Edit - fixed Youtube link.

Wow. This guy is really impressive. Check out this Washington Post article. Snippets:

…[Masoud] said imams who outlawed art and music were misinterpreting their faith. He talked about love and relationships, the need to be compassionate toward homosexuals and tolerant of non-Muslims.

…

Television preaching in the Middle East was once largely limited to elderly scholars in white robes reading holy texts from behind a desk, emphasizing the afterlife over this life, and sometimes inciting violence against nonbelievers. But as TV has evolved from one or two heavily controlled state channels to hundreds of diverse, private satellite offerings, Masoud and perhaps a dozen other young men — plus a few women — have emerged as increasingly popular alternatives. Masoud and others promote “a sweet orthodoxy, which stresses the humane and compassionate” as an alternative to “unthinking rage”

…

As fundamental teachings, Masoud advocates adherence to prayer five times a day, peace toward all and abstinence from alcohol, sex outside of marriage and violence. Beyond those principles, he said, Islam is suffering from a “crisis of interpretation.”
“I’m sure Osama bin Laden knows a lot of the Koran,” he said. “But when a Muslim celebrates when the Twin Towers collapse, you have a big problem.”

This Youtube is also fantastic (minus the cheesy Braveheart music). He appears to have a website, but a lot of the links, including the “English” one, are broken. Also found this - looks like he spoke at a conference in 2005 called “The Radical Middle Way” (Vineyard anyone?).

Conservatives have been calling for more moderate Muslims - hopefully they will give support and encouragement to these emerging voices.

The ever-wonderful Madeline L’Engle passed away on Thursday. She was 88.

I grew up reading, and loving, the Wrinkle in Time books. She was a beautiful soul.

“Why does anybody tell a story? [It has] something to do with faith - faith that the universe has meaning, that our little human lives are not irrelevant, that what we choose or say or do matters, matters cosmically.”

May her memory be eternal.

(NYT)

The Habeas Corpus Restoration Act of 2007, introduced by Senators Spector (R-PA) and Leahy (D-VT), looks like a really important piece of legislation that may go up for a vote by this Thursday.

S. 185 (now renamed S. Amdt. 2022 as an amendment to the Department of Defense authorizations bill) is short and sweet:

RESTORATION OF HABEAS CORPUS FOR THOSE DETAINED BY THE UNITED STATES.

(a) In General.–Section 2241 of title 28, United States Code, is amended by striking subsection (e).
(b) Title 10.–Section 950j of title 10, United States Code, is amended by striking subsection (b) and inserting the following:

“(b) Limited Review of Military Commission Procedures and Actions.–Except as otherwise provided in this chapter or in section 2241 of title 28 or any other habeas corpus provision, and notwithstanding any other provision of law, no court, justice, or judge shall have jurisdiction to hear or consider any claim or cause of action whatsoever, including any action pending on or filed after the date of the enactment of the Military Commissions Act of 2006, relating to the prosecution, trial, or judgment of a military commission under this chapter, including challenges to the lawfulness of procedures of military commissions under this chapter.”.

(c) Effective Date and Applicability.–The amendments made by this section shall–

(1) take effect on the date of the enactment of this Act; and
(2) apply to any case that is pending on or after the date of enactment of this Act.

The good part is section (a): “(a) In General.–Section 2241 of title 28, United States Code, is amended by striking subsection (e)“. Subsection (e) is a lovely bit to get rid of:

“No court, justice, or judge shall have jurisdiction to hear or consider an application for a writ of habeas corpus filed by or on behalf of an alien detained by the United States who has been determined by the United States to have been properly detained as an enemy combatant or is awaiting such determination.”
-from the Military Commissions Act

Here is the list of the cosponsors:
•Joe Biden (D-DE)
•Jeff Bingaman (D-NM)
•Barbara Boxer (D-CA)
•Sherrod Brown (D-OH)
•Robert Byrd (D-WV)
•Maria Cantwell (D-WA)
•Ben Cardin (D-MD)
•Thomas Carper (D-DE)
•Hillary Clinton (D-NY)
•Chris Dodd (D-CT)
•Dick Durbin (D-IL)
•Russ Feingold (D-WI)
•Dianne Feinstein (D-CA)
•Tom Harkin (D-IA)
•Ted Kennedy (D-MA)
•John Kerry (D-MA)
•Amy Klobuchar (D-MN)
•Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ)
•Patrick Leahy (D-VT)
•Carl Levin (D-MI)
•Claire McCaskill (D-MO)
•Robert Menendez (D-NJ)
•Bill Nelson (D-FL)
•Barack Obama (D-IL)
•Jay Rockefeller (D-WV)
•Ken Salazar (D-CO)
•Bernie Sanders (I-VT)
•Debbie Stabenow (D-MI)
•Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI)

If your Senator’s name is missing from the list, such as our very own Patty Murray, why not give them a call and ask them to co-sponsor it? I just got off the phone with a staffer at Senator Murray’s office, had a very nice little chat, and he said he’d pass on my request to the Senator. This could be important, even if they are already planning (as is Senator Murray, I was told) to vote for the Act.

Call the US Capitol toll-free at 800.862.5530, or use the Senate’s directory (.pdf - the numbers all start with 202.22). The direct line to Senator Murray’s office is 202.224.2621.

(via via)

Just saw this on BBC news - looks like they’re a day late for Blog Like It’s the End of the World day.

Check Technorati for more post-apocalyptic goodness.
(Update: If you’re seeing this in a reader multiple times, I’m sorry. Curse me for not previewing!)

BBC has picked up on the story (see my first post for the breakdown).

I’m getting the impression that Flickr/Yahoo thinks that this problem will go away with time as the blog heat dies down over this. Methinks that it’s certainly not. Google “flickr” and “censor”. 1.5 million results don’t just disappear.

They have apologized and claim that policy changes are being considered, but have yet to announce exactly what they are going to do to change their policy of “delete first, ask questions later”. It’s especially disturbing that in the current setup, when a photo page is deleted by Flickr staff, it is gone permanently, with no advance warning, explanation or opportunity for recovery or contest.

Via Thomas Hawk.

Where to start on this one? It’s been a dramatic couple of days…

•On Monday, Rebekka Guðleifsdóttir, one of Flickr’s most popular photographers, discovered that only-dreemin.com was selling her work on ebay and in their online store. They had profited thousands of dollars from this blatant copyright infringement.
•Rebekka posted about it on Flickr, under a composite image of the images that had been stolen (still available at her blog), starting a major @#$%-storm on Digg, Reddit, thomashawk and elsewhere.
•The page on Flickr had thousands of page views (over 101,000 views at the time of its deletion), and hundreds of comments (~450) offering support and advice to Rebekka.
•Yesterday, Flickr permanently deleted the image - along with all the comments, page views, favorites, etc. According to Flickr staff member Heather, “We maintain a rolling snapshot of the site to recover from outages etc. When a photo, comment, FlickrMail, tag, note, etc., is deleted, it’s removed from that snapshot.” An email was sent to Rebekka, accusing her of harassment and threatening account termination: “Flickr is not a venue for to you harass, abuse, impersonate, or intimidate others. If we receive a valid complaint about your conduct, we will send you a warning or terminate your account.”
•As should be expected, there’s a bit of an uproar about Flickr/Yahoo’s action here. See Rebekka, Thomas Hawk, and Digg. It’s currently the top story on Reddit.
•Flikr has apologized, admitting a “mistake”, but denying censorship: “Actions taken by the team to ensure that any content or activity on the site resides within these boundaries is not and cannot be viewed as censorship. That said, the removal of rebekka’s photo was a mistake.”
•There’s a discussion going on in Flickr’s forum about all this. Thomas makes a substantive point here saying (emphasis his),

The problem is with Yahoo’s process which is thoughtless and irresponsible at best. When a “mistake” happens over and over again you have to expect that a little “oopsie, we made another mistake,” might not be enough…Yahoo’s *process* needs to be changed. It should be changed. It could be changed in a very simple way to prevent most incidents like this from happening in the future.
1. Do not delete any image permanently.
2. Provide Flickr users a 48 hour rebuttal time to dispute those that would wish to censor their work.
3. Have an actual competent human being review the decision.

Thomas has been burned in the past by Flickr’s overeager deletion policy. He points out that the Flickr help forum has 90 threads on “censorship” - so there’s obviously a systemic problem with the Flickr/Yahoo process. The fact that it has been used (in at least two documented cases now) in favor of abusers over against the abused makes this a justice issue in my book.

getting out my hammer…

UPDATE: Stewart Butterfield, “one of the co-founders of Flickr, and … the general manager with overall responsibility for all things Flickr”, has posted a very thorough explanation and heartfelt apology for the entire situation, and claims that “There are several policies which will be changing as a direct result of this incident and the goal is that nothing like this ever happens again. Any errors from now on should be on the side of caution.” I very much look forward to hearing more about the policy changes.

“You’re kind of dead wrong, but you’re the nicest wrong guy I’ve met in a long time” - Al Sharpton

“I hated everything he stood for, but after meeting him in person, years after the trial, Jerry Falwell and I became good friends. He would visit me in California and we would debate together on college campuses. I always appreciated his sincerity even though I knew what he was selling and he knew what I was selling.” - Larry Flynt

Any others, or your own thoughts?

When I was young, probably my single favorite movie was 1981’s The Great Muppet Caper. It still holds a very special place in my heart. My favorite scene is the part when the Muppets are planning their scheme to break into the Mallory Gallery and stop the theives from stealing the Baseball Diamond. At one point, all the Muppets are talking at once, advancing their own theories, discussing, bantering, clamoring for attention - the noise gets to a level where Kermit the Frog yells “QUIET!”

Everyone stops talking except Janice (the lead guitar player of Dr. Teeth and The Electric Mayhem), who is caught mid-sentence. “…So I said, ‘Look, mother! It’s my life, oo-kaay? So if I want to live on the beach and walk around naked…’ [She realizes everyone else is staring at her] Oh.”

I finished reading Listening to the Beliefs of Emerging Churches: Five Perspectives Monday night. It was a really enjoyable read, overall. I’ve always liked the “point/counterpoint”-style books, where I get to peek into the minds of various people, and see how people with different worldviews approach a problem. I like the atmosphere of mutual respect, admiration, and “agree-to-disagree” that authors generally provide for one another.

Such was definitely the case with this book. The authors, ranging from “conservative” to “liberal”, mainline to evangelical, and a host of other cultural and spiritual differences (although more than one stated his/her dislike for such labels), found common ground in discussing missional, incarnational theology in a postmodern world, and freely expressed their concerns without chasing rabbit-trails, resorting to ad hominem attacks, mischaracterizations, or bad faith arguments.

This goes for all the authors, that is, except Mark Driscoll. John Burke, Dan Kimball, Doug Pagitt, and Karen Ward seem to be having a really productive exchange - challenging each other, presenting new perspectives, discussing ways of “being” in the world, the role of Christianity and Christians, how to relate to unbelievers and people of different faiths, etc. - and then Mark would come in, guns blazing, blasting someone for not espousing his version of orthodoxy. Mark has always been a big fan of “man’s man” metaphors - I imagine he pictures himself as William Wallace in Braveheart: “I’m going to pick a fight.”

At first, this made me really mad (see, for example, my earlier post) - I wanted to yell at Mark for being unfair, for using logical fallacies, for nitpicking abstract theological “issues” (penal substitutionary atonement, eternal literal hell, plenary biblical infallibility) and ignoring the real substance of the other authors’ statements about collaborative theology, the importance of community, incarnational ministry, and the realities of living in a post-Christian, pluralistic society. After continuing to read it, though, I stopped being mad/offended. I realized the dynamic of what was going on in this discussion: Mark Driscoll was simply not having the same conversation that everyone else was. He wasn’t absorbing what the others were saying in order to respond thoughtfully; he was in full battle mode, looking for errors to expose. It stopped being a tragedy, and turned into a farce. Any admission by him of missional living, or of the centrality of praxis in the life of a church/Christian, was absolutely tangential to “theology” in the abstract. He made it abundantly clear that that was his topic, and he wasn’t going to be sidetracked by what anyone else was saying.

As the book went on, I took him less and less seriously. He was so far afield from the conversation everyone else was having, he may as well have been saying “…So I said, ‘Look, mother! It’s my life, oo-kaay? So if I want to live on the beach and walk around naked…’ ”

Mark Driscoll as Janice the Muppet.

I thought I was pretty clever coming up with “muppet theology”, so I googled it. Yes! Only two prior hits!

“Gonzo, Divine King of the Muppets, Most Benevolent, Guardian of the Blue, Patron of Frilly Head-Antennae” - oh my…
(BTW, it doesn’t work in Firefox - IE Tab that sucker).