Caleb: “I and hate and it.” That was the 5-word review given by my friend Rob Case of the last Avetts album, after they supposedly sold out for the first time. Now they’re in a GAP commercial. Just wanted to let you know, I liked them before they were popular. But I’m proud to say I ain’t no ironic bandwagon hipster: I still like them now. And I don’t think they sold out. Look, guys’ gotta eat. By the way, if you don’t know the Avetts and are reading this for some reason, they are what rock and roll would sound like if it was invented right after the War of Northern Aggression.
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_Not Worth Fighting For_ Review: Part 4
Chapter 3 deconstructed the difficult scenario of a loved one being attacked.
In Chapter 4 Robert Brimlow answers the question “What about Hitler?”
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_Not Worth Fighting For_ Review: Part 3
Chapter 2 discussed the hope of the resurrection and the life of Jesus as the core of Christian nonviolence. We dealt with the question of helping a neighbor who is being attacked and how a Christian committed to nonviolence may handle such a situation and why.
Chapter 3 leaps right into a very very difficult question: “What would you do if someone were attacking a loved one?”
I have a wife and a child. I love them and want to protect them from evil. Because of this, many things in this world are unsettling to me even more than they would be were I single and childless. Whatever I believe and do, I must live like Christ.
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_Not Worth Fighting For_ Review: Part 2
“Pacifism is not a monolithic stance or approach to war, violence, or politics. There are varieties of it.”
The first chapter of the book distinguished between pacifism and passivity.
In chapter 2 D. Stephen Long deals with the difficult question “What About Protecting Third Party Innocents? Can we just let our neighbors die?”
Long doesn’t pretend all this is easy. He’s a reluctant pacifist who came from a military family. He doesn’t let us choose pacifism for some bogus reason. He rejects that liberal pacifism where we just say we hate war but perpetuate the conditions that make war “necessary”. He rejects the notion that war is bad because all soldiers are bloodthirsty savages. Many soldiers are and have been decent, loving, exceptional, faithful people who seem to be incapable of harboring hate, and what we call good soldiering requires “self sacrifice, disciplined community, and moral attentiveness.” He rejects the notion that pacifists are better because they don’t like war and everyone else does. Practically nobody loves war (except immature American boys who play Call of Duty all day and think war would be fun). Even the most battle-hardened want to avoid it, with few exceptions. So we can’t reject violence for cheap reasons.
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Morality is a big, broad world
Red Letter Christians » Commendable in an Age of Short Cuts: Kings, Presidents and Prophets
No matter what anyone says, economy is a heavily moral issue. It is not a side issue.
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_Not Worth Fighting For_ Review: Part 1
When you think of people who believe in nonviolence, what image comes to mind? Is it someone you find distaste in? Is something about them other than their commitment making you dislike them? Now picture someone who is like you or someone you admire in every way. Then imagine them truly believing in nonviolence. Would you call them a sissy? Coward?
In my last post I introduced the chapter-by-chapter review of A Faith Not Worth Fighting For, a collection of essays on Christian nonviolence, specifically questions often asked about it by skeptics, or just curious seekers.
The first chapter opens with a common misconception worded in this question: “Isn’t Pacifism Passive?”
We come to see that this argument against peacemaking has not roots in logic or theology, but comes from what I’ve found is a mixture of semantic misunderstanding and aesthetic distaste. In her essay C. Rosalee Velloso Ewell addresses this question very well.
[note: for the sake of clarification when I speak of pacifism I will speak of it in broad terms, meaning a commitment to nonviolence, which we will see is based on the word for “passion”. Whether that means a decision never to use violence ever, we shall see as we read along.]
As with the rest of the book, Ewell leads the discussion based on five assumptions for Christians:
1) Jesus and his story are real
2) We are to be witnesses of Jesus
3) We “see thru a glass dimly” (1 Cor. 13:12), but “we do see Jesus” (Heb. 2:9)
4) Faith is a journey in which we question ourselves and shine our light for others
5) It all goes back to the life (and death, and re-life) of Jesus
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Announcing: A by-chapter review of _A Faith Not Worth Fighting For_
I will take away the chariots from Ephraim
and the warhorses from Jerusalem,
and the battle bow will be broken.
He will command peace to the nations.
-Zecheriah 9:9-10
I’ve been looking forward to reading a certain book for a while, now that I’ve had some friends recommend it to me. The book is called A Faith Not Worth Fighting For, a collection of essays about Christian nonviolence. It is a book that I already know will challenge me, will set the voice of scripture up against some things people sometimes tell me who also read that scripture a lot.
I’d like to thank Carl Jenkins for really getting me interested in the reading, and for giving me bits and pieces of his reading along the way. He did a book review. I’m doing a full chapter-by-chapter throughout the next month or so.
Lessons from a Tampa Tantrum
One of the lessons I’m going to teach my son one day is this: I have an apple and Mikey and Tommy both have an apple too, but they each want another apple. Joey has never had an apple and wants to try one, so I decide to give him mine. But Mikey and Tommy are big bullies, and Joey gets picked on, so if I give him an apple they’re just gonna take it away from him most likely. Tommy’s always been the bigger bully (at least that’s what Mikey always says), and so I might as well give my apple to Mikey instead of Joey because if I give it to Joey and Mikey and Tommy try to get it, Tommy might get it instead of Mikey.
What I’m going to teach my son is that it’s very important for me to give Joey my apple no matter what Mikey and Tommy say or do, even if I know they’ll take it away. Because there are four people who need to see it happen. What I will not teach my son is that giving an apple to Joey is the same as giving it to Tommy because he’s a big old bully.
Bane Memes!
Last post I treated you to a Bane meme. Want some more?
Learn of Bane’s childhood. The untold story.
Sustainable Hobbiton: Found my dream hood
Real Life Hobbit Village Proves the Greenest Way to Live is Like Bilbo Baggins
A real life hobbit village. And it’s sustainable.
I remember reading an article in the St. Austin Review that described Tolkien’s Hobbiton as an embodiment of a social philosophy known as “distributism.” G.K. Chesterton was a big proponent of it. Wendell Berry—know him? You could call him one too.
It’s basically agrarianism where everyone is a peasant and nobody is a lord. In Hobbiton, all the farms are for sustaining the community, not trading with the outside world at large. The mill is the closest thing to an industry, but once again it is for producing enough for the Shire. “Distributists were ‘greens’ before anyone had the label,” and it certainly wasn’t because they worshipped the earth or anything. As Christians, they believed not that all creation was God, but that all creation was God’s temple.
CALEB COY 