Took a trip up to Fairplay last night -- a couple hours up, couple hours back. Arrived on a plain, surrounded by peaks, as dusk drew in. Glorious. Cranked tunes and drove with the windows open. Hard to ask for anything more in this world.

In other locale-related news, I'm now really a CO resident: Got my driver's license, and they punched a hole in my PA one. So apparently it's true, you can't home again... Also, I dropped my GOP registration. No more primary voting for me, but I can't say I'm with even a majority of the party positions anymore, so the jig is up. Feels odd to join the oh-so-trendy "independent voter" ranks, though.

Am convinced now that my little hypothesis about Luke is wrong; the pattern doesn't hold, really. I do, though, think that "escalation" is a good angle to look at the Gospels from. What got me to spot it was, oddly, some RPG theory discussions on The Forge. (A number of narrativist-oriented games use mechanisms to ratchet up the "price" of dramatic actions, which must be "bought off" with reversals for the character, in a manner satisfactory to the player(s).) Those discussions just highlighted the rise and fall, ebb and flow, of dramatic action in a story, for me. Then I started to see Jesus and his opponents starting to 'raise the stakes', as it were, and approach some resolution to conflicts. Might be worth looking at how the conflicts play out, depending on who has initiative in a pericope; which are initiated by Jesus questioning or judging, and which are initiated by Pharisees/scribes/Sadducees trying to deal Jesus a setback, and how do they proceed differently? The conflicts usually end, of course, with Jesus doing a sign (esp., opening eyes or resurrection), and/or, silencing the whole audience, and/or, opponents working to kill him somehow. The aftermath is then a conflict which gets stakes set and a resolution worked out, lather, rinse, repeat...

Besides that, I have a modest little project going as well, which might take some more time. As if I ever try to go w/ ACME under proper, long-range terms, I'll get much more detailed grilling about doctrinal stuff, I've decided I need to work out what exactly irks me about the infallerrantistic evangelical position on the doctrine of Scripture. I can intuit it, but that's not even enough for myself; self-deception is a powerful tool. So I'm doing a bit of a survey of Scripture to figure out what it actually says about itself. I call this the WoGiSs Survey -- snappy, no? Just going through and picking up passages that deal with "the Word" or speech, Scripture, writings, law, related ideas, and trying to put together a survey of "the Word of God in the Scriptures" (hence WoGiSs!). For those of you following along at home, I'll reinterate my key question: What negative statements are made about Word/Scripture(s), and what positive ones? (Ex.: "Not erring" is a negative statement, says what it isn't; "Useful for teaching" is a positive statement of value.) Working hypothesis is that there are few negative statements made, and those do not match the sweeping ones so much in dogmatic vogue only after 1800 AD. Compare Lutheran confessions and 39 Articles w/ modern infallerrantistic jargon...

And now the dishes are washed, and it's pushing midnight... Time to call it a day, as tomorrow has a lot in it.

Pax.