Category Archives: Weekly Post

Ten New Games for Long Car Rides

Leave a comment Posted by on October 13, 2017

October is the month for retreating in New England. This week I’m in between two retreats to New Hampshire, my 11th and 12th fall retreats there in my six years of grad school — I’ve gone to all six math department retreats, four with my church, and two with the Graduate Christian Fellowship.

Retreats in grad school have provided what frisbee tournaments in college and sightseeing across the Western US in my childhood did: Long car or bus rides. When I’m not sleeping, getting to know or catching up with people, or just pontificating on society in general together, it’s often the right context to play some kind of game with the other passengers.

But given the moving environment and constrained seating positions, such rides don’t easily lend themselves to nearly any of the board games in our collection. Card games like Hanabi or A Game for Good Christians probably come closest but often those need some kind of surface to play onto. Growing up, my siblings and I would keep a wooden tray under one of the seats in our mini-van, which we would then place on the armrests of the two captain’s chairs for such a surface on which to play card games, but that was always a bit imperfect as cards would slide around whenever we went around a windy mountain road.

In this post, though, I want to focus on games that don’t require any advance preparation or equipment. Many of these games typically spread by word-of-mouth, but I’m hoping that by articulating them in a blog post, we can speed up that process. They aren’t all “new” per se, but unless you spend a lot of time around me, I can almost guarantee you haven’t heard of half of these. Without further ado, here are the categories:

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board games, Personal Experience, Weekly Post , , , ,

Turning Off the Noise

1 Comment Posted by on October 6, 2017

One of my favorite albums of all time is Switchfoot’s The Beautiful Letdown (2003). In addition to the radio smash hits Dare You to Move, This is Your Life, and Gone, the album also featured a song that I initially found a little strange. Here’s the chorus:

If we’re adding to the noise
turn off this song
If we’re adding to the noise
turn off your stereo, radio, video

Why would the band be telling you to turn off their music? Is this some weird reverse psychological tactic?

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Personal Experience, politics, Weekly Post , , , , ,

What hangups do you have with Christianity?

7 Comments Posted by on September 29, 2017

I originally titled this blog “The Christian Rationalist” because both my faith and what I hope is at least close to rational thought together form the basis for how I live my life. It’s true that it sounds a bit pretentious, but “A Christian Rationalist” just didn’t have the same ring to it.

More subversively, though, I’m implicitly claiming that Christianity and rational thought are compatible. This cuts both ways: obviously some usually nonreligious folks find Christianity irrational, but there are also Christians who find rational thought antithetical to their faith. In the larger context of the blog, I try to push on both misperceptions, modeling a successful synthesis. Here are a few examples:

But that’s only the beginning. I’d like to write more about this synthesis, at the very least to be able to bring my friends together from these different camps and articulate the core of our disagreement. It strikes me as rather strange that so many thoughtful people would firmly fall on one side or another without some sort of means of resolving that disagreement.

At some point when I’m better able to articulate what rational thought entails, I’ll ask the reverse question, but for now, I’d like to ask my rationality-minded non-Christian friends what holds them back from joining the faith. What hang ups do you have with Christianity?

Let me drive this home a bit further by sharing my experience. From being a Christian, I’ve gotten a natural community almost anywhere I go, a robust ability to process both success and failure, and a sense of purpose bigger than myself. In just the last five years, my church has been literally my favorite part of living in Boston, and I met my wife and many of my closest friends through the Graduate Christian Fellowship.

If that’s a possibility, why not learn more? What stops you, or what would stop you if you thought about it, from looking into becoming a Christian?

Weekly Post

Farewell to Summer

5 Comments Posted by on September 22, 2017

As of about an hour ago, fall has officially begun. The equinox feels as good a time as any to reflect on my summer, as well as provide a cognitive break point and encourage myself to treat fall differently.

Normally, I reflect like this approximately once a month, reviewing my previous month, getting a handle on the big picture of my upcoming schedule, and setting some personal goals. I don’t write them for an audience, but my plans aren’t really secret — I often tell Grace or other friends like my community group what I’m thinking. In a certain sense, though, God is my audience, and I’ve certainly felt waves of conviction and resolve while reflecting, similar to those I’ve felt in church or reading through the Bible.

Naturally, though, my choice to make this reflection public before writing it will likely inflect my writing in various ways, some of which I might not even be aware of. I already feel a need to edit my language to be more precise; when writing for myself, I feel a bit more free to follow ideas as they come rather than retrace my steps to write more precisely. Anyways, here goes.

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board games, Personal Experience, Weekly Post , , , , ,

Five More Things Millennials Need to Kill

3 Comments Posted by on September 15, 2017

I’m a millennial, and I like to read about what’s unique about my generation, even if it’s just a lazy analysis of market trends that might as well be noise. But the one consistent thing I keep reading is that Millennials are Killing Everything. At least, that’s what the Miami Herald says, offering 27 examples. Business Insider claims that ‘Psychologically Scarred’ Millennials are killing countless industries, but I can count, and they only have 19 in their list. Even BuzzFeed seems to mock their own style of headline: Here Are 28 Things Millennials Are Killing In Cold Blood. Not to be outdone, Mashable offers 70 things millennials have killed.

Since this seems to be our generational superpower (apparently always alongside avocado toast), I have a few more things that I’d like to see us use it on.

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Lifehack, Philosophy, Weekly Post , , , , ,

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