the sights and sounds of the asbury community
Jul 29th, 2010 by Matt Stout
This strip came about purely because I wanted to try and draw Henry Clay Morrison and then decided that I had to incorporate him into a strip. I like the idea that he’s silently weeping while peoples’ time is being wasted during class at the institution he founded.
Jul 21st, 2010 by Matt Stout
As a Georgia native, I gotta say I’m not thrilled about the switch to Pepsi. Sure, they’ve got Mountain Dew, but my hometown pride is still damaged. I was thinking about ways that I could still get Coke to drink while I’m at work, and it occurred to me that I might have to resort to deals in dark alleys.
Jul 13th, 2010 by Matt Stout
I’ve been enjoying Wimba Pronto, and I hope lots of people use it. It reminds me of my freshman year of college, before there was Facebook, when my friends and I checked each others’ AIM away messages to keep track of what was going on. I like having everybody in Asbury available for chat.
That being said, I think there is a huge potential downside in that if I have to use it for video chats in class, I think it could lead to loudmouth opinions being beamed into my living room.
Jul 5th, 2010 by Matt Stout
Sorry about the lack of comics lately! Summer lethargy is definitely to blame. I’m still doing the strip, though! I haven’t forgotten about it! This exact thing happened to a friend of mine who shall remain unnamed.
Jun 22nd, 2010 by krissi.carson
I (Krissi) am spending my summer in Toronto for my all-volunteer multi-cultural mentored ministry working at a children’s day camp that is part of Community Alliance Church located in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA, for short). For the summer I am staying with two active members of this church’s Persian church, one of its many ethnic churches. The people I’m staying with are a Christian married couple originally from Iran. Here is just a little glimpse of this summer (click on the photo to see the whole picture):
Life is always slower with Mammad and Mitra. Not that they don’t have fast paced lives at times, but when they sit for meals, they really sit. And they always invite me in. We sit for breakfast and chat. We sit for dinner and chat. If I’m around, we sit for lunch and chat, sometimes for hours, because in Persian culture, lunch is the biggest meal of the day. Mitra claims she’s not much of a cook, and yet in one week I’ve seen her cook more than my own mother may possibly have cooked in my entire eighteen year childhood (that says more about my mother than Mitra).
And then there’s the tea, the Persian Ceylon tea with the special ingredient (which she tells me I’m not allowed to tell to anyone). It’s not just a drink. It’s a series of conversations that span subjects and countries and sometimes even centuries (because the Persians have been civilized forever, you know). It’s peace on the back patio over-looking a pool and an expanse of forest while knowing that on the other side of the house, just a short walk away are the bluffs overlooking Lake Ontario. It’s an hour of remembering God and the world while momentarily forgetting the busyness of the city. Tea with Mammad and Mitra, while lounging on the back yard furniture, maybe with a fire going in the outside fireplace, if it’s evening and chilly, is everything the world isn’t but just might be if everyone sat back every day just like this—if everyone had just a little Persian blood in them. Even the sixty-something British friend of theirs I met the other day had to concede that Persian tea is the most superior.
These days, I have no money here in Canada. The cost of the work permit I didn’t know I would need upon entry into the country combined with no financial aid until mid-July means I’m out of cash. My poverty keeps me home these days, so I have nothing better to do with my time than chat over meals and tea with people who were, I’m told, living well cultured lives while my people were still living in caves. We learn, we laugh, I listen a lot. If poverty in the early Canadian summer looks like this, perhaps I might not mind, for now.
May 18th, 2010 by Matt Stout
I still haven’t done it.
May 12th, 2010 by jessica.hamilton
Stop by the Student Center and top off your mug. All week long there will be coffee, tea and hot chocolate stationed next to the main entrance to the Dining Hall.
1pm – 8pm come into the Student Center and relax by getting a free chair massage by a Licensed Massage Therapist. (the line is short so come now while you can!)
Then from 6pm- 9pm take a break with friends in the Dining Hall. Professional Karaoke/DJ will be playing and have some PIZZA. Order it the way you want it. Free of charge.
Sponsored by the Student Council.
May 10th, 2010 by Matt Stout
I have been so busy lately. I wish I could write a funny comic, but I just can’t manage it tonight. So I think I got a little loopy and random and this is what I came up with. On the plus side, I got an excuse to include my little dachshund Maggie! Isn’t she a cute widdwe puppy?!
Check out my regular comic at http://www.bigsandygilmore.com
May 9th, 2010 by krissi.carson
Counseling student, Trisha, reads in chapel.
photo by Krissi Carson
May 6th, 2010 by tom.fuerst
When was the last time Ford Motor Company tried to persuade you to purchase an F-150 through bullet-pointed pamphlets logically delineating their superiority to Chevy?
Probably never.
Ford’s too clever for that. They cast commercials our direction boasting of beautiful black trucks with purring engines; they seduce us with sweet scenes of slain mud pits and loyal construction workers. They don’t need logic to convert you to the kingdom of Ford, they bribe you with beautiful babes riding shot-gun while you pull a 30 ton payload.
Or when was the last time you purchased a pair of Nikes simply because the president of Nike came on TV and lectured you on their shoe’s health benefits?
Probably never.
They arrest our imagination with images of last-second three-pointers and impossible dunks, races won and the feeling of victory, stolen bases and the despair of defeat. They don’t need logic to convert you to the kingdom of Nike, they bribe you with, well, uh…puppets.
Great businesses have tapped into something the church has largely forgotten – people are not oriented to the goals of their kingdom through logical premises and nuanced argumentation – much less three points of alliterative kitsch. They orient us toward their marketing kingdoms before we ever think a logical thought; before our cognition kicks in we are formed by their images, sounds, smells, dreams, and tastes of “the good life.”
While the church is busy with bullet-points, power-points, and alliterative points, we’ve forgotten that it is not arguments that primarily shape people, but images, sounds, imagination, and tastes of “the good life.” Appeals to the senses, more than appeals to reason, shape human desire and form us toward a particular kind of kingdom. We, the church, need to begin exploring what this looks like and how the we can revive this understanding of human persons as embodied rather than mere thinking things. Or, to put it another way, “what would the church’s practices have to look like if they’re going to form us as the kind of people who desire something different – who desire the kingdom?” (James K. A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom. 25.)
