What is culture? Is there a difference between people and culture? If someone argues that Jesus calls to redeem people but not culture, are they really saying anything, or is the difference inconsequential?

It seems to me people make up culture; to reach people would be to reach their culture, and you can’t reach a culture as such because it’s a concept, a description. You reach people who think and act in patterns we describe as cultures, and if we apply the gospel to the making of art or business, then we are reaching people within their cultural context.

Or am I missing something?

The iMonk talks about our brokenness before our Lord:

How can someone who has the answers for everyone one moment, have no answers for themselves the next? Why are we, after all that confident talk of “new life,” “new creation,” “the power of God,” “healing,” “wisdom,” “miracles,” “the power of prayer,” …why are we so weak? Why do so many “good Christian people,” turn out to be just like everyone else? Divorced. Depressed. Broken. Messed up. Full of pain and secrets. Addicted, needy and phony. I thought we were different.

…

You people with your Bibles. Look something up for me? Isn’t almost everyone in that book screwed up? I mean, don’t the screwed up people- like Abraham, Jacob, Moses, David, Hosea- outnumber the “good Christians” by about ten to one?

Jared has a good list on parishioners who should come with warning labels:

2. The young guy who likes it when you rant against stuff or preach angry. Beware of pleasing young men too much. Young men are notoriously stupid. (I know, ’cause I am one.)

3. The guy or gal who doesn’t like it when you rant against stuff or preach angry. Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. If you’re sincerely and reliably preaching the Word, toes are going to be stepped on from time to time. If you’re not being self-indulgent about it and you are speaking the truth, beware those who think you should be more “positive” like those fellows on TV.

This may go along with Ori’s link in the previous post. Atheists don’t appear to be more rational than their opponents, just more angry. Maybe they had bad Sunday School experiences. But then “a fool says in his heart, ‘There is no god,'” so we may be talking about complete irrationality here.

Novelist and neocon Roger L. Simon hasn’t started believing in God again, after a lifetime of atheism.

He’s just beginning to have some doubts.

The doubts rise, not from an experience of God, but from a confrontation with Evil. He writes of his experience at the Durban II conference:

Well, just as there are no atheists in foxholes, maybe no one is an atheist when confronted with what he finally acknowledges to be Evil. If there is Evil, there must be Good, no? And some force governing this game, something that, well, looks over it.

I know I am being irrational here, so I will stop. Being in the presence of Ahmadinejad’s evil, fleeting and haltingly put me in the presence of something else.

Tip: Gene Edward Veith at Cranach.

Publishing update: Looks like the new book will actually be released sometime around May 22.



On Monday, I replaced my desk flag.

It must have been late in 1968, my first semester at Waldorf College, Forest City, Iowa, when I bought a miniature Norwegian flag on a stand-up base for my dorm room desk. It’s been with me ever since, in several states, and in several states of being. But only recently I noticed that, in addition to being kind of limp and faded, it had actually started to show holes, produced not by any kind of friction, but just by the aging of the fabric (nylon, I think).

So I sent away to Ingebretsen’s Scandinavian Shop for a replacement. And I had to discard the old flag.

This makes me sad. Continue reading Flag at half mast →

Patrol: I feel like, especially in my generation, there’s this backlash against Christian cheese.

Winter: Look, nobody starts out to make a bad movie. Everyone starts out with good intentions. People have differing skill sets to do that and different reasons and purposes.

I think that movies are better at entertaining people than transmitting content. And I think when we try to convince people of the truth of the Gospel, movies aren’t the way to do that. That’s where you can get in trouble. It would take tremendous skill to make a movie to do that. And I look at movies that just touch on it a little bit.

I don’t know if you’ve ever seen Ben-Hur. I just saw it—I watch it every Easter. It’s a powerful movie. And you never see Jesus’ face, you never hear him speak. The conversion process that happens for Judah Ben-Hur is after he stands at the cross and sees Jesus, he comes back to Esther, his then sort-of girlfriend, and says, “When he spoke, I felt the sword fall from my hand.”

And you know from that three-hour journey you’ve been on that that’s a big deal to him. And that’s his conversion; it happens off-screen. But you begin to see the results of that, it changes who he is and how he acts. Those are powerful, entertaining stories that make you question why. It would take a very, very skilled filmmaker that could figure out how to do that and be evangelistic without being cheesy. I can’t imagine at that moment what that movie would be. It’s better at asking questions. It’s better as an art form.

Mark Upton has an interesting post to a heart-breaking story on PRI’s This American Life. The whole show is interesting, but Mark’s focus is the story of man witnessing to woman over the phone. The dialogue we hear on the radio show sounds like the man was answering without fully listening. There’s a bit of conversation in the comments.