A to-the-point analysis from Politico.com.
Aug 152008
The two candidates will make their first joint appearance this Saturday at Saddleback Church, hosted by Rick Warren. The website for the event can be found here. NPR reports:
Warren has said that the conversations will focus on issues such as
poverty, AIDS, climate change and human rights. The forum also gives
the politicians the chance to appeal to religious voters. The most recent poll
from the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life shows that white
evangelicals are more undecided now than they were at this point during
the last two election cycles.
And also this, from a Q&A with the Pew Forum’s John Green:
Beyond what it may say about the role of religion and the campaign, the
event seems to serve the purposes of both the Obama and McCain
campaigns. As you know, there has been a lot of back-and-forth between
the campaigns about joint appearances. This is the first one that’s
happened. It could also be that some of the people who put this
together, including Rick Warren himself, were a particular draw.
In the course of further discussion, Green compares Rick Warren’s recent place in political discussion to Billy Graham:
One of the reasons Warren has the kind of attraction to Obama and
McCain is that he is not as political as some pastors are. He cares
very much about issues like AIDS in Africa. The better parallel is
between him and [Billy] Graham. Graham was friends with many presidents
and close to the Bush family. Graham did this in a very bipartisan way
but always managed to stay above the rough and tumble, because he
always talked about issues, and he based his appeal on personal
relationships.
Read more here. Mark Stricherz of getReligion.org offers some further thoughts about Rick Warren. It is also interesting that the abortion debate does not appear to be on the agenda, particularly given some statements by Obama, not to mention proposed changes in the Democratic platform on the issue.
Peter Sagal on All Things Considered:
Like a lot of people, I am constantly checking my e-mail accounts. I also check if anybody has commented on my blog, and I check my phone for text messages, and I await instant messages like a trembling young fawn. But I noticed recently that once I’ve received an e-mail, text message or comment, I feel a certain letdown. Before it arrives, it could be anything: a new opportunity, an old friend emerging from the past, a summons to the palace, because the king has decided that only I can save the kingdom. Once the messages arrive, they seem so mundane: friends I already have, requests that ask nothing of my special crime-fighting abilities, entreaties from Nigerians to whom I’ve already sent checks.
Read more.
I asked the question here. The answer, perhaps, is available here. An excerpt:
Up until last night, the person with the most followers on the micro-messaging service was Digg founder and Web celeb Kevin Rose
, with 56,482 other people following his every public mind burp. It took none other than Barack Obama
Aug 132008
Listen to the hour-long interview of Pete Enns, author of Inspiration and Incarnation, on NPR’s “Radio Times with Marty Moss-Coane” here.
Aug 122008
The Bush era may have created a polarized political environment, but the differences between Obama and McCain are more than political. Increasingly voters are asked to consider the socio-cultural differences between the candidates, whether it be age, race, ideology, or some other factor.
Two recent stories illustrate this trend.
First, and close to my nerdy heart, here is an analysis of Obama’s recent announcement that SMS and Email would be the information medium of choice for his upcoming VP announcement. It’s a move that simultaneously galvanizes young voters, for whom SMS in particular is a primary method of communication, and functions as a kind of pot-shot at McCain’s less than sophisticated utilization of technology.
Second, NPR takes penetrating news analysis to a new level with this story about the candidates top music choices. This kind of thing also appeals to a younger crowd, for whom musical preferences are a way of creating personal identity. In this regard, I wonder how McCain’s choice of ABBA–twice–will resonate.
Check out this list of handy websites for writers. Here are a couple that I have found particularly useful:
SparkNotes Ultimate Style. The web’s ultimate guide to grammar provides a searchable database of topics and an easy-to-search A-Z list of common questions.
MIT OpenCourseWare. MIT offers dozens of free writing courses through their OpenCourseWare program. Course topics include short story writing, fiction writing, expository writing, technical writing, essay writing and poetry.
Also be sure to check out the Internet Archive, which contains a ton of resources in the public domain. It is a great place to look for old books, lectures, etc. And while your browsing, you can download live music (or go here, particularly if you like bluegrass or the Grateful Dead)!
You will need a good Bittorrent Client to download large items from the Internet Archive.
Aug 072008
At first it may seem that the Garfield comic strip has nothing to do with my aforementioned open-source agenda. But check out this post, which not only tells us about the benefits of a culture of sharing, but also provides an interesting perspective on art, language, hermeneutics, and the contextual nature of meaning.
Going back to school? Getting ready for school is more than just pens and pencils nowadays. Summer is the time to take a software/webware inventory. This post offers some advice on web applications that might come in handy. I would only make one change: replace their recommended bibliography application EasyBib with Zotero, which, while not technically a web-app, promises web syncing in the near future and is much more robust than EasyBib.
A future post here will describe the steps I have taken to sync Google and Remember the Milk with Mozilla’s excellent Thunderbird email program. Want to make sure you catch this up-coming post? Then subscribe to this blog!
Here is an interesting post by John Walton about children’s Bible curricula.
If we are negligent of sound hermeneutics when we teach Bible to children, should it be any wonder that when they get into youth groups, Bible studies and become adults in the church, that they do not know how to derive the authoritative teaching from the text?
He identifies 5 common and easily avoidable mistakes. The fifth I found particularly convicting:
Focus on people rather than God: The Bible is God’s revelation of himself and its message and teaching is largely based on what it tells us about God. This is particularly true of narrative (stories). While we are drawn to observe the people in the stories, we cannot forget that the stories are intended to teach us about God more than about people. If in the end, the final point is “We should/shouldn’t be like X (= some biblical character)” there is probably a problem unless the “X” is Jesus or God. Better is “we can learn through X’s story that God . . .”
Read the whole thing at Zondervan’s recently launched koinonia blog.
