Author: Jonathan Dodson

Lester Brown at the Globalist presents a compelling case for people-centered urban design, to promote the overall quality of life in cities. He writes:

With more than half of the world’s population living in urban areas, pollution and traffic congestion are an ever increasing problem. In an age where public parks are being sacrificed to make room for parking lots, Lester Brown proposes that city planning should benefit people — not cars.

I raised some similar issues in my article “Hate the City, Love the City.” However, Brown does deeper but without the lens redemption. Read the whole article and share your thoughts.

Living in Austin has a lot of benefits. One is the culture of “Keep Austin Weird,” which among other things, advocates supporting local business. From Whole Foods to Austin Java, local business in Austin offers the consumer a diverse, unique, and often of high quality shopping experience. We’ve bought into the ethos; it’s great to eat, shop, and frolic locally.

According to the Globalist, going local is a rising trend that may clip globalization. Stephen Roach points out that globalization has led to a higher standard of living in third world countries, while producing more consumers. India and China’s standards of living have doubled and quadrupled over the past 15 years. However, richer countries like the U.S. aren’t benefiting from increased consumers and globalization, as imagined.

Roach writes: “With labor costs easily accounting for the largest portion of business expenses, this has proved to be a veritable bonanza for the return to capital — pushing the profits share of national income in the major countries of the industrial world to historical highs of 15.6%.” In other words, “An era of localization will have some very different characteristics from recent trends: Wages could go up, and corporate profits could come under pressure.”

Local or global? Do you see these trends as economical delusion or definite possiblity?

I met a guy in the Green Muse this morning who told me that we are in a spiritual war. He said, “You know, it’s like Dylan said, ‘You gotta serve somebody, serve Satan or the Lord.'” It brought to mind the movie Fight Club, where Tyler (Pitt) says:

Man, I see in fight club the strongest and smartest men who have ever lived. I see all this potential — God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas and waiting tables;  they’re slaves with white collars. Advertisements have them chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit they don’t need. We are the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no great war, or great depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised by television to believe that one day we’ll all be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars — but we won’t.

In his soon-to-be-standard on a biblical theology of mission, The Mission of God, Chris Wright helpfully clears the fog surrounding kitsch missional terminology by providing some very clear definitions for mission, missional, missionary. Anyone remotely interested in being missional would benefit greatly by paying attention to Wright’s lucid distinctions.

My recent article on the missional movement attempts to deal with some of the thin-blooded and misconstrued conceptions of what mission, missional, and missionary mean. Wright pegs the meaning of these words with theological acumen and missiological precision with everyday language:

Mission: Our committed participation as God’s people, at God’s invitation and command, in God’s own mission within the history of God’s world for the redemption of God’s creation.

 

Missionary: referring to people who engage in mission, usually in a culture other than their own. It has even more of a flavor of “being sent” than the word mission itself…the term missionary still evokes images of white, Western expatriates among “natives”…[we] ought to know that already the majority of those engaged in crosscultural mission are not Western at all.

 

Missional: Missional is simply an adjective denoting something that is related to or characterized by mission…missional is to the word mission what covenantal is to covenant, or fictional to fiction. We might say that Israel had a missional role in the midst of the nations–implying that they had an identity and role connected to God’s ultimate intention of blessing the nations.