Friday Funday // 02.08.2013

Back into Friday Funday! Let’s see what we have this week…

• Darrell over at My Obama Year posted an excruciatingly open and heartfelt post about the healthcare debate.

So here is my invitation to you: the next time you get into a discussion about healthcare put my face on the pain of millions of people just like me. Maybe if you can see my wife as the one who needs help it will be easier to speak a little more softly and be a little kinder even when we differ. Let us be the ones you see when you think about the sick and needy. Let our story speak for them.

• Peter Rollins writes about hiding the truth from the “big Other” so that we can actually hide the truth from ourselves.
  

By singing songs that claim we are happy, fulfilled and utterly devoted we protect the Big Other from seeing the truth of our inner antagonisms  The more frenetically we sing the more we attempt to conceal the truth from this Big Other.

• Dr. Eric Seibert wrote a series of posts at Peter Enns’s blog entitled “When the ‘Good Book’ is Bad: Challenging the Bible’s Violent Portrayals of God.” (Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3)
  

It is hard—some would say impossible—to justify the killing of infants and toddlers in stories like these. Reading this way sensitizes us to the problem of violence in these texts and keeps us from simplistically classifying such moral atrocities as good.

• John Manguno posted an article at One Theology on the relation of ANE mythological creatures to some of the rich imagery found in the Old Testament.
  

There are a smattering of sea monsters and dragons throughout the OT. Their roots as ANE chaos monsters is to me quite clear, but exactly how much of that mythology survived into Israelite thought is a question which requires a great deal of thought and individual examination.

• David Henson wrote a fantastic article about Beyoncé’s performance at the Super Bowl as a display of feminism and power, NOT sexuality. (Unless, of course, that’s what you wanted to see.)

Because Beyoncé’s performance Sunday night in New Orleans wasn’t about sex. It was about power, and Beyoncé had it in spades. In fact, her show was one of the most compelling, embodied and prophetic statements of female power I have seen on mainstream television.