LOST

i love the tv show LOST. my buddy Jason got me hooked on it around at the beginning of the third season and it's been one of our favorite shows ever. between that and the new Battlestar Galactica, we were in tv heaven.
i've resisted posting too much on it until now, so if you don't want to read any spoilers, read no further.

seriously.

don't read if you think you'll watch the show....

you sure?

okay... here we go...

wait, really? you're not going to watch it? or have you already... okay, i'll quit stalling...


i love the whole narrative of LOST, it has something for everyone. it is very post-modern this way as it largely could be experience in a variety of ways. if you like drama, it had it. action, tons! mystery, how 'bout a big freak'n smoke monster, Egyptian statues, a 1800's ship thousands of yards inland, and strange science stations littered around the island protected by a mysterious group of "natives." but largely, the narrative was character driven, so however you watched it, it had to be done with the characters and their connections and relationships in mind.

LOST can't be categorized either. it had everything. " 'Lost' is in a class by itself," ABC's programming chief, Jeff Bader, said this week in this WashingtonPost article. "It is the most successful cult show ever." so what the hell was it about?

I think the show was offering us a big ol' allegory, for everything! The primary one is on how life should be lived. Namely an ongoing effort to understand each other and ourselves and this can only happen to it's fullest when undertaken with a community of people. a plane crashes, people meet up and figure out how the live together. their motto is "live together, die alone." and that was initially in reference to, "live with us and behave, or go out and get killed by a polar bear, the smoke monster, or the Others." but i understand that differently now.

we live together, we are defined by our relationships. yet no one can tell us who we are, we make our own narrative. yet we don't do this alone, we intersect and get feedback and such. we come into the narrative, the conversation, and it's already going on, and it will continue long after we're gone. who started it? not important. what is it about? about life itself. about what's real and what's worth paying attention to, how we should live and what "this" is all about. when we have listened long enough, we may enter in and vigorously discuss. but everyone does, articulately or un, explicitly or implicitly, live in relationship to the conversation. and after all our striving and figuring out, and trying to understand this existence comes to a close, we die alone.

yet not alone. we are surrounded by our memories of those who have come before us, and maybe, just maybe, we may find that the exact same people we lived with, already there, waiting on us. at least, that is my hope, some don't believe this, but Lost puts it in there and i like it.

the show was an awesome riff on Apokatastasis as everyone is together and reconsiled at the end. what we know is that there was a plane crash, people survived and lived together for a time. there is also a "side-ways universe" where they meet again and remember the island and everything that happened on it. it turns out that this place of meeting is an after-life, a place to reconnect and remember. and they move on from there.

this story gets us to ask many questions, and the questions we ask about "the island" are the exact questions we ask ourselves today. the main three at 1. what is the island? 2. why are they on it? 3. what happens when they leave? this can be translated to 1. what is existence? 2. why are we here? 3. what happens when we die? these are important questions... much like the ones Al raises on his most recent post.

i loved the "inclusio" in the finale. Lost started with an extreme close-up of Jack opening his eye and ended with him closing it. that was a bit of poetry and really stuck with me. great narrative move by the writers.

I like how this EWonline Article summed it up:

Lost is asking ''what if?'' What if our actions on this planet counted against some eternal reckoning? How does that possibility change things for you? If that possibility does inspire you to live a better life, then... how? And even before then, what is a ''better life''? Is it doing ''good''? But what is ''good''? Lost doesn't have answers for these questions and the others that they raise — it's just demanding that we ask them and discuss them. Together. Are we? Are you? Am I? Do you even have a choice? 

There is a lot to chew on. There are also many questions left unanswered, some of which aren't really all that important. what is important is the relationships formed during the time these people were alive. they were with each other on the journey, and still are. and they may forever be as far as we know. 

LTS Senior Skit

here is our senior skit, i'm in there a few times. it was written by my good friend KT (the narrator) and really gives a flavor of our seminary. lots of inside jokes, but still some good stuff. enjoy!

What We Could Be...

why we're not:

What Should We Do About that Moon? by Hafiz

A wine bottle fell from a wagon and broke open in a field.

that night one hundred beetles and all their cousins gathered.

and did some serious binge drinking.

They even found some seed husks nearby
and began to play them like drums and whirl.
This made God very happy.

Then the "night candle" rose into the sky
and one drunk creature, laying down his instrument,
said to his friend--for no apparent reason,

"What should we do about that moon?"

Seems to Hafiz
most everyone has laid aside the music

tackling such profoundly useless questions.

Some Thoughts
let's take today and just be silly. try not to be offended, laugh instead. crank the radio before dinner and have a dance party and invite others to dance with you. friend and family will think you have lost your mind, but they will soon join in and remember the taste of what it means to be alive and outside of expected routine.

don't worry, the world won't fall apart while you're doing this.

there will still be bigots, racists, fundamentalists, and they won't take over while your guard is down.

there will still be flowers, trees, coo'n babies, and other good things too, they won't go away during this time.

so dance! dance and be silly and enjoy the absurdity of life and it's preciousness. who knows? maybe this time will make it more so.

Moments

I hope that i will sieze these fleeting moments. my world is so rich... and it's bizarre to think that all of that nothing amounts to something. reality is mostly empty space, nothing that is pose'n as something. and yet all of us exist.

these symbols you are reading aren't the images that are conjured in your head.

one day my daughter will speak in complete sentences, drive a car, find love and heartbreak and love again...



all we have is now and metaphors to try and capture it. even our best technology, video camera's that record in HD, digital camera's that can freeze and instant, are nothing compared to the present moment, and our memories of it. and by the time you recognize this moment, this moment will be gone, but you'll bend the light pretending that it some how lingered on.



rawk in these mountains and now diamonds will remain. we're live'n in this life together and we'll wait to find if it lasts forever...

forever and ever amen.

A Special Announcement

Reformation Week will run June 1st to the 5th! Check back each day for posts!

Eve Elizabeth

here's your first look at Eve E.



everyone said that having a baby changes you, changes your world, changes everything! and they're right! i'm more astonished at life and the wonder of it all... it's amazing.

i really can't fathom anyone being an atheist now. like i could sorta see it, but now i think i've been pushed over the edge by the birth of my first child. this kid has aspects of me, aspects of Kate, and some combination of the two... or even stuff that we have no idea where it came from! (and this is only day 5!!)

it's all too perfect of a system, too well designed, thought out, it functions pretty awesomely. and since everyone has been born, you'd think we know everything about it... but we don't. we have the chemicals to induce birth, but have no idea how these things occur naturally. we have no idea why women have Group B streptococcus (GBS), nor why it kills some babies and not others.

just like the world... we can figure out a lot of things in it.. but we can't account for it's existence. we can't account for why things are they way they are, why humans act like they do, why gravity is and how it acts (because it's no where near as uniform as we once thought).

anywho... i love this child. i stare at Eve, i take joy in her even when she's wailing to beat the band. i can't account for how she is or what she will become, but i will take joy and soak up the wonder and awe of it all.. i will be a witness.

Battlestar RULES

best. show. ever.

here's the Admiral of the Battlestar Galactica (Edward James Olmos) talks about race as I understand it.



thanks to Bryce for the find.

Self-Reflection

a year of seminary has ended. this usually invites a time of self-reflection and confessions. at this time of schooling there is a human impluse to confess to one another long held secrets or opinions. it is an interesting phenomenon.


i had many great experiences here. i've been told by one collegue that they wish to see the world as i see it, just for one day. that was very nice! i was also told by another collegue that if i was in charge of the earth, they would wake up and have no idea what was going on with a purple sun rise and a velociraptor riding a bike down their street. so there's both affirmation and humility sprinkled in here and it is precisely this mix that is sacred.

this leads to the question of how do i see the world? what frames am i using when i view it? we all use frames as the world is too much to view all at once, too paradoxical. which ones are mine? which ones are useful and which should i discard?

These questions are a step in the process of figuring out the verbage I’m going to use when describing Christian Education. For me right now:

Christian Education is getting to zero.
We do this by examining what we carry,
Why we carry it,
Who gave it to us,
And is it worth keeping?
Zero then is understood as not the absense, but the possibility.

I like this, but I’m unsure of the practicality of this statement. I like that it takes words at the symbolic level. Words are symbols of something, not the actual thing. The word Duck is not a duck. We loose sight of this in our religious communities as we become wrapped up in the one interepretation of the word, not the symbol of it. Words are important but more important I would contend are the possible themes those words are to evoke.

We are standing in the center of something rare and vast. The problem isn’t that we don’t know, it’s that we don’t care to explore the possibilities of our lives.

one way to graphically demonstrate this is with two videos. the first is one of my favorite bands of all time Royksopp... you may have heard them on the Geico Caveman at the Airport ad, but their style really appeals to me. the genre of music is known as "chill" or "deep couch" for it's laid back approach. this video represents how i walk down the street... how and what i think... there's a feeling that this music produces.. a hopeful-melancholy. this may sound like a paradox, but what is life but a paradox?! enjoy the video:



this other one is super-catchy audio crack! i loooove Japanese power-pop like P5. this is if P5 and Slipknot had a baby, both happy and agressive. another paradox! thanks to Weaver for the find!



i think they're saying "sweet and sour, we've got your MEGA-Lover" which is totally cool! whatever they're singing i can't stop listening to it! eeeek!

amazing underwater world

watch the octopus at the end! those things are amazing! too bad that science has nothing to do with God cause all of this is random and makes no sense ;-)

What Is Emerging?

The New Religious Landscape:



this is from the blog over there in the bar called Emergent Village, a great source. Tony is a great source and expert on all the different types of "emerging." I really enjoyed this. Tony asks his own stunning (rhetorical) question: “What do we do with the robots when they show up at the church doors?!

I consider myself a emergent. Get the context and then dialog with others about. Gather around the tribal fire and tell stories and try to figure out one another's lives. Great video! Check it out!

Mimetic Theory in Action

Hey y'all, remember that scary Mimetic Theory i talked about in this post and this other post?

Well since I will now point out daily applications of what i post about, i figured i'd start here. The best instance of Mimetic Theory can be found the best show on TV today... BATTLESTAR GALACTICA!

Remember when Lee gives an empassioned speech in defense of Baltar? That's Mimetic Theory!

Lee points out a string of incidents, some involving himself, where people were forgiven for serious crimes, and defends those decisions, arguing that humanity is not a real civilization anymore. Adama thinks that executing Baltar for actions that he couldn't really prevent is not justice, and that Baltar is just the Fleet's scapegoat for everyone's misdeeds and failures on New Caprica. The speech plays a major role in Baltar's subsequent acquittal.

I couldn't find a video of Lee's speech, but you can listen to it here!



GO WATCH BATTLESTAR! IT'S THE BEST, MOST RELEVANT SHOW ON TV!!!!

Who did I see this past Monday?

you betcha!

Importance of Context

Postcolonialism is one of those university words... it deals with cultural identity in colonised societies: the dilemmas of developing a national identity after colonial rule; the ways in which writers articulate and celebrate that identity (often reclaiming it from and maintaining strong connections with the coloniser); the ways in which the knowledge of the colonised (subordinated) people has been generated and used to serve the coloniser's interests; and the ways in which the coloniser's literature has justified colonialism via images of the colonised as a perpetually inferior people, society and culture.

I am a postcolonialist. The short of this translates to: i'm trying to renounce my white priviledge. "Hi i'm luke! what's your favorite color?! i see your skin is different than mine, do you identify primarily through this medium or do you prefer i deal with you on an individual level?" There are no inferior people, just people in different contexts. The point is to dialog about those context and see the similarities! imagine what we could learn! imagine the different ways of viewing the world that we could learn and in turn use these to help solve problems in our own contexts! awesome huh?

the opposite of this view is colonialist. no one will identify as this, but i see a TON of this popping up recently. a colonialists believes that their country is the greatest and all other countries must measure up to their standard. for example, US colonialism would hold that white, male, middle to upper-class capitalist that is religiously nondenominational Prostestant is the standard to be measured by.

the biggest instance in current events is the whole blow up on the Barack Obama's pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright's 2001 comments where he stated "God damn America!" people are jumping up and down about this.. people are asking me what my thoughts are.. here they are:

someone claimed that Obama is “as a man and member of the Elite social-economic class Senator Obama has no sense of what working class men or women suffer, survive, and live through daily”

he’s not. please read his background. he's actually quite poor compared to every other politician out there...

as for the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.. please listen to his whole speech in context and read what Black Liberation Theology means. it mainly means that it is Afro-centric but not Afro-supremists. Why don't we have White Liberation Theology? Because we don't need it in this country! The majority of theology in America is white. What would we be liberated from? Keep that in mind while you view the whole speech! enjoy!



Do you see the postcolonialist message in here?

This whole mess is started because a man, Obama, was raised by a white mother and self-identifed as a black man and went to a progressive black church. this is what it is. what we’re dealing with is race issues on both sides and white priviledge is being confronted. white people don't like having to remember the fact that they were generally shitty to people of color despite the fact they had "All Men are Created EQUAL" in the bill of rights since the late 1700s and still haven't lived up to it yet (although there have been some improvements).

now that you have the context... what do you think?

Wook at dat Face

hey y'all! we're off in AZ for vacation, i'll see ya on the 24th. i leave you with this moral: Don't Be Evil.

Rawk!

The First Day of Your Life

This is the first day of your life, but i just thought that you should know.... i could go anywhere with you and i'd be happy, these things there's no telling, we'll just have to wait and see.

but i'd rather be working for a paycheck than waiting to win the lottery.



Happy Birthday Reverse Babe! 2-28-80 to 2-28-08

The Subversive Gospels

Let's transcend labels. Labels are useful but we too often confuse labels with the actual complex entities our labels describe. This is what i'm getting after rereading much of the Gospels. The Gospels are very shocking and subversive, and Jesus is asking us to get over our preconceived notions.

Here's an updated parable:
A Bible believing pastor of the largest church in the area meets with a confused teenage male. The pastor starts by saying "Dear Lord, thank you for this chance to witness to this young man. Thank you for helping me make up his mind."

The young man begins his own prayer, "Dear Lord, I don't know if i believe in virgin birth, bodily resurrection, or even if you exist as a personal being, but I thank you for the brain I have so that I can keep on searching for you." God heard the teenager's prayer!

This is a loose metaphor for what the Gospels are saying everytime Jesus talks to a Pharisee. The Pharisees were not the bad guys, as we think of them today, they were the ardent, honest scholars who faithfully believed. The Gospels are SHOCKING! Met to shake us out of our notions, overturn what we think is going to happen. Jesus upset the normal order! Jesus was like the teenager.

People who believe that they're already at their destination haven't even started yet. People who are humble enough to admit that they are searching are closer than they realize to the truth. Gospels original intention is to shock and overturn belief, not to reinforce it. The God of Jesus is the God of EVERYONE.

Further Reading:

The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus by Peter Gomes

Rule of Three:
Watching: 300
Reading: The Apocraphal Gospels
Listening: Jimmy Eat World: Futures

CoExist comedy tour!

I gotta find out if this is coming to LTS. Maybe i can get the commitee on diversity to get these people here!

CMAs, Scary Stories, and GOBLINS!

So I told my Ma that i don't like today's country and said i wouldn't be watching the CMA's. but kate and i checked it out and then barely turned the channel. we really loved carrie underwood's song "so small" i couldn't find a good copy of the song, but here's a cover.


we also liked Taylor Swift! This song really brought us back to being bf & gf!


so Ma's pretty smart! Although we still can't stand Sugarland.. sounds like the lady swallowed a cat and is try'n unsuccessfully to bring it back up. and the guy who sings "these are my ppl" is boring and i'm not a fan of these types of songs. YAY US! YOU GUYS DON'T KNOW SO QUIT ACT'N LIKE YOU DO type songs suck. so yay for the rest of country music! also Kitchen Nightmares is like TV Crack Goodness!

Here's random videos to recap some past events that i'd like to share:

Here's Kate telling me a scary story for halloween:


Just when you think that getting stairs for your dog is the best invention ever, here comes the trump card!

Kate and i have so much trouble with Zerrag, but since we got the Goblin Steps, all is well in the world!

Pearl's Back!

Katie Burke sent me THE LANDLORD and i laughed until milk came out my nose. then i realized i don't drink milk. when something is so funny it makes my nose lactate, it's worth doing a sequel.



plus brandon and alley were married at the beginning of june!!! i don't think i've mentioned that on here. great wedding!a big post is upcoming! until then bloggateers!

Chew On This

Hey Y'all!

Last nights Lost was a doozie! The quick run down is that Ben has father issues and killed off all the Dharma Intitiative peeps by gas'n them. Ben takes Locke to see "Jacob" who speaks to Locke. Locke is then shot by Ben and left for dead in the open grave of the Dharma ppl. Here's the entire run down on About.com

There are many theories floating around to the nature of the island and motivations of Ben. Some say it's hell, some say a limbo of some sort, some speculate it's an electromagnetic sensitive place. The Poprocks Blog has a good run down of theories and speculations. Another good run down can also be found on the New York Mag online.

Here's my amatuer assessment of the island's true nature. The writers have put in a lot of Stephen King references, from the book review of Carrie to numerous others.. for the full run down check out this post.. So for me to come out and say what the island is it would have to explain the following:

1. Reappearance of Dead People
2. Miraculous Healing (Locke being prime example)
3. The Black Cloud
4. How can their be crash survivors when their plane being 4 miles under the sea

In Stephen King's magnum opus The Dark Tower Series, the Dark Tower is the center of the multi-verse. The point where all dimensions and universes come together into one point. If the island is this world's Dark Tower, it would explain a lot. The island would be "thin" where long dead people can cross over and contact those on the island. Also this would explain how there could be no survivors of flight 815 and yet have survivors on the island at the same time ala Donnie Darko. This incorporates tangent universes, multiple life-locations, and even Locke's healing (because he was never paralyzed in this dimension/tagent universe).

Granted there's a lot of work that needs to go into this theory and a whole lot more research than i'm prepared to give to it. I think my buddy Jason would be the go to guy to confirm or deny, as he's the one who got me hooked on this damn show that never gives me answers!!!!