Hard Sun

I have decided to start a new series of posts called Songs that Touch My Heart. Building on White Blank Page, I will occasionally review and reflect on songs that I feel have a special way of reaching into the soul and resonating with something deep inside.

All the posts in this series will be put into one category which is clickable in the menu on the right.

Hard Sun by Eddie Vedder (an Indio cover), is from the Into the Wild soundtrack .

Foolishness

For the message of the Cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.

– 1 Corintians 1:18

Every time I try to think of how I might communicate my belief in Jesus, I feel like a fool. My head tells me that what I am saying, or thinking, sounds ridiculous. But my heart says, you know what happened – why can’t you say it?

This amused me very much

And it has Joseph Gordon-Levitt in it.

Bad Religion

I have been looking for a church to settle in recently. It has got me thinking about the way we think about church and spirituality and how we think about being Christian today.  For one thing, I find that I initially had to tread very carefully into the world of organised religion. There is a such thing as bad religion and I do not intend to get caught up in it. But the question is, how much of Christianity today is bad religion?

What did MLK think about gay people?

MLK day lives on, it would seem. I have seen quite a few gay blogs and opinion pieces on gay rights under the theme of the civil rights movement. But what would the man himself say?

Check out the CNN Faith Blog’s post by John Blake for an insightful and balanced look at what Martin Luther King, Jr. thought about gay people.

Scripts

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts

– William Shakespeare, As You Like It

The film Black Swan by Darren Aronofsky tells the story of ballet dancer Nina. Throughout the film, Nina is desperately trying to let go of her restrictive, perfectionist, ‘good girl’ self in order to properly portray the seductive black swan in her dance company’s production of Swan Lake. One haunting moment in the film shows Nina taunted by voices calling her “sweet girl! sweet girl!”.

In this moment, Nina was doing something I call rescripting herself.

The Ex-Gay Debate: Part III – Change and Choices

When I first began to recognise the attraction I felt towards men as a real part of my life, I was sure I could do away with it. Many forces in my life, social and religious, had assured me that homosexuality was undesirable and evil and I was sure that God or society would provide me with a way out. I have tried reconstructing the journey that took me from where I was then to where I am now, and have found it hard to put the pieces all in place. I went through so many extreme emotions, so many confusing ideas, that to retrace it is impossible. But I have kept tabs on a few of the major landmarks I passed and here they are, along with a whole bunch of web resources that I found along the way.

Q 1) Why am I this way?

The Ex-Gay Debate: Part II – The Unification Church and Homosexuality

The Unification Church is, on all accounts, at least a very interesting religion. It might be small, but in many ways its thinking is unique and it does provide ample opportunities for extended debate on many topics. Unificationist thought is a curious blend of Christianity (mainstream Protestant, Evangelical, and even occasionally Pentecostal) and Korean Confucianism with a broad rudimentary academic edge and Rev. Moon’s personal touch mixed in. While it has a pretty comprehensive response to many problems, homosexuality per sé is not one of them. This is because, on the whole, homosexuality is not considered to ‘exist’ – i.e. gay is not a kind of person in Unificationist thinking. To find out what they really think about homosexuality, you have to do some digging.

The Ex-Gay Debate: Pt I – Is Gay a Kind of Person?

I promised I would eventually post about why I don’t believe in ex-gay ministry or in reparative therapy. This is a really huge topic so I will split this into three parts. Part I investigates one of the fundamental assumptions at the heart of the discussion. In Part II I will tell my experience of how the Unification Church handles homosexuality. Part III will be about change and why I don’t believe in ex-gay ministry and reparative therapy.

The Omnipotence Paradox

When I was younger, I remember hearing a question that was something like a riddle, or perhaps a koan. It went like this: if God is omnipotent, can he create a rock that is too heavy for him to lift? The point being, of course, to illustrate a paradox: an omnipotent being cannot limit its own omnipotence.

Recently, however, I noticed that God has done exactly that. God has blown the omnipotence paradox to bits. If before I was unsure of God’s omnipotence, I am now fairly sure that God is at least more capable than I thought. Of his absolute omnipotence I remain unconvinced (as in the manner of many Unificationists).