The lists are coming … the lists are coming!  I hope to have a top 10 albums of 2007 if I get around to it but this is a very random best-of list of stuff I did this year I would recommend to anyone interested in any of this stuff!  Note, most of it has nothing to do with 2007 other than they are things I consumed for the first time at some point this year.

• Best Album: Radiohead - In Rainbows (Band of Horses is sooo close to No. 1 right now for me though)
• Best Non-Fiction:  H. Richard Niebuhr - The Social Sources of Denominationalism
• Best TV Series:  Heroes and The Office
  
• Best Fiction: Nikos Kasantzakis - The Last Temptation of Christ
• Best Kids’ Music: Dane Zanes and Friends
• Best Movie: Smokin’ Aces
• Best Sign of the Apocalypse: Tie: All Things Britney Spears and Friends & Cheating in Sports
  
• Best Come Back of the Year: Big Ben Roethlisberger of the Steelers (Yes I am totally biased here)

So what did you consume this year either intentionally or unintentionally (I say the latter because often such a sign of the apocalypse is unintended but unavoidable)?

Not tagging anyone in particular here, but if you care, please spread the virus with me

This is a new kind of post that I am going to start now and do more frequently since I was able to install a cool plugin to add audio files to my posts! I am a music addict, as well as a musician, and so music is part of my life not unlike John Cusak’s character in High Fidelity who organizes his massive music catalog by events in his life.

A few weeks ago I posted a comment on an article over at Julie Unplugged and I included lyrics to a song that I thought defined my religious journey as I entered into my last year of seminary following my decision not to take a call to the pastorate. I had passed my ords, and had passed the trials at my Presbytery, but my calling felt a bit funny at the time. I ended up in higher education and have been there ever since.

I remember my wife and I had been attending a planted church outside of Philadelphia which at first was a very enriching experience. The church used a rented space and had the feel of a “house church”. Soon after they entered into their new building, a beautiful but humble structure, the session signed an agreement that the church supported the Confessing Church movement in the Presbyterian Church (USA). The crux of this movement has to do with the ordination of gays and lesbians, but cloaks this language in the language of chastity. You cannot be ordained if you have sex outside of marriage willingly. If you are a homosexual you cannot be married as recognized by the church.

Now there are more elements to this that have to do with a strict adherence to different forms of orthodoxy, but sex is the primary issue that gave the movement life. My wife over at identitymixed has more details related to her personal involvement with the movement as well as a link to the PCUSA site of an article that has to do with one of the founders - her former pastor.

When this happened (you have to read her article for a deeper understanding) red flags began to go up about the church. Now my wife and I are never silent about things with which we disagree and we were very vocal about our refusal to support the church’s decision on the matter. We also found ourselves doctrinally more and more at odds with the pastor and especially his wife who was a “spiritual counselor” with the church. Our last moment with the church was at a barbecue. These are supposed to be fun and welcoming events to share and have fellowship. We sat at a table with her youngest brother who was living with us at the time (another long story) and despite our best attempts to say hello to people and be involved, we sat there alone. We ate dinner and left never feeling a part of that congregation - like an uninvited dinner guest.

We stopped going to church at that very moment and really did not go back until we moved back to Pennsylvania last year. The church we are going to now is far more open minded, missional, and energized after experience years of dysfunction and social ill. We have never felt out of place and have been welcomed and called upon to participate in the ministry - something that really did not happen before.

But in that four year or so period of spending our Sundays getting closer to God by going on hikes with the dogs or seeing friends and going into the city where we found true fellowship, we stopped going to church and had absolutely no urge to go back. That moment at the last church to which we went is what the song I include in this post means.

The song is called Run by King’s X from their album Ear Candy (1996). They are about the most unknown and underrated hard rock band at least since the mid-1980’s and I would argue much sooner than that. Putting them in the same breath as Deep Purple or Mountain along these lines is not a stretch.


Run (1996)
by King’s X
Yeah she told me, that if I wasn’t good
He would get me, make me pay for
everything I did, and she said
that everybody bad would burn in Hell
I did what she told me and I became
someone else.
I had to run
I had to hide
In the world outside
A better chance, out there
If God is everywhere.
I wait for nothing, take my chances let it ride
maybe there’s an answer but it’s buried by the lies
Somebody told me that it’s just a waste of my time.
But I can’t get rid of all those bags I left behind
I had to run
I had to hide
In the world outside
A better chance, out there
If God is everywhere.

Tom Cruise bought the rights to Charlie Brown specials including the Christmas special which is about the only Christmas special that gets it right. Here is Jimmy Kimmel’s interpretation on the subject and a possible new version of the climactic moment of the special during Linus’ famous monologue.

Give each other the gift of time this holiday.

• The time with each other.
• Time with the kids.
• Time to reflect on where you have been.
• Time to reflect on where you are going.
• Time to meditate on what you have and what you can give.
• Time to purge the anxieties of this fast world.
• Time to meditate on the meaning of a God who comes as a child to save humanity.
• Time to reflect on what you will do this year to respond to such an act of radical grace.

The one who is timeless came into time in order to redeem time and all that lives within it. This year how will you find redemption in the time within which you live? How will you find a taste of eternity in the midst of the pressures of time and space? How will you live within a grace so omnipotent that it will limit power in order to redeem time and space and everything that lives within it?

How will we respond to the event of the Christ child this season and sustain that response in critical reflection through Easter Sunday?

Interesting report from the BBC on a shrinking conservative/fundamentalist Kansas church. It was once in a large building at the center of town and is now on the outskirts in a Best Western Hotel. This example certainly counters rhetoric that inclusive/liberal churches are inevitably dying out.

You would expect the Rev Fox in God-fearing Kansas, to be preaching in a mega-church, an establishment big enough to cope with the crowds.

And until recently he was: the Immanuel Baptist Church near the centre of town was his.

It was easily spotted because of the huge, tubular, white cross, 100ft (30 metres) high and heated from the inside so that it does not freeze and topple over.

But the Rev Fox’s cross is all that is left of his ministry at the old place.

He tells me it was time to move on but most locals think he was thrown out for being too dogmatic, too extreme, even in Wichita.

It will be interesting to see data on situations like this to see if there is indeed a trend.

Only in Texas?

Earlier, I had posted on an initiative in Texas Higher Education for a master’s degree in science that would have a focus on intelligent design or creationism. It appears that they are one step closer to approving it even though it may encounter problems with accreditation from the Southern States.

A Texas higher education panel has recommended allowing a Bible-based group called the Institute for Creation Research to offer online master’s degrees in science education.

The action comes weeks after the Texas Education Agency’s director of science, Christine Castillo Comer, lost her job after superiors accused her of displaying bias against creationism and failing to be “neutral” over the teaching of evolution.

The state’s commissioner of higher education, Raymund A. Paredes, said late Monday that he was aware of the institute’s opposition to evolution but was withholding judgment until the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board meets Jan. 24 to rule on the recommendation, made last Friday, by the board’s certification advisory council.

Henry Morris III, the chief executive of the Institute for Creation Research, said Tuesday that the proposed curriculum, taught in California, used faculty and textbooks “from all the top schools” along with, he said, the “value added” of challenges to standard teachings of evolution.

Find the article posted on the Pew Forum here.

Opinion

Also from Pew is a nice op-ed from the Washington Post here.

I have little knowledge of, or interest in, the science behind this debate. Can gradual evolutionary changes account for the complex structures of cells and the eye? Why is the fossil record so weak when it comes to major mutations? I have no idea. There are unsolved mysteries in Darwinian evolution. There is also no credible scientific alternative.

But whatever the scientific objections, it is the theological objections to evolution that are weakest. Critics seem to argue that the laws of nature are somehow less miraculous than their divine suspension. But the elegant formulas of physics, and the complex mechanisms of evolution, strike me as an equal tribute to the Creator.

…But you can’t take the Trenton stray out of the dog.

The picture that you see in my little logo is a little picture of our first adopted dog Stella, a Rhodesian Ridgeback/German Shepherd mix, yawning during a long exposure. No effects there, all over-exposure action… Some neat photos happen by accident. I include a couple others of her here. We adopted Stella while we were living in Plainsboro, NJ near Princeton. It was a typical rainy Saturday and the turtle needed a heat lamp. We saw the ears you see to the left, and came home with Stella who was pretty much a wild animal at the time. And she still is sometimes - not in the violent sense, but in the sense of forgetting that she has a pack here at home…

Anywho… After my puking adventure with the kiddos and my dreams of red wine induced bliss, I followed the routine of feeding the dogs and my wife Brenna let them out. Now Sophie, our adopted Rhodesian Ridgeback purebred, sticks by you like your own Olsen twin. Stella, who has been with us about 4 1/2 years longer, likes to wander. She has always come back after we cut through her elective ignorance and magical hearing problem that strikes when she begins to sniff like she is looking for a bomb or drugs amidst the rabbit droppings. Tonight she decided to see what bunnies she could find beyond the back yard.

There is enough snow on the ground that we were able to track her pretty well. her wandering paw prints. Nope, not chasing, just meandering off our property into an adjacent truck sales lot way off to the back corner of our lot. I followed her tracks for about 20 minutes through all of the sleeping big rigs while my wife tracked via car shaking the food dish.

Evan, of course, woke up twice and Alex twice during the process so I decided to hang back at home and wait. Forty-five minutes after the search began Stella sauntered back in the house from the back door and darted upstairs all ready for bed as if nothing had just transpired. She was not muddy and did not smell which was a bonus. Good for her. Not so much for us. Dog run goes up tomorrow in lieu of a fence. We will find a way to trap Trenton stray in our backyard…

PS. I don’t think we ever did get that heat lamp that day we brought Stella home .