Tag: NY Times
0 The Gospel of Intolerance
Sigh. Actually, sigh isn’t strong enough of an expression for how this makes me feel. Yet again, this will be another example of how people refuse to follow Jesus simply because they’re revolted by the people who do follow Jesus.
0 By the Power Vested in Me by this Mouse
I’ve often thought the NY Times wedding pages are a good harbinger of the trends to come. Long before ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ died a relatively quiet death and well before a seeming cultural consensus settled about homosexuality, the NY Times posted wedding announcements celebrating gay couples like they we just ordinary couples.
That’s not a comment on the rightness/wrongness of the issue; it’s just a comment that the Times foreshadow future trends.
So here’s another trend.
Those same wedding pages this week wrote a story about the ever-increasing trend of couples getting friends, duly vested in made-up online religions, to preside over their ceremony.
As much as I refuse to pimp myself out to marry couples who are just treating me in the same way they do the caterer, it’s also depressing that an increasing number of people prefer to circumvent any faith element in their wedding altogether.
This is the cultural climate in which we’ll need to figure out how to do Church into the future.
Here’s the article…and before you get your friend to perform your wedding after a few minutes on Google make sure he/she is legal.
IN the days leading up to their August wedding at the Ram’s Head Inn on Shelter Island, Kinara Flagg and Paul Fileri chose Andrew Case, a friend and former law school classmate of Ms. Flagg’s, to officiate.
In the eyes of the couple, Mr. Case, who had become a Universal Life minister through a quick online ordination, was the right man for the job. In the eyes of the law, however, Mr. Case, who was not a part of an active ministry, was officiating in the wrong county.
An increasing number of couples are steering away from traditional religious and civil wedding officiants in favor of friends and relatives who become ordained through online ministries. But many couples are unaware that while New York State recognizes marriages performed by those who became ministers by the power vested in a mouse, there are five downstate counties where such officiants are not technically legal.
Ms. Flagg and Mr. Fileri, who knew that Suffolk County on Long Island, which includes Shelter Island, was among the handful of no-online-minister zones in the state, obtained their marriage license in Monroe County (where Mr. Fileri grew up and which recognizes online ministries), making their wedding a legal union after all.
“It’s surprising that Suffolk County does not recognize these online ministers,” Ms. Flagg said.
Neither do the counties of Nassau, Westchester, Putnam or Dutchess, owing to a 1989 ruling by the Appellate Division of the State Supreme Court in a case involving a Suffolk County couple who were then embroiled in a divorce. In that case, the court ruled that the couple’s marriage and prenuptial agreement were void because their officiant was a Universal Life minister.
Though Ms. Flagg speaks for many married couples when she says “we wanted a friend to marry us, someone who could speak about us to our friends and family, rather than a person who doesn’t really know us and recites a lot of formulaic vows,” it remains that Connecticut, Alabama, Virginia, Tennessee, a part of Pennsylvania and (of all places) Las Vegas do not necessarily recognize the credentials of officiants who were created, for better or worse, through such online ministries as the Universal Life Church, the Church of Spiritual Humanism, Rose Ministries and the Temple of Earth.
For many years, New York City also did not recognize online ministers, but in 2006 began allowing them to officiate at weddings in the five boroughs. But the appellate court’s ruling still holds for the other counties. (In September 2007, a couple in York County, Pa., who had been married two months earlier by an online minister received a call from a county clerk who told them that a judge had ruled that ministers who do not have a “regularly established church or congregation” cannot perform marriages under state law. Their marriage, they were told, might not be valid. Representatives of the American Civil Liberties Union advised them to seek help from the organization if the legality of their marriage was ever challenged.)
New York Assemblywoman Sandy Galef, a Westchester County Democrat, who has been trying since 2005 to pass a bill in Albany that would give online officiants legal power to marry couples throughout the state, said, “We need to change the law so that people everywhere can be legally married by online ministers.”
“I have had lots of conversations about this issue with the Judiciary Committee staff in Albany, and everyone knows something needs to be done,” Ms. Galef said. “I’m not quite sure what is blocking this bill. Is there opposition from priests, rabbis and other clergymen who see this as both a competitive and economic thing? I just don’t know.”
The Rev. Kent Winters-Hazelton, who once served in a no-online-minister zone at the United Community Church of Wantagh on Long Island, in Nassau County, and is now pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in Lawrence, Kan., said that he understood why some states still do not recognize online ministers.
“In some places, there is still an understanding that certain qualifications have to be met by a minister or a justice of the peace before they are legally able to perform marriages,” he said. “And I agree with that.”
Here’s the rest of the article.
4 Is Hipsterism Inherently UnChristian?
Ask yourself: Do I communicate primarily through inside jokes and pop culture references? What percentage of my speech is meaningful? How much hyperbolic language do I use? Do I feign indifference? Look at your clothes. What parts of your wardrobe could be described as costume-like, derivative or reminiscent of some specific style archetype? In other words, is your style an anti-style?
I like beards.
And, as I’ve mentioned before, I home-brewed before it was trendy to do so.
That’s about where I part ways with the hipster movement- that, and being a tail-end Gen Xer, I’m too old for the movement.
Take a look at seminary campuses, however, and you will see the hipster’s intentionally cultivated look of antiquation everywhere. It might lead you to conclude the trend is but a form of Christian subterfuge.
And yet….and yet…perhaps at root there’s something about hipsterism that’s deeply at odds with the Christian faith.
Consider the argument made in the NY Times by Christy Wampole:
The irony of the Hipster is the most self-defensive mode, as it allows a person to dodge responsibility for his or her choices, aesthetic and otherwise. To live ironically is to hide in public. It is flagrantly indirect, a form of subterfuge, which means etymologically to “secretly flee” (subter + fuge). Somehow, directness has become unbearable to us.
One of the points I like to make to couples preparing for their wedding is that marriage is a means of grace precisely because it forces us into a relationship of mutual vulnerability. Physical nakedness isn’t the only kind of nakedness required by marriage. There’s an emotional nakedness too.
And, in this way, I think marriage points out a deeper, more fundamental truth about what it means to be a Christian; namely, just as Jesus makes himself completely vulnerable to the Father and follows his path in faithfulness, we demonstrate our faith by our willingness to be vulnerable, genuine, real and authentic to others.
If this so then there’s something incongruent between following Jesus and following an intentionally defensive posture.
Of course, maybe this speculation hits home for me because, while fashion may not be my thing, I am ironic to the core. What Wampole says about herself could easily be my own confession:
I find it difficult to give sincere gifts. Instead, I often give what in the past would have been accepted only at a White Elephant gift exchange: a kitschy painting from a thrift store, a coffee mug with flashy images of “Texas, the Lone Star State,” plastic Mexican wrestler figures. Good for a chuckle in the moment, but worth little in the long term. Something about the responsibility of choosing a personal, meaningful gift for a friend feels too intimate, too momentous. I somehow cannot bear the thought of a friend disliking a gift I’d chosen with sincerity. The simple act of noticing my self-defensive behavior has made me think deeply about how potentially toxic ironic posturing could be.
Realizing I’m guilty as charged, I wonder if it’s not, after all, a bad thing that, as my 6 year old son likes to point out with glee, it only takes a 20 second trailer of The Blind Side (‘You threaten my son, you threaten me’) to get me to weeping like a baby. Seriously.
I’ve always been embarrassed by falling prey to such a saccharine movie but now I wonder if it might not be good news.
Here’s the full article by Wampole.
2 Are Democratic Women Uglier?
Gosh, I really hope people read more than the header.
According to the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, specific facial cues may be an indicator of party affiliation and the results suggest that women identifying with the Democratic Party appear…mannish?
What exactly is one to do with a study like this?
1. Wonder what worthless, juvenile interest prompted it?
2. Wonder why on earth this matters?
3. Wonder why psychologists couldn’t spend their time researching something that could be a bit more helpful to society?
4. Send it up in witty mockery?
That’s what Samantha Bee, from the Daily Show, does in Sunday’s NY Times. It’s pretty hilarious and not only because she works in both references to Smoky and the Bandit and ‘boob honking.’
DID you know that science can teach you all sorts of amazing things about how the world works and why it works that way and how the dinosaurs probably all had feathers? Did you know that it can also teach you things that you never wanted to know and now not-so-secretly wish you didn’t?
I am referring to a recent study out of the U.C.L.A. Department of Psychology that determined that the women of the Grand Old Party have more feminine faces than those of their female Democratic colleagues. In conducting the study, researchers analyzed the faces of the House of Representatives in the 111th Congress based on objective measures of feminine facial structure. The faces were then rated according to gender-typical femininity, and shown to undergraduate students, who (in exchange for course credit) were asked to judge which political party they thought each face was affiliated with. The students guessed correctly with surprising accuracy.
The resulting data suggested that the more conservative a female politician is, the more likely her face will conform to subtleties that are considered typically feminine. The flip side being that more liberal female politicians tend to have less feminine facial structures. As in: they’re more masculine, I guess. As in: terrific.
The researchers call it the “Michele Bachmann Effect.” Funny, but that’s exactly how I refer to the tingly feeling that overtakes me when I read or hear something so profoundly ridiculous that I briefly consider living the rest of my life in monkish isolation on a mountaintop with only the cold wind for companionship.
Listen, anybody who has ever attended the Democratic National Convention knows that Democratic women prefer flats over heels, by an estimated ratio of 10 to 1. After all, if the sensible shoe fits… But this is anecdotal. It’s the type of research done after three days of being yelled at on the convention floor by people in 10-gallon hats, with only a steady diet of Coke Zero and SunChips to keep you upright. You’re punchy. Who can blame you for slumping on the floor outside a women’s washroom and counting people’s feet as they go by?
But this U.C.L.A. study contains measurable scientific data collected by actual professional scientists who have just basically given us the green light to go ahead and judge a book by its cover. And though the data offered no evidence as to the relative “attractiveness” of either party’s representatives (as the face-modeling software controlled for superficial markers like makeup and hairstyles), why would that stop anyone from conflating gender typicality with sex appeal? The answer is ha ha, of course it wouldn’t, but I adore your innocence.
I can’t figure out which part of this story is the most unforgivably retro. Is it the part where the Internet is flooded by a tsunami of bickering over which political party has the “prettier” members of Congress and/or prettier voters? Followed by smug accusations of sour grapes, actual sour grapes, and finally resentful grumbling by lots of women in comfort clogs, maybe even including me. (It’s none of your business but I require them for the back support. Take it easy, I have a doctor’s note.)
Or is it the part that suggests that a key factor in the electability and, dare I say, presence of a female politician on a national stage can be dependent on something as random as the placement of her eyebrows? Are there really subtle ways in which people would consider a woman suitable for office that are rooted in their visceral reaction to the width and prominence of her cheekbones? Well, probably.
All I know is that once I finished reading the study I’m pretty sure 1970s Burt Reynolds reached across the passenger seat of his Trans Am to give me a wink and a boob honk.
Thankfully, the “sex typical” phenomenon applies only to female members of Congress. When it comes to male members of Congress, the results of the study are somewhat less conclusive. So guys, feel free to go to work on behalf of your constituents without wondering for a second whether psych undergrads around the country are hotly debating whether or not you got hit at birth with an ugly stick. Don’t you worry your pretty little man-heads about it.
In the end, of course, it’s hard to know what the take-away is for voters: What should bother us more — that a scholarly journal decided to float this information out into the pre-election maelstrom of partisan nastiness or that some people will relish the findings and distribute the study as a voting guide?
Perhaps over time the answer — and the usefulness of this research — will reveal itself. But until that comes to pass, perhaps science could take a crack at something I can use right now, like time manipulation, since I can’t help but yearn for the person I was before reading this study. The person not compelled to consider the possibility that her own facial structure could be construed as “mannish.” By a certain light.
1 The Gay Debate: The Bible and Homosexuality
What does scripture say about homosexuality?
Does scripture condemn loving, monogamous gay relationships? Does it? Are you sure?
The NY Times ran a story on Sunday about Matthew Vines a young gay Christian whose lifelong church, and many lifelong friends, couldn’t abide his sexuality nor his insistence that he was still in the parameters of scripture.
I’ve written here before that Christians of good will can and do disagree over this issue, but here’s what I have no patience for: Christians- on either side- who make their arguments and pronouncements pro or con but have no actual knowledge of what scripture says. I hear a lot of ‘the bible teaches…’ by people who don’t seem to really know what in fact the bible teaches.
And that’s what I admire about Matthew Vines’ story. Rejected by his church and many friends, he’s responded A) not in anger or despair and B) not by giving up on the faith. Instead he’s taken on a teaching mission to unpack just what scripture says on these thorny issues. Disagree with him if you like; however, his drive and zeal to be counted among God’s People is to be admired.
Here’s the story. And just below is Matthew’s presentation on You Tube. It’s worth a full watch.