Happy Thanksgiving everyone! While you are all settling down to a nice, filling, American-style meal, my fellow ex-patriots and I shall be attending lectures, researching and writing papers, and meeting with our professors. Not to worry though, our Thanksgiving has just been moved to Saturday instead. I'll let you know how it all turns out. I'm in charge of getting the turkeys carved on Friday night, and, for some unknown reason, they've decided to put me in charge of an afternoon football game. I tried to explain what "football" meant to me, but nonetheless I will attempt to organize the 'american-style,' as they put it, as best I can. By the way, the picture is my attempt at photographic-art... its the Bodliean Library at Night (5pm)...

There's not much to report, as usual. I just worked on papers all week. One on the historian Thomas Babington Macaulay (what a cool British middle name), and the other on the doctrine of the atonement. They were both great fun, and the Macaulay paper I presented last night. My tutor was impressed and I think it was actually one of my best papers so far. The question for that essay, and the one he just assigned me, also on Macaulay, were dreadfully easy. They have turned out to be simple "YES or NO" questions... well goodness, how do you say "yes" in 2,000 words?... I'm training myself to be efficient with my words.

The atonement paper was loads of fun. Its not as well written on paper, but the truths of it have be written on my heart. Mostly it seems that theological philosophers tend to abandon most elements that make God or Christ recognizable, and they tend to latch on to a single truth and then explain it to death as the "only reasonable understanding." This seems to have happened with the doctrine of the atonement. There are gobs of theories, each one focusing on one aspect of the idea, and for that reason incomplete... which spurs some other philosopher to develop a newer theory which deals with the problems but falls into the same illness.

For example, there is a theory that the atonement is all about Jesus defeating the evil powers and principalities of this world through his perfect life and innocent death under their hands. Another, suggests that Jesus is the sacrificial lamb which satisfies God's desires for justice. Another theory is that Christ's death pays off a debt we owe God. Yet another stands on the atonement as God opening the door for us to be reconciled with him. The problem is that all of these theories compete against one another, and I think they all have truth in them. It doesn't make sense to me why we would put God into our box of atonement and say, "it means this 100%." It seems perfectly reasonable to me that God used Christ's death to accomplish many things... conquering evil, paying off our debt and releasing us from punishment by claiming Christ as our perfect sacrifice, all for the purpose of becoming reconciled with God, because of His love and grace. So it was a fun paper.

Today, my lady-friend Shelby is flying into Britain. Her father work for United Airlines, and she's wanted to come to England for a long time, and what better time than when you know someone here, right? She'll celebrate Thanksgiving here with us, and then we'll spend a day in London. It ought to be a lot of fun, and I think she'll really like the people here... I sure do.

On that note, let me tell a quick story about my friend Adam's birthday. Adam turned 22 a few days ago, and at midnight, we decided to throw a big jamboree... We all had work to do, but how often do you really get to hang out with brilliant great friends? We decided to cook-up all the meat we had, and feast ourselves upon a manly meal. The result was a sausage, bacon, hamburger birthday cake, with potatoes, and fried vegetables. We completed this endeavor by 2am, and proceeded to watch the Shawshank redemption. It seemed like the guy thing to do. It was a ton of fun. A bunch of college guys, hanging out. It was a blast, and made me miss my friends, but happy to have added these guys to that list. Here's the video.


Happy Thanksgiving!