Background Information for Episode 1

Our first podcast is coming soon. Read the brief biography of Rick Warren I posted earlier and then have a look at some of this material to get ready for the discussion.

Here is Rick Warren's own "News and Views" podcast he produces every couple weeks. This one is from mid-December and it highlights a number of the issues we are likely to touch on. I especially like, at about the 2 minute mark, where he says that bloggers who criticize him need to get a life. Yep. We do.

Here is a portion of the Civic Forum Warren hosted, where he interviewed Obama and McCain. This is just a portion with Obama, but if you follow it back to Youtube you can find the rest of the clips.



Below is a chunk of an interview Warren did with Sean Hannity on Fox News to promote his new book. The conversation took a brief diversion into foreign policy, as you will see...



And here is a CNN debate on Obama's choice to have Warren deliver the invocation at his inauguration.



There is a plethora of material out there if you want more perspectives to reflect on, but this should give you a start.

Meet Richard Duane Warren

We said from the beginning that this site was going to host a podcast and maybe eventually forums and who knows what else. We are very much "in development" here. This is early stages. You are seeing us without our makeup on. But we meant what we said about the podcast.

Our first podcast will be posted this weekend if things go smoothly, and the subject will be Pastor Rick Warren. Tune in to hear Doug, Nick, and myself banter about the man who is, for better or worse, the most prominent face of the church in our country right now.

We're saving the meaty stuff for the podcast, but I thought it would be useful to put up some basic biographical information about Rev. Warren, for us and our readers to refer to. If you haven't already been inundated with commentary and editorial on this guy, you've probably been living under a rock, but somehow in a sea of opinion this kind of basic information often gets missed.

Rick Warren is the senior pastor of Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, California. Most places I've found list this as somewhere between the 4th and 8th largest megachurch in the country, with weekly attendance around 20,000 people. He founded Saddleback in 1980, preaching on his first Sunday to a congregation of 200. Since then the church has used 80 different facilities as they've grown. His church is big. Really big.

Warren was born in 1954 in San Jose, California. His father was a Baptist minister, and his mother was a High School Librarian. He received his personal call into full-time ministry at the age of 19 when he and a friend skipped class to go hear W.A. Criswell preach. Shaking hands after the service, Criswell laid hands on Warren and announced that he would start a church of his own. Warren went to Seminary at Southwestern Baptist where he graduated in 1979, just before starting Saddleback.

Warren is most famous for writing the "Purpose Driven" series of books, particularly Purpose Driven Life. The first book in the series was about his church growth strategies. Purpose Driven Life is a devotional for the individual believer focusing on the same themes of achieving goals by trusting in God. These books have spawned a series of conferences and countless small groups in churches around the world who aim to restructure their lives, and their ministry using Warren's method.

Warren is usually regarded as a moderate evangelical because his ministry has included emphasis on education, HIV/AIDS relief, poverty, and other issues typically emphasized by progressives. However, he holds strongly conservative views on social issues like abortion, gay marriage, euthanasia, and capital punishment. He is theologically conservative on most issues, though some evangelicals have questioned his positions on salvation for non-christians, which he has normally claimed to be agnostic about.

Warren has recently gained a lot of attention and controversy for his political involvement. He played a role in the 2008 Presidential election when he hosted John McCain and Barack Obama at his church for a question and answer session in a stated attempt to restore civility to civil discourse. However, many felt that he was manipulative in his questions in order to boost John McCain's image. He also was a public supporter of Prop 8 in California to ban homosexual marriage, comparing homosexuality to pedophilia and incest in his sermons. These actions made him a controversial choice by President Elect Obama to give the inaugural prayer on January 20th.

Many are saying that Warren is the new Billy Graham - the nation's pastor. Regardless of whether you like him or not he is shaping many people's perception of Christianity in America.

Conversation Topics

Here at Two Friars and A Fool, we hope to have a lot of good conversations. One of the ways we want to converse is though a podcast that we are currently working on. We invite anyone who's interested to join in the discussion. We have been cogitating on what we might want to talk about, and would like any feedback people want to offer on some of our ideas, as well as other topics you want to see us cover.

One is Rick Warren. In a recent conversation with Sean Hannity, he came out and said that it would not only be righteous to assassinate Mahmoud Akmadinijad, but that it was God's intent for the state to do things like that. This statement and some of what followed it infuriated me to no end, and I want to talk about it and see what we come up with.

Another is Seminary education. These grapes have set our teeth on edge for almost four years now, ever since we Friars and Fool have been caught up in the sticky web of SFTS. If nothing else, we need to vent so that our ulcers are put off a couple of years. This may need to wait until we've all officially graduated, though.

A third could be abortion. Its an issue that seems designed to divide people and make them furiously angry. Also, to make them call each other Nazis as often as possible. And while calling people you hardly know "Nazi!" is pretty fun, eventually you realize that they're calling you Nazi too, and maybe you should do some more thinking about this topic. At least, that's where I'm at.

We could easily do a series on our current political climate. It seems like a lot of changes are happening. Our tax dollars are being shoveled into the pockets of incompetent executives at record-setting rates - billions of dollars allegedly already gone unaccounted-for in our haste to enact what Jon Stewart calls our "cash for incompetence program". Pretty soon Obama will ride into the White House on the back of a rainbow unicorn and fix everything with a wave of his magic wand. Right? Definitely stuff to talk about there.

Also, what the Hell? We can talk about that age-old threat leveled against non-believers and lukewarm believers alike - the fires of perdition! Do we need Hell? Do we want Hell? Is it a core affirmation of our faith, or relic of a time before the Hubble and geology? If we do keep it, where does it go? If we can toss it, what do we lose?

Of course we have to mention sex. The beast with two backs. The horizontal mambo. Coitus. Coupling. And so on. What argument about religion and then politics would be complete without ranging over into sex? A lot of yelling goes on about sex - who is having it with whom, what they are allowed to do, when they are allowed to do it - and a lot of sex is going on amidst all that yelling. Yet, rape statistics remain humiliating and terrifying for anyone with even a sliver of conscience and empathy. Domestic abuse and violence are unbelievably common. Kids continue to have kids. I dunno...maybe all this yelling isn't working? Ya think? So what do we do instead?

(And when the category of sex comes up, we'll probably also talk about The Gay. Mike Huckabee, on the Daily Show, just laid out the case against, and I think Jon did some good work taking it to him and not letting the issue stand pat, but there's always more to say.)

One thing I think we'd all like to see is feedback and suggestions from the patrons at our little bar here. What do you want to listen to three guys discuss and argue about? What do you want to discuss or argue about with us?