gmail

I've got 6 gmail invites. first come, first serve. Please leave a comment on this post with your name and email addr and I'll send an invite to the first six I get.

Stephen Olford with the Ages

Stephen Olford, a champion of expository preaching and a mentor to many evangelical leaders, died Aug. 29 at age 86.

more

When I first became a Jesusfollower, I used to listen to Stephen Olford.

Stages of Emergence

Len Hjalmarson does something of a rewrite of my earlier Wrapping the Brain Around the Emerging Church on Resonate's Blog with some original material. I find his additions/edits helpful.

Toward an Emergent Church Values Set VI: Mystery

Paul Soupiset in his continuing series

intro

first

second

third

fourth

fifth

sixth

Finding Your Strengths

I'm enjoying reading Now Discover Your Strengths by Marcus Buckingham and Dr. Donald Clifton. Great book. I had thoroughly enjoyed First Break all the Rules and have written an outline on it that will probably soon morph into a book summary.

Last night I started took the online StrengthsFinder test. Of the 34 themes, I'm

Input
Maximizer
Individuation
Activator
Ideation

I'm looking for one or two other great strengths evaluation tools, Christian or not. Do you have any suggestions?

Laura Branigan Dies

Laura Branigan, a Grammy-nominated pop singer best known for her 1982 platinum hit "Gloria," has died. She was 47.

link

There's also a biography and a beautiful tribute on her website.

Thanks for the joy and beauty, Laura.

Streaming Audio: Eugene Peterson, Gordon Fee, Alister McGrath, & NT Wright

courtesy of Regent Radio.

props to jordon on resonate for the heads up.

It's official.

Jordon's just called me Resonate's Token American.

I love it. ;)

creating syndicated feeds

the free service that blogstreet.com offers where they create a syndicated feed for you now seems to be down all the time. anyone know of a similar service anywhere?

a personal comment: scattered and rootless

I don't use this platform very much to talk ab my personal life. But if this find resonance with one reader, perhaps it's helpful:

I do not want my life to be froth.

I don't want my life to be collapsable to mere meme generation, propagation, and execution.

My life is too small to be the focus of my life. I don't want to be the center.

This morning I am striving to get reconnected.

follow up to LA Times' article on Spencer Burke and Friends' Ecclesial Adventure

Spencer posted a comment to my earlier blog on this article that I thought was worth highlighting here:

it is difficult when someone is trying to describe what we are doing as a church, especially when they are looking from the outside in. connie did a great job of listening and researching, but what we are doing is very different from other communities i am aware of. that is not a "good or bad" statement, just we have started from different premises.as a community we decide to start with only those things that helped us "be" the church in our context. when i have planted other churches we started with those things that helped us "do" church - 501c3, the sunday event, budgets, staffing, mission or purpose statements...i am not against these things. as steve points out we will probably "need" at some point to "do" those things as we journey together. but my thought is, we probably can do with out much of the "cooperation" of church and only add them to our "overhead" when they help us...a little like the question jesus posed - is sabbath made for humans or are humans made to serve the sabbath.

Thanks Spencer!

Sudan Atrocities: What is our Response?

An intensive U.S. government-funded study has confirmed widespread atrocities against Africans in the Darfur region of Sudan, including mass rape and summary executions of male villagers, the study's director and senior Bush administration officials said Wednesday.

...

In some instances, she said, the janjaweed would take infants from their mothers' backs. If the child was a boy, he would be killed by crushing or knifing. Female infants would be tossed aside.

...

More than 30,000 people have been killed ....

"Report verifies Sudan atrocities", Thursday 26 August 2004 - The Miami Herald

karen neudorf alerts us to a recent article by joan chittister in National Catholic Reporter ab the killing in Sudan.

On 1 August, 35 Evangelical Leaders urged President Bush to take more aggressive steps to address the situation.

If you wish to keep up, The Washington Post has an entire section of their site dedicated to the Sudan.

thanks to jordon for the heads up he gave us on resonate.

resonate blog

Though I live in the US, the kind folks at resonate have invited me to participate in their blog for purposes of internationalization. I'm honored to have been asked to associate with this group.

baby and bathwater

chris monroe said some great things ab the church and the emerging community.

Another Significant Site:
millennium matrix is launched

In addition to the launching of resonate, I just found out that my friend Rex Miller, author of The Millennium Matrix, has also launched his new site. On his site you can read endorsements of his book, review a list of chapters, keep up with cutting edge rex thru his blog, see a list of articles and resources, and enjoy other tasty offerings as well.

If you're looking for the syndicated feed of his blog, after I bit of sleuthing I was able to find

http://www.millenniummatrix.com/content/blog/atom.xml

Enjoy!

resonate launches!

Good news for all Canadians and friends of Canadians!

This from Jordon Cooper:

Several years ago Beyond Magazine started and hosted what was probably the first national conversation talking about the Gospel in a postmodern culture. It was a national dialogue with pastors, people who have left the church, artists, theologians, and people new to the faith coming together to talk about issues that were not being even thought of in many circles in the church. When Beyond decided to leave the discussion a couple of years ago, it kind of languished in Canada. Some of us started talking this summer that while we appreciated the conversation south of the border, our context was very different and there was a need for something Canadian. From those conversations, Resonate was born. Resonate is a national conversation that has brought together people from across the country to talk about newways of living out the Gospel in a Canadian context.It happens nationally online through a variety of online means. It also happens regionally in a variety of a cities across Canada and like any groups of friends, we like to help out when we can. We have also created a collabrative online community to share worshipmedia using Flickr. There is also a space for some news and view from not online Canada but also from our friends around the world on the Resonate Blog.

Learn more here.

George C Marshall, the Internet, Technological Innovation and the Future of Theological Discourse

Earlier in posts both here and here about the degree to which online discourse will modify (while not completely revolutionalizing) theological discourse I mentioned George C Marshall and his views on military technological advancement and the execution of war. I found the exact quote and thought I'd post it.

Ed Cray, in his wonderful biography of George C Marshall - General of the Army - writes:

In a speech on March 2, 1939, he detailed a long list of military innovations that supposedly would dominate the battlefields of history: chariots, then elephants, the mounted hordes of Genghis Khan, armored knights, artillery, tanks, and now the airplane. ‘But in all these struggles, as the smoke cleared away, it was the man with the sword, or the crossbow, or the rifle who settled the final issue on the field.’

In other words, Marshall understood that these advances definitely affected how wars are fought but eschewed triumphalism about any specific development (the quote above was in the context of Marshall's fighting against the notion that airplanes alone would defeat the Axis).

Similarly, I believe it's most helpful if we strike the balance between appreciating what can happen online for God's kingdom and believing that the online world is a wholesale revolution.

a denial of ephemerality:
a tiny rebellion / bit of a rant

andrew jones declared earlier this year that a blog post lasts 3 days. this moved maggi dawn to comment:

I've noticed that the blogosphere shares one of the tendencies of tabloid news - as if each issue is only today's news, and it's over in a few days. Andrew Jones said the other day that the maximum life-span of a blog post is 3 days. This may or may not be true (I think it's both true and false, depending on what you mean...) But if it is true, how do we connect up with stuff 3 or four weeks later. In my academic work I'm reading stuff that's been written over a period of years (centuries even), not just a few days. 'Recent' can mean anytime in the last 10 or 20 years. 3 days just isn't enough...

I entirely agree and so for some time now...

...I don't hesitate to post about someone else's post here, or comment on a post on someone else's site just because someone else's post is not recent,

...or not to reply to a discussion group note just because it's not new.

...Further, I am an enthusiastic user of bloglines and clip with wanton abandon posts I wish to read more carefully later and/or posts on which I wish to comment or to blog about. And there is no expiration date for a great post. I care not for their putatively short shelf life. How silly. Noveau is not an intrinsic good. I am temporarily trapped in time but my Lord is not. Neither is His truth.

I deny that blogging must be ephemeral.

I further deny that substance cannot be addressed thru blogs.

I deny that serious conversation can't occur here.

I deny that significant spiritual community cannot be created through this medium.

I deny that we can't love God and others here.

We haven't begun to profitably exploit blogging and the online world for His glory.

background to kerry swift boat controversy

if you're trying to get a bead on the swift boat question kerry is dealing with , the post has put together a pretty good summary of the issues involved (free registration required).

"my place is of the light
this place is of the dark
I do not feel the romance
I do not catch the spark"

- Emily Saliers

Recently I met Anne Hefley online after noticing her blog on crablogs (where I'm also listed as a Baltimore blogger). Anne's ok now, but recently she was assaulted. A few weeks ago, Anne was contacted by a man who told her about how his son had also been assaulted but did not survive the attack. Anne then writes:

I then watched a documentary television show about New York City police, profiling a murder in New York City. I saw the victim, a handsome sandy-haired young man, and thought, "He looks like the type of guy that I would date." His face smiled up from his driver's license. The smile of someone who would never be able to do so again. A life cut short by complete losers who accosted him and a friend on the street and demanded what they didn't want to work for.One shot was fired, killing one Burke O'Brien. It's a senseless crime that is still unsolved almost a year later. The man had pointed me to the website of the show after it aired, and I mentioned in a return email how sad it was watching the parents come into the city to identify their son. Their world completely shattered into a devastating reality. In his return email, he said, "yes, that was me."I was at work when I got that response, and it shocked me. I had no idea I had been exchanging emails with the very person that I'd just watched on television and felt such empathy for. I wondered, why he had reached out to me? What could I possibly offer someone who had suffered such a loss? And then it became clear. I can spread the word. I can be one link closer to the police finding the killers. A chainlink of me and other bloggers who can shake the rafters and call attention to this crime and the subhumans who did it and are still walking the streets. Perhaps you brushed by them in the subway, or helped them at your retail job. Perhaps you are only a degree or two of separation from the people who did this or someone who knows something. Eventually, the net will close in if enough people are made aware.

Then, tragically, Anne just found out that Brien's dad, Mark O'Brien - who had contacted her - was just killed recently in a traffic accident.

And so I join Anne's quest to publicize this incident and perhaps in some way make it more likely that the police can catch Burke's killers. For more info see Seven Inches of Sense or Burke O'Brien.org.

But I also wanted to post this because it was just another reminder of how very tenuous and brief life is. The older I become, the more I realize this. It was also a reminder of evil in the world.

I do not understand God; I do not get God.

In the town where I grew up some time ago, a child died after being left in a hot car for hours. God could have arranged for someone to have found that baby but He did not. Why did he not? I do not understand. Someone once said that God must view death very differently than we do and I think that may be the case. We can hold nothing in this place tightly to our chest; it will be taken away.

Now I am not shocked that I don't get God. The finite cannot be shocked that she does not understand the infinite. I haven't yet read a theodicy that made me go, "Ok, now I get it! That makes perfect sense!" But if it were one of my dear ones that died in some similarly tragic way, well....

I think the late Malcolm Muggeridge did have a bead on things when he wrote:

How can I ever explain to those who insist that we must believe in the world to love it that it is because I disbelieve in the world that I love every breath I take, look forward with ever-greater delight to the coming of each spring, rejoice ever more in the companionship of my fellow-humans, to no single one of whom – searching my heart – do I wish ill, and from no single one of whom do I wish to separate myself, in word or thought or deed, or in the prospect of some other existence beyond the ticking of the clocks, the vista of the hills, the bounds and dimensions of our earthly hopes and desires? To accept this world as a destination rather than a staging-post, and the experience of living in it as expressing life’s full significance, would seem to me to reduce life to something too banal and trivial to be taken seriously or held in esteem.

…

In other words, the Christian proposition that he that loves his life in this world shall lose it, and he that hates his life in this world shall see it projected and glorified into eternity, is for living, not for dying. After all, it was a St Francis who truly loved the world he so gaily abjured, as his enchanting prayers and canticles convey; not a Pere Goriot who so cherished its commodities. It is misers and Don Juans who moan; spendthrifts and saints are always laughing.

….

All I can claim to have learnt from the years I have spent in this world is that the only happiness is love, which is attained by giving, not receiving; and that the world itself only becomes the dear and habitable dwelling place it is when we who inhabit it know we are migrants, due when the time comes to fly away to other more commodious skies.

Chronicles of Wasted Time

(Malcolm Muggeridge led an interesting life. He was the British journalist who popularized Mother Teresa in his Something Beautiful for God. He was a journalist in England for the Manchester Guardian. He was with the British intelligence unit serving as an operative during WWII with the MI5. He went on to become an editor of the famous British satirical journal Punch. I believe he became a Catholic while in his 70’s. )

If we are paying attention, I believe that there are reminders every day that we must be forever people.

But I frankly confess that I don't understand all of them. If and when you talk to God, please mention the O'Brien family.

blogger navbar

you might have noticed that instead of ads now at the top of this blog, there is what blogger is calling a navbar. One neat feature is that you can now search on the blog you're viewing using the navbar. And if you're into random blog surfing, "Next Blog" will help.

popdex

ranks the most popular links on the 'net.

looking for a pithy quote

try wikiquote.com

the emerging church: closing down options?

...let's explore alternative models of understanding the atonement. But when you write a book that ends by slamming a widely-held view with "I used to preach that but I don't any more" and the unnecessarily shocking "that view boils down to child abuse" you have to expect that people will remember that as the issue. You're not opening up our horizons, you're telling us "don't believe what you and I used to believe, believe this instead."

...


All I really want to ask here is this:

Why is emergent putting itself in the position of saying "believe this, reject that"? Wasn't this supposed to be a postmodern "both and" movement rather than a modernist "either or"?
I like the church so much better when we're able to experiment playfully, saying "By all means, hold on to that, but, whoa, look at this".

conrad gempf has posted what, from my seat, is a helpfully provocative post .

It's not unprecedented for movements (or conversations, if you prefer) to overreact to imbalance. Conrad calls the emerging church to take care not to throw baby out with bathwater.

si johnson met da carson @ 35,000 feet...

....and they had an interesting conversation. i personally appreciated some of the outer boundaries that carson delineated in the gagging of god, but i haven't felt that he's mined the pomoChristian thoughtspace for all its potential depths.

effusing again about bloglines

this thing is really revolutionizing the way I surf blogs. A few days ago I was speaking with Rex Miller about blogging, theology, and leadership formation and I was telling him that because of bloglines I could check I could check the over 80 blogs I blogroll in abou 5 minutes. This is because bloglines lets me know of only those blogs that have been updated. Moreover, if I read something interesting that I wish to blog on myself or read more carefully later, all I need to do is to clip it and it's saved for my future reflection. If there's a blog that doesn't syndicate itself? All I need to do is to surf over to blogstreet and in about 3 minutes I can create a syndicated feed to use when adding the site to bloglines. It's the bomb.

the danger of merely propositionalizing the transpropositional:
a great barth quote!

The Word became flesh -- and then through theologians it became words again. -- Karl Barth

thanks to jordon

scott stapp, formerly of creed, a christian

see the 9 August ChristianMusicToday.com interview.

thanks to welcometotheplanet for the link.

blogging and mission

si johnson had some comments somewhat related to the recent conversation between dan hughes, maggi dawn, steve taylor and myself.

spencer burke (theooze.com) in la times

jordon alerts us to the fact that the Los Angeles Times today had an article on spencer burke and his "emerging church" (free registration required).

I read somewhere once that when a newspaper article is written on something you really know a lot about, it's amazing how many inaccuracies you see. I'd love to hear Spencer's take on this article but here's a couple of observations.

The article says,

"The 1-year-old church in Orange County has no name, no building and no set time to meet"

and then later comments

"They're part of a new phenomenon — "emerging churches" — growing out of evangelical Christianity."

The implication that Spencer's church is a typical "emerging church".

No slam at all on Spencer or his new spiritual community, but I'm sure it's not a typical "emerging church". Most "emerging churches" do have names and do have set times to meet. Some have buildings. Moreover, the article goes on to quote Dan Kimball, author of The Emerging Church, whose Vintage Faith Church definitely has a name, set times to meet and meets in its mother church's Worship Center.

That being said, that's not to say at all that the typical emerging church - and readers of this blog - don't have something to learn from Spencer and his friends' ecclesial adventures.

the portal

found an interesting site called The Portal, which was founded by Sarah Raymond Cunningham. Still exploring....

becoming privately successful

thanks to maggi for turning me onto gapingvoid. An exerpt from "How to Be Creative":

6. Everyone is born creative; everyone is given a box of crayons in kindergarten.
Then when you hit puberty they take the crayons away and replace them with books on algebra etc. Being suddenly hit years later with the creative bug is just a wee voice telling you, "I’d like my crayons back, please."

some mature content

millennium matrix

watch this space.

stay on the bleeding edge

BlogPulse is an automated trend discovery system for blogs and a portal into the blogosphere.

USA TODAY

Someone asked me to show some pictures of where I work. We moved into our new corporate headquarters in 2001. It's an award winning Kohn Pederson Fox design. Though I've been with USA TODAY since 1989, I only started working here in January of 2002. It was a difficult time in my life and one of the Godthreads in my life at that time was the beauty of our campus. I see it as reflecting Man's creativity, which - of course - , reflects God's creativity. My favorite feature of the building is the hanging staircase in our lobby.

I'm grateful for the opportunity to work for this company and have learned much here. I remember that when I worked at Cedar Ridge with small groups and adult education, I wasn't sure if I had learned more from seminary or from working for Gannett/USA TODAY!

the gospel in post-modern culture

the billy graham center sponsored a roundtable on this topic and papers presented are now available online. among others see papers here by Brian McLaren, Brad Kallenburg, and George Hunter.

thanks to steve knight for the link.

how does the online medium help us develop a new praxis of theology (was "do blogs democratise knowledge"?)

I'm renaming this meme 'cause I'm concerned it's too easy to be distracted by the very sexy phenomenon of blogging.

First to recap:

Dan Hughes got the ball rolling with his post that opened with:

the next generation of theologians will start as bloggers.

Steve Taylor expressed some skepticism.

Maggi Dawn made some important comments.

I underlined some of their concerns and suggested an additional nuance that I feared was being missed.

Dan followed up.

and Steve followed up.

and Maggi added a bit more.

Further, in response to my earlier post , in comments, maggi wrote:

some good points, stephen. But my worry with the inflated claims for blogging remains. I don't dispute that blogging is a useful form for theological discussion - theology can take place in any format at all. But the suggestion that blogging and other internet forms can or should (or have already) replaced conventional forms doesn't democratise anything - on the contrary, it narrows the field. The best theological blogs are ones that offer some reflection on what is being read and written and discussed elsewhere, the blog thus being one thread in a much bigger fabric. If we use the blog as a useful addition to other forms, it will be fruitful indeed. But if we neglect other forms in favour of the blog, we risk going down a very shallow stream indeed.

maggi, i like very much your comment about blogging being "one thread in a much bigger fabric".

i recently read ed cray's wonderful general of the army about george c marshall, US army chief of staff during WWII. after WWI the technology of airplanes advanced and by WWII there were those who felt that practically all US resources should be expended on building as many as possible. marshall, however, knew that while the airplane would change military tactics significantly, it would not be the one thing that would defeat the nazis.

similarly, with the blog specifically and our new and developing online world more generally, we most avoid the triumphalism of thinking "this will change everything" while at the same time taking full advantage of how this - to modify slightly your metaphor - new kind of fabric adds more strength and flexibility to the cloth. We must also be chary of collapsing new modalities of discussion down to the current level of depth achieved in blogging. We mustn't let the current cultural phenomenon of blogging dim our vision of what the online world offers. I respectfully suggest it's a hint of what can occur. The church has not yet optimized its full capacity.

What theologians have generally done well through generations has been to systematize knowledge (to the degree the Divine is subject to such) and to parse out theological formulations. What both the theological and eccesial community have not done nearly as well (from my admittedly Western seat) has been to formulate an effective praxis of theological disagreement. It is in this very area that I am most hopeful that our new online forums can help us: To enable the church's theologians to be exposed to a wide diversity of confessing thought without the abstraction that can occur through de-relationalized interaction. The online world provides both a wideness of information and the opportunity for such discussions to occur in the context of spiritual friendship. Humility can result; genuine listening may follow, and wisdom could prevail as a hosts of minds consider each topic from various angles.

This is what could happen; it's a mistake to think that blogging is the full flower of what's possible.

May God help us to disagree more Christianly - in all contexts - and so come closer to Christ's mind.

more on blogged theological discourse

I didn't mention Herbert Marshall McLuhan, but - happily - Dan Hughes did in a followup to his original post upon which Maggie, Steve, and I commented.

do blogs democratise knowledge?

Maggi Dawn recently asserted that blogging does not democratise knowledge.

She was responding to a post by Dan Hughes that's worth quoting

the next generation of theologians will start as bloggers. they will be schooled in global-reach pontification, in flame wars and public reconciliation. they will know how it feels to be wrong in a very open way and will be well versed in admitting to it. this admission will bring with it both a more scrupulous fact checking and a more fast and loose approach to publishing. comments, conversations, deep links and trackbacks will be the circuitous route that many thoughts will gestate along.

Maggie also mentions the skeptical comments of Steve Taylor who writes,

But if the statement is to input some magical status to theoblogians, I will need more convincing. As an inhabiter of both clasroom and blogoshere [sic], the debate in the blogosphere is no deeper or more incisive than the debate in a theological classroom. In fact, often the debate in the blogosophere is less incisive. At least in the classroom there are things called assignments that encourage reading.

and Steve elsewhere asserts,

Blogs democratise knowledge. I am not convinced that democratisation will enhance theology, not because their [sic] is anything elite in theology, but because blogging can be a surface, skimming occupation that leaves less time to think and reflect.

Maggie demurs:

I do not subscribe to the idea that blogs do - or should - democratise knowledge.

...

Blogs are often like marginalia - they are the spill-over comments, the little points where your main work touches on the news of the day, or where specialist information suddenly becomes highly relevant. For in-depth thought you need full length essays, book-length developments (whether in print or on-screen).

While making valid and necessary points, I respectfully suggest that Maggie and Steve are missing something very important.

They are both entirely correct in asserting that blogging doesn't suddenly make you a brilliant and knowledgeable theologian. Dan would have done well to mention this. - but maybe not. Maybe he was writing iconoclastically - painting with broad stroke without mentioning all the nuances.

What Dan is onto that, I fear, is being missed is the effect the medium of blogging can one day have on the quality of theological discourse.

Several years ago, not too long after email began, while on a business flight I read an article in Fortune about how the phenomenon of email was having a de-hierarchicalizing effect on a large consulting firm. This company was using Lotus Notes and when one consultant had a question, he would send out a message to all others on the network and, quite often, someone could provide some expert help. It was revolutionary in that business and this phenomenon had the effect of democratising the individuals in the company because they were now being evaluated on the quality of their knowledge instead of how high up they were in the company's food chain. Francis Bacon was right: Knowledge *is* power. The immediacy and ubiquity of online technology is putting knowledge into the hands of more individuals than ever and giving them new mediums of discussion.

Four years ago, Francis McInerney and Sean White's investing book FutureWealth claimed that society changes as the cost of information falls. When handwritten books and the time to learn how to read and write them is very precious, then temples and specialized priests must create, read, interpret, cherish and transmit them from generation to generation. When the printing press is invented, the cost of information lowers and a sea change in society can occur. Some consider that the Gutenberg Press empowered the Protestant Reformation. Yet even with this, discrete intuitions of higher learning are still necessary because there must be some place where the books can be accumulated and studied, and young minds can be exposed to older, more informed, and wiser minds.

But today, information can be acquired and minds can meet online. In technological development, hardware is always first, then software, and then folks' optimized use of the software. Many, for example, have attributed the carnage of the Civil War at least partially to the fact that old military tactics were deployed with newer military technologies. And so we have yet to see the exponentially transformative effect that the ubiquity of information combined with the immediacy and availability of online relationship can have on the praxis of theological disagreement.

Dan well stresses the requisite character of theological discussion. Our new forum of theological discussion provides the theologian with increased humility opportunities. This is all to the good.

"Blogging" - in its current popular form - may be as ephemeral to online communication as the citizen band radio was to wireless communication. Maggie and Steve are to be forgiven for not being impressed that blogging itself is going to transform theological discourse as we know it. And they both are quite right to insist that merely the ability to expatiate atop the online soapbox doesn't instantly validate what's being said. Fruitful theological discourse requires in tandem both the hard work of information acquisition and spiritual transformation (combining what the 'mappers call propositional and transpropositional elements). But it's a mistake to collapse the potential of online interaction to its blogged vernacular form. Because of the way the online world rapidly disperses information and empowers relationships, it easily has the potential to be a very fruitful modality for theological discourse (though online discourse is not to be considered the omnicompetent modality). The widespread use of the internet lowers the cost of information and thereby makes it more readily accessible. The interactive nature of all things online makes this more widely dispersed information more readily discussable. And the interconnections of individuals accessing and discussing this information allows the development of more and more relationships strengthening Christian community.

This very blogged conversation is illustrative. Steve, Dan, Maggie, perhaps myself, and others whom I've not yet read all contribute valid points to this discussion and we all have something to learn from our fellows. Further, how likely is it that the four of us - and now you - would have ever gotten together to interact around this topic? It's the wise reader who pulls the best from all to form his own conclusion. And we have yet to see how these new community threads will strengthen Christ's church's capacity to love God and others more perfectly through better theology.

evangelicals take step out of the same ol', same ol'

Thirty-five evangelical Christian leaders have signed a letter urging President Bush to provide massive humanitarian aid and consider sending U.S. troops to stop what they called the "genocide" taking place in the Darfur region of Sudan.
The Aug. 1 letter marks a shift in focus for the evangelical movement, which previously was interested primarily in halting violence against Christians in southern Sudan. The victims in Darfur, a western province, are mostly Muslim.

more from the Washington Post.

Sam Carrasco

Originally uploaded by sshields.

Sam is in remission!

new site on the basics of blogging

thanks to dj for the reference.

someone just used a cool phrase or word

and you have no clue what's being said.

berkley comes to the rescue

jordon incites resonate buzz

i'm only posting this 'cause jordon posted it, so it must be interesting.

grand haven, mi goes wi-fi

dan hughes lets us know that the entire city now is wi-fi.

i wanna blog! i wanna blog!

you're reading this and you really want to blog but feel intimidated by the technology 'cause you're neither an ubergeek nor a geek.

not to worry - scott johnson comes to the rescue.

idiot's guide to blogging

jonny baker tells us how. thanks to steve knight for the link.

blogstats

"Blog Authoring: 2% - 7%

3.7 - 13.0 bloggers in the US
20 - 70 million bloggers worldwide

Blog Readers: 11%

20.4 million blog readers in the US
110 million readers worldwide"

darren rouse turns us on to Blog Count

another great example of transpropositionality

from the Washington Post's Science Notebook:

Babies Grasp Concepts

Why were you born?

I was in Los Angeles recently, having lunch with a friend. I learned that one of the hostesses at the restaurant had just moved to la from Connecticut. So I got a copy of my book and gave it to her. Another hostess was on the phone, and when she saw the book in my hand, she said, "I love that book, I love that book! Why are you giving her that book?" I said, "I'm the author." She hung up the phone, and with great excitement she told me that the book was part of her family's history. Her grandfather had read the book. He then gave it to her father on her parents' wedding day. And her father has now given it to each of his children, including her. Every age can use it, it seems.

Richard Bolles in What Happened to Your Parachute?, a FAST COMPANY interview with the author of What Color is Your Parachute?

I started going through this book maybe a year ago and found it transformational. It speaks to much more than merely how to find a job. It really does help the reader find his calling. Will Samson and I had breakfast yesterday and when I mentioned this book, he similarly raved.

NT Wright - Christian Origins and the People of God

On 14 thru 16 July in hothorpe hall, leicestershire, england, Jason Clark, Chris Erskine, Simon Hall, Mike Love, Andrew Perriman, Matt Scrimgeour sponsored a two and a half day discussion with NT Wright, who is Bishop of Durham, called The Future of the People of God.

Andrew posted some preliminary reading material for the conference on his open theology site. Just at this writing am I discovering that included in this is a helpful synopsis of Wright's in-process multi-volume series, Christian Origins and the People of God. He provides a synopsis of

The New Testament and the People of God

Jesus and the Victory of God

and

The Resurrection of the Son of God

These are big tomes and Andrew truly renders those who have not taken time yet to read all published books of this series so far.

More to come.

a guide to every christian site

what would your site look like if you wished to catalog every christian site in the internet including emerging church categories?

maybe something like this.