Frosted Echoes

The church that I have been attending, All Saints Orthodox Church, has a new website design and a video to go along with it. The video is a meditation on what worship is like for an Orthodox Christian, focusing on the five senses. I appreciate the fact that it brings up the conditioning of the smells, sounds and sights that are involved with worship. I have come to associate the incense used at Divine Liturgy with the very act of worship.

May my prayer be set before you like incense; may the lifting up of my hands be like the evening sacrifice. (Psalm 141:2)

Some Christians are looking for religious liberty exemptions from employer-based vaccine mandates. 

David French writes about the surge in Christians (mostly those who consider themselves Evangelical Christians) who are seeking religious exemptions from having to get COVID-19 vaccines.

For example, there is a scramble by Christian Americans to seek “religious exemptions” from employer vaccine mandates. I’ve received correspondence from Christian religious liberty ministries who report a sharp rise in requests for legal assistance to secure religious exemptions. One ministry indicated in an email to affiliated attorneys that it had been “inundated by requests” for help. A pastor in a large church in California has promised to hand out “religious exemption forms” to anyone who attends the church and asks.

The truth is that there are very few exemptions on religious grounds, unless there is a long-standing mandate in that denomination to oppose medical science or vaccines.1

Russell Moore, who has been working on religious liberty cases for 8 years, covers this topic in his newsletter.

In certain, very limited cases they could be. Someone who is part of, for instance, a religious tradition that eschews all medical treatment, along with any other shots or inoculations, could make a credible claim to religious liberty. There are very few such groups—and no group that I’m aware of with a creedal prohibition on masks.

Beyond that, the principle is well established in American law and culture that public health measures are a legitimate state interest. Almost all public schools have required, for years, proof of vaccination for polio and smallpox, etc. The United States military certainly has the mandate to keep troops from dying off from a potentially deadly disease. Certainly, private businesses have the right to ask potential customers to abide by their safety protocols.

The fact that the most vocal Christians, and those that are covered the most by media, are some of the people most vehemently opposed to public safety standards is yet another reason to lament the state of American Christianity.

Greg's Guitar Lessons covers "Start Without Me" by Pedro The Lion. As far as I know, this is the only song T.W. Walsh wrote for the band and it's nearly universally agreed upon as one of their best.

Duett channels the sounds of the 1980's on their pastel-infused album Leisure.

Leisure by Duett

Duett has been around for a while, but just came to my attention via Bandcamp's Instagram account last week. I was drawn in by the stylized artwork and colorful pastels on the album cover of their newest offering, Leisure. The contents of the album sound exactly like you would expect from looking at the cover. Over-the-top synths bathe the listener in the color palette of the 1980's. The aesthetic is so completely intact, that the opening track, "Gallery," sounds like it was pulled from an 80's film about Wall Street.

At times, the synthisizer parts sound a bit like a softer, more radio friendly, Com Truise or a band on Jim Smith from Teeel's Synth Recordings label. While the synths dominate, though, there are other instruments that also cling tightly to the sounds of the Regan era. Ostentatious guitar solos pop up in places like the track "Lifetime" and remind you of the chase scenes that were a staple of blockbusters and b-movies alike back then.

Most of the album is instrumental. It's a surprise when, the vocals appear four songs into the affair, in "About You." With vocals in the mix, the band reminds me of Sophie and Peter Johnston, albeit with less range and variation.

Jason Morehead asks if Facebook deliberately deplatformed his church. Like others who have had this happen, he tried to work through the labyrinthine Facebook system to straighten things out, but eventually succumbed to frustration.

At this point, I just gave up. (Though I did take some solace in the fact that I’m not the only one who’s been confused and frustrated by this situation.) I checked the page several more times to see if somehow, miraculously, Facebook had reversed their decision but to no avail. Then I stopped checking altogether until late last month, when I found that Facebook had finally done the inevitable: they had deleted the page.

Some Christians are looking for religious liberty exemptions from employer-based vaccine mandates. 

David French writes about the surge in Christians(https://frenchpress.thedispatch.com/p/its-time-to-stop-rationalizing-christian) (mostly those who consider themselves Evangelical Christians) who are seeking religious exemptions from having to get COVID-19 vaccines.

For example, there is a scramble by Christian Americans to seek “religious exemptions” from employer vaccine mandates. I’ve received correspondence from Christian religious liberty ministries who report a sharp rise in requests for legal assistance to secure religious exemptions. One ministry indicated in an email to affiliated attorneys that it had been “inundated by requests” for help. A pastor in a large church in California has promised to hand out “religious exemption forms” to anyone who attends the church and asks.

The truth is that there are very few exemptions on religious grounds, unless there is a long-standing mandate in that denomination to oppose medical science or vaccines.1

Russell Moore, who has been working on religious liberty cases for 8 years, covers this topic(https://www.russellmoore.com/2021/08/26/what-mask-and-vaccine-mandates-mean-for-religious-liberty/) in his newsletter.

In certain, very limited cases they could be. Someone who is part of, for instance, a religious tradition that eschews all medical treatment, along with any other shots or inoculations, could make a credible claim to religious liberty. There are very few such groups—and no group that I’m aware of with a creedal prohibition on masks.

Beyond that, the principle is well established in American law and culture that public health measures are a legitimate state interest. Almost all public schools have required, for years, proof of vaccination for polio and smallpox, etc. The United States military certainly has the mandate to keep troops from dying off from a potentially deadly disease. Certainly, private businesses have the right to ask potential customers to abide by their safety protocols.

The fact that the most vocal Christians, and those that are covered the most by media, are some of the people most vehemently opposed to public safety standards is yet another reason to lament the state of American Christianity.

This one came up out of the blue last week, just as I had posted “Pink and Blue” as a Friday Night Video. Colatura is from Brooklyn and they correctly guessed that people would want to watch a guy in a half gorilla suite skating around what is presumably NYC.

Mars Hill Church reveled in being Christian the manly way.

I recently started listening to the much-acclaimed podcast on the Rise and Fall of Mars Hill, produced by Mike Cosper. Mars Hill is the Seattle-based church that was founded by hyper-masculine pastor Mark Driscoll. I always found Mark Driscoll to be deeply suspect and wondered where he fit into Christian theology. In many clips I see or hear of him, he’s yelling “who do you think you are???!!!” or “how dare you!!!”1 He sounds like me when I think my wife has eaten the dark chocolate marshmallows from Trader Joe’s.

In audio clips from the podcast, Driscoll goes on about running people at his church over with a bus and there being a pile of dead bodies behind the bus. I could see Driscoll being a drill sergeant or the coach of a sports team, but repping for the Prince of Peace?2 It always puzzled me that someone would actually buy into that.

There are indisputably those who benefit from Driscoll’s message of personal responsibility. It resonates strongly with young men. It can be helpful, but like the teachings of Jordan Peterson, it’s not uniquely Christian in its nature. It could come from any self-help guru. It could come from Matt Foley.

I love Mike Cosper and he does a fantastic job with the production values of his podcasts, but I pretty quickly realized I had no interest hearing about this particular figure and his job church. The whole situation is alien to my experience, since the denomination that I am part of, PC(USA), doesn’t have celebrity pastors. You won’t find dudes in thousand dollar sneakers trotting around a stage. Instead, you will find teaching elders (women included) typically preaching in traditional vestments from behind an old fashioned pulpit.

(📸 Photo of Mark Driscoll by James Gordon via Flickr)

I’ve witnessed this behavior in multiple documentaries. [return]

Date: 08/30/2021

The YouTube Generation

My 9-yr.-old loves video games. It seems sometimes like his love for video games surpasses his love for everything else. When he’s not playing video games, or negotiating with me about his game time limits, he’s watching others play video games on YouTube. The pandemic hasn’t really bothered him, because it did nothing to interfere with his favorite activities.

Since I set game time limitations, the main concern I have had about these patterns is the exclusivity of the entertainment choices. Unlike when I was a child, or even when his brother was growing up, he doesn’t watch shows with narrative or characters.1 It’s nearly always some guy playing a video game and yelling at the screen. That doesn’t seem to be teaching him much.

The only thing I’ve noticed that these videos may have improved is his vocabulary, as most of the YouTubers are older and have more sophisticated ways of communicating than younger kids. However, his language has also commensurately, at times, become more colorful. Just like his heroes, he talks a lot when he plays games. Most of the time, he just seems frustrated, always accusing some online unknown person of “hacking.” Today, he was talking about someone making mistakes, “as a newb” but then said, “what the eff do you think you are doing?”

At that point, I heard a record scratch. I admonished him, of course, but more than that, I started thinking that perhaps open access to YouTube is not beneficial for this child. I’m going to look at getting the Disney Circle back up and running, so I can limit time on YouTube and on which devices he will have access to it.

It was scary enough when my progeny said he didn’t need to go to college because he was going to be a YouTuber, and they don’t need college degrees. Now that he’s taking foul mouthed language queues from these guys (and all the ones he watches are guys), I’m at the breaking point.