Good thoughts from Brian McLaren:

It's no surprise that in this fragmented world, community becomes a higher value, even though it is so darned hard to achieve and sustain. It's no surprise that interest in house churches increases in these times, where the shared life of a few is so important that even bothering with public worship is optional.

Throwing a small-groups program at this hunger for community is like feeding an elephant Cheerios, one by one. What's needed is a profound reorganization of our way of life, not a squeeze-another-hour-for-"community" into the week.

Of course, maybe a little programmed community is better than nothing, but I expect that this thirst for community will lead to a lot of experimentation in the years ahead. Perhaps many of our churches will become more like Catholic churches in the past, where the ideal parish had a few households where monks or nuns lived in community, practicing radical hospitality that would overflow to the community at large...

... I was once talking with Dallas Willard about Islam. He dropped this little thought virus: "Remember, Brian, in a pluralistic world, a religion is valued by the benefits it brings to its non-adherents." The virus has taken hold in my thinking, bringing to mind sayings of our Lord, like "the birds of the air" nesting in the branches of the kingdom of God, people seeing the light of our good deeds and "glorifying your Father in heaven," "by their fruits you will know them."

How different is this missional approach to the "rhetoric of exclusion" that worked so well in modernity: "There are blessings to being on the inside. You're on the outside and so can't enjoy them. Want to be a blessed insider like us?"

In contrast, missional Christianity says, "God is expressing his love to all outsiders through our acts of kindness and service. You're invited to leave your life of accumulation and competition and self-centeredness to join us in this mission of love, blessing, and peace. Want to join in the mission?"

Man. Didn't I read about this in a science fiction novel in high school? Freaky.

Human chips more than skin-deep

Advocates of technologies like radio frequency identification tags say their potentially life-saving benefits far outweigh any Orwellian concerns about privacy. RFID tags sewn into clothing or even embedded under people's skin could curb identity theft, help identify disaster victims and improve medical care, they say.

Critics, however, say such technologies would make it easier for government agencies to track a person's every movement and allow widespread invasion of privacy. Abuse could take countless other forms, including corporations surreptitiously identifying shoppers for relentless sales pitches. Critics also speculate about a day when people's possessions will be tagged--allowing nosy subway riders with the right technology to examine the contents of nearby purses and backpacks.

Great language story (from blog I just randomly found...):

A Japanese friend of mine took her mother to Paris one year. Everywhere they went they heard the phrase"Qu`est-ce que c`est?" (what is that). To a Japanese person, unfamiliar with the French language, that phrase sounds very close to "Ketsu kusei," which in Japanese slang means "the ass stinks." My friend's mother, who did not understand French asked her, "why are these people saying my ass stinks?" Poor woman!

Another Japanese story - I went to a boarding school with students from all over the world. Fun part of the experience was to share food, culture, music from our countries. The Spanish kids were trying to make friends with the Japanese kids by offering them gum. They would stretch their open palms (offering the gum) and ask, "un chiclet?"(brand of gum). Now, that phrase in Japanese sounds like "unchi kuray" or "give me poop." Here's what the whole scene looks like from a Japanese perspective - a guy is stretching his hand out to you and asking a question... ok so he wants something from me... thenhe hear the Spanish guy saying, "give me (your) poop."Of course, "un chiclet" became a great insider joke between the Spanish and Japanese kids!

Oh oh oh. What has happened to my interest in blogging? I remember when love was young. Me and Sony had so much fun. Posting life-bits and findin' links. Never lacked a topic or cared what anyone thinks...

But now I don't even check for comments, and when I sit here and try to think of something to post, there is nothing that intrigues me. Might be because I am not reading much these days. Or surfing the net. Just studying kanji. Everyday. Drawing little pictographs, and then drawing them again. Coming home on the train - kanji. Few extra minutes at the doctor's office - kanji.

It really is a good thing though. I feel so productive. And I wonder what goes on in my own head when for two years I can hardly motivate myself to lift a finger for study, and suddenly, it is what I do with every spare moment. At this rate, I might possibly be fluent at this language one day.

Oh I know. I hve really been wanting to do a post about the whole weight loss thing I have been on to in the last year, and how that has so radically impacted my life in the area of self-discipline. But I don't even have jam for that right now. Instead, I will just post my before and after pictures, in case you are interested:

I think I figured out my type:

Martin arrives for five-day Arctic trip, says region defines what Canada is

What... cold?

Just thought that was a funny headline...

... maybe empty?

...north?

A great quote Graham found by Kirkegaard:

It is well known that Christ consistently used the expression "follower." He never asks for admirers, worshippers, or adherents. No, he calls disciples. It is not adherents of a teaching but followers of a life Christ is looking for.

What then, is the difference between an admirer and a follower? A follower is or strives to be what he admires. An admirer, however, keeps himself personally detached. He fails to see that what is admired involves a claim upon him, and thus he fails to be or strive to be what he admires.

The difference between an admirer and a follower still remains, no matter where you are. The admirer never makes any true sacrifices. He always plays it safe. Though in words, phrases, songs, he is inexhaustible about how highly he prizes Christ, he renounces nothing, gives up nothing, will not reconstruct his life, will not be what he admires, and will not let his life express what it is he supposedly admires. Not so for the follower. No, no.

The follower aspires with all his strength, with all his will to be what he admires. And then, remarkably enough, even though he is living amongst a "Christian people," the same danger results for him as was once the case when it was dangerous to openly confess Christ...

Hey, you better check out my phlog. I was taking pictures in the temple grounds, and apparently some ghosts just walked right into the picture. Whaddya know...

Three posts in a day. Wow. I thought that was worth celebrating with one more post.

Just to say I want to look more into this thing I found on Dwight Friesen's blog.

"Sobornost is a Russian Orthodox social church theory"

Ok. I am sufficiently inspired. And I am in a internet cafe with a lot of time on my hands. so...

That's the text I am using these days. I decided to go for it - learn kanji. Kanji are the Chinese characters used in Japanese writing. I guess I should break that down a little more: reading Japanese is really hard. It consists of two alphabets (three if you count the roman one) plus kanji, which is not an alphabet, but pictographs, pictures that represent a word. So to read a newspaper, you have to be able to read both the alphabets, plus about 2000 of the kanji. The alphabets are no big deal, we did that in the first couple months here. But kanji! Well, many just assume they will never get it and leave it at that.

There was a time. about two months ago, when I thought i would be one of those guys who may never learn kanji. But a friend of mine stumbled across this system that he got all evangelical to me about. He was convinced that it is absolutely life-changing in regard to kanji learning. Always a sucker for evangelism, I checked out the system and now find myself spending about two hours a day at it.

I don't exactly know why I am able to do that. I am not known for my discipline, but for some reason I am feeling highly motivated to do this. And I guess it is basically because of the success. The way I used to try and learn kanji, I would just learn a bunch and then have them fall out of my brain in a week. But this guy has come up with a way that makes the kanji stick in my head like that last grain of rice in the rice bowl.

He does it with really strange stories. Remember in school using strange acronyms to make stuff stick in your memory, like roygbiv for the colors of the rainbow? Well, it's kind of like that. Here, I will demonstrate, sitting right here in the internet cafe. First, I've gotta find a kanji appropriate for explaining. Just a sec...

Ok. I couldn't find one, so I am drawing one on a napkin. Now I have to mail it to the phlog. Hold on...

Ok. So here it is:



So, this is how he breaks this one down. The top part there, the part that looks like a cross with one arm lopped off, that is a magician's wand. And the square, that is a mouth. So the mouth with the wand on top means fortune telling. Now add four little dots underneath, and that is that kanji for "spot". See, because this fortune teller looks into the fire and tells your fortune from the spots she sees in front of her eyes.

Now that just sounds like the dumbest things, doesn't it. But that is actually the point. the stories get a lot weirder than that, but it seems like the weirder the are, the less likely you are to forget the kanji.

I learned 200 in the last two weeks. Previous to that I was at about 40 in two years. I plan for another hundred next week.

2000 by Christmas???

Anyway, if your thinking of getting born again into the world of Japanese reading, the name of the book is Remembering the Kanji by a professor named James Heisig.

I haven't been blogging with any consistency for a while now (granted there is no rule that says I must) so there is likely not a lot of people to see this recommendation, but I thought I would jot it down anyway.

For anyone who has a freaky somewhat inexplicable attraction to Russia (as I do), this guy is living in Moscow right now and having some great times that he writes about in detail.

In fact, maybe he will inspire me to write in more detail about some of my experiences here. Maybe.

Great day at the beach yesterday. We went to a place on the Japan Sea called Wakasa. Nice place but the sand was a little gritty. I still have yet to find a beach with sand as nice as that at Grand Beach. Amazing little jewel that Lake Winnipeg...

And it is hot and HUMID here. Like you wouldn't believe. We hide in the air conditioning and go to the beach or the river. And the week is going to get rough when it comes time to put on a tie. The Japanese should never have taken on western modes of business dress. It just doesn't fit the summer here. If we did it real Japanese style, we would all be wearing yukatas, which is almost like wearing pajamas all day. Ii ne...

Check it out. 80's t-shirts... Cool.

Was in Canada. Saw Farenheit 911. The following isn't my opinion, but I thought it was an interesting one...

I have been defending Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 from the criticism in mainstream and conservative circles that the film is leftist propaganda. Nothing could be further from the truth; there is very little left critique in the movie. In fact, it's hard to find any coherent critique in the movie at all.

The sad truth is that Fahrenheit 9/11 is a bad movie, but not for the reasons it is being attacked in the dominant culture. It's at times a racist movie. And the analysis that underlies the film's main political points is either dangerously incomplete or virtually incoherent.

But, most important, it's a conservative movie that ends with an endorsement of one of the central lies of the United States, which should warm the hearts of the right-wingers who condemn Moore...

...Is the administration of George W. Bush full of ideological fanatics? Yes. Have its actions since 9/11 been reckless and put the world at risk? Yes. In the course of pursuing those policies, has it enriched fat-cat friends? Yes.

But it is a serious mistake to believe that these wars can be explained by focusing so exclusively on the Bush administration and ignoring clear trends in U.S. foreign and military policy. In short, these wars are not a sharp departure from the past but instead should be seen as an intensification of longstanding policies, affected by the confluence of this particular administration's ideology and the opportunities created by the events of 9/11...

...The claim that Fahrenheit 9/11 is a conservative movie may strike some as ludicrous. But the film endorses one of the central lies that Americans tell themselves, that the U.S. military fights for our freedom. This construction of the military as a defensive force obscures the harsh reality that the military is used to project U.S. power around the world to ensure dominance, not to defend anyone's freedom, at home or abroad...

Maybe have to give this one a read...

If someone were to ask you what was the theme of Jesus' preaching, what would be your answer? Man's need for salvation? God's love for mankind? The new birth?

To be sure, Jesus spoke about all of those things. And they're all essential truths. But none of them were the theme of His teaching. The theme of Jesus' message was the kingdom of God.

Wherever He went, Jesus preached about the kingdom. The irony is that the message of the kingdom is almost totally missing from the gospel that's preached today. As a result, a lot of Christians don't realize that the kingdom of God is a present reality on earth. In fact, they don't even know what the kingdom of God is. Consequently, they never make the kingdom commitment that Christ requires.

In The Kingdom that Turned the World Upside Down, David Bercot takes the reader back to Jesus' teachings of the kingdom - teachings that have too often been forgotten. Bercot describes the radically new laws of the kingdom and its upside-down values. There's no room in Christ's kingdom for superficial Christianity, for this is a kingdom that has historically turned the world upside down.