Rethinking The Church & Its Relationship to the Community

Nana Thoughts

nobody@vox.com(lovetheword) — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 10:09:36 -0700

I just have to brag a little this morning about my three oldest grandsons. David, age 12 is an awesome swimmer and yesterday he agreed to teach me to swim better. He is going to be an great personal trainer, and if he can teach me, he can teach anyone!

Riser boys

Daniel, age 18, is in Germany and then on to Austria to work at a castle being used as a pastor's retreat. He will be there until late August and then start his college classes when he returns. He is a wonderful young man.

This morning I received an e mail from my daughter forwarded from my 16 year old grandson Blake. He is on a mission trip to Panama:

Hello Mom,

I Have to make this quick because there are others wanting to send emails out at this little internet cafe in Panama. But I just wanted to let you and everyone know that the trip is going amazing! Panama is soo beautiful.

Many people have come to know the Lord through evangelizm and the discipleship is going great as well. Tommorow we are going to the Ngobe Tribe in the jungle. We are all really excited to see what the Lord is going to do. He has already done so many amazing things on this trip, I cant wait to tell you all when I get back.

I can’t wait to see you all when I get back!

Love,
Blake

This just reminds me that the most important investment we can make is in the lives of our children and grandchildren.

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Thoughts On Blogging

nobody@vox.com(lovetheword) — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 10:15:46 -0700

I have been looking through my personal journal over the past few months, since I have entered the world of blogging. Certainly it has been a blessing, far beyond anything I expected, and it has also been a challenge as I have interacted with those who oppose the message of God’s Word.

I thought I would share some of my entries in the hope that it may encourage other Christians to step out and share their faith. Some of these entries are direct from Scripture on a day when I needed it, and some are from writings by Oswald Chambers.

· Jeremiah 20:9 “His word was in my heart like a burning fire shut up in my bones. I was weary of holding it back and I could not.”

· 2 Timothy 1:2 “The gifts and calling of God are irrevocable.”

· Jeremiah 10:23 “O Lord, I know the way of man is not in himself; it is not in man who walks to direct his own steps.”

· Oswald Chambers – “There is no responsibility on you for the work; the only responsibility you have is to keep in living constant touch with God, and to see that you allow nothing to hinder your cooperation with Him.”

· Oswald Chambers – “God engineers everything; wherever He puts us our one great aim is to pour out our whole hearted devotion to Him in that particular work.”

· Oswald Chambers – “Spiritually we cannot measure our life by success, but only by what God pours through us; and we cannot measure that at all.”

· Acts 18:10 – The Lord said to Paul, “Dismiss your fears; go on speaking and do not give up, I am with you and no one shall attack you or injure you; for I have many people in this city.”

· Acts 11:23 – About Barnabas - “He encouraged them all to remain with fixed resolve, faithful to the Lord.”

· Acts 4:20b Weymouth – “As for us, what we have seen and heard we cannot help speaking about.”

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Christian mission and my story

nobody@vox.com(Butt Rock Ken) — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 17:37:33 -0700

Two weeks ago I spoke at a conference for Christian artists (kind of ...). I spoke about my journey in learning about what/who we are to be as the church and a few insights I've come to. It's a little bit disjointed, but I thought I'd share it here anyway. This is what I wrote down to go by, but I didn't present it word for word. At the moment, I added some things and left other things out, but these are still the basic ideas I put forth.

*******************************************************
About seven or eight years ago, I got really frustrated with the church and stopped going for a while. During this time a friend let me borrow a book called “The Post-Evangelical” which dealt with what it means to be a Christian in a postmodern world. That led me to read other books, listen to lectures, and attend conferences that were thinking along the same lines. At the time it was refreshing to hear some of the disconnect and dissatisfaction I had been feeling affirmed, but after a while I noticed that that was almost all of what it was doing. There was a lot of talk about how the traditional church had failed, but relatively little talk about what to do moving forward. Every book/lecture/conference seemed to have the same things to say, just in different ways.

I ended up coming across the writings of N.T. Wright, who is a first century historian and theologian. He has given me a much better perspective on who Jesus was (and is), what he accomplished, and what we're here to accomplish. Modernity had a metanarrative that assumed that modernity itself was the climax of humanity. Science would eventually break everything down into objective facts, and there would be no use for religion. The Christian establishment reacted to that by essentially taking the same approach to doctrine: the assumption was that we could eventually break the bible down into concise doctrines and timeless truths. Realizing that metanarrative to be false and seeing how it is used to gain (and abuse) power, postmodernity rejected it, and as a result became highly suspicious of all metanarratives. One frustration I've heard from Christians who are solidly grounded in modernity is that when they are trying to bring someone to Christ they hear something along the lines of “That may be true for you, but it's not for me.” The conclusion that Wright reaches is that our reaction should be to affirm the assertion of postmodernity that the metanarrative of modernity is, in fact, false. But the challenge is to realize that instead of throwing out all metanarratives, we are to recognize the true metanarrative, which is the story of God pursuing and eventually redeeming humanity through Jesus. In this metanarrative, the cross is the climax and the resurrection is the beginning of a new creation. Jesus died on a Friday. Was in the tomb on the Sabbath – the day God rested. And was raised on the first day of the week, signifying the beginning of the new creation. In one place N.T. Wright uses the analogy of Jesus as a composer writing a score and the Church as the orchestra (or whatever) that is to take that score and play it. In other words, we cannot accomplish what Jesus accomplished, but we are to implement the Kingdom of God that Jesus was announcing. Jesus' reply to Pilate that is so often translated “My kingdom is not of this world” is actually translated, perhaps more clearly, in the NRSV as “My kingdom is not from this world.”

So, these lines of though have been leading me to think more about how we can live out the mission that Jesus has called us to.

This approach to ministry calls for a radically different way of looking at things, let alone doing things. We need to read the bible as the story of God searching out humanity. In Jesus' parables of the lost sheep, lost coin, and eventually lost son (which most of us know as the parable of the prodigal son) is is always the God character who is doing the searching. We all know we need to think about the Church differently. The image that I keep coming across is the parable of the wheat and weeds. In this parable, the farmer sows good seed in his field, but an enemy sneaks in and sows weeds. The farmer's servant asks if he should pull up the weeds and the farmer says to let them grow up together and the harvesters will sort it out at the harvest. Statistically, the church is no different than the world at large. We have the same divorce rates, the same unwed pregnancy rates, the same rates of bankrupcy, etc.. So why do we try to pretend that we are, and separate ourselves from the rest of the world? We also need to change the way we think about people who aren't christians. Every human has the image of God within them. It's been distorted and covered by our sin, but it's still there. Our job is to find that image within others and help it to grow.

I'm still trying to figure out how these things work out in practice. The one thing I do know is that it will look very different in different contexts. Some may look like what we traditionally think of as church, others will look nothing like what we think of as church. We have to be okay with that.

I named my son Josiah, after the Old Testament king credited with restoring the Law of God and clearing the temple of idols and false Gods. Last night, I wrote down under “dreams” that I want to raise my children with these ideas. If we don't start changing things right now our children will have it so much harder than we ever have. That's a real motivating thing for me. I want to sow the seeds that my children can grow into something amazing.

“Christian mission in the postmodern world must be the means of the church grasping the initiative and enabling our world to turn the corner in the right direction.”
“The Challenge of Jesus” by N.T. Wright pg. 168

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the truth about cain and abel

nobody@vox.com(Nick) — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 14:02:12 -0700

Cain

Both men, you’ll remember, offer sacrifices to God. Cain’s is an offering of crops, whereas Abel offers a blood sacrifice. God likes Abel’s offering but rejects Cain’s. Cain, angry, kills Abel. Taken as a simple historical narrative, the story yields little. We don’t learn why God prefers flesh to fauna. God comes across as both bloodthirsty and ungrateful. The standard moral of the story? Don't kill your brother just because God doesn't like your prize-winning marrows.

It’s only when we begin to speculate about the wider significance of the story that things get interesting.

The anthropologist Rene Girard, for example, thinks that the story is about the original meaning and function of sacrifice, namely the channeling (and therefore the containment) of violence in human societies. As modern ethology has shown, thwarted violence always seeks a surrogate victim, and so in societies that (unlike ours) don’t have centralised, powerful, theoretically impartial judiciaries and police forces, acts of violence can lead to orgies of recrimination, intractable blood feuds, geometric escalations of bloodshed. Violence is like a plague, and in order to contain it, societies have treated those things associated with violence as taboo. Girard’s overwhelmingly powerful argument is that blood sacrifice, in all tribal societies throughout history, has served as a means by which communities’ pent-up violence can be discharged in a ritually contained manner. The positing of ‘gods’ as beneficiaries of the blood sacrifice essentially conceals the mundane functions of sacrifice from the community, and legitimises the operation.

For Girard, the Cain and Abel story – irrespective of whether it refers to an actual historical event – captures the whole meaning of the sacrificial system: Cain’s sacrifice does not involve violence, and so it does not absorb his animosity towards his brother. His murder of Abel somehow necessitates the formal institution of the violence-limiting sacrificial cult that becomes Hebrew religion, and which God ordains in order to create social order. (Note that God later claims to hate these sacrifices, which supports the view that sacrifices were a necessary evil.)

It could be that stories like that of Cain and Abel encapsulate seismic cultural shifts in microcosmic stories involving a small number of characters who may or may not have also been real historical people. When we try to force them (for non-biblically warranted reasons) to conform to a straightforwardly ‘historical’ model of truth, we rob them of their vast scope, just as we would if we argued that Jesus’s parables are all literally true. The irony is that a reading like Girard’s reveals the full historical significance of the bible passage rather than diminishes it. The story of Cain and Abel is (among many other things) the story of how Judaism – as a matter of historical fact – became, by necessity, and as an act of divine wisdom and mercy, a sacrificial religion.

Look at the story of Abraham and Isaac that Christopher Hitchens finds so morally revolting. God asks Abraham to kill his own child to prove his faithfulness. Isaac is then put through a hideous ordeal of thinking his own father is going to stab him to death. What's not to like about that? True, we can read this as an instructive example of someone putting God first and demonstrating faith. But look: how would we really feel if a faithful, sane Christian at our church turned up one Sunday and confided in a shaky voice that that God had asked him to stab his son to death? Would we urge him to be faithful? Would we even think it possible that the man was right in believing that God wanted him to do this? Heaven forbid! We would tie the guy to a pew and call the police.

What if, like the story of Cain and Abel, the story of Abraham and Isaac captures in capsule-form the truth (historical and otherwise) of a seismic shift in culture, a new stage in God’s relationship with humans? We know that many civilisations exalted human sacrifice over non-human sacrifice (even those that didn’t exalt human sacrifice have tended to ‘anthropomorphise’ the animals they sacrificed – see Girard again). What if the story of Abraham and Isaac describes the momentous revelation that came to the Jewish people, perhaps originally through a real man named Abraham, that the worthiness of a sacrifice depends not on what is killed, but on the inward, personal sacrifice made by the sacrificer? The story shows, in capsule form, the historic shift from a focus on the external form of worship to a focus on the internal motive - a shift that has developed throughout the history of the Jews. This was the momentous shift that served to preclude human sacrifice from Jewish religion.

We fundamentalists believe that all scriptural stories are rooted in real encounters between God and real humans: to affirm this is just to affirm the Judeo-Christian tradition. But the historic changes that occur on the basis of these cataclysmic encounters can be captured in capsule form without diminishing their historicity. It’s a matter of literary convention. We can argue for the truth – and yes, the infallibility or inerrancy – of the bible without acting as though it’s nothing but straight reportage.

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lunchbreak musings: seekers' solidarity

nobody@vox.com(Nick) — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 04:40:04 -0700

Before the internet

All this online pugilism between Christians of different stripes! All these forum fencing-matches about free will and predestination and law and grace and evolution and intelligent design and miracles! All these arguments that might never have arisen if the Good Lord had produced for us a clearer bible, one that really spelled things out! A catechism, rather than a collection of stories, poems, genealogies, aphorisms...

Why are we so often angry at each other and so seldom irked at God?

Here's something to think about next time you see an online argument between a Christian who believes in miracles and one who believes that miracles belonged to the time of the apostles (ie a cessationist):

The cessationist has at some point prayed really, really hard for a miracle - and got diddly squat. The cessationist is some guy whose cancer didn't go away, or whose daughter died, or whose wife left, you name it. And instead of hating God, our cessationist friend has changed theological positions to make room for a God who didn't come through for him in any clear way.

Want to tell him to believe in miracles? Good luck! But don't rant hatefully at him - he may not be the dogmatist you think he is.

In every theological argument, you'll find at least two people who are trying so damned hard to be charitable towards God that they sometimes forget to be charitable towards each other. But God is sturdy enough to take human anger on the chin. Humans, on the other hand, break.

That person who believes in election? The person who believes in free will? Scrapping like hoods on some internet discussion board? God could have spoken decisively on this issue, and God didn't. Or maybe God did speak, through the Church of Rome - in which case, God should have done a whole lot more to preserve the unity of the church. And don't tell me that the bible is clear on these issues. There are very brainy and very holy people on both sides of every controversy.

By all means adopt the atheist solution to the problem and deny that God exists. But if you're averse to that move, let's not despise each other over issues on which God has not spoken loudly enough. We're in the same boat.

One thing binds us all together: we live in a more or less silent universe. Let's admit it! It's probably more silent than religious people say it is, and less silent than atheists say it is: but it is a universe in which someone can cry out to an invisible God and not receive any reply. It's a universe in which someone else always seems to be experiencing the miracles, and in which cries of 'It's a miracle!' sometimes seem obscene in the face of so many unanswered prayers. As Sheri put it recently on her blog, 'Do you really believe the Sudanese don't pray?'

In the face of this divine silence, we can never be anything more than co-seekers, and this should give us solidarity.

This seekers' solidarity should be the basis of every discussion about doctrine. Moreover, it should be the basis of our communion with each other. We should always be willing to at least imagine what might crouch behind the arras of a person's theological position, the stories behind the convictions. We should declare at the beginning of each exchange: We are on the same side. Let's end this exchange having gained an even greater sense of solidarity, irrespective of whether we move closer to an actual agreement. It's worth a try, isn't it?

Maybe if we achieved real solidarity in the face of God's silence, we'd discover that the possiblity of creating solidarity is why God opted to refuse to arbitrate on so many issues in the first place.

Maybe God's silence is a necessary condition of human solidarity. Maybe the compassion we might feel towards our fellow seekers is the thing that we, as seekers, are supposed to find.

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"The Investment"

nobody@vox.com(Butt Rock Ken) — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 10:42:25 -0700

"In his poem 'The Investment,' Robert Frost sketches a quaint scene of people trying to escape the reality of the hardscrabble life of potato farming. Depending on which way you look at the poem, it is either a testament to human folly or a triumph of the human spirit. Set in a potato field, it concerns a community of struggling farmers, 'where they speak of life as staying' (instead of living). Life is tough. One family has reacted against their lot and defied the landscape of endless bleak, brown hills by painting their old house brightly and installing the luxury of a piano. It's not difficult to picture this freshly painted shack in the fields of ploughed hills. In this otherwise barren, silent vista you can almost hear the honky-tonk sounds of a parlor piano.

"Out in the fields, a farmer, freezing as he digs in the cold soil, hears the music and looks back to the brightly colored home. He wonders to himself who lives there and why they waste their money on indulgences like a piano and new paint ('Was it some money suddenly come into?/Or some extravagance young love had been to?') But it is his third possible explanation that is left ringing in our ears as the poem ends:

Or old love on an impulse not to care -
Not to sink under being man and wife,
But get some color and music out of life.

"The metaphor of an old couple surrounded by desolate potato fields, splashing their home with color and filling their parlor with music is a powerful one. Either it represents sheer foolhardiness, a desperate denial of the facts of life - wastefulness in the face of great need - or it celebrates life and joy against the debilitation forces of stagnation and hunger. A man and woman refuse to sink under the forces that reduce them to being just a man and wife struggling to survive.

'For us it is a great metaphor of the church. And as with all of Robert Frost's best work, the poem (and the metaphor) speaks in several ways. First, the church might accurately be seen as a painted-over, old dilapidated shack in the middle of barren fields. Its once grand and powerful splendor now faded, it looks silly in the barrenness and faithlessness that surrounds it. Its color an music seem wasteful, anachronistic, and even obstinate in the face of a world of fading dreams. We can't reapply the same colors or play our pianos a little louder. Rather the house needs a complete overhaul.

"But on the other hand, the metaphor works as a symbol of what the church might become. As Robert Frost says of the farmer in the field:

Out in the ploughed ground in the cold a digger,
Among the unearthed potatoes standing still,
Was counting winter dinners, one a hill,
With half an ear to the piano's vigor

"The farmer's chief concern is survival. He's counting winter dinners while giving half an ear to the enthusiastic playing. In the midst of the cold, brown plots a house full of color and music that rages against the prevailing culture of sandness and uncertainty is just what the church should be.

"We recently saw the covor of a book about reinventing the church that's an icon of just what we think is wrong with the post-Christendom church. It depicts a classic church building, replete with a tall steeple, long stained glass windows, and a white picket fence. Leaning over the building from behind is a giant man in a white, long-sleeved shirt and tie (we think he's meant to be a minister - very clean cut) and a gigantic wrench in his hand. He is tightening a huge bolt on the front of the steeple. When we talk about reinventing the church, too many people assume it's as simple as tightening a bolt here, oiling a hinge there, slapping on a new coat of paint. But we are proposing a monumental change to the way we think about being and doing church.

"All the tinkering with the existing model of church that's going on will not save the day. Simply making minor adjustments like replacing pews with more comfortable seating, or singing contemporary pop songs instead of hymns will not reverse the fundamental decline in the fortunes of the Western chruch. If you think of the church as a car, we cannot simply take it in for service. We need a whole new model. Or think of a chruch as a VCR. If you have newer DVDs, you can't play them on your old VCR - you need an entirely different device."

from The Shaping of Things to Come by Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch

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Wells and Fences

nobody@vox.com(Butt Rock Ken) — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 13:34:59 -0700

"It is important ... to distinguish between centered sets and bounded sets .... The attractional church is a bounded set. That is, it is a set of people clearly marked off from those who do not belong to it. Churches thus mark themselves in a variety of ways. Having a church membership roll is an obvious one. This mechanism determines who's in and who's out. The missional-incarnational church, though, is a centered set. This means that rather than drawing a border to determine who belongs and who doesn't, a centered set is defined by its core values, and people are not seen as in or out, but as closer or further away from the center. In that sense, everyone is in and no one is out. Though some people are close to the center and others far from it, everyone is potentially part of the community in its broadest sense.

"A useful illustration is to think of the difference between wells and fences. In some farming communities, the farmer might build fences around their properties to keep their livestock in and the livestock of neighboring farms out. This is a bounded set. But in rural communities where farms or ranches cover an enormous geographic area, fencing the property is out of the question. In our home of Australia, ranches (called stations) are so vast that fences are superfluous. Under these conditions a farmer has to sink a bore and create a well, a precious water supply in the Outback. It is assumed that livestock, though they will stray, will never roam too far from the well, lest they die. This is a centered set. As long as there is a supply of clean water, the livestock will remain close by.

"Churches that see themselves as a centered set recognize that the gospel is so precious, so refreshing that, like a well in the Australian Outback, lovers of Christ will not stray too far from it. It is then a truly Christ-centered model. Rather than seeing people as Christian or non-Christian, as in or out, we would see people by their degree of distance from the center, Christ. In this way, the missional-incarnational church sees people as Christian and not-yet-Christian. It acknowledges the contribution of all people."
-Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch in "The Shaping of Things to Come"

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Wheat and Weeds

nobody@vox.com(Butt Rock Ken) — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 13:21:50 -0700

This is something I wrote for my wife's blog. I decided to go ahead and post it here, too.

****************************************

Jesus told them another parable: "The kingdom of heaven is like a man who sowed good seed in his field. But while everyone was sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and went away. When the wheat sprouted and formed heads, then the weeds also appeared.

"The owner's servants came to him and said, 'Sir, didn't you sow good seed in your field? Where then did the weeds come from?'

" 'An enemy did this,' he replied.

"The servants asked him, 'Do you want us to go and pull them up?'

" 'No,' he answered, 'because while you are pulling the weeds, you may root up the wheat with them. 30Let both grow together until the harvest. At that time I will tell the harvesters: First collect the weeds and tie them in bundles to be burned; then gather the wheat and bring it into my barn.' "

Then he left the crowd and went into the house. His disciples came to him and said, "Explain to us the parable of the weeds in the field."

He answered, "The one who sowed the good seed is the Son of Man. The field is the world, and the good seed stands for the sons of the kingdom. The weeds are the sons of the evil one, and the enemy who sows them is the devil. The harvest is the end of the age, and the harvesters are angels.

"As the weeds are pulled up and burned in the fire, so it will be at the end of the age. 41The Son of Man will send out his angels, and they will weed out of his kingdom everything that causes sin and all who do evil. They will throw them into the fiery furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father. He who has ears, let him hear.

-Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43

In the parable above, the wheat is growing up with the weeds. The owner tells the servant not to pull the weeds up because they may root up the wheat with them. When we exclude these people with overt, outward sins from the church we risk rooting up good wheat because of the weeds growing up with them. We all have our weeds. Some are just more outward and obvious than others. How horrible would it be to root up and destroy someone who may end up becoming a powerful force for Christ in the world just because they were homosexual, a teenage mother, divorced, or have any number of other outward sins?

There was an unmarried couple who were living together attending the church of a friend of mine. The pastor struggled throughout the premarital counseling process with wanting to approach the couple about their living situation, but felt God saying that he shouldn't. It turns out that the man in the relationship had decided that if the pastor said anything about them living together he was done with the church. About two weeks before the wedding the couple felt convicted about their living/sexual situation and they chose to live separately until the wedding. Now they are both very committed Christians and very involved in that church. If the pastor would have confronted them they would have either never gone to church again or not gone for a long time (never underestimate God's ability to find people!).

Excluding these people from the church betrays a real lack of faith and trust in God. It's a way to retain control while acting pious and "holy." We need to repent of trying to retain that control instead of giving all of ourselves to God.

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a visit to my old neighborhood

nobody@vox.com(Nick) — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 13:32:45 -0700

Fellow Nick Drake fan Scott Small over on Not In Me has been so kind (or imprudent) as to let me post some reflections on heaven and suburbia on his upliftingly lovely blog There's Treasure Everywhere. If you're feeling whimsical please do pop over and give it a read, as well as the other posts there, and grace us with your thoughts!

Ta,

Nick.

click here for a visit to my old neighborhood

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A Good Morning?

nobody@vox.com(Christianity in the Raw) — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 19:57:51 -0700

I woke up early today to drop by and borrow a pick-up. God, i hate mornings. The mother of all oxymorons: "good morning." The Wife and i went and cleared out a load of furniture and cleared out 2/3 of our stuff from our landlord's garage. In between, she went to the orthodontist and i went and picked up my new pair of glasses. The Wife says they look good, a kind of hip 50s retro vibe, which probably means i look a lot like my old man and his 50s pair of Buddy Holly classics.... except now they're "hip." Sigh. Oh well -- she is the one who has to look at me, right?

The one thing we are good at we did to perfection this morning: we took a task that could have been challenging and fun and turned it into pure misery. Did i mention what i thought the term "good morning" was? THAT was fun, altho we were both apologizing for our actions and words pretty quick afterwards, so that we have that going for us.

The Wife went to work later in the afternoon for a few hours, and i stayed home and literally vegged in front of my computer. I went onto Craig's list and found a couple of people trying to get rid of a couple of G4 mac ibooks for $325. There were pictures, and they looked like they were well cared for.

I don't know if its just me, but has anyone else noticed that its pretty easy to hit a pornography website by mistake? That they are that omnipresent on the internet?

I gotta admit that i didn't hang around, but it was only because i wasn't all that tempted. My weakness has never been Playboy or Hustler and all that inauthentic airbrushed T&A, but Penthouse's letters. I'm a sucker for narrative, and an occasionally unsanctified and vivid imagination. I get offended that these sites seem to think men are just that hangdog stupid as to be fascinated by obviously doctored pictures..... oh, yeah. Oops.

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America

The Wife had ordered a table, so she spent the night putting the thing together. I went out and had a rousing discussion at the coffee shop among all the hip Northeastern Progressive coffee snobs on authority and government and if private property is, in fact, an unalienable right. My friends each had a different opinion. N was for the redistribution of wealth and felt God, because of Jubilee, did not consider private property the way John Locke did about the subject. My other friend S was basically Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, and argued that both freedom and liberty actually depend upon the concept of private ownership (he even thinks the government shouldn't own any public lands, like say Yellowstone National Park). I argued that the Church was a political entity in and of its self, with a unique set of economics and governance (although i agreed with S that private ownership is the foundation for our modern concept of government). It was an interesting discussion of Capitalism, Socialism, and theocratic monarchy. In other words, it was three friends bullshitting a summer's night away. We finished reading our book, The Black Swan, and are set to begin reading The Metaphysical Club for next Monday. You know fun was had if Thomas Jefferson, Foucault, King David, and Rodney Clapp was mentioned in off-hand ways.

I came home to take out the trash and get ready for bed -- the car is fucked up again. One of the car-eating potholes here in Amherst rattled the exhaust loose from the front and sounds like a Russian T-34 on the attack at Kursk. I have to have the riceburner in by 8:00 AM in the morning. Till i hit the hay i got a good deal on Wings:Season 6, so i have been watching an episode here and there...

God have mercy on the person who wishes me a "good morning" tomorrow morning.

Ruination Day (Part 2)-Gillian Welsh

Wings - The Sixth Season

Train In Vain-The Clash
Winters Come And Gone-Gillian Welsh
To Have And Have Not-Billy Bragg
Blue Side Of The Mountain-SteelDrivers
Blackhawk-Emmylou Harris
Like A Hurricane(Live)-Neil Young
China Grove-Doobie Brothers
Down There By The Train-Johnny Cash
Little Rain-Jimmy Reed

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