Thursday, December 20, 2007

Marketing genius

Evil marketing genius! Last night a kid stopped by as we were sitting down to dinner to get us to subscribe to the local paper The Gazette. My wife and I have gone around and around trying to figure out whether we should subscribe to a newspaper. When it comes down to it, we feel guilty if we don't read it, so we spend time we would dedicate to other things (for her, schoolwork) trying to allay our consciences over the money we spent on it. But mostly when we subscribed to the Denver paper, it would make a nice stack of newspapers.

So I answer the door. Dude offers me a copy of The Gazette, telling me he's trying help build the subscriber base. If he signs up 50 new subscribers, the paper will pay for a semester at the local community college. He said he was at 47, so I could have helped him get one closer. I applaud programs like this that allow students to get education. But it's sinister in that a big corporation, desperate for a subscriber base to promote to potential advertisers, is willing to use my emotions about the value of education to get me to pony up cash that we need to pay for my wife's education (or insert your own family's need here). We have planned generosity built into our budget from regular monthly support of different organizations to a small discretionary amount for other things that pop up. But I feel bad for other people who are manipulated by the wonderful opportunity of education into paying another chunk of money for something they don't need and won't read. It's a small handful of people who will form a new and enjoyable habit of reading the paper by being convinced to sign up. When they move to a new town, most newspaper readers will call the local paper and sign up if they want it. The vast majority of people who sign up for promotions like this do so out of guilt and get what zefrank calls "a litter version of the internet."

This makes me question the future of newspapers, because our culture will soon reach the critical mass of people who get their newsertainment from other media and don't care to keep using paper. Advertising will drop. Papers will charge more for subscriptions. The generation older than me, which has a higher propensity to read the paper, will go the way of . . . generations. My generation has about ten percent, if that, who intentionally read the paper. Newspapers will probably collapse under the inefficiency. Not that I want that to happen. We're seeing more and more physical media go away. Physical media have great value, but since it is only economics that drive these media, they will probably go away. Not a prediction, a prophecy or a guarantee, but I don't see how the economics will continue to work. Unless someone comes to my doorstep saying, "If you don't subscribe to The Paper, I will kill this kitten."

Tuesday, December 18, 2007

A viscous circle

And yes, I do mean sticky. But I guess it's not so much a circle, as maybe a downward spiral. What I'm talking about is pietism as an entertainment culture. Many pixels have been illuminated over the idea that individualism is a/the bane of human existence. Agreed. Further, one very particular activity that people undertake exacerbates the problem.

I've heard it said a number of times: It's just me and Jesus. Or sung many times: It's just you and me here now, Lord (or some variation). This type of attitude is a direct descendant of pietism, that thing that started out of camp meetings and encouraged folks in their personal relationship with Jesus. (Admission: this is a strong response; maybe like using a blowtorch to light farts. And it's probably going to burn my off.) A very strong aspect of pietism is the Modernist myth of continual progress. So I do my devotions, I get more holy, and naturally sin goes bye-bye. So now it's personal holiness; all that matters is Jesus and how he's making me holy. It feeds individualism.

Now if you're stuck inside your own head, and your main goal is progress of some sort, it starts to look a lot like entertainment. So while our secular culture is looking for the next awesome cinematographic experience, and amazing blood-splattering graphics on their video games, the Christians are looking for the next spiritual high. Retreats. Devotionals. Guest speakers. Lights. Flat screens. Smoke. Loud music. Entertain me! I'm not sure if I would have sat at a camp meeting and predicted our individualistic entertainment culture. (Okay I wouldn't have.) But it seems like all the curses of said American dream culture were brought on ourselves within religious practice 150 years ago. Maybe the whole thing doesn't need to be chucked. But most of it does.

Back to community. Holiness as the body of Christ, not as individual bodies within the "body" of Christ. (Dan Merchant's "Lord, Save Us from Your Followers" shows a brilliant metaphor for this "body." Just watch it.) Accountability in the communal setting where we are lovingly intolerant of that which perverts the image of God. This involves individual spiritual disciplines, obviously. But it involves much more engagement with God's image around us.

Monday, December 17, 2007

Electability

Seems like the key for a major party in candidate choice is whether the candidate is "electable." Doesn't matter who they are or what they stand for, if they have the charisma to beat the other party in the general election, we're gonna nominate them! Presumably if there are "electable" candidates, there are "unelectable' ones. Perhaps for no other reason than linguistic humor, but also to make the next year slightly more bearable, everyone needs to refer to terrible candidates like Giuliani and Clinton as "ineluctably unelectable." (Except that they might be those charismatic ones . . . aargh!)

Friendship as recognition

I'm (finishing after a long hiatus) reading NT Wright's "Evil and the Justice of God." A phenomenal work as I remember it, and it's already yielding interesting insights in the second sitting. In perhaps a throwaway line, Wright mentions that the righteous are always waiting for God to vindicate them, and this will surely happen, but maybe only "beyond death itself" (looking toward the vindication of resurrection). Which got the cogs turning.

I believe God is omniscient and omnipotent (to use terms from systematic theology), so there is no doubt that at the resurrection, he could offhandedly say, "Arise!" and all the righteous are resurrected to life and the unrighteous to death, whatever form that takes. There's even the "Lamb's Book of Life" in case he forgets to raise a righteous one. But a focus of evangelicalism among other movements is that God loves us and knows us and knit us together in our mother's wombs (which the Bible does actually say). Perhaps resurrection to life is supposed to be far more intimate. In this case, the driver in resurrection may not be God's blind power but his love and our love in relationship. Jesus's line would then make far more sense: "I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!" (TNIV). So again, it may not be God's omnipotence or omniscience that powers that dramatic and all-encompassing scene of the resurrection. It could be the fact that he recognizes us in a very intimate way, based on how we have related to him in this age, that determines whether we get a hearty welcome or a castigation.

Thursday, December 13, 2007

For your Shabbat convenience

We just found out today that our oven has a Sabbath setting. We can instruct it to not do certain things on our pre-defined Sabbath. It's okay to broil, I understand, but not bake. So the normal bake settings are disabled on the Sabbath. But suppose I'm broiling and want to look at my food? Not so fast, young man! The oven light won't work. And since it won't work, I won't work. And that's the point isn't it?

Monday, December 10, 2007

Systematic Theology

I've had this debate raging in my head for a few weeks now, and sometimes it rages outside my head: Is systematic theology worth anything? My department went to a conference a couple of weeks ago, and this was a major topic of conversation. One main presenter is done with systematics. The other two are hanging on, although one has a redefinition of the word "systematic" that doesn't help a bit. Systematics is so dogged with baggage, I'm not sure it's fruitful to try to redeem the word.

Here's my short assessment: Systematics as traditionally conceived doesn't seem to have any merit. It takes all sorts of diverse moments of Scripture and lists them out so we can handle the concepts. So take the idea of God's immutability. From Hebrews, systematics says, "God doesn't change. He is the same yesterday, today and forever." But if they're honest, they have to see that God "repented" of making humans when he flooded the earth in the time of Noah and that Moses convinced God not to destroy the Hebrews and make his Name a laughingstock. If we engage the stories (and more importantly perhaps, the Story), we will have an enigmatic view of God emerge, but one that we can engage in faith. Otherwise, if we live according to a list of God's attributes, we have to pick our favorite characteristics: "God obviously never changes! It says so in Hebrews!" Or: "Look how God listened to his servant! I don't care what Hebrews says!" Now if we read in context, many of these contradictions will vanish, but we need to be able to live with the tensions in the story.

The only (almost) value of systematics is that you can memorize a bunch of references to locate stories. But I think getting familiar with your Bible through frequent reading will accomplish that. I guess my current opinion is that systematics doesn't help.

Sunday, December 9, 2007

Also proud of . . .

P - p - pr - president Bush? Can it be true? I have to go on record saying that I'm proud of President Bush for sending a letter to Kim-Jong Il, the notorious notorious-person in charge of North Korea. For too many years, we've had this awfully arrogant looking policy of not communicating with people we don't like. I may not be an elected official, but I am a human being, and it seems like it's necessarily to communicate with the other party in some personal way if we hope to have a humanizing influence. So I was shocked to hear of such a letter, but it turns out it's true. W is for "Way to go!"

A small step

Commercial-behemoth-in-the-consumer-wasteland Sam's Club is taking a small step toward environmental helpfulness. In light of the miles of receipts they print every day, our local "Club" is now printing on both sides of the receipt. While it probably took a bit of doing to replace all the receipt printers, or at least to enable them to print both sides with new printer heads and software, I'm proud of them for saving a quite a bit of paper in the long run.

Friday, December 7, 2007

A true reversal

I think a lot about sustainable farming, and how much I want to grow most of the food my family consumes. I realized last night that 80 years ago, you had to be pretty wealthy to consider not doing subsistence farming to stay alive. But in that time frame, America has changed so much that you have to be quite wealthy in order to realistically consider doing subsistence/sustainable farming today. My, how times have changed! And I don't think necessarily for the better.

Wednesday, December 5, 2007

It's just pixels

There have been a lot of pixels spilled in articles and blogs over the past few weeks concerning how churches use the video game Halo 3 as an outreach tool. The New York Times published an article about it here. There are some really fun quotes in there. For instance, one youth pastor wrote a letter to parents in his church saying, "We want to make it hard for teenagers to go to hell." Never mind that you're bringing hell into your church by giving kids the thrill of blowing people/creatures up in the video game.

One really, really solid argument I saw for doing this was that there's no actual killing. It's all just pixels, so it doesn't really matter. I'm sorry . . . I know my posts are usually . . . longer than this . . . it's just I've got these great pixels . . . on my screen . . . they're not really naked women . . .