25Apr, 2010

Sunday Morning Music, Ryan Bingham

Posted by Don
22

I first heard Ryan Bingham on a late-night drive from Dallas to Abilene. There’s a terrific radio station in Dallas called The Ranch (95.5) that plays a lot of traditional country music, mostly Texas based. I’d flown in and found the station and it kept me country along that beautiful road of rolling hills when a song came on that I liked so much I pulled out my i-phone and recorded enough of it I could research and find out who sang it. And later I did that, and discovered it was Ryan Bingham. The song was Dylan’s Hard Rain. Bingham was born in New Mexico and dropped out of school at 17. He recorded his first record in 2006 to much critical and fan appreciation, and recently won an Academy Award for best original song for his song The Weary Kind. Here he is singing that song. I hope you like Ryan as much as I do. Good Sunday morning, to you.

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23Apr, 2010

Is Telling the Truth More Important than Selling the Truth?

Posted by Don
1

If you were to put a group of modern, leading evangelicals in a room and ask them to write a book about God and the church, formalizing a message to the world, I doubt you’d end up with anything like the Bible. You probably wouldn’t tell the story of Bill Clinton having an affair, Benny Hinn faking healings and getting a divorce or Ted Haggard talking macho and homophobic and then secretly sleeping with men and using drugs. I doubt you’d talk about powerful religious figures being involved in incest, either. But that’s exactly the sort of stories we find in scripture. And not only that, but these are principal characters through which Christ lineage and God’s redemptive message are passed down through. Write that book today and we’d likely get some specific theological statements, mapped out like math, some song lyrics, some stories that make God and his followers look good, and after each chapter, actionable steps leading to a more vibrant life in which you are happy and financially stable. In other words, you’d get modern Mormonism.  What I love about the Bible is it’s honesty. This is not a book in which authors tried to hide anything. If [...]

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22Apr, 2010

Are People Basically Good?

Posted by Don
1

I’ve always wondered why people who believe in total depravity say things to their kids like “good job” when they catch a baseball. Shouldn’t they say something like you caught the ball, but you still deserve to go to hell? I’ve never really trusted people who believed we were totally depraved, for obvious reasons. How can their view of the world be trusted? They are totally depraved, after all. A pastor friend told me recently, though, that the term total depravity doesn’t mean you aren’t a good person, or aren’t capable of doing good, but that you aren’t capable of redeeming yourself. You are totally depraved, he said, at being able to access God. That made more sense to me, to be honest. And besides, I’ve met plenty of people who don’t even know God who are good people. And I mean really, really good. I mean they love and care about people, they are moral, they are charitable, so the whole idea there is nothing good in them doesn’t seem to jive with reality. Sometimes I wonder if God has an enemy and that enemy is trying to get us to not like people, because if we don’t like [...]

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21Apr, 2010

Does Your Personality Influence Your Theology?

Posted by Don
4

Have you ever noticed Calvinists think in black and white? And I’m not just talking about their theology, I mean they think in black and white about everything? And have you noticed that people who obsess about the second coming also like science fiction books? Of course those are general statements, and the most offensive thing you can say to a twenty-something is that people might have common characteristics (they hear “nobody is original”) but, honestly, and I mean really, really, honestly, is this something you’ve noticed? So I’ve been wondering how much our personality goes into our understanding of God? And I’ve been concluding that, well, it goes into our view of God quite a bit. For the past several years, I’ve studied the Enneagram, a personality assessment not unlike Myers-Briggs. The theory divides people into nine personalities, each with a wing, so with nine subtypes. And I’ve noticed some of the personalities are predisposed to certain theologies. Personality eight, which struggles with controlling people, leans toward a rules based, black and white theology that allows them to easily decide who is right and wrong, and who to fight, who is with them or against them. If you disagree [...]

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20Apr, 2010

Warning Labels on Cell Phones

Posted by Don
3

I met a new friend recently who made cell phones. His company made smart phones, I don’t remember which ones, but lots of the ones that aren’t the I-phones. He was brilliant to talk to, and socially conscious, too. What I mean is, he actually spent time wondering what his products were doing to the social landscape, how the creation of a particular phone changed the way people lived their lives. And he wondered whether people’s lives were changed for the better, honestly. We talked about how, in the automotive industry, all sorts of regulations were in place to make sure people were safe. Seatbelts and airbags and crash-safe frames are all regulated by the government, but when it comes to social wrecks, emotional crashes and that sort of thing, we hardly give any thought to the products we buy. The truth is, our children’s generation will grow up believing we loved our phones more than we loved them. It will be the battle cry of rebellion, that their parents were too busy checking facebook on their phones to pay any attention to them. I can see an entire movement of kids who don’t want phones because they represent neglect. [...]

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