And now I can breathe.
After a long year of learning Hebrew and reading commentaries, I made it out alive. Though it looked a bit dodgy at times, I made it through my first semester of seminary. Many marathon reading sessions, lots of last minute studying for exams, and a few all-night paper writing sessions. See, what happens when you leave all of your 15 page papers until the last month of the semester is that you just don't sleep for a month. It's a terrible, terrible idea. Luckily, I was pretty happy with how my papers turned out. I wrote a paper about Satan (from Job 1), a paper about slavery (from Leviticus 25) and a paper about the absolutely insane passage Exodus 4:24-26. It was pretty interesting, wrestling with these different passages and reading all sorts of different commentaries about them, and I thought they all were rather good papers, if I do say so myself.
Anyway, hopefully with the summer here, I'll be able to do a little more blogging, maybe even picking back up on "Project Switchfoot". I'm hoping to get a lot of quality reading done with my free time. My first project is the book "Gilead", which I have heard really great things about. I'm also hoping to get some Tim Keller books read (I've got Prodigal God, Counterfeit Gods, and The King's Cross), a bit of John Piper perhaps (I really want to read Desiring God sometime) and I'd love to finish Gene Wolfe's "Book of the New Sun" series, but that is highly unlikely, because those are the densest fantasy books I've ever read. That's my reading list,so I'll keep you all up to date on how many I actually finish. My bet is probably no more than two.
So, as I have already documented, I have a serious weakness for singing competitions. They're my guilty pleasures. American Idol just finished, and my quick synopsis is this: Scotty has been the clear frontrunner for the last 10 weeks or so, and though he seems like a very nice young man, I do not appreciate country music very much, so I wasn't really a fan. My favorite contestant ended up being Haley, who really grew during the competition and definitely won me over. She made top 3, so I can't really complain. Anyway, here were all of my favorite performances from this season (I'm posting links, because it would be way too many embedded videos):
Jacob Lusk - A House Is Not A Home: I have to comment on this one. It's probably the best performance of the whole competition, and I was convinced after this that Jacob was amazing. Unfortunately, Jacob never came anywhere close to this level of greatness again. He has tremendous natural talent, but his singing became so ridiculously self-indulgent that it bordered on unlistenable. I had to go back and check if this performance was actually as good as I remembered. Yup, it's legitimately great. Such a shame.
Lauren Alaina-I Hope You Dance
Scotty McCreery - Gone: The only time I really liked Scotty
Pia Toscano - Ricer Deep Mountain High: Ironically, the song she was eliminated on
Pai Toscano - I'll Stand By You: Worth it for the big finish
Casey Abrams - Your Song
Haley Reinhart - Benny and the Jets
Haley Reinhart - The House of the Rising Sun
Haley Reinhart - I Who Have Nothing
