Under Seige

Just noticed this. A comprehensive site of all the Global coverage of the Ad-Scam scandal. Is it just me or does this site look a little biased?

Soularize :: March 2-4 2005 :: Los Angeles

There, the cat's out of the bad. Site coming soon. Regional locations coming too.

US chose to ignore Rwandan genocide

The Guardian article over simplifies it a little bit but from what I have read, the Clinton administration had no desire to get involved at almost any cost. That being said, the mood of the American people was isolationalist and Congress wouldn't have supported them. The blame needs to go beyond governments (but not exclude them) and go to the people of the west who didn't care.

It discovered that the CIA's national intelligence daily, a secret briefing circulated to Mr Clinton, the then vice-president, Al Gore, and hundreds of senior officials, included almost daily reports on Rwanda. One, dated April 23, said rebels would continue fighting to "stop the genocide, which ... is spreading south".
Three days later the state department's intelligence briefing for former secretary of state Warren Christopher and other officials noted "genocide and partition" and reported declarations of a "final solution to eliminate all Tutsis".
However, the administration did not publicly use the word genocide until May 25 and even then diluted its impact by saying "acts of genocide".
Ms Des Forges said: "They feared this word would generate public opinion which would demand some sort of action and they didn't want to act. It was a very pragmatic determination."
The administration did not want to repeat the fiasco of US intervention in Somalia, where US troops became sucked into fighting. It also felt the US had no interests in Rwanda, a small central African country with no minerals or strategic value.

Sadly the west only value life when it has minerals or strategic value. The Belgiums pulled out when they lost a dozen troops. The Canadian government kept their troops in but they only monitored the slaughter. I agree wth Paul Martin when he called it a national disgrace for Canada. A sad chapter in the history of the world.

Why churches need websites

Was reading AKMA's excellent post about why churches need websites when I started to wonder what holds churches back. I started poking around the web, looked at GeoCities but didn't really like what I saw (man did Yahoo! wreck that site), looked at Blogspot, Typepad, and came across Squarespace. It looked intriging and free so I started to fiddle. 30 minutes later I had recreated the Lakeland Church website with no knowledge of html needed. Is it as good as Typepad, not quite (but really, really close) but has a free version that is better for the beginner than Blogspot (and no ads). My point is that any church can do this. Any pastor can do this with nothing more than a Pentium 100 and a dial-up connection. The bar has been lowered so low that there is no have or have-nots, only want or want nots.

The Adventures of Jerry Seinfeld and Superman

Link

Children in Angola tortured as witches

Far from exuding wickedness, the 13-year-old schoolgirl is nervous and shy. Her "101 Dalmatians" cartoon T-shirt is grubby and doesn't fit. She swings her bare feet beneath her chair in the hyper way that all kids do. And she cries a lot. Especially about the torture.

Last month Helena was accused by her parents of sickening two of her nieces with evil spells. In retaliation, the bewildered girl says, one of her small hands was burned on a red-hot stove. Her meager possessions, including her clothes, were torched. She was choked. And finally, to destroy her reputation in the community, she was beaten in front of a large crowd. Her mother and elder sisters administered these punishments.

"They tell me that if I try to come home they will kill me," sobbed Helena her tears spattering the floor of the church shelter where she has run for safety. "They say I'm cursed."

Many children seem to be cursed these days in the impoverished hinterlands of Angola--accused of witchcraft by their families, then systematically abused, abandoned and even killed for imagined acts of witchcraft.

The scale and viciousness of the attacks on so-called criancas feiticeiras, or child witches, confounds even hardened human-rights workers in the war-haunted country, and some said the abuse is one of the most disturbing outbreaks of domestic violence seen in Africa in recent years.

The news article is sickening but here is the link

San Francisco ballpark makes pitch for Wi-Fi fans

Baseball fans bored by the slow pace of a game or wanting more statistics and information will be able to connect computer devices via Wi-Fi at San Francisco Giants home games this year, the team announced Tuesday. The Giants' ballpark is, after all, called SBC Park, for telecommunications giant SBC Communications.

"We've created, if not the largest, one of the largest hot spots in the world," said Larry Baer, the team's chief operating officer. "We're the first professional sports facility to provide people universal Wi-Fi connectivity."

Nice

Ummm, maybe not.

Heather Champ posted this great picture of a Basset Hound over on her photoblog. I always think I want one and then I remember talking to owners of them who remind me that a rather heavy, short legged, gasious, drooling dog may not be the best house pets. Wonderful picture though.

Saskatchewan Budget Analysis

In the words of Murray Mandryk

Is Ottawa severely short-changing us on health care and other areas of federal-provincial funding as Calvert contends? Or has the federal government provided adequate funding to a province that simply has not "renewed and rejuvenated" its own budget?
Well, the answer to this was actually available even before Goodale -- sporting the province's Western Red Lily -- stood up in the House of Commons Tuesday to deliver his budget speech. Frankly, all one really had to do is track four critical numbers in Saskatchewan's own provincial budgets during the past 12-years of this NDP administration.
The following four critical budget numbers go a long ways to resolving this debate:
- Critical Budget Number One: Transfers from the Government of Canada. Saskatchewan received $1.304 billion from Ottawa in 1992-93; $761 million in 1996-97, and will receive (according to the third-quarter update of the 2003-04 budget) $858 million.
That translates into a 12.7-per-cent increase in the past seven years (despite a decline in population cutting the province's equalization). However, it's actually a 34-per-cent decrease from Ottawa over the life of this NDP administration.
- Critical Budget Number Two: Own Source revenues. Excluding the money we received from Ottawa, Saskatchewan pulled in $3.072 billion in 1992-93 (including $2.3 billion from taxation and $396 million from natural resources); $4.743 billion in 1996-97 (including $3.1 billion from taxation and $908 million from natural resources) and will pull in another $5.447 billion in 2003-04 (including $3.4 billion in taxation and $1.1 billion in natural resource revenues).
That translates into a 77-per-cent increase in our own ability to generate revenue since the NDP came to power, largely driven by a 170-per-cent increase in oil and gas wealth and a respectable 48-per-cent increase in tax revenue (despite previous cuts to the provincial sales tax and substantial cuts to income taxes).
- Critical Budget Number Three: Provincial expenditures. Saskatchewan's overall budget expenditures were $4.968 billion in 1992-93 (including $734 million in debt-servicing costs); $5.096 billion in 1996-97 (including $794 million in debt servicing costs), and; $6.768 billion in 2003-04 (including $620 million in debt servicing costs).
That translates into a 36-per-cent spending increase in 11 years, but -- even more telling -- a 33-per-cent spending increase in the past seven years since the NDP government abandoned its first-term austerity program. Moreover, when you factor in the lower debt-interest costs and focus just on departmental operating costs, spending has actually increased 43 per cent in the past seven years.
- Critical Budget Number Four: The health budget. Simply put, Saskatchewan Health Department spending of $1.548 billion in 1992-93 increased just 3.9 per cent by 1996-97 to $1.608 billion, but has increased by a whopping 56.8 per cent in the past seven years to $2.522 billion in 2003-04. In fact, increases in provincial health spending have accounted for 54.7 per cent of all the new dollars spent by government in the past seven years.
Conclusion? While federal support to Saskatchewan has rebounded slightly in the past seven years, there is no doubt that this province's finances were hurt by the cutbacks it endured when then-finance minister and now prime minister Paul Martin was balancing the budget. But an increase in tax revenue and a massive increase in resource revenue should have more than made up for the federal transfer shortfall.
Saskatchewan has a spending problem -- not a revenue problem. While the NDP government did successfully curb health-care costs in its first term, it's failed to get health care under control since.

I hope it is a tough budget this year. I don't mind less services but I think running deficits like we have been for the last three years isn't going to help anyone either. I miss Janice McKinnon as finance minister.

Change

It's been six years today that we buried my mom after she lost a short and brutal fight with brain cancer. Been doing some reflecting lately on how life my life has changed since she died. A lot has happened in the last six years. It was a phase of life and I find myself leaving more and more of that behind. Some of things I am really happy to be leaving behind, other things I find it really hard to let go because it is security and stability when I didn't have a lot of either.

I have a tendancy to mock my past. Even my recent past, partly because it is mockable and I find it easy to make fun of myself (it really is all about me) but when I look I can see how God had me on a journey. Lately I have felt God very impatient with me, almost disappointed with me in our quiet times. I finally started to realize is that the journey was still ongoing and I was lingering and holding on to things that were holding me back. Maybe because I was scared, maybe because I was nervous, and more than likely a little lonely. During devotions I have been hearing God saying, "Get over yourself" and "Get moving, you aren't done yet." I find it disconcerting when other people talk of the Holy Spirit, he sounds much more affirming then when I hear the Spirit, it is often sounds a little sarcastic. Nice but a little flippant.

It kind of affirms what a couple other people have been telling me lately. I am seem to be out of sync in some areas of my life. Holding on to something that I shouldn't. Posting too much about American politics which they find boring (tough Canadian crowd).

What I hear is that I am stopping and focusing on the wrong things. I need to focus on the things that matter. The things that God called me to do and be. Forget some of the good things that distract me and concentrate on the God things I need to be. Good advice.

That being said, today reminds me of how terrible unfair life is. I think of how hard my mom's life was and then think back of the joy that we have experienced over the last five years and she missed it all. Life isn't fair and their isn't much of a guarantee that it will be there tomorrow.

Organizational life cycles

Phil just told me about a post he put up at Signposts about the life cycles of organizations. It is excellent.

My Wishes

Here is a poem written by Cecilia Zhang, and read by her father, today, on the day that would have been her tenth birthday. This case has saddened all of us. No motive, no clues, just a pointless murder of an innocent child.

If Christianity Is So Great, How Come Christians Keep Imitating The World?

via Scott Williams

Now, this month, comes a new Barna survey loaded with data that suggest the direction of the contemporary church is the wrong one. New Barna data suggest that “born again Christians” have a reputation slightly better than that of prostitutes, but lower than that of lawyers. And Barna, who is often quoted by the “seeker” crowd, for the first time came out with a statement explicitly saying that “seeker” approaches do not attract the unchurched. Instead, he says, the unchurched are seeking God's presence. "The one thing that the local church can provide that no other social institution does is the tangible, palpable presence of God," Barna says. "Trying to help people understand who God is, and ushering them into His presence is what we need to be aiming at," he says.

Link

Every kind of church is NOT OK.

From Alan Creech

Every kind of church is NOT OK. I won't go off indefinitely on this here, but I'm sort of tired of the hyper "get along" attitude that has crept into some of our conversation. And I don't mean to say that I like a hyper "don't get along" attitude either, so please don't put me in that category. I usually say what I mean, unless I'm holding back so as not to get attacked by those who await such opportunities like a Heron standing on a creek bank. This time I'll try to say it and be very brief. There ARE forms of church that ARE crippling and harmful to Christians who are part of them - there just are. And some of those are churches that we have generally thought of as OK for a long time. But they're not. "Well, isn't there room for this kind and that kind in order to reach everyone?" Well, probably - I would never argue for total homogeneity of expression - that would NOT be my point. I am not simply mad at the "traditional" church because somebody pissed me off or hurt me. Just not.

Charlie Wear posts his thoughts here.

All I'm saying is, okay, criticize, correct, prophesy to, passionately preach to, the church, but be careful about saying that something is "not ok." I mean, heck, Christ loves his whole church, with all of its screw ups, doesn't he? Am I making sense...did I miss the point?

Hockey

by Ken Dryden in the Globe and Mail.

Amateur theologian

Maggie Dawn has an excellent post about Karl Rahner being an amateur theologian.

Continuous Partial Attention

from Joi Ito

Also, the IRC back channel at conferences or the multi-modal distance learning projects where you have a video of the speaker, the power point presentation, the chat, the wiki and the back channel going at the same time. It CAN be very overwhelming, but I think it's because we are conditioned to think that we need to understand all of the information that is being transmitted.

I think an interesting metaphor might be the difference between loss-less and lossy compression technology. There is so much information being transmitted and it doesn't matter if you everything exactly (or if you are getting exactly the same bits as someone else). You can glean from the fire-hose in the mode that makes the most sense for you. The trick is to get a picture of what is going on from a perspective that makes sense for you in a format that compresses well for you. I think that if we stop trying to "catch it all" which we are conditioned to do, and think more in terms of lossy compression and surfing parallel streams and multi-modes, maybe it is easier.

via Dan

Mena's Corner

Six Apart's new weblog

Safety

“Any God who comes incarnate and get himself crucified is obviously not particularly concerned about safety.” – Rick Watts via One House

Spammer's Porsche up for grabs

Internet giant AOL has ratcheted up the war against unsolicited e-mail with a publicity-grabbing coup - an online raffle of a spammer's seized Porsche.
AOL won the car - a $47,000 Boxster S - as part of a court settlement against an unnamed e-mailer last year.
"We'll take cars, houses, boats - whatever we can find and get a hold of," said AOL's Randall Boe.
According to Mr Boe, the Porsche's previous owner made more than $1m by sending junk e-mail.
The Porsche-owning spammer, whose identity remains confidential, was one of a group sued last year for having sent 1 billion junk messages to AOL members, pitching pornography, college degrees, cable TV descramblers and other products.

Link

Why I like Orkut

There has been some comments about Friendster and Orkut and Dogster and all the other networking sites lately. That's cool. Not all people like them. David Weinberger and Andrew Careaga are two people that don't. They have some good points and Andrew asks

The Internet is all the social network we need. Isn't it?

Of course it is but there are tools that make some kinds of interactions easy and Orkut and Flickr do that for me. It was Dan Hughes that invited me and I have invited about 50 other people. Some of them have joined, others have not. That isn't what has made Orkut cool for me. Since I have been signed up, I have found a couple people I had lost touch with and have joined into a couple of communities (or conversations) that I would never have either. I agree with David Weinberger that relationships are not valid if we are collecting them or should we be using them but Orkut does provide another tie to people and gives us a place where we can chat together that might otherwise not happen. As to answer Andrew Careaga's question, I think Orkut, Friendster, Dogster and others are just benches we gather around while living out life on the web.

Syndication and My Yahoo!

I was chatting with Jeb today about syndication and My Yahoo!. While he was there, he set up part of Lakeview Church's website to publish an Atom syndication feed so that people at Lakeview can read it. Big deal right? It is when you think how many people use My Yahoo! and they can now get all of the current news and updates from their church right in the site where they get their news, weather, and sports with a click of a button (Jeb doesn't have the button on Lakeview's site yet)

Some good friends of mine have given me some good reasons for why they don't syndicate their blogs and I respect that but a lot of people mock technology because they don't use it (Friendster and Orkut for example but more on that later) or don't understand it enough to use it. Or maybe they don't use that bit of technology. That being said, in the space of less than 30 seconds, Jeb made it able for people at Lakeview Church to be able to integrate the news and life of the church into their lives a lot easier. I don't know how many people at Lakeview use My Yahoo!. When I was there, a fair amount did. I have no idea of how many of them will integrate Lakeview Church's news into their My Yahoo! but for those that will, I think they will find it a cool thing. In the case of Blogger and Moveable Type, I think more effort is made by some mocking it instead of making it available for people to see if they want to use it themselves. Whatever the case I think Jeb did a cool thing in making Lakeview's Atom feed available.

Rethinking Evangelism

A conversation with Dallas Willard

Evangelism

Much of evangelism today is rooted in a misunderstanding of salvation. People have been told they are Christians because they have confessed they believe that Jesus died for their sins, but the total package is presented in such a way that it leaves the general life untouched.

Biblically, salvation means deliverance; the question is, “Deliverance from what?” The common message is “deliverance from guilt.” But the full concept of salvation in the New Testament is deliverance from our present sins. Deliverance from sins comes from the new life of God’s Kingdom when we place our confidence in Jesus the person.

The problem is that we have been obsessed with this idea that the real issue is “making the cut” to get to heaven. We have taken the discipleship out of conversion.

The Gospel

In today’s presentation of the gospel, Jesus’ death is primarily presented as a ransom that deals with guilt and the effects of guilt regarding our standing before God. But there is more to life than guilt. Once you have been forgiven, you still have to live. Jesus is about the redemption of actual life from actual sin. It is by entering into his life, which is still ongoing on earth, that we are delivered from actual sin. The New Testament is absolutely clear on this. You just take Colossians 3, Philippians 3, 1 John and Titus 3. All make it clear that the righteousness which is by faith is a matter of being delivered from the evil that is around us in action and that we are in danger of falling into ourselves.

Faith in the living Christ raises us above merely being delivered from the consequences of sin. We need a doctrine not only of justification but of regeneration. We need a picture of our life in God that does not leave most of our life untouched. What has happened today is that we’ve reduced salvation to justification. We’ve reduced the saving work of Christ to his death on the cross. So what relevance has the resurrected Christ? None! Apparently, we would have gone to heaven even if Christ had never risen from the dead, because the payment was made in full on the cross. At that point, we would have all gone to heaven because God could not have found anything against us; it would have all been forgiven. Nothing else would have been available to us to make us ready for heaven, so that we would be comfortable when we get there! I shudder when I think of many people who are professing Christians today winding up in heaven; I don’t know what’s going to happen to them. I think they could not be very happy in heaven if they have not gotten acclimated here.

Discipleship

The leading assumption in the American church is that you can be a Christian but not a disciple. That has placed a tremendous burden on a mass of Christians who are not disciples. We tell them to come to church, participate in our programs and give money. But we see a church that knows nothing of commitment. We have settled for the marginal, and so we carry this awful burden of trying to motivate people to do what they don’t want to do. We can’t think about church the way we have been.

We need to clear in our heads about what discipleship is. My definition: A disciple is a person who has decided that the most important thing in their life is to learn how to do what Jesus said to do. A disciple is not a person who has things under control, or knows a lot of things. Disciples simply are people who are constantly revising their affairs to carry through on their decision to follow Jesus.

Dialogue

Evangelism is for the lost. People who regard themselves as not in need can be enjoyed as good company, but there is not much that will be done for them if they think they don’t have a need.

Now, for those who have a need, it’s very simple. You help them understand their need, and then you tell them that if they put their confidence in Christ now, in the sense that “confidence” ordinarily has in human life—which is to trust and to act on that trust—they will come to know a different kind of life than they presently have. They will enter into an interactive life with God and his Kingdom, and there will be differences in their life which can only be understood in those terms.

We can invite people to find out about this. A standard move for me when I find someone who would like to know more is to say “Why don’t you read the Gospel of Mark and come back next week and we’ll talk about it?”

Evangelism and the Church

The primary function of the church is not evangelism, but to be a place for the dwelling of God on the earth. This requires that people grow and receive God and occupy their place with God. That would have a natural effect of evangelism. What we want is not just evangelism that makes converts. We want disciples...and if you are intent on making disciples and keep on that track, evangelism will take care of itself.

Of course, understanding that evangelism is a natural function of a healthy Body doesn’t preclude specific efforts. But the role of the community would be a primary factor in this. Many people will be drawn in without any special strategy but simply by the health of the people.

Right now, evangelism with big meetings is in a very hard place—not only in trying to keep it going, but because of its results. Three out of four people who make professions at crusades never show up in any church. That’s partly due to the fact that in our notions of evangelism today, being converted has nothing to do with community; it just has to do with your “personal relationship” with God.

Link via Jason Clark

Soul-Shaper

Jeff Bailey talks with Tony Jones, Youth Pastor and Author, Postmodern Youth Ministry.

What are your thoughts about where youth ministry is at today?

Youth ministry is broken significantly, I think. Kids think church is about fun, about being entertained, and then they graduate and get out of youth group and realize, “church isn’t all that fun” – the programs in most churches for adults pale in comparison to the programs for youth, in their ability to keep people engaged. I think for kids to be spiritually formed, kids have to develop some sense of true commitment to the local embodiment of the Body of Christ. The youth should infiltrate the whole church. The ghettoized youth ministry programs where they are never with the adults are dangerous. In many of the best, emerging churches that I’m familiar with, there is no “youth ministry.” If a sixteen-year-old comes, they’re just a full human being like any other full human being who is emotionally developed enough to sit through an hour and a half worship service, or to sit at a committee meeting, or to pack up canned food for the food pantry. That’s where kids are spiritually formed – when they get out of the youth ministry ghetto with pithy talks by the youth pastor, and instead get involved in the whole life of the church.

Kids who we’ve moved right into leadership roles and given opportunities to carry authority of some sort – leading a high school small group or being a junior high group counselor – those kids immediately feel an investment in the church. They feel like God is using them for something. Yes, they’re immature, and probably not quite ready to be in leadership, but they are a lot more mature than some of the adult leaders sometimes!

All of this means the church has to change.

Absolutely. Suddenly they are cross pollenizing with adults. The fact of the matter is that the youth pastor is going to move on, probably sooner rather than later. Sixty-five year old Mary Jane, who has been a member of the church for forty years, isn’t going anywhere. If we can set up mentoring relationships between kids and adults, long after the youth pastor is gone, Mary Jane and people like her are going to care for that kid when she’s trying to figure out where to go to college, or if this is the right guy to marry.

I’ve done that over the last few years of ministry. Every kid gets assigned a mentor when they are fifteen. We try to work it so that starting when they enter youth group age, there are eight adults who are significant parts of their life: a confirmation class mentor and a confirmation small group leader, three youth pastors, a high school small group leader, and so on. You figure God is going to make sure one of those eight relationships works, at least!

Of course, that means Sunday worship needs to be youth-friendly. Students need to learn the rhythms of worship, but the senior pastor needs to be reminded to use anecdotes periodically from his or her life in high school, not always from when he or she was thirty-five. When they wrap up a sermon and challenge folks to apply it, they need to not always talk about “co-workers,” but talk about fellow-students or teammates. Have a mind that in a normal church, ten to fifteen percent of your audience on Sunday morning is 18 or younger. They don’t have co-workers, for the most part.

What place does age-specific ministry have in this paradigm?

I don’t know the answer, exactly, but I think age-specific ministry is going to be an aid to families and parents who are discipling their kids, and then, if course, an outreach to students who don’t come from Christ-following families. Of course, there will always be a place for a high school mission trip or a Junior High summer camp, just as there is a Christmas banquet for the seniors in the church, or a Youth Families retreat in the fall. It’s just that those things shouldn’t be the “be-all-end-all” of youth ministry. Of course, that also means that the youth minister should be just as theologically trained as any other pastor; he’s not a program director, but a pastor who does pastoral care. The kids I’m graduating with were sixth graders when I came. I’ve gone a full cycle with these kids. The connection I have with them is unparalleled in my experience.

Show some grace

A lot of people read this site and they come from a lot of different backgrounds. In addition to the people who come to this site, a lot of people subscribe to my site via RSS. A lot of people are authors and writers who get quoted on this blog. Some of them have been quite hurt but some personal attacks on them in the comments. There are a lot of different worldviews that come here. Postmodern, modern, Reformed, Wesleyan, conservative (and Conservative), liberal (and Liberal) and I post from a wide variety of angles. What I am getting at is that some of the comments have been really personal in nature and some of the authors and people who have posted that stuff have read it and some have been shocked and hurt by what was said. I know a lot of people and I pull from a lot of their stuff. When you attack them personally, there is a chance that they may read it. I think there is a difference between having differening opinons and outright mocking of the person who says it. I have no problem with Wesleyan's seeing the world differently then those who are Reformed and conservatives not agreeing with the liberals but can we stop attacking and belittling the people? Differences of opinions are okay and exchanges of ideas are good but bashing my friends is not what I want to happen. That's not what I am about and it's not about what this space is about.

Update :: I was thinking about this some more. Vigorous discussion is needed because I think we are looking for the truth. I think there is a difference in debating to find the truth and using language to humiliate someone else. I guess the whole Richard Clark debacle has me thinking about this stuff. Attacking a person's conclusions is one thing. Attacking a person's character is another. I know for many there is a lot invested in what you believe but chances are that intelligent and good people totally disagree with you just as there are those that agree.

A Magna Carta

Dan Hughes just posted this

...We believe that there is an inherent risk in the theologies and ecclesiologies that have come to dominate the memory of the man Jesus. We envision a direct, participatory spirituality whose modalities rest more in the patterns of day-to-day life than in the cycles of attendance and consumption that have come to define the dominate brands soliciting patronage in the name of Christ.

We believe that the fattened, current systems of empowered Christianity are vulnerable to one thing: less. These systems are built on the presumption that people will always want more. The organizational master plans presume this. The staffing levels, the building projects, the criteria of success all circumambulate the idol of more. These systems are unable to cope with less: people who find community in the normal connections of their daily lives rather than purpose-driven programs with a community label; those not interested in the system's alternatives to Disneyland and MTV, who don't need another Jesus-coloring-book Adult Sunday School class or desire to contribute to the capital stewardship drive to build the new wing.

Less brings with it the spectre of irrelevance. That gnawing sense that there may in fact be little purpose now in the things that have passed as Church....

You can read the rest of it here.

Worship Freehouse last night

Last night was a different kind of Worship Freehouse. First of all we were in a new location. We rented out the Chapel of Emmanuel St. Chad, an Anglican Chapel on the University of Saskatchewan campus. I posted a couple of pictures here.

Chester and I cleared off what looked to be a dance floor and Cathy Johnson set up art supplies for people to paint, draw, color and in the case of Mark, spill paint. After about 90 minutes of that, we had people share what they had created. It was good. Even Mark shared what he painted. A nice night.

Becky posted a picture of her creation here.

Ocean 'dead zones' a rising threat, UN agency warns

So-called "dead zones," oxygen-starved areas of the world's oceans that are devoid of fish, top the list of emerging environmental challenges, the United Nations Environment Program warned Monday in its global overview.
The spreading zones have doubled over the last decade and pose as big a threat to fish stocks as overfishing, the agency said in its Global Environment Outlook Year Book 2003, released at the opening of the agency's eighth summit meeting for the world's environment ministers.
Dead zones have long afflicted the Gulf of Mexico and Chesapeake Bay, but are now spreading to other bodies of water, such as the Baltic Sea, Black Sea, Adriatic Sea, Gulf of Thailand and Yellow Sea, as other regions develop, the UN agency said. They are also appearing off South America, Japan, Australia and New Zealand.

Link

Worship Freehouse tonight

8:00 p.m. at the The College of Emmanuel and St. Chad :: 1337 College Drive

Michael McDonough’s Top Ten Things They Never Taught Me in Design School

Link via Jason Kottke

“In the Vietnam era,” Clinton declared, “most young men, including the president, the vice president and me, most of us could have gone to Vietnam and didn’t go. And John Kerry said, ‘send me.’” - Bill Clinton

Why She Blogs

Cathy has a good post about why she blogs.

Another story about weblog syndication

over on Yahoo!

Kerryomics? A Clinton feel

Article over at the New York Times on the Kerry economic team.

Reading this blog just keeps getting easier.

Now with a click of the mouse, you can subscribe to my RSS feed via Bloglines and now (drum roll please) My Yahoo!. The web team at jordoncooper.com is all about one thing, serving the finest readers in the world. Of course you can also subscribe via e-mail as always.

Noam Chomsky's blog

right here

create an e-mail to send to the future

right here

Defining Stephen Harper

Who is Stephen Harper? His opponents call the new Conservative leader a right-wing zealot, dangerously out of touch with mainstream Canadian opinion.
"Extremism" is the word Liberal Revenue Minister Stan Keyes uses to characterize Harper's views.
Harper's own comments since winning his party's leadership last week have been designed to defy this zealot stereotype.
"We need the Red Tory vision of important national institutions and sustainable social programs," he said in his victory speech, referring to the left wing of the old Progressive Conservative party that is associated with leaders such as former Ontario premier Bill Davis and former prime minister Joe Clark.
"Harper manoeuvring party to the centre," wrote one newspaper after these remarks.
Yet, the real Stephen Harper, or at least the one that he has chosen to present to the world over the past 17 years, fits neither of these convenient images.

Read the rest of the article here

File sharing a criminal act

via Boing, Boing

A draft bill obtained by Wired News recently circulated among members of the House judiciary committee would make it much easier for the Justice Department to pursue criminal prosecutions against file sharers by lowering the burden of proof. The bill also would seek penalties of fines and prison time of up to ten years for file sharing.

In addition, on Thursday, Sens. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) introduced a bill that would allow the Justice Department to pursue civil cases against file sharers, again making it easier for law enforcement to punish people trading copyright music over peer-to-peer networks. They dubbed the bill "Protecting Intellectual Rights Against Theft and Expropriation Act of 2004," or the Pirate Act.

The bills come at a time when the music and movie industries are exerting enormous pressure on all branches of government at the federal and state levels to crack down on P2P content piracy. The industries also are pushing to portray P2P networks as dens of terrorists, child pornographers and criminals -- a strategy that would make it more palatable for politicians to pass laws against products that are very popular with their constituents.

In defending the Pirate Act, Hatch said the operators of P2P networks are running a conspiracy in which they lure children and young people with free music, movies and pornography. With these "human shields," the P2P companies are trying to ransom the entertainment industries into accepting their networks as a distribution channel and source of revenue.

This is the same Senator Orin Hatch which suggested that record companies be allowed to hack into computers to sabatoge them. I don't file share. I never have. I don't own pirated music yet I find the RIAA's tactics more and more and more disgusting every single day.

Voice recording Larry Lessig's new book

AKMA has a great idea over at his blog

The license pretty clearly indicates that, so long as we’re not making a commercial venture of it, we can make a recording of (“perform”) the text. There are a Preface, Introduction, fifteen chapters, a conclusion and an afterword. If you’re willing to contribute an MP3 recording of a chapter (ideally, hosting it on your own server — but I’ll bet we can gird up the Disseminary to host chapters for you, if you can host it yourself — drop us a comment and let us know which chapters you’ll take. Heck, we could have duelling chapters; which version of chapter 5 do you like, Accordion Guy’s or Jenny the Shifted Librarian’s? (Disclaimer: I just typed their names in there. They haven’t offered or anything. Yet.) (Another disclaimer: When I went to Jenny’s just now to get her link, I saw that she had the same idea — and we didn’t even talk about it Wednesday night!)

If we all chip in, the effort will be minimal and the benefits great.

Great idea! I am in.

The Todd Peters Band

The Worship Freehouse's Todd Peters is playing tomorrow night at McNally Robinson.

Make Your Hotel Room Picture-Perfect

from National Geographic

Elk Horn Pictures

Some of our pictures and commentary from Elk Horn have been posted online over at my site on fotopages.
Sunday
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday.

You can take a look at them if you want. A lot of pictures of Mark and Wendy are there.

We had a great time. As I posted last week I wasn't expecting the snow that was there. As some of the pictures show, there was 4-6 feet of snow beside some of the buildings and cabins in Clear Lake and on the last day there, they were digging out to prepare for spring. Snow blowers and graders everywhere clearing the way.

The resort itself was really nice and our chalet was a lot of fun to be in. Being an independent unit meant that we could be as noisy as we wanted to be and we were. We brought up my mp3 player and my old computer speakers so we had a stereo there and we chased Mark in and around the chalet playing "tag" for a hours. The lodge itself had condo style apartments but also housed Solstice Spa and the pool and hot tub. We never went to the spa but spent a lot of time in the pool and hot tub. Mark learned how to float and kind of swim. The pool was really nice. As a kid I used to love staying in places that had a pool but as I grew older I was too cool to splash in a pool. Now that I have Mark, I enjoy splashing in the pool again.

The only thing it didn't have was instructions for lighting a fire for Wendy. If my life depended on Wendy lighting a fire, I would die. She had a lot of fun not lighting a fire though. I don't think Mark's advice helped her at all.

We spent a bit of the trip reading. As I mentioned before I read Anne Lamott's excellent book, Traveling Mercies : Some Thoughts on Faith. A lot of Christians I know would struggle with her language and story but I found it to be a remarkable book. It was the right one to read. I also spent some more time re-reading Doug Pagitt's book. It is both visionary and humble and while I was reading it, I found myself being both encouraged and unsettled which I liked.

Perhaps the best part of the trip was the stargazing that Wendy, Mark and I did one night. Clear night, the Northern Lights, no wind, no cars, just Wendy, Mark, myself and the stars.

Convert your Atom feed to RSS

Here (useful for you Blogger users out there that actually care about such things)

A Eulogy for HyperCard

It's sad to see it go.

Randall Friesen

is sporting a new blog design. It looks good.

Conferences & Festivals & Gatherings

Caterina Fake has a great post on the different spaces in which people gather.

More or Less Passion

I posted this article by Brian McLaren a while ago in which he questioned the mania about the Passion. Rick Warren replied here. I didn't really care for Rick Warren's response and I think he missed some of the key points of Brian McLaren's article but I think one will see it a certain way depending on which worldview they subscribe too. What really hit me is that from the article, it appears that Rick Warren still doesn't understand what postmodernity is (hint, it has very little to do with age)

?

I remember thinking Dr. Smooth was cool at one time.

I am back

It is cold here (what is going on with this cold?!) while it was nice in Elk Horn. Last night Mark and I walked to the pool in our trunks. Nice to be back home but I wish we could have stayed a little longer (Wendy has to work tomorrow). Will post some pics later tonight while answering about 400 e-mail (ugh). Everytime I sat down at the terminal in Elk Horn, someone stood behind me waiting for me to finish.

Am off to the Theology Pub right away. It is at the Saskatoon Inn Lounge.

"The absolute desire of 'having more' encourages the selfishness that destroys communal bonds among the children of God. It does so because the idolatry of riches prevents the majority from sharing the goods that the Creator has made for all, and in the all-possessing minority it produces an exaggerated pleasure in these goods."

- Archbishop Oscar Romero, "The Church's Mission Amid the National Crisis," August 6, 1979. Twenty-four years ago today, Monsenor Romero was assassinated as he celebrated Mass in San Salvador.

Worship Freehouse

The Worship Freehouse is gathering this Sunday night at 8:00 p.m. at a new location. We are meeting on the University of Saskatchewan campus in the chapel of the College of Emmanuel-St. Chad, just off College Drive. We will be connecting through some verbal and non-verbal expressions Sunday night. Of course we will have some food and beverage there as well.

There will be ample parking around there as it is a Sunday night. The bus stops at several points along College Drive as well.

If you are thinking of attending or even if you are not, would you mind helping us spread the word. If you would post the information on your blog, send an e-mail, or invite someone along, that would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

As far as worshipfreehouse.com goes... I am working with our ISP in getting the domain name restored. According to them I am paid but according to a whois search, it says it was not :( It should be online tomorrow but you never know....

Wildlife

Didn't see any wildlife until last night. Not a bad thing as they have the same sort of wildlife here as I try to avoid on my way to and from Spiritwood. We went into Minnedosa (more on Minnedosa later) and tried to find a place to eat and on route saw about 50 deer. We got some pictures but they were to far away. I think Wendy got a good one with her camera but will have to wait until we get the film back.

Saw some amazing stars and northern lights the last couple of nights. Night skies like the last couple of nights remind me why I love western Canada.

It wasn't all good. As I said before, we went to Minnedosa last night for food. Only thing that looked decent was a Chicken Delight. Big mistake. The fries tasted moldy. How do frozen and then deep fried fries taste bad? The town itself is in a picturesque valley but seems old and dying. Kind of weird.

Well, Mark seems content that I have been blogging enough so now we can go swimming again.

Cross Country Skiing

I was thinking of getting some cross country skis today. Then I watched about 50 people ski past the chalet. Not very graceful, going really slow, falling over often. I'll walk thanks. Of course none of them fell into snow up to their waste and hitting themselves in the face with a tripod... well none that I saw.

My other thought that will only make sense to the Saskatchewan readers of my blog... Clear Lake reminds me of Waskesiu. I imagine the layout is done by Park's Canada but even the kind of shops are the same in the same kind of buildings with the same kind of signs. I got a kick ou