Site of the Day: Christian Vision Project

I've made no secret of my man-crush on Andy Crouch, the director of the Christian Vision Project. That dude is as cool as he is smart, and he's really cool. I mention this because (a) I've historically neglected to link my site to the CVP site, an oversight I've now corrected (see the sidebar below); and (b) I've recently learned that the great DVD curriculum assembled by the CVP--Intersect | Culture--is now available for $25, which is half what I paid for my copy at last year's Catalyst Conference. (A couple weeks later I got a free copy, so it all works out. I heart CVP.) If you have some missionally minded, creatively inclined friends who enjoy hashing out what posture Christians ought to have toward the culture they perceive themselves as living in, you'd enjoy this. Buy it (or at least take a peek at it) here.

What Color Is Your Pair of Fruit?

Today I dissed my friend Stacey's choice of lunch item. She was standing innocently by the microwave, just making conversation, commenting that she'd never tried this particular brand of pre-fab food before. So I looked and noticed that her particular selection of pre-fab food had been titled "Orange Beef." So I said, out loud, "That sounds gross."

It was a purely visceral response, and she received it with great aplomb, but a comment such as mine is only the beginning of a conversation--never should it be the ending. Together we figured out that what she was interpreting as a fruit, I was interpreting as a color. I, of course, quickly agreed that orange as a flavor is delicious, and presumably would taste good glazed over a nice chunk of pre-fab beef. Stacey also quickly allowed that she would eat orange-colored beef only under duress.

I should also say that I'm not really in any position to judge anyone's eating habits. While I was mocking Stacey's entree, I was heating up an ad-hoc combination of my Monday night's dinner (beef and spiral pasta with an onion-based sauce) with my Wednesday lunch leftovers (chicken and shells in a pesto sauce). My meal was an odd mix of earth tones--green chicken, brown beef, and a mix of tan and green noodles of varying shapes. What can I say--I was hungry.

Anyway, that's not my point. My point is that there's an odd history of blurred boundaries between fruits and vegetables, on the one hand, and colors on the other. My brother has luggage that isn't blue or purple but eggplant. My sister-in-law introduced me to the joy and frustration of blueberry picking, and she has a blackberry bush in her backyard. Banana-flavored candy doesn't taste like bananas; it tastes like crap. It's only called banana-flavored because it's yellow.

So now I'm intrigued by how fruits and vegetables and colors get commingled in culture, so let me cherry-pick your grey matter a bit:

What are your favorite cultural artifacts, mental images and cliched metaphors that employ fruits, vegetables and colors?

RIP, CAP

Captain America is dead. Read about it here.

I devoted a chapter of my book to Captain America as a symbol of the journey from idealism through disillusionment to conviction. And while to kill a superhero is not necessarily to end his life, the death of Captain America is unavoidably a statement. He died once before, in the 1940s, as short-sighted comic publishers failed to grasp a vision for the character beyond the immediate jingoism of World War II, but his death this time is an indictment not of comic publishing but of the American experiment: the world, it suggests, has moved beyond America, and America will ultimately be left behind.

It's funny, because before I heard about this development I rewatched Superman Returns, in which Superman, um, returns after a five-year unexplained absence. In the interim, Lois Lane has moved on, giving birth to a child of dubious parentage, entering into a long-term committed romance and authoring the article "Why the World Doesn't Need Superman"--for which she wins a Pulitzer prize. Superman isn't dead per se, but in the eyes of Lois, in the eyes of the world, he might as well be.

By the end of the movie, of course, Lois has saved Superman, Superman has saved her; she has saved her son, he has saved her; she has saved her boyfriend, he has saved her. Superman has saved the world, and the world has saved him. Lois sits down to write another article: "Why the World Needs Superman." She's moved from idealism, through disillusionment, to conviction.

It's funny, because I'm also three months into the Year of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who writes on Christianity in the aftermath of the death of Christianity. He is leading me from idealism, through disillusionment, to conviction.

So I'm hopeful that Captain America will be resurrected. The world may not need him today, but tomorrow is another story.

***

In other news, my book just came out in an Indonesian edition. I can't read it, but it sure looks sweet.