The Thursday Review: The Top Five Oddest Movies I'm Glad I Can't Forget

First Posted May 7, 2009

A couple of years back, after an extended stint of picking some doozies, I was banned for a while from choosing the movie when we rented videos for a movie night (I think Anaconda was the pick that finally got my video-choosing license suspended for a while). It's not so much that I have bad taste, but I'm usually a sucker for an intriguing idea, however poorly executed, or an exotic setting, however dull the action taking place there. With this disclaimer up front, I've put together a list of the top five oddest movies I'm glad I can't forget. By "oddest" here I mean both that the movie concept itself was oddly unique, and that it's odd the movie should have etched itself into my imagination the way it has.

(On a side note, in his book Through a Screen Darkly, Jeffry Overstreet talks eloquently about the spirituality of films, and the unique way in which this particular art medium can act as a window onto the divine. While only one of the movies here makes it to his 200+ list of spiritually thought-provoking films, I think each of them in its own way raises spiritual themes that the Christian Faith might speak to.)

5. Meetings with Remarkable Men. Directed by Peter Brook (1979). Hands down one of the strangest movies I've ever seen. Based on a semi-autobiographical book by an obscure Greek-Armenian mystic named G. I. Gurdjieff, the film is a fragmented series of episodes and dialogues that traces Gurdjieff's journey through Central Asia looking for spiritual enlightenment and esoteric knowledge. It culminates with his initiation into a mysterious brotherhood of mystics. I had a friend in university who was a self-styled Gurdjieffian searching for esoteric knowledge himself, and who roped me into watching it with him. I wish I had known then what I know now: that in Christ, God's hidden wisdom and knowledge have been made public in the open scandal of the cross (Col 2:1-3). What talks we might have had then.

4. Walkabout. Directed by Nicholas Roeg (1971). The story of two British schoolchildren, abandoned in the outback of Australia and befriended by a silent aboriginal boy on walkabout who helps them survive. With a lot of surreal, dream-like footage of the Australian landscape, and a lot of drawn-out, wordless interactions between the three children, it asks a lot of the audience, and the ending is anyone's guess. It struck me at the time as a kind of "return to Eden/back to innocence" story wrapped up (ironically) in a poignant and painful coming of age story. Maybe it's the kind of back-to-Eden story we should hear more often.

3. Joe vs. The Volcano. Directed by John Patrick Shanely (1990). Though this is probably the one movie Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan would like to call a mulligan on, I found something strangely appealing about this campy story of a man's journey to find his inner hero. A satire of western capitalism, an allegory about the modern search for meaning, a quest story about finding inner wholeness by confronting our fear of death, it asks the kind of questions about the spiritual life that Christians should be engaging, I think, with the answers of Christ. (You can click here for a hypertext film-study I designed for teaching this movie in my grade eleven English classes.)

2. Far Away, So Close. Directed by Wim Wenders (1993). A film about fallenness and grace and incarnation, it tells the story of an angel who becomes human in an instant (to save a boy falling off a balcony), and who then finds himself on a quest for experience and redemption in his new life in the flesh. Apparently angels can only see in black and white, and can hear everyone's thoughts at once, which makes for some pretty evocative scenes moving in and out of colour with all sorts of mumbled lines in different languages coming at you all at once. It's the kind of film you could wear your beret to if you want.

1. Babette's Feast.Directed by Gabriel Axel (1987). Critically acclaimed and demonstrably brilliant, this is the only movie on this list that I would endorse as a must see. It tells the story of Babette, an extraordinarily gifted chef de cuisine and Parisian restaurateur who has been living incognito as a simple cook to two elderly sisters in a small, rustic fishing village in Denmark. When Babette wins 10,000 francs in a lottery, rather than return to Paris, she choses to spend the money on a lavish banquet for the villagers. Though they are woefully ignorant of the luxury they are being treated to, a spirit of genuine fellowship settles over them through the course of the meal, exposing and healing some deep-rooted hurts and bitterness in the community. Funny, moving, and evocative, this film asks powerful questions about the spirituality of food, and table-fellowship, and hospitality and art (and for the Christian, it also suggests poignant questions about the meaning of the Eucharistic meal, where Christ invites his community to find reconciliation and healing at a table laid with the extravagant feast of his own poured-out life).

A View of the World from Gravity Falls, Part I: Scratching the Cultural Surface

When I was a kid, one of the big faith questions we Christians wrestled with was not how many angels can balance on the head of a pin? or how can human free-will be compatible with God’s foreknowledge? or even what’s the nature of the hypostatic union?

It was: Should a Christian watch Star Wars? 

As a faith dilemma, this seems a bit antiquated, even quaint, I realize.  It’s been some 40 years since Luke Skywalker and his team of misfits first rebelled against the Evil Galactic Empire, and in the last four decades, the mythos and iconography of the Star Wars Universe have become so woven into the fabric of our culture that it’s hard to imagine a time when well-meaning, godly followers of Jesus once asked it in all seriousness, “What has Tatooine to do with Jerusalem?”

But they did.  I clearly remember one calmly-reasoned and humbly-offered sermon that laid it all out for us:  Yoda was really the Buddha, the Force is based on Eastern Mysticism and Pantheism, and “the Dark Side” is really just riffing on a “yin-yang” principle that has little to commend itself to a Christian world-view (and all, this, keep in mind, was before Episode I revealed that Anakin was, in fact, the result of a virgin birth... woah Nellie...)

One of my best friends in Sunday School was not allowed to watch Star Wars, read Star Wars books, or otherwise have anything to do with the franchise.  To their credit, my parents tended to see it all as harmless imaginative fun, and I got to see for myself the look of dismay on Luke’s face when he finds out that Vader is, after all, his Father.  From what I understand, their decision raised one or two pious eyebrows among the more cautious parents at church.

But I was thinking about the Star Wars controversy the other day, because the long-awaited Season 2, Episode 10 of Gravity Falls just came out, and my kids and I made a date of it the other night.

In case you don’t have a houseful of pre-teens/teenagers to keep you abreast of the latest in pop-culture phenomena, I should explain that Gravity Falls is a quirky, sometimes bizarre, but very compelling animated series by Disney that’s really big with the folks down at the Internet these days.  And it’s pretty big with my kids too.

In a nutshell, Gravity falls is about these twins, Dipper and Mabel Pines, who visit their Great Uncle Stan for the summer, in a sleepy little Oregon town called Gravity Falls.  A bit of a shyster with a sketchy past, Grunkle Stan runs a “museum of the paranormal” called the Mystery Shack, along with ‘Soos, his handyman, and Wendy, the aloof teen hired on for a summer job. 

In the pilot episode, Dipper and Mabel stumble across an enigmatic journal by an unknown author that describes the many out-of-the-ordinary things to be avoided in and around Gravity Falls.  This sets them on a series of encounters with all sorts of preternatural oddities, urban legends, mythic creatures and other cryptic things.  Think The X-Files meets the Bobbsey Twins.  For the especially attentive, the show is filled with secret codes and mysterious symbols that have generated no end of speculation and conspiracy theories on the world-wide inter-web (see here, for examples). 

Season  2, Episode 9 ended hanging off a cliff, with a broken laptop predicting the end of the world and Grunkle Stan up to something mysterious; so, like I say,  Episode 10 was eagerly awaited.

But here’s why I’m thinking about it today:  because not only is Gravity Falls original, creative, and funny, it also tends to wander into territory that’s bound to raise the eyebrow of a Christian parent or two.  There’s the surface, of course: things openly spiritual (like the dream-demon of episode 1.19), ambiguously supernatural (like the love god of episode 2.9), even vaguely cultic (like the society of the blind eye of episode 2.7) are the show’s stock and trade.  And then there’s beneath the surface: every episode is replete with secret ciphers, bizarre anagrams, backward messages and mysterious symbols that are evocative of—if not directly inspired by—the occult.   As Focus on the Family puts it: “Slippery spiritual content—every bit played for giggles and guffaws—includes magic, incantations and crystals with the power to alter the world around them.  Stan’s hat evokes the idea of Masonic headgear, and we see other such icons scattered across the landscape.”

So, besides speculation about “Who’s the author of the journal?” and “What’s up with the goat?” another big question the show raises is “Should Christians watch it?” (Here’s one of the more emphatic“no’s” I’ve come across )

Like Star Wars 40 years ago, or the Simpsons 30 years ago, Harry Potter 15 years ago, and Rock and Roll since, well, since it was just a twinkle in Churck Berry’ eye, the cultural phenomenon that is Gravity Falls forces Christians to think through and come to conclusions about what it looks like to live and move and breathe in a culture that they are inextricably part of, but, at the same time, not at home in.  The real question here seems to be: to what extent is participating in a non-Christian or un-Christian cultural phenomenon actually endorsing it? and to what extent is endorsing something unchristian a real threat to my Christian convictions?

Traditionally, Christians have taken three basic routes when it comes to this question: 1) the “Good-Christians-don’t-read-Harry-Potter” approach, which basically rejects culture as irredeemably fallen; 2) the “Harry-Potter-is-really-a-Christ-figure” approach, which basically finds an allegory for the Christian Faith behind every cultural bush; and 3) the “What’s-the-big-deal-about-Harry-Potter-anyway?” approach, that basically engages with it unreflectively as good, harmless fun.

I’d suggest that none of these approaches—blindly rejecting, blindly co-opting or blindly participating in popular culture—are ideal.  What is especially called for is something that, in high-falutin’ theological circles we call “cultural exegesis.”  The word “exegesis” means, “to draw meaning from and/or to interpret a text,” and cultural exegesis involves “reading” one’s own culture in a way that gets to its deepest meaning, and then interprets that meaning from a Christian perspective.  The best kind of cultural exegesis is actually a kind of conversation, where we think deeply about the meaning of what’s going on in popular culture, identify points of contact with, but also points of divergence from a Christian worldview, and engage with it in a way challenges us to live out our Christian convictions authentically in the public sphere.

Is it okay for a Christian to watch Gravity Falls?  Well, yes.

Especially if it can be the start of a conversation about a Christian worldview, and how it differs from a secular world view but at the same time speaks to some of the deepest questions a non-Christian culture seems to be asking.  This is what Paul did, for instance, when the Corinthian Church asked if Christians should eat meat that was sacrificed in a pagan temple, and his answer in 1 Corinthians 8 is sort of the prototype for Christian cultural exegesis. 

Well, that’s a pretty long preamble to the point of today’s post, which is to explain why the next month or so we’ll be spending some time discussing this very popular Disney show, looking at its themes and trying to understand their significance from a Christian perspective—kind of a “Christian view of the world from Gravity Falls.”

As a blog series, this is meant, on the one hand, very directly, as a way of engaging with a cultural phenomenon that the youth in my circle of influence find very compelling, but it’s also meant to model and encourage Christian cultural exegesis more generally.  After all, the work of cultural exegesis is harder work than simply rejecting or blindly co-opting, but it is, I’d argue, more rewarding, and probably, too, more Christlike.

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Lift Up Your Head, a song

A gidjak is a musical instrument from Central Asia that is a little bit like a violin (inasmuch as you play it with a bow), a little bit like a cello (inasmuch as you play it upright) and a little bit like a banjo (inasmuch as it has a skin that vibrates with the strings). It's hard to describe, but here's some YouTube footage of someone playing a gidjak.



My Aunt and Uncle worked as missionaries in Tajikistan for a number of years, and, knowing my penchant for exotic musical instruments, they brought me back a traditional gidjak. Mine actually looks almost identical to the one in the video above. Of course, I had no clue how to tune it or play it, but thanks to the wonders of YouTube technology, I was soon underway. I won't be playing Carnegie Hall anytime soon, but I did write a song (2005) with a couple of parts in it for the gidjak, and even a gidjak lead break. I posted a rough recording of it a couple of years ago, along with some theological musings about ethnodoxology and the travesty of musical homogeneity in the church. You can read all that here. Last fall I re-worked the song and made a new recording of it, which I'll post here for your listening pleasure. See if you can't pick out the gidjak in the arrangement.

Lift Up Your Head (prayer for Persia)

[listen]

Brown land, like a cracked and calloused hand
Dry land, flesh of stone and bone of sand
Lift up your head

Long night, like the ash of phoenix flight
Dark night, red the dawn the longing light
Lift up your head

Lift up your head and see, the lamb was slain to set you free
The phoenix flame will rise again and perch upon the holy tree
Lift up your head behold, the child you welcomed once of old
With myrrh and frankincense and gold
Is now the resurrected Lord
He comes to heal your land
Lift up your head

Ancient place, like a lined and noble face
Antique place, mist of myrrh and tear of grace
Lift up your head


Night skies like the gleam of veiled eyes
Eastern skies, see afar his star arise
Lift up your head

Lift up your head and see, the lamb was slain to set you free
The phoenix flame will rise again and perch upon the holy tree
Lift up your head behold, the child you welcomed once of old
With myrrh and frankincense and gold
Is now the resurrected Lord
He comes to heal your land
Lift up your head

When the Logic of Secular Liberalism Devours its Own Tail

This spring CBC Radio covered an emerging controversy related to the practice of gender-selective abortions among some communities in Canada.  Recent statistics have shown that some cultural groups in Canada have disproportionately high rates of male birth, and everyone's strong suspicion is that utrasounds are being used to determine the sex of an unborn fetus, and the girls are being aborted.

This report is indicative of the kind of coverage the story received:



The story has rumbled still, now; at least I haven’t heard anything for months, but here’s the cynical question I just can’t shake: if we live in a society that long ago accepted it as a fundamental tenet of women’s rights that no woman should be required to carry an unwanted baby to term, then on what reasonable grounds can we now protest gender-selective abortions, just because the baby's sex happens to be the reason it's unwanted? Put more rhetorically: why is “I don’t want a girl” suddenly an inappropriate reason to terminate a pregnancy when “I don’t want a disabled child” or “we’re just not ready to be parents” have been acceptable reasons for years?

In my view it is bitterly ironic and highly hypocritical that the CBC is worrying this particular bone so self-righteously, when in all other regards it has been such a biased advocate of legalized abortion that it can probably take some (though by no means all) of the credit for the ease with which gender-selective abortions are obtained, and for the moral apathy our culture has towards the entire issue. And it’s telling that in all CBC coverage of this story, not once did I hear anyone connect the dots between the issue of gender selection and the deep moral questions surrounding abortion generally (not once, for instance, did anyone suggest restricting or regulating abortion as a solution; the best they could do was a flimsy proposal to withhold ultrasound results).

But I also see a glimmer of hope at the bottom of this well of irony. Because if people still experience visceral indignation when they learn that some fetuses are being terminated simply because they’re unwanted (the reason notwithstanding) then it suggests that there are still some starting points left for Christians who believe in the sanctity of all life, to talk reasonably and calmly about why there is more at stake than personal choice when it comes to the question of abortion.

The Halloween Files (Part II): The Modern Living Room and the Age-Old Denial of Death

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Time was the modern-day "living room" was called the "parlour."  The word derives from the French word parler (to speak) and pointed to the fact that once upon a time this room was reserved for entertaining on only the most formal of occasions.  Here we kept the most valuable of our furnishings and the most ornate of our domestic status symbols, in a kind of sacred space within the home that was set aside for momentous events and special visitations.

Like births, and wedding receptions, and funerals.

Yes, funerals.   The word "parlour," and the memory that once we hosted funerals in the living-room, actually lives on in our modern euphemism for the local mortuary.  These days funerals happen in "funeral parlors," but time was the funeral--at least the open casket and the viewing and the reception parts of the funeral--time was this happened in our own parlors. 

The “funeral home” used to be our own home.

Because once upon a time dealing with death was an integral part of life, and by necessity we made space for it in our day-to-day.  Like Psychologist Richard Beck puts it, "We used to live with the dead.  We were born in our homes and we died in our homes.  The wake was in the home, and our dead bodies were viewed in the parlor of the home."

Of course, we don't call the parlour a parlour anymore, anymore than we use it for wakes and funerals.  Today professionals deal with death for us, in professionalized space out of sight and out of mind, and, what with all that valuable real-estate taking up space in the home, we've reclaimed the room that once served this purpose.  Today it's called "the living room" (perhaps aptly), and the memory that it was once used for dying, too, is all but gone.

This isn't the only way we deny death in our world.

We used to worship alongside the dead, for instance.  The churchyard was a cemetery, and once a week you had to walk by that sombre memento mori on your way to meet with the Lord of Life.  Time was. 

Richard Beck points out how now a-days, cemeteries are kept on the metropolitan outskirts, not at the centre of public life, and since no one wants to drive past a field full of morbid-looking tombstones, we've replaced all those solemn monuments with ground-level grave-markers so the fact that it is a cemetery can be kept strictly on a need-to-know basis.  A modern cemetery looks more like a serene city park than real graveyard.

I think there is something almost pathological in our modern world’s efforts to push death to the edges of our awareness and to professionalize and de-sacralise our encounters with it.  In general, I would argue that making peace with the reality of death is a vital step towards spiritual maturity, and that the denial of death leads to spiritual emptiness.  This is part of what Thoreau was getting at, I think, when he said that “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”  Quiet desperation hums almost audibly in the heart that refuses even to look at death.

But there’s more: because as a follower of the Risen Jesus, I believe both that death has been drained of its despair, but also that the inevitable fact of death can, and should, and does point us to our Maker and the offer of life he makes us in Jesus Christ (so death, defeated, is made to pay tribute to its Conqueror, Jesus Christ).  But in a world that refuses even to look at death, the news of its defeat will fall on deaf ears.

Which brings me at last to the point of today’s post.  Because in 22 days our culture will celebrate a community-wide ceremony that asks us all to take a good hard look at death, if only for one night of the year.  Or at least it used to ask us to.  It came knocking on your door asking for a treat, of all things.  And even today, the vestiges of that ceremony—plastic tombstones and rubber skeletons and all—are still hung up on display, a Made in China memento mori, but a memento mori nonetheless.

And it seems to me, thinking about Halloween theologically this month, and all, that there’s something going on here that the Gospel can, and should lay hold of.   Because the truth is, in Jesus Christ we need neither deny death nor to despair in it.  And as the quiet desperation of a death-denying culture is given voice, (mask-muffled voice, to be sure, but voice nonetheless) on this one "All’s Hallowed" night of the year—whatever else is going on October 31—we're being given the opportunity to remember and proclaim the sure saying that we live by:  “Death has been swallowed up in Victory.”

Thanks be to God, who gives us victory through Jesus Christ our Lord.

The Halloween Files (Part I)

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Yesterday I saw the first Halloween decorations on display in our neighborhood. The door of a house around the corner was sporting a ghostly rubber skeleton in a tattered white robe, the lawn of another house down the street was cluttered with a variety of kitschy plastic tombstones, and from the porch across the way, a ghastly deaths-head glowered down on passers by with flickering red eyes .

‘Tis the season.

Personally, I’m ambivalent about Halloween. On the one hand, I see problems with its historical ties to paganism and the occult, its celebration of violence and its glorification of gore. On the other hand, there are things in the Halloween tradition that inspire me to think about my faith more deeply: the questions it asks about “Hallowed-ness” (the sacred and the nebulous), its tenuous connection to All-Saint’s Day, the way it taunts a death-denying culture, for just one night, with the knowledge that we are, after all, mortal.

My wife is less ambivalent. Because of all the problems listed on the one hand, she’s always held Halloween at arm’s length. We had some friends who had immigrated to Canada from South Africa and they were absolutely mortified the first time they encountered a real Canadian Halloween.  This community wide celebration of witchcraft and death was baffling and disturbing to them.  My wife has tended to share their opinion.

For my part, like I say, I’m not sure; but one of the things I am sure of, is that there’s always more going on in the most commonplace trappings of our culture than meets the eye; and it seems to me that if there ever was a cultural trapping that could challenge us to think about the intersections between secular culture and Christian spirituality, it’s the strange stuff that takes place on the night of All’s-Hallowed-Eve.

All this is my way of introducing a series I’m working on for October here at terra incongita. Through the month of October we’re going to be spending some time exorcising my Halloween demons (so to speak) and analysing the theological significance of this most-secular-seeming tradition of Canadian culture.

I hope you’ll join us for the trip. And as we’re packing our bags, let me suggest a few more reasons why Halloween is worth some careful Christian scrutiny.

1) It provides a good primer on the Christian Worldview.  Buzz-Light-Year costumes and pillowcases full of candy not withstanding, Halloween actually asks some pretty significant questions about the veil between the material and the spiritual, and whether or not its as solid as we usually like to think.  Historical Christianity has always held that the veil between the material and the spiritual is made more of gossamer than pall, and that things like angels and demons and miracles and the "supernatural" are closer and real-er to us than we know (and not something you'd ever want to triffle with).  Reflecting on Halloween, then, helps us ask some important questions about how Christian our Worldview really is.

2) Halloween is one of the last community traditions we have.  When else does your neighborhood throw a huge block party and hand out goodies to all the kids? In this it can’t be avoided. It’s like voting: even opting out is significant form of participation, and the way Christians participate inevitably says something about our posture towards the community in general.

3) Theological reflection on Halloween is good practice for theological reflection on culture in general. The Christian faith actually takes the themes of Halloween more seriously than the even monster-garbed kids counting their candy afterward do, so no matter how we participate in it, we need to do things like: read culture through theological lenses, and weigh cultural practices against our Christian convictions, and make faith-shaped decisions about our role (as salt and light) in culture as a whole. This is stuff, actually, that Christians ought to be doing on a regular basis about more regular things than Halloween night (retirement investing, drinking coffee, driving cars, recycling, sexual ethics, the list is endless). Halloween, it turns out, is a good, low-stakes training ground, to develop these skills.

"Lift Up Your Head" (or: Me and My Gidjak)

A few years ago my parents visited my aunt and uncle, when they were working in the middle eastern country of Tajikistan. Knowing I have a curious spirit when it comes to musical instruments from far away places, they brought me home a gidjak. A gidjak is an instrument that resembles a violin, but you play it upright, resting it on your knee. Its sound is a bit of a curiosity: something like a violin, but less pitchy and more humming. You can find out more about the gidjak (and hear one being played by someone who knows what he's doing) here.

Anyways, after watching a few youtube videos to get an idea of how it's played, I thought I'd try my hand at writing a song for my gidjak. After much trial and error, here's what I came up with. And as you listen, please rest assured: I have no pending plans to quit my day job.

Lift Up Your Head

Brown land, like a cracked and calloused hand
Dry land, flesh of stone and bone of sand
Lift up your head

Long night, like the ash of phoenix flight
Dark night, red the dawn the longing light
Lift up your head

Lift up your head and see, the lamb was slain to set you free
The phoenix flame will rise again and perch upon the holy tree
Lift up your head behold, the child you welcomed once of old
With myrrh and frankincense and gold
Is now the resurrected Lord
He comes to heal your land
Lift up your head

Ancient place, like a lined and noble face
Antique place, mist of myrrh and tear of grace
Lift up your head

Night skies like the gleam of veiled eyes
Eastern skies, see afar his star arise
Lift up your head

Lift up your head and see, the lamb was slain to set you free
The phoenix flame will rise again and perch upon the holy tree
Lift up your head behold, the child you welcomed once of old
With myrrh and frankincense and gold
Is now the resurrected Lord
He comes to heal your land
Lift up your head

DNTO and Cultural Exegesis

A while back I shared some thoughts on the Top 10 Reasons I Listen to CBC Radio. A reason I might add to the list if I were to update it today is the Saturday afternoon program called Definitely Not the Opera (so called, I found out recently, because it airs opposite the CBC Radio 2 program, Saturday Afternoon at the Opera).


If you've never heard it before, let me explain. In concept, the show takes a broad theme related to contemporary culture-- last week's theme was "small gestures"-- and then puts together a meandering itinerary of stories, songs and interviews all related to said theme. Over the course of two hours, it covers a lot of ground, from the inane, to the academic, to the curious, to the profound. The host, Sook-Yin Lee, has a warm way with interviews and an unpretentious knack for storytelling.


As a pastor, I find DNTO so compelling because it challenges me to think about the spiritual dimensions of everyday things ("the power of story" for instance, or "the place of small talk") and it gives me a chance to hear how people in our culture are experiencing things that the Christian Faith actually speaks to in a meaningful way ("the motivating power of guilt" perhaps, or "gain through personal sacrifice"). It's a 2 hour exercise in what they sometimes called "cultural exegesis" when I was in Seminary: listening to the deepest questions of culture and reflecting on what Word the Christian Faith might add to the conversation.


You can check the show out here, and you can download podcasts here. But in the meantime, here are some direct links to a few of my favorite episodes. If you're a Christian in a reflective mode today, and curious about doing a bit of "cultural exegesis," perhaps one of the following might give you some food for thought:


The episode on "forgiving and forgetting."


The "getting kicked out" episode.


The "listening" episode.

Food for Thought

Maybe you've seen this before. It was one of those shotgun emails with a subject line like "Interesting must see" or something, that came across my computer screen a while back. It's a photo essay that explores what people around the world eat in a week. After a bit of Google-work, I found out it came from this fascinating book on the same subject.

So, for instance, here's what the Revis family of North Carolina ate in one week:

By contrast, here's what the Ayme family of Tingo Peru ate in one week.

You can view the complete photo essay here, with pictures of families from, among other places, Japan (lots of fish), Italy (lots of bread), Germany (lots of cream), Chad (not much of anything). It's quite a thought-provoking piece that raises all sorts of questions about the food-stuffs we stuff into our maws.

Questions about what we eat. How much we eat. Where it comes from, and with whom we eat it (it stands out to me that in many of the non-western photos, it's not just a Mom and Dad and child, 3.2 people standing by their pile of food, but a whole household that spans maybe 3.2 generations). It also raises questions about imbalance of wealth and power in the world, or about the mechanized, modernized, synthesized food processing industry that we depend on in the West to laden our tables with so many plastic-wrapped edibles.

I've been thinking about these questions a lot lately. This is partly because I think there's something very spiritual about food that we've lost sight of in our world, where food no longer comes from the dirt and the rain and at the expense of living things, but from from a box in a store at the expense of our debit card. I don't think its coincidental, for instance that Levitical purity laws put such an emphasis on what you ate as part of your life with God, or that you sealed a covenant in the ancient world by eating a meal, or that Jesus ate with sinners.

Inspired by this photo essay to explore some of these questions a bit further, I spent a week tracking all the food I ate. It turned out to be a humbling and enlightening exercise that challenged me to think a little more deeply about food and its role in our lives. So, in the spirit of "What the World Eats," here's a picture of what it takes to keep me fed for the week:

Can We Talk?

One of the things I've found indispensably useful since starting my new life as a pastor is my new HTC Android Dream Smart Phone. I say this with not a little sheepishness, because for a long time I held out against cell phones on principle. And now, here I am, with no mere cell phone, but a touch-sensitive cellular communications device with instant access to email, gmail, text messages and chatting, roaming internet, youtube viewing and GPS capabilities. It's like going from a pedal bike to a Porsche over night.

Now I say I held out because for a long time I had this sense that cell phone technology stunted the growth of genuine community by making us so independent and self-sufficient that we no longer need to have any real connection with the actual flesh-and-blood human beings around us. For example: time was when my car broke down on the side of the highway I would have to knock on the neighbour's door and ask for help; and more often that not, they would. Now I can call nameless, faceless roadside assistance from the comfort of my car (and view a variety of inane Youtube clips while I'm waiting for them to come).

I was talking about this with a friend a while back and she told me that she found her cell phone helpful because when she had to walk home from her university classes at night and felt unsafe, she could call her dad to come meet her. Then she said: "Of course, if I didn't have the cell phone, I'd have to get to know the other students in the class well enough that I could walk home with one of them..." And I think that was my point in the hold-out days: I felt that roaming communications technologies like cell phones allowed us to seal up our spheres of influence so tightly that the strangers around us never had to be anything more than strangers.

And maybe there's a kernel of truth there.

But here I am with my HTC Smart Phone and finding it, as I said earlier, indispensably useful.

But I'm also wondering about the revenge effects of such technology.

Author and social scientist Edward Tenner argues that all technologies have a natural tendency to "bite back" with "revenge effects" on the societies into which they are introduced. His theory is that societies are really just systems that constantly seek the "status quo." He suggests that as new technologies significantly upset this status quo, the system itself will naturally adjust in unexpected, unintended, even unconscious ways to counteract their effect, and so maintain the status quo.

Example 1: As we introduce a plethora of ingenious time-saving appliances to the kitchen, the system adjusts to maintain a status quo of business: once it's been freed from meal prep-and-clean-up hours, it's possible to overload our evening schedule with other things, and so we find ourselves busier than ever.

Example 2 (and perhaps more to the point): As communications devices make communication increasingly clear and easy, we find our actual communicating and decision-making processes more (not less) cloudy and confused because now everything has to be answered and decided and acted on under the tyranny of the now.

I'm not sure if Turner's on to anything or not (though they say that the advent of email has significantly increased-- not decreased-- paper consumption in the office workplace). But I do know this: the other day a friend called me at home and when I picked up the phone he said: "Finally found you." He'd tried my gmail, left a message on my voice mail, called my office phone, and when he couldn't get me at any of these he tried me at home. All the ways to connect with me, it seems, had actually made me harder to find.

Vengeance is mine, sayeth the HTC Dream.

The Psalm They Never Told Me About in Sunday School

Last night there were severe storm warnings for the Moose Jaw region. Walking my dog, I could see menacing clouds piling up in heavy heaps in all directions. I kept humming that line from the old hymn-- "dark is his path on the wings of the storm"-- and watching the horizon-- and thinking about Psalm 29.

Psalm 29 doesn't get as much airtime as the more intimate ones like #23 or #42. This is too bad, maybe, because there's something really subversive going on here that's worth mulling over. On the surface it's this straight forward, albeit glorious hymn celebrating the Voice of the Lord with vivid "severe-storm-warning" imagery. Yahweh presides over the divine counsel (v.1 literally, "the sons of god"), and his mighty Voice rumbles out exactly seven times: it thunders over the waters; it is powerful; it is majestic; it breaks the mighty cedars; it flashes with lightning; it shakes the desert; it strips the forests bare. All creation convulses as Yahweh is enthroned as King forever, reigning supreme over the chaotic waters (v. 10 the "flood").

And in his temple, all cry "Glory!"

But here's the subversive thing: a divine warrior subduing the chaotic waters, sitting enthroned amid a counsel of divine beings, thundering his sevenfold voice from his divine palace-- these are all images straight out of the ancient Baal myths. In fact, in a text that Ugaritic scholars call KTU² 1.101.3b-4 (Ugariticia,V, 3.3b-4), we find a description of Baal sitting enthroned over the flood water, and then a vivid reference to his "seven lightnings," his "eight storehouses of thunder," his "shaft of lightning."

Remember Baal? The enemy of Yahweh? The false god whose cult Elijah worked so zealously to purge from Israel? Well it looks like psalmist here has lifted the precise attributes of the mythic Baal, and then ascribed their glory directly to Yahweh.

In a way that makes playing rock music in church look pretty tame, Psalm 29 uses the specific language of an idolatrous culture to make a bold case for the One True God. Because to claim that Yahweh's voice thunders over the waters is to claim implicitly and subversively that Baal's does not. Ugaritic scholar Peter Craigie says it like this: "Language normally employed to worship Baal for the awesome might of the thunderstorm did not rightfully belong to him who was not true god. Such language belonged to the God of Israel alone."

Now, I think it would be easy to make too much out of the Baal-myth imagery in Psalm 29 (and I've read a few scholars who've done just that). At the same time, however, it would be easier to make too little out of it-- to ignore altogether the startling fact that this psalm makes Baalistic imagery bear witness to Yahweh.

I've posted a bit on culture and Faith lately (like here , here, or here ). And as I wonder out loud about the Christian's prophetic role in a non-Christian culture, I wonder if we shouldn't meditate a bit on Psalm 29. Because here God confounds the claims of an idolatrous impostor by revealing himself specifically and scandalously in the impostor's own terms. It's almost as if you can hear God say to all those ancient Baalists: "You had the right notion of divine glory-- you just ascribed it to the wrong god. There is a voice that subdues chaos and gives life-- only it's mine, and most assuredly not Baal's."

And I wonder what it would look like if Christians were as daring in their apologetic strategy as this Psalmist. What if we looked for broken witnesses to the One True God buried in the language and imagery of the culture around us? What if-- like Psalmist #29-- we pointed these out, saying to our neighbours: "You had the right notion of divine glory-- or divine love-- or divine Spirit-- you just ascribed it to the wrong god."

If we could, we just might hear the same voice of the Lord that the Psalmist heard, rumbling like looming thunder on the distant horizon of his culture.

A Case in Point...

With the words of my last post still ringing in my ears, my son and I sat down to enjoy an episode of the Debaters this afternoon. My bowdlerization-trigger-finger twitched for just a moment with the impulse to turn it off when I heard the topic: "Monotheism vs. Polytheism. If one god is good... are many gods better?"

My son looked at me. "Should we listen to this one, Dad?"

But we've talked a bit lately about Christian attitudes towards humor, and I wanted to model the kind of cultural mapping I was describing a post ago, so I said, "Well, let's listen to the kind of jokes they make, and talk about them after."

And here's specifically what we talked about after: listen to the argument that comedian Ron Sparks makes here in favor of monotheism. What struck me is that-- tongue-in-cheekisms and comedic bathos aside-- this is almost exactly the same argument that St. Augustine made against Roman paganism some 1600 years ago in his monumental work City of God: If the pagan deities are such supreme beings, why does there have to be so many of them to keep the universe running?

It's not quite as funny (or succinct), but here's how Augustine put it (Book IV, Chapter 8):

But how is it possible to recount in one part of this book all the names of gods or goddesses, which they could scarcely comprise in great volumes, distributing among these divinities their peculiar offices about single things? They have not even thought that the charge of their lands should be committed to any one god: but they have entrusted their farms to Rusina; the ridges of the mountains to Jugatinus; over the downs they have set the goddess Collatina; over the valleys, Vallonia. Nor could they even find one Segetia so competent, that they could commend to her care all their grain crops at once; but so long as their seed-grain was still under the ground, they would have the goddess Seia set over it; then, whenever it was above ground and formed straw, they set over it the goddess Segetia; and when the grain was collected and stored, they set over it the goddess Tutilina, that it might be kept safe. Who would not have thought that goddess Segetia sufficient to take care of the standing grain until it had passed from the first green blades to the dry ears? Yet she was not enough for men, who loved a multitude of gods, that the miserable soul, despising the chaste embrace of the one true God, should be prostituted to a crowd of demons. Therefore they set Proserpina over the germinating seeds; over the joints and knots of the stems, the god Nodotus; over the sheaths enfolding the ears, the goddess Voluntina; when the sheaths opened that the spike might shoot forth, it was ascribed to the goddess Patelana; when the stems stood all equal with new ears, because the ancients described this equalizing by the term hostire, it was ascribed to the goddess Hostilina; when the grain was in flower, it was dedicated to the goddess Flora; when full of milk, to the god Lacturnus; when maturing, to the goddess Matuta; when the crop was runcated,— that is, removed from the soil—to the goddess Runcina. Nor do I yet recount them all, for I am sick of all this, though it gives them no shame. Only, I have said these very few things, in order that it may be understood they dare by no means say that the Roman empire has been established, increased, and preserved by their deities, who had all their own functions assigned to them in such a way, that no general oversight was entrusted to any one of them.

A comedian making jokes about monotheism on national, secular radio stumbles onto an argument that one of the greatest theologians of Church history marshaled in defense of the one true God against the pagans. The audience laughs. Ron wins the debate. And I'm trying to trace one more route to a spiritual point of contact on my map of Canadian culture.

Top Ten Reasons I Listen to CBC Radio

Looking back over the last few months of blogging, I've noticed that a fair number of my posts have been inspired by something heard on CBC radio. I'm not religious about it or anything, but I do try to catch a bit of CBC each day (usually on the drive to-and-from work), and often a thought provoking interview or insightful documentary will inspire me to reflect on God, life, faith, love, words or spirituality.

I was thinking about this the other day, CBC Radio sowing the seeds of blog posts in my brain and all, and I thought I'd put together my list of the top ten reasons I listen to the CBC.

10. Quirks and Quarks (Saturdays 12:06 pm). Bob McDonald takes the most esoteric of science and makes it feel like an old buddy from elementary school. Often makes me think about how deep a role science plays in the modern act of myth-making.

9. Tapestry (Sunday 2:05 pm). This weekly "exploration of spirituality, religion and the search for meaning" assures me that Canadians are "seeking" a lot more than they let on. They're just not seeking the way the mega-church-shopping seekers that Willow Creek has sensitized us to are seeking. This program challenges me to think carefully about how Canadians in particular are seeking, and how the church might meet them in that search with the life-changing story of Jesus.

8. Talking Books. Sadly this program is no longer on the air, but I loved listening to Ian Brown's book talks. Sometimes the guests he had sounded a bit pompous, but I think that was part of the charm: they always seemed exactly like I'd expect a book club to sound. You could almost feel the itch of the cardigan or smell the orange pekoe cooling in the cup as they ranted or raved.

7. The "9.30 in Newfoundland" thing. I love this constant reminder that Canadians are citizens of a huge country. Huge. Bigger than Vancouver. Bigger than Calgary. Bigger than Toronto. So big it needs an extra half a time zone. There're people scattered all over this land mass, and there's something kinda Canadian in not wanting to offend anyone by leaving any of them out.

6. Ideas (Wednesdays at 9:05 pm). Billed as the program that "explores social issues, culture and the arts, geopolitics, history, biography, science and technology and the humanities," any time I've listened it's actually delivered pretty well on this long list of disciplines. If there are still Renaissance men (or women) alive in Canada, I know what they're doing Wednesday nights at 9.

5. The Debaters (Saturdays 11:30 am). There is something quintessentially Canadian in this show: take some legitimate political, social or cultural issue and have comedians debate it with an irreverent combination of "fact and funny." Not only does it showcase what's best about Canadian humor, but it often unmasks pretty deep issues so that we can look at their foibles in new light. And it's really funny.

4. The Vinyl Cafe (Sundays 12:05 pm). Love Stuart Mclean's stories. So does my son. Often we catch them just as we're coming home from church, and he'll sit in the car in our driveway listening intently if we get home before the story's done. This program gives me hope that Canadians will still listen patiently, delightedly and enthralled to the spoken word-- even the orally-read written word-- if those words are arranged with care, love, wisdom and wit.

3. The Age of Persuasion (Thursdays 3:30pm). Anyone who lives in a world bombarded by advertising media should catch this program once in a while to get a brief, engaging glimpse at the inner clockworks of that world. There're cogs in there you never knew existed. And Terry O'Reilly is pretty good at explaining them as he explores "the countless ways marketers permeate your life, from media, art and language, to politics, religion and fashion."

2. Jian Ghomeshi (on Q). I think Jian Ghomeshi is one of the most gracious hosts on the air today. And I make this claim especially because I have no way of quantifying it. But anyone who could handle this interview with as much poise as he did is at least in the running for the Most Gracious Host Award. Listening to him makes me think all over again about the importance of insightful, well-timed questions and thoughtful, active listening.

1. Lessons in Loving the Culture Christ Died For. In his book, The Twenty-First Century Pastor, David Fisher says that learning to love our culture with the redemptive love of a Christ-follower is vital to genuine Christian ministry. He writes, "Cultural adaptation and respect has far more to do with effective pastoral ministry than many people want to admit. We need to become experts at reading and understanding [our] cultural maps." The questions I hear being asked on CBC Radio, and the answers I hear being offered, help me draw the kind of "cultural map" Fisher's talking about here. And Christians really need this kind of a map. We need sources for doing the cartography. Because, as Fisher says in a more convicting passage later on: "Christ's church and its pastoral leaders need to follow Jesus down that hill [from which he wept over Jerusalem] towards our address. A culture-bashing Christianity does not serve well the Christ who went to a cross to die for his enemies, even the enemies of our church." As mixed up and confused as some of the stuff I hear on CBC is, it always reminds me that this is the culture that Christ died to redeem, and this is the culture that he has called me to do ministry in.

The Top Five Oddest Movies I'm Glad I Can't Forget

A couple of years back, after an extended stint of picking some doozies, I was banned for a while from choosing the movie when we rented videos for a movie night (I think Anaconda was the pick that finally got my video-choosing license suspended for a while). It's not so much that I have bad taste, but I'm usually a sucker for an intriguing idea, however poorly executed, or an exotic setting, however dull the action taking place there. With this disclaimer up front, I've put together a list of the top five oddest movies I'm glad I can't forget. By "oddest" here I mean both that the movie concept itself was oddly unique, and that it's odd the movie should have etched itself into my imagination the way it has.

(On a side note, in his book Through a Screen Darkly, Jeffry Overstreet talks eloquently about the spirituality of films, and the unique way in which this particular art medium can act as a window onto the divine. While only one of the movies here makes it to his 200+ list of spiritually thought-provoking films, I think each of them in its own way raises spiritual themes that the Christian Faith might speak to.)

5. Meetings with Remarkable Men. Directed by Peter Brook (1979). Hands down one of the strangest movies I've ever seen. Based on a semi-autobiographical book by an obscure Greek-Armenian mystic named G. I. Gurdjieff, the film is a fragmented series of episodes and dialogues that traces Gurdjieff's journey through Central Asia looking for spiritual enlightenment and esoteric knowledge. It culminates with his initiation into a mysterious brotherhood of mystics. I had a friend in university who was a self-styled Gurdjieffian searching for esoteric knowledge himself, and who roped me into watching it with him. I wish I had known then what I know now: that in Christ, God's hidden wisdom and knowledge have been made public in the open scandal of the cross (Col 2:1-3). What talks we might have had then.

4. Walkabout. Directed by Nicholas Roeg (1971). The story of two British schoolchildren, abandoned in the outback of Australia and befriended by a silent aboriginal boy on walkabout who helps them survive. With a lot of surreal, dream-like footage of the Australian landscape, and a lot of drawn-out, wordless interactions between the three children, it asks a lot of the audience, and the ending is anyone's guess. It struck me at the time as a kind of "return to Eden/back to innocence" story wrapped up (ironically) in a poignant and painful coming of age story. Maybe it's the kind of back-to-Eden story we should hear more often.

3. Joe vs. The Volcano. Directed by John Patrick Shanely (1990). Though this is probably the one movie Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan would like to call a mulligan on, I found something strangely appealing about this campy story of a man's journey to find his inner hero. A satire of western capitalism, an allegory about the modern search for meaning, a quest story about finding inner wholeness by confronting our fear of death, it asks the kind of questions about the spiritual life that Christians should be engaging, I think, with the answers of Christ. (You can click here for a hypertext film-study I designed for teaching this movie in my grade eleven English classes.)

2. Far Away, So Close. Directed by Wim Wenders (1993). A film about fallenness and grace and incarnation, it tells the story of an angel who becomes human in an instant (to save a boy falling off a balcony), and who then finds himself on a quest for experience and redemption in his new life in the flesh. Apparently angels can only see in black and white, and can hear everyone's thoughts at once, which makes for some pretty evocative scenes moving in and out of colour with all sorts of mumbled lines in different languages coming at you all at once. It's the kind of film you could wear your beret to if you want.

1. Babette's Feast.Directed by Gabriel Axel (1987). Critically acclaimed and demonstrably brilliant, this is the only movie on this list that I would endorse as a must see. It tells the story of Babette, an extraordinarily gifted chef de cuisine and Parisian restaurateur who has been living incognito as a simple cook to two elderly sisters in a small, rustic fishing village in Denmark. When Babette wins 10,000 francs in a lottery, rather than return to Paris, she choses to spend the money on a lavish banquet for the villagers. Though they are woefully ignorant of the luxury they are being treated to, a spirit of genuine fellowship settles over them through the course of the meal, exposing and healing some deep-rooted hurts and bitterness in the community. Funny, moving, and evocative, this film asks powerful questions about the spirituality of food, and table-fellowship, and hospitality and art (and for the Christian, it also suggests poignant questions about the meaning of the Eucharistic meal, where Christ invites his community to find reconciliation and healing at a table laid with the extravagant feast of his own poured-out life).

A "Jug O' Punch" in Church?

Did you ever get that mass email that warns you not to flash your lights at an oncoming car with their high-beams on, because of a new "gang initiation ritual" where initiates to some enigmatic (probably Asian) gang drive around with their high-beams on and are required to chase down and shoot the first motorist who signals them like this?

It's an urban myth.

Or how about the one about the man who follows a beautiful seductress home from the bar, only to wake up, one or two spiked-drinks later, shivering in a bathtub full of ice with mysterious stitches in his side and a note (maybe written in lipstick on the mirror, for effect) explaining that one of his kidneys was surgically removed while he lay anesthetized, to be sold on the organ-donor's black market?

Urban myth.

I once heard some sociologist suggest that urban legends like these are actually significant narrative acts whereby a social group tries to justify its deepest cultural anxieties by framing them in outrageous stories that are just plausible enough to need no substantiation. The gang initiation myth, for instance, allows us to justify our irrational xenophobia; the stolen kidney allows us to narrate our anxieties about the dangers of promiscuity, or our suspicion of the mysterious powers of modern medicine.

The Faith, of course, has its own versions of these narrative acts. Heard the one about the unassuming first-year college student who calmly refuted the belligerent professor of evolutionary biology or nihilistic philosophy using nothing but cool reason? Or how about the one about some high-tech space-clock at NASA that inexplicably discovered a missing day in the chronology of the solar system and thus inadvertently proved Joshua 10:13?

Christian-urban myths.

But here's another Christian urban myth you might have heard. It usually comes up when people in the church are asking questions about whether the latest rock-music style is appropriate for worship. At some point someone quips that, after all, Luther used bar songs for the melodies of some of his greatest hymns; if Luther could use drinking songs, surely a bit of fuzz on the electric guitar shouldn't turn heads.

But here's the thing. Although the hymnals of the Reformation were indeed criticized for their rollicking rhythms, there's no evidence that Luther ever used bar tunes for his hymns. In fact, as far as we know, the only time he actually used a secular folk tune, he ended up changing the tune because of its worldly associations. (Here's some hard data from the Works of Martin Luther: of Luther's 37 chorales, 15 were tunes he composed himself, 13 came from Latin service music, 4 were German religious folk songs, 2 were pilgrimage hymns, 2 are of unknown origin, and only one came from a secular folk song.)

Some music historians suggest that the legend about Luther using drinking songs comes from the fact that most of his hymns follow a musical pattern known (coincidentally) as a "bar form."

Luther didn't use bar songs, he wrote his songs in "bar form."

Now, to be clear: this is not a post about whether or not rock music belongs in church. But it is a post about the stories we tell ourselves to narrate and validate our irrational anxieties. And I wonder: are there anxieties about our relationship to culture as Christians that a myth like "Luther used drinking songs" narrates for us?

I'm just thinking out loud here, but could it be that, musical styles aside, there's this niggling thought in the back of our mind that in some way, on some level, we've acquiesced to the worst of culture-- it's glare, it's wealth, it's power-plays, maybe-- in ways we feel we need to justify?

And maybe an urban myth-- like the one about the great Church reformer who used his culture's drinking songs to revamp the church's worship-- helps us do this.

Darth Maul Meets Indiana Jones

One of the biggest faith issues in the church of my childhood was not the predestination-vs-freewill debate, nor pre- mid- post-trib. rapture speculations, nor even the "can a Christian lose his salvation?" question.

It was whether or not Christians could watch Star Wars.

There were two pretty distinct castes in my Sunday school: those with parents who banned the movies from the minds of their children because they suspected that Satan's face lurked behind the mysterious mask of Darth Vader; and those with parents (like mine) who saw it all as harmless imaginative fun and allowed their children to personally witness Luke channel the Force against the powers of darkness. These fortunate few were viewed with mingled awe and admiration by the uninitiated.

I'm only mildly exaggerating. I can still remember a very calm, reasoned sermon in our church one Sunday morning where the preacher laid it all out for us: Yoda is really the Buddha, the Force is based on Eastern mysticism/pantheism, and the "Dark side" is just the yin-yang principle in disguise. And this was light-years before Episode One would reveal that Anakin Skywalker was born of a virgin...

Of course, that's not all. I remember bringing a copy of The Two Towers with me to Bible camp and being asked not to read it there because it "dabbles in the occult and paganism. " As a teacher, I once had some Christian parents request that their child be excused from reading Lord of the Flies because of the way it posed hard questions about the source of human depravity. And I'm sure you could make your own list of ways you've seen Christians try to stay true to their convictions by holding culture at arms length.

For my part, I've tried to follow the example of my parents, and encourage in our children the attitudes and discernment necessary to engage culture with Christ-like courage and wisdom, not fear and suspicion. This is not an easier path: it means being deeply involved in my kids' lives, having engaged and honest conversations about difficult topics, and being willing to take some risks.

But I'm thinking about this today because, as I mentioned elsewhere, my 10-year-old son's list of current hobbies includes stop-motion animation with his Lego sets. And, as you might have guessed, one of his favorite themes (when his dad's not talking him into Shakespeare) is Star Wars. When I watch his imagination run free and wild with this visual storytelling medium, I often wonder: what would the well-meaning, culture-banning Christians of my youth say if they could see us now?

Mostly for your viewing pleasure, but also to stimulate dialogue on what it might mean for Christians to view the culture around them with the discerning eyes of Christ, I offer this sample of his work:

Post-Mod-what-ity?

No review of my studies at Briercrest would be complete without uttering the "p-word" at least once. Questions about post-modernity came up a lot in my courses: What does it mean for the church? What does it mean for ministry and mission? What does it mean for faith and theology? What kind of response should Christians make to it?

And what ever happened to absolute truth?

I don't think of myself as especially post-modern; but this mostly because I don't find the term itself all that useful, and I tend to resist labeling myself (or others) on principle. (Some would take this as a sure sign that I'm more post-modern than I care to admit.)

Anyways, pre-, mid- or post-modern as they may be, here are some thoughts from a paper I wrote looking at ministry in a post-modern world.

Regardless of one’s opinion of the so-called “post-modern ethos,” any attempt to explore the challenges of evangelism and mission in the twenty-first century must eventually acknowledge and make some kind of response to it. Though the term “post-modern” itself is admittedly difficult to define, in his Primer on Postmodernism theologian Stanley Grenz offers a helpful framework for understanding its significance: “Whatever else it might be ... postmodernism signifies the quest to move beyond modernism”. It eschews the “myth of inevitable progress,” “refuses to limit truth to its rational dimension,” “dethrones the human intellect as the arbiter of truth,” and rejects the “Enlightenment belief that knowledge is objective.” Adding his voice to the call of other Christian analysts of post-modernity, Grenz urges his readers to “appraise any new ethos that shapes the culture in which God calls believers to live as his people,” and to ask how we can “express the gospel in categories of the new social context”

Grenz’s own answer to that question—that Christians must embody the gospel “in a manner that is post-individualistic, post-rationalisitc, post-dualistic and post-noeticentric”—points to the possibility of proclaiming a vital and vibrant Gospel to a new generation. Such suggestions find notable similarities in the portrait of post-modern evangelism that Robert Webber paints in Ancient Future Evangelism. In brush-strokes similar to Grenz’s “post-rationalism” and “post-noeticentrism,” Webber pictures post-modern evangelism as a “display” as opposed to an “argument”—an invitation into “a community that is shaped by a tradition of worship, discipleship, Christian formation, and vocation.” Similarly, Webber echoes Grenz’s “post-individualism” when he describes worship as a dialogue between God and the community of God’s people. Rejecting the ego-centric, experiential nature of much contemporary worship, Webber argues instead that the Church’s worship must have a specifically missional focus: “Worship is not about me and my experience; it is about God and God’s mission to save humanity and to rescue the world through Jesus Christ’s death, resurrection, and coming again.” With Grenz, Webber is also emphatically “post-dualistic” in his vision for evangelism. He diagnoses much contemporary Christianity with an “incipient Gnosticism” that functionally denies the goodness of creation, bodily salvation, and the biblical truth that the work of Christ extends to all creation, and reflects instead “our individualistic, rationalistic and nonembodied modern view of Christianity.” The lesson here for the church is that evangelism must start “with God’s act of creation, with God’s love of creation, and with God’s intent to rescue the created order.”