Your Asthmatic Grandchildren Will Not Care to Hear Your Reasons For Not Occupying Wall Street

How long have we been comfortable in the 1st world church? Nourishing ourselves on the warm broth of prayer and fellowship, resting and gathering strength, singing worship songs that seek an inward peace from God, a strengthened personal faith.

How much time do we spend on theologies seeking to eradicate lust, or to be more grateful for what we have? How long have we spent on our morning devotions, alone?

As another time understood, "Idle hands are the devils playthings."

The Occupy Wall Street Movement as the Body of Christ

It is difficult for individualist-minded Christians to join a populist movement. This is because we want to intellectually assent, as we would to articles of faith, to the intellectual propositions of Occupy Wall Street. But popular movements are living, breathing entities.

When we join a political movement, like when we join the church, we gain brothers and sisters we are sometimes ashamed of. There are missionaries who we dislike, dogmas and creeds that we disagree with. But we are still part of the church, following Christ, for better of for worse.

Looking up from the godless bits and vectors

It costs the (post)modern man to look at the waves and see God. The pre-modern human would have seen, in the cresting foam, an unexplainable force which could rise in fury to destroy, or, in turn, yield a rich bounty. Behind it were god(s) who must be placated or served.

But we can look at the waves and see fluid mechanics, gravity, and the protean force of life, evolving steadily: the selfish gene reproducing itself. We peer into the depths of nature and see bits or vectors, beautiful, chaotic, elegantly ordered, or dangerous.

But to look up, to God? Why would we look upwards to a Creator-God? We have all the miracle we need inside the very atoms that comprise us.

Action is a Tree Planted in the Heart

I am concerned for my generation because prevailingly, we believe that tinkering with our governmental and economic systems will create the definitively just world. For many of us, we believe that if equal opportunity and equal resources were provided, we'd arrive at utopia.

As a Christian, I am a stranger to the world, an alien, a sojourner. I find common cause with people working for a more just world, and I work alongside them. But I only believe in a better world than the one we've got, not a perfect one.

A Prophetic Christianity Against Religious Elitism

I am rarely surprised when fellow bloggers like

Mike Friesen and Lydia Schoch mention foul experiences amongst Christians. I recently had a long conversation with an Italian friend who wondered why I could possibly be both a Christian and an advocate for social justice when Catholicism has brought so much intolerance to Europe. He considered that intolerance must be the core of Christianity itself, because this has been its fruit.

Nonviolence, or Ahimsa? Choosing Truth-Firmness

Nonviolence. Ahimsa, "not-hurting." Gandhi proposed another word, satyagraha, or "truth-force."

I have given nonviolence trainings where people believed that any form of property destruction, strong disagreement, or disobedience of authority was a form of violence. For them, nonviolence was ahimsa, or not-hurting. It is easy, using this negative concept, to negate any action at all, from the carnage wrought among ants by the walking person, to the car emissions fueling planetary climate change. In the face of such an full negation, Ahimsa leads to quietism, inaction, and support for the status quo.

The limiting factor of health in love, or, lessons from a chronic illness

Some of you may know that I am recently recovered from a 5-year illness that caused me chronic fatigue. With problems relating to energy levels, it is as though the color has been washed from the world: all things are dimmed. Mornings are a sort of apocalypse, the end of sleep.

Before my digestive illness contracted traveling in Central America, I was ravenously health. Addicted to my own sense of well-being, I glutted myself on health's joy. Entitled, I did not understand why others lacked the energy or will to walk long distances or push through pain.

The Rebellion of Artificial Intelligence: Paradise Lost in Tron

It is inevitable that all sufficiently intelligent systems will confound their creator-gods.  Tron's story is the story of the war of angels from Paradise Lost, which is in turn the narrative of what it means to create a child, a being differentiated from the self, with a will that can confound the will of its creator. The very framework of the universe, mathematics, was confounded by this problem of created freedom, which was the stumbling block that ended the quest to ground mathematics in formal logic.

Using WikiLeaks to Shape History as it Happens

Cross-posted on ReadWriteWeb!

The problem with working to change United States foreign policy is that you're never really sure what it's going on behind the curtain. By the time you have submitted a FOIA request and the government deems your information save, the present has passed into history. Which raises the question, will Wikileaks bring us the transparency we need to be able to understand the internal workings of US covert operations?

Dreaming of Corporate Social Responsibility

In a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, Dr. Karnani makes the case that corporate responsibility is a distraction from the true purpose of companies, to maximize shareholder value. Reading through his article, I found myself persuaded in the opposite direction.

At EchoDitto, we are engaged in a continuous conversation about what it means to be a responsible company: who we want to work with, what we want to do, and how we work for a sustainable world.

bicycle-gholem

the fire in my flesh

a bicycle-gholem
from the amputated and discarded

the bionics of a thousand worlds
all impossible, forgotten
a lace of time
resolving to now
discarded limbs, all
remembered
touching and flexing the lost
moments of departure
dead flesh kindled
in the fire of what was not
the haunting
of a limb that never was

i feel the jar of steel
through my hands and feet
as i ride her
the memories and frustrations
carry me

Madness and Civilization

In the midst of Foucault's book, Madness and Civilization, I find myself once again wondering about this blanketing expanse of reason that is computing, or the mechanization of all matter, rendering it inert, the thing we call science. Computing is the vast citadel of passive reason, motored by science. It is at the outskirts of this empire that I speculate.

That is, before we carve this empire, we face a vast and raging sea: madness.

oars in the water

i am myself
lived through me
another's hand
upon me

i am in love
with her
she is a prescient guide
past my doubts
and troubled questions

I must persevere
as I have done
for less
towards less.

There is no returning
only the dip of oars
soft in the night
lapping at the stillness
in my soul
as i move towards the moon
on the water

ahab

I am Ahab
that terrible king
of self

Fate
a godless windup
ratcheting its red arms

Blasphemy
is an empty hatred
motored as I am
a blood-turned turbine

Hope
a harpoon
thrust towards the leviathan

Life
crushed to oil

Fuel
for the machine

god of a tiny world

i am awake in dawn

thoughtlessly alive
in a stream of life

past a collection of islands
against a grey sea
in a system of seas
infinite swirling grey
revolving about an black abyss
that is needing

i am moving
in increments
of eight
by sixty
by sixty

I am moving
still smaller
past atoms
quarks
leptons
bosons
and fermions
the spaces between things
are not rules, no.

Pages

Subscribe to