I belong), but a good time was had by all.

And thanks to my mom for giving me the tickets for Christmas!

I've added a "Writings" link up top (also see the post below this one). There's only one academic paper at the moment. But I plan on uploading a few older papers as well as a few new ones during the upcoming semester.

Al Mohler, president of Southern Seminary and fellow blogger, has suffered complications from a recent surgery and is in need of urgent prayer. This is from his blog:

Dr. Mohler's health has sustained a setback. Over the past 36 hours Dr. Mohler has suffered from unrelenting pain. This unusual degree of pain signaled concern for the attending physicians and prompted additional tests this afternoon. In the past hour these tests have revealed that Dr. Mohler is suffering from pulmonary emboli in both lungs. His condition is quite serious and he has been moved to the intensive care unit of Baptist East Hospital in Louisville, KY for immediate treatment. Please make this a matter of urgent prayer. Thank you once again for your concern and support during these days.

This article says that pulmonary emboli is "an extremely common and highly lethal" condition. Please keep Dr. Mohler and his family in your prayers.

[UPDATE: Russ Moore says Dr. Mohler is doing fine.]

I apologize for the pathetic dearth of activity around here recently, but with the combination of the Thanksgiving holiday and the end of the fall semester I've had little time for blogging. I spent a big chunk of the last few weeks working on a paper comparing Jonathan Edward's immaterialism to George Berkeley's, and if and when my professor is kind enough to give me a grade that shows he thinks I have treated my subject well then I will post it here, just in case anyone is interested in that sort of thing.

Also, I haven't forgotten some of the recent promises I've made regarding upcoming posts. I'll be posting the second part of my series on Atheistic Ethics soon, as well as my thoughts on the Fall mini-season of Lost. And even though it's been over seven months since the last post in my series on Answering Popular Objections to Christianity, the next entry in that series is forthcoming as well.

I also want to make a few changes around here. The reading list on the right is shamefully out of date. I hope to (1) keep it more current and post more comments on what I'm reading and (2) expand it to include not only current books but recent completed books that I recommend.

HowManyOfMe.com

There are: 39 people with my name in the U.S.A. How many have your name?

So there are 38 other Brian Trapps out there, but guess who has briantrapp.com?

in your laugh I heard another world

Yesterday I held you before the sun awoke
the grey world, smiled as you rubbed your
eyes and buried your head in my shoulder.
I squeezed the funny spot on your leg and
in your laugh I heard another world, like
a song from beyond the borders of time,
as one does when a child: thinks he sees
an angel or a ghost in the distant woods,
no more than a mercurial glimpse of
eternity in an empty corner of his eye.
I held you and you reached and felt the
roughness of my chin and in the mystic
blue-within-blue of your eyes I saw
not only the long story of time but
that strange beauty that is inextricably
bound up with the deep glory of God.

         - Brian Trapp, September 22, 2006

Today is September 22, a very significant day in the Trapp household. There are three reasons why this date is significant to me, and I'll put them in ascending order of importance, with the most trivial being first and the most meaningful being last.

First, September 22, 2004 is the original airdate of the pilot for ABC's Lost, the only TV show I watch regularly. I've blogged before on why I like this show so much (see the TV category for my Lost posts). I like any drama that deals seriously with questions of faith and philosophy, even if said drama is written by Hollywood writers who know absolutely nothing about faith or philosophy. More relevant to the show itself, September 22, 2004 was the date that Oceanic Flight 815 crashed onto the mysterious island.

Second, September 22 is the birthday of Frodo Baggins, hero of J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy, and his uncle Bilbo Baggins of Tolkien's earlier The Hobbit. Anyone who knows me knows that I'm a huge Tolkien fan, and if you asked me what one book (other than the Bible) that I would like to have with me on a desert island, it would probably be The Lord of the Rings.

Third and most importantly, September 22, 2005 is the date my daughter was born, so she shares a birthday with two of my favorite fictional characters. To tell you the truth, knowing my wife's due date was in September I was secretly hoping this would be the case, but I was operating under the false impression that Frodo and Bilbo's birthday was September 24th. It wasn't until eight or nine months later that I opened my copy of The Fellowship of the Ring to find that Bilbo's famous birthday party - a fateful event in the LOTR saga - was celebrating his birthday of the 22nd. On a side note, I chronicled my wife's pregnancy with our digital camera and put together a now famous video called The Arrival of Lillie Kate. Or at least it's famous in Florence, Alabama and a few circles in Louisville, Kentucky. Click the link to watch it.

But there's more. My nephew, Landon, was born about an hour and a half after Lillie Kate. Thus both Trapp babies - the first of their generation in my immediate family - share the same birthday. This was not planned by either me, my brother, or our wives.

Tolkien had Bilbo and Frodo share the same birthday as a way of illustrating the fact that their fates were intertwined. As ringbearers they would change the world and be forever altered by their experience, and while I certainly hope that the lives of Lillie Kate and Landon have a lasting impact on the world, I hope they don't have to fight any giant spiders or carry any cursed jewelry to do so.

And yes, I am aware that I am a geek.

So far this month nineteen days have passed but I have only written new posts on three of them. For those who frequent this site, I apologize. Thus is the life of a grad student when the semester starts. Maybe I'll start posting book reviews of the roughly twelve thousand books I have to read over the next few months.

I am now a dual blogger. I figured my readers here at ChristianThinker.net don't really care what I have to say about video games, so I started a new blog devoted to one of my favorite recreational activities. It's called gamer/Christian and you can find it here. I've recently been wanting to start something like this since there are all kinds of Christian sites and blogs that take a critical look at TV, movies, books, etc., but very few that do the same for video games. And while we're on the subject of games and new blogs, my Xbox 360 has started its own blog. Very weird.

O dearest, dearest girl! my heart For better lore would seldom yearn, Could I but teach the hundredth part Of what from thee I learn.

- Slightly adapted (!) from Wordsworth, "Anecdote for Fathers"

I'll be out of town for the next week with no internet access, so blogging here at ChristianThinker.net will be on hiatus until then.

I think it's probably good to post a picture of myself once in a blue moon just so readers of this blog will have a face to match with the blogger. This is me and my daughter, Lillie Kate, AKA the cutest baby in the annals of human history. And thanks to Alex Forrest, whose post today inspired me to do this.

Here is the scene: it is about 6:45 this morning and I, my wife, and my baby daughter are in the kitchen of our home in Louisville, Kentucky. My wife is sitting at the breakfast table eating Cheerios, and I am feeding the baby her rice cereal. My wife is actually sitting at the table's farthest chair, a seat that neither of us ever sits in. She has sat there because it is where the baby cannot see her; if she is in my daughter's field of vision then the baby will be too distracted to eat her cereal.

Consider this: it is extremely strange for all three of us to be in the kitchen at one time in the morning. My wife and I take turns getting up with the baby and feeding her, while the other one gets to sleep a little later. I can only remember one or two other times that all three of us were in the kitchen in the morning. My wife is up with us this morning because she has to get ready to drive to Alabama to see her family. She had planned on leaving Friday with the baby, as she usually does, but she decided to leave Thursday instead because the forecast for Friday across Kentucky and Tennessee was for heavy rain. Again, my wife has visited family in Alabama dozens of times in the four years since we have lived in Louisville, but I can never once remember her leaving on a Thursday.

My point is that the state of affairs that we found ourselves in this morning was highly out of the ordinary due to various factors. Now let's go back to the kitchen table. I am feeding the baby and my wife is eating Cheerios. Out of the corner of her eye she sees a robin sitting on the fence of our neighbors' house that is two lots down from ours. She admires the beauty of the bird and carries on with her breakfast. A few moments later, she sees something bright red or orange fall down from the gutter of the same neighbors' house. She thinks it is the robin but does not understand why he would be making a nosedive toward the ground. She looks closer at the house and sees a thin stream of smoke coming from the gutter area from which she had seen the orange-colored thing fall. At this point she says to me, "Brian, I think our neighbor's house may be on fire."

It's official: I'll be starting my Ph.D. in Christian Philosophy at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in the fall. I just finished my M. Div. at Southern in December and I was greatly enriched and edified during my time there. My faculty supervisor will be Dr. Mark Coppenger. Dr. Coppenger is a pastor, writer, and teacher and did his Ph.D. in philosophy at Vanderbilt University. I look forward to working with him and spending the next few years in Louisville.

I'm a tall, pasty white male with a beautiful wife and the two best kids in the world. I'm also an orthodox Christian and I'm finishing up my Ph.D. in philosophy at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, specializing in philosophy of religion and metaethics. If you must know, the title of my dissertation is, God and Moral Properties: A Trinitarian Realist Model of Theistic Metaethics.

You can also check out my Facebook page or you can always follow me on Twitter.