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]

And We're Off!



First Orbit, recalling and recreating Yuri Gagarin's *first* human orbit ever. Has it really been 50 years? Maybe warp drive will be next, to go where no one has gone before. :)

Father Matthew on Pat Robertson, Demonization and Christ

[via A New Anglican's Journey]

Still Earth-Shattering

Way back when, in 1994 when I was in Elementary school I remember hearing about the 7.0 magnitude earthquake that shook the Northridge area of California. I remember seeing the scenes of overpasses dropped onto traffic below, pavement cracked revelaing deep crevasses in the earth and buidlings turned to rubble. I remember thinking, this was devastation. {continue...}

[via withmyowntwohands, HT: IdeaJoy]

Inclusive or Inciting?

[via Orcinus in this post]



[Also, for a counterpoint: The Paranoid Center, via Reason Magazine]

Related:

Injustice and civility cannot coexist. Being civil is a function of being free. When our discourse abuses freedom by demeaning others, it is something that affects not only the freedom of those tho[sic] whom it is directed, it affects the freedom of those who make such utterances.

Justice is a holistic concept. When one person suffers injustice in a civil society, all suffer injustice because the system has been broken. Those within such a system are now captive to their own need to exert power over others....

It is no longer civil because our discourse does not serve the end of living together and working together so that we all may prosper. It is a discourse tearing this down as it incites division and hostility only for a small minority to serve their own selfish gain.

The key to what we wish to be is that to which we direct our attention and hence that which we consume. If we want to achieve truth, beauty, and goodness, then these are what we need to consume. Listening to the poison thereby consuming it gives it power. When we attend to something we feed it. Perhaps it's time to fast. {full post}

[via Notes From Off-Center]

Critical Patriotism

As I write this, it is already 04 July 2009. It’s Independence Day, the anniversary of the day (04 July 1776) when American colonists declared their independence from the U.K. It’s the birthday of this republic, the United States of America, although our current form of government did not set until 1790. Throughout this land on Sunday, churches will be filled with pastors giving sermons on freedom or on “God and country,” etc. Most of them will be pretty bad. Some of them will be positively idolatrous–reducing the God of all creation to a tribal deity that somehow cares more for this nation than others–a truly blasphemous idea.

Some preachers will do better....

A Christian patriotism must be an “eyes wide open” critical patriotism that is always calling for repentence and reform. Because Christians can never forget that no nation, no government, is anywhere close to the standards of the Rule of God. Our first loyalty is to that other “kingdom” (forgive the patriarchal language, the political meaning comes through better) which is not from this world–but which will overthrow the Powers and Authorities of this world. We are loyal first to the “God Revolution,” and second to the global church (the scattered People of God) and third to the whole world, in and out of the church, as God’s beloved creation. Only after that, as a lesser loyalty, can we be lovers of our own nation and government.

Nationalists and jingoists, therefore, will always find Christians to be suspect. We will not appear patriotic enough for them. Too bad. {full post}

[via Levellers]

---

The American view has tended neither toward the death of God nor His reconfiguration as the foundation of some American civil religion. Writers often discuss the American civil religion, but generally describe it as some variant of Biblical religion with an active God.

From the beginning, Americans have not grappled in the same way with the contradiction between intense personal longings and impersonal science or theology. Consider our Declaration of Independence. The theoretical core of the Declaration—on self-evident truths, unalienable rights, and instituting government—speaks of “Nature’s God,” a Deist creator, the source of the impersonal laws of nature. Christian members of the Continental Congress insisted that two other references to God be added to the eminently modern Jefferson and Franklin’s draft, and so the rousing conclusion, ending with “sacred Honor,” speaks of a Creator-God as the “Supreme Judge” of us all and as the source of “divine Providence.” Thanks to this legislative compromise, the Declaration offers up a “Nature’s God” Who also knows and cares about each of us. Through most of our history, such compromises between modern and Christian Americans have considerably reduced the distance between Christian and modern views of the person’s natural and theological environment. {full post}

[via The New Atlantis]

Swine Fever: Part of the Deal

[via Kester Brewin, HT: Jordon Cooper]

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]

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]

Big Yellow Taxi, Bruckner's Symphonies and Scholarly Confusion Between Orality and Quantum Mechanics

[via Exploring Our Matrix]

Day of Reckoning

President-elect Barack Obama is quite different from Reverend King. Obama has never been a pastor; he did not grow up in the segregated South; and Obama has been elected to a political office, while King held a prophetic office (by personal conviction and seeming acclamation). Yet four years may provide a sad resemblance. The chances for disenchantment seem eerily similar. If 2008 hearkens back to 1963, will 2012 be reminiscent of 1967? As so many politicians and pundits have commented, Obama will become President with more crises on his hands than fingers. His followers voted for “change” but what will change mean in manifest form?

The potential for dashed dreams and unfulfilled prophecies is high. How shall we avoid disappointment? How can we not get stuck in a nightmare of a dream? If “Yes We Can” sounds as distant in 2012 as “I Have a Dream” did in 1967, where will we turn for help? Perhaps we should turn to the words of another American prophet, W. E. B. Du Bois, and link them to the vision of King. Du Bois, who died only a day before King’s epic speech, called Americans not to dream, but to wake up. “Awake, awake” he implored Americans as the prophet Isaiah had for the Israelites. Seeing the “day of reckoning” at hand, Du Bois charged Americans to “put on thy strength.” King and Du Bois knew – and President-elect Obama knows—that faith takes works, hope demands honesty, and love needs justice. {full post}

[via Religion Dispatches, HT: Ponderings on a Faith Journey]

How Barack Obama Won

[via jordoncooper.com]

Since It's Almost Over...

President Bush's Legacy: One of Our Greatest Presidents

[via Jon Swift]

What I've Become, What I've Appreciated

Welp. 2008 is almost gone. I hear echoing in my brain the many sermons I’ve heard over the years that go something like this, “Some of you have had the best year of your life, and some of you have had the worst year of your life . . .”

I’ve experienced some of both, but that’s for the violins, and I’m not into violins tonight.

What I am into is what I’ve become and what I’ve learned to appreciate this past year. I’ve become much more pessimistic and cautious. And what I’ve learned is to appreciate the endless energy and optimism and hope of youth. As I’ve become more callous, I’ve become more thankful for those who have yet to experience anything in life that would curb these qualities.

I’ve learned that energy is not wasted on the youth even though they lack wisdom gained from experience and are often reckless. {continue...}

[via Recon's Black Ops]

Liberty Easy, Equality Harder

As a white American, who has never tasted discrimination, it is hard to imagine what it must have been like for African Americans to grow up assuming that to reach highest office, one must be white. Remember that at this time Barack Obama is the only African American in the U.S. Senate. Last night's celebrations weren't just for Barack. They were celebrations of a milestone that spoke loudly to every person of color.

My friend and fellow Disciple historian, Mark Toulouse, has written an insightful piece for PBS's Religion & Ethics Newsweekly entitled "The Economy of Equality," which explores the difference between liberty and equality. Liberty can be achieved much more easily through legislation than equality. The Voting Rights Act was enacted 43 years ago. It took that long to elect an African American President. For women, it shall be even longer. But someday, they will also see one of their own reach this pinnacle. {whole post}

[via Ponderings on a Faith Journey]

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]

Lowered Standards

There is a great similarity between the Monarchists of post-Revolutionary France, and the conservatives in America in 2008, who intend to vote for Third Party Candidates. The Monarchists were holding out for a theoretical, potential future return of the Monarchy. Third-Party voters are holding out for the theoretical, potential true-conservative candidate. It is possible that, had they not obeyed the Pope, had the French continued to abstain from voting or running for office, one day the Monarchy would have been brought back to France. There is also a remote possibility that Third Party voters may, one day, bring about the nomination, in America, of a true conservative. And yet, and here is the point Pope Leo XIII made, Catholics are bound to live in the concrete reality in which God places them today. While not perfect, the good that would be accomplished by the French Catholics and the American conservatives, is at risk of not being done because of the pursuit of theoretical, potential, utopian possibility of perfection.

[via Taliban Rising]

Weirded Out

I felt so glad to be inside.

What puzzles me is that people buy these spooky things, they think it's fun, part of getting into the "halloween spirit", I suppose. And I'm the type of girl who LOVES having any excuse to dress up (just ask my family). But the spooky, scary stuff you can keep....

I wonder if anyone else feels as weirded out and out-of-place as me? I wonder if the way I feel tonight is the way early Christians felt all the time....vulnerable, surrounded by pagan ideas that dehumanized their friends and family. Did they see friends coming back from the temple with hair shaven off and cuts on their body, proof of their devotion to Artemis? Did they witness the degredation of a sister turned into a temple prostitue? Did they watch as neighbors purposefully invested in acts that twisted their humanity?

I feel like, tonight, I can taste the alien-like feeling early Christians must have felt. It makes me glad that Halloween comes only once a year.

[via Jonalyn Grace Fincher]

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]

Made in China

China's Olympic Games began in Beijing in venues choked by smog and under the shadow of a crackdown on human rights and religious freedom.

The Chinese dazzled the world with an impressive and often intimidating opening night display of pageantry and technical flash.

Now millions of concerned Christians around the world are focused on China because of the Games and want to support believers there. But like the smog that cloaks the Beijing skyline, layers of cultural misperceptions, political biases and contradictory information conceal the actual status of the Chinese church from our view.

What's really going on with the church in China?

It's hard to tell what's real. At least that's been my experience. Maybe you'll do better at sorting it all out than I have. (The discovery that much of the Olympics fireworks display on opening night was computer-generated is perhaps emblematic of the problem).

The main issues first surfaced this year in the controversy over evangelizing at the Games. {continue...}

[via The Wittenburg Door]