Remembering Glen Stassen

Early this morning, I got a message from one of the professors I work with at Fuller, informing me that Dr. Glen Stassen had passed away a few hours previously. It wasn't unexpected news. Dr. Stassen had been fighting cancer for much of the previous year, and his health had taken such a turn in recent months that a planned retirement event honoring Dr. Stassen was moved ahead to this past month to make sure that he would still be around to enjoy it. Although this naturally made for some quick scrambling for my colleagues and myself in Fuller's School of Theology Dean's Office, I can safely speak for all of us in saying that we were happy to do so.
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Looking (Out) for the Helpers

When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, "Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping." To this day, especially in times of "disaster," I remember my mother's words, and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers — so many caring people in this world.

— From The World According to Mister Rogers, p. 187.

I've been thinking about this quote a lot lately. It's not that there's been any recent "disaster" in the conventional sense. At least, I haven't heard of any significant earthquake, or crime, or other such tragedy, although I'm sure that there are things happening all over the world to people that I won't ever know about. Indeed, the irony is that the "disaster" I have in mind is not only of a more figurative kind, but it's one that has specifically targeted "helpers" who... well, if you're reading this at about the same time as I'm posting it, you probably already know what's been going on. And if you don't, it's perhaps just as well. In another month or two, this event will fade into the recesses of memory, and I can only hope that things will return to normal enough that it won't matter that I ever had a specific incident in mind. The words will hopefully stand on their own.
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On "Microagressions" and Continuing Gender Inequality

Given the nature of my blog, it is perhaps not surprising that, when I bring up issues related to gender inequality (which, naturally, tends to mean oppression of women. Although I fully acknowledge that it can happen to men, it would be disingenuous to suggest that oppression of men happens with anything like the same frequency or effect), I tend to discuss the topic predominantly in relation to the church. Yet it is obvious that these things happen in the rest of the world, as well. I was therefore intrigued by an article written by clinical psychiatrist Dr. Andrea Letamendi, written for The Mary Sue (a blog devoted to "Geek Girl Culture"), that touched on the other main focus of Transforming Seminarian, at least insofar as the Transformers fandom qualifies as part of "Geek Culture."
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White Flour: The Video

Five years ago, the city of Knoxville, Tennessee was the site of a most unusual demonstration. A group of white supremacists marched through the city, but (sadly) that wasn't what was unusual. The unusual part was the form of counter-protest staged in response.
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Batman and the Power of Wealth

I'm still recovering from a week-long vacation, but have been trying to keep up with what's going on in the outside world just a bit. Before the recent release of the new Batman movie, The Dark Knight Returns was overshadowed by the opening-night shooting that left a dozen people dead, and scores more injured, its coming was anticipated as an enjoyable escape from the realities of every day life.
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California and its Culinary Curiosities

My wife and I have been traveling along the California coast this past week. One of things we've been impressed by is just how much of this state is devoted to food. We passed through a region calling itself a "salad bowl," and a city proclaiming itself to be "the artichoke center of the world." We visited one city just before it could celebrate its garlic festival, and another on the edge of celebrating an olive festival. We regularly travel down highways that run parallel to cattle farms, and see various forms of grain and produce being grown, and often sold at small wooden roadside vendors. It is hard to escape the reality that food is a large part of California's identity.
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Badges of Honor

When I was in elementary school, I had a teacher who was fond of calling certain students "rednecks." Often, he would tell the student that they should "rub the back of (their) neck to get some of that red off!" Notwithstanding the fact that such an action could only serve to make a neck more red, rather than less, it seemed pretty clear to me, even at that time, that this teacher considered "redneck" to be a bad thing. In retrospect, I find myself amazed that he never seemed to get into trouble for these insults.

"Redneck" is not a term I'm comfortable using. I simply cannot think of that term as anything other than an insult.
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Money's Gotta Circulate!

For years and years, Scrooge McDuck—Donald Duck's uncle and well-established as "the richest duck in the world"—was strictly a comic book character. First introduced at the end of 1947, Scrooge didn't appear in animated form for twenty years (excepting a brief cameo in a crowd of characters as part of the opening of The Mickey Mouse Club in the '50s), until he was used in a 1967 educational short called Scrooge McDuck and Money. It took another 16 years after that for McDuck to to be used again, in 1983's Mickey's Christmas Carol. Finally, in 1987, McDuck showed up in Sport Goofy in Soccermania a few months before the beginning of DuckTales, after which McDuck was finally firmly established as a cartoon character, in addition to being a comic book icon.
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Majority Tools

Shortly after being elected to the office of Student Body President at my college, my Vice-President and I had a conversation with the Dean of Students about what was ahead for us in the coming academic year. Among other things, he suggested that we needed to guard against the "tyranny of the majority."

I have to confess, it wasn't until several years after I graduated that I really understood what that term meant. While I did have some concept for using my own judgment not to just follow along if it seemed like everyone else was doing something I knew was wrong, I nonetheless generally assumed that the best way to be fair to the most people was to do what the majority wanted.
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On Quarters, Coin-Operated Laundry, and Inequity

When I was a kid, and my friend and I would go to play video games, getting quarters with which to play was a minor challenge. Usually, the question was far more one of whether we had any money at all rather than one of making change, because at most venues where video games could be found, there were convenient change machines standing ready to convert our dollar bills into quarters we could pump into the games.

These days, I really don't play coin-operated video games anymore, but my need for quarters still exists. Only nowadays, I need quarters for a far more basic need: to do my laundry using the coin-operated units in my apartment complex. But getting quarters nowadays is much more of a challenge than it was back then:
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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.
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On Dealing with Bullies

Mark Driscoll is a bully.

I'm not unaware that to call someone a "bully" (and I'm not the first person to do so) is to resort to name-calling, and I'm not really a fan of conscious name-calling (not that I advocate for doing it unconsciously, so much as I recognize that—being human—I don't always realize when I've failed to uphold my own ideals). But I find that the only other word I can come up with to describe the man, based on what I've read of his own words and his interactions with other Christian leaders, is "thuggish," and that amounts to much the same thing.
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Success, Assurance, and the Sims Social

I've recently discovered the Sims Social on Facebook. It's hardly the first game, even on Facebook, that "simulates" a virtual world, but it certainly seems to be one of the more popular. Although this may seem like an obvious statement to some, it's perhaps an ironic one to others: a game that explicitly attempts to resemble (parts of) real life gets me thinking about real life in ways that I might not have thought about it without the simulation.
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Scot McKnight on Junia - Part 3

As I wind down my reflections on Scot McKnight's discussion on Junia last week, I recognize that the topic of Junia is one that generates a fair bit of discussion in academic circles. Having talked about Junia's place in the early church, and how other women in Biblical history have similarly had their contributions silenced and forgotten, it's appropriate to ask "so, what do we do about it?"
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Scot McKnight on Junia - Part 2

Having established the back-and-forth of Junia's history of gender-swapping and whether or not s/he was an apostle, Scot McKnight, speaking to an audience at Fuller Theological Seminary last week, suggested that Junia has been silenced by elements of the church. As I mentioned on Monday, the title of the lecture was "Junia is Not Alone in the Church." Junia is not the only woman of significance to the church, and Junia is not alone in having been silenced.
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When "Personal Responsibility" Crosses the Line

A couple of days ago, shortly after the Republican debate scheduled for that evening, I found the following statement on Twitter:

In the last two debates, the GOP debate audience has cheered: 1. 234 executions, 2. Letting uninsured people die

I was already aware of the incident that point #1 refers to, and found Bruce Reyes-Chow's commentary on that incident to be a more than sufficient response.  I chose not to throw in "my two cents" at that time, except to share that post via Twitter and Facebook.
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When Real is Just Shorthand for Rotten

I hear a lot about the need for "authenticity" these days.  We're told that modern generations (by which I mean not only my own, but especially those people younger than I am) value authenticity very highly, and are deeply suspicious of anything "inauthentic."  Now, obviously, no one, of any generation, claims to value "inauthencity," per se.  And, indeed, I wonder how much of our current push for "authenticity" isn't actually the positive thing that it sounds like at first.
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Identifying Racists and Scalpers

I've been noticing a disturbing trend in current American dialogue.  On one side, you have people who seem to cry "racism" at everything (recognizing that racist attitudes are far more prevalent and systemic than many seem to realize), and on the other side, you have folks who deny racism exists at all (except perhaps in the obvious KKK or Nazi caricature).

It's perhaps obvious that the truth of racism in our culture lies somewhere in the middle.  Most people who do, in fact, possess racist attitudes don't realize it, and are certainly unlikely to be donning the white robe or the swastika.  Even so, there are definitely times when it seems that people cry "racist!" just a little too quickly, and I can't help but wonder if the resentment caused by such outcry may actually be hardening hearts to the problem when things really do need to change.
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Godwin's Law and Osama bin Laden

If you've read or participated in any long-winding and contentious internet debates, you've probably seen Godwin's Law invoked.  For those who don't know what I'm talking about, the basic idea is this: "Eventually someone brings up Hitler or the Nazis."  Many groups have developed a corollary to this law, which is basically "whoever brings up Hitler loses the argument."
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The Monster at the End of This Blog

One of my favorite books as a kid (I confess that there were many books I would fit into this category) was The Monster at the End of this Book featuring (as the cover of the book itself puts it) “Lovable, Furry Old Grover.”  The book breaks the fourth wall, certainly figuratively and perhaps even literally.  Basically, upon realizing the book’s title, Grover tries every means imaginable to get the reader (that’s you!) to stop turning pages, lest you get to the end of the book and to the monster that threatens to be present there.  But, since all of Grover’s obstacles are merely illustrations on the page (rather than literal ropes tying the page down or brick walls impeding one’s progress), the reader turns each page effortlessly until the end of the book is reached, and Grover himself is revealed to be the only monster present.  The book has been so popular that it's spawned a sequel (almost identical to the original, but with added Elmo).
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