July, 2006

Reading Scot McKnight's blog at the JesusCreed, I ran across this entry...

[The Spirit is Life
Filed under: Romans — Scot McKnight @ 4:10 am
Christians, according to Romans 8:9-11, are not in the flesh. They are in the Spirit. That, Paul would argue, is the difference between those in Christ and those not in Christ. What does having the Spirit mean?

It means “life.” It means transformation now and transformation then. Paul’s issues are always death and life, not hell and heaven (for that narrows the interest of Paul far, far too much). It is all about death and life — life now, life then; death now, death then.

continue reading ""In Christ Jesus" as Inclusive"

I'd like to ask for prayers for a friend of mine. She was fired yesterday for personality conflicts with the clients we serve. On a purely business level, one might say, "this is a tough business, and we have to keep the customers happy". What about trying to help someone who is struggling with depression, who has been on four anti-depressants that have not worked, who has worked herself to the bone for many years raising two daughters one her own (husband walked out) and saw them both get married and move out within the last year?

continue reading "People are not disposable"

Who is most influential in the Emerging Church Blogosphere—if there exists such a thing—and how do you measure it?

I've struggled with my conscience since yesterday, over whether to bring this issue up and criticize the hard work of another. After all, I've never done graduate research, so I shouldn't critique it. It's also bearing on my mind that choosing a topic and getting a committee of academics to approve it must be tough enough without amateurs like me second guessing it. But the irony of studying the “influence” of emerging church bloggers and defining “influential” according their relative position in Technorati's Emerging Church tag listing is too much.

continue reading "Who's Influential in the Emergent Blogosphere?"

If you dislike something about faithCommons—the content, the mood, the layout—now is a good time to give us your opinions and suggestions. Or, if there are some things, or subjects that you really like and want to keep or improve, now is the time to lay it out in a blog post or a forum thread. There are at least two reasons that now is a good time. One is that the site has grown enough and been around long enough that original assumptions need reconsidering and new voices need hearing. The other reason is that I'm going to be busy with other things over the next 2 to 3 weeks and posting very little, so it's an opportunity for new thoughts other than my same old ranting.

continue reading "Now Is the Time To Give Us Your Ideas"

From the About page:

ProgressiveIslam.Org is an online town commons created for individuals to gather and engage each other through sharing news, insights, opinions, stories, art, and scholarship. Just like at an old town commons, ProgressiveIslam.Org offers its resources to the community to build practical connections by providing space for social networking, education, activism, and forums for debate. It is our sincere hope that through this space and others like it we can avoid the tragedy of the commons by working with each other toward a unified community of diverse Muslims.

continue reading "ProgressiveIslam.Org"

The future of Christian (and religious) thought and practice is rapidly moving from orthodoxy to heterodoxy. In the same way that markets for everything from books, to music and movies, to news and opinion (blogging), erupts from mainstream to broad-stream, religious thought and practice will continue to grow increasingly diverse. From hierarchical to network to complexity, our social structures—including those of markets as well as spirituality—are breaking free of their moorings to scatter, emerge, cluster and re-form more to the real world and less to the arbitrary structures designed and defined by the experts and brokers of mass marketing and orthodoxy. Reido's Church Without Walls has a lot in common with Chris Anderson's The Long Tail.

continue reading "Heterodoxy and The Long Tail"

Many of us were taught that orthodoxy is the “right way,” which by default declares every other “way” to be the “wrong way.” But this is all wrong. It's wrong mostly because it is an answer to the wrong question. It's also wrong because it's an incomplete answer, but I'll have to leave that for another time. “Right way” or “right thinking” or “right worship” is the answer to the question of how rightly to “do” something. Doing in this case is really the result not the cause. Defining the right way to do, is a short cut which short circuits the process of answering the right question. Which I'll not specify just now, but you can get a hint from the James 2 link above. For now, my point is that orthodoxy, or standardized theology and worship, not only does not exist but neither is it effective.

Let's begin with a look at this quote from a 1969 book on education. The issue is single-answer, stereotyping and oversimplification in the teaching of history.

continue reading "The Orthodoxy Paradoxy"

From Amazon:

Reviewer: Neil Hinrichsen (Knysna South Africa) - See all my reviews

Quite simply one of the most thought-provoking books I have ever read. However hard it is to get a copy, it is MUST reading for anyone involved in educating people. Heavily influenced by McLuhan, this book is devastating in showing what classrooms REALLY teach - that there is one right answer, that the teacher has it, that memorising facts is important, that fellow students have nothing to contribute, etc etc - and how to construct an environment in which REAL learning takes place - where people learn how to learn themselves. This is one of those books that shakes one's previously-unexamined foundational assumptions of education. I cannot recommend it too highly.

A previous post attempted to describe The Tragedy of Orthodoxy and the shrinking nature of its exlusiveness. Contrary to human reason, development of, and enforcement of, a standard orthodoxy, or “right thinking” within the church does not improve and increase, but instead, it corrupts and devours. The following quote from a comment made by Limber Up, is a real life, real time, example of the systemic nature of Orthodoxy to cast out all dissent until there is nothing left.

Talking of the calumnies of orthodoxy, if you go back on the E-No thread, you'll see that the wonderful Pastor Rod has, like myself, been banned. I think it's shocking. He was asking serious questions, which Carla was (almost by her own admission) simply not smart enough to answer. So she banned him! What kind of response is that? Orthodoxy really is proving its own undertaker!

continue reading "The Dangers in Casting Pearls"

Unfortunately, some of your recent comments went to spam filter purgatory and I just found and rescued them this morning. There were also several syndicated posts from other sites that suffered the same fate, probably for the same reasons.

The reasons include the growing tenacity and intelligence of spammers. Some have developed intelligent (and likely automated) ways to make their spam content look increasingly like normal content on the specific site they attack. The result is that the spam filter “learns” to reject legitimate content because the illegitimate content looks so, well legitimate. Make sense?

Anyway, I must be more diligent in looking for false positives.

Most unfortunate is that a comment on Zoarastionism by Mahamed Taher, his first comment here, was in spam purgatory long enough to get rolled off the list of Recent Comments. My apologies to Dr. Taher. And also, I invite you to read his comment on that thread about the origins of modern religions because he brings a multifaith background to the table.

continue reading "Rescued Comments From Spam Filter Purgatory"

The tragedy of Orthodoxy is that it eventually does itself in. Because the very process of detecting imperfections and casting them out tends toward minimum, Orthodoxy will ultimately shrink itself down to the exclusion of all but those setting the standards.

Orthodox supporters consider themselves the narrow way but they miss the rest of the chapter. They will quote the following:

continue reading "The Tragedy of Orthodoxy"