gathering in light

It’s been a little while since I’ve done a dress down friday post (a casual listing of interesting web links) and so today seemed like a good day to start back up again, at least on an on-again-off-again basis.

Better World Books is an online bookstore that uses funds from their sales to help encouarge literacy throughout the world, not to mention recycling old used books and giving them to those in need, and shipping your order free to anywhere in the US [thanks JR].

Better World Books collects and sells books online to fund literacy initiatives worldwide. With more than two million new and used titles in stock, we’re a self-sustaining, triple-bottom-line company that creates social, economic and environmental value for all our stakeholders.

A church youth conference set to give away a semiautomatic assualt riffle to one teenager had to cancel the giveaway.

[Read more]

A friend sent this article by Wendell Berry the other day and said it was worth the read, he is right. The article looks at how our insatiable desire for more not only has adverse effects on our lives and economy but also on our environment. This limitlessness that’s rooted in an Englightenment mentality of progress is not only unchristian but ultimately destructive. He says,

The problem with us is not only prodigal extravagance but also an assumed limitlessness. We have obscured the issue by refusing to see that limitlessness is a godly trait. We have insistently, and with relief, defined ourselves as animals or as “higher animals.� But to define ourselves as animals, given our specifically human powers and desires, is to define ourselves as limitless animals—which of course is a contradiction in terms. Any definition is a limit, which is why the God of Exodus refuses to define Himself: “I am that I am.�

And his point is that we do need limits, that this is the way things really work. He writes:

It is the artists, not the scientists, who have dealt unremittingly with the problem of limits. A painting, however large, must finally be bounded by a frame or a wall. A composer or playwright must reckon, at a minimum, with the capacity of an audience to sit still and pay attention. A story, once begun, must end somewhere within the limits of the writer’s and the reader’s memory. And of course the arts characteristically impose limits that are artificial: the five acts of a play, or the fourteen lines of a sonnet. Within these limits artists achieve elaborations of pattern, of sustaining relationships of parts with one another and with the whole, that may be astonishingly complex. And probably most of us can name a painting, a piece of music, a poem or play or story that still grows in meaning and remains fresh after many years of familiarity.

Read the rest of the article, he uses Militon and Christopher Marlowe’s Tragical History of Doctor Faustus to help make his point. it’s very thought provoking and well argued.

Faustian economics: Hell hath no limits—By Wendell Berry (Harper’s Magazine).

Shane Claiborne has a great post on the difference between “endorsing” and “advising” candidates. While I’ve already made my vote clear, I completely agree with Claibornes approach and points. One thing he said that really stands out is:

Our central allegience is to God’s Kingdom, and we invite everything else in the world to align itself with the norms of that upside-down Kingdom. That is what we endorse, and we stand behind everything and everyone that moves us closer to that - the coming of God’s Kingdom “on earth as it is in heaven.” And we get in the way of everything that contradicts and works against God’s Kingdom - interrupting injustice with grace.

God’s Politics - Jim Wallis blog, faith blog, religion, christian, christianity, politics, values.

With the last post I crossed over the 700 post mark, not a small feat considering how long it took me to do this. The first post counted on this blog is from April 2004, though I’d been blogging for at least a year before that.

It was also during this time that I hit the 100,000 unique hits mark for this website since I started keeping track in 2006. [Read more]

Most of you know about Mark Driscoll, he’s a mainstream pastor from Seattle with a church of about 6,000 people. He’s also infamous to many for being rather misogynistic, and focused on an overtly-testosterone reading of the Scriptures.  The satire magazine Wittenburg Door has done an article about his recent conference and it’s a good read.
Here’s a quote:

“The problem with our churches today is that the lead pastor is some sissy boy who wears cardigan sweaters, has The Carpenters dialed in on his iPod, gets his hair cut at a salon instead of a barber shop, hasn’t been to an Ultimate Fighting match, works out on an elliptical machine instead of going to isolated regions of Russia like in Rocky IV in order to harvest lumber with his teeth, and generally swishes around like Jack from Three’s Company whenever Mr. Roper was around.�

Driscoll Reaches New Spiritual Level, Kicks His Own Ass | Wittenburg Door

[Read more]

I’ve posted my June essay on Barclay press if you care to have a read (it’s nice and long!). Here’s and excerpt:

This past April Radiohead did another thing that sparked imaginations and challenged the preexisting structures of the music industry, yet again. They setup a website and invited people to remix one of their singles, “Nude.” Along with the invitation, they released the audio tracks containing the guitars, strings, drums, bass, and vocals through the iTunes music store. They invited people to participate in a contest to see who would make the best remix of their song, all the votes would be made by Radiohead fans (the winning remix received 38568 votes). By looking at remix culture, I think the church can learn something about how creativity and imagination interacts with existing ideas and structures and builds off those resources while also moving beyond them in new ways.

Click here to continue reading this essay.

Here’s a nice long quote from Rufus M. Jones about what he hopes to see in the future of Friends. The quote comes from a lecture he gave at the Baltimore Young Friends Yearly Meeting in 1944:

I am looking for a time, and counting on it, when we shall have a Society of Friends not composed of a few awakened leaders and a body of unkindled quiescent members who move in the ancient grooves of habit and routine. But instead a live membership of persons who have thought out their principles of life and not merely adopted them second hand. It was that unique high level of the total membership of the body which made early Quakerism such a convincing and conquering body of people. They knew what they believed and they lived in the power of it. They had a philosophy of life and they transmitted it.

There is very great need to have the unique aspect of spirit in man and its relation to the divine spirit in the universe freshly interpreted in a world that has become bogged down with material conceptions of life and the world.

There is very great need of a more vital grasp of the unique Person at the headwaters of our faith lined up with the Real Presence of the inward Christ who is the Life of our lives…We can very well have a moratorium of divisive theological doctrines and focus our minds on a religion of life, vitally, livingly, constructively grasped and expressed in life and character.

Jones, R. M. (1944). What Will Get Us Ready? The Baltimore Young Friends Yearly Meeting Lecture for 1944. Baltimore Yearly Meeting, p 6.

It’s been really nice to return to Woodbrooke Quaker Study Center this past week. I’ve been here now for about a week and a half and have just about that much time left in the UK before I make a return trip to Ohio for a little vacation with the family. The familiarity of returning here, having friends I looked forward to seeing, and having actual conferences, as well as studying to do has made it even more fun to be in Birmingham than last year, albeit also very busy. I’ve been spending my mornings getting up around 8am, eating breakfast, going to morning worship and then studying until about 4 or 5pm, doing dinner and then meeting up with friends. [Read more]