Digressions » JakeBouma.com

Kenda Creasy Dean has a new article in The Christian Century titled Faith, nice and easy: The almost-Christian formation of teens. “Young people will not develop consequential faith simply by being absorbed into a so-called Christian culture as an alternative to the culture at large; churches are quite capable of developing deformative cultures of their own, while washing down the gospel with large gulps of rationalization. Consequential faith is the result of doing ministry, and not simply being ministered to.” The article is a distillation of her new book Almost Christian: What the Faith of Our Teenagers is Telling the American Church which Tony Jones is blogging his way through. 08/10/2010
This is the best article on an unknown philosopher you’ll read all weekend. I’m almost tempted to quote the whole thing, but I’ll refrain. “In the academic world, custom dictates that you may be considered a legend if there is more than one well-known anecdote about you. Morgenbesser, with his Borscht Belt humor and preternaturally agile mind, was the subject of dozens. In the absence of a written record of his wisdom, this was how people related to him: by knowing the stories and wanting to know more. The most widely circulated tale — in many renditions it is even presented as a joke, not the true story that it is — was his encounter with the Oxford philosopher J. L. Austin. During a talk on the philosophy of language at Columbia in the 50’s, Austin noted that while a double negative amounts to a positive, never does a double positive amount to a negative. From the audience, a familiar nasal voice muttered a dismissive, ‘Yeah, yeah.’” Wikipedia has a few more delectable Morgenbesser anecdotes (”Asked to prove a questioner’s existence, Morgenbesser shot back, ‘Who’s asking?’”). Publishers: I’d drop everything to read his biography. 08/07/2010
On Distraction is a short, cogent article by Alain de Botton. “We are continuously challenged to discover new works of culture—and, in the process, we don’t allow any one of them to assume a weight in our minds. We leave a movie theater vowing to reconsider our lives in the light of a film’s values. Yet by the following evening, our experience is well on the way to dissolution, like so much of what once impressed us: the ruins of Ephesus, the view from Mount Sinai, the feelings after finishing Tolstoy’s Death of Ivan Ilyich.” Related: The Age of the Informavore 06/08/2010
I found it nearly impossible to read John Caputo’s latest article in Tikkun Magazine without connecting it to LOST. “God does not bring closure but a gap. A God of the gaps is not the gap God fills, but the gap God opens. The name of God makes the present a space troubled by an immemorial past and an unforeseeable future.” HT: Tony Jones and Blake Huggins 05/24/2010
The Advent Community and the Emergence of God’s Dream for Creation by Troy Bronsink. “I have observed four theologies that are undergoing reimagination by emergent congregations: ecclesiology, eschatology, missiology, and incarnation. From the vantage point of these emergent theologies, I want to illuminate four metaphors from these texts that reimage preaching in Advent: an ecclesiology of the unfinished way, an eschatology of trade in seeds that will find future purchase in God’s coming dreams, a missiology in which language and symbols are reconceived by the Holy Spirit, and an incarnational theology of ordinary watching and witnessing.” (HT: Soupiset) 12/21/2009
Is Advent Biblical? “But I’m not concerned merely with whether Advent is not disallowed in Scripture. I want to know if observing Advent is consistent with biblical themes and priorities. Is Advent biblical in this grander sense? Could the observance of Advent help one to grow in faith in a way that aligns with biblical faith?” 12/09/2009
Fortress Forum, a social community for religious academics, has posted an interview with Walter Brueggemann. “Given the current frailty of the capitalist system and the fact that the ‘big money’ continues to grow while ordinary people increasingly become poor and homeless, I suspect that this character [God], embedded in this tradition, is a wake-up call for contemporary social-political thought. It is not difficult to imagine that dominant ideologies and narrative explanations of reality have reached a dead end. For that reason I judge that it is a worth-while effort, regardless of one’s ‘faith commitments,’ to continue to pay attention to and exposit this character and the tradition that clusters around the character. I understand that to be the work of biblical theology. Such a perspective refuses to be boxed in by the critical categories of Enlightenment rationality, for it is a reach behind that rationality to see about the haunting that cannot be so readily dismissed.” Brueggemann’s newest book is titled An Unsettling God: The Heart of the Hebrew Bible. 11/19/2009
Shane Claiborne wrote a letter to non-believers in Esquire(!) titled What If Jesus Meant All That Stuff? “The entire story of Jesus is about a God who did not just want to stay ‘out there’ but who moves into the neighborhood, a neighborhood where folks said, ‘Nothing good could come.’ It is this Jesus who was accused of being a glutton and drunkard and rabble-rouser for hanging out with all of society’s rejects, and who died on the imperial cross of Rome reserved for bandits and failed messiahs. This is why the triumph over the cross was a triumph over everything ugly we do to ourselves and to others. It is the final promise that love wins.” 11/18/2009
The Age of the Informavore: A Talk With Frank Schirrmacher is currently featured in Edge, along with responses from thinkers like Nicholas Carr and Steven Pinker. “We are apparently now in a situation where modern technology is changing the way people behave, people talk, people react, people think, and people remember. And you encounter this not only in a theoretical way, but when you meet people, when suddenly people start forgetting things, when suddenly people depend on their gadgets, and other stuff, to remember certain things. This is the beginning, its just an experience. But if you think about it and you think about your own behavior, you suddenly realize that something fundamental is going on.” So much good stuff in there. Related: Is Google Making Us Stupid? 11/06/2009
Here’s a new Pew report on Social Isolation and New Technology for your perusal. “Sociologists Miller McPherson, Lynn Smith-Lovin and Matthew Brashears suggest that new technologies, such as the internet and mobile phone, may play a role in advancing this trend [of becoming more socially isolated]. Specifically, they argue that the type of social ties supported by these technologies are relatively weak and geographically dispersed, not the strong, often locally-based ties that tend to be a part of peoples’ core discussion network.” 11/04/2009

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