Now what else is the whole life of mortals but a sort of comedy, in which the various actors, disguised by various costumes and masks, walk on and play each one his part, until the manager waves them off the stage? Moreover, this manager frequently bids the same actor to go back in a different costume, so that he who has but lately played the king in scarlet now acts the flunkey in patched clothes. Thus all things are presented by shadows. -Desiderius Erasmus, The Praise of Folly

Photoshop lets me be whoever I want for a brief, narcissistic moment (yes, that’s my face strutting down the catwalk). Websites ranging from Yearbook Yourself to Face In Hole have capitalized on our identity-switcheroo imaginations. It’s rather addictive. One glimpse of yourself as Margaret Thatcher or Jack Sparrow or a Teletubby and you’re hooked. And did I forget to tell you? Photoshopped religion allows you the same creative fake-out.

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Why have so many of the non-readers at my high school read Twilight?  How come the aprons in the 1800s were all made from calico prints? Why do some Christians believe that Obama is the anti-Christ?

In his bestselling book The Tipping Point (2000), Malcolm Gladwell explores the parallels between ideas and viruses. He uses an epidemiological motif to promote his thesis—that human behavior is shaped suddenly and powerfully by viral influences in their communities. If ideas are viruses, then my proximity to both Christian skepticism and Christian trendiness is bringing me dangerously close to getting the flu.

I’m going to admit something very honest. My Christian faith has suffered from my chronic reading, interfacing, and networking this past year. I'm rather shocked by this. I thought I was doing myself some good by jumping into the conversation. I’m not talking about the good and beautiful result of knowing all sorts of people. I’m not talking about exposure to new ideas, or being challenged to examine the credibility of my beliefs. But I’m suffering from some information inflammation—the relentless sound bytes, articles, videos, jokes, books, concepts, marketing, and opinions that my spiritual antibodies must filter every day. I don’t think my soul was designed for this much discernment.

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I’ve determined there are three effective methods of getting widespread attention: death, blasphemy, and public nudity.

David Blaine and Harry Houdini, generations apart, capitalized on our fear of death by flirting with it during dangerous stunts, and in 1999 (long before Paranormal Activity made grainy realism super-scary), the marketing geniuses for Blair Witch Project pretended to release real life footage of young people being murdered in the forest. Of course, if Jimmy Hoffa or Tupac were to rise from the dead tomorrow, that might be the best stunt ever.

The death trick always works, but blasphemy gets equal press, as Salman Rushdie knows too well.  Lindsay Lohan and her Christ-ish photograph (complete with crown of thorns and arms outstretched) or Madonna’s now-classic blending of Catholic imagery and eroticism are cheap stunts that cost the public millions in itunes and tabloid subscriptions.

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Geoffrey Chaucer, the guy who might have had Shakespeare’s reputation if Will hadn’t done his thing so brilliantly, wrote this little book you might have heard about. His magnum opus is, of course, The Canterbury Tales, and its prologue reads like 13^th century reality television, a sort of Real World for Medieval England. Chaucer examines his own society in all its wacky diversity and throws twenty-seven characters together on a journey, many of them religious. They are, supposedly, going to pay homage to a slain archbishop, but it's just a set up. We're more interested in the bufoonery on display than the pilgrimage itself.

As I see it, Chaucer’s pilgrims are the perfect mirror of his society.  They are alternately perverse, holy, hypocritical, promiscuous, chaste, and hilarious. The Roman Catholic Church is the target of much of his fun, but he also takes a shot at gender roles, infidelity, body building, stupidity, and farting, among other targets. It’s a hoot, let me tell you.

In re-reading Chaucer, I am impressed by his wit. It can’t be missed. Had Chaucer’s Christian characters all been scoundrels, I would’ve dismissed him as a nasty critic, only eager to expose the religious misfits and hypocrites. But Chaucer’s genius is even better displayed in his evenhanded treatment of the world he observes. Consider this description of the humble Parson, a country pastor whose love of his congregation showcases the transformation of Christ in a perverse world:

He was a shepherd and not mercenary.

It’s the tail end of winter. I’m sitting in one of those wooden-beamed ski lodges in the Sierra Nevadas. I am not a downhiller—probably never will be—so I’m being a good sport today, watching my family whoosh down the runs while I sit in the wussy lodge with my laptop and a fake ski cap. Veteran skiers with hi-tech goggles and marshmallow pants have been wandering past me all morning. If I really want to feel like a loser, I'll watch the Olympics later today. 

The outsider vibe feels familiar. I, a follower of Jesus Christ, have gotten used to watching the rest of the world do its risky things while I sit in the safety of the lodge. I’ve grown accustomed to observing breathless speed through a 9 x 12 foot picture window. If someone saw me in the hallway, he might think I belong here, with my appropriate Goretex pants and cute little gloves. But does he know I’m really a lodge-sitter, a mogul-shunner, a lover of sea level?

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If you spent your childhood outside the evangelical bubble before Jesus Christ and his radical, irrational message knocked you flat as an adult, then you, like the apostle Paul, understand the mystery of spiritual conversion. You might have been missing some Christian street cred—an Awana certificate, a Precious Moments figurines collection, a working knowledge of Dove Award winners—but what is all that anyway? You didn’t know the secret handshake at the front gate, so Jesus sprung you an entrance through the back door of God’s Kingdom, and you crossed the divide between life and death.

I’m so stinking jealous of you.

I, on the other hand, spent my life knowing the secret handshake. I suspect I first experienced a cultural conversion, learning the lexicon of American Christianity as one learns his ABC’s.

Here's a repost from the past. 

Writing is like sex. When you get the impulse to do it, you’re seldom in the right place, and when the atmosphere is sublime, you might not be in the mood. I suspect this accounts for the vast number of unsatisfying blogs written every day across America. 

So goes my theory about the mysterious impulses of the mind and body. Blogging is a mystery to me, a modern curiosity that is trying to find its place in the history of mankind’s literary arts. The percentage of people who write a blog is growing every day, and it's changing the art of the word.

I’m coming to understand the art of blogging as a hybrid of inclination, narcissism, and curiosity. Do I come to my screen as the ancients did with a quill, looking to shape and frame an idea, a thesis, an ideology? Does the spontaneity of the medium favor only freshly baked insights, or is it all right to offer the timeless truths of an essayist? Am I truly a writer—or am I, as they say, merely a Cat Blogger, someone who enjoys telling you that my cat did such and such today with the profound assurance that someone cares? (Cat Bloggers, by the way, aren’t new; they’ve been around for centuries, but their daily rhapsodies were mercifully trapped in little diaries with cheap aluminum keys).

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I'm being assaulted.

Not by violence, you see, but news of it. All the stories of bloodshed and disaster and evil are getting to me. It's really messing up my happy new year here in the suburbs.

For those of us whose lives don’t seem to reflect the expanse of human suffering in the world, how can we label our good luck as a divine blessing without simultaneously implying that God decided to screw everybody else? It is then that God starts to feel like a nickel slot machine. Solomon used different language when he proclaimed in the book of Ecclesiastes, “There is something else meaningless that occurs on earth: righteous men who get what the wicked deserve, and wicked men who get what the righteous deserve.”  Aw Shoot. Makes no sense to me either.

People living in perennial peace are often afraid to question God’s sovereignty. Maybe if we don’t say anything, God won’t check his records and notice we got two paychecks by mistake while someone else forgot to get paid at all. Or perhaps worst of all, the numbing softness of our lives prompts no philosophical questions whatsoever. When that happens, God becomes unnecessary. Suffering has no meaning. Violence is mere cinema.

Dictators dreaming of nuclear weapons, suffering children dying in rubble, desperate looters shooting the innocent at will—how can we not see the hand of evil at work in the world? Essayist Lance Morrow wisely observes that  “each era gets its suitable evils.” The play is the same; only the cast of characters changes from generation to generation.  

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In the Greek pantheon of emotions, Love has the power of Zeus, Compassion is the lovely Aphrodite, and Anger kicks butt like Ares—but Sadness? He’s just a hated Cyclops, weeping out of that one ugly eye, a monster that nobody likes at all.

Sadness is the emotion that Americans like to eliminate right away. If our children are sad, we try to fix them with candy and distractions. If our best friend has the blues, we invite him to Happy Hour. A spouse feeling down? Well, here’s some shopping money, a round of golf, maybe a massage. We are uncomfortable with sadness; it’s such a downer to everyone in its radius.

Poets seem to understand the beauty of sadness better than the rest of us, but some are really just happy pretending they are sad. Bands like Atreyu (who sing lines like It only hurts when I breathe) capitalize on youthful angst with an almost self-conscious joy, and when the Smiths sing  My gut is burning.  Won't you find me some water? / Hey,just forget it . . . Can you bring me gasoline?  their hyper-tragic lines betray a twisted kind of happiness

Yet John Donne, a profound 16^th century metaphysical poet whom I reckon never wore an emo haircut or painted his fingernails black, wrote “Affliction is a treasure and scarce any man hath enough of it.”  I believe he was closer to getting at the real paradox of sadness: that when we try to kill suffering too quickly, we short circuit the natural order of things.

And what is the natural order of things? It’s first moving in rhythm to Ecclesiastes chapter 3, where there is a time for everything under the sun. It’s experiencing both suffering and joy, the juxtaposition of which ultimately defines both. It’s found in the book of James which makes the audacious claim, “Blessed is the man who perseveres under trial, because when he has stood the test, he will receive the crown of life that God has promised to those who love him.”

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What do pastors do when Sunday morning is barreling down on them and they realize they have absolutely nothing to say from the pulpit?  Women-in-the-pulpit theology aside, I’m awfully glad I will never be a pastor. The burden to create life-changing sermons week upon week must weigh on a man, especially if he is naturally a shepherd, a hand-on-the-shoulder guy, or just rhetorically average.

Inspiration is a tricky cat. If you believe in the Holy Spirit—and I do—you want to believe that God can zap our intellect, give us supernatural insight, and use his Holy Scriptures to shape our teaching. Yet I’m pretty sure God didn’t deem sacred the seven-day cycle of insights, where the Holy Spirit punches his time clock at certain intervals just in time for the church secretary to print the sermon title every Wednesday for the church bulletin.