beautiful things happening …
in emergent village.
Here's one account from Kelly Bean.
And here's the part that's worth several thousand words ...
0 Comments1 Minute
for fans of Donald Miller …
You might want to help bring attention and support to the movie that's been made of his book Blue Like Jazz. Info here. What a gifted writer Don is, and what a splendid person .... should be a tremendous movie!
0 Comments1 Minute
Evangelicals speaking out against torture
Last night I shared some bad news about Evangelicals supporting torture ... but here's some better news:
From Gabriel Salguero here ...
Torture is morally reprehensible. Christians, who serve a Christ who was tortured and murdered by a brutal Empire should know this to be true. Torture is not just an affront to the human dignity of the person being tortured but also on the one's who are dong the torturing. Any society that sanctions torture has lost its moral compass and threatens the ethical integrity of all its people.
From Robert King
Politically, militarily it seems that people can find ways to justify torture. But for the life of me I can't see why churchgoing folk should support it. And indeed, there is a campaign against torture being lead by religious groups.
But it seems to me that a group of people who elevates Jesus as its model, teacher and prophet has gone off the rails when it is ready to attach the electrodes to the private parts of the battlefield enemies of its country.
0 Comments1 Minutes
What do White Evangelicals stand for?
Too many stand for torture, according to a recent Pew Forum study reported by CNN.com.
White evangelical Protestants were the religious group most likely to say torture is often or sometimes justified -- more than six in 10 supported it. People unaffiliated with any religious organization were least likely to back it. Only four in 10 of them did.
These are disturbing statistics, and I hope they engender some dialogue among White Evangelicals. These figures reminded me of something I wrote last year for Christian Century:
Consider this question: Is it ever justifiable to intentionally target innocent civilians in order to achieve other political or military ends? 86, 81, and 80% of American, Canadian, and British citizens say never. But only 46% of Iranians say never. A striking 24% say attacks on civilians are often or sometimes justified, and 6% say such attacks are completely justified.
The previous sentences are lies, dangerous lies. The fact that these lies nestle so easily into our presumed knowledge suggests why we need to rethink what many of us think we know about Islam – and ourselves. An important new book, Who Speaks for Islam? What a Billion Muslims Really Think (John L. Esposito and Dalia Mogahed, Gallup Press, 2007) would be a great place to begin such a rethinking.
The truth is that the scary figures attributed above to Iranians actually apply to Americans, and the more civilized figures attributed to Americans, Canadians, and British citizens apply to the people of Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Iran (Who Speaks? p. 95). In contrast to the 6% of Americans who say civilian attacks are completely justified, only 2% of Iranians or Lebanese would agree, and only 4% of Saudis.
What do these statistics say about Americans in general and white American Evangelicals in particular? Why would White Evangelicals be most likely to support torture? Could some conventional theological assumptions of Evangelicals have anything to do with it?
0 Comments2 Minutes
humorous eschatological interlude …
In A New Kind of Christianity (from which I'm taking a five-minute break), I'm addressing ten questions that I think are especially catalytic at this time. One of them has to do with eschatology. My hunch is that most of our popular eschatologies do to Jesus exactly what Weird Al Yankovitch does to Gandhi in UHF, in my opinion, one of the great comedic masterpieces since the Big Bang. The so-called "second coming" perfectly invalidates and overturns the first, converting Jesus into a more proper and respectable Caesar-like ruler after all. Enjoy, and then reflect ...
0 Comments1 Minute