Philip's Tunnel to Nowhere 3

I wrote up a page about the Alabama Christian freaks get-together on January 30 in Birmingham.    (In this theme, pages get special treatment at the top, and I want to always have the latest up there.)  Check it out, and join the Facebook group or comment to be kept up to date on details.

Being confined to hospital for a week isn’t great, but it does give you the chance to get out of some well-worn channels of your daily routine and into some other habits of greater or lesser value, such as reading novels or watching TV, respectively. I’m fortunate to have had some friends from church who brought reading material, and others who loaded up the church iPod with more than just sermons. Here’s what I’ve learned in the last week:

• The Price Is Right is an underappreciated cultural staple. Well, not exactly underappreciated, but… OK, what I mean is, I’d not bothered to watch it in the Drew Carey era despite considering myself a low-grade game show connoisseur. (Mind you, low-grade because I’m certainly not like most of the people commenting here). Now that I have spent a week waiting for 10:00 CT to arrive each day so I could watch the only remaining network daytime game show, I’m quite impressed by how they mixed so many of the naturally retro elements that have just aged well with other more consciously retro accents to celebrate the show’s place in TV lore. In the former bucket we have:
  • the dollar sign logo and “the price is right” logotype
  • virtually all the music and audio cues, from the iconic “losing horns” to the little ditties that play when prizes are shown off
  • minor elements of the set, such as the curtains in the back of the studio and the little flower design motif
  • many classic games, such as the Range Game whose analog mechanism looks like it hasn’t changed a bit.

  Meanwhile, I think I’d always been put off by what I glimpsed of the Carey-era changes, until it dawned on me this week that they’re consciously in homage to the hearty roots of the show in 60’s consumerism:

  • the changes to the set, particularly the box motif in light blue/dark blue (or whatever other color schemes)
  • that weird almost polygonal shape around the logo now

  There are a few other signs of the times — do the models’ longer dresses mean that we’re getting away from, “Sex sells,” finally? — but in general TPIR is still a lot of fun for those of us who grew up on daytime game shows in the 1980s.

• When you spend a lot of time watching the local TV news, the anchors showing up at their appointed times start to feel like family. “Oh, it’s the 5:00 pm news. There’s good ol’ Jim Jaggers doing the weather!” I get virtually none of my news from TV newscasts, so this time spent watching TV when I didn’t feel like getting news off the computer gave me some insight into the emotional bond that older generations seem to feel toward their TV news presenters.
• Life of Pi , Yann Martell’s fanciful 2002 novel about an Indian zookeeper’s son lost on the high Pacific, is the kind of book that makes me question why I don’t spend more time reading novels. I’ll have much more to say about this book. Its central theme of God expressing himself through story should be right in the sweet spot of most emergent/postmodern Christians’ discussion. (Wait, do pomoXtians ever actually discuss novels, or just talk about how important stories are? And no, of course A New Kind of Christian doesn’t count.)
• Cliff Stoll’s The Cuckoo’s Egg , a 1990 first-hand account of his efforts to counteract malicious hacking into early computer networks, was interesting, too, in a different way. Quite dated of course but fun to read about for anyone who’s ever cared about this time in tech history.
• The Apple iPod user interface is hugely overrated, and even though I might consider purchasing an Apple device I’ll still be a proud curmudgeonly Luddite. My complains may show up as a post of their own, so I’ll just summarize it like this: When someone tosses you an audio player the day after your surgery, even not being an “Apple person” it shouldn’t take you more than ten seconds to figure out how to do anything besides play all the songs alphabetically starting at AC/DC.
• That said, two days later when I picked up the iPod I took to the UI a lot better. Obviously someone at my church has similar musical taste to mine, but in much greater depth, because I kept finding whole albums by artists that I just kinda-sorta-thought would be worth learning more about.
• By now I’m familiar with most of the songs from Sufjan Stevens’ Illinois but for the first time I listened to all 22 tracks pretty much in sequence. It really drove home why that guy is so highly thought of.

Often I get in conversations with other people about churches and sermons. I guess this is because of my obsession with macro-level thinking, with always considering how to improve institutions that matter to me.

In any case, I find this conversations often going down well-worn paths, to the question of whether a church ought to be “aiming low” in its spiritual content, trying to clarify the basics so that any non-Christian coming in feels at ease; or “aiming high” so that the staunch believers making up most of the congregation will feel that the spiritual content continues to challenge them. (It should hopefully be obvious from the scare quotes that when I call this “aiming high”, I’m only talking about level of theological knowledge, not implying that the theologically knowledgeable are better or even more moral people.)

My position is typically that treating the question this way forces a false dichotomy. I think it’s plausible that a talented pastor can “aim low” by teaching the same fundamental truths of the Gospel again and again, but do it in such a way as to also “aim high” by illustrating those truths in ways that cause that jaded portion of the flock to think, “Wow, I’d never quite thought of that truth in those terms.” To be sure it takes talent, and it’s not like it happens every day. But there is a supernatural aspect to the Bible that renews it with every reading, so it’s not like the preacher is left to his own devices. Hopefully he’s calling on the Holy Spirit for help!

In any case, this came to mind last week at the church where I’m getting settled in, Redeemer Memphis. Jeffrey Lancaster gave a sermon on the beginning of Isaiah 6, and in my notes I transcribed his overview as:
“God is convicting, overwhelming, and the one who calls us.”

Now, none of these characteristics of God is exactly novel to me. I know God convicts; I know God is overwhelmingly holy; and I know God is the one who calls us. I’d probably even thought of each of the three in isolation in reference to that passage! But I’d not really thought of the three together, and certainly not with the particular illustrations that Jeffrey chose from his own experience.

I just wanted to get my position out there on the Internets: You can ask for preaching that does it all, both reiterating the fundamental truths and illuminating them for those who’ve already heard it all. How many preachers do that, though, or how the Holy Spirit interacts with the individual talents of the preacher, I wouldn’t venture to guess.

From day to day, week to week, I have a lot of thoughts spilling out of my brain that I think are interesting enough to write down here for future reference. But I rarely remember what they are by the time I have the volition to actually type up blog entries.

In any event, the transition to mostly living and working in Memphis is going really well. After some early drama around the question of whether my landlord’s previous roommate was really going to clear out or not (some months after he stopped paying rent!), everything finally worked out. I love Mud Island — very upper-middle class, true, but also great for walking with beautiful views of the DeSoto (I-40) Bridge. I live somewhat off the left side of this view, on the Memphis side

I have some other thoughts that I’d like to write about today, but in the interest of blog readability I think they’d best be displaced to their own posts. And for even more fun I can set them to auto-post
sometime in the future, oh my!

I talked a bit about my transition to Memphis, but here’s a thought that’s been going through my mind lately.

I’m acutely aware that my brain requires a certain amount of novelty to function, and that rearranging my work life so that I could move came at just the right time when I was about to flip out over being confined to Huntsville. But making this move has helped remind me just how much fun it novelty is to me.

I like getting lost and finding my way around streets I don’t know. I’ve been doing that a lot.

To some extent I like having to make new friends. I don’t mean that I tire of my old friends, exactly, or that I like feeling alone. But there’s something stimulating about the blank social slate.

I like being new places and having new opportunities to explore. I need to explore more of these coffee shops and not just stick to Otherlands and High Point. I definitely need to go through this list of Memphis BBQ joints!

Anyway, my point about novelty is that even though I’m just soaking it up, I’m acutely aware than in 3 or 6 months, everything novel about Memphis won’t seem novel any more. And although Memphis is the kind of place I could settle for good, much more than Huntsville, I also know that it won’t always be this new and exciting. So I can move around a lot, or I can learn new ways to create novelty in familiar settings. (For the record, grad school may move me away from Memphis in 2009 anyway.)

I’m not sure how “settled” I’ll be in the future, but I do know that I can’t live without some sort of novelty.

My mom is undergoing surgery tomorrow. It’s pretty routine, but she’s understandably nervous. If you happen to see this and care to pray, it’s much appreciated.

I know I’m beating a dead horse here, and of course the author is biased and pro-Democrat. And of course he selects informants who play into the worst stereotypes about the South. But the part about how this is a very calculated strategy to focus everyone off of issues and onto demonization still rings true.

This basically is everything the GOP has been serving up for all of my generation. As much as I dislike the policies of the Democrats, as much as they’re opposed to small government in theory, I’ll be pulling for them to beat the crap out of the GOP this November. Electoral humiliation is the only morality these turkeys know. Everything else validates their trash as a means to an end.

Last night I ventured out to the Hi-Tone for the first time to see Unwed Sailor, an impressive instrumental band that I was only vaguely familiar with. I’m glad I did, because being more active in the music scene locally is one of my priorities for this move to Memphis.

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I’m restarting this blog again. Here’s why. And the latest on my career/living status.

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