Shallow People

I am more convinced than ever that what passes as a 'deep' person in our culture would have been seen as 'shallow' in centuries past. In the past week I tried to get away and spend some quality time in renewal and I got several emails, three phone calls and couldn't stop thinking about my 'need' to return what turned out to be inconsequential phone calls. Lord help me become a truly deep soul.

Aslan is on the Move - AGAIN

MAY 16, 2008 WILLIAMSON WEALTH MANAGEMENT WILL, ONCE AGAIN, BE HOSTING CLIENTS, CLIENTS FAMILIES AND FRIENDS TO VIEW

PRINCE CASPIAN

SEE TRAILER HERE

Expelled

When Ben Stein brings his new movie, Expelled, to the big screen in February I will be sponsoring a Night at the Movies in Franklin,  much like I did with Amazing Grace in February of 2006.  For a preview of Expelled go to George Grants blog and view his December 18th entry. The showing of Expelled will be an awareness and support gathering event for New College Franklin, a classical christian college being started in Franklin, TN.

Seating will be limited and I expect a very overwhelming response so let me know so I can put you in the queue. Email me at: tom@wwmonline.com

Expelled the Movie website here.

Also, be thinking of friends and family who you will want to bring to Prince Caspian!

Public Education Seems to be Working - Something Really Scary for Holloween

"If we can just tell the lie enough times and get a 'place' where the lie is told to our victims from a very young age - like the US public schools! - yeah, that's the ticket, we can probably blow that undeniable truth that the Founders of America were dead set on creating and sustaining a "Christian Nation" off the map. I thinks it's working!" A conversation overheard of Satan and his minions.

But alas, due to the lack of strong voices in the Christian intellectual camp (that could be an oxymoron), it takes a very well read and integrous man like Michael Medved, a Jewish friend, to tell the truth in the face of lies, lies and more lies. God grant us more friends like this who say, "I want to be like Mike".

Go to Michaels piece at Townhall.com here.

Holy Evolutionary Cow! Creationism and ID are Dangerous! No, No, Sir - God is Dangerous

Good Lord! The Archbishop of Canterbury believes Creationism SHOULD NOT be taught in schools. I guess it is silly to ask when the lunatics began running the asylum? It appears that we have crossed the point in time where Europe has forgotten that the Reformation and formation of Western culture was formed on the ethos that God is Creator and Lord of ALL of life. Now the leaders of the church have, once again, joined with the civic and intellectual authorities to drive religion out of the church.

Heaven Help Us!!! Read the article below to be informed, but make sure your near a window in case you become ill!

Europe circles the wagons against creationism and intelligent design

October 16th, 2007, filed by Tom Heneghan
Europeans are circling the wagons to keep creationism and intelligent design out of their schools. The latest development came on Monday when Sweden announced it wanted to tighten rules governing private religious schools to ensure they do not teach creationism. This is a new twist. Private schools across Europe usually have to follow some kind of national curriculum but can add other elements such as religious views. Creationism is certainly a religious view and a very large majority in Europe says ID is too.

“This is naturally brought about by the fact that different viewpoints are being discussed, for instance about the creation of the world - one based on science and one on religious views,” Swedish Education Minister Jan Bjorklund said while announcing the new policy. “Teaching in school must have a scientific basis.”

The Council of Europe made the headlines two weeks ago with a resolution firmly opposing these views and urging member countries to keep them out of their science classes. It defined ID as a form of creationism. That resolution entitled “The Dangers of Creationism in Education” was based on a long report with an interesting country-by-country list of cases where creationism has become an issue in Europe (see report pages 9-14). This was a non-binding resolution but it expressed the widespread mood of lawmakers who until recently thought creationism and ID were such simplistic U.S. religious views that they would never cross the Atlantic.

The issue has been around in Britain for a while now. Two weeks ago, a professor of science education in Britain made waves by suggesting that creationism should be discussed in science classes to better equip pupils with arguments to confront it.“There are lots of pupils who come to science lessons from families where they very seriously believe the world was created in a few days 6,000 or 10,000 years ago,” said Michael Reiss, who is a professor at London’s Institute of Education, an Anglican priest and an evolutionary biologist. “I want to try and not ridicule those students but to help them understand the scientific way in which we can also understand the universe.”

Britain’s Qualifications and Curriculum Authority issued new guidelines in January of this year saying that creationism and ID belonged in religion classes alongside evolution, not in science class. French education authorities and scientists have been warning against creationism and ID since a lavishly produced Muslim creationist book, Atlas of Creation by the secretive Turkish writer Harun Yahya , mysteriously began appearing in the mail free-of-charge at schools around the country.

Several large churches have also spoken out against putting a religious spin on science. In Germany, the Lutheran Church issued background material in July to confront “this Americanisation of European religious culture.” Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, head of the Church of England and spiritual leaders of the world’s Anglicans, said last year that creationism was “a kind of category mistake, as if the Bible were a theory like other theories” and said it should not be taught in British schools.

In several statements and a book over the past year or so, Pope Benedict has clearly been more sympathetic to critics who say scientists go beyond their limits when they say Darwinism proves God does not exist. But he has also made clear the Roman Catholic Church does not support creationism and does not reject the scientific theory of evolution.

It’s fascinating to see this trans-Atlantic divide between Europe and the United States (where, it should be noted, the courts and many scientists also reject these views). Could this mean that creationism and ID are mostly American views that won’t catch on elsewhere?

Does Church Architecture Matter?

Of course it does!!! Below is an interesting article laying the blame for ugly and utilitarian churches that have no "sacred" meaning or structure at the feet of America.

I saw this today:

"The Rev. Andy Stanley believes if you're going to build a church in Buckhead, it ought to look like an office building.

North Point Ministries, Stanley's business-casual, Christian mega-congregation in Alpharetta, plans to spread its word to Atlanta's business address by building a $40 million, 3,000-seat sanctuary at Tower Place on Lenox Road. "

I REST MY CASE! Scroll down for the article.

"How Great Thou Aren't"?A lament on new church buildings
by Helen Hull Hitchcock

"I'm thinking of starting a movement called Pagans for Proper Churches", Elizabeth Farrelly wrote recently in the Sydney Morning Herald. "Dark and lonely work, sure, but necessary", she continued, "because everywhere, under every log and rock, nice old churches are being melted down into nightclubs or ad agencies, while the new [churches] have the common-or-corporate look."
The article "How Great Thou Aren't" (Herald, December 21), succinctly describes several examples of "desymbolized" new churches in Sydney: "a convincing imitation of a laundrette"; "as spiritual as your average dentist's waiting room"; a "horizontal aspect to give the mystery-levels of a standard school gym"; and "a 1960s bank". (Sound familiar?)
"The times when sacred music, liturgy and architecture were troves of transcendent beauty are long gone", the author laments. What these churches deny, she says, "is the traditional role of abstraction and metaphor -- beauty, in a word -- in engaging [the] senses".
Why would stripped-down churches matter to a pagan? She responds to her own question: she has a "nagging intuition" that symbolism, mystery, cultural depth, spirituality, and beauty "are all somehow connected".
Why are new church buildings "being systematically stripped of all penumbral and asymbolic meaning"? The author blames "populism" -- a search for popularity that demands ordinariness and lowest-common-denominator beliefs. The church buildings express a fundamentally changed faith. She quotes an Anglican bishop, who said, "function is creating form, and the function is changing". The church's center is "no longer the altar but the audiovisual suite".
Alas, Miss Farrelly believes this "easy alliance between the New Church and the McMansion" is American-led. She quotes an American church architect, Ray Robinson, as observing: "Following typically American trends of one-stop shopping centers, the contemporary church often incorporates cafes, gymnasiums, computer centers... These facilities are designed to increase religion's prominence in the activities of everyday life and develop a sense of community".
Underpinning this view, writes Miss Farrelly, "is a profound paradigm shift. Abandoning the mystery... and otherness of the traditional Eucharistic church, the New Church models itself on human relationships. This changes everything".
"The traditional cruciform church plan can be read as a symbolic Corpus Christi, making the altar rail, at the crossing or shoulders, a threshold not only between body and head, but also between this world and the next; between humanity, if you like, and God. But the implied distancing and subordination (of humans to God) is no popularity cinch", she observes.
"So the new church exchanges vertical for horizontal, gloaming for daylight, otherworld to world; relationship with God, perhaps, for a 'community of relationships where people feel at home and welcomed'".
Where does this lead? The author quotes the late theologian, Hans Urs von Balthasar: "We no longer dare to believe in beauty and we make of it a mere appearance in order the more easily to dispose of it".
Diminishing the real power of beauty is a serious matter, even for "romanticizing heathens" like Pagans for Proper Churches, the author concludes.
Miss Farrelly's "pagan" observations resonate with lot of Catholics on this side of the pond -- especially those whose parish churches and even cathedrals have been subjected to the iconoclastic "paradigm shift" of influential church builders and renovaters. Again, alas.

Is Fred Thompson the GOP's Savior?

Sam Brownback, A Good Man Who Cannot Gain a Crowd

Fred Thompson, Candidate for President of the United States

Hopefully, those who call themselves "followers of Jesus" have learned by now that there is only One Savior and that no politician can save us in a fallen and imperfect world. Amazingly, the man who holds close the views of those who follow Jesus cannot get anyone to show up (see first picture of Sen. Brownback). Perhaps it shouldn't be so amazing?