Story, Journalism, and Activism: KONY2012 (NOTE: The clip from the KONY2012 video here has no sound.)

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[via Up with Chris Hayes]

Rebuilding

[via FutureShorts]



[YouTube link; Vimeo link]

For more about it: The Madman and the Cathedral

Capturing Many Moments, Seize The Day



(inspired by David Eagleman's book, Sum)

Accentuating the Real?

Whose responsibility is it to censor happiness?

Is it the voice or the ear? Or should the positive be censored at all?

{continue...}

[via Desperate for changing, starving for truth]

The Boob Tube: The problematic new ad from Rethink Breast Cancer

[via ABOUT-FACE-blog]

The Geometry of Love, If You Imagine...

And so there I was, awkwardly trying to convey why I find this reassuring, why I find "We can't know" so much more pregnant with hope than "We don't know," when I suddenly realized that I hadn't yet named the reason or the source for that hopefulness, and that trying to do so might sound like nothing more than one more hollow, funeral-week platitude.

Flatland is a fine little parable as far as it goes, an invaluable illustration of geometry and physics and of finite creatures' inability to grasp the infinities that surround them, but it has little to say about love. And while there is much that we do not and cannot know, if you want to know what I think or guess or believe or hope, it is this: The universe is governed by love.

"Love?" the tesseract says. "That's nonsense. There's no such thing as love, only ..." {full post}

[via slacktivist]

Lots To See

[via Indexed]

Farrah, Michael, and the Day the 70's Died

[via Ponderings on a Faith Journey]

A Brief History of Modern Fantasy Literature, p. I

A Brief History of Modern Fantasy Literature, p. II

[via Levellers]

Mere Mortals

Our kings and queens have changed quite a bit over the years. We’ve shifted from having political rulers as our kings, to crowning our artists to be our kings and queens. Which seems to be the way people go, isn’t it? I mean a while ago I read a quote that said “Artists are the prophets to this generation.” Think U2 and Sir Paul, and even individuals like Madonna. They speak to these generations of the needs of life be it in me or in Africa. Perhaps the next step is that artists are the Kings and Queens to this generation. I mean it’s happened before right?

Prophets are never enough, besides they get noisy and rub the wrong way. What we want is a king, to tell us what to think, what to do, how to dress, how to behave. I think in more ways than we care to admit, Michael Jackson was a king.

It helps us to be reminded that these kings are mere mortals.
And so we recognize that indeed, the king is dead.

[via randallfriesen.com]

In Defense of Eye Candy

[HT: frenetic peace]

Benign and Objective Translations?

Before I go on, there's a bit to say.

First, Hitler translates Hebrews. His is an entirely neutral and benign and objective translation too. His supreme German is dynamically equivalent to the original Greek. There's not a hint of a whiff of the horrors of holocaust in it. No propaganda. No agenda. No bias. No racism. No rhetoric. No sexism.

No? You don't believe that? {continue...}

[via Aristotle's Feminist Subject]

Matrix Revisited

[via xkcd.com]

In Religious Dress

The Bible is a rich field of story and image, the most fertile bed of the imagination of the West. I have no problem with allegories and analogies drawn from Biblical models. But it seems to me a perverse misreading of the Bible to treat its stories as if they were themselves allegories of politics in religious dress.

I was once in a group of earnest young people wrestling with how to understand the mystical experience of God. One young man, not really in sympathy with the project, said it would be easy to find out: just go into the desert and fast for forty days. If you had a mystical experience, then it was real. This was such a perversely backwards way of understanding mysticism that we were left speechless. If you go into the desert and fast, but are not earnestly seeking God, you are not recreating the absolutely vital core of the desert mystics' experience. {full post}

[via Gruntled Center]

Stereotypes and Status

As many of you know, Mark Driscoll, pastor of the Mars Hill Church in Seattle, has been causing quite a stir among Christian writers, thinkers, bloggers, and church leaders. I thought I'd wade into these waters as a Christian research psychologist and offer up some thoughts on Mark Driscoll.

The aspect of Driscoll's ministry that I'd like to focus on is Driscoll's thesis regarding the place of masculinity within Christianity. This "Macho Man" emphasis is the most provocative and controversial aspect of Driscoll's ministry....

When you listen to Driscoll much of what he is talking about has more to do with traditional gender role interests than agenic personality. Changing the oil in my car, shooting guns, and loving NASCAR are, stereotypically, male gender role interests. And Driscoll has a point that none of this is intrinsically unChristian. The trouble comes when issues of gender role interest get confused with issues of agenic psychology. Loving Monster Truck rallies is a separate issue from psychological needs for power, control, and dominance.

Here's my point. People tend to confuse gender role interest and agenic personality motives. If "Joe Six Pack" shows up at church and gets the vibe that he "can't be a man" what, exactly, does this mean? That to be a Christian you can't drink beer or go to Ultimate Fighter matches? It seems to me that the feminine/child metaphors of Christianity are pushing back against agenic strivings rather then stereotypical gender interests. But this is not at all clear to many male believers. The two issues--gender role interests and agenic motives--are often conflated. This leads to a great deal of confusion about if "real guys" have a place at church....

A lot of the reaction to Driscoll isn't even about gender. We are actually talking about the little discussed fissure running through many churches: Education.

I see this everyday in my own church. The educated teach, preach, and have the public leadership roles. The uneducated are marginalized. Worse, if you are an uneducated male, you are force-fed those feminine metaphors. Educated males, being chickified, don't mind or even notice the feminine metaphors. But Joe Six Pack notices the metaphors. All this creates a disjoint in the church. Two groups of males who find each other alien and weird. So when Joe Six Pack wants to start a Wild at Heart study the chickified church leader just blinks uncomprehendingly. Or, if you are me, turns back to his knitting...

Let me offer up this little test for your reflection and experimentation:

If you hear a man trash Wild at Heart or Promise Keepers that person very often has a graduate degree. {full post}

[via Experimental Theology, HT: Notes From Off-Center]

Making Preparations

William P. Young's The Shack is one of those Christian buzz books right now, and in spite of the overblown comparisons by Eugene Peterson (it will not have the same effect on culture as Pilgrim's Progress? did for Bunyan's culture), I decided to read it in the interests of knowing what it is about and how to handle it. I was pleasantly surprised by the book, which presents a unique allegorical way of thinking about God. I would not recommend it as a theological text, but it is an interesting read for people who have traditionally put God in a box. It made me think about some of the ways in which I relate to God, and it is the kind of text to which I expect to return in the future, as I can see that it might have emotional or spiritual significance in various life contexts. But The Shack did make me think about the nature of allegory.
Allegorical texts always have a certain risk to them: will they will be appropriately subtle and crafted; or will they be limited by cultural expectations and concerns? There is always the possibility of this dichotomy in using allegory: Tolkien deliberately avoided using allegory because he wanted to infuse his texts with deeper significance, and he thought that allegory removed that possibility; Lewis used allegory because he thought it allowed him to reach those deeper truths. Some allegories have really spoken to me: {continue...}

[via Life of Turner]

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]

Curiosity, Determination, Optimism

Why get worked up over a machine that was slowly shutting down?

It wasn’t the machine itself that we loved: the metals, the mechanisms, the scientific equipment. It was the human spirit that had sent it there, so many miles from our home, not for profit or war or necessity, but simply because there was a chance to discover something we’d never known before. So many people had dreamed, had planned, had worked to put that bit of metal on that frozen surface, and the light of the human spirit shone as bright as any star. The freezing chill of Martian winter may have caused the machine to shut down, but the spirit it embodies is still there, as strong as ever, burning bright with curiosity, determination, and optimism. {full post}

[via Deluded Wine]

How Barack Obama Won

[via jordoncooper.com]

Something Big

[via Indexed]