There’s a really interesting story in the LA Times about a religion reporter and documents his finding faith then losing it. It is moving in that you can feel the depth of his convictions and struggles and disturbing to see again the depth of the flaws in the institutions and people of the church.
I found a link to this article today at The Corner. There’s a whole list of comments I could make here about the sillyness of this article, but I’ll pass because I’m sure others have done better. Well, maybe I’ll make one. To suggest that al Qaeda supports the emerging church movement is pretty ridiculous, in my opinion. Suggesting they have any interest in an internecine conflict in the American protestant church strains belief.
Moving on. What I find most interesting is how Frank Pastore paints extremist Islam with such a broad brush. From what I’ve read (and I’m not an expert by any means), Islam is just as fractured, if not more, as the western Christian church. Isn’t it interesting to think that al Qaeda probably has this vision of the “unified” Christian west and we think of them as the “unified” Muslim east? In reality, neither is probably true. But how much does that worldview shape our response to each other?
It’s been a month since my last post. I’d like to be able to say that I’ve been really busy, but that’s just not true. Work is (now) coming out of a lull and I had some time off in there too.
The important update is that we did successfully wean Elliot from breastfeeding. It was actually pretty easy. The bad news is that he’s still occasionally waking up at night. I’m hoping that will settle out soon.
Lately I’ve been playing with myspace, Facebook, and LinkedIn. I can’t get over just how ugly most myspace pages are. I like the look and feel of Facebook a lot, but there aren’t many people there I know yet. The interesting thing is that there are a lot more people from my high school on myspace. There was a post at apophenia last month where the author mused about class divisions between myspace and Facebook. She argued that Facebook skewed towards middle/upper class, while myspace skewed lower/middle class. Not to suggest anything about my classmates, but my high school was somewhat rural. Anyway - LinkedIn is interesting from a professional perspective, but I’m still not sure how or if it will come in handy.