A non-owner's taste in gun porn

weapons.

I haven't been there for awhile, though, and last night saw me glutting through its archives. Six or seven pages back, I stumbled across this:

I also have a real interest in guns with interesting histories. Guns with a long series of modifications, or pieces that were used by 2 or 3 or 4 or more different countries before finally finding their way to the US....

I could go on – K98k Mausers and MG42s taken from Nazi stockpiles and used by the fledgling Israeli state, Gewehr 88s used in WWI by Germany and then given to Turkey, updated to use spitzer ammo, and then reworked to look like Mausers... Vetterli rifles updated every time a European war looked imminent... They may not appeal to a lot of people, but to me those are the really interesting pieces. “If this rifle could talk…I’d need to learn three new languages to understand its story.”

What do you think? What do you find appealing in a prospective gun purchase?

And so, having neglected blogging for a few days, I thought I'd write about it here.

This is my story

The single most visited page in the history of this blog was "Testifying." My list of 15 reasons why I spent ten years out of the church, written in response to Rachel Held Evans's post of the same name. (I've retroactively tagged it "responsive writing," because it totally was that before the tag existed for it to be.)

Rachel also wrote a follow-up piece to it, "15 Reasons I Returned to Church." It doesn't have nearly as many responses, and while I may yet itemize a 15-point list of my own, this isn't going to be that list. It's tangentially related, though, because once again I'm writing a confession of faith.

No rest for the non-rightist Christian, I guess. Last week it was Tony Jones. This week it's the Anarchist Reverend:

But in our attempt to not be the screaming of the religious right we’ve become a kind of watered down left filled with platitudes and vague warm feelings. That doesn’t cut it for me anymore. And I have a feeling that it doesn’t cut it for a lot of other people either.

I want to know why you’re in this faith. I want to know why you remain a Christian? Why does it matter?

It was a good question, and although I didn't answer before the 24-hour deadline was up, it got me thinking.

Attempting "something substantive about God"

Back on Tuesday, Tony Jones wrote "A Challenge to Liberal Bloggers to Write One Post About God":

I challenge all progressive theo-bloggers to write one post about God between now and August 15.

I mean, all of you: Fred, Scot, Rachel, MPT, John Shore, everyone at the Patheos Progressive Portal, and all of you I haven’t mentioned or even ever read. Write something substantive about God. Not about Jesus, not about the Bible, but about God.

Now that I'm done, as Tony Jones would put it, "clearing my throat," I'm gonna (pardon the metaphor) spit it out.

God is sacred, and near at hand and difficult to grasp, and love in an eldritch non-Euclidean way, and kinda self-explanatory but not so much, and above my pay grade.

So there you go: a substantive sentence. And having said that, let's unpack this thing.

"Something substantive about God": clearing my throat

Back on Tuesday, Tony Jones wrote "A Challenge to Liberal Bloggers to Write One Post About God":

I challenge all progressive theo-bloggers to write one post about God between now and August 15.

I mean, all of you: Fred, Scot, Rachel, MPT, John Shore, everyone at the Patheos Progressive Portal, and all of you I haven’t mentioned or even ever read. Write something substantive about God. Not about Jesus, not about the Bible, but about God.

This is not going to be that post. In fact, it's gonna be everything but that post, so I can save time writing it.

My 10 faith-shaping books.

Sarah Bessey (as noted earlier) is a smarter person than I, and when I read that post in which she shared 10 books that changed her faith, I felt... kinda compelled to respond. It just took me a really, really long time to figure out what that list was, especially being distracted by being a demiurge and all. (Confession time: while I was in Niantic last week, I bought some of those books. One of them is overlapping, but one or two others were "Hey, she mentioned that! Want!" splurges.)

So here we are, with my list of 10 books that shaped my faith.

#1: Stealing Jesus: How Fundamentalism Betrays Christianity, by Bruce Bawer.
I'm honestly ashamed by this one, because in a lot of ways it shaped my faith for the worse. But it was the first chronologically, and it's had the most lasting impact, so there it is at the top.

Testifying.

Rachel Held Evans started this. Slacktivist made it known to me. The commenters inspired me to join them.

No two members of my family churched the same. Dad didn’t at all, despite those missionaries teaching him to speak English. Mom left Catholicism for various other things over the last thirty years. My sister spent her formative years dragging Mom to the local evangelical church, where the projector screen in the sanctuary was bigger than the parking lot outside. I was the only one raised as a purely mainline Protestant.

In some kinds of testimonies, you’re supposed to get to the part where you invited Jesus into your heart, and then you cry until your makeup runs, and then everybody prays over you. This ain’t one of those testimonies. This is mine. This is why I left.

1. I left because my confirmation was a tribal signifier.