The OOC

Doh, I thought I was going to get to be the one to break the 6 week silence here. Darn that Joel Keen for posting about Star Wars before I had a chance! Now I’ll have to comment on that post too. Oh well, I’ll still throw out a couple of thoughts I had while avoiding work…

First of all, Go Cards!

Secondly, (believe it or not I have more on my little mind than baseball) I thought I’d bring up how great the retreat was a couple of weeks ago. The Nelson family had a wonderful time getting to know several people better and spending time at a really terrific place – even got to smoke a pipe around the campfire with some fellow pipe smokers! Truly community building and fun. Which brings me to this:

T.S. Eliot wrote in Choruses from the Rock:

What life have you, if you have not life together?
There is not life that is not in community,
And no community not lived in praise of GOD.

This is a quote that has been banging around in the back of my head for about the past 10 years. The community that is Old Orchard Church is truly a blessing. Sure, we are broken and twisted and in many ways I’m sure we fail one another, but we are also a little spot of light doing our best to love one another as Christ has loved us.

Now before I get too mushy and cheesy; anybody out here have thoughts on what it looks like to be a community when many of us don’t live close enough to actually get together on a regular basis? I know this is something that gets hashed around quite a bit in Christendom, but I’m curious if anyone as any particular thoughts as it’s something that is often on my mind.

STLtoday – Entertainment – Movies

The P-D had this review about the last installment of the “Star Wars” hex-ilogy. I’ve never been a fan of these films (I actually never saw any of the original three in their entirety until they were re-released before the first of the prequel movies), but this seems to sum up what I’ve expierenced of all of them.

Any other thoughts about this series? Any ruffled feathers?

Hey, I hope everyone is enjoying the first week of Baseball. We are having perfect opening week weather. Go Cards.

If you need some springtime reading to supplement “Baseball Tonight” One of my favorite works of fiction, “The Brothers K” by David James Duncan might fit the bill. Here is a link to a great review of the book at Ransom Fellowship.

Since we at the Orchard have been slowing increasing our repertoire of Indelible Grace hymns during worship, I figured the following links to new music from friends of IG (from the latest IG mailing) might interest you:

• Jars of Clay – REDEMPTION SONGS
• Christopher Miner – ALL GOOD THINGS COME FROM THE DESERT
• St. Pat’s – THINE ALL THE MERITS: Celtic/classically-tinged worship produced by IG alum Blayne Chastain.
• Red Mountain Music – THE GADSBY PROJECT: Birmingham folks release third project with no signs of slowing down.

The Jars of Clay (popularly known for “Flood”) site is nice because it has streaming audio of their album (which is mostly well-done covers of IG tunes) and allows you to select tracks yourself. OOCers will recognize track 11. Also, listen to the funkified version of “It Is Well” and the unique take on “Nothing But the Blood.”

Insightful article on why “American Idol” is refreshingly judgmental in today’s WSJ Taste page:

Ostensibly the whole point of “American Idol” is to watch a field of amateur singers get whittled down from the initial thousands of contestants to the current cast of 10, and then to see them voted off one by one until at last we come to the real-life American Idol. … But none of this accounts for the massive appeal of the show, which is just a high-stakes karaoke contest. The real draw, I suspect, is the judges, each of whom acts as a kind of stand-in for a moral idea–a theory of justice, if you will–at work in America today.

Even if you don’t watch it, you’ll appreciate the article, I think.

TheStar.com – Why Schiavo case worries the disabled

This is an interesting article from (of all places) Canada. Read it and comment away.

Christian Right. Conservative. Liberal. Closed Minded. Open Minded. All are terms used in newspaper articles referenced in a few of the posts below. We all get upset at the labels, either because they are unfair or most commonly because they are a sign of intellectual laziness.

Labels are used from professors to common folk to sterotype a group of people. Often they are used pejoratively. “That lousy liberal neighbor of mine!” or “She is soooooooo closed minded.”

Labels are used in order to easily and simply describe whatever group of people one decides to label. Using a single word is of course the easiet way to place a label. However, it often misses the mark.

Most people would say I am a conservative. I am a Christian, I tend to vote Republican, I am pro life, etc. Oh wait, those three add up to being…part of the Christian Right! Which I suppose is a subset of the conservative label. But what about the following: Except on the essentials of the Christian Faith, I do not associate myself with either Robertson or Falwell and actually cringe when I hear them speak; I can be constructively critical of President Bush; I listen to The Clash and some of that other very very bad anti-establishment music; I believe its ok to dance though I myself should not actually enter the dance floor; I believe it is ok to drink alcohol, though I myself have never had the penchant for it cept for the occasional glass of wine.

So. What am I?

No labels gets my dander up like Closed Minded/Open Minded though. A close examination reveals that really what is being labled is not how people use their minds but labeling a certain set of convictions. If you smoke pot, your open minded. If you dont, your closed minded. Correct me if I am wrong, but what if I decided to seriously look at the issue of pot smoking. I went to the library and checked out several books. I even looked at the last few months of Pot Smokers Weekly. In my intellectual pursuit and sound use of my mind, I concluded that pot smoking was wrong. Not just wrong for me (gag at the relativism), but wrong period. So does my conclusion mean I am Closed Minded simply because I came to a different conviction then pot smoking people? I believe my intellectual exercise shows that I used my mind openly.

What gets me is that “Open Minded” people criticize “Closed Minded” people for being superior, etc. But are they not saying that “Open Mindedness” (remember, its real the convictions being the label here) is far better than “Closed Mindedness”? Who has the superiority complex here?

People who are “Open Minded” have just as strong CONVICTIONS as people who are supposedly “Closed Minded”. Why arent they open minded enough to consider changing their convictions?

I can say more, but I need to rest my “closed minded” mind from engaging in the open minded task of loving God with all my intellect (i.e. mind).

I’ve been away from the blog for a bit and just read the numerous posts about the Terri Schiavo case and I wanted to weigh in. Paul wrote, “All this comes back to whether we have a Right to Die or a Right to Live. Depending on which one a culture decides to emphasize will make all the difference in the world.” It is interesting to me, that criminals actually are protected in the Bill of Rights (Article V), whereas Terri Schiavo is not. An interesting article about how Peter Singer reacted; when faced with this decision about his mother, he chose to keep her alive and let “nature” take its course. How much longer must we listen to his banter, when he, himself does not believe it?

I read the following tidbit on Best of the Web Today:

Be Diverse, Ignore God
The Princeton Review publishes a college guide, and its Web site lists the various criteria on which it ranks the 357 campuses included. One of them is “demographics,” which is based on comparisons in four criteria:

Diversity University	Monochromatic Institute
Lots of Race/Class Interaction	Little Race/Class Interaction
Diverse Student Population	Homogeneous Student Population
Students Ignore God on a Regular Basis	Students Pray on a Regular Basis
Gay Community Accepted	Alternative Lifestyles Not An Alternative

We have no quarrel with the first, second and fourth of these criteria, but the third one is quite astonishing. If you “ignore God on a regular basis,” you’re “diverse,” whereas if you “pray on a regular basis,” you’re “monochromatic”? What if you pray in a black church, or pray for a more diverse campus?

I checked out the Princeton Review’s site, just to see what schools qualified as “diversity university” and “monochromatic institute” (I suppose if you’re monochomatic, you can’t be considered a “university”) in the God category.

The top five “closed-minded” campuses:

1. Brigham Young University
2. Wheaton College (sorry Seth and Jon E.)
3. Grove City College
4. University of Dallas
5. Samford University (sorry, Jen S.)

And the “broad-minded” schools:

1. Reed College
2. Lewis & Clark College
3. Marlboro College
4. Eugene Lang College
5. Hampshire College

Incidentally, Grove City College and Wheaton also show up in the “Alternative Lifestyles Not An Alternative” top five, while Eugene Lang is tops in the “Gay Community Accepted.” Perhaps not so incidentally, Lewis & Clark and Hampshire appear on the fun-sounding “Reefer Madness” chart in the “Party School” section of the Review. Then again, doesn’t everyone know that open-minded, “diverse” people smoke pot? Or does pot help you “ignore God on a regular basis”?

Yahoo! News – U.S. Court Rejects Appeal in Brain-Damage Case:

Here’s an excerpt from this article:

“Schiavo’s feeding tube was removed on Friday under a state court order. In an emotional right-to-die case that has galvanized the Christian right, the Republican-led U.S. Congress raced over the weekend to pass a special bill to allow her parents to take the case to federal court.”

It’s galvanized the “Christian Right?” It would be more accurate to say that it’s polarized the country. In my dentist’s waiting room I overheard a mother and daughter talking about this story, and while I don’t know if they were from the “Christian Right,” They were talking about the tragedy of the case. The daughter commented that withholding food and water seemed cruel.

This is something that the entire country is talking about, and I suspect that lawmakers from both sides of the aisle voted for this legislation.

It just angers me a bit to see this kind of bias when the facts of this story are compelling enough.