projects

As part of my second year at George Fox Seminary (Portland), I’ll be researching two separate topics.  One will be Christianity and Christian history in Mexico.  The second takes a more contemporary bent and will focus on what holistic worship is.
I’m looking for resources (journal articles, books, websites/blogs, papers, etc) that touch on various aspects of worship and what worship means in the evangelical community.  Of late, “worship” has been restricted to a portion of a church service in which the congregation is led in song; it’s got to be more than that – in fact, I’m convinced we do the term and ourselves a disservice when we view worship with this shallow a definition.

I’m interested in your input.  What is worship to you?  What does it consist of?  Are their boundaries to what worship is?

responsible rights

Lindsay Lohan

“Is it a sin to be gay?” Lohan asked. “Should it be a sin to be straight? Or to use birth control? Or to have sex before marriage? Or even to have a child out of wedlock?  Is our country so divided that the Republicans best hope is a narrow minded, media obsessed homophobe?“
- Lindsay Lohan

Lohans words are indicative of a society who’s chief concern is our individual selves, whose primary allegiance is to our pleasure, whose devotion is to desire.  It is unfortunate that one who so clearly lacks anything even close to a moral compass would choose use her celebrity status to make political statements on whether a potential presidential vice president would make a good television anchor.

But even Lindsay is defined by her times.  These are not, as much as she would like to think, her own original thoughts.  The mentality she spouts is the very same thinking that is responsible for the prime time  television advertisements for the purple pill and herpes treatments.

She questions:  “Should it be a sin to have sex before marriage?  Or even to have a child out of wedlock?”  Lohan betrays her ignorance of social values.  These are not Republican social values, but rather those that are subscribed to across the political spectrum.  How many times have we heard bipartisan calls for sexual promiscuity to be curbed?  Or debates on how best to reduce the number of pregnancies or abortions or STDs?  Who among us is calling for complete sexual anarchy?  Regardless of affiliation, society and history affirm that a war cry for rights should be tempered with a call for responsibility.

Whether or not abstinance should be the only sexual education taught in our schools is not the issue here.  All sides agree that abstinance is the best and most responsible decision to avoid pregnancy, STDs and emotional scarring.  That much is agreed upon.  And I suspect that even the most liberal social moralist today would prefer to see reduced the numbers of teen/unmarried pregnancies, the rate of STD infections to drop, the number of abortions lessened.

Unfortunately, Lindsay Lohan would rather fancy herself as a sexually liberated woman whose actions are her rights, whose responsibility as a role model to her fans (Shaquille O’Neal anyone?) is a farce and whose political commentary is on par with educated political analysts.

We’ve taken Shakespeare’s, “To thine own self be true” and ignored its context.  We would be a much better people and much better country were we to hear his intent, not of selfishness, nor of loudly promoting our supposed rights, but of responsibility:

“To thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man”