Fernando Gros

Thoughts From Blogland

These occa­sional posts, com­pil­ing inter­est­ing thoughts from a vari­ety of sources, are a by-product of the way I create con­tent for this blog. Insight­ful blo­g­posts that merit com­ment and con­sid­er­a­tion, get archived and impor­ted into Scrivener, where I jot down some ini­tial responses. But, if those ini­tial notes don’t ger­min­ate into a larger piece within a week or two, the odds of them over going any­where drop sig­ni­fic­antly. Instead of let­ting that link fall into a vir­tual dump, I aggreg­ate it with other links that are in the same sort of limbo. My hope is that you, the reader, might take up some of those frag­ments and think cre­at­ively about them yourself.

Of course, I’m often prone to adding too many dis­par­ate and unncon­ec­ted links on these posts and for that I apo­lo­gise. My blog read­ing is wide and quite varied — what else can I do? Anyway, here are some great blo­g­posts from the last week.

“Ver­nacu­lar Cre­ativ­ity”: An Inter­view with Jean Bur­gess (Part One) and “Ver­nacu­lar Cre­ativ­ity”: An Inter­view with Jean Bur­gess (Part Two) — I love the concept of ver­nacu­lar cre­ativ­ity and this two-part inter­view explores the concept and teases out some great insights about social net­work­ing, cul­tural par­ti­cip­a­tion and civic engagement.

Seeing The World As A Sink­ing Ship — More thoughts on evan­gel­ic­al­ism, cul­tural engagement/estrangement and fundamentalism.

Dawkins On The Couch — Like Mark, I’ve often wondered about the life exper­i­ences and small inter­ac­tions that have fuelled Dawkins ire for reli­gion and in par­tic­u­lar for Chris­tian­ity. I’m not sure this Freu­dian read­ing fo the situ­ation is totally con­vin­cing, but sure is fascinating.

Stock­hom Syn­drome — Intel­li­gently pro­voc­at­ive piece on abus­ive church struc­tures and why people allow them­selves to remain within them.

Unchris­tian — The UnChris­tian meme is spread­ing around the blo­go­sphere and draw­ing some very telling responses. The idea is that par­ti­cipapants must write three neg­at­ive per­c­petions about Chris­ti­ans and “…one thing that Chris­ti­ans should be known for.” Glenn’s thoughts stood out for their focus and clarity.

Neo-Youth Min­istry Meth­ods: The End of Bait and Switch — The use of viol­ent games like Halo 3 in youth min­istry and the gen­eral accept­ance of hyper-violence amongst some con­ser­vat­ive Chris­ti­ans con­tin­ues to attract com­ment and atten­tion. It’s import­ant not just to cri­tique the wrong­headed­ness of con­don­ing hyper-violence, but also to look deeper at what such approach say bout the way we think about the Chris­tian mes­sage the church that (seeks to) embody it.

What You Win Them With is What You Win Them To — Fur­ther to the point, the issue is not that cul­ture is being used to express spir­itual ideas, but that cul­ture is sub­mer­ging spir­itual ideas to the point where they are clear in the attrac­tional package.

Instilling Values in Your Child: Teach by Doing - Our chil­dren are watch­ing us and form­ing their moral com­pass in response to what we do. Here’s a great example of teach­ing mor­al­ity through being moral. I think as par­ents we need to col­lect these sort of examples as remind­ers and inspirations.

People In Glass Houses — Con­sidered, humble and self-reflexive review of Tanya Levin‚Äôs auto­bi­o­graph­ical account of grow­ing up in and even­tu­ally leav­ing the church that became Hill­song.

When It Comes To Per­cep­tion — Christianity’s Taking A Beat­ing — Without doubt the pop­u­lar (and pop­u­list) back­lash against Chris­tian­ity that we are now seeing is a con­sequence of the con­front­a­tional approach some (many) Chris­ti­ans have taken towards the cul­ture wars in the US, the way these have been expor­ted glob­ally and the uncrit­ical mar­riage of con­ser­vat­ive reli­gion with far right wing polit­ics. My feel­ing is it is only going to get worse over the rest of this decade.

Right Time To Say Sorry — Appar­ently Aus­tralian Prime Min­is­ter, John Howard, is claim­ing that the time is right for Aus­tralia to think about recon­cil­li­ation with it’s indi­gen­ous pop­u­la­tion. I’ve read a few reports on this and I can’t help but laugh; that deep, cyn­ical laugh, that only polit­ical men­dacity can inspire. Remem­ber this is the same man who sys­tem­at­ic­ally dis­matled the pro­cesses towards recon­cil­li­ation that were in place when his party came to power.

Of course, he is not offer­ing to apo­lo­gise, just to have a ref­er­en­dum about it. Given the way the last import­ant ref­er­en­dum, about the repub­lic was framed, the odds would be against this one being worded in a way favour­able towards suc­cess. Moreover, the odds are against Howard still being in power when and if an apo­logy were required — even if he wins the next elec­tion (which I pre­dict he will). This move is noth­ing but cyn­icism writ large.

Tech­nor­ati Tags: Evan­gel­ic­al­ism, Church, Youth Min­istry, Hill­song, Aus­tralia, John Howard, Ethics, Richard Dawkins, Atheism

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 18th, 2007 at 11:44 am. It is filed under Blogging, Education, Globalisation, Missional Church, Theology and Culture, Trends. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.