Warning: while I do not find this comic particularly offensive, if you peruse this sight you will find (very funny) comics of questionable taste. 
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal by Zach Weiner
Each comic is followed by a little “afterward:”
Christianity
The second (and third, fourth) coming of Jesus
“Anglican Collider Breaks Down”
I was just directed to this wonderful parody. A great post from September at a very interesting blog, Pluralist Speaks. I wonder if he does all that artwork himself. They seem to be original. Be sure to read the whole thing but here are a few snippets.
Anglican Collider Breaks Down
The Anglican Collider will be out of action for months or even years, according to The European Cern (TEC).
A large magnet, located at Pittsburgh, USA, has malfunctioned. Apparently it has slipped away, and may only now be useful for attaching to a different, lesser collider. The fault seems to be in a nut, essentially characterising a bishop, and bishops are notorious for having a screw loose.
This blog recently recorded how Anglican particles are sent spinning round the collider in opposite directions, causing huge outbursts of energy that generate more heat than light.
…The problems emerged on Friday. The magnets, also called bishops, have to be super cool in order that the particles stay within the collider. It seems that a number of magnets have been heating up. A critical point was passed when the Presiding Bishop particle was set off, causing ruptures in a number of places and an immediate dislodging of that one magnet at Pittsburgh. …
However, the whole TEC needs warming up slowly and then cooling down again, and this takes considerable time. The Archbishop of Canterbury provides the model for this slow operation. He is known to be in deep freeze most of the time, is slowly warmed up, makes an ambiguous statement and then cools down again back to freezing point. His one utterance when warm is said to keep the Anglican Collider going for months.
Culture Making by Andy Crouch
Cathleen Falsani, the “God Girl” of The Dude Abides, offers a review of a new book by Andy Crouch, Culture Making. Andy was, in addition to everything else about him that Falsani says below, was a classmate of mine (or I of his) at Cornell. I haven’t read the book yet (only so much time!) but I am eager to do so.
Andy Crouch, a savvy culture watcher and commentator who runs the Christian Vision Project at Christianity Today, has a pretty brilliant idea that’s rooted, in some ways, in Shelley’s idea of poet as unacknowledged legislator.
Speaking at the Catalyst Conference, a gathering of more than 12,000 young evangelical Christian leaders who run the gamut from very liberal to uber-conservative, outside Atlanta last weekend, Crouch urged the religiously minded among us to start thinking about culture making rather than culture battling.
It’s the theme of Crouch’s new book, Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling, where he traces the pattern of his community’s (i.e. evangelical Christian) engagement with culture (to use the term broadly) over the last 100 or so years.
Crouch, who for 10 years served as a campus minister at Harvard University, says Christians first engaged culture by critiquing it, sometimes viciously. Then they began copying culture, which explains the emergence of profoundly bad “Christian” pop music from the mid-’70s until the mid-’90s.
Of late, many religious folks, Crouch argues, have become blind consumers of culture. And none of these approaches — critiquing, copying or consuming — will do anything toward changing the culture for the better.
People of faith need to start earnestly cultivating culture. If you want to see something good, create it. Or support those who do.
Essay by Philip Jenkins – The reach of African churches
Philip is a scholar of religion and colleague of mine at Penn State. He is also a national (NY Times) bestseller. This morning he emailed me a copy of his latest article from The Christian Century and gave me permission to reproduce it here.
notes from the GLOBAL CHURCH
Philip Jenkins.
The Christian Century.
Chicago: Sep 9, 2008. Vol. 125, Iss. 18; pg. 60, 1 pgsNot long ago I was taking a cab from O’Hare Airport to downtown
Chicago, and my friendly driver proved to be a Nigerian from the Yoruba people. As the traffic gave us lots of time to talk, I soon found that this man was a pastor of a Nigerian-based congregation about which I had written at some length, one of the so-called
Aladura churches. Indeed, he was the nephew of the church’s founding prophet, and whenever the prophet visited the U.S. he normally stayed
in his nephew’s apartment. The image startled me: drawing from the Old Testament, I had always imagined prophets laying their weary heads in caves or under trees, and not in a comfortable Chicago apartment. Yet another biblical stereotype bit the dust.This encounter stirred other thoughts about the presence of churches from the global South in North America and Europe. For decades now, ministers and missionaries from Africa, Asia and Latin America have been active in the global North, and such churches are easy enough to find in most major cities: just look at the Yellow Pages. But these bodies have not registered much in popular consciousness. When local news media discover their existence, as they do every couple of years, they normally report the story as a curiosity, an ironic reversal of the once-familiar pattern of missionaries heading from the U.S. to Africa or China. And when media report in those terms, they miss one of the most important stories in the modern history of Christianity, namely the prolific emergence of new independent an prophetic churches and, no less important, their projection onto a global stage. (more…)
Charlie Brown, what is the purpose of man?
That is the first question of the Westminster Shorter Catechism (that I had to study and reply to before I joined the Presbyterian church as a youth).
Q. 1. What is the chief end of man?
A. Man’s chief end is to glorify God,[1] and to enjoy him forever.[2]
I am sure that you all are aware of Charles Schultz’s (1922-2000) personal Christian convictions and that it seeped into his Peanuts strip from time to time. This week’s reruns have CB addressing just this question, but his answer is hardly catechetical.
It seems to me that Lucy and Linus’ responses are rather profound, given CB’s view that our purpose is “to make others happy.” If that is our sole or primary purpose then indeed somebody (everyone) isn’t doing their job. Now on the other hand, I suppose we could say that this is just “the second great command” put in new terms and I would accept that, but it is given primacy in this account. I think the order (love God first then we are able to love our neighbors, and even ourselves, properly) is rather important.
