The Sub Prime Crisis

I was working on something else this afternoon when I got distracted by an article on the mortgage crisis in the U.S.  Some light reading for you below if you are interested.

• A great video of a roller coaster riding the housing market from 1890 to 2007 (pre-crash)
• Wikipedia has an exhaustive page on the sub prime lending crisis
• The Financial Post tries to explain what the crisis is all about
• Apparently some of the Fed officials saw this coming
• The Economist has a depressing PDF on what this means for the world economy
• The BBC has a timeline of events
• Wikipedia has another page on the U.S.A. mortgage meltdown

Technorati Tags: mortgage,sub-prime,economics,U.S.A.

Station 20 West

Much has been written about the Government of Saskatchewan canceling Station 20 West.  Much of that has come from the competing rationale of the Government ministers themselves.  The final word seems to come from a bunch of rural MLA's, including Premier Brad Wall which had this to say, "basically a mall development, where we'd be competing with grocery stores, competing with others who are already renting now to community clinics in the area."

The problem is that there isn't any grocery stores in the area.  The closest grocery store is the limited selection of food at Giant Tiger (really inexpensive but limited selection), 33rd Street Safeway, or the Safeway/Superstore in Confederation Mall.  As for competing with other mall owners, they obviously don't see the benefit of a centralized service complex which would hold the following services.

• Community Clinic-Westside: cooperative primary health care services
• Saskatoon Health Region: primary health services may include public health, mental health and addiction services
• U of S College of Dentistry: outreach education clinic
• U of S College of Medicine: outreach clinical services
• SWITCH: Student Wellness Initiative Toward Community Health

There would be some other organizations housed here.

• CHEP Good Food Inc: essential food security programming—community kitchens, children’s nutrition, Good Food Box, local food
• Good Food Junction Co-op: neighbourhood-owned grocery store with good food at reasonable costs
• Quint Development Corporation: affordable housing initiatives, small business development and loans, employment and educational support

This seems to be an decision based on ideology rather than anything.  The idea that the government should not be providing services it feels that private enterprise can and should.  Of course this ideology doesn't work in reverse as seen my Royal University Foundation looking for private money to bring Saskatoon's main emergency room, ICU, and other facilities up to date.

Is it a good project?  On the government's side, the Westside Clinic is already operational and I assume isn't going anywhere and they house SWITCH.  While I agree with the idea of an affordable food co-op but from it's inception, I have questioned if they are going to be affordable (which may be secondary to availability).  Some friends have been involved and the questions on affordable pricing remain unanswered.  It isn't a flaw with the business plan but a volume and distribution question.  Also some would argue proximity to St. Paul's Hospital.  So there are some questions of whether or not the government should be funding a project like this.

On the Station 20 West side is availability.  In my job one of my biggest challenges right now is providing health care and in particular, mental health care to the men who call the shelter home.  In terms of health care, emergency room health care is not a good solution for the system (cost) or to the patient (lack of regular checkups).  While it can be hard to get accessible health services for all of us, it is a lot harder to find a doctor if one doesn't have car.  All of us in the house drive across town to see our doctor which would be a couple hour trip if we had to use a bus or incur a $40 bill if we used a taxi.  That is a HUGE obstacle to those that I serve at work.

Speaking of availability, that is the main advantage of the co-operative grocery store.  As I just said, I am not really convinced that it is sustainable.  At night the Shopper's Drug Mart on 22nd street often has one clerk and two uniformed security guards to stop robbery and to stop shop lifting.  One can't tell me that it is making any money at all under those conditions.  There is also another reason why Safeway, Loblaw, and Super Valu has all pulled out of the city centre.

Despite that, affordable food is hard to come by.  Wendy and I shop at Safeway (primarily at 33rd Street where we live and Wendy picks up stuff at the Centre at Circle and 8th where she works), Co-op, and Costco.  We save a lot of money by being able to pick and choose.  For the poorest in Saskatoon, there are not grocery stores in close proximity and if you would like to join me at the 7-11 on 22nd Street on days when government checks are sent out, it looks like a riot hit it by midnight (There is evidence that Scott Reid was somewhat correct when he made his quip about beer and popcorn).  People are spending an incredible amount of their checks on food from a 7-11.  Is it a great decision?  Of course not.  There are people with a very, very, limited food budget spending it in a horrible location (price wise and healthwise - don't get me wrong, I love a good 7-11 burger but it isn't a lifestyle I would recommend).  The alternative is having to get a cab to go to a grocery store which is another huge budgetary issue.  The people that most often who need to take a cab to a grocery store are often those that can't afford to.  It is the reason why I was asked to drive people home from the warehouse when the Salvation Army handed out Christmas hampers.  If we hadn't, the burden to get a FREE hamper may have too much for people to receive one.

If you drive through Riversdale, Caswell Hill, and Mayfair, you see a bunch of homes that used to be corner stores and small grocery stores.  Jane Jacobs wrote extensively on what happened to them but we abandoned them for the big box stores.  While it made life better for some, it hurts those that can't make it to the mega malls.  It is one of the reasons why I take Mark as much as possible to the Roxy Theatre and not the Galaxy.  I don't want to lose something that means so much to the community.

Of course this isn't a fight about movie theatres, it is about providing a place for healthy food, medical services, affordable dental care (even if it is done by students... shudder...), and more mental health providers in a place that desperately needs them.  It is only $8 million dollars out of $9.1 billion dollar budget (wow, do we know how to spend money in Saskatchewan, where is Janice MacKinnon when we need her).  It is also about investing in a part of the city that has seen so little investment over the last 40 years.  Yes Meewasin and the Farmer's Market is nice but Riversdale has been ignored for much of the last several decades despite being represented by a New Democratic Premier since 1991.  Investing in that part of the city also sends the huge message that we believe that we are not willing to leave behind some of the provinces poorest. 

I'll leave the last word to the editorial writers of the Saskatoon Star Phoenix.

Gantefoer believed the grant was cut because there was little chance the proponents of the project could raise the "$12 million to $14 million" needed to come from private interests. By next day he was admitting he was in error, and the necessary private funds were a minuscule portion of that amount.

Even more incredibly, McMorris suggested the money had to be pulled from a project that would make it easier for inner-city residents to access timely health care because the funds were needed to buy a fire alarm for St. Paul's Hospital and to ward off a mould attack. The decision, he assured us, had nothing to do with politics.

At least Wall's weak excuse was credible, if only because it illustrated an ideological basis to the ill-considered decision. The premier suggested the grant was killed because his government saw the inclusion of a co-operatively run grocery store within Station 20 as a threat to private industry.

But to cancel the entire project rather than deal directly with the situation is to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

When the NDP absurdly castigated Wall for giving his 14-year-old daughter driving lessons on a publicly owned rural gravel road, it demonstrated just how far out of touch with rural Saskatchewan that party has become.

But Wall's clear lack of understanding about the dire needs of core neighbourhoods and the history of Saskatoon demonstrates just how out of touch he remains with urban Saskatchewan. Considering the role the province's largest city is playing in the economic revival of Saskatchewan, such ignorance could have dire consequences.

The proponents of Station 20 want a grocery store not because they want to compete with private industry but because many people in core neighbourhoods don't have the wherewithal to keep hiring cabs to go shopping. The last of the downtown grocery stores left more than a decade ago.

To ignore such realities for the sake of political partisanship and ideological reasons is an inauspicious beginning for a government that Saskatchewan people hoped could lead them to a prosperous future.

If you have strong feelings about this, contact your MLA and let them know.

Technorati Tags: Station 20 West,Riversdale,Pleasant Hill

RBC: "Saskatchewan is the new Alberta"

According to RBC, Saskatchewan's future is looking up.

"Saskatchewan is the new Alberta - holding the top spot nationwide on growth across all key housing indicators including housing starts, house prices, residential building permits and resale activity," Holt explained in a company news release.

Fox Business News has more. 

I grew up in Calgary in the late 70s and early 80s and still think of myself as a Calgarian at some times.  At the same time the Calgary where I grew up and left is a lot different than the Calgary that exists today.  The last couple of years in Saskatoon give me the same feeling.  Saskatoon isn't the same as it was a couple of years ago.  Yeah we have an Adidas outlet store but for many people, we now have housing that is no longer affordable for the middle class, rents now longer affordable for the poor, and now I am seeing friends who don't own, moving to other parts of the province which saddens me as well.

Technorati Tags: Saskatchewan,Alberta,Saskatoon,economy,RBC,growth

IMF needed to bailout American banks?

This column by Paul Krugman stunned me this morning.

Last week, Robert Rubin, the former Treasury secretary, and John Lipsky, a top official at the International Monetary Fund, both suggested that public funds might be needed to rescue the U.S. financial system. Mr. Lipsky insisted that he wasn’t talking about a bailout. But he was.

It’s true that Henry Paulson, the current Treasury secretary, still says that any proposal to use taxpayers’ money to help resolve the crisis is a “non-starter.” But that’s about as credible as all of his previous pronouncements on the financial situation.

So here’s the question we really should be asking: When the feds do bail out the financial system, what will they do to ensure that they aren’t also bailing out the people who got us into this mess?

Let’s talk about why a bailout is inevitable.

Between 2002 and 2007, false beliefs in the private sector — the belief that home prices only go up, that financial innovation had made risk go away, that a triple-A rating really meant that an investment was safe — led to an epidemic of bad lending. Meanwhile, false beliefs in the political arena — the belief of Alan Greenspan and his friends in the Bush administration that the market is always right and regulation always a bad thing — led Washington to ignore the warning signs.

By the way, Mr. Greenspan is still at it: accepting no blame, he continues to insist that “market flexibility and open competition” are the “most reliable safeguards against cumulative economic failure.”

The result of all that bad lending was an unholy financial mess that will cause trillions of dollars in losses. A large chunk of these losses will fall on financial institutions: commercial banks, investment banks, hedge funds and so on.

Many people say that the government should let the chips fall where they may — that those who made bad loans should simply be left to suffer the consequences. But it’s not going to happen. When push comes to shove, financial officials — rightly — aren’t willing to run the risk that losses on bad loans will cripple the financial system and take the real economy down with it.

So if he is right, what happens to the American economy?  Update: Fortune magazine says that this is the end of Wall Street as we know it.

Wall Street's second problem is its love of leverage. At the end of 2007, Morgan Stanley and Lehman had ratios of assets to shareholders' equity of 33 to 1, closely rivaled by 28 to 1 at Merrill. Again, it's the curse that felled Bear Stearns: If the value of the portfolios of any of these firms falls by 3%, their entire capital would be wiped out. To be sure, that massive leverage magnified gains mightily from 2002 to mid-2007. But today, it threatens to erase most, or even all, of their shareholders' wealth. The sad truth is that Wall Street managers aren't geniuses but big risk-takers who get lucky. Until they get unlucky.

It's the third problem, Wall Street's legendary largesse on pay, that encourages that outrageous risk-taking. The system rewards swashbuckling behavior from every level from traders to CEOs. If traders can generate big profits for a year or two by taking risky bets, they can collect bonuses big enough to retire on. In good years, top managers at places like Bear and Morgan Stanley collect grants of restricted stock and options far out of proportion to the size of their companies. For example, James Cayne, Bear's former CEO, collected almost $40 million in pay for 2006.

Once again, Bear's big profits were driven largely by excessive leverage and a frothy market, not, to put it mildly, by enlightened management. At most of the firms, the employees took 30% or more of the company through stock grants that they paid nothing for, leaving far less for shareholders.

Thanks Don!

Technorati Tags: Bear Stearns,Wall Street

The Economic Consequences of George W. Bush

Nobel Laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz sees a generation long recovery from the Bush administration's policies.

Up to now, the conventional wisdom has been that Herbert Hoover, whose policies aggravated the Great Depression, is the odds-on claimant for the mantle “worst president” when it comes to stewardship of the American economy. Once Franklin Roosevelt assumed office and reversed Hoover’s policies, the country began to recover. The economic effects of Bush’s presidency are more insidious than those of Hoover, harder to reverse, and likely to be longer-lasting. There is no threat of America’s being displaced from its position as the world’s richest economy. But our grandchildren will still be living with, and struggling with, the economic consequences of Mr. Bush.

Technorati tags: Joseph E. Stiglitz, George W. Bush, economics, Herbert Hoover

Just because you can build it...

Doesn't mean you always should. A good article on the problems caused by the Three Gorges Dam.

But authorities now admit that the dam is generating major problems. It's created a huge — and heavy — reservoir pressing against the mountains along the Yangtze, making them more prone to landslides. The deep reservoir stretches upriver about 370 miles, impeding the natural flushing action of the river and trapping pesticides, fertilizer and raw sewage. Downriver from the dam, water flows cleaner and faster, adversely affecting aquatic species adapted to sediment in the river.

Authorities are finally letting reports of the dam's problems reach the public in an apparent bid to pre-empt criticism should disaster unfold. And it's disaster that the official Xinhua news agency forewarned of in an unusually blunt report two weeks ago during a forum on the environmental consequences of the project.

"If no preventive measures are taken, the project could lead to catastrophe," the Sept. 26 Xinhua report said, paraphrasing unnamed "officials."

The report cited Tan Qiwei, the vice mayor of Chongqing, a sprawling city at the head of the reservoir, as saying that slopes along the Yangtze had collapsed in 91 places and a total of 22 miles of land along the river had caved in.

"We cannot take the problems too seriously. We should never sacrifice our environment in exchange for a flash of economic prosperity," Wang Xiaofeng, the head of the executive office of the State Council Three Gorges Project Construction Committee, told state media.

There is no green revolution

Tom Friedman argues that whatever gains we are making at home are being lost by the developing world western like economic expansion.

Hey, I’m really glad you switched to long-lasting compact fluorescent light bulbs in your house. But the growth in Doha and Dalian ate all your energy savings for breakfast. I’m glad you bought a hybrid car. But Doha and Dalian devoured that before noon. I am glad that the U.S. Congress is debating whether to bring U.S. auto mileage requirements up to European levels by 2020. Doha and Dalian will have those gains for lunch — maybe just the first course. I’m glad that solar and wind power are “soaring” toward 2 percent of U.S. energy generation, but Doha and Dalian will devour all those gains for dinner. I am thrilled that you are now doing the “20 green things” suggested by your favorite American magazine. Doha and Dalian will snack on them all, like popcorn before bedtime.

But, as I said, this is not just about “them.” It is still very much about us. Peter Bakker is the chief executive of TNT, the biggest express delivery company in Europe. The Dow Jones Sustainability Index 2007 just listed TNT as the No. 1 company in terms of energy and environmental practices. Mr. Bakker, whom I met in China, told me this story:

“We operate 35,000 trucks and 48 aircraft in Europe. We just bought two Boeing 747s, which, when fully operational, will do nine round trips every week between our home base in Liège [Belgium] and Shanghai. They leave Liège only partly full and every day fly back to Europe as full as you can stuff them with iPods and computers. By our calculations, just these two 747s will use as much fuel each week as our 48 other aircraft combined and emit as much CO2.”

That’s why we’re fooling ourselves. There is no green revolution, or, if there is, the counter-revolution is trumping it at every turn. Without a transformational technological breakthrough in the energy space, all of the incremental gains we’re making will be devoured by the exponential growth of all the new and old “Americans.”

The War As We Saw It

A New York Times op-ed by some soon to be returning troops of 82nd Airborne. Here is just part of it but the entire op-ed is worth reading.

Political reconciliation in Iraq will occur, but not at our insistence or in ways that meet our benchmarks. It will happen on Iraqi terms when the reality on the battlefield is congruent with that in the political sphere. There will be no magnanimous solutions that please every party the way we expect, and there will be winners and losers. The choice we have left is to decide which side we will take. Trying to please every party in the conflict — as we do now — will only ensure we are hated by all in the long run.

At the same time, the most important front in the counterinsurgency, improving basic social and economic conditions, is the one on which we have failed most miserably. Two million Iraqis are in refugee camps in bordering countries. Close to two million more are internally displaced and now fill many urban slums. Cities lack regular electricity, telephone services and sanitation. “Lucky” Iraqis live in gated communities barricaded with concrete blast walls that provide them with a sense of communal claustrophobia rather than any sense of security we would consider normal.

In a lawless environment where men with guns rule the streets, engaging in the banalities of life has become a death-defying act. Four years into our occupation, we have failed on every promise, while we have substituted Baath Party tyranny with a tyranny of Islamist, militia and criminal violence. When the primary preoccupation of average Iraqis is when and how they are likely to be killed, we can hardly feel smug as we hand out care packages. As an Iraqi man told us a few days ago with deep resignation, “We need security, not free food.”

In the end, we need to recognize that our presence may have released Iraqis from the grip of a tyrant, but that it has also robbed them of their self-respect. They will soon realize that the best way to regain dignity is to call us what we are — an army of occupation — and force our withdrawal.

Until that happens, it would be prudent for us to increasingly let Iraqis take center stage in all matters, to come up with a nuanced policy in which we assist them from the margins but let them resolve their differences as they see fit. This suggestion is not meant to be defeatist, but rather to highlight our pursuit of incompatible policies to absurd ends without recognizing the incongruities.

We need not talk about our morale. As committed soldiers, we will see this mission through.

It's the Economy, Stupid

• The spread of the subprime meltdown
• American consumerism in action
• Harvard Magazine is looking at the rising risk of financing the American dream.
• The Fed on how our consumer debt is increasing and increasing and increasing...
• What's next?

Contextless Links

• According to the Pope, only the Roman Catholic Church is the true church. Protestant churches are just ecclesial communities.
• Wendy has posted about the last couple of weeks. About as bad as she describes it but not as bad as some of the e-mails have made it out to be.
  
• An op-ed by Anne Murray fighting a wind farm near her cottage. I remember seeing a piece with Walter Cronkite fighting a wind farm near his cottage because it would interfere with sailing. It's the old we like alternative energy, as long as it isn't near me.
• Seth Godin on sloppy naming and branding. We had a discussion on church and ministry names not that long ago on Resonate. This applies to churches as well. You Apple fans will want to check out this diagram on Apple naming throughout the ages.
• The New York Times is calling for an immediate withdrawal from Iraq :: While I was never in favor of the war I generally subscribe to the belief that when you destroy a country, you need to fix it. This paragraph seems to sum up the editorial and the problem :: At first, we believed that after destroying Iraq’s government, army, police and economic structures, the United States was obliged to try to accomplish some of the goals Mr. Bush claimed to be pursuing, chiefly building a stable, unified Iraq. When it became clear that the president had neither the vision nor the means to do that, we argued against setting a withdrawal date while there was still some chance to mitigate the chaos that would most likely follow.While Mr. Bush scorns deadlines, he kept promising breakthroughs — after elections, after a constitution, after sending in thousands more troops. But those milestones came and went without any progress toward a stable, democratic Iraq or a path for withdrawal. It is frighteningly clear that Mr. Bush’s plan is to stay the course as long as he is president and dump the mess on his successor. Whatever his cause was, it is lost.

Contextless Links

• The dark side of Google?
• Oligarchy in the church: Sociologists have discovered that in virtually all forms of social organizations, from friendship groups to nations, a small self-perpetuating group grabs most of the power. This tendency to concentrate power in the hands of a few persons is called the law of oligarchy. Through His various words and actions that we read in the Bible, Jesus condemns oligarchy in social, economic, political and religious spheres of life.
• Scot McKnight asks if Christianity is mercenary?
• The electability of John Edwards :: A top handicapper told me recently that he expects Hillary to perform in a general election as ‘Generic Democrat Minus Five Points.’ Meaning that she can win — but only in another wave election like we saw in the 2006 election, where resentment against Bush and the GOP gives Dems a 6 to 8 point head start. Barack Obama may have a similar structural disadvantage. (Though given his ability to mobilize untraditional voters — millennials and gen xers in particular — he might be able to make up for it. He remains as ever a wild card.) If Democrats are looking for a safer bet to take back the Oval office, Edwards the silver tongued Southern senator looks like a winner from this poll data…  especially if he’s fortunate to run against another flip flopper from Massachusetts.
• Font Sugar: Ray Larabie has put together a selection of fonts great for casual use via
• Jason Evans on the "house church model"
• "People don't change that much": Bishop Willimon  is talking about Marcus Buckingham's book but there are are incredible implications to his statement about discipleship in addition to just leadership.
• Google zooms in on the Darfur genocide
• Missional living in an age of abandoned kids
• Mark is off to grade 2 :: Now we have the summer together to torment each other.
• Homelessness is chronic in Canada :: For more information, you can check out www.homeslessness.gc.ca. 
• Life at Google from a Microsoft perspective:  An interesting look at how the two organizations interact.
• Guy Kawasaki's iPhone review: Same old bad cell phone tech support.
• Barbara Ehrenreich asks who Hillary Clinton is:
• Quote of the week
• Mark Andreesen's guide to start ups: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4
• Are Presidential elections just a higher stakes version of American Idol?
• So what does Ann Coulter actually have against John Edwards? :: But really. What is it with Coulter and Edwards… this virulent Barbie hates Ken thing? My best guess is that Edwards makes an easy proxy target. Rabid rightwingers can no longer safely call Hillary the B word, much less call Obama the N word (although that hasn’t stopped Rush from calling him a Negro), but you can still get away with calling Edwards a “faggot.” And apologize for it by voicing your deathwishes for him on Good Morning America.
• Doug Pagitt reminds us that the Emergent Gathering is coming up in October
• Abandon the pastoral church
• Missional Church?  Prepare to lose
• The Brand that Saved Baseball
• An open letter to airlines
• Holiness and the mission
• Corruption in the Global Fund to Fight HIV/AIDS :: In his opening essay, Bono writes that in just nine months, (Product) Red has raised around $25 million for its beneficiary, the Geneva-based Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. What he doesn’t mention is that throughout its brief existence, the Global Fund—a Sachs brainchild—has been wracked by corruption scandals. Last week, the news in Uganda was dominated by the arrests of four onetime government officials, including the powerful (and immensely wealthy) former health minister, on charges of skimming huge sums off the millions in Global Fund grants Uganda has received. And, lest we think corruption is purely an African problem, an internal audit revealed earlier this year that the British executive director of the fund, Sir Richard Feachem, was using his expense account to rent limousines and to throw expensive dinner parties. New luxury, indeed.  On a recent return visit to Uganda, where I’d lived for two years, one of the first changes I noticed was that a multistory residential building had been erected across the dirt road from the little pub I frequented. My friends told me the owner of the property worked for the health ministry. They’d nicknamed the place the “Global Fund Apartments.” We all laughed at the joke: Ugandans know that there are worse sins in this world than corruption. They’ve learned, through rough experience, to see Africa for what it is: a continent of people, not vessels for our pity. Their Africa is a vibrant, funny, human place. I wish we could separate it from this business of being inspi(red). :: Also, here is another link on Bono's hypocrisy over taxes :: Before you flame me, we give Bono a lot of link love over the years but the last link really bothered me.
• How to turn around a dying organization
• How did the CCCP really collapse?  It's the economy stupid!

Contextless Links

• Why the world needs and open confident America
• Jonny Baker writes about a missional agency for the emerging church from his experiences with CMS
• The end of cargo crate Christianity?
• The New York city parking shuffle
• A Brief History of Economic Time :: The underlying expectation -- that the present is supposed to be better than the past -- is a new phenomenon in history. No 18th-century politician would have asked "Are you better off than you were four years ago?" because it never would have occurred to anyone that they ought to be better off than they were four years ago.
• Great Lakes under siege :: A recent report by Environment Canada and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency paints a mixed picture of the lakes, acknowledging partial success in cleaning up over the last 30 years but also revealing new problems - some of which that likely can't be fixed.  It will be almost impossible to eradicate the 300 non-native species that have invaded the Great Lakes basin, and new chemicals are being identified in the waters all the time, experts say. "Sometimes I'm a little bit concerned that the Great Lakes have slid to the back of environmental concerns," McGuinty said in an interview earlier this week.  "It's really important that we keep the Great Lakes water quality on the national agenda."  McGuinty called on Ottawa to spearhead a meeting of Canadian and American federal, provincial and state officials, which he said would go a long way toward better protecting a resource that's being taken for granted.  "What I'd love the federal government to do is take on the whole idea of a national clean water summit," he said.  "It is a tremendous resource, it is something that people around the world recognize as being a kind of crown jewel of the North American ecosystem and we have to continue to work together to protect it." Canada has been lagging behind its American counterparts in cleaning up the Great Lakes and it's time the federal government stepped up its commitments, said Aaron Freeman, policy director for Environmental Defence.

Contextless Links

• How to talk to the press
• The Poverty Business
• The Economics of the Poverty Business
• Cutting the Cost of Poverty
• Brian McLaren on the worship "industry" via
• The emerging church as an "industry"
  

Contextless Links

• According to Yahoo!, Google is too hard to use.
• Pernell and the Freeway are looking for interns for a missional living opportunity
• Clinton sounds the alarm on China holding so much American debt. :: When China sells more to America than it buys from America, it invests many of the dollars earned in dollar-denominated assets such as Treasury bonds.  In recent testimony to the Senate Budget Committee, Fred Bergsten, director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, pointed out that the current account deficit “now accounts for about 7 percent of GDP, more than double the previous modern record of 3.4 percent in the middle 1980s.” “The possibility of a sharp dollar fall is in fact the greatest short-term risk now emanating from our budget deficits and provides the most compelling reason for urgent action on them,” Bergsten said.  As of the end of 2006, Chinese investors held $350 billion in U.S. Treasury securities, about 15 percent of the total foreign holdings of Treasury securities. Japanese investors held a bigger chunk ($640 billion) of Treasury securities than did the Chinese. And the British and Japanese together held $848 billion, more than twice as much as Chinese investors hold.  But China is a more problematic creditor due to US strategic conflicts with China, such as its recent test of an anti-satellite weapon.
• Alien technology to solve global warming according to former Canadian cabinet minister
• City council wants to charge admission for the Mendel Art Gallery
• Jerry Falwell says that global warming is a tool of the Devil :: Apparently Al Gore is making it all up.
• Isaiah Thomas is going to be resigned :: I need to make this into a poster for work.  If he can keep his job, no one should be fired from any job anywhere.
• Only $100,000 a year separated the Oilers and Ryan Smyth
• Remember when Shaq was good?
• Kottke on partisan spin over the "wasted lives" comments
• Are you my first or second or third cousin?
• Test to see if your site can be read in China :: jordoncooper.com is okay but resonate.ca is blocked!
• YouChoose!  YouTube has all of the presidential candidate videos all in once place.
• I Did Not Know That Yesterday
• HIV spreading rapidly by people with concurrent partners :: Night after night they return for the carefree, beery vibe, with the same partners or new ones, creating a web of sexual interaction. A growing number of studies single out such behavior -- in which men and women maintain two or more ongoing relationships -- as the most powerful force propelling a killer disease through a vulnerable continent.  This new understanding of how the AIDS virus attacks individuals and their societies helps explain why the disease has devastated southern Africa while sparing other places. It also suggests how the region's AIDS programs, which have struggled to prevent new infections even as treatment for the disease has become more widely available, might save far more lives: by discouraging sexual networks.
• The Swiss accidently invade Lietchenstein :: According to Swiss daily Blick, the 170 infantry soldiers from the neutral country wandered 2 kilometers (more than a mile) across an unmarked border into the tiny principality early Thursday before realizing their mistake and turning back.  A spokesman for the Swiss army confirmed the story, but said that there were unlikely to be any serious repercussions for the mistaken invasion.  "We've spoken to the authorities in Liechtenstein and it's not a problem," Daniel Reist told The Associated Press on Friday.
• Jon Gruber on gender diversity in design and tech fields

Contextless Links

• At the end of this New Yorker article has an interesting update on the alleged identidy of one of Wikipedia's administrators. The July 31, 2006, piece on Wikipedia, “Know It All,” by Stacy Schiff, contained an interview with a Wikipedia site administrator and contributor called Essjay, whose responsibilities included handling disagreements about the accuracy of the site’s articles and taking action against users who violate site policy. He was described in the piece as “a tenured professor of religion at a private university” with “a Ph.D. in theology and a degree in canon law.” ... Essjay now says that his real name is Ryan Jordan, that he is twenty-four and holds no advanced degrees, and that he has never taught. He was recently hired by Wikia—a for-profit company affiliated with Wikipedia—as a “community manager”; he continues to hold his Wikipedia positions. via
• Megacities, mega-problems :: THE WORLD HAS reached a point of hyper-urbanization: 2007 marks the first year when more than half the global population is "urban," not "rural." Indeed, this is the era of the "mega-city" — metropolises of 10 million-plus. In 1950, only Tokyo and New York met that threshold. Today there are 20 mega-cities, including Mexico City, Karachi, Manila, Dhaka, Lagos, Jakarta and Chongqing. This type of drastic population shift isn't without precedent. During the Industrial Revolution, concentrations of people in U.S. and European cities were part and parcel of a factory economy. But that economic and technological progress came with a price — decades of fetid slums, horrific child mortality, raging epidemic disease. This time around, with cities 10 times bigger and demand for workers uncertain, the costs could be exponentially larger. via
• Note from the boss to the employees
• John Stackhouse is talking about Teg Haggard and Henri Nouwen :: The whole post is worth reading and I don't want to quote it out of context so just click on the link.
• 16 million Americans live in "severe poverty" :: Under $5,080 a year. via

Review of The Forgotten Ways by Alan Hirsch

Published by Brazos Press :: Purchase at Amazon.com or Amazon.ca
294 Pages
Website: www.theforgottenways.org which also has an excellent weblog which is published by Alan Hirsch
Disclaimer: Publisher (Brazos Press) sent me a free review copy but I would have purchased the book regardless.

Before you start into the review, my initial thoughts on the book topped 9000 words which testifies to how good of book I thought it was but it was a little depressing to think that I needed to edit that long of a review (Wendy says that any review that long is not a review but a sequel). The book is divided into two sections so what I plan to do is review the first section now, take a week or so break from it and review the second section. I will put it all together for a single review when I am all done. As is the blog policy, all typos and spelling mistakes are mine and we will blame the spell checker in Google Docs and never speak of them again.

A couple of months ago now I started reading Alan Hirsch's latest book, The Forgotten Ways. Along with Michael Frost, he wrote The Shaping of Things to Come, one of the most important books in the area of the church and missiology that many of us have ever read. Not only can they write good books together but they can write solo as well. Michael Frost's book Exiles came out last year and Alan Hirsch's book, The Forgotten Ways showed up in my mailbox in early 2007. For the last two months every free moment has been spent with the book or thinking about the consequences of what has been written. It's a book that I will read more than once but here are some early thoughts that will do the book justice.

The book is divided into two sections. Section One is “The Making of a Missionary.” Hirsch tells his own story. It is a path that many of us would recognize that starts with him in the "come to us" attractional model of doing church that has defined evangelicalism since it became part of the establishment to moving towards a missional incarnation. Section Two is titled “A Journey to the Heart of Apostolic Genius.” There we explore what Hirsch calls Missional DNA. Methodists will recognize the work of Howard Snyder who has used the DNA analogy in the past. For us Canadians who read a lot of Alan Roxburgh, you will recognize the concepts of liminality and "communitas vs. community".

Forward by Leonard Sweet.

Sweet opens up with a great forward that was quite helpful to me in dealing with the frustrations I have talking with those in traditional churches and especially those that have been schooled in church growth thinking. He uses the metaphor of occasionally having to defrag our computers and get all of the bits and pieces put in their proper places. Not only do we have to do it with our computers but also with our minds.

Sometimes our hard drives need fragmenting. Data entered on our hard drives isn't always done neatly. The more files you have, and the more programs you download, the more your hard drive gets scrambled by confusing, scattered, random inputs that get sprayed over lots of space. Computer crashes, power outages, and stalled programs just add to the fragmentation.

The harder your hard drive has to work to retrieve the original information, the slower it becomes, the more blurred the pictures are, and the more resistant everything is. As a serial procrastinator, I tend to put off my defragging until the computer almost grinds to a halt. Defragging requires I dedicate the computer to doing nothing but cleaning up the confusion my messes and misses have caused. This housecleaning can take hours. But once I got through the defragging process, my hard drive recovers its speed, and my images once again snap, crackle, and pop with clarity and conviction.

Christianity has undergone untold crashes and clashes in the past two thousand years. In the last five hundred years its original hard drive has wiped out so many times, especially in the West, that it has almost ground to a halt.

I appreciated Len Sweet's forward to the book as I can't remember how many discussions I have had about the emerging church and people bring up the measuring points of Christendom. There is a desire for something different but we drag along all of this clutter from what where we have come from.

The discussion starts with a good question. How did the early Christian movement go from roughly 25,000 members in 100 AD to roughly 20 million by 300 AD? More importantly, it did it without all of the things that today's church defines as vital for ministry. Buildings, a defined Scripture, professional clergy, John Maxwell seminars on leadership, Hillsong worship CDs, Christian radio or television (I may be embellishing his list but you get the point). Not only was the church "deprived" of the "essentials", it was also under persecution. It isn't just a discussion of the early church, the church in China had a similar growth rate under the same kind of persecution and also the Methodist revival in England is touched on. So how do they do it. Hirsch identifies six elements of what he calls Missional DNA or mDNA.

• Jesus is Lord
• Disciple Making
• Missional-Incarnational Impulse
• Apostolic Environment
• Organic Systems
• Communitas instead of community

Chapter One :: Setting the Scene

He notes the same thing that many of have been saying (probably because we read it in his first book) that great missionary movements begin on the margins.

In the study of the history of missions, one can even be formulaic about asserting that all great missionary movements begin at the fringes of the church, among the poor and the marginalized, and seldom if ever at the center. It is vital that in pursuing missional modes of church, we get out of the stifling equilibrium of the center of our movements and denominations, move to the fringes, and engage in real mission there. But there's more to it then just mission; mist great movements of mission have inspirited significant and related movements of renewal in the life of the church. It seems that when the church engages at the fringes, it almost always brings life to the center. This says a whole lot about God and gospel, and the church will do well to heed it. (page 30)

For the longest time, I have been saying that churches can't or won't go through tremendous change. I gladly eat those words when I read about Hirsch's community, the South Melbourne Restoration Community (now called Red). At some very frustrating times in my pastoral journey, I would have loved to have read there story of transformation from the holding pattern that most churches are in to becoming missional was worth the price of the book for me (disclaimer, I didn't pay for the book, I got a review copy but you know what I mean). A particularly jarring part of the book is his mention that only 10-15% of Australian culture is attracted to the contemporary church growth model.

A combination of recent research in Australia indicates that about 10-15 percent of that population is attracted to what we call the contemporary church growth model. In other words, this model has significant "market appeal" to about 12 percent of our population. The more successful forms of this model tend to be large, highly professionalized, and overwhelmingly middle class, and express themselves culturally using contemporary, "seeker friendly" language and middle-of-the-road music forms. They structure themselves around "family ministry" and therefore offer multi-generational services. Demographically speaking, they tend to cater largely to what might be called the "family-values-segment"--good, solid, well-educated citizens who don't abuse their kids, who pay their taxes, and who live largely, what can be called a suburban lifestyle.

Not only is this type of church largely made up of Christian people who fit this profile, the research indicates that these churches can also be very effective in reaching non-Christian people fitting the same demographic description--the people within their cultural reach. That is, the church does not have to cross any significant cultural barriers in order to communicate the gospel to that cultural context. (pg 35)

Since almost all churches in typical western cities are working from this model, they are all competing for the same demographic. I started flipping through Michael Adams book, Fire and Ice and I would say our percentage is 15 to 20% of is in that "family values segment" versus 35% for the United States. To make this simple for everyone, the way we do church in Canada manages to avoid 75-80% of the population. Not are the vast majority of churches competing for the same segment, according to George Barna, it is a shrinking segment which by 2025 is expected to decrease by half. Despite the fact that doing the same thing and expecting a different result is a definition of insanity, it is what we do. As Hirsch says on page 37

What is becoming increasingly clear is that if we are going to meaningfully reach this majority of people, we are not going to be able to do it by simply doing more of the same. And yet it seems that when faced with our problems of decline, we automatically reach for the latest church growth package to solve the problem--we seem to have nowhere else to go. But simply pumping up the programs, improving the music, and audiovisual effects, or jiggering the ministry mix won't solve our missional crisis. Something far more fundamental is needed.

So what do we do about this? Well as Hirsch shares his experiences, changing the system does have some effect. As he diagrams out, on pages 43 and 33, moving from a pulpit ministry (5%) to a platform and programmed ministry (10% active in ministry) to a alternative worship gathering (20% of people involved). While 20% is a sizable improvement, it still leaves 80% as pew potatoes.

In his discussion about this on page 45 he offers up this interesting footnote.

In a dialog between Michael Frost, many members of the faculty of Fuller's School of World Mission, and me, it was generally acknowledged by all there that church growth theory had, by and large, failed to reverse the church's decline in America and was therefor somewhat of a failed experiment. The fact remains that more than four decades of church growth principles and practice has not halted the decline of the church in Western contexts.

So how do we reach out to the remaining 80% of people who don't have the church on their radar if church growth principles aren't the answer? Hirsch draws a correlation that I don't think I have read before but makes a lot of sense. Hirsch concluded that the fundamental issue was that they had been ineffective at making disciples, and so were failing at living missionally. This coincides with what Ron Sider wrote about in The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience and what Robert Webber writes in Ancient Future Evangelism, we don't do a good job in making disciples which undermines everything else we try to do as a church.

The phrase, “we cannot consume our way to discipleship" hit me hard. For years I proposed that if we could give people enough opportunities to learn, they would. While I worked at Lakeview Church we tried to expand our offerings which overlooked the consumeristic nature of what we were trying to do. Christians come to church to be fed and we are just feeding the idea of a consumption based faith reinforces the church shopping ethos at the expense of undermining our efforts at discipleship before we can begin.

The alternative according to Hirsch is to move away from the idea of choices that come from consumerism and take a covenantal approach to discipleship which reminds me of some of what Stanley Hauerwas has written as a response to capitalism. How does that happen?

1. Structural changes :: To address the problems of passivity, they became a cell church so it made it harder to be a pew potato.
2. Instead of core values and statements, they adopted a covenant and some core practices. Most core values in churches are all the same anyways but what they wanted were something that would cause movement. So instead of appealing to the head, they appealed to the feet.

3. Each cell group had to practice spiritual disciplines. The model they came up with is called TEMPT.

Chapter Two :: Setting the Scene

“Nothing is more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than achieving a new order of things.” Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince

“Strictly speaking one ought to say that the church is always in a state of crisis and that its greatest shortcoming is that it is only occasionally aware of it… This ought to be the case because of the abiding tension between the church's essential nature and its empirical condition.... that there were so many crisis centuries of crisis free existence for the church was therefore an abnormality... And if the atmosphere of crisislessness still lingers on in many parts of the West, this is simply the result of a dangerous delusion. Let us also know that to encounter crisis is to encounter the possibility of truly being the church.” David Bosch, Transforming Mission

Hirsch starts the second chapter with this from Edward de Bono.

...if there is a known and successful cure for an illness, patients generally prefer the doctor to use the known cure rather than seek to design a better one. Yet there may be better cures to be found. He rightly asks how we are to find a better cure at each critical moment we always opt for the traditional treatment. Think about this in relation to our usual ways of solving our problems. Do we not constantly default to previous patterns and ways of tackling issues of theology, spirituality and the church? To quote another Bono, this time from the band U2, it seems like we are "stuck in a moment and now [we[ can't get out of it."

The follow up thought to this is “most efforts at change in the church fail to deal with the very assumptions on which Christendom is built and maintains itself.” ( page 51) In part, this is why we are “stuck in a moment and can’t get out of it” (U2).

Hirsch then uses an analogy from the computer world. Apple Inc. is synonymous with innovation. In that world innovation translates into reworking three components: hardware, OS, and software. We saw that with the iPhone where Apple asked that Cingular change their wireless protocol to accommodate the innovation of the iPhone. To take advantage of new hardware, you need a new operating system. If you don't have new and great software ready to go, what's the need for a new operating system. Working at one and not the other doesn't always make a lot of sense (somewhere Bill Gates is sitting on top of a pile of money disagreeing with Hirsch but we get the point) without the other.

As Hirsch continues on page 52 that many efforts to revitalize the church aim at simply adding or developing new programs (Alpha in many churches comes to mind) or sharpening the theology and doctrinal base of the church without changing the foundational understanding of Christendom or how the church operates. Leadership needs to develop new assumptions on which more missional expression of the church can be built.

How do we do that, Hirsch quotes refers to Ivan Illich on page 53

Ivan Illich was once asked what he thought was the most radical way to change society; was it through violent revolution of gradual reform? He gave a careful answer. Neither. Rather, he suggested that if one wanted to change society, then one must tell an alternative story. Illich is right; we need to reframe our understandings through a different lens, an alternative story, if we wish to move beyond the captivity of the predominantly institutional paradigm that clearly dominates our current approach to leadership and church.

He sees the system story at the center of who we are reaching out to affect everything else we do.

Church consultant Bill Easum is right when he notes that…“Following Jesus into the mission field is either impossible or extremely difficult for the vast majority of congregations in the Western world because of one thing: They have a systems story that will not allow them to take the first step out of the institution into the mission field, even though the mission field is just outside the door of the congregation.” (Unfreezing Moves, 31) He goes on to note that every organization is built upon on “an underlying systems story.” He points out that “…this is not a belief system. It is the continually repeated life story that determines how an organization feels, thinks, and thus acts. This systems story determines the way an organization behaves, no matter how the organizational chart is drawn. It’s the primary template which shapes all other things. Restructure the organization and leave the systems story in place and nothing changes within the organization. It’s futile trying to revitalize the church, or a denomination, without first changing the system.” Drilling down into this systems story, the paradigm, or mode of church, is he suggests one of the keys to change and constant innovation.

Easum notes that most theories about congregational life are flawed from the start because they are based on an institutional and mechanical worldview. Or what he calls the “Command and Control, Stifling Story.” This is particularly marked when you recognize how different the predominant forms of church are from the apostolic modes.

After a conversation with Scripture he concludes that "we realized that Bible sustains a thoroughly consistent warning against the centralization of power in a few individuals and concentration of it in inflexible and impersonal institutions (pg 55)

Reinforcing his view is Martin Buber and C.S. Lewis. (pg 55) .

...[Buber] warns us about the dangers of religious institutionalism when he notes that "centralization and codification, undertaken in the interests of religion, are a danger to the core of religion." This is inevitably the case he says, unless there is a very vigorous life of faith embodied in the whole community, one that exerts an unrelenting pressure for renewal on the institution. It was C.S. Lewis who observed that "there exists in every church something that sooner or later works against the very purpose for which it came into existence. So we must strive very hard, by the grace of God to keep the church focused on the mission that Christ originally gave to it."

For those of you who have read Brian McLaren, the name Ralph Winter may be familiar. Basically he gives us the concept of cultural distance. It is a good guide to help a church conceptualize the barriers it must cross in order to be effective missionally.

As one moves along the scale each step from left to right it indicates a barrier one must cross to demonstrate the Gospel.

• m0-m1 Some concept of Christianity, same language, similar interests, same nationality, same socio-economic class to yours and your church's. Most of your friends are in this bracket.
• m1-m2 Stereotypical non-Christian. Little interest in Christianity and suspicious of the church or had a bad experience with Christians. Just go to the local pub to find these folks.
• m2-m3 No idea about Christianity or antagonistic towards Christianity as they understand it.

• m3-m4 The most distance and active resistance. Major cultural and/or worldview obstacles exist.

As Hirsch points out, the Edict of Milan and Constantine’s deal with the church provided a uniform context in the western world for about 1600 years. As Rodney Stark puts it on page 60.

Far too long, historians have accepted the claim that the conversion of Emperor Constantine (ca 285-337) caused the triumph of Christianity. To the contrary, he destroyed its most attractive and dynamic aspects, turning a high-intensity, grassroots movement into a arrogant institution controlled by an elite who often managed to be brutal and lax.

The church has largely conformed to that mode and is comfortable working with the m0 to m1 regions. The other regions were largely "missionary" concerns until the end of WWII. as Hirsch pointed out early, the m0 to m1 zone is vanishing (Perhaps 15% in Australia to 35% of people in the United States). We are surrounded by people in our neighborhoods that have m2 - m4 barriers up. In Christendom “outreach” often worked as the barriers to acceptance were much less. In post-Christendom and the pluralistic environment, the cultural distance has increased and our local context has become missional.

Hirsch breaks down the move from Christendom to now with this important thought on pg 60

With the breakup of the modern period and the subsequent postmodern period, things have begun to radically change. For one, the power of hegemonic ideologies has come to an end, and with that, the breakdown of the power of the state (e.g. the Soviet Union) and other forms of "grand stories" that bind societies and groups together in a grand vision. The net effect of that has been the resultant flourishing of sub cultures, and what sociologists call the heterogenization, or simply the tribalization, of western culture...

People now identify themselves less by grand ideologies, national identities, or political allegiances, and by much less grand stories: those of interest groups, new religious movements (New Age), sexual identity (gays, lesbians, transsexuals, etc), sports activities, competing ideologies (neo-Marxist, neofacist, eco-rats, etc.) class, conspicuous consumption (metrosexuals, urban grunge, etc), work types (computer geeks, hackers, designers, etc.), and so forth. On one occasion some youth ministry specialists I work with identified in an hour fifty easily discernible youth subcultures alone (computer nerds, skaters, homies, surfies, punks, etc.). Each of hem taks their subcultural identity with utmost seriousness, and hence any missional response to them must as well.

Hirsch uses Alpha as an example which while over three million people in the UK have participated, they have not been integrated into traditional churches. He points out that it is most successful with the dechurched and instead of being a missionary tool for the unchurched, pointed out that we often don't reach very hard beyond our own walls (pg 63) Why don't they want to go to church? It is the "Jesus yes, Church no." phenomenon again where people come to faith in small informal groups but don't want the organized part of the religion to be part of the deal. Hirsch suggests that the prevailing expression of church (Christendom) has become a major stumbling block to the spread of Christianity in the West.

So for those of you who are feeling uncomfortable, the good news is that it hasn't always been done this way. Hirsch refers to Robert Webber and points out that we are probably closer to life in the early church than in Christendom (although being in a post-Christian society is radically different than being in a pre-Christian one of the early church). He quotes Loren Meed on page 66 who brings a healthy dose of reality to where we are at.

We are surrounded by the relics of the Christendom Paradigm, a paradigm that has largely ceased to exist to work. [These] relics hold us hostage to the past and make it difficult to create a new paradigm that can be as compelling for the next age as the Christendom paradigm has been for the past age.

From there is a discussion on the emerging church that has this great comment by Hirsch.

Another quite remarkable feature is that by and large this phenomenon flies under the radar of must church observers, because they are looking for the familiar features of the church as we know it through Christendom. As such it tends to be an underground movement. I have often had to field criticism of the EMC in the guise of pragmatic questions like, "Where is it working?" or dismissed in phrases like "When I can see some success, I might consider it". But it is working. The answer is right there under our noses, but we can't seem to see it because we are looking for the wrong things. If we look for certain features obvious in the Christendom paradigm (like buildings, programs, over leaders, church growth, organization, etc.), we will miss what is really happening.

That's enough for the first section of the book which for me is worth the price of the book. If you haven't read the book already, you need to purchase it. For leaders of Christian communities, the book is that good and that revolutionary. The second part of the book is even better and gets at the heart of what needs to happen in more theological and practical terms.

When is the next part of the review coming? I have a couple of days off this week and will have the second half of the book review online next Sunday. That way I won't be too far being in my effort to review 52 books in 52 weeks.

For more on the book...

• The official site and weblog
• Len Hjalmarson has a multipart review which I found helpful for this one. His reviews are always excellent.
• Scot McKnight has reviewed it as well.
• Don't forget Andrew Jones "cartoonish" review of the book.
• Download a PDF of the first chapter (I can't believe that I spent hours typing quotes from Chapter 1 for the review... when I could have just used this)
• There is also some online training to be had.

Technorati Tags : The+Forgotten+Ways, Alan+Hirsch, emerging+church, church+planting, book+review

Contextless Links

• What I use a PC
• Yale Economic Review reviews the End of Poverty
• The Calgary Resonate Greenhouse just had their first get together
• The Disseminary has some wonderful early church theologian trading cards online
• An innovative way to keep homeless people away from your megachurch/private members club.

Contextless Links

• Wendy is writing about sex in the snow and no she isn't referring to the book
• Winner of the 2007 World Press Photo contest of a badly wounded Iraq war vet returning home to marry his sweetheart:: Their story is here.  More photos of the couple here. via
• CEO of Cineplex compares those who camcorder movies to drug dealers :: It also endangers our young employees, because they are dealing with hardened criminals, for whom this is more lucrative then selling drugs. via who has more here
• Vive Le California? :: California to split from the United States of America? :: Governor Schwarzenegger is quite clear that California is not simply another state. “We are the modern equivalent of the ancient city-states of Athens and Sparta,” he recently declared. “We have the economic strength, we have the population and the technological force of a nation-state.” In his inaugural address, Mr. Schwarzenegger proclaimed, “We are a good and global commonwealth.” via
• Trouble for a University built on profits via :: The complaints have built through months of turmoil. The president resigned, as did the chief executive and other top officers at the Apollo Group, the university’s parent corporation. A federal court reinstated a lawsuit accusing the university of fraudulently obtaining hundreds of millions of dollars in financial aid. The university denies wrongdoing. Apollo stock fell so far that in November, CNBC featured it on a “Biggest Losers” segment. The stock has since gained back some ground. In November, the Intel Corporation excluded the university from its tuition reimbursement program, saying it lacked top-notch accreditation.
• Cows can't eat grass!  Hurry, tell that to the several million grass fed cattle that roam Saskatchewan
• Curing Souls: The Forgotten Art by Eugene Peterson
• The real reason we love dogs :: They dance with joy when we come home, put their heads on our knees and stare longingly into our eyes. Ah, we think, at last, the love and loyalty we so richly deserve and so rarely receive. Over thousands of years of living with humans, dogs have become wily and transfixing sidekicks with the particularly appealing characteristic of being unable to speak. We are therefore free to fill in the blanks with what we need to hear. (What the dog may really be telling us, much of the time, is, "Feed me.")
• The John Edwards "blogger" scandal won't be the last.  If I were you, I wouldn't trust anyone who has a blog.
• Rwanda, haunted by genocide has a new problem, overpopulation :: Though Rwanda is predominantly Catholic, the church’s leaders here are not expected to oppose a campaign for population control. A number of priests, nuns and lay workers participated in the 1994 genocide, which weakened the church’s moral authority, and has led it to avoid politics.
• Reading your own Stasi files :: Although the Stasi had little in their files about me, within days they had a relatively good idea of my activities and, at that point, I was charged with espionage. The order for my incarceration was issued two weeks after I was initially arrested--and about a week later than the East German law required such orders to be made. Such legal niceties, however, made little difference to the Stasi.
• Most IED's are coming from IRAN according to USA Today and MSNBC.  The question is after being lied to so many times, do we believe them?
• Mark Cuban vs. Dwyne Wade :: I know Shaq appreciates your leadership as well. He called out your team a few weeks ago saying it was " embarassing'. Great leadership DWade. Your coach sat players for being fat. I guess you couldnt lead them away from the buffet.
• Hockey is being outmarketed by America's other fringe sport, MLS
• Free Methodist college fires transgendered professor

Book 3 of 53: Signs of Emergence by Kester Brewin

A couple of years ago when The Complex Christ came out, I plopped down some puny Canadian dollars, exchanged them for British pounds and bought the book from Amazon UK and eagerly waited for it to be shipped across the Atlantic. When it did arrive in Canada, I had to plop down some more Canadian dollars, this time to the Canadian Borders Services Agency to free it from them. After paying three times what the book cost in shipping and duties, I sat down and started reading. The book was worth the cost and the wait.

The good news is that the book is being released in North America by Baker Publishing under the name Signs of Emergence with the easy to remember subtitle, A Vision for Church That Is Always Organic/Networked/Decentralized/Bottom-Up/Communal/Flexible/Always Evolving which means no more British pounds, no more voyages across the Atlantic, and no more donations to the Canadian treasury. The author, Kester Brewin is blogging at the official Signs of Emergence weblog so you can get a feel for his thinking and writing while you are waiting for your book to arrive (it doesn't ship in North America until July 1st). Since my copy is still The Complex Christ, I am going to refer to it as Signs of Emergence in this review but when I quote from it, it will be from The Complex Christ and use those page numbers.

The book is as complex as the topic he covers and each time I have read the book, different things have hit me. Because of my context of involveme