30 Songs I really love.
In no particular order:
- Viva la Vida – Coldplay
- Round Here – Counting Crows
- Passion – Pigeon John, featuring Tapwater
- Frail – Jars of Clay
- What a Wonderful World – Louis Armstrong
- Hallelujah – Jeff Buckley, covering Leonard Cohen
- Have yourself a Merry little Christmas – Hem, covering Judy Garland
- Eyes of a Child – Soul Asylum
- No Sensitivity – Jimmy Eat World
- Train Song – Listener Project
- New Slang – the Shins
- When You Were Young – the Killers
- One Headlight – the Wallflowers
- Casimir Pulaski Day – Sufjan Stevens
- Power of the Gospel – Ben Harper and the Innocent Criminals
- Priceless – Copeland
- 10 Days – Missy Higgins
- Pills – the Perishers featuring Sarah McLachlan
- The Freshmen – the Verve Pipe
- Transatlanticism – Death Cab for Cutie
- Rudy – the Be Good Tanyas
- Lola – the Kinks
- Soul Meets Body – Death Cab for Cutie
- Adventures in Solitude – the New Pornographers
- Broken Wings – Sage Francis
- First Christmas – Stan Rogers
- Equally Skilled – Jon Foreman
- Abraham – Sufjan Stevens
- Mad World – Gary Jules and Michael Andrews
- The Way we Walk – Sintax the Terrific featuring Mouth Warrin’
This entry was written by , posted on November 15, 2008 at 3:24 am, filed under Music, Things I love and tagged Music, Things I love. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
The New Wave of Charities.
Charities seem to be different these days.
I mean, I think about charities that have been around forever (relative to my 20-some years of awareness outside of my own family) like United Way, Goodwill, Salvation Army, Christian Children’s Fund, and Worldvision, and I think about rocks within my community – stable, unobtrusive, and fairly low-key. I see them as the charities of my parents: heirarchical, top-down, Modernist, and somewhat outdated. First, let me say that I’m not trying to put down any of these organizations – I’ve donated to almost all of the above charitable organizations without regret – but I don’t see a spread, a growth, or a story.
Each one of the above have pretty much done things the same way, organizationally and communicatively, for as long as I can remember. If something isn’t broke, don’t fix it, right? This worries me because as we move into an ever-evolving post-modern internet culture where information is in excess and meaning is in short supply, I’m not sure these organizations know how to tell their stories to a new generation.
The reason I’ve been thinking about this is because I’ve been thinking about a few charities of late that have really touched me. Let me outline a few:
- Love Knits: Love Knits was started by a friend of mine, Julie Rains, who sat down one day and decided that she had a talent for crochet and knitting and a passion to help the impoverished, so she started Love Knits as a grassroots-level movement to have people come together to make knits for those who need it. One thing I love about the site is that the blog is dedicated to highlighting other organizations and telling their stories too.
- To Write Love On Her Arms: This charity is almost a phenomenon, especially amongst Christian teens and twenty-somethings in the harder genres of music scenes. TWLOHA is a non-profit that is centered around getting young people help for addiction, depression, and self-injury. It all started with a story about spending 5 days with someone who was waiting to get into a rehab clinic. They started selling t-shirts to support their friend in rehab. It has exploded since then, by grabbing onto the music scene and touring with bands left, right, and center.
- Treaures: This one is a group of women who are reaching out and helping women trapped in the sex industry in the Los Angeles and Las Vegas areas. It started when an ex-stripper just felt led to put some postcards in a stripclub parking lot, each one written with love and an invitation to church that weekend. It bloomed from there.
I think what’s different about these charities is not that they are hip, attractive, and cutting-edge in website design (though that helps), but I think its because they have all centered themselves around, and deeply invested themselves in, meaningful stories. Meaning and purpose drip from these charities, and catch my eye because they speak my language.
The vet charities will hopefully be around forever because of the need they fill, and people fill that need because of what they know it does good, but it seems that they are organizations and not people; faceless constructs intent on supplying the world with good. My fear is that without change, these might indeed become relics in history.
Luckily there are a few that have picked up on this for the vets too and have done something about it. My friend, Tim Bailey, decided to see for himself what Compassion does with the money he donates to sponsor a young one, and he went to Haiti and made a movie about it. The movie is great. It connected with me and gave meaning to sponsoring children. I hope to do the same in a few years in Thailand with Isaiah 61 Project.
Where do we go from here? Well we need to find our way into these giants of charity work in North America (primarily) and help them regain a story and a meaning that will connect themselves with the generation at hand.
WK
This entry was written by , posted on at 2:58 am, filed under Activism, Culture and tagged Charity, Christian Children's Fund, Compassion, Goodwill, Isaiah 61 Project, Love Knits, Meaning, Millenials, Salvation Army, Treasures, TWLOHA, United Way, Worldvision. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
Babylon
One of my classes this semester is a Text and Interpretation class on Revelation. I haven’t really been that interested in the class, as there is nothing new or particularly shocking being lectured (for me, that is). At most, the thing that has piqued my interest is the literary component of Revelation – it’s various chiastic and repetitive structures that scream Hebrew Literature. I’d be more interested in the idea that Revelation is the summation of the entire OT (and NT) with its 640-odd references to the OT, but I just can’t invest the time to read interpretatively the entirety of the Bible to really understand Revelation at a deep level. Interesting stuff, but nothing that has really hit me in the head to change my mind.
Until today.
Until today, I’ve been what you could call a preterist. That is, I believed that Revelation was primarily written to be a polemic against Rome for the persecuted Church in Asia Minor. Everything that is in Revelation concerning Powers, Oppresion and Evil can fit well into Roman Empire. My professor has been trying to get across to the class that Revelation is timelessly written, with next to no temporal prophecy involved, framed within Rome as the ultimate evil to which we wage holy war with our weapons of praise, suffering, and witness. After class today, that has changed.
In Revelation 17, we learn of the woman, Babylon the Great, the mother of harlots. Rome, right? Babylon is code for Rome, right? Wrong. Throughout all of the OT, and all of our salvation-historical narrative history, Babylon was code for something older: Babel, the first worldly power that tried to overthrow God. Babel/Babylon is then every world power that has been mentioned in the OT: Tyre, Sidon, Assyria, Persia, Macedonia, Babylon, Rome, Egypt, etc. On top of that, its crucial to see that Revelation’s Babylon is a mother of harlots – more Babylons. So here’s the thing, this isn’t the first Babylon, and it certainly isn’t the last. Rome is irrelevant.
This is far more polemical than before. Instead of acknowledging (though condemning and judging) the powers of Rome, Revelation casts aside Rome as just another temporary world power.
Revelation is about being a faithful witness through persecution by the powers of the World, which will lose in the end to the power of God.
Revelation just got interesting.
This entry was written by , posted on November 12, 2008 at 12:29 am, filed under Biblical Study and tagged Bible, Interpretation, Revelation, School. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
Too Busy to even think.
About blog posts that is.
For those who are into this kind of thing, here’s the introduction to University video we showed the Frosh at Tyndale this year:
For more hilarity, check out our youtube channel
This entry was written by , posted on November 11, 2008 at 1:02 am, filed under Uncategorized and tagged Humour, Tyndale University College, youtube. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
Evangelicalism Then and Now: Crucicentrism
Looking out the main window of the Chapel of the Holy Cross, Sedona, AZ
Out of all 4 of the skewed definitions, this is the one that is most firmly entrenched in Evangelicalism, I think. The idea that the atoning work of Christ is simple fire insurance is the greatest disservice to Christianity that we (in North America especially) have come up with. But what about it?
The atoning work of Christ has been thoroughly dialogued about throughout the centuries, by the greatest Christian thinkers in our history. By reading Genesis 3, we see that the fall affected our relationship with God, each other, and all of creation, which brought death into the game. Christ’s atonement is the focal point of Christian history, because it brought us reconciliation with God, each other, and all of creation. Death was beaten and the Kingdom of God was victorious in the Cross. The amazing story that envelops Christians into the story that leads their lives.
And then a bunch of over-zealous preachers came along, threw out 1900 years of thought about the atonement and decided that Christianity’s number one goal was to get people out of Hell. Out goes creation stewardship. Out goes loving your neighbour. Out goes an ever-deepening discipling by God. That’s right, Christianity is now going through the Roman’s Road and saying the Sinner’s Prayer. That’ll be just swell.
Does anyone else think this is absolutely freaking ridiculous?
Without even coming to a consensus with what Hell even is, to cheapen the atonement is to cheapen the whole of Christ’s incarnation. It angers me that thousands of people see only the shallowest puddle of what the Trinity is doing in each of our lives.
So what is the solution? We have to start to looking at new ways to see evangelism. Maybe goes as far as putting a moratorium on Hell for awhile. I don’t know. Maybe it’s as simple as gagging certain preachers long enough to reboot the congregations into thinking for themselves.
Thinking for themselves? That’s the next Then and Now.
WK
This entry was written by , posted on November 7, 2008 at 1:04 am, filed under Christianity, Church and tagged Atonement, Bebbington, Christ, Evangelicalism, Hell. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
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