Sunday Seven: Interesting links from the past week
- Free speech. Be grateful for it. The new MySpace China doesn’t have it. From TEXYT via Slashdot.
- Six tips for tackling a dreaded task. Tip three is that most jobs are MUCH more enjoyable if you do them with friends. Good stuff from The Happiness Project, via Lifehacker.
- World Vision campaigns against the use of child-soldiers, especially in U. S. assisted countries. Sounds right to me.
- What’s wrong with my blog? A list of 11 pitfalls between you and successful blogging. From Modern Life via ProBlogger.
- Don’t cede the high ground. On abortion or other matters, the most important question is NOT how it affects women. It’s about right and wrong. From Christianity Today.
- Patently bad ideas. Too much testosterone and free time resulted in these crazy but patented ideas. From Wired.
- Washington Watch lists and describes bills before Congress AND breaks down the cost of each PER FAMILY. Via TechCrunch.
Poverty education from rich white people
I recently attended the Poverty Awareness Workshop at our local United Way. While I did get some good information, the workshop was hampered by:
- A superficial presentation marred by 60s-style small group projects.
- The slaughter of countless trees to provide numerous handouts of outdated information that we didn’t have time to look at and probably will never use again…and now I find that this NY Times interactive chart gives me most of the info. I need.
- The fact that all of us in the room were white, middle-class, well-educated “helping professionals” who have lost touch not only with poverty but with working for an hourly wage.
Nevertheless, a few helpful insights emerged. The speaker mentioned that many lottery winners are worse off five years after the win than they were before. I think of this as the Mike Tyson syndrome, and it illustrates how escaping poverty requires more than extra income. It also means learning to think differently about money, the future and value - learning to play by different rules.
But it DOES require extra income too. For lessons about THAT, I’m now reading a book by another rich white person - Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed. Ehrenreich went “undercover” for several years, taking low-wage jobs and trying to make ends meet.
Which is sort of what Jesus did. As our example.
Last year’s school shooting
In the awful eclipse of tragedy by tragedy, it’s easy to forget that on October 2, 2006, a one-room Amish school was victimized in the same horrible way that Virginia Tech was last week. U.S. News has a great story on how the people around Lancaster County, PA are coping six months on.
The overwhelming response by the Amish to the shooting has been forgiveness, and the article dwells on this point:
The forgiveness here “wasn’t an aberration,” Kraybill said during a recent interview. “To a person, the Amish would argue that forgiveness is the central teaching of Jesus. They will take you to the Lord’s Prayer-if you don’t forgive, you won’t be forgiven.”
I grew up in Holmes County, Ohio, which has a strong Amish population. Living so close to Amish people makes it easy to pick on their apparent legalism - they don’t own cars but they ride in them; they have no phones in their homes, but use cell phones - but it sure is hard to argue with people who follow Christ by taking forgiveness so seriously.
Thanks to PreachingToday.com for pointing me to this article.
Sunday Seven: Interesting links from the past week
- Speculators snatch up potentially profitable domain names, hoping to make a buck off the VT murders - names like vatechbloodbath.com. From Wired.
- Dancing with consumerism. An excellent interview with an advertising pro turned Mennonite pastor on consumerism, counter-consumerism and anti-consumerism. From Out of Ur.
- I mentioned the book and movie called Starving Jesus in Sunday’s sermon. Find out more here.
- My cancer: “No death is meaningless”. A blog post at NPR on “misdemeanor homicides” and facing cancer.
- The University of Akron. My dad taught there, and every member of my family attended there at one time or another. But with this appearance on Leno’s headlines, the school has finally arrived.
- Simplify your offline life. I like grab-bag lists like these. Lots of good ideas, from Wisegeek via Lifehacker.
- Summer may have been hopped up on Mt. Dew when she wrote this, but I’m taking it as gospel. I love that lady!
Sermon: Starving Jesus
Series: Luxury, Poverty and the Kingdom of God
Sermon 2 of 8 - 4.22.07: Starving Jesus. Listen (stream) MP3 (right-click)
Virginia Tech & gun control
After the horrendous shooting spree at Virginia Tech yesterday, there has been/will be a steady wind of gun-control talk. Far be it from me not to blow a little wind myself.
One viewpoint is that an armed citizenry could prevent tragedies like the one yesterday- that is, if guns were not illegal in most public places, there no doubt would have been a responsible gun-owner in the building yesterday to put a stop to this murderous rampage. This is the position of gun-rights advocate and former CEO of the National Rifle Association Wayne LaPierre in his 1995 book. I’m confident that if more people carried guns, and if they could have legally carried them on campus, the Virginia Tech shooter would have been stopped much sooner. But the trade-off is that more guns in more hands and more places means more accidents, more crimes of passion, and more stupid decisions - an unacceptable solution, I think.
On the other extreme is the viewpoint that more, tougher gun control laws are needed, perhaps even an outright ban on the sale and ownership of guns. I don’t think it’s remotely possible to get rid of guns by passing laws, but I have to admit that the harder it is to get a gun, the less likely a tragically-ill English major would have obtained one. But this is a dangerous solution too. One of the most serious felonies you can commit these days is to carry a gun into a public place like a university classroom building, which means that if someone is deranged enough to do it, he is virtually guaranteed an overwhelming advantage over anyone he chooses to kill. If we’re going to ban guns from all public places, we have a duty to acknowledge and address this.
Maybe we can learn a lesson from the airlines. An army of armed passengers isn’t the answer. Total disarmament (plus surprise) brought us 9/11. But the possibility (remote though it may be) of an unidentified armed air marshall provides a measure of deterrent. Could we do the same in schools, stores, concert venues and the rest of society? I’m not thinking of paid security guards, but a few trained, responsible volunteers. On a college campus or in your kids’ school, it might be several teachers or administrators. In church, it would be (and only be) the preacher (no, I’m kidding about that last one). Several good friends of mine who are responsible gun-owners have carry-permits, but these DON’T allow them to carry guns into public places where they might be needed to prevent a tragedy like yesterday’s.
I’m hoping that my good friend and ultra-neo-con Josh Stevenson 
will weigh in on this, either here or over at his blog.
BBC Documentary Archive
One of the best friends this blog has is Kristen Laprise, and she recently got me listening to the BBC Documentary Archive. I actually listened to 7 or 8 episodes today on my drive up to Ohio. I highly recommend it as a way to broaden your worldview on a wide variety of topics.
Today I listened to a three-part series called Feeding the World which I’d describe as a scientifiic and economic study of issues of hunger and food production. Interesting, and a little scary. I also heard a feature on the charismatic churches in Ghana, Africa, and the surprising place of the health-and-wealth gospel there.
Kristen has helped open my eyes to the needs of the world. Until she get her own blog (perhaps a nice photo blog), the Doc. Archive will be my best source of information about world issues.
Sunday Seven: Interesting links from the past week
- Tips for tackling tax day. If you still need this, you may want to start with the tip about filing for an extension. From Lifehacker.
- Evel overcome with good. I’ve always had a strange fascination with Evel Knievel, so news about his conversion to Christ (and powerful testimony) got me. From Christianity Today.
- Subway Stradivarius. If a world-class violinist played a Stradivarius at a subway stop, who would even notice such an odd bit of grace? From Signal vs. Noise.
- RunningMap.com. Take any site on the planet and trace out your running or hiking route to determine distance. If only this cool site used Google Maps.
- So it goes. I loved Kurt Vonnegut when I was in college, but hadn’t read him in 20 years. His death this week made me nostalgic. Favorite: Cat’s Cradle. Story and link-collection from NPR.
- House shakes hands with an unborn child. TV’s gloriously cynical doctor gets a pro-life(?) surprise. From Breaking Christian News, thanks to Linda Mowrer.
- In God They Trust. A story on doctors who believe God intervenes in their business. From Chicago Sun-Times via Relevant.
Sermon: Beggars at the gate
Series: Luxury, Poverty and the Kingdom of God
Sermon 1 of 8 - 4.15.07: Beggars at the gate. Listen (stream) MP3 (right-click)
Jonestown
Just before Thanksgiving during my freshman year in high school, Jim Jones and his People’s Temple cult entered the national consciousness. It was on November 18, 1978 that 909 members of People’s Temple died in Guyana, Africa. Most of them committed suicide. A significant number were murdered. 276 were children.
Last night, Cindy and I watched the new Jonestown documentary on PBS. I was hoping to gain new insight into this mysterious tragedy. What was it that drew people to Jim Jones? What explains the fanatical devotion to this cause, demonstrated by the willingness of so many to relocate to Africa to live in his community? Most of all, why would hundreds of people surrender their own lives at his command, with (apparently) nothing to gain by it?
The documentary begins with the voice of a former Temple member saying that no one intentionally joins a cult that they think will harm them; rather, people join movements they believe in. But it’s hard to see from this film what Jim Jones offered people to believe in. The documentary traces Jones’ life: misfit kid, Pentecostal revival preacher, pioneer in racial integration (from the start he insisted that all races worship together), and founder of a community that moved from Indiana to California to Guyana. Obviously Jones had something beyond charisma. This documentary reports on it, but doesn’t capture it. We hear of Jones the powerful preacher, charlatan, sexual deviant and totalitarian dictator. We get snippets of his beliefs, which seem to have grown out of Biblical Christianity before metastasizing into Jones’ own dogma. We see the evidence of his power to move people (Jones and his group played a huge role in the San Fransisco mayoral election) but not the power itself.
In short, the documentary fails to show us why Jim Jones was so powerful. Maybe the filmmakers missed the mark. Or maybe it’s because nearly all the true believers died on 11.18.78.
Actually, I saw something else at work in Jim Jones. Before Judas betrayed Jesus, it says that Satan entered him. I have always believed (and this is my opinion) that when Satan was finished using Judas, he abandoned him. And when I see the photos of 909 bodies lying around that forsaken compound, I see the same evil force at work. Jim Jones had a power from beyond this world, and the goal of that dark force is always to steal, kill and destroy.
