theo|digital

Just because.

(these guys were hanging out in Daley Plaza a couple weeks ago. They’re sitting on the footing of the Picasso – the name of which I don’t know because Chicagoans just call it, you know, the Picasso).

Whoops, I forget to get back the post I started on Walter Wink. He was wondering about “angels of the churches” in Revelation.

His answer? Instead of being angel figures like white-clothed figure with wings, he proposed that they are the corporate personality of the church – its ethos or spirit.

Looking back over my own experience of churches, I realized that each did indeed have a unique personality. Furthermore, that personality was real. It wasn’t what we call a “personification” like Uncle Sam or the Quaker on the box of oats.

He goes on to notice this idea of angels that seem to be of nations in the book of Daniel.

In fact, he starts realizing that lots of structures – especially ones that have power – have a sort of spirit. Corporations, governments, universities, institutions. And these are big players in the world – the kind of structures or systems that exert power on us. That can do moral things - good or evil.

A corporation can provide needed medical drugs or it can withhold them. A government can assist the weak or oppress them. But who does the husband-abandoned welfare mother who can’t get child-care aid blame? The CEO? The Mayor? We often do, but these people aren’t usually trying to create evil. They are are many layers removed. And they are working withing a great system of powers – economic and political. She becomes the victim of evil but it’s hard to see who made that willful choice.

She’s a victim of a real spiritual enemy – but one expressed in structural evil. And maybe this is all connected…

—————-
Now playing: Béla Fleck & The Flecktones – Scratch & Sniff

On 24 Feb ’08, Mark Driscoll of Mars Hill Church (Seattle) spoke on the topic of the emerging church. Mark is often quoted — especially by general-audience news media (doing feature articles in the religion section) — as an “emerging church leader,” though I don’t think I’d agree (despite the wide breadth the term covers). Really he’s simply a younger conservative evangelical pastor who wears Urban Outfitter t-shirts.

But he does have a past association with Emergent Village types, which he can be pretty negative towards. Because I wanted to look more closely at what he had to say, I went ahead and transcribed his entire talk. The audio and video of his talk were already publicly available, but sometimes it’s easier to read it. I did it for myself but then figured others might want it as well. So here it is, the full transcript of his talk. It was part of a sermon series entitled Religion Saves & Nine Other Misconceptions.

Full Transcript (pdf – 379kb) Mark Driscoll Ask Anything Question 2: Emerging Church

The above is my unmarked transcript of his talk. If you’d like to see the copy I was using to mark up, including my personal (biased) comments, you can download that instead. Maybe I’ll be able to get back around and put up some quotes later.

Hey I-Life/Champaign friends – see below.

My first real breakthrough in understanding these invisible powers came when I stumbled over the angels of the churches in the New Testament Book of Revelation. Why, I wondered, are each of the seven letters in chapters two and three addressed, not to the congregation, as in apostles Paul’s letters, but to the congregation’s angel?

~ Biblical scholar Walter Wink in his 1999 book The Powers That Be.

I frowned when I read this. Really?? I mean, it only took me a second to look it up and confirm. But it was something I’d always ignored – just sort of took each message to be to the people in the church. Okay, but does this mean there is an angelic middle-manangel of sorts? It is footnoted in some translations as possibly messenger. …

Wink doesn’t think so.

I first heard of Wink several years ago via my friend J.R. Woodward — and he’s challenging me (although I don’t know if I’ll agree with everything he writes – he’s fairly progressive theologically). Anyway, I recently picked him back up in part to prepare a talk on 5 April, when I’m speaking at Saturday Night Grace at the invitation of Ty Grigg and company. Hey I-Life/Champaign friends: be sure to come out and say hi. I’d love to see you. (can you believe it: it’s been almost a year since I’ve spoken at SNG…geesh.)

—————-
Now playing: Interference – Gold
via FoxyTunes

Obama’s speech Tuesday on race is the most straightforward speech I’ve ever heard from a public official. One small portion on his controversial pastor:

Trinity embodies the black community in its entirety – the doctor and the welfare mom, the model student and the former gang-banger. Like other black churches, Trinity’s services are full of raucous laughter and sometimes bawdy humor. They are full of dancing, clapping, screaming and shouting that may seem jarring to the untrained ear. The church contains in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and yes, the bitterness and bias that make up the black experience in America.

And this helps explain, perhaps, my relationship with Reverend Wright. As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me. …He contains within him the contradictions – the good and the bad – of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.

And it gets wider, discussing white backlash to affirmative action, and noting that the thing that would help him more politically would be to let this fade. Read the fulltext for faster reading (it’s the best about 50-60% of the way through). But you can watch at least part of it to get the tone (although he’s a bit bound to the teleprompter in the first eight minutes).

Quick few more links: it’s being compared to Kennedy’s speech on being a Catholic, Time magazine compiles academic reactions, web traffic about the speech (ironically) is soaring, Sean Hannity’s discussion boards are outrageous as usual (Obama is still a muslim), and John Kass even decided it was for real.

Regional rag Innocent Words Magazine reviews indie music nationwide, with an emphasis on Illinois and Chicago scenes. I’m still enjoying doing some writing for them. Here’s my last.

Butterfly Pinned
Monster in the Machine
(2007 Emotional Syphon)

Funny thing about titles like “New Wave” – the “new” always overstays its welcome. Classed as the backlash to disco, the early-80s-keyboards -plus-reverb-snare genre is fun for lunchtime radio, but otherwise is appropriately semi-retired. Of course, there are always some for whom the wave still rolls. Enter Bowie-inspired Shannon Crawford, the chain-smoking keyboardist-guitarist-painter (really) who’s released a 2007 new album with a new band to go with it –complete with (not so new) synth lead.

Butterfly Pinned is Crawford’s eye-shadowed brainchild, and though it’s band-attributed to Monster in the Machine, Crawford’s accompaniment seems about as permanent as INXS’ lead vocals – recording bassist Doug Ardito and drummer Josh Freese aren’t even touring.

The lead man probably doesn’t mind using replacements – his tracks are soaked in melodramatic vocal flair – whispers, echoes, counterpoints, and falsetto croanings that evoke the show-stealing emotional vibrato of a 1985 Danny Elfman (Oingo Boingo). And here comes the synth! Fat pads and programmed arpeggios barrel us into the (“new”) electronic age of music in luscious detail. “Helicopter” doesn’t make it a minute in before succumbing to a dream sequence of fading vocals and spinning effects under the heady influence of the pitch-blend wheel. And hand-keyed pan flutes (whee!) show up in at least three tracks.

The 80s-is-back-I-Heart-Duran-Duran crowd (check out “Dot on my Soul”) will enjoy Butterfly Pinned as an admittedly skilled revival entry in the New Wave. But those who don’t like it so thick should run sideways to the tenured and original Of Montreal. Unless you’re producing an over-sexed new 80s film. In that case, Shannon Crawford’s got your walkout credits covered.

~ Chris Ridgeway
(more reviews at www.innocentwords.com)

Many have heard my rant about getting news: edit out as many editors as you can. Meaning, if you can watch the entire speech on C-SPAN instead of the 45 second clip – do it.

Typical of Chicago politics, we’ve got another big case happening at the Dirksen building – the trial of Chicago businessman Tony Rezko. He has serious ties to the governor, but wouldn’t be getting as much press if it weren’t for him also knowing Barack Obama personally.

On Friday, Obama sat down with Chicago Trib editors for an exhaustive interview on the subject, and the entire transcript is posted. Worth the read. Not just about the issue, but also thinking about the political process – the relationship of the press to the presidency.

At the end of the transcript, Obama is wrapping up and is typically helpfully descriptive of a complicated relationship:

You know, [Tribune editor] Anne Marie [Lipinski] asked what it is that I’ve learned. Learning the relationship with the press in a national campaign is a challenge. I mean, I mean, I will say this, that there’s no experience similar to this in terms of living in the fish bowl. And there are times where very legitimate and fair questions are raised about my inconsistencies, contradictions or foibles.

There are times where, you know, folks are just picking at you, you know, because they need some copy. And so what it can induce is a mentality of let’s be very protective of information for interviews and access so we can control the narrative a little more. That’s something we have to be careful of, not just as a candidate but presumably even more so as a president because what you want to do is balance, not responding to every reporter out there, maintaining a sense of openness and accessibility and a willingness to engage the criticisms that are made. And that’s something that we’re still learning as a team

I thought the entire interview was a good example of Obama being honest. Trib columnist John Kass allows for shreds of remaining suspicion. But his column would be boring if it didn’t, right?

—————-
Now playing: Coldplay – Fix You
via FoxyTunes

There flashed upon his mind the idea of the difficulty that attended the kind of life he had begun, and he felt as if he heard some one whispering to him, “How can you keep up for seventy years of your life these practices which you have begun?”

Knowing that this thought was a temptation of the evil one, he expelled it by this answer: “Can you, wretched one, promise me one hour of life?”

St. Ignatius of Loyola, in his Autobiography, during his stay at the hospital at Manresa, about 1523. (though it’s an autobiography, he dictates it in the third person).

I’ve has a similar thought many times. My desire to follow hard after Jesus. Can I ‘keep it up?’ for 50 years?

—————-
Now playing: Béla Fleck & The Flecktones – Big Country
via FoxyTunes

Scot McKnight has posted up two more of my reviews on Don Evert’s short book series. If you’re familiar with them, feel free to agree or disagree there.

• Jesus Creed: Don Everts 3
• Jesus Creed: Don Everts 4

Thanks again to Scot for the opportunities and challenges he’s providing me.