parables of a prodigal world

Found a really cool new site called The Ongoing Adventures of ASBO Jesus . Christian cartoon satire, a la Dave Walker . For the non-British among you, an ‘ASBO’ is an ‘anti-social behavior order’… the courts in Britain award them to people who are deemed to be constant trouble in their neighborhoods… presumably according to their neighbors. Here's a sampling: Grace and Peace, Raffi

I caught this video over at ABCNews.com. It chronicles how researchers tested approximately 200 largely undecided voters across the country through a simple online test that measures implicit biases. About half the test subjects were shown a picture of Obama and the other half a picture of McCain. Various words, both positive and negative, were flashed on the screen in different colors. The participants were asked to press a button that corresponded to the color of the word as it appeared on the screen. Most of the voters in the study said ads calling McCain "out of touch" didn't affect their perception of him. The same went for an Obama ad that suggested McCain was "erratic." But according to the test results, "Bush" and "erratic" were the top two words the group associated with McCain. The group was also shown a clip of a Sarah Palin rally where she said, "Obama, he pals around with terrorists." The majority of voters said they d...

God’s sovereignty. Obedience. Thy will, not my will. Big concepts. Big problems. I remember having a conversation with the father of a friend from church. Dad wasn’t too keen on this whole church thing. He was old school, from the old country. “I don’t want my son to be controlled,” he said. Big concept, this whole “control” thing. Modern man doesn’t like to be controlled. Master of my fate. King of the castle. No one’s gonna tell me what to do. You see the hindrance here? That whole “folly to Greeks” thing. “We’re all controlled by someone or something,” I told the man. “For me, I choose to be controlled by the creator of the universe. If I’m gonna be controlled, he’s not a bad choice.” “Ah, ha!” He retorted. “So you admit to being controlled.” I don’t think he got my point. Probably my fault. I should have told this story: Some months ago, God told me to do something. Please don’t read that as meaning there was a booming voice in the sky saying, “Raffi, goeth and doeth such and such!...

I loves me some Rob Bell. I've called him the modern-day Origen, kinda out there, but you know that this guy's got a tap into the Living God that very few people out there have. His latest (in collaboration with fellow Mars Hill-er Don Golden) is called Jesus Wants to Save Christians: A Manifesto for the Church in Exile . Ballsy title, you say? Wait till you read the book. And until then, here's a summary, in a style that Bell would, I hope, be proud of... The Bible tells one story. One big fat story. It's a story about Exodus. It's always been a story about Exodus, about God hearing the cry of his oppressed people and coming to set them free. That's what God does...then and now. God saves. And what does He save from ? Well, all sort of things, of course, but the story we're told in the Bible speaks about a God who saves us from manifestations of our own human fallenness, the most glaring of which is Empire , the human tendency to erect systems that use powe...