Fifty Shades of Grey is getting a tremendous amount of hype right now, but there's another side to the story. In a remarkable commentary, Annie Lobert talks about her experience with the kind of lifestyle portrayed in the film.
The Dark Side of Grey
Wednesday, February 25, 2015
Jimmy Fallon and Lent
On a related note, in a time when so much media attention is focused on negativity, and when people seem to make great efforts to run one another down, it's refreshing to see a celebrity who is just a little humbled by the company he keeps. Here's a look at Jmmy Fallon, describing with joy his slightly manic experience of being part of Saturday Night Live's 40th Anniversary show and the after-party. Jimmy Fallon recaps SNL 40th.
Maybe Fallon's joy can give us a little insight into how we add light into our lives this Lent. Thanks to brokenhalo.com!
Maybe Fallon's joy can give us a little insight into how we add light into our lives this Lent. Thanks to brokenhalo.com!
More Light, Not Less Dark!
Often, we think about Lent as a time for giving up something...no coffee, no beer, no ice cream, or whatever. And there's not question that denying one's self something can have a good effect on a person's spiritual life. But, it makes me wonder if we miss the point when our Lenten question becomes "Whatcha gonna give up?"
Lent is fundamentally a time of preparation...back in the early-church day, it was when converted Christians prepared for baptism at Easter. It's a time for spiritual focus, for some introspection, some "stock-taking" of one's life, spiritually and otherwise. So, might we use that introspection as an opportunity not simply for denial of something peripheral in one's life, but to add or develop something more positive and lasting?
CS Lewis talks about evil as the absence of the goodness of God, as opposed to it being some opposite equal force. As darkness is the absence of light and not its own entity, so evil is the absence of good. Maybe this is stretching his idea a bit far, but doesn't it seem that making a positive change in your life or mine is like adding light? If that image works, then it would seem that adding light is much more spiritually beneficial than "giving up" darkness, especially if the darkness is something as mundane as your morning coffee, or television on Tuesdays.
It might be as simple as beginning a new good habit instead of putting a not-so-good one on the shelf for six weeks. Maybe it's taking a walk after work each night, writing notes to loved ones, or having intentional conversations with your spouse, parents, or kids. I have to believe there's more potential for healthy spirituality in any of those, or a dozen others, that we'll ever get from giving up caffeine.
The kind of self-denial about which Jesus speaks in the gospels is not trivial; it is a radical reordering of one's life, and it is paired with "taking up one's cross" to follow Jesus. To follow Christ is far more about walking in the light than it is creating a list of behaviors to abandon. Which means it is focused letting the light of Jesus shine from your life into the life of others!
So...maybe the question for Lent this year is "What will you add into your life to let the light of Christ shine in and through you?
Wednesday, February 11, 2015
Love and Service: A Most Powerful Witness
Where did we ever get the notion that Christianity is best practiced away from the marketplace? Surely not from the New Testament; Jesus is teaching in public setting throughout the gospels, from alongside the Sea of Galilee to Jacob's Well, to the synagogue in Capernaum. Paul's career happened in the streets, marketplaces and public arenas of Palestine, Asia Minor and southeastern Europe. Even when early Christians were afraid of the authories, they brought the gospel into the public square.
Not only was it public, but from the earliest days, Christians have been servants to those on the margins. Throughout our history, Lutheran Christians have seen service as a central tenet of our faith. One can make a pretty good argument to say that we've alway been involved in serving; Lutherans have long been advocates of education and health care, and have been responsible for hospitals and colleges in the US and around the world, and Lutheran disaster relief efforts have been exemplary. Even so, for many people today, especially younger adults, we have left the impression that our religious expression is disconnected from the everyday needs of the society around us.
Jesus himself took "the form of a servant," on his way to our redemption at the cross. This focus on service does not diminish the important roles of teaching and proclamation; rather it sets them in a uniquely post-modern context. The missional church of this century will understand that our witness and theology in the public square will only be as strong and as effective as our service, and that a primary way we will teach the faith to a new generation is to help them learn about God through active service to others. We will experience the love of Christ as we bring Jesus' love to others. And the world, as the old campfire song says, will know we are Christians by our love.
Not only was it public, but from the earliest days, Christians have been servants to those on the margins. Throughout our history, Lutheran Christians have seen service as a central tenet of our faith. One can make a pretty good argument to say that we've alway been involved in serving; Lutherans have long been advocates of education and health care, and have been responsible for hospitals and colleges in the US and around the world, and Lutheran disaster relief efforts have been exemplary. Even so, for many people today, especially younger adults, we have left the impression that our religious expression is disconnected from the everyday needs of the society around us.
Jesus himself took "the form of a servant," on his way to our redemption at the cross. This focus on service does not diminish the important roles of teaching and proclamation; rather it sets them in a uniquely post-modern context. The missional church of this century will understand that our witness and theology in the public square will only be as strong and as effective as our service, and that a primary way we will teach the faith to a new generation is to help them learn about God through active service to others. We will experience the love of Christ as we bring Jesus' love to others. And the world, as the old campfire song says, will know we are Christians by our love.
The Search for God in The Act of Service
For Baby Boomers like me, faith development using involved study and conversation. We'd talk and talk and talk and then think about concept of considering the idea of exploring the notion of service. Not so with today's younger adults, notably those who find "old-school" religious forms wanting. Today's young adults often work out their theology through their service, that is the discover what the believe through what they do.
Here's an example... Leadership Education at Duke University has many thought-provoking articles, including this one by Nick Street, titled "Tell David Brooks the 'Nones' are Alright": by Nick Street @ShindoStreet
David Brooks’ Feb. 3 column in The New York Times, “Building better secularists,” begins with a sleight of hand. “Over the past few years,” he writes, “there has been a sharp rise in the number of people who are atheist, agnostic or without religious affiliation. A fifth of all adults and a third of the youngest adults fit into this category.” For starters, lumping atheists and secularists into the same category as agnostics and religious “nones” — those who don’t consider themselves atheist but still check “none of the above” on religious identification surveys — makes sense only if you think that everyone who says “no thanks” to organized religion is doing so for the same reasons. And that’s just not the case. Atheists shun religion because they don’t believe in the supernatural, regardless of whether that term is used to refer to gods, ghosts, karma or witchcraft. They point to human reason rather than divine revelation as the source for moral codes of conduct. On the other hand, most of the “nones” — whose ranks are growing much faster than atheists, according to Pew Research Center surveys and who account for the lion’s share of the religiously unaffiliated — are leaving organized religion for very different reasons. They tend to describe themselves as put off by what they see as institutional religion’s rote ritual, polarizing politics and disengagement from the needs of those who are economically marginalized in their communities.
So when Brooks argues that “secularism has to do for nonbelievers what religion does for believers — arouse the higher emotions, exalt the passions in pursuit of moral action,” he’s actually talking about the tiny fraction of nonbelievers in the religiously unaffiliated group whose numbers have sharply risen. More to the point, he’s also overlooking the fact that the “nones” are leaving organized religion precisely because, in their view, many religious institutions are no longer doing a good job of arousing those emotions or exalting that passion for moral action. In my reporting on service-oriented multifaith groups in Southern California, I’ve had a chance to see these trends playing out firsthand. “The Episcopal Church is dying,” Christian Kassoff, the founder and a co-leader of an experimental spiritual community called Thom’s, told me. “And I was screaming, ‘We need to change the church!’” Named after Thomas, the doubting disciple of Jesus, Thom’s radically reimagines what it means to be a church. For one, it has dismantled the traditional Sunday worship service. “We weren’t a choir,” said Kassoff. “We weren’t the Nicene Creed. We weren’t stale music or hymns with bad theology. We weren’t talk and not action. What we wanted was service first, worship second.” For the past three years, Kassoff and the other Thom’s members have poured that energy into the group’s monthly Laundry Love event, during which they gather at a laundromat in Huntington Beach to do laundry for the homeless and the working poor. As Kassoff put it, “For Thom’s, Laundry Love is church.”
And they are not alone. In the decade since its inception in Southern California, Laundry Love has become a nationwide movement and includes 100 participating laundromats. Many who leave theological confines do so because they feel they must seek those experiences elsewhere. This growing passion for service is apparent among many of the “nones” I’ve met recently. Some of them, like 30-year-old Abraham Booey, participate in multiple service groups in order to get an altruistic fix. “Once I got the ball rolling,” he said, “it’s kind of addicting.” Booey, who describes himself as “spiritual but not religious,” is a service junkie. He volunteers with Share-a-Meal and Monday Night Mission, organizations that help feed the homeless on Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles. Last year he organized Down but Not Out, a service-oriented Meetup group. “Obviously you’re doing it because you care,” he said of the motivation behind his volunteerism. “But you’re also doing it for selfish reasons. You kind of feel good about it, and when you step away from it, it’s hard to feel that way with something else.” This is exactly the kind of morally inflected emotional experience that Brooks apparently believes religiously unaffiliated young people will not easily find outside the doctrinal boundaries of organized religion. But as with Booey, many of them are leaving those theological confines because they feel they must seek those experiences elsewhere. According to a Pew survey published in September, more than 70 percent of American adults say that religion is losing its influence — and most of those surveyed believe that’s an ominous development. But the news of organized religion’s declining influence trades on the discredited idea that people who leave religious institutions become secular citizens who are no longer interested in any form of religious practice or experience — or in the expressions of compassion and altruism that most believers place at the heart of their faith.
In fact, over the past decade, as half of all adults have switched from one religious affiliation to another and 1 in 5 has left organized religion altogether, service-oriented groups have begun to flourish. “Helping other people in a way that’s effective is very affirming, a positive emotional experience,” said Matthew Lee, a professor of sociology at the University of Akron and co-author of “The Heart of Religion: Spiritual Empowerment, Benevolence and the Experience of God’s Love.” “This is pretty close to the purpose of life itself. If an organization is effective at getting people into that flow, it’s going to grow.” Multifaith and religiously unaffiliated service groups are arguably thriving because the ritual and social priorities of many religious institutions are driving away people such as Kassoff and Booey. This trend is apparent with Monday Night Mission, which over the past two years has grown from a handful of volunteers gathering on Mondays in downtown L.A. to a regular crew of roughly 300 spread across five nights a week. Meanwhile, membership in mainline Protestant and even evangelical congregations continues to decline. Brooks believes that the “nones” who are abandoning those pews are part of a “mass secularization” movement that is morally rudderless. He is wrong on both counts.
Nick Street is the senior writer with the Center for Religion and Civic Culture at the University of Southern California. His writing on religion, science, sexuality, media and culture has appeared in Religion Dispatches, Global Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, LA Weekly, the Jewish Journal and Patheos.
Here's an example... Leadership Education at Duke University has many thought-provoking articles, including this one by Nick Street, titled "Tell David Brooks the 'Nones' are Alright": by Nick Street @ShindoStreet
David Brooks’ Feb. 3 column in The New York Times, “Building better secularists,” begins with a sleight of hand. “Over the past few years,” he writes, “there has been a sharp rise in the number of people who are atheist, agnostic or without religious affiliation. A fifth of all adults and a third of the youngest adults fit into this category.” For starters, lumping atheists and secularists into the same category as agnostics and religious “nones” — those who don’t consider themselves atheist but still check “none of the above” on religious identification surveys — makes sense only if you think that everyone who says “no thanks” to organized religion is doing so for the same reasons. And that’s just not the case. Atheists shun religion because they don’t believe in the supernatural, regardless of whether that term is used to refer to gods, ghosts, karma or witchcraft. They point to human reason rather than divine revelation as the source for moral codes of conduct. On the other hand, most of the “nones” — whose ranks are growing much faster than atheists, according to Pew Research Center surveys and who account for the lion’s share of the religiously unaffiliated — are leaving organized religion for very different reasons. They tend to describe themselves as put off by what they see as institutional religion’s rote ritual, polarizing politics and disengagement from the needs of those who are economically marginalized in their communities.
So when Brooks argues that “secularism has to do for nonbelievers what religion does for believers — arouse the higher emotions, exalt the passions in pursuit of moral action,” he’s actually talking about the tiny fraction of nonbelievers in the religiously unaffiliated group whose numbers have sharply risen. More to the point, he’s also overlooking the fact that the “nones” are leaving organized religion precisely because, in their view, many religious institutions are no longer doing a good job of arousing those emotions or exalting that passion for moral action. In my reporting on service-oriented multifaith groups in Southern California, I’ve had a chance to see these trends playing out firsthand. “The Episcopal Church is dying,” Christian Kassoff, the founder and a co-leader of an experimental spiritual community called Thom’s, told me. “And I was screaming, ‘We need to change the church!’” Named after Thomas, the doubting disciple of Jesus, Thom’s radically reimagines what it means to be a church. For one, it has dismantled the traditional Sunday worship service. “We weren’t a choir,” said Kassoff. “We weren’t the Nicene Creed. We weren’t stale music or hymns with bad theology. We weren’t talk and not action. What we wanted was service first, worship second.” For the past three years, Kassoff and the other Thom’s members have poured that energy into the group’s monthly Laundry Love event, during which they gather at a laundromat in Huntington Beach to do laundry for the homeless and the working poor. As Kassoff put it, “For Thom’s, Laundry Love is church.”
And they are not alone. In the decade since its inception in Southern California, Laundry Love has become a nationwide movement and includes 100 participating laundromats. Many who leave theological confines do so because they feel they must seek those experiences elsewhere. This growing passion for service is apparent among many of the “nones” I’ve met recently. Some of them, like 30-year-old Abraham Booey, participate in multiple service groups in order to get an altruistic fix. “Once I got the ball rolling,” he said, “it’s kind of addicting.” Booey, who describes himself as “spiritual but not religious,” is a service junkie. He volunteers with Share-a-Meal and Monday Night Mission, organizations that help feed the homeless on Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles. Last year he organized Down but Not Out, a service-oriented Meetup group. “Obviously you’re doing it because you care,” he said of the motivation behind his volunteerism. “But you’re also doing it for selfish reasons. You kind of feel good about it, and when you step away from it, it’s hard to feel that way with something else.” This is exactly the kind of morally inflected emotional experience that Brooks apparently believes religiously unaffiliated young people will not easily find outside the doctrinal boundaries of organized religion. But as with Booey, many of them are leaving those theological confines because they feel they must seek those experiences elsewhere. According to a Pew survey published in September, more than 70 percent of American adults say that religion is losing its influence — and most of those surveyed believe that’s an ominous development. But the news of organized religion’s declining influence trades on the discredited idea that people who leave religious institutions become secular citizens who are no longer interested in any form of religious practice or experience — or in the expressions of compassion and altruism that most believers place at the heart of their faith.
In fact, over the past decade, as half of all adults have switched from one religious affiliation to another and 1 in 5 has left organized religion altogether, service-oriented groups have begun to flourish. “Helping other people in a way that’s effective is very affirming, a positive emotional experience,” said Matthew Lee, a professor of sociology at the University of Akron and co-author of “The Heart of Religion: Spiritual Empowerment, Benevolence and the Experience of God’s Love.” “This is pretty close to the purpose of life itself. If an organization is effective at getting people into that flow, it’s going to grow.” Multifaith and religiously unaffiliated service groups are arguably thriving because the ritual and social priorities of many religious institutions are driving away people such as Kassoff and Booey. This trend is apparent with Monday Night Mission, which over the past two years has grown from a handful of volunteers gathering on Mondays in downtown L.A. to a regular crew of roughly 300 spread across five nights a week. Meanwhile, membership in mainline Protestant and even evangelical congregations continues to decline. Brooks believes that the “nones” who are abandoning those pews are part of a “mass secularization” movement that is morally rudderless. He is wrong on both counts.
Nick Street is the senior writer with the Center for Religion and Civic Culture at the University of Southern California. His writing on religion, science, sexuality, media and culture has appeared in Religion Dispatches, Global Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, LA Weekly, the Jewish Journal and Patheos.
Thursday, February 5, 2015
So, I haven't posted on this blog in forever, but hopefully that will change, starting now.
99 days till sabbatical...
What will it be like to be away from my work routine for three months? In 2006 I went six months without work and it was awful--the most depressing time of my life. Granted, this will be a very different kind of experience, but still.
I would like this experience to teach me something about the spiritual connections post-modern people are making. What place does spirituality have in their lives? Does the idea of God speak into their world? Could something (someone) as old-school as Jesus have a place in a post-modern spiritual journey?
How will congregations like Shepherd of the Hills speak into the lives of today's young adults and "post-religious" people?
Let the conversation begin!
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