Tweeting About Twitter... Narcissism... Reality?

Every day I am amazed at how many people have and are getting Twitter. Phenomenons like this [even blogging] just seem to sweep across everyone's computers. I read a great blog, though, a couple days ago, about Twitter, and I think some of the comments about Twitter are right on. As with anything, there are good things about Twitter--I'm not saying there aren't. But I do think that as students of our culture we need to be taking closer looks at what we so blindly take as good and meaningful, and look at the holistic affects there can be on our lives.

My favorite parts:

"Twitter unbundles the blog, fragments the fragment. It broadcasts the text message, turns SMS into a mass medium.

And what exactly are we broadcasting? The minutiae of our lives. The moment-by-moment answer to what is, in Twitterland, the most important question in the world: What are you doing? Or, to save four characters: What you doing? Twitter is the telegraph of Narcissus. Not only are you the star of the show, but everything that happens to you, no matter how trifling, is a headline, a media event, a stop-the-presses bulletin. Quicksilver turns to amber.

Are you exhausted yet?

...using Twitter presents us with the possibility of a social reward, while not using it presents us with the possibility of a social penalty - and the possibility of a reward or penalty is a far more compelling motivator than the reality of a reward or penalty. Look at me! Look at me! Are you looking?

What used to happen in the privacy of the mind is now tossed into the public's bowl like so many Fritos. The broadcasting of the spectacle of the self has become a full-time job. Au revoir, Jean Baudrillard, your work here is done.

The great paradox of "social networking" is that it uses narcissism as the glue for "community." Being online means being alone, and being in an online community means being alone together. The community is purely symbolic, a pixellated simulation conjured up by software to feed the modern self's bottomless hunger. Hunger for what? For verification of its existence? No, not even that. For verification that it has a role to play. As I walk down the street with thin white cords hanging from my ears, as I look at the display of khakis in the window of the Gap, as I sit in a Starbucks sipping a chai served up by a barista, I can't quite bring myself to believe that I'm real. But if I send out to a theoretical audience of my peers 140 characters of text saying that I'm walking down the street, looking in a shop window, drinking tea, suddenly I become real. I have a voice. I exist, if only as a symbol speaking of symbols to other symbols.

...As the physical world takes on more of the characteristics of a simulation, we seek reality in the simulated world. At least there we can be confident that the simulation is real. At least there we can be freed from the anxiety of not knowing where the edge between real and unreal lies. At least there we find something to hold onto, even if it's nothing."

I think there really are some great points made. Even as I've sat and pondered getting Twitter before, the thoughts that come into my head really are so self-conscious: "If I get Twitter, people will know what I am doing--that's worth something, right? I won't be out of the loop, I'll know what's going on with people. I want to be in the know. I should to be in the know. And I want people to know about my life, too." And this is even first assuming that people will even look at my Twitter page to begin with. In a time where everyone is so busy, where there is no time left, why are we adding something else to remove us even more from the reality that we really live in--the human part of us? Why are we looking to one more thing to bring us a sense of identity, even in the smallest of ways? I don't at all want to vilify Twitter, but I just want to ask questions of our use of some technology in the first place. There's not necessarily anything inherently wrong with Twitter, but how are we using it?

Are You a Christian Hipster?

Hilarious. I bet if you're reading this, this description fits you pretty well :)

Christian Hipster Likes and Dislikes (By No Means Exhaustive… Just a Sampling)

Things they don’t like:
Christian hipsters don’t like megachurches, altar calls, and door-to-door evangelism. They don’t really like John Eldredge’s Wild at Heart or youth pastors who talk too much about Braveheart. In general, they tend not to like Mel Gibson and have come to really dislike The Passion for being overly bloody and maybe a little sadistic. They don’t like people like Pat Robertson, who on The 700 Club famously said that America should “take Hugo Chavez out”; and they don’t particularly like The 700 Club either, except to make fun of it. They don’t like evangelical leaders who get too involved in politics, such as James Dobson or Jerry Falwell, who once said of terrorists that America should “blow them all away in the name of the Lord.” They don’t like TBN, PAX, or Joel Osteen. They do have a wry fondness for Benny Hinn, however.

Christian hipsters tend not to like contemporary Christian music (CCM), or Christian films (except ironically), or any non-book item sold at Family Christian Stores. They hate warehouse churches or churches with American flags on stage, or churches with any flag on stage, really. They prefer “Christ follower” to “Christian” and can’t stand the phrases “soul winning” or “non-denominational,” and they could do without weird and awkward evangelistic methods including (but not limited to): sock puppets, ventriloquism, mimes, sign language, “beach evangelism,” and modern dance. Surprisingly, they don’t really have that big of a problem with old school evangelists like Billy Graham and Billy Sunday and kind of love the really wild ones like Aimee Semple McPherson.

Things they like:
Christian hipsters like music, movies, and books that are well-respected by their respective artistic communities—Christian or not. They love books like Resident Aliens by Stanley Hauerwas and Will Willimon, Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger by Ron Sider, God’s Politics by Jim Wallis, and The Imitation of Christ by Thomas a Kempis. They tend to be fans of any number of the following authors: Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, Wendell Berry, Thomas Merton, John Howard Yoder, Walter Brueggemann, N.T. Wright, Brennan Manning, Eugene Peterson, Anne Lamott, C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, Henri Nouwen, Soren Kierkegaard, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Annie Dillard, Marilynne Robison, Chuck Klosterman, David Sedaris, or anything ancient and/or philosophically important.

Christian hipsters love thinking and acting Catholic, even if they are thoroughly Protestant. They love the Pope, liturgy, incense, lectio divina, Lent, and timeless phrases like “Thanks be to God” or “Peace of Christ be with you.” They enjoy Eastern Orthodox churches and mysterious iconography, and they love the elaborate cathedrals of Europe (even if they are too museum-like for hipster tastes). Christian hipsters also love taking communion with real Port, and they don’t mind common cups. They love poetry readings, worshipping with candles, and smoking pipes while talking about God. Some of them like smoking a lot of different things.

Christian hipsters love breaking the taboos that used to be taboo for Christians. They love piercings, dressing a little goth, getting lots of tattoos (the Christian Tattoo Association now lists more than 100 member shops), carrying flasks and smoking cloves. A lot of them love skateboarding and surfing, and many of them play in bands. They tend to get jobs working for churches, parachurch organizations, non-profits, or the government. They are, on the whole, a little more sincere and idealistic than their secular hipster counterparts.

http://stillsearching.wordpress.com/2009/02/27/are-you-a-christian-hipster/

What does this say about the church? Is this what we've made Christianity into? "Cool Christianity" -- distancing yourself from contemporary evangelical Christianity? Or is it simply a convenient title for a personality? One comment I read on the website was astonished at this definition of Christian hipster. He said:

WHAT IN THE WORLD??? No, literally!?! What in the world? I read the whole blog but you lost me at “…don’t like door-to-door evangelism…alter calls…”

Really? Does it matter what you like or dislike? Do these “hipster’s” care more about the new secularistic church than the “church” that Christ is trying to unite through men who these hipster’s don’t like?

Just interesting to think about. Thoughts??

College and the American Dream

Here's an old post by Anthony Bradley about Christians in college and what their true motivation is for getting a degree. After i read this, I felt both affirmed and convicted in my own education. Take a look. And here's a little taste:

"What is man's chief end? Americans answer this way: to glorify himself and live in comfort and ease forever. American evangelicals think no differently. Ask Christian college kids WHY they choose their major. And the answers at times will depress you. It's not the vocation that's the problem but the motive. So now we have Christians missing from certains sectors of society because those areas don't pay well. It's SICK!!"

"Doesn't it just make you sick to think that many Christian kids in college or soon there after do not see the purpose of their gifts, interests, and abilities to serve God and other people. That's right, Christians use what God has given to serve Him and others...."

"Nowhere in the Bible are Christians encouraged to work hard for the material rewards. I wish someone would tell this to Christians in America. The American dream in motivated by and grounded in pagan idolatry promoting material success, ease, and comfort at all cost."

"Wouldn't it be great if Christians were motivated to pursue vocations because God revealed some of the needs in the world and gives the interest and ability to meet some of the needs in the world."

"What does mean for a Christian to be living a "successful" life?"

"But the idea that "getting an education to aid in providing for your family" is what Christians need to think about more deeply. Namely, we need to ask what, then, is the purpose of education? If we look at Daniel, for example, the purpose of his education was service of God and other people, not a future economic safety net. Christians have become utilitarians with respect to education. Education from a Christian perspective used to be about learning about God's world and being broadly equipped to do whatever God might call a person to do vocationally. Even, now for Christians, education is not directed at discerning one's calling but the utility of the economic result. Is education's only value an economic one? This is exactly why kids don't want to learn information for the sake of knowledge but want to get good grades because of the long-term economic consequences. People don't care if they learn anything or not."

"I would be more comfortable if Christians thought like this, "I'm getting an education in order to pursue and prepare for God's calling in my life vocationally." If we pursue God and not economic safety then we will find that Jesus' words are true that if seek first the kingdom of God all the other material things in life will be taken care of."

possibility junkies.

mmm great blog post by ken meyers on the evangelical outpost. as an ideas person, i really loved it. here's some of my favorite sections of it, but read the whole thing here.

"Ideas, we are frequently told, have consequences. We are less often encouraged to reflect on the equally significant if more elusive relationship of ideas to their antecedents. Ideas come from somewhere, and they are able to take up residence in our lives because they find friendly surroundings. So if bad ideas are plaguing our society (and having bad consequences), we ought to ask about their origins. And we need to ask what it is about the shape of our lives that make bad ideas seem plausible."

"If Edmundson's diagnosis of the ethos of our culture is accurate, there are at least two avenues of response available to parents, teachers, clergy, and others in positions of Church and cultural leadership. One is to try to figure out how to go with the flow (although "flow" may not be the best word/semi what about "rampage" or "tsunami"?). But if the absence of thickness, depth, and commitment encouraged by fast skating is really not in keeping with the shape of human flourishing, if there is something truly unnatural about this mentality, something in it that is not consistent with our nature, then we need to attend to the maintenance of counter-cultural institutions and practices. Reading and re-reading books, slowly, keeping personal and private journals (not public blogs) which invite true introspection without the distraction of self-presentation, face-to-face conversations that linger and dwell, conversations that achieve some contrapuntal pleasure, attentive listening to musical works that require us to slow down and perceive subtle resonances and formal nuance: these are monotasking practices of closure, commitment, and contemplation. Their loss is one of the ways our contemporaries are becoming figurative widows and orphans (see James 1:27)."

"The pursuit of actuality rather than infinite possibility will not come easily, and will require repudiation of the ways of life that characterize our moment. Those Christian leaders who discourage such repudiation in the name of "cultural engagement" need to be able to explain to people like Mark Edmundson why the Church is indifferent to the plight of students who cannot stop and think."

The Journey in the New York Times!

Yesterday, the New York Times published an article on The Journey in St. Louis. Here's an excerpt:

"ST. LOUIS — Southern Baptists, as a rule, do not drink. But once a month, young congregants of the Journey, a Baptist church here, and their friends get together in the back room of a sprawling brew pub called the Schlafly Bottleworks to talk about the big questions: President Bush, faith and war, the meaning of life, and “what’s wrong with religion.”

“We go where people are because we feel like Jesus went to the people,” said the Rev. Darrin Patrick, founder of the Journey.

“That’s where people are having their conversations about things that matter,” the Rev. Darrin Patrick, senior pastor and founder of the Journey, said about the talks in the bar. “We go where people are because we feel like Jesus went to the people.”

The Journey, a megachurch of mostly younger evangelicals, is representative of a new generation that refuses to put politics at the center of its faith and rejects identification with the religious right.

They say they are tired of the culture wars. They say they do not want the test of their faith to be the fight against gay rights. They say they want to broaden the traditional evangelical anti-abortion agenda to include care for the poor, the environment, immigrants and people with H.I.V., according to experts on younger evangelicals and the young people themselves."

The Walls We Have Built

In the Apologetics & Outreach course that Jerram Barrs teaches at Covenant Seminary in St. Louis, Jerram discusses barriers we create between ourselves as Christians and the world:

1. Intimidation or fear: Are we intimidated by the culture in which we live? We look at our society and we see that much of it is deeply hostile to the Christian faith, whether that is in universities or in popular culture. If we are terrified of the people around us, afraid of the non-Christians in our community, and afraid of the cultural products of our world, the consequences are disastrous. This creates an enormous divide from each other.

2. Condemnation: A constant judging of those who are out there. "Let us say three or four of you are sitting at a table in the coffee shop any day of the week, or anywhere, and you are sitting discussing something in culture, let us say homosexuality or political leaders or candidates. How do you talk about people, how do people overhear you, and what kind of language do they hear you using? Do they hear you using the language of condemnation and of self-righteousness? What do people hear from us?" We shouldn't delight in attacking and condemning people. It matters how I talk about the human beings involved in the issues.

3. Cultural retreat: "We can become so distressed by the world because it is so worldly, as if that should surprise us, that we try to create our own distinct evangelical culture so that we can avoid the sinful society as much as possible." Examples of this could be Christian country clubs, Christian sports facilities, Christian teams, schools, etc. Not that these are bad things, but turning our churches into havens from the world is not what we are called to do. Christ didn't redeem us by living in a haven that was completely retreated from the world.

4. Personal separation: The insistence that what it means for us to be holy and set apart from sinners, as the Scripture calls us to, as Jesus was, is that we must be personally separated from them, in the sense of keeping ourselves apart from them and having nothing whatsoever to do with them. This is generally a thinking that the only way we can grow in the faith and continue in the faith is by keeping ourselves personally separate from the unbelievers and the sinners around us, because of a possible "contamination."

If we build these walls, our model of evangelism becomes incredibly unbiblical. "Do we think of evangelism as raids that we undertake for a brief moment or two, or an hour or two? We go always in groups of two or three, never alone, to make sure that we are secure. We go in groups of two of three from the church into the world, hoping that we can grab somebody and bring them back with us." Jesus came into the world to relate to us; He challenges us to not be afraid, and to trust that our Heavenly Father would care for us and protect us. We may feel overwhelmed, but God is greater. We serve the Creator of heaven and earth.

It is easy to think that our calling is to judge everybody all the time. Even on Christian radio and television, you hear constant scorn, condemnation, criticism, and judgment of the culture and even of unbelievers by name. Our calling is not to condemn the culture in which we live, but to be merciful toward it. And it does not matter if people hate Christ, the Church, and the Gospel; we are called to love them still. We are to bless them and to pray for them. God has shown time and time again that He delights in saving people who make themselves enemies of His law, His Word, and His Son. We shouldn't be surprised if people hate the Gospel, the Church, the faith, and us personally, because they hated Christ. But our response to them is to serve them and pray for them, to pray God's blessing on the world.

the "new story:" why christianity must change?

i've had my nose in by demonstration: god, by wade bradshaw for about a week now, and it raises some really good points. one thing bradshaw said was really interesting to me:

bradshaw says there are two stories going on today, an Old one and a New one. in the Old Story, if someone wanted to be good they would go to the church and the God of the Bible. forgiveness was available to them there. even though this might have been the "moral high ground," non-christians were in agreement with it--if they wanted to climb this moral high ground, they would go to where goodness resided--in the church.

but now there is a New Story. people no longer feel that the church is the moral high ground, but instead they think themselves morally superior to the God the church proclaims. they might look to spirituality for guidance if they decided to be good, but not the church. why would someone want to go back there to find a good ethical life?

"our neighbors think we are calling them down to something they are already above, a god they are sure they have outgrown." it is inferior and immoral. bradshaw goes on to say:

"think of the hot religious issues of our day; the points on which our culture really disagrees with evangelicals on the way to live a good life. the God of the Bible is seen as homophobic. the God of the Bible is considered misogynistic. he is regarded as violent and cruel, as revealed by his acts in history. he is prejudiced and partial in his judgments, treating some people as more important than others" (142).

so what do we do, how do we respond to this? i think some have given up insisting that our God is a personal God, and some have given up on doctrine that is theologically sound. they throw it away for something that is easier to swallow, replacing it with something that has a bitter taste, but a taste nonetheless. but we cannot be unfaithful to the revelation of God. we must listen and understand where the arguments are coming from and do this carefully, even if it is frightening or displeasing, as bradshaw says. "we cannot do everything else that others may require of us in order to be acceptable." we cannot simply say that we live in a culture which will not tolerate sound doctrine and leave it at that. we must react and explain things in such a way that they do make reasonable and moral sense today--because they should and they do.

reaching out without embracing sin.

In the latest issue of Critique (a ransom fellowship publication), there was a letter to the editor that was really interesting to me. It responded to a lecture that told a story about “a church providing help to a pregnant couple who lived near the church who happened to be lesbians. Estranged from their families, they had no one to give them a baby shower, to provide meals, or to be with them during the births of their child. The church decided to offer them these practical expressions of care and love.” The letter written in regard to this asked questions like ‘what does it look like for the church to open our arms in situations like this without appearing to be embracing their sin?’ and ‘how do we be faithful without driving current members away who might be offended by the church’s choice?’

I thought this was really interesting in many respects; one, how great it is that a church would do this in the first place, and two, how much the Christian culture rejects being faithful over reputation. It is such a good picture of the church—this is what we are called to do, to reach out to our city, to those around us, and show them love in a practical and real way.

Denis Haack (who will be speaking at the L’abri conference!) had a great response. Whenever we offer help to anyone we are offering help to sinners; it makes no difference what the sin(s) are. He said that “there is only one category of person: all have sinned.” And if helping a fallen person means that we are endorsing or embracing their sin, then we could help no one. But why isn’t this understood by many? Why do we have such legalistic view of the world and our lives within it? Jesus himself ate with people who many believers, like the Pharisees, found undesirable. He was criticized for it and looked down upon.

Haack states, “The church needs to be faithful to teach the people of God what it means to truly follow Christ. Just as he was never aloof from fallen people in a broken, messy world, so we too must live in a way that incarnates grace.” Paul also spells out to us how Christ instructs his followers not to judge:

“I have written you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people, not at all meaning the people of this world who are immoral, or the greedy and swindlers, or idolaters. In that case you would have to leave the world… What business is it of mine to judge those outside the church? Are you not to judge those inside? God will judge those outside.” -- 1 Corinthians 5:9-13

If we refuse to associate with sinners, we are disobeying this clear instruction of Scripture. Haack closes his response with this: Christ’s sharpest criticism and most scathing rhetoric was leveled against those who imagined they would be contaminated by associating with fallen people.

“After all, what could be wrong with having a good reputation, with not offending fellow believers, with not hanging out with bad people? According to the example of Christ and the teaching of Scripture, everything.”