the mystical limpet

Desert Spirituality for the Emerging Church 7

2010-11-06T13:16:00.000-07:00

The previous post in this series explored the historical significance of the Jesus Prayer in its original Eastern Orthodox monastic context. This post will discuss one example of how such an ancient prayer is being utilized fruitfully today.

At Emmaus Way, our worship pastor, Wade Baynham, composed a contemplative musical version of the Jesus Prayer (available for purchase on iTunes here). About 7 minutes long, the song shifts through a variety of musical styles and moods. Repeating only the lyrics, "Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me a sinner; Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me", the song begins in a minor, somewhat unsettling key, with strong percussion and a Middle Eastern sound. As the song continues, the music shifts from a minor to a major key, and becomes less percussive, signaling the shift from confession to absolution. Though the music is contemporary, the traditional repetition of the Jesus Prayer is emphasized. This musical version of the Jesus Prayer is available to be listened to online, and our hope is that other communities and individuals would make use of it. Perhaps in this small way the Jesus Prayer can be experienced for the first time among those unfamiliar with hesychast tradition.

In our present context we do not generally have a monastic cell we can retreat to. We certainly live in a time and place of much greater population density than the hesychasts. But many of us can put in earphones, shut out the world, and listen to contemplative music as a way of focusing the mind on God. As with the desert monastics' use of prayer techniques, using music in this way should be seen as a tool for growing still and focusing the mind on God for prayer and worship, and never overemphasized as an end in itself.

Desert Spirituality for the Emerging Church 6

2010-10-22T13:14:00.000-07:00

This series has been looking at monastic spirituality and how it can be appropriated in the church for today. One essential practice of any Christian spirituality is prayer. The monks were certainly no exception to this, so let us turn to one practice from the Eastern church which I believe can be very fruitful for our postmodern context: the Jesus Prayer.

The Jesus Prayer, according to John Meyendorff, is "at the center of all hesychast spirituality." It comes in a few different forms, but is most usually:

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

Practiced in primitive form since ancient times, the Jesus Prayer is a primary tool for pursuing the monastic goal of "circumscrib[ing] the Incorporeal in a dwelling of flesh" (St. John Climacus, from The Ladder of Divine Ascent). According to Bishop Kallistos Ware (as cited by Father Edward Rommen), the Jesus Prayer has 4 main activities:

devotion to the name of Jesus as something almost sacramental in nature
an appeal for divine mercy, accompanied by inward grief
frequent repetition
the quest for silence

We are not monks. We do not spend 12 hours a day in prayer, nor are we free from the distractions of jobs, family life, and so on. Many of us, myself included, do not come from traditions in which we the use of formulaic prayers has been encouraged. Whether or not we should would require a whole separate series, but if we would like to begin learning from that tradition, the Jesus Prayer is a great place to start. It is not long, is easily memorized, and is useful for a variety of purposes, whether we are praying for some specific need, repenting of some sin, quietly contemplating, or in times of urgent distress.

Up next: A musical interpretation of the Jesus Prayer

Desert Spirituality for the Emerging Church 5

2010-10-12T17:27:00.000-07:00

Last post we looked at the monastic practice of poverty, and asked how this extreme way of live can be applicable today.

I believe one way forward is to look not to the hermits and anchorites, who lived as individuals in isolation, but to the cenobites who lived in community. These monks would gather together under an abbot and share all resources, following the same rule of life. They gave up their claim to ownership as individuals, but shared all things in common. This sharing of resources, which so pushes against our desire to have our own things packed away in a little cubby somewhere, so as not to be inconvenienced or have to rely on others, is exactly what we need as an antidote to our consumeristic lives today.

My wife and I have begun to practice some of this on a small scale even now with people from our church. Three or four nights a week we share meals with another couple from church who live across the street from us. We trade back and forth cooking dinner and hosting. We also share many household things like tools. We say frequently in church things like, "I don't need to buy a weedwhacker if so-and-so has one". This sharing of resources has allowed us to live more simply, own less things, and go into less debt.

It is not always easy. You sacrifice control; things aren't always available when you want them. Dinner isn't always what you would prefer. You sacrifice self-sufficiency; you have to ask people for things, and be interrupted by them asking you. But I am convinced that in this life of being both a borrower and a lender (contra Shakespeare) is the life of Christ. Because the truth is we aren't self-sufficient. Our very life comes from God, both directly and mediated through the created order and our community. We are not, ultimately, isolated individuals. Our value does not come from what we can do or how much stuff we have, but from receiving from God.

This small effort at communal life has been an experiment between two families in our church, but I think we can all pursue similar ideas in our own contexts.

What examples of living in community and simplicity have you seen or participated in?

But what about the inevitable complications? Human communities inevitably have to face their own brokenness and frustration. I think the example of the cenobitic house rule is helpful here. Living simply and in community is so contrary to our culture that we cannot expect these things to just happen. The monks are eminently practical about living as a group of human beings. They encountered the same frustrations, inconveniences, and struggles as we do as they collected diverse personalities and abilities under one roof. So even though their "one roof" was literal and ours may be figurative, we should learn from their life together.

They knew that to live freely in common there had to be procedures in place, like the dry wood that allows spiritual fire to be kindled. Contrary to their image as people of harsh discipline, the monks knew how to bear one another's burdens, living by the gracious example of God.

My favorite example of this comes from a story about two monks who go into town to sell their crafts. One monk falls into fornication, and tells the other monk he will not be returning to the monastery. The second monk, though he has done nothing wrong, says to the first monk, "The same thing happened to me; after I left you, I also fell into fornication. Let us go together, and do penance with all our might, and God will pardon us sinners." And so they both returned.

We do not have to live in a monastery to practice this kind of sacrificial love and solidarity, healing one another's brokenness, creating an environment of non-judgmental confession, so that the grace of God rules over all.

Desert Spirituality for the Emerging Church 4

2010-10-09T09:25:00.000-07:00

The monks of the desert lived in near-total poverty. They were reacting both in obedience to their reading of Scripture (particularly the story of the Rich Young Ruler) and to the sudden influx of wealth and prestige the church experienced in the third and fourth centuries. Their choice of lifestyle seems incredibly extreme today.

One story is told of a monk who sold even his Gospel book because it told him to sell all and give to the poor. To me, someone who has several Bibles on his shelf, and many other books besides, that way of life seems quite impossible. It is similarly hard to understand the sayings of the desert fathers which celebrate the sick and elderly who refuse to save, or even to accept, just a few coins for their own well-being.

Except perhaps for the commitment to celibacy, poverty is the part of the monastic way of life that seems most out of touch and indeed inhuman to contemporary sensibilities. And yet it is for that reason the most needed, even if in a less extreme a form, because materialism and consumerism are surely the great idols of our age.

We are addicted to products, and to the status they signify. When catastrophe strikes the nation, our leaders (of both parties) warn us to keep shopping, lest the terrorists win. We are, as a people and as a generation, deeply in debt. The recent economic meltdown has a complex variety of causes, but while fingers point in different directions, one thing is clear: there is no security in wealth.

None of this is a new phenomenon, of course. The monks knew full well, as Jesus taught, the danger of placing one's trust and one's self-worth on material possessions. And modern culture is not blind to it either; the popular movie Fight Club features a protagonist who, unsatisfied by his comfortable material existence, finds solace in a violent and nihilistic but arguably monastic way of life.

But how do we live out this monastic commitment to poverty today? Move to the woods and forage for food? Become homeless and live on the streets? Are those extreme examples our only options, or are there ways to begin incorporating a monastic vision of life into our ordinary lives as workers and consumers?

Desert Spirituality for the Emerging Church 3

2010-10-06T14:33:00.000-07:00

Last post I discussed how the celebration of the Eucharist was essential for the desert fathers & mothers, despite their seeming individualism. But what about us? To answer that question I'll look at my own specific church community: Emmaus Way, a non-denominational emerging/missional church here in Durham, North Carolina. I won't make sweeping generalizations; certainly this proposal would not be appropriate in Catholic or Orthodox traditions. But for those from a more low-church background who are tired of downplaying the Lord's Supper, consider this one way back to a sacramental life in Christ.

Celebrating the Eucharist at Emmaus Way is very different than for Palamas, the hesychasts, and the other desert monastics in many ways. For one thing, we are free-church sacramentalists. For us, what makes Eucharist more than mere bread and wine is not the blessing of a specially qualified leader, but the involvement of the whole community in the act of Eucharist. We do not simply receive the bread and the cup, but all actively share it with those in line around us. When we break off a piece of bread for someone we say, "This is Christ's body, broken for you". When we pour wine or juice for one another, we say, "This is Christ's blood, shed for you." Additionally, we practice an open table at which all are invited to participate, which is a significantly different practice from traditions like Eastern Orthodoxy in which Communion is restricted to baptized and confirmed members of the Church.

But these not-insignificant distinctions aside, at Emmaus Way we share with the monastics the conviction that regular participation at the Table is essential for our life together as the people of God. With St. Mary of Egypt we look forward to it with "irrepressible love and longing". It is the focus and high point of our gathered worship, which is liturgical in structure though not always in content; we use everything from contemporary songs to ancient hymns, organized so that before Eucharist we have a song of confession and a song of absolution, or sometimes we celebrate the Great Thanksgiving from the Book of Common Prayer.

We celebrate the Eucharist every week, which is somewhat unusual for people in the free-church tradition, but for us has become essential. Indeed our very name, Emmaus Way, reflects that focus. "Emmaus Way" comes from the story in Luke 24, in which two disciples are traveling from Jerusalem to Emmaus after the crucifixion of Jesus. The resurrected Jesus appears to them as a stranger, and explains to them from the Scriptures the meaning of his death. When they arrive at their destination, the disciples invite Jesus in, and he breaks bread for them, finally revealing himself.

This story illustrates so many of our values: the importance of hospitality, a passion for the Scriptures, the missional, on-the-road nature of Christian life. But as important as those themes are, from this story we learn that it is truly in the breaking of bread together that Jesus is experienced for who he is.

What role does Communion play in your spiritual life and church community? Why is it important?

Up next: Community/Simplicity

Desert Spirituality for the Emerging Church 2

2010-10-06T14:09:00.000-07:00

When one thinks of the monastic life, isolation usually comes to mind. The hermit or monk would seem to be removed from the communal life of the church as celebrated in sacraments like baptism and Eucharist (aka Communion, or the Lord's Supper). But for the Eastern Orthodox monastic movement known as hesychasm, best summed up by the figure of St. Gregory Palamas, Eucharist was essential:

"The Christian mystic seeks a new life in Christ, an active life for his whole being, and he knows that the grace of baptism and the eucharist have already given him that life; moreover he seeks it in the interior of his own being. That is why the hesychast movement of the fourteenth century never deteriorated into individualistic and subjective mysticism but led in fact to a revival of ecclesiastical sacramentalism. Palamas himself says of baptism and the eucharist that in these two sacraments our whole salvation is found, for they sum up the dispensation of the God-Man...he also advises what would seem to be daily communion."

--John Meyendorff, St. Gregory Palamas and Orthodox Spirituality

So Eucharist was central for the monastics. But how can those of us who have very different theologies of Communion and very different ecclesiologies (how the church should think about and organize itself) practice this contested rite in continuity with the desert fathers and mothers?

Up next: A "case study" of Eucharist in one missional church

Series Index:

Introduction

Desert Spirituality for the Emerging Church 1

2010-10-05T16:49:00.000-07:00

Church life in America, borrowing from the culture around it, heavily emphasizes the new. The weight of history has no weight.

But Christianity is a historical religion; it is about God's faithful saving action in history, through Jesus Christ and his people. We can and must learn from the great Christian movements of the past. To borrow Leonard Sweet's image of the porch swing, we must lean back in order to move forward.

In the next few blog posts I will trace connections between monastic spirituality and our own present-day context. I will be observing both differences and similarities, and proposing ways in which these ancient voices can be a resource for today, particularly for churches or individuals that are part of the emerging/missional church conversation.

I will focus especially on three areas of monasticism: emphasis on the Eucharist, commitment to living in community and simplicity, and the Jesus Prayer.

Up next: Eucharist.

The Pillars of the Earth and the Legitimacy of Hell

2010-09-24T12:33:00.000-07:00

I'm about halfway through the Starz! miniseries of The Pillars of the Earth, based on the book of the same title by Ken Follett. The story is takes place during medieval times, and is about the events surrounding the building of a cathedral. Trust me, it's more interesting than it sounds.

As is usual, the book was better. But once you get past the exposition-heavy first episode, the series isn't bad. The cast is well chosen, and though the production values are spotty in places (this is no Lord of the Rings), they're pretty good for television (it's also no Xena: Warrior Princess).

The interesting thing for me is how both series and book demonstrate the uses of the idea of hell. The main villain character, a nobleman who does the usual rape/pillage/oppression thing, is occasionally kept at bay by the good guy (a priest/monk) using the fear of hell and damnation. This in a book written by an atheist.

The specific question of hell aside (especially since I'm not sure how much it was actually historically used to afflict the powerful and comfort the afflicted), thinking about it this way can show us something about judgment. We normally think judgment is inherently bad, but in the Bible it is basically synonymous with justice. For oppressed people, the idea that someone is going to rout the bad guys and make things right is a very good thing.

Is judgment bad? If we fear judgment/justice, is it possibly because we might find ourselves among those first who will be last?

For further thought: David Opderbeck posted some very interesting thoughts in regard to justice, the coming of the Lord, and child sexual abuse here.

Quote: The Neighborly Love of God

2010-09-16T13:58:00.000-07:00

This love, moreover, counts every human being as a neighbor. The Lord, after all, censured on man on this very score, a man who held that a righteous soul does not owe the duties of a neighbor to a soul that is entangled in wickedness. For this very reason, moreover, he constructed the parable that tells how a certain man fell among thieves while going down from Jerusalem to Jericho; and he blames the priest and the Levite who passed him by when they saw him lying half-dead, but he approves of the Samaritan who had compassion; and by the response of the man who had asked the question he established that the Samaritan was a neighbor to the victim, and said, "Go, and do thou likewise" (Luke 10:37).

For by nature we are neighbors to one another; but by works of love a person who can do good to one who is unable to do so becomes a neighbor. Hence too our Savior became a neighbor to us. He did not pass us by while we were lying half-dead from wounds inflicted by thieves. So it must be understood that love directed to God is always moving toward God, from whom it takes its origin; and it has regard for its neighbor, to whom it is akin as being similarly created...

-- Origen

Quote: N.T. Wright on Church

2010-08-03T07:49:00.000-07:00

...the task of the church can't be attempted without the Spirit. I have sometimes heard Christian people talk as though God, having done what he's done in Jesus, now wants us to do our part by getting on with things under our own steam. But that is a tragic misunderstanding. It leads to arrogance. burnout, or both. Without God's Spirit, there is nothing we can do that will count for God's kingdom. Without God's Spirit, the church simply can't be the church.

I use the word "church here with a somewhat heavy heart. I know that for many of my readers that very word will carry the overtones of large, dark buildings, pompous religious pronouncements, false solemnity, and rank hypocrisy...

But there is another side to it...For many, "church" means just the opposite of that negative image. It's a place of welcome and laughter, of healing and hope, of friends and family and justice and new life. It's where the homeless drop in for a bowl fo soup and the elderly stop by for a chat. It's where on group is working to help drug addicts and another is campaigning for global justice. It's where you'll find people learning to pray, coming to faith, struggling with temptation, finding new purpose, and getting in touch with a new power to carry that purpose out. It's where people bring their own small faith and discover, in getting together with others to worship the one true God, that the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts. No church is like this all the time. But a remarkable number of churches are partly like that for quite a lot of the time...

I would rather rehabilitate the word "church" than beat about the bush with long-winded phrases like "the family of God's people" or "all those who believe in and follow Jesus" or "the company of those who, in the power of the Spirit, are bringing God's new creation to brith." But I mean all those things when I say "church".

N.T. Wright

Simply Christian

Review: Inception

2010-07-24T14:36:00.000-07:00

My review of Inception is up at Jesus Creed. Check it out.

Women in Ministry

2010-07-19T11:56:00.000-07:00

Kurt Willems at Groans from Within has begun a series on women in ministry which I plan to follow closely. He begins with the basic questions:

Can women serve in any role within the church? If so, how does this compare to most modern evangelical churches? If not, what are the boundaries for women in ministry? How does the New Testament serve as a guide on this issue?

This was, in part, my response:

I am a proponent of full inclusion of women in all areas of ministry and leadership...I became an egalitarian (really, I’m what Scot McKnight calls a mutualist; I believe in male/female complementarity without hierarchy) when I realized:

The overwhelming majority of churches would shut down, today, if not for the involvement, including leadership and teaching, of women. This includes churches that claim women cannot lead or teach. It is particularly maddening when churches allow women to hold positions like “Director of XYZ” when they clearly have the same status as any (male) “Minister of ABC”. This is just hypocrisy and cowardice. I try to maintain the point of view that complementarians are genuinely following what they believe the teaching of Scripture to be, but it is hard in the face of such cognitive dissonance.
It’s far from clear that Jesus and Paul held to some kind of hard complementarianism. There is the oft-quoted verse mentioned here, but Paul also frequently alludes to women prophesying, leading churches, and so on, and the gospels are full of images of women as leaders in Jesus’ movement, like the first witnesses of the Resurrection, and Mary sitting at Jesus’ feet in the posture of a rabbi’s disciple.
Even if Jesus, Paul, and the early church were indeed hard complementarians who would have restricted women from certain roles, that does not in any way make those sorts of gender relations normative for all time. The NT also implicitly accepts slavery. The Bible is not a book of rules that we just have to follow blindly. We are called to ethical discernment. I am persuaded by the redemptive movement hermeneutic that, like with slavery, the overall thrust of Scripture’s narrative is firmly in favor of emancipation.

What do you think?

Quote - Incarnation

2010-07-02T07:15:00.001-07:00

We are invited to trust, to trust this one human being with our pain and suffering, our dreams and hopes. Only when trust has been established can there be a joining to his flesh, a sharing in his mission and ministry, and a participating in his life. For those who would follow him, this is indeed entrance into the saving action of the triune God in Jesus. In order for salvation to be made real, those who would follow Jesus must trust fallen human flesh, flesh fully human, weak and vulnerable. There is no way around it -- both with Jesus himself, and with his company of disciples -- there is a priority of trust. And what will bind them together as a community of believers and as those sent into a world will be this same trust.

Willie James Jennings

"He Became Truly Human": Incarnation, Emancipation, and Authentic Identity

What kind of bird is Big Bird?

2010-06-29T08:42:00.000-07:00

HT: BoingBoing

Mission and Creation

2010-06-28T10:01:00.000-07:00

At E-Way last night we talked about mission. It's part of our ongoing look at our Minister's Liturgy (our rite of belonging/statement of values). Specifically it says this:

To engage missionally in Durham and our larger communities as a redemptive presence and in faithful service.

We talked a lot about mission being redemptive. Mission is about God's purposes. Mission reveals to us our own brokenness and the brokenness of the world, and calls us to participate in God's redemption of us and our world. Christian faith is inherently mission-driven. It is outward- and other-oriented.

Which is all great, and true. But in the back of my mind I thought there was a missing dimension to our dialogue.

God didn't start having purposes when human beings started sinning. No, mission isn't just about redemption, but about creation. God is characterized by love, and love is inherently relational. The back-and-forth dance of love at the heart of the Trinity always expressed this relational love, and God graciously and purposefully decided to share that love by creating a whole universe (or more, for all we know) and life capable of receiving love.

So mission is built into the very fabric of creation. The world has a telos, it exists for a reason, and that reason is good. God's purpose for the world is shalom -- peace, not just in the sense of absence of conflict, but in terms of completeness. Wholeness. Thriving.

Now, where that world has gone astray mission will necessarily involve restoration and redemption. And God's redemption is graciously participatory; He invites us along for the ride. But even when all that work is finished, when the kingdom of God is consummated and we all gather around Jesus' table, there will still be mission. Life will still have a purpose -- to receive and to share the love of the Triune God.

Peace Quote

2010-06-22T09:02:00.000-07:00

In the end, then, we have to decide which blessing we value more: social freedom, though at the cost of losing our moral integrity by starting a nuclear war; or moral integrity as a nation, though at the cost of losing our social freedom by allowing our country to be overrun. If this might one day be the option for us, I hope we should know which to choose. It would be better to suffer physical defeat than moral defeat; better to lose freedom of speech, of assembly, even of religion, than freedom of conscience before God.

-John Stott, Human Rights and Human Wrongs

Shamelessly stolen from Josh Rowley at the post-yesterday church

Quote: Tolkien on Jonah

2010-05-25T12:41:00.000-07:00

I was unaware of this, but J.R.R. Tolkien, who wrote The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, worked on a translation of the book of Jonah for the Roman Catholic Jerusalem Bible. Here is a quote from a letter to his grandson Michael, in 1957:

Incidentally, if you look at Jonah you'll find that the 'whale' - it is not really said to be a whale, but a big fish - is quite unimportant. The real point is that God is much more merciful than 'prophets', is easily moved by penitence, and won't be dictated to even by high ecclesiastics whom he has himself appointed.

On the LOST finale

2010-05-24T11:55:00.000-07:00

LOST ended last night, and we had a viewing party at our place (and us without a kitchen!) with friends new and old to celebrate/mourn the passing of a great show. I personally thought it was great.

I’m not going to start gushing theories about what the Island really is or what the deal with Walt was or how the smoke monster worked. I just thought I’d reflect a bit on the overarching themes and meaning of the show.

If you'd asked me before the finale what LOST, ultimately, was about, I'd have answered with an oft-repeated quote from the show: Live together, die alone. After last night, I'd amend it to (and this is vague but might be slightly SPOILER-y, so fair warning): Find meaning in life together, die together.

Lost is about many conflicts: science vs. faith, good vs. evil, self vs. community, free will vs. destiny, but mostly it's about finding connection with others in the chaos of life, and pursuing purpose together with them, even when the mysteries remain mysteries, or simply lead to more questions.

So far the internet consensus on the finale is mixed, and a lot of people seem genuinely not to understand it (no, it was not all a dream, nor were they all dead the whole time). But while I have some disappointments (I wanted more closure for Sawyer) , I thought it was overall pretty great, and a fitting end to a sure-to-be classic show.

Power

2010-05-14T13:05:00.000-07:00

From this Christianity Today interview with James Davison Hunter:

There are four characteristics to the social power that Jesus exercised. First, his power was derivative—originating from intimacy and submission to his Father. Second, his power was humble—rejecting the privileges of status and reputation, suffering indignities with joy. Third, his power was compassionate—serving the good of all and not just the good of the community of faith. And fourth, his power was noncoercive—blessing rather than cursing "the other," as we can see from his encounters with Samaritans and Romans.

France's burqa ban

2010-05-11T07:58:00.000-07:00

Note: I also posted this at The Center Way.

In this article in Slate, Christopher Hitchens wastes his considerable wit arguing stupidly in favor of France’s burqa ban, which is supported by French president Nicolas Sarkozy. He compares burqas to the masks of the KKK and posits that in a democracy, we all have the right (!?) to see each other’s faces.

So it’s really quite simple. My right to see your face is the beginning of it, as is your right to see mine. Next but not least comes the right of women to show their faces, which easily trumps the right of their male relatives or their male imams to decide otherwise. The law must be decisively on the side of transparency. The French are striking a blow not just for liberty and equality and fraternity, but for sorority too.

He also contends that “pseudoliberals who take a soft line on the veil and the burqa” only make this allowance for one religion, Islam. No. It is the backers of this proposed law who single out Muslims. I have yet to hear of a French ban on prescribed coverings for, say, nuns. The law is paternalistic and the implications are xenophobic. Hitchens gives the game away with this line: “The burqa and the veil, surely, are the most aggressive sign of a refusal to integrate or accommodate.” Ah, yes. We must strip away all differences. You have to dress as the French dress, speak as they speak, (worship as they worship?), or you have no place in France. Hitchens exposes his devotion to the secular state, where any separation from Enlightened Society (TM) must be eliminated.

The irony is that by trying to aggressively force this kind of cultural assimilation, France sets itself up as antagonistic toward Muslims, and is probably driving greater wedges between the segments of its society. I would never claim that the U.S. has no history of shame in the area of ethnic and cultural differences, but I know this kind of law would never fly here.

Now, I understand the concern of French legislators for women in patriarchal family groups who are forced to wear the burqa and endure other restrictive and abusive practices. I personally find the burqa oppressive. But I’m not the boss of how other people dress. And you aren’t going to overcome centuries of tradition with a law like this. Those women who do not choose to wear the veil (there are many who do choose it, including many converts to Islam), but are forced to, will be just as oppressed. Only now they won’t be allowed to go outside.

So here’s my view, which I think is pretty common sense: nobody should have to wear anything they don’t want to wear, and also nobody should have to not wear anything they do want to wear. Where there is an unavoidable conflict between religious law/ethnic custom and some legitimate safety need of the government (like taking photographs of one’s face to get a driver’s license) then public safety comes first and some folks might not be able to participate. But that should be a last resort, and the law should bend over backward to allow people to express their faith as they see fit. And if you are bothered by women in hijabs, Sikh men in turbans, or Jewish men with payot, that probably says something about you.

The end of the world

2010-05-06T13:53:00.000-07:00

The better way to talk about the end of the world is to lean on another meaning of the word “end.” What’s the world for? What’s its ultimate purpose and destiny? For those of us in Christ that destiny is one of hope: creation restored, sin erased, all creatures able to live into the future God wishes for them, all of it glorified and in communion with the God who created us in love. It’s especially good news for those who have it roughest now, and perhaps not such good news for those at the top now. The most basic of biblical prayers, like Miriam’s song and Mary’s Magnificat, witness to that basic Christian truth.

Jason Byassee, at Duke's Call & Response blog

The Christian Mystery of Physical Resurrection - Newsweek.com

2010-05-06T13:30:00.000-07:00

The Christian Mystery of Physical Resurrection - Newsweek.com

Even in biblical times, resurrection deniers who hoped for an afterlife took an alternative route. This is what scholars call "the immortality of the soul." Embraced by Plato and popular today especially among progressive believers (Reform Jews and liberal Protestants, for example) and people who call themselves "spiritual but not religious," the immortality of the soul is easier to swallow than resurrection. After death, the soul—unique and indestructible—ascends to heaven to be with God while the corpse, the locus of our senses and all our low human desires, stays behind to rot. This more reasonable view, perhaps, has a serious defect: a disembodied soul attaching itself to God in heaven offers no more comfort or inspiration than an escaped balloon. Consolation was not the goal of Plato's afterlife. Without sight or hearing, taste or touch, a soul in heaven can no more enjoy the "green, green pastures" of the Muslim paradise, or the God light of Dante's cantos, than it can play a Bach cello suite or hit a home run. Rationalistic visions of heaven fail to satisfy.

Another popular way out of the Easter conundrum—"I want to believe in heaven but can't get my head around the revivification of human flesh"—is to imagine "resurrection" as a metaphor for something else: an inexplicable event, a new kind of life, the birth of the Christian community on earth, the renewal of a people, an individual's spiritual rebirth, a bodiless ascension to God. Progressives frequently fall back on resurrection-as-metaphor, for it allows them to celebrate Easter while also expressing a reasonable agnosticism. They quote that great theological cop-out: "We cannot know what God has in store for us."

The intellectual flabbiness of this approach causes agonies for such orthodox Christians as N. T. Wright, the Anglican bishop of Durham, England. "People have been told so often that resurrection is just a metaphor," he once told my editor Jon Meacham and me in an interview for this magazine. "In other words, [Jesus] went to heaven, whatever that means. And they've never realized that the word 'resurrection' simply didn't mean that. If people [in the first century] had wanted to say that he died and went to heaven, they had perfectly good ways of saying that." The whole point of the Christian story is that the Resurrection really happened, Wright insists. The disciples rolled back the rock on the third day, and Jesus' body was gone. This insistence on the veracity of resurrection is no less sure in Judaism, where the Orthodox pray thrice a day to a God "who causes the dead to come to life," or in Islam. "I swear by the day of resurrection!" proclaims the Quran. "Yes, Indeed!"

And so, the paradox. Resurrection may be unbelievable, but belief in a traditional heaven requires it. I think often of Jon D. Levenson, a Jewish scholar at Harvard Divinity School who hopes to bring the idea of resurrection back to mainstream Judaism, where it has been lost in practice for generations. I visited him one cold November afternoon because, as a literal-minded skeptic, I wanted him to explain to me how it works. How does God put bodies—burned in fire or pulverized in war—back together again? Levenson looked at me, eyes twinkling, and said, "It's no use to ask, 'If I had a lab at MIT, how would I try to resurrect a body?' The belief in resurrection is more radical. It's a supernatural event. It's a special act of grace or of kindness on God's part."

Dad is Dead: Rebutting Roger Ebert - PC Feature at IGN

2010-04-20T13:28:00.000-07:00

Mike Thomsen rebuts Roger Ebert, who claims (say it ain't so, Rog) videogames will never be art. I agree with Mike: bullshit.

Dad is Dead: Rebutting Roger Ebert - PC Feature at IGN

At the end of his essay, Ebert asks a pointed question. "Why are gamers so intensely concerned, anyway, that games be defined as art? Bobby Fischer, Michael Jordan and Dick Butkus never said they thought their games were an art form. Nor did Shi Hua Chen, winner of the $500,000 World Series of Mah Jong in 2009. Why aren't gamers content to play their games and simply enjoy themselves?"

The answer is simple. Videogames are not games, and there is more in them than winning and enjoyment. The reason football is not art is because its rules were designed with the primary goal of competition. Competition is only one of a great many different experiences that a videogame can create. Games can also be about losing, and not competing at all. They can be about love, the impossibility of relationships, the beautiful indifference to our individual life choices, urgent intimacy in the shadow of death, sexual anxiety, and confrontation with life choices to which there are no right answers. There are games that, using the language of authored interaction, invoke all of these ideas, and many more beyond.

What's most ironic about Ebert's latest round of criticism is that it's based on an invalid reading of the works he's arguing against. After watching a video of "Waco Resurrection," Ebert concludes that it is a "brainless shooting gallery." Of Braid, he says the time reversal mechanic breaks the "discipline of the game," and doubts that "I can learn about my own past by taking back my mistakes in a video game." Ebert concludes by addressing Flower: "Nothing she shows from this game seemed of more than decorative interest on the level of a greeting card." He reaches these conclusions by virtue of having streamed clips of each work online. This would be the equivalent of dismissing a film after having read a dismissive essay about it.

What is the best way to give advice? | Psychology Today

2010-04-19T11:23:00.000-07:00

What is the best way to give advice? | Psychology Today

A paper by Reeshad Dalal and Silvia Bonaccio in a 2010 issue of Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes looked at several different kinds of advice that people get and give to understand how likely people are to use them. They distinguished between four types of advice.

Advice for is a recommendation to pick a particular option.

Advice against is a recommendation to avoid a particular option.

Information supplies a piece of information that the decision maker might not know about.

Decision support suggests how to go about making the choice, but does not make a specific recommendation. (For example, you might recommend that a friend looking to go to a movie check out a website that aggregates movie reviews. You aren't recommending a particular movie, but just a technique for making a decision.)

In the studies, college students were asked to imagine making a particular decision. Some participants considered a choice of a job after graduate school. Others selected among candidates for officers in a student group. They were given a variety of different kinds of advice and asked how satisfying and useful the advice was for making a decision.

In general, people found all of the types of advice to be useful to some degree. However, information was the most useful kind of advice across the studies. That is, people found it most helpful when people told them about aspects of the options that they might not have known about already.

What implications does this finding have for evangelism?

Miracles

2010-04-13T07:06:00.000-07:00

No, not that kind. The funny kind. The ridiculous kind. The kind where Insane Clown Posse sing-rap about magnets and rainbows.

Hulu

2010-04-01T11:31:00.000-07:00

My wife and I recently ditched cable entirely in favor of a combination of Netflix (even the $8.99 bottom-level subscription gets you unlimited access to their already pretty good and constantly growing instant-streaming catalog) and online video from sites like Hulu. We bought a $20 adapter for our laptop (a 3 year old Macbook Pro) and now pay $70 less a month. The switch has been totally worth it.

We watch the ads on Hulu, as much as we did on cable or broadcast TV. I would consider paying some kind of subscription, if the deal was reasonable. There are lots of ways to make it more profitable, better for consumers, and used more. There are really only 2 things in the way, and neither of them are technological.

1. Corporate shortsightedness. Cable companies are (rightly) afraid that consumers will prefer something on-demand nature of web video rather than the firehose that is cable. They hobble burgeoning web video to protect what they perceive to be their own stable base of cable subscriptions. In this way, they are like the railroad companies who failed to perceive that they weren’t in the railroad business; they were in the transportation business. Media is headed to the internet, and companies that see sites like Hulu as their competition rather than their future will end up as feeble as the railroads.

2. Stigma against the Internet. Ads on broadcast television command far higher fees than internet ads. Some of this is understandable; many browsers have various ad-blocker extensions you can install, and of course television is a much older medium than the web. But I spend as much time online as I do watching television, if not more, and there’s no reason advertising on a TV show that “airs” over the internet has to be any different than one that’s broadcast in the traditional manner. In fact, the web can probably provide much more accurate metrics for advertisers than the highly questionable Neilsen ratings system.

Much like the anticipated demise of newspapers, the apparent threat that online video presents to established media companies is entirely a result of their misunderstanding their own business. They are entrenched in old business models where they control everything and the consumer passively watches the television they make. But they don’t make television; they make content. I want to watch that content, along with my own movies, and the stuff from YouTube or whatever, when and how I want. I’m willing to pay for it through subscriptions or by watching ads. The pipe on which that content rides to my house should be irrelevant to them. And if they can’t figure out how to make money at it, somebody else will.

Successes and Some Growing Pains at Hulu – NYTimes.com.

Durham's first integrated basketball game

2010-03-30T10:50:00.000-07:00

Duke University Alumni Magazine

Neat story. Thanks to Trigger for pointing this out.

On Sunday morning, March 12, 1944, as eleven o'clock church services were getting under way all over Durham, the members of the medical school basketball team piled into a couple of borrowed cars and headed across town. Everyone was nervous. They weren't the only ones. Inside the North Carolina College gymnasium, Aubrey Stanley struggled to keep calm. The youngest player for the Eagles, the sixteen-year-old guard, worried what might happen if there were a hard foul, or if a fight broke out. In Beaufort, North Carolina, where he had grown up, you were taught to avert your eyes if a white person walked by. Now, for the first time in his life, he would be guarding one.

Axe Cop

2010-03-26T07:20:00.001-07:00

This is amazing. It's an online comic written by a 5-year-old and drawn by his 29-year-old brother. I wish I still had the kind of imagination that would allow me to think of Sockarang, a hero who has socks instead of arms, which he can throw as weapons, but they always come back to him.

Start here.

Quote

2010-03-23T07:48:00.000-07:00

...if the crucified Jesus is the Messiah, then God's way of saving Israel and redeeming the world is not by inflicting violence, but by absorbing it.

Michael Gorman

Reading Paul

Money

2010-03-22T08:19:00.001-07:00

Duke's Call & Response blog has a thoughtful exchange about money and church, between Tom Arthur, pastor of Sycamore Creek UMC in Lansing, Michigan, and James Martin, a Jesuit priest.

Check out Pastor Arthur's letter here and Father Martin's response here.

Movie Review: Shutter Island

2010-02-26T18:02:00.000-08:00

Scot McKnight at Jesus Creed was kind enough to post my review of Shutter Island. Check it out here.

Ash Wednesday

2010-02-18T11:00:00.000-08:00

^{Isaiah 58:1-12}"Shout it aloud, do not hold back.
Raise your voice like a trumpet.
Declare to my people their rebellion
and to the house of Jacob their sins.

For day after day they seek me out;
they seem eager to know my ways,
as if they were a nation that does what is right
and has not forsaken the commands of its God.
They ask me for just decisions
and seem eager for God to come near them.

'Why have we fasted,' they say,
'and you have not seen it?
Why have we humbled ourselves,
and you have not noticed?'
"Yet on the day of your fasting, you do as you please
and exploit all your workers.

Your fasting ends in quarreling and strife,
and in striking each other with wicked fists.
You cannot fast as you do today
and expect your voice to be heard on high.

Is this the kind of fast I have chosen,
only a day for a man to humble himself?
Is it only for bowing one's head like a reed
and for lying on sackcloth and ashes?
Is that what you call a fast,
a day acceptable to the LORD ?

"Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen:
to loose the chains of injustice
and untie the cords of the yoke,
to set the oppressed free
and break every yoke?

Is it not to share your food with the hungry
and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter—
when you see the naked, to clothe him,
and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood?

Then your light will break forth like the dawn,
and your healing will quickly appear;
then your righteousness will go before you,
and the glory of the LORD will be your rear guard.

Then you will call, and the LORD will answer;
you will cry for help, and he will say: Here am I.
"If you do away with the yoke of oppression,
with the pointing finger and malicious talk,

and if you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry
and satisfy the needs of the oppressed,
then your light will rise in the darkness,
and your night will become like the noonday.

The LORD will guide you always;
he will satisfy your needs in a sun-scorched land
and will strengthen your frame.
You will be like a well-watered garden,
like a spring whose waters never fail.

Your people will rebuild the ancient ruins
and will raise up the age-old foundations;
you will be called Repairer of Broken Walls,
Restorer of Streets with Dwellings.

Rob Bell interview

2010-02-15T19:54:00.000-08:00

A stellar interview with Rob Bell is up at Leadership Journal. Here's a bit, talking about "video venue" services:

There is something more powerful than simply beaming yourself into other locations, and that is raising up disciples. Over time that will go farther and faster, but right now it will be more work and slower. With technology today it's easy to spend all of your energies reproducing your own voice, but there is a longer view that says, what if instead of beaming video to those ten locations, we train ten people who can go there and lead? That's a very basic question that should be in the mix somewhere.

Neither Clergy nor Laity

2010-02-12T08:49:00.001-08:00

Here's a clip from a long but excellent post on the New Testament vision of ministry by Ben Witherington.

The Greek word laos from which we get the term laity simply means the people of God. It is used this way over and over again in the NT, sometimes of Israel sometimes of those who are in Christ, but in neither case is it used to refer to a particular kind or class of believing persons who are set apart from the 'clergy'. And about that word clergy, it is not a Biblical word at all. Webster's tells us it comes to us from the Medieval French word clerc (13^th century), but in fact ultimately the term comes from the Greek κλῆρος - klēros, "a lot", "that which is assigned by lot" (allotment) or metaphorically, "inheritance". So it partially has a Biblical root, but no persons in the NT are called kleroi to distinguish a class of ministers. And there is a good reason for this.
First of all the reason is that Christ and his sacrifice has torn down the wall not only between God and an alienated and lost humanity, but also the wall between Jew and Greek, between slave and free, between male and female, and yes between priests and ordinary folk. There is no priesthood as a class of individual ministers in the NT. There are in fact two priesthoods--- the unique heavenly high priesthood of Christ, as described in glorious technicolor in Hebrews, and the priesthood of all believers as described in 1 Peter and elsewhere. In other words, no one on earth is or can be a priest like Jesus, and on the other hand, every believer is part of the 'kingdom of priests' foreseen by Moses, and actualized by Jesus.
And so it is that the author of 1 Peter is not saying something novel when he throws down the gauntlet and says to his Christian audience "but you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's special possession, so that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light" ( 1 Pet. 2.9). This friends is the Magna Carta of Christian identity and Christian freedom, and among other things it means we are all laity, and we are all priests. We will unpack the implications of this wonderful verse in a moment, but first we need to answer a question--- if what I say is true, what went wrong with Christian religion, and when did it happen? Why do we continue to have a clergy club and laity conferences for non-clergy?

Provocative Question

2010-02-11T06:36:00.001-08:00

Josh Rowley at Post-Yesterday Church asks a compelling "potential ordination exam" question:

After preaching a sermon on Mark 9:14-29, a passage in which Jesus is described as exorcising a demonic spirit from a boy who seems to have epilepsy, you are confronted by a church member. He says: "I just can't buy that exorcism stuff. It's clear the boy in that story had epilepsy. Why don't we just drop talk about spirits and the like?" How do you respond? What (if anything) do you indicate would be gained by the member's suggestion to jettison the language of exorcism? What (if anything) do you indicate would be lost by this suggestion?

Here's my response:

Tough. I think that particular kid probably did just have epilepsy, and the language of evil spirits was all the gospel-writers had. And there are other exorcism scenes that can easily be described in terms of mental illness. But there are other stories that imply much more...mental illnesses and neurological problems don't generally grant one the ability to tell fortunes(Acts 16), nor do they ask to be sent into a herd of pigs (Matthew 8).

I think rather than jettisoning the language of exorcism, it would be better to add the language of healing, including healing of disorders the ancients didn't have a category for. Jesus is Lord also of our synapses and serotonin levels. That is, some exorcism stories perhaps are better understood as healing stories, but not in a way that rules out the reality of spiritual forces opposed to God. Or perhaps the distinction is false, as if problems could ever be just physical or just spiritual...another example of our underlying gnosticism.

As for the hypothetical church member, I think a little soft naturalism on this issue probably isn't the worst of things. And wholesome doubts are perfectly natural and even helpful sometimes, but I would encourage that person to keep in mind the prayer of the father in the story: I do believe; help my unbelief! Or perhaps: I do believe Jesus is Lord over everything, including the spirits and demons who I'm not sure exist. Help me keep my mind open to the possibilities of God's redemption happening in realms I'm not even aware of!

Resident Aliens

2010-02-07T09:49:00.000-08:00

For Christians cannot be distinguished from the rest of the human race by country or language or customs. They do not live in cities of their own; they do not use a peculiar form of speech; they do not follow an eccentric manner of life...

Yet, although they live in Greek and barbarians cities alike, as each man's lot has been cast, and follow the customs of the country in clothing and food and other matters of daily living, at the same time they give proof of the remarkable and admittedly extraordinary constitution of their own commonwealth. They live in their own countries, but only as aliens. They have a share in everything as citizens, and endure everything as foreigners. Every foreign land is their fatherland, and yet for them every fatherland is a foreign land.

from the anonymous Letter to Diognetus

2nd or 3rd century A.D.

Selleck Waterfall Sandwich

2010-02-05T07:36:00.000-08:00

File this under: Why does this exist?

http://selleckwaterfallsandwich.tumblr.com/

U.S. Military Weapons Inscribed With Secret 'Jesus' Bible Codes

2010-01-18T13:16:00.000-08:00

Anyone else creeped out/pissed off/sickened by this?

Coded references to New Testament Bible passages about Jesus Christ are inscribed on high-powered rifle sights provided to the United States military by a Michigan company, an ABC News investigation has found.
...
Trijicon confirmed to ABCNews.com that it adds the biblical codes to the sights sold to the U.S. military. Tom Munson, director of sales and marketing for Trijicon, which is based in Wixom, Michigan, said the inscriptions "have always been there" and said there was nothing wrong or illegal with adding them. Munson said the issue was being raised by a group that is "not Christian." The company has said the practice began under its founder, Glyn Bindon, a devout Christian from South Africa who was killed in a 2003 plane crash.

He loved his killer

2010-01-14T16:53:00.000-08:00

A must-read post: http://www.inhabitatiodei.com/2010/01/14/he-loved-his-killer/

When Thomas killed Jonathan he committed a crime against the state of Alabama. Alabama, for reasons of its own, chose not to punish him for that crime against itself. And do we not all know what those reasons were?
When Thomas killed Jonathan he committed a crime against God. The strange, the near maddening thing about this case is that both these offended parties have rendered the same verdict—not for the same reasons, not in the same way, but the verdict is the same—acquittal.
The Christian response here is not to damn the “acquittal by law,” but to proclaim the “acquittal by resurrection.” One frees him to go and kill again. The other liberates him to obedience in Christ. Acquittal by law was the act of Caesar. Render unto him what is his. The state, by its very nature and definition, can do anything it wills to do—Hitler proved that much. Acquittal by resurrection was the act of God. And he has entrusted us with that message.
Thomas also committed a crime against Jonathan. And Jonathan rendered a similar verdict when he loved him.

Pat Robertson, shut your fat mouth

2010-01-13T12:35:00.001-08:00

Seriously.

Letters of Note

2010-01-12T13:38:00.001-08:00

I'd like to draw attention to this fantastic blog: Letters of Note. It's just images of letters that are interesting for various reasons, with transcriptions. Check it out.

All-Along Belonging

2010-01-08T11:22:00.000-08:00

Fantastic article by Jeff McSwain on The Other Journal. Jeff is the executive director of Reality Ministries, in which my church, Emmaus Way, finds its physical home.

Like [Young Life founder Jim] Rayburn and the Apostle Paul, [theologian Karl] Barth’s proclamation of the gospel began at the starting point of theological belonging for all. His heavy emphasis on the objective truth of our salvation was often misunderstood as universalism, yet anyone aware of Barth’s emphasis on freedom would recognize his intolerance for replacing one determinist scheme (five-point Calvinism) with another (universalism).

Barth draws clear distinctions between objective truth and our subjective viewpoints of that objective truth. For instance, we cannot undo the objective truth of what Christ has done, but we might deny the reality of it all the way to hell (cf. 2 Pet. 2:1). In the words of Barth, “To the man who persistently tries to change the truth into untruth, God does not owe eternal patience and therefore deliverance.”

Although we do not create objective truth by our subjective decisions, we may freely participate in objective truth. This happens by the Holy Spirit, appropriately named the Spirit of Truth. With Spirit-filled anticipation, Paul, Rayburn, and Barth all urged their hearers to repent and believe the good news.

"The apostles wrote fan fiction on Torah"

2010-01-08T06:04:00.000-08:00

The word "influence" is insufficient and too one-sided to describe a relationship that is much more accurately reflected by the system of tribute/appropriation/critique that fandom employs. This kind of process, by which one generation of fan/critics (because anyone who doesn't understand that a fan is a critic doesn't know what a fan is, and there is nothing sadder to contemplate than the idea of a critic who is not also a fan) becomes the creators whose work inspires and obsesses and is critiqued by the next generation of fans, who in turn become critic-creators, has occurred in every popular art form across the board going back fifty or five thousand years. The apostles wrote fan fiction on Torah.

Michael Chabon, on io9.com

Quote

2009-12-09T12:46:00.000-08:00

"Shall it be held lawful to make an occupation of the sword, when the Lord proclaims that he who uses the sword shall perish by the sword? And shall the son of peace take part in the battle when it does not become him even to sue at law? And shall he apply the chain, and the prison, and the torture, and the punishment, who is not the avenger even of his own wrongs?"

Tertullian

Quote

2009-11-28T12:56:00.000-08:00

John Howard Yoder

Body Politics

On binding and loosing (Matthew 18:15-18)

"Moral discernment and forgiveness condition and enable one another in complex ways. Admonition presupposes prior discernment; otherwise the criteria for admonition would not be common to both parties. Conversation with reconciling intent is the most powerful way for a community to discover when the rules they have been applying are inadequate, so that they may be modified. Asking whether there has really been an offense helps determine which differences need to be resolved by coming to unanimity by means of dialogue and forgiveness and which call for an agreement to differ. Having experienced forgiveness together enables a community to deliberate in an otherwise inaccessible mode of mutual trust.

Before moving on toward the present, let me summarize the primary components of this mandate; some of them differ from the way our world usually works:

1. Believing men and women are empowered to act in God's name.

2. What the believers do, God is doing, in and through human action.

3. God will not normally do this without human action.

4. If we receive forgiveness, we must give it.

5. This dialogical reconciling process must come first. Only then must we turn to talk of the set of standards that this process enforces. Much Christian debate about moral issues makes the mistake o concentrating on what the standards ought to be rather than on how they are to be discerned and implemented.

Taking seriously this apostolic witness would seem to put us at the mercy of a number of ecclesiastical scarecrows. It gives more authority to the church than does Rome, trusts more to the Holy Spirit than does Pentecostalism, has more respect for the individual than does liberal humanism, makes moral standards more binding than did Puritanism, and is more open to the new situation than was what some called "the new morality" a quarter-century ago. If practiced, it would radically restructure the life of churches. Thus the path to the rediscovery of Christian faithfulness might lead through some positions contemporary Christian "moderates" have been trying to avoid."

Silent Matrix

2009-11-10T08:54:00.000-08:00

If the Matrix had been shot in the Silent Era. The main guy does a pretty good Charlie Chaplin.

Current Events

2009-11-05T12:52:00.000-08:00

This will be a bit of a rant, but I’m posting it here because I’m curious whether others have had a similar experience.

I was reading this post Michael Kruse linked to about the fall of the Berlin Wall and I realize that I know almost nothing about the fall of the Berlin Wall. Which reminded me of something I’ve really felt is is lacking in our education system.

We really need a “recent events” class or something, because I took multiple versions of American History (middle school, high school, college) and not one of them got further than World War II. I know much, much more about the Revolutionary War than I do about the Vietnam War. I know much, much more about the Civil War than I do about the Cold War.

I suspect there’s a weird inverse bell curve to our knowledge of history, such that we know what happened 50+ years ago because of history classes, and we know what happened since we (hopefully) started paying attention to the news, but there’s a 30 year blind spot. The year in American history about which I know least is probably the year of my birth. And what I do know is unlikely to be very accurate. What I know about the European colonization of the Americas or the New Deal comes from textbooks. What I know about the ’70s and ’80s comes from Forrest Gump.

And yet this is likely to be the most relevant for understanding the world, right? Knowing about what precipitated World War I matters (the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand), but not much more than the French revolution. We’re still dealing with the fallout from the Cold War, and that is particularly relevant to questions about government involvement in the economic sector. Many folks hold up the example of the fall of Communism as why the free market is better, and I don’t even know enough about the events of my own lifetime to be able to evaluate that claim. I’m a pretty informed guy, and yet I resort to reading Wikipedia articles about Gorbachev, because articles written today by people of an older generation assume a level of knowledge I don’t have. And so we talk past each other because some of us think We already tried that in the ’70’s, you idiot, don’t you remember Carter but they don’t say that, and others of us only know Republican excesses, not Democratic ones, so we think There’s nothing self-evident about the idea that regulation is bad, so why are those old people such ideologues?

Ironically, we relate worst with the generation closest to us, because a common frame of reference is assumed, and yet nothing could be further from the truth. I can relate to my grandparents, because I learned about the world they came of age in, and we are socially conditioned to realize we come from different worlds, but my parents are a mystery to me, although we never act like it.

If my theory is right, the generation coming after me, who will live in a world to large degree shaped by 9/11 and the war on terror and whatever we eventually call the current economic crisis, will be those who know least about what happened. And I and people my age will act as if they know more than they do, because they were born in 1998, for Pete’s sake, they were there, but they weren’t, because they were 5 or 10 or maybe 12, and if they are very lucky they will have learned about American history up to the Kennedy assassination, flattened by history into being as relevant as Lincoln’s.

Japan suspends death penalty

2009-09-21T14:10:00.000-07:00

Link.

And then there was one (industrialized democracy, that is).

Obama on Kanye

2009-09-17T07:16:00.000-07:00

The War Prayer - by Mark Twain

2009-09-11T14:05:00.000-07:00

It was a time of great and exalting excitement. The country was up in arms, the war was on, in every breast burned the holy fire of patriotism; the drums were beating, the bands playing, the toy pistols popping, the bunched firecrackers hissing and spluttering; on every hand and far down the receding and fading spread of roofs and balconies a fluttering wilderness of flags flashed in the sun; daily the young volunteers marched down the wide avenue gay and fine in their new uniforms, the proud fathers and mothers and sisters and sweethearts cheering them with voices choked with happy emotion as they swung by; nightly the packed mass meetings listened, panting, to patriot oratory which stirred the deepest deeps of their hearts, and which they interrupted at briefest intervals with cyclones of applause, the tears running down their cheeks the while; in the churches the pastors preached devotion to flag and country, and invoked the God of Battles beseeching His aid in our good cause in outpourings of fervid eloquence which moved every listener. It was indeed a glad and gracious time, and the half dozen rash spirits that ventured to disapprove of the war and cast a doubt upon its righteousness straightway got such a stern and angry warning that for their personal safety's sake they quickly shrank out of sight and offended no more in that way.

Sunday morning came – next day the battalions would leave for the front; the church was filled; the volunteers were there, their young faces alight with martial dreams – visions of the stern advance, the gathering momentum, the rushing charge, the flashing sabers, the flight of the foe, the tumult, the enveloping smoke, the fierce pursuit, the surrender! Then home from the war, bronzed heroes, welcomed, adored, submerged in golden seas of glory! With the volunteers sat their dear ones, proud, happy, and envied by the neighbors and friends who had no sons and brothers to send forth to the field of honor, there to win for the flag, or, failing, die the noblest of noble deaths. The service proceeded; a war chapter from the Old Testament was read; the first prayer was said; it was followed by an organ burst that shook the building, and with one impulse the house rose, with glowing eyes and beating hearts, and poured out that tremendous invocation

God the all-terrible! Thou who ordainest! Thunder thy clarion and lightning thy sword!

Then came the "long" prayer. None could remember the like of it for passionate pleading and moving and beautiful language. The burden of its supplication was, that an ever-merciful and benignant Father of us all would watch over our noble young soldiers, and aid, comfort, and encourage them in their patriotic work; bless them, shield them in the day of battle and the hour of peril, bear them in His mighty hand, make them strong and confident, invincible in the bloody onset; help them to crush the foe, grant to them and to their flag and country imperishable honor and glory –

An aged stranger entered and moved with slow and noiseless step up the main aisle, his eyes fixed upon the minister, his long body clothed in a robe that reached to his feet, his head bare, his white hair descending in a frothy cataract to his shoulders, his seamy face unnaturally pale, pale even to ghastliness. With all eyes following him and wondering, he made his silent way; without pausing, he ascended to the preacher's side and stood there waiting. With shut lids the preacher, unconscious of his presence, continued with his moving prayer, and at last finished it with the words, uttered in fervent appeal, "Bless our arms, grant us the victory, O Lord our God, Father and Protector of our land and flag!"

The stranger touched his arm, motioned him to step aside – which the startled minister did – and took his place. During some moments he surveyed the spellbound audience with solemn eyes, in which burned an uncanny light; then in a deep voice he said:

"I come from the Throne – bearing a message from Almighty God!" The words smote the house with a shock; if the stranger perceived it he gave no attention. "He has heard the prayer of His servant your shepherd, and will grant it if such shall be your desire after I, His messenger, shall have explained to you its import – that is to say, its full import. For it is like unto many of the prayers of men, in that it asks for more than he who utters it is aware of – except he pause and think.

"God's servant and yours has prayed his prayer. Has he paused and taken thought? Is it one prayer? No, it is two – one uttered, the other not. Both have reached the ear of Him Who heareth all supplications, the spoken and the unspoken. Ponder this – keep it in mind. If you would beseech a blessing upon yourself, beware! lest without intent you invoke a curse upon a neighbor at the same time. If you pray for the blessing of rain upon your crop which needs it, by that act you are possibly praying for a curse upon some neighbor's crop which may not need rain and can be injured by it.

"You have heard your servant's prayer – the uttered part of it. I am commissioned of God to put into words the other part of it – that part which the pastor – and also you in your hearts – fervently prayed silently. And ignorantly and unthinkingly? God grant that it was so! You heard these words: 'Grant us the victory, O Lord our God!' That is sufficient. the whole of the uttered prayer is compact into those pregnant words. Elaborations were not necessary. When you have prayed for victory you have prayed for many unmentioned results which follow victory – must follow it, cannot help but follow it. Upon the listening spirit of God fell also the unspoken part of the prayer. He commandeth me to put it into words. Listen!

"O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle – be Thou near them! With them – in spirit – we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it – for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.

(After a pause.) "Ye have prayed it; if ye still desire it, speak! The messenger of the Most High waits!"

It was believed afterward that the man was a lunatic, because there was no sense in what he said.

Execution of the Innocent

2009-08-31T11:36:00.000-07:00

Texas may very shortly become the first state to recognize that they have executed a legally and factually innocent person. This piece on the Cameron Todd Willingham case is long, and it's in the New Yorker, so you'll have to put up with those insufferable cartoons, but it's a fascinating and heartbreaking tale.

Street Magic Proposal

2009-08-26T05:49:00.000-07:00

My five-word review of The Shack

2009-08-25T08:07:00.000-07:00

Good theology. Terrible, terrible writing.

For the teachers

2009-08-18T10:54:00.000-07:00

The Center Way

2009-08-17T09:53:00.000-07:00

My friend Jesse has started a blog on the healthcare debate, to which I will also be contributing. I may occasionally post things both here and there, but I'm probably too lazy to do that. Anyway, check it out:

http://thecenterway.wordpress.com/

Quote

2009-08-11T13:27:00.000-07:00

"For me to be a Spirit-bearer is to realize all the distinctive characteristics in my personality; it is to become truly free, truly myself in my uniqueness. Life in the Spirit possesses an inexhaustible variety; it is wrong-doing, not sanctity, that is boring and repetitive. As a friend of mine, a priest who spent many hours each day hearing confessions, used to remark wearily: 'What a pity there are no new sins!' But there are always new forms of holiness."

Bishop Kallistos Ware, The Orthodox Way

Free for All

2009-08-04T13:49:00.000-07:00

Tim Conder and Dan Rhodes, two of our pastors at Emmaus Way, have a new book out now. It's called Free for All: Rediscovering the Bible in Community. I'll post a review once I get my copy, but for now, here's the description from the back cover:

Say "free-for-all," and most people imagine a brawl. But what if we had a free-for-all with the Bible? What if we opened up to aggressive interpretation within the communities of our local churches? In this provocative book, Tim Conder and Daniel Rhodes explore the critical need to encounter Scripture collectively, and then they invite us to listen in as a group from their church delves into four Bible passages--the obscure, the emotive, the familiar, and the controversial. Free for All makes a compelling case for communities as a valid authority for biblical interpretation. The authors show that communities are capable of breaking open the texts in fresh and surprising ways, unleashing them anew into our lives.

Trailer: The Fantastic Mr. Fox

2009-07-31T07:51:00.000-07:00

Wes Anderson's movies take place in such an artificial, carefully crafted universe, it's only natural that he would turn to a form of animation, where he can control literally everything onscreen. I'm cautiously interested, since I think Anderson does his best work when some element is unruly enough to burst out of his micromanaged mise-en-scène, like Gene Hackman in The Royal Tenenbaums (still Wes Anderson's best work). I'm not sure if George Clooney's voice is enough to give Anderson's somewhat airless style the life it needs.

On the other hand, Roald Dahl wrote the original story, and his stuff is usually brilliant. Plus, stop-motion is underutilized, so good for them.

Pluralism

2009-07-29T12:24:00.000-07:00

Christianity Today had this fascinating article on a third way between religious fundamentalism and religious relativism. The story is mostly about a Muslim leader on interfaith dialogue named Evoo Patel:

"For fifteen minutes the students debate the matter, fluctuating between constitutional rights and economic realities. Finally, Patel interrupts.

'I'm hearing you articulate two grand narratives. First, the narrative of American freedom. And second, the narrative of capitalism and productivity. But remember, the reporter is not calling you because you are an expert in economics or constitutional law. He's calling you because you are a minister. Don't be afraid to answer the question as a Christian. Answer out of the Christian narrative.'

The irony of a Muslim challenging a group of pastors to be more Christian was not lost on the students. Heads dropped as they contemplated a different response to the case study. Cassie Meyer assisted the students by adapting the scenario.

'Imagine you're the pastoral intern at the church in Grand Island,' Meyer says, 'and you've been given the responsibility to preach a sermon this Sunday addressing the conflict between the Christians and Muslims. What would you say from the pulpit? What would you use from Scripture?'

'The greatest commandment is to love God and love our neighbors,' says one student. 'Whether we like it or not, these Somali Muslims are our neighbors and we are called to love them.'

'But many in the town don't view the Muslims as their neighbors,' says another student. 'They view them as intruders, unwanted outsiders, or even their enemies.'

'Do you think referring to the Muslims as 'enemies' in your sermon might inflame the problem?' Patel asks.

"' don't think so,' the student responds. 'Jesus calls us to love our enemies and to show kindness to aliens. But that would have to be made clear in the sermon. The story of the Good Samaritan comes to mind.' Patel is out of his chair, energized by what he is hearing.

'I want you to see what just happened,' he says. 'I want to affirm this. You are using the grand Christian narrative to respond to an interfaith conflict. First, I heard the Christian story of loving God and loving your neighbor. Second, I heard the Christian story of the Good Samaritan and the call to love the stranger. By using these stories, you are defining reality through the Christian narrative.

'Remember, the three most powerful narratives on the planet are narratives of religion, narratives of nation, and narratives of ethnicity/race. You cannot afford to forfeit that territory by talking about economics or the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Don't be afraid to be Christian ministers. If you don't use the Christian narrative to define reality for your people, then someone else will define reality for them with a different narrative.'

Patel's call to stand firmly on the Christian narrative isn't what most students expect to hear from a Muslim professor."

Jay-Z and American Hegemony

2009-07-14T07:50:00.000-07:00

Marc Lynch at Foreign Policy has an interesting (to me, anyway) analysis of the limits of hard and soft power, as displayed in the current beef between Jay-Z and the Game.

"See, Jay-Z (Shawn Carter) is the closest thing to a hegemon which the rap world has known for a long time. He's #1 on the Forbes list of the top earning rappers. He has an unimpeachable reputation, both artistic and commercial, and has produced some of the all-time best (and best-selling) hip hop albums including standouts Reasonable Doubt, The Blueprint and the Black Album. He spent several successful years as the CEO of Def Jam Records before buying out his contract a few months ago to release his new album on his own label. And he's got Beyonce. Nobody, but nobody, in the hip hop world has his combination of hard power and soft power. If there be hegemony, then this is it. Heck, when he tried to retire after the Black Album, he found himself dragged back into the game (shades of America's inward turn during the Clinton years?).

But the limits on his ability to use this power recalls the debates about U.S. primacy. Should he use this power to its fullest extent, as neo-conservatives would advise, imposing his will to reshape the world, forcing others to adapt to his values and leadership? Or should he fear a backlash against the unilateral use of power, as realists such as my colleague Steve Walt or liberals such as John Ikenberry would warn, and instead exercise self-restraint?"

Click here for the full article.

We are this much closer to the Matrix

2009-07-13T10:11:00.000-07:00

Thanks, science.

Quote

2009-06-25T07:05:00.000-07:00

"Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, ... about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience.

Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. ...

If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason?"

St. Augustine

A Stranger

2009-06-02T10:54:00.000-07:00

They say there are really only two stories in the world:

Someone goes on a journey, or

A stranger comes to town.

Both kinds of story have a similar rhythm. The status quo is upset somehow, and equilibrium must be restored. The protagonist is either thrust by events outside the familiar into the larger world, or the larger world comes bursting into the protagonist's comfort zone in the form of the stranger.

In the first kind of story, the journey can be literal, metaphysical, philosophical, spiritual, or (usually) all of the above. Dorothy is ripped from her home and takes a physical journey through Oz, but it's also a journey to adulthood of sorts, where she makes friends, learns lessons, and discovers personal strength. Frodo has to journey to Mount Doom in Lord of the Rings, but it's also a spiritual journey of sacrifice. Ebenezer Scrooge travels in space and time (or dreams it, or whatever), but his real journey is one of personal discovery.

The second kind of story is common in Westerns. The townpeople are being oppressed, but surviving, until a stranger rides into town wearing a white hat to clean up the badguys. Once that's done, he rides off into the sunset. Or think of The Cat in the Hat. Equilibrium is upset by the appearance of the strange figure, but in the end a better status quo is established. Romantic comedies can work this way too, particularly recently. Frequently the mopey male lead's world is interrupted by the manic pixie dream girl, who is a destructive force but draws him out of his shell (Elizabethtown, Garden State). You know it's the "stranger comes to town" plot when there's a big speech at the end where the guy says something like "ever since you showed up, you've ruined everything, I can't sleep, I don't know what to do, but you're all I think about..." and so on and so forth.

So if the Bible is primarily the story we find ourselves in, what kind of story is it? There are of course a huge variety of smaller stories within the big story, but I think we can see the Bible's narrative as kind of a fractal pattern involving both story types.

In the Old Testament, after all the exposition and setup (Genesis 1-11), a stranger comes to town. Abraham's ordinary life is interrupted by the arrival of a strange God, who tells him to take a journey, both physical and spiritual. The rest of the OT is an account of this journey, with all its digressions, dramatic interludes, and what Scot McKnight calls "wiki-stories", smaller stories that fit within the big story (Ruth & Boaz, Jonah). But the big journey seems to fizzle out. The Promised Land is reached, and yet...Israel still seems to be stuck in a persistent exile. There's a new status quo, all right, but it's apparently one of expectantly waiting while being oppressed. Some story.

And then a stranger comes to town.

And he starts to talk about the old story, and how it's now coming to fruition through himself. And he talks about how the status quo is being overturned, and there really is a happy ending on the way, though of course (like all good stories) there's a lot of bad to come before that. And he threatens the people who profit from the status quo and tells them the part they've chosen in the story does not end well, and of course they don't like that so they kill him. And the story seems to be over. It's a cautionary tale about not rocking the boat. Because the villains always win. Life is nasty, brutish, and short, and eventually Grendel or Darth Vader or Caesar will get you.

And yet.

The story isn't over. Paradoxically, the antagonist's moment of triumph was simultaneously their very defeat. The rhythm of the universe picks up again. The seed sown in the dark earth sprouts up a plant. Aslan gets off the stone table, Neo picks himself up off the (virtual) ground, and Jesus walks out of his final resting place not just resuscitated, but Resurrected.

And the story starts again. A new people is gathered, made of all the nations of the earth, and the friends go on a journey. The turning point has happened, the war is over, but there is still a lot of work to do. The story continues, and we're still in it, and we decide what part we will play. The invitation is extended to join the journeying friends, who will have their own smaller stories, but these stories will find their place in the great narrative that fills the cosmos.

This pattern repeats itself yet a third time. Because the journeying friends know that the stranger will once more come to town, and set all things right. And then a new journey will begin. And this part of the story stretches away so far ahead of us we can barely understand it, but it's the story we're choosing to live in, every day. It's the story that is the most beautiful to us. It's the story that is deeply good. And it's a story that is true; that is, it makes the most sense of what we find around us. And we learn how to mourn, and how to celebrate, because the story isn't over.

Cool Guys Don't Look at Explosions

2009-06-01T16:35:00.001-07:00

Quote

2009-05-27T05:58:00.000-07:00

"...the shorthand phrase "the authority of scripture" when unpacked, offers a picture of God's sovereign and saving plan for the entire cosmos, dramatically inaugurated by Jesus himself, and now implemented through the Spirit-led life of the church precisely as the scripture-reading community. ... We read scripture in order to be refreshed in our memory and understanding of the story within which we ourselves are actors, to be reminded where it has come from and where it is going to, and hence what our own part within it ought to be."

N.T. Wright, The Last Word

Things I've Learned Recently

2009-05-13T11:27:00.000-07:00

FACT: Dinosaurs can be hilarious.
SOURCE: http://www.qwantz.com/

FACT: Hurley has a blog. (Okay, it's not Hurley, it's the actor who plays him, Jorge Garcia.)
SOURCE: http://dispatchesfromtheisland.blogspot.com/

FACT: Buying a house is hard work, and emotionally taxing.
SOURCE: The whole last freaking 2 months.

FACT: Asparagus is from the lily family, and can grow 6 to 10 inches in a day.
SOURCE: Lynn.

FACT: "Weisure" is a stupid word, and I hope it doesn't catch on.
SOURCE: CNN, home of "articles" that are basically interviews with one person about whatever they want to say, apparently.

Dumpster Diving

2009-04-30T07:06:00.000-07:00

Everybody go check out my beautiful wife Amy's article on dumpster diving over at Relevant.

"As far as dumpsters go, the one I was standing in didn’t smell all that bad. My garbage can in my kitchen has produced worse smells.

It’s midnight on a chilly spring night in North Carolina. A young woman, dressed in dark jeans and a hooded sweatshirt hops a short chain link into a nearby alley and scrambles up the side of an open dumpster. Sounds of rustling emerge as she sorts through newspapers, bulging trash bags and bins of produce.

Are we watching a scene from an afternoon special? A documentary on the dangers of street living? A burglary in progress?

None of the above. The scene I just described took place behind a suburban strip mall. The girl involved? A graduate student from Duke University. She was participating in a practice that has become more and more popular..."

Biblical Curse Generator

2009-04-27T12:54:00.000-07:00

"Behold, thou shalt be as welcome as a fart in the queen's bedchamber, O ye plaything of Beelzebub!"

Thanks, Ship of Fools. Go here for more.

Christian Utilitarianism, and Mourning

2009-04-21T13:59:00.000-07:00

Everybody go read this thoughtful and poignant reflection on how the church has unfortunately absorbed our culture's utilitarian ethics. Daniel Salinas' daughter, Karis, was born with cerebral palsy, and he writes about his experience with the well-intentioned but totally inadequate response of Christian community:

"We thought that we would find compassion, understanding, empathy, help, rest, and a friendly hand in the Christian community, but instead we found the same utilitarian ethics as in the secular world. For most believers, including the majority of our family members, there were two options: Either God heals her, or God takes her away. They posed questions like: What sense does it make to live like that? Isn’t it better that God takes her away instead of letting her suffer here? Innocent questions, yes, but behind these questions we saw the same arguments that secular scholars have proposed....

Death is our enemy. But in our case, for most of the believers who came to comfort us, our daughter’s death was the best thing that could have happened to her and to us. For those people, she was better off dead. They were not that blunt, but the message was clear: She is better off now, no more suffering, no more pain.

That was too much for us to bear. Would anyone in their right mind say that to parents who are burying their seven-year-old “normal child”? Yes, Karis lived with much pain and suffering, but how much better to search for ways to alleviate the pain and not celebrate death. Does our God not care about life, all life? Are we not supposed to promote life? So then, why did our fellow Christians keep telling us that it was better for our daughter to die?"

We need desperately to rethink how and why we value people, and how we can support and love those with special challenges of all kinds. Go check out L'Arche for a great example of this.

And also very importantly, we need to learn how to grieve with people. There's a very simple answer we should remember when we're tempted to avoid those in mourning by claiming "we don't know what to say": don't say anything. Take a cue from Job's 3 friends. When they first show up to comfort him after the loss of his family, they sit in silence with him for a week. It's only when they open their mouths that they get into trouble. So if someone is mourning or grieving, and you want to offer them a platitude about God being in control, or how every cloud has a silver lining, or how really, it's better this way...just shut the hell up and be there.

Como Hacer un Bebe

2009-04-20T08:38:00.000-07:00

or, How to Make a Baby

So that's how it works.

via BoingBoing

Flotsam & Jetsam: Post-Resurrection Edition

2009-04-13T05:46:00.000-07:00

...Mary stood outside the tomb weeping. As she wept, she knelt to look into the tomb and saw two angels sitting there, dressed in white, one at the head, the other at the foot of where Jesus' body had been laid. They said to her, "Woman, why do you weep?"

"They took my Master," she said, "and I don't know where they put him." After she said this, she turned away and saw Jesus standing there. But she didn't recognize him. Jesus spoke to her, "Woman, why do you weep? Who are you looking for?" She, thinking that he was the gardener, said, "Mister, if you took him, tell me where you put him so I can care for him."

Jesus said, "Mary."

Turning to face him, she said in Hebrew, "Rabboni!" meaning "Teacher!"

Jesus said, "Don't cling to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father. Go to my brothers and tell them, 'I ascend to my Father and your Father, my God and your God.'" Mary Magdalene went, telling the news to the disciples: "I saw the Master!" And she told them everything he said to her.

Hope you had a great Easter weekend like we did. Back to blogging.

1. This guy gets it.

2. These jurors don't. Right before Good Friday?

3. That sucks.

4. This looks neat, but isn't that amount of ambient electricity a problem?

5. Legos!

6. You never thought about it from the goombas' perspective, did you?
via Offworld

7. Appropriately rescued on Easter. But what do we do about piracy in Somalia, which is basically ungoverned?

8. Mike Morrell posts an excerpt from Peter Rollins' new book. I plan to get it.

9. Speaking of Rollins, and since it's Easter-time, here's a quote from him, when accused of denying Jesus' Resurrection:

Without equivocation or hesitation I fully and completely admit that I deny the resurrection of Christ. This is something that anyone who knows me could tell you, and I am not afraid to say it publicly, no matter what some people may think…

I deny the resurrection of Christ every time I do not serve at the feet of the oppressed, each day that I turn my back on the poor; I deny the resurrection of Christ when I close my ears to the cries of the downtrodden and lend my support to an unjust and corrupt system.

However there are moments when I affirm that resurrection, few and far between as they are. I affirm it when I stand up for those who are forced to live on their knees, when I speak for those who have had their tongues torn out, when I cry for those who have no more tears left to shed.

Lent

2009-02-24T19:14:00.000-08:00

I'm giving up the Internet for Lent.

Well, most of it. I'll still be checking my email (I'll hold myself to twice a day), and as a matter of practicality, anything work-related is okay. As are very specific searches, like if I genuinely need to look up a phone number or something.

Basically, I'm giving up recreational web-surfing.

Not because it's inherently bad, of course. It just takes up too much of my time. So I'm going to make some space in my life, and hopefully fill that space with Jesus.

This means I won't be blogging. We'll chat after Easter.

Is this a joke?

2009-02-24T14:07:00.001-08:00

I somehow stumbled across this website, which is either for a crazy super-fundamentalist church, or a really clever satire of one. I can't decide which. The pastor's name is Darwin Fish, but he insists that's his real name.

Either way, it's good for a laugh.

I especially thought this from the FAQ was pretty funny:

1. Are you the only true church/believers?

We do not know. There was a church in Murfreesboro, TN, but that has since dissolved. Other than that, we have not yet, as of this date, found another church that is in the truth (1 John 4:6), and we have been to many. Will we find one? Actually, the real question is, will Christ find one?

When the Son of Man comes, will He really find faith on the earth? (Luke 18:8, see also 2 Timothy 3:1-5; 4:3; 2 Peter 2:2)

Also, apparently, if you regard such crazy radical left-wing liberals as Billy Graham, John MacArthur, Charles Stanley, T.D. Jakes, Charles Spurgeon, Chuck Colson, C.S. Lewis, or "Pope John Paul" (I assume they mean the Second) as godly men, you are not saved.

Wow, I'm boned. Dallas Willard, Rob Bell, and Phyllis Tickle didn't even make the guy's shitlist. See you in hell, everybody.

Previously on Lost

2009-02-23T07:09:00.001-08:00

BEN: Thomas, the Apostle. When Jesus wanted to return to Judea, knowing that he probably would be murdered there, Thomas said to the others, "Let us all go that we might die with him." But Thomas was not remembered for this bravery. His claim to fame came later, when he refused to acknowledge the resurrection. He just couldn't wrap his mind around it. The story goes that he needed to touch Jesus' wounds to be convinced.

JACK: So, was he?

BEN: Of course he was. We're all convinced sooner or later, Jack.

Jetsam and Flotsam

2009-02-20T11:31:00.000-08:00

Go here, and feel better about your day.

Time-lapse snails

Cave house for sale

Conan is about to displace Leno, finally.

Oh yeah!

I'm glad that everyone is welcome at our communion table, even J.I. Packer

They'll know we are Christians by our...what was it exactly?

2009-02-18T13:38:00.000-08:00

Everybody go read this ridiculous story of a bunch of church people being total jerks to a waitress.

I'll quote:

A group of six church-goers came in last night after their evening services and sat down, not in her area but in another server's. When the girl came to greet them and take their drink order, one of them said, "We want to tell you up front that we will not be tipping you tonight because..."

Are you ready?

"...we do not believe in people working on Sunday."

The girl was taken full-aback, stammered out something that sounded like "I wouldn't have to work on Sunday if so many church people didn't come in," or some such. She was furious. So was the manager of the restaurant whom she summoned to deal with them. I think he should have tossed the people out on their...uh...Bibles. To his credit, and demonstrating something like agape all around, he did say to them, "Well, we don't believe in making our people work for nothing, so I will be serving you tonight." And he did. God bless him.

Flotsam, also Jetsam

2009-02-17T10:46:00.000-08:00

Rainn Wilson (Dwight on The Office) on religious persecution in Iran

You will never hear this song the same way again

You know, I might actually hire this guy

Carl McColman on the future of Christian mysticism (via Mike Morrell)

I'm basically a pacifist nowadays, so why do I think armor and swords and stuff are so cool?

Speaking of cool, Amazon has great deals on this book:
(via Brant Hansen's blog, which also features this amazing judge-off)

The Dark Night of the Soul

2009-02-09T12:32:00.000-08:00

And now a few words from St. John of the Cross:
On a dark night, Kindled in love with yearnings—oh, happy chance!—
I went forth without being observed, My house being now at rest.

In darkness and secure, By the secret ladder, disguised—oh, happy chance!—
In darkness and in concealment, My house being now at rest.

In the happy night, In secret, when none saw me,
Nor I beheld aught, Without light or guide, save that which burned in my heart.

This light guided me More surely than the light of noonday
To the place where he (well I knew who!) was awaiting me— A place where none appeared.

Oh, night that guided me, Oh, night more lovely than the dawn,
Oh, night that joined Beloved with lover, Transforming Lover in Beloved!
Upon my flowery breast, Kept wholly for himself alone,
There he stayed sleeping, and I caressed him, And the fanning of the cedars made a breeze.

The breeze blew from the turret As I parted his locks;
With his gentle hand he wounded my neck And caused all my senses to be suspended.

I remained, lost in oblivion; My face I reclined on the Beloved.
All ceased and I abandoned myself, Leaving my cares forgotten among the lilies.

Proverbs 16:18

2009-01-28T06:39:00.000-08:00

Flotsam & Jetsam

2009-01-23T10:17:00.000-08:00

The weird story of Amy Grant suing Dr. Strange

Obama-ize thyself

Bishop Will Willimon sticks it to antitheist Bart Ehrman

Why Disney dumped the Narnia series...I hope they can find another distributor, at least long enough to make The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. More Reepicheep!

Freaking awesome guitar-shaped boat for sale

The bioethics of prenatal cancer gene screening

How marketing affects (read: controls) moviemaking

The Curious Case of Forrest Gump

2009-01-22T10:54:00.000-08:00

I enjoyed "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button", but this is pretty funny:

The Curious Case of Forrest Gump - watch more funny videos

Kings

2009-01-19T09:39:00.000-08:00

I'm cautiously excited about a new series NBC has coming out. It's called "Kings" and it appears to be a modern-day retelling of the story of David and Saul. You can learn about the show here. You can read the story of David here.

I've often thought that the Samuel/Kings/Chronicles narrative would make a fabulous movie or TV series (or comic book, or something). Film versions of Bible stories tend to be centered around either Exodus or Easter or the Christmas story (all of which are great, mind you) and tend to be depressingly traditional. Everybody wears bathrobes, like they stepped off a flannel-graph display, and everyone speaks in stilted, grand cadences. And until fairly recently, all the Jewish characters (Moses, Jesus, etc.) were suspiciously Norwegian-looking.

But so many more interesting things could be done with the stories. Make Jesus black in the South during Jim Crow, and make the Roman Empire into the KKK. Make Moses the adopted son of a factory owner at the height of the Industrial Revolution, leading his people out of unfair working conditions. Or zoom in a little bit. Tell the story from Peter's perspective. Or Pilate's. Or Judas'. Mel Gibson did this a little bit with The Passion of the Christ, in that the film is really just about Jesus' crucifixion (I wish he'd done more than this, actually; the flashback scenes between Jesus and Mary were the best in the film, but I give him credit for trying).

And the story of David and Saul is absolutely ripe for this kind of artistic interpretation. It's epic. It's tragic. It's full of Shakespearean intrigue. It is not a pious Sunday school story. Sex! Violence! Betrayal! Hundreds of foreskins! Revenge! Impotence!

You really could make a show about this that could last for years. David's rise from small-town shepherd boy, to new king favored by God, to arrogant rapist/murderer, to repentant yet inevitably declining monarch...he's a tragic hero the Greeks wish they'd thought of. Plus he's the rock star of the ancient world. Ooh, that would be interesting...David as young wannabe to Saul's aging rock god...

What biblical story do you think is unjustly ignored, and deserves a good retelling? How would you tell it?

Flotsam & Jetsam

2009-01-14T11:13:00.000-08:00

<--I have no idea who this woman is, but she's my hero

-Does this spin, or are the wheels just for effect?

-Get ready for action

-I don't usually say things like, "What's the world coming to?", but...what's the world coming to?

Cities are too gridlike. Let's just throw buildings around randomly.

As a former video editor, I thought this was just really charming

Bars & Tones from André F. Chocron on Vimeo.

Bushisms

2009-01-12T12:52:00.001-08:00

No matter your opinion of President (for another week, anyway) Bush, he is not a great orator. Here's my favorite of his mangled phrases:

"There's an old saying in Tennessee—I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee—that says, fool me once, shame on—shame on you. Fool me—you can't get fooled again."
—Nashville, Tenn., Sept. 17, 2002

I like the way he gives up halfway through the saying and just sums it up.

What's your favorite Bush quote or made-up word? "Misunderestimated"? "Strategery"?

Because my back hurts today

2009-01-07T12:52:00.000-08:00

Hell

2009-01-06T13:16:00.000-08:00

N.T. Wright on hell

(See also this book by him. And this one, by that other British Anglican guy. And this podcast for a different perspective, which you can find free on iTunes, but I don't know how to link to that.)

What do you think? Since adolescence I've discovered the Bible isn't nearly so clear about heaven, hell, and the afterlife as I thought it was. It's clear enough (whatever hell or judgment or separation from God mean, you don't want it), but the Bible does not usually speak in ways that lend themselves to tidy diagrams and charts.

I know this isn't a fun conversation to have, but I think it's one we need to have.

With a Capital "P"

2009-01-05T12:35:00.000-08:00

Scot McKnight is complaining about informal pastor web pages.

"What annoyed me about these sites was the utter absence of a sense of the sacred in pastoring, of the overwhelming sense of God's call upon a life that reaches so deep that everything becomes holy, of the profound respect and privilege of the call to lead God's people, and of the total lack of order."

I normally think he's right on, but not today. I don't like the argument that the priesthood of all believers means the pastor's calling isn't "better, just different", when that "just different" calling comes with special titles and decorum and pomp and circumstance and seats of honor and special access to God. I don't like the implication that God's call that makes everything holy is reserved for a select few. There is none not called (Yoder said that somewhere).

If this is a problem at all (I'm quite dubious), it's a problem of the celebritization of pastors. Scot cites the fact that some pastors' websites list what's on their iPod or what they're reading. It is a little self-absorbed to think that everyone will want to know what your favorite music is. But then again, I have a blog, and so does Scot, so how can we judge?

Now, he's right that the priesthood of all believers doesn't mean hyper-individualistic rejection of authority. It doesn't mean "no one can tell me what to do" or "I can find God on my own". It means the opposite of that, actually. The priesthood of believers is a call to incredible mutual interdependence. But it also doesn't mean the outsourcing of our spiritual life to a special class of religious professionals.

What do you think? Does your church's website have pastor bios with tidbits of info? Do we treat pastors too informally? Too formally? Should we have a clergy/laity distinction at all, or is the biblical image of the body of Christ much more complex than that?

How I Spent My Winter Vacation

2009-01-05T08:35:00.000-08:00

I didn't seem to blog at all over Christmas. I guess it's because we were bouncing around all over Florida, with inconsistent internet access and plenty to do. Or maybe I only blog when I'm avoiding work.

Somehow over a week and a half Amy and I managed to see lots of folks on our list of People To See. People in our lives are now roughly divided into 5 categories: Family (Amy's, mine), Tampa (mostly Amy's friends), Polk County (mostly my friends), Orlando (our friends from college and Wesley), and now North Carolina. We saw the fam (we had 4 separate Christmases, of course). And New Year's was fun, and made more exciting by the announcement of Amy's sister Monica's engagement to her longtime beau, Louis. Due to a well-timed wedding (congratulations, you two) we managed to see many Orlando friends we hadn't seen in awhile, albeit far too briefly.

I always love going home, and I'm always equally ready to come home. (Yes, you can have more than one home).

Apropos of nothing, did you know bubbles can freeze?

Advent Conspiracy

2008-12-20T14:15:00.000-08:00

Watch this video (via Out of Ur):

Trains, Personal Space, and Mission

2008-12-19T11:03:00.000-08:00

Wherever this is (Asia somewhere apparently), they clearly have very different cultural norms of personal space than we do in America. How nice of the porters to help everyone cram in, though.

Question: What cultural differences (in a place you've either been to or heard about) have seemed most strange to you? Have you gotten over the culture shock to realize how arbitrary some of the things we take for granted are? For instance, I would not want to ride on this train. But our American sense of inviolable personal space is why we all drive planet-killing SUV-tanks instead of carpooling in smaller, more efficient cars, or (horrors!) taking public transportation.

How do we live out the gospel in places or cultures that seem so alien to us? (This doesn't have to be another country; crossing generational, regional, racial, and political lines can be just as difficult.) If the earliest Christians could do it (nearly all Jews who were taught from birth not to mingle with other cultures or people), surely those of us from the American melting pot should be able to, right?

Flotsam & Jetsam (& Lagan)

2008-12-17T12:24:00.000-08:00

Are Christians at Christmastime like the Comic Book Guy? (via Steve Taylor)

Umm...don't name your kid Adolf Hitler, and maybe you won't have this problem

Postmodernism, comic books, and my favorite author

Vital unanswered questions

Still-President Bush: "I've abandoned free-market principles to save the free-market system." Points for honesty, I guess.

Almost-President Obama needs to bring back this pimpin' hat (and yes, that's an ordinary tobacco cigarette):

It's always time for unwarranted police brutality

Skills:

Essentials

2008-12-17T12:00:00.001-08:00

A few days ago Scot McKnight (over at Jesus Creed) asked, "What are the essentials of the Christian faith?"

"To permit non-essentials to shape our concerns, our relations, and our reputations is, to use the words of Jesus, to "strain gnats." ... What we need is discernment to see again and again what is essential about our faith and to see what is non-essential. This requires a firm grip on the essentials and a loose grip on the non-essentials."

The comments section is always the most fun part of Scot's blog. RJS, who comments and posts there a lot (and is some kind of scientist in real life), posted this brief list, adapted from the historic church creeds, which I promptly stole and tweaked a little:

1. I believe in God, the Creator Almighty, the Maker of heaven and earth.

2. I believe in Jesus Christ, God's only Son, our Lord: in His birth, life, teachings, death and resurrection.

3. I believe in the Holy Spirit as poured out at Pentecost,

4. I believe in the Spirit-filled church as the body of Christ and people of God, and in the communion of saints.

5. I believe that God calls us to total commitment: heart, mind, body, and soul – that this should impact everything we do and every decision we make.

6. I believe that the purpose of the church is to begin to embody the kingdom of God, here, today, in all creation.

7. I believe in judgment and forgiveness.

8. I believe in the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting.

So what do you think? Remember, we're talking about essentials of Christian belief, not an exhaustive list of all its implications, or even a list of what's most important in Christianity (that's an easy question: Love God, love others). Too many things? Not enough? Is the search for essentials problematic in the first place?

Flotsam & Jetsam

2008-12-16T11:07:00.000-08:00

Wear the armband, kid.

Red velvet cake in the shape of a camera

The periodic table of awesoments

Robots won't be writing books anytime soon

16 things

2008-12-15T13:37:00.001-08:00

There's a thing going around Facebook wherein you are supposed to list 16 things about yourself and then pass it on. Well, somehow everybody I know did one, which means peer pressure kicks in and I felt obligated to do it as well. I might as well post it here too. So, here's 16 factoids about yours truly:

1. I am completely incapable of using the defroster on my car windshield. If my windshield is fogged up, I fiddle around with the air conditioner, yet always seem to make it worse. It's one of the many areas in which I'd be lost without Amy.

2. I can type extremely fast. I've been tested at 125 words per minute. I took a typing class in high school and actually learned to use the home row keys and all that sort of thing. It's basically what got me my job.

3. I like to discuss issues to the point that I basically end up debating, particularly with people who are smart, stubborn, and disagree with me. I don't think I'm argumentative, but I like to toss around ideas and argue different sides of a question. Usually I'm contrarian enough that I argue the opposite of whatever the general consensus in the room is, so don't assume I always believe what I'm saying. I find it fun, possibly to the point that other people find it tedious. Oh well.

4. I love movies. If it's a favorite of mine I could watch it probably endlessly. Even if it's not I like to watch things a couple of times. I am definitely not one of those people who gets bored at movies. I was a film minor, and my secret dream profession is film director, so even if a movie sucks I'm paying attention to camera angles and editing stuff. I have never walked out of a movie, except for...

5. Saw IV. Or maybe Saw III. I forget. We left in the first 10 minutes because I couldn't handle it. We had watched the other ones on DVD, and I didn't think it would be that different in the theater, but it was. Somehow my lovely wife's 16 things left out the fact that she loves horror movies.

6. I am a notary. I have an official stamp and I had to swear an oath and everything. Actually, I think I affirmed rather than swore. Let your yes be yes and all that. My commission expires November 4th, 2013, in case you're curious.

7. I grew up in central Florida, and had never lived anywhere else until we moved to Durham. We'll probably end up back in FL at some point. I'll miss the geography. And weather. And seasons. And people.

8. I miss the student schedule. 2 weeks of vacation a year just doesn't go far enough. I think about quitting my job at least once a week. Then I remember what not having a job feels like, and remind myself to stop whining, because I'm not doing this forever. I'll probably go back to school at some point.

9. Speaking of school, I was in the gifted program in elementary and middle school. What I recall of it was basically going to a different classroom a few days a week and learning about the Mayans. And playing Oregon Trail.

10. I'm not athletic. Never have been. I've been trying to run in the mornings. It's hard.

11. My favorite candy in the world is Peanut Butter M&Ms. Not Peanut; Peanut Butter.

12. I quit popcorn. That's right. I quit it. I like popcorn, but I would always regret eating it because of the little kernels that get stuck on the back of your throat. It's not worth the trouble, so I quit it.

13. I have a poor memory for people's names, and even things that happened to me, but I have a very good memory for random trivia and information. Consequently, I'm somewhat used to knowing the answers to questions, and it's easy for me to sound authoritative about a topic when someone asks. So sometimes I like to just make stuff up. Just lie and completely bullshit something unbelievable. I can usually only keep it up for a minute or two, and I never let the conversation end without coming clean. Am I using my powers for evil?

14. When I was 10 somebody tricked me into going on a roller coaster for the first time. They lied and said it didn't have any big drops or loops or anything. I've been hooked ever since, although I can only go on a few before the motion sickness gets to me. It was the Mindbender at Six Flags Over Georgia, which I'm sure I would think was quite lame if I went on it now.

15. I have worn glasses since I was 3. Most of that time I had bifocals; I've only fairly recently gone down to unifocals(?) or whatever. Amy sometimes wants me to try contacts, but I feel uncomfortable in public without my glasses on, and not just because I can't see. Psychologically, without them, I feel weird and naked.

16. I have four tattoos, and I want more. You heard right; they are addictive.

Life in Maryland

2008-12-15T06:06:00.000-08:00

A legislative commission in Maryland has recommended that the state abolish capital punishment. This report cites several reasons to drop the death penalty, including racial disparity, jurisdictional disparity, substantially higher costs (yes, as opposed to life in prison), detrimental effects on victims' families, the risk of executing an innocent person, and no evidence of deterrence.

There are lots of reasons to be against the death penalty. There is exactly one reason to be for it: believing in the retributive justice of "an eye for an eye". I have little to say to people of non-Christian faiths, or no faith, who support the death penalty for this reason, other than to reiterate all the practical problems with capital punishment (Jews who support capital punishment should read this).

But to my fellow Jesus-followers who support, or are ambivalent about capital punishment, I'd issue this challenge: You have placed your faith in violence and revenge rather than in the Jesus who taught us to forgive our enemies, who flatly rejected "eye for an eye" thinking, and who died to save even (or especially) the worst of us. Who is not willing that any should perish. Who begged for forgiveness for his killers, while they were killing him. Repent.

I hope the state legislature of Maryland listens to this recommendation. Last year New Jersey abolished capital punishment. There is momentum to end this cycle of revenge and violence, even in the South. Let's pray for grace in violent times.

Flotsam and Jetsam

2008-12-12T07:05:00.000-08:00

Next stop, mind-reading

Tetris Ice Cubes

Brrr. No thanks.

Albino Raccoon

Live this story

Boss fights are getting too hard these days

2008-12-11T13:49:00.000-08:00

You Have to Burn the Rope

(This may not be funny if you don't play videogames, but I thought this was awesome. Stick around for the song at the end.)

Flotsam and Jetsam

2008-12-09T07:27:00.000-08:00

Proclaim the favorable year of the Lord

How rich are we, really?

DEFINITELY NOT A SCAM

How do you know what makes a good teacher?

Ye olde Star Wars

Flotsam and Jetsam

2008-12-08T06:59:00.000-08:00

Scot on the Third Way between liberal and conservative Christianity

Everybody answer my Christmas movie poll, to the right----->

This game sounds really freaking cool

I wish I could do stuff like this

I like to go to Wikipedia and look at the entries for everyday objects like the spoon. I don't know why.

Ba ha ha

Good King Wenceslas

2008-12-08T06:03:00.001-08:00

At church last night we sang "Good King Wenceslas" by John M. Neale. You've probably heard it; it's a pretty traditional Christmas song, despite the fact that it doesn't mention Christmas, or little baby Jesus, or shepherds, or stars, or anything like that. Like me, you probably only know the first few lines:

Good King Wenceslas looked out on the Feast of Stephen,
When the snow lay round about, deep and crisp and even.

But the song actually tells a story about the king, or rather, the duke. Wenceslas was Duke of Bohemia (which is part of the present-day Czech Republic) from 921 to around 935 A.D., when he was killed by his brother. He is considered a martyr, and is the patron saint of the Czech Republic. Legend, which I tend to believe unless I have a reason not to, depicts him as a "good king" who traveled around giving to the poor and needy of his kingdom (or dukedom or fiefdom or whatever). And if that's not enough, he was played in a movie by Jonathan Brandis.

So read the rest of the lyrics. The song has several good lessons, and features one of those characteristically low-key Christian miracles. The language is a little baroque, so I'll summarize each verse.

Good King Wenceslas looked out on the Feast of Stephen,
When the snow lay round about, deep and crisp and even.
Brightly shone the moon that night, though the frost was cruel,
When a poor man came in sight, gathering winter fuel.

It's the day after Christmas, and Wenceslas sees a poor man gathering sticks to make a fire.

“Hither, page, and stand by me, if you know it, telling,
Yonder peasant, who is he? Where and what his dwelling?”
“Sire, he lives a good league hence, underneath the mountain,
Right against the forest fence, by Saint Agnes’ fountain.”

He calls a servant over and finds out where the peasant lives.

“Bring me food and bring me wine, bring me pine logs hither,
You and I will see him dine, when we bear them thither.”
Page and monarch, forth they went, forth they went together,
Through the cold wind’s wild lament and the bitter weather.

The duke orders food and logs for a fire, and goes with his servant through the winter to eat with the peasant.

“Sire, the night is darker now, and the wind blows stronger,
Fails my heart, I know not how; I can go no longer.”
“Mark my footsteps, my good page, tread now in them boldly,
You shall find the winter’s rage freeze your blood less coldly.”

It's freaking cold, and the servant doesn't think he can go on to feed the poor man, but Wenceslas advises him to walk behind him.

In his master’s steps he trod, where the snow lay dinted;
Heat was in the very sod which the saint had printed.
Therefore, Christian men, be sure, wealth or rank possessing,
You who now will bless the poor shall yourselves find blessing.

The servant walks "in his master's steps", from which miraculous heat emanates. It's not in the song, but presumably they successfully find the poor man and dine with him. One historian wrote in 1119, "But his deeds I think you know better than I could tell you; for, as is read in his Passion, no one doubts that, rising every night from his noble bed, with bare feet and only one chamberlain, he went around to God’s churches and gave alms generously to widows, orphans, those in prison and afflicted by every difficulty, so much so that he was considered, not a prince, but the father of all the wretched."

I really like the idea of a barefoot king wandering around in the snow, giving away his kingdom to the poor and inviting people to walk in his footsteps. So even though on first glance "Good King Wenceslas" seems only vaguely Christmas-y because it mentions snow, I think it's a great song to sing as we celebrate the birth of another barefoot king.