Daily Links – 1.9.10

A Pedagogical Experiment
Adam talks about a new experiment in his classes he is undertaking where students are only tested on the primary sources. The secondary sources are something to be “overcome” in the class. I like the idea!

The Evolving Church: Kingdom Economy
This looks like an interesting conference. It’s a bit far for me to travel, but maybe some of you folks who read the blog would be interested in going.

Some thoughts from James K.A. Smith

So prosperity preachers are easy targets for blame—and they certainly deserve that. But what about the sort of low-grade, soft-sell gospel of prosperity that is part of “mainstream” evangelicalism? While folks like Rick Warren are quick to denounce the heresy of treating God like a cosmic bubble-gum machine, run-of-the-mill suburban evangelicals are complicit with a consumerism and fixation on property that operates under-the-radar, as it were. While mainstream megapastors aren’t promising Bentleys for faith, they generally extol a vision of the “good life” that has 4 bedrooms and a 3-car garage, with an SUV in the drive. (If you really want to know what evangelicals value, stroll the parking lot at Saddleback Church—and then ask folks where they live.) This is why evangelicals have been so easily assimilated to the American ideal of economic growth and personal prosperity (an American gospel that is certainly not just the property of Republicans).

In other words, while Osteen and his ilk might be denounced by evangelicals, I do wonder if his gospel of prosperity differs by degree, rather than in kind.

AVATAR: The New “Thing”
I have been trying now for some time to find a way to describe AVATAR after seeing it yesterday, and I thought that Morgan Meis did a good job of describing it on The Smart Set (HT: Abbas):

It is fitting, then, that the story told in Avatar is so very dumb. It’s the standard dehumanizing evils of modernity versus authentic people of the forest tale. But just like in the good old days, the story isn’t what we’re there for. We are there to see reality expanded once again, to see digital technology create a coherent world that never existed anywhere on the corporeal plain. A good story would get in the way. Cameron obliges us by not bothering. Instead, he creates a glowing forest landscape filled with fluorescent plants and animals that pop and whiz and jump around the screen. I heard oohs and ahhs in that theater in Vegas. I can’t say when I last heard such genuine, guttural expressions of human amazement in a movie theater. Our minds were being, if gently, blown. That is worth something, to have one’s sense of reality tweaked in a format that has otherwise been so comfortable for so long. What happens in the movie? Who cares? But dammit if Sallie Gardner doesn’t ride again.

NT Wright’s Book on Virtue
Apparently, NT Wright is coming out new book on the virtues. His interview with Trevin sounds like something out of a Dallas Willard book (HT: Jeff):

[W]e modern westerners – and even more postmodern westerners – are trained by the media and public discourse to think that “letting it all out” and “doing what comes naturally” are the criteria for how to behave. There is a sense in which they are – but only when the character has been trained so that “what comes naturally” is the result of that habit-forming [virtuous] training.