From New York Times:
"Gary Chang, a Hong Kong architect, lives in a tiny apartment, but thanks to accordion-like wall units, he can create at least 24 different room configurations."
link and photos
ht: Matt
Welcome! You have accidentally reached the blog of a heteroclite follower of Jesus: dave wainscott. I'm "pushing toward the unobvious" as I post thinkings/linkings re: Scripture, church and culture. Hot topics include: temple tantrums, time travel, sexuality/spirituality, U2kklesia, role of the pastor, God-haunted music/art..and subversive videos like these.
I submit these words because I rarely hear them used in a remotely accurate way (that is, used as a way that is grounded in their foundational meaning as used in the Bible).
WORD//MISUSE//USED TO MEAN
church//building, organization//gathering of friends
worship//religious concert & lecture//a life poured out, as a sacrifice
saved//guilt free pass//salvaged and put back to hard work
truth//proposition, world view//a person--Jesus
christian//religious conservative//one who loves & suffers like Jesus
preach//religious lecture//announce on the street
ministry//professional religious program//serving like a slave
apostle//spiritual superstar//expendable messenger
prophet//dead, lacking diplomacy//listens to God
pastor//religious CEO//smelly sheep tender
love//feeling or mood//sacrificial, tender care acted out
Link,
Sometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter—a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, to be precise. His vision was failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a page had become exhausting and painful, often bringing on crushing headaches. He had been forced to curtail his writing, and he feared that he would soon have to give it up. The typewriter rescued him, at least for a time. Once he had mastered touch-typing, he was able to write with his eyes closed, using only the tips of his fingers. Words could once again flow from his mind to the page.
But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. One of Nietzsche’s friends, a composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing. His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic. “Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom,” the friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work, his “‘thoughts’ in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper.”
“You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.” Under the sway of the machine, writes the German media scholar Friedrich A. Kittler , Nietzsche’s prose “changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.”..
-link, Nietzche and Gear Lust
Ty and I are looking through the stacks of Thank-You cards and he tosses me one that has me doing a double-take. There printed on the front is a quote that makes my head spin: "May the Lord repay you for what you have done." I wouldn't send that one to anyone other than an enemy. I would be quaking in my boots if I received that card in the mail. Everything I've done is deserving of death. I don't want the Lord repaying me for that.
-Walt Mueller
In The Post-American World (published some months before the Wall Street meltdown), Fareed Zakaria argued that modern history’s third great power shift was already upon us—the rise of the West in the 15th century and the rise of America in the 19th century being the two previous sea changes. But Zakaria added that this transition is defined less by American decline than by “the rise of the rest.” We’re to look forward to a world economy, he wrote, “defined and directed from many places and by many peoples.”by Richard Florida, How the Crash Will Reshape America
Hat tip:Len
"On previous albums, Bono brazenly beseeched listeners to fall to their knees, but on tracks this potent, he doesn't have to ask - the impulse is instinctual..
'Let me in the sound!' Bono shouts...and it's no empty slogan - it's an order."
-Joe Bosso, Music Radar
"U2 have broken away from safety to offer us something prophetic..
Latterly, they have been about a Proustian rampage through the debris of a music that happens too quickly for clarity, excavating pieces that seemed like they might have contained something more than they revealed first time around. In these tracks, you keep hearing snatches of elusive allusiveness that take you to a deeper level of memory, but in a way that suggests redemption rather than repetition...
...one leg in a future as exciting as anything they have hitherto allowed us to glimpse. If, as we have previously noted, music is prophetic as to the drift of wider reality, then this album may be the most hopeful thing you will hear all year."
-John Waters, Irish Times
"But while I´m getting over certainty/Stop helping God across the road like a little old lady." ("Stand Up Comedy")
" Two souls too smart to be in the realm of certainty"
("Moment of Surrender")
-We walk by faith,
and not by sight;
so certainly this is not certainty. 2 Cor 5.17
-Abraham left home, completely clueless about where he was going;
knowing why he was going was enough. Heb 11.8
...What IS celebrated perhaps by the underworld is your insistence on getting so stuck on arguing with Why?, you never ask yourself the other, oft forgotten, but hugely important question: How? And while answering Why? is usually considered the gateway to the secret of life, I’d like to vote for How?. Because how you respond to life’s immense cause and effect scenarios is where you actually find meaning. Why? is a question that leads to ends that are beyond our understanding (why is God love?) How? has answers that have either come before you, or are created by your attempt to actually ‘do’ something. And your responses to How? can actually have a positive impact on future events....
-Andy Prickett, "Why Ask Why?"
"I'm not certain about much. I woke up today feeling the ridiculousness of believing in an invisible partner to fashion myself after and follow. This whole idea of religions seems rather foolish. Why not live my own life my way? Prayer seems like one step removed from the delusion of talking to your self. The whole idea of church struck me as rather cult-ish. So why do it? Why put myself through all of the mental anguish that comes with faith? If I don’t want to come at this from a ‘yay! I’m down with Jesus’ perspective, what am I left with?'
-Maurice Broaddus
Thus everything is assumed to be in order with regard to the Holy Scriptures--what then? has the person who did not believe come a single stop closer to faith? No, not a single step. Faith does not result from straightforward scholarly deliberation, nor does it come directly; on the contrary, in this objectivity one loses that infinite, personal, impassioned interestedness, which is the condition of faith, the ubique et nusquam [everywhere and nowhere] in which faith can come into existence.
Has the person who did believe gained anything with regard to the power and strength of faith? No, not in the least; in this prolix knowledge, in this certainty that lurks at faith's door and craves for it, he is rather in such a precarious position that much effort, much fear and trembling will indeed be needed lest he fall into temptation and confuse knowledge with faith. Where as up to now faith has had a beneficial taskmaster in uncertainty, it would have its worst enemy in this certainty. This is, if passion is taken away, faith no longer exists, and certainty and passion do not hitch up as a team.
-Soren Kierkegaard,
Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments
lifted from Tommy's blog
You send your "25 Random Things" chain-letter-style to 25 friends, and they fill it out and tag 25 others, and ...
And soon Facebook — a virtual living room where people hang out and tell everyone else what they're doing and thinking — is awash with personal revelations, admissions, info once kept private.
Facebook turned five Feb. 4. Sometime in mid-January, "25 Random Things" became a wildfire fad there.
Many have called Web lists such as "25 Random Things" "narcissism...But Facebook users and experts are saying: not so fast
This all reminded me of Earl Crep's thoughts on public/private space, and my experience being
Of course, ego is involved. But "25 Random Things" is a product of the information age. And that age is simply different from what went before.If they are right, "25 Random Things" reveals a decisive shift in our society, and there's no going back. Many of us — younger, mostly — take a distinctive view of private and public, in which a permanent, always-connected audience trades personal, even intimate, information as part of having friends and being social. That hyperconnected life is here to stay. Call this narcissism, but it might be that the train left and you weren't on it. link
"'Let me in the sound'" is a repeated lyrical motif .. The theme of the album is surrender." - Neil McCormick
"I think the thing that could transform the gift of prophecy
I was speeding on the subway
Through the stations of the cross
"The Anabaptist churches {of the 1500s} discerned and sent out many apostles. The designation 'apostles' was deliberately chosen for those who were sent out in apostolic teams...the Anabaptist apostolate took on new shape and form..
and we, too, must view with equal significance the ethical teaching of the Sermon on the Mount and the 'magna charta' of the Great Commision.
..The Anabaptists retained the New Testament concept of apostle and applied it to their own missionaries. In fact, they considered the apostolic band of a Paul and Barnabas to be a legitimate model"
(59, 69)
If the past is any predictor for the future, the future of cards is very clear: there won't be any of them, and we'll be using our mobile phones as a mass market payment mechanism before 2012.
I was reading a little on the relationship between the Reformation and capitalism, but not enough to speak fluently and with accuracy. It was interesting to see the Reformer's attitude towards "avarice" and debt and how churches would punish the money lenders for usury that went above acceptable levels - levels that we have seen recently. The church has not had much of a voice in the events leading to this recession [and many churches have bought into it] but maybe the church will speak wisdom into our currently circumstances and offer a way out that is not reliant on more debt, more buying, and more greed.
link
our idealization of spiritual leaders establishes a fertile environment for the kind of duplicity, deceit and denial (sorry for the alliteration) shown by Ted in the unravelling of his professional life as a pastor. In churches like Ted’s and mine, too often repentance of sin is marked solely by an altar call or a baptism, a “come to Jesus moment” after which the race looks more like image management than the life integration suggested by the gospels and epistles. What if we expected our church leaders to be
honest instead of perfect
servants instead of rulers
friends instead of managers
coaches instead of performers?
It might not make for good TV, but it may just change the atmosphere in our communities.
link
"I regret that I never really helped my people find their place in the Body of Christ. I tried, but inadequately. At a certain point in the church year my congregations had their financial campaigns, during which members pledged their monetary support for the coming year. In time, we came to include in the financial appeal a second pledge form in which people were asked to indicate how they would like to use their gifts in the church: Teach Sunday School? Usher and greet? Sing in the choir or play a musical instrument? Serve on a committee?
(I remember the little gallows humor: 'I went to church to find Christ, and they appointed me to a committee.')
-Ellsworth Kallas, "On the Journey," The Asbury Herald ,Winter 2009, p.13
(emphasis mine)
The crucial change brought about in the everyday life of Catholics by Vatican II was the dropping of the Tridentine or "Latin" Mass and its replacement by services in the vernacular. The crucial change brought about in the relationship of Catholics to non-Catholics by Vatican II was the abandonment by the church of the charge of "deicide" against the Jewish people as a whole: in other words, the dropping of the allegation that the Jews bore a historic and collective responsibility for the torture and murder of Jesus. The two changes, perhaps unfortunately, were and are related. The old Latin form of the Mass included a specific Good Friday prayer for the conversion of the Jews, who were in some versions of the ritual described as "perfidious."
The Pope's Denial Problem
By Christopher Hitchens
"When I began reading physics texts on my own...(I learned) that the top quark is that last elusive piece of matter....But (now we read) that the top quark may itself be composed of still smaller pieces of unnamed matter that are so small they have no position in time and space.
We live in an ocean of energy. Life is energy. God is pure creative energy...You and I are an emergent human form of organized energy, the mattering of God's Spirit.
Music does more than to experience God as spirit as we experience life as spirit.
Music is more accurately the essence of who we are as human beings created in the image of God.
If the most elemental and elementary aspect of life is energy that vibrates, then life is at base music.For anything that vibrates give off sound. Sound is a function of vibration, of resonance...Everything that is has sound rhythm-from whales and octupi to supernovas and quasars.Cosmic vibration are everywhere. From cells to our cellular phones, from snowflakes to supernovas, everything emits vibrations, sounds to feed or famish the soul.You and I are at base sound-a human organization of dancing energy. You and I are at base a song. There is not an atom in our body that is not singing a song. The vibrations and resonance
that go on at the atomic level rveal that our entire body was created to hear-burst into song..There is no one who isn't musical."