This past Saturday Fox News commentator Glenn Beck held a rally that many have rightly termed a revival at the National Mall in Washington DC. Beck promised that the event, called “Restoring Honor,” would not be political in nature, and even though Sarah Palin was one of the event's main speakers, it seems he may have stuck (mostly) to his promise. The event has been likened more to an old Pentecostal tent meeting or a church picnic, then to a political rally.

Beck, a Mormon, invoked the name of God as the answer to our nation’s woes and declared Saturday the day that America “begins to turn back to God.” His audience, predominantly white and brimming with Christians, cheered Beck and the other speakers and provided the New York Times and plenty of Jesus-laden quotes about the fate of this country.

Some readers may expect us at Patrol to condemn Mr. Beck and his rally, but I’m going to do the opposite. I’m going to thank him...

Two years ago, in the spring, my wife and I were planning a move to New York City. We didn't have jobs or even a sense of where in the vast region we should live. All we knew was that Steph was starting graduate school in the fall.

I was scared. I know that many “moving to New York” stories don’t tell you this, but it is scary. It’s scary to make a move toward the unknown in any situation, but when the unknown is New York City, the trepidation multiplies.

This experience might have been completely unbearable if it hadn’t been for a happy accident in the month of May. As a last assignment in the freshmen writing course I was teaching I asked my students to write an evaluation essay, a review – music, film, book – anything. I love this assignment because it is fun for the students and I get to learn about new albums, movies, and books. One student took it upon herself to review the then latest album by mewithoutYou, “Brother, Sister.”

I had heard of the band from a friend who thought, correctly, that I would like them. He showed me “January 1979” from "Catch for Us the Foxes," and though I thought it was great, I didn’t get around to purchasing the record or following up on the band. But after reading my student’s review, which was very well written (I hope I gave her an A), I downloaded “Brother, Sister” immediately.

That album, in no small way, made the move to NYC not only possible, but truly a life changing experience. There is a refrain that both opens and closes the record and is weaved throughout; Aaron Weiss, the lead vocalist, proclaims, “I do not exist.” Concluding in the last track, “In A Sweater Poorly Knit,” “Only you exist.”

I’m not sure why this refrain had such an impact, or continues to move me so strongly. Something about getting myself out of the way felt right and made our move easier. Coincidentally, the very month we arrived, after I found a job through a set of miraculous circumstances and we fell in love with our new neighborhood, mewithoutYou was playing a show at Maxwells in Hoboken. Here I learned my first lesson about the music scene in NYC: tickets must be bought far in advance. The show was sold out. I would have to wait for my chance to see them live.

Last night, the wait ended...

I think we are caught in a vicious cycle. Case and point: a new series over at "Patheos" on the future of Evangelicalism. This particular run of articles and opinions is a part of a larger look at the future of religion, and in the Christian camp they've already covered Catholicism and Mainline Protestantism.

The series began yesterday and a new set of essays will be released on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays for the next two weeks. Our old buddy Matt Anderson already weighed in on the question, as have other prominent evangelical writers and bloggers like Scot McKnight and our favorite antagonist, Joe Carter. Still to come is insight from Mark Noll, Jim Wallis, Brian McLaren and Rob Moll...

I recently published a piece over at Religion Dispatches, one of a few wonderful, lately emerging religion news sites, about the trend of young evangelicals converting to Catholicism. It's called "Evangelicals ‘Crossing the Tiber’ to Catholicism" and you can read it here.

Check it out, and weigh in by using their "letters-to-the-editor" feature.

Well, almost a year after we at Patrol went on record to quell the manufactured outrage over swearing Christians, Christianity Today is back at it again. This time it is Mollie Ziegler Hemingway who posted a piece on that most specific and forbidden kind of cussing, “using the Lord’s name in vain.”

In her article she lays out her case with example after example of the way that people who do not necessarily profess to be Christians or even have any real relationship with Christianity use our Lord’s name in vain. Among the offenders are the HBO series “The Pacific,” Jonathan Chait of The New Republic, Joe Biden, and even Tiger Woods.

Hemingway’s piece does dig a bit deeper when she gets to the importance of God’s name as the way that he reveals himself to humanity, and she really hits her stride as she points out that using God’s name in vain can mean misrepresenting him in word or deed...

This post over at “Mere Orthodoxy,” entitled "The Culture Wars Enter American Cinema," reminded me that I meant to solicit some opinions on the film “The Kids Are All Right.”

Christopher Benson, author of the aforementioned post doesn’t say much about the film (actually what he did was embed the film’s trailer, in addition to a few others which I had not heard of but that are meant to exemplify the point he is making in the post’s title), but the implication, I think, is that it is clearly propaganda in the culture wars.

I have a couple of thoughts about this. The first relates to the assertion that the “culture wars” are just now entering American cinema. If you are a person that is concerned with the culture wars, wouldn’t you believe that American cinema has always been a battlefield?

Secondly, and I suppose this is more of a question than a point, did anyone who saw “The Kids Are All Right” feel that they were witnessing propaganda? My wife and I saw it this past weekend and we were both amazed by how little “proselytizing” it actually did...how cynical is that? The message to me seemed to be that marriage is difficult and family is important. In fact, the only aspect of the film that I felt could be construed as pushing some kind of agenda would have to be the title, which, of course, is a reference to a 1960’s song by The Who.

Did you see it? What did you think?

I know this isn't a tech blog, but sometimes I like to pretend.

There are a lot of rumors flying around the blogoworld today about a potential recall of the iPhone 4. I think this is ridiculous.

As if it wasn't annoying enough that the first question strangers ask when they see my shiny new phone is some variation of, "Have you had any of those problems that everyone is talking about?"

No.

And I know this may seem narrow, but I'm not sure there really is a problem. Yes, we can all make the bars on our phone drop by doing some fancy handling tricks, but is anyone dropping calls? In my mind there are a bunch of techy geeks (even more so than me) standing around (and making videos) covering a corner of there iPhones with big, sweaty palms in order to show off this "flaw." But is that how they hold their phones? In a bear grip? Then there are the more delicate, but equally nerdy, clowns holding the bottom left corner with their index finger. Really?

Wait, what?

Books & Culture, the revered evangelical scholarly journal, featured this small poem today on their site:

Seems funny enough, but on B&C? I don't get it. Professor Belz? J-Dub? Anybody?

Nevermind the World Cup or General Petraeus, for me the big news of the day is the release of the iPhone 4. Though some lucky people received their prize yesterday, the rest of us (early adopters? Fanboys?) are forced to wait expectantly for the elusive FedEx or UPS truck to roll down the street. Anyway, that’s the story here in Jersey City where there’s nothing to do (actually, there’s always a ton of things to do) but wait.

In the meantime, this gadget-lust and obsessive need to upgrade got me thinking about a piece I wrote a while back for our sister-magazine The Curator. Here’s an excerpt, and a link to the rest below:

I think upgrading is great. I upgrade as often as possible: phone software, websites, computer hardware, anything. But I’m very much aware that something important is lost in all of this frenzied upgrading – namely, permanence.

For instance: consider that website you visit frequently. Imagine that the design has changed, but you really liked the way it looked before. Too bad – it’s gone now. This certainly has been evident in the many new iterations of Facebook that have been released in the last few years. Every time that social networking site updates their look or the way certain features work, a group (the existence of which was, of course, an added feature to their previous platform) is created decrying the new look and feel.

We, as humans, long for change, for the chance to better ourselves and our surroundings and yet, almost as vehemently, we mourn the loss of what we had. Take for example, the graphic designer who decided to print out 437 “featured” Wikipedia articles, producing a book 5,000 pages long and 19 inches thick, to “make a comment on how everyone goes to the internet these days for information, yet it is very unreliable compared to what it has replaced.” No one, not even this “artist,” is even sure what is being replaced, but we’re sure we’ll miss it – that is, if we take the time to think about it long enough.

Read the rest here.

Last night my wife and I had the distinct privilege of attending the preview night of this year’s Shakespeare in the Park presentation of The Merchant of Venice. This is the second time we’ve had the opportunity to attend the event and in both instances we have been blown away by the cast performances, lighting and stage design, and artful rendering of Shakespeare’s masterpieces.

Last year’s Twelfth Night was mirthful and quirky, the directors and cast obviously having fun with the gender-bending roles. One of my favorite features of The Public Theater’s (the company that puts on Shakespeare in the Park) staging of the plays is the way they manage to make Shakespeare’s antiquated language sound, to the casual listener, as if the cast were speaking in contemporary parlance. In this way, what may be difficult to understand and follow for the uninitiated becomes more accessible.

The Merchant of Venice is no exception. The Public set the play in the 19^th century, and still many of the lines are so casually recited that the listener might wonder, did Shakespeare write that line, or was it added? But Merchant provides another opportunity – or challenge, depending on how you look at it – for the director and cast. That is, when viewed through the eyes of contemporary culture it can easily be seen as a very racist play. Much has been written about the portrayal of Shylock, “The Jew,” but his character, though the most prominent, is not the only stereotype that lives and breathes and walks across Shakespeare’s stage. Each of the princes that tries for Portia’s hand in marriage, the ones you see on stage like the Moroccan and the aging prince from Aragon, in addition to those that are merely described, are walking caricatures.