• Are we on the verge of the Great Emergence? is a short article that discusses Phyllis Tickle’s talk at the Atlanta NYWC:

  “This kind of revolution, said Tickle, doesn’t mean ‘any one of those forms of earlier Christianity ever ceases to be. It simply means that every time we have one of these great upheavals … whatever was the dominant form of Christianity loses its pride of place and gives way to something new. What’s giving way, right now, is Protestantism as you and I have always known it.’”

  See also The Future of the Emerging Church: Are we experiencing the next Reformation of Christianity?, an interview with Tickle from earlier this year. (ht: ysmarko) 11/29/2007
• Set your TiVo; we’re landing on Mars in August 2031. 11/27/2007

William Sloane Coffin, “A Politically Engaged Spirituality”

The iTunes store subdivision iTunes U makes available tons of lectures (audio and video) from 28 colleges and universities, including MIT, Yale, Fuller Theological Seminary, Duke, UC Berkley and others (Click here to open iTunes U in your iTunes). It’s essentially a free goldmine of collegiate and graduate level lectures that you can download individually or subscribe to podcast-style. JR Woodward recently posted about iTunes U as well.

I recently had the chance to listen to several lectures from the Yale Religion Department (link opens in iTunes), including one from April 2005 entitled “A Politically Engaged Spirituality” by the late William Sloane Coffin. Coffin was an outspoken political activist (he was indicted by a Federal grand jury in 1968 for conspiracy to aid draft resistance) and he was a gay rights advocate before it became trendy.

The lecture can be downloaded from iTunes (again, for free), and Yale has a full transcript available as well. Before I found the transcript, I had made mental notes of several quotes that stuck with me – check them out below:

I believe Christianity is a worldview that undergirds all progressive thought and action. The Christian church doesn’t have a social ethic as much as it is a social ethic, called to respond to biblical mandates like truth-telling, confronting injustice and pursuing peace. What is so heart-breaking is that, in a world of pain crying out for change, so many American churches today are basically down to management and therapy.

The Religious Right is also not going away. As Robert Kennedy properly observed, “What is dangerous is not that extremists are extreme but that they are intolerant.” Almost equally dangerous, I would suggest, is the sense of superiority that keeps theologians and biblical scholars from taking on the Falwells of the world because they don’t consider them worthy antagonists. I sympathize. The delusional is no longer marginal but has come in from the fringe and occupies the center of power.

The problem is not to reconcile homosexuality with biblical passages that condemn it. The problem is to make Christians face up to the fact that everything biblical is not Christ-like, and that Christians are called upon to worship the Word made flesh, not the Word made words.

I can only hope that I’m as passionate and fiery in my old age as Coffin was.

Anyway, I encourage you to listen to his lecture and let me know what you think. Also, take some time and poke around iTunes U. What do you find that piques your interest?

Looking for more on William Sloane Coffin? Check it:

Religion & Ethics Newsweekly profile of Coffin, August 2004

Coffin’s entry on Wikipedia

Remembrance of Coffin in The Nation

• Google is investing tens of millions of dollars to develop clean energy technologies that are cheaper than coal. “It is an audacious goal that nobody will blame Google for not meeting, and that will attract heaps praise if they make any progress whatsoever. But, hey, they are smart guys. Solving global warming is just a big engineering problem, right?” 11/27/2007

The Subversive Blogger Awards

Today I would like to officially announce a brand-spanking-new blog meme called the Subversive Blogger Awards.

American author Henry Miller (1891-1980) once said, “The new always carries with it the sense of violation, of sacrilege. What is dead is sacred; what is new, that is different, is evil, dangerous, or subversive.”

Subversive bloggers are unsatisfied with the status quo, whether in church, politics, economics or any other power-laden institution, and they are searching for (and blogging about) what is new (or a “return to”) – even though it may be labeled as sacrilege, dangerous, or subversive.

To kick off the Subversive Blogger Awards, I am tagging the following five blogs/bloggers:

1. Pomomusings by Adam Walker Cleaveland
2. Mattopia by Matt Cleaver
3. iamjoshbrown by Josh Brown
4. Headphonaught’s Nanolog by Thomas Mathie
5. soupablog by Paul Soupiset

The rules of participation are pretty straightforward:

1. If you are tagged, write a post with links to five subversive blogs
2. Link back to this post on JakeBouma.com so people can easily find the origin of the meme
3. Optional: Proudly display the “Subversive Blogger Award” somewhere on your blog (images below) with a link to the post that you wrote

That’s all there is to it. Keep in mind that this award is meant as an encouragement to bloggers to keep doing what they’re already doing – being subversive (however you interpret it). May we never forget that Jesus (and His message) was the original and ultimate subversive.

Here are the images you can use for your blog, courtesy of Josh Brown and Red Cowboy Designs. All I ask is that you download them and upload them to your own server.

Blog on.

Thanksgiving update

I have been in St. Louis for the past few days, enjoying Thanksgiving break. The blogging will pick up again on Monday.

During my time here, I finished the book Revisiting Relational Youth Ministry: From a Strategy of Influence to a Theology of Incarnation, and I’m about 2/3 through The Primal Teen: What the New Discoveries about the Teenage Brain Tell Us about Our Kids. I’ll post reviews of both books in the near future. The Thirty pages per day project is full steam ahead.

I also saw the film Michael Clayton. It wasn’t too bad, as far as lawyer movies go.

• Said at Southern Seminary has posted a lengthy (1:02) interview with N.T. Wright which covers all sorts of ground, including justification, sola scriptura, New Perspective on Paul (NPP), penal substitution, evangelism, and so on. 11/19/2007
• Relevant Magazine reviews Rob Bell’s “the gods aren’t angry” tour (tour dates). “The strength of Bell’s style as a writer and speaker is his ability to apply big ideas, cultural analogies and personal stories into dynamic illustrations of scriptural principles. It’s this way of delivering his message that has made Bell one of the most exciting leaders in the up-and-coming church, and especially engaging at the evening’s event.” 11/19/2007

Cat owners, this one’s for you

Donald Miller – “Story”

kelly’s balcony, originally uploaded by jakebouma on flickr.

I have been in Chicago for the past few days, visiting some friends and enjoying the city. One of my favorite things about traveling is that I can listen to a bunch of podcasts for which I don’t normally have time.

On the drive here I got caught up on the Mars Hill Bible Church podcast (Rob Bell’s church). The latest episode is a guest appearance by Donald Miller called “Story” (see below for download links). Miller speaks about God’s ability as a storyteller and how our lives are essentially lived stories. He breaks down the components of stories and analyzes what differentiates good stories from bad stories. I was totally engaged during the whole presentation; it was awesome.

From what I understand, Miller’s message is a distillation of his forthcoming book Let Story Guide You which is currently slated for release in May 2008. Sounds like it will be another great book. [UPDATE 02/26/09: According to this blog post on Don's website, the name of his new book is A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, which is "essentially the same subject matter (of Let Story Guide You) but told in a more narrative form," and it has a release date of November 30, 2009.]

You can listen to his message by clicking either of the links below:

Donald Miller – “Story” (mp3, Mars Hill website)

Mars Hill Bible Church podcast on iTunes

If you choose to listen to the podcast, or have heard Miller speak on “Story” already, what are your thoughts? What resonated with you and/or what did you disagree with?

• A Robot Performs Stand-Up Comedy to a Lackluster Response. “Dating between robots can also be difficult. I will often say, ‘Please let me watch the local sporting event.’ But she will just as often say, ‘I want to spend time together!’ The metaphor is that male robots and female robots speak different languages. Do you agree?” (warning: adult language, but hilarious nonetheless) 11/15/2007
• Brandon has resurrected Kingdom Theories from the dead with his post On History: A Brief (vulnerable) Word: Part I. “As I study history, I find it hard to say anything that hasn’t already been said. Anything that hasn’t already been ignored. Anything that hasn’t already been exploited to promulgate idiosyncratic, ethnocentric, or schismatic ideas.” 11/14/2007

The “Thirty pages per day” project

Although I love reading, I am a notoriously bad reader. This somewhat paradoxical statement has led me to develop the “Thirty pages per day” project.

My stack of “to read” books is growing and I’m barely making a dent. I have maybe five or six books that I’ve started and not finished, and in a couple of those I am at least halfway through. Perhaps it’s built into my personality as an Enneagram type seven: “[Type sevens have a] tendency to believe that something better awaits them, [which] makes them reluctant to narrow down their options or to pursue their aims with true devotion.”

Regardless, the “Thirty pages per day” project is my personal attempt to overcome my reading deficiencies. The process is pretty straightforward: read thirty pages per day from the same book until completion and move on to the next book. This will both help to develop a discipline of reading in my daily schedule and make a bigger dent in my stack of books.

If I remain faithful to the project for an entire year without skipping any days (unlikely), I will have read a total of 10,950 pages. Assuming the average book is 300 pages long (a rather generous assumption, I presume), that amounts to 36.5 books.

I think I might use a productivity secret from Jerry Seinfeld to help me in the project. To ensure he does his task of writing every day, Jerry hangs a big wall calendar and draws a red “X” through every day that he has completed his task. The goal is then to get a long chain of Xs, which encourages you to keep going to avoid breaking the chain. While writing this post I even discovered the website www.dontbreakthechain.com, an online version of Jerry’s concept.

I’ve heard similar projects, like 52 books in 52 weeks, but does anyone else use some sort of program like this to guide their reading habits?

• Announcing the 2007 Oxford word of the year: Locavore. “The ‘locavore’ movement encourages consumers to buy from farmers’ markets or even to grow or pick their own food, arguing that fresh, local products are more nutritious and taste better. Locavores also shun supermarket offerings as an environmentally friendly measure, since shipping food over long distances often requires more fuel for transportation.” 11/13/2007
• Challenges to Both Left and Right on Global Warming, from the New York Times, discusses recent books and a trend of de-polarization in the environmentalism movement. “In the end, the books overlap most in their embrace of the idea that the human influence on climate requires a concerted response, but that the rhetoric of catastrophe is unlikely to motivate that response.” Related: Changing the Climate Debate 11/12/2007

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