Barackomania

NB: If you're reading this via facebook, you'll need to open the entry in full. Non-textual media almost never come through, and this post requires it.



Watch'em swoon!



Maybe it's because they aren't getting enough fact in their diet?

h/t ModernCounterCulture

Great Reading for Great Lent

I ran across an EXCELLENT idea: reading the Church Fathers as a Lenten devotion.

There are two versions: one is pretty heavy, the other is light.

I hope that you'll consider doing one of them this Lent.

H is for Hypocrisy

On Wednesdays, I try to blog on a worship topic. However, my seminary has decided that the worship of perverse sexual acts and child rape is appropriate, so I'm interrupting my regular schedule.

(Sort-of...they promote it with the title V is for Venite. And venite is a legitimate liturgical topic which I'll need to return to at some point.)

Q is for Questionable Judgment

Here's the link to their site discussing the upcoming campus-sponsored production of Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues.

R is for Risible

Here's my response (which may or may not be on the site...they moderate, and I was censored in public discourse throughout parts of my seminary career):

I'm personally saddened to see the Women's Center sponsoring this play. In a notorious section, "The Little Coochi Snorcher that Could," a woman recounts how as a 13 yr old girl she is given alcohol and then seduced by a 24 yr old woman. In the original form (which has been unsatisfactorily redacted to omit it and change the age from 13 to 16), she dismisses the substance abuse and statutory violation by saying: "Now people say it was a kind of rape.... Well, I say if it was rape, it was a good rape...." In another segment, a six year old is queried about her genitalia (smells, names, etc.). As the father of beautiful little girl, I would be hard pressed to stay in my seat through such a performance.

The rest of the play wavers between diatribes against men and male-female sex as inherently violent, or about sexual practices that really deserve to stay in the bedroom. How this play actually addresses violence against women (especially when it is celebrated in the above scene), or opens frank conversations about the role men - and women - have in the sexualization of children and women (objectification is a prologue to rape and oppression) is perhaps beyond the scope of Wimminwise to answer. But it would be helpful to reflect on why this play at this seminary - of all the venues and content available - is appropriate and effective.

O is for Objection

Beyond the politicization of a day that Christians should remember for martyrs, they overturn a divinely-ordained institution (heterosexual marriage). Worse, marriage is meant to be a mysterious - almost sacramental - expression of the union of Christ and His Church. What are we to make of this from a seminary?

B is for Bias

Why is homosexual rape given a pass by an event promoted as anti-violence-against-women?

H is for Hypocrisy

We have a mandate to reform the culture to the Scriptural norm (the norming norm), not let culture corrupt the message of the Scriptures.

E is for End!!!

U is for Update: They posted my response. It was the same old "You don't know what you're talking about." However, I have it from an eyewitness that the attendance at these events has been blissfully low. As some one once termed roughly 1/3 of the campus population: "middle-aged bitter divorcees and their dogs."

Sad, really. Men need to be molded by their interactions with the pain of women....this just stops with scolding.

Zombie-economics

A spectre is rising! The return of economic nationalism!

This is the cover story from the Feb 5 `09 issue of The Economist. I gotta love anything with zombies. That it throws in the problem of anticapitalist fear-mongering protectionism just ices the cake.

Milgram Study Still Shocks!

Chuck Colson reports on a recent rehash of the Milgram experiment.

The results: apparently 40 years of slamming authority structures, transcendental meditation, and not really educating our children has produced the same result as the last 5,960 years of recorded history. DEPRAVED HUMANS.

In fact, this is just one in a long line of scientific proofs for the one indisputable starting point of soteriology - Total Depravity. There is no place in our humanity (will, body, intellect, etc.) that exists as an island of righteousness or wholeness. We are corrupt in even our best intentions - and the more honest one is, the more they recognize that to be the case.

(BTW, I challenge any skeptic to sincerely examine the claims of any other religion and find one as consistent with reality - scientifically defined or otherwise - as Christianity has proven to be.)

So what do we do? If all the vast techno-prowess we have still leaves us with wicked humans with itchy fingers on bigger and badder weapons, what's to be done.

The answer is simple: Tell'em about Jesus.