Wanna go to church? Tired of shopping? Go to “The Church of Stop Shopping.”

"The Church of Stop Shopping," eh? What is this church all about? I'm not sure yet. This "Church" got my renewed attention, thanks to a friend who sent me a link today. Among it's other activities, the Church is promoting a new movie ("The movie santa doesn't want you to see"). The title of the new movie? "What Would Jesus Buy?"

On Friday, November 16th, the Shopocalypse ends. It is on that date that Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping set out across America in two bio-diesel buses, confronting with their singing and preaching the shopping frenzy of America. Travel with our harmonizing activists, as they invade the Mall of America, cast spells on the front-door of Wal Mart headquarters in Bentonville, wind up a whirlwind in a tent revival in Texas and hurls them all the way to Disneyland and the final Day of Judgment: Christmas.
Here's a bit of information about the church itself:
The first job of a church is to save souls. Pulling out of the advertising/debt/waste cycle of Consumerism is our idea of deliverance. Our soul-saving mission work is dramatic rituals and plays inside retail environments. As you will see from the interventions that I sketch out below, in instruction manual form – our missionaries are sometimes completely invisible to management’s eye. And then sometimes the chaos and broad strokes — Inappropriate Behavior! Amen! – is the whole point and carries our message best.

Continue ReadingWanna go to church? Tired of shopping? Go to “The Church of Stop Shopping.”

What fuels media coverage of political campaigns

Marty Kaplan has described how the media covers political campaigns.  The media: work for a big business, whose oxygen is attention. They live or die on grabbing and holding audiences. To stay in business, they need combat, conflict, heat, meat, flip-flops, gotchas, losers, boozers, hairpin turns, heroes with feet of clay, Rockys,…

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Are you having difficulty figuring out who you are ? Then take an inventory of your friends.

Periodically, I become a bit disoriented in the swirl of life, which gives rise to the question: “Who am I?”  We aren’t static beings, of course.  We are complex adaptive systems, communities of relatively simple cellular life that number in the trillions.  Many of “our” cells (in fact, the great…

Continue ReadingAre you having difficulty figuring out who you are ? Then take an inventory of your friends.

Jeffrey Stone on originalism

In "Supreme Imbalance: Why Originalism and Conservative Activism Are Wrong," I think Jeffrey Stone has it about right in his Huffpo article on the jurisprudential doctrine that goes under the name of "originalism." With this mindset, the notion that any particular moment's conception of rights should be taken as exhaustive…

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