I know that things have been pretty quiet around these parts. Truth be told, I have a lot of my plate. Well not really.

Anyway, here are somethings worth looking at:

A Visual Aid to the Credit Crisis [H/T: Byron]

If you are for banning gay marriage, you’re a porn addict and voted for McCain. At least that’s what this research suggests. [H/T: Halden]

Evangelicalism as we know it will collapse within 10 years [H/T: Halden]

The word Evangelical has accrued the implied synonym of Terrorist.

Now, I know that wasn’t Billy Graham’s use of the word when he started using it. But it has been interesting to me to watch those both within the church and those outside of it trying to understand this word that has become an ideology. A ‘literal’ definition of evangelical, might be gospel-ish — which may be a definition evangelicals might like to cling to and promote.

However, whenever this term is used in North American media, it seems like they were using it synonymously with something like “terrorist”. Now, at first one might say, well, those media bastards are just biased. And just dismiss such a public comparison. And to be truthful, I did this for some time. But recently, I watched two films that made me think that dismissing “the liberal media” is not a healthy option for Christians who would consider themselves somewhat gospel-ish.

The first film I saw which got me thinking about religious fundamentalism is Religulous with Bill Maher.

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Now, I did find Bill Maher completely annoying in this film. However, I did hear out his laments about what he calls “religion”. He did not just target Evangelicals, but went and targeted a wider circle of crazies. I think what the film does well, is not dismantle “religion” but instead, shows how “fundamentalism” in religion is the cause of unbelief in a society. I think you should rent the film and give it a hearing.

The second film that I saw was a documentary called Friends of God: A Road Trip with Alexandra Pelosi.

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I felt that this documentary was very well done and Ms. Pelosi was very charitable in places where she could have punched harder. In fact, the sort of synonym came out to me in the watching of this documentary as interviews took place with high level evangelicals and the language they used of war, battle cry, no fear of death, etc. It became apparent to me that these interviews ran parallel to the caricature of a muslim terrorist.

What happens when fundamentalism sees itself in the mirror? I found a very interesting interview with the atheistic fundamentalist, Richard Dawkins. It was very interesting to see both Ted Haggard and Dawkins spar off in their fundamentalist rants.

What I am not saying is that we need to up the ante and sound the drums for a return to the culture wars. As there are some who consider themselves evangelical who do so. No, what I am saying is, perhaps, gospel-ish Christians should become more gospel-ish. I don’t see the “liberal media” advancing a bias in these films. Instead, I see them holding up a mirror to the church (and the rest of the world) to reflect the kind of witness the church is (not) giving to Christ.

What these films lack are, however, a bit of diversity in the evangelical scene. Granted, the majority of evangelicals are rightly portrayed in such films, however, instead of going to Falwell’s University for interviews, these filmmakers may have found something more gospel-ish in places like Regent College in Vancouver, BC. There is a growing minority under the big tent of Evangelicalism that seeks to disconnect itself from religious fundamentalism. John Stackhouse, a professor at Regent, recently wrote an article on this very topic entitled Evangelicalsim and Fundamentalism.

So, American Evangelicals… Go watch these films and do some reflecting on them. Have the small groups in your churches watch them together so that we might begin to look more like the Jesus of the Gospels, and less like terrorists.

I spent this evening googling articles by a young poet named Cristian Wiman after having read his recent contribution, God is Not Beyond in the latest issue of The Christian Century. Here is an excerpt from that article:

“Our natures—and nature itself—are not
corrupt but unfinished. “All Creation groaneth and travaileth
together,” says Paul, which is exactly right. But also this: all
creation, including every atom of our selves, groaneth and travaileth toward
something—not toward some ideal existence from which “sin” has
irretrievably separated us, and not toward some heaven that is simply
this existence times eternity. No. Faith is not faith in some state
beyond change. Faith is faith in change. That this welter of
cells entails for us great sorrow and difficulty is true. That
uppercase Life requires our lowercase ones is beyond question. But
there is great joy in this ongoing apocalypse as well (apocalypse,
meaning to uncover, to reveal)—joy in reality’s abundance and
prodigality, in its atomic detail and essential indestructibility, and
in the deep implicit peace whose surest promise is the miraculous
capacity we have—in a work of art, a gesture of love, or any of the
other ways in which we acknowledge the God who is this ever-perfecting
process—to imagine it.

…

You continually seek something that
will resolve your anxieties once and for all, will push you over into a
consistent and comforting belief. You read book after book, you seek
out intense experiences in nature or in conversations with people whom
you respect and who seem to rest more securely in their belief than
you. Sometimes it seems that gains are made, for all of these things
can and do provide relief and instruction. But always the anxieties
come back, are the norm from which faith deviates, if faith is even
what you could call these intense but somehow vague and fleeting
experiences of God. You have forgotten, or perhaps simply will not let
yourself see, what true faith is, its active and outward nature (as
opposed to active but inward, which is what all of those activities
above are). Do not pray to be at peace in your belief. Pray that your
anxieties be given peaceful outlets, that you may be the means to a
peace which you yourself do not feel.

…

There are definitely times when we must
suffer God’s absence, when we are called to enter the dark night of the
soul in order to pass into some new understanding of God, some deeper
communion with him and with all of creation. But this is very rare, and
for the most part our dark nights of the soul are, in a way that is
more pathetic than tragic, wishful thinking. God is not absent. He is
everywhere in the world we are too dispirited to love. To feel him—to find
him—does not usually require that we renounce all worldly possessions
and enter a monastery, or give our lives over to some cause of social
justice, or create some sort of sacred art, or begin spontaneously
speaking in tongues. All too often the task to which we are called is
simply to show a kindness to the irritating person in the cubicle next
to us, say, or touch the face of a spouse from whom we ourselves have
been long absent, letting grace wake love from our intense,
self-enclosed sleep.”

You should also check out two other articles that he wrote:

Gazing into the Abyss – an account of his journey towards faith and hope

This Inwardness, This Ice – a chilling poem; make sure and listen to him reading it.

Notes on Poetry and Religion – brief snippets of brilliance

This last quote comes from his article entitled, My Bright Abyss:

“In fact, there is no way to “return to the faith of your childhood,”
not really, not unless you’ve just woken from a decades-long and
absolutely literal coma. Faith is not some remote, remembered country
into which you come like a long-exiled king, dispensing the old wisdom,
casting out the radical, insurrectionist aspects of yourself by which
you’d been betrayed. No. Life is not an error, even when it is. That is
to say, whatever faith you emerge with at the end of your life is going
to be not simply affected by that life but intimately dependent upon
it, for faith in God is, in the deepest sense, faith in life—which
means, of course, that even the staunchest life of faith is a life of
great change. It follows that if you believe at 50 what you believed at
15, then you have not lived—or have denied the reality of your life.”