another link-a-thon--postal workers ignoring email, 90s bands recycle, and other stuff

There is a time for writing that is writing itself, so to speak, and there is a time for writing about what you read.  This second category has been more of what's happened at Wenatchee The Hatchet than in previous years.  In previous years there was a lot of writing ... but then day jobs can cut down on how much time you have to spare.  There's a mountain range of backlogged writing projects.  Be that as it may ... here is another set of links with assorted observations and associations presented as food for though.

Slate reminds us that in the magazine Wired back in 2001 postal workers were saying `email is not a threat'. 

Brace yourself for 90s band nostalgia tours and Gen X doing the Baby Boomer retread route.

From ... actually ... Friday the 13th, Mark Driscoll published "What I told 7,000 counselors today".

John Piper discusses the difference between 'adrenaline' Christians and 'coronary' Christians and associated ministries over at World Magazine. (This is probably an example of an adrenaline-fueled thing ).

Dan over at City of God proposes an explanation for why Christian filmmakers are never making stuff like Breaking Bad.  When some evangelicals write about engaging culture it no longer seems to include discussing shows like Breaking Bad, Mad Men, or Game of Thrones. Now maybe folks who were "engaging culture" in their 20s are in their 40s now and are "upstream" and developing things.  But if Dan's polemic has some force (and I think, maybe, it does) the stuff evangelicals will be making will not come near the aforementioned shows.  Christians who are engaging culture are never going to invent a Tyrion Lannister or get so far as casting Peter Dinklage to play him.  To be sure GoT is not exactly my cup of tea as genre stuff goes but Dinklage as Tyrion is a peculiar joy to watch on screen, just not wonderful enough to get me to watch the rest of that series! 

But, again, evangelicals of a certain stripe don't even seem to be talking about television of this sort, let alone making it.  If there are people with the talent to make material at that level of productivity and thought within evangelicalism it's not clear whether they are really doing that or whether their talents are put into what amount to promotional materials for megachurches.  Or as Alastair Roberts put it about Rob Bell, "If the theologian of the 16^th century was a lawyer, the theologian of the 21^st century is an ad man."  He might have a speech communications major and he might have a drastically different approach than Rob Bell but Robert's observation that the Ad Man's Gospel seems to be a thing in evangelicalism left or right.


In his tireless campaign against transformationist paradigms of missional cultural engagement, D. G. Hart writes:

... But when it comes to a liberal education, are Calvinists really supposed to say that Christians know a liberal education better than non-Christians? Even though the liberal arts and their derivation from classical languages and letters by Christians predated Reformed Protestantism, we are now supposed to conclude that only faculty with a biblical or Reformed w-w will be the ones to yield a genuinely liberal education?

This is complete nonsense and amazingly smug, as if regeneration somehow gives Christians insights into tragedy, epistemology, or historical contingency.

He then builds up to the following:

... Once you accept that people who do not know Christ, along with the institutions they found, are legitimate and reflect in some measure of the image of God in man along with the truths of general revelation, then you can aspire to be learned the way that Epstein is, or try to follow constitutional republicanism the way the founders of the U.S. did, or even read Plato and Thucydides for profit the way most college students in the West for centuries have (if you were rich and smart enough). If you appeal to common grace to free you from the polarities of such hyper-antithesis, by all means, go right ahead. That means you have to stop bellyaching about secular learning, secular governments, and secular persons because common grace is a way of affirming that all of those institutions and people have a legitimate role in God’s gracious ends. It also means giving up transformationalism because common grace has already done what you seemed to think transforming the culture would do.

He also couldn't resist linking back to his polemic "Jihad if you do, holy war if you don't."

A few links here, here, and here at The Elephant's Debt regarding the recent ex-cathedra style pronouncemnts from Harvest Bible Chapel elders.

An excerpt of note:

It was at this point of the church history that James assigned a “research committee” outside of the elder board’s authority and knowledge, to significantly restructure the governance of the church. The intended result was to remove the elders from having authority over the direction of the church – giving him more authority than any one man should have. In essence, he already had it. He had a way of working around the elders to accomplish his objectives and announce them as “approved by the elders”. How James imploded the Harvest elder board in 2009 is remarkably similar to how Mark Driscoll imploded his a year earlier.

It was in 2007 that the entire church got restructured at Mars Hill, for those who were at Mars Hill at the time.  People who weren't contracted members of the organization could be forgiven for not getting the right year for when the big and controversial re-org happened.  Changes at Mars Hill can often be so frenetic it can be tough to catch them all or keep up with them.  However, commenters of various sorts have provided updates on transitions here and there.  Still, it's worth noting the above statement from David Corning takes as given the understanding that Mark Driscoll imploded his elder board some time before James MacDonald re-structured HBC. 

A couple of links from here and there

First off, I find it impossible to feel even the slightest bit bad for Abercrombie & Fitch.

Our estimable blogging buddy David Zahl at Mockingbird has an interesting piece on middle-aged friendship. 

Chris Rosebrough takes note of the Harvest Bible Chapel's video in a podcast and describes them as Stepford elders.

Carl Trueman discusses how it's valuable and helpful for a pastor's wife to not be a fan of his preaching.

Wendy at Practical Theology for Women has some advice for those burned by the Church.  Could write a few things about this and other links but this is just a linkathon for today.

A few links from the blog of Martin Shields

Martin Shields (author of a fine little commentary on Ecclesiates that will, some day, be a blog topic again) has a few interesting posts I'm linking to.

Common misreadings of Genesis 2, particularly where sex is found (and not
Here Shields points out that naming animals does not and did not imply authority over them, for instance.

Whatever the Hebrew word transliterated `hebel' means, it can't really be `fleeting'.
For those unfamiliar with his compelling little monograph The End of Wisdom, Shields proposes that Solomon not only did not write the book but also that at no point can Qoholeth be described as repenting of anything.  That's something we'll have to try to get back to blogging about ... some day.

Finally, the obscurity of Genesis 4:7 and its allusions back to the seed of the woman and the serpent respectively.

HT Jim West: Norma Franklin proposes a reason why Omri would have established his kingdom at Samaria, a lucrative oil and wine trade

http://www.bibleinterp.com/opeds/2013/09/fra378013.shtml

In short, the newly established capital of the northern Kingdom of Israel was not a militarily strategic site, nor was it located on any major trade route; rather it served as the hub of a highly specialized and lucrative oil and wine industry that flourished throughout southern Samaria. It must have been an important element in the kingdom’s economy and a key factor in the emergence of the fully fledged Israelite state during the Omride dynasty.

There's more but that's the concluding paragraph for those readers who will do more than read this post.  :)

Mark Driscoll is ... apparently out of Acts 29 leadership?

http://www.acts29network.org/about/leadership/

You'll still be able to find all sorts of Mars Hill and Mars Hill affiliated churches in the Acts 29 Network ... but where's Driscoll on the executive leadership listing these days?

Someone anonymously mentioned earlier this year in a comment thread that relations were strained between Mark Driscoll and Darrin Patrick (and Jamie Munson) but the part where there seems to be no sign of Mark Driscoll at the Acts 29 Network leadership listings is peculiar.

It's not like that hadn't happened to David Nicholas, though, come to think of it. There was kind of no public explanation of his transition out of the public eye, either.  Well, as always, if anyone wants to speak on record about these kinds of things Wenatchee The Hatchet can provide a venue. If Driscoll's still on the Acts 29 board in some capacity definitely correct misunderstandings and thanks in advance.

Here's some UBI stuff

http://www.sos.wa.gov/corps/search_detail.aspx?ubi=602407802
That's the old one that had Steve Tompkins as registered agent.  This is the newer WA listing.
http://www.sos.wa.gov/corps/search_detail.aspx?ubi=602502267
Clearly Scott Thomas is not going to be a registered agent these days.  It's worth nothing who the top guys were in the organization.

President Driscoll, Mark
1411 NW 50th Street
SEATTLE, WA 98107
Vice President Bruskas, David
1411 NW 50th Street
SEATTLE, WA 98107

Secretary Turner, Sutton
1411 NW 50TH ST
Seattle, WA 98107
Treasurer Turner, Sutton
1411 NW 50th Street
Seattle, WA 98107
Then there's this:

UBI Number	602502267
Category	REG
Profit/Nonprofit	Nonprofit
Active/Inactive	Inactive
State Of Incorporation	WA
WA Filing Date	05/11/2005
Expiration Date	05/31/2013
Inactive Date	09/03/2013
Duration	Perpetual

So the inactive date was at the start of the month.  Okay.  Texas having different sorts of laws and codes finding out the names of the officers and so forth will be a bit trickier.

The Elephant's Debt: Former elders Scott Phelps and Barry Slabaugh release a statement, are then publicly labeled as satanic

http://theelephantsdebt.com/2013/09/15/former-elders-scott-phelps-and-barry-slabaugh-release-a-statement-and-are-publicly-labeled-as-satantic-and-ex-communicated-by-hbc/

http://www.harvestbiblechapel.org/10780/blogentry/entry_id/372494/Elder-Update-September-2013

For those who have some interest in James MacDonald and Harvest Bible Chapel stuff.

Concerns about MacDonald will be relevant to those who have an interest in Mars Hill since Mark Driscoll has referred to MacDonald as a friend and as having a spiritual gift of real estate acquisition and an ability to raise resources. Granting that the posted descriptions of governance at MH have changed drastically between the spring of 2012 and the summer of 2013 (discussed here). Since at one point, in the event of any charge being made against Driscoll, James MacDonald was listed as one of the parties to assess charges (discussed here) it seems good to keep some idea of what's going on over there and what issues are in public discussion.

There Are Probably No Duties. Now Stop Worrying and Enjoy Your Life

HT Dr. Tim Bulkeley:

 

http://www.mandm.org.nz/2013/09/you-probably-have-no-duties-so-stop-worrying-and-enjoy-your-life.html

 

So it is almost certain that duties do not exist. However, if nothing is right or wrong then religious terrorism is not wrong, inquisitions are not wrong, crusades are not wrong, homophobia is not wrong. The Taliban are not doing anything wrong when they throw battery acid in a woman’s face. One can state that they don’t like these things but subjective expressions of emotion are not a replacement for sensible public evidence like science. Those who offer moral critiques of religious practices may as well invoke the existence of fairies at the end of the garden, belief in unicorns, imaginary friends or spaghetti monsters if they want us to accept there are moral duties. Belief in duties is just a primitive Bronze Age superstition.

 

Flipping around arguments against a deity and re-applying them to moral duties of every kind makes for an interesting rhetorical play.  Now an atheist could still propose that the existence of a god in the mind of a theist is likely an extension of the "theory of mind" that allows for empathy between humans and even between humans and non-humans (i.e. caring about cruelty to animals) but this is the internet ... and the weekend.  So, yes, we admit we're not trying that hard here.

Ribbon Farm on the distinction between authority and authoritah HT to Alastair Roberts

http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2013/09/12/the-exercise-of-authoritah/

Once authoritah has been effectively imposed, it can be exercised in dramatically leveraged and highly deterministic ways. A single phone call can move mountains, without tedious consultation, arguments, second-guessing or questioning. Connecting is for normal, nice people. Collecting is for people who are headed for either world domination or madness.

It gets better!

... Cartman is not a natural leader. He ends up leading the gang most of the time primarily because he is prepared to expend prodigious amounts of energy  to get his way. More energy than the others are willing to put into resisting him. [emphasis added, as below]

So very true!

But energy alone is not enough. Cartman is not the smartest of the gang, but he possesses social cunning, which manifests as an ability to manipulate the social realities of others. He is able to do this not because he understands social realities better (though that is sometimes the case), but because he values them less and is therefore more willing to damage them to get his way. What is sacred to others is not sacred to Cartman.

And nothing is more sacred to most people than the human quality of relationships. Devaluing the human element in relationships is at the heart of the difference between collection and connection, and the essence of authoritah.

By contrast:

Connecting is the basis of the social graph metaphor: a space of relationships whose idealized primitive building block is a one-to-one relationship based on mutual recognition.  Recognition in this philosophical sense is about more than identification in the information-theoretic sense of connecting names to unique faces. To recognize someone is to acknowledge them as fully human and with an equal claim to defining the relationship. In fact, the core underlying assumption is stronger: that there is a whole-greater-than-parts element to relationships that can only be unlocked if the relationship is defined by consensus. So with mutual recognition, the value in the relationship lies in the fact that it is mutually defined.

The relational whole can only be greater than the sum of its parts and, further, to be said to even truly exist if mutual consent creates the relationship. 

If you want a fantastic summation quote it'd probably hard to top this:

The difference between authority and authoritah is that we recognize and gladly follow authority, but we succumb to authoritah. Though authoritah is a mode of relating that applies to all relationships made by a collector, only the active, external kind of collecting behavior involves coercion. [emphasis original]

Then we get this beautiful gear-shift from quasi-academic jargon to ...

If extreme physical or emotional violence is not an option, and the connectee appears immune to flattery or incentives, the collector is likely to resort to bullshit: a pattern of persuasion based on indifference to the truth/falsity of what is being said.  But bullshit deployed as part of the exercise of authoritah is no ordinary bullshit.

Ordinary bullshit can be casual and unfocused, but bullshit deployed as part of the exercise of authoritah is like a laser beam. It drives the collectee relentlessly towards accepting the relationship structure proposed by the collector.

Authoritah works its magic primarily by wearing down the collectee. It becomes so exhausting to penetrate the relentless barrage of bullshit, cajoling, threats, flattery, intimidation, pandering and bullying that you end up yielding. [emphasis added] When this happens, you’ve been assimilated into a reality distortion field of the sort attributed to Steve Jobs and charismatic leaders of kool-aid cults who drive their followers to suicide.

There's more but I've electively quoted the most fascinating excerpts for your consideration.  ;) 

The Gospel Coalition vs The Resurgence on "intentionality"

Apparently the boundless idiocy known as "intentionality" is not just alive and well in MH teaching (alas!) but it's getting continued promotion in the same lazy categories as have existed before.

Behold!  More simplistic tedious boilerplate recycling ideas Driscoll and company were attempting to shill an entire decade ago. 

http://theresurgence.com/2012/08/28/5-notes-on-dating-for-the-guys

Rather than quote junk I got tired of seeing a decade ago, I will note that someone at The Gospel Coalition found the Martian bromides on dating weird enough to single them out specifically.

http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/tgc/2013/09/11/what-does-intentional-mean-in-dating/

...  For the most part, Andersen's piece spoon feeds us the same folk wisdom we've been hearing in the church since everyone freaked out when that first guy asked the first girl on a one-on-one date to get ice cream (I think the same folks are still freaking). I am disappointed that we haven't modified our thinking about a cultural practice that has evolved immensely in good ways and bad. We are stuck dealing with the most complex, dynamic relationship situations by applying clunky and awkward dating categories that are entirely unique to a historical setting at least 50 years ago in our small subculture.

Moving along ...

Andersen's language makes the "intentional" guy sound obviously intelligent, while the unintentional guy can barely put together a sentence. That contrast confuses the nature of the issue so that it is difficult to see Andersen's point. In fact, I don't think he is contrasting intentionality and unintentionality at all. He is talking about certainty and uncertainty.[emphasis added] He creates a utopian connection between intentionality and certainty (and, I suppose, a dystopian connection between unintentionality and uncertainty) that does not necessarily exist. Relationships in general are not so black-and-white, and they are far less so in the context of attraction and romance. Yet he says that if you don't act black and white, you're falling short of your responsibilities as a man. This contrast misses altogether the intentional guy who's uncertain about his feelings for a girl he's getting to know. Guys need to understand they should not necessarily feel guilty for uncertainty.

Near the end ... :

Hard-and-fast rules about intentionality could very easily be used by a guy as an excuse for trying to control the relationship, or for forcing a girl to come to terms with and articulate her feelings too early on in the relationship. That's unhealthy. In fact, it's more than unhealthy. It's untrue to life as it really is, and it will most likely suffocate the relationship and drive a person away (or draw an unhealthily insecure person closer).

One of the most striking stories one of my married friends shared with me was how he was writing to a friend about the girlfriend he had at the time.  The sentiment was that she wasn't Ms. Right but she was certainly Ms. Right-for-Right-Now.  About ten years later when my friend and Ms. Right-for-Right-Now had been married for years she came across a box of letters that had this sentiment in it!  She read the letter!  Fortunately for my friend his wife has a pretty keen sense of humor and irony, and she laughed, maybe even laughed pretty hard.  These two have been married for more than a decade now and my friend said he was embarrassed his wife discovered something he wrote in a letter ages ago but grateful she could laugh and take it in stride. 

If that was a story shared with me by a Mars Hill pastor about his own wife (and it was!) then public blathering about "intentionality" is unalloyed effluvium.  Or as an apostle put it in a letter, look here you people who declare that you will do X, you don't know what will happen tomorrow ... .

At the risk of playfully interpreting Maxwell's response to Anderson, when even a Gospel Coalition contributor responds to a Resurgence article parroting Mars Hill bromides on dating and basically says "The stupid, it burns" we've seen a fairly strong cleaving between Mars Hill and The Gospel Coalition crystalized into a single talking point.

Hanna Rosin provokes ire for saying the patriarchy is dead and that the most powerful and affluent white women seem most upset to hear the news

... But most of the resistance to the idea that men have ceased to be the dominant sex has come from women—not from working-class women, who seem to find what I’m describing painfully familiar, if not totally obvious, but from women in the college, professional class.

and from the follow-up:

... In the real world it’s hard to find a young woman who spends her time scanning for sexist insults. But on the Web it’s a steady job. And you can, if you look hard enough, find some sexist bastard at a tech company or a hedge fund or a frat who says insulting things every day. But this doesn’t mean that the patriarchy is thriving. The satire response to my piece from the Cut, “The 39 Things We’ll Miss About the Patriarchy,” includes a handful of genuine, timeless horrors such as rape and honor killings but also dozens of minor ones such as juice cleansing and vibrators shaped like cupcakes. See what I mean? Look hard enough, and you’ll never run out of examples.

Certainly managing to stir things up a bit. 

Mars Hill Church in May and June of 2012: systemic deficits and a million-dollar home purchased in Snonohomish county

We'll just start with some numbers because these numbers tell a story. 

http://marshill.com/2012/05/31/an-update-on-mars-hill-church-from-pastor-mark-may-2012
From the May 2012 update

FINANCIAL UPDATE
April vs March 2012
              Adults that give  weekly giving per A.  Giving Households  Weekly attendance
April        42%                     $29.13                                   5,490                   14,059
March      41%                     $32.79                                   4838                    13,125

http://marshill.com/2012/06/13/an-update-on-the-church-from-pastor-mark-june-2012
The June 2012 budget update included the following
                                             PAST     PRESENT       FUTURE
Weekly giving per adult        $20.25     $30.25           $35.00
church costs                        -$14.20   -$11.82         -$10.00
facilities costs                     -$12.37   -$8.81           -$10.00
central costs                        -$22.69   -$16.07         -$10.00
projects/investments           -$3.60     -$0.99           -$3.50
expansion
Margin/Loss                        -$22.61    -$7.44           $1.50

presents list of weekly deficits per campus, we'll add corresponding percentages of givers per campus into this list since Driscoll went to that stat set next
                           wkly deficit  % adults that gave
Rainer Valley      -$3.39                27%
Portland              -$3.74                42%
Federal Way        -$4.71                42%
Ballard                -$4.81                41%
Everett                -$5.73                45%
Bellevue              -$6.14                54%
Albuquerque        -$7.16               38%
Downtown           -$8.29               24%
Olympia               -$8.35               59%
Orange County    -$8.65               32%
Sammamish        -$9.75               64%
West Seattle        -$11.55              66%
U-district             -$11.82              29%
Shoreline             -$18.02              67%

So after a few years of every year being best-year-ever by the summer of 2012 Driscoll was sharing that every campus was running systemic deficits. He also alluded to what seemed to have been a mass layoff or termination process of some kind. 

So if you hear, "Hey, Mars Hill's canceled a few programs. The staff is shrinking a little bit. They're making some transitions," it's not that anybody has sinned, or done anything wrong, or is in touble, it's just that we had an economic model that wasn't sustainable for our future.

Nobody sinned but there were systemic deficits?  What happened to financial stewardship?  Who was falling short of the best they could do?  There's an explanation Driscoll would proffer elsewhere in the June 2012 update but let's take a little detour into real estate that probably wouldn't qualify as a Mars Hill campus.

In late May of 2012 the following real estate transaction was listed in Snohomish county records
https://www.snoco.org/proptax/(x5uewe45hikjyf55g2guwo3l)/search.aspx?parcel_number=00704300000600

The sales price was $1,055,888.00 and sold to a grantee/buyer that had its base at the physical address of the corporate headquarters of Mars Hill Church, namely

1411 NW 50TH ST, SEATTLE, WA 98107 

So however lean and difficult the financial season at Mars Hill was in June of 2012, as Mark Driscoll explained things, there was still someone who 1) had some affiliation with the Mars Hill corporate headquarters address 2) and had enough money to buy a roughly one-million dollar home in the previous month. For people with a background in fundraising in non-profit settings the address (which we're not going to actually publish here) is nested in what might be called a "prestige ZIP code".  It's sexier to say you live in X than, say, Edmonds. 

And, let's face it, while the exact person(s) party to the transaction may not be listed, in the lean season Driscoll said Mars Hill was going through last year, there weren't exactly a whole lot of people affiliated with 1411 NW 50th St in Seattle, WA 98107 that were going to be in a position to buy a house that cost a million in the midst of what Driscoll called one of the tougher financial seasons of the church. 

And because government websites tend to make things available to the public, it's no secret that by later 2012 Mark Driscoll was listed as Manager for a couple of LLCs that are registered with Washington state but incorporated in Colorado.

OMCRU INVESTMENTS, LLC
http://www.sos.wa.gov/corps/search_detail.aspx?ubi=603258278
UBI Number                   603258278
Category                        LLC
Active/Inactive              Active
State Of Incorporation    CO
WA Filing Date               12/06/2012
Expiration Date              12/31/2013
Inactive Date
Duration                        Perpetual
Registered Agent Information
Agent Name                  C T Corporation System
Address                         505 Union Ave Se Ste 120
                                     Olympia, WA 98501

For governing persons the title, name and address are as follows:
Manager
DRISCOLL, MARK
1411 NW 50TH ST
SEATTLE, WA 98107

Then there's ON MISSION, LLC, the owner of the copyright in Mark and Grace Driscoll's book Real Marriage:

http://www.sos.wa.gov/corps/search_detail.aspx?ubi=603258287
UBI Number                 603258287
Category                      LLC
Active/Inactive            Active
State Of Incorporation CO
WA Filing Date            12/06/2012
Expiration Date           12/31/2013
Inactive Date 
Duration                      Perpetual
Registered Agent Information
Agent Name                C T Corporation System
Address                       505 Union Ave Se Ste 120
                                   Olympia, WA 98501
Governing Persons
Once again, the title, name and address turn out to be
Manager
DRISCOLL, MARK
1411 NW 50TH ST
SEATTLE, WA 98107

Now, in a way, whose million-dollar house in Snohomish County it is that has some affiliation with the corporate headquarters of Mars Hill is not particularly important.  An author can sell tens of thousands of books and can have earned the revenue to live in a spendy house in a prestige ZIP code.

Mark Driscoll also owns or co-owns the copyright for most published things with his name on it (that Driscoll owns the copyright and not the church is another topic for discussion at some other time).  Driscoll can sell as many books as he likes and put that revenue to whatever use he sees fit, and "if" he bought an expensive house in Snohomish county he can do that. 

And Snohomish county publicized that information for anyone to consult as government registers have a habit of doing. And as for search tools, Google is pretty popular.  It's just a matter of popping in the MH-HQ address alongside "Snohomish County" and it's the first result that pops up.  Anyone can do that. Simple as that. 

This real estate transaction, whatever its connection to parties at Mars Hill, retroactively sheds some new light on an older post at Wenatchee The Hatchet.  Namely the one posted here about how Mark Driscoll told Mars Hill "We're not a wealthy church."  However not-wealthy Mars Hill Church was someone felt confident enough in their revenue stream to buy a house, a million-dollar house, at a time that Driscoll described as one of the tougher financial seasons in the history of Mars Hill.  

Yes, in June 2012 Mark Driscoll was explaining the systemic deficits Mars Hill Church was running at each and every campus and explained that nobody sinned, MHC just had a financial model that wasn't sustainable for the long-term future.  Apparently systemic deficits don't indicate even the possibility of any kind of sin within Mars Hill.  Well, maybe giving needed to improve alongside scaling back staff and programs and, meanwhile, the month before Driscoll would share about systemic deficits someone with an affiliation to the corporate headquarters of Mars Hill bought a roughly million-dollar house in Snohomish county.

Who bought that house?  Well, in a way it's not very important, is it?  People can buy real estate if they can afford it.  But we're on the other side of a housing bubble, aren't we?  And who bought that house is, in another way, obviously the point anyone would be likely to care about when the topic is Mars Hill and at ... some blog.  We're not going to bother explicating that, because it's not 100% certain through primary documentation (at this point) who bought the house.  We do not necessarily provide answers (most of the time) so much as raise questions.  [Edit. If you want to plug the parcel number into a county auditor's index of public records ... you're free to do that. The answer is not exactly a great big shock.]

So let's let the question float around a little for consideration as we close with Mark Driscoll's dry aside from his sermon about the church in Philadelphia.  In discussing the sytemic deficits and how things would improve going forward Mark Driscoll would publicly explain to Mars Hill Church what myth pervades the church when it comes to finances (sermon transcript):

Now, you look at this, you say, “Fourteen churches.” See, this is the myth at Mars Hill: “There’s a money fairy somewhere and the money fairy takes care of it.” Okay. You’re the money fairy. Okay.

POSTSCRIPT 05-09-2014
Seeing as Mars Hill Church has pulled the "Update" page and introduced robots.txt to preclude the use of The WayBack Machine readers who want to learn what's in the "Update" that was originally quoted in this post may need to try out some links over here if they want to see and hear for themselves what was discussed by Driscoll that was quoted in this post.

After a longish and apparently unplanned hiatus Orthocuban is back up

Sure, maybe you won't remember Orthocuban, dear reader. Wenatchee The Hatchet is pleased to see that Fr. Obregon is back at the blog and things are up and working again.  We've missed his blog being around! 

Mars Hill sermon series coming up: The Ten Commandments (Lutherans, you may want to reach for your heart medication :) )

http://marshill.com/2013/09/04/a-new-series-on-the-ten-commandments

Lutheran brothers and sisters, grab the nitro pills before you watch this trailer! ;)

What this series will have to do with the first, second or even third use of the law remains to be seen but we can guess our Lutheran friends will be bracing themselves. 

"It's all about the numbers?", How to get over fear of inviting people to church, and a parking lot community group--Mars Hill in a time of numeric decline

http://marshill.com/2013/08/27/it-s-all-about-the-numbers
By Pastor Mark Driscoll
On September 12th, Outreach magazine will release its annual issue listing the 100 largest and fastest-growing churches in the nation. For the first time in a number of years, you won’t see Mars Hill Church listed.

... We will continue to count things at Mars Hill, such as how many people we have on Sundays, how many people are baptized every year, how many people are in Community Groups, how many elders we have to lovingly lead our people, how many people are giving financially, how many dollars we are bringing in and sending out, how many locations and services we have, etc. But, we will use that data internally for our church and not be publishing it much externally. [emphasis added]

http://marshill.com/2013/08/29/How-to-get-over-the-fear-of-inviting-people-to-church
by Pastor Matt Rogers

... This next stat is a tough pill to swallow: about 1 in 5 of us churchgoers invites anybody to church in the course of a year, per Rainer. We might have someone who could be totally up for it right in front of us, practically beckoning us to invite them, and instead we hesitate and hem and haw and sometimes don’t even get the words out of our mouths.


http://marshill.com/2013/08/28/the-parking-lot-community-group
As of today, Mars Hill Albuquerque has a new Community Group in the parking lot. I hope to engage with this group every time I see them. I’ll let you know when we replicate.

In a comment from August 12, 2013 a Jeremiah Kendrick wrote the following:

http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2013/08/where-are-they-now-mars-hill-pastors_11.html?showComment=1376368921220#c7464551772588171156
Jeremiah Kendrick said...

Andrew; no I'm not alone in leaving Mars Hills was around 14,000 people a Sunday at the end of 2012 and now is around 11,600. Most of the pastors who left did leave over the corporation management style that took full effect about 18 months ago, moving for a 5 day work week at 10 to 12 hours a day, to 6 day work week at 12 to 18 hours a day. And when you question this as a pastor or member like I did and many ex-pastors you are told to resign and leave Mars Hill for not being in full submission to Mars Hill's 3 executive pastors, Mark Driscoll, Dave Bruskas and Sutton. Turner. Most of the ex-pastors are bond by non-disclosure agreements and will be sued by Mars Hill for ever thing they have if they talk about it in public. I pray for a heart change form the 3 executive pastors and for all the ex-pastors and ex-members forced out of Mars Hill to land in a Christ centered church.

... and then there's this update from Pastor Sutton Turner posted ... somewhere. 

Monthly Stewardship Update

From Pastor Sutton Turner: Mars Hill Family, Each month we provide a financial health update to give everyone at the church a basic awareness of how we’re doing in this critical area. Normally, this update comes in the form of a letter from me and Kerry Dodd (our Chief Financial Officer), as well as a quick update from Pastor Mark during a sermon. This month looks a little different: guest preachers are in the pulpit and I just returned from Ethiopia to visit the twenty pastors that you’re supporting over there. It was an amazing trip. We hosted a national conference for hundreds of Christian pastors and their wives, and some traveled for days in order to attend from all corners of the country. We printed 1,000 Bibles in Amharic and gave them away to the pastors as a gift. Until now, most have had to share and trade individual books of the Bible with other pastors they know, so full access to the Word of God is a significant gift to their ministry. Here’s a photo of the group: I look forward to sharing more with you in the coming weeks. Thank you to all who have prayed for this journey!  July Recap All that to say, here is a summary of our July numbers—the first month of our new fiscal year: Average weekly attendance: 11,151 (8,959 adults and 2,191 kids)  [emphasis added] Contributing households: 3,394 (an estimated 32% of adults at Mars Hill Church gave during July) Average giving per adult: $38.33 (higher than projected) Total giving: $1.61M (target: $1.48M) Bottom line: Good start to the fiscal year, with positive variances overall.  Tacoma & Everett Fundraising Tacoma and Everett continue to make progress raising money for their buildings. Tacoma has $132,000 left to raise, and Everett needs another $360,000. Both churches are praying to finish fundraising and full occupy their new buildings by January 1.   Please Pray Next week is filled with strategic meetings that will affect the course of our church in the next season: Tuesday: the entire staff will gather together for training and fellowship. Wednesday: the Executive Elders will meet with the Board of Advisors and Accountability to review last year and make plans for next. [WtH if you'd like to compare the Governance page in 2013 to what it was in 2012 go here and here] Thursday & Friday: the Full Council of Elders (all of the pastors at Mars Hill) and our wives will gather in person for the first time since we expanded to multiple states. Big week, please pray. Enjoy the remaining weeks of the Best Sermon Ever series, and get ready for The Ten Commandments, come September.

So it would appear that based on the update posted by Pastor Sutton Turner and Kerry Dodd that Jeremiah Kendrick's mention of numeric decline has at least some plausibility to it.  Numeric decline could explain the new emphasis in how it's-not-about-the-numbers-even-though-we-still-plan-to-keep-growing-because-living-things-grow stuff that we've seen shared before. 

Driscoll has shared that Mars Hill will not be sharing numbers quite so much externally.  A new fiscal year kicked off recently at Mars Hill and new sites are in waiting but it may be that commenter Jeremiah Kendrick was right in pointing out that in terms of numbers Mars Hill has faced a decline.  It wouldn't be the first or last time numbers have fluctuated.  It's worth proposing that when three posts in a row have Driscoll on numbers, another guy on how laity should get over a fear of inviting people to church, and a campus pastor writes a personal story of hanging with Native Americans a common thread may be that if growth is going to return people need a direct, personal, and communal incentive beyond the expansion of a Mars Hill that has in the last few years come across more and more as a corporate brand, not least when it waded into trademark and logo issues back in 2011. 

1.6 million sure seems like a good sum of money but, let's remember, Mark Driscoll has said about Mars Hill "We're not a wealthy church".  Because Driscoll has said that numbers matter and there are people who count things it might be worth noting that the single most read post at Wenatchee The Hatchet is currently this one, in which Driscoll's claim "We're not a wealthy church." apparently made available at one point on The City as an internal message was set alongside the externally released FY2012 annual report to see how not-wealthy they were in FY2012.  If you'd like to go look directly at the report yourself, go here.

As for the Ten Commandments sermon series kicking off in September, Lutherans will want to take their heart medications where applicable, most likely.  :)

POSTSCRIPT: 09-7-2013

for those who read the FY2012 annual report you'll have noticed the average attendance was listed as a number closer to ... (btw each dot represents one person and 2796 were the blue dots representing new people) ...

Presented in its original size.
Subtle, yes?  13,173 as a simple font might have been, you know, simpler.

So the 14k number Kendrick listed may have been a bit on the high side.  People who can confirm that the number was closer to 14k than 13k are welcome to provide some documentation. 

POSTSCRIPT 2: 09-07-2013
http://marshill.com/2012/05/31/an-update-on-mars-hill-church-from-pastor-mark-may-2012
These figures were from the May 2012 update Mark Driscoll gave last year.

FINANCIAL UPDATE
April vs March 2012
             Adults that gave  weekly giving per A.  Giving Households  Weekly attendance
April     42%                    $29.13                         5,490                       14,059
March   41%                    $32.79                         4,838                       13,125

another HT to Alastair Roberts: a review of The Dark Ages Myth over at Strange Notions

An atheist with an interest in medieval history and science spends a bit of time discussing how science actually existed in the medieval period, contra popular narratives suggesting science was oppressed.  A relatively brief sampler:

... I love to totally stump these propagators by asking them to present me with the name of one - just one - scientist burned, persecuted, or oppressed for their science in the Middle Ages. They always fail to come up with any. They usually try to crowbar Galileo back into the Middle Ages, which is amusing considering he was a contemporary of Descartes. When asked why they have failed to produce any such scientists given the Church was apparently so busily oppressing them, they often resort to claiming that the Evil Old Church did such a good job of oppression that everyone was too scared to practice science. By the time I produce a laundry list of Medieval scientists - like Albertus Magnus, Robert Grosseteste, Roger Bacon, John Peckham, Duns Scotus, Thomas Bradwardine, Walter Burley, William Heytesbury, Richard Swineshead, John Dumbleton, Richard of Wallingford, Nicholas Oresme, Jean Buridan and Nicholas of Cusa - and ask why these men were happily pursuing science in the Middle Ages without molestation from the Church, my opponents usually scratch their heads in puzzlement at what just went wrong.

There's quite a bit more but I've settled for a short sampler to, I hope, spark your interest. 

POSTSCRIPT: 09-05-2013, as HUG pointed out, a link sure would be handy!

http://www.strangenotions.com/gods-philosophers/

Shortpacked on how a cartoonist has depicted parts of Bill Watterson's 20-year old Kenyon address

http://www.shortpacked.com/index.php?id=1919

You may have already seen the earlier cartoon depicting part of Bill Watterson's Kenyon address. 

Read the comments, some of the discussion gets lively.  Watterson liked what he did enough to do it for a decade but he also retired the strip.  The delicate balance of making a living doing something you're good at and that people enjoy alongside the realization that running on fumes and forsaking artistic challenges for the sake of a relatively certain income isn't a problem everyone will face, or even that many people.  Let's keep in mind that even John Lennon once said that selling out was, initially, pretty much the whole point.  The goal was to, if possible, get bigger than Elvis.

Andi Watson once said in an interview that there are some people who seem to think that "sell out" means you actually pay the bills by the revenue from your art rather than from unemployment checks.  As lively as intra-cartoonist debate about what to make of Watterson's 20-year old speech may be there's a sense in which the self-labeled fans may need these Shortpacked-style correctives more. 

HT to Alastair Roberts, btw

meow! D. G. Hart zings the Bayly brothers and Doug Wilson on Labor Day

There's nothing quite so intriguing about the Christian blogosphere as its capacity for rants and cyber-battles about ideas and ideals.  :)  It's what makes so many of us so very, very American.  Which makes it fitting on Labor Day that, among other things, D. G. Hart decided to zing the Brothers Bayly and Doug Wilson about their postmillennialism (Hart's gotta speak up for two-kingdom theology, of course).  Presented for brief consideration, the following:

... In other words, is Christendom a creation or is it heaven on earth? Does [Doug] Wilson violate every canon of Christian and conservative conviction by immanentizing the eschaton? It sure looks like his postmillenniaism and repeated briefs on behalf of Christendom has a lot of immanentizing going on. Then again, it’s a slippery Christendom and a libertarian theocracy he advocates (oxymoron intended).
  
In point of fact, Wilson does not acknowledge that Christians are aliens and strangers. His model for Christian political and cultural engagement is Christendom (minus the Crusades, papacy, Index of Books, Jewish ghettos). ...

and a bit more: 

Of course, the image of Christians as persecuted and martyrs doesn’t play well among folks who like to hurl “sissy” as an epithet. Turning the other cheek is not a model for cultural domination or for Mere Christendom — not sure it works for cultural engagement, actually.

Of course two-kingdom theology could and did become handy in the antebellum South as a reason not to get too swift in addressing slavery, just as two-kingdom theology could and did become handy in Weimar years when it was easier to let some things happen than to make some objections.  Any systematic applied across the board is going to lead to an atrocity of some kind when wielded by flesh and blood.  The history of the internet, and of the sorts of humans who invented it (i.e. the human race) is that we've got a long history of convincing ourselves our ideas won't have the same consequences as the ideas of those other people even if history could be shown to have proven otherwise. 

Or as some author of some book put it, there is none who is righteous, not even one.  But we peoples have a habit of thinking that quote is supposed to apply to you and never quite come around to applying to me.

A little music for Labor Day: Radamas Gnattali's Sonata for Cello and Guitar

Radames Gnattali, Sonata for Cello & Guitar
Andre Rodrigues (guitar)
Raphael Buratto (cello)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0AEC6cXkUY

The whole three-movement thing, which is a charmer.  :)

A little music for Labor Day: Ferdinand Rebay's Sonata for flute and guitar No. 2

Ferdinand Rebay: Sonata for flute and guitar No 2 in D
movement 1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ApPc8vUeGoc
movement 2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TldISLSqZv8
movement 3
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6L56GmkeOM
movement 4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqejbO7xAGc

a weekend linkathon while you wait for laundry to dry

Carl Trueman visits a liturgical service, shares the realization that traditional liturgical services can cover a whole ton more Bible than the smugly self-satisfied "Bible" church service. It's a worthwhile read.  Every religious gathering has some fashion of liturgy but ulta-low-liturgists tend to be in denial about that.

Hanna Rosin writes that there are some popular claims about earning discrepancy between men and women and that the popular stat is a false one.

This is one I'm reposting in case you didn't catch it the first time.

For some reason some British tabloid has revived an old idea that breast implants could be a way to smuggle explosives in for terrorist attacks.  Shallow men beware, fake breasts might one day literally be the death of you!

Well, there is such a thing as having a weekend.  May you enjoy yours.  This is a relatively fallow period of activity at Wenatchee The Hatchet.  That may not be the ideal for some but it is the ideal for Wenatchee at the present time.  :)  But there are sets of posts that will continue, so the plan goes, after there's some time set aside to enjoy what is left of summer

HT Phoenix Preacher: Kim Riddleberger's series on Orange County as a new Burned Over District, parts 1-6

http://kimriddlebarger.squarespace.com/the-latest-post/2013/6/25/the-oc-a-new-burned-over-district.html
http://kimriddlebarger.squarespace.com/the-latest-post/2013/7/2/the-oc-a-new-burned-over-district-part-one-the-buzz.html
http://kimriddlebarger.squarespace.com/the-latest-post/2013/7/9/the-oc-a-new-burned-over-district-part-two-tbn.html
http://kimriddlebarger.squarespace.com/the-latest-post/2013/7/16/the-oc-a-new-burned-over-district-part-three-calvary-chapel.html
http://kimriddlebarger.squarespace.com/the-latest-post/2013/7/23/the-oc-a-new-burned-over-district-part-four-robert-schuller.html
http://kimriddlebarger.squarespace.com/the-latest-post/2013/8/14/the-oc-a-new-burned-over-district-part-five-the-bible-teache.html
http://kimriddlebarger.squarespace.com/the-latest-post/2013/8/21/the-oc-a-new-burned-over-district-part-six-what-are-the-less.html

Some striking quotes from the final part of the series:

The very fact that Robert Schuller's Crystal Cathedral is now Christ Cathedral--home to Rome's OC diocese--points to a degree of change which is absolutely unfathomable to those of us who lived through this tumultuous and exciting time.  Robert Schuller--the great "possibility thinker"--didn't consider the possibility of bankruptcy and losing his beloved Cathedral.  For a time it looked like a smooth transition from father to son, and then  suddenly, everything blew up.  Now the Crystal Cathedral is "Christ Cathedral" and a Roman altar now stands obtrusively in the center of the Cathedral.

...

The reality is that good deeds don't often generate buzz.  Warren is now old news here in the OC, suffering the fate of every "new" ministry when the "new" wears off.  "Now what do we do?"  "How do we keep it all going?"  I'd bet the farm that figuring out what strategic step to take next occupies the time and energy of the staffs and governing boards of the remaining evangelical megachurches.  Pity the poor staff person or board member who suggests going back to the basics of preaching the gospel!  These churches truly miss the "buzz" which built them, and would probably do just about anything to get it back.  But the buzz is long gone and chasing it is a fool's errand.

And this is why the OC is now a "burned over" distinct.  People have seen too many staged miracles and fake healings.  They have been told too many times that Jesus is coming back any moment because some crisis in the Middle East pointed in that direction.  Too many times they've heard that God was doing a "radical" world-changing work through some preacher who then spent more time begging for more money to keep it all going than he did explaining how this radical new work might come about.  Because the buzz was generated by personalities and entertainment, should we really be surprised it has fallen silent?  No.  All that remains when the buzz ends are ugly concrete shells with smaller and smaller crowds on Sundays, and ministers seeking to be more "radical" and hipper than their predecessors.  It can only turn out badly in the end.  This is why it is good the buzz is falling silent.      
If Orange County is as burned over a district as Riddleberger says it is then the folks at Mars Hill Church should not expect too much.  Ecclesiastes includes the legendary and wry observation that if you see something that appears new it is not, it was from ages past and that it is not really new.  But if there's anything I learned the hard way within Mars Hill it's that a lot of us are convinced we know church history enough to think we're doing something new when we don't realize that, at best, we've done nothing more than needlessly reinvent a wheel or, at worst, contributed to a foolhardy cult of personality that shouldn't have been permitted to emerge to begin with.  But the lure of legacy is just tempting enough that younger men, in particular (to whom the sales pitch has been rather explicitly crafted) are still likely to buy in.  A responsible overview of church history may play a role in providing reasons for a young man to reconsider.  The same could be said, of course, for older men. 

Ribbon Farm: You Are Not an Artisan

This has been linked to in the past at Wenatchee The Hatchet but a few key excerpts seem worth quoting and linking to again.

The future of work looks bleaker than it needs to for one simple reason: we bring consumption sensibilities to production behavior choices. Even our language reflects this: we “shop around” for careers. We  look for prestigious brands to work for. We look for “fulfillment” at work. Sometimes we even accept pay cuts to be associated with famous names.  This is work as fashion accessory and conversation fodder.

We can think of this as conspicuous production, by analogy to conspicuous consumption. First-world artisan tendencies take this to a logical extreme.

When you subconsciously think of work as something you consume for pleasure, you end up with a possibly irrational (economically speaking) attraction to artisan work. Even those who don’t actually end up as artisans choose work the way they choose cars, jewelry or handbags, over-valuing things like resume-value and exposure-value.

...

What makes it worse is that in an economy based on a fiat currency, shareholder value maximization and deficit spending, the capacity to generate an income does not necessarily imply that meaningful work is being done, either in a subjective psychological sense (it helps you evolve rather than atrophy) or economic sense (net wealth is being created rather than consumed or harvested). You might even end up having to pay to do real work.

Since income being generated at an individual level is not a reliable indicator that work being performed, I prefer a different distinction: schlep work versus sexy work. If there is schlepping involved, it is more likely to be real work. If there are sexy elements involved, it is more likely to be conspicuous production pretending to be work.

...
What unites all these trades [that are emerging in the information economy, as discussed earlier in the article] is that they accept roles based on kinds of schlepping that machines are bad at rather than insisting on work that humans like to do.


***

And that might be the biggest tell of all, the sexier the job looks the less likely it is that that job involves real work.  There are things machines are bad at, and may always be bad at, that humans will need to do, but these things can often be tedious and decidedly anti-sexy.  But someone has to do that stuff.  The paperless office I was being told would emerge thirty years ago has not quite arrived.  If anything the sea of documents we must slog through has either remained the same or increased but what has changed is the water line that is some kind of informational sea level, the level at which our ability to sink or swim may depend on not needing to have our feet on the ground of what we used to be able to trust.  But that's just rambling, never mind that.

Courtesy of Terry Teachout, a quote from Lord Acton--no not the one about absolute power, that one's TOO obvious. :)

There is no error so monstrous that it fails to find defenders among the ablest men."
Lord Acton, letter to Mary Gladstone (Apr. 24, 1881)

Christian Brady on Jesus' cursing the fig tree and cleansing the Temple and a continually puzzling tale

http://targuman.org/blog/2013/08/19/of-fig-trees-and-faith/

There are many puzzling accounts in biblical texts, Jesus cursing a fig tree that was not even in the season to bear fruit is one of them.  Christian Brady, whose work we've linked to in the past for his nice explanation of why Mark Driscoll's claims that the Targum Neofiti proves Jews believed in the Trinity before Jesus (or something weirdly like that) doesn't hold up to any scholarly scrutiny.  If you want to part with some of your money to read Robert Cargill's paper inspired by the same Driscollian sub-competence on Old Testament literature generally and Jewish Targums (i.e. commentaries on Jewish scriptures) in particularly, knock yourself out. 

Meanwhile, Brady's writing about Jesus' cursing a fig tree is worth linking to.  Give it a read, if you've come this far already, and thanks for visiting.

Foreign Policy: CIA files establish US aided Saddam in Iran/Iraq war during Reagan administration

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/08/25/secret_cia_files_prove_america_helped_saddam_as_he_gassed_iran?page=full

No comment at this time, but a link to the article seemed worth doing. 

The Elephant's Debt in August, three posts

http://theelephantsdebt.com/2013/08/08/recent-developments-8-august-2013/

http://theelephantsdebt.com/2013/08/19/harvest-bible-chapels-big-house-undergoes-an-expensive-renovation-and-hbc-creates-a-new-web-page-to-explain/

http://theelephantsdebt.com/2013/08/22/dr-ronald-allchin-former-elder-of-harvest-bible-chapel-speaks-publicly-for-the-first-time/#more-1865

Matt Redmond--More Thoughts on Weakness--and a few thoughts on 2 Corinthians 11-12 as a rhetorical response to super-apostles

Everything in American church culture fights against weakness as a way to let the power of God rest on us as individuals, as families and as churches. It’s all about position and influence and money and energy and momentum and celebrity and excellence and skill. None of those things are bad in and of themselves. But the power when all are arrayed is hard to overcome. At least in the minds of those who wield it.

If this is true (and I imagine there are some who would say it isn't because, well, this is America) why would everything in the American church fight against weakness as a way to let the power of God rest on us as individuals, as families, and as churches? 

Let me offer a playful answer, because we conflate weakness with sin.  If weakness in the life of a Christian isn't because of sin it is an opportunity for sin. 

Now maybe boasting in weakness is something we're reluctant to do because even the way Paul does it in 2 Corinthians may count as one of the world's earlier cases of what has been called a humblebrag.  :) 

Maybe we think of "the weaker brother" passages and how for the sake of the weaker brother we won't eat meat, or how we're just going to eat meat and the weaker brother should just deal with it because that's needless legalism.  There's a whole category of professing Christian that is, as it were professionally offended and professionally offensive.  It can often come in the form of claiming to speak truth to power or claiming that there are weaknesses or things to be offended by within a church or the Church.  Whether from a presumed position of institutional power or speaking truth to power the power plays can look startlingly similar.

Often the most brazen attempts at controlling the behavior of other Christians takes on the guise of appellations to weakness of condition or status.  Back when I was in college every spring there'd be some knuckle-headed bromide about the need for women to be modest and hand-wringing about women wearing outfits that let a guy realize she had secondary sexual characteristics.  Granting that times changed and what may seem normal now would have been considered hoochie attire forty years ago ... the weakness of the abstracted other as a substitute for our own power plays can make boasting in weakness feel weird. 

When we talk about areas where we feel "weak" in our Christian life we can often talk about areas where we feel apt to fall into sin, or so it often seems.  Boasting in weakness as Paul does it in 2 Corinthians shows us that there can be boasting in the physical abuse endured for apostolic work.  Paul even goes on to write about divine revelations he partook of that were too wonderful to find words for.  To keep him from being conceited a messenger from Satan was sent to torment him.  How many Christians have you met who have boasted that God permitted a satanic affliction to beset them to prevent them from being conceited?  A thorn in the flesh that was not only not removed but remained, with an answer to a prayer that said "My grace is sufficient for you, my power is made perfect in weakness."

Forget the usual pious bromides about how "God answers every prayer" and think about this boast, Paul's boast was that the answer to his three petitions for the removal of the thorn in the flesh, the messenger from Satan was ... "Praise God, He's leaving it there!"  If the goal of the prayer was, let us note, the removal of that affliction, then Paul is boasting in a prayer that was answered with "no".  After all, did the affliction remain?  Paul tells us himself it did.  Let's put away pious reinterpretations that would say Paul was not boasting in his apostolic role giving him the opportunity to witness divine mysteries but in the fact that to keep him from being conceited he was afflicted and that, crucially, when he asked that the affliction be removed, was told "no".  When's the last time you bragged that God didn't give you want earnestly prayed for because you needed to be kept from becoming conceited?  Even boasting in that weakness acknowledged along the way what sin Paul said he needed to be guarded from.

When Paul wrote that he was about to get into crazy talk we can be tempted to not take him entirely seriously there.  Boasting in weakness arguably can't get any bigger than boasting in how God providentially opted to not answer your prayer that He would remove physical suffering from you.  Boasting that, instead of removing the affliction, His answer was "My grace is sufficient for you, my power is made perfect in weakness" and that now you have to live with the affliction the rest of your life, that thorn in the flesh, whatever it was, that messenger from Satan, that's kind of crazy.  We're given the impression the super-apostles were not the sort who would brag about the prayers they prayed that God didn't answer. 

Practical Theology for Women: on sarcastic pastors and a follow up

Here's the original post Wendy published on sarcastic pastors.

And here's a follow-up post on hermeneutics.

My own thoughts in response to the first post Wendy published were the subject of an earlier post).  And I've given the matter a little more thought since. 

The core social problem with sarcasm as employed by some pastors and bloggers is that it is essentially a shortcut from dealing with ideas and people they disagree with in a serious way.  There is also a significant temptation to succumb to double standards.  This can manifest in a form where some knowing risqué joke typed with a nudge and a wink by Team A is given a pass and when a comparable joke is given by someone on Team B the people on Team A take offense, apparently in an entirely serious and unreflective way.  Now a couple of epistles discourage coarse joking generally so someone might say that there's a more basic underlying problem in the example I've given.  Sure, let's grant that up front, but it's another case in which a select group of people will refer to how offensive passages in Ezekiel are that deal with sexual organs and that since that's in the Bible coarse analogies for the sake of effect are totally legit.

Now there's a somewhat lazy group of people who will simply figure from this that those kinds of contradictions prove the Bible is useless. The reason it's lazy is because those kinds of contradictions are inherent to the entire human species. Why is it that certain types of executive power exercised in the United States are anathema to conservatives and liberals only when the other side resorts to them?  Hypocrisy is the natural human condition and may not be on purpose (most of the time it is likely inadvertent) but double standards have to be explained.  :)   Anyone can pretend to themselves and others that I get to use belittling sarcastic analogies because I'm speaking truth to power while you're just being an offensive troll.  No, that won't work in either direction so long as we attempt to justify for ourselves what we find offensive in others. Either we're going to have to explain why certain double standards are not only justified but necessary but to do so in a way that exonerates us while condemning others.  But that's the whole internet already, isn't it?  Do we not aspire to something slightly better?  No, not in reality, it seems.

I would myself return to the observation that a great many good and serious preachers did not see any necessity for sarcasm in instruction most of the time.  Remembering that humor comes in the categories of laughing with and laughing at, guided by the golden rule, should be rule enough to think better of most types of sarcasm we're tempted to employ.  If you wouldn't want to be on the receiving end of it why be on the giving end of it?  Because someone on the internet is wrong?  There's an xkcd for that, right?

POSTSCRIPT:
I'll be the first to admit I've employed sarcasm mercilessly about certain people in the past.  This old post of mine is basically sarcasm from start to finish.  If you feel there is no other option but to employ sarcasm I suggest you use it to address ideas and behaviors rather than to address individuals and categories of people.  People can let go of ideas and behaviors in time but their very self tends to stick with them until death, eh?

a linkathon with a theme, the past

Headline says Angry Nixon: New tapes reveal an overwrought president in grips of Watergate.
In other news water contains the elements hydrogen and oxygen but, hey, we still drink water.

On the subject of something else from the later 20th century, it appears Gitmo may have banned someone from receiving The Gulag Archipeligo.  Irony hardly gets more meta than that.

When asked, lots of people don't want to go back to the 1990s. 

For animation fans the 1990s kinda rocked.  We got The Simpsons (the first four to six seasons of which are great).  We got Batman: the animated series.  We got Animaniacs, worthy of note just for Pinky & the Brain alone. Slightly less kid-friendly we got Beavis & Butthead, South Park, and casting about further east we got Cowboy Bebop and the frankly over-hyped Neon Genesis Evangelion.  Then there's some studio called Pixar that emerged in the mid-1990s and somebody named Brad Bird did an adaptation of The Iron Giant.  The 1990s kinda rocked on the `toon front. 

To close a short post with a reference to ... linkathon ... sorta, it's nice to see Phoenix Preacher is back online.

some assembled light reading and listening (i.e. links) for the week

HT Alastair Roberts, "I hate strong female characters".
Insert scare quotes around "strong female character" as the article is thematically a summation of comparable ideas blogged a few years ago over here. The repetition of Joss Whedon's waif-fu trope withstanding, this meme in popular entertainment does not mean we're getting strong female characters just because someone like Megan Fox asserts that her character in the Michael Bay Transformers franchise was a strong female character. 

HT Phoenix Preacher, Salman Rushdie states that our age is defined too much by what we take offense at and not what we love.

Carl Trueman proposes that the cultural transformation paradigm of the new Calvinism isn't new and that's got no evidence to show it has worked. And, yes, we can all talk about Christendom and the West until the cows come home but this is not quite the same thing as revivalism as it has emerged in the continental United States.

A set of posts over at The Art of Manliness caught my eye, thanks to Alastair Roberts. He just linked to part 3.  I'll link to three parts. 

... experiments by Dr. Ariely and others have shown that far from being a deliberate, rational choice, dishonesty often results from psychological and environmental factors that people typically aren’t even aware of.

The greater the psychological distance between our dishonest actions and their consequences, the easier those actions become to rationalize as morally and ethically acceptable.


Or as Ariely puts it:

“Passed from person to person, dishonesty has a slow, creeping, socially erosive effect. As the ‘virus’ mutates and spreads from one person to another, a new, less ethical code of conduct develops. And although it is subtle and gradual, the final outcome can be disastrous. This is the real cost of even minor instances of cheating and the reason we need to more vigilant in our efforts to curb even small infractions.”

Chris Rosebrough over at Fighting for the Faith discusses the anatomy of religious money scams.

HT Jason Engwer of Triablogue, organized skepticism has seen better days. Turns out that on either side of the "evangelism" divide evangelists for skepticism or old time religion can end up committing identify fraud, sexually harassing people, revealing racial or ethnic bigotries and generally behaving like jerks regardless of the values they ostensibly promote, whether reason or charity.  It's hard to blame secular humanists for a not-so-sneaking suspicion that organized skepticism will quickly get you the same problems we've all seen show up in organized religion. 

Then again, as I've written in the past, [I]n a time such as ours it's a lot sexier to talk about how impersonal a bureaucracy is than to talk about how it helps the sick get better, how it can save the lives of people who would die without the help of institutions, or how institutions can help those going blind to see.

Episode 267: Elysium, where all the wealth is concentrated, for some reason, on a spaceship.
You can skip all the way to minute 20 before listening to the podcast.  That Elysium itself doesn't seem to have any foundational economy that produces anything (production is all planet-side, it seems) makes the dystopia a little tough to take as given.  I mean, class divides have been the subject of films since, oh, Fritz Lang, but in Lang's dystopian future the relationship between the two classes and, crucially, the interdependence of them, is the whole focus of the film.

In Elysium we get, well, a big build-up to the idea that though Elysium is a doomed society that expends limited resources that the best thing to do is to use all those resources to provide medical care to an already overpopulated planet rife with disease.  The end, where everyone planetside can be considered a citizen, seems altruistic enough but what it accomplishes in terms of emotional beats is the little girl gets cured of leukemia, no small good there, obviously, but it remains to be seen how a system as limited and insular as Elysium will be able to remedy a whole planet of people. 

There's also nothing indicating why people would keep needing to use med beds to heal themselves unless there's a condition or two the med beds can ameliorate but not completely fix.  Per the pscyopath played by Sharlto Copley (who does a memorable job chewing through every scene) what if repeated reliance on med beds has had unforeseen consequences?  A common trope in folklore is that those who are able to attain immortality lose morality.  It could be that this could be explored a bit more directly, if that's where the director wanted to go, that Kruger has relied on med beds to fix fatal conditions to a point where he's been re-atomized enough times he isn't the self he once was. But how re-atomization actually works is never explained and simply a given.  It has no flaws in terms of methodology or diagnostics.  It is just assumed to work.  But if the sort of fission/fusion that "reatomization" would imply has become possible by the 22nd century then, hey, why not use that technology to convert toxic waste into, I dunno, organic compounds that can be used for food?  In fact why did nobody in Elysium seem to come up with this?  Because the film is a strictly political parable about the here and now rather than an exploration of possibilities.

If a political parable about how the haves have medical technology you don't have and want to keep immigrants out (and one of the gaping questions, literally, is how Elysium's atmosphere is retained in the donut in space) then the putative science is immaterial.  There's enough scarcity that Elysium is said by its own director of security to be doomed but there's still enough resources on the thing to ... heal everyone on the planet?  Well ... that's enough links and rambling commentary for a post.

Not that I didn't find some enjoyment from the film, by the way.  Copley is a fun actor to watch.  If you want to know why the hippo did it you can feel free to catch the film as a matinee.  ;)

Slate: grieving (sorta) an arranged marriage

http://www.slate.com/articles/life/family/2013/08/arranged_marriage_in_america_my_parents_moved_here_from_india_raised_me.single.html

The writer/philosopher Kierkegaard, ever the smart-ass, wrote that the single man bemoans his lack of a wife and then the married man bemoans the fact that he has one.  A life lived without any regret is the life of a sociopath.

While arranged marriages were flirtatiously and coyly discussed during the courtship fad at the old church scene nobody wanted for even a second to actually give up the ideal of mutual butterflies and twitterpation. Even in a setting like ancient Israel mutual affection and attraction were held to be wonderful enough to be the topic of a set of erotic poems.  Although the detail about the poems being erotic literature but that Christians shouldn't be reading erotica may yet prove the subject of another installment in a laconic review of Real Marriage.

That and the topic of bitterness in the best-seller in comparison to the topic of bitterness in somebody's lengthy discourse on spiritual warfare. 

Benedict Cumberbatch shares a note with photographers on the set of Sherlock--go to Egypt and take photographs of something that's actually important

http://www.buzzfeed.com/ellievhall/benedict-cumberbatch-sherlock-egypt-paparazzi

HT Jim West

A small bit of dry amusement for a weekend.

bits of cirremt evemts from the last few weeks discussed at The Guardian, comment is free

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/aug/14/google-gmail-users-privacy-email-lawsuit?INTCMP=ILCNETTXT3487
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/09/lavabit-shutdown-snowden-silicon-valley
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/18/david-miranda-detained-uk-nsa

Barry Webb's commentary on the book of Judges ... a new toy for the read pile

http://zwingliusredivivus.wordpress.com/2012/12/08/the-book-of-judges-the-new-international-commentary-on-the-old-testament/

Learned of it through this little post at Jim West's blog.

Started reading the book in the last few weeks.  Fascinating stuff for a layman.  I, too, am looking forward to commentary on the Levite's concubine. 

In fact Webb's commentary might be something useful to consult when I get around to composing a suite called The Levite's Concubine: 12 fragments for solo guitar.

I'm actually not kidding about that last part.

Studio Ghibli's hayao miyazaki has a new film coming out, The Wind Rises

http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2013/08/15/the_wind_rises_english_trailer_the_new_miyazaki_movie_looks_haunting.html

Decades ago World War 2 was the subject of the bleak Grave of the Fireflies.  Now Hayao Miyazaki has tackled a fictionalized account of the creator of the famous Mitsubishi Zero.  Miyazaki's films have heretofore always addressed fantastic else-worlds rather than our own.  Miyazaki has always been, at heart, a very serious filmmaker and a storyteller in spite of his flights (literal and figurative) of fancy.  He's also no spring chicken and some policy changes in Japan and shifts in governance may have inspired him to be more blunt and direct.  There's a sense in which, the desires of movie critics withstanding, no art is ultimately subtle in the end, thus the artifice of art. 

This should be interesting and an advantage of living in the Emerald City is that no matter how limited the release this film may get (will Disney really give THIS film a nationwide screening in the US?) there will be a chance to see this in Seattle. 

stuff at Cinemagogue

http://cinemagogue.com/2013/08/14/miss-me-a-review-of-the-conjuring/
http://cinemagogue.com/2013/08/16/the-wolverine-there-can-be-only-one/

After a semi-hiatus James Harleman has a couple of posts on recent films over at Cinemagogue.  Wolverine finally gets a decent stand-alone movie that, ironically, ties everything to the X-Men trilogy that came before in terms of backstory.  Oh well, that's the thing about the X-Men franchise that is a strength or a weakness depending on who you ask.  I say it's a weakness but then that's just personal taste.  First Class was arguably the first and only X-Men film that WASN'T about Wolverine.  It was about Magneto and since Magneto's one of the persistently actually interesting characters in the franchise First Class was fun.  Not that McKellan wasn't always fun as Magneto ... just that we're often given the idea that we're supposed to sympathize with the heroes. 

NPR: Why are American orchestras afraid of new symphonies?

http://www.npr.org/blogs/deceptivecadence/2013/08/12/211376496/why-are-american-orchestras-afraid-of-new-symphonies

Normally articles that have titles that end in question marks are inane rhetorical questions (personal opinion, any article written by Graeme McMillan for Spinoff).  This article, however, delves a bit into one conductor's view about how and why American symphonies don't back new works.  We could have a big old discussion about the contemporary place of the symphony has become the soundtrack of the blockbuster rather than as a "pure music" venue that was replete with programmatic digressions and stories to imbue meaning into abstract music.  If anything a person could playfully make the case that the symphony has ultimately gone Hollywood, which was where symphonists seemed determined to take the whole genre for centuries.  If Beethoven were alive today I don't think he'd mind that his Ninth shows up in the first Die Hard movie just so long as he got the royalty checks.  :)