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As you likely have already heard, last night four students and one faculty member from Taylor University were killed in a tragic semi-truck and van accident.

My wife and I are faculty members at Taylor. We had connections to two of the students who were killed. Thank you for your prayers for the whole Taylor community. We are deeply saddened by the loss.

At the moment, I am in Fairview, Pennsylvania because my mother-in-law, Nancy Steinfield, passed away suddenly and her funeral was yesterday. Her obituary is here. So we are grieving because of that and also grieving in absentia for the Taylor tragedy. Amy and I will return to Taylor on Saturday or Sunday.

There are a number of links below to find out more about the tragedy from Taylor’s website and local news media.

Taylor University Official Updates

Chronicle-Tribune.com – local paper with regular updates and photos

WISH-TV – stories and video

WTHR.com – stories and video

TheIndyChannel.com – stories and video

IndyStar.com – Indianapolis Star newspaper

See also the comments by Blue Like Jazz author Donald Miller here.

You can listen to my LAUNCHcast Station here

It plays

• Christian artists like Jennifer Knapp and Chris Rice
• Worship artists like Chris Tomlin, Vicky Beeching, David Crowder Band, Shane & Shane, and Delirious?
• Christian artists who sing "secular music" like U2, Lifehouse, Bob Dylan, Bruce Cockburn, and Johnny Cash.
• Non-Christian artists like Toad the Wet Sprocket, Matchbox Twenty, Gin Blossoms, Indigo Girls, Alanis Morissette, and Pearl Jam who I like because of their thoughtful words and/or great melodies.

Note:

I have to turn off ("disable") my Norton Internet Security pop-up blocker to play the station.

Disclaimer:

I freely admit I am not a very artistic, musically-astute listener. I last played an instrument when I played tuba in 8th grade. I don’t prioritize buying CD’s or buying concert tickets. The height of my musical appreciation was listening to lots of top 40 radio from 1986-1994 (jr-high and high school).

My listening habits:

I can listen to all the LAUNCHcast radio stations commercial-free because I have SBC DSL high-speed internet at home. Find the LAUNCHcast station guide here for lots of stations like Contemporary Christian Station or the Praise and Worship Station which you can listen to with commercials.

I have a cord from my laptop (from the headphone jack) to my stereo so I can listen to it through my stereo speakers.

At work, I can’t get LAUNCHcast to work because of the settings at the school so I sometimes listen to Christian radio at K-Love here.

Often times in the morning, I listen to NPR (National Public Radio). I listen to their Hourly Newscast 5-minute news summary, the NPR Program Stream or stories that look interesting. I have blogged about this before here and here and here.

Still, I most often am found listening to sermons and lectures online. My post here gives a great list of Sermons and Lectures online. This may be my most valuable post.

I have written posts after listening to a number of the sermons and lectures. (See here about William Lane Craig and here about John Perkins and Erwin McManus and here about Wangerin, McLaren, Buechner, Capon, Foster, Groome and here on John MacArthur).

I listen to stuff on the internet a lot because:

1. We don’t have TV but we can watch DVDs and videos.
2. I often prepare to teach class at home and watch 10-month year-old son Ryan.
3. I do the laundry and cleaning around the house.

The discipline of study vs. the discipline of silence

Sometimes I have felt guilty for not practicing the presence of God like Brother Lawrence. I have felt bad for not practicing the discipline of silence. In chapter 7 of Celebration of Discipline, Richard Foster writes: "Our fear of being alone drives us to noise and crowds . . . We buy radios that strap to our wrists or fit over our ears so that, if no one else is around, at least we are not condemned to silence." I take his prophetic warning seriously. There is a place for silence in my life and surely needs to be cultivated more.

But I think there is also a place for thinking about "whatever" is worth thinking about (Philippians 4:8). (I just realized that this is equivalent to Richard Foster’s "discipline of study" (ch. 5 of Celebration of Discipline) and he in fact quotes Philippians 4:8). I hope that I can turn what I am listening to into prayer. "Lord, help me to sort through what I am hearing and use it to serve you better."

Another option is to listen to Scripture read aloud. See Biblegateway’s Audio here or listen to the New Testament in Greek here like NT Wright used to do. See my post about him here.

Eugene Peterson, author of The Message, and one of my heroes because of his books on pastoring, says U2 has a prophetic voice. We often say that biblical prophets were more about "forthtelling" than "foretelling." Prophets are also poets and a bit rough around the edges. But they tell us what we need to hear. Below I have put some of my favorite quotes from the article. See the full article here.

"Is U2 a prophetic voice? I rather think so. And many of my friends think so. If they do not explicitly proclaim the Kingdom, they certainly prepare the way for that proclamation in much the same way that John the Baptist prepared the way for the kerygma of Jesus…Amos crafted poems, Jeremiah wept sermons, Isaiah alternately rebuked and comforted, Ezekiel did street theater. U2 writes songs and goes on tour, singing them."

U2 doesn’t seem to be calculated in what they are doing. It just comes out of who they are, and maybe that’s why people respond to them, because they are so unconventional in the rock music world. And then there is the social passion they have evidenced in the African world, and the effort that they go to to speak to people of influence in order to try to convince them that pain and suffering and impoverishment are the responsibility of those who are in positions of influence and power — such people are not to just make war and do public relations and win elections and develop strategies to get people to be better consumers.So I’ve used the word prophet for them. Walter Brueggemann describes prophets as uncredentialed spokesmen for God. Well, I think that fits them pretty well. They don’t have any authority in the world of faith.

I think they started out pretty confused and were kind of just messing around. I think they must be as surprised about this — that people like me are calling them prophets — as maybe as I am. But doesn’t that happen a lot? When we’re living with any kind of authenticity, we don’t know what we are doing until, suddenly, moments come of clarification — catalytic moments — and we see suddenly this is what I am, this is what I’m doing. But in the spiritual life, calculation doesn’t work.

I don’t have a whole lot of respect for popular culture — too much of it seems to me to be reductive, escapist, and trivial. But none of those adjectives fit Bono and U2 as far as I know.

There’s something very refreshing about U2. It’s honest music. There’s an honesty and that’s why I think the word prophetic is accurate for them. They are not saying things that people want to hear to make them escape from their ordinary lives. They push us back into the conditions in which we have to live.