Part 1

Why not start with Karl Barth? In his essay, “Church and Culture” (in Theology and Church, London: SCM, 1962), Barth disallows any uncritical approval of culture, nor does take a consistent stand against culture. As usual, Barth makes things complicated. On the one side of the dialectic, Barth takes up the ax of John the Baptist: “Christian preaching…has met every culture, however supposedly rich and mature, with ultimate sharp skepticism” (quoted in T.J. Gorringe, Furthering Humanity: A Theology of Culture, p. 18). But later in that same essay, Barth has no patience for a spiritualism that ignores our cultural milieu. There is no room, Barth writes, “for a basic blindness to the possibility that culture may be revelatory, that it can be filled with promise.” The seeds of God’s kingdom proliferate throughout the world. Barth pursues the same line of thinking in Church Dogmatics IV/3, where he claims that if “all things are created in and through Jesus” (Colossians 1:16-17), then, as Peter Dula puts it, “there is nowhere, not even the mouth of an ass, that we cannot expect to find words reflecting the light of the Word” (Peter Dula, “A Theology of Interfaith Bridge Building,” p. 164 in Borders and Bridges: Mennonite Witness in a Religiously Diverse World). Barth goes on to call these diverse worldly witnesses to God’s kingdom “secular parables” (CD IV/3, p. 115). The earth and human culture resound with echoes of the one Word of God and speaks into existence the kingdom of God. Therefore we must pay attention to the places we inhabit, the cultures that permeate us. “The Church,” he writes, “will be alert for the signs which, perhaps in many cultural achievements, announce that the kingdom approaches” (20). The kingdom does come. The question Barth poses to the church is whether she is ready to receive it, however strange it may appear.

It’s a strange possibility to consider how the pieces of culture called ‘technology’ may display God’s kingdom, if only parabolically. Barth won’t let us rule out an abstract category like “technology” without serious engagement in particular technological machineries—he calls them “cultural achievements.” Nor will he take up every new sophisticated invention as a chance for the kingdom to make headway. There’s nothing wrong with a healthy dose of skepticism.

In The Hidden Power of Electronic Culture (Zondervan, 2005), pastor Shane Hipps critically considers the place of technologies in worship. He carefully steers clear of many church leaders who welcome any and every form of technology as the panacea for dying churches. Blidly welcoming technology into church life turns worship into another capitalist commodity. We then become one show among many where Christians can find “new experiences to consume” (15). In Modernity, writes Hipps, “churches heeded consumer demands and sough to reinvent church. They either had to compete in teh consumer marketplace on the consumer’s terms or face extinction. In the spirit of modernity, these churches reincarnated themselves as highly competent vendors of religious programs and services” (99). But the answer, according to Hipps, is not a reactionary turn against all forms of technology. “I’m not arguing for some Luddite strategy of literally destroying media” (65). Instead, we carefully and communally discern how modern technologies can aid us as we embody the good news of Christ. In Hipps’ words, “We learn to understand the power of our technologies to shape us, thereby regaining power over them” (122).

Pastor Hipps considers how the internet feeds off our desire for community. “Our electronic media has rekindled our interest in community and made us aware of our total interdependence on one another” (121). Hipps quotes Marshall McLuhan to this extent: “The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village” (103). The internet has shown us how we are connected to the rest of the world. We inhabit a global village. While the internet displays our interdependence, it also offers us cheap community, a simulacra of intimacy. “In our quest for meaningful connections we encounter convenient decoys—the always-appealing cotton candy communities of the virtual world” (121).

Probably Hipps’ best technological criticism comes into play when he describes the egalitarian nature of church and recent developments in shareware and collaberative technologies. His guide is Marshal McLuhan who writes, “Christianity—in a centralized, administrative, bureaucratic form—is certainly irrelavent…. We must get rid of the hierarachy if we want participation” (125). Hipps welcomes the organization structure displayed in our electronic age. “This shift toward information diffusion and the subsequent diffusion of power are providing us with a helpful corrective to the long history of centralized, top-down authority in the church” (130). This is an example where techonology can help us relearn what it means to be a faithful church. “Electronic culture is helping us recover a biblical vision for more collaborative and egalitarian leadership models” (143). Church is a non-hierarchical, highly participatory community. Thus decision-making through consensus is the decisive practice that displays this power-sharing organization. But, as Hipps notes, our media culture forms us to be impatient people who value instant results. Thus we have hard work ahead of us in our churches as we try to cultivate virtues and practices of patience that make space for the hard work of communal intimacy. A patient church that takes time to listen to the weakest voices in our midst is a counter-(media)cultural church.

What I appreciate about Hipps’ book is the way he turns a conversation about electronic culture into a argument about the shape of a faithful church—a clever move. Questions about technology and media become unimportant. For Pastor Hipps, what matters is the way we exercise ecclesial authority and how we welcome and listen to friends and enemies. What is missing in his critical engagement is the role of socio-economic class. But he is not uniquely culpable for this blindness. It’s quite typical for church leaders to ignore the question of class when they discuss worship styles, communication technologies, and cultural relevance. To be fair to Hipps, at least he does mention the economic factors of techonological relevance: “Extensive resources are being sunk into editing equipment, audio systems, video projectors, light shows, and more. there is no other period in church history when relevance has cost so much time and money” (154). Hipps does put spending practices on the table. But, at the beginning of the book he tells a story that puts the question of economics on the back burner: “We wondered were the money would come from? Would the screen be obtrusive?.... These were all valid and important quesitons, but we began to believe these were not the most important questions for us to ask” (21). Economic issues don’t take center stage because we don’t worship with needy people. We can ignore issues of cost in our discussions of technology because we lack the prophetic presence of the poor.

In Simple Spirituality (IVP, 2008), Chris Heuertz challenges our churches to think how we’ve created cultures of worship that are inhospitable to the poor. “[T]he church…isolates the poor” (72). The poor have their place in the world, and we have ours. Heuertz asks, “Do our multi-million-dollar sanctuaries in North America send the same message?” Even if they did stumble into our worship services, could we hear their silent cries over the perfectly amplified music and the crystal clear voice of the preacher on his cordless mic? “As the statistics of poverty grow, the church only sings louder so as not to hear the staggering numbers and the cries of the victims” (71). Our state of the art worship tends toward immorality because we use it to cushion ourselves against what Heuertz calls “the prophetic presence of the poor” (82). Our churches look and feel different when we worship alongside someone who doesn’t know where they will sleep that night, or a parent who has to prostitute themselves so they can put food on the table. How much does that cordless microphone cost, anyhow? Heuertz can’t help but think about economic realities: “my waste was offensive…. My poor friends became a prophetic presence” (83). “We would often invite local friends (many of them extremely poor) to join us, their presence a constant reminder not to waste” (86). Thus the cost of technology isn’t important to those who don’t have the prophetic presence of the poor. And if we lack their presence, we aren’t living into Christ’s mission: “to preach good news to the poor” (Luke 4).

Part 2

If Marshall McLuhan’s dictum, “the medium is the message,” is helpful (as Shane Hipps argues), then we must go all the way down; we must dig into the materiality of the medium. We must investigate the conditions that make possible the process of production. Hidden powers are physically remembered in the pieces of technology we use.

Most popular discussions of technology and worship fail to explore the realities of material production—the where, when, why, and how of invention and assembly. From readings these books on media and worship, one would that assume technologies magically appear—created out of nothing. Since electronic devices are available, we have to figure out ways to make them liturgically productive. The problem, according to Eileen D. Crowley, is that “Most churches lag at least twenty years or more behind the art world in the kind of media art they create or purchase and in how they imagine that media might be integrated within worship” (32). Our churches are not on the cutting edge of media. Our liturgical media is passé. We have failed to encourage the development of artists who makes use of anything at their disposal to lead us into an “experience of the Holy” (32)

The best books on media and worship call us to create ecclesial cultures of creative cooperation. Media should not be imposed from above by consultants and experts. Rather, our use of technology at church should arise from the discernment of the people. In Liturgical Art for a Media Culture (Liturgical Press, 2007), Professor Crowley offers on such argument, typical among the most helpful books on liturgical use of media. She engages in a discussion of the dangers and possitive possibilities of our media culture for worship and offers reasoned “tools [that] can help a church decide whether this new media  and new ministry are appropriate for their circumstances” (90). While Prof. Crowley wants to situate our modern use of technology in worship in a long history of multimedia liturgy, she doesn’t engage the history of technological production. Since church has always been a multimedia performance, Crowley argues, then we deceive ourselves when we think that there is a kind of worship that is not already multimedia. “Adding today’s new media to these old media does not make worship multimedia. Liturgy has always been multimedia” (8). She exposes the false distinctions that underlie our usual ways of thinking about using multimedia in worship. We already do! We have done so for centuries.

The problem, according to Prof. Crowley, is that we lack a theologically informed process of ecclesial discernment. She proposes a highly participatory liturgical use of technology that invites as many people as possible to the planning table. Her model “includes all the faithful in the creative process, and encourages the creation of locally produced liturgical media” (90). The problems with technology in worship happen when a select few of experts and consultants impose change from above. They force technological changes to worship without any engagement with the people.

While her model describes a healthy egalitarian and communal decision-making process, Crowley never digs into what matters most: the economic, political, and social realities that make technological production possible. All those factors remain hidden. Her readers are left with the impression that pieces from technology exist creatio ex nihilo. Speakers, screen, computers, and microphones magically appear in catalogs and box stores. Where does the LCD monitor come from? Best Buy or Circuit City. End of story. The shear existence of technologies warrents our use. It’s at the store, so we think through what it will do to our worship and community if we use it. It’s a utilitarian argument.

Thomas Friedman begins to open our eyes to the reality of the conditions that make technologies possible. In The Lexus and the Olive Tree (2000), he writes, “The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist… And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies to flourish is called the US Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps” (pp. 464-475, quoted in Gorringe, p. 88). Our electronic devices receive their life-blood from weapons of mass destruction. Sophisticated weaponry and well-trained soldiers make possible our technological arsenal for worship. And our indebtedness to Silicon Valley provides the cultural legitimacy to our military machine—they defend our technological way of life. The hidden power of our liturgical electronic art is violence. To repeat Friedman’s line, the U.S. armed forces is “the hidden fist that keeps to world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies to flourish.” How can we worship God with devices that reverberate with effects of violence? Our church sound booths are awash with the blood of victims.

Crowley is right to say that “the creation of media for worship raises social justice issues” (83). But she doesn’t expose the fibers of the dead that hold together our liturgical electronics, nor does she unmask the clean surfaces to show how they are infused with violence. She does not help us listen for the voices. She isn’t haunted by their cries echoing in the microphones and reverberating through the amplifiers. Attempts at redeeming technologies through ethical use simply ignores the issue. Our self-justifying attempts at redemption aid our convenient forgetfulness; we wash our hands and move on. But God is not fooled by our trickery, nor does God absolve our sins of omissive memories: “Listen; your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground” (Gen 4:10). God want us to listen with penetrating ears. Can we tune our senses to penetrate through the desired technological sensations and hear what civilization wants us to forget? Electronic media has a lot to hide in order to make its way into our spaces of worship.

Well, enough geekery. Almost. I did want to point to the other reason I haven’t been blogging much: rusted code, my little web development business I’ve been creating the past few months. So if you need a website built…

The final thing is the need for an acronym for “blip.” The name doesn’t particularly mean anything, it was just all Isaac and I could think of when we started this thing. So, if you’ve got an idea for an acronym, post a comment. Maybe I’ll make the acronym also be random each visit as well

• My initial findings were done by googling a theologian’s name plus “mp3,” so googling “jurgen moltmann mp3” turns up some interesting results. Using this method I’ve found an interesting set of lectures on eschatology by Moltamann, a great sermon/talk by Marva Dawn on creation, and a series of lectures by N.T. Wright.


• I’ve also hunted around for weekly theology-related podcasts. So far the only one I’ve found is Speaking of Faith which is usually excellent. My favorites so far: New Monastics with Shane Claiborne, Eastern Orthodoxy and Gardening with Vigen Guroian, and The Ecstatic Faith of Rumi.


• The above methods are decent, but they can be time-consuming and hit-and-miss in terms of quality. But just a couple weeks ago a whole new method arose when Apple released iTunesU which has hundreds of lectures for download for free by a growing number of universities. So far I’ve found a number of interesting lectures by Randy Maddox under Seattle Pacific University, Duke Divinity School has some lectures up, Concordia Seminary has whole classes posted, and the list could go on. You can even search iTunes for a certain theologian now and it will search iTunesU in addition to the usual catalog of songs. The number of schools seems to be increasing daily, but there are still schools who have iTunesU sites, but which are not yet listed (i.e. Fuller iTunesU).

With all of those resources I shouldn’t have trouble keeping to my exercise schedule! And if you’ve come across good lectures/discussions/sermons feel free to post them in the comments.

But the crazy thing about it is the name: Divine Strake. Is the Department of Defense claiming divinity? Ok, it’s an absurd insinuation. But how in the world did they think that using a word like “divine” was an appropriate way to name a military project? If they use such language, they enter into theological (literally, “talk about the divine”) territory, and into a tradition (at least for Christians) that takes language about the divine very seriously—that’s what the Council of Nicaea, among others, is all about. So, even if the DTRA thought it was just a clever idea to use language about God for the project, it seems important to think a little bit about why such language is inappropriate, and what they may be saying implicitly (heck, why not explicitly) about their project.

The first thing that comes to mind is a passage from Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt’s book called Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin Press, 2004). In their first chapter, they argue that after modernity war “now tends toward the absolute.” “In modernity war never had an absolute, ontological character…. War was an element of social life; it did not rule over life.” But in our age, war now rules over life—it becomes “a form of biopower” (literally, it holds the “power of life”, and that’s made evident by it’s ability to end life, to kill). Thus, as Hardt and Negri put it, “war becomes properly ontological.” At the center of the threat of global war, of weapons of mass destruction, is the claim of sovereignty—and it’s “not simply of an individual or group but of humanity itself and perhaps indeed of all being” (18-19). That is why war, especially the threat of mass destruction, becomes an ontological claim—it claims to control being.

Maybe the Department of Defense is finally being honest about their control over weapons that have the potential to end life. Divine Strake is it’s way to explore ways to make sure others don’t share in the United State’s ability to decide when and where life should end—ontological biopower. It is the Defense Department’s desire for soveriegnty, for godlike control of the power over life and death—thus, divine. To share God’s ontological soveriegnty. To be like God: sicut deus.

In his very early work on Genesis 1-3, Dietrich Bonhoeffer engaged in a theological exegesis of the creation and fall of humanity. He has a chapter called “Sicut Deus”—like God. Bonhoffer explores what it means for the serpent to tempt humanity with the possibility of making ourselves “like God” (Gen. 3:4-5). And I think he offers some helpful ways to understand what it may mean for us to think about the use of language that seizes divinity for ourselves (projects like Divine Strake). He writes, “In what does humankind’s being sicut deus consist? It consists in its own attempt to be for God” (116). “This is disobedience in the semblance of obedience, the desire to rule in the semblance of service, the will to be creator in the semblance of being a creature, being dead in the semblance of life” (117). Those words seem to be a very appropriate warning, and it helps unmasks rulers who claim to do things in our service: the desire to rule in the semblance of service. And the last line captures the ontological biopower of threats of war and control over weapons of mass destruction: death in the semblance of life.

The last passage I want to quote from Bonhoffer’s Creation and Fall (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997) ends his chapter on the Fall (p. 120):

It is rebellion, the creature’s stepping outside of the creature’s only possible attitude, the creature’s becoming creator, the destruction of creatureliness, a defection, a falling away from being safely held as a creature. As such a defection it is a continual fall, a plunging down into a bottomless abyss, a state of being let go, a process of moving further and further away, falling deeper and deeper. And in all this it is not merely a moral lapse but the destruction of creation by the creature… From now on that world has been robbed of its creatureliness and drops blindly into infinite space, like a meteor that has torn itself away from the core to which it once belonged.

Lastly, I have to end with Karl Barth. It seems I always make my way back to him. This is from his early work on the Epistle to the Romans: page 236 of The Epistle to the Romans (London: Oxford University Press, 1963):

If, then, by the consciousness of religion we make human thought and will and act to be the thought and will and act of God, does not human behaviour become supremely impressive, significant, necessary, and inevitable?... A man may or may not act religiously; but if he does so act, it is widely supposed that he does well, and is thereby justified and established and secure. In fact, however, he merely established himself, rests upon his own competence, and treats his own ambitions as adequate and satisfactory. Religion, then, so far from dissolving men existentially, so far from rolling them out and pressing them against the wall, so far from overwhelming them and transforming them, acts upon them like a drug which has been extremely skilfully administered. Instead of counteracting human illusions, it does no more than introduce an alternative condition of pleasurable emotion. Thus it is that the possibility of religion enables the existentially godless man to attain the full maturity of his godlessness by bringing forth a rich and most conspicuous harvest of fruit unto death.

We’re flying out of Los Angeles with Virgin Atlantic from whom we got a great deal that gets us to London. The day after touching down in London we fly out with a small European airline (EasyJet) to take us down to Rome (another great deal at $50 a person). After hanging out in Rome for a few days we’ll take the train up to Cinque Terra. Then over to Venice for a weekend (even though Isaac swears no one actually lives in the town and its not worth the visit!). Next, we’ll take the train to Bolzano, and from there a bus up to Castelrotto, a small town in the Dolomites. After hiking around there for a bit we’ll take an overnight train to Budapest, Hungary for something a little more off the beaten path. Finally, we’ll fly back up to London for a few days. Should be a blast! If you have any good places to stay/eat/stay in any of the locations we’re visiting let us know.

• First get vim It’s a programmers editor, and will allow you to actually code your new program with some amount of efficiency and speed. Get your feet wet by walking through the vim tutorial

• Next install the following on your computer (all of which are open source and free): mysql , php , apache , putty Having all these on your machine allows you to turn your desktop into a min-webserver, and thus allow you to work even when you aren’t connected to the internet.

• Now it’s time to learn some things! Start out with html (I like this tutorial because he teaches you right the first time by giving you modern, standards-compliant, css-based, html. Not the crappy netscape 4 html that most tutorials dish out.)

• Next move on to making a dynamic web page that does something. Download the docs because they are a great reference to have at hand. Then chew on chapter 2 of the manual, a very basic tutorial

• Now it’s time to learn how to process data and save it by storing it in a database. This is a fairly decent tutorial for learning how to use mysql within a PHP page. But don’t forget the mysql manual which is also a great resource.

• By now you should be well on your way to having some sort of web program running. What’s left? Well, learning a bit of object oriented programming is a good way to move past noob status, as well as learning to use some of the PEAR packages out there (PEAR is a collection of hiqh-quality code that takes a lot of the work out of many common tasks, such as building forms (HTML_QuickForm ) and database abstraction (DB )

Happy coding!

Their solution? For lectures and meetings use PP as a way to complement auditory information with a visual component. Use good images (not cheesy clip art) from stock photography sites like this , this , and this . I gave it a try for a PP presentation a group of us had to give in my multi-culturalism class. I’m obviously biased, but I think it went pretty well . Now, if only my company’s suits would read the articles…


SELECT t1.id, t1.user
FROM carts AS t1
LEFT JOIN cart_items AS t2 ON t1.id = t2.cart_id
WHERE t1.status = 'ACTIVE' AND t2.item_id = 5
GROUP BY t1.id


With 100,000 carts and 10 times that in the cart_items table this starts to crawl, EVEN if item 5 has only been i n 1 cart. The slownewss is in the LEFT join. Here is where the nuances of different joins comes in. A LEFT join must return all rows from the left table, and fill them with NULL values if it can’t find a matching row on the right. So, in our example the database engine goes through the 100,000 carts trying to join them up with the some kind of item on the right. If you try do this by hand, you’ll begin to see why this is such a slow operation .

The solution is found in an INNER join. An INNER join is a much more basic join and thus much faster. An INNER join will not return all the rows from the left table; it will only return those rows that match between the two tables. So, if you need all the rows from the left table, even when they don’t have a corresponding row on the right table you have to use a LEFT join. But in our case we don’t care about carts that don’t have matching entries in the right table. We just want the ones that have used item 5. So when we replace the LEFT JOIN with an INNER JOIN the query becomes blazingly fast. The reason is that the database engine doesn’t have to worry about returning all the rows from the left table so it is free to chop out rows using the WHERE clause before doing the join. So, in our example it is able to remove all but 1 row from the right table (assuming there is only one cart that uses item 5). Now, the left table only has to join on one row!

You might think, why couldn’t the LEFT JOIN have known to pare down the right table based on the WHERE statement? It’s because it has no way of knowing if you are relying on the fact that NULL values will be present for the unmatched rows on the left table. The key is that a LEFT (or RIGHT) join can only prune from the primary table before beginning the join process, while an INNER can prune rows from both tables. It’s these one word nuances that keep programmers in business!