Steven S. Hoffman, a Wash. U. College Republican, was caught posting a rather unpatriotic comment at General JC Christian, Patriot:
To make matters worse, Hoffman tried to do this under cover of a regular commenter’s name. Too bad you can track commenters by IP addresses. And too bad the General sent his name on to Wash U campus security. Sounds like this Hoffman is a real Karl Rove in the making. Mother must be proud.
Operation Yellow Elephant is going so well.
UPDATE: This is the same Hoffman who recently responded to a school paper columnist’s charge of Republican racism by calling that columnist a "nigger" (scroll down a bit).
UPDATE: As Bill Baar says in comments below, Hoffman denies he wrote the comment. His alibi? He was supporting Our Leader’s war effort by playing Halo with twelve friends. His friends had better hope he’s telling the truth—these things are pretty easy to track, and his friend won’t want to be accomplices in something so severe.
Giblets over at Fafblog makes a persuasive case for staying the course in Iraq:
The only thing to do is for America to stay the course and remain in Iraq for the next five to twelvezenteen years, until either our resources are depleted or we have been chased from the roof of the American embassy in the middle of a full-blown civil war. That is the kind of blood-curdling, explosively crippling losingdom that terrorists can stand back and admire!
Because when America loses, America loses victoriously!
The evangelical claim that the Bible is the “Word of God” is a curious one. In the John 1:1-18" target="_self" href="http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=john%201:1-18;&version=31;">first chapter of John’s Gospel we learn that Christ is the Word of God. If Christ is the Word of God made flesh, then is the Bible the Word of God made ink? Yet for all of evangelicals’ trust in the Bible, it never itself makes the claim of being the Word of God; it only claims that honor for Christ.
Giving divine status to sacred literature is a belief more at home in Islam, whose eternal Quran stands in roughly the same place as Christianity’s Christ. Christianity’s central, radical claim is that the historical person Jesus of Nazareth is the eternal Word of God made flesh. Evangelicals who claim the Bible and Christ are the Word of God place themselves at odds with that central message. Is the Word of God a living, breathing person who walked this earth—or a book? Is Christ not only fully God and fully man—but also fully book? Did a book die for the world’s sin? If both claims are true, how they can both be true has never been explained, or even attempted, to my knowledge. The theological acrobatics required boggle the mind.
The evangelicals’ Bible worship balks at the truth that the life Jesus of Nazareth led among tax collectors and prostitutes, the words he spoke against the scholars and lawyers, the healing he gave to lepers and the possessed, and the lynching he suffered at the hands of an occupying power and its collaborators is, for Christians, the penultimate conversation between god and humanity—which is to say, the Word of God. For all of this, evangelicals substitute a book and a “personal” Jesus no bigger than their individual hearts. How can this even be called Christian?
My wife (who has Crohn’s disease) thinks this post—which begins “So a couple of months ago I squirted some blood out of my ass…”—is absolutely hilarious.
Ordained ministry is been overprofessionalized. When you expect people (without ever coming out and saying it) to live in genteel poverty for their first ten or fifteen years, and when most new ministers take out huge loans and have children to support, well, it just isn’t right.
Add to that the “entrepreneurial” bit, as Scott Wells recently put it. It’s good for prospective clergy to show initiative, but it’s even better for the church system to show deep care for them throughout the process. I was stunned myself by the contrast in caring attention I got between my “called into the ministry” phase and the actual ordination process. It was as though the ordination process was wholly outside the church, wholly secular. It seemed wholly a matter of jumping hoops and reading the politics of the folks on your committee.
Perhaps this is what I mean by the ordination process being overprofessionalized: it feels little different than becoming a social worker, or a lawyer, or a doctor. That’s not a good thing. We should draw what we can from the professions, but we must remember that the clergy ain’t one. Because ministerial office is something that communities of faith (and not “the public”) entrust in certain of their members—a trust to embody and lead them in their deepest held values—it cheapens ordained ministry to make it no more or no less than the professions.
I’m going to insist that we play “by their fruits we know them” here.
- We expect a graduate professional degree very similar in structure to an MD, JD, MBA, or MSW.
- We expect a credentialing process very similar in structure to medicine, law, counseling and social work.
- We do not “shepherd” ministerial candidates through this process in a way that comes close to embodying our deepest held values (what Scott Wells calls “entrepreneurial” expectations).
- We then supply a dozen years of genteel poverty as their reward.
We expect professional level education and credentialling, but then treat successful candidates about as well as someone with an associates degree. Which is it? Are they professionals, to be paid as such, or are they not?
The education-credentialing process itself can do little to ensure that the candidates who make it through have the “gifts and graces” (as the Methodists put it) for ordained ministry. What the process does ensure is that successful candidates are those who can write a good term paper and say the right things in front of ordination committees. That folks manage to make it through who do have the gifts and graces is a sign of divine providence amidst our foolishness. Any ordained minister can name names of folks who made it through who have no business leading a congregation.
I propose a new model for ministerial formation. Click to continue reading “A better way to do ministerial formation”
A little research project for you. Over the next three or four months, devote the occasional coffee hour conversation at church to finding something out: how many great new ideas has the "church committee ethos" squashed in your church? Here’s one method that might get you there. First, as you meander and mingle, ask people questions like these:
- "If you could make any one thing happen here, what would it be?"
- "If you could change any one thing here, what would it be?"
- "What’s the best new idea you’ve heard lately for this church?"
Then follow up with questions like these:
- "Who would you have to convince to make that happen?"
- "Why do you think that’s not in place already?"
Another method is to approach chairfolk and ask them, "What new ideas have folks brought to your committee?" Then ask what happened to those ideas. Their answers may be enlightening.
But these two methods still don’t get at the most insidious part of the "church committee ethos:" once it’s in the water, it discourages people from generating great new ideas, regardless of good intentions. Why imagine change when there’s a committee for everything? People who have great new ideas have to track down the appropriate chairfolk, lobby the appropriate committeefolk, rinse, lather, repeat. Who wants to go to another meeting? In most churches, committees serve a gate keeping function. Committeefolk generally see their role as preventing harm and preserving the status quo. The risk of a great new idea just doesn’t compute.
And then there’s the cases when two or three additional committees would have to be consulted, especially if money is involved. When this is the ethos, the only great new ideas that get through are those championed by people who make it more trouble to say no than to say yes.
