Well, so much going on lately, I haven’t checked in. My new son was born on June 24th, and his name is Abel Teague. It looks like I may never get to name a son Alyosha Greenleaf.

Speaking of Greenleaf, that’s no longer going to be the name of the street we live on. Why, you might ask? Are they renaming our street after some newly en vougue multicultural hero? Yes, our street is now called O’Higgins Highway, after the famous South American patriot, Bernardo O’Higgins, who was Chile’s great liberator from Spanish rule. What was wrong with Greenleaf? Well, no one has read the poems of John Greenleaf Whittier for a while, and they thought it would attract a different sort of population to the area, one that properly respects the great people of other nations and ethnic origins, and is ready to begin the heady work of class reconcilation. This sort of progress would never be made by the type of population that is more interested in John G. Whittier’s poetry.

Actually, we are leaving our beautiful, beloved and well-adapted apartment on Greenleaf to move into my parents house a few blocks away. The move will be a lot of work. I’m going to have to build a wireless network for our computers, since it won’t be feasible to wire the place with Cat5. And I will be without broadband internet for nearly a month before I get re-setup. I’m going to change from Earthlink to Verizon DSL in hopes of getting my service in place faster. Plus, I think Verizon charges less for some of the higher-speed packages. And Earthlink wanted to charge me $99 to have my service relocated. I’ve been their customer for six years (DSL for 2+), and that’s just lame.

Reading: let’s see, I bought a book of Billy Collin’s poems (Picnic, Lightning) last weekend and have deeply enjoyed them. I read Orson Scott Card’s Speaker for the Dead a month ago and was very impressed with its thoughtfulness and the way Card goes about exposing truth through narrative.

I read Four Perspectives on Salvation last month (edited by Dennis Okholm) while I was working on my application to teach at Biola University and enjoyed that quite a bit. I ended up agreeing the most with Alister McGrath’s approach, which was quite similar to Pinnock’s. I’d call it a measured inclusivism. What’s that? It means that all who are taken into the presence of God after death are justified by the agency of Christ’s blood, but not necessarily by full knowledge of Christ’s person. The way I understand it, it suggests that there is enough evidence it general revelation for a person to know, more or less, the character of God, and to honor Him appropriately, like Enoch or Abraham might have done. Exposure to the Gospel is a powerful thing, and can bring a person who would have had no understanding of God into relationship with Him, so it is always beneficial, but salvation is not merely a knowledge formula like the ’sinner’s prayer’ and one-time-conversion doctrines that mainstream evangelicalism generally hold to. Anyway, a bit much to discuss here, methinks.