Pastor’s Blog

A couple of you asked about my brief reference to an astronomical explanation for the Star of Bethlehem. The website I mentioned is here.  In my opinion there are two key issues, both discussed by Rick Larson: (1) the date of death for Herod, which has usually been taken as 4 BC, but is argued at the website to be 1 AD.  Another web page that independently makes the same argument can be viewed here. (2) how certain star / planet conjunctions would be viewed by ancient astrologers.  That, in my opinion, is the weak point of this argument: the conjunctions postulated are not obviously significant unless they were something ancient astronomers would be particularly interested in.

As a last item from the Christmas series, I have posted the “O Little Town of Bethlehem” video on YouTube:

As always, comments welcome!

I was gratified by the response to the visually enhanced sermon “God and Sinners Reconciled” on December 14, 2008. Several of you asked when it would be available online, so I asked Frank to get me the audio quickly and I made the video this morning. Once again, we are using viddler as the video host.

I’m not entirely happy with the quality on viddler: I may try to burn a couple DVD’s of this message before Sunday, which should be much higher quality.

Also, if you want the hand-out that goes along with the sermon we’ve uploaded it here as a PDF file.

As always, comments welcome.

After Sunday’s Sermon (Longing, November 30, 2008) several people asked me about C. S. Lewis’ biography. The book I quoted from the most was Surprised By Joy, Lewis’ spiritual autobiography written in 1955. It is available on Amazon (Surprised By Joy). I also saw several copies at the Mardel bookstore last week.

Several of the backgrounds I used in the Lewis section used photos of actual ‘Lewis’ locations. This is Magdalene College, Oxford, where Lewis taught for some thirty years. One strange side note is that those who attend this college do not pronounce it ‘mag da lin’ or even ‘mag da lean’ but ‘maudlin’. It’s apparently one of those strange college traditions that no one is sure how it got started.

This is the corner table in ‘The Eagle and the Child’, the pub where Lewis met with J.R.R. Tolkien and the rest of ‘The Inklings’.

This is a fireplace at Magdalene college, but probably not the one where Lewis’ influential conversation with the atheist who accepted the historical reliability of the Gospels took place.

These are the windows of Lewis’s rooms (offices) at Oxford.

Because his description of his conversion implies that it happened in the evening, I had to modify the picture to be night.