Dress Down Friday | The Anxious Economy and Proto-Christianity

Here is another edition of Dress Down Friday, complete with stuff on the economic crises and gun-racks for your bikes.

Slavoj Žižek has an article in the London Review of Books this week on the financial crisis called: Don’t Just Do Something, Talk. In it he says:

Faced with a disaster over which we have no real influence, people will often say, stupidly, ‘Don’t just talk, do something!’ Perhaps, lately, we have been doing too much. Maybe it is time to step back, think and say the right thing. True, we often talk about doing something instead of actually doing it – but sometimes we do things in order to avoid talking and thinking about them. Like quickly throwing $700 billion at a problem instead of reflecting on how it came about.

PeterRollins.net » Blog Archive » We don’t need early Christianity, we need Proto-Christianity (making straight paths for a second coming) Rollins argues against a mere primitivism within the church and points towards what he calls a proto-Christiniaty.

The early church is an historical response to the Christ-Event, to the rupture that took place all those years ago. And as an historical response it is related to its historical epoch and the issues of that time. The Event that gave birth to early Christianity however can be approached in purely negative terms as an a-historical rupture within history (in the world but not of it). As a New Beginning housing a subversive new possibility. It was a rupture that took place within Judaism, a happening that pre-dated Christianity: as testified to in the common claim that Jesus was a Jew not a Christian….The main problem we face today is that the wider church has lost the belief that there can be a universal call to re-configure the basic co-ordinates (it is worth noting that all established groups will find it difficult to accept this idea as it threatens the status quo). Instead we have embraced the idea of piecemeal change. Radical groups are thus labeled ‘new forms’, ‘fresh expressions’

» In Our Economic Crisis, Who Do We Project Our Anxiety Onto? Who Pays the Cost? (Family Systems Thinking and a Biblical Parable) Rhett discusses family systems and exposes the anxieties behind consuming too much.

There are several key components to family systems, and sometimes it can get quite complicated, but what I’m interested in for this post, and what I will overgeneralize is the concept of anxiety within a system, and how that anxiety is often projected onto someone, or something else. For example, in a family, often when there is anxiety between spouses it can be projected onto a child. In a larger context when there is anxiety, for example in a culture or country, anxiety can be projected onto other people groups, politics, etc. When anxiety enters that system the goal of that system, whether it be a family, or a society, is to reduce that anxiety and bring the system back to a homeostatic state….otherwise to balance it out. This can be done in many ways, but often the anxiety is balanced out in the system because it has been put on someone or something else outside of it. This is an over simplification, but I think you get the idea.

• Check out the Eco-Gym, I wonder how much a membership would cost?
• How do you do up against the Match-O-Matic?
• And seriously, you never know when something like this might come in handy [ht:chase].
• Check out the Typewrite Orchestra, it’s actually pretty cool.