• Recently Written

  • Move Over Health Care, Pass the Election Reform!
  • Back from Hiatus
  • Ingmar Bergman is Dead!
  • The End of the Anti-Manichaeist
  • Falwell, and the Religious Right, as seen by the World
  • Religious and Political Themes in Spiderman 3
  • A British Reporter Recounts the Pressures Faced While Reporting on Scientology!
  • Romney has No Comment on Upcoming Film on Historic Massacre by Mormons!
  • My Question for the Presidential Candidates
  • Servant Leadership Must Be Willing to Step Down!

• Categories

  • Uncategorized

• Archives

  • October 2009
  • September 2008
  • August 2007
  • May 2007
  • April 2007
  • March 2007
  • February 2007
  • January 2007
  • December 2006
  • November 2006
  • October 2006
  • September 2006
  • August 2006
  • July 2006
  • June 2006
  • May 2006
  • April 2006
  • March 2006
  • February 2006
  • January 2006
  • December 2005
  • November 2005
  • October 2005
  • September 2005
  • August 2005
  • July 2005
  • June 2005
  • May 2005
  • April 2005
  • March 2005
  • February 2005
  • January 2005
  • December 2004
  • November 2004
  • October 2004
  • September 2004
  • August 2004
  • July 2004
  • June 2004
  • May 2004

• Blogroll

  • 42 dreams of Arizona Bay
  • A Pilgrim’s Digression
  • Bart Campolo
  • Christian Persecution
  • dhalgren
  • Donlan News Wire
  • escape_velocity
  • Faith and Theology
  • Foreign Notes-Ukraine
  • from vigo to vega
  • Global Voices
  • God’s Politics by Jim Wallis
  • Imitatio Christi
  • jam on bread
  • Jesus Manifesto
  • Jesus Politics
  • Kruse Kronicle
  • Levellers
  • lunablue
  • Nukraya
  • Poser or Prophet
  • shnooks
  • Solly Gratia
  • stormfront
  • t. l. blumberments
  • Talking Points Memo
  • The Evangelical Ecologist
  • Touchy Subjects
  • Ukrainiana
  • Vanguard Church
  • without a map
  • XPatriated Texan

• Admin

  • Log in
  • Wordpress
  • Photo Album
  • 
  • XHTML

• Search

This is an incredible article that talks about the testimony of faith of a Protestant Church in Kyev that is focused on witnessing to the truths of Christianity in a non-fanatical way thru community and doing good works for the least of their society.

I think it is particularly important that though the church’s ministry is focused on power undering serving of the least of society that they are not dogmatic about working with people involved in gov’t and willing to openly criticize the existing gov’t and the importance of getting less greedy and corrupt people into gov’t in Ukraine. 

I think this illustrates the both/and/but approach to power under/over.  For consistency, we need to admit that we rely on both power under and over in our ministries, but we trust that it is through power under actions that change people’s hearts that will ultimately provide for lasting changes/progress. 

dlw

I love Google News.  Its such a hard thing to give up.  I am better informed about what’s going on with my country with having so many non-US newspapers to choose from. 

Consider a recent spate of articles on Cheney’s recent endorsement of “WaterBoarding“.  The vast majority of the articles are not from the US.  But, thankgoodness, Bush has come out saying, “the United States does not torture prisoners!”  At least not anymore or according to the definitions of torture that our president understands.  

It also has made the headlines at Google News that Bush has now signed into law a long fence to be constructed between the US and Mexico.  This is gov’t waste, to say nothing of alienating further our Latin American allies.  If we took the money for that fence and spent more of it making more Mexicans less poor, it would do more to reduce the immigration problem and help reduce the populist appeal of demagogues like Hugo Chavez.  Most Mexicans would not leave their country if they were somewhat less desperate for jobs and income.

dlw

New Jesus Movie coming out with a Black Jesus.  I found out about it from Google News, it’s getting about 53,000 hits from Google.  Here’s a clip from the CNN article. 

“Color of the Cross,” written, produced and starring Haitian-American filmmaker Jean Claude LaMarre opens in around 30 cinemas across the U.S. on Friday. The film is scheduled to open to broader audiences next month.

LaMarre said the film was intended as a step towards rehabilitating the portrayal of black characters in Hollywood films after decades of negative stereotyping.

“The idea of re-imaging is very important to my vision of this story,” said LaMarre. “For decades blacks have been the victims of negative imaging… Jesus is a great place to start.”

It’s now online and Wallis blogs well about it here. 

Comment: It’s just a little ironic that Boyd’s radical counter-cultural position is quite a bit like what Wallis used to hold over twenty-five years ago.  Wallis is the more experienced of the two in political matters, but he commonly makes suppositions that are in dispute by Boyd and others. 

dlw

Fared Mohammed recently posted at my old site, under the post on Understanding Moderate Islam, about Ikhwanweb.  Here’s what he wrote:

IKhwanweb is the Muslim Brotherhood’s only official English web site. The Main office is located in London, although Ikhwanweb has correspondents in most countries. Our staff is exclusively made of volunteers and stretched over the five continents.

The Muslim Brotherhood opinions and views can be found under the sections of MB statements and MB opinions, in addition to the Editorial Message.

Items posted under “other views” are usually different from these of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Ikhwanweb does not censor any articles or comments but has the right only to remove any inappropriate words that defy public taste

Ikhwanweb is not a news website, although we report news that matter to the Muslim Brotherhood’s cause. Our main misson is to present the Muslim Brotherhood vision right from the source and rebut misonceptions about the movement in western societies. We value debate on the issues and we welcome constructive criticism.

 I don’t really have time for this, but I hope others will…

dlw

I wrote up the following idea for my British friend Solly. It is a way to weld together the Anabaptist-like commitment to radical counter-cultural witness with an activistic commitment to political civic responsibility.

You have a community of 30 or less adults from a local community/area.  This is analogous to the size of a house church.  The size matters so as to preserve a relative absence of strong hierarchy within the group.  The group should have leaders, with different leaders for different sorts of ministry.  What matters most is that there be built up a strong sense of mutual obligation and trust among the community.  This is so the community can act together in ways that will enhance their witness to others but without sowing serious divisions within the community.  It does not matter whether they are literally a house church or a cell-group within a larger church. 

The house church would see its primary purposes as building each other up and serving their local community.  But this would not prevent them from some strategic participation in non-local politics as a complement to their local community ministry.  The key is to both to choose their issues carefully and to act together so that their impact will be stronger.  Because of the limited nature of democracy, it is best for the group to choose carefully a set of three or four issues that they, as a community, will have monitored and act on.  These issues could include ”Campaign Finances”, which would entail monitoring the extent a candidate, or groups acting on her or his behalf, have accepted donations from individuals in amounts greater than fifty dollars.  If this issue were chosen then the candidate who raised less funds would be supported, all other things held equal. 

The issues chosen should not be too vague, like poverty, or too specific like what someone voted on a specific bill.  The issues should not be too partisan or too bipartisan.  They should be more tangible or measurable, rather than “the leadership ability” of the candidates.  This approach implicitly trusts the parties to choose reasonably qualified candidates(an assumption that may not always be true ;-)).  The issues chosen need to offer a reasonable chance for the group to make a difference on them, in part, by not precommitting the group to a specific political course of action.  But, even more critical is that the group use two principles to guide them: their issues/activism should generally enhance or complement their ability to witness with others in their community and second, their issues/activism must balance well with their ministry and their cohesion as a group.  A focus on three or four issues at a time, with respect to different levels of government, both reduces the time needed to adequately monitor the issues and should make it easier to rank the candidates on the chosen issues. 

So as to steward their time well, the community would choose one or two of their members to become the political stewards for the rest of the group.  While the rest of the community abstains from interacting with the streams of political information and instead focus their time and energies on local activism, study and community outreach.  The purpose of a steward would be to monitor nonlocal politics for the rest of the group and to make critical decisions for how the group could act together in a timely manner.  If two stewards are selected then they would specialize in monitoring politics at different levels of government, like state gov’t vs nat’l gov’t. 

There are a number of ways the stewards could strategically focus their observation.  During an election period, they could monitor and petition a subset of the parties along with the three or four issues that their group had determined for them, over time.  After an election, they would monitor how the elected officials fulfill their promises.  The steward(s), who would still join the others in local community activities, would provide the group with periodic updates, like every 1-2 months, and decide for the others how they would vote/act politically at critical times.  The stewards would collaborate with other stewards, preferably in groups of thirty or less, from other communities that have similar goals.  They would share information and dialogue, perhaps on gated internet communities, on the issues. 

This is just an outline.  I think ultimately, there would be a fair amount of learning by doing in developing house churches/cell groups as units for a political activism.  But I think it is a way to balance being politically responsible with having a focus on local affairs that we have a greater chance of influencing and local ministry that is in continuity with the early church.

So tell me what do you think? I think it’s weakness is that it doesn’t deal with how members of the group would relate to parties. I think it would inevitably weaken the importance of party -membership but not end it, per se. This would be a matter that could require us to work out creative rules of thumb to balance that sort of thing along the way.

dlw

If only it were true… Read more

My Grandfather, my mother’s father, passed away at 2am last night.  He was a pastor in the Swedish-American Baptist tradition.  He followed the footsteps of his own father Ole Larson who was an immigrant from Sweden to Alberta, Canada.  When Ole became a Christian, he gave up his planned life of becoming a landed farmer to become a church-planter. 

My grandfather accepted Jesus in his heart as a youth while living in Alberta Canada.  He was attending the Salvation Army after school classes.  He was about the same age as Billy Graham.  He started preaching as a teenager, went to some college and graduated from Bethel Seminary in MN.  It was in MN that he met my grandmother.  They had five children and fourteen grandchildren and three great grandchildren. 

My grandfather was the one who encouraged me repeatedly to go to seminary.  Although, before I lost my professor of economics job in Mexico, I would brush the suggestion off as career-suicide. 

We will see, when some doors close, other doors open.  I am convinced now that the problems that plague the world are more spiritual/social problems than economics problems, though economics is critically interwoven into these problems. 

Anyways, I am so glad I got to spend these past couple of months helping to care for my grandfather at night.  On Sunday Night/Monday Morning, I was there with my grandfather as he was persistently trying to get out of bed.  I prayed with him and heard and joined him in his last prayer, “help me Lord”.  And then when I needed to sleep most, he listened to me and went to sleep at 7am.  I woke again at 8:30am when he had sat himself up, I helped him to lie down again and I think those were among his last quasi-lucid moments.  On Monday, he was moved to a rest-home where he stayed until his death.

dlw 

I am glad Jesus Politics and others are giving attention to David Kuo’s book “Tempting Faith”, which currently garners 143,000 google hits.  Kuo wants us to fast from politics.  I say it’d be better to use simple rules of thumb to fast from the large amount of media attention given to politics. 

I love the blogosphere.  I love how it’s changed our conversations about politics.  This is not just happening in the US, it is also apparent elsewhere in the world.  In particular, it seems some interesting blogging coverage is appearing in Russia/Former Soviet Union concerning the recent murder of journalist/dissident Anna Politkovskaya(google news(2,000 plus) google(1 million)).  It seems that her murder may do more to bring attention/change to Russia than anything she ever wrote as a journalist.  This is just another testimony to the liberating power of the Politics of Jesus.  Read more

My friend Solly from across the pond has more on the methodological atheist Jurgen Habermas’ endorsement of Christianity against “Secularism”.  It’s, not surprisingly, a somewhat heady read, but still an interesting one…

dlw

Next Page →