With the recent controversy over Chick-fil-A president Dan Cathey’s non-remarks about gay marriage, followed by a threatened boycott, then a day of support, then a suggested Kiss-In, public discourse, like water, quickly ran to the lowest point. One of my friends, himself no stranger to stirring the pot, finally was compelled to write on Facebook: To my conservative friends, please stop posting these stupid e-cards about Chick filA, God hating gays and protests. No wonder people won’t visit church anymore. To my liberal friends, quit whining like Dan Cathy attacked a small child or something. Who cares what he thinks. The chicken is delicious. Eat it or don’t eat, but for god’s sake, everyone please focus on the real problems in this world. Then, an ongoing conversation with an openly gay friend who I have known since he was a child turned my thoughts to the ways we as followers of Christ have, perhaps, misunderstood the plight, feelings, and concerns of those around us with same-sex attraction. This context, as well as the trials of another friend last week, made me open to a recommendation to read Washed and Waiting: Reflections on Christian Faithfulness and Homosexuality, by Durham University PhD student, Wesley Hill. I am very thankful for the recommendation, as this is one of the most moving books I have ever read, and perhaps one of the most important.
Jonathan Merritt responds
Jonathan Merritt is a well known writer and author whose books include Green Like God and A Faith of Our Own. Among younger evangelicals he is a leading voice, having written more than 300 columns on topics ranging from environmentalism, politics, civil, discourse and gay marriage in places are varying as USAToday, HuffPo, and The Washington Post. Most recently, an article he wrote for The Atlantic, “In Defense of Eating at Chick-fil-A,” really stirred the pot. In response to a proposed boycott of Chick-fil-A by gay marriage supporters, Merritt opposed the boycott culture, saying,
‘god is not Great,’ by Christopher Hitchens, book review [from the archives]
A number of years ago on another blog this review was published. Hitchens has now passed from this life, but I’ve left the review exactly as published before sans the introduction. Christopher Hitchens is, quoting the inside cover of god is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything: “a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and a visiting professor of liberal studies at the New School…He was named, to his own amusement, number five on a list of ‘Top 100 Public Intellectuals’ by Foreign Policy and Britain’s Prospect.” The New Yorker calls him, “An intellectual willing to show his teeth in the cause for righteousness” (the last being an odd choice of terms to say the least), while the Village Voice lauds Hitchens as “American’s foremost rhetorical pugilist.” The best place to summarize this book is by beginning with a quote from its final two pages: Religion has run out of justification. Thanks to the teleschope and the microscope, it no longer offers an explanation of anything important….Confronted with undreamed-of vistas inside our own evolving cortex, in the farthest reaches of the known universe, and in the proteins and acids which constitute our nature, religion offers either annihilation in the name of god, or else the false promise that if we take a knife to our foreskins, or pray in the right direction, or ingest pieces of wafer, we shall be “saved.” If is as if someone, offered a delicious and fragrant out-of-season fruit, matured in a painstakingly and lovingly designed hothouse, should throw away the flesh and the pulp and gnaw moodily on the pit.
Three boyfriends die shielding girlfriends from bullets in Aurora shooting
HuffPo is reporting three of the slain in the Aurora mass murder last Friday morning were men who died saving their the lives of each one’s girlfriend. Jon Blunk, Matt McQuinn and Alex Teves, all in their 20’s, died as they shielded their girlfriends from the killer’s bullets. Writes Ryan Grenoble: Jon Blunk had served in the Navy and was planning to re-enlist. On Friday, the 26-year-old took his girlfriend, Jansen Young, to see the “Dark Knight” — when the assault began, Young says he saved her life. “Jon just took a bullet for me,” Young said in an interview on TODAY. “He knew and threw me on the ground, and was like, ‘We have to get down and stay down.’” While Holmes walked up and down the aisles shooting, Young says her boyfriend was a constant presence, pushing her further under the seats and out of the line of fire. Finally, as the shots slowed, she crawled out and attempted to pull up Blunk by the shoulder, but he didn’t move. “I guess I didn’t really know he had passed, up until I started shaking him and saying, ‘Jon, Jon, we have to go… It’s time for us to get out of here,’ ” she told the Denver Post. Read the entire article at HuffPo. While some of my friends may quibble over the masculinity I picture, this, in my opinion, is what men do: they protect their women. Pure and simple, constantly and to the death if necessary. I do not know either of these three, but one thing is already settled in my mind. There were not merely males; they were men.
Across the great divide: The Complementarian – Egalitarian war
Standin by your window in pain, A pistol in your hand, And I beg you, dear Molly, girl, Try and understand your man the best you can. Across The Great Divide, Just grab your hat, and take that ride Get yourself a bride, And bring your children down to the river side. “Across the Great Divide”, The Band Something of an Internet war broke out last week when a blogger at The Gospel Coalition website quoted an excerpt from Douglas Wilson’s 1999 book, Fidelity: What is Means to Be a One Woman Man. After a somewhat-less-than-pleased Rachel Held Evans began tweeting phrases from the excerpt, it was “Would-Be Theologians Gone Wild” for a couple of days.
‘None’ now the religious choice of 1 in 5 Americans
Several years ago I was shocked when Dr. Jimmy Cobb of the Canadian Baptist Seminary in Cochrane, Alberta, Canada told me the fastest growing religious segment of the population in Canada was those who claimed “no religion.” It looks as if that northern sentiment has filtered south. A July 19, 2012 online article in USA Today notes that 19% of Americans chose “None” as their religion, the highest that answer has ever been. Writes Cathy Lynn Grossman: People who check “None” for their religious affiliation are now nearly one in five Americans (19%), the highest ever documented, according to the Pew Center for the People and the Press. The rapid rise of Nones — including atheists, agnostics and those who say they believe “nothing in particular” — defies the usually glacial rate of change in spiritual identity. The tabulation included surveys of 19,377 people conducted by the Pew Research Center throughout 2011.
Gluttony: The worship of food? Part 2
In Part 1 of this series we considered gluttony as a sin. Click here to read that post. Among other things we saw: The Bible speaks indirectly to gluttony each time it speaks of self-control (self-discipline). Self-control, where food is concerned, is exhibited by not gluttonizing our meals. The Bible, incidentally, teaches us that self-control is a fruit of the Spirit. When the Holy Spirit is controlling our lives self-control is an evidence of it. On a practical level this reveals a dramatic number of times we seem to sit at the table, quench the Spirit, and immediately lose control of our appetite. One Hebrew word translated gluttons in the Old Testament is zalal which means “a riotous eater,” but can also figuratively mean “to have loose morals.” Would it be too far a stretch to call gluttony “the pornification of food”? At the end of the post I promised a look at a biblical understanding of gluttony and some tools to help. Perhaps it would have helped to have reworded “a biblical understanding” of gluttony to “a biblical awareness of how to respond to gluttony.” Having already understood that gluttony is a sin, how should we respond to it? If we are given to gluttony what should we do?
‘The Dark Knight Rises,’ movie review
The long awaited, highly anticipated final chapter of Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy comes to an end with The Dark Knight Rises, which opened this morning at theaters across the country. It has already been hailed as a “masterpiece” by Andrew O’Hehir at Salon and “mercilessly brilliant” by Kenneth Turan, the Los Angeles Times film critic. Set eight years after The Dark Knight Batman is no longer a hero. Taking the fall for the death of District Attorney gone mad, Harvey Dent, Batman is in exile, just as the final scenes of the second installment prefigured. Passage of the Dent Act in Gotham City has jailed a thousand gangsters and reduced crime to parking tickets. Or a missing senator to be precise. Enter Bane the mercenary terrorist. Tom Hardy plays the respirator masked villain, the “pure evil” who becomes Gotham’s undoing. As the city is held hostage until her certain destruction, The Dark Knight Rises incorporates elements of both Batman Begins with its philosophical underpinnings and The Dark Knight with the character portrayal of malevolent, seemingly unstoppable evil. (I see this segment as having more direct biblical overtones than the first two. The heel of the savior is bruised, he spends time in the grave (“hell” if you prefer), and comes back to crush the head of the enemy.)
Armed senior citizen thwarts would be robbers in Florida [VIDEO]
I wonder if Samuel Williams would be available the next time I’m in the internet cafe? Friday, he single handedly staved off a robbery attempt by taking action against two thugs, one with a pistol, the other with a baseball bat. Williams, himself a senior citizen, said he feared for his wife who was also at the cafe beside him. Another concealed carry permit story gone right.
Fortune 500 CEOs and social media use [INFOGRAPHIC]
The good folks at CEO.com have released an interesting infographic about Fortune 500 CEOs and their use of social media. The entire report can be found here. The folks at DOMO, who co-sponsored the study, were surprised as 70% of CEOs have no social media presence at all.