creds + contribsFor this week’s edition

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SEMI CREDITS

Managing EditorCarmen Valdés

Editor Janay Garrick

Production EditorMatthew Schuler

KYLE SHEVLIN

CYNTHIA GLASS

LUKE BROOKS & SAM MARTIN

Kyle (MDiv) is a singer/songwriter from the Midwest transplanted to Southern California to study theology; attempting to put into words the collision of faith and world through song and written word. kyleshevlin.com

Cynthia (2nd yr MAT, Theology and the Arts): “Anything worth doing is worth sharing.” ironyandlove.wordpress.com.

Charming, dashing, and debonair, international students Sam and Luke harken from “across the pond” and have a keen eye on the biscuit.

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semi sweetEditor’s NoteBy Janay Garrick

I have a love-hate relationship with technology and social networking. I often feel resentment toward my friends for “leaving me” to text someone else while I am standing in their presence and attempting to have a conversation. I feel impatient when required to walk more slowly so that said friends can text-while-walking. Come on! Sometimes, I just want to chuck all iPhones and any beeping device onto the ground and crush them like grapes. But I don’t.

I have friends who still refuse to open a Facebook account because they don’t want to get addicted or feel like a loser because they have twenty-two friends while someone else has 1200. (But seriously, how can a person have 1200 friends, right?) If anything, technology and social networking is redefining so many classic categories and relationships. What does it mean to be someone’s “friend” on Facebook? And should you really ask someone out on a date via text just because you can?

Writer Jeanne Murray Walker in Image Journal poignantly remarks: “These electronic devices that let us do everything simultaneously – talk on the phone, use the computer, speak with somebody

in the room – make life go by faster. Sometimes I wonder if that isn’t paradoxically what we are trying to do: get rid of our lives because it’s hard to live and make wise choices and be aware that we’re going to die. These things are hard to deal with. I sometimes think that these addictions to speed are a form of denial.”

I don’t want to get rid of my life, do you? If anything, these “devices” and “networks” and “tools” should enrich our lives, not usurp them, right? This SEMI is dedicated to talking about said twenty-first century tech. We hope that you don’t just read it online, but pick up a “high touch,” tangible copy on the campus stands and talk to a live person about it over coffee.

It’s no secret. Everyone is doing it. It started in people’s homes. Then spread to the work place. Some people have become so addicted that they compulsively do it in public--sometimes even right in front of their friends, family, and loved ones.

That’s right. I am talking about “twitterbation.”

For those of you unfamiliar with the word, which I hope is everyone since it is my own neologism, let me give you a definition:

twitterbation - noun - (twi-ter-bay-shun) the act of using various forms of social media as a substitute for genuine interaction with other people.

I came up with this word a couple years ago and while I do write it with a degree of jest, I also write it purposefully intending all of its implied connotations. I hope to tactfully explore some of these connotations in the course of this article and apply what is found to the usage of social media.

Masturbation, the term from which twitterbation is derived, is a sensitive topic in the church and in the world. Many of us are aware of its taboo nature and how poorly it has been

handled throughout history. While I hope not to turn this article into a discussion about masturbation, some of the issues that are associated with it have a direct correlation to how we use social media.

In some sense, masturbation is a substitute for sexual intercourse. It is fake. While physically satisfying, it cannot possibly attain the same degree of satisfaction as the real thing. The problem is that the substitute can create an environment that inhibits the pursuit of the actual thing. The person becomes enslaved to the substitute perhaps even believing that what is false is better than what is true. I think most of us would agree that we were made to pursue true things yet we are great at finding substitutes. Golden calf, anyone?

I believe the same can occur with our interactions via social media. Our mediated interactions with each other can become a substitute for actual interaction. We chat and tweet back and forth and we call it dialogue. We call it conversation, but I think many of us recognize that there is something missing from it. We can sense it. Maybe even taste it. We find ourselves engrossed in relational aspartame. We ingest social saccharine.

Twitterbation by Kyle Shevlin

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We make these ersatz connections all the time, many without realizing it. Consider how you use your phone. How many of us text more often than we call nowadays? Have you considered why this is? I suggest it is because texting and email allows us the opportunity to edit ourselves in a way vocal dialogue does not. When I am typing or texting the backspace key is right there. I can delete and retype. Delete and retype. Delete and retype, until I get it absolutely perfect. The problem with this is we end up presenting a false image of ourselves, thus adding yet another layer of mediation to our interactions. We are able to create an idealized portrait of ourselves through social media that doesn’t come close to the person we actually are. Inherently, this creates a falsehood in our online interactions because we are never connecting with the actual person. In turn, they are never interacting with the actual us.

Now, I do not believe social media to be a bad thing in and of itself. This is where the ambiguity of the word “genuine” in my definition comes into play. Our ability to connect with people that are far away from us is a great thing. Many of us use Skype and Facebook to remain in contact with our friends and family who do not live close enough to allow non-mediated contact. I would like to point out, though, that this is most effective when it is done with someone with whom we already have an established relationship. We stay connected

online because we have a connection offline. Yet, even with those dearest to us, we cannot help but realize that the intimacy between two people is diminished when our interactions are mediated.

This is why twitterbation is dangerous. If we are not cautious, it can become a substitute for proximal interactions with people. We can be narcotized into believing that our artificial interactions are equal to our real ones, that our virtual conversations are indistinguishable from our analog ones.

However, I do not write this to make us fearful of social media. We cannot be afraid, nor naive about it. This dynamic will only increase as new technologies are developed. But hopefully, we can be more conscious of how we use it.

Each of us at Fuller is preparing ourselves to be difference makers -- to make a real impact on real people. No matter what the future of social interaction entails, we must always be prepared to lend real ears to hear, real mouths to speak and real arms to embrace one another because the bonds created when we share the same air and space will always be greater than the ones created when we share the same website. ▪

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This article features excerpts from a paper I once wrote for Barry Taylor’s “Theology and Culture” class on the topic of social media and the church. As I wrote it, I ended excited-yet-wary over this still new, near fantastical technology. And in the year that has followed, things are much the same. As it came about, I’ve developed quite the love-hate relationship with both Facebook and its little sibling Twitter as friendships I thought were promising (given interactions in virtual reality) took left turns and fell sideways when exposed to the daylight of actual reality. I’ve found nuance impossible, passions clipped, and the only thing the medium seems primed for are carefully crafted quips of 140 characters or less as we all jockey for position as the wittiest person in the room with the most esoteric musical taste. Or we have a rough day and we compose a line or two that strikes a balance between the melancholy we feel and the clever snap this public medium demands, but the Internet comes back silent.

But. Yet. Even as I was compiling this

article, Facebook provided a platform for a friend to surprise me with a few words that I really needed to hear. And Twitter has often provided me with much needed amusement that gets me through my day. Both mediums have enabled continued contact with friends and colleagues that once would have been unheard of. So I don’t know. For every news item detailing how this constant stream of data is negatively shaping humanity’s attention spans, there is one to meet it detailing the incredible frontiers these platforms for communication create. Who can know what the future holds?

In its best form, social media allows us to tell stories about ourselves to the world, and allows us to read other people’s stories, dialogue with them and perhaps even identify needs and speak into them—all things in which the church of today is interested. But in its worst form, it can also hinder natural communication as community gets spread a mile wide and an inch deep, and the impetus for that communication becomes self-serving.

Sorry, I just tweeted all over your facebook: a cautionary taleby Cynthia Glass

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The nature of written communication is one-way: I say something to someone and he or she responds or doesn’t. Or a friend of mine says something to me and I can choose to respond or not. As a result, this medium teaches us to communicate in a way that is surest to garner a reaction, to reassure us that we are not shouting into a void. I end up communicating for my own benefit, rather than for the benefit of sharing and communicating with another person, a sentiment that runs entirely counter to the self-giving Kingdom of God.

Much more than this, however, is social media’s uncanny ability to take us away from the small audience of our immediate world and into the untold reaches of the digital realm and its promises of possible connection: the fantasy self that could exist were a certain email to come in, or the relationship that could occur if a certain somebody were to comment on your witty post. What follows is the very real danger of completely ignoring the concrete friendship that exists in front of our faces.

Due to the overwhelming accessibility of all the information that we can choose to consume, we come to feel like we are constantly behind in a loosing race, and thus fall captive to the lure of the new and unknown in our electronic device. If you have even 200 friends on Facebook, you can’t meaningfully interact with each of them. So

you economize: you throw them a comment here, a status mention there. Maybe you share a video or song. But all this only matters if you also go to the length of interacting with that person in real life in a way that can only take place in person, giving of yourself in the way that Jesus directs his followers to do and allowing that person to do the same. When we spread ourselves as thin as social media can encourage us to do, it becomes harder and harder to devote time to only a few people—a thing that is crucial to personal development.

We’ve got to hold on to the ability to live where we are and not where we wish we were because if you are not where you are, then really, where are you? If you are in a place where you are spending time with people you believe God has put in your life for a reason, you’ve got to trust that it is the investment you make in them right now that will ultimately pay off, not some phantom relationship that may or may not come into reality.

The long and the short of it is that social media can be a powerful tool building up the community of God. It can create an excellent space where community can be formed. However, it cannot—it must not— replace transformative discipleship by real people in real life. Otherwise, we run the risk of converting the church once more into another social gathering place, and God knows we have had quite enough of that. ▪

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After seven weeks of avoiding a place called the “refectory” assuming it was a part of Payton-under-construction, and too embarrassed to ask anyone what a refectory really was, we nervously tip-toed into the promised land. Our expectations were far surpassed. Indeed, it was a land of milk and honey – mainly dripping on the floor from the trash can.

Now we had been told by our fellow students that the friendly and ambient refectory (a.k.a. cafeteria for monks) was a peaceful atmosphere where time stood still. This evoked much enthusiasm of course, but after spending thirty minutes waiting in line and staring at the walls, we realized that what they had meant was simply that the clock on the wall was out of batteries. We made note of the total lack of conversation and complete absence of eye contact. As international students, we can get fed up with the excessive and often artificial, “Welcome to the – how are you today?” verbiage. So to be greeted with a warm and blunt, “What do you want?” made a nice change. Whilst looking around we also began to appreciate the refectory’s unique décor: it has an “Eastern European

train station meets hospital morgue” type feel. We could only assume that Fuller was making the most profound social commentary.

We were also encouraged to see the refectory making a statement on behalf of the Fuller community against the dangers of the modern “Christian” environmental movement. The refectory offers no local, organic, or fresh produce – nothing which even comes close to being accused of “connectedness to the land.” This is a commendable stance against the deep-rooted neo-paganism and feminist mother-earth worship endemic in so-called Christian “creation-care.” The refectory gives no credence to the environmental garb which claims that “God is green.” Um, no, duh. God is not a color, and the refectory’s steamed vegetables hit this theological point right on the head.

The refectory greets students with an intriguing menu offering a wide selection of snacks and meals: everything from burgers to sandwiches. (We still can’t work out why the Chicken Quesadilla appears twice.) One morning, we thought

Across the PondWhat in the “L” is a Refectory?by Luke Brooks & Sam Martin

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we would splash out one breakfast and order a specialty item. The lady behind the counter seemed confused when we ordered oatmeal. “What does it usually come with?” she asked. We replied, “A bowl and a spoon.” The menu smartly makes a statement against a culture obsessed with choice. Every second item is unavailable.

When attempting to pay we were told that we must spend a minimum of ten dollars to use a credit card and so far the bill was $6.50: a further $3.50 needed to be spent on something. We ordered an apple and settled up. Apparently you pay the price for high quality. And for anyone who doesn’t know, Fuller’s refectory has named its sandwiches after heralded heroes of the Christian faith. Of particular interest is the “Mother Theresa Sandwich” which is bacon, sausage, cheese, scrambled egg, hash brown in sour dough bread: an interesting choice of ingredients considering Theresa herself was a life-long vegan and took a vow of poverty. I know that I duly reflect on this saint’s love for the needy and her drive for social justice

as I proceed to shove five different types of meat down my throat.

Now whilst the refectory doesn’t have a large number of staff, a plethora of ingredients, or even a wide array of condiments, there is one thing that remains in plentiful supply: empty chairs. Joking aside though, the refectory is ingeniously designed. Its architectural brilliance is demonstrated by the fact that the refectory has its door ratio well worked out: one for entering, three for leaving.

Let us end on a biblical note. We fondly remember the beloved Canaanite woman who suggested that even Gentiles should receive crumbs from the table. The refectory has taken this model even further and created an entire meal from them: known as the ‘Chef’s Special.’ We are confident that the refectory as a business will continue to survive, primarily due to its strategic location on campus. During student’s seven to ten minute class breaks, the refectory thrives, mainly because there really is no time to get anywhere else. We cannot recommend Fuller’s refectory highly enough. A real triumph! ▪

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HOST | WELCOME | ENGAGE | NETWORKJoin Fuller in welcoming new students this coming academic year. The 2011-2012 Orientation Crew is a fun, temporary, seasonal paid position. Mandatory trainings in Pasadena throughout the summer beginning in August. Space limited. Click on the Portico announcement to view the requirements & complete an application. Contact matthewtalley@fuller.edu, 626.584.5435. Apps due May 25. Interviews to be completed prior to Commencement (6/11).

May 25 the Garth 2-3pAGRICULTURAL ETHICSPeace & Justice AdvocatesSpeaker: Becky Shenton

MAY 27-28 Travis 730p (doors), 8p (curtain)Lee Blessing’s ELEEMOSYNARYFuller Company Theater ProductionELEEMOSYNARY is a fabulous piece of theater which depicts the relations between an eccentric grandmother, a trying mother, and a bright spark of a daughter. Dream like, yet anchored to an often painful reality, Blessing takes the audience on a journey through the complexity, joy, struggle,

and humor of life together. Tix $10 student/$12 general. ASC office on campus or brownpapertickets.comQ’s? thefullercompany@gmail.com

June 1EVERGREEN MINISTRY APPLICATION For 1st/2nd year MDiv students. Great opportunity to work with Ken Fong and Jonathan Wu at Evergreen Baptist Church of LA. Evergreen is one of the most prominent and established Asian American churches. Interviews and a final decisions made by July 1. aatf.fuller@gmail.com

June 4 Travis Auditorium 730p“O TASTE AND SEE” VOCAL ENSEMBLE CONCERTThe ensemble joins in celebrating the Brehm Center 10th Anniversary theme “Engaging the Senses” with a performance that will stimulate all the senses - taste, sight, smell, and touch as well as hearing. Will perform works by Byrd, Rutter, Pärt, Whitacre, and others. Featured guest artist Dr. Karen Johnson, soprano. Suggested donation $5 students/$10 general. brehmcenter.com

June 27-29 Theological Education by Experience (TEE) Interactive tour sponsored by ISAAC (Institute for Study of Asian American Christianity) includes theological reflections with ministerial implications. Learn to connect your stories with the stories of Little Tokyo, Olvera Street, Chinatown, and Koreatown. $150/Registration fee (three days of guided tours, educational group sessions, transportation + lunch). Space very limited. aatf.fuller@gmail.com

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FIELD ED

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AUTO BODY REPAIRColumbia Auto Body- Quality collision repair since 1982. We work with every insurance company. Lifetime Warranty! Owned by Fuller graduate. 1567 Colorado Blvd,Eagle Rock. 323-258-0565

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fielded@fuller.eduAlejandra Mattoni626 584 5387

June 23 Geneva Rm 12-2pORIENTATION TO THEOLOGICAL REFLECTIONRequired for those enrolled in 1st qtr Part-time Church Intern (FE501/A), Full-time Church Internship (FE533/A), + FE500 Practicum (Summer Qtr). Contact Field Ed to sign up.

SUMMER 2011 FIELD ED HOSPITAL + HOSPICE INTERNSHIPSTwo-unit FE546 Hospital Chaplaincy internships offered at Huntington Memorial Hospital in Pas, Glendale Adventist, Providence Holy Cross in Mission Hills, and St. Joseph Medical Center in Burbank. A two-unit FE548 Hospice Chaplaincy internship offered through VITAS Healthcare Corporation of California or Roze Room Hospice. Courses emphasize spiritual care training in hospital/hospice setting. Learn how to be present to patients/families during crisis, plus prelim steps in performing a spiritual care assessment. Before registering, interns must be interviewed & accepted by the hospital/hospice chaplain. Start the process early!

July 12 Geneva Rm 5-7pMINISTRY + MARRIAGE - DISASTER OR DELIGHT?Presenter: Sharon Hargrave, Director of Strong Marriages, Successful Ministries52% of pastors say that being in ministry is hazardous to the health and well being of their family. Knowing and understanding the role

of marriage and family in ministry can actually benefit the couple and the ministry. Understanding conflict patterns, boundary issues, couple identity and spiritual gifts can enhance the relationship between the pastor and congregation. Participants welcome and encouraged to bring spouses. Seminar will be recorded. July 18 Rm 220 (2nd Fl, 490 E Walnut St) 1-3pWEDDINGS: BEYOND THE CAKE & RINGSPresenter: Rev. Dr. Phil Carlson, Senior Pastor of Bethany Church of Sierra MadreA pastor can have a key role in helping couples prepare and plan for the wedding day, the beauty and significance of the wedding ceremony, as well as the health and longevity of the marriage. Seminar will address premarital counseling, elements of a wedding ceremony, wedding homily, and more.

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institute for the study of asian american christianity (ISAAC) presents

Theological Education by Experiencean interactive historical tour

JUNE 27-29, 2011 ❦ TOUR of LA ❦ $150OLVERA ST., LITTLE TOKYO, CHINATOWN, KOREATOWNDISCUSSIONS LED BY SCHOLARS AND PASTORS ONTHEOLOGICAL REFLECTION & MINISTRY IMPLICATIONS

for more info: SoCal@isaacweb.org