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Brian,
I am working on a Romans 13 paper, and I was wondering if your suggestion that we read “honor” in 13:7 with quotation marks around it came from a specific source, or if it’s original to you. I’m wanting to cite it as a possibility in my paper, and I need to know who to cite.
Thanks, man!
Peace,
Thom Stark
Hi Brian, hello others whom I’ve never met. I am working with Brian and faithful others at Wine Before Breakfast at the U of T this year, and I just took my first look around Empire Remixed (which should really be called The ER…cause you’ll need to set up triage for people who stumble in here accidentially!). I just read “To Hell With Romans 13″, and on that note I’d like to submit a poem to Empire Remixed called “Spiritual Politics”. If you can use it, great. If not, we’ll never speak again. Just kidding.
Spiritual Politics
Wonderous all the time
A-political parties going on in my mind
Throwing balls left and right
Where they bounce is where I will end up tonight
White halls
Power
Taste
Enemies of the state
No matter how hard we try we can never relate
Inside of the empty space
The full distaste
The unbroken rhythm of fighting on the threshold of heaven’s gate
Spiritual politics
Never done with putting in for the fix
For all the fights
Underneath all the kicks
Unending spiritual politics
Thanks!
Jordan Holman
Ok, didn’t realize that the comments showed up right on the page…awesome.
Jordan
got an idea I write about at my blog for election reform that has become also an idea for a new kind of third party who cares more about influence than power.
Love to have y’all help me get it some circulation.
http://anewkindofparty.blogspot.com/2008/08/initiative-for-most-people-and-polemic.html
dlw
No RSS? Really? And it’s WordPress? Man I’d love to stay up to date with this site, but wow I think RSS is far preferable to email. Consider working that into your WordPress site; it would be a simple thing to incorporate via plugins.
Hey Blake, there is in fact an RSS feed. Scroll a little further down, and you’ll see it in the right-hand column
Since I have only now found time to read Colossians Remixed, I risk pointing out a problem that others may have long since discussed. In their ficitional dialog on p. 81 Walsh and Keesmaat argue against using economic metaphors “when attempting to evaluate the stewardship of resources for ministry, education, health, home life, and a whole host of other dimensions of life”. The particular metaphor under discussion is “buying an argument”. There are at least three difficulties here:
1) Walsh and Keesmaat have Paul against them. He uses all sorts of economic metaphors in his letters (he’s especially fond of “redemption”), and Colossians specifically makes use of the one they find so offensive in Col 4:5: The Colossian Christians are enjoined to “buy out (i.e. make the most of) the time”.
2) Probably, though, neither Walsh and Keesmaat’s fictional discussion partner nor Paul actually realized they were using metaphorical language, and here we have the second problem. People use terms like “reckon”, “wager” “bottom line” “you can bank on it” etc. all the time without realizing they are making use of “dead” metaphors. This, by the way, can hardly be “credited” (another dead economic metaphor; I would use “chalked up”, but that goes back to tally boards using in commerce and gaming) to influence of capitalism or globalization, because you find this in all cultures at all times. Walsh and Keesmaat’s desire to rid language of economic metaphors, whether dead or alive, is a kind of sociolinguistic control fantasy: first one has to make others aware that they are actually using them and then one has to warn them of the ideological dangers involved.
3) Finally (and perhaps this can be understood as a more basic criticism of the book) the argument has a Gnostic flavor about it, with “economics” replacing “material things”, which are by definition bad. But economics is merely the study of the allocation of resources. Why shouldn’t ministry, health, family life, etc. be viewed from this perspective? Certainly it should not be viewed exclusively from this perspective, but who is arguing for that? Even in Walsh and Keesmaat’s ideal economy, people will be allocating resources in every aspect of their lives, and they will probably be using economic metaphors to describe what they’re doing. Is that really so bad?