Funny furniture ad

(HT: The Buck Stops Here)

Man Asks Entire Town for Forgiveness for Racism

(Video HT: Ochuk)

“I loathe the term ‘African American’”

LaShawn Barber

Pride: In the Name of Love

By Terri Moore

Growing up in a small town in the deep South, racisim was not a word I knew or a concept I often thought about, but rather it was like the water I swam around in.  Most of the time I could go about my swimming without noticing it or realizing it was there, but every now and then someone would make a splash and I would see it in all its ugliness as it attempted to drown me and everyone else in it.

Like the time an elementary school teacher dared to teach us about MLK and the civil rights movement, and some of the parents complained. I remember a friend’s dad saying “She’s not supposed to be teaching ya’ll that stuff. I hope she tells you what a trouble-maker King was” …

Read the rest

In spite of many obscenities, Eastwood’s Gran Torino full of integrity

Megan Basham, WORLD

“Why aren’t we drawn to Dong Yun Moon?”

Eugene Cho thinks it strange that so little attention has been given to the case of Dong Yun Moon, whose family was killed when an F/A-18 crashed into his home in San Diego … while stories about much more banal topics (snow in Texas) are flagged up:

“To be blunt, is it because he has slanted Asian eyes?  He’s Asian which means he doens’t look like your prototypical male ‘American’ man.”

Story at Mercury News (San Jose).

Weekend Walkabout: Nov. 8, 2008

26 posts from the week that escaped mention (almost!):

• Amway Evangelism
  
• Billy Clubs, Firehoses, and Attack Dogs for the New Civil Rights Movement
• C’mon Obama Voter, You Have To Admit This is Pretty Funny
• Dominican Republic - Ordinary Superheroes
• Errr…
• Fear Not!
• “Gross Food Related Youth Group Games” (Stuff Christians Like)
• “How Not to Raise a Pagan”
• I’m Saved! But From What? - Part 3
• James White - Debates in London
• King David’s Water Tunnel in Jerusalem
• Law and Gospel: Galatians - The practice of Christian liberty
• Missing your calling
• Nate Huss recognizes National Adoption Month with new song, video
• Obama and the Bishops
• Passion For The City
• Quote of the day
• Real Life Photoshop
• Still having a dream
• Two songs
• Urban Exile: Re-discovering Justice?
• Voting for our imaginations
• What Churches Can Learn from Election Marketing
• X-ray Crab (OK, not from a Christian blog, but it does start with an ‘X’!)
• You’re a Hyper-Calvinist
• ‘Zack and Miri’ Advertising Leaves Out the P-Word

Some election debrief

Beliefnet editor Steven Waldman shares some interesting ‘factoids’ such as the following:

• Turnout was up more among Born Again Christians than among youths….
• In Colorado, the base of James Dobson’s Focus on the Family, the percentage of evangelicals supporting the Democrat doubled since 2004.

Thabiti Anyabile offers some keen insights at Justin Taylor’s blog:

“There will no doubt be many associations made between [Obama's] skin color, assumptions about his race, and a host of successes or failures during his presidency. But let us Christians avoid such errors. Let us avoid saddling this one man with the responsibility of representing a “race” of people, or saddling the people with this one man’s failures or achievements.”

And Taylor Marshall blames Obama’s win on American Catholics.

Is socialist a code word for black?

La Shawn Barber responds to a recent Kansas Star editorial by Lewis Diuguid, who suggests it is.

“Oh, what a tangled web we weave when we practice to play the race card so close to Election Eve!”

Anyabwile: “Why It’s Difficult for Me to Vote” (update)

A multi-part essay posted by Thabiti Anyabwile, at Pure Church.

Part one:

“From Philadelphia to “hot mic” comments from Jesse Jackson to the present CNN obsession with “race” and the election (an obsession that seems to only have grown more rabid since S.C.), the steady drip of conjecture has turned an opportunity into an obstacle. Now, it seems to me, the table has been re-set and the conversation returned to the old, tired, myopic, and ultimately unhelpful speculations about racism. Like cozy slippers and a favorite robe on a cool winter morning, we’ve slipped right back into the tattered familiar.”

Part two. (update 10/16)

“I think advancement on the abortion front and on the war front and on the economic front and every other front depends on Americans embracing a biblical view of humanity and human life.”

Part three. (update 10/21)

“Sen. Clinton’s historical bid failed her 18 million supporters in one unmistakable way: it failed to call the question on what womanhood and femininity should entail.”

Part four. (update 10/24)

“Is poverty a social or theological evil that should be combated? Is it an evil effect of the Fall to be resisted or a social commonplace to be accepted? It seems to me failure to address this question is what keeps us bickering about this or that tax policy or this or that program’s effectiveness.”

Good theology a remedy for racism

Especially a sound view of Christ, according to J. Kameron Carter, the author of Race: A Theological Account. Scot McKnight comments on the prelude to Carter’s work:

“Carter argues that Irenaeus’ response to Gnosticism profoundly undoes any basis for hierarchy among humans, for disconnecting the Church from Israel, and for delegitimating YHWH as God.”

FYI
Gnosticism was “an early Greek religious movement of broad proportions that was particularly influential in the second-century church … Gnostics believed that devotees had gained a special kind of spiritual enlightenment, through which they had attained a secret or higher level of knowledge not accessible to the uninitiated.” - from the Pocket Dictionary of Theological Terms, edited by Grenz, Guretzki and Nordling (InterVarsity, 1999).