"10 Pious People Who Defy Common Religious Stereotypes"

If anything on this list grabs your attention, click here for the article and videos

• Nuns With Guns
• Miss Muslimah, The Islamic Equivalent Of Miss World
• Muslim Punk Rockers
• Neon Trees, The All-Mormon Rock Band With A Gay Lead Singer
• New Zealand’s Comically Irreverent St. Matthew-In-The-City Church
• JC’s Girls Stripper Outreach Ministry
• Alysa Stanton, America’s First Black Female Rabbi
• Christians Fight Ministries
• Yossi Eilfort, The Martial Arts Rabbi
• Father Gofo, The Rock-And-Roll Priest

A sleuthing search engine that's better than the real thing (Google) and catches sex traffickers?

Read all about it here

"absolutely convinced that most Christians do not study the Bible"

"We are absolutely convinced that most Christians do not study the Bible.
The gospel and its overt messages of selfless love and personal sacrifice seem to be lost on us.
If the church were to openly teach or study the first five chapters of Matthew, we would have more social unrest than France. There is more for people to argue about and get offended about and go nuts over in those first fice chapters than our entire little antiporn ministry could ever dish out."
Gross and  Mahon, Starving Jesus, p. 52

from same book:

pastors with bodyguards

losing faith and finding porn online? Ask Samson and the Pirate Monks

link  
...yes, it's a safe click (:
                              Article by Joel Miller

the Duke porn star

Headsup: some of these links are not for the faint of heart..especially the second link (disturbing), but this is an important story:

Duke porn star Belle Knox: Rough sex empowering, critics off base

Duke Porn Star Belle Knox Abused on the Porn Set

Duke porn star Belle Knox says she wants to help sex workers after bankrolling law degree with sex

'Sherri Shepherd was condescending and I regret my rough sex scene': Duke porn star opens up about media spotlight since being outed as adult movie star

EXCLUSIVE: The shocking modelling photos that show that 18-year-old Duke porn star Belle Knox is a cutter who gets 'aroused' by hurting herself

"Make Love, Not Porn": back alley TED Talk by Cindy Gallop

TED Talk by Cindy Gallop below, backstory here; adult language alert.

Russell Willingham video: "Pornography: What's the Big Deal?"

\

Veritas Forum--Pornography: What's the Big Deal?

California State University, Fresno

February 21, 2007

Mr. Russell Willingham will explore the issue of pornography and sexual brokenness. He will examine the spiritual, psychological, social and cultural aspects of these issues from a biblical standpoint. He will demonstrate how a biblical worldview on this subject is effective in transforming lives for the better. Dr. Pierce will share her research and expertise on the content, some of it pornographic, found on teens' MySpace sites. We hope that this session will inspire discussion on the presence and effects of pornography in society today.

"more likely to catch computer viruses visiting a church website than surfing for porn"

see this link (from a great blog)

Swoboda on narrative envy and social pornography

read it here

Theodore Zeldin's "An Intimate History of Humanity."

Of course, as a heteroclitic (heteroclitician?),
 I enjoy genre-defying   or
             genre-denying books..

Genre-bending
 genre-ending;
                                genre-inventing
                                genre-circumventing

books can rock.....
                    when done well, mixed genre
                                                trumps
                                                fixed genre.

One of the great gifts is genre-subversion.

How about history books that are

                                              hilarious

or


                                 non-linear.

How obvious is that?

Do check out Theodore Zeldin's "An Intimate History of Humanity."

Help?

"As we leave behind, one hopes, a culture of quantitative, linear, abstract, cold tabulations of human experience, Theodore Zeldin's An Intimate History of Humanity offers one attractive way to reflect on the nature of just about everything. His world is vernacular, personal without being personalistic, full of information alchemized into wisdom, pleasurable, witty, unsentimental, and concerned - virtues not in vogue in the realm of cultural remembrance. It's a book to enjoy, pure and simple." 
--- Thomas Moore, author of Care of the Soul and Soul Mates


"An intellectually dazzling view of our past and future."--Time Magazine

"Extraordinary and beautiful...the most exciting and ambitious work of non-fiction I have read in more than a decade" -- Maggie Gee Daily Telegraph 

 "Theodore Zeldin's all-embracing history of our feelings throughout the ages [is] brilliantly original and unsettling... His scope is dazzling... A seductive and unusually thought provoking book" Sunday Telegraph 

"Bubbling wit... Zeldin makes life exciting for the reader. It is like being on some careering fair-ground ride that whirls you from one limelit fragment of civilisation to the next at breakneck speed...gatecrashing all the cultures of the world" Spectator 

"It's the sort of book that will go on being famous long after we're all dead... If ever a volume deserved that overused ecomium "this book will change your life", it is this one" Oxford Today

 Oxford historian Theodore Zeldin has taken the academically unfashionable step of writing a book which aims to change our lives. It is an accessible, audacious and thought- provoking work which presents history as a liberating force, one which can reveal the multiplicity of human possibilities, and thereby free us from the impasses of the present.Zeldin's title is somewhat misleading. This is no history in the chronological sense, nor is it specifically a study of love and friendship. Rather, the book asks a host of questions about the nature of human needs and desires, amounting to a grand survey of the ends of life -The Independent

I don't know where to start..

so let's just post a quote on two hot topics:

sex

and

religion.

SEX:
.

"Sex is the miracle which makes humans, who are normally frightened by strangers, feel attracted to some of them...Pornography had its holy books...Even Christianity, the religion of love, has been afraid of sexual love, confining it strictly to marriage, which Luther compared to a hospital that cured lust  (96, 102)
--\
RELIGION:

That has been shown too by churches all over the world which have been trying to talk to one another. Negotiations to reconcile  points of divergence in their theological positions have seldom drawn them much closet, for that involves defining their identity,which has usually led them to draw more rigid frontiers than existed in practice, ignoring the fuzzy edges. The first World Parliament of Churches, which met in Chicago in 1893, and the World Council of Churches (established 1945) have been almost fruitless as disarmament conferences, even if there have been some reconciliations,  even if different sects collaborate in such tasks as the translation of the Bible. There is still no sign of an end to wars of religion.  Churches as institutions have been as reluctant as nations to compromise their sovereignty. The great surge in hospitality between religions has been due mainly to individuals and informal groups  interested in reviving the primitive spirit of religion, ignoring  the caution of those who hold power, and expressing their faith by devoting themselves to the disadvantaged.

But humanitarian organisations quickly discovered that they were not immune to sectarianism, and have laso found themselves fragmenting into rival sects, just like the churches . 'When one tries to start a fraternity, one raises up hatred. " the wars between philanthropists  are the worst of all, says the  says the founder of Médecins sans Frontiéres, Bernard Kouchner. "The organisers quarrel among themselves for control of the victims of disasters and fight to the death amongst themselves after having  risked their lives together' All the experience of history confirms that sharing the same beliefs has been a preliminary to quarrelling about their interpretation Co-operation has worked best between those who have only a few aims in common, who are not rivals, who are untroubled by thoughts about who should control whom: when they come from different origins and intend to return once their mission is accomplished, there may be friction, but there have been fewer cancerous animosities. Close encounters must, in part, remain distant too.

That is why hospitality between believers and unbelievers holds our particular promise, now that the war is almost over between them, now that churches are no longer attempting to dominate government and, having become poor once more, are turning their attention to the poor, emphasizing compassion more than dogma  and human relations more than ritual. In practice, believers and unbelievers often find themselves on the same side when faced by violence or injustice, and in such circumstances, the crucial difference between them  -- belief in God and a sacred text — becomes a stimulus to the imagination of both, when the believers discuss their doubts and the unbelievers reflect on their own search for values..  They are made to be intermediaries to each other's worlds  (458-9)

"All men" watch porn?/The Great Porn Experiment

Brad Williams posts:

Men Like to Look At Naked Girls On The Internet. Here’s Why They Should Stop That.  (yes, it's a safe click)

Here's  the video he linked:
The Great Porn Ecperiment TED Talk

Talbot Davis sermon on The Man Cave

Kudos to my friend from seminary days, Talbot Davis, for a bold sermon on men and porn: "Man Cave".

Bold?

"Some of the guys in this room today have a Man Cave back at home..
... I’ll name the main thing I’m talking about.  Porn. Adult entertainment. The sex industry and the escalation that goes along with it and often leads to encounters, rendezvous, and affairs.  Probably 60% of the men in the room are involved in the former and not a few of you in the latter. "

The worship service included a PG version of this clip on sex trafficking:

 Full  sermon video below  (transcript here)

" how pornography may be changing human nature itself"

The Problem With Porn: Author Martin Amis on how pornography may be changing human nature  itself.  Martin Amis doesn’t attack pornography on moral or religious grounds. But the British author is deeply troubled by what he sees as the insidious effect porn is having not just on sexuality but on human nature itself.  In an interview with Slate’s Jacob Weisberg, Amis says the ubiquity of explicit material serves only to extend the distance between sex and love and thereby changes what he calls “the style of the whole operation.”  -Slate.com
.

"wanting to be like God/Jesus" is idolatry or porn...or both

Leonard Sweet:

...The language of  "likeness" is either idolatry or porn.  '

 It is idolatry because the desire to become "more like God"  or "like the divine"  is the original sin of the human race.  Jesus ("The Second Adam") did not come to show us how to be more "like God," but how to be the true humans  ("The First Adam")  God first created us to be.  The whole message of Jesus' life was not "Let me show you how to be more spiritual."  Rather it was, "Let me show you how to be authentically human."

Second, the language of "likeness" is porn because imitation is pornography.  That's why to "be like Jesus" is a  porn piety.  Porn stars are professional fakers of pleasure and arousal.

Imitation fits our impersonal, mechanical, pornographic culture of impersonation.  And  the more "like" we become  the more skanky our spirituality and the more burlesque our beliefs.  Besides,what happens when you copy a copy...and keep copying the copy?  The original not only gets lost, but gets weaker with each copy and blurred beyond recognition.  The real Charlie Chaplin  reportedly once came in third  in a Charlie Chaplin lookalike contest.

When Christianity becomes a porn spirituality, the "face" of Jesus becomes unrecognizable, lost in the fake culture itself.  Don't be like Jesus,  Let Jesus be himself in you, making you into your true self.  Don't be an "imitator,"  Be the real deal.
-Leonard Sweet, "So Beautiful: Divine Design for Life and the Church," pp. 213-214

 
--------------------------------
So Beautiful, by Leonard Sweet

porn, looking at women and worldview changes

Thanks to St. Paul Wikinson for being honest..one of his gifts...this time about porn:

'..addicts look for greater kicks.  And the worldview changes it brings are massive.  And, as I said in an earlier chapter, it means that the guy in question never again looks at any female the same way.

-link:Which Pornography Is He Looking At?

       Note: this post is a commentary on his free book The Pornography Effect 

Related:

Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition, Images, and Aphrodite

Pyromaniacs, Porn and Paper Pastors

Thanks to Paul Wilkinson, who tipped me off to the following post by PyroManiacs called "Porn and Paper Pastors." ..  He helpfully sets the article in context."While regular readers here know that I’m not likely to start a fan page for the Team Pyro writers anytime soon, I’m not about to write them off when they get it right like" (link):

Decades ago, I read a disturbingly candid essay by a pastor about his struggles with pornography. It was in Leadership magazine. Years later, two of his realizations still stand out to me.
The author came to see (as I recall) that he was attracted to these images because they were unreal. The women in the pictures never had bad days, were never crabby and demanding, never disrespectful and demeaning. No mood swings. They always suited his mood, his needs, his wants. They were unreal.
He came to see that he had no actual relationship with these women whatever. If (he named a female celebrity) had sat down next to him in an airplane, she wouldn't know him from Adam. Whatever may have happened in his sinful fantasies, the two of them had no relationship in the real world.
Of course, this is why so many women resent actresses and models. It isn't catty pettiness or smallness. It is that they know how visually-tempted men can be, and they know that they can't compete with a fantasy — if their man is fool enough to chase one.
And they're right, in a way. They can't compete with these women. Because these women don't exist in the real world! They may not even look like their pictures! Thanks to computer wizardry, the pictures we see may actually bear only the slightest resemblance to the actual women.
Nobody can compete with a fantasy.
And this post is not about pornography, men, women, nor marriage.
It is about people with paper pastors.
Now, some professed Christians sin outright, by never physically attending an actual, in-person church. We've talked about that, and they aren't our focus.

But others do attend a church — physically. They come in, they sit down. They sing, they may give financially. They may look at you, Pastor, as you preach.
But you know their heart belongs to another.
Their real pastor isn't you. It's Dave Hunt. Or it's John Piper. Or it's John MacArthur, or Ligon Duncan, or Mark Dever, or David Cloud, or Joel Osteen. Or it's Charles Spurgeon, or D. M. Lloyd-Jones, or J. C. Ryle. Or Calvin, or Luther, or Bahnsen, or de Mar, or R. B. Thieme (Jr.), or J. Vernon McGee.
And they're such better pastors than you are! You know they are!
Why?
Well, paper pastors are never in a bad mood. They're never cranky, or sleepy or sick. (Especially the dead ones.)
They've never just had someone else pull their guts out with a rusty fork, and then had to turn and listen graciously to yourcomplaint about the translation they preach from, or argue about a Greek word they can't even pronounce. They don't have a family who loses the time you use. They never half-listen, never have an appointment that cuts short their time. Their office hours are youroffice hours. They're available 24/7, and everywhere, at your whim, and you always have their undivided attention.
What's more is they always have all the answers! They can tell you with complete confidence and masterful eloquence. They never stammer, guess, nor search their memory. And they can prove it — whatever they're saying! With footnotes!
And these paper pastors maintain the perfect distance. If you don't want to hear something, they don't press it — or you can instantly shut them up, snap! They never ask you to do something uncomfortable and follow up on you. They never persistently probe an area of sin, in you, in person, eyeball to eyeball... nor will they. Church discipline will not be a threat with them. Ever.
Because they don't know you from Adam.
Yet how many pastors know that there are people in their..

        CONTINUED at Pyromiacs, here

pastor: "they cast porn films in our building"

"It’s a safe guess that only a few pastors can utter the following sentence:
 'They do casting for porn films in our building'....." 

(story continued here. 
(HT St Mike)

XXX Church: Porn Sunday message/Pastor's son the porn producer

a little leitmotif lite: "No Line" as a (non-linear) sequel/prequel to "Achtung Baby"

buy the T-shirts (:

Along with the brilliant Rev. St. Keltic Ken, I have an affinity for those pop/rock songs from the 60s and 70s that were able to pack celtic-ish creativity, ethereal vibe, and a bit of progrock into a  radio-friendly three minutes.
Tunes like:


"A Whiter Shade of Pale," by Procul Harum:



"Society's Child" by Janis Ian:



God must love "spooky music," huh, Ken?
(How about some McArthur Park?)
Especially in short doses...as singles.


More than  Ken, I also love many of the longer opuses and epics of progrock; songs with "movements," a la classical music.
Even though grand can become grandiose pretty quickly, and operatic can translate cheese...
I still love
"In the Court of the Crimson King" by King Crimson...





"Supper's Ready" by Genesis  (Don't get me started)..
whether with frontman Peter Gabriel:

(continued here, it's in 3 parts...of course)

Or with Phil Collins:







--


But one can see how bands would grow weary of reproducing the long opuses, and concept albums/rock operas, in concert, especially thirty five yeas later.  It has been said that when fans call out for "Supper's Ready," Collins sings a condensed version:  "There's an angel standing in the sun...666...Jerusaleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeem!!"


Which reminds us that any good, long story can be condensed.  And just hearing Collins  belt out those three snippets sends chills up the spine, as it is a microsm (albeit Cliff's notes) of the real  (23 minute) and grander thing (see the biblical backstory here)


Of couse, long songs, and concept albums (which are sometimes basically an hour-long song) have of course taken a hit in our soundbite  and megabyte times and technologies.
We are not living in Tommy anymore, and The Wall has come down.


But some recent albums:

• "A Thousand Suns' by Linkin Park
• "Church Music" by David Crowder Band
• "No Line on the Horizon"  by U2
• "Le Noise"   by Pastor Neil Young

...though technically not concept albums, or rock operas, maintain something of the concept and feel.
Sometimes lyrically, sometimes thematically, sometimes musically.
Songs segue, themes interweave, leitmotif happens.


Little leitmotifs, if you will.
Which is not the same as leitmotif lite.


This works well for Linkin Park, with lyrical refrains being revisited, as well as musical ones.
And many will remember the classic moment from a Neil Young concert: a fan yelled out, "All the songs sound the same!"  Neil dryly retorted: "They're all the same song!"


But it's the subtle, but obvious
(to an intent listener with their intelligence on....
one reason concept and complex albums...and albums themselves are in hard times...intent listeners are hard to find),
musical motifs that ocassionally reappear in a U2 work that  haunt, highlight and hyperlink it.
"Story shapes story," as Ray Vander Laan says of the biblical narrative's  intriguing intertextuality.


U2 plots their homiletical plot.
Lietmotif can be liturgy and leitiourgia.
(see  this by Beth Maynard, and  "Leitourgia, Leitmotif, Porn Stars and the Drowning Man")

It was Beth who got me thinking on the hyperlinked "oh oh"s of "Unknown Caller" and "White as Snow" as profound, and not just words. See also Beth's awesome comments on "God's signature melody"
throughout the U2 "No Line" album. (I blogged a bit on that here, and here ate two more posts by Beth on the narrative of "No Line": Moments and characters and "Time won't leave me where i am,")

"No Line" began as a concept album, but was released as something less than...though the narrative line is still tracable,  and the shadow of the arc remains.... for those with ears to see (synesthesia is a helpful hermeneutical grid for U2).

Of course, one could make the case that U2 have been making "virtual concept albums" (even versions of the same album)  since their first album.

 But maybe "No Line" is sequel to,  or part 2, of "Achtung Baby" (I hope it's not a prequel).  Obviously one is darker and ocassioned by divorce; and one is overall more optimistic and opti-mystic (But there is more "up"/kataphtatic on "Achtung"... and more "down"/apophatic on "No Line".... that at first glance). And the newer album contains an obvious repeated lyrical leitmotif  in "let me in the sound."

It was Beth Maynard who got me thinking on the hyperlinked "oh oh"s of "Unknown Caller" and "White as Snow" as profound, and not just words. See also Beth's comments on "God's signature melody"
throughout the U2 "No Line" album,  as a classic example of a musical leitmotif which segued not only two consecutive songs together, but hemistich the whole story. (I blogged a bit on that here).

 And hear Beth out:

 

I defintely think there’s a relational thin place in this album. Consider ...also how the holy encounter at the end of "Unknown Caller" transitions, quickly, in the same key and with a very similar musical gesture, into the “old married folks” world of “Crazy Tonight.” The mundane is not mundane!
-Beth Maynard, see bottom of page here

 

The 'No Line" album's 

"Crazy Tonight/Unknown Caller" hemistich

is mirrored in 

the "Achtung Baby" album's

"Acrobat/Love is Blindness.'  Both sets of songs reveal, by a little leitmotif, an interpretive key to their respective albums.

These should've/could've been the singles !  (: 

How about a single 45, with A (Achtung) and B  (No Line) sides?

 

So, check this from Stephen Catanzarite's hugely helpful 33 1/3 book, "Achtung Baby: Meditations on Love in Light of the Fall":

There is a stirring musical motif  in "Acrobat,"  a guitar line reminscent of the darkly sublime themes found in  Ennio Morricone's classic scores for the films of Sergio Leone.  As with those  scores, the guitars in Acrobat play out over a human landscape that is at once comic and tragic, desolate and abundant, Godforsaken and blessed.  It is no accident that this theme will be repeated again in the following song, "Love is Blindness,"a sign of the Spirit that wills to abound in the darkest recesses of the human heart
-Catanzarite, p. 82, emphasis mine

        To the soft purr of the organ repeating the  mournful motif from "Acrobat," "Love is Blindness" finds our man and woman walking unsteadily down the aisle of an empty cathedral where, just above the altar, a light burns in the darkness...The struggle is heard in the martial bass line, which though dimly beligerent, seems on the edge of exaltation.....It is a continutaion of his confession in "Acrobat," but it goes further...followed by one of the most powerful and harrowing  guitar solos ever recorded. _-Catanzaarite, p. 87

Would it be too much  to suggest that  "Achtung " is a rock opera?  Probably.  Other tahn a melodic figure from "Acrobat" that is repeated on "Love is Blindness," there are no leitmotifs or recurring musical themes on the album, such as there are on Tommy, nor are any of the sonbgs reprised, as on The Wall.  To borrow a phrase from Bill Flanagan, the album does have a "novelistic cohesiveness"....It might be moire precise to decribe it as a "song cucle"  (such as Lou Reed's New York), or even a concept album (a concept pioneeered by Frank Sinatra)..Catanzarite,96-97

Buy the book already, and read chapter 1  yesterday!

 

Could it be that all of U2's U2ness  can be shorthanded and summarized in that one theme, even that one note in "No Line," or that one "harrowing solo" on Achtung?

 If so, how ironic and appropriate that is The Edge who offers the centerpoint.

Even Bono's words are often wordless.

But Edge's  "swirling epiphanies" (Time Magazine's phrase!) and  "signature melodies of God,"

are interpreted glossolalia/Bongolese 
 (see 

Praying thru guitar again..in tongues this time

)
that interpret the text, the times.....and us.

A little leitmotif goes a long way.

Maybe  those short 60s songs were prophetic and proleptic signs of the times, and of the Kingdom.

The concept album may be dead.
(See "Gregory of Nyssa and Green Day: death/birth of the concept of the concept album")
But long live the kingly and Kingdomed concept of a conceptual double single..