God’s Pentecost vs. my cynicism

God broke me today in a really good way. You see I’m a recovering cynic who relapses at least several dozen times a day. Nothing is more insufferable to me than an overly cheerful person. Somehow I’ve been programmed to presume that cheerful people are disingenuous. But then there’s my friend Beth Anderson who smiles more than just about anyone I know and is also absolutely genuine to the core. She preached a sermon to us at our provisional retreat this morning about God’s perpetual Pentecost that melted my cynicism. I just hope that it sticks.

Is Guantanamo Bay as far as the east is from the west?

Do you think these human beings matter to God? They certainly don’t matter much to us. About a hundred prisoners at Guantanamo Bay are now engaged in a hunger strike. But don’t worry; the prison guards won’t let them die. They force-feed them through tubes in their noses. Apparently one detainee has been force-fed daily since 2005.

Worldviewism and the nature of truth

I had an outbreak of worldviewism today on my Facebook page today after I shared my post on privilege and Biblical interpretation. Worldviewism is a school of thought within the evangelical world, particularly among the homeschoolers and tribulation preppers, that divides the world into thought-systems (there are often said to be four) which are completely self-enclosed, disconnected, and incompatible with one another. Your task as a Christian is to make sure that your Christian worldview hasn’t been infiltrated by traces of other ones (except for capitalism which isn’t one of the other three worldviews since capitalism is just the way God created the world to work ).

Removing the linchpin of Christian hate

People hate each other for all kinds of sinful reasons. In my life, I’ve hated people unfairly before, usually out of some sort of envy or paranoid presumption about what somebody else thought of me. It’s different when people hate out of devotion to God. Two nights ago, when I took a look at Way of the Master evangelist guru Ray Comfort’s account of his airplane evangelism, it was jaw-dropping to see the contempt he held for the people he was witnessing to. I don’t think that Comfort is an evil person; I think he genuinely believes that God wants him to hate ungodly people. His hate, like the hate of the Pharisees who crucified Jesus, is a genuine solidarity with a God he has misunderstood. The linchpin of Christian hate, insofar as it has a theological root, is the assumption that God’s holiness amounts to a nihilistic, ruthlessly unsympathetic perfectionism. This assumption is largely derived from a distorted inheritance of the medieval satisfaction atonement theory of Anselm of Canterbury and a ubiquitous misinterpretation of Romans 3.

Five D’s of Emergent Christian Mansplanation

Yesterday I talked about Christian mansplainers who operate according to 18th century principles of epistemology. You might call them “objective” Christian mansplainers. But there’s a different category of Christian mansplainers that are actually more exasperating than the first kind. They prefer late 20th century French philosophers to 18th century field preachers. They are superior to you because they’re better at irony. This species is called mansplainer emergenticus. I am an expert in their nature because I live with one; I see him every morning in the mirror. So here are the five D’s of emergent Christian mansplainmanship: dialogue, deconstruction, disingenuous use of the word “we,” difficulty with labels, and dialectic.

Five C’s of Christian Mansplanation

I witnessed a conversation on facebook last night where one of these young, restless, well informed Christian guys was being a mansplaining stereotype of himself. There is a particular form of Christian thought that causes people (usually men because of how we’re wired but occasionally women) to think they’re experts in the faith after maybe a couple of years of serious Bible study. Their expertise then gives them the duty to “mansplain” Christianity, e.g. do things like ask patronizing, predictable rhetorical questions of complete strangers in social media in order to help them become experts in Christianity too. This morning while taking a bath, I thought of five C’s that characterize Christian mansplanation: clarity, conclusiveness, conformity, commodity, and control.

Is it Christian to fire a sexy employee?

I wasn’t going to blog this week and instead re-post old blogs from each of the months in 2012. But my blood is really boiling about the case in which the all-male Supreme Court of Iowa ruled that there was no gender discrimination at play when dentist James Knight fired a dental assistant Melissa Nelson because he was “irresistibly attracted” to her. Dan Brennan has a much more eloquent response, but I guess I just needed to write something too. Knight’s wife discovered that her husband and Nelson were sending text messages to each other, so she confronted her husband about it and he responded by firing Nelson. What bothers me the most is that a pastor from Knight’s church presided over the process of Nelson’s firing. They had a meeting at which the pastor was present where Knight read Nelson a prepared statement announcing her termination. In response to the oft-played card that “straw men” are being deployed in the evangelical church’s gender debates, this would be an example of a living straw man. This is a case of the false narrative of sexuality in “family values” culture creating an abominable, misogynistic ethics.

If I were to make a Christian hip-hop/electronica album…

Then my artist name would be εξουθενημενος and my album would be בן בלי שם (both of these words roughly translate to “The Nobody” because God refines my art by making people ignore it). I used to have a rock band seven years ago called the Junior Varsity Superheroes. I learned how to navigate the local rock scene and we did pretty well. Hip-hop is very much a second language to me; I learned how to rap because I was a youth pastor. I have little interest in mainstream hip-hop. I’m more interested in pursuing what it was originally: a genre geared to social critique (KRS-1, Tribe Called Quest, Public Enemy, etc). The 16 tracks I have shared below may appeal to the micro-constituency of people who are trying to recover from the phenomenon known as evangelical Christianity.

Our Father	Jesus Come Back
Jesus Is My Candidate	Jesus Save the World from Me
Kayal Ta-arog (Psalm 42)	The Script
Exposure	Isaiah 6
Jeremiah	The Lord Is My Shepherd
Star Spangled Banner	This Is My Father’s World
Zion	Hate
1 John	Satan

60 Jesus tweets for the presidential debate

Tonight from 9-10:30 pm EST, two men neither of whom are the anti-Christ and both of whom are sinners whom God has used to accomplish varying degrees of good in our world will get on TV and attack one another while millions of Americans watch. While this happens, hundreds and perhaps thousands of Christians will get on twitter and damage their witness to co-workers and friends of different races and political persuasions by writing snide commentaries that bash either of the two candidates. The reason I have made a fool out of myself trying to promote the #JesusIsMyCandidate campaign is to offer a different witness of Christ to people who have been alienated by loudmouth Christians who have not spoken with integrity or represented Christ well. If you have a twitter account, I have made it incredibly easy for you to participate tonight. You can cut and paste any number of the 60 sample tweets below anytime today into a tweet scheduler called twuffer.com (yes, the name is silly) so that you don’t have to post live during the debate.

My impotent witness against holy war