Bloggy Linky Goodness
OK, my week had eight days in it this week. But it’s a holiday, so you won’t notice anyways and we’ll just keep it to ourselves, k? BTW, can anyone tell me if hyper-dramatic 6 year old girls ever work the histrionics out of their system. Or is this just our ramp up for her teen years? Cuz if she keeps this up, her bedroom door might end up as damaged as mine is from all the slamming. Although maybe that would help – I haven’t slammed my bedroom door in ages because it’s completely borked now. The doors in this house just weren’t built to stand up to a woman with a difficult marriage and 5 or 6 kids. IJS
So moving on . . . it’s Bloggy Linky Goodness! I know you’re all so excited. And really impressed with my semi-consistancy with getting this up 6 whole times now. This is amazing stuff from the woman who forms tendencies the way other people form habits. Well, I do have one habit – I read everyfreakingthing. Which is good for you because now I can tell you which things out of everyfreakingthing are most worth reading. Here goes:
No Room for Prophets: When Your Church Rejects Your Spiritual Gift Dan at Cerulean Sanctum has a post which is much better than the title indicates. In it he calls the church to stop dealing with people from a place of fear, control and vanity. We are the body and the various gifts we have been given are to be used by the body. Be happy about it! In the comments, Dan also linked to an old post of his which I highly recommend you read. It’s called The Loss of Imagination. In fact if you feel you must pick between the two, pick The Loss of Imagination.
Why You Should No Longer Care About Being Normal As someone who spent most of my life laboring under the delusion that I was the apex of normality, I quite enjoyed this list of reasons being normal isn’t all it’s cracked up to be anyways. From The Purpose Fairy.
Is Christianity a Tribalistic Religion? Sort of Looks That Way Peter Enns takes a look at our human tendency to behave tribally and asks if we Christians have adopted that way of being. In particular he looks at the way Christians exclude those they disagree with: “We exclude others to control them. We control because we are afraid.” I left a couple of comments on this one that you may want to check out while you’re there.
For Whom The Bell Tolls This is for my eggheady friends. Maybe some of y’all can tell me if there’s anything to this. This essay explains how the long running noetic studies program at Princeton is using a network of Random Number Generators to detect connections between mind and matter. It includes stories of two very strange events which occurred on the first anniversary of 9/11 that I hadn’t heard before.
Life Experience and Women in Ministry Scot McKnight shares this from J. Dwayne Howell about women in ministry. He manages to simultaneously explain why we need women in ministry and how absurd our supposed attempts to keep them out have been. It’s more than just another variation on the theme, imo.
How (Not) to Correct Another Christian Reading through this excellent list by Frank Viola, I was struck by the idea that applying this advice to our marriages would probably be both excellent and the hardest thing ever. For a while anyways. Because that’s how good, hard things generally work – they’re really, really hard for a while and then they’re just not.
Being Consumed (4) Patrick Mitchel at Faith in Ireland has been blogging through the book Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire by William Caveaaugh. The issue of money, consumption, justice and Christian morality is both extraordinarily important and difficult. And not simply because it might involve things we don’t want to hear. Even trying to understand the issues at play is an “examining the matrix” sort of thing. This post in the series is particularly good. And I now know about an amazing Spanish company – Mondragon – started by a priest that has had success with a totally different corporate model.
Finally, another for my eggheady friends: Welcome to Dystopia! Entering a Long-Term and Politically Dangerous Food Crisis This is an analysis created for long-term investors laying out the serious problems we are facing in feeding world populations. Believe it or not, it’s a clear-headed analysis that gives morality a place at the table. One of the things which is pretty clear from reading this is that we here in North America have a choice: we can weather the coming storm without too much pain or having to make too many changes for a long time simply by depending on the resources we have been blessed with. But if we do that, much of the rest of humanity will literally starve to death. If we don’t start thinking and acting on this now, by the time the rest of the world is failing and starving to death it will be too late to do much to help them. So, what are we going to do? I wish our leaders were willing to talk about these problems and begin a discussion of the moral questions involved. However, we have an electorate that is so infantile in every way that I doubt the conversation would get very far before one side started trying to get us to chip in for condoms and the other burst into chants of USA-USA-USA. So I’m making serious plans to put in a large organic garden next year. Do what you can right?
And that’s it for this week. As always, if you are a blogger with something you’d like considered for inclusion in next week’s Bloggy Linky Goodness, email me at ratrotter73@yahoo.com or use the “contact” form (it’s on the “About” menu). You may have noticed a couple of “reworked from the archives” posts in the last week. Readership on the blog has grown enormously since the beginning of the year, so I’m pulling out a few of the best things from the past for those who weren’t here when they went up the first time. But don’t worry – I’m busy thinking big thoughts. New posts are a’comin’.
Pass It On!
#politics #christianity #smart #creativity #biblestudy #foodcrisis #spirituality #noetics #religion