reaing 'the golden compass'

We're a small portion through "The Golden Compass," and I'm fascinated with just about every aspect of the book so far: not just the characterizations of Lyra, Asriel, the Master and others; but also with the imaginative setting he's created in Jordan College, a world where people's souls are visibly expressed outside their bodies; and the tremendously rich language, like alethiometer and anbarology.

 

Good book. Wish I could figure out what all the fuss is about.

the lost relic of calcata

I've heard of all sorts of holy relics before: the Shroud of Turin,  skeletal remains of one saint or another, splinters from the Holy Rood (enough  of them to make dozens of crosses), and so on.

 

Somehow it never occurred to me that anyone would claim to have the foreskin of Christ. Once you  accept that someone did, it only makes sense to think that the Vatican might have stolen it just to shut people up and get rid of the  embarassment.

The Purpose-Driven phenomenon is an empty hack

I must be really slow on the uptake, but I finally realized tonight what I mislike so much about the Purpose-Driven books.

It's not the self-help aspect of it. Actually, that's the part that most makes it intimidating to criticize. As soon as you say something against a book like "The Prayer of Jabez," "40 Days of Purpose" or "The Purpose-Driven Life," a dozen people will spring up out of the woodwork to tell you how you don't understand, how you're being too hasty to judge the books, and how these volumes have revolutionized their spiritual lives.

If the books really have had that tremendous an effect -- and I have to admit, I haven't seen any evidence to suggest they have, beyond mere anecdotes about personal internal spiritual states -- who am I to criticize or say that the books' proponents are misguided? More power to them.

It's also not the marketing aspect of it, although I have to admit that the stealth marketing of spiritual self-help books doesn't do anything to detract from the dislike and suspicion I heave their way. It seems like modern-day simony to beguile a pastor with hype about the latest big thing spiritually, into trying a sermon series that requires either the church or its parishioners to buy dozens of copies of a book.

It's not just books like Rick Warren's bestseller doing this now. Last year, pastors could win $1,000 if they mentioned Disney's "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" during a sermon before the movie's release date. Earlier this year, there was a tremendous hoopla over programs and books churches could offer to counter the bad history and Gnostic philosophy underlying "The Da Vinci Code," which also benefited from all the publicity.

No, here's what really bothers me about these books: They're a cheat. All too often books like "The Purpose-Driven Life" represent the sort of Christianity that sticks around by pooping out Hallmark cards in front of a live studio audience.

They promise spiritual growth, expanded territory, righteous living and new purpose to life in five easy steps. Why bother wrestling with life's difficult problems, working through troubling passages of Scripture, or serious doubts about God's nature, character and existence? You don't need to follow God for years to develop spiritual discipline! Now you can do it in no time at all.

Eah.

In other news, I've made six loaves of bread in the past two days to give to the girls' teachers for Christmas. I haven't made bread since I won a prize in the Cub Scouts bakeoff nearly 30 years ago, so it was actually kind of fun to do it again. We shaped the bread like teddy bears, in memory of that ancient bakeoff, and now that I'm out of yeast and flour but still have some buttermilk, I'm wondering how the bread tastes.

I guess I'll have to buy some more yeast and some more flour, and make some more today or Friday. Probably Friday. I have a school board meeting and a counseling session today.

The part of Hanukkah we don't celebrate

If you're a Christian and you're thinking of adding Hanukkah to the holidays you celebrate, you might want to plan for a problem we ran into unexpectedly Wednesday night.


This is our third year celebrating Hanukkah, and overall it's been going more smoothly than ever. We've remembered to light the candles each night, we've been saying the appropriate prayer before we light the shamash, and the kids have been devouring the latkes like hotcakes. Each night, we've told the story of Judah the Maccabee and the legendary miracle of the oil, tied it into the coming of Christ, and the girls have remembered it in greater detail each time.

Still, we don't have it all down just yet. As Evangeline pointed out tonight with all the anger of Sally Brown on Halloween, if you're going to celebrate a holiday, you have do the whole thing.

Unlike her best friend, who happens to be Jewish, Evangeline didn't get any presents for Hanukkah this year.

When media coverage of media goes too far

Is it inappropriate for a news outlet to report that the first lady recently was tested for skin cancer? Is it appropriate for news outlet to wonder if such reporting is appropriate?

ABC News has brought both questions into focus recently with a news story that U.S. first lady Laura Bush had been treated for skin cancer. A reporter noticed that Bush had had surgery on her leg, asked her about it, and discovered that the surgery had been to remove a cancerous mole.

This is not a particularly big story, and apparently not one that the first lady had pushed, since it's a fairly personal issue and not everyone likes to draw everyone in the world into their personal battles with cancer.

Still, she's first lady and therefore highly public, she got the treatment, and someone wrote a story on it. No big deal.

What was unusual was that ABC News then did a story exploring whether that initial report had made a private matter too public. The news desk even took a poll of its online readers about whether the reporter had turned a personal matter into a public story needlessly.

If you have to ask ...

A friend of mine who likes to snark at the media predictably complained that ABC News was being idiotic and too concerned with itself. How soon we forget. This was nothing.

The ultimate in media narcissism came back during Clinton's infamous Zippergate scandal with his intern.

First came the tidal wave of coverage over the details of the scandal. Then came the surge of stories on how many media outlets were reporting all the salacious details. Lastly came an Associated Press story on how many media outlets were reporting on the oversaturation of news stories about the scandal.

The media can overdo their job, but that one really took the cake. I wish I were making it up.

An Irish Hanukkah

It was a great evening, a holy evening, tonight.

The girls loved hearing the story of Judah the Maccabee. They loved watching the flickering lights of the menorah. Hanukkah is off to a great start.

Except the latkes I made came out green.

Happy O'Hanukkah.

What little girls are made of: sugar and soy, unlike boys

I've heard a lot of weird things claims about what "makes" people gay.

The list has included a lack of sports, certain TV shows and movies, distant fathers, distant mothers, overly close fathers, overly close mothers, sexual abuse, physical abuse, emotional abuse, no discipline, sexual curiosity and experimentation, overly strict religious upbringing, overly lax religious upbringing, genetics, environment, the erosion of traditional gender roles, exposure to Broadway music, participation in ballet, being a sensitive artistic sort, leg hair, and lack of friendships growing up.

Never have I heard someone pin it on diet. Until now.

Apparently, America's growing desire for health food is turning us into a soy bean Sodom. So says Jim Rutza at World Net Daily.

Soy beans. You just can't make this stuff up.

Art, incorporated into the church

You know, I think my church is actually getting to the point that it's becoming some place neat to go on Sunday.

Don't get me wrong. It's been a good church for a while now. If it weren't, I don't think we'd have been going there for the past year-and-a-half or so that we've been attending. The worship always has been decent, if a trifle on the loud side; the preaching has almost always been pretty good to excellent; and the people have always been real, in our experience. It's a decent place to attend and be involved, and it reminds me in a lot of ways of the late, lamented Community Gospel Church, which was the last place we attended that we really enjoyed.

But The Point is becoming more than a good place to attend church. It's starting to become some place that's really interesting to go.

The big thing is the art. Actual art. Most churches I've attended the last 18 years or so paid lip service to art but didn't really embrace artistic expression unless it was "appropriate," which means that it's sanitized, prepackaged, not upsetting, not offensive, and is either by Thomas Kincade or is just otherwise uninteresting to look at or create. If it doesn't make people feel good about themselves and about Christ, it doesn't belong in church is the philosophy I think most churches operate on when it comes to art.

I've been pushing for more use of the arts at The Point, to the point that last year I convinced the leadership team it would be a good idea to create a worship station for a few weeks where people could come up and paint as much or as little as they wanted during the service. It was a neat idea, everyone agreed, but it didn't work well. About the only people to paint were the kids, and the pictures painted were (no joke) cute fluffy sheep, a cross or two, and something that might have been grass.

Back around Easter, they revisited the idea slightly by asking four different artists to paint whatever they wanted, on their own canvases, during the service. (Evangeline was one of the artists asked, which of course I enjoyed tremendously, as her father.)

The last few weeks, that sort of thing has been a fixture at both our downtown and suburban congregations. In addition to the band leading everyone in worship and the preacher doing his thing, there's been a painter working on a painting during the service, of paintings that were thematically related to the service but not explicitly religious. 

This morning, when the sermon was about Hanukkah, a woman painted a cluster of candles. In the downtown service, for the theme of Hope, the artist painted a hand holding a winged sphere. ("Hope is that thing with feathers, as Emily Dickinson, although his finished painting looked something like a golden snitch from Harry Potter.) When the theme was Faith, the painting was of a blindfolded woman being led by the hand. And the paintings have been display on subsequent weeks.

Last week our downtown service included interpretive dance as part of the worship service.

The worship team, which has been a little too heavy on guitars -- three of them, to be specific, with two of them electrics -- for my taste, is branching out. The team at each congregation includes someone who provides vocals and vocals alone, and downtown the worship band now includes a flutist. As a result, the worship is being transformed.

I guess you can tell why I'm getting excited about this church. It's taking a step beyond what's traditional, what's expected -- or perhaps it's taken a step beyond what's expected, back to what's traditional, since the Church traditionally was the significant patron of the arts for the longest time.

And I'm seeing a church leadership that's willing to take risks. At the downtown service tonight, two other people and I delivered a sucker-punch drama that had everyone's full attention and provided a deeply attentive audience when the pastor got up to preach.

We're working through Advent right now, with the sermon this week on joy. Our drama began when Jonathan got up to read Luke's account of the angelic visitation to the shepherds. He had just read the point that the angels began singing their hosannas and Gloria-in-Excelsis-Deos when someone in the congregation snorted loudly and derisively, the sort of snort I've used once or twice when I heard a preacher claim that the book of Job mentions dinosaurs.

No one who wasn't in on the drama knew this was coming. For the next minute or so, everyone in the congregation had the look of the proverbial deer caught in the headlights as Glorianne talked about how uninvolved she was in worship, and that while it's a great story that angels came to shepherds at night, it doesn't really match her experience at all. 

Everyone was stunned, first at the impropriety of interrupting like that and then (from some of the expressions I saw) at her willingness to articulate something they all could relate to but would never think of sharing.

Following the script, but a little uncertainly because Glorianne hadn't given him the cues he had been expecting, Jonathan tried to explain something about the joy not being in angels' presence but in following God, and then I lit into him for throwing around the idea of joy when he has no idea what he's talking about, nor does just about anyone with our casual, drive-by Christmastime religion. 

And for a closer, we tied it all in to the poverty that's very real and very present in our city, and probably got the attention of the homeless people who come to our services each week.

(The associate pastor, knowing it was a drama, leaned over to the fellow next to him and said, "Boy, this is awkward." The other fellow nodded mutely, and said, strained, "You're telling me.")

It was a set-up, admittedly, a piece of experimental theater where the audience doesn't know where they end and the actors begin, but it had the effect we intended. The lead pastor started talking, and I think he did an excellent job addressing the issues we raised. Afterward, everyone was talking about the drama and what was said afterward.

Through our sucker-punch drama, we succeeded at doing something important. We spoke to people about real pain, real disappointment, real frustration, and then about real joy.

I love this church.

An accidental Fimbulwinter?

It's cold, and the days grow darker, but we are well.

But still, I can't help but wonder: What if one of these years it actually didn't start getting brighter with the solistice, all because some pesky shamanistic priest somewhere forgot which day it was, or was at the hospital, and by the time he realized what had happened, things had gone too far for a simple ritual to fix.

Worst. Hanukkah Story. Ever.

Yesterday I found what must be the worst Hanukkah story ever written -- worse even than "Herschel and the Hanukkah Goblins."

Rachel and I were at the library yesterday, picking up the latest book for Niki's book club, returning some old books, and looking for a few new prizes. While Rachel busied herself first with picking out two new Christmas books that we could borrow, I headed over to the holiday section to see if I could locate any good Hanukkah storybooks. (You know that we celebrate Hanukkah, right?)

I wasn't expecting much in the way of bad stories. Hanukkah's picked up steam in America because of its proximity to Christmas, but most Hanukkah stories I've read have been either retellings of the story of Judah the Maccabee or they've been stories about how one person or another celebrated Hanukkah as a child, the personal sort of story that children enjoy hearing and that parents don't mind reading. Since the holiday hasn't been commercialized for that long, I didn't expect anything too hideous, say on the order of "Dora saves Christmas."

We found a couple of those -- one with a potato miracle that parallels the legendary miracle of the oil, and another about a child who comes to appreciate the beauty of her grandmother's homemade menorah -- but I was stunned when I found a Hanukkah story so bad that I think you'd have to be on LSD to enjoy it. (Appropriately, it was written in 1979.)

It's called "The Return of the Golem," a catchy enough title if you're familiar with the legend of the golem. If you're not, the golem was created in the Middle Ages to protect the Jews of Prague against a wave of persecution stemming from the blood libel that they were using the blood of Christian children to make their matzoh.

In this book, it's almost Hanukkah when children see a spaceship land just outside the village. A group of aliens gets out and soon are up to mischief. In no time at all, they head to the synagogue, where they throw books and push over chairs. They find the ark, remove the Torah and put out the eternal flame.

The children run to Rabbi Joseph to tell him what has happened. The rabbi exclaims, "This looks like a job for the golem!" At this point, I half-expected the rabbi to run into a phone booth and pull off his yarmulke to reveal the letters Aleph, Beth, Gimel and Daleth on his forehead, but instead he creates a golem by reciting the Hebrew alphabet. (That's how it's done now, I guess.) The golem chases away the aliens, and then goes haywire.

This was about the time I was too busy cracking up to read any more. I took the book up to the children's librarian, who is Jewish, and showed it to her. She read it in bewilderment and then declared, "We're throwing it out."

Still, I find comfort in this. If "The Return of the Golem" can be published, so can anything I write.

letting the terrorists win

I did feel that one or two of the answer selections lacked proper nuance, but I'm sure you'll agree that this test still gauges the true levels of my patriotism quite accurately:

 

Your 'Do You Want the Terrorists to Win' Score: 94%

You are a terrorist-loving, Bush-bashing, "blame America first"-crowd traitor. You are in league with evil-doers who hate our freedoms. By all counts you are a liberal, and as such cleary desire the terrorists to succeed and impose their harsh theocratic restrictions on us all. You are fit to be hung for treason! Luckily George Bush is tapping your internet connection and is now aware of your thought-crime. Have a nice day.... in Guantanamo!

Do You Want the Terrorists to Win?
Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

Send letters to the damned with the post-Rapture post

A friend of mine recently referred me to the Post-Rapture Post, a service that offers to deliver a message to your unsaved relatives when the Rapture comes and you are no longer available to point them toward Christ.

For those who take the Rapture seriously, the site has everything one could want. It offers a wide range of messages, from personalized notes to simple premade cards that say "I told you so." It also offers various Cafe Press sort of merchandise, and even a guide on how to navigate the difficulties of life now that the Great Tribulation has begun (an authentic Bible).

The site is absolutely stunning in the respectful way it goes about its business so quietly tongue-in-cheek. There are appropriate Scripture verses on every page, and down-to-earth explanations of basic Christian doctrine pertaining to salvation.

From the Post-Rapture Post's promotional material:

Just write your letter and it will be hand-delivered immediately following the exodus of the pure from the Earth. But you must be thinking to yourself, "How can the letters be delivered after the Rapture?" The answer is simple. The creators of this site are Atheists. That's right, we don't believe in God. How else would we be able to deliver your correspondence after the Rapture?

I don't believe in the Rapture myself, so I suppose if I were to use the Rapture Post, my message might say something like, "Well, it looks my eschatology was wrong, but at least my theology was better than yours. Neener neener."

Paint it black

Last night at Evangeline's drop-in art class, one of the teachers and I were chatting, and I said that in a lot of ways, Evangeline is a teen already. She already has a lot of the agnst. So it shouldn't be a surprise that when the teacher asked her to name her favorite color, Evangeline said, simply, "Black."

"Why black?"

"That's just the way it is."

Media aren't understanding the Christian Left

Here's an important fact-check point for media commentators: Being an evangelical does not make someone a conservative.

Writing for Nightline, Jake Tapper and Dan Morris discuss efforts by some evangelicals to extend the church's focus from traditional conservative  causes like opposing gay rights and abortion access, to include issues like global warming and poverty.

Not surprisingly, those making these efforts are being pushed out of the organizations they're trying to take in new directions. Tapper and Morris portray this is as a split in the conservative evangelical community.

News flash! The conservatives aren't split at all. This divide is not between Right and Right, but between the Right and the Left in Christianity. The story is the growing number of evangelicals and post-evangelicals who identify themselves with something other than the GOP.

The story is the growing awareness in the church of our responsibility to the whole message of Christ, not just to areas of morality that he never addressed himself.

Jesus never said a word in the gospels about abortion or homosexuality. But he said plenty about caring for the weak and the outcast, the poor and the downtrodden. He talked about a revolution of values that utterly transformed society so the poor were fed and the wealty were sent away hungry.

Do those sound like conservative talking points to you? Conservative voices have a place in the church, but stop pretending that they speak for all of us. They don't, and the truth is that they never did.