Thursday, February 26, 2009

You Might Not Be Repentant If...

You might not be repentant if...

You gave up your virginity for Lent....

You might not be repentant if...

You think "fasting" means going over the speed limit. {full post}
[via J-TWO-O]

Sunday, February 22, 2009

Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Unspoken Obligation

I mean as married people, people that have been blessed with the gift of marriage, “complete people” if you will as evidenced by that incredibly accurate line in the move Jerry Maguire, we kind of have an unspoken obligation to get our single friends married off as fast as possible. (I prefer to get my single friends married "up" instead of "married off" because then they can say things like "I out kicked my coverage" and "I married way over my head" or the lazier but still accurate, "my wife is way hotter than me.")

But you've got to be subtle about these sorts of things....

Ultimately, the single friends you're trying to force, no strike that, encourage into marriage might remind you that in Christ, their lives are complete. If that happens, just pretend you hear you're wife calling you, "What's that? My wife needs me? My awesome, always happy, super hott with two t’s wife needs me?" And then slowly back away.

We'll get that single person next time. Oh we'll get them indeed. {full post}
[via Stuff Christians Like]

Sunday, February 15, 2009

Because There Is A Saint in Valentine's

How have we gone from a beheaded priest to a giddy worldwide day of romantic love? In a word: the widespread conviction that love is a dizzying sacrifice.

If we ponder the primary Valentine’s Day symbol, a human heart pierced by an arrow, then the connection may be easier to see. Jesus himself had famously warned that if you wish to find your life you’ll need to lose it first. Many a Romantic artist has said the same: the self must clear out for the spirit of creativity to enter. Loss of self is perceived as fulfillment of self.

Now enter the lover in love, long venerated by poets and rhapsodes of all stripes, starting with the lyrical Lesbian, Sappho herself. The lover who tries to leave reason in control, she warns, does not follow her god to the end. It is the very chaos of love, the swirl of love, that may link our modern Romantic musings to the Greeks…mediated to us, ironically enough, by the martyr-rolls of the early churches. {full post}
[via Religion Dispatches]

Saturday, February 14, 2009

Suffer Well by Depeche Mode

Where were you when I fell from grace
Frozen heart, an empty space
Something's changing, it's in your eyes
Please don't speak, you'll only lie
I found treasure not where I thought
Peace of mind can't be bought
Still I believe

I just hang on
Suffer well
Sometimes it's hard
It's hard to tell

An angel led me when I was blind
I said take me back, I've changed my mind
Now I believe
From the blackest room, I was torn
You called my name, our love was born
So I believe

I just hang on
Suffer well
Sometimes it's hard
It's hard to tell

I just hang on
Suffer well
Sometimes it's hard
So hard to tell

Friday, February 13, 2009

Turning Our Love Inward

It is we, in perverse irony, who are never fully actualized in a celebrity culture.

Soldiers and Marines speak of entering combat as if they are entering a movie, although if they try to engage in movie-style heroics they often are killed. The difference between the celebrity-inspired heroics and the reality of war, which takes less than a minute in a firefight to grasp, is jolting. Wounded Marines booed and hissed John Wayne when he visited them in a hospital in World War II. They had uncovered the manipulation and self-delusion of celebrity culture. They understood that mass culture is a form of social control, a way to influence behavior that is self-destructive....

The fantasy of celebrity culture is not designed simply to entertain. It is designed to keep us from fighting back, even, apparently, in death. {full article}
[via Alternet, HT: Mainstream Baptist]

Complexity of Valentine's Day

With all the attention given today to the bicentennial birthdays of Darwin and Lincoln, it's easy to forget that this is also Valentine's Weekend. In today's edition of Sightings Wendy Doniger of the University of Chicago writes about the complexities of Valentines Day in India -- and it's effect on women. Of course, western expressions of sexuality and religion have, over the years, effected views there. So, take a read: {continue...}
[via Ponderings on a Faith Journey]

Enriching the Future...

The reception of Darwin’s ideas has been mixed. On the one hand, almost the entire scientific world accepts the neo-Darwinian synthesis of evolutionary theory. Almost no field of modern science would be able to function in quite the same way without evolutionary thought. On the other, Darwin’s popularity among non-scientists, especially people of faith, has been mixed from the beginning. He had his defenders among Christian theologians from the outset, but also his critics. In earlier generations, most of those theological critics concentrated on the challenge of Darwinian thought to teleological and cosmological arguments for God’s existence, for the goodness of Creation, the uniqueness of humanity and of purpose to human existence. In recent decades, however, these larger questions have been downplayed in favor of biblical literalism and of pseudo-scientific attempts to justify that literalism via such oxymoronic schemes as “creation science,” and “intelligent design theory.”....

Ironically, it was Abraham Lincoln who, even in the midst of our nation’s greatest struggle for survival (both physical and as a nation of freedom and equality for ALL), created our National Academy of Sciences. He sought not only to preserve the Union physically, but to enrich its future through promotion of scientific inquiry. Origin of Species was only published in 1859 and The Descent of Man was not published until 1871, so it is unclear if Lincoln had ever heard of any of Darwin’s researches or theories. (Lincoln was self-taught, but widely read. He won his law license and admission to the Illinois Bar completely through self-study.) Yet, I think Lincoln would be disappointed that the United States today, though in many ways far more advanced than in Lincoln’s day, would take knowledge and scientific inquiry so lightly that only 39% of the public is completely convinced of biological evolution via natural selection.

Many Americans are reading more about Lincoln this year in honor of his bicentennial. It’s a good idea. But take some time out to read Darwin, too. {full post}
[via Levellers]

Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Big Yellow Taxi, Bruckner's Symphonies and Scholarly Confusion Between Orality and Quantum Mechanics
[via Exploring Our Matrix]

Some routine is just a continuous loop of play.

Proverbs 12:9
Better to be a nobody and yet have a servant,
than pretend to be somebody and have no food.{continue...}
[via 97secondswithgod]

Tuesday, February 03, 2009

Being sacrificial and being stolen is all about supply and demand.