United Airlines to charge fee to check single bag (Yahoo! News)

“With record-breaking fuel prices, we must pursue new revenue opportunities, while continuing to offer competitive fares, by tailoring our products and services around what our customers value most and are willing to pay for,” John Tague, UAL’s chief operating officer, said in a statement.

November Election is Obama’s to Lose (Barna Group)

Unless Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama commits political suicide between now and election day, the Senator from Illinois is in a very comfortable position to win the November race against Republican challenger John McCain.

Yes, Dear. Tonight Again. (NY Times)

There’s a strong relationship between rating your marriage as happy and frequency of intercourse, said Tom W. Smith, who conducted the American Sexual Behavior study.

U.S. Foreign Policy Versus the Great Commission (Tony Campolo: God’s Politics)

The ramifications of our nation big-stick foreign policies in the Middle East have been severe for missionary work. For the first time in a thousand years, churches in Baghdad are being burned down. The Coptic bishop of Iraq was kidnapped and later found dead. Christians, facing persecution, have fled Iraq by the tens of thousands, so that a Christian community that once numbered more than 1.3 million is now down to 600,000.

The 125 Healthiest Supermarket Foods in America (Men’s Health)

Ladies and gentlemen, rev your appetites and steer your shopping carts toward the delicious staples of a healthy diet. We scoured the grocery aisles and chose the most reliable basics and the best secret ingredients that will improve your diet and take your cooking up a notch—all in one trip to the supermarket!

Multi-Ethnic Church Staff (Out of Ur)

How multi-ethnic should your church staff be? Should churches have hiring quotas to ensure diversity? In this podcast Skye Jethani , David Swanson , and Matt Tebbe discuss DeYmaz’s article and what happened to all of the racial reconciliation rhetoric from the 90’s.

The Bible is Neither Conservative or Liberal (Jim Wallis: God’s Politics)

Beliefnet invited Jim Wallis for a “blogalogue” with David Klinghoffer, author of How Would God Vote? Why the Bible Commands You to Be a Conservative. Here’s Jim’s response to David’s first post, “Let’s Clarify the Politics of the Bible.”

Sleep Easy, We’ve Figured This Out (In Theory) (Next Gener.Asian Church)

We were not called to reproduce the Tower of Babel as though that were the solution to the kingdom gathering the masses of people under one language, one banner, and one edifice. We were called to be the “living stones,” the very material – with all the particular properties that go into building materials of varying texture, composition, density and color (i.e. race, ethnicity, and culture).

7 Deadly Glasses (Hamilton Design)

These red wine glasses are based on the 7 deadly sins. Each glass encapsulates a sin, which is revealed through the ritual of drinking. The ‘7 Deadly Glasses’ are about celebrating passion and encouraging the user to be sinful in a theatrical fashion.

Why the Neo-Radical-Young and Restless-Reformed is Not the Way Forward (Reclaiming the Mission)

[C]ould it be that Classic Protestantism, along with its cousin Enlightenment modernity, is the real culprit that led us to the kind of sick Christianity so manifest in America and the West in general?

One mode is the mode of Christian thought. It is highly aspirational, and within this lifestyle, I seek to love, to encourage, to fight, to preach, to advocate, to worship, and to pray. I see the paradigm of Christian holiness and continue to add to it through further theological exploration.

But another mode is unwittingly and utterly secular, so secular in fact that it would qualify to what Craig Gay (and perhaps others before him) has called “practical atheism”. It is a lifestyle devoid of God, an immersion into a personal culture in which we behave as if there IS no God. Literally, hours go by without an active acknowledgment from me that God is God and I am a finite creation of His whim: loved, sustained, counseled, and disciplined by His hand.

What is the solution? Short of total monastic devotion, I don’t really know what a life wholly dedicated to Christ really looks like. The appealing but sloppy solutions are as follows:

1. Admit that loving God with all of our heart, souls, minds and strengths is actually impossible, that it’s just an aspirational goal that cannot be realized on earth. In a sense, Jesus was just talking overboard; He didn’t really mean it. And even if He did, it was largely within a cultural context of rabbinic hyperbole, a phrase not to be overly literalist with. God is happy when we do our best to love Him.

I reject this for a simple reason: if God is God, an empowering game-changing life-altering force of supernatural weight through whom all things are possible, then giving His people a command that asks for everything is not hyperbolic. It is simply the high calling of humankind from its one true deity.

2. The other reconciling theory is that loving God can happen without the conscious acknowledgment of God. This is the abstraction of God’s personhood into His qualities. Whenever I love anyone, I’m participating in blessing God, because God is love. Whenever I feel restful and at peace, I am somehow magnifying concepts that remind people of God, so I’m really loving Him.

Yes, loving Him may bear fruit in subconscious effects, such that the desires of His heart become our own. Good. But to actively LOVE God, like loving any person… it is an act of will. It is not something that can be rationalized after the fact. A man would never tell his wife, “Gosh do I love feasting my eyes on Eva Longoria, or what. She’s so crazy hot. Um, because she’s a brunette. Just like you. I’m really loving you, here. Dang, I must really love you, honey.” (If that works for you, wow. I don’t know if you’re lucky or cursed.)

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The solution? I don’t really know. But all I know is that I must find a way to infiltrate my days and nights with the identity of God. I don’t think this means piety or religiousness as we’ve known it, but I do think that it means an active, courageous foray into moments of sanctity, of reverence. I think it means discipline to pause and consider, at any given instant, if the hour that has just passed is one that was spent with the person of God, wearing the mantle of His royal, chosen priest.

My new roommate, jadanzzy, and I will be moving into our place over the next month. As I consider where the furniture will go, I consider the space that I’m designing for my daily activities. Where will I cook, sleep, watch tv? How should I arrange my furniture accordingly?

But as I make plans and arrangements for the mundane, do I make plans for holiness to inhabit my space? Have I considered where and how God will reside in the mornings and afternoons of my everyday life? Is it so absurd for the old Jesuit order to require a crucifix in every room, or for the early Eastern Christian traditions to build shrines of icons?

I welcome any thoughts or concepts about how to sanctify the time and space that constitute my life.

While making a left turn, I felt the vibration. I reached into my sweatshirt pocket fishing around for my phone, but it wasn’t there. What the … ? That’s when I realized, it wasn’t my phone vibrating, but my stomach. Grumbling.

Am I that out of touch with my body that I can’t even recognize whether or not my stomach is grumbling? This mini-event launched me into a long and still-lasting inner dialogue with myself about my body and my connection to it. What is my body? Is it simply a vessel carrying the more important part of me, my soul? or is the body also something that is “essentially” me, and I use the word essentially in the philosophical sense, in the Aristotelian sense. Is my body the essence of my being? Or do I subscribe to the ideas of dualism–that mental processes are not of my body, but solely of my mind and therefore, my body is unimportant and my soul is the real.

Slowly, I am coming to the conclusion that the body is a truly important part of my spiritual self. I’m a little miffed, to be honest, by mainstream evangelicalism’s neglect of the body and physical elements as essential to spirituality. I really wish I had grown up in a church that practiced the seven sacraments and spoke of the elements as real conduits of spiritual realities in a physical world. How much more significant might communion be, for example, if I was told that these physical elements–the wine and the bread–held within them real, spiritual significance rather than just symbolic meaning? Instead, I’m given welch’s grape juice and a piece of hawaiian bread and told to pray and think upon the meaning of what Christ did for me thousands of years ago.

I’m not saying that I subscribe to transubstantiation, but I am here to ask us to question the body soul dualism that has permeated modern Christian thought. What are the ramnifications of church teaching that says this world is simply a waiting room, a holding place for those just passing through and moving on to paradise ahead? How devastating could such a soul embalming, mind calming teaching be?

Pretty darn devastating, in my opinion. It has bred a generation of Christians who have no sense of reality, no feeling of urgency to confront the physical maladies of this world. Global poverty, AIDS, economic disparity in the classes, suburban sprawl, warfare, persecution, abuse of the earth’s resources–all of these world-wide disasters are simply physical and therefore insignificant to a group of people just passing through on a heavenbound train.

But this ideology is not reminiscent of the Jesus I know. My Jesus fed the hungry, not symbolically, but he literally gave them a pick of fish, which they put into their mouth, chewed with their teeth, and swallowed in order for the food to fill their empty stomachs. My Jesus healed the sick, by touching their leprous skin, so that the weeping sores closed with new skin, as cuts miraculously do.

The healing was immediate, it was physical, it was visible, it was tangible, it was real. And if we claim to be followers of Christ in this world, then our work and our worship must also be just as immediate, physical, visible, tangible and real. So, while speaking about spiritual life can be a largely figurative endeavor, I’m here to advocate for a newfound acknowledgment and appreciation for the truth: that in Him we LIVE and MOVE and have our BEING.

And I have thoroughly enjoyed engaging with my brothers on this site. Their thoughts and opinions are robust and challenging. Their exposure to various ideologies and cultural artifacts is invaluable to me. You boys are truly top notch.

All of my distant admiration of the brothers was somewhat ruffled, however, when one day, while in a chatroom discussing the future of merging lanes some of our brothers asked that we excuse them of their lack of involvement because they had just started dating.

ummm … seriously?

This seemed so strange to me. And yet, upon further reflection, I realized that a lot of my guy friends became unrecognizeable once they started dating. Their phone calls stopped. Their productivity dipped. Back in college, their grades slipped. We didn’t see them around ministry activities so much anymore. In other words, they went completely AWOL.

Brothers, what’s the deal?? I mean, I’m as romantic as they come, but are you seriously going to tell me that the woman in your life makes you completely … ahem … impotent in the other areas of your life? Bros before ho’s my friends! I mean, isn’t that your manly mantra?

On the other hand, I find that my female friends start dating and become superwomen. They work out more, they look better, take on more responsibility, clean themselves up AND their boyfriends. They pick up gardening. Start baking. Learn how to cook three course meals while simultaneously reading up on current events. They rock at their jobs and get promotions. They serve at church, visit their parents often and go on bi-annual missions trips with World Vision.

My theory is that eventually, the women surpass their men, their men feel threatened, and eventually leave them for someone a little duller, less interesting, less threatening.

Then, out of bitterness, the women become more and more productive (Note: After my own breakup, I took up sewing and German!). In the end, men die off and women rule the world!

Ok, I’m just kidding. But really, is there something you boys are trying to tell us? Is dating that stressful? Anything we can help you with to ease the pain?