Two videos: :What if we could see what people are going through?

"Got Service?:What if we could see what people are going through?":
"Life in four minutes: If we could see inside others' hearts?" :

" Don’t Call Me 'Pastor'”

Tony Jones, in the context of linking a NY Times article  on Liquidnet, a brokerage firm that has  done away with all titles:

But, as you might guess, I’d rather do away with titles in church life altogether. I am firmly against hierarchies — bishops, synods, general assemblies, district superintendents, etc. — because they are bad for the gospel. They may be good for organizational proliferation, but the gospel has absolutely no interest in organizational proliferation...titles are not about leadership, they are about power. Get rid of them, and watch the power dynamics in your church change.   link

Here's some of the interview with the founder of Liquidnet (emphases by Jones.

Q.Tell me about some of the values of your culture.
A. One is personal responsibility. I tell this to our new people during orientation, but if you see something that we’re not doing right and you don’t say something, then it’s on you. If you think that everyone on the leadership team is taking into account everything that could possibly go wrong, you’re wrong. It’s everybody’s responsibility to help us run this company better than we can do it by ourselves.
One of our philosophies is that I would much rather have everyone assume that everything we do here is wrong and that it’s your responsibility to help us fix it. That eliminates all the ego, or it should eliminate all the ego. Since we’re trying to constantly improve ourselves, you’re helping us by giving us some suggestions about what we can do better.
Q.Some people must be a bit skeptical at first. It’s one of those policies that sounds good in theory, but how do they know you mean it?
A. Well, first of all, we don’t have any titles. And the reason is that I do not want a junior vice president to be at a meeting and not say anything because they have a senior vice president in the room, which I believe happens quite often. Having no titles is symbolic, but it really works. Just to give you one example: we had an intern, 19 years old, and there were a bunch of us in a meeting. I was giving everyone my latest and greatest idea and he took me on and he disagreed with me. It turned out he was right, and I told him he was right at the meeting. So we have to practice it at the top.
Q. But you must have some hierarchy.
A. Everyone has managers, but the elimination of titles means that everyone has a right to state their opinion. We define levels by the responsibility you have in the company. So I am a “shape.” Most of the folks on the leadership team are shapes. We help shape the direction of the company. The people next level down are “guides.” The level below that are “drives,” and below that are “solves” and then there are “creates.” A working group came up with those levels. I just think they nailed it.
Q.What else about your culture?
A. We have something that I call a very efficient organ-rejection mechanism. If somebody comes in and just does not fit the culture, we reject them. Firing is a very big and an important part of who we are, as well. I think firing is much harder than hiring but it’s every bit as important. If you make a mistake, try to fix the mistake as quickly as you possibly can.  LINK

Timothy Snyder: The René Girard Lecture on The Holocaust's Global Causes

Video below..... summary and review here

death of Jesus and "A Reordering of Power"

 Herman C. Waetjen:

Now at the end of his life, at the moment of his physical death, the curtain of the sanctuary is torn apart, and God comes forth again. Jesus’ earlier symbolic act of invalidating the temple institution is consummated by the divine exit from the Holy of Holies. Consequently the architectonic center of Judaism is canceled. The old order, which is represented by the temple, its sacrifices and its hierocracy, is abolished. Jerusalem is no longer the navel of the world where heaven and earth are united and where God’s presence is uniquely experienced. Heaven and earth have been reconciled cosmically and universally. Accordingly, the binary opposition between the sacred and the secular, constituted by the temple as the axis mundi of Judaism, is dissolved. Both are reunited, and the entire creation once again becomes ambiguously sacred and profane. Henceforth no geographical, religious, social, sexual, or racial lines can be drawn to separate the clean from the unclean, good from evil,  life from death. God’s presence will be experience everywhere or anywhere without the necessity of atoning sacrifices or a mediating priesthood. God’s presence will be experienced wherever the eschatological reality of the New Humanity that Jesus incarnated throughout his ministry is encountered. -A Reordering of Power a Socio-Political Reading of Mark’s Gospel. , HT Michael Bird

we are the temple

The new NIV nails it...again (they replaced "sinful nature" with "flesh," etc)

In  1 Cor 3:16-17, however, Paul is speaking of the corporate body, the church.  The three appearances of “you” are plural:

Do you not know that you (plural) are a temple of God and the Spirit of God dwells among you (plural)?  If anyone destroys the temple of God, God will destroy him.  For the temple of God is holy, and that is what you (plural) are.

The NASB and ESV note this in the margin, but the translations don’t capture Paul’s sense and leave the impression that it’s singular.

The updated NIV, however, nails it:

Don’t you know that you yourselves are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in your midst?  If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy that person; for God’s temple is sacred, and you together are that temple.  Tim Gombis

simultaneous perception and epistemology/synsethesia/simulacra of the city

Tony Hiss coined the phrase simultaneous perception in his  presceient 1990 book The Experience of Place: A New Way of Looking at and Dealing With our Radically Changing Cities and Countryside.

The introduction and first chapter are invaluable (read here..just a few pages missing)  in discerning a "full-sensed" epistemology of the city.
I am making connections to synesthesia and simulacra (well, an "even worse than the real thing"  anti-simulacra: “A damaged experience is not only numbing; over time we can begin to mistake it for the original.”)


For example:

 It alters what I know about my surroundings and about whatever is going on around me, and at the same time modifies my sense of what all these things mean to me. The change - one that is reasonably well known to all of us, or is at least lodged somewhere in our memories-lets me gently refocus my attention and allows a more general awareness of a great many different things at once: sights, sounds, smells, and sensations of touch and balance, as well as thoughts and feelings." (3)

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The Experience of Place  (promo blurb):

Hiss uses the experience of place to help us understand how profoundly we are affected by the places around us. By bringing together the insights of planners, ecologists, psychologists, and environmentalists, he explores how our experiences in public places can restore our connection to our senses. Hiss uncovers why some places – the concourse of Grand Central Terminal or a small farm or the corner of a skyscraper – affect us so mysteriously and so forcefully. In doing so, he demonstrates how our society can continue to grow without destroying the places that have nourished it for generations – how we can design changes that, rather than harming us, will enhance our future lives.

Excerpts

“A damaged experience is not only numbing; over time we can begin to mistake it for the original.”

“Conscious noticing of what we’re experiencing, once we get back the hang of it, can be a common denominator, a language of connectedness between social, environmental, and economic concerns. Using the things we know or sense about places but seldom put into words, we can bring all our minds to bear on the problems of how our communities, regions, and landscapes should change.”

“Until recently, when people spoke about a vivid experience of a place, it would usually be a wonderful memory, a magic moment at one of the sweet spots of the world – an orange sunset over a white sand beach; or hearing the soft hooting of an owl while standing in a moonlit meadow; or standing up for one minute during the seventh-inning stretch of a sold-out playoff game at Fenway Park in Boston; or walking up Fifth Avenue in New York at Christmastime, dodging past roast-chestnut and hot-pretzel vendors, and catching a glimpse of the two stone lions in front of the Public Library, with fresh snow on their gray manes and big wreaths around their necks.”

“These days people often tell me that some of their most unforgettable experiences of places are disturbingly painful and have to do with unanticipated loss. Sometimes there’s less to see or hear or do in a place: the curving road in front of an old suburban house, for instance, gets straightened and widened, and suddenly a favorite grove of oaks or pines that the winds whistled through is chopped down and paved over. In the center of a big city, people who have been used to window-shopping from the bus on the way home from work find that they can’t look out the bus windows at night anymore because these now have a dark-green or bronze tint – and then, squinting tight, they realize there are no longer any store windows to see, because they have all been covered over by steel grates.”

“Today, often without even realizing it, four out of five Americans have moved into a new kind of home – metropolitan areas. And it looks more and more likely that, twenty years from now, those numbers will be closer to nine out of ten. America has had cities and suburbs for more than a hundred years. What’s new about today’s metropolitan areas is that, whether we wish it so or not, within each new metropolitan area the economies, the social problems, the environments – the destinies – of all cities and suburbs are tightly linked. They need each other to prosper, and by themselves they can’t solve either the problems we already know about or those that the 21st century will inevitably dump in our laps.”  Link

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Later book:
"How We Travel"

Tony Hiss, "Deep Travel":
In Motion: The Experience of Travel:

Ministry and Caregiving: Henri Nouwen video