Have your cake and eat it too.

From the Tesla site:

• 100% Electric
• 0 to 60 in approx 4 seconds
• 135 mpg equivelent
• 250 miles per charge
• About 1 cent per mile

Now the questions remain: How much does it cost? Is it reliable? What are the average maintenance costs? Is it just as sexy in person?

Photo: RJ Muna via Wired.

[Update: Sticker price is $100k, via the Washington Post]

David says:

Justin,
I thought (for just a moment) of using the Postmodern Generator” to write my term paper, but alas, they’re not long enough. Since, in postmodern thought, parody is equivalent to original thought, that it would make the perfect statement.

Justin, if I could, how do you see postmodernism incorporated into Christianity? Or do you see Christianity trying to “appear” postmodern? What postmodern concepts do you feel that the church should embrace?

My response (which I hope you will comment on and expand):

I’m pretty busy with Danforth right now, but I can offer a few thoughts. Postmodernism as you are describing it was explored by a few writers and philosphers decades ago, but does not currently resemble that at all.

Postmodernism is not a set of ideas or concepts; it is a set of assumptions about the world, just as modernism is. Its main assumptions, in the less-extreme form that people actually believe:

• Modernism was loaded with arrogance, especially the idea that we could know everything and obtain total mastery of the world and human existence if we studied it objectively enough.
• Total objectivity is impossible for mortals like us; we see from a particular vantage point, and don’t know what we don’t know or how our thinking and perception are distorted.
• Our perceptions and thinking are shaped heavily by our experiences, including the shared experience of culture. Therefore, people from different cultures will necessarily have different ways of looking at the world, and no two people will see everything exactly the same way, even if they use the same words to describe their understanding.
• Humor and parody often illustrate great truths more succinctly and eloquently than propositional statements, though of course people might not agree on what the joke means.
• The modern worldview is based on Newtonian physics, which has been substantially revised by quantum physics. In particular, much of what we thought about things being separate and discreet has been proven wrong - the universe is much more tightly interconnected than we once thought.
• Truth is more a matter of coherence and interconnected meaning; people do not proceed rationally from logical foundations to their logical conclusions.
• The more concepts in one area reinforce and cohere with concepts in another area of our knowledge, the more clearly true the concepts probably are, though of course this is subject to revision as our network of knowledge grows.
• Power has been abused throughout history, and one form of power is truth-construction, knowledge-construction, explaining reality, or whatever you’d prefer to call it. Those who define the rules are often unaware that they are defining situations in ways that put others at a disadvantage.

Some implications for the church:

• Postmodern people do not view truth as a building with a foundation, and you cannot convince someone of a concept simply by starting with a foundation they agree with and proceeding rationally. Yes, the NT uses the metaphor of the church as a building with Jesus as the cornerstone, but it’s a metaphor, and it’s not referring to truth, but the church itself. People need to see that what they are hearing is coherent with what they know about the world and life; selling them an isolated set of truths will not work.
• The church has too much power, and is therefore suspect, in the eyes of most people.
• Christians cannot preach good news if they are not also good people; inauthenticity is not merely bothersome, but completely invalidates the message.
• The bible is meant to be interpreted in community, not individually.

That’s about all I can come up with now; I need to get to my 70 pages of reading before tomorrow :). Perhaps commenters on the blog can be of additional help.

Get your jargon-laced, name-dropping mumbo-jumbo here, then hit refresh for a new helping of randomly compiled pomospeak.

Of course, these terms are all taken out of context and jumbled together; they do have a great deal of coherence in their original uses. But it’s awfully funny :).

Is the church, as an organization, worth paying attention to?

Is it worth studying, examining, building, paying for, structuring, designing, staffing, running?

What if we just stopped worrying about church altogether? What would happen?

Pull, uploaded by justinbaeder.

This is my favorite photo that I’ve taken so far. It is an ant, dragging a dead ladybug. More beautiful than it sounds :).

We are spending the week in Pack Forest, an experimental forest and retreat center owned by the University of Washington. Amy’s doing a workshop on ethics in the science classroom, and I’m tagging along.

Next week, I’ll be back here for Danforth, so I’m getting to know the lay of the land. I took a bunch of pictures yesterday, and will probably wear out my Pro Flickr account by the end of the month.

We have formed a group (currently composed of five people we’re up to nine! fifteen sixteen!) who will be reading through N.T. Wright’s The New Testament and the People of God, the first book in his massive five-part series Christian Origins and the Question of God.

If you would like to participate, please order the book (you can get it here) and leave a comment to indicate your participation. We will be blogging and so forth at Urban Monastery.

I will post a reading schedule, and we can figure out ways to share the reading together via blogs, Skype, and face-to-face gatherings. Edit: Might this be an ideal use for Skypecasts?

If you would like to participate but can’t afford the book (US$23 on Amazon), let me know. I can buy two people copies if they have the need and agree to participate fully.

If you’d like to learn more about N.T. Wright, you can read many of his articles and hear some sermons at the fansite (yes, a theologian with a fansite) ntwrightpage.com.

I’m going back through James K. A. Smith’s excellent Introducing Radical Orthodoxy and blogging about the passages I bookmarked.

One of the major themes in Radical Orthodoxy is the assertion that there is no such thing as neutral secularity:

From an epistemological perspective, the church conceded analysis of the social sphere to rationality. This was linked to a second concession: Ecclesiologies conceded the temporal plane to the secular….this model resulted in a certain evacuation of the church from the political as such, engendering “the creation of the temporal as an autonomous space from which the church was removed.” …modern ecclesiologies “embraced a conception of politics as statecraft” such that “the sate was left as the uncontested overseer of the political realm.”

Finally, because the church failed to recognize the mythical status of the secular story and conceded the temporal realm to the state, it also failed to discern the antithesis between this story and the Christian story….following Augustine, “there can be no justice and no common weal where God is not truly worshipped.” As a result, Christians need to reconsider their capitulation to the state soteriology [the state's claim to have saving power] and the liberal project it has spawned. This will require a revisiting the church’s capitulation to key themes of secular modernity that grew out of a mythos that was deeply antithetical to the Christian narrative. p. 135-136

In other words, the state has essentially taken on the role of the church, offering a rival gospel and salvation. This is particularly interesting given that Radical Orthodoxy is a decidedly British phenomenon.