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October 30, 2007
What a joy..
Here is a great video that is probably quite old to many of you; however, Lammert just highlighted it for me and it was posted on the Shema website.
I've watched it several times and get the same response...chills, joy, wow...
As many of you will know he did...win the 'got talent' show as well as the hearts of all who watched. Here is his final performance:
peace, joy, enjoyment...thanks lammert!
jc
Posted by joshuacase at 07:16 PM | Comments (0)
Tuesday is for Thomas
Merton journal entry entitled: Prayer is all I have left
If everything centers on my obligation to respond to God's call in solitude, this does not simply mean putting everything out of mind and living as if only God and I existed. This is impossible anyway. It means rather learning from what contacts and conflicts I still have how deep a solitude is required of me. This means now the difficult realization that i have relied too much on the support and approval of others- and yet I do need others. I must now painfully rectify this. That is to say that there is a sense in which some of God's answers must come to me from others, even from those with whom i disagree, even from those who do not understand my way of life. Yet, it would be disastrous to seek merely to placate these people- the mere willingness to do so would make me deaf to what ever real message they might have. To do this job rightly is beyond my power. Prayer is all I have left- and patient, humble (if possible) obedience to God's will. One thing is certain: I do not possess my answers ready at hand in myself. But I cannot simply seek them from others either. The problem is in learning to go for some time, perhaps for long periods, with no answer!!
jc
Posted by joshuacase at 10:55 AM | Comments (0)
October 26, 2007
Off for a few days
Laura and I are off to London for a few days. Will be back on Monday night.
till then...
joshua
Posted by joshuacase at 07:30 AM | Comments (2)
October 24, 2007
Tonight & Tomorrow: Planet in Peril.
I hope you have your calendar marked for this CNN special report. I am not sure how it will compare to Christiane Amanpour's God's Warriors, but it should be good. Oh, and did you see that Amanpour was honored by the Queen with a CBE?
watch if you can or wait for the replays;)
jc
Posted by joshuacase at 09:57 AM
October 23, 2007
Tuesday is for Thomas
Merton said:
"Businesses, are, in reality, quasi-religious sects. When you go to work in one, you embrace A New Faith. And if they are really big businesses, you progress from faith to a kind of mystique. Belief in the product, preaching the product, in the end the product becomes the focus of a transcendental experience. Through 'the product' one communes with the vast forces of life, nature, and history that are expressed in business...Advertising treats all products with the reverence and the seriousness due to sacraments."
Found this interesting to reflect upon. Never realized Merton had so much to say about business. But increasingly as I read more and more of his stuff, I am amazed at how deeply practical his writings are for today. And maybe that is the mark of good writing...it spans the ages.
have a great tuesday...
jc
Posted by joshuacase at 07:26 AM | Comments (0)
October 22, 2007
Carbon Health Warnings on New British Cars
I subscribe to the treehugger.com blog. This is per treehugger.com. Interesting...
Carbon Health Warnings on New British Cars
According to the Times, "all advertising for new cars will have to carry cigarette-style “health warnings” about their environmental impact, under a European plan to force manufacturers to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Advertisements in newspapers and magazines, will have to devote at least 20 per cent of the space to details about fuel economy and CO2 emissions. At the moment manufacturers have to include only basic mpg and CO2 figures in the small print. Car advertisements will have to carry colour-coded emissions labels such as those already displayed on new fridges and washing machines, with bands ranging from dark green to red."
This is the thin edge of the wedge! As with cigarettes, one keeps upping the ante. Now the cars are getting this in advertising and sales literature; next will be bumper stickers on the cars stating their rated emissions, and finally the cars themselves will be colour coded with paint ranging from dark green to red, so that we can instantly pick out the scarlet letter and hurl abuse at them.
drive carefully...
jc
Posted by joshuacase at 09:22 AM | Comments (0)
October 21, 2007
Shema today..
Today at Shema, we used the following video in our discussion on new creation and hope.
enjoy....
jc
Posted by joshuacase at 03:42 PM | Comments (0)
October 19, 2007
Everything Must Change...A conversation...
This is the space for 'Everything Must Change,' the conversation.
NIcholas Fiedler and myself are hosting a conversatio here about Brian McLaren's newest book, 'Everything Must Change.'
This week, post your thoughts on section one.
So, what are your responses to section one?
peace...
jc
Posted by joshuacase at 10:12 PM | Comments (0)
October 17, 2007
Chickens...scared-y-cats..
I am convinced most people are just scared. Scared to let providence or fate choose for you. Scared to roll the dice and see what songs match your week. Scared to take up the shuffle challenge?!?
Well, if you have indeed found yourself scared, the following exert from Mike Mason's 'The Gospel According Job' on Luck will not help much either.
enjoy your self-influenced listening this week...or so you think;)
jc
Luck
By Mike Mason
(ht to lammert for this article)
"The Lord gives and the Lord takes away;
blessed be the name of the Lord!" 11:21b)
Job's remarkable statement here takes us back to the very primitive (and some would say pagan) concept of chance or luck. Job is basically saying that there is good luck and there is bad luck and that God administrates them both, and not only is it His divine prerogative to do so, but for every one of His seemingly arbitrary decrees He is to be praised. Whether in the casinos of Las Vegas or in the parliaments of the nations, it is God who picks up the roulette ball and places it wherever He will. It is He who shuffles the deck, even if He does not shuffle but rather arranges each card as carefuIly as He numbers the hairs on a head. Whether luck exists at all from God's point of view, is a good question. But from the human standpoint, there is so much of the divine patterning that cannot be understood, that we might as well chalk it up to luck. Why does one person have red hair and another brown? Why is one sick and another well? Why does one die young and another live to see four generations and all without any regard for individual spiritual beliefs? There are no good religious answers to these questions. There is only the nonreligious answer: the luck of the draw.
To believe in God is to accept the nonreligious answer. It is to allow for the fact that the Deity behind the strange and inexplicable facade of this world is a real, living person, and therefore a person with not only rational plans and ideas, but also with nonrational intuitions, feelings, and even whims of His own. To know the Lord in this way is, in some respects, just like knowing anybody else, for in our dealings with other people do we not inevitably run up against a large measure of pure unfathomable irrationality? People could not be people if they were entirely reasonable, and so it is with God. How reasonable is grace? Or love? Many cannot believe in God because they cannot stomach His whims. But to allow the Lord His whimsicalness-and more than that, to bless Him for it is faith.
This topic turns out to be the crux of a good deal of the long debate between Job and his friends. The friends could never have made the statement in 1:21. It would have been too arbitrary, too superstitious for their liking. Good religious people do not believe in luck; they believe in finding reasons for everything. They are always trying to figure out why they are having a bad day, or, why they are sick, or why they are not more happy, or prosperous.
This kind of thinking which forever tries to appease and manipulate the god behind every bush and rock, is a kind of paganism. There is no room for the sheer arbitraryness of the Lord. By contrast, the mind that is able to live with unanswerable questions, letting the roulette ball spin at will see the Lord's hand at work. this is the mind of true faith. This is the faith that can respond, whether in good luck or in bad,
"Amen!"
The moment we start thinking that we can discern some pattern to the ways of the Lord, we begin to draw dangerously close to idolatry. We come to worship the pattern rather than the God behind it. We see patterns everywhere, as in tea leaves, we grow preoccupied with technique rather than relationship. Patterns become molds into which we try and squeeze all of reality, whether it fits, it or not. In modern times the most obvious, example of this is science. Certainly there are patterns in God's universe to be discovered and legitimately exploited; but no pattern can encompass all of reality. When a pattern or system attempts to be all inclusive the result is that it excludes the most vital factor of all: God. This is not to say that God is not rational, only that mere rationality does not completely define His being.
To the ancient Hebrews pure chance, far from being an idea opposed to God, was one of the very things that proclaimed His sovereignty'. Why else would they have cast lots' a device of "urim and Thummim" to discern the Lord’s will? (See Exodus. 28:30)? "The lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the Lord" (Prov. 1.6:.33). Luck was just one more of the enigmatic channels through which God worked. The mere fact that we are alive at all-is that not lucky? That a loving Heavenly Father has preordained every detail of human lives does not mean that there is any discernible reason why the ball lands on 7 other than 15.
There is much about God that can be known, this is not what the book of Job is about. Job is about the incomprehensible ways of God' and about the praise that is due Him in bad luck as in good.
Posted by joshuacase at 08:01 PM | Comments (3)
October 16, 2007
A conversation to begin this week...
Everything Must Change, a conversation.
join in this friday...
jc
Posted by joshuacase at 12:12 PM | Comments (0)
Tuesday is for Thomas
Merton wrote:
'It is simply time that I must pray intently for the needs of the whole world and not be concerned with other, seemingly "more effective" forms of action. For me, prayer comes first, the other forms of action follow, if they have their place. And, they no doubt do to some extent. Prayer...must happen for the idiot civilization that is going down to ruin and dragging everything down with it.'
December 13, 1960
Posted by joshuacase at 08:39 AM | Comments (0)
October 15, 2007
The Shuffle Challenge
So this is the challenge. Join me in a week of choosing to not choose.
I am of the opinion that in fact, from time to time, we need to not have the power to choose. That destiny, as it is, should choose for us. Or maybe it is God's plan, or something else. But either way, let the shuffle decide!
So here is the challenge. Put your mac, or your ipod on 'shuffle songs'. Let it decide what you listen to for one week starting tomorrow. Join me in the decision to not decide. To release the power to choose.
Are you up for it? Join me and lets see how our week goes; you know, what songs/podcasts match the rhythm of our weeks without our choosing. If you are up for it challenge others to do the same, and lets see what comes from this.
will you dare to shuffle?
jc
Posted by joshuacase at 09:00 PM | Comments (2)
October 11, 2007
A confession: I love CNN.
CNN, the people who brought us 'God's Warriors' has a new show coming out. Entitled, Planet in Peril, it should prove to be quite the cry for helping our creation in need. Infact, i suspect that more than just a information piece, it will also prove to include a measure of the prophetic.
Here is a brief clip about it. It is supposed to air in two weeks time.
I'll be watching...
jc
Posted by joshuacase at 10:01 PM | Comments (3)
October 10, 2007
Been busy...been away!
Sorry I've been away and busy.
Here's a little something to think about.
jc
Posted by joshuacase at 06:29 PM | Comments (0)
October 05, 2007
Thoughts elsewhere.
Please join the conversation over at Jason Clark's blog. I've posted a few thoughts there under the title, 'Kingdoms of our Age'.
speak to you soon...
jc
Posted by joshuacase at 08:49 AM | Comments (0)
October 01, 2007
Brian McLaren's New Book: A (Positive) Review
Tomorrow, Brian McLaren's new book gets released. Over the course of the last few weeks I have been working through it, or rather, devouring it and being challenged by the way it is forming the way i see the world.
Here are my thoughts, my plug, my endorsement:
In Brian McLaren's newest book, Everything Must Change, Brian connects the dots of the days' largest global crisis and shifts in global thinking with the heart of the message of Christianity. Brian's careful weaving of story and reality happens in such a way that it will make everyone from his friends to his greatest critics pause and reflect.
In what maybe his most accessibly comprehensive work yet, Brian tells his story of wrestling with the nature Christianity as we have it today, and why it must not merely change, but learn to confront the 'suicidal framing stories of our day.'
Whether you are new to Brian, read every one of his works, or a staunch critic...READ THIS BOOK!
Theologically, politically, spiritually, and economically this book might just be the straw that breaks the back of the camel of colonial, modern, daulistic thinking in every religion. Many who have left the church will read this book and again experience a revolution of hope welling up inside of them.
The message of Jesus as explored in Everything Must Change is good news for all who have the capacity to read and who choose to understand it. But maybe more importantly, it is GREAT NEWS for those who will experience this compassionate, loving, truth-telling, non-violent shift in their communities, in their families, and in their nations.
In the end, its simple: if what Brian puts forth is true, not only can everything change, but everything must change because of Jesus!
buy it, read it, share it!!
jc
Posted by joshuacase at 05:53 PM | Comments (1)