move that bus!

After a few hours of reading Benjamin Barber's Consumed, a book about the infantilist ethos in the current marketplace I decided to give my brain a rest and turned on the TV. 10,000 miles away from home I was able to turn on "Extreme Home Makeover" on Aussie TV and get a quick Yankee Fix via the fairly obnoxious Ty Pennington.

I've always been a bit suspicious of "Extreme Home Makeover." Watching it, viewers get a sense of satisfaction, distantly experiencing the gratification of philanthropy, living vicariously through the ABC design team.

Consumed considers the idea of two third worlds: the actual third world and the third world within the first world. The third world within the first world is able to experience the temptation of the marketplace without ever being able to participate in it. The third world has even less power because there is no real incentive for the consumer marketplace to consider it: it has very little disposable income. Third world children are some of the most marginalized and exploited citizens of the world because, unlike first world children who hugely influence the marketplace because of their ability to influence adult spending, third world children have absolutely no buying power.

Later, this thought was a light bulb above my head during "Extreme Home Makeover." Not only does the show allow people to satisfy their philanthropic urges through the personalities on television, but it is a terrific example of infantilization penetrating popular culture. A home makeover show that chooses American families that have experienced some sort of hardship and remodels their home into a veritable dreamland. It is essentially indulgent charity. (Sponsored by your friendly, hometown Sears!) Though the people chosen by ABC are certainly in a state of need, it is relative. Need for a working class family in America is drastically different than need in many parts of the rest of the world. It is charity for those in a lesser state of need: upgrading them from American struggle to American luxury. The lottery of charities.

The problem with this lottery mentality is that it further cements the childish notion of fantastic, almost magical luck and fortune. Furthermore, it implies that the goal in life is to attain riches. Instead of simply providing the crucial needs to as many people as possible and minimizing the actual weight of poverty, this show practices true indulgence. The families are given mansions, new cars, big checks, and all the little plasma and flat screen extras to boot. It engrains a cultural acceptance of self-indulgence by using it as a rewards to families as the ultimate act of charity, without really attacking major problems.

It subtly projects the message that poverty is easy to cure and as simple as a shot at a middle class living for one family.

It also successfully alienates the average American consumer (coincidentally the same person being appealed to by "Extreme Home Makeover") from the real problems and needs that exist in the world. This further promotes the consumer to stay young: cementing infantilization. By keeping the consumer focused on indulgence as a goal and to keep the consumer from ignoring and even disbelieving the reality of poverty in the world, the consumer will continue to do its job: consume. They will consume without conscience or fear of the consequences, as Barber further points out. The consumer climate today is of spending without consequence, what Barber describes as the ultimate "disempowerment" of the consumer. The consumer is insulated from the true depth of the problems and needs of the world and free from feeling the need to solve this problem or amend their buying habits to contribute less to an oppressive system. "Extreme Home Makeover" and its cultural colleague successfully insulate the American consumer from the reality of the links between consumption and world poverty.

It is easier for middle class America to live with their comforts and indulgences when it thinks donating canned goods to a homeless shelter and writing a few checks is the end of their responsibility to a suffering world. If ever there were a true lottery it was what I won when I was born a middle class American citizen. Being insulated cements infantilization because it helps us to neglect responsibility; the real treasure of childhood, after all is the lack of real responsibilities. We are rewriting history as it happens, choosing to believe enough to help us rationalize our indulgent, selfish lifestyles. After all, indulgence is the prize they're handing out to needy families on "Extreme Home Makeover."

Don't get me wrong, I don't have an easy solution. Perhaps you should read this book. Consider your own buying habits. Evaluate what your lifestyle says about how you view the world. How does it reflect your faith or your faith perspective? I did. And it is refreshing. And sometimes surprising. When I considered all the ways consumerism affected my life and then I thought about all the ways I could take it out of my life, I was surprised by how attached to it I was. I'm proud to say I've given up many forms of shopping and consuming, but there are parts I'm still working out of my system. The point is, evaluating your own lifestyle and the way you give of your time and your resources can be really eye-opening and challenging, and ultimately so rewarding. When you think about how your lifestyle can speak to your views about justice and responsibility in the world, it can be pretty compelling. And I bet you're up for the challenge.

Stay tuned. The consumpti-rants will soon continue.

This blog sponsored by Sears.
Because Sears gives poor people free stainless steel refrigerators.

god was green before it was trendy

In my quest to read the Bible in 90 days I fell off the wagon. So, after a long winter holiday I have resumed my 25 pages/day schedule. I highly advocate my method, suggested to me by celebripastor Joy Douglas Strome.
Actually, she's not a celebrity, just my beloved pastor from Lake View Presbyterian Church back in Chicago. But having a blog these days makes one want to celebri-everything. Perez Hilton is the new black.

Anyway, Joy suggested that I read the Bible several sections at a time- drawing from the major collections in the Old and New Testament. So each day I read a bit from the Torah, the History, the Poetry and Writings, the Prophets, the Gospels, and the Epistles. It reminds you that the Bible is a mosaic, the individual tiles connect to create one unified picture. Thanks, Joy. (Check her out Sunday mornings at 9 and 11 at Lake View Presby in Wrigleyville!)

As I get back into the swing of things I'm doing a quick review of my pre-holiday reading and I came across something in Job that surprised me. I've read Job several times and I always react to it differently. Last time around I remember feeling irritated with the whole situation. Job's family was dead, his friends were jerks, and then God comes and lectures him. I mean, Job's consolation prize at the end of the chapter is the least God could do for using righteous Job to teach millions of Jews and Christians a lesson.

But this time around I noticed something. My former heretical reaction aside, I began understand the reasoning behind a popular opinion on God's speeches to Job. God is communicating something very important to Job (and us) here; He is bigger than all our concepts of Him. He comes to assert, "I am the Lord" and that's it. But that really does say it all, doesn't it? I am the Lord. The alpha and the omega. The beginning and the end. What more do you need to know?

Which is where God pauses to get on His green soap box. In explaining to Job the role of creating and caring for the world, God doesn't merely talk about His relationship with humans, but with the natural world that He created and cares for, as well. He proceeds to lovingly admire His many natural works, a reminder of His pleasure during creation, "It was good."

God loves on the sky:
"Do you know the balancings of the clouds, the wondrous works of the one whose knowledge is perfect, you whose garments are hot when the earth is still because of south wind? Can you, like him, spread out the skies, hard as a molten mirror?"
Job 37: 16-18

God loves on the ocean:
"Who shut in the sea with doors when it burst out from the womb? When I made the clouds its garment, and thick darkness its swaddling band, and prescribed bounds for it, and set bars and doors, and said, 'Thus far shall you come, and no farther, and here shall your proud waves be stopped.'"
Job 38: 8-11

God loves on animals:
"Do you know when the mountain goats give birth? Do you observe the calving of the deer? Can you number the months that they fulfill; and do you know the time when they give birth, when they crouch to give birth to their offspring, and are delivered of their young?"
Job 39: 1-3

I must say, I was surprised I had missed this part. Last time around I was so distracted by my annoyance at God that I completely missed His little public service announcement. God loves all His stuff. The sky, the land, the sea, the animals, the rain, the snow, the morning, the afternoon, the evening. After all, he made it! And when He says to Job, "Where were you when I wallpapered the sky, when I fenced in the ocean, when I watched each animal give birth? Oh yeah, I forgot. You weren't even born." God establishes His supreme love and care in creating this place and also that even the righteous Job can be humbled. And when it comes to the green dilemma we have on our hands now, I think it's time we be humbled, too.

I'm actually repeating myself when I say God is green because inherent in God is His love for creation. God did not create the "bars and doors" of the sea for us to pollute it. He did not "spread out the skies, hard as a molten mirror" for us to cloud it up. He did not "command that the eagle mounts up and makes it nest on high" for us to cut it down.

Job is a book that centers around the question of whether misfortune really is divine punishment. In light of this book, and the environmental issue, I would say that it is pretty obvious that we are not on a punishment/reward system. In the real world, nice guys still "finish last" and righteous people like Job befall misfortune constantly. The bad guy doesn't always caught. And illness and hardship are not saved only for the guilty. It is easy to sit back and wait for God to fix the world's problems, with the notion that justice will be served in God's own time. But I think God made us capable and intelligent for the same reason He gave us free will. We have the tools to make God's "will be done."

Something tells me that God isn't going to reverse global warming. But He has given us the ability to do it ourselves, He gives us the strength and the courage to do it, and even a bit of scripture to back it up.

God isn't green.

Green is God.

back with a vengeance

So I've been anxiously trying to ease my way back into the blogging world with some smooth and witty catch up entry but I've realized those are uncomfortable for everyone. Instead I think I'll just dive right in and share some thoughts I've been cranking out while studying for my Christian Theology class.

Our text is "Faith Seeking Understanding" by Daniel Migliore (amongst many others) and I came across some very stirring passages.

Indulge me. If you dare.

"Questions arise at the edges of what we can know and what we can do as human beings. They thrust themselves on us with special force in times and situations of crisis such as sickness, suffering, guilt, injustice, personal or social upheaval, and death. Believers are not immune to the questions that arise in these situations. Indeed, they may be more perlexed than others because they have to relate their faith to what is happening in their lives and in the world. Precisely as believers, they experience the frequent and disturbing incongruity between faith and lived reality. They believe in a sovereign and good God, but they live in a world where evil often seems triumphant. They believe in a living Lord, but more often than not they experience the absence rather than the presence of God. They believe in the transforming power of the Spirit of God, but they know all too well of the impotence of the church and of themselves. They know that they should obey God's will, but they find that it is often difficult to know what God's will is in regard to particular issues. And even whey they know God's will, they frequently resist doing it. Christian faith asks questions, seeks understanding, both because God is always greater than our ideas of God, and because the public world that faith inhabits confronts it with challenges and contradictions that can't be ignored."
-Faith Seeking Understanding -Daniel Migliore

If this were a dish I had just finished I would kiss my fingers and say, "Delicious."

"If we believe in God, we will have to become seekers, pilgrims, pioneers with no permanent residence. We will no longer be satisfied with the unexamined beliefs and practices of our everyday personal and social world. If we believe in God, we will necessarily question the gods of power, wealth, nationality, and race that clamor for our allegiance. Christian faith is thinking faith."

I have a hard time with the intensity of the Old Testament but I will say that this idea helps me to relate to the Israelites. Christianity is very much a pilgrimage. Just as the Israelites spent hundreds of years in constant chaos and flux, modern Christians face increasingly irreconcilable mystery. The Israelites were challenged with believing in and following God at a time when things kept going from bad to worse (with a few small vacations.) They were charged with interpreting God correctly amidst all the noise of sin going on around them. Christians today face innumerable distractions. And while the Israelites struggled to overcome their fixation on false gods, we struggle to ignore the temptations of consumerism and self-indulgence.

The Israelites put their hand in the fire over and over again (oftentimes admittedly) and so do we. Put this on a larger scale and it's easy to correlate our sins (gluttony, pride, greed) with the current state of the world. Just as the Israelites kept reaping their misfortune, we too are asking for trouble (and getting it!) with the way we treat each other and the place we live.

Of course, this isn't merely Christians. Every human being is in some way responsible for the way the world looks when they leave it. But, the Israelites were not alone either. They were a small portion of a larger world population, too.

Ah, I digress. (It's always fun to find an appropriate place to use that phrase!) The point is, oftentimes I feel alienated by the Old Testament: unable to relate or identify. I think many Christians do. As a Christian I sometimes feel like the Old Testament is off limits, perhaps I may offend someone who sees my identifying with the Old Testament as intrusive or even silly. Yet, I see that my Christian faith relies on it so I struggle to find a connection.

Well, thanks to my first week in Christian Theology...thar she blows.