August 3, 2007 Posted by Roger Overton
closeAuthor: Roger Overton
Name: Roger Overton
Email: rogeroverton@hotmail.com
Site: http://ateamblog.com
About: Roger Overton is currently pursuing a Masters degree at Talbot School of Theology. He has addressed various churches, schools and youth camps throughout the United States. Roger was co-editor of The New Media Frontier (Crossway, 2008) and God and Governing (Wipf & Stock, 2009).
Roger can be emailed at rogeroverton@hotmail.com.See Authors Posts (570)
“Some say John the Baptist, others say Elijah. Personally I think you're the most totally awesome surfer!”
(images from http://www.wearefishermen.com, where these are also for sale)
Apparently even Surfer Jesus can't get tan enough to look like He is actually from the Middle East.
And apparently, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God,” just isn't good enough. Some people really do try hard to make Jesus look like the Jesus they want him to be.
Posted in Main Page, Miscellaneous, Roger's Posts 
6 Comments »
August 1, 2007 Posted by Roger OvertoncloseAuthor: Roger Overton
Name: Roger Overton
Email: rogeroverton@hotmail.com
Site: http://ateamblog.com
About: Roger Overton is currently pursuing a Masters degree at Talbot School of Theology. He has addressed various churches, schools and youth camps throughout the United States. Roger was co-editor of The New Media Frontier (Crossway, 2008) and God and Governing (Wipf & Stock, 2009).
Roger can be emailed at rogeroverton@hotmail.com.See Authors Posts (570)
I consider myself a forgiving guy. I actually have a
difficult time holding grudges against people, and I can only think of one or
two people who have caused me to struggle with the practice.
That is, except for when I think of myself. When I consider
Roger Overton, I can be the most critical and unforgiving person you might ever
meet. The worst of it led me into a very serious depression for about a month,
and that continued as a less serious depression for another eleven months (this
was several years ago).
How is it that I can forgive others so easily but I run
myself into the ground even for lesser offenses? It’s because I hold myself to
a higher standard than anyone else. In my mind, it’s okay for those around me
to slip occasionally, but I ought to be better than that. It’s not so much that
I think that I should be better than other people, but I hold myself to a high
standard regardless of what standards those around me live up to.
I know other people have struggled with this problem as
well, so I’d like to share how I’ve been dealing with it in hopes that it might
help you. At some point it occurred to me that my inability to forgive myself
is actually a pride issue and a source of further sin.
While my personal standards are rather high, God’s standard
is much higher: perfection. In reality, I fail to meet His standards far more
often than I fail my own. Yet, if Christ has died for my sins (and I believe He
has), then God is no longer holding my sins against me (Isaiah 43:25, 1 John
1:9). What does it mean if God can forgive me for not living up to His perfect
standard but I can’t forgive myself for failing at a lesser standard? It means
that I think my standards are higher than God’s, and that is a rather prideful
sin. It also involves disobedience since we are repeatedly commanded to forgive
(Matthew 6:14-15, Ephesians 4:32). Certainly those commandments include us
under the umbrella of our grace toward others.
Indeed, we are called to forget our past. Philippians 3:13-14
“Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own. But one thing I do:
forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press
on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.” We
cannot “strain forward to what lies ahead” if we are stuck in our past sins. We
cannot press on toward the goal if we are looking backward.
The way forward is marked with repentance; not
self-condemnation. I’ve found that the best I can do to practice God’s grace in
my life is to avoid wallowing in my guilt and direct my frustrations toward
doing better in the future by the power of His Holy Spirit. Withholding
forgiveness from ourselves is at best unproductive and at worse sinful. If we
truly want to practice God’s grace in our lives, we must forgive ourselves out
of humility and submission to God’s amazing grace, and repent toward a life
that brings glory to God and enjoys Him forever.
“For Christ also sufferedonce
for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God,
being put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit.” -1 Peter 3:18
Posted in Ethics, Main Page, Roger's Posts, Theology No Comments »
July 29, 2007 Posted by Roger OvertoncloseAuthor: Roger Overton
Name: Roger Overton
Email: rogeroverton@hotmail.com
Site: http://ateamblog.com
About: Roger Overton is currently pursuing a Masters degree at Talbot School of Theology. He has addressed various churches, schools and youth camps throughout the United States. Roger was co-editor of The New Media Frontier (Crossway, 2008) and God and Governing (Wipf & Stock, 2009).
Roger can be emailed at rogeroverton@hotmail.com.See Authors Posts (570)
Word came out of Comic-Con today that Disney will be filming all seven of the Chronicles of Narnia books. The original plan was to only make four of them. My guess is that the money was too good to pass on. They'll also be accelerating the production schedule so that a new film is released every May. Prince Caspian, the next in the series, is due out May 2008. See MTV for more info.
A teaser site has been launched for the next Batman flick- The Dark Knight. The big deal is that you can watch a teaser (which is pretty much just audio), though there are a few other things there to look at. Batman Begins was outstanding, so I'm very interested in seeing how this turns out.
Our friend John Divito (The Reformed Baptist Thinker) posted some information on Brian McLaren's next book: Everything Must Change: Jesus, Global Crises, and a Revolution of Hope. There's a brief review and an interview by Publisher's Weekly, as well as some YouTube readings by McLaren himself. I'm really not sure why he read from the first passage for YouTube- I don't feel like it told me anything about the book. The second reading I found agreeable, though his constant repositioning of the camera is nauseating.
For those in the Southern California area, Apologetics.com will be hosting a conference on “Postmodernism & The Emerging Church” August 18th beginning at 3:00pm. J.P. Moreland and Craig Hazen are the main speakers with several of the Apologetics.com staff teaching breakout sessions.
Southern Baptist Theological Seminary will be hosting a grand conference on C.S. Lewis this October 26-27. It features Lewis's secretary, Walter Hooper, one of the founders of the New York C.S. Lewis Society, James Como, and one of the preeminent Lewis scholars of our day, Bruce Edwards. Other notable scholars will be presenting papers, as well as less notables such as myself. My paper will be “The Virtuous Case for Christ: How Lewis's Theological Virtues Should Aid Christians Living
in a Postmodern Culture.”
Further down the road is another great conference in Southern California hosted by Trinity Law School: God and Governing. It will be February 1-2, 2008 and feature such outstanding speakers as Os Guinness, David Wells, Vishal Mangalwadi, and a few others.
Posted in Main Page, Miscellaneous, Roger's Posts 1 Comment »
July 19, 2007 Posted by Roger OvertoncloseAuthor: Roger Overton
Name: Roger Overton
Email: rogeroverton@hotmail.com
Site: http://ateamblog.com
About: Roger Overton is currently pursuing a Masters degree at Talbot School of Theology. He has addressed various churches, schools and youth camps throughout the United States. Roger was co-editor of The New Media Frontier (Crossway, 2008) and God and Governing (Wipf & Stock, 2009).
Roger can be emailed at rogeroverton@hotmail.com.See Authors Posts (570)
“What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun.” Ecclesiastes 1:9
We are far too accustomed to hearing about “new things.” When shopping we are constantly faced with “new and improved” products. Our politicians claim to advance “new” plans and ideas. Even some theologians argue that they’ve got a “new perspective” to offer us from time to time. And now many of us are claiming to be involved in something called “new media.” Are we really talking about something new, or is there nothing new under the sun?
From the context of Ecclesiastes, we can see that this famous verse refers to satisfaction in life. No amount of human creativity can bring about something so new that it will change where we derive our satisfaction or our salvation. These have always been found in God and they always will be found in Him. The writer of Ecclesiastes did not condemn human ingenuity altogether, but made it clear that all of our attempts to satisfy ourselves are futile.
Still, the claim that there is “nothing new under the sun” is generally true when more widely applied. The voyages to the moon brought man to a new destination, but traveling is something man has always done and will continue to do. Technology simply enhanced man’s ability to travel.
Similarly, new media is nothing more than communication. All that is new is the form of communication. Instead of writing to a local paper hoping to get an opinion published, many people have turned to publishing their thoughts on the Internet (primarily on blogs). Internet technology has enhanced textual communication by allowing just about everyone to publish their opinions. Among other things, this gives people a greater ability to exercise their freedom of speech.
If we were simply to leave it at that, though, we would be uncritical stewards of this new technology. It is far too easy to embrace the intended benefits of new technology without even noticing the unintended consequences. One such consequence is that readers become accustomed to brief, cursory thoughts and lose their appetite for longer, deeper commentaries. We might expect, then, that in the long-run people will generally have a lower tolerance for complex lines of argument and will only give ear to pithy sound bites. So while new media is merely a new way of doing something we’ve done before, it does bring to bear both new opportunities and new consequences.
Posted in Main Page, New Media 2 Comments »
After that last post, you may need to read this over on The Thinklings–and some of the comments are as funny as the post.
That's a much better way to start your weekend.
Posted in Amy's Posts, Main Page, Miscellaneous No Comments »
I hear a pretty constant stream of a specific kind of personal attack by leftists against conservatives, including to my face. And honestly, I’m sick of it. The basic idea they’re convinced of is that deep down, we have secret, selfish motives for everything, and/or that we’re downright evil. You can see how this leads to fine, rational conversations about policy with us.
Here’s an excerpt from the latest example of the vile, civilized-political-discourse-destroying, irrational assumption that conservatives (and in this particular case, the President) have only evil motives (even if good leftists can’t always uncover them) spewed by Peter Mehlman on the Huffington Post. (If they take it down, you’ll be able to find the whole thing here.) And frankly, this isn’t an unusual opinion, in my experience:
So now we’re six and a half years into Bush and everyone from Helen Thomas on down is declaring him the worst president ever. What no one is saying is the one overarching reason he’s the worst: the Bush administration is the first that doesn’t even mean well.
With the possible exception of immigration reform — and who knows what grotesque financial incentive underlies that — try to pinpoint even one policy motivated by the desire to lessen human suffering, to improve the life of citizens. Nothing. There is nothing….
It’s been the ultimate frustration to consider the people who don’t see Bush’s malevolence….You could argue that even the world’s worst fascist dictators at least meant well. They honestly thought were doing good things for their countries by suppressing blacks/eliminating Jews/eradicating free enterprise/repressing individual thought/killing off rivals/invading neighbors, etc. Only the Saudi royal family is driven by the same motives as Bush, but they were already entrenched. Bush set a new precedent. He came into office with the attitude of “I’m so tired of the public good. What about my good? What about my rich friends’ good?”
How can anyone not see it? It’s not that their policies have been misguided or haven’t played out right. They. Don’t. Even. Mean. Well.
There you go, folks. I’m so disgusted by this that I have no commentary–at least, none without expletives, and this is a family show.
If you’re interested in reading a more level-headed response to this phenomenon that I wrote back when I still naively believed I could reason with leftists about conservative ideas–before I had banged my head against the wall of “secret evil motives” so often that I lost the motivation to interact, read this.
Posted in Amy's Posts, Main Page, Politics 3 Comments »
Do you ever get those spam emails that have a short advertisement at the top (the real point of the email) and then fill up the rest of the space with bits of text gathered throughout the internet to create a semi-coherent message designed to get said spam past the junk mail gatekeeper?
Well, they must somehow do word searches on blogs and then create the text disguise accordingly, sending targeted emails to the connected addresses, because this is an excerpt from the one I got last Monday:
The Bush administration blew their chance with lies, bad faith and monstrous incompetence, and the majority of conservatives I know feel betrayed. It must have been in much the same condition in Joseph Smith's day when fragments of it were glued haphazardly to other totally unrelated papyri. Although his horrible actions are nothing to be admired, his skill at forgery and his ability to fool even the best experts for years was an impressive feat. It would be an understatement to say I loved my mission. Even Mormon scholars agree that.
She refused to believe me. He would charge people a nominal fee to let them view the papyri and mummies. So he was willing, based on what we knew at the time, to let Sadam [sic] retain WMD and work with terrorists, that is a very strong defense position?
I brought this email out several times this week to relive the chuckle. Then finally, today I got curious about where some of the pieced-together fragments used for this spam came from, so I picked a sentence and Googled it. It brought me directly to my friend Rob Sivulka's site at Mormoninfo.org.
Either it's a very small world, or their technology is scary out of control.
Posted in Amy's Posts, Main Page, Miscellaneous No Comments »
In Genesis 9:6, God commands, “Whoever sheds man’s blood, by man his blood shall be shed, for in the image of God He made man.” Because he bears the image of God, the value of a man is so great that there is only one punishment worthy of the unjust taking of his life. The ultimate crime against the innocent demands the ultimate penalty for the guilty. This is not only just, it’s also a way to protect the innocent. According to the article “Studies say death penalty deters crime,” anywhere between 3 and 18 (depending on the study) lives are saved when a murderer is executed.
“Science does really draw a conclusion. It did. There is no question about it,” said Naci Mocan, an economics professor at the University of Colorado at Denver. “The conclusion is there is a deterrent effect.”
A 2003 study he co-authored, and a 2006 study that re-examined the data, found that each execution results in five fewer homicides, and commuting a death sentence means five more homicides. “The results are robust, they don’t really go away,” he said. “I oppose the death penalty. But my results show that the death penalty (deters) — what am I going to do, hide them?”
Another professor responded:
“Abolitionists or others, like me, who are skeptical about the death penalty haven’t given adequate consideration to the possibility that innocent life is saved by the death penalty.”
If the findings are correct, they pose a real dilemma for those who oppose the death penalty: Is it right to keep a murderer alive if it means as many as 18 innocent people will die?
Posted in Amy's Posts, Ethics, Main Page, Politics 18 Comments »
I came across an incredible article, “Death of a Guru” about a man named Rabi Maharaj who left the comforts of being worshipped within his Hindu religion for something even more enticing. He had become increasingly unsettled as he came to realize that his view of the divine didn't match what he knew to be true about goodness and reality. Ultimately, he left the emptiness and inevitable losing of oneself that happens through meditation (a process he had witnessed in his father) and embraced the One outside of himself who is real and good and solid.
A condensed version of the story:
For eight long years [my father] uttered not a word. The trancelike condition he had achieved is called in the East a state of higher consciousness and can be attained only through deep meditation…. “Why is Father that way?” I would ask my mother, still too young to understand. “He is someone very special–the greatest man you could have for a father,” she would reply. “He is seeking the true Self that lies within us all, the One Being, of which there is no other. And that's what you are too, Rabi….”
I was obviously [according to the astrologers and palm readers] a chosen vessel, destined for early success in the search for union with Brahman (the One). The forces that had guided my father were now guiding me….
It was encouraging to learn that the lines on my palms and the planets and stars, according to those who interpreted them, all agreed I would become a great Hindu leader…. How I loved religious ceremonies–especially private ones in our own home or those of others, where friends and relatives would crowd in. There I would be the center of attention, admired by all. I loved to move through the audience, sprinkling holy water on worshipers or marking foreheads with the sacred white sandalwood paste. I also loved how the worshipers, after the ceremony, bowed low before me to leave their offerings at my feet….
During my third year in high school I experienced an increasingly deep inner conflict. My growing awareness of God as the Creator, separate and distinct from the universe He had made, contradicted the Hindu concept that god was everything, that the Creator and the Creation were one and the same. If there was only One Reality, then Brahman was evil as well as good, death as well as life, hatred as well as love. That made everything meaningless, life an absurdity. It was not easy to maintain both one's sanity and the view that good and evil, love and hate, life and death were One Reality….
Before I finished [my prayer to Jesus for forgiveness], I knew that Jesus wasn't just another one of several million gods. He was the God for whom I had hungered. He Himself was the Creator. Yet, He loved me enough to become a man and die for my sins. With that realization, tons of darkness seemed to lift and a brilliant light flooded my soul.
Read the full story here.
Posted in Amy's Posts, Apologetics, Main Page, Miscellaneous No Comments »
From John 9:2-3:
And His disciples asked Him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he would be born blind?” Jesus answered, “It was neither that this man sinned, nor his parents; but it was so that the works of God might be displayed in him.”
I was reminded again as I read this last night that everything is about God. This man had endured blindness for who knows how many years, but it wasn't for nothing; it was for the noblest of all causes–to display the glory and power of God. How much easier it is to endure everything when we remember that it's the glory of God that matters most (more than our comfort or even our lives), and that our sufferings for His glory are worth it because of what they accomplish for His plan! When seen this way, we can embrace them as our duty and willing service and submit to them “for the joy set before us” both now and in the end.
Posted in Amy's Posts, Main Page, Poetry/Scripture/Liturgy/Etc., Theology No Comments »
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