Theoblogia is moving…

Why don’t you join me at my new blog? I’ll keep this one up for a while until everyone can update their bookmarks, RSS feeds, and links. I just started playing with the features, but I think it’s looking better already. Many thanks to GKB for tips on CSS and Photoshop. The new blog is conveniently located at:

http://theoblogia.com

Glossolalia

Can someone please explain to me the communal benefit(s) of speaking in tongues? I don’t doubt that many people are able to speak in tongues (though I do wonder if it’s much of a gift in the “spiritual gift” sense of the word), but I don’t understand the point if others can’t understand what another is saying. Thoughts?

Getting mad at God

It’s natural to get mad at God every once in a while. That doesn’t give you license to drive your truck into a church, though. Hopefully this person will receive good pastoral care in the midst of this unfortunate incident, including being assured that being angry with God is fine, but involving an innocent truck as the vehicle of one’s rage is another thing altogether.

Chicago Part Deux

My last post was a little haphazard; we had just returned from Chicago, and I was exhausted from waking up at 4:00AM to get back to Dallas. A few more highlights from the trip:

This was the view from our hotel room on the 23rd floor of Club Quarters Wacker at Michigan. We were located on the corner of Wacker Dr. (which runs the length of the Chicago River) and Michigan Ave. (home to the Magnificent Mile, literally a mile of shops and restaurants in the heart of downtown Chicago).

That building in the middle is the Club Quarters Wacker Hotel. We really enjoyed the architecture of Chicago, and this building happened to be one of our favorites.

At Millenium Park they had these large rectangular structures that enclosed some type of LCD display behind a waterproof plastic covering so that water could spray out of the top of the structure. It was certainly interesting to see the carefree kids playing in the water in front of this picture of a rather dour old man staring off into space. Maybe this is what Gordon Lathrop is talking about when he talks about significance of juxtaposition.

The Bongo Room was the restaurant where we ate breakfast in Wicker Park and had our semi-celebrity sighting. Unbelievable pancakes/hotcakes. I got the white chocolate raspberry cheesecake pancakes; T got the lemon raspberry hotcakes. Best pancakes of my life, and the place felt quite cool, even before our celebrity friend dropped in. On a different breakfast excursion we headed up to Ann Sather for Swedish food. The Crab Cake Benedict and Salmon Benedict were delectable, and the huge cinnamon rolls and hash browns were very good.

We ate pizza three times while there; twice at Giordano’s and once at Lou Malnati’s. I liked the latter just fine, but we loved Giordano’s. Unbelievable pizza. Prior to seeing Wicked we had dinner at a nice little Italian restaurant called Trattoria no. 10. It was a short jaunt from the theatre, which was perfect for us. Good food, but the prices were a little high for what we got (butternut squash ravioli with butter cream sauce).

The campus of the University of Chicago was beautiful; I can see myself studying there one day (now if only I can convince the admissions committee and my wife…). Like many universities in big cities it’s closer to a more rundown part of the city, but the campus itself feels like an ivy league school. We were in such a hurry that we weren’t able to locate the Divinity School, but we happened to run into Bond Chapel (where they have their services every Wednesday). Here’s a photo:

It was a miracle that we made it back to downtown in time to pick up our tickets to the White Sox game; a bus driver picked us up at a stop that wasn’t his and realized we had gotten lost trying to get to the Green Line station near the campus, so he took us the rest of the way.

We were surprised at how easy it was to get around using the “El”; I can’t imagine why anyone would want to rent a car while visiting the city. Who knows where we will end up in a couple years, but if Chicago were an option I wouldn’t be entirely disappointed. Great fall and spring weather, a serious winter (perhaps too serious?), and an awful August. If only the cost of living was better…plus we know very little about what life is like for all the people who don’t live in the city itself. My guess is that the folks in suburban Chicago pay a little less than what we saw on craigslist for downtown living.

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When we got home we had a few hours to rest before taking in our last summer concert before beginning work again. At the Nokia in Grand Prairie, Rufus Wainwright headlined a show that included A Fine Frenzy and Neko Case. Surprisingly, I enjoyed the latter two opening acts more than Wainwright’s set. A Fine Frenzy is basically one girl and a piano. She was very, very good live, and I recently purchased her album for T who was singing her songs on the way home following the concert. Neko Case was outstanding, a truly incredible live performer. I would have paid the same price just to have watched her set. Rufus was Rufus, the only problem was that I only knew a handful of the songs he sang that night. It was a good way to spend four hours on a Friday evening, though.

Well, that’s about all there is to say about the whirlwind that was last week. I apologize to those looking for personal photographs from our vacation. Maybe my lovely wife will post those on her blog. I’ve been wanting to blog about some other stuff for a while now, but I haven’t had a chance to do so yet. Soon, though. Until then…

Chicago

We just returned from a wonderful trip to Chicago. The weather was unbearable at times, but we packed in as much as we could. Here are a few photos:

Just a big tall building that I liked.

Millenium Park

U-505 at the Museum of Science and Industry

Rockefeller Memorial Chapel on the campus of the University of Chicago

Inside the chapel (even better in person).

Cubs were out of town so we headed to a White Sox game on Tuesday evening.

Caught Wicked on Wednesday evening. Maybe the best show I’ve seen thus far.

For the uninitiated, this is Megan from NBC’s reality show Age of Love. We saw her at breakfast on Thursday morning in Wicker Park.

Beautiful skyline of Chicago at night.

We really enjoyed Chicago, especially being our first time there. Next time we’ll go there in the fall to avoid the swampy heat of August. If I had to rate the cities we’ve been to together over the last few years I would place Chicago slightly ahead of New York mostly for its wonderful public transportation in addition to cheaper food and lodging. NYC is more romantic in many ways, but they both pale in comparison to San Francisco. Next cities on the list to visit: Boston and Seattle. More to come. Shalom!

Random remarks

• Many props to my wife for finishing the last of her coursework toward the completion of her Masters degree at TWU and for being asked to submit her professional paper for publication by her major professor. She is incredibly talented yet remarkably humble. I look forward to riding her coattails as she makes her way up the ladder of upward mobility.
• We’ve watched a few DVDs recently. Movies of note include a French film (romantic comedy of sorts) called Jet Lag with Juliette Binoche and Jean Reno. It was much better than I thought it would be. We also watched a documentary called The Cruise that we enjoyed quite a bit. It’s about a tour guide from NYC who gives bus tours and basically follows him around as he ruminates on the nature of life and the personality of the city. For NYC lovers this is a must see. We also rented Extras Season 2 (with Ricky Gervais & Stephen Merchant), and I have to say I was a little disappointed. Aside from the episode with David Bowie I really didn’t find this season all the funny; perhaps they were trying to make it more serious or something. I don’t know. I miss David Brent from The Office. Looking forward to Gervais’ next offering and hoping it’s better than Extras.
• Just finished watching a show called The Once and Future City: San Francisco and got that soul sick feeling all over again. Just when you think you’ve gotten over your last visit Discovery HD goes and messes everything up again. All I have to do is convince T that living in SF wouldn’t be that difficult as long as we could find a place to live that was bigger than 500 sq. ft. Of course, that would cost twice as much as any mortgage around here, but you only live once and you might as well live in San Francisco. That’s what I always say, at least.
• I’ve been thinking about a road trip lately; anybody have suggestions on where we should go that would take approximately 12 hours (max.) to get to from Dallas?
• Musically, I’ve been listening to a lot of Midlake’s The Trials of Van Occupanther and old school Rufus Wainwright. Speaking of the latter; we’re planning on catching his concert on August 10th at the Nokia with special guest Neko Case. It should be a good show, especially considering that we’ll be about 30 feet from the stage.
• Anybody out there tried AT&T’s U-Verse? A sales guy came by last week and made it sound pretty good. For now we just ordered naked DSL (DSL without the phone line), so hopefully our internet woes will cease. Apparently a number of e-mails I’ve tried to send have not been getting to their recipients and websites tend to get hung up about half way through loading. Gotta love Time Warner Cable.
• Finished The Chosen by Potok a couple days ago and loved it! Looking forward to picking up The Promise later today and then moving on to more helpful material for the job that I start in a little over 3 weeks.
• Tomorrow I will sit in on a conversation about James Cone’s The God of the Oppressed that Central Dallas Ministries sponsors, so that should be interesting. I think it’s funny that such powerful, often shocking, language comes from a person who seems so nice in real life. I’ll never forget seeing him on TV one day and thinking, “That was James Cone?” Anyway, it should be a good meeting. The only thing better than talking about his book, though, would be having Cone talk about it himself. Maybe one day…

Well, that about all I’ve got for now; sorry the personal updates are less frequent than normal. My life isn’t that exciting really, and the things that are exciting I’d rather not share with the entire world (which is to say, Google, who I’m convinced rules the world with Amazon, Netflix, and other companies that seem to know more about me than I do).

From the pen of Sallie McFague

If the Enlightenment was the first watershed, thrusting us into the modern world, then the contemporary era must be called the second watershed, for its assumptions differ from those of the Enlightenment that created the modern world. Any listing of these assumptions will vary but will probably include some of the following: a greater appreciation of nature, linked with a chastened admiration for technology; the recognition of the importance of language (and hence interpretation and construction) in human existence; the acceptance of the challenge that other religious options present to the Judeo-Christian tradition; a sense of the displacement of the white, Western male and the rise of the dispossessed because of gender, race, or class; an apocalyptic sensibility, fueled in part by the awareness that we exist between two holocausts, the Jewish and the nuclear; and perhaps most significant, a growing appreciation of the thoroughgoing, radical interdependence of life at all levels and in every imaginable way. These assumptions, I believe, form the context for theology if it is to be theology for our time.

From the preface to her book Models of God: Theology for an Ecological, Nuclear Age published in 1987.

I knew it!

I always thought the current Vice President was a robot. This headline confirms that fact:

Cheney in hospital for battery change

A defensive faith

A recent conversation with my lovely wife got me thinking about faith and culture. Do you think there is significant interaction between current events and faith as it’s found in the general public? Specifically, I’m wondering if conservative evangelicalism altered its course of action in response to the political and military rhetoric going around. I’m not talking so much about the jingoistic excitement of the early days of the conflict in Afghanistan and later in Iraq but rather the remarkably defensive posture that faith has taken over the last 20 or so years (this is not an exact time frame but roundabout estimate based on lazy conjecture). I don’t know where it started or if it goes in and out of style like 70’s clothing, but the popular Christian faith, especially what gets marketed or shown on television, has become primarily a defensive faith. It would be interesting to compare the government’s military spending with some objective measure of Christian behavior over the same period of time. My guess is that there would be a fairly significant positive correlation, not necessarily a causal relationship, but something to that effect.

I first saw the defensive faith when we moved to Dallas in 2002. Our first church experience happened to be at a local church’s young marrieds class that was studying the book Seeing the Unseen. For the uninitiated, this is a book on spiritual warfare by one of our tradition’s more eclectic authors. Before we knew it we were trying to figure out which demons were in charge of Dallas and how to keep them away (how to encourage your guardian angel to do its job was probably another class). Much of it felt like silliness at best and a complete waste of time at worst. All of it revolved around a defensive faith. We live in a world where Satan is in charge, and the goal is to make it to the end as pure as possible by defeating the demons that do his bidding. We were encouraged to think in these terms, to locate where, in our own lives and marriages, Satan was at work. Everywhere we turned we were to be on the look out for “the enemy.” I had had enough after a couple classes and some unfruitful dialogue with the senior minister who felt no responsibility for the poor theology being espoused at his church.

I felt similarly while at ACU in our Family Relations class. One of the books on marriage was His Needs, Her Needs, another defensive diatribe aimed at relationships. The goal: for women to act defensively so as to avoid the inevitable affair their husbands would have if they didn’t get enough sex. This was pushed in our class; men were to appease the women emotionally in order to have their love banks filled sexually. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that a marriage built on the hope of avoiding affairs is likely a pretty stale excuse for true relationship.

As we continue to move forward through time there is no end to the potential “threats” to our faith. Consider school prayer, teaching Bible as part of school curriculum, the home schooling wars, keeping the 10 commandments in our courtrooms, intelligent design vs. evolution, the abortion debate, our stance on gays and lesbians, civil unions, same sex adoption, pornography, the Supreme Court justices, immigration, etc. All of these things (and many more) have become volatile issues for which we often see people drawing lines in the sand; either you’re with us or you’re against us. “What kind of message are you sending the troops if you don’t support the war…” That’s the kind of reasoning I often hear within our churches. We are a people who have mastered the defensive posture of faith. If there is something to be against you should contact the Christian church before wasting money on a PR firm. We wrote the book on defense.

There’s nothing necessarily wrong with defense; some believe that the best offense is a good defense. When it comes to faith I don’t agree with this viewpoint, but it’s one way of looking at the world. I am for good marriages and keeping folks out of the throes of addiction, but I’m not sure I understand the mentality that attempts to defend the faith, especially the tendency to defend God. This is especially salient in the ever present philosophical attempts to prove God’s existence; are we not trying to defend a particular portrait of God by way of deductive (and/or other) principles? In many ways it reminds me of the show the X-Files where Mulder saw a conspiracy in every situation; some Christians seem to be overly neurotic that everyone is out to get them when in reality all we really need is a good sense of humor and the self-awareness to realize that we have some growing to do as well.

When I look back over the breadth of scripture and in the life of the historical body of followers of the Way I don’t see a strong belief in defense. I see people who are open to a God who is beyond definition, beyond tribal boundaries, beyond understanding, and beyond playing favorites. The people who “defend the faith” in scripture (Job’s friends, some of the Pharisees in the NT record, etc.) are not looked upon favorably. Early Christians seemed rather unconcerned with defending anything; they saw it as the greatest honor to give up their life for the sake of Christ, which brings me to my last point. Christians who see it as their job to defend Christianity, prayer in schools, the Bible as curriculum in public schools, and even God all do so from an assumed position of power. Only the powerful are overly concerned with defense, but the life of faith is not supposed to be one from a position of power; rather, we divest ourselves of such hindrances so as not to confuse our power with God’s goodness. There is something wrong when we assume we should be the majority, that everyone should believe how we believe, abstain from the things which we abstain from, and celebrate the anniversaries that we celebrate.

My hope is that the rise in the defensive nature of our faith, much like defense-obsessed imperialistic nations, signals an inevitable decline in the church as we know it. In order for the church to survive it must become less so that Christ can become greater. It should be willing to forego popularity for faithfulness, being right for doing good, and engaging others competitively for seeking to work cooperatively. A defensive faith is not attractive. While we are all huddled around a particular remnant of truth the rest of the world only sees our collective backs which have been turned to the ills of our present age. Perhaps our best defense is learning what mercy is and sacrificing our tendency to defend a God whose love is so great that it led to an openness that even the grave could not overcome. Maybe we will understand once more the freedom to be found in Christ, a freedom to love completely, a love free of coercion, a love free of defensiveness, and a love so open that we no longer struggle with the source of our protective faith, namely fear itself.

Things that annoy me (and a new blog)

• Going to FedEx Kinko’s: I used to go to Kinko’s to print out long documents and, for some classes, bind larger papers. I would bring in a flash drive and give it to the folks behind the counter who would make the prints for $.08/page. It was a painless experience. However, the last two trips to Kinko’s have been quite annoying. They seem to have trained their employees to think that all people are idiots. I’ve gone in on two separate occasions at two separate stores and told them I needed to make a long printout. Their response: OK, you can use the computers in the back (which cost like $1.00/minute) and make your prints there. When I ask them how much it costs to print there they tell me $.49/page. That’s a $.41/page increase. When I ask them how much it would cost if I simply gave them the flash drive they both told me $.08/page. So I would have to go through this cat and mouse game each time I wanted to print something out in order to obtain an acceptable price. My plea to the folks at FedEx Kinko’s: please don’t teach your employees to assume that we’re all dumb enough to pay fifty cents for a printed page. I will not be using FedEx Kinko’s for anything in the future.

• Eye doctors who are obviously in bed with contact manufacturers and contact solution providers. On a recent trip to the optometrist my doctor suggested that I try a new lens called Accuvue Oasys saying that it would last longer without becoming dry. I figured this would be a good thing, so I agreed and I headed to try them on and pay my bill. Before I left he wanted to let me know that since these were made from a new material I would need to use a special contact solution. In fact, there were only two that would be considered acceptable for these lenses. He said store bought solutions could create problems with the lenses. I went to Costco to check the prices on these new contacts and found that they were nearly $10 more per box, and the solution was around $8.00/bottle compared to the store bought solution from Target I’d been using (around $2.20/bottle). When I woke up the next morning I had a strange sticky film on my eyes that made it difficult to open them. I had been using an acceptable sample solution that he gave me before I left. I was also having a hard time seeing with the new contacts; for some reason they made my eyes really tired. I decided to call back to get my prescription for my old lenses. You would have thought I had threatened something much worse because when I told them about my problems the woman told me that I was probably using the wrong solution (it was the right kind given to me as a sample) and that I needed to come in and pick up a sample of the only other solution that works with these lenses. I told her I would not be coming in to do such a thing and would like to pick up a prescription for my old lenses. She sighed and eventually acquiesced despite all her attempts to change my mind. I don’t understand why this would be such a big deal unless they received a cut from Accuvue and these contact solution companies. It appears I may have made a good decision after reading this forum. I don’t like feeling like I’m at a car dealership or a mattress store when I’m at the doctor. It’s almost as bad as seeing Dr. Robert Jarvick hawking Lipitor during commercial breaks.

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On a completely unrelated note (I promise) my wife has recently started a blog, which up to this point I’ve failed to announce. She is quite funny and a breath of fresh air for those tired of my rantings. Friends from church keep asking when her next post will be, so she’s under a lot of pressure to produce more zaniness. You can see for yourself at her blog entitled Amusing Myself.