I hate the DOD bloggers roundtable

Got 50 minutes of overtime today finishing up an 8-minute Defense Department bloggers roundtable. A typical roundtable consists of a military official being interviewed by a moderator, who then opens up the phone lines to military-focused bloggers. Though I've gotten pretty good at Iraqi geography, names, et cetera, this one was difficult. I also mispelled Shi'a (as S'hia) throughout my portion and luckily caught it before I sent out the whole thing. Today was the latest I've ever stayed because of my own work.

I had vegan for dinner tonight with my sister. My breakfast was an egg and cheese sandwich and my lunch was a small coffee. The vegan food was shaped and textured to be like meat and was actually satisfying. To stay consistent with dinner, I'm drinking a vegan bock as I blog.

I'm halfway through a lecture I downloaded by an Orthodox monk saying Christ is the fulfillment of the Tao. It's pretty interesting, as it's not promoting religious Taoism or Buddhism or pluralism but saying that Lao Tzu's writing was very much consistent and a foreshadowing of Christian revelation, much in the same way that many of the Greeks appear to have foreshadowed many aspects of Christianity. He even claims that much of Greek and Chinese thought paralleled much of the time in history, even though the thinkers would not have had contact with one another. Especially interesting was the fact that the idea of "nothingness" in Eastern thought doesn't actually mean "nothingness" in the sense it's often translated into Western ideas by top philosophers of religion like Ray Comfort.

During the Q&A he said that he considered Thomas Merton a tragic figure who had lost his faith. I had thought Merton had said right before he died that his experiences in the East had not caused him to reject any part of his Catholic faith and actually strengthened it, and that he was content, but perhaps the speaker knows a lot more about this than I. For the sake of my overflowing shelves, it would be helpful to find out Merton wasn't worth reading, but I'm not going to make any quick judgments yet, and I'd prefer thinking he was having fellowship with God.

If anyone is interesting in perusing the lecture, the link is here.

That's all I've got for right now. I'll try to do something lighter tomorrow eve.