BIZARRE AND OUTRAGEOUS: People of Walmart

A while back, Time did the article below. Now there's the song...


That Viral Thing: People of Walmart
By Claire Suddath Monday, Aug. 31, 2009

Why don't people wear shirts when they shop at Walmart? Or pants that fit? Has that woman been wearing a fanny pack for 15 years or did she just recently pick up on the belt-as-purse trend? Is that guy wearing a cape?

People of Walmart, a website that launched earlier this month, catalogs the gloriously absurd attire that is sported by the big-box retailer's customer base. There are photos of fat people in sweatpants, a child with a rattail and a guy wearing a Captain America costume. But the website's founders, three guys in their early 20s who preferred to provide only their first names, aren't interested in stereotypical rednecks or run-of-the-mill mullet sightings. "Mullets are too common," says Andrew, who is 23 and lives in Indiana. "We want to document the kind of stuff that when you see it, you immediately have to call someone and be like, 'Dude, I'm at Walmart and I just saw a goat.' "

Andrew, his brother Adam and their friend Luke started People of Walmart after a shopping trip to a South Carolina branch earlier this month. "We turned a corner to see a stripper — at least, I think she was a stripper — with a shirt that read 'Go F___ Yourself,' and she had a 2-year-old kid in one of those child harnesses that looked like a dog leash," says Adam. They turned another corner and saw a guy with a ZZ Top beard.

Inspired by the experience, the three friends — who shop at Walmart regularly, sometimes while wearing ugly clothes — went home and created the website. They asked their friends to submit photos and naively assumed that no one outside their social circle would ever see it. "Honestly," says Andrew, "we didn't think we'd even update it very often."

But the last week in August, People of Walmart went viral, earning mention on websites like Funny or Die. Its traffic increased by 700% on Aug. 27 alone. Photo submissions went from one or two to more than 120. The flood of visitors has even crashed the site.
(See the 50 best websites of 2009.)

People of Walmart's founders expect some people to take issue with the site's tone. "I'm not gonna sit here and say the site isn't pretentious or that it doesn't poke fun at people — because it does," admits Adam, who says he "loves" Walmart. "But we have limits. We won't make fun of the people who can't help it." They do not publish photos of disabled people or Walmart employees who are just doing their job. "I can't tell you how many people send in pictures of overweight people on motorized scooters," he says. "But we won't post them because some of those people need scooters for a reason." He also refuses to post pictures of the Amish.

Because of those ground rules, People of Walmart mostly ridicules folks with bad hairdos, excessive tattoos or ill-fitting clothing. "Look, I'm a big guy," says Adam. "I'm not going to walk around in medium-size clothes. I'd look like an idiot." By the same token, he figures, you shouldn't wear a Captain America costume, put your goat on a leash or let your pants fall down in public. If you do, you're begging to be laughed at — just like this woman.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1919401,00.html#ixzz1NaeQ1goA

Bizarre and Outrageous Department: World beard and Moustasche Competition

Books after Nooks

Is this what will eventually happen to books,

now that there are Kindles and there are Nooks?

Perhaps you will disagree,

but for me it's like cutting down a tree.

Aftercomers will never guess

The way these books are able to bless

a wondering mind, a searching heart;

or know the joy that they impart!

Electronic readers certainly have their advantages, and doubtless I will end up owning one someday soon. However, there's an aesthetic that goes with books that future generations will miss: the feel of the paper, the smell of print; cover art (remember record jackets, as opposed to CD boxes?) deckle edged pages...Funny, but I still remember with great fondness my third-grade lanugage arts book. It was a beautiful pale green, and was printed on paper that felt like silk.

 Not to mention autographs and hidden treasure! Susan has now given me two books on opera that she found at the University of Toronto booksale that once belonged to Father M. Owen Lee, the great classicist, operaphile and frequent commenator on the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts. When I opened one to read it, out tumbled 1983 San Francisco Opera ticket stub for Die Walkure  and a sheet of notes, in his own hand.
There's something wonderful about holding a book that has been passed down to you!

The Big Story (new adaption)

The Big Story from Life Center on Vimeo.

Via Brad

Granados: Spanish Dances, No. 2, "Oriental"

Julian Bream and John Williams play Granados' Spanish Dances op 37 no 2 "Oriental." An orchestral version of this came up on Pandora recently, and I have fallen in love with it.

Points of View

Click to see text

QUOTE: My name is Kevin and I'm a Kataphatic

There are spiritual personalities, just like there are psychological personalities. Barbara Mujica of Georgetown University writes, "Apophatic or 'negative' spirituality stresses interiority, 'imageless-ness,' and 'wordlessness.' Kataphatic, or 'postive' spirituality is image-driven and uses analogies to speak of God."  Postmodernists tend to be apophatic; stressing difference, how God is "not like" things. This has caused great alarm from Reformed quarters. I think there is a place for both: it's not an either/or.  However,  my natural temperment is kataphatic. Kevin, I think you've got a point there!

"Yes, yes, a thousand times yes; we do see through a glass dimly; we do not fully understand; we don't know God as God knows Himself; our words can't capture the essence of God. God is greater than we can conceive- but what about the 1,189 chapters in the Bible? Don't they tell us lots of things about God that we are supposed to do more with than doubt and not understand? Aren't the Scriptures written so that we might believe and be sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see and even proclaim this faith to others?"


 -- Kevin DeYoung,  Why We're Not Emergent: By Two Guys Who Should Be  (p. 123-124)

 

Evangelicals and Memorial Day

(This is what I wrote to my uncle, who is a deacon in the Catholic church, as a preface to the article below.)

I don't know what it is like for Catholics, but this is a real problem for lots of us who are evangelicals. Many of us celebrate the civic year instead of the Church Year: Mother's Day, Memorial Day, Father's Day, Fourth of July, Labor Day, Veteran's Day, Harvest Festival (the evangelical alternative for Halloween.) We also do not have a formal liturgy, like the Catholics or Orthodox, which would prescribe the texts and practices for our worship. Thus we often mistake our own concerns for those of the Spirit. All this can tempt us to put country before God.

Finally, because Protestants tend to have a more individualistic understanding of their faith, when De Young uses the word "church" below, it might be a worthwhile exercise to substitute "any particular Christian..."

Thinking Theologically About Memorial Day


Posted By Kevin DeYoung On May 26, 2011 @ 5:26 am

This is post probably has something to make everyone unhappy. But here goes.

With Memorial Day on Monday (in the U.S.) and, no doubt, a number of patriotic services scheduled for this Sunday, I want to offer a few theses on patriotism and the church. Each of these points could be substantially expanded and beg more detailed defense and explanation, but since this is a blog and not a term paper, I’ll try to keep this under 1500 words.

1. Being a Christian does not remove ethnic and national identities.

In Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, slave nor free (Gal. 3:28), but this does not mean men cease to be male or Jews ceases to be Jewish. The worshiping throng gathered around the throne is not a bland mess of Esperanto Christians in matching khaki pants and white polos. God makes us one in Christ, but that oneness does not mean we can no longer recognize tribes, tongues, nations, and peoples in heaven. If you don’t have to renounce being an American in heaven, you shouldn’t have to pretend you aren’t one now.

2. Patriotism, like other earthly “prides,” can be a virtue or vice.

Most people love their families. Many people love their schools, their home, and their sports teams. All of these loves can be appropriate. In making us for himself, God did mean to eradicate all other loves. Instead he wants those loves to be purer and in right proportion to our ultimate Love. Adam and Eve should have loved the Garden. God didn’t intend for them to be so “spiritual” that they were blind to the goodness around them. In the same way, where there is good in our country or family it is right to have affection and display affection for those good things.

Of course, we can turn patriotism into an idol, just like family can be an idol. But being proud of your country (or proud to be an American or a Canadian or a Russian or whatever) is not inherently worse than being proud of your kids or proud to be a Smith or a Jones or a Dostoevsky. I find it strange that while it is fashionable to love your city, be proud of your city, and talk about transforming your city, it is, for some of the same people, quite gauche to love your country, be proud of your country, and talk about transforming your country.

3. Allegiance to God and allegiance to your country are not inherently incompatible.

Sometimes Christians talk like you should have no loyalty for your country, as if love for your country was always a bad thing. To be sure, this must never be ultimate loyalty. We must always obey God rather than men. But most Christians have understood the fifth commandment to be about honoring not only your parents but all those in authority over you.

Moreover, Jesus shows its possible to honor God and honor Caesar. This is especially clear if you know some of the Jewish history. The tax in question in Mark 12 is about the poll tax or census tax. It was first instituted in AD 6, not too many years before Jesus’ ministry. When it was established a man by the name of Judas of Galilee led a revolt. According to Josephus, “He called his fellow countrymen cowards for being willing to pay tribute to the Romans and for putting up with mortal masters in place of God.” Like the Zealots, he believed allegiance to God and allegiance to any earthly government were fundamentally incompatible. As far as they were concerned if God was your king, you couldn’t have an earthly king.

But Jesus completely disagreed. By telling the people to “render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s” he was saying there are duties to government that do not infringe on your ultimate duty to God. It’s possible to honor lesser authorities in good conscience because they have been instituted by a greater authority.

If you read all that the New Testament says about governing authorities in places like Romans 13 and 1 Peter 2, you see that the normal situation is one of compatible loyalties. The church is not the state and the state is not God, but this does not mean the church must always be against the state. In general, then, it’s possible to be a good Christian and a good American, or a good Ghanaian or a good Korean. Patriotism is not bad. Singing your national anthem and getting choked up is not bad. Allegiance to God and allegiance to your country do not have to be at odds.

4. God’s people are not tied to any one nation.

When Jesus says “go ahead and give to Caesar what belongs to him” he is effectively saying, “you can support nations that do not formally worship the one true God.” Or to put it a different way: true religion is not bound with only one country. This means–as we see in Revelation 7 and Isaiah 49 and Psalm 87 and Matthew 28 and Acts 1and a hundred other places–the Church will be transcultural and transnational.

While American churches are in America, they must never be only American churches. We must keep in mind (and when applicable, explicitly state) that our congregations are filled with brothers and sisters from all over the world. Likewise, we must work hard to help people see that Christianity is not just a Western religion or American religion. Christianity started in the Middle East and quickly spread to North Africa, and parts of Asia and Europe. The Church was always meant to be international. Today there are more Anglicans in church in Nigeria than in England, more Presbyterians in South Korea than in the United States. The promise to Abraham way back in Genesis is that through his family God would bless the whole world. Christianity is not tied to just one certain nation. Following Christ is not an ethnic thing. You can be from any country and worship Jesus.

5. All this leads to one final point: while patriotism can be good, the church is not a good place for patriotism.

We should pray for service men and women in our congregations. We should pray for the President. We should pray for the just cause to triumph over the evil one. We are not moral relativists. We do not believe just because all people are sinners and all nations are sinful that no person or no nation can be more righteous or more wicked than another. God may be on America’s side in some (not all) her endeavors.

But please think twice before putting on a Star Spangled gala in church this Sunday. I love to hear the national anthem and “God Bless America” and “My Country, Tis of Thee,” but not in church where the nations gather to worship the King of all peoples. I love to see the presentation of colors and salute our veterans, but these would be better at the Memorial Day parade or during a time of remembrance at the cemetery. Earthly worship should reflect the on-going worship in heaven. And while there are many Americans singing glorious songs to Jesus there, they are not singing songs about the glories of America. We must hold to the traditions of the Apostles in our worship, not the traditions of American history. The church should not ask of her people what is not required in Scripture. So how can we ask the Koreans and Chinese and Mexicans and South Africans in our churches to pledge allegiance to a flag that is not theirs? Are we gathered under the banner of Christ or another banner? Is the church of Jesus Christ–our Jewish Lord and Savior–for those draped in the red, white, and blue or for those washed in the blood of the Lamb?

In some parts of the church, every hint of patriotism makes you a jingoistic idolater. You are allowed to love every country except your own. But in other parts of the church, true religion blends too comfortably into civil religion. You are allowed to worship in our services as long as you love America as much as we do. I don’t claim to have arrived at the golden mean, but I imagine many churches could stand to think more carefully about their theology of God and country. Churches should be glad to have their members celebrate Memorial Day with gusto this Monday. We should be less sanguine about celebrating it with pomp and circumstance on Sunday.

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 The comments are worth reading just as much as the article...

World's Biggest Scavenger Hunt Celebrates its Silver Anniversary

(I'm behind on my blog, having spent a week in Arizona, and fulfilled my final round as supervisor of the VCC Yard Sale, which incidentally was fabulous--we made $2700 in six hours!)

In 1987, a University of Chicago tradition was born: the annual four-day Scavenger Hunt,  fondly known as "Scav." It has come to include the  Scav Olympics (held on the quad); the Roadtrip (not to exceed 1000 miles from campus, or to be done in a 15 passenger van); and the Hunt Proper (see the items here. )

This year, Scav set a new world record:

"On the evening of Friday, 6 May 2011, we broke the official world record for the largest scavenger hunt with 924 partipants on the Quads! This event did not require that you register or affiliate yourself with one of the main Scav Hunt teams. In order to make our record official, several very particular rules were followed. The rules, which were also handed out at the event, are posted here. "

It is with great pride that I report that our daughter's dorm, humble and religiously-inclined Burton Judson, beat Scav's perennial winners, Snell-Hitchcock. This is victory is even more savory since it marked the Scav's 25th anniversary.

My favorite items for 2011:

26. Lewis and Clark came back with an herbarium of almost 300 samples from the American West; we'reasking for only 10, drawn from plant species which are engraved or painted on campus buildings. Thenomenclature and notations don't have be written in quill, but the herbarium should be aesthetically and botanically pleasing. [10 points]

 31. Celebrating holiday meals one at a time is inefficient when you could combine them, yielding delicacies such as green matzo ball soup or B^uche de Noel studded with black-eyed peas. Present us with a single dish that adequately acknowledges the four holidays of Scav: Cinco de Mayo, Space Day, National Scrapbook Day, and Mother's Day. [10 points]

40. Affix a pair of appropriately enormous googly eyes to the campus building of your choice. [8 points]

54. A relief of a famous literary scene, carved entirely from its print source. [22 points]

56. A box of cryptozoology animal crackers. [5 points]

82. Bake! Build! As fast as you can. An autonomous, sprinting gingerbread man. [18 points]

95. Get out your crochet hooks or knitting needles. It's time to pay tribute to the intricate patterns of atoms and bonds that are the basis of life with a helical scarf featuring the beloved individual Watson-Crick base pairs which defigne us. Three feet minimum. [24 points]

105. Get your team logo displayed at the South Pole. [60 points]

120. Last year's Captains were but pharaohs, but through death they have ascended to godhood as well. To that end, they require an appropriate 1BR/studio for the afterlife. It should have a sarcophagus, pets or servants, royal treasures, and maybe some snacks to tide them over in the eternity to come. It'll need four rigid walls between eight and twelve feet wide, but it won't need a ceiling. That's right: Pyramids on the Quads. To be completed by 1:00 p.m. on Friday. [(egyptian hieroglyph inserted here) points]

121. A rust belt. A Bible belt. A borscht belt. [3 points]

125. Find something beautiful in Fargo, ND. Be prepared to justify calling whatever it is "beautiful". Do not conflate with Item 15. [15 points]

135. The University's "giving opportunity" mailings to alumni do not sufficiently take advantage of our generation's raging nostalgia. To remedy this, produce such a mailing in the style of Lisa Frank.
[5 points]

195. In 1961, a Soviet surgeon stationed in Antarctica removed his own appendix. This year, we will perform a far more diffcult maneuver. Lying on your back with a game of Operation on your chest, remove all twelve organs without setting the buzzer off more than five times. Be sure to have an attending Judge present in the operating room when this feat is attempted. [18 points]

211. Send your best stenographer for a test of tachygraphy. At 10:00 a.m. on Friday, in the Bartlett Trophy Room, I'll give a dictation and then expect a neatly written copy handed back to me. Paper and pen or pencil only, unless you have a stenotype machine. [5 points for actually using a stenographic system,10 points for the stenotype machine, 15 points for getting it all right]

224. Send me your Cherokees, your Frisians, your !Kungs. Send me a member of your team to natively speak in a living language with the fewest living speakers. [6 points]

233. Dan Lacey has created his incredible tribute to Barack Obama riding a unicorn. But why don't the Republicans ever get any love? Bring us a painting of Dick Cheney, naked, riding a Kraken. [12 points]

246. A game of language telephone. I tell you a phrase in English, and your teammate recites it back to me perfectly after passing the message through up to four additional intermediaries. Each junction must receive and transmit in a different language. Meet at 9:30 a.m. on Friday in the Reynolds Club basement conference room. [up to 12 points]

266. Dante's Hell in a handbasket. [13.21 points]

276. Calling all bards! A true tale from the storyteller's own life experiences of such rapture that, when suddenly stopped between 45 and 60 seconds into the telling, causes your Judge to exclaim, "No, no! Tell me how it ends!" [4 points]

277. And now, let's talk seriously for a moment. We've been together for 25 years now, and we think it'stime to make it offcial. On Friday evening, at 5:30 p.m., come to the University Avenue entrance to the Quads to set a new world record for the largest scavenger hunt. [(heiroglyph inserted here) points]

The most outrageous scav item ever:

In 1999, two physics majors, Justin Kasper and Fred Niell, made a functioning nuclear reactor from scratch, winning 500 points for the effort.

"It's kind of scary how easy it was to do," said Niell, assuring onlookers that there was only a trace of plutonium -- nothing harmful. "It only took us about a day to build it. We've been thinking about it for a few days and we gathered the parts, and last night we assembled it. In Justin's room -- he lost the coin toss."

Jerry Walls, Evangelist of the Mind

This afternoon on Talk of the Nation, Neal Conan had Jerry Walls as his guest for a brief segment on the upcoming end of the world and our fascination with "end times." Jerry fielded a Swedenborgian and other callers, and gave a clear orthodox affirmation of his faith: "Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again." Great stuff!

We knew Jerry when we were at Notre Dame. In 2005 we heard him as keynote speaker for the Wheaton Philosophy Conference: "Philosophers Think about Heaven and Hell." Jerry is an engaging speaker, and a vocal Arminian, as the clip below shows:
Jerry Walls



Jerry's Bio, from The Christian Studies Center

B.A., Houghton College
M.Div., Princeton Seminary
S.T.M., Yale Divinity School
Ph.D., Department of Philosophy, University of Notre Dame

Jerry Walls is one of the most respected Christian philosophers in America. His engaging, energetic lectures make Jerry a student favorite, and his lively debates outside the classroom help students learn to think and communicate Christianly on a variety of topics. For many years, Jerry taught at Asbury Theological Seminary and is currently a Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Philosophy of Religion at the University of Notre Dame. He has authored and edited nearly a dozen books and has been a contributor to almost 20 others. Jerry has published a pair of books that make a philosophical defense of Christian views on the afterlife, Heaven: The Logic of Eternal Joy and Hell: The Logic of Damnation. He is also an editor of a volume in the prestigious Oxford Handbook series, The Oxford Handbook of Eschatology. Two of his other books explore the thought of C.S. Lewis, C. S. Lewis and Francis Schaeffer (with Scott Burson) and The Chronicles of Narnia and Philosophy (with Gregory Bassham). Not merely a cut and dry philosopher, Jerry also won a national poetry contest in his college years, and in 2009, he published his first book of poetry Who Watch For The Morning. When he is not writing books, Jerry serves as a pastor, guest lecturer or avid sports fan.










Areas of Specialty: C.S. Lewis, Heaven and Hell, Calvinism and Arminianism