Fernando Gros

Another Week, Another Roundup

Which is more accur­ate? or sadly true? — Take a look at the two car­toons and decide for your­self. Me, I think they are both true (can we mirror them and put them at two ends of a plat­eau). That said, I find no com­fort in my answer, because I’m agree­ing that many thinkers I like and respect are cut­ting their nose off to spite their face.

All this, just to make us shop - “One way or another, we work hard to be con­sumers. We do half the advert­isers‚Äô work for them.” Actu­ally, we do far more than half the work and the advert­isers don’t prom­ise us any­thing that we are not already crav­ing and long­ing for anyway. Still, Duncan is asking all the right ques­tions, espe­cially with regard to the drive to spend.

Wel­come 2 — Maybe it is a false dicotomy, between the insti­tu­tional wel­come and the authen­tic wel­come, but I can’t help but agree with the quote,

“‘Any organ­isa­tion’, she said talk­ing about the church, ‘Any organ­isa­tion which needs to appoint welcomers…has got to be suspect!’.

What a stun­ning observation.”

My guess is that most of us have been in churches (and other social con­texts) where people thought them­selves to be wle­com­ing and friendly, but man­aged in prac­tice to be the oppos­ite. Form­al­ising the wel­com­ing pro­cess is a good safety net and will always high­light the fact if a church is not being hos­pit­able. But, it should never be a sub­sti­tute for rad­ical hospitality.

Con­don­ing Tor­ture — Should it sur­prise us that the per­cent­age of Amer­ican Evan­gel­ic­als who view tor­ture as always unjus­ti­fi­able is hov­er­ing at a 28%, even lower than the29 % per­tenage in the soci­ety as a whole?

Umberto Eco on Fas­cism‚Ķ via Jesus Polit­ics - The rela­tion­ship between facisim and reli­gion is a topic I’ve been mean­ing to pick up in detail for some time (and a part of my ongo­ing interest in the Span­ish Civil War). Baptist Blog­ger has done us a ser­vice sum­mar­ising Eco’s 14 points on facism and high­light­ing their poten­tial over­lap with some expres­sions of faith. Of par­tic­u­lar interest is the rela­tion­ship between facism and tech­no­logy, hero­ism, diversity and social frus­tra­tion (or as I tend to call it, ressentiment).

Leader As Listener — Part of the prob­lem with “lead­er­ship” lan­guage is, for me, the fact that it too often starts with act­iv­ism and res­ults, not with quiet, con­tem­pla­tion and reflec­tion. If Jesus is our model for min­istry in any way, then have to take ser­i­ously the fact that Jesus did not just jump in at the first oppor­tun­ity, but waited, worked, listened and learned.

Cloak­room Com­munity — Like Brodie, I found Bauman’s idea of cloak­room com­munit­ies to be an apt cri­tique of some churches.

Let the Lion­iz­ing and Skew­er­ing and Cari­ca­tur­ing Begin — Jerry Falwell’s passing has left most of us with a lot of ques­tions, not least the prob­lem of how to com­ment on his legacy. This is one of many attempts that at least tries to bal­ance Falwell’s effect on the “cul­ture wars” with his prac­tical work and ministry.

Go, Change! — Lovely piece on mar­ket­ing in India.

Iraq’s Women Under Pres­sure via Tensegrit­ies — as Mary puts it, “Bush & Co. tend to make it a talk­ing point that women have been lib­er­ated by the US inva­sion of Iraq. A respec­ted scholar begs to differ.”

Are House Churches Bib­lical? Part 1 — Slightly tongue-in-cheek title to what may well be a solid series of obser­va­tions. I took the same exeget­ical trip a few years back and it was very revealing.

Tech­nor­ati Tags: House Church, Iraq, Church, Community

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 22nd, 2007 at 5:48 pm. It is filed under Blogging, Delhi, Globalisation, Marketing, Missional Church, Theology and Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.