The debate around “knowing”

Posted on December 21, 2010 by doradueck

So what do we think of TIME’s decision to name Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg their Man of the Year? We, the citizens of Facebook, I mean — citizens of the third largest nation in the world, if 500 million accounts counted as a nation. But also we as in all of us, whether we’re on Facebook or not, who know how profoundly media and technology have shifted, who have adapted our communication and connection habits, whether we wanted to or not. And we as in all of us who know that notions of private and public are being re-shaped, again.

There’s plenty of chatter about the angles of this – from sneers that TIME isn’t exactly the authority it used to be on what’s important (which is why I asked what “we” all think, if the we over at Facebook can just pause from collecting tractors for our farms for a moment, or taking a test to discover what dead celebrity we might have been in another life) to SNL’s comics setting up WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange as bitter over Zuckerberg getting TIME’s honour (and this landing in newspapers and on computer screens everywhere as news!).

Of the list of TIME candidates (Julian Assange, the Tea Party, Afghan president Hami Karzai, and the Chilean miners), my pick would have been Julian Assange. Not because I find him more likable (it’s not about liking — Hitler was once was Man of the Year, and Stalin was twice), but because I think the WikiLeak events and the impulses behind them will reverberate through global politics and life more significantly than Facebook has or will. Continue reading →

Stories from Cape Town 2010

Posted on November 19, 2010 by doradueck

This week I attended an informal discussion meeting in which my friend Doug Koop, editor of ChristianWeek, talked about his experience of Cape Town 2010, the third congress of the Lausanne movement (the first being 1974, in Lausanne). We discussed The Cape Town Commitment, a document authored for the congress by Chris Wright, but mostly we enjoyed hearing about the event, especially to get those perspectives one doesn’t necessarily get in official press releases. I confess that I hadn’t really informed myself about this event earlier, as I’m mostly out of the loop on matters Evangelical, but I did read some of Doug’s reports on Facebook.

He gave us a quick history primer: the Lausanne event in 1974, key organizers being the Billy Graham group and John Stott, with an internal debate sparked by then-young upstarts Samuel Escobar and Rene Padilla, arguing for a holistic gospel; then to the congress in Manila in 1989 whose primary result was partnerships and an emphasis on the language of “unreached people groups.” And now, a third congress in Cape Town, 2010. The Cape Town Commitment uses the language of love as a way of framing commitment (We love because God first loved us, we love the living God… etc., 10 points in all), which struck us as both compelling and significant, though one person in our discussion group commented (to the nods of others) that while it uses love language it seems to have a belief agenda.

Doug shared Cape Town 2010 highlights: the words of Libby Little, recently widowed when Dan Little was killed in Afghanistan, and of Sung Kyung, a young woman from North Korea. Other matters of note included controversy around John Piper going “off script” in his exposition of Ephesians 3, and the critique of “managerial missiology” or preoccupation with numbers.

Rather than trying to convey things third-hand, I commend Doug’s writing on the event at ChristianWeek blogs. There’s also an interesting piece there by Wendy Gritter of New Direction on her conversation about homosexuality with Anglican Archbishop Henry Orombi of Uganda.

Sometimes it seems that the large clusters of the Christian church — Evangelicals, World Council of Churches, Anabaptists — circle only in their own orbits, which partially explains the personal out-of-the-loop note above, but I notice that the Mennonite World Conference had some 30 representatives at Cape Town, according to this report by Byron Rempel Burkholder.

A wake-up call

Posted on October 3, 2010 by doradueck

There’s a video clip going around my friendship corner of Facebook, of Ellen DeGeneres responding — movingly, pleadingly — to the senseless death of Tyler Clementi, the Rutgers student who committed suicide after being “outed” as gay. Please watch it at the link above, if you haven’t already. (Sorry, I haven’t quite figured out how to add video to my blog.)

There’s nothing I could possibly add but Amen.

And yes, I know, I know…. many church groups, including my own, are still figuring out their “positions” on homosexuality. It could be argued that the debate itself contributes to an oppressive dynamic, but can we at least agree that whatever time that conversation takes gives us absolutely no excuse to put off a major overhaul of behaviour, or the urgency of teaching our children firm and unequivocal protocols of behaviour about difference? Being gay is not a crime — or a sin. Harassing, outing someone without their permission, bullying, is never — never! — okay. Figuring out who you are, as DeGeneres says, is hard enough (remember being a teen?) without the added cruelty of bullying — for any reason. And gay youth who wish to live with integrity, with authenticity, will eventually come to their own conclusions about how they do this. But it’s their timeline, no one else’s.

There are many other names and faces, other stories, that could be highlighted in reference to this “suicide epidemic,” people who attempt to escape for various reasons, but most certainly often because of the harassment.

William C. Trench has some pertinent words:

For years, those who oppose equal rights for gays and lesbians have said that they have nothing against the Tyler Clementi’s of the world, what they are against is “The Homosexual Agenda.” This tragic event brings that debate into sharp relief.

The “Homosexual Agenda” is precisely this: to create a society in which young men and women do not jump off of bridges in a desperate attempt to escape who they are, because society has told them in a thousand different ways that who they are is not acceptable.

We who are Christians must bear a special responsibility in this effort.

I hope you’ll also take the time to read Trench’s whole post here. I don’t have much more than Amen to add to it either. Except to wonder, in light of DeGeneres’ wake-up call, and Trench’s call for angels, whether we’re awake, and alert to our assignments.