In case you were wondering. Smurfs are actually quite sinister creatures (and racist to boot).
They have horns, not bendy hats.
Via Pop Chart Labs.
Author: Nathan Campbell
Nathan runs St Eutychus. He loves Jesus. His wife. His daughter. His son. His other daughter. His dog. Coffee. And the Internet. He is the pastor of City South Presbyterian Church, a church in Brisbane, a graduate of Queensland Theological College (M. Div) and the Queensland University of Technology (B. Journ). He spent a significant portion of his pre-ministry-as-a-full-time-job life working in Public Relations, and now loves promoting Jesus in Brisbane and online. He can't believe how great it is that people pay him to talk and think about Jesus. If you'd like to support his writing financially you can do that by giving to his church.
Guns don’t kill people. Zappers kill people.
My first gun wasn’t a Nintendo Zapper. My first gun was a cap gun with a trigger action too stiff for my childlike hands to squeeze. I soon realised that life was better with the zapper as I plucked ducks out of the air with style. A clever photoshopper has done his bit for getting the zapper back in the eyes of the internet world by putting it in the hands of some of your favourite movie characters.
Via Churchm.ag.
Ethics at QTC
We’ve got an Ethics intensive this week. I’m pretty excited. I’ll be blogging some stuff at Venn Theology. We’re being lectured by a British guy named Jonathon Burnside he has been in Dr Who. So he’s cool. This is his website.
He’s a “reader in law” who specialises in OT law. And he’s big on basing our Christian ethics on the OT. Which should be fun.
“We should feel free to draw on the whole of Scripture in forming our ethics”
The basis for not applying laws about shrimp is:
“There is ethical continuity but there is ethnic discontinuity.”
I was thinking about this yesterday. I was thinking about the very literal way the New Atheists read Old Testament laws. It doesn’t match the way we read any laws in a modern setting. We don’t apply the laws literally, the courts interpret the laws. And they do so via an Acts Interpretation Act (there’s the entire benefit of my 2.5 years as a law student).
I’m thinking that Deuteronomy 6:5 acts as a paradigmatic “Acts Interpretation Act”… and thus, the need to know the law involves being able to interpret it properly.
4 Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. 5 Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. 6 These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts. 7 Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. 8 Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. 9Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.
Which makes it extra interesting that Jesus then refers back to that as the most important commandment in all three synoptic gospels.
What do you reckon? I’m going to try to get into an argument with an atheist and see how that line flies.
Check out Venn Theology for Ethics posts.
Musical Mormons
The creators of South Park, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, have always had a soft spot for Mormons. Because lets face it. There’s comedy to be had in people who wear magic undergarments and believe all sorts of funny supernatural stuff. They made a musical. A Broadway Musical. And one of the songs was performed at the Tony Awards this week.
I felt a little uncomfortable at the idea of ridiculing about 30% of the things Mormons believe. I felt like the song was having a dig at all Christians. And then I thought about it. While Mormons are theists who embrace the God of the Bible, they’re also an incredibly wacky and dangerous cult. And it’s right to ridicule some of their beliefs so that people steer clear of them. I can’t understand why anybody who is not an incredibly patriotic American falls for Mormon theology. Though I’d like to believe I get my own planet. So maybe that’s it.
What Christians being “on message” looks like in the public sphere
In the discussion on my initial criticism of the ACL over its handling of the rip’n’roll billboard fiasco a friend asked if I had any examples of positive alternatives, namely, Christian groups that engage in public debate without straying from the message of the gospel (a criticism I leveraged at the ACL).
Now. I’m aware that Wordle isn’t the best measure of how “on message” an organisation is, but it certainly helps give a picture of what an organisation’s focus looks like.
The Sydney Anglicans were one example I put forward as an example. Here’s a wordle of their media releases.
The Centre for Public Christianity is another. They don’t necessarily comment directly on political issues (perhaps they should) but they do engage with the news cycle. Here’s a wordle of their releases.
Compare that with this ACL wordle from my post last week:
Now, some caveats. The ACL write more releases about more issues with a different purpose to these other two organisations. I recognise this. And my point remains that this proactive media strategy has left them as the default spokespeople for Christian belief in Australia. I’ve had some fruitful email conversations (from my perspective) with some ACL representatives since my last post. I won’t talk outcomes, but I think they’ve at the very least heard and acknowledged the point the post made. While I think the ACL get good coverage from their releases (releases get picked up in some form) the coverage is not usually favourable or positive. At some point as a PR person I’d be questioning the value of speaking if my position was never properly represented. In PR we value stories with an equivalent advertising spend and usually a multiplier based on how much the story represents our view. Unless the ACL subscribes to the “all publicity is good publicity” maxim, I’d say their multiplier is so low as to be non-existent, and their media coverage is hurting their cause. And worse. Hurting the gospel. My working hypothesis is that it is possible to speak on public issues without removing the gospel of Jesus from the picture. The questions are how, and what the PR “win” is. I’d say the Centre for Public Christianity has the best Christian PR approach in Australia, and the Sydney Anglicans aren’t far behind. Even when stories featuring Archbishop Peter Jensen are negative he usually manages to make sure the gospel is clearly articulated and linked to his response. That’s an art.
A Case Study in Gay Marriage
The Archbishop has recently featured in the SMH for an opinion piece he wrote elsewhere on the gay marriage issue. Here’s another confronting moral issue of our time where there’s every chance the gospel is going to be lost in a sea of moralising reinterpreted as bigotry (or homophobia). Sadly in this case, and I suspect because it was the result of a slightly underhanded move where quotes were lifted from an article for a Christian audience (Southern Cross Newspaper) and placed in a story for a different outlet (The SMH) so the angle was doubtless well and truly form before any follow up interview took place and thus the initiative was lost.
Now. I recognise that an article in the church’s own newspaper is the perfect place to discuss issues from a Christian perspective, it’s for the church, not for the public at large. So I’m not really interested in judging the approach to the issue they’ve taken there (which I agree with), nor in whether or not they should have expected the media to pick up the story and run with it.
I’m wondering if part of the issue with the way we approach debates regarding homosexuality is that we lack empathy with those who identify as homosexual or struggle with same sex attraction. We are able to put ourselves in the shoes of heterosexual moral offenders with a “there but for the grace of God go I” mentality. But most of us have no idea what its like to grapple with an outside the norm sexual orientation. And I think it shows. And I think our approach to the issue of gay marriage might be a little bit more nuanced if we firstly realised that our opposition to gay marriage is largely driven by our Biblical convictions, not necessarily our natural ones, and secondly realised that the origin of these convictions means we should think carefully about how we approach legislation in a democracy which definitionally seeks to serve all constituants not just the powerful majority or noisiest lobby group.
I’ve had a couple of stabs at articulating a position and approach to gay marriage previously (and also posted about the danger of slippery slope arguments like the one the archbishop employed over at Venn Theology), and I think these would play out a little better in the press.
Gay marriage makes an interesting PR case study, particularly in the light of this article dealing with the Sydney Anglican position on the issue.
Arguing against gay marriage is going to end up confusing the gospel message in the public eye. Which is really my major reason for not fighting the issue. We end up becoming just like the ACL, no matter how nuanced our position. For two reasons:
a) because the media is hostile to us, and
b) because people like the ACL keep making this about “Christian worldview inspired family values”…
Stories like the one on the Archbishop’s position are normative mainstream media treatments of Christian statements about moral issues. I’d be interested to see the story if we framed our approach around questions of identity, and being able to identify, in our society, by whatever belief, creed, or sexuality we choose. I think that’s a message with traction that would possible allow Christian ministers to continue to define marriage traditionally, present the gospel clearly as we articulate our position on homosexuality (“we believe we are not defined by our sexuality but defined by following Jesus which has flow on effects for how we see sexuality”)… every time we speak out on a position morally the story is going to end with a quote like this one:
‘The archbishop would acknowledge we live in a multi-faith society, and as such he must respect that his views should not be imposed on those religions that want to perform same-sex marriages, such as the Quakers and progressive synagogues, or the civil celebrants who perform 67 per cent of all marriages,” he said.”
Here’s how the ACL tackles the issue in a Media Release. Here’s a thought. Rather than angrily responding to a minority who face a fair bit of ostracism for having outside the norm sexual orientation for using the words “bigot” and “homophobe” what if we turn the other cheek. And empathise with them. And lovingly disagree.
“We are also yet to have a debate in this country free of abusive slurs such as ‘homophobe’ and ‘bigot’ and until that can occur, not one should jump to conclusions about the inevitability of redefining marriage.”
It doesn’t really matter what we say in this debate. The other side is always going to reinterpret our position as an attack on their core identity (why is sexuality an anchor point for identity anyway?). So why not just stick to presenting the gospel in a gracious and winsome manner, where we do more than pay lip service to gay rights (which every Christian statement seems to be based on). Why not talk about how Jesus loves all sinners – gay and straight. And how he calls us to find our identity not in our sexuality, but in submitting to his Lordship? The media will still be hostile to us. But at least we’re not confusing the moral issue with the gospel message, as though homosexuality is worse than other sins.
The question then is essentially what would Jesus say about gay marriage, to the state. Because that, trite as it sounds, should frame the approach we take to the state. While Jesus clearly taught that marriage is a relationship between one man and one woman (Matthew 19:4-6) he wasn’t really a political revolutionary speaking out against the immorality of the Roman empire. And there was plenty to criticise.
Image Credit: Che Jesus has its own Wikipedia Entry
I’m not sure what sort of normative ethical principles of engaging with the state can be drawn from Jesus’ “render unto Caesar” approach to paying taxes. Or from his lack of protesting about the empire’s immorality (when his disciples clearly expected a political revolution). But I’d suggest his approach with sinners – lovingly calling them to repent, because God’s kingdom was near, should probably have some bearing on how we approach issues of morality. The problem is that this can potentially lead to political quietism, where we say nothing about the way our government runs. Which would be a bizarre position to adopt. Especially in a democracy. And especially when we have a responsibility to seek the welfare of our city (some previous posts on that note: 1 and 2). So, and I’m happy to flesh this out in the comments, I think there’s a place for speaking out politically in a WWJD approach, but I think it should be motivated by a desire to love the lost and proclaim the Lordship of Jesus. Not impose that Lordship by proxy. It would be interesting to examine how the Christian church changed the Roman Empire, in terms of their views of Christianity, but that would be a pretty long post.
What would Paul Do
Another interesting paradigm for understanding a Christian relationship to the state comes from Paul’s trial before Agrippa in Acts 26. Now. Paul was defending himself against criminal charges, but he was also essentially lobbying for Christianity’s legal status before a hostile state. We’re increasingly in a position where parallels can easily be drawn between the state we live in and the idyllic, though very immoral, Roman empire. Paul meets this king, and in his defence, he preaches the gospel of Jesus and essentially appears to be evangelising Agrippa in the process.
“28 Then Agrippa said to Paul, “Do you think that in such a short time you can persuade me to be a Christian?”
29 Paul replied, “Short time or long—I pray to God that not only you but all who are listening to me today may become what I am, except for these chains.”
There’s a Biblical model for lobbying. Right there. I won’t revisit old ground too much, and this is already an excessively long post. But in my next installment I’ll have a go at writing a media release that demonstrates how I think one might stay “on message” in this debate.
The Third Eagle responds to the Ridiculist
The internet should probably explode as a result of this. William Tapley. Third Eagle of the Apocalypse. Co-Prophet of the End Times. Has decided to take up the fight against a popular television program that mocked him.
William Tapley started the ball rolling with the assertion (a year ago) that the Denver Airport features a mural with some hidden adult content, a sign of the end times.
It’s just loopy. So loopy that a CNN national news round up program singled him out on its “Ridiculist”.
Here’s his resonse to his spot on CNN’s Anderson Cooper’s Ridiculist.
So Anderson Cooper put him on again.
Someone once gave me some good advice when I wanted to go after the local news paper for some incorrect and nasty things they’d said about my organisation.
Never fight with someone who prints by the tonne. The same is true for YouTube broadcasters who have a small following (mostly people who aren’t interested in what you’re saying but think you’re a loony) and global news outlets.
FacedType: Typecasting typefaces
I made a new blog. It’s very much a work in progress. Mostly because I need someone who can draw. I’m thinking that fonts are like actors. They’re perfect for playing some roles and obviously miscast in others. Which is great. Because the language of type lends itself to such an interpretation.
When I’m trying to pick a font I like to think of my publication/purpose in terms of a type of person or profession, and then I match the font to that. This is pretty much the premise driving FacedType.
e.g
Papyrus: A Vegas Casino Egyptian Character. Not really authentic, but what people think might be authentic.
If you can draw and would like to make me little cartoon caricatures for these fonts I’m sure we could make a book, or trading cards, or some sort of splash on the internet. If you can think of a two or three line description of the type of actor/role typified by a font. Let me know.
Check it out (I’ll be moving it over to facedtype.com at some point in the near future).
Legends of the Joystick: The post-retirement lives of characters from your favourite games
Nobody plays Frogger anymore. Even less people are likely to play pong. At least you can probably get Frogger on the iPhone… So what happens to the characters from these games when they’re put on the shelf to rot. They get old. And become irrelevant.
Legends of the Joystick takes a trip down memory lane with some conversations with the original stars of the gaming world. Like Frogger, the 2 Pacs, Mario, and the paddles from Pong.
An Idiot’s Guide to Piracy: one limb amputation at a time
Authenticity is hugely important for a successful career on the seven seas. Get authentic by following the steps on this ‘ere inforgrarrrphic.
From David Soames, Via 22 Words.
A taxonomy of wine labels: how to pick a wine you’ll like
Lets face it. Very few people know enough about wine to be able to pick out a new drop based on the descriptors and region of providence. Most of us have some idea about the difference between red and white wines and vague notions of what food goes with what drop. But last time I tried to count there were about 100 chardonnay varieties in the fridge at my local wine distributor, and oodles more on the shelf. What’s a guy to do. For me. The choice is easy. I go with the label with the best typography. If they know their fonts (or have paid a designer who does) then I suspect they’ll have put some effort into their wine.
You too can judge a bottle by its label, thanks to this taxonomy/pie graph.
Here’s a couple of sample descriptors of the type of wine matched to the type of label…
Diluted French
Take the French label and remove a lot of the words. Voilà! These give the feeling of a French label — tradition, upper class — but without all the confusing detail. You usually get the grape name, the region, and they usually try to shoehorn the word “chateau” in there somewhere. Also, there is often a pen and ink drawing of a house that we are meant to believe is the aforementioned chateau.
What to Expect: The winemaker often isn’t actually French, but is instead an American making wine in the French style. That means it will taste sort of like dirt and fruit. You know how people say, “I don’t know, tastes like red wine to me”? This is what they are talking about.
Graphic Design Subclass: Letterpress
Have you seen those greeting cards where there is some nice serif font that says something like “Thank You” and then there is an equally nice image of a dandelion on it? And also a lot of white space, and it sort of looks like a wedding invitation? That’s what these wine bottles look like.
What to Expect: Smooth wines usually, not super-tannic (i.e, cotton-mouthy), not super-fruity or earthy. Defined more by what they are not. Which is not a bad thing, I don’t think.
I’m a letterpress type of guy. How about you?
How to be “on message” and engaging with the message of Jesus
This is turning into a bit of a series, or a saga, on Christianity in the public sphere. I’ve actually got a couple more up my sleeve too. So if you’re enjoying them… stay tuned.
Back in the post about billboards from a couple of weeks ago I mentioned the Islamic “Jesus: prophet of Islam” campaign in Sydney. I didn’t pay a huge amount of attention to it in the post because the ACL Rip’n’roll thing was more timely, but it has been interesting to watch the Sydney evangelical juggernaut respond to the billboard challenge with grace and the proclamation of Jesus.
Here’s the Islamic Billboard (and the associated SMH story).
The Centre for Public Christianity put together a really nice interview with the Muslim guy behind the billboard, which you can watch below…
Jesus a prophet of Islam? from CPX on Vimeo.
And right off the bat the Sydney Christians have been on message – starting with Bishop Forsyth who responded by disagreeing with the sentiment of the billboard while welcoming the discussion (unlike the Catholics).
“The Anglican Bishop of South Sydney, Rob Forsyth, said it was ”complete nonsense” to say Jesus was a prophet of Islam. ”Jesus was not the prophet of a religion that came into being 600 years later.”
But the billboard was not offensive, he said. ”They’ve got a perfect right to say it, and I would defend their right to say it [but] … you couldn’t run a Christian billboard in Saudi Arabia.”
The bishop said he would pay for billboards to counter those of MyPeace if he could afford it, and ”maybe the atheists should run their billboards as well”.
Turns out that last statement (not the atheist bit) didn’t fall on deaf ears, and some funds were fronted to respond with an appropriate Christian message. And this is it.
This billboard sits on the M4, a highway in Sydney, getting stacks of traffic and, at the very least, making it clear that not all Christians are bigoted idiots. So full points for that. If people do use this as an opportunity to engage in conversation with Muslim friends then this could be a really amazing story where the media give coverage to the question of who Jesus is.
I’ve had a chat to one of the guys behind this slogan tonight and I really appreciate the way they worked to keep grace at the heart of the response in order to avoid being combative or defensive, and they’ve made it all about Jesus. And they’ve made it welcoming. I love the “Aussie Muslims/Aussie Christians” thing and hope that some really good dialogue is born out of this. I’ve written a piece for the aussiechristians.com.au website, no idea when my bit will go live, but head on over and join in any discussion that happens on any of the posts. Just do it with grace, and understanding that the aim of the campaign is to have a friendly, grown up, dialogue about who Jesus actually is. If you don’t want to participate, pray that the outcome of this campaign will be fruitful conversation about Jesus.
It’s (not) Friday, but this is clever
A little jumpy. A little bit like the kind of video you don’t show epileptics. A little bit good.
Sent to me by my friend Matt on Facebook. But between then and now it’s gone a bit viral.