as we’ve all been reminded by the obligatory holiday sales (on a sidenote, does anyone else find rampant consumerism and observance of “holy-days” contradictory? why does every holiday inevitably become reduced to an excuse to feed the greed of capitalism?), today is memorial day and thanks to an afternoon of cable news at my in-laws’ house, i’ve seen plenty of flags and heard many references to why we celebrate this day. and it’s appropriate. brave soldiers have bled for the freedoms we hold so flippantly, and for their sacrifice i am grateful. so i’m all for supporting the troops if that means making sure they are a last resort, ensuring that they are justifiably sent into harm’s way, and advocating for adequate veterans’ healthcare and support services in society. i support the troops because they’re people, too- with families, career questions, and difficult circumstances that really are life and death situations. but thankfully, supporting the troops does not mean that i have to support the war. (more…)
so i’m contemplating starting a baby blog, but wouldn’t that just be so predictable? to secure babyjonas.wordpress.com and then post photos and entries where i pretend that he speaks in first person in a cute and clever, infantile (literally) kind of way? until i decide, here are some of my favorite pics from his first five weeks.
DAY 1: “why did you take me out?! put me back in! stop weighing me!”
Filed under: activism, church, community, culture, global, justice, neighborhood, urban
in an age when mass media pipes instant images of chinese earthquake victims and the burmese cyclone disaster into our living rooms and onto our smart phones, it’s ever increasingly popular to be socially conscious, especially as global tragedies and body counts take turns piling up. and while we acknowledge and appreciate the technology, most of us are puzzled as to how to respond. we feel bad in a distant sort of way, or maybe we donate some money to our preferred humanitarian organization, and sometimes we offer up a prayer if we’re the religious type. we watch the news coverage and are temporarily horrified by the conditions in which most of the world lives, but then we go back to our hyper-commodified lives and numb ourselves with entertainment or- ironically- consider some celebrity’s endorsement of the social cause-of-the-day we should support to alleviate our privileged guilt. (more…)
[h/t to eliacin] i don’t normally plug the millions of mark driscoll-hater blog posts (seriously, there are way too many to track), but this one was just too interesting to pass up. titled who can mark driscoll worship?, it’s a harsh diatribe against driscoll’s oft-critiqued gender theology as it applies to jesus. what initially drew me in was the images (who draws these!?)- and the sad realities they point to about our distortions of jesus’ character as we remake him in our image (instead of the other way around), repainting him as a reflection of our own brokenness, or projecting our own insecurities onto his mysterious, seemingly contradictory duality of divinity and humanity. (more…)
amidst the incomprehensible suffering and loss going on right now in burma, there are some good ideas and some bad ideas. one particularly bad idea i’ve come across is a military invasion, as if that would actually help the situation. now i realize that time/cnn isn’t exactly at the top of the heap when it comes to journalistic quality, but really- time to invade burma? are you serious?
we americans do tend to shoot first and ask questions later, but i have to say that i don’t think it’s worked out very well for us on the global stage. our reputation for diplomatic integrity has been in the toilet for quite some time thanks to our spectacular work in iraq, so another botched invasion with staged “mission accomplished” banners ready to fly is the last thing we need right now. (more…)
a few people have asked about jonas’ name, and if there’s a story behind it or not… well, there’s not really a story per se, but we did have our reasons. when choosing a name, our first preference was to avoid any name of anyone we knew, including acquaintances, friends’ children, pets, etc. so that ruled out most names right off the bat. but we were also concerned that a “unique” name could easily become weird, and we didn’t want our son to get beat up on the playground because we gave him a strange name. (more…)
in addition to significant changes on the homefront thanks to the arrival of little jonas, another recent development in my life has been a pleasantly surprising opportunity at seattle pacific university to teach nearly full-time starting in the fall of this year. as of sept 1, i’ll be taking on an 80% load (so as to hopefully have enough time to finish my PhD in 2009!) as an “instructor of missional theology,” with an emphasis on global and urban ministries. the school of theology at SPU has an impressive faculty of scholars, and so i’m honored and humbled to join these colleagues as both a learner and a teacher. (more…)
