Scot McKnight:
The theme of burial with Christ is that we are raised to be one. The
original heresy was to cut up the body of Christ and hack it to
pieces.
What if the heretics were not only in the church, but the churches
themselves were the ones committing the heresy?
Does your church sign advertise oneness in Christ or difference from
other churches? How does it do so? Does your church website market
your distinctiveness or your union with all churches in Christ?
Andrew Sullivan:
It is a sign of a movement that has so lost the narrative it can only
smear or ignore those with whom is disagrees — rather than engage
them.
Megan Howard:
Easter is the holiday where we celebrate the fact that Jesus finished
the work he came to do, the work that changed the world. But I also
think there is good reason for Christmas to be the “bigger” holiday.
It is the holiday of mystery and wonder. The holiday where we
celebrate not what Jesus has done, but the holiday where we celebrate
hope for what he could do. The baby Jesus is not a symbol of
accomplishment, but a symbol of potential, and potential holds a great
mystery.
Jay Rosen:
If in doing the serious work of journalism–digging, reporting,
verification, mastering a beat–you develop a view, expressing that
view does not diminish your authority. It may even add to it. The
View from Nowhere doesn’t know from this. It also encourages
journalists to develop bad habits. Like: criticism from both sides is
a sign that you’re doing something right, when you could be doing
everything wrong.
I am more and more of the opinion that opinionated reporting is more
honest than “impartial” reporting. I don’t believe that one can truly be
impartial and that anyone who claims to be is not being honest.
If someone has spent a lifetime covering an industry or topic or company
or whatever, that makes them something of an expert on the subject.
Someone whose opinion we should value.
Dan Bouchelle:
Whether you like it, love it, fear it or loathe it, the dream below is
representative of many in a generation raised in our churches who have
stuck it out but are struggling to live out their faith in our current
setting.
What follows in the post it a list of attributes of the church this
young minister wants to lead. Definitely go read the full thing, but
I’ll pick out a few:
- There is no building, but the foundation is the love of Christ
- There is no pulpit, but Scripture is opened and taught in living
rooms, coffee shops, bars and parks- Ethnic diversity is the norm
- No topic off the table for discussion–a “safe place” for any issue
The Four Types of Christian Christmas Parents
John Crist:
The “Giving-Gifts-With-Subtle-Hints” Parents:
When I was 13 I got deodorant for Christmas. Thanks mom. When did you
realize I should start wearing deodorant? April? And you decided to
wait nine months because you figured it would be less awkward that just
setting it on my sink one morning and saying, “Use this.” It was more
awkward at Christmas. Trust me.
So, last week Twitter debuted a new interface with the stated intent of
simplifying the experience. This new interface has drawn criticism
from many bloggers. Most of the discussion centered around
Twitter organizing their user interface under two categories: Connect
and Discover.
Their PR explains it this way (emphasis mine):
We’ve simplified the design to make it easier than ever to follow what
you care about, connect with others and discover something new.
The problem with Connect and Discover is that they are not words
people use to describe routine actions. Instead they are vague
words that convey a range of meanings instead of describing specific
activities1.
I actually get where they’re coming from. There is a perceived problem
that people don’t really know how to use Twitter. In the old days of
boxed software, this would be a documentation issue. In the post-manual
world that we live in today, the user interface is to blame.
The answer is to simplify, which means we need less options. Before
there were @replies, #hashtags, lists, search, followers and people you
follow. I can imagine the meeting where someone asks:
What if we could reduce all those features to two sections. Two is
less than six, so that makes it simpler which makes it better. We
just need to name the two options in a way that conveys the full
power behind them.
That’s how you come up with Connect and Discover. These are abstract
concepts, not product features. To someone
who already knows what Twitter is capable of, Connect and Discover
are great words that succinctly distill the full potential of Twitter.
To someone that doesn’t know anything about Twitter, these words mean
nothing. They need to be explained in the context of Twitter.
The reason I know this is because Josh Gertzen and I made the same
mistake with TileStack.
We needed a name for the button that brought up the
stack editor.2 We wanted to convey to the user that launching the
editor was a safe operation, that any changes they made would not be
applied to the stack they were viewing.3 For that reason, we didn’t
want to use ‘Edit‘, because ‘Edit‘ made it sound like you could
modify something that someone else had made. We had many long
conversations and debates about what to call the button. The thesaurus
was consulted. Finally we chose a word4: ‘Customize this stack‘.
The idea was that ‘Customize‘ implied that you were creating a custom
version of the stack you were modifying instead of modifying the
original. This was the exact behavior we wanted to encourage: see a cool
stack, make some changes and save a new copy with your changes. We
really wanted to grow a community of re-mixers.
There was just one problem: people didn’t click the button. We knew this
not by using fancy analytics tools, but by the questions we were asked
by email or in our forums. One of the top questions we got was a feature
request for a stack editor. We were completely befuddled. The stack
editor was the core of what we had built, and most people didn’t
even know it existed!
Back to the drawing board. The problem with ‘Customize‘ was that it
always implied that the intent was to make a new creation. Early on,
there was no community. People just wanted to upload their
HyperCard stacks and edit them in the browser. We needed something
that would convey this ability as well as the fact that it is still a
safe operation on someone else’s public stack.
After another long round, we finally settled on ‘Inspect‘. The word
sounds pretty harmless. You’re just looking around to see how something
worked. There’s also the notion of an Inspector Window which was
essentially what our editor was.5
Do you care to guess what the impact of that change was? How about
nothing? We ended up making a series of videos showing how to use the
site, which did help a lot, but we still got questions about where to
find the stack editor.
To be fair, both Customize and Inspect are actually pretty concrete
words, but they were the wrong words. How do I know they were the wrong
words? I didn’t use them myself. I would always say Edit. In fact, the
tool palette that appeared was called the Editor (not Customizer or
Inspector). Those words were forced because the natural word wasn’t
deemed to be good enough. This just exposes that we weren’t as smart as
we thought we were. Eventually we broke down and just called the
button ‘Edit‘6
So, American detainees are non-citizens?
Dave Jones:
But, remember what we’re talking about here. The whole controversy is
about detaining Americans, captured on American soil. So, when
Scott Brown says that trying these folks in court would “award
detainees the same rights as U.S. citizens,” he is evidently saying
that once you are detained, you are no longer a citizen.
Rachel Held Evans:
…we’ve got to have a “Merry Christmas” banner in front of every
parade and an inflatable manger scene outside of every courthouse…
or else we’ll make a big stink about it in the name of Jesus.…
This is a very strange way to honor Jesus, “who, being in very nature
God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped…but
made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant.”
(Philippians 2:8)…
Jesus wasn’t embraced by the government. He was crucified by it.
On the impracticality of a cheeseburger.
Waldo Jaquith:
Further reflection revealed that it’s quite impractical–nearly
impossible–to make a cheeseburger from scratch. Tomatoes are in
season in the late summer. Lettuce is in season in spring and fall.
Large mammals are slaughtered in early winter. The process of making
such a burger would take nearly a year, and would be wildly
expensive–requiring a trio of cows–and demand many acres of land.
There’s just no sense in it.
via Daring Fireball
Ted's Tidbits 