Tag: crap

Gospel as a threat

As I looked through my stuff, there are lot of interesting things that might as well go here on ispeculate.net. When taking a class about Urban Ministry in Detroit, I attended few lectures by Dr. James W. (Jim) Perkinson. Dr. Perkinson was in his lectures focused on the reading of the Bible as a response to the Empire. Continue reading Gospel as a threat

Addiction

Addiction is any compulsive, habitual behavior that limits the freedom of human desire. It is caused by the attachment, or nailing, of desire to specific objects. The word behavior is especially important in this definition, for it indicates that action is essential to addiction.

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There is a vast difference between doing these things because we freely choose and doing them because we are compelled. In the first case, the motivation is love; in the second slavery.

From Addiction and Grace: Love and Spirituality in the Healing of Addictions

Myers-Briggs

The main problem has to do with the uncritical, theologically naive, rigid, and overly confident manner in which Myers-Briggs categories are often employed in various church settings. Church people, particularly the clergy, are taking MBTI results as the gospel truth and blithely using them to make employment decisions, to establish leadership styles and regulate staff relationships, and to advise people about everything from marriage roles to prayer techniques.
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Why is it that so many in the Christian church, with its long and rich history of understanding persons in the most profound way possible -as living souls and as creatures made in the image of God should fall into the trap of allowing for a moment those theologically enduring and wondrously mysterious understandings to be displaced by something as superficial as a grid of sixteen suspiciously artificial personality types woven out of a questionable and all-too-fashionable theory of human temperament?

via Theology Today – Vol 49, No.3 – October 1992 – EDITORIAL – Myers-Briggs and Other Modern Astrologies.

Multitasking

Multitasking messes with the brain in several ways. At the most basic level, the mental balancing acts that it requires—the constant switching and pivoting—energize regions of the brain that specialize in visual processing and physical coordination and simultaneously appear to shortchange some of the higher areas related to memory and learning. We concentrate on the act of concentration at the expense of whatever it is that we’re supposed to be concentrating on.

via The Autumn of the Multitaskers by Walter Kirn.

The Miracle Question

There are various catch-all solution to be found out there. The miracle question, pioneered by Steve de Shazer could be seen as one of them. However, it is merely an attempt to be a shortcut to get right to the core of the problem in therapy. The therapist asks the client to imagine what the world would be like if the problem he presented to the therapist would disappear by a miracle over night.

One might wonder whether this is very far from the Secret or Joel Osteen, and surely I am not sure.

You can read about Solution focused brief therapy which is the fancy name for the Miracle Question.

The Myth of Positive Thinking

I came across this via orvitinn.com. Watching this video led my to www.thersa.org which describe themselves as:

For over 250 years the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) has been a cradle of enlightenment thinking and a force for social progress.  Our approach is multi-disciplinary, politically independent and combines cutting edge research and policy development with practical action.

Liberalism as the Root of Decline

In the article Death of Protestant America: A Political Theory of the Protestant Mainline (subscription needed), Joseph Bottum seems to come to the conclusion that well educated liberals in charge of the mainline denominations headquarters are to blame not only for the church’s decline but for rising division in God’s chosen country it self.

Many Americans are profoundly patriotic, no doubt, and many Americans are profoundly critical of their country. We are left, however, with a great problem in combining the two, and that problem was bequeathed to us by the death of Protestant America – by the collapse of the churches that were once both the accommodating help and criticizing prophet of the American experiment.

Mr. Bottum is right when he brings attention to the new unity in the religious spectrum.

The horizontal unity of Mere Religion cuts across denominations. Serious, believing Presbyterians, for example, now typically feel that they have more in common with serious, believing Catholics and evangelicals – with serious believing Jew, for that matter – than they do, vertically, with the unserious, unorthodox members of their own denomination.

However, I would not use words like serious and unserious believer, implying that those that don’t belong to the conservative, orthodox, “right-wingishy,” world that Mr. Bottum seems to lean towards are somehow not taking their faith seriously. It is actually possible to claim the oposite as a fact.

Creeds

When I was reading blogs from Iceland this morning it struck me that there was a person with an undergraduate degree in Philosophy and a graduate degree in teaching, an individual that had been through confirmation in ELCI and has been active in writing about religion that did not know that the Apostolic Creed is universal creed of most Christians, and he even claimed that it is not used by the Roman Catholic Church. To be excact, it sounded like he considered the Apostolic Creed to be some specific Lutheran thing.

One must ask what is the use of teaching Christianity in elementary school, like is mandatory in Iceland if this does not make it through. The second thing is of course how one can study philosophy on an undergraduate level in Western Europe without learning a thing or two about Christianity. The third is then the confirmation studies in Iceland, are they good for anything?

Child of God

My name is not “Those People.”
I am a loving woman, a mother in pain,
giving birth to the future, where my babies
have the same chance to thrive as anyone.

My name is not “Inadequate.”
I did not make my husband leave –
he chose to, and chooses not to pay child support.
Truth is though, there isn’t a job base
for all fathers to support their families.
While society turns its head, my children pay the price.

My name is not “Problem and Case to Be Managed.”
I am a capable human being and citizen, not a client.
The social service system can never replace the
compassion and concern of loving grandparents,
aunts, uncles, fathers, cousins, community –
all the bonded people who need to be
but are not present to bring children forward to their potential.

My name is not “Lazy, Dependent Welfare Mother.”
If the unwaged work of parenting,
homemaking and community building were factored
into the Gross National Product,
My work would have untold value. And why is it that mothers whose
Husbands support them to stay home and raise children
Are glorified – and why don’t they get called lazy and dependent?

This is a beginning of a poem by Julia K. Dinsmore. Her book took me back to my short experience in Detroit. The injustice, the lie called the American Dream, the difference between neighborhoods, the blatant racism, the systematic violence, the corrupt system, and the working poor stuck in a cycle of poverty, all is there in Mrs Dinsmore’s poetic memoirs or at least I sense it there.

Thoughts after reading the book My Name is Child of God … Not “Those People.”

Annals of Religion: Project Trinity : The New Yorker

‘It was the riots in Detroit, in Newark, both in ’67—that was what shook me,” he recounted. “I said to myself, ‘I have to have a theology that speaks to the hurt in my community. I want a theology that would empower people to be more creative. To be just as aggressive as they are in the riots, but more constructive.’

via Annals of Religion: Project Trinity : The New Yorker.

An important article about Black Theology, Wright and Obama.

Human Development Reports (HDR)

Human Development is a development paradigm that is about much more than the rise or fall of national incomes. It is about creating an environment in which people can develop their full potential and lead productive, creative lives in accord with their needs and interests. People are the real wealth of nations. Development is thus about expanding the choices people have to lead lives that they value. And it is thus about much more than economic growth, which is only a means —if a very important one —of enlarging people’s choices.

via Human Development | Human Development Reports (HDR) | United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

In recent years Iceland has constantly been considered one of the best places in world to life, according to HDR. No report has been published based on information gathered after the Economic Collapse in the country in October 2008.

ELCA’s Social Statement on Health and Healthcare

Health is central to our well-being, vital to relationships, and helps us live out our vocations in family, work, and community. Caring for one’s own health is a matter of human necessity and good stewardship. Caring for the health of others expresses both love for our neighbors and responsibility for a just society. As a personal and social responsibility, health care is a shared endeavor.

via Health and Healthcare – Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

Rapture Ready

I remember when I heard first about the rapture from a TV-evangelist five or six years ago. I immediately thought it was some kind of a joke having never seen anything in the Bible referring to anything like what he described. However, the believe in the rapture is real, and some incorrectly think that believing in a hateful God, that is out to destroy all Creation has something to do with Christianity.

American Dispensationalism’s Perpetually Imminent End Times* by Jonathan R. Baer is a good article that addresses this hateful religion.

God and the Digestive System

Luther suffered from lifelong constipation and urine retention. Thus, “In this creative moment the tension of nights and days of meditation found release throughout his being – and nobody who has read Luther’s private remarks can doubt that his total being always included his bowels.” Thus, for Erikson, there is something profoundly physiological in Luther’s new understanding of God as one who is “no longer lurking in the periphery of space and time,” but is rather “moving from inside” of us, and is thus, in a very real sense, “what works in us.”

From “The Soul as the ‘Coreness’ of the Self” by Donald Capps.

Pewless by Martin E. Marty

This spring a certain Christian layperson has been criticized for not exiting his local church when he disagreed with something his pastor preached.

The experts on the subject have been, as far as I can tell, media personnel who never go to church, do not know what sermons are for, and have not experienced lively congregational participation; people who value fidelity very little and church hopping and sermon shopping very highly; those who have political stakes in their judgment; and people who pay no attention to the contexts of messages.

via The Christian Century.

Restructuring UMC

The United Methodist Church or, more specifically, its U.S. component, often continues to be entangled in U.S. political and economic ideologies and desires. … we must clearly grasp that the so-called “American Way of Life” requires critique. Capitalism and consumerism are not practices taken straight from the gospel.

Elaine A Robinson has an interesting article about the need to restructure UMC in an Age of Empire (PDF). Asking questions about the unbalanced relationship between north and south.

The cost of short-term missions

While on the phone, I asked her what she thought of those groups. Her answer might surprise you: “Everyone knows,” she said, “That short term missions benefit the people who come, not the people here.”

Is that true? If so, then thousands of people are raising millions of dollars each year to do something not for others, but for themselves. Are we fooling ourselves by pretending these trips help people when they are really just an excuse to see a foreign country? If our good works are not doing good, why do them?

via catapult magazine The cost of short-term missions. The original article is to be found on pdf at www.ajshonduras.org/joannsarticle.pdf.