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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?
I love your very Christian take on David Dewees. Here FYI is my article from yesterday’s xtra. Thank you for your true Christian take!…. sincerely..james dubro:
Dewees’ funeral draws hundreds
IN PERSON / What we really know about what the events leading to his death
James Dubro / Toronto / Thursday, October 22, 2009
The Runnymede United Church near High Park in Toronto was packed for a funeral on Oct 9. More than 1,000 people jammed the aisles, entryways and basement.
Dead was David Dewees, 32, a Grade 10 teacher at Jarvis Collegiate Institute and counsellor at Ontario Pioneer Camp who killed himself on Oct 3 after being charged by police with two counts each of invitation to sexual touching and luring. Police allege Dewees had “inappropriate contact” over the internet with two young guys, 15 and 16, he knew from camp.
On Aug 17 the teens told the director of Ontario Pioneer Camp that Dewees had previously sent them sexually charged messages over the net. Dewees was escorted from the camp, the director called police and Children’s Aid. Dewees retreated to his home until his arrest on the morning of Oct 1.
Then his mug shot and the charges against him blared from mainstream media. The Toronto Star incorrectly reported that he had been charged with sexual assault against two 13-year-olds. The Star ran a tiny correction the same day Dewees committed suicide, Oct 3. The train driver says he is haunted, he made eye contact with Dewees in his last moment but was unable to stop in time.
But even after Dewees’ suicide The Star went further. Rosie DiManno, in a malicious column, assumed his guilt then painted Dewees’ as a paedophile, hardwired to molest young boys.
“Tyler,” who knew Dewees from camp, was interviewed on CFRB radio. He said in the piece that Dewees sent him a number of emails about his sexual exploits with women and wanted Tyler to respond with stories of his own. Tyler later compared notes with other campers and found five young guys who had similar internet experiences with Dewees. Tyler said Dewees’ emails “creeped him out” but that he didn’t contact police until after the story broke.
So what is it about Dewees’ life and tragic death that drew all these people — more than 80 members of the Mendelssohn Choir, hundreds of students from Jarvis Collegiate, dozens of former campers and friends — to pay heartfelt tribute to this young man who died under a cloud of scandal and suspicion?
“When I saw the image of David on the TV that night along with the sensational account of the charges I said to myself, ‘His life is over,’” says James Harbeck, a friend and longtime Mendelssohn Choir colleague of Dewees’.
“How is asking teenage boys to tell you about their sexual experiences or fantasies tantamount to child abuse?” asks Harbeck. “Oh, what he’s accused of is inadvisable and inappropriate behaviour, certainly, but when I was 14 and 15 I was in high school and had an unrelentingly dirty mind and the permanent hard-on nearly all adolescent boys have. The behaviour described isn’t destroying their innocence; it’s just creeping them out.”
Twenty-two-year-old NathanThompson, a former camper who Dewees’ mentored, told Xtra he met Dewees at camp when he was 15, that Dewees had become a friend and helped him through many problems over the course of seven years.
From the pulpit officiating reverend Linda Levin grappled to reconcile her Christian faith with the horror of Dewees’ tragic end. Dewees, she said, was publicly humiliated, cast out, suffered and had a darkness descend on him, not unlike what happened to Jesus Christ. “Dewees never had a chance to defend himself,” she said, adding that he was mercilessly humiliated in the newspapers and on TV.
“If one good thing could come out this, it might be a change in the procedures in the justice system,” she said, suggesting that in some sensitive cases the names and photos of accused ought not be made public before a trial or a finding of guilt.
Chris Tindal ran twice as a federal Green Party candidate. He got to know Dewees enough to attend the funeral. They canvassed the corner of Church and Wellesley together during the 2008 by-election.
“The way it played it out is very upsetting and tragic no matter what way you look at it,” Tindal told Xtra. “I think the public needs to know what the police knew. They behaved in a way that suggested they believed David to be a dangerous predator and I don’t think we’ve seen the evidence to support that.”
Elizabeth Addo Noel, principal at Jarvis Collegiate, eulogized Dewees by calling him an exceptionally gifted teacher who went well beyond the call of duty.
In the end Dewees was both the victim of a sensational media frenzy and, perhaps, of a few ill-advised emails. But one cannot say if he was secretly gay. In his faith, which meant so much to him, gay sex was simply not an option. And if he did indulge, he would have have been burdened with guilt.
“We all have our demons and we all have our occasional lapses of judgment,” says Harbeck. “I don’t know whether David made the lapse of judgment he is accused of, but in one day his whole life was taken away and then came his greatest lapse of judgment: killing himself.”
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