Have you been wondering why the upcoming reincarnation of Issues, Etc. calls its website "Pirate Christian Radio"? I admit it: I have. After all, what do pirates have to do with Christians? Can/Should Christians consider themselves pirates?I must also admit that my first thought was along the lines of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. It's an odd thing to watch a movie and root for *the pirates* as "the good guys," but in those movies Captain Jack Sparrow, Will Turner and company are indeed "the good guys" (okay, protagonists) even though they are pirates. After all, they do have to "fight" against not only the bad pirates (Davey Jones, et. al.), but also against the tyrannical British imperialists in the movies.
Could something like that be in the minds of "the pirates" behind the new Issues, Etc.? Well, we'll just have to wait and listen and hope they explain such fine points of Christian doctrine. :-)
In the meantime, though, here's another possible, and speculative, explanation offered by Pr. Joel Brondos as he looks to St. Augustine for clues.
6 comments:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_radio
I think the choice of name has less to do with the morality of being a pirate, and more to do with the idea of lack of regulation--something specific to radio, not to the Spanish Main.
Peace!
From Pr. Wilken's page on the WT, a comment posted 4 June 2008:
"Contrary to all the worry, it's just a webradio site that offered to host our new show's streaming audio.
No deep meaning, no coded messages.
We prefer to put the deep meaning into the show, and keep our messages clear."
Thanks, wrmyers!
I assume that Pirate Radio is a reference to the historic designation for radio stations that operate outside of regulations or contrary to local regulation. Orson Wells broadcast English language shows from Luxemburg to be received in England. These broadcasts were not sanctioned by the UK but were perfectly legal. In a similar sense US broadcasts to Cuba or the old Radio Free Europe could be considered Pirate Radio.
I would tend to agree with anonymous above. "Pirate radio" is a radio station that operates outside the normal jurisdiction of government regulations and international agreements (that keep stations from bordering each other from stepping on each others's signals). In many cases they allowed a freer disemination of information or a wider range of music to be heard that were not approved by the government of the people that they served. In a similar vain, Pirate Christian Radio can serve those Lutherans with a message that will not be provided by the LCMS.
On Wittenberg Trail, Rev. Wilken's note said "Contrary to all the worry, it's just a webradio site that offered to host our new show's streaming audio. No deep meaning, no coded messages. We prefer to put the deep meaning into the show, and keep our messages clear."
All one has to do is go to http://tinyurl.com/6bxsxv to prove that the webradio site offering to host the new show's streaming audio was not established by Wilken & Schwarz.
I am curious, though, what other webradio programs that PirateChristianRadio is hosting on its site. If they're anything like Issues, Etc., I'd like to listen to them.
As an aside, it's amazing what one can track on the internet these days. I had an "anonymous" commenter on my blog the other day who had some rather critical things to say. So I've been tracking down the source using some readily available tools -- discovering that the commenter is probably from the St. Louis area (in the vicinity of the 63101 zip code) who is an SBCGlobal.net (AT&T) customer using DSL and a FireFox browser. I keep getting closer . . .
(Sorry for the lengthy tangent! I'm just amazed at what is out there.)
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