Happy (Saint) Valentine's Day

Let's remember the reason for the season...

Political correctness and humor on the Open Graph

Satan from "Coffee With Jesus"
via Radio Free Babylon

Sometimes you look into the vast world created by the immanent frame and never know the frame itself there. This can last for years, a lifetime even. It's normal. Then...sometimes, the immanent frame winks back at you. And you feel very small.

This happened to me this morning on Facebook. I posted on my wall strip #118 of the webcomic, Coffee With Jesus, created by the strange and wonderful folks at Radio Free Babylon (RFB). The link I just provided is misleading, though, because I discovered the comic not through their website but through Facebook.

Joshua (hilariously abridged)

After last night's intense post about militarism I'm happy to offer something a bit more lighthearted this evening. A fellow Brethren from Bethany Theological Seminary has put together this wonderfully funny abridged account of the book of Joshua in a series he calls "Scribble Theology." Check it out:

Companion to "The Butcher's Apprentice"

In a long post yesterday, The Butcher's Apprentice, I argued that "people should have an awareness and respect for the cycle that sustains corporeal existence." This point was being illustrated by my recent experience of butchering pigs. But it could also be illustrated by way of this classic Saturday Night Live commercial from the early 90s which has stayed with me. Enjoy...



Favorite quote from Clucky: "Hey, kids, how's the me?"

Post-Christendom theologians and the craft of lightbulb-changing

So two Dunkers and a neo-Jungian psychoanalyst are having an e-mail conversation about postmodernity and one Dunker (my pastor) cracks a joke that gets the other Dunker (me) thinking of a fun little project involving humor and theology.

The question: How many post-Christendom theologians does it take to change a lightbulb?

I put this question out on Facebook and asked fellow theology nerds there to respond. In the process I hooked one professor at EMU into answering and thought it would be cool to try and get some more scholarly opinion surrounding this question. So I sent groveling e-mails to a few scholars I respect and actually got a few bites!

Read on after the break to see the responses and some commentary from yours truly...

Let's call him Carl

"You should be doing that at home."

The elderly store clerk looks up from the trash can she was emptying and spots the source of this unsolicited comment: He's just a few years younger than her - maybe 70 - and dressed in ragged blue jeans and an untucked dark blue polo shirt, unbuttoned at the neck. The clerk blows him off and returns to her work.

The obnoxious old man (let's call him "Carl"), meanwhile, has strolled over to the beer cooler and grabbed himself a 40 oz. bottle of Busch Light. With a donut in one hand, I look at my phone in the other: 8:30 a.m. on a Thursday. I chuckle to myself and fall into line behind Carl, who's just grabbed the morning paper. At the register he asks for a pack of GPC's, pays for his beer and smokes and struts out the door, the scuffled hair on the sides of his balding pink-splotched head whipping around in the breeze.

The clerk and I stand inside at the register, but we're both gawking out the window at glorious Carl as he hops into a spotless Cadillac SUV, the morning sun gleaming off the shiny silver rims. Our jaws drop a little lower when Carl pops the cap off his 40 and takes a few swallows off the top. Finally, he lights up a GPC before driving away, probably off to enjoy the best day ever.

Santa's on MY naughty list

Had two stories of Santas being naughty this week. One from a friend, and one that I experienced w/ my daughter. The first one is simple: my friend in Iowa saw Santa taking a smoke break in plain view of everyone (at Jolly Holiday Lights for ye DSM-dwellers).  My daughter, who is 9, and I went and saw Santa in this little plywood cabin yesterday at the public library in Harrisonburg. Breaking Santa protocol, Santa asked my daughter what she wanted to be when she grew up. Being a good sport, she told him she wanted to be a teacher.

Santa then proceeded to criticize this career move because teachers "don't make very much money." So he asked her again. Still being a good sport, she suggested a desire to perhaps be an artist. Santa grumbled and suggested she come up with "something better," suggesting being a scientist because they make a lot of money (itself a dubious claim).

As someone who recently left a relatively lucrative career in Information Technology to go to grad school and study theology and peacebulding, I was aghast at the nerve of this guy in the Santa suit, but was polite while we were in his presence. As soon as we were in the car, though, we had a discussion about why that encounter was a load of crap. She agreed, even commenting later in the day that she really didn't like that Santa.  I assured her that despite what Santa said, she could choose to be whatever the heck her heart, spirit, and mind are telling her to become. A teacher, or an artist, or an art teacher, or a teacher who is artistic, or whatever. Mid-stream changes are okay, too.

Restoring a sense of humor

A friend of mine who grew up in the same church recently wondered "why some people seem to think 'christian' and 'sense of humor' are mutually exclusive terms."  He is a tremendously intelligent, hilarious, and humble Brethren sojourning with Dutch Reformers as a youth minister in Iowa.  And I wonder the same thing from time to time.  Humor has been high on my list of desirable qualities and behaviors my whole life.   When I was in kindergarten, I used to stand outside my classroom after recess, as the fifth graders were just going out to recess.  I would do a spot-on Woody Woodpecker impression for them, and it never failed to get a rise out of the big kids.  Of course, this often got a hyperactive kid like me in trouble a lot, but I eventually learned how to balance appropriately (not until late in high school).

So last year, some friends and classmates in seminary got together for two final projects in our year-long Christian Tradition class and made spoof news shows that cover 2,000 years of church history.  We had a blast collaboratively writing the show, filming it, and editing it.  The last step was often done into the wee hours of the morning just a day or two before the project was due, but we hung together to bang it out, and it was great.  We laughed our asses off through the whole process, but we took seriously the subject matter.

Indeed, in order to do comedy well, you have to be serious in some respects.  You can't parody something you don't know anything about, so we took our studies seriously.  Another thing I find interesting about humor is its referential nature that is often culturally-bound.  How many jokes are funny outside their cultural context?  Not many.

So here are the two episodes of Millennium Update whose slogan is "Church History from a Heavenly Perspective."  Each episode 20-30 minutes long, and each is broken up into a series of shorter YouTube videos strung together in a playlist.  The intended audience is definitely a seminary-educated crowd, but I think there is still some material in there for folks with a modicum of interest in church history to chuckle at.

Episode I - Fall '08


Episode II - Spring '09