I've already reviewed Frank Viola's book "Reimagining Church." Currently I'm reading his book for the fourth time through. Viola should take this as an indication that I regard his book very seriously, although I still think there are several weaknesses in it. But its main thrust is important. If anything, I may read it through a fifth time.

Also, over at Counterpunch in an article entitled "What Economy?", Paul Craig Roberts has nothing good to say about Goldman Sachs. Furthermore, according to him, things in American are going to get much worse:

The worst of the economic crisis has not yet hit. I don’t mean the rest of the real estate crisis that is waiting in the wings. Home prices will fall further when the foreclosed properties currently held off the market are dumped. Store and office closings are adversely impacting the ability of owners of shopping malls and office buildings to make their mortgage payments. Commercial real estate loans were also securitized and turned into derivatives.

The real crisis awaits us. It is the crisis of high unemployment, of stagnant and declining real wages confronted with rising prices from the printing of money to pay the government’s bills and from the dollar’s loss of exchange value. Suddenly, Wal-Mart prices will look like Nieman Marcus prices.

Read the whole thing. So Roberts is basically saying "ya ain't seen nuthin' yet." As for myself, I think the hole our country has dug for itself is now so deep that with a few shovelfuls more we'll be in China. Hey, it may as well be since the Chicoms own us anyhow.

I don't usually point out articles by Catholic blogger Mark Shea, but I thought this one comparing the various levels of sacrilege carried out by our political parties was perspicacious and analyzes very well the differences between them in this regard. Shea's article, entitled "The Democrats: Party of Casual Blasphemy and Cultured Despisers," reminded me once again why I consider myself a Neitherist: I favor neither the evil Stupid Party nor the stupid Evil Party. Although its title is about the Democrats, Shea draws a comparison between them and the Republicans, and if anything he thinks there may be more hope for the Democrats that they'll come to repentance. Now if were Dante were alive today and rewriting his Comedia, I suspect he'd have a load of fun with our Republidemocanicratic oligarchs, especially while populating the various rings in the Inferno section.

David Gossett and others had a lengthy (and very interesting) back and forth discussion with David Di Sabatino regarding the documentary film "Fallen Angel." Added to this is an editorial by Gossett about the whole matter. I'll quote a portion:

David Di Sabatino wrote on one of the Yahoo Discussion Groups that he perceived Larry as being a fraud like Marjoe Goitner and so attempted to present him as such. Ironically, I knew Marjoe personally and therefore may have a little more insight into him than most.… In the movie, Marjoe speaks directly to the camera explaining how he is about to fraudulently deceive his audience for the sake of his film as a "last hurrah" before retiring and his only motives are to get money and create this film. I find it very hard to believe that Larry was a fraud as Marjoe was—and certainly the evidence does not support that.…

Conclusion

So I was reminded of both the positive and negative sides of Larry leading me to my conclusion concerning the film. I think the fundamental problem with the film is that the director claims he simply presented the unpleasant truth concerning someone that some consider a hero. This would be fine if it were true. However, I believe that rather than gathering interviews to uncover "the truth", the director's starting premise is that Larry was a pathological liar and fraud and has sought out interviews and other information to support his premise. It is not necessarily a problem that the film leads us to a judgment but it is a problem that the film is based on a pre-judgment.

Whatever personal faults Larry Norman may have had, in no way was he comparable to the unabashed cynicism of a Marjoe Goitner. It amazes me that Di Sabatino would make such a patently ridiculous comparison.¹ Gossett's entire editorial should be read. And I think his conclusion paralleled, at least in some small way, the estimation that I had about "Life and and Death of a Hippie Preacher," which is that Di Sabatino had a predetermined template, or Procrustean Bed, into which everything was to be fitted. This narrative template required "villains" for the story, and Chuck Smith and John Wimber were shanghaied, so to speak, into filling those roles.²

In my opinion, if the recent project that I had mentioned earlier were to have some kind of worthy objective, it might be to show that Lonnie Frisbee over the course of his life didn't stay merely the "long-haired (gayh) hippie preacher," the meme³ that now dominates nearly everybody's conception of him, which has been, intentional or not, the primary result of Di Sabatino's documentary. Instead, this recent project might show that his life was in fact far more complicated than this meme, and that perhaps he in some measure overcame his flaws and matured as a person, that he didn't stay the same.

As one example of why I think there's more to the story, such a project might try to explain why Frisbee in the early 1990s was speaking at a Vineyard associated church in Denver, as evinced by the video I pointed out earlier. This seems to belie the theory that Frisbee became the "ostracized outcast," a condition that putatively never changed. But something obviously had changed. What was it? Furthermore, there was Frisbee's evangelistic work overseas, such as in South Africa. He obviously had support for it. Whose was it? There is also the "clerical collar" question that I raised earlier. What was that all about? Was it just a fashion statement? Also, how did Frisbee get involved with this ministry that now claims to have rights to his life's story? What brought him there? What was he doing for them? There are a lot of questions. Therefore, even though I am not ready to give a carte blanche endorsement ahead of time to this project, if it ever does manage to produce a finished product, I shall be very interested in seeing it.

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¹ Such a comparion is a complete confusion of categories. Likewise, when I saw one of John Gilhooley's doctored-up pictures of Di Sabatino, back in Matt Coker's OC Weekly article, I thought that comparing Di Sabatino's difficulties to Christ's suffering was another overblown and muddled confusion of categories.

² Sadly enough, John Wimber died in 1997, and he is no longer here to tell his side of the story; and Chuck Smith Sr., for his own reasons, has chosen not to defend himself against the traducing manner in which he was depicted in Di Sabatino's documentary. But as we have learned from Michael Moore's illustrious career, award-winning film "documentaries" don't necessarily have to be fair or even factual.

³ Which meme has been utilized by some political activists and their fellow travelers by transforming Frisbee into a poster boy in their gayh propaganda toolbox. Therefore, they have a vested interest in maintaining the meme exactly as it is and will strongly oppose any attempt to challenge or modify it.

Back on June 16th, I said, down in a footnote that

It recently came to my attention that there is another group of people who are also attempting to produce a biographical documentary about Frisbee, and their project appears to be a long running one that hasn't been completed yet. What makes this group different is their claim, which they seem ready to back up, that Frisbee before he died had signed over to them the rights to his life's story.

However, I should point out that my mentioning this project should not be construed as an endorsement, which is one reason why I didn't provide any links to it. Furthermore, this project seems to have been on-going since around April of 2008 or earlier, and its milestones are very unclear, although its advocates are soliciting for financial support. People can donate to them if they wish, but there's no way to tell what the money is actually getting used for.

Now the people running this project claim to have rights to his life story, which they say were signed over to them by Frisbee himself before died, the purpose being that any proceeds should go back into the ministry work that Frisbee had last been involved with. Frisbee died over 16 years ago, on March 12th in 1993, and is buried in Garden Grove, California; yet this ministry has apparently been sitting on these rights all this time without doing anything with them. Why was there such a long delay? I can only wonder.

Nevertheless, this more recent project, for all I know, may indeed have as its goal the creation of an an honest and accurate biography, which would be commendable, but unfortunately there is no way to tell if this is the case merely by inspecting the assertions being made on somebody's web page. For some people might claim that they want nothing more than to "preserve the historical record," but in the end their claims can turn out to be nothing but self-serving pish posh. When it comes to the Internet, you can never be sure of anything, and I have no way of judging what the real intentions of this project are.

Also, I'm giving no endorsement because I do not want to be seen as encouraging, in any shape or form, the continuation of a hero worship that is focused on excessively magnifying Lonnie Frisbee. There has been way too much of this already—which is something that became even more evident to me when I viewed a recent video on the Internet in which some people were treating Frisbee's old painting easel as if it were a holy relic. I just hope it doesn't get sawed up into little "splinters of the True Easel" to be auctioned off.

But whatever the aims of this more recent project are, especially if they're to present an alternative view, it's clear that its producers will have a very tough row to hoe, especially when you take into consideration that Di Sabatino's film, which has been in circulation for several years now, has turned Frisbee into a meme of sorts.

Cromwell Requiescat

Near to this place
Was buried the head
Of Oliver Cromwell.
And who can compare
To the terror & dread
Of Oliver Cromwell?
His musket & sword
The Irish have sworn
Were the pain's sting
Of Oliver Cromwell.
"May God sort them out!"
Was Ollie's high shout
When Drogheda's church
Did burn down
All to the ground
At the dire siege
Of Oliver Cromwell.
But now he is gone
And history's song
Forever will be
How dreadful was he,
That nasty & bold
Old Oliver Cromwell.

In my earlier review of Di Sabatino's film, I had mentioned a video of Lonnie Frisbee, which apparently was recorded at Crossroads church in Denver, which was founded by Tom Stipe who is the senior pastor there. The video is over 50 minutes long, and I am trying to track down the exact date when it was recorded, although I suspect it came from the early 1990s or late 1980s. The person who uploaded the video labeled it as "Lonnie Frisbee ministering at Vineyard Church in Dever [Denver] CO Senior Pastor Tom Stipe." However, I can't find anything at Crossroads' website indicating that it is still affiliated with Vineyard at this present time.¹

However, the reason why this particular video caught my attention was near the start (at the 2:36 mark), Frisbee mentions that the breakup of his marriage was the result of an unnamed "spiritual pastor" having an adulterous affair with wife. "He took my filly," which was how Frisbee put it, using an old expression. As I recollect from David Di Sabatino's film, Frisbee's ex-wife pretty much came across in the interviews as the grieving victim with a big beef against pastor Chuck Smith of Calvary Chapel, under whom Frisbee had once ministered. But nothing that I can recollect from Di Sabatino's film indicated she also might have been entangled in an illicit affair of her own. That this might have been the case does tend to belie the depiction, conveyed in the film, of her as a hurting and injured party. At first that depiction seemed convincing, but when I watched this video, it cast Di Sabatino's film in a very different light.

In the Denver video Frisbee gave no further details about this matter and went on with the rest of his sermon, since his purpose for being there in Denver was not to talk about his past. I have no way of verifying what he said, nor am I interested in knowing the lurid details, but what he said does at least indicate that things are not always what they seem to be at first, and that he did have his own point of view about his past relationships and why his marriage failed. My primary reason for pointing this out is that it demonstrates that you can't always take "documentary films" at face value because important information that changes the color of things can get left out, sometimes deliberately. For there can also be another side to the story about Lonnie Frisbee, and his life may have been much more anfractuous than the linear, simplistic narrative theory that Di Sabatino wove in his production "Frisbee: Life and Death of a Hippie Preacher." It is just one reason why I don't entirely trust Di Sabatino's documentary, and why I consider it to have been in some ways disingenuous. And if what I've read about Di Sabatino's other more recent film concerning Larry Norman is any indication, there are other people who don't trust his documentaries either. I suspect that Larry Norman would not have.

Finally, after seeing the Denver video, I can say that Frisbee was an irrepressible and vivacious individual, even mercurial, and it would not surprise me if it was often difficult for him to fit in easily with the conventional way of doing things churchwise. It is easy to imagine that some senior pastors could view him as being too unpredictable and liable to insubordination. But his unpredictability may have been his best quality, for he seemed always ready to turn on a dime if he felt that God was leading him that way. One thing also stands out and that was his humor. He was very funny. It's sad that he is gone.² And now that he can no longer speak for himself, it's even sadder that some people want to exploit him for their own purposes and for procuring a meal ticket for themselves.

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¹ [Update] A search of the Vineyard USA database doesn't list Crossroads as an affliated church; however, it appears that Tom Stipes was affliated with Vineyard in the past, up until around 1991.

² [Update] It recently came to my attention that there is another group of people who are also attempting to produce a biographical documentary about Frisbee, and their project appears to be a long running one that hasn't been completed yet. What makes this group different is their claim, which they seem ready to back up, that Frisbee before he died had signed over to them the rights to his life's story.

Back on Nov. 27th of last year, I had mentioned briefly some of my past, albeit not extensive, dealings with David Di Sabatino. I still haven't had the opportunity of seeing his recent documentary film on musician Larry Norman, who died around February of 2008 after an extended period of ill health. The films's title is "Fallen Angel—The Outlaw Larry Norman." However, I recently came across an interesting review of the film written by Donnie Gossett, who started the band Salvation Air Force and who apparently knew Larry Norman fairly well. Gossett gave the film a mixed review.

Gossett's review did give me some pause. Although I haven't seen "Fallen Angel," I have seen Di Sabatino's earlier film on Lonnie Frisbee. Its title was "Frisbee: The Life and Death of a Hippie Preacher." (I also took the time to retrieve and read Di Sabatino's bibliographic work on the Jesus People Movement, which is probably the only compilation of its kind.) And I've known for some time about the controversy, the details of which I will not go into here, that occured involving Di Sabatino's usage of some of Norman's music in the initial version of the film about Frisbee.

However, for me the biggest, and what I consider the most glaring, flaw in the documentary about Frisbee was the near absence of Chuck Smith's and John Wimber's side of the story. And their side of the story would have been critical to getting a complete picture. I say this especially since in many ways the film painted a very unadmiring picture of Chuck Smith's dealings with Frisbee. I suspect the actual situation was much more complex than this, and I for one don't think that Smith was as callous as the film ended up depicting him as being. Therefore, hearing more from Smith about his side of the matter was something very lacking.

Consequently I had the feeling that Di Sabatino tended to push things into the mold of a preconceived paradigm and that too much of what might have been important was left out, especially if it didn't readily fit that paradigm. As it was, the film was compilation of interviews with some added music and graphics, but taken altogether, it struck me as one-sided and overly simplistic, narrating Frisbee's life as a good-guy versus bad-guys scenario—even if it was a "flawed hero versus the big bad establishment" variation of that scenario. The film did have some merit in trying to tell a story of an interesting personality from a now obscure corner of days gone by, but I don't think it deserved all the soaring acclaim it received. It wasn't that great.

Although a charismatic personality, a revivalist, Frisbee was not some figure who towered way above others, but was just one participant within a movement that was very much larger than himself.¹ There were many other people in that movement who were just as influential but just haven't made it into documentary films. The movement itself has since passed away, but the film makes Frisbee's role look larger than it really was at the time. And if Frisbee wasn't flawed in the particular way that he was, I doubt that he would have received the sort of attention that he has nowadays. Instead he probably would have been dismissed by the world as just another déclassé holy roller, a druggie turned preacher who found religion. That Frisbee gets remembered may be more than anything a reflection on our society now, especially its obession with titillation and moral dissolution. More than anything that's what sells at the box office.

Furthermore, regardless of whether Di Sabatino intended this or not, his film also lends itself very readily to being used by some people to promote gayh agitprop, wherein Frisbee gets reinterpreted and cast into the iconic role of the "poor gayh guy who got stomped on by the evil xtians." For there are people who for political and other reasons find it convenient to deploy Lonnie Frisbee as just another weapon in their propaganda arsenal. It's also inescapable that many of the influential and powerful gatekeepers of the film and entertainment industry do have a list of political desiderata, and therefore they would not have failed to notice that Di Sabatino's film about Frisbee can easily be spun in directions suitable for their own purposes.² So I find it very difficult to believe that Di Sabatino never had this consideration in mind while contemplating the likelihood of his film's success, for obtaining the applause of those gatekeepers would have been a very desirable thing to achieve if someone is venturing to make a career in cinema. And what better way can there be to garner such applause than by making a film about a dead xtian who had a struggle with homosexuality, and by casting him as the hapless, misunderstood victim of a hostile church establishment? It was bound to get attention of the gatekeepers who would have seen it as lining up quite well with their own point of view. At this time I am not prepared to say that Di Sabatino was deliberately being tendentious, but when I watched the film I had to wonder what he was really up to. I have definite reasons to question the veracity of a few of the people that Di Sabatino interviewed for the film, and it was also obvious that some of the interviewees in the film had their own agendas and very much wanted to steer things in a particular direction. To give Di Sabatino the benefit of the doubt, he might have, as a greenhorn documentary film maker, been too ready to accept what his interviewees were telling him at face value, when he should have been a little more critical of what he was hearing. Then again it's also possible that being too critical would not have suited the overall objective, which was to make a movie that has glitter, gets noticed, and sells.

One odd scene in the film went by very quickly. In it we saw Frisbee wearing a suit and a clerical collar. This was apparently some time after Frisbee had left Calvary Chapel and Wimber's Vineyard.³ However, I don't recollect any explanations being given on why at that time Frisbee was dressing this way, although a clerical collar usually has no purpose other than identifying someone as a professional clergyman ordained by some denomination. If this was so, what denomination was it? Had Frisbee been ordained by someone? I was very curious to know. Unfortunately, the film never explained how the "hippie preacher" ended up dressed like that.

Finally, I personally owe Lonnie for preaching the Gospel to my wife. For that I am thankful. Frisbee died in March of 1993, the same year when we left SoCal for good. He's now famous enough to have a Wikipedia entry about him. However, there's reality and then there's "Wiki-reality," and so I would be very cautious about relying on what's written about him there, as is the case with anybody who's famous or controversial.‡ As a rule of thumb, you should believe only about half of what's written at Wikipedia. The problem comes in trying to figure out which half it is.

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¹ Some people will find such a statement, as bland as the one referenced above is, difficult to accept and likely to arouse their ire, especially when the promotion of their own agendas requires the perpetuation of some form of hero worship centered on Lonnie Frisbee; they would like to elevate him into a colossus to be adored. Nevertheless, the Jesus People Movement was much larger than just what happened in Orange county, California; and Lonnie probably would have agreed with me that it was larger than even himself and that there are no "heros" in the Kingdom of God, only children. I admit that I am adamant about one thing: I refuse to acknowledge anybody's supposed proprietary claim over Frisbee—there's only one Person who owns him. And besides, Lonnie doesn't need anybody to polish his aureole for him.

² It's naïve to think there was no particular reason why the film was shown at the 2006 Philadelphia International Gay & Lesbian Film Festival.

³ However, a video still exists which show Frisbee speaking at Tom Stipe's Vineyard affliated church in Denver, although the actual date of the recording is unclear. The location might have been at Crossroads. The video is dated at Google as Jan 29, 2006, which clearly can't be when it was recorded since Frisbee died in 1993. The video looks to me as though it were likely made in the late 1980s or early 1990s.

‡ A good example of what I mean here came up when I needed to track down whether Kathryn Kuhlman had ever been located in Denver. This was just your very boring names, dates, and places kind of stuff that you should expect to be in an encyclopedia. However, in this regard, the Wikipedia entry about her was worthless, because it was little more than scandal mongering and miracle debunking. I had to consult the archives at Wheaton college instead to get a basic biography.

One my favorite bloggers, the famous Crunchy Con Rod Dreher, had an article up on BeliefNet entitled "Darwin, science and culture." In it Dreher declared with boldness:

It seems to me that we today are in such awe of science, and its authority, that we accept its pretensions to dispassion and objectivity with far too little skepticism.

And then a few sentences later Dreher added this disclaimer:

Mind you, I'm not trying to dump on Darwinism.

On seeing this, I thought to myself with some amusement, "And you had better not be if you know what's good for you. Just try dumping on holy Darwin and see what happens to you. You'll never get a job in this town again." Putting out such a disclaimer is pretty much obligatory in this day and age. But I can't but help of being reminded of the funny Seinfeld episode The Outing where George and Jerry while all the time denying that they are gay are always careful to add the disclaimer "Not that there's anything wrong with that…" For example, this conversation:

Jerry: There's been a big misunderstanding here! We did that whole thing for your benefit. We knew you were eavesdropping. That's why my friend said all that. It was on purpose! We're not gay! Not that there's anything wrong with that…

George: No, of course not…

Jerry: I mean that's fine if that's who you are…

George: Absolutely…

Jerry: I mean I have many gay friends…

George: My father is gay…

Sharon: Look, I know what I heard.

Jerry: It was a joke…

George: Look, you wanna have sex right now? Do want to have sex with me right now? Let's go! C'mon, let's go baby! C'mon!

The pantheon of today is Darwin, Marx, Freud, Descartes, Rousseau, Kant, Nietzsche, Kinsey, Sagan, et al. One must walk in reverent fear of them at all times. So we're not as free as we imagine ourselves to be. And to undo any possible ill effects from violating the taboos of seeming to speak evil of them, the proper incantations must be uttered. For they, the gods of the modern world, rule over all aspects of our lives and careers…not that there's anything wrong with that, mind you.