The Devil's Kitchen, dinosaurs, and the Bible - September 15, 2015

So far, no comments on my crowd sourcing question yesterday. I did have  a very thoughtful email response from a friend. If  you prefer to send an email, by all means do. Richard.R.Crocker@gmail.com will do it.

Today, a rest day, began with my dropping my iPhone on the  wooden floor in my historic hotel room and shattering the crystal. Yuk. But the phone still works, and it is insured, so no big tragedy. Just a nuisance.

Then I set out to explore some scenic gravel roads around Greybull, one leading to Devil's Kitchen and the other to Wyoming's greatest concentration of dinosaur tracks. Both adventures involved driving very slowly for miles over rough gravel roads. Devil's Kitchen, pictured below, inadequately, is a sink-hole or canyon filled with strange, multi-colored formations that do in fact look like a cauldron brew. I was there totally by myself, of course, except for a few monstrous trucks hauling bentonite that I encountered on the road. It was worth the journey.

The dinosaur tracks, not so much. Miles of deserted road got me  to a place where, remarkably there was a school bus-load of grammar school kids cavorting  around, despite the signs warning of rattlesnakes. And the dinosaur tracks, painstakingly described in posted signs, were absolutely invisible to me. The  rocks were full of chicken scratch, as  far as I could  tell. But the signs proclaimed their singular significance. Here is one of the signs, which  testifies that Dartmouth  students have worked  on this site. This was part of the  Earth Science off-campus term, I am sure. It pleases me to think of Dartmouth students scratching around among the rattlesnakes, miles  from anything resembling civilization.

I have been thinking about churches, too. I was told yesterday that there is a lot of negative feeling about the PCUSA in some places because there is a perception, given General Assembly actions, that "Presbyterians don't believe the Bible." That has set me wondering what in the world it means to believe the Bible. There is NO tradition that takes the Bible more seriously than Presbyterians do. But taking it seriously means that we use all the tools at our disposal to understand it, rather than simply repeating phrases from it. This seems to me to be the  heart of a very painful controversy.