Poor Mojo's Newswire

PETERSBURG, Ky. — Tamaki Sato was confused by the dinosaur exhibit. The placards described the various dinosaurs as originating from different geological periods — the stegosaurus from the Upper Jurassic, the heterodontosaurus from the Lower Jurassic, the velociraptor from the Upper Cretaceous — yet in each case, the date of demise was the same: around 2348 B.C. “I was just curious why,” said Dr. Sato, a professor of geology from Tokyo Gakugei University in Japan. . . . The museum’s presentation appeals to visitors like Steven Leinberger and his wife, Deborah, who came with a group from the Church of the Lutheran Confession in Eau Claire, Wis. “This is what should be taught even in science,” Mr. Leinberger said. . . . Dr. Bengtson noted that to explain how the few species aboard the ark could have diversified to the multitude of animals alive today in only a few thousand years, the museum said simply, “God provided organisms with special tools to change rapidly.” “Thus in one sentence they admit that evolution is real,” Dr. Bengtson said, “and that they have to invoke magic to explain how it works.”

Britain's parliament got its first ever Jewish speaker of the house this week, with the election of Conservative MP John Bercow to replace disgraced Labourite Michael Martin. Martin resigned last month over the expences scandal that has rocked the British political world. Bercow beat nine other candidates in three rounds of voting, despite a lack of support from his own party, winning the final ballot with 322 votes to 271. The new speaker has been MP for Buckingham since 1997. Bercow, a 46-year-old father of three, was born to a Jewish middle-class family in the north London neighborhood of Finchley. In 2001, he visited Israel on the invite of a Jewish friend from the Conservative party.

I wonder if these new media, present a more fundamental challenge not just to power structures within church life but to the core of some kinds of ecclesiology. Increasingly I’ve come to wonder if churches are, to some extent, analogous to record labels and newspapers. ... This truly is a blessed time for those for whom doing is a reward in and of itself, regardless of the rewards. The way of doing for the “ordinary” person has changed, if they are really focused first on the doing. How does this relate to church? Forgive me for waxing economical, but to me church is a kind of resource problem (or collective action problem). We “do” church because there are things a Christian just can’t “do” by themselves. In a way, ecclesiological power was like the power of the record label or newspaper in time when access to theological education and resources was scarce and expensive. ... There was a time where possession of a Bachelor of Theology degree put your near the top of the educated within a western society. But, today it is usually very unlikely that a pastor would be anywhere near being the most educated person in their congregation in most churches. ... Which brings us back to the online thing. The open, flat, collaborative, fluid dynamic that marks out online culture is a place that problematises a lot of the assumptions that feed the church-as-answer-to-scarce-resources model. Put simply, we no longer need that kind of church or the denominational structures that were built to support it.