Avdat

I am a cafeteria Mennonite

Maybe you've heard of cafeteria Catholics. Maybe you are one. Well in this post, Halden Doerge has a cautionary word for cafeteria Mennonites:

The Anabaptist tradition is not, first of all, about “nonviolence” but rather about the nature of discipleship, the church, the world and the meaning of Christ’s Lordship. You can’t divorce Anabaptist’s theology of peace from their commitment to things like believer’s baptism, voluntary church membership, congregationalism, the rejection of clericalism, and yes, opposition to certain understandings of sacramentalism. To do so is to fail to take the tradition with any real seriousness. The same is true for Anabaptists and Mennonites who quickly latch on to quasi-Catholic enthusiasm about sacramental theology. (Indeed, most of what I’m saying here applies, vice-versa, to free churchers who think they can appropriate whatever elements of Catholicism they find compelling, a similarly-common tendency.)

I came to a related conclusion a month ago when I taught a little course on the Didache for a dozen or so teens on campus for Project Burning Bush. I really wonder how compatible infant baptism is with the kind of high-commitment Christianity (non-violence, resistance to capitalism, church discipline as mutual accountability) that so many communitarians want.

The return of You Tube Friday, "It's life Jim, but not as we know it" Version

For my peeps at Montreat this week:

Whew, that was close

Angry purple clouds rose over the trees in the back yard. The weather radar indicated a thunderstorm was bearing down on us. Should I chance a run? My training schedule called for a three-miler today. I might just get it in.

"You won't melt," sneered Mrs. Avdat. So I went. When the first frigid downdraft hit, driving away the oppressive heat and humidity, I was glad to be out there. But when limbs started flying through the air, and thunder started peeling, I began to worry.

Martin Luther got caught in a thunderstorm, and he was so scared he made a deal with Saint Anne: "Save me, and I'll become a monk. I swear!"

So I prayed, "Lord, get me home before the storm hits in earnest, lest I wind up promising you something stoopid."

And the Lord had mercy on me.

Would today's GOP filibuster the Americans with Disabilities Act?

I was going to blog about this, but Kevin Drum beat me to it.

History ain't on your side

My next contribution to the peace, unity and purity of the church will be to teach a course on early Christian sexuality. If we're condemned to fight over sex ad infinitum, I want both liberals and conservatives to know that neither has history on its side.

Imagine a time when substantial numbers of Christians regarded procreation as a great evil. Imagine a time when the counter-cultural "left" practiced sexual renunciation. It's not some science fiction future. We've been there and done that.

As part of a directed study on monasticism I read Peter Brown's The Body and Society and Susanna Elm's Virgins of God. Both are excellent historical works. Brown's book could just as easily been titled All the Reasons Why Primitive Christians Quit Having Sex.

There were practical reasons, to be sure. Given the appalling levels of infant and childhood mortality, Roman women needed to give birth to six children just to maintain the population level. The Caesars pressured them to do just that, for the ruling class needed offspring to inherit all that upper crust wealth. Patriotism asks a lot of its soldiers, but Roman patriotism asked even more of its women. Six kids! In fourth world squalor! No wonder many Christian women found celibacy appealing.

But a purely materialist explanation won't suffice. It was the power of an idea that drove many Christians, male and female, to renounce sex.

The Lord will provide... good meds

Abraham's aborted sacrifice of Issac in Genesis 22 resonates with the part of me who is the parent of an autistic child. In moments of desperation, rage or despair over my son's inability to be at peace with himself, his loved ones and his surroundings, it seems as if God has given me this child only in order to will his destruction before my very eyes. But the story, though terrifying, ends happily. Issac is not burned on the altar. God provides. This--and the right pharmaceutical cocktail--gives me hope.

It's been a hellish few months. Our son has taken depakote for several years because of an abnormal EEG. Tests late last year were normal, so his neurologist began to wean him off the depakote. Trouble is, depakote not only prevents seizures, it's a mood stabilizer, which our son desperately needs. Without it he became a holy terror.

We learned our lesson. Back on the depakote. But then, he became incapable of keeping down his anti-depressant. So he was throwing up everything. Without reliable levels of medicine in his system, he was completely unmanageable. We packed a little bag in case we had to hospitalize him--quickly. He's almost 13, and as tall as I am. I can't pick him up and tote him off to his room like I did a few years ago whenever he fell apart.

Then his doctor prescribed a new anti-depressant, which, praise God, didn't induce nausea. And he changed--overnight. He's able to sit still and think. He's able to roll with the little surprises most of us barely notice but can rock the world of an autistic person. 

It's very hard being his father, but I remain incapable of wishing he weren't autistic, because then he wouldn't be the son I know and love. I do believe that "all things work together for good," and the good that has come from all this is a gratitude for things I surely would have taken for granted had our lives unfolded differently. Really simple things--like being able to go out in the back yard and pull weeds, and leave the boys alone, inside together.

His meds will get out whack again because he's still growing. It's worrisome. He's so big, the potential for danger is much greater now that when he was six or seven. Our problem has always been that fable about the boiling frog. Our situation gradually deteriorates until it's almost too late to fix. But the last three weeks of peace and quiet, and reading Genesis 22 this morning and realizing that it doesn't end in tragedy, dares me to be hope that our stories won't either.

Contemporvant worship coming soon to your town

Hilarity ensues as the sharp teeth of satire sink in on the coolest Christians out there:

"Sunday's Coming" Movie Trailer from North Point Media on Vimeo.

Bush in 2012

Josh Green is high on Jeb Bush's chances to be the GOP nominee in 2012. I like this idea. I like it a lot.

Jeb has stuff going for him that the usual suspects don't. He was a rather successful, two-term governor of Florida. Yes, there was the Terry Schiavo madness. True, he relied on testing more than adequate funding to improve Florida's schools, but at a distance, he seems to have run a populous state effectively, and he earned the right to do so with no small amount of Democratic votes. Plus, he's not a race-baiter. What prominent Republican can you say that about these days!

In terms of a resume, only Mitt Romney can compare to Jeb, but a shameless chameleon like Romney doesn't deserve the nation's highest office. Jeb is smarter than his brother, and while that's not setting the bar too high, it's a bar too high for Sarah Palin to get over. And Palin governed a state whose entire population doesn't equal one of Florida's biggest cities. And for just two years.

The others? Haley Barbour? I loved O Brother Where Art Thou, but I wouldn't want to live in a republic governed by Pappy O'Daniel. Although I'm sure Barbour's would be "a well-run campaign." Newt Gingrich is a bomb-thrower, a revolutionary, not a statesman. Bobby Jindal? Which Bobby Jindal, the Kenneth from 30 Rock Jindal, or the Jindal who thinks government's too big, or the Jindal who thinks the government's response to the Deepwater Horizon blowout isn't big enough? Mike Huckabee would make a great Chairman of Bass Pro Shops, but not a great President.

Jeb would be hard to beat. So as a Democrat I shouldn't want him to win the nomination, right? Wrong. Democrats are crazy to want the most beatable (i.e. extreme) Republican to win the nomination, because what if he/she manages to win? I don't want to see Sarah Palin's fingernails anywhere near the nuclear button. If Palin runs, I hope the rest of the field beats her like a drum in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina.

I can't foresee any circumstances that would lead me to vote Republican in 2012, but if it must be a Republican, I would hope that it would be the most intelligent and least temperamental of their candidates. This far out, that looks like Jeb Bush to me.

Summer Language Immersion Distraction

You may not know a lick of Spanish, but you recognize it when you hear it, by its sound. Same thing with French. Or German. But have you ever wondered what English sounds like to people who don't speak English? This Italian singer wrote a song with nonsense, English-sounding words so that English speakers could hear the sound of their native tongue through foreign ears:

See more funny videos and Music Videos at Today's Big Thing.

Turns out that to the rest of the world, we English speakers sound like a cross between Bob Dylan and any hip hop artist.

Cable news bizarro world

It's more convenient to set my iron up near the TV than the radio, which means that I've been spending a lot of time with Shirley Sherrod this week. What's utterly strange is how CNN has made this a story about the Obama administration rather than how Andrew Breitbart assassinated a good woman's character.

In this matter, the only thing that the administration is guilty of is being too credulous when it comes to its enemies in the right wing media. Breitbart, on the other hand, posted a doctored video that smeared a decent person and good public servant.

Yet as I stood here ironing this morning I watched an intrepid CNN reporter narrate his dogged attempts to reach the Ag department secretary who called Sherrod and asked for her resignation. "On whose orders did she make that call? What did the administration know and when did they know it? What will be the political fallout for the Obama administration in this affair?"

Look, CNN, why aren't you turning the bright, white media glare on Breitbart's yellow journalism? Sherrod herself acknowledges that's where the real story is. In your own report this morning, Sherrod went to bat for her supervisor, saying she'd done great things in the Ag department. She also said in effect that it would have been beneath the President's dignity to apologize to her.

Breitbart, like all right wing hacks, purports to hate the media, as if he isn't part of the media, as if the media is this unalloyed monolith. News outlets like CNN, on the other hand, really hate the internet media. "Those bloggers are just a bunch of out-of-work guys hammering away at a keyboard in their mom's basement," they say. Yet CNN clearly has a lot more energy for investigating a non-scandal in the White House than investigating a very real case of defamation of character. 

Makes you wonder if, behind all the rhetoric, Breitbart and the liberal media have each other's backs.