Nazbo pride. Love the video.
(Also love how everyone from the West Coast thinks that Kansas City is in Kansas and not Missouri.)

Osgood was great tonight in net for the Wings. So in his honor I think it’s time for some good old Avs/Wings nostalgia.

Brian McLaren was in town last night speaking about his new book Everything Must Change: Jesus, Global Crises, and a Revolution of Hope. It was an excellent presentation, one of those “big idea” kinds of presentations that just build and build. I thought he did a great job of packing all of these concepts into a 1 1/2 hour presentation. While I felt like I was keeping up with him, tracking with where he was going, I still left with my head spinning. There was just so much that he covered and the implications are innumerable.

Later in the evening Brian joined us at the Princeton Emergent Cohort and we were also joined by the North Jersey Emergent Cohort. We packed 20+ people into a small corner of the Yankee Doodle Tap Room. It was a great time of informal conversation and we picked Brian’s brain about Narrative Theology, Stanley Hauerwas, Radical Orthodoxy, global economies and local economic practices, Wendell Barry, Plato, eschatology, N.T. Wright, Andrew Perriman, terrorism, the presidential election, pastoral care, dealing with conflict in the local church and the writing process. It was a great conversation with a great thinker.

I’ve loved all of Brian’s books that I’ve read so far but I had Everything Must Change on the backburner. No more. After last night I want to dig deeper into what Brian’s getting at in this book because I think it’s going to be incredibly important for the church as we quit playing “intramural games” as he put it, and start addressing how the Gospel frames and narrates our lives in such a way that we are sent into the world in a posture of serving, reconciling, compassion and healing.

If this stuff excites you like it does me, be sure to check out the Deep Shift tour. Brian will be in the Bronx May 2-3rd. If you can’t make it to the tour be sure to check out everythingmustchange.org where people are contributing and dreaming of ways to change the world one act at a time.

As I’ve been preparing for an upcoming series on sexuality in our High School ministry I’ve been trying to read some fresh stuff that engages sexuality from a theological point of view with special attention towards discipleship. I’ve been pretty underwhelmed by so much of the church’s teaching on sexuality for so long. I’ve used curriculum that I felt went straight for the “what’s over the line” question and felt schizophrenic in it’s mixture of guilt and affirmation of sex. As I teach on sex I wanted to really do an excellent job of engaging sexuality, theology and discipleship this time around. So two books immediately hit the top of my “must read” list. 1. Rob Bell’s Sex God and 2. Lauren F. Winner’s Real Sex. I’ve heard Winner speak on the topic of chastity in a break out session at Youth Specialties this past year and she was great.

I’m really glad I took the time to read Bell’s book before engaging this subject with the youth at our church. Bell’s style of writing is so conversational that it belies the deep theological work he’s doing in this book. Bell’s catch phrase quickly becomes “this is really about that.” And over and over again he makes connections between sexuality and spirituality and about how “this” is really all about “that.” Bell’s definition of sexuality alone was extremely helpful.

“For many, sexuality is simply what happens between two people involving physical pleasure. But that’s only a small percentage of what sexuality is. Our sexuality is all of the ways we strive to reconnect with our world, with each other, and with God (42).”

Hmm, sexuality is all the ways we try to reconnect? That means that even the celibate can practice and express their sexuality. And on the very next page Bell makes this point saying,

“Some of the most sexual people I know are celibate.

They sleep alone.

They have chosen to give themselves to lots of people, to serve and give and connect their lives with beautiful and worthy causes (43).”

Bell takes this understanding of sexuality to deconstruct our culture’s definition of sexuality. Some of the most overt expressions of “sexuality” in our world are the exact opposite of real sexuality. To illustrate this Bell describes the infamous “Red Light District” in Amsterdam where women sit in store front windows advertising themselves for prostitution. The transaction that happens between a man who goes to one of these prostitutes and the woman herself is just that, a transaction. Physical sex happens, but there is no reconnection. Indeed this kind of sex only serves to further divide and isolate the two parties. The man uses the woman for his own physical gratification and the woman falls deeper into the darkness of her situation. This is the exact opposite of two human beings reconnecting, and we still call it sex.

Bell’s treatment of pre-marital sex is good. As far as I remember he never even used the term “pre-marital sex.” Instead Bell contrasts “taking your clothes off” and “getting naked.” Anyone can take their clothes off and have sex, but in the end this is not true reconnection. Real reconnection happens in physical sex when both parties can be naked with one another. Being naked is about way more than taking off clothes, it’s about trust, it’s about security, it’s about accepting the other person with all their faults and still loving them. It’s about being willing to die for the other person and the promise to remain faithful. Getting naked requires the commitment of marriage, the commitment to serve one another as Christ did the church. As always, “this” is really about “that.”

I could go on and on… needless to say, I thought it was a great book.

For Lent this year I gave up television with the exception of LOST. I got a lot of flak for including this caveat when I was asked about lent. I understand why people would think this was only going half-way or just a lazy attempt at spiritual discipline. The truth is I was really fasting from useless background noise.

Tv and film for all their similarities have very different effects on the viewer as well as the intended outcomes their producers have in mind. On a very basic level their relationship to selling products is very different. Insightful critiques about the constant product-placement in film not withstanding, the film is the product. The film is selling itself, we pay to see the film and then for 2 hours we watch the film uninterrupted. Television is set up to draw us to the tv for long enough that we will sit through commercials trying to sell us products. The show itself is not the product but the means by which we are exposed to the product. And so it is in the interests of television creators to create content that always leaves us unsatisfied, always wanting something better to watch. An excellent film will likely attract more attention and then more ticket buyers, but a television show that can be entertaining enough to keep our attention while always leaving us wanting something better helps to perpetuate the genre and expose us to more advertising. Bad tv is good for tv.

If you’re like me, you’ve fallen into this trap. I’ll turn on the tv hoping to find something good to watch (knowing full well that I can count the number of quality programs on one hand) and just end up having the tv on as background noise. After years of doing this I’ve become so comfortable with having the tv on in the background I felt awkward alone in a room with out it’s constant stream of sound. This is bad.

I never have a film on “in the background” simply to fill the air with sound. When I watch a film I do just that, sit down and watch it. So for lent I decided to give up all tv. I put the LOST exception in there because I interact with LOST like film, I sit down and engage the narrative and then turn off the tv and talk about it. LOST is never “background noise” I use to eradicate silence in my life. Tv in had become just that for me… a way to eradicate silence.

So for the entire season of lent I watched 8 episodes of LOST and the Oscars. That was it. In forty days I had watched 11 hours of television. It was so good. I wasn’t staying up as late, I was way more productive in my work and I began to read so much more. So I’m trying to keep up the habit. I haven’t been as strict as I was during Lent, but I’m trying to only watch tv if I’m going to engage it and turn it off if I find myself using it to drown out the silence. Because silence is good for the soul.

Last night was the first night of the Stanley Cup playoffs for Detroit. They came away with a 3-1 win against Central Division rival Nashville.

If your computer uses a widescreen and you want to keep track of the Stanley Cup bracket, check out this wallpaper I’ve made for Hockey fans just like you.

I love this time of year, GO WINGS!

A few days ago I finished Jesus for President and I’ve already lent it out to the first person on the growing waiting list. What a magnificent book! If you went to seminary and constantly had your nose stuck in a Hauerwas or Yoder book but wished you could lend a more accessible version to someone… this is that book. It isn’t dumbed down, let me be clear about that, it’s just that this book was really written for the church. This isn’t the kind of conversation that takes place in the ethereal upper layers of academia, this is the best Kingdom-of-God theology taken to the streets. And what would we expect? Shane & Co aren’t professors, they’re subversive prophets living in the abandoned places of the empire. Making their own clothes, living with the poor, dumpster diving for food… always pointing to Jesus. They are living at the margins pointing us to Jesus. They are shouting with their lives (and this book) that the America we live in is a pitiful and fallen Kingdom not worth our allegiance.

The Eagle is fake, the Eagle is dead.

Follow the Lamb!

Today is Kara’s birthday!

I love that she has become the unpaid editor of my blog (I still have a misspelled word in my last post to check on).

I love that she ain’t afraid to keep it real and loves blasting ghetto rap while driving around.

I love that she’s a pushover when it comes to going out to celebrate, no matter the occasion!

I love her beautiful hair and how she fusses over it.

I love her mind and how she uses it to serve God and the church.

I love that she’ll still watch a zombie movie with me, even now that we’re married.

I love that she’s such a book nerd.

I love that she keeps me on my hermeneutical toes.

I love her style and attention to fashion, but also that she’s taken to the idea of giving away clothes.

I love that 10 months and 4 days ago she said “I do.”

I just plain love this girl.

Last week I picked up a book that I’ve been looking forward to reading for several months now. I didn’t even know that it had been released until I was wondering the isles of my local Barnes & Noble and bumped into the display for Shane Claiborne & Chris Haw’s new book Jesus For President. I’m about a third of the way through it now and it’s everything I was hoping it would be. Claiborne & Co have taken theologians and biblical scholars close to my own heart and made them scandalously accessible to an general audience. The book (so far) is tackling our own ideas about empire by taking a look at God and the people of God and their relationship to empire. The book is a creative mish-mash of art and prose and Kingdom Propaganda. This book provokes us towards a Christian imagination of politics and calls us to seriously rethink where our hope and allegiance really lay. Go pick it up now!