intersections

My sermon at Crosswalk is now online

The sermon I gave at the Crosswalk Church on February 2 is now online at the Crosswalk Church website. The sermon is entitled, The Corporation, and is essentially a theological response to the corporation and the form of life embodied by free-market capitalism. If you haven't seen the documentary film, The Corporation, I highly recommend it. I'd love to hear what you think of the message after you listen to or watch it.

NT Wright on Heaven

NT Wright has a new book out (by the way, how does this guy do it? I'm in awe!) called, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection and the Mission of the Church. My copy is on its way from an Amazon.com warehouse to my door as I type!

Here's an really interesting article and interview with Wright from Time magazine. I highly recommend this short piece from Time. I'll let you know about the book after I read it, but as some of you know, NT Wright is something of a hero with me so I'm predisposed to agree with him. He's one of the top 5 people I'd like to meet someday.

Here's a short quote to whet your appetite. It has interesting resonances with Adventist theology of the nature of people, death, resurrection, heaven and hell.

Our culture is very interested in life after death, but the New Testament is much more interested in what I've called the life after life after death — in the ultimate resurrection into the new heavens and the new Earth. Jesus' resurrection marks the beginning of a restoration that he will complete upon his return. Part of this will be the resurrection of all the dead, who will "awake," be embodied and participate in the renewal. John Polkinghorne, a physicist and a priest, has put it this way: "God will download our software onto his hardware until the time he gives us new hardware to run the software again for ourselves." That gets to two things nicely: that the period after death is a period when we are in God's presence but not active in our own bodies, and also that the more important transformation will be when we are again embodied and administering Christ's kingdom.

My Delicious Library

For just less than a year I've been using Delicious Library to catalogue my books and it's really wonderful. If you use a Mac and love books, this is definitely the software for you. Recently, thanks to my friend Johnny Ramirez, I was introduced to a small (free) program that will make a webpage out of your Delicious Library catalogue. It's called DeliciWeb and you can download it here. It takes a while if you have a lot of books in your library, but it does make your library available for others to look at online.

You can connect to my library by clicking here. There are some 560 book in there, so it will take a bit to load. There's a link to request to borrow a book which sends an email to the owner of the library. It's not perfect. As best I can tell it's listing my books in random order in spite of the fact that I've check the "sort by author's name" checkbox in the Preferences. If anyone has any tips I'm all ears!

The Cost of War

President Bush just released his budget yesterday, which calls for a 8.1% increase in Pentagon spending while cutting domestic programs like Medicare for the poor and elderly and more than doubling the federal deficit, according to the LA Times. All of this, AND...experts say the real cost of continuing the war is not reflected in his budget. Not even close.

Please look at this video by the American Friends Service Committee, a ministry of the Quakers.