A Few Lessons from THE WATCHMEN

[via Levellers]

Wearing Many Masks

If you head to a Halloween party tonight in a devil's mask and a flowing red cape, you'll embody an array of ideas that might seem mutually exclusive: the allure of a Devil's Food Cake and the fear of the demon within, the cosmic enemy in a Jack Chick comic and a camp figure on South Park. Over the last two millennia, Satan has worn many masks. In the pluralistic postmodern era, he wears them all. {continue...}

[via reasononline]

Tangled History

Economy in a freefall. Political rhetoric. An apathetic electorate dismayed by the slide of their country into irrelevence. Theological liberalism. Doctrinal indifference.

America, 2008? {continue...}

[via blog.worship.com, HT: The Daily Scroll]

Not A Thing

It struck me recently that a lot of people think they know what’s wrong with this world, and it also struck me that they’re all wrong.

Seriously — almost every political and religious group, every opinionated person, every publication with an opinion, has said at one time or another what they think is wrong with this world.

Conservatives think that we’ve become a welfare state (giving too many handouts to the poor), while many liberals think we’ve allowed too much corporate welfare (and I tend to agree with this more — we give billions to corporations and much less to the poor and sick). Others think that abortion is the problem, others think it’s declining morals, others think it’s infidels, and others say it’s infidelity. Other things that are wrong with this world, depending on the group: the media, young people, environmentalists, McDonald’s, criminals, gays, black people, white people, foreigners overrunning our country, bigots, radicals, the Establishment, poor people, corporations, lazy people, evil people, Fox News, the Internet … the list could go on and on, obviously.

So what’s really wrong with the world, in my opinion?

Not a thing. {continue...}

[via Zen Habits, HT: Swinging from the Vine]

Painful, Humiliating Work

Imagine you are a filmmaker, an auteur who has just released a short film to the waiting public. Every image, every word was painstakingly chosen to convey a single message. This single-mindedness of theme is reflected in the tiniest details -- down to the style and coloring of every letter that appears onscreen. You edit and re-edit until every second, every frame reinforces this single theme. Your finished product is seamless, relentless, forceful and uncompromising.

Now imagine that after all that work, all that laborious craftsmanship, you find yourself forced to go before the public in order to deny that this single, unmistakable theme was the intent of your film. In interview after interview you are forced to lie again and again. "No," you say, "that's not what the film intended to convey, not at all."

Those interviews would be painful, humiliating work. Some part of you -- the craftsman, the artist -- might be secretly proud that your intended message had gotten through as clearly as you had hoped. That small part of you might feel rewarded and gratified to see your skills recognized. Yes! you'd be thinking, they got it. But at the same time, you'd be forced to deny that this was really the message of your film. You'd be forced to try to convince these astute viewers that you were, in fact, an ineffective and talentless filmmaker who had failed, miserably, to convey the "true message" of your film. It doesn't mean what it seems to mean, you would have to say. It means something else.

The scenario above is not hypothetical. It's happening now, in the real world, to real filmmakers. {continue...}

[via slactivist, also: Unsubtle]

and there's apparently an Election Shocker! via The Nation, HT: The Rambling Prophet 2

Self-Interest and Sacrifice in The Dark Knight

[via C. Orthodoxy]

‘Dark Knight’ of our souls

[via ThinkChristian.NET]

The New Atheism as Inadequate Theodicy

[via TheOtherJournal.com, HT: Rumblings]

Learning to Love

Standing Against Sexual Slavery

[via Radical Womanhood]

THE UGLY IS COMING OUT

[via ...]

Won't Someone Think of the Vampires?

"When the living dead outnumber the living, even the Messiah needs a little help!"{watch...}

Love as a Problem

Evil is rightly considered a ‘problem’ by any thinking person who observes the many ways in which it thwarts our expectations and mocks our aspirations. But we rarely think about love (or pleasure or beauty) as a ‘problem’ worthy of sustained reflection.

Of course love does not present itself as an immediate problem because we don’t experience it as something negative. But I think that the fact that we all experience and long for it is a remarkable feature of human experience, one that cries out for explanation because it could surely have been otherwise.

[via Just Wondering]

Truly Difficult

It is truly difficult for me to say who has done me more good
and who has done me more evil in the world: friends or enemies. {the rest: [HTML], [PDF]}

The Problem With Pain is That There is Pain (The Koan of Faith and Suffering)

[via Sandalstraps' Sanctuary]

Deflecting Attention Away

I tuned in to watch the Republican presidential candidates debate last night, because I'd seen a disturbing report about Mitt Romney.

Bill Keller, a St. Petersburg, Fla., evangelist declared on his website, "If you vote for Mitt Romney you are voting for Satan." If Romney, a Mormon, becomes president, he said, it would "lead millions of souls to the eternal flames of hell."

Keller bills himself as the "Dr. Phil of Prayer" and "the next big thing in mass media religion." Howard Stern calls the guy up to have him on his radio show. Keller's ministry brings in more than $2 million annually. Now his TV show is on the i Network (formerly PAX).

So I tuned in, just in case Keller knew something no one else did. But I didn't see anything evil about Mitt Romney--at least not any more evil than the rest of the politicos.

That's when I decided to find out some more about Keller himself. Could this man be the Antichrist? {continue}

[via The Wittenburg Blog]

A Fragile Bond

Mama tried

[via GetReligion]

More of the Same

First, we must acknowledge that there is nothing wildly unusual about the Virginia Tech massacre. It’s horrible, of course. But people have been doing horrible, deadly things to other people for quite a long time. And they are doing them now, on a greater scale than this, in Sudan, Eritrea, Nigeria, Afghanistan, Iraq, and every other badly troubled spot on the globe.

So to the question, “How could this have happened?” one can respond that it is always happening, and has been happening for millennia. This is what some of us do to each other when we become deeply angry, deeply sad, deeply alienated, and deeply wicked.

Notice that I used that word “deeply.” I did it to show that such people are simply at a further position down the same spectrum of evil upon which I myself am located. I mentally and verbally write off people all the time—while I drive, while I’m reading or watching something I hate, while I’m in a particularly intense argument, or while I’m being threatened. I don’t think I’m especially prone to violence and neither are you. But haven’t each of us thought that, if we could just get away with it, we might just want to murder him or her?

....A gun, thirdly, provides an easy way out. The gunman, having spent his anger, can turn the gun on himself and blow his brains out in an instant.

This is an important consideration. Anyone considering going on a rampage in the past faced the question of what to do once the killing was done. Escape, sure: but one would be on the run, perhaps forever. And if you were caught, society would exact a terrible price.

Suicide was the alternative. But every previous means of quick suicide meant suffering. Falling on your sword meant excruciating pain; hanging yourself ineptly resulted in slow strangulation; jumping off a height meant perhaps not dying, or dying quickly—each of these were pretty awful to contemplate. But one quick jerk of the trigger and…the hope of everlasting sleep. Not much of a deterrent....

In the shadow of the Virginia Tech massacre, however, we might pause to consider that there is something new under the sun, a technology that makes this sort of terror not just possible, but likely.

And yet what this new technology does is magnify what has been there all along: the age-old evil in humanity—in all of us.

So yes, we should spend more, and better, on mental health facilities. Yes, we should help campus ministries and churches reach more lonely youth. Yes, we should aid parents struggling to raise troubled children. And, yes, we should rethink gun control laws.

But no matter what we do about the place of guns, especially in American society, we must brace ourselves for more of the same.

[via Prof. John Stackhouse's Weblog]

Discontinuity As Well...

Evil is in the news again. This week’s tragedy in Virginia, the seemingly endless stream of death and destruction that comes out of Iraq, the recent tsunami in the Solomon Islands… these things always force us to acknowledge, again, that our world is not as it ought to be. While I am a little hesitant to add my voice to the innumerable others that inevitably accompany these high-profile tragedies, this week’s events drew my thoughts back to a little book by David Bentley Hart on the problem of evil that was recommended by Gil a while back. I found this book to offer many helpful ways of thinking about evil, two of which stand out:

1) the falsity of the notion that all of the evil of the world has to be fit into a wise providential plan “without remainder” (i.e., he’s very critical of specifically Protestant approaches which see each and every instance of evil as serving some necessary purpose in the divine plan), and

2) the importance of retaining some semblance of “gnostic” or dualistic elements in our worldview, as long as these terms are strictly defined and carefully used....

Sometimes it seems all that is necessary to demonstrate the deficiency of an argument is to show how the view under discussion is “gnostic”, or could lead in that direction. I remember questioning this notion when I first encountered it, and while my resistance to simply pronouncing everything that has a hint of dualism or gnosticism heretical has been blunted somewhat, I continue to have reservations.

Chief among them is my suspicion that world-affirming, environmentally conscious, incarnational theologies are not terribly difficult to hold when one’s experience of the world is largely a pleasant one. It’s not hard to affirm that Christianity has always been about the renewal of this world (as opposed to an escape to another one) in a wealthy, conflict-free liberal democracy where one is, to a large extent, free to chart one’s own course in the world largely unimpeded. Put bluntly, if my experience of the world is a happy one, my theology of the value of the physical world will be more likely to reflect this.

That’s why it’s so remarkable that the early church rejected gnosticism. Life in the Roman Empire was undoubtedly “nastier,” “shorter,” and “more brutish” (to borrow Hobbesian language) in almost every conceivable way than life in twenty-first century North America. Whenever I am tempted to despair of any goodness in this world, I am sobered by this fact. If I, a privileged twenty-first century North American whose experience of the world is one that human beings throughout the bulk of history could only have dreamed of, sometimes feel that there is too much evil in the world to affirm an organic link between this life and the next, how much harder would it have been in first-century Rome? Medieval Europe? Twentieth-century Russia?

The goodness and importance of this world - the fact that the Christian message speaks of renewal and redemption, not a disembodied spiritual reality, and not starting over from scratch - is a truth that must sometimes be affirmed in the teeth of the evidence. Sometimes a radical form of dualism, where the world we long for can only be conceived of as being totally different than this one, seems to most adequately account for the horrors of this world....

Perhaps part of what it means to be “appropriately gnostic” is to honestly face our world, with its maddening combination of goodness and evil, with a courage and a hope that will at times seem infinitely well-warranted, and at others seem to be nothing more than a desperate wish in the dark. Christians affirm that there will be continuity between this world and the next; however the existence of evil stands as an ever-present reminder that there is, and must be discontinuity as well.

[via Ryan Dueck, emphasis mine]

{Shudder}Uh...We are the, um, World?

Makes the original tune sound better!

[via Dark Christianity]



Why, oh why, can't we just sing a song of flowers?

Where Is The Victory?

There is a word which sums up the week after Easter very nicely: Anticlimax.

If you take half of the claims that the Church makes about Easter seriously you’d almost have to regard the next couple weeks, decades, centuries, even millennia, as a pretty colossal anticlimax....

...at some point this last week, I’m willing to bet, normal life intruded on your Easter glow and it wasn’t quite so triumphant. While the Church shouts “Victory!” from the pulpit, someone we love dies of cancer. While the Church sounds “Victory!” with the pipe-organ, war in Iraq goes on unabated. While the Church sings “Victory!” with our hymns, millions are being defeated by hunger.

To say the least, it is a tad ironic to proclaim that Easter is Christ’s victory over death, when to all appearances death still has the last laugh in the life of every human.

How can we make any sense of this victory one anticlimactic week after Easter?

...Following the trajectory of the narrative it might be easy to imagine that the history of the Church is a straightforward progression from the day of the Resurrection to the day that every knee will bow and every tongue will confess his name. We might comfort ourselves in the face of our own suffering by believing that the victory of the Church is delayed only a while longer until enough missionaries have converted enough people. We could talk about the Bible being translated into every tongue, and churches being planted in every region even though Luke never had any of that in mind.

The problem with all of this is that it is a shallow reading of the text, a shallow telling of the Gospel, with a shallow hope for the hearer. So shallow that it can’t possibly hide the glaring contradiction that faces us post-Easter. The promise is better than that! It is better than conversion of the heathens and incorporation of the nations into a bickering, divisive, feuding Church, where people are still sick, still sinners, still dying. Even if all the world was converted and every corner was reached we would still have to ask the question: where is the victory?!

One answer that is sometimes given to this question in our present era of individualism and psycho babble is to declare the victory of Easter a private victory. A gift of the Spirit, felt in the heart of the believer. A warm glow in our tummies and a confidence in an afterlife. People who view Easter in this way don’t expect the Resurrection of Jesus Christ to have an impact on the world around them. They consider the gift of Easter to be, primarily, a feeling which uplifts us and gives us hope....

We cannot get away from the conundrum of victory by watering down the Gospel. We cannot avoid the harsh reality of suffering continuing even as we declare “He is Risen!” by lowering the bar to a standard far below the complete renewal of creation promised in Scripture. At times we might look at the Church’s Easter witness and be reminded of an infamous President, in an infamous flight-suit, on an infamous aircraft-carrier, with an infamous banner behind him, with the infamous words upon it, “Mission Accomplished!”

What then, can this victory mean, if not Mission Accomplished?

[via Mined Splatterings]

Apocalyptic in the Truest Sense

The new Nine Inch Nails album, Year Zero, comes out on Tuesday. It's a science-fictional concept album (probably the first such thing since David Bowie's Outside, though I may be wrong about that), and the story are of particularly interest for both its critique of conservative religion and its broader eschatological themes.

The nonlinear story has been unfolding in a viral marketing campaign (or "alternate reality game," or "interactive experience") made up of websites, mp3s, and toll-free phone numbers starting earlier this year, establishing the history and atmosphere of the dystopia in which Year Zero takes place. In a nutshell: 15 years from now, the United States has become both a police state and a theocracy. This government has used nuclear weapons on Iran, required all Muslims to register or face execution, and drugged the populace into submission with tranquilizers in the water supply. The Year Zero backstory takes a bleak view of the future of American religion, summed up by the logo of the "Faithful Civil Patrol" organized by the First Evangelical Church of Plano: a crucifix emerging from the barrel of a gun.

This type of dystopia is not the most original—it's reminiscent of the worlds of Katherine Kerr's story "Asylum" and the film Children of Men, just to name two. The medium in which it has been revealed is a novelty, though, and there's a definite thrill to be gained from exploring the sites, a sense of uncovering a mystery. This is especially true in the case of Year Zero's most interesting concept: "The Presence," a mysterious vision/hallucination of an enormous, ghostly hand descending from the sky.....

The Presence is a warning against our tribalism and selfishness. Year Zero is apocalyptic in the truest sense of the word: if we don't get our act together, it warns us, God will end the world for us. In this regard, there's something remarkably traditional about the eschatology of Year Zero. Though its political origins are the opposite of, say, Left Behind, its attitude towards the relation between God and sinful humanity is the same. We have strayed from the path of righteousness, it tells us, and we are blundering into divine retribution.

{the full post}

[via SF Gospel]