Prebylutheranism 2nd Anniversary Spectacular! (My Top 10 Posts Ever)

Just because.

The other day was the second anniversary of my foray into blogging, and what a long, strange trip it’s been. I haven’t proven to be the most consistent blogger on the Web, or the one with the biggest following, or the smartest, or the funniest, or the most talented, or the best-loved, but I’m certainly…one of them?

I guess?

But one thing I am sure of is that starting this blog was a good call. Some of the things that have happened since I began it:

• I’ve been published by Cracked a couple of times;
• My work has appeared in Reader’s Digest;
• I’ve scored a book deal;
• I’ve been made a weekly columnist at Christ and Pop Culture;
• I’ve almost finished a novel (which is more of a distraction from blogging than anything, but whatever).

I thought that for this august occasion (which, ironically, is a June occasion), it might be fun to run down my blog’s top 10 posts, along with some of my commentary on them. Unless it’s not fun, in which case, I’m sorry.

Buttcracks and Legos: An Internet Full of Me

Hey guys,

Just thought I’d let you know that I have a couple new pieces going up around the web today.

There’s this, my latest ‘LOL Interwebz’ column for Christ and Pop Culture. It’s about buttcracks and Magic: The Gathering.

Then there’s this, a contrarian piece I wrote for The Erstwhile Philistine. It’s about The Lego Movie and The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and why EVERY CHILDREN’S MOVIE YOU LOVE IS A LIE.

By the way, since I have your attention: Christ and Pop Culture has a podcast, and it’s phenomenal. I’m not shilling; it’s seriously my absolute favorite podcast and I listen to it all the time. And incidentally, I’ve had the pleasure of starring in three of its episodes:

• This one (Cash, Cobain, Bush);
• This one (April Fools, #CancelColbert, The Pope’s Confession);
• And this one (Participation Trophies, A Church’s Fake Persecution Stunt, “Average Barbie”).

It’s been a blast. But every single episode is great, and you should listen to them all.

Till next time!

In the Spirit of Aronofsky’s ‘Pi,’ Here’s a Mathematical Proof that ‘Noah’ Would Have Pissed Everyone Off, No Matter What

I haven’t seen Darren Aronofsky’s Noah yet (gave up movies for Lent, grr), but here’s what I’ve learned about it from the blogosphere:

• Noah is a great movie.
• Noah sucks.
• Noah is a biblical movie.
• Noah is completely unbiblical.
• Aronofsky is totally an atheist.
• No, he’s not.
• Noah is just environmentalist propaganda.
• No it’s not, and that’s stupid.
• Noah is just a bunch of subliminal Gnostic messages.
• No it’s not, and that’s even stupider.
• Every Christian should boycott Noah.
• Every Christian should see Noah.
• It’s just a movie.
• Nothing is just a movie.
• ROCK PEOPLE. ROCK PEOPLE. ROCK PEOPLE.

If you read that, you now know everything there is to know about Noah. Congratulations!

Twestling with God

Just a quick warning that my review of The Twible — in which religion scholar Jana Reiss condenses every single chapter of the Bible into a tweet — is available for your viewing pleasure over at Christ and Pop Culture.

Go read it. That’s an order, soldier.

Donald Miller Left Me Standing at the Altar, in More Ways Than One

[NOTE: If you’d rather read something less squishy and more concrete, or less Lutheran and more Reformed, my total-BFF-who-I-just-met, Derek Rishmawy, has a great piece over at Christ and Pop Culture.]

In addition to being a blogger, memoirist, and in-demand speaker, Don Miller is also known for being hungry like the wolf.

Oh, Don Miller. You used to be cool.

I admit it. Like pretty much every Christian my age, I had a torrid love affair with Blue Like Jazz (the book, not the movie, but also kind of the movie). What can I say? Jazz is to us post-evangelicals what Atlas Shrugged is to libertarians, or what The Lord of the Rings is to hippies, or what Martha Stewart Living is to really terrible people.

But now I kind of want to take it all back.

Equality is Medicine, Not Food.

“I thought love meant equality,” she said, “and free companionship.”

“Ah, equality!” said the Director. “We must talk of that some other time. Yes, we must be guarded by equal rights and must all wear clothes for the same reason. But the naked body should be there underneath the clothes, ripening for the day when we shall need them no longer. Equality is not the deepest thing, you know.”

“I always thought that was just what it was. I thought it was in their souls that people were equal.”

“You were mistaken,” he said gravely. “That is the last place where they are equal. Equality before the law, equality of incomes — that is very well. Equality guards life, it doesn’t make it. It is medicine, not food.”

Some Dirty Jokes in Your Bible.

With my left-handed dagger, I stabbeth thee!

Hello there, friend! Do you enjoy my twisted-but-mostly-reverent take on Christian orthodoxy? Then you’ll probably love and/or be indifferent to and/or be deeply offended by my latest piece for Cracked, 6 Filthy Jokes You Won’t Believe are From the Bible! It’s got all the Biblical literacy and sarcasm that you’ve come to expect from this PK trapped in perpetual adolescence! Head on over and check it out.

The real reason I won’t be buying a videogame system this week.

David Wong’s comic horror novel John Dies at the End posits a race of inter-dimensional beings who can play with our universe’s timeline as they see fit, inserting and removing people and things at will. Towards the end, a middle-aged character pontificates on his first encounter with a videogame system (which is one of the things they’ve inserted):

If You Can’t Be Female, at Least Be a Celebrity

I’m currently about halfway through Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics by Ross Douthat of the New York Times. Douthat is NYT’s token conservative Catholic columnist, and I have to admit that, whether I want to agree with him or not (short version of my viewpoint: as a grad student, I’m far too steeped in postmodernism to form actual opinions anymore), he tells a compelling story regarding how American churches abandoned orthodoxy, allowing for the rise of heresies like the the Jesus Seminar, Dan Brown’s revisionist history, and Benny Hinn’s outfits.

Of particular interest, though admittedly less amusing than poking fun at Dan Brown (short version: that guy sucks), is his take on what happened to the two major branches of mainstream Protestantism in the ’60s and ’70s. To summarize Douthat’s analysis, both Mainline and Evangelical stripes got hooked on political activism for its own sake, and in the process were turned into their respective parties’ lapdogs instead of being the protectors of the Gospel that they should have been. The Mainline decided that every political cause was basically the Civil Rights Movement and started doing whatever the New Left told them; Evangelicals decided that every political cause was the Pro-Life Movement, and proceeded to be yanked around by Reaganomics and Neoconservativism for the next four decades.

Blue Like Jazz: Too Subtle for Its Own Good

It’s a rare thing to be sitting in a movie theater and feel like the film you’re viewing was, somehow, made just for you. I’ve had that particular experience once before. Maybe twice. The first time was with Treasure Planet, because, at the time, nobody but me recognized the supreme awesomeness of steampunk, or of the combination of pirates and space — a pairing far more inspired than chocolate and peanut butter (which I’ve always found to be overrated, but don’t tell my wife). I might count Ratatouille among these as well, but I won’t, since everybody likes Pixar movies, and I have no desire to make myself a cliché.

What you can add to the list, however, is Steve Taylor’s film Blue Like Jazz. I feel pretty alone in really loving this movie, since the theater was deserted when I saw it and it’s currently sitting at a disappointing 48 on Metacritic. But I suppose that’s to be expected. It’s not the sort of movie you’ll love if you walk into the theater with your brain turned off (which, given the massive success of Michael Bay, is apparently what most people do), and it’s not something that will beat you over the head with a trite presentation of the Gospel message (did you hear that noise? it was Kirk Cameron shedding a single tear). What it is, is the story of a single believer being drawn out of the Slough of Despond by the still, small voice of God.

When I got home from the film, I posted this on my Facebook page, along with a link to the trailer: