How to Calculate the Best College Football Team Ever

This was a really interesting statistical method of evaluating teams across history, and I think that it should settle the question once and for all: the 1995 Nebraska Cornhuskers were the best college football team ever to play the game.

But I’m still a little offended at the absolute lack of professionalism and class displayed by Kirk Herbstreit in this.

Movie Quotes Meme

1. Pick 15 of your favorite movies.
2. Go to IMDb and find a quote from each movie.
3. Post them here for everyone to guess.
4. Right answers/affirmations will be posted in the comments section accordingly.
5. NO using Google or my Facebook profile or any other use of the intranets to CHEAT.

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1. You’re crazy. You oughta be locked up. You, too. Two hundred and fifty guys just walkin’ down the road, just like that?

2. Right. Let’s sort the buyers from the spyers, the needy from the greedy, and those who trust me from the ones who don’t, because if you can’t see value here today, you’re not up here shopping. You’re up here shoplifting.

3. Get out of here, ghost. Get out of here, and don’t you dare turn around and come back, for if you do, all the armies of my boot will kick you in the teeth, and you will be cast up, and thrown in the dirt, and thrust back to Perdition!

4. I’m going to resign in protest? To force it on the air? The answer’s ‘no’. I don’t plan to spend the end of my days wandering in the wilderness of National Public Radio. That decision I’ve already made.

5. Well… Wildcat was written in a kind of obselete vernacular…

6. Now you wanna gun down a police captain. Why? Because he slapped ya in the face a little bit? Hah? What do you think this is the Army, where you shoot ‘em a mile away? You’ve gotta get up close like this and – bada-BING! – you blow their brains all over your nice Ivy League suit. C’mere…

7. I been workin’ here at the D.Q. for about, um… eight months? Seven? I don’t know, somethin’ like that, it’s fun. Just do the cones… make sundaes, make Blizzards, ‘n… put stuff on ‘em, ‘n… see a lot of people come in, a lot of people come to the D.Q… burgers… ice cream… anything, you know? Cokes… just drive in and get a Coke, if you’re thirsty.

8. That guy is tense. Tension is a killer. I used to be in a barbershop quartet in Skokie, Illinois. The baritone was this guy named Kip Diskin, big fat guy, I mean, like, orca fat. He was so stressed in the morning…

9. I have respect for beer. I have respect for beer!

10. If I take one more step, it’ll be the farthest away from home I’ve ever been.

11. That’s Tommy. He tells people he was named after a gun, but I know he was really named after a famous 19th century ballet dancer.

12. I wouldn’t go so far as to call a dog filthy but they’re definitely dirty. But, a dog’s got personality. Personality goes a long way.

13. Bloody hell…I’m gonna die to Boney M.

14. I want my lamp back. I’m gonna need it to get out of this slimy mudhole.

15. You’re nothing to me now. You’re not a brother, you’re not a friend. I don’t want to know you or what you do. I don’t want to see you at the hotels, I don’t want you near my house. When you see our mother, I want to know a day in advance, so I won’t be there. You understand?

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Thanks, Ernie

There are a thousand issues on which Sen. Ernie Chambers and I disagree, but my time as a page in the Nebraska Legislature taught me that he was a very good senator. In fact, after seeing his thoroughness, passion, and high respect for the institutions of Nebraska government, I ended up admiring him more than any other senator. If you are not familiar with my political views, you should know that my praising Senator Chambers is shocking. Still, I think that the vast amount of his work in the Legislature was for the good, even as I would argue that much of what he did was not good.

So, as newly established constitutional term limits end an extraordinary streak in office (38 years!), the Legislature adopted a resolution thanking him for his service over the years. I enjoyed a highlight video of the debate on the resolution, which you can see here. (By the way, in my job as a page I used to do what the two kids in black vests on the left part of the screen at the beginning of the video are doing.)

Thanks, Ernie–you taught me many things in those short two years when I had the privilege of watching you work.

Covenant Theology and Dispensationalism

Over Spring Break, I read The Dispensational-Covenantal Rift: The Fissuring of American Evangelical Theology from 1936 to 1944. The book was originally a Ph.D. dissertation in Church History by a Dallas Theological Seminary graduate, and I found it absolutely fascinating. He by no means repudiates his dispensational theology (he apparently won the John F. Walvoord Award for outstanding work in eschatology), but I thought that he was extraordinarily fair in his analysis of the point in history at which dispensationalists and covenantalists parted ways. If anything, he seemed to think that early dispensationalists (especially Lewis Sperry Chafer, founder and first president of Dallas Theological Seminary) were largely to blame for (what he would describe as) the misunderstanding between both camps.

Put simply, his thesis is that dispensationalists and covenantalists misunderstood each other because of their different attempts to defend the historic faith against liberalism. To Covenantalists, especially in the wake of the fallout at Princeton Seminary with J. Gresham Machen, the solution was to uphold the historic creeds and confessions, especially the Westminster Confession of Faith. The problem with the liberals, as they saw it, was their willingness to modify the confessions in order to bring them into line with modernist philosophy. Because the PCUSA did not denounce and excommunicate modernists within the Presbyterian Church, those modernists (or at least those who were willing to tolerate the modernists in the name of Christian Unity) took over control of the denomination. Therefore, conservative Presbyterians (such as those in the newly-founded Westminster Theological Seminary and the Orthodox Presbyterian Church) believed that if Presbyterians remained faithful to their confession, they would also remain faithful to the faith so that there would not be a second liberalization of the Presbyterian Church.

Dispensationalists, on the other hand, believed that the problem was that liberals had stopped interpreting the Bible literally. Certainly, in some ways, they were correct: by interpreting the incarnation, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus in figurative and spiritual ways–therefore denying their historicity–the liberals had abandoned a literal interpretation, and therefore had abandoned the faith. So, the solution was simple: an emphasis on the literal interpretation of Scripture would protect against further defections to liberalism.

The disagreement arose when this hermeneutic of literalism began to interpret God’s promises to Israel. This, of course, resulted in Dispensationalism’s unique take on the distinction between Israel and the Church and their resulting eschatology, Dispensational Premillenialism. Realizing that this theological perspective was not in conformity with the Westminster Confession and Catechisms, prominent dispensationalists began to advocate a revision of the standards. (Believe it or not, Dallas employed almost an exclusively Presbyterian faculty in its early years; notably, Chafer and Walvoord were Presbyterians in the beginning. [p. 217-18])

Do you see the problem? Two different groups of conservative Presbyterian Christians were advocating two mutually exclusive ways to prevent a liberal takeover of their denominations: one insisted on holding to the Westminster Standards; another insisted on a “literal” hermeneutic for biblical interpretation that would demand a revision of the Standards. This moved the traditional (Covenantal) Presbyterians to examine more closely the Dispensationalism that they had largely ignored before the 1930s, when all their efforts had been directed toward combating liberalism. Upon examination, they came to the conclusion that Dispensationalism was not in conformity with the standards, and therefore they began to remove dispensationalists (and, unfortunately, many Historic Premillenialists who got caught in the cross-fire) from the denomination.

There is a much bigger story here, of course, and the whole thing is fascinating. I would strongly recommend that anyone interested in Dispensationalism and Covenant Theology read the book–it helps a lot to see where the disagreements arose, and I think that he is particularly helpful in tracing points where the two camps are closer now than they ever had been, especially since many of the misunderstandings on both sides have been cleared up since the 1940s.

This book in no way made me more sympathetic to the aspects of Dispensationalism that have not changed over the years (notably, their distinction of the Church and Israel and their eschatology), but I think that this book helped me to reaffirm in my mind the points of commonality that I do share with dispensationalist Christians–we both are committed to the historic faith delivered once for all to the saints through our mutual affirmation of human depravity, Christ’s full deity and full humanity in the incarnation, his death on the cross as a substitute for sinners, his bodily resurrection in victory over sin and death, and his future bodily return to earth, whatever such a return might mean.