No Chains on Me…

Got started on this documentary called The Century of Self. Some really interesting stuff on Freud and how he and those close to him in the psychoanalysis have created the consumerist, want-driven, selfish society we have today. Interesting this come up now as the topics in my Personal Finance class have been really focused on this topic of late. Its really well done even if the video quality is really not the best. It’s yet another fantastic film by Adam Curtis, also the creator of The Power of Nightmares and The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom? Also a warning, its a pretty long series so you’ll need ample time to watch, but I’m a big believer in self-education. Enjoy!

Courtesy of FreeDocumentaries.org

EPISODE 1: HAPPINESS MACHINES

EPISODE 2: THE ENGINEERING OF CONSENT

EPISODE 3: THERE IS A POLICEMAN INSIDE ALL OUR HEADS: HE MUST BE DESTROYED

EPISODE 4: EIGHT PEOPLE SIPPING WINE IN KETTERING

Just in case anyone else was wondering, my disconnection from Facebook has not been prompted by any of you I decided to drop it after several years of going back and forth about whether or not it was something I really needed/wanted. I think its been a drag on little bits and corners of time that I have many other ways that I should be spending in far more beneficial ways. Moreover, I told myself a long time ago I wanted to trash it after graduating, since, no judgement offered on anyone who has it now, it seemed (to me) like a very highschool/college student kinda fad. And as mature as I am (*cough*) I decided I didn’t want it around afterwards. And why not start now? So I ditched it for all those reasons, and I tried to do it quickly to avoid wrestling with it in my head more than would be good for me.

And let me tell you its been a huge relief. Its cleared up a lot more time than I would have thought! Its been weird not having my trusty old friend facebook along each day so far, and its been an adjustment to try to place the time once invested there in something worthwhile. But it feels really good to know its gone. I dunno why exactly, but I’m happy to now have time to actually be forced to use my time at least a little more wisely. Maybe, maybe you can expect to see me more on here now though… I might not count on it though

So long live Facebookers, just without me. Peace all!

This is the article that made me want to teach. I’ve mentioned it before, but I don’t ever think I posted it here. Just found it again today.

Looking for a Light Switch: Scenes from an Urban Classroom

Forgotten to do this for a while.

Since Finals week started, here’s been my listening trends:

Great historical definition and look at anarchy as well as a dialog on American politics. Read the whole article. Please. Even though I quote what I think is the best of it here, there is much more Van Dyke says that is really solid, especially the last two paragraphs.

[...] the belief that Christianity and Enlightenment institutions are reconcilable has been essential to maintaining a rough degree of political consensus in America over the last two hundred years. Americans may disagree about how political institutions should be managed, but we do not use our faith perspectives to question their basic legitimacy. And this is just how the founders wanted it. They hoped to create a system that would be durable because of its ability to accommodate differences in opinion. However, this flexibility was also meant to keep those differences of opinion from escalating into conflicts that challenged the basic framework itself. The potential for matters of religion to become overheated made it especially necessary for spiritual issues to be privatized and subsumed under the overall governing principles that had been derived from the Enlightenment and concretized in America’s institutions. In other words, religious dissenters, though protected by the Enlightenment notion of tolerance, would be overreaching if they worked to undermine the dominant institutions that secured their “spiritual freedom,” even if their private spiritual opinions led them to question the fundamental structures. And so, American Christians on both the Right and the Left have generally supported the implicit limit to their political activities that is inscribed into the dominant systems, and they have tended to work toward a more righteous use of the ruling systems instead of questioning the systems themselves. [Emphasis mine]

[...]

To clarify, people who have aligned themselves with the anarchist critique have historically arrayed themselves against the militarized state, capitalist means of production, organized religion, and the legal structures that uphold these entities. Anarchists have opposed these systems and institutions because, according to anarchists, each takes advantage (for their own benefit) of basic existential anxieties that are shared by all people; these systems exercise a determinative role in shaping of society, and individuals are pressured in all sorts of ways to implicitly accept that these systems provide the only means of organizing and securing their social existence. However, the anarchist critique contends that individuals have the means to organize themselves apart from such institutions, and that it is not necessary to relinquish basic liberties and social potentialities that the state, private property, and organized religion foreclose. [Emphasis mine] Furthermore, anarchism calls for a politics (or method of organizing society) that does not depend on the ultimate use of violence or propaganda. It is based on the belief that people can cooperate socially apart from coercion, and it also suggests that individuals find identities that contain the greatest amount of meaning and purpose only within the freely organized social body.

[...]

On the Right, there seems to be a withdrawal into a type of Christian nationalism that verges on paganism and that deploys words like freedomin ways that have nothing to do with Locke and Rousseau. I am using the word paganism here to refer to this basic reversion to pre-Enlightenment impulses as well as to Slavoj Žižek’s description of paganism, in his bookThe Fragile Absolute, as an allegiance to an “ethnic” group (or “community of the same”) that puts the imperatives of the group above the universalizing command to love one’s neighbor.¹

On the other hand, the Left’s general secularism has cut it off from one of the primary rejuvenating forces in American politics, the Christian nationalistic viewpoint that America has an essential and divine role to play in the world. Its absolute severing of this relationship between religion and politics has caused it to retreat into solipsistic theorizing that is often very interesting but that doesn’t offer much in terms of practical day-to-day politics.

[...]

To give just one example of this natural alignment, both Christians and anarchists believe that ultimate authority is not to be found in any human system and that human organizations have a Babel-like tendency to become anxiously invested in their own perpetuation and to react violently toward those who threaten them. Therefore, both Christians and anarchists should never foreclose the possibility of fundamentally changing those systems if they threaten important values. From a Christian perspective, systems based on greed and fear are faithless; from the anarchist perspective, such systems are inegalitarian and a threat to individual liberties. A Christian anarchism that combines the two perspectives would thus act politically in ways that would resist and undermine systems of control based on anxiety, greed, and fear rather than on faith, hope, and love.

[...]

Furthermore, a Christian embrace of anarchy would require a re-emphasis on the practical and communal nature of faith—on how it is an all-encompassing orientation toward the kingdom of God that never uses evil means to produce righteousness, an orientation that has no ultimate concern for self-perpetuation. [yes yes yes!!] [Emphasis mine]

[...]

And finally, in order to break the fateful compromise that has hindered Christians from judging their governing systems too harshly, there needs to be a repudiation of the duality between private goodness and publicfunction. American Christians will need to realize there are no separate systems of morality for private and institutional life—at least of the type that enable institutions, governmental powers, or bureaucracies to deny moral culpability for actions that private individuals could never get away with. The claims for such discrepancies are based on moral obfuscation and bad theology. The Bible might at times seem like it is giving rulers the right to kill, steal, and destroy on the public’s behalf, but the greater weight of scripture tells us that leaders will, if anything, be held to an even higher moral standard because of the responsibility they have for society as a whole.

[...]

Ideally, it might open things up to a whole new political imagination derived from the insight of that old Catholic anarchist, Kenneth Rexroth, who often liked to say that the present American society would crumble immediately if the tenets of the Sermon of the Mount were suddenly put into practice on a wide scale.² I don’t know whether that is true, but it might be worthwhile to consider what it would mean if it were true, since it was, well, Jesus who gave the message.

[From The Other Journal at Mars Hill Graduate School :: Anarchist Imperatives and Fundamental Change by Michael Van Dyke]

I’d forgotten just how good Mars Hill’s The Other Journal can be.

I’m an incredibly prideful person. Most of the time I don’t even realize it. I get humbled in unique ways, ways that highlight my pride even more. And its usually in the light of incredible grace, which shows me just how prideful and sinful I can be.

My girlfriend, Katie, likes to run in the mornings. I do to… when its with her But it also so happens that I pretty much fail at remembering to set good alarms the night before. I missed once, and felt horrible for doing so. I told myself I’d never do it again, always try to be early to things, set better alarms, etc. So then I forget again yesterday morning and wake up almost an hour after I was supposed to meet her. Yikes… so now I feel even worse, and its the second time it happened, AND I am going to be seeing her for church in but a few minutes. Mmm… so I know I’m going to have to try to practice meekness and humility because I screwed up again. Something I don’t get a lot of practice with.

Its the worst to mess up in front of people you know you want to make a good impression on. Which girlfriends usually are…

So I walk up to campus, feeling really badly. Get the van, get ready to pick people up for church. And then she comes in and acts like I didn’t leave her out in the cold, tells me its alright, checks to make sure I’m okay, of all things, and then moves right past my failing, as if she meant what she said when she said it was okay… Who does that? And I spent most of the rest of the morning, wondering how she could do that. I was a lot harder on myself than she was, and she was the one who had every right to.

A few of thoughts come out of this.

1) Only, what, two weeks of dating this young woman? and I’m finding she’s one of the most gracious and loving people I have ever met. In these two instances, she’s shown me a lot of grace, in the purest sense of that word. She’s let go several opportunities she could have been really angry with me over, and rightly so. As I have been told by several people who know her better than I, this is a quality woman of God.

2) I feel a lot worse at failing her than I often do when I fail God. God has had to show me infinitely more grace because of that. She has been a very tangible and somewhat painful but much needed reminder of Him lately, for which I can only give Him praise both for his grace towards me, and for Katie and her grace towards me.

3) My pride is a lot bigger than I thought. I had a harder time letting go of my failings than she did, and I know even that was because of my pride. I don’t like being humbled, and somehow its even easier to make myself feel bad for doing something wrong, rather than accepting the forgiveness given.

Relationships, I find, are some of the most wonderful things, not necessarily because of the emotional highs they can bring or the great people you can get to know, but simply because of how much God can do to humble you before another person. Its easy to cruise along in life, feeling like you’re doing fine, even like you are serving God well and wholeheartedly. You can even fake perfection around close friends, giving off the appearance of “having it together.” But somehow, when you run up against someone whom you are spending specific, intentional time to get to know for the purpose of considering and building a long-term relationship, God seems to do some unique things to make you humble before them and Him, and to make you realize how far you are from where you thought you were. I have such a long way to go…

Praise God for His grace and patience with me. And thank God for Katie, who has been His messenger of that same grace and patience.

This is great, from my brother in peace, Kev Cole. I’ve heard multiple times this week already that it is shallow to claim to be pro-life, and only be thinking of abortion. You cannot be pro-life and be pro-death penalty and pro-war. All you are in that case is anti-abortion, or, as I heard it put, pro-birth. Which is fine, but you should not say you’re pro-life if you choose to not care about the same kids you worked so hard to have the chance to be born. Hopefully without sounding too evil, it would be better to have children aborted than have them grow up in a living hell, where the body of Christ cares nothing for them and the quality of their lives after birth. Don’t get me wrong. I still think abortion is a horrible wrong. But when contrasted with the alternative, I know which I’d rather take issue with. And now, a word from Kevin:

Many Pro-lifers love arguments based on intuition: show someone a photo of a fetus (always a fetus, never a blastocyst), and they’re supposed to intuitively feel that this is a person worth saving. So too with their photos of an aborted fetus, proffered in the hopes that America will legislate based on that which we find icky. Here’s my own emotional plea:

This is a zygote. It costs Americans ~$300 to kill a zygote.	This is an Iraqi girl. It costs Americans ~$1.5million to kill an Iraqi girl.

Which is more valuable, the zygote or the Iraqi? Which has more dignity? If you had to kill one, which would it be and why? How many deaths of one justify the loss of the other?

The intuitive argument is thus: can you really honestly look the little Iraqi girl in the eyes and tell her she is worth no more than a diploid cell? That “what it means to be human” is simply to have a genome?

Some (many?) of you now undoubtedly think I’ve “crossed the line.” So think carefully: what is that line, precisely? And why have I transgressed? And do your answers to those questions give clues to what’s wrong with the abortion debate and what to do about it?

[From Intuitive Abortion Arguments]

The city my heart breaks for. An e-mail from Ryan. Most of these people you don’t know and haven’t met. Pray anyways.

I just got a call from Elizabeth Flow (9:20 pm Sunday night). She went to All Nations tonight to go to CAS and when she got there she found that brother Harper had found Clayton (a guy who hangs out in the alleys behind the church building [not Clayton Grubb]) in a state of shock. He had stumbled his way out of the alleyways after being mugged. Elizabeth described having seen his head being quite bloody. He didn’t have a shirt on and he was kind of just frozen in shock kneeling in the middle of the All Nations parking lot. Brother Harper called it in and the police and ambulance arrived to help. The All Nations crew left to go to CAS and upon their arrival back to church they found the whole parking lot and surrounding-ish area taped off as a police investigation zone. Apparently Clayton had two collapsed lungs, and they’re not expecting him to make it so they’ve been investigating the incident as homicide. PLEASE take a moment to pause what you’re doing and pray for Clayton: his health and his salvation, probably in reverse order. Also pray for brother Harper. He really needs to get home, but he also needs to stick around until the detective can interview him (since Harper was the one who called it in). Also…pray for our sister, Elizabeth. She said she was doing fine, but at the same time it was surreal to have to pull her car out from behind a police car, across the tape, and through the barricade (after they moved it ). Even as a spectator it’s a shaking experience…so just be praying. We serve a big God.

Beautiful reminder.

We are not that different.

We all have vices. Some are simply more visible than others. Yet, vices are destructive nonetheless.

I spend a few hours each day with a group of homeless men and women. They hold onto visible vices. You can see their vices on their face. You can smell their vices on their breath.

Yet, we are not that different.

A group of homeless men and women spend a few hours each day with me. I hold onto hidden vices. You can’t see my vices. My vices are not on display….but they are present.

We are not that different.

Have mercy on me O God, according to your unfailing love.

[From Waco Vice….]

In order to prepare for a coming dialog on Christian Anarchy, I can think of no better book to read than the aptly titled: Christian Anarchy by Vernard Eller. First quote coming out of this book, actually a quote of a quote from Thy Kingdom Come Eerdmans:

People are afraid of the collapse of the world. I am looking forward to it. I wish it would begin right now to crash and break apart. For this world of the humanly great is and remains the case of all misery. They cannot do anything about it, these well-intentioned people, these good kings and ministers, these excellent prelates and popes. However they try, they cannot. I would like to tell all of them, “You cannot do it!”

Will discuss this more later….