Tim Keel's Blog

Live at Panera Bread, it's...

Michael Toy, who is live in San Francisco, or some neighboring villa. The Apple website announced the opening of a new store in San Francisco, which makes me wonder as I look at the list of cities with retailers: what does Lyndhurst, Ohio have that Kansas City does not? I mean London I can understand, but Lyndhurst?

And while you're at it, don't take my word for it: check out this review of the iSight product.

iSight review on Network World Fusion.

What I am curious about is whether or not I ought to also download the Yahoo! Messenger service? Any thoughts on that from anyone?

Ancient of Days, Ancient of Ways

Reading from Habakkuk this morning...

"God, I have heard what our ancestors say about you, and I'm stopped in my tracks, down on my knees. Do among us what you did among them. Work among us as you worked among them. And as you bring judgment, as you surely must, remember mercy."

This from Jeremiah...

"This is what the Lord says: 'Stand at the crossroads and look; ask for the ancient paths, ask where the good way is, and walk in it, and you will find rest for your souls.'"

My So-called iLife

I love Apple. I've been using iChat and the iSight camera for video conferencing for a couple of months. I can video conference with Jason in London, Doug in Minneapolis, Todd in Denver, Rudy (pictured below, standing outside the Harambee Center chatting with me) in Pasadena. My sense of comunity and connection has expanded in very meaningful ways through technology.

Today it took a quantum leap forward. I have our projector in my office because I am putting together a Keynote presentation for our Ash Wednesday gathering tonight. I'm set up with a double-monitior. When I move my mouse across the screen to the left it keeps going to the next monitor. As a result my screen space is doubled. I can drag programs onto the other workspace for example. Today I made the projector my second monitor. It shoots an image of my desktop onto the wall and thus my desktop is probably five by seven feet. Now add to that iChat and what I have is a full-wall image of another person talking in real-time who can also see me. With this, I could have Jason, in London, do some teaching with leaders here in Kansas City, among a million other possibilities.

Unbelievable. It's a wonderful iLife.

A Pretty Compelling Review

Hey, here's a couple of reviews from my favorite movie site, Ain't It Cool News on The Passion of the Christ. And here's a review that is more critical written by "Moriarty."

What I Did on My Summer Vacation

Last summer I took a trip to France with Mike King, CEO of Youthfront, along with a number of other amazing Youthfront folks. Tony Jones, author and post-graduate student in theology at Princeton, joined us, too. The purpose of our trip was to explore the community at Taize, a Protestant/Catholic monastic community begun in the 1940s in the wake of World War II, and explore its implications for youth ministry in the U.S.A, specifically in Kansas City. At any given time there are generally 4000 youth from all over Europe, and the world, residing at Taize. I'm not going to go into all the details but we had a great time (more below). Greg Warner of Faithworks Magazine wrote an article called Taize: Stirring Europe's Youth, which describes the history and phenomenon of Taize.

I took over five hundred photos and they have been sitting in iPhoto unseen. But now...after visiting Doug Pagitt's blog and discovering that in converting him to Mac the grasshopper has surpassed the sensei...after seeing that Doug took his photos from his recent vacation to Hawaii, converted them into a slideshow in iPhoto, exported the slideshow to a Quicktime movie, then uploaded the QT movie into his .mac homepage, I have done the same.

Here is my slideshow from our trip to France. It lasts about five minutes and when you click on the link you have to wait a few minutes for it to load. The pictures come from a day spent in Paris (the day after Armstrong won the Tour), a couple days in the French Alps village of Annecy, a day in Geneva, and a number of days in the Taize monastic community, as well as the surrounding and original village of Taize (oh yeah...we spent a few evenings at a wonderful cafe in Cluny...the ruins here are from a Benedictine monastery built in the tenth century and which once boasted the largest church in Europe...Tony is looking over the ruins above).

Slideshow: Taize 2003

Everyone else is, why not me, too?

Saturated...that is, it seems like everywhere I turn Mel Gibson and his telling of the story of the passion of Jesus has penetrated our cultural consciousness.

Those of us in the church, by all accounts, are thrilled by the prospect of this film. There are myriad reasons for this excitement. Many believe it wil be the evangelism tool of the millenium. My own personal reason is that it actually appears that this is, in fact, a film. Gibson approached the story artistically.

One of my favorite film geek sites, Ain't It Cool News hosts an annual event called "Butt-Numb-A-Thon" where 300 lucky film-freaks show up for 24 straight hours of film-watching - with no prior knowledge of what is going to be shown. Harry Knowles, chief geek, arranges to have directors show-up, film in hand, and screen their movie, some old, some new. This last November's event boasted Peter Jackson and Return of the King and Mel Gibson and The Passion of the Christ. Most of these people and reviewers, I assume, aren't Christians. Reading their reviews and responses to these films nearly brought tears to my eyes, not because they were being sucked in, but because they were blown away by the telling of the story, and thus the Story itself.

I guess I am cautious. Our particular brand of Christianity seems so taken by the event. If only we can get people to the event. And to be sure, it works in many instances. I don't know, maybe this is dumb. I just get discouraged at times by the ways in which it seems like we are way more into events than living life with people. Certainly these things are not mutually exclusive, and this film has fallen into the hype machine that characterizes so much of modern and post-modern America. But the distribution/marketing company and many churches and para-church ministries that are whole-hog into this thing concern me. The Trinity Broadcasting Network appears to be the Passion Broadcasting Network, much the same way it was the Left Behind or Omega Code Broadcasting Network when those films came onto the scene. I just feel the "Next Big Christian Thing" fatigue (think Prayer of Jabez). I just wish those of us in the church would not be so quick to jump on board, whether it is against things like The Last Temptation of Christ or for The Passion of the Christ. Maybe I'm wrong.

Here are two articles processing different responses to this film. Jason Clark posted an article on his blog titled, Will Mel Gibson's Passion of Christ Help Save Christianity?, by Daniel Johnson. Mike King linked me to an article by Frederica Mathewes-Green, an orthodox theologian and writer, titled, What Mel Missed, which actually uses the film to discuss some history of the theology of the atonement and different interpretations.

Noun & Verb

Gibson writes,

"That hole at the core of Laney's being, that underlying absence, he begins to suspect, is not so much an absence in the self as of the self.

Something has happened to him since his descent into the cardboard city. He has started to see that previously he had, in some unthinkably literal way, no self.

But what was there, he wonders, before?

Sub-routines: maladaptive survival behaviors desperately conspiring to approximate a presence that would be, and never quite be, Laney. And he has never known this before, although he knows that he had always, somehow, been aware of something having been desperately and utterly wrong.

Something tells him this. Something in the core and totality, it seems, of DatAmerica. How can that be?

But now he lies, propped in sleeping bags, in darkness, as if at the earth's core, and beyond cardboard walls are walls of concrete, sheathed in ceramic tile, and beyond them the footing of this country, Japan, with the shudder of the trains a reminder of tectonic forces, the shifting of continent-wide plates.

Somewhere within Laney, something else is shifting.

There is movement, and potential for greater movement still, and he wonders why he is no longer afraid.

And all of this is somehow a gift of the sickness. Not of the cough, the fever, but of that underlying dis-ease that he takes to be the product of the 5-SB he ingested so long ago in the orphanage in Gainesville.

We were all volunteers, he thinks, as he clutches the eyephones and follows his point of view over the edge of a cliff of data, plunging down the wall of this code mesa, its face compounded of fractally differentiated fields of information he has come to suspect of hiding some power or intelligence beyond his comprehension.

Something at once noun and verb (emphasis mine).

While Laney, plunging, eyes wide against the pressure of information, knows himself to be merely adjectival: a Laney-colored smear, meaningless without context. A microscopic cog in some catastrophic plan. But positioned, he senses, centrally.

Crucially.

And that is why sleep is no longer an option.

From All Tomorrow's Parties, by William Gibson

Something at once noun and verb, and we, merely adjectival. No division between being and doing.

The Church as the Image of the Trinity

James Mills has been doing a lot of quoting of Miroslav Volf on his blog recently. He has been reading After Our Likeness: The Church as the Image of the Trinity. Volf is a professor of Systematic Theology at Fuller Theological Seminary and my friends Mike King and Tony Jones have been raving about him forever.

I had an Amazon.com delivery waiting for me on my porch when I got home tonight. Everyone's asleep and I have a new book. I've only read the introduction, but if what I've read there is any indication of what is to come, then I am thrilled.

Volf writes in the preface (of his childhood life in the church in communist Yugoslavia and what he learned there)...

"Life in the small Christian community in Novi Sad taught me two basic ecclesiological lessons even before I possessed the theological language to express them. The first lesson: no church without the reign of God. The church lives from something and toward something that is greater than the church itself. When the windows facing toward the reign of God get closed, darkness descends upon the churches and the air becomes heavy. When the windows facing toward the reign of God are opened, the life-giving breath and light of God give the churches fresh hope. The second lesson: no reign of God without the church. Just as the life of the churches depend on the reign of God, so also does the vitality of hope for the reign of God depend on the communities of faith. We come to recognize the fresh breath of God and the light of God that renew the creation only because there are communities called churches - communities that keep alive the memory of the crucified Messiah and the hope for the Coming One. Without communities born and sustained by the Spirit, the hope for the reign of God would die out."

The Economy as Religion

I have the benefit of a friend, Dr. Ashley Cleveland, who regularly sends me articles out of The Chronicle of Higher Education (that is not the only benefit of my friendship with Ashley, mind you).

Before the new year she sent this one titled, "The Economy as Religion: The Dynamics of Consumer Culture" by Dell DeChant. I have to confess this article really pushes: the first page is difficult to navigate (but DeChants treatment of cosmologies is very provocative, I think) but if you stay with it, the pay-off at the end of the article is significant.

DeChant raises questions that are not easy to unpack. I am planning on re-reading this article multiple times because I believe he is jack-hammering at the foundations of how we perceive what it means to be human beings and how that plays into our perceptions of reality and thus, God. He also ratchets up the stakes by revealing in a new way the conflict between the Kingdom of God and that of mammon, even if he is doing so unwittingly.

Again, I have posted this as a Word document that you can download.

The Economy As Religion

Being Human

In the middle of January my friend Jason Clark came through town and joined a group of people from Jacob's Well in a discussion/midrash over Lesslie Newbigin's book, Proper Confidence. We had a great discussion, reminiscent of last May when the Emergent Coordinating Group was in Kansas City for a planning meeting. We took a couple of days and went to Conception Abbey to plan, recreate, and actually "do" some theology. Jason (above, with Father Adam Ryan) presented a paper he had been working on the subject of developing a doctrine of creation.

Our Newbigin discussion eventually turned towards this topic (creation theology - not creation vs. evolution, but more an understanding of what it means to be human) and Jason took some time to describe where he is in his exploration. Well, I found out a couple of days ago that he has written a paper, a continuation and refinement of what he presented in May. This paper is part of his doctoral program that I mentioned in an entry on January 20. He sent it to Brooke - seems like my friend been holding out on me. Anyway, it is now in my possession and Jason has given me permission to post for anyone who wants to download it. It is a Word document, around 40 pages. It has all the markings of an academic paper because that is what it is. Enjoy.

Being Human