Results tagged “church”

What other church in our area besides Mars Hill (or, perhaps, The Stranger) could possibly have attracted the attention of a national television show looking to talk about Satan? This Friday, ABC's 'Nightline' will film a half-hour segment at Mars Hill, of course.

The internet is indeed alluring and the source of many pleasures, and locals just can't keep their hands off her. This morning, we learn that Washington state legislators are ga-ga for Facebook (late pass! but welcome) and that Mars Hill Church has given worshippers the go-ahead to tweet during services (...ugh). Careful, guys: the world wide web is a cruel mistress. Forgive the Napoleon Dynamite reference, it was unavoidable.

Did any of our readers catch Mars Hill Church's feature on Nightline last night? ABC ran their three page 'summary' of the feature online yesterday with the beautiful headline, "Pastor Dude's Mega-Church Draws Crowds." (It's almost as good as the New York Times' Driscoll headline, "Who Would Jesus Smack Down?") We're wondering when the program will be online so we can catch the visuals. West Seattle Blog tweeted overnight that their site received a "miniblitz" of folks who had, presumably, seen the program and were googling for more info about Driscoll and homosexuality--a subject which didn't figure prominently in ABC's write-up. We love us some generous national media attention, don't we, Mars Hill?

MARCH POINT: SIFF Cinema is offering a free screening of this local film production by members of the Swinomish Indian Reservation. March Point is a movie about a movie about oil refineries, Native American communities, and growing up. Isn't it supposed to be raining on Saturday? Perfect: this is indoors and will expand your soul's horizons. (Probably.) RSVP to be on the safe side.

Yesterday, one of the largest mainline Protestant Christian denominations--the Presbyterian Church (USA)--voted at their General Assembly to end the ban on ordination of gays and lesbians. The vote was 54% to 46%, an impressive margin for a denomination that has been roiled by bitter conflict over this issue for a solid thirty years. Technically worded, the vote dropped the rule that "fidelity within the covenant of marriage between and a man and a woman, or chastity in singleness" was an absolute requirement for ordination. It will take another year for the nation's 173 presbyteries, or geographically grouped churches who have a shared governing body, to vote individually to approve a change to the PC(USA)'s constitution. But as of right now, a church--yes, even a church in the moderately conservative Presbytery of Seattle--may on a case by case basis overrule the ban and ordain gays and lesbians. This is huge news!

10 out of 10 Pro Bowl voters agree--the Seahawks have more talent on defense than on offense.

While trolling through today's Floor Proceedings of the U.S. House of Representatives for our other job (it's an exciting one), we noticed something that will probably get no coverage anywhere else. However, we think it is important to note when Congress singles out one faith as important. We think it's doubly important to note when the vote is taken while Congress fights with the Bush Administration over funding the government for the next year, haggles...

This Seattlest started his carpet-bagging campaign here about ten years ago, so maybe we have an imperfect understanding of the Fun Forest and it's cultural baggage. When we heard that the City Council had elected to raze the Fun Forest in 2009 our first reaction was "What?! They're clear-cutting the Wenatchee National Forest?!" But then we caught on, as we occasionally do, and realized they were talking about the little carnivalette that lives in Seattle...

Hoo-eee, was Chop Suey's stage packed on Friday night! Promised: Macklemore, Gabriel Teodros, Rajnii, Language Arts, Knowmads, Hella Maze, and DJ Marc Sense. Performed: all of the above, plus XPerience, Khingz, and some group called 2012. Sometimes it can be exhilarating and refreshing to have so many artists jumping on and off stage in one night. In this case, it was confusing and overwhelming, and we hardly know where to start when telling you about the night. Mostly, everyone was very loud and there was a lot of yelling. Not every hip-hop night can be an awesome hip-hop night.

It's safe to assume that Sharon Jones is cooler than you. The current queen of neo-funk/soul grew up in Macon, Georgia and Brooklyn, singing in church before ending up doing session work in the '70s as the anonymous vocals on dance and disco records. Without a solo contract of her own, she left the industry and took odd jobs like corrections officer at Rikers Island and Wells Fargo armored car guard.

Towards the very end of last night's People Talking and Singing, as the clock ticked past 10:00 and John Roderick announced he'd play another song and take a few requests from the audience, our butts chimed in: "Hey, this is starting to go on a little long."

Even that movie voice-over guy will be unemployed. You have heard of this impending strike, have you not? It may seem unrelated to you, the sad inner workings of Hollywood, but in truth, if you are someone who ever turns on their TV, if 8pm every day marks your celebration in the church of Stewart-Colbert, you best care.

Seattle's known as one of the least-churched cities in the U.S. But consider this recent report from the Barna Group, which found that three out of every four American adults interpret literally the Bible story in which Jesus rises from the dead after being crucified and buried. The numbers are taken from a thousand-person telephone survey. There's some interesting poll information there, and some even more interesting commentary from the Barna Group ("Your partner for information, strategy, execution and transformation!" says their website):

A minority of the people who believe these stories to be true consistently apply the principles embedded in these stories within their own lives. It seems that millions of Americans believe the Bible content is true, but are not willing to translate those stories into action. Sadly, for many people, the Bible has become a respected but impersonal religious history lesson that stays removed from their life.

Last Friday we saw Sea Wolf at Chop Suey. We found this Pop Matters review of their first full-length album, but if you'd like to learn more, here's an interview by Sound on the Sound.

We were first turned onto Susan Werner back in our New York days when she played a free show at the World Trade Center. We were broke and all about free things, and we had a nice healthy respect for the sort of music the show sponsor WFUV felt like sharing with the world. We were impressed then by her candid poetics and a particularly lovely tune called "Time Between Trains" that stuck with us quite a while.

Seattlest watches as a S.L.U.T. is born and Seattle Flickr users go nuts over a local art installation. A restaurant critic demands a Diner's Bill of Rights over a gnat next to her drink, and, in lieu of a Portlandist, Seattlest debates with itself over the identity of the Northwest's crown jewel. Seattlest also joins the guys from Fantagraphics for an ill-fated gun party in the woods.

Last night was our first live encounter with Ohio's Over the Rhine, and the Triple Door turned out to be the perfect venue for the neo-cabaret sound of their new album The Trumpet Child (which they're streaming on their site). Tonight's show is sold out, but they're doing SRO sales at the window. The Triple Door website will tell you the show's at 8pm, but we showed up at 7:45pm last night and got sat during opener Griffin House's set.

The husband-and-wife team Over the Rhine [MySpace] play at the Triple Door at 7:30pm this Thursday and Friday, and both shows are already sold out -- SRO tickets will be on sale the nights of the shows.

The Mojo and the Sayso which opened at ACT last night is four actors and a car, but the car is the thing, the main entity. The car is the set, the stage, and the focal character. It may not have any lines, but it stands in for everything that moves playwright Aisha Rahman's story forward. It's the absent child, gunned down by aggro off-duty cops, it's the broken family, being rebuilt from the ground up with parts scavenged from here or there, it's the hard facts of terrestrial life in the face of the easy fixes of shyster spirituality. Jennifer Zeyl designed the set. She's a genius, we hear.

Rifling through the remains of the house's cookbook library (which was amassed sometime in the 50's when it was used as the high school's home ec facility), we came across a promotional brochure from the Vermont Maple Promotion Board. It gave information about maple trees and sugar houses (it takes 35 gallons of sap to make just one gallon of delicious Vermont maple syrup!) and a few maple-laden recipes, a surprising number of which actually sounded good.

Hey, whaddya know? There's another show worth your attention at the Sunset this week. Tonight it's Irish singer-songwriter Fionn Regan. Yeah yeah, we know what you're thinking: "Another singer-songwriter? Just look at him, all broody with messed-up hair strumming a guitar in an alley." Truth be told, we usually avoid the genre as a whole, since most singer-songwriters run the gamut from boring hippie to boring douchebag. But in this case, don't be so easy to dismiss.

One Saturday a few weeks ago, we went to the Rainier Beach library with Little Miss Seattlest. After picking out several books, we were making our way to the circulation desk when one of the librarians behind the public service desk spoke.

As of this morning, queer couples in the state of Washington have about three new rights, which include, but are not limited to:

Last night at the Crocodile was one of those evenings you stumble on where things just keep getting better and better. We went down to see headliners Sea Wolf [MySpace] after hearing them do an in-studio bit at KEXP (not posted yet). About two songs in, the indie-folk melodies and lead singer's baritone duets with cello swept us and Shelves of Vinyl off our feet.

-- "The texture of Seattle: Seattle feels, looks, tastes like the cinematic 1980s."

This week's Comment of the Week was posted as a reply to a post about an immigration announcement out of the office of Mayor Greg Nickels and uses the word "homo" six times, including such creative constructions as "homo liberals," "homo culture," and "liberal homos."

Seattlest got a Sony Walkman for our 15th birthday, and bought our first couple of cassette tapes with saved allowance: Dire Straits’ Brothers in Arms and Eazy-E’s Eazy-Duz-It. As any self-respecting male teen would be, we were offended thrilled by the latter’s raw language and humor. So within a few weeks, we’d procured N.W.A.’s tape, Straight Outta Compton. That’s how we knew what we were hearing Sunday night when we were put on hold after calling Mad Pizza:

--A former Redmond church leader is being charged with child rape.