Lets stage our own Greenslide. If every member of your church joined the Greens and advocated for the environment, for social justice, and for a less rabidly anti-Christian platform we’d have the makings of a fantastic party.

(Via St. Eutychus.)

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From a recent issue of the New Yorker, Adam Gopnik surveys a recent selection of books about who Jesus was.

The American scholar Bart Ehrman has been explaining the scholars’ truths for more than a decade now, in a series of sincere, quiet, and successful books. Ehrman is one of those best-selling authors like Richard Dawkins and Robert Ludlum and Peter Mayle, who write the same book over and over — but the basic template is so good that the new version is always worth reading. In his latest installment, ‘Jesus, Interrupted’, Ehrman once again shares with his readers the not entirely good news he found a quarter century ago when, after a fundamentalist youth, he went to graduate school: that all the Gospels were written decades after Jesus’ death; that all were written in Greek, which Jesus and the apostles didn’t speak and couldn’t write (if they could read and write at all); and that they were written as testaments of faith, not chronicles of biography, shaped to fit a prophecy rather than report a profile.

Shame about those, you know, facts.

There were, however, a couple of mitigating factors at play that you should know about. I was 15. I’d never heard of him. I listened to about 20 seconds of each track in the shop, and it sounded ok, so I bought it. (When I got it home I realised that it’s exactly the same as those 20 seconds, repeated over and over and over and ….) It’s at the very bottom of my CD collection, having been played through once only.

But I do own the CD. And as a sax player, I cringe each and every time I hear someone speaking approvingly of him.

Which is why this essay by Pat Metheney on the musical and cultural value—or lack thereof—of Kenny G’s music is so awesome:

By disrespecting Louis, his legacy and by default, everyone who has ever tried to do something positive with improvised music and what it can be, Kenny G has created a new low point in modern culture – something that we all should be totally embarrassed about – and afraid of.

(h/t kottke)

[h/t bathgate]

(Note: extraordinarily and graphically awful, not least because of the church’s siding with the powerful and charismatic over the weak. Powerful and disturbing reading.)

Steep is the descent into orthographic antinomianism.

But there’s other gold there too. Programmers, especially: go read it.

Use it wisely, friends.

I read an article this morning about some poorer examples of Twilight defence:

But the people — my God — the people who unironically love Twilight, who scour the Internet to find opportunities to defend it, who suffer weird delusions of grandeur — these people terrify me.

For what it is, it’s interesting. Both for the examples of hopeless comments (presumably made by teenage girls), but also for the counter-attacks in the comments. From both sides there’s a whole lot of “ZOMG you are so wrong you should just shut up and die!!!11!!“, only one side has slightly better grammar. And a superiority complex.

The very next random link was all about language: snarkiness, to be exact.

[Earnestness] builds a case; flippancy gets to just dance entertainingly on a case. One is the way you talk to people who get you, the other is the way you explain yourself to people who don’t. Teenagers are really amazing at one and often really poor at the other; they like being gotten, and they haven’t collected much information yet about what other people’s assumptions even are.

This kind of thing is often really important in Christian ministry—both earnestness and flippancy. The whole project is to establish sincerely and clearly the truth of the good news about Jesus. In lots of contexts, though, the key do communicating effectively is to be (at least partly) within the subculture of the group, whether it’s teenagers or retirees.

That’s where appropriate flippancy is gold. A one-liner that the 14-year-old gets (but maybe her parents don’t) goes a long way. It says ‘I understand you; I get where you’re coming from… and so you can probably get what I’m saying too’.

To pull off that one-liner, though, requires a bunch of cultural know-how. Get to know the people you’re with, what makes them tick, what they watch, listen to, love, hate, talk about, don’t know about. Not just to give you the sociological credit, but in order to really love them—it’s near impossible to love people you don’t know.

Maybe even—just maybe—watch Twilight.