A Case Against "Masculine Christianity"

What says "masculine"
better than the
Old Spice guy?

In what is only the latest in a long series of comments by Christian leaders advocating for the supremacy of men over and against women, John Piper has recently explicitly said that he believes that "God has given Christianity a masculine feel." Now, when he says such a thing, I do not imagine that he would actually say that he believes men are "superior" to women. The usual complementarian line, which I understand Piper to embrace, says that the genders are equal, but that they merely have different God-given roles. That said, it's difficult to read a belief in a "masculine Christianity" without feeling like a belief in male superiority is actually at play, whether Piper acknowledges it or not.

A Brief History of G.B. Blackrock - Part Two

In the previous entry, I detailed multi-millionaire industrialist G.B. Blackrock's first encounters with the Transformers in issues #5 and #6 of the original Marvel Comics Transformers series, as the Decepticons attacked and captured a new oil drilling platform built by his company. Another casualty of the attack was one of Blackrock's employees, Josie Beller, who was left paralyzed. Although Blackrock is only seen in cameo appearances in issues #7 and #8 as he visits Beller in the hospital, it is clear that both are planning to fight back.

Musical Misdemeanors

I've observed in the past that all churches, even those who don't consider themselves "liturgical," nonetheless do have a liturgy, by which I mean that each church has a set pattern by which that community worships God. A pattern that, if it is disrupted, the disruption is not only noticed, but often resented. I am by no means immune to this observation. I worship with the congregation I do for many reasons, but one of them is that I find myself more or less "in tune" with the patterns of worship there, and when those patterns are disrupted, I don't always like it.

A Brief History of G.B. Blackrock - Part One

OK. So we've been told that the old Marvel Transformers comic continuity is being picked up again, starting with a Free Comic Book Day issue in May. The good folks at Comic Book Resources have released a preview that gives us a little more information. Obviously, this has generated some speculation about just what lies in store, and I've been following all of that with interest. But what really caught my attention was the fact that G.B. Blackrock was one of the characters "we can expect" to see featured in the new stories. Having used that name as my main Transformers-forum alias for many years now, and having gone to the trouble to create a custom figure of the character, Blackrock is obviously a character I'm pleased to see again. So, for the benefit of those who only know of Blackrock from the occasional mention of his name here on the blog, it's time to fill in Blackrock's story.

Montreat! Montreat! Montreat!

Although I've certainly shared videos, myself, I have to admit that I really wish that people didn't share videos on Facebook and elsewhere as much as they do. I would much rather everything shared was text. The reason for this is that I do much of my browsing during downtime at work, and I don't wish to disturb my co-workers with the sound (obviously, an audio-only piece can be even worse). Also, it's much easier to leave a page of text alone when a task comes in, and come back to it once I'm done, than it is with video.

All this means is that, when I started to see this video of "Stuff Presbyterian Seminarians Say" making the rounds on Facebook Monday morning, I waited until I was at home that evening to finally watch it. You can watch the video for yourself after the jump, or just go straight on to my comments.

Year of the Dragon: Let's Update Cryotek

I've been getting a lot of e-mails and notices informing me that it's Chinese New Year time, and that specifically this will be the year of the Dragon. I figure it's as good an opportunity as any to revisit one of my dragon-themed Transformers, and quickly realized that my old Cryotek entry had pretty lousy pictures, and that I could almost certainly do better.

I invite you to head back to the entry and see the new robot mode and dragon mode images (I confess that I didn't retake the "dragster" picture, which needed it less, anyway).

Transformers Feature: Gutcruncher with Reprolabels

This entry has been a long time in coming.

A little less than five years ago, I announced the completion of my collection of American-released Action Master figures with the acquisition of Gutcruncher. I made that claim by the standard of having all of the actual figures themselves, even though I didn't then—and still don't to this day—actually have all of the accessories that came with each figure if one was to buy them at retail in the early 1990s. Although I was able to get all of the accessories for Gutcruncher when I procured the Gutcruncher figure, they came with none of the stickers applied. At the end of my original Gutcruncher post, I commented that I had contacted the folks at Reprolabels about getting a set of Gutcruncher labels made. Such a set was finally made available a few months ago, and I made sure to order my set!