Meet GodTube.com 31 March, 2007
Posted by Zack in Web2.0Schmeb2.0.add a comment
I like big Bibles and I can not lie…
She’s quick to resist temptation,
And she loves a new translation…Baby Got Book!
Check out GodTube.com
655,000 26 March, 2007
Posted by Zack in Uncategorized.2 comments
A new layer of credibility (if you needed one) has been draped on the Johns Hopkins study of Iraqi deaths that concluded 655,000 have died because of the violence unleashed by the U.S./British invasion of Iraq.
655,000.
What causes American activists to pick out one or another world atrocity to rally for? The people of Darfur have activist groups at every University trying to save them. As they should! But the very highest estimate of the death toll in Darfur is 400,000.
Where is the movement to save Iraqis from the mess we’ve made of their country? It’s not the same as the movement to bring home the troops. That movement almost never—maybe, never?—speaks of America’s responsibility toward the Iraqi people. We’ve already squandered hundreds of billions of dollars on development aide mis-adminstered by Bush cronies. Well, we’ve just got to spend hundreds of billions more and this time make sure it actually goes into development and to Iraqis.
The American people would support such spending, if it was presented sincerely and powerfully. American politicians might not know that though.
I wonder if there isn’t some way, now that we have the Intarweb, to allow the Iraqi people to help make the point to us directly?
Tony Blair, funniest politician ever 18 March, 2007
Posted by Zack in Labour.3 comments
People outside Britain will need some background on the Catherine Tate Show.
Adventures in Google Books 18 March, 2007
Posted by Zack in Adventures in Google Books.1 comment so far
With Google Books, I can show you what I’m reading, you can get a taste, and click on the Amazon link if you want to buy it and read it yourself. (Now watch the Author’s Guild sue me for this.)
I’ve been reading Nelson Lichtenstein’s Walter Reuther: The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit. Reuther was one of the founders of the UAW and its first president. I found this fascinating…start at the bottom (or the top) of page 26…
Walter Reuther: The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit; pages 26-28
…In the depression, he and his brother and some of their friends slept in homeless shelters and in Hoovervilles. They had good-paying skilled jobs at Ford. They were seeking an understanding of what was going on around them, and had passion enough for that understanding that they stepped outside of their relatively comfortable lives.
Do we see that anywhere on the left these days? I don’t. Let me know if you do.
However, one place you do see that kind of passion these days is among the rising movement of “revolutionary evangelicals” I wrote about last week in In These Times. Compare Walter and Victor Reuther in 1932 to Christian author Shane Claiborne and his friends in 1998 as they slept on the streets of Phily:
Shane Claiborne’s Irresistible Revolution.
OK, here’s where this turns into an adventure. The publisher wants to prevent me from using Google books to spread the word about Shane Claiborne’s book. So they’ve made it impossible for me to link to the pages I want to show you. But you can find them if you get a little adventurous.
Just click on the link above and the search within the book for the phrase: “through the winter”. That will get you to page 47.
Then search for “comfort of our dorm” to get to page 48.
This has been what’s hopefully the first in an occasional series of ADVENTURES IN GOOGLE BOOKS!
Preaching Revolution 14 March, 2007
Posted by Zack in prophetic politics.8 comments
I’ve got an article in the magazine In These Times this week. (Buy it and support In These Times, which is a non-profit. The issue hits newsstands today and includes a great article by Barbara Ehrenrich too.)
The article is about a rising movement of “revolutionary” evangelical Christians. “Revolutionary” is not my word, it’s theirs. George Barna–the Stan Greenberg of the Christian Right, with clients like James Dobson and Billy Graham–estimates there are 20 million of these “Revolutionaries.” It’s a complicated topic, and I couldn’t do it justice in one short article–look for more posts here on this in the future.
You can read it online here.
This movement blows away a lot of the excuses the left makes for itself at the expense of American people. These preachers are filling churches with a challenge to sacrifice for the dream of making a better world (here on Earth). They’re asking people to change their lives in ways that go far beyond switching to florescent light-bulbs or voting–they’re asking people to turn their lives upside down in service of the poor and oppressed, and to overturn “systems of oppression”. Rather than running away, people are flocking to these churches and building incredibly powerful communities based on liberation.
The church I focus on in my article attracts 10,000 West Michigan suburbanites each Sunday. It meets in what used to be shopping mall. They’ve converted over the WHOLE MALL–with shops now serving as Sunday school classrooms and meeting spaces for events throughout the week.
You may need to flush some stereotypes about Bible-based Christian churches out of your mind in order to understand what these folks are up to. I’ve tried to capture something of what they’re about in the article, so please do check it out.
I got a lot of great comments from PastorDan over at Street Prophets when I sent him a copy yesterday. He pointed out that I used too broad a brush in describing “liberal churches” and that I should have talked more about small churches, where this revolution has been going on for quite some time. (I did follow one country church pastor in the article, but that got cut for space.) He also made me realize I should have drawn a sharper distinction between what’s going on at Mars Hill and other ‘revolutionary’ mega churches and the ‘seeker-sensitive’ churches that are more about putting on a nice show and less about sacrificing for one’s community.
(Also check out a post I wrote here last year about this movement.)
