jfurnal's Xanga

papal visit to durham?

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 10:11:15 GMT

Everyone has their fingers crossed hoping that Pope Benedict XVI will accept Tom Wright & Co.'s invite to visit Durham. You can read more about it at the Centre for Catholic Studies website.

the principalities and powers of healthcare

Sun, 11 Oct 2009 20:28:57 GMT

One of the surprising things to me about going through enrollment at Durham University was the Medical Registration. April went with me and she stopped one lady to ask what sort of paperwork would be required and how much it would cost for school insurance. The lady smiled and said, "Nothing dear. Just go through the line and sign up for it." My wife's mouth hit the floor and said, "You mean we don't have to write anything down about pre-existing conditions?" The lady didn't skip a beat, "That's right. It's free. This is health-care."

Bill Moyers recently interviewed a former health insurance executive for CIGNA named Wendell Potter. In this clip, Potter explains how a group of insurance companies got together and formed a strategy to circulate misinformation about Michael Moore's film Sicko and the health care issues that the film raises.

See full interview here

Being in the States this last summer, I was able to have many conversations about health care with my family members and friends. Most of the reasons that were given for being against health care that I heard people give me find their origin in this spinster strategy by the insurance companies.

What does one do when one hears from the horse's mouth that the anti-health care scare is only propaganda? Does that change anything? Or is the media still discredited by obtaining a "liberal bias"?

What does it say about America, that I, as an American, in order to get health care, have to become an immigrant?

is the evangelical sub-culture good for our society?

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 15:32:23 GMT

Francis Schaeffer's son says no!

New Study on Teen Pregnancy and Conservative Religion

Who are these conservative evangelicals?

They are people who suffer from:

• Read the Bible only in the original version – the NIV, of course! – as if there were a neutral and stable position from which this library of a book could be translated, as if translations weren’t themselves interpretations, and as if our interpretations of these interpretations didn’t go all the way down and resist closure – they do.

• Hold tenaciously to the quite unbiblical, relatively newfangled, and deeply problematical doctrine of biblical inerrancy.

• Act like the doctrine of penal substitution is in the Creeds, find nothing at all sub-Christian in the idea that God “punished” Jesus on the cross, and deploy this model of the atonement as the litmus test for distinguishing “real” Christians.

• Argue that the Levitical and Pauline condemnations of homosexuality conclusively settle the contemporary discussion of same-sex relationships, insisting, however, that “while we hate the sin, we love the sinner.” (Gay/Lesbian Christians: “Yeah, right!”)

• Worship with “choruses” that are four lines long, a half-inch deep, and take 20 minutes to sing.

• Punctuate their prayers with the word “just” (“Father, we just pray this, and Father, we just pray that”) with mind-numbing repetition, and assume that the more people you have praying about something, the more likely you are to get a result.

• Despise Richard Dawkins while actually believing in the kind of God he rightly rejects, as if the existence of God were, in principle, demonstrable, as if the proposition “God exists” were a hypothesis to be affirmed or denied, as if God were simply the hugest of individuals.

• Treat the visions in the book of Revelation as if they were the prognostications of a Nostradamus rather than imaginative murals of encouragement for confessing churches and protest against militant empires.

• Believe, sometimes with quite unpleasant schadenfreude, that hell will be full rather than empty – and that they have access to the Inferno’s census.

• Are fans rather than followers of Jesus when it comes to his absolute rejection of violence; for example, they will kill other people if the state tells them to.

- Taken from Divine Flu

Jacqueline du Pre': bringing to life the work and vision of another

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 15:03:16 GMT

"[Jesus] is performing God's love, God's purpose, without a break, without a false note, without a stumble; yet he is never other than himself, with all that makes him distinctly human taken up with this creative work. If we look at great musicians, we see both the intensity of the struggle and the strength of the joy that goes with it. Whatever is happening, these performers are not becoming less human, less distinctive. In the fullness of their skill and their joy, another is made present. So with Jesus; this is a human life and a human will whose power and joy is the performance of who God is and what God wants, the performance of the Word of God. When the early Christians insisted that we could not imagine sin in Jesus, they were not saying something negative but something positive; there is nothing in this performance that blocks out the composer. And when they insisted that there was no 'gap' in Jesus' humanity where God fitted in, they were insisting that this was the performance of one work only--the humanity of the performer is most full and real in the performance."

- Rowan Williams, Tokens of Trust: An Introduction to Christian Belief, p. 74-75.

ted haggard: evangelical saint

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 17:19:24 GMT

There has been a lot of hub-bub since last month’s news about the Episcopal church and their appointing openly gay bishops (see here and here). Many people have taken sides on “the issue” each tugging at the Bible in support of their own opinion. As long as it remains in the abstract as “an issue” it is easy to either promote or dismiss; especially from the pulpit.

The old adage still rings true, “what the preacher harps on the most, he struggles with most.” It wasn’t until the other night that I began to see the underbelly of coming down hard on “the issues”, or as some preachers like to frame it up as, “preaching the whole counsel of God.” The other night, I watched on HBO a documentary called “The Trials of Ted Haggard.” This was a short but potent film about the following 18 months after his scandal. The camera follows Ted and his family around in a U-Haul as they struggle to earn a living after being exiled from the state of Colorado, not by the state government, but rather by the mega-church he preached at. The documentary quoted a church elder wishing that Haggard “would just disappear.”

Last January, Oprah brought both Ted and his family on her show to show her audience “where are they now”:

For the whole show go here

Now Haggard sells health insurance and is banned from the ministry. Rightfully so, some might say. If your pastor was doing drugs and was employing a male prostitute, then you’d most likely not want him leading your congregation. But while watching this documentary, it dawned on me that Ted’s Church was only following through with the anti-gay protocol that they had received from the pulpit. They were practicing what he was preaching—and made him disappear. But what was astonishing was that his family didn’t bail on him. The faithful witness to Christ that Ted’s wife gives me hope about the Church.

In the Oprah clip, Ted mentions that he had believed the wrong “ideal” about himself which he couldn’t work out. I wonder how much the Church must take responsibility for this man’s fall from grace because they enabled a situation where Haggard could not be redeemed or find a way out. He was on a pedestal receiving pastor-worship which only pushed him farther away from being able to come to grips with his problems. Since he was a pastor, he was sacred, not like us humans. So when he revealed that he wasn’t sacred, it was a shock and this forced people to gather around him as a sacrifice to be offered in the name of the holy one. He had to be thrown outside the gates, left to fend for himself.

After watching this, I asked myself, what is the Church for? Does the Church exist in the world in order to maintain the moral high ground for a small circle of humanity which is made up of popes, priests, and pastors? If so, what about everybody else? It seems like in situations like these, that people get thrown under the bus in the name of ‘coming down hard on’ what they think is sin. This only pushes people out of the church and into the crumbling health insurance business.

I think Jesus said something about pointing out splinters in other people’s eyes while ignoring the large plank in our own eye. The Church must come to grips with two things: 1) that theology matters; it does, people act and make decisions on how they perceive who God is in Jesus Christ. 2) the Gospel is not ammo for the Church to fire at this hell-bent world, but it is in fact the Church’s worst enemy. So whether that puts you on one side of an issue, or the other, that will continue to be debated. But it brought up questions for me about how well Evangelicals can handle their own medicine when they condemn others. It’s one thing to say all you want about “the issue” but when it comes to one of your own people, how Christ-like are your reactions?

xanga: the sinking ship

Mon, 24 Aug 2009 20:10:39 GMT

I think there are about 5 people that still use xanga. At least, there are about five that continue to come up in my subscriptions. Rumour has it that xanga will be shutting down. Who knows if this is true or not?

For those of you who still read this blog, for about two years now, I've been posting the same material over at:

www.joshfurnal.com

If you'd like to continue to follow this blog, go ahead and update your RSS feeds and bookmarks for my other site.

For the time being, until xanga sinks, I will continue to post on both sites.

heading to wobegon country

Mon, 10 Aug 2009 01:34:35 GMT

Tomorrow, April & I are headed up north for a 16 hour drive to visit my dad and Katie. We won't brave the trip in one day, but I will be away from the blog for awhile. In the meantime, here are some articles worth reading:

Bill Cavanaugh on the economic faithfulness of the Church (audio)

advice for writers

book review of Letty Russell's Just Hospitality [someone could buy me this as a gift... hint hint]

N.T. Wright project

Rowan Williams and the Anglican Controversy

Sex in Public - Debra Dean Murphy

Reading for Ministry

book review, In the Beginning was the Meal [someone could buy me this as a gift as well]

the world is a stage...

Sat, 08 Aug 2009 17:13:21 GMT

Last night, April & I went to see Wicked the musical. It has been in Tulsa for the summer and April has been waiting to see it for a very long time. I found the production to be very good. The sets were intricate, the costumes elaborate, and the voices were impressive.

However, what I thought was seriously lacking was the writing. The lyrics were lame as well as the story. The musical is based on the book, which I haven't read. So I don't know if the bad writing is transposed by the musical or if the source of it all is the book.

The overall success of this musical for me was because it piggy-backs on a larger, better story. The musical was a kind of parallel story of the original to which it tips it's hat at different places in the story. And it is this that keeps people coming in droves. Including myself and my beautiful wife.

Continuing on the same 'theatre' theme, we've also seen a movie recently called, Synedoche, New York. For those of you who liked the movie Adaptation, this is the same sort of whackyness. I hate to tell very much about this film, but it is definitely worth picking up and seeing!

still alive...

Fri, 07 Aug 2009 17:38:27 GMT

It's been about a month since I've posted on this blog. I haven't been writing in my journal at all either.

This means that either my life is just too busy or boring.

In the meantime, check out the latest blurb about bob dylan doin' a xmas album!

getting back into the swing of things...

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 17:55:41 GMT

I'm just now getting back into the swing of things with email, facebook, and blog readers...

Here are a few things worth looking at:

5 Books to pick up on Paul and Biblical Interpretation

Ben Myers on Blogging as Theological Discourse

Review of Cross-Shattered Church

BBC Interview about St. Paul with John Barclay and others

Some books on Romans to pick up

Eugene Peterson Audio

Are the Elderly worth anything?!

How are we to understand 'Mission'?

Jesus Loves You: How NOT to do evangelism

Sermons by Greg Boyd

10 Good books to pick up