Star Trek, if you haven’t seen it… go see it. (On the other hand, Terminator, if you haven’t seen it, before sure to shut off your ability to think before actually going to see it). In honor of the great new Trek movie, we have this time theory analysis that will make any Trekkie proud, and a nice video about the new movie from Geeks Are Sexy.

In the world of good news, apparently my predilection towards drinking coffee is indeed a good thing.

In an effort to create the next new annoying phase in american typography, I’m proud to throw my support behind “Flip Title! ¡ǝlʇıʇ dılɟ” Enjoy! and use with reckless abandon to the point where your friend block you on iChat, and your twitter followers abandon you by the droves.

I’m not going to break into the full details here, but start following Derek Webb’s viral marketing campaign, songs will be dropping along the way, and it looks to be a fun ride. I haven’t been a huge fan of his music, but I’m captivated by the marketing scheme.

If you haven’t heard, Liberty University shut down the College Democrats group on its campus, in an amazing display of support for free speech and the first amendment. Yesterday news came down that the club would be able to reform, but only under a charter that essentially disabled them from supporting any pro-choice candidate (so no support to Obama in 2012). Some various reactions: Eugene Cho, Liberty Freelance, Think Progress. Oh, and for some reason this website is rather sympathetic to liberty’s viewpoint (I wonder why?). Also, if you can read the comments on that story and hold your last meal in your stomach, you’re doing quite well (well… if you can even manage to read all the comments due to the piss poor web design on that site, you’re doing damned well).

Right, this is a “religion” blog, so let’s get at least one of those links up, shall we? Tony Jones asks if we should “out” religious leaders who support Same Sex Marriage. I think we should, do you?

What am I listening to?

Still listening to the Green Day and Coldplay albums, but I haven’t spent much time in the car this week, and most of what I have it’s been listening to NPR: Planet Money.

What am I reading?

Finished “The Orthodox Heretic” the other day, and I’ll reiterate: It’s one of the most important books I’ve read in a while. I will be rereading it.

I grabbed “The Origin of Satan” off my bookshelf to start reading today, I started it a while back but didn’t get to deep into it, I’ll let you guys know what I think of it.

What I’ve discovered in Link-Land:

My favorite has to be the American Patriot’s Bible. I’ve always been amazed the capacity of the Bible to be manipulated to back the cause of those who would seek to do injustice, here we have yet another briliant example of the same. The problem with perversions like these is they influence just how we understand the Bible. It’s similar to growing up in an SBC church, they always told us to check what was said against the Bible, the problem was it was their interpretation of the Bible they wanted us to check everything against. The American Patriots Bible seeks to put everything within the matrix of American superiority and to fully back the notion that America is indeed God’s greatest gift to the world. For a far more detailed and thoughtful examination of the American Patriot’s Bible, check out Greg Boyd’s Post “Really?”

I don’t often read “Church Marketing Sucks,” mostly because I don’t believe churches need to market in the first place, even if the marketing doesn’t suck, but this link made it’s way around the twittersphere, so I went to check it out. Joshua Cody does a great job of philosophising  on “Church Copy Cats” and their true damaging nature. Here’s the money quote:

You trade the entire mission of God for the comfort of a walled garden, and you chose your Christian social network over actually networking with non-Christians. It doesn’t go unnoticed.

My final link for the week comes from Coldplay.com, from now until their last show in ’09 they’re giving away a live EP, which, if you like Coldplay at all, is a great album. Check it out/download it here.

What I’m listening to:

I’m splitting my time, first I’m listening to the aforementioned Coldplay EP, It’s very tempting to begin singing along whilst listening to the EP in your headphones, I would highly advise against this, as you get rather strange looks in your coffee house. I give it 4/5 (insert whatever cool rating system I’m going to come up with here), mostly because it’s essentially the same Coldplay I’ve heard before.

On the other hand, I’ve been listening to the new Green Day album, 21st Century Breakdown, available at amazon for 4.99 (ht: AdamWC). I give it 3/5 (again, insert witty rating system here), but I expect it to grow on me just like American Idiot did.

What I’m reading:

I just finished “Jesus, Interrupted,” and I need to write a post on it for the Viral Bloggers.

Currently though, I’m reading through “The Orthodox Heretic (and Other Impossible Tales),” it only took two months after I placed my order to get it, but it was worth the wait. I’m tempted to say this may be the most important book I’ve read in a while, but on the other hand that statement may actually go against the purpose of the book. It’s powerful stuff, it’s life changing stuff, it’s God stuff. While most books I read I normally don’t return to for anything other than momentary reference, I have a feeling I’ll be rereading this book, in doing so letting the Parables reread me.

First up, if you haven’t checked out Open Table Theology yet, please give us a look.  Blake did an excellent write up about us you should see here, complete with the brilliant phrase “A Dialogical Experiment.”
Then, Josh Brown, had an interesting weeks worth of posts. We first read here that Josh was leaving Social Media (for the uninitiated: Blogging/twittering/facebook/myspace, all that stuff), I responded with a big hat tip here, then Josh opened up a bit more here, before finally admitting he was back here. Yeah, crazy week. Glad he’s back though.

I went to the Atlanta Area cohort on Tuesday night, where David Park, Will Yoo, and Dan Ra, all lead us in a conversation about asianamergance. It was a great night, and I think everyone around felt like the conversation went to some beneficial (and difficult) places, these guys (plus Danny Yang) went on to write this post for Emergent Village. If you’re interested in following that conversation, add “asianamergence” to your twitter search feed. I’m looking forward to seeing where it takes us.

I missed last weeks “roundup” so I didn’t get a chance to post this. In case you’re not following Adam Walker Cleaveland’s series on Plurality, you may have missed this post by John O’Hara, which has been my favorite of the series, thus far.

Did I miss any interesting links? Let me know.

• First up, my friend Paul responded to my post on becoming more conversant, forgive him for using the Blogger platform. (I guess google can’t be great at everything)

• Pete Rollins has a couple of readings from his upcoming book, The Orthodox Heretic. Please note the $1000 used price tag, thats how you know a book is a classic before it’s even released.

• Emergent Village announced a forthcoming meeting to discuss the possible futures of EV.

And

• Mike Morell talks about the Texan Secession stirup from the teabagging session tax day tea parties.

Did I miss any interesting links from this past week? Let me know.

Blake had a good post on trying to define violence, and a follow up post with a pretty good definition of violence.

Josh has apparently discovered the wombats, a band which I may or may not have listened to way to much over the past couple months. (My wife will have to confirm that rumor)

Tony Jones talks a bit on “Good” Friday and the death of Christ.

This was last week, but Pete Rollin’s posted a video from J. D. Crossan about defining literalism and fundamentalism. Definitely worth a listen.

And, I posted this brief thought on the term emergent and it’s current level of usefulness.

And of course, HuffPo has a brief story on the “bowing controversy” from Obama’s word trip this past week.

Any links I missed that are worth checking out?

[tags] emergent, christianity, good friday, Jesus, Cross, life, Peter Rollins, Crossan, literalism, fundamentalism, violence, non-violence, links, blogs, the wombats, music, youtube [tags]