Eno: The True Wheel

Dan Bodah has been using this as the opening track for his show Airborne Event on WFMU:




I realize the phrase "still sounds fresh" gets overused, but I swear that when I didn't know what this track was I assumed it was Le Tigre.

FBC Jax Watchdog series on FBC Dallas building program

FBC Jax Watchdog continues his series on the $140 million First Baptist Dallas building program, asking how the decision was made to commit to spend the money. His analysis includes asking how they can justify committing to spend so much money when the church still owes $8-9 million from its last building project.

Did the three step plan work?

1. God spoke to Brunson and gave him the vision;

2. Brunson worked with Doug (whoever Doug is) and the planners;

3. God worked in the hearts of the people to support the vision.

Steps 1 and 2 worked, but I submit step 3 didn't work. The project was sold to the church as a project that would be paid for by pledges made.

But today, FBC Dallas still owes $8.7 million on the Criswell Building. God apparently didn't tell the people at Dallas that this was God's will, else they would have given the money, right? I mean, if this is how God does His work, as Jeffress said, why didn't God complete step 3?

The question of how anyone can be sure they're doing the right thing when taking a step of faith is a difficult one, and to his credit the author generally keeps his rhetorical tone low. Unfortunately the same cannot be said for some of the people who left comments:

Members also know the "lot" of you are the YES MEN who will agree with anything MB wants. No matter, the "lot of you" can pay off the remaining debt - the pews are more empty than filled these days. Pushing MB to go into debt didn't work!

Etc. For the record I don't pretend to have all the facts in hand regarding the Dallas building situation, but I'm quite curious about how this building program plays out. If I attended FBC Dallas I'd be apprehensive about giving a dime if they're still in debt and justifying a huge building project on the basis of vague appeals to "visions" God is supposed to have passed down to "shepherds." I'd be willing to bet that these "visions" aren't also being given to people who can actually co-sign a loan. 

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Augusten Burroughs: Running with Scissors

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Augusten Burroughs's 2002 memoir Running with Scissors is one of the most disturbing things I've read in a while. Granted, I don't read a lot of fiction, and I don't generally read just for freak value, but I picked this up at my local library on a whim, and by the time I got to the parts I found really disturbing it was really too late to put it down.

The basic story is this: Burroughs's mother is crazy, and she comes under the influence of a psychiatrist who is also crazy. She leaves him at the age of twelve with the doctor and the doctor's family. Hilarity more or less ensues. Some sexuality and adult situations. Some cruelty to animals.

Much of the stuff that jumps out at the casual reader is barely worth name-checking: the sex, the drugs, the codependent behavior. What's left when I ignore all of this is a story of a child who slips through the cracks, who should have gotten attention from welfare officials, but who was mostly ignored, probably on the strength of the leeway society gave psychiatrists at the time. And I suppose a lot of what happens here happens elsewhere in situations where oversight is inadequate, absent, or wrong-headed: cults, communes, foster homes, etc.

And I think that's all I really have to say about it. It struck me as a story of improperly placed trust, social status, etc. and I'm not really sure what else to say about it.

It's a reasonably good example of how an outrageous story becomes more palatable if presented as nonfiction. The story moves briskly. I don't recommend reading it.

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FBC Jax Watchdog series on FBC Dallas building program

The church watch weblog FBC (for First Baptist Church) Jax (for Jacksonville) Watchdog is doing a series on the building program at First Baptist Church Dallas, home of Robert Jeffress. The first installment is here. For those of you who don't follow the goings-on at other churches, FBC Dallas has embarked on a building program in downtown Dallas, and is asking churchgoers to give $140 million.

chairman Ronnie Floyd is telling us that to fund this GCR the money is in the "pockets and portfolios" of the church members - we see that one of the SBC's most historic churches is asking for its members to not dig into their "pockets and portfolios" to fund more missions, but to give 10% or more of all "personal assets" to build a $140 million dollar campus downtown

This of course gives us one piece of a puzzle that arose when religion reporter Frank Lockwood noted that this breaks down to $40,625 per worshiper: the executive management of FBC Dallas don't think of the rank and file as being you know, ordinary middle-class Americans making four to five hundred thousand dollars a year. They instead see the people in their church as the sort of people who have a spare forty thousand dollars stashed in their retirement funds, or mattresses, or what-have-you.

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"meat for lunch for Lent"

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There is so much I do not understand about Catholicism. So much so that when I see a sequence like the following I'm pretty sure I'll never understand what it's like to be Catholic, and I'll double-never-understand what it's like to be ex-Catholic.

Here's Ross Douthat from the Times; I think he's decrying the do-it-yourself of American religiosity, particularly of American mysticism:

In a sense, Americans seem to have done with mysticism what we’ve done with every other kind of human experience: We’ve democratized it, diversified it, and taken it mass market. No previous society has offered seekers so many different ways to chase after nirvana, so many different paths to unity with God or Gaia or Whomever. A would-be mystic can attend a Pentecostal healing service one day and a class on Buddhism the next, dabble in Kabbalah in February and experiment with crystals in March, practice yoga every morning and spend weekends at an Eastern Orthodox retreat center. Sufi prayer techniques, Eucharistic adoration, peyote, tantric sex — name your preferred path to spiritual epiphany, and it’s probably on the table.

I have to admit that I'm so American that I'm genuinely of two minds on this: I love having the freedom to make a mess of my own spiritual practice, but I'm sometimes put off by the messes other people make of their spiritual practices. See e.g. my attempts to make sense of Colin Beavan, the No Impact Man.

But then there's Mary Valle, who I have to thank for mentioning this article:

Ross, do you eat meat for lunch every day otherwise? Really? It’s lunchtime and you’re all “Time for a hamburger! I think I’ll have some chops! Whoa, is that brisket? Garcon! Wheel that meat cart over my way, if you please!”

And I swear I've walked into the middle of a conversation uninvited. In a language I do not speak. Or words to that effect.

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Gribbin and Plagemann: The Jupiter Effect

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John R. Gribbin and Stephen H. Plagemann's 1974 book The Jupiter Effect: The Planets as Triggers of Devastating Earthquakes is believe it or not a book by two scientists (with a foreward by Isaac Asimov, of all people) that predicted a massive California earthquake in the early 1980s. Nowadays it seems like a curosity in a number of ways: it presents data using charts and graphs that were state of the art in 1973 or thereabouts; it talks about massive changes but doesn't mention climate change, global warming, or even peak oil; it even talks about scientific issues without mentioning politics.

It presents a relatively straightforward story: every so often California has a massive earthquake that impacts  one end of the San Andreas fault or the other: either San Francisco and the Bay Area up north, or Los Angeles down south. This is because the San Andreas fault is where the North American plate and the Pacific plate meet, and these two plates are slipping past each other at a fixed average rate, but not at a fixed actual rate. This means that every so often there has to be an earthquake to "catch up:" that is, to release energy stored in the fault over time. The authors present what is reasonably well understood about how often this slippage occurs, present current theories about why earthquakes occur when they do, and propose a theory to explain some of the effects not explained by other theories.

They focus on four sometimes overlapping factors: earth tides, earth spin, solar flares, and sunspot cycles. Earth tides are just what they sound like: periodic movement of the earth along the shoreline due to periodic effects. The spin of the earth has some impact on earth tides, and it fluctuates over time, causing the day to get longer or shorter by tiny fractions of a second. Solar flares seem to have some impact on the changes in the rate of the earth's spin, and the occur because of sunspots. Sunspots and solar flares occur regularly enough for radio experts to issue sunspot weather reports with almanac-like accuracy.

And finally, the authors' theory: planetary alignment causes sunspots. They leave it to the reader to track the uneven distribution of planets as a cause all the way back to the San Andreas fault, where they theoretically would have caused a massive California earthquake in March 1982. Fortunately the massive earthquake didn't arrive.

I hesistate to say it's a shame the earthquake didn't arrive. Of course the sort of displacement and disaster the book predicts would have been awful, but the book itself is one of the leanest, most linear and lucid popular science books I've ever read. It also spawned a sequel, The Jupiter Effect Reconsidered, but I will probably give that one a miss.

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NPR story on 133 C Street SE DC

As I mentioned the other day, a number of pastors have suggested that the C Street house used by the group that runs the National Prayer Breakfast should not be considered a church for tax purposes. This story surfaced on National Public Radio a couple of weeks ago.

The story repeats the inaccurate characterization of The Family as a fundamentalist group:

The three-story, brick townhouse at 133 C Street SE sits a half-block from the Cannon House Office Building, roughly three blocks from the Capitol — the home-away-from-home for a regular contingent of fundamentalist Christian members of Congress, who can pray in the living room and walk to work.

I have to include that either a) the term "fundamentalist Christian" doesn't mean anything, or b) it is misapplied here. There are four Senators mentioned in the piece: Tom Coburn, Mark Sanford, Chip Pickering, and John Ensign. Of these four, Coburn and Pickering are Baptists, Ensign is Foursquare Gospel, and Sanford is Episcopalian. They may be fundamentalists of some stripe, but they're not fundamentalist Christians; fundamentalism just isn't big enough a tent to accommodate both an Episcopalian and a charismatic.

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