Entries from August 2005 ↓

Adam hits it out of the park with this one.

ORLANDO FL.—In a statement to the public Michael Robinson of Relevant Magazine said that Bono would be beatified Tuesday afternoon. The monumental pronouncement is the first of many to come, sources say. “Beatifying a rock star is serious business,” said Robinson, “You really have to make an impact on the culture to achieve the status of sainthood. Bono has set that standard.”

Longsuffering experts on Relevant’s beatifying process have been waiting a long time for the decree to be made public, saying there are many more who are being considered as theological visionaries of the next generation. Names like Moby, Kanye West, and Scott Stapp have been swirling in the “beatific buzz” for years. Though the other names are subject to heated debate amongst the Editorial and Advertising Cardinals, all agree that Bono is the closest thing to Christ incarnate living today.

Read the entire “article” here.

Completely unrelated to Church Search 2005, my buddy JDR of the .Net and I are on the hunt for the best coffee and espresso in town.

Like I, he’s a coffee enthusiast, and like I, he’s a recent immigrant to the east side of Columbus, OH. Unlike I, he seems to have already found a church to call home, but neither of us have a café to call the same. Knowing how passionate I am about good coffee, he issued something of a challenge to me in his blog to search for the best coffeeshops around Columbus.

The challenge was accepted, and the first chapter completed this past Friday. I’ll be writing about it soon.

(By the way, some of you may have noticed that I’ve been throwing in a few more “everyday life” entries — like this one — here and there. I’m considering re-purposing this blog — yes, again — into something that more fully reflects the whole of my life . . . not just the lofty and theological. I’d like to talk about other things that interest me, like technology and home improvement/design and family life and health and such. If I indeed decide to do this, my hope is that it will remain decidedly God-centered, as following Christ is something I’m supposed to do in every aspect of my life . . . and the theological stuff will still be here. Just not necessarily all the time. Let me know what you think.)

My friend Carey has begun a new weblog, and I’m now pimping it. If you have any interest in various things like comics, technology, web design, podcasting, and indie rock, you should definitely check it out @ . . .

www.liftedeyes.com

To you I lift up my eyes,
O you who are enthroned in the heavens!
Behold, as the eyes of servants
look to the hand of their master,
as the eyes of a maidservant
to the hand of her mistress,
so our eyes look to the Lord our God,
till he has mercy upon us.
- Psalm 123.1-2

As some of you may know, Starbucks is not only my big-market coffeehouse of choice, but also a former employer of mine. As even more of you probably know, the church my family and I were most recently members of (before we moved away) is affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention. While I wasn’t raised in a Baptist church, and while my religious affections sometimes line up better with those of Presbyterians, I still usually answer “Baptist” when asked what “kind” of Christian I am.

Imagine my eye-rolling, then, when I saw a headline on the Baptist Press News website that read “Starbucks promotes homosexual agenda with coffee cup”. (Yes, those are the exact words. Click for yourself.) Apparently, some folks in my denomination think that simply printing a quote in which someone mentions the fact that he’s gay is a form of “blatantly push[ing] the homosexual agenda”.

See, Starbucks recently started a campaign called “The Way I See It”, in which people (some famous, some not-so-much) submit blurbs to be quoted and printed on their ubiquitous paper cups. These quotes run the gamut: from the intellectual, to the philisophical, to the whimsical, to the downright silly (and some stops in-between). The “controversial” quote in question is from Armistead Maupin, an American author. In it, he speaks of the fear that prevented him from “coming out” as a gay man. To make it worse, he uses an “expletive” (likely damn) in the quote. (Click here to see the actual quote on an actual cup. The “expletive” was censored by BPNews.net.) The mere mention of homosexuality apparently sets off alarms in the minds of uber-conservative public policy group Concerned Women for America, and those bells resound in the minds of some folks at Baptist Press News. Thus far, they’ve stopped short of calling for a boycott of Starbucks, but there are already rumblings of such evident in the article.

Now, the way I see it, this is silly. Starbucks is no more “promoting the homosexual agenda” by printing Maupin’s quote than they are promoting conservatism and the war in Iraq by printing a quote from National Review Online editor-at-large Jonah Goldberg. (Of course, I wouldn’t be terribly shocked if some idiot leftists out there were decrying Starbucks for doing such a thing in much the same fashion as the SBC and CWA.) Granted, the article also speaks of Starbucks’ sponsorship of “gay pride” events in some west-coast cities, but what they fail to realize is that such sponsorships are the prerogative of individual stores and their managers . . . it is not a corporate edict. Furthermore, the participation of the employees in such events is entirely voluntary.

Now, am I saying that sin should be celebrated or even ignored? Of course not. What I am saying is that instead of obsessing over coffee cups and pride marches, perhaps my Baptist brothers’ and sisters’ time and energy would be better spent lovingly showing sinners the freedom that they themselves have found at the Cross.

After all, life is too damn short.

To see some other bloggers’ thoughts on this . . .
Agent Tim Online
Issues that Matter
Virtue Blog
Reformissionary

(It should go without saying that my inclusion of the above links doesn’t constitute my agreement with their contents . . . but Steve McCoy’s got it about right. ;-))

Hiatus over. Anyone still here?

We are officially moved into our house and, hopefully, regular posting will resume here.

On a personal note, I’d like to ask for the prayers of those who read here. As I’ve alluded to in recent mini-posts, my spiritual tank has been sputtering along on empty for at least the past month or so (probably longer). Worshiping with the brothers and sisters at Grace Central last night provided some much-needed refreshing, but I still have some catching-up to do with the Lord.

By the way, the Church Search post I promised a few weeks back won’t be happening. Let’s just say that while the people at this church (that I won’t link or even mention by name) were very friendly, the actual worship service wasn’t a very good experience at all, and out of respect for those folks, that’s all I’ll say. I’m sure their community is strong, but it’s definitely not the place for us.

1) House preparations are going well. It’s an ambitious goal, but I hope to be completely moved in and truly living in the new house by the end of this week.

2) There was a bit of a row over at Vagrant involving some false accusations thrown my way. I’ve decided to take a break.

3) Speaking of taking a break, it seems that the busy-ness and constant activity of the past few weeks has caused us to take a break from searching for a new church to join. We haven’t been to Sunday worship anywhere in at least a month, and it’s taken a toll . . . my tank is on “E”, and I’m confident saying that Amy feels the same. I think I opened my Bible for the first time in weeks this past Wednesday. Sad. Next week will be a new beginning.