At A Hen's Pace: Further Conference Highlights

Sunday, January 25, 2009

Further Conference Highlights

We're back home already! We were gone only 48 hours, but how much was packed into that short time!

Dinesh D'Souza spoke two more times and gave us all a lot more food for thought.

All weekend we had wonderful worship with singer/songwriter/worship leader Billy Sprague.

We had a great time catching up with old friends from Rez.

I met this blogger (Caryn, not Carla) and her husband.

Papa Rooster and I had the privilege of driving Dinesh to the airport and we had such an enjoyable conversation on the way!

At the end, we were asked to give some feedback to the conference organizers (and by the way, if you'd be interested in the next one, next January, email me. It's just a word-of-mouth little thing). We were asked to sum up the conference in one word, and the word I chose was "stimulating." I have so many thoughts percolating right now, if I could get them all down, I'd have blog posts for a month! (Which probably won't happen, since Crazy Week starts tomorrow....)

One of my biggest takeaways was a new vision for how to help prepare my teenagers to deal with secular culture. As Dinesh explained, teens need to understand that there are other religions and worldviews out there, but that Christianity is a rationally defensible position, even apart from the Scripture, and that while atheism poses as the "rational" belief system and paints religion as the realm of faith apart from reason, it can actually require just as much faith to hold the atheistic point of view. For example, neither the atheist or the Christian knows for sure what lies on the other side of death. Both hold their positions on faith that they're right.

(And who has more to lose if they are wrong? --That was Pascal's famous argument for belief. Dinesh pointed out that former president Bush had to look at reports of weapons of mass destruction in Iran with the same question in mind: What if I believe them, and I'm wrong...what if I don't act on them, and I'm wrong?)

See? My whole weekend was like that! One thought stimulating another and another!

Papa Rooster was busy too, digesting everything and simultaneously taking pictures!

Here is me trying to get a little further in Dinesh's book before the conference began. (Traveling further than most, we were the first to arrive!)