Category: Uncategorized

Oh dear:

If popularity is next to godliness, Eagle Brook Church is the holiest place in Minnesota.

The Lino Lakes church became the state’s largest this month, with weekly attendance of 8,000.
And that’s without the cup holders.

The new $24 million building is designed to make worship as comfortable as possible, and movie-theater-style cup holders soon might draw even more people.

[…]

Critics of megachurches say high-volume big-box religion cheapens the value of worship because it appeals to the consumer culture. Instead of being quiet places of prayer and reflection, megachurches mimic the architecture and noise of malls, theaters and sports arenas.

But megachurch leaders say the style isn’t important — it’s the message. And preaching to empty pews doesn’t accomplish anything, Anderson said. He said millions have found megachurches an alternative to stuffy, traditional churches.

Being un-churchly is exactly the point of Eagle Brook. First-timers could be excused for thinking they were in a mall or a high school, with bright, open spaces and a lack of religious decoration.

“That’s our cafe on the left,” said Anderson, as he gave a tour of the building in December.

Next to Cafe 5000 is the religious bookstore, Beyond Books. Next to that is the Box Office, offering tickets for events aimed at nonmembers.

“That’s so you can check out the church without feeling you have to join,” Anderson said.

Inside, the sanctuary looks like a large theater, with comfortable movie-style seats with armrests. The razzle-dazzle services include comedy sketches, rock music from an 11-piece band and staging that would fit right in at the Guthrie Theater. There are no pews, no Bibles, no hymnals, no stained-glass windows.

The church is designed to feel homey. Which brings us to the cup holders.

“Our little coffee shop is humming on Sunday mornings,” Anderson said. “It’s a huge hit.”

But church leaders figured it was difficult to stand, sit or praise the Lord with your hands in the air while worrying about dumping a hot latte onto fellow Christians. So they decided to add cup holders — anything to boost their reputation for putting people at ease.

“You can’t underestimate the value of energy and buzz,” Anderson said. “Those things bring people through the door.”

Fr. Jim Tucker has a good balanced post on the cartoon controversy:

A number of editorials make the point that if media can disrespect Christianity (Rolling Stone’s current cover, for instance), Islam shouldn’t be given a free pass. That’s playground logic. In reality, media shouldn’t take great, offensive swipes against Christianity, either (or any serious religion, for that matter). But that “shouldn’t” is a moral “shouldn’t,” not a legal one.

[…]

Obviously, burning down embassies is not a proportional response to cartoons, but I don’t see why mass protests shouldn’t be. Those protests, though, ought to be aimed at the newspapers that make the decision to print inflammatory and irresponsible content, not at the governments that refrain from forbidding it. I think that one of the reasons that these protests (even minus the rioting) seem so excessive to us is that we have lost the intensity of our own piety.

Here’s a Christian-specific question, though. Interpretations vary on how we are to understand Jesus’ admonition to “turn the other cheek” (e.g. does it forbid all use of force to defend oneself or others), but nearly everyone agrees that it means that we aren’t supposed to retaliate against insults we receive as Christians. So, is it un-Christian to protest (even in a civil way) when someone blasphemously depicts Jesus or the Blessed Virgin or mocks Christianity in some other way? And how do you tell the difference between turning the other cheek and a decadent tolerance that can’t get angry about anything?

Jennifer tagged me with this meme, and who am I to say no?

Four Jobs I’ve Had
1. Pizza Delivery Boy
2. Street Department worker (included such fun tasks as shoveling asphalt, clearing downed tree branches, painting crosswalks, etc.)
3. Stock room manager at the Gap
4. Assitant Editor at a book publisher

Four Movies to Watch Over and Over
1. Star Wars (the original trilogy, but, like Jennifer I think Empire repays the most multiple viewings)
2. It’s a Wonderful Life
3. Ghostbusters
4. A Fish Called Wanda

Four Places I’ve Lived
1. Greenville, Pennsylvania (my hometown)
2. Lafayette, Indiana
3. Berkeley, California
4. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Four TV Shows I Love to Watch
1. The Office
2. Scrubs
3. Battlestar Galactica (though, due to our lack of cable I’ve been watching it on DVD and am a season behind)
4. The Way of the Master – that awesome show where Kirk Cameron and that Australian guy are talking about Jesus from inside Alcatraz (A prison – get it? It’s a metaphor! For sin! Get it??) Did I mention I don’t have cable?

Four Places I’ve Been on Vacation
1. Maui (even better than you’d think)
2. Prince Edward Island (yes, I’ve seen the Anne of Green Gables house!)
3. London
4. Yosemite National Park

Four Websites I Visit Daily
1. Various blogs
2. Arts & Letters Daily
3. Slate
4. Reason

Four Favorite Foods
1. Vegetarian chili with a thick hearty bread of some sort
2. Pizza
3. Filet mignon (I know, I’m supposed to be a vegetarian, but darn it, is there really anything better?!)
4. Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches (just like the Prez!)

Four Places I’d Rather Be Right Now
1. Home in bed with beloved wife, cats, and a book
2. On a road trip
3. Hanging out with my college buddies, of whom I’ve seen far too little in the last several years
4. Walking in the woods

Four People I’m Tagging (should they choose to accept it, and my feelings won’t be hurt if they don’t)
1. Josh
2. D. Klein
3. Jack
4. Eric

The religious person should not seek an accommodation with liberalism; he should seek to rout it from the field, to extirpate it, root and branch. — Stanley Fish

This line from celebrity literary intellectual Stanley Fish occurred to me in light of the controversy over the cartoons printed in Denmark which have sparked numerous protests in the Muslim world, some of them violent. Fish’s article was one half of an exchange with Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, who contends that Christianity is compatible with at least some forms of liberalism – understood broadly as a political system that protects individual rights and refrains from imposing a substanitve vision of the good life on its citizens. Though Fish is not himself religious as far as I know, his criticisms of liberalism have been picked up by certain “post-liberal” theologians, most notably Stanley Hauerwas.

The Hauerwas school of thought sees liberalism as, despite its claims to the contrary, imposing a metaphysic or a “narrative” that is at odds with and indeed undermines Christian faithfulness. In Hauerwas’ view, liberal modernity seeks to remake us into autonomous choosers, people who “have no story except the story they choose when they had no story” as he likes to say. For Hauerwasians, liberalism manifests itself in the political arena by making “freedom” or “choice” the highest value, and in the economic realm by its embrace of free-market capitalism (whether of the relatively unregulated U.S. version or of the tamer European social-democratic variety doesn’t seem to make much difference to these critics of liberalism). Some, like John Milbank, go as far as to accuse liberalism of being founded in an “ontological violence” – of positing egoism as a natural and normal part of the human condition, rather as a result of the fall as in Christian theology.

What the Danish cartoon controversy may indicate, though, is that the people who have the best chance of extirpating liberalism in our world are not likely to be civilized pacifistic theology professors. The notion that liberalism and its guarantees of freedom of speech, religion, etc. are anathema to a robust religious faith appears to have been embraced by many of the more radical elements in the Islamic world. Under these circumstances, the liberal idea that we often need to be protected from other people’s certainties starts to look pretty appealing. This isn’t to deny that post-liberals make salutary criticisms of (at least certain varieties of) liberalism – I agree that they do – just that before we write it off, we ought to see what’s most likely to be put in its place.

P.S. Just to forestall any confusion, I didn’t intend this to be some alarmist post about the “Muslim hordes bearing down on us,” ’cause I don’t really think that’s true. My point was the more general one that, whatever ills liberalism may cause, chucking liberalism is likely not the answer, because the forces of illiberalism are almost always worse, wherever they may come from.

But I don’t think that commits me to a kind of dogmatic come-what-may defense of liberalism. It’s possible that there are other ways of ordering political life that are just as legitimate, but among what appear to be our currently available options, liberal democracy looks the best to me.

This piece overreaches in a few places (the cell phone user as Gnostic is a bit of a stretch), but makes some salient points about the ubiquity of the cell and its consequences. As far as I can tell, what we have is a new technology that has cut across the public/private distinction. Talking on your phone used to be an essentially private activity, but now that you can literally do it anywhere, people haven’t adjusted their phone-behavior from ways that would be appropriate in private to ones more suited to a public setting. Instead we see people behaving in inappropriate, and in many cases downright rude, ways because they seem to think that an invisible bubble of privacy surrounds every cell phone call.

Historian Jeffrey L. Pasley on the roots of the debate over executive power (via A&L Daily).

Defenders of the inherent-powers position frequently and significantly direct attention to the necessity or desirability of the ends they seek to achieve: fighting the terrorists or Communists or (in Hamilton’s case) achieving national greatness and economic growth. While such goals were worthy enough on their own, the move of loudly proclaiming their transcendent worthiness is a political tactic rather than a constitutional or substantive argument; its real function is to embarrass and silence critics by calling their patriotism or morals into question. At the same time, the tactic expresses a basic tenet of old-school governance, which is that law, procedure, and constitutionalism are minor matters as long as what Hamilton called “the essential ends of political society”—security and prosperity and whatever other states of being a community wants for itself—are being met. State this as a folksy modern politician might, say as “getting the job done,” and it sounds like practical good sense. State it a bit more clearly, and it makes a mockery of the very idea of limited, transparent, and democratic government by dismissing it as so much “red tape.”

At least according to this funny post on what your drink says about you (via Dappled Things).

In thinking about how non-Christians might be saved without compromising the claim that Jesus is the unique agent of salvation, I wonder if it might be helpful to think about the different ways in which we can be said to know someone. I can know someone in virtue of having met them and engaged in personal interaction with them, or I can know things about someone (e.g. by reading books about them, having them described to me, or under a particular title like “The Queen of England”). This is similar to, though probably not the same as, Bertrand Russell’s distinction between knowledge by acqaintance and knowledge by description.

Applied to the question of salvation, maybe we can say that it’s possible to become acquainted with Jesus and respond to him in an appropriate way, without encountering him under the same description as Christians would use. This could take place in the context of other religions, but might not necessarily have to. Though it would be difficult, if not impossible, to specify exactly which events would count as such encounters, which is why this kind of speculation should not be taken to be a substitute for Christians sharing the gospel.

Just some thoughts – even less well thought out than the usual fare here.

It should be remembered that truth does not vary according to persons; when a human being says something true he is invincible, irrespective of the one with whom he may be disputing. – St. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Job

(from this article via Kevin Jones)

Andrew Bacevich on President Bush’s “isolationist” canard in the SOTU. As Bacevich correctly points out, no political figure of any importance in the U.S. today could be accurately labeled an isolationist (more’s the pity, some might say).

Isolationism survives in contemporary American political discourse because it retains utility as a cheap device employed to impose discipline. Think of it as akin to red-baiting — conjuring up bogus fears to enforce conformity in the realm of foreign policy. In that regard, the beleaguered Bush, his standing in public opinion polls tumbling, is by no means the first president to sound the alarm about supposed isolationists subverting American statecraft.

Even those who, for a variety of reasons, favor a less interventionist U.S. foreign policy are hardly ever “isolationist” in the sense of wanting any kind of U.S. withdrawal from the rest of the world. On occasion you get someone like Pat Buchanan who is broadly non-interventionist and favors protectionism and stricter controls on immigration, but he’s a comparative rarity with virtually no following or significant influence (though the magazine he helped found frequently runs articles of interest). In any event, surely the greater danger right now is an excessive confidence, among virtually the entirety of our political elite, in the U.S.A.’s ability to solve the world’s problems, “end tyranny,” etc.