Don’t miss the Baked Oatmeal train

I made it again this morning–I can’t help myself–I just make it over and over.  Baked oatmeal is here to stay.

So, let’s here it.  Have you tried it?  What did you think?

Response to my Jesus Doll letter

No responses to my Jesus doll letter were printed in the paper, though I did get a personal one sent through the U.S. Mail to my church. Surprisingly (at least to me), the letter doesn’t address the Jesus doll issue but rather takes the opportunity to criticize faith and religion in general. For your pleasure and comment, I here reproduce the letter as is:

Rev Brett Hendrickson

Brett,

I read your letter about the Jesus doll.

I was raised Christian, but by age 10 was bright enough to realize that biblical writings were utter nonsense, Fantasy, mysticism and fictional. But in many decades have studied all the major religions.

If I read select verse from the bible at your church, the congregation would collectively mess their pants. Much Of the bible is too nasty to be read before children. If Jesus existed, he was a Jew, no different than other men, except he may have been a religious reformer and a thorn protesting exisiting religious corruption. Jesus was never a Lord nor a King. Thousands of years ago religions competed with kings for control of the people. Religious extremists wanted their own heroes to have equal status with Kings and lords. Thusly, they were called the same.

Hitler didn’t kill 6 millions Jews. It was centuries of racism and hatred by Christian churches that allowed this to happen. It was the Christian church, which killed those Jews, and they had been discriminating against Jews for centuries. The Romans didn’t kill Jesus. Romans paid no attention to local religions. Jewish priests may have ordered the riddance of Jesus, assuming he was in conflict with the church corruption at that time. Then, as now, Religions, slaughter their dissenters. Your church drives dissenters out. There is no freedom of religion within the church. Islam still murders their dissidents and murders non-believers who criticize Islam.

Radical Christian clergy are anti-abortion, anti-birth control. The bible says nothing about abortion, and it was The only widely known means of birth control at that time. Your concordance lists countless legitmate reasons for killing. Review Leviticus. You can slaughter your daughter if she has sex outside of marriage. God was the first to kill off the unborn. I suggest you remind your members of Noah and God. God drowned hundreds of thousands. He drowned all the unborn. The babies, the mothers, all the adults. His killing lust not yet satisfied, he drowned all the unborn animals, the babies, the adults. Maybe we should bring God down here and try him before a jury along with Saddam.

One minister theologian told me that there has been over 3,000 religions and 10,000 gods. I reminded him that no religion has ever produced a god. This is the 21st century, time for all religions to produce their gods before the UN or forever be prohibited from claiming that there are such things. If I sell stock in a gold mine but can’t produce my mine, I would be jailed for fraud. Clerics should also be jailed for the same failure to produce. This is Consumer fraud, extracting millions from the gullible

You have been brainwashed into your own beliefs, reading only the scriptural side. There are several great Skeptic magazines which will provide you with sound arguments against such religious fraud. There are well researched books criticizing both religions and psychics,. I suggest you read some of this. Science and Religion, by Paul Kurtz is great reading. Prometheus Books are great sources of info. You should read Free Inquiry and Skeptical Inquirer. Factual magazines. As a Christian cleric, you should be running scared. I doubt that you have read Islam. It repeatedly states that Muslims are to slaughter all non-believers until there are no more, wherever you can find them, especially Jews and Christians.

[signature]

I have decided not to respond because I don’t think that the letter writer and I are having the same conversation. I find his depiction of Islam especially ignorant and troubling, but other than that, I don’t really disagree with him that the Bible is full of scary and confusing stuff, that I’ve never produced scientific proof of God, that the Bible doesn’t talk about abortion or birth control, and that Christians are historically responsible for many atrocities such as the Holocaust. It’s funny that we can sort of agree on these basic points while being so fundamentally and diametrically not on the same page.

Baptizing a baby

In a few minutes I will leave for church with my son, Tom. Alex and Lily are already at Alex’s church, and Alex plans to preach fast and then come to Guadalupe as soon as she can. Today, I will baptize a baby, the son of a friend of ours. The little boy, like our children, was adopted from Guatemala. The parent, unlike us, is herself an immigrant from El Salvador. As a pastor, I always get a bad case of nerves before a baptism. I don’t perform the rite very often, and I don’t want to screw it up (as if I could!).

Baptism is another part of our faith that we have tried to “cutify.” I’ve seen some pastors make a baptism one little part of the children’s sermon, or they call all the children to come and surround the baby as it is baptized. For better of worse, in Guadalupe we don’t have a “children’s sermon” because there aren’t enough kids. I’m not happy about the low numbers of kids, but I’m thrilled I don’t have to tell some silly, moralistic, “Bible story” for the vicarious pleasure of the old people. It says a lot about someone’s faith maturity when he says, “I sometimes get more out of the children’s sermon than the regular one.” This also means the pastor is self-consciously speaking to the adults at the chidren’s expense.

The Bible is not a children’s book, despite many efforts to make it so. The story of Noah is the story of the massive extermination of all life on earth. There are slaves and wars and genocide. The story of Jesus includes his own execution. Sex and money and intrigue and meanness are pretty much par for the course.

Likewise, baptism, while definitely good for babies, is not a cute little act. It is their death. They die in the water and rise to new life by the power of Christ. They, and their parents, promise to battle evil in all its guises, and they promise to be faithful, a promise we as a group have not kept. They promise that on their death beds they will remember and be grateful that these promises will finally be complete. It is a permanent mark–indelible, scarring.

Baptism is also a joyous event, worthy of special celebration. I’m nervous, but I promise not to be too dour or puritanical. It is a little baby, and he is very cute.

Change and Constancy

One of my favorite movies is Smoke. It’s a simple and moving story about a tobacco shop and the people around it in Brooklyn. One of the best scenes in the movie involves the shop owner showing a stack of photo albums to one of his regular customers. There are thousands of photos all taken at exactly the same time in the same place, early in the morning in front of the tobacco shop. As the photos flash before the movie camera, you see a place change and stay the same.

Now, there’s a new short movie on YouTube that makes the same kind of impact:

The images of Noah Kalina go by so quickly by, it’s mostly his hair that seems to change. But you can also see how he ages slightly, and how his environment changes over time. You can see an incredible and even inspiring sameness over the course of six years, and you can see hints of bad days and good days.

One reason to give thanks

My wife, Alex, has a blog called BesoMami. Her post today shows some pictures of our daugther, Lily. We are thankful for our family.

Hit by a Rock

As I’ve mentioned, my church in Guadalupe is in a very economically depressed neighborhood. Drugs and gangs are serious problems there, along with signicant rates of underemployment. Despite these factors, I have always felt safe and welcome there.

Today, my wife and I along with two women from a local company, one of whom is a member of my wife’s church, went to a parishioner’s home in Guadalupe to deliver a Thanksgiving gift box. Every year, about a dozen people from this company give a Thanksgiving gift including plates and utensils and pretty things for the kitchen and a gift card to the grocery store to a needy family. This year, I helped match them with a family in my church who could use the help, so we went out together to drop off the items.

After we delivered everything, we walked back out to the street and stood around our two cars talking for a few minutes–one white man (me) and three white women standing on a street talking in a primarily Hispanic and Native American neighborhood. I’ve worked in Guadalupe for two and a half years now and, as I said, have felt safe the entire time, though, admittedly, I spend very little time away from the church. So, on this day, in broad daylight, I felt absolutely no sense of fear or that we didn’t belong there. But, when Alex and I got in the car to pull away from the curb, someone threw a rock hard into the passenger-side window. It sounded like a gunshot inside the car, and the window shattered. The shaded window film kept the glass from actually falling apart, but the window is ruined.

Our insurance has a 0-deductible policy for glass, so we’re not actually out any money, but I am upset. I’m angry and disappointed that such a stereotypical thing happened to us in Guadalupe, the sort of thing that perpetuates white people’s fear of brown people, rich people’s fear of poor. I refuse to be afraid, and I refuse to let one incident in two and a half years overly color my whole experience, but it’s hard not to read something into such an action. I’m assuming that one of two things explains the window: 1) some stupid teenage boy did it because his brain is addled by testosterone; or 2) we had inadvertently parked on some sort of drug turf, and this was our message not to park there any more. I’m guesing this second explanation is probably the correct one.

I’m not the white savior of the neighborhood or anything, and I don’t feel like they owe it to me to keep me safe and not let this sort of crap happen. But I’m mad anyway. Mad for the basic fact of a broken window, and mad for the whole stupid situation of crime and drugs and acts of bravura.

Letter to the Editor of the AZ Republic

For the backstory on this letter to the editor, published in today’s Arizona Republic, click here.

Dear Editor:

The Marine Reserves’ “Toys for Tots” program directors were surely wise to be cautious about giving away talking Jesus dolls to children for fear of offending Muslim or Jewish families. Those who should be most offended by the dolls, however, are Christians. Jesus Christ is not a toy. For two thousand years, Christians have professed that Jesus is Lord, that Jesus is of one substance with God the Father, and that Jesus will come “to judge the quick and the dead.” How, then, can Christians actually support this inane and offensive doll that does little more than mock the glory of the accepted central figure of our faith?

I regret, for Christians’ sakes, that the Marine Reserves has reversed its decision about these dolls and now plans to give them as gifts.

Yours,

Rev. Brett Hendrickson, pastor
Guadalupe Presbyterian Church

Slyder Stuffing

Over on megnut.com there’s a report of a truly novel Thanksgiving dish: stuffing made out of White Castle slyders. Slyders are the kind of food I talk about but don’t actually eat. This Thanksgiving, all that may have to change. As a public service, I reprint the recipe here in full:

White Castle Turkey Stuffing
INGREDIENTS
10 White Castle hamburgers, no pickles
1 1/2 cups celery, diced
1 1/4 tsp. ground thyme
1 1/2 tsp. ground sage
3/4 tsp. coarsely ground black pepper
1/4 cup chicken broth

INSTRUCTIONS
In a large mixing bowl, tear the burgers into pieces and add diced celery and seasonings. Toss and add chicken broth. Toss well. Stuff cavity of turkey just before roasting. Makes about 9 cups (enough for a 10- to 12-pound turkey). Note: Allow 1 hamburger for each pound of turkey, which will be the equivalent of 3/4 cup of stuffing per pound.
Submitted by White Castle Management Co.

Last Christmas, my father-in-law mail-ordered what I thought was the holy grail of stuffing: the turducken (a chicken stuffed in a duck stuffed in a turkey). But, I have to say, at best we were whelmed by the turducken. So, instead of stuffing other birds into your turkey, this year why not try bovine parts and puffy buns?

Advent at Guadalupe

Advent is almost here (the 1st Sunday is December 3). This means a few things at Guadalupe:

• The Christmas tree will be put up in the chancel. It has blinking colored lights, which I do not care for. In addition to this, someone (I know who) will put a big stuffed Santa Claus on the table against the wall in the back of the chancel right below the banner that has the cross on it. I maintain hope that the gospel message of Christmas is great enough that I don’t need to register my dislike of the stuffed Santa Claus. Besides, I don’t face the chancel–I face the door in the narthex–so I don’t have to look at the blessed thing.
• People will bring poinsettias and line the steps up to the chancel with the red and white plants. Poinsettias can grow year-round in Arizona if you plant them outside after Christmas, though they may wilt and die in the summer (as may I).
• We will sing Christmas carols even though I know these should be sung after Christmas.
• Tamales!!!
• Our most beautiful altar table cloths will come out of the closet. They’re deep blue with a silver star sewed onto the front.
• Year C in the lectionary will begin. Year C is my favorite year since Luke is my favorite gospel.
• Other decorations include a card table with a nativity set up on it. If our house were bigger, I would start a nativity collection and set them up every Christmas.
• I will feel once again that I actually have a vocation for ministry.

I do need some help from anyone who happens to read this. The “Advent wreath” that Guadalupe has is some kind of wrought-iron thing that was never meant to be used as an advent wreath. How do I know this? Because it only has three candle holders surrounding the central candle. As you may know, Advent has four Sundays, each allotted its own candle. This is how a complete Advent wreath should look:

If you want to imagine our wreath, think of something a lot more dangerous looking, minus one of the outer candles. For the last two Christmases, I’ve handled this the same way I handle the stuffed Santa Claus, namely, I’ve ignored it. But this Advent I’d like to improve. You know, baby steps. What do you think I should do? Should we try to get an expensive new advent wreath? Should I keep ignoring it? Or, do you have another more creative solution?

Refuge & Rejection

Since last May, I’ve been working as a research assistant for a couple of history professors here at Arizona State on a new internet project concerning refugees and the humanities. Today, we finally launched the website, which is the heart and soul of the project. Here’s the announcement we sent out:

Announcing a new academic website:

The humanities have not had a common forum for discussion of refugees and forcibly displaced persons. We hope to provide that central place in our new web-based site: “Refuge & Rejection: The Humanities in the Study of Forced Migration.”

“Refuge & Rejection” is an initiative that hopes to fill the need for thoughtful and challenging humanities scholarship on these themes, and to engage your review and participation. Sponsored by the Institute for Humanities Research at Arizona State University, “Refuge & Rejection” has an international editorial board of scholars interested in the humanities. Our first issue will feature Professor Anna Holian in an essay “Refugees and the Humanities: A Challenge”, along with comments by Howard Adelman and Carl Bon Tempo. Additional essays, portraits, and image galleries will be offered in the coming months. We also provide a wide variety of online links for other resources. We very much encourage comment and submission of work from the humanities on refugees and forced migration..

We invite you to visit the “Refuge & Rejection” website, view the latest contributions and to participate in online forums. Please consider whether your own work might be submitted for peer review and publication.

Visit http://www.asu.edu/clas/history/proj/refugee/ to find out more.

So far, the site’s had a whole bunch of hits, and a lot of people have signed up to be on our email mailing list. With any luck, we’ll start to get submissions from scholars soon.