Saturday, August 13, 2005

Aslan's Forum: 2005-2006


For the past couple of years, I've facilitated a readers' forum at Oak Hills Baptist Church. The forum, titled Aslan's Forum, was started in the late 90s by Wendell Hoffman.

The forum was a big reason why my wife and I chose to attend Oak Hills. Moving from the Dallas metroplex to Sioux Falls, I had pretty much given up on the possibility of having a thoughtful, intellectual reading group, or something like Denton Bible Church's Lay Institute. But, when we visited Oak Hills, the sign for Aslan's Forum was stading smack-dab in the middle of the hallway. The group became a real blessing for me.

Now that I'm facilitating the group, the hardest part of the job is compiling the list of books to be read during a given year. I get several helpful suggestions from group members, but much of the process consists of me putting together a list of books that I find compelling, and then tweaking the list in hopes that it is perceived as intellectually rigorous and compelling without being too academic. I'm never sure if I succeed.

The reading list for 2005-2006 was generated with a loose theme centering on the senses. Four of the seven books have some connection with one of the senses. Of course, some of those books are more closely connected with the senses than others. In any event, here's the reading list for the next year. It goes public in September. Anyone interested in participating can obtain more details from the web site for Aslan's Forum.


  • October 2005: C. S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
  • November 2005: Philip Yancey's Rumors of Another World
  • December 2005: Bill McKibben's Hundred Dollar Holiday
  • February 2006: Henri Nouwen's The Return of the Prodigal Son
  • March 2006: Robin Jensen's The Substance of Things Seen
  • April 2006: Michael Schut's Food & Faith: Justice, Joy, and Daily Bread
  • May 2006: Richard Mouw's The Smell of Sawdust

Monday, August 01, 2005

There Goes My Life


I dropped the kids off with the grandparents today. It's the first time they've gone away on their own. Usually if both my wife and I have to be out of town or something, then one of the grandparents comes to South Dakota to stay at our house. In any event, as I was driving home--like that scene from the movie Better Off Dead, Kenny Chesney's "There Goes My Life" came on the radio. (Those unfamilar with the song can at least take a look at the lyrics here.) While the song is about a young man who became a dad as a teenager, and I didn't become a dad until my 30s--and under much different circumstances, I suspect it is a song that resonates with most fathers of little girls (of all ages). At least, I hope it would on some level.

I'll admit to being a guy who tears up at some odd things. For instance, Bill Murray's Scrooged makes me well up every time. Chesney's song hits me in a similar fashion, especially on days when I've just started driving north while the kids are riding south. It was a bittersweet three or four minutes.

Those minutes did, however, revive my memory of a web-based writing project that crossed my brain a while back. One that I've considered using as sort of a special-topics-creative-writing-over-Interim course. Given the impact that music has on our lives, the way songs can function almost as bookmarks allowing us to flip back to particular emotional places in our past, I have this notion of a web site called "The Synoptic Jukebox."

The interface to the site would function like one of those old countertop jukeboxes, where you flip the pages to see the various songs available. When readers select a particular title, they would be met with a collection of writings connected in some way with the song. The writings wouldn't be about the songs--at least not directly--but about those emotional places that we associate with various songs. Hall and Oates's "Sara Smile," for example, might connect with an account of a high school dance where some goofy young teen (to remain nameless) requested the song in order to orchestrate the perfect moment to ask a certain Sara to dance. But, perhaps the DJ at this dance, who said he'd be glad to play the song, never got around to doing so, and the goofy young teen--waiting for the perfect moment--never asked the girl to dance. That's just one hypothetical example.

The intersections of music and experience seem such fertile ground that the site could grow rapidly, and given a sufficient number of voices, could become quite fascinating. Regional difference. Generational difference. Etc.

gad