Hate to bring up religion and politics in polite company, but I thought this NPR story was interesting.
In keeping with my previous post on Billy Graham, I think this is an appropriate follow up.
My friend Tullian posted on his blog that a new movie is coming out soon on his "Daddy Bill" AKA Billy Graham.
Billy: The Early Years, starring up-and-coming actor Armie Hammer in the title role, covers Graham's life from his salvation experience at a 1934 tent revival in Charlotte, North Carolina, through moments of uncertainty concerning his calling, before coming full circle to become the great evangelist known throughout the world.
Read the rest at The Making of an Evangelist | Christianity Today Movies.
Britain's turntablist, producer, artist and film music composer for the docufilm Expelled:
Read here.
And read more here.
Sadly, Steven Curtis Chapman's youngest daughter, Maria (sitting in SCC's lap), died yesterday after being accidentally run over by her brother. Please keep them in your prayers. In Memory of Maria: Maria Sue Chapman (2003-2008)
Thanks to being raised in a family that loves Southern Gospel music, I remember hearing Dottie Rambo's song, "We Shall Behold Him" a lot growing up. (You can hear that song in its original recording, as well as her popular "I Go to the Rock" at her MySpace page.) She was the author of over 2,500 gospel songs, many of which were recorded by stars like Elvis and Johnny Cash.
Early Sunday morning, Dottie died in a bus crash. You can get the details here:
Remembering Dottie Rambo
The second most popular podcast on iTunes is iVideosongs' "Beginning Guitar 101.
Check it out at iVideosongs.
The article starts out saying,
Chord books and music lessons still sell, but for visual learners, the best option is probably the video tutorial.
However, I know that even though I myself am a visual learner, nothing takes the place of learning something hands-on with someone else (like riding a Harley-Davidson, which happens to be why I teach guitar :-) ).
Worth reading, a disturbing article in Rolling Stone called Jesus Made Me Puke. Obviously not of the intellectual fervor that New York Times writer David Brooks brings (see his interesting article on The Neural Buddhists), but most of my peers don't read the Times. They read Wired, Paste and a ton of blogs.
This article is not a reflection of modern evangelical Christianity, but is a caricaturization of it, which is even worse, since that is what post-moderns living in a post-Christian society are going to believe is an accurate description of evangelicals. (What?! Surely the Rolling Stone is an objective magazine!) The article is by an atheist posing as a young believer who goes to a "boot camp" with members from John Hagee's church.
Here are some highlights:
In these Southern churches there are few wizened old sages such as one might find among Catholic bishops or Russian startsi. Here your church leader is an athlete, a business dynamo, a champion eater with a bull's belly, outwardly a tireless heterosexual — and if you want to know what a church beginner is supposed to look like, just make it the opposite of that. Show weakness, financial trouble, frustration with the opposite sex, and if you're overweight, be so unhealthily, and in a way that you're ashamed of. The fundamentalist formula is much less a journey from folly to wisdom than it is from weakness to strength. They don't want a near-complete personality that needs fine-tuning — they want a human jellyfish, raw clay they can transform into a vigorous instrument of God.
On church music:
...we would have lengthy, fifteen-to-twenty-minute sessions singing unbearably atonal Christian hymns.
On politics:
Afterward, a frightening thought shot through my head. It occurred to me that over the past decades, any number of our prominent political leaders (from Jimmy Carter to Chuck Colson to W himself) had boasted publicly of their born-again experiences, broadcasting to Middle America an understanding of their personal relationships with God. But whereas once these conversions were humble things — Billy Graham whispering and putting his hand on W's shoulder in Kennebunkport, or even (in the case of Tom DeLay) a flash of recognition while watching a televangelist program — the modern version might very easily be this completely bats*** holy-vomitus/demon-exorcism deal. The thought that any politician could claim this kind of experience and not be immediately disqualified from public service seemed utterly terrifying.
In summary, on the Christian mind & ability to reasoning:
By the end of the weekend I realized how quaint was the mere suggestion that Christians of this type should learn to "be rational" or "set aside your religion" about such things as the Iraq War or other policy matters. Once you've made a journey like this — once you've gone this far — you are beyond suggestible. It's not merely the informational indoctrination, the constant belittling of homosexuals and atheists and Muslims and pacifists, etc., that's the issue. It's that once you've gotten to this place, you've left behind the mental process that a person would need to form an independent opinion about such things. You make this journey precisely to experience the ecstasy of beating to the same big gristly heart with a roomful of like-minded folks. Once you reach that place with them, you're thinking with muscles, not neurons.
If you're a worship leader, take a look at this. It has transformed the way I plan and schedule for worship. PlanningCenterOnline.com
“The first and most solid conclusion which (for me) emerges is that both musical parties, the High Brows and the Low, assume far too easily the spiritual value of the music they want. Neither the greatest excellence of a trained performance from the choir, nor the heartiest and most enthusiastic bellowing from the pews, must be taken to signify that any specifically religious activity is going on. It may be so, or it may not.”
–C. S. Lewis, “On Church Music” in God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics
(HT: Ron Mann)
My friend Tre Shepherd and his wife Tori have a pretty happening band called One Hundred Hours. Check them out:
http://www.myspace.com/onehundredhours
C.J. Mahaney is writing a great posts on his blog regarding modesty. Check it out: Modesty: A Pastor's Concern (pt. 4): "I am simply a concerned pastor who charitably assumes that most Christian women who dress immodestly are ignorant of the war with lust that men confront on a daily basis. They probably don’t have a clue what goes on in a man’s mind and what effect their bodies have on the eyes and hearts of men young and old."
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