Because I’ve posted about the movie here, I’ll point you to my review of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull over on my arts blog.

Carey and I have become members of the Arboretum of Los Angeles County for a year. Finding a place so lush with vegetation in Southern California offers a unique breather from the asphalt and power lines. I’d hate to see their water bill, however. Here are some pictures. I’ll be posting more as the year progresses I’m sure.

“An Evangelical Manifesto: A Declaration of Evangelical Identity and Public Commitment,” is up on the interwebs. I’ve yet to read it, but really want to since the issue—faith and politics—is right up my alley. I hope to get to it and post on it soon.

Over at Mere Mission, Todd Hiestand asks what the announcements in our church bulletins can tell us about how missional our congregations are.

Are all your announcements about things internal? While I’m a believer that discipleship and community life stuff is important for the mission of a local body, if all of the activities, programs, etc are pointed inward, this might be a good indication that the church needs to take some intentional steps outside itself.

This is a good question, in my opinion. If bulletins tell us what is happening in the life of a congregation from week to week, I think they can give us a sense of where our focus lies. This would be a challenging and life-giving experiment for many churches, I imagine.

Matt Barber sent me this GigaOM interview with director Brad Bird regarding how he engenders a creative environment. He sounds like a fascinating manager. Bird has made some of the most original and multifaceted films in the past ten years. He doesn’t receive the attention he deserves and I think that’s because his films are animated, as if that medium is somehow deficient compared to live-action movies. But Bird’s three films, The Iron Giant, The Incredibles, Ratatouille, are testaments to his imagination and skill at inspiring people under his leadership to express their creativity. Here are a couple of their exchanges.

The Quarterly: Do angry people—malcontents, in your words—make for better innovation?

Brad Bird: Involved people make for better innovation… Involved people can be quiet, loud, or anything in-between—what they have in common is a restless, probing nature: “I want to get to the problem. There’s something I want to do.” If you had thermal glasses, you could see heat coming off them.

The Quarterly: How do you build and lead a team?

Brad Bird: I got everybody in a room. This was different from what the previous guy had done; he had reviewed the work in private, generated notes, and sent them to the person… I said, “Look, this is a young team. As individual animators, we all have different strengths and weaknesses, but if we can interconnect all our strengths, we are collectively the greatest animator on earth. So I want you guys to speak up and drop your drawers. We’re going to look at your scenes in front of everybody. Everyone will get humiliated and encouraged together…

What would it look like in churches if we employed similar ideas? It might be chaotic, but there is certainly something beautiful in Bird’s sense of we are stronger together than as individuals.

There has been some good discussion and debate. I thought I’d take a moment to lighten things up since it’s Friday. Over on my arts blog, I wrote about some promising developments in the film version of The Hobbit. Not the least of which is the opportunity to see Ian McKellen as Gandalf again. Here is a fantastic clip from the show Extras where he explains his acting method, using his portrayal as Gandalf as an example.

Of all the stages of grief, I find the one I have the most difficulty with is anger. Similarly, others around me seem confounded with the anger. I can appreciate denial, depression, bargaining, and acceptance as natural stages in which it is reasonable to experience without any need to seek a resolution. Anger is a different animal, however.

At its best, anger acts as an emotion or state of mind that responds reasonably to injustice, injury, or simply to things not being right. Anger often moves us to seek solutions to the problems we see. And there lies my difficulty with my anger in my grief. I’ve found myself entering cycles where I am furious at God, Death, or just the fact that my father is dead and then I am mad at myself for being so angry because the thing I want so much is impossible. What solution can come in my angry that will satisfy me? Can I bring my father back to life? I also find myself on edge and in a general state of anger. Little things that normally wouldn’t bother me or might mildly annoy me set me off on tirades.

I’m trying to learn to accept my anger—and anger without resolution in this case—as reasonable. I’m trying not to beat myself up because I want the impossible, as if I would feel better if I only didn’t want my father to come back from the dead. I come from a long line of people who bottle their emotions and so it is difficult to express my anger. Generally, I’m better at distracting myself than with dealing with my anger in the moment. Grief, however, doesn’t allow itself to be ignored.

I know I speak of the stages of grief often and please don’t read into it that I’m trying to compartmentalize mourning—I simply find the stages a helpful matrix to locate myself from time to time.

Rosa Brooks, writing in today’s Los Angeles Times offers a reasonable assessment of what to do with Jeremiah Wright, his claims, and the larger issues he has unearthed.

With multiple televised performances, Wright has now definitively proved he shares that most quintessential of all American traits: a profound desire to hog the airwaves and proclaim, “It’s all about me.” Next stop: “American Idol”!...

With a campaign message emphasizing unity and hope, the last thing Obama needs is his former pastor running around espousing views most other Americans find offensive and deluded, such as the conviction that the U.S. government started the HIV/AIDS epidemic, or the suggestion that U.S. foreign policy is little different from terrorism….

Something about our collective willingness to throw Wright under the nearest subway train strikes me as a bit too easy….

Let’s turn to Wright, the man with all the answers. Here’s what he said this week: “Based on the Tuskegee experiment and … what has happened to Africans in this country, I believe our government is capable of doing anything.”

That’s not a completely unreasonable perspective. The Tuskegee experiment was a 40-year U.S. Public Health Service study on the effects of untreated syphilis. Who were the lucky human guinea pigs who got to experience untreated syphilis? Poor and mostly illiterate black sharecroppers in Alabama, that’s who. They were falsely informed that they had “bad blood,” not syphilis, and denied access to the necessary medicine. The study was terminated only in 1972, when an appalled researcher leaked reports to the media.

That could make you a little paranoid. And it’s not a form of paranoia Americans can afford to scoff at. As the 2005 Rand study concludes, African American distrust of the healthcare system—stemming from “well-documented cases of racial discrimination that led to substandard healthcare for African Americans”—may be “one factor contributing to the AIDS epidemic.”

In other words, if we want to score political points, we can dismiss AIDS conspiracy theories as crazy. But if we’re actually interested in ending the AIDS epidemic, we need to understand how rational people can end up believing such theories so we can persuade them to change their minds and their behavior. The same goes for most of Wright’s other seemingly far-fetched assertions….

[E]ven if it makes us queasy, we should take his theories about the world seriously enough to refute them, carefully and thoughtfully. If we truly want to move beyond the politics of division, we can’t afford to do anything less.