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“We don’t have a choice when it comes to our relatives. We have a choice when it comes to our pastors and the churches we attend.”

Hillary Clinton, responding to Barak Obama’s decision to continue attending his church despite Pastor Wright’s controversial comments.

“Then he looked at those seated in a circle around him and said, ‘Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does God’s will is my brother and sister and mother.’

Jesus, in Mark 3:34

Do we really have more choice about our churches than we have about our families?

written by Kyle \\ tags: church, Family, politics, theology

I am infatuated with simplity: reading Unclutterer, Zen Habits, Paul Graham’s Stuff… purging my cubicle, cleaning out the garage, and maybe even picking up around our home office (the worst den of disorganization). We are paring down the amount of stuff we own. Nothing radical yet, but just a little here, a little there.

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written by Kyle

One day and two absolutely incredible segments on NPR.

The first was a story about “the race to rescue a Lebanese girl buried by an Israeli airstrike”:http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5624491. It is a poignant reminder of the human toll of war, as the story could have easily come from either side (i.e. it could have been an Israeli girl buried by a rocket attack).

That afternoon I listened as Betsy Chalmers explained why “I believe in faithfulness.” Though you can read her essay, I would recommend listening, to hear the emotions in her voice; this too was a frank look at the human toll of brokeness, but within the context of God’s redemptive work.

written by Kyle

In “Pat Robertson’s own words”:http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/wireStory?id=1975129: “If I heard the Lord right about 2006, the coasts of America will be lashed by storms. There well may be something as bad as a tsunami in the Pacific Northwest.”

Amazing. The coasts of America will be lashed by storms. With hurricanes increasing in number each year, America will be hit by storms. Truly a divine revelation.

Mr. Robertson reminds me of some elderly drivers; he keeps crashing but no one’s figured out how to kindly and gently take away his license.

written by Kyle

Take this quote:

bq. “Organizations like this one across the country are gaining access to schools through the famous people and entertainment value and then using those opportunities to proselytize,” she said. “These organizations sometimes take advantage of the schools’ desire to provide compelling experiences for their students.”

What’s the context? Another Christian morals crusader railing against liberal Hollywood or violent video games? Hardly.

That’s Drewry Fennell, executive director of the Delaware chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. She’s talking about “a recent assembly at a public high school that featured two Philadelphia Eagles football players”:http://sports.espn.go.com/nfl/news/story?id=2205460. Tra Thomas and Thomas Tapeh apparently mentioned their faith during their speeches and urged students to attend a local Christian concert. Parents complained and the principle disavowed any knowledge that the speeches would have a Christian tinge.

School assemblies like there _are_ dicey ground for separation of church and state. With that said, I find it incredibly ironic that Christians are being accused of being too media and entertainment-industry savvy. Dang. Who knew? Furthermore, shame on us for using the innocent entertainment industry to spread propaganda! How dare we…

written by Kyle

Switchfoot, a Christian band currently experiencing crossover success, has “posted instructions for circumventing the copy protection on their new CD”:http://forums1.sonymusic.com/groupee/forums/a/tpc/f/716102313/m/5201067064. Take note, because *this is illegal*.

The “Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA)”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMCA, a favorite in Congress, makes it illegal to circumvent encryption schemes, even if the end goal is perfectly legal. Switchfoot is helping their fans break United States law and circumvent measures their label has put into place to prevent piracy. And I applaud them for it.

The Wikipedia has a good article on the controversy around “Section 103’s anti-circumvention provisions”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMCA_anti-circumvention, but I’ll attempt to distill my complaints against the law down to a few sentences. The Supreme Court established fair use in the case Sony Corp v. Universal City Studios. I can already see your eyes glossing over, but stay with me here because if the Supreme Court hadn’t ruled in favor of fair use, you wouldn’t have a VCR. You see, the movie studios at the time were outraged that folks like you and I could use a VCR to make copies of their movies, so they tried to sue the VCR out of existence.

So what is fair use? It basically means that we can ignore copyrights as long as the copies we’re making aren’t:

# going to make us any money
# on a large scale
# isn’t going to deprive the copyright holder of signifigant chunks of money

Music fans everywhere enjoy fair use when they make (for my parents’ generation) mixed tapes or (my generation) rip mixed CDs. And that brings us back to Switchfoot and the DMCA.

You see, the DMCA makes it illegal for you to make those mixed tapes if the record label has some sort of encryption scheme on the albums. Even though the end goal is clearly legal under fair use, you’d have to break a law to get to the end goal. And that really sucks.

DMCA is badly in need of revision–Section 103 needs to be overhauled to account for fair use or dropped entirely. But until that happens, the only avenue left to protest is a time-honored tradition in American history: civil disobedience. I, for one, salute Switchfoot’s attempt to assist their customers in breaking the law. That’s a start.

But the Christian music industry needs to begin waking up to the new opportunities in the age of digital music. Bands with a strong fan base like Switchfoot no longer need a label to get their music out to the fans, between sites like “CDBaby”:http://www.cdbaby.com/ and the “iTunes Music Store”:http://www.itunes.com/ (with an 80% marketshare and a distribution deal with CDBaby). Furthermore, Christian artists need to begin looking at the “Creative Commons”:http://www.creativecommons.org/ for copyrights that would maintain their rights as artists while allowing freedom of use for their fans.

written by Kyle

I’ve been taken to task in the past for characterizing my worldview as “conservative” despite the following scribbles:

* “opposing most conservatives on Terry Schiavo’s situation”:http://www.kyleandkelly.com/scribbles/politics_and_current_events/abducting_life/
* “criticizing a constitutional amendment on marriage”:http://www.kyleandkelly.com/scribbles/christianity/amendments_marriage_and_the_church/
* “positing that God is not a Republican”:http://www.kyleandkelly.com/scribbles/christianity/politics_and_religion/

Whether or not I’ve crossed the line to a liberal worldview is an issue for another post, but in short: I would posit that I’m critical of Christian conservative orthodoxy (if we can have neo-conservatives, we can have orthodox conservatives) because I care about the Christian viewpoint. I wouldn’t critique if I didn’t care. I want to make sure that what we bring to the world is well-thought out and truly consistent with God’s Word.

Why post this now? I don’t want to see Christian conservatives become radical zealots, and I think it’s a “very real and timely danger”:http://news.google.com/?ncl=http://olympics.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx%3Ftype%3DtopNews%26storyID%3D2005-08-23T172944Z_01_SCH362917_RTRIDST_0_NEWS-VENEZUELA-ROBERTSON-DC.XML&hl=en. What the heck was Robertson thinking? Am I being out of line in calling his statements “over the line”? Any conservatives out there who want to attempt a defense?

written by Kyle

“God is Not a Republican. Or a Democrat.”:http://go.sojo.net/campaign/takebackourfaith

written by Kyle

This one’s been brewing in me for awhile, and recent events (including the Senate’s rejection of the proposed Amendment) have brought it to the surface.

Unlike many of my friends and family, I oppose a constitutional amendment to define marriage as between one man and one woman. I oppose it from two perspectives: one political, the other religious.

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written by Kyle

I recently wrapped up some freelance web design work on the “Life is Zen, Inc.”:http://www.lifeiszen.com web site; Life is Zen, Inc. is a marketing agency that caters to Zen Buddhists. I confess to initially accepting the job because the money was attractive; a pretty sinful reason looking back on it. That said, I want to start thinking about how I, as a Christian, should handle those times when my profession creates a nexus with the secular world. I want to be prepared the next time a situation like this arises.
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written by Kyle