AND YOU THOUGHT YOU'D HEARD IT ALL

From Candace Chellew-Hodge at Religious Dispatches:

Despite having heard a lot of bluster from the religious right over the years, they still sometimes have the ability to say something so totally brand new, and patently offensive, that it just knocks the wind right out of me. Take this gem quoted in the Colorado Springs Gazette over the weekend in a story about the recent rash of gay teen suicides:

Peter Sprigg, senior fellow for policy studies at the Family Research Council in Washington, D.C., said the rash September suicides by gays might be linked to the students believing they were born gay. “That creates hopelessness,” he said. “It is more loving and compassionate to say you don’t have to be gay for the rest of your lives.”

What would be far more loving and compassionate is for Sprigg and his compatriots to actually engage in a true act of compassion. “Compassion” literally means “to suffer with” or “suffer together.” We can only have compassion for someone when we understand, on a deeply personal level, what, exactly, is the other person’s struggle.

He said that?!!! Well, yes he did. In the name of compassion, no less, Peter Sprigg said that. As the author says, you thought you'd heard it all.

What makes the thought of be “being gay for the rest of your lives” such a horrible, shameful, terrible thought to even bear consideration is because Sprigg and people like him dedicate their entire careers to making the lives of gays and lesbians so incredibly miserable. They produce ridiculous studies full of lies that no reputable psychologist or social scientist would touch with a ten foot pole and when their scientific lies are exposed they play the religion card and say, “well, God didn’t create you gay.”

Just yesterday, included in the the readings from the Lectionary, which were referenced in the two sermons to which I linked, is the story of Ruth, the Moabite, the foreigner, the outcast, the despised, who - surprise! - was given the honor of becoming the great-grandmother of one of the greatest heroes in the Hebrew Testament, King David.

From another reading is the story of Jesus healing ten lepers. Lepers were only permitted in the company of other lepers, but Jesus allowed the lepers to approach him, and he sent them on their way telling them they would be healed. And all ten were healed, but only one returned to thank Jesus, a Samaritan, a twofold outcast, one of the despised that the Jewish people had nothing to do with. Jesus sent the Samaritan off again with the words "...your faith has made you well."

That Ruth and the Samaritan were amongst the despised by the people at the time was of no consequence to God's/Jesus' decision to mark them with favor.

Are there lessons in these stories from the Scriptures for us today about how we view and act toward those who may be numbered amongst the despised, the outcasts, the different, those who are not like us? May we claim that our compassion is godly, if it is offered with conditions attached?

Thanks to Cathy for the link.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING, MY CANADIAN FRIENDS!!

BONNE ACTION DE GRÂCE, MES AMIS CANADIENS!!

From B4tea:

Thanksgiving Day in Canada has been celebrated since 1957, on the second Monday of October. It is a chance to give thanks for good harvest and other fortunes in the past year for the people. People have a day off work on this day, though perhaps religious in origin, Thanksgiving is identified as a secular holiday now. Many stores and other organizations and businesses are also closed on this day.

Canadians eat their Thanksgiving meal with turkey and mashed potatoes and other meal such as pumpkin, corn ears and pecan nuts. At this time of year, a common image is seen of a cornucopia, or horn, filled with seasonal fruit and vegetables.

The Thanksgiving weekend is a well-liked time to take a short autumn vacation. Many other popular activities are also done including outdoor breaks to admire the spectacular colors of the Canadian autumn; hiking; and fishing. While who are the Fans of the teams in the Canadian Football League may expend their part of the weekend watching the Thanksgiving Day Classic matches.

TWO EXCELLENT SERMONS FOR 10-10-10

The preachers both speak of punch lines from stories from Scripture, having to do with foreigners, stories which were shocking in their own time.

For no particular reason, starting with Caminante, who preaches from the story of the healing of the ten lepers. (Luke 17:11-19)

The gospel has saved up the punch-line for this moment. In one short sentence, it informs us, ‘And he was a Samaritan.’A Samaritan.

Not only once cast out of society by virtue of his leprosy, but twice cast out because of his nationality. A doubly impure, scorned man, someone whom the boundaries would have permanently kept out.

Yet Jesus ministers to this man with the same grace as he has to the other nine. Moreover, he tells the Samaritan something he does not tell the other nine: ‘Your faith has made you well.’ A stronger translation is, ‘Your faith has brought you salvation.'

And the sermon titled "Shame On You" by Tobias Haller at In a Godward Direction on his sermon blog. Tobias preaches from the story of Ruth and Naomi (Ruth 1:(1-7)8-19a) and from the story of the ten lepers. (Luke 17:11-19)

On Ruth, the Moabite, who follows her mother-in-law back to Judah after both have become widows.

Ruth does in the end discover a distant relative of her late husband; she finds Boaz, who because of Ruth’s loyalty to him and to Naomi marries her. She bears him a son — and that son, it turns out right at the end of the story, is none other than the grandfather of King David!

Imagine how that punch-line must have sounded in the ears of proud Judeans: David’s great-grandmother was an immigrant Moabite — a foreign-born member of one of Israel’s ancestral enemies. For Moabites had once long before treated the wandering Israelites themselves as lower than dirt and wouldn’t let them so much as set a foot in Moab on their roundabout way to the promised land; and in latter days the songs of Israel would declare, “Moab is my washbasin” — and yet here it turns out that our greatest hero, David the King, David the Deliverer, is part Moabite, and wouldn’t even have been born at all had it not been for the loyalty of a woman of Moab, Ruth, in not turning back from Naomi. And perhaps a feeling of shame might rise in the heart of any Israelite who had ever mistreated a foreigner.

Of course, I urge you to read both sermons in their entirety. The sermons serve us well as they point us toward an examination of our present attitudes and actions toward not just immigrants, but all those in our society who are viewed as different, other, not like us.

STORY OF THE DAY - BACKUP PLAN

Sometimes I think we should bury all
our money in a hole & go back to
enjoying life again, he said. It'd
probably be a good idea to make a map
of where the hole was just in case it
didn't work out though.

From StoryPeople.

AN OVERDOSE OF CUTE

I'M SO CUTE, THEY WONT MIND IF I SHRED THIS!!

 

WHAT PART OF QUIET DIDN'T YOU UNDERSTAND?!

 

OK, NOW DON'T MOVE FOR ABOUT A WEEK!

 

SORRY MOM, I'M NEW AT THIS!



I REALLY NEED TO GET GOING, BUT JUST CAN'T SEEM TO GET MOTIVATED....

All together now, AWWWWW!!!

Thanks to Doug.

PLEASE PRAY FOR CATHY

From Cathy, my good and faithful friend and travel companion:

By the way, Mimi, I was wondering if you would mind adding me to your prayer list, just because I feel rather unwell? I have been getting a nagging pain in the left side on and off for a few years now. I did get examined for it (ultrasound etc, and they put some tubing with a camera on it into my stomach to check it out), and they couldn't find anything, but it is getting worse, I think, and my digestive system is increasingly going haywire for no really good reason. I need to get it checked out again. It feels as if there is some kind of blockage or problem in my gut somewhere. I am a little worried. In fact if you wouldn't mind posting a prayer request at Wounded Bird I would be immensely grateful.

O God, the strength of the weak and the comfort of sufferers: Mercifully accept our prayers, and grant to your servant Cathy the help of your power, that her sickness may be turned into health, and our sorrow into joy; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

BUT IS IT TRUE?

From the New York Times:

Millions of the moviegoers who made “The Social Network” the top box-office draw of the weekend saw an unflattering portrayal of Mark Zuckerberg, the co-founder and chief executive of Facebook.

To many viewers, Mr. Zuckerberg comes off as a callow, socially inept schemer who misled fellow students who had wanted to build an online social network at Harvard and who also pushed out a co-founder of the company. With only a few exceptions — girlfriends and a prominent Silicon Valley venture capital firm — the names have not been changed to mask identities.

The film’s truthfulness, however, has been strongly questioned in forums like Slate, the online magazine, and The New Republic.

According to the articles in Slate and The New Republic, the movie is inaccurate in its portrayal of Zuckerberg, Harvard, and the founding of Facebook. People who know Mark Zuckerberg personally agree.

And that raises a question: how can filmmakers take liberties with the story of a living person, and does that person have any recourse if the portrayal upsets him? After all, many movies run a legal disclaimer in the credits that says, “Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.”
....

When it comes to public figures, lawyers say, appropriating someone’s life story for a movie is not so different from telling such details in a news article or printed biography. Politicians have grown used to harsh onscreen treatment, having learned that there is a degree of latitude for inaccuracy and strong protection against libel suits.

Eugene Volokh, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, law school, said that if Mr. Zuckerberg sued and was declared a public figure, he would then “have to show that the filmmakers knew the statements were false, or were reckless about the possibility of falsehood.”

In the Slate article, Nathan Heller, who attended Harvard at the same as Zuckerberg and was acquainted with him, is disappointed in "The Social Network":

The Social Network I saw was a rote and deeply mediocre film, much weaker than the best work of its writer or director. How could I, who should have been sucked deep into that on-screen universe (Mark Zuckerberg was one of the first people I met in college; we lived a couple of rooms apart as freshmen), feel so impervious to the movie's "emblematic" pull?

Of Zuckerberg, Heller says:

There was a sense in 2002 and 2003, in other words, that as a group of people on the verge of cultural maturity, we had little of our own with which to lay claim to the moment—besides, maybe, the social bonds and shorthand that arose from all being in this place together. That is the real beginning of Facebook's rise and the useful measure of Mark Zuckerberg's brilliance. What's often overlooked in recent talk of the Facebook founder's "robot" stiffness or bizarre, officious ideas about online privacy is what a canny and receptive cultural reader he was.

Heller should know. And my concerns about online privacy at Facebook are antediluvian, if not worse. And here I thought I was one of the elders who was keeping up. Good-bye to all that.

Lawrence Lessig, at The New Republic says:

In 2009, Aaron Sorkin (“Sports Night,” “The West Wing”) got (yes, the same word) the idea to write a script for a movie about this new social network. Here’s the important point: He made it. As with every one of his extraordinary works, Sorkin crafted dialogue for an as-yet-not-evolved species of humans—ordinary people, here students, who talk perpetually with the wit and brilliance of George Bernard Shaw or Bertrand Russell. (I’m a Harvard professor. Trust me: The students don’t speak this language.) With that script, and with a massive hand from the film’s director, David Fincher, he helped steer an intelligent, beautiful, and compelling film through to completion. You will see this movie, and you should. As a film, visually and rhythmically, and as a story, dramatically, the work earns its place in the history of the field.

But as a story about Facebook, it is deeply, deeply flawed. As I watched the film, and considered what it missed, it struck me that there was more than a hint of self-congratulatory contempt in the motives behind how this story was told. Imagine a jester from King George III’s court, charged in 1790 with writing a comedy about the new American Republic. That comedy would show the new Republic through the eyes of the old. It would dress up the story with familiar figures—an aristocracy, or a wannabe aristocracy, with grand estates, but none remotely as grand as in England. The message would be, “Fear not, there’s no reason to go. The new world is silly at best, deeply degenerate, at worst.”

Was I so affected by the movie because I share somewhat in Sorkin's self-congratulatory contempt of Facebook? Because I view the website through the eyes of the old?

Why am I giving so much time and thought to the movie? Why do I continue to bang on about it on my blog? Am I obsessed? I confess that I don't know. I know one thing. I'm still a presence on Facebook, but I don't quite approve of my being there. The website is useful for keeping in touch with family members and friends, but there is something that I truly dislike about Facebook, and seeing the movie played into that antipathy.

And it's a little disturbing for me to find myself out of sync with 500 billion people, with 1/14 of the population of the entire world.

Photo of the real Mark Zuckerberg from Wikipedia.

WANH, WANH, WANH!

Mining again from the Church Times:

THE Catholic Group in the General Synod was described on Wednesday morning as “incandescent” about Tuesday’s announcement of the membership of the group that will prepare the draft code of practice to accompany the women-bishops Measure.

The drafting group was set up by the House of Bishops, which has the responsibility of presenting a draft code to the General Synod.

You may read the names of the members appointed to the group with responsibility for preparing the draft code of practice on women bishops at the website.

Prebendary David Houlding, a leading member of the Catholic Group, said on Wednesday: “We are all so angry and dismayed. It’s clear from the compilation of this group that there is to be no honoured place in the Church of England for traditionalists — that we are not wanted. This group is set up to fail before it begins. It’s one [Bishop Martin Warner] against seven.

“To put two members of the revision committee and no members of the Catholic Group — the audacity of it. I think it’s a disaster.”

Meanwhile, back at the Ranch of the Disaffected:

TWO Church of England flying bishops have denied reports that they will resign in order to join the Roman Catholic Ordinariate before the end of the year.

The Bishop of Ebbsfleet, the Rt Revd Andrew Burnham, and the Bishop of Richborough, the Rt Revd Keith Newton, both Provincial Epis copal Visitors, were said last week to have decided to leave the C of E and accept the Pope’s invitation to join the Ordinariate within the Roman Catholic Church.
....

The two bishops will be on study leave from tomorrow until the end of December.

Well, it appears that there may not be the quick rush for the door that certain bishops and clerics on both sides of the Tiber would have predicted.

The report also said that Bishop Burnham favoured joining the Ordinariate, and was not optimistic about the new Society of St Wilfrid and St Hilda for Catholic clergy and laity (News, 1 October).

That would be SSWSH.

Describing the society’s purpose, Bishop Ford said that it “had been worked up in embryo to be offered as an option so that those who could not, in conscience, see a way forward in the Ordinariate would have some sort of identity”. It “is not competing with the Ordinariate”, he said, and it would “not be another club or pressure group”, but “a common life”.
....

The Revd Ivan Aquilina, Vicar of St John the Baptist, Sevenoaks, who attended the sacred synod, said: “So far, what the aims and objectives are is not clear, so, while some are joining it, already others will want to wait and see. . . The society may or may not secure some sort of provision or a stronger code of practice. It may also be an honoured vehicle for those who, for personal or ecclesial reasons, cannot be part of the Catholic family.”

It appears that in England there will be this group and that group of the disaffected formed until the motherland rivals its daughter, the US, in alphabet soup mixtures of "Anglican" religious bodies.

The current issue of the The Church Times is a gold mine of information.

THERE THEY GO AGAIN

From the Church Times:

PRIMATES from the Global South are contemplating a boycott of the next Primates’ Meeting because the US Presiding Bishop, Dr Katharine Jefferts Schori, will be present.

The Archbishop of the Indian Ocean, the Most Revd Ian Ernest, has confirmed that he will not attend the meeting, due to take place in Dublin, 25-31 January.
....

Dr Jefferts Schori has already confirmed that she will attend the meeting.

Primates of the Global South are expected to meet this month to discuss whether they will refuse en masse to attend.
....

They [Global South primates] are being encouraged to attend by, among others, the president of the American Anglican Council, the Rt Revd David Anderson, a suffragan bishop within the Convocation of Anglicans in North America, who has posted a letter on a website urging traditionalist bishops to go to the meeting.

In a bizarre suggestion, he advises that Dr Jefferts Schori be shut out of the room, or removed “by force of numbers” if she attends. If Dr Williams objects to this, the meeting could go ahead in a separate room without him.
....

“In the above case, if Dr Williams did not go along with Jefferts Schori’s exclusion, then I would suggest having the next-door meeting with out him. I just don’t believe staying home from the field of battle helps win a war over the truth and nature of Christianity within Anglicanism.”

Paraphrasing Ronald Reagan, "There they go again."

Guys, I have another suggestion: Stamp your feet hard and say (all together now), "If she's going to be there, I'm not going!" And then throw yourselves on the floor and scream and kick your feet. Perhaps then you will get your way.

And David Anderson signs off in his letter, with his "bizarre" suggestions and talk of battles and war, with these words:

Blessings and Peace in Christ Jesus,

The Rt. Rev. David C. Anderson, Sr.
President and CEO, American Anglican Council

H/T to Thinking Anglicans>

"THE SOCIAL NETWORK"

Jesse Eisenberg, left, and Joseph Mazzello star in a scene from 'The Social Network.'

Since Monday, I've been putting off writing about the movie, then stopping and starting, partly because I will have to, you know, actually compose, write words of my own, and not simply copy, paste, and link, and partly because I have writer's block. I traveled to New Orleans to see the film, because the theater in the next town over is not showing the movie. I assume that the movie theater powers assume that we are too low-brow here in the boonies to appreciate a movie about internet wonks. Judging from the small audience in attendance in the New Orleans 'burbs, I assume that the folks there may also be too low-brow to appreciate a film about internet wonks, but it's difficult to be certain for an afternoon showing. In any case, only a very few of the, no doubt, large percentage of the population of the area, who are active users of Facebook, were there to see the movie about the founders of Facebook.

UPDATED NOTE: I've just now remembered that the theater scheduled two simultaneous showings at the time I went, so there was likely a full house in another theater on the site. My smart remark probably does not apply to the New Orleans 'burbs.

UPDATED NOTE 2: The movie is now showing at the theater in Houma, the next town over. I guess we're not too low-brow around here to see the film after all. It was just a little slow in getting here. But one never knows, because a good many movies that I'd like to see are never shown in my area.

I'd read Mike Scott's review in the Times-Picayune and David Denby's review in The New Yorker. Both reviewers gave the film smashingly good marks.

From Mike Scott:

If "The Social Network" was a Facebook page, I'd have no choice but to "like" it -- but only because there's not a "love" button, or a "totally gaga about" button.

David Fincher's smartly written, expertly told chronicling of the dawn of the Facebook era -- and, more subtly, of the impact it's had on the devolution of humankind as a social animal -- is just that compelling, that engrossing, that hard to resist.

Kind of like a certain website.

For the record, I don't find the website quite so compelling, engrossing, and hard to resist as others, actually 500 million active-user others, one out of 14 people in the world. I'm a not-so-active user of Facebook, but....

From David Denby's long review:

“The Social Network,” directed by David Fincher and written by Aaron Sorkin, rushes through a coruscating series of exhilarations and desolations, triumphs and betrayals, and ends with what feels like darkness closing in on an isolated soul. This brilliantly entertaining and emotionally wrenching movie is built around a melancholy paradox: in 2003, Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg), a nineteen-year-old Harvard sophomore, invents Facebook and eventually creates a five-hundred-million-strong network of “friends,” but Zuckerberg is so egotistical, work-obsessed, and withdrawn that he can’t stay close to anyone; he blows off his only real pal, Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield), a fellow Jewish student at Harvard, who helps him launch the site.

The movie is outstanding, engrossing, and irresistible. I walked out in a stunned state. Truly, I was that affected. I didn't recover my equilibrium for quite some time. The movie captures the breathtaking pace of the growth of Facebook from its founder's dorm room at Harvard. Zuckerberg is so intensely focused on his vision and his codes that he blows off those around him, including his lovely girl friend, and seems to have few doubts about knocking others out of the way and walking over them, if necessary, in pursuit of his goals. Zuckerberg's emotional development seems stunted, and his social skills are utterly lacking.

Although Zuckerberg appears amoral in the movie, I felt that, in a way, he was not entirely responsible for the hurt that he caused to those around him. For all his brilliance, he's missing a character or personality component that would move him to pause and reflect on possible consequences of his actions on others, especially those close to him, or to feel remorse, once he saw the oftentimes unfortunate consequences.

The film is superbly written and directed, and the actors do the material full justice. Seeing the movie was an extraordinary experience. I definitely want to see it again to know the effect on me of a second viewing. Since I don't want to do a spoiler review, I won't say much more about the film, except to say that one of my favorite scenes comes early in the movie, a scene with Zuckerberg and his girl friend. Watch for it.

Already there is controversy about the movie. Zuckerberg says the portrayal of his character is inaccurate.

In my stunned state, as I left the theater, I said to myself, "I'm getting out of Facebook. I must get out of there." Well, I haven't yet. We shall see.

A couple of weeks ago, I read the "Letter From Palo Alto" on Mark Zuckerberg by Jose Antonio Vargas in The New Yorker, which is a profile of Zuckerberg, based on interviews with the subject himself and others who knew him, along with background research on the Facebook website.

Before there was Facebook, there was Facemash:

Soon afterward, he (Zuckerberg) came up with Facemash, where users looked at looked at photographs of two and clicked a button to note who they thought was hotter, a kind of sexual-playoff system. It was quickly shut down by the school administration.

Okay, Zuckerberg was 19. He's now 26. One hopes he's matured.

And this:

Zuckerberg's business model depends on the shifting notions of privacy, revelations, and sheer self-display. The more that people are willing to put online, the more money his site can make from advertizers.

My major concern with Facebook is privacy. To read this statement in the profile is surely cautionary to me. I don't know that using Facebook has, as yet, provided the online world or the great world out there with much more information than what has been revealed through my activities in Blogland, but what about the future Facebook?

Zuckerberg’s ultimate goal is to create, and dominate, a different kind of Internet. Google and other search engines may index the Web, but, he says, “most of the information that we care about is things that are in our heads, right? And that’s not out there to be indexed, right?” Zuckerberg was in middle school when Google launched, and he seems to have a deep desire to build something that moves beyond it. “It’s like hardwired into us in a deeper way: you really want to know what’s going on with the people around you,” he said.
....

For this plan to work optimally, people have to be willing to give up more and more personal information to Facebook and its partners. Perhaps to accelerate the process, in December, 2009, Facebook made changes to its privacy policies. Unless you wrestled with a set of complicated settings, vastly more of your information—possibly including your name, your gender, your photograph, your list of friends—would be made public by default. The following month, Zuckerberg declared that privacy was an evolving “social norm.”

The backlash came swiftly. The American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Privacy Information Center cried foul. Users revolted, claiming that Facebook had violated the social compact upon which the company is based. What followed was a tug-of-war about what it means to be a private person with a public identity. In the spring, Zuckerberg announced a simplified version of the privacy settings.

In answer to the author's question about the privacy changes, Zuckerberg said, “We realize that people will probably criticize us for this for a long time, but we just believe that this is the right thing to do.” Zuckerberg's answer to the question is why I think that now may be the time for me to remove myself from Facebook, rather than later.