Tony Jones: August 2009 Archives

I've been influenced by the blog, Minimal Mac, to simplify my cluttered workspace, so I canceled cable TV and used the money I saved to buy a cheap-but-highly-rated Dell monitor. I'm trying to keep all paper off my desk and allow no clutter except the occasional coffee mug.

Christianity21_MediaRelease.pdf

Event's Line-Up Challenges Perceptions of Church Conferences

JoPa Productions presents an event featuring more than 20 women speaking into the state of Christianity in the 21^st Century--but it's not a women's conference

Minneapolis, MN

August 20, 2009 - Christianity21 [http://www.Christianity21.com] is poised as an event that offers an innovative, holistic, and communal experience. It's also featuring more than 20 women as the speakers--and no men--which has led people to ask if it's an event solely for women.

"If you show up at an event with all male speakers, do you automatically assume it's an event for men?" asks Tony Jones, co-founder of JoPa Productions [http://www.JoPaProductions.com]. "We wanted to give the mic to women who have something to say about the future of Christianity, and we found strong women with a wide array of thoughts and opinions to really challenge our participants to think broadly about the future of Christianity."

Attendees, referred to by Jones and Doug Pagitt (co-founder of JoPa Productions) as "participants," will consist of both women and men, church leaders and pastors, volunteers, and everyday people seeking a deeper experience with faith.

Participants will have the opportunity to listen to and engage with presenters who range from mainline Protestant liberals to conservatives with backgrounds at evangelical mega-churches. "While we have voices coming from every angle of Christian faith (and even the voices of women wrestling with faith and church), Christianity21 will not be a place where the speakers are arguing about gays or the other contentious issues of our day," Jones said. "This event, by its very nature, will be hopeful and constructive," he added.

Jones and Pagitt have been known to do things that go against the "norms." Unconventional by nature, Jones and Pagitt launched JoPa Productions with the Church Basement Roadshow, which Publisher's Weekly said, "reinvented the book tour." They followed that up with The Great Emergence National Event, which celebrated the release of Phyllis Tickle's eponymous book.

Unlike events where speakers merely speak, the presenters at Christianity21 will use unique presentation styles that will engage a variety of learning styles. Christianity21 will further challenge perceptions of church conferences by offering holistic opportunities such as yoga classes, natural health coaching, sex and intimacy counseling, spiritual direction, job search counseling, an interactive guerrilla art project, and much more.

For additional information on Christianity21 or JoPa Productions, contact Jen Howver or visit http://www.JoPaProductions.com. In addition to producing events, JoPa Productions offers consulting services in the area of social media marketing and communications for authors, publishers, pastors, and non-profit organizations.

About JoPa Productions: JoPa Productions, LLC, was founded in 2007 by Tony Jones and Doug Pagitt. Jones and Pagitt, both prolific authors, bloggers, and public speakers, founded JoPa to serve the publishing, church, and non-profit industries with innovative events and social media consulting.

Contact: Jen Howver, Owner VOD Communications, Inc., 847-665-9863 http://www.vodcommunications.com

Seriously, this stuff is a mind-bender for me.  It changes everything, really.  Why?  Because it's the exceptions into which the norms need to fit to make them "norms."  The doctrine of imago dei, the hallmark of which is so often misconstrued as rationality must take into account the human being with Down Syndrome.  Is that human being, lacking the reasoning facilities of other human beings, also created in the image of God?  Of course.

And, so, when dictating with whom a person can and not have sex, we simply must deal with the gender ambiguity that afflicts many of our fellow human beings.

Zoe Brain writes,

I'm Intersexed. It's not particularly rare. 1 in 60 people have minor Intersex conditions, though it would take a laboratory test to determine that.

About 1 in 1000 have an Intersex condition that's obvious.

I have one of the rarest and most spectacular ones.

In the country of my birth, I would only be allowed to marry another woman - because homosexual marriage is strongly forbidden, and there I'm legally male. Even though my passport says "female" based on my anatomy - and despite my chromosomes, which are usually (though not always) found only in men.

In the country where I live, I could only marry a man, because there I'm legally female, and homosexual marriage is strongly forbidden. It took many thousands of dollars worth of MRIs, gene tests, Ultrasounds of my pelvis etc to determine that I was more female than male, but that diagnosis is definitive.

I REALLY wish Fundamentalist Christians would MAKE UP THEIR MIND as to who it is I'm supposed to have sex with. They all say it's obvious, but they differ as to what the answer is.

Me, I try to follow Isaiah 56:4-5. 1 Corinthians 13 too. It can be difficult maintaining a charitable attitude when no matter what I do, or fail to do, I'm supposed to be condemned to perdition for it.

So yesterday, John Piper once again entered crazy-television-evangelist territory and blamed a small tornado that jumped over Minneapolis and toppled a steeple on Central Lutheran Church on the fact that the ELCA delegate were down the street discussing whether to welcome practicing homosexuals into the clergy. He even implies in his post that the lack of warning by the National Weather Service shows that God cooked up this twister with her his pinky at the last minute.

Of course, this is not new territory for Pastor Piper. He made similar claims to know the Divine Mind after the Minneapolis bridge collapse, the Asian tsunami, and other times. And, as might be expected, Piper has been gently questioned by Scot, excoriated by Adam, Drew, and others, and brilliantly satirized by Jenell.

Here's a comment string from the last post that might be interesting...Confused and Hurting Sinner writes,most of the previous comments seem somewhat educated albeit cold & clincal. To me the elephant in the room that everyone seemed to ignore is...

It seems to me that the same people who take the stance that the Bible has a plain meaning in all cases also seem to assume that human sexuality is a pretty simple manner.  There are men and there are...

There have been some real gems among the hundreds and hundreds of comments left on this blog in the past couple weeks.  Among those that bear repeating is this one from Edward Green:To begin to understand the Bible's views (and...

...since last week....

No, Dr. Moltmann hasn't taken up tweeting.  But others of us have been tweeting about him in advance of his appearence at the 2009 Emergent Village Theological Conversation. If you tweet, and you've got a question you'd like us to...

I introduced Flory and Miller's book,  Finding Faith: The Spiritual Quest of the Post-Boomer Generation, earlier this week.  As sociologists, Flory and Miller have no axe to grind, thus I find their taxonomy of the emerging movement inherently more honest...

OK, I'm serious about this. I'm not even being snarky. Really.If you are one who thinks that homosexual sex is sinful, can you please explain to me WHY a gay or lesbian person who is in a long-term, monogamous relationship...

I've been generally unhappy with the existing taxonomies of the emerging/-ent church movement that are out there.  The most well known, I suppose, is Ed Stetzer's triptych:Relevants: "They are simply trying to explain the message of Christ in a way...