Tag: contemporary culture

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Life(style)

WTC Theology: Week 8: A Broken World (@WTCTheology)

wtc-week-8

Thoughts from the videos from Week 8:

Session 8.1: Introduction to Social Justice (Bob Ekblad)

What is the Biblical basis for social justice and advocacy, and what does that look like in contemporary life?

  • Child soldiers, slaves, prostitutes, trafficking, etc. are huge issues.
  • Death penalty in US, homeless, prisoners, asylum seekers etc. need advocacy

Biblical Basis?

  • Gen 1:27-28 (in God’s image)
  • Gen 1/Ps 8 (All creation EXCEPT HUMANS under human dominion)
  • Gen 1:1-2 (God present in darkness)
  • Gen 3-4 (God clothed/sought Adam, Eve, Cain, etc.)
  • Exod 1 (God blesses midwives with doomed baby boys)
  • Exod 2-3 (God knows, hears, sees oppressed)
  • Isaiah 58 (homeless poor – religious practice that doesn’t include them)
  • Gen 16 (Hagar)
  • Gen 18:16-33 (Abraham for Sodom/Lot)
  • Jesus in the incarnation = most radical example

Session 8.2: Basis of Advocacy

  • A God who sees/hears the cries
  • Following the flow of God’s heart (love, not anger) (Exodus 6:1-8)
  • God chooses the weak and humble as his agents (Isaiah 42: 1, 6-8a, 18-22)
  • God recruits those on the margins to become a light to the nations (chooses murderer – Moses – as liberator of the people of Israel)

Session 8.3: Advocacy in the New Testament

The writer of Matthew – a number of women appear (in the genealogy)

  • Tamar (Gen 38) – incest
  • Rahab – prostitute
  • Ruth – Moabitess
  • Bathsheba – possibly Hittite
  • Mary (pregnant with the Holy Spirit, visited by the Angel)
  • John the Baptist (murdered for critiquing Herod)
  • Jesus as Prototypical Advocate (Luke 4) – compassion, taking authority of the devil
  • Holoy Spirit as Advocate – Defender – Comforter

Session 8.4: Social Justice and Advocacy Today

Talking about experience with his charity, esp working with illegal immigrant workers.

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Academic

Fairy Tales? 200 years of the Brothers Grimm

http://www.sxc.hu/photo/790734

The year 2012 will see countless celebrations of the 200th anniversary of the first edition of the Brothers Grimm’s first collection of fairy tales, published as Children’s and Household Tales.

But would Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm have been pleased by all the conferences, books and papers that will honour their work? Actually, they are more likely to be turning in their graves, if they weren’t already, at the mass-mediated hype of fairy tales. Were they alive today, they would surely be concerned that the tales of the folk are being turned into trivial pulp for the masses by the globalised culture industry.

The brothers revered fairy tales, especially the oral “wonder tales”, or märchen, which they saw as innocent expressions and representations of the divine nature of the world. For them, the simplicity of the pristine spoken tales was historically profound, and the Grimms saw themselves as cultivators of lost relics whose essence had to be conserved and disseminated before the tales vanished. The wondrous fairy tales, they firmly believed, enabled people to get in touch with both their inner selves and the outside world. It was because “genuine” fairy tales ran counter to the real world that they served as moral correctives and introduced unique learning processes through exquisite metaphor.

The Grimms promoted the collecting of all sorts of folk tales, and they were certain that if other educated men and women began gathering tales from the common people, these stories, especially fairy tales, would resonate among the young and old in all countries of the world.

Read full story.

 

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Academic

A New Gift: Venereal Disease

OK, I know the Keep Calm and Carry On poster is a hit, but really, WHY would you want to wear this on your t-shirts! I’m giving a conference paper on health propaganda next week, most likely Coughs and Sneezes Spread Diseases, but VD was also another area that I researched (not personally, I hasten to add), and this is what came up when I searched for “Venereal Disease”: http://www.zazzle.co.uk/venereal+disease+gifts?pg=4

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Life(style) Reviewer

Damaris Culturewatch: My Sister’s Keeper (review)

In My Sister’s Keeper, Kate Fitzgerald (Sofia Vassilieva) is diagnosed with acute promyelocytic leukemia when she is two years old, and the prognosis is not positive. Her parents, Sara (Cameron Diaz) and Brian (Jason Patric), and her brother Jesse (Evan Ellingson) are not genetic matches. Sara, at least, will do anything to save Kate, and Dr Wayne (Jeffrey Markle) suggests, off the record, that producing another child in a test-tube would provide a perfectly matched donor. Anna (Abigail Breslin) is the result. The initial expectation is that only the blood from the umbilical cord will be used, but by the time Anna is 11, she’s undergone a number of medical procedures, including bone marrow transplants, and the latest call is for a kidney.

Download the rest of this article (be aware, it contains plot spoilers), which I wrote.
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Life(style)

Bex is totally addicted

“Bex is totally addicted: she can’t resist a sale sign, can’t ignore a new pair of Prada shoes and can convince herself that she ‘needs’ it all. Shopping to Bex is better than falling in love:

‘You know that thing when you see someone cute and he smiles, and your heart kinda goes like warm butter sliding down hot toast? Well, that’s what it’s like when I see a store, only its better’.

Bex is a shopaholic. She sees shopping as infinitely satisfying, unlike men: ‘You see, a man will never love you or treat you as well as a store. If a man doesn’t fit you can’t exchange him seven days later for a gorgeous cashmere sweater.”

Woah, thought somewas was defaming me, but no, it’s Becca Cockram’s review of ‘Confessions of a Shopaholic‘. I think my friend Kate would say that I’m capable of convincing myself that I “need” what I buy, but after having to hoik a load of stuff around whilst travelling, I’d rather have less “stuff” and have more fun!