The last time I went to Korea, I left with a business idea, for online English translation services. I'd have this website where Korean businesses could ask for English translation review. It would run the full gamut, from full service, where we'd work with companies to craft their English-language marketing campaigns, to "quick review" where people could just submit an English phrase, their email address (for a response) and pay $5 for someone to review it and make sure the spelling and grammar is correct before they plaster it on promotional materials, signs, or whatever.

The reason I got this idea, of course, is because the number of prominent, public English errors in Korea - stuff that any American child could catch - is appalling. Wouldn't it be worth it to spend $5 just for a quick double-check that there aren't any glaring errors before you plaster it on signs or (literally) carve it into granite? And I could review these like one a minute. I think it could get lucrative.

Like, my favorite Korean fried chicken chain (the #1 chain in Korea) is BBQ Chicken. You can see the English problems already. BBQ Chicken is not barbecued chicken. It's fried chicken. BBQ stands for "Best of the Best Quality", a fairly awkward English sentence. Their packaging is filled with similarly odd English. E.g. on their box:: "They returned for more when they found out the BBQ CHICKEN were actually good."

This chain aspires to be an international brand. Could they have not used my English editing services? How much value would that have been to them? To have someone take them aside and say, "Hey, BBQ actually means something in English, something very different than what you're doing. And the reason you're using that acronym - the phrase behind it - isn't even that compelling. You're forcing an awkward phrase to confusion. How about just calling yourselves BQ Chicken? Or Best Fried Chicken? And as for the box, I think you want 'was' instead of 'were'. But more importantly, the English suggests that people were expecting disgusting chicken and came back because they were pleasantly surprised that it was palatable. It's not a good slogan. It's equivalent to writing 'BBQ Chicken - you'll be surprised at how not crappy it tastes.' Maybe a different English phrase is in order?"

I'd do all of BBQ Chicken's stuff for free, then I'd promote myself as the website that fixed all of BBQ Chicken's English. Then every Korean company would just automatically remember to double check their English with www.dcenglishcheck.co.kr before publishing anything. I really think there's potential there.

I get the same feeling when reading some of my kids' books. I'm not saying that I am or could be a good book editor, just that I have some common sense, and some of these books could have used a common sense veto for the stuff they did.

For example, we have this one Sesame Street book about shapes, where Big Bird asks the reader to choose from various items on each page the one that matches both the shape he names and its description. For example, he asks, which object is a rectangle where you turn pages? That's a book.

So for the triangle, the object he names is a triangle. As in the musical instrument. See, as the common sense children't book editor, I would have nixed this. It's a terrible idea. Because when you're reading it to kids, it's totally confusing. Another object on the page is also triangular (a boat sail). If the child picks it, you have to explain, yes, that's a triangle, but no, it's not a triangle. On the next page, Big Bird asks, "did you pick the triangle?" And again, if the child picked a triangle but not *the* triangle, you have to explain that. To a 1-year-old. Virtually impossible. It's just a terrible idea that is literally interfering with Joshua's learning. It infuriates me every time I read it, which is daily.

There are shockingly so many children's books like that, that just lack some obvious common sense. Really really awful rhymes. Characters that exercise *after* getting ready for bed. Ambiguous text placement, like the opening credits for Ted Danson and Shelley Long on Cheers. The children's book world needs a common sense editor. I'd do it if I had the time.

Lifehacker recently had an entry about how organization fosters creativity. A key quotation:

Organization is in part about being prepared for the moment when insight strikes. It's about creating the conditions for creativity to flourish, so that when you enter into creation mode, your physical world is set up to support you. Being organized also creates the mental order that many people need to be able to put aside mundane things and enter a creative head-space.

This is so true. We so often think of creativity as being this serendipitous, spontaneous moment of inspiration. In truth, creativity is the byproduct of dedicated work. As Thomas Edison said, genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. I read some songwriting stuff a few years back and every successful songwriter echoed the same message: songwriting is a craft. It's not something that just comes to you. You need to work at it so that you're prepared for inspiration. That's true whether you're a Christian songwriter or not.

Personally, I think the same is true for the Holy Spirit. I sometimes hear people say that they'll "just let the Spirit move" as a synonym for not planning or organizing. I don't think that's how the Spirit works, as described in Scripture and in real life.

I can think of only one passage where Scripture says to intentionally not plan in order to let the Spirit work, in Mark 13:11 - "Whenever you are arrested and brought to trial, do not worry beforehand about what to say. Just say whatever is given you at the time, for it is not you speaking, but the Holy Spirit."

Balanced against that are, I think, many verses that say that there must be planning, foresight, and organization. I think 1 Corinthians 14 sums it up best. It describes how certain spiritual gifts (e.g. speaking in tongues and prophecy) should be practiced in the church, and Paul proscribes order: "everything should be done in a fitting and orderly way." (1 Cor. 14:39). Organization.

I found this random video from WorshipGod 2009 on Youtube and the speakers make the same point, more bluntly: "If your understanding of the personal work of the Holy Spirit doesn't involve or include planning, then you're... dumb."

And from what I've seen, people and organizations most in tune with the Holy Spirit spend a lot of time planning. My dad, when he prays for someone's healing, spends a bunch of time in preparation before he even starts to pray. Jieun's mom seems to prepare a lot for her prayer sessions as well.

To be sure, there is a type of planning that can interfere with the Holy Spirit, just like slavish devotion to a plan can stifle creativity. Planning doesn't guarantee the Spirit, and inflexible planning can quench him. But even though that's true, in my view, it's a fallacy to therefore think that the Holy Spirit moves better when we don't plan. As far as I've seen, the opposite is true. Good, proper planning helps make us ready for when the Spirit moves.

Survey question: how many people love In N' Out? I do. I love it. My favorite burger in the world. But I ask because it's recently come to my attention that not everyone loves In N' Out. And honestly, I'm shocked. This all started when we went to Five Guys. Blair believes it to be a far superior burger to In N' Out. I don't agree personally, but I can understand - Five Guys is a very good burger and I can see how people might prefer it, even if I don't. What does shock me is not how much he likes Five Guys, but how lukewarm he is about In N' Out. It's not just him. I surveyed some people at church and quite a few of them thought In N' Out was either just OK or decent. "It's consistent and you can sit outside" is the best Lee had to say about it. What??? People honestly don't love In N' Out? My mind was blown. It's like when I realized how to pronounce the words segue and feral, or when I learned that the penultimate line to the Three's Company theme song is "down at our rendezvous." Really?

I just took it for granted that everyone loves In N' Out, because I do so much. Here's why.

Actually, if you have time, read this fascinating Malcolm Gladwell essay about ketchup. The condensed version: one of the great marketing realizations of the 70s is that people don't like the same thing. Before, companies used to sell just one kind of everything, be it mustard, or spaghetti sauce, or whatever. They'd make focus groups to test different recipes, and sell the one people liked best. It seems obvious now, but it took a few pioneers to realize that different people like different things. Those companies that took advantage of it, by introducing dijon mustard, or chunky spaghetti sauce, or whatever, were enormously successful. And this realization lead to the endless variety we have today, the world of organic Cherry Vanilla Berry Burst Cheerios.

The interesting this is, this doesn't apply to ketchup. No one has successfully introduced a new variety of ketchup like they have with pretty much any other condiment or food. The reason is, ketchup is in some ways an ideal food. The human palate has five known fundamental tastes: salty, sweet, sour, bitter, and umami. Ketchup delivers all of those tastes in balance. And that just tastes right. It's why children instinctively like to cover their food in ketchup. And because it's so well balanced, anything that deviates from it ends up tasting off.

I bring this up because that balance between different tastes is why I love In N' Out. It is, for me, the ideal balance of tastes combined with high quality. The bun is slightly sweet and soft, contrasted with the toasted part that helps manage the juices. The lettuce is cold and crisp. The tomato is slightly sweet, slightly tangy. The onion is slightly sweet and sharp. The meat and cheese, salty and warm. The sauce adds additional tang and sweet. If I'm in a spicy mood, I ask for sliced chiles. The combination of tastes, texture, and temperature in an In N' Out burger is, to me, almost ideal.

I'm still blown away that not everyone shares my love for In N' Out. It's not that I don't appreciate other burgers. I do. I like variety. But In N' Out is nearly my platonic burger ideal.

ABC was in the office yesterday because we reached 500 million active users. You can see me, obstructed in the ABC World News video at 8:40, just left of the reporter, hidden behind my monitor. Also again briefly at 19:30. I think I performed well. If programming doesn't work out, I may pursue a career as a Wilson-type character in network newscasts.

Apparently I was quoted in a recent news article also. I'm now known to the dozens of people who read it for giving beer. I hadn't heard from Ryan in maybe a decade before he called for this. Incidentally, the friend to whom I gave that beer? George.

Also, Jieun insisted that Amazon clean up their entry for my dad's book so now I'm listed and come up if you search for my name in Amazon. For the record, I was against putting my name on it, because I really didn't do anything and none of the text or ideas are mine, but my dad ended up doing it anyway.

Now I need to get on IMDB. Maybe I can have Janice list me in "Special Thanks" for her short film just so I can get a listing. Then my goal of being obscurely mentioned in media will be complete.

Joshua's starting to enter a defiant phase. Two of his favorite phrases at the moment are "right now!" and "go away!" It would be annoying if it wasn't kind of adorable.

The kids are learning to share a lot better but it's still a source of quarreling. Jieun taught Joshua to, instead of just grabbing things, asking politely and counting to 10. The thing is, he generally skips the asking nicely part, so he's constantly walking up to people and counting loudly to 10.

The funny thing is, Abby's started to do this also. (That's been a curious phenomenon. We expected Joshua to do everything Abby does. But for certain things, Abby's wanted to do what Joshua is into, and that was a surprise.) So the other morning, both kids were fighting over some toy and both kept yelling at each other, repeatedly, "1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10!" It was pretty funny.

Of all the prominent atheists, I respect Sam Harris the least. I find his arguments the least persuasive.

Side note. I found out recently that Christopher Hitchens, another prominent atheist (and all-around gloomy guy) has a brother who was at one time also a militant atheist and eventually became a Christian. He recently wrote a book about his path toward faith. I find that remarkable.

Back to Harris. He recently gave a TED talk that so bothered me so much that I feel compelled to respond, even though no one here cares at all.

Here's the issue. Many people of faith argue (and I agree), that it's difficult, if not impossible, to establish a moral framework, a system for evaluating what's right and wrong, without religion. Science can tell us much about facts. But it can't tell us about values.

Harris disagrees, saying that science is sufficient to answer such questions. He argues that values are, in fact, based on facts. For example, we care more about animals than rocks. Why? Because the former has a greater degree of consciousness. And this is a testable fact. He adds that he has never encountered a value system that isn't reducible to a concern about conscious experience, and since science can answer the question of what is conscious, science is a reliable guide for morality.

The problem is, his argument begs the question. Even if science can help us elucidate what things have a conscious experience, it still can't tell us why we should care about others' conscious experience. In other words, science may be able to help us measure moral values we hold. But science still doesn't answer why those moral values should be there in the first place.

That's basically the problem with his entire approach - it always begs the question. He says afterwards that we know that there's a continuum between suffering and an idyllic state. And he claims that there are objective, measurable answers about how to move people along that continuum. Again, that begs the question; several questions in fact. How do we know the criteria for this continuum? Is being poor on the wrong side of the continuum, even one is happy? If happiness is the criteria, how do you define that? Science can't.

Furthermore, why should we care about others well-being? In history, there have been many cases where societies only cared about their own well-being. There are extreme examples like the Nazis. But in ancient times, caring only about one's own society was the norm. Empires' entire economies (like the Romans) depended on conquering and pillaging other lands. We now think that's wrong, and that we should care about other societies in addition to our own. But why?

His whole talk is predicated on the premise that morality is about maximizing human well-being and flourishing and that science can establish how to do that. But he fails to explain the most basic question - why should morality care about human well-being? And science just can't answer that.

Later, he addresses the question of how we can resolve moral questions when many people have different ideas about what morality is. He argues that just as there are experts in the sciences whose opinions should matter more, we should acknowledge that people can be more or less knowledgeable about morality, and thus they're ideas should be held in more esteem or discredited. Isn't it obvious, he says, that we should disregard the ideas of the Taliban.

Again, this begs the question. It's a circular argument. He's saying that in figuring out whose ideas of morality are valid, we should evaluate them according to.. who is most moral. That makes no sense.

Anyway. I find it odd that Sam Harris garners so much respect. Hitchens and Dawkins I understand, even if I disagree. But Harris doesn't even make sense.

I still remember two times that Henry got angry at me that have impacted me to this day.

One time was before my wedding. I asked Minho to be the DJ, and he came over to 420 James Rd. one night to make a mix for the reception. He asked me what kind of music I wanted, and I told him to use whatever he wants, that I trusted him. Then when he started assembling some music together, I started nixing some of his selections.

Henry overheard that and got pissed. And he was right to.

You can't tell someone they can do whatever they want, that they have ownership over it, and then object to some of their decisions. It's the worst thing you can do. It gives the impression of enabling, but really leaves them powerless, and worse, paralyzed, because they're expected to make their own decisions but know that really, they have to conform to some unstated preferences that you have. You're making them do something and not giving them the ability to really do it. That sucks.

Either you fully entrust them, and accept whatever they decide, or you be honest and state all your requirements up front. But saying they can do whatever they want and then objecting or modifying it when they do, that's the worst. It's a lesson I've remembered to this day.

And I need to remember it, because honestly, I still do this too much, especially with Jieun. It happens a lot when we're deciding where/what to eat. I'll say I'm fine with whatever. So she'll decide on something, say Chili's. And then I'll nix it. That sucks, and I'll remember as it happens that it sucks, but I need to remember more before I do it.

Another time Henry got angry at me was when Eric came over to work on a project for our CS 223B (Computer Vision) class. It was due the next day, and it was already pretty late, and I was screwing around, probably browsing the web or something. Henry was pissed. Because it's one thing to waste your own time. It's another thing to waste someone else's time. That sucks.

And again, he was right, and it's a lesson I've held with me to this day. So like, at work, if someone is waiting on something from me, I prioritize that first. It's not good to waste your own time, but it's awful to waste someone else's.

SN: I got an A+ in that class. Eric took it for pass / no-credit so no A+ for him. The Cal folks that go to Stanford for grad school claim that Stanford has rampant grade inflation. I disagree, but classes like that one don't help my argument; there's no way I deserved an A+. I got a few other A+s in college but those were work; sadly, Eric and other Cal folks probably think it's as easy as it was for CS 223B, which it wasn't. Sigh.

I remember these two times because they were lessons I've kept with me, but also because they were two of the rarer times that Henry was right to be angry. He gets angry many other times for no valid reason. One of my favorite memories, really in my life, was a time we were playing Bust-A-Move. Henry got so angry that I was consistently winning that he started foaming at the mouth. He wasn't angry at me, really. And actually, he was more frustrated than angry, I think. But I had never seen anyone upset to the point of foaming at the mouth before. Good times.

Random stat from Christianity Today - Growth in size of the main courses depicted in Last Supper paintings between years 1000 and 2000: 69%

Growth in size of the bread: 23%

Abby recently made name tags for everyone in small group before they came. Her name tag read "Disney Princess".

I've started to make up bedtime stories for Abby. They're all similar, involving the Chai Royal Family on a quest to do something or other, and along the way they have to pass tasks by showing how they can share with others, or love each other, or stuff like that. It's my way of getting her to think for herself how she can treat others better. It doesn't work.

Anyway, in a recent story, the Chai Royal Family's quest was to recover their friend Ariel the Mermaid's 3 lost items: a dinglehopper, a Prince Eric statue, and a snarfblatt. Abby requested that we change the last item to an iPad. Kids these days.

Certain Laker fans continue to drive me nuts, in particular the ones who say that Kobe is clearly better than LeBron because of his superior performance in the playoffs and how far his teams go.

Look, everyone (including me) respects Kobe, his game, his preparation, his devotion to his craft. It's all about winning championships, and he has 4 rings. He's one of the best players ever. But it's unfair to say Kobe and LeBron's teams' performances are a direct reflection on them. As every rational NBA commentator consistently points out, Kobe has a far better supporting cast than LeBron does. And that matters.

Certain Kobe fanboys say that that's just an excuse for LeBron. But it's not. Kobe would not have done any better were he in LeBron's situation. And that's not just speculation; Kobe was in the exact same position in 2004-2007, an awesome player on a mediocre team. In those 3 seasons, the Lakers missed the playoffs (tied with the Warriors for last place in the Pacific) and lost in the first round twice. His supporting cast in those seasons were comparable to what LeBron has now, probably better. I'd argue that Odom then was better than anyone on the current Cavs team. And they went nowhere. So spare me the LeBron isn't as good as Kobe because he can't carry a team in the playoffs by himself. Empirically, Kobe didn't either. In fact, he did far worse. For the record, neither did Michael.

Dave's post made me wonder when I started hating the Lakers, because I didn't always. I liked them a lot in the 80s. I'm with him - I think a lot of it started when I first encountered LA-centricism in college, people who act like LA (and LA sports) is the center of the universe. Newsflash - it's not. Unless that universe is hell.

I've repeatedly extolled John Bogle. One of the things I love about him is his ability to tell a good, meaningful story. He recently gave a speech at Trinity College. It's short and worth reading, but let me just quote from the beginning:

There is a wonderful story — which is, I fear, apocryphal... It is the story of a visit to Harrow School during the early 1960s by Sir Winston Churchill, that lion of the British Empire, returning to the scene of his graduation in 1893.

As the story goes, Churchill was well into his eighties — frail, wizened, and bent over — when he returned to Harrow for the opening of school, a formal affair with the students and their teachers in white tie. At the conclusion of the dinner, Churchill was asked if he'd say a few words. He rose, paused, and then spoke. "Never give up. Never. Never. Never. Never. Never." Then he sat down, to thunderous applause.

That is the simple message I deliver to you today as you enter the tough real world that recent generations have given you: Never give up. I've especially loved the fifth "never" in that sequence, not because of the number itself, but because that fifth "never" is a wonderful metaphor for the numerous times in the lives of so many of us when, faced with defeat, we have had to draw on our deepest resources to fight back and defend our lives, our careers, our principles, our honor, and our character.

...

Don't forget that fifth never. Someday you may need it.

Never give up. Never. Never. Never. Never. Never. Good words.

I recently got a zit right in the crevice where the nose meets the cheek, a near impossible location to pop. It depresses me that I still get zits in my advanced age. My parents each claim that they've never gotten a pimple before. I have no reason to doubt them; in all my life, I've never seen them sporting one. But even with their genes on my side, I'm still getting zits in my mid-30s. It sucks. Not that I have a right to complain. I never wash my face with cleanser and I'm about to have a snack of fried cheddar cheese and black pepper french fries. You reap what you sow.

A recap of the most inconvenient places to get a zit that I have had:

• The nose/cheek crevice I just mentioned.
• The ear canal. I got this one a few weeks ago also. How do you pop that? You can squeeze out, you have to try to push on it, which I did to the point of tears, but no popping.
• Inside the eyelid. Oh man. Always there, always annoying you every time you blink.
• On the butt. So it hurts every time you sit down. Terrible.
• In the butt. Uh, won't elaborate. But it sucks.

I just got a free TB skin test at Kaiser.

I don't get why Kaiser doesn't get more love. Maybe I'm biased because I've been going there forever. But I've always been happy with it. It always gets high ratings (e.g., as of this writing, it was the highest ranked health insurance plan in California by U.S. News and World Report). In Atul Gawande's important New Yorker article on the most expensive (and worst) health care in the country, Kaiser is mentioned as being one of the best. Still, despite its high ratings and reputations, a lot of my coworkers, when given the choice between Kaiser and something else (typically more expensive), they'll choose something else.

To me, this points to another reason why free market principles can't currently work with health care. One critical prerequisite for a working free market is information. And there's simply not enough information about the relative effectiveness of different health care centers. In another fascinating article, Gawande writes about cystic-fibrosis, and about how for years, there was no way of knowing which centers were better in treating cystic-fibrosis, although when you looked at the data, some clearly were. Which hospitals in the Bay Area are best? I, for one, have no clue, because there's no real data for me to compare.

Hospitals have good reason for not publishing data about their outcomes. It's really hard to interpret. For example, if the 5-year survival rates for cancer patients is higher at one hospital than at another, it's hard to tell if it's because the first hospital is better or because the latter one gets more difficult or advanced cases.

In the absence of available data, Americans tend to assume that more is better when it comes to health care. They assume that more expensive plans must be better, even though there's no evidence to support that (and some to support that there's almost no link between spending and effectiveness). Americans hospitals do far more unnecessary tests, spend far more on unnecessary treatment and procedures, all based on the assumption that more must be better. But it's not.

Anyway, I'm pretty happy with Kaiser. We've had good experiences. It's universally highly rated by national publications (Gawande giving Kaiser a shout out in the New Yorker as being a model sticks with me). And it's relatively cheap, which has mattered a lot since we gave birth to and are raising two kids. Not much to dislike about that.

I love how fearless Joshua is. I'm proud that he can do the climbing wall. It gets him into trouble (he nearly fell yesterday when jumping at Jieun before she was ready), but I'm still proud.

The other day I was taking bags for Goodwill and noticed that there were a couple of Abby's toys, a Disney Princesses cell phone and a doll she plays with that comes with a backpack. I was surprised to see them there, as they're in good condition and Abby still likes them, so I asked Jieun if they were supposed to be there.

It turns out that Jieun is doing this Flylady exercise with Abby, periodically going through her stuff and giving away things that she doesn't love so that she can bless others with them. The criteria isn't whether she likes them, but whether she loves them. And Abby chose those items.

I teared up when I heard about this. It's easy to give away stuff you don't want or need anymore. But to give away stuff you still do like? To bless others? That's amazing. Especially when you understand how obsessed Abby is with Disney Princesses. I'm still shocked.

It's really hard in this culture to not want more and more stuff and be owned by the things you have. We try as a family to be counter-cultural about this, by intentionally not getting some of the things we want and can afford, and trying to want less in general. But there's more to it than that. Just denying yourself of things is empty asceticism. The point is to have less so you can give more. And in giving away her Disney Princess cell phone and that doll, Abby is doing that. I couldn't be more proud. I think it's the most proud of her I've ever been.

It almost balances out the countless times we've been at Target and she's run through the toy aisles, saying that she wants everything there.

Interesting things come up during elementary Sunday school when I teach. One girl asked if the Abraham I kept talking about was Abraham Lincoln.

The last lesson was about how the Gentiles were grafted into the tree and how that process involved working out differences in culture and expectations. Fairly heavy stuff. The current curriculum has been challenging; theologically heavy and not a ton of application, which is hard to teach to elementary school kids. Like, the last lesson I taught was about how Jesus is Abraham's seed. Eyoiks.

In any case, at one point I was saying how we don't have to do all the things the Jews did in order to know God, we just have to believe in Jesus. One girl (the same girl who asked if Abraham == Abraham Lincoln) asked a legitimate and difficult question: how do we know that everything we know about Jesus is true? It happened a long time ago.

Instead of answering that directly, I decided to the question around on her, and show her how we accept many things about people in the past without having direct evidence. To come back to an earlier point, I asked her, how do we know about Abraham Lincoln? He died a long time ago. She responded, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world, "Umm hello, he's on the penny." Q.E.D.

Later in the same conversation, I decided to challenge them even more, telling them how many of the things we think we know about dinosaurs (a subject some of them love) we can't know to be true. Like, the fossils we find are rarely complete, intact skeletons, so scientists have to guess how they fit together, and they've frequently gotten it wrong. With many dinosaurs, we have no idea if they're really shaped the way we think they are.

This didn't go over well. One boy, visibly perturbed, left his seat, ran up to me and yelled, "YOU'RE RUINING OUR IMAGINATION!"

Yeah, I won't be repeating that style of teaching again.

I made an offhand comment on how I was glad that Hideyo was talking about JEPD. Let me explain why.

As you may or may not know, I went to a Catholic high school. Jesuit. I'm extremely grateful that I did; it really widened my horizons.

That said, there were some really difficult aspects to it. (Surprisingly, being all-male was not one of them. I actually highly encourage people to go to single-gender high schools. It's an experience you can never recreate.) One of those was the theology I was taught.

I won't pretend to be an expert - or even that familiar - with Catholic or Jesuit theology. I just know what I was taught. And what I was taught was.. odd. In certain religious studies classes, they basically espoused universalism, that there are many paths to the truth, and that Christianity was just one of them. I never understood that. Not necessarily the teaching. But in light of the teaching, why would anyone choose to be Catholic, much less a priest? If many paths lead to the truth, why not choose a different one? Say, one that didn't require celibacy?

In any case, like I said, I know very little about Catholic theology, but given what I was taught in school, to me, it was no wonder why few of my classmates were really devoted to the faith. When you're taught that there are many paths to truth, it seems arbitrary, even unnecessary, to really follow a particular one.

Beyond being universalist, the theology was pretty liberal. I learned all these ways of looking at Scripture that I had never encountered before. Including the Documentary Hypothesis. And when I did, I was shaken. Because it made a lot of sense. It was honest about the inconsistencies in the Old Testament, as well as the different writing styles and language, and it seemed to explain them well. I felt like it really thought about Scripture, instead of working from assumptions, and because of that, it felt like it had more depth.

The problem is, to me, the framework in which it was presented robbed Scripture of its divine inspiration. It turned it into a historical, human-created document. And coming from an evangelical background where the infallibility of Scripture was unquestioned and not even really examined, it was a huge shock. It made me question a lot of the assumptions I had been taught in church. And made me even question the quality of my faith.

I resolved these questions, at least to my own satisfaction, and I think my faith was made stranger in the end. But I was forced to go through that process on my own, and that didn't feel right to me. I tentatively raised the subject with some people at church at the time and no one was familiar with it. My dad was, but he was too dismissive of it in a way that doesn't jive with the way teenage minds work with ideas. I realized that in my evangelical upbringing, we studied the Bible a ton, but to a certain extent, we kept our study at a superficial level. And it thus left me open to being blindsided when I encountered a different way of looking at things.

I don't think I'm alone in this. I once read a biography of Billy Graham and it mentioned a close friend of his, a fellow evangelist, who as he started looking at Scripture critically in his graduate studies found that he could no longer in good intellectual faith accept it as infallible and true. Billy Graham shared some of the same questions, but he decided to take a stand on the truth of Scripture based on faith.

In my heart, I can't accept that what Graham and his friend chose are the only options possible - to take a stand on faith and, in some sense, turn off your head, or to use your head and reject the truth of Scripture. I have to believe there's a place for both. And to do that one has to be willing to address different ideas that are out there.

And that's why I feel like it's useful for evangelical churches to deal with JEPD. Honestly, I have no idea what the evangelical stance is on the Documentary Hypothesis, because, as I've said, I've never really seen it discussed in any sort of detail. But whatever it is, I think it should be discussed, because if we don't hear about it framed in an evangelical context, we'll hear about it in a different, likely academic and critical one. And at least for me, that experience was not good for my faith, even if the outcome was.

To me, it's kind of like really talking to your kids about sex. It's uncomfortable, and it's easier to just say don't do it. But if you don't frame sex for your kids in the right way, other things will, and that won't necessarily be good.

So talking about JEPD in evangelical churches: I'm all for it.

You know what's always amazed me? How it is that men stink and women smell good.

In college, most of us lived in the dorms all 4 years, and many of the dorms were 3 floors, with one floor all-male, one floor all-female, and one floor co-ed. The all-male floors invariably stunk to high heaven. A mix of sweat, body odor, and sundry other foul stenches.

The all-female floors, by contrast, smelled fine. Not just fine, but good. And it wasn't just that they liked and utilized pleasant scents. Even the ones that didn't, their rooms smelled good. Women just smell good.

The weird thing was, the co-ed floors smelled fine also. You would expect them to smell half as bad as the all-male floors. But no, they were perfectly fine. So it's not that men smell and women don't. Women actually have some sort of deodorizing effect, actually neutralizing men smell.

I've mentioned this before, but there's actually a term for this in Korean, roughly translated as bachelor smell. The concept is, you take a bachelor, and he (as well as his living space) smells. When he gets married, he (and his living space) doesn't smell anymore. Amazing. Inexplicable.

I think living in all-male floors for a couple years in college permanently damaged my sense of smell. I'm not joking. It used to be pretty strong. Came from my mom, I think. She constantly makes sniffing sounds, an indication that some odor is off. Freshman year, I lived on a co-ed floor, and every time I went to the male floor the smell was unbearable. Sophomore year, it took a while to get used to the smell of my all-male floor, but eventually I did, and I stopped noticing it. Senior year, I lived on an all-male floor again and I barely noticed any smell from the very beginning.

It's reflected in my sense of taste as well, which has dulled through time. I used to not be able to tolerate even a drop of Tabasco sauce; it was too strong for me. Now I add jalapenos to anything I can, for flavor. I blame in part the two years I lived on all-male dorm floors.

Why am I thinking about this? Oh yeah. The last (excruciatingly boring) half of Exodus we're reading. It's probably just me, but when I read about the tabernacle and the priestly clothes, all I can think about is how they must have smelled. Parts of the tabernacle are made of a bunch of fabric, left outdoors. That must have gotten really mildewy after a while. And the clothes - the regulations involve regularly flinging blood, oil, and maybe other stuff I don't remember on it. There are all these stones and other stuff embedded in the clothes, so they can't have been washed much if at all. Sounds smelly.

Not unlike men. But unlike women.