Movie Update

So I'm rocking the longest time between posts that I ever have. Blogging has definitely been on the back burner. Let me do a movie update though.

1. The King of Kong: A documentary about a ring of nerdy guys who play classic video games (pac-man, Galaga, Defender, Donkey Kong). It really zooms in on the guy who set the record in Donkey Kong like 20 years ago and who is like the king of classic video games, and a teacher/coach who buys an arcade version and sets out to beat the record. It is very interesting, sad, revealing, and many other things in a sociological way. I would recommend it.

2. Man on Wire: Another documentary about a man, Phelippe Petit, who learns when he is very young to walk on the tightrope, and then takes that passion to new levels, including spanning the towers of the Notre Dame (while mass is going on!) and culminating with walking across a rope between the World Trade Center towers. What is interesting is that as you can imagine, he can;t just stroll up to the top and toss a wire across. There is a ton of planning that has to be done. It is kind of like they are planning a bank robbery, but the goal is tightrope walking rather than stealing money. It is interesting, and the thing that captures you is the vision and determination of Philippe. He is dedicated to accomplish his mission or die trying, which is inspirational. Check it out. (Both this and King of Kong are available with the "Play Now" option on Netflix).


3. Primer: I can't believe I haven't blogged about this already. I saw this a few months ago...probably February. It is low budget with a lot of editing mistakes and all that, because Shane Carruth starred in, shot, cast, edited and everything else himself. I don;t want to exaggerate, because it seems like one of those movies that you either love or you hate, but everything about it is amazing in my humble opinion. From the music, to the character development, to the slow twisting of the plot and everything in between. It rocked my world. It is one of those movies where it is better to not know anything going in. It is also one where if you like it you will want to watch it over and over to pick up on small things you missed before. this is in my top 5 of all time.


4. Once: This is an interesting movie about a down and out musician who is struggling to survive in England. He meets an immigrant and they connect on a musical level and have a great week together, making music and sharing life. It is simple, but charming and well done. The details make the point hit home in this film.

So there it is! I welcome your comments on these as well as your own suggestions.

Earth Day

I'm Late into the game regarding Earth Day, but I thought this video was cool. I was it first at Brian's website.

Evolution Graph

After the post earlier linking to Ken's post about Darwin, I came across this graph reporting on those who accept evolution divided by religious affiliation. For some reason it doesn't surprise me that the three lowest groups are Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons, and Evangelical Christians.

The other thing that interested me is that no group went over 81%. I'm wondering what that tells us.

Nonetheless, I thought this was a very interesting graph. What are your thoughts?

Ken Wilson on Darwin

Why not break the blog drought, eh? I is no secret how busy I've been in the last 6 months with a new job requiring more time and mental energy and going grad school full time. However, I'm going to try to get back into "reference posts", a term I just made up 5 seconds ago for the kind of post where I simply link to another story I find interesting and give it some pub. Is there an actual name for that?

Nonetheless, this is a very interesting article looking at the life of Charles Darwin on his 200th birthday. Perhaps there is no other figure in history who has been more slandered and scoffed at for merely discovering and doing his job. Evangelicals have certainly been hard on CD. Ken Wilson defends him, and even points to a number of evangelicals in his day who were open to Darwin's ideas.

Darwin’s friend and colleague Asa Gray, a Harvard botanist and devout evangelical, saw no inherent conflict either between natural selection and a creating God. In fact, Asa Gray did more to promote Darwin’s writings in the United States than any other scientist. He was one of Darwin’s closest friends. An evangelical.

But these evangelicals took the time to understand Darwin’s idea and consider the evidence for it. They sought to understand the man before calling him dangerous or his ideas heretical. They could understand if the man was too busy with his beetles and barnacles to integrate these new scientific insights with Christian faith. That was a task for people more steeped in theology than he.

Give the article a full read, as it is worth it. It seems in the church today that a good number of people are lessening their opposition to Darwin's ideas. Have you noticed this too, and in your mind is it a good shift or a bad shift?

Donald Miller and Some Random Reflections

Donald Miller's writing is always entertaining. His most recent blog article is a collection of thoughts about his new puppy, how simple her life is, and how we could all learn something from the blissful simplicity of her example.

I’ve been watching Lucy (the aforementioned dog) and wondered why God made her. A pet. Just a dog (chocolate lab puppy) that runs and jumps and chews things and, even though we’ve only known each other for a couple weeks, wants nothing more than to please me. She puts on no airs, which is one of the things I think we find so comforting about pets and children. There is no false motive, only the desire to eat, reproduce and play.

I think of that scripture that tells us to not think more of ourselves than we should, and not less of ourselves either. I think if Lucy could understand a hearing of that passage, she’d probably tilt her head and say “what is an I?”….all she knows is her red ball and her weasel chew toy and the fact she can dig her nose into snow to make a tunnel.

And later

I wonder what it was like for humans before the fall of man, to not think too much or too little of themselves, to enjoy play, to enjoy work, to enjoy God. I think the difference between them and us would be startling. If they could come here today and have a conversation with us, my guess is they would sniff out all our motives and wonder why it is we care about so many things that don’t matter at all.

Interesting thoughts.

An Advent Meditation by Rowan Williams

This video, which I found posted by Tony Jones, is an interesting reflection on the season of Advent.



As I continue in my faith, sacramental, liturgical presentations like this one that used to bore me, become rich and enjoyable. What are your thoughts?

Scott McKnight's Third Way

Scott McKnight is starting a series of posts regarding a Third Way:

There is a Third Way, and this post officially kicks off a series of occasional reflections about the Third Way. The Third Way approach to the orthodox Christian faith is one that gets

beyond the fighting and
between the fighters in order
to carve out a middle way.

The Third Way captures and sustains the good in both the conservative and the liberal. It is the Jesus Creed at work in the church's theology and praxis. It affirms the great traditions of the Church and seeks to embody those traditions in a new way for a new day. It is not afraid of change but has a deep desire to remain faithful.

He says later:

At the heart of our Third Way project is fashioning the gospel as robust enough to be both a "kingdom" gospel and a "salvation" gospel, a salvation that is both spiritual/personal and social. A salvation that means complete liberation. We're tired of the old-fashioned, thin gospels of both the conservatives and the liberals. It is hard to hold both sides of this debate together, but we will attempt to do so ... and I think many of you want to as well.

I'm looking forward to this series. I'm interested in a third way. What do you think?

Boyd on the Unreconciled Church

Greg Boyd has some interesting points about some of the "white evangelical" response the day after Obama won.

Several people responded to my most recent blog by contrasting what I wrote with the “hostility” and “venom” they were reading on some white conservative Christian blogs the day following the election. While most other Americans — even most opponents of Obama’s politics — were celebrating what Obama’s election means for race relations in this country, these white Christians, I was told, were enraged.

And later, regarding a study he ran into at a conference:

One of the sad but unavoidable conclusions Emerson drew from this combination of studies was that participating in a homogenous church — as the vast majority of white evangelicals do — actually makes people more prone toward racism. Folks who are strongly bound to homogenous religous groups tend to embrace racial stereotypes and be more wary of people whose ethnicity and culture is different from their own than those who don’t. As a result, participating in homogenous religious groups tends to make people less interested in, and less adept at, making progress at bridging the racial divide.

In this light, it’s not surprising that some white evangelicals were enraged over Obama’s victory while so much of the rest of the country was celebrating it. Arguably, no group in America is at one and the same time more invested in political opinions that oppose Obama and less able to appreciate the significance of his racial achievement than this group.

He concludes by saying:

This would amount to nothing more than a curious sociological observation except for one thing: white evangelicals are among those who are supposed to be demonstrating to the world the beauty of racial reconciliation! One of the reasons Jesus gave his life was to form “one new humanity” in which all racial, cultural and class walls have been torn down (Eph. 2:14-15; Gal. 3:26-29). Racial reconciliation isn’t some sort of “politically correct” addendum to the Gospel: it’s part of its very essence! If Jesus died to create “one new humanity,” then manifesting a community in which people of different ethnicities are learning to love, understand and do life with one another is as mandatory for the church as is preaching the forgiveness of sins, which Jesus also died for.

An interesting commentary, I thought. What do you think?

Interesting Election Facts from Barna

Here is the link to The Barna Report (as referenced on The Jesus Creed)

As was true in the past two presidential elections, two-thirds of all evangelicals who were registered to vote (65%) were aligned with the Republican Party. One out of five (21%) was Democrats and just one out of ten (10%) was registered independent of a party. That puts evangelicals at odds with the national voter profile, which shows a plurality of Democrats (42%), one-third Republican (34%) and two out of ten (20%) independent of a party affiliation.

Most remarkably, however, was the overwhelming support registered among evangelicals for Republican candidate John McCain. In total, 88% voted for Sen. McCain, compared to just 11% for Sen. Obama. The 88% is statistically identical to the 85% of evangelicals who backed George W. Bush in 2004. Surveys conducted by Barna throughout the campaign season showed that evangelicals were not enthusiastic about either candidate, but on Election Day evangelicals came through in a big way for the most conservative major candidate on the ballot.

Church Marketing Strategies for Starbucks

This is a weird but funny video about how the church must look to visitors sometimes (found on ThinkChristian).



Thoughts?

Congratulations...

Let me be among the first to congratulate Barack Obama for becoming our new president elect.

Quite a story, isn't it? The first major party minority candidate wins the election. Think about what has happened in the arena of race in the last 100 years?

Quite an historic day. Quite a day indeed.

Donald Miller's Political History

Donald Miller has posted a long but interesting political history of his life. He shares some experiences with working with the Obama campaign this year.

While in Denver I met people from the Obama Campaign. I met Joshua Dubois and Paul Monteiro, Obama’s faith-policy advisors. Paul, like me, had been a Republican until recently. He is a staunch pro-life conservative who got tired of Republicans not making enough strides on the issue and was won over by the dramatic effect economic policy has on unwanted pregnancy and the bottom-up effects of economic stimulation as opposed to the conservative, supply-side policy. And Joshua spoke to me about Senator Obama’s personal faith, his commitment to close his events in prayer, his daily morning devotions and his twenty-year history of talking openly about Jesus. I didn’t need to be won over. I’d started a mentoring foundation in Portland two years before and was attracted to Obama’s message on responsible fatherhood (along with his backing of The Responsible Fatherhood Act.)

Elsewhere he says,

Last year I vowed I wouldn’t make decisions out of fear. And because of that I’ve had one of the greatest years of my life.

If you have a few minutes, give it a read. Donald is a great writer and always makes you think.

A Question...

How much does God care about the election happening in two days?

Does he care enough to spend billions of dollars on advertising?

Does he care enough to spend millions of man (and woman) hours organizing and strategizing?

Does he care enough to see perhaps the fiercest division in four years that Americans experience between one another?

I'm not suggesting God doesn't care (though I could be wrong), but I'm willing to go out on a limb and suggest that we care more that He does.

I'm not suggesting you should not vote (though I'm open to certain situations where people feel that is the right move), but I am suggesting that if you decide to vote, that it is the least amount of involvement possible to be a participating citizen. We treat voting as if it is such a big deal, whereas it seems to me that we vote every day by what we value, what we spend money on, what we give money too, what we say to and about our neighbors. Maybe instead of just voting for the pro-environment candidate, I could challenge you that after you cast your vote on Tuesday, you could spend that evening learning to go green, recycle and pollute less? Maybe instead of just voting for the anti-abortion, I could challenge you after you cast your vote on Tuesday to find a crisis pregnancy center to which you could donate $25 or $50 a month and 5 hours a week of your time.

It seems to me that if everyone who voted (which is typically in the upper 40's of percent) spent significant time and energy living out the values they vote for, we would have a revolution on our hands. Imagine if on Tuesday, half the nation left their respective polling places and vowed to live differently. What might that mean?

It seems to me that God is much more concerned with how we live and who we are becoming than he is with how we vote.


Lord, start with me.

Boyd and Kimball on "Religulous"

As you may have heard, Bill Maher has made a movie bashing religion that is now out. I have not seen the movie myself (not yet anyway), but several good thinkers and church leaders have. I thought I'd share some of their thoughts and posts.

Dan Kimball wrote the first response I read about it here. Dan says:

The film was really well done, and it went by very fast. Bill Maher is trying to show how "religion" in general is messed up and even very damaging (which it can be). He tries to make his point in a very, very humorous way. But it also was very predictable in what it covered. I have either listened to or read most of the arguments he made in the film, so what was in the film itself wasn't really new information.

But Bill raised good and legitimate questions but he didn't get good answers from the people he interviewed (again, at least how they edited the film). People in the theater laughed (including me) at how the responses generally came across from Christians to his questions.

He does have some criticisms about the film, however.

Although it was a humorous film, and although it raised great questions which need to be asked - it only showed a very one-sided perspective. Thus, to me it was a poor film journalistically as it misrepresented Christianity by only showing the extremes of it.

Greg Boyd also wrote a review of the film here.

I also have to say that I found myself in agreement with much of Maher’s commentary. While many Christians seem to feel the need to defend religion – at least the Christian religion – from the sort of criticism Maher raises, I think its imperative for followers of Jesus to side with these sorts of criticisms. For the undeniable truth is that religion – including the Christian religion — is often irrational and extremely dangerous.

Fortunately, the kingdom Jesus inaugurated has got nothing to do with religion. Indeed, Jesus’ main opposition came from the guardians of religion, and religion continues to be a main obstacle to the advancement of his kingdom. (For more on this, see my Repenting of Religion). If Maher’s documentary does anything to help people get free of religion, it’s done humanity and the kingdom a great service, in my opinion.

In critique, Greg says:

First, Religulous is utterly devoid of nuances and objectivity. Maher lumps all religion in the same silly and dangerous bucket while never bothering to tell his audience what he means by the term “religion.” One gets the impression that humanity can be divided up into two well defined groups: on the one side you have rational humane people who have no religious beliefs and who simply want to make the world a better place; on the other side you have irrational misanthropic people who have “religious” beliefs and who inhibit progress and threaten the world.

and later...

This brings me to my second, more specific, criticism. Maher provides absolutely no evidence to support his remarkable claim that the Jesus story is a variation of the Horus myth. To his credit, Maher did interview Francis Collins, head of the Human Genome project, about the Gospels (the only educated “religious” person included in the documentary by the way). But Francis Collins is unfortunately an expert in biology, not biblical history. It’s hardly fair to call on him to give a robust defense of the historicity of the Gospels or refutation of the Horus-Jesus theory. (Yet, for all we know, he provided one that was edited out).

The truth is that there are many compelling reasons to conclude that the Gospels are substantially rooted in history, not legend or myth. Paul Eddy and I provide these reasons and argue against all the major Jesus-legend or Jesus-myth theories in The Jesus Legend (Baker, 2007) and (in a much more popular format) in Lord or Legend? (Baker, 2007). Had Maher seriously interacted with this material his documentary would have been much more informative. But it also would have undermined the objective of the film, which was to entertain audiences by making all religion (including faith in Jesus) look silly and dangerous.

What do you think? Have any of you seen the movie? Other than these two blog reviews (on blogs I read regularly) I haven't heard much about it. Has there been a surge against it by the religious right?

Abortion Facts

As it is nearly election time, the hot topic of abortion is in the air (which only seems to be a big deal in election years, interesting). I thought I'd share some interesting facts a ran across about abortion in the US. I'll leave the analysis to you. (Read the original post here).

Abortion Facts

Half of all pregnancies in the United States are unintended.

Almost half of unintended pregnancies end in abortion.

The most frequent reasons given by women seeking an abortion are that a child would limit ability to meet current responsibilities and that they cannot afford a child at this point in their lives.

Unintended pregnancy has increased by 29% among poor women while decreasing 20% among higher-income women.

Women below the federal poverty level have abortion rates almost four times those of higher-income women.

Between 1996 and 2000, while abortion rates for all other groups fell, abortion rates among poor and low-income women increased.

The majority of women having abortions are in their 20s or younger.

Overturning Roe Vs. Wade Will Not End Abortion in America

Overturning Roe Vs. Wade, a long time goal of the pro-life movement, would not end abortion in the United States, it would simply send the decision to the states.

If states with more than 45% "pro-life" sentiment chose to outlaw abortion, this would only impact 16 states accounting for 10% of abortions nationwide, or less than 100,000 abortions a year.

Women in these 16 states would still be able to travel to seek an abortion in another state, or seek an illegal abortion, making the impact likely less than a 10% reduction in abortions nation-wide.

States with the highest abortion rates in the country, like California and New York, would be unlikely to outlaw abortion in their states.

Studies Show that Economic Support for Women and Families Reduces Abortion

In a recent study released by Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good finds that social and economic supports such as benefits for pregnant women and mothers and economic assistance to low-income families have contributed significantly to reducing the number of abortions in the United States over the past twenty years.

Economic assistance to low income families is correlated with a 20% lower abortion rate. Across the entire United States, this translates into 200,000 fewer abortions.

In the 1990s, states with more generous grants to women, infants and children under the age of five as provided by the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC) program had a 37% lower abortion rate.

Higher male employment in the 1990s was associated with a 29% lower abortion rate.

The abortion rate has declined most rapidly from 1990-1996 when there was an economic boom under President Clinton. While rates have continued to decrease, they have declined less rapidly in recent years when poverty rates have been climbing.

Legal Status of Abortion Does Not Necessarily Impact Abortion Rates

Nearly half of all abortions in the world are performed in countries that have made abortion illegal.

The lowest abortion rates in the world - less than 10 per 1,000 women of reproductive age - are in Europe, where abortion is legal and available.

By contrast, in Africa and Latin America and the Caribbean, where abortion law is most restrictive, the regional rates are 29 and 31 per 1,000 women, respectively.

These countries are also much poorer than the U.S. and provide fewer social services; and a larger proportion of their population lives in poverty.

In Western European countries, in contrast, where more social services are provided and fewer women live in poverty, the abortion rates are consistently the lowest rates in the world.

Source: Joseph Wright and Michael Bailey, "Reducing Abortion in America : The Effect of Economic and Social Supports" (Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good) and The Guttmacher Institute "An Overview of Abortion in The United States"