Colombia: Cultural Tidbits

This will be the final post in my Colombia series. There will be no real connection between all these little blurbs, and it will irritate me that I can’t organize it, but I’ll have to get over that. These facts I’ll be sharing are relevant only to the areas we worked in, unless noted otherwise.

Ice cream is huge there. Almost every little store that sells food (and some that don’t) sells ice cream. In the mall, you can stand in any given place and spot at least one ice cream place. At the bigger mall, you can always spot at least two. And it’s good ice cream, too.

The garbage trucks and not the ice cream trucks play the music we associate with ice cream here in the U.S.

There are two ways to rank the affluence of a person by their home: their roof and their walls. Very well-off people have concrete roofs. Everyone else has corrugated metal. Fiberglass panels with the metal serve as sky lights in nicer houses. Bolts hold the roof tight in better houses, while bricks and rocks serve the purpose in worse houses. The best houses are made of bricks covered in concrete and painted bright colors. Minus colors is worse, then minus the concrete layer, and the worst is a house made of boards or corrugated metal tacked and tied together with tarps over the gaps.

Black coffee is sometimes referred to as “la tinta,” which literally means ink.

The most commonly eaten meats are chicken and beef.

Complex carbs are responsible for most of their diet. Potatoes, plantains, yucca, and rice are the most common, but pasta can also be found.

Fruit typically comes from street vendors who bring in their goods from their farms every day in trucks that we would consider valuable antiques.

Their hot chocolate is stronger and a touch more bitter than ours. I like it a lot more.

When they make fruit juice, they take the fruit, remove leaves or stems, stick it in a blender, add a bit of water, and blend it all up. It adds a whole new dimension of texture to your juice experience.

There are stray dogs all over the place. You can walk one block and see a dozen. They ignore you if you ignore them. From what I can tell, they live off of garbage and the occasional rat. At night they like to bark endlessly.

At church they have a few customary question and response things they use at the beginning of a service or whenever they need to get people's attention. It goes like this: "Que vive?" "Christo!" "Y su nombre es?" "Gloria!" It translates to this: "Who lives?" "Christ!" "And what is his name?" "Glorious!" It's neat to hear everyone shout the answers.

The day starts when the sun comes up. At 5:30 am there are already people up and about, mariachi music playing from windows, and stores open.

Few people have cars, but the ones who do drive aggressively. As do the motorcycles, taxis, buses, and trucks. Traffic is insane down there. Only the brave can manage to get anywhere.

Nobody has room for a garden, but house plants are popular, especially geraniums.

When someone can afford to paint their house, they use bright colors and patterns. Most of the patterns feature diamonds, sometimes with circles.

All doors and windows have metal gratings to reduce theft. These gratings come in all sort of designs and patterns from rectangles to rays to flowers. They add charm to any home.

Their Coke is made with cane sugar and is therefore superior in taste to American Coke. Even I, who am not well acquainted with any sort of pop, recognized this.

Chickens roam the city, like the dogs, but in lesser quantities. They can be found on roofs, unlike the dogs, and are noisy in the morning rather than at night.

It is common for friends, especially females, to greet each other with a kiss on the cheek.

When you say hello at church, "Dios bendiga" is the key phrase. It means "God bless you."

I'm back!

Today marks the end of my semi-internet fast. As you can see, my blog has undergone some aesthetic changes. There's no guarantee that I'll keep the current layout. In fact, I can almost guarantee that it will changing fairly frequently. With so many new options and none that strike me as absolutely perfect, I'll be cycling through various backgrounds depending on my mood and whatnot. At the moment I'm thinking I will loosely tie the blog's feel to the seasons, but there will probably be days or weeks in there when I choose something completely unrelated.

Tomorrow I will start posting one entry a day of things I typed while I was off the blog. I currently have five book reviews, three question-based entries, and seven descriptions of travel adventures lined up for sharing. It is important to note that I will be dating them based on when I would have posted them, so you'll have to scroll past this entry to get to the new ones until I catch up.

Colombia: Tourist Days

Our three VBS and construction days were flanked by two days of touristy stuff. On Monday we visited Monserrate and the largest mall and South America, and on Friday we went to the Salt Cathedral and a smaller mall.

For those of us who went on the trip two years ago, this was our second time at Monserrate. Monserrate is a chapel perched atop the highest point in Bogota. It has beautiful gardens, charming architecture, and a spectacular view of the massive city of Bogota. I loved it last time, and it was no less exciting to me this time around. To get up to the chapel, you ride the Funicular, a cable car sort of thing that you stand in as you head up the steep mountainside. At the top, we were given free rein to wander as we wished. I looked around at the scenery for a while and then headed to the alley full of vendors. I bought three pairs of earrings and a purse. I’ve decided to downgrade purse sizes. My old purse consistently weighed about ten pounds. I couldn’t carry it at Purdue along with my book-bag, or it would give me back and shoulder problems. My new purse is less than half the capacity. It holds the bare necessities (from my point of view) from my old purse. I still have the other one, and thanks to the fact that I kept its contents compartmentalized into pouches I can quickly switch back to it if the occasion calls for my characteristic Mary Poppins purse. We got a group picture, rode back down in the Funicular, and waited for our bus. We were waiting next to a man with a saddled llama. He could tell that we were amused by his llama, so he let all of us who were interested take turns sitting on the llama. We finished right about when the bus arrived.

The mall wasn’t terribly exciting to me. I don’t much care for malls in the U.S., and this one wasn’t much different. It was well-designed and decorated though, I must say. My dad and brother weren’t too excited by it either, so after I helped Bill and Keri order from Dunkin’ Donuts and ordered ice cream for the three of us, we went back outside and sat near a fountain until it was time to go.

After our three days of work, we took another day off to leave the city and visit El Cathedral de Sal in the neighboring city of Zipaquira. The Salt Cathedral is built into a salt mine. Everything is carved into the salt and is completely made of salt (except for a few places where granite or marble were used to reinforce the floor). It is comprised of fourteen “chapels” representing the fourteen stages of the cross, according to Catholic tradition. At each stage is a sculpture involving a cross and the surrounding salt symbolizing the events of that stage. We were led through the cathedral by an English-speaking Colombian man who seemed to have learned his English from someone from Australia. He was not only informative, but also incredibly entertaining - even more entertaining than he intended to be. It was a beautiful place. While some stopped at the coffee shop at the end of the tour (after all, there is no other coffee shop in the world farther beneath the surface than the one there), I set off to take pictures.

After the Salt Cathedral, we drove to another mall smaller than the first. We ate lunch there, and then I sat down and read. I had become very dehydrated and was starting to feel dizzy with an insanely fast pulse. Fortunately I had brought both a book and a water bottle in my purse, so once I sat down and drank some I started to feel better. The drive back was long, but we passed through some beautiful countryside areas and colorful urban regions. Colombia is a beautiful country.

Colombia: Vacation Bible School

We did three days of vacation Bible school, one in each of the churches we helped at. The fun would commence around 9:00 AM and go until noon when we would send them off with a lunch of noodles with chicken, and then pick back up at 2:00 and go to 5:00 when we sent them off with some sort of snack. All of these times are very approximate, of course. We would start with singing, move to the lesson, disperse for crafts, games, and face-painting, and then reconvene to close and give out food.

El Paraiso
Day one was at El Paraiso. A woman named Vivian sang some songs with them, and then my dad and I taught them the Hallelu song. Jonathon taught the parable of the lost sheep, and then Raqchell helped them memorize a verse from the relevant scripture passage in Spanish. Then they split off to go play games outside or do crafts or face-painting inside. The craft for the morning was making sheep with paper, cotton balls, and googly eyes. We only had six bottles of glue, so getting glue to everyone was a challenge. Eventually Angela (July and Didier’s mom) went upstairs and got some communion cups to put glue in. Then the kids just spread it around with their fingers. It was messy, but it worked. Everyone came back together around 11:30 to close out the morning session. We sang some more songs, did the memory verse a few more times, and then fed the kids lunch.

A few hours later we repeated the process, except that the lesson was about storing your treasures in heaven and the craft was decorating treasure chests and the snack was ice cream. It took a while to track down all the markers and glue, but the craft seemed less chaotic than in the morning.

Overall, this was our most hectic day. It was at the biggest church of the three and the kids didn’t have school that day (it was Colombia’s independence day), so we had a lot a lot of kids. This group also had a wider and older range of ages than any of the other churches. Combine older kids with relatively good living conditions, and you have more energy than you know what to do with. Since there were older kids there, we got to interact with them on more of an individual basis. I sat with some of the 8-10 year old range girls and learned a hand game and got to know a good number of them well enough to know their names and personalities.

Los Alpes
The activities of the day were much the same on the first and second days. Again we started with songs, a story, and a Bible verse and then split off for games, crafts, and face painting. There were a lot of younger kids, so we had to help more directly with the crafts. We only gave glue to the school age kids. We went around with the other bottles to add glue for the preschoolers. We added bubbles to the mix for kids who weren’t big enough to go around the corner to the playground where the other games were happening. After sending them off with lunch, a handful of the oldest kids stuck around for a chalk war. The boys were sort of vicious, especially the one who claimed to know karate, but it was good fun.

After lunch was the second session about treasures in heaven. I added “Yo Tengo Gozo” to my repertoire of Spanish VBS songs. They didn’t need nearly as much help decorating their treasure chests as they did making their sheep, so I got to roam with my camera. Fredo was present this time and sat himself over by the face painters to irritate Rachel. She and Brooke got pretty good at disappearing without him noticing. At the end we sent them off with some juice and a slice of pound cake for each.

VBS at Los Alpes was relatively calm but busy. It was calm because about half of our attendees were preschool-age daycare kids from around the corner, and a lot of those little kids were malnourished and lacked energy. They were adorable and easy to work with, but it was very sad to see how lethargic they were. They didn’t even make much of a sound (except for the few that cried), let alone move often.

Luciera
And now for something completely different. At Luciera, we only had VBS in the morning, but we still did both lessons. We did the lessons and crafts in a room with little plastic tables and chairs. First we sang and learned about the lost sheep. Then everyone did the craft all at once. Once they finished their craft, they could go out in the hallway and get their face painted. When everyone had finished, we all walked to the playground a block away to play for a little bit. We had bubbles, chalk, frisbees, and beach balls. When we came back inside we sang some more songs and did the second lesson and craft. We fed them lunch, and that was all.

At Luciera it felt like we were running a pre-school for the morning. All but one of the children were in the three-six year age range. We all sat at colorful plastic chairs at colorful plastic tables while each adult worked with a small table of cheerful, chatty little children. We held hands in long chains on the way to the playground and giggled and laughed at bubbles and beach balls. It was a relaxing way to end our VBS week. In the afternoon, I got to wind down even more sitting around reading and playing cards.

Colombia: a Few Key People

I didn’t know whether to group Mark and Theresa with the team or with Colombia people, but I’ve decided to put them here. Theresa is a Colombian, so that works, and Mark lived there for a while, and they weren’t exactly part of our NHCC team, so I think they fit here better. Without further ado, here are some of the people we were around the most. They are listed in alphabetical order by first name.

Alejandra is the middle daughter in the preacher’s family. She is reserved, and polite, unlike her younger sister. Her goal is to learn English well enough to move to America. She hopes to go to school here at the very least, and hopefully find a job and live here permanently.

Andrew is an interesting character. He’s 27 (not 22, like he told us on the shuttle ride away from the airport) and is well-versed in American music. It seems that every time we go, he will pick a new American girl to be attracted to. Last time it was Katie Zalar (who he called Jessica). This time, once he realized “Jessica” wouldn’t be there, I was chosen. That was rather awkward.

Ashlee the red is a little girl with bright red hair. Her mom helps with the kids at church, so she was around us a lot. She is adorable and she knows it. She knows exactly how to act to catch and keep attention. She’s a lot of fun.

Ashlee the not so red is a girl from El Paraiso who does not have red hair, but she is friends with Ashlee the red. Her mom sings at church. Last time we were in Colombia, I sat next to Ashlee during one of the church services, and she taught me some words in Spanish and laughed at me for not being able to roll by rr's.

Didier is quite the little stinker. He is 12 years old, I believe, but he acts like he's eight or nine. He likes to annoy people. He called us fat, ugly, and stupid in English and Spanish, and added a gwop every now and again. I got to drop an insect on his head and make him squeal. That was pretty fun.

Francisco mostly worked with the guys at the construction site, so I didn’t get to know him well. He took a while to get comfortable with us, but by the end of the week he was laughing and joking with us. He constantly helps at the church. Part of his motivation is the fact that his wife had left him without explanation a few months before, and he is trying to keep himself occupied to avoid going insane.

Fredo is a kid we spent a lot of time around last time we were in Colombia. He asked us to call him Freddie. He was a sort of shy, active kid, probably 11 or 12 years old. Now he has grown up, and asks people to call him Sebastien. Who knows why. He took a liking to Rachel, much to her embarrassment. Instead of running around playing games with us like last time, he had his hair constantly slicked back and avoided getting dirty.

Gloria was one of our returning cooks. She’s a sweet, emotional, older woman with a huge family. And she cooks fantastically. It was a joy to be around her all week again.

Joanna is one of the moms in the church. She helped cook for the kids and VBS and organized almost all of our basketball games. Despite the fact she is only about 4’ 5”, she is quite skilled at basketball. She has an adorable little daughter named Valentina who we called Luna.

July is a girl at El Paraiso. She’s probably 15 or 16 years old. Last time we became very close friends, but we didn’t see each other often enough this time to get far past the awkward getting-used-to-one-another-again stage. She made the two bracelets I always wear now. Last time she gave me a ring, but this year I passed it on to another girl, much to my immediate regret.

Liana is close to my age. She mostly sticks around Los Alpes, but is sometimes found at El Paraiso. She sings and plays guitar and piano at church. She is learning English and likes to try to talk to me in English. She was the first of the Colombian girls to find me on Facebook, so I’ve been in touch with her since this past winter.

Mark is a CCU graduate who was a missionary in Bogota for fifteen or twenty years. NHCC was one of his sponsor churches, and that’s how we got the link to Colombia. When he worked in Bogota, he helped plant and preach at two churches, but his goal was to eventually put them in the hands of the native Colombians. Five years ago he and his family went moved back to the U.S. and he has visited a few times.

Martha was another returning cook from last time. She’s younger and full of vigor. Her kids are Fredo, no-nonsense Paula, and the energetic but shy twins Brandon and Johann. She’s a fun person to have around.

Oscar is the preacher at all three churches we worked with. He is extremely tall for a Colombian, or for an American, even. He is not incredibly talkative until you get to know him, but from what I can tell he leads his congregations superbly. He is also the head of a wonderful family.

Patricia is Oscar’s wife. She teaches the women and children at church. She also does lots of crafts and sewing to sell and give to others. She is trying to learn English along with Alejandra. She is a lively, loving, and enthusiastic woman, and I love being around her.

The other Particia was the new cook on the team. She is quiet, but always in a good mood. At the end of the week, we learned that she was born with Down Syndrome, but had been cured. Given that Down Syndrome is a genetic anomaly, I can see no explanation for this short of a miracle. She still has some problems and will probably never learn to read, but looking at her you would never guess she had had this disease.

Samuel is Oscar’s grandson. His mom is Yennifer, Oscar's oldest daughter, but we didn’t see her enough for her to get her own blurb. Sammy is one-and-a-half, and he’s one of the most adorable kids ever. He even blows kisses when he says good-bye. He had us all wrapped around his finger for the entire week.

Teresa is Mark’s wife and a native Colombian. When she left Colombia, her goal was to avoid going back, but you see how that worked out. She helped Mark with the churches and led the women down in Bogota. As our only team member who speaks Spanish as her native language, she was an invaluable help, especially at VBS.

Valentina is Oscar’s youngest daughter. She’s Allison’s age and causes a good deal of mischief. We taught her enough English to insult people, and she’s an expert tickler. She and Luke picked on one another quite a lot, but it was in a friendly way. She hasn’t learned much English at all, so even though we spent the entire week around this crazy kid we did very little talking with her, and yet we had no trouble communicating.

Colombia: The Churches

We worked at three churches down in Bogota: El Paraiso, Los Alpes, and Luciera. Each church was named after the barrio in which it was located.


El Paraiso
El Paraiso was our home base both this time and two years ago. We lived in its upper rooms all week, and we had more services there than at the other two churches. El Paraiso is at Bogota’s second lowest poverty level. The main room on the ground floor was nicer than most other structures in the area. It had a red tile floor, blue walls and structural pillars, and a bas relief painting sort of thing behind the stage area. It could seat over 100 in plastic lawn chairs and was approximately the size of NHCC’s fellowship hall. Upstairs was a kitchen area connected to a sitting area, two rooms with beds for us (one for guys and one for girls), a storage room, a room we used as VBS headquarters, an office, and two bathrooms with showers. Aside from the main meeting area on the first floor, the rooms were walled and floored in concrete and roofed with corrugated metal and fiberglass panels. The interior was painted bright colors.

Los Alpes
For both trips, Los Alpes has been our secondary church. They no longer have their own Sunday service, but they get bussed down to El Paraiso on Sunday mornings for a larger service. This was where the women’s group met while the men met at El Paraiso. The neighborhood of Los Alpes is at Bogota’s lowest level of poverty, and it’s easy to tell. While the Los Alpes church is smaller and not quite as nice as El Paraiso, it’s still nice compared to the surrounding structures with its well-made brick walls and a tiled meeting room. It’s one of the few two-story structures in the area. Upstairs is an office, a kitchen, a bathroom, and two rooms for general purposes.

Luciera
I’m not at all confident that I’ve gotten the exact name of this church/barrio. This church was established within the past two years in an area two affluence levels above El Paraiso. Compared to what we were used to in Bogota, it was a pretty nice area. We were only at Luciera for a Sunday morning service, one day of VBS, and an evening service, but with its much smaller congregation we were able to get to know people a little better. There were some adults there who were learning English, so we got to help them with that while they helped us with our Spanish. The building we were in had two levels, but the upper level had private apartments. The church “building” itself had a small meeting room, a craft/sewing room, a classroom, a bathroom, and a kitchen area.

Colombia: The Team

I’m not very good at relating events in chronological order without forgetting countless details, so I’m going to try reporting on Colombia in a different format. I will describe our trip by describing related chunks of people and places interspersed with anecdotes. First I will introduce the team. There were twelve of us in all: six teens and six adults, seven returning members and five new members, eleven NHCC members and one brave friend from another church. They will, of course, be introduced in alphabetical order by last name.

Jim Chandler: Jim joined us in Colombia for the first time this week, but he was by no means new to missionary work. He spent a good portion his adult life on the mission field in Spanish-speaking places. He was therefore fluent in Spanish and did all the sermons for the week in Spanish. Surprisingly, I understood pretty much everything he said, but I think he spoke with a bit of an American accent. He left a day early due to the death of his father. He knew when he came that his dad may very well die while he was in Bogota, but he came anyway. That takes a lot of strength.

Allison Gast: This was Allison’s first time on a plane or in a different country. She is the second of my four younger sisters. Despite the fact that she knew maybe five words in Spanish and has a tendency to be a very picky eater, she did very well. She was active in VBS, tried most of the food, and didn’t complain. She also integrated well into the team, despite my fears that she would fade into the background.

Jonathon Gast: Jonathon is my younger brother (I’m going to pretend that more than one person reads this and that they might possibly not know my family). He was another second-time team member. He returned to the VBS side of things and helped run the outdoor games.

Maria Gast: Hey, it’s me. I was returning for the second time. I was in charge of planning VBS and teaching at the women’s group. All went smoothly, thanks to plenty of prayers and reminders to chill and not stress over little things.


Raqchell Gast: Rachel is the oldest of my younger sisters and is also a returning team member. She once again oversaw the face-painting at VBS with the help of Brooke. She and Valentina were attached at the hip for most of the week.

Tony Gast: Tony is my dad, and he, too, was a returning team member. He ran the outdoor games for VBS and was always present when basketball was played. He helped Bob get all the travel plans coordinated.

Bob Kline: Bob (also a returning team member) was in charge of coordinating travel plans with the help of my dad and was our primary communication link to Mark. He was also the head of the construction team. He worked with the preacher's wife and daughter to improve their English, and in the process he learned a little more Spanish.

Brooke Nichols: Brooke is the NHCC preacher’s daughter, and was yet another team member who was there in 2008. She did face-painting with Rachel during VBS and was a constant source of comic relief throughout the trip. We may never know how much of her cluelessness was genuine and how much of it was calculated, but it brought smiles to our faces in either case.

Luke Nichols: Luke is Brooke’s older brother. He was also a returning team member. He worked at the construction site and made very little effort at all to learn proper Spanish. He liked to pick on other team members in a good-natured way, and got at least as much teasing as he gave. He brought “$w@ggg” to Colombia and left with the nick-name El Caballo.

Brit Royse: Brit was our brave non-NHCC team member. He knows Jim from work and decided to come along with us despite the fact that Jim was the only one of us he had ever seen until a few weeks before we left. He was quickly accepted into the team-family. He worked at the construction site and was one of our better-learned Spanish speakers. He chose the name “Flava-Craze” and may be teaming up with El Caballo to bring $w@gg and jerk dancing to Bogota.

Bill Sporing: Bill wanted to come last time, but that didn’t work out. This time he was determined to join us, and I’m glad he did. I didn’t get to know him all that well since he worked at the construction site, but from what I saw he was a great asset to the team and he thoroughly enjoyed the experience. With the hat he bought at Monserrate, he could have passed as a Colombian native if you looked past the fact that he could scarcely speak a word of Spanish.

Keri Sporing: Keri is Bill’s wife, and I’m so very happy that she got to come this time around. She did crafts with me at VBS, and she was great with the kids. Not everyone who came last time worked well with the cross-cultural aspect of VBS, but Keri was very well suited to the task. She overflowed with compassion for the kids.

Book Review: Frankenstein

This book followed The Man Who Was Thursday in my Colombia leisure reading. It started off strong, but by the end I was thoroughly disappointed. This book may have been whinier than even Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. I really don’t care how anguished Frankenstein was over creating the monster, or how emotionally devastated the monster was about being rejected by humankind. A sentence or two – maybe even a full paragraph, to be generous – would have sufficed to communicate that they weren’t very happy people. Furthermore, I did not find many of the characters very interesting. Clerval was a good fellow, the monster was somewhat interesting, the poor French peasants in the cottage had a touching story, but that was about it. I suppose Frankenstein was alright before he went emo, and I do support his decision not to make a second monster based on his Scotland reasoning (his initial reasons on the ice field did not satisfy me). I never really connected to any of the other characters, particularly Elizabeth. I really didn’t care very much about her at all.

I did like how the story was set inside a collection of letters. That was a neat idea. And I also approved of the fact that the guy writing the letters (I forget his name) decided not to drag his crew on a hopeless adventure. I’m sure I could find other nice things to say about the book, but I’m not sure what they are. Given my liking for efficiency, wasting over a hundred pages on whining was enough to completely estrange me from this book.

Book Information
Title: Frankenstein
Author: Mary Shelley
Year Published: 1818

Book Review: The Man Who Was Thursday

This was a thoroughly delightful read. I’ve read some short stories over the past few years, but I haven’t picked up a full-length book for any purpose other than school or personal study since the summer of 2008. For many reasons, I couldn’t have picked anything better as my first just-for-fun book in years.

First, I was happy to return to the writing style of Chesterton. He is much better at keeping a line through a plot than through theology. I didn’t feel like I was running around in circles. But even in the more circuitous Orthodoxy, there was something about his use of language that I found wonderful. I don’t exactly know how to describe it.

(Warning! Spoilers below!)
As far as the plot goes, this book wins again. I was a little concerned at first. I feared I had figured everything out too early on. I guessed that Symes would become Thursday rather than Gregory. I knew right away that Sunday was the man in the dark room who started the whole philosophical police force. Once I learned that Monday was an officer, I predicted that the rest would also be undercover cops. I could not read the ensuing chapters seriously. None of their run-ins in the village bothered me in the least, because I was pretty sure I knew how everything would end. It was well-written enough that I enjoyed reading it even though I wasn’t surprised.

And then came the last few chapters. What on earth? While I was right about my predictions, I had no way at all of guessing the final ending to this book. I’m still not entirely sure what happened and what it meant. I’ll probably re-read the end again at some point to more thoroughly digest it. It’s short enough that I could probably even find the time to read the whole thing over again on Thanksgiving break or something.

Book Information
Title: The Man Who Was Thursday
Author: G.K. Chesterton
Year Published: 1908

Book Review: In Search of the Soul

I picked up this book from the CCU bookstore in hopes of finding some sort of answer to a question I’ve asked for quite some time now: how can the immaterial soul interact with the material body? The book did not answer my question. Later I’ll deal with my current view on the question. For now I’ll do a brief introduction of each of the four views represented and the challenges and triumphs of each. I will skip all the nonsense about various people being introspectively aware of themselves as essentially material or immaterial because, in the words of Clark Gable, frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn.

Substance Dualism (Stewart Goetz)
All forms of dualism assert that humans have both an immaterial soul/mind and a physical body. In substance dualism, the mind is created separately from the body and can exist apart from it. Some substance dualisms assert that the mind is what makes the body human; others say that both are required for full human-ness.

Strengths:

• Dualism is implied in scripture.
• The doctrine of physical resurrection is easily dealt with.
• It’s completely compatible with free will.
• Fetuses, mentally deficient people, and people in vegetative states still count as humans.

Weaknesses:

• It may be possible to account for all psychological phenomena without assuming the existence of a soul.
• Subconscious thought is eschewed if all thought happens in the substantively simple soul.
• If the person is considered just a soul and not a soul-body composite, then we can’t truly be said to do physical things (to use Hasker's illustration, “you” can’t kiss anyone, since “you” are merely a soul inhabiting a body).

Emergent Dualism (William Hasker)
Emergent dualism is like substance dualism in that it claims that humans have distinct bodies and souls, but it differs in its explanation of their origin. According to emergent dualism, the proper combination of brain structures gives rise to a distinct new substance – the mind/soul.

Strengths:

• Dualism is implied in scripture.
• It’s completely compatible with free will.
• Souls don’t need to be individually created by God.
• Other kinds of emergence are evident in nature (ex: water and its properties emerge from the combination of two atoms of hydrogen and an atom of oxygen).
• Animals can have less fully-endowed souls.

Weaknesses:

• At the resurrection, you either end up with a new soul or the old soul re-established…like it would have been established in the first place in substance dualism.
• If a person’s brain isn’t fully-functioning, they aren’t considered fully human.
• It’s a large (and possibly unmerited) step from the kind of emergence we see in nature and math to this emergent dualism.

Nonreductive Physicalism (Nancey Murphy)
Physicalists don’t believe in souls. Nonreductive physicalists believe that you can avoid reduction to micro-physical determinism even without a soul. They believe that consciousness and all other psychological phenomena can be explained by a combination of neurobiology, social relations, culture, and (for Christians) God’s interaction with people (although the author never addresses this dimension of humans in her essay in the book). On this view, a meta-network of neurons gives rise to consciousness and allows downward causation, thus escaping determinism.

Strengths

• It’s a material explanation, and, when more plausible, those are preferred.
• Explains without the shadow of a doubt why higher functions and brain functions are so integrally tied together.

Weaknesses

• Dualism is strongly implied in scripture.
• It doesn’t escape determinism, despite its claim.
• Conservation of identity at the resurrection is a problem unless the resurrected body is numerically identical to the one that died.
• Unity of consciousness is somewhat of a challenge if the brain is all you have to work with.

Constitutional View of Persons (Kevin Corcoran)
This is another view that denies a soul, but it is not nonreductive physicalism. It falls somewhere between nonreductive physicalism and emergent dualism. For the defender of this view, a person is not identical to their body in the same way that a statue is not identical to the material that forms it. It’s a sort of emergentism, but instead of a new substance emerging, it’s just the identity that emerges. Causal connection is cited as what allows identity to persist.

Strengths

• It can account for the doctrine of resurrection better than the nonreductive physicalist view.
• It’s a material explanation, and, when more plausible, those are preferred.

Weaknesses

• It has the same problems with qualifications for personhood that emergent dualism and nonreductive physicalism have.
• It does not satisfactorily fulfill the doctrine of resurrection.
• His causes are "spooky": they can do an awful lot that they shouldn't be able to do (I don't know how to concisely explain it any better).
• (He didn’t address much of anything aside from resurrection, so I can’t criticize any other points of this view.)

Here are a few additional questions I would like to see each view answer before I can reach my personal conclusion:

• When does a person become a person?
• How did the incarnation of Jesus work?
• How does the Holy Spirit dwell within us?

I currently lean the most toward some sort of substance dualism. All others have problems with the doctrine of resurrection as well as giving a good definition of when a person becomes a person. However, I have not yet looked into different types of substance dualism enough to decide which of those I think is most right. That will be my next task in my quest to build up a sound doctrine of the soul. I will also take the time to go through all the Bible passages that teach on human nature and constitution to make sure that my view of the soul is not only philosophically coherent but also biblically accurate.

Now I return to my original question of interaction between the material and immaterial. I’ve come to realize that I will probably never in this life get a good answer to that question. However, as I was told by a friend some time ago when I asked him this question, the fact that I can’t describe how the body and soul interact doesn’t mean that they don’t interact. If we are to believe Christian doctrine, interaction between the material and immaterial happens all over the place, not just within humans. The resurrection of Jesus is a prime example. This miracle (and, of course, all others) requires that the immaterial and omnipotent God intervene with the material world. How did this happen? We can’t answer that apart from saying that it was an act of God. Does this discredit belief that this event took place? Not at all. Looking at the arguments for the historical reliability of the resurrection accounts leaves no other sensible option than that Jesus did in fact die and return to life thanks to the immaterial acting on the material in some way. We see a similar sort of thing happening in science all the time. For centuries (perhaps even millennia), we knew that plants somehow used energy from the sun to grow. Just because the workings of this process were not known until relatively recently in human history didn’t mean that people before that point had any reason to doubt the apparent truth that the plants were somehow using the energy to grow. With that, I lay to rest my question of interaction for the time being. If anything comes to light on the subject, I will be ready to take it up again, but it seems to me like this is the sort of thing that we won’t really understand on this earth, if it is something we will ever understand.

Book Information:
Title: In Search of the Soul: Four Views of the Mind-Body Problem
Editors: Joel B. Green, Stuart L. Palmer
Contributors: Kevin Corcoran, Stewart Goetz, William Hasker, Nancey Murphy
Year Published: 2005

Pennsylvania

I’ve already enumerated most of my Pennsylvania adventures to my only consistent reader, so I won’t go into great detail here. Plus, I’m sure I've already forgotten countless little events. I’ll just give a generalized account of my attitude going into the trip and the turn-around that had occurred by the time I headed home.

The Thursday before I left I considered calling Adrianne and canceling my plans. I was insanely stressed out. Traveling always stresses me out, plus I was driving eight hours by myself to a place I had never been before to spend a week with a family (at this time I still thought that just meant immediate family) I barely knew (except for Adrianne). Plus I was still pulling together last-minute preparations for teaching VBS and the women’s group, NHCC’s VBS was lurking around the corner, I would soon need to put together a lesson for all of Joshua for the high school girls, etc. And then there was the whole wheelbarrow injury. I was just way too stressed out and terrified of driving alone for eight hours. But I decided to go anyway.

I arrived almost uneventfully. I started driving at the secondary dip in my Circadian rhythm, which was a horrible idea. I had to stop three times in the first two or three hours because I had a hard time staying awake. Once I came back to my normal self, the driving went smoothly. The toll road confusion worked itself out just fine, and I only sort of got lost. When Adrianne took me to the cottage I was in for another surprise. I had expected to spend the weekend with her immediate family, but it was actually an extended family get-together with her dad’s side of the family. I don’t have the most pleasant, close-knit extended family, so I was a tad bit nervous about hers.

Within less than a day, my opinion of the trip had been turned on its head. Adrianne’s family were some of the nicest, most welcoming people I’ve ever met in my life. By the end of the weekend I was completely at ease. They made me feel like I was just another cousin. They were different from my dad’s family by how they interacted pleasantly with one another rather than everyone retreating to their own interests and picking on one another at every opportunity. They were different from my mom’s side of the family in their ability to completely relax without an itinerary or competition. I spent the weekend eating, chatting, playing cards (without keeping score), and enjoying the company of enjoyable people.

I headed back home from Adrianne’s house (I unexpectedly got to see her house and hometown after all) a refreshed and relaxed person. I don’t know if I’ve ever had a more relaxing weekend in my life. Not only did I get to be lazy, but I got to be lazy socially or non-socially as needed. I couldn’t have asked for a better weekend in the midst of an incredibly stressful few weeks.

What does "kaleidoscope" mean in Greek?

I sometimes ask Josh about words of Greek origin, and here is one specific question I asked at CIY that gives me an excuse to explain several. For some of these he didn’t know the full meaning, but I’ll give him credit for recognizing that they were Greek.

• kaleidoscope:  something through which you look at beautiful things (kalos=beautiful, eidos=shape, scope=something you look through)
• nostalgia: pain of home (nostos=poetic word for home, algos=pain)
• charisma: divine gift (kharis=grace)
• blasphemy: slander or speaking ill (pheme=to speak evil, blas=?)
• platypus: flat-footed (platys=broad or flat, pous=foot)

I have a theological question based on something earlier in the conversation.

My original question to Todd dealt with whether or not a person could fall from the faith (the view I had learned was supported by him), but in the end I learned far more about Calvinism than was immediately relevant to the original question. My understanding of them, particularly of their doctrine of predestination, has been completely revolutionized.

Calvinism can be summarized in the acronym TULIP:

• Total depravity – man is incapable of doing anything good
• Unconditional election – God chooses who he will save, and it has nothing to do with their merit
• Limited atonement – God’s work on the cross only applies to the elect
• Irresistible grace – the elect can’t be taken from God’s grace, he will save who he has chosen to save
• Perseverance of the saints – the truly saved can’t lose their salvation

The question I originally asked is linked to the “P” of the acronym, but that just touches on what I learned. To me, the most significant thing I learned was the rationale behind predestination. Because of the doctrine of total depravity, man cannot choose God. That would be a truly good choice and therefore something that totally depraved creature would be incapable of. This pervades all other letters of the acronym, and illuminated for me the core of Calvinistic doctrine (a doctrine I don't hold, just to be clear).