Currently, I’m of the opinion that the all-out-battle I see presented by Christians in the political realm against gay marriage terribly misses the mark. It’s as if we think the most appropriate way to love our neighbor is to stand at a distance and vote away their immorality. All that aside, from what I can tell, Christians are fighting a lossing battle. Gay marriage will be recognized by the state eventually, it’s just a matter of time. And then the apocolypse will come, or our society will decline into moral degradation, or maybe we’ll go on just like we have been. Regardless of your opinion, here are a couple suggestions I have on how the church should be addressing this whole Gay Marriage thing. It’s mostly a PR campaign.

The Church should make a clear distinction between Biblical Marriage and State Marriage

Instead of arguing that the whole gay marriage thing is a threat to the institution of marriage we should be letting everyone know there is a clear distinction between what the state recognizes and what the Bible says (though plenty disagree on what it does actually say). This will help us do away with the feeling of being threatened since they are two entirely separate things. Maybe churches should start calling Biblical Marriage something else to help make the distinction. How about Biblicariage?

The Church should apologize for being silent or hostile to the Homosexual Community

I believe that before the church has an opportunity to speak to the Homosexual community it should offer an apology. We need to apologize for standing silent, or picketed, as AIDS took the lives of many. We should ask forgiveness for being alienating and hostile to many who had once called Christianity home but where ostracized because of their lifestyle choices. And we should acknowledge that though the main face of Christianity that has been presented to the homosexual community has been of hostile picketers at parades and funerals, we are also sorry for apathetically standing by.
This message could easily be communicated through a collection of pastors sending open letters to gay media outlets or publishing full page ads in those magazines. If the church should be an example of anything it should be in our willingness to acknowledge our own sin and ask forgiveness.

I figure there will be a lot to talk about around this one as well, so I’ll keep it short.

It’s seems when it comes to Christian voting decisions there are two main issues I hear spoken about on the Christian radio and from the pulpits. Gay Marriage is one of those and I’ve had a hard time wrapping my mind around why. As I mentioned earlier, in high school I probably would have agreed to vote Republican and outlaw gay marriage and wouldn’t have given it a second thought, but when I started thinking about it I came to some challenges. Regardless of whether or not you thinking Homosexuality is a sin, I think the points below are still valid, and so, we’ll stipulate for the rest of the post that you the reader, consider it a sin.

Gay Marriage is not Homosexuality

The legal issue of whether or not we recognize a gay couple as married has nothing to do with keeping anyone from sinning. There are many people in active homosexual relationships, a law outlawing them to be recognized as legal married, has nothing to do holding back the tides of immorality.

Marriage recognized by the Government isn’t the same as Christian Marriage

Christians historically made a huge mistake when we started confusing the marriage license you get from the government with the marital union recognized by God. The definition of marriage by the government in no way changes the definition of marriage by God, they are two entirely different things and we do ourselves and society a disservice when we confuse them.

Gay Marriage is an issue of Civil Rights

Whether you agree with this statement or not, that is the motivation and passion behind it. It is not some hidden ‘homosexual agenda’ out to corrupt society and our youth. A married homosexual couple would like to enjoy the same legal benefits as a married heterosexual couple. Benefits like making medical or end-of-life decisions for their partner, being with them in the emergency room, and the hundreds of rights, benefits and protections of marriage.

Gay Marriage is an opportunity to encourage Loving Monogamy

Besides the necessity of marriage being one man and one woman, Christians recognize there are many other values and qualities a spouse needs to bring the a marriage in order for it to thrive. Some of those include: selfless love, putting others before themselves, commitment, and monogamy. These are all values Christian find Biblical basis for and esteem to in their own marriages (though we often fall short). Gay couples desire to be married is an opportunity for the church to esteem those values and commitments in these individuals. This sort of support does not have to ignore or eliminate that the church disagrees with homosexual relations, but it is an opportunity to draw out the Christ-like qualities in people and their relationships. When my wife esteems me for making a delicious omlette I know it doesn’t repeal the fact that I’m a total slob at times.

That’s enough for now, I’ll hit up part two on the topic tomorrow.

I’ve had the privilege to start writing occasionally for Creation Care‘s new web initiative, Deep Green Conversations. Josh Brown (from that podcast), has been working really hard on this project and I wanted to be sure to give him a shout out. You should check out the new site, where you might find a familiar article by me about plastic bags.

When our baby was on the way I started searching for Christians who I could look to as examples of living a simple and sacrifical life while raising children. One couple I ran across was Nancy and Matthew Sleeth. They are fascinating people, here’s just a snippet…

When God called me to this creation care ministry, I was a physician—chief of staff and head of the emergency department—at one of the nicest hospitals in America. I enjoyed my job, my colleagues, my expensive home, my fast car, and my big paycheck. I have since given up every one of these things.

We now live in a house the exact size of our old garage. We use less than one-third of the fossil fuels and one-quarter of the electricity we once used. We’ve gone from leaving two barrels of trash by the curb each week to leaving one bag every few weeks. We no longer own a clothes dryer, garbage disposal, dishwasher, or lawn mower. Our “yard” is planted with native wildflowers and a large vegetable garden. Half of our possessions have found new homes. We are a poster family for the downwardly mobile.

What my family and I have gained in exchange is a life richer in meaning than I could have imagined. Because of these changes, we have more time for God. Spiritual concerns have filled the void left by material ones. Owning fewer things has resulted in things no longer owning us. We have put God to the test, and we have found his Word to be true. He has poured blessings and opportunities upon us. When we stopped living a life dedicated to consumerism, our cup began to run over.

Read the rest and more at Deep Green Conversations

Food Court Musical

Cleaning Up Circulars (is this wrong?)

Kerri Pomarolli

I recently finished reading Rapture Ready!: Adventures in the Parallel Universe of Christian Pop Culture, by Daniel Radosh. It was another Ooze Select Blogger book that I received. I really enjoyed this book and I think it lent some great insight into the Christian culture in the United States.

Radosh is a self-proclaimed humanistic Jew. His search into christian culture was not some spiritual journey, nor was it a witch hunt. It was both an honest journalistic insight into the culture and at times an insightful critical commentary on it as well.

I really liked Radosh’s writing style, as he traveled the country investigating facets of the parallel universe as far reaching as christian wrestling to the pinnicale of Christian marketing, the CBA Christian Retail Show. The book draws you in, and even if your well aware of the culture, you interact with it in a new and different way. If anything, I think it’s a great book for ‘insiders’ to read, because it will give you an opportunity to listen and hear things from a different perspective, and allow your self to think critically about Christian Pop Culture.

I’d definitely recommend this book to anyone, particularly Christians, because of the critical insight in lends. Radosh is balanced and has a number of touching commentaries that are quite positive about Christians he met. The really thought provoking stuff to me was the constructive critiscism so I’ll leave you with a handful of quotes I enjoyed…

Evangelical blogger Fred Clark has written one of the most effective (and hilsrious) critiques of Left Behind, a page-by-page dissection of the first book that has taken him, at the time of this writing, about four years. The level of detail gives Clark space to build a devastating case that the book’s glaring absence of sympathy for anyone other than its main characters is not just a failure of imagination on the part of the authors but a form of hatred. The heroes of the book, Clark declares, are sociopaths. They are men who arrive at an airport an hour or so after billions of people have vanished without a trace- with countless hundreds or thousands more dead or dying in the wreckages of suddenly pilotless planes- yet who make no attempt to help or even inquire about the feelings of, a single person they meet. Instead they focus relentlessly on their own travel plans, jobs, and lives…
“The authors behave as they imagine God behaves,” Clark writes, “They have a plot that must move forward and they will advance that plot even if it means causing, then callously disregarding, the suffering of billions of people. Plot trumps — and tramples on, and violates — character. Here, once more, Bad Writing and Bad Theology intersect.”
-p. 79-80

“I think if there’s a legitimate indictment of the church today, it’s that we’re subcultural rather than countercultural. A subculture, sociologically, speaking, buys into the vast majority of the values of the surrounding society but tacks on its own things. We buy into the same materialism, we say, ‘Nope, money won’t make me happy,’ and then we go out and work sixty hours a week to buy stuff, because we act like stuff is going to make us happy, and we go out pursuing stuff- just like the rest of the world does” -p. 169 (from interview with Jay Howard, author of Apostles of Rock)

I think that might be it for the quotes for now. I had a few more, but my wonderful daughter pulled the sticky tabs right out of the book and now I can’t find the pages I marked any longer. If anyone has read the Left Behind series or any of Frank Peretti’s novels, I’d love to hear your opinion on them. And if you want to borrow (or have) this book just let me know, I’d be glad to pass it on.

A while back I had a brief reunion with some close friends and the controversial topic of abortion came up. Sparing the details, it prompted me to find this amazing piece of writing (in my opinion) that flips some of the thinking on it’s head and gets us to at least start to try and consider things from different angles then we have in the past.

The article below is written by Katha Pollitt and this is my first introduction to her. It was written in 1995 but is relevant to today’s debates as well I think. My wife first read it in her Bio-medical Ethics class at Wheaton College in a great book of essays (I might post others). Anyways, it’s been titled a number of things, here it was called A Modest Proposal. Please read it below, or click the links to read it larger, but do come back and discuss.

From the NYT:

It was one of the worst sweatshops that state inspectors have visited in years, they said, sometimes requiring its 100 employees to work seven days a week, sometimes for months in a row.

The factory, in Queens — which made women’s apparel for Banana Republic, the Gap, Macy’s, Urban Apparel and Victoria’s Secret — handed out instructions to its workers telling them to give false answers about working conditions when government inspectors visited.

Wage violations were so widespread, state labor officials said at a news conference on Wednesday, that the factory, Jin Shun, cheated its workers of $5.3 million. The case made by the State Labor Department against Jin Shun is one of the biggest involving back pay that it has ever brought.

According to state officials, most employees, virtually all of them Chinese immigrants, were paid just $250 when they worked their typical 66-hour, six-day weeks, amounting to $3.79 an hour, far below the state’s $7.15-an-hour minimum wage. They received more when they were required to work seven-day weeks.

I’ve heard a lot of response to conversations as it relates to sweatshops, which might be summed up nicely in this comment on the story:

Let me try and address these briefly, one at a time…

1. “silly/desperate enough to accept the job” – This argument comes from the perspective that we all have complete freedom and an abundance of options in this country. Therefore, if we decide to work in deplorable conditions, then it’s our own fault.
   Besides being cold-hearted, this is a ridiculous argument when you try to apply it consistently. Would you say the same thing to an abused spouse who stays in the relationship? To a molested child? For a number of reasons: injustice, mistreatment, desperation, psychological trauma, lack of access to resource and more, many people do not have complete autonomy.
2. “People in China need jobs too” – This statement is made with the presumption that if sweatshops where not available to provide work things would be far worse in China and other countries then with sweatshops. Besides the fact that that is not necessarily the case, it miss the point. Simply because the hypothetical alternative is even more grime, that does not excuse unjust and unethical treatment in the current situation. (by the way the above story is about a sweatshop in Queens NY)
3. “goods that were cheaply made” – I’m not quite sure of the original commenters intent, but the argument is made on a pure economics level that this is no more then financial transactions, which is how we tend to think of our purchasing. We simply look at price tags and make decisions accordingly. In turn this affects the whole economic system as supply and demand align to provide us with the price we would pay for Gap jeans or VS bra. Where economics falls short is in it’s ability to account for and consider human rights and the implications sweatshops and unethical work conditions have on our society as a whole.

My goal isn’t to try and provide a definitive argument against sweatshops, but to simply encourage you to think and reflect on the impact situations like this sweatshop in the USA have on us. In the USA we have standards for working conditions, ethical standards that must be legally followed (one reason I’m extremely grateful to live in the USA). We as a society have made decision about what is fair and what isn’t, what is humane and what is unjust, and we’ve agreed to follow those regardless of what might be suggested otherwise. A situation of mistreatment in factories in our country should alarm us, because it is a reflection of our ability to uphold the standards, freedoms and liberties we believe in. That’s why stories like this are important, and why we should be conscience of where we shop and what we support with our dollars.

So, we all know “Being Green” is the in thing these days. Seems like every business under the sun is doing some marketing to let consumers know that they’re ‘green.’ And we individually are jumping on board as well, in ways we can prove our greeness. Honda had a hybrid car out for a while that didn’t sell well at all, the reason, it didn’t look distinct (like a Prius). You see, people who drive hybrid’s want you to know they are driving a hybrid. A lot of what we do, quite honestly, is to bolster our own image. Going Green is often more about me, then the earth.

And because it’s more about me and my image, consumerism continues to thrive. Everyone who wants to be ‘green’ goes out and by reusable grocery bags. We find out plastic is bad so everyone buys stainless steal water bottles. We buy organic, new t-shirts with catchy slogans on them. And sometimes we make drastic changes and change the location we buy coffee at to the local organic shop rather then the big box. But, in all of this, we are continuing to buy, buy and buy some more. We are buying new things that still need to be manufactured, shipped, packaged and sold, when we might not have needed to buy anything at all. We have not changed our consumption habits, simply tailored them to a specific style, a ‘green’ style (which doesn’t seem any better at times then someone whose style is that they enjoy the color pink).

I’m not trying to be overly critical (Though maybe I am), I just think we need a challenge to the ‘green’ trends we are seeing everywhere. And here is my challenge. If your desire to Go Green is really about the earth and not about you, then band your altruism and energy conservation together and help your neighbor at the same time as you help the planet. Instead of spending thousands on a hybrid, which is better for the environment, but not necessarily ton’s better (for the cost) then your current car (unless it’s an SUV, then maybe), try this experiment.

From what I’ve heard, CFL bulbs are pretty much the most cost-efficient, energy-saving switch a person can make. They not only save you money in the short run (electric bills) and the long-run (bulb replacement), but I think per dollar spent they have one of the biggest energy savings/conservations (sorry I don’t have a stat to link to), and everyone needs light bulbs. So, buy a bunch of CFL bulbs in bulk (ebay is good for this). Put them all in a little red wagon and go walking down your street. Knock on your neighbors door and offer to trade them three cfl’s for three of their incandescent bulbs (You can use them for the few places you can’t switch to cfl, or let them keep them, or try these). If that seems like too much work, you can send me some money via paypal and I’ll do it in my own neighborhood. It’s a much better use of your ‘green’ dollars then some of the more consumeristic trendy ‘green’ decisions.

(photo credit)

Barbie’s Greenwashing (ht. PEM)

The UnConvention is coming to the Twin Cities

The Search for Cool. Does this bother anyone else? (ht. PEM)

Maxed Out trailer. I think it’s worth a watch. (ht. JR)