When Open Pit Mining Becomes Redemptive

What do you do when you lose your house to a mining company? Save the church. Check this out:

200 Lashes for Saudi Arabian Rulers!

This is sick.

A young woman who was raped has been sentenced to 200 lashes, and 6 months in jail - for unlawfully mingling! Somebody tell me this isn't the way most Muslim men think! It certainly has be a anomaly of absolute power gone awry. There must be lots of angry people out there! Check out the BBC story here, and the New York Times article alledging that even the Saudi's are shocked - I sure hope so, adn I hope it changes the laws soon.

The girl's lawyer is one heroic fellow.

Political Ad You Just Gotta Love

Okay, I may lean right, but even if I leaned left, this ad rocks. Finally someone with a sense of humor. It may be cornball, but it's time that someone did an ad with fun as one goal. So here's to Mike Huckabee - thanks for the laugh. Chuck Norris fans will be voting for you.

Beowulf - potential Razzie?

If you watch closely on the trailer below you will find what I think ought to be considered as for a Razzie award. I should have seen it coming. Most ridiculous moment in cinematic history - Grendel's Mother in Stilettos. Okay, so that answers the question of how I felt about the movie. A year ago when I first heard that Angelina Jolie was Grendel's Mother, it made me rethink wanting to see the film. You know what they say about first impressions.

The movie is CGI throughout, and if you are someone who loves the story of Beowulf you will be wishing you had a controller to kick and stab, or restart the game at certain places in the movie. It started off somewhat faithful to the story, although far more sexually edgy and contemporarily Heathen. Angelina Jolie goes full frontal with CGI which makes her a moving mannikin. R rating CGI'd down to PG-13 definitely.

I've got two thumbs - both go down.


The interpretations of Beowulf which allow for such a silly rendering as Zemekis presents come from this kind of thinking. Perhaps we have Freud to blame for this movie.

Beowulf - a gotta see film for me

So, I really think that Angelina Jolie as Grendel's mother is weird, but I still need to see Beowulf. I don't often need to see a film, but this is way too epic a story to miss. What about you?

When the Edginess Leads to Excitement - Wanna Take Over the World?

So my last post documented feeling displaced by typical Christian church styles, even though they were good examples of doing church typically today - really it was a great example, but I felt out of place and strange in the experience. Now that I am home and back in the church office after Off the Map Live I actually have some sense of seeing, or at least looking ahead toward the future. After being beat up for a couple years, then going on a two month sabbatical (thanks to many of you), and then coming back in September to have to blitz toward our wild and crazy October outreaches here in Salem, then flying out on November 1st the morning after the busiest day of my year to go to Off the Map, I am now back in the saddle, and feel like I can project toward the future better than I have been able to do in a long, long time.

I wonder if all that Off the Map stuff was part of the envigorating energy? Combined with Taize, and Druid festivals in the UK, and visiting The Fringe, and spending time in Wales, and hanging out with Mike and Jules, and being free from the church stresses for a couple months, maybe the combination of things has brought some excitement back to my heart. Woo-hoo - who wants to take on the world with me today?

Going Through Withdrawls from Edginess

After being on sabbatical for two months (on the mission field in the UK, and visiting Taize), followed by returning to the church in time to do our outreach in the month of October, then hopping on a plance to go to the Off the Map conference and spend time with the likes of Brian McLaren, Spencer Burke, Karen Sloan and PresbYmergent gang, Richard Twiss, John Smulo, Jim Henderson, Meg and Benjamin Ady, Sherman and Sidell Bradley, and scores of other cool people I find myself coming off the busyness of the season feeling like "church as usual" is just too weird for me.

Does this mean I have adapted to things that are outside my own box of religious experience - the edgy as if it was a new center for myself?