Foundational Stories 1 (Campmeeting 2014)

We're back!  I (David) apologize for the lack of a podcast last weekend.  I was preaching at my local church and forgot about the podcast entirely.  If you're interested, let me know and I can post a link to it.

This week begins the second session from our Story presentations at Campmeeting 2014.  We entitled it "Foundational Stories."  Underlying the small stories we tell are larger stories about what stories are and how we should relate to them.  Technically, this can be termed "foundational philosophy."  To begin the presentation, Dale and I talked about how each of us began to grapple with foundational stories through our own (academic) experiences.  This is one of my favourite presentations because we lay out many of the guiding ideas that have shaped the rest of our thought.  It's great listening to it again and being reminded of these things.

I hope you enjoy listening.


Foundational Stories 1

Nietzsche, Paul, Story and Practice: Spectrum Review Part 3

This week we look at a few different things, continuing on the theme of language or story breaking down.  David briefly presents his experiences reading Nietzsche and how his writings kept taking him back to Paul, then we look at the question of how the way we live can be at odds with the stories we tell  We look at this question in the context of two of the other roundtable discussions from the Third Way Conference, on Adventist story-telling and on the history of pacifism within Adventism.  Both are examples of how the stories we tell, or forget to tell, can stand at odds with how we view the world based on our beliefs and lifestyle choices.

Specturm Conference Review Part 3

Our question this week - what are stories that you were told as a child that did not mesh with the way your family lived, or with the beliefs you were raised with?

Made for the Story?

One of the ways to start talking about something is to, well, start talking about it.  To that end, here is the first in a long series of podcasts! Unfortunately I pulled out the mic when we were already a little bit into the conversation, so here's an intro.

We were talking about Jacques Ellul's book On Freedom, Love, and Power in the context of a discussion about how we use stories, especially in a culture where we have stories that can tell us what to do in every decision.  Do we view our myths and stories as boundaries, boxes, that we must live in, or do are they less boundaries and more guides?  Do we have a mixture of the two?  Our discussion is here:

     Were we made for the story, or the story made for us?

     And a second link via Spreaker with it's own forum for comments

And an addendum - here are links and citations to some of the texts and stories referenced in the course of the the discussion.

     Brown, Wendy. States of injury: Power and freedom in late modernity. Vol. 120. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995.

     As it Happens interview with Tariq Ali on the death of Hugo Chavez

     Ellul, Jacques. On Freedom, Love, and Power. University of Toronto Press, 2010.

     Ingold, Tim. Lines:: A Brief History. Routledge, 2007.

     Selmanovic, Samir. It's Really All About God: Reflections of a Muslim Atheist Jewish Christian. Jossey-Bass, 2009.

     The Hebrew Yeshua versus the Greek Jesus, a presentation by Nehemia Gordon, a Karaite Jew

     Choice: a podcast from Radiolab.

Many of the other stories referenced, The Bible, Rambo, The Shawshank Redemption, The Hurt Locker, and The Hobbit you'll have to find for yourself, as well as the two works by Joss Whedon referenced, Firefly and Angel.