Speak With Authority
Listen to poet Taylor Mali speak for two minutes about speaking with authority. Hilarious. Helpful. Powerful.
Typography from Ronnie Bruce on Vimeo.
Peter Jones Interview
Peter Jones is our keynote speaker for our The Gospel Coalition: Bay Area conference on March 18.
Below is an interview Mark Driscoll recently conducted with Peter Jones:
The 5 Big Issues Facing the Western Church
Tim Keller on the five big issues facing the Western Church:
1. The opportunity for extensive culture-making in the U.S.
2. The rise of Islam.
3. The new non-western Global Christianity.
4. The growing cultural remoteness of the gospel.
5. The end of prosperity?
99 Balloons
99 Balloons from Igniter Media on Vimeo.
Eliot was born with an undeveloped lung, a heart with a hole in it and DNA that placed faulty information into each and every cell of his body. However, that could not stop the living God from proclaiming Himself through this boy who never uttered a word.
In the midst of heartbreaking tragedy, the Mooney family found the presence of God strengthening, comforting, and guiding them. Their story reminds us to seek God and endure our struggles rather than blame Him for our hardships.
HT: JT
The Manhattan Declaration
Last Friday The Manhattan Declaration was released, a new six-page statement from the pens of evangelical, orthodox, and Catholic Christians. The statement was written to “reaffirm fundamental truths about justice and the common good,” namely: “the sanctity of human life, the dignity of marriage as the conjugal union of husband and wife, and the rights of conscience and religious liberty”
The declaration was drafted by Robert George, Timothy George, and Chuck Colson. Signers of the statement include J.I. Packer, Randy Alcorn, Tim Keller, Wayne Grudem, Joni Eareckson Tada, Peter Kreeft, Al Mohler, Ravi Zacharias, and many others.
The Manhattan Declaration has now received 88,384 signatures. That number will have gone up by the time you read this. This is a timely document for America and for the church. I think Christians should carefully read The Manhattan Declaration and consider signing it. Take 15 minutes to read the document, then go here if interested in signing it. I signed the document earlier this morning.
Below is the beautifully written Preamble to The Manhattan Declaration. Read the whole document here.
Preamble:
Christians are heirs of a 2,000-year tradition of proclaiming God’s word, seeking justice in our societies, resisting tyranny, and reaching out with compassion to the poor, oppressed and suffering.
While fully acknowledging the imperfections and shortcomings of Christian institutions and communities in all ages, we claim the heritage of those Christians who defended innocent life by rescuing discarded babies from trash heaps in Roman cities and publicly denouncing the Empire’s sanctioning of infanticide. We remember with reverence those believers who sacrificed their lives by remaining in Roman cities to tend the sick and dying during the plagues, and who died bravely in the coliseums rather than deny their Lord.
After the barbarian tribes overran Europe, Christian monasteries preserved not only the Bible but also the literature and art of Western culture. It was Christians who combated the evil of slavery: Papal edicts in the 16th and 17th centuries decried the practice of slavery and first excommunicated anyone involved in the slave trade; evangelical Christians in England, led by John Wesley and William Wilberforce, put an end to the slave trade in that country. Christians under Wilberforce’s leadership also formed hundreds of societies for helping the poor, the imprisoned, and child laborers chained to machines.
In Europe, Christians challenged the divine claims of kings and successfully fought to establish the rule of law and balance of governmental powers, which made modern democracy possible. And in America, Christian women stood at the vanguard of the suffrage movement. The great civil rights crusades of the 1950s and 60s were led by Christians claiming the Scriptures and asserting the glory of the image of God in every human being regardless of race, religion, age or class.
This same devotion to human dignity has led Christians in the last decade to work to end the dehumanizing scourge of human trafficking and sexual slavery, bring compassionate care to AIDS sufferers in Africa, and assist in a myriad of other human rights causes – from providing clean water in developing nations to providing homes for tens of thousands of children orphaned by war, disease and gender discrimination.
Like those who have gone before us in the faith, Christians today are called to proclaim the Gospel of costly grace, to protect the intrinsic dignity of the human person and to stand for the common good. In being true to its own calling, the call to discipleship, the church through service to others can make a profound contribution to the public good.
Social Isolation and New Technology
Today the Pew Research Center released a new report on Social Isolation and New Technology. The overview:
This report adds new insights to an ongoing debate about the extent of social isolation in America. A widely-reported 2006 study argued that since 1985 Americans have become more socially isolated, the size of their discussion networks has declined, and the diversity of those people with whom they discuss important matters has decreased. In particular, the study found that Americans have fewer close ties to those from their neighborhoods and from voluntary associations. Sociologists Miller McPherson, Lynn Smith-Lovin and Matthew Brashears suggest that new technologies, such as the internet and mobile phone, may play a role in advancing this trend. Specifically, they argue that the type of social ties supported by these technologies are relatively weak and geographically dispersed, not the strong, often locally-based ties that tend to be a part of peoples’ core discussion network. They depicted the rise of internet and mobile phones as one of the major trends that pulls people away from traditional social settings, neighborhoods, voluntary associations, and public spaces that have been associated with large and diverse core networks.
…This Pew Internet Personal Networks and Community survey finds that Americans are not as isolated as has been previously reported. People’s use of the mobile phone and the internet is associated with larger and more diverse discussion networks. And, when we examine people’s full personal network – their strong and weak ties – internet use in general and use of social networking services such as Facebook in particular are associated with more diverse social networks.
The questions the report explores:
Are Americans More Socially Isolated?
Is Internet or Mobile Phone Use Related to Smaller or Less Diverse Core Networks?
Is Internet Use Leading to Less Face-to-Face Contact with our Closest Social Ties or with Local Social Ties?
Are Core Network Members Also our “Friends” on Social Networking Services such as Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn?
Is Internet Use Related to Less Interaction with Neighbors or Lower Levels of Participation in Local Voluntary Associations?
Is Internet Use Associated With “Cocooning,” or a Withdrawal from Public and Semipublic Spaces?
Are Internet and Mobile Phone Use Associated with More or Less Diverse Personal Networks?
The Value of a Wandering Mind
Clive Thompson always has interesting things to say. His latest piece in Wired is thought provoking. Perhaps it’s a good thing for our minds to wander.
Our modern info-culture lionizes those who possess laserlike focus, particularly at work. Drifting off into a reverie is considered the enemy of productivity, which is partly why some companies control employee access to the Internet…
But what if we’re wrong about daydreaming? What if it’s crucial to solving problems in our personal lives and at work?
Brain scientists are beginning to suspect that it is. And if they’re right, we might need to rethink the way we work — perhaps even develop tools that actually encourage mental drift.
For years, brain scientists viewed a wandering mind as merely a lapse in cognition. But recent studies have found that we lose concentration shockingly often. A 2007 study by Michael Kane of the University of North Carolina found that our minds drift away from our tasks fully one-third of the time. And this suggests that daydreaming can actually be useful — because if it were such a bad thing, it’s unlikely that we’d do it so often.
Why do our minds wander? Brain-scanning technology has uncovered some clues. It turns out that when your mind drifts, your temporal lobes — which are associated with processing long-term memories — become busier. So when you float off into a reverie, you’re actually doing important data-storage work.
Daydreaming isn’t just the mind’s way of processing information, though. Other scans have found that the wandering mind also utilizes the prefrontal cortex, the part of our brain that’s involved in problem-solving. The upshot, says Jonathan Schooler, a professor of psychology at UC Santa Barbara who is studying this area, is that your idling mind is likely doing deeply creative work, tackling your hairiest long-term tasks — projects you’ve been trying to address for months, the arc of your career, the state of your marriage. “Mind-wandering is actually a very involved task,” Schooler says. “You leave the here and now and focus on more remote concerns that nevertheless might be more important. We’ve been focusing on the downside of this, but we need to think about the upside.”
Image Projection vs. Human Connection
From World Magazine, an excellent critique of our times by Janie B. Cheaney, Tragically Famous: Image Projection is a Very Poor Second for Connection. An excerpt:
There was a time when fame meant success: military victory, artistic accomplishment, scientific achievement, “Hail to the Chief.” It came with cheers, banners, and confetti. A famous man was preceded by his reputation; his deeds were known better than his face. But a significant shift occurred around the turn of the 20th century. In 1915, the most famous man in the world was not a king or conqueror. He was a commoner associated with thwarted ambitions: Charlie Chaplin.
…Meanwhile, another era begins: from the Public Face to Facebook. If fame consists of image projection, Andy Warhol’s prediction (“In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes”) seems spookily relevant. Much of the projection via social networking sites and webcams is harmless, but it spreads us wide and thin. While deciding what to share with our public we’re also editing ourselves, taking online quizzes to determine our Most Compatible Historical Era or Star Wars character. But true self-knowledge remains as elusive as ever. We see not only others, but also ourselves, “as through a glass darkly.”
Reading
Some good thoughts from Wired’s Clive Thompson: The Future of Reading in a Digital World.
An excerpt:
You’re far more likely to hear about a book if a friend has highlighted a couple brilliant sentences in a Facebook update—and if you hear about it, you’re far more likely to buy it in print. Yes, in print: The few authors who have experimented with giving away digital copies (mostly in sci-fi) have found that they end up selling more print copies, because their books are discovered by more people.
I’m not suggesting that books need always be social. One of the chief pleasures of a book is mental solitude, that deep, quiet focus on an author’s thoughts—and your own. That’s not going away. But books have been held hostage offline for far too long. Taking them digital will unlock their real hidden value: the readers.
Did You Know 3.0
This video is well done. May Jesus be our rock as we engage a fast, new world for his glory.
HT: JT
