Digressions » JakeBouma.com

Following in the footsteps of The Boston Globe’s The Big Picture and The Wall Street Journal’s Photo Journal, Christianity Today has launched Imago Fidei, a photoblog that bills itself as “a daily view of Christian life.” While not strictly photos, there are some gems in the archives. 05/15/2009
C. Wess Daniels, a Quaker, discusses Denominations and Traditions: Thoughts on Differences. Just for the fun of it, I’ll replace the word ‘Quaker’ in a section of his post with ‘Lutheran’: “I have very little interest in Lutheranism, in as much as it is an ism. These things that are the “way we’ve always done them” can actually becomes obstacles to our believing in the power of God’s Spirit. The denominational nitty gritty, when it is left to its own devices and not rooted within the life of the tradition, only sustains structures often reinforcing the church’s role as a placeholder for our belief rather than a bottom-up community of people following God’s mission in the world. I want to be a part of a community that not only tells but also lives into the stories of those we call Lutheran.” 04/30/2009
Nate Phelps, the son of faux-Christian hate peddler Fred Phelps, recently presented a paper at the American Atheists Convention titled The Uncomfortable Grayness of Life. There is simply too much good stuff to quote here, so just go read it for yourself (it’s lengthy, but totally worthwhile). Oh, heck, here’s a tasty morsel:
His desire to get back in shape was, in and of itself, a good and even necessary thing. However, true to his character, my father took a personal desire to improve his health and turned it into an obsession that impacted the entire family. Soon, we would arrive home from selling candies, only to get back in the cars and head over to the high school to run 5 or 10 miles around the track. Charts were hung up all around the house, tracking progress and setting new distance goals. Running the marathon became my father’s Holy Grail; learning of a marathon that was coming up nearby, he stepped up our training to run 15 and then 20 miles. As grueling as this regiment was, none of the children dared complain.
Related: The Church of Hate and Westboro Baptist Lawsuit 04/28/2009
Philosophy’s great experiment. “A dynamic new school of thought is emerging that wants to kick down the walls of recent philosophy and place experimentation back at its centre. It has a name to delight an advertising executive: x-phi. It has blogs and books devoted to it, and boasts an expanding body of researchers in elite universities. It even has an icon: an armchair in flames. If philosophy ever can be, x-phi is trendy. But, increasingly, it is also attracting hostility.” 04/13/2009
New poll from Gallup: “Despite suggestions that the economic recession might cause religiosity among Americans to increase, there has been no evident change over the past 15 months in either Americans’ self-reported church attendance or the importance of religion in their daily lives.” 03/26/2009
Godless America? Say Hello to the “Apatheists”. “It appears that most of the unaffiliated individuals [in recent surveys] are not atheistic or anti-religious in any activist sense, but are rather apathetic toward organized religion and reluctant to join any particular denomination or sect. Perhaps an appropriate term to describe such individuals is ‘apatheist,’ a person who is not interested in trying to prove or disprove God’s existence or any other religious dogma.” 03/19/2009
Growing Up on Facebook is an interesting editorial on how Facebook impacts adolescents in their transition into adulthood. “College was my big chance to doff the roles in my family and community that I had outgrown, to reinvent myself, to get busy with the embarrassing, exciting, muddy, wonderful work of creating an adult identity. Can you really do that with your 450 closest friends watching, all tweeting to affirm ad nauseam your present self?” 03/15/2009
According to Brett McCracken, I am a Christian hipster. “They love poetry readings, worshipping with candles, and smoking pipes while talking about God.” 03/06/2009
Marshall McLuhan was far ahead of his time in terms of understanding media and communication theory, but he was surprisingly anti-technology. “Many people seem to think that if you talk about something recent, you’re in favor of it. The exact opposite is true in my case. Anything I talk about is almost certain to be something I’m resolutely against, and it seems to me the best way of opposing it is to understand it, and then you know where to turn off the button.” Related: Is Google Making Us Stupid? 03/05/2009
The Myth of the Institution-less Church. “Often, in reaction, we think that, in having no programmes, no hierarchy, the removal of the institution will solve the problem. After all, if the institution is getting in the way of the purpose, get rid of the institution. This response is increasingly ingrained in us, such that even using the word ‘institution’ is anathema to those seeking new ways of doing and being church. But I think how ever well intentioned, this approach is naive and inadequate to the task of being Church.” 03/02/2009
Five places to go before global warming messes them up. I’ve been to two of the five, but it’s the two that are in the United States. 02/23/2009
On the occasion of Darwin’s birthday: Five Things We Can Learn From Creationists. “2) They never tire of pointing out how scientific ideas can be misused by dangerous ideologies, from reckless capitalism, to vanguard communism, to Nazism. We will always need the reminder.” 02/12/2009
How Teenagers Find Themselves. “Cognitive neuroscientist Sarah-Jayne Blakemore of University College London and her colleagues found that when compared with scenarios describing basic emotions that did not involve the opinions of others, such as fear and disgust, girls who thought about onlookers’ opinions engaged a brain region known as the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) more during social emotional scenarios than adult women did. This area is one of the last regions to develop before adulthood, and it is known to activate in adults when they think about themselves, about other people and even about the personality traits of animals.” Related: The Primal Teen: Book review 02/06/2009
The End of Solitude from The Chronicle of Higher Education. The long quote is worth it: “Loneliness is not the absence of company, it is grief over that absence. The lost sheep is lonely; the shepherd is not lonely. But the Internet is as powerful a machine for the production of loneliness as television is for the manufacture of boredom. If six hours of television a day creates the aptitude for boredom, the inability to sit still, a hundred text messages a day creates the aptitude for loneliness, the inability to be by yourself. Some degree of boredom and loneliness is to be expected, especially among young people, given the way our human environment has been attenuated. But technology amplifies those tendencies. You could call your schoolmates when I was a teenager, but you couldn’t call them 100 times a day. You could get together with your friends when I was in college, but you couldn’t always get together with them when you wanted to, for the simple reason that you couldn’t always find them. If boredom is the great emotion of the TV generation, loneliness is the great emotion of the Web generation. We lost the ability to be still, our capacity for idleness. They have lost the ability to be alone, their capacity for solitude.” 01/24/2009
Mysterious ways in which the Lord works. “Always minimizes windows right when you walk up.” 01/22/2009

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