(Ir)religiosity

I mean…I like ketchup and fries, but that just sounds gross.

I’m loving Google more and more everday.  I use Gmail, GoogleReader, GoogleDocs…I could go on.  This past week they added a new blog feature called FriendConnect, a web2.0-type outlet that can network all your blog readers/followers together to create a sort of meta-community.  Pretty cool.  Other bloggers have been adding this feature, and I’ve been working on mine over the last day or so.  I’m now ready to launch.

You will notice over in the second sidebar I’ve added a couple of FriendConnect gadgets where you can join the BlakeHuggins.com community and participate in the conversation.  Also, now when you click a post permalink to comment you will have the opportunity to rate the post and, if you want, post a FriendConnect comment.

So, come one, come all and join the FriendConnect community!  It’s super easy.  You can sign in with your Google, Yahoo, AIM, or OpenID account(s).

And, if you’re interested, you can follow me in other places.  Just take a look at the LifeStreaming widget in the sidebar!

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Relations of power are not in themselves forms of repression. But what happens is that, in society, in most societies, organizations are created to freeze the relations of power, hold those relations in a state of asymmetry, so that a certain number of persons get an advantage, socially, economically, politically, institutionally, etc. And this totally freezes the situation. That’s what one calls power in the strict sense of the term: it’s a specific type of power relation that has been institutionalized, frozen, immobilized, to the profit of some and to the detriment of others. (ht)

– Michel Foucault

Very true.  And, I would add, very compatible with the Christian narrative, at least in my interpretation.  I do wonder about his initial claim relations and networks of power are not in themselves forms of repression.  If it is true, then I’m failing to come up with a historical example in which power did not lead to repression and oppression.  That is not to say there are not other creative possibilities, just that we haven’t had the audacity to experiment yet.  So, I think I can say with confidence that until now power, in it’s normative functions and applications, has usually led to destructive dominance.  Hopefully, we can change that.  Hopefully.

Brilliant.  Absolutely brilliant.

N.T. Wright on the desire to keep one foot in the academy and one foot in the local church:

When I was at seminary in my early twenties having graduated I remember talking to one of my advisors about my desire to do both pastoral work and scholarship and the advisor saying very firmly ‘well, you’re going to have to choose which you want.’ And I thought then and think now thirty-five years later that he was wrong, that I have been right to combine the two. And it has meant at times living on the fault line between two tectonic plates, but that is part of the deal as far as I’m concerned. I think both the church and the academy have suffered from the disjunction. I think it’s important that some people at least get to that particular place of pain, which is a place of, as it were, cultural pain....I sit in a study at home where the great portrait on the wall is J.B. Lightfoot, who was one of most famous ever bishops of Durham and also one of the five leading intellectuals in Europe of his day. He embodies the fact that you should be bringing this stuff together. And that is an incredible model to have day by day.    (ht)

This resonates with me just about as much as anything could I suppose.  I am constantly thinking, discerning, and reevaluating where exaclty my vocational calling lies post-school (whenever that is!).  Only recently am I coming to this realization that it lies in both academia and the local faith community.  Practically, I’m not real sure how that works, there is a certain degree of tension there, but I think it’s a healthy kind of tension.  And I’m more than willing to thing outside the box about how the looks in reality.  For now, its very comforting to know that I am not alone.

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The good folks over at the Ooze sent me a copy of The Ordinary Radicals last week.  I had a chance to watch in full the other day and I really enjoyed it.  I read Jesus for President as soon as it came out and enjoyed it as well.  If you’re like me and weren’t able to attend the tour the past summer, then the film is definitely for you because it chronicles the entire journey, from being censored in Grand Rapids to refueling the bus with used vegetable oil (yep, that’s right, veggie oil) to everything in between.  And I haven’t even watched the special features yet.

Hearing some of the person stories that were spoken of in the book — the guy who left the military, and the Amish tragedy come to mind — was moving.  And of course the music was great too.  I absolutely love The Psalters.

I felt like that whole thing was just a tad long and could’ve been slightly shorter, but other than that it was great.  Good film editing and, from someone who didn’t make it to the real thing, a great inside look on the book tour.  Whether you’ve read the book or not, The Ordinary Radicals is well worth you time.