I wish I could say I lost it gracefully, quietly, stoically…. And suddenly I looked at the huge pile of laundry in the corner sitting next to the still-unpacked suitcases full of more dirty clothes, and the STUFF piled on every surface in every room paired with the dirty dishes in the sink and the dust and debris on the floor, and I was completely and utterly overwhelmed. The weight of everything I had been carrying for the last ten days suddenly felt to heavy to bear. All the stress and frustration and overwhelm I had been holding at bay came pouring out, and for the next two hours, I very loudly and very angrily cleaned the house from top to bottom.
I changed the sheets and cleaned the bathroom, washed the dishes and swept the floor, unpacked my suitcase and finally attended to all that laundry in the corner.
Suddenly I felt like I could breathe again. Suddenly I felt a lot more calm and ready to deal with whatever curveballs life threw my way. The ironic thing is, I know this about myself! In fact, in the first chapter of my new book, Unstuffed , I explain:. The more cluttered and chaotic we are inside, the more our homes will reflect that confusion. But the opposite is also true. The more we can tame the physical space around us and create an environment that soothes, welcomes, and comforts, the calmer we will feel inside. But knowing it and living it are sometimes two different things, and I guess I just needed the reminder.
When You Finally Lose It Over Clutter and Chaos
I think we all do sometimes. This book answers so many questions about how the opposing and confused opinions of God's sovereignty and His loving nature can be rationalized as well as how, historically and even biblically they seem to be in conflict. One of the many important truths that I remember and often cite from Dr. Kallas's classes was the difference between Greek and Hebrew thinking which affect our understanding of the scriptures and his oft-repeated phrase of holding opposing truths in tension.
In this book, he further clarifies that dichotomy. I can't emphasize enough how much think all pastors and religion instructors would do well to read and teach this book if for no other reason than to gain an understanding of the conflicting teaching between denominations and to improve their counseling of skeptical seekers of the truth and of those who are wrestling with the age-old problem of "bad things happening to good people. Kallas, for another great gift to us all!
After many years it was great to read from one who many university students camped over night to make sure they got in his class. Kindle Edition Verified Purchase. James Kallas with another great exposition of vital Biblical understanding. One person found this helpful. See all 4 reviews.
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Creative Tension at the Edge-of-Chaos: Towards an Evolutionary Christology
Get to Know Us. English Choose a language for shopping. Explore the Home Gift Guide. Evolution on the edge-of-chaos is also evidenced in the central mystery of evolutionary biology — the emergence of altogether new species in the history of life. In a long-standing challenge to the explanatory scope and power of the Neo-Darwinian theory, and one which furnishes us with further evidence for a theory of creative tension at the edge-of-chaos, comes from palaeontology and particularly the work of Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge.
These palaeontologists challenged the traditional gradualist conception of change in the Neo-Darwinian theory, specifically the notion that evolution takes place through the slow, continuous, incremental mutation of favourable characteristics in organisms over long stretches of geological time. We can find a striking parallel here between the pattern of stasis and punctuated emergence in the fossil record and the discoveries of the sciences of complexity. Now in the same way, the notion that speciation in the living world is correlated with sudden changes in self-organizing systems, which pass through periods of instability and then lock onto new stable patterns, fits very well with the models of transformation as described by both the theory of punctuated equilibrium and the sciences of complexity.
As a result, in opposition to the tradition notion Darwinian gradualism for which there is a conspicuous lack of evidence of the fossil record it is more reasonable to think that the critical transformations between species that give rise the incredible complexity and diversity in the evolution of life have arisen through these relatively abrupt transformations and symmetry breaks, which is confirmed by both the dynamic pattern of self-organization on the edge-of-chaos in the sciences of complexity where new forms of life suddenly emerge at the critical threshold between necessity and contingency and the pattern of stasis and punctuated change exhibited in the fossil record.
This edge-of-chaos dynamic can also be traced through the historical development of the human species. During the disintegration of a civilization, two separate plays with different plots are being performed simultaneously side by side. While an unchanging dominant majority is perpetually rehearsing its own defeat, fresh challenges are perpetually evoking creative responses from newly recruited minorities, which proclaim their own creative power by rising, each time to the occasion.
When You Finally Lose It Over Clutter and Chaos - FaithGateway
This dynamic pattern of self-organization via instability and transformation is evidenced in everything from the supernovae explosion of the primordial elements that give birth to the building blocks of life to the catastrophic mass extinction events that catalyze the emergence to new living species on our hot house planet to the passionate and bloody upheavals of human history. Moreover, the dynamic self-organization on the edge-of-chaos is also considered to be the likely precondition of evolution itself, which thereby provides the fundamental tie between self-organization and natural selection.
As Stuart Kauffman, one of the pioneers of the sciences of complexity and self-organization puts it in a recent interview:. So here is a marriage of self-organization transformation and selection adaptation.
So self-organization affords the capacity to be critical at the edge-of-chaos and then selection gets it and maintains it. So in fundamental congruence with the paradoxical heart of Christianity, the capacity to evolve at the edge-of-chaos can also be construed as the driving force of large-scale evolutionary dynamics, where natural selection works to keep evolving systems in the dynamic regime that holds the tension between opposite poles and fine-tunes the novelty and diversity that is constantly and spontaneously being generated. This more general explanatory framework can embrace the essential truth-claims of the Christian tradition while providing a potentially rich and inclusive alternative to the orthodox Neo-Darwinian theory of evolution.
The multitude of life forms that have evolved in the natural world are not merely the outcome of blind chance and long stretches of geological time but rather the outcome of a dynamic interplay between Darwinian selection working to optimize reproductive fitness and the immanent self-organizing dynamics evolvability of complex systems working to bring forth new forms of living complexity across successively higher hierarchical levels of evolution physical, chemical, biological, socio-cultural.
So from this perspective, it is possible to incorporate the fundamentals of Neo-Darwinism into a broader evolutionary framework, where selective pressures constitute the surrounding matrix over which the intrinsic self-organizing factors of physical, biological and socio-cultural systems are disclosed. As Kauffman again writes, evolving systems:. And natural selection is not the antagonist of self-organization. It is more like a law of motion, a force that is constantly pushing emergent, self-organizing systems toward the edge of chaos.
So, while we can reject the overtly reductionist side of Neo-Darwinism, which upholds the billions of tons of single-celled bacteria prokaryotes on our planet as the dominant exemplar of Darwinian fitness in the history of life, 38 we can preserve the central Darwinian mechanism of natural selection and incorporate it into a broader and more inclusive evolutionary framework.
This means that we remove natural selection as the primary mechanism of evolution, that which guides and controls the task of optimizing reproductive fitness. In contrast natural selection can be seen to operate, but in a modified sense where selection moves diverse forms of adaptive complexity to the creative edge of evolution while discarding whatever mutations are not compatible with the minimal constraints survival and reproduction these biological constraints that become increasingly unnecessary in human socio-cultural evolution.
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In this more general context, natural selection acts as a broad survival filter where the criteria of Darwinian fitness maximal reproductive success that can be recast as a structural feature of our biological hard-wiring and a loose constraint to be satisfied rather than optimized. Evolution is not just tinkering. This is a significant reworking of the core Neo-Darwinian doctrine and entails a radical rethinking of evolutionary biology.