If it ain't apparent, I rarely blog here. Most of the activity happens on my LJ and on FB.

I saw Brokeback Mountain this past weekend. I've been reading the discussion thread about it over at Ship of Fools and posted my take on the film there.

Christianity Today has a review of the film that I think is very good for the most part. I quibble with very few of the details and they give it a 3 out of 4 stars which speaks of their integrity, as the subject matter of the film can't be very comfortable for them.

I didn't know that Ray Ozzie had gone to work for Microsoft. Did they buy Groove? I've had my head in the sand. His latest blog entry about Really Simple Sharing takes me back to the halcyon days of X-Windows, Unix, SMTP, News and emerging, collaborative technologies. I hope he's having fun is M$-land.

I've had blogdex squirreled away on my IE Links bar for a long time now ... It's how I keep up with the blogosphere and the high-interest memes that are flying about. It's not the most reliable site in the world but it shows interesting stuff when it is up.

This is pretty rich coming from a leader who insists on maintaining the right to torture and holds people in detention centers where they have no rights. Does he not see what a hypocrit he comes off as? It's his administration which has ceded the moral high ground.

Sony feels the heat from the blogosphere here. Their arrogance in not understanding how their software trespassed surreptitiously on people's computer systems and even caused their customers' systems to be exposed to other virii is astonishing.

I should be blogging here more often as I read enough. I tend to write mostly on my live journal (<== see it? It's the top link over there on the left) though. I'll try to do better to post my observations about things here.

I find Malcontent, AmericaBlog, TowleRoad, AfterElton, Ex-Gay Watch, Queer Visions & Postive Liberty to be good, regular reads. I love BlogDex because it's a finger on the dynamic pulse of what's interesting in the moment throughout the blogosphere.

Jeffrey Overstreet excerpts from "Bono in Conversation", the new book of interviews with U2's front man by Michka Assayas.


of which, one bit is:

Assayas: [...]Christ has his rank among the world’s great thinkers. But Son of God, isn’t that farfetched?

Bono: No, it’s not farfetched to me. Look, the secular response to the Christ story always goes like this: he was a great prophet, obviously a very interesting guy, had a lot to say along the lines of other great prophets, be they Elijah, Muhammad, Buddha, or Confucius. But actually Christ doesn’t allow you that. He doesn’t let you off that hook. Christ says, No. I’m not saying I’m a teacher, don’t call me teacher. I’m not saying I’m a prophet. I’m saying: “I’m the Messiah.” I’m saying: “I am God incarnate.” And people say: No, no, please, just be a prophet. A prophet we can take. You’re a bit eccentric. We’ve had John the Baptist eating locusts and wild honey, we can handle that. But don’t mention the “M” word! Because, you know, we’re gonna have to crucify you. And he goes: No, no, I know you’re expecting me to come back with an army and set you free from these creeps, but actually I am the Messiah. At this point, everyone starts staring at their shoes, and says: Oh, my God, he gonna keep saying this. So what you’re left with is either Christ was who He said He was—the Messiah—or a complete nutcase. I mean, we’re talking nutcase on the level of Charles Manson. This man was like some of the people we’ve been talking about earlier. This man was strapping himself to a bomb, and had King of the Jews” on his head, and was they were putting him up on the Cross, was going: OK, martyrdom, here we go. Bring on the pain! I can take it. I’m not joking here. The idea that the entire course of civilization for over half of the globe could have its fate changed and turned upside-down by a nutcase, for me that’s farfetched…

Jim Johnson cites an op-ed piece written by John Danforth, US Ambassador to the UN, entitled Onward, Moderate Christian Soldiers. This bit stuck out for me:

In recent years, conservative Christians have presented themselves as representing the one authentic Christian perspective on politics. With due respect for our conservative friends, equally devout Christians come to very different conclusions.
...
Like conservative Christians, we attend church, read the Bible and say our prayers.

But for us, the only absolute standard of behavior is the commandment to love our neighbors as ourselves.

In the NYT, Lucian Truscott writes about the impending loss of the core of the young Army officer corp due to placing them in situations where they can't fulfill the honor code they were programmed to believe in: "you pledged that you would not lie, cheat or steal, and that you would not tolerate those who did."

Truscott, himself a West Point graduate -- Class of '69, recounts how it failed then: "the honor code broke down before our eyes as staff and faculty jobs at West Point began filling with officers returning from Vietnam. Some had covered their uniforms with bogus medals and made their careers with lies - inflating body counts, ignoring drug abuse, turning a blind eye to racial discrimination, and worst of all, telling everyone above them in the chain of command that we were winning a war they knew we were losing. The lies became embedded in the curriculum of the academy, and finally in its moral DNA."

And now, it's happening all over again: "The problem the Army created in Vietnam has never really been solved. If you keep faith with soldiers and tell them the truth even when it threatens their beliefs, you run the risk of losing them. But if you peddle cleverly manipulated talking points to people who trust you not to lie, you won't merely lose them, you'll break their hearts."

In a guest column in the NYT, Stacy Schiff opines:

"More than 60 percent of the American people don't trust the press. Why should they? They've been reading 'The Da Vinci Code' and marveling at its historical insights. I have nothing against a fine thriller, especially one that claims the highest of literary honors: it's a movie on the page. But 'The Da Vinci Code' is not a work of nonfiction. If one more person talks to me about Dan Brown's crackerjack research I'm shooting on sight.
The novel's success does point up something critical. We're happier to swallow a half-baked Renaissance religious conspiracy theory than to examine the historical fiction we're living (and dying for) today."

The Economist reviews 3 books about politics and oil.

Peter O'Dell trashes (again) the assertion that we're running out of gas because he says the argument ignores technology and economics (as it did 30 years ago).

Michael Klare puts oil geopolitics in perspective by showing that the current American support for not-nice regimes where most of the current proven reserves happen to be is a bipartisan development over the years.

Lastly, the Rocky Mountain Institute puts out a collection of articles on Winning the Oil Endgame; ideas for getting around the decreasing supply of fossil fuels and still keep our economies from plunging down the toilet.

Things that have my interest at the moment:

St. Lukes, Holloway. Pastored by Dave Tomlinson. I heard him speak at Greenbelt about being post-evangelical, formerly charismatic house-church leader.
http://www.saintlukeschurch.org.uk/whoweare.html

Evangelical Fellowship of Lesbian & Gay Christians. Until recently, I didn't know they existed here in the UK
http://www.eflgc.org.uk/believe.shtml
I knew about Evangelicals Concerned in the US.
http://www.ecinc.org/ and EC Western Region (they really ought to sort that bit of frippery) http://www.ecwr.org/

The Lesbian & Gay Christians Movement
http://www.lgcm.org.uk

And Courage Trust, an historically ex-gay ministry with a twist:
http://www.courage.org.uk/

And there's a growing segment of evangelicals, not all glbt, that are moving for more inclusiveness, acceptance and honoring of same-sex relationships
http://www.acceptingevangelicals.org/
http://www.inclusivechurch.net
http://www.rmnetwork.org/ (Troy Plummer, a former pastor of mine, is the director here)

Susan Jacoby writes abou the necessity of and the political courage required to approach civil issues from a firmly secluristic position in this Op-Ed piece in the NYTimes: One Nation, Under Secularism (free but registration req'd).

She refutes the idea that the founders weren't secularly motivated and that abolition of slavery, civil rights for racial minorities and women's rights were successfully fought by organized religion.

"...Abraham Lincoln, whose spiritual beliefs were so elusive that both atheists and the devoutly religious have tried to claim him as their own, spoke eloquently on this point during his long period of deliberation before issuing the Emancipation Proclamation.

"I am approached with the most opposite opinions and advice, and that by religious men, who are equally certain that they represent the divine will," he told a group of ministers in September 1862. "I hope it will not be irreverent for me to say that if it is probable that God would reveal his will to others, on a point so connected with my duty, it might be supposed that he would reveal it directly to me. . . . These are not, however, the days of miracles. . . . I must study the plain, physical facts of the case, ascertain what is possible, and learn what appears to be wise and right."

Today, many voters, of many religious beliefs, might well be receptive to a candidate who forthrightly declares that his vision of social justice will be determined by the "plain, physical facts of the case" on humanity's green and fragile earth. But that would take an inspirational leader who glories in the nation's secular heritage and is not afraid to say so. ..."

I think this is the foundation of the case to be made for civil marriage equality for LGBT folk.

Clifford Longley writes in the Guardian that in issuing the edict by the Vatican's Congregation of the Doctrine of faith, the RCC is picking a fight they can't win. He compares it to Christianity picking a fight with Darwinism in the latter century (and losing, miserably).

Anna Quindlen pulls together some odd memes to make some points that I agree with in her column in Newsweek titled: Outside the Bright Lines.

She starts off by reviewing Jenny Boylan's book wherein the author recounts her experience as a MTF transgender (emphasis mine):

Tolerance is the rice pudding of modern behavior; it tastes sweeter than bigotry, but no one would confuse it with a parfait. What Boylan’s book represents is something deeper and more important than tolerance. The way in which people insisted on valuing her on the basis of who she was and not their confusion about what she had done represents the best of human behavior.

Doing that is hard. The old bright lines used to make things so simple. White was different from black. Male was different from female. Straight was better than gay. Gay was bad. So was sex, unless it had been sanctified by Alencon lace and a catering hall. Sanctified by God, some would say, or “natural moral law,” which is what the Vatican cited in its statement last week against gay marriage, the theological version of “because I said so.”

The God who suggested we love one another seemed strangely absent from all this. Look at the bright lines in the new movie “The Magdalene Sisters.” It’s a devastating drama based on the true story of unmarried Roman Catholic girls who got pregnant and were essentially imprisoned in Irish laundries called the Magdalene Asylums, sent there by their own parents for no crime other than sexuality. Who cares about compassion when you can have never-darken-my-doorstep certainty?

Maureen Dowd scores some good points before she gets fluffy on us in her column in the New York Times titled: Butch, Butch Bush!:

"Last time I checked, we had separation of church and state, so I don't know why the president is talking about sin, or why he is implying that gays who want to make a permanent commitment in a world full of divorce and loneliness are sinners.

If we follow Mr. Bush's logic, shouldn't we have a one-strike-and-you're-out constitutional amendment: no marriage for gays, but no second marriage for straights who prove they're not up to it?"

I think she got the annoyance/insult sense of Bush's words just right. He thinks he's being magnanimous. He comes across as patronizing and insulting.

Of course, my friends say that his words weren't meant for us. They were meant as a sop to the political right-wing/conservative christian factions of the GOP. We'll see. If this amendment thing gets any traction, every queer in the country needs to be prepared to go to the barricades. I won't idly stand by while the equivalent of slave compromise gets written into the Constitution.

More than any other issue, the never-say-die efforts of liberals to normalize homosexuality have galvanized grassroots support for the political campaigns of the evangelical renewal.

so say the authors of an article in Christianity Today Magazine: "The High-Octane Fuel of Gay Activism"

This is a difficult article for me to read because the authors couch the struggle in stark terms of "us vs. them", liberals vs. evangelicals. I consider myself an evangelical who has had to dig a bit more on the issue of sexual orientation. The authors posit that the "normalization" of homosexuality (which I consider "normal" already; same-gender attraction has existed in the human condition for all of recorded history and exists "naturally" in the non-human animal kingdom as well) is the fuel that is driving the vitality of the confessing movement. If this is true, it bothers me a bit that the thing that drives the various expressions of this movement is not so much the desire for a closer walk with God; to know Him better; to have His life manifest in our lives (and through us, in society) but rather to strive *against* a group of people, a minority, who are struggling for acceptance in society in general and for full participation in the life of the church in specific. And they thing that is being disagreed over is how and towards whom we express *love* and the implications of that expression in terms of building healthy, stable, long-term committed relationships and how we create and build our families. What a crazy issue for Christians to be divided over.

I think that this is no different than the church splits that occured in the mid 19th century over the issue of slavery. Some churches took the high moral ground and others used scripture to support theologies of owning slaves and the social and cultural context status quo.

I read and hear mostly about the mounting body count independent of the context of *what* we're getting for it. This article in the Washington Post gets into some detail about how the troops are executing the ongoing war for the hearts and minds of the Iraqi's and tracking down the guys that are still trying to hold onto power.

20 Lies About the War explains the stuff that was foisted on the "not very thinking" general public.