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New Attitudes Color Iranian Society, Culture by Barbara Slavin (USA Today)

Posted by Ed Miller

TEHRAN, Iran — In a city that only a few years ago was almost monochromatic — full of women draped head to toe in black — women and girls this winter are sporting pink coats, pink sweaters, pink head scarves, shoes and bags.

Iran’s Islamic rulers appear to have given up trying to make women observe more than the letter of the hijab, the Koran’s admonition that Muslim women outside their homes should cover everything but their faces, hands and feet. The change has been gradual, but this year coats have gotten shorter, brighter and tighter, heels higher and scarves have slipped farther back to reveal most of women’s hair.

Iran’s “pink revolution” is a silent fashion statement that sends a powerful message. Unable to act overtly against the rigid Islamism that has shaped Iranian political and cultural life since the U.S.-backed shah was overthrown in 1979, many Iranians express their contempt for the government through their clothing.

For women, that means the sexiest, most fashionable attire possible while still covering the requisite body parts. For men, dissatisfaction takes the form of clean shaves — Islam encourages beards — publicly shaking hands with unrelated women and wearing jeans and long hair.

“The more you look at the people in the streets, they don’t look like Iranians any more,” says Goli Emami, a translator of English books into the Iranian language Farsi.

Yet, the country has changed in ways that have contradicted the Islamic tenets on which the revolution was based. For every weblog shut down, two more seem to emerge. New, reform-leaning newspapers regularly challenge government policies. Reformist politicians are hoping for a comeback. And in a society where more than half the population is under the age of 30, young Iranians are staging a non-violent but potent counterrevolution not only through fashion, but also with their music and relations between the sexes that defy the strict Islamism dictated by the ruling mullahs.

The evidence of that change is obvious to anyone walking on Tehran’s streets. “Two years ago, we all wore red. This year, we’re wearing pink, and next year, who knows?” says Farzaneh Samadian, 21, a computer software engineer whose pink and navy scarf is barely attached to her head. “We love freedom.”

The King Of The Blues B.B.King by Joel Selvin (SF Chronicle)

Posted by Ed Miller

It was his first gig in five weeks. The indefatigable 79-year-old took time off for a second cataract surgery, after recovering from the first cataract operation with only a few appearances in between, for what amounted to three months out of action.

“I haven’t had three months off in 57 years,” said King, who will play nine shows in the next 11 days on a short West Coast swing before he heads through the Midwest and into deepest Canada over the next couple of months. He owns a house in Las Vegas, but he calls any place he stays three nights home.

At this point in his life, B.B. King has come to represent an entire generation of black musicians. Born Riley B. King in the Mississippi Delta, he can remember playing tobacco barns in the South on the same circuit as Ray Charles, Big Joe Turner, Wynonie Harris and all the others, long gone, where people dancing kicked up the dust between the floorboards until they couldn’t see who they were dancing with. King sang movingly and tearfully at Charles’ funeral last June. How many others are left?

“I haven’t checked since this morning,” he joked. “Not that many ... not that many. I’m one of the few.”

The blues often was seen as nothing less than the devil’s music by many of the more pious in the black community. At best it was considered a gangly, unsophisticated country cousin of big-city jazz and rhythm and blues. The music’s humble origins and old-fashioned traditions often were linked with unpleasant memories of life under segregation for a generation of blacks raised in the cities, far from the country life and farm work King grew up doing.

Bearing all that in mind, he always approached his profession with immense dignity because he knew he would be one of the main figures to take this low-born, provincial music out of the rural South, the juke joints of the Mississippi Delta and the roughneck gin mills of West Memphis in the ‘40s, and expose it to the rest of the world. He said that was one of the reasons he still works so hard.

He rattles off the names of younger blues musicians—John Mayer, Jonny Lang, Corey Harris, Keb’ Mo’. “I’ve been out there it seems like 100 years,” he said. “I keep a watch on what I hear around me. I hope they don’t have to go through what I went through.”

He sang songs he has been singing since he worked the chitlin’ circuit at places like Oakland’s Showcase Lounge and was entirely unknown in the white community. He did old Louis Jordan numbers. He did the U2 song Bono wrote for him, “When Love Comes to Town.”

He played his own signature pieces such as “The Thrill Is Gone,” “How Blue Can You Get,” “Rock Me Baby.” He sang numbers like Big Bill Broonzy’s “Key to the Highway” that connect him to the music’s beginnings.

He is truly a tribal elder, a shaman with wisdom and magic to impart. But at the core of everything he does lies the immutable truth of the blues, the inevitable hands of fate and fortune extracting their terrible price from human existence.

“Listen to the blues ... listen to what they’re saying,” he sang Thursday in “Nightlife,” a song written by Willie Nelson that King has been singing at least since he recorded the number on his classic 1967 album, “Blues Is King.”

“Oh, the nightlife, ain’t no good life,” he sang, “but it’s my life.”

Calvin College On U2 by Charles Honey(Christianity Today)

Posted by Ed Miller

College class on U2 explores religious influence of a rock band.

Dwarfed by a giant bank of TV monitors, the rock star Bono gyrates across the arena stage—a dancing shaman channeling the ecstasy of thousands of U2 fans.

“In waves of regret, in waves of joy, I reached for the one I tried to destroy,” he sings passionately. “You said you’d wait till the end of the world.”

Hands reach out to him as he walks among the faithful. Video clips show tidal waves crashing, lightning flashing and a woman wailing.

The soundtrack to apocalypse? No, it’s a splice of a TV special about a U2 tour of the early 1990s.

It’s also a sign of increased interest in the spiritual significance of this immensely popular Irish rock group.

The images are taken in by a class of Calvin College students, who are probing what Bono and his band have to say as Christians to the world of pop culture.

But why a class on U2, one of the world’s most adored rock bands, at a conservative Christian college?

“Religion and rock ‘n’ roll can meld together,” insists Katie Arbogast. “U2 does the best job of it.”

Many scholars and clergy agree. They say U2 is an important spiritual influence on a youth culture more enamored of popular media than of the church.

“What they have to offer is a vision,” said Mark Mulder, who is teaching the U2 course during Calvin’s three-week interim semester. “They’re saying there’s something wrong with the world. But at the same time, they offer a hope. The gospel message is embedded within.”

If you listen hard enough, there are a lot of things going on in pop culture which really question the ordering of the world today, and offer a vision of what things could and should be like,” said Mulder.

The Rev. Beth Maynard also sees a spiritual surge in pop culture, from the rock groups Switchfoot and Evanescence to the TV show “Joan of Arcadia.”

“We’re in a phase as a society right now where a great deal of theological reflection is happening in pop culture,” said Maynard, an Episcopal priest from Fairhaven, Mass. “U2 were in the vanguard of that.”

Maynard sees the group fertilizing the ground of pop culture for the sowing of the gospel, helping people take “small steps in the direction of God.”

“They seem to be seeking to just give an open invitation for people to move into the realm of asking questions about spiritual life, about God, about Christ. It’s raising the questions but not overtly or forcefully prescribing the answers.”

“Bono’s view of the world is very close to what we teach here at Calvin. We’re not just sitting around waiting for the Earth to be destroyed. We expect the world to be renewed.”

Pimp My Faith by Rabbi Marc Gellman( Newsweek)

Posted by Ed Miller

Think TV is a wasteland? Here are two reality shows that are hip and healing

Feb. 16 - After seeing a television picture for the first time some 60 years ago, the writer E.B. White said, “This will either be a grave disturbance or a saving radiant light.” In retrospect, the grave-disturbance theory has basically trounced the saving-radiant-light theory—except for any episode of “I love Lucy,” the coverage of the first lunar landing and a few nature programs most of which begin with the somnolescent preface, “The platypus is a very interesting animal.” Look, if you can find some saving spiritual lesson in “Jackass” please enlighten me immediately.

However, I feel the stirrings of the saving radiant pixels of a new age. Who would have thought that the prophets for this generation of spiritually acceptable television would be a hip-hop rapper named Xzibit and an ex-J Crew model named Ty Pennington. I hereby proclaim the Gospel of “Pimp My Ride” and “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition.” What I see in these two shows is a saving radiant glimmer of how television married to compassion (and a blown 450cc short block engine) can produce programs that are both hip and healing, both popular and profound.
Anyway, both shows select poor, needy and worthy people, some of whom are also courageous and sick. On “Pimp My Ride,” a hunk of steaming junk from a hysterically grateful recipient is driven by Xzibit to West Coast Custom body shop in L.A. to be stripped and rebuilt from the metal up by a team of charismatic car trolls who delight in going to any lengths to make the new car a thing of beauty and fantasy for its needy owner. In “Extreme Makeover,” the run-down house of hysterically grateful recipients is demolished and then a new house is built in one week, usually on a new and vastly enlarged foundation by Ty and his team of design and production hotties. 

What makes these two shows not just kind and weepy but actually luminous is the way they unselfconsciously obliterate the traditional ways we often treat the poor. First, both shows treat the needy without a hint of condescension or pity. They respect these people completely. It is that respect, more than the pimped-out ride or the new house, that is the real gift.  Also the workers on both shows work with real joy. Charity is often seen as a dutiful burden, but in these cases it is a labor of love. Psalm 100 says, “Serve the Lord in joy.” I checked in vain the ancient commentaries for a reference to the joy produced by trunk-mounted bowling ball washers, but who knows what King David had in mind 3,000 years ago when he wrote that psalm?
To give the poor a gift that far exceeds their wildest imagination and to give that gift with respect and joy is not just a good thing; it is a new and saving thing whose radiance, I feel certain in my soul, will let ol’ E.B. rest in peace, assuming of course he can’t tune in to see the new season of “The Bachelorette.”

Our Glorious Salvation

Posted by Daveg

God Displays His Glory By Choosing Some For Eternal Life and Not Others

“He must become greater, and I must become less.”  Those words of John the Baptist resonate with every believer at some point in their Christian experience.  We can all appreciate how, as our vision of God’s goodness and greatness grows, our picture of ourselves diminishes.  Anything that contributes to enlarging our understanding of God is bound to cause us to think less of ourselves.  But what we often fail to see is the intimate connection between that process and our own joy.  We sometimes hear John’s words as a concession, uttered with a heavy sigh, as if he were saying, “My time has come and gone—I’ve had my 15 minutes of fame, and now it’s time for the main act.”  But we can’t hear John at all unless we hear him fully; “The friend who attends the bridegroom waits and listens for him, and is full of joy when he hears the bridegroom’s voice.  That joy is mine, and it is now complete.  He must become greater; I must become less.” At the heart of John’s words is his commitment to pursing his own joy in the glory of the Son.  I can imagine him shouting those words, even weeping for joy as he uttered them.  The lesson should not be lost on us.  Anything that contributes to our drinking in a fuller picture of God’s greatness—anything that fosters greater humility on our part, is destined to bring us joy.  I am sometimes asked, “why does it matter what we think about God’s sovereignty?  That topic has sparked so much controversy anyway.”  My desire for myself and for my family and friends is that our joy be complete—and what we believe about the sovereignty of God has everything to do with God becoming greater and me becoming less.
  One of the ways that God brings glory to His name is the way in which people are saved.  As we mentioned last week, the Bible is filled with paradoxes, and the question of how we are saved is perhaps one of the most vexing.  But should it surprise us that God is emotionally complex—that he is not simple or one-dimensional, and that, despite the apparent contradictions, the one thing that consistently shines through is Him?  G.K. Chesterton, the brilliant Christian apologist of the last century said it best:  “Christianity got over the difficulty of combining furious opposites by keeping them both, and keeping them both furious.”  As we look at God’s sovereignty in salvation, we discover furious opposites—and we dare not refashion them to fit our own expectations of the way we think God should act.
  So, how is it that people are saved? The Bible teaches that God anguishes over the plight of the lost and that his desire is that everyone should repent and be saved (2 Peter 3:9; 1 Tim.2:1-4; Exod. 34:6; Ezek. 18:32).  We can only conclude from these verses that God’s kindness and love are genuine and that his anguish over the plight of the lost is real.  But, obviously, not all people are saved.  So if God wills that everyone should repent, why does it not happen?  Although God “wills” that all people repent, there is a higher purpose that God must have in mind, a greater priority that must be pursued.  So, what is that higher purpose?  One obvious answer is that God wants to magnify the free-will of the creatures he has made, drawing our attention to the sovereignty of the choices we make with regard to salvation.  But I don’t believe that this explanation holds up under the weight of scripture, which seem to point to a different priority.  That greater priority is that we might drink in a picture of the fullness of God’s glory, manifested in both his mercy and his wrath, and that, ultimately, we might enjoy giving God all the credit for our rescue and salvation.  God magnifies the glory of His mercy and His wrath by choosing some to be saved, and not others.  He does this through the exercise of his sovereign, electing grace, without regard to the anticipated faith or the potential merit of the recipient of that grace.
  We first see God exercising this electing love in the call of one man, Abraham. (Neh. 9:7). In the same way, God chose one people, the people of Israel to be his special possession (Deut. 14:2).  Why did God move in the hearts of this individual and this people?  Because it pleased him to pour his love and compassion on them in this way.  The Bible makes it clear that it had nothing to do with any perceived faith or anticipated response to God’s invitation (Deut.10:14-15; 7:6-8).  The same arguments are given in the choosing of one son (Jacob, not Esau, and Isaac, not Ishmael) over another (Rom. 9:10-13). God’s overriding objective in exercising his free, unconditional and sovereign choice was always the same; to the praise of his glorious grace (Isa. 43:7, 21). 
  In the New Testament, we see the same commitment on God’s part to his sovereign electing grace, only now his focus moves from an ethnic people (Israel) to a new people composed of every nation (The Church).  Again and again, we are told that God, without regard to the expectations of humankind, and without consideration of any merit on the part of the recipient, chose some to be his own, while he hardened the hearts of others. (Eph. 1:4-6, 11-12, 14; John 10:25-26;  John 6:37-39; Romans 8:28-32; Acts 13:48; Romans 11:7-10; Acts 16:14; John 6:65; 1 Cor. 1:23-24; Rom. 11:25-26; Romans 9:14-18.)  Not only does God’s electing grace impact the destiny of individuals and nations, but apparently the fate of angelic beings is determined in the same way (1 Tim. 5:21)
  We can conclude then, that it is God’s Spirit that makes our dead hearts alive to God’s call (John 3:3,5; 6:65), it is God who gives us the capacity to repent (Acts 11:18; 2 Tim. 2:25), it is God who gives us the ability to respond in faith (Acts 13:48; I Cor. 12:3; Eph. 2:8-9), and it is God who will persevere to the end, guaranteeing that none of those who are truly His will ever be lost (John 10:27-28; 1 Peter 1:3-5).  All of this to say simply that the work of our salvation is wholly an effort of God. As Romans 9:14-16 makes clear, the fact of whether or not we receive God’s mercy is not initiated by us, nor is it ever ultimately influenced by our will.  And all of this has one ultimate aim in mind; “to the praise of the glory of his grace.” 
  Can we assume from this that we are mere robots, and that God has programmed us to respond in certain ways, and that he gives some the “salvation chip” and others the “damnation chip?” We must be careful not to simplify the emotions of God or try and force Him to either act upon all His emotions or express His emotions as we might.  God is compassionate.  God is just. God is tenderhearted, and God is a consuming fire.  Through it all, he blazes a trail for his glory that He bids us all to follow.  He demands repentance of us all, and he invites all of us to respond in faith.  We are all held responsible for the choices we make. But the ability to do the very thing that is asked of us is only given to some and not to others, to the praise of the glory of His grace.  “But how can this be?” we might ask.  The answer can only be found in the mystery of the sovereignty of God.  To say that God is sovereign in salvation and that we are morally responsible for the choices we make seems contradictory.  But the Bible teaches both, and we are not permitted the luxury of choosing one or the other. 
  “Why would God do it this way?”  The answer that the Bible consistently gives is so that His grace might tower above all, and so that He might receive all the glory.  The flipside to that coin is so that there might be no boasting of any kind on our part; “for it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast (Eph. 2:8-9); Where then is boasting? It is excluded. By what kind of law? Of works? No, but by a law of faith. For we maintain that a man is justified by faith apart from works of the Law. (Eph. 3:11)”
“He must become greater, and I must become less.”  God is glorious!  And he displays that glory in His decision to save some and not others, through the exercise of His sovereign grace.  God’s choices are never arbitrary or made without emotion—he chooses as he does so that “His purposes in election might stand.”(Romans 9:10-13)  Let me close by affirming two things; first, I believe that a balanced view of God’s sovereignty is essential to walking humbly before God.  My own struggle in this area has been great.  My flesh is constantly straining to pull God down to my level, to exchange His glory for my own.  My feeble attempts betray the depths of my own sinfulness and my commitment to fall short of God’s glory.  But in those moments when I catch a glimpse of the greatness of God’s glory—when I fall on my face and worship Him, conscious of how great my salvation is precisely because I can take no credit for it—in those moments, I am most happy.  As I meditate on the fact that, through no effort of my own and for no reason other than to the praise of the glory of His grace, I have been born again, God becomes greater, and I become less, and my joy is complete.
  Second, in those (far too rare) moments of humble submission, I also find that the truth of God’s sovereignty in salvation is a great incentive to share the gospel with others.  So many great evangelists throughout history have found the same to be true (Peter Cameron Scott, Charles Spurgeon, William Carey and George Whitfield, to name only a few).  As we begin to understand God’s sovereign, electing love, it serves as a powerful motivation to share the gospel with every people.  That people is made up of every tribe and tongue and nation on earth.  He will draw them to Himself!  He will be lifted up among the nations!  He will bring to Himself those sheep who are yet outside the fold!  And He has given to us the glorious privilege of joining Him in this work that cannot fail. 

  Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God!  How unsearchable his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing out!  Who has known the mind of the Lord?  Or who has been his counselor?  Who has ever given to God, that God should repay him?  For from him and through him and to him are all things.  To him be the glory forever!  Amen. (Rom. 11:33-36)