A nice set of posts by Bob Robinson. The series started with Embracing the True, the Good, and the Beautiful and also included a post on Art in Action: Toward Shalom and also included Finding God in Secular Movies? and several posts on Andy Crouch’s typologies of condemning, critiquing, copying, and consuming culture. The latest post is about how Creation/Fall/Redemption provides a better paradigm for cultural engagement.

April Diaz reflecting an almost-meltdown: “My days are out of control recently. I’m working way too much. Way. It’s a unique season of ministry where I’ve finished most days with a list of “to dos” longer than when I’ve started the day. Every single day has dealt with painful emails, difficult conversations, disappointed followers, misunderstood decisions, and awkward transitions. Literally, every single day. It’s a season I hope to leave sooner than later. Tears have defiantly fallen more often than I’d like. I’ve been hanging on by a thread while passionately casting a vision of a new thing I believe God’s calling our community toward [Isaiah 43:18-19]. Most days I feel a complicated tension of intense conviction and a weary beat down.”

Justin Taylor has a good post on the “angry Calvinist” issue. Calvinism ought to produce humility but the intoxication of its subject has led some — and their number is miniscule even if quite noisy — to be angry or arrogant. It’s not Calvinism but the person. It would be reasonable to think each system of thought would have the same number of angry proponents.

10 Reasons why we should care about science and faith discussions by Thomas Jay Oord.

Rachel Blom: “A very good friend of mine is single. I’ve never considered him different from all my other friends, most of whom are married, but he feels he is. He is a Christian, like me, and till recently we attended the same church. The difference is that he often feels excluded in the sermons we both hear, while I don’t.”

Bibledex, quite the source.

Tim Dalrymple’s announcement.

Robert Henry, on GLBT, on talking with instead of talking about.

Jamal Jivanjee: “Do you see where I am going with this? The evangelical system has become a glorified ‘pyramid’ scheme. Like the soap, we are taught to tell people about this amazing man named Jesus Christ who loves us and died for us. We tell the world that He is the living bread. We tell people that the water He gives will satisfy. We tell people that he comes to give us abundant life, etc… then, shortly after a person is interested in this Christ and says yes, the focus changes. Instead of discovering and experiencing the depths and beauty of this glorious man, we are quickly taught that there are things we must ‘do’ to get more and train more Christ ‘distributors’. This was true in my own life. As a young man, I fell in love with Jesus Christ and I said yes to His proposal. The more time I spent in the religious system, however, the more that the focus shifted off of Him and on something else. I was taught that more ‘distributors’ were needed, and my job was to go get them and train them in the same way that my co-worker sold me on Amway. I speak from experience when I say that this focus on ‘doing’ does not lead to life, but away from life. There is a reason for this.”

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Barnabas Piper on his dad and Kirby Puckett’s example: ““Kirby Puckett NEVER jogs to first base!” 20 years ago a father yelled this encouragement to his chubby, baseball-loving son on a baked, dirt infield at Elliot Park near downtown Minneapolis. That chubby kid never forgot that piece of advice. For some reason my dad’s encouragement at that patchy, scrubby baseball field has resonated in my head a lot recently. I am not really sure why. Anyone who’s read John Piper’s books or has listened to him preach knows that he has made some profound, challenging, mind-blowing, tongue-twisting, soul-wrenching statements. But what I remember most is that “Kirby Puckett NEVER jogs to first base!” Speaking of John Piper, here’s a nice set of thoughts about more than thirty years of ministry.

As long as we don’t surrender eternity, we need to embolden our embodiment in theology.

On the end of postmodernity: “At some point, however, it stopped working. It stopped being relevant. Or maybe people just got tired of it. At some point the response to the postmodern itself became “Whatever…” Maybe we saw that everyone could do it, or because we felt at some level it was superficial semiotic play. Postmodern works became almost self-deconstructing, and appreciation of culture devolved into nothing more than solving puzzles by following clues left deliberately by authors. Or maybe it was a heightened sense of reality after 9-11, or maybe the Great Recession makes the cultural pastiche central to postmodern culture seem trite. Or maybe it’s simply exhausted. …  The best way I can describe what I think comes next, in light of postmodernism, is the death of cool. The detachment and aloofness that defined cool are no longer palatable to younger generations. “Whatever,” followed by some glib deconstruction of motives, intent, and meaning, is no longer an acceptable response to an idea or question. Deconstruction is no longer an excuse for inaction or withdrawal. Now the preferred response seems to be “I know you can’t trust it, I know you can’t be sure, but still…”

Here are Kris and I at Berry Farm near Margaret River feeding Honey Eaters.

Wisdom on alcohol from Brad.

Faithful to (and beyond) the end.

Good personal story by Chaplain Mike.

Rachel Stone interviews Bill Webb, a patient and kind Bible professor, on Bible reading and feminism. Here’s a good clip: “Many complementarians believe that an egalitarian reading of the Bible owes more to our own cultural prejudices than to a faithful reading of Scripture. What’s your answer to them? I think this question betrays two incorrect assumptions. First, it wrongly assumes that hierarchicalists or patriarchalists do not have their own cultural and subcultural prejudices that impact their reading of Scripture. Second, it wrongly assumes that Scripture itself has not been impacted in its own formation with cultural components and a fallen-world context that shapes its social ethics. One would do well to read Mark Noll’s The Civil War as a Theological Crisis to see how communities dominate how we read Scripture (many preachers used Scripture to defend slavery). Did ancient culture impact the biblical ethics of slavery but not that of women? ”

She also interviewed Russell Moore, one of the finest Christian gentleman I’ve met, who speaks from the angle of the complementarian: “What complementarianism contributes to this discussion is to say that where there is a loss of self-sacrificial, other-protective male leadership, the result is not equality but the worst form of patriarchy. In the Bible, headship is not dictatorship, but instead the responsibility to sacrifice oneself for another (Eph. 5:25-30). In a Christian view of reality, women’s value is not determined by her sexual attractiveness or availability to men. A truly complementarian Christianity will value the full spectrum of gifts, and the cooperative economy that God brings about through the distinctions between women and men as well as through their commonalities.”

Jesus was right to elevate this theme from the margins to the center, and we’d do ourselves a favor by listening to him.

One possible consequence of blogging, yowzers!

Dean Curry, at Patheos, on an ethic of civility explaining what he sees as drift among evangelicals: “Apart from his prescience in this area, Hunter’s analysis is perhaps most useful in helping us understand the reasons for change within evangelicalism. Of particular note is Hunter’s insightful parsing of the dimensions of “civility,” one of modernity’s unassailable innovations. The essence of civility is tolerance, arguably the primordial concept of our post-modern age, and a habit now widely embraced by evangelicals. But there is another dimension to civility that Hunter identifies as the inversion of tolerance, namely tolerability, and it is this side of civility that Hunter argues is key to understanding the dynamics of transformation that have taken place within American evangelicalism.The ethic of civility requires not only that individuals be tolerant of others; it also requires that they must be tolerable to others.” And if you read the site, check also John Sanders’ comment.

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Paul Simms is Mark Twain 2.0.

K. Rex Butts on a Bible reading motto: “The motto was “speak where the Bible speaks, be silent where the Bible is silent.”  Its has a long history in my church tradition.  It became a rule for interpreting the New Testament which was viewed as though it was a legislative law establishing a once-for-all fixed pattern for the way the church was to worship and be organized. I don’t know about you but I find it a bit ironic that this motto–which can be found no where in scripture and yet calls for silence where the Bible is silent–has held such sway over the way the Bible was read.”

Robert Crosby’s three trends in Pentecostalism: “Ministry practitioners, denominational leaders, and scholars whom I have talked to have noted three prominent trends in North American Pentecostalism: a marked decrease in speaking in tongues in public worship; fresh developments in Pentecostal eschatology; and a broader engagement in compassionate ministry and social concern.”

I tire of Bart Ehrman’s relentless attempts to live down his past, but one person who tirelessly examines Ehrman’s manifestos is Dan Wallace. And Jeremy Bouma tackles universalism in Romans 5. The Virtual Abbess takes a look at M. Scott Peck.

Tim Dalrymple: “So make no mistake: the Budget Control Act doesn’t put a dent in the mountain of debt our government has accrued.  If the commitments of the BCA are fulfilled, then we will add to that mountain at a slightly-less-manic pace than before, but the very purpose of the act was to enable the big Beltway spenders to make the mountain bigger.  Worse, the BCA leaves completely unchanged the social and political dynamics that have led to this debt in the first place.  Our political elite are addicted to spending.  It’s how they curry favor, it’s how they win elections, and it’s how they exercise and enjoy their power.  They’re perfectly willing to borrow money to feed the addiction, because they have a credit card.  The name on the credit card is: You and Your Children.”

I came upon a few pieces about education and bundle them together here. Matt Damon made waves when he complained about how low public school teachers are, and that led Nick Gillespie into some research with this: “According to Department of Education statistics for 2007-2008 (the most recent year listed), the average public school teacher brought in a bit over $53,000 in “total school-year and summer earned income.” That figure, which is about $13,000 more than what the average private-school teacher gets in straight salary, does not include health and retirement benefits, places where teachers almost always get better deals and bigger employer contributions than the typical private-sector worker. For more on teacher compensation, go here. An average salary of $53,000 may not be much for a movie star such as Damon, but it’s a pretty good wage when compared to U.S. averages. Indeed, the Census Bureau reports that median householdincome in 2008 was $52,000. Teaching in most public schools requires a bachelor’s degree and here teachers fare less well on first glance, though still not awful. The median income for a man with a B.A. was $82,000; for a woman, it was $54,000. About three-quarters of teachers are women, so the average salaries when gender comes into play hew closely to one another.

And Virginia Postel asks if teachers are not as smart as they used to be: “PUBLIC-SCHOOL teachers just aren’t as smart as they used to be. After all, women have more job opportunities. Bright women who once would have taught school today become doctors and lawyers. The gain for individual women is a loss for education.Or so many people believe. The story is plausible, but is it true?”

From Murtaza, with some serious computerese: “Are students’ teaching evaluations influenced by instructors’ looks? ggplot2 may help find the answer.”

And by Liz Dwyer: “Another sign that the college lecture might be dying: Harvard University physics professor Eric Mazur is championing the “flipped classroom,” a model where information traditionally transferred during lectures is learned on a student’s own time, and classroom time is spent discussing and applying knowledge to real-world situations. To make it easy for professors to transition out of lecture mode, Mazur has developedLearning Catalytics, an interactive software that enables them to make the most of student interactions and maximize the retention of knowledge.”

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