July 29, 2008

I rarely promote other blogs as must reads. I have quite a few—GetReligion, the Bintel Blog, FaithWorld—and a little over a week ago, I found another. Stuff Christians Like, which was started in March and backdated to January, is a riff on the outrageously popular Stuff White People Like, which had its own spin-off called Stuff God Hates. It has quickly developed quite a following, and, in fact, the Dallas Morning News agreed with me and this week named the blog its Web site of the week. (Coincidentally, I turned in last night my first book review for the Morning News’ religion section, a short bit about “Rapture Ready!”)

To begin with, the blog’s author, Prodigal Jon, is ridiculously prolific. One of today’s installments, “Feeling unqualified for ‘that thing,’” is No. 364—in six months. The post’s often are long and insightful, and Jon has a knack for noting the machinations of Christian life that often go unnoticed.

The beer test, occasional swearing—been there, done that. And even though God doesn’t like religious tattoos, Jon is correct in stating that many Christians do—ugh. The post that caught my eye last week discussed a Christianism I haven’t been guilty of in a while, probably since entering college, but certainly was as a teenager: “Warning friends that your new friend is a non-Christian.”

Praise from Dallas Morning News

Jon writes:

That’s a weird phenomenon, the Christian disclaimer, and I should probably spend some time thinking about what it means about my faith. But right now, I’m curious why we say something like that about people that aren’t Christians. I have three guesses:

1. Non Christians are loose cannons.

Sometimes people disclaim the arrival of a non Christian just in case they do something wild, like swear. But by disclaiming them it automatically creates a weird tension of us vs. them in the context of a dinner party. And honestly, have you ever not disclaimed someone and then had to go back later and say, “I’m so sorry about my friend Hucklebuck. Honestly, I had no idea he was just going to start punching people in the face. And I didn’t even know he carried a gun. I’ll help you pick out a new cat tomorrow. I should have warned you he’s a non-Christian.”

2. Our Christian friends might say something crazy.

Maybe we’re afraid that our Christian friends are going to say something really crazy in front of the girl from work that’s a non-Christian. You’ll all be eating dinner and then one of your friends will say, “Can you please pass the salt and did I tell you about the angel that spoke to me last night and helped me find a parking space at the mall today? My savior has a first name, it’s J-E-S-U-S!!” But chances are, if they’re real friends that you trust and care about, they won’t do something like this.

3. It’s witness time.

It could be that we think when our friends find out there’s a non-Christian in the room they’ll go into “witness mode.” Suddenly instead of acting normal and how they would every other moment of the day, they’ll start using all their fancy seminary words. They’ll start asking awkwardly intimate questions like “are you happy on the inside?” They’ll spend the whole night stuffing tracts into your non-Christian friend’s purse like squirrels before winter. Extreme examples? Perhaps, but I promise you it happens.

When I read A.J. Jacob’s “The Year of Living Biblically,” I wished I had thought of spending a year living like an ancient Israelite. But the book had already been written, and I didn’t know an adulterer to stone, so I moved on to other odd makeovers, like growing a mustache. What then does Daniel Harrell hope to gain from his 30-day Leviticus challenge?

In my cover story this week about Hard Times in the Jewish community, I mentioned how the dropping dollar was killing internationally oriented organizations, particularly the American Jewish Joint Distribution Comittee, which cut 60 jobs, including 52 in Israel.

Others, like the United Jewish Communities, Hadassah, the New Israel Fund, pretty much anybody with operations overseas, have been hard hit.

“We grant in dollars,” Bennett Samson, national development director of the New Israel Fund, tells me. “So if we are giving a $1,000 grant, last year they were able to do 4,000 shekels worth of something with that. This year we give them $1,000, a flat renewal, and they are only able to do 3,200 shekels worth with that. We are giving our grants in dollars, but we know they can do less with that. And we are in the same boat; we’ve got 100 staffers in Israel.”

Now you can add Taglit-birthright israel, the wildly successful charity that since 2000 has taken 200,000 Jews, age 18-26, on their first trip to the Jewish state. Birthright’s not broke—how could an organization with an $80 million budget and sugar daddy Sheldon Adelson as its biggest benefactor be broke?—but co-founder Michael Steinhardt says that the dollar’s devaluation is crippling its resources and 2,000 fewer participants would be included on trips this winter.

Steinhardt speaks with the Fundermentalist after the jump:

I was going to avoid blogging about the magnitude-5.8 earthquake we just had about 40 miles east of my place—that’s what twitter is for. But after a conversation with a few friends, I can’t resist. See, they were worried about their loved ones—spouses, kids, the like. My wife is fine, thank you, but my first concern as I tried to figure out whether I should leave the coffee shop was not her safety or my own but that of my computer.

“Tells you a lot about yourself,” my editor said.

Oh, Mac PowerBook, how I love thee.

Victims of a recent bombing

It’s become increasingly apparent that India is not free from the terror of Islamic extremism. Even in the United States and Britain, an appalling proportion of college-age Muslims support, in some cases, violence for Islam’s sake (about 26 percent in the United States and 32 percent in Britain). In India, where an ugly history between Muslims and Hindus pervades and the country’s 1.1 million citizens includes 150 million Muslims, it wouldn’t, or maybe didn’t, take much of a spark to start a devastating fire.

Faithworld breaks down the numbers:

For years, India had been seen as country that had largely rejected the attractions of global militancy spurred on by wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. U.S. President George W. Bush notably said there were no Indians in al Qaeda.

But mainly Hindu India is home to one of the world’s biggest Muslim populations, around 13 percent of its 1.1 billion people.

It only takes 0.0001 percent of India’s roughly 150 million Muslims to form a nucleus of 15,000 militants, as Uday Bhaskar, former director of New Delhi’s Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, told me. 

And the attacks on Ahmedabad may have involved dozens of people. 

“We have crossed the tipping point,” he said.