Misc. Wednesday

• Hillary plays my favorite game from my childhood. That's why we love her:

Lady in the Yellow Jacket '08 Clap Clap Point Point

• So, it seems that bloggers do have some influence in the Evangelical Christian Academic World after all. Just crappy, negative and plain ignorant influence. To be fair, my brother went to this school (Cedarville, in southern Ohio near Dayton) and it is on the right side of the Evangelical shrift, but the fact that they were scared off of featuring a speaker (an avowed Christian speaker, who works in the Christian realm) by some bloggers who aren't even in the school because this speaker, Shane Claiborne, is in some way - although not officially - partial to the Emergent movement. To people who are not aware, for a smidgen of the right-wing Ev world, Emergents are the devil. That's because it is a movement that's hard to try to figure out. So people who don't know anything about history or church history (well, outside of the Reformers and their followers, perhaps) see it as an affront to the Church and orthodoxy, not understanding that their understanding of 'orthodoxy' (or, right teaching) is very much informed by the Age of Reasoning and is every bit as dangerous as - if not more so than - any of the theology or even pseudo-theology peddled by the Emergents (which, again, is a very wide tent and is extremely diverse in their practices and doctrinal leanings. It is not an organized or centralized classification or denomination. The only real constant is that Emergents want to do church differently in order to reach - and because they are a part of - a different generation).

But the truth is, a visit to Claiborne's website has me more convinced that he is much more old-school and orthodox (and creative. And compassionate) than those that fear him and try to shut him up.

The bad news is that the school was scared off by scare tactics of people who aren't even directly involved in the school, who would not go to the meetings in the first place, who would not even talk with Mr. Claiborne themselves, but rather - from a place of unnecessary fear and through a place of constipating fear - put pressure on a school to so-called maintain its integrity.

Bull. If they have integrity, they shouldn't worry about hearing someone out (especially an activist who was going to speak on dealing with the poor out of a genuine place) just because they disagree with him.

Heck, maybe they were offended by truth such as this:

If you ask most people what Christians believe, they can tell you, “Christians believe that Jesus is God’s Son and that Jesus rose from the dead.” But if you ask the average person how Christians live, they are struck silent. We have not shown the world another way of doing life. Christians pretty much live like everybody else; they just sprinkle a little Jesus in along the way. And doctrine is not very attractive, even if it’s true.

• Even though we really don't watch tv in this house (and there should be enough movies to keep us busy for awhile - although, I haven't found much besides Once that Jen and I both liked), I'm more than glad that the strike is over. It was draining watching Conan spin his little coins several times in a row, trying to beat his record. Not the same as his Walker, Texas Ranger lever. Speaking of Walker, though, this was probably the best part of the strike, the "ongoing feud" between Conan O'Brien, Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart.

• Interesting article at Ypulse about how affluent suburban kids are more messed up than inner-city kids.