Author: BrJames

27Jun

Cheap grace

In the aftermath of the tragic shooting in South Carolina, a shockingly racist hate crime, this bit piqued my interest:

What too many whites seem to demand from these families’ statements, however, isn’t really grace. As the journalist Jamelle Bouie pointed out, people like Santorum insist on what the German theologian and anti-Nazi freedom fighter Dietrich Bonhoeffer called “cheap grace” — the “preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance” from those who have sinned. The forgiveness they want is so cheap that I can only call it “Wal-Mart grace”: low-priced but shoddy, destructive of real community and built on exploitation.

Source: LA Times editorial online at: http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-0625-baptist-charleston-forgiveness-20150625-story.html

The author goes on to suggest a theological error–that whites need to atone for their years of racism.  As if they could do so.  In fact, the heart of the gospel is this:  We cannot atone for our own sins.  Only Jesus can pay that price.

However, while we can’t atone for the past, we can choose a better future.  We go forward trying to live differently, and making what amends we can out of love and gratitude.  The word that the author should have chosen here is the word “repentance”.  This is the word that Bonhoeffer chose. For even as Jesus says “I forgive you”, he also says, “go, and sin no more.”  To do otherwise is indeed to cheapen that precious gift of grace.

 

 

25Jun

Sleepy Hollow: Apocalypse Word Salad

image“Sleepy Hollow” is a show that trades on a formula: This or that cursed object or ritual is about to usher in the apocalypse, or visit some doom or tragedy upon an innocent girl, or both. It reminds me a bit of an old show called “Friday the 13th” in which a curio shop owner collected occult objects that the heroes were trying to get out of public circulation.

The first episode of “Sleepy Hollow” has a headless axe-wielding British horseman emerging from a barn to terrorize a sleepy upstate New York community. In what seems a mashup of Irving’s Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle, Ichabod Crane also mysteriously awakens 200+ years after facing the horseman in the 1700’s. In this telling, Crane is no wimpy schoolteacher, but rather a revolutionary war hero, played enthusiastically by Tom Mison, who is resurrected to take on this hideous beast. He teams up with a street wise female cop (Nicole Beharie), who becomes his partner of sorts. Some of the enjoyment in the early episodes is watching him cope with modernity, even as she must come to grips with the realization that there may be supernatural forces at work.

Fairly quickly, things take a turn for the apocalyptic. The headless horseman is none other than one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, who is about to usher in the End of Days.

The Bible is treated in typical media fashion as a book of arcana that contains a recipe and doomsday calendar for the earth’s end. (Of course, to be fair, there are some Christians out there that view parts of it this way, too). The Bible is discarded for the most part except to offer up a frightening passage here and there from Revelations or Ezekiel. I haven’t watched enough to see if they are even using real verses or just making stuff up. In any case, even if the verses are real, there is no context or theological framework to make sense of them. The show basically puts the scripture in a blender and hits “frappe”.

True believers will be saddened to note that although demons abound, there is very little of God to be found anywhere. The forces in play are demons, not angels. The wrath of Molech is substituted for the wrath of God. And of course, the End of Days can be averted if humans can just stop that next portal from opening, or disrupt a profane ritual involving dribbling blood on some tied up female victim, or just get get that [insert occult object here] off the streets.

Perhaps they should have stopped with the pilot. The proverbial “jumping the shark” occurred somewhere fairly early on. Two seasons now have seen a proliferation of creatures and occult entities to rival even what the old 1960s “Dark Shadows” soap opera could envision at its campiest. (A Barnabas Collins vampire would fit right in; Alas, but Jonathan Frid was born too early). At least “Dark Shadows”–and “Ghostbusters”, to name another that pops to mind–didn’t take themselves too seriously. In “Sleepy Hollow”, that sickening sound you hear isn’t the rolling of heads onscreen, but of eyes offscreen, as the show chugs along, introducing pied pipers, cursed Judas coins, good witches fighting evil ones, a demon named Molech snarling at his human servants, a Frankenstein monster created by Benjamin Franklin, and so on.

So consider watching this for the atmosphere (though this seems to get less creepy as the silliness mounts), and perhaps for some unintentionally campy fun. But don’t expect to learn anything of eschatological or biblical importance. You won’t find much similarity with Washington Irving’s tales, either, aside from some names.

06Jun

Policeman buys groceries for struggling shoplifter

In Tarrant, Alabama, a woman was stopped for shoplifting this past December.  When she mentioned that she was struggling to feed a family, the officer, William Stacy, ran inside and bought her groceries.

 

The officer’s kind act was caught on camera by a bystander who posted the clip online. It quickly went viral racking up more than 650,000 views.

Johnson’s family of six, including her two daughters, two grandchildren and a niece, have been living off of disability and welfare. The welfare check she was supposed to receive this month had gotten lost in the mail, according to AL.com.

And while Stacy’s decision to lend a helping hand was a generous one, the kindness didn’t stop there. The Tarrant Police Department has since signed Johnson’s family up for a local toy drive and collected food donations from the community, eventually delivering two truckloads of groceries to the 47-year-old’s apartment.

Read it all: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/12/officer-buys-eggs-for-gma-caught-stealing_n_6310630.html

This is a most welcome change from all those police brutality stories.

28May

Dollar–A Good Name for This Guy

Some folks apparently missed the bit in Scripture where Jesus said, “You cannot serve both God and Money.”  Mega-rich pastors preaching the false gospel of prosperity are probably one of the biggest things, after pedophile priests, to give Christianity a bad name in the world.

Take the latest controversy regarding the televangelist with the rather appropriate name of Creflo Dollar:

…the finances of the televangelist’s 30,000-member church, World Changers Church International in College Park, Georgia, are under close scrutiny after Dollar asked his followers to buy him a $65 million private jet.

Dollar’s sermons pack his 8,500-seat mega-church, and like any house of worship, the church is non-profit and tax-exempt, reports CBS News correspondent Mark Strassmann.

His ministry has prospered with satellite churches in at least a dozen states and hundreds of thousands of online followers. Dollar owns a multi-million dollar mansion and condo.

Read it all: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/televangelist-creflo-dollar-under-scrutiny-asking-for-65-million-private-jet/

15May

Interstellar: A Wild (If Illogical) Ride

imageI saw the movie “Interstellar” again recently, this time via On Demand. Let me just say that I really like this movie. Also, before you read much further, be aware that if you haven’t seen this movie already, there are spoilers below.

I’ll start with what makes this a highly watchable and interesting movie. The first half of the movie does a great job of creating an air of mystery. There are creepy events that lend a sense of a ghost story–an unseen entity is manipulating gravity inside the bedroom of the girl Murph, making books move and creating patterns in the dust. Furthermore, this is set against a bleak and melancholic backdrop, as humans are struggling to survive on a dying earth. The acting of Matthew McConaughey and little Mackenzie Foy, in setting up the theme of father-daughter love, was superb. Their relationship is an emotional glue that holds together the entire movie. I thought the scene in which Cooper is launched into space, juxtaposed with images of Murph shrieking in agonized grief at the loss of her father, is one of the most heart-wrenching portrayals in all of cinema.

The rest of the movie kicks into the realm of suspenseful science fiction featuring an epic quest through space and time. The movie has been compared to 2001, and the attempts at “space realism” and Cooper’s psychedelic voyage into the black hole certainly evoked this prior classic. In “Interstellar” there is an inverse of the Hal incident: the superintelligent robot remains loyal and heroic, while a murderous human madman nearly kills them all. Over all, I felt that this movie has more heart than Stanley Kubrick’s nearly wordless and vaguely misanthropic film.

The movie explores the existential dread that humans naturally feel when approaching death. This is what drives Dr. Mann mad. This is the theme echoed in Professor Brand’s mantra, the poem by Dylan Thomas that says, “Do not go gentle into that good night…”

Now I have to mention some downsides. First, while this movie is in many ways a warm and relationship-affirming movie, it is a godless movie. There is no depiction of religion, church-going, or anything smacking of faith in a higher being. Even the small town and farm life that is featured in the opening and closing scenes, while thoughtfully portrayed, seems incomplete: The movie shows some authentic charm–baseball games, school conferences, a main street, and a kindly small town grandpa swilling beer on his Victorian porch–but nary a steeple is to be seen. It’s not anti-God, per se, but merely agnostic. Of course, that’s about the best one can hope for from mainstream movies these days.

Then there is the silly and the illogical. First I give the silly: Love is a force of nature, affirms the teary eyed younger Dr. Brand, played by Anne Hathaway. I felt that this weakened things a bit. Now I don’t want to slander love, which is a great and wondrous thing–within the domain of relationships. God is Love, after all. So I won’t say that it was bad. “Silly” may be too harsh; “cheesy” might be more accurate. Sometimes cheesy is good, but here it made my eyes roll a bit.

Now for the illogical: One major subplot of the movie is that an evolved humanity of the future reaches back through time to help present day humanity avoid extinction. While handily sidestepping the supernatural, this is inherently illogical.

This reminds me of something. C.S. Lewis once opined with characteristic wit, “Nonsense remains nonsense even when we talk it about God” (C.S Lewis, The Problem of Pain). A corollary to this might be, “nonsense is nonsense, even when dressed in science and inserted into a gripping movie.”

04May

Responsive site

We beg your pardon as we transition our affiliated web site to a “responsive” design. This means that at a small screen size, the web pages will shift from the usual two column layout with a navigation bar, to a single column layout with a collapsible navigation menu button. This should make our site more readable on a mobile device. Pages may come down or behave oddly for brief periods of time. This blog, which already has a responsive layout, should be unaffected.

Here is an example of the differences in appearance that you may notice on a smartphone screen:

image image

03May

Minecraft Psalm 23, another video project

We are pleased to announce our second video offering, a bit of (respectful) whimsy that utilizes the creative game of Minecraft:

The Text here is from the King James version of the Holy Bible.

The images are screen shots from a minecraft game.

The music is by Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg (1843-1907), from his Piano Concerto in A minor, Op 16: Adagio section. This is a public domain recording available on the musOpen website.  This is an early work, written when he was 24 while visiting Søllerød, Denmark, and is the only concerto completed by Grieg.  It is often compared to the piano concerto by Schumann.  It is scored for piano, woodwinds in pairs, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, and strings.  The performers here are the Skidmore College Orchestra.

The Minecraft style titles are thanks to Textcraft: http://textcraft.net/

And of course I am grateful to the inventive folks at Mojang for their creative game.

16Apr

Persecution of Iraqi Christians

This is a story that deserves a wider hearing.

According to the reporter:

There are few places on earth where Christianity is as old as it is in Iraq. Christians there trace their history to the first century apostles. But today, their existence has been threatened by the terrorist group that calls itself Islamic State. More than 125,000 Christians — men, women and children — have been forced from their homes over the last 10 months.

Read more here: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/iraq-christians-persecuted-by-isis-60-minutes/

One part I found especially sad is the cultural losses:

Archbishop Nicodemus Sharaf: “I think they burn all the books. And we have books from the first century of the Christianity.”

Lara Logan: “You had from the first century..”

Archbishop Nicodemus Sharaf: “Yes, of the Christianity. When I remember this, I cannot …”(crying) “from the beginning the Christianity, this is the first time we cannot pray in our churches.”

You just can’t get back centuries old manuscripts that are burned. Some things are irreplaceable.