- The World is Flat author Thomas Friedman’s new book is titled Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution — and How It Can Renew America. The Huffington Post has the roundup and some videos. “The book’s main argument is that the convergence of global warming, global flattening (the rise of middle classes all over the world), and global crowding (the population boom) is driving five key trends that will define the 21st century. Friedman argues that those five trends — energy and resource supply and demand, petro-dictatorship, biodiversity loss, climate change, and energy poverty — have all been driven past a tipping point such that they have created a new era of history: the energy climate era.” BONUS: From now until August 4, you can download The World is Flat audiobook in it’s entirety for free at Friedman’s website (it’s a hefty $39 on iTunes)! 07/26/2008
- “The perfect church service would be one we were almost unaware of; our attention would have been on God. But novelty prevents this. It fixes our attention on the service itself; and thinking about worship is a different thing from worshiping. ‘Tis mad idolatry that makes the service greater than the God.” – C.S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm 07/24/2008
- Christians Spend Too Much Time Studying The Bible. “It’s obvious, from historical observation alone, that one can be a sold-out, fully devote, [sic] willing to die a martyr’s death follower of Jesus and spend next to no time practicing the spiritual discipline of Bible study.” 07/21/2008
- David Fitch offers three issues to consider as you discern for yourself and your church as to whether to vote or not vote as act of Christian social justice. “Where is the recognition that abstaining from voting (refusing to participate) can be an even more aggressive activist (dare I say Biblical) stance for justice?” 07/21/2008
A brief hiatus
July 12th, 2008 | I am leaving in 7.5 hours with thirteen students and two adult volunteers for a week; we’ll be doing mission work in Red Lake, Minnesota. I won’t be anywhere near JakeBouma.com until after the 20th of July, but if you’re interested you can follow along at the St. Mark Student Ministries blog, YouTube page, and Flickr page.
See you on the other side.
- Nicholas Carr, author of The Big Switch, wrote an article for The Atlantic titled Is Google Making Us Stupid?: What the Internet is doing to our brains. “My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.” This is a superb article, and I couldn’t help but notice the strong tie-ins with TSK’s “1024 Window”. Related: Nicholas Carr on Marshal McLuhan, Best of 2007 07/07/2008
- Jeremy writes about Worshiping Empire America This July 4th Sunday. “Rather than praying to our Father who art in Heaven that His Kingdom will come, His will be done on Earth as in Heaven, we’ll ask God to bless our Kingdom and the fruits of Americas labor. Worship of God will be replaced by worship of America.” I, for one, am preaching at my church tomorrow and am purposely circumventing any mention of Independence Day. 07/05/2008
- Leading scientist John Holdren says “global warming” is not the correct term to use; he prefers “global disruption”. “‘Global warming’ [is] misleading. It implies something that’s mainly about temperature, that’s gradual, and that’s uniform across the planet… In fact, temperature is only one of the things that’s changing. It’s a sort of an index of the state of the climate. The whole climate is changing: the winds, the ocean currents, the storm patterns, snow packs, snowmelt, flooding, droughts. Temperature is just a bit of it.” 07/04/2008
- Tony Jones discusses the trouble with defining “evangelical”, which may be helpful in light of recent posts here. “To most evangelicals… ‘evangelical’ is a theological category. It represents what one believes about the Bible, about Jesus, about salvation, and about the afterlife. But to the mainstream media, ‘evangelical’ is a cultural category. One is an ‘evangelical’ based on whom you vote for, whether you listen to Christian radio, shop at Christian bookstores, contribute to evangelical ministries, and vote for certain candidates.” 07/01/2008
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