Posts filed under 'cultural'
The Cult of Car
- Emissions - The most obvious and detrimental product: visible as smog, invisible as carcinogenic compounds causing direct harm to humanity and changing the composition of the planet. We’ve known about this for some time, but awareness has yet to culminate into significant action. Modest increases in fuel economy and emission controls can’t offset the rapidly increasing total number of miles driven. Driving a hybrid is like a lung cancer patient switching to low tar.
- Oil dependence - We have put all our eggs in this one basket and now it’s being tossed about. More than ever, the effects of natural and man-made chaos across the planet can send the whole system into panic.
- Noise - The music of civilization comes from tailpipes, tires, horns, and faulty security alarms in the middle of the night. Emergency vehicles must use an incredibly high volume to notify cars of their passage… usually to the site of a car accident.
- Danger - 42,000 people die per year from automobile crashes and another 4,000 from motorcycles. 400 times as many people die from car crashes than from terrorism. More lives are lost each month on US highways than from the 9/11 attacks.
- Traffic - Life is too short to spend idling in a metal cage. It’s morbidly ironic that the worst traffic delays are actually caused by drivers rubbernecking at accidents to gawk at yet another gory victim of traffic. A vicious cycle.
- Suburban sprawl - Because of the “ease” of auto commuting, residential areas are now separated by great distance from commercial and social areas. Localities used to be more heterogeneous with all goods and services within walking distance.
- Social estrangement - Garage doors isolate. If neighbors were out walking around in the marketplace, we would have to interact a lot more. It’s so much easier to hate some anonymous person behind the wheel than face-to-face.
- Asphalt - See map of Pennsylvania.
- Parking lots - Who enjoys finding parking? Who enjoys paying for parking? Who enjoys paying tickets for parking in the wrong place or at the wrong time? These impervious surfaces exacerbate flood control and require energy to wastefully illuminate through the night. Church growth in the US is limited to the availability of parking.
- Obesity - The body seems to have a way of adjusting its content according to the amount it is asked to transport itself around. Why waste time and money doing cardio at the gym when you could kill two birds with one commute?
- Road rage - Compare to a brisk walk: fresh air, solitude, sunlight, and stress reduction rather than creation.
- Overshopping - If we had to manually transport the products we buy and dispose of the trash created by them, we’d likely not buy as much.
- Advertising - Imagine radio without J.W. Motormile’s obnoxious commercials every hour. “Cash back!”, “No money down!”, “Your job is your credit!” which leads to…
- Debt enslavement - The allure of a new truck has hoodwinked more than one poor man into buying something he couldn’t afford because he didn’t think past 0% financing for the first 6 months. Imagine the number of people who get suckered into feeding a car payment instead of their kids! Seriously, which is more socially destructive: the drug dealer or the car dealer?
- Operational cost - With gas, maintenance, and insurance, my paid-for car costs about $7/day to operate. I suspect marketers maximized a curve of how much operational cost I could tolerate while still maintaining my brand loyalty. There’s no doubt that engineers designed parts to break within months of the warranty expiration.
- Vacation brevity - When people had to traverse great distances, they would stay there for months, strengthening family connections and deepening learning experiences. Now, because we can drive to the beach or grandma’s in a day, we don’t stay as long.
- Convenience - A simple tilt of the right foot is much easier than moving both arms and feet in laborious swinging motions.
- Sex - For nearly a century, otherwise unattractive teen and middle-aged men have improved their chances.
- Power - As human muscle atrophies in the information age, it’s reassuring to have the energy of several hundred horses available on command. There may be speed limits but there are no posted acceleration limits.
- Mobility - Sure, I haven’t driven my sport utility vehicle over yon mountain as advertised in the TV commercial (or off-road for that matter), but I theoretically could if I needed to.
- Soccer moms - An entire economy of sporting-goods, fast-food, and portable electronics revolves around the maternal mini-van experience.
- Hmmm - I can’t think of anything else positive.
(And for some positives.)
Feel free to add to the list.
-->Ecclesia National Conference in Review - Notes on David Fitch
- In our postmodern culture, Christians no longer speak the same language, science does not mean the same thing to everyone, and words only make sense inhabited in a way of life.
- What kinds of people have we been? unChristian shows the shocking stats of how we’re perceived by those outside the church.
- Contrasts between evangelism and witness: apologetics vs. tell a story, universal story vs. personalized story, strategic vs. everyday life, depends on me vs. depends on God, detached vs. embodied in community, “I win” vs. “epistemic crisis” (the story is so compelling, it throws all other stories into lack).
- Greek kerygma is preaching gospel in a church; marturia is testimony of whole life (martyr), inseparable from character
- A witness is not a prosecutor, judge, or jury, simply one who testifies to what they’ve experienced, completely non-coercive, not aiming at a preconceived outcome.
- The premier task is to shepherd communities of character that can embody witness of who we are in Christ within the world.
- What kinds of people are we producing? Phil 1:27. Belief + Practice = Culture.
- Icons of Christianity: dispassionate/distant (Worldcom’s Bernie Ebers and Ken Lay embezzled money while teaching Sunday school), coercive/violent/arrogant (George Bush believes God is on his side and can do no wrong), and morally duplicitous (Jessica Simpson presents a sexy virginity without redemption of desire).
- The gospel has been subverted by market capitalism’s impetus of fear: fear of strangers, fear of death, fear of being poor, fear of loss of freedom. “The basis of any true society is our mutual fear of one another.” - Thomas Hobbes
- Doing isolated acts of charity (sending money, going on mission trips, helping in the downtown soup kitchen) is always easier than inviting the poor into our own house to be wholly redeemed.
- Churches have become economically, socially, racially homogeneous because it helps maintain our isolation from those we fear.
- The Acts church rejected privacy (not necessarily private ownership) of resources. They visited the sick, cared for widows/orphans/aged/incarcerated, ministered grace to strangers, and were hospitable to all.
- Pluralism (from Babel) was for the clarification of the gospel by having to relate it through all cultures and languages.
- Are we confident that we are right or are we making sure of it by our insistence on inerrancy, perspicuity, individual inductive Bible study, expository preaching, and apologetics?
- The gospel is conveyed by a canon, carried by a people. Sustain the hermeneutic of peoplehood.
- Quit explaining and start proclaiming; scripture is a drama, not a textbook; quit the application and go for the liturgical response right then, not as homework. Liturgical response it responding to the reality of the gospel in that moment: silence, repentance, proclamation of truth.
- The act of preaching can only be the tip of the communal iceberg.
- Fund the imagination.
- You can’t dissect a story: you must enter in or reject it. The word of God enlivened by the Holy Spirit in our hearts changes us—pushing for application is not as important as we’ve come to think.
- How do we call the immoral to reorder desire when we don’t know how either? There’s often no sense that desire is being directed toward anything but itself. The world successfully shapes our desire but the church fails at this. There is a vacuous gap in our way of sanctification.
- Salvation has become transactional: I pray X, you give me Y, distances us from God. Like a marriage deal: you take care of house/kids, I’ll pay the bills. Where’s the mutual love in a transaction?
- Cartesian mindset: pastor/Bible tells mind what is right, mind understands, mind tells body how to behave.
- We are not invited into a transaction but a life of reciprocity.
- Luther overprotected against works by putting a separation between salvation and sanctification, but the two are inextricable. Each sin is an opportunity for grace and transformation. Salvation is participation in the reciprocal life of God. (2 Cor 5:16-21)
- Justification is beween Christ and us. Justiceification is between us and mankind.
- Practice triads: reading scripture, silence, confession, submission to God, affirmation of truth, discernment and prayer, service to poor.