Jesus’ instructions with regard to judging others is very simply put; He says, “Don’t.” The average Christian is the most piercingly critical individual known. Criticism is one of the ordinary activities of people, but in the spiritual realm nothing is accomplished by it. The effect of criticism is the dividing up of the strengths of the one being criticized. The Holy Spirit is the only one in the proper position to criticize, and He alone is able to show what is wrong without hurting and wounding. It is impossible to enter into fellowship with God when you are in a critical mood. Criticism serves to make you harsh, vindictive, and cruel, and leaves you with the soothing and flattering idea that you are somehow superior to others. Jesus says that as His disciple you should cultivate a temperament that is never critical. This will not happen quickly but must be developed over a span of time. You must constantly beware of anything that causes you to think of yourself as a superior person.

There is no escaping the penetrating search of my life by Jesus. If I see the little speck in your eye, it means that I have a plank of timber in my own (see Matthew 7:3-5 ). Every wrong thing that I see in you, God finds in me. Every time I judge, I condemn myself (see Romans 2:17-24 ). Stop having a measuring stick for other people. There is always at least one more fact, which we know nothing about, in every person’s situation. The first thing God does is to give us a thorough spiritual cleaning. After that, there is no possibility of pride remaining in us. I have never met a person I could despair of, or lose all hope for, after discerning what lies in me apart from the grace of God.

~Oswald Chambers, My Utmost For His Highest, June 17th The Uncritical Temper

• 
  My Utmost For His Highest: Limited PB Edition
  Author: Oswald Chambers

Criticism is one of the ordinary activities of people…

For sure, the faculty of critical discernment is something very special that makes us human. We do it unconsciously and purposefully all day as a natural operation of existence. To be conscious is to be judging. This ability allows us to do and create. But that’s all the basics, Mr. Chambers is getting at the habit of critiquing someone’s spiritual life, their soul even..


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Categories: Judgement, Massage, Therapy, N.T. Wright, Community, Books, Bible Study, My Utmost for His Highest, Criticisms
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Do not heed much if men mock you and speak lies of you, or in goodwill defend you unworthily. Heed not much if even the righteous turn their backs upon you. Only take heed that you turn not from them.

~On One’s Critics

Let a man do right, not trouble himself about worthless opinion; the less he heeds tongues, the less difficult will he find it to love men.

~On Idle Tongues

Do you so love the truth and the right that you welcome, or at least submit willingly to, the idea of an exposure of what in you is yet unknown to yourself–an exposure that may be redound to the glory of the truth by making you ashamed and humble?… Are you willing to be made glad that you were wrong when you thought others were wrong?

~Do We Love Light?

• 
  George MacDonald
  Author: C. S. Lewis

What would it look like to rightly care for no one’s opinion, refrain from criticism and judgments, and yet have a teachable spirit?

Somehow the combination of these negations and one positive create a sort of unconscious teacher and pupil in any relationship or community of peers where authority is ambiguous.

Categories: George MacDonald, Books, Criticisms
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I have a few friends in the automotive industry, and over the years I have enjoyed throwing a variety of hypothetical silliness at them for future design considerations.

Like, the NERF ® Car… ok, now it is out, if GM makes a big comeback with this… they saw it here first.

The idea is simple, we could virtually illuminate accident injuries and fatalities by manufacturing cars with a 6 inch think interior / exterior NERF ® coating.

At the same time, we would simultaneously end road rage, folks would be obliged to ram each other at will… freeways would become veritable bumper car extravaganzas of fun and frolic! Not enough room to get up to ramming speed… no worries, just take it out on the foam interior… go ahead; bash your fist, foot, head, or whatever against any available surface without damaging your vehicle or yourself! In just a couple short years of production we could completely change the modern driving experience…

Ok, so there is a down side… when your car gets wet you would have to endure that swampy old dog wet NERF ® smell; but car washes could be quickly retrofitted into washboard style squeezers to get most of the water out of your car’s side panels after a rain. Do you see the genius, a whole new industry would emerge! Just run with the spirit of entrepreneurial invention!

Well, my friends usually endure my over-hyped sophomoric sales pitch just long enough for me to get it out of my system and then they quickly diffuse all of my enthusiasm with some sobering realities along the lines of manufacturing impossibilities and the public’s inevitable rejection of clunky foam technology in deference for sleek chrome beauty.

If my make believe NERF ® car receives the derision it deserves, then I am grateful to see Mr. Zuckerberg reaping some as well.

Six years ago, we built Facebook around a few simple ideas. People want to share and stay connected with their friends and the people around them. If we give people control over what they share, they will want to share more. If people share more, the world will become more open and connected. And a world that’s more open and connected is a better world. These are still our core principles today.

~Mark Zuckerberg, Washington Post Response to Privacy Concerns

Lee Siegel likens the explosive growth, acceptance, and trends of the internet to the recent past technical marvel of convenience… the automobile… before it had safety belts.

Not only was the public horrified; it was shocked. What it had accepted as an inevitable condition turned out to be wholly arbitrary. Things should have been very different from the way they were. And gradually, by means of public pressure, the “permanent” condition of the necessarily dangerous car did yield to the new condition of a safety-conscious auto industry. People stopped dying on the road in staggering numbers. Things changed.

Heaven knows, I’m not comparing the internet to a hurtling death trap. But the internet has its destructive side just as the automobile does, and both technologies entered the world behind a curtain of triumphalism hiding their dangers from critical view. Like the car, the internet has been made out to be a miracle of social and personal transformation when it is really a marvel of convenience–and in the case of the internet, a marvel of convenience that has caused a social and personal upheaval. As with the car, the highly arbitrary way in which the internet has evolved has been portrayed as inevitable and inexorable. As with the car, criticism of the internet’s shortcomings, risks, and perils has been silenced, or ignored, or stigmatized as an expression of those two great American taboos, negativity and fear of change. As with the car, a rhetoric of freedom, democracy, choice, and access has covered up the greed and blind self-interest that lie behind what much of the internet has developed into today.

~Lee Siegel, Against the Machine

• 
  Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob
  Author: Lee Siegel

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Categories: Advertising, Social Networking, Technology, Books, Criticisms
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When fighting and death exercise their wild dominion around us, then we are called to bear witness to God’s love and God’s peace not only by word and thought, but also by our deeds. Read James 4:1-12! We should daily ask ourselves where we can bear witness in what we do to the kingdom in which love and peace prevail. The great peace for which we long can only grow again from peace between twos and threes. Let us put an end to all hate, mistrust, envy, disquiet, wherever we can. “Blessed are the pacemakers for they shall be called the children of God.”

~Dietrich Bonhoeffer, A Testament to Freedom

• 
  A Testament to Freedom: The Essential Writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer
  Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

James 4

Submit Yourselves to God

1What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you? 2You want something but don’t get it. You kill and covet, but you cannot have what you want. You quarrel and fight. You do not have, because you do not ask God. 3When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures.

4You adulterous people, don’t you know that friendship with the world is hatred toward God? Anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God. 5Or do you think Scripture says without reason that the spirit he caused to live in us envies intensely?[a] 6But he gives us more grace. That is why Scripture says:
“God opposes the proud
but gives grace to the humble.”[b]

7Submit yourselves, then, to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. 8Come near to God and he will come near to you. Wash your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. 9Grieve, mourn and wail. Change your laughter to mourning and your joy to gloom. 10Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up.

11Brothers, do not slander one another. Anyone who speaks against his brother or judges him speaks against the law and judges it. When you judge the law, you are not keeping it, but sitting in judgment on it. 12There is only one Lawgiver and Judge, the one who is able to save and destroy. But you—who are you to judge your neighbor?

~James 4:1-12

• What causes fights and quarrels among you?
• Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you?
• You want something but don’t get it.

It’s hard to own up to, but its true… most of the strife and contention in my life is of my own doing. On some internal plane of hyperactive-reasoning and contemplation, I create all the worries and concerns of the imaginary tomorrow. All this anxiety has to come out somewhere, unfortunately this “somewhere” is oftentimes within the relationships that should be characterized by love and peace.

Family in-fighting, friendship strife, community squabbles, city divisions, political venom, world wide paranoia…

…what could be the antidote to such evils?


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Categories: C.S. Lewis, Judgement, Peace, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Advice, Books, Art, Criticisms
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I probably have no moment of greater indulgent film pleasure than that of watching mechanized forces of good and evil tear each other apart via ballistic fisticuffs of glory.

For this reason, a movie like Iron Man is my saccharine technolust desire and completion, I cannot refuse its allure any more than I can resist a handful of peanut M&Ms.

But try to pawn off a bag of regular M&Ms on me, and I will most likely turn up my nose with scoffing resignation… much like my derisive laughter at the horrible beer commercial excuse of a movie Transformers…

I want and need something beyond the candy shell…

One could hardly call computer generated robo-scrimmages “high art”, but if we attempt to get beyond that shellacked candy surface and dig in for the chocolate and the nut, do we find anything that satisfies?

Being a self proclaimed film aficionado and having expressed deep admiration for the first Iron Man film, many people have been asking me for my opinion on the latest sequel.

And as I begin my reply by restating the grand triumph of the first film as perhaps my favorite “super hero” film of all time… most folks get where I am going with what is at best going to be a second hand compliment to an attempt at a worthy sequel.

• 
  Iron Man (Ultimate Two-Disc Edition + BD Live) [Blu-ray]
  Director: Paramount

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Categories: C.S. Lewis, Film, Reviews, Art, Movies, Books, Criticisms
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Every man who tries to obey the Master is my brother, whether he counts me such or not, and I revere him; but dare I give quarter to what I see to be a lie because my brother believes it? The lie is not of God, whoever may hold it.

~George MacDonald

• 
  George MacDonald
  Author: C. S. Lewis

If what we believe matters at all, extreme passivism is not ultimately compatible. We will contend for what we believe is true, even if we are to say that one should not contend. The tricky part of this statement is the inherent subjectivity of any judgment; the “…what I see to be a lie…” source of one’s contention for the truth. Folks who are well acquainted with history tend to have a better grasp on what has proven to be a myth or a truth. In some way, all rigorous theologians are truly historians of Christian thought.

I believe the danger for modern folks like myself is the jumping into fervent argument with a cursory understanding of the material to begin with. Information floats about me with the temptation of mastery simply because I am aware of an idea. I know a little bit about everything and I believe I must side up on every apparent issue and defend “the truth”, however that is presented to me.

C.S. Lewis was a prolific critic, but he tempered his criticism with what he called “genial criticism”; something he apparently picked up from a chap named Coleridge.

Basically, the idea is that we should criticize, but we should stick to criticizing within a genre that we also appreciate. If you actually like science fiction movies, then go ahead and blast away at Avatar… if you think all of sci-fi is worthless adolescent gunslinger fantasy fluff… then you should probably hold back on your moral critiques of the genre.

In the moral sphere, every act of justice or charity involves putting ourselves in the other person’s place and thus transcending our own competitive particularity.

~C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism

• 
  An Experiment in Criticism (Canto)
  Author: C. S. Lewis

This rebuke towards genial criticism is one that good friends have brought to my doorstep on numerous occasions in regards to all sorts of stilted aspersions on my behalf.

It is hard to back down on an argument, but when you have to deal with the question of why you care to criticize in the first place it does become easier.

I like movies, and I am a critic.
I like stories, and I am a critic.
I like technology, and I am a critic.
I like theology, and I am a critic.
I don’t really care much for sports, politics, and faith healing…

…so it should be easy for me to hold my tongue there.

Categories: Orthodoxy, C.S. Lewis, Art, Books, Criticisms
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Sure, Christians (and perhaps especially evangelicals… those vocal and rowdy bunch) are often times highlighted in the media for scandals of the typical political and celebrity variety; sex, drugs, power abuse, and embezzlement. But it would seem that evangelical Christians themselves are the harshest critics of the movement’s more subtle yet deeply pernicious sins… like not thinking, feeling, or living.

My youth pastor gave me this book about 15 years ago now, Mark Noll’s “The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind”. I am still caught up in the whirlwind of trying to figure out what is this “Christianity” that has been thrust upon me from before I was able to think critically about anything. At that moment, the dawn of my adult life, this book was a sign post of responsibility going forward.

The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind…

By an evangelical “life of the mind” I mean more the effort to think like a Christian–to think within a specifically Christian framework–across the whole spectrum of modern learning, including economics and political science, literary criticism and imaginative writing, historical inquiry and philosophical studies, linguistics and the history of science, social theory and the arts. Academic disciplines provide modern categories for the life of the mind, but the point is not simply whether evangelicals can learn how to succeed in the modern academy. The much more important matter is what it means to think like a Christian about the nature and workings of the physical world, the character of human social structures like government and the economy, the meaning of the past, the nature of artistic creation, and the circumstances attending our perception of the world outside ourselves. Failure to exercise the mind for Christ in these areas has become acute in the twentieth century. That failure is the scandal of the evangelical mind.

~Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind

• 
  The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind
  Author: Mark A. Noll

I have recently caught up again, in bodily conversation, with my youth pastor from yesteryear… it appears that we are still both working out some very old challenges, perhaps we will be doing so until the day we die. Should we go into politics or stay home with the family? Should we go into academia or serve community non-profits.

The balance between thinking and doing is certainly a precarious one. I am reminded of a quote that escapes me now from C.S. Lewis where he suggests that often times the worst response to duty is to write a book (or blog post) about it… that is, we are tempted to simply cogitate on a problem instead of taking the obvious action of work in front of us.

28 Do not say to your neighbor,
“Come back later; I’ll give it tomorrow”—
when you now have it with you.

~Proverbs 3:28

I am tempted by this retreat into the gray tower of critical thinking and I am grateful to the ready challenge of friends and mentors who would call me down and into the fight I would otherwise be satisfied in merely observing from a safe distance. I think MacDonald sums up the call pretty well as follows…

He who does that which he sees, shall understand, he who is set upon understanding rather than doing, shall go on stumbling and mistaking and speaking foolishness…. It is he that runneth that shall read, and no other. It is not intended by the speaker of the parables that any other should know intellectually what, known but intellectually, would be for his injury–what, grasped, perhaps even appropriated. When the pilgrim of the truth comes on his journey to the region of the parable, he finds its interpretation. It is not a fruit or a jewel to be stored, but a well springing by the wayside.

~George MacDonald, The Way of Understanding #108

• 
  George MacDonald
  Author: C. S. Lewis

So here I am again, I think both of these wise Christian mentors are right and have the very advice I need to heed right now.

I don’t believe it is a conundrum that should end in stagnant ambivalence, but rather the two should dance together and form the shape of your life and mind.

So yes; think, feel, pray, do, live… and repeat…

Categories: Thinking, Christianity, Challenges, Criticisms
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Online culture, he goes on, “is a culture of reaction without action” and rationalizations that “we were entering a transitional lull before a creative storm” are just that — rationalizations. “The sad truth,” he concludes, “is that we were not passing through a momentary lull before a storm. We had instead entered a persistent somnolence, and I have come to believe that we will only escape it when we kill the hive.”

~Jaron Lanier, from the NY Times

• 
  You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto
  Author: Jaron Lanier

Categories: Technology, Books, Criticisms
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I love big robots and I love computer animation. So why, was “Transformers; Revenge of the Fallen” one of my worst movie watching experiences of all time. I think it is worth the effort to elaborate on this horrible piece of cinema, because it should become a landmark of failure in most every realm of film making, decency, and ultimately imagination.

For now, Roger Ebert’s analysis captures the majority of my sentiments…

“Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” is a horrible experience of unbearable length, briefly punctuated by three or four amusing moments. One of these involves a dog-like robot humping the leg of the heroine. Such are the meager joys. If you want to save yourself the ticket price, go into the kitchen, cue up a male choir singing the music of hell, and get a kid to start banging pots and pans together. Then close your eyes and use your imagination.

The plot is incomprehensible. The dialog of the Autobots®, Decepticons® and Otherbots® is meaningless word flap. Their accents are Brooklyese, British and hip-hop, as befits a race from the distant stars. Their appearance looks like junkyard throw-up. They are dumb as a rock. They share the film with human characters who are much more interesting, and that is very faint praise indeed.

~Roger Ebert, The Sun Times

Roger Ebert’s Kind Review

Categories: Reviews, Film Making, Movies, Criticisms
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Thanks be to the critic
Bring your precision
That well crafted word of deflation
That righteous eye of observation
Convict us of the sin
Of settling for the lesser thing

Thanks be to the critic
The one motivated rightly
Born of pure honesty
Tempered with humility
Defending the senses diligently

Thanks be to the critic
Friend of the populous
Scourge of the callous
Seeker of the righteous

Thanks be to the critic
Revealer of beauty to us
Mindless enjoyment your sacrifice
In a pursuit zealous
For art and culture beneficent

Categories: Poetry, Criticisms
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I have been encountering many challenges to reevaluate my online social habits as of late. After reading this article entitled, “Possibility Junkies” and the discussion source article, “Dwelling in the Possibilities”… I am forced to evaluate my compulsion to blog…

Reading and re-reading books, slowly, keeping personal and private journals (not public blogs) which invite true introspection without the distraction of self-presentation, face-to-face conversations that linger and dwell, conversations that achieve some contrapuntal pleasure, attentive listening to musical works that require us to slow down and perceive subtle resonances and formal nuance: these are monotasking practices of closure, commitment, and contemplation.

~Ken Myers

Why am I doing this again?

Categories: Introspection, Technology, Criticisms, About This
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