Disqus - Latest Comments for BDRhodes

Re: Concept imagines dark mode + split screen features for iPhone 7 & iOS 10

BDRhodes — Mon, 06 Jun 2016 17:21:36 -0000

I'd wager this will be a hardware-exclusive change only for the 2017 iPhone, as it will use OLED to deliver the deep blacks that will make the software's dark mode really stand out. Best yet, like on the Apple Watch, a blacker UI will also be a sneaky way to extend battery life.

Re: Slow Church Stories: Salem Alliance Church

BDRhodes — Mon, 02 Jun 2014 12:02:39 -0000

Candice and I bicycled down to Salem from Portland a few years ago to visit this building – it's quite beautiful! I hope it's continued to help weave a fabric of care in the neighborhood, as that seemed to be the arc of their longing for it.

Re: The Belmont Goats Will Become the Lents Goats

BDRhodes — Mon, 10 Feb 2014 18:03:07 -0000

Rolling Oasis didn't get 8930 SE Foster (yet) – their thanks-but-no-thanks letter indicates they were concerned about coding issues with my proposal. Understandable, but disappointing all the same; my research suggests it's code-compliant. Ah well: Rolling Oasis Grocers will still begin service in March, though for now without a swanky and memorable hub in Lents Town Center.

Re: What Liturgy Shapes Your Church?

BDRhodes — Thu, 06 Feb 2014 12:28:19 -0000

How we get to the church building in the first place has its own liturgical implications. Driving several miles out of our neighborhood and through the neighborhoods we "minister" in to get to the Sunday gathering's own set of liturgies, where we sit by others who drove from their neighborhoods, past ours, to get there... that feels very liturgical. It is a perverse or even disincarnational sort of "Procession of Christ's Body."

Try walking to the church gathering closest to you and see how different an experience you'll have. Or even try walking *with other Christians* to the gathering. It is powerful. The liturgies of auto-cratic vs active transportation options are quite real.

Tony Kriz wrote a great article on this in the Leadership Journal... http://www.christianitytoda...

Re: Knitting While Detroit Burns?

BDRhodes — Fri, 23 Aug 2013 02:26:02 -0000

Brilliant. *high five*

Re: Knitting While Detroit Burns?

BDRhodes — Thu, 22 Aug 2013 11:41:23 -0000

Thanks for writing such a thoughtful (and witty) response to my essay. You've got a lot of really important points.

To clarify, some Zoe folk practice something like a both/and on this. Some have headed up their neighborhood association, met with City Hall and local governing bodies, and been involved with policy-making. While at least one in Zoe identifies as a Christian anarchist (as do I), we both practice exploring that vision by occasionally engaging local governance. And we have the backs of our friends whose work is more toward those ends. With all due respect, none of them practice the caricature of do-nothing-but-make-peppernuts-all-damn-day Anabaptist insularity that your post seems to leverage. I wonder if you're reading that into my editorial voice and Zoe's own story. They're not Anabaptist or Hauerwasian.

They're not living out of a ressentiment against Christendom or power-politics, either. Nor do I hear them smoldering about it. Here's the obligatory Hauerwas quote that unearths this more: "Yoder understood well, therefore, that you do not free yourself of Constinianism by becoming anti-Constantinian. For him the alternative to Constantinianism was not anti-Constantinianism, but locality and place. According to Yoder locality and place are the forms of communal life necessary to express the particularity of Jesus through the visibility of the church." (from an amazing essay: http://www.scribd.com/doc/6... To me this leaves the door open for careful and local-first policy engagement.

Anyway, I perceive that Zoe's calling has to do with their life together in the 'hood catalyzing the affections of other neighbors for that particular parish's shalom. They kindle longing, drum up desire. Localizing together in our fragmented paved-new-world of commuting is an everyday liturgy that opens themselves and others toward desiring the kingdom.

Re: Slow Church: The Book

BDRhodes — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 15:00:56 -0000

Congrats, y'all! John, come up to Portland sometime and I'd love to introduce you to some groovy place-based church folk.

Re: http://localrhodes.tumblr.com/post/12603641975

BDRhodes — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 13:04:38 -0000

I think that's fair, Mark.

I had hoped my focus on our mundaneness, and even dorky lameness at times, would offset any sensationalism or smugness that leaked through. It's a hard thing to pull off.

Thanks for taking the time to give it a read. :)

Re: Repenting of Christianity

BDRhodes — Thu, 12 May 2011 02:22:18 -0000

Beautifully said, Mark.

In conversations lately about race, class, and gender issues, I've come to a similar posture. That Christians must discover a way to be honest about oppression that isn't finally debilitating or proud -- the "Aha, now that I'm radical I'm cleansed of sexism" bit you mentioned -- but instead is able to create a safe social-spiritual space (reclaimed, as you say) where winsome, honest, restorative repentance can happen that ultimately frees all people to move forward, that creates a new humanity yielded to God instead of a new class of Redeemed Radicals over-and-against Depraved Constantinians. Becoming the people who can say "Yeah, and..." instead of "Yeah, but..." about the fallibility of our faith journeys. You've definitely helped my heart break through into healthier plains on these matters. Thank you.

In addition to the gelassenheit, do you have more stories and suggested practices for how to live repentance as an ongoing posture that doesn't collapse into shame (e.g., white guilt) or pride (self-righteous radicalism)?

Re: http://theycallmepastorbryan.com/post/1517745876

BDRhodes — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 13:08:11 -0000

We should have beer and talk about this sometime. Have many thoughts and questions.

Re: Early Christian Ecclesiology and “The Property Question” [part 2]

BDRhodes — Sun, 10 Oct 2010 12:49:48 -0000

I'm really enjoying these articles, Andy! Lots of important ideas are coming into focus for me as I read your meditations and discoveries. Thanks for sharing them with everyone. :)

Re: Solidarity and Resistance in Community 3: On Private Property

BDRhodes — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 15:45:15 -0000

Not quite true, Jason. Wherever there was abundance or excess, there emerged various senses of property and monetary exchange.

Consider my own state: Oregon. In the arid high deserts, grasslands, and winding canyon-countries of its easter half, native tribes were much as you describe -- all is shared, etc. Things are so scarce that tribes are necessarily nomadic.

Move over to the coast, though, and things change dramatically. Food from forest and sea are so robust that tribes are radically more settled. They have much more elaborate clothing -- forms of jewelrly, even. And to boot, they began using intact sand-dollars as, well, dollars! Notions of land-ownership may still have been foreign to these peoples, but monetization and posessiveness certainly was not.

Re: @collapse: exploring the future of blogging against empire

BDRhodes — Thu, 07 May 2009 22:49:00 -0000

I agree: the ruthless and revilable of the world will often take oppressive advantage of the collapse. The iron grips of tyrants big and small, corporate and state, will often only tighten.

But the point I was arguing for in the article was NOT that the "way of the world" (which I sloppily collapsed into the word 'empire') is going away. Like I just said: it's far from going away.

The point I was driving home is that, first, the zeitgeists of Empire will increasingly become more like phantom limbs -- morbid echoes of a gilded and grossly-garnered age of abundance. And second: new challenges command our prayers, discussion, and attention. Not just the "loss" of imperial glory, but of all the accompanying horsemen of such an apocalypse -- food scarcity, massive population dislocations, violent civil unrest, dying to the meta-narratives of progress and infinite growth. These are very distinct, if occassionally overlapping, questions and challenges from that we faced even just a year ago.

Re: @collapse: exploring the future of blogging against empire

BDRhodes — Thu, 07 May 2009 20:55:39 -0000

I speak of collapse with such confidence because it seems like this inbreaking Greater Depression is coinciding with our species finally bumping into global limits -- there's only so much oil, only so much soil, only so much water. And we're hitting those limits to growth.

Worse, those limits seem to be constricting. Oil production is peaking. Ancient aquifers (so-called "fossil water") are drying up. Soil is eroding faster than we can dump chemicals on it -- which, by the way, is only making its demise all the sharper.

These are the kinds of crises which decimate civilizations -- be it the Maya, Easter Island, or Rome. We're no different, as the global-capitalist American Empire. And we're no different as a global society, as a species. Limits exist.

The present economic freefall was provoked by these limits (http://tinyurl.com/ctpxa9 and http://tinyurl.com/ct5a29) and we'll not see a recovery precisely because of these ever-constricting lifebloods (oil, soil, water) of industrial civilization so steadily going away. Less oil is less oil, which translates into, well, LESS OIL. There's nothing any empire can do to combat the basics of that equation. All empires and societies today will shrink or shrivel in this new world of scarcity.

So, yes: I stand by the claim of collapse in the present tense. We'll keep acting like one, keep using the language of it, for a while. Denial will set in pretty quick, and we'll want to believe that The Light of Freedom in the World that is (allegedly) America will triumph once more. But that we'll define our narrative of the collapse that way doesn't negate the reality of that collapse happening to real people and real communities.

Re: Guestroom for Jesus?

BDRhodes — Sat, 02 May 2009 13:17:02 -0000

Are you implying that the main problem is "I gotta protect my stuff from this unsafe person" or "I will use my land/property-owning status to compel a departure"?

Paul seems to be clear that people who are persistently causing relational violence or is otherwise in persistent sin within the beloved community need to be handed over to the satan -- both for their restoration and for the health of the community.

Re: Guestroom for Jesus?

BDRhodes — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 16:56:03 -0000

Good thoughts, and it's an astonishingly lovely thing to imagine all homeless being absorbed simply by the Jesus-lovin' households.

I often see and hear the appeal to hospitality as analogous to God's scandalous open invite to all and sundry to join the family of God, to come into the kingdom of God. God's grace is that wide, so why can't our houses? That sort of thing.

And I agree with that analogy. And that it devastates the sorts of arguments that you rightly shot down (not safe, etc.). God's gracious, radical invitation is indeed risky!

But the trick is, God invites us wherever we are, but has loving stipulations as to what life in his household is like. And God equips us in the Spirit, by the Word, and amid Beloved Community to be able to live into those "terms of tenancy." He invites us where we're at, but loves us too much to stay there.

So too in the church's hospitality? Yes, I think so. We recently had a couch-surfer servant-type fellow in our community. But we never really defined the "terms of tenancy", or "defined the relationship"... so there became no way to clearly say, "Hey, if you start doing A, B, or C, then be aware that we'll exhort you towards something more Christ-like." When certain behaviours which were not physically dangerous but definitely spiritually dangerous became persistent, and when he refused any "define the relationship" conversations with us, we had to ask him to leave. I think we were greatly hospitable to this brother, but because we didn't accompany radical hospitality with an eventually-integrated radical discipleship, it became profoundly unhealthy to all involved.

How do you sort out this need for radical hospitality with radical discipleship? Including "helping you toward holiness" alongside "hospitality", Ariah?

Re: Seeing What Love Has Done

BDRhodes — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 14:41:20 -0000

The "since then" clause is rightly concerning, methinks.

One of Jesus' central templates for understanding his cruciform vocation was that of the suffering servant in Isaiah. Some have suggested, and I have followed them in this, that these songs were originally ways of the Jews coping with their own problem of evil, their own exile... an embodied theodicy, if you will. They were asking, "How if we are supposed to be the righteous servant of the almighty God, are we still in this bind?"

Their answer was that their sufferings are somehow redemptive, somehow sin-cleansing. Isaiah, in seeing Israel as the suffering servant, proclaims that their exile and torment under pagan empires would atone for their exile-causing sins... hence every slapped cheek and carried cross and imperial curseword was perhaps, somehow, maybe, just maybe... heaping coals upon the oppressors' heads and leading ever closer to the end of the exile.

If Jesus is Israel "par excellance", if he is embodying in himself the vocation of Suffering Servant Israel, then we can see how his sufferings undo the exile once and for all... that he does for Israel what it could never do for itself. Thus we can see how Paul's sufferings commemorate or even "complete" (his words) the sufferings of the Servant King, and also perhaps refracting it backwards in time, how the sufferings of the righteous mystically anticipate the sufferings of Messiah. To us the cross is brought near in our own sufferings, and to the ancient righteous the power of the cross was also brought forward from Golgotha into their pain... and the power of that union, of that communion, reached the ears of God.

Re: A More Gracious Radicalism

BDRhodes — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 22:56:51 -0000

"the details of living radically" -- I'm with you on that one. I'd love to see practitioners who have some experience in all this begin talking more about lessons learned.

Re: Gospel Fun with Wordle!

BDRhodes — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 17:37:55 -0000

That was awesome. Wish I'd seen this earlier! :)

Re: A More Gracious Radicalism

BDRhodes — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 14:04:32 -0000

I think that's spot on -- that we too easily give faaaar too much credit to the empire. It's so easy for us to find our identity in what we're not (consumer, imperial, just-war, suburban, whatever), that we just wind up perpetuating the mythic might of the principalities n powers.

It's great to be against things, but how much better to be against them because we were FIRST FOR something. That helps me remain unimpressed with the lies and myths which propagate the defeated powers. 'Tis better to create than to crassly condemn.

Re: Interview with George Barna and Frank Viola on their book, Pagan Christianity, and their Take on the Missional Church Debate

BDRhodes — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 20:36:28 -0000

What a great, and encouraging, interview. Gives me renewed hope as a fellow member of the post-Christendom re-localized church movement. :)

Thanks George and Frank for your time and words and wisdom.

Re: Rebellion as Staying Put

BDRhodes — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 19:13:47 -0000

Matt, thank you for expressing something deep in my bones and which flutters like new life.

When I stay put, I find spiritual health. When I move around, I get spiritually malnourished. And it's impressive how much I've had to defend the nobly austere vision you've so splendidly shared.

I wonder what happens in the years to come as Easy-Mobility withers along with our energy supplies. Should make for a fascinating cultural readjustment. We'll again discover the virtues of commitment and contentment, and the disciplines of reconciliation and neighborliness.

I hope.

Re: Rebellion as Staying Put

BDRhodes — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 19:11:32 -0000

Yep... I've definitely experienced attempts at "authentic community" that really dealt more with "don't rock the boat" than it did the full mess of committed life together that IS The Church. Thank Jesus I've also experienced genuinely fruit-bearing and death-pruning and finding-contentment-in-the-mundane community too. Now THAT'S authentic. :)

Re: Who are the ‘Least of These’?

BDRhodes — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 04:01:16 -0000

Ahhh, wonderful.

Perriman, though I have carefully read two of his books ('Coming of...' and 'Re:Mission'), read his blog a lot, and prodded his theology face-to-face, continues to be a delightfully challenging conversation partner in understanding Jesus. Often, it feels like Andrew has a very small (though he would say robustly Jewish and biblical) Jesus -- something which would naturally rub many of us "way of Jesus" Anabaptist-minded folk quite sourly.

Bluntly: to me, it often feels like Andrew marginalizes Jesus and hyper-localizes Jesus' historical teachings. How have you, Daniel, made the jump from Perriman to the quasi-Anabaptist Jesus-centeredness of this web 'zine? I still ask this about myself. :)

Perhaps for me, the answer is reverting to the Jesus-centeredness of Bishop Tom, whom you also cite; and whom furthermore is able to read both TOWARD neo-preterist conclusions within the horizons of Jesus' historical locale, ... and yet also FOR enduring applications of Jesus' teachings beyond those horizons.

Re: Who are the ‘Least of These’?

BDRhodes — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 23:18:02 -0000

Thank you, thank you, thank you! I've been waiting, whether I knew it or not, for such a thoughtful explanation of this passage. You snap it into the bigger short-term eschatological crisis faced by the early Palestinian church brilliantly and beautifully.

I wonder, though, if it is hermeneutically possible to use this passage as a way to also understand God's intentions for life within the church, or for understanding God's wider concern and impossibly obscure preference for hanging out with (nay, solidly identifying with!) the 'least of these.' I wonder if, as the Orthodox teach us about ikons, we can look through this passage into that wider reality. I don't mean to let that be a gateway to exegetical sloppiness, but I do think we can see a big part of the heart of God in this than our neo-preterism might otherwise foster.

Merry Christmas to you, too. :)