Pope Francis: insult comic/snarky prophet

Excerpt from  The Week's article

Pope Francis, insult comicHailed for striking a gentler tone, the pope is actually the vicar of snark

...The unnoticed part of the "new tone" in the church is that Francis is practically an insult comic. Where Benedict sought to condemn errors in the abstract, Pope Francis makes it personal and attacks tendencies within certain groups of people, usually in highly stylized papal idioms.

He has condemned "airport bishops." Christians who complain too much, he called "Mr. and Mrs. Whiner." Can we even imagine how much crap Pope Benedict would have taken from the media if he told nuns not to become "old maids?" Francis said just that, though.

Sometimes it is not exactly clear whom the pope intends to lampoon. The pope has dumped rhetorical acid on "Christians of words," who "are rigid! This type think that being Christian means being in perpetual mourning." At other times Francis is much too clear, like when he said journalists run the risk of "becoming ill from coprophilia and thus fomenting coprophagia" — that is, journalists turned on by shit might get sick from eating it.

Catholics of a more traditional bent really cause Francis to bring out the stick. He has called them "triumphalists" and "restorationists." He dubs those that send him notes enumerating the number of rosaries they have prayed for him "Pelagians," after the heretic who denied the necessity of divine grace for salvation 

..One Catholic blogger has been commissioned to compile all the Vicar of Christ's invective into The Pope Francis Little Book of Insults.

 Insults aren't foreign to Christianity. Jesus himself was brutal when condemning the "whitened sepulchers" and the "brood of vipers" among the religious leaders of his day.  
.. link.

the sound of DNA

"We are people born of sound...Let me in the sound, God"  -U2

"We are sung, musically into form. I love this fact. We are all part of a symphony, a choreography of a score.. DNA music exists within every living organism universally and now we have the technology 
to unlock a symphony from within everyone for a better and more aesthetic understanding of life, ourselves and each other" Stuart Mitchell, link below

Links:
Your DNA Song
What Does DNA Sound Like?

TF Translates DNA Into Music Sequence - The Harvard Crimson

Morning Edition - How a Cell Sounds - NPR

Promote your mixtape at ReverbNation.com

"Why I Don’t Go to Church Very Often" by Donald Miller

worth a careful read:

 Why I Don’t Go to Church Very Often"  by Donald Miller

Sample below, Reason #7:
Your church likely looks nothing like the church in the book of Acts, which, was not much of a prescription on how to do church anyway. There are some marching orders in the book, but there aren’t many. Mostly those direct instructions are about choosing elders and deacons and dividing up each others money so that it’s shared. But that’s mostly it.
The modern traditional church sticks to the part about the elders, very loosely nods towards the financial stuff, but is basically a large school system. The modern evangelical church is an adaptation of an ancient institution led by scholars after the invention of the printing press. It is also an evolution of a government-run institution dating back centuries. And it continues to evolve today into something else.

Unless you are Shane Claiborne, your church probably doesn’t look anything like the church in the book of Acts, so lets not get self righteous.

As a side note, many thinkers in America credit the growth of the American church with supply and demand principals. They say the reason the church in England is struggling is because it was so influenced by the government it didn’t adapt with culture, where in America churches had to compete with each other and so adapted, evolved, grew in style, shared best practices at conferences and adopted marketing and branding strategies they learned from business leaders.
The church in America, in other words, is a product of a school-like system mingled with best business practices and is quickly moving toward entertainment-like institutions. And to be honest, that amazing adaptation and evolution has worked fantastically. I think it’s great. These practices reach tons of people who want Jesus, community and wisdom from an ancient trustworthy text. That said, to say traditional church is Biblical is a stretch because of two false presuppositions.

Those two false presuppositions are:

1. The Bible has specific, robust and complete instructions on building and running a church community. It doesn’t. As I said earlier, the book of Acts has a few marching orders, but as a writer I assure you, that’s not the authors intent in that book. It’s a history of the early church and an encouragement for us.

2. The church you are attending is a Biblical church. If you mean it’s a church that is centered around Jesus and takes the eucharist, perhaps. But, again, your church likely doesn’t look like the church in Acts. And I think that’s fine. God wanted the orthodox theology to stay the same, but the church can, should and has evolved in style, language, customs and so forth.
It’s a hard thing for some people to get their heads around, but God shares agency with us in creating the church and we get to use our creativity and heart and passion to incorporate these loose instructions. Actually, big business could learn a thing or two from churches. And so could education reformers. Because of the passion pastors have for the gospel, their willingness to share best practices and the economic competition they face with neighboring churches, they often adapt faster than business. When I was a kid, our church looked like a school mixed with an anglican-style high church.

Today, many churches look like night clubs complete with pastors being piped in on video. It’s quite brilliant and I’ve no problem with it, it’s just not my thing. I don’t like night clubs. And I don’t like lectures and I don’t emote to worship music. And I still love Jesus. It’s shocking, but it’s true. That said, lets stop using the word “Biblical” as some sort of ace card when it comes to how church should be done.   link

"The pope, a porn star and a parrot walk into a bar.."

That is one of the best opening lines ever ...
                                     in an article about Pope Francis.
Read it here...you know you want to,

holy blending...just do it

"Jesus never opened his mouth without a parable coming out," (Matt 13:34-5)

“The greatest thing by far is to be master of analogy....it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars.”
(Poetics, 1459 a 5-8, "The Basic Works of Aristotle")


"If genius is the ability to see analogy;
certainly madness is the ability to see analogy where none exists." -Mike Nesmith
---


One of the most important disciplines for stretching your brain and creating creativity is

...whatever you want to call it:

• "looking for the unobvious" connections between two things
• reading, engaging parables that compare/contrast
• making a song mash-up of two songs
• seizing synesthesia
• making metaphors

In light of this photo by Brant Hansen 
(great blogger, hope he starts again), I have a new metaphor for

this whole metaphoring discipline:

holy blending

The look on the blender's face reminds me of the look on the faces of some students who at first think they can't do it/don't want to do it.
Usually, it's more fun than they thought.

Go to it.  Blend two items that you don't think blend well...

If Dr. Hook can make it, why not Pope Francis?

See the Rolling Stone cover story on Francis
here.

Pope Francis: The Times They AreInteresting article  for many reasons.  One random example: his leadership style is twice compared to Bill Clinton's..

 Related:

• 9 ridiculous claims in Rolling Stone's cover story on Pope Francis
• Pope Francis' Rolling Stone Cover Cements His Prominence In Pop Culture
• Why 'Cool Pope Francis' but no rabbi makes the cover of Rolling Stone
• Archbishop hits Rolling Stone for comparing Pope Francis, resigned Pope Benedict

U2theology on Interference

Interesting that almost all  the articles listed under a current click of the tab called "U2 Commentary, Essays and Analysis" on the Interference site are explicitly theological.


 Andrew William Smith:

Sacred Stables, Sacred Stadiums: Lifting the Veil on “Zooropa” at Christmas  by Andrew William Smith
...........Something got hidden away in the starry starburst of rising young rockstars. God gets lost in man chasing mammon. God gets lost from man. Like God hiding from Moses in the rocks, this is rock that hides God only to reveal God. Bono recalls, “I wanted to get away from the weight of where I was going. I wanted to fly. . . . And I have no religion, I don’t know what’s what. There is a line in the New Testament [John 3:8] which says that the Spirit moves and no one knows where it comes from or where it is going. It’s like a wind. I have always felt that about my faith. Religion is often the enemy of God because it denies the spontaneity of the Spirit and almost anarchistic nature of the Spirit.”

At its dirty Christmas core, the Christ story is an anarchic breaking through. The veil of colored lights gets lifted, and we get lifeblood. The dirty story of Christmas finds this unmarried teenager and faithful fiancé finding the unfound, unfettered scandalous incarnation of a baby king.
The “Zooropa” narrative of human-techno hybrids in hope and fear throws back a couple of millennia to the divine-human dangerous idea of messianic and revolutionary Jesus. Bono sings, “Let’s go to the overground/Get your head out of the mud baby/Put flowers in the mud baby/Overground.”

Jesus Christ is the flower in the mud, the flower in the gunbarrel of history, saying love still wins. The author of Love Wins, Rob Bell, in his followup treatise What We Talk About When We Talk About God, rips the veil even further.

Referencing Hebrews 10:20, Bell suggests the Christ-event ripped open history and lifted the veil. Bell proclaims, “[T]his ripping was a picture of how, because of Jesus, we can have new, direct access to God. […T]he curtain ripping also means that God comes out, that God is no longer confined to the temple as God was previously. God, of course, was never confined by a building. The point of the story is that our understanding of God was.”

Perhaps Bell and Bono of the post-Zoo period are onto the same thing: ripping away the veils between secular and sacred dualities, human and divine dichotomies. When the veil of lights lifted from the 360-stage to reveal the band again, the new setting set fires in souls..

.Then the next U2 rock show, whether in stadiums or back to arenas, can be again, like Bell writes, a place to say: “You are on holy ground wherever you are, and Jesus comes to let us know that the whole world is a temple because we’re temples, all of life is spiritual, all space sacred, all ground holy.” Even stables of the first century, even stadiums of the 21^st century. 

Pastor Jonathan Martin:

U2 & the Holy Ghost iPod Shuffle

...There may well be a rational explanation to the timing and sequencing of those songs on my iPod that day, but even if that were true, it wouldn’t change or diminish the impact of what I heard.  My response was not irrational, but it transcended my capacity for reason.  I wasn’t just hearing U2 play a rock song.  I was hearing an ancient song.  I was hearing the music of God’s love in the same way I believe David heard it in the field as a boy.  It was the wonder that called me back to who I really am, that called me forward to who I am meant to become.  That’s what music does; that’s what wonder does.  God uses these things to remind us of who we really are. –Jonathan Martin

Ted Trost:

Transgressing Theology: Locating Jesus in a “F—ed-Up World” by Religious Studies Prof  Ted Trost
In the tradition of Ronald Reagan and Pink Floyd (in very different contexts), U2′s songs amount to the plea: “tear down the wall.”  Within the framework of Christian doctrine, U2 put forward a “transgressive theology.”  In these POP tunes, U2 transgress the borders between spirit and flesh, sacred and profane, high and low.  On this album, the “Popmart” as medium of pop culture in the context of commercial exchange becomes hallowed ground.  To be extreme about it:  God is Pop.....

The POP album opens in the tradition of David.. 

...this pursuit includes the search for “baby Jesus under the trash”—that is, in the midst of the muck and mire of human existence, once again challenging the dividing line between sacred realm and the earth-bound.   Locating Jesus under the trash is not the same thing as positioning him “at the right hand of God the Father Almighty,” to quote a doctrinal formulation.  Indeed (as Bono will sing in a different but related context in the song “If God Will Send His Angels”):  “the High Street never looked so low.”  Still, there’s something hauntingly familiar about this dislocation to “the places where no flowers grow,” to the realm of the discarded, to the barn out back after permission to enter the inn has been withheld.POP becomes a theological assertion.  It claims the commercial realm as God’s realm.  link

Snith

Flamethrower Holiness: Bono, Brueggemann, & the Psalms (Headphone Devotionals, part two)

...Rock music as a daily devotional tool surely gets practiced by runners, walkers, weight-lifters, and coffee-sipping hipsters on the daily, but to theorize such in a theological-liturgical manner means new terrain. Like with the songs “Bad” or “Drowning Man,” like “Vertigo” or “Wake Up Dead Man,” the psalms have an aching rock-bottom blues disposition that’s not pretty or pious. Even ever popular and too readily categorized U2, rock music itself remains a renegade force in culture, still largely undomesticated in its musicological meme. Brueggemann begs us to see past what he calls “equilibrium” to that queasy and uneasy place that the Psalter takes us, liminal “experiences of dislocation and relocation” because it “is experiences of being overwhelmed, nearly destroyed, and surprisingly given life that empower us to pray and sing.” 

Check out the Headphone Devotionals project blog where we can pray the U2 songs together: http://headphonedevotionals.blogspot.com/    link