jeremyduncan.ca

Dinner

// May 1st, 2009 // No Comments » // photos

Cooked some sirloin steak with garlic butter, green beans with walnuts and lemon zest, a little garlic bread and red wine. Turned out pretty good. Somehow though the photo looks even better.

Dinner

// March 28th, 2009 // No Comments » // photos

I cooked dinner for my sisters (in visiting from Toronto) and some friend last night. Seared some salmon with lemon, pepper, salt and capers to go with some rice, field tomatoes and zucchini. Served it with some bread, balsamic, olive oil and 5 yr white cheddar and finished the whole meal off with an incredible bottle of 2000 Domaine Follin Arbelet Aloxe-Corton Premier Cru Les Vercots Burgandy that went just about perfectly with the fish. Best bottle of wine I’ve had this week…

[photos]

Monday Morning reflections

// September 29th, 2008 // No Comments » // church, photos

I feel like mashed two somewhat unrelated ideas together this weekend.

The philosophical mistake of arguing for a God-of-the-gaps who exists in the shrinking window of what we don’t know about the universe, and the more practical mistake of believing in a God who is only present in the shrinking gap of possibility defined by the choices we have already made in life.

Nevertheless here’s how I worked it through;

Life is only worth living because of the possibility of new experiences. There is always something new to discover, taste and experience.

Twist Movie endings (Sixth Sense)
Black Swan (Nicolas Nassim Table)
Wine (8000 years and still learning)

That doesn’t mean we should try to explain God only by what we don’t know. God-of-the-Gaps type arguments are fundamentally flawed because the frontier of knowledge keeps pushing that type of God in continual retreat.

Barnett

To use the God-Of-The-Gaps argument is to open up your poor old deity to scientific scrutiny. If you say that proof of your God can be shown by a particular unexplained phenomenon, you’re going to be in trouble when science gets round to examining and explaining that phenomenon. Does your God vanish or die, or just scuttle over to the next Gap, like some giant cockroach when the light is switched on?
Sometime, someday, most of the important gaps will be closed, and those remaining believers who rely on this form of argument will be heard saying “Ah, but what about the mating ritual of the Venezuelan Accordion Beetle, eh? You can’t explain that with your stupid test tubes, can you? Bow down and praise the Lord in apology!”Far and few, far and few, are the gaps where the deities live.

Bonhoeffer

How wrong it is to use God as a stop-gap for the incompleteness of our knowledge.
If in fact the frontiers of knowledge are being pushed further and further back (and that is bound to be the case), then God is being pushed back with them, and is therefore continually in retreat.
We are to find God in what we know, not in what we don’t know

Instead Jesus uses the term born again to frame this idea that sometimes we need to go back and look at our lives with fresh eyes to see God not just in “what’s left” but in places we may have missed him before.

When we’re born we are open to everything, full of potential. It’s over time that we learn to manage, focus and direct that potential to the point where it can seem like our options are pretty limited. The idea of being born again, in a lot of ways, is about seeing things with new eyes again and being open to new possibilities. Perhaps it was meant to be less about a new set of conclusions and more about a recapturing a willingness to consider new ideas or reconsider old ones in a new way that we’ve lost over time

We see Nicodemus three times in the Book of John.

John 3
Nicodemus shows a willingness to engage with something that doesn’t initially fit in his world
John 7
He opens himself up to listen and learn and be surprised
John 19
And then eventually – though a process of journey and discovery he allows that new experience to become the catylist through which he reinterprets everything in his life

Where was the moment when Nicodemus was “born again”? Perhaps it was closer to the moment he opened himself up to a new possibility than to the moment he settled on a new set of conclusions.

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Sept 28: Gaps in our Experience

Video SLR?

// August 29th, 2008 // No Comments » // photos, random

Okay so when Nikon announced the new D90 I thought it was kind of silly. I mean who buys a reasonable serious DSLR camera and wants to shoot low quality video with it… but then I started to think about the option of shooting video at a consumer level harnessing the power of the readily available catalogue of Nikon lenses.

Seriously, check these videos shot on the D90. Now granted the lenses they used are worth, in most cases, at least as much as the body itself but when have you ever seen that kind of depth of field control, or wide angle shots on a consumer level video camera… I’ll tell you when… never, that’s when.

There may be some real potential here in this gimmick.

Zambia Photos

// April 10th, 2008 // No Comments » // africa, photos

Here’s the links to the full catalogue of photos I took on the trip. Eventually I will compile everyone’s pictures together for a comprehensive (and extensive) list.

Home Based Care
Schools
Luanshya
London UK
Livingstone and Victoria Falls
Botswana Safari

Most of the photos have been geo-tagged in the exif data so you can find where the image was taken in Google Earth or Maps.

Photo of the week

// April 6th, 2007 // 4 Comments » // photos

Photo Stream

Photo of the week

// March 10th, 2007 // 10 Comments » // photos

Some old rusty shopping carts in the alley behind Westside.

Photo Stream

New Lens II

// March 8th, 2007 // 11 Comments » // photos

So two days after my 28mm showed up in the mail I saw this orphaned (re: on consignment) Sigma at the Camera Store. Yeah I know it’s a Sigma but it’s a 24-70mm f2.8 constant aperture… and it’s a huge sucker which would be great if I had to compensate for anything else… I don’t.

Depending on how soft (or sharp) this lens is wide open I may put the 28mm up on eBay.

New Lens

// March 4th, 2007 // 5 Comments » // photos, random

My new lens was in the mailbox this morning. Which is odd because it’s Sunday. I checked Friday, nothing. As far as I know mail isn’t delivered on the weekends so I resigned myself to waiting for Monday but this afternoon I was strangely compelled to check again and there it was, in all of its 28mm f2.8 glory. I know you’re excited too so you can stop pretending to be disinterested.

Photo of the week

// March 1st, 2007 // 1 Comment » // photos

I was walking home from Starbucks and saw this clamp holding the guide wires along the sidewalk. I thought it was odd that one bolt would be so rusted and the other look completely new. No insights in the fabric of reality, just a rusty bolt.

Photo Stream