A Gut Cry to God After Fergusson

Some friends and I at Fuller Theological Seminary were so grieved by the shooting of Michael Brown and the difficulty of conversations around it that we started to practice a monthly day of prayer for this year on the 9th of the month.  We are doing it on the Quad, Fuller's online community I helped create.  Our first prayer was led by Jeanelle Austin.  My prayer was in response.

I don't normally pray in public as Jesus warns against the temptation to self-aggrandizement. But I've decided to post it here as a way to say something honest in public about these events.

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Dear God,

I come to you and confess that my white culture taught me to fear black men.  I pray as a white person who has benefitted from access to privilege, power and money to the degree I’ve been unconscious of it most of my life.

I confess that my family made money on black labor in the same same sawmill town that made James Cone rise up and challenge the white church. A challenge to face its infidelity to Jesus in their tacit support of and the lynch mob and the jail beating.

I confess that I have doubted the stories of my black friends about their experiences with the police.  It took youtube and going to church together to make it possible for me to see past my insular reality.  Every black person I’ve asked since I started believing has a story.  Even off duty black officers.

Please be with the families of black men who have been killed by the police this year.

Please be with the the boys in their teens watching the way our society is willing to let them die.  Kindle hope in their hearts and stern resolve to outlive and subvert those expectations.

Wake us up to the subtle and unconscious ways that we turn away and explain away violence done to black people that would hit us differently if happened to white people.

Weave our families together with people from the other side of all the boundaries that divide and sub-divide the places we live.  Call us to feel the danger that our neighbors feel.

Use your scripture and your preachers to show us how the practice of enslaving humans has consequences for generations that can’t be erased by a few decades of legislation.

Open our ears to the blood crying from the ground.

Use your pastors to create space for our brothers and sisters in law enforcement to talk about the impossibility of carrying and using guns, tazers and clubs on our behalf perfect.

Inspire us with the stories of faithfulness to the way of Jesus embodied in the leaders of the civil rights struggle.  

Awaken in our hearts and our conversations a call to bear witness that the gospel demands a response to this deep sickness buried in the heart of our culture.  

Let us who have ignored or had that history hidden from us come with humility and learn it from our black brothers and sisters, in print and over meals.

Open our eyes to the the way the gospel shines light on the needs and the areas where folks are kept away from what they need to thrive. In Pasadena and Altadena.  Call us to move into tough neighborhoods and listen for Jesus knocking.

Give us wisdom and insight into how we can use the power we have in the communities and pulpits we have to confront and dismantle the policies, narratives, fears and suspicions that are literally deadly.

Teach me that guilty feelings are not penance.

Teach us that how we act is more important to you than how we feel.

Teach us that how we act, specifically toward those with the least power, individually and collectively, is more important than how we feel.

Teach us that the sacrifice you desire is not white guilt, but concrete acts of love, inclusion and empathy.

Inspire us to see where those can fit into the lives and relationships we have today.  Where they don’t fit, pry us open.

Make new cracks in our defenses.

Graft us into the communities who are suffering.  Make their suffering our suffering until we are one body bearing witness to your oppression, your torture and death at the hands of the state police.

Lord, take off the masks our culture and our history have hung on us.  Let us recognize each other and see ourselves the way we really are.

We ask these things in the crucified name of Jesus.

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This prayer is an invitation to add your prayer to my own, where you live, in your church, in your town. 

Gay People, the Bible and the Church:

How the Bible and the Communities who Interpret it Face Social Change Faithfully

 Fireside Class

For the past few years I've had the privilege of leading a weekly adult bible study class at my church, Altadena Baptist.

The Fireside class meets in the basement by a non-functioning fireplace Sunday mornings 9:45a to 10:45a.  We share prayer requests, pray and try to learn more about God each Sunday.

We've worked, together, to make room for the kinds of that don't always fit in Sunday school classes --the kinds of questions I call burning questions.  The ones that really matter.  The ones that don't go away with quick, glib answers.

We tend to pick a focus for the year and spend our weeks working through it carefully with lots of room for conversation and perspectives from the very different people who come to the class.  Last year we worked through the question: "What did Jesus do in the Cross and in the Resurrection?"  Before that it was, "Who is the Holy Spirit and how do we Hear from God?"  Before that: "Where did the Bible Come From and How to we Read It?"

This year (we finished the Cross and Resurrection late), the majority of the class has asked to talk about Gay people.  Specifically, as one class member put it, how it is that her gay family member can see herself as both a Christian and a gay person when it seems so contrary to the way she reads her bible.

About this Class

We announced the class in our bulletin and many people decided to join.  Many more who read our bulletin wrote, concerned about what we might be teaching and what resources we are using.

In part, I hope this post will make that more clear.  I also wanted to share my outline with the class as it evolves (I never get it ready in time to print it up before Sunday morning).

No Foregone Conclusions

A word or two about how I prepare for this class: 
First, this is not the sort of class where I'm going to tell you what to think.  I believe we learn best when we study with people who don't already share all of our opinions.  Further, I think God uses encounters between people who don't agree to open up fresh possibilities for both.  I have in mind Peter and Cornelius in the book of Acts.

I am not aiming for a particular answer or destination other than getting deeper into scripture, the Christian tradition, past and present, that is working to interpret it faithfully.  I like to present the breadth of what people striving to follow Jesus have come to understand and then hash out how that hits each of us in our own context.

Conversation Not Indoctrination

I want this class to get at our burning questions because those are often rooted in what we most value about our faith.  This means that I like to lay out a general outline for how we are going to look at the topic and modify it as we get into it and I get more familiar with what the class members needs and goals are.  That's a big reason I wanted to do this here, so that I can modify and update the outline as it evolves.  I'll do my best to tag updates as they happen, but we'll see how it goes.

Comments on the Post

I'm tentatively welcoming comments on this post but I'll prioritize my responses to class members.  If you do want to comment, please read section I. of the outline and keep it in mind when writing.  It's my blog so I reserve the right to decide if you are trolling or just not entering into the conversation with sufficient goodwill to justify our attention.  That said, some class members were excited about a space to ask questions outside of Sunday morning.

The Outline

I'll put the date and comments on each session below the content we covered that session in italics after the fact.  I'll highlight the most recent week's updates.

I. How we talk about this and how do we listen? In ways that are faithful to Jesus’s character?

A.  Agreement of humility and respect

1.     Integrity: Do you know anyone personally who is Gay? Lets imagine they are in the room with us and talk the way we would talk if they were here.
2.    We are all trying to follow Jesus: No one's commitment to the Faith or inclusion in the Church is in question.
3.     The Golden Rule: Listen and interpret with the same charity that you would want to others to listen to you with.  When in doubt, assume the best, until you can clarify.
4.     No ultimatums: "Either you believe this or you we can't talk." We are here to explore our differences and learn from one another.  This kind of talk stops that process.
5.     Make room for minority perspectives.  Avoid ganging up.
6.     What you say matters: "I feel" and "I think" doesn't mean people can't ask questions or ask you to explain or explore what you've said.
7.     Our pasts matter: periodically we will devote time for people in the group to share their personal experiences that have shaped their perspective and questions on this issue. 
8.     Own your statements, judgements and interpretations of others: "What I'm hearing you say is…" instead of "You're saying…" and "I feel insulted when you say…" instead of "you're insulting me when…" make room for us to clarify misunderstandings gracefully.
   
   Week 1: 3-16-14In our first session we layed out some ground rules for the conversation as this issue is so divisive.  We know we want to be careful in how we listen and talk.

B. What are our Goals? 

1. Decide whether I would officiate at a church wedding if a friend asked me to.
2. What do you want to answer for yourself?  For your friends and family?  What do you want to get out of this?

1. Week 2: 3-23-14
   The class had a wide variety of goals and questions I attempted to combine and synthesize below.  Forgive me if I've not grasped the heart of your question.  Better yet: let me know.
   
   Class Goals: 
   1. How do we talk about faith with our gay neighbors?
   2. How does the conflict many gay people and many churches feel between one another effect gay peoples' ability to relate to God?
   3. How do we reconcile our perception of God's focus on judgement in the Old Testament (as in stories prescribing death by stoning for gathering sticks on the sabbath) with the New Testament's focus on grace and forgiveness?
   4. How does the Church obscure, hide or distort the gospel while trying to be faithful to it?
   5. How can we show God's righteousness and standards and still show the God's grace in a way that is welcoming?
   6. Since our feelings about our sexual identity are so strong, how can we be sure we are reading the bible faithfully and not in a selfish, self-serving, or self-justifying way?
   7. Are some sins worse than others?  To God? To us? If so, what are the criteria?
   8. Is being gay a sin?  Are sexual relationships between people of the same gender sinful?
   9. What does science have to teach us on this?  Does knowing more than the communities who authored scripture make us more or less responsible to use that knowledge?

C. Defining our terms

    1.  What do we mean by Gay?  LGBTQ(IA)?
Week 3: 3-30-14

    2.  What is gender? Sex?
Week 4: 4-6-14

  
 Week 5: 4-13-14
    Gender Continued: the challenge posted to gender as binary by intersex people born with ambiguity in their biological sex which leads to ambiguity in their psychological, social and cultural gender identity and often their sexual identity.  This can come from errors in genetics, missing or extra chromosomes, or simply a body in which the receptors for androgens, the hormones that trigger male sex charateristics to form in utero and throughout life, simply don't function.  Between 1/1000 and 1/2000 babies is born with some ambiguity in their sex and gender.  An retired neonatal nurse in our class confirmed that she saw these issues regularly, perhaps even more often and that parents often want to push the child into one sex or another based on what they can see in the external genitalia, but that this isn't always a reliable way of even discerning genetic sex.

We talked further about the current neuroscience research that shows different neurological formation in utero along gender lines.  Male and female brains are observably different in their internal structure.  This complicates gender formation further because the hormones present in the mother's uterus in the second trimester play in shaping the baby's brain's development across a spectrum that corresponds to more stereotypically female, male a spectrum in between.

Though culture and language often push us into seeing gender as an either / or or a binary option, there have always been people with us who don't fit easily into either.  Some identify as intersex, others as gender queer, still others as transgender.

These are among the people we want to pay attention to because our culture has not and because they are speaking about their experience in ways they've not been able to prior.

    3.  What is marriage?
    4. Issues to investigate: Gender, Sex, marriage, homosexuality
    5. Other Issues? We'll take these Issues and the definitions we flesh out forward.

II. What does the Bible say about these issues?

III. What does the Christian Tradition in the PAST say about these issues?

IV. What does the Global Church TODAY say about these issues?

V. Implications

A.  marriage
B.  ministry leadership
C. Christian unity
D.  Adoption
E.  Separation of Church and state
F. Theology of Sexuality

Gospel & Narrative Exhibit Featuring My Work

The Exhibit

Some of my larger visual art pieces have been included in an exhibit. Fuller Seminary’s Brehm Center for theology and the arts is hosting their annual Brehm Lectures focused on the theme: Gospel and Narrative.

My friend and neighbor, Maria Fee invited me to contribute some pieces I’ve been doing focused around the narrative of my Father and how his life intersected mine. Regular visitors of this site will have seen one or two of the pieces but at least one hasn’t been posted online.

We are hosting a reception on Tuesday. I and some of the other contributing artists will be attending. They have some strong work and each contributor is working with distinct media and methods.

The Gospel & Narrative Exhibition

October 29, 6:00–8:00PM
David Allan Hubbard Library
135 N Oakland Ave, Pasadena

Parking Map: You can almost always park free in the lot near Travis Auditorium.
The library is located in the Southwest corner of campus.

I hope you will drop by and say hello. I’ll be happy to talk about any of the pieces, the different processes I used to make them and what stories I think they tell, though I’m just as eager to hear how they hit you in your own story.

Godtalk.co Sketchnotes: Dave Rinker, Matt Schuler

Memorial Day: Where My Dad Crashed

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The Filter

We live in a time of exponentially rising information.

Whether that information is useful or mere noise getting in the way depends on the filter of one's mind.

In this context, the value of higher education is not primarily in the delivery of information, but in the development of the character, capacity, and capability of the filter.

The information is everywhere but without the filter you still won't find it.

Talk of God Talk of Science / #tog2013

Day 1

Jennifer Wiseman

I deeply appreciated Jennifer Wiseman's reminder of our context as practitioners of faith within a cosmos we now know to be many orders of magnitude more vast than humanity had ever imagined prior to this century.

Particularly poignant was her highlighting of the tough question of what we are to do with the the age of the universe as a people whose tradition is only concerned with the smallest sliver of the last few thousand years. Further, what meaning do we make out of the profoundly slow process of many generations or cycles of star birth and death that are required to forge the heavier elements that form solid planets and make up all life on earth?

By situating the problem of evil, both disasters and people being wicked to other people and other creatures, within that narrow band of the last few millennia of creaturely existence, and by emphasizing the goodness of creation prior to that,  she radically recontextualizes the problem of evil within a vast and ancient created cosmos that is in her words "good in its totality."  This is not an perspective I've encountered before in the age old wrestling match between thinking, suffering humans and our concept of an omnipotent God and it is one that, I think, is only possible by the dramatic expansion of our ability to imagine and understand the cosmos that comes from the fruits of science in the past century.

All the more fitting that her talk happened within sight of the Mount Wilson observatory where Edwin Hubble first made the observations that established that the universe's expansion was accelerating.

Warren Brown

Dr. Brown's talk on embodied cognition and the role mirror our mirror neurons play is always fascinating, but all the more in the context of Christian formation.

I'm a little leery of his quick jump from the notion of mobile phone as off-loaded cognitive work into the environment to the notion of Christian community as off-loaded cognitive / belief / formation work since the one is reliant on artifacts, designs and systems and the other is reliant on humans in relationship.

Further, since my work with read-together.com and with Fuller's endeavors into formation through programs primarily delivered online, I've been working on the question of how formative interactions mediated through the web can be.  I'm no techno-determinist but if you accept Brown's thesis that most meaning, language, learning and formation happens through the means of the body "enmeshed in recurrent situational feedback" and "rooted in sensory motor experiences" the relatively dis-embodied modes of most online interaction become problematic. Stripped of both communal context for language, and of all sensory motor cues he suggests are used in everything from making sense of language to building empathy, it's little wonder so few people understand one another or interact charitably online.

My team and I are working on decreasing the context-stripping tendencies of the web by structuring the scaffolding around interactions to build both context for the individuals and shared contexts, experiences and interactions on which to build better discourse.  Online contexts can perhaps themselves be venues for recurrent situation feedback and charitable, Christ-patterned online interactions can themselves become something to be learned by observation and mirroring.But if the cognitive roots of empathy and the ability to be formed by mirroring others we observe are rooted exclusively in bodily experience, and the cognitive work of running non-enacted simulations of the other's mind, how far can we expect to get in being formed and transformed by those whose bodies we can't see, hear or mirror?

I attempted to get at this question and was thankful for Mark Labberton's observation that my question was an expression of concern for the implications of embodied cognition in a world that is increasingly communicating in disembodied ways (note the way we the room groaned at the mention of the endless sea of email).  Brown concluded his response by recognizing this as something on which more work needs to be done.

This is precisely where I am focusing my work.

The centrality of these challenges for the Christian Church and really all human communities who strive to stay whole and make sense of themselves given the disembodying tendencies of technologically mediated interaction are what motivate that work.

Extremophiles

"An extremophile is an organism that can survive in climates that are hostile, [where] it was previously believed that no life could exist. It's an apt metaphor for the independent artist in 2013." -Sole

http://www.spin.com/articles/sole-gold-panda-extremophile-video-no-wising-up-no-settling-down/

When is Matt Going to Use His Seminary Degree?

 Seminary

I moved to California in 2007 to attend Fuller Theological Seminary.  I had spent the seven years prior trying on different ways of being a minister, searching for one that didn't feel like a sentence to a slow death.

During and after my BA in Biblical Studies and Philosophy, I had been a youth minister, a missionary and a hospital chaplain.  I was ready to bring my questions to a community known for new models, new ideas and new ways forward between the rock of the Christian tradition and the hard place of human culture and experience.  I was ready to explore the length and breadth of what it could mean to be faithful to a call to ministry because none of the ways I had tried had fully fit.

I went with the blessing and support of my family, my grandmother and the Church that ordained me to the gospel ministry.  I went with the expectations of dozens of teachers, ministers, colleagues and friends who saw in me potential, gifts and ability as a minister in the ways that they understood that role. I expected to hold my nose and tolerate Southern California. I never expected it to feel like coming home.

I finished my MDiv in 2011, exactly four years after I moved to California. It's now 2013 and I'm still here.  People are beginning to wonder why.  They are too polite to ask me, so my wife has to try to answer for me when they say "So... When is Matt going to USE his seminary degree?"

During my MDiv I studied with teachers and students from Lebanon, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Malaysia, Philadelphia, PA and Little Rock, AR.  I came to deeper, more satisfying ways of understanding how culture, religion, scripture and the human mind interact. I came to see how God plays, composes and breathes among them all.

A Call From a Broken Community

For the first time since adolescence, I let myself look unshrinkingly at how broken the community that shaped my faith and my call to ministry had been. I began the painful process of questioning my own call and identity as a minister.  With help from dear friends, my pastors and my wife I emerged on the other side with a new confidence in my identity as one loved and called by God to faithfulness. But I came to realize that I had understood that call in far too narrow a way.  No matter what ministry I did, no matter how innovative or demanding, I heard in my mind a voice condemning me for running away from my “call” to be a pastor of the sort I had known at the small country church where I had grown up.  It was a searing, freeing sort of pain to realize that this wasn't the voice of God but of my old pastor, living on in a mental chorus of condemnation that I was conducting. Because that little church had been the context where I had become aware of God's call, I had mistakenly taken it as the boundary of that call.

Never Just one Thing

A wise teacher of mine once told me, “God doesn't call us to do one thing.  God calls us to faithfulness.” Those words have sustained me through many different things I have done and continue to do in my life of service to God.

Perhaps the most powerful lesson of my MDiv was that faithfulness involves taking seriously the particular gifts, skills and opportunities God has given me.  Repeatedly in scripture, God calls particular people with particular histories and personalities and then makes use of them in ways that emphasize their particularity.

All my life I had imagined that one day I would have to cut off all the strands of myself that didn't fit within that narrow band of what ministry might look like, but I couldn't bear the thought of it so I leapt from one model of ministry to another, looking for a way to be both faithful and whole.

But what if God knew who he was calling? What if faithfulness didn't mean cutting off or stifling my love for science, technology, music, art, poetry and philosophy, but instead embracing them and the opportunities and joy they bring to me and others?  Suddenly a new way of being faithful to God AND to myself began to crack open.  At first I could only see a blurry image of what that kind of life might look like but it has grown clearer and clearer since.

A Gutenberg Moment

During my time at Fuller I developed my skills with the web which had begun when I was a chaplain.  Before long I was being paid by Fuller to work on web projects.  I moved through projects and positions until the last one was paying our rent and allowing my family to stay in Pasadena where we have a healthy church we love and a school where my oldest daughter is thriving.

Also toward the end of my degree I began thinking about ways I could share the transformative experience of studying scripture with people with very different experiences and history from one another. I started working on an experiment in social reading called read-together.com in 2012.  Around this same time, Fuller began focusing its energy on expanding our online course offerings and new models of education and course delivery.  It became clear that my work on read-together.com and the goals of the school were beginning to overlap.  Last June I accepted a new position as Online User Experience Strategist focusing on building the online structures to facilitate formative encounter between students, faculty and the entire seminary community.

Forty years after the invention of the Gutenberg press, the reformation happened along with the complete social and political upheaval of Europe.  We are twenty years into the Internet and I don't believe we fully understand the extent to which this will change us.  The church survived and thrived in that era because individuals and communities were exploring how this new information technology could be used well and in ways faithful to the Christian tradition.  I see my work today very much along the same lines.

Read-together.com is on the verge of private beta launch (you can sign up now to keep up with the latest).  I'm working on a project for Fuller that is a pioneering new effort in connecting students with the life of the seminary online.  What we are learning has implications beyond the simple survival of theological Higher Education.  We are experimenting with the new tools the Church and the rest of humanity will use to encounter, hear and hopefully be changed by one another. We are helping shape the future of human discourse and cultural exchange.

This is not the kind of life I could have imagined as faithful to a call before my degree at Fuller.  My MDiv expanded the horizons of the possible so that I could see this work for the service to the church and humanity that it is.  My education enables me to think critically, anthropologicaly and theologically about the rapid transformations our species and the church are undergoing.

The Answer

I teach an adult bible study class every week at my church, Altadena Baptist.  I preach, teach and speak whenever I can both there and other places.  I welcome other artists, musicians and creatives who are struggling between the same rock and hard place of identity that I passed through.  I play music with worship bands, release albums of experimental electronic music online and occasionally perform it or lend it to filmmakers to tell stories with.  I paint and draw in church as a part of worship or on my own as therapy and catharsis. And I eat lunch almost every day with my wife and youngest daughter in the warm California sun and the cool breeze.

I have found a place of faithfulness where every part of me is vibrant and alive, humming with the creative energy of the God who created the universe and the unquenchable life of the Son who came to embrace it through death into resurrection.

But when you decide to go off the existing paths in a new direction, you have to expect that people will ask where you are headed and that you will have to offer some word of explanation if they are going to understand, let alone follow you.  

Still, the misunderstanding of those who ask the question stings the wounds I carry and rouses the chorus of voices for whom my faithfulness will never be enough --that is until it conforms to familiar patterns.

But I do have an answer:  My degree created a context for a new vision of where the church and the world's need and my gifts, personality and opportunities intersect. My degree got me where I am and I'm finding new ways it informs my work every day.  

I hope you will join me in my gratitude to God who revels in fresh possibilities and loves to set them free and see them thrive.

From: How to Find Fulfilling Work on Brainpickings.org

"The lack of any clear positive relationship between rising income and rising happiness has become one of the most powerful findings in the modern social sciences. Once our income reaches an amount that covers our basic needs, further increases add little, if anything, to our levels of life satisfaction." Roman Kznaric

Krznaric quotes the French writer François-René de Chateaubriand, who wrote over a century ago:

A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both.

How to Find Fulfilling Work
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/04/23/how-to-find-fulfilling-work-roman-krznaric/

Sent via Flipboard

Wiman, The Limit

"It did happen, though. It marked me. I don't believe in "laying to rest" the past. There are wounds we won't get over. There are things that happen to us that, no matter how hard we try to forget, no matter with what fortitude we face them, what mix of religion and therapy we swallow, what finished and durable forms of art we turn them into, are going to go on happening inside of us for as long as our brains are alive."

http://www.threepennyreview.com/samples/wiman_f01.html

I annotate conference

Update (4-14-13)

 I just replaced all the images with higher res versions for those who asked for them.

Big thanks to everyone, especially Dan Whaley and everyone who stopped by at the hackday to share their interest and excitement about the possibilities social reading around religious texts and the communities they form.

--So many good conversations started and so many tools to explore.

Also, if you're putting on a conference and are interested in a more visual way of getting your attendees engaged, we should talk.  I'm available for commission.
---

 


On the Leakiness of Surveillance Culture, the Corporate Gaze, and What That Has To Do With the New Aesthetic | Quiet Babylon

"

We are living inside a Cambrian explosion of entities of varying independence and varying physicality, some quite compact and individual, others smeared across great expanses of space and time. Some tied very much to a medium, others extruding parts of themselves into the biosphere, the noosphere, the memesphere, the digisphere.
...
I'm interested in the aesthetics of the corporate readable world, and their truly alien gaze.

Corporations communicate to us through money, press-releases, and advertising, always advertising. For a glimpse of the corporate readable world, look to Twitter's routinely useless "who to follow" panel, Klout's laughable ideas about what you are influential about, Facebook's clumsy attempts to get you to join a dating site, and Google's demented, personalized, Gmail ads. You can see it in your credit rating, and your position on the actuarial tables. You can see it in Blackwater/Xe/Academi's attempt to conceal itself by shedding names like a trickster god shedding skins."

http://quietbabylon.com/2012/on-the-leakiness-of-surveillance-culture-the-corporate-gaze-and-what-that-has-to-do-with-the-new-aesthetic/

(Source: https://twitter.com/ayjay/status/321437048160534528)

Sent from my iPhone

The Medium is the Message: Social Assassination

"The Medium is the Message" Ink & water on watercolor paper 16"x24"

The Medium is the Message
I recently completed a painting that addresses the deep unrest I feel about the increasing use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV's or drones) in unilateral assassinations by our government against people we assert we have intelligence linking to the Taliban or Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan.  These actions are taken in secret and remain unacknowledged by our government.  If there is any check on our government's executive power to kill anyone, anywhere in the world we deem a threat, it is not transparent. 

Social Assassination
I completed this piece in response to the Brehm Lectures and still plan to submit it for their call for artwork.  The day after I completed it this week Israel launched their offensive near Gaza. Not only have they made heavy use of UAV missile strikes for targeted assassinations openly, but they have been using twitter to post links to video from the drone strikes and Photoshopped images of people they have killed listing the alleged crimes for which they have been judged and executed.

I won't pretend this struggle isn't old and complex.  My concern is that we are now witnessing an extension of ourselves into the technology of UAV's and the strikes they justify and enable in which the fact of our being able to do them is being mistaken for a value or moral imperative to do them along with an a minimized "collateral damage."

I object to people killing people.  I especially object to governments killing people.  I object even more when they do it without any check on that power and without transparent oversight.  Secret courts don't count precisely because they are secret.

In short, as often is the case with new technology, "We were so pre-occupied with whether or not we could, we forgot to ask whether or not we should."  We have extended our selves to our great moral, ethical, economic and human peril.

---
Update (March 23, 2013):
The painting and a write-up have been shared by both:

Fuller Theological Seminary's Brehm Center for worship theology and the arts
and
the Institute for Middle East Studies of Beirut, Lebanon.

Genre and Form as Solution to Email Overload: InboxPro

My friend Chuck linked me to this article about the latest solution to email inbox overload.  It forces senders to think about their receivers when they send and structure their emails so they are simpler to respond to and triage.

Structure Communicates Genre
Structure/genre is important and only going to become more important as mediums of communication multiply.  In the past we had scarce mediums so we pressed lots of genres into a few forms and "tagged" them with certain stylistic cues (e.g. Dear Chuck, vs. To whom it may concern... personal letter vs. business etc.).  I've already begun "labeling" my email for people in how I format it by summarizing, adding headings on long emails, pulling out bulletted lists.

Medium Constrains Structure
Now we have a dozen new platforms or mediums for communication each with their own sub-genres that work well within them.  The ones we find useful over time will persist and the ones we don't won't but in the mean time, we would all do well to think about the receiver of our communication before we begin the message and think about what works best for them instead of what works best for us (more in my upcoming Semi piece on UX). 

I think the folks at inbox pro are on the right track but until we each take on the responsibility to practice thinking about the other person before ourselves, our technological structures will continue to be the medium of thoughtlessness instead of regard for a fellow human with an overloaded inbox. 

Shane Hipps, Ryan Bolger vs. Barry Taylor Sketches #BrehmLectures2012

 

Yesterday the Brehm Center for theology, worship and the arts hosted the annual Brehm Lectures.  I enjoyed the conversation exposing many in the Fuller community for the first time to Marshall McLuhan.  Barry Taylor stirred the pot and kept things moving while deftly deflecting the ever-present first-quarter-Fuller-student question "Are you saying there is no such thing as absolute truth?"

Perhaps most remarkable was Hipps apparent confession that he has built both his advertising and ministry/speaking circuit/writing careers mainly by appropriating McLuhan for audiences that hadn't yet encountered him.  This isn't a jab.  Translators and bridge people are important.  Still it was humorous to watch my theology friends trying to make sense the opaque, zen-riddle like aphorisms.  Don't worry, he made them opaque and poly-valent on purpose.

A final anecdote from a Cameroonian student relating how her attempts at ministry here in the states to a troubled student were frustrated by the student's confession that she couldn't really talk face to face but could only communicate by text with any level of self-disclosure or intimacy.  This made Hipps point (one echoed by Sherry Turkle) about the losses implicit in the unconscious use of these technologies but also prompted an eerily colonial generalization in response from Taylor regarding tribal cultures in Africa and the positive social function of "masks" and "rituals." This felt like an imprecise caricature, and to me, missed the point of the question: namely that the young woman had lost or never learned to speak face to face.  Nonetheless, it was a rich and lively conversation.  I would have liked to hear more riffing from Hipps and Taylor.

As Fuller moves toward moving more and more of its content and education into mediated forms, we would do well to balance the opportunities with the dangers of "over-extended" senses.  I agree with the panel that the global church is at a cross-roads analogous to that faced by the European church in the reformation as we struggle and fail and re-imagine our way into faithfulness in a social world mediated by our technology.

Several people on twitter have wanted to do things with the sketches I did while they were speaking so I'm posting up some higher resolution scans.  I'm using a creative commons license for free sharing with attribution.  This means anyone can share and  make fun things out of them, just link back here if you share them elsewhere and attach my name.

Labor Day: Organized Labor & Calico Critters

It wasn't until I was in my late twenties that I ever thought to reflect about what Labor Day actually meant or where it came from.  I wanted my kids to know the value of collective bargaining and community organization as a means of getting powerful people who aren't listening to start listening.  So this morning we played this story together with her Calico Critters.

While this version of the story is a dramatic oversimplification and doesn't address the way that the structures created to fight oppression can themselves become oppressive, I hope it starts a conversation with my 7 year old that we can continue.  Also, I will add that if the power relationships represented here don't seem realistic, then you should count yourself lucky for having worked for honorable employers.  For the rest of us who have worked bad jobs, in unsafe conditions for employers who didn't respect us or listen, Labor day has a particular meaning.

Story by Matt Lumpkin
Poses, set dressing and props by Eleanor Lumpkin

There once was a cat who ran a factory.  He made decisions about the factory and the animals that worked there from his office.

The animals who worked in the factory made refrigerators.  They worked hard together and sometimes had fun doing their work.

But when they were at work, they left their kids at home.

One day, at the end of a long day of work, the manager came down from his office to the factory floor.  Everyone stopped what they were doing to listen to what he would tell them.

     "What's taking so long?" he complained.  "You're way behind on your numbers!  We're going to stay here as long as it takes to get up to quota!"

     The workers were already tired and were very sad to hear this though they weren't surprised.  It was not uncommon for the manager to ask them to work long hours without telling them ahead of time.  But this was a particular problem for the white rabbit because her babysitter couldn't stay any longer than usual.  So she had to sneak out and ask her friends to cover for her.

They workers did take breaks, especially for special occasions like birthdays, but they had to take turns, and the manager would often come down and yell at them to get back to work.

Even when they worked longer days, when the manager brought their paychecks, they often didn't include the extra time they had worked.  The workers were very disappointed, but again, they weren't surprised.  This was the way they were used to being treated.  Many of them thought that this was the way all jobs and bosses were, so what was the use of resisting?

One night at the end of a long week of working 12 hour days, they were told they had to work extra hours again.  They were exhausted and started to make mistakes.  The mouse whose job it was to put the clear drawers into the refrigerators tripped and fell.  He was injured so badly he couldn't work.

He had to stay home laying down all day.

His friends were really upset because this never would have happened if they hadn't had to work such long hours when they were already tired.  They decided they needed to go and talk to their boss to see if they could make some changes that would keep this kind of thing from happening again.

When they went, their boss just blamed it on the mouse who got hurt and warned them that if they kept complaining they would be out of a job.  He even said that he would talk to his manager friends at other factories and keep them from getting another job from them.

The workers were very discouraged.  They talked to each other during breaks about it.  Their boss didn't seem to care about them or the problems he was causing.  What would make him listen?

One of the older cats realized that he would never listen to them until they did something that made him afraid he might loose something that mattered to him.  They knew that making refrigerators to sell seemed to matter a lot to him so they came up with a plan.

If any one of them complained or quit their job, they could be replaced.  But it would be hard to replace a whole factory.  If they all refused to do their job together, then that would surely get his attention.  They planned a strike: where no one would do their job until the boss listened to their complaints.

On the day of the strike, some of the workers came and stood out in front of the factory telling everyone how bad the working conditions were and what had happened to the injured mouse.  Some workers even brought their kids.

The boss got on the phone and made some calls to find out how long it would take him to replace the workers and how much money he would lose every day that the factory didn't make refrigerators.  That's when the boss got scared.  The next call he made was to the leader of the workers.

When they met, the conversation went very differently.  Instead of threats and demands, the boss listened.  The workers didn't get everything they wanted but they did get a guarantee that they would get paid for the time they worked, extra pay for work after their normal 8 hours, more notice before they would be asked to work more hours and a 1 hour break for every 8 hours they worked.

 

At the end of the meeting the boss and the leader of the workers shook hands.  The relationship between the boss and workers changed that day because the power in their relationship changed.  Before, the boss and the workers had thought the boss had all the power.  Now, they understood that the people, if they worked together, had some power too.

The workers working together called themselves a union.  The contributions that workers and workers united into unions have made is what we celebrate on Labor day.  From then on, new employees at the refrigerator factory learned about the union and the story of how they came to enjoy better jobs than they had had before.