Lucy

I remember sitting there in a class this last year in Nancey Murphy and Warren Brown's Portraits of Human Nature when lecture materials eventually turned to the proposal for human mental scaffolding. Let the reader know, the premise of the class was that human beings are emergent, singular entities understood to have matured, evolved even, over millions of years to become the persons they currently are. The class entertained topics such as monism (that humans do not possess souls, but ought to be conceived of as whole entities), the Resurrection of the Dead, and evolution.


This evening, after I finished cleaning up dinner dishes (Henry made a very tasty pizza, mmm) we were listening to NPR when a quick news blurb came on during a commercial break during Talk of the Nation about a new fossil display that would be making its way to the US (Texas, to be specific). Discovered some thirty years ago in Ethiopia, the "3.3 million-year-old skeleton of a child, the oldest child fossil on record", has come to be called by the scientific community as "Lucy." I had not thought about Lucy since taking this class, but as soon as I heard her name on the radio I was reminded of the way I first felt about her. Mind you, at the time of this class I had never been presented in a formal lecture setting a pro-evolutionary biology lesson. Accordingly, to be instructed of this material by one of my all-time favorite Fuller profs and a well respected neuro-psychologist was, to say the least, thrilling (seriously). Soaking all of this wonderful knowledge in, a feeling of gratitude for all the years of perseverance and triumph Lucy represented was almost too much to take. Certainly, this course came the quarter after the quarter I had a class on the writings of J. Moltmann (in which I discovered just how much process theism lay beneath my theological constructions), and perhaps that correlation ought to have something to say about how sometimes I am all too susceptible to being caught up in some new idea to me and don't give enough personal, critical thought. Nevertheless, I could not help but feel that throughout all the years of evolution God was guiding his creation to something new and relational. Something about this Deity's forbearance to wait long enough to one day engage with these hominid ancestors of ours is beautiful. I guess that it just made me feel proud to be a part of something that has been going on for millions of years and, so long as we don't greenhouse gas our way into extinction, will continue on into the future.

So, in conclusion, I would like to thank Henry for making a delicious pizza tonight, NPR for providing helpful news wire updates, Nancey Murphy and Warren Brown for a thought-provoking class lecture, and God for having such great resolve to see creation to this point in history, even when we mess things up all the time.

If you loving composting so much, then why don't you marry it?

I am gonna shoot straight with you right now. I love the idea of making my own fertilizer with my half-rotted, worm-eaten banana peels and lettuce. The other day I composted for the first time. Happily, I avoided a sophomoric rookie mistake of simply dumping my decomposing vegetable peels onto the leafy goodness, remembering the brief training I received from one of the elder statesmen of Allelous, Susan Young, wife of Steve Young (not the former 49ers QB with a rocket cannon for an arm, the cooler version; the one with homemade bookshelves brimming to the top with multiplicitous theological treatises--ah, books.) Anyway, as I took that shovel in my hands and began to unearth what lay beneath this shallow grave of bio-degradables, I rejoiced in the fact that one day these remnants of food would be transported to just outside my window to help nourish the small garden Dave, Henry and myself hope to landscape in the next few months. Can you imagine it? Waking up and going outside to pick some fresh fruit to sweeten up a healthy bowl of bran cereal, or returning from work and before you step into the house plucking a delicious cucumber for the evening's salad. I can't wait. So I guess that until the day comes when I am getting on in age, white-haired and allowed to be beligerent to little children, who choose to run on my freshly mowed lawn (that is, Old Man Thompson--please be patient, a blog explaining this dream persona will one day follow), I will have to resign myself to Tree-Hugging, hopefully-not-anemic, Farmer Thompson.

1314 Los Robles #BB

Well, yesterday it finally happened. A long-anticipated day of moving came and went without a hitch (except for Henry's box springs falling out of my mom's truck only to be quickly snatched up by the expedient hands of one C. Laine Julian). At this present moment in reality, only the bedroom found its way into some semblance of order before both Henry and I crashed (our third roommate Awesome Dave, who will be gracing the Southland with his charming presence this weekend, will, sadly enough, not be moving in until early September). Nevertheless, Henry and I have avowed to carry out a pre-emptive strike upon the clutter of this house with policy of sock and awe that would make William Kristol and the rest of his neo-conservative PNAC friends proud.

Anyway, I am gonna have to take off now and take me a Greek quiz. Today we are being tested on the subjunctive mood. Accordingly, because I studied very little for this quiz, I might not do so well on it. Then, I could get lucky and pass it with flying colors making it look like I studied for several hours the day before. Personally, I would settle for something in the middle.

Well, here's to new apartments, massive cleaning efforts and barely scathing by on foreign language examinations.