Zero Day McMafia

First and foremost, props to my retail brethren at Amazon.com for getting GTA 4 out for delivery on zero day. My copy is in a Big Brown UPS Truck on its way to my doorstep even as I write this.

Second, props to Misha Glenny for publishing McMafia only a few weeks before GTA 4 dropped. It’s a fascinating read about global organized crime, with a particular emphasis on the rise of major criminal syndicates in eastern Europe around and following the time of the demise of Soviet Communism. Highly recommended for more reflective gamers who might like some serious background on where our fictional protagonist Niko came from.

The Puritans Got a Bad Rap

Somewhere along the way calling someone “puritanical” started meaning that they hated sex.  To which I say, “ballocks”.

One of the best remedies that can be prescribed to married persons (next to an awfull feare of God, and a continuall setting of him before them, wheresoever they are) is, that husband and wife mutually delight each in other, and maintaine a pure and fervent love betwixt themselves, yielding that due benevolence one to another which is warranted and sanctified by God’s word, and ordained of God for this particular end. This due benevolence (as the Apostle stileth it) is one of the most proper and essentiall acts of marriage: and necessary for the maine and pincipall ends thereof: as for preservation of chastity in such as have not the gift of continency, for increasing the world with a legitimate brood, and for linking the affections of the married couple more firmly together. These ends of marriage, at least the two former, are made void without this duty be performed. As it is called benevolence because it must be performed with good will and delight, willingly, readily and cheerfully; so it is said to be due because it is a debt which the wife oweth to her husband, and he to her (1 Cor 7:4). (William Gouge, “Of Domesticall Duties”, 215-216, quoted in Sex and the Supremacy of Christ — ye olde spellings preserved)

To God be the Glory, great things He has done.

“I absolutely refuse to be dogmatic”

Simon McIntyre is pretty much always worth listening to:

http://www.c3iglobal.org/NEWS/IRefuse2/tabid/137/Default.aspx

On a less-light note, I’m reading Rob Bell’s second book, “SEX GOD”, and so far have been less than impressed. See my review-in-progress.

Update: Well, it looks like the c3i global web site overwrote the article with a new one.  Sorry I didn’t save a copy, and I can’t find a link to the old text anywhere.

Joel Osteen on Glenn Beck

I rarely, if ever, watch any of the cable news talking head shows anymore.   But tonight I left Headline News on while I was cooking dinner, and I caught Glenn Beck interviewing Joel Osteen.  A lot of Christian thinkers have a lot of questions about Osteen, but Beck beautifully distilled most of them by asking (my paraphrase): “if you’re a Christian leader, shouldn’t you talk about Jesus more?”

Osteen made a tip of the hat to Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection as tenets of faith, but it took him less than 3 seconds on the subject before he shifted to talking about “life beyond that”.  Now, I get the importance of talking about living the Christian life in practical terms — it’s good and right and important to do so.  But the most practical thing you can do as a Christian is to turn your attention toward the Cross and what it accomplished and to fix your mind upon the person of Jesus Christ as our Lord, our great high priest, our savior, our righteousness, our God; when we fail to do that, our attempts at “Christian living” invariably go badly awry.  So I worry about ministries that spend too much time “beyond the cross” because their message starts to become indistinct from Tony Robbins-style “we’re all okay, let’s be better”, diminishing the importance of the Cross and encouraging us to think more highly of ourselves and think less frequently about the place of Jesus in our worlds — which amounts to a sick kind of baptized idolatry.

But, if Your Best Life Now isn’t as “best” or as “now” as you want it to be, I suppose you can take the more modest step of buying Osteen’s new book, “Become a Better You”.

Regarding books written for “Christian Men”

Maybe I’m just being a hot-headed know-it-all young theological whippersnapper.  In fact, I’m pretty sure that’s exactly my problem.  But I’m having a really hard time finding really compelling books connecting my guyhood and my Christianity.

Back in the mid-90s I read “Seven Promises of a Promisekeeper” and Stu Weber’s “Tender Warrior”, and it was a mixed bag.  A little bit of “stand up and fight” and a little bit of “play nice and don’t do anything mean” all muddled together and padded out with a few too many silk pillows.   Then “Wild at Heart” came out, and I read it a few months before getting married, and for all of its strengths was still left scratching my head why books about and for men spend more time repenting for the sins of men past and condemning that which masculinity is not than they spend extolling masculine virtues and casting a compelling vision (rooted in a faithfully orthodox theolog) for the place of men and manhood in the local church.  So next I read “Why Men Hate Going to Church”, which correctly points out some of the pathologies within the church that make such a vision unwelcome and unpalatable, but its pragmatic slant leaves it unsatisfying to the reflective leader, who comes away with a few highly context-specific examples of stuff that works but little more than “c’mon, guys, we need to do better!” as a theological platform for devising his own local strategy.  So now I’m reading “No More Christian Nice Guy”, which is falling into some similar patterns — enumerating the countless vices of preferring “Nice” over “Good” without spending any contiguous set of pages on what being “Good” should look like (although some chapter titles near the end look promising).  It’s also not particularly endearing watching the author speak of his own family-of-origin issues as having broad applicability to all “Christian Nice Guys” — some of us came to our niceness pathologies by completely unrelated paths, and I’m actually starting to worry that his solutions may be similarly bound up to a theory of niceness origins that doesn’t apply to me.

The closest things I’ve found to good “Men’s Books” for Christians have been Mark Driscoll’s two Reformission books — “The Radical Reformission” and “Confessions of a Reformission Rev”.  They work for me because they pull no punches while fanatically obsessing on moving forward with the mission of Jesus to transform our families, cities, and nations by the redeeming power of the gospel.  Men are not coddled, but neither are they inundated with the standard litanies of male evils; instead, they are invited to stone up, take their blows, and to press on in strength, courage, and integrity for the sakes of their families and their churches.

The Dawkins Delusion

Today’s favorite bit of Python-esque humor that makes more sense than the supposedly serious-minded man it lampoons: YouTube - The Dawkins Delusion. I’m still absolutely dumbfounded by the audacity (and hypocrisy) of some of Dawkin’s supposedly “scientific” oughts, the most untenable of which being (my paraphrase, of course) “do not raise your children according to the convictions of your faith — instead, raise them according to the dictates of mine! To do otherwise is immoral (in a strictly naturalistic and evolutionary sense, of course).”

Today’s favorite track: “Love Will Find A Way” off of Yes’s Big Generator.

Just Say “No” to Pink Dress Doctrine

Today’s mood: Sick of wussified Christianity and its watered-down “champions” — Jesus In A Pink Dress Overlooking The Grateful Dead

A “christianity” which feels the need to apologize for how violent and uncivilized the Old Testament was does not have the necessary moral or intellectual backbone to survive, and needs to die off as soon as possible to preserve the health of the population.

And, on a not entirely unrelated note…

I’ve been trying to force myself to finish a chapter in a self-describedly “evangelical” book that takes “slavery is an immoral institution” as an irrefutable platitude and goes on to make arguments based upon that assumption about Paul’s “household codes”. Was there sin in the practices of Hebrew, Greek, and Roman slavery? Without a doubt, yes. Is slavery as an institution more intrinsically sinful than capitalism (and its wage slavery), socialism (and its collectivist slavery), democracy (and the tyranny of the majority), consumerism (in which everything is eventually owed to and owned by the creditors)? I seriously doubt it. There will always be gradients of power, whether enshrined in law or not, and sinful man will always abuse them. The problem is not with any institution, because every institution is warped and mangled by our sinfulness in an attempt to destroy ourselves and each other. The problem is with our sin, our overestimation of ourselves and our underestimation of God, and I am completely fed up with the same old arguments about equalizing institutional roles as some sort of Edenic panacea when the promise of the gospel is to redeem every institution by remaking it from people cleansed of their sin.

Think

Taking a short break from David Wells' books to finish The Divine Conspiracy (Dallas Willard) and to blast through "Th!nk", Michael R. LeGault's desperate plea for us not fall into the trap of Malcolm Gladwell's "Blink". A few chestnuts:

The only consistent finding of research done on the subject appears to be that people with high self-esteem are happier. One study conducted by a group of University of Iowa researchers on twenty-three thousand highschool students found little correlation between high self-esteem and better academic performance.

I would bet on the certainty that men and women have different brains before I would bet on the certainty that a water molecule has two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen. … As a generation of feminists-cum-mothers has discovered: "Boys really are different."

In the most economically secure, culturally influential, politically powerful country on the planet, how is it that the best means of mass communication event invented [TV] can only be an outlet for the crude, stupid, mindless, and meaningless? The barbarians aren't at our gates, they're dining with us. Their names are J.Lo, Ja Rule, and Paris Hilton.

As a medium of images and emotion, television intersects with a number of the themes proposed by this book to account for the decline of critical and creative thinking in American society. Television, for exammple, has been an important factor in the spread of egalitarian intelligence - the view that all ideas and opinions are of equal value and that all knowledge and reasoning tend toward the same conclusions. In a society that spends five times more time watching television than it does reading, the view and thoughts of more of the public will inevitably begin to form around cliches–politically correct, ideological, or dogmatic.

I'm reminded of a post I made about a year and a half ago. The homoginization of our imaginations and critical thinking skills may have a lot to do with how uninteresting much of the Church has become in our age.

Current Reading

While waiting for “Confessions of a Reformission Rev” to come out, I’m attempting to plow through David Wells’ tetralogy (No Place for Truth, God In the Wasteland, Losing Our Virtue, and Above All Earthly Pow’rs). I hadn’t set out at first to read the whole series; indeed, I was unaware that there even was a series until I had almost finished No Place a few weeks ago. But his case in No Place was so compelling, the problems he exposed of entangling evangelical faith, modernization, and modernity so daunting, that I couldn’t not want to follow his line of thought forward toward a viable and faithful Christian confession.

Books I Can’t Wait to Read

1. Blogging Church by Brian Bailey and Terry Storch
2. Confessions of a Reformission Rev by Mark Driscoll
3. Too Good to Be True by Michael Horton

And, in the interest of balance, books I have read recently I wish I had spent less time on:

1. The Deliberate Church by Mark Dever and Paul Alexander
2. a Generous Orthodoxy by Brian D. McLaren
3. The Present Future by Reggie McNeal