George Martzen "georgos"

I love science fiction.  The rest of my family are not so in love.  So when I saw from the " Gravity" trailer that it starred Sandra Bullock and George Clooney, I was intrigued to say the least.  And when I heard that the two would be tethered together in space, I figured it had to be break-through in movie watching, at least for my my family. I was not disappointed.  We didn't see it in 3D or Imax3D, but but we still had sense of being on a roller coaster ride in outer space.  The movie immediately opens in orbit around earth, with the space shuttle latched onto the Hubble Telescope for maintenance.  Bullock's character, medical engineer Dr. Ryan Stone, is perched atop the shuttle's robotic arm making adjustments on the telescope, while Clooney's character, veteran astronaut Matt Kowalski, is testing his maneuvering unit and another crew member is doing a tethered space walk in the shuttle's open bay. Conversation is jovial as they anticipate complet...

Sometimes when I look in the mirror I wonder who the ang mo (caucasian) is.  Sunday I had a similar experience at the 74th Anniversary combined worship at Paya Lebar Chinese Methodist Church.  As we sang the Hokkien songs (I used the Romanized text) I was feeling proud to be Hokkien.  Wow, all our voices so nice, blending together, so beautiful.  When my colleague gave announcements in Hokkien I followed in English.  Well, I sort of designed the service.  But someone after thought I was interpreting Hokkien into English.  Mei banfa. Wo bu dong. No, I enjoy my Hokkien and other Chinese friends, but my ancestry is from the other end of the Euro-Asian landmass.  My mother was English and my father German (Volga Deutsche), and the two spoken languages I tried to learn in my youth are German and Spanish, not Chinese.  But back to the combined service at PLCMC, I am interested in the experience of solidarity evoked by that congregational sing...

Last night I had the pleasure of attending a lecture by the retired NT professor, Richard Bauckham, on "The Johannine Jesus and the Synoptic Gospels".  Bauckham is guest lecturing this week at Trinity Theological College (Singapore).  His presentation was based on a new commentary he is writing.  Though I dare not call myself a New Testament scholar (having lost my fervor for rabbinical debate some time ago), I do preach and teach often enough on the Gospel of John to know that it takes me into a very different space than do the synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke). In fact, I admit that I frequently shy away from preaching on John.  Dr Bauckham, who brings a historian's eye to the narratives, clearly acknowledges the diversity of the gospels, though in this lecture he seemed reluctant to jump into etiological speculations, but rather to point out that there are many different ways to do historiography. He may have spoken more about this at other lectures, but...

In Equal Justice Under the Law , Sojourner's Jim Wallis has observed a strange irony in this week's U.S. Supreme Court rulings.  First, on June 25, the court struck down as unconstitutional a part of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 intended to maintain free voting access for low-income and people of color.  Many of my friends in justice ministries were shocked at this ruling.  When I first saw the headlines, I really thought it was a joke, or that someone had accidently brought up a news article from the 1930s.  The next day the same court also thwarted two laws that had prevented same-sex marriage, the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and California's Proposition 8, the "Marriage Defense Act". While recognizing that many Christians have deep concerns about homosexuality, based on their reading of the Bible, Wallis has joined a growing number of religious people who support same-sex marriage as a matter of civil rights.  After all, legal marriage in the U...

I sat at the foot of the hill - Bukit Timah - and watched the show, energized. Rain coming down in buckets, whipped by the wind, like the swallows, dancing in the currents high above the trees, fully engaged in the movement.  Lightening struck here and there, in booming octophonic fidelity, electrifying the air. The music echoed from the clouds to the earth, from Bukit Timah to Bukit Gombak, between the great trees and the buildings .  Boom, boom, boom!  The trees all clapped their leaves and swayed to the rhythm of the sky, danced to the rhythm of the earth, pulsated with the leaping electrons.  Only the swallows dared venture out, twirling and soaring with nature's ensemble, joined to the fleeting liminality while ants and humans scuttled anxiously inside. The voice of thunder takes over during the reversal. Nature rules again; the birds, the trees the hills, the clouds and the earth all rejoice.  Slowly the rain subsides, the wind dies down, the atmospheri...