From Wendy Koch in yesterday’s USA Today, “HUD Gets New View of Who’s Homeless:”

A groundbreaking survey of homelessness being released today found that 704,000 people nationwide sought shelter at least once in a three-month period.

Families with children accounted for one-third of those seeking emergency shelter or transitional housing between February and April 2005, the most recent period studied, according to the report by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The rest were individuals, mostly adult men. Nearly half were black.

The count covered only those seeking shelter, not people living on the street, so the total number of homeless people would be higher….

One of every three homeless kids has a diagnosable psychiatric disorder, such as post-traumatic stress, by age 8, says Ellen Bassuk, a psychiatrist who is president of the National Center on Family Homelessness.

“They have trouble sitting still and learning in school,” she says.

Nine of 10 homeless mothers have been victims of violence, often domestic, she says.

I am on a committee at my church that has begun to look deeper at homelessness in Pasadena. We have hosted a bad weather shelter for the past 18 years and have seen the problem of homelessness grow worse during that time. There are far more women, children, and families living on the streets than there were just ten years ago. Our committee recently participated in a homeless census for Pasadena, though I am not sure when the results of that survey will appear. On a personal note, it is interesting to find myself in the process of buying a house while I grow in my knowledge of and care for people who do not have homes. Perhaps this is an issue that should be addressed in my Theology and Home series.

In the comments of an earlier post on my top 5 closing lines of novels, Timbo suggested that a top 5 list of closing lines of movies would make a post. I agreed. Now, remember, these are my top 5 lists, not lists that I’m arguing are the best of all time for all people. I also decided not to use the line from The Return of the King since I already put that in my list for novels—it’s no fun to have things show up in multiple lists unless it’s something like Richard Nixon showing up in historians’ lists simultaneously for the best and worst U.S. Presidents. Again, these are the last lines of movies, so there are likely spoilers. Consider yourselves warned.

It is difficult to read any part of the Bible and not run into a discussion of land, or home—the issue of home is found in nearly all the meta-narratives of the Old and New Testaments. The first stories of the Bible concern God creating a home for all living creatures and humans getting themselves expelled from it. God makes a grand promise to Abraham and Sarah, that their descendants will have a land—a home—where they will grow into a great nation. The Hebrews later have to leave their home for Egypt during a famine and there they stay for several centuries and become slaves to an empire. At the great Exodus, God liberates the Hebrews and leads them on a journey back to the land they know to be their home. Many of the instructions God gives in the Torah to prepare Israel for their homecoming concern the land, its distribution, and the right care for it. Once they reach the land promised to Abraham, they must clear out the occupants. Generations later, the people of Israel grow unfaithful and God allows foreign powers to attack, overthrow, and take their home from them. The foreign invaders forcibly take large portions of the Hebrew people to distant lands where they become subjects of other empires. Several of the Old Testament texts come from this exilic period when the people of God had to make sense of the fact that they had lost their home. Once the New Testament comes, Israel is back in its home, but Rome, another mighty foreign power, is in charge. As the definition of the people of God expands, over and over again, the followers of Jesus learn that they have a different citizenship, that they are currently aliens or exiles, and will not be truly home until the end of all things, when Christ returns and establishes the new beginning of all things. The Bible can be understood as a story of God guiding his people home.

Carey and I are in the midst of escrow on a house in San Gabriel. I haven’t written anything about it on this blog because I’m a bit of a pessimist and didn’t want myself to become too attached before we held the keys in our hands. We haven’t reached that point yet, but it looks like we’ll be homeowners some time in March. The process of buying a house has proved to be thrilling, but exigent. Finding a realtor, looking at houses, receiving pre-approval and final approval for loans, negotiations, inspections, appraisals, paperwork, paperwork, and more paperwork. We have reached the place, however, where are beginning to dream. We visited hardware stores and pulled paint chips. We walked through Ikea, looking for ideas on how to decorate. (Confession: I like Ikea, but I can’t visit one of their stores without lines from Fight Club running through my head. “Where are you going with this, Ikea-boy?”)

Through this process, we have tried to reflect on buying a house, especially theologically. The discussion of property and ownership is one I fear that the Church has sadly given over to the dominant culture to determine without much of a fight. I will start a series of posts on thinking theologically about home ownership. The morality of purchasing a home will be discussed, but it’s not as easy as a binary decision, i. e., should a Christian own a house/home or not? We’ll explore biblical and theological notions of ownership, home, property, stewardship, and other areas that are relevant to this topic. These are blog posts, so don’t expect a thorough treatment of the Bible and historical theology, but I will try to incorporate the wisdom of others as much as I can. I welcome any thoughts or input.

Tim McGirk writes on Time magazine’s Middle East blog:

Brace yourself. James Cameron, the man who brought you ‘The Titanic’ is back with another blockbuster. This time, the ship he’s sinking is Christianity.

In a new documentary, Producer Cameron and his director, Simcha Jacobovici, make the starting claim that Jesus wasn’t resurrected—the cornerstone of Christian faith—and that his burial cave was discovered near Jerusalem. And, get this, Jesus sired a son with Mary Magdelene….

Cameron is holding a New York press conference on Monday at which he will reveal three coffins, supposedly those of Jesus of Nazareth, his mother Mary and Mary Magdalene.

For real.

From Henri J. M. Nouwen, in In the Name of Jesus:

Lord show me where you want me to go and I will follow you, but please be clear and unambiguous about it! (11)

As a Protestant and an Evangelical, the view of the Bible is especially crucial to my faith traditions. We throw around a lot of technical terms and then debate their definitions. A traditional split has been to say whether the Bible is inerrant or infallible, and each of those terms has several definitions (see this debate in the comments of the A-Team’s blog for an example).

While I appreciate the discussion about whether the Bible is inerrant, infallible, or something else altogether, I wonder if we miss something in our conversation, namely history. (First, a disclaimer that I do not want to take our important, but contextual terms of inerrant or infallible and place them incorrectly into a time period where these terms were not used.) What I mean by history is that the Bible as a collection of various writings has a long, rich, and varied history. When the New Testament was written, the Hebrew Scriptures were pretty well established. But let us remember that the Church did not close the New Testament canon until around 397 at the Synod of Carthage. Until that point, and even afterward, vast amounts of debate surrounded which early Church texts should be considered Scripture and which should not. Books like The Shepherd of Hermas and 1 and 2 Clement did not make the cut. Many church leaders argued that other books that were canonized should have been left out, such as 2 Peter, Hebrews, and Revelation. While some criteria for determining whether a text should be considered Scripture emerged, the early Church never agreed upon a formal set of measures.

I wonder do the facts that a) there was debate over what the NT would look like, and b) that the process of canonization took several centuries to complete, now inform our debates about whether the Bible is inerrant, infallible, etc.? Systematic theology—the area of theology that would deal with matters of biblical inspiration—does address the history of the texts, but usually at the moment of their creation. That is, theologians debate how much the texts are the works of divine action versus how much they are human products. I have seen little that discusses how the fact that the Church put together the NT relates to whether the texts should be considered infallible, inerrant, authoritative, inspired, etc. Peter Kreeft argues that in order for the Bible to be infallible that we would need an infallible Church (his argument is in his talk for the Veritas Forum on why he became a Catholic after growing up as a Protestant Evangelical). Kreeft’s assertion is helpful in the conversation. While as a Protestant, I don’t buy into the idea of an infallible Church, Kreeft at least does address the canonization process of Scripture.

I wonder what people think of this issue. If you are a Christian, how do you view the biblical texts? What brought you to that conclusion? How does the process of canonization inform your view?

New Testament scholar and Princeton Theological Seminary professor emeritus, Bruce Metzger, died on Tuesday. His book The New Testament: Its Background, Growth and Content was the first academic text I read on any of the Bible in my undergraduate studies. Most people will read the first two sentences of this post and ask, who? I would argue that for Christians and anyone who has read the New Testament in the last sixty years, that Metzger was one of the most important and influential figures. Christians reading the Bible put a lot of their faith in his hands without knowing it. Metzger not only helped edit part of the Revised Standard Version of the Bible and served as the general editor of the New Revised Standard Version, he was a major editor with the United Bible Societies, which produces the critical Greek texts of the New Testament upon which most contemporary translations of the NT are based. The United Bible Societies sifts through all the various fragments of NT books, and compiles them into a single work that translators use to create the Bibles you and I read. Metzger was one of the most important figures in the United Bible Societies for decades. He will be missed and we will no doubt continue to feel his influence for decades to come.

(HT: Gathering In Light)

It’s Oscar season. Last night I watched Martin Scorsese’s latest brilliant film The Departed and I thought, he should definitely win this year. I haven’t seen The Queen or Babel, but of the three best picture nominees I have seen (Letters From Iwo Jima and Little Miss Sunshine being the other two), The Departed is by far the most engrossing and consistently good film. Anyway, I thought, in my blog world, it’s time to set the Oscar world to rights. With no authority, I shall become a fanboy and tell you what I think are the great Oscar mistakes and how they should be corrected. It’s odd because lately, the Oscars and most awards have become less important to me. It’s not as if my tastes are validated simply because a film won awards. It’s become evident in recent years that winning Oscars is more about good campaigns than good films. You don’t have to care about these things, and probably shouldn’t, but these are the fun posts that we can debate without anything really mattering.

My first suggestion would be to get rid of the best director and best picture split. How can a film win or even be nominated for best picture without the best direction? For example, in 2001 Moulin Rouge! was nominated for best picture but its director Baz Lurman was not recognized for his part in the film. Who made the movie? Best picture should include the director with the producers. While we’re at it, let’s create best ensemble acting as well. That way films like The Lord of the Rings trilogy can be recognized for all the solid performances.

The second suggestion might be cliche and obvious, but it needs to be said. It’s a travesty that Citizen Kane only won one Oscar (best original screenplay). I say let’s give it the sweep it deserves and hand over the other seven Oscars for which it was nominated—especially best picture, director, and actor (the latter two were obviously Orson Wells). Gary Cooper was good in Sergent York, but Wells’ acting doesn’t feel a bit dated.

In one of my favorite comics from Gary Larson’s The Far Side, we can see inside a bee hive. There are police bees and a detective bee looking at holes in the bottom of the hive clearly made by rocks. The detective bee says something to the extent of, “Wait, someone must have been throwing rocks from the inside!” We can also see a young boy stuffed inside the bee hive. The caption at the bottom of the strip reads:

Artist: G. Larson
Medium: Ink and Paper
Title: It was Late, I was Tired

Without further ado, I present to you a version of It was Late and We were Tired, I have titled, “The Gladiators Circa 2000.” We took these photographs when a couple college roommates and I had some pictures at the end of a film roll to kill. I was behind the camera. I’ll keep my roommates’ identities a secret.