The Coolest Thing I've Found In a While

Heard of the Human Genome Project? Well, there's a Music Genome Project to. And it rocks way harder. Everyone should go to Pandora Radio and set up a free account. You create your own radio stations (up to 100) based on artists you like, and it plays others in a similar vein. Right now, I'm listening to my own Iron & Wine station. It's awesome, but don't take my word for it. Go experience it yourself.

I'm Always Up For Some Star Wars Humor

Darth Vader won't just blow up your planet or magically strangle you from across the room, he'll humiliate you too.

This Film's Intense Like Sewing Your Own Stitches and Admitting Your Wounds Are Self-Inflicted

The work of two of my favorite living artists, Cormac McCarthy and the Coen Brothers, (yup, counting the Coens as one artist, because the work would not be the same without the collaboration) comes together beautifully (in a strange sense) in No Country for Old Men. There is not one moment in this film, about the tide of wickedness flooding the world, where the tension is diminished. The Coen's dry, witty humor does appear. But there is no comic relief. These instants only wind you tighter as you begin to care more about this character only to worry about what will become of them now that they've made you smile. And as you worry about these characters, you worry about this world, and this feeling is further intensified by Tommy Lee Jones' amazing performance, which puts your concern on the screen for you to see.

While I do not ultimately share the worldview of the Coens' or McCarthy, there is much truthfulness in their work. Especially this one. Our God is one who causes the sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous, and while this is the case, the world will never be easily divided into us and them, good and evil. The good will suffer at the hands of the evil and the evil will benefit from the work of the good - which is portrayed masterfully in the next to last scene in which a ruthless murderer is helped by a boy on a bike. The lines between good and evil cut right through each and every one of us, and the only thing that puts on on one side or the other is not chance, but the choices we make. Lets just hope that because of the love of Christ more people will be compelled to go on ahead "and make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold" than these artists think will.

The Church and It's Self-Subversion

There is much discussion, and arguing, and outright yelling going on right now about the church and her formation of doctrine. It is not a new criticism that says the church and her doctrine as we know it is simply the result of Constantine and his political co-optation of the church. That Christianity is what it is because it has been power-hungry from its formal inception. But, thanks to a terribly written novel, an even worse movie and some grumpy atheists, these arguments are finding a larger audience.

Today, I revisited Alan Lewis' "Between Cross and Resurrection: A Theology of Holy Saturday," and found something I wanted to share. He does not deny the role that Constantine and his politics played in the formation of the church's doctrine. However, because of the incarnational nature of Christian theology - basically because God uses people, even the ones who suck royally - truth could (did) still win out, and Constantine ended up, on an eternal scale, shooting himself in his very foot that pressed on the necks of the lowly. But Lewis says it better:

(Forming doctrine is an) uncertain struggle to speak as truthfully as possible, though always fallibly and with penultimacy, (that) happens not in a vacuum of intellectual and spiritual purity, but in the midst of and affected by webs of ecclesiastical, political, and social circumstance. How extraordinary, then, in this case, that it was the doctrine of the Trinity and thus a God of vulnerability and lowliness to which the church's authorities gave clear endorsement in the years and decades following its triumph - however disastrous that establishment of Christendom may have been for the followers of Jesus, crucified by Pontius Pilate. The church did not stop thinking now about the nature of the gospel, theologically anaesthetized by the elixir of political power. RATHER, AN UNDERSTANDING OF GOD WAS SEALED WHICH POSITIVELY CHALLENGED THE VERY NOTIONS OF EARTHLY POWER AND IMPERIAL AUTHORITY WHICH THE CHURCH IN PRACTICE WAS ENJOYING.If ever there was a moment to preserve for its political effect belief in God as monad it might have been when Constantine brought church and state together under a single dominion: "one God, one emperor, one church." In the face of such a claim upon divine monarchy, the ultimate sanctification of earthly sovereignty, the church chose to reject monistic unitarianism for plurality and community within God, the sharing of rule among interdependents rather than its imposition by a single, superior, self-sufficient governor upon inferior subjects. Whatever might be true of the church, of pope and patriarch, of God the church's doctrine said that majesty and glory are revealed in the lowliness of mortal being; that almightiness and power are exercised not ultimately from on high but in the powerlessness of a crucified and buried one; that transcendence and distance do not negate but find expression in vulnerability and intimacy, and in the depths of flesh and loss and death. In such contradictions of the external context, AND SUBVERTING ITS OWN BRIGHT MOMENT OF POWER AND GLORY, the church of Jesus Christ gave birth to a new doctrine which, in spite of everything, bore witness to the scandalous story of the cross by which foolishness, weakness, and nothingness bring to shame all that has existence, might, and wisdom. (emphasis mine)

Here, doctrine seems to provide its own nice critique of those who attack it, as well as those who form it.

May we always be open to the critique of the truth, and remember that it is not ours to own, but rather that by which we are to be owned.