Category: Faith

Calvin College Hosts Sigur Rós

Though the concert happened more than a month ago, I just discovered this interesting commentary on Icelandic band Sigur Rós’ concert at my alma mater Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Calvin is a liberal arts college affiliated with the Christian Reformed Church and for me continues to exemplify the best example of what a thoughtful Christian education can be.

As part of a regular series, the school hosted a question and answer session with the band before the show, which you can listen to as an MP3 file. This unique approach allowed not only the audience to get to know the band, but the band to understand a little bit about the people for whom they were performing. What a great idea.

Also, it’s nice to see that I’m not the only person who raves about the feelings of transcendence that the band’s live performances inspire.

P.S. More love for Calvin: the Director of Student Activities, Kate Bowman Johnson, keeps a wonderully-titled blog called Evangelical Expatriate. And former student Ben Reed blogs thoughtfully and often hilariously about the evangelical subculture over at Christian Retail.

Gays Versus Muslims

The Institute of Multicultural Development, a Dutch multicultural group is arranging a soccer match between Muslims and homosexuals. In an effort to combat fears and misconceptions, the two sides will meet on the pitch, and hopefully in the process, come to see each other as human beings.

While I applaud this effort, it does seem a bit strange to bring people together over a competitive sporting activity. For years, I’ve had the idea of bringing some of my fundamentalist Christian friends together with some gay friends (my smart-ass title for the events: Fags and Fundies), but at least over a meal, people have time to talk and there are no winners or losers.

Still, I suppose anything that can bring two groups of misunderstood and misunderstanding people together is a good thing.

P.S. The funniest thing in the Beliefnet story was the organizer’s assurance that gay Muslims can choose either team!

Harper’s On Torture

Harper’s is going from strength to strength recently, taking on the Iraq war with ferocity and honesty. Here are the last two paragraphs of an article about torture entitled “What We’ve Lost” by William Pfaff that appears in the November 2005 issue:

International illegality, the deliberate repudiation of international law, and torture, gratuitously employed in defiance of the moral intuitions of ordinary people, all show that the Bush Administration has chosen to place itself outside the moral community of modern Western democratic civilization. This is not an unwarranted or outrageous judgment; it logically follows from the evidence. It seems a strange choice to have been made by an American government that more than any other in history identifies itself with righteousness and with Christianity.

In that respect, if one is to invoke religious judgments, I would cite André Malraux’s remarks to the novelist Georges Bernanos, who had returned to France from wartime exile and asked what judgment Malraux made on Europe in 1945. Malraux replied, “With the camps, Satan has visibly reappeared over the world.”

Why aren’t the mainstream media talking this way?

Who Was Lonnie Frisbee?

Lonnie Frisbee

I’m not really old enough to remember it, but the “Jesus People” movement was a full-blown phenomenon in the late 1960s and into the early 1970s. Centred mostly in northern California, hippies began getting into Jesus and these “Jesus Freaks” turned the established church on its ear. One of the most influential figures in this period was a young man with the unlikely name of Lonnie Frisbee. Lonnie’s ministry was influential in the foundation of two of evangelicalism’s biggest denominations. And yet, his name has disappeared from most accounts of the movement. Why? Because Lonnie was gay.

David di Sabatino has made a documentary film about Lonnie and it will be shown here in Toronto later this month as part of the Reel Heart Film Festival. I’m very interested in seeing it, but I do find one thing interesting. The director, who is an evangelical, talks about Lonnie’s homosexuality as a “struggle with sexual sin” and points to Lonnie as an example of a flawed prophet. Sadly, Lonnie died from AIDS in 1993, but I wonder what would have been the outcome if Lonnie had been able to embrace his sexuality and be accepted in the evangelical movement for what he was, without feeling like he had to live two separate lives.

Film critic Peter Chattaway conducted a lengthy interview with director di Sabatino back in April and the director says that Lonnie was raped as an eight-year-old child and that this might explain his fragmented identity, but I always find it funny that Christian people always need some “explanation” for someone’s sexuality. It’s more likely his fragmented identity was a result of not being able to tell people close to him about his homosexuality for fear of being denounced.

That being said, the film sounds like it genuinely tries to understand a complex individual, and I hope I’ll get to see it. It doesn’t hurt a bit that there are lots of Larry Norman songs in the soundtrack.

Note: Music was a huge factor in the Jesus People movement. Here’s a great site with lots of history on “Jesus Music”.