An Artisan I’ve long been fascintated by the Greek word tekton (literally artisan or craftsperson) which is translated “carpenter” in the gospels (Matthew 13:55, Mark 6:3) to describe the kind of work Joseph did, because it means as a little boy Jesus would have watched his earthly father creating which is theologically awesome since we believe all things were
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Last week, three big websites referenced things I’ve worked on recently: Biola University launched it’s new Open Biola project and featured my lecture on its homepage of resources. Jeffrey Zeldman, one of the web’s leading designers, blogged about my MediaElement.js library. Outreach Magazine and other websites reported on my work to distribute 50,000 Arabic digital Bibles during
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Last fall, CNN posted an article which argued that if you tell people you are trying to lose weight, it can actually make it harder to succeed. Problems with Losing Weight There are certainly some great reasons to talk with a community about weight loss, diet, and exercise. Accountability and encouragement are really important, and yet some doctors
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A few Sundays ago, I looked up at the screens in our church auditorium and immediately bumped my wife and said, “Look!” Her response was, “What? What am I looking at?” I couldn’t believe it. For 10 years our church has had 4:3 screens sitting inside widescreen frames, and that day they had finally upgraded to
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Jon Acuff has a nice post about Skrillex (an Internet sensation for his electronic music) who recently advised a group of his fans that they shouldn’t try to experience his concert through their smartphones. In the words of Mr. Skrillex: Don’t try to experience the party through your cell phone just so you can document it to
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There is a slowly growing body of teaching about media that is actually based in media, and I think this is a good thing. The past few years have seen the release of many books on technology and Christianity (including my own), but the trouble is most of the people who need to hear their
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This is the third and final post in a series on the meaning of the word medium. It was inspired by Erik Eekhoff’s review of Tim Challies’ The Next Story: Life and Faith after the Digital Explosion and thoughts I’ve had after writing my own book From the Garden to the City: The Redeeming and Corrupting Power of Technology. Part
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This is the second post in a series of posts on the meaning of the word medium. It was inspired by Erik Eekhoff’s review of Tim Challies’ The Next Story: Life and Faith after the Digital Explosion. Part 1 – Medium as Connection, Medium as Transference Part 2 – Medium as Environment, Medium as Language Part 3 – Mediums
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Last week, MereOrthodoxy.com posted a review of Tim Challies’ The Next Story: Life and Faith after the Digital Explosion from engineer Erik Eekhoff. One thing that caught my eye was Eekhoff’s critique of Challies’ use of terms like mediated and unmediated (it caught Justin Taylor‘s eye as well). Eekhoff brings up some great points, some of which will be applicable to
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A few weeks ago I had the rare pleasure of meeting an fellow as interesting as Chris Ridgeway. Chris currently works in church fundraising, but he did his master’s thesis on media ecology under Scot McKnight, and he has some great ideas about technology and culture. One of the most interesting things he mentioned to me
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