Tag: international

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Evangelicals walking the talk

The New York Times has a story about a Baptist church in Georgia adapting to a multicultural world. Having fallen from 600 to 100 members as the demographics of their town changed, the former Clarkston Baptist Church is now the Clarkston International Bible Church and is back up to 300 members.

Mr. Perrin said the impact of the church on his life hit him when he and his wife were traveling through the Midwest. They stopped to worship at whatever Baptist church they could find.

“Every church that we walked into was pure white Caucasian,” he said. “My wife and I really felt uncomfortable, because, we realized, here in Clarkston is what the world is all about.”

They did it because a close reading of the Bible indicated that Jesus had envisioned a multicultural Church. They lost some old members, of course, but I think it’s great that as a community they were able to decide to change—and then to implement it. Now if only more churches would realize LGBT people are meant to be welcomed as members as well.

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Shoddy financial services

For convenience, I decided to use a CapitalOne Mastercard for my monthly fee from Linden Lab, the company behind Second Life. This morning, I got an email from Linden Lab saying my charge had been rejected. When I called CapitalOne, they said the transaction had been sent to the fraud department since it was charged via London (just a bad decision in Linden Lab’s choice of billing vendor). They said they would mark it as ok, but when I mentioned that it is a monthly charge, however, they said I would have to call every month. Calling every month for a routine transaction, just because it’s coming from London? What a load. I’ll be moving my business elsewhere.

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A Handbook of Norse Mythology

While in Portland for the UUA’s General Assembly, I of course went shopping at Powell’s City of Books. I’ve been there once before, and what a treat it is. (They also do mail-order of new and used books.) Among the books I bought was a Dover reprint of Karl Mortensen’s 1912 A Handbook of Norse Mythology, translated from the Danish by A. Clinton Crowell. I remember D’Aulaire’s Book of Norse Myths quite fondly from childhood, and I was looking for a good source of northern-European names and folklore for, erm, “inspiration” in Second Life. (Part of the modest role-play I engage in has me a part of House Heidrun. Heidrún is a goat at Valhalla that produces never-ending mead.)

This slim book lays out the basic mythology of the nordic peoples in a very straightforward way, including some assessment of the layers of mythology and the changes over time–like the promotion of Odin to the head of the pantheon following earlier focus on Thor. A happy purchase.

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An insufficient analysis

Andrew Sullivan posts about “a challenging analysis” of the U.S. position in the Middle East with reference to gas and oil sources, but I don’t think that’s sufficient. The pertinent sentence from the portion of the Star-Telegram article he quotes:

Any group, nation or coalition of nations able to dominate this region would hold the keys to domination of a world economy dependent on these fuels.

As soon as any nation becomes independent of these fuels (which we all, eventually, must), they escape this domination. Instead of focusing on being the dominant force in the world, the United States would do well to ensure that we are not subject to the vagaries of oil and gas production, in the Middle East or anywhere else.