It got pretty here.

Yes, it got very pretty here. It was rainy for about four days. Grey (or gray?). Gray. Cold. Miserable. I really just don't do well with no sunlight. I can handle coldness. It's just when everything is completely fogged over (which is what happens here; I'll take a picture next time it happens) and you can't see anything at all outside that I get cabin fever and start to go crazy. Luckily for us, Saturday and Sunday were beautiful days, as was Monday. Today seems to be keeping the streak alive.

Since it was so nice outside on Sunday, a few of us decided to go on a hike. Actually, I didn't want to go at first, but I was talked into it. I'm glad I went. It was a nice one. We hiked up to Roc D'Orsay from Huemoz, about a three hour hike. It wasn't very strenuous but a couple of the people that went with us got worn out by the time we made it to the top. The problem was that we were at the top at 4:30 that afternoon, we spent half an hour looking around, and then we had to be back at L'Abri for dinner at seven o'clock. It wouldn't have been that big of a deal if half of our group wasn't completely and utterly exhausted and thus taking forever to walk down the mountain. After about thirty minutes of me and another girl, Erin, going at our own pace running and jogging down the trail and then waiting for ten minutes for the rest to catch up, we decided to split up. By "we", I mean me and Erin. Uli, one of the new guys here (he's from Gemany), also thought we should split up, but he agreed to stay back with the slowpokes. The problem was that the slowpokes thought we should stick together, that it was a bad idea safety-wise for us to be separated. Well, I disagreed and we argued about it for awhile and never came to an agreement. So, Erin and I told them that we would see them at the bottom, and we ran off down the mountain. It was actually a much more tense situation than I can describe on a blog, but it doesn't really matter. I don't think you care very much about it.

In other news, I finished reading The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind and I highly recommend it for everyone who thinks about anything at all. It's a great look at how evangelical thought got to be where it is today, which is, in the author's opinion, slowly recovering from a century of anti-intellectualism characterized by tendencies towards activism (as prioritized above the life of the mind), intuitiveness (relying on your gut feeling as opposed to seeking out the truth), populism (as opposed to scholarly research and publication), and biblicism (relating absolutely everything that's going on in the world to some prophecy or something else in Scripture). It was a helpful book for me because it brought to the fore some of those proclivities in myself. It's an interesting, albeit brief and sometimes overly general, history of evangelical thought in America. You should read it.

Now, I've picked up a book called An Emergent Manifesto of Hope which is a book written by numerous authors, thinkers, and participants within the Emergent movement, a 'postmodern' response of some Christians to the thoroughly modern evangelical church. After finishing the first two sections, I'm not very impressed. I'm going to keep reading it because I feel like it's an interesting movement, but the writers of the book aren't very good at saying anything solid and don't seem to realize that the ideas that they're throwing around (ie the breakdown of knowledge) are huge ideas with serious implications, and they aren't being appropriated by the Emergent church very scrupulously. I know, I know, that's a very general statement made after reading only two sections of the book. I'll post more later.

Anyway, here's some pictures from the hike. Well, the first one isn't from the hike this week. It's from the L'Abri looking across the valley at the Dents du Morcles, the mountain I hiked a few weeks ago.

Enjoy!

The Dents du Morcles are those two points jutting up on the right.

Stopping for some pictures. From the left: Peter (Australia), Hugh (BC, Canada), Uli (Germany), Amelia (behind Uli; Tennessee), Erin (Florida).

Leading the way.

The Swiss army has all of these doors put up on the mountain. We couldn't kick them open.

Up at the top.