This is my guest post today on Jason Clark’s blog
What I’m willing to read (and what I do read) has changed a lot over the last decade.
The biggest reason for the change is: I’m less afraid that what I read will adversely affect me.
I’m curious about all of you. What are you willing to read?
If you’re a Christian…
If you’re not a Christian…
David posted some interesting thoughts last week about information sources in a comment on the post Replacements Needed on our Justice and Compassion blog. From his comment
The internet has lowered the barrier for dissemination of information. That has been good in some respects because it has allowed stories to become known that would never have come to light in the past. However, it doesn’t really help answer the question of who can you trust to get the truth about anything.
My best guess is that most Americans these days turn to information sources that tell them things with which they already agree. Getting them to look beyond those sources appears to be becoming increasingly difficult BECAUSE of the vast array of information choices provided by the internet.
How do you decide whether an information source is trustworthy? Which sources do you trust (if any)?
Posted in General Conversation | 12 Comments »This is my latest letter in the local newspaper, which is a response to George and Mary.
George, yes, I do understand that although I found freedom by leaving church, you and others find freedom through your involvement with church. You could have decided, “This means Helen simply went to the ‘wrong’ church. She needs to switch to mine.” I very much appreciate that you didn’t go there. At the same time, I appreciate your kind invitation to me, one Sunday last year, to attend your church. An invitation is very different from putting pressure on me by implying “there is something wrong with you unless you like the church I like.”
Mary, I see you have questions and haven’t read the whole dialog. You can find it by going to the Wednesday Journal’s website www.wednesdayjournalonline.com and searching on Rev. Lueking’s and my last names. The dialog began July 5 last year.
In particular, if you read more, I hope you will see nature is not my God any more than ice cream is. I enjoy nature and ice cream, but that’s very different from worshiping them!
Admittedly, I may be intentionally avoiding the certainty you seek from me. I used to want it. I thought I was on an intellectual quest for truth, not realizing I was as least as much on an emotional quest to feel safe and secure. The emotional quest pulled me towards an overly simplistic way of looking at humanity: my group is good, yours is bad!
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I (Eliza) had the pleasure of attending the Seattle Men’s Chorus (SMC) show “Scared Faithless: God and Gays in the 21st Century” with Benjamin and Megan last weekend. It was a most interesting and enjoyable evening! I was glad that Megan and Benjamin were interested in seeing the show. It was great to talk with them about the show at intermission & afterwards. I couldn’t have had better company! (Benjamin & Megan are camping this week, so won’t be able to comment until next week — they may have different observations about the show.)
Seattle’s a pretty liberal city, & SMC is well-known for including some risqué (& therefore by extension irreverent) elements in their shows. SMC is also well known for being made up of gay men — that’s its raison d’etre. (It’s big, too — the SMC website lists more than 200 chorus members at last update, last year.) Even so, this show definitely broke some usually pretty intact taboos by approaching religion in a less-than-reverential manner, and questioning it. It was breath-taking to see this show occur. At the beginning, I was thinking, “I can’t believe they’re doing this”. By the middle of the 3rd piece, though, I was thinking “It’s about time!”
Apparently there was a “sour note” before the show:
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We went to see Evan Almighty yesterday afternoon. I enjoyed it.
The name indicates it’s a sequel to Bruce Almighty. God’s interactions with Evan and Bruce are somewhat different though. In Bruce Almighty Bruce challenges God and God responds by saying “Ok, let’s see how you would do at my job” and gives Bruce all his powers. In Evan Almighty Evan doesn’t challenge God. He asks God to help him change the world and God says “Ok, build an ark for me”.
This movie comes about as close as anything I’ve seen to depicting the way God interacts with people in the Bible. God shows up unexpectedly and asks people to do things he says are important, which tend to be unusual and extremely inconvenient. It would be nice if God also appeared to the family and friends of those people and said “Yes, I really did tell them to do this!” But God often chooses not to do that, leaving the people the challenge of convincing others they are not crazy but rather are doing what God asked them to do.
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Last Saturday we went to Cantigny Park for the annual art fair. I was curious to see if they had any or many cicadas.
As we drove west to get to the park, we went through some areas where we could hear cicadas (with the car windows closed) and see them flying across the expressway.
There was a table at Cantigny with information for children about cicadas. I asked a man helping there (who was from the University of Illinois) why Oak Park doesn’t have cicadas but River Forest does. He said it was because Oak Park had so many elm trees and every time a tree dies the cicadas living on its roots die. River Forest was planted with more variety of trees (before these areas were settled they were prairie, I believe – people added the trees) and so the cicada population was not hit so hard there. I also wonder if it’s because it’s right next to the river, where the trees are not disturbed.
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After the two discussions about servant evangelism a week ago (Strangers giving kids candy and servant evangelism or ‘being served’ evangelism?) Steve Sjogren kindly sent me some of his books. I’ve been reading Outflow: outward-focused living in a self-focused world, which he co-authored with Dave Ping.
My own approach is to outward-focused living is fairly simple (I think): be kind to people because it’s the right thing to do. Practice being kind because practicing it helps me remember to do it more being sorry I wasn’t doing it, or making internal commitments that I am going to do better at it.
The approach of Outflow is: get filled up with God’s love so it will overflow out of you to other people.
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Up/rooted is a local organization for emerging Christians. Mike Clawson is one of the organizers – I heard about it through him.
Yesterday I went to the Up/rooted West meeting yesterday which was a book discussion with Hemant Mehta about I Sold My Soul on eBay. It was fun to see Hemant and Mike and Julie again. There were a couple of other people there I’d met through Mike or up/rooted (I’ve been to one other meeting of theirs). I didn’t know the rest of the group, most of whom were from Mike and Julie’s church Via Christus.
There were about 13 people there. The meeting was in someone’s house – a nice friendly setting. Mike commented that this was pretty much how his church service was when Hemant visited last year.
I heard the story from Mike of why Hemant visited his church.
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