Homer’s Coffee House, Overland Park, KS November 22, 2008
Posted by Zack in Kansas | 3 comments
Dispatch from the alternate universe. After trying out the new Indian Restaurant that’s getting raves, we stopped by a Christian Coffee house we’d heard about, Homer’s Coffee House. I’ve been getting some good writing done here.
At first glance, it looks like any other coffee house. But look a little closer and you’ll notice that the 12 year old kid on the couch is memorizing Bible verses. A couple of men sitting alone are studying Bibles. I’m guessing the big group of women with note pads out are some kind of church small group.
Anyways, it’s a great coffee house. Comfy, clean, good coffee and not playing any bad music.
More Layoffs at Focus on the Family November 18, 2008
Posted by Zack in Colorado | 11 commentsFor several years, James Dobson’s anger-driven on-air politics has been driving away the mainstream love-focused Focus on the Family audience. Apparently it’s starting to show on their bottom line. This article doesn’t say anything about donations from members falling, but I’m guessing they’ve got to be going down.
Focus on the Family announced this afternoon that 202 jobs will be cut companywide — an estimated 20 percent of its workforce. Initial reports bring the total number of remaining employees to around 950.
Focus on the Family is poised to announce major layoffs to its Colorado Springs-based ministry and media empire today. The cutbacks come just weeks after the group pumped more than half a million dollars into the successful effort to pass a gay-marriage ban in California.
Critics are holding up the layoffs, which come just two months after the organization’s last round of dismissals, as a sad commentary on the true priorities of the ministry.
I’ve met a lot of people who have relied on Focus on the Family’s parenting and marriage shows and materials who have become increasingly alienated by FOTF’s angry political agenda. Most non-religious liberals would be very surprised by some of the mainstay content the group provides. The parenting materials, for example, focus on the importance of showing children “unconditional love” and teach parents not to punish children for childish mistakes. Much of the marriage advice given to husbands—often by women—sounds downright feminist, believe it or not, for example reminding men that the Bible also teaches husbands to submit to their wives.
For years, FOTF was one long, continuous, cheery stream of socially conservative but therapeutically liberal self-help and affirmation. And then suddenly James Dobson started frothing at the mouth. More and more, he crowded out feel-good programs with hysterical anger about things like “the Homosexual Agenda!” I’m guessing a big chunk of the grassroots funding base is walking away.
Starving in America November 18, 2008
Posted by Zack in | write a commentOne in eight Americans “struggling to feed themselves” this year…from the AP:
Some 691,000 children went hungry in America sometime in 2007, while close to one in eight Americans struggled to feed themselves adequately even before this year’s sharp economic downturn, the Agriculture Department reported Monday.
The department’s annual report on food security showed that during 2007 the number of children who suffered a substantial disruption in the amount of food they typically eat was more than 50 percent above the 430,000 in 2006 and the largest figure since 716,000 in 1998.
Overall, the 36.2 million adults and children who struggled with hunger during the year was up slightly from 35.5 million in 2006. That was 12.2 percent of Americans who didn’t have the money or assistance to get enough food.
Almost a third of those, 11.9 million adults and children, went hungry at some point. That figure has grown by more than 40 percent since 2000. The government says these people suffered a substantial disruption in their food supply at some point and classifies them as having “very low food security.” Until the government rewrote its definitions two years ago, this group was described as having “food insecurity with hunger.”
Study: Election created new ‘values voter’ November 17, 2008
Posted by Zack in DC | 1 commentCongratulations to Faith in Public Life for sponsoring this great survey around the elections. This really helps to underline a shift that a lot of us have been seeing anecdotally.
This from the Christian Science Monitor:
Americans painted a new picture of the “values voter” in the recent election.
They rejected the “culture wars,” with its narrow agendas and liberal-conservative divisiveness, in favor of politics that build bridges on a range of contentious issues. The readiness to work together is revealed in a national poll on voters’ priorities and values taken on Nov. 5-7 in the immediate aftermath of the election.
Nearly three-quarters of voters (and of religious voters) said people of faith should promote the common good, not protect their own views. Even groups most active in the religious right said a broader faith agenda would best reflect their values.
Only 1 in 5 white Evangelicals and 1 in 8 Catholics said an agenda focused on abortion and same-sex marriage best expressed their values. A majority of both Evangelicals (55 percent) and Catholics (51 percent) opted for a broad agenda that also includes poverty, the environment, and the war in Iraq. The survey involved a nationally representative sample of 1,277 voters and had a margin of error of 3 percent.
“Our poll shows that Catholics and white Evangelicals reject the idea that focusing on one or two issues is the right way to engage in public life,” says Katie Paris, of Faith in Public Life, which sponsored the survey conducted by Public Religion Research in Washington.blockquote>
Read the whole article here.
Spiritual movement based on ancient Eastern texts sweeps Midwest! November 17, 2008
Posted by Zack in Missouri | 1 commentJust judging from trips on planes in and out of Kansas City, my new home has got to be one of the most Bible-studying American cities. There’s always at least one wild looking hipster studying a heavily marked up bible. I’ll grant you, it’s an unscientific survey, but it’s been very consistent in my way-too-big sample size lately.
I’m writing this post on a plane. The guy across the isle and in front of me is reading Chronicles. The chapter is all marked up, lots of notes, highlighter marks, checks and underlines. He was just reading for a while, and now has his face in his hands. Now he’s looking at the ceiling. He’s thinking his brains out. The book is open again and he’s reading away again. Think of how many times he’s read this book in his life. But he’s going back, once again, to see something new. And obviously, he’s seeing it. He just jumped back to Kings 19. The first several paragraphs are highlighted in yellow, in addition to many notes and underlines.
I see this all the time. Walk into any hipster coffeeshop in Kansas City and you’ll see at least one kid doing this.
Step back and think about what is really going on here. This Kansas City guy—who fits many Midwestern red state stereotypes—is reading, and living by, 2,500 year-old Jewish texts. He believes these texts are guides for his own life. He believes God is speaking to humanity through these stories. The way to understand how amazing that is, is to imagine this probably conservative Kansas Citian reading Taoist or Buddhist texts, and really studying them, really trying to understand the roots and historical context of them. For some reason that sounds cool, right? But he’s just reading ancient Jewish texts instead of ancient Indian or Chinese texts. If I put it that way, doesn’t it sound a little cool as well? And keep in mind, he doesn’t just read this book. He’s probably read hundreds of books about the book—books that explain the cultural, political and economic context of the narrative of the book.
Bob Carlton’s Obama book November 15, 2008
Posted by Zack in | 1 comment
My friend Bob Carlton and Ariele Gentiles just published an Obama book called “An American Story” geared toward youth. I’ve seen parts of the book from when Bob was working on it, and I think this is a great read. Give this book to your Christian friends who are apprehensive about the new president.
The book does not advocate for Obama’s policies, but simply tries to introduce his story as a human being and to explore the relationship he has to his faith.
From the promotional materials:
No life story is universal, but the journey of this young American born in the 49th state resonates with the life experience of millions of other young women and men. Someone who wants to find his place in a family where he is visibly different: chubby where others are thin, dark-skinned where others are light. A young person living in a distant land searches and finds new friends, a new language and a heartbreaking lesson about his identity in the pages of an American magazine. A fatherless son struggling to gain a sense of identity and an understanding of how vital parenting is to the families and communities we live in. A young black man struggling for acceptance at an institution of privilege, where he finds himself growing so angry and disillusioned at the world around him that he turns to alcohol and drugs. A searching adult who turns to Jesus for deeper meaning, finding an example that sets him on a course of a lifetime dedicated to feeding the hungry and healing the sick, always prioritizing what his Savior called “the least of these” over the powerful.
Barack Obama is the person who has traveled that journey, from Hawaii to the cusp of the highest political office in the United States of America. Obama’s story is one of historic “firsts,” from the schools he attended, to the jobs he has taken, to the legislation he has championed. His story is also one of reconciliation, as a son growing up without a father, as an African American in a country that still struggles with racism, as someone who struggles to work beyond the stiffling boundaries of partisian politics. For this man who loves building bridges and playing basketball, there is no greater calling than that of serving the common good, working to change hearts and change structures.
The Defining Moment November 12, 2008
Posted by Zack in | 5 comments
Reading about FDR in The Defining Moment by Jonathan Alter. It’s an account of the sweeping first hundred days of his presidency. The first half of the book is biographical and a look at his road to the White House.
A few things that struck me:
- Bush gets a lot of criticism for believing God put him on Earth to become president. FDR believed the same thing.
- Bush gets a lot if criticism for allowing advisors to argue and then mixing and matching their advice resulting in often incoherent policy. FDR did the same thing.
- Bush had a strong handler who was arguably more responsible for his career than Bush was himself. So did FDR.
- Bush was seen as a lightweight intellectually, was chronically misunderestimated and was never fully accepted or respected inside his own social caste. Same with FDR.
- Bush played fast and loose with the constitution. FDR played faster and looser.
All those similarities didn’t even strike me until I just started writing them.
Other interesting things:
- FDR’s New Deal and economic policies were mainly created on the fly once he was in office.
- He had essentially all the same positions as Hoover on economics until he got into office.
- He scorned conventional wisdom and created a highly non-traditional “brain trust” who helped formulate his economic policies.
- Part of the reason New Deal investment all went to infrastructure and not industry was because of certain ideas about how the economy worked. They largely left “productive” industry alone. (Until the war, of course, which is what really got the US out of the depression).
And that’s just after the first half of the book. I haven’t even gotten into the 100 days yet. It’s a great read — I highly recommend it.
Couldn’t hurt to check November 10, 2008
Posted by Zack in Uncategorized | 3 commentsI don’t check my blog traffic stats very often. But I looked last night and saw a big bump on November 5. I thought it must have been just post-election excitement that probably hit all blogs, because there was no single source of referring traffic. But this morning I thought to look more closely at the search terms. There was a whole lot of Obama action going on.
I guess a lot of people had heard the rumor and thought it couldn’t hurt to check and see what Google had to say about similarities between Obama and…The Antichrist! (Or, oddly, Slovoj Zizek.)
Actually, if you read through all of them, you’ll see that maybe half are people looking for arguments (perhaps to convince worried friends?) that Obama is NOT the anti-Christ.
Here are all the search terms including “Obama” that brought people to the blog on Nov. 5:
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Posted by Zack in Oregon | write a commentDonald Miller has a great post up about his journey that reflects the experience of at least a few million other evangelical Christians.
Our theology insinuated that shortly after original sin, once Adam and Eve at the apple, they registered as Democrats and went on with their lives, trying to create large governments that would enable lazy people through expensive social programs.
Obama narrowed the ‘God Gap’ November 6, 2008
Posted by Zack in Missouri | 1 commentSteve Waldman breaks down Obama’s reclamation of Christian voters in WSJ.
