Oh.

My.

That…

Was interesting.

Speakerguy, my friend I posted about last time, spoke on campus.

Things were going fine until a student during Q&A asked him what he thought about all the attention devoted to fighting gay marriage in American churches.

Oh dear.

More details after i catch a little rest.

photo from flickr by porkfork6

 

Visitation

This week a guest lecturer is coming to my campus to speak about Christian mission. I work at a small private Christian liberal arts college in the Northeast, and I think this guy plans on talking about things I’d expect the students around here to be into: social justice and serving the poor. I know this because the “speaker-guy” (as I used to call him) is a friend of mine. I rented a room from and hung out with him and his family years ago before I was married.

I’m a little anxious. He’s been speaking publicly in recent months about ideas he’s previously kept to himself. Stuff about biblical interpretation, judgment and eternal damnation, gay people. In fact it’s a lot of the things I hear discussed by emerging Christians (and the traditionalists who loathe their theology).

But maybe it won’t be so bad. The students (and faculty and staff) at my college are pretty good examples of people without a 100% buy-in to the comfortable cultural system that rationalizes the hoarding of wealth at the expense of others. A lot of the students coming through my classes plan post-graduation lives of service. It will take many of them a long, long time to pay off their college debts because they will be working for development organizations that don’t pay jack (at least in dollars).

All of this is central to my friend’s typical message. Other Christian colleges that have been canceling his speaking engagements, even asking him to leave early in one case, probably don’t have the commitment to radical service to the poor that Speakerguy calls for in his sermons and lectures.

I mean, I hope not anyway.

 

Emergent Terrorism

Ugh.

I’m coming late to this bit of online drama. Not sure how I missed it this summer, but the Christianity Today blog linked to an article by someone name Frank Pastore who thinks that the goals of emerging church and Al Qaeda are the same.

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Yes, really.

The emergent blogs jumped on this bit of horror-filled nonsense better than I ever could.

Steve Knight’s lack of “sputtering sarcasm.”
Mark VanSteenwyck is reminded of Anabaptism
Jordan Cooper calls it stupid, but gets some weird ananymous trolling in the comments.

There’s not much I can really even say about this. Even some emergent-unfriendly commenters condemn such lunacy (linked to by Steve above). But I do just want to say how sad and uncomfortable I felt reading some of the Christianity Today post comments. No one really defended Pastore. But a disturbing number of posters thought there was a grain of truth in his rant.

Ugh.

 

Today is January 8, 2008

OK, here’s the deal.

I started this blog September 11, 2007, but it was a personal exercise, private, hidden from public consumption. So I guess it was kind of fake blogging. But it was fun, and probably a bit therapeutic.

So now, as part of 2008’s “New Year Resolutions Surely to Cause Dave Trouble,” I’ve decided to switch the blog to hosting on WordPress.com, and post more consistently, hopefully as part of a more public conversation.

Unfortunately the whole enterprise was hosed in my attempt to switch over. So I’m left with a bunch of unformatted text files on my hard drive to manually enter into this new blog site, one post at a time. My plan of course is to just keep posting several a day until I get caught up, and then continue blogging from there, “in real time.”

After just a couple of days into this “plan,” a few people have already somehow discovered this blog and started reading it (hi guys!). I know this because I’ve received a couple comments and e-mails. So I figured I should post an explanation for why the newest posts are from last September!

The summary is that I’ll be adding a few posts a day from fall and winter until this new blog is caught up, so please bear with me while I finish posting the archive. Then I’ll continue with new posts in ’08.