1. The Presbyterian Outlook, an independent magazine reporting on issues of interest to the PC(USA), is looking for two new part-time employees. And yes, you can even work from the comfort of your own home! I know I’m not alone in my push, in the most amiable way, for the Outlook to refocus efforts on web presence and social media (yes, their site makes me want to pull my hair out). Well, the new Internet Content Manager Job will do just that. They’re also looking for someone to fill this CopyEditor Job Description. I’ve worked with the Outlook folk in the past and can recommend them as a classy organization filling a vital role in the denomination.
2. The Thoughtful Christian.com, a great portal for lesson plans and book deals, has recently expanded and launched a new blog: Gathering Voices. I managed to wrangle my way into the first group of regular bloggers, so Wednesdays my posts from Gathering Voices will be cross-posted back here. I’m excited to work with such an awesome group of bloggers — some young, some old, all smart — and I’m also quite happy that it’s less of a time commitment than my stint with the Century Blog. It’s live as of yesterday; my first post goes up tomorrow.
3. MinnPost.com, speaking of new ventures, is a newish effort in high-quality nonprofit journalism for “news-intense people who care about Minnesota.” Well, that’d be me!  I’ve followed them for a few months, and recently re-worked a post for them.  It appears today in their “Community Voices” section under the title, “The Minnesota breakfast crew vs. the Twitterati: Cherishing a sense of perspective.” Check out their site, though, not for my voice but for their new model of quality journalism.

I’ve written often on culture, social media, and the consequences of both (e.g.

by Andrew Hall

Andrew Hall is a guest blogger for My Dog Ate My Blog and a writer on Online Degree for Guide to Online Schools.

Either I don’t understand Little Rock, Arkansas, or Clint McCance doesn’t understand how the internet works. In the wake of many national news stories about gay teenagers having killed themselves as a consequence of bullying and harassment, McCance, a Little Rock school board representative, used Facebook to single-handedly end his time on the school board.

To do so, he responded to a call to wear purple in support of LGBT by writing back “Seriously they want me to wear purple because five queers killed themselves. The only way im wearin it for them is if they all commit suicide. I cant believe the people of this world have gotten this stupid. We are honoring the fact that they sinned and killed thereselves because of their sin. REALLY PEOPLE,” then followed this with another rant explaining that he liked how homosexuals “often give each other aids and die,” then followed this with yet another that explains how he would “disown [his] kids [if] they were gay [… I would] absolutely run them off. My kids will have solid christian beliefs.” In addition to espousing blatantly homophobic language, McCance also demonstrates his basic inability to write functionally in the English language, not at all befitting someone intended to represent educational institutions in any school system that predominantly works in English.

McCance’s comments are somewhat unbelievable. It’s hard to imagine that someone in 2010 would truly not understand the implications for one’s career in posting something of this sort on Facebook, where both personal and professional acquaintances (and their friends) can easily see it, take screenshots of it, share it with one’s employers, the national media, and anyone and everyone else who might want to use it as an opportunity to try to end McCance’s career. If you truly must, however, you can account this to a generational gap, and McCance’s misguided belief that his comments wouldn’t easily find an audience ready to jump on them being a consequence of his not having grown up with an online public social life.

What that reading doesn’t account for, however, is the fact that McCance exists, or believes he exists, in a culture in which comments that heavily use negative epithets to refer to homosexuals are completely and totally acceptable when said not by professional bigots, but by people who supposedly have the interests of a city’s very young people at heart. That McCance was willing to post his multipart rant at all is indicative of the fact that he believed that there was no problem at all with what he was saying (especially given that the horrifically bad writing indicates that he didn’t take a minute to edit it), and this is a clear consequence of a culture of long-established homophobia in McCance’s world, possibly in Little Rock, and elsewhere.

This is a clear case of social networking revealing someone’s worst qualities as a human being (and being done in professionally by it). This does not, unfortunately, get us closer to resolving the issues at its center.

Andrew Hall is a guest blogger for My Dog Ate My Blog and a writer on Online Degree for Guide to Online Schools.The image is by Laura.

Sacred the Body

Sacred the body God has created,
temple of Spirit that dwells deep inside.
Cherish each person; nurture creation.
Treat flesh as holy, that love may abide.

Bodies are varied, made in all sizes,
pale, full of color, both fragile and strong.
Holy the difference, gift of the Maker,
so let us honor each story and song.

Love respects person, bodies, and boundries.
Love does not batter, neglect or abuse.
Love touches gently, never coercing.
Love leaves the other with power to choose.

Holy of holies, God ever loving,
make us your temples; indwell all we do.
May we be careful, tender, and caring,
so may our bodies give honor to you.

-Ruth Duck

I love this hymn text, but it also troubles me. Then again, maybe the tension is why I love it.

First, my initial reaction to speaking of one’s body as a temple is the negative way I’ve seen the phrase used. Mostly, in my experience, it’s usually male pastors who use the phrase to coax female teens not to have sex. Somehow, the message doesn’t get communicated to the boys as clearly, and really, the “just say no to sex” message is a huge pigeon-holing of Paul’s letter (and bad sex ed, but that’s another matter).

Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 6:19 , “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit,” but the “you” is plural — “you all.” Paul’s point isn’t about one body, but about the whole church in Corinth. Those in the church in Corinth are one body together. Paul’s point is that, to be the temple of the Holy Spirit, they need each other.

Even with this rather sizable exegetical question, the way the stanza continues with the idea that flesh and bodies are holy — indeed, they are created by God — redeems the first stanza for me.

The second stanza is probably my favorite as it notes the import of difference, claiming that in recognizing our difference we honor both God and neighbor. Difference isn’t honored just because, but due to the fact that our bodies are gifts from God (this approaches Paul’s actual argument in 1 Cor.)

The third stanza grates me. It’s beautiful. It’s well-written. But, I sometimes feel like the focus of the hymn completely changes. It moves from a focus on bodies, to focusing on love. Sure, one could construe the stanzas as completely connected, but it does feel like a switch to me, and a sizable one at that. So the question becomes: should we sing about abuse of bodies in a hymn? And, if so, how?

As I read it, the third stanza only mentions abuse of bodies by other people — which, actually I think, is a stellar thing to tackle in corporate worship. It’s interesting, though, that Duck doesn’t mention abuse of bodies by one’s self, rather just by others.

A charitable reading might argue that Duck addresses self-care and self-abuse in the final stanza. It’s indirect, but maybe that’s best. The final sentence calls all, “we,” to use all bodies to give honor to God. We don’t honor God when we abuse our bodies, and most (all?) abuse can be connected by to that “we.” As a society, our approach to women’s and men’s bodies certainly encourages unholy actions and abuse.

I like this hymn (which appears, by the way, in at least two hymnals: The Faith We Sing and Sing the Faith). I like the hymn, perhaps in part, because it challenges me to think about what I’m singing. As I sing the phrases, the stimulating text makes me particularly aware of what I’m singing, which draws me into a dual awareness of those with whom I sing — the sacred body. That body, singing Ruth Duck’s hymn, is made up of different bodies — of all shapes and sizes, some abused by particular people and others abused by society in general — but, bodies which, together, might be a temple of the Holy Spirit.

This is the second post in a guest blogger series on the Bible.

My Bible hurts…and heals
by Erika Funk

My Bible hurts.

It hurts when I throw it across the room and it hits young people in the face.
It hurts when someone tells me “my Bible” is wrong.
It hurts when something I was sure I understood suddenly becomes very unclear.
My Bible hurts my head and my heart.

But sometimes the Bible heals.

The faith community I live in now, Broad Street Ministry in Philadelphia has a weekly bible study called No Holds Barred, run by our Dean for the Center for Subversive Theology. So already you can tell it’s different.

Because we are located in the heart of downtown Philadelphia and we serve food whenever we gather, we get all kinds of people who wander in for Bible Study…and for all kinds of reasons. Which if we’re going to be honest, isn’t much different than any church Bible Study from Anchorage to Ayr. We all come with our “bibles” in our brains; we come with the tapes in our heads from former Bible teachers and pastors and we all come with bruises from when someone threw their bible at us. We’ve learned too well to duck when something dangerous comes our way (like the gospel) and to re-load and re-launch our rhetoric when we see a breach in someone’s theological fortification.

Having seen some of this biblical bruising and scriptural scarring, our C4ST Dean created some ground rules for the No Holds Barred Bible Study. We call them table manners. One of the rules is no one knows it all, your thoughts and questions are welcome.

Recently, we were studying a passage from Isaiah and got into a discussion about the New Jerusalem and wondered together what that meant, where it is, when we are likely to see it. Rather than leading an exegesis on the historical understandings of the biblical concept of “New Jerusalem” we thought it through together, as homeless, student, professional, worker, and teacher. Michael, one of our regulars at BSM, said he thought he’d found New Jerusalem right here. Michael is a 60+ years-old, well educated, formerly homeless man who speaks 12 different languages, once worked for the U.N. and was raised Jewish. He now lives in a permanent residence run by a wonderful organization called the Bethesda Project. I asked where he sensed this New Jerusalem. He said here at Broad Street Ministry. So I asked what markers he saw that displayed to him that this was the New Kingdom, a place of God’s continual presence. To him, he said, it was the way we didn’t tell him what to think, we didn’t tell him what he had to believe. Instead, we said “invite your neighbor to dinner”. He heard, “come join us at the table and be who you are and have a cup of coffee.” That was to Michael evidence of God’s Kingdom on earth.

My Bible hurts when the unexpected joy of its truth pierces my hardened heart and fills it with grace.

Erika Funk is the Youth Initiative Minister at Broad Street Ministry in Philadelphia. Check out their fantastic ministry and contact Erika for information on youth mission experiences and Broad Street Ministry.