Some of you may identify yourselves as a lost Christian or indifferent about religion. All travelers to the Middle East discover that this normally self-assured religion gets insecure in the small hours of night and feels it has to rehearse its foundational beliefs, in public, at 190 dB. Cut out a trapezoid, making sure that the small is wide enough to loosely tie around your child’s neck. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all His splendor was dressed like one of these.” Just take a look out your window and you’ll see what Jesus means. But they can put off meeting the requirements, which effectively means they do not adopt the euro. He can alter his appearance at will yet retains his sarcastic personality. “The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed.” (Romans 8:19) The land has been given to us as a gift, but it’s a gift that will one day need to be returned to its Maker. Though John picks up another dog later on, his original puppy was given to him as a present by his wife. In the days of Julius Caesar, wreaths were worn by aristocrats and used by Greeks to crown victorious athletes in the original Olympic games.

Those are just ordinary days. And rural is as close to natural as you can get these days. This passionate nature can manifest in their professional endeavors, their personal relationships, and their creative pursuits. Psalm 19 tells us that “The heavens declare the glory of God”, while in the New Testament Paul explains that “since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities – His eternal power and divine nature – have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made” (Romans 1:20). Clearly creation, land included, is important to the Lord. An old Norse legend tells of 12 gods who sat down to dine. There would be very few people who would say that man has always placed the perfect value on land. The experts say that you should hold off on spilling all of your drama and baggage until at least a few dates have gone by. This is why, accordingly, I find so strange those expressions of certain philosophers who say that the eternal truths of metaphysics and Geometry, and consequently the principles of goodness, of justice, and of perfection, are effects only of the will of God. In the summer of 1963, a young Sudanese student at Dartmouth College named Ahmed Osman was walking through Harlem with a friend when he decided to pop into Muhammad’s Temple No. 7. There he encountered a charismatic, 38-year-old minister named Malcolm X, who was delivering a passionate talk on the theology of the Nation of Islam.

Well, who better to explain than God himself? These different conceptions of Ultimate Reality bring with them distinct understandings of other significant issues as well, such as salvation/liberation, life after death, and evil and suffering, among others. J.R.R. Tolkien does ugly cities well, as any beholder of beauty ought to acknowledge. Our building codes are littered with rule after rule, guarding us against fires and earthquakes, telling us how many car parks we need to provide, but requirements for beauty take a definite back seat. The model comes to us by way of particle physics, a field filled with physicists dedicated to reducing our complicated universe to its most basic building blocks – subatomic particles. But like all power, this power comes with responsibility. Our urban environments seem to be dominated by the mighty modern townhouse – an invention that comes with as much asphalt as possible, to reduce the quantity of time-consuming green stuff we used to play on. Oh my God, they killed HPKP!

This King of the Northern Kingdom of Israel killed an entire royal house. When we move forward to the time of King David, God chooses to dwell among his people in a city – in Jerusalem. Jerusalem isn’t a temporary storage location, either. Are you willing to accept the possibility that God’s dictation of the Good isn’t rational, and the product of nothing but her own “mind”? If we accept God’s omnibenevolence (another Abrahamic trait), then what substantiates it? If the Good is an arbitrary command, then God’s reasons for commanding do not need to be Good themselves (or even rational). If God decides the rules that characterize him as omnibenevolent, then aren’t we back at contingent morality? It turns morality into divine command. That opinion prevailed as people were “copypastaing” HPKP example policies from around the web and thus unknowingly blocked access to their own web servers. I’ve done this because when people are asking to convert to something just because it’s “based,” Truth is unfortunately not necessarily their concern, so I’ve first addressed issues that do concern them. It’s really an ethical issue, one that requires careful attention.