Monday, April 24, 2006

A few new links; and Down with the gospel according to the WPA

It's 10 pm in Kikai. Do you know where your kids are?
Me, I'm in front of my lappy-toppy, prepared once again to type a blog.
Let me take a moment to point out a few links, BlogSpotting if you will. First, the Blackblogger has written an extremely insightful post on the recent Duke LaCrosse team incident, and I think his last 2 posts have been his best so far. Getting better w/ age, he is. Much like a good aromatic French cheese. But don't tell him I related him to something French. Don't want his next aggressive post to be about ME.
Also, on the left (if I indeed remembered to republish this blog before hitting the sack tonight) you will see a few new links. One is to my new MySpace site. It's not much, but the good thing about that is that it won't take long to visit. I guess I think MySpace is OK, and there are a couple of people I can more easily communicate w/ thru that site than by other means (since they don't seem to respond well to email). So there you go. Also, you'll see a couple of Kikaijima links that I dredged up from my old still-in-Norman-waiting-to-go-to-Japan bookmarks. Now that I have been here for 8 months, I find them very interesting and cogent, actually.
My favorite part of the articles is the last quote of the first one about Kikai's political scene. I think that article is at least 8 years old, written (obviously) before the alluded-to military installation was constructed (it's now operational) on Kikai. There was (according to a couple of friends of mine) vast public disapproval of it, but the gov't built it anyway.
I bring this up b/c mainline Christian leaders and churches in Japan have a reputation for being much more interested in the "social gospel" than they do in the real Gospel of Christ, and end up being involved in public education and politics, pacifism, etc. It appears that Pastor Maruyama (whose 'church' we attend on Sundays) ('church' is in quotes b/c it's, as previously mentioned, part of his family, one handicapped lady, and us) is no exception to this rule. A friend told me a story about Pastor M attending a public education town hall meeting and bawling out the speaker b/c of educational policies and quality of the schools. I take that w/ a grain of salt. But then 3 weeks ago a peace activist-in-training shows up on Kikai from Nagasaki and spends 3 days here seeing some WW2-related sites. Pastor M proudly escorted him around the island on at least one of those days, he himself told me. And then there's his comment in this article about the military installation.
So I suppose this can serve as a partial answer to the question: What do you guys pray for? Could anything be of more value to Kikai right now than a little good spiritual leadership?

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