Josh the Baptist turned Catholic says this is the protestant doctrine of sola fide. Recognize it?

Michael,

I believe all the black students are African-American.  At another coop our kids attend there are quite a few Africans, though.  We had some ties to an organization that ran an orphanage in Sierra Leone, and lots of people we know adopted from there.  Unfortunately, there were accusations of child trafficking, and the man who ran the organization went to jail.  The Sierra Leone government has since cut off most of the adoptions out of the country.

I really like my children’s school. The children organized themselves into houses, ala’ Harry Potter.  My wife administrates the website: Rivendell Study Center.  UPDATE: My wife says I’m totally off base on the socio-economic aspect of our school.  She says that there is a large range of income levels and backgrounds represented.

Mark: Glad to know your coop beats the example of typical Christian schools, which are overwhelmingly white. BTW- are the black students African-American?

...that if you make up enough moonbat theories, eventually one will happen to be right by chance. From the article that John inked:

Indie culture

“Religious narratives show up in all expressive forms, from politics to music. I see a lot of the religious narrative of Puritanism in the indie music scene; the idea that, to have the pure divine experience, it has to be direct and unmediated. So the smaller and more intimate a show is, the ‘truer’ fans believe their experience was, compared to someone who saw them later on in a bigger venue. That’s why so many people claim to have seen the Sex Pistols at the 100 Club.”

My kids are half home schooled, half co-op. The co-op is based on the classical education model: grammar, dialectic, rhetoric. The school body (about 40 kids) is about 25% minorities (Hispanic, Asian, Black). However, if you bring class into it as a constituent of ‘race’, we are pretty much the same. From a socioeconomic POV, we’re as homogeneous as it gets.

Matt Taibbi from Rolling Stone Magazine goes undercover and joins Hagee’s church and attends a retreat there. The article is titled JESUS MADE ME PUKE

Quote on necessity of muscular pastors:

One of the implicit promises of the church is that following its program will restore to you your vigor, confidence and assertiveness, effecting, among other things, a marked and obvious physical transformation from crippled lost soul to hearty vessel of God. That’s one of the reasons that it’s so important for the pastors to look healthy, lusty and lustrous — they’re appearing as the “after” photo in the ongoing advertisement for the church wellness cure.

But as far as I could see, in the early going, most of what we were doing was simple pop-psych self-examination using New Age-y diagnostic tools of the Deepak Chopra school: Identify your problems, face your oppressors, visualize your obstacles. Be your dream job. With a little rhetorical tweaking and much better food, this could easily have been Tony Robbins instructing a bunch of Upper East Side housewives to “find your wounds”

John/Michael: Speaking only from my own experience, it’s de facto segregation, not deliberate, and mostly – but not entirely – based on economic status. That is, private schools in the U.S. have to be financed entirely by the parents, and for whatever reason, more white parents do this than other skin colors. I think this holds true even outside my own direct experience, because there aren’t very many private schools that are predominantly attended by children of non-white skin colors.

Segregation in the government schools resulted in generally all-white schools and generally all-black schools, while private schools are almost entirely all-white, for whatever reason.

Speaking from even more direct experience, as someone who helped found a private school for home-schoolers, I can say that we wanted more non-white families in the school, but didn’t know how to actively recruit them. We didn’t know much how to actively recruit anyone, but the folks who found us mostly had white skin. Again, for whatever reasons, and I’m sure that there are many.

When I attended a church where a minority of the congregation had white skin, the private school was much more integrated, which I think reflects two things: the economic status of the congregation (basically middle-class), and that the church was able to easily spread word about the school to families with non-white skin because they were already there.

The story of how the church came to be multi-ethnic is a different and longer one.

According to Wendy Fonarow, professor of anthropology at UCLA and author of Empire Of Dirt: The Aesthetics And Rituals Of British Indie Music, rock ‘n’ roll was a sort of “grow your own heathenism” kit for missionally-frustrated 1950s evangelicals:

“There are interesting theories as to why rock’n’roll happened when it did. There’s evidence to suggest Christianity, which exists as a missionising religion, had run out of ‘exotic others’ to missionise after the fall of colonialism. Therefore it was in their interests to get adolescents to act like heathens, so they had a supply of unconverted people to convert. So what we did was produce a heathen in our own midst to act out all the same things we’d accused other societies of doing. And have a period of time where eventually they reject what they’re doing.”

Uh. Huh.

Gotta love that “There’s evidence to suggest…” (jn)

Wait a minute, Michael.  Some Christian schools give “scholarships” to black athletes that are really good.  I don’t see any segregation there!

Michael: for the benefit of this non-US observer, could you clarify what you mean? Do you mean de facto segregation – i.e. it just so happens that, entirely coincidentally (jn), a school ends up with a 99% white student population – or do you mean actual, formal policies which exclude black students?

In the UK, “faith schools” are a controversial issue because they are seen by some as reinforcing educational inequalities (i.e. only taking nice, bright, well-behaved middle-class children). That’s a different situation though, because these schools are state-funded (call the ACLU!) and the problem is not so much racism as the fact that they are generally really good schools, and hence they attract middle-class parents who are better at gaming the system than working-class parents.

It would be great if once- just once- an evangelical bragging on how great Christian schools are would acknowledge that they are also the prime purveyors of segregation in American culture. Just acknowledge it and say something that shows you have enough moral discernment to know there is more to a school being “Christian” than high test scores.

Parchment and Pen has a good post on complementarianism vs egalitarianism. The comments are about what you would expect, although most of the commenters avoid complete hysteria. Only a few mention swimming to deserted islands…really.

My views lean toward egalitarianism, my wife is a complimentarian, but practically we are complimentarian. 

Travis: If you can find an old notebook hard drive (or beg one from somebody), you can get an enclosure that will turn it into a USB drive for $30 or less.

Travis: Hrmmm, from what I’ve seen lately, $80-100 seems to be the current sweet spot for removable storage. I recently picked up an external 500GB Seagate drive from Fry’s for 99 smackers. I won’t link a picture, because it is too ugly, but it gets the job done.

Alright – I’m looking to buy an external hard drive for regular backup of my macbook, storage of music, videos, photos.  I have $55 to work with.  Somebody link me somewhere.

True. Some of us upgraded to wife-1.0.

WoW marriages don’t count.

Then something else: I’ve found that of late, my theological questioning has died down a lot. I’ve virtually stopped asking why? – now I go to church, accept forgiveness, partake of His body & blood, and pray and work through stuff daily, without tormenting myself about the big (theological) picture. I can’t say why this has happened – but there is little angst and introspection regarding theological matters. Not that I have the answers, or have found solutions. I’ve had plenty of other problems to deal with – but in the past, problems let me to question theology. It is not happening now so much anymore. Is that a good thing?

I know exactly what you mean. For all that I may engage in more theological discussion than is probably healthy, I really don’t have any major angst about theological issues any more. Basically, if it’s not in the Small Catechism then as far as I’m concerned it really doesn’t matter all that much.

If it is in the Small Catechism, though, then you can take it from me when you prise it out of my cold, dead hands. (no jn)

I’m still here – in between at least 2 big deadlines, I’ve been spending time getting seedlings going etc – here in Saskatchewan, you don’t put vegetable seed / seedlings in the ground until Victoria Day (last Monday before 24 May) or after. So I went out to get some grow lights to give my tomatoes / chard / squash / herbs / artichokes / peppers etc etc a kickstart. We still had snow this weekend  – which has all but dissapeared by this morning. But the experts say that we are in for a cool spring – but hey, they’ve been wrong before!

Then something else: I’ve found that of late, my theological questioning has died down a lot. I’ve virtually stopped asking why? – now I go to church, accept forgiveness, partake of His body & blood, and pray and work through stuff daily, without tormenting myself about the big (theological) picture. I can’t say why this has happened –  but there is little angst and introspection regarding theological matters. Not that I have the answers, or have found  solutions.  I’ve had plenty of other problems to deal with – but in the past, problems let me to question theology. It is not happening now so much anymore. Is that a good thing? 

“Yeah, everyone knows Linux users don’t have girlfriends.”

Kurt:  I am having a transcendent experience listening to that song.  On the other hand, I am also the only person I know who is a fan of Pat Boone’s metal album.

Firstly, Linux will never be “ready for the desktop” until its standard-bearers stop being as sexist and condescending as the whole premise for the linked article. “Ready for your girlfriend”? Good grief.

Yeah, everyone knows Linux users don’t have girlfriends.

John: How about the TNIV version, “your non-technically inclined significant other”? ;)

The new Ubuntu is great, but probably still not ready for your Mom, or your girlfriend.

Firstly, Linux will never be “ready for the desktop” until its standard-bearers stop being as sexist and condescending as the whole premise for the linked article. “Ready for your girlfriend”? Good grief.

Second, if we rephrase the article as, “Is Ubuntu ready for a non-technically inclined person of any gender, running the computer themselves with minimal expert assistance?”, then the answer is probably “No”. But guess what? Have you seen a “non-technically inclined person” try to sysadmin a Windows PC recently?

But as regards everyday usability for a NTIPOAG, with the actual system maintenance being carried out by a friendly neighbourhood geek, our Debian box is used on a daily basis by my wife (who is emphatically a “non-geek”) and on a weekly basis (or however often they can successfully pester us…) by our two older boys, aged 7 and 4.

I am watching the National Press Club Q and A with Rev Wright and now am beginning to just feel sorry for Obama’s association with him. How much is the Clinton campaign paying this clown to keep this stuff up?

The Nordstrom clan didn’t make it to church this past Sunday, so I won’t have anything theological to contribute this week at all.

The new Ubuntu is great, but probably still not ready for your Mom, or your girlfriend.

The most annoying song ever? I’m currently listening. It is…special. The operatic rap sections actually get my foot tapping. (HT: Challies).

A little Rob Dingdong action. I’m—too sexy for my church—too sexy for my church.

A new concept in RSS feeds.

Anyone have a banner quote?

Charlie Brooker on the rolling news coverage of the presidential race: “it’s hard not to conclude that 24-hour rolling news is the worst thing to befall humankind since the Manhattan Project.”

Sunday night musings…

Sundays are my days for personal reflection, contemplation, and prayer.  I just finished reading Michael’s ‘Hitting a Wall’ over at IM, and if you haven’t read it yet, you’re missing out.  There is a breaking point in each one of us that has to be crossed over for us to grow.  What do we do when God falls short of our expectations?  I’ve known some people that blame themselves…’If only I had enough faith’ or ‘if only I had done insert formula here’.  I was one of these folks for years; trying to find the right combination of faith, knowledge, and low expectations that would insulate me from a poisonous disappointment with God.  However, there was a danger in the way I kept paring down my expectations from God.  There was nothing to replace the security that God had ‘promised’ me…abundant life, right?

As stopped relying on Him to fix my problems, keep my family safe, and make all my infertile friends have babies, I had a frightening realization: I had always relied on God to produce results, now I was going to have to trust not in His results, but in the process of Him working in me.  That’s harder, much harder.  Instead of my friends becoming fertile, I was going to have to learn to be a comforting friend.  Instead of my family having a ‘hedge of protection’ around them, I was going to have to grapple with death and violence.  I was going to have to learn to let Him be strong in my weakness…argh.

I still pray for protection, I still pray for my friends to have more babies than their house can hold, and I still pray for my little ones when they get sick.  More to the point, I pray for God to be with me in all things…in sickness and health, in strength and weakness, in joy and sorrow…all things, amen.

Just finished rereading Mere Christianity. I thought that I might jot down some bits that related to some of our recent discussions.

On Christianity and cultural institutions:

When it [Christianity] tells you to feed the hungry it does not give you lessons in cookery. When it tells you to read the Scriptures it does not give you lessons in Hebrew or Greek…It was never intended to replace or supersede the ordinary human arts and sciences: it is rather a director which will set them all to the right jobs, and a source of energy which will give them all new life.

Most of us are not really approaching the subject in order to find out what Christianity says: we are approaching it in the hope of finding support from Christianity for the views of our own party. We are looking for an ally where we are offered a Master…

The bad psychological material is not a sin but a disease. It does not need to be repented of, but to be cured….Human beings judge one another by their external actions. God judges them by their moral choices. When a man who has been perverted from his youth and taught that cruelty is the right thing does some tiny little kindness…he may, in God’s eyes, be doing more than you and I would do if we gave up life itself for a friend…That is why Christians are told not to judge

Matthew, I’m learning as I go, so unfortunately I have no helpful advice here.  I’ve been told by folks to just go to a local lawn and garden place and ask what I should do…but when I actually get a few minutes to do work, I tend to just start working.  My weeds have been mostly ground ivy – that broad-leafed stuff that winds its way across the whole lawn in one gigantic root system.  I’ve been pulling that up, loosening up the dirt with a metal rake, and pulling more roots.

As far as rocks go…I remember working on a new garden with my dad years ago, and I recall roto-tilling, using the metal rake to pull out the rocks, and then tilling again.  Might be a nearby place where you can rent a tiller for a few hours.

Travis, we just bought a brand new house and while the front is sodded (with a ton of weeds, grrrr) the back is nothing but weeds and rocks. I’m getting ready to rid us of the weeds and seed the back with bermuda. What’s the easiest way to get rid of weeds? Also, if you have experience, what’s the best way to get rocks out of a yard. We have a ton.

Is everyone Spring planting already? Is that why no one’s in the bar?

I’ve been working on re-seeding the entire backyard, which is overrun with weeds. I got about half of it done with a metal rake before learning that a friend of mine just down the road as a rototiller. I should be able to get things done much quicker and more effectively from here on out.

The root systems of these weeds are insane.

Looks like tomorrow will see some of the “controversial legislation” show up at the General Conference of the United Methodist Church. I’ll do my best to update this tomorrow if there are any interested. Unfortunately I’ll be doing some grunt work for my District Supernintendo in the morning so I won’t get to do anything web related until the afternoon or evening.

Ben Witherington III writes about The Opposite of Predestination.

I’ve been rearranging a portion of my sabbatical (which begins in 3+ weeks.) Week of June 22-25 I’m going to be in Louisville taking in 4 days of the Louisville Bats. Then June 27-29 Noel, Ryan and I are going to Cleveland to see the Indians and the Reds. Then back to Columbus for a Clippers game. Whoot!

Adam:

No matter how many times I see it, a guy sticking his tongue into a fan is high comedy… :)

This is absolute proof that a biblical flood occurred…nevermind the dates…

or

This is absolute proof that scientific dating methods are flawed because we know the flood happened less than 20K years ago.

Choose your preferred spin. (jn)

I just learned that The Shack has sold 750,000 copies. I move someone sponsor “Together at The Shack.”

And looks like the human race had a close call.

New from Rock TV: The Dealbreaker List

Michael, I would like to venture that Josh’s sloppy “Either the Baptist version of sola scriptura is right, or the pope is the infallible Vicar of Christ, and truth is progressively revealed through him” thinking is a product of the sloppy thinking that permeates so much Christianity.  I saw a similar rationale in a Logia article by a former ELCA seminary prof turned RC.  One could rephrase the theme of the article, “Luther’s formulation of Law and Gospel is detrimental to sanctification, therefore the pope has the power to grant indulgences out of the treasury of the merit of Christ and the saints.”  Needless to say, I didn’t follow the logic.  I think you’re right—conversions to Catholicism generally have something much deeper going on than finding out that all the logical holes of one’s tradition are plugged if one jumps on the Newman hype train.

Tal Prince: Don’t Race Down Redemption Road. Great stuff.

Josh MacManaway tells us how a Southern Baptist seminary student becomes Roman Catholic.

Someone needs to remind Josh that it’s a non-issue that tradition exists. What you have in the RCC is infallible tradition, over scripture, and dogma asserted by an infallible pope. That’s a long way from a few names and incidents mentioned from extra-biblical sources.

With all due respect, this oft repeated “path to Rome” always looks like the chapter outline by some convert apologist, and NEVER says a word about the personal life of the person swimming the Tiber. It’s just “look at these better arguments.” Yeah right. That’s it. (jn++)

How about “I need to say my church is THE TRUE (sound effects) CHURCH and yours isn’t?”

Ehrman vs. Wright on the Problem of Evil.

Speaking of Wright, Jared got to hear him in Nashville.

The God Journey Podcast

Load up the pantry. And it’s not temporary.

Well, if its only a two person contest, I would have to say McCain…err, you were referring to McCain and Obama weren’t you?

Nathan Finn nails it regarding the future of the SBC.

Sorry to interrupt the conversation. I enjoyed Peg of my heart’s column this week. She usually has her finger on the pulse.

But check out this video. BW3 actually linked to it, so you know it’s phat.

Aaron: Not quite answering your question, but I was interested to read the following in Peggy Noonan’s latest column:

In Lubbock, Texas – Lubbock Comma Texas, the heart of Texas conservatism – they dislike President Bush. He has lost them. I was there and saw it. Confusion has been followed by frustration has turned into resentment, and this is huge. Everyone knows the president’s poll numbers are at historic lows, but if he is over in Lubbock, there is no place in this country that likes him. I made a speech and moved around and I was tough on him and no one – not one – defended or disagreed. I did the same in North Carolina recently, and again no defenders. I did the same in Fresno, Calif., and no defenders, not one. [...] This will have impact down the road.

Closer to answer: I suppose part of it is a choice between poetry and prose...

We have had 7 years of a President that fumbles over his words and makes some up at times. My question for the Tavern is, politics aside, who do you want to hear four the next for years when it comes to public speaking? The one I want to support does a pretty good job speaking. One of them when I listen to speak gives me the same reaction I have when I hear nails scratched on a chalk board and the one that really says the least when speaking is the one I would prefer to listen to. I wonder how much of a factor this is in this election. I would like to see a poll.

From the wiki article linked by Mark:

the SID … is partly credited for initiating the demoscene.

Help me out here. Did the Demoscene come before or after the Pleistocene? (jn)

Edit: And anyway, who needs SID when you have… BEEP? A curse on decadent polyphony! (jn)

No to open the door to more unabated geekery, but…

Do any of you listen to Slay Radio?  Its an internet radio station devoted to music produced by the SID family of chips.  If you ever had an unhealthy devotion to a computer, this radio station is probably for you.  Word to the wise… When rocking out to this music in your office, and someone asks you what your listening to, lie…lie like a dog…  Otherwise, people who don’t know what the ‘Last V8’ was will mock you.  

“ahhh, another visitor.  Stay awhile, staayyy forevah”

The religion described in that Ark article is obviously what Jesus really was talking about when he taught his disciples. I’m converting tomorrow.

So this may be the longest I have been absent from this great place.  In case anyone noticed (or cares), I thought I would explain myself (by the way, that “anyone noticed (or cares)” part was not self-pity at all—I just don’t like to be presumptuous.  I am cool with the fact that some people might be like, “Who is this guy?  Where’s that next post on baptismal regeneration?” or whatever (I don’t know what the latest conversations are about, so I just, you know, pulled one out as an example)).

Here is the Rigney medical dossier as of late:

Psoriatic arthritis continuing to rage and ravage, although the chemotherapy I started recently is working on making the pain retreat enough into the background to at least not cry and limp in the mornings and have to take one stair at a time.

The umbillical hernia surgery I underwent in March that was supposed to be 3 stitches and out in an hour turned into 14 incisions, 27 staples, and an overnight stay, complete with catheter and white hot hell every time I tried to sit up or stand or sit for about a week.

Sound like an old man, right?  Who knew 36 held such surprises.

But I am happy.  I have a great family and friends, and a great job.  So am I asking for prayer?  Sure.  But just for general things and maybe that I’ll stumble on a bag of twenties or something, because I actually consider myself a pretty daggone lucky guy.

I’ll try to pop in here more.  Thanks, Michael, for this place, and for not throwing me out in my absenteeism.

Ten ways to reclaim your lunch break.

Smithsonian explores the “Ark is in Aksum, Ethiopia” claim.

Been reading some CS Lewis this morning.  On speaking of why Jesus had to become a human being…

...unfortunately we now need God’s help in order to do something which God, in His own nature, never does at all – to surrender, to suffer, to submit, to die.  Nothing in God’s nature corresponds to this process at all…but we cannot share God’s dying unless God dies; and He cannot die except by being a man.

Oh, this brings back memories: as a big-bucks remake of Blake’s 7 is announced, the Guardian runs a gallery of photos from the original series.

Hopefully the remake will follow the path of the original, and by series two it’ll still be called Blake’s 7, but there won’t be seven of them and none of them will be called Blake. (jn)

Mark N: I like the way you think. I still haven’t seen it!

Trevin Wax interviews N.T. Wright.  He explains his view on Hell in this.

John- The global food crisis is bad. It kinda illustrates my point about the media though. I have seen many reports on something that is caused by the oil prices and farmers deciding to use their crops for fuel resources instead of another crisis that makes people question global warming. The thing is I am for us doing more for the environment but we need to be smart about what we do. Farmers growing corn for ethanol is not viable but hey the first caucus in this country is in Iowa. As for Senegal on your list of countries it is hard for me to believe they import most of their food. I lived there for for months and the staple diet of Senegal is millet along with fish. Rice is grown in the south part of the country in the Cassamance region (where it is indigenous by the way) and since the are a coastal country fish are easy to come by. They might be upset about oil costs but don’t think most villages are having any kind of crisis though I could be wrong.

But the 1977 pictures from the JC penny catalog are mahvelous. My coolest going off to college outfit was a jumpsuit just like the white one. NOT the cell block D orange one. And my brother wore the wing collar shirts and belts.

Michael: oops, my bad. I googled “The Dividing Line” and the #1 hit was, “The home for Live Broadcasts of Progressive Rock music over the internet”. :-)

You’ve mentioned prog rock with approval once or twice on your podcast so I didn’t think to perform a quick sanity check and scroll down to see what else might appear in the results. That said, I’m more surprised you’re recommending JW’s podcast than I was that you were recommending prog rock… (jn)

John H: I didn’t recommend a prog rock podcast. Which one are you talking about?

Kletos, Michael: thanks for the podcast suggestions. Am checking them out now (though I decided to skip the prog rock podcast – sorry, Michael… (sw))

I also like a podcast from Australian public radio called The Philosopher’s Zone.

It would go against my fanatically liberal worldview (jn) to resort to national stereotyping, so I won’t ask if the podcast comes from the philosophy department at the University of Walamaloo...

Aaron: I haven’t heard much about the situation in Asia myself, but last week’s New Statesman had a summary (At the end of the linked article) of the food riots that have affected countries from Mexico through Africa to Asia this year. Full list after the fold.

The same article contained this telling (and depressing) factoid:

Next year, the use of US corn for ethanol is forecast to rise to 114 million tonnes – nearly a third of the whole projected US crop. American cars now burn enough corn to cover all the import needs of the 82 nations classed by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) as “low-income food-deficit countries”.

Typing “food riots” into Google News throws up a lot of stories, too.

I read a story about how Asia is having the harshest winter in a hundred years and relief organizations have been dispatched to help rural villages and locations. Is our national press so biased they can not report on such a catastrophe. Has anyone else seen or heard anything about what the winter caused in parts of Asia?

Well, if you’re using your beer correctly, you don’t use it and gas at the same time, right?

Waitasecond! I just came up with a great new wasteful government program set up ostensibly to serve energy policy but in reality serving my own financial purposes idea!  Free beer means less driving, more carpooling and/or crawling!  How could we not save gas?  Better still, we end our independence on unreliable middle eastern countries without breweries.  I’ll call it the REDWHITEANDBLUE Act.  All I have to do now is come up with what that acronym stands for.  (I’m pretty sure it has something to do with children.)

Sams, Costco limiting rice sales

The scarcity of some cereal grains and rice has been pinching food manufacturers for some time now.  With corn suddenly profitable, and displacing other crops, malt and hops have been ever harder to come by.  Tim Herzog, the owner of Flying Bison brewery, told me the other day that if they hadn’t contracted their hops a year previous, they would have no raw materials to make their beer.   

The situation is so dire for many craft beer makers that Samuel Adams has opened up some of their strategic hop reserve (that’s not a typo) for public sale. 

All this to say:  Historically, didn’t people finally reach the breaking point and riot when it was whiskey, beer, or tea that was getting trounced by market forces/taxes?

Hmm….Gas or Beer….gas or beer? 

I’m in Charelston WV today.  Hopefully, I’ll get to a West Virginia Power game tonight (single A ball club for the Brewers).  The Appalachians are beautiful in their full springtime blush. 

Baseball, beer, and a mountain vista…Good times…

Mark: I’ve seen it. The porn comparison is dead on.

Mark, Mel’s Passion is fine if your purpose is to watch a reenactment of the stations of the cross. But I agree with you that it’s not the best evangelistic tool. For all practical purposes, it leaves out the very reason for the passion being a good thing – the resurrection. And for those who’ve seen it, I don’t think a few seconds of closeup on a formerly nail pierced hand before the person walks away counts as portraying the resurrection.

As for the porn comment, you’re not too far off base. Unless you’re one of us who happen to have seen enough violence in film to not be so deeply affected by it (may God have mercy on us), the movie is hard to distinguish from what many people call “torture porn” movies. Were it not for the redemptive content, Passion would be hard to distinguish from Saw.

I was with a ‘small group’ from my church the other day, and put my foot in my mouth.  Someone brought up the movie ‘Passion of the Christ’ in the context of using it for evangelistic purposes.  I said that I prefer we not use it.  They asked why and I said that it was akin to porn.  It just popped out.  I could have chosen some better words, but some poeple really have an attachement to this thing.  You’d figure, by now, that the fervor it stirred up for itself would have died away.  Then they asked me the question: ‘Have you seen it?’.  I had to say no, I hadn’t, which apparently make me the last evangelical on earth not to have seen this movie….sigh.  They replied that I was in no place to judge the show, since I hadn’t seen it.  Point conceded.  However, I can safely say that I don’t need to watch any kind of porn (violent, erotic, food channel) to know whats in it (and that I shouldn’t be viewing it).  So while I can’t critique the movie from a content standpoint, I can draw some conclusions from a qualitative standpoint (given the information I’ve read, Gibson’s body of work, ect…).

In Modern Art and the Death of  a Culture, Roomaker talks about Venus being dead and buried.  What evolved after that were paintings of ‘just women’.  The transcendant had been removed in favor of realism and empirical ‘truth’.  Well, if Venus is dead and buried, then the Pieta is as well, with the Passion of the Christ being what we get in exchange.    I may yet see this movie, but I don’t want to exchange the Messiah for a bloody Palestinian, if you take my meaning. 

Mark I’m in, especially if someone will subsidize my purchase of Toshiba’s micro nuclear reactor.

Aaron I wonder if they fire up the Large Hadron Collider this year and it creates a black hole that destroys the earth, if Bush will somehow be implicated.

John do you listen to NPR’s Science Friday and the Scientific American podcast? Both are pretty good – the Science Friday segments are of various lengths. As a bonus, they would not challenge your fanatically liberal world view a bit (good natured jn.) I also like a podcast from Australian public radio called The Philosopher’s Zone. It delves into science on occasion, but covers a broad range of topics. Occasionally they will host talks from the History of Philosophy in Australasia project, which is considerably less interesting unless you care about philosophical currents in Australian universities.

Studio 360
Speaking of Faith
Theology Unplugged
Frederica Here and Now
The Dividing Line