Avdat

Web sites that suck: www.pcusa.org

To follow up on my previous post, in which I mentioned both Andrew Sullivan and the awful PC(USA) web site, there's a thread on Sullivan's blog about web sites that suck. So why don't you go the PC(USA) homepage and decide for yourself. Does it suck like a restaurant website?

 

 

Or like a college website?

 

 

That thing about not being able to copy and paste anything because it's in Flash makes me bang my head against the keyboard, and sadly, it's true of so many church web sites.

What I love about our front page is how the link to PC(USA) Agencies follows you as you scroll down the page. Yeah, like curiosity about the Presbyterian Investment and Loan Program is generating Google searches on "Presbyterian."

A Facebook friend pointed out that the PC(USA) web site blows so bad that somebody created a Wiki to help navigate it. I had to use it to find the page on what Presbyterians believe. It's four links from the PC(USA) front page and the clicking sequence is bizarre:

Home-->General Assembly Mission Council-->Mission and Ministry-->Communications and Funds Development (Huh?)-->Presbyterian 101.

So I think it's less a matter of not knowing what we believe; maybe a bit more of beliefs being irrelevant on a web site by and for ecclesiastical paper-pushers, and maybe a whole lot of not wanting people to know what we believe--the page on predestination is another two clicks deeper into the bowels of the site.

(Although that's understandable; I mean, when the Mormons land on your front porch they don't lead off with getting your own planet and multiple wives after you die).

If you Google "what we believe," eight of the top ten returns are denominational web sites with prominent links on their front pages. Everybody from the United Methodists and Evangelical Lutherans to the Foursquare Church and Seventh Day Adventists. If it occurs to practically everybody else to put their faith front and center online, why not us?

Church growth

Running past the lovely Metropolitan Community Church of Richmond the other day, a question occurred to me: Now that the Presbyterians have joined the Lutherans, Episcopalians and UCCs in ordaining gay and lesbian people, is there any need for the MCC anymore?

Andrew Sullivan has been documenting the death of gay culture for years now, beginning with this 2005 piece in The New Republic. Is the MCC, like the music of Queen or the flamboyance of Elton John, an artifact of a time in which gays and lesbians had to form a subculture of resistance?

If so, we Presbyterians need to jump on this opportunity. I'm talking mergers and acquisitions, baby! A friendly takeover of one irrelevant denomination by another irrelevant denomination.

You're dubious; I can tell. But isn't this how other institutions grow? Two guys cook up some cool new software in their garage. They start making a little money. And then the Redmond mafia show up with an offer they can't refuse. Next thing you know, that hot little app or innovation is folded seamlessly into the latest version of Windows, and one of those two guys is on Househunters International, trying to decide which condo in Dubai to purchase.

The question is, What's the offer that the MCC can't refuse? Well, there's Montreat, of course. And we have lay elders in the PC(USA) and no high and mighty bishops. That's gotta give us a leg up over the Episcopalians.

But I think that our best selling point is the Board of Pensions. A beyond fully-funded, defined benefit plan and medical coverage that's second to none. We have hit them up hard over the years--two open heart surgeries, a renal surgery, and God-awful expensive ABA therapy--and they pay out, right as rain. If you want to know what the Presbyterian bureaucracy does really well, it's taking care of the clergy.

So we pitch the BOP to the MCC clergy, and get them to bring along their laity with the awesome accessory of Ruling Elder.

Now the MCC only has 44,000 members, and we lose that many members each year. But you gotta start small. This is how pidly a Charlotte-based bank named NCNB became Bank of America. They gobbled up all the little fish in the Old North State; then they swallowed C&S/Sovran, and then unhinged their jaws to consume BankAmerica.

If the MCC acquisition goes well, we can set our sights on the Reformed Church of America, and then the Disciples of Christ. After that, we can either acquire the UCC or bypass them, letting them die on the vine while we land the Big Kahuna: the Southern Baptist Convention. And I know we can offer them: guilt free trips to the liquor store!

You may point out that conservatives will object to a transfusion of tens of thousands of homosexuals and their straight allies into the PC(USA). But here's the thing: the MCC is a theologically traditional denomination. Read their statement of faith. It's as clear and lucid a description of Bible-believing Nicene-Chalcedonian orthodoxy as you'll find out there.

Not only that, it's easy to find! All you have to do is click on the "Who We Are" tab on their home page, and a link to "Our beliefs" pops up. I can't find anything like that on the PCUSA homepage. Either because Presbyterians don't know what they think, or because the PC(USA) website is created by bureaucrats for bureaucrats. But the home page link to the Board of Pensions is nice!

Conservatives in the PC(USA) often conflate theological and social radicalism. But the MCC is living proof that the two don't necessarily go hand-in-hand. So here's an opportunity for a grand bargain: buy out the MCC, and move the denomination to the right theologically and to the left socially. It's like revenues and spending cuts! Two great tastes that taste great together!

I anticipate one last objection: Marvin, you're talking about sheep-stealing here! This isn't evangelism! This isn't legitimate church growth.

Look. Conversion is off the table for now. The public face of Christianity these days is Fred Phelps and Michelle Bachmann. When the unchurched think "Christianity," they think that's the North American branch of the Taliban. Who wants to convert to that?

So, until we rebrand the Christian label, let's concentrate on increasing our share of the shrinking slice of the U.S. pie that self-identifies as Christian.

Plus, I'd just love to get my hands on that church in the Fan! What a handsome building!

Incarnation and mission

Warning: this post is long,rambling, and ranting.

In an essay in the book The Cross-Cultural Proces in Christian History, Andrew Walls disputes the conventional wisdom that Church History is the story of Christianity going from strength to strength. In fact, Christianity often has found itself in deep, deep water, only to survive by having the good sense to grab whatever lifeline was thrown to it from some distant shore.

Case in point: Christianity had essentially hit a dead end only a few years after Jesus' resurrection. If it hadn't been for some anonymous believers in Antioch who got a wild hair to preach the gospel to some Gentiles, Christianity likely would have died out as any number of apocalyptic first century Jewish sects did. Instead, Christianity uprooted itself from its Palestinian Jewish soil and flowered in Greco-Roman society. In a few centuries the Jewish Messiah had become one substance with the immutable God of the philosophers.

Examples abound. It was mighty convenient that when the dioceses once administered by Augustine, Athanasius and the Cappadocians were falling to the Muslims, Pope Gregory was commissioning a mission to the Angles and the Saxons, the new pagan overlords of Briton.

The same process is at work today. Secularism has displaced Christianity in Europe far more quickly than Islam ever did in North Africa and the Near East, yet Christianity has found a new lease on life in Africa. At the beginning of the last century, 90% of Christians lived in Europe and North America. Today, 60% live in Africa, a monumental and lightning-quick shift in the religion's center of gravity with which no one yet has come to grips.

Walls makes a couple of points about this two-steps-forward, one-step-back narrative.

What I did on my vacation

Not a lot, actually. We spent a week at Sandbridge, Virginia, just south of Virginia Beach. There are no highrises, waterparks and boardwalks at Sandbridge, but there are a lot of people in the surf by day, packed into beach houses and condos on narrow lots by night.

Fortunately, the beach borders the Back Bay National Wildlife Refuge, so if you really want to get away from it all, you can just ignore the Access Prohibited sign on the beach, and before you know it, you're surrounded by sea gulls and sandpipers. Although there's nothing you can do about the Navy fighter jets roaring overhead.

Which is where I found this honking huge clam shell, still intact. I'm pretty proud of it. I am no kind of hunter, not even a shell hunter. And there it was, being played with by a seagull. I exercised my God-given dominion over nature in a rather high-handed way; I clean took it from him. I looked up the shell in my mother-in-law's guide book, and come to find out it's a Quahog, an Algonquin name. Lives in the sand from the low tide line to 50 feet of water.

I also found a beautiful Shark's Eye (not pictured). And as it turns out, the shark's eye preys on bivalves like the Quahog by boring a hole through its shell, and eating the meat therein. My Quahog has one little, tiny, perfectly round indention, but no other evidence of penetration.

My brother-in-law and I took Ethan fishing, caught a few spots that made for a nice accent piece on the dinner plate, and Ethan caught a stingray. Proudest moment of his life--sting rays being one of his peculiar obsessions. We threw it back, and I was proud that Ethan didn't mind. 

The water was a tad cooler than I'm used to, vacationing in North Carolina, but the waves were crashing the first few days we were there, and full of sand and brine, so it was invigorating. Unfortunately, I seem to be allergic to salt water. Every trip to the beach, but only when I swim, the skin on my chest and shoulders turns red, feels like it's shrunk two sizes too tight, and tingles, like I've become a pin cushion. I saw an allergist about it once. He said he had no idea what I was talking about, and hustled me out of the office with a handful of Claritin samples. I think he thought I was lying. 

Mainly what I did on my vacation was not troll the internet. The house we stayed in had no connection. At the end of the week, my mother-in-law figured out that she could get on through the neighbor's router if she stood on the deck. I checked my email, read about some loose ends I have to tie up from that summer school class I taught, and breathed a sigh of relief.

If hating that thing you have to have is an addiction, then I've developed something of an addiction to the internet. Mainly blogs (political, religious and sports-oriented) and Facebook. This is how it happened. I don't have a TV show I'm following; I don't like to watch movies because I get up so early, and all the reading I do at the library extinguished my enthusiasm for pleasure reading at home. So the internet filled my evenings. But I'm sick of it. It's no way to spend a couple of hours, checking and checking again to see if a site has been updated, like some glassy-eyed old lady feeding a slot machine with quarters, hoping this time something will turn up.

I need a new relationship with the internet. And I'm bound and determined to do it. I had a great meeting with my adviser and the Dean before we left on vacation, and if I work hard, I think I can take my comprehensive exams in January rather than May. I need to get out of grad school ASAP. Money don't grow on trees. And I can't get out ahead of time checking Facebook every 15 minutes.

So, no internet by day, unless I'm searching the library's catalog or one of the library's many online databases. I will blog and/or look at web sites after 5:00 PM, and for not too long. And I will fill my time with other stuff. I picked up the Aubrey Maturin series again, mainly out of desperation, and was delighted to discover that it charmed me as much the second time around. Just because my work is reading all day doesn't mean I can't do it for fun by night.

Can porn save your marriage? Probably not

I was in the doctor's office waiting room the other days reading one of those magazines you're likely to find there, and one article caught my eye. It was about the wife who discovered that her husband was coming to bed way after her because he was viewing porn on the internet. Naturally the wife was distressed, but the husband, and as I recall, some outside expert, a therapist or somebody, assured her that it was all innocent. In fact, the discovery prompted the husband and wife to have a frank conversation about the husband's lack of fulfillment in the bedroom. This prompted the wife to spice things up a bit, and now everybody's happy.

Call me skeptical. I'm skeptical that:

1. Furtive "one-handed surfing" can be a good conversation starter, and
2. The problem is a frigid wife and not a husband who's going outside the marriage looking for sexual gratification (we call that adultery).

Number two is a big problem. What happens when the husband's palate is sated with the increased dose of bedroom spice? Will he return to his laptop for the gratification which always seems to be eluding his grasp in real life?

If your definition of sex is little more than arousal and orgasm, the wife, of course, will never be able to compete with the online pornographic image. The image is always 19-23 years old. Surgically enhanced and airbrushed, she is immune to the ravages of time--saddle bags, gray hair, wrinkles. The image never gets tired, is never irritable, never wakes up with bad breath. The image is utterly at his disposal, 24/7. 

But there's more to sex than arousal and orgasm. Sex reinforces and is in turn reinforced by the emotional and intellectual unions between the marriage partners. Sex is a good way to make up after a fight. It is the real "sacrament of reconciliation" for a lot of people. Sex also creates new human beings, and makes parents out of sexual partners. Porn can't really contribute anything to these important dimensions of sexuality, and in fact erodes them.

And we haven't even talked about how the porn industry is rife with drug use, pays people poorly, and subjects them to psychological and at times physical abuse. What could be innocent about that?

Still, even if porn actors and actresses weren't exploited, porn would not be a good or healthy thing. And the reticence to say so in a medical magazine is baffling.

I am aware that people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. There's probably not a guy alive in this society who hasn't seen pornography at one time or another, yours truly included. I'm not judging anybody. It's more a matter of pity. I pity guys who treat sex like toothpaste--a product to be bought to satisfy a basic bodily need. And I pity people who make porn--people for whom sex is just a job.

In short, consuming porn is a way to treat people like things, which would seem to be utterly incompatible with the mutuality of a marriage covenant.

Dissertation topic here just for the askin'

OK, so I think a title like "Queer Eye for the Ascetic Guy: Homoeroticism, Children and the Making of Monks" is too clever by half for a referred journal. But there it is, in my June issue of JAAR.

So, I read it. I mean, I am going to do a dissertation on monasticism, so I have a, ahem, professional obligation to immerse myself in the full range of scholarly literature on the topic. And the author argues, and I quote, "Monastic texts prohibiting sex nonetheless authorize and normalize a voyeuristic gaze on the part of monks. They cultivate a decidedly queer eye for the ascetic guy." Get it? Get it? Just because I can read Coptic doesn't mean I don't watch TV!

If you don't get it, the author provides a few examples. One is of a father and son who went out to the desert to live as monks, but the other monks were gossiping about something sexually illicit afoot, until the son put a stop to it by disfiguring his body in chemicals used to embalm mummies. Our geeky, culturally relevant academic asks the naughty questions, "Did you flinch when reading of Zacharias entering the natron? Did you take pleasure in the flinch?"

Speaking only for myself, the answers are Yes, and, um, NO, respectively.

But I'm not a naughty little monk trying to subdue my passions.

We knew this, didn't we? It's a variation on a theme that goes back at least to Romans 7 in which Paul observes the irony that law can actually incite the behavior it prohibits. Pity the poor monk who didn't know what lust was until he read some lurid cautionary tale about sodomy in an Egyptian cave. Now he's a quivering mass of homoeroticism.

If this can get published in a peer-reviewed journal, then I swear that there's a dissertation out there waiting to be written about Deadspin. Because it does the same thing. The site's wall-to-wall coverage of Michael David Barrett, peeping tom to ESPN reporter Erin Andrews, is a case in point. Deadspin writers and commenters rightly skewer Barrett for the pathetic loser that he and any peeping tom is, but even as the reader enjoys Barrett getting his just desserts, he's thinking about what Barrett got to see--Erin Andrews--Naked!!! See, stern and witty disapproval of voyeurism makes us all... voyeurs.

The rest of the site does the same thing. There's skin there, but also text that mocks the surgical enhancements, the obvious promiscuity of the coed, and the crass media pandering to idiot guys for whom watching sports and oggling girls are two great tastes that taste great together. But Deadspin still incites you to lust, even as it exhorts you not to be "that guy." See what I mean?

When you turn this into a dissertation and then a monograph, I don't ask that you dedicate it to me, only that you mention me among all the other little people who helped you write it...

More deep thoughts from your intrepid blogger

The difference between kid sports and grownup sports is that not all grownups get a trophy for participation. In other words, there are losers in grownup sports. But for this one, crucial detail, a site like Deadspin could not exist.

Next up: What Deadspin can teach us about Egyptian monasticism! (A teaser for my legions of fanactical readers!)

A Tarantino free post about violence and hateful, spiteful onlookers

I want to briefly re-visit the horrible quadruple murder in Farmville, VA, and specifically this Richmond Times-Dispatch article about the victims to which I linked below. I'm sure more of the truth will come out later--truth which may undermine the following--but from what the article says, one can easily imagine the following scenario:

 A teenage girl decides to rebel against her minister father and her criminologist mother by dabbling in the horrorcore scene. What stronger statement could a teen make? Grinding music about cannibalism and murder is about as far away from Christianity and a commitment to prevent violence against women as you can get. Criminologist's mother makes a judgment call--rather than forbid any further exposure to these people or their music, which may inspire a backlash (running away, delinquent behavior) she will try to demystify this scene by chaperoning her daughter's trip to a horrorcore festival. But things went terribly wrong.

Now that may not be the way things went down. And that may or may not be the way you'd handle the situation. But whether it went down that way or not, and whether that scenario is at all understandable, there's no excuse for this reading of the situation buried in the comment thread:

I hate to blame the victim here, but, come on, taking your child to a concert featuring bands named “Stitch Mouth”,  “Dismembered Fetus”, and “BodyBagz”?  That is clearly irresponsible parenting if not child endangerment. How do you just expect a child to ‘grow out of it’ if you don’t steer them in the right direction? It sounds like the mother was probably a liberal (she was a college professor), and had that mentality that evil doesn’t exist and that she didn’t want to ‘interfere’ with her child… give me a break!

"I hate to blame the victim here," but truth be told I can't wait to get in my licks! This commenter knows a lot about the situation. (S)he knows how the victim votes; (s)he knows the victim is a laissez-faire parent, and (s)he knows that the victim was far too sentimental about human nature for her own good. Wow, that's a lot more than I know.

And this is par for the course for any newspaper's web site. Blogs are notorious for flame wars and trolls, but blogs are an episode of Barney compared to the general American public opining on hapless schmucks who wind up featured in their hometown daily.

I swear, there's a ton of people out there who enjoy the newspaper with their coffee because they could no more face the day without feeling smug than they could without caffeine. They don't read the newspaper to learn anything. They read it because they can. Reading the paper and not showing up in it is proof positive you aren't one of the stupids who's getting what's coming to you.

I'd love to live in a world like that. If the world were really like that, I'd drop my aspirations to work in higher education in a heartbeat. I'd buy a Sarah Palin 2012 pinup calendar. I'd lock my home-schooled kids in a basement, pop in a Jonas Brothers CD, hit "repeat all" and tell them to do their math while I cleaned my guns. And I'd sleep like a baby.

But we don't live in a world where everybody gets what's coming to them.

Sound and fury

I find myself thinking a lot about the North Korean nuclear and missile tests this week. There are lots of Korean students on campus, and a group of classmates are traveling in Asia this month. No doubt their emails from abroad and my international classmates heighten the situation in my mind.

I also find myself reading the usual liberal blogs, and noting a dearth of posting on this seemingly important topic. But there is no shortage of posts on the Sotomayor nomination. Which is interesting because a North Korea with full nuclear capability is really a game-changer, but replacing one left of center judge with another left of center judge on the Nation's High Court is not.

I imagine the imbalance is due to this fact: there are no good options for dealing with North Korea's nuclear program. So there's not much point in blogging about it. But the Sotomayor nomination gets into the realm of identity politics, where there is no shortage of shrill and stupid opinions. So one can blog til the cows come home about the idiocy of opposing a Supreme Court nominee based on her predilection for Puerto Rican food.

I will grant that there's no small satisfaction in shooting fish in a barrel. But in the end have you written anything worthwhile?

I'm luvin' me some Facebook

It's so much better than MySpace. The software is much more deft at helping you to instantly expand your network of connections. It's not overrun with teenagers. It doesn't have that Coyote Ugly ambiance. 

So I'm busy uploading photos and slinging sheep at people.

I highly recommend it.

Meanwhile, what's the matter with Typepad? It suddenly hates two spaces between periods and the start of the next sentence. Puts a funny question mark in there.