Thought it was a good time for something a little lighter here…

Although my wonder years were all over the Midwest, I’ve always called New Jersey (or just “Jersey” to us natives) as my home state. It’s the place where I went through my adolesence and met my sweet wife.

In a fit of sudden nostalgia for a place most people can’t wait to get out of, here’s my Lonely Planet guide to obscure Jersey stuff…

You Might Be From New Jersey If…

You don’t think of fruit when people mention “The Oranges”.

No, you think of East Orange and West Orange and South Orange and, well, Orange. They’re places. People live there. Not anyone I know, though.

You know that it’s called Great Adventure, not Six Flags.

Six Flags, the ClearChannel of amusement parks, bought this property many years ago, but all the locals loyally refuse to call it anything but Great Adventure.

You’ve known the way to Seaside Heights since you were seven.

I really have. All roads down the shore eventually become the Garden State Parkway. I could’ve driven to Seaside Heights when I was seven, if I could’ve reached the pedals.

You know what a “jug handle” is.

It’s a way you can make a left turn by turning right first. Or, um, well…too hard to explain. Here:

Capisci?

You know how to properly negotiate a Circle.

You knew that the last sentence had to do with driving.

Obvious reference to a traffic circle–or “roundabout” as the Brits have it. These are found throughout New England, but North Jersey has way too many of them.

You know that a “White Castle” is the name of BOTH a fast food chain AND a fast food sandwich.

White Castle burgers (known as “sliders”) are greasy little squares of “beef” with holes and steamed in onions. “Buy ‘em by the sack!” (TM). My friend Hudson and I bought about 50 or them one night and drove all the way down the shore [proper Jersey grammar - never down TO the shore] and back while eating them and stringing the little boxes they came in across the back window of his Plymouth Valiant. The next day I puked harder than I have before or since.

Every year you have at least one kid in your class named Tony.

This is true. And his father is always named “Big Tony.” You do not mess with this kid. Do I need to explain this?

You know the location of every clip shown in the Sopranos opening credits.

Yes, I do –> Lincoln Tunnel to the Jersey Turnpike to Rte. 3 to Rte. 46 to tract housing in Little Falls to Tony’s home in North Caldwell. My family belonged to a swim club that was almost in the Soprano’s back yard.

You weren’t raised in New Jersey — you were raised in either North Jersey, Central Jersey or South Jersey.

Karyn and I? North Jersey. Never New Jersey — puh-leaze!

You don’t consider Newark or Camden to actually be part of the state.

You mean…they are?

You remember the stores Korvette’s, Two Guys, Rickel’s, Channel, Bamberger’s and Orbach’s.

These stores were the precursors of most of today’s chain stores, thought they’re all gone now. Korvettes and Two Guys…read Walmart. Rickels and Channel…think Lowes and Home Depot. Bambergers and Orbachs were upscale department stores.

Fact is…anything in modern junk culture…Jersey had it first.

You also remember Palisades Amusement Park.

“Palisades has the rides
Palisades has the food
Come on over!
Palisades Amusement Park
Swings all day and after dark
Come and play and get cool
In the waves in our pool
You’ll have fun!
So come on over!”

If you’re over 40 and from Jersey, you’re singing along by now.

You’ve had a Boardwalk cheese steak and vinegar fries.

And Kohr’s custard and salt water taffy.

A few more quickies:

–You call them the Garden State and the Turnpike (never the Garden State Parkway or the New Jersey Turnpike). And you tell other Jersey-ites where you live by the exit number on the Garden State.
–You went to school with the son or daughter of a mobster
–You had your prom and/or wedding reception at a gigantic catering house like the Wayne Manor
–Bruce Springsteen’s early songs pretty much describe your high school years.
–You not only listen to Fountains of Wayne, you’ve shopped there.

The web has book review blogs by the score, but every so often one comes along that promises to be something special and different. Welcome The Discarded Image.

From the “About” page: “This blog is an exploration of my changing model and those images which I have discarded, for good or bad (that will be a matter for the reader).  At times, my ideas have changed because I simply cannot abide with an older model, at other times, the facts sucker-punch me, forcing change.  In any case, I’ve experienced a lot of personal change over the years and I find comfort in knowing that questions are not my enemy.  Not every thought here is expressed with the same level of certainty.  Nor does the mere articulation of an idea indicate an absolute change or my final word on the subject. What is here is what I’m willing to explore publicly and I hope some of it resonates with you.”

We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already; we have the power to imagine better.

- J. K. Rowling (http://harvardmagazine.com/go/jkrowling.html – quoted in Harry Potter and Imagination: The Way Between Worlds by Travis Prinzi, p. iv.)

Exultation is the going
Of an island soul to sea,

Past the houses–
Past the headlands–into deep Eternity–

Bred as we, among the mountains,
Can the sailor understand
The divine intoxication
Of the first league out from land?

- Emily Dickinson

Doctor, you say there are no halos
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don’t see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.
Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors; fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.
What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolve
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe
of objects that don’t know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent. The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.
To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and change our bones, skin, clothes
to gases. Doctor
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.

- Lisel Mueller (from Alive Together: New and Selected Poems. Copyright 1996 by Lisel Mueller. Quoted in Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith by Anne Lamott.)

This morning my wife went down to the kitchen to get some coffee when she spied the beauty in this picture right up against our kitchen window. It’s devouring an insect nearly as large as itself (one of our many carpenter bees, I suspect).

She got a number of other amazing, way-too-close-for-me shots which are posted on her blog, Boulders2Bits.

Anybody want to put up some venture capital for us to film a low-budge horror movie while this thing is in action?

I like being around [faith communities, churches]. I like being able to catch some of the energy, whatever I can or can’t believe. I think there’s something to be said for it. Despite the fact that most Christian denominations, politically, are about twenty million miles from where I want to be. ….If you’re into music, you’re into religion, somehow or another. Religion, that’s the bloodline of music. The whole reason, I’m pretty sure, we have music on notation is to preserve chant– to transcribe what was going on, which we’re singing in order to describe the experience the divine. So there is that connection, which is part of the big appeal, to me, of churches– that there’s always something musical going on in there. That is making what to me is a pretty obvious connection between whatever we want to call divine and music, which seems permanently and inextricably bound.

John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats in an interview at Pitchfork

An old piece of folk wisdom says that if you don’t want to offend, there are two topics you never mention in polite company: politics and religion. Rock music has never much worried about polite company, and giving offense is often its raison d’etre. However, historically rock has far more often tread on the toes of politics than religion. The Mountain Goats’ The Life of the World to Come steps boldly over the religion line, but to engage rather than offend.

Goats founder, leader, and sometimes only member John Darnielle–wild-eyed, metaphorically-gifted, demonically frenetic onstage–chose for this album to write a cycle of songs, every one of which has as its title a passage from the Bible.

Darnielle has had a lifetime love affair with the Bible, even though he doesn’t believe it to be of divine origin. As a fifth-year seminarian I had a couple of opportunities to sit down with John and talk faith and religion. Actually, a talk with John Darnielle can never be confined to one topic. His fertile and far-reaching mind quickly links together Christianity to sociology to poetry to neuroscience to boxing. (Yes, boxing. Darnielle is as passionate about pugilistic sports like boxing and hockey as he is about music.)

One of the lasting impressions I retain from those chats was his almost encyclopedic knowledge of the Bible. I shouldn’t have been surprised; many times listening to his older recordings I was delighted and surprised by sometimes very obscure allusions to biblical stories and themes. They can crop up in the most unexpected places. For example, in his song “This Year” he uses the line “there will be feasting and dancing in Jerusalem next year” to evoke the wild hope of a 17 year old dreaming of escape from his dysfunctional home.Though The Life of the World to Come’s songs all have Bible passage titles, this is not an album about the Bible, nor is it particularly religious–but in my view it is very much about faith. There is a meta-narrative that runs through Darnielle’s mega-prolific songwriting over the years. His songs are often about people at the end of their ropes–scratch that, people who have set fire to the very rope they dangle from over the precipice. And yet, it is at that bottoming out that his characters find a strange, inexplicable hope.

In his interview on Stephen Colbert’s Colbert Report (video below), Colbert read back to Darnielle some of his bleaker lyrics. Darnielle responded, “To me any scene that is tending toward that moment of absolute desolation, and it sounds like something you would say when you’re lying to somebody–but it can’t go anywhere but up from there…take it all the way down to the bottom so you can go, ‘Hey, what can you do to me now?’”

The new album uses the titular Bible passages as the merest inspiration, a canvas upon which Darnielle paints very contemporary–yet timeless–portraits of grief, despair, resignation…and inexplicable faith, hope, and love. An example of this is the bouncy “Genesis 3:23″ in which the original verse (”therefore the Lord God sent him out from the garden of Eden to work the ground from which he was taken”) provides a proper motif for a more contemporary exile story of a man who breaks into the house where he grew up to confront the ghosts he has carried with him since he left.

Break the lock on my own garden gate
When I get home after dark
Sit looking up at the stars outside
Like teeth in the mouth of a shark

In The Life of the World to Come John Darnielle is at the peak of both his songwriting and performing powers. From the frantic 40-miles-per-hour-over-the-limit thrash of “Psalm 40:2″ (video below) to the fragile-as-a-new-spider-web intimacy of “Ezekiel 7 (and the permanent efficacy of grace),” these songs reflect the full range of Mountain Goat music–and that is a wide range to cover. Yet the production here is minimal–just enough and not an ounce more. A few songs are just John and guitar or piano.

The album’s opening song (”1 Samuel 15:23″) pays tribute in its opening seconds to Darnielle’s fabled lo-fi origins (for years his albums were recorded on a cheap boom box and released on cassette tape). Listening with earphones the first thing you hear is John settling on his seat and his fingers dragging up the guitar strings into position for the first chord. Longtime Mountain Goat listeners will smile for a moment, remembering the grind of the Panasonic boombox motor that used to begin nearly every recorded song.

The Bible is a treasure house (sometimes a horror house) of the seeds of every imaginable human plot. Over the course of this album, Darnielle and fellow Goats Peter Hughes (bass) and Jon Wurster (percussion) take us on a journey through a good number of  those. We encounter untimely death, exile, alienation, sickness, misunderstanding. But Darnielle’s warbly-nasal voice, the intense intimacy of his inflections, the way he brings each word from his mouth as if it were from a scroll sweet as honey (Ezekiel 3:3) calls us to resurrection. to rise phoenix-like from the ashes of our own lives.

To come fully under John Darnielle’s prophetic spell, you must see and hear him perform his songs live. He embodies his songs, and sometimes it is the body language and facial expressions that tell you what the real message is beneath the words of hurt and despair. Watch the video below of The Mountain Goats performing “Psalm 40:2.” The music and the words scream desperation: a frantic flight from who-knows-what to who-knows-where. But watch Darnielle’s face, his body. There is joy inexpressible when we learn to sing and dance right on top of our own graves. There will be feasting and dancing in Jerusalem next year.

John Darnielle interviewed by Stephen Colbert – Oct. 6, 2009

“Psalm 40:2″ as performed on The Colbert Report, Oct. 6, 2009

Bonus: “Ezekiel 7 and the Permanent Efficacy of Grace” from a film documentation of The Life of the World to Come by Rian Johnson

Click here to view the embedded video.

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Anyone who knows me knows I’m a nut for Internet social media. Earlier this year I wrote about my social media evolution, chronicling how I’d moved along with each new wave of the growth of the social web, from chat rooms to forums to blogging to Facebook, Friendfeed and Twitter.

I started my first Twitter account (@trappermark) around a year ago, and was immediately intrigued with how easy it was to find and engage fascinating people from all over and all walks of life. At the risk of romanticizing the good ol’ days (yeesh, I’m talking about just 365 days ago!), it seemed like back then you could build up a fairly large following and still find that the majority of your followers were there to engage, to converse, to share and have fun.

That is most definitely no longer the case.

As most people with an open Twitter account would attest these days, the vast majority of followers end up being robot accounts, spammers, or just people who are only interested in tweeting links to their own stuff. It’s begun to feel like the social is being sucked out of social web.

At times I feel very tempted to give up on Twitter. But then I think about how much I have gotten out of it (at its best) and how much time I’ve put into it. So starting today–and over the next few weeks–I’m going to see if I can take back Twitter.

Here’s what I’m doing:

1. I’m cleaning out my Twitter account by unfollowing anyone who shows evidence that they only followed me to add to their over-inflated follower numbers or to broadcast their spam at me.
2. I’m going to actively seek out “real people” who are still in my account but with whom I’ve never before engaged. I will be placing these “tweeps” in a special column in TweetDeck labeled “The Real Trappermark.” And I commit to make a real effort to engage with as many of these people as possible on a daily basis. I want to reclaim that early thrill of discovering new and different people, and letting them discover me. I want to put the social back in my social media.

If you’re on Twitter, and you’re “real” and want to have conversation, feel free to follow @trappermark. I’m now using a verification service called TruTwit to prevent future spammers from re-cluttering my Twitter stream. If you follow me, TruTwit wil send you a DM (Twitter Direct Message) with a link to verify your account. TruTwit uses Twitter OAuth authorization service, which means that when you log in there, Twitter will teall TruTwit that you are indeed the owner of the Twitter account, but TruTwit has no access to your Twitter login or account info. I’ll get a message that you have verified yourself, and I’ll then gladly follow you back. [EDIT: I've decided to discontinue using TruTwit (see first two comments below) and go back to hand-managing follower requests.]

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This is one of a series of posts that will interact with the new book by John Franke, Manifold Witness: The Plurality of Truth. John Franke is The Lester and Kay Clemens Professor of Missional Theology at Biblical Seminary in Hatfield, PA. He is the author of several previous books, including Beyond Foundationalism (with Stanley Grenz) and The Character of Theology.

Chapter 3: The Historic Christian Faith?
In this chapter, Franke continues pondering the implications of the great diversity we find in the “historic Christian faith.” He recounts that as a child he was led to affirm Protestant evangelicalism because it was committed to both the Bible and the “historic Christian faith.” However, once he began to study that “historic faith,” he began to think that that category was not as helpful as a unifying device as his early teachers wanted him to believe.

Now at this point some of my readers may be ready to give up on the book, protesting that Franke seems to be chiefly motivated by factors external to the Bible. If evangelical Protestant theology has one overriding dictum, it would probably be “all theology must be derived from and able to be wholly explained by and within the Bible.” Indeed, one of the first comments I received on my first post about Manifold Witness was from someone demanding to see Franke’s “exegetical support” for his plurality of truth thesis.

I trust that support will be forthcoming. However much Franke’s critics fear he has been taken captive by postmodernism or the Emergent Church crowd, Franke remains heart and soul an evangelical Protestant theologian. I trust that he would never develop a theological approach that he did not think he could support biblically. Indeed, one of the upcoming chapters is titled “Scripture as Manifold Witness.” (I’m writing these posts as I read through the book rather than after having completed it. These are my “as it happens” reactions to the book.)

More to the point, though, I have come to strongly disagree with the knee-jerk reaction I observe among so many conservative evangelicals against admitting any extra-biblical evidence–whether from history, science, sociology, psychology, etc.–into the theological discussion. I first encountered this sort of aversion in the debates over Peter Enns’s book Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament. Along with a number of my friends, I was an up close observer of such debates as a student at the seminary where Enns lost his position over the issues. Enns raised again and again a question which (in my opinion) never received a satisfactory answer (and was more often than not just completely ignored): Certain extra-biblical phenomena are there and well-attested; what do we do with them? Ignoring said phenomena with some variation of the old “the Bible says it; I believe it; that settles it” fideism just no longer cut if for those of us who felt that emperor was walking around naked in public.

I remember well a panel discussion over Enns’s book at a national meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society. One of the panelists (curiously enough, a colleague from Enns’s own seminary) attacked the thesis of Enns’s book on the basis of its supposed incompatibility with the historic confession upon which their commons seminary was founded. In his response, Enns stood up, raised one outstretched hand and said, “Genesis 1-3.” Holding out the other hand he said, “Enuma Elish.” Then he looked at his colleague and said simply, “Go.” Over the next three years of debate at the seminary, I waited for a real response from Enns’s critics to that challenge. I’m still waiting.

So while Franke seems to promise in Manifold Witness that by the end of the book he will have developed his thesis biblically, he is choosing to formulate a full-orbed theology that takes into account general as well as special revelation. It is simply undeniable that what we call “the historic Christian faith” is in reality “an incredibly diverse set of assumptions, conversations, and disputes that looks like anything but a unified set of beliefs” (p. 22).

To emphasize his point, Franke summarizes a thought experiment by missiologist Andrew Walls. Picture yourself as a “Professor of Comparative Inter-Planetary Religions” from outer space visiting Earth every few centuries to examine the Christian church. What would he file under “historic Christian church”? The very Jewish-looking first century church in Jerusalem? The church of the  very gentile and philosophically-oriented “church fathers” of the Council of Nicea? The aesthetically- and ascetically-oriented monk-dominated church of early Medieval Ireland? The aggressively missionary evangelical church of London in the mid-19th century? The signs-and-miracles-driven church of Nigeria in the 21st century?

Despite the apparent disparity of particular expressions of Christianity throughout time and across geography, Walls believes there are two categories which do indeed tie together a historic Christian church: “historical connection” and “essential continuity.” Historical connection traces the way that each of the expressions mentioned above grew out of and continued influences from the expressions that came before it. They were not spontaneously generated. The essential continuity of the historic church is that in all its diversity of expression, each of these parts of the historic church has in common “one theme which is as unvarying as the language which expresses it is various; that the person of Jesus called the Christ has ultimate significance” (p. 25).

So if the larger church throughout history has historical connection and essential continuity, is there something inherent within Christian faith that accounts for the incredible amount of diversity in expression? Franke believes there is. Still following Walls, Franke discusses what he calls Christianity’s “indiginization principle” and its “transformation principle.” The indiginization principle, briefly stated, draws an analogy to the gospel principle that, in Christ, all are welcomed to reconciliation with God “just as they are.” In similar fashion, Franke says, God welcomes and accommodates to cultures, times and places (cf. Acts 15 Jerusalem Council).

The transformation principle works in a certain tension with the indiginization principle: while God accepts us (and cultures) where we are, he doesn’t leave us (or cultures) where we were. While God in Christ affirms and accommodates to every culture in planting the church therein, once planted the church will find many ways in which “faithfulness to Christ” often puts them “out of step with [their] culture” (p.27). “These principles point to both the complexity and plurality of the  faith as it has been expressed throughout the history of the Christian tradition nad to the calling to take responsibility for this plurality in bearing witness to the gospel of Jesus Christ” (p. 28).

Franke’s concluding paragraph is worth quoting in full:

The ongoing engagement of the gospel with the cultures of the world means that the work of theology is never completed. It results in an ongoing and irreducible plurality that is reflective of the missional nature of the Christian community to take the good news of the love of God proclaimed in the gospel of Jesus Christ to the ends of the earth and embody it among all peoples and situations for the good of the world. This is the very nature and essence of the historic Christian faith.