Friday in the wild - July 15, 2005

It's Friday, and that means it's time for the end-of-week roundup of interesting reading around the blogosphere. It was a busy week, making up for a couple of lacklustre ones.

Philosopher and theologian Douglas Groothius has a new blog: The Constructive Curmudgeon. How can I not plug it with a name like that?

My blog is called The Constructure [sic] Curmudgeon because I believe that truth-tellers, no matter how malligned [sic] or ignored, are crucial for living a serious and honest life. The curmudgeon is bothered by poppycock, humbug, bovine excrement, and any form of lies or intellectually lazy communication or inauthentic living. Curmudgeons have little tolerance for trendiness, cliches, or fashionable nonsense. Although they may be old and jaded, there hero is the little boy in the fable who said, "The emperor has no clothes." Indeed, curmudgeons denude pretense and prevarication for the sake of truth. That is the aim, the goal, the ideal - however inadquately [sic] realized. The curmudgeon himself needs to be corrected by fellow curmudgeons.

[Read Curmudgeonhood: Opening Salvo]

This curmudgeon agrees: allow me to point out that constructive, maligned, and inadequately were the words Dr. Groothius was reaching for. 8-)

Update: I have been informed by the good doctor himself that the correct spelling of his name is "Groothuis. Mea culpa; I'm especially embarrassed since my own name is frequently misspelled. This is why neither one of us calls himself the Infallible Curmudgeon, I'm sure.

Adrian Warnock caught my eye this week with a bit of speculative theology: Did Paul ever meet Jesus during his earthly ministry?

All my Christian life people have told me Paul never met Jesus during his ministry. I have somehow instinctively never quite believed it. Why you ask? The main reason is psychological. Paul was driven by such hatred to persecute christians it seems hard to believe he hadn't met the object of his fury. I suspect Paul had met Jesus, indeed I wonder whether many of Luke's Pharisee encounters were actually told to him by Paul.

[Read Did Paul meet Jesus when he was on earth?]

Don't forget to read the continuing discussion in the comments section.

I was going to highlight The Howling Coyote's excellent post on C. S. Lewis and Douglas Adams, but then he outdid himself on his other blog, The Texas Baptist Underground. James points out that certain fundamentalist "leaders"' attitude toward women stands in sharp relief to the Lord's:

Though Jesus sometimes leveled harsh words toward his enemies, he never did so toward a woman. Though Jesus often launched epithets toward the religious leaders of his day, never toward a woman.

In what opposition we find the ministry of Bob Gray to the noble portrait Scripture paints of Christ. Time after time after time I have heard Gray demean and humiliate women from the pulpit. If you have had any exposure to his ministry at all, and if you are honest, you will have to admit the same.

Heifer, whore, hussy, mammy-woofer, these colorful metaphors find their way into almost every sermon in some way or another and they are all used to describe women in general or sometimes even specific, individual women in Bob Gray's sermons.

[Read Demeaning the Fairer Sex]

("Mammy-woofer"? Never heard that one before.)

Here's a post from the Thinklings that caused a few waves over on the Fightin' Fundamentalist Forum. It turns out that the world's biggest rock star, of all people, has a better Christian testimony than the pastor of America's biggest church:

Okay, so Bono has a knack for using profanity. He is soft on ecumenicalism. He is probably a universalist or at least an inclusivist of some sort. He is "liberal" when it comes to politics and most social issues (including, I think, abortion and gay rights). Put all that on hold just for a second. Because when asked pointed "religious" questions by a mainstream journalist, Bono preaches the whole gospel - sin, grace, Jesus, the full deal. He even manages to contextualize it for his audience (in this case, the interviewer and the interviewer's readers), but the gospel of Jesus Christ is right there shining clearly.

[Read Bono Preaches the Gospel]

The award for "Most Incoherent New Blog of the Week" goes to Thucydides 67, an anonymous nitwit who apparently decided to grab the Blunderbuss O' Truth^TM from above the mantle and go postal on pretty much everyone. Blogging while medicated should be outlawed. And that's all I have to say about that.

The Googlers have been sane this week; not a second's worth of search-engine weirdness has come my way.

Until next week, enjoy.