jonathan stegall

Jim Walls, who wrote God’s Politics, recently released The Great Awakening. Along with the book’s release, he is traveling around the country on The Great Awakening Tour.
The event is described like this:

“What would it take to end extreme poverty, to address climate change, to create peace?

For too long, a narrow religious agenda has been used like a wedge to divide people. But a wider and deeper vision of faith and values is emerging. It’s a renewal of faith – a great awakening – that combines personal faith with social justice. A new social movement is on the rise. The Great Awakening is upon us. “

From time to time, Sojourners, Jim Wallis’ organization, seems a bit naive with the way it wants faith to impact politics. Some of this is the language that is used to describe things, and some of it is probably what is actually being expressed.

But with things like this book, and the tour accompanying it, they really perceive something that is happening, and the potential for growth to happen, in the way that faith relates to politics in the United States. A recent blog post from Jim Wallis says this:

This doesn’t mean young evangelicals are automatically becoming Democrats (and I don’t think they should). It does mean that their agenda is broader and deeper, no longer beholden to a single partisan ideology – more concerned with 30,000 children dying daily of poverty and disease than with gay marriage amendments in Ohio.

Theologically, these 20-somethings are abandoning a worldview that reduces the gospel of Jesus Christ to an afterlife-oriented, fire-insurance, salvation pitch. These are Matthew 25, Luke 4, and “Sermon on the Mount” Christians. They really believe that the kingdom of God represents God’s best hopes and dreams for this present age, not only for the life to come.

This goes alongside any number of other things that God is doing in the United States, specifically. He’s doing amazing things in the rest of the world, and it is easy to be discouraged by the situation here in the States. He is asking us to begin to see past our attempts to box in the ways we expect and want him to interact with us. For many years, there have been people at the forefront of new things that he is doing, and I believe that things like this indicate that their message can have an impact.

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Today, Adobe AIR comes out of beta. AIR allows designers and developers to create web applications that run on the desktop. There have been little tastes of this, from the OSX and Yahoo widgets, to the Vista Gadgets, but none of these are full-featured applications that run on the desktop.

Other than that, desktop applications have not been web applications. Developers have had to know desktop programming to create them, and they haven’t really had access to data that resides online. At least, not as part of their core functionality.

With AIR, full web applications can also be full desktop applications. It’s been an interesting thing to watch all this develop, and I look forward to coming up with ways of using it.

For what it’s worth, the example that first made me interested in this was the eBay Desktop. Worth a look, especially now that beta is over.

For the next day or so (48 hours starting on Monday at noon), there is a premiere of a new video from Nooma about prayer. It’s brilliant. Watch it. Then buy it and watch it again.

In my life as of late, God will not shut up about prayer. He is drilling it into me. “Hey Jon, you don’t get it, and you’ve asked me for help. I want to tell you something! Shut up and listen to me!” Messages and thoughts about prayer show up everywhere lately. Church, my wife’s school, books I’m reading, random videos on Facebook, random blogs, and so on.

It’s a beautiful thing to hear the voice of God speaking in different areas of life. There is grace in that. Grace to say, “I know this is difficult for you. It’s ok. I’ll say it again.”

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Recently, to my great jealousy, my wife bought a MacBook for graduate school. Her previous Windows laptop was on its last legs, so we replaced it. During its good times, she was able to use it to print to and share files with my Windows desktop. I knew it was possible to do this with a Mac as well, and didn’t know how.

Today, I found this tutorial on exactly that. Some of the dialogs are different than Leopard’s, but it is fairly easy to configure both on the Windows side and the Mac side. Note that the RedMon software required the use of a mirror site to download it.

Anyway. She can now happily print to my desktop from her laptop, when it is running Windows. My next related project will be attempting to understand how she can print to my desktop when it is running Ubuntu. Any advice is, of course, most appreciated.

Update: Using this tutorial, I was able to use the MacBook to print to my Ubuntu desktop. The configuration was much easier than it was for Mac to Windows printing.

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At Josh Brown’s blog, there is a series of posts that I began to link to yesterday that are challenging some of the common critiques leveled against Emergent (and in this sense, I do mean, at least predominantly, Emergent Village, not the global emerging church).

One of the posts deals with the conception that Emergent consists of white guys, sitting around talking about theology. The post itself is well worth a read, as are the comments. One of the comments, from Julie Clawson, is what I want to look into, at the moment.

Part of it reads like this:

“Nice Christian women” are taught to be polite, respectful, and submissive - very hard things to be if you ever want to get a word in edgewise in a conversation with men.

I saw this firsthand during the first year we led the local Emergent Cohort. The group consisted of mostly younger men and single women (wives never show up, what family shells out babysitting money just so the woman can participate in such things???). The group nearly fell apart after all the women left. They left because they never got a chance to participate in the conversation and constantly received the message that they weren’t wanted. If they tried to speak up, some guy would jump in and talk them down, and as nice Christian women they were “trained” to let that happen. The guys weren’t doing it intentionally or generally even aware of what they were doing, they were just holding a conversation like they had been trained to do.

I feel like there is something deeply significant in that statement, as it pertains to things like Emergent, or theological and church-related discussions in general, and also as it pertains to life in general. At this time in the development of Emergent, many of the people who are attracted to it do have a history of involvement with the evangelical church. For a number of reasons that are related to everything from serious biblical misinterpretation to simple selfishness, evangelicalism has not, especially in the last fifty years, welcomed the voices of women. There is a certain “training” that Julie alludes to that women receive in modern evangelicalism that leads them to be quiet and let themselves be shut out of conversations with men.

As a man who has both formal and informal experience in evangelicalism and training in evangelical ministry, I read this comment and was immediately struck by how true it is. I recognize guilt in myself of shutting women out from conversations, because I have spoken as I learned to speak. I have unintentionally expected women to speak in the same ways that I do, and I have neglected to recognize the differences between the framework that I have been given and the framework that they have been given.

The implications of this thought really hit home when I began to think about my marriage. I recognize guilt in shutting out my wife by expecting her to speak like I do. This occurs in public conversations as well as private ones. She has a longer, and in general far more negative, history with the church in general and evangelicalism in particular than I do, and thus this framework has been drilled into her even more than it has into me, and many times I have failed to recognize this.

I believe that a comment like Julie’s has the potential to teach guys like me how difficult it can be for a woman to get past that framework, and the damage that it can cause. This kind of learning is essential for the development of the Emergent conversation as more than a bunch of white guys discussing theology.